MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lolinder | 2025-05-11 14:27:31+00:00
I don't think any of the negativity is about whether MCP works. It's just about whether MCP is a horribly ill-planned design that could have been much better if they'd taken the time to learn from the 50 years of experience we have as an industry in building protocols.

That it works is in some ways worse because it means we'll be stuck with it. If it didn't work we'd be more likely to be able to throw it away and start over.
by DannyBee | 2025-05-11 14:27:41+00:00
Russ didn't leave. But this is also different, AFAIK.

In this case I expect it's more related to how the engineering ladder has changed at Google over time, and the effects of cost cutting placing pressure to conform to the ladder, even when the ladder doesn't reward what it necessarily should be rewarding.

That's about as unobtuse as i can be about it, for various reasons.
by tmpz22 | 2025-05-11 14:27:45+00:00
I've always used the analogy of 90's Wall Street to explain the Tech industry behind the curtains. Our 2008 moment will be when society realizes AI is nothing but a tool for wealth transfer from what remains in the middle class to the top ultra wealthy.

We had a brief window in the mid 2010s when folks started to throw rocks at the tech buses where I thought people were starting to realize it. Around Bernie's presidential run - which makes sense because he preached wealth inequality. But somehow during COVID tech slithered back into everybody's good graces.

* I don't condone people throwing rocks at the buses for both the humanitarian reasons and the fact that few if any executive or social changes could result from that behavior. But it struck me as a microcosm of the prevailing sentiment towards technology workers.
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-05-11 14:27:48+00:00
Reading the QR code spec (or even just the wikipedia page) could help a lot here. A lot of the room on the code is taken up by metadata, rather than output-data. The output data is repeated lots of times across the code (this is why you can have a brand logo right in the middle of the code).

Repairing the metadata parts & iterating over each of the version number should make the overwhelming majority of broken QR codes usable again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code#/media/File:QR_Code_St...
by cmsj | 2025-05-11 14:28:53+00:00
Congrats, you have trapped yourself in an ideological bubble where nobody can ever tell you that AI is a bad fit for a given application.

Try this on for size: I am not a therapist, but I will happily tell you that a statistical word generating LLM is a truly atrocious substitute for the hard work of a creative, empathetic and caring human being.
by dotancohen | 2025-05-11 14:29:51+00:00
Maybe you're the person to ask. My Python Qt app is sluggish when it loads tens of thousands of values from SQLite. Various variations of pagination and lazy loading hurt usability. But isolating the issue and testing with C++ and Rust show that those two languages don't have the performance hit of Python.

I could use C++ and stick with Qt, but I'd much prefer Rust. Rust has no good Qt bindings. What are my options?

The app makes use of QV/HBoxLayout, QWidget, Qdialog, QPushButton, and other really standard features. It reads from the filesystem, reads and writes to SQLite, and outputs sound from mostly ogg files at various speeds (through VLC behind the scenes). I stick with Qt because I like how it integrates with KDE and other desktops flawlessly.
by maxcomperatore | 2025-05-11 14:30:41+00:00
WhatsApp.

NEVER use whatsapp for work communication. it blurs you personal and work life, there's no boundaries, you are online 24/7, it drains you energy, chats are completely ephemeral (if 30h have passed since a message its gone forever), no pins, no task tracking, no onboarding, no search, no automation, it starts to fall apart with half a dozen people, insecure if they steal your phone, dumb ui, no scheduling, no nothing. Work and personal life must be separated, one app for each. work done? CTRL+W slack and done, offline mode, in whatsapp you cannot close it and its very unprofessional. Your boss hits u up at saturday 9pm and you will have that chat unread lingering there and draining your energy till monday, constant context switch between work and personal. It's horrible.

If you are a startup founder, DO NOT use whatsapp for work comms.
by stephc_int13 | 2025-05-11 14:31:12+00:00
To be clear, the design is pretty solid. But the marketing and storytelling around it is BS.

