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How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

https://laurentiugabriel.github.io/blog/articles/how-i-use-llms-to-learn/
264•laurentiurad•3h ago•143 comments

The Hacker's Renaissance

https://phrack.org/issues/72/19#article
53•yu3zhou4•2h ago•37 comments

New Zealand lost its music media, and what we're building to replace it

https://propelmusic.co.nz/articles/the-sound-went-quiet-nz-music-media
32•berghoffer•2h ago•15 comments

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

140•david927•5h ago•520 comments

Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/08/09/mea-culpa-dark-hours.html
519•satvikpendem•9h ago•237 comments

The tragedy of the commons, AI edition

https://www.economist.com/britain/2026/08/06/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-ai-edition
48•simonpure•3h ago•19 comments

Cool URIs Don't Change (1998)

https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
154•Klaster_1•8h ago•29 comments

Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

https://theconversation.com/taxi-drivers-rarely-die-of-alzheimers-how-complex-mental-maps-and-spa...
128•jader201•7h ago•100 comments

OpenChamber: An Agentic Development Environment

https://openchamber.dev/
88•hexomancer•5h ago•46 comments

Tuxedo No. 2 – Cocktail recipes

https://tuxedono2.com
14•smartmic•2h ago•2 comments

Andrew Wiles on proving Fermat’s Last Theorem (1995) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GS7CxAtV5Ks
17•jackdoe•3d ago•9 comments

The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)

https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-main-way-ive-seen-people-turn
59•mef•2h ago•41 comments

Show HN: Lumabri – What if LLMs worked like Napster?

https://github.com/JustVugg/lumabri
3•vforno•28m ago•0 comments

I made tinnitus my friend, then it disappeared [video]

https://mynoise.net/vlog.php?ep=20260803
34•gregsadetsky•4h ago•9 comments

Touring the Consensus, Six Months In

https://theconsensus.dev/blog/2026/08/05/touring-the-consensus-six-months-in.html
4•tosh•3d ago•0 comments

How Golden Is Silence, Actually?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/08/10/silence-kate-mcloughlin-book-review
25•tintinnabula•3d ago•9 comments

John C. Lilly on solid state intelligence and the elimination of man (1978)

https://kibotronics.net/unlisted/lilly-machines/
110•Kiboneu•9h ago•67 comments

Everything you do is being recorded

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/05/ai-wearable-surveillance-countermeasures/687203/
163•ike_usawa•11h ago•136 comments

When Compilers Disagree About UTF‑8

https://nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com/p/when-compilers-disagree-about-utf8
23•rbanffy•4d ago•5 comments

Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Windows-11-s-built-in-Weather-app-wastes-more-than-1-GB-of-RAM.1364...
296•akyuu•7h ago•252 comments

Show HN: A Project Oberon System version running on RISC-V instead of RISC-5

https://github.com/rochus-keller/OberonSystem/tree/op2-rv32
98•Rochus•10h ago•16 comments

Show HN: Alphabet Soup, a multiplayer game, build the longest word to win

https://alphabetsoup.club
16•johnchinjew•2h ago•9 comments

Crickets as pets

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crickets_as_pets
70•Michelangelo11•4d ago•33 comments

Georgia police officers fired after Flock camera misuse

https://www.wtoc.com/2026/08/07/savannah-police-department-fires-6-employees-over-flock-safety-sy...
17•chirau•1h ago•4 comments

Two wheels, a few tradeoffs, and gas prices

https://blog.raed.dev/posts/motocycle/
13•Raed667•3h ago•11 comments

Reviving a four year old reMarkable 2

https://oskrim.github.io/hardware/2026/08/09/remarkable-over-ssh.html
106•tremguy•11h ago•83 comments

The climate benefits of retiring an operational combustion engine vehicle

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adv5441
8•toomuchtodo•2h ago•6 comments

Ransomware gangs skip the CEO, head straight for the 40-something IT manager

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/08/09/ransomware-gangs-skip-the-ceo-head-straight-for-t...
65•joebuckwilliams•3h ago•27 comments

There Are Magic Hexagons of Every Order

https://gukov.dev/math/2026/08/02/new-magic-hexagons.html
175•gukoff•15h ago•28 comments

Human vs. AI – Diff-based line-level provenance for text under agentic editing

https://github.com/eighttrigrams/us-vs-them
39•eighttrigrams•7h ago•8 comments
Open in hackernews

Mistral Agents API

https://mistral.ai/news/agents-api
152•pember•1y ago

Comments

orliesaurus•1y ago
Whoever made those embedded videos, here some feedback if you want it take it, it's free:

1) It's really hard to follow some of the videos since you're just copy pasting the prompts fr your agents into the chat because the output generation comes out and hides the prompts. Instead put the prompt text as an overlay/subtitle-like so we know what you're doing

2) The clicking sound of you copy pasting and typing is not ASMR, please just mute it next time

3) Please zoom into the text more, not everyone has 20/20 super vision 4K style

ianhawes•1y ago
4) Use a clean browser profile so you don't show unrelated autocomplete
threeducks•1y ago
To add to 3): YouTube embedded videos default to 360p for me even if I maximize the embedded video on my 4k screen, which is completely unreadable. This is probably an attempt by YouTube to get viewers to click through to the YouTube website. It is probably not in Mistral's best interest to funnel viewers to YouTube, so they should use a different video host.

But even at maximum 1080p resolution, the image quality is not that great. And while we are at it, the wine-red (#833048) on dark-brown (#23231F) syntax highlighting for keyword arguments has very poor contrast ratio of around 1.8 to 1: https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ which earns a rating of "Fail" across the categories normal text, large text and UI elements.

moralestapia•1y ago
I came here to see if anyone else noticed.

