MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by voidhorse | 2025-11-17 00:39:02+00:00
Yeah, and just like the web space there will be a plethora of different frameworks out there all solving the same problems in their own slightly different, uniquely crappy ways and an entire pointless industry built around ceaselessly creating and rehashing and debating this needlessly bloated ecosystem of competing solutions will emerge and employ many "ai engineers".

Outside of a few notable exceptions, the software industry has become such a joke.
by robot-wrangler | 2025-11-17 00:39:04+00:00
MCP is how you wrap/distribute/compose things related to tool-use. Tool-use is how you insist on an IO schema that LLMs must conform to. Schemas are how you combat hallucination, and how you can use AI in structured ways for things that it wasn't explicitly trained on. And this is really just scratching the surface of what MCP is for.

You can throw all that away by rejecting MCP completely or by boiling tool-use down to just generating and running unstructured shell commands. But setting aside security issues or why you'd want to embrace more opportunities for hallucination instead of less.. shelling out for everything is perfect faith in the model's ability to generate correct bash for an infinite space of CLI surfaces. You've lost the ability to ever pivot to smaller/cheaper/local models, and now you're more addicted to external vendors/SOTA models.

Consider the following workflow with a large CLI surface that's a candidate for a dedicated LLM tool, maybe ffmpeg. Convert the man page to a JSON schema. Convert the JSON schema to a tool. Add the tool to a MCP server, alongside similar wizards for imagemagick/blender. The first steps can use SOTA models if necessary, but the later steps can all feasibly work for free, as a stand-alone app that has no cloud footprint and no subscription fee. This still works if ffmpeg/blender/imagemagick were private custom tools instead of well-known tools that are decades old. You can test the tools in offline isolation too. And since things like fastmcp support server composition you can push and pop that particular stack of wizards in or out of LLM capabilities.

Good luck getting real composition with markdown files and tweaking prompts for tone by adding a "Please" preamble. Good luck engineering real systems with vague beliefs about magic, no concrete specifications for any part of any step, constantly changing external dependencies, and perfect faith in vendors.
by ggm | 2025-11-17 00:39:33+00:00
Thats simply not true. To argue to an absurd reduction, if that were true the NHS would preference amputation and wooden limbs over all other treatments for infected limbs. They still preference paths short of amputation.

It's a race to a medium. the problem is the medium is lower than rich people want, and the masses of poorer people who benefit from being lifted above amputation and a wooden leg don't appear in the cashflow as benefactors.

Getting used to a happy medium being lower than many people are used to, is hard.
by andyferris | 2025-11-17 00:39:44+00:00
The style of marketing material was becoming SO heavily cargo-culted with telltale signs exactly like these in the leadup to LLMs.

Humans were learning the same patterns off each other. Such style advice has been floating around on e.g. LinkedIn for a while now. Just a couple years later, humans are (predictably) still doing it, even if the LLMs are now too.

We should be giving each other a bit of break. I'd personally be offended if someone thought I was a clanker.
by kaashif | 2025-11-17 00:41:32+00:00
Why even mock anything in this example? You need to read the source code to work out what to mock, reaching deep inside the code to name some method to mock.

But what if you just passed in the contents of the file or something?

Edit: oh wait actually this is what the very last line in the blog post says! But I think it should be emphasized more!
by lelandbatey | 2025-11-17 00:41:48+00:00
I feel like the #1 reason mocks break looks nothing like this and instead looks like: you change the internal behaviors of a function/method and now the mocks interact differently with the underlying code, forcing you to change the mocks. Which highlights how awful mocking as a concept is; it is of truly limited usefulness for anything but the most brittle of tests.

Don't test the wrong things; if you care about some precondition, that should be an input. If you need to measure a side effect, that should be an output. Don't tweak global state to do your testing.
by ef2k | 2025-11-17 00:42:03+00:00
> I’m still trying to figure out what kinds of open source are worth writing in this new era

Is there any upside to opensourcing anything anymore? Anything published today becomes training data for the next model, with no attribution to the original work.

