MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: OpenMemory – Make your MCP clients more context-aware
by staranjeet | 2025-05-13 16:52:00+00:00
Hey HN, we’re launching OpenMemory (https://github.com/mem0ai/mem0/tree/main/openmemory), an open source tool that lets you run a personal, portable memory layer for LLMs. Fully self-hosted and under your control. It uses standard MCP protocol and plugs into any MCP client (like Cursor, Windsurf, Claude, etc.) over Server-Sent Events (SSE).

https://mem0.ai/blog/how-to-make-your-clients-more-context-a... is a complete tutorial that shows how to set it up locally, the underlying components involved, complete overview of architecture and with some real-world use cases with examples. It also explains the basic flow, why the project even matters, security, access control and what's actually happening behind the UI.

A couple of months ago, we were experimenting with multi-agent setups using tools like Cursor and Claude, and we kept running into the same issue: Agents starting the conversation from scratch (no context). We wanted something lightweight but powerful, a memory layer that lives locally on your machine, works with any MCP client over SSE, and lets you store, search, and control long-term memory without shipping your data to the cloud. It acts as a middle layer between your LLM-powered client and a vector database, storing and recalling arbitrary chunks of text called “memories” across sessions.

Under the hood, it uses Qdrant for semantic search and relevance-based retrieval, while running entirely on your own infrastructure via Docker, Postgres and Qdrant with zero data leaving your system. A built-in Next.js & Redux dashboard lets you inspect which apps are reading or writing memories, along with a full audit trail of state changes. So happy to share learnings and get insights from your experiences. looking forward to comments!
by motohagiography | 2025-05-13 16:52:16+00:00
funny how orgs reward people who hold grudges but not people who let them go or who just set normal adult boundaries.

i'm 'that guy' prety much everywhere, and one reason is that I really just like what I do and am usually committed to the mission over the org. defying pournelle's iron law plays out predictably though.

another reason is Pfeffer's triad, where power in any situation is a local weighting of Performance, Credentials, and Relationships. I trade on performance and cred, where my relationships are often polarized because of the imbalance being heavy in those other weightings.

a friend once described it as the relative skills of an indoors cat vs. an outdoors cat, where an outdoors cat catches all the mice and keeps off some larger animals but will probably scratch the furniture and cause a stink once in a while, whereas an indoors cat keeps the house mostly mouse-free, uses a litter box, but doesn't survive long outside, and if you don't empty the litter box often enough you get toxoplasmosis gondii and become a zombie.

managing indoors and outdoors cats together is an art.
by elgenie | 2025-05-13 16:52:28+00:00
Sort of. Campaigning on vague slogans about something doesn't mean you have democratic legitimacy to avoid the whole process by which that something is supposed to get turned into law.

Congress has previously delegated tariff authority for emergencies to allow the president to do stuff like impose (temporary) sanctions in fast moving foreign policy negotiations. The mechanism by which all the current tariff stuff is getting done is by Trump having declared that trade deficits (in goods only), by virtue of existing, constitute such an emergency, despite having been observed for 80 years and being both an inevitable consequence of the US being an advanced country. Like, the whole thing rests on a total perversion of the law's intent, economics, and the English language itself.
by ralusek | 2025-05-13 16:52:53+00:00
> The benefit of choosing a dodecahedron is that it is the platonic solid with the lowest vertex curvature, and by this measure it is the most spherical of all the platonic solids. This is key for minimizing cell distortion as the process of projecting a platonic solid onto a sphere involves warping the cell geometry to force the vertex curvature to approach zero. Thus, the lower the original vertex curvature, the less distortion will be introduced by the projection.

This feels like an uncommon need to optimize for. Can't think of a reason I would reach for this over S2 or H3
by whatshisface | 2025-05-13 16:52:54+00:00
Each of these has a long answer, so I'll pick this one:

>[Chemistry]? Such as? What benefits do you expect to see?

