MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Apple Health MCP Server
by _neil | 2025-07-23 17:23:23+00:00
Hey HN,

This is an MCP server to chat with Apple Health data. I built it because I'm working on (yet another) personal trainer tool that keeps track of my workout goals, etc. and does scheduling for me. Part of that is weekly check-ins. I thought pairing those check-ins with sensor data could be useful, so here we are.

It seems there isn't a way to automate access to Apple Health data, so this relies on an iOS app that can quickly/easily export key data to CSV. So the process at the moment is to export the data every Sunday before doing a check-in. More steps than I'd like, but in practice isn't a big lift.

Under the hood this is mostly a thin wrapper around duckdb.

There's a video of it in action here: https://x.com/realtron/status/1947710791521591514
by autoexec | 2025-07-23 17:24:13+00:00
1. time spent in front of screen means you aren't in a face to face interaction with someone, but the same can be said of books. When many people still connected to a local BBS it was another way to get to know people around you and meetups were common.

2 & 6 & 7. access to airlines (and travel in general) was a net positive for meeting new people. Suddenly people could meet and get to know far more people than the handful of folks in the town they grew up in. Travel is probably on the best ways to meet new people and gain relationships and being able to pack up and move to where your new friends/love interests are is a good thing while communication tech lets you keep in touch with people who are in different cities/states/countries and maintain those relationships

3 & 4. People have to depend more on others to do their farming for them, but if you're working the fields you can't be out meeting real people face to face either. You're much more likely to have a social encounter at a grocery store than a grain silo. the hours you aren't spending growing your own food means you have more time to be with the people you love

5. independence is good and learning new skills means going out to new places to practice them or for supplies and equipment where you can meet other people with similar interests. It's the parasocial aspect of youtube that's most harmful.
by xxmarkuski | 2025-07-23 17:24:23+00:00
> This caps capacity and reliability.

Karlsruhe: The local operators have severe quality issues, in part due to this concept. There are like four points in the city where issues impact the whole network. The rolling stock is very bad compared to the other regional trains running in Baden-Württemberg (no/bad ac, flaky internet, no sockets, bad seating). The trains have way too little capacity, I’ve seen incidents, where they run three coaches (which they don’t do often, they are too long to enter the city), where people could not get in anymore. Some of the stations in the surrounding area are absolutely mental (Durmersheim for example), you have to walk over rails where ICEs and cargo goes through. Some trains are split or merged when leaving or entering the city, but it always causes delays. When trains can’t use the heavy metal rails and thus not leave the city due to ICEs getting priority, a lot of inner city traffic can be affected. The cooperation between the different infrastructure operators is also a source of problems.

Do not take Karlsruhe uncritically as an example where this model works well, yeah sure average numbers make it look good, but the reliability is complete ass. KVV always manages to surprise me on how bad it gets.
by alephnerd | 2025-07-23 17:24:34+00:00
> super toxic work culture

Not as bad as it was 20 years ago - which most of the stereotypes continue to perpetuate.

Hours worked are roughly comparable between the Scandinavian 4 and Japan [3]

Israel and Korea are the new Japan

> economic stagnation

Not much more different from Sweden or Finland, or Denmark+Norway once you exclude high value but low employment industries like biopharma and oil respectively.

Japanese GDP growth rates, interest rates, TFR, and median incomes largely converge with Northern Europe (or more like, Northern Europe converged with Japan by the 2000s).

Edit: can't reply to OP

Household disposable income is roughly comparable between DK and JP [0]

GDP growth rate is roughly comparable between DK and JP [1]

The only difference between DK and JP is age [2], but Denmark's demographics align with Japan's from 10 years ago, and given that Denmark's economic metrics have already aligned with Japan, it's safe to say that what Japan is today is what Denmark will converge to within the next 5-10 years.

If Japan is collapsing, then so is the rest of Northern Europe. If Northern Europe is booming, then so is Japan.

[0] - https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/household-disposable...

[1] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locat...

[2] - https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/median-age/coun...

