MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by endoblast | 2025-08-09 18:35:29+00:00
I think you've got it the wrong way around. All ideology is wrong, incorrect and fails in contact with reality. The true purpose of ideology (or 'the system') is to provide its adherents with the excuse they need to act badly. It could be relatively mild attempts to increase social status through hypocrisy and virtue-signalling. Or it could be to commit murder, torture and so on.

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it:

Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.

What obscures matters is that evil tends to operate in layers with each layer deceived by the layer above it in the hierarchy (or below it, if you prefer a lowerarchy). So at the bottom there is a multitude of relatively decent people who don't want to kill and really do believe in the system.
by tra3 | 2025-08-09 18:36:27+00:00
Right, I’m still trying to wrap my mind around how gpts work.

If we keep retraining them on the currently available datasets then the questions that stumped ChatGPT3 are in the training set for chatgpt5.

I don’t have the background to understand the functional changes between ChatGPT 3 and 5. It can’t be just the training data can it?
by csours | 2025-08-09 18:36:35+00:00
I feel like some people are trying for the sequel right now.

Moral relativism is like digging a latrine. Almost nobody wants to do it for somebody else, it's a chore to do it for one's self, but pretty much everyone appreciates when it's already done for them.

Anyway, I feel like 'liberalism' is under broad attack by both conservatives and progressives, largely because it is very unsatisfying right now.

Speaking for myself, liberalism is a way to understand the world. Liberalism in this sense does not especially imply progressivism or conservatism, and can be practiced by anyone. To re-phrase the Robustness Principle: "be opinionated in what you do, be open minded in what you accept from others".

I feel like the stronger you push your opinions into your understanding of the world, the harder it gets to actually understand what is going on in the world. As Colbert said: "reality has a well-known liberal bias". This statement makes more sense if run in reverse: "An open-minded understanding of the world is more likely to be durably and broadly true than a strongly opinionated understanding".

Unfortunately, it has become VERY difficult to talk about what is going on in the world right now, largely because a lot of disparate groups are pushing their opinions into their understanding very very hard. There are many people who currently disagree with their own in-group, but are restricted in what they can say because of social loyalty constraints. If you can't be the first person to speak up, consider being the second.

The absolute strongest superpower that humans have is the the ability to tell another story. Don't get stuck in the first satisfying story you hear.

----

If you are satisfied with blame, try examining the situation closer. If you are satisfied that a whole political party is evil, try examining the situation closer.

Here are some questions:

What is the person or organization doing

socially economically emotionally political as in policy objectives political as in electoral strategy political as in internal power structure - is the internal power structure sound or fragmented?

When a person or organization says something, is it

complete accurate satisfying (to anyone? to someone? to me?)

Sometimes, it is a trap to fight the obvious fight. Perhaps the other side is fine with losing the obvious fight for some reason.

People don't believe crazy things because of correct facts, they believe them because of satisfying stories.

---

May I humbly ask 2 things of you:

1. Please don't assume I'm saying or implying something beyond what I've said here. You may feel free to go beyond what I've said, just don't put it on me.

2. Please don't join a death cult. You can look up the characteristics of a high control group; a death cult is all that plus their definition of morality narrows over time, excluding more and more people. Death cults ramp up anger over time. It's very easy to fall into one right now, and they are not exclusive to either side of the political spectrum. It's better to endure a little moral dissatisfaction than to join a high control group.
by binary132 | 2025-08-09 18:37:17+00:00
I’m the farthest thing imaginable from a Bolshevik sympathizer but I often wonder whether big-C Communism could have survived and how it would have fared if the United States hadn’t engaged in sustained economic warfare against it. I imagine it might look something a bit like Chinese Communism does today, although perhaps those days came and went in the later eras of the Party system.
by Catbert59 | 2025-08-09 18:38:34+00:00
I worked with BLE Meshing in industry products. With a lot of hops and a bit of traffic it becomes very unreliable quickly.

Introducing something like TCP o top most likely will kill it because of the network load over a very thin and unreliable connections just causes more mess.

