MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by noahho | 2025-05-05 16:41:47+00:00
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We're hiring a founding team to build this new category:

Software Engineer: Build scalable infra & APIs. Data Scientist / ML Engineer: Optimize & scale our TFMs. Product Manager: Define the vision for AI-native tabular tools. Developer Relations: Grow our community & drive adoption. Location: On-site in Berlin or Freiburg (we build together). Offer: Competitive salary + significant equity. Shape the future of AI for structured data from day one.

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Questions? Reach out at noah@priorlabs.ai
by alwa | 2025-05-05 16:41:51+00:00
Have you had that experience, of being taken as a weirdo? We may move in very different circles, but when I ask to be left out of social media posts I’m always met with respect and understanding, at least to my face.

If anything, in recent years, I’m met with something closer to the respect people afford recovering addicts turning down drinks: “oh man, I wish I were off of it too, good for you.”
by jajko | 2025-05-05 16:42:10+00:00
That's how I pass my (2x a week) trips from work in the office. I just put away my phone and look out of the train at one of most beautiful sights I've ever seen in my life - huge (by my standards) clear Geneva lake with boats and Swiss & French alps in the background, and if weather is clear also Mont Blanc and surrounding peaks towering above it all. I've proposed to my wife on top of it some time ago during a grueling and dangerous ski tour - one way to forever change a look at some sight.

Walking in some easy nature is great too, somehow relaxes subconsciousness so I end up with few todos marked in my phone after each such walk. When I occasionally smoke weed at such walks somehow this feed becomes a firehose and sometimes struggle to note it all. Nature is amazing in any form, recharging, healing and somehow at lowest level that connection just feels right.
by wouterjanl | 2025-05-05 16:42:42+00:00
Good points! Totally agree that people care less than you think, and it’s very healthy to live your life without thinking you have to please everyone all the time. The nuance I tried to make, but I was perhaps not really clear, is that when people talk with each other, people have the chance to make sure a message comes across so that it does not offend a person. That chance for nuance is lost when people post on social media. Not that people do it deliberately, it’s just that social media is designed to be focused on the poster rather than on how that message makes certain people in the audience feel. And I do believe people are bothered not to offend someone, and that they are less likely to do so when you actually talk.
by mjevans | 2025-05-05 16:42:48+00:00
Should it be allowed / legal to 'tag' people that are not part of a service?

I might agree that 'celebrities' and leaders of larger organizations are 'public figures' and thus if there's a reasonable public interest it should be allowed to tag them, probably with a publishing delay for security.

However individuals? Random citizens who aren't part of a platform and cannot manage their data? IMO the default should be deny data collection and do not profile.
by nicovank | 2025-05-05 16:42:54+00:00
Beyond saving tokens, this greatly improved the quality and speed of answers: the language server (most notably used to find the declaration/definition of an identifier) gives the LLM

1. a shorter path to relevant information by querying for specific variables or functions rather than longer investigation of source code. LLMs are typically trained/instructed to keep their answers within a range of tokens, so keeping shorter conversations when possible extends the search space the LLM will be "willing" to explore before outputting a final answer.

2. a good starting point in some cases by immediately inspecting suspicious variables or function calls. In my experience this happens a lot in our Python implementation, where the first function calls are typically `info` calls to gather background on the variables and functions in frame.
by marcuskane2 | 2025-05-05 16:43:10+00:00
> the police does not show up to a fire or an emergency, why would they?

Because they're trained first-responders, who have medical first aid training, vehicles with lights and sirens to move quickly through traffic, knowledge of the local area to navigate around road closures or ambiguous location descriptions, etc.

There are many situations where multiple sub-specialties of first-responders (police, firefighters, EMT, etc) are useful. The police aren't just showing up to arrest or shoot people, in a functioning society they can and do provide valuable service in assisting injured people, controlling traffic around car accidents, etc.
by jeremy_k | 2025-05-05 16:44:02+00:00
I just wanted to say thank you for these replies. I was also confused by the top of this comment chain as I think that author misunderstood what the point of this project this. I wanted to jump in and say something to the effect of "The OP (Jake) has clearly shown he has the aptitude to accomplish tasks by building this tool" but you've done that far better than I could have. Thanks again.
by barefeg | 2025-05-05 16:44:04+00:00
For some time, authentication was not part of the MCP. Now it’s there https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-03-26/bas... so I’m wondering what is being addressed in Klavis. Is it something that the reference implementation of MCP lacks? If so, will it eventually make it to MCP?

I think it’s important to release SDKs that are secure by default, so not providing this in the reference MCP would be a big issue.

