MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gruez | 2025-07-21 23:51:52+00:00
>One of them had a media machine that painted them as Literally Tony Stark™ for two decades

What "media machine"? He only bought twitter in 2022, and even if he had a PR person or two, it can hardly be considered a "media machine" any more than some SMB with one or two social media interns has a "media machine".
by kaibee | 2025-07-21 23:51:55+00:00
> They are worried about how LGBTQ/trans athletes are destroying the moral fabric of their society. Those concerns aren't going to evaporate just because everyone is fed and housed. If anything if they're more economically secure they'd be able to spend even more time on culture war issues.

The mistake is assuming that these issues rise into public debate entirely through grassroots, when really its more of a consequence of the incentive structures around politics in the US. The Democratic party doesn't want to upset their donors, but they need some issue to campaign on, rally support etc. And equal rights and such is all well and good, has been successful in the past, and played well with the base. The Republican party, also doesn't want to upset their donors, and opposing the Democrats on equal rights is easy to sell to their base.

As long as the game is about moving the ball of cultural/rights issues around, the wealthy win.
by hadlock | 2025-07-21 23:52:37+00:00
This completely ignores the need for baseload generation. Wind and solar will probably always be cheaper, but the power grid will likely always need a diverse array of power supplies. If your photovalic cell factories get bombed, how will you make more? If Egypt were 100% solar powered, it would be trivial to defeat them in a war by shooting less than a million dollars of artillery shells into their solar plants, leaving everyone in the dark in perpetuity. Japan was almost wholly dependent on the US for oil and coal before the US pulled their delivery contracts which was partly why they bombed pearl harbor, they had little to no power diversity. Nuclear and hydro will always backstop grid energy, even if solar becomes free or net negative.
by simonw | 2025-07-21 23:53:47+00:00
The "declaring script dependencies" thing is incredibly useful: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/scripts/#declaring-script-d...

# /// script # dependencies = [ # "requests<3", # "rich", # ] # /// import requests, rich # ... script goes here

Save that as script.py and you can use "uv run script.py" to run it with the specified dependencies, magically installed into a temporary virtual environment without you having to think about them at all.

It's an implementation of Python PEP 723: https://peps.python.org/pep-0723/

Claude 4 actually knows about this trick, which means you can ask it to write you a Python script "with inline script dependencies" and it will do the right thing, e.g. https://claude.ai/share/1217b467-d273-40d0-9699-f6a38113f045 - the prompt there was:

Write a Python script with inline script dependencies that uses httpx and click to download a large file and show a progress bar

Prior to Claude 4 I had a custom Claude project that included special instructions on how to do this, but that's not necessary any more: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/19/one-shot-python-tools/
by taftster | 2025-07-21 23:54:08+00:00
The total sum of all natural resources has yet to be discovered. We were supposed to hit peak oil in what, the 1990's? Trees are on a dramatic decline, but they still exist. No one can correctly or meaningfully count the amount of natural resources left in total existence. And when there's scarcity, another solution tends to emerge as substitute.

As such, as parent stated, it's not a zero sum game. Zero sum assumes you can define the end state.

That being said, whether or not it's zero-sum is meaningless, and I don't take issue with arguing against the parent. Ultimately, the wealth-gap is widening to detrimental effect. The middle class is being divided into haves and have nots.

Whether you believe this is a problem, that's probably another type of discussion.
Show HN: Outlook MCP – I accidentally made the best email assistant
by Norcim133 | 2025-07-21 23:55:11+00:00
I couldn't understand the hype around MCP so I decided to build a simple server for Outlook (requires admin in Azure).

For the build I just used a Python MCP SDK: https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/python-sdk

Now, I'm not a fast dev. Still, in 2 days I had Claude Desktop filing and responding to emails better than any assistant I've worked with (human or otherwise). None of this was due to my skill. I was basically just wrapping msgraph calls in the same @mcp.tool decorator over and over.

In fact, I spent more time fiddling with msgraph auth & api-calls than I did on the MCP server itself.

