MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Playground to Test Skills and MCP
by chelojimenez | 2026-01-29 20:03:17+00:00
Hi HN, I'm Matt, founder of MCPJam. We're building open source dev tools for MCP server builders.

There’s been a lot of debate around skills vs MCP. From what I see, there’s a growing trend of people using skills paired with MCP servers. Skills teach the agent how to use the MCP server tools and guide the agent to completing complex workflows.

We’re also seeing Anthropic encourage the use of Skills + MCP in their products. Anthropic recently launched the connectors marketplace. A good example of this is the Figma connector + skills. The Figma skill teaches the agent how to use the Figma MCP connector to set up design system rules.

The use of Skills + MCP pairing is growing, and we recommend MCP server developers to start thinking about writing skills that complement their MCP server. Today, we’re releasing two features around skills to help you test skills + MCP pairing.

In MCPJam, you can now view your skills beautifully in the skills tab. MCPJam lets you upload skills directly, which are then saved to your local skills directory.

You can also test skills paired with your MCP server in MCPJam’s LLM playground. We’ve created a tool that contextually fetches your skills so they get loaded into the chat. If you want more control, you can also deterministically inject them with a “/” slash command.

Skills + MCP are a fairly new concept. I would love to hear your thoughts on it!
by vladms | 2026-01-29 20:03:23+00:00
I tried to check a list of literary devices (Wikipedia) and couldn't exactly map to a specific category - would be interesting to know if there such a category.

The problem I have with this literary device is that I think it works if most / many questions would fit it then he would go to disapprove it. Using it, for me, kind of indirectly reinforces the idea that "there are many simple answers". Which I came to loathe as it is pushed again and again due to social media. Everything is "clear", "simple", "everybody knows better", "everybody did their research".

How did this literal device make you feel? Interested? Curious? Bored? When I read it my initial instinct was "no, it's definitely not simple, so if that's what are you going to explain me, I will not bother".
by Night_Thastus | 2026-01-29 20:03:52+00:00
For older games: MechWarrior 3 and 4 (plus expansions). Thief 1+2. Freespace 2. Gothic 1+2. Dark Messiah of Might and Magic.

But in general, I play a lot of weirder, niche games that just don't get a lot of traction for community fixes and so on.
by alterom | 2026-01-29 20:04:15+00:00
Not in principle, mind you.

It's just that the company has stalled every major project they started, and, so far, completed a rather shitty an uninspiring one in Vegas that has no reason to exist in the first place (it's subway but with Teslas instead of trains).

Its only purpose is to prevent the money from being spent on viable public transportation projects, and in that sense, it's very interesting that it got so far.
by ufmace | 2026-01-29 20:04:22+00:00
> More than 50% of roadway fatalities involve drugs or alcohol. If you want to spend your efforts improving safety _anywhere_ it's right here. Self driving cars do not stand a chance of improving outcomes as much as sensible policy does. Europe leads the US here by a wide margin.

Could you spell out exactly what "sensible" policy changes you were thinking of? Driving under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol is already illegal in every state. Are you advocating for drastically more severe enforcement, regardless of which race the person driving is, or what it does to the national prison population? Or perhaps for "improved transit access", which is a nice idea, but will take many decades to make a real difference?
by digiown | 2026-01-29 20:04:31+00:00
Yeah, but the whole point of Google's locked down system and integrity APIs is to offer a way to subjugate users and transfer power from the users to the providers. Arguably it shouldn't work in an ideal competitive market where most consumers are intelligent, but it is how it is in our world.

Banks, governments, and anything else that's required to participate in society should not depend on proving the loyalty of my device to Google or any other entity that isn't me.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-01-29 20:04:55+00:00
Many years ago before I stopped using Windows and switched back to NetBSD (I had originally used it on the VAX), I used Cygwin and later MSYS on Windows in the process of moving back to UNIX

I was not interested in graphical programs, I only wanted a UNIX shell and standard UNIX utilities

I recently received a used computer with pre-installed Windows 10 Home for personal use so I will be experimenting with it offline^1

I used Windows Services for UNIX ("SFU") on work computers back in the day to compile programs I wrote for UNIX. I am curious about using "WSL" in a similar way

NetBSD is still favorite OS but I use Linux the most

1. I can boot this computer from USB stick so I will also use it to run NetBSD from RAM
by dwaite | 2026-01-29 20:05:08+00:00
Sure, if Google wants to start a business model where your websites only load if you sign a business agreement and agree to commissions.

However, regulators would probably take note that Google has been aggressively pushing their browser for free for over a decade to gain market share, and have a field day.

