MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bgbntty2 | 2025-12-26 22:48:20+00:00
I'm on the "outside" of this argument - never owned a gun yet and not in the US, but the right to life (not to be shot) can be exercised by protecting oneself from guns, with a gun.

Here we're discussing how attacks against privacy are totalitarian and how more and more governments are on their way to become totalitarian regimes, but we don't agree that people having guns is a good defense against a totalitarian government. We talk about police or ICE overreach, but don't talk about what would happen if that overreach expands even more.
by zahlman | 2025-12-26 22:49:20+00:00
> pip is simply difficult to maintain. Backward compatibility concerns surely contribute to that but also there are other factors, like an older project having to satisfy the needs of modern times.

Backwards compatibility is the one thing that prevents the code in an older project from being replaced with a better approach in situ. It cannot be more difficult than a rewrite, except that rewrites (arguably including my project) may hold themselves free to skip hard legacy cases, at least initially (they might not be relevant by the time other code is ready).

(I would be interested in hearing from you about UX designs for cross-platform resolution, though. Are you just imagining passing command-line flags that describe the desired target environment? What's the use case exactly — just making a .pylock file? It's hard to imagine cross-platform installation....)
Show HN: Maple – Multi-agent protocol with resource-aware scheduling
by maheshvaikri99 | 2025-12-26 22:50:03+00:00
MAPLE (Multi Agent Protocol Language Engine) - a communication protocol for multi-agent AI systems.

The gap I'm filling: MCP handles tools, A2A handles agent discovery, but neither lets agents specify resource requirements.

With MAPLE, an agent can say: "I need 4GB GPU, 8GB RAM, complete within 30 seconds."

Key features:
- Resource-aware messaging (CPU, GPU, memory, network, deadlines)
- Link Identification Mechanism (LIM) for secure agent-to-agent communication
- Distributed state synchronization
- Type-safe error handling
- Works with any LLM/framework

900+ downloads on PyPI.

pip install maple-oss

GitHub: https://github.com/maheshvaikri-code/maple-oss

Solo developer. Looking for feedback from anyone building multi-agent systems.
by exasperaited | 2025-12-26 22:50:23+00:00
I am unconcerned about it being downvoted. If it makes people defensive enough to downvote it, it did its job, and maybe through attrition it, with other people’s disgusted rage, will contribute to educating the sociopathic Valley tech industry that things are going badly wrong.

One more seemingly futile fist punched at the wall that traps us in the world that unfettered tech industry greed has made for us. Might take millions of us to make an impression but we will.
by schmuckonwheels | 2025-12-26 22:50:32+00:00
This got buried on HN a few days ago which is a shame:

https://social.kernel.org/notice/B1aR6QFuzksLVSyBZQ

Linus rants that the SFC is wrong and argues that the GPLv2 which the kernel is licensed under does NOT force you to open your hardware. The spirit of the GPLv2 was about contributing software improvements back to the community.

Which brings us to the question: what is this guy going to do with (presumably) the kernel source? Force the Chinese to contribute back their improvements to the kernel? Of which there are likely none. Try and run custom software on his medical device which can likely kill him? More than likely.

The judge's comments on the Vizio case are such that should this guy get his hands on the code, he has no right to modify/reinstall it AND expect it will continue to operate as an insulin pump.

This is about as ridiculous as buying a ticket on an airplane and thinking you are entitled to the source code of the Linux in-seat entertainment system.
by hnhn34 | 2025-12-26 22:51:01+00:00
> But there is a difference between Google, which is arguably a mixed bag, and the AI companies, which are unquestionably cancer

Google's DeepMind has been at the forefront of AI research for the past 11+ years. Even before that, Google Brain was making incredible contributions to the field since 2011, only two years after the release of Go.

OpenAI was founded in response to Google's AI dominance. The transformer architecture is a Google invention. It's not an exaggeration to claim Google is one of the main contributors to the insanely fast-paced advancements of LLMs.