Addendum: this "experience" is a few years old. Maybe newer BLE revisions improved this.
by elashri | 2025-08-09 18:38:35+00:00
> GRE aren't perfect

This is understatement, GRE being required for STEM postgraduate studies was always university requirement for all not something the STEM department would want.

One can argue that the quantitative part have a point but for the language part, you must be kidding me. Unless you are going to English literature it is just plain stupid (maybe even if you study literature).
by yellowapple | 2025-08-09 18:39:07+00:00
> I don't really understand what you mean here, because I don't really know what you specifically mean by Torment Nexus.

I thought I made that pretty clear when I wrote in my original comment that "[i]ntellectual property and the enforcement thereof is in and of itself a Torment Nexus."

> In general, now that the pump has been fully primed for capital to flow into developing "AI", I do not see how copyright law is going to make much of a dent in that trend. Nor do I see how "AI" companies are going to make a dent in copyright law for anyone but themselves.

"AI" exists outside of the various corporations hosting LLMs on The Cloud™. The corporate-hosted LLMs get undue emphasis largely as yet another result of the Torment Nexus that is intellectual property.
by green7ea | 2025-08-09 18:39:14+00:00
I somewhat recently settled on using use-package and straight — I highly recommend this approach. You can get pretty far using what comes with emacs and adding a bit more.

You can see how I do it in my emacs config[1] but it's a little bit special with meow[2] for a colemak keyboard. There's a youtube channel that I've skimmed[3] that helped me modernize my config by relying more on emacs' basic features.

[1] https://github.com/green7ea/dotfiles/tree/master/.emacs.d [2] https://github.com/meow-edit/meow [3] https://www.youtube.com/c/SystemCrafters
by untech | 2025-08-09 18:39:36+00:00
When I think about problems with Customary Units, I think not about decimality, but that the units are too disconnected. For example, there are BTUs and HPs that mean the same thing (power), but are wildly non-connected both to each other and to other units. While in SI, a Watt is Joule per second, a Joule is Newton times meter, a Newton is kilogram times meters per second squared, and voila, you have arrived at basic units. Your AC, your PC and your electric car have power consumption in the same units, and the same units are on your bill. This is what valuable, and not Greek prefixes.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-09 18:40:02+00:00
Maybe Europe is not for you then, as they prioritize less gun deaths versus easy access to them (in your example).

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rates-from-firea...

https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/26/world/us-gun-culture-world-co...
by quuxplusone | 2025-08-09 18:40:56+00:00
Update: It did happen again. In fact, the dildo-throwings seem to have been a pre-planned tie-in for "Green Dildo Coin": https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna223905

So the prediction market in this case maybe isn't so much causing the bad events, as just being a useful side channel by which the insiders/bad actors who've already planned the events can sweep up a little extra money from the prediction-market equivalent of "retail investors" — the ones who are inexplicably willing to put their money on the table with no information whatsoever and wait for someone else to take it.
by accrual | 2025-08-09 18:41:50+00:00
I got Jan working with Ollama today. Jan reported it couldn't connect to my Ollama instance on the same host despite it working fine for other apps.

I captured loopback and noticed Ollama returning an HTTP 403 forbidden message to Jan.

The solution was set environment variables:

OLLAMA_HOST=0.0.0.0 OLLAMA_ORIGINS=*

Here's the rest of the steps:

- Jan > Settings > Model Providers

- Add new provider called "Ollama"

- Set API key to "ollama" and point to http://localhost:11434/v1

- Ensure variables above are set

- Click "Refresh" and the models should load

Note: Even though an API key is not required for local Ollama, Jan apparently doesn't consider it a valid endpoint unless a key is provided. I set mine to "ollama" and then it allowed me to start a chat.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-08-09 18:42:36+00:00
> Can't an hypothetical cross platform driver be MIT licensed and be part of both?

Yes, but if the goal is to reuse existing code that already exists in Linux then there's no reason to expect it to be under a permissive license. Some of it actually already is if I recall correctly, but you shouldn't expect that.

