MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hombre_fatal | 2025-04-12 00:30:28+00:00
Yeah, you'd need a lib or roll your own that races the response against a timeout.

Kind of like how you also need to implement app-layer ping/pong over websockets for keepalive even though tcp already sends its own ping/pong. -_-

As for EventSource, I don't remember exactly, something always comes up. That said, you could say the same for websockets since even implementing non-buggy reconn/backaway logic is annoying.

I'll admit, time for me to try the thing you pitch in the article.
by d0gsg0w00f | 2025-04-12 00:31:12+00:00
To be fair...the other side was just as ferocious when someone postulated that the election was rigged, or that COVID couldn't be stopped by masks. You're essentially asking for conservatives to be the bigger person and stop the blood feud.

IMO both approaches should have been more measured, but who do you think will propose the ceasefire agreement?
by adenta | 2025-04-12 00:32:27+00:00
> But on a modern cloud platform, there’s really no reason to permanently grant Sam Altman Google Mail access, even if you want his robots to sort your inbox. You can decouple access to your mail spool from persistent access to your account by tokenizing your OAuth tokens, so the LLM gets a placeholder token that a hardware-isolated, robot-free Fly Machine can substitute on the fly for a real one.

This kind of isolation is nice. Next logical step would be some way to prevent Fly from having access to the tokens.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-04-12 00:32:42+00:00
Agree with most of what you're saying here, but:

> But animals are incapable of doing so, even if a Bonobo is roughly as intelligent as a human, it's not like it can transmit any kind of information to future generations, so every generation of Bonobos need to learn either from scratch or from their community.

We just don't know if this is true.
by jiggawatts | 2025-04-12 00:33:15+00:00
Thank you for that term!

I finally know what to call these idiotic trends that I've learned to recognise but couldn't name.

The one that grind my gears the most has been Microsoft breaking decades-old Windows paradigms to cater for Linux-developers-on-Windows, which is a very marginal, even actively disinterested group. All this at the expense of the 99.9% of their loyal user base.

For example, VS Code had the opposite shortcut (literally with the arrow keys going in opposing directions) for "go back in search history" to every other editor ever made for Windows... but matching the Linux equivalent.

Similarly, they recently broke "cls" to match the broken(!) behaviour of "clear" in Linux because of basically just one or two Linux users complaining in a GitHub Issue ticket. Windows users weren't listened to, because they're already users, not potential new users.
by breadwinner | 2025-04-12 00:33:15+00:00
Here are my gripes with the modern Windows experience:

- Runs Windows update and reboots without my permission

- Keeps trying to make me switch to Bing

- Keeps trying to make me use Microsoft Account vs. local account

- Does a crappy job of reopening windows on reboot. Miserable copy of macOS.

- Fan spinning on my laptop with no easy way to figure out what process is consuming CPU

- Flat UI

- No built-in way to view markdown files

- No tool to graphically show where my diskspace went; allowing me to find and delete large files

- Printers keep getting disconnected; it is easier to print from iPhone thanks to bonjour

- No dictionary app (macOS has it)

- Can't airdrop to iPhone (3rd party apps can do it)

- No screenshot tool that allows you to type text (in addition to circling and highlighting and arrows)

- No command-line zip / unzip

- No instant search (macOS has had it for how many years now?)
by DimmieMan | 2025-04-12 00:34:27+00:00
> The odd-numbered .NET releases aren't even worth looking at from an enterprise perspective.

Not hard to argue the opposite either; as you have to upgrade every 2ish years anyway is the LTS track really that valuable compared to updating every march-ish when the latest has been proven? 6 -> 7 -> 8 -> 9 was trivial too.

Meanwhile a friend of mine still has 4.6 going strong and I’d struggle to argue a reason to migrate.
by stefan_ | 2025-04-12 00:34:53+00:00
You know what does not give me confidence? Updating software, but whats that, its still printing the same build date? Of course hours later tens of files deep I found out some reproducability goof just hardcoded it.

So far, reproducible builds are heavy on the former, zero on these bugs you mention and zero on supply chain attacks.

Some of these supposed use cases make no sense. You update the compiler. Oh no, all the code is different? Enjoy the 16h deep dive to realize someone tweaked code generation based on the cycle times given on page 7893 of the Intel x64 architecture reference manual.
by nisa | 2025-04-12 00:35:51+00:00
As a German I would love to contradict this but I tend to agree. Bureaucracy isn't such a big deal in my experience - might be different depending what area you are working in - but the leadership culture regarding software is the cause of most of the misery I've seen and I've been involved with.

Cheap as in no investments in people or software quality. Salaries are also not competitive in a lot of places.

Disregard for the user and disregard for usability.

Unfortunately most software shops locked in their customers and the lack of any technical merit pays well and is disconnected from product quality.

