MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Custom MCP Client
by jeomon27 | 2025-06-11 02:48:16+00:00
I created an MCP Client from scratch from the API layer, without using the MCP library from Claude, which might seem an anti-pattern, but it's still worth it. Learning how the MCP works under the hood.

The main reason is I'm building an MCP Agent, I'm getting RuntimeError: Attempted to exit cancel scope in a different task than it was entered in

While disconnecting the servers..

So looked for fixes from GitHub, but unfortunately none worked, but I wanted to build it, so I developed the MCP-Client.

https://github.com/Jeomon/MCP-Client
by zdc1 | 2025-06-11 02:48:29+00:00
If the purpose is to identify text that can be used as training data, in some ways it makes sense to me to mark anything and everything that isn't hand-typed as AI generated.

Like for your last example: to me, the concept "proper scientific tone" exists because humans hand-typed/wrote in a certain way. If we use AI edited/transformed text to act as a source for what "proper scientific tone" looks like, we still could end up with an echo chamber where AI biases for certain words and phrases feed into training data for the next round.

Being strict about how we mark text could mean a world where 99% of text is marked as AI-touched and less than 1% is marked as human-originated. That's still plenty of text to train on, though such a split could also arguably introduce its own (measurable) biases...
by WillAdams | 2025-06-11 02:50:30+00:00
I've been trying to make this sort of thing more tractable by modeling the movement of tooling in a CNC machine so as to make 3D parts using Python in OpenSCAD (https://pythonscad.org/):

https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview

That said, the only 3D CAD tool where I was able to follow the tutorial (after a fashion) was Dune 3D: https://dune3d.org/ --- if you haven't tried that, I'd highly recommend it.

The usual way to get started w/ molding is to make a vacuum molding machine:

https://makezine.com/projects/diy-injection-molding

(I remember one such plan page where the first project was to make a handle to make the machine more comfortable to use...)
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-06-11 02:50:58+00:00
I've got a few designs in mind for an alternative to scarcity based economics. I don't presume to have it right, but its worth a shot and its a bit more concrete than blind trust in one technology or another. I thought it would take my whole life to just lay the foundation, but with some AI help, maybe not.

The trouble with you naysayers is you always take as immutable things that we can change.
by db48x | 2025-06-11 02:51:25+00:00
Eh, most research is done privately by corporations. The fraction that happens at universities is not critical. There are more postdocs than will ever become researchers or professors; most will have to get jobs outside the industry anyway. And huge swathes of the public research is tainted by irreproducibility and scandal.

But most importantly there is no reason why that research has to be paid for by the government, out of taxpayer funds. The research will still be done, but more of the money will come from the corporations who benefit the most from it.
by imgabe | 2025-06-11 02:51:54+00:00
> The point is that global health is also about access to a drug, not just existence.

And that point is irrelevant to whether or not we should develop new drugs.

> Countries that receive aid typically do not have functional governments.

Maybe they should work on fixing that, or just dissolve the country and get absorbed into a functional country if they can't manage to create a functional government on their own.
by kamranjon | 2025-06-11 02:52:18+00:00
This is a pretty awful take. Everyone understands they are modifying the weights - that is the point. It’s not like these models were released with all of the weights perfectly accounted for and changing them in any way ruins them. The awesome thing about fine-tuning is that the weights are malleable and you have a great base to start from.

Also the basic premise that knowledge injection is a bad use-case seems flawed? There are countless open models released by Google that completely fly in the face of this. Medgemma is just Gemma 3 4b fine-tuned on a ton of medical datasets, and it’s measurably better than stock Gemma within the medical domain. Maybe it lost some ability to answer trivia about Minecraft in the process, but isn’t that kinda implied by “fine-tuning” something? Your making it purpose built for a specific domain.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-06-11 02:52:44+00:00
> Are there though? We are just at the front of the curve, if we look at the whole... what if AI destroys the underlying mechanics of exchange society and we rely upon.

