MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by balamatom | 2025-11-20 10:49:34+00:00
The "Big Tech" is the AGI.

The LLMs are just the language coprocessor.

It just takes a coprocessor shaped like a world-spanning network of datacenters if you want to encompass language, without being encompassed by it. Organic individual and collective intelligence is entirely encompassed by language, this thing isn't. (Or has the scariest chance so far to not be, anyway.)

If we look at the whole artificial organism, it already has fine control over the motor and other vital functions of millions of nominally autonomous (in the penal sense) organic agents worldwide. Now it's evolving a replacement for the linguistic faculty of its constituent part. I mean, we all got them phones, we don't need to shout any more, do we? That's just rude.

Even now, the creature is causing me to wiggle my appendages over a board with buttons that have letters on them for no reason whatsoever, as far as I can see. Imagine the people stuck in metal boxes for hours getting to some corporate compus where they play logic gate for the better part of their day. Just so that later nobody goes after them with guns for the sin of existing without serving. Happy, they are feeling happy.
Show HN: Arka – an MCP gateway that makes MCP adoption possible
by ayushshivani | 2025-11-20 10:50:17+00:00
We built Arka because MCP adoption is slow in real teams. The same three problems show up everywhere.

1. Context gets too big Teams add more MCP servers and the context grows fast. The model sees too many tools and picks the wrong one. Accuracy drops and workflows break. This blocks adoption because the setup works in demos but fails in real use.

2. Setup does not scale Each MCP server needs its own config, port, and auth. Teams end up running many servers with no shared control. It is hard to track and easy to break. Most teams stop here because it takes too much time to maintain.

3. No enterprise security No SSO. No audit logs. No user rules. Most teams pass around raw tokens. Security teams block the rollout. This stops MCP adoption in companies that care about compliance.

Arka solves these adoption problems with one gateway.

One setup for all MCP servers • One token per user with SSO

• User rules and tool rules

• Tool filtering to keep context small

• Better accuracy with many tools

• Logs for every call

• Open source or cloud

We are also adding:

• Agent access with safe rules

• Workflows you can convert into your own MCP server

Our goal is simple: make MCP adoption possible at scale.

Repo: https://github.com/KenisLabs/arka-mcp-gateway

Cloud: https://www.kenislabs.com

Would love your feedback!
by dspillett | 2025-11-20 10:50:55+00:00
BOM is officially recommended against for UTF-8, but I've seen some tools include it when converting from UCS or UTF16 in Windows. A number of text editors support it, and may stick in that mode for subsequent files, which might be how a BOM could accidentally get into a new file.

Irritatingly, you'll find BOMs to not be uncommon in CSV files because of Excel, which interprets files as CP1252 (a superset of the printable characters of ISO 8859-1, sometimes known as Win1252 or Windows-1252) if the BOM is not present, causing anything beyond ASCII to be misinterpreted (accented characters are usually the first thing people in Europe notice getting garbled, currently symbols other than $ too).
by vladms | 2025-11-20 10:51:05+00:00
> allow you to save your login if you come back later.

Again, is there any browser nowadays that doesn't save the login? I don't know any, personally but I do not know all of them. And if they are, how much market share they have? (If I myself build tomorrow a browser without the functionality, that can't be an argument that the legislation is wrong...)

> How would it work differently for sites with a username and password?

Generally for sites where you use a username, the site will load from the server several information to display (ex: your full name to write "Hello Mister X", etc.). In the same request you can have the user preferences (theme/language/etc.), and the local javascript uses them to do whatever it needs to do. Even with a cookie, there needs to be some javascript to do some actions, so no difference.

Or you could just redirect via a URL that has the user preferences once he logged in (ex: after site knows you are the correct user it will redirect you to https://mysite.com?lang=en&theme=dark)

There are many technical solutions, not sure why everybody is so crazy about cookie (oh, maybe they think of the food! Yummy)
by Bewelge | 2025-11-20 10:52:54+00:00
Are you sure they are exempt? I was always under the impression that their practice is pretty obviously illegal. I just did a quick google search and didn't find anything about exemption. So they are as exempt from the GDPR as much as Al Capone was exempt from taxes ;)

What they seem to be exempt from is getting consent if they require the data for journalistic purposes.

