MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lsaferite | 2025-05-17 11:50:26+00:00
You are complaining about the transport aspect of the specification.

The protocol could easily be transported over websockets. Heck, since stdio is one transport, you could simply pipe that over websockets. Of course, that leaves a massive gap around authn and authz.

The Streamable HTTP transport includes an authentication workflow using OAuth. Of course, that only addresses part of the issue.

There are many flaws that need improvement in MCP, but railing against the current transports by using a presumably denigratory term ("vibe-coded") isn't helpful.

Your "that is it" stops at talking about one single aspect of the protocol. On the server side you left out resources and prompts. On the client side you left out sampling, which I find to be a very interesting possibility.

I think MCP has many warts that need addressing. I also think it's a good start on a way to standardize connections between tools and agents.
by mistercow | 2025-05-17 11:52:34+00:00
> No one to day learns that anymore. The vast, vast majority have no idea and I don’t think people are dumber because of it.

Arguably, the kind of person who was helped by learning to do that by hand still learns to do it by hand, but because of curiosity rather than because a teacher told them to.

I remember being thirteen and trying to brute force methods for computing the square root. I didn’t have the tools yet to figure out how to do it in any systematic way, and the internet wasn’t at a point yet where it would have even occurred to me to just search online. Wikipedia wouldn’t exist for another two years.

I probably finally looked it up at some point in high school. I’m not sure exactly when, but I remember spending a lot of time practicing doing a few iterations in my head as a parlor trick (not that I ever had the opportunity to show it off).

If I were thirteen and curious about that now, I’d probably just ask ChatGPT. Then I’d have a whole follow up conversation about how it was derived. It would spit a lot of intimidating LaTeX at me, but unlike with Wikipedia, I’d be able to ask it to explain what those things meant.

This is the thing I don’t get when people talk about LLMs’ impact on education. Everybody focuses on cheating, like learning is inherently a chore that all students hate and must be carefully herded into doing despite themselves.

But that’s a problem with school, not learning. If your actual, self-motivated goal is to learn something, LLM’s are an incredible tool, not a hindrance.
by jstummbillig | 2025-05-17 11:53:46+00:00
Reading this I am not sure I got the gist of your previous post. Re-reading the previous post, I still don't see how the two posts gel. I submit we might just have very different interpretations of the same observations. For example I have a hard imagining the described 3500 LOC program as 'simple'. Limited in scope, sure. But if you got it done 5-10x faster, then it can't be that simple?

Anyway: I found the writers perspective on this whole subject to be interesting, and agree on the merits — I definitely think they are correct on their analysis and outlook, and here the two of us apparently disagree – but I don't share their concluding feelings.

But I can see, how they got there.
by milliams | 2025-05-17 11:54:09+00:00
Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder. Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels. Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies. Elves are glamorous. They project glamour. Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment. Elves are terrific. They beget terror. The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning. No one ever said elves are nice. Elves are bad.

― Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies
by xg15 | 2025-05-17 11:54:13+00:00
This is a great idea, but:

> Integration of [Symbol.dispose] and [Symbol.asyncDispose] in web APIs like streams may happen in the future, so developers do not have to write the manual wrapper object.

So for the foreseeable future, you have a situation where some APIs and libraries support the feature, but others - the majority - don't.

So you can either write your code as a complicated mix of "using" directives and try/catch blocks - or you can just ignore the feature and use try/catch for everything, which will result in code that is far easier to understand.

I fear this feature has a high risk of getting a "not practically usable" reputation (because right now that's what it is) which will be difficult to undo even when the feature eventually has enough support to be usable.

