MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jibal | 2025-11-11 11:53:56+00:00
Zig's sub-language and evaluation rules are exactly the same as the Zig language except that `type` is a first class type and the TypeInfo of any type can be both examined and modified. In Zig, generics are implemented by computing types--most often by a function returning a struct that is specialized to a type argument to the function.

I've been writing some D code and, while D "template" functions can take compile-time arguments that are types, they can only produce types via mixins, which are strings that are injected at the point of invocation and then parsed by the compiler. This gives you all of the power of Zig and then some, but it's not nearly as elegant (it would help a lot if D's token quote construct q{...} had lisp-like quasi-quote functionality). OTOH, I found when writing Zig it could become extremely confusing to have the comptime and runtime languages intermixed, which is often done for loop unrolling and "conditional compilation" -- whether it's a comptime or runtime operation is in many cases a function of whether the variables involved are comptime or runtime types. In D it's generally clearer because comptime operations are distinguished with such things as static if for flow control, enum for declaring comptime variables, foo!(comptime args)(runtime args) for function calls, etc.
by jbreckmckye | 2025-11-11 11:54:03+00:00
I have observed it too, it is heavily inspired by economics and mathematics.

Saying "it's better to complete something imperfect than spend forever polishing" - dull, trite, anyone knows that. Saying "effort is a utility curve function that must be clamped to achieve meta-optimisation" - now that sounds clever

If I was going to be uncharitable, I think there is are corners of the internet where people write straightforward things dressed it up in technical language to launder it as somehow academic and data driven.

And you're right, it does show up in the worse parts of the EA / rationalist community.

(This writing style, at its worst, allows people to say things like "I don't want my tax spent on teaching poor kids to read" but without looking like complete psychopaths - "aggregate outcomes in standardised literacy programmes lag behind individualised tutorials")

That's not what the blog post here is doing, but it is definitely bad language use that is doing more work to obscure ideas than illuminate them
by DrScientist | 2025-11-11 11:54:06+00:00
I note that the complaint about clips taken out of context is supported by a clip taken out of context ( ie a very short segment of the entire programmme ).

Now I'm quite willing to accept that that particular Panaroma episode had a slant - they are not 'news' per se but an in depth perspective type programme - and so they reflect the views of the authors.

But that's just one episode by one set of programme makers - it's not such evidence of clear and consistent bias - it's just evidence that some programmes take a view - whether that balances out over time requires you to look at the output at a whole, not just a single clip of a single programme.
by janeway | 2025-11-11 11:55:17+00:00
This topic is fascinating to me. The Toy Story film workflow is a perfect illustration of intentional compensation: artists pushed greens in the digital master because 35 mm film would darken and desaturate them. The aim was never neon greens on screen, it was colour calibration for a later step. Only later, when digital masters were reused without the film stage, did those compensating choices start to look like creative ones.

I run into this same failure mode often. We introduce purposeful scaffolding in the workflow that isn’t meant to stand alone, but exists solely to ensure the final output behaves as intended. Months later, someone is pitching how we should “lean into the bold saturated greens,” not realising the topic only exists because we specifically wanted neutral greens in the final output. The scaffold becomes the building.

In our work this kind of nuance isn’t optional, it is the project. If we lose track of which decisions are compensations and which are targets, outcomes drift badly and quietly, and everything built after is optimised for the wrong goal.

I’d genuinely value advice on preventing this. Is there a good name or framework for this pattern? Something concise that distinguishes a process artefact from product intent, and helps teams course-correct early without sounding like a semantics debate?
by jorangreef | 2025-11-11 11:55:55+00:00
The short answer is that we tried, back in 2020, while working on a central bank payment switch by the Gates Foundation. We found we were hitting the limits of Amdahl's Law, given Postgres' concurrency control with row locks held across the network as well as internal I/O, leading to the design of TigerBeetle. To specialize not for general purpose but only for transaction processing.

