MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hirsin | 2025-05-23 19:58:45+00:00
We don't need SDKs, they publish API docs.

We don't need packages or functions, we can just write the code ourselves, every time it's needed.

We don't need compilers, the computer understands assembly already.

It's a mismatch of use - MCP isn't about telling the LLM about the APIs. It's also about encapsulating and simplifying them so the LLM isn't manually figuring them out every single time from scratch.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-05-23 19:59:02+00:00
I think to many AI enthusiasts, we're already at the "specialized AIs" phase. The question is whether those will jump to AGI. I'm personally unconvinced but I'm not an ML researcher so my opinion is colored by what I use and what I read, not active research. I do think though that many specialized AIs is already enough to experience massive economic disruption.
by johnwalkr | 2025-05-23 19:59:09+00:00
It's not hard to look this up. It's not just fewer hours per day, latitude matters a lot. If you look at yearly totals[1] Alberta looks better than BC but not better than any other neighbors to the South or East. All its neighbors also have plenty of space. Plus, total energy consumption (electricity plus gas) is probably highest in winter when solar input is lowest. I think it's hard to argue Alberta will become an exporter of solar-derived power.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance#/media/File:W...
by dang | 2025-05-23 19:59:25+00:00
That's a whole new view of Jane Jacobs! You should post this as a submission to HN sometime (maybe in a few weeks, after which it won't seem like a follow-up to this thread). If you want to do that, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll arrange to put it in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), which guarantees at least a bit of frontpage time.

(Edit: I suppose I should hasten to add that my response here isn't about Alberta/Canada. Just about JJ.)
by layer8 | 2025-05-23 19:59:26+00:00
One way of formally defining a programming languages is as the set of strings accepted as programs by the compiler, or by the formally defined algorithm that is implemented by the compiler. By such a definition, a given string is not a valid program of the respective programming language if the algorithm rejects it. And it is useful for the error message to show how the input program fails the requirements of the algorithm. The input program may be sound in type-system terms, but still not valid for the respective programming language.
by fanf2 | 2025-05-23 19:59:31+00:00
Tedious and pedantic note:

You can’t mindlessly compare the bytes of the host name: you have to know that it’s the presentation format of the name, not the DNS wire format; you have to deal with ASCII case insensitivity; you have to guess what to do about trailing dots (because that isn’t specified); you have to deal with wildcards (being careful to note that PKIX wildcard matching is different from DNS wildcard matching).

It’s not as easy as it should be!
by AdrianB1 | 2025-05-23 19:59:50+00:00
No, it has a different purpose; VS Code extension and the former ADS are targeted for development, while SSMS is for server and database administration. I am a heavy user of SSMS and can do everything I ever need there, I don't use the VS Code extension for MS SQL even if I have it installed and I use VS Code quite a lot. This is because I am also acting as a backup and supervisor for our DBA team, so I am involved in DBA work.
by mrandish | 2025-05-23 20:00:46+00:00
A key aspect of the Carmack approach (or similar 'smart hacker' unconventional career approach) is avoiding that situation in the first place. However, this also carries substantial career, financial and lifestyle risks & trade-offs - especially if you're not both talented enough and lucky enough to hit a sufficiently fertile oppty in the right time window on the first few tries.

Assuming one is willing to accept the risks and has the requisite high-talent plus strong work drive, the Carmack-like career pattern is to devote great care to evaluating and selecting opptys near the edges of newly emerging 'interesting things' which also: coincide with your interests/talents, are still at a point where a small team can plausibly generate meaningful traction, and have plausible potential to grow quickly and get big.

Carmack was fortunate that his strong interest in graphics and games overlapped a time period when Moore's Law was enabling quite capable CPU, RAM and GFX hardware to hit consumer prices. But we shouldn't dismiss Carmack's success as "luck". That kind of luck is an ever-present uncontrolled variable which must be factored into your approach - not ignored. Since Carmack has since shown he can get very interested in a variety of things, I assume he filtered his strong interests to pick the one with the most near-term growth potential which also matched his skills. I suspect the most fortunate "luck" Carmack had wasn't picking game graphics in the early 90s, it was that (for whatever reasons) he wasn't already employed in a more typical "well-paying job with a big, stable company, great benefits and career growth potential" so he was free to find the oppty in the first place.