Everything around us is made up of "molecules," assemblages of parts called atoms. Since it's not possible to manipulate the molecules directly in sufficient numbers (one pound of plastic is made of 2000000000000000000000 individual molecules), we have to assemble molecules en masse by subjecting them to processes that cause each step to happen to all of them at once. How does that work?

Let's say you have a molecule. Its structure will have exposed parts, and some bonds will be weaker than others. If you want to replace a part with another part (one step in the assembly of the final product), you might go about it by letting another molecule come along that has a greater affinity to bond with the location of the part you want to replace, and also has a tendency to be in turn itself replaced with the part you want to add. How can you know which molecule to use for this? You could run a computer simulation, apply a rule of thumb, or look it up in a book. In order to write the simulations, deduce the correct rules of thumb and write the books, scientists need to try a lot of combinations of molecules to see what parts swap with what other parts when they're mixed, and then think very hard about what's happening and why it is happening. This practice is known as, "chemistry."

Once a lot of the rules for a certain molecule are mapped out, engineers with an application in mind can go to the library and ask, "what sequence of steps will take me from available molecules to a molecule I can sell in a way that succeeds very often?" This is called, "industrial chemistry." If there was no library and no knowledge in it, industrial chemistry would be impossible. That is the relationship between science and engineering.
by AuryGlenz | 2025-05-13 16:53:18+00:00
And congress decided that the president can raise tariffs himself. Congress has given away a lot of power, of the years.

Ironically I think this is one instance that sort of thing made sense, but they should have done their usual and made some sort of government agency to oversee it themselves. Neither congress nor the president are good managers of tariffs as they're unpopular in the short term, as we've seen, and need a long term outlook.
Ask HN: Automating Unit Tests
by ashbate | 2025-05-13 16:53:41+00:00
Hi everybody,

My friends and I have been working on a product to streamline writing unit tests. We hate writing them and wanted to solve it for good.

We talked with people around us and designed a product that currently connects to slack and github repos and then creates PRs with the unit tests all managed on Slack. Yes it is AI on the backend.

We were wondering if a tool like this has any value for software teams. What are your thoughts?
by meta_ai_x | 2025-05-13 16:53:45+00:00
"Didn't vote" implicitly give their vote by saying that they don't care if any of them win.

Effectively they are giving 1/2 votes to each of their candidates, resulting in no change in the final result.

But, if you really want to be analytic, the higher the turnout of disaffected voters, the more likely they vote for Trump.

That's why, since 2016 or so, Trump always overperforms in general elections, while Democrats overperform in special/mid-term elections where the turnout is low.

So, these liberal/democrats copium about turnouts and non-votes no longer hold true. pre-2016 "Get out to Vote" were implicit Democrat crying calls to rally votes for the Democratic party. You still see people who haven't understood the underlying shift using this as a "dog whistle" to campaign for democrats while appearing neutral
by echelon | 2025-05-13 16:53:50+00:00
> And for refactoring and tests, this is where Vim/Emacs comes in.

I've used Vim bindings and strongly typed languages with IDEs that have strong AST-based refactoring my entire career.

Nothing comes close to changing one condition of a test and having the AI autocomplete magically suggest the correct series of ten updates that fix the test. In under the blink of an eye, too.

Everything is truly changing in big ways.
by jdiff | 2025-05-13 16:54:05+00:00
It might be useful for telling Cream of Chicken from Cream of Mushroom, but for locomotion I can't see this adding anything over existing strategies people use to get around sans sight.

"There's a tree. There's a tree. There's a tree. There's a number of pedestrians. There's a tree. There's a sign." does not strike me as useful feedback for getting around.
by grepfru_it | 2025-05-13 16:54:20+00:00
Sigh. This is yCombinator’s startup school or whatever it’s called where they teach you to launch a product and solicit engagement and feedback. This template is boilerplate for the last 3 or 4 I’ve seen. Then it gets posted to hacker news to solicit feedback from “real users”. Without fail the creators happen to haha stumble in and happily take your feedback. Absolutely nothing changes and you will return to the same product page as an old bookmark 2 years from now and realize nothing on the page has changed.

