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Microsoft fires employee who interrupted CEO's speech to protest

https://apnews.com/article/microsoft-build-israel-gaza-protest-worker-fired-a395ac137b74002886b2ad727b5ae5c2
1•donsupreme•1m ago•0 comments

Desktop Icons of Yore

https://www.datagubbe.se/icons/
1•blakespot•1m ago•0 comments

Trading PETR4 stocks using Hill Climbing

https://www.dpbmdev.com/posts/hill-climbing-for-trading-c0g7f2b882afa/
1•Dpbm•1m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Agent / workflow frameworks or roll your own?

1•dennisy•2m ago•0 comments

Writing web-based interactive fiction with ink

https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/web-tutorial/
1•Tomte•2m ago•0 comments

Writing the Prince symbol in Unicode (2013)

https://parkerhiggins.net/2013/01/writing-the-prince-symbol-in-unicode/
1•Tomte•2m ago•0 comments

AdTech: Out of Control and Systematically Breaking the Law (2022)

https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2020/01/adtech-out-of-control-and-systematically-breaking-the-law/
1•Bluestein•2m ago•0 comments

Yes, Social Media Might Be Making Kids Depressed

https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2025/05/430011/yes-social-media-might-be-making-kids-depressed
1•giuliomagnifico•4m ago•0 comments

Chicago Paper Publishes 'Summer Reading List' of Fake Books Created with AI

https://gizmodo.com/chicago-paper-summer-reading-list-fake-books-ai-2000604708
2•cpeterso•7m ago•2 comments

Kangaroo: A flash cache optimized for tiny objects (2021)

https://engineering.fb.com/2021/10/26/core-infra/kangaroo/
3•PaulHoule•8m ago•0 comments

Transfer Learning: Lessons from Predictive ML for Agentic AI

https://www.tecton.ai/blog/transfer-learning-from-ml-for-ai-agents-mcp/
3•mihirmathur•9m ago•0 comments

AI Is Eating Data Center Power Demand–and It's Only Getting Worse

https://www.wired.com/story/new-research-energy-electricity-artificial-intelligence-ai/
1•beardyw•9m ago•0 comments

Built a Technical Quant for Stocks

https://discord.com/channels/1368978013760520262/1368978014230155386
1•estebanle•9m ago•0 comments

Homeland Security blocks Harvard's ability to enroll international students

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-blocks-harvards-ability-enroll-international-students-nyt-reports-2025-05-22/
2•krigath•9m ago•0 comments

Trump administration blocks Harvard's ability to enroll international students

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/harvard-international-students-trump-administration-rcna208591
7•krigath•10m ago•1 comments

A potential 'anti-spice' that could dial down the heat of fiery food

https://news.osu.edu/a-potential-anti-spice-that-could-dial-down-the-heat-of-fiery-food/
2•gnabgib•11m ago•0 comments

AI is killing tech jobs. Now, a new employment model is emerging

https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/lucrative-tech-jobs-vanish-klarna-gig-work-20339137.php
2•PretzelFisch•11m ago•0 comments

Court Upholds Verdict Adtech TCF for RTB Is Illegal Under GDPR

https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2025/05/court-upholds-verdict-adtech-tcf-for-rtb-is-illegal-under-gdpr/
3•speckx•14m ago•0 comments

Google is paying Samsung an 'enormous sum' to preinstall Gemini

https://www.theverge.com/news/652746/google-samsung-gemini-default-placement-antitrust-trial
3•mgh2•14m ago•0 comments

The Next Abstraction

https://substack.com/inbox/post/164096497
1•mbs348•14m ago•0 comments

Blue light may not affect your sleep-wake cycle, study finds

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/blue-light-may-not-affect-sleep-wake-cycle
1•akyuu•16m ago•0 comments

Scientific conferences are leaving the US amid border fears

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01636-5
9•jmsflknr•16m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Software to Render Font to PNG

1•delduca•17m ago•0 comments

Book Order Scams and Fake Reviews

https://writerbeware.blog/2025/05/09/two-to-avoid-book-order-scams-and-fake-reviews/
1•ilamont•19m ago•0 comments

Lawsuit claims discrimination by Workday's hiring tech

https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/22/tech/workday-ai-hiring-discrimination-lawsuit
2•PretzelFisch•19m ago•0 comments

Trump administration blocks Harvard from enrolling international students

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/22/trump-harvard-students-international.html
10•donsupreme•20m ago•1 comments

PR Bots as Code Sidekicks

https://jazzberry.ai/blog/pr-bots-as-sidekicks
1•MarcoDewey•20m ago•0 comments

From Agile to Apathy: Why Google Didn't Work for Me

https://dethstrobe.com/blog/20250522-google/
1•hyeomans•20m ago•0 comments

What happens if investors lose faith in America?

