MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lougarou | 2025-05-30 21:59:46+00:00
Hi I am the creator of KurrentDB's MCP Server. KurrentDB (formerly known as Event Store) keeps data as a stream of events. This allows you to keep state transitions. We also have something called a projection engine which does a left fold on that stream using Javascript. This is unique to our database and this allows us to have a feedback loop back to the frontier model. You can use the MCP Server to generate a projection code, which is then tested by the model by writing input events and reading the resulting events, then debugging the projection based on the feedback and repeat.

The source code is pretty small around 200 lines of code and easily extensible. We have an article to show how to do that https://www.kurrent.io/blog/mcp-server-adding-your-own-promp...

The repo can be found at: https://github.com/kurrent-io/mcp-server

Thanks, Lokhesh
by cb321 | 2025-05-30 22:00:16+00:00
I think you may misunderstand - the idea is "in addition to", not "instead of" the usual syntax, `a=123 b=456 mycmd arg1 arg2 arg3 ..`, but it happens to provide a way to give "long names".

Also, it did catch on in the sense of being available, if not well known as much as POSIX (BSDs) /Bash (Linux) / Zsh (Mac OSX) caught on.

The spacing is as confusing or not as any Unix shell quoting, as in `a="1 2 3" b="4 5 6" mycmd "arg 1" "arg 2"`.

FWIW, I agree `help= cmd` looks a bit funny, though a user could probably also say, in the interests of clarity, `help=1 cmd` or `help='' cmd` if the convention was to ignore the value of `$help` and just go by its existence.

cmd [key1] arg1 [key2=val2] arg2 is interesting. Thanks for that!
by nirav72 | 2025-05-30 22:00:39+00:00
GP is using SingleFile browser extension. Which allows him to download the entire page as a single .html file. But SingleFile also allows sending that page to Karakeep directly instead of downloading it to his local file system. (if he's hosting karakeep on a NAS on his network). He can then use the mobile app or Karakeep web UI to search and view that archived page. Karakeep does the indexing. (Including auto-tagging via LLM)
by recursivedoubts | 2025-05-30 22:01:39+00:00
i'm not saying it feels that way

i'm saying it is that way, and i also think you know it to be true, but don't want acknowledge that due to further conclusions that can be drawn from that truth

so we aren't agreeing at all, in any way: you don't want to believe in an objective morality for your own reasons, I acknowledge it despite the inconveniences it presents me
by prmph | 2025-05-30 22:01:48+00:00
I just don't believe this. It's weird; I just don't know where folks are getting these extreme productivity gains from.

For example, the other day I asked a major LLMs to generate a simple markdown viewer with automatic section indentation for me in Node.js. The basic code worked after a few additional prompts from me.

Now I wanted folding. That was also done by the LLM. And then when I tried to add a few additional simples features, things fell apart. There were one or two seemingly simple runtime errors that the LLM was unable to fix after almost 10 tries.

I could fix it if I started digging inside the code, but then the productivity gains would start to slip away.
by constantcrying | 2025-05-30 22:02:13+00:00
The idea that criticizing something by criticizing its premise is off topic or unrelated is ridiculous.

>"The premise of your whole thing is invalid" is not something you can grumpdump on someone showing their work.

Why? It is obviously extremely relevant and on topic. Also don't pretend this is some drive by "This sucks because hiring sucks". I specifically am criticizing the specific aspect this Show HN is targeting.
by chriswarbo | 2025-05-30 22:02:24+00:00
> I've heard of this problem, but I've never really gotten why the solution in lambda calculus is to rename variables in lower scopes with overlapping names so that everything has a globally unique name. The way that programming languages usually solve this is by keeping a stack of symbol tables for scopes, right? Why is that never presented as a possible solution?

