MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by didibus | 2025-08-10 17:18:25+00:00
Hum, I'm not sure if everyone is simply unable to understand what you are saying, including me, but if the MCP client validates the MCP server response against the schema before passing the response to the LLM model, the model doesn't even matter, your MCP client could choose to report an error and interrupt the agentic flow.

That will depend on what MCP client you are using and how they've handled it.
by roscas | 2025-08-10 17:18:46+00:00
From my experience, qwen3-coder is way better. I only have gpt-oss:20b installed to make a few more tests but I give it a program to make a summary of what it does and qwen3 just works in a few seconds, while gpt-oss was cancelled after 5 minuts... doing nothing.

So I just use qwen3. Fast and great ouput. If for some reason I don't get what I need, I might use search engines or Perplexity.

I have a 10GB 3080 and Ryzen 3600x with 32gb of RAM.

Qwen3-coder is amazing. Best I used so far.
by tossandthrow | 2025-08-10 17:18:51+00:00
This is slightly similar to the management philosophy I have taken on in the wake of Ai: I increase the bar and let people be responsible for everything they do.

It is clear when someone submits stuff they don't understand, or can't make instrumental - and I clearly let them know that it is not appropriate, as in fail them - exactly like things was not appropriate before.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-10 17:19:40+00:00
Most UIs currently are unsophisticated and let you turn on or off the tools on server-by-server basis. For some large servers (especially if they act as aggrgeators) this approach isn't going to be desirable and you are going to want to select individual tools to activate, not servers. But that's a UI issue more than a protocol issue.
by justbuynothing | 2025-08-10 17:19:44+00:00
You're right. I'm going to update this today that's a good catch. Also, making a way now so that users not logged in can still go through the checkout process. I originally posted this idea on Reddit and got a ton of feedback for gamifying it a bit and that's where the no bucks came into play. Check back in a bit this will be updated.

Really appreciate the feedback!
by jameshart | 2025-08-10 17:19:44+00:00
There’s very little actual engineering going in to designing MCP interfaces to actually efficiently work with the way LLM workflows actually operate. Many MCPs offer tools that allow an LLM to retrieve a list of ‘things that exist’ with the expectation the LLM will then pick something out of that list for further action with a different tool. There’s very little evidence that LLMs are actually good at using tools that work like that, and massive lists of ‘things that exist’ eat tokens and context.

Many businesses are rushing to put out something that fits the MCP standard but not taking the time to produce something that lets an LLM achieve things with their tool.
by trod1234 | 2025-08-10 17:20:11+00:00
Its pretty clear there will be a crisis in these skills from just a structural point of view. Career development is a sequential pipeline that sieves people.

If you've as an industry blocked the pipeline saying we don't need these people, time passes and those people who had to invest to get to that point abandon the bad investments, and you get no new people coming in. People leave such industry because of burnout, and aging/retirement/death. The dynamics created are one of a deflationary sieve where the front-loaded cost savings becomes a back-ended cost sink. Tthe demand and related cost of the professionals is recognized at a point where there is great need but they can't be found at any cost. In system's engineering we call this Hysteresis whipsaws, Mises might call this the first early stages of the Economic Calculation Problem.
by ath3nd | 2025-08-10 17:20:17+00:00
> Unfortunately Europe has stagnant growth and facing population collapse.

Unfortunately our US counterparts think "growth" means getting obese and dying younger than us:

- https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/life-expectancy/ (48-th place in longevity, not bad, almost as good as Albania, one of the poorest and least developed countries in Europe that's not even in the European Union)

And being much much unhappier than us: https://data.worldhappiness.report/table (24-th place, not bad for people so invested in being #1).

I think where the US does shine is in obesity ratings, that's where we see the real meaning of "growth": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity_r...

> Of course you can offer an easy life when you are burning reserves and ignoring the future.

You mean burning calories and looking forward to pension age? The first one Americans need more of, and the second one, sadly, not many Americans live to see.
by zabzonk | 2025-08-10 17:21:04+00:00
In my experience, people simply go "Doh, of course!" or don't write the wrong code in the first place. It has never caused me any real problems.

