MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by angusturner | 2025-04-14 11:42:41+00:00
I have been developing with MCP for a few weeks now, making some small python and javascript servers to integrate with Claude Desktop.

I am yet to see a use case that wouldn't be better served with an HTTP API. I understand the need to standardize some conventions around this, but at the heart of it, all "tool" use boils down to: 1. an API endpoint to expose capabilities / report the API schema 2. other endpoints ("tools") to expose functionality

Want state? ("resources") - put a database or some random in-memory data structure behind an API endpoint. Want "prompts"? This is just a special case of a tool.

Fundamentally (like most everyone else experimenting with this tech), I need an API that returns some text and maybe images. So why did I just lose two days trying to debug the Python MCP SDK, and the fact that its stdio transport can't send more than a few KB without crashing the server?

If only there was a stateless way to communicate data between a client and a server, that could easily recover from and handle errors...
by decimalenough | 2025-04-14 11:42:52+00:00
A society where everybody can create wealth ends up far richer than one where one person hoards it all. So, yes, extreme inequality is bad for everybody, even those at the top of an unequal society.

Most people view the Nordics as desirable places to live and their Gini coefficient hovers around 0.3, while places with very high inequality, like Brazil and South Africa, tend to be poor and violent.
by icameron | 2025-04-14 11:43:12+00:00
Slightly tangential question for you- does 48% taxes include healthcare? How about pension? It’s tax week in the US, I think my rate was 22% overall. But another 10% of compensation is health insurance. Another 15% is retirement savings. My municipal water bill last quarter mostly was not for actual water usage (about 40% was for water) rest is system charge and storm water fees. Regarding the VAT thing… we may be effectively getting the equivalent with tariffs on goods and materials supposedly taking effect!
by k0tan32 | 2025-04-14 11:44:34+00:00
Thanks for sharing, I'll check it out! Lighthouse seems to go much further in extracting the feeds and even finds some likely variants by brute force or crawls for links.

For this browser extension I aim to have a small but curated list of ad-hoc derives instead of one-fits-all solution. This makes me wonder: if RSS is supported by a website but is not accessible at all, perhaps the right approach would be to simply ask the owners to provide access to it.
by itake | 2025-04-14 11:45:19+00:00
Pot calling the kettle black. You're saying the commenter is wrong, without presenting any substantive arguments or "empirical evidence" otherwise.

"Do your homework" is not a useful comment, b/c you can easily find eco-chambers re-enforce any point you want on the internet. Instead of trying to engage in conversation, you're just pushing them further into their own ecochamber.
by kibwen | 2025-04-14 11:46:26+00:00
It's easy to see that with an unbounded amount of wealth, a single actor can keep a market irrational for an unbounded amount of time. Even with realistic (finite) amounts of wealth, this actor can keep a market irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

In general, markets can only work when people are averse to the loss of money, thereby introducing a feedback mechanism. And people are only averse to the loss of money when that has material consequences for their well-being. For the ultra-wealthy today, the marginal value of every additional dollar (or million dollars) is essentially zero, so the self-balancing properties of markets are prevented from doing their job properly, namely the efficient allocation of resources.
by codingdave | 2025-04-14 11:47:10+00:00
> I will never understand the resistance against putting things on the side.

It is a side effect of mobile devices -- Mobile-first design. When apps got popular, people decided that everything needed to be designed for mobile devices first, and adjusted for larger browsers screens later. So people started making everything tall and narrow. And said it was bad practice to do otherwise. Now people who learned UI design after those days often follow that idea. Personally, I am not a fan, but that is where it comes from.
by noosphr | 2025-04-14 11:47:38+00:00
>What does this say about Google's commitment to developer excellence?

Look inside the tensorflow code base for your answer.

I had the Kafkaesque experience of reporting a bug, being told there is no bug by a help desk employee, while the bug was throwing up errors in the official docs.

To top it off I got a message by one of the onshore team months later that they were going to solve it only for the person to be fired within a week.