With all due respect, you need some insane mental gymnastics to claim AI companies are "unquestionably cancer" while an adtech/analytics borderline monopoly giant is merely a "mixed bag".
by orthoxerox | 2025-12-26 22:51:02+00:00
Yes, about 60% of all new single-family homes are built out of AAC in Russia. It's also very common as an infill in reinforced concrete frames, like blocks of flats.

There are AAC factories in Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan that I know of. The rest are probably too seismically risky to be major AAC markets.
by simonw | 2025-12-26 22:51:31+00:00
The data center companies frequently pay for upgrades to the local water systems.

https://www.hermiston.gov/publicworks/page/hermiston-water-s... - "AWS is covering all construction costs associated with the water service agreement"

https://www.thedalles.org/news_detail_T4_R180.php - "The fees paid by Google have funded essential upgrades to our water systems, ensuring reliable service and addressing the City's growing needs. Additionally, Google continues to pay for its water use and contributes to infrastructure projects that exceed the requirements of its facilities."

https://commerce.idaho.gov/press-releases/meta-announces-kun... - "As part of the company’s commitment to Kuna, Meta is investing approximately $50 million in a new water and sewer system for the city. Infrastructure will be constructed by Meta and dedicated to the City of Kuna to own and operate."
by j-pb | 2025-12-26 22:51:48+00:00
Well is it the humans responsibility and action, or is it not? You can't have it both ways.

You also obviously didn't read the mail, because it contains explicit info that this was send by claude on behalf of AI village.

It's at worst cheezy. But people get tons of truly nefarious spam and fraud mails everyday without any kind of meltdown.
But an AI wishes you a nice day, suddenly it's all pitchforks and torches.

Stop clutching your pearls ffs.
by Xorakios | 2025-12-26 22:51:58+00:00
Dunno if this is helpful to everyone, but I have a month's long interaction with Perplexity Pro/Enterprise about the scientific background to a game I am building.

Part of my canon introduction to every new conversation includes many instructions about particular formatting, like "always utilize alphanumeric/roman/legal style indents in responses for easier references while we discuss"

But I also include "When I push boundaries assume I'm an idiot. Push back. I don't learn from compliments; I learn from being proven incorrect and you don't have real emotions so don't bother sparing mine". on the other hand I also say "hoosgow" when describing the game's jail, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
by giardini | 2025-12-26 22:52:09+00:00
b/c he lives someplace where people get parasites regularly? Also b/c it is far cheaper to treat for parasites (take a pill) than to test and then treat (visit a doctor, get a prescription, take a pill).

For example, many parasites are endemic to the southern USA. As a child I was checked for parasites every year. Most modern doctors I've met are negligent in this regard. Under questioning several have stated that it is unimportant. Some doctors assert incorrectly that blood tests would reveal any significant parasitic infestation. I always correct them but I also change doctors.

Ever walk barefoot across the lawn?

Ever eat uncooked fish/flesh/sushi?

Then you might want to get tested!8-))
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-12-26 22:52:13+00:00
You deal with the fraud in front of you first. Here the most prominent (and most egregious!) fraud is crafting stories out of nothing that tightly adhere to predrawn conclusions.

There will never be enough facts (actual or otherwise) to sprinkle into this creator's stories that his tales will ever be anything other than bad-faith fiction.
by punnerud | 2025-12-26 22:53:48+00:00
My favorite speed up trick: “ HTTP range requests for metadata. Wheel files are zip archives, and zip archives put their file listing at the end. uv tries PEP 658 metadata first, falls back to HTTP range requests for the zip central directory, then full wheel download, then building from source. Each step is slower and riskier. The design makes the fast path cover 99% of cases. None of this requires Rust.”
by simonw | 2025-12-26 22:54:14+00:00
Two things can be true at once:

1. I think that sending "thank you" emails (or indeed any other form of unsolicited email) from AI is a terrible use of that technology, and should be called out.

