MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by deepdarkforest | 2025-07-09 10:31:54+00:00
Haha we are in such a bubble. All engineering concepts are being thrown in the trash. We already have problems with prompt injections in MCP (eg supabase thread yesterday). Imagine the possibilities when you allow the LLM itself to write and execute arbitrary code that directly has access to sensitive info. This is the equivalent of allowing a malware to not only just execute code, but give the malware developer free reign to write his bespoke code for your machine.

Outside of that, writing your own tools on the fly it's clear waste of tokens/money, plus makes benchmarking and evaluation way more difficult, it's another degree of freedom etc. People never think with first principles in mind anymore. Just the quickest cute solution to anything, with not the slightest consideration any side effects
by vidarh | 2025-07-09 10:32:23+00:00
The problem is that the moment the interpreter is powerful enough, you're relying on the data not being good enough at convincing the interpreter that it is an exception.

You can only maintain hard isolation if the interpreter of the data is sufficiently primitive, and even then it is often hard to avoid errors that renders it more powerful than intended, be it outright bugs all the way up to unintentional Turing completeness.
by hobofan | 2025-07-09 10:32:26+00:00
Flagged. Contrary to what the title suggests, this is just a "Show HN" post with 0 content (of which the same author has already submitted ~5 for this tool).

If you want people to take interest in you product maybe actually try to articulate and explore the idea in the title instead of plugging your product after the first sentence?
by nijave | 2025-07-09 10:32:34+00:00
We were toying around with an LLM-based data exploration system at work (ask question about data, let LLM pull and summarize data) and found gated APIs were much easier to manage than raw SQL.

We switched to GraphQL where you can add privilege and sanity checks in code and let the LLM query that instead of arbitrary SQL and had better results. In addition, it simplified what types of queries the LLM needed to generate leading to better results.

Imo connecting directly to SQL is an anti pattern since presumably the LLM is using a service/app account instead of a scoped down user account.
by lproven | 2025-07-09 10:33:27+00:00
> in favor of bad design ideas from 1995 (looking at you, Start menu)

For what it's worth, that's the point when your comment jumped the shark. I knew then that this was just a rant.

The Start menu was a _superb_ piece of design, as was Win95 in general. If nothing else, the existence proof of this is the sheer number of other desktops that imitate the design:

KDE; GNOME 1/2; MATE; Xfce; QNX Neutrino Photon; Inferno; OS/2 Warp 4; BeOS Tracker; Enlightenment; Moksha; XPde; Fvwm95; IceWM; JWM; Lumina; LXDE; LXQt; Cinnamon; GNOME Flashback; EDE; Budgie; UKUI; Deepin; Aura; FyneDesk.

I could probably find more, but 24 should do for now. Even combining forks, there are over 20.

You may not like it, and that's a legitimate view I am not arguing with, but billions of people use desktop interfaces modelled upon it, representing the combined work of thousands of developers, reimplementing it in dozens of languages.
by dschuessler | 2025-07-09 10:34:29+00:00
I find it sad that Astro advertises itself this way, because I think that it is perfectly capable of building web projects of any complexity, simply by means of the component libraries you can plug in.

What makes it so great is not that it serves a particular niche (like "content-driven websites") but that it provides a developer experience that makes it incredibly easy to scale from a static website to something very complex and interaction-heavy without compromising UX.
by andreasmetsala | 2025-07-09 10:34:29+00:00
> In reality the culture and circumstances of parliament members is too far removed from the voters. I also cannot know the other representatives, so my voting decision will always be restricted to a shallow popularity contest. But as explained, this doesn't matter, because the elected representatives cannot implement any agenda.

That’s an odd thing to say when there is a real chance of the commission failing a confidence vote this week. We might end up with a new commission due to the conservatives colluding with the far right to abandon the climate agenda entirely.

This is a very concrete consequence of the voters electing right-wing parliamentarians.
by vintagedave | 2025-07-09 10:34:50+00:00
The conclusion is true.

> 2020s are the Lisa years. Outside of Accessibility, everything feels anodyne and disposable. There might not be a single control panel in modern macOS that feels like someone cares.

> Teddy Bears, managing memory, and Gizmo I don’t miss. But the care I do.

