MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lsaferite | 2025-08-09 19:48:47+00:00
And yet, TCP powers the Internet.

That being said. MCP as a protocol has a fairly simple niche. Provide context that can be fed to a model to perform some task. MCP covers the discovery process around presenting those tools and resources to an Agent in a standardized manner. An it includes several other aspects that are useful in this niche. Things like "sampling" and "elicitations". Is it perfect? Not at all. But it's a step in the right direction.

The crowd saying "just point it at an OpenAPI service" does not seem to fully understand the current problem space. Can many LLMs extract meaning from un-curated API response messages? Sure. But they are also burning up context holding junk that isn't needed. Part of MCP is the acknowledgement that general API responses aren't the right way to feed the model the context it needs. MCP is supposed to be taking a concrete task, performing all the activities need to gather the info or affect the change, then generate clean context meant for the LLM. If you design an OpenAPI service around those same goals, then it could easily be added to an Agent. You'd still need to figure out.all the other aspects, but you'd be close. But at that point you aren't pointing an Agent at a random API, you're pointing it at a purpose made API. And then you have to wonder, why not something like MCP that's designed for that purpose from the start?

I'll close by saying there are an enormous number of MCP Servers out there that are poorly written, thin wrappers on general APIs, or have some other bad aspects. I attribute a lot of this to the rise in AI Coding Agents allowing people with poor comprehension of the space enabling them to crank out this... Noise.

There are also great examples of MCP Servers to be found. They are the ones that have thoughtful designs, leverage the spec fully, and provide nice clean context for the Agent to feed to the LLM.

I can envision a future where we can simply point an agent at a series of OpenAPI services and the agent uses it's models to self-assemble what we consider the MCP server today. Basically it would curate accessing the APIs into a set of focused tools and the code needed to generate the final context. That's not quite where we are today. It's likely not far off though.
by sublimefire | 2025-08-09 19:48:57+00:00
> deeper authoritarian sympathies

It is not that but systematic destruction of any institution standing in the way. Once that is done it is easier to wield power and suppress people to do stuff. Just look at Russia today, where dissent is extremely risky to you and people around you, where shitnews television is pumping people with weird narratives, etc. Similarly T.Snyder argues that a precursor to the atrocities (not the war per se) in WWII were the destruction of the institutions.
by totallynothoney | 2025-08-09 19:49:28+00:00
That's a philosophical discussion, not scientific fact. (The scientific facts of fetal development are of course important for the discussion) I'm sure we would entirely disagree when a fetus gets qualia or becomes a human being, but that doesn't necessarily mean one of us is ignoring science.

Unique DNA is irrelevant (a clone would be a person), lacking a viable circulatory system or fingerprints doesn't mean lack of personhood. Someone completely braindead a person or closer to a cadaver? Not everybody agrees on the same.

>In my understanding, any definition that discounts there individuality is primarily there to depersonalize them and thus justify their killing.

That's bad faith. Let me try one myself, all anti-choice people are just useful fools in the ultra-conservative campaign to maintain authoritarian control of the relationships and bodies of the people. In my country divorce was illegal until 2004, the same party that maligned it's legalization took condoms out of UN care packages after an earthquake. They would absolutely prohibit Plan B, limit condoms to married couples and make homosexuality illegal if they in had the power.

In the US, the poor will be kept barefoot and pregnant, while the Republican senator and the megapastor will get an abortion for their mistress.

Well, that's easy. Just think everyone else is evil and stupid :^)
by akkartik | 2025-08-09 19:50:33+00:00
Yeah, my install instructions are consistently:

1. Download LÖVE from its website.

2. Download my app (as Lua source code).

It's not going to lead to Instagram-level downloads, but that's not the aim. My goal is to teach people a little at a time to be thoughtful about whom they trust to run code on their devices. Forcing people to take 2 steps hopefully has 2 benefits:

1. You start from day 1 to take baby steps in being mindful of how software is put together for you to use. It's not just a single hermetically sealed box. This part comes from one supplier, this part from another. Both can be modified, and require different skills to modify.

