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CUDA-oxide: Nvidia's official Rust to CUDA compiler

https://nvlabs.github.io/cuda-oxide/index.html
230•adamnemecek•3h ago•62 comments

Nullsoft, 1997-2004 (2004)

https://slate.com/technology/2004/11/the-death-of-the-last-maverick-tech-company.html
119•downbad_•3d ago•34 comments

Ratty – A terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics

https://ratty-term.org/
503•orhunp_•8h ago•169 comments

Can Someone Please Explain Whether Cloudflare Blackmailed Canonical?

https://www.flyingpenguin.com/can-someone-please-explain-whether-cloudflare-blackmailed-canonical/
64•speckx•55m ago•19 comments

Training an LLM in Swift, Part 1: Taking matrix mult from Gflop/s to Tflop/s

https://www.cocoawithlove.com/blog/matrix-multiplications-swift.html
165•zdw•1d ago•8 comments

Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message

https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/google-account-registration-now-requires-sending-an-sms-via-p...
394•negura•11h ago•248 comments

Interfaze: A new model architecture built for high accuracy at scale

https://interfaze.ai/blog/interfaze-a-new-model-architecture-built-for-high-accuracy-at-scale
37•yoeven•2h ago•6 comments

AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs

https://duarteocarmo.com/blog/amalia-and-the-future-of-european-portuguese-llms
82•johnbarron•3d ago•35 comments

Bild AI (YC W25) Is Hiring Founding Product Engineers

https://bild.ai/jobs
1•rooppal•1h ago

Show HN: TikTok but for Scientific Papers

https://andreaturchet.github.io/website/index.html
54•ciwrl•3h ago•33 comments

Venom and Hot Peppers Offer a Key to Killing Resistant Bacteria

https://www.wired.com/story/mexican-science-transforms-scorpion-venom-and-habanero-chile-into-ant...
132•littlexsparkee•2d ago•44 comments

I'm going back to writing code by hand

https://blog.k10s.dev/im-going-back-to-writing-code-by-hand/
835•dropbox_miner•17h ago•497 comments

Building a web server in aarch64 assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning

https://imtomt.github.io/ymawky/
69•theanonymousone•3d ago•24 comments

Holding Community Space

https://supernuclear.substack.com/p/building-a-space-people-never-want
19•surprisetalk•3d ago•9 comments

Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

https://www.seangoedecke.com/software-engineering-may-no-longer-be-a-lifetime-career/
189•movis•4h ago•342 comments

Running local models on an M4 with 24GB memory

https://jola.dev/posts/running-local-models-on-m4
508•shintoist•19h ago•153 comments

The Boston Library Where You Still Can Borrow a Giant Puppet

https://binj.news/2026/05/06/the-boston-library-where-you-still-can-borrow-a-giant-puppet/
9•gnabgib•2d ago•0 comments

The greatest shot in television: James Burke had one chance to nail this scene (2024)

https://www.openculture.com/2024/10/the-greatest-shot-in-television.html
306•susam•16h ago•175 comments

Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/116550899908879585
2014•ChuckMcM•1d ago•676 comments

Guitar tuner that uses phone accelerometer

https://tautme.github.io/phone-sensors/accel-tuner.html
128•adm4•3d ago•74 comments

An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs

https://www.jamesshore.com/v2/blog/2026/you-need-ai-that-reduces-your-maintenance-costs
325•cratermoon•19h ago•93 comments

Obsidian plugin was abused to deploy a remote access trojan

https://cyber.netsecops.io/articles/obsidian-plugin-abused-in-campaign-to-deploy-phantom-pulse-rat/
333•cmbailey•21h ago•197 comments

Local AI needs to be the norm

https://unix.foo/posts/local-ai-needs-to-be-norm/
1677•cylo•1d ago•662 comments

Microsoft Israel chief leaves amid ethical controversy

https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-microsoft-israel-chief-leaves-amid-ethical-controversy-1001542602
68•bhouston•1h ago•56 comments

Bliss (Photograph)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_(photograph)
97•cainxinth•3d ago•41 comments

Students Boo Commencement Speaker After She Calls AI Next Industrial Revolution

https://www.404media.co/ucf-ai-commencement-speaker-booed/
112•cdrnsf•3h ago•94 comments

Mythos Finds a Curl Vulnerability

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/05/11/mythos-finds-a-curl-vulnerability/
532•TangerineDream•12h ago•221 comments

Should you leave red herrings about yourself online?

https://blog.alcazarsec.com/posts/should-you-leave-red-herrings-about-yourself-online
34•alcazar•3h ago•30 comments

A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/09/business/dealbook/ai-notetakers-legal-risk.html
184•JumpCrisscross•9h ago•137 comments

Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)

242•david927•1d ago•911 comments
Open in hackernews

Adventures in Symbolic Algebra with Model Context Protocol

https://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/computer_algebra_mcp/
121•freediver•11mo ago

Comments

behnamoh•11mo 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•11mo 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.
godelski•11mo ago
I think the problem here is we keep making promises we can't keep. It causes us to put too many eggs in one bakery, ironically frequently preventing us from filling in those gaps. We'd make much more progress without the railroading.

There's only so much money but come on, we're dumping trillions into highly saturated research directions where several already well funded organizations have years worth of a head start. You can't tell me that there's enough money to throw at another dozen OpenAI competitors and another dozen CoPilot competitors but we don't have enough for a handful of alternative paradigms that already show promise but will struggle to grow without funding. These are not only much cheaper investments but much less risky then betting on a scrappy startup being the top dog at their own game.

ogogmad•11mo ago
The article also suggests that you could use a proof-verifier like Lean instead. Using that capability to generate synthetic data on which to train helps too. Very large context windows have been known to help with programming, and should help with mathematical reasoning too. None of this gives you AGI, I suppose, but the important thing is it makes LLMs more reliable at mathematics.