[3] - https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/hours-worked.html?oe...
by louthy | 2025-07-23 17:24:34+00:00
Who uses plugins? ;)

The reason I have a need for so much IO is that nearly all of my processing goes through external hardware (EQs, compressors, delays, reverbs, filters, phasers, chorus, summing mixer, multi-FX units like Eventide H3000 & H8000) and I have a wall of modular gear + about 20 synths and drum machines.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-23 17:24:37+00:00
>your anti-EU rant

How is it anti-EU? I was explaining what I observed, nothing what I said has to do with the EU political union, but with the way EU companies operate. Criticizing the way European companies choose to do business doesn't make you "anti-EU".

What's with this hyper-partisan George-Bush-style "You're either with us or against us" type of arguments, where you can't criticize something without someone accusing you of being a hater?

Can't we just debate things reasonably and assuming good faith as per HN rules, instead of resorting to attacks and accusations of partisan?
by poly2it | 2025-07-23 17:24:47+00:00
I'm increasingly annoyed by the extent at which our state (Sweden, EU) is willing to sacrifice our rights to hinder the usage of recreational drugs by a minority of the population. How can it be that alcohol is endorsed so widely, given that we know many of the drugs we are being sacrificed to stop are safer, less addictive and less potent [1]? It's perhaps cynical to ask, but are we protecting the citizens, or the alcohol industry?

1: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rational_harm_asse...
by ta1243 | 2025-07-23 17:24:48+00:00
In the Schengen area, if you are a non-EU person, until recently you needed to ensure you are stamped in and out otherwise you'll run into issues with them thinking you may have overstayed.

After UK went all freedumb and left the EU this caused a lot of issues, I have a UK colleague that visited his wife's family in Poland over a Christmas, didn't get a stamp on the way back, then ran into problems a few months later as they argued he had been in Europe for months.
by humblebeekeeper | 2025-07-23 17:25:09+00:00
This is a symptom of alienation, imo, not a unique problem from AI.

There's a theory that we're becoming increasingly removed from our work -- we have less control over what we get to build, we have less control over how the products we build function.

Because we don't influence what we create as much, work becomes much more about getting a pay check. We no longer work to craft, we work simply to build the things the bosses want.

Now that work is just a paycheck, we're increasingly unsettled, and increasingly in competition with one another. Material conditions are such that the bosses get most of the profits, and we get squeezed more and more. Competition gets more desperate, and we begin to see others as threatening our remaining resources, more than a community.

Now that we're increasingly isolated from one another, we end up isolating ourselves. We find ourselves less creative, less fulfilled, more alone, and looking for any semblance of community.

It's not surprising someone in this state turns to anything, even an AI, that wants to engage with the person.
by subscribed | 2025-07-23 17:25:14+00:00
If you were to carry sharpened pencil and stopped by police claimed it's for self defense, you might get arrested: https://www.askthe.police.uk/faq/?id=fefeb701-3a75-ed11-81ac...

No spray, no airgun, no folding mace, absolutely nothing can be used in self defense.

Except for the alarm.
by rcxdude | 2025-07-23 17:25:15+00:00
The Ptolemaic system was already not particularly favored and was well and truly killed in Gallileo's time (in part by his observations). The competition was Tycho Brahe's model, in which the sun revolves around the earth but the planets revolve around the sun. They for the most part make identical predictions as far as astronomical observations, but Brahe's was very slightly simpler and didn't cause the other objections.
by happytoexplain | 2025-07-23 17:25:26+00:00
First, I don't know why you're using the word "you". Second, if I was the person in question, why would you punish a woman for expressing a fear by verbally abusing her like this? Besides being a hideous thing to do, it also teaches her to not voice fears in the future.

Wouldn't the obvious talking point be the thing causing the fear, rather than insulting and belittling a person for being afraid?

>afraid that whatever Uber puts in place to anonymize your bad rating is insufficient?

This seems like a reasonable concern. Why are you framing it as an insult, as if you were trying to bully a person into trusting a company? Why would a person trust Uber/Lyft to be transparently secure and technically thorough about this detail? In other services, service-providers can and have used basic reasoning skills to identify clients who gave bad reviews.

