MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: InvoiceMCP – Let AI create and manage invoices directly
by jdalton | 2025-06-02 13:22:43+00:00
InvoiceMCP is an MCP server that gives AI tools (Claude, Windsurf, Cursor, etc.) direct access to invoicing systems.

Instead of stopping to open an app, I can stay inside Claude and say:

“Invoice Acme for API integration work – $3500”

It creates the invoice, generates the PDFs, handles everything. No context switch.

The bigger idea: as AI agents handle more end-to-end workflows, they’ll need billing systems they can talk to programmatically — without human intervention. That’s what InvoiceMCP provides.

Current features:

Natural language invoice creation

Client lookup + management

Payment tracking

Bulk + multi-company support

Full MCP API + server docs

Would love your feedback, questions, or ideas!
Show HN: MCPglue (Open Source) – Let your agent build its own tools
by sfaist | 2025-06-02 13:22:47+00:00
We found that many devs struggle building agent tools that work for each use case while not overwhelming the agent with too many options to pick from. That’s why we built MCPglue so your agents can build the tools they need when they need to. It gives you the reliability you’re looking for when deploying in prod, and agents the custom tools they need to do their job well.

Here’s a walkthrough of how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uc-jdM9XnhE

MCPglue allows your agent to build its own tools using the superglue integration agent. It can read the documentation of your APIs and chain endpoints together to fulfil any use case, and expose them as tools via MCP. It abstracts away API calls and data mappings, and self-heals even as inputs, upstream APIs or data change.

You can use MCPglue to let your agent run cross-API workflows reliably, like fetching transactions in Stripe and updating them in Hubspot, to build agents that react to app triggers or to wrap your own API into task-specific tools agents can use.

Quickstart guide: https://docs.superglue.cloud/mcp Find us on GitHub: https://github.com/superglue-ai/superglue

Would be curious to hear how you’ve been dealing with tool use, and what you would want to build with MCPglue.
by JohnBooty | 2025-06-02 13:22:57+00:00
you have to hand it to Lucas for trying to significantly expand his space opera by adding in galactical politics

No, absolutely zero credit.

While "evil guy corrupting a democracy" is certainly a noble and relevant thing to explore, the prequels don't explore that in any useful or fun or insightful way. It's literally just an excuse for pew pew pew lasers and spaceships and laser swords.

(Remarkably, they also make the democracy, and the Jedi who defend it, seem almost universally super boring and dumb and uncool. Making Jedi uncool is some kind of special achievement...)

Even as a real-world allegory, it sucks.

The bad guys in real life aren't even remotely like the Sith, who are physically twisted freaks that are explicitly like "yep! we're evil!"

Real-life bad guys are often good looking and most of them think they're actually doing the right thing.
by bobmcnamara | 2025-06-02 13:23:02+00:00
I suspect you are talking a few decades after the time I am talking about. Many of the earliest chess programs used lossy pruning(type b Shannon engines), under the assumption that the static evaluation at some node could just be bad enough to say don't look down this branch anymore. But they were not provably correct like with alpha beta. Shannon's paper explains a lot more about this. In the late 1940s some of these programs were being run on pen and paper.

For what it's worth stockfish didn't invent efficiently updatable neural networks, Yu Nasu did. Hisayori Noda ported it to Western chess and Stockfish. NNUE is really neat.
by naravara | 2025-06-02 13:23:25+00:00
I also don’t understand the anxiety. One of the reasons eReaders are expensive is because they’re designed for durability in light of how people actually use them, which seems to be getting thrown around loose in a tote bag or in environments hostile to electronics such as hot tubs or by the beach. I’ve had my Kindle 2nd Generation since it came out and it still works. I don’t baby it, and at this point its biggest problem is that the battery life has shrunk to only last a couple of days.
by dwattttt | 2025-06-02 13:24:20+00:00
Issue 8 (2024, https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/basedefs/sy...) relaxed the language there. st_ino and st_dev still uniquely identify a file, but it now notes that the duration it identifies it for is not indefinite.

