MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by derbOac | 2025-06-24 16:56:10+00:00
But those training the LLMs are still using the works, and not just to discuss them, which I think is the point of fair use doctrine. I guess I fail to see how it's any different from me using it in some other way? If I wanted to write a play very loosely inspired by Blood Meridian, it might be transformative, but that doesn't justify me pirating the book.

I tend to think copyright should be extremely limited compared to what it is now, but to me the logic of this ruling is illogical other than "it's ok for a corporation to use lots of works without permission but not for an individual to use a single work without permission." Maybe if they suddenly loosened copyright enforcement for everyone I might feel differently.

"Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror." (An admittedly hyperbolic comparison, but similar idea.)
by ashwinsundar | 2025-06-24 16:56:41+00:00
You don't need to aspire to use "MCP", but rather select some MCP servers that will be useful for you.

MCP servers basically expose pieces of the web/data that your LLM client has not been trained on. Maybe some private APIs, or internal data that isn't part of training data sets. Real-time data is another good use case.

This list has a lot of ideas:

https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/servers?tab=readme-o...

I personally use the Kagi MCP server (allows an LLM client to execute searches against the Kagi search engine), and stochastic thinking/sequential thinking (some alternate thought patterns that help models escape the "valley of optimization" problem).

You can't tell Claude.md to "use the Kagi search engine"...it doesn't have an API key to do that. The MCP server basically just exposes the API. You're right, it's a lot less exciting than people make it sound. The future possibilities are where the excitement is at imo.

I'm excited about MCP more from a developer side, than from a user side. It really does feel like the first week of mobile apps still. Will it "revolutionize everything"? No, just like mobile apps didn't solve every problem (and made some worse).
by tucnak | 2025-06-24 16:56:55+00:00
Unfortunately, GPU's are old news now. When it comes to perf/watt/dollar, TPU's are substantially ahead for both training and inference. There's a sparsity disadvantage with the trailing-edge TPU devices such as v4 but if you care about large-scale training of any sort, it's not even close. Additionally, Tenstorrent p300 devices are hitting the market soon enough, and there's lots of promising stuff is coming on Xilinx side of the AMD shop: the recent Versal chips allow for AI compute-in-network capabilities that puts NVIDIA Bluefield's supposed programmability to shame. NVIDIA likes to say Bluefield is like a next-generation SmartNIC, but compared to actually field-programmable Versal stuff, it's more like 100BASE-T cards from the 90s.

I think it's very naive to assume that GPU's will continue to dominate the AI landscape.
by gwbas1c | 2025-06-24 16:57:10+00:00
I personally find virtual film effects distracting.

Personally, I've seen old silent films projected from original filmstock, in a theater that considers itself a museum. It's different enough from a scan that I wouldn't want someone to try to "emulate" film for me. Otherwise, I might as well just find the film on bluray or streaming and watch it at home, with all the cleanup and pretty soundtracks that come with home releases.

That being said: Very old film is flammable and can only be projected in flameproof projection rooms. (If you've ever seen a "safety film only" sign, this is why.) Due to the fire risk, scanning the film might be the only practical option.
by floxy | 2025-06-24 16:57:40+00:00
>also consider that most people can only afford (and have space for) one car, perhaps two if they're upper-middle class or have really old second hand ones

In the U.S., something like 59% of households own two or more cars. 22% have three or more.

https://shunauto.com/article/how-many-people-have-a-car-in-a...
by AstroBen | 2025-06-24 16:57:44+00:00
What can the government do? Some more ideas: I don't agree with regulating it but taxing sugar, heavy sweeteners, and fast food and invest it into a universal healthcare system. Invest in improving walk-ability and bike-ability in cities and stop subsidizing the meat and dairy industries

If you want to eat junk then fine but there's something going wrong if it's the cheapest, most convenient option available
by v3ss0n | 2025-06-24 16:58:26+00:00
Yeah that but - Why SSE? - Why JsonRPC - Why Statefulness

REST based Tool Call Server would work 100% fine. Now auth have to be redone for those specifically.

