MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by giantrobot | 2025-08-10 15:27:14+00:00
I love that MCP servers are rediscovering the old idea of public web APIs mash-ups from the early days of Web 2.0. Of course we don't need any icky XML with its namespace and schemas. Just some vibe-heavy JSON.

Snark aside it's, autonomous agents were one of the more interesting justifications for web APIs back in the day. I don't think people necessarily envisioned LLMs but some sort of agent you could send off to grab data or book flights or whatever. Specs like WSDL do what MCP does today letting the autonomous system figure out how to use a service.

Oh well, schemas and the ability to do browser-native style transforms were lame! Lets transition to YAML so no one can say "no" to Norway.
by driggs | 2025-08-10 15:29:35+00:00
The point is that potatoes are one of the top 4 food sources worldwide, and they collectively dwarf the percentages of the long tail of other food sources.

Proportions vary significantly continent-to-continent and culture-to-culture, such that it'd be more meaningless to try and put a more precise (but less accurate) number on it.

This is not difficult to parse out of the sentence if you choose to take a charitable rather than a pedantic perspective, which I recommend to you generally.
by ben_w | 2025-08-10 15:29:41+00:00
Easier said than done:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cant_(language)

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics)

Or even just regional differences, like how British people, upon hearing about "gravy and biscuits" for the first time, think this: https://thebigandthesmall.com/blog/2019/02/26/biscuits-gravy...

> It applies to ai, but also many other circumstances where the intention is that you are governed - eg medical, legal, financial.

May be impossible to avoid in any practical sense, due to every speciality having its own jargon. Imagine web developers having to constantly explain why "child element" has nothing to do with offspring.
by drewda | 2025-08-10 15:29:49+00:00
The OSM Foundation has been serving raster tiles for years and years (that's what's visible by default on the slippy map at www.openstreetmap.org): https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap_Carto

After on and off experimentation by various contributors, OSMF just released vector tiles as well: https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/vector/
by dnh44 | 2025-08-10 15:30:02+00:00
>I thought these tools are so great, so awesome, that even without much experience they will help you?

I never made that claim, I don't think it's generally true, but I do think it can be true for some people.

Regarding the study, I pointed out why I thought it was limited in its scope. If someone did a study on the potential productivity gains of using emacs and they based the study on people who had only used it for a week it wouldn't be a particularly useful study. A Piano is not a useful tool for making music for someone who has only used it for a week either.

I do have a customer with no prior programming experience that has created custom software for his own small manufacturing business automating tedious tasks. I think that's pretty amazing and so does he.
by ohdeargodno | 2025-08-10 15:30:34+00:00
>My test suite currently runs in ~6 seconds on 9700K

Absolutely nothing. 6 seconds is about the time it will take you to tab to your terminal, press up arrow, find your test task and run it. There's no amount of money that makes it go from 6 to 3, and no world in which there's any value to it.

In addition, upgrading to a 13900K means you're playing the Intel Dance: sockets have (again) changed, in an (again) incompatible manner. So you're looking at, at the very least, a new CPU, a new motherboard, potentially a new cooler, and if you're going too forward with CPUs, new RAM since Intel's Z890 is not DDR4 compatible (and the Z390 was not DDR5 compatible). Or buying an entire new PC.

Since you're behind a socket wall, the reasonable option for an upgrade would rather be a sizeable one, and most likely abandoning Intel to its stupid decisions for a while and instead going for Zen 5 CPUs, which are going to be socket compatible for a good 7 years at least.
by transpute | 2025-08-10 15:32:50+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43671940#43674311

> The PFB is found in many different application domains such as radio astronomy, wireless communication, radar, ultrasound imaging and quantum computing.. the authors worked on the evaluation of a PFB on the AIE.. [developing] a performant dataflow implementation.. which made us curious about the AMD Ryzen NPU.

> The [NPU] PFB figure shows.. speedup of circa 9.5x compared to the Ryzen CPU.. TINA allows running a non-NN algorithm on the NPU with just two extra operations or approximately 20 lines of added code.. on [Nvidia] GPUs CUDA memory is a limiting factor.. This limitation is alleviated on the AMD Ryzen NPU since it shares the same memory with the CPU providing up to 64GB of memory.
Show HN: Day 2 of QuotationGenie – Feedback Needed on My Quotes&Invoicing SaaS
by Samrat_Neupane | 2025-08-10 15:33:26+00:00
Yesterday I launched quotationgenie.online — a tool to create and manage quotations, invoices, and contracts in one place.

