MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cbcoutinho | 2025-11-29 15:25:51+00:00
This is why I built the Nextcloud MCP server, so that you can talk with your own data. Obviously this is Nextcloud-specific, but if you're using it already then this is possible now.

https://github.com/cbcoutinho/nextcloud-mcp-server

The default MCP server deployment supports simple CRUD operations on your data, but if you enable vector search the MCP server will begin embedding docs/notes/etc. Currently ollama and openai are supporting embeddings providers.

The MCP server then exposes tools you can use to search your docs based on semantic search and/or bm25 (via qdrant fusion) as well as generate responses using MCP sampling.

Importantly, rather than generating responses itself, the server relies on MCP sampling so that you can use any LLM/MCP client. This MCP sampling/RAG pattern is extremely powerful and it wouldn't surprise me if there was something open source that generalizes this across other data sources.
by eszed | 2025-11-29 15:25:57+00:00
I've studied and taught Shakespeare, and been professionally acquainted with Shakespeare scholars whose names (at least) other Shakespeare scholars know. That's an... eccentric reading. There's no "definitely" in literature, of course, and GP's reading can be made to work.

If I were to try to defend it in an academic setting I'd be looking for how securely or inevitably "groan" is used as a synecdoche for orgasm (I can think of at least three instances in Shakespeare where it doesn't, and off the top of my head no others where it does), and for other period instances where the neck is eroticized as a site of ejaculation (I am not aware of any).
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-11-29 15:26:23+00:00
Yet a colossal number of servers on satellites would require the same energy-production facilities to be shipped into orbit (and to receive regular maintainence in orbit whenever they fail), which requires loads of land for launch facilities as well as processing for fuel and other consumable resources. Solar might be somewhat more efficient, but not nearly so much so as to make up for the added difficulty in cooling. One could maybe postulate asteroid mining and space manufacturing to reduce the total delta-V requirement per satellite-year, but missions to asteroids have fuel requirements of their own.

If anything, I'd expect large-scale Mars datacenters before large-scale space datacenters, if we can find viable resources there.
by mpascale00 | 2025-11-29 15:26:35+00:00
I think you make a good point that much of what we call thinking is really discourse either with another ^[0], with media, or with one's own self. These are largely mediated by language, but still there are other forms of communicative _art_ which externalize thought.

The other thoughts here largely provide within-indivudal examples: others noted Hellen Keller and that some folks do not experience internal monologue. These tell us about the sort of thinking that does happen within a person, but I think that there are many forms of communication which are not linguistic, and therefore there is also external thinking which is non-linguistic.

The observation that not all thought utilizes linguistic representations (see particularly the annotated references in the bibliography) tells us something about the representations that may be useful for reasoning, thought, etc. That though language _can_ represent the world it is both not the only way and certainly not the only way used by biological beings.

^[0]: It Takes Two to Think https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-023-02074-2
by delichon | 2025-11-29 15:26:55+00:00
It's a bit encouraging to read about Edison's flops too. All my failures have just been preparation! One was a kind of 1890 Optimus, dolls he called "little monsters" with a built in miniature phonograph.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison%27s_Phonograph_Doll

I am impressed by how much of commercial success is a matter of the product's tastefulness. Chamath Palihapitiya said this and I have to agree. It is easy to Dunning-Kruger your business to death without it.
by vintermann | 2025-11-29 15:27:30+00:00
Always remember the magic words: dual use technology. The people pushing these aren't saying to you that they want to build data centers in space because conventional data centers are at huge risk of getting bombed by foreign nations or eventually getting smashed by angry mobs. But you can bet they're saying that to the people with the dual-use technology money bag. Or even better, let them draw that conclusion themselves, to make them think it was their idea - that also has the advantage of deniability when it turns out data centers in space was a terrible solution to the problem.
by justvugg | 2025-11-29 15:28:11+00:00
Hi everyone,

I’m excited to share PolyMCP, a toolkit for creating MCP servers and agents that can call them. It works in Python via HTTP, stdio, or in-process for zero-latency calls, and supports almost any model.

