MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crystal_revenge | 2025-05-27 18:38:46+00:00
I see this question frequently related to MCP, but I'm guessing these questions come from people who haven't built a lot of products using LLMs?

Even if you're LLM could learn the openai spec, you still have to figure out how to concretely receive a response back. This is necessary for virtually any application build using an LLM and requires support for far, far more use cases than just calling an API.

Consider the following use case: - You need to include some relevant contextual data from a local RAG system. - There are local functions that you want the model to be able to call - The API example you describe - You need to access data from a database

In all of these cases, if you have experience working with LLMs, you've implemented some ad hoc template solution to pass the context into the model. You might have writing something like "Here is the info relevant to this task {{info}}" or "These are the tools you can use {{tools}}", but in each case you've had to craft a prompting solution specific to one problem.

MCP solves this by making a generic interface to sending a wide range of information to the model to make use of. While the hype can be a bit much, it's a pretty good (minus the lack of foresight around security) and obvious solution to this current problem in AI Engineering.
by bfrog | 2025-05-27 18:38:47+00:00
I’ve tried a few times now, it’s great when you don’t have to actually write nix yourself. At scale though the typeless dictionary style parameter approach is so impossibly unreadable, constantly hunting down some nixos helper and its underspecified parameters is painful. Its honestly a lot of the same pain yaml has at scale. Lack of typing means more burden on me to remember everything, except nix adds to this a really tough debugging story as it’s lazy and the error messages aren’t usually that helpful.
by Whoppertime | 2025-05-27 18:38:54+00:00
https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-8-part-f-chapter-... Form DS-160, the Nonimmigrant Visa Application used by people applying to enter the U.S. on a temporary (non-immigrant) basis—like tourists, students, or business travelers asks the following question "Are you or have you ever been a member of a Communist or other totalitarian party?" These sorts of questions have been upheld as constitutional in the past by the United States Supreme Court Harisiades v. Shaughnessy (1952): The Court upheld the government's authority to deport legal residents who had been members of the Communist Party, ruling that such deportations did not violate the First or Fifth Amendments. Kleindienst v. Mandel (1972): The Court affirmed the executive branch's broad discretion in denying visas, even when such denials impact First Amendment interests of U.S. citizens.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-05-27 18:39:12+00:00
MS Office will insert em-dashes automatically in most documents, so in fact there are a lot of Word docs and Outlook emails that contain them.

I sometimes specifically try and trigger them: if you have a piece of text and go back to insert a hyphen, it won't em-dash until you've followed it with a space, another word and then another space. I now sort of end up doing '- x ' and then backspacing so that the word following the x now follows an em-dash.

They exist to provide clarity. The are not hyphens, or en-dashes, they're em-dashes. The fact that some people have forgotten how to use them (or perhaps not been taught), does not make them "archaic", it makes those people who find them as such to be ignorant of basic sentence structure and punctuation.

I think if you're under the age of 30 and you suddenly start using them, you're showing your GenAI a little too much, but the answer is not to get your AI to stop using them, but for us to teach people why they exist and to use them more often when and where they are appropriate.
by bradchris | 2025-05-27 18:39:30+00:00
You're misconstruing what I said— nowhere in the constitution is a student visa a “right” to a citizen or not. But subjecting a non-citizen to a potentially unreasonable search while exempting regular citizens is likely against the 4th and 5th amendments (due process + unreasonable searches). Of course, “unreasonable” depends on the court’s interpretation.

Some Supreme Court decisions—

Bridges v. Wixon, 326 U.S. 135 (1945)

> freedom of speech and of press is accorded aliens residing in this country.

Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202 (1982)

> constitutional protections extend to “all persons” within the U.S, including undocumented immigrants.
by BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 | 2025-05-27 18:39:52+00:00
Axial flow made more demands on metallurgy of the time than centrifugal flow. The Viscount was the first turbine powered civil aircraft using RR Darts with two centrifugal compressor stages.

I enjoyed flying on the Viscount. It offered a much nicer passenger experience than the current crop of sardine cans.

Decades later I got in a lot of time flying the simulator that Air Canada donated to a tech school.

http://www.vickersviscount.net/Pages_Technical/Rolls-RoyceDa...
by wildzzz | 2025-05-27 18:41:27+00:00
They even did that on the original Xbox. The first year of consoles didn't have Xbox Live and therefore had no knowledge of the service to obtain updates, dashboard updates were delivered on games that used Xbox Live. For that first year, the only thing the Ethernet port was used for was LAN games (and WAN games with private networks). To my knowledge, dashboard updates were only delivered with games but title updates and DLC could be downloaded over the internet.
by hedgehog | 2025-05-27 18:41:35+00:00
Bringing this back to startups, which hubs seem likely to benefit most from this policy direction? It seems likely a lot of students will choose (or be forced) to go elsewhere, places like London, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Vancouver could take up some of the tech-trajectory students and end up with stronger startup ecosystems as a result. I imagine we have a lot of non-US founders here, for the benefit of those of us without that experience what's it been like building in your city?

