MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pgt | 2025-04-14 18:15:56+00:00
Re: Auth, you are correct that MCP does not specify auth (aside from env vars for e.g. API keys which is host-specific – another gripe of mine).

However, practically the host (e.g. Claude Desktop by Anthropic) asks for permission before calling specific MCP tools.

It is not part of the MCP spec, but it's part of most host implementations of MCP and one of the big practical reasons for MCP's existence is to avoid giving models carte blanche HTTP access.

IMO this should be part of the MCP spec, e.g. "you can call this GET /weather endpoint any time, but to make payments via this POST /transactions request, ask for permission once or always."

Aside: just because someone "defines <X> as something" does not make it true.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-14 18:16:26+00:00
> Depends on your definition of rich, your definition of "lion's share" and where in the west

Not really, it just requires pointing out that the rates you’re using to compare the modern West and Ancient Rome are much, much higher in every case for the latter.

> In the UK

I’ll admit I don’t know British figures well, so you may have a point. (As a small country, it has e.g. non-dom issues the EU, China and America do not.)

In the U.S., about half of taxes are paid by the top 1%. That’s not commensurate with our power or privilege. But it’s also not nothing.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-04-14 18:16:49+00:00
Jeff Bezos seems to have made a few minor genuflections in Trump's direction and is otherwise unaffected (except for the wreckage Trump's tariffs are likely inflicting on Amazon.) No, Musk's decision was a choice. And now he's stuck with that choice. There is almost certainly no way that things "just go back to normal" with a future Democratic administration.
by Fauntleroy | 2025-04-14 18:16:56+00:00
The video to audio examples are really impressive! The video featuring the band showcases some of the obvious shortcomings of this method (humans will have very precise expectations about the kinds of sounds 5 trombones will make)—but the tennis example shows its strengths (decent timing of hit sounds, eerily accurate acoustics for the large internal space). I'm very excited to see how this improves a few more papers down the line!
by throwup238 | 2025-04-14 18:17:12+00:00
Synthetic data requires a discriminator that can select the highest quality results to feed back into training. Training a discriminator is easier than a full blown LLM, but it still suffers from a lack of high quality training data in the case of 1M context windows. How do you train a discriminator to select good 2,000 page synthetic books if the only ones you have to train it with are Proust and concatenated Harry Potter/Game of Thrones/etc.
by beAbU | 2025-04-14 18:17:25+00:00
I dont even know where to to start with the math, but I always wondered if there is not a viable carbon capture business in just growing and burying plants.

Get some fast growing plant like Japanese Knotweed or bamboo, grow it out for a year, harvest and dump the biomass into a decomissioned mineshaft to minimize contact with the atmosphere. Rinse and repeat.
by Tainnor | 2025-04-14 18:17:35+00:00
There must be something wrong in the way FP is taught if the takeaway that people have is that it prevents or is somehow opposed to mutation.

On the one hand you have bunch of FP languages that don't care in the least bit about "purity" (i.e. being side-effect free) or are more pragmatic around it, such as various LISPs, OCaml, Scala or even parts of the JS ecosystem. And on the other hand, there's a lot of research and discussion in e.g. the Haskell community about how to properly deal with side effects. The idea here is not that side effects are bad, but that we want to know where they happen and combine them safely.
by zamadatix | 2025-04-14 18:19:03+00:00
4.1 is a pinned API variant with the improvements from the newer iterations of 4o you're already using in the app, so that's why the comparison focuses between those two.

Pricing wise the per token cost of o3-mini is less than 4.1 but keep in mind o3-mini is a reasoning model and you will pay for those tokens too, not just the final output tokens. Also be aware reasoning models can take a long time to return a response... which isn't great if you're trying to use an API for interactive coding.
by mikeInAlaska | 2025-04-14 18:19:22+00:00
Here's a rust version i made with bitmapped fonts for both i2c and SPI https://github.com/scopenews/minimalSSD1306driver/ I was running this on my pi as a demo.

