MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Mtinie | 2025-08-09 21:18:40+00:00
I’ve lived in Loudoun County for twenty-four years, so I’ve seen much of the development firsthand. The data center expansion, particularly in Ashburn and Sterling, has been amazing to watch.

However, I’m puzzled by this portion of your comment: ‘…has seen tremendous development thanks to data center expansion.’

The major residential growth in Ashburn, Broadlands, Sterling, Lansdowne, and surrounding areas significantly predates the data center boom. These communities were already experiencing rapid expansion and large influxes of new residents well before the data center industry took off here.
by stego-tech | 2025-08-09 21:18:52+00:00
> Old homes (if not historic) should get depreciated aggressively by the market to the point that knock downs make sense.

This doesn’t get shouted nearly enough. >90% of New England housing stock older than 30 years is not remotely worth the price they’re commanding. They’re either dumpster fires of knob-tube wiring and sagging floors, or contractor “spray foam specials” that make deliberate errors like the OP’s post points out. Yet because zoning laws are strongly tilted in favor of existing owners (and who are predominantly NIMBYs), it makes teardowns a costly affair on their own - and getting approval to build a new structure can take years, if at all.

Housing shouldn’t be disposable, but it should be readily replaceable with modern techniques and efficiency gains, provided it’s up to local code.
by cperciva | 2025-08-09 21:18:59+00:00
Good enough for what? I'd love to have a lawn mower which can dump grass clippings in my compost pile (mulching them and leaving them behind is better for the lawn, I know, but my wife is allergic to grass so this would basically mean she never gets to use the lawn). Also, we have two apple trees which spend a few months dropping apples on the lawn, so I'd like to have a robot lawn mower which can pick up the apples and toss them in the compost pile too. Oh, and there's a gate separating the front yard from the back yard, so it would be great if it can open and close the gate.

Robot lawn mowers are getting better, but I have yet to see one which can handle every situation that humans routinely handle.
by tremon | 2025-08-09 21:19:06+00:00
If the official i386 arch was built with instructions that your hardware doesn't support, tough cookies

While theoretically possible, that would only happen on processors older than 30 years. Debian's i386 architecture still uses -march=i686 as its baseline compiler target, which is the venerable Pentium Pro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P6_(microarchitecture)
by esseph | 2025-08-09 21:19:31+00:00
There have been a ton of states passing laws, starting in 2022 but really hitting stride in 2024/2025, where the Republican party has pushed laws or changes to state constitutions to prevent Ranked Choice Voting.

Example, in Missouri there was a ballot initiative called Amendment 7. The first part of the Amendment was to enshrine banning non-citizens from voting. I want to be clear, this was already against state law. This didn't change anything.

The second part of Amendment 7 was to ban ranked choice voting and require a plurality. That was the REAL intent of the Amendment.

People got duped, badly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_Un...
by falcor84 | 2025-08-09 21:20:07+00:00
On a related note, there are hundreds of millions of knowledge workers around the world who don't want to write code but do want to automate repetitive calculations across various domains. Over the last decades, they have created many billions of spreadsheets that are now the blood vessels of the global economy. Most of these spreadsheets are bug-ridden, particularly around edge conditions. Nevertheless, the economic "blood" keeps flowing, routing around errors and inefficiencies, and I've never heard anyone claim that we'd have better productivity if random Joe couldn't create a spreadsheet, and had to instead wait for the budget for a programmer to write code for them to do that (even if we had programmers writing bug-free code).
by bachmeier | 2025-08-09 21:20:22+00:00
The problem I have (full disclosure: I'm a professor) is that those things have nothing to do with a university. If they're doing non-academic things, the elite academics of the university are irrelevant.

But then that raises the question of why they want to go to an elite university. Well, obviously, because being able to pass as a good student does matter.
by kasabali | 2025-08-09 21:20:24+00:00
> Debian's heavy patching of kernel in Debian stable

Needs citation.

Debian stable uses upstream LTS kernels and I'm not aware of any heavy patching they do on top of that.

Upstream -stable trees are very relaxed in patches they accept and unfortunately they don't get serious testing before being released either (you can see there's a new release in every -stable tree like every week), so that's probably what you've been bit by.
by tart-lemonade | 2025-08-09 21:20:40+00:00
Out in rural Michigan, there are plenty of spots where an LTE signal technically exists but you can't do much beyond calls and texts (and even those fail sometimes), and it's interesting to see what apps still work. For instance, YouTube will still load and play videos, albeit at an abysmal pace that's really not worth it (and it's interesting to see how the app prioritizes the video itself over its metadata, to the point that you could watch an entire video in 144p before the channel name and description load), while my bank's app just fails entirely despite ostensibly requiring less bandwidth than video playback.
by TechDebtDevin | 2025-08-09 21:20:59+00:00
All of my MCPs, including browser automation, are very much deterministic. My backend provides a very limited amount of options. Say for doing my Amazon shopping, it is fed the top 10 options per search query, and can only put one in a cart. Then email me when its done for review, it can't actually control the browser fully.

