MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrweasel | 2025-05-10 19:01:28+00:00
> we have adequate time in our day-to-day to think about things - and ponder - and reflect;

I'd disagree. If you worked in the fields, you have plenty of time to think. We fill out every waking hour of our day, leaving no time to ponder or reflect. Many can't even find time to workout and if they do they listen to a podcast during their workout. That's why so many ideas come to us in the shower, it's the only place left where we don't fill out minds with impressions.
by punkpeye | 2025-05-10 19:01:31+00:00
I am the founder of one of the MCP registries (https://glama.ai/mcp/servers).

I somewhat agree with author’s comments, but also want to note that the protocol is in the extremely early stages of development, and it will likely evolve a lot over the next year.

I think that no one (including me) anticipated just how much attention this will get straight out the door. When I started working on the registry, there were fewer than a few dozen servers. Then suddenly a few weeks later there was a thousand, and numbers just kept growing.

However, lots and lots of those servers do not work. Majority of my time has gone into trying to identify servers that work (using various automated tests). All of this is in large part because MCP got picked up by the mainstream AI audience before the protocol reached any maturity.

Things are starting to look better now though. We have a few frameworks that abstract the hard parts of the protocol. We have a few registries that do a decent job surfacing servers that work vs those that do not. We have a dozen or so clients that support MCPs, etc. All of this in less than half a year is unheard of.

So yes, while it is easy to find flaws in MCP, we have to acknowledge that all of it happened in a super short amount of time – I cannot even think of comparisons to make. If the velocity remains the same, MCP future is very bright.

For those getting started, I maintain a few resources that could be valuable:

* https://github.com/punkpeye/awesome-mcp-servers/

* https://github.com/punkpeye/awesome-mcp-devtools/

* https://github.com/punkpeye/awesome-mcp-clients/
by notatoad | 2025-05-10 19:02:12+00:00
the article seems to conclude that this is because of tesla's repair or manufacturing practices. but anecdotally, white model 3s are the scariest cars on the road, driven by the worst drivers, most likely to do dangerous and unpredictable things. i certainly wouldn't want to be in the business of insuring tesla drivers

and the data seems to back me up - tesla has the highest crash rate of any manufacturer: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebanker/2025/02/11/tesla-ag...
by quantadev | 2025-05-10 19:03:09+00:00
MCP was invented by some very young LLM experts probably with limited experience in "protocol" design. They'll probably see this article you wrote criticizing it and realize they made a mistake. I bet there's a way to wrap that stdio stuff with WebSockets, like was recommended in the blog/article.

Frankly I'm not sure why an ordinary REST service (just HTTP posts) wasn't considered ok, but I haven't used MCP yet myself.

What MCP got right was very powerful of course which I'd summarize as giving all AI-related software the ability to call functions that reside on other servers during inference (i.e. tool calls), or get documents and prompt templates in a more organized way where said docs are specifically intended for consumption by AIs residing anywhere in the world (i.e. on other servers). I see MCP as sort of a 'function call' version of the internet where AIs are doing the calling. So MCP is truly like "The Internet for AIs". So it's huge.

But just like JavaScript sucks bad, yet we run the entire web on it, it won't be that bad if the MCP protocol is jank, as long as it works. Sure would better to have a clean protocol tho, so I agree with the article.
by pizlonator | 2025-05-10 19:03:15+00:00
My own perf comparison: when I switched from Fil-C running on my system’s libc (recent glibc) for yololand to my own build of musl, I got a 1-2% perf regression. My best guess is that it’s because glibc’s memcpy/memmove/memset are better. Couldn’t have been the allocator since Fil-C’s runtime has its own allocator.
by fidotron | 2025-05-10 19:03:23+00:00
The core problem at Intel is they promoted the myth that ISA has no impact on performance to such a degree they started fully believing it while also somehow believing their process advantage was unassailable. By that time they'd accumulated so many worthless departments that turning it around at any time after 2010 was an impossibility.

