MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Ask-human-mcp – zero-config human-in-loop hatch to stop hallucinations
by echollama | 2025-06-05 22:57:16+00:00
While building my startup i kept running into the issue where ai agents in cursor create endpoints or code that shouldn't exist, hallucinates strings, or just don't understand the code.

ask-human-mcp pauses your agent whenever it’s stuck, logs a question into ask_human.md in your root directory with answer: PENDING, and then resumes as soon as you fill in the correct answer.

the pain:

your agent screams out an endpoint that never existed it makes confident assumptions and you spend hours debugging false leads

the fix:

ask-human-mcp gives your agent an escape hatch. when it’s unsure, it calls ask_human(), writes a question into ask_human.md, and waits. you swap answer: PENDING for the real answer and it keeps going.

some features:

- zero config: pip install ask-human-mcp + one line in .cursor/mcp.json → boom, you’re live - cross-platform: works on macOS, Linux, and Windows—no extra servers or webhooks. - markdown Q\&A: agent calls await ask_human(), question lands in ask_human.md with answer: PENDING. you write the answer, agent picks back up - file locking & rotation: prevents corrupt files, limits pending questions, auto-rotates when ask_human.md hits ~50 MB

the quickstart

pip install ask-human-mcp ask-human-mcp --help

add to .cursor/mcp.json and restart: { "mcpServers": { "ask-human": { "command": "ask-human-mcp" } } }

now any call like:

answer = await ask_human( "which auth endpoint do we use?", "building login form in auth.js" )

creates:

### Q8c4f1e2a ts: 2025-01-15 14:30 q: which auth endpoint do we use? ctx: building login form in auth.js answer: PENDING

just replace answer: PENDING with the real endpoint (e.g., `POST /api/v2/auth/login`) and your agent continues.

link:

github -> https://github.com/Masony817/ask-human-mcp

feedback:

I'm Mason a 19yo solo-founder at Kallro. Happy to hear any bugs, feature requests, or weird edge cases you uncover - drop a comment or open an issue! buy me a coffee -> coff.ee/masonyarbrough
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-06-05 22:58:40+00:00
"Starve now"? If you're talking about the US, get real.

Essentially nobody is starving in the US for lack of calories (unless it's a case of mental illness or something similar). In fact, in the US, usually the opposite is true. From the Wikipedia page on food insecurity in the US:

> Reliance on food banks has led to a rise in obesity and diabetes within the food insecure community. Many foods in food banks are highly processed and low in nutritional value leading to further health effects. One study showed 33% of American households visiting food pantries had diabetes.
by bigyabai | 2025-06-05 22:59:52+00:00
In this case, the "ice cream" is a zero-margin utility. It can be reproduced infinitely without incurring extra costs beyond what Kroger deems sufficient. The act of installing an app on iOS can't even be compared to Kroger charging money for you to drink out of their hose in the back of the store. Software is simply not a physical commodity, apps like Safari are proof that data still flows freely.

In a fair universe people would stop going to this store and visit other places with lower margins. But Apple conveniently took steps to prevent you from leaving their shop, so they can charge whatever they consider a fair price. You cannot rationally defend this, jurisdictions worldwide are suing Apple for this, because it's a blatant racket. It is indefensible.
by walleeee | 2025-06-05 23:00:10+00:00
Energy and materials. In particular, discovery and exploitation of hydrocarbons changed the entire trajectory of human technology development.

It is very interesting to wonder if we may have seen "convergent evolution" towards certain technologies with different physical circumstances, but I think it's safe to say our species' (and planet's) future is forever altered by the massive biogeochemical battery, trickle-charged over eons, which we are discharging as rapidly as possible.
by cherry_tree | 2025-06-05 23:00:11+00:00
>Schadenfreude is the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures, pain, suffering, or humiliation of another. It is a loanword from German. Schadenfreude has been detected in children as young as 24 months and may be an important social emotion establishing "inequity aversion".[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude
by tomnipotent | 2025-06-05 23:01:19+00:00
> Should they hand it over just because they have it?