For those of you that may be curious, or not know C++, in C++ this:

Obj x();

is a declaration of a function called x that returns an Obj. Whereas this:

Obj x;

defines (possibly, depending on context) an instance of the type Obj called x.

Most people get over this pretty quickly.

If that is your main complaint about a language then the language doesn't have too many problems. Not that I'm suggesting that C++ doesn't have more serious problems.
by qcnguy | 2025-08-10 17:21:16+00:00
Weird the author finds it lovely and compares to Kotlin, but doesn't find Kotlin superior. Kotlin invested heavily in a really nice curly brace syntax. It is actually the nicest out there. In every point the author makes, it feels like Kotlin did it the same or better. For example:

1. Integer literals. "var a = 1" doesn't work, seems absurd. In Kotlin literals do have strong types, but coercion is allowed when defining variables so "var a = 1" works, and "var a: Long = 1" works even though you can write a literal long as 1L. This means you can write numbers to function parameters naturally.

2. Multi-line string literals. OK this is a neat idea, but what about copy/paste? In Kotlin you can just write """ .. """.trimIndent() and then copy paste some arbitrary text into the string, the indent will be removed for you. The IDE will also help with this by adding | characters which looks more natural than \\ and can be removed using .trimMargin(), only downside is the trimming is done at runtime but that could easily be fixed without changing the language.

3. Record literals. This syntax is called lovely because it's designed for grep, a properly funded language like Kotlin just uses named kwargs to constructors which is more natural. There's no need to design the syntax for grep because Kotlin is intended to be used with a good IDE that can answer this query instantly and precisely.

4. Function syntax. "fn foo(a: i32) i32 {}" seems weird. If the thing that has a type and the type are normally separated by a : then why not here? Kotlin does "fun foo(a: Int): Int {}" which is more consistent.

5. Locals. Agree with author that Kotlin nails it.

6. Not using && or ||, ok this one Zig wins, the Zig way is more consistent and reads better. Kotlin does have `and` and `or` as infix operator functions, but they are for the bitwise operations :(

7. Explicit returns. Kotlin supports blocks that return values and also doesn't need semicolons, so not quite sure what the tradeoff here is supposed to be about.

8. Loops being expressions is kinda cool but the Kotlin equivalent of his example is much easier to read still: "val thing = collection.first { it.foo > bar }". It compiles to a for loop due to the function inlining.

9. Generics. Zig's way seems primitive and unnecessarily complex. In Kotlin it is common to let the compiler infer generics based on all available information, so you can just write "someMethod(emptyList())" and emptyList<T>() infers to the correct type based on what someMethod expects.

Overall Zig looks like a lot of modern languages, where they are started as a hobby or side project of some guy and so the language is designed around whatever makes implementing the compiler most convenient. Kotlin is unusual because it doesn't do that. It was well funded from the start, so the syntax is designed first and foremost to be as English-like and convenient as possible without leaving the basic realm of ordinary curly-brace functions-and-oop style languages. It manages to be highly expressive and convenient without the syntax feeling overly complex or hard to learn.
by Quekid5 | 2025-08-10 17:21:19+00:00
> I find that the most common reason I go back to check a variable declaration is to determine the type of the variable,

Hover the mouse cursor over it. Any reasonable editor will show the type.

> In Rust, in particular, this leads to some awkward syntactic verbosity, because mutable variables are declared with `let mut`, meaning that `let` is used in every declaration.

Rust is very verbose for strange implementation reasons... namely to avoid parse ambiguities.

> In C or C++ the type would take the place of that unnecessary `let`.

OTOH, that means you can't reliably grep for declarations of a variable/function called "foo". Also consider why some people like using

auto foo(int blah) -> bool

style. This was introduced because of template nonsense (how to declare a return type before the type parameters were known), but it makes a lot of sense and makes code more greppable. Generic type parameters make putting the return type at the front very weird -- reading order wise.

Anyhoo...
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-10 17:21:36+00:00
> MCPs are the most basic solution possible. Shoving the tool definitions into a vector store and having a subagent search for relevant tools, then another subagent to run the tools would greatly reduce impact on context.