Instead, notice when this happens and then take away your own experience and use it to build your own product. Good luck!
by sabslikesobs | 2025-05-13 16:54:28+00:00
Oh wow! It took me a bit to realize this was DHH of Ruby on Rails fame (among other things). I like this message. After a career in Java, bash, Python, PHP, and a half-dozen config-definition languages, I've never found anything that evokes the joy-of-actually-writing-code like Ruby does.

Well, other than few tiny niggles like my code editor not being sure what kind of variable something is. But usually that doesn't matter.
by autoexec | 2025-05-13 16:54:56+00:00
> Not taxes, tariffs - which is of course a tax - which the general public did not, by all available evidence, understand was a tax.

Experts were pretty clear in telling the public that it was a tax. The only people who can say they didn't understand that would have to be people who not only didn't know what tariffs were in the first place, but who also didn't bother to listen to the many many people trying their best to explain it to them.

I'm 100% convinced that trump doesn't understand them and refused to listen to the many many people who have tried to explain it to him, which is why he had to suddenly start walking them back. Only his ego is getting in the way now.
by renewiltord | 2025-05-13 16:55:00+00:00
Bro, it's $500 billion not $500 million. $500 million is very easy to invest. That's not Stargate - that's IncandescentBulbGate.

https://openai.com/index/announcing-the-stargate-project/

Trying to get a journalist to understand numbers is like teaching a rock calculus.
by mindslight | 2025-05-13 16:55:03+00:00
> would defy you to find a single Trump voter who thinks taxes needed to be raised

You're going to lose this one hard, because you chose the wrong tense. One exceptional thing about this cult is their ability to rationalize anything once Dear Leader has proclaimed it. This has been a general basic mechanism of mass media centralized democracy (eg the number of "liberals" eagerly supporting censorship ~10 years ago), but the Trump cult cranks it to 11 (eg "from my cold, dead hands" -> "blue lives matter")
by bloppe | 2025-05-13 16:55:10+00:00
The prevailing trade doctrine pre-Trump is called the most favored nation system, by which the countries of the WTO agreed to treat all other members by the same rules. That didn't preclude tariffs at all, but for instance China could not apply a tariff on America without also applying the same tariff on all other WTO members. American multinationals flourished under this system far more than the companies of any other country, including China.

Now we have a system of bilateral agreements that encourage market fragmentation and are complicated and cumbersome to enforce, which is a big part of the reason we moved away from that system in the first place. Now, they're also created revoked on a whim by one man with a knack for giving exemptions to his pals and extracting big personal gifts from world leaders in exchange for favors. Even if you support moving back to a bilateral tariff system, the way it's being handled should concern you
by tacitusarc | 2025-05-13 16:55:22+00:00
I think this characterization implies a dichotomy that bothers me.

Work is certainly not my top priority, but I spend a ton of my time on my job, and I would like to feel fulfilled and happy doing it. Have capable colleagues that you can trust to pull their weight is a big part of that.

In general, I’ve found that the clock-in, clock-out types seem to take their mediocrity as almost a badge of honor, with this feeling that by not working hard or accomplishing a lot, they ensure the business is not getting overmuch value out of them.

This is so sad, IMO. If at all possible, work should be fun. As programmers, we have more opportunity for that than most, and should take advantage. Is that perspective “Live to Work”?
by Terr_ | 2025-05-13 16:55:23+00:00
Right, there are many cases where an adversarial power dynamic gets disguised, dressed-up as just the voluntary freedom of the majestic unbound human spirit etc.

At the extreme end, "slavery or death" may be an individual choice, but it's not the kind we want to celebrate or encourage.

___

> "I should not agree with your young [socialistic] friends," said Marcus curtly, "I am so old-fashioned as to believe in free contract."