On the one hand, yes, you could use a general purpose string database to count/move integers, up to a certain scale. But a specialized integer database like TigerBeetle can take you further. It's the same reason, that yes, you could use Postgres as object storage or as queue, or you could use S3 and Kafka and get separation of concerns in your architecture.

I did a talk diving into all this recently, looking at the power law, OLTP contention, and how this interacts with Amdahl's Law and Postgres and TigerBeetle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKgfk8lTQuE
by lproven | 2025-11-11 11:56:18+00:00
It does now. :-) It didn't when I posted earlier

I wrote that article, but I no longer post my stories to HN because I am subject to a block and anything of my own I submit is flagged [dead]. I do not know why, and I have written to ask with no reply.

I only write 5-10 articles a week so I don't exactly spam the site at high frequency, and if I don't feel I can add more context or insight to a story, I don't write it -- except at the very slowest times of the year, and I wouldn't post those stories here.

Ah well.
by davidsainez | 2025-11-11 11:56:56+00:00
It is difficult to understand the full beauty (or horror, depending on your pov) of functional programming with such a simple example. But as you scale up in complexity, it can be someone’s full time job to make sure the model is accurately translated to the computer’s memory. With a pure language, the compiler is responsible for maintaining the mapping to memory, so you (mostly) just focus on the symbolic relationships of your model. This can be extremely freeing once you train yourself to think in functional terms. Of course, there is a performance cost, but this can be managed and in cases where people turn to functional programming reliability and correctness outweigh the cost.
Show HN: Graphql-MCP Python Library
by robjampar | 2025-11-11 11:57:11+00:00
I've built an open source library that can take a Python GraphQL service and expose it as an MCP service.

It supports using Strawberry, Adriane, Graphene or anything that uses graphql-core.

Just interested in any general feedback or seeing if this is useful for anyone!
by rincebrain | 2025-11-11 11:57:32+00:00
Because almost everything is risk mitigation or reduction, not elimination.

In particular, in the US, the legal apparatus has been gamified to the point that the expectation becomes people will sue if their expected value out of it is positive even if the case is insane on its merits, because it's much more likely someone with enough risk and cost will settle as the cheaper option.

And in that world, there is nothing that completely eliminates the risk of being sued in bad faith - but the more things you put in your mitigation basket, the narrower the error bars are on the risk even if the 99.999th percentile is still the same.
by dspillett | 2025-11-11 11:57:37+00:00
> Vast majority of laptops sold today have standard SSDs you can upgrade.

Though some make it quite difficult to get in to replace the drive, and put everything back together after.

Some are very easy: an obvious compartment at the bottom, unscrew lid, remove drive, put in replacement, power up and transfer old content, done. I've seen both NVMe and 2.5" SATA drives arranged this way. On the other hand, upgrading my friend's laptop recently involved taking most of it apart, the drive was under the keyboard inaccessible from the back, with other link cables (for keyboard, antenna, screen) in the way so they had to be disconnected and were in very inconvenient arrangements for reconnecting after…
by 4gotunameagain | 2025-11-11 11:58:35+00:00
Calls a simple swap function with pointers inscrutable (the only hard to decipher character is the asterisk), and as a good counterexample provides this ?

-module(ping). -export([start/0, ping/1]). start() -> register(ping, spawn(fun() -> ping(0) end)). ping(Count) -> receive {pong, Pong_PID} -> io:format("Ping received pong (~p)~n", [Count]), Pong_PID ! {ping, self()}, ping(Count + 1) end.

I am not against functional programming, or using the tools you love, but at least make a valid argument about it ;)
by yorwba | 2025-11-11 12:01:11+00:00
The Ethnologue link in footnote 7 of the paper has utm_source=chatgpt.com at the end, so I suspect whoever was tasked with listing languages and determining their status thought this wasn't important enough to do it themselves and just had ChatGPT give them a list. FWIW, Ethnologue does say that Ghari is "Stable" https://www.ethnologue.com/language/gri/ Meanwhile Swedish is "Institutional," the highest possible level of vitality https://www.ethnologue.com/language/swe/
by theshrike79 | 2025-11-11 12:01:23+00:00
AFAIK these only work for the Copilot in VS Code. Not in Rider or other tools, which require just the single file.