Very sloppy job, imo.

It costs next to nothing to come up with a little story and have someone on Fiverr narrate it (or an AI, after all that's what they sell).

bbor•1y ago
Ok I’m behind the times in terms of MCP implementation, so would appreciate a check: the appeal of this feature is that you can pass off the “when to call which MCP endpoint and with what” logic to Mistral, rather than implementing it yourself? If so I’m not sure I completely understand why I’d want a model-specific, remote solution for this rather than a single local library, since theoretically this logic should be the same for any given LLM/MCP toolset pairing. Just simpler?

It certainly looks easy to implement, I will say that! Docs halfway down the page: https://docs.mistral.ai/agents/mcp/

potatolicious•1y ago
It seems like the main pitch here is auto-inclusion and auto-exclusion of various tools via an orchestration agent (which may or may not be the main model itself? Unclear from their post)

Mostly this seems like an end-run around tool calling scalability limits. Model performance degrades heavily if the field of possible tools gets too large, so you insert a component into the system that figures out what tools should be in-scope, and make only those available, to get reliability higher.

In terms of "why outsource this" it seems like the idea is that their orchestration agent would be better than a cruder task state machine that you would implement yourself. Time will tell if this assertion is true!

ed•1y ago
> auto-inclusion and auto-exclusion of various tools via an orchestration agent

Where do you see that? That would be neat, I'm under the impression orchestration is manual though – you define an agent and give it the ability to hand off tasks to sub-agents.

potatolicious•1y ago
Sorry, maybe I could've phrased it better: it basically forces the devs to divide their tools into buckets of fewer tools manually. (The Travel Agent has N tools, the Research Agent has M tools, etc. all specified by the dev)

The pitch is that if you do this bucketization, the overall orchestrator can intelligently pick the bucket to use, but the idea is that at any moment the LLM is only exposed to a limited set of tools.

As opposed to the more pie-in-the-sky idea that given N tools (where N is very very large) the LLM can still accurately tool-select without any developer intervention. This seems pretty far off at this point.

htrp•1y ago
is mistral a model company, an agent company, or a enterprise software company now?
nomsters•1y ago
yes
greenavocado•1y ago
Mistral is trying to be everything at once and it shows. To make ends meet they pivoted to selling enterprise software through Le Chat and cozying up to Microsoft. Now they're throwing around terms like "agentic AI" to stay trendy, even as competitors like DeepSeek outperform them in key areas. Their identity crisis is obvious. Are they a model company? A software vendor? A research lab? At this point, they seem more like a startup chasing hype and funding than a company with a clear direction. The 6 billion Euro valuation looks impressive, but with so many shifts in strategy, you have to wonder if they're building something lasting or just riding the AI wave until it crashes.
eigenspace•1y ago
Their strategy doesn't make sense to you because you're looking for a technical feature that differentiates them. But technical features aren't their key differentiator, geography is their key differentiator. They'll get a lot of contracts in Europe simply because they're European. Everyone is keenly aware of how dependant European tech stacks are on increasingly unfriendly foreign powers.

If there's a local European option that does most of what an American or Chinese company does, that's simply a safer choice.

From this point of view, them trying to do everything at once makes a lot of sense. They don't actually need to be the absolute best or even the cheapest at any one thing. They need to just exist in Europe, be stable, and offer good services that people want. Casting a wide net is a better strategy for them.

FailMore•1y ago
Is this basically a LLM that has tools automatically configured so I don’t have to handle that myself? Or am I not understanding it correctly? As in do I just make standard requests , but the LLM does more work than normal before sending me a response? Or I get the response to every step?
spmurrayzzz•1y ago
The aspirational goal is that the model knows what tools to call and when, without human intervention. In practice, you'll see varying efficacy with that depending on the tools you need. Some of the tool usage is in-distribution / well represented in training set, but if you have some custom exotic MCP server you created yourself (or pulled off of some random github) you may see mixed results. Sometimes that can be fixed by simply augmenting your prompt with contrastive examples of how to use or not use the tool.

As an aside, my experience with devstral (both via API and locally w/ open weights) has been very underwhelming to this effect. So I'm curious how this new agent infra performs given that observation.

koakuma-chan•1y ago
It's a software framework for orchestrating agents. Each agent can have its own system prompt, its own tools, and it can delegate ("hand off") to a different agent. When a hand off occurs, the LLM runs again but as a different agent.
manmal•1y ago
Like Gemini Gems, but agentic?
koakuma-chan•1y ago
Gemini Gems seems to be a ChatGPT “GPTs” equivalent, and I never figured out what those actually are. Mistral Agents API is like OpenAI Agents SDK.
qwertox•1y ago
The "My MCPs" button looks very promising.

I was looking around at Le Chat, a thing I haven't done in months, and I thought that they've really worked on interesting stuff in interesting ways.

The ability to enrich either a chat or generally an agent with one or more libraries has been solved in a very friendly way. I don't think OpenAI nor Anthropic have solved it so well.

Raed667•1y ago
Do they need to pick one? Their offering doesn't seem incoherent to me
brandall10•1y ago
Couldn't the same questions be asked of OpenAI and Anthropic?

Ultimately these are product/service companies, levering their research and innovations as differentiators.

If you're "only a model" company you likely have no moat.

LeoPanthera•1y ago
Gems and GPTs are just a way to customize the system prompt from the web UI.