As an example, it offers that the identity of a file that's deleted could be reused.
by alienbaby | 2025-06-02 13:24:33+00:00
I gave co-pilot a shot this weekend. Building a toy app for doing a bunch of text processing.

Last time I tried, when this stuff was 'new' , I was thoroughly unimpressed.

This weekend, I did about 8 hours work in 2 hours. Copilot worked _almost flawlessly.

I cam away very impressed. I still wonder how well it would work against a large established repository where it isn't free to re-invent the wheel and doesn't know about established architecture and methods etc..

But it did change my perception overalll. They are getting better, and fast...
by glimshe | 2025-06-02 13:24:36+00:00
If we're around in 2000 and 2009, you've seen this before. Our field has ups and downs and every time we hit the bottom people say it won't come back. It will.

We had some cleaning up to do. I was a hiring manager during COVID and the resumes I saw were unbelievable. People with "web" boot camps being considered for 6 figure salaries. People who had absolutely no business being in this field were being hired.

It was due to the easy money from low interest rates. This field always had solid salaries but some people were making a million to sit on meetings and integrate frameworks into me-too websites.

The hammer is coming down and is unfortunately hitting many good people too. But they will recover while the people who shouldn't be here will move on. Don't get your HVAC repair certification quite yet. Stop complaining about AI and go study it (the hard stuff not ChatGPT for dummies).
by cassianoleal | 2025-06-02 13:25:05+00:00
I think it depends. In Brazil it's common (and lawful) to consume Ayahuasca in certain religious contexts. The biggest religions are Santo Daime and União do Vegetal - both are heavily Christian.

I know personally several people, many of whom hardcore atheists, who have had life-changing experiences taking part of those rituals and many have gone back or made it a regular occurrence. None of them ceased to be hardcore atheists.
by enum | 2025-06-02 13:25:08+00:00
Lots of discussion about choice of programming language in the comments below.

- In principle, it should not matter at all, but there are practical reasons why one PL may be better than another in a particular school or context.

- But, all this "choice of PL" discussion is really a discussion about CS1. A CS degree has at least seven other courses -- assuming 1 CS course per semester -- and in practice many more than that. So, if you're going to ask questions about CS1, the question to ask is, "Does CS1 setup students to succeed in the advanced courses?" Classically, these were courses in compilers, operating systems, networking, and so on. These days, you can add distributed computing, machine learning, etc. (but don't subtract the classics).
by goodpanda | 2025-06-02 13:25:32+00:00
You do have a valid point that TURN is sometimes needed but not ALWAYS right?

My understanding is that ICE tries to establish a direct p2p connection between clients and only if there is no path, it uses TURN?

In either case, the files definitely don't go through my servers and are not stored anywhere and are e2e encrypted which really matters the most.
by ben_w | 2025-06-02 13:25:34+00:00
The Empire ended because WW2 was a Pyrrhic victory for the UK, that left the UK in a bad shape economically and heavily dependent on the USA. The USA didn't like the Empire, but the UK government didn't fully realise how much things had changed until the Suez Crisis.

Also, WW2 happened despite the Empire, and the UK wasn't really in a good place to fight it when they did — as in "we don't have enough guns and uniforms for everyone" not ready, despite having ended the military cutbacks 5 years before the war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_rearmament_before_Worl..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_Small_Arms_Company#..., https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/8-facts-about-clothes-rationi...
by firesteelrain | 2025-06-02 13:25:41+00:00
"Just look at lots of the recent tech layoffs that have snared well-respected, senior technologists. Apparently they were "valued", until they weren't"

You are actually agreeing with the author here. Rephrase that to "Apparently they were useful, until they weren't"

They weren't valued.

I think the author is apt in their observation.
by blueflow | 2025-06-02 13:25:51+00:00
Typical cuss filter UX:

types something in live chat

some random word from the sentence gets censored out

"Why did this just got censored out?"

check urban disctionary

"Why?????"