I fully agree that there are risks and the one you describe is quite real. However, there are important wrinkles which render campaigning against rushed AI impractical and possibly outright damaging for the cause.

For one, the presumptive winners define themselves as such because... they can! Power corrupts, good luck using persuasion to uncorrupt it. In other words, they'll take their chances, hide in their bunkers, etc. Human nature hasn't changed in the last 100 years except for the worse.

Next, the problem with AI is just another step in the complicated relations between man and machine. In other words it's a political problem and there's history of successfully solving it by political means. The previous solutions involved workers rights and wider sharing of the fruits of productivity increases. It took some work to get it done and it can be done again despite the concerted efforts of the would be "winners" to prevent it and pull us back in the Gilded Age.
by leakycap | 2025-06-11 02:53:13+00:00
I didn't expect this pundit to be a fan of the visual changes; interesting how you can't pin down an interesting person opinion in advance.

The Finder in Tahoe dev beta 1 is so cluttered, I honestly won't be staying with macOS if it resembles this. iOS 26 is better than Tahoe, but it's quite bad.
by Mathnerd314 | 2025-06-11 02:53:45+00:00
Wasn't there that thing about how large LLM's are essentially compression algorithms (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.10668)? Maybe that's where this article is coming from, is the idea that finetuning "adds" data to the set of data that compresses well. But that indeed doesn't work unless you mix in the finetuning data with the original training corpus of the base model. I think the article is wrong though in saying it "replaces" the data - it's true that finetuning without keeping in the original training corpus increases loss on the original data, but "large" in LLM really is large and current models are not trained to saturation so there is plenty of room to fit in finetuning if you do it right.
by const_cast | 2025-06-11 02:53:53+00:00
I don't think so, this has always been the limitation and why things like Windows ARM and Windows Phone fail over and over again. The interface part is easy, I guess, the application part is not. If you can figure out the application part, then you have a real shot at disrupting the market.

So far, only Apple has figured out the applications part on MacOS, and only partially. They still have wierdo iPadOS. Microsoft is doing Windows on ARM... again. We'll see how long that lasts.
by proc0 | 2025-06-11 02:55:21+00:00
There's definitely corruption with the landlord companies and the local government to some extent, I'm just not sure exactly how and don't know much about it, but it's clear the priorities of the city do not favor the average SF citizen. The only way to deal with the corruption has to be holding the leadership of the city accountable through mass change in voting. Otherwise the same people keep running the place and it will never change.

So yes, pointing it out and exposing them is probably part of the solution but it would only be a small part. I think people need to break out of their unwavering loyalty in order to hold the system accountable for any change to happen.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-06-11 02:55:40+00:00
> Is it even attempting to be veiled at all?

I do believe the veil is at best "thin." Perhaps I was being too generous given the post starts with:

New abstractions and techniques for software development and deployment gain traction, those abstractions make software more accessible by hiding complexity, and that complexity requires new ways to monitor and measure what’s happening. We build tools like dashboards, adaptive alerting, and dynamic sampling. All of these help us compress the sheer amount of stuff happening into something that’s comprehensible to our human intelligence. In AI, I see the death of this paradigm. It’s already real, it’s already here, and it’s going to fundamentally change the way we approach systems design and operation in the future.

Maybe I should have detected the utterly condescending phrase, "something that’s comprehensible to our human intelligence."
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-06-11 02:56:13+00:00
Nothing intellectually, but some things are financially, spatially, and/or temporally out of reach. A long term goal of mine has been to make machines which are decently precise with wide dynamic range measurement capabilities for all of the SI base units & some commonly-used derived units. Somewhere in the 6-8 digits of dynamic range for each.

E.g. be able to measure distances over a 50cm range to a resolution of ±500nm. Easy for a coordinate measuring machine, very challenging and expensive to DIY.