I've mostly moved to jax for daily experiments. Hopefully the fact that codebase is small and modular will mean that when Google Googles all over the project there will be enough know how to maintain a community fork.
by marcusb | 2025-04-14 11:47:48+00:00
First, I'll say it is pretty common to use the terms interchangeably. I don't think anyone was confused by what I wrote, or that your "clarification" was in any way helpful. See, for example, these legal groups using the term "protected group" in relation to US employment law:

* https://www.osbar.org/public/legalinfo/1095_DiscriminationEm...

* https://pedersenlaw.com/practice-areas/discrimination/

Secondly, I used the phrase "protected group" referring to disparate impact, and here, your assertion (to the extent it has any validity at all) is simply incorrect. The entire idea is to ferret out subtle acts of discrimination that have an outsize impact on a group consisting of members of a protected class, and in the case law you see the phrase "protected group" used explicitly. For example:

On the contrary, the ultimate burden of proving that discrimination against a protected group has been caused by a specific employment practice remains with the plaintiff at all times (Watson v Fort Worth Bank & Trust, 487 US 977 - Supreme Court 1988[0])

0 - https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=637945611431669...
by throwing_away | 2025-04-14 11:47:53+00:00
Yes, it happens all the time, especially as the devices age.

L1 devices remotely downgrade to become L3 devices. This has different effects depending on content provided from "totally unavailable" to "lower resolution".

It's both DRM and planned-obsolescence in one.

The qualifier: https://developer.android.com/privacy-and-security/security-...

The list: https://android.googleapis.com/attestation/status

The dev docs: https://github.com/doridori/Android-Security-Reference/blob/...

I'm not sure if it's confirmed, but it's believed Level 1 video output contains a watermarking scheme that ties the key to the media, so if it's leaked they can disable the key that leaked the content.

You can search around and find tons of angry consumers shouting into the void about widevine errors on older consumer devices.
by Joker_vD | 2025-04-14 11:48:25+00:00
It's not unusual at all, it's just... should it be exposed? I personally prefer having "Node struct with next pointer + inlined generic data" design when it can be encapsulated away since, well, it can be encapsulated away, and the result data layout is the same. And when you expose this design, well, you end with all sorts of disasters, including OOP inheritance (no, really: [0]).

[0] https://catern.com/inheritance.html
by matt-p | 2025-04-14 11:48:33+00:00
My point still stands even if it's equity. PE/corp buyers may not care about buying out the very small minority stock holders, that is the point I 'm making.

Lets say you've got

Founder A 25% - Voting, Founder B 25% - Voting, Investor A 10% - Voting, Investor B 15% - Voting, Investor C 8% - Voting.

Former Employee A 0.5% - Non Voting, Former Employee B 0.4% - Non Voting, Employee C+ 0.2-0.3% each all Non Voting.

If say Big Co want's to buy the company why do they care about buying out former Employee B? If they can pickup the two founders and the three investors, thats enough for complete practical control.
by trod1234 | 2025-04-14 11:49:20+00:00
There doesn't appear to be. There is actually quite a bit of older literature on this.

Many of the books reference the observation that schizophrenia symptoms are commonly seen in victims of torture, specifically in returning PoWs during the Korean Conflict.

Joost Meerloo, and Robert Lifton are two well established authors that come to mind, and while there are other diagnostic criteria its fairly safe to say that mass delusion it seems occurs more regularly when the population is tortured.

The 4 elements needed for torture are isolation, cognitive dissonance, coercion with real or perceived loss, and lack of agency to remove.

These things naturally occurs where all communication channels have been jammed with misinformation. These things fall under 5th Generation Warfare.

Mao came up with some very clever ways of structuring and clustering the elements of torture into trauma loops utilizing all of the psychological blindspots we have. Cialdini's book on influence covers most of the blindspots if you are unaware, except distorted reflected appraisal.

Technically the phone-based dopamine triggers of today through associative priming could be considered a form of targeted Narcosynthesis/Narcoanalysis which has impacts on the ability to resist torture.
by kqr | 2025-04-14 11:49:22+00:00
I don't have any specific knowledge about this, but one of the things I do when buying bicycles second hand is lift them up and give them a good shake. Any noise should be easy to attribute and once addressed, it should be quiet. This helps discover weak joints between components.

