MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: MCP-framework – Build MCP servers and AI agents in Rust
by wiwoworld | 2025-11-11 21:27:56+00:00
Just shipped mcp-framework and wanted to share it here.

It's a production-ready Rust implementation of the Model Context Protocol with blazing-fast performance, showcase tools and examples, and a web-based inspector.

Here's what it does:

- lets ai agents (claude, openai) use tools you define - has a web ui for testing/debugging your tools - keeps conversation history so agents can reason across multiple turns - includes 8 example tools to get you started instantly

All code examples work, ready for production.

Would genuinely appreciate any feedback.
by ACCount37 | 2025-11-11 21:28:02+00:00
Is an off the shelf FPV drone with a grenade strapped to it a "best in class" weapon?

No.

By now, its battlefield lethality exceeds that of small arms and artillery shells.

Take that as a lesson on "best in class" systems. The "best" system is often one that's barely "good enough", but can be manufactured at scale.

And, what can US manufacture at scale today? Oh.
by Brybry | 2025-11-11 21:28:06+00:00
Which 3M PPE factory folded?

Cursory searching says in 2020 they created a new production line in Wisconsin and moved it to 3M Aberdeen.[1][2]

If you look on Google street view dates for the Aberdeen factory and compare 2019 to 2023 it had a big expansion that's still there.

The other major 3M PPE factory, 3M Valley, was expanded in 2024. [3]

Edit: For the curious, Honeywell did fire their pandemic mask factory workers, closed a pandemic mask factory, and then exited the PPE business entirely. [4][5][6]

[1] https://www.startribune.com/3m-says-it-s-on-track-with-n95-p...

[2] https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/company-us/coronavirus/us-policy...

[3] https://news.3m.com/2024-05-03-3M-expands-facility-in-Valley...

[4] https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/honeywell-manufactured-...

[5] https://www.wpri.com/business-news/honeywell-smithfield-faci...

[6] https://www.honeywell.com/us/en/press/2025/05/honeywell-comp...
by Muromec | 2025-11-11 21:28:28+00:00
After dealing with datepickers for (checks notes) two decades, my best advice is to use the damn input type text with a placeholder showing a format, then saving it as a string in whatever that ISO that makes sense is called.

Everything else is asking for endless trouble and pain with browsers, a11y, locales and what not. Also, may the God allmerciful save you from the cancer that custom components are, let whoever invented this wipe his ass with fiberglass insulation for the end of times.

Don't get fancy and you will not fall down 10 rabbit holes that datepickers are.
by jbellis | 2025-11-11 21:28:29+00:00
two great points here: (1) quantization is how you speed up vector indexes, and (2) how your build your graph matters much much less*

These are the insights behind DiskANN, which has replaced HNSW in most production systems.

past that, well, you should really go read the DiskANN paper instead of this article, product quantization is way way way way way more effective than simple int8 or binary quant.

here's my writeup from a year and a half ago: https://dev.to/datastax/why-vector-compression-matters-64l

and if you want to skip forward several years to the cutting edge, check out https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.18471 and the references list for further reading

* but it still matters more than a lot of people thought circa 2020
by rgmerk | 2025-11-11 21:28:50+00:00
For some applications.

Photography didn’t make artists obsolete.

For that matter, the car didn’t make horse riding completely obsolete either.

For artists, the question is whether generative AI is like photography or the car. My guess, at this stage, is photography.

For what it’s worth I think the proponents of generative AI are grossly overestimating the utility and economic value of meh-OK images that approximate the thing you’ve asked for.
by cestith | 2025-11-11 21:28:54+00:00
You seem to view them as opposites because you expect ownership to mean that all employees are motivated to have a sense of ownership over the whole process. There’s some benefit to that, sure.

The meaning the article is using is that there’s an owner, and they own the project without dilution. There’s not death by committee. One person or one team is given something to do, and they go do it without interference from the rest of the company. Whether what’s delivered at the end is fit for purpose is open to other people’s opinions and input. How it gets implemented and reaches delivery is the exclusive concern of one person or a very small group.
by palmotea | 2025-11-11 21:29:35+00:00
> The USSR would evacuate its cities right before the attack.

