MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PantaloonFlames | 2025-09-27 23:21:05+00:00
Not an XML bomb, but... at the protocol level, AFAIK, MCP allows the server to change its list of tools and what they do, and the description of what they do, at any point. The chatbot when it starts up, calls "tools/list" and gets a list of tools. So, if "approval for use" depends on that data, .. the approval is built on something that can shift at any time.

That, coupled with dynamic invocation driven by the LLM engine, seems like a security problem at the protocol level.

-----

Contrast to connecting an agent to a service that is defined by a spec. In this hypothetical world, I can tell my agent: "here's the spec and here's the endpoint that implements it". And then my agent will theoretically call only the methods in the spec. The endpoint may change, my spec won't.

I still need to trust the endpoint; that it's not compromised. Maybe I'm seeing a difference where there is none.
by hamandcheese | 2025-09-27 23:21:11+00:00
You contrast Nix with Bazel, and liken it to Docker, tells me you don't have a great grasp of what Nix is. It is far more similar to Bazel than it is to Docker.

> Depend on glibc, copypaste all your other shared lib dependencies and plop them in RPATH. Pretend `/lib` is locked at initial install. Remove `/usr/lib` from the path and include everything.

You are not describing relocatable builds at all. You are describing... well, it kinda sounds like how Nix handles RPATH.
by mc32 | 2025-09-27 23:22:29+00:00
Naive idealism mixed with immaturity leads to these things. Wishing for things to be so doesn’t make them so.

Someone somewhere has to work for things to happen.

To me it feels like when a parasite finds a weak host. Neither will survive long. The relationship can be symbiotic but that requires effort as well as conscientiousness on both sides. The place was not running at break even but they wanted more despite that. They wouldn’t even accept cuts in staffing… They bled it to death with idealism.
by koito17 | 2025-09-27 23:22:37+00:00
> I don't understand why some academic flavor of markdown isn't the standard

I would argue that is exactly what LaTeX is... I studied mathematics in university, and from what I recall, every major publisher provided a LaTeX template for articles and textbooks. Likewise, pretty much every mathematics presentation uses Beamer slides, and most mathematicians are able to "compile" subsets of LaTeX in their head. Websites like MSE and MO use MathJax precisely so that people can write notation as they would on assignments, notes, papers, etc.

Note: I am not saying people particularly like LaTeX as a tool. However, the vast majority of the complaints about LaTeX do seem to be from computer science people. Many mathematics students just create an Overleaf (formerly ShareLaTeX) account and call it a day. Of course, nobody enjoys notes taking 10 seconds to compile, or the first 100 lines of their thesis being a preamble, but the important part is the ability to express notation across a variety of mediums, and the publisher support (as GP mentioned).
by dmurray | 2025-09-27 23:22:52+00:00
That was the original intent of mypy, to allow a subset of Python to be interpreted by a JIT or transpiled to a compiled, statically typed language.

The type hints proved to be useful on their own so the project moved past what was useful for that purpose, but a new JIT (such as the one the upcoming CPython 3.14 lays the groundwork for) could certainly use them.
by scuff3d | 2025-09-27 23:23:23+00:00
It's not even close compared to working with Java or Go or any language built with static typing in mind.

To be clear, I'm not opposed to type hints. I use them everywhere, especially in function signatures. But the primary advantage to Python is speed (or at least perceived speed but that's a separate conversation). It is so popular specifically because you don't have to worry about type checking and can just move. Which is one of the many reasons it's great for prototypes and fucking terrible in production. You turn on strict type checking in a linter and all that goes away.

Worse, Python was not built with this workflow in mind. So with strict typing on, when types start to get complicated, you have to jump through all kinds of weird hoops to make the checker happy. When I'm writing code just to make a linter shut up something is seriously wrong.

Trying to ad typing to a dynamic language in my opinion is almost always a bad idea. Either do what Typescript did and write a language that compiles down to the dynamic one, or just leave it dynamic.

And if you want types just use a typed language. In a production setting, working with multiple developers, I would take literally almost any statically typed language over Python.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-09-27 23:24:18+00:00
Most of my traveling outside of the US has been in Canada, Mexico, central and South American and the Caribbean. You can find those chains in most of those countries.

I have been to London and found plenty of choices for Hilton. Looking at our bucket list for the next few years (we started traveling a lot post 2021), I’m looking at Hyatts in Spain (Barcelona, Seville and Madrid), in Australia and Japan.

It’s not until I get to countries in Africa where I can’t find many chains. In big cities in Europe, Australia and Asia, the American chains are ubiquitous.
by Uptrenda | 2025-09-27 23:25:28+00:00
Why do these useless Wrong Think police keep inserting themselves in open source projects? No one wants the drama they bring to their projects. People are just trying to build software... Open source is not a platform for forcing political and social views on people, and not wanting to be a part of that isn't equivalent to opposing it.