I also visually inspect the frame – especially on the underside and around the bottom bracket and head tube, and look for any deformations or cracks.

I have always wanted to try to apply bending forces to the frame and listen for creaking, but I haven't figured out a good technique to do so with a stationary bicycle. The best I can achieve is a test ride where I try things like accelerating hard on a high gear, doing little front-wheel hops, etc.
by caseyy | 2025-04-14 11:49:40+00:00
My point is that narrative-driven funding is very often the wrong approach. Before people polish their storytelling and pitch decks, they should look at the fundamentals of their business. Then, they probably won't need the whole startup theater to try to get funding. Moreover, if the fundamentals are so bad they can't be funded, it's a signal about the business, isn't it? Maybe that doesn't apply to some one-off unicorn businesses, but it applies to the 99%.

I'd say people are better off going with fundamentals. Because if your fundamentals are bad, but let's say you manage to enthral the investors with your confidence, charisma, and selective optimism, they may fund you, but your negotiating position will be incredibly weak. If they stagger the funding over milestones, upsetting your investors for any matter - product related or not - will mean game over. If they want a lot of equity, you will have to say yes, as they'll still be the one investor tentatively interested, etc. It's a bad deal. It's risking a lot of structural damage to a new business.

With good fundamentals, all of that doesn't apply. If you start a company, get some cash flow going, and show profit, investors will start chasing you. Whatever funding you would have gotten through the usual Silicon Valley venture pitching, you will now get on actually good terms.

> they'll ask you to put up all your personal assets as collateral in exchange for a 20% loan on your existing accounts receivable

Has this happened to you? My experience is that banks offer almost up to 1:1 debt to (company) assets, so long as the business model is clear and profitable. If someone's trying to fund an unprofitable business (like I said, for market capture, for example), then there will be problems. But in that case, the fundamentals aren't great.
by reissbaker | 2025-04-14 11:50:04+00:00
Zig has first-class functions (you can pass functions as parameters); it just doesn't have closures. Map pretty rarely uses closures anyway IME; e.g. converting a list to JSON doesn't need to close over outside variables. And anyway, anything that's:

1. Generic over lists, and

2. Takes a function as a parameter

Will want to know what the node field name is. Luckily, comptime provides a solution there.

TBH I think "you just don't" is a pretty unsatisfying answer to "how do I use these features that are built into Zig" — especially when you can use them, very easily.
by amiga386 | 2025-04-14 11:50:15+00:00
On the one hand, yes; I don't think the admins made that specific change, but they took away the ability to sticky normal posts, in response to T_D's shenanigans, ending the effectiveness of that tactic.

On the other hand, there aren't simple technological fixes to social problems. T_D's mods remained tricksy and continued to work their userbase to upvote and focus - in ways which didn't breach the sitewide rules on manipulation - and still kept hitting /r/all
by eigenspace | 2025-04-14 11:50:52+00:00
That's like cutting off your feet to save weight in a running race.

Yes, those government workers cost money, but no, cutting them will not improve the fiscal situation in the USA. The jobs are not being cut in anything even close to a thoughtful or intelligent way.

Even putting aside the obviously moronic ones like getting rid of IRS staff who bring in truckloads of money for pennies of spending, most of these cuts are just going to cause more chaos and inefficiencies than they prevent. E.g. USAID may seem like 'waste' to sociopathic creitns, but it also serves a very deliberate purpose in furthering the USA'S interests abroad and keeping the international community aligned with the USA and open to US businesses
by Tainnor | 2025-04-14 11:51:31+00:00
IME, this was true four years ago. Few rounds, assessments were mostly take homes or in-person "implement a feature" style, interview questions didn't seem to be built to trip you up.

Now, every job I apply for has 4-5 rounds, leetcode is more common, they do behavioural and system design rounds that you have to prepare for, etc. One job I applied to even asked me two behavioural questions via email before I even talked to someone. Something's truly off.
by eesmith | 2025-04-14 11:51:54+00:00
Most members of the Commonwealth - Canadians excepted - say "maths" while North American English uses "math".

https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/12/math-versus-maths-h...