Which would be a real shame, as it does solve a real problem and the design itself looks well thought out.
by chiph | 2025-05-17 11:54:27+00:00
Meanwhile, Wolfspeed in North Carolina has their building nearly done (last time I drove past a few months ago) and is already growing silicon carbide crystals. They will be making 200mm wafers.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/jQJ117hsBiP3q8uc9

They received $750mm under the CHIPS Act.
by palata | 2025-05-17 11:54:34+00:00
To all those people on the previous HN discussions that were saying that Nextcloud was responsible because they did not use the Android APIs properly... seems like Google proved you wrong:

> Andy Schertzinger, Director of Engineering at Nextcloud, confirmed this to The Register, saying, "Google has decided to restore the permissions to our Android app so we can bring back the full file syncing functionality."
by simonw | 2025-05-17 11:54:46+00:00
> As in, it does not take a lot learning time before you're faster than the LLM for 90% of things, and those things occur frequently enough that your "learning time deficit" gets repaid quickly.

It doesn't matter how fast I get at regex, I still won't be able to type any but the shortest (<5 characters) patterns out quicker than an LLM can. They are typing assistants that can make really good guesses about my vaguely worded intent.

As for learning deficit: I am learning so much more thanks to heavy use of LLMs!

Prior to LLMs the idea of using a 100 line PostgreSQL query with embedded regex to answer a mild curiosity about my use of alt text would have finished at the idea stage: that's not a high value enough problem for me to invest more than a couple of minutes, so I would not have done it at all.
by AngryData | 2025-05-17 11:54:47+00:00
People go through so much trouble just to avoid using a wire despite 95% of their "smart home" devices home being static. It seems like such a colossal waste of time and effort in my opinion. Wires are not complicated, and if you put in even 1/10th the effort into using wire as they use in avoiding wires you can make them look nice.

Don't like the look of bare kinked wires? A $5 piece of decorative conduit or mounting tape or a new wall socket will do what an extra $100+ in less reliable specialty tech can accomplish. For people who are suppose to be all about tech you would think something as simple as a bit of wiring wouldn't be so out of their depth.
by user3939382 | 2025-05-17 11:55:59+00:00
I can’t reconcile statements like this with my experience trying to code with LLMs. As soon as there’s any real complexity they spit out nonsense broken code that in some cases could take a long time to debug. Then when you correct it “You’re totally right, I’ll change it so that x y z”. If you weren’t a senior dev with loads of experience you wouldn’t be able to debug or correct the code these tools produce.
by palata | 2025-05-17 11:58:59+00:00
> Google said Amazon doesn’t have a special deal. The company and Amazon declined to offer specifics.

> Google and Amazon say the payment options aren’t new. Google said Amazon was among a few companies that had been able to offer non-Google payment options for their existing customers, under a test program.

"It's not a special deal. It's just that only a few companies can benefit from it."

Who are they kidding, seriously?
by hippich | 2025-05-17 11:59:29+00:00
Just I quick note - writing to congressman may actually help and worth trying. My mom's greencard was stuck in 2023 due to some bs with documents in consulate with officer there non responding. After the letter by my senator I got a call from the officer over there and the issue resolved within a day. This is of course different from op's issue, but just wanted to note that it is worth trying in any case.
by snickerbockers | 2025-05-17 11:59:35+00:00
That's the neat part, you don't. 90% percent of webdev is "upgrading" things in ways nobody asked for or appreciates because it's just taken for granted that your codebase will grow mold or something if it isn't stirred often enough and the other 10% of the work is fixing legitimate problems resulting from the first 90%. Of course, no probability is ever actually 1.0 so there will be rare occasions that you need to understand something that ChatGP-err, sorry my bad, i meant to say "something that you" wrote more than a year ago you suggest to your boss that this bug should be preserved until next time there's a new hire because it would make a great "jumping-on" point and until then the users will still be able to get work done by using the recommended work-around, whic his installing windows XP Pirate Edition onto a VM and using IE6 to get into the legacy-portal that somehow inexplicably still exists 20 years after the corporate merger that was supposed to make it obsolete.
by ksdnjweusdnkl21 | 2025-05-17 11:59:44+00:00
It's amazingly fractured actually. In my home country every store pretty much has the same exact model of a card reader that takes all contacless payments and credit cards with chips. In Japan it's a coinflip wether a credit card reader can take contactless credit cards. And if you do it with the chip, it's always a fun process of the clerk not understanding you need to insert a pin or select a currency, so they sometimes abort the process in confusion.