Bonus points if its regular ethnonyms that are classified as profanities, so people from that place are having big trouble to tell where they are from.
by km144 | 2025-06-02 13:25:54+00:00
I actually think prestige is a contributing factor for CS as well. People assume you must be smart to be a software engineer, and FAANG companies are prestigious to normal people because they have name recognition. Definitely not on the same level as a Doctor/Surgeon/Lawyer or whatever but certainly could be more than a typical 4-year degree will get you. And I suppose there's also the fact that those companies were viewed very differently 10-15 years ago and now there is a lot more cynicism about big tech in general.
by sgarland | 2025-06-02 13:26:47+00:00
> Yesterday almost my whole day was wasted because I chose to attack a problem primarily by using Claude 4 Sonnet

I have been extremely cynical about LLMs up until Claude 4. For the specific project I've been using it on, it's done spectacularly well at specific asks - namely, performance and memory optimization in C code used as a Python library.
by naravara | 2025-06-02 13:26:49+00:00
One of the most popular eReaders with the BookTok crowd is the Boox Palma, which is an eReader with the form factor of a phone.

It’s actually just an Android phone with an eInk screen, so you can run any android app on it. It’s just that eInk is terrible at everything but displaying static content so it’s not good for much besides being an eReader. Though you can also pull up a PDF reader or read emails if you really want to.
by nasalgoat | 2025-06-02 13:26:52+00:00
I was a founding member of a dating app startup and worked there for 10 years until it filed for bankruptcy. I have some insight.

The number one reason dating apps suck is money, or the ability to make money is antithetical to the purpose of getting people together. A dating app is successful when people don't use it anymore, so that user churn is a serious impediment to earning a profit. Thus, the apps are designed to keep you paying that monthly subscription.

In that same vein, apps have to work way harder than websites to turn a profit because of app store fees. Our app would have been profitable if we didn't have to give Apple 30% of our fees, so we had to do way sketchier shit to increase profits to compensate.

Second problem is the wildly unbalanced male/female ratios in users. We had one of the better ratios in the market but it was still 70/30 male to female. Straight men and women simply do not have the same motivations around dating and trying to balance those is a hard problem. There are many videos out there about this problem, no need for me to go into detail.

Third is reach. We spent a lot of time trying to find ways to advertise or optimize for store placement and the restrictions placed on us were almost puritanical. For instance, Facebook wouldn't let us advertise because our relationship settings had "married" in the list, so we were forced to remove that option in order to place ads on Facebook. There were other compromises we had to introduce in order to qualify for other stores or advertisers.

Lastly, the Match Group is the 800lb gorilla of the industry and they buy all the good ones (OKCupid, Plenty of Fish) and grind them into maximum profitability like a hedge fund, thus removing any distinctiveness they had in favour of the Match methods.

What it comes down to is the ecosystem is gamed to make good datings apps impossible.
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-02 13:27:59+00:00
Tablets too. I should be shocked that nobody has mentioned the aggressively low pricing of Amazon's Fire Tablets, but somehow Fire Tablets are invisible to the technorati. (e.g. people used to ask "Why are Android Tablets dead?" and the answer is that Samsung can't compete with half-priced tablets subsidized by AMZN any more than your local taxi company can compete with half-priced Uber rides subsidized by Softbank)

Not only are the fire tablets priced aggressively but they can be used to watch videos, surf the web, listen to music, play games, use remote desktop, all sorts of things. And if you lose one you are out $30 instead of $300 or so for an iPad.
by silcoon | 2025-06-02 13:28:19+00:00
I think ereaders are cheap if you used them heavily. I read on it every day and I take it with me wherever I go so I can read instead of scrolling of my phone. I’ve hundreds of books on my Kobo and is really the best tech gadget I have, and it cost me around $130 if I remember well.

If you compare the cost for example to a gaming console, is it justified? Probably depends how much you play video games. There are heavy players and people that play video games only occasionally. Same for readers.

Yes the price is slightly increasing but still justified for people that used them frequently. With a good cover they become pretty resistant and the battery stays for weeks.