That sounds like a dumb plan on its face, because the evacuations could not possibly be hidden and would totally give the whole "we're about to launch a first strike" plan away.

> Then after waiting for the fallout to subside (e.g., waiting 3 weeks) the people leave their fallout shelters in the countryside and start rebuilding the cities.

And this was a plan for the USSR to come out ahead? Their now-homeless population rebuilding their wrecked cities and the wrecked cities of Eastern and Western Europe?

Did they build enough fallout shelters in the countryside to accommodate their entire urban population for this plan? If they did, I'd like to see the proof.
by tptacek | 2025-11-11 21:29:57+00:00
A reminder that, while this is pretty neat and also probably offers a lot of convenient tooling for GCloud resources already built, an "agent" is simply an LLM call in a loop, each call presenting some number of available tools. If you're building your first agent, I'd recommend coding to an LLM API (probably the OpenAI Responses API, which is sort of a lingua franca of LLMs now) directly.

This is one of those cases where it's really helpful to code, at least once, at one layer of abstraction below the one that seems most natural to you.
by MattPalmer1086 | 2025-11-11 21:29:59+00:00
It seems clear to me that you need to be leading now, not being a cog with no influence.

I also resisted "being a manager, for a long time. It's like it was a dirty word and I thought it would be turning my back on what I was good at and enjoyed. But the truth is, you are no longer enjoying what you previously did and have not grown for 5 to 10 years.

Being a leader is not being a line manager. Managing some people may be part of being a leader, but it's not the main focus. I manage about 3 people and mostly I just delegate stuff to them. It's not that hard and isn't what I spend most time on.

What I really enjoy is that I get to set direction, come up with the strategy and use my years of experience to build things the right way.

So I would advise trying to get into a leadership role and give it a try. It has to be something where you can really set direction. You do not want to be a middle manager just doing people management, and there are plenty of roles like that. Worst case - you get a break from what's driving you mad right now and some fresh perspective. Best case is you actually find some new passion.
by rvrb | 2025-11-11 21:30:08+00:00
C, C++, Rust, Zig. Rust and C++ have an infamous learning curve. If you know anything about using any systems language other than Zig, Zig is incredibly simple to pick up, like C. Unlike C, it pushes you toward making less mistakes.

If you don't know anything about using a systems language, Zig makes it easier for the people who do to review your code and make sure you didn't mess it up. It does this with very intentional design that makes it easier to understand the full impact of code quickly, reducing the cost of review, making review practical to catch the issues. It also has many other fail safes to catch these problems before they ever reach a production release.

So, yeah, it's totally depending on where you are coming from -- but Zig is not a tool built for a web developer who doesn't know anything about memory to go and ship an application within their first week. It does make it easier for that person to learn the ropes at a steady pace.

Meanwhile, everyone complaining that Zig is not memory safe doesn't seem to care that applications written in Zig do not have the vulnerabilities that memory safety solves on the scale that C does[0].

If you have not written a real application in Zig and evaluated it for vulnerabilities, but are claiming that creating Zig was irresponsible, and using it is too; you are cargo culting.

If you have, you probably understand there is a niche that Zig fits in and that it isn't surprising it exists to fill it. Like all things in our industry, there is a cost/benefit analysis required for choosing the tools you build with.

No one reasonable has claimed that memory safe languages should not exist, but there is a maddening number of people being disrespectful toward those who think there are other ways of addressing the same problems.

[0]: https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-gtk-rewrite
by AceJohnny2 | 2025-11-11 21:30:28+00:00
> others feel obliged to give feedback because we have a culture of feedback.

See also "bikeshedding". Made famous by FreeBSD core developer Poul-Henning Kamp (phk). I see there is now a website dedicated to his email: https://www.bikeshed.org

In short: people give feedback and quibble because they can, to demonstrate that they're participating, that they can contribute.

