MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by electric_muse | 2025-08-07 14:54:42+00:00
That's ironic. I think local MCPs are an auth nightmare.

Just think of all those plaintext auth tokens sitting in well-known locations on your machine.

It's a black hat dream.

We'll see, but I think commercial use of local MCPs is going to be constrained to use cases that only make sense if the MCP is local (e.g. it requires local file access).

For everything else, the only commercially reasonable way to use them is going to be remote streamable HTTP MCPs running in isolated containers

And even then, you need some management and identity plane. So they're going to likely be accessed via an enterprise gateway/proxy to handle things like: - composition -- bundling multiple MCPs into one for easier connection - identities per-user / per-agent - generation of rotatable tokens for headless agents - filtering what features (tools, prompts, resources) flow through into LLM context - basic security features, like tool description whitelisting to prevent rug pulls

MCP is only a protocol, after all. It's not meant to be a batteries-included product.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-07 14:54:47+00:00
This is to soak retail for liquidity private equity desperately needs. Public market infra already skims from retail today, but there are only ~4300 public companies and that number continues to decline; this is to juice what they can skim via assets under management and transaction fees.

Ask why PE wants access to retail capital directly versus going public to provide exposure and gain liquidity. Why do they not want to go public? (My take: Valuations won't hold up; extend and pretend)

People Are Worried About Private Market Liquidity - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-06-10/peo... | https://archive.today/wJ3Uf - June 10th, 2025

Private Equity Fundraising Plunges Amid Struggle to Return Cash - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-27/private-e... | https://archive.today/hxvzb - May 27th, 2025

Private Equity Firms Hunt for Alternate Ways to Return Investor Cash - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-05-14/privat... | https://archive.today/6UzBk - May 14th, 2025

Unlocking a potential US$3.8 trillion opportunity for private equity firms - https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/financial-s... - December 16th, 2024

The stock market is shrinking and Jamie Dimon is worried - https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/09/investing/premarket-stocks-tr... - April 9th, 2024
by gcr | 2025-08-07 14:55:09+00:00
Goodbye MPEG group, and to be frank, good riddance I think. I'm glad that open codecs are now taking over on the frontier of SOTA encoding.

Maybe these sorts of handshake agreements and industry collaboration were necessary to get things rolling in 198x. If so, then I thank the MPEG group for starting that work. But by 2005 or so when DivX and XviD and h264 were heating up, it was time to move beyond that model towards open interoperability.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-08-07 14:55:16+00:00
Good point, OP describes "firms" e.g. large established organizations, and ignores early stage startups for the most part. I think that fact and your comment illuminate another reason for the high salaries - namely:

A huge raison detre to create and sustain a "firm" in the first place is stability. That stability extends on all fronts - stable base of customers, stable base of revenue, stable base of shareholder returns, and stable base of compensation for employees. Therefore, it is expected that there would be some looseness/slip/"irrationally high" or however you want to think about it, in the salaries. An early-stage startup by comparison is dealing with a different problem and purpose.
by insignificntape | 2025-08-07 14:55:21+00:00
That's not true. And trust me, dude, it scares the living ** out of me, so I wish you were right. Next-token prediction is the AI-equivalent of a baby flailing its arms around and learning basic concepts about the world around it. The AI learns to mimic human behavior and recognize patterns, but it doesn't learn how to leverage this behavior to achieve goals. The pre-training is simply giving the AI a baseline understanding of the world. Everything that's going on now, getting it to think (i.e. talking to itself to solve more complex tasks), or getting it do do maths or coding, is simply us directing that inherent knowledge it's gathered from its pre-training and teaching the AI how to use it.

Look at Claude Code. Unless they hacked into private GitHub/GitLab repos... (which, honestly, I wouldn't put beyond these tech CEO's, see what CloudFlare recently found out about Perplexity as an example), but unless they really did that, they trained Claude 4 on approximately the same data as Claude 3. Yet for some reason its agentic coding skills are stupidly enhanced when compared to previous iterations.