The difference is that Apple's business model hasn't changed - you've always been restricted to distributing apps under a business agreement, and the conditions on commissions have been pretty consistent since inception, or at least since IAP was added in 2009.

"What ifs" about Apple charging 30% for bank transactions would run afoul of regulators. This is about consuming member-exclusive goods and services in-app, which again has been in the contract terms since 2009.

Goods and services consumed outside of the app (such as purchases of physical items on Amazon, or plane tickets or the like) are actually forbidden from using in-app purchase and do not have a commission rate.
by bonoboTP | 2026-01-29 20:05:22+00:00
This has nothing to do with overloading. The suspicion is that when there is too much demand (or they just want to save costs), Anthropic sometimes uses a less capable (quantized, distilled, etc) version of the model. People want to measure this so there is concrete evidence instead of hunches and feelings.

To say that this measurement is bad because the server might just be overloaded completely misses the point. The point is to see if the model sometimes silently performs worse. If I get a response from "Opus", I want a response from Opus. Or at least want to be told that I'm getting slightly-dumber-Opus this hour because the server load is too much.
by jjk166 | 2026-01-29 20:06:48+00:00
> It's an article, not a 20 page research analysis. It provides detail aappropriate to its scope.

And if it merely cited the 20 page research analysis someone else did, that would be fine, but it doesn't.

The article also is rather disingenuous, leaving out a lot of context. Looking closer, this was not some isolated UN estimate. Instead the UN was generating estimates every year, and the 2022 study was conducted differently because of covid. Subsequent UN estimates also went back to the original numbers. Also it wasn't a report that was buried, the numbers were released in 2022, they were revised down in 2023 after the UN conducted its next study. Seems like quite the omission.

> If you disagree, it's up to you to provide additional evidence to the contrary, not just arguments.

While arguments presented without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, sure here's the CIA estimate for the population which is in close agreement with both PNG's internal estimate and the actually adopted UN estimate. While the CIA is hardly the ultimate source of truth, the arguments that PNG pressured the UN to change its estimates for its own internal political reasons can't possibly explain the CIA coming to the same conclusion.

https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/about/archives/2023/c...

> The article devotes a paragraph on why the UN didn't release the report.

The article spends a paragraph insinuating an ulterior motive while giving no evidence it is anything other than pure speculation.

> But the article is going into depth to defend its reporting, and you're not.

The article throws claims against the wall. It is obliged to defend them and it fails. That I can find contradictory evidence with a 30 second google search is convenient but irrelevant. Even if would take a year of extensive research to refute the claim, it does not change the fact the claim was never supported to begin with.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-29 20:06:55+00:00
The easiest way to deal with horrible trauma is to prevent said trauma in the next generation.

What is either revealing or terrifying is seeing how many people attempt to prevent that. Sexual abuse for example is pretty rampant in the US. Sexual education at a young age so people know they are being abused under no uncertain terms is a good solution for this.

And yet you will run into far too many people that under no uncertain terms want their children to be excused from sex abuse education. What deeply concerns me is when you see people with this position that you know where sexually abused themselves.

I don't know, people really suck.
by mlyle | 2026-01-29 20:07:03+00:00
> Drunk driving isn't just impoverished alcoholics. People go to bars and parts and get drunk all the time

Yes, but the drivers who are 5th percentile drivers who cause a huge share of the most severe accidents are "special" in various ways. Most of them are probably not autonomy early adopters.

The guy who decided to drive on the wrong side of a double yellow on a windy mountain road and hit our family car in a probable suicide attempt was not going to replace that trip with Waymo.
by torstenvl | 2026-01-29 20:07:45+00:00
Medical Advice Generative Adversarial Networks would be a good idea.

I see some of this adversarial second-guessing introspection from Claude sometimes. ("But wait. I just said x y and z, but that's inconsistent with this other thing. Let me rethink that.")

Sometimes when I get the sense that an LLM is too sycophantic, I'll instruct it to steelman the counter l-argument, then assess the persuasiveness of that counter-argument. It helps.
by crusty | 2026-01-29 20:07:48+00:00
This.

The logical response to non- compliance with your country's regulations is simply to block them. 4chan probably won't care, but that's what will keep the bigger players like X and Meta engaged in some way. They won't want to be cut off from the European market, and a precedent set that 'non-awful' governments are justified to block them.

Of course, all this a month after the US invaded another country to snatch their president and his wife to put them on trial for US "crimes" they supposedly committed while not in the US and while not being Americans abroad. I wonder if the murdering of ~100 people in that operation is a crime there that those on the US would be expected to answer for \s. It's all so stupidly rich.
by comrade1234 | 2026-01-29 20:07:55+00:00
I just looked it up and the Burj Khalifa is finally attached to the sewage system. For years a convoy of tankers would pump out its sewage and dump it in the desert.

