MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: MCP Boilerplate – A rock-solid Model Context Protocol server
by truly_sn | 2025-05-10 18:15:11+00:00
I created an open-source MCP (Model Context Protocol) server boilerplate after encountering numerous issues with SSE connections timing out when connecting AI models to tools.

The Model Context Protocol enables AI models to interact with external tools through a standardized interface. While implementing MCP servers, I frequently ran into the "SSE error: terminated Body timeout" which led me to develop this boilerplate with: • Robust keepalive mechanisms (30-second intervals) • Proper SSE headers including Connection: keep-alive • Socket and response timeout disabling • Comprehensive error handling with retries • Heartbeat notifications

I've also included a centralized configuration system to make adjustments simple without modifying multiple files, proper session management, and example tools with TypeScript interfaces to help you extend the server.

My goal was to create a foundation that others could build upon without having to solve the same connection issues I faced.

I'd appreciate any feedback, suggestions, or contributions to make this even better.
by awkwardpotato | 2025-05-10 18:15:32+00:00
Yes, they're also currently $2 billion dollars in debt and are attempting to split into 3 separate companies.

"Middle-earth Enterprises & Friends" - The legal successor to Embracer. For their triple A studios and major ip rights (they currently own the rights to LOTR-based games)

"Coffee Stain & Friends" - For their indie studios. (Named after their most successful indie studio, the people behind Goat Simulator and Satisfactory)

Asmodee - Their board and card game group. They took out a 900 million euro "financial agreement" with Embracer to pay back part of their debts. Officially a separate entity as of February.

[0] https://embracer.com/releases/embracer-group-announces-its-i...
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-05-10 18:15:47+00:00
<< I recommend it to anyone who's curious / positive about new tech.

I would ask that you elaborate a little more. I am an example of one. I like LLMs, but I cringe internally and externally at times at some of the things people seem to want to use them for ( and I just saw a presentation that basically said the equivalent of "add AI here, happy sunshine leaves there". And how? Magic. Nobody knows. ). I like crypto, but it is impossible to not see million rugpulls, scams and so on out there. I like technology, but I am very, very aware of the issues with basic human nature.
by refulgentis | 2025-05-10 18:16:29+00:00
Idk the whole discussion is hard for me to parse.

- Any one-off data point could be just random decrease or tariff impacts and we do not have a forward-looking time machine to accumulate more data

- It doesn't really shed any light at all if volumes are less or more: both outcomes can be spun as a success (if they're less, great, American Juche continues unimpeded, if they're more, great, then we just debate if the manufacturers ("China") are "paying for" the tariffs by decreasing list prices to the importer enough that the importer can maintain the same price for customers) ("China" cannot literally pay for the tariffs, they are paid for by the US company or individual accepting the shipment from the dock)

It's sort of like if it was February 2020, Wuhan was overrun and Italy was exploding, and people spent a lot of time in the nuances of if the US double digit case was up more this week than it was last week or two weeks ago
by theturtle32 | 2025-05-10 18:16:50+00:00
Finally, someone putting into words what I have felt intuitively ever since the concept of an "MVP" and the obsession around A/B testing came into vogue. The quotes that most resonated with me:

---

The MVP concept is often overused to justify low-quality products.

Metrics are treated as precise guides without accounting for interpretation or strategy.

---

When I entered the startup world, I mistakenly followed the MVP playbook. We launched too early, misread feedback, and ended up iterating around noise. What saved the company wasn’t lean methodology. It was building something so good that users couldn’t ignore it. I’ve hired engineers who were obsessed with quality and passed on candidates with vague “passion.”
by codingdave | 2025-05-10 18:17:10+00:00
> clients already do this kind of integration. They don’t ask their suppliers to "be creative," they give precise goals and constraints.

I'm not sure who your clients are. Mine do have goals, but ask me to be creative and come up with the constraints. Literally, I had someone ask me for exactly that on my last call. My folks are nowhere near precise. If they were, they would not need me.
by abc-1 | 2025-05-10 18:17:25+00:00
The goal to automate is to reduce suffering. Full stop. It’s not to “save time”. STEM types like to pretend they’re stoic cold calculating robots and everything is objective and they don’t mind doing some repetitive 5 minute task every day, because they saw some xkcd comic about efficiency. Maybe they pretend they don’t mind simply so they can smugly post the xkcd comic every time someone new asks why they’re suffering through some repetitive slog.
by AndrewOMartin | 2025-05-10 18:18:02+00:00
I think you can make an analogy with Casinos and their incentives to cheat. They could do all sorts of things and there are plenty of gambling scams that do those things, but most legit looking Casinos are already making money hand over fist, have published odds on their favour and against yours, can kick out anyone who seems to be doing well, have all sorts of non-cheat tricks to squeeze money out if you, and are risking serious reputation and legal damage if found out.

