MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vidarh | 2025-11-25 01:24:44+00:00
Skills are less exciting because they're effectively documentation that's selectively loaded.

They are a bigger deal in a sense because they remove the need for all the scaffolding MCPs require.

E.g. I needed Claude to work on transcripts from my Fathom account, so I just had it write a CLI script to download them, and then I had it write a SKILL.md, and didn't have to care about wrapping it up into an MCP.

At a client, I needed a way to test their APIs, so I just told Claude Code to pull out the client code from one of their projects and turn it into a CLI, and then write a SKILL.md. And again, no need to care about wrapping it up into an MCP.

But this seems a lot less remarkable, and there's a lot less room to build big complicated projects and tooling around it, and so, sure, people will talk about it less.
by araes | 2025-11-25 01:24:59+00:00
Seems like this could also be a big effect on the massive data center buildout.

> exclusion WR Berkley proposed would bar claims involving “any actual or alleged use” of AI, including any product or service sold by a company “incorporating” the technology.

Read liberally this would make every AI data center un-insurable. If it goes towards issues like you cannot actually insure the facility, insure the hardware involved, and insure related ideas, then it starts to be a really serious financial issue from a company risk perspective.

Much like housing, there's a lot of areas where you simply cannot build without proper insurance that will cover likely claims.
by visioninmyblood | 2025-11-25 01:25:26+00:00
I’ve taken a more opinionated stance on this. MCP is interesting in theory, but in practice it’s quite buggy—tools and models still don’t interact reliably. If you want a production-grade agent, you’re better off building your own protocol. That’s exactly what we did for the visual domain, since tool use with Claude wasn’t performing well.

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14210
by EliteGadget | 2025-11-25 01:26:17+00:00
They just aren't very good motorcycles. You can get almost any other motorcycle and they will be better to ride, more reliable and probably cost a lot less.

Harley Davidson also didn't modernise its brand. Also a lot of the image of Harley Davidson is attached to the heyday of motorcycle gangs, old movies between the 50s-80s e.g. "Easy Rider", "Electra Glide in Blue" and Music from that era.
by macintux | 2025-11-25 01:26:51+00:00
> You don’t need this whole baroque “HN simulator” stack to fake being in a simulation; a 200-line Flask app, SQLite, and a cron job to regurgitate a few canned comment templates would get you 90% of the way there. Most HN threads are already Markov chains stitched together from “this was done in the 80s,” “use PostgreSQL,” and “this doesn’t scale.”
by ethin | 2025-11-25 01:26:56+00:00
This is such a wild take. And not in a good way. These LLMs are known to cause psychosis and to act as a form of constant re-enforcement to the ideas and delusions of people. If the NYT posts this and it happens to hurt OAI, good -- these companies should actually focus on the harms they cause to their customers. Their profits are a lot less important than the people who use their products. Or that's how it should be, anyway. Bean counters will happily tell you the opposite.
by IncreasePosts | 2025-11-25 01:27:07+00:00
Is it the gigantic, sparse levels made out of 10 polygons per square mile?

I only played the game for a few months 27 years ago but it has stuck with me. I don't know if I've ever found a game that was that compelling and fun. But then again, I haven't really given any of the modern games a shot and mostly gave up with the FPS genre after team fortress classic fell out of favor
by vidarh | 2025-11-25 01:28:09+00:00
It's more that they are embracing that the LLM is smart enough that you don't need to build-in this functionality beyond that very minimal part.

A fun thing: Claude Code will sometimes fail to find the skill the "proper" way, and will then in fact sometimes look for the SKILL.md file with tools, and read the file with tools, showing that it's perfectly capable of doing all the steps.

You could probably "fake" skills pretty well with instructions in CLAUDE.md to use a suitable command to extract the preamble of files in a given directory, and tell it to use that to decide when to read the rest.

It's the fact that it's such a thin layer that is exciting - it means we need increasingly less special logic other than relying on just basic instructions to the model itself.
by throwup238 | 2025-11-25 01:28:57+00:00
They probably just haven't done it yet since it's a self certification where the manufacturer themselves runs tests following NHTSA test procedures. Importers won't import (and probably can't sell in many jurisdictions) without that self-certification and it's likely just not worth it for BYD right now with the 100% tariff.