Essentially I provide a very limited (but powerful) interactive menu for every MCP response, it can only respond with the Index of the menu choice, one number, it works really well at preventing scary things (which I've experienced) search queries with some parsing, but must fit in a given sites url pattern, also containerization ofc.
by spwa4 | 2025-08-09 21:21:40+00:00
> Capitalism stops them. The state has expectations of everyone. They will have to deal with things from outside that will force them into some level of capitalistic thinking which will ultimately eat the project from within.

This is not a difference between capitalism and communism, and so not a valid complaint. You will pay taxes in a communist system. You will have to deal with all sorts of external influences in a communist system.

> The fact that the death of these experiments comes with a sale is illustrative of the point above

No it isn't. These were voluntary sales (especially since most were abandoned, not sold. There was no profit in leaving, except in some cases). It is illustrative of the simple fact that given the choice, all but a rare exception chooses against communism.

Or to put it another way: people REALLY don't want communism, and after trying it, that becomes worse. In many cases abandoning these communes required a large-ish group of people taking the decision together. In other words: they organized themselves to destroy their little patch of communism. Which illustrates the next point:

> > without constant terror, socialism cannot exist.

> Is that so? It sounds like red scare propaganda honestly, and I don't think you could reasonably make an argument for this without conceding that the same is true of capitalism.

You just made an argument in favor of this. Your argument is that people cannot be allowed to have access to the external world, or they will abandon communism. That must be prevented, in your argument.

HOW will you prevent it? State terror.
by lbeurerkellner | 2025-08-09 21:22:11+00:00
This is way more common with popular MCP server/agent toolsets than you would think.

For those interested in some threat modeling exercise, we recently added a feature to mcp-scan that can analyze toolsets for potential lethal trifecta scenarios. See [1] and [2].

[1] toxic flow analysis, https://invariantlabs.ai/blog/toxic-flow-analysis

[2] mcp-scan, https://github.com/invariantlabs-ai/mcp-scan
by shinycode | 2025-08-09 21:22:26+00:00
Non deterministic software will never produce 100% of the time perfect results. So we will need humans with knowledge to verify up to when an other technology will be able to build enough trust to avoid human reviews. With 2000 line very precise prompts, Claude code finishes saying the code is ready for production and there is still anomalies and bugs that it should have catched but didn’t. Good luck trusting 100% of your business on such technologies.
by mgh95 | 2025-08-09 21:22:26+00:00
> What language actually allows a type definition for "ISO-8601 timestamp" that's complete?

It is absolutely possible to do this, and to generate client code which complies with ISO-8601 in JS/TS. Large amounts of financial services would not work if this was not the case.

See the c# support for ISO-8601 strings: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/base-types...
by titzer | 2025-08-09 21:23:04+00:00
> Communism has nothing to do with environmentalism.

No one claimed it does. Basically all of what you wrote above is because of pursuit of economic growth regardless of the -ism. Environmental destruction is the inevitable result of growth of industrial society. Governments without transparency, with no environmental protections, with burgeoning eminent domain, and with corruption and backstabbing make it worse.
by abeppu | 2025-08-09 21:23:14+00:00
Isn't the point that _all_ admissions from a range of institutions over a period of years (decades?) were "holistic" admissions, and thus basically all post-college success stories are holistic success stories? Further, _it's actively harmful_ as well as unfounded to post-hoc try to say that person X would _only_ have been admitted under a holistic framework.

In the same way, if up until last year, your company had any form of DEI, it's pretty toxic to point to any of your colleagues, claim that they were diversity hire and their success is a credit to DEI policies b/c that undermines them in a way that's impossible to provide evidence against.

The implication that "you were only <hired or admitted> because of a policy that gave you credit for <trait/circumstance>" can't have a factual basis unless you have all applications and notes from the admissions/hiring deliberation process, which the person in question almost certainly cannot.
by suspended_state | 2025-08-09 21:23:49+00:00
> They soldered on the RAM. Which makes it a very strange entry for a brand marketing itself as the DIY dream

This was also my first thought when discovering this new model, but I think it was a pragmatic design decision.

The questions you should ask yourself are:

- which upgradable memory module format could be used with the same speed and bandwidth as the soldered in solution,

- if this solution exists, how much would it cost

- what's the maximum supported amount of ram for this CPU
by jiggawatts | 2025-08-09 21:23:51+00:00
Junior developers are the equivalent of the draftsmen that used to work under architects.

Just like how CAD has almost entirely eliminated that line of work, the same thing will happen in software development. Only the “architects” will remain.