Doubtless there are scummy poker games, but for most of them the money comes plenty easy, and the existential risk of faking cards to increase pot sizes just isn't worth the marginal benefit.

Of course everyone, winners, losers, and impartial bystanders will see these patterns in completely random deals so every site will be accused eventually.
by drdeca | 2025-05-10 18:18:14+00:00
Outside of the context of a convex hull, I don’t know how to make a distinction between interpolation and extrapolation. This is the core of my question.

What precisely is it that you mean when you say that it is interpolating rather than extrapolating? In the only definition that I know, the one based on convex hulls, I believe it would be extrapolating rather than interpolating. But people often say it is interpolating rather than extrapolating, and I don’t know what they mean.
by adra | 2025-05-10 18:18:16+00:00
It's not great, but you can always catch and retry if your belief is that the GC will free enough memory to allow the attempt to continue after the memory pressure subsides.

Let's say you get 1/100 requests that are randomly sent to your process. That 1 takes 100x the average memory usage of the others. You could spin it out to different services to better handle the weird one-off, but that doesn't always make sense. Sometimes you just need to be ok with working the 100x job and let the other 99 get progressive falloff retry. Different solutions are always possible.
by neilv | 2025-05-10 18:18:29+00:00
> The pre-beginners are not at Stack Overflow to look at existing solutions (which is what Stack Overflow wants you to do). They just want someone to do their homework for them.

This is/was also a thing in the Scheme (and Racket) community, where maybe half the users in the world, at any given time, just want to pass the class and then never see it again.

The funny part was that it's a fairly small world, and the forums the students were asking include the people who wrote the textbooks and often the problem sets, as well as probably knew the students' professors.

Fortunately, :) "AI" is now doing all the lazy students' homework for them. So now:

1. The AI plagiarizes from books, open source code, and forums;

2. then the student plagiarizes from the AI;

3. then the forums are left to people who are actually interested;

4. then the AI companies come and again steal whatever the interested people do;

5. and repeat.
by ww520 | 2025-05-10 18:19:29+00:00
20 years ago I had the same thought. I actually started implementing the Rete algorithm. Midway through I realized, “hey, this is just relational algebra. May be I can integrate it in a relational DB engine. Use rows in tables as facts and materialized views as generated facts.” It soon spin out of scope and I lost interest. Later I did use what I learned to build a rule based event processing engine.
by grogenaut | 2025-05-10 18:19:48+00:00
I find the discussing of the quality of the MCP protocol funny. This space is constantly evolving very quickly. I consider MCP completely throw away, and I'm willing to deal with it as unimportant in that rapidly evolving space. I'm sure there will be a different implementation and approach in 6-12 months, or not. From the speed I'm able to turn on MCP integrations I don't think it'll take that long to swap to another protocol. We're in the sone age here. MCP may be crappy but it's a flint and steel versus a bowstring. Eventually we'll get to central or zoned heating.

I'm using MCP locally on my laptop, the security requirements are different there than on a server. Logging can be done at the actual integration with external api level if you have standard clients and logging, which I do and push for.

To me what is important right now is to glue my apis, data sources, and tools, to the AI tools my people are using. MCP seems to do that easily. Honestly I don't care about the protocol, at the end of the day, protocols are just ways for things to talk to each other, if they're interesting in and of themselves to you you're focusing on other things than I am. My goal is delivering power with the integration.

MCP may be messy, but the AI tools I'm using them with seem just fine and dealing with that mess to help me build more power into the AI tools. That, at the end of the day is what I care about, can I get the info and power into the tools so that my employees can do stuff they couldn't do before. MCP seems to do that just fine. If we move to some other protocol in 6 months, I'm assuming I can do that with AI tools on a pretty quick basis, as fast as I'm building it right now.
by danboarder | 2025-05-10 18:19:55+00:00
This action comes a bit late, at the end of the "Search engine" era, at a time when AI responses from many sources are largely replacing the "Google Search".

Similar action happened against Microsoft Windows around 2000, just as the rise of web-based apps (online email, google docs, etc) largely made the underlying operating system less relevant to how people use their computers and apps.

So I read this as the dominant player can monopolize a market while it's relevant without an issue, and once the market starts to move on, the antitrust lawsuits come in to "make the market more competitive" at a time when that era is mostly over.

And trying to regulate early (as with the last administration's AI legislation that is now being repealed) we can see that only hindsight is 20/20, and regulating too early can kill a market. My conclusion is to just let the best product win, and even dominate for a while as this is part of the market cycle, and when a better product/platform comes along the market will move to it.
by bogwog | 2025-05-10 18:20:44+00:00
> and provides liquidity by acquiring startups

You mean kills potentially successful tech companies of the future by acquiring startups to cement their dominance.