I wouldn't be surprised if they've already designed the core components of their cars (like the chassis) that they sell in Europe to meet American standards anyway. Stuff like the height and orientation of headlights can be modified more cheaply later when they want to enter the US market.
by remram | 2025-11-25 01:30:04+00:00
I'm not trying to argue against it, I think "slave" branches make no sense anyway, but to GP's point BitKeeper didn't enslave anybody, just used the word.

If we believe we should remove allusions to negative things why are we ok with "kill", "orphan", "evict", "bash", "cut", "isolate" etc? What is special about that terrible concept that we should stop using the word even when not applied to people at all?
by acdha | 2025-11-25 01:30:42+00:00
> Pip does not support this; with uv, use `--exclude-newer`. This appears to require a timestamp; so if you always want things up to X days old you'll have to recalculate.

I do this by having my shell init do this:

export UV_EXCLUDE_NEWER=$(date -Iu -d "14 days ago")

That’s easy to override if you need to but otherwise seamless.
by jazzyjackson | 2025-11-25 01:31:41+00:00
Encryption doesn't have to be backdoord because none of the group chats on telegram are encrypted (telegram gets to claim it's "encrypted" because it's TLS between client and server, but e2ee is not claimed except for inconvenient device-to-device chat.

In any case, the back door may be more of a Room 641A arrangement where all messages are intercepted by the host government, saving them the trouble of installing sockpuppet accounts in all the chatrooms they want to keep an eye on
by agentifysh | 2025-11-25 01:32:18+00:00
hmmm this is interesting I was always the impression Taiwanese wives were more progressive and men had to do lot more lifting vs other regional cultures in east asia

my original thinking after reading some of the anecdotes from TSMC engineers is that they were obsessively dedicated which means extreme hours from North American culture

its also the same in places like Samsung where the company treats employers very well with perks and long career stability but its not free always requires huge sacrifice I'd imagine similar to Japanese conglomerates.

I'm not sure which is better in America its definitely transactional relationship but it also comes with stability issues relatively compared to what these East Asian giants offer but at the cost of not being able to switch if and when you find yourselves at odds.

Not sure what it was like at Nokia but also another conglomerate that ultimately folded under competition and also a country with more stringent labor/life constraints that you would find less enforced in East Asia.

Getting a bit distracted here but noting how much culture plays a role in these large companies and their management styles.
by ejflick | 2025-11-25 01:32:25+00:00
> Basically your objects are data-only, so there's no benefit.

This makes me wonder why most of us use Java at all. In your typical web app project, classes just feel like either:

1) Data structures. This I suspect is a result of ORM's not really being ORM's but actually "Structural Relational Mappers".

- or -

2) Namespaces to dump functions. These are your run-of-the-mill "utils" classes or "service" classes, etc.

The more I work in Java, the more I feel friction between the language, its identity(OO beginning to incorporate functional ideas), and how people write in it.
by vidarh | 2025-11-25 01:33:12+00:00
This is no different to an MCP, where you rely on the model to use the metadata provided to pick the right tool, and understand how to use it.

Like with MCP, you can provide a deterministic, known-good piece of code to carry out the operation once the LLM decides to use it.

But a skill can evolve from pure Markdown via inlining some shell commands, up to a large application. And if you let it, with Skills the LLM can also inspect the tool, and modify it if it will help you.

All the Skills I use now have evolved bit by bit as I've run into new use-cases and told Claude Code to update the script the skills references or the SKILL.md itself. I can evolve the tooling while I'm using it.
by tpmoney | 2025-11-25 01:33:44+00:00
Replying to myself since it's too late to edit, but according to these numbers[1], it looks like this tax would hit about 52% of American households, so my "even the poorest of Americans" is a bit overwrought. And if we take the US median home price (~410k as of this year[2]) and exclude 75% of that (~307k), then this tax would hit ~30% of American households (~$481k net worth). Even at that, it's still quite a hurdle to clear to convince the top 1/3 of households support a 1% tax on their accumulated wealth.