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/se...

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/ar...
by incomingpain | 2025-05-27 18:41:52+00:00
Up here in Canada, maintenance of way railway workers use flamethrowers to melt train switches often in the winter. Whereas a snowblower will tend not to do the job.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSpDPGTUZCk

Some places, especially yards, will tend to have them built in.
by endtime | 2025-05-27 18:42:06+00:00
I hope what this policy amounts to is declining visas to students who support proscribed terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hizballah, broadcast blood libels, harass Jewish students on campus, etc. I had a foreign (Pakistani) student tell me, to my face, "I don't like you because you're a Jew." -- in front of a group of mutual friends, who awkwardly laughed it off as if he must have been joking. It's _not_ about mere criticism of Israeli policy or war doctrine, and pretending it is seems to be a new popular misperception on both the far left and the far right.

This was a very real thing when I was an undergrad, and it's surely much worse today. I have family with long histories of attending Ivy League schools, and their seniors are no longer applying to those schools, entirely over antisemitism.

If American universities were 1/3 populated by, say, Russian students with a high propensity for harassing gay students, implying that all gay people are predators, etc., I think the left-leaning commenters here would take a very different perspective.
by colinnordin | 2025-05-27 18:42:17+00:00
I'm really glad to hear that! Two things I've thought about that would probably make the process even smoother:

- Create cards directly from camera input in the app.

- Create multiple cards from a source text, so that she can just supply a text body and the llm figures out what is important, and then the user can just discard cards they do not find useful.
by pmarreck | 2025-05-27 18:42:22+00:00
AI makes it completely defensible these days, as long as you have some "dev intuition".

Example: Someone just handed me a USB key with some old DOS software on it called SAGE made by a company which disappeared in 2011 (which apparently still powers a number of law offices... shocker), and they encountered a date handling issue (any case entered for 2026 borks some views and reports) and I'm facing either a decompilation or some other heavy analysis (none of which I'm familiar with) since the source code is obviously unobtainable (score another for open source? Seriously, when companies sink, they should be required to release their source code...). I'm not doing this for free, of course (I did tell them that failure was a distinct possibility), but I'm going to attack it with AI and rely on dev intuition for the rest and see what happens... (and use some kind of test harness, of course... to prevent regressions and prove the fixes)
by bradchris | 2025-05-27 18:42:36+00:00
Being subject to unreasonable searches likely does, still. Depends on what is “reasonable” or not, but just because they’re applying for a status does not mean they give up their right to unreasonable searches and detainment.

Note: US Embassies, where interviews are often conducted, are still considered US soil subject to US laws (otherwise the latest declaration from Trump pausing them would not apply to them)
by miki123211 | 2025-05-27 18:42:49+00:00
An LLM is not (and will never be) like a human.

There's an extremely large number of humans, all slightly different, each vulnerable to slightly different attack patterns. All of these humans have some capability to learn from attacks they see, and avoid them in the future.

LLMs are different, as there's only a smart number of flagship models in wide use. An attack on model A at company X will usually work just as well on a completely different deployment of model A at company Y. Furthermore, each conversation with the LLM is completely separate, so hundreds of slightly different attacks can be tested until you find one that works.

If CS departments were staffed by thousands of identical human clones, each one decommissioned at the end of the workday and restored from the same checkpoint each morning, social engineering would be a lot easier. That's where we are with LLMs.

The right approach here is to adopt much more stringent security practices. Dispense with role-based access control, adopt context-based access control instead.

For example, an LLM tasked with handling a customer support request should be empowered with the permissions to handle just that request, not with all the permissions that a CS rep could ever need. It should be able to access customer details, but only for the customer that opened the case. Maybe it should even be forced to classify what kind of case it is handling, and be given a set of tools appropriate for that kind of case, permanently locking it out of other tools that would be extremely destructive in combination.
by ceejayoz | 2025-05-27 18:43:18+00:00
Uh...

https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcri...

> No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.

> No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

"it applied to all residents of the US…"

Slaves? Native Americans?
by abeppu | 2025-05-27 18:43:50+00:00
> I’m pretty sure the men who actually wrote the first amendment would have been strongly against any non-European foreigner being educated in America, let alone those among them with anti-American views.

Is there any example of colonial or early federal period governmental actions demanding that anyone make a record of all of their correspondence available for review to determine whether they had anti-American views? Even at the level of senate confirmations, did the standard of "we should be able to check that you never wrote anything which we view as unacceptable" ever turn up? Bear in mind that for years after the fight for independence, many of them lived in communities where they knew and interacted with former British loyalists, so this wasn't an idle concern.

