MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by HumanOstrich | 2025-06-28 21:39:15+00:00
I don't understand what you mean.

> It (the main benefit?) is the LLM itself, if it knows how to wield tools.

LLMs and their ability to use tools are not a benefit or feature that arose from MCP. There has been tool usage/support with various protocols and conventions way before MCP.

MCP doesn't have any novel aspects that are making it successful. It's relatively simple and easy to understand (for humans), and luck was on Anthropic's side. So people were able to quickly write many kinds of MCP servers and it exploded in popularity.

Interoperability and interconnecting tools, APIs, and models across providers are the main benefits of MCP, driven by its wide-scale adoption.
by idle_zealot | 2025-06-28 21:39:25+00:00
> a) invest more and more energy into self-promotion, advertisement, etc. (zero- or negative-sum games)

How is advertising a book you've written and are selling different than advertising your writing or skills to potential patrons and clients with regard to being negative-sum?

b) flat out give a part of their income to people who are already richer than them?

Who said anything about the relative wealth or patrons and authors? People seem totally willing to subscribe to people whose creative output they value. Sometimes such patronage is barely enough to live, sometimes it's an impressive total sum.
by Bender | 2025-06-28 21:40:24+00:00
DSN's Delivery Status Notifications are absolutely useful otherwise they never would have been created. Read-replies and out of office auto-replies that reply to non corporate primary domains are used to validate email addresses for spammers. Even DSN's can be abused this way. Older versions of Exchange would not limit out-of-office replies to the corporate domains.

One can drop read-replies and even out-of-office auto-replies without dropping specific DSN's. It is up to each organization how they wish to handle these. Some financial institutions will go full BOFH Bastard Operator from Hell, like me and some will cherry pick what goes through such as limiting responses to employees. Some will let everything through to justify the purchase of their anti-spam, anti-malware third party service. I was brought into existence in the 2150th level of hell.

So that is the cool thing about such rules is that one can cherry pick whichever meets the needs and requirements of their organization and this is just the beginning of what one can do. The first step in this process is to enable logging of Subjects, Attachment Names / Sizes, FCrDNS and others to syslog then start building reports to see what is leaking out of ones organization and what nonsense is flooding ones organization. Some DLP's Data Loss Prevention appliances can do some of this too but they can be pricey and may leak data to yet another third party. As a proper BOFH I keep logs in-house. Logging to a third party can get extra painful with newer privacy laws in some countries.

I always front-end exchange servers with multiple Postfix servers with large queues so that work can be done without losing things, extra logging can be enabled and extra anti-spam capabilities can be enabled or added.
by carlosjobim | 2025-06-28 21:40:26+00:00
Then don't make a company with shares. This is like complaining in a tennis court that it's better to play football. Anybody who makes his business a company with shares will be beholden to shareholders, even if he's the only shareholder. There are plenty of venues for any activity, which isn't structured in this way.

1. Nobody forces you to use a smart phone. 2. Nobody forces you to have social media or use it. 3. Nobody forces you to watch Netflix.

We all choose what we do in life.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-28 21:41:12+00:00
It’s absolutely the case that Hamas hasn’t sued for peace with unconditional surrender. (Or recognised that the hostages confer leverage on Israel, not themselves.) Both Hamas and Israel remain belligerents in this conflict until one of them withdraws or surrenders, that’s just how war works.

There are a lot of atrocities being committed in this conflict. But bombing a school that was used as a missile launch site really isn’t one of them.
by zbentley | 2025-06-28 21:42:30+00:00
Quality of engineering and longevity of the company producing the engineered product have nothing to do with each other.

Evaluated by how useful they are to society at large, many businesses should not exist forever--or even for very long. Xerox PARC, Kodak, and Netscape are examples of companies (or, in PARC's case, a division of a company) that contributed significantly to their fields before becoming defunct. Those contributions aren't worsened or inferior, somehow, because the companies that engineered them are gone.