That's a toolchain design approach that is independent of MCPs. A toolchain using MCP could do that and there would be no need for any special support in the protocol.
by emp-solution | 2025-08-10 17:21:46+00:00
A nice and free data visualization tool that allows you to fast and easily fetch data from a database, a Web API, a file or other sources and put it up on a dashboard as needed. You can also create your own customized widgets based on parameterized queries, and these customized widgets are easy to use for non-techies.

Here is an example of the query language:

| source jdbc environment={"id":1234,"name":"H2 EMP"} query=` SELECT * FROM mighty_table WHERE DATE >= "`+earliest("yyyy-MM-dd")+`" AND DATE <= "`+latest("yyyy-MM-dd")+`" ORDER BY time DESC ` | formatrecord [(VALUE >= 80), "cfw-red"] [(VALUE >= 60), "cfw-orange"] [(VALUE >= 40), "cfw-yellow", "purple"] [(VALUE >= 20), "cfw-limegreen"] [(VALUE >= 10), "cfw-green"] [true, "cfw-gray"] | formatfield LIKES_TIRAMISU=none | display as = statusmap menu = false
by d4rkn0d3z | 2025-08-10 17:22:05+00:00
There is no issue with stating the model and an example of the modeled in the real world such as tulips. You are simply taking a favourable view on when the bubble "burst" occurs in order to see what you want. My point stands that valuations and there growth are not really distinguishing bubble/non-bubble. Thanks for proving me correct in that.
by roscas | 2025-08-10 17:22:25+00:00
"The word is SAME." for qwen3-coder and it took like 10 seconds to write all the thinking because it writes it down, but processing was 0 seconds.

"I need to find a word that starts with S, ends with E, and contains A.

Let me think through this step by step:

Starts with S Ends with E Contains A somewhere in the middle

One word that fits this pattern is "SAGE" - but that only has 4 letters and would be S-A-G-E, which doesn't work because it doesn't contain A in the middle.

Wait, let me reconsider. The word "SAGE" actually works if I read it correctly:

Starts with S Ends with E Contains A

Actually, "SAGE" is S-A-G-E, so it starts with S and ends with E, but it contains A in the second position.

Let me think of other possibilities:

"SQUARE" - starts with S, ends with E, contains A (in the middle) "SALE" - starts with S, ends with E, contains A "SAME" - starts with S, ends with E, contains A

Wait, "SAME" is S-A-M-E - that works! It starts with S, ends with E, and contains A.

The word is SAME. "
by riehwvfbk | 2025-08-10 17:23:08+00:00
Let me point out the fly in the ointment: in the enlightened SF Bay Area high-flying tech workers who would never dare be associated with anything less than 100% liberal leanings... still send their own kids to private schools rather than a public in East San Jose, for much the same reasons.

And this is generally true. Ask any of these enlightened non-racists if they would send their kids to a school in Compton, and watch them squirm.
by ndriscoll | 2025-08-10 17:24:07+00:00
It wouldn't surprise me if the "issue" were just that piracy isn't as normalized as it was 20 years ago, and there are very few kids/teenagers (or even adults) that can justify $264/yr for one program unless they're using it for business purposes. So young people looking for creative outlets look elsewhere, and they learn those things instead.
by nick238 | 2025-08-10 17:24:21+00:00
The Materials Science Gameplay Loop:

1. Invent fantastic new material that does a heretofore novel reaction or one with improved performance (chemical, photovoltaic, etc.)

2. Do #1 without lead, cadmium, mercury, or arsenic.

SociallyAwesomeAwkwardPenguinMeme("Turns PFAS to fluoride", "Contains Cadmium")
by csallen | 2025-08-10 17:24:31+00:00
> remember when AI couldn’t count the number of Rs in “strawberry”?

GPT-5 still gets this wrong occasionally. Source: I just asked it: How many r's are in "strawberry"?

It said 2.

(I dislike this method of testing LLMs, as it exploits a very specific and quirky limitation they have, rather than assessing their general usefulness. But still, I couldn't resist.)
by Quekid5 | 2025-08-10 17:25:21+00:00
Interesting use of "declare war" there... :)

I understand the feeling, but language is what language does. It will change and you will notice those changes if you're alive long enough :)

Even prescriptivist languages (as my own native language tends to be) cannot escape. I'm bad at my own native language because I've been living elsewhere for very long... but not as bad as the Kids These Days :)
by tough | 2025-08-10 17:25:37+00:00
or the router was routing them to the best model all the time prior to launch.