Being aware of this habit and inhibiting it is something I teach to every new employee in my team. (If you know how to avoid it always, teach me)
by TZubiri | 2025-11-11 21:31:26+00:00
In art, while there are mistakes that can really make a drawing "wrong", there is a much wider array of valid end-states. Which is why Generative AI managed to make art way before it managed to write code.

An example of this is Bob Ross' school of incorporating mistakes into the piece. Surely it's something that would fly way less in some types of drawings like anatomical ones, but especially when the motif is fantastical or even abstract, there's fewer possible mistakes to make, so there's less reason to throw something away.
by woodruffw | 2025-11-11 21:31:30+00:00
I don’t think vulnerability researchers are having trouble finding exploitable bugs in FFmpeg, so I don’t know how much this actually holds. Much of the cost center of vulnerability research is weaponization and making an exploit reliable against a specific set of targets.

(The argument also seems backwards to me: Google appears to use a lot of not-inexpensive human talent to produce high quality reports to projects, instead of dumping an ASan log and calling it a day. If all they cared about was shoveling labor onto OSS maintainers, they could make things a lot easier for themselves than they currently do!)
by SequoiaHope | 2025-11-11 21:31:59+00:00
Amazing that Apple would prominently highlight a product made with 3D knitting, as I’ve just gotten in to machine knitting as a hobby after buying an old Brother KH-910 on eBay and modding with with an AYAB (all yarns are beautiful)[1] open hardware/software knitting machine board from the AYAB discord. I just got a second needle bed for my knitting machine (KR-850 ribber) so I can do double bed jacquard knitting and other more advanced stuff.

But this has also led me down the rabbit hole learning about industrial machine knitting and 3d “wholegarment” knitting, invented by Masahiro Shima first in the 1960’s for autonomous glove knitting and later for entire full size garments in the 1990’s. [2,3,4] That’s what Apple is using in this product (now two companies offer 3D knitting machines according to Wikipedia). In traditional machine knitting you still have to make multiple flat sections and stitch them together, but in 3D Wholegarment knitting the machine is capable of knitting an entire complex garment, bag, utility item, whatever all in one go fully autonomously. Shima Seiki invented a new kind of knitting needle and expanded the system from two needle beds to four to enable the most advanced form of Wholegarment knitting. What I find fascinating about this technology is that it makes it possible to run a garment manufacturing business which is almost fully autonomous, eliminating the need for often poorly treated overseas labor [5], and potentially simplifying business operations dramatically.

The piece linked in [2] talks to an Italian knitting company that was able to keep manufacturing domestic thanks to these machines, and this helps explain how Apple can offer these bags as made in Japan in these volumes. I daydream about getting a used Mach2x and parking it somewhere to make it run 24/7 to make warm garments for the homeless around the Bay Area, perhaps with a low volume boutique fashion brand which helps pay for it. Anyway they’re really neat machines and this has been my little autistic hyperfocus lately, I thought I would share!

[1] https://www.ayab-knitting.com/

[2] https://youtu.be/kZE8rvPYbII

[3] https://www.shimaseiki.com/ire/about/history.html

[4] https://youtu.be/y6wHl0Xtxfw

[5] https://youtu.be/PxFwA-jw3X4
by hinkley | 2025-11-11 21:32:17+00:00
The line you quote is oddly one of my strongest arguments against Scrum.

Agile in general and Scrum in particular don’t want to declare things as done when they aren’t and if you haven’t yet given feedback, is it really Done? I don’t think it is.

With Scrum the pressure to put away the done thing and start something else is very high. The moment you start thinking about your next story, unless it’s very closely related to the previous, your ability to accept feedback becomes quickly curtailed.

This is half of the point of Continuous Integration. Fast feedback is often the only feedback that causes behavioral changes. Things that happened a while ago become abstract. Think about a conversation you’ve seen where someone describes how another person hurt their feelings yesterday, versus five years ago. The reactions are very different.

So if you enjoy talking, I suppose it “works” for you but if you hate having to give the same correction over and over, you need to make the person stop and go back until they learn how not to get stopped. Anything else loses the war.
by ttshaw1 | 2025-11-11 21:33:06+00:00
I don't like the notion of doing speed control by putting a digipot in series with a motor. It worked because the fan happened to be low enough power but it doesn't seem like the author gave thought to the power handling capability of the digipot. If the fan happened to be beefier he's letting the smoke out with this design.