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/gaming-out-a-sudden-stop
5•dxs•21m ago•0 comments

Practicing graphical debugging using visualizations of the Hilbert curve

https://akkartik.name/debugUIs.html
2•akkartik•21m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Adventures in Symbolic Algebra with Model Context Protocol

https://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/computer_algebra_mcp/
63•freediver•4h ago

Comments

behnamoh•4h ago
So, we’ve come full circle to symbolic AI! This article essentially suggests that LLMs could be effective translators of our requests to command-line code or input to symbolic AI software, which would then yield precise solutions. However, I feel this approach is overly mechanical, and I don’t believe AGI would be achieved by creating thousands, if not millions, of MCP servers on our machines. This is especially true because MCP lacks scalability, and anyone who has had to send more than three or four function schemas to a language model knows that excessive JSON schema complexity confuses the model and reduces its performance.
pona-a•1h ago
I'm reminded of what happened in the later years of Cyc. They found their logical framework didn't address certain common problems, so they kept adding specialized hard-coded solutions in Lisp. LLMs are headed for AI autumn.
arunbahl•3h ago
Awesome stuff! We use a similar approach (without MCP) to great effect with Prolog currently and feels like we're only just starting to scratch the surface here.

A great paper from Nasim Borazjanizadeh and Steven Piantadosi at UC Berkeley for those interested: Reliable Reasoning Beyond Natural Language https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.11373

For anyone digging in who wants to hack on this: arun [at] aloe.inc

tpurves•3h ago
Wonderfully cheeky but also helpfully informative writeup. Also appreciate the hat-tip to all the (as yet) unsolved security issues. Clearly MCP is onto something important, although undoubtedly the standard (or some replacement standard) will mature a fair bit before we're done with it. The flip side to that is, MCPs are probably as 'easier' to experiment with now than they are ever going to be.
ash-ali•3h ago
I think this is the proper way to use llms for tasks that require high fidelity. currently im working on binary analysis using llms for natural language and letting ghidra/codeql do the symbolic work. scalability is a massive issue, perhaps the biggest besides fidelity.

its interesting to see many people come to the same neuro-symbolic conclusion around the same time.

amelius•2h ago
How does the LLM know that it can use the factor tool to factor integers? Just by looking at the string "factor an integer"?
manojlds•2h ago
Yup

this is what the tools response for the mcp server looks like:

{ tools: [ 0: { name: "factor" description: "Factor an integer" inputSchema: { ... } 4 items } ] }

snek_case•2h ago
They give it a list of tool commands it can use in the context I believe.
svat•31m ago
Yes, and I believe this is what the article is referring to when it says “a stochastic black box that communicates through a complex web of JSON schemas attached to docstring annotations”. Specifically, in the function definition:

    @mcp.tool()
    def factor(a: int) -> int:
        """Factor an integer"""
        return factor_number(a)
the decorator `@mcp.tool()` does something behind the scenes to set up the right thing using the docstring of the function.

The documentation and source code seem to be:

- (official SDK): https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/python-sdk/blob/e80c... -> using the function's docstring: https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/python-sdk/blob/e80c...

- (v2?): https://gofastmcp.com/servers/tools#the-%40tool-decorator and https://github.com/jlowin/fastmcp/blob/998de22a6e76fc8ae323e... -> using the function's docstring: https://github.com/jlowin/fastmcp/blob/998de22a6e76fc8ae323e...

rjeli•2h ago
the implementations have a distinctly "I wrote this at a 3 AM hackathon" vibe

The LLM handles the natural language interaction and orchestration, while the computer algebra system does what it does best ... exact symbolic manipulation.

this smells like claude :D

jgalt212•1h ago
> But let's not let a potential rootkit get in the way of a fun weekend experiment.

Great quote.

FilosofumRex•1h ago

  > So, we’ve come full circle to symbolic AI!
Yes, but from a business point of view, NLP based GUIs have been the holy grail of marketing and customer support, especially in STEM apps market.

Case in point, Wolfram Alpha is not much more than an attempt to market Mathematica to lazy and failing college students. If that cost, and localization, can be offloaded to LLMs as the universal front end to technical software, it'd free up SWE resources to focus on core functionality.

If Magma, my favorite math/cryptography tool, had an LLM frontend, I could save time wasted onboarding new cryptographers.

https://magma.maths.usyd.edu.au/calc/

Iwan-Zotow•27m ago
Curious if this could be done for Mathematica. SymPy is kind of ...