Using and seeing some of the earlier control panels, including in OS X, really drives this home.
by perihelions | 2025-07-09 10:35:01+00:00
That's a remarkable result. Looks like (if I haven't misunderstood) SEXTANT a software experiment that piggybacks on the raw datastream from the NICER x-ray telescope, and estimates the phases of the time-of-arrival of bright millisecond pulsars (in x-ray photons). From differential phases (at microsecond accuracy), they infer differential position (kilometers). I understand it's eight (8) pulsars in the catalog.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.08507

I wonder if it's really that easy to extend this to interstellar scales. If you move 300 km, a 1-ms source is reset to its original phase. Go out to New Horizons distances, and all your phases are millions of cycles offset from Earth, by highly jumbled fractional parts. Is it mathematically feasible to reconstruct everything then? Or: do you maintain a continuously-updated model across the entire mission—and hope that you don't lose count of your cycles?
by simonh | 2025-07-09 10:35:21+00:00
My wife is chinese and they have a very commonly used word for 10,000 so when she needs to say either 10,000 or 100,000 she almost always gets it wrong and says 1,000 instead of 10,000 and says 10,000 instead of 100,000. It's happened so often I mentally translate automatically if it's clear from context.
by mort96 | 2025-07-09 10:35:29+00:00
Why should I (or you, for that matter) go and tell them their restful has nothing to do with rest? Why does it matter? They're making perfectly fine HTTP APIs, and they use the industry standard term to describe what kind of HTTP API it is.

It's convenient to have a word for "HTTP API where entities are represented by JSON objects with unique paths, errors are communicated via HTTP status codes and CRUD actions use the appropriate HTTP methods". The term we have for that kind of API is "rest". And that's fine.
by xg15 | 2025-07-09 10:35:31+00:00
I'm wary of having the AI just run off with my browser context ad-hoc, but what I think could be useful is to have an AI construct an MCP integration in one step, then use that integrated in a separate step.

E.g. instead of fiddling with APIs yourself, you could do something like: "Here is Foo.io's apidoc and you also get access to a JavaScript environment with network access to their domain and an API key for testing. Now write me a server that exposes their API as MCP."

This might even work without an official API at all by going through a website.

Then you can collect a growing "toolbox" of AI-generated MCP conversion scripts that agents fan use for their actual tasks - but you can still inspect those scripts manually to understand their capability and choose which scripts to make available to an agent as needed.

(And you might also simply use those scripts without any AI agents at all)
by bsenftner | 2025-07-09 10:35:49+00:00
Sounds like 3 card monte, sounds like the fast but short thinkers are running out of analogies, they might actually have to think and realize that the common assessment of AI as an automation technology is not correct. It's a muse and a Socratic mentor, a lobotomy when tasked to think for you, and a Rube Goldberg Machine when applied to automation.
by pjmlp | 2025-07-09 10:35:55+00:00
Ironically, as ex zealot, desilusied with the endless fragmentation of Linux distributions and desktop dream, FOSS OSes currently are looking as the only way out of American dominated consumer OSes and related programming languages.

Plus in my deep Penguin days, SuSE was one of my favourite distros, I loved yast based management, and the KDE integration.
by camillomiller | 2025-07-09 10:36:27+00:00
>> See that code fence at the top? That runs at build time, not in the browser. Your data fetching, your logic - it all happens before the user even loads the page. You get brilliant TypeScript support without any of the complexity of hooks, state management, or lifecycle methods.

This is satire, right? If only there was any other server side language that could do the same and produce static compliant super-light HTML-first pages!
by x187463 | 2025-07-09 10:36:45+00:00
Then don't use the service? Use one of the 'better' free alternatives. Let's see how long they remain free once (if) they actually see a meaningful amount of traffic. Complaining about advertising while using a service for which you pay nothing is immature and unreasonable. I hate advertising and have done everything I can to remove it from my life. That means paying for services that I enjoy using. I would rather provide value to the business via money than ad attention.
by tajd | 2025-07-09 10:37:06+00:00
I ported my personal website from Jekyll to Astro a few weeks back and I really liked it. Astro is much easier to build and extend for me (and that is a personal preference point - I (and by I mostly mean claude) - and it's cool to add react components in to create more interactive points (but I haven't deployed that element yet).

Speed is probably the same as jekyll - but relative to my react vite and nextjs apps it's about 10 times faster.

I would definitely use Astro for more complicated websites than content driven - but would probably return to nextjs or more hefty full stack solutions for complicated web apps.
by jamesemmott | 2025-07-09 10:37:09+00:00
The design of exception handling in C++ was inspired by ML, which used 'raise', and C++ might itself have used that word, were it not already the name of a function in the C standard library (as was 'signal'). The words 'throw' and 'catch' were introduced by Maclisp, which is how Stroustrup came to know of them. As he told Guy Steele at the second ACM History of Programming Languages (HOPL) conference in 1993, 'I also think I knew whatever names had been used in just about any language with exceptions, and "throw" and "catch" just were the ones I liked best.'
by inferiorhuman | 2025-07-09 10:37:20+00:00
The problems I listed were for Darktable. If you use the stock configuration and go into the "white balance" module you will get an error. If memory serves turning off the "white balance" module also leads to problems. Instead you're expected to go into the "color calibration" module. More powerful? Perhaps. Unnecessarily obtuse? Absolutely.