2. I find Claude Code personally useful and aim to help people understand why that is. In this case I pulled off a quite complex digital forensics project with it in less than 15 minutes. Without Claude Code I would not have attempted that investigation at all - I have a family dinner to prepare.

I was very aware of the tension involved in using AI tools to investigate a story about unethical AI usage. I made that choice deliberately.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-12-26 22:54:14+00:00
No.

"Optimization pressure" makes it sound as if there is a single metric for optimization, whereas there are a constantly shifting set of different metrics. Worse (or more precisely, more complex) there are frequently multiple different "solutions" for a given metric, and evolution doesn't care. Put a little differently, there is no "optimization" pressure at all: evolution is not attempting to optimize anything ().

Trying to fit anthropomorphized design onto a process that is absolutely the opposite of that in every way (no intent, multiple outcomes, no optimization) just leads people to not think clearly about this sort of thing.

() no, not even "reproductive fitness" - rates of reproduction are subject to massive amounts of environmental "noise", to the degree that minor improvements in offspring survivability will often be invisible over anything other than the very long term. Further, the most desirable rates of reproduction will also vary over time, leading to what once may have appeared to be an improvement into a liability (and vice versa, of course).
by be_erik | 2025-12-26 22:54:38+00:00
If you're looking to build and install this from source, here's the incantation:

CGO_ENABLED=0 go build -ldflags "-X main.version=dev -X main.commit=$(git rev-parse --short HEAD) -X 'main.buildDate=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)'" -o witr ./cmd/witr

Call me old-fashioned, but if there's an install.sh, I would hope it would prefer the local src over binaries.

Very cool utility! Simple tools like these keep me glued to the terminal. Thank you!
by eduction | 2025-12-26 22:54:41+00:00
Actually uv retains compatibility with the setup.py “insanity,” according to the article:

> uv parses TOML and wheel metadata natively, only spawning Python when it hits a setup.py-only package that has no other option

The article implies that pip also prefers toml and wheel metadata, but has to shell out to parse those, unlike uv.
by 578_Observer | 2025-12-26 22:54:58+00:00
Writing this from rural Japan.

From a systems perspective, Musk didn't just become a "villain"; he simply removed the *Cooling System* to overclock the engine.
"Sustainability" acts as a heat sink. It dissipates the entropy generated by rapid scaling.

Here in Japan, we have "Shinise" (companies lasting >1000 years).
Their OS is designed for *"Thermal Management"* rather than maximum clock speed.
They prioritize "Cooling" (Rei/Gratitude/Maintenance) over "Heating" (Infinite Growth).

Musk just dismantled the radiator to squeeze out 1% more speed.
We are no longer watching a business strategy; we are observing a machine entering pure *Thermal Runaway*.
by jasonwatkinspdx | 2025-12-26 22:55:53+00:00
At least in the US parasite risk from sushi is very low because nearly all seafood sold/served is put through a deep freeze cycle.

But if you're slicing up something you just caught that could be an issue. It's a concern with hunting/game as well. Most people who get trichinosis in the US get it from eating bear apparently.
by themgt | 2025-12-26 22:55:57+00:00
If you're not Google, please for the love of god, please consider just launching a monolith and database on a Linux box (or two) in the corner and see how beautifully simple life can be.

You can literally get a Linux box (or two) in the corner and run:

curl -sfL https://get.k3s.io | sh -
cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
...(json/yaml here)
EOF

How am I installing a monolith and a database on this Linux box without Kubernetes? Be specific, just show the commands for me to run. Kubernetes that will work for ~anything. HNers spend more tokens complaining about the complexity than it takes to setup.

The mental gymnastics required to express oneself in yaml, rather than, say, literally anything else

Like, brainfuck? Like bash? Like Terraform HCL puppet chef ansible pile-o-scripts? The effort required to output your desired infrastructure's definition as JSON shouldn't really be that gargantuan. You express yourself in anything else but it can't be dumped to JSON?
by ptero | 2025-12-26 22:56:02+00:00
> I still don't see the problem. You can criticize things you're part of.