I get why people on this site are in love with the idea of building an unsustainable, money-losing business where the only path to success is being acquired by a tech giant. It's like winning the lottery! But it helps nobody, it hurts your customers/users, and it hurts innovation. It's also stupid, as a successful tech company could potentially grow as big as the giants you're courting (ESPECIALLY now that the FTC has started finally doing its job). Why else do you think they're spending so much money to acquire you? It's easier on the ego to call it an "acquihire", but the truth is that they're just paying a maintenance tax on their monopoly.

Every time people complain about how detrimental big tech is to society, it ultimately comes down to this sad strategy.
by crustycoder | 2025-05-10 18:21:21+00:00
Coincidentally, on Friday I pulled my dusty 1987 copies of Sterling & Shapiro and Bratko off the bookshelf for the first time in literally decades, and built myself a copy of SWI so that I could have a tinker with it for something where I think it may be a good fit.

Sure there are now some shinier toys in the Prolog box but the problems with Prolog seem to be the same now as they were 35+ years ago - it's seen as a niche CS-only tool, where to get any traction at all you have to absorb reams of terminology that's mostly unknown outside of academia, or has been forgotten post-graduation - Prolog really doesn't do itself any favours, and never has.

I think expecting academia to ever "sell" Prolog is a bust - if it hasn't happened by now, it never will. Better to directly target people earning their crust writing code, and sell the benefits to them, with real examples, not Towers of Hanoi and N-Queens. And as far as practicable, try to relate them to things that they are more likely to already know, such as SQL or Functional programming?
by mmooss | 2025-05-10 18:22:10+00:00
> If there's a world out there without a moon and could not really see other plants and stars, would they have developed the math and science that we have without such motivation? Maybe but slower?

They would have other advantages and disadvantages, and develop math for different reasons. Then they'd look at our planet and say, 'lacking our conditions, how could they develop mathematics?'
by yial | 2025-05-10 18:22:48+00:00
The annual letter to shareholders is such a great signal that seems to be missed by a lot of people I encounter in business.

They’ll read current popular books. Or even older ones. But seem to miss scale / times / people / resources and mis apply.* (I agree with your statement about waiting - or if you want to read it applying heavy discernment ).

However, they don’t seem to have the same interest in reading shareholder letters. I’ll add that certain annual reports can contain really helpful information about economic realities, marketing, logistics, etc. (Home Depot’s is a surprisingly good example - again- if you apply some discernment to what you’re reading).

*by that I mean if you’re an executive at a 15 person company, that’s experiencing stagnation or slow (3-5% growth) and dealing with physical widgets, trying to emulate Twitter, Airbnb, or SaaS businesses might not be the right move.
by kbolino | 2025-05-10 18:23:03+00:00
Embedded Rust usually means no_std Rust, in which case no, neither the standard library nor any runtime to support it get included in the resulting binary. This isn't getting externalized either; no_std code simply cannot use any of the features that std provides. It is roughly equivalent to freestanding C.

What you say is true enough for external-runtime languages and Go, though TinyGo is available for resource-constrained environments.
by poobear22 | 2025-05-10 18:23:10+00:00
I read so many business books, and they are hard to get rid of after you have amassed a large collection of several hundred. On reflection, many seem like crap, or maybe a good few points what could be summarized in a few pages but somehow turned into a long book. I'm still glad I read them, and the jewels have always made it worth the adventure. I really like looking back at the discredited books I've read and in hindsight, asked myself how I was fooled at the time in not detecting the the weaknesses in the books. It has always been a point of reflection to improve these detection skills when reading new material. For me, at the time of reading, the books: "In Search of Excellence" and "Think and Grow Rich" seemed great, but in hindsight, "What was I thinking".
by benoau | 2025-05-10 18:23:10+00:00
The person you're referring to is more like a conductor. Everyone in an orchestra can play their instruments just fine. Better than fine. They are great at it. But the conductor keeps them coordinated and synchronized. But these conductors will consolidate and become obsolete too. After everyone else in the chain.

Some ideas question why we would need "middleman" software at all in a decade: what's the point of Photoshop if you can ask AI to fix blemishes and manipulate images and compose your graphics without it? On some level it's selling picks and shovels after the gold rush.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-05-10 18:23:16+00:00
At Blekko we advocated for this as well.

Google has two interlocked monopolies, one is the search index and the other is their advertising service. We often joked that if Google reasonable and non-discriminatory priced access to their index, both to themselves and to others, AND they allowed someone to put what ever ads they wanted on those results. That change the landscape dramatically.

Google would carve out their crawler/indexer/ranker business and sell access to themselves and others which would allow that business an income that did NOT go back to the parent company (had to be disbursed inside as capex or opex for the business).

