MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cyberax | 2025-10-27 21:47:02+00:00
OK, I will tone it down.

However, it IS also a description of the current state of affairs in the MCP land. The comment threads and proposals in the MCP projects are dominated by the LLM-generated text, so it is almost impossible to keep the full picture in one's mind. LLMs made it possible to create an overwhelming amount of activity with ease.

Moreover, a lot of _code_ for the MCP servers is also AI-generated and has never been used in practice. It's easy to verify. Here are Github search results for the ProxyOAuthServerProvider that is supposed to delegate the authentication to a third-party server: https://github.com/search?q=ProxyOAuthServerProvider&type=co...

There are 215 results at the time of writing, and all but 3 of them are either forks of or LLM-fueled rewrites of the same code from the `modelcontextprotocol` repo. And one of the 3 is mine, and it doesn't quite work.

So yes, "It's just more of AI slop". Sorry. That's just a neutral description of the current state of affairs in the MCP/AI world. And yes, it's absolutely horrifying.
by spankalee | 2025-10-27 21:47:19+00:00
> > The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers.

> The mission explicitly calls for engineering a racial and ethinic composoition to the user base.

If you're going to lie, don't refute yourself right before the lie.
by nsagent | 2025-10-27 21:47:24+00:00
I'd be 100% okay with the government stating no grant money can be used for funding DEI, but the actual wording in the grant prevents organizations like the PSF from any DEI, whether or not it is funded by the government grant. That's overly broad and seems likely to be an infringement of the first amendment (though I'm not a lawyer, so this is my lay interpretation).
by socketcluster | 2025-10-27 21:47:27+00:00
Wow. What luxury some people have to reject $1.5 million.

For that kind of money, I would put a large national flag in the banner of the socketcluster.io website, I would relocate HQ to whatever country and state they want. I would never utter the word 'diversity' for the rest of my life and upon receiving the money, I would take a screenshot, frame it, put it up on the back wall of my new office and I would pray to it every morning to give thanks.
by ModernMech | 2025-10-27 21:47:40+00:00
The best and brightest are not working on these matters.They put out work product with misspellings, misstatements, outright lies, and ChatGPT hallucinations. We have to assume any mistakes are unintentional. Maybe if you’re sued, the mistake gets you off the hook in front of a judge, but you should expect to be hassled no matter what the actual text says.
by cweagans | 2025-10-27 21:47:52+00:00
Do you actually care if the requests were made on some specific calendar day? Or do you just want to make sure that heavy users are paying more and/or people aren't abusing your system?

Instead of tying your quotas to calendar days in some specific time zone, tie them to a rolling 24 hour usage period. Even better: use a rolling hour.
by braza | 2025-10-27 21:48:36+00:00
> A lot of ML systems run on Python. A lot of ML systems are first implemented in Python. > That by being open source it doesn't deserve money? I think this is a flaw we probably need to fix.

Independent of how one feels about the current US administration, I do not think, as a non-American, that a particular government should foot the bill for it, but in reality I know that no company will do it in good will either.

I've been thinking a lot in terms of financing, but the current system of grants, where some agency tied with the executive body will approve or reject something, is fundamentally broken, as we can see.

In those cases of critical infrastructure, I think it's worth some kind of minimum 1:1 deductible of pre-tax programs where the foundations can apply, and then they could have their financing without being at the whims of some branch of the executive.
by rmason | 2025-10-27 21:48:56+00:00
Here's a link for non-subscribers https://archive.is/Z0w7A#selection-501.0-501.43

I remember having one of those cardboard VR viewers. I have been trying VR viewers for close to thirty years and within ten minutes always get a headache and my eyes feel like they are bulging out of my head. The cardboard viewer was no different ;<(
by sshine | 2025-10-27 21:49:11+00:00
I had the CEO and CTO of our ccTLD registry give a guest lecture to my CS students, and one question came up regarding the AWS incident.

Prior to the question, the CEO boasted a 100% uptime (not just five nines), and the CTO said “We’re basically 30 people maintaining a 1GB text file.”