> "I, being older, perhaps believe in it even more," answered M. Louis smiling. "But surely it is a very old principle of law that a leonine contract is not a free contract. And it is hypocrisy to pretend that a bargain between a starving man and a man with all the food is anything but a leonine contract." He glanced up at the fire-escape, a ladder leading up to the balcony of a very high attic above. "I live in that garret; or rather on that balcony. If I fell off the balcony and hung on a spike, so far from the steps that somebody with a ladder could offer to rescue me if I gave him a hundred million francs, I should be quite morally justified in using his ladder and then telling him to go to hell for his hundred million. Hell, indeed, is not out of the picture; for it is a sin of injustice to force an advantage against the desperate. Well, all those poor men are desperate; they all hang starving on spikes. If they must not bargain collectively, they cannot bargain at all. You are not supporting contract; you are opposing all contract; for yours cannot be a real contract at all."

-- The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond by GK Chesterton [https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks05/0500421h.html]
by t-writescode | 2025-05-13 16:55:23+00:00
Anecdotally, yes. 100% yes.

When I push past my mental capacity, stress, drain circling, anger, all that starts to seep in and it destroys my ability to think through hard problems, complexities, details and so on.

I’ll end up banging my head against the wall for hours, stressed and exhausted from some misguided sense that my worth is in my output and all of it will plummet for several days afterward.

I’ve studied myself. When I work extra hard when I can’t think anymore, even if it’s just to “get over this one hump”, my productivity is near zero and my agitation is up for 1-3 days of work after, *even with a weekend break*.

But with stable, consistent work that works out to 4-8 real work hours a day, usually around 6 or 7 but sometimes only 3, rarely 9-10, I have made huge amounts of progress on projects and done things more complex and complicated than I have ever done before. And it’s almost felt easy.
by jandrese | 2025-05-13 16:55:44+00:00
2005 was Pentium 4 era.

For comparison: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/1075vs5852/Intel-Pentiu...

That's about a 168x difference. That was from before Moores law started petering out.

For only a 5x speed difference you need to go back to the 4th or 5th generation Intel Core processors from about 10 years ago.

It is important to note that the speed figure above is computed by adding all of the cores together and that single core performance has not increased nearly as much. A lot of that difference is simply from comparing a single core processor with one that has 20 cores. Single core performance is only about 8 times faster than that ancient Pentium 4.
by naasking | 2025-05-13 16:55:47+00:00
> well at least astronomy is a convenient cover for military/intelligence interests funding better optics

Right, defense can and has funded research for its own purposes, and sometimes those purposes can find wider commercial application (like the internet). That's all great, national defense is one of the government's primary purposes.

> There are huge parts of physics which are only publicly funded.

Yes, and? Is this an argument that they cannot be funded in other ways, or an argument that the parts of physics that cannot be funded in any other way ought to be publicly funded? There's just this blanket assumption that this is true but it simply doesn't follow.

For instance, the newest super collider project that some people are pushing for completely misses the opportunity cost of not funding other projects that could be far more impactful, like wakefield accelerators, which would reduce the size and cost of particle accelerators by orders of magnitude.
by selectnull | 2025-05-13 16:56:03+00:00
You are completely correct, my comment was shallow and that was my fault.

Here is my opinion on Mozilla and their direction: in the previous decade (or a little bit more) or so their primary money bringer was Google, paying for the default search engine placement in Firefox. Annually, that brought about half a billion US (I don't have the exact amounts, but let's assume in that decade they should have earned a few billions).

At the same time, Firefox continuously lost market share and with that, the power to steer the web in the direction of privacy (1) and open standards (2).

(1) instead, they've acquired Anonym, an ad business which touts itself to be interested in user's privacy. color me sceptic on that one.

(2) it's all Chrome and iOS. Firefox is a lagard.

So, what has Mozilla done with the billions? Have they invested it in Firefox? MDN perhaps? Are they the web champions they have been in 2010s?

You can still argue that these points are shallow. My original comment was motivated by my disappointment in Mozilla's lost opportunity to be a fighter for an open web. Instead they have sold their soul to the highest (and only) bidder.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-05-13 16:56:24+00:00
> Like, the whole thing rests on a total perversion of the law's intent, economics, and the English language itself.

I agree with this statement and have commented as much elsewhere, but Congress could rein in Trump's tariff-setting ability any time they wanted to, and they have very explicitly chosen not to.