If the goal is to experiment, share ideas, or let others learn from the work, maybe the better default now is "source available", instead of FOSS in the classic sense. It gives people visibility while setting clearer boundaries on how the work can be used.

I learned most of what I know thanks to FOSS projects so I'm still on the fence on this.
by tptacek | 2025-11-17 00:46:12+00:00
We get threads about this on HN a couple times a year, and I feel like people have never thought this through. The company that cures T1D or MS will make approximately eleventy jillion dollars. The mustache-twirlers engineering MS into a chronic manageable disease rather than curing it would simply be outcompeted and put out of business by the straight-mustached cure owners. If you believe the mustache-twirlers are capable of suppressing knowledge of a viable cure, I'm going to have fun selling you on a lot of more-plausible conspiracy theories; for instance, the faked moon landing, which would have required less collusion and been less impactful to the world.

In a strict sense, curing a single disease isn't a long term "sustainable business", because you'll eventually push the population of affected patients below a threshold of profitability. The premise of a major pharma company is that they keep finding other treatments.
by coderenegade | 2025-11-17 00:46:19+00:00
The morality of an organization is distinct from the morality of the decision-makers within the organization. Modern organizations are setup to distribute responsibility, and take advantage of extra-organizational structures and entities to further that end. Decision-makers often have legal obligations that may override their own individual morality.

Whenever any large organization takes a "think of the children" stance, it's almost always in service of another goal, with the trivial exception of single-issue organizations that specifically care about that issue. This doesn't preclude individuals, even within the organization, from caring about a given issue. But a company like OpenAI that is actively considering its own version of slop-tok almost certainly cares about profit more than children, and its senior members are in the business of making money for their investors, which, again, takes precedence over their own individual thoughts on child safety. It just so happens that in this case, child safety is a convenient argument for guard rails, which neatly avoids having to contend with advertisers, which is about the money.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-11-17 00:47:05+00:00
>why didn't you try fraud if you think it's so easy?

Because I'm not a criminal? I have too much to lose, and frankly I don't know the system. I know roughly the kinds of things that would get me paid but it's not easy for an honest person. Some of the fraud is also, no doubt, in the form of under-reporting income or not updating the records with your current household status.

>It's mindboggling to see you argue that somehow the rules that made it hard for you to get social support are somehow waived for others.

The rules apply VERY differently based on a large number of factors. Without going too far into it, I am 100% certain that being an "asylum seeker" (aka an economic migrant to those of us who know) will get you paid. I can't fake that, it's not worth it. Also, I'd have needed it 10+ years ago, not today.

>The country isn't facing bankruptcy because children are getting food. The country is facing bankruptcy because billionaires are getting so much welfare in the form of tax cuts and low wages - their employees can't afford food and rent while working full time jobs to help the leeches amass even more wealth.

The rich are getting richer but it's mostly because they know how to work the system. It's NOT because poor people are getting screwed generally, or because they deserve more money in an economic sense. Every productive industry is being outsourced or else flooded with immigrant workers, and this has gone on for decades. The rich don't HAVE enough to pay for the welfare state or higher wages for uncompetitive workers. If you want to be mad about something, be mad that our politicians allowed the country to be hollowed out.
by amarant | 2025-11-17 00:49:30+00:00
You're getting downvoted for being right. Attempt being nuanced and people will call you a robot.

Well if that's how we identify humans I for one prefer our new LLM overlords.

A lot of people who say stuff like "boo AI!" are not only setting the bar for humanity very low, they're also discouraging intellectualism and intelligent discourse online. Honestly, if a LLM wrote a good think piece, I prefer that over "human slop".

I just wish people would critique a text on its own merits instead of inventing strawman arguments about how it was written.