I normally work with C++ on esp32 for these little displays, and in there I use a screen buffer for partial refreshes which makes them very fast !!
by mschuster91 | 2025-04-14 18:20:06+00:00
It became apparent really fast that ivermectin was effective... against a superinfection with parasites, which the reported success cases all had.

But by the time it became apparent, the correction didn't spread nearly as fast nor wide as the original information.

The problem is, most people lack the scientific literacy to understand how science works, and many newspapers have long since gutted their expert journalists.
by gusgus01 | 2025-04-14 18:20:19+00:00
Actually, there are some studies that show a anti-depressive effect from exposure to heat/fever like conditions. These are just two from a rudimentary Google search to check if I was remembering correctly. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6519523/ https://www.colorado.edu/asmagazine-archive/node/2080
by cess11 | 2025-04-14 18:20:22+00:00
Your IDE should already have facilities for generating class boilerplate, like package address and brackets and so on. And then you put in the attributes and generate a constructor and any getters and setters you need, it's so fast and trivially generated that I doubt LLM:s can actually contribute much to it.

Perhaps they can make suggestions for properties based on the class name but so can a dictionary once you start writing.
by grayhatter | 2025-04-14 18:20:23+00:00
> No, it's not hypothetical. I just did it, which demonstrates that it's not type safe and that the compiler won't give you an error if you write invalid code, which is what the post I responded to claimed.

Describe explicitly how your example will trigger illegal behavior? Happy to discuss the behavior of the compiled asm if you'd like to be that pendantic?

Not type safe, and contains an appreciable risk or defect are two distinct concerns. One matters less than the other.

> Because there is no well-defined layout for plain structs in Zig, they satisfy the "ill-defined layout" requirement.

No? Struts have a defined layout, they're not guaranteed between compilations, but they don't change within a compilation unit.

> Merely invoking the @fieldParentPtr on a pointer that doesn't satisfy the other requirement in that case invokes unchecked illegal behavior according to the language reference.

And the failure mode is the compiler will decide to delete your OS?

Unchecked illegal behavior isn't magic, doing something similar to illegal behavior doesn't mean the code will or won't do what you intended. uint rollover is unchecked illegal behavior (when not explict, in release fast) but just because the uint might roll over doesn't make that code invalid.

> I'm very clearly not saying that it can't be done correctly and I don't think you can argue for that in good faith.

I thought you were saying that it's guaranteed to be incorrect. In fact, I think that's what you said in your reply to me. Mostly because you used the word 'mearly'.

The way that I understood what you meant was, the example you provided was guaranteed wrong. In fact it's actually correct. It will have the same semantics and behavior as what I assume was desired.

> Ignoring that you can't seem to get the facts straight [...] and I don't think you can argue for that in good faith.

I'm sorry if I was unclear, I was trying to discuss it in good faith. :(
by burningChrome | 2025-04-14 18:20:40+00:00
>> the only thing I could guess is that they're intentionally horrible to applicants in order to filter out the ones that won't tolerate it.

I had two friends within the span of 18 months have this experience where they've run the gauntlet of pre-screening, get invited out to Google offices. Run through two days of grueling interviews, all the while getting a lot of great positive feedback about their performance. They end the last day, go back to the hotel, thinking about leaving the following morning.

They get a call around dinner time. "Hey, we had two more directors that wanted to speak to you tomorrow, it would only be for a few hours, but they were really impressed with the feedback and wanted to have some more time with you. Can you stay for one more day?"

Both later found out this is a complete ruse to find out how bad you want to work at Google. This forces you to change your flight plans, pay for the change to your ticket, pay for another night at a hotel, etc. If you do, they line something up that's super casual. If you reject the offer and return home, they conclude you didn't want to work their bad enough to change all of your plans and remove you from the candidate pool.

Same thing, once you turn them down and maintain your plans of leaving the next morning, they just ghost you and you never hear back from them. The irony was one of the two was contacted a year later from a different department asking him if he would be interested in interviewing for another position there. He said he rolled his eyes and politely declined the offer. He said it was pretty unreal to treat him like garbage and then come back and see if he was interested in another role there. As if everything there is so disconnected or they thought this was just completely acceptable behavior.
by simonw | 2025-04-14 18:21:13+00:00
Here's a summary of this Hacker News thread created by GPT-4.1 (the full sized model) when the conversation hit 164 comments: https://gist.github.com/simonw/93b2a67a54667ac46a247e7c5a2fe...