This should be called hardening and the whole "unsafe" thing is also detrimental. Computer security and exploits is a highly complex topic, there are no silver bullets. Rust code is safer to some extent, but not "safe" from bugs and exploits.
by oli5679 | 2025-05-11 14:31:25+00:00
It’s really easy to be cynical.

There is a big upside potential for high growth companies taking advantage of technology trends.

Today, Google’s revenue is £263.66 Billion. This is nearly 300x the revenue Google generated in 2003 ($961.9 million). The company went public on August 19, 2004, at $85 per share, valuing the company at $23 billion. After the IPO, Google reported $1.47 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2003, with a profit of $105.6 million.
by etaioinshrdlu | 2025-05-11 14:31:30+00:00
Ignoring politics, which I think makes this article somewhat off-topic, I would argue with many of the points in this article - but just one would be that ZIRP specifically caused inflation and required higher interest rates.

The way I remember it, rates were already raised substantially, during the first Trump admin, not due to inflation, lowered again during COVID, and raised due to inflation, where a likely causative factor in the inflation being high government spending and stimulus.
by gethly | 2025-05-11 14:32:41+00:00
I can relate, though I am not that far. I spent few years working full-time on developing my product, had a business plan, spent money and things like that. Only to finally go online and get zero bites. I was counting on few people to become instant customers, none of that materialised. Even friends left me hanging out in the cold. So that was quite a cold shower and a slap in the face. But in the end, it was my own miscalculation. Also, the mobile UI is important. I did not underestimate it, I just had no time to implement it. It will take weeks or months to do and I pushed it as the next thing, after I am done developing the current feature. In the end, you cannot do it all, certainly not out the gate. I am still kinda on schedule and progressing as planned with things, I was just expecting more interest. I had to adjust and refocus, but in the end, it is about being able to keep going.
by moltar | 2025-05-11 14:32:44+00:00
Try this experiment. Install a few apps, like Time Doctor and Wakatime to track where you spend most of your time while on the computer for work purposes.

After a week, take note of how many hours you spend actually writing code.

I won’t share my exact count, but it’s shockingly low in relation to all of the hours spent working.

My bottleneck to more productive output is 100% not “unable to write more code faster”. It’s actually people. Other people.
by dumah | 2025-05-11 14:33:31+00:00
From my perspective, the adoption for Linux kernel modules, prevalence in the ecosystem of data science my industry relies on, and the explosion of great rust CLI tools satisfies this foundation.

Native rust extensions to provide canonical high quality interfaces for other languages, like Valkey Glide are another example.

Adding on the fact that rust is the fastest or nearly the fastest growing language in terms of users, and I can’t agree with the view that it is not moving in that direction.
by tom_m | 2025-05-11 14:33:54+00:00
Yea, but Microsoft was slapped with anti-trust before too. These companies shrug it off.

Yea, I guess it's not really much of a race. Because they are competing for something Google already largely has.

In a few years, literally everyone is going to have the same AI and it'll become cheaper and cheaper to operate. I mean already, if you look at those leaderboards, many models are more or less the same.

Training data (legal data) is running out. The algorithms are pushing their limits. It's not unlimited. It's not the second coming of Jesus as some people believe. It's a commodity and everyone is going to have it.

So fast forward a little and think about that. The companies in the better position, the "winners," are going to be the same they always are. Those with the bigger user base and those with more data. That's Google. Yes, AWS too. Yes, Microsoft.

The reason I'm bullish on Google is I suppose not because of Gemini itself. It's because of a super power like Google having their own LLM that performs as well as any other.

I also believe OpenAI will go out of business or be acquired. They way way overspent, but they were also pioneers here a bit so they took on that burden. They over raised. That's painfully obvious after DeepSeek. They lost most of their top talent. They are being propped up because there's a LOT of money at stake. Not just for OpenAI but for other companies too. They are the face of AI so if they went belly up tomorrow then it'd start a wave of panic selling. People would think AI failed. So until some other successor steps in (Meta, Microsoft, Google, etc.), everyone including competitors will keep OpenAI on life support if need be. I don't think it helps that they foolishly bought Windsurf for $3B when you go and look at Roo Code hanging out there for free.
by asadk | 2025-05-11 14:34:14+00:00
One of my favorite genres of HN submission is a list of books that make up the "canon" for a field or line of work.

