MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shawneechase | 2025-09-26 22:57:43+00:00
Most AI agents today break on simple UX.

Ask an agent: “List my Jira tasks.” It doesn’t know your user_id. “Send an Outlook email.” It doesn’t know your mailbox. “Pull my ClickUp tasks.” It doesn’t know your workspace.

So the agent either fails or annoys the user with the same context questions every single time. That’s friction your users won’t tolerate — it kills adoption and drives churn.

We built WhoAmI tools to fix this. They’re drop-in, provider-specific tools that fetch just enough identity info (user IDs, workspace IDs, emails, timezones) for the agent to act.

From the end user’s perspective: it just works. No repeated setup, no prompts for boilerplate data.

We’ve shipped WhoAmI tools for Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, Jira, Notion, Zendesk, and more. If you’re building agents with Arcade, you get this UX out of the box.

Better agent UX → happier end users → better retention and traction.
by popcar2 | 2025-09-26 22:57:50+00:00
This is very true, and it's a large part of why I never use microblogging at all, it's impossible to just find posts that fit what you want to see.

That's why I mostly use Lemmy/Piefed because everything is neatly organized into communities that you can subscribe to. I mostly browse tech & gaming communities and my feed is very chill.
by layer8 | 2025-09-26 22:58:57+00:00
Mailing lists are largely a different mode of communication than chat, as alluded to in parts of TFA. I’d go as far as to say that mailing lists are mostly incompatible with chat-like usage patterns. It’s a feature, not a bug. Chat programs and protocols like IRC have existed almost as long as mailing lists, but were never a replacement for them.
by andrewjf | 2025-09-26 22:59:10+00:00
I have two moonlanders but wound up giving up because I just couldn't adapt to it. And when writing code, finding the symbols like {, =, }, and other common coding ones was just too difficult to retain muscle memory. I tried many layouts, I tried to make my own, and at the end of the day it was just too different. I wish I had a better experience.

Any recommendations?
by pfexec | 2025-09-26 23:00:37+00:00
Sounds like boomer-speak for they sent one of those full-screen SMS messages (aka 'flash SMS') with a link to a livestream.

You guys read too much Tom Clancy.

If spammers can do it and send me links to phishing sites so can one of the most technologically-proficient governments. You really think they would waste multiple 0-days on some bullshit like this?
by baby_souffle | 2025-09-26 23:00:49+00:00
Your point about having to enable two different things at the same time in two different places is a concise way of expressing my extreme frustration with that project.

I burned the better part of a Saturday trying to figure out why a relatively straightforward configuration wasn't applying and it's because one half of the configuration that I was trying to apply has to be done in the static manner and not the dynamic manner.

Documentation doesn't really spell this out and after quite a bit of frustrated googling I found a few other people complaining about effectively the same problem. It's only a few lines of code to spit out something along the lines of "hey, you're trying to configure ¢thing in an inappropriate way. Did you mean to configure ¢thing over in €thisLocation?" message... But nope, that would make things so much simpler and easier to use and probably cut into their support contract sales...

Now I basically just stick with nginx because it's documentation isn't crap, useful and applicable examples are all over the Internet.
by 9dev | 2025-09-26 23:01:43+00:00
A word of advice that you might or might not need to learn on your own: Don’t let all the habits from work creep in—dependencies, tooling, code style, neat documentation, multi-platform support, proper commit messages—and most importantly, any notion of "MVP" or "feature creep". Try to make an effort to get side tracked while you’re side tracked, do things that you couldn’t justify doing at work, the stuff no user would notice, the polishing that you’d always postpone, or the massively overengineered spec-compliant OAuth server in your personal book library.

Nobody can judge you for it. There’s no deadline to meet. So what if it’s never finished? It’s cathartic to go as deep into the rabbit hole as you want, a freedom that your day job probably not grants you, and thus all the more valuable.