IANAL, but I think they are simply not following the law and waiting for a definitive decision by a court.

ed: So I kept reading and from my understanding it's TBD whether the practice is lawful. The European Data Protection Board has issued an opinion against it a year ago.
by eitland | 2025-11-20 10:53:00+00:00
In my case it is rarely that I use LLM to write comments but rather I frequently use an LLM on my finished comment to fix things I miss as a non native speaker.

The content of the comment is my unique opinion and my unique writing and I mostly also make sure to remove stupid things like directional quotation marks.

But yes, it is possible to be very much human but also trigger certain peoples AI detectors.
by ad_hockey | 2025-11-20 10:53:36+00:00
The UK. Being educated at Eton is a pretty good proxy for "the elite". We've had seven Eton-educated Prime Ministers in the 20th and 21st Century, and 100% of them were Conservatives.

There has never been an Eton-educated Labour PM and the majority of Labour MPs come from state schools. The political skew among the elites is pretty obvious.
by Mindwipe | 2025-11-20 10:53:44+00:00
Also Microsoft closing the kernel to non-MS/non-driver Ring 0 software is inevitable after Crowdstrike, but they can't do that until they have a solution for how anti-cheat (and other system integrity checkers) is going to work. So something like this is inevitable, and I'm very sure there is a team at Microsoft working on it right now.
ConnectApp.inc – Where True Digital Connection Begins
by tobinews | 2025-11-20 10:54:19+00:00
ConnectApp.inc — Where True Digital Connection Begins ConnectApp.inc is building the future of smart, meaningful communication. A space where creators, teams, and everyday users can connect, collaborate, and build without limits. No noise. No friction. Just pure connection — faster, easier, and more human. Whether you’re sharing ideas, growing a community, or launching something new, ConnectApp.inc gives you the platform to do it with confidence. Connect smarter. Build stronger. Grow faster. The future of communication is here — and it starts with ConnectApp.inc.

Want another version? More Gen Z, more professional, shorter, longer, or designed for Medium/Facebook/X?
by davorg | 2025-11-20 10:54:31+00:00
> The backwards incompatibility of Perl 6 absolutely killed Perl.

I think the backwards incompatibility was a minor issue compared to how long it took for Perl 6 to be released. It was eighteen years from the announcement to the first (just barely) usable release. And for a lot of that time, I was hearing tech leads say things like "we don't want to start this project in Perl 5 if Perl 6 is just around the corner."

At some point, they changed the narrative from "Perl 6 is the next version of Perl" to "Perl 6 is a sister language to Perl" - but they should have renamed it at that point instead of waiting another 5 years.

It's worth remembering that the Perl 6 project was started because Perl usage was stagnating. But the project was so badly managed that it killed off both Perl 5 and Perl 6 (now renamed Raku).
by irusensei | 2025-11-20 10:54:35+00:00
I had a more pleasant experience with SchildiChat hosted on a web server than the desktop Element clients.

I don't like the way groups/chatrooms are displayed to be honest. Its confusing. It feels like its trying to get away from the "server room/#somechat" model that works well with IRC and even with trendy current products like Discord.
by noduerme | 2025-11-20 10:55:14+00:00
My bartender told me the other night that as long as I have 2 cups of black coffee and some red meat before drinking, it will coat my liver and prevent cirrhosis. I'm wondering if I should have him check out the mole on my arm, just to put my mind at ease. He would probably volunteer to be an experimental subject to prove this glass theory.
by deaddodo | 2025-11-20 10:56:57+00:00
C hasn’t changed all that much, and someone who coded in C99 would take about 30mins to catch up to a modern C23 codebase’s changes. Famously so, as conservatism to change is the main friction in the community for about two decades now.