Not unless LEO sues OpenAI while it's preserving data from the first discovery, otherwise they cannot be compelled to give up data. Nor are they allowed to violate their TOS and use the data outside of retention, despite the FUD you want to spread about it.

> Having the data means it's possible

No, it doesn't. That's not how any of this works.
by atombender | 2025-06-05 23:01:47+00:00
I'm looking for a new logging solution to replace Kibana. I have very good experience with ClickHouse, and HyperDX looks like a decent UI for it.

I'm primarily interested in logs, though, and the existing log shipping pipeline is around Vector on Kubernetes. Admittedly Vector has an OTel sink in beta, but I'm curious if that's the best/fastest way to ship logs, especially given that the original data comes out of apps as plain JSON rather than OTel.

The current system is processing several TB/day and needs fairly serious throughput to keep up.
by fallinditch | 2025-06-05 23:02:03+00:00
As a Windsurf user I was happy with Claude 3.7 but then switched to Google Gemini 2.5 when Claude started glitching on a particularly large file. It's a bummer that 3.7 has gone from Windsurf - I considered cancelling my Windsurf subscription, but decided not to because it is still good value for money.
by minitech | 2025-06-05 23:02:51+00:00
We should implement mechanisms that make it hard and obvious to do unsafe things and easy to do safe things, in all kinds of computers; even as an expert user, I don’t want to have to think about my text editor’s color scheme being able to access my bank. Yes, this necessarily involves a barrier to installing apps with certain privileges, and it should be high enough in software targeted at non-expert users to provide them with protection against scams. No, we obviously shouldn’t make it illegal for a user to do what they want, and nobody has even come close to proposing that here. That’s a straw man.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-06-05 23:04:08+00:00
Super cool.

Tangent: I know this is communications related — but I was wondering today (just read something about some new FRB's) if radio astronomy, of a kind, could be something an amateur could deep dive into and actually contribute to.

I recall a project that allowed you to tune into long radio emissions from the sun — perhaps keep tabs on the solar weather?

(And stupid me thought astronomy was more or less headed for stagnancy decades ago.)
by DavidPiper | 2025-06-05 23:04:22+00:00
Not sure if you're serious, but you made me laugh, so have an upvote.

I'm one of those people who went pretty hard into the whole "Second Brain" movement (using Apple Notes first, then Obsidian).

~6000 notes later and I've started finding the whole thing overwhelming and pointless at the same time. The vast majority of notes I have don't need to be noted down. At most they could have been a journal entry rather than a separate, curated piece.

Usually I hear something like "excessive noting means you're less likely to try to commit something to memory because you know it's there when you need it". (This is touted as an advantage of the Second Brain concept, incidentally.)

But I've actually found something different as well: excessive noting means you're actively engaging with significantly more information, and most of it is designed to be (or at least should be considered) ephemeral. Noting so much of it down is effectively the digital equivalent of hoarding junk, and the mental/memory repercussions are similar to the physical repercussions of hoarding actual junk.
by vaxman | 2025-06-05 23:05:56+00:00
The guy who invented NodeJS (a "fashionable" giant hack) got up and said he regretted it and now uses Go. Did that stop anyone from running up the tech debt with NodeJS? After all, "everyone is doing it!" So easy to start banging out JavaScript...

At the other extreme you have Swift which is not Good (as opposed to no good) until V5 which is now obsoleted by V6. Do we all know how screwed Apple is when it comes to LLM training coverage of Swift 5 or 6? Short of their own codebase (and even then), where are they going to get enough training data to help all the Vibe Coders and novices? Could take years to resolve this.

Weird future, eh? So FORTH may not be "fashionable" but it is hella fun and very good in a number of dimensions. With the right LLM interfaces (which love large libraries of concise word-like primitives), world domination is assured.
by BugsJustFindMe | 2025-06-05 23:07:38+00:00
I read the description of what this is (nb. maybe move that to the top instead of the middle of the page?), and I don't think I understand what problem it solves.

> Reduced interruptions: Automatically handles permission dialogs based on configurable rules

Why? Claude Code already gives you the option to accept requests permanently going forward. The cost of configuring rules is worse than the cost of just telling Claude Code "yes and you don't need to ask again".