P.S. Interesting insights in the article about the price factors and patents.
by ednite | 2025-06-02 13:29:05+00:00
The best advice as others mentioned and the one that hits closest to home, is to write for yourself. Do it for the love of the craft, not for the clicks or metrics. The rest may follow, or it may not, but either way, it’s worth it.

I’m just starting as a blogger and recently wrote about how creativity can feel like a curse, the kind that won’t let you rest until you get the words out. If you’re thinking of pursuing a creative path (or any passion, really), I have one simple word for you:

Start.
by StefanKarpinski | 2025-06-02 13:29:11+00:00
Floating-point arithmetic is non-associative, but it is commutative for the operations that are algebraically commutative: x + y == y + x and x*y == y*x. And x - y = -(y - x) so subtraction is properly anti-commutative.

The only very marginal exception to this is that when both arguments are NaN, the return value will be NaN, but which NaN payload is returned can depend on argument order. But no one ever uses this because it's not specified, so it can't be used reliably for anything useful. The behavior I wish IEEE 754 had specified for this is to define a standard NaN value (or two), and when the return value of an op is NaN, and some of the arguments are non-standard NaNs, then one of those non-standard NaN values must be returned. This doesn't depend on argument order and allows NaN payloads to be reliably propagated, which would let you encode useful debugging information in NaN payloads and know that it will flow through the program.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-06-02 13:29:12+00:00
But degrading an other is ok? From the very beginning tech was about making jobs easier, and now it’s easier to make jobs easier, including our own. So I think it’s ethically consistent to be happy about both, even if our own jobs are at risk.

My rational as to why this is a good thing in general was and remains a focus on generating consumer surplus, it’s this surplus which we as a people derive our wealth. The hope was that the surplus would be sufficient to cover the loss of those that lost their jobs, either in wealth redistribution or in new opportunities.

What’s different this time is productivity increases are not being met with an increase in demand. This will drastically increase inequality and to a lesser extent civil unrest, and I think both are destructive. I think financialization of the economy did greater damage, and the combination of both is going to really suck. I would prefer we keep productivity improvements and reverse the financialization even if that means pensions are decimated - they are probably going to be decimated anyway. Better to do it in a way that causes less damage.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-06-02 13:29:13+00:00
> Europe is winning the real victory (as well as obviously the moral victory in as far as outcomes for its own citizens)

If only Europeans could pay their mortgages and bills with morals instead of money. If only Russia could be defeated by morals and not weapons. If only the pensions and welfare Europeans enjoy could be funded my morals and not by economic growth.

As usual, people who keep scoffing at economic growth saying "money doesn't matter" are those living in a bubble where they already have more than enough money and never experienced massive economic decline and take the economic prosperity they had for granted.

Ask Greece or Eastern European countries how they feel about winning economically.
Show HN: Lkalma - The Offline-First AI Collaborative Whiteboard
by iev | 2025-06-02 13:29:26+00:00
This app is an offline first TLDraw based whiteboard that also implements some of the AI features found in TLDraw computer but using pollinations.ai instead.

I've built the app for the Dexie Global Hackathon 25 using dexie cloud as a backend.

The app can be used without login or by using one of the demo accounts.
by ubermonkey | 2025-06-02 13:29:55+00:00
Rushmore was my favorite of his films until the release of Moonrise Kingdom.

Fun fact: Rushmore was shot in an era without social media. All my film nerd pals were aware of Anderson after Bottle Rocket, and were tacitly awaiting his next film, but its ultimate arrival was a surprise. Even MORE surprising (at least for us) was that it was shot right here in Houston -- recognizably, obviously Houston. (I'm sure the St John's community was aware... )

Its release also solved a puzzle for my friend E. and I dating from the winter of 97-98. We'd stopped for sushi at a middling but reasonably priced joint between our rental house the bar we were headed to, and after posting up at the corner of the sushi counter and ordering a bit, we noticed the guy at the far end of the bar. He had a sort of admiring entourage with him of 2-3 younger folks.

The guy looked familiar, but we couldn't place him. Finally:

"Wow, that guy looks like Bill Murray."