I had a similarly unconventional career path which, fortunately, turned out very well for me (although not quite at Carmack's scale :-)). The best luck I had actually looked like 'bad luck' to me and everyone else. Due to my inability to succeed in a traditional educational context (and other personal shortcomings), I didn't have a college degree or resume sufficient to get a "good job", so I had little choice but to take the high-risk road and figure out the unconventional approach as best I could - which involved teaching myself, then hiring myself (because no one else would) and then repeatedly failing my way through learning startup entrepreneurship until I got good at it. I think the reality is that few who succeed on the 'unconventional approach' consciously chose that path at the beginning over lower risk, more comfortable alternatives - we simply never had those alternatives to 'bravely' reject in pursuit of our dreams :-).
by thielgary | 2025-05-23 20:00:54+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m a solo founder building Merlin — an AI executive assistant that acts like a digital Chief of Staff.

It connects to Gmail, Google Calendar, and Slack to find your highest-impact priorities each day (not just unread emails — actual business-critical stuff). Then it helps you act: summarize threads, draft replies, reschedule meetings, or turn chaos into calm — all in one place.

I built it out of frustration. As a lead engineer, I was constantly juggling investor emails, product meetings, and team pings. Most tools organized the noise — none helped me know what mattered or actually move things forward.

I’m now testing with early users (mostly startup founders), and I’d love your feedback: • Would this be useful for how you work? • Where would it fall short for you? • What’s your biggest friction managing email/calendar/Slack?

Happy to share more about how the AI works under the hood too.

Thanks in advance — really value this community’s input
by Nayak_S1991 | 2025-05-23 20:01:14+00:00
I have built

1- FULLY MANAGED DIGITAL ECOSYSTEM(ALL IN ONE PARTNER) 2- Digital Presence & Branding 3- SEO & LEAD GENERATION mechanism 4- Native WEBSITE & MOBILE APP 5- AI-BASED AUTOMATION 6- POS & RESTAURANT OPERATIONS 7- PERFORMANCE MARKETING framework 8- SOFTWARE BASED SOPS 9- UNIQUE SELLING PROPOSITION (USP)
by kstrauser | 2025-05-23 20:01:18+00:00
That looks pretty neat! I haven't played around with it yet, but here's some preliminary feedback:

* "⌘ + C + C", to me, means "press cmd-C, then press C". It look me a minute to release it means "press cmd-C twice".

* Thank you for using iCloud sync!

* Your privacy policy says "The developer does not collect any data from this app.". Thank you!

* The pricing feels high to me. I'm mentally comparing it to PastePal (clipboard manager, one-time $15 payment) plus GoodLinks (bookmarks manager, $5 per year to buy upgrades, but you can use it forever for free). I know it's not an exact comparison, but as someone who might really like your app, that's how I personally think of it.
by dang | 2025-05-23 20:01:52+00:00
> got nothing in return except spat in the face

Please don't do regional flamewar on HN. Like national flamewar and religious flamewar, it's a circle of hell we want to avoid here. You can make your substantive points without it, so please do that instead.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by bilbo0s | 2025-05-23 20:02:09+00:00
-API documentation may have been poorly written.

-Even with good documentation, the LLM may generate incorrect code to interact with API. (If you fix the generated code and just have the LLM call that code to interact with the API, then you're on your way to an intermediary in any case. You're basically building an "MCP-like" server.)

-Security or resource allocation issues when giving LLMs direct access to APIs. (LLM has limited knowledge of when API was last called. It could call too often and, if each call is expensive, generate surprise infrastructure bills.)

-So on and so forth. Lots of other potential pain points solved by having something intermediate.

Should that "something" be MCP? Reasonable people can disagree on that. Works well enough right now to get done what people need done I suppose.
by lukeschlather | 2025-05-23 20:02:55+00:00
> But then again, that is precisely the point. A chess bot also has access to gigabytes of perfect working memory. I don't see people complaining about that.