>I suggest clicking help and reporting the driver directly

I don't understand - reporting suffers the same problem, as I mentioned in the comment you're replying to.
by davidclark | 2025-07-23 17:25:34+00:00
Well written typespecs + dialyzer catches most things you’d want to catch with a type system: https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/typespecs.html

There is also pattern matching and guard clauses so you can write something like:

def add(a, b) when is_integer(a) and is_integer(b), do: a + b

def add(_, _), do: :error

It’s up to personal preference and the exact context if you want a fall through case like this. Could also have it raise an error if that is preferred. Not including the fallback case will cause an error if the conditions aren’t met for values passed to the function.
by tptacek | 2025-07-23 17:25:35+00:00
This is a confusing piece. A lot of it would make sense if Weakly was talking about a coding agent (a particular flavor of agent that worked more like how antirez just said he prefers coding with AI in 2025 --- more manual, more advisory, less do-ing). But she's not: she's talking about agents that assist in investigating and resolving operations incidents.

The fulcrum of Weakly's argument is that agents should stay in their lane, offering helpful Clippy-like suggestions and letting humans drive. But what exactly is the value in having humans grovel through logs to isolate anomalies and create hypotheses for incidents? AI tools are fundamentally better at this task than humans are, for the same reason that computers are better at playing chess.

What Weakly seems to be doing is laying out a bright line between advising engineers and actually performing actions --- any kind of action, other than suggestions (and only those suggestions the human driver would want, and wouldn't prefer to learn and upskill on their own). That's not the right line. There are actions AI tools shouldn't perform autonomously (I certainly wouldn't let one run a Terraform apply), but there are plenty of actions where it doesn't make sense to stop them.

The purpose of incident resolution is to resolve incidents.
by Nevermark | 2025-07-23 17:25:37+00:00
I feel like we need another system. Proprietary is great, as long as it's not the only choice. Open source is another great choice.

They are both a marriage of technology with quite different economic systems. With different pro's and con's.

But a technological/economic system that highly incentivized suppliers of fine grain pick-and-choose modularity (in the form of both modular systems and individual modules), over bloat/irreversably-integrated products would be an incredible boon for choice.

Because modularity = choice, maximum competition. Non-modularity = lack of choice, reduced competition.

Then vertical proprietary systems could still compete, including leveraging integration when it provides benefits (performance, simpler choices, lower user-side complexity), but they would be competing with viable modular substitutes with a different benefit: they do what users want, and only what they want.

Not saying I have a realistic economic model for how a very strong modularity incentive happens, but the question has been on my mind the last couple decades!

Note that both proprietary and open-source provide haphazard modularity, but neither is pervasively modular today. Although the latter is reliably malleable, sort of atomically modular. But we the option for modularity at all levels clearly has huge untapped/unrewarded economic value.
by TheNewsIsHere | 2025-07-23 17:25:38+00:00
I think the best way to prevent the sale of crime fridges to criminals would be to have national governments integrate the entirety of data that each nation has, from every level, on every citizen. Then we can create an API which market participants like Frigidaire and Bosch can use to query whether a purchase should be permitted based on the purchaser.

/s, if not obvious. Strange times.
by trod1234 | 2025-07-23 17:25:53+00:00
Sounds like a market distortion to me.

I have to wonder what kind of kickbacks they get for employing those people, or whether they have a work program based in whole or part on slave labor (quite common in a number of places, slavery isn't illegal for those who have been incarcerated).

Markets can't compete with slave labor, which explains why monopoly and other socialist practices take hold. Corruption has a long arm.
by munificent | 2025-07-23 17:26:05+00:00
The top two comments here both suggest that the people using chatbots in place of social interaction were already a priori socially isolated and AI has no effect on it. It's merely a "symptom" or after the fact consequence.

I deeply, fundamentally disagree with that. Humans are one step mathematical operations that take in an input, transform to an output, and are done.