Only lots of bankruptcies might help. I have nothing but disdain for these people in leadership.

I've surely not seen all but I've seen enough. It's that bad.
by ajxs | 2025-04-12 00:36:10+00:00
I discovered this for myself while trying to cancel my plan. I told them I'd contact my state's consumer affairs regulator, and they instantly buckled. They ended up saving us both the trouble, and waived my 'cancellation fee'. For what it's worth, the previous time I tried to cancel their support offered me a 50% discount, which I accepted. Once that discount expired I was out. Adobe aren't earning their keep. Their costs are exorbitant when compared to the quality of the software. I mostly used Premiere (on Windows), which seems to get slower with each release. Media Encoder crashes constantly, and Photoshop is as slow as molasses.
by dole | 2025-04-12 00:36:25+00:00
I can nowhere near afford them, but I love most everything about Vacheron Constantin except for that godawful, cheap, brash font they use for their logo. The font on this piece is fine, their overall design and language is great, I'm glad a company like VC pushes the technological limits and industry forward, but that Helvetica-lookin font is visual fingernails-on-a-chalkboard.
by ghirni | 2025-04-12 00:37:07+00:00
Neelcamp is a marketplace where parents can search and book the safest, most affordable, and enriching after-school and summer camp programs for their children.

Key features and capabilities

Marketplace: Parents can filter programs, book directly, and make payments online.

SAAS: Providers get tools for registration, payment processing, scheduling, and communication with parents.
by phonon | 2025-04-12 00:37:12+00:00
What exactly do think the Federal Budget is? Discretionary budgeting within USAID is a tiny, tiny amount. Even the items they cherry picked as being wasteful, many were from the State Department (Ambassadors has some discretionary funds to support the local arts.)

Congress decides how taxes are spent, not the Executive Branch, and certainly not the accountable to no-one DOGE.

https://apnews.com/article/usaid-funding-trump-musk-misinfor...
by TS_Posts | 2025-04-12 00:37:45+00:00
Hi there (I work on a2a) - A2A works at a different level than MCP. We are working with partners on very specific customer problems. Customers are building individual agents in different frameworks OR are purchasing agents from multiple vendors. Those agents are isolated and do not share tools, or memory, or context.

For example, most companies have an internal directory and internal private APIs and tools. They can build an agent to help complete internal tasks. However, they also may purchase an "HR Agent" or "Travel Assistant Agent" or "Tax Preparation Agent" or "Facilities Control Agent". These agents aren't sharing their private APIs and data with each other.

It's also difficult to model these agents as structured tools. For example, a "Tax Preparation Agent" may need to evaluate many different options and ask for specific different documents and information based on an individual users needs. Modeling this as 100s of tools isn't practical. That's where we see A2A helping. Talk to an agent as an agent.

This lets a user talk to only their company agent and then have that agent work with the HR Agent or Travel Booking Agent to complete complex tasks.
by gerdesj | 2025-04-12 00:38:08+00:00
"I also feel like calling the LLMs "Robots" is needlessly confusing. "AI" or "Agent" would have been more fitting."

They are just computer programs.

Why on earth is IT so bereft of creativity that it needs to invoke "robot". Robot is derived from a Czech word for forced labour or even slave. These things don't go "diddly diddly deep" like Twiggy, nor whatever R2D2 beeps. They are certainly not physical, which is attribute one for a "robot" (it's a thing not a non thing).

If you replace the word robot with the word wankery, the article really starts to make sense. When you encounter various declensions and conjugations and so on, be careful to keep it real.
by hntrl | 2025-04-12 00:38:10+00:00
who's to say your data is coming from multiple streams? You can propagate any updates you need to make in the application to a single stream (like SSE or a long-lived response) in place of a WebSocket. your http responses can just be always 204 if all they're doing is handling updates and pushing events to aforementioned single stream.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command%E2%80%93query_separati...
by jsheard | 2025-04-12 00:38:10+00:00
I guess it depends on your definition of "long period" but high end Quartz movements can achieve ±1 second per year by using a high frequency, thermally compensated oscillator. Movements with atomic radio control can do even better than that of course, though that's arguably cheating since the heavy lifting happens in a standards lab somewhere rather than on your wrist.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-04-12 00:38:29+00:00
There are dozens (maybe even hundreds) of human cultures that existed at the time Homer was writing, or when Gilgamesh was written, that also have no equivalent.

The idea that any roughly equivalent human culture will develop the same things is clearly wrong. Just look at the plough - for centuries or even millenia, humans outside of what is now China had ploughs but failed to gain the insight to improve it in the way it was improved in China. Once trade exposed them to the Chinese plough, it was more or less universally adopted within decades.

While multiple (re)invention may be common, it is not universal. Just because culture A manages to find is way to cultural/technological innovation doesn't imply that culture B will, even if the two cultures are very similar.
by tpmoney | 2025-04-12 00:39:32+00:00
> The best they could do was pass Dodd-Frank to prevent the next financial crisis and ACA, which the courts promptly watered down.