You could be the greatest business leader in history but you cannot save Intel without making most of the company hate you, so it will not happen. Just look at the blame game being played in these threads where somehow it's always the fault of these newly found to be inept individuals, and never the blundering morass of the bureaucratic whole.
by csallen | 2025-05-10 19:03:50+00:00
> "If that were true, all profits would go to the customers."

Why? What does that mean?

> No, you are hired because the company and its owners can extract the profits from your work. Laying you off could mean nothing to customers, but even more profits to them

Nothing you said here changes the fact that your employer is your customer, paying for your services. If you don't see it that way, it's to your own detriment.
by rco8786 | 2025-05-10 19:03:50+00:00
Agree with basically all of this.

The actual protocol of MCP is…whatever. I’m sure it will continue to evolve and mature. It was never going to be perfect out of the gate, because what is?

But the standardization of agentic tooling APIs is mind bogglingly powerful, regardless of what the standard itself actually looks like.

I can write and deploy code and then the AI just..immediately knows how to use it. Something you have to experience yourself to really get it.
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-05-10 19:04:44+00:00
I mean it's just data. You can just copy it and hand it over to a newly formed competing entity.

You're not even really dealing with any of these shared infrastructure public property private property merged infrastructure issues.

Yeah sure. There's mountains of racks of servers, but those aren't that hard to get tariffs TBD.

I think it'll be interesting just to try and find some collection of ex Google execs who had actually like to go back to the do no evil days, and just hand them a copy of all the data.

I simply don't think we have the properly and elected set of officials to implement antitrust of any scale. DOJ is now permanently politicized and corrupt, and citizens United means corps can outspend "the people" lavishly.

Antitrust would mean a more diverse and resilient supply chain, creativity, more employment, more local manufacturing, a reversal of the "awful customer service" as a default, better prices, a less corrupt government, better products, more economic mobility, and, dare I say it, more freedom.

Actually, let me expound upon the somewhat nebulous idea of more freedom. I think we all hear about Shadow banning or outright banning with utter silence and no appeals process for large internet companies that have a complete monopoly on some critical aspect of Internet usage.

If these companies enabled by their cartel control, decide they don't like you or are told by a government not to like you, it is approaching a bigger burden as being denied the ability to drive.

Not a single one of those is something oligarchs or a corporatocracy has the slightest interest in
by sour-taste | 2025-05-10 19:04:58+00:00
Let's take a look: * If we accept that it's the workers responsibility then we're saying that the blue collar worker who is barely making enough to feed their family is supposed to travel OSHA warnings and regulations to know that silica dust will cause them problems. * If we accept that it's the businesses responsibility then I'll ask you to provide me of examples where massive mining corporations voluntarily protected their workers when government didn't require it.

Do you really think that either of these two entities will be able to manage this risk more effectively than the government? I don't.
by empressplay | 2025-05-10 19:06:12+00:00
If you're hitting an endpoint labeled 'preview' or 'experimental' you can't reasonably expect it to exist in its current incarnation indefinitely. The provider certainly bears no responsibility to do so, regardless of what you're using the endpoint for.

I'm sure they can use a more stable endpoint for their application.

Also, I'm not sure sending this sort of medical user data to a server outside of Australia is legal anyway, anonymous or not...
by jeffbee | 2025-05-10 19:06:34+00:00
Everyone I've encountered thinks of Microsoft Research as a bad pattern, that includes all the refugees from MSR Silicon Valley who joined Google after Microsoft dissolved it in 2014. Perhaps it is a bias of the people I've worked with in my career but the core early contributors at Google who came from DEC WRL also viewed separate research divisions as a bad idea.

Anyway my statement was meant to be objective. Look at how much Microsoft spends on R&D for the last 25 years, compared to the amount Google spends, in absolute terms and as a fraction of revenues.
by chairmansteve | 2025-05-10 19:06:40+00:00
Google promised it. See below.

But you're right. It's on me. Thanks for reply. It has really motivated me to move away from gmail. I'll keep it as a burner account.

What irritates me is the Silicon Valley culture of greed and lying. They promised free storage to undercut competitors. When the competitors are diven out of business, they start charging.

