MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mschuster91 | 2025-06-05 20:25:34+00:00
Up until the Soviet era, a lot of the natural resources Afghanistan has simply were not relevant, or maybe that fits it better, there were easier ways to acquire them than a country thousands of road (!) miles away from the powers that were.

The Soviets wanted Afghanistan for imperialist reasons, during the first Taliban era there were enough other sources that were more convenient, the Americans lacked the conviction and coherence to follow through... and now the Chinese are swooping in with money.
by vstoi_can | 2025-06-05 20:25:41+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m one of the founders of MCP-Cloud. We host Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers so you can add tool-calling abilities to LLM agents without touching Docker, Kubernetes, or cloud credentials.

Why we built it

The MCP spec (open-sourced by Anthropic) standardises how an AI agent calls external tools, but you still have to run an MCP server for every tool you want. That means containers, TLS, auth, scaling, etc.—work most AI/automation devs don’t want to handle.

What it does

- 50+ ready-made templates (GitHub, Slack, Postgres, Notion, etc.) - < 60 s deploy – click Deploy, get a live HTTPS endpoint - JWT-secured + SSE streaming out of the box

Copy the code snippet into Claude Desktop, n8n, Cursor, VS Code, Windsurf —or any client that speaks HTTP + SSE

Ask HN:

Does this remove enough friction to make MCP useful in your projects?

Which templates/workflows should we add next?

Thoughts on the pricing model (usage-based after the free tier)?

We’d love feedback—from “this solved my problem” to “here’s why I wouldn’t use it.” Thanks for reading and for any comments!
by Shmungus | 2025-06-05 20:25:55+00:00
Thanks for the feedback. ANGELCORE is definitely a speculative, exploratory project, so it’s naturally not as grounded as my other work. I also have more traditional, technically solid projects like an LLM hallucination detector, a fragrance AI chatbot, and a machine learning model that predicts daily SEC filing numbers, all of which are finished and fully functional.

ANGELCORE is more of a grand platform where I’m trying to combine a wide range of ideas, from biology to symbolic AI to physics—into something new. I appreciate the call to clarity and will keep working on making the concrete aspects easier to see alongside the vision.
by mdip | 2025-06-05 20:27:01+00:00
So these are popping up everywhere, then?

I have two within five miles of my house. They've both been there over a year, probably a bit longer. I'm in a mid-western US suburb, mostly blue-colllar/manufacturing employers around here. And there's a "Red Tag" store (similar) which is very obviously trying to pass off that they sell Target returns/over-stock. It's across the street from -- surprise -- a Target!

Of the two "bin" stores, nearby, one is much larger/newer. The bigger one starts off at $7 on Saturday at noon, dropping to a buck by the following Friday. There is a loooooong line. I think they started selling memberships or something along those lines to let you have the first spots in said line (or maybe get in a little early). They sell other, higher-dollar items, but I've walked out of there on a Saturday with a portable pump for $7 that was selling for $60 on Amazon (it was worth about $20 IMHO). There's a reason people line up.

They also sell $35 random (sealed) boxes (and I think you can buy 4 for $100 or some kind of arrangement like that). I've never seen the contents of these boxes. It looks like most of these businesses stock returns from, mostly, Amazon but also others which they buy in lots. I'm not sure the mechanics of it but I'm sure another comment has an explanation by now.

Searching "Surplus" on Google Maps surfaced the two I found (with identical models) as well as one an hour away that didn't do the "bin" arrangement, but dealt in larger items. I purchased an ultra-wide monitor for $400, there (about $350 off the best price when I bought it).

Personally, I love these spots. There is such a massive stock of returns that you can almost rely on showing up at one of these places and having a pretty good chance of finding what you need, it just takes a little more effort.
by taylodl | 2025-06-05 20:27:22+00:00
Thing is, Musk's DOGE team was hoovering a lot of data - and folks on the left were concerned about that, though the folks on the right tended to pooh-pooh the issue. Now that Musk is rogue, everybody should be concerned. We have no idea what data and information Musk has, and this administration has been so slipshod with respect to information management and following proper protocols I wouldn't be surprised if they don't turn around and deem Musk a national security threat.
by recursive | 2025-06-05 20:27:45+00:00
Sometimes I try to do stuff with AI. Results are mixed. Sometimes it's somewhat helpful. Sometimes it's a complete waste of time. Maybe that means I'm holding it wrong. In the end, it's probably a wash for me. Maybe slightly positive.