Day 2, and I’m already getting early feedback from users. I’d love to hear from the HN community:

Are the workflows intuitive?

Any key features you feel are missing?

Thoughts on pricing models for freelancers & small businesses?

Main features right now:

Custom quotation creation

Invoicing with payment tracking (paid, unpaid, overdue)

Digital contract creation & signing

I’m especially interested in suggestions that would make this tool a no-brainer for everyday business use.

Thanks for taking the time! — quotationgenie.online
by einpoklum | 2025-08-10 15:34:43+00:00
I don't really understand Why one should bother with the pluggable ports in something that's not a laptop. Even in 4.5L, shouldn't we just have "all the ports"?

Also, this reminds me of "SkyReach Tiny":

https://store.nfc-systems.com/products/skyreach-4-tiny

an even smaller case, very versatile. No pluggable gimmicks though.
by zahlman | 2025-08-10 15:34:58+00:00
> Security firm Malwarebytes on Friday said it recently discovered that porn sites have been seeding boobytrapped .svg files to select visitors. When one of these people clicks on the image, it causes browsers to surreptitiously register a like for Facebook posts promoting the site.

I think I'm missing something; if you can embed arbitrary JavaScript in the SVG, why is a click necessary to make that JavaScript run? And if JavaScript on your page can exploit CSRF on Facebook, why is embedding it in an SVG necessary?
by jmclnx | 2025-08-10 15:35:08+00:00
Yet another Tiling WM Clone, granted probably a very good one.

But, until there is a Fluxbox clone on Wayland that can use ~/.fluxbox without any configuration changes, I will stick to X11.

As a second choice I would accept a cwm clone that can use the same config file as cwm(1).
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-08-10 15:35:45+00:00
I see your point. I don't think it's different in kind, just degree. My thought process: First, is my dad's accountant infallible?

If not, then they must themselves make mistakes or do things suboptimally sometimes. Whose responsibility is that - my dad, or my dad's accountant?

If it is my dad, does that then mean my dad has an obligation to review and fully understand everything the accountant has written?

And do we have to generalize that responsibility to everything and everyone my dad has to hand off work to in order to get something done? Clearly not, that's absurd. So where do we draw the line? You draw it in the same place I do for right now, but I don't see why we expect that line to be static.
by bccdee | 2025-08-10 15:35:46+00:00
I've been seeing a lot of these durable workflow engines around lately, for some reason. I'm not sure I understand the pitch. It just seems like a thin wrapper around some very normal patterns for running background jobs. Persist your jobs in a db, checkpoint as necessary, periodically retry. I guess they're meant to be a low-code alternative to writing the db tables yourself, but it seems like you're not saving much code in practice.
by tocs3 | 2025-08-10 15:36:06+00:00
I certainly see the dendritic nature of the rock but I am wondering if there are rocks found on Earth that look he same. Most of the examples of that sort of thing are more 2D patterns.

Just some images of what I am talking about: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dindrite+rock&t=ffab&ia=images&iax...
by accrual | 2025-08-10 15:36:07+00:00
Yep! I did some testing and found 6.8 was the final version to support 486 CPUs. The reason is the OpenBSD project switched to clang for the compiler in 6.9, and in the process became dependent on Pentium instructions.

However, that doesn't stop one from installing a Pentium Overdrive in an old Socket 3 board and running the latest release. ;)
by jeberle | 2025-08-10 15:36:15+00:00
That is very cool. I had a similar boot disk w/ DOS 3.x and TurboPascal. It made any PC I could walk up to a complete developer box.

Just to be clear, when you say "without the need for the GUI", more accurately that's "without a GUI" (w/o Presentation Manager). So you're using OS/2 in an 80x25 console screen, what would appear to be a very good DOS box.
by SR2Z | 2025-08-10 15:36:34+00:00
I think there's a (wrong) expectation that an American manufacturer would idiot-proof their products and not do anything dumb like double the voltage while keeping the connector the same.