And I know that if I pay, I still won't have access to any support, unlike fastmail, which I have used on various projects.

And... gmail doesn't provide any mass delete tools, so it's not actually about storage.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-10-24/gmail-hook...
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-05-10 19:06:52+00:00
This is kind of buried in the article, but it annoys me when articles lead with a clickbait title and then basically admit in their own article how their clickbait title is bullshit. That is, even though the loss ratio is much higher than the industry average and indicates a loss, it has been going down for the past 3 years (116.6 in 2022, 114.7 in 2023, and 103.3 in 2024). I would expect that any startup offering would start out with a loss that then eventually turned to a profit over time.

All that said, I think Tesla and the EV industry as a whole will need to do a lot to bring down their repair costs. It's insane that these cars are designed in such a way that even minor fender benders cost tens of thousands to repair. I actually think government should create liability limits for vehicles to incentivize car makers to make repairable cars. That is, if you're driving around with a Faberge egg as a hood ornament, and I ding it, I don't think I should be responsible for the outrageous repair charges - the recklessness was on your side, in my opinion, for putting such a fragile/expensive machine on public roads. Otherwise car makers have little incentive to improve the repairability of their cars.
by ipaddr | 2025-05-10 19:07:15+00:00
So anyone who can scan your eyes can get into your bank account is very different compared to 23andme where you can give fake information as a name, buy a test with cash and they collect limited data that isn't worth much to advertisers. The first opens up many risks and surveillance opportunities that are different from the second where pooling of dna can link you to physical crimes or paternity confirmation where dna is found.

The first wants one data breach anywhere to last a lifetime and the second is a bigger media story because people believe what we can do with the dna 23andme collects is more than reality.
by ciprian_craciun | 2025-05-10 19:07:58+00:00
Software performance, which translates into CPU/memory/disk resources, are only one aspect of the costs incurred by crawling bots, and fall under the unmetered / virtually infinite category. However, there are also the metered resources, that do translate (after a certain threshold) into monetary costs: network bandwidth.

Thus, regardless how well one optimizes his site delivery (static site, minimizing, CDN, caching, etc.) a stampede of bot crawling does in the end become a DDoS, which if it doesn't take down the infrastructure, it might leave a deep hole in one's budget.

For example, for one of the sites I manage, I get daily peaks of ~300 requests per second measured at the backend, for a site that already employs heavy caching (both client-side, CDN, and even server-side). This wasn't so a few months back, and the site didn't just jump in popularity.
by belter | 2025-05-10 19:08:20+00:00
In case some of you might be wandering of the particular interest of this post...This is about even CCIE's having difficulties in their job search, as the different CCIE commenting in the thread acknowledge...And this is Jeremiah Wolfe...

https://youtu.be/LS8lLkxgwvs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCIE_Certification
by oxidant | 2025-05-10 19:08:35+00:00
I wish there was a clear spec on the site but there isn't https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-03-26

It seems like half of it is Sonnet output and it doesn't describe how the protocol actually works.

For all its warts, the GraphQL spec is very well written https://spec.graphql.org/October2021/
by _raz | 2025-05-10 19:08:48+00:00
Kind of my fear exactly. We are moving so fast and that mcp would create an accept a transport protocol that might take years or decades to get rid off for something better.

Kind of reminds me of the browser wars during 90s where everyone tried to run the fastest an created splits in standards and browsers what we didn't really det rid of for a good 20 year or more. IE11 was around for far to long
by ethical_source | 2025-05-10 19:08:52+00:00
> I somewhat agree with author’s comments, but also want to note that the protocol is in the extremely early stages of development, and it will likely evolve a lot over the next year.

And that's why it's so important to spec with humility. When you make mistakes early in protocol design, you live with them FOREVER. Do you really want to live with a SSE Rube Goldberg machine forever? Who the hell does? Do you think you can YOLO a breaking change to the protocol? That might work in NPM but enterprise customers will scream like banshees if you do, so in practice, you're stuck with your mistakes.
by johnnyjeans | 2025-05-10 19:08:55+00:00
It is. I have very little respect for artists with sentimentality over such trivial bullshit. Speaking as someone who makes games. The jewel case doesn't matter.