2. You start from day 1 to take baby steps in thinking about whom to trust. Here there are 2 separate projects that would be very hard to collude together. That limits at least the level of malicious stuff I can do.

Summary: I don't want a bunch of people blindly trusting me. I want a few people choosing mindfully to trust me.
by mindslight | 2025-08-09 19:50:37+00:00
> [i]ntellectual property and the enforcement thereof is in and of itself a Torment Nexus.

That does not make it clear. Saying that A is an instance of B does not define what B is.

> "AI" exists outside of the various corporations hosting LLMs on The Cloud™

You're speaking obliquely here, so I'm left guessing what you mean. I think you're just referring to how individuals can train/download/modify/run models locally. I don't see how that affects copyright, as it seems to fit in the same exact place as piracy of the source material (unfortunately). Downloading a model that has gotten the attention of corpos for "infringing" will be treated exactly how torrenting original works is now.
by seba_dos1 | 2025-08-09 19:50:55+00:00
It's exactly what agentic tools make harder to do. LLM-generated code usually looks great at the first glance - your opinion on how bad it is is a function of effort spent reviewing, analyzing and questioning it.

The shitty code it comes up with helps me a lot, because fixing broken stuff and unraveling the first principles of why it's broken is how I learn best. It helps me think and stay focused. When learning new areas, the goal is to grasp the subject matter enough to find out what's wrong with the generated code - and it's still a pretty safe bet that it will be wrong, one way or another. Whenever I attempt to outsource the actual thinking (because of feeling lazy or even just to check the abilities of the model), the results are pretty bad and absolutely nowhere near the quality level of anything I'd want to sign my name under.

Of course, some people don't mind and end up wasting other people's time with their generated patches. It's not that hard to find them around. I have higher standards than replying "dunno, that's what AI wrote" when a reviewer asks why is something done this particular way. Agentic tools bring down the walls which could let you stop for a moment and notice the sloppiness of that output even further. They just let the model do more of the things it's not very good at, and encourage it to flood the code with yet another workaround for an issue that would disappear completely had you spent two minutes pondering about the root cause (which you won't do, because you don't have a mental model of what the code does, because you let the agent do it for you).
Scaling customer support destroys it – here's the proof
by duggalji | 2025-08-09 19:50:56+00:00
I’ve been running a SaaS for 2 years. I thought I was “improving” customer support. In reality, I killed it.

Month 1: Me answering every email. Response time: 5 minutes. Customer satisfaction: 98%. People sent thank-you notes.

Month 24: 8 support reps + Zendesk + Intercom + “best practices.” Response time: 18 hours. Customer satisfaction: 43%. People leave angry reviews.

Cost per ticket: $0 → $23 Churn from support issues: 0% → 31%

I literally made support worse by “scaling” it.

The brutal truth: Every support tool promises to “scale customer success.” What they actually scale is customer frustration.

Added a chatbot → customer satisfaction dropped 40%. But hey, the dashboard said “response time improved,” so it looked like a win.

Agents spend 70% of their time in tools, 30% actually helping people.

Customers would rather wait 2 hours to talk to someone who gives a damn than get an instant reply from someone reading a script.

The impossible choice:

Personal support → expensive, doesn’t scale

Efficient support → cheap, customers hate it

No support → honest, but brutal

I’m now experimenting with voice AI to recreate the “founder answers personally” experience for 10,000 customers. Not because I think AI will save us — but because human support breaks the second you scale past yourself.

Has anyone here actually scaled support without it turning to shit? Or is good support and growth just… mutually exclusive?
by sahila | 2025-08-09 19:51:14+00:00
> But social mobility for serious kids is much easier in the United States than elsewhere.

This is an unrelated point, is your contention that the US is better off with unserious students? Social mobility / wealth accumulation for the masses does suck in other countries but it's great that people are still seriously motivated by schools. It's a big reason those students immigrant to the US and companies here hire those people in masses.
by binwiederhier | 2025-08-09 19:51:18+00:00
Thank you to all the Debian volunteers that make Debian and all its derivatives possible. It's remarkable how many people and businesses have been enabled by your work. Thank you!