At least I realized I loose interest in my side projects the moment they become a chore, and then I remember to tell Dependabot to go to hell again.
by malchow | 2025-09-26 23:01:55+00:00
Cells are subject to aggressive binning – akin to the early days of MOS process. And specs and process capability adhesion in the industry are not as "serious" as they are in the modern, U.S.-led semiconductor industry.

Source: I work on 100% Si anode batteries constructed in part with a litho-derived laser process at Enovix.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-09-26 23:02:13+00:00
Why are you so obsessed with using Xitter? He bought it, and literally gives a shit.

If you can't resist and absolutely have to... use something like https://xcancel.com for a browser based alternative view. And show the teens how to use that, too. It's less algorithmic, and gives a threaded view.

Don't forget to click on the cogwheel in the upper right for settings like theme, autoplay/stop, redirections to other services, and so on. You actually might like some of them.
by blakepelton | 2025-09-26 23:02:19+00:00
I've asked two financial advisors about CAT bonds. One had never heard of them and the other said were about as risky as crypto. I guess this is such a niche product that there isn't widespread knowledge about it.

I wonder how much more diversified $ILS could be if it were larger. Would a 10x increase in assets under management give it significantly less volatility because it could do a better job spreading risk around the globe?
by antasvara | 2025-09-26 23:02:50+00:00
There are a lot of interesting dynamics in this market.

For example, CAT bonds are generally tied to the specific natural hazard ("this bond triggers if a hurricane of Category 3 or higher land falls in this segment of Florida") or to industry losses, as estimated by an agreed upon source.

This means that a CAT bond is correlated with, but not directly informed by an insurer's actual loss experience. Traditional reinsurance (so an insurer themselves getting insurance) will usually be tied to specific policies, so their experienced loss is what determines payout.

However, depending on the insurer's policies, traditional reinsurance may be unavailable or much too expensive (either due to the large limit needed, the risk level of the policies, or any number of other reasons). Depending on the trigger, a CAT bond can also pay out faster because you don't have to wait to see the claims from 100k home insurance policies.

From the technical side, most large reinsurers license CAT modeling software from one or both of the same two vendors: Moody's RMS or Verisk. The biggest reinsurers will develop their own models, and there are other modeling vendors that they may license for particular perils (EQEcat for earthquake and KatRisk for flood come to mind), but the big two are pretty widely accepted in reinsurance markets.

That means if your policies are "odd" in some way (uncommon construction type, power facility, etc.), depending on how a reinsurers chooses to model them (or how the model specifically handles them) can have a big impact on your reinsurance pricing. If you know something about your policies that can't be incorporated into a vendor model very well, you may get better pricing on a CAT bond.

These are just some of the considerations! There are so many more things that go into it. But I think it's super interesting to think about.

Source: I work in this side of the industry, specifically in natural catastrophe modeling.
by constantcrying | 2025-09-26 23:02:52+00:00
>is quite wrong unless you're simply redefining the strings "three", "plus", "equals" and/or "two" to mean quite different things.

Which are the different rules he talks about. Obviously he does not say that all rules have to apply t at the same time. What a silly thing to interpret into his words.

>That is quite confused and conflates several different things.

It isn't though? It is definitely an experience I had during my mathematics degree.

>If this actually happened, I doubt that it took him as long as five minutes. And how does that square with "did it because he or she didn’t try to" ... surely Gauss tried to find a simpler way to calculate the sum. Also, Gauss had vastly more impressive achievements than this, although I suppose it depends on how young he was at the time.

The point he is making is actually pretty clear. Namely, that there is a distinction between a good solution and a great solution. A good solution takes the hard way and does all the right things. A great solution completely understands the problem and gives a solution so clear that after that you do not even see the problem.

>Mediocre mathematicians do the same--I'm not even that, but I was on my high school math team and was routin

If you ever have done mathematics at a university level you will have encountered exactly what Torvalds describes. In your homework you make all the right arguments, and through many steps you work through a difficult proof. In the end it is correct.