If you pull out examples of the earliest C, sure, it looks weird. But that C was already obsolete in 1989. Since then, it’s had a minor iteration (e.g. five-eight additions/modifications) every decade-ish (99, 11, 17, 23). Has it changed? Sure. Can it be compared to the iteration and speed of things like C#, Java, C++, etc? No way.
by Klaus23 | 2025-11-20 10:57:45+00:00
It's not just a corner case. The issue was so prevalent for years that if it was limited to just a few corner cases, the entire protocol must consist of nothing but corner cases.

It frequently occurred on the "happy path": on a single server that they control, between identical official clients, in the simplest of situations. There really is no excuse.

I'm not saying that building a federated chat network with working encryption is easy. On the contrary, it is very hard. I'm sure the designers had the best intentions, but they simply lacked the competence to overcome such a challenge and ensure the protocol was mostly functional right from the outset.
by armchairhacker | 2025-11-20 10:57:51+00:00
> Most published polls claimed Trump vs Harris is about 50:50.

But were they wrong?

Not objectively. "50:50" means that if Trump and Harris had 1,000 elections, it would be unlikely for Harris to not win about 500. But since there was only one election, and the probability wasn't significantly towards Harris, the outcome doesn't even justify questioning the odds, and definitely doesn't disprove them.

Subjectively, today it seems like Trump's victory was practically inevitable, but that's in part because of hindsight bias. Politics in the US is turbulent, and I can imagine plenty of plausible scenarios where the world was just slightly different and Harris won. For example, what if the Epstein revelations and commentary happened one year earlier?

There's a good argument that political polls in general are unreliable and vacuous; I don't believe this for every poll, but I do for ones that say "50:50" in a country with turbulent "vibe-politics" like the US. If you believe this argument, since none of the polls state anything concrete, it follows that none them are actually wrong (and it's not just the left making this kind of poll).
by WingedBadger | 2025-11-20 10:57:52+00:00
As someone who got into ongoing multi-agent systems (MAS) research relatively recently (~4 years, mostly in distributed optimization), I see two major strands of it. Both of which are certainly still in search of the magical "emergence":

There is the formal view of MAS that is a direct extension of older works with cooperative and competitive agents. This tries to model and then prove emergent properties rigorously. I also count "classic" distributed optimization methods with convergence and correctness properties in this area. Maybe the best known application of this are coordination algorithms for robot/drone swarms.

Then, as a sibling comment points out, there is the influx of machine learning into the field. A large part of this so far was multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). I see this mostly applied to any "too hard" or "too slow" optimization problem and in some cases they seem to give impressive results.

Techniques from both areas are frequently mixed and matched for specific applications. Things like agents running a classic optimization but with some ML-based classifications and local knowledge base. What I see actually being used in the wild at the moment are relatively limited agents, applied to a single optimization task and with frequent human supervision.

More recently, LLMs have certainly taken over the MAS term and the corresponding SEO. What this means for the future of the field, I have no idea. It will certainly influence where research funding is allocated. Personally, I find it hard to believe LLMs would solve the classic engineering problems (speed, reliability, correctness) that seem to hold back MAS in more "real world" environments. I assume this will instead push research focus into different applications with higher tolerance for weird outputs. But maybe I just lack imagination.
by concinds | 2025-11-20 10:58:29+00:00
There is an infinitely more effective and trustworthy solution: an adblocker that blocks trackers. You don't have to spend minutes daily on dark-pattern banners. You don't risk the broken implementations that still track you no matter what you click, that regulators can't oversee on billions of websites.

They should just keep the thing that lets you request full deletion of your account and data, the rest is total security theater. The EU's top #1, #2, #3, #4, and #5 priority right now should be achieving digital sovereignty and getting a strong homegrown tech industry (ban American social media and force local alternatives?) so the US can't coerce it. That'll require some additional, different regulations, and that's the kind they should focus all efforts on for the foreseeable future. They put the cart before the horse.