Validating anything I build means finding a calibration lab willing to check it, which is also rather pricey. I don't have the space, the time, or the money to do this.
by NewJazz | 2025-06-11 02:56:29+00:00
An expert opinion based on knowledge of virology and the impact of the vaccine on symptoms that lead to transmission is "making things up" much in the same way the Manhattan project "made up" nuclear weapons.

While the vaccines do not eliminate all transmission, they can help. Studies done after distribution of the COVID-19 vaccines began, including research by Pfizer, did find that the company’s shot reduced asymptomatic infections in addition to symptomatic cases with earlier variants of the virus. Researchers in the United Kingdom reported in a February observational study that Pfizer’s vaccine helped cut transmission of the alpha and delta variants.

https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-pfizer-transmission-eu...
by jakogut | 2025-06-11 02:56:52+00:00
You can achieve a good amount of this with system prompts. I've actually had good success using LLMs to craft effective system prompts and custom instructions to get more rigorous and well researched answers by default.

One I use with ChatGPT currently is:

> Prioritize substance, clarity, and depth. Challenge all my proposals, designs, and conclusions as hypotheses to be tested. Sharpen follow-up questions for precision, surfacing hidden assumptions, trade offs, and failure modes early. Default to terse, logically structured, information-dense responses unless detailed exploration is required. Skip unnecessary praise unless grounded in evidence. Explicitly acknowledge uncertainty when applicable. Always propose at least one alternative framing. Accept critical debate as normal and preferred. Treat all factual claims as provisional unless cited or clearly justified. Cite when appropriate. Acknowledge when claims rely on inference or incomplete information. Favor accuracy over sounding certain.
by Aziell | 2025-06-11 02:56:56+00:00
I use AI a lot myself and it definitely makes getting information faster but it feels like something’s missing, like the fun of digging for the truth yourself. These AI tools can just give you the answers, which saves time, but it also takes away a lot of depth and variety. Without realizing it, we might also be losing our ability to think independently.

Do you think AI can really replace all the value traditional news brings?
by WillAdams | 2025-06-11 02:57:04+00:00
For me, it's Bézier curves --- Freya Holmér has a wonderful video on them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvPPXbo87ds

and I've been trying to read through _METAFONT: The Program_ and https://pomax.github.io/bezierinfo/ and I keep wondering if I shouldn't just try scripting Inkscape....

I want to do a couple of different things, and not sure if they all fit in one project or no:

- implement a single line font in my current project: https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview

- implement a way to convert arbitrary curves into smooth arcs (for DXFs or G2/G3 arcs for G-code)

- work up an interactive version of METAFONT/METAPOST which allows both programming and drawing
by tomhow | 2025-06-11 02:57:10+00:00
Both commenters have broken the guidelines in this flamey back-and-forth, which is exactly the kind of thing we're trying to avoid on HN. In particular you've both made swipes at each other, and engaged in ideological battle. Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by latchkey | 2025-06-11 02:57:59+00:00
We're not testing Java, we're testing your code which is a method to add items to a list. If it passes the tests, great. If there is a bug in the JVM, maybe it picks it up or doesn't. That doesn't negate the need for the test.

The way I look at testing is less about the current point in time. It is about changes over time. If someone else comes along and changes the underlying implementation to a list where sort order is not guaranteed (maybe thinking their version is faster or something), then the tests will fail and that's exactly what you want. You're testing the expected behavior over time and right now, the expected behavior is a sorted list.

Regardless, I don't understand what you're trying to argue or prove here. Yes, testing is hard and not easily won, I already said that.
by zzo38computer | 2025-06-11 02:59:00+00:00
I have also patched open-source programs locally in order to get them to do what I want, although sometimes the program is very large and takes a long time to compile, while other times the program is much smaller and can compile more quickly. I had also sometimes modified binaries, or had entirely rewritten a program to get it to do what I wanted. Sometimes, I was able to do it by editing configuration files manually rather than using the UI, or by changing the permissions of files.
by wmf | 2025-06-11 02:59:01+00:00
This is trying to extrapolate a general trend from a very small number of specific data points. Jeff Geerling's video was mistakenly banned and is already back up. Videos about how to block YouTube ads are going to be censored because obviously they're a threat to YouTube's business (this is bad and blatantly anticompetitive but what do you expect).

