MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mooreds | 2025-12-10 14:36:36+00:00
I've been involved with a few MCP servers. MCP seems like an API designed specifically for LLMs/AIs to interact with.

Agree that tool calling is the primary use case.

Because of context window limits, a 1:1 mapping of REST API endpoint to MCP tool endpoint is usually the wrong approach. Even though LLMs/agents are very good at figuring out the right API call to make.

So you can build on top of APIs or other business logic to present a higher level workflow.

But many of the same concerns apply to MCP servers as they did to REST APIs, which is why we're seeing an explosion of gateways and other management software for MCP servers.

I don't think it is a fad, as it is gaining traction and I don't see what replaces it for a very real use case: tool calling by agents/LLMs.
by RobKohr | 2025-12-10 14:37:04+00:00
Or maybe no one with interesting thoughts on anything would invest anything in a nation where if post anything online that might be slightly controversial you might go to jail and not even have the protection of a jury to balance out the overreach of government.

That and other things that are transforming it into a nanny state make it a hell no.

But yeah, it's nice you are lowering taxes and regulations on those who fall in line.
by superultra | 2025-12-10 14:37:11+00:00
More and more these are feeling like they’re written for investors not users:

> Adobe is doubling down on its strategy of using AI to bring more users into its product ecosystem.

> Adobe has shipped many AI-powered features and products this year.

I’m not a professional designer but I use the creative suite enough in my contracting work to pay for it. The AI integrations thus far are laughable, more for a good laugh than practical use. I don’t have a lot of hope for this either.

If all this is a bubble I’m hopeful that it bursts soon. AI is powerful and useful but we’re so far into cramming AI features into products to satiate investment that it’s time to return to user based work.

(Also is “doubling down” the new “deep dive”?)
by cestith | 2025-12-10 14:37:12+00:00
Planes are quite sensitive to engine failure during flight. Data centers don’t tend to fly for three hours then sit idle for an hour, then sit idle overnight. They need to be up 24/7. When you’re talking 40 or 50 megawatts, you’re not going to necessarily buy triple or quadruple capacity. So it’d better be reliable without a lot of downtime for checks and maintenance.
by lioeters | 2025-12-10 14:37:13+00:00
Off topic but if you're the author of sokol, I'm so thankful because it led to my re-learning the C language in the most enjoyable way. Started to learn Zig these days and I see you're active in the community too. Not sure if it's just me but I feel like there's a renaissance of old-school C, the language but more the mentality of minimalism in computing that Zig also embodies.
by Ajedi32 | 2025-12-10 14:37:16+00:00
You claim to know, yet you still make statements that are obviously foolish given said knowledge? Imagine applying this logic to other industries:

> The existence of folding phones inundates phone manufactures with orders for devices with unimportant luxury features when there are people who are struggling to afford even a basic entry level phone. Having money doesn't make your needs more important. We should ban folding phones to make entry-level phones more accessible to poor people.

Do you agree the paragraph above is unreasonable and that trying to implement it in the real world would make things worse for everyone? If so, why did you just propose the same thing for medical care a couple comments back?

That's what I'm so curious about; I see this all the time where when the subject matter is emotionally or politically charged people revert to this "there's a fixed-sized pie and I want to make sure I get a big piece" economic model, even while appearing in other contexts to understand that that's not how things work.
by jchallis | 2025-12-10 14:37:17+00:00
And all available from Project Gutenberg! https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/bookshelf/40

If you are looking where to start, Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren's "How to Read a Book" is an excellent and practical introduction to reading these books. They offer some very practical advice on how to go about this : Elementary Reading (basic decoding), Inspectional Reading(skimming for structure), Analytical Reading (deep, thorough engagement with one book), and Syntopical Reading (comparing multiple texts on a topic).

Happy Reading!
by phantasmish | 2025-12-10 14:37:30+00:00
> Probably most people are in a dire enough situation that they cannot afford to protest, and are busy enough trying to figure out how to re-organize their living situation.

A lot of it's that. Our GDP is inflated by bullshit like over-paying for healthcare to the tune of double-digit percentages of total GDP, among other things, so we're flat-out not as rich as we look on paper, as a country. Our social safety net is really bad, government retirement systems and disability are sub-par by OECD standards, and we may have as few as zero paid vacation days or ability to refuse a shift (without being fired for it).

Anyone under the top 20% or so in the US is struggling, or at least stressed out by knowing that one bad month can mess them up for years and years and ruin any long-term plans they had.