Data no longer seems to be the bottleneck. Which is understandable. At the end of the day, data is really just a way to get the AI to make a predicion and run gradient descent on it. If you can generate for example a bunch of unit tests, you can let the AI freewheel its way into getting them to pass. A kid learns to catch a baseball not by seeing a million examples of people catching balls, but instead by testing their skills in the real world, and gathering feedback from the real world on whether their attempt to catch the ball was successful. If an AI can try to achieve goals and assess whether or not its actions lead to a successful or a failed attempt, who needs more data?
by mike_hearn | 2025-08-07 14:55:26+00:00
They're hardware accelerated so it's not worth making a new codec until you have a big improvement over the prior baseline, because it takes a long time to manufacture and roll out devices that are better. Verifying an optimization is worth it requires testing against a big library of videos using standardized perception metrics, it requires ensuring there's an efficient way to decode it in both hardware and software, including efficient encoding. It's easy to improve one kind of input but regress another. Most of the low hanging fruit is taken already. Just the usual stuff that makes advancing the frontier hard.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-07 14:55:29+00:00
MCP is a means of communicating information about externally-defined tools to the “application wrapper” (and your examples of “generic chatbots” are also application wrappers). Well, between the application wrapper and servers; “application wrappers” for LLMs are pretty much the motivating (but not sole) case of MCP Clients.

Without something like MCP, each application wrapper is left do do its own ad hoc wrappers for external tools (tools internal to the wrapper don’t use MCP.) With MCP, it just integrates an MCP client library, and then it can use any tool, resource, or prompt provided by any MCP server available to it.
by precompute | 2025-08-07 14:56:31+00:00
>LLM generated

>Buzzwords

>Author's English (when not written by a LLM) sounds translated

Doesn't inspire confidence.

Use GPG, it's not difficult. For non-technical folks, use signal or disappearing messages. For slightly more secure comms with non-technical people, use a combination of rot13 / caesar / similar.
by jacobr1 | 2025-08-07 14:56:53+00:00
You bought the bundle. You got games (crosswords and such), Local/National/Intl News, local Arts, schedule info for things like movies/theater, recipes, comics, sports score and analysis, classifieds, even for the ads to see if there were shopping deals to be had.

You bought a subscription in part for the value of one or more sections, but also because culturally everyone else did too, and once you have it you probably found something interesting. Few people ever read everything in the paper front to back regularly. That is why both then and now headlines were important.
by grahamjperrin | 2025-08-07 14:57:08+00:00
Not exactly a new laptop, but a few days ago I spent a similar period (around an hour) toying with FreeBSD on an HP EliteBook 660 16" (G11).

Very rough notes – things were rushed (squeezing as much as possible into the end of a Friday afternoon):

https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/1mey64f/hp_elitebo...
by eyberg | 2025-08-07 14:57:09+00:00
Packages exist: https://repo.ops.city

Mounts also exist - in fact you can hotplug volumes on the fly on all the major clouds. People really like this cause they can do things like rotate ssl certs every few hours.

The file system exists - at the very least you need to load a program that sits on the filesystem but people are running webservers that write to temp files and load static assets and also databases.
by jonfw | 2025-08-07 14:58:03+00:00
MCP is just packaging. It's the ideal abstraction for building AI applications.

I think it provides the similar benefits of decoupling the front and back end of a standard app.

I can pick my favorite AI "front end"- whether that's in my IDE as a dev, a desktop app as a business user, or on a server if I'm running an agentic workflow.

MCP allows you to package tools, prompts, etc. in a way that works across any of those front ends.

Even if you don't plan on leveraging the MCP across multiple tools in that way- I do think it has some benefits in de-coupling the lifecycle of the tool development from the model/ UI.
by red-iron-pine | 2025-08-07 14:58:41+00:00
you need to walk through the battlefield to trace it. you know, the one the drone just flew over.

they're pretty thin, and it's not hard for the operators to displace. even using other drones and AI to track refraction index of the fiber it's still a tall order. you'd probably have better luck shooting artillery at any large building or hedgerow nearby...
by tsimionescu | 2025-08-07 15:00:30+00:00
That's great, but it's not what FLOSS activists hoped and fight for.