Today, in a typical workflow, I just tell Claude to "sort my inbox" and it handles everything from filing mails, creating folders, writing responses, scheduling meetings, flagging actions, etc.

For anyone wondering about MCP, the following struck me:

1. It was the fastest "time-to-capable" I've had on any software build.

2. It was fully "human-capable" in a way that I have not experienced with "agentic workflow" approaches... it just worked.

3. There are nuances to how you "architect" your tool signatures for best results. For example, I had to name one parameter html_code_mail_body to prevent Claude from using plaintext in mails.

4. It was better to make pure, highly cohesive and atomic tools and let the LLM combine them for more complicated tasks.

5. It was so easy to build, all companies are likely to launch official MCP servers eventually.

Overall, I think MCP offers a stark alternative to the "agentic workflows" model. In a technical sense, each step in a workflow is highly coupled to its upstream/downstream counterpart. This makes them both rigid and fragile. That's the source of some of the "RPA smells" people talk about with workflow agents.

MCP is classic dependency inversion. The llm becomes an abstraction that can self-orchestrate using any tool it wants, in any order, based on the task set for it.
by TMWNN | 2025-07-21 23:55:28+00:00
> It's interesting to claim that tourism in Europe won't be "durable" at a moment when tourism in the US is sharply declining..

Sorry to shatter your illusions, but for April 2025 (most recent month with final data) <https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https%3A%2...>, Canadian visits are down 20% yoy but overall worldwide visits to US are up 1.3% yoy, including 17% yoy rise in Mexican visitors.

Full data <https://www.trade.gov/i-94-arrivals-program>
by quantified | 2025-07-21 23:55:37+00:00
> FaceCrime does not claim to have complete or comprehensive data on all individuals. The database used for matching is limited and may not contain current or accurate information. Any matches provided by the Service should be considered preliminary and subject to verification through official channels. WE EXPLICITLY DISCLAIM ANY RESPONSIBILITY FOR MISIDENTIFICATION OR FALSE MATCHES. Users must exercise due diligence and not rely solely on the Service for identification purposes.

Yeah.
by tumnus | 2025-07-21 23:55:56+00:00
I suspect the person you are responding to is suggesting that these culture war issues are merely meant to distract from the real problem, which is wealth inequality. Many of the people worried about 'moral fabric' are fine with divorce and sexual assault (and will vote for politicians with these compromised moral values) but are also concerned about trans athletes who by most metrics comprise less that .01% of all athletes.
by doubled112 | 2025-07-21 23:56:18+00:00
I think you missed the joke here, being that Sharepoint is installed in many of orgs, but never used after installation.

I have worked at an org that did the same. We already had Confluence. Somebody decided we needed Sharepoint. We licensed and installed it. Six months later we migrated the handful of documents and files and decommissioned it.
by vineyardmike | 2025-07-21 23:56:24+00:00
Cable companies and other infrastructure companies have been focusing on free cash flow and revenue over profit for generations. Interest rates have fluctuated a lot in that time.

Amazon started to be very profitable because they couldn’t reinvest all that money into growing the business in a meaningful way. The timing aligning with when they stopped their Covid-buildout because sales behavior returned to in-store, they started scaling back the billions a year they wasted on Alexa, and started scaling back various moonshot ideas like Amazon Go stores.
by johnisgood | 2025-07-21 23:56:28+00:00
I am sorry to disappoint you, but posting nasty comments is a crime in the UK under the 2003 Communications Act, which means it has been a crime for decades.

Section 127(1) makes it an offence to: "Send by means of a public electronic communications network a message that is a - (a) grossly offensive, (b) indecent, obscene, or menacing, or (c) false, known to be false, for causing annoyance, inconvenience, or needless anxiety." Section 127(2) adds that: "A person is also guilty of an offence if they cause a message or other matter to be sent that is similarly offensive or menancing.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/21/section/127
by inamberclad | 2025-07-21 23:56:34+00:00
Agreed, the cost of housing is the primary driver of every other increased cost in the Bay Area except for the cost of gas.

High rent means high wages, which means high costs for business, which means high prices for consumers...