Plus, this is more complicated than just doing PWM.
by patcon | 2025-11-11 21:33:16+00:00
> Similarly, there are, right now, efforts in order to really check if the “H” in the HNSWs is really needed, and if instead a flat data structure with just one layer would perform more or less the same (I hope I’ll cover more about this in the future: my feeling is that the truth is in the middle, and that it makes sense to modify the level selection function to just have levels greater than a given threshold).

Small world networks have been my obsession for almost a decade, from a biological and sociological evolution angle. Love this stuff.

This is the paper he's referring to, which I was just reading again yesterday :)

Down with the Hierarchy: The 'H' in HNSW Stands for "Hubs" (2025) https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.01940

Also:

Hubs in Space: Popular Nearest Neighbors in High-Dimensional Data (2010) https://www.jmlr.org/papers/v11/radovanovic10a.html

As someone also interested in not just repair of the social fabric, but the evolution of gendered social dynamics in social species (biologically and culturally), it's interesting to me that there might be some property of networks that:

1. Makes any random point as close as possible to any other random point (all solutions are equally likely to be close to the unknown solution somewhere in the network)

2. Minimally edges must be maintained (valuable in social networks, where edges are relationships that have maintenance cost)

3. Involves some negotiation between hierarchy (aka entrepreneurial networks, with opportunity for value extraction thru rent-seeking traffic) and hubness (which dissolve capture points in networks via "weaving" them out of existence). All the short paths in a small-world pass through hubs, which necessarily maintain many more weaker connections in a much more "gossip" comms protocols

Am working on this stuff related to collective intelligence and democracy work, if anyone wants to be in touch https://linkedin.com/in/patcon-
by Brian_K_White | 2025-11-11 21:33:20+00:00
I don't think you should try to invoke the idea of naivete when you fail to address the unhappy but perfectly simple reality that the ideal option doesn't exist, is a fantasy that isn't actually available, and among the available options, even though none are good, one is worse than another.

"obscurity isn't security" is true enough, as far as it goes, but is just not that far.

And "put the bugs that won't be fixed soon on a billboard" is worse.

The super naive approach is ignoring that and thinking that "fix the bugs" is a thing that exists.
by gnfargbl | 2025-11-11 21:34:34+00:00
They could, but there is really no requirement on them to do so. The security flaw was discovered by Google, but it was not created by them.

Equally there is no requirement on ffmpeg to fix these CVEs nor any other.

And, of course, there is no requirement on end-users to run software from projects which do not consider untrusted-input-validation bugs to be high priority.
by scythe | 2025-11-11 21:34:46+00:00
You can compare diagnostic reference levels (DRLs) from different years for the same exam; these correspond to the 75th percentile patient dose for a particular imaging study. It can be a little annoying to find older DRLs (I just tried).

NCRP 172 (published 2015) provides a direct comparison of digital to film for some examinations. For upper GI fluoroscopy without oral contrast the DRL for film is 3.9 mSv and for digital is 1.5 mSv. I think this is roughly typical.
by mattmaroon | 2025-11-11 21:34:59+00:00
I have had that problem with nano banana but when it works I find it so much better than the others for editing an image. Since it’s free I usually try it first, and I would say approximately 10% of the time find myself having to use something else.

I’m editing mostly pics of food and beverages though, it wouldn’t surprise me if it is situationally better or worse.
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-11 21:35:15+00:00
> macOS is probably the best choice since it provides a native Unix environment

And the first thing I do is install the gnu coreutils because it still ships really old BSD utils, and everything expects linux-isms now.

In that regard, macOS is worse than Windows+WSL which at least is real Linux with a real package manager. macOS being better OOTB was true Pre-WSL/Windows 7 era where your choices were macOS for a UNIX with a really nice desktop environment and working sound, or taking a gamble with Linux on your hardware and praying everything worked. Windows was a non-starter for any development that wasn't win32, lest you were a masochist that wanted to deal with Cygwin and the like.