When another student presents their argument or when you later go through some textbook, there is a deceptively simple transformation and suddenly the argument becomes a trivial case of a previous theorem. Suddenly the problem has disappeared all together.

What makes a great mathematician is no doubt that ability. In fact if you ask a mathematician what makes a great proof it will be exactly this, taking something which looks incredibly complicated and suddenly transforming it into something incredibly obvious.
by flir | 2025-09-26 23:03:06+00:00
> Generally, yes. It simplifies dealing with government bureaucracy. Proving your identity is generally something you will have to do anyway, this is will just remove a bunch of hoops you have to go through.

This community, more than most, should understand in its bones that security and convenience are the ends of a see-saw. Convenience is five-character passwords, security is 2FA. Convenience is contactless payments, security is cash. Etc etc.

When you argue from convenience, I find it almost axiomatic that my security is going to take a beating.
by godelski | 2025-09-26 23:03:08+00:00
True, but I think this post is for a more general audience. Where continuous (and visible) lasers are still found on many things, including weapons.

It's also worth mentioning that the power rating in many commercial laser pointers should not be considered reliable. It's also possible to overdrive them. I'll put out this way, in my undergrad I spent a lot of time in the optics lab and the post doc had a fun story about where she was working with IR lasers. Basically it was "There's light! Yay! It's working! ... oh fuck! There's VISIBLE light! I'm burning my eyeballs!" It's easy to do some serious damage even with cheap electronics and expertise. The big problem is that laser damage happens without you feeling a thing. If you do feel it, you're probably getting seriously fucked up.
by btown | 2025-09-26 23:03:25+00:00
I've often thought that if you want to represent a probabilistic world model, with nodes that represent physical objects in space-time (and planned-future space-time) and our level of certainty about their relationships to one another... you'd do that outside an LLM's token stream.

You could, in theory, represent that model as a linear stream of tokens, and provide it as context to an LLM directly. It would be an absurdly wasteful number of tokens, at minimum, and the attention-esque algorithm for how someone might "skim" that model given a structured query would be very different from how we skim over text, or image patches, or other things we represent in the token stream of typical multi-modal LLMs.

But could it instead be something that we provide as a tool to LLMs, and use an LLM as the reasoning system to generate structured commands that interact with it? I would wager that anyone who's read a book, drawn a map of the fantasy world within, and argued about that map's validity on the internet, would consider this a viable path.

At the end of the day, I think that the notion of a "pure LLM" is somewhat pedantic, because the very term LLM encapsulates our capability of "gluing" unstructured text to other arbitrary tools and models. Did we ever expect to tie our hands behind our back and make it so those arbitrary tools and models aren't allowed to maintain state? And if they can maintain state, then they can maintain the world model, and let the LLM apply the "bitter lesson" that compute always wins, on how to best interact with and update that state.
by hnlmorg | 2025-09-26 23:03:31+00:00
> You seem to be arguing simultaneously that the Brits are worse than average when it comes to adapting to local norms as tourists, while also suggesting that the people moving to Britain permanently shouldn't have to?

No. I’m arguing that people who say “people change their personalities to suit mine” are hypocrites.

> But a small country can't preserve their identity when they are overloaded by so many immigrants coming in at once who FORCE their ways on their new home. Think of it as Push vs Pull, there's a difference.

Citation required — for literally every part of that sentence.

> Every country having a unique culture makes the world more interesting.

Exactly my point as well.

> Leftists would in that case be empathetic toward the remaining indigenous minority who feel their historic way of life was killed off against their will. Why should it be any different if you swap the country and nationalities in this example to what is happening in the UK?

If you think a fraction of a percentage of people coming to the UK is suddenly going to change the identity of the entire country then you need to get out and explore more of the UK yourself.

