MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by magicmicah85 | 2025-08-10 15:50:30+00:00
When President Obama privately asked Rick Wagoner to resign from GM, do you think that spared him from embarrassment or feeling bullied? There was absolutely no need for Rick Wagoner to have to resign, but the Obama administration needed a blood sacrifice to sell a bailout. A 30 year career at GM ended in disgrace because the government couldn’t trust him to turn around GM, even though he was a popular CEO.

But you’re right, the Obama administration didn’t publicly bully him, just privately did so. I don’t see one method as better than the other, there’s a use for either but they both have the same goals.

Fortunate for Tan, a lot of people don’t like Trump and he’ll probably gain more public support and potentially stay on as CEO. This is certainly where this backfires on Trump as his method of publicly shooting from the hip doesn’t always work. Tan becomes the target of the day, forgotten about a week later. This is where Trump diplomacy could work better through private methods, but we also don’t know if that’s been tried. Quite honestly, I think he just had somebody whispering in his ear and he just decided to tweet it.
by 827a | 2025-08-10 15:50:40+00:00
I really don't know where you're coming from with that statement.

1. No one asserted that MCP's key innovation was its format. In fact, what I strongly, almost explicitly implied with my previous comment is that MCP has made no key innovations beyond its marketing system (which does matter and has forced a lot of companies who would never have operated in this space to make an MCP system, and that is good. I like MCP.).

2. MCP is fundamentally bidirectional, not unidirectional. Its a schematized request-response protocol that defines a ton of the same primitives that OpenAPI defines, like available RPC methods, authorization, request parameters, and response schemas [1]. Of course, OpenAPI goes beyond that into HTTP-specific characteristics like status codes, and MCP goes beyond that into LLM-specific characteristics like a prompt catalogue.

3. I'm not aware of any problem domain outside of LLMs that is adopting MCP. In fact, its adoption even within the world of LLMs has been lackluster at best [2].

[1] https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/learn/architecture#data...

[2] https://modelcontextprotocol.io/clients
by GhostDrift | 2025-08-10 15:50:43+00:00
Background Softmax attention blends all values weighted by normalized scores. While effective, it inherently diffuses signal — sometimes undesirable in tasks requiring discrete focus.

GD-Attention, derived from the Ghost Drift Theory, takes a different approach: it selects a single coherence point ∗ along a "jump" direction in the semantic space, determined by an underlying energy function.

The attached paper formalizes this mathematically, and the demos let you see and interact with these mechanisms in real time:

Part 1: Energy landscape → find ∗ and Part 2: Compare Softmax vs GD-Attention outputs and selectivity

This is still experimental, and feedback from the community — especially on edge cases, real-world applicability, and potential integration with transformer architectures — would be hugely appreciated.
by tossandthrow | 2025-08-10 15:51:19+00:00
Ofcause it is unpopular.

In the context you are literally complaining that you can not get your favorite breakfast because some people need to get less slave like wages.

That should be wildly unpopular to utter.

And yes, you have a side comment about job reductions, but it still misses the broader picture: some people can barely feed themselves.
Ask HN: Best way to get a land line for my kids?
by xrd | 2025-08-10 15:51:28+00:00
If you are a parent like me, perhaps you'll understand this. My kids spend way too much time on their phones.

As we start the new school year, I want to add a "land line" to my house so I can tell them "devices are off at 8:30! If you urgently need to make a call, go ahead and use this land line."

I am hopeful this will mean they don't "just need to text someone" and then get sucked into the void of their smart phone addictions until all hours of the night, damaging their fragile sleep patterns.

Of course, I don't really want a land line. I want a SIP phone that connects via Plivo or Twilio. I've been looking on eBay and others to find an inexpensive cordless version that I can easily connect to Plivo.

I'm confused, however, what the difference is between a SIP phone, a DECT phone, Bluetooth and a WiFi phone, and if those can all be used with Plivo/Twilio.

For example this link:

https://www.voipsupply.com/voip-phones/cordless

Anyone have suggestions on going down this path? Do I need to run a PBX on one of my machines?