On a personal note, Trixie is very exciting for me because my side project, ntfy [1], was packaged [2] and is now included in Trixie. I only learned about the fact that it was included very late in cycle when the package maintainer asked for license clarifications. As a result the Debian-ized version of ntfy doesn't contain a web app (which is a reaaal bummer), and has a few things "patched out" (which is fine). I approached the maintainer and just recently added build tags [3] to make it easier to remove Stripe, Firebase and WebPush, so that the next Debian-ized version will not have to contain (so many) awkward patches.

As an "upstream maintainer", I must say it isn't obvious at all why the web app wasn't included. It was clearly removed on purpose [4], but I don't really know what to do to get it into the next Debian release. Doing an "apt install ntfy" is going to be quite disappointing for most if the web app doesn't work. Any help or guidance is very welcome!

[1] https://github.com/binwiederhier/ntfy

[2] https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ntfy

[3] https://github.com/binwiederhier/ntfy/pull/1420

[4] https://salsa.debian.org/ahmadkhalifa/ntfy/-/blob/debian/lat...
by jeroenhd | 2025-08-09 19:51:18+00:00
An agent as far as I've seen people use it is a script that will add some stuff to your prompt and monitor the LLM's output for a specific pattern and execute code when it encounters that.

For instance, you could have an "agent" that can read/edit files on your computer by adding something like "to read a file, issue the `read_file $path`" to your prompt, and whenever a line of LLM output that starts with `read_file` is finished, the script running on your computer will read that file, paste it into the prompt, and let the LLM continue its autocomplete-on-steroids.

If you write enough tools and a complicated enough prompt, you end up with an LLM that can do stuff. By default, smart tools usually require user confirmation before actually doing stuff, but if you run the LLM in full agent mode, you trust the LLM not to do anything it shouldn't. curl2bash with LLMs, basically.

An LLM with significant training and access to file access, HTTP(S) API access, and access to some OS APIs can do a lot of work for you if you prompt it right. My experience with Claude/Copilot/etc. is that 75% of the time, the LLM will fail to do what it should be doing without manually repairing its mistakes, but in the other 25% of the time it does look rather sci-fi-ish.

With some tools you can tell your computer "take this directory, examine the EXIF data of each image, map the coordinates to the country and nearest town the picture was taken in, then make directories for each town and move the pictures to their corresponding locations". The LLM will type out shell commands (`ls /some/directory`), interpret the results as part of the prompt response that your computer sends back, and repeat that until its task has been completed. If you prepare a specific prompt and set of tools for the purpose of managing files, you could call that a "file management agent".

Generally, this works best for things you can do by hand in a couple of minutes or maybe an hour if it's a big set of images, but something the computer can now probably take care of you for you. That said, you're basically spending enough CO2 to drive to the store and back, so until we get more energy efficient data centers I'm not too fond of using these tools for banal interactions like that.
by gizmo686 | 2025-08-09 19:51:55+00:00
I think that understanding how eyes and light work is very informative on this subject.

Why are there 3 primary colors (regardless of which 3 you pick)? That has nothing to do with the nature of light, and everything to do with the fact that humans see light using 3 distinct frequency response curves [0]. This means that humans perceive color as a 3 dimensional space; and the role of the primary colors is to pick a point in this space by selectively stimulating or masking the 3 response curves. In a world of pure linear algebra, almost any 3 colors would do, but physical reality limits how ideally we can mix them; and how much light they can emit/mask.

Further, the 3 response curves are overlapping, so there is no set of ideal colors that would let you actually control the 3 curves independently.