There are ~86 billion neurons in the human brain. If we assume each neuron stores a single bit a human also has access to gigabytes of working memory. If we assume each synapse is a bit that's terabytes. Petabytes is not unreasonable assuming 1kb of storage per synapse. (And more than 1kb is also not unreasonable.)

The whole point of the exercise is figuring out how much memory compares to a human brain.
by kouteiheika | 2025-05-23 20:03:30+00:00
> Let's look at some of the most important ones that have been developed over the years and try to implement the basic ideas as succinctly as possible.

One big architectural tweak that comes to mind and isn't in the article is QK norm: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.04245

> Cosine Schedule

A lot (most?) of new training runs actually don't use cosine schedule anymore; instead they keep the learning rate constant and only decay it at the very end, which gives equivalent or better results. See:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.18392 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.06395

> There is a highly optimized implementation of AdamW in PyTorch.

A fun tidbit - it's actually not highly optimized from my experience. Imagine my surprise when I reimplemented it in Triton (because I needed to tweak a few things) and I got better performance than the built-in PyTorch implementation.
Show HN: Advanced Chunking in JavaScript/TypeScript with Chonkie
by snyy | 2025-05-23 20:03:41+00:00
Hi HN,

We’re Shreyash and Bhavnick. We built Chonkie, an open-source library for advanced chunking and embedding of text and code. It was previously Python-only, but we just released a TypeScript version: https://github.com/chonkie-inc/chonkie-ts

Many AI projects in JS/TS (like those using Vercel's AI SDK or Mastra) rely on basic text splitters. But better chunking = better retrieval = better performance. That’s what Chonkie is built for.

Current native chunkers (in TS):

- Code Chunker – handles Python, TypeScript, etc.

- Recursive Chunker – rule-based, hierarchical splitting

- Token Chunker – split by token count (fully customizable)

- Sentence Chunker – split on sentence boundaries. Delimiters are customizable, so it works for multiple languages.

All chunkers support custom tokenizers, chunk overlap, delimiters, and more.

Coming soon in native TS (already available via the API client):

- Semantic Chunker – splits texts wherever it detects a shift in meaning.

- SDPM Chunker – merges semantically similar disjoint chunks

- Late Chunker – generates context-aware embeddings for each chunk

- Slumber Chunker – LLM-refined recursive chunks. Significantly reduces token usage (and thus cost) while maximizing chunk quality.

- Embeddings Refinery - Embed chunks with any embedding model

- Overlap Refinery – Create overlaps between consecutive chunks for better context preservation.

Chonkie is free, open-source, and MIT licensed. GitHub: https://github.com/chonkie-inc/chonkie-ts

We’d love your feedback, ideas, or contributions. Thanks!
by nailer | 2025-05-23 20:05:19+00:00
This feels inevitable. Right now stables are dominated by Circle and Tether (depending whether you’re inside or outside the US), with a little PayPal, Sky and other orgs. USDT isn’t headquartered in the US, banks don’t want to assist paxos/coinbase (Circle) and if retail banks can now hold and stake tokens they’ll probably want their own stablecoin.
by perihelions | 2025-05-23 20:05:31+00:00
Not surprising given the Times' background, that the CIA isn't mentioned at all as a suspect. Despite that quietly funding and boosting separatist groups is their quintessential modus operandi; that they've done this hundreds of times all over the world; and US intelligence is the most well-funded in the world; and US leadership has now without ambiguity signaled US' intention to end Canada as a sovereign nation.

They acknowledge the politician, sure; but they disregard the enormous state apparatus that politician wields, what it does and is capable of. The New York Times is pretty consistent about ignoring it.

Note US administration-aligned media has lately been spotlighting US annexation of Alberta[0], despite only 18% support in actual Alberta[1].

Note also the related intelligence admissions about Greenland[2].

[0] https://www.foxnews.com/video/6369677470112 ("Canadian lawyer leading delegation to DC to make Alberta a state")

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canada-join-u-s-poll-1.743431... ("...the most support for that proposal in Alberta with 18 per cent of respondents agreeing Canada should join the U.S.")