Why the heck are we ok with an entire wing of US politicians that even when they have total control over the government can only give us "watered down" "the best they could do" effort? And why are we ok with not holding them at least partially responsible for anything that happens when they don't have control over all parts of the government? Why do we have any faith at all that these objectively ineffectual and cowardly children are going to do anything to save us from would be dictators and mad men? If they're just going to lie back and watch the country slide into oblivion with only the mildest of protests, shouldn't we just fire them and at least save the tax money their salaries are costing us?

I've long felt the DNC's fatal flaw was that a lot of the really important issues that they're strong on are also hyper local issues that just don't connect broadly. That is, gun control might be extremely relevant and important to the NYC "high crime is killing our children" contingent, and so far down the list for the Rocky Mountain "pollution is ruining my wildlife preserves" contingent that actually gathering and holding support at a national level on those positions is extremely difficult. Combine that with a messaging and broad set of policies that despite lip service to being about "unity" is continually asking us to divide ourselves into special interest groups (and sometime even be at odds with each other). That would explain why states that are "red" on the national elections often have "blue" state level governments.

But I'm starting to wonder if the reality is no one actually believes they're capable of getting anything done at all. After all, if even their most ardent supporters believe that they can't get anything done without full control of the government, how is anyone else supposed to believe it? It's not just that the minority party is strongly disadvantaged, it's that the DNC is actually a terrible and ineffectual minority party and barely better as a majority party. God help us all if these are the people we need to rely on to fix things.
by TS_Posts | 2025-04-12 00:41:14+00:00
Hi there (I work on a2a) - reposting from above.

We are working with partners on very specific customer problems. Customers are building individual agents in different frameworks OR are purchasing agents from multiple vendors. Those agents are isolated and do not share tools, or memory, or context.

For example, most companies have an internal directory and internal private APIs and tools. They can build an agent to help complete internal tasks. However, they also may purchase an "HR Agent" or "Travel Assistant Agent" or "Tax Preparation Agent" or "Facilities Control Agent". These agents aren't sharing their private APIs and data with each other.

It's also difficult to model these agents as structured tools. For example, a "Tax Preparation Agent" may need to evaluate many different options and ask for specific different documents and information based on an individual users needs. Modeling this as 100s of tools isn't practical. That's where we see A2A helping. Talk to an agent as an agent.

This lets a user talk to only their company agent and then have that agent work with the HR Agent or Travel Booking Agent to complete complex tasks when they cannot be modeled as tools.
by anigbrowl | 2025-04-12 00:41:22+00:00
This is not true. People who claimed the election was rigged were asked to back up their claims with evidence. Typically they never did, although a smaller number made an effort...but the profferred evidence was nonsensical. I am not just talking about talking heads widely quoted on TV or social media posts, I read a lot of election litigation.

I think the anti-mask people had some valid points, but they sank their own boat by ranting about 'masktards' and 'face diapers' while also demonstrating callous indifference to the large number of deaths.
by gavmor | 2025-04-12 00:41:24+00:00
Can you articulate the kinds of business problems Erlang is particularly well-suited to solve?

When you choose Erlang for a project, what kind of return on investment do you think it typically offers? Does it lead to significant cost savings or help generate more revenue in ways that other languages might not?

In situations where Erlang is chosen, what are some concrete examples of how it has demonstrably increased efficiency, reduced errors, or enabled new business opportunities that wouldn't have been as feasible with other technologies?

Edit: I guess if I'd done any research myself before asking, I might've found this: https://www.erlang-solutions.com/blog/which-companies-are-us...
by mindcrime | 2025-04-12 00:41:42+00:00
Okay, but won’t whatever cultural forces caused your job to be 9-5 (or whatever) under standard time eventually cause it to drift to 10-6 under +1 offset time, and then you haven’t gained anything?

Sure, probably. But how does that help me today? Of course I'm not literally just talking about myself per-se, but I expect that line of thought is how most people would view this. Who wants to wait a couple of years[1] for schedule drift to allow them to live a normal life?

[1]: would it actually be that long? I have no idea, TBH. But from a risk aversion viewpoint, one would probably prefer to already known scenario that optimizes for available sunlight after work.
by TS_Posts | 2025-04-12 00:41:59+00:00
Hi there (I work on a2a) - reposting from above.

We are working with partners on very specific customer problems. Customers are building individual agents in different frameworks OR are purchasing agents from multiple vendors. Those agents are isolated and do not share tools, or memory, or context.

For example, most companies have an internal directory and internal private APIs and tools. They can build an agent to help complete internal tasks. However, they also may purchase an "HR Agent" or "Travel Assistant Agent" or "Tax Preparation Agent" or "Facilities Control Agent". These agents aren't sharing their private APIs and data with each other.