The number of times I've heard people complain about "cursed" M-M 3 prong AC power cables suggests that there is no amount of idiot-proof proofing that will keep a determined American safe from themselves.
by mathgeek | 2025-08-10 15:36:35+00:00
> I think I'm missing something; if you can embed arbitrary JavaScript in the SVG, why is a click necessary to make that JavaScript run? And if JavaScript on your page can exploit CSRF on Facebook, why is embedding it in an SVG necessary?

A human clicking something on the site tends to get around bot detection and similar systems put in place to prevent automation. This is a basic “get the user to take an action they don’t know the outcome of” attack.
by metalman | 2025-08-10 15:36:43+00:00
could be formed by something like a stromatilite(s), which are presumed to be the most ancient life forms to 1 leave macro fosils, and 2 are an existing species today or just some blobby rock's in any case, it's one more reason to go to mars, other than of course we dont realy have anywhere else to go, and with 9 billion people side eyeing each other, were going
by bjackman | 2025-08-10 15:38:42+00:00
Yep "correctness" only exists contextually. A language teacher can say "no that's wrong" with the implied meaning of "that doesnt follow the patterns of the dialect I'm teaching you". Ditto for newspaper editors and their house style.

But in 99% of situations no such context exists and "that's grammatically incorrect" is a bullshit statement.

In the UK when someone "corrects" language what they are very often doing is engaging in class signalling. It's widely done and widely accepted but personally I think it's pointless and somewhat toxic.

(Note many languages have government-sanctioned standard forms of the language, but what I said is still true there too. Nobody speaks that dialect and nobody should be expected to. It's just a "reference implementation".)
by bayarearefugee | 2025-08-10 15:40:19+00:00
I understand the point people are trying to make with this argument, but we are so far into a nearly universal scam economy where corporations see small (relative to their costs of business) fines as just part of normal expenses that I also think anyone who really believes the AI companies aren't using their data to train models, even if it is against their terms, is wildly naive.
by phil21 | 2025-08-10 15:42:17+00:00
Old people should not be prioritized over the young.

A 600% increase in property taxes over 7 years is an extreme outlier. Zero of my friends or family have ever once experienced such a thing happening.

I certainly am not a fan of how heavy my property taxes are in one of the heaviest taxed cities in the US - but I would absolutely vote down anything resembling something like Prop 13. It's an immoral bit of tax code that favors old people over the young and productive - like seemingly most of our current policy.

I should not be paying a different rate than the young couple moving in next door to me simply because I got here first. The services need to be paid all the same regardless of my age.

> How am I supposed to plan my retirement? Plan to leave my home of years, where I have built a life and have all my things?

Yes, obviously. I have this giant asset called property I can sell and downsize to something reasonable in retirement. Or in the worst case - move. I could also use the equity in my home to pay for living expenses if I must. This was considered normal and expected just a couple generations ago.

This whole "let the old eat their young" streak of society needs to die off sooner than later.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-10 15:42:42+00:00
Because at the time it was obvious, Smalltalk was the C++ companion on OS/2, a bit like VB and .NET came to be on Windows years later.

Aggregation is not inheritance, rather a workaround, using delegation. And it has been always a bit of the pain to set up, if one wants to avoid writing all the boilerplate by hand.

As for WinRT, I used to have it in high regard, until Microsoft management managed to kill everything good that UWP was all about, and now only folks that cannot avoid it, or Microsoft employees on Windows team, care about its existence.
by _pdp_ | 2025-08-10 15:43:31+00:00
The way the function is described to the LLM matter. Even when the parameters are the same and the effect is the same the title and description can fundamentally influence how the task is performed.

The other issue is that you cannot think of MCP servers as universal pluggable systems that can fit into every use-case with minimal wrapping. Real world scenarios require pulling a lot of tricks. Caching can be done at higher or lower level depending on the use-case. Communication of different information from the MCP server also is different depending on the use-case (should we replace these long IDs for shorter IDs that are automatically translated to longer ones). Should we automatically tinyurl all the links to reduce hallucination? Which operations can be effectively solved with pure algorithms (compress 2-3 operations into one) because doing this with LLMs is not only error-prone but also not optimal (imagine using LLM to grep for strings in many files one by one using tool calls rather than using grep to search for strings - not the same)

There are so many things to consider. MCP is nice abstraction but it is not a silver bullet.