Oh and, for the provocative effect — I'll end my comment with an em dash.
by dedalus | 2025-11-17 00:51:29+00:00
I see one reason why: I was running my whole thing on Cloudflare whereas I do need one MCP proxy all the time and if I run that one thing on GCP it suffers from latency so moving all my stack there now. The extra cost is for control of docker/kubernets which gives me on prem as well. So I kinda answered my own question of how to deploy both on CF as well as move away from it
by AstroNutt | 2025-11-17 00:51:29+00:00
I was recently in Atlanta GA for work and noticed these cameras were EVERYWHERE! They even have white cars that randomly drive the streets with a camera on each corner of the car, plus one on the roof. 5 total on one car!!!

I was wondering why Atlanta was so dystopian and creepy, then I Googled the guy posting here, Garrett Langley. It makes sense now.

"Flock was founded in 2017. It was co-founded by three Georgia Tech alumni:

Garrett Langley (chief executive officer), Paige Todd (chief people officer), and Matt Feury (chief technology officer)."
by bentt | 2025-11-17 00:51:53+00:00
Nope.

Is this the same crash that happened when tariffs were announced? What about the 2022 crash? What sort of crash are we talking about?

IMO the AI incumbents want to provoke smaller pullbacks on the way up to A) kill competitors who can't handle it and B) prevent a catastrophic crash that would actually hurt them.

That's why we see stuff like Thiel selling his NVDA holdings. He's just going to buy back in later.
by rglover | 2025-11-17 00:53:46+00:00
> Even now there’s a movement toward putting documentation in an llms.txt file, so you can just point an agent at it and save your brain cells the effort of deciphering English prose. (Is this even documentation anymore? What is documentation?)

I look at it as why not have the best of both worlds? The docs for my JS framework all have the option of being returned as LLM-friendly text [1].

When I utilize this myself, it's to get help fleshing out skeleton code inside of an app built w/ my framework (e.g, Claude Sonnet w/ these docs in context build a nearly ~90-100% accurate implementation for most stuff I throw at it—anything from little lib stuff up to full-blown API endpoint design and even framework-level implementations of small stuff like helping to refactor the built-in middleware loading). It's not for a lack of desire to read, but rather a lack of desire to build every little thing from scratch when I know an LLM is perfectly capable (and much faster than me).

[1] https://docs.cheatcode.co/joystick/ui/component/dynamic-page...
by aw1621107 | 2025-11-17 00:54:26+00:00
> no_std for instance does not protect the stack completely. That means that, if you for instance have a simple stack-overflow bug in a Rust program when using no_std, even if the program has absolutely no usage of the unsafe keyword, you can get undefined behavior.

I think you're technically correct, though I also think the picture is a bit more complicated than you paint it. From my understanding, stack overflow protection needs cooperation between (at least) a language, its runtime (if present), and the environment the program is run in. In other words, I'm not sure any language can "protect the stack completely" without knowledge of the environment it's going to be run in, so at least technically speaking I don't think Rust is any different here.

That being said, rustc will insert stack probes even when compiling with no_std, so in environments where stack probes are sufficient to protect against stack overflow/stack clashes no_std is safe with respect to that particular issue.

For example, this short program:

#![no_std] #[inline(never)] pub fn f() -> u8 { let v: [u8; 16384] = [1; 16384]; v.iter().sum() }

Produces stack probes on e.g., x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu [0]:

example::f::hb88315ca0b28f303: sub rsp, 4096 mov qword ptr [rsp], 0 sub rsp, 4096 mov qword ptr [rsp], 0 sub rsp, 4096 mov qword ptr [rsp], 0 sub rsp, 4096 mov qword ptr [rsp], 0 push rax lea rdi, [rsp + 8] mov edx, 16384 mov esi, 1 call qword ptr [rip + memset@GOTPCREL] <further assembly omitted>

[0]: https://rust.godbolt.org/z/rcdvj8j4K
by dherls | 2025-11-17 00:54:40+00:00
This blog post talks as if mocking the `open` function is a good thing that people should be told how to do. If you are mocking anything in the standard library your code is probably structured poorly.