Human life is an endless continuous cascade of incentives, feedback loops, iterations, and modification. When you change anything in a person's environment, it will affect them. Perhaps the effect is small unless someone is primed by their prior environment in certain ways, but nonetheless nearly everything leaves its mark.

Can you eat healthy if your kitchen is full of free junk food? Yes, it's possible. Can you get out of the house and socialize even when endless media and parasocial relationships are just a screen away? Yes, it's possible.

Will you in practice? Evidence shows clearly over and over again that even tiny incentives have huge effects when compounded over time.

We all have a deep moral obligation to build an environment (physical, cultural, social) that is nourishing and incentivizes all of us to flourish. If you're building technology like AI chatbots that enables people to become more socially isolated, in my mind you are in the same category as junk food sellers, drug pushers, and polluting factory owners. You're making people sicker and the world worse.
by pmarreck | 2025-07-23 17:26:37+00:00
It's in line with the erlang philosophy of letting things crash trivially and restart instantly. Due to the universal immutability, starting a new process from a given state in Erlang/Elixir is nearly instantaneous and has extremely little overhead as they are not OS threads, they are BEAM VM threads.

Very opposite the Go model, btw.
by VirusNewbie | 2025-07-23 17:26:39+00:00
I work at Google as a SWE working on the Cloud. I'm a little 'behind' level wise for the straight years of experience I have, but I also feel like I'm doing pretty darn well for my level as well.

For the first ~ten years of my career I worked shit jobs for pretty mediocre pay at small companies that overworked and under appreciated me. I did Open Source to stay sane, to learn, for fun, and I leveled up every few years, learning CS, hardware, algorithms, FP, type systems, and more.

Eventually I worked at larger companies, smaller companies with big scale, and eventually FAANG.
by mjr00 | 2025-07-23 17:26:46+00:00
> What happens between getting up one day and installing an AI friend?

* You get up one day

* You enter a world where fewer and fewer people are trying to form in-person, human connections because they see pseudonymous social media and parasocial relationships as valid substitute

* You try these relationships too and find they are low-effort ways to keep yourself entertained with surface-level human connections

* Forming actual human connections in-person is too high effort (requires leaving the house; has a risk of rejection) so you don't do it

* An AI friend is low-effort and sort of a human connection so you do that

Ultimately I don't see "having an AI friend" as much worse than "'donating' $500 to Asmongold because he's my friend" (note: Asmongold has no idea who you are).
by Peteragain | 2025-07-23 17:27:11+00:00
In Melbourne we loved our Tram Trams that run down the middle of the street and hold up the traffic. The W class trams were all fazed out and replaced with "light rail". Bigger Faster Better. Not. Melbourne has a good mix of tram and train - yes you take athe train to the city (a through route via the underground loop) and get on a tram for the last km. Small frequent trams are better for this and require lighter track. I think there was a recent HN article to this effect.
by schneems | 2025-07-23 17:27:14+00:00
Not OP but: The very essence of the program was publicity. As soon as the public lost interest (mission accomplished!), the program was canceled. We built Saturn V rockets that we never launched.

That being said, I know a lot of things were unknown. We didn’t know if the surface of the moon would interact with the atmosphere inside the capsules to combust. Some of these unknowns were downplayed. Some others were played up for dramatic effect.

The whole process of getting a person to the moon took hundreds of thousands of involved workers and the. coordinated effort of a country’s politicians and populace to fund it. I think it’s unfair to boil it down to “just publicity” but it is a big part in keeping it afloat.
by johnfn | 2025-07-23 17:27:14+00:00
Zed seems really nice, and the usability has come a really long way in the last couple of months. That being said, I have one issue, and I hesitate to even bring it up because it seems so shallow: I hate all the themes! They all look so ugly and amateur. I know this is a really trivial thing, it's like complaining I don't like Python because it uses whitespace for indent or something, but I just can't get over it. VSCode/Cursor is beautiful in comparison.