It is a very nice looking building though. I had nice drinks at the window on a floor close to the top (or top? I have no idea). We had to order an expensive bottle of champagne as a bribe to get the window. View at night was hypnotic and knowing that they would have to ship my piss to the desert the next day amusing.
by jmyeet | 2026-01-29 20:08:03+00:00
Buying Twitter was a financially disastrous decision. It had reportedly lost at least 80% of its value [1]. The loans were secured against Tesla shares so there was the real risk of a margin call and a forced sell off.

And then along came xAI where a bunch of people gave Elon money and he "merged" Twitter and xAI, basically siphoning off billions of the investment funds ti bail himself out. If securities law had teeth, he probably should've gone to prison for this.

At the ssame time, why weer people giving this charlatan man-child billions to invest in AI?

The problem is they weren't buying AI. IMHO they were buying a seat at the table and an influence in the administration, a bit like the Saudi sovereign fund's "investment" in Jared Kushner.

Thing is, this isn't the first time he's done this. Elon used one of his companies (Tesla) to buy another of his companies (SolarCity) who was essentially insolvent but owed a lot of money to a third of Elon's companies (SpaceX). There was a lawsuit but it was dismissed. If you're sufficiently wealthy, the law basically doesn't apply to you [2].

I knew before even clicking on this that the justification would be orbital data centers (and it is). They make no sense becaus eof launch costs, cooling and cosmic rays and solar radiation.

Is this the continuation of the Twitter buyout shell game?

[1]: https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-twitter-x-...

[2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50695593
by threetonesun | 2026-01-29 20:08:31+00:00
The joke of looking symptoms up on WebMD and determining you have cancer has been around for... geez over 20 years now. Anti-vaccine sentiment mostly derived from Facebook. Google any symptom today and there are about 10 million Quora-esque websites of "doctors" answering questions. I'm not sure that funneling all of this into the singular UI of an AI interface is really better or worse or even all that different.

But I do agree that some focused and well funded public health bot would be ideal, although we'll need the WHO to do it, it's certainly not coming from the US any time soon.
by atoav | 2026-01-29 20:08:50+00:00
Well yes, but as an extremely patient person I can tell you that infinite patience doesn't come without its own problems. In certain social situations the ethically better thing to do is to actually to lose your patience, may it be to shake the person talking to you up, may it be to indicate they are going down a wrong path or whatnot.

I have experience with building systems to remove that infinite patience from chatbots and it does make interactions much more realistic.
by likium | 2026-01-29 20:09:06+00:00
So set up e2e tests and make sure it does things you said you wanted. Just like how you use a library or database. Trust, but verify. Only if it breaks do you have to peak under the covers.

Sadly people do not care about redundant and verbose code. If that was a concern, we wouldn't have 100+mb of apps, nor 5mb web app bundles. Multibillion b2b apps shipping a 10mb json file just for searching emojis and no one blinks an eye.
by 827a | 2026-01-29 20:09:08+00:00
But afaik this wasn't a state courthouse; it's a county courthouse. Legally, obviously, the state has authority and they were in the right, but functionally this is really good advice: if you're doing a penetration test of a space, you functionally need to clear it with the people who are responsible for the security of that space, and whom you might encounter defending it.

Frankly, I would not have taken this gig unless you had verbal confirmation that the Sheriff knows about it and has signed off. If you're entering a red team situation where the State wants to assess the security of their county courthouses, but doesn't want the local authorities to know its happening because they don't trust them: That is not a situation you want to be in the middle of, they gotta sort that out.
by reenorap | 2026-01-29 20:09:30+00:00
I and many of my friends have used ChatGPT extremely effectively to diagnose medical issues. In fact, I would say that ChatGPT is better than most doctors because most doctors don't actually listen to you. ChatGPT took the time to ask me questions and based on my answers, narrowed down a particularly scary diagnosis and gave excellent instructions on how to get to a local hospital in a foreign country, what to ask for, and that I didn't have to worry very much because it sounded very typical for what I had. The level of reassurance that I was doing everything right actually made me feel less scared, because it was a pretty serious problem. Everything it told me was 100% correct and it guided me perfectly.

I was taking one high blood pressure medication but then noticed my blood sugar jumped. I did some research with ChatGPT and it found a paper that did indicate that it could raise blood sugar levels and gave me a recommendation for an alternative I asked my doctor about it and she said I was wrong, but I gently pushed her to switch and gave the recommended medication. She obliged, which is why I have kept her for almost 30 years now, and lo and behold, my blood sugar did drop.