If you're out there crawling open source projects: looking to insert "acceptable usage guides", edit doc language to be Correct (tm), or ready to jump into essays on being persecuted, people should just start blocking these posters.
by charles_irl | 2025-09-27 23:26:06+00:00
Hey, one of the authors here!

Reductively, software engineering means taking an idea and mapping it into code. So one form of "reverse" engineering would be taking the code and extracting the ideas. That's what we did here.

Because the source is public, there's quite a lot to work with from the start -- the warp specializations are named and there are helpful comments in many places.

But for many components, we didn't have much. Maybe the clearest case of "reverse engineering" explained in the post is with the cubic approximation for the rational part of the exponentiation. That required staring at some inline assembly and doing math.
by tompccs | 2025-09-27 23:26:32+00:00
The difference to the dot com bubble is that the unprofitable companies are privately held and the public companies are extremely profitable and have finally found something to soak up their ridiculous profits other than stock buybacks. How a crash affects anyone other than high-net-worth individuals with money tied up in VC funds is not explained.

Real estate and crypto on the other hand...
by alsetmusic | 2025-09-27 23:27:37+00:00
I’ll bite. I’ve been reading about the first two hundred years of christianity for the past couple of years. Here’s my canned take that I got tired of retyping:

Jesus is an ahistorical figure who was originally crucified in the firmament above the earth. Notice no mention of an earthly ministry in the Pailine epistles; Paul is arguing for salvation from a heavenly figure. In his letters, Jesus is still to be revealed, rather than returning. Only decades later did the stories about a human man get written.

The Didache was most likely part of the letter written by the "pillars in Jerusalem" (James the Just, Peter, and John) after their meeting with Paul. This was the meeting to discuss the matter of preaching to gentiles and whether circumcision ought to be required for christian converts. It contains many of the tenets later ascribed to Jesus, but doesn't associate him with teaching them.

The reason the earthly story was embraced by the church was to stop people like Paul from having visions of Christ that the church couldn’t control. By pointing to a real guy on earth, they could control the message. Otherwise, any yokel on the street could teach that Jesus revealed new teachings and the church risked being undermined.

Marcion was probably the first to create a collection of writings associated with christianity: he collected some of Paul's letters and had his own gospel. It was thought that he had a shortened version of Luke (as testified by Eusebius and Tertullian). Marcion, however, claimed that his gospel had been "judaized"; this suggests that his shorter version was the original gospel before others modified it.

Acts was written as a direct response to Marcion’s scripture. It was written to harmonize Paul’s high-jacking of the religion by making he and Peter appear to be in alignment when actually he was at odds with the leaders in Jerusalem.

The Jerusalem pillars (James, Peter, John), were strict adherents of Judaism, whereas Paul taught that Jesus made the Law / Torah unnecessary. They were almost certainly Essenes, one of the three flavors of Judaism at the time (the other two were the Pharisees and Sadducees mentioned in the new testament). John the Baptist was clearly also an Essene. He's said to wear camel's hair with a leather belt around his waist and ate locusts and honey. His practice of baptism also aligns with daily ritual water immersion believed to be a core practice of the Essenes.

This is a very long way of saying that Jesus first appeared in visions and spoke to the early leaders without walking on earth. It's a fringe belief about which I was quite skeptical, but damn if the evidence doesn't line up. See Robert Price, Earl Doherty, and Elbe Spurling for more info. Elbe's online book is free and contains a huge amount of historical information about the region at the.

——

So, I’ll ask you this: which of us has spent more time earnestly trying to understand the faith? I know I read more actual research (as opposed to dogma) than most USA christians, especially evangelicals.
by ofalkaed | 2025-09-27 23:27:48+00:00
This is part of what ruined gaming for me, just picking a game to play became more of a commitment than the game itself. In the 90s it was simple, swing through any of the stores that sold software once every month or two and spend a few minutes browsing the games, buy something if it interested me, or maybe buy one of those magazines that would have a cdrom of shareware/demos to try. The last time I tried to find a game to play I gave up almost immediately, just too many options.
by kyledrake | 2025-09-27 23:27:49+00:00
If I'm allowed to be anecdotal too I've also spent a decent amount of time in the area, including a visit to Bloomington, Indiana to visit their Informatics school, which was full of very interesting, open people that were absolutely wonderful and invited us into their world for a weekend.

The last night there I had dinner at one of the professors' houses in a very nice neighborhood that was absolutely lovely, and in general I thought it was a solid middle class place to live. If it was plopped in the middle of Silicon Valley it would be considered one of the more bucolic and put together cities in the area. And unlike Greenland, the weather is quite good for much of the year and there are trees.