I recently found Github Dark Default, which is probably the okay-est of the 10-15 I tried, but there is so much that still looks bad. The autocomplete popover looks far worse than VSCode, the file tree looks much worse, tabs look ugly, etc.

Does anyone have any suggestions here?
by panabee | 2025-07-23 17:27:28+00:00
Thanks. This is helpful. Looking forward to more of your thoughts.

Some nuance:

What happens when the methods are outdated/biased? We highlight a potential case in breast cancer in one of our papers.

Worse, who decides?

To reiterate, this isn’t to discourage the idea. The idea is good and should be considered, but doesn’t escape (yet) the core issue of when something becomes a “fact.”
by visarga | 2025-07-23 17:27:36+00:00
> We're really good at cumulative iteration. Humans are turbo optimized for communities, basically. This is why brainstorming is so effective… But usually only in a group. There is an entire theory in cognitive psychology about cumulative culture that goes directly into this and shows empirically how humans work in groups.

> Humans learn collectively and innovate collectively via copying, mimicry, and iteration on top of prior art. You know that quote about standing on the shoulders of giants? It turns out that it's not only a fun quote, but it's fundamentally how humans work.

Creativity is search. Social search. It's not coming from the brain itself, it comes from the encounter between brain and environment, and builds up over time in the social/cultural layer.

That is why I don't ask myself if LLMs really understand. As long as they search, generating ideas and validating them in the world, it does not matter.

It's also why I don't think substrate matters, only search does. But substrate might have to do with the search spaces we are afforded to explore.
by bitpush | 2025-07-23 17:27:46+00:00
> Can you though?

Take a look at this Haskell program that LLM wrote. I do not write Haskell, but I can review the code just fine to say that this is doing what I want.

-- Simple multiplication function multiply :: Num a => a -> a -> a multiply x y = x * y -- Main function for running the program main :: IO () main = do putStrLn "Enter the first number:" input1 <- getLine putStrLn "Enter the second number:" input2 <- getLine let num1 = read input1 :: Double let num2 = read input2 :: Double let result = multiply num1 num2 putStrLn $ "Result: " ++ show num1 ++ " * " ++ show num2 ++ " = " ++ show result

If I had to write this by myself, it'd have taken atleast 20mins. First I have to be learn how main function is setup, how type definitions work, what putStrLn is, how to get an input, how to define a multiple function etc etc.

It really is an NP problem, come to think of it.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-07-23 17:27:50+00:00
> 2 & 6 & 7. access to airlines (and travel in general) was a net positive for meeting new people. Suddenly people could meet and get to know far more people than the handful of folks in the town they grew up in.

Debatable because social relationships also become more frivilous.

> 3 & 4. People have to depend more on others to do their farming for them, but if you're working the fields you can't be out meeting real people face to face either.

But at least you can develop closer relationships with fewer people. Again, it's a matter of what place on the spectrum is ideal.

> 5. independence is good and learning new skills means going out to new places to practice them or for supplies and equipment where you can meet other people with similar interests

Independence is good only up to a point. Too much independence is a natural consequence of advancing technology and becomes pathological.
by tptacek | 2025-07-23 17:28:17+00:00
Right, so: having an agent go drop index segments from a search cluster to resolve a volume utilization problem is a bad idea, rather than just suggesting "these old index segments are using up 70% of the storage on this volume and your emergency search cluster outage would be resolved if you dropped them, here's how you'd do that".

But there are plenty of active investigative steps you'd want to take in generating hypotheses for an outage. Weakly's piece strongly suggests AI tools not take these actions, but rather suggest them to operators. This is a waste of time, and time is the currency of incident resolution.
by tuckerman | 2025-07-23 17:28:50+00:00
I think most people wouldn't mind (as much) clean, functioning RVs. The people living like that are likely getting swept up in the backlash against the broken/unsafe RVs that cause a lot of problems for neighbors. This is anecdotal for sure, but the RVs near my neighborhood in San Jose are really rough. Missing windows, full of trash/vermin, and don't seem to have working facilities.

I don't have any idea what percentage of RVs fall into which camp, I just know that the bad ones are very visible.