I really like the style started by Cursor(?) where you can apply prompts only when the LLM touches a specific type of file - but there is no standard for it so we get stuff that only works in a limited set of circumstances.
by avar | 2025-11-11 12:01:57+00:00
Actually a shipping container full of micro-SD cards hurtling down the highway has lower overall bandwidth than a 56k modem.

That's because whoever's attempting to load an ideal 400 million micro-SD cards into one will take approximately forever carefully trying to line up even one row of them on the floor of a shipping container, before having the whole thing fall over like dominoes.

And even if they manage that, the whole thing will tumble over once they need to deal with the first row of the container's side corrugation. Nobody at the department of Spherical Cows in Vacuums thought to account for those dimensions[1] not lining up with the size of micro-SD cards.

If they do manage some approximation of this it'll take forever just to drive this down the road, let alone get the necessary permits to take the thing on the highway.

Turns out not a lot of semi truck trailers or roads are prepared to deal with a 40 ft container weighing around 100 metric tons (the weight of one packed to the brim with sand, a close approximation).

The good news is that such transportation gets more fuel efficient the longer the trip is.

The bad news is that the container will arrive mostly empty, as it's discovered that shipping container door panel gaps and road vibrations conspire to spread a steady stream of micro-SD cards behind you the entire way there.

Commuters in snowy areas held up behind the slowly moving "OVERSIZED LOAD!" with a mandatory police escort wonder if it's a trial for a new type of road salt that makes a pleasant crunchy sound as you drive over it.

Finally, an attempt to recover the remaining data fails. The sharding strategy chosen didn't account for failure due to road salt ingression into the container, cards at the bottom of the container being crushed to dust by the weight of those above, or that the leased container hadn't been thoroughly cleaned since last transporting, wait, what is that smell?

1. https://www.discovercontainers.com/wp-content/uploads/contai...
by justin66 | 2025-11-11 12:03:37+00:00
> Say a 30Y payment is $1000/mo. A 50Y payment may be $800/mo.

Maybe? At present the 15-year fixed is at 5.57% and the 30-year is at 6.15%. It's impossible to predict what a 50-year mortgage would cost since we don't know what the government will throw at it or what goofily-named government-sponsored enterprises would be created to buy these mortgages, but... more. The tools banks use to measure the risk of a mortgage right now don't even apply if the common situation becomes that the house and the owner are likely to age out into decrepitude during the life of the loan.

If the 50-year becomes a real thing we can use the government to backstop all this and provide financial support when all the obvious things go wrong (at enormous taxpayer expense). Might as well, we provide a lot of stuff to keep the 30-year going, which is definitely not a loan that would exist otherwise. It's unwise to pretend that this is all a perpetual motion machine that's only going to make itself stronger over time if we use it cleverly.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-11-11 12:03:38+00:00
Wow really appreciate your message

I actually didn't know that openbsd and netbsd offer a more complete experience than as compared to freebsd

I had heard about openbsd a lot as well but freebsd I think is a lot more known in the nas community partially/wholely because of the zfs integration

Capsicum is definitely really interesting as well, I had heard of pledge partially because of justine tunney's cosmopolitan-esque port of pledge to linux and I was always fascinated by it

I wonder what is the state of software of openbsd /bsd's in general. I think another interesting thing that I found was that SSPL license could probably be bypassed if one can run freebsd etc., I am pretty sure that I had read one such comment regarding something similar on HN

Also, if I may ask, what is the difference with the linux kernel itself, I feel like bsd's have some security advantages which might make it a little bit more suitable for multi-tenancy. But the same things can be done in linux as well with things like podman / docker etc. or with firejail/bubblewrap/flatpak but with a higher cost like ram etc. or they can be considered bloated solutions as compared to bsd's but still.