I know we have a reasonable number of hobbyist and other pilots on here and put together a list of the finest books about flying. I've included more tactical/reference material as well as plenty of fiction and history that's recommended over and over.

I plan to update it over time and would welcome additions/corrections!
by jmull | 2025-05-11 14:36:29+00:00
The author hand waves away ReleaseSafe, but does not really seem to understand its usage.

I don't think zig best-practices are written in stone yet, but I would expect ReleaseSafe to be the default in production. Since zig allows turning off/on safety checks on a per-block basis, you only need to pay as much of a performance cost as you want for this.

Actually, this doesn't really come across as a sincere critique of zig. It's more like how a sport fan talks about a rival team (I guess the author must be team Odin). The "first impressions" section is silly.. of course you don't understand how it all works before you've learned anything about it. It might be a bit confusing and have some new patterns. And yes, all the options of the advanced build system is complex, but... you can use the simple build mechanism, or just go with the template for that matter.

Myself, I think there are certainly valid criticisms of zig to make and I don't know if it's ultimately going to amount to something, but you've got to have some knowledge of the subject and not come at it with a predetermined conclusion.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-05-11 14:36:31+00:00
There's an inherent limit in how many people they can be treating - even group therapy sessions will be limited by number. As such, there's not many "exploits" that they can use to gain more and more power/money. Also, the job is far more likely to attract people that are interested in helping rather than exploiting people. People that want to exploit others are going to want to expand their audience.
by cmsj | 2025-05-11 14:36:41+00:00
Ultimately what therapists do is lead you through an exploration of yourself, in which you actually do all of the work.

I 100% do not doubt the usefulness of therapy for those who are suffering in some way, but I feel like the idea that "everyone should probably have a therapist" is kinda odd - if you're generally in a good place, you can explore your feelings/motivations yourself with little risk.
by perlgeek | 2025-05-11 14:37:23+00:00
> And what’s worse, malicious threat actors can manipulate time synchronization protocols in many cases to trigger this vulnerability at the time of their choosing.

If you switch to 64 bit timestamps, and the network protocol supports dates > 2038, can you then just trigger the rollover bugs by pretending it's 2*64 - 1 seconds after epoch start?

Also, if the actions are potentially so severe, and NTP (or whatever is used) so vulnerable, why haven't we seen many such attacks in the wild?

Update: to be clear I'm not arguing that there isn't a problem, I've already run into it myself. I'm trying to understand how severe it is, how exploitable, and how robust a solution could be.
by lambdaone | 2025-05-11 14:37:47+00:00
Even though it might seem unlikely, you absolutely can't eliminate the possibility of planes falling out of the air unless you have thoroughly audited and tested all their systems in advance. Not having planes in the air at the exact moment of rollover - just in case - might be a good idea too. Similarly financial markets and other key infrastructure.

13 years is plenty of time to make a start on all of this, and will allow the costs to be spread over that time period without undue hurry. It's also long enough that it will be possible for much software to be allowed to reach end-of-life without being audited, while applying rigorous testing to new software. Procrastination, though, is not a good option.
by mkj | 2025-05-11 14:38:35+00:00
Are they doing anything to fix it or just raising awareness?

Here's an example of measuring packages that report warnings for software that has suspicious conversions. Compile with `-Wconversion` with both 32-bit and 64-bit time_t, and see what the difference is. https://github.com/mkj/yocto-y2038

That is using yocto, but you could probably do something similar with other less-embedded distros too, if you can rebuild the world.

FWIW I didn't find much interesting with that apart from busybox dhcpd.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-05-11 14:38:51+00:00
> Here is the state of venture capital in early 2025: Venture capital is moribund except AI. AI is moribund except OpenAI. OpenAI is a weird scam that wants to burn money so fast it summons AI God. Nobody can cash out.