In my view, MCP should be maintained by the vendors themselves. It’s too complicated to use in the enterprise if everything comes from the community with questionable security. So I applaud initiatives that try to solve this. I think smithery.ai provides something similar while also being a repository of servers (I’m not associated with them), but again the problem is needing to trust an extra middleman vendor.

Does anyone else share this view? For example, will AWS (or insert any other hyperscaler) end up providing the “Bedrock” of MCP where security is native to the platform? Or will individual companies (Box, Google, MS, etc.) start rolling them out as part of their standard developer APIs?
by dang | 2025-05-05 16:44:08+00:00
Actually, this was a case of HN being ahead of the curve. I re-upped micahflee's original post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43875476 as soon as I saw it yesterday, and it spent 18 hours on the front page.

At 6pm yesterday this update came out, which seems to have gotten more public attention, but HN had already been discussing the original in-depth article for quite a while by then. What to do?

The story itself is on-topic. The question is whether the update (the current submission) should be counted as a follow-up [1] to the earlier thread, or whether it should be counted as significant new information (SNI) [2], and thus have its own thread.

On HN two articles count as the same story if they would lead to substantially the same discussion. That's pretty clearly the case with 43875476 (the original thread) and 43890179 (this update). In such cases we merge the threads, as tomhow mentioned, so as not to have a split discussion.

But it's clear that there's community demand to discuss this story today. Since "well actually we were ahead of the curve" is no way to speak to a hungry beast, we're going to re-up the original thread, so discussion of the story can continue on the frontpage, and pin a link to the update article to the top of that one (tomhow already did this), so people can read both.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
by crystal_revenge | 2025-05-05 16:44:12+00:00
> An LLM just remembers/get inspired by what it consumes

As mentioned in another comment, LLMs (and most popular machine learning algorithms) can be viewed, correctly, as compression algorithms which leverage lossy encoding + interpolation to force a kind of generalization.

Your argument is that a video wouldn't count as pirated if the compression used for the pirated copy was lossy (or at least sufficiently lossy). The closest real world example would be the cases where someone records a the filming of a movie on their phone then uploads it. Such a copy is lossy enough that you can't produce anything really like the original, but my most definitions is still considered copyright.
by necovek | 2025-05-05 16:44:22+00:00
You asked:

> As a team lead, what would you think of a team member who consistently generated "crap" pull requests?

This is directly answered with my first paragraph: that's exactly what I would think of them, and how I would act on it.

Your first question was:

> How is that better?

In the second paragraph, I explained why it's better to do a code review for a crappy pull request that's human-produced vs LLM-generated: it is easier, faster, and more psychologically rewarding.

If you are talking about a case where an inexperienced human uses LLM to start off with a crappy code change, but then adapts the output during the review process, and potentially learns through it (though research confirms people learn better when they produce mistakes themselves) — they still won't be able to use LLM to produce comparable code the next time, so they'll have to do the review and improve it by hand before putting it up for review by somebody else, thus negating any productivity gain (which was the original premise), and likely reducing the learning potential.

If there was a question I misinterpreted, please enlighten me. Thanks! :)
by nonethewiser | 2025-05-05 16:44:27+00:00
I think it also encourages socialization. Chatting with someone instead of being engrossed in your phone.

I did a screen time detox a few years back. After hearing a similar idea about needing to get to boredom sometimes and not just escaping to a device. Only used a computer for work and exclusively worked on it, then no screen time whatsoever. Maybe lasted 3 weeks or so and made me more interested in stuff like reading, drawing, etc.
by tzury | 2025-05-05 16:44:28+00:00
I’ve found that starting with a plain old filesystem often outperforms fancy services - just as the Unix philosophy (“everything is a file” [1]) has preached for decades [2].

When BigQuery was still in alpha I had to ingest ~15 billion HTTP requests a day (headers, bodies, and metadata). None of the official tooling was ready, so I wrote a tiny bash script that:

1. uploaded the raw logs to Cloud Storage, and 2. tracked state with three folders: `pending/`, `processing/`, `done/`.

A cron job cycled through those directories and quietly pushed petabytes every week without dropping a byte. Later, Google’s own pipelines—and third-party stacks like Logstash—never matched that script’s throughput or reliability.

Lesson: reach for the filesystem first; add services only once you’ve proven you actually need them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_is_a_file [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
by am3101 | 2025-05-05 16:44:44+00:00
Canavan is eminently more qualified to talk about Tolkien than I am, though I am surprised (as another commenter noted) that there are no references to any of the legendarium beyond LOTR.