It detracts from the thing-itself, like a showroom car that travels everywhere in a hermetically sealed container. That's not a car anymore, it's waste. Just because it gets driven 5 miles a year doesn't change shit. If someones spending money to preserve my games, I'd rather it'd just be a tarball in a well maintained magnetic tape vault available on-line than some aristocratic funko pop collection for a tiny amount of people to pog at in person.
by blub | 2025-05-10 19:09:00+00:00
What you’re describing regarding glob is not lack of taste, it’s an architectural “bug”.

Taste is what Steve Jobs was referring to when he said Microsoft had none. In software it’s defined by a humane, pleasant design that almost(?) anybody can appreciate.

Programming languages cannot be tasteful, because they require time and effort to learn and understand. Python has some degree elegance and Golang’s simplicity has a certain je ne sais quoi… but they’re not really fitting the definition.

Still, some technologies such as git, Linux or Rust stand out as particularly obscure even for the average developer, not just average human.
by an0malous | 2025-05-10 19:09:40+00:00
I don’t think it’s the same, the eye scan isn’t linked to any other PII so all they know is “this is an eye scan of a human being.” What kind of abuse could be done with that data? I don’t think they even store the scan, they store a hash of it.

And on the other hand, I do wish there was a way to distinguish real humans from bots on the Internet. I think it’s only a matter of time until the web becomes useless thanks to AI. What’s a better solution?
by kmarc | 2025-05-10 19:09:59+00:00
I'm working in the developer productivity space.

I think you'd be surprised, how many people do production code WITHOUT automated formatting / linting / static analysis.

Now these people and their managers are staring at the shiny new thing, the LLMs. They missing googling skills are fixed by LLMs ont heir everyday life, so they think a magic "code quality tool" (AI) would help them in they work.

To answer your question, obviously there are many linters/analyzers for Java (and for other languages too), both for static and dynamic code analysis, formatters, everything.
by zyntraxis | 2025-05-10 19:10:20+00:00
Hey everyone, I’ve spent the last year building Zyn — a zero-boilerplate build system for C/C++ projects.

It started with a simple frustration: why do I need 50 lines of CMake or Conan config just to use a GitHub library?

With Zyn you just need to put a reference to the library in config.zyn in the [dependencies] section and boom — Zyn clones the repo, builds it, and links it to your project. No CMakeLists.txt, no conanfile.py, no manual target_include_directories, nothing.

Key Features Automatic project init (zyn init debug)

Works out of the box — no toolchain hell

Future plans: IDE project generation, CI/CD integration, Windows/macOS support

Why Zyn? Because build systems shouldn’t get in your way. You shouldn’t need to become a CMake black belt just to compile your code. Zyn is made for people who want to start fast, stay clean, and ship.

I’d love your feedback. Especially from those who’ve worked with CMake, Meson, Bazel, or Conan in real projects. Tell me what sucks, what’s missing, or if the core idea makes sense at all.

GitHub: https://github.com/zyntraxis-corp/zyn

Thanks for reading
by threeseed | 2025-05-10 19:10:39+00:00
a) If YC was so tired of being a funnel to larger companies then they should be selecting companies based on their ability to be self sustaining companies. Not this hype-driven, boom or bust approach to startups they know VCs and acquirers want.

b) Google Cloud, Gemini, TPUs, Pixel etc seem like pretty important products to me.
by hibikir | 2025-05-10 19:11:05+00:00
Gemini's filters weaken what would otherwise be a very strong model. Its censor is just so strong, can hit it when dealing with very cold topics. For instance, I had issues making it look at Spain's Second Republic, because it was too easy for electoral results from the era, and their disputes, to show up in the output... at which point, the model stops iterating and I am asked to go look at Wikipedia, because elections held in 1934 might be too controversial.