> I am an immigrant myself, and a fairly liberal one at that. But I made the effort to come to my new home legally and assimilate to the best of my ability. I'm not sure why I should hold others to a lower standard.

The problem isn’t the suggestion. The problem is the entitlement.

I do think it’s courteous for people to make an effort to integrate. But it should also be their decision, not ours.

And that’s the crux of the problem.

Most of the time, the complains about immigration are unfounded scapegoating of people who are different. It’s got fuck all to do with facts. It’s just people who the government have failed, or people who feel entitled, being fearful of other people who are different. It’s literally just an unchecked primal instinct. And we need to grow past that as a species.
by mschuster91 | 2025-09-26 23:03:32+00:00
> But secondly, I would argue that you really don't. What kind of war are you even anticipating where you would need massively scaled up tank production of all things?

The war we're seeing in Ukraine right now. Europe has by far not enough tanks, especially heavy self-propelling artillery, to counter Russia. And for whatever reason, despite us actually having manufacturers for vehicles, we still haven't spun up large scale production, it's absurd.

IMHO, when WW3 hits, the situation will be like WW2, Europe relying on the US yet again - but I'm not certain that this time, even if the US wanted to support us, if they actually could. Not because of current political issues, but because the factories, the supply chains are all broken these days, tracing back to China far too often for my liking.

> Being independent sounds really good on paper (and looks appealing when glancing e.g. at the European gas situation), but isolating your nation economically has a really shitty track record, historically, especially when you are not sitting on top of a global empire to circumvent some of the drawbacks.

I'm not advocating for full isolation amongst Western countries but for as much isolation from China and India as reasonably possible. We don't need to produce everything ourselves all the time, but if Covid has showed us one thing, it is that each country should at least have important industries running on low scale and people with knowledge around that can be expanded quickly in time of need. The US in particular should know the danger of knowledge literally dying out - what was it, about a decade was needed to replicate Fogbank [1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank
by nomel | 2025-09-26 23:04:12+00:00
The concept of mostly static weights holding the bulk of base intuition/knowledge (foundation if you will ;)) seems like a good bet, since it's how the mammalian brain works (with updates of those long term weights mostly happening while you sleep [1]).

I very naively assume the "easy" path will be similar: a very different system that's bolted on/references the foundation models, to enable the realtime/novel reasoning (outside the fixed latent space) bit that isn't possible now.

[1] https://animalcare.umich.edu/our-impact/our-impact-monitorin...
by tonymet | 2025-09-26 23:04:43+00:00
I digitized HOA records and initially considered using a collaboration tool like Slack partnered with Google Drive to create an online community.

Although a corporation and their hierarchy can impose tools easily, HOA communities don't have that luxury. You have broad demographics, skills and no time to support any of them.

A bigger issue is credentialing. You don't want the business of helping seniors log into or reset their Slack password.

My ultimate "non-engineering" solution was to use email for everything. A mailing list for communications. Records requests are handled via email with some automation.

There's tremendous opportunity for more email Saas -- like Sourcehut but for other disciplines.

Everyone and everything can do email. It's easy to automate, and authentication is someone else's problem (the recipient only needs access to their inbox).
by nightpool | 2025-09-26 23:05:42+00:00
Every one of these "How AT proto works" explainers focuses on data ownership—which is where ATProto shines—and glosses over data processing, where ATProto is decidedly weaker than ActivityPub. ATProto is built on a global, public view of the world, where all events are visible to a trusted global "AppServer" that can make all of the decisions for you—how to create your feed, who can see who's posts, etc—all of those decisions have to be made by a trusted intermediary. ActivityPub is more like RSS or email—your local server only has to manage the feeds you subscribe to, and your inbox is directly built from all of the posts you have access to. People you subscribe to send you your posts, and you don't have to process them at all.