Whether or not a company is still in business only tells you whether a company is good at keeping itself alive. Over time, that quality is increasingly disconnected from whether a company produces valuable goods or services.
by iainmerrick | 2025-06-28 21:42:32+00:00
I can assure you that Satie’s music was very, very well-known and popular (even though most people wouldn’t recognise his name) long before YouTube existed.

Most people don’t intentionally listen to 100-year-old music, sure, but you’re underestimating how much we absorb this stuff as background music in ads, movies, TV shows etc.

Most classical music is very niche but a few pieces become cornerstones of popular culture -- think of “flight of the bumblebee” or the William Tell overture. Satie has a disproportionate number of hits. His style is exceptionally simple, distinct and timeless.
by pstuart | 2025-06-28 21:42:43+00:00
Harsh, perhaps, but well deserved (Technology Review used to produce interesting articles back in the day but now just create clickbait, so I'm triggered in this regard).

The reasoning for abandoning it has been communicated as both that thorium technology doesn't align with weapons research, and that working with molten salt at scale is more challenging than water.

I've not seen anything yet that gives details on China's advancements, only that they're actually moving forward with it. I've a notion they are not incentivized to share that information.

Disclaimer: i'm just a random geek on teh interwebs who saw the LFTR Ted Talk way back when and has been waiting for it to deliver the goods for real.
by Aurornis | 2025-06-28 21:43:06+00:00
Late to respond, but here's one such link: https://web.archive.org/web/20130118213127/https://www.overc...

Title of the post is "Hail Scott Siskind" from Robin Hanson's blog Overcoming Bias. This blog was a central point of the early rationalist movement.

Notably, posts like this were scrubbed some time near the New York Times debacle. There was an active effort to scrub mentions of "Siskind" from rationalist adjacent blogs around that time.

It was amazingly effective at rewriting the history. You won't find any mention of the activities to scrub "Siskind" from the rationalist blogs, though.
by 8n4vidtmkvmk | 2025-06-28 21:43:28+00:00
I've been using perl instead of sed because PCRE is just better and it's the same regex that PHP uses which I've been coding in for nearly 20 years. I still don't actually know perl, but apparently Gemini does. It wrote a particularly crazy find and replace for me. Never got around to using or learning awk. Only time I see it come up is when you want to parse some tab delimited output
by martin-t | 2025-06-28 21:43:45+00:00
In fact, if _just taking_ someone else's material possessions (rather than intellectual work) was legal, why would anyone build anything they can't physically protect themselves?

A lot of the people bashing on copyright seem to have no concept of the second order effects abolishing copyright would have and no intention to game it out.

Copyright has issues. For example it protects corporations instead of individual creators and workers. But not having it means rich people who own brands and have access to massive advertising can just take someone's work and make money from it while contributing nothing of value by themselves.
Ask HN: How do you decide what to ship each week as a solo founder?
by five9s | 2025-06-28 21:44:17+00:00
I’ve been building solo for a little while now. Some weeks feel clear. Other weeks, I’m debating between features, user feedback, marketing, and random (but sometimes good) ideas.

There's no real deadlines. It's just me and my partner trying to move things forward and build useful stuff for customers without thrashing between too many directions.

If you’re solo (or part of a tiny team), how do you figure out what’s worth shipping each week?

Do you plan it all Monday morning?

Do you have a goal each week?

Do you just ship what "feels" most urgent?

Curious to hear how others make these calls>?
by troupo | 2025-06-28 21:46:04+00:00
Usually a new feature:

- doesn't require 20+ web specs

- doesn't forget and then scramble to fix the most basic expected functionality like form participation

- doesn't pollute the space so badly that actual useful specs like Scoped CSS are delayed for years because now they have to deal with all the web coponent shenanigans

- hopefully doesn't take 15 years to barely do what others have been doing since time immemorial
by Aurornis | 2025-06-28 21:47:32+00:00
A couple months ago another project claimed to have sped up llama.cpp (IIRC) on the front page of HN, from another green name account.