It's still almost impossible to have a digital life that doesn't involve significant use of proprietary software, and the vast majority of users do their computing almost exclusively through proprietary software. The fact that this proprietary software is a bit of glue on top of a bunch of FLOSS libraries possibly running on a FLOSS kernel that uses FLOSS libraries to talk to a FLOSS router doesn't really buy much actual freedom for the end users. They're still locked in to the proprietary software vendors just as much as they were in the 90s (perhaps paying with their private data instead of actual money).
by LAsteNERD | 2025-08-07 15:00:37+00:00
Researchers may have discovered a biochemical "vector" for aging. A new study in Metabolism shows that a DNA-binding protein called HMGB1, when released by aging or stressed cells, can induce senescence in nearby healthy cells—essentially spreading aging. The reduced (low-oxygen) form of HMGB1 triggered this effect in both cell cultures and live mice; oxidized HMGB1 did not. Mice injected with the reduced protein began to show signs of aging within a week. The findings suggest that aging may be transmissible at a cellular level—at least in part—through circulating proteins in the blood.

Makes me wonder if this is responsible for the effect of rapid aging at (around) 44 and 60.
by lelandbatey | 2025-08-07 15:00:47+00:00
The Fido2 folks really really want things to be so secure and centralized, with so little user freedom, and they want to use attestation to do it.

Here's a Fido2 member (Okta) employee saying "If keepass allows users to back up passkeys to paper, I think we'll have to allow providers to block keepass via attestation." https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407#iss...

All because passkeys backup is deemed "too unsafe and users should never be allowed that feature, so if you implement it we'll kick you out of the treehouse."

The authoritarian nature of passkeys is already on full display. I hope they never get adopted and die.
by DonHopkins | 2025-08-07 15:01:47+00:00
Or going on Glaswegian Chocolate Bar Safaris hoping to spot Sad Oompa Loompas in their natural habitat.

https://x.com/KalhanR/status/1762703755462468045

We went viral as Oompa Loompas but we're just normal people:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cv2y59r89vjo

If not a theme park or safari, then at least a movie:

>A petition to to bring back the experience has been launched, while Scottish actress Karen Gillan has said she wants to star in a film adaptation of the event.

https://www.tiktok.com/@movieweb/video/7348892246982397190

>I would be a cheeky Oompa Looma!
by Jtsummers | 2025-08-07 15:01:50+00:00
Welcome to the world of large legacy systems developed for and used by organizations that don't understand IT, and don't know that they don't understand IT.

The good news is there's always a contractor willing to promise the world and deliver something that doesn't work in 5-10 years. Your internal team, who could have finished the original job in a couple years if they'd been funded, will be the ones that end up making that delivered system actually work. But you'll tell everyone that it was the contractor's high quality output that did the trick, because saying they failed would hurt your career. In 15-30 years the system will get replaced and your successor will hear about how great <contractor> did the first time, and they'll get another shot at failure.
by phkahler | 2025-08-07 15:02:03+00:00
12 bit color would have been great. In the old days 4 bits for each of RGB, or even packing 2 pixels per byte. Today 12 bit per channel would be awesome, although high end cameras seem to be at 14 (which doesn't fit bytes well either).

Instruction sets - 12 bits for small chips and 24 for large ones. RISC-V instructions encode better in 24bits if you use immediate data after the opcode instead of inside it.

Physical memory is topping out near 40bits of address space and some virtual address implementations don't even use 64 bits on modern systems.

Floating point is kinda iffy. 36 bits with more than 24bit mantissa would be good. not sure what would replace doubles.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-07 15:02:29+00:00
Not investing advice.