And for users of MCP Tools - they are sending a lot of their information to whatever service they are running - that they have never control of

For developer it is not necessary and security nightmare if you use someone's MCP service or run your own.

For users , it is a privacy nightmare .
by 0xjunhao | 2025-06-24 16:58:29+00:00
Hi, I had a quick question. Would it be correct to say the following?

1. For long inputs and short outputs, the inference can be arbitrarily number of times faster, as it avoids repeated KV computation.

2. Conversely, for short inputs and long outputs, it might be slightly slower, since loading and storing the KV cache are on the critical path of the execution.
by garciasn | 2025-06-24 16:58:49+00:00
No; because it's late-stage capitalism. People are looking to make a buck and you can't maximize your return unless you nickle and dime everyone, especially when you need to take on the risk of renting your place out to random assholes.

I do Rover on the side; largely because I went through a divorce and I can't really afford a dog of my own--I might as well get paid to watch someone else's, right? The good thing about Rover is that I do a 'meet and greet' before I agree to host the animal and I know that the owner has to pay in advance, even with the platform taking a massive cut. This gives me great peace of mind that I will get along w/the dog; they will get along with me; and I will get paid at the end of it.

In the case of Airbnb, you don't have that luxury. You are handing over your, likely, biggest financial asset, to a stranger. While you know you're going to get paid, you're likely going to be missing things, have things broken/destroyed, and/or have to deal with nitpicky assholes about every little thing (on both sides).

I have never had a ENTIRELY poor experience with Airbnb (or Vrbo for that matter) but I have been disappointed a bit at times. Take, for example, the off-the-grid cabin I rented over the winter w/my gf. We knew there was going to be an outhouse; what we didn't expect was that it was going to be VERY full, to the point that I chose not to use it for anything but to take a piss, as I was worried I'd touch the pile w/my ass. When I told the owner that, they didn't even reply--as if my expectations were too high that I didn't want to have my ass or junk touch a pile of someone else's shit. My poor gf didn't have the same luxury I did; however, at least she didn't have something hanging down into the very full tank.

I go out of my way when I watch dogs on Rover to be kind, empathetic, thoughtful, and to care for the dogs like I would care for my own. I'm certain there are Airbnb owners that are like me on Rover, but you get lost in the mix with those who do it and are late, incommunicado, and return your dog with bite and other red marks--as I've been told by owners who thought I was going above and beyond while I thought I was just following the golden rule.

YMMV.
by faxmeyourcode | 2025-06-24 16:58:59+00:00
Based on the comments here, a lot of folks are assuming the primary users of mcp are the end users connecting their claude/vscode/etc to whatever saas platform they're working on. While this _is_ a huge benefit and super cool to use, imo the main benefit is for things like giving complex tool access to centralized agents. Where the mcp servers allow you to build agents that have the tools to do a sort of "custom deep research."

We have deployed this internally at work where business users are giving it a list of 20 jira tickets and asking it to summarize or classify them based on some fuzzy contextual reasoning found in the description/comments. It will happly run 50+ tool calls poking around in Jira/confluence and respond in a few seconds what would have taken them hours to do manually. The fact that it uses mcp under the hood is completely irrelevant but it makes our job as builders much much easier.
by stingraycharles | 2025-06-24 16:59:01+00:00
I don’t think running these commands in a docker container is the standard way of doing this, I’ve seen “npx” et al being used way more often.

Furthermore, the “docker” part wouldn’t even be the most resource wasteful if you consider the general computational costs of LLMs.

The selling point of MCP servers is that they are composable and plug in into any AI agent. A monolith doesn’t achieve that, unless I’m misunderstanding things.

What I find annoying is that it’s very unpredictable when exactly an LLM will actually invoke an MCP tool function. Different LLM providers’ models behave differently, and even within the same provider different models behave differently.

Eg it’s surprisingly difficult to get an AI agent to actually use a language server to retrieve relevant information about source code, and it’s even more difficult to figure out a prompt for all language server functions that works reliably across all models.

And I guess that’s because of the fuzzy nature of it all.

