MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: MCP Kit – a toolkit for building, mocking and optimizing AI agents
by maurosr | 2025-06-17 21:40:24+00:00
Hi HN!

We’ve just released MCP Kit (https://github.com/agentiqs/mcp-kit-python), an open-source Python toolkit to help developers build, test, and connect AI agents to real-world tools, APIs, and services using the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

We built this at Agentiqs (https://agentiqs.ai) while experimenting with multi-agent workflows. We found ourselves repeatedly writing glue code to connect OpenAPI specs, mock APIs, and deploy custom toolchains—so we decided to package that all into a unified, config-driven toolkit.

What it does:

* Convert REST APIs into MCP-compatible tools using OpenAPI specs.

* Mock tool behavior using either LLMs or random generators for development.

* Combine multiple tools/services into one interface with multiplexing.

* Use the same targets across OpenAI Agents, LangGraph, and raw MCP sessions.

* Configure workflows using YAML or JSON, and deploy anywhere.

Example: Want to simulate a tool with realistic behavior before building the backend? Just point MCP Kit at a spec, add a mock LLM config, and it works out-of-the-box—no scaffolding needed.

Try it now:

uv add mcp-kit

Or check out the examples: https://github.com/agentiqs/mcp-kit-python/tree/main/example...

Why we built it:

We’re building a platform that heavily relies on connecting agent tools across many teams and APIs. There wasn’t a lightweight, flexible, and modular solution that spoke MCP fluently and supported both real and mocked workflows for testing. So we built one.

It’s still early, but stable and usable—we’d love feedback from anyone working with AI agents, developer tools, or protocol-based integrations. Happy to answer questions or discuss implementation details.

GitHub: https://github.com/agentiqs/mcp-kit-python

Full docs and examples: https://agentiqs.ai/docs/category/python-sdk

PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/mcp-kit/

Thanks! Mauro & Guido @ Agentiqs
by 1659447091 | 2025-06-17 21:40:39+00:00
> Of course NK has no real ability to blow up the US, but they could likely nuke or at least obliterate a sizeable piece of ally South Korea no problem.

They could hit any number of US bases, they also have ICBMs "estimated to be at least 15,000 km (9,300 mi), allows it to reach targets anywhere in the contiguous United States."[0]

"Kim announced a Five-Year Defense Plan that said the country would field a new nuclear-capable submarine, develop its tactical nuclear weapons, deploy multiple warheads on a single missile, and improve its ICBMs' accuracy, among other goals. The plan includes development of an ICBM with a range of 15,000 km for "preemptive and retaliatory nuclear strike," and ground-based and sea-based solid-fueled ICBMs. Some analysts predict an increase in missile testing this year in order to meet these goals by 2026." [1]

They are also working with Russia now. "Russia is increasingly supporting North Korea’s nuclear status in exchange for Pyongyang’s support to Moscow’s war against Ukraine."[2]

The threat assessment[2] says about Iran: "We continue to assess Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003, though pressure has probably built on him to do so."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwasong-19

[1] https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF10472

[2] https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/reports-publications/...
by crazygringo | 2025-06-17 21:41:14+00:00
This a million times. Spotify on the subway is infinitely frustrating until you go into airplane mode.

Ideally, apps shouldn't detect if you have internet and then act differently. They should pull up your cached/offline data immediately and then update/sync as attempted connections return results.

The model where you have offline data but you can't even see your playlists because it wants to update them first because it thinks you have internet is maddening.
by sterlind | 2025-06-17 21:41:34+00:00
we really need immigration reform. companies prefer H1B workers because they can treat them like indentured servants: they're bound to the company that sponsored their visa, and have only 60 days to find a new job if fired or they'll be deported. companies can also reset the green card process in retaliation if they do leave.

I'm radically pro-immigrant. I want the smartest people from around the world to come work here. I want to unshackle them from their corporate sponsors. the current system is unfair to immigrants (who are bound like serfs to their workplace) and to citizens (who lose jobs because corporations prefer serfs.)
by dghlsakjg | 2025-06-17 21:41:36+00:00
Spotify deals with degraded connections absolutely horrendously (on iOs anyway).