Needless to say, I prefer to use cash in Japan.
by hardwaresofton | 2025-05-17 11:59:51+00:00
Yeah I think so -- I like to think I can control my router at least, so I don't have to worry about it. That said, probably not protected from the botnet case.

Also, unfortunately up until now I've been saying the wrong thing -- I mean Matter over Thread versus Matter over Wifi. Matter over Wifi seemed like a winner to me because I could just use it.

It looks like going forward I'll be plugging a small SBC into my Router's USB (+ ethernet) and connecting a Zigbee + Thread dongle. That should cover me for most communication options, then from there it's "just" a software problem :)
by evrimoztamur | 2025-05-17 12:00:56+00:00
I would like to point out a much more exciting modelling process, whereby neural networks extract the underlying boolean logic from simulation outputs: https://google-research.github.io/self-organising-systems/di...

I firmly believe that differentiable logic CA is the winner, in particular because it extracts the logic directly, and thus leads to generalize-able programs as opposed to staying stuck in matrix multiplication land.
by johnisgood | 2025-05-17 12:00:58+00:00
So... Tor, i2p, OpenZiti, and what else can you think of?

Zrok seems nice. Right now I use LocalSend to share files between some of my devices, but it is not encrypted at all IIRC, and as the name suggests, it is only "local".

I wonder how zrok compares to OnionShare.
by xg15 | 2025-05-17 12:01:32+00:00
Also, sticking to one style and not mixing all the wildly different approaches to do the same thing.

JS, like HTML has the special property that you effectively cannot make backwards-incompatible changes ever, because that scrappy webshop or router UI that was last updated in the 90s still has to work.

But this means that the language is more like an archeological site with different layers of ruins and a modern city built on top of it. Don't use all the features only because they are available.
by firesteelrain | 2025-05-17 12:01:42+00:00
You are probably right.

Let’s look at it differently though: even if the federal preemption push is cynical, is there still a valid, public-interest reason to avoid fragmented AI regulation?

That’s the only place your argument could be stress-tested: not in exposing the hypocrisy.

But there isn’t an introduction of like AI ethics rules or policy or directing a federal agency to establish any so that’s a valid criticism. What if we take the viewpoint that they are trying to get there?
by sbarre | 2025-05-17 12:02:36+00:00
We should factor in the hiring sprees that really distorted the market from 2020-2022..

2020-2022 was not "normal hiring", it was much higher than normal.

Even the large, conservative, boring enterprise where I work was hiring about 5 new developers a week in those years.. I know because I did the "Welcome to our department" technical onboarding workshop and I saw everyone coming in the door every week.

Before 2020 I ran that workshop once a month or so? Probably 10 times a year at most.

So of course then the layoffs came when ZIRP ended, as everyone had to adjust back to real world conditions and grapple with the fact that the team sizes they had now were not sustainable (or necessary?) when free money ended.

Couple that with "efficiencies" from AI and generally more conservative scope and ambition by a lot of companies in these uncertain times, and the market looks drastically worse than it did in 2020-2022.

But if you compare the market today to 2018 (for example) instead, it's still worse but definitely not as worse.

Lastly, hiring is also very broken today due to AI, with candidates using it to flood companies with applications and then companies using AI to auto-filter that incoming flood (and likely losing out on good candidates in the process) simply because they can't handle the volume.

I have a lot of sympathy for folks coming right out of university trying to land their first good job. I'm sure it's the toughest it's been in a generation...
by keybored | 2025-05-17 12:04:26+00:00
It is correct that this is a back and forth process and not simply a thing that either evolves or devolves or collapses. We are impacted by the tools we use. No matter how advanced the tools.

But you can’t just dismiss the issue on the grounds that humans are removed from reality as well because they have a representation-of-thing instead of instead of thing as such. In fact it doesn’t make sense. We could be directing slave monkeys to write literature. Then we could water down that description of the process as humans curating, modifying and publishing content—just indirectly, but what’s one more level of indirection between primates.