An Aussie chastising an American for being insufficiently American enough should put their cork hat back on and drink an ice cold Foster's.
by dshil | 2025-04-14 11:52:53+00:00
Location: Serbia

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: C, C++, Embedded, RTOS, IoT, ESP32, Linux, Networking

Résumé/CV: https://dshil.net

Email: dshil@fastmail.com

Software engineer with 10+ years of experience in embedded, IoT, high-load, and distributed systems. Built tools, libraries for embedded and IoT projects (https://github.com/open-control-systems). Previously led firmware development for hydrogen devices.

Looking for a small, engineering-focused team building embedded systems, real-time software, and IoT.
by bayindirh | 2025-04-14 11:53:03+00:00
For these kinds of cargo, you can't decide the route yourself. You ask to the government bureau which handles the roads with your specs, and they give you the route after checking it with the road specs and clearances. Insurance also needs these documents.

After you insure your cargo, you take the exact route the bureau provided, and if something happens due to road conditions, government pays your damages.

Dad was working in insurance. This is the standard procedure.
by flohofwoe | 2025-04-14 11:53:06+00:00
If the node embeds the data item you can't link the item into multiple linked lists, but if the data item embeds the node(s) suddenly that's trivial.

I don't know if this was the motiviation for the design change though, but IMHO intrusive linked list are the 'proper' linked list design, and C++-style "nodes with payload" are a weird outlier.

Another reason might be that generic code leads to a lot of code duplication in the binary (which may or may not be optimized away by the compiler though - but at the cost of increased build times though).
by codydkdc | 2025-04-14 11:53:13+00:00
the only one of these points I personally care about is:

> The protocol has a very LLM-friendly interface, but not always a human friendly one.

similar to the people asking "why not just use the API directly", I have another question: why not just use the CLI directly? LLMs are trained on natural language. CLIs are an extremely common solution for client/server interactions in a human-readable, human-writeable way (that can be easily traversed down subcommands)

for instance, instead of using the GitHub MCP server, why not just use the `gh` CLI? it's super easy to generate the help and feed it into the LLM, super easy to allow the user to inspect the command before running it, and already provides a sane exposure of the REST APIs. the human and the LLM can work in the same way, using the exact same interface
by malaya_zemlya | 2025-04-14 11:55:18+00:00
I suspect the microtransaction idea was in the air in the 1960s. Nikolai Nosov's "Dunno on the Moon" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunno_on_the_Moon) which is a Soviet satire of American capitalism describes exactly the same idea implemented at the "Economy Hotel" That's 4 years before Ubik.
by tkgally | 2025-04-14 11:55:39+00:00
Four-decade resident of Japan here. While small towns might have their appeal, for me the real Japan is the Yamanote Line between Shinjuku and Ikebukuro on a Friday evening in summer, the cars packed with sweaty drunk and sober people of all kinds, talking and laughing and reading and looking at their phones and dozing off as they sway against each other when the train stops at Takadanobaba.
by bigfatkitten | 2025-04-14 11:56:30+00:00
> My gut feeling is that US-founded startups consider Australia, NZ, SE Asia as too hard-basket to set up offices for, and don't want to deal with the potentially complex company structure, tax and payroll issues that hiring employees in these countries might require.

That's pretty much it. There is a significant cost to doing this, and the talent pool in Australia just isn't deep enough to necessarily make it worthwhile.
by bhouston | 2025-04-14 11:56:46+00:00
> I am missing something big here. How and why did they raise 480 million dollars in a year for a cloud security product?

I am not an expert at Wiz specifically but I understand this is a "sales lead SaaS business" rather than "product lead SaaS business."