I am however surprised because leftists have historically criticized Tolkien for his black and white views, which I always thought was the point. Another English professor (who defends this view) notes:

> It has just become the tale that middle-to-high brow critics tell--ever since Edward Wilson was saying his own manifestly untrue things about Tolkien in the New Yorker fifty years ago--that Tolkien's fictional world is morally simplistic and rigidly Manichaean. It may be true that the story of the Ring is less morally ambiguous than the average realistic novel, but that's primarily because Tolkien wasn't especially interested in the problem of knowing right from wrong. His concern was to explore the psychology of the moment when you know right from wrong but aren't sure whether you have the courage and fortitude to do the right thing.

> Modern liberalism likes to think that all our problems are epistemological: we are afflicted by never knowing with sufficient clarity what we ought to do. Our fictions tend to reflect that assumption. Tolkien, not being a modern liberal, thought it more interesting to explore situations when people know what they need to know but may lack the strength of will to act on that knowledge. He might say, and with some justification, that contemporary literary fiction is not simplistic in regard to such problems but oblivious to them.
by btilly | 2025-05-05 16:44:52+00:00
You can write down any set of hopefully consistent axioms, write down any set of definitions from them, and start proving theorems. The result will be mathematics. But not all mathematics is equally interesting.

People who look at asymptotic growth are interested in what happens for all, or occasionally almost all, large n. The possibility of this kind of total order is irrelevant, and therefore uninteresting to people who are interested in that. What Tao is doing is mathematics, but not mathematics of a kind that I, personally, like.
by steveBK123 | 2025-05-05 16:45:02+00:00
One of my "its probably time to quit IG" moments prior to quitting 3 years involved being on a condo board.

A resident sent a petition asking for a variance from the bylaws, and part of the pitch was "well I saw XYZ on your IG so I thought you'd approve of this".

Uhh thanks, rejected.. blocked on IG, quit IG, bye.
by jhgaylor | 2025-05-05 16:46:03+00:00
I ended up building the first couple of iterations of this tool just to stop entering the same information into Claude for every new conversation.

By connecting an assistant to a job searching api, a database, and context about myself I am able to create a prompt such as "find interesting jobs for jake. maybe something in the ai space?" and in a few minutes I can browse a curated list of potential job matches.

By connecting the assistant to text to speech and speech to text tools and context about myself I can provide a the job description in my prompt and request the assistant play the role of an interviewer. This has been much nicer than practicing in the mirror.

I think that for the next few weeks/months that a hiring team connecting to my mcp server will play out well for me but I think you're in the right ball park. It will be because I was able to show that I can extract value from technology.
by crdrost | 2025-05-05 16:46:13+00:00
Upvoted for the cute proof- without-words geometrical diagram of the Legendre transform, but the fact that you defined the inverse map as (x, y) to (\hat y, \hat x) I found impossible to keep my head straight. Probably it's easy if I slow down and stop skimming the article.

IMO the easier derivation — may just be personal tastes as someone more on the engineering side — is just another integration by parts.

So with f(g(x)) = g(f(x)) = x, define y = g(x) for U-substitution with x = f(y):

∫ g(x) dx = ∫ g(f(y)) f'(y) dy = ∫ y f'(y) dy = y f(y) – ∫ f(y) dy = g(x) x – F(g(x)) + C

The more interesting thing is that this is a really basic integration by parts which means that this diagram of yours that I like, is more universal than it appears at first? I'd have to think about that a bit more, how you can maybe graphically teach integration by parts that way, is there always a u substitution so that you can get u f(u) or so and get this nice pretty rectangle in a rectangle... hmm.
Connect all your vendors status pages to your Better Stack account
by ntomas | 2025-05-05 16:46:26+00:00
Now you can monitor third-party outages right in your Better Stack account with https://isdown.app.

What will you get?

Single incident feed – Internal alerts and third-party outages appear in the same view.

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Instant context – Each incident has the vendor name and a direct link to the status page.

Automatic resolve – IsDown closes the incident when the vendor switches to green.

Full timeline – Every update the vendor posts arrives as a comment on the open incident, so your team reads one thread instead of chasing status pages.

Any Better Stack customers want to give it a try?

There's a free 14-day trial.
by tetha | 2025-05-05 16:46:59+00:00
As I joke, some of my deepest architecture work has been done by reading up on the concrete topics and then flopping into a hammock to look at a cloud and watch a pair of magpies build a nest, with some coffee with ice cream and some calm tunes. Cup not entirely filled to the brim naturally, as that would be a cause for disaster very quickly.