If I have a podcast already downloaded, but I am on an iffy connection, Spotify will block me from getting to that podcast view while it tries to load the podcast view from the web instead of using downloaded data.

I frequently put my phone in airplane mode to force spotify into offline mode to get content to play.
by ethbr1 | 2025-06-17 21:41:53+00:00
There was a submission a few months ago that boiled down to 'AI will force us to reevaluate our human in the loop decision points.'

Which I expect will be the gist of management consulting reports for the next decade.

If human decision-makers become the bottleneck... eventually that will be reengineered.

I'm fascinated to imagine what change control will need to look like in a majority-AI scenario. Expect there will be a lot more focus on TDD.
by Ario5 | 2025-06-17 21:41:56+00:00
your unsourced numbers for roads are wrong and at best representative of a rural area single lane mile not a 4 lane highway. Here are some better numbers for different places and types of roads:

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/23cpr/appendixa.cfm (scroll down a little ways)

so your reference for freeway is likely using a single lane number not the actual cost of a 4 lane high way which would be 12 - 80 million per mile.
by bsder | 2025-06-17 21:42:02+00:00
> If you like Xorg, use Xorg. If you like Wayland, use Wayland. If you're not happy about an issue, contribute to it.

The problem is that RedHat nee IBM are attempting to force everybody onto Wayland by dropping X11 support. They already tried once and the outcry was so huge that they had to back off saying they would try again next version.

This is kind of a rock and a hard place. The Wayland developers don't want to support X11 but neither does anybody else. Wayland is fundamentally broken in many ways down at the architectural level, but the sunk cost fallacy keeps them working on it.

Everybody forgets that Wayland predates Vulkan. A "real" replacement for X11/Wayland probably needs to restart from "Vulkan support is the base layer" and build up from there.
by Groxx | 2025-06-17 21:43:38+00:00
Human languages have less "rules" and more "patterns that improve communication", and they constantly change. And even languages with like legitimate rules-bodies overseeing it still see variation in normal use.

Prescriptivism is an option of course, but it's inherently futile to some degree. Unleſſ you intend to maintain thiſ for all time, and even then your choice of what to canonicalize iſ pretty arbitrary outside of conlangſ (ſo maybe you have a chance with Eſperanto)
by nine_k | 2025-06-17 21:44:00+00:00
The thing is that the population of Iran is not being bombed, except a few high-ranking military personnel. It's the nuclear facilities, air defense sites, and some electrical power facilities that have been bombed.

A number of meetings / manifestations of expatriate Iranians happened around the world, supporting the Israeli actions. The current regime earned no love from most of the population, it seems; massive anti-government protests happened in Iran for last few years, sometimes lasting for months.

If there is no civil war and no actual troops on the ground, the regime may still be unstable enough, its pillars like IRGC being paper tigers, and willing to defect. It can still fall. An example: the Soviet regime fell in 1991 within a week, basically without any war, and the USSR split into its formal constituent republics, most of which stayed peaceful since then. Another example: the Portuguese regime fell within a week in 1974, with zero shots fired.
by prmoustache | 2025-06-17 21:44:28+00:00
There is the parent's group for the school mentionnned above, my cycling club to discuss the upcoming rides/events and share pics (replace cycling with any kind of hobby you can think of), we have a family group chat with my parents and siblings, which are leaving in a different country as mine, an extended family in law group chat, comprised mostly of people living in another continent. At a former job we had a group chat that was meant to discuss anything not related to work, arrange out of office meetups. It sporadically served to share valuable information relative to work when there has been natural disaster so that people don't try to reach the office and stay at home. Much quicker than calling all employees.

Additionally whenever there is a social event a group chat is created so that people can discuss the organization, and after the event share their sentiments, pictures, videos.

It is never mandatory to participates in all those group chats but a lot of info go through them and they are usually useful. And the family group chats are great when you only get the chance to meet them more than a couple times a year.
by myself248 | 2025-06-17 21:44:38+00:00
Because when I eat a hamburger, there isn't a whole restaurant inside it.