I agree with the parent comment - people in the US very clearly voted for this, buyer's remorse be damned.
by piva00 | 2025-05-13 16:56:33+00:00
The new wave of authoritarianism uses the bureaucracy and state machine against itself. They've learnt from the past, there's no Night of the Long Knives, or the burning of the Reichstag, that's too overt.

Look at Orbán, Erdogan, and similar new authoritarians, the coup is a slow grinding of every facet of democracy: grind the press, grind the judiciary, throw a new law into the mix made up by your cronies in the parliament/Congress, keep grinding at the foundations of democracy over decades and you get a shell of institutions that used to be the foundation of a democratic state being re-purposed to push the agenda of the dictator.

The veneer of institutions is the point, it's to make you have exactly this reaction:

> I genuinely don't understand how this can be a coup when all three branches agree.

Because you are expecting an overt coup, not a slow moving covert one.
by musjleman | 2025-05-13 16:56:33+00:00
> If people have enabled that setting, or left that default on, then that's their problem; it's not Windows Defender's fault.

There is no such setting for Defender. The file scanning is either on or defender is completely off. To even access some of the better stuff like ASR rules (that are disabled by default) you need third-party software or pay for their enterprise offering.

Consumer Defender literally has like 4 toggles in total. It's a dumbed down and extremely permissive AV because it runs on every Windows machine.
Show HN: Stop Reels – Block Instagram/Facebook/TikTok Reels, Keep the Rest
by invisibilities | 2025-05-13 16:56:58+00:00
Hey HN,

I just launched a free Chrome extension called Stop Reels — it blocks Reels/short videos on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, without breaking other features like messaging or the regular feed.

Why I built it Like many people, I found myself endlessly scrolling Reels even when I only opened the apps for something specific. The algorithms are too good at hijacking attention.

There are tools to block entire sites, but none I found that just surgically block Reels and Shorts — and leave the rest of the platform functional (DMs, posts, marketplace, etc).

So I built Stop Reels to do exactly that.

It’s open source, lightweight (no trackers), and aims to make social platforms a bit more intentional.

How it works It targets known reel containers/classes and removes or hides them.

No background tracking or analytics — everything runs in your browser.

It’s designed to be modular, so adding support for other "endless scroll" modules is easy.

It’s not perfect, and platforms constantly change their DOM structures, but I’m updating it actively. Suggestions and PRs are welcome!

Roadmap - Firefox support - Options UI for fine-tuning what to block - Community-sourced rule system (like uBlock filters, but for attention)

If you've found this helpful and want to support continued development, I'm accepting sponsorships here: https://github.com/sponsors/iInvisibilities

Happy to answer any questions or hear feedback!

– Khalil
by audunw | 2025-05-13 16:57:15+00:00
There’s several very promising next gen battery technologies that’s in pre production or trial production in US and Europe now.

I wonder how this will pan out vs China. Will it turn out that China invested too much in what will end up being outdated battery chemistries, or will they keep pace, match the innovations and quickly retool for these new chemistries.

I think there’s a chance for the west to catch up with China, if governments get really serious about massive investments in building out production capacity for these next gen chemistries when they’re ready. And it’s probably the last chance.

I don’t really expect the west to surpass China, to be clear.
by peterhadlaw | 2025-05-13 16:57:18+00:00
The thing with Americans is that they've had it so good for so long they don't even know what bad looks like. People who come from oppressive governments and have lived through it actually do. Notice I never mentioned efficiency in my original post, you assumed that's what I meant. I meant the oppressive nature of just the shear unending growth of the US government and the weight that bears upon it's people, its businesses, and most importantly it's morale.
by ceejayoz | 2025-05-13 16:57:32+00:00
> How was smuggled tea more expensive?

Smuggling adds costs, and the Dutch/British product weren't identical in quality either. The Tax Act reduced the tax/cost burden (removing a requirement to go through London-based middlemen first, and lessening import duties) on legitimate tea.

> The shipping costs for both products would be the same (right?)

Not at all. The risk of seizure (of both cargo and ship) drives it way up.