There is an implicit assumption made by the people concerned about junior devs disappearing that that’s where senior developers come from.

The reality is that almost junior developers never gain significantly better skill, no matter how their age or title.

I regularly work with people with decades of “experience” that still have no idea how to use a database engine. A real senior developer could write their own database engine from scratch. That’s the difference!
by fidotron | 2025-08-09 21:23:57+00:00
The fundamental difference is the JS community believe in finding the happy path that results in something they can sell before they have filled in all those annoying problem areas around it.

If an LLM can be shown to be useful 80% of the time to the JS mindset this is fine, and the remaining 20% can be resolved once we're being paid for the rest, Pareto principle be damned.
by hyperknot | 2025-08-09 21:24:14+00:00
I'm sure the server hardware is not a problem. The full dataset is 150 GB and the server has 64 GB RAM, most of which will be never requested. So I'm sure that the used tiles would actually get served from OS cache. If not, it's on a RAID 0 NVME SSD, connected locally.

What I've been referring to is the fact that even unlimited 1 Gbps connections can be quite expensive, now try to find a 2x40 gig connection for a reasonable money. That one user generated 200 TB in 24 hours! I have no idea about bandwidth pricing, but I bet it ain't cheap to serve that.
by jonas21 | 2025-08-09 21:24:22+00:00
It's likely that the skills you'd learn as an entry-level engineer today will be mostly irrelevant to being a senior 10 years from now -- just as knowing how to write a program on punch cards is irrelevant to today's engineers.

Seniors will have to come from somewhere, but it wouldn't be through this pipeline, even if companies were still hiring at full rate for entry-level work.

For some just getting into the field, this could be a great opportunity -- if you can figure out where the puck is heading, you can skate directly there.
by sammorrowdrums | 2025-08-09 21:24:29+00:00
I’m one of main devs of GitHub MCP (opinions my own) and I’ve really enjoyed your talks on the subject. I hope we can chat in-person some time.

I am personally very happy for our GH MCP Server to be your example. The conversations you are inspiring are extremely important. Given the GH MCP server can trivially be locked down to mitigate the risks of the lethal trifecta I also hope people realise that and don’t think they cannot use it safely.

“Unless you can prove otherwise” is definitely the load bearing phrase above.

I will say The Lethal Trifecta is a very catchy name, but it also directly overlaps with the trifecta of utility and you can’t simply exclude any of the three without negatively impacting utility like all security/privacy trade-offs. Awareness of the risks is incredibly important, but not everyone should/would choose complete caution. An example being working on a private codebase, and wanting GH MCP to search for an issue from a lib you use that has a bug. You risk prompt injection by doing so, but your agent cannot easily complete your tasks otherwise (without manual intervention). It’s not clear to me that all users should choose to make the manual step to avoid the potential risk. I expect the specific user context matters a lot here.

User comfort level must depend on the level of autonomy/oversight of the agentic tool in question as well as personal risk profile etc.

Here are two contrasting uses of GH MCP with wildly different risk profiles:

- GitHub Coding Agent has high autonomy (although good oversight) and it natively uses the GH MCP in read only mode, with an individual repo scoped token and additional mitigations. The risks are too high otherwise, and finding out after the fact is too risky, so it is extremely locked down by default.

In contrast, by if you install the GH MCP into copilot agent mode in VS Code with default settings, you are technically vulnerable to lethal trifecta as you mention but the user can scrutinise effectively in real time, with user in the loop on every write action by default etc.

I know I personally feel comfortable using a less restrictive token in the VS Code context and simply inspecting tool call payloads etc. and maintaining the human in the loop setting.

Users running full yolo mode/fully autonomous contexts should definitely heed your words and lock it down.

As it happens I am also working (at a variety of levels in the agent/MCP stack) on some mitigations for data privacy, token scanning etc. because we clearly all need to do better while at the same time trying to preserve more utility than complete avoidance of the lethal trifecta can achieve.

Anyway, as I said above I found your talks super interesting and insightful and I am still reflecting on what this means for MCP.

Thank you!
by kristianp | 2025-08-09 21:24:37+00:00
> There's at least a little flexibility with the graphics card if you move the board into a different case—there's a single PCIe x4 slot on the board that you could put an external GPU into, though many PCIe x16 graphics cards will be bandwidth starved.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/review-framework-des...
by animal_spirits | 2025-08-09 21:24:47+00:00
I will point out that in capitalist systems, the money saved by the efficiencies can be put towards more environmentally positive products and technologies. Electric cars for example were very expensive, and it was the wealthy that were able to demand them, drive the market, push prices down so more middle class families can afford them. This is happening again with compostable plastics, B-corps that are more circular, efficient/recyclable packaging solutions, and other parts of our industry.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-08-09 21:25:10+00:00
A different take, and I'm not sure if this is controversial or not. The "prestige of your alma mater" is not just some empty signal. Of course it's not cut and dry, but yes, you tend to find much higher quality software developers graduating from the top of their class with a CS degree from MIT or Stanford than you do graduating from Codesmith. I'm honestly a little baffled this is even a semi-controversial take to begin with.