States like Texas keep housing low, which means lower wages for workers and lower prices for consumers, but I don't want us to artificially impoverish people in order to achieve the goal of "affordability."

Instead we have to lower rent without lowering income as much. This would cause an explosion in average spending power and therefore a much stronger middle class.

Great right? Yes it would be, except for the landlords, real estate investors, and middle aged homeowners who will do anything and hurt almost anyone to keep the value of their properties artificially inflated to preposterous levels. Unfortunately, those are the people in charge in most cities.
by reactordev | 2025-07-21 23:57:01+00:00
Why should I disclose public domain knowledge when it’s public? The whole point was to point out there’s ways that aren’t public being used.

Believe it or not, I actually care about privacy. Innuendo is not my intent, no maliciousness here, only stating there are programs that have access to your data. Telegram/Signal/Encrypted or not. They don’t need access to your device. Only access to the Internet.
by I_dream_of_Geni | 2025-07-21 23:57:04+00:00
I have read many of the comments here, and there seems to be a huge misunderstanding of this specific MRI and facility. This seems to be a private "Doc-in-the-box" type facility, where the staffing is VERY minimal, because it isn't a hospital, and may not even be connected to any hospital. So, the costs are WAY lower for the patient (10x or so), thereby making the staffing lower to reduce costs. These machines many times are the older machines taken from hospitals as the hospital update their equipment. So, yes, the machine still functions well, and the costs are much lower, but the MRI scan generally is poorer than the newest generation machine. Case in point, I blew out a disk in my back, went to my doctor, who said I could get the MRI at the local hospital for $6000 (10 years ago), or go to this 'private' MRI and pay $600. The staffing was literally a receptionist and a certified tech. 2 people. I doubt there was a radiologist within 20 miles. My scan was easy and quick. The price was right.
by greatgib | 2025-07-21 23:58:25+00:00
When you dig it up, it is totally crazy and the total shit that we could expect.

Nothing works really well nowadays with exchange (classic, new, web, ...) or Teams. It is a complex layer based on sharepoint, that was not designed for that, because OneDrive is so bad that they have absolutely no way to manage a proper sharing of files between multiple persons, and so even less between teams and orgs.
by poemxo | 2025-07-21 23:59:06+00:00
We need more Red Hat and less Microsoft in the on-prem enterprise business. These exploitable vulnerabilities are unacceptable when your customers are the likes of DoD.

No one considers Google anything less than an impenetrable fortress, but when it's some government entity responsible for keeping American lives safe it's like "ah yeah they probably have a vulnerable on-prem Sharepoint that could easily be pwned."

So why is this? Why do Microsoft products enjoy a monopoly on the server in these sectors when more secure (Linux-based) options are far cheaper and widely deployed already? Isn't security the number one priority in those spaces?
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-07-21 23:59:09+00:00
How about "schglop?"

Fair bit of slop indeed with half-buried side (rather a main?) of unsolicited schlep request

That'd make frankonfraud a golps

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44641575

https://archive.today/latest/frankonfraud.com/sms-blasters-t...

My 2s helping frank go full .org :)
by greyface- | 2025-07-21 23:59:26+00:00
Good time to note that Buypass offers free certificates over ACME. I have a few of my domains configured to use them instead of LetsEncrypt, just for redundancy and to ensure I have a working non-LE cert source in case LE suffers problems like this over a longer time period.

Example OpenBSD /etc/acme-client.conf:

authority buypass { api url "https://api.buypass.com/acme/directory" account key "/etc/acme/buypass-privkey.pem" contact "mailto:youremail@example.com" } domain example.com { domain key "/etc/ssl/private/example.com.key" domain full chain certificate "/etc/ssl/example.com.pem" sign with buypass }
by kaibee | 2025-07-21 23:59:41+00:00
> wealth inequality does not make the economy worse anyway. economies are always better where more wealth is created, and wealth is never created "evenly" across the population; however, the rising tide does lift all boats, that's the empirical history of successful economies.