Then front ends would have a good shot, DDG for example could front the index with the value proposition of privacy. Someone else could front the index with a value proposition of no-ads ever. A third party might front that index attuned to specific use cases like literature search.

It would be a very different world.
by wespiser_2018 | 2025-05-10 18:23:36+00:00
I'm not opposed to business books. It's true that most of them are in narrative form and try to extract anecdotal lessons into broad strategy, but I've found them useful for framing my own thinking about teams, strategy, and leadership. Thinking about your work, just in a different way, or though a different lens, I believe is helpful. How helpful? Probably not as much as making more decisions yourself, but at least in my environment I'm rate limited by circumstances beyond my control!

That said, there are a couple of "good" business books, and I agree with the author on the works of Michael Porter (esp. On Competition) and ET Jaynes, Probability Theory: The Logic of Science. The later was a major influence on my life and pivotal book I read as a young scientist, and it moved me into the direction of data science!
Show HN: Unicmp – fast universal ordering function for Go
by Snawoot | 2025-05-10 18:23:51+00:00
Have you ever wanted something `comparable` to be also ordered, e.g. for canonicalization sort or sorted collections? This function uses fast runtime's map hash (with rare exceptions) for comparisons of arbitrary values, providing strict ordering for any `comparable` type.

In other words, it's like `cmp.Compare` from Go's stdlib expanded to every `comparable` type, not just strings and numbers.
by fakedang | 2025-05-10 18:24:05+00:00
Hah, seriously? Is that even a valid excuse?

Nearly every country I know of has solved the married woman name-change issue. The US literally does not have a process to manage official name changes?

It's literally so darn simple everywhere - previous official issued ID, marriage license copy, 2 newspaper ads stating the name change. There might be minor variations here and there depending on the country, but that's all you need to get your name changed anywhere on official documents. The real headache comes in changing previous unofficial documents afterwards, such as certificates, etc.

This is literally not an excuse for the Arsenal of Democracy.
by chuckadams | 2025-05-10 18:26:32+00:00
Teaching prolog in the context of modern type systems might be more worthwhile, since to my understanding, there's quite a bit of overlap, to where you can write arbitrary prolog in Haskell or Scala's type systems. Probably even holds for C++ and TypeScript too. But I don't think there's a technological solution for teaching a subject for which the school cares so little that it won't hire anyone who actually understands it.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-05-10 18:27:12+00:00
If I understand what they're saying, the interactions you have with the model are not driven by "maximising eyeballs/time/purchases/etc". You get to role-play inside a context window, and if it went in a direction you don't like you reset and start over again. But during those interactions, you control whatever happens, not some 3rd party that may have ulterior motives.
by mmooss | 2025-05-10 18:27:25+00:00
On one hand, the private competition to match mature, 60 year old technology makes sense. NASA should be focused well out past the bleeding edge.

But being private companies, do they publish their science and research like NASA does? Is development of space tech moving forward in proprietary silos?

Maybe part of goverment funding, which many or all of these projects have, should be publishing the science (if they don't publish it already).
by nawgz | 2025-05-10 18:27:34+00:00
Has ThreeJS updated to start using X3D (https://www.x3dom.org/) yet?

Taking a quick look at [the docs](https://r3f.docs.pmnd.rs/getting-started/introduction) linked above, I see the use of Canvas. Fair enough.

I start using X3D at work in order to enable some cool functionality showing steps to build an assembly in 3D, and it's actually insane how high the performance is. It's all HTML components, so I wrote a super thin React wrapper (essentially the scene needs to be manually loaded once, that's about all) and have been cruising with that.

Effortless to fly, rotate, hide or highlight parts, decompose things into x3d assets, and so on.

It might have issues somewhere, I haven't widely tested browser compat or anything, but it's curious to me how little I see it versus how much I see ThreeJS when it seems that X3D is the more capable platform.
by azemetre | 2025-05-10 18:28:49+00:00
Web flow will sue you if you use green sock as a competitor. In what world of truly open source software is that something we should allow as a society? Let alone want.

I don’t want software to get corrupted by financialization. This is why so many people are passionate about open source, it also leads us to the next phase of this battle where software patents are made obsolete because it’s all mathematics and you shouldn’t be able to patent mathematical systems.
by dlandis | 2025-05-10 18:29:22+00:00
Agree... this is an important blog. People need to press pause on MCP in terms of adoption...it was simply not designed with a solid enough technical foundation that would make it suitable to be an industry standard. People are hyped about it, kind of like they were for LangChain and many other projects, but people are going to gradually (after diving into implementations) that it's not actually what they were looking for..It's basically a hack thrown together by a few people and there are tons of questionable decisions, with websockets being just one example of a big miss.