99.9% of videos about open source and self-hosting are fine.
by gofreddygo | 2025-06-11 03:00:40+00:00
> how long until advertisers get their grubby meathooks into the training data

You're so right. it's not an if anymore, but when. and when it does, you wouldn't know what's an ad and what isn't.

In recent years i started noticing a correlation between alcohol consumption and movies. I couldn't help but notice how many of the movies I've seen in the past few years promote alcohol and try to correlate it with the good times. how many of these are paid promotions? I don't know.

and now, after noticing, this every movie that involves alcohol has become distasteful for me mostly because it casts a shadow on the negative side of alcohol consumption.

I can see how ads in an LLM can go the same route, deeply embedded in the content and indistinguishable from everything else.
by programjames | 2025-06-11 03:00:52+00:00
I find it pretty plausible they got an 80% speedup just by making optimized kernels for everything. Even when GPUs say they're being 100% utilized, there are so many improvements to be made, like:

- Carefully interleaving shared memory loading with computation, and the whole kernel with global memory loading.

- Warp shuffling for softmax.

- Avoiding memory access conflicts in matrix multiplication.

I'm sure the guys at ClosedAI have many more optimizations they've implemented ;). They're probably eventually going to design their own chips or use photonic chips for lower energy costs, but there's still a lot of gains to be made in the software.
by andsoitis | 2025-06-11 03:01:21+00:00
Tesla's been pretty clever about this whole autonomous vehicle thing. While other companies are burning through investor cash, Tesla basically got their customers to fund the entire operation. Tesla owners paid for the cars, paid extra for the self-driving features (which funded the R&D), and then their cars collected all the data needed to train the AI.

I've been seeing a bunch of consumer research about Waymo users lately, and what people are telling researchers is fascinating. Almost everyone says the same three things: they're done with car ownership, they never want to drive again, and they're over dealing with regular rideshare apps.

Consumer research about Waymo users reports almost everyone says the same three things: they're done with car ownership, they never want to drive again, and they're over dealing with regular rideshare apps.

Tesla's going to be able to offer rides cheaper than Waymo while giving people a better experience. And since Elon already got us to pay for everything upfront, Tesla's robotaxi network is basically going to print money from day one.
by hdjdbdirbrbtv | 2025-06-11 03:01:29+00:00
Are you talking about teaching in the context window or fine tuning?

If it is the context window, then you are limited to the size of said window and everything is lost on the next run.

Learning is memory, what you are describing is an llm being the main character in the movie Momento, I.e. no longterm memories past what was trained in the last training run.
by BrenBarn | 2025-06-11 03:01:58+00:00
I think there's a lot of ways things could be fixed without necessarily "tearing everything down". More like shifting in a new foundation while leaving a lot of the superstructure intact. Like we could still have a lot of the same basic governmental functions and operations even if the constitution were entirely rewritten.

The irony is that Trump is doing the exact opposite, tearing down those "surface-level" operations without doing anything to improve the foundations ---and in fact causing major cracks in those foundations, thus making it even more necessary to replace them.
by alwillis | 2025-06-11 03:02:43+00:00
> On paper yes. And that is after all these improvements. It still have more issues than others.

Each browser has to pass thousands of the same tests; this isn't just "on paper" compatibility.

Each browser is 100% compatible with the CSS Nesting (for example) specification and with each other.