We're also a lot more spread out than most countries. It's a lot more expensive and time-consuming to go protest in DC when you live in, say, Colorado, than it is for someone in Marseilles to go attend a protest in Paris. So they go to some local protest with 50 people instead, or maybe to one in Denver with a couple thousand, and you never hear about it. And the protests don't get rowdy (they might get teargassed anyway, of course) because see above about the "one bad month" thing—an arrest without charges of a working adult can easily end up making their family homeless, because they lose their job and can't get another one fast enough (and it's much, much worse if even very low-level charges are filed, even if the charges don't stick or are dropped—our legal system is great at eating thousands of dollars for what ends up being nothing, besides further schedule disruption bringing further risk to employment)
by toss1 | 2025-12-10 14:37:32+00:00
I also notice they don't mention the noise profile of these plants. Putting a stationary engine like that will make an insane amount of noise, and even enclosed will change the soundscape for miles around, affecting everything from human well-being to animals' ability to communicate. Not cool.

But maybe they aren't really thinking about that because it is nowhere near being done.
by JohnFen | 2025-12-10 14:37:37+00:00
I used to be very public, just as the author prefers. However, as the amount of surveillance on the internet increased it eventually reached a tipping point for me and I switched to being much more private as a matter of self-protection.

There's no way I'd be comfortable going back to the way things used to be unless the web becomes better -- and I don't think that's happening anytime soon.
by brihati | 2025-12-10 14:37:47+00:00
This article argues that the real fragility in engineering teams isn’t the bus factor, it's the loss of decision context. Most systems depend on knowledge locked in a few heads, and when that disappears, teams pay for it in outages, rewrites, and slow recovery. The post proposes a simple operating model: capturing intent through decision logs, enforcing a technical "constitution" and using automation to reduce drift, so teams can scale without accumulating invisible risk.

I would love to hear from the community how are you handling tribal knowledge within your organisation

Post link: https://brihatijain.com/blog/beyond_the_bus_factor
by nluken | 2025-12-10 14:38:36+00:00
Despite worries about creeping prices, coffee in Italy averages around €1.20 for an espresso or €1.50 for a cappuccino [1]. Way different than in a major American city.

[1]: https://www.ft.com/content/ccd7ef60-cef2-4b03-b4a4-63fa32854...
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-12-10 14:39:05+00:00
The CVE system would be greatly improved by a "PoC or GTFO" policy. CVSS would still be trash, but it'd simplify triage to two steps: "is there a proof-of-concept?" and "does it actually work?". Some real vulns would get missed, but the signal:noise ratio of the current system causes real vulns to get missed today so I suspect it'd be a net improvement to security.
by graemep | 2025-12-10 14:39:14+00:00
> GDP per capita has been declining in the UK

not true:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CN?location...

There were declines in 2009 andd 2020, for reasons that out to be fairly obvious, but overall consistent growth

> that also means retaliatory barriers from the EU, which is still the largest trading partner (41% of exports, twice the volume to the 2nd export market, which is the US

However, trade with the EU was declining as a proportion of total trade even before Brexit, is exaggerated by transshipment, and does not have as significant benefits as trading with economies with different strengths (i.e. more comparative advantage)
by auspiv | 2025-12-10 14:39:14+00:00
a 16" natural gas pipeline moving 200 MMscf/d at pressures >1000 psi (relatively standard numbers, 16" can go up to ~600 MMscf/d) has a power transport capability of 2.5 GW (thermal). burn that in 60% efficient combined cycle turbines and you get 1 GW of electricity. that's a lot easier than building 1 GW of electric transmission lines.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-10 14:39:39+00:00
> This isn’t how it works.

It absolutely is how it works. You've got your economics wrong.

Your analogies are wrong because you're talking about people getting massive promotions.

I'm talking about doing the exact same job, just for a different type of company.

Also, you realize that accountants still exist and it's a well-paying job? They just use Excel now. They're not "working at two burger joints".
by estearum | 2025-12-10 14:39:50+00:00
I don't know what to tell you if you don't think there's a divergence between what gets people put into power and what role they're supposed to play with that power. Again: we are currently living a live, empirical disproof of your position, as you have already acknowledged.

> It sounds like you would rather claim a lack of agency (it’s all up to the big bad Republicans) rather than even attempt to implement a pragmatic, common sense strategy. And this is why the Democratic Party finds itself rudderless.

Huh? No. It sounds like instead of reading the words in front of you, you're just arguing against the claims you want me to be making.

Harris was a terrible candidate, we don't disagree there.

Again: We disagree in your assertion that pragmatic policies on the oppositional side are all that's required to win against a demagogue.

If that's true, please tell me why demagogues have long been known to be a real vulnerability in democracies?