I don't understand these people that are saying they are getting huge value from LLMs. I haven't put a ton of effort into figuring out how to "hold it right" because stuff is changing so fast still. I've had bad experiences with rabbit holes like this where the true believers will tell me the pot of gold is always right around the next corner. If and when I can get some positive value out it using whatever's easily available on the default, then I might investigate deeper.

My experience mostly consists of GPT and Copilot, as provided by my employer. I'm part of a pilot program to evaluate Copilot. My feedback is that it's slightly positive in agggregate, but individual results are very mixed. It's not worth much to me.
by kentonv | 2025-06-05 20:28:24+00:00
The author goes into great detail about how he looked at my commit log[0] where I used AI, and he found it "nauseating" and concluded he'd never want to work that way.

I'm certainly not going to tell anyone that they're wrong if they try AI and don't like it! But this guy... did not try it? He looked at a commit log, tried to imagine what my experience was like, and then decided he didn't like that? And then he wrote about it?

Folks, it's really not that hard to actually try it. There is no learning curve. You just run the terminal app in your repo and you ask it to do things. Please, I beg you, before you go write walls of text about how much you hate the thing, actually try it, so that you actually have some idea what you're talking about.

Six months ago, I myself imagined that I would hate AI-assisted coding! Then I tried it. I found out a lot of things that surprised me, and it turns out I don't hate it as much as I thought.

[0] https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-oauth-provider/commits... (link to oldest commits so you can browse in order; newer commits are not as interesting)
by drdeca | 2025-06-05 20:29:23+00:00
Regarding gatekeeping, there was one webforum I used to visit when I was a kid, which I think approached this in an interesting way. Most of the boards were available to the public, general users could post in them (other than the one that announced rules of course), but there was a subforum which could only be accessed by those who had demonstrated some minimum level of competency. Specifically this was a forum about programs for bots for a for-kids MMO (said MMO didn’t really have PVP that depended or gear or levels or anything, or a way of trading items or anything like that, so there wasn’t any player economy. So I think these cheats were pretty harmless. Well, except for the people making bots move in arrangements to make offensive symbols.). The process was, one could submit a program one had made that did something interesting, and they would judge whether it was sufficient to be allowed in to the subforum.

I think this had the benefits of:

• allowing people who don’t want to bother with newbies to not have to, if they stay in the subforum

• still having the places for “people who are skilled and willing to work with/help newbies” and “people who are skilled but don’t want to deal with newbies much” be in a sense the same place, while also having the place for the latter be the same as a place for newbies.

• provides an incentive for newbies to become skilled.

_____

Of course, this method doesn’t work if no one is willing to engage with the newbies. But I think it’s probably fine/reasonable to keep outsiders away from a few things provided that there is a reasonable path in.

Though, I’m not advocating that the approach that forum used be implemented everywhere. I just think it is something that a community could reasonably choose, depending on their priorities.
by hxorr | 2025-06-05 20:29:40+00:00
This is wrong. As another commentator pointed out,the body processes fructose differently from sucrose.

As for honey (and fruit, for that matter) - they are full of beneficial compounds that help your body regulate blood sugar.

To illustrate this, someone I know of with type I diabetes who ate natural honey didn't need to inject as much insulin as when eating commercially processed/heated honey - those beneficial compounds are destroyed during the process. Same for fruit vs fruit juice...
by inglor_cz | 2025-06-05 20:30:02+00:00
We have studied hunters and gatherers which survived into recent times and they indeed seem to be very metabolically healthy. "Starvation" is a strong word, but they certainly don't live in a world of plenty and tend to be lean.