Yes, I'm sure that once all of the wealth is held by a tiny fraction of the elites, they will successfully centrally plan the whole economy for maximum efficiency.
by heavyset_go | 2025-07-22 00:00:25+00:00
What middle class person has thousands of literal servants who will spend every waking hour serving, feeding, cleaning, tailoring, cooking and creating for them in their giant, country-spanning estates?

How many middle class people have the God-given divine right to rule and demand the sons of every nobleman to fight to keep and expand their power?

How many middle class people literally own a country and can dictate what happens in it from the top down? How many vineyards do middle class people own? How many garden hermits[1] do they keep on their estates simply for their ambience and kitsch?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_hermit
by raincole | 2025-07-22 00:01:02+00:00
The article mentions "Akamai" 7 times to just say:

> Don’t overinvest in large language models

> Don’t let LLM success cloud your judgment

> Explore the world of AI beyond LLMs

> Let employees experiment

a.k.a. nuffing.

Reject LLM, embrace traditional keyword SEO?
by waldopat | 2025-07-22 00:01:17+00:00
While it may be easier to build features, or even a simple product, marketing and sales are only getting harder. Your moat is your ability to grow fast, capture market and earn customer loyalty. From that perspective, technical skills need to move more into GTM engineering to a degree.

But what's sad about what you're suggesting is that we've built the most advanced LLMs in the history of humanity and all we can think to do with them is clone something that already exists. Innovation still requires a human brain and the LLMs only know what they've been told.

So I would say the need for technical skills is actually even more acute. We need smart people to solve highly complex problems as well as teams of developers to deliver quality, secure and efficient code.
by ryeguy_24 | 2025-07-22 00:01:33+00:00
Isn’t there a whole bunch of dependency here related to prompting and methodology that would significantly impact overall performance? My gut instinct is that there are many many ways to architect this around the LLMs and each might yield different levels of accuracy. What do others think?

Edit: In reading more, I guess this is meant to be a dumb benchmark to monitor through time. Maybe that’s the aim here instead of viability as an auto close tool.
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-07-22 00:02:28+00:00
What are some tells of a business flight? The only one that comes to my mind: I am doing whatever is possible to fly out on Monday or Friday rather than give up my weekend for the company.

I have always booked corporate flights through an internal portal system. I assumed that this identified me as a belonging to X company, so my options would be priced by some standing agreement with the airline. Is this not true?
by kristianp | 2025-07-22 00:04:19+00:00
NVIDIA unveiled OpenReasoning-Nemotron, a quartet of distilled reasoning models with 1.5B, 7B, 14B, and 32B parameters, all derived from the 671B-parameter DeepSeek R1 0528. [1]

[1] https://www.techpowerup.com/339089/nvidia-brings-reasoning-m...
by johnnienaked | 2025-07-22 00:04:20+00:00
Writing isn't necessarily thinking. For example you can have a spreadsheet of 20 000 words and use an algorithm to randomly pick a sequence of words. No one would call that thinking, even if such a process made intelligible sentences sometimes.

"AI" is using an algorithm and statistics in the same way---it's just more accurate at making intelligible sentences than the example above. I wouldn't call either thinking, would you?
by anothereng | 2025-07-22 00:04:30+00:00
you don't need that many servants when you have businesses that offer the same services and you can afford them. Or you think middle class people can't afford travelling, laundry services, food delivery, etc.

The second thing you're referring to is power. Power I admit can be zero sum but most people are not ambitious in that way, they just want material wealth not political power.
by phil21 | 2025-07-22 00:05:08+00:00
I call it the liabilty fairy.

It's why school boards don't do anything useful, among many many other things in our society. It's an endemic disease.

Most of the time it's extremely exaggerated, but it's trotted out and used as a CYA excuse almost immediately by most in the executive/managerial class. Both due to outright laziness and incompetence, and also as just a... why take any personal risk whatsoever making actual decisions with any impact if I can keep my cushy job and career rolling by being as milquetoast as possible.