I think it did very well - it's clearly good at instruction following.

Total token cost: 11,758 input, 2,743 output = 4.546 cents.

Same experiment run with GPT-4.1 mini: https://gist.github.com/simonw/325e6e5e63d449cc5394e92b8f2a3... (0.8802 cents)

And GPT-4.1 nano: https://gist.github.com/simonw/1d19f034edf285a788245b7b08734... (0.2018 cents)
by mikepurvis | 2025-04-14 18:21:30+00:00
But for the intrusive one you have the visibility into its membership in the other structures, since you're holding a reference to the object and its intrusive fields.

In the non-intrusive case, all you know is how you got there, you don't have return info to the other structures— particularly annoying if you're trying to destroy an object and have to speculatively look for references to it in the other lists in order to get rid of them.
by hwpythonner | 2025-04-14 18:22:11+00:00
Very cool. I’m wondering if you’ve thought about memory pruning or summarization as usage grows?

What do you think of this: instead of just deleting old entries, you could either do LRU (I guess Claude can help with it), or you could summarize the responses and store the summary back into the same table — kind of like memory consolidation. That way raw data fades, but a compressed version sticks around. Might be a nice way to keep memory lightweight while preserving context.
by clown_strike | 2025-04-14 18:22:25+00:00
This was about Elon's "Nazi salute" and both so incorrect and blatantly astroturfed I haven't returned to Reddit out of disgust.

A ton of near-dead subreddits with no activity and no reason to link to x.com for any reason suddenly had thousands of people show up demanding links to x.com be blocked like it's an everyday problem for the sub.

The quiet beneficiary of this campaign are those who benefit from Reddit's groomed narrative and their competing platform Bluesky.
by atombender | 2025-04-14 18:22:41+00:00
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Show HN: Browser Extension for Getting EBooks into AI
by stephreader | 2025-04-14 18:22:43+00:00
I created a free browser extension called ReaderBot that speed reads eBooks you own and outputs a text (Markdown) transcript that can be used in any AI tool as context for questions, or to generate summaries. You can even put multiple books together for richer, more objective insights.

I'm genuinely curious: How would YOU use AI to dive deeper into the books you love? Could this be the future of reading, or just a random result of my love of books and code?
by arandomusername | 2025-04-14 18:22:53+00:00
> It was but one example of a list much longer than the post you responded to, which anyone who was fair would recognize.

"Anyone who is fair would see it exactly how I see it!"

> No, not really.

Yes, really.

Wonderful way to have a conversation, isn't it. Everything else in your response is nitpicking and hanging up over minor details!

> The bleach argument was one example and you're being nitpicky about it anyway.

The other example was groping. So I refuted half the points the user made, pretty major to me. It's not being nitpicky, it's major difference. If I said Kamala wanted to establish soviet like price controls, people would rightfully correct that and that wouldn't be nitpicky or hanging up over minor details.

> Strawman.

No, you are just nitpicking.

> When did you engage with the main point that Trump has poor character and is unintelligent?

I did, by engaging in the DIRECT argument that the user provided for him being unintelligent. User said "Trump did X. He is unintelligent". I'm supposed to say "ohh no but he is intelligent" completely ignoring the reasoning for his conclusion? In an actual conversation, you engage the reasons provided - otherwise it just turns into unproductive "no/yes/no/yes" conversation.
by redcannon218 | 2025-04-14 18:24:19+00:00
My benchmarks are not public, but on AMD EPYC processors ChaCha12 (5 GB / s) is faster than hardware-accelerated AES-256-GCM (3.5 GB / s).

Unfortunately, this is comparing apples to oranges because AES-256-GCM is authenticated, so you will need a MAC with ChaCha12 (usually Poly1305) which finally makes ChaCha12 in AEAD mode slower than AES-256-GCM.