Answer directly: If that's all that's necessary, then why did the Founding Fathers even bother to write extensively on this problem?
by uselesswords | 2025-12-10 14:40:03+00:00
Yes there are. It is well documented in other countries such as Venezuela or Argentina and some vendors even prefer cryptocurrency because compared to their national currency it is more stable. In addition, there are significant remitance and cross-border payments done in crypto where banking or FX controls make dollars hard to access in countries like Venezuela and certain regions in Africa.

Day-to-day transactions at the street level may not be dominated by crypto or even a majority, but it is a growing nontrivial minority in a lot of places especially emerging markets.

[1] https://www.trmlabs.com/reports-and-whitepapers/2025-crypto-...

[2] https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/2025-global-crypto-adoption...

[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1362104/cryptocurrency-a...
by pfdietz | 2025-12-10 14:40:27+00:00
The problem is the last two percent isn't evenly distributed in time, but rather occurs rarely, but in large chunks. On average it's 2%, but not at each point in time.

Also, if solar ends up much cheaper than wind there's going to be need for seasonal energy storage, which could be considerably more than 2% at high latitude. Batteries are unsuitable for this.
by immibis | 2025-12-10 14:40:55+00:00
It has to have a good purpose. Obviously there are a lot of words written about what constitutes a good purpose. Antivirus is probably one. Wanting to intimidate your employees is not. The same thing applies to security cameras.

Privacy laws are about the end-to-end process, not technical implementation. It's not "You can't MITM TLS" - it's more like "You can't spy on your employees". Blocking viruses is not spying on your employees. If you take the logs from the virus blocker and use them to spy on your employees, then you are spying on your employees. (Virus blockers aiming to be sold in the EU would do well not to keep unnecessary logs that could be used to spy on employees.)
by reeeli | 2025-12-10 14:40:58+00:00
that's one way to kindly ask 27 - 42 countries/states with a population of more or less than 500 million: "helloooo, anybody there? are you aware? sentient? more or less conscious?"

America on one side, 27 - 42 European countries in the middle and Russia on the other side. (since the narratives like to exclude the great big rest of the world) impressive democracies and people!
by exasperaited | 2025-12-10 14:41:13+00:00
We were going to visit!?

The government will be able to bury the impact of its international tourism pariah status in some sort of claim about people not wanting to fill this in. But the reality is visitor numbers are going to tank no matter what.

People from the UK in particular visit the USA because it is the USA: brash, welcoming, colourful, vibrant, thriving, free, fun. It's a holiday from being reserved and quiet. Things are louder, bigger and brighter, less apologetic, more colourful.

I guess it is low on the administration's priority list, but Trump is building a USA that no one from the UK in particular will want to visit. You should see the comments on the increasingly desperate attempts to advertise discount flights on Facebook. We'll go elsewhere.
by gus_massa | 2025-12-10 14:41:17+00:00
I agree. I remember once the full especification I got was

> Enough

After talking for 4 hours and 3 coffe cups, I got enough corner cases and main case to understand what they wanted. 1 week later I got a list of criteria that can be programmed. 5 years later most of the unusual but anoying rought corners were fixed. We still had a button to aprove manually the weird cases.
by rsynnott | 2025-12-10 14:41:48+00:00
This seems a bit like trying to replace stone axes with axes made out of pottery, though. Neolithic pottery, of course, had its uses, but didn't make for a good axe. This is clearly worse than actually doing the job properly in every conceivable way.

I'm not convinced that generative AI video will _ever_ hit the 'acceptable' threshold, at least with current tech. Fundamentally it lacks a world model, so you get all this nightmarish _wrongness_.
Tell HN: There are now FOSS/H alternatives to major BigTech products
by iris-digital | 2025-12-10 14:42:00+00:00
It's been a difficult two decades for those of us who expect technology to respect our freedom and privacy. We have been so marginalized by the mobile revolution, that we'd nearly given up looking for options.

While commiserating recently, we realized that several important missing pieces of the puzzle have neatly dropped into place under our noses!

What are they? Oh, the Fairphone6 w/eOS, Furilabs FLX1s, Starlite tablet, new Framework laptops, OpenWRT One, and a number of others. Software options are plentiful as well, maybe even a bit too plentiful.

Of course, these products are not perfect. Right now you're probably counting their flaws, or about to post better alternatives. But we feel there's a better way to look at the situation. The long-term view is that these open, freedom, and privacy-respecting options are now good enough for the vast majority of folks, and they'll only get better (if further invested in).