I'd like to see a few motivating user stories, tbh.
by giantrobot | 2025-06-05 23:07:48+00:00
Something else PURLs don't capture well for native libraries is any sort of build configuration. I don't know of any clear way in a PURL to describe a say Debian package built from a src package with a custom set of compiler options.

For Java and interpreted language packages the "build" configuration is less important or non-existent. For compiled packages the build environment is important.

It seems the only way is to use a custom namespace and abuse the qualifiers but then you've got a non-canonical PURL and its utility in things like SBOMs is limited.
by tunesmith | 2025-06-05 23:08:00+00:00
That's exactly the right level of pedantry. ;-) Right, I'd argue all of that is in the human ingenuity category.

But in contrast, if we knew that some invention like grinding lenses or whatever was completely impossible until some meteor or fungus hit planet Earth in year N and introduced a new element we were able to use, then that's an external factor.

I suppose there more pedantry is possible, like we could have invented space travel meteor-hopping tech by that point and discovered the "new element" for ourselves, but that's probably the wrong level of pedantry.

I think the closest practical answer is probably more along the lines of population density, and arguing that certain inventions would not be created until the density was enough to create a problem justifying its existence.
by mikeshi42 | 2025-06-05 23:09:06+00:00
Echoing the comment below, I guess one obvious thing is that we are a team at ClickHouse and an official first-party product on top. That translates into:

- We're flexible on top of any ClickHouse instance, you can use virtually any schema in ClickHouse and things will still work. Custom schemas are pretty important for either tuned high performance or once you're at a scale like Anthropic. This makes it also incredibly easy to get started (especially if you already have data in ClickHouse). - The above also means you don't need to buy into OTel. I love OTel but some companies choose to use Vector, Cribl, S3, a custom writing script, etc for good reasons. All of that is supported natively due to the various ClickHouse integrations, and naturally means you can use ClickStack/HyperDX in that scenario as well. - We also have some cool tools around wrangling telemetry at scale, from Event Deltas (high cardinality correlation between slow spans and normal spans to root cause issues) to Event Patterns (clustering similar logs or spans together automatically with ML) - all of these help users dive into their data in easier ways than just searching & charting. - We also have session replay capability - to truly unify everything from click to infra metrics.

We're built to work at the 100PB+ scale we run internally here for monitoring ClickHouse Cloud, but flexible enough to pin point specific user issues that get brought up once in a support case in an end-to-end manner.

There's probably a lot more I'm missing. Ultimately from a product philosophy standpoint, we aren't big believers in the "3 pillars" concept, which tends to manifest as 3 silos/tabs for "logs", "metrics", "traces" (this isn't just Signoz - but across the industry). I'm a big believer that we're building tools to unify and centralize signals/clues in one place and giving the right datapoint at the right time to the engineer. During an incident I just think about what's the next clue I can get to root cause an issue, not if I'm in the logging product or the tracing product.
by BugsJustFindMe | 2025-06-05 23:11:14+00:00
I was also once the molecules from the outgassing of Napoleon's corpse and the cheesecake my dad had for dinner, and burying Napoleon differently or my dad being on a diet might have caused someone else to be born instead of me, but it's curious that I don't see us debating weight loss and the burial practices of exiled monarchs. Maybe causal chains of branching paths and being grown from cells aren't actually useful metrics for being "me" after all.

> Third, destroying an embryo means you ceased to exist, not that you never existed like the original person I responded to said.

Something that eventually became me ceased to exist. It wasn't anywhere close to being me yet, just a precursor, like Napoleon's chest hair.
by kulahan | 2025-06-05 23:11:21+00:00
I found this on Wikipedia, but tldr they taste test it.

> Successful predation of the rough-skinned newt by the common garter snake is made possible by the ability of individuals in a common garter snake population to gauge whether the newt's level of toxin is too high to feed on. T. sirtalis assays toxin levels of the rough-skinned newt and decides whether or not the levels are manageable by partially swallowing the newt, and either swallowing or releasing the newt.
by mikeshi42 | 2025-06-05 23:11:39+00:00
Luckily ClickHouse and serious throughput are pretty synonymous. Internally we're at 100+PB of telemetry stored in our own monitoring system.