I think a bunch of them were on record making very broad statements in defense of personal liberties, and a bunch of them had been accused by the crown of being treasonous based on stuff they had written, so one could understand them being _not_ on the same page of creating punishments for categories of speech.

> Pornography being protected by the first amendment is another example that is pretty straightforwardly against the original spirit.

Is it? My understanding is anti-obscenity laws at the federal level in the US really go back to the Comstock act in the 1870s, i.e. the founders and multiple generations after them didn't attempt to ban porn. I think it's entirely consistent to believe that the founders didn't imagine that a government had any business making such stipulations.
by TrackerFF | 2025-05-27 18:43:59+00:00
I think everyone with a working brain will know that once this sort of vetting starts, it will usher through a host of other keywords that they will search for.

But let's forget that for a second, and talk about the present. How do you define an "activist"?

Lengthy blogs on certain topics?

Heated debates on facebook?

A temporarily "I stand with Palestine" profile picture?

A facebook like on any newspaper article that's negative toward Israel?
by skydhash | 2025-05-27 18:44:09+00:00
> superior in some areas, inferior in others, with the balance changing with technological advancement.

So what are the areas that AI are superior to traditional programming? If your answer is suggestion, then refinement with traditional tooling, then it's just a workflow addon like contextual help, google search, and github code search. And I prefer the others because they are more reliable.

We have six major phases in the software development lifecycle: 1) Planning, 2) Analysis, 3) Design, 4) Implementation, 5) Testing, 6) Maintenance. I failed to see how LLM assistance is objectively better even in part than not having it at all. Everything I've read is mostly anecdote where the root cause is inexperience and lack of knowledge.
by degrees57 | 2025-05-27 18:44:10+00:00
I donate to FutureMe.org because I like the service, and want to see it continue. I used to be able to schedule a monthly donation through Paypal (I think), but something happened, and now I have to remember to send a donation out every year.

My other donations go out monthly to Internet Archive, EFF, and Thunderbird.

There for a while, The TOR Project had a thing where I could contribute by running (paying for) a node on a hosting provider (I think it might have been AWS?). That effort died on the vine and was shut down.

For content creators, I donate to Phoronix.
by dfxm12 | 2025-05-27 18:44:11+00:00
On first pass, it seems vague enough to border on click bait. Shallow compared to what? No knowledge? Adept knowledge? Expert knowledge? Is the argument we should intentionally stop at "shallow"? Why isn't this clear?

But, with the added context that it's from a personal blog, we should give the benefit of the doubt that the author is just not good at writing headlines and give the article a shot on its own merits...
by zamalek | 2025-05-27 18:44:25+00:00
My way of thinking about this has been: code is to a developer as bricks are to a builder. Writing a line of code is merely the final 10% of the work, there's a whole bunch of cognitive effort that precedes it. Just like a builder has already established a blueprint, set up straight lines, mixed cement, and what-have-you, prioir to laying a brick.
by dugmartin | 2025-05-27 18:45:01+00:00
fyi, I've done something similar and the cleanest method for leader election is to use the web locks api:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Locks_A...

It is supported by all browsers. You just have all the tabs try to lock the same resource and have them return a promise in the lock callback. The first one wins and when that tab closes the next one in line gets automatically elected.

The leader can then use a broadcast channel and act as a server for all the other tabs to serialize access to any shared resources.
by twic | 2025-05-27 18:45:17+00:00
The Black Redstart evolved to live in holes in cliffs and the like, and never used to be widespread in the UK. After the second world war, cities all over the south were bombed out, and they moved into the deserted, derelict bombed areas in great numbers. As the bomb sites were cleared and the cities redeveloped, their habitat was eroded. But at the same time, Britain was de-industrialising, and they moved into the abandoned factories in the North. As those now get redeveloped, they are losing their habitat again.
by miki123211 | 2025-05-27 18:45:38+00:00
Web search is mostly fine, as long as you can only access pre-indexed URLs, and as long as you consider the search provider not to be in with the attacker.

It would be even better if web content was served from cache (to make side channels based on request patterns much harder to construct), but the anti-copyright-infringement crowd would probably balk at that idea.
by Teever | 2025-05-27 18:45:49+00:00
The chilling effect that this is going to have will have blowback consequences for the Social Media industry and the surveillance community that work lockstep to get people to share personal details and opinions in public online environments.

It'll take a while but people will start hiding their political beliefs and actions as a reaction to this and then the culture of oversharing may change.