It gathered hundreds of GitHub stars and was on the front page all day. When some of us finally had time to look at the code we discovered they didn't invent anything new at all. They took some existing command line options for llama.cpp and then changed the wording slightly to make them appear novel.

The strangest part was that everyone who pointed it out was downvoted at first. The first comment to catch it was even flagged away! You couldn't see it unless you had showdead turned on.

At first glance I don't see this repo as being in the same category, though the "3X throughput increase" claim is very clearly dependent on the level of caching for subsequent responses and the "lossless" claim doesn't hold up as analyzed by another top-level comment.

I think AI self-promoters have realized how easy it is to game Hacker News and GitHub stars if you use the right wording. You can make some big claims that are hard to examine in the quick turnaround times of a Hacker News front page cycle.
by smikhanov | 2025-06-28 21:47:40+00:00
Do the math on how many people are necessary to run a web site with on-call rotation, minimum moderation, and someone to run the business. The number of $2/month subscription required to make that work is prohbitively high.

Is this really so? Let's try doing the math: you're describing a distributed team of maybe 10 people, likely less. Let's assume you need $600K/year to run this business (is this the right number? not sure, feel free to correct me). At $2/month, that requires 25000 paying users.

Difficult, but not impossible. At $5/month (the $3 difference wouldn't trigger any price sensitivity, talking from real experience) that's 10000 users. If your service actually provides value, you can crank it even higher. Again, difficult, but totally within the realm of possible.

if the unpaid social network competitors can't get any traction, what makes you think adding a $2/month signup hurdle would improve the situation?

Because the "traction" needed to make free and paid social network work is vastly different. You need insane scale (millions or tens of millions of users) to make free social network viable, hell, my stomach hurts from only thinking about it. A paid social network business, run with certain austerity, can be profitable with one thousand paid users.
by baby | 2025-06-28 21:47:42+00:00
I have a theory that anyone who wants to learn OCaml as their first FL will fail miserably because the docs and the user experience is horrible. But if you've spend time learning haskell then it's not that bad. BTW I could read erlang pretty well I started learning OCaml and yet that didn't help me much I felt, maybe because erlang is still much simpler?
by megaloblasto | 2025-06-28 21:48:01+00:00
I don't really think about azure because I choose not to support Microsoft. Also, as of now I have had very little personal use for running servers, besides things that can easily be hosted almost anywhere.

I'm sure it's convenient for some people with certain projects.

I think Linux is a superior operating system to Windows in almost every way. This is supported by the fact that over 60% of azure servers run Linux [1].

Windows operating system is a walled off garden of intellectual property that wastes billions of dollars every year. Schools, government agencies, hospitals, etc all are spending an incredible amount on proprietary software and this is mainly benefitting a very small amount of people. Yet, thier shitty spyware OS is actually worse then the open source alternative. I think this is a moral failure for humans.

[1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/virtual-machines/...
by latexr | 2025-06-28 21:48:22+00:00
> Another option is to use Python, which is ubiquitous enough that it can be expected to be installed on virtually every machine

Not on macOS. You can do it easily by just invoking /usr/bin/python3, but you’ll get a (short and non-threatening) dialog to install the Xcode Command-Line Developer Tools. For macOS environments, JavaScript for Automation (i.e. JXA, i.e /usr/bin/osascript -l JavaScript) is a better choice.

However, since Sequoia, jq is now installed by default on macOS.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-06-28 21:49:16+00:00
Persistent media watermarking through the analog hole is a solved problem and has been for years. It's standard practice on films.

What does it even mean that hardware keys are extractable in O(N) time? If there's some reasonable multiple of N where you can figure out a key, your cryptosystem is broken, physical or not.