I figure the least expensive way is just direct to Plivo. The pay-as-you-go plan seems to be about $0.005 a minute inbound, $0.01 a minute outbound. That's easily worth my sanity.

https://www.plivo.com/pricing/
by indrora | 2025-08-10 15:51:54+00:00
It's also way more than 1px/30s -- Its like 20px/30s and you have a "tank" of them, which you can expand to however big you want.

Placing pixels gives you points, which you can turn into more pixels or a bigger bag of pixels over time. I've seen people who have done enough pixel pushing that they get 3-4K pixels at a time.
by burgerguyg | 2025-08-10 15:51:54+00:00
You're a tool... of landlord propaganda.

There is no such thing as a living wage in a housing market like this. The recent bill in WA to control rents limited rental increases to the rate of inflation plus 7% (or a flat 10%, whichever is lower). So when inflation is at 3% every year, and rents rise 10% every year, how long before someone who gets a 5% annual raise (40% higher than the rate of inflation) can't afford rent?

As long as the rental market cannot meet rental demand, raising wages just bids up rents. No more people get housed or are able to create savings to weather emergencies. All that money just gets transferred from business owners to landlords, using minimum wage workers as mules to transport the money.

Your bias is demonstrated by the fact that you seem to think this is all about greedy business owners and you put ZERO responsibility on the landowners and politicians who have perpetuated this housing crisis.

Meanwhile, in states without property tax caps, overheated housing markets raise the property taxes of seniors until they can no longer afford their homes, even if they're paid off. My property taxes are still just a fraction of my mortgage but they've more than doubled in the past 8 years and in another 8 years I'll be 64 and likely pay more annually in property taxes than in mortgage payments.

So seniors and digital nomads sell their ridiculously overpriced homes in superheated markets and take those profits to cooler markets, increasing property values and property taxes, which may seem like a benefit until it heats up the local housing market too much.

But we saw Marc Andreessen and his wife demonstrate their nasty NIMBY values trying to stop a measure increasing housing density in Atherton, California a few years back. The same hero of VC who invested 9 figures in Adam Neumann's housing startup doesn't want any of the plebes it would serve within a bike ride of his home.
by jfengel | 2025-08-10 15:53:24+00:00
As far as grammar is concerned, yes, that's true.

But register also matters. A communication is about much more than the surface meaning. It conveys a lot about the relationship between speaker and listener. Some languages formalize that grammatically, but it's present in myriad other ways.

Adhering to the arbitrary rules of correctness is one. Saying "try and" in a resume cover letter probably conveys a message of slackness and over-familiarity. Which might be a deliberate choice, but you're better off if you at least know you're making it.
by Zee2 | 2025-08-10 15:53:31+00:00
$14US in Seattle will barely get you a side of fries. A popular place near me (not fancy!) lists their pretzel+dip appetizer for $17US, or €14.50.

With these prices, restaurants and eating out in general has become completely inaccessible to a huge swath of people. And even for those who can afford it, it’s a less frequent treat. It has a noticeable impact on the liveliness of the city and the social vibe, from my experience.
by whoknowsidont | 2025-08-10 15:53:51+00:00
>No, they don't. LLM frontends, which are traditional deterministic programs, use MCP to do that, and to find schemas for what should be sent to and expected from the tools.

You are REALLY, REALLY misunderstanding how this works. Like severely.

You think MCP is being used for some other purpose despite the one it was explicitly designed for... which is just weird and silly.

>Confusing these two issues can only happen if you think the model does something with each response that controls whether or not the toolchain validates it

No, you're still just arguing against something no one is arguing for the sake of pretending like MCP is doing something it literally cannot do or fundamentally fix about how LLM's operate.

I promise you if you read this a month from now with a fresh pair of eyes you will see your mistake.
by bgwalter | 2025-08-10 15:54:09+00:00
> several of them are written by well-known developers who’ve been around for over a decade

All of whom had greater output in terms of volume and impact before LLMs. And it is always the same people who now get voted to the top as opposed to a couple of months ago, when one of them got ratio'd for one of his exuberant blog posts.
by vips7L | 2025-08-10 15:54:25+00:00
I think they’re talking about powershells programming syntax which is much more sane than any Unix shell. There’s way less footguns and everything is typed. You’re not dealing with raw strings for everything.