What you are describing is so-called "thrifty gene hypothesis", it makes a lot of sense, but it hasn't been corroborated by actual genomic observations yet.
by dragonwriter | 2025-06-05 20:30:17+00:00
> And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing.

Drones don't remove people from the battlefield, they further the trend of there being no boundary to "the battlefield", putting everyone on it.

They can, depending on how they are employed, reduce the casualties (total and particularly civilian) on both sides of a conflict for any degree of military impact (Ukraine's recent strike against Russian bombers is an example), or they can increase the civilian death toll for marginal military impact (the accounts of Israeli gun- and missile-armed drones directly targeting civilians in Gaza being an example of what that could look like.)
by skrtskrt | 2025-06-05 20:30:41+00:00
I tend to agree with this basic argument that feckless do-nothing liberalism leads to fascism. If the existing power structure is actively, visibly, constantly working to make people's lives better than fascist messaging is far less effective.

I do think that our current brand of fascism has completely skipped the "make some things better to prove the superiority of our ideology" stage (e.g. "Mussolini made the trains run on time" type stuff.) To say they are actually addressing problems is an absurdity. They can't even cut overall spending like they claim they would. They simply have to use their tens of thousands of media outlets and social media bots to convince people to not believe their eyes while things visibly and rapidly deteriorate.
by Spivak | 2025-06-05 20:31:31+00:00
I mean sure, he's not wrong. The downstream browsers are dependent on upstream for security patches but they're getting them. Waterfox ships security fixes less than 48 hours behind upstream and has occasionally has shipped security fixes before Firefox. I guess just do your homework when picking a downstream browser.

I don't think downstream browsers are trying to do anything other than strip out some user-unfriendly aspects like ads and make some minor superficial changes. I still am in shock Mozilla actually put ads in the URL bar.
by TimTheTinker | 2025-06-05 20:31:32+00:00
Thanks for the links. Your content on how LLMs are built is excellent.

> Those new tools and techniques are the future of software development.

If that's the case, you may have to count me out. I'm glad to use LLMs to automate the easy/boring parts out, but I'm not outsourcing my technical creativity -- that's a significant part of who I am as a human. If that means I'm out of a job, so be it. My body is slowing down in middle age, but if I had to choose, I'd rather finish my working years breaking my back in the trades serving people in ways that are meaningful to both me and my customers.
by aurizon | 2025-06-05 20:31:54+00:00
In essence, you and others see the impending crash - others do not? Analyse your role and, what made it 'sink', and determine if the 'holes' are terminal or if they can be patched and the ship saved - this assumes you know chapter/verse of the cause(s). This inside data might be of value to any potential 'White Knight' saviour to see if there is a save possible, and if not what can be built from the scrap metal - at whatever stage. This might allow you to craft a better role with your detailed knowledge - even an enduring role at a relaunch or with the use made of the parts. Your conclusions might be of value to the captain who steered them onto the rocks - or he might want to hand you an anchor to help you swim. The best defence is your own network and help delay the plunge and see how these options fan out. As others say, provision your own lifeboat as well and keep it ready as long as the cook is still feeding the crew in the gally. You are not alone, various startups have failed over the years - small/large. Their histories are probably archived in HN and will offer insights/connections. Good Luck.!!
by alterom | 2025-06-05 20:33:44+00:00
The control panel doesn't need to reach all corners.

Just enough corners to cover day-to-day usability so that new users would be able to help themselves if they get stumped.

That set of corners has been pretty much covered by Windows 95 when it comes to the GUI.

For tweakability, command-line interface isn't unfriendly — the commands are.

People love talking to ChatGPT. This tells you how friendly typing interface is.

I'm not saying that natural language processing should necessarily be a feature of the interface (although it could make a lot of things much smoother), but FFS, an interactive dialogue-based CLI is a much friendlier thing than "figure out the right incantation" paradigm.
by jessoteric | 2025-06-05 20:33:51+00:00
isn't the issue that sometimes a given scanner can't know from where the package is sourced?

like if I'm scanning an arbitrary linux system, and I see `libssl.so.1` but I don't see it in the local package manager, I don't really have an option other than to call it generic.