Never mind you get the big bucks to make such important and controversial decisions at great personal (career) risk when some inevitably go wrong. Everyone forgot that part. Such roles should be hard, difficult, and risky.
by blindhippo | 2025-07-22 00:05:15+00:00
Humans (accountants) are non-deterministic, so unsure if an LLM would be better or worse if we threw more effort at the problem.

But in general, I tend to side with the "lets leave the math to purpose built models/applications" instead of generalized LLMS. LLMs are great if you are just aiming for "good enough to get through next quarter" type results. If you need 100% accuracy, an LLM isn't going to cut it.
by kuhsaft | 2025-07-22 00:05:20+00:00
Yeah. Once you start working with the SharePoint API and Exchange API, you realize how it’s a miracle that Teams works at all. It’s bonkers.

I once figured out that you can go to the permissions page on the SharePoint site created by Teams and remove access for the corresponding M365 group.

M365 relies on SharePoint and Exchange, but they don’t rely on M365. So, you can potentially break Teams.
by fsckboy | 2025-07-22 00:06:06+00:00
I have flown "first class" on flights that turned out to be small airplanes and there was not much to the first class distinction, seats only slightly bigger, no special food, etc.

I'm confused a little by what you are saying, are you saying that there was first class boarding but you were not allowed to participate? was there a first class lounge with the name of your airline and you were not allowed to use it? etc.
by bgwalter | 2025-07-22 00:06:25+00:00
The Sloan school again uses the sycophantic conductor meme for the dear business leaders, many of whom are entirely uncultivated and have never touched a classical instrument.

Regarding "AI", at least this CTO is cautious, but also says: “Most jobs at this point can benefit from AI.”

That is of course incorrect. I'm waiting for a CTO who dismisses "AI" outright. That is probably too dangerous in the current climate.
by selcuka | 2025-07-22 00:07:17+00:00
It is reflected. That's why plants are green.

You seem to have missed the context of my reply:

> an extinction level event that filtered sunlight for a long time, removing green

The lack of green sunlight would not necessarily result in a mutation that reflects green. There is no evolutionary pressure for reflecting/not using something that doesn't exist. In fact, it would be adding intent to a process that has no intent.
by an0malous | 2025-07-22 00:07:28+00:00
The majority of conservatives believe the democrats are wasting trillions of dollars on wars, inflating debt to give trillions to their corporate and banker friends, spending billions on foreign aid, "woke" education, and fraudulent welfare. This majority gets lumped together with the anti-LGBTQ and anti-immigrant people because they believe that a lot of this wasteful spending is going towards these communities and their needs. If you removed their concerns about this spending, the remaining people who are still against LGBTQ/immigrant/welfare policies would be a small fringe group. The vast majority of conservatives do not intrinsically hate the LGBTQ/immigrant/welfare community, it's only to the extent that the former believes the latter is taking resources from them. All of this hatred stems from fear, the fear that you won't have food, shelter, or healthcare causes people to lash out at others that they perceive are causing these deficiencies.

The spin job that the elite class does is to argue that the bankers and CEOs are actually creating jobs and wealth, and the fault rests with those low-life poors/immigrants/socialists that are consuming more than they've earned. At its core, this is all about wealth and resource disparity.
by scrlk | 2025-07-22 00:07:36+00:00
Yes, it's simple supply and demand dynamics at work. FWIW, I think the treasury companies bear a resemblance to the 'ponzinomics' of Olympus DAO and its forks in the last crypto cycle. They ran to tens of billions in market cap before going to zero.

This is the first cycle where TradFi is getting properly involved, so no idea how high we go across BTC and the rest of crypto.
by yonran | 2025-07-22 00:08:28+00:00
What a disappointment that this “Silicon Valley Pain Index”—where the pain consists of things like high rents and homelessness—is headlined with an irrelevant scapegoat of 9 billionaires. The 9 billionaires named in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44641525) do not own the vast majority of residential zoned land and are not active in land use politics as far as I know. It’s the few hundred thousand millionaires who use regulatory capture (zoning) to prevent abundant multifamily housing.

You can hate billionaires for other reasons, but urban land use is mostly a problem of your own neighbors who vote, not some tiny minority of super-rich.