If you don’t like the Verb-Noun nonsense I’d encourage you to look at the default aliases as they make everything a lot less verbose. For example Where-Object is just “where” or getchild-item is default aliased to ls and gci.

Id encourage you to look at NuShell as well since it is mostly the same philosophy as PowerShell.
Show HN: Implemented my own file system syncing algorithm
by naklecha | 2025-08-10 15:54:38+00:00
i implemented a file system syncing algorithm that improves metadata and file updates from your gpu instance to your cloud storage significantly (on average >90%). examples and details below:

examples: - 200 small files, 2-3 rclone updates - 10,000 small files, ~1000 rclone updates - 1 mil small files, ~2000 rclone updates - 100 mil small files, ~4000 rclone updates - 500 large, 10k small files, ~2000 rclone updates - 1000 large files, ~1000 rclone updates

details: i implemented similar file chunking algorithms that popular dfs use without needing redis/sql metadata updates during file writes in real time.

instead, your updated file chunks and metadata are computed + synced in the background when reads and writes to your file system are stagnant.

it's live on http://cloudy.so, starting today. this update, improves instance spin-up and spin-down time, as well as significantly reduces storage costs :')
by lutusp | 2025-08-10 15:54:47+00:00
This pales when compared to my favorite grammatical annoyance, a common perverse construction, for example "... similar effect to ..." when "... effect similar to ..." is actually intended. This misordering is so common that, in a Web search, it appears to outnumber the canonical ordering.

I acknowledge that terms like "canonical" argue for a nonexistent language authority, and that an acceptable word ordering is any one that conveys what the speaker intends.
by gwd | 2025-08-10 15:54:48+00:00
> I remember that there is truly no correct way to say something

Weirdly, that's not what this says. It specifically says you can't say this:

> * John will both try and kill mosquitos.

or

> * I tried and finished the assignment

or

> * Try always and tell the truth

What I'd say instead is: If native speakers say something, then it's grammatically correct. What you were taught is the "prescribed grammar" or "prestige grammar".

Also, grammar is voted on by speakers of a language. I'm generally against making fun of people for deviating from the prestige grammar; but I will "vote against" using the word "literally" to mean "figuratively" as long as I can.
by bcantrill | 2025-08-10 15:55:08+00:00
So (foolishly?) I had never bothered to check Glassdoor, because we have been so upfront about our compensation.[0] But apparently that was a mistake! If it needs to be said, the Glassdoor numbers are comically wrong -- and in fact the high number in the "Engineer" range was quite a bit less than what we payed everyone six years ago!

[0] https://oxide.computer/blog/oxides-compensation-model-how-is...
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-08-10 15:55:31+00:00
> I like Debian's measured pragmatism with ideology

There is plenty that could be said of Debian but as far as I’m concerned that’s not part of it.

Debian patches software for purely ideological reasons because they think they are not free enough. That’s not pragmatism. That’s the reverse of pragmatism. It certainly is a real drag on the teams developing the software they try to ship.
by justinrubek | 2025-08-10 15:56:24+00:00
If you are having any kind of issue with this, please consider doing it. I have this background as well. I am not used to large paychecks or even financial stability. I often freeze when spending that makes my life better. Recently I bought a window air conditioner unit that helped my sleep tremendously. I don't even notice the $300 gone but I've gotten energy back that I didn't know I had. I've tried other things for sleep but this one was the most significant. There is a cost for not deploying your resources too.
by trenchpilgrim | 2025-08-10 15:56:52+00:00
> “The unfortunate thing right now, specifically for recent college grads, is those positions that are most likely to be automated are the entry-level positions that they would be seeking,” said Matthew Martin, U.S. senior economist at Oxford Economics, a forecasting firm.