That's a perfectly fine way to implement this-or-that language (and is hence why many/most programming languages do it). However, it's not a valid solution in lambda calculus, since lambda calculus only has variables, lambdas or applications; there's literally no way to write down "a stack of symbol tables", or whathaveyou (note that you can implement such a thing using lambda calculus, but that would be more like an interpreter for some other language; "running" that implementation would still require a way to beta-reduce the "host" language in a capture-avoiding way)
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-05-30 22:02:58+00:00
>It's just kind of lost, in tech.

Because you can't offshore your clogged toilet or broken HVAC issue to someone abroad for cheap on a whim like you can with certain cases in tech.

You're dependent on a trained and licensed local showing up at your door, which gives him actual bargaining power, since he's only competing with the other locals to fix your issue and not with the entire planet in a race to the bottom.

Unionization only works in favor of the workers in the cases when labor needs to be done on-site (since the government enforces the rules of unions) and can't be easily moved over the internet to another jurisdiction where unions aren't a thing. See the US VFX industry as a brutal example.

There are articles discussing how LA risks becoming the next Detroit with many of the successful blockbusters of 2025 being produced abroad now due to the obscene costs of production in California caused mostly by the unions there. Like 350 $ per hour for a guy to push a button on a smoke machine, because only a union man is allowed to do it. Or that it costs more to move across a Cali studio parking lot than to film a scene in the UK. Letting unions bleed companies dry is only gonna result them moving all jobs that can be moved abroad.
by kelnos | 2025-05-30 22:03:00+00:00
It's funny because I want sort of the opposite. I have quite a few tech and tech-adjacent friends, and while I value those friendships a great deal, I want to make new friendships with people who aren't in tech and can talk about other topics. Both because I'm interested in other topics, and because I want to learn about and be involved in other things that are not tech.
by dylan604 | 2025-05-30 22:04:12+00:00
That's what I assumed. One of the post facilities I worked in had multiple mag followers where the audio was recorded in 2 channel pairs before ultimately getting mixed down to the final mix that would be used to make that optical track on a release print. At some point, for the lulz, someone laid down a 5.1 mix to 3 separate 35mm mags just to playback in the theater. These would all sync to the projector, and would make all sorts of clunks and loud noises when they'd all start playing. these were all kept in sync with quartz crystals. it was the most steampunk thing I had ever seen. Mind you, this was in the early/mid 90s just after the first NLEs were coming out. So my mind was totally blown in how it used to be done.
by nickpsecurity | 2025-05-30 22:04:14+00:00
You're looking for foundational, proof-carrying code with verified logins. I can't find the verified logic right now, though. Examples:

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/fpcc.pdf

https://hol-light.github.io/

I'll also add that mutation testing has found specification errors, too.

https://github.com/EngineeringSoftware/mcoq
by alephnerd | 2025-05-30 22:04:33+00:00
I mean, a lot of what you mentioned is an issue around critical thinking (and I'm not sure that's something that can be taught), which has always remained an issue in any job market, and to solve that deskilling via automation (AI or traditional) was used to remediate that gap.

But if you deskill processes, it makes it harder to argue in favor of paying the same premium you did before.
Show HN: Free feedback widget for Next.js apps
by mrrxwyz | 2025-05-30 22:04:37+00:00
I made a free, self-hosted feedback widget for Next.js apps.

The CLI sets up everything you need to collect user feedback using your own Supabase project and shadcn/ui components in seconds.

You can also set up email notifications via Resend, and even get AI-generated summaries of the feedback.

Would love to hear your thoughts or suggestions!
by kelnos | 2025-05-30 22:05:05+00:00
I do wonder what percentage of people (men, in particular, I guess) are members of such organizations. I'm pretty sure I don't even know one person who is a member. I certainly have my own bubble, though, so I assume they're still decently active, but my general impression is that it's likely, say, under 5% of the US population that belongs to one of those.
by observationist | 2025-05-30 22:05:43+00:00
The structure of their research - the process, the specific task, and the data they generate - will help inform how other research gets performed. Instead of GPU kernels, maybe the next task is something like neuron modules, looking for structures that improve on attention blocks, or things like that - each time you run through an experiment like this, you're creating foundational data upon which other experiments can be run and improved. Once you've done enough of them, you can generalize.