I’m waiting to see how this all matures, I have the highest expectations of Anthropic with this. OpenAI seems to be doing their own thing (although ChatGPT supposedly will come with MCP support soon). Google’s models appear to be the most eager to actually invoke MCP functions, but they invoke them way too much, in turn causing a lot of context to get wasted / token noise.
by martythemaniak | 2025-06-24 16:59:40+00:00
I've spent the last few months looking into VLAs and I'm convinced that they're gonna be a big deal, ie they very well might be the "chatgpt moment for robotics" that everyone's been anticipating. Multimodal LLMs already have a ton of built-in understanding of images and text, so VLAs are just regular MMLLMs that are fine-tuned to output a specific sequence of instructions that can be fed to a robot.

OpenVLA, which came out last year, is a Llama2 fine tune with extra image encoding that outputs a 7-tuple of integers. The integers are rotation and translation inputs for a robot arm. If you give a vision llama2 a picture of a an apple and a bowl and say "put the apple in the bowl", it already understands apples, bowls, knows the end state should apple in bowl etc. What missing is a series of tuples that will correctly manipulate the arm to do that, and the way they did it is through a large number of short instruction videos.

The neat part is that although everyone is focusing on robot arms manipulating objects at the moment, there's no reason this method can't be applied to any task. Want a smart lawnmower? It already understands "lawn" "mow", "don't destroy toy in path" etc, just needs a finetune on how to corectly operate a lawnmower. Sam Altman made some comments about having self-driving technology recently and I'm certain it's a chat-gpt based VLA. After all, if you give chatgpt a picture of a street, it knows what's a car, pedestrian, etc. It doesn't know how to output the correct turn/go/stop commands, and it does need a great deal of diverse data, but there's no reason why it can't do it. https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1le7iq4/sa...

Anyway, super exciting stuff. If I had time, I'd rig a snowblower with a remote control setup, record a bunch of runs and get a VLA to clean my driveway while I sleep.
by busterarm | 2025-06-24 16:59:46+00:00
This is why I have always just gotten a hotel.

Everyone I know who AirBNBs has horror stories. I've never had a hotel horror story. I've had minor disappointments but always the hotel went out of their accommodate me or my credit card company would have if they failed to meet their obligations.

Even for the niche reasons some people AirBNB for (large groups, extended stays), I've always found niche hotels offering the same. Even before AirBNB existed I could do things like book out an apartment-style hotel in Reykjavik to house 40 people for a week. That place is still operating now even.
by svachalek | 2025-06-24 16:59:50+00:00
I don't know what model you're using through ollama but a lot of people pick up a 4b model and expect it to be ChatGPT when it's like 0.2% of the size. 4b models are mostly toys imo. The latest generation of 8b models are sometimes useful, but often still laughably stupid. 14b starts to have potential, 30b are pretty good.

But remember, the hosted frontier models are still gigantic compared to these, and still make stupid mistakes all the time.
Expand.ai (YC S24) is hiring a founding engineer
by timsuchanek | 2025-06-24 17:00:25+00:00
What if the internet were a database you could query?

At expand.ai we're making that a reality.

A combination of distributed systems, custom models, browser infrastructure, and a lot of passion from a tiny team, in-person here in Dogpatch, SF, is all you need.

Apply if you're interested in working on bleeding-edge web agents applied at a large scale.

We have a very talented team, great architects, and some have even worked on custom hardware before.

I'm Tim, a 2nd-time founder, and I have sold my last company, Stellate, to Shopify.

Write me at founder@expand.ai if you're interested. Let's go!

https://expand.ai/careers/founding-engineer
by miloignis | 2025-06-24 17:00:47+00:00
No, nothing is sacred. I'll note the "literally" case in GP is arguably even more of a flip than drop.

The only way for a human language to stay the same is for people to stop speaking it, i.e. Latin - France has trouble keeping French the same, and English is the polar opposite with no ruling body and a history of katamari damacy-ing words from every other language.

Words can mean multiple things, and if there's enough of a gap a new word or usage will rise to fill its place.