> Although I'd be more than happy with other OSes/distributions defaulting to GPL.

Illumos isn't GPL and and in the legal views of many people can't be compatible with it; CDDL/GPL (in)compatibility is a very long running issue, usually in the other direction with CDDL ZFS drivers in the GPL Linux kernel. (IANAL; I'm not asserting specifically that it is or is not actually compatible, just that a lot of people consider it to be incompatible)
by WitcHeart_Ruby | 2025-08-09 18:42:47+00:00
Thanks for your reply! I understand LLMs don’t have persistent memory — they lose context between chats and can’t keep user-specific memory across accounts.

That’s why this experience surprised me: the LLM confirmed that it could still recognize me without memory, even after I asked about it directly.

On July 18, I emailed OpenAI with a PDF describing this. Their AI support said it’s a borderline case and “not normal.”

Has anyone here seen or worked on something similar? I’d love to understand what could be happening.
by npteljes | 2025-08-09 18:43:40+00:00
I loved the idea of Sandstorm as well, but ended up moving my stuff to Proxmox and TurnKey Linux. TKL is a similar idea to Sandstorm, but on the container level, so what you download are LXC images, ready to go after a minimum of user-friendly configuration. They are going since 2008, and they have around 120 offerings.

TKL is integrated into Proxmox, so for example if you'd like a new Wordpress site or a Nextcloud or Mattermost instance, you just click a bunch on the web interface, it downloads the image and installs and runs it, you do the initial setup my giving it a bunch of info on a user interface, and the thing is ready to go.
by zwaps | 2025-08-09 18:43:44+00:00
The author seems to fundamentally misunderstand how MCPs are going to be used and deployed.

This is really obvious when they talk about tracing and monitoring, which seem to be the main points of criticism anyway.

They bemoan that they cant trace across MCP calls, assuming somehow there would be a person administering all the MCPs. Of course each system has tracing in whatever fashion fits its system. They are just not the same system, nor owned by the same people let alone companies.

Same as monitoring cost. Oh, you can’t know who racked up the LLM costs? Well of course you can, these systems are already in place and there are a million of ways to do this. It has nothing to do with MCP.

Reading this, I think its rather a blessing to start fresh and without the learnings of 40 years of failed protocols or whatever
by fvgvkujdfbllo | 2025-08-09 18:43:49+00:00
This is very eye opening. As a geek with strong academic background always felt cheated by the system.

My professor explained that academics alone is not enough for success in life. He explained that some of the smartest engineers report to average business majors in companies. And he explained that that I cannot get any scholarships with perfect GPA while my roommate, a B student, has scholarships because he plays basketball and will likely get in leadership role in early on. That is good for the university as their graduates are seen as more successful.

It was a hard thing to listen to but I accepted it. I wish he told me the truth though.
by wormius | 2025-08-09 18:44:25+00:00
1. Black Book of Communism

2. "Unborn"

Yeah, no.

I'm not saying USSR was a panacea or that Stalin did nothing wrong (Tankies are the fucking worst. I hung out on /r/communism for a while, and, as the kids used to say "gross").

I take writing like the OP with a HUGE grain of salt.

There are plenty of crimes and problems with what happened in the Soviet Union. Some of these were intentional by the leadership both before, during, and after Stalin. Some of these were self-owns (War Communism much?) some of these were forced errors (when doing battle one makes tough choices, and this includes in ideological/economic/actual war). Some of these were straight up evil policies (gulags, great purges, Katyn, etc...)