[1]: https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentiles/ [2]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS
by Izkata | 2025-11-25 01:33:49+00:00
It found problems in the tree - lost files, wrong node counts, other stuff - which led to me finding files that didn't match previous backups (and when opened were obviously corrupted, like the bottom half of an image being just noise). Once I found this was a problem I've also caught ones that couldn't be read (IOError) that fsck would delete on the next run.

I may not have noticed had fsck not alerted me something was wrong.
by blaiz2025 | 2025-11-25 01:34:09+00:00
Sarcasm? Know that feeling. Midi does work on Wine under Mac without any fuss, both on Intel chip (tested on Mac Mini 2018) and Apple silicon (tested on Mac Mini 2023) with a fairly decent system soundfont for good music reproduction.

As for Linux, well... that's more difficult, even under Ubuntu with GUI apps for help. You need to have two audio apps installed and actively running and setup just right in-order for midi to produce any sound on Linux, which are "Qsynth" the midi soundfont player and "QjackCtl/Jack Audio" which is the audio stream controller.

Note, if you're running Linux in a virtual machine chances are it won't handle midi playback properly even if everything is setup right. I tested this under Ubuntu v20 I think a few years back and the midi playback was horribly distorted - don't think the IO rate between the virtual machine and the real machine was up to the job.

Unfortunately on Linux it can be rather difficult to say the least to get midi working right, and more often than not you want to hit the screen in frustration. Sadly, there is no simple "just do it" option to get things working as you'd expect.

In addition, Qsynth loves to generate multiple midi playback devices, like 6 or more, of which only one or two from my experience actually render any sound. To help with this frustration, Cynthia has a play all midi device option (main GUI bottom right, Playback Device, select "A"). This way, if only one of six or more midi devices on Linux is capable of sound playback Cynthia will get it working. Unfortunately Qsynth and Jack can be a real pain to setup and keep working.
by EliteGadget | 2025-11-25 01:35:09+00:00
Their ports to older non-x86 stuff does work well but I can't justify using it as a desktop OS. Too many compromises you have to make without a lot of benefit IME.

I find with the BSDs is that it is difficult to look up how to do something quick via a web search. Yes that is a man page that will tell you how to use whatever, but knowing where you are supposed to look to solve "why doesn't two button scroll work" isn't immediately obvious.

I was mucking around with FreeBSD on my old laptop and it works well and it isn't too bad to get stuff going if you are following the handbook, there is still that "how do I get <thing> working". I think the OS is good underneath, but I kinda want two finger scrolling to kinda work when I install cinnamon and X.

Debian is at the stage now of install, you have desktop and most stuff just works at least on a x86-64 system. If I want to install anything, it is download deb / flatpak and I am done.
Im note going crazy. Right? Windows disabled WiFi when postponing updates
by TheCombinator | 2025-11-25 01:36:01+00:00
Has this ever happened to anyone else? It has happened to me over a dozen times over the years, even going back to Windows 8. And it always happened when the update had been paused too many times and it always resolved it self after the update.

It happened, perhaps for the last time now as the last update came in. It's impossible to find discussions on this topic online but I know for certain this has been a pattern on varied computers I've owned and I just have a human need to talk to someone else about this.

Has it happened to you?

How do you feel about it?

Why hasnt anyone done anything about this in terms of writing an article or even going to court? Imagine it happening in the middle of an important meeting, a virtual court session, a poker game, etc?

I've lucked out so far.
by mikeyouse | 2025-11-25 01:36:21+00:00
I think they legitimately blocked Telegram and then Durov made a series of choices to bring it back to Russia.

Basically everything in the KI story has been verified. Durov admitted that he kept his Russian passport, he admitted that he was essentially lying about his Russian exile and regularly and freely traveled there, he hasn’t denied spending the week before Telegram was reinstated in St Petersburg which would be a no-brainer if he wasn’t really there.