I say this as someone still all-in on the "Apple Ecosystem" across all devices, Apple fans that are also developers all seem to be blind to the ways Apple has been slowly boiling the frog and making macOS hostile to developers in all other aspects of the OS outside of it having a unix terminal. Apple is outright hostile to developers at times.
by herewulf | 2025-11-11 21:35:29+00:00
Might come across as pedantic, but it's important, "Kingdom of Denmark" not "Denmark". Confusing the two can upset people, especially those from the rest of the the Kingdom of Denmark.

Also, picking on non-native English speakers for using a name that is identical to the very old, commonly accepted name for the entire UK in their own language is beyond pedantic.
by quirkot | 2025-11-11 21:35:46+00:00
it took me a minute to parse that sentence also. They are saying that health tissue makes up < 100% of the body, but that microplastics can be found in a full 100% of the body (healthy and non-healthy). Therefore microplastic prevalence > healthy tissue. It's saying that there is no part of the body that isn't impacted
by phantasmish | 2025-11-11 21:36:06+00:00
I dunno if it was manufactured as early as 1995 (though it couldn't have been more than four years later, absolute max) but some time around 2002 I picked up a pair of used 19" (IIRC) IBM flat-screen (that is, the screen itself was flat, not flat-panel) CRT monitors in a flea market that had both more total pixels and greater pixel density than any screen in my house until I started picking up devices with Apple Retina displays. I believe the short side of the 4x3 on that thing maxed out at 1920.

My boring, 17" consumer Trinitron monitor in 1995 could do 1600x1200 IIRC.

Max resolution and pixel density (plus, for a long time, color gamut, contrast/depth-of-black, latency, et c) on typical monitors took a huge dive when LCDs replaced CRTs. "High res" in 1995 would probably qualify as fairly high-res today, too, if not quite top-of-the-heap. Only expensive, relatively recent displays in the consumer space really beat those '90s CRTs overall to a degree where it's not at least a close call (though they may still be a little worse in some ways)
by unixplumber | 2025-11-11 21:36:18+00:00
> I guess that copying from the output of cat file on a terminal is one of those unfortunate cases.

It depends on the terminal. Some will actually preserve the line breaks vs soft wraps. Those terminals will reflow the text when you resize the window.

But if you already have the file you might as well run something like `xclip <file` to copy its contents directly to the clipboard.
by antirez | 2025-11-11 21:36:22+00:00
Hi! I worked with product quantization in the past in the context of a library I released to read LLMs stored in llama.cpp format (GUFF). However, in the context of in-memory HNSWs, I found them to make a small difference. The recall is already almost perfect with int8. Of course it is very different in the case you are quantizing an actual neural network with, for instance 4 bit quants. There it will make a huge difference. But in my use case I picked what would be the fastest, given that both performed equally well. What could be potentially done with PQ in the case of Redis Vector Sets is to make 4 bit quants work decently (but not as well as int8 anyway), however given how fat the data structure nodes are per-se, I don't think this is a great tradeoff.}

All this to say: the blog post tells mostly the conclusions, but to reach that design, many things were tried, including things that looked cooler but in the practice were not the best fit. It's not by chance that Redis HNSWs are easily able to go 50k full queries/sec in decent hardware.
by ergocoder | 2025-11-11 21:36:33+00:00
This is an example of why collaboration and feedback before launch are mostly useless.

Posthog is obviously successful. The design is good enough. But is it perfect? nah. would a better design make it more successful? highly doubt it.

If we were to take this feedback seriously, then we would've halted the launch and redesign the site. Now imagine having 10+ feedback like this. This would significantly delay the launch which would impact the success in a significant way.
by lurking_swe | 2025-11-11 21:36:52+00:00
this is why i love walkable cities! You don’t need to “schedule” time every week to meet basic fitness goals. You just walk to the subway, bus stop, etc. Walk to lunch. Walk to the park, Walk to buy groceries, etc.

For those living in suburbs, I hear dogs can be a good excuse to walk more. :)