But the real question is: What is fast enough?

I believe that between 1 and 2 GB / s per core for an AEAD is fast enough as I/O will be your bottleneck way before that.

This is why I will always favor a ChaCha20/ChaCha12-based AEAD over AES and its many footguns.
by zoogeny | 2025-04-14 18:24:36+00:00
I've heard the opposite, stories from users that MCP has been a flop. One of my acquaintances works in marketing and is a heavy LLM user. He got swept up in the hype of MCPs and tried a bunch of them out. He was expressing his disappointment and frustration.

It is a drawback of hype and early adoption. I think highly technical users can get value out of it for now and can keep their expectations in line. If I am building my own MCP server and it is a bit flaky, I manage that responsibility myself. If I am wiring up a MCP server that makes some claims of automating some workflow and it doesn't work, then I negatively associate that with the very idea of MCP.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-04-14 18:24:44+00:00
"Bukele refusing" is total nonsense. Trump could demand that man be returned, and he'd be in the US tomorrow. This entire performance is a charade being scripted by the White House.

ETA: it is also a hard kick in the teeth of the Supreme Court, which seems to have been offering him an off-ramp. I wonder where this goes next.
by FireBeyond | 2025-04-14 18:24:56+00:00
No, it doesn't, at all:

> within 1 year of the end of pregnancy from any cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy

We have you here saying "If you overdose on recreational drugs a year after giving birth that's considered pregnancy-related" - no it's not. Just as elsewhere someone is claiming "If you die in a car accident six months after giving birth, that's pregnancy-related".

Too many people think they have these "gotcha" moments that they think have uncovered some ideological agenda in this data, but in reality, it only uncovers their own agenda. The same was true a few years ago - "if you fall down the stairs and die a year after having COVID, that will be counted as a COVID death". Again, no, it won't.
by dkarl | 2025-04-14 18:25:10+00:00
> given AI seems like a winner takes all type market

Does it, though? LLMs seemed magic when they arrived, and they continue to get better, but it seems like it takes a ton of hand-holding and experimentation to get useful work out of them. That opens up the field for different players to thrive in different niches, finding ways to make AI work for different applications in different industries.

In the realm of using LLMs for software development, for which you'd expect HNers to have a decent amount of hands-on experience, you see multiple LLMs from multiple companies mentioned in every conversation.

I think the LLM success stories are going to be companies that discover niches where the state of the art is sufficient to significantly reduce the amount of labor required for labor-intensive jobs, but it takes a combination of AI mastery and domain savvy to make it happen. Theoretically, companies like OpenAI should have a head start at finding and exploiting those opportunities, but history says the big success stories will emerge as the survivors of a gold rush where thousands or tens of thousands of companies are founded to "bring AI to X" where X is healthcare, insurance, shipping, underwear, etc. 99% of those companies will fail, a few will find seams of ore to exploit, and one or two will become the Microsoft or Amazon of their generation.
by Graziano_M | 2025-04-14 18:25:11+00:00
To embed a binary in esp-idf I believe you need something like:

create_resources(${CMAKE_CURRENT_LIST_DIR}/../../binaries/RAM_APP ${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/binaries.c) set_property(SOURCE ${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/binaries.c PROPERTY GENERATED 1)

Or using `EMBED_FILES`

I just happened to be looking at this very thing today that had to do this: https://github.com/espressif/esp-serial-flasher/blob/master/...
by srean | 2025-04-14 18:25:52+00:00
Calm down. No need to be rude and condescending and throw personal insults.

If you had read this part --

"But that alone would tell us almost nothing of what dolphin dialogue means.

To understand their language we need shared experiences, shared emotions, common internal worlds. Observation of dolphin-dolphin interaction would help but to a limited degree."

it ought to have been clear that what I am arguing is a corpus of dolphin communication fed to an LLM alone will not suffice. A lot of investments have to be made in this part -- To understand their language we need shared experiences, shared emotions, common internal worlds.