There’s also PolyMCP-TS, a TypeScript version, so everything you can do in Python can now run in TypeScript as well.

PolyMCP makes it easy to build modular, agent-driven architectures without having to write a lot of glue code.

Feedback, suggestions, or bug reports are very welcome!
by ryanackley | 2025-11-29 15:29:01+00:00
You're wrong (IMO) The onus should not be on the communicator to qualify every statement of opinion. This is tedious and unreasonable.

Not prefacing what clearly is an opinion with "IMO" is not a jedi mind trick that makes others believe it as fact.

You're also demonstrating some hypocrisy by presenting your own point of view in the same manner. No qualifiers. You're simply stating something as truth
by balamatom | 2025-11-29 15:29:04+00:00
As far as the cat herself is concerned, there is no reason to make that known, either. "Introspection" and "self-reflexivity" are notions, language items. Best used by a human for explaining to other humans why that human should be fed, you know?

What ontological difference does it make whether a being contains "introspection" and "self-reflexivity" but not "nuclear physics" or "interpretive dance"? It's still hungry with or without them. And what good is any of those to a cat, when "meow" fills the bowl just fine?

>If there are other avenues other than language, how would we know?

Well, if you knew, you'd certainly know, tautology extremely intended.

You would just be unable to communicate it, because language would forbid it.

Not "not support it", you see, explicitly forbid it: it would not only be impossible for you to communicate it, you would be exposing yourself to danger by attempting to communicate it.

Because the arbitrary limitation of expressible complexity is what holds language in power. (Hint: if people keep responding to you in confusing ways, you may be doing extralinguistic cognition; keep it up!)

>I think language is a medium that enables this kind of structured thought. Without it, I cannot imagine reaching this level of abstraction (understanding being a "self").

Language does a bait and switch here: first it sets a normative upper bound on the efficiency of knowledge transfer, then points at the limitation and names it "knowledge".

That's stupid.

Example: "the Self", oh that pesky Self, what is its true nature o wise ones? It's just another fucking linguistic artifact, that's what it is; "self-referentiality" is like the least abstract thing there is. You just got a bunch of extra unrelated stuff tacked onto that. And of course, you have an obligation to mistake that stuff for some mysterious ineffable nature and/or for yourself: if you did not learn to perform these miscognitions, the apes would very quickly begin to deny you sustenance, shelter, and/or bodily integrity.

Sincerely, your cat
by tim333 | 2025-11-29 15:29:45+00:00
>Since the widening disequilibrium between the monetary and the material must eventually crash the financial system...

isn't true. Prices go up and down all the time, the money supply figures change all the time. It doesn't mean the financial system must crash. Unless by 'crash' you mean prices go up and down, which they always do.

The whole things seems kind of cranky.
by gruez | 2025-11-29 15:31:26+00:00
It's highly unlikely they obtained 17 billion samples, so they're likely guesstimating it by assuming each attribute is independent, and summing the entropy of all attributes. That's obviously incorrect, both because attributes are inevitably going to be correlated (eg. ip geolocation correlated with time zone), and that two identical devices (eg. 2 iPhones) will have identical fingerprints.
by pclmulqdq | 2025-11-29 15:31:43+00:00
If Zcash had privacy by default, they would have won against Monero for being the private cryptocurrency. As it stands, any private transaction on the Zcash chain stands out like a sore thumb and the use of de-anonymized transactions around it make it easy to figure out how much money was moved. It was a missed layer 8 opportunity on the part of Zcash.

This attack doesn't seem to work if you run a monero node, though.
by a4isms | 2025-11-29 15:32:25+00:00
Back when Java was the NextBigLanguage, we built Java development tools at KL Group/Sitraka (now a part of Quest). For version 2 of the suite of tools, we were getting rid of the nerdy configuration text file and planned on shipping a configuration wizard (yes, we called them wizards while fondling the onions we tied to our belts).