We could woolily describe it like that. We’re just creating content. Okay. But is it going anywhere? Or is it just gibberish? No, we won’t simply keep doing it if the monkeys give us gibberish.
by yorwba | 2025-05-17 12:04:39+00:00
They're using learned positional embeddings for each grid cell, so there's no straightforward way to extend a model trained on a small grid to a larger grid. If you go from large to small, I think it would do better than chance, but get the periodic boundary condition wrong, because the period changes with the grid size.

Using 2D RoPE instead would in principle allow scaling up as well, and maybe even period detection if you train it across a range of grids, but would eventually hit the same issues that plague long-context scaling in LLMs.
by dns_snek | 2025-05-17 12:05:05+00:00
That's really beside the point here, from GP:

> As soon as I notice the word crypto, I think the project will go the way of the dodo.

Their belief is that a project is more likely to fail because it's associated with cryptocurrency. You can challenge that belief by asking yourself whether Sci-Net would be more or less likely to fail if it tried to accept cards or Paypal instead.
by belter | 2025-05-17 12:06:48+00:00
The so called "Nobel Prize in Economics" wasn’t created by Nobel himself, a scientist and engineer, but by a grant from the Swedish Central Bank. The actual money for prize every year is not paid from the Nobel foundation funds, is paid by the endowment created by the bank. It pays the Nobel Foundation administrative expenses and the monetary component.

Its basically economists trying to launder their way into science by proximity. Like Astrology lobbying to get a physics badge.

So as example in 1974, they awarded the prize to Friedrich Hayek and Gunnar Myrdal. Two economists whose views could not be more opposed. That is like awarding the Physics Nobel jointly to someone who says “objects fall down” and another who insists “objects fall up.” Or honoring two chemists, one who says “water freezes at 0°C” and the other who claims it freezes at 5°C.

And if you say that would never happen, because physics has actual empirical standards then yes, exactly. You get the point.

Even Paul Samuelson, a 1970 economy nobel laureate and actual champion of applying mathematical methods to economics, dismissed Hayek’s most famous work.

Which, intentionally or not, remains the most accurate definition of economics I’ve ever seen: A discipline where ideology often outweighs evidence and both sides get prizes.
by flysand7 | 2025-05-17 12:07:19+00:00
Mostly anime. Surprisingly, not that much, I think somewhere in the ballpark of 100 titles. In the beginning I was also watching some grammar tutorials on YouTube to get started with grammar quicker (Otherwise convergence on solution would be too slow).

Contrary to what I said I actually did use dictionaries, but the point I was trying to make is rather than memorizing phrases in advance, I used it to translate something I thought I heard.
by CoolCold | 2025-05-17 12:07:43+00:00
in recent podcast episode with the found of your company ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xkCykuJwKs , От стартапа до международного бизнеса: история VictoriaMetrics и её уроки | Александр Валялкин | #36) he explicitly described the path VictoriaMetrics has come and one of the early steps was trying to sell SaaS, while quite a lot of users/customers want to have on premise/own setup for such tooling.

So, answering your question: > My question is: is it really convenient to use only SaaS now

no, it's not
by goblin89 | 2025-05-17 12:08:28+00:00
At this point, whenever there is an incident with neurology-related crew incapacitation or degradation (cf. the Jeju air disaster and how many professional pilots fail to make sense of crew’s actions) and the aircraft uses bleed air, I am donning tinfoil and suspecting a fume event.

For a mind-boggling near miss account (actually, not even a miss, since one of the crew has died in the aftermath), see https://avherald.com/h?article=4b6eb830. It quotes research estimating that in the US alone the number of air fume events is around 2000 per year, while the number of reported fume events is less than 10. Mental degradation is insidious, because you may not even be aware it is happening in the first place, so if you have arrived safely you have nothing to report. Yet the industry is silent (including FAA, which had no record of the Spirit incident).