This matches my experience. About 90% of the coding tasks I would have assigned to a junior in years past, I can get done for a fraction of the price at a similar quality and in 1/3rd the time by a tool like Claude Code. The only reason I have to hire a junior would be to develop them into a senior over 3-5 years, and companies are far too shortsided to think about that training pipeline.

A good senior engineer still does things the tools can't- in particular, non-programming tasks like planning, persuading, and accountability. I fear that there will be a crisis in these skills as the current seniors retire/change industries in the coming years.
by ndriscoll | 2025-08-10 15:56:58+00:00
Generally speaking, getting good performance out of a database mostly comes down to understanding how the thing works and then not making it do a stupid amount of unnecessary work. I expect someone who understands that would also not e.g. fetch a script that then fetches the actual text instead of just sending the text. For example Markus Winand's sites work just fine with javascript off.

For ML stuff I'd let e.g. mathjax fly, but I expect the surrounding prose to show up first to get me interested enough to enable scripts.

It's not an exact filter, but it gives some signal to feed into the "is this worth my time" model.

It's also odd to characterize it as fanaticism: scriptless sites are the default. If you just type words, it will work. You have to go out of your way to make a Rube Goldberg machine. I'm not interested in Rube Goldberg machines or the insights of the people that enjoy making them. Like if you own a restaurant and make your menu so that it's only available on a phone, I'll just leave. I don't appreciate the gimmick. Likewise for things that want me to install an app or use a cloud. Not happening.
by lucianbr | 2025-08-10 15:57:01+00:00
Feels like in terms of warranty, support, repairability, it's not so much that Chinese brands have advanced, but that the west has seriously regressed. Every company now is looking to lock me out of my own hardware, extract as much information about me, extract as much value possible by degrading support and compatibility and whatever else they can...

Maybe when we run out of reasons to buy american or european or japanese they will wake up, but I don't see it.
by jacobegold | 2025-08-10 15:57:16+00:00
We've already soft launched the next step toward this to some existing Graphite users, so I'm fine sharing!

We're adding an agentic chat sidebar to the pull request that can help you gather context to understand a PR and make pre-merge changes without needing to leave the PR page. Open beta next week.

We're only going to spend more and more time looking at diffs as the amount of them increases, so the tools that we use here need to evolve as well. "AI code review" should be an interactive experience that directly builds on how code is reviewed today, not just a bot that comments on your PRs.
by K0balt | 2025-08-10 15:57:21+00:00
It’s not background, it’s donations.

While I hate the taste, it makes sense to combine smart with powerful if you want to produce industry.

The rich don’t need to be particularly competitive academically - they are hyper-advantaged socially.

Exposing them to intelligent thought keeps them from being powerful ignoramuses, and encouraging the academically gifted to rub shoulders with those that can help them to implement their ideas is also an advantage.

I hate it but it actually makes sense to me.

I’m not sure that was the motivation in this case though, easily could have been an accounting decision.
by nlawalker | 2025-08-10 15:58:28+00:00
Totally agree - the true source of all of the value here is the new incentive to write very simple services with very simple documentation and to make that documentation easily discoverable.

It fills a gap that exists in most service documentation: an easily discoverable page for developers (specifically, those who already know how to use their ecosystem of choice's HTTP APIs) that has a very short list of the service's most fundamental functionality with a simplified specification so they can go and play around with it.
by _alternator_ | 2025-08-10 15:58:48+00:00
The crazy thing is that they refused CalGrants not because it forces them to end legacy and donor admissions, but because they’d have to publish data about such admissions.

So the calculation was that a report showing how much unfairness there is in the admissions process will hurt the Stanford ‘brand’ by more that $3M per year. Ouch.
by brookst | 2025-08-10 15:58:51+00:00
I don’t like MCP because it relies on good faith from the plugin provider. It works great in closed, trusted environments but it cannot scale across trust boundaries.

It just begs for spam and fraud, with badly-behaving services advertising lowest-cost, highest-quality, totally amazing services. It feels like the web circa 1995… lots of implicit trust that isn’t sustainable.
by k310 | 2025-08-10 15:59:39+00:00
AI is coming, with all its demands on hardware and software to accommodate it, even "securely remote", famous last words, and I never asked for it, nor do I need it. There's a certain human satisfaction in laying out tasks and checking them off.