I tried Rawtherapee first as they actually sign their (macOS) app. Unfortunately it was too unstable to be useful.
by ltbarcly3 | 2025-07-09 10:38:13+00:00
Wow, a program that doesn't matter anymore has been very very minimally enhanced on a platform that doesn't matter anymore, benefitting the 7 users that have more than 64 real cores with Windoes and are regularly compressing archives so large that it doesn't drastically reduce the compression ratio to split it into more thsn 64 sections.

Posting this link to hn has consumed more human potential than the thing it is describing will save up to the end of time.
by johnisgood | 2025-07-09 10:38:35+00:00
We all know psychedelics, especially psilocybin is great for various health-related problems. There has been extensive research on the topic of these shrooms.

When (if at all) can we expect it to be legalized in the US or EU? I had no idea it could extend cellular lifespan, that is amazing.

I have a feeling though that Big Pharma is going to want to keep it off the market so they can synthesize their own whatnots and make a medication out of it and then sell for a high price. They are doing the same with Kratom.
by resiros | 2025-07-09 10:38:54+00:00
1. Why is the author calling this agencies. He is talking about multi-agent systems, a space with research spanning decades (check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-agent_system ). Renaming this to agencies is weird.

2. Creating single agent systems is already quite tricky. The best practices and LLMOps workflows are far from mature. Jumping to multi-agent systems is very early imo. My suggestion to any builder in this space is to start simple, very simple, and then add complexity, instead of building a house of cards.
by sensanaty | 2025-07-09 10:39:04+00:00
That's nice in theory, but what happens when the inevitable comes and Vercel's grubby little VC hands start squeezing their yoke in order to extract money out of the ecosystem? They're on their Series E last time I checked, that's a lot of VCs who are going to want to cash in on things sooner rather than later.

Enshittification is inevitable when VC is involved in any way whatsoever, so this doesn't strike me as a good thing. I can already see the future where we're getting convoluted features no one ever asked for for the sole reason of inflating Vercel's hosting costs, as was and is the case with Next and how they completely took over React to the point that even the official React docs mention Next before any alternative like Vite. Hell, knowing the VC playbook, I wouldn't be surprised if in a year's time they decide to shutter Nuxt completely and force everyone to move into the abomination that is Next.

This isn't a swipe against you guys, I'm thrilled to see OS devs like you who truly deserve all the success in the world get that success, I'm just not convinced that a VC-funded company with a dubious history & track record monopolizing the entire frontend framework landscape is a good thing. Thankfully Evan seems to still be independent and as such Vue will continue being independent, but it's a bit worrying that it's basically the only one.
by weinzierl | 2025-07-09 10:40:16+00:00
"He never calls subroutines "functions"; I'm not sure where that usage comes from, but certainly by BASIC and LISP there were "functions" that were at least implemented by subroutines."

I think the early BASIC's used the subroutine nomenclature for GOSUB, where there was no parameter passing or anything, just a jump that automatically remembered the place to return.

Functions in BASIC, as I remember it, were something quite different. I think they were merely named abbreviations for arithmetic expressions and simple one line artithmetic expressions only. They were more similar to very primitive and heavily restricted macros than to subroutines or functions.
by porridgeraisin | 2025-07-09 10:40:26+00:00
> RPC with status codes

Yes. All endpoints POST, JSON in, JSON out (or whatever) and meaningful HTTP status codes. It's a great sweet spot.

Of course, this works only for apps that fetch() and createElement() the UI. But that's a lot of apps.

If I don't want to use an RPC framework or whatever I just do:

{ method: "makeBooking", argument: { one: 1, two: "too", }, ... }

And have a dictionary in my server mapping method names to the actual functions.

All functions take one param (a dictionary with the data), validate it, use it and return another single dictionary along with appropriate status code.

You can add versions and such but at that point you just use JSON-RPC.

This kind of setup can be much better than REST APIs for certain usecases
by mopsi | 2025-07-09 10:40:27+00:00
You forgot to mention the widespread coercion of Russian conscripts into "voluntarily" enlisting for the war in Ukraine. Stories like this are extremely common:

Semyon* (name changed) was conscripted in Chelyabinsk, in the Urals, having served in the Pskov region of northwestern Russia for the first five months, where he was asked to sign a contract several times but refused. On 20 April, he was transferred to the Chebarkul garrison and signed up for professional service after just two and a half hours. His mother says that on the way to the unit he complained of being actively pressured into signing a contract, after which Semyon was taken to a separate office, where a sergeant fired a gun next to him and showed him a video of dead and wounded people, threatening that the same thing would happen to him if he didn’t sign. Semyon broke under the pressure, his family says. On the same day, he applied to have the contract annulled, saying he had signed under duress, asking for it to be declared invalid as the commander had not yet signed it, but to no avail.

https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2025/05/14/unwilling-signat...