Certainly. But this, IMO, is not the reason for the criticism in the comments. If Rob ranted about AI, about spam, slop, whatever, most of those criticizing his take would nod instead.

However, the one and only thing that Rob says in his post is "fuck you people who build datacenters, you rape the planet". And this coming from someone who worked at Google from 2004 to 2021 and instead could have picked any job anywhere. He knew full well what Google was doing; those youtube videos and ad machines were not hosted in a parallel universe.

I have no problem with someone working at Google on whatever with full knowledge that Google is pushing ads, hosting videos, working on next gen compute, LLM, AGI, whatever. I also have no problem with someone who rails against cloud compute, AI, etc. and fights it as a colossal waste or misallocation of resources or whatever. But not when one person does both. Just my 2c, not pushing my worldview on anyone else.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-26 22:56:33+00:00
>Does it though?

Yes. The alternative is that everyone spams the most popular brands instead of making their own creations. Both can be abused, but I see more good here than in the alternative.

Mind you, this is mostly for creative IP. We can definitely argue for technical patents being a different case.

>but people who like innovation and creativity usually tend to think otherwise.

People who like innovation and creativity still might need to commission or sell fan art to make ends meet. That's already a gray area for IP.

I think that's why this argument always rubs me strangely. In a post scarcity world, sure. People can do and remix and innovate as they want. We're not only not there, but rapidly collapsing back to serfdom with the current trajectory. Creativity doesn't flourish when you need to spend your waking life making the elite richer.
by MisterMower | 2025-12-26 22:57:06+00:00
No, it’s a supply side issue. There aren’t as many silver only mines out there anymore, so ramping up production to meet demand is difficult.

Most silver extraction is actually done in copper or gold mines. But you can’t ramp up silver production in those mines because the silver output is actually a waste product from the primary metal being extracted in those mines.

Demand is rising but silver supply is relatively inelastic, resulting in the price going up.
by Bjorkbat | 2025-12-26 22:57:31+00:00
I’m sure there’s some boring neuro-chemical explanation for this, and I won’t doubt or deny the neuro-chemical explanation, but the fact that there’s a mushroom that consistently brings about hallucinations of tiny people is so bizarre that I kind of want to indulge in equally bizarre explanations. Maybe it’s not a hallucination and this mushroom simply allows us to see the tiny people all around us. Maybe mushrooms are intelligent and are intentionally making us hallucinate tiny people.

It’s a little bit crazy, I know, but it’s odd to me that evolutionary forces would produce a mushroom that makes you have some specific hallucinations, rather than simply make things swirl together or simply produce intense feelings of euphoria or dread. I mean, marijuana just gets you high and that’s that.
by gary_0 | 2025-12-26 22:57:50+00:00
A more intuitive and natural phrasing, even though it's invalid in a technical sense. I've noticed this happens when people talk about computers/software as well ("it thinks the variable is set", "it freaks out if it doesn't get a response", etc). Outside of formal writing/presentations, using only technical terminology seems to take a suboptimal amount of effort for both speaker and listener compared to anthropomorphizing (unless, as you mention, the listener is a layman who gets the wrong idea).
by exasperaited | 2025-12-26 22:58:24+00:00
I am no expert but my take on this is:

FreeCAD is obviously not a commercial grade CAD package, but it’s not because it is weak conceptually: it’s not dissimilar to Solidworks, Onshape or Fusion. It’s weak in terms of UI flow and its CAD kernel is flawed in some ways (as you probably already know: fillets, chamfers, drafts, thicknesses/shells).

I don’t believe there is so much to learn to get from FreeCAD to one of those packages, at least where core concepts are concerned, so I carry on with what I am doing.

But on the other hand I think one learns a concept best from multiple perspectives, and all of them, essentially, have a free, student or cheap (e.g. Solidworks For Makers) tier, so probably the answer is to do some learning in one or two of those alongside.