In the example the author walks through, a cleaner way would be to have the second function take the Options as a parameter and decouple those two functions. You can then test both in isolation.
by angoragoats | 2025-11-17 00:54:46+00:00
> The Bluetooth spec only supports one battery status. AirPods have three batteries. Is 1 < 3 a satisfactory enough answer to you?

No, it's not. The Bluetooth Battery Service spec allows for a single device with multiple batteries and individual battery reporting for each. [0] They even give the example in that doc of earbuds which are one “logical device” but two physically separate pieces, each with its own battery.

> On the subject of the multi-trillion-dollar behemoth, Apple is a private company.

Apple is, by definition, a public company.

> If you have the capital, you can acquire a controlling interest and then they’ll work on whatever you like. Until then, you’re out of luck.

No. Anticompetitive behavior such as tying (what I would argue is happening here) can and should always be subject to examination, criticism, and possible litigation by the public.

[0] https://www.bluetooth.com/wp-content/uploads/Files/Specifica...
by ghssds | 2025-11-17 00:54:51+00:00
It's so easy to use coins, pennies included, in day-to-day transactions I never accumulate any. Accumulating pennies or other coins is a concept I don't understand. You can spend up to 4 pennies in any purchase you do, and if you don't can't never receive more than 4. For nickels, dimes, and quarters, the maximum is smaller.
by pixelpoet | 2025-11-17 00:55:32+00:00
For the 7800x3d and 9800x3d being really good CPUs? I worked on Cinebench and its rendering engine, so I'll often go by its single- and multi-threaded results, and in a past life I worked on Indigo Renderer and find IndigoBench still works great too: https://indigorenderer.com/indigobench
by TheAlchemist | 2025-11-17 00:56:00+00:00
Frankly, I would be happy if riots in the streets happen (if there is a bailout of Big Tech in the first place). What's going on recently with OpenAI publicly, and probably most of the 'AI' players not publicly, is disgusting - it's a bubble, everyone and their mother knows it, and these guys try to save their asses by asking for governement backing before the bubble even pops. Privatize gains, socialize losses...

It's a shame that no more bankers went to jail after 2008, although I find the situation was much more complicated than here.
by angoragoats | 2025-11-17 00:56:21+00:00
As I posted elsewhere in the thread, this is incorrect. The Bluetooth Battery Service spec allows for a single device with multiple batteries and individual battery reporting for each. [0] They even give the example in that doc of earbuds which are one “logical device” but two physically separate pieces, each with its own battery.

As additional evidence, there are "AirPods-like" earbuds on the market such as the Sony WF-C700N, which have no problem reporting three battery levels over standard Bluetooth on e.g. Linux.

[0] https://www.bluetooth.com/wp-content/uploads/Files/Specifica...
by rekabis | 2025-11-17 00:57:24+00:00
>If you have a reference for UUIDv7 support in MSSQL

There isn’t any AFAIK. What I ran across was SQL that was meant to go into a trigger or something like that to generate a proper UUIDv7 as if MSSQL was creating one.

Hmmm… could have sworn it was featured here on HN, could have sworn I saw it within the last six months, could have sworn I bookmarked it for closer examination. Not finding it in my favourited stories here on HN, and I have even double-checked on Reddit and Lemmy - no bueno. Really frustrating me, because I love UUIDs for their resistance to the incrementing attacks that integer primary keys typically suffer from.

Edit: After a brief Google search this tickles my memory, but not entirely sure if it is the same code I remember looking at: https://github.com/osexpert/GuidPhantom/blob/main/Uuid_v7_v8...
by ssl-3 | 2025-11-17 00:57:53+00:00
Without planning and the resultant guidance, we stand to be inconvenienced every time one of the customers in front of us and the cashier have differences in their ideas for how rounding works.

(But that's OK, I guess: After all, that's just an aggregate of many millions of little inconveniences, instead of some somewhat larger inconveniences for a few people in advance. Their time is clearly more important than yours is, or mine is. All hail the chief.)
by Zak | 2025-11-17 00:58:07+00:00
The linked project is about removing censorship from open-weight models people can run on their own hardware, and your comment addresses incidents involving LLM-based consumer products.