I was the Program Manager, and as usual we were very tightly constrained for time, and in the era of golden master DVDs that had to be ready to distribute at JavaOne in the Moscone Centre... Hard decisions had to be made. The team decided to work on more important features, and drop the configuration wizard from 2.0. Then I did what everyone knows is a no good, very bad, terrible thing. And although I got away with it that time, it's still a no good very bad, terrible thing:

I took my work computer home for the weekend and fired up a HyperCard "compiler" called Runtime Revolution that could make executables for Windows and Unix. Come Monday morning, we had a shippable configuration wizard. Leadership blew its top, because one of their values was, "We're a Java shop, which means we use Java to write Java tools." And after I left the company, they rewrote the configuration wizard in Java Swing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode_(company)

To this day I consider firing up Electron and a complete React framework for simple tools to be a "Turing Tarpit," a place where absolutely anything you imagine is possible, but nothing of interest (in the domain of simple tools) is easy.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-11-29 15:32:26+00:00
In many ways it's worse, because with social media you know -- or think you know -- the source, and you use that to judge accordingly how open you are to what you're reading or how much you trust its veracity, or what biases it might have. Whereas with LLMs most people inherently trust because the LLM is supposedly objective and unbiased.
by lanyard-textile | 2025-11-29 15:32:41+00:00
The branding is so strong and it works well enough (I’d say, according to the perception of most people) that it’s just the first “obvious” choice.

Akin to nobody getting fired for choosing AWS, nobody would think poorly of you using ChatGPT.

I don’t think Claude has that same presence yet.

Google has a reputation for being a risk to develop with, and I think they flopped on marketing for general users. It’s hard to compete with “ChatGPT” where there’s a perceived call to action right in the name; You don’t really know what Gemini is for until it’s explained.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-11-29 15:34:35+00:00
Nit: Do you mean "revisionist history"? ;)

VAX/VMS was originally virtualization of the PDP-11. Windows NT benefited from the loss of MICA/PRISM to virtualize/isolate what was once messy, unreliable, single-tasking, cooperative Windows 3.1/9x to be more isolated, reliable, concurrent, and parallel processing where the fundamental unit of isolated granular execution was the process like UNIX.

DOS mode "VM"s run within Windows 3.x/9x/NT aren't really isolated VMs because they can't replace the DPMI server or launch another instance of (386enh mode) Windows. All they do is semi-isolate real mode and DPMI client apps somewhat to allow multiple instances of them. They can still do bad things™ and don't have full control of the "system" in the way a real system, emulator, or hardware-assisted type-1 or type-2 hypervisor does. They're "virtual" in the way DesqView was "virtual".

Consumerized enterprise virtualization happened in the PC world with VMware Workstation->GSX->Server->ESX->ESXi/vCenter in relatively quick succession around 2001-2005. Xen popped up about the time of ESX (pre-ESXi).

IBM keeps quietly churning out z-based mainframe processors like the z17. Software from the 60's and 70's still runs because they don't do the incompatibility churn that's slowly being more and more adopted in the past 15 years to break everything, all the time, so that nothing "old" that had a long-lasting standard or compatibility ABI that was working will work now. I'm sure it's a lot of work, but churn is also work and especially when it breaks N users. Also, I don't think many folks from the PC-based enterprise server world appreciate the reliability, availability, and service features mainframes have/had.. although vMotion (moving VMs between physical machine linked to shared storage) when it came out was pretty cool.
by voakbasda | 2025-11-29 15:35:29+00:00
This has echos of “First They Came” [0]. The current status quo begs a question that must have been asked in the time it was written: at what point does it have become morally acceptable for citizens to rise up and overthrow a violent government?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came?wprov=sfti1#
by homebrewer | 2025-11-29 15:36:04+00:00
I doubt it, maybe in rich countries where the air is already pretty good. There are enough places out there (mine included) where you can see and feel air pollution without using any sensors: limited visibility on the order of a few dozen meters, smell of burning coal and rubber tires in the air, windows blackened by soot. Everybody knows how terrible the air is, talks about it daily, and can't actually do anything about it.