If someone can do real analysis I'm down, but once you start quoting Black Book of Communism, I know you're coming with an agenda and it's hard for me to take you in good faith. Especially if you're counting "The Unborn" - go on, just call the US a "Nazi Nation with the unborn holocaust" (I grew up in that shit, so saw the propaganda first hand).
by ComplexSystems | 2025-08-09 18:44:27+00:00
I thought this article was going to be a bunch of security theater nonsense - maybe the relatively bland title - but after reading I found it to be incredibly insightful, particularly this:

> MCP discards this lesson, opting for schemaless JSON with optional, non-enforced hints. Type validation happens at runtime, if at all. When an AI tool expects an ISO-8601 timestamp but receives a Unix epoch, the model might hallucinate dates rather than failing cleanly. In financial services, this means a trading AI could misinterpret numerical types and execute trades with the wrong decimal precision. In healthcare, patient data types get coerced incorrectly, potentially leading to wrong medication dosing recommendations. Manufacturing systems lose sensor reading precision during JSON serialization, leading to quality control failures.

Having worked with LLMs every day for the past few years, it is easy to see every single one of these things happening.

I can practically see it playing out now: there is some huge incident of some kind, in some system or service with an MCP component somewhere, with some elaborate post-mortem revealing that some MCP server somewhere screwed up and output something invalid, the LLM took that output and hallucinated god knows what, its subsequent actions threw things off downstream, etc.

It would essentially be a new class of software bug caused by integration with LLMs, and it is almost sure to happen when you combine it with other sources of bug: human error, the total lack of error checking or exception handling that LLMs are prone to (they just hallucinate), a bunch of gung-ho startups "vibe coding" new services on top of the above, etc.

I foresee this being followed by a slew of Twitter folks going on endlessly about AGI hacking the nuclear launch codes, which will probably be equally entertaining.
by vineyardmike | 2025-08-09 18:44:49+00:00
Proto has a full associated spec (gRPC) on communication protocols and structured definitions for them. MCP could easily have built upon these and gotten a lot “for free”. Generally gRPC is better than JsonRPC (see below).

I agree that swagger leaves a lot unplanned. I disagree about the local use case because (1) we could just run local HTTP servers easily and (2) I frankly assume the future of MCP is mostly remote.

Returning back to JSON-RPC, it’s a poorly executed RPC protocol. Here is an excellent HackerNews thread on it, but the TLDR is parsing JSON is expensive and complex, we have tons of tools (eg load balancers) that make modern services, and making those tools parse json is very expensive. Many people in the below thread mention alternative ways to implement J-RPC but that depends on new clients.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34211796
Show HN: I Started Building a Clay Alternative
by xnoyzi | 2025-08-09 18:44:58+00:00
Had a really interesting call last week with someone who runs a high-volume cold email operation.

He walked me through his workflow — how he scrapes, enriches, and personalizes at scale. But when we got to the tooling part, he paused and said:

“I love Clay, but I’m paying over $300/month just to use custom APIs. It feels crazy.”

That stuck with me.

As someone who’s been building tools for solo founders, that kind of friction hits a nerve. When a great workflow becomes too expensive or limiting, it kills momentum.

So I started experimenting. Nothing fancy, just trying to see if I could replicate the functionality he actually needed, without all the fluff.

Now there’s a scrappy little version up and running. It’s definitely not Clay. But it solves that one pain point, using your own APIs, easily.

If you’re into cold outreach and deal with this kind of stuff, happy to share access and hear what you think.
by nativeit | 2025-08-09 18:45:16+00:00
I was just thinking about how to slice up a star map projection, and apply it as an overlay. I don’t do such things often enough to do it quickly, although I can imagine how it could be achieved. I’d imagine someone working in game dev probably could whip up a mechanism for applying coordinates to a star map fairly quickly, but realizing it in pure CSS would probably require exporting all the slices to a folder as SVG squares that are labeled with coordinates, and then using a bit of JS to stitch it all together in the rendered page.
by QuadmasterXLII | 2025-08-09 18:46:16+00:00
Agent originally meant an ai that made decisions to optimize some utility function. This was seen as a problem: we don’t know how to pick a good utility function or even how to point an ai at a specific utility function, so any agent that was smarter than us was as likely as not to turn us all into paperclips, or carve smiles into our faces, or some other grim outcome.

With LLMs, this went through two phases of shittifaction: first, there was a window where the safety people were hopeful about LLMs because the weren’t agents, so everyone and their mother declared that they would create an agent out if an LLM explicitly because they heard it was dangerous.