The interesting thing, to me, is how speculative OpenAI's bet is.

IIRC it was 2019 when I tinkered with the versions of GPT 2.0 that had web interfaces, and they were interesting toys. Then I began using ChatGPT since its launch, which was around Dec 2022, and that was a profound paradigm shift. It showed real emergent behavior and it was capable of very interesting things.

2019 - 2022 was three years. No hype, no trillions of dollars invested, but tremendous progress.

Now, there has been progress in the part ~three years in synthetic benchmarks, but the feeling with ChatGPT 4.5 today is still the same as it was with GPT-3/GPT-4 in 2022. 4.5/o3 doesn't seem hugely more intelligent then 3.0 -- it hallucinates less, and it's capable of running web searches and doing directed research -- but it's no paradigm shift. If things keep progressing the way they're going, we'll get better interfaces and more tools, but it's far from clear that superintelligence (more-than-human insight, skill, and inventiveness,) is even possible with LLMs.
by wafadaar | 2025-05-11 14:38:56+00:00
Like any tool, really depends on how you approach using them.

Giving it a problem statement and just blindly asking it for an answer will always yield the worst result, but I find this is often our first instinct.

Working with it to solve the problem in a "step-by-step" manner obviously yields a much better result as you tend to understand how it got to the answer.

I look at it as similar to rote-memorization vs. learning/understanding.

Most often I now use it to help find the "right question" for me to ask when starting with a new topic or domain or synthesize docs that were difficult for me to understand into simpler or more digestible terms.
by lambdaone | 2025-05-11 14:39:55+00:00
Why should floppy disks be a problem? Even if they are fantastically out of date, if they can be maintained as a niche legacy technology, they're not a problem. They won't suddenly stop working, it will just slowly get more and more expensive to get the parts. Supply chains are magic - at the right price, someone will always be willing to make more floppies or drives. Of course that price might be $500 per floppy and $50,000 per drive...
by johannes1234321 | 2025-05-11 14:40:05+00:00
> may not have had a basis in reality.

I believe there is a lot of reality. As well as they gave a lot of brilliant co-workers which seems to have made it a great place to spin ideas. Also from stories too leader ship was at least open to listen to criticism in "thanks God it's Friday" meetings.

While from observing some friends the promotion play was always tough as well. If you wanted to be promoted you always had to use your 20% time "wisely" which for some meant to still work on the main project. For other to strategically work on a side project they could use for the promotion panel.

Today's Google seem to be fully focused on numbers, where a lot of the spirit is gone. Back in the days when I visited some friends working for Google we went to Google for breakfast or met at Google for dinner as it was just a good place to hangout. (Which motivated people to stay at Google for more than their regular hours) Nowadays it seem to be more of a workplace.
by staunton | 2025-05-11 14:40:17+00:00
There is no such thing as a magical "quantum realm". Devices performing quantum state preparation or measurements are just devices. They aren't perfect and can never be made to "100%" satisfy any assumptions.

The Q part is secure in theory, assuming your devices satisfy a specific theoretical model. That's not a 100% guarantee. In fact, it's just the same kind of guarantee as we get for any other security system: "We carefully examined the system and it seems like it satisfies the assumptions of our theoretical model, thus promising security".

Not that this is a bad thing, it's just that "quantum" doesn't make anything "magically 100% secure". There's no such thing as "100% security".
by aschobel | 2025-05-11 14:40:20+00:00
Same, from United States and not seeing dollars is a bit funky.

I wonder if there are opportunities for more call to actions. e.g. I scrolled the page and the only links to sign up are at the top (I’m on mobile).

Compare this to https://stripe.com/ and it’s super obvious how to “Start now” from anywhere on the page.
by cranberryturkey | 2025-05-11 14:40:25+00:00
Totally agree with the Scientific American article "To Educate Students About AI, Make Them Use It." Instead of banning tools like ChatGPT, schools should encourage kids to use AI regularly as part of their education.