So the question was, “How come 30 people can have 100% uptime, and the biggest cloud with all of its expertise can’t? Sure, it was DNS, but are you even doing the same thing?”

And the answer was, (paraphrasing) “No, what we do is simple. They use DNS to solve all sorts of distributed problems.”

As did the CTO with all of these new record types embedding authentication. But running CoreDNS in a Kubernetes megacluster is not “maintaining a 1GB text file”.
by AlSweigart | 2025-10-27 21:49:41+00:00
> If we accepted and spent the money despite this term, there was a very real risk that the money could be clawed back later. That represents an existential risk for the foundation since we would have already spent the money!

> I was one of the board members who voted to reject this funding - a unanimous but tough decision. I’m proud to serve on a board that can make difficult decisions like this.

Kudos to Simon and the rest of the board. Accepting that money would be more than a strategic mistake, it'd be an existential danger to the PSF itself.
by simonebrunozzi | 2025-10-27 21:49:43+00:00
Great guide! I think the first "My first RISC-V assembly program" emulator plane should be right at the beginning of the guide. Otherwise, casual readers might think that this is a text-only introduction (despite the word "interactive" in the title).

Will spend more time on it in the coming days. I am quite interested in RISC-V and I think that it might have a bright future ahead.

If any AI expert is reading this now, please use Replit or Lovable or something like that to re-create "Core War" [0] with RISC-V assembly. It would be GREAT.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War
by Thrymr | 2025-10-27 21:49:44+00:00
> Noam Shazeer said on a Dwarkesh podcast that he stopped cleaning his garage, because a robot will be able to do it very soon.

We all come up with excuses for why we haven't done a chore, but some of us need to sound a bit more plausible to other members of the household than that.

It would get about the same reaction as "I'm not going to wash the dishes tonight, the rapture is tomorrow."
by SilverElfin | 2025-10-27 21:49:48+00:00
Secrecy seems to be the norm in many school districts. They don’t want filming, or parents auditing classes, or to stream what’s happening in the classroom to parents, or whatever. They don’t want to answer questions. They don’t want to share the curriculum. They don’t want to share student’s medical records with their own parents.

It all adds up to a disturbing wall that keeps parents out of their own children’s lives. It’s a whole culture rather than just a one off thing about this incident or others.
by mjburgess | 2025-10-27 21:49:59+00:00
What does 'facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers' mean?

Here 'diversity' refers to race/ethnicity.

If you don't think so, the PSF do, because its their explicit reason for their lawyers declining the grant. It's also the plain meaning of the term in this context.

Yes, the foundation for a programming language has a mission which involves the racial composition of its user base. Yes, this is entirely in-keeping with their comms and practices over the last few years, if you are at all aware of how they've acted.
by btown | 2025-10-27 21:50:05+00:00
More details on the underlying project that the grant would have funded: https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-funding-statement.h...

And for those who want to fund the security of one of the few remaining independent foundation-led package ecosystems:

https://www.python.org/psf/donations/

https://www.python.org/sponsors/application/
by sllabres | 2025-10-27 21:50:07+00:00
I don't want to be petty, but there is no 'winter time', only standard time and summer time or 'daylight saving time'.

I first heard the term 'winter time' when it was discussed to decide weather to keep DST permanently or if people would like to keep 'winter time' always. And of course who would want to have winter-something always. ;)
by everforward | 2025-10-27 21:50:23+00:00
This is the big one for me. I recently needed to solve a fairly simple issue; in 3 days I had a solution in FastAPI and SQLAlchemy working with a React front end. Under 1,000 lines of code between the two.

Of course we can’t spend $20/month on compute for that, so it’s now a web hook jankily jammed into another app that writes data to Jira with an Airflow job that triggers Databricks to run a notebook that uses Spark to write the data to S3.

All that to replace a Lambda that would never have gotten to triple digit queries per day. No, instead we spent a month of engineering time to strap all this together and we probably spend 4x as much on compute because it is both slower and requires more resources.