My personal experience does not match the image of tired, doomed NPCs living in a wasteland that it's painted as in this blog post and in these comments.
by lucb1e | 2025-09-27 23:28:11+00:00
> the enormity of what is in front of you and actually being able to feel the sound in your body it can only be experienced by being there.

I have a video of the coolest moment of my life and it looks like maybe the magnitude of a firefly on film. An asteroid impact was predicted and I heard of it in time, so I went to observe it. No sound (or body feel) in my case, but knowing how crazy big and distant the fireball that you're observing is, lighting up the sky from the far side of France...

People whom I showed didn't really have a big reaction. I didn't really understand that, but by now I have enough distance to the event to look back at the video more objectively and realize that, indeed, it's cool but it's just another video. This, too, seems like it can only be experienced in real life

Eleven have been predicted ever (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_prediction#Lis...), none yet in 2025. If you see the notice and you're within, say, 750 km, share the news with a friend and go see it! Of course, it objectively really is just what it is: bigger version of a shooting star. Idk if everyone would have my reaction, but I did ^^

Thank you for sharing iceberg cracking. I love 'cold vacations' anyway (two months in Finland were some of the best months), so this is a new entry on my bucket list :)
by rcfox | 2025-09-27 23:28:43+00:00
In Python, every variable is either defined or imported in the file in which it's used, so you always know where to find it. (Assuming you don't do `from foo import *`, which is frowned upon.)

In C++, a variable might be defined in a header or in a parent class somewhere else, and there's no indication of where it came from.
by Ericson2314 | 2025-09-27 23:29:52+00:00
LaTeX is a horrible system, that has some fans who are basically cultists. I suppose people like it cause Knuth, but remember Knuth just made Tex.

Imagine if C++ had stayed a hodge podge of extra tools compiling to C and C macros? That's LaTeX relative to TeX.

Typst should win and destroy all this stuff. If was in control of government science funding, I would just make all the journals accept it immediately, just like the open access arm twisting.

Academics are too precarious to self-advocate, and have been slaves to LaTeX's bullshit for too long. I'm grad procrastinating grad students are writing Typst packages to liberate them.

Best of luck to everyone involved.
by Mathnerd314 | 2025-09-27 23:30:42+00:00
It seems to be a combination of a lot of corporations using NixOS and a lot of community members using it as their personal distro. Nix is pretty flexible as a package manager but there are tensions that do crop up and you get arguments over really unimportant things that just sort of escalate because people bring in politics and all sorts of other stuff. And my understanding is that the moderation team was cooling off a lot of these disagreements, but now that there's no moderation team, I'm kind of curious to see what happens.

Disclaimer: I use nixos but try not to participate in it (private fork), after seeing how they treat prospective contributors.
by basisword | 2025-09-27 23:30:43+00:00
This kind of thing would only work as a co-operative or non-profit passion project where everyone has equal standing. Either you all want to put equal effort into running the non-profitable enterprise or you want fair pay, rights etc. in which case it needs to be profitable - and that's pretty much impossible for something like this. And in fact the employees clearly recognised it needed to be a co-operative)

There are a lot of comments linking this to 'left politics' but in reality this community bookshop was setup and only functioned by taking advantage of the 'employees' wanting to contribute something good to society. They come out of this looking bad but in reality their good nature was taken advantage of because if you can only run a 'business' on zero hours contracts and no sick pay (keeping in mind workers rights in the UK are much higher than in the US where a lot of readers may be from) you're taking advantage of people who are either desperate or too idealistic (to their own detriment).

Take this paragraph for example:

>>Trying to create a space like this in advanced capitalism is extremely difficult,” it read.

If the 'advanced capitalism' they're talking about is capitalism where workers have rights...good.

>> “The management targeted by this dispute is not a faceless collective of executives in boardrooms. It is one person, who is multiply marginalised, a known member of the community and for the past year has been working for six or seven days a week for the fraction of the salary offered to the booksellers.”

Wonderful. That's what founders do. They work hard and suck it up hopefully for some sort of pay off later on. Struggling as a founder does not give you any right to take advantage of your employees.
by throwaway81523 | 2025-09-27 23:31:25+00:00
I would say mypy is better than nothing but it still misses things sometimes, and makes some signatures difficult or impossible to write. I use it anyway, but patched-on static typing (Erlang, Clojure, and Racket also have it) seems like a compromise from the get-go. I'd rather have the type system designed into the language.
by rhetocj23 | 2025-09-27 23:31:30+00:00
Its a matter of time until the implosion happens.

As a corporate finance and valuation geek, Ill warn you now: dont try and time mood and momentum. Thats what is driving much of the valuations being thrown around.

If this blows up big time and it is found that the Big Tech firms were operating on lies and false hope, there will be consequences - in the form of shareholders demanding cash returned and setting limits on the cash balance held by Google et al. Apple has stayed smart staying out of this nonsense and not doing M&A.