And sure, I booked like 6 hours that day with no concrete immediate result, but 2-3 days like that a year or two ago shaped how applications function in the company today and it does so effectively.

Another thought the article provokes is the idea of mindfullnes and living in the moment. Sometimes it is easy to open up the phone and just escape. But in those situations, it can be quite interesting to just be in the moment, meet people and see where it goes. If you're in a shitty situation -- like a train stopping in the middle of nothing and dropping all passengers at a train station too short for the train -- it can be interesting to interact with and observe people. It can teach how all of us have very similar basic problems, no matter how we look or who we are. And I'm saying that as an introvert -- sometimes the anonymity of never meeting people again is a good thing.
by dang | 2025-05-05 16:47:03+00:00
> i saw this story on other sites and immediately thought: hacker news will be the best place to follow along with this

By the time the story hit other sites, HN had already been discussing it for quite a while (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43875476), and that thread had gone through the usual life cycle and was falling off the frontpage.

We've re-upped it now, because lots of people are having the experience you described: seeing the story on other sites and wondering why it isn't on HN.

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43896978 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43893699 and let us know if you have any questions that aren't answered there!
by vendiddy | 2025-05-05 16:47:10+00:00
That's a good one.

One analogy I use a lot: if I have a professor sitting next to me, what is the best way to learn a topic?

Struggle through it on my own and I won't be leveraging the professors knowledge.

Ask the professor to do everything for me and I won't be learning anything at all.

Now if the professor is an AI, the same trade-offs hold.

For example, I will back and forth conversations with AI to explain subjects to me. I ask questions, push back, ask for examples, and so on.

If I do ask the AI to answer something for me, I then ask it to break down the answer for me so I can make sure I understand it deeply.

And of course, none of this matters if I don't want to learn something :)
by hammock | 2025-05-05 16:47:27+00:00
Not really. It hurts people's feelings to find out they weren't invited to something they thought they should have been. Protecting feelings and smoothing out awkward social dynamics are the the category of "very adult."

As a more general example, you wouldn't talk about a happy hour you were going to after work with people who weren't invited/aren't invited/you wouldn't invite. I believe every sitcom on the planet has at least one episode with this lesson in it.
by aetherson | 2025-05-05 16:47:28+00:00
Armies are combined arms, with few exceptions (Mongolian horde, perhaps), they didn't have just a single unit type. But armored heavy cavalry (with stirrups) wasn't some kind of weird sociological hang-up of European nations, it was a very effective unit type to have in your mix, such that societies were "willing" to spend significant resources in supporting the existence of that unit.

Here "willing" really means, "subjected to competition pressure such that societies that didn't support heavy cavalry units were for the most part militarily bullied into either annexation or standing up their own heavy cavalry support system."

That lasted until the technological realities of war changed (sufficiently-advanced firearms), at which point quite rapidly those societies stopped fielding heavy cavalry, which is another data point that this wasn't some kind of peacock display from nobles.
Show HN: Introducing Burla – The simplest way to scale Python
by pancakeguy | 2025-05-05 16:47:47+00:00
Hi HN! We're Jake, Jack, and Joe, and we're happy to share what we think is probably the simplest way to scale python code across thousands of computers in the cloud.

Coming from the Biotech world we were frustrated by how surprisingly slow and difficult it can be to iterate on large-scale batch processing pipelines, while contending with the security requirements imposed on us by the FDA. Simple small changes necessitated rebuilding docker containers, waiting for batch pipelines to redeploy, and waiting for vm's to cold boot, a >5minute per iteration dev cycle, all just so I can see what error my code throws this time, then do it all over again! Many other tools in the space were either too complicated for our bioinformaticians and data scientists to use, closed-source / managed only (a no-no with medical data), too difficult to setup and manage, or simply too expensive.

This is why we created Burla, an incredibly simple way to run python on thousands of computers, in any container, with any hardware.

It's open-source, can be setup with one command, and is simple enough for beginners to use.

Most importantly, Burla allows developers to iterate quickly on large scale pipelines, changes to code deploy in about 2 seconds, even with thousands of vm's running.

We believe that, in general, whether you're coding locally, or on a cluster of 1000 machines, infrastructure should update and react quickly, like under-a-second quickly. We should be able to iterate at the speed of thought, not at the speed my lambda function, batch workload, ETL-pipeline, or Kubernetes service takes to redeploy. We wrote more out long term goal here: https://docs.burla.dev/about

Github: https://github.com/Burla-Cloud/burla

More info: https://docs.burla.dev