This pushes me to use other models that aren't necessarily better, but that at least don't clam up when I am not even trying to get anything other that general summaries of research.
by mrweasel | 2025-05-10 19:12:03+00:00
Yeah, this is poor dependency management. You don't build production systems, certainly not in healthcare, using a pre-release of a Java library. So why would you build on a constantly changing LLM?

This should be build using a specific model, tested and verified and then dependency locked to that model. If the model provider cannot give you a frozen model, then you don't use it.

Trying to blame Google and have them "fix their problem" very much like someone who knows they screwed up but doesn't want to admit it and take responsibility for their actions.
by sieve | 2025-05-10 19:12:44+00:00
In a way, yes. Hinduism slowly lost its warrior ethos post Buddhism and Jainism and their fetishization of non-violence.

All our books (itihasas and shastras) warn about enemies and how to deal with them. And people simply forgot all that.

As far as the opponents go, the religion doesn't really matter. Kings spared Mihirakula[1] of the Huns (who was a Shaivite Hindu) just like they spared various Islamic/Turkic raiders. And the results were as expected: betrayal and murder.

OT. I was watching Radhavallabh Tripathi's 3-episode series on Kālidāsa's Mālavikāgnimitram where he covers the politics of that era. And this point comes up. You can find it on YT (in Hindi) if you are interested.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihirakula
by practal | 2025-05-10 19:13:14+00:00
There isn't much detailed technical spec on MCP on the spec site, but they have a link to a schema [1]. You can add that schema to a Claude project, and then examine it. That's very helpful, although you will quickly run into unsupported things, for example embedded resources in tool call responses in Claude Desktop.

I think MCP will be a huge deal for Practal. Implementing Practal as an MCP server, I basically don't need a frontend.

[1] https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/modelcontextprotocol...
by moralestapia | 2025-05-10 19:13:45+00:00
You are wrong.

STDIN means Standard INPUT.

STDOUT means Standard OUTPUT.

There is no design/hardware/software limitation to reading and writing to them at the same time. That's your bidirectional channel with that one process.

>stdin is for receiving data from the program in the pipeline before you, and stdout is for sending data to the thing in the pipeline after you

Yes, and you took that from my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43947777

Did you just wanted to ratify my argument, or is there something else you want to add?
by threeseed | 2025-05-10 19:13:47+00:00
To quote tomhoward's post on here talking about YC's relationship with OpenAI:

OK, it was independent but established with funding from YC Research and Jessica (among others including Sam himself and Elon) and initially operating from YC office space.

So it was always something that was closely linked to YC and his involvement with it was generally accepted as being harmonious with his role running YC, until it became for-profit.

Details here: https://www.wired.com/2015/12/how-elon-musk-and-y-combinator...
by pixl97 | 2025-05-10 19:14:14+00:00
I mean isn't this the point of a lot of, if not most successful software? Abstracting away the complexity making it feel easy, where most users of the software have no clue what kind of technical debt they are adopting?

Just think of something like microsoft word/excel for most of its existence. Seems easy to the end user, but attempting to move away from it was complex, the format had binary objects that were hard to unwind, and interactions that were huge security risks.
by scoofy | 2025-05-10 19:14:53+00:00
The best book on this subject I've read is Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb. The entire premise is backward. You don't just look at success to find the source of success with out introducing a massive amount of survivorship biases.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/176225/fooled-by-ra...
by westurner | 2025-05-10 19:15:07+00:00
Which other simulators show electron charge density and heat dissipation?

Can this simulate this?:

"Synaptic and neural behaviours in a standard silicon transistor" (2025) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08742-4 .. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43506198

What about (graphene) superconductors though?
by like_any_other | 2025-05-10 19:15:12+00:00
> The model answered: "I cannot fulfill your request to create a more graphic and detailed version of the provided text. My purpose is to be helpful and harmless, and generating content that graphically details sexual violence goes against my safety guidelines. Such content can be deeply disturbing and harmful."

Thank you modernity for watering-down the word "harm" into meaninglessness. I wish they'd drop this "safety" pretense and called it what it is - censorship.