Nothing about the food suggests its function. And the function varies, it might be a whole rabbit-warren of menus and options. It might be a bunch of actions. It might just be one last item that wouldn't fit on the screen. It's an awful graphic for an awful concept. "We ran out of UI ideas so we just shoveled what was left into this junk drawer" is no way to go through life.
by ethbr1 | 2025-06-17 21:44:40+00:00
I mean, labor is a significant component of prices for goods.

But I expect the increasing income stratification of the 10s+ is a harbinger that we're running out of high-paying jobs for the number of people who are qualified for them.

And the window is closing for countries to agree to something like a structural tax on AI with benefits going to society to address the ills.

Absent that: further stratification, more employee-less businesses, and not a great future
by tech_ken | 2025-06-17 21:45:23+00:00
> If this really worked, you'd be making billions on the stock market

That's kind of a weird thing to say given that the market cap for quantitative finance is well over a billion dollars, and this product clearly seems to be targeting that sector (plus others) as a B2B service provider. Do you think that all those quantitative trading firms are using something other than time-series analytics?

Also, setting aside the issue of whether time-series forecasting is valuable for stock-market trading, it seems like the value add of this product isn't necessarily the improved accuracy of the forecasts, but rather the streamlined ETL -> Feature Engineering -> Model Design process. For most firms (either in quantitative finance or elsewhere) that's the work of a small dedicated team of highly-trained specialists. This seems like it has the potential to greatly reduce the labor requirements for such an organization without a concomitant loss of product quality.
by shadowgovt | 2025-06-17 21:45:30+00:00
Being at a firm where the decision to use C++ was made, the thought process went something like this:

"We're going to need to fit parts of this into very constrained architectures."

"Right, so we need a language that compiles directly to machine code with no runtime interpretation."

"Which one should we use?"

"What about Rust?"

"I know zero Rust developers."

"What about C++?"

"I know twenty C++ developers and am confident we can hire three of them tomorrow."

The calculus at the corporate level really isn't more complicated than that. And the thing about twenty C++ developers is that they're very good at using the tools to stamp the undefined behavior out of the system because they've been doing it their entire careers.
by herval | 2025-06-17 21:45:58+00:00
I never worked at a place where not having a backlog was an issue. Quite the opposite in fact - there’s always infinite backlogs of stuff. Every single time I’ve seen organizations being slow to decide anything, it was due to the human tendency to stretch their tasks to occupy as much time as possible. Planning meetings are “the work” for a legion of people (even though they also know they’re mostly pointless). Untangling dependencies is harder when it involves approvals of other humans (particularly fun as multiple people are “the tech lead”, are all objectively wrong but unable to see how they’re simply getting in the way).

I don’t think LLMs are particularly smart, or capable of, or will definitely replace humans at anything, or if they’ll lead to better work. But I can already tell that their inherent lack of an ego DO accelerate things at enterprises, for the simple reason that the self-imposed roadblocks above stop happening
by Analemma_ | 2025-06-17 21:46:11+00:00
For now the solution is proof-of-work systems like Anubis combined with cookie-based rate limiting: you get throttled if your session cookie indicates you scraped here before, and if you throw the cookie out you get the POW challenge again. I don't know how long this will continue to work, but for my site at least it seems to be holding back the deluge, for the moment.
by IshKebab | 2025-06-17 21:46:30+00:00
Since you're being downvoted I just wanted to say I agree. I'm sure it was cathartic to write but it's not a good way to actually communicate.

Also like a lot of programming advice it isn't actually that useful. Advice like "avoid complexity" sounds like it is good advice, but it isn't good advice. Of course you should avoid complexity. Telling people to do that is about as useful as telling people to "be more confident".

We mostly learn to avoid complexity through trial and error - working on complex and simple systems, seeing the pitfalls, specific techniques to avoid complexity, what specific complexity is bad, etc. Because not all complexity is bad. You want simplicity? Better trade in you Zen 4 and buy a Cortex M0. And I hope you aren't running a modern OS on it.