I do agree that "generic" seems to be WAY overused though. Maybe tools that report on SBOMs, like FOSSA or whatever, should emit warnings to users about "generic" PURLs.
by Tallain | 2025-06-05 20:34:11+00:00
A small difference at small levels but one which obviously matters when it's shoved into countless foods without most people event realizing. It's not just in soda and candy; it's in bread, pasta, almost any processed food (crackers, ketchups and other sauces, canned fruit, applesauce, lunch meat, peanut butter, the list goes on) and many foods one might not considered processed.

It makes sense to try to eliminate it even though it's "only" a small difference. Might as well remove the difference at all and look out for things with no HFCS shoved in it for no reason.
by dingnuts | 2025-06-05 20:34:40+00:00
I think the people who are in denial about the uselessness of these tools are in for a bad time.

I've been playing with language models for seven years now. I've even trained them from scratch. I'm playing with aider and I use the chats.

I give them lots of context and ask specific questions about things I know. They always get things wrong in subtle ways that make me not trust them for things I don't know. Sometimes they can point me to real documentation.

gemma3:4b on my laptop with aider can merge a diff in about twenty minutes of 4070 GPU time. incredible technology. truly groundbreaking.

call me in ten years if they figure out how to scale these things without just adding 10x compute for each 1x improvement.

I mean hell, the big improvements over the last year aren't even to do with learning. Agents are just systems code. RAG is better prompting. System prompts are just added context. call me when GPT 5 drops, and isn't an incremental improvement
by byt3bl33d3r | 2025-06-05 20:35:54+00:00
100% agree on the impact of it on research. It's pretty obvious that it'll accelerate 0day discovery but standard defense in depth strategies prepare you for 0day vulns against your org.

It will be extremely interesting to see how vulnerability discovery evolves with LLMs but the whole "sky is falling hide your kids" hype cycle is ludicrous.
by batrat | 2025-06-05 20:36:23+00:00
What I like about Gemini is the search function that is very very good compared to others. I was blown away when I asked to compose me an email for a company that was sending spam to our domain. It literally searched and found not only the abuse email of the hosting company but all the info about the domain and the host(mx servers, ip owners, datacenters, etc.). Also if you want to convert a research paper into a podcast it did it instantly for me and it's fun to listen.
by luckylion | 2025-06-05 20:36:41+00:00
I don't think that necessarily follows from what they said. Apple might charge, much like grocery stores, for exposure (i.e. ads, which they also do), or they might charge the consumer a fee.

They shouldn't be a permanent middle man between consumer and manufacturer is what I took away from that comment. The app stores are only money printers because they are (largely) exclusive on their platforms. Would users and developers choose Apple's app store and its hefty fees if there was fair competition? Possibly, but likely not at the same conditions Apple can dictate today.
by globular-toast | 2025-06-05 20:37:30+00:00
HTTPS doesn't care about IP addresses. It's all based on domain names. You can get a certificate for any domain you own. You can also set said domain to resolve to any address you like, including a "local" one.

NAT has rotted people's brains unfortunately. RFC 1918 is not really the way to tell if something is "local" or not. 25 years ago I had 4 publicly routable IPv4 addresses. All 4 of these were "local" to me despite also being publicly routable.

An IP address is local if you can resolve it and don't have to communicate via a router.

It seems too far gone, though. People seem unable to separate RFC 1918 from the concept of "local network".
by treetalker | 2025-06-05 20:37:42+00:00
A further irony is that, for US citizens, doing so has an increased likelihood of the federal government (through the NSA and FISA) having grounds to intercept, monitor, and store your data "legally" without a warrant (it claims).

<insert obvious but judicially ignored logic that FISA violates the letter and spirit of the Fourth Amendment>
by inglor_cz | 2025-06-05 20:37:52+00:00
Given the "successes" of various prohibitions and wars on drugs all around the world, I don't think this is going to work, at least not with major unintended consequences (hello sugar-smuggling gangs with machetes!). People are really good at trafficking banned substances.

Treating addiction as a disease would probably be less violent and less likely to produce major human rights violations.