It's also difficult to model these agents as structured tools. For example, a "Tax Preparation Agent" may need to evaluate many different options and ask for specific different documents and information based on an individual users needs. Modeling this as 100s of tools isn't practical. That's where we see A2A helping. Talk to an agent as an agent.

This lets a user talk to only their company agent and then have that agent work with the HR Agent or Travel Booking Agent to complete complex tasks when they cannot be modeled as tools.
by TS_Posts | 2025-04-12 00:42:34+00:00
Yes, that is our assumption. reposting from above:

We are working with partners on very specific customer problems. Customers are building individual agents in different frameworks OR are purchasing agents from multiple vendors. Those agents are isolated and do not share tools, or memory, or context.

For example, most companies have an internal directory and internal private APIs and tools. They can build an agent to help complete internal tasks. However, they also may purchase an "HR Agent" or "Travel Assistant Agent" or "Tax Preparation Agent" or "Facilities Control Agent". These agents aren't sharing their private APIs and data with each other.

It's also difficult to model these agents as structured tools. For example, a "Tax Preparation Agent" may need to evaluate many different options and ask for specific different documents and information based on an individual users needs. Modeling this as 100s of tools isn't practical. That's where we see A2A helping. Talk to an agent as an agent.

This lets a user talk to only their company agent and then have that agent work with the HR Agent or Travel Booking Agent to complete complex tasks when they cannot be modeled as tools.
by socketcluster | 2025-04-12 00:44:53+00:00
The problem with HTTP2 is that the server-push aspect was tacked on top of an existing protocol as an afterthought. Also, because HTTP is a resource transfer protocol, it adds a whole bunch of overheads like request and response headings which aren't always necessary but add to processing time. The primary purpose of HTTP2 was to allow servers to preemptively push files/resources to clients to avoid round-trip latency; to reduce the reliance on script bundles.

WebSockets is a simpler protocol built from the ground up for bidirectional communication. It provides a lot more control over the flow of data as everything passes over a single connection which has a single lifecycle. It makes it a lot easier to manage state and to recover cleanly from a lost connection when you only have one logical connection. It makes it easier to process messages in a specific order and to do serial processing of messages. Having just one connection also greatly simplifies things in terms of authentication and access control.

I considered the possibility of switching the transport to HTTP2 for https://socketcluster.io/ years ago, but it's a fundamentally more complex protocol which adds unnecessary overheads and introduces new security challenges so it wasn't worth it.
by trod1234 | 2025-04-12 00:45:55+00:00
Can someone provide a brief clarification about build reproducibility in general?

The stated aim is that when you compile the same source, environment, and instructions the end result is bit identical.

There is, however; hardware specific optimizations that will naturally negate this stated aim, and I don't see how there's any way to avoid throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

I understand why having a reproducible build is needed on a lot of fronts, but the stated requirements don't seem to be in line with the realities.

At its most basic, there is hardware, where the hardware may advertise features it doesn't have, or doesn't perform the same instructions in the same way, and other nuances that break determinism as a property, and that naturally taints the entire stack since computers rely heavily on emergent design.

This is often hidden in layers of abstraction and/or may be separated into pieces that are architecture dependent vs independent (freestanding), but it remains there.

Most if not all of the beneficial properties of reproducible builds rely on the environment being limited to a deterministic scope, and the reality is manufacturers ensure these things remain in a stochastic scope.
by anigbrowl | 2025-04-12 00:47:28+00:00
I am aware of some US citizens being deported by mistake under previous administrations, but there was a general consensus that those were genuine mistakes, examples of negligence rather than policy: https://immigrationimpact.com/2021/07/30/ice-deport-us-citiz...

However the current administration is explicitly considering the idea of deliberately deporting citizens: https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/deadline-legal-bl...
by TS_Posts | 2025-04-12 00:47:37+00:00
Hi there - I work on a2a. Thanks for the reaction - lots of good points here. We really do see a2a as different and complementary to MCP. I personally am working on both and see them in very different contexts.

I see MCP as vital when building an agent. An agent is an LLM with data, resources, tools, and services. However, our customers are building or purchasing agents from other providers - e.g. purchasing "HR Agent", "Bank Account Agent", "Photo Editor Agent", etc. All of these agents are closed systems and have access to private data, APIs, etc. There needs to be a way for my agent to work with these other agents when a tool is not enough.

Other comments you have are spot on - the current specification and samples are early. We are working on many more advanced examples and official SDKs and client/servers. We're working with partners, other Google teams, and framework providers to turn this into a stable standard. We're doing it in the open - so there are things that are missing because (a) its early and (b) we want partners and the community to bring features to the table.

tldr - this is NOT done. We want your feedback and sincerely appreciate it!