And now I’m getting complaints that it’s complicated and hard to troubleshoot. Yeah, of course, we’ve duct taped together products whose combined manuals are thousands of pages. Color me shocked it’s hard to use.
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-27 21:50:59+00:00
> How does the legalese parse here? Does "violation of Federal anti-descrimination laws" apply to the whole thing or just the "discriminatory equity ideology" portion of the statement?

“Discriminatory equity ideology” seems intended to be an expansion of DEI (its not the normal meaning of that term, but the structure would be an odd coincidence if it was intended to be an alternative) in which case the sentence should probably read:

“[...] that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology, in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.” (note added comma after ideology).

If “DEI” and “discriminatory equity ideology” were intended as alternatives, the sentence should probably read:

“[...] that advance or promote DEI or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.” (note removed comma before “or”)

In either case, the “in violation of federal anti-discrimination law” clearly applies to the whole structure. To make it not do so, you’d have to interpret the meaning as best expressed by:

"[...] that advance or promote DEI or, in violation of Federal anti-discrimination law, discriminatory equity ideology.”

That is, that they were intended as alternatives, but also that the “in violation of Federal anti-discrimination law” was misplaced.

But it really doesn’t matter that much how you read it, when you recognize that the whole reason it is in there at all is as implementaiton of the policy in EO 14151, which characterizes DEI (with its normal expansion, not the new one that looks like an expansion but could be read as an alternative) as categorically a violation of federal anti-discrimination law.
by aarroyoc | 2025-10-27 21:51:05+00:00
Having learned assembly with the book "Computer Organization And Design" from Patterson and Hennessy, it really shows how much RISC-V takes from MIPS. After all they share some of the people involved in both ISAs and they have learned from the MIPS mistakes (no delay slots!). Basically if you come from a MIPS the assembly is very very similar, as it was my case.

Now that book is also available with a RISC-V edition, which has a very interesting chapter comparing all different RISC ISAs and what they do differently (SH, Alpha, SPARC, PA-RISC, POWER, ARM, ...),...

However I've been exploring AArch64 for some time and I think it has some very interesting ideas too. Maybe not as clean as RISC-V but with very pragmatic design and some choices that make me question if RISC-V was too conservative in its design.
by txrx0000 | 2025-10-27 21:51:29+00:00
Before the Internet and social media, groups had a practical size cap because they had to meet up in person. Polarization was naturally limited.

I don't think the social media companies' algorithms are entirely to blame. But more broadly it's centralized moderation of public online spaces.

Moderation of public behavior of physical spaces was only necessary because it wasn't possible to selectively filter people's influences on eachother in public. If someone is doing something you don't want to see in public, covering your eyes is not good enough because you also block out the people you do want to see. Centralized moderation was a practical half-measure rather than an ideal solution for a democratic society that values free expression and self-determination.

That kind of moderation isn't necessary online because all filters can be implemented client-side. We just aren't doing it because people are so used to the old way. But the old way will naturally lead to more and worse conflict when we have infinite connectivity.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-10-27 21:52:02+00:00
Well, shadows are always tallest when it's a new dawn or impending darkness, either one.

Not like this kind of thing happens on a reliable 24-hour cycle.

Maybe over a year before you can possibly be sure.

If it's a new dawn things are better than they were a year ago, and keep getting brighter from here.

I think there's got to be a number of people having this opinion.

If it's darkness instead, it won't get any brighter for a long time, and only after dimming completely.

Plenty are bound to be feeling this way too.

Others for whom it remains to be seen, and everybody normally draws the line somewhere different, so it may turn out that differences in opinion are more critical than anything actually factual.
by sho_hn | 2025-10-27 21:52:27+00:00
> What luxury some people have to reject $1.5 million.

For a non-profit backing a community, an important goal is to ensure the long-term sustainability and viability of the org, because the community relies on it to keep infra working, legal representation in place, and other vital needs.