Speaking from experience with actual customers and real use-case.
by watwut | 2025-08-10 15:44:25+00:00
> The author meant this signaled a lack of character because... I dunno. It means the person wasn't as committed as the author?

It is simple. Salary has to be paid, now. The stocks is likely end up being nothing as most startups fail. So, the author is strongly motivated to pay in stock options and not pay in money.

But, admitting so would make him sound bad. Therefore, it is about your character. If you want to actually be paid, you have bad character.
by shellkr | 2025-08-10 15:45:11+00:00
I guess I am still in that phase then, after 25y+ of Linux. Not that I rice constantly but that I configure my desktop exactly how I like it and then let it stay. Usually the ricing/configuring comes when I buy new hardware.. so not that often. Or when a major change like Wayland comes around which is what made switch from Arch/X11/Bspwm to Arch/Wayland/Hyperland. I have tried but can not use vanilla for long... I just have to adapt the system to me. I feel constrained if I have to adapt to the system.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-10 15:46:09+00:00
Everyone keeps rediscovering OS IPC extensions via RPC.

Not only that, apparently we finally got Jini and Agent Tcl back!

https://www.usenix.org/conference/fourth-annual-usenix-tcltk...

https://www.eetimes.com/jini-basics-interrelating-with-java/
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-08-10 15:46:58+00:00
The lack of unit tests is something I'm guilty of too and you're very right about it. The community is dimly aware of the fact that systems are more on the "academic prototype" side of things and less on the "enterprise software" but there's so little interest from industry that nobody is going to spend significant effort to change that. Kind of a catch 22 maybe.

How about ISO? Why was this a requirement, out of curiosity?
by ben_w | 2025-08-10 15:47:42+00:00
I agree with you that Marxism is flawed, that as you say it doesn’t account for human nature.

But: There's no additional overhead to "seize the means of production" vs. any other system of governance and organisation, given that corporations, money, ownership, and the law are all things that any functioning system of government controls anyway, regardless of if they want these things to be collectively owned (/nationalised) or privately controlled.

Now, my former partner who is a self-identified Communist of some kind (I can't remember which kind), she wants to abolish money, and abolishing it rather than using it would need quite a lot of extra effort.

> How do you allocate resources and labor fairly?

I believe the general claim here is "democratically". This doesn't really work too well, but on the other hand, neither does letting people accumulate so much money they become the de-facto leadership with the carrots and sticks of "I will move my business to whoever has the lowest tax/cheapest labour/least expensive safety requirements".

Consider also that normal people are nowhere near as carful with language use as you or I may wish; some of the people you're worried about may be identifying themselves as "Communists" in the first place only because they're exactly one step to the left of the Democrat Party's Overton window while also repeatedly observing the US Republican party describe the Democrats as "socialists".

(Conversely, my former is one of the people I expect you to be correctly worried about, as she agreed with my assessment that she was to the left of the Cuban communist party).
by pid-1 | 2025-08-10 15:47:57+00:00
> what's the consequences for HN of a user having their password compromised

HN does not enforce anonymity, so the identity of some users (many startup owners btw) is tied to their real identities.

A compromised password could allow a bad actor to impersonate those users. That could be used to scam others or to kickstart some social engineering that could be used to compromise other systems.
by scarface_74 | 2025-08-10 15:48:07+00:00
I don’t think I’ve ever even proffered “passion” about software development or whatever random B2B SaaS vertical the company was doing.

I show proficiency, professionalism, expertise, and the ability to bring that to a job.

I’ve had 10 jobs everything from startups, random big enterprise, and BigTech.

Am I suppose to show passion about - bill printing? Field services sending technicians to people’s houses? Railroad car repair?