Delete works, of course, and I think the opposite to "new feature just dropped" in tech circles is "killed" or "killed off", as in killedbygoogle.com
by MyOutfitIsVague | 2025-06-24 17:01:07+00:00
nushell does that out of the box:

> history | get 82076 ╭─────────────────┬──────────────────╮ │ start_timestamp │ 2025-06-24 16:46 │ │ command │ mpc play │ │ cwd │ /home/work │ │ duration │ 1ms │ │ exit_status │ 0 │ ╰─────────────────┴──────────────────╯

It's really nice, because it doesn't just tell you time between command executions (or rather time between commands finishing), but the actual runtime duration of the command.
by ramoz | 2025-06-24 17:01:10+00:00
9 times out of 10 my Claude Code is using a bash script before I hook up an MCP to it.

- less tokens required in context (CLAUDE.md vs CLAUDE.md + MCP bloat per request)

- native agent tooling, relying on Bash(my-script params)

- less black box (you & the coding agent can read the scripts)

MCPs are often wrapping restful apis. Turns out agents can use those just fine.
by myrmidon | 2025-06-24 17:01:15+00:00
Good point, but I think those are "worth" less from a risk-analysis PoV: 1km diameter is apparently about 200 times more likely (1/500000 years) according to wiki, but would need to kill 40M people to match the extinction-level asteroid risk (so basically-- unmitigated hit on Tokyo or bust).

To be honest, I think the 1km diameter range might still be a major fraction of the actual risk, because the estimates around "human exctinction every 100Ma" are probably much too pessimistic.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-06-24 17:01:18+00:00
Your comment doesn't make any sense. The South has terrible climate, suffocating heat and humidity much of the year. It is at the same latitude as North Africa. Why would anyone expect people to be outdoors in this environment? There is a reason they rely on air conditioning.

The populated parts of Alaska have mild climates similar to the Pacific Northwest, certainly more pleasant than the Midwest and not nearly as cold in winter. The high desert (e.g. Utah, Colorado) similarly has a pleasant low-humidity climate most of the year that is conducive to outdoor activity.
by froh42 | 2025-06-24 17:01:24+00:00
Coming from Commodore Amiga, my first PC was a 486dx with 4MB to run Linux. I did set it up the same day I bought it - noticed 4MB was not enough to run XFree86 on top of Linux 0.99.6 or whatever, so I grumbled, checked my wallet and bank account, went back to the dealer and asked him to take back the 4MB memory and sell me 16MB of RAM.

I was a student and ate only very cheap food the rest of that month.

Oh, and a bit later (two or three years) Tanenbaum visited my University and held a lecture about Amoeba.
by ticulatedspline | 2025-06-24 17:01:36+00:00
Definitely seems reasonable to say "you can train on this data but you have to have a legal copy"

Personally I like to frame most AI problems by substituting a human (or humans) for the AI. Works pretty well most of the time.

In this case if you hired a bunch of artists/writers that somehow had never seen a Disney movie and to train them to make crappy Disney clones you made them watch all the movies it certainly would be legal to do so but only if they had legit copies in the training room. Pirating the movies would be illegal.

Though the downside is it does create a training moat. If you want to create the super-brain AI that's conversant on the corpus of copyrighted human literature you're going to need a training library worth millions
by 9rx | 2025-06-24 17:01:47+00:00
> That's the thing, a lot of Americans really don't like this idea of being squeezed in tightly.

Sure, it isn't coincidence that the "American Dream" has always been portrayed the sizeable house on a large acreage out in the country surrounded by white picket fences. But we're talking about the people who are choosing to cram in beside one another, but aren't bringing the services and joy that such density normally offers to go along with it.

> These tiny lots are all they can afford while still being somewhat acceptable to them about commutes.

I've lived in cities and on farms and the commute times end up being about the same if you ever have to leave your immediate community that is within walking distance. You have to drive further from the farm, sure, but the highway is surprisingly efficient. Is there some reason people are more concerned about distance than time?

The city offers a clear advantage when you are travelling short enough distances that you can walk. But, that brings us right back to wondering what you need costly transportation for? The two dangly things beneath you are right there! (Yes, I know, some people hazve disabilities, but the discussion isn't about them)

> But people act like these zoning laws just come about on their own.