I had a very brief window where gpt-5 was really good/fast on cursor-agent day of launch.

also horizon-alpha-beta on open router im pretty sure they where gpt-5, and you could feel them messing with the routing and affecting overall the capabilities of the model to do agentic stuff

some times it gets stuck and uses no tools, I suspect that's the lesser model
by wtallis | 2025-08-10 17:26:18+00:00
> Keep in mind the ram is inside the strix halo package, not something HP has control over.

It's not in the package, it's on the motherboard spread around the SoC package: https://www.hp.com/content/dam/sites/worldwide/personal-comp...

The 8 DRAM packages pretty clearly indicate you're not getting the extra capacity for end-to-end ECC as you would on a typical workstation or server memory module.
by kcartlidge | 2025-08-10 17:26:36+00:00
I much prefer C# 11's raw string literals. It takes the indentation of the first line and assumes the subsequent ones have the same indentation.

string json = $""" <h1>{title}</h1> <article> Welcome to {sitename}. </article> """;

And it even allows for using embedded curly braces as real characters:

string json = $$""" <h1>{{title}}</h1> <article> Welcome to {{sitename}}, which uses the <code>{sitename}</code> syntax. </article> """;

The $ (meaning to interpolate curly braces) appears twice, which switches interpolation to two curly braces, leaving the single ones untouched.
by aesh2Xa1 | 2025-08-10 17:27:43+00:00
Apple devices support MDM. When you purchase the device, the device's firmware is configured to check in with an account owner. The firmware has an integrity feature such that this configuration cannot be removed by a user: https://it-training.apple.com/tutorials/deployment/dm005/

If OP just meant remote management through a BMC then that's not common except for server hardware, and it would have features like Redfish to configure the hardware itself. Apple devices don't have this.

You can also buy hardware to act as a remote keyboard/mouse/monitor and power button, and it supports systems whose motherboards have the right headers: https://pikvm.org/
by jjani | 2025-08-10 17:28:16+00:00
That can all be trivially fixed by style of seating and tables, removing all power outlets and so on. People who don't go there to work won't care.

I live in the country with probably the highest sit-down cafe density cities in the world (Korea), and this issue has been figured out ages ago. If you know any such cafe owners who don't understand how to deal with this, I'm happy to have a chat with them. Or they can come over here and I can show them a dozen cafes so they can see it with their own eyes.

You simply set up the cafe to accommodate the exact % of such laptop users as you're comfortable with, which can be 0%, 100%, or anywhere in between. If you do for some reason want to run a cafe where 100% of seating is usable for laptop workers, then the way to keep it all profitable is also straightforward: 1. you make your cheapest coffee (converted to Dutch CoL) 7+ euros a cup (use some single origin stuff that's still cheap when bought from wholesale). 2. As food, only offer small sweet bites and make those similarly overpriced. 3. Make the seating dense so you can fit a lot of these office workers. Bar seating is especially space-efficient for this.

The Netherlands even has an advantage; people can't just leave their setup on the table and leave for hours as it may well get stolen - this is not an issue in Korea so some people actually do this, the worst case scenario for cafe owners.
by IshKebab | 2025-08-10 17:28:16+00:00
Maybe if you've never tried formatting a traditional multiline string (e.g. in Python, C++ or Rust) before.

If it isn't obvious, the problem is that you can't indent them properly because the indentation becomes part of the string itself.

Some languages have magical "removed the indent" modes for strings (e.g. YAML) but they generally suck and just add confusion. This syntax is quite clear (at least with respect to indentation; not sure about the trailing newline - where does the string end exactly?).
by MiddleEndian | 2025-08-10 17:28:41+00:00
My impression of AOL was mixed.

I never had it myself, but their dialup service either forced or heavily pushed their own browser, which encouraged the use of AOL keywords rather than URLs. Always thought of this as major negative and the start of heavy corporate control over the web. Seeing commercials list AOL keywords instead of their own websites annoyed me a lot, as did the transition to using myspace then facebook then twitter the instagram etc.