It's also very straightforward to attach metadata to media and wouldn't take a format change.
by carlosjobim | 2025-06-28 21:49:43+00:00
You're never going to be able to change the economic system for the entire population where you live. Better to vote with your feet and move to a country where all economic activity is arranged for "the common good". There are many, many such countries. You're not the first with that idea.

That of course won't mean that you will have the privilege of deciding for everyone else what counts as "the common good". It's unfortunately not like the Arch Linux terminal where you are omnipotent.

I say that sincerely, as somebody who had to do just that. It's easier for Mohammad to go to the mountain.

Edit: To say: I voted with my feet and moved to a place which better aligns with my values. From a "common good" society to a "freedom" society.
by trod1234 | 2025-06-28 21:49:55+00:00
This is the problem with this type of reasoning.

How much hindsight is sufficient? 2 years, 5 years, 10, 20, 50...

Wages for the past 50 years have been trending down in terms of real purchasing power regardless of career/job. The number of jobs too if you average together a complete boom bust bailout cycle and normalize population growth.
by Fogest | 2025-06-28 21:50:46+00:00
Honestly, I had no idea JavaScript was even a trademarked name. I've always just assumed it's the name of a programming language and had no idea it had anything to do with Oracle.

I guess I don't feel bad not knowing this though, as the language really does have nothing to do with the company it's insane that they even hold a trademark for it.
by RaiyanYahya | 2025-06-28 21:51:20+00:00
I apologize if anyone got offended by this. I thought it was pretty cool. The intention was not to show off. I did use ai to help me build this. The goal was to have a local implementation of a queue which can be used to decouple systems and use for processing messages. I should have included the intention of the post. I thought some other people would find it cool.

If you have ever used AWS SQS, I wanted to build something like that. Something that would run locally and can be used on simple servers. I apologize if it came out as something else. I apologize again.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-06-28 21:51:41+00:00
> Every attempt to “fix” social media eventually becomes part of the problem because the economic structure creates inevitable corruption of the original mission.

Which is why we need a social medium that is not controlled by anything more centralized than "all the users". Anything else will present high values targets for corruption and is doomed to fail. You're not going to get investors in such a thing, because the lack of chokepoints means you can't really monetize it. But I do think that the existing players will eventually behave badly enough that such a thing will emerge--one volunteer effort at a time.

They sold us a dream of what the internet could be and I don't think we're letting that go--we just have to dispatch with them first.
by econ | 2025-06-28 21:52:09+00:00
This seems to fit a reoccurring thought of mine.

The idea was to make an effort to isolate and strictly define parts of job descriptions.

Your job might be to fire people for poor performance. Any manager would be able to do it but they would all do it differently. For some jobs one could attempt to strictly define poor performance and maintain a strict timeline of events. This would depend on how strict the other job is defined.

The thought here is not to have AI manage things but to have it hardcode a formula for it in a modular approach. Humans should proofread. Then it may propose well reasoned updates for review.

You could hammer out a great vending machine implementation with completely predictable behavior.
by compressedgas | 2025-06-28 21:52:10+00:00
This article does not mention Jumbostore (Kave Eshghi, Mark Lillibridge, Lawrence Wilcock, Guillaume Belrose, and Rycharde Hawkes) which used content defined chunking recursively on the chunk list of a content defined chunked file in 2007. This is exactly what a Prolly Tree is.
by hayst4ck | 2025-06-28 21:52:28+00:00
Watching Blinken say "rules based international order" on camera about Ukraine was one of the few times I felt good about American foreign policy, then watching Blinken talk about Israel made it clear that it's rules for our enemies only, and loyalty for our "friends" which is the precise opposite of a rules based international order.

Hearing democrats decry Russian foreign influence was also something I was on board with, but much like Nancy Pelosi saying it's not corrupt when she trades on stock with private information, apparently it's not corrupt when the democratic party accepts foreign aid in the form of AIPAC donations, or just as likely threats of the use of Pegasus against them.