And solving problems, challenging the brain, like practicing piano, compared to just listening. Keep this old mind very sharp (pun unintended)

Many of the examples given, of AI, and technology in general, are simple tasks, made extremely complex, flakey and dangerous, that people used to do. Think: getting a ride, shopping.

Call me when AI can replace some damaged door molding and install new replacement window blinds.

In my misspent youth, I would supplement my education by buying used copies of Scientific American at a bookstore on Huntington Ave. in Boston. One article stuck in my mind. Joey, "A Mechanical Boy" [0] Original source [1]. PDF.

Apparently autistic, Joey mechanized his entire life until he recovered. I learned to mechanize just what was needed.

> One last detail and this fragment of Joey's story has been told. When Joey was 12, he made a Boat for our Memorial Day parade. It carried the slogan: "Feelings are more important than anything under the sun." Feelings, Joey had learned, are what make for humanity; their absence, for a mechanical existence. With this knowledge Joey entered the human condition.

I vaguely remember the clerk who kindly asked if I was going to buy that stack of magazines or was just making a mess. A human moment.

[0] https://blogs.uoregon.edu/autismhistoryproject/archive/bruno...

[1] https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.uoregon.edu/dist/d/16656...
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-08-10 16:00:35+00:00
I have rented for a few decades, primarily from older owners' crappier 2nd-homes, typically the last remants of older housing in gentrifying parts of working-class towns. My ideal landlord doesn't want to invest anything in their rental, other than bare-minimums for legal habitability [even then..].

This has four-times given me immense negotiating leverage, with the trade-off of having to provide my own labor for minimal standards of living (e.g. I currently pay ~40% below-market, but am responsible for all HVAC/mech/pest maintenance; example: recently replaced the water heater).

Have you asked your landlord if you can modify your apartment, or is it a corporate no-returned-calls situation?
by Traubenfuchs | 2025-08-10 16:00:58+00:00
> (a) try (./!)

> She shouted: Try! Try, try, try! Just fucking try it!

> try as you may/might

> try is my favorite word

> try harder

> try 1/2/3/…

> try, quickly!

Do my examples fit in those 3 examples?

Me thinkest thoug dost not knoweth English very well.

And I am not even a native speaker.

But then again, I have no Harvard education, so what do I know.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-08-10 16:02:05+00:00
> 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).

My advise to you is to deny all support from people using the Debian version of your software and automatically close all bug tickets from Debian saying you don’t support externally patched software.

You would be far from the first to do so and it’s a completely rational and sane decision. You don’t have to engage with the insanity that Debian own policies force on its maintainers and users.
by Swizec | 2025-08-10 16:04:52+00:00
> 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".

Many of those languages have mutually unintelligible dialects. The reference implementation exists to patch communication when you run into trouble with people who aren’t from your village.

Even American English has this. People from Appalachia register switch to more standard English when they’re not home, for example. Or a high schooler will tamper their slang when talking to grandma.

You could also argue international business English is a contrived dialect used primarily by ESL speakers. It definitely has many differences from any English spoken natively at home.
by do_not_redeem | 2025-08-10 16:06:10+00:00
Since we're talking syntax... it's mildly infuriating that the zig parser is not smart enough to understand expressions like `const x=a()orelse b();`. You have to manually add a space before `orelse` -- but isn't that what `zig fmt` is for? I have RSI and it's maddening having to mash the arrow keys and add/remove whitespace until the parser is happy.

I've heard the argument that people might confuse binary operators for prefix/postfix operators, but I don't buy it. Who would think an operator named `orelse` is anything but binary?
by watwut | 2025-08-10 16:06:21+00:00
That was not a threat if you slacked off. Slacking off was basically completely normalized.

That was a treat if you was political inconvenient. Or if someone seen you as a threat in his career ascent and denounced you (falsely or truthfully). Which, in a roundabout way caused more of that slacking culture. It was literally safer to NOT look like the best worker with initiative.