Not to mention authorities raiding places like gyms to get the conscripts in the first place:

Russian police are targeting migrants and draft-age men in a wave of raids on gyms and martial arts clubs across major cities, with activists describing them as part of a broader crackdown that intensified ahead of the country’s spring military draft. Lawyers in multiple regions told Sever Realii that gym raids now happen at least twice a month in major cities. Russian citizens are typically sent to enlistment offices, while foreign nationals are taken to temporary detention centers. Many are ultimately deported. In one raid, a military officer reportedly accompanied police to hand out conscription notices directly. Activists say authorities are also targeting naturalized citizens who have obtained Russian passports but avoided military service, pressuring them to sign military contracts under threat of deportation or loss of citizenship.

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/05/01/russian-police-rai...
by whatevsmate | 2025-07-09 10:40:50+00:00
I think sociolinguists will have to do better than just chatting with one bot[1] before waxing poetic about the invisible power dynamics that shaped the interaction. This is critical theory: thought-provoking cynical fart-sniffing. Autoethnography “research”.

[1] no clear sign of model chosen either. Who knows what software version or system prompt they were blabbing to.
by resiros | 2025-07-09 10:42:03+00:00
Same observations we had talking to many of our users. The trick to build reliable systems, is minimize the complexity to the max, not the other way around.

I think the theoretical value of multi-agents is collaboration with external agents (outside your code base). Other than that, there is a very little use cases where it make sense (e.g. https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/built-multi-agent-rese... ), and building it / debugging them take much much longer and is much harder. So unless you have the ressources, not worth the trouble
by runroader | 2025-07-09 10:42:47+00:00
This is more like people arguing over "proper" English, the point of language is to communicate ideas. I work for a German company and my German is not great but if I can make myself understood, that's all that's needed. Likewise, the point of an API is to allow programs, systems, and people to interoperate. If it accomplishes that goal, it's fine and not worth fighting over.

If my API is supposed to rely on content-type, how many different representations do I need? JSON is a given anymore, and maybe XML, but why not plain text, why not PDF? My job isn't an academic paper, good enough to get the job done is going to have to be good enough.
by bborud | 2025-07-09 10:42:55+00:00
Turn the argument on its head: why is it reasonable to ask someone who presumably knows better to waste time trying to solve a server problem on the client side? And why would it be unreasonable for a candidate to reject the premise and suggest a better solution?

(I often pose problems to candidates where challenging the given premise IS the point. You want people who will speak up)

I've spent perhaps a couple of decades designing and implementing various forms of distributed systems, and there are good reasons to avoid trying to hack your way out of trouble by requiring clients to behave a certain way. You will always have less control, it is almost never any easier than fixing the server side, and it doesn't actually address the root problem. You start at the end where the problem is instead of introducing hacks that run the risk of becoming long-lived.

You can always put something in front of a misbehaving backend that can compensate for the problem on the server side. In fact, this common enough that there exists a rich fauna of components that are used to address these kinds of issues. From more generic load balancers to more advanced application specific middleware. I've worked on perhaps half a dozen such systems and I've designed and implemented two of them from the ground up.

So yes, when people start trying to solve server problems by hacking the client, I tend to assume that they probably don't know what they are doing. And if they're not open to the possibility that they are wrong, why on earth would I waste my time working for them? Let alone try to convince them? Life is too short.
by _rpxpx | 2025-07-09 10:43:47+00:00
Great work, and great to hear about Echoplayer. Sorely needed. I currently use a Cowon Plenue D2 and have an iPod Video running Rockbox. The iPod looks nice, but is flaky and outdated, and can't utilize 24-bit flacs. The Cowon is pretty good, but the UI has a load of irritating elements and proprietary nonsense.

Congratulations on not carrying a cell phone!
by Traubenfuchs | 2025-07-09 10:44:25+00:00
REST(ful) API issues can all be resolved with one addition:

Adding actions to it!

POST api/registration / api/signup? All of this sucks. Posting or putting on api/user? Also doesn‘t feel right.

POST to api/user:signup

Boom! Full REST for entities + actions with custom requests and responses for actions!

How do I make a restful filter call? GET request params are not enough…

You POST to api/user:search, boom!

(I prefer to use the description RESTful API, instead of REST API -everyone fails to implement pure REST anyways, and it‘s unnecessarily limited.)
by throw0101a | 2025-07-09 10:44:51+00:00
> Credit where credit is due: the EU gets a lot of flack for being bureaucratic, hidebound, sclerotic, whatever, but the single currency has been a success and it's still expanding, 26 years after its creation.

For certain definitions of "success". The 2010s weren't such a great time:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_area_crisis

The EU isn't as integrated (e.g., labour mobility) as other currency areas, and so problems in one region are harder to fix.