As for choice of app — it again depends on your adversary. Telegram’s non-standard and home-brewed protocol has had every crypto expert asking “why? If not to…”

Lookup the name Vladimir Vedeneev and try and figure out why he’s signing Russian contracts as Telegram’s CFO and why his company GlobalNet has bragged about being the first to do DPI on backbone infrastructure while his other company Electrotelecom has FSB contracts for surveillance software.
by johncolanduoni | 2025-11-25 01:36:54+00:00
Okay, I should've said implementing AES in C without a timing sidechannel performantly enough to power TLS for a browser running on a shitty ARMv7 phone is basically impossible. Also if only Thomas Pornin can correctly implement your cipher without assembly, that's not a selling point.

I'm not contesting AES's success or saying it doesn't deserve it. I'm not even saying we should move off it (especially now that even most mobile processors have AES instructions). But nobody would put something like a S-Box in a cipher created today.
by userbinator | 2025-11-25 01:37:46+00:00
One key point about retention which is not often mentioned, and indeed neither does this article, is that retention is inversely proportional to program/erase cycles and decreases exponentially with increasing temperature. Hence why retention specs are usually X amount of time after Y cycles at Z temperature. Even a QLC SSD that has only been written to once, and kept in a freezer at -40, may hold data for several decades.

Manufacturers have been playing this game with DWPD/TBW numbers too --- by reducing the retention spec, they can advertise a drive as having a higher endurance with the exact same flash. But if you compare the numbers over the years, it's clear that NAND flash has gotten significantly worse; the only thing that has gone up, multiplicatively, is capacity, while endurance and rentention have both gone down by a few orders of magnitude.

For a long time, 10 years after 100K cycles was the gold standard of SLC flash.

Now we are down to several months after less than 1K cycles for QLC.
by vidarh | 2025-11-25 01:39:14+00:00
There's no lock-in there.

Tell your agent of choice to read the preamble of all the documents in the skills directory, and tell it that when it has a task that matches one of the preambles, it should read the rest of the relevant file for full instructions.

There are far fewer dependencies for skills than for MCP. Even a model that knows nothing about tool use beyond how to run a shell command, and has no support for anything else can figure out skills.

I don't know what you mean regarding explicitly referencing other skills - Claude at least is smart enough that if you reference a skill that isn't even properly registered, it will often start using grep and find to hunt for it to figure out what you meant. I've seen this happen regularly while developing a plugin and having errors in my setup.
by defrost | 2025-11-25 01:39:24+00:00
Those of us born in the 60s also recall many variations of CRT terminals.

I had a lot of fun with Tektronix 4010 series storage-tube CRT terminals.

In real life they had crisp lines and rarely any perceivable flicker (depended how far you pushed the ray trace line length)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tektronix_4010

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SbCIP1m6hs

You could drive them (in my experience at least) with a PDP-11, an Apple ][, a BBC micro, or a transputer breadboard.
by greycol | 2025-11-25 01:40:21+00:00
> Why does prominence matter?

Because when things go to court you need a meeting of the minds for a contract to be held up. It's accepted that people don't read contracts so the terms can't be far outside what people expect unless you've highlighted unexpected clauses, or shown that the person did actually consider the contract. It's one of the reasons, for example, you can't buy a house without having a lawyer representing you (in plenty of countries).
by dmux | 2025-11-25 01:40:40+00:00
Yes, you could also build and deploy a Smalltalk system, but my point is that the “build & deploy” approach (to me) seems antithetical to the message passing and late-binding paradigms. To use another example, it seems like you lose a lot of the benefits of Common Lisp via Slime (hot code reloading) if you deploy your Common Lisp app to a short-lived, ephemeral environment.
by sanswork | 2025-11-25 01:40:59+00:00
Back in the early 2000s I worked for Cap Gemini in Birmingham England which had a part of the office that was some sort of partnership with IBM GS(I think IBM did the hardware and cap got the services contacts). They also had a big blinkin lights server setup in the middle of the office for clients to see. As a teenage geek in his first tech job I used to love going to peek at it even though I did tape rotation on the real servers in the basement most days.
by igor47 | 2025-11-25 01:41:12+00:00
But dietary cholesterol is not linked to cholesterol in the blood vessels

> We confirm from the review of the literature on epidemiological data, meta-analysis, and clinical interventions where dietary cholesterol challenges were utilized that there is not a direct correlation between cholesterol intake and blood cholesterol.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9143438/#abstract1
by nullbio | 2025-11-25 01:41:33+00:00
When will folks stop trusting Palantir-partnered Anthropic is probably a better question.