There is a middle road of simply taxing highly processed foodstuff more without banning it outright, but that also creates perverse incentives for governments which now have a source of income that they don't want to jeopardize.
by layer8 | 2025-06-05 20:38:15+00:00
For most applications, we don’t want “functionally identical”. We do not want it to have its own desires and a will of its own, biological(-analogous) needs, having a circadian rhythm, getting tired and needing sleep, being subject to mood changes and emotional swings, feeling pain, having a sexual drive, needing recognition and validation, and so on. So we don’t want to copy the neural and bodily correlates that give rise to those phenomena, which arguably are not essential to how the human brain manages to have the intelligence it has. That is likely to drastically change the ethics of it. We will have to learn more about how those things work in the brain to avoid the undesirables.
by verall | 2025-06-05 20:38:38+00:00
I think it's just very dependent on what you're doing. Claude 3.5/3.7 Sonnet (thinking or not) were just absolutely terrible at almost anything I asked of it (C/C++/Make/CMake). Like constantly giving wrong facts, generating code that could never work, hallucinating syntax and APIs, thinking about something then concluding the opposite, etc. Gemini 2.5-pro and o3 (even old o1-preview, o1-mini) were miles better. I haven't used Claude 4 yet.

But everyone is using them for different things and it doesn't always generalize. Maybe Claude was great at typescript or ruby or something else I don't do. But for some of us, it definitely was not astroturf for Gemini. My whole team was talking about how much better it was.
by mwcampbell | 2025-06-05 20:38:49+00:00
He explained why he hasn't tried it in the section "The Challenge". Also see footnote 21, which says that what he called his "quirky constraints" in the main text are really bedrock ethical concerns. I respect him a great deal for not compromising on these.

Edit to add: Full disclosure: I've been a fan of his writing and work for a long time anyway, and am a supporter on Patreon.
by mikestew | 2025-06-05 20:39:42+00:00
Every time the New York Times publishes a health-related article, the comment section is filled with comments just like this: just self-congratulations without any useful takeaways for anyone else, and zero self-awareness that would enable them to realize, hey, not everyone is like me.

Whenever one feels tempted to utter “it’s all in your head”, my advice is to take a step back and reflect on how little I know about the circumstances of others, and then, you know, maybe just keep it to myself.
by pama | 2025-06-05 20:40:34+00:00
Lots of the numbers here are confusing in relation to other numbers…

“The researchers found that just under 3% of people in the UK, France and Germany, and 4% of those in the US have MASH, but diagnosis rates were below 18%. That means about 20 million people in the US, UK, Germany and France are living with MASH but only 2.5 million people have a diagnosis, leaving more than three-quarters – about 16.7 million people – unaware they have the condition.”

2.5/20 is 12.5%, which is under 18% but a very weird and specifc way to put it; 16.7 is more than 3/4 of 20 indeed (by a lot), but adding 2.5 to 16.7 is about 19 not about 20. This just all seems randomly off in various ways that make little sense to me. Anyone has any good theory how such sentences escape editorial edits, or can find a simple typo or two that make this paragraph coherent again?
by buserror | 2025-06-05 20:40:38+00:00
I am absolutely amazed at the amount of garbage being "logged", enough that it is not just a huge business, but also one of the primary task for some devops guys. It's like a goal in itself, you have a look at the output and it is absolutely scary, HUGE messages being "logged" for purpose unknown.

I've seen single traces over 100KB of absolute pure randomness encoded as base64... Because! Oh and also, we have to pay for the service, so it looks important.

Sure they tell you it is super helpful for debugging issues, but in a VERY large proportion of cases, it is 1) WAY too much, and 2) never used anyway. And most of the time what's interesting is the last 10 minutes of the debug version, you don't need a "service" for that.

/me gets down his horse :-)
by db48x | 2025-06-05 20:40:59+00:00
It’s true that most Americans are lazy and do not pay sufficient attention in school. Thus the observation of nuances such as this are becoming rarer every day.

Do you pronounce the “oo” in “coordination” the same way as you do in “bookkeeper”? Because that is a very weird mispronunciation. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/coordination