Accepting those $1.5mio would have come with significant "we want that money back" risk, as the post explains. At a $5mio annual budget that could seriously destabilize a small org like this, from the money shortfall to community unrest. Taking this money would be irresponsible.

My two cents, as treasurer of another large FOSS non-profit.
by dang | 2025-10-27 21:52:53+00:00
That's right, but the test we use is "are two articles different enough to support a substantively different discussion". In this case the answer is clearly no, so they fall in the same equivalence class.

(We'll put a link to https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/27/psf-withdrawn-proposal... in the toptext of the other post though)
by dang | 2025-10-27 21:53:27+00:00
[stub for offtopicness / flamewarness / guideline-breakingness]

(this is a rough cut - I know there are other posts left in the thread that arguably belong here, but this time I'm in a bit of a rush)

(please, everyone, you can make substantive points thoughtfully but do so within the guardrails at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - avoid the generic-indignant-flamey-snarky-namecalley-hardcore-battley sectors of internet discourse - we're trying for something different here and we need everyone to help with that)
by consumer451 | 2025-10-27 21:54:23+00:00
I want to make it very clear that this was a lighthearted response from Noam to the "AGI timeline" question.

Noam does not do a lot of interviews, and I really hope that stuff like my dumb comment does not prevent him from doing more in the future. We could all learn a lot from him. I am not sure that everyone understands everything that this man has given us.
by mfrye0 | 2025-10-27 21:54:35+00:00
If you do this sort of thing often, I'd love to chat further. I'm basically trying to automate this sort of manual research around companies with a library of deep research APIs.

Had a show HN last week that seemed to go under the radar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45671087

We launched corporate hierarchy research and working on UBO now. From the corporate hierarchy standpoint, it looks like the Delaware entity fully owns the Estonian entity. Auto generated mermaid diagram from the deep research:

graph TD e1[BuildJet, Inc.]-->|100%, 2022-12-16|e2[Buildjet OÜ]
by bigiain | 2025-10-27 21:54:43+00:00
Best and cheapest option is a dog, decent insurance, and off site backups that regularly get restores tested.

And maybe a little bit of not getting too attached to "stuff" - there's very little stuff that's truly irreplaceable. I'd miss my first guitar if my house was robbed and they took it or if my place burnt down. I'd miss the HiFi gear I bought in 1988 and still use, and maybe my modded espresso machine. But I'd get over that loss and my sentimental attraction to those things just fine, especially after I'd replaced then with my insurance settlement.
by StickTIGLiIon4 | 2025-10-27 21:54:49+00:00
Batteries in series, typical stick welding voltage is ~27v. You might be able to light up on one battery, but you will quickly learn why it's called "stick" welding.

I wouldn't arc weld with any number of pairs of sunglasses, that was firmly tongue-in-cheek; but yes you are right, stacked glasses would be series.

Also, if you try this, before pulling the battery from the non-broken jeep, drive it to the top of a hill so you can bump start it later when the battery is too dead to turn the engine over.
by dekhn | 2025-10-27 21:54:57+00:00
Take a look at MIT's response to the administration regarding the University Compact (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_for_Academic_Excellenc...). You can see that MIT has an excellent understanding on how to reply. AFAICT the administration did not reply furiously (if I missed their reply, I woudl appreciate a link to it).

I can also predict the next step here: UT Austin is likely to agree to the compact and will be given a huge monetary award (although I don't think it's a foregone conclusion- they didn't reply within the deadline which suggests that they are working behind the scenes on an agreement).
by comex | 2025-10-27 21:55:07+00:00
macOS doesn't have (many) consistency issues in the OS itself or first-party apps. But when it comes to the third-party apps people use? Totally inconsistent. Most of them are either webapps accessed through the browser (Google Docs), webapps accessed through Electron shells (Discord, Slack, Zoom, 1Password), or non-webapps that nevertheless have their own bespoke UI (Adobe, Microsoft Office, browsers themselves other than Safari). I'm not a fan of the situation, but that's the way it is.