401ks remain fine as investment strategy assuming there is at least a handful of index or target date funds providing the capital market exposure you're after at very low expense ratio cost. But, if your employer's plan doesn't allow in service transfers to a brokerage held IRA, those funds are going to be held captive until you separate and can wholesale transfer. Find the best deal you can within them for your time horizon of having the funds tied up.
by strcat | 2025-08-07 15:02:31+00:00
The article contains libelous claims without substantiating them or providing evidence. It links to harassment content on YouTube doing the same. Both the article and those videos blatantly fabricate many things including parts which are self-evidently inaccurate. We have provided a lot of evidence and you can disprove the rest through basic research.

Demanding we provide evidence every time we respond to libelous claims lacking evidence is strange. The people attacking us this way haven't provided evidence for their claims and in fact what they show counters their own claims since it doesn't match what they're claiming it shows. They've disproven their own claims in their own content.
by lhamil64 | 2025-08-07 15:02:39+00:00
I personally don't do this because I feel like it defeats the whole purpose of 2fa. If someone gets into your bitwarden account, now they have your passwords and can generate 2fa codes. Of course, if the alternative is just not doing 2fa then it's better than nothing but I'd still prefer an authenticator app or hardware key than putting them in bitwarden.
by sigseg1v | 2025-08-07 15:02:52+00:00
Ever since the recent AI fad, more and more of these types of people have come out of the woodwork.

Every random unknown business now truly believes that they have built something novel and revolutionary. They have the audacity to see difficult things being invented by geniuses and think "wow, I can do it too". They think that they must succeed at all costs; their employees must work unlimited hours and they must use unlimited resources because nothing is more important.

It's kind of sad to watch, knowing that in a couple years nobody will care and their company will have produced nothing of value, while the negative consequences of their "progress at all costs" will still be felt by individuals and the world.
by flashgordon | 2025-08-07 15:03:39+00:00
To be fair. After having done this for the last 6 months (sabbaticals are fantastic things). About 5k lines of code corresponds to 1-2 "decent" features. And though an ai skeptic originally I've turned around - so 10k is not hard if:

A. you are doing this "full time"

B. Know what to build

C. More importantly you know "how" you want it built and you push the llm to refactoring regularly in your style.

I don't buy into the "let the agent code for 6 hours straight" agentic nonsense. I review every (big) change and just saving me stackoverflow/Google visits has been a huge productivity booster. Heck I wrote css, proto plugins, dsl parsers, simple games and more because now I needed much less "onboarding" times.
by simianwords | 2025-08-07 15:04:02+00:00
Your internal verifier model in your head is actually good enough and not random. It knows how the world works and subconsciously applies a lot of sniff tests it has learned over the years.

Sure a lot of answers from llms may be inaccurate - but you mostly identify them as such because your ability to verify (using various heuristics) is good too.

Do you learn from asking people advice? Do you learn from reading comments on Reddit? You still do without trusting them fully because you have sniff tests.
by Keyb0ardWarri0r | 2025-08-07 15:04:11+00:00
Interesting construction, thank you for sharing!

But:

- More and more people see ChaCha20 as wasteful (too many rounds)

- Poly1305 is "hard" to implement

- ChaCha12 + BLAKE3 can fulfill all the symmetric cryptography needs (MAC, AEAD, Hash, RNG...), which is untrue of ChaCha20 + Poly1305, therefore simplifying the deployment of secure cryptography

- ChaCha12 + BLAKE3 both scales with the width of SIMD vectors, opening the door to really really fast cryptography on general-purpose hardware, especially with ARM SVE & SVE2

- SIV construction requires to decrypt the entire payload before being able to verify the authentication tag, which can be costly and may lead to DoS attacks due to the asymmetry of the cost of attack / cost of defense
by csomar | 2025-08-07 15:04:17+00:00
Lots have changed in the last 30 years; ie: processors are much different now. There are better ways to do stuff now. Just because some people messes things in front-end development doesn't translate in one becoming a Luddite. The issue is that these upgrades usually end up in a catastrophe of some sort. But that's not an unavoidable fate.
by alfanick | 2025-08-07 15:04:32+00:00
I work as a software engineer and a manager in a medical devices company, but also as a hobby, whenever I'm at the doctors, I always ask them to show me the systems they're using.