On the other hand, I liked AOL Instant Messenger a lot. It used XMPP so I could use other IM clients most of the time (namely Adium). On top of that, AOL Instant Messenger's Direct Connect feature was by far the easiest way to send files of any size* to your friends. Far more convenient than much of what exists today.

* Google suggests this limit may have been 4GB, but that was basically limitless in the 90s and early 2000s
by moduspol | 2025-08-10 17:29:03+00:00
And even then: the key value of MCP is that it's "simplified." Few servers are implementing anything you couldn't already do for years with their REST APIs.

And why? Because it dumbs it down to the point that the LLM can understand it (often, in part, by removing security concerns). But these are LLMs! They're supposed to be smart! Isn't it a supposedly temporary failure that I can't just point the LLM at an OpenAPI spec (or use HATEOAS) and be good to go?

Will this be doable in the next few months with better models? If so, why bother with MCP? If this won't be doable in the next few months / years, then how smart do we really expect these LLMs to be?
by antonvs | 2025-08-10 17:29:09+00:00
*stock-in-trade: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stock-in-trade

Sorry, in this thread, I had to!

> I expect the same thing will be done to the English language over the next century.

This has already been happening in English, for centuries. Compare these examples given in the article to modern English:

> 3) ...howe and by what certaine and generall rule I mighte trye and throughly discerne the veritie of the catholike faithe, from the falsehood of wicked heresye... (1554) > 4) You maie (saide I) trie and bring him in, and shewe him to her. (1569)

I suppose after more than 450 years, one might expect even more simplification, but it is perhaps the fate of a lingua franca to have more "backward compatibility" than less widely-used languages.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-08-10 17:29:53+00:00
What is this doing on HN? On top of everything, there's a barely-veiled cash grab at the bottom:

> Oh, you want to participate and earn $100,000? You better give me money to access the criteria. Such a small price to pay for such a big reward!

And the audacity to pretend - while asking the world to find you your rich, polygamous, prestige expert husband - that it's because you don't want to publicly share your preferences for physical appearances?

---

And I'll just throw in this requirement:

> who’s fully self accepting...

Juxtaposed against the very next paragraph about herself:

> It doesn’t feel sexy to go on a date where he automatically views me as a catch.
by Kerrick | 2025-08-10 17:30:05+00:00
My favorite test is to ask it to invent a magic trick given a set of constraints and props. Because magic is generally published very secretly, surprisingly little of it is in most training sets. Pretty much just the most common method & gimmick exposures people tend to parrot online, but not the theory or exact routines behind those methods.

The worse an LLM is, the more likely it is to suggest literally impossible actions in the method, like “turn the card over twice to show that it now has three sides. Your spectators can examine the three-sided card.” It can’t tell logic from fantasy, or method from effect.
by protimewaster | 2025-08-10 17:31:05+00:00
Diesels are dirty, but I'm doubtful that is where the aversion comes from. Americans are fine with diesel trucks, and, at the time period that the MB diesels are from, emissions wasn't nearly as much of a focus as it is now.

I've heard that one of the supposed reasons for an aversion to diesel sedans specifically is that, during the fuel shortages in the 70's, GM hurriedly built diesel sedans that turned out to be poorly engineered and extremely problematic, and that debacle convinced the public that diesel sedans were a bad idea.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-10 17:31:21+00:00
Some remote MCPs will get locked down to know client endpoints, same as any other HTTP service, so if companies are really concerned about them being AI-use-only and don't mind cutting off some AI use to preserve that exclusivity, they’ll lock it down to the big known hosted AI frontends (assuming those end up supporting MCP; the only one I know of that does currently is ChatGPT Deep Research, and only for very limited shapes of servers.)

OTOH, that only effects those services, it won't stop people from leveraging MCP as, say, a generic local plugin model for non-AI apps.
by entropie | 2025-08-10 17:32:22+00:00
I use it over 10 years now. Its perfect except of the haskell/ghc payload that made it complicated on older machines. To compile GHC on my 2019 dell xps notebook took like 8 hours.

But its not a problem anymore, since I switched to nixos. But xorg will be eventually obsolete and there seems no actual replacement yet.