MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ibejoeb | 2025-04-14 15:54:57+00:00
> We all participate in this hostile culture

You can try to participate less. It's also work, but for some people, it's better than the corporate environment.

Keep your expenses under control. (That alone can be hard to do if you're relatively successful in tech, so I mention it because it's something to really think about.) Network in real life to find projects that have finite durations. Take some time between those projects and use that to both relax and develop new business. Go to a different city for a few days, maybe for an organized meetup or a conference (even if you don't attend) and try to meet people. You're double dipping here. Go sightseeing or something else entertaining, and then try to work a room.

> they really don't care about you. In fact, more likely than not, they detest you.

Hopefully more the former than the latter. You're not getting married. You shouldn't be out to find a new family, and everyone hates that metaphor anyway. You probably will find people you do like, though. Since you're targeting well defined business, you don't have to live with that relationship if it doesn't pan out. You just need to get to your next cycle.

I've found a lot of people that I really do like. Some, I still do business with, and others I just sometimes get together with for dinner or a cocktail. We know we still like each other because there's no longer any money involved.

This is a defensive play also since you aren't all-in on one engagement. You can't get complacent just because you're on a W-2 and it all feels good, as this post illustrates.

I'm aware that this isn't an out-of-the-gate strategy. If you're gainfully employed now, save up. Even if you hate your job, use it to establish a stable position so that you can get out when you want to. Seriously consider what you think are the luxuries in life and whether you actually enjoy them or if you have been convinced that you do for some other purpose, like pleasing others, peacocking, or keeping up with the Joneses.
by dandanua | 2025-04-14 15:56:19+00:00
@crote

> Are you allowed to take money from the other tables? Clearly the contract says you can, but surely that can't be what they intended?

If their entire business model is based on giving a service that allows you to store your money in safety without any government dependency, while in reality they allow everyone else to take your money, then they deserve whatever happens to them.
by abainbridge | 2025-04-14 15:56:27+00:00
> I would have guessed that any kind of forests have quite limited cap how much carbon it could retain in dead wood

The article says, "We found that a forest that's developing toward old-growth condition is accruing more wood in the stream than is being lost through decomposition" and "The effect will continue in coming decades, Keeton said, because many mature New England forests are only about halfway through their long recovery from 19th- and 20th-century clearing for timber and agriculture".
by myrmidon | 2025-04-14 15:56:40+00:00
> In the "west" currently, you are not allowed to publish anything looking favorably "east" in a serious way on mainstream networks

"Not allowed" by whom? There is a big difference between silencing journalists and a branch of the entertainment industry self-selecting for some current "meta-consensus" (dependent on their target consumers).

Personally, I think calling Putin a dictator is stretching it a bit, but I have come to realize that honest, independent media is an absolutely essential cornerstone of an "actual" democracy: As soon as political leaders can prevent their mistakes from being reported to their voters, the whole thing becomes a farce.

You see a similar facet of this problem in the US, but not because governments have secured media control, but because the media landscape has completeley stratified (with a very strong partisan bias), and a lot of voters are basically never exposed to reporting "from the other side" at all (and are saturated with appropriate "outrage-bait" all day instead).

If you are talking about Russia, then I'd say that highly critical/adversarial reporting in the west is to be expected; this is basically "play imperialist games, win imperialist prices". Just compare WW2 era US messaging/reporting on axis power (before it even got involved itself).

But I'm curious about your perspective. What do you think should the US press say about the "east" that it does not?
by cruffle_duffle | 2025-04-14 15:57:08+00:00
I think makers of LLM “chat bots” like the Claude desktop or cursor have a ways to go when it comes to exposing precisely what the LLM is being promoted.

Because yes, for the LLM to find the MCP servers it needs that info on its prompt. And the software is currently hiding how that information is being exposed. Is it prepended to your own message? Does it put it at the start of the entire context? If yes, wouldn’t real-time changes in tool availability invalidate the entire context? So then does it add it to end of the context window instead?

Like nobody really has this dialed in completely. Somebody needs to make a LLM “front end” that is the raw de-tokenized input and output. Don’t even attempt to structure it. Give me the input blob and output blob.

… I dunno. I wish these tools had ways to do more precise context editing. And more visibility. It would help make more informed choices on what to prompt the model with.

/Ramble mode off.

But slightly more serious; what is the token cost for a MCP tool? Like the llm needs its name, a description, parameters… so maybe like 100 tokens max per tool? It’s not a lot but it isn’t nothing either.
by BizarroLand | 2025-04-14 15:57:35+00:00
I call that the stackoverflow effect, where once a topical community reaches a certain information density anything that does not go neatly on the very top of the current pile is mercilessly destroyed.