Sales lead Saas companies are incredibly costly from a sales and marketing standpoint, you hire a ton of sales people, BDRs and event marketing and other types of outreach and you fly your sales people around the place to win and dine your customers. So you basically invest all your VC money into your sales organization and it probably takes up 65% or maybe more of your head count. The sales people also take a decent percentage of all the ACV contracts they bring in, thus even if you make a ton of sales, they are not profitable for at least the first year. This is growth at all costs.
by ralferoo | 2025-04-14 11:56:52+00:00
I don't use Zig, but one advantage of having a genericised intrusive linked list where the next pointer doesn't have to be the first thing in the structure is when you want to use larger types, such as 128-bit fields. Sticking a pointer at the beginning would mean the compiler would have to insert alignment padding after the pointer or break the default alignment.
by Someone1234 | 2025-04-14 11:56:58+00:00
What is "our" job in this context? For example, when I was a junior over 50% of my work was literal programming, but as I get more senior I program less and less.

From my perspective "our" job is to deliver solutions to specific problems our end-users have. How people accomplish that varies a lot by their position/seniority.

To get into the weeds: When I first stared worst case scenario, I could waste my own time with poor or overengineered solutions. Now I can waste half a dozen programmer's time by not doing enough due-diligence and or planning.
by 9dev | 2025-04-14 11:56:58+00:00
I doubt you're able to catch all edge cases even in your own program (in an economically viable way), but great for you if that works for that use case.

However, if we're talking about the TypeScript compiler, the complexity required to ensure end-to-end runtime type soundness is orders of magnitude greater than sprinkling a bunch of isString checks here and there.
by fidelramos | 2025-04-14 11:58:14+00:00
As a GrapheneOS user I can speak of my experience: the app for my bank was working fine until 2 months ago, when after an upgrade it stopped working because of Integration API.

I will contact them to try to get them to support GrapheneOS, but I will not be holding my breath. I uninstalled it in the meantime and use my computer. If they ever require the app I would likely switch to a different bank.
I built world fastest caching database
by yasirdevloper | 2025-04-14 11:58:16+00:00
I am pakistani guy and i built my own caching database and it is production ready. It is multithreaded and here is detailed comparison between this and other caching databases.

It is world fastest because it uses Assembly language , common sense;

here is it s source code http://github.com/muhammadyasir-dev/dustdb
by bko | 2025-04-14 11:58:19+00:00
> We're supposed to pay $20/mo with usage limits for that?

I never understood the pushback on pricing. A junior engineer maybe makes 150k a year in US so $20 is 16m of his time. If you can save 16m of a junior devs time a month, it’s worth it. Much less for more senior engineers.

Sure if it’s net negative then you wouldn’t use it even if it were free. But surely the value isn’t 0 < min saved < 16m so what’s the point of bringing up the price
Why aren't there more tech startups serving B2B /prosumer finance?
by danirogerc | 2025-04-14 11:58:26+00:00
I went down a rabbit hole of investigating funds like https://www.motivepartners.com/ and their portfolios. A lot of b2b finance startups in these PE/VC portfolios seem to be very underdeveloped compared to traditional SaaS. Maybe it is because sales are almost exclusively relationship-driven and they thrive on privacy, but I can't help but frown and believe there should be more of these tools, reviews, documentation... Serving PE firms and financial institutions. G2 and Capterra are also underdeveloped in this category.

Aside from this underserved b2b software segment, personal experience in investing has shown me that a lot of the most popular prosumer SaaS like finbox, tikr, koyfin, with huge user bases do not have a lot of employees, and at the same, provide a lot of value to the end user making subscriptions of over $20/mo justifiable for an investor with a relatively small portfolio.

Any reason aside from the regulatory and technical aspects of finance for these projects to be in short supply? It seems like most startups in finance tend to fall in consumer fintech which is a crowded space much harder to stand out in.
by grafmax | 2025-04-14 11:58:28+00:00
I’d argue this is the biggest issue, because it’s ultimately about who controls the political process. Unless we can wrest that control from the hands of the wealthy, it’s hard to see how we can make lasting progress on other fronts. They run the show according to their own interests, even undermining the Constitution when it suits them.

The fact that they still hold all the power is proof that, consciously or not, enough people are still settling for scraps. You may not be, but many are, and that’s part of the problem.