A few observations: * software for medical devices is obscure, usually still done with 90s/00s technologies, people in the field are underpayed too. The result is you get bad code and most of the time you're just maintain it, instead of implementing new stuff, * this applies to both software and hardware - amount of often useless paperwork is ridiculous. You're bound by a lot of standards and regulations to make software/hardware compatible with those regulations. Which means engineering is not doing much engineering, but rather fillout those docs, do countless reviews of them, spend a lot of time on testing and QA. I know a few of those standards by heart, and often the work is not about implementing a standard but rather about being complaint with the standard - aka interpreting and stretching them that whatever you do is kinda complaint, but not really following the rules * software to manage these docs/requirements is also from 00s/90s, super not intuitive * med software itself, like stuff used by a doctor or folks in a hospital has really terrible user experience, sometimes it takes years to master it. Then once people master it, they get used to it, they don't like upgrades, cause then you have to master them again, * in my country you can do a lot of med stuff via email, what they call "encrypted email" - it's not PGP, and it's not encrypted with x509 certs etc You get like an email with a page embedded there that only works on Edge or Chrome, and to "unencrypt it" you need to put like data of birth or something like that.

This market seems really miserable from software/firmware perspective. Happy to ask some more questions.
by coldstartops | 2025-08-07 15:04:41+00:00
Yes, valid, congratulations on shipping!

It's just that the entry level for adopting a new tool (for other people) is:

Convince my recipient to use this system instead of "Why not just send the password as we usually do on our secret chat."

And then we spend 20 minutes talking about it and me advocating for their unknown and unaccountable creator.
by llm_nerd | 2025-08-07 15:04:49+00:00
Here on HN there are actually multiple people, and I wasn't the one that replied earlier with a specific citation (versus your ridiculous claim of cooking your own numbers, which you should understand convinces absolutely no one).

But a general observation that the more processed a product is the more likely it is nutritionally garbage is pretty universally accepted and is generally valid, however vague and debatable the specific tiers might be.

>but here especially because you broadly accused HN of being anti-science on this subject

Do you imagine yourself to be the universal "HN"? I made no such claim. Nor is there some pro-UPF faction dominating HN that you seem to imagine. Seems to be a pretty mixed group, many legitimately curious and learning and coming at it from different perspectives and levels of knowledge.

Then there's you, spouting nonsense and looking for an argument while you muddy the waters.

Again, though, your shrieking about artificial sweeteners again just betrays that you're a hyper-polarized person just looking for an argument at whatever cost. Humorously I've defended and encouraged artificial sweeteners on this very site many times.
by mike_hearn | 2025-08-07 15:04:51+00:00
Mozilla is just Google from a financial perspective, it's not an independent org, so the financing point stands.

H.264 was something like >90% of all video a few years ago and wasn't it free for streaming if the end user wasn't paying? IIRC someone also paid the fees for an open source version. There were pretty good licensing terms available and all the big players have used it extensively.

Anyway, my point was only that expecting Google to develop every piece of tech in the world and give it all away for free isn't a general model for tech development, whereas IP rights and patent pools are. The free ride ends the moment Google decide they need more profit, feel threatened in some way or get broken up by the government.
by CoastalCoder | 2025-08-07 15:04:54+00:00
I'm curious how long until most users just don't care if their CPU has native x86 support.

As someone developing HPC applications, I generally don't care either, as long as the hardware has good fundamentals, and is well supported by the available compilers and profiling tools.

Honestly at this point the only reason that I'm aware of to prefer Intel for my workloads is the awesomeness of VTune.

How's the quality of the equivalent AMD or Arm tooling these days?