I am sure both you and me would be very happy the day we can have some conversation with dolphins.
Ask HN: Are there any truly private chat apps?
by fir3dvst | 2025-04-14 18:26:28+00:00
If you have to input email, phone or any identifying info to use - it's not private. I'm thinking about a messaging service that generates a key for you to use for identification and encryption. All data is encrypted on the client side. Everything is tied to a single key that the user is responsible for keeping safe to access their chats.

Does something like this exist?
by atemerev | 2025-04-14 18:26:36+00:00
There is no OpenAI model better than R1, reasoning or not (as confirmed by the same Aider benchmark; non-coding tests are less objective, but I think it still holds).

With Gemini (current SOTA) and Sonnet (great potential, but tends to overengineer/overdo things) it is debatable, they are probably better than R1 (and all OpenAI models by extension).
by ryandrake | 2025-04-14 18:27:32+00:00
I don't believe my office is my family, but I expect to at least be treated with a baseline level of decency, civility, dignity, respect, and kindness, which are non-monetary and (by my reading of your post) unnecessary in your office full of Vulcans.

The fact that these things are seen as optional and unimportant explains a lot of what's happened to public discourse.
by meifun | 2025-04-14 18:27:44+00:00
My dad used to bring me home the Gazette with a box of powdered doughnuts and chocolate milk.

I was 10.

I’d spend the whole weekend typing in all the code and trying to get it to run on our Commodore 64. If it was dinner time, he would bring me a plate and leave me be. I’d be so excited when everything worked and I could show it off to him.

It is the best memory I have of my father.

Thank you dad.
by DistractionRect | 2025-04-14 18:28:52+00:00
It's a lot of things. Their reputation, their legal jurisdiction (outside the US), that it's available now, etc.

The administration is using it as a trial run for bigger things. They're already talking about building more, negotiating with other countries, etc.

Right now it's just seeing how the courts will react and if/what consequences there will be, and what loopholes they can use. It's why they're actively fighting against getting back the get "accidently" deported from Maryland. They're hoping they can set a precedent that once outside the country, they're no longer accountable/responsible for human rights/due process afforded by the constitution. It sets up a blueprint to disappear any US citizen (read political opponents/dissidents) with impunity.

Edit: in regards to El Salvador saying it's preposterous to give him back. His comment and the US administration act as if they're being asked to smuggle him past the Coast Guard in the dead of night, give him a gun, and free him in the woods. It's ridiculous. Give him back in the same way he was delivered, in cuffs, on a plane, and handed over to the local authorities.
by jerf | 2025-04-14 18:30:05+00:00
If we include as a axiom for the purposes of this conversation that we must be able to refactor out any part of the "constructor" and that the refactored function must have the same mutation "privileges" as the original creator, which I think is fairly reasonable, this leads you in the direction of something like Rust I think, which can construct objects and lend bits and pieces of it out in a controlled manner to auxiliary functions, but the value being returned can still have constraints on it.
by ska | 2025-04-14 18:30:28+00:00
"On paper this was supposed to lead to the immanent collapse of it's service."

I don't know anyone who expected this. The typical failure mode is slow degradation and lack of new development, not sudden collapse. Services become flakier, innovation stops. There was probably some fat to cut,as you put it, but the concept of eating your seed corn is also relevant.
by FollowingTheDao | 2025-04-14 18:30:45+00:00
Another aspect of this is that high levels of IL 17 can cause mania in bipolar patients.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27295856/

I do not know why doctors are so hesitant to link the immune system and mood disorders. I have schizoaffective disorder and I see this expressing myself every time. For example, when I caught Covid, I had one of the worst psychotic episodes in my life. None of my doctors really cared about this important correlation.

And I will scream this from the rooftops for as long as I can; mood disorders are immune disorders.
by jimt1234 | 2025-04-14 18:30:58+00:00
I've noticed a disturbing trend in the last year or so where a company announces a significant layoff, saying it needed to let go of "underperforming employees" or similar wording. I've been in this industry for a long time, experienced several layoffs, but this way to announce a layoff (publicly calling-out "underperforming employees") feels new to me. It also feels shady - like, announcing to the industry, "Don't hire these losers we just got rid of. LOL"