Admittedly my first job as an architect was for a company that managed sending nurses to the homes of special needs kids and the next two were in the health care industry, but after that it was dealing with cloud consulting (full time jobs) first at AWS directly then other consulting companies (currently a staff architect at a 3rd party cloud company)

I can talk about technical solutions, be a post sales architect, lead implementations and do system design and coding all day long without being “passionate” about the business. It’s just professionalism and my addictions to food and shelter
by unscaled | 2025-08-10 15:48:22+00:00
These are not linguists doing that. No self-respecting linguists will waste time doing prescriptivism. These are two linguistic articles about this constructs that are quoting amateur language usage manuals. The oldest one is a boys magazine[1] published in 1864 discussing "the Queen's English"[2]. The newest one (Crews et al.) seems to be an obscure usage manual for writers[3].

As demonstrated here, "try and" is older and more "original" than "try to", if not contemporary with it. Any other reason why would "try to" be more "correct" cannot even make sense as anything more than a purely uneducated opinion. When you dig deep into most examples of perspectivism you'll usually run into the same story too. "Incorrect" forms often predate the "correct" forms and are often employed by respected writers (such as Shakespeare and Jane Austen). And even if they don't, there isn't really any scientific ground to brand one form as incorrect.

Linguists do not generally engage in linguist prescriptivism. As far as I'm concerned (and I believe most linguists would agree), this is stylistic opinion at best and pseudoscience at worst. Still, it's not linguists can do anything to stop amateurs from publishing prescriptive language usage manuals, so you'll always have people who claim that "try and" or "ain't" or "me and my friend went for a walk" are incorrect.

[1] https://www.victorianresearch.org/atcl/show_periodical.php?j...

[2] Yes, this is Edmund Routledge whose father is the namesake of the present scholarly publisher, but they were just publishing popular books back in the 19th century.

[3] https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/Frederick-Crews/dp/0070136386
Show HN: A new alternative to Softmax attention – live GD-Attention demos
by GhostDrift | 2025-08-10 15:48:24+00:00
We built two live demos to illustrate the Ghost Drift Theory — a framework for modeling semantic coherence — and a new attention mechanism called GD-Attention.

• Part 1 — Semantic Energy Landscape: Visualize the unique coherence point s* and jump direction g in real time. • Part 2 — GD-Attention vs Softmax: "Softmax blends, GD-Attention selects" — explore the difference interactively.

Paper (with Zenodo DOI): [Ghost Drift Theory & GD-Attention PDF](https://zenodo.org/records/16757311) ▶ Part 1: https://gdt-semantic-energy-demo-jdgoe6gkrohleltjgvwgwq.stre... ▶ Part 2: https://gda-vs-softmax-demo-zooif4cfewrmnv85zaqymy.streamlit...

Would love feedback on clarity, use cases, and potential improvements.
by mkayokay | 2025-08-10 15:48:54+00:00
A new semi-passive 850-watt fully modular PSU is around EUR 130, the Noctua fan around EUR 30.

I guess if you know electronics and how to safely handle the PSU internals, the risk of injury is low, but I personally would not risk it for EUR 100.

Also, if the only problem was the noisy fan, I guess selling it used would have returned most of the investment, leaving him with like EUR 50 in added cost. Compared to the price of a modern gaming PC, that's nothing (also avoiding not risking your life).
by lifeisstillgood | 2025-08-10 15:49:16+00:00
So this is something like a 5000 USD machine (https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/ampereone-cores-are-n...) And is designed as a cloud provider or telco edge machine (hence the erlang consultancy)

But if you are looking at a hosted erlang VM for a capex of one dollar then these folks are onto something

Cores really are the only way to escape the broken moores law - and this does look like a real step in the important direction. Less LLMs more tiny cores
by smelendez | 2025-08-10 15:49:32+00:00
> regular coordination permits the order of conjuncts to be changed, while in (7) we see that the same is not possible with try and (De Vos 2005:59).

But sometimes conjunction implies sequential order or causation, right? Which seems related here. “I’m going to take a shower and get this dirt off me” or “I’m going to get some flour and bake a cake.” You can’t change the order. It doesn’t make sense to add both in those cases, either.

It’s also interesting about motion verbs, because I see “he came and picked me up at the station” as an example of two literal sequential actions, versus “he went and picked me up at the station” as more about emphasis, like he did something notable. Which could be good or bad: “he went and got himself arrested again.”