I do fully admit these consistency issues were less bad in the past.
by belorn | 2025-10-27 21:55:28+00:00
Diversity is good when it is either applied in a neutral and identify-agnostic way, or if we as a society all agree on which groups deserve getting benefits and which ones don't.

The first one is sadly horrible disliked and tend to lose support as soon the "wrong" demographic get benefits. If you have a diversity program to benefit minority X, and then later X become majority, then the program get canceled rather than applied for any new minority. The programs always get designed with a specific target in mind.

Similar for the second, if a group get popular support, diversity programs will help those while ignore any similar but disliked group. The program is not there to fix diversity, it is to help the intended group. When the political environment becomes polarized, it becomes very clear which groups get support from which side.

It has been very clear by diversity programs, and those who oppose diversity programs, that no one want a difference in perspectives, or for that matter catching their own blind spots.
by foxfired | 2025-10-27 21:56:17+00:00
There was a post just a few hours ago on the frontpage asking not to use AI for writing [0]. I copied the content and pasted it on multiple "AI detection" tools. It scored from 0% and to up to 80%. This is not gonna cut it. As someone who used LLMs to "improve" my writing, after a while, no matter the prompt, you will find the exact same patterns. "Here's the kicker" or "here is the most disturbing part" those expressions and many more come up no matter how your engineer the prompt. But here's the kicker, real people also use these expressions, just at a lesser rate.

Detection is not what is going to solve the problem. We need to go back and reevaluate why we are asking students to write in the first place. And how we can still achieve the goal of teaching even when these modern tools are one click away.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45722069
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-10-27 21:56:21+00:00
At a previous company, a power outage knocked out our router, which knocked out the card access system, which locked us out of the server room where the router was. Good news, there was a physical key bypass. Bad news, nobody knew where said key was. Lucky for us, I could pop out to my car, grab my picks, and then got the thing open in a couple of minutes.

Definitely the most above-the-board use those picks ever got (Though obtaining access to my university dorm's AC controls definitely made me more popular).
by anthk | 2025-10-27 21:56:48+00:00
I'd love Metal Warrior (and Hessian) ported to SDL2 and some 6502 CPU library similar to what the Super Mario World port for PC it's using to emulate 6502's Big Brother.

Also, the author it's amazing; I was looking for this https://github.com/M64GitHub/6510-emulator-c in order to run Metal Warrior 1-4 (and a few more c64 demos) under my n270 ATOM based netbook without getting mad with VICE. I already use FastSID instead of resid and I rebuilt it against SDL1 and disabled some OpenGL effects, but it doesn't run 100% fast.

Yes, I tried with x64 instead of x64sc.

Maybe one day I'll be competent enough to create some simple SDL2 based emulator with that core plus the 6502...
by _alternator_ | 2025-10-27 21:57:01+00:00
It occurs to me that the gamma ray hypothesis has a fairly easy check. Light sources pass through the telescope’s optics (typically mirrors or occasionally lenses) which leads to a characteristic “point spread function” for point sources like stars. If it were an errant gamma ray exposure directly on the film, it’s extremely unlikely to have the PSF of the standard light sources.

You can compute the PSF from known stars on the same image and run a statistical test, but TBH just visually comparing the transient with a few stars of similar brightness on the same image should put this one to rest.
by Animats | 2025-10-27 21:57:20+00:00
> Instead, we use an approach where a human and AI agent collaborate to produce the code changes. For our team, every commit has an engineer's name attached to it, and that engineer ultimately needs to review and stand behind the code. We use steering rules to setup constraints for how the AI agent should operate within our codebase,

This sounds a lot like Tesla's Fake Self Driving. It self drives right up to the crash, then the user is blamed.
by sothatsit | 2025-10-27 21:57:53+00:00
I really don’t think this is accurate. I think the median opinion here is to be suspicious of claims made about AI, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. But I also regularly see posts talking about AI positively (e.g. simonw), or talking about it negatively. I think this is a good thing, it is nice to have a diversity of opinions on a technology. It's a feature, not a bug.