Vector supports directly writing into ClickHouse - several companies use this at scale (iirc Anthropic does exactly this, they spoke about this recently at our user conference).

Please give it a try and let us know how it goes! Happy to help :)
by hirako2000 | 2025-06-05 23:12:09+00:00
We are trading tokens and mental health for time?

I used Cursor well over a year ago. It gave me a headache. It was very immature. Used cursor more recently: the headache intensity increased. It's not cursor it is the senseless loops hoping for the LLM to spit out something somewhat correct. Revisiting the prompt. Trying to become an elite in language protocols because we need that machine to understand us.

Leaving aside the headache, its side effects. It isn't clear we haven't already maxed out on the productivity tools efficiency. Auto complete. Indexed and searchable doc a second screen rather than having to turn the pages of some reference book. Etc etc.

I'm convinced at this stage that we've already started to trade too far. So far beyond the optimal balance that these aren't diminishing returns. It is absolute diminishing.

Engineers need to spend more time thinking.

I'm convinced that engineers, if they were to chose, would throw this thing out and make space for more drawing boards, would use a 5 minute Solitaire break every 1h. Or take a walk.

For some reason the constant pressure to go faster eventually makes its mark.

It feels right to see thousands of lines of code written up by this thing. It feels aligned with the inadequate way we've been measured.

Anyway. It can get expensive and this is by design.
by minitech | 2025-06-05 23:13:27+00:00
> Old computers, before sandboxing and Windows defender and real-time protection, were more secure, because people were less likely to plug their bank account information, social security number, birth date, and home address into them.

So they weren’t actually more secure – they were less secure and less useful (setting aside the questionable historical accuracy of where popular online banking sits in the timeline relative to OS security measures in that claim). Maybe if we relax the made up constraint that a change must create 100% foolproof security, we can have a more nuanced discussion about ways to improve security.
by eru | 2025-06-05 23:13:36+00:00
> the GFC would like to chat about that.

They didn't take their own advice, that they previously gave to the Japanese central bank in the 1990s. Instead, they started paying interest on excess reserves to neuter their own buying.

> Inflation never took hold no matter what they tried.

They tried approximately nothing. As I said, if you found a way to keep printing money without raising inflation, that's actually an opportunity, not a problem: just keep printing money and gradually buy the rest of the world for a bit of paper and ink. (Well in reality, it's only database entries. Which are even cheaper.)

If they can't create inflation, they should go and take lessons from Argentina, Turkey or Zimbabwe.

> the Feds can never be out of assets, as they just print more.

The Fed prints liabilities, not assets. Domestic money is a liability for the Fed. Assets are the stuff they bought with the money, like eg bonds or gold.
by XorNot | 2025-06-05 23:14:17+00:00
But that proves the point: coincident discovery implies that ingenuity was far less important than environment. There are smart people everywhere, what there is not is the prior knowledge or resources to turn that into new discoveries.

Notably we see way more coincident discovery after the printing press and more distant trade became common place (and centers of trade usually originated innovations wherever they happened).
by mikebannister | 2025-06-05 23:14:27+00:00
> Why?

I have a lot of different projects, scenarios, and edge cases where it's helpful to me.

I think you will find that if you're interactive mode there will always be some dialogs to dismiss, especially if you're jumping around a lot of different projects, etc. So for me the goals are somewhere at the intersection of the interactive mode and unattended operation.

It depends what your goals are for sure. TBH I use it mostly in full yolo mode. But toolsets are much more useful for me. I can create groups of mcps and pre-allowed permissions and reuse that "preset". I have different types of projects that I use different toolsets for each.

But yeah, I hear you. This is pretty niche and might solve problems that only I care about.
by profsummergig | 2025-06-05 23:14:40+00:00
This is an Ayn Rand novel happening in real time. As an enjoyer of Ayn Rand, I'm feeling tingly.

Remember: if he so wants, Musk can get access to all the private messages that MAGA people DM'ed each other on X (well into the past).

A lot of vanity bonfires can happen.
by mikeshi42 | 2025-06-05 23:15:50+00:00
Nope! We're virtually schema agnostic, you can map your custom schema to observability concepts (ex. the SQL expression for TraceID, either a column or a full function/expression will work).