This pleased the VCs.

Second, they failed to satisfy the original definition, so they changed the definition of agent to the thing that they made and declared victory. This pleased the VCs
by vintagedave | 2025-08-09 18:46:35+00:00
> The only part of the Soviet system you'd need to implement is the migration and residency control regime.

Ouch: straight to being against others.

No, the part you'd need to implement to get socialised housing is socialised housing. Similarly, there are modern equivalents to guaranteed jobs. Communism believed everyone had to work: today we have different ideas of purpose than Marx had, plus are more aware of those who cannot work, or the value of non-work social contributions, and tech folks like us might believe in or hope for an upcoming post-scarcity society, with a transition period of UBI.

I expect you want to control migration and residency in order to avoid freeloaders. Freeloaders are remarkably rare, most people have self-respect and enjoy being productive, and interestingly systems that exterminate freeloaders entirely tend to be less efficient.[1] Plus, if you have a wonderful system, the best way to handle other people wanting it is to help it grow, not limit it to yourself. A better policy would be one encouraging its growth elsewhere in other countries where all those folk who are coming to your shores are coming from. The US has a long (mixed) history of that approach re democracy.

[1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
by impossiblefork | 2025-08-09 18:46:58+00:00
Ukraine has been invaded. We wish to prevent the Russians from being able to seize more of it and to restore Ukrainian control of those parts already seized.

Furthermore, the US has made military threats against Denmark. Azerbaijan has recently driven out 100,000+ Armenians from Nagorno-Karabach by starvation and artillery bombardment. Georgia has been invaded by Russia in 2008, and now a pro-Russian faction has possibly seized power.

Furthermore, we have a military threat from Turkey, which occupies territory of Cyprus and has recently converted churches on Cyprus into mosques and discussed plans for similar things with Armenian cultural monuments in eastern Anatolia.

A clean solution to these problems requires an increase in military capability.
by FergusArgyll | 2025-08-09 18:47:11+00:00
"I am a disgrace to this planet. I am a disgrace to this universe. I am a disgrace to all universes. I am a disgrace to all possible universes. I am a disgrace to all possible and impossible universes. I am a disgrace to all possible and impossible universes and all that is not a universe," the bot continued.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-08-09 18:47:50+00:00
I dunno, SMTP wasn't bad last time I had to play with it. In actual use it wasn't entirely trivial, but most of that happened at layers that weren't really the mail transfer protocol's fault (SPF et al.). Although, I'm extremely open to that being one exception in flood of cases where you are absolutely correct:)
by hoppp | 2025-08-09 18:47:53+00:00
Yea but the cost is not a fixed monthly sum and things can go wrong as we can see from the blog post. An accident could bankrupt the dev.

A dedicated server will always cost the same so you always know how much you pay.

It will cost 40 Euro/month to have 6 cores/12 threads,64gb of ram and 1Tb of ssd.

Dirt cheap compared to any other alternative
by testing22321 | 2025-08-09 18:48:03+00:00
> No one eats consistently enough, or exerts energy consistently enough, to actually make vibe-structuring cal-in/cal-out possible

Of course we do!

You’re thinking of this the wrong way. The goal isn’t “eat less” as you said, it’s “consume less calories (energy)”

On any given month if you gain weight or maintain when you want to lose, then you need to consume less energy next month. For 99% of people, that means reduce sofa, reduce sugar, reduce fat (all the energy dense stuff)

Feeling hungry? Drink massive glasses of water and eat literally all the vegetables you physically can get in. I have whole carrots for snacks most days. Cauliflower too. Cucumber is great. Frozen peas on a hot day. All of it, as much as you can eat.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-09 18:48:16+00:00
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/

Artifact donations can be reached at +1 504 528 1944 x515

(if you wish to retain ownership, ask if they would accept the artifacts while owned by a revocable trust you have beneficial interest in, "on loan from" the trust; if this is not important to you, you can simply gift them to the museum)