It could be that the end result is the knowledge of strict boundaries of LLM capabilities, that they can only operate in specific domains, or only improve to a certain extent, and some currently unspecified defect limits the level of improvement.

The underlying idea of specifying a domain and task conditions, then letting an LLM run thousands of experiments, is a great search technique. The hope is that there is no implicit defect and that the methodology will extend and generalize - it's not too complex a notion to think that you could have an LLM create a broad range of individual tasks, with a meta-goal of identifying better and more general recursive improvement processes and algorithms.
by creer | 2025-05-30 22:05:44+00:00
I suggest mixing projects and deliberately splitting time between the various demands but also opportunities: (a) answering job postings but only a half share of that: I feel the normal job pipeline is seriously disfunctional, (b) seriously working a network: people you have already been in contact with and others met at presentations, trade shows, HN, anywhere - current contacts and ongoing network development, (c) working on a personal project - whether business or hobby, (d) working out, (e) enjoying the time off for whatever it is that you do - because the thing is, we rarely get to enjoy large slices of leisure time.

Because like you say, spending months on just courting depression - is not good. Deliberating splitting time gives you something to look forward to in the morning - and time for stuff that realistically you don't get to do otherwise. Not enough anyway.
by cyjackx | 2025-05-30 22:06:28+00:00
I mean, I didn't need to learn those things, they were just in whatever web GUI I originally learned on; all I knew was that I could ignore it for now, a la the topic. Should the UI have masked that from me until I was ready? I suppose so, but even then I was doing things in an IDE not really knowing what those things were for until much later.
by xp84 | 2025-05-30 22:06:38+00:00
Famously, Borders and Target both allowed Amazon to run their ecommerce operations on this side of the pond, until they realized what a bad idea it is to partner with your competitor on something important. Target can be forgiven, I suppose, as in those days Amazon was mainly a store for books, CDs, and DVDs. Unclear how Borders didn't see it coming, though!
by fsmv | 2025-05-30 22:07:00+00:00
They are subtly different. Macros are the only way to process s-expressions without first calling eval on them. This is necessary because without macros you could only generate and eval quoted code. Also practically it's cumbersome to work with everything being quoted when writing lisp code generators.

Without macros you could implement eval still but your internal lisp implementation could only work on quoted s-expressions, there would be no way to get back to the base unquoted level of lisp code (assuming you can't use the primitive eval, since you're trying to implement lisp in lisp).

Another use case is implementing a shortcutting boolean and function. You can't do the shortcutting without macros because all of the arguments get eval'd before passing to your and function.
by ryao | 2025-05-30 22:07:52+00:00
The other guy’s remarks were based on the behavior of ancient compilers. I was describing current ones. In any case, my remarks mostly apply to LLVM too. GCC and LLVM are the only compilers that matter these days.

Intel replaced ICC with a LLVM fork and Microsoft’s compiler is used by only a subset of Windows’ developers. There are few other compilers in widespread use for C and C++. I believe ARM has a compiler, but Linaro has made it such that practically nobody uses it. Pathscale threw in the towel several years ago too. There is the Compcert C compiler, but it is used in only niche applications. I could probably name a few others if I tried, but they are progressively more niche as I continue.
by j4mehta | 2025-05-30 22:08:15+00:00
Yeah fair point! Honestly, the low faith in AI is probably a good stance to have right now.

The AI podcast was an experiment for me, I created it by feeding reference content (textbooks, primary material, etc) to NotebookLM. The results were _okay_, some episodes were good but the discussion was far too surface level, and I couldn't direct it towards any specific direction.

The tech is evolving so fast though, so I do think there's an opportunity in that space to build something interesting.
by ls612 | 2025-05-30 22:08:51+00:00
At the rate the hyperscalers are increasing capex anything less than 1990s internet era growth rates will not be pretty. So far its been able to sustain those growth rates at the big boy AI companies (look at OpenAI revenue over time) but will it continue? Are we near the end of major LLM advances or are we near the beginning? There are compelling arguments both ways (running out of data is IMO the most compelling bear argument).
by bawolff | 2025-05-30 22:09:06+00:00
In the us, unpublished works created before 1978 are copyrighted until 70 years after the death of the author (Sweeden might be different though).