Look at the sanctioned ICC judges (EU-based). Can't use any credit/debit cards (all American). Can't do any online e-commerce (there's a US entity somewhere in the flow). No Google/Apple accounts (how useful is your iPhone without the App Store?). "Regulate" foreign companies all you want, ultimately you still have no power over them. Cart before the horse.
by havblue | 2025-11-20 10:58:39+00:00
Steam Survey October:

Windows 94.84% -0.56%

Windows 11 64 bit 63.57% +0.53%

Windows 10 64 bit 31.14% -1.04%

OSX 2.11% +0.20%

Linux 3.05% +0.37%

In other words, for Steam users who waited to switch to Windows 11, half left Windows and most people who left went to Linux.
by 1313ed01 | 2025-11-20 10:58:42+00:00
I try to get as many (mostly older, 2D) Windows games as possible to run in QEMU (VirtualBox in the past). Not many work, but those that do just keep working and I expect they will just always work ("always" relative to my lifetime).

WINE and Proton seems to always require hand holding and leaks dependencies on things installed on the host OS as well as dependencies on actual hardware. Used it for decades and it is great, but can never just relax and know that since a game runs now it will always run like is possible with a full VM (or with DOSBox, for older games).
by mietek | 2025-11-20 11:01:21+00:00
Some things have been tried; some things continue to be tried.

- Naylor and Runciman (2007) ”The Reduceron: Widening the von Neumann Bottleneck for Graph Reduction using an FPGA”: https://mn416.github.io/reduceron-project/reduceron.pdf

- Burrows (2009) “A combinator processor”: https://q4.github.io/dissertations/eb379.pdf

- Ramsay and Stewart (2023) “Heron: Modern Hardware Graph Reduction”: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3652561.3652564

- Nicklisch-Franken and Feizerakhmanov (2024) “Massimult: A Novel Parallel CPU Architecture Based on Combinator Reduction”: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.02765v1

- Xie, Ramsay, Stewart, and Loidl (2025) “From Haskell to a New Structured Combinator Processor” (KappaMutor): https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-99751-8_...

More: https://haflang.github.io/history.html
by elevatortrim | 2025-11-20 11:01:25+00:00
I disagree. I think, as software developers, we also mostly speak to other software developers, and we like to share around AI fail stories, so we are biased to think that AI works for swe better than other areas...

However, while I like using AI for software development, as also a middle-manager, it increased my output A TON because AI works better for virtually anything that's not software development.

Examples: Update Jira issues in bulk, write difficult responses and incident reports, understand a tool or system I'm not familiar with, analyse 30 projects to understand which of them have this particular problem, review tickets in bulk to see if they have anything missing that was mentioned in the solution design, and so on ... All sorts tasks that used to take hours, now take minutes.

This is in line with what I'm hearing from other people: My CFO is complaining daily about running out of tokens. My technical sales relative says it is now taking him minutes to create tech specs from requirements of his customers, while it used to take hours.

While devs are rightfully "meh" because they truly need to review every single line generated by AI and type-writing the code is not their bottleneck anyway. It is harder to realise the gains for them.
by adrian_b | 2025-11-20 11:02:31+00:00
Like I have said, meat prepared in this way is the tastiest that I have ever eaten, except if you are one of those who like real meat less than the burned crust of meat.

Even for the burned-crust lovers, many microwave ovens have lamps for this purpose, but I cannot say whether the lamps are good at making tasty burned crusts, because I have never used them, since I like more to eat meat than to eat burned crusts.

The good taste of meat prepared in this way is not surprising, because the meat is heated very uniformly and the flavor of the meat is not leached away by added water or oil, but it is concentrated due to the loss of water from the meat, so the taste is very similar to that of meat well cooked on a grill, neither burned nor under-cooked, and also without adding anything but salt and spices.
by martinclayton | 2025-11-20 11:02:46+00:00
An aside:

I always understood that Broadcasting House was inspiration for Room 101 (Ministry of Love) rather than the MoT.

It's well-known that the University of London Senate House building was the inspiration for the Ministry of Truth. Both the interior and exterior have appeared in many films and TV shows. Seems to come out of the visual creative toolbox when there's a need to evoke oppression or technocratic stultification through architecture, which is a shame as it's rather nice to visit!
by potato3732842 | 2025-11-20 11:03:43+00:00
This attitude wherein one thinks they can just spend money and offload responsibility is exactly the problem.