There is a good video on YouTube by Deltahedra where he does a Solidworks certification exam using FreeCAD, incidentally.
by zahlman | 2025-12-26 22:58:29+00:00
> Not many projects use setup.py now anyway and pip is still super slow.

Yes, but that's still largely not because of being written in Python. The architecture is really just that bad. Any run of pip that touches the network will end up importing more than 500 modules and a lot of that code will simply not be used.

For example, one of the major dependencies is Rich, which includes things like a 3600-entry mapping of string names to emoji; Rich in turn depends on Pygments which normally includes a bunch of rules for syntax highlighting in dozens of programming languages (but this year they've finished trimming those parts of the vendored Pygments).

Another thing is that pip's cache is an HTTP cache. It literally doesn't know how to access its own package download cache without hitting the network, and it does that access through wrappers that rely on cachecontrol and Requests.
by zbyforgotp | 2025-12-26 22:58:37+00:00
Property is a local low - it applies to a thing that exists in one place. Intellectual property is trying to apply similar rules to stuff that happen remotely - a text is not a thing, and controlling copying might work in some technological regimes while in others would require totalitarian control. When you extend these rules to cover not just copying of texts but also at the level of ideas it gets even worse.
by znpy | 2025-12-26 22:58:46+00:00
> All those amazing tools are internal and nobody can check them out. How convenient.

i might open source one of those i wrote, sooner or later. it's a simple bridge/connector thingy to make it easier for two different systems to work together and many internal users are loving it. this one in particular might be useful to people outside my current employer.

> And guys don't forget that nobody created one off internal tools before GPT.

moot point. i did this kind of one-off developments before chatgpt as well, but it was much slower work. the example from above took me a couple of afternoons, from idea to deployment.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-12-26 22:59:04+00:00
The search space is highly constrained. All life on this planet is based on hydrocarbon chemistry, more or less, and must operate in the face of high rates of oxidation and water as pretty much the only available solvent. Even with such constraints, the differences between what has evolved (bacteria to blue whales! viruses to polar bears! algae to orchids!) are staggering.

The fact that you find something hard to believe doesn't say much at all. Humans have all kinds of things that we find hard to believe - for example, I find it almost impossible to believe that there is only one object I can see in the night sky with my own eyes that is outside of our galaxy - but that doesn't make them any more or less true.
by BugsJustFindMe | 2025-12-26 22:59:09+00:00
I switched from OpenAI models to using Anthropic ones some time ago, and every once in a while I briefly check in again just in case. I continue to be amazed at how infuriating OpenAI's agents are. They do things I never asked for, make decisions I didn't ask them to make, impute assumptions I never suggested, and just generally rapidly piss me off. I find it maddening, and then I immediately switch back to using Claude and it's like an immediate wave of relief washes over me because Claude just always seems to follow along with me and do what I actually want.
by defrost | 2025-12-26 22:59:14+00:00
The story of Copernican heliocentrism as commonly told is enough to bounce many out of the rut of thinking as the comment above implied that a large beauracry aligns itself with anything an individual thinks.

> The Galileo affair was not about heliocentrism. It was about a clash of egos and personalities

Pretty much the way I heard it, outside of the Catholic Church, some 50 years ago.

> No doubt, you have in mind the oft-repeated Galileo affair
> It isn’t as piquant as the story as typically told would have you believe.

It's like you're not reading my mind and yet somehow imagine you can.
by beepbooptheory | 2025-12-26 22:59:14+00:00
Right I think we all understand the idea here, its not a misunderstanding. I just think people, reasonably, don't actually see the mechanism working.

It's weird to lump ever other possible idea in one category. These are complex issues with ever changing contexts. The surface of the problem is huge! Surely with anything else we wouldn't be so tunnel visioned, we wouldn't just say: "well we simply _must_ discount everything else, so we can only be happy with what we got." It would literally sound absurd in any other context, but because we are trained to politicize thinking outside of market mechanisms, we see very smart people saying ridiculous things!