I've been advocating for closed windows and increased use of air purifiers and FFP3/N99 respirators, and had some limited success among people I know. People are often easily convinced once they see the state of their filter or respirator after a few days of use.
by naasking | 2025-11-29 15:36:31+00:00
I think there are other sorts of reasoning, like spatial reasoning. If you're trying to sort a set of physical items in front of you in order of size, are you thinking about the items linguistically, or is your mind working on some different internal representation?

It's more the latter for me. I don't think there's necessarily one type of internal thought, I think there's likely a multimodal landscape of thought. Maybe spatial reasoning modes are more geometric, and linguistic modes are more sequential.

I think the human brain builds predictive models for all of its abilities for planning and control, and I think all of these likely have a type of thought for planning future "moves".
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-11-29 15:36:59+00:00
Almost every problem a modern corpo has can be solved with an appropriate head-count of appropriately trained/educated people, and that's why none of them get solved.

The processes suck because of decades of corner cutting and "fat" trimming while the executives congratulate themselves for only making the product a biiiit worse in exchange for a 0.0005% cost reduction, before then offsetting any gains by giving themselves all the money that would've gone to whatever is now dead.

Repeat this process for 30 years and you have companies like Microsoft that can barely ship anything that works anymore, and our 4 Big Websites frequently just fail to load pages for no explicable reason, Amazon goes down and takes 1/3 of the internet with it, and AI companies are now going to devour the carcass of our internet and shit it back to us in LLM waffle while charging us money for the privilege to eat it.
by nunobrito | 2025-11-29 15:37:00+00:00
This isn't deanonymization, it is modifying and infiltrating nodes to then listen what is happening from naive users connecting to them.

There was never an expectation of privacy when you connect to servers outside your control with non-encrypted data. That is the reason why the article itself mentions that this isn't working when running your own node, as most people do.

This is the same thing as complaining that Monero is no longer anonymous because Windows is capturing screenshots and keyboard presses when you open the desktop app.

Monero remains anonymous by default.
by gregdeon | 2025-11-29 15:37:09+00:00
This is all right, but it just kicks the intuition into the assumption that the function is convex. As far as I can tell from the paper, this turns out to be exactly the argument they use to prove that (1/2, 1/2) is the optimal guess. But the majority of that proof is dedicated to showing that the function is indeed convex.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-11-29 15:37:09+00:00
At least use 11 Enterprise (24H2) to mostly avoid the nonstop cacophony of ads. I don't want to hear about 365 or OneDrive or OneNote or Copilot every 3 μs.

Before AppVolumes got bought and became VMware App Volumes, there was Softricity (which became Microsoft App-V).. the app was actually a thin client to talk to a terminal server running the app in a container on a server. Office "installs" in 1 second because it's already "installed" on the app server. The next iteration was AppVolumes streams already installed apps like "Linux snaps" on-demand for Windows to do away with the separate terminal server.
by illwrks | 2025-11-29 15:37:30+00:00
I wouldn't downvote it, I would appreciate context though! I'm open to other people's opinions and ideas, I don't like guesswork though.

I share a nationality with the author but I've not read her books. I thought that perhaps there was some connection in the themes of her writing and it's relevance to HN - there is a little bit but I think it's mostly oppression that the OP wants to highlight.
by makeitdouble | 2025-11-29 15:37:31+00:00
> User targeted ads are the main business model of the internet?

Ads helped the internet get up and expand, but it went to a degree that now plagues most aspect of our online life.

Google being first and foremost an ad company is an issue we're tackling, from the search engine becoming dog shit, to Google subsidizing Apple to not compete with them, online content getting shaped to fit advertisers' needs etc.

Another potential tech giant adopting the most toxic business model is IMO something to be pissed about.
by hughw | 2025-11-29 15:38:50+00:00
Is it really so unrelated? Isn't it a case where a similar phenomenon -- radiation impacting a computer calculation -- happened and it's one we can all relate to more easily, and reproduce if we cared to, than high altitude avionics? Not necessarily disputing but it just seems like a relatable case that helps me understand the issue better. If it's a radically different case somehow I'm interested to learn.
by surajrmal | 2025-11-29 15:38:52+00:00
That's not a scalable solution as not every piece of software can pay the packaging cost for every Linux distro. Maybe it's fine for core system software, but it's too difficult to expect that model to work for all software. Imagine if every website you interacted with needed to ship new website updates by packaging it and getting it vetted.