(Not to mention, how about the daily tug-of-wars with Windows or dumbing-down of MacOS? Are those products perfect? No, and arguably getting worse as the screws are turned.)

TL;DR—A full suite of respectful, ethical products is available. The catch? One needs to wrangle dozens of products from almost as many companies. That's not gonna work; it's too complicated, even for geeks. Our first idea to tackle the issue is this:

- Build a united storefront, on something like shopify (easy).

- Get numerous vendors to let us sell, integrate, and support their products (probably hard). Anyone out there know how to build such relationships?

If we can help these products sell, they'll be further invested in, and we'll move forward even faster. Full details are at "The Ethical Computing Initiative," at https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/

- Product Status Page at: https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/status.html
by f1shy | 2025-12-10 14:42:22+00:00
> So you essentially say that you should not distinguish between intended and non-intended warnings?

No, I pretty clearly said the opposite. Please read what I wrote:

"[...] is not a problem to document them clearly. Developers building the project should be informed anyway of many other things"

I also stated "warnings, you should have as few as possible, if any at all" in the projects I worked we hardly had any in the final delivery, but we had many in-between, which I find ok. If there are only 2 warnings, I do not see a big risk of not seeing a 3rd. I expect developers to look the compiler output, carefully, as if it was a review from a coworker.

Last but not least you ignore my last paragraph, where I say warnings are typically technical debt. There should be in the long run no "expected" warnings. My whole point is that they are just no error, so you should allow the program to compile and keep working in other things. I do not think is ok to have warnings. Also (specially) I think is a bad idea to silence the compiler.

Anyway, a good compiler will end with a nile lime “N warnings detected“ so there is that. You can just compare an integer to know if there are more warnings… not so difficult, is it?

If you read my comments it should be clear. If not, I cannot help with that. If you want to disagree, as long as you don't work in my code, is ok. This is just my 2ct opinion.
by phkahler | 2025-12-10 14:43:00+00:00
I'm starting to believe "economic growth" is fiction. Just because an item has a higher price does not mean it's higher output. If we measure the value of things based on say the energy + labor cost to produce it, economic output (or GDP) will look very different. I'm not saying that's a good measure, but that there are other ways to look at it and the current one seems broken.

When Elon Musk says the only way to solve the US debt crisis is through automation and AI to boost GDP, it makes no sense. Government revenue has less and less to do with output and more to do with taxes on labor, so automation will make the problem worse. I'm not saying we shouldn't automate things, but that the ideas of cause->effect when it come to money are not very well thought out - yes, including my own.
by immibis | 2025-12-10 14:43:44+00:00
Many programmers tend to treat the legal system as if it was a computer program: if(form.is_public && form.contains(private_health_records)) move(form.owner, get_nearest_jail()); - but this is not how the legal system actually works. Not even in excessively-bureaucratic-and-wording-of-rules-based Germany.
by complianceowl | 2025-12-10 14:44:00+00:00
I wish you were right, but you're wrong. It's a wishful thinking that I have been participatory in for decades. However, it will not come to fruition. Why? It's very simple: we, as a people and as a society, are not willing to give up convenience.

Secondly, the corporate media have been straight up propaganda centers for decades now and anyone who has been paying attention has known that for a long time now. That is not something that we are on the edge of our seats waiting to happen. It happened a long time ago.

Remember when CNN was meeting with the Pentagon so that the Pentagon could approve their stories during the Iraq War? Remember when the media constantly lied to us during COVID? Remember when they told us Biden's health was in pristine condition and that he was never better?

Don't try and politicize this issue in one way or the other. Anyone paying attention can see that there is no savior on the left or the right. It's the corrupt politicians vs. us.
by jfindper | 2025-12-10 14:44:29+00:00
>Those are not benefits. Do not do those things.

>The best speakers really do just never bother with it in the first place.

This person has a preference which is not universal despite them stating it like a universal truth. I have also watched hundreds of presentations (and presented dozens), so I'm at least as equally qualified to say:

A fade between slides, fading-in bullet points or a picture on a slide as they become relevant, underlining/bolding/changing the color of a word to draw emphasis to it after the fact, etc. All of these can be perfectly fine. In fact, I think these small details can turn an okay slide deck into a well polished one.

>[...] had to wait fifteen seconds or so for his dumb, contentless transitions to play out, each slide he advanced, [...]

But yes, don't make your transitions 15 seconds. And if you're going backwards or skipping ahead, you can skip animations. You don't need to let it play out.

Also important to keep in mind that a good (or bad) slide deck alone does not make a good (or bad) presentation. The speaker and their knowledge + passion for the topic is what is important. A good slide deck is just a bonus.