Anthropic has weaponized the safety narrative into a marketing and political tool, and it is quite clear that they're pushing this narrative both for publicity from media that love the doomer narrative because it brings in ad-revenue, and for regulatory capture reasons.

Their intentions are obviously self-motivated, or they wouldn't be partnering with a company that openly prides itself on dystopian-level spying and surveillance of the world.

OpenAI aren't the good guys either, but I wish people would stop pretending like Anthropic are.
by worble | 2025-11-25 01:42:36+00:00
Junior's grow into mids, and eventually into seniors. OSS contributor's eventually learn the codebase, you talk to them, you all get invested in the shared success of the project and sometimes you even become friends.

For me, personally, I just don't see the point of putting that same effort into a machine. It won't learn or grow from the corrections I make in that PR, so why bother? I might as well have written it myself and saved the merge review headache.

Maybe one day it'll reach perfect parity of what I could've written myself, but today isn't that day.
by tpmoney | 2025-11-25 01:43:52+00:00
Stop telling people what will or won't irritate others right off the bat. There's no better way to wrongly speak for someone else. :)

More seriously, it's probably a good bet that most people haven't heard of McMaster Carr in general, and if they have, probably not in the context of having a smart or well designed website. So it's not a terrible article headline. And of all the click bait style headlines that could be used, it's probably the least offensive. At least they give you the name in the headline.
by losvedir | 2025-11-25 01:44:29+00:00
> That's one of the big problems with any kind of AI alignment or safety work.

That's why I found this announcement interesting, with regard to its discussion of alignment. Alignment as you're talking about here centers around ethics and a moral framework and is so named because a lot of the early LLM folks were big into "artificial general intelligence" and the fear that the AI will take over the world or whatever.

But fundamentally, and at a technical level, the "alignment" step is just additional training on top of the pre-training of the gigantic corpus of text. The pre-training kind of teaches it the world model and English, and "alignment" turns it into a question and answer bot that can "think" and use tools.

In other words, there's plenty of non-controversial "alignment" improvements that can be made, and indeed the highlight of this announcement is that it's now less susceptible to prompt injection (which, yes, is alignment!). Other improvements could be how well it uses tools, follows instructions, etc.
by vunderba | 2025-11-25 01:44:31+00:00
Good benchmark! Definitely love to see stuff focusing on the models which are capable of handling more than a single image at a time (NB, NB Pro, gpt-image-1, SeedDream v4, etc.)

Just a small note, but it looks like when click on the "Details" button of each comparison the actual text is being cut off.
by ttkciar | 2025-11-25 01:45:30+00:00
The author speculates that bigger/smarter models interpreting vague directives to utilize general-function tools will outperform more precise and detailed directives to utilize narrow-function tools:

> Granted to use a skill the agent needs to have general purpose access to a computer, but this is the bitter lesson in action. Giving an agent general purpose tools and trusting it to have the ability to use them to accomplish a task might very well be the winning strategy over making specialized tools for every task.
by vidarh | 2025-11-25 01:45:53+00:00
The thing is, MCP is little more than another self-descriping API format, and current models can handle most semi-regular API's with just a description and basic tooling. I had Claude interact with my app server via Curl before I decided to just tell it to write an API client instead. I could have told it to implement MCP instead, but now I have a CLI client that I can use as well, and Claude happily uses it with just the --help options.

If you don't already have an API, sure, MCP is a possible choice for that API. But if you have an API, there is decreasing reasons to bother implementing an MPC server the smarter the models are getting vs. just giving it access to your API docs.