I think you still need a centralized distribution model even for things like flatpak to ensure some level of centralized auditing and revocation for software that has access to sensitive capabilities. However this doesn't necessarily need to be as large of a barrier for shipping updates as trying to package your software for a distro (and playing the game of trying to get your shared library versions aligned).
by Rebuff5007 | 2025-11-29 15:38:58+00:00
I think the good news is that open-source models are a genuine counterweight to these closed-source models. The moment ads become egregious, I expect to see and use services for an affordable "private GPT on demand, fine-tuned as you want it"

So instead of a single everything-llm, i will have a few cheaper subscriptions to a coding llm, a life planning llm (recipes, and some travel advice?). Probably it.
by mikestew | 2025-11-29 15:39:55+00:00
So no, "decades" is bullshit.

First car I looked up from 20 years ago (I own one), and the automatic does just a bit better than the manual:

https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/bymodel/2005_Scion_xB.shtml

We bought manual version despite that. You shouldn’t have a hard time finding other examples.
by qwertox | 2025-11-29 15:39:56+00:00
When my plan expired 3 weeks ago, I exported all my chats, then went into Data controls > Delete all chats and clicked the button "Delete all".

It behaved odd, most messages were no longer accessible, but still in the sidebar. after some time, they were all readable again.

In short: Their "Delete all chats"-feature is broken.

I just hope that they don't mine my chats in order to use the data for advertising.
by TheTaytay | 2025-11-29 15:40:11+00:00
I have also been surprised that personal search engines are not a solved problem. “We” have actually known how to do decent search for a long time, including across images and the entire freaking internet for over two decades, but it’s not simple or commonplace to get a good semantic search interface for your own files, local or remote.

Chrome currently offers a semantic search across your browser history, but it’s buried. The major photo services allow for search across your photos. Windows and Mac have indexed keyword search across files, but the interface feels primitive.

I increasingly want a private search index across my browsing history, my photos, my notes/files, my voice recordings, GitHub projects, etc.

I thought a paid personalizable search engine like Kagi would be a good place to get/build a personalized internet search index on my browser history, but they don’t really offer the tools for that scale.

There are some enterprise search engines trying to solve this for orgs, so maybe I should be looking there?

I’m glad to see projects like Hachi, and am curious what others are doing or reaching for.
by mort96 | 2025-11-29 15:41:46+00:00
This seems completely orthogonal? This is an alternative to zip and tar built on SQLite:

> An "SQLite Archive" is a file container similar to a ZIP archive or Tarball but based on an SQLite database.

Your parent comment said that when you're using SQLite as an application format, the content in the database don't get compressed. These two things have nothing to do with each other.
by torginus | 2025-11-29 15:42:00+00:00
Good point, but you also need to correct for inflation - which was about 9.5% if I'm looking it up correctly. Adding a 2% yearly EUR inflation, that eats up 11.5% of the value.

This gives 4% real value growthy for XMAG - and 5.2% for MAG7. It also needs to account that Trump's election and the tariff craziness was almost exactly a year ago, so the numbers might be a bit unreliable.

This raises interesting questions about the profitability of AI - if AI was economically valuable, we'd see network effects on companies that produce AI inputs - power, datacenter, servers etc. or other companies becoming more valuable as a result which doesn't seem to be tha case.
by wiz21c | 2025-11-29 15:42:14+00:00
From: https://engine.xyz/resident-companies/northwood-space

> Unlike traditional parabolic dish antennas, our phased array antenna can connect with multiple satellites simultaneously.

if that's how they plan to reach more than 1Gbps, then that's not 100Gbps per satellite, that's 100 for a collection of satellites.

Starlink is about 100Mbps. That's 1000x times less than 100Gbps