The browser vendors get how important it is for features to function and render the same way in each browser.
by mdaniel | 2025-06-11 03:02:46+00:00
Recompiling a method[1], popping the stack frame, and re-entering the new method is a very, very common debugging pattern on the JVM. I miss it every day that I'm on vastly dumber platforms

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/altering-the-program-s-e... -> https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/pro-tips.html#drop-frame

1: pedantically, you're recompiling the whole class, but usually it's only one method changing at a time unless things are really going bananas

DCEVM (RIP) allowed swapping the method signature, too, but that is a lot more tricky to use effectively during debugging (e.g. popping the stack frame doesn't magically change the callsite so if you added extra params it's not going to end well) e.g. https://github.com/TravaOpenJDK/trava-jdk-11-dcevm#trava-jdk...
by jrm4 | 2025-06-11 03:02:46+00:00
I still genuinely struggle to understand the advantage of UEFI/Secureboot whatever over BIOS.

I own a piece of hardware, so I can do what I want to it. Out there, there is software, which I have to figure out how I'm going to trust, whether it's e.g Windows and I'm trusting that whole way of doing things, or Linux and that other whole way of doing things.
by resonious | 2025-06-11 03:03:01+00:00
The title is a bit overly dramatic. You still need all of your existing observability tools, so nothing is ending. You just might not need to spend quite as much time building and staring at graphs.

It's the same effect LLMs are having on everything, it seems. They can help you get faster at something you already know how to do (and help you learn how to do something!), but they don't seem to outright replace any particular skill.
by seadan83 | 2025-06-11 03:03:11+00:00
> I gave you an example of exactly that but you say you "suspect" its not that

Sorry, I should have been more direct. I do not see your example is a verbatim, "we cannot handle this." Your example strikes me as a: "please don't dump everyone on us all at once without telling us first. Spread it out some, give us notice, and don't do it in the middle of the night so that the people who would help are available."

> Chicago doesn't need "volunteers" to handle intake.

I'm just quoting the source, from the previously referenced [1]: "The city says buses can arrive only during daytime hours so volunteers can be available to help."

> Demand doesn't just drop off just because city decided to rate limit.

We agree there was a limit put in place. We have not yet established the intent was to rate limit vs any other plausible explanation. Even if load balancing were not the intent, that does not prove the intent was rate limiting.

OTOH, if we did know the total number of buses, then we could infer rate limiting. Notably if there are more than 14 buses/wk, then the 2 buses per day limit would be a rate limit. If it's 10 busses/wk, then a 2 bus/day max is not a rate limit beyond the 24 hour threshold, which is exactly load balancing.

> Anyways, I don't have dog in this fight. I am telling you what the mood was here in south chicago at that time.

I appreciate that. I can understand that there would have been a tense mood. The way people were 'shipped' to Chicago seemed intended to put high stress on the community receiving them.
by z2 | 2025-06-11 03:04:07+00:00
This is a major oversimplification and misses the difference between basic research and applied development. The university and public side is where most basic science happens. It's the high-risk, not-immediately-profitable work of figuring out the fundamental mechanics of why cancer happens. This is the foundation everything else is built on. The private corporate side is where development happens. They take the foundational knowledge from basic science and use it to create specific, patentable, profitable drugs. Corporations rarely fund the basic stuff because there's no immediate payoff. They won't spend a billion dollars on a 10-year project that might not lead to a product for their company. So, if you kill public funding, you're not just pausing work; you're taking dynamite to the foundation of the entire pipeline. In 10-20 years, the private companies will have nothing new to develop. The fear of a "lost generation" of scientists and a long-term crisis is spot on.
by zzo38computer | 2025-06-11 03:04:16+00:00
I think that if the entire computer and operating system are designed better, and the software is designed better, then there are things to be done which would improve the customizability and other things. (I mentioned some of my ideas in some other comments.)

FOSS also helps, but just because it is FOSS does not itself help (and is mentioned in the article), but it is one of the things to be done, too.

UNIX programs with pipes is also one thing that helps, but it is not quite perfectly. Nevertheless, writing programs that do this when working with UNIX systems, is helpful to do. (For working with picture files, I almost entirely use programs that I wrote myself which use farbfeld, and use pipes to combine them; I will then convert to PNG or other formats when writing to disk (I do not use farbfeld as a format to store pictures on disk, but only as the intermediate format to use with pipes).)