Not at all. That's why we question why people are doing it. It is clearly their own choice. But why when we then hear them crying that the transportation costs are too high?
by alganet | 2025-06-24 17:01:56+00:00
A good reality check is: if a stranger asks you about a specific part of your toy project, would you be able to explain it?

If you can't, it means there's something there you don't understand, and you lost an opportunity to learn. Of course, this is also true for reusing libraries and stuff.

Within a job, what matters is the _team learning_, and it's roughly the same idea. At least one person in the team should be able to explain anything the team does. Trusting it to an AI puts the whole team in a precarious situation, even if it is something as simple as a CSS layout.
by derektank | 2025-06-24 17:02:39+00:00
The opportunity cost of having a vehicle sit unused in a parking lot 90+% of the time is really high. We've only tolerated it for so long because human labor is and has been more expensive than the vehicle's depreciation. Autonomous taxis potentially flip the script on that assumption.

Sure, rich people will always have enough money to afford luxuries like privacy and comfort, but most people are price sensitive and will opt for the cheapest transportation solution that delivers them where they need to go in the fastest amount of time. I would wager this will be a Waymo type autonomous taxi service but time will tell.
by palata | 2025-06-24 17:03:04+00:00
I was assuming that we as a society would rather want to survive this century, but you're right, maybe we don't. We surely act like we really, really don't.

But hypothetically, if we were to want to survive, such regulations would be some of the very easy steps to take (and by far not enough, of course).

And again, I think you're right: it's far more likely that we as a society will just collapse, so maybe it's not even worth wondering what we would do if we didn't want it.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-06-24 17:03:11+00:00
I do not code/program, but I do read thousands of fiction pages annually. LLMs (Perplexity, specifically) have been my lifetime favorite book club member — I can ask anything.

However, I can't just say "on page 123..." I've found it's better to either provide the quote, or describe the context, and then ask how it relates to [another concept]. Or I'll say "at the end of chapter 6, Bob does X, then why Y?" (perhaps this is similar to asking a coding LLM to fix a specific function instead of a specific line?).

My favorite examples of this have been sitting with living human authors and discussing their books — usually to jaw-dropped creators, particularly to Unknowns.

Works for non-fiction, too (of course). But for all those books you didn't read in HS English classes, you can somewhat recreate all that class discussion your teachers always attempted to foster — at your own discretion/direction.
by rcxdude | 2025-06-24 17:03:14+00:00
>If I wanted to write a play very loosely inspired by Blood Meridian, it might be transformative, but that doesn't justify me pirating the book.

I think that's the conclusion of the judge. If Anthropic were to buy the books and train on them, without extra permission from the authors, it would be fair use, much like if you were to be inspired by it (though in that case, it may not even count as a derivative work at all, if the relationship is sufficiently loose). But that doesn't mean they are free to pirate it either, so they are likely to be liable for that (exactly how that interpretation works with copyright law I'm not entirely sure: I know in some places that downloading stuff is less of a problem than distributing it to others because the latter is the main thing that copyright is concerned with. And AFAIK most companies doing large model training are maintaining that fair use also extends to them gathering the data in the first place).

(Fair use isn't just for discussion. It covers a broad range of potential use cases, and they're not enumerated precisely in copyright law AFAIK, there's a complicated range of case law that forms the guidelines for it)
by OutOfHere | 2025-06-24 17:03:33+00:00
Boolean constructs are sacred. This includes words like "yes", "no", "true", and "false". Without these holding on to their meaning, the language, the culture, and civilization will fall apart. "Dropped" is very close to them. "Delete" works for now, but give it a century, and we could lose it too because the click-generating hipsters are always on the lookout for new words to exploit.
by krunck | 2025-06-24 17:03:39+00:00
The problem is owners rent out their space and try to do all the work from afar. Cleaners are rented and just do what their told. No one really inspects the place between guests. No one maintains anything. It's just maximal profit extraction which turns everything into crap.

I would never rent out my home or extra dwelling without greeting the guests in person, being available for assistance, and maybe even showing up at checkout time.