Anyone have a link to an article exploring Lean plus MCP? EDIT: Here's a recent Arxiv paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.12534v2, the keyword is "neural theorem proving"

I've just remembered: AlphaEvolve showed that LLMs can design their own "learning curricula", to help train themselves to do better at reasoning tasks. I recall these involve the AI suggesting problems that have the right amount of difficulty to be useful to train on.

I'll ramble a tiny bit more: Anybody who learns maths comes to understand that it helps to understand the "guts" of how things work. It helps to see proofs, write proofs, do homework, challenge yourself with puzzles, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing were true for LLMs. As such, I think having the LLM call out to symbolic solvers could ultimately undermine their intelligence - but using Lean to ensure rigour probably helps.

bwfan123•11mo ago
We've come back full-circle to precise and "narrow interfaces".

Long story short, it is great when humans interact with LLMs for imprecise queries, because, we can ascribe meaning to LLM output. But for precise queries, the human, or the LLM needs to speak a narrow interface to another machine.

Precision requires formalism, as what we mean by precise involves symbolism and operational definition. Where the genius of the human brain lies (and which is not yet captured in LLMs) is the insight and understanding of what it means to precisely model a world via symbolism - ie, the place where symbolism originates. As an example, humans operationally and precisely model the shared experience of "space" using the symbolism and theory of euclidean geometry.

arunbahl•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo ago
They give it a list of tool commands it can use in the context I believe.
svat•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo ago
> But let's not let a potential rootkit get in the way of a fun weekend experiment.

Great quote.

FilosofumRex•11mo 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•11mo ago
Curious if this could be done for Mathematica. SymPy is kind of ...
georgearvanitis•11mo ago
Live CEOing Ep 910: Design Review for MCP Server Paclet[0] posted yesterday
Hugsun•11mo ago
I was very pleased to discover that Mistral's Le Chat has inbuilt support for python code execution and sympy is importable.

It will regularly use it and reliably when asked to.

crystal_revenge•11mo ago
I really appreciate Stephen's mixture of skepticism combined with genuine interest in experimenting with these tools. Most MCP posts I've read have been so much hype I've been left with no clue what MCP actually does. This is the first article I've read on the topic that earnestly makes me want to start messing around with MCP for fun (and makes it clear how to get started).

It's a bit unfortunate that the field is so dominated by extremes of hype and skepticism, both of which aren't particularly helpful to getting problems really solved.

beastman82•11mo ago
It's just good writing. Funny, insightful, detailed.
mhh__•11mo ago
I like this type of flow.

On tensor notation: Tensor indices aren't bad (a good notation should guide a calculation and they do) but I can't help but feel they're far too error prone.

What are the alternatives? Penrose diagrams?

ogogmad•11mo ago
Abstract index notation. It's completely different!
0cf8612b2e1e•11mo ago
Tangentially, are there any symbolic algebra systems that can handle millions of equations?

I have never used a symbolic algebra system, but came across a problem where I am trying to model a deterministic simulation system. I can write out the computation graph (~20 million equations for final state), but Sympy chokes on seemingly dozens of symbols. No hope of processing the final state or being able to express a simulation state in terms of my desired input variables.

Not sure if my expectations are mismatched with reality, I am hugely bungling the tool, or Sympy has laughable performance vs the more capable commercial options.

6gvONxR4sf7o•11mo ago
Presumably if you have 20 million equations, they came from a program that's has fewer than 20 million moving parts, like if they came from A x = b where the matrix A has 20M entries. The gist is either exploit structure to make a massive number of small equations or keep the symbols in their "natural" form instead of reducing to scalars, and work with more advanced CAS functionality (like, you might have to learn about noncommutative variations on groebner bases). But also, yes sympy is ultra slow with some things.
FilosofumRex•11mo ago
There is no general purpose solver available that can symbolically solve 20M equations, and unfortunately, progress in this field has been excruciatingly slow.

It's highly unlikely it's possible, even in theory. Symbolic solvers must explore many known "routes" to expand and simply given equations, without any theoretical guarantees. Even if you found a symbolic solution to your 20M system, it'd have so many terms in it that you'd have to settle for a numerical approximation, just to make sense of them all.

Numerical solvers are of course, a different matter, altogether.

0cf8612b2e1e•11mo ago
Ahh nuts. I was foolishly optimistic because my experience with SAT solvers has been magical where they can effortlessly chew through huge numbers of constraints. Was thinking that computers are really fast and good at math, surely they can balance a bunch of algebra given some guidance.

Ah well. Will have to resign myself to raw numbers.

FilosofumRex•11mo ago
I can't recommend SAT solvers enough, the CS community isn't familiar with them and don't appreciate their vast improvements in recent years. If you've the luxury of formulating your 20M system in terms of satisfiability problem, it'd well worth a try.

Unfortunately, most problems in physics(field equations), or engineering (Navier Stokes) can't be formulated as satisfiability problems.

rudi_mk•11mo ago
Damn. I started building exactly the same thing a couple weeks ago.

https://github.com/equationscp/equationscp

hosolmaz•11mo ago
It might make more sense to give the model a Jupyter Notebook/code interpreter MCP as a more general case. The environment would have to have sympy, numpy, scipy, matplotlib etc. installed of course
nickysielicki•11mo ago
bit more fleshed out than what I slopped together last month for this: https://github.com/sielicki/dogfood/blob/master/scripts/mcp-...

I've found it useful for thought experiments around trading.