Sure, products like character.ai and ChatGPT should be designed to avoid giving harmful advice or encouraging the user to form emotional attachments to the model. It may be impossible to build a product like character.ai without encouraging that behavior, in which case I'm inclined to think the product should not be built at all.
by mccoyb | 2025-11-17 00:58:26+00:00
> Julia's "secret sauce", the dynamic type system and method dispatch that endows it with its powers of composability, will never be a feature of languages such as Fortran. The tradeoff is a more complex compilation process and the necessity to have part of the Julia runtime available during execution.

> The main limitation is the prohibition of dynamic dispatch. This is a key feature of Julia, where methods can be selected at run time based on the types of function arguments encountered. The consequence is that most public packages don't work, as they may contain at least some instances of dynamic dispatch in contexts that are not performance-critical. Some of these packages can and will be rewritten so that they can be used in standalone binaries, but, in others, the dynamic dispatch is a necessary or desirable feature, so they will never be suitable for static compilation.

The problem (which the author didn't focus on, but which I believe to be the case) that Julia willingly hoisted on itself in the pursuit of maximum performance is _invoking the compiler at runtime_ to specialize methods when type information is finally known.

Method dispatch can be done statically. For instance, what if I don't know what method to call via abstract interpretation? Well, use a bunch of branches. Okay, you say, but that's garbage for performance ... well, raise a compiler error or warning like JET.jl so someone knows that it is garbage for performance.

Now, my read on this work is the noble goal of prying a different, more static version of Julia free from this compiler design decision.

But I think at the heart of this is an infrastructural problem ... does one really need to invoke the compiler at runtime? What space of programs is that serving that cannot be served statically, or with a bit of upfront user refactoring?

Open to be shown wrong, but I believe this is the key compiler issue.
by coderenegade | 2025-11-17 00:59:21+00:00
To play devil's advocate, a leader that dismantles broken systems in order fix an otherwise failing society will look identical to one that siezes power by dismantling those same systems. Indeed, in the latter case, they often believe they're the former.

I'm not American, so I have no horse in the Trump race, but it seems clear to me that a significant chunk of the country elected the guy on the premise that he would do what he's currently doing. Whether or not you think he's Hitler or the savior of America almost certainly depends on your view of how well the system was working beforehand, and whether or not it needed to be torn down and rebuilt.

Which is to say, I don't know that historians will have much of relevance to say until the ink is dry and it's become history.
by loeg | 2025-11-17 01:01:52+00:00
I don't know, I think paying your traffic tickets is about the least you can do downstream of very occasionally being caught for habitual dangerous driving behavior. Breaking the "municipal debt collection" breaks the deterrent effect of traffic tickets.

I agree that in the abstract maybe there are better things some cops could be doing, but it seems like a vaguely reasonable use of some traffic enforcement resources. It's not like this taking away from murder investigations.

There's a prisoner's dilemma defecting thing going on here, right? You'd want neighboring municipalities to enforce warrants out of Oak Park.
by h4ny | 2025-11-17 01:01:53+00:00
I encourage everyone to read the definition on the home page:

> Definition: A gaming dark pattern is something that is deliberately added to a game to cause an unwanted negative experience for the player with a positive outcome for the game developer.

And also the detailed descriptions of each of the dark patterns, for example:

https://www.darkpattern.games/pattern/12/grinding.html

Quoting just the short descriptions of the dark patterns without considering the definition above is effectively mischaracterizing the intent of the website and not using the tool as intended, and all the patterns seem like they can be/are just enjoyable mechanics to many.

Some of the users reviewing games on the website seem to also miss the point (inaccurate reviews), which leads to comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45947761#45948330.

It is increasingly often the case in predatory games that a very subtle combination of the mechanics listed make them dark patterns collectively, so it's also important to consider the patterns in groups.