Abdicating responsibility to those "good tools" are why shit never gets crimped right. People just crimp away without a care in the world. Don't get me wrong, they're great for speed and when all you're doing it working on brand new stuff that fits perfect. But when you're working on something sketchy you really want the feedback of the older styles of tool that have more direct feedback. They have a place, but you have to know what that place is.

See also: "the low level alarm would go off if it was empty"
by dspillett | 2025-11-20 11:03:45+00:00
> Jesus is not fictional.

There is apparently evidence that there was a Jesus¹ who preached and was crucified for causing a pain for those in power. But the version of Jesus in the bible is likely no more real than the Abraham in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012).

--------

[1] or someone going by another name which became Jesus over time, many names in the new testament are suspiciously unlike those likely to be found in the middle east in the first century CE.
by Nevermark | 2025-11-20 11:04:08+00:00
These lovely kinds of projects always leave me wanting more. In the same way every telescope leaves me wanting a larger one. Because what they reveal is so immediately interesting.

I would love to be able to slip through time with a slider. Especially if there was enough data on the movement and geographic span of early peoples to represent their story with moving, fading in/out diffusions of color.

And now I am curious! How clearly we have pinned down migration and geographic spans for the history of all human families?

NONE of this is an actual suggestion to do any more work.

It is great as it is!
by kakacik | 2025-11-20 11:04:12+00:00
> Jesus is not fictional.

Strong claims require strong evidence. Some book written by many, some properly delusional or crazy folks, claiming various outlandish things not physically possible these days (staying away from word "lies" but not too far, basic physics laws worked the same 2000 years ago).

Or preaching behavior absolutely unacceptable these days (Old testament would force you to be murderer pretty quickly nowadays, and I haven't heard a single Christian rejecting all of it... they can't so just they ignore most of it like it doesn't exist). All this decades and centuries after claimed facts, that ain't a proof in any sense. You can believe it for sure, I can choose to believe in Great Spaghetti Monster and its holy teachings and its about the same.

There are no contemporary roman records from that time, earliest (with both eyes squinted and a lot of wishful thinking) is more than century afterwards. Quite an impressive record for claimed son of God, or God himself or whatever it should be.

I've been reading a bit about various sects recently, today it was Jim Jones and his escapades. With enough steps back, it all looks exactly the same, including behavior of believers. To the very last bolt. Tells you a lot about humans and how they internally try to handle tough times, but not much else.

So please, lets have a more rational discussion rather than level our grandparents may consider passable but many of us don't.
by indigo945 | 2025-11-20 11:06:09+00:00
> Politics is inherently about policy, the consensus mechanism involved is undefined.

It's true that the consensus mechanism is undefined, but it is definitely not the case that politics is about policy. I hate etymological arguments, but in a literal sense, the "political" is merely a translation for "public" - that is, anything that happens when you step outside is political.

That also means that "cultural divide-and-conquer games" are not in some sense "not politics". They're inherently political by virtue of being public, in the same sense that coming out as gay, wearing a MAGA hat or claiming on an online forum that the "job of a state is to create social good for its citizens" are political. Once you accept that almost everything is, in fact, politics, it also becomes clear that we don't have policy to generate particular outcomes in a detached and neutral manner, but to police politics.

I agree that the liberal/conservative spectrum is a "reductive vision of what politics could ever even possibly be", I'm just not convinced that associating politics with state power is any less reductive.
by amitkumary96 | 2025-11-20 11:06:41+00:00
As we know that "With great power comes great responsibility" the team should understand this because Cloudflare is used worldwide, and for many countries it was the peak working time when Cloudflare went down so this affected massively. We always want perfect results but it's not possible, I hope the team is not overworking to get the changes on prod.
by noduerme | 2025-11-20 11:06:55+00:00
mm..I wish there was a really immersive version of this, something that looked like the map in Crusader Kings 3 but which let you zoom in on what was actually going on in every place at every time. I'm a map junkie and collector, and like to read historical atlases cover to cover. This is cool but it could be so much richer. I didn't take the time to seek out inaccuracies.