What are some operating openbsd or some other servers which are used and where are they used, I used to see some apache servers in openbsd in some websites but what are your thoughts on the whole situation, I would love to know more about and thanks once again for your insightful comment!
by Marshferm | 2025-11-11 12:03:54+00:00
Of course, but the mechanisms “remain obscure”. The entorhinal cortex is but a facet of this puzzle and placement vs head direction etc must be understood beyond mere prediction. There are too many essential parts that are not understood particularly senses and emotion which play the tinkering precursors to evolutionary function that are excluded now as well as the likelyhood that prediction error and prediction are but mistaken precursor computational bottlenecks to unpredictability. Pushing AI into the 4% of a process materially identified as entorhinal is way premature.

This approach simply follows suit with the blundering reverse engineering of the brain in cog sci where material properties are seen in isolation and processes are deduced piecemeal. The brain can only be understood as a whole first. See rhythms of the brain or unlocking the brain.

There’s a terrifying lack of curiosity in the paper you posted, a kind of smug synthetic rush to import code into a part of the brain that’s a directory among directories that has redundancies as a warning: we get along without this.

Your and their view (OSM) is too narrow. eg categorization is baked into the whole brain. How? This is one of 1000s of processes that generalize materially across the entire brain. Isolating "learning" to the allocortex is incredibly misleading.

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(25)...
by _heimdall | 2025-11-11 12:04:49+00:00
Sounds like we just fundamentally disagree here, nothing wrong with that.

I view the increase in money supply a core issue that harms all of us. Yes, it wouldn't technically matter if all of us received the new money in a perfect allocation based on the amount of money we currently hold - if I have $100 and the supply increases by 2% I'm fine if I now have $102. It never works like that though, and never will.

Allocation is only one of the challenges to deal with when debasing the currency by increasing supply.
Show HN: Siri for Sites Using MCP
by andupotorac | 2025-11-11 12:05:11+00:00
I built a prototype that lets users send voice commands to your site, as long as you expose some core functionality through MCP. Think of it as Siri for your website.

If you scroll down, there’s a quick demo game where you move a ball into the goal using your voice. You can even chain actions like “one square down, two left”, depeding on the maze you get.

This could be useful for products with complex workflows, or e-commerce sites where screen space is focused on a single CTA. The YT video also shows it running on an actual website.

There are still bugs to iron out & I haven’t tested on mobile or tablet yet, so please use a desktop for now. :-)

Note: this isn’t for customer support, but for user actions.
by 0x00cl | 2025-11-11 12:05:13+00:00
> cheap SCART to HDMI convertor

From my understanding this is the "bottleneck" in quality for older systems (at least in gaming consoles), converting Analogue to Digital. Which is why "RetroTink" sells different converters from ~$100 up to $750 (RetroTINK-4K Pro). I've seen a few videos comparing cheap generic USB converters with more expensive upscalers and there is a noticeable difference in image quality
by TekMol | 2025-11-11 12:06:35+00:00
I am using Git submodules for dependencies. My approach to a situation like this:

1: Clone gh.com/someone/LibBar to gh.com/me/LibBar 2: Fix the bug 3: Send pull request to someone 5: git submodule set-url lib/LibBar https://gh.com/me/LibBar.git git submodule sync lib/LibBar git submodule update --init --remote --recursive lib/LibBar cd lib/LibBar/; git checkout main; cd ../.. git add .; git commit -m "Use my own version of lib/LibBar"

And keep using my fork until upstream accepted my pull request. Then I switch the url of the dependency back.
by pu_pe | 2025-11-11 12:06:45+00:00
It was obvious that there would be no space for Yann LeCun after Alexandr Wang came in. He was probably just waiting for the best time to leave.

I cannot judge his research output at Meta but he failed pretty bad at the LLM race. Since so many other organizations succeeded at creating open source models of far higher quality at much lower cost, it would be instructive to understand what exactly went wrong there.
by HeinzStuckeIt | 2025-11-11 12:06:58+00:00
Lyrics produced some of the first AI slop I noticed after ChatGPT was launched in late 2022, even if the large models hadn’t been trained on them specifically. Overnight there were a bunch of different advertising-laden sites that clearly scraped Genius or other lyric websites, and then had GPT generate commentaries on what the lyrics supposedly mean, so that these would get picked up by search engines.