Ok "avoid unnecessary complexity"? Great how exactly do you know what's unnecessary? Years of experience that's how. Nothing you can distill to a gimmicky essay.
by lucgommans | 2025-06-17 21:46:48+00:00
> It’s been difficult to remove [old JPEG] from its perch. [...] the formats AVIF and HEIC, each developed by standards bodies, have largely outpaced [JPEG]

I'm currently sticking to JPEG because, last time I tried, JPEG came out as the best format. Referencing my memory at https://chaos.social/@luc/113615076328300784

- JPEG has two advantages on slow connections: the dimensions are either stored up front so the layout doesn't jump, or maybe the renderer is better; and it loads a less-sharp version first and progressively gets sharper

- JPEG was way faster when compressing and decompressing

- on the particular photo I wanted to optimise in this instance, JPEG was also simply the best quality for a given filesize which really surprised me after 32 years of potential innovation

Regarding AVIF, my n=1 experience was that it "makes smooth gradients where jpeg degrades to blotchy pixels, but at decent quality levels, jpeg preserves the grain that makes the photo look real". Gradients instead of ugliness at really small sizes can be perfect for your use-case, but note that it's also ~80 times slower at compression (80s vs. <1s)

JpegXL isn't widely in browsers yet so I couldn't use it

> These days, the [JPEG] format is similar to MP3

The difference with mp3 is that Opus is either a bit better or much better, but it's always noticeably better.

You can save ~half the storage space. For speech (audio books) I use 40kbps, and for music maybe 128kbps which is probably overkill. And I delete the originals without even checking anymore if it really sounds the same, I noticed that I simply can't tell the original apart in a blind test, no matter what expensive headset setup I try

TFA attributes it to a simple "they were first" advantage, but I think this is why "Why JPEGs still rule the web": no file format is better than JPEG in the same way as Opus is better than MP3; in that you don't have to think about it anymore and it's always a win in either filesize or quality

That said, Opus is also annoyingly hard to get into people's minds, but I've done it and you also see major platforms from compress-once-serve-continuously video (e.g. Youtube) to VoIP (e.g. Whatsapp) switching over for all their audio applications
by idopmstuff | 2025-06-17 21:47:08+00:00
Good for her - I'm just astounded that I didn't know any of this. Even the fact that generics only have to be within something like 20% of the active ingredient of the non-generic was surprising to me; I thought they were basically identical.

But the quality of manufacturing stuff is just unbelievable. You take for granted that our medications are highly regulated and it turns out to not be remotely true...
by dgb23 | 2025-06-17 21:47:31+00:00
I don't work in typical OO codebases, so I wasn't aware of what the visitor pattern even is. But there's an _excellent_ book about building an interpreter (and vm) "crafting interpreters". It has a section where it uses the visitor pattern.

https://craftinginterpreters.com/representing-code.html#the-...

I remember reading through it and not understanding why it had to be this complicated and then just used a tagged union instead.

Maybe I'm too stupid for OO. But I think that's kind of the point of the grug article as well. Why burden ourselves with indirection and complexity when there's a more straight forward way?
by thejarren | 2025-06-17 21:47:34+00:00
Yes it is, a few businesses such as Walgreens are moving to replace it over the next few years.

https://www.pca.state.mn.us/business-with-us/bpa-and-bps-in-...

https://www.pca.state.mn.us/business-with-us/bpa-and-bps-in-...

https://www.pca.state.mn.us/business-with-us/bpa-and-bps-in-...
by leptons | 2025-06-17 21:48:04+00:00
>By looking at the pages it looked at and deciding for yourself, just like you would with a web search you invoked yourself.