This will ultimately be detrimental to national security as the US won't be able to so readily determine who is radical and who may potentially become radicalized.
Show HN: I made an open-source synthetic text datasets generator
by astropat | 2025-05-27 18:46:21+00:00
Many LLMs projects suffers due to the lack of custom datasets:

- no labelled data at all

- lack coverage and diversity in existing data

- Data collection and annotation processes are slow and boring

- Not enough examples to fine-tune or evaluate LLMs…

So I built datafast, an open-source library for synthetic text datasets generation.

Right now it supports 5 datasets types:

- Text Classification Dataset

- Raw Text Generation Dataset

- Instruction Dataset (Ultrachat-like)

- Multiple Choice Question (MCQ) Dataset

- Preference Dataset

And more to come.

Currently supported LLM providers for generation are:

- OpenAI

- Anthropic

- Google Gemini

- Ollama (local LLM server)

There is more to come but I am not in a rush for features. I seek data quality, data diversity and reliability over quantity. I don't measure success by shipping more features: I succeed if it works when you try it out, and if you actually use it.

Hope you like that!
by weitendorf | 2025-05-27 18:46:27+00:00
My company is working on a similar tool to Cline, and we had an intern project last summer to create a tool for AI-for-coding RAG: https://github.com/accretional/semantifly

Ultimately we came to a similar conclusion and put the project on ice: chunking and vector similarity search are fundamentally not great approaches for code RAG.

I don't really agree with most of Cline's other assertions because those are pretty easy to work around (I suspect they may just be content slop?). It's pretty easy to vectorize and re-chunk code as you change it as long as you have a fixed way of encoding vectors, and you can also generate indices or do more expensive changes to encoding as part of your CI/CD. Indices can be stored in your git repo itself so theres not really a security risk either. Our tool made this pretty easy to do. An index can literally just be a file.

No, the problem is really that vector search (especially with a-kNN) is fundamentally a fuzzy/lossy kind of search, and even when the vector search part works perfectly, your choice of k will usually either include more information than you intend or miss information that didn't meet the top-K threshold. And naive implementations that don't add additional context or are unconditionally searching based on your prompt will probably bias or confuse your model with code that might seem relevant but isn't (eg if you are trying to debug deployments, you include a bunch of your code related to deployments, but the bug is in the application code, and also you have a bunch of deployment scripts in your codebase that are for different platforms and are extra irrelevant).

It's significantly more work to make a vector based approach to code-RAG actually good than it is to get a naive implementation working. We have a different approach to Cline but it's similar in that it uses things like references and how the developer actually understands their codebase.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-27 18:47:08+00:00
> what this policy amounts to is declining visas to students who support proscribed terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hizballah, broadcast blood libels, harass Jewish students, on campus, etc.

I dressed up as Ghadaffi in college for a party. Not because I knew almost anything about the man. But because it was edgy and adolescent brains are dumb, particularly when male. Plenty of students who will go on to be good and productive members of society hold stupid views now, possibly most given the state of scial media.

This move, in particular, comes across as in particularly bad faith inasmuch as it's being done by the man who pardoned the January 6th nutters. Actual violent criminals subscribing to terrorist tactics.
by InsideOutSanta | 2025-05-27 18:47:29+00:00
I think the Mac got this right (before Mac OS X) and has since screwed it up. Every file had both a creator code and a type code. So, for every file, you would know which application created it and also which format it was.

So, double-clicking the file opened it in the application it was made in, but the Mac would also know which other applications could open that file.
by pistoriusp | 2025-05-27 18:48:50+00:00
Nope! They just return standard JavaScript.

A typical worker looks something like this:

export default { fetch({ request }) { return new Response('ok') } }

DefineApp just wraps that initial entry point into something that allows us to run middleware, match the router, and render out the page or the response object.

Love that you're a fan! Remember... No magicians allowed here.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-27 18:49:08+00:00
> there's an argument to be made that importing talent doesn't necessarily make _America_ (or its citizens) stronger, but just the owners of a handful of mostly privately owned American corporations

I can argue that cows are hats, that doesn't mean the evidence [1] supports it.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09275...
by mleonhard | 2025-05-27 18:49:17+00:00
Looking at the paper, it seems like they put some silicon-dioxide nanoparticles on a substrate, then add a plastic (poly-ethylene) layer on top and melt it (annealing). The spaces between the nanoparticles gets partially filled with plastic. The ratio of plastic to particles is the poly-ethylene volume fraction (ϕPE). They tested different fractions and found that a certain range caused the wetting behavior.

Their experiments suggest that tiny water droplets appear inside the material at 70% RH (relative humidity). If this is true, then I expect there is a way to extract the droplets using very little energy. Ideas:

- make open collection points on the film

- use ultrasound to bounce the droplets around and consolidate them

- make the film on a material that can be saturated with water so the new droplets can easily join the flow

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volume_fraction