The result was mostly comical, the commentaries for vacuous pop music all sounded more or less the same: “‘Shake Your Booty’ by KC and the Sunshine Band expresses the importance of letting one’s hair down and letting loose. The song communicates to listeners how liberating it is to gyrate one’s posterior and dance.” Definitely one of the first signs that this new tech was not going to be good for the web.
by voxleone | 2025-11-11 12:07:54+00:00
>>Spatial Intelligence is the scaffolding upon which our cognition is built.

Human cognition isn’t built on abstract reasoning alone. It’s embodied, grounded in sensation.

Evolution didn’t achieve generalization across domains by making brains more symbolic. It did so by making them more integrated by fusing chemical gradients, touch, proprioception, light, sound, temperature, and pressure into one continuous internal narrative.

Intelligence does not seem to be an algorithmic property; it’s a felt coherence across senses. Our reasoning emerges from a complex interaction of sensory information, memory, emotions, and cognitive processing. Sensory completeness is the way forward.
by actionfromafar | 2025-11-11 12:08:32+00:00
The best solution for "normies" is to get a Panasonic DVD player with HDD recording ability. That thing has a circuit which synchronizes all scanrows, i.e. it completely removes all tearing of the image.

Then proceed with something to digitize the analog output from SCART2.

A couple of models with this feature:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XW_-16Vo4E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaH73rhBHbk
by olcarl75 | 2025-11-11 12:09:19+00:00
I run a SVN server for my personal projects, home lab and home automation stuff.

I noticed that the SVN CLI workflow is a bit dated and I think there's room to create a graphite like experience for svn, especially focusing on stacking.

I am set out to: - create a modern CLI to interact with SVN

- create a subsystem to run alongside the svn repo (similar to gitaly)

- create a good looking web UI to browser the repo, review code reviews, etc
by zeta0134 | 2025-11-11 12:09:23+00:00
Ah yes, we often get folks in the nesdev community bickering over which "NES Palette" (sourced from their favorite emulator) is the "best" one. The reality is extraordinarily complicated and I'm barely qualified to explain it:

https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/PPU_palettes#2C02

In addition to CRTs having variable properties, it turns out a lot of consoles (understandably!) cheat a little bit when generating a composite signal. The PPU's voltages are slightly out of spec, its timing is weird to work around a color artifact issue, and it generates a square wave for the chroma carrier rather than an ideal sine wave, which produces even more fun problems near the edges. So we've got all of that going on, and then the varying properties of how each TV chooses to interpret the signal. Then we throw electrons at phosphors and the pesky real world and human perception gets involved... it's a real mess!
by metalman | 2025-11-11 12:10:34+00:00
in other news, busses in Norway have been found to have had internet conectivity installed by there chinese makers,spy busses and spy cranes, which is supposed to terrify us enough that we stop demanding $10000 chinese electric cars, which will spy on us, and send pictures of our children, likely throwing sandwiches at each other, back to china, for analysis of our eating habits and child rearing practice, so that they can wage profound psychological warfare on us, yes you, YOU, are making your child, FAT!
by davidferguson | 2025-11-11 12:11:08+00:00
And it was made by a lab that made choices on processing and developing times, that can quite easily affect the resulting image. You hope that labs are reasonably standard across the board and calibrate frequently, but even processing two copies of the same material in a lab, one after the other will result in images that look different if projected side by side. This is why it's probably impossible to made new prints of 3-strip-cinerama films now, the knowledge and number of labs that can do this are near zero.
by portaouflop | 2025-11-11 12:11:12+00:00
It would be so hilarious if GEMA was actually useful for once and not a detriment to society and artists in general.

However of course OpenAI will ignore this and at worst nothing will change and at best they get a slap on the wrist and a fine and continue scraping.

You can’t take that stuff out of the models at this point anyway.