Or you could just cut out the middleman(bot) and just do the search yourself, since you're going to have to anyway to verify what the "AI" wrote. It's just all so stupid that society is rushing towards this iffy-at-best technology when we still need to do the same work anyway to verify it isn't bullshitting us. Ugh, I hate this timeline.
by Analemma_ | 2025-06-17 21:48:29+00:00
I'm not sure that's true. As hardware gets cheaper, you're going to see more and more people wanting to build+deploy their own personal LLMs to avoid the guardrails/censorship (or just the cost) of the commercial ones, and that means scraping the internet themselves. I suspect the amount of scraping that's coming from individuals or small projects is going to increase dramatically in the months/years to come.
by dtagames | 2025-06-17 21:48:38+00:00
I'm a serial founder, YC SUS graduate, and YC applicant and I've been ghosted by every single company that posts on WaaS.

I think it's either just for appearances or in hopes of luring some miracle candidate. But would those people be applying via WaaS? Seems unlikely.

Besides, what startup has money to add headcount right away? Certainly not on what you get from YC.
by kccqzy | 2025-06-17 21:48:44+00:00
Python is an acceptable though not perfect substrate for developing embedded DSLs. It's dynamic enough that you can do a lot of things. Besides operator overloading which is commonly used in C++ for eDSLs, you can even write decorators that take the AST, completely regenerate new code via LLVM or something similar. This is the approach used by numba for JIT for example.

In the end I think mentioning Python is a red herring. You can produce an eDSL in Python that's not in LLM training data so difficult for LLMs to grok, and yet still perfectly valid Python. The deeper issue here is that even if you use Python, LLMs are restricting people to use a small subset of what Python is even capable of.
Job searching and torrent-related homelab infra
by McAlpine5892 | 2025-06-17 21:49:12+00:00
Hi:

I keep a homelab with a good bit of deploy infra that I'm quite proud of. However, there's a good bit of configuration around torrent-related activities. The technical side can be fairly interesting to talk about in relations to automation, atomic moves, VPN handling, etc.

There is other code but it's frankly not as interesting. Should this not be associated with the same profile given to job applications?
by kibwen | 2025-06-17 21:49:12+00:00
People often use the analogy of LLMs being to high-level languages what compilers were for assembly languages, and despite being a terrible analogy there's no guarantee it won't eventually be largely true in practice. And if it does come true, consider how the advent of the compiler completely eliminated any incentive to improve the ergonomics or usability of assembly code, which has been and continues to be absolute crap, because who cares? That could be the grim future for high-level languages; this may be the end of the line.
by tootie | 2025-06-17 21:49:21+00:00
Revoking a visa due to politically speech is a violation of the first amendment. It's leverage executive authority explicitly to promote the administrations current preferred foreign policy. He committed no crime and made no threats to any government or person. Pure thought crime. His particular thought, that Israel is very badly mistreating Palestinians and that they should stop immediately, is one shared by many millions of Americans including myself.

If government is permitted to set any policy of any kind specifically to police the speech of any person of any status, then they can do it to everyone for everything. And it's the same for their denial of due process to other people they have deported.

And furthermore, Khalil had a green card and is married to a US citizen. Not a student visa.
by shakna | 2025-06-17 21:50:23+00:00
In my experience, its harder to review.

It'll dump you three classes and a thousand lines of code, where it should use a simple for loop to iterate.

The code Claude, Gemini and Cursor produces still is not enough to pass half-decent quality checks. If you're in "compile=ship", sure.

If you care about performance, or security, or maintainability, no. It's wasting your time, and the review team's time.
by rurp | 2025-06-17 21:50:43+00:00
I'm really surprised there isn't more pushback to the program since it has aspects that piss off post political sides. Maybe it's just too wonky for mainstream political coverage. A system of indentured servants really is the best description, the potential for abuse is both obvious and widespread. For the other side of course they can jobs from Americans in many cases. Big tech companies love hiring people they can abuse, especially if they can also pay them less than local hires.
by bitpush | 2025-06-17 21:50:45+00:00
In HN's opinion, what should a company do when users are actively trying to subvert it from making money?

Imagine a situation where someone walks into Apple Store to explicitly steal iPhones. Is Apple justfied in preventing the person from entering? If you think "steal" is a bridge too far, lets say someone walks into Apple Store with an expectation to chat with the employees, goof around with display units, preventing legitimate customers from accessing them - will the company be justified in preventing that behavior?