This is why Bluesky could never have "private likes" in the same way Twitter or ActivityPub does—every AppView needs to track the like counts of every post in the network manually. It's a huge hassle! I just don't see this architecture winning out in the long term, when compared to the AP feed-subscription architecture.

primarily because multiple programs can access the same identity

Actually, this was how AP was originally designed as well—it was just that the most popular early implementations took shortcuts to remove that functionality to fit them into their existing architecture. This is a direct consequence of the fact that the biggest AP implementations when it was initially adopted were descendants of older OStatus social networks, and not built to be "ActivityPub-native" from the ground up.
by layer8 | 2025-09-26 23:06:45+00:00
You can set up an email list using Google Groups, for instance. As an example for such a list, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44767555.

People need to subscribe to the mailing list, either by sending a subscribe email to the appropriate email address, or via a web interface that is specific to the mailing list server. Once subscribed, you simply send emails to the list’s email address, and receive emails from that address. It’s useful to set up a filter in your email account or email client so that all messages from a given mailing list are automatically sorted into a separate email folder.
by Findecanor | 2025-09-26 23:07:13+00:00
I think it is more likely that the Israeli government would have abused Gaza's wireless emergency alert system to send a link to a live stream to every cell phone. AFAIK, emergency alert systems are limited to text messages but smartphones will recognise URLs to allow users to tap to open them.

But a user would have needed to actively tap on the link to open the stream.
by themafia | 2025-09-26 23:07:18+00:00
> too much Tom Clancy.

Isn't this is the nation that planted explosives into pagers? I think they're the ones reading too much Clancy.

> so can one of the most technologically-proficient governments.

How would you feel if China did this to your nation? Would you marvel at their proficiency or perhaps focus on the complete lack of diplomacy it displays?
by kragen | 2025-09-26 23:07:21+00:00
This is very interesting, thanks!

> While this hypothesis is not entirely wrong, it doesn’t reveal the full picture. For example, even on a GPU, running the same matrix multiplication on the same data repeatedly will always provide bitwise equal results. We’re definitely using floating-point numbers. And our GPU definitely has a lot of concurrency. Why don’t we see nondeterminism in this test?
by rakoo | 2025-09-26 23:07:25+00:00
This is a beautifully written introduction to the architecture of AT, but after much consideration I will still remain on ActivityPub for the time being.

I love the idea to define data formats first, and then build on top of that. It's the only way we should do everything, because if you have the data, everything can be re-built on top. Unfortunately the way AT works is all contained in here:

> Social aggregation features like notifications, feeds, and search are non-negotiable in modern social products. [...] Coincidentally, that’s the exact mechanism you would use for aggregation. You listen to events from all of your app users’ repositories, write them to a local database, and query that database as much as you like with zero extra latency. [...] This might remind you of how Google Reader crawls RSS (rip).

In order for the social aspect to work, all data must at some point or another be aggregated in a single place. Said single place must then be huge, as it scales linearly with the activity of the network; in a still-capitalist world this means that this single place will always be run and led by money, unless some extraordinary volunteers-based project like Wikipedia springs up. The example of Google Reader is to the point: it was the biggest tech company at the time, provided a service for free, and decided to stop because it didn't care anymore.

In fact Google Reader is a very good comparison. AT works exactly as if you had websites, each with their own RSS feed, and then a big relay called Google, providing search, feeds, notifications, ... but as we all know by being the middleman between producers and readers Google gained an astonishingly high power. That is the business model described by Cory Doctorow when he talks about enshittification. Put yourself in the middle, and everyone will depend on you.

The only way an AT based product works at scale, ie with everyone easily talking to everyone, is with one or a few mega intermediaries between everyone of us. I fear this is not going to solve any of the issues we have.

What is different in ActivityPub ? Intermediaries are definitely useful for some services, but once your network is built you don't need them anymore: content flows directly between the repository, no middlemen needed.

In short: if we want a single network at large scale, AT requires large scale centralization points, while AP certainly needs them but could survive without them. Either we face that, or we start exploring and living within small-scale networks