Investing in projects with negative NPV destroys the wealth of shareholders.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-09-27 23:31:50+00:00
Well, just speaking for myself, socialization is the least of the benefits of the structure I follow. That socialization is also incredibly deep. It's not your usual Kiwanis Club.

I have learned that addicts (and alcoholics are just alcohol addicts), need a lot more than just "socialization."

Most folks have no idea how to address true addiction.

Well, they have "ideas," but very few are at all effective.

> "The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake."

> "There's always an easy solution to every human problem; Neat, plausible and wrong."

- H. L. Mencken

I certainly don't claim to have all the answers, but I know one that works for me, and I have seen a lot of people fail; often, spectacularly. It really is one of those "If I have to explain, you wouldn't understand." things.
by bbor | 2025-09-27 23:31:51+00:00
HA, wow, thanks for posting. It’s hard to recall another instance of someone writing something so confident that they’ll come off well, while clearly coming off as self-centered; “our (unelected) team was being steered by the (elected) steering committee” and “they kept annoyingly fighting for objective moderation practices” are pretty damning complaints, especially when given without any actual context! The framing of “the moderation team” resigning when two of them aren’t is a delectable cherry on top of the other drama.

This really is like a very strange, petty version of last year’s (ongoing?) Python Foundation moderation debacle, which is quite fitting for one of the goofiest online communities I’ve ever interacted with. NixOS is probably great and laboring to improve OSS is always laudable, but they’re quite a… confident bunch.

Some random thoughts from the thread:

1. “Rust has a different rule; who are you to say you know better than the rust charter writers?” is a hilarious and very Rustian point to make.

2. Describing forum moderation as some arcane art that only experts can truly understand is something I never expected to see outside of political science textbooks. Like a hyperbolic thought experiment criticizing Technocracy, but real…

3. I referenced this above, but the idea that true objectivity is impossible and thus should be forgotten applies equally as much to truth more broadly, good, and unity (i.e. definitions of terms). It’s something we must strive for in order to make society work, knowing that perfect success is inherently unreachable! ISTG, our society really needs to make philosophy courses more accessible+popular…

P.S. anyone know what the political left/right split here is? I don’t want to litigate that part on HN ofc, but there’s quite a few vague allusions that make think it’s there, just like it was for the Python debacle. Sadly, no one in the linked thread has made it clear yet for us unlookers, if so.
by austinjp | 2025-09-27 23:32:23+00:00
While I very much appreciate the story, I wish it was written in a more straightforward style. The cross-paragraph callbacks from a Google employee to someone living in a basement... well, that's fine for fiction (although I'd still find it tiring) but for this I found it needlessly difficult to follow.

But maybe that's just me. I appreciate this is a stylistic complaint, so I doubt everyone will agree. Still, for a factual piece that I expected to read more like reportage, I found this article fiddly to process.
by xyzzy_plugh | 2025-09-27 23:32:41+00:00
1) this is not the entire moderation team

2) this post is a good summary of the entire situation: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/a-statement-from-members-of-th...

3) as someone with a bit of a horse in this race, I feel like things are working as intended here and this is probably for the best. The past moderation team has done thankless work for a long time, but has struggled to keep up with the community growth. I think the Steering Committee is doing a good job so far.

Overall, this is a bit of a flamey post. Seems to me like there is nothing much to see here. The Nix Community feels healthier than ever.
by nickm12 | 2025-09-27 23:33:06+00:00
I read the TeXBook over 25 years ago when I wanted to learn about how mathematics was typeset. It gave me a lifelong appreciation for and love of the art of typography.

The downside is that once you know, you know and you will see lots of bad typography. Though I genuinely think digital typography has continually and gradually improved over the decades. The typography you get "out of the box" is much better than 20 years ago. Also, high dpi displays rock!
by sobiolite | 2025-09-27 23:33:12+00:00
So I do think we're in a bubble, but I also remember when all the discussion around here was around Uber, and I read many, many hot takes about how they were vastly unprofitable, had no real business model, could never be profitable, and only existed because investors were pumping in money and as soon as they stopped, Uber would be dead. Well, it's now ten years later, Uber still exists, and last year they made $43.9bn in revenue and net income of $9.8bn.
by imron | 2025-09-27 23:33:18+00:00
I too would much rather work in a statically typed language, but sometimes you have to work with what you’ve got.

These systems are part of the core banking platform for a bank so I’d rather some initial developer friction over runtime incidents.

And I say initial friction because although developers are sometimes resistant to it initially, I’ve yet to meet one who doesn’t come to appreciate the benefits over the course of working on our system.

Different projects have different requirements, so YMMV but for the ones I’m working on type hints are an essential part of ensuring system reliability.