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43910874 ("U.S. Orders Intelligence Agencies to Step Up Spying on Greenland (wsj.com)")
by bryanlarsen | 2025-05-23 20:05:34+00:00
Alberta's solar energy might make BC rich. The price of electricity while the sun is shining is very low. The combination of Alberta solar during the daytime and BC hydro at night is valuable, but it's the hydro that'll get the vast bulk of the dollars.

And Alberta is quite far from big electricity markets. It's far cheaper to put overbuild solar in places with poor sunshine than it is to build a HVDC line.

Plus Alberta will have to compete with Arizona and neighboring states, which have even more sunshine than Alberta does.
by jgon | 2025-05-23 20:06:08+00:00
I think its important to think about this point in the context that Jessica attended one of the most elite private schools in the US, Phillips Academy, with an annual tuition that is currently ~60kUSD/year. Notable alumni include both Bush presidents, and many billionaires or their children. Afterwards she attended Bucknell University, another private elite institution, tuition ~65kUSD/year, where the median family income is > 200kUSD/year, and 73% of the student body is from the top 20% income bracket.

So its important to "find your people", but as always it's as important to situate advice in the context where the advice-giver issues it from, and in this case Jessica has spent her entire life as an elite, finding other elites in elite circles, and I'm going to hazard a guess that this is probably something that has had a positive impact on her life.

I think your friends are probably on to something, realizing that you're responsible for helping to guide your child as they grow up has a way of crystalizing certain arguments, and various "hypotheticals" fall by the wayside as the attraction of an intellectual experiment and being the devil's advocate just doesn't really have the same pull anymore once it's your own child's future at stake and not just some thought experiment about "volumes and contrasts". As always people are free to make their own choices, and even listen to a speech from someone who was able have almost $200,000 of money spent on their high-school education, a speech about how to plan your career that is big on "gumption" and "stick to it" energy, and surprisingly short on "be born in the top 1% of economic circles", but given that this is a speech at the aforementioned Bucknell, I am pretty sure that most of the crowd is already pretty hip to the realities of the world they're about to enter.
by alaxhn | 2025-05-23 20:06:21+00:00
Oh I see - did you reply to the correct comment initially?

So far Trump's administration has seemed to address perceived grievances that they have with the university administration. In the comment you replied to I outlined some positive reforms that I would personally like to see as someone who cares deeply about education and wants to see a successful system. Trump's administration hasn't and probably won't make progress in this direction. In other words they are saying "don't do X" and aren't saying "Do Y". I approve of their progress on the former and think they are unlikely to make progress on the latter.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-05-23 20:06:53+00:00
Except for the vast majority of normal people, uBlock Origin Lite is enough. And Blink alternatives like Brave or Vivaldi have them built-in while using the "preferred" engine, which is even more convient.

So, to them, Firefox is a worse performing browser with missing features that sometimes doesn't work for certain websites. There's no "killer app" to be seen.
by nulld3v | 2025-05-23 20:07:17+00:00
The reason I didn't believe Project 2025 would happen was because Trump was much more moderate during his first term. I foolishly ignored all the signs that Trump was actually an unhinged madman and that the country only survived because his administration reigned him in.

So yes, I know the Republicans are massively more corrupt. But the Dems contributed to normalizing corruption in government. When you point at obvious corruption in the Republican party, and then they respond by pointing out obvious corruption in the Democratic party, and then you resort to saying stuff like: "sure we have corruption, just less of it and you have more of it", you have lost.

You mention police corruption: what happened to "defund the police"? https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/democrats-wen...

Universal healthcare: if it was such a partisan issue, then the problem would be easy to fix, no? Dems pass universal healthcare in blue states. Republicans see how good it is and get jealous. So why isn't it happening?

> I don't know where you mean to go with California, listens fox too much?