It's akin to the concept of "climbing a ladder to the top and then pulling the ladder up behind you", and imho it's the alarm bell that indicates that a community has died, even if the community itself does not know it yet.
by steve_gh | 2025-04-14 15:58:29+00:00
Coming from the "Scandanavian Architect" rather than the "Racoon on Meth" side of the argument, I try to load the dishwasher to make it easy to unload (eg knives, forks spoons all sorted in the cutlery tray as I load it). So when someone (no names!) just throws things in randomly, 'it's annoying because it makes extra sorting work for me as I unload it.
by cherryteastain | 2025-04-14 15:58:49+00:00
I am well aware that "code is law" has no weight in actual law. The point I tried to raise was, given the following sequence of events:

1. You deploy a smart contract to the ethereum blockchain

2. I interact with your smart contract in some manner

how do we define whether the manner of interaction in step 2 is fradulent or not?

"Code is law" is one interpretation by crypto enthusiasts to define under what conditions interacting with the blockchain is fraud; in their definition, it's never fradulent.

Let's assume "code is law" is nonsense, as many comments here say. Then, under what conditions do we define interacting with the blockchain as fradulent? What is fraud and what is not fraud?

Edit: In the blockchain we can even formalize this. The ethereum blockchain at block K has a certain state S_K. I submit a certain transaction/set of instructions T to the blockchain which is mined as block K+1. How do we define a function isIllegal(S_K, T)? (Assuming block K+1 contains EVM instructions from my transaction T only)
by andrewflnr | 2025-04-14 15:58:51+00:00
Amateur speculation, but informed by professionals: I think this tendency toward complexity is situational, not fundamental. Specifically, it's a product of this stage of the universe having lots of available energy. More complex structures are favored when/because they can consume more energy and increase entropy more effectively. The complexity will probably start fading when the hydrogen-fusion party dies. The second law will continue on its way.
by qwerpy | 2025-04-14 15:59:25+00:00
My opinion on this is that as a generic business it's better to just stay out of politics and not pander to specific groups. You may score some short-term wins but if you fail any purity test from that point onwards, or pull back at all, that group will feel jilted and retaliate. Then, you're worse off than if you had just remained neutral.
by swiftcoder | 2025-04-14 15:59:50+00:00
> Google is just really bad at this, but seems to think it's not bad at this

The BigTech firms have been doing this intentionally for a very long time. I started hearing about Microsoft doing the security-escorts-you-straight-out-the-door all the way back in 2012.

It's not that they are bad at this, it's that they think the trade-off works out in their favour. And it probably does - what's a few but-hurt former employees, versus one disgruntled former employee who had enough warning to snag critical data on their way out the door?

Though it's probably our fault, since we're all so trusting of our mega corp employers, and/or so optimistic about our chances of surviving layoffs, that no one is stashing the incriminating data ahead of time.
by Vegenoid | 2025-04-14 15:59:55+00:00
Getting laid off sucks, but this comment isn't about that. What I noticed when I read the post is that the website isn't very good. It's laggy, as in slow to load, scroll, and for the mouse-hover stuff to respond, and this is on a fancy modern macbook. It seems to focus on pretty modern web aesthetic over presenting content. This is exactly the kind of website that makes me bemoan the tendency to prioritize looking better than a simple website when comparing 2 static images, and not prioritizing the experience of actually using the website.

I find these things have a real "well it works on my machine" about them. Whereas sites that stick to simple tech (ex. HN) are far more likely to work well on all machines.
by karmakaze | 2025-04-14 16:00:41+00:00
It's an exercise. I would have much preferred using the 20k most common words or something like that. The first thing that came to mind is "elevator" which is where the equivalence eureka comes from. It can be done in British English as "lift" but difficult otherwise.

Elevators are cool like telephone booths. I've wondered what a dog thinks using them for the first time, then accepting what they do and how much they understand its geometries.
by byefruit | 2025-04-14 16:00:43+00:00
"In addition, S3 Express One Zone has reduced the per-GB charges for data uploads and retrievals by 60 percent, and these charges now apply to all bytes transferred rather than just portions of requests greater than 512 KB"

It's not clear but are there cases where this could be a significant price rise? If you exclusively had small objects (<512kb) being written and read then this could add up quickly.
by anthony-zentic | 2025-04-14 16:00:56+00:00
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by kryptiskt | 2025-04-14 16:01:03+00:00
C lacks sympathy with nearly all additions to hardware capabilities since the late 80s. And it's only with the addition of atomics that it earns the qualification of "nearly". The only thing that makes it appear as lower level than other languages is the lack of high-level abstraction capabilities, not any special affinity for the hardware.