It should be straightforward to mandate a subsystem that presents mental challenges to pilots to test their awareness, and that simplifies access (e.g., disables the emergency override timeout that apparently slowed down the entry in the Lufthansa incident) if one pilot is out to pee and the one remaining is not responsive.

I am curious if pilots in Spirit and Lufthansa cases exhibit similar neuro-degenerative damage.
by sebastiennight | 2025-05-17 12:09:06+00:00
Hi Kristian, if you intend to switch to "marketing mode", I would highly recommend you check out the

- guidelines for posting a "Show HN" thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

- tips to get the most engagement on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638

- and check out the most successful ones: https://news.ycombinator.com/show

Source: I've only done 1 Show HN so far but it's been on the frontpage, and the most active thread I've posted here.
by dadadad100 | 2025-05-17 12:09:14+00:00
I believe it is the case that US (at least) iPhones work as IC cards in Japan

Source - I’m sitting in Kyoto right now having travelled all over Tokyo and then on to Kyoto using only my phone to interact with Japan Rail. Verified with two 16Es and a 12. In fact we were able to add the Suica cards to our phones and charge them fromApplePay while still stateside. That let us skip the Welcome Suica line at Haneda and go straight to the monorail. Highly recommended
by SigmundA | 2025-05-17 12:09:57+00:00
>Well, sure don't use it for heavy computational loads if it doesn't work for you.

>why would we drop multi-processing with isolated tiny heaps with a few KBs each and move to multi-threading with a large multi-megabyte stacks per thread and all sharing and writing to the same heap?

This is the question I was answering and I gave you an example then you proceeded to say there is no overhead Erlangs process model, which now you admit exists.

>That's a specific workload, it's not universal, for sure. I haven't worked on cases there is a single large data structure and all million clients have to manipulate it concurrently.

Thats not the workload, simple as a single client doing heavy processing of large image or video, multithreaded shared heap wins due the the overhead of Erlang's processing model, thats why you give it up which is answering your original question again.

Geez this is tough crowd, first Erlang has no overhead, then its well that nots whats its good at, which I said. Then its well those are specific workloads, yeah serving little messages to a million clients is a specific workload too. I like Erlang, it's very good at specific things but it sacrifices quite a bit of performance to do that like many good abstractions. That can help overall reliability and performance on certain workloads but other modern languages following the shared heap multi-threading model will probably outperform it if care is taken in the design because they more closely match the underlying OS and hardware execution model of today with less indirection and overhead and they can also do other workloads that Erlang will never be good at with its share nothing green thread/process design.
by Washuu | 2025-05-17 12:10:22+00:00
> In addition, the annoyance of these gates comes from having to fiddle with the wallet, etc. in order to find the card or the phone, or the fact that multiples tries may be required for the reader to actually read it;

The NFC readers on the gates in Japan will read cards from several centimeters away. My phone, which has Osaifu-Keitai setup, can be left in my bag and I just wave my bag over the reader as I walk by. It is incredibly rare for a misread to occur. They just work.
by sbarre | 2025-05-17 12:10:27+00:00
I've often given developers I mentor the advice they should "zig-zag" to grow their career and get varied experiences rather than stay in one place too long, but my advice was 2-3 years at each place at minimum.

I think anything less than that, and you haven't had time to really learn an ecosystem, and more importantly you might not have had a chance to live with the consequences of your technical decisions (i.e. supporting something in prod that you built).

I know plenty of people who started somewhere, left for a while, and then came back and ended up in a position higher than they would have gotten if they had stayed put and tried to climb internally.

And yes agreed that moving around will 100% grow your comp faster than staying put (in most cases).
by codesnik | 2025-05-17 12:11:44+00:00
oh, here you are!

ok, for me it's a strange hybrid of pop-science with some newyorker style storytelling which seems to be written in a way for reader to somehow enjoy just an amount of words used. I love reading scientific news, but I'm not sure what's so interesting about what kind of coffee drinks specific scientist behind it and what is their morning routine. And when I skip over that stuff, actual description of the discovery in question is seriously lacking in details, at least to my taste.