[0] At least for color perception in a typical human.
by willseth | 2025-08-09 19:52:08+00:00
I’m not sure it would since the whole Bluetooth stack is already designed for P2P. Apple’s network is a true mesh though and not point to point. If you share locations with your friends on FindMy using iPhones or AirTags you will get updates via the encrypted mesh network (that includes other peoples’ iPhones) without being connected to a WiFi or cell network.

https://support.apple.com/guide/security/find-my-security-se...
by Teknomadix | 2025-08-09 19:52:48+00:00
I can confirm as an owner of several W124 vehicles, most notably the 1987 North American market S124, this is the 300 TDT, a station wagon version of the W124 chassis with the OM603 turbo diesel. Currently my wagons clock has just over 370,000 mi. This is a unicorn car in North America. They only sold this car during one sales year in 1987, with this particular engine configuration. This engine can also be found in several other cars around the same era from Mercedes-Benz.

I also own a 1999 W210 with the OM606 turbo diesel. This is the electronically controlled and upgraded version of the OM603. I can confirm that the w w210 is plagued with the myriad of problems. But it is still a fairly nice chassis with modern features and once one becomes acustomized with its particular idiosyncrasies it isn't really that horrible. But it's definitely not the tank that the w124 and w123 series chassis were. The primary prize is the OM606 engine. Which is commonly extracted from the W210 chassis and used to repower any number of other vehicles. There are lots of ways to crank tons of horsepower out of these engines, but at the sacrifice of their longevity.
by esseph | 2025-08-09 19:52:50+00:00
"Lack of skill" is a real problem I've seen grow over the past decade.

No matter the company I'm with or in conversations with others at other places, there just hasn't been a solid intake of junior programmers / sysadmins / network engineers / etc.

Which sucks, because now there's very few junior staff to teach, which makes backfills harder.

Any junior positions that do seem to happen are just a money funnel to offshoring and the results are /mostly/ less than stellar and ultimately aren't setup to solve the knowledge transfer problem in a meaningful, long-term way.
by duggalji | 2025-08-09 19:52:51+00:00
What I'm trying now: Building voice AI that actually solves problems instead of creating tickets. Not because I love AI, but because human support is fundamentally broken at scale. Maybe AI can be the "me answering emails personally" experience for 10,000 customers instead of 10. Early access if you're dealing with the same nightmare: https://www.synthicai.com/ Anyone else notice their support got worse as they grew? How did you solve it without losing your soul?
by Santosh83 | 2025-08-09 19:54:25+00:00
He was also a minor when the convicted offences took place. Important point because Lunduke acolytes always go everywhere & make it sound as if he was a grown man who molested children "thousands of times". Apparently what is closer to the facts is that he was himself a minor when he started SA his siblings, which was ignored by their parents. He was convicted later in life as an adult & as noted, served his time.
by MKRhere | 2025-08-09 19:55:02+00:00
Author here. We have an idea in the works to implement `typeInfo`, but it serves a more type -> value usecase (for example, generating validations from types).

However, going full cycle (type -> value -> type) is not as trivial because we won't get to ride on TypeScript's existing language server support, and solutions such as needing to use our own patched tsserver, etc., are too hacky for my liking.

Also not possible is generic types as parameters to comptime functions like Zig.

Happy to discuss more comptime usecases though. Feel free to raise an issue if you'd like to discuss, we can look into feasibility.
by pryelluw | 2025-08-09 19:55:11+00:00
To this day I refuse to buy digital only media. Hoping DVDs or blue rays take off again. Maybe something else? I’m not up to date with the modern physical media formats.

Correction:

I meant to speak of my refusal to buy downloadable media like tv shows, movies, video games or music.

As penance, I shall force myself to write maven config for old Java projects.
by cryptoalex | 2025-08-09 19:55:27+00:00
Delphi was so ahead of its time (a mandatory remark)... I've used Delphi 1 to 4 then moved on to other things. Using .NET since 1.0 beta, and it still remains my favorite stack. The project I am currently building is a software infra for building E2EE applications, and it requires a little bit of everything - mobile apps for key management, desktop/cli apps/client libraries for actually encrypting data, sometimes a web based app, and a zero trust backend. Using Xamarin/MAUI for mobile apps, Blazor WASM for Web, Blazor Hybrid / MAUI / Avalonia UI for Desktop. All of the frameworks have their quirks, so it may take a bit of time to learn your patterns, build your base classes, but after that you pretty much enjoy the productivity of a modern high level language.