I've always felt like coding bootcamps were pretty much doomed to fail. I don't know why so many in the industry tried to denigrate the profession in the first place by pretending that a ~20 week bootcamp would suffice. It's like if the New York Philharmonic said "We're going to expand beyond the old stuffy prestige names of Julliard and Curtis, and instead start looking for non-traditional students who took a semester long 'Learn the Cello in 12 weeks' course."

But even then, the biggest problem with coding boot camps wasn't competition from AI, it was offshore competition. People in the US spent a ton to be trained in basic skills like front end web development when there are millions of people around the world willing to do that, at a similar or higher level of skill, for $20/hr or less.

I don't mean to denigrate people who took non-traditional routes to software development. On the contrary, some of the best programmers (and, especially, dev managers) I've ever worked with don't have CS degrees. Speaking of cello, for some reason an inordinate number of top programmers I've worked with have music degrees. But all of these folks just had a certain way of thinking - very detail oriented, extremely logical, extremely self-motivated, that is just not common among people at large. It's not surprising companies try to find talent where the pool is full rather than doing needle-in-a-haystack searches.
by ACS_Solver | 2025-08-09 21:25:16+00:00
Fascinating, I had no idea that it's a thing.

Also interesting to see people they experienced this when sick as children. I did too, I remember two instances when I had fevers and was seeing such things. Some objects would suddenly have the wrong size, or my parents would appear like they're very far away. It was a scary experience that I think would be much less scary now as an adult, but definitely not something I'd like anyway.
by coldtea | 2025-08-09 21:25:34+00:00
>If you have to double check everything, is it really saving time?

What if it gets you most of the way there and you don't care so much about the quality (and thus don't feel any urge to double-check), though?

Which, I expect, is the most common case: people using it to churn half-arsed work faster and with no effort from them.
by darth_avocado | 2025-08-09 21:26:15+00:00
I think all that matters is that most if not all professors care about teaching. And my experience at top universities has been that most still care about teaching and the grad students they need to rely on is because of the class size. There were definitely some that were basking in their own glory from the past, but those were few. Can’t tell about all universities, but I’d assume it’s the same everywhere. The reality is that given what it takes to become a tenured professor, you’re bound to have at least a few who generally suck at teaching.
by shakow | 2025-08-09 21:26:45+00:00
> having moved from capitalist America to post-communist Poland

Poland is definitely a very nice place to live right now, and improvements since the fall of the communist government is undeniable.

However, please note that not all Polish growth is just due to capitalism knocking to the door – the country is the recipient of a huge amount of EU funds[0]. To illustrate it, France, the 2nd largest net contributor to the EU budget, gives barely more than Poland receives, even though the population is a bit half as big.

Is it a bad thing? Not necessarily. But it is definitely not an illustration of a post-communist country standing by its own self.

[0] https://www.statista.com/chart/18794/net-contributors-to-eu-...
by throwaway3060 | 2025-08-09 21:27:25+00:00
IMO, when thinking about this question it's useful to look at the full scope of their objectives. We don't know much about what else Stalin planned, but given the time he had it probably would not fundamentally change the order of magnitude. On the other hand, we do know some of what the Nazis planned to do if they had won, and it was on a scale far beyond even the millions they did murder.
by ranger_danger | 2025-08-09 21:27:45+00:00
Pro-tip they're just not. A lot of tech nerds really like to think they're a genius with all the answers ("why don't they just do XX"), but some eventually learn that the world is not so black and white.

The Dunning-Kruger effect also applies to smart people. You don't stop when you are estimating your ability correctly. As you learn more, you gain more awareness of your ignorance and continue being conservative with your self estimates.
by tim333 | 2025-08-09 21:28:08+00:00
>The era of boundary-breaking advancements is over

Maybe for LLMs but they are not the only possible algorithm. Only this week we had Genie 3 as in:

>The Surprising Leap in AI: How Genie 3’s World Model Redefines Synthetic Reality https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-surprising-lea...

and:

>DeepMind thinks its new Genie 3 world model presents a stepping stone toward AGI https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/05/deepmind-thinks-genie-3-wo...
by throwaway5752 | 2025-08-09 21:28:17+00:00
Question, are they morons? Is your disagreement with them really that simple? Was it necessary to call them that? I don't like posting this comment, because it will be distracting and tone policing. I was just going to downvote and flag your comment and move on, but I think you offered some valuable information about the policy and I'd like to hear more without the divisive parts that add less value.