For one, would expect that a low level language wouldn't be so completely worthless at bit twiddling. Another thing, if C is so low level, why can't I define a new calling convention optimized for my use case? Why doesn't C have a rich library for working with SIMD types that has been ubiquitous in processors for 25 years?
by tomjen3 | 2025-04-14 16:01:06+00:00
I don't buy it.

If they had an API Booking would not likely return their data to you, they would almost certainly have an API that you would search and which would then return the same result you get on their website. Probably with some nice JSON or XML formatting.

Booking makes a small amount of ads, but they are paid by the hotels that you book with. And yes, today they already have to compete with people who go there see a hotel listing and go find the actual hotel off-site. That would not really change if they create an MCP.

It might make it marginally more easy to do, especially automatically. But I suspect the real benefits of booking.com is: A) that you are perceived to get some form of discount and B) you get stamps toward the free stay. And of course the third part which is you trust Booking more than some random hotel.

I actually think it would be a good idea for Booking to have an API. What is the alternative?

I can right now run a Deep search for great hotels in Tokyo - that will probably go through substantially all hotels in Tokyo. Go to the hotel's website and find the information, then search through and find exactly what I want.

Booking.com might prefer I go go to their website, but I am sure they would prefer above all that you book through them.

In fact I think the idea of advertisement is given above impact here, possibly because its a popular way for the places that employ the kind of people who post here to make money, but substantially all businesses that are not web-based and that do not sell web-based services for free don't make their money through ads (at least not directly). For all those places ads are an expense and they would much prefer your AI search their (comparably cheap to serve) websites.

Basically, the only website owners who should object to you going to their website through an AI agent are those who are in the publishing industry and who primarily make money through ads. That is a small number of all possible businesses.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-04-14 16:01:10+00:00
It's a question of what kind of business Google is/wants-to-be.

The one it claimed to be, in the past, with a broader holistic mission, claiming to attract the world's brightest to make information accessible? Using its hoard of cash to do a bunch of neat stuff and hire really smart people do it?

Or is it what we always suspected all along, a cynical money printing machine that turns ad impressions into shareholder value and nothing else?

It's always been a mix of both. Those of us who worked there certainly saw in the inside the gradual transition of the internal discourse from "justifying B to support A" to "who cares about A."

They can do whatever they want, they're a private business. But they still trade on a certain reputation, and have the advantage of a quasi-monopoly status in many things.

I would hope that advancing them any kind of good will as any kind of "special" company (which our profession tended to do, before) and muting criticisms is just over now.

They built their money printing machine in part by swallowing competition and exterminating it.
by ncr100 | 2025-04-14 16:01:15+00:00
Awful experience.

What is interesting is our denial, as (ex-)corporate employees, that the corporation is NOT FAMILY...even though we may feel it is.

> Big companies are soulless.

"And God created the C Corporation" -nowhere in the Bible / Koran / Hinduism / Buddhism / Torah

I feel this lesson keeps being re-learned by us people / workers ...
by omneity | 2025-04-14 16:01:17+00:00
I hope they also improve their JSONSchema support for structured output and tool calling. Currently it has many limitations compared to OpenAI’s, for example it doesn’t support “additionalProperties” which eliminates an entire class of use cases and makes it immediately incompatible with many MCP servers.

Marketing the API as OpenAI-compatible and then me getting 400s when I switch to Gemini leaves a sour taste in the mouth, and doesn’t make me confident about their MCP support.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-04-14 16:01:54+00:00
Same is true with people - repeat attempts at social engineering will eventually succeed. We deal with that by a combination of training, segregating responsibilities, involving multiple people in critical decisions, and ultimately, by treating malicious attempts at fooling people as felonies. Same is needed with LLMs.

In context of security, it's actually helpful to anthropomorphize LLMs! They are nowhere near human, but they are fundamentally similar enough to have the same risks and failure modes.
by jdminhbg | 2025-04-14 16:02:03+00:00
For things like remote heating or auto trunk operation, the cost I’d be willing to bear is gated mostly by how much the delta to just buying a new car would be. Especially since having kids, a lot of this stuff makes my life a lot easier. If I’m trying to carry a crying toddler and a large bag of groceries into the house, I don’t want to be struggling to try to get the trunk closed. Being able to completely de-ice the car from inside while I’m getting kids dressed for school instead of needing to spend an extra five minutes doing it manually is likewise huge.

The Tesla (like any EV I’ve driven) is also fun to drive, but I’d trade away the instant torque for the other features if you made me choose.
by julianh65 | 2025-04-14 16:02:04+00:00
I've been using Math Academy for a couple of months now seriously (~3.5k XP). Initially I was reviewing topics / concepts that I already had an intuitive understanding of from college courses, and I believe for those it has helped take me to the next level in that I now can, 99% of the time, solve problems in those topics. As I start to approach topics that I haven't fully covered in college or have some intuitive understanding for I do find that I can mechanically carry out the operations, but I lack an understanding of "why" I'm doing this.