We don't have any lock in to our ingestion pipeline or schema. Of course we optimize a lot for the OTel path, but it works perfectly fine without it too.
by GeoAtreides | 2025-06-05 23:17:08+00:00
I have running for years both SCD30 and SCD41, and they're very much in-sync, although the technology is different. SCD41 is very sensitive to voltage, so you need to keep it as stable as possible. SCD30 is NDIR, so it doesn't need calibration (mostly...).

For VOC also run SEN55, BME680 with BSEC 2.0 and BME688 with BSEC 2.6, they mostly agree, with the SEN55 being more sensitive to 'chemicals' (think industrial chemicals vs living entities chemicals), and BME688 more 'agressive/sensitive' to changes than BME680.
by eru | 2025-06-05 23:17:30+00:00
Why do you care so much about 'regressive'?

Yes, only an income tax cares about your income. Eg a capital gains tax also doesn't care about your income.

So you are also arguing conversely that giving landowners some free gifts will lead to a drop in rents? Colour me skeptical.

Prices are set by demand and supply. For a cost to be passed on, supply must shrink.

There's nothing in the LVT that would cause supply to shrink.
by ookblah | 2025-06-05 23:17:39+00:00
there was literally a post a few days ago where someone from cloudflare or fly (can't remember) released a new feature built with AI (albeit heavily supervised) and answered q's along the way about it.

it's funny because what i'd also like to see is people who are skeptics make a video as well since sometimes i also have the opposite suspicion. i get a lot of the criticism, but i don't get the "it produces pure garbage" type ones.
by pledess | 2025-06-05 23:18:05+00:00
Reformulating this slightly:

Yesterday, you saw the first 30-minute segment. Today, you arrive at the multiplex, and are informed that the three 30-minute segments (1, 2, 3) are starting shortly on screens A, B, and C. However, you are not told the mapping of segment to screen. You are asked to select a screen, and choose screen B. You are then informed about the status of either screen A or screen C: that status may be that it will play segment 1 (from your perspective: a duplicate) or that it will play segment 3 (from your perspective: out of order). Finally, you are asked whether you will be watching screen B, or the other, unrevealed screen. (If you don't actually watch your final choice, you're banned from the multiplex forever.)

Is this harder (e.g., not solvable at all) compared to the Monty Hall problem, because segment 1 is merely an annoyance, but segment 3 is a spoiler (permanently impacting your enjoyment of the movie)?
by the_af | 2025-06-05 23:18:31+00:00
> Jewish people have no moral high ground here.

You did say "Jewish people" instead of "many Israelis". This is not the same. I'm of Jewish heritage and I strongly disagree with Israel's foreign policy and treatment of Palestinians.

Going back to your original question, it's ironic that a Jewish person is "committed to race science" (to quote the original comment) because "race science" was used by the nazis to justify the Holocaust; one would think Jewish people would be particularly wary of anyone using "race science" as an argument for anything.

You seem to imply it's not ironic because of Israeli treatment of Gaza and Palestinians in general, but consider this: that's also ironic, for the same reason.
by asgraham | 2025-06-05 23:19:22+00:00
What a wild thing to comment.

a) “professional” writ large often encompasses academic research, even though it’s also often specifically used in contrast. Language is weird like that. Former and current academics like to have a term for all the stuff we’ve been paid to do, and we usually default to “professional experience” (though current academics do usually say “research experience” because you’re right that professional has the default connotation of corporate employment).

b) the project seems to have been over 2000 lines of APL. That’s not the “small” student project you’re implying, in any language, and in APL that’s quite substantial.
by mikebannister | 2025-06-05 23:20:04+00:00
If you like the idea but they aren't working the way you'd like let me know. They aren't very "well baked" but I'll dump some time into improving at some point. If you have pain points or feedback I'll be happy to consider it.

BTW, I also intend to add some way to send push notifications of some sort. I need to be reminded when Claude is done hustling and and it's time to leave the comfort of my iced coffee on the patio for a keyboard and glowing terminal screen.