One good example they mentioned was from Elon University. Students there had to use ChatGPT to write essays, and afterward they analyzed the AI-generated content. They quickly found out the essays often contained mistakes or outright made-up information. This type of hands-on exercise actually helped students become better critical thinkers by teaching them how to spot inaccuracies and question AI output.

The goal here isn't to replace teachers or traditional education methods. Instead, letting kids use AI tools helps prepare them for a world where understanding and interacting with AI will be a valuable skill. Educators like Ethan Mollick at Wharton and Salman Khan from Khan Academy also support the idea, suggesting it can make learning more personalized and reduce teacher workloads, benefiting both students and educators.

Sources: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/to-educate-studen... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT_in_education https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/brave-new-words-salman-kh...
by Herring | 2025-05-11 14:40:38+00:00
I think the problem is businesses are tiny little fascist dictatorships. They are always trying to pay less taxes, evade regulations, layoff workers, monopolize, destroy competitors etc. This is their first time ever having to think about the public sphere, or common good, or government, or democracy, or rule of law. They suck at that, it goes against all their training and instincts.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-05-11 14:41:55+00:00
Again how is it out of touch with reality? We have memes about vibe coders who don’t understand shit. Why do those memes exist? Because that’s where the trend-lines of technology are pointing. Whether we get there is another story. But denying the trendline is irrational.

Oh I just read your second paragraph. I’m obviously only talking about coding. Blue collar jobs that involves a lot of manual skill is less of an issue. Robotics has an upward trendline but it’s nowhere near moving at the breakneck pace of AI.
by vlovich123 | 2025-05-11 14:42:03+00:00
There are audio recorders like TileRec by Attodigit that can record for 30 hours on a single charge and voice is recorded at 16khz and compressed live to mp3 and is super tiny at 0.5z. I’m thoroughly unconvinced that power or complexity of handling a 200hz signal is the bottleneck. 200hz is nothing probably even to a low end microcontroller these days.
by openplatypus | 2025-05-11 14:42:44+00:00
> Collabora, Etherpad, CryptPad

+ OnlyOffice

> Qwant, DuckDuckGo

+ Mojeek

> Matomo, Plausible Analytics

+ Wide Angle Analytics, Simple Analytics

> Firefox, Brave

+ Vivaldi

> GMX, ProtonMail, Tutanota

+ Infomaniak, Mailo, Runbox

and tons of others
by makeitdouble | 2025-05-11 14:42:52+00:00
It's not consistent but they do block users [0] when adblock is detected. I wonder how it goes internally and what's the actual reason that stops them for doing it full scale, but I've personally got the block so can confirm it's a real thing, and assume they won't be giving it up (of course workarounds also exist)

[0] https://www.techspot.com/news/107221-youtube-anti-ad-blocker...
by avyeed_desa | 2025-05-11 14:43:37+00:00
Egypt is a sovereign state with complete control over their side of the Gaza border.[0]

They do consult IDF and Israeli government, but the narrative, that Israel is 100% controlling all borders to Gaza is not factual and untrue.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egypt%E2%80%93Gaza_border#Buff...
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-05-11 14:43:42+00:00
Because of the medium that is the internet (low friction and high observability) it has a glaring lack of interest in solving problems where the destination is high friction low observability.

In fact, because the digital world explicitly competes with friction for engagement any financially incentivized platform must direct people away from the real world and real people.

So the endgame is to replace real people with digital people even in our relationships.

Real spaces with fake places.

Real disagreements with manufacturered ones.

Only people who have been heavily involved in 3rd places seem to be able to quantify what our modern world has unnecessarily thrown away.

It's a glaring ommission once you realize it, working to solve that atm.
by justinrubek | 2025-05-11 14:43:44+00:00
I can't really agree with that on windows. When I've had to use it, I've always had gnarly issues that I don't think I'd be able to deal with if I wasn't knowledgeable about computers. Sometimes, even then, basic functionality just doesn't work at all. It's further complicated by the software not giving proper insight into what is going wrong so as to make it impossible to deal with.