So you might be waiting a long time.

> he could release his "work output" and own the copyright on that

Probably not in the united States, but other countries (i know UK at the very least) this would be true. The united states requires "creative decisions" to grant copyright. Work output by itself doesn't count.

You could still distribute it, you just couldn't copyright it.
by quickthrowman | 2025-05-30 22:09:57+00:00
> But trust me in the next 6 months ai driving through snow will be 100% ready.

I’ll believe it when I see Waymo expand into Buffalo or Syracuse.

Driving on unplowed roads with several inches of snow is challenging, sometimes you can’t tell where the road stops and the curb/ditch/median starts. Do you follow the tire tracks or somehow stay between the lane markers (which aren’t visible due to the snow)?
by throwaway7783 | 2025-05-30 22:10:51+00:00
That's exactly where I landed too. We didn't need a modern data stack managed by a data team, where everything is coded with significant turnaround times. We ended up using an MDM (Syncari).

MDMs are unsexy and have a lot of baggage filled with legacy, expensive vendors. But the principles are sound, and more modern platforms have turned out to be pretty good.
by kelnos | 2025-05-30 22:12:37+00:00
I think the main difference is that when you and your friends live near each other (and/or work together) and enjoy the same sorts of activities, maintaining those friendships (even at a deeper level than "hey let's go to the club and hang out without much real social interaction") isn't too difficult.

When people get married, change jobs, start families, move away... then it actually requires a solid amount of effort to maintain those friendships. For some people they really value the friendships enough to put in that work, and for others they don't (and when they do, it has to be mutual for it to work out). The sad part is when people value the friendships, but don't understand that shift, and what's required, and those friendships fizzle out.

I still maintain friendships with a 10-15 people who no longer live near me, and who are doing different things with their lives, and are in very different circumstances than I am. The oldest of these friendships are pushing 30 years now. It's doable, but everyone needs to be on the same page as to what they expect from and what effort they're willing to put into the friendships.
by layer8 | 2025-05-30 22:12:46+00:00
We observe that the matter density in the universe is decreasing with time. As far as we know, this looks the same from every point in the universe: galaxies move away from each other. The speed at which they move away from each other doesn’t depend on where in the universe you are. (It only depends on the time, as the speed is slowly increasing.) There is no center from which they move away from. Or alternatively, every point in the universe is such a center. It’s like when zooming into a grid. It doesn’t matter at which point of the grid you zoom in, the grid expands in the same way regardless. The grid has no center, and also no boundary.

Due to the laws of general relativity, extrapolating that observation into the past, the implication is that the matter in the universe was ever denser the further you go into past. Furthermore, there is a point in time where it becomes infinitely dense. This is what we call the Big Bang. Because our equations break down at that point, we don’t know what happened at that point in time, or before, or whether there was a before. However, observational evidence like the cosmic microwave background strongly support the theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang#Observational_evidenc...

Note that “infinitely dense” does not imply that the universe shrinks to a single point at that time. Rather, it was infinitely dense at every point. (Again, this is like zooming out from an infinite grid infinitely far. The grid always remains infinitely large.) This means that the Big Bang happened everywhere at once. It’s a point in time, not a location.
by AaronAPU | 2025-05-30 22:14:12+00:00
I think if you are a self directed learner in general, who is drawn toward learning, it will magnify that tendency and lower the activation energy required to bootstrap new domains of knowledge.

But if you don’t like learning, and only do it because you have to, it will magnify that tendency and provide a way to avoid learning altogether.

We are likely to end up with a large subset of the population basically being meat puppets doing whatever their favorite flavor of LLM tells them to do.
by energywut | 2025-05-30 22:14:16+00:00
Politics is not limited to specific parties or governments. Politics is also concerned with the principles of an organization within their sphere, particularly if those principles are about who has access to power.