It is quite sad to be an American of good conscience right now. It's hard to respect our country in any way when it shows such little moral fiber and such little backbone.
by fasthands9 | 2025-06-28 21:52:59+00:00
>The provision was squeezed into the bill, nicknamed the “Big Beautiful Bill,” in May. It is designed to prohibit states from “[enforcing] any law or regulation regulating [AI] models, [AI] systems, or automated decision systems” for a decade.

I still am a bit confused by this. States require certain tasks be done by license, like writing prescriptions or having a degree to teach in public schools. It seems like licensing rules like that could still be passed?

Though still makes me nervous. I admit I would like some type of safety inspection of the top labs, even though that sounds heavy handed. I just feel like it would be good for making them dedicate a minimum amount of resources to safety.
by criemen | 2025-06-28 21:53:45+00:00
Thanks for writing the article!

I didn't quite get

Note that during the prefill phase, all prompt tokens from a request can be processed in one batch. This is possible because the query (Q) tensors, calculated from the tokens immediately before them, are available for each prompt token position.

I know that in practice prefill is much faster than inference. Would watching the 2h video from Karpathy help me understand why?
by ofjcihen | 2025-06-28 21:54:56+00:00
Text - “we have no idea if they actually said that”

Picture - “this could be out of context” (this is used constantly in politics and people fall for it anyway)

Video removes the question of context and if the person actually did it. So now instead of printing about it or showing an awkward picture from a certain unflattering angle I can generate a video of your favorite politician taking upskirt photos on a city bus.

As the tech gets more and more realistic we’re increasingly straining the average persons ability to maintain presence of mind and ask questions.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-06-28 21:55:45+00:00
I think this is actually a bit different than the principal agent problem, at least how the principal agent problem is normally described and envisioned.

E.g. you often imagine cases like a manager making a decision that causes a short term pop in stock price (and bonuses to the manager) to the detriment of the long term health of the company when thinking about the principal agent problem. In the cases I'm thinking about, though, it's more that people rarely can do nothing, even if that's sometimes the best thing to do. E.g. large companies need to have lawyers and designers on staff for lots of reasons. But sometimes there just isn't enough work for these folks to do (even if they need to be "warm" and ready when important work comes along). And if there isn't enough work to do, these people will find work to do.

This is another reason why I think that, even though layoffs are painful, having people "milling about" without clear direction and purpose is the worst for everyone involved. These people will just schedule meetings, insert themselves where it isn't helpful, etc., just to make it seem like they have a purpose.

This could be thought of as a "variant" of the principal agent problem I guess, but this instance of "idle hands are the devil's playthings" is different enough from the "standard" principal agent problem that I don't think it's helpful to conflate these two things.
by toyg | 2025-06-28 21:55:56+00:00
I think the Oracle hate goes a bit beyond the generic hatred for successful companies (be it Microsoft, FAANG, etc).

People actually used to like the products that made these companies explode. Windows 2000 was cool; Facebook was cool; Google was cool. Whenever they stop being pure unadulterated evil for a few minutes, very quickly a lot of people are willing to forgive them and welcome them back into polite society.

But as long as most geeks can remember, Oracle has never been cool. At its peak, the company enabled a world of snooty BOFH DBAs, selling unreasonably expensive products to well-oiled middle-managers. And then they started "acqui-squeezing" adjacent products, blackmailing their own customers, and suing everyone in sight. They could cure cancer tomorrow, gifting all the related IPs to the world, and most geeks would still see them as scum trying to whitewash their image - and they would probably be right. There are some great engineers in Oracle, but their management is all that is wrong with capitalism.
by asdf6969 | 2025-06-28 21:56:58+00:00
I like the post but I feel like it’s missing the reason why VC funding is necessary. A lot of small scale apps and old school forums can be run pretty cheap. What is stopping social media from growing slow and following a more traditional business model? For example, people regularly start things like nail salons with just personal funds and bank loans but they are so much more expensive to run than something like this website