"Yeah, he really does, doesn't he?"

"I think that might actually BE Bill Murray."

"What the hell is he doing in Houston?"

"No idea. Is there a tournament at the River Oaks club?"

We ate. We left. We forgot about seeing him -- until we saw Rushmore the following fall.

(In the unlikely event someone reading this knows Houston: this was at the Miyako that used to be just north of 59 on the west side of Kirby, so close to River Oaks.)
by km144 | 2025-06-02 13:30:28+00:00
I'd argue it is actually more of a broad trend i.e. the boom in computer science enrollment over the last 20 years has been driven mostly by people chasing a better return on investment in the increasing cost of the average four-year degree, and software pays better than the average four-year degree. I do think that college being cheaper on average would help at least somewhat with CS being such a popular major.
by keiferski | 2025-06-02 13:30:40+00:00
Both Picasso and Godard changed their style dramatically over their careers. I'm not familiar enough with Woody Allen's movies to comment on them.

These are good examples to show how being an auteur doesn't mean you need to stick to the same stereotypical aesthetic. Anderson is still pretty young, so maybe he is shifting in one direction or another. But as far as his work goes as of today, the range of stylistic choices is far, far less than what Picasso or Godard did in their careers.
by TaupeRanger | 2025-06-02 13:31:55+00:00
That's a narrow view of the issue described in the blog post. You're coming at this from the perspective of a software engineer, which is understandable given the website we're posting on, but the post is really focusing on something higher level - the ability to decide whether the problems you're decomposing and the code you're reviewing is for something "good" or "worthwhile" in the first place. Claude could "decompose problems" and "review code" 10x better than it currently does, but if the thing it's making is useless, awkward, or otherwise bad (because of prompts given by people without the qualities in the blog post), it won't matter.
by mrkramer | 2025-06-02 13:31:56+00:00
TikTok and Substack showed that the problem is not lack of quality content creators but that the problem is lack of good discovery engines. Google is probably the first internet company that fell victim to the enshittification; once they started prioritizing commercial content and commercial websites the game was over for indie content creators. We need better internet platforms for discovery of content creators and their content.
by Balgair | 2025-06-02 13:33:20+00:00
Longer term, we can expect Ukraine to do this over and over, even is they loose.

Like, if Ukraine lost the war today, folded up, surrendered, kaput. You'd still get organized splinter groups with funding from small nation-states or even motivated partisan groups. And they'd still be able to pull off things like this strike. Not much can stop them.

Yeah, the planning and patience here is unmatched. I don't think the US or even China could pull off this level of patience today. But the cost here, my god, this was just so cheap! And there is no telling about how many more of these Ukraine already has in RU too

And Ukraine and everyone else knows this. Maybe not mad Vlad, maybe not yet. But even is Vlad wins, he's going to have to deal with these kinds of strikes until Ukraine is free again. And that kind of paranoia is not cheap.

And every other nation also knows this now too. Small non-nation-state actors now have a playbook of how to cost you big time.
by typesarecool | 2025-06-02 13:33:24+00:00
Paying for grad school out of pocket (around 700 USD per month, I'm going slowly). Paying for a large tattoo out of pocket, actually the same price as grad school (700 USD). Member of a few different clubs (BJJ, Muay Thai, local spa gym) which is maybe 300 USD all in.

Those are my regular monthly bills outside of house, food, etc...

Won't say salary but in a high percentile of income in EU country.

If I had no job and unlimited money (and no responsibilities) I'd go to Phuket and train Muay Thai for a year, then go to the Wudang mountains and train Kung Fu at some probably quite Westernised temple for another year. Afterwards I'd start a company in the defence or space sector.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-06-02 13:33:54+00:00
As I understood that article, it seemed to be saying that formal methods often don't provide a good enough cost/benefit tradeoff to be worth it in many situations to many organizations. Right at the end, it basically says that your favorite underappreciated formal method isn't used because it costs too much and/or delivers too little. If an outfit that sells formal methods is saying that, then I suspect that (many) formal methods actually do cost too much for what benefit they deliver.