The FSF is very concerned with who has power within the relationship of software author and user -- namely that users should retain the power to redistribute and edit their software.

If someone is trying to ensure a community retains power or someone is trying to ensure a community loses access to power, that's politics too.
by crq-yml | 2025-05-30 22:15:45+00:00
There are movements towards making these. It's an integrated SW+HW stack problem and Apple has had years of leadership on that space. Times are changing.

What you would see in the past are "PC or Android with a tablet manufacturer's sticker on it". Wacom has a history of occasionally licensing their stuff for a laptop. And XPPen, for example, has made a few in the "Magic Drawing Pad" series now and they needed a few iterations to move away from being a generic OSI tablet to actually using their digitizer tech. These products don't excite tech enthusiasts - a fully integrated device, as opposed to screen and digitizer, comes with more concerns about all-round performance and value - and so far, the premium on them makes them compete with iPads. But there is tremendous demand for it - seemingly every "art kid" sees an iPad and Procreate as a milestone, because that combination is what the content creators they watch are using.
by Daisywh | 2025-05-30 22:16:32+00:00
Sometimes I get irritated by the tiniest UX bug like when a dropdown doesn't close unless you click outside of it. It’s dumb. But it sits in my brain all day. Eventually I realized: these moments are design feedback, whether I like it or not. I started keeping a dumb little “annoyance log” just for fun. After a while, it turned into a surprisingly useful list of product ideas. Not saying every irritation is genius, but some of them are definitely signal. You just have to catch them before they fade.
by yobbo | 2025-05-30 22:17:58+00:00
> The idea that literally massive amounts of this workforce couldn't possibly be filled by domestic grads

One theory is that the benefit they might be providing over domestic "grads" is lack of prerequisites for promotion above certain levels (language, cultural fit, and so on). For managers, this means the prestige of increased headcount without the various "burdens" of managing "careerists". For example, less plausible competition for career-ladder jobs which can then be reserved for favoured individuals. Just a theory.
by ekelsen | 2025-05-30 22:18:05+00:00
"FP32 is less common in modern ML workloads and often less optimized on recent hardware compared to FP16 or BF16, which may partly explain why it’s easier to achieve performance gains over PyTorch with FP32 kernels."

People haven't spent time optimizing the fp32 versions of these kernels in years. This will be much more interesting if they can improve the kernels where developer effort has gone and that are actually used.
by xp84 | 2025-05-30 22:18:08+00:00
> Most retailers will argue that connecting with their core customers and delivering delightful experiences to them is their core expertise.

Having worked in e-commerce for most of my career, for individual retailers, I can assure you that the perpetual tension you describe is real. The problem as I see it is, every little retailer thinks that their two-bit designers and product managers are so uniquely visionary in designing interactions that they rightfully should have full control over the product that is the ecommerce website. Shopify employs God-knows-how-many engineers to build and maintain this experience, and probably thousands of SREs to be there 24/7 making sure a random DDOS or slow query doesn't take your site out. "But we think we can build a better site than Shopify with 10 engineers and a couple of managers," they say.

They can build one that has the 3 cute whiz-bang features that their self-important product design staff thinks matter, but it will be unreliable, and they won't have sufficient expertise to get right the other 90% of what a "good" ecom site should have. And on top of it all, none of those gimmicks will likely improve conversion or order value enough to be worth doing.

The smarter ones IMHO do use Shopify. It lacks so many things in its core that it's infuriating (decent search, any nontrivial filtering), but retailers who use it mostly patch over those flaws with plugins sold by third parties (which often introduce ghastly single points of failure that you have no visibility into, and you can't sue some random plugin vendor you pay $50 a month for your site going down on Black Friday).

Ecommerce is hard tbh. But I do personally think that most of my previous employers probably should have done lightweight Shopify skins and made their core competence sourcing, merchandising, and advertising product rather than designing cute search filters, or their own product recommendations algorithm.