I think the author of this makes some good points to this effect. I believe that the best approach is a bit inverse of what the author is saying however. I think that Math Academy should be the base, where 80-90% of your time is spent. The remaining 10-20% should be used to supplement this. Either with lectures, textbook / edutainment reading or other ways to develop more of that intuition.
by waffletower | 2025-04-14 16:02:20+00:00
I have used Replicate Cog, built on docker, fairly heavily and and find it is a decent compromise of features. Docker taking this use case more seriously is quite welcome, though surprisingly late. Local metal GPU support (where available to the containerized application APIs), not currently available in Cog, is attractive though it would require generalization of application code to support containers executable via Cuda and Metal etc.
by Calwestjobs | 2025-04-14 16:02:34+00:00
efficiency of plants - 1%

efficiency of photovoltaic - 20%

so photovoltaic is 15 times more land efficient then burning biomass. so we absolutely need trees to provide ecological functions. but in era of 5kwp PV array paying itself in 5-6 years(and still working afterwards), to heat water... its is ridiculous to cut trees and burn them to have hot water. 80% of time Canadian citizen can have 100% solar hot water (PV), less then 100% rest of the year.
by goosedragons | 2025-04-14 16:02:46+00:00
Is that good? Windows 11 officially supports computers from 2017 too, Linux way further. Ubuntu 24.04 will happily run on machines over a decade old with no problems.

And Apple has poor backwards compatibility. You can't run 32-bit Intel binaries on anything newer than 10.14. PPC has been out of the question for over 15 years. Meanwhile even on Windows on Arm you can run stuff made with XP or even Windows 98 in mind.
by tpayet | 2025-04-14 16:02:50+00:00
Meilisearch keeps all the data on disk. It uses memory-mapping for optimizing performance, by default everything is safe on disk and the OS cache the most needed pages in memory.

So it works on any machine, really. 2GiB is usually enough for most workloads, but the bigger the dataset, the faster it will be if you give it more memory!
by alganet | 2025-04-14 16:02:59+00:00
In simple terms, I am talking about making kind human beings that are not fools. But that is a very generic description.

The idea of AI companions plays with the notion of the 2020s "incel". A sad boy who can't get a girlfriend and spend time with games and digital toys. There is no other possible audience for a product like this. My assessment is that this interpretation is wrong, and those kids are not sad and lonely.

That "personality" has been shaped and used online for all kinds of purposes. I think deep down they know that and will see the "digital girl" product as an insult.

The fact that this demography uses LLMs is not a tell that they need someone to chat. Those kids are using AI chatbot content on others, not themselves. What they want is an LLM thug or bully agent to retaliate who mocks them.

What they really need though is a friend, who can understand a little bit of what they went through, and that won't try to use them for some shady purpose or mock them.

They will eventually realize that tech is not that friend, and have been manipulating them all along.

Take some time to think about these issues before dismissing my point. I know you will dismiss my point, but take the time to do so. Thinking about humans as humans is important.
by Thoreandan | 2025-04-14 16:03:03+00:00
Game Developers Conference Classic Gaming Postmortem: Zork (2014)

"Dave Lebling, co-author of Zork and co-founder of Infocom, gives a postmortem talk on the classic text adventure. Lebling, who currently works as a senior principal software engineer at BAE Systems, created the "grue," co-authored Zork I-III and wrote seven other text adventures. He plans to give an hour-long talk explaining, among other things, the creation of both the mainframe and microcomputer versions of Zork, the trials and tribulations of coding a cutting-edge text parser, and what it was like to experiment with self-publishing at a time when most PC games were sold in hand-packed plastic bags.

https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020612/Classic-Game-Postmorte...

https://archive.org/details/GDC2014Lebling
by fsflover | 2025-04-14 16:03:09+00:00
> I agree, I'm not saying it's perfect. Far from that.

> But removing the framework

Are you trying to convince me that this path is wrong? I never said or implied it was correct.

> What Jack and Elon are sustaining, when you read between the lines, is not reform to sustain the actual people that actually create the stuff.

I completely agree.
by jeswin | 2025-04-14 16:03:33+00:00
Given their anti-trust struggles, if Google for some reason dominates AI, they'd not want people to bring up anti-competitive behavior as a reason for that. Adopting open standards, especially open standards conceived outside Google is good for everyone including Google. They're well placed - from research to hardware to software and data.

They'll also want the industry to rapidly move forward and connect data to AI. MCP has momemtum.