Prop 47 was dragged through the mud on basically every major new outlet (although TBF, nearly every major new outlet is right-leaning). Same for the homeowner's insurance market.
by qingcharles | 2025-05-23 20:07:31+00:00
He overpriced the phone. Good2Go have a 1GB data plan for $5/mo that I use. I only need data when I'm outside the house. You can buy a half-decent Android phone off eBay for $30-50. But, you still need some sort of Internet. If you can't get wired, then that means having to fork out for Starlink or Hughes.

I'm in literally the middle of nowhere in a one-horse town and it has 1Gbps wired to my house and they just put in a second company with 5Gbps the other day, which is wild.
by jallmann | 2025-05-23 20:07:42+00:00
Yes! The book "One From Many" from Dee Hock, the Visa founder, discusses this formation in depth. For a long time, Visa's governance structure was quite unusual due to it being a consortium of stakeholders, some with very different interests.

Somewhat ironically, Hock's "chaordic" management philosophy has strong parallels with ethos of decentralization held by some crypto idealists.
by ipdashc | 2025-05-23 20:07:43+00:00
I did already mention both of those: re. bandwidth, I can't imagine LLMs use that much of it? It's just text - absolutely peanuts compared to something like Netflix. That said, of course, there are multimodal models. Construction difficulty is a factor, but at the same time, it's not like Iceland or Quebec/Canada are backwater regions, they're developed countries. Building a warehouse with some wires in it isn't the most complicated thing ever.

As for power, that's what I was referring to with geothermal and hydro - Iceland and Quebec both have famously cheap electricity. The former would need a large increase in capacity, for sure, but Quebec already pumps out a lot of power (and regularly sells it to the Northeastern US).

Not saying it wouldn't be difficult, by any means, but it does seem like all the right incentives are there.
by roywiggins | 2025-05-23 20:08:07+00:00
“All the doors in this spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done.”

As the door closed behind them it became apparent that it did indeed have a satisfied sigh-like quality to it. “Hummmmmmmyummmmmmm ah!” it said.

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=135
by rfrey | 2025-05-23 20:08:18+00:00
Low royalties compared to other jurisdictions, with the possibility of them going lower with an "independent" government comprised of their surrogates.

Complete socialization of externalities: for example oil companies are flagrantly ignoring their legal obligations to clean up abandoned sites, and the current government is moving to assume the liability for them. Having that and similar cost offloading happen without the pesky federal courts interfering is worth some investment.
by henrikschroder | 2025-05-23 20:08:23+00:00
The post-WWII order was deliberately designed by clever American politicians who realised they could leverage the untouched industrial base and built-up military capability to become a world superpower, in an alliance with Western Europe. All of these policies were and are 100% America First, because the US has always been the primary benefactor of it all, but they've been marketed as some kind of benevolent altruistic goodwill-project that "leader of the free world" simply "has to do" because it's "the right thing".

Bullshit. It's naked greed all the way down. Exceptional? Exceptionally greedy more like it.
by SketchySeaBeast | 2025-05-23 20:08:47+00:00
> What the hell gives one place the right, particularly when it consistently votes down the desired values of the other, to prevent it from leaving and going its own way? Self-determination as a principle isn't magically restricted to national borders only. That would be a ridiculous assertion.

How granular does this asserted right go? Should Edmonton be able to secede from Alberta? Can I run outside and put up a flag on my front lawn?
by mr_mitm | 2025-05-23 20:09:58+00:00
I don't see how your reply is related to my post, but anyway.

> The jumble of letters Fourier says nothing about what a Fourier Transform is or does. Signalidominomorphosis, or just dominomorphosis, tells a lot more at face value than Fourier Transformation which just basically says "a transformation associated with a Fourier."

On the contrary. The jumble of letters tells you precisely what a Fourier transform is or does after you learn what the letters mean.

Telling someone "Signalidominomorphosis" does not enable them to find the Fourier transform of the double-sided exponential.
by vasusen | 2025-05-23 20:10:02+00:00
What worries me most about MCP isn't that the protocol is so poorly created, but that fixing/improving it is only at the mercy of internal teams at Anthropic and OpenAI. It doesn't seem like the folks who are coming up with the protocol are actual engineers trying to implement it as well.

Vaguely seems like a Visa-Mastercard duopoly.