- What programming languages and frameworks are popular for desktop apps? - for me - Blazor Hybrid / MAUI / Avalonia UI / WinForms

- Are there any go-to IDEs, build tools, or libraries that make development easier? - I use MSVS 2022, VSCode for .NET, IntelliJ for $$$ at work. There are of course UI control libraries, I am using MudBlazor for Blazor WASM / Hybrid, other than that I use built-in controls that come with each framework. I try to use as little as possible of 3rd party libraries b/c my apps are security-sensitive.

- Do the above answers change if you care about code performance or efficiency (whatever that means to you)? - in my case no, I am able to find what I need in .NET ecosystem. Modern .NET supports ahead-of-time compilation compiling to native code, and that helps to reduce start-up time which is important for Desktop / CLI. Ironically, for a long running processes, like a web service, the just-in-time compilation sometimes produces code running faster than ahead-of-time compilation, b/c it learns most common execution paths at runtime, and is able to recompile on the fly, optimizing for most frequent execution paths, giving a non-trivial performance boost in some cases

- Is native desktop app development still viable as a career, or are most greenfield projects shifting to web-based alternatives - depends on the app/use case. For my project, desktop is the first class citizen, but I am building E2EE apps, i.e. end-to-end-encryption apps, aka client-side encryption, and native / Desktop / CLI is a better fit for E2EE in most of the cases compared to web apps. For those Web apps that I have it is still E2EE but in the browser (still client side encryption)
by gbacon | 2025-08-09 19:55:48+00:00
While we’re trading anecdotes, I’m a CFI and have never encountered or even heard of a student being able to land an airplane decently (which I’m using in a relaxed sense, not strictly checkride-ready) based solely on sim experience.

Maybe your claim is more along lines of landing an airplane is easy in general. I’ve been flying for 10+ years and still have the occasional one that makes me think That landing really sucked. Let’s grant that you started making decent landings on your first flight lesson or two, and if so, you are in a tiny minority. The Gleim private pilot syllabus has first solo at Flight Lesson 11, which will be at 15 flight hours or more into training. Even then, I’m only soloing students on calm days with plenty of ceiling and visibility.

We had a DPE here in north Alabama who liked to talk candidates who were still wearing foggles all the way to the runway on their final landing of the practical test. He probably could have coached a brand new compliant student to a successful landing, but he had 40k+ hours in his logbook and gave more than ten thousand checkride approvals (not just attempts).

https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2017/june/14/so...
by gregsadetsky | 2025-08-09 19:57:05+00:00
You can enable a feature in Cloudflare which will inject the approximate user's lat/lng (based on their IP (and other factors?)) as an HTTP header added to the original request:

https://developers.cloudflare.com/network/ip-geolocation/

"This Managed Transform adds HTTP request headers with location information for the visitor's IP address, such as city, country, continent, longitude, and latitude."
by hirvi74 | 2025-08-09 19:57:29+00:00
I'm noticing significant differences already.

Code seems to work on the first try more often for me too.

Perhaps my favorite change so far is the difference of verbosity. Some of the responses I am receiving when asking trivial questions are now are merely a handful of sentences instead of a dissertation. However, dissertation mode comes back when appropriate, which is also nice.

Edit: Slightly tangential, but I forgot to ask, do any of you all have access to the $200/month plan? If so, how does that model compare to GPT-5?
by ElectricalUnion | 2025-08-09 19:57:54+00:00
> I suppose it's possible that an OS could shim the dialog boxes for file selection, open, save, etc... and then transparently provide access to only those files

Isn't this the idea behind Flatpak portals? Make your average app sandbox-compatible, except that your average bubblewrap/Flatpak sandbox sucks because it turns out the average app is shit and you often need `filesystem=host` or `filesystem=home` to barely work.

It reminds me of that XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1200/