Most people have a hard time pushing back against doctors and doctors mostly work with blinders on and don't listen. ChatGPT gives you the ability to keep asking questions without thinking you are bothering them.

I think ChatGPT is a great advance in terms of medical help in my opinion and I recommend it to everyone. Yes, it might make mistakes and I caution everyone to be careful and don't trust it 100%, but I say that about human doctors as well.
by BlackPearl02 | 2026-01-29 20:09:41+00:00
I've been running into this issue where my backup cron jobs "succeed" but create empty files.

For example:

Database backup cron runs, exit code 0, but creates a zero-byte dump file
Disk space runs out mid-backup, leaving an empty file but script still exits successfully
Network timeout during remote backup creates empty file, but no error is raised
File permission issues prevent writes, but the backup script doesn't check if anything was actually written

The logs say everything's fine, but when you actually need the backup, it's not there. Actually, the errors are probably in the logs somewhere, but who checks logs proactively? I'm not going through log files every day to see if something silently failed.

I've tried:

Adding file size checks in scripts - works, but you still need to check the logs or set up alerts
Monitoring tools that watch exit codes - but they don't catch "successful" failures
Manual verification - but that defeats the purpose of automation

I ended up building a simple monitoring tool that watches backup results instead of just execution - you send it the actual file size and it alerts if the backup is empty or suspiciously small. No need to dig through logs.

But I'm curious: how do you all handle this? Are you actually checking backup file sizes regularly, or do you have something that proactively alerts you when backups are empty or incomplete?
by OsrsNeedsf2P | 2026-01-29 20:09:52+00:00
This article is so painful to read. Do people not have shame in publishing slop?

> MakuluLinux is not just an OS with a backdoor. It's a delivery vehicle for a centralized AI-as-a-service platform.

But to the actual article point; it looks like this OS is designed to have these "integration features" that depend on a 3rd party connection. They could obviously be better - But the intent of them is very similar to how Android, Windows, or MacOS operate.
by etempleton | 2026-01-29 20:10:12+00:00
Tesla could be a major automaker if they released cars like a normal functional automaker. Elon, for his many faults, was perhaps the best person in the world to get Tesla where it is today, but he is more likely to burn it to the ground than maintain success of the company. If Tesla built a more traditional mid size SUV it would probably sell nearly as well as the Model Y and if they created a new more modern Model S It would probably do well also.

I have my doubts their robots will be anything more than a gimmick for rich people.
by Thoreandan | 2026-01-29 20:10:21+00:00
Reminds me of an excellent paper I just read by a former Google DeepMind Ethics Research Team member

https://www.mdpi.com/2504-3900/114/1/4 - Reinecke, Madeline G., et al. "The double-edged sword of anthropomorphism in llms." Proceedings. Vol. 114. No. 1. MDPI, 2025
Author: https://www.mgreinecke.com/
by Nition | 2026-01-29 20:10:33+00:00
A lot of clickbait headlines have the same problem. "You're using too much washing powder!"

Everyone's replying to you as if you truly don't understand the sign's intention but I'm sure you do. It's just annoying to be doing everything right and the signs and headlines are still telling you you're wrong.

There was a driving safety safety ad campaign here: "Drive to the conditions. If they change, reduce your speed." You can imagine how slow we'd all be going if the weather kept changing.

We might have OCPD.
by agentcoops | 2026-01-29 20:11:01+00:00
Honestly, I don't think it's irrational: the car industry is just horrible from a business perspective, which is why Tesla had to be financed for so long by crypto scams and most investors wouldn't touch it. Historically (if of course briefly/crudely), it was always a debt-backed gamble on overproduction hoping you could expand forever globally without competition (Ford) or into new market segments through financing (GM).

It's paywalled unfortunately, but [1] is an illustrative Financial Times article discussing car manufacturer behavior in relation to Covid shutdowns and strikes. Many firms found the manufacturing shutdowns to be a boon: the winning strategy to accept it as a cost cut and just raise prices on existing inventory for above average financial performance.

My sense is that Tesla is now just taking that a step further by getting rid of their Fordist aspirations and applying the unarguably successful Apple model to the automotive industry. They don't want to mass produce cars and hope for X% conversion rate to software and services over time: they literally don't want customers who are not able or not going to pay for recurring software services. Software is where free cash flow comes from and free cash flow is where dividends/buybacks come from, which determines the value of an equity. That, of course, is why we get paid well.

I end with the disclaimer that obviously I don't believe the world should be meticulously and exclusively organized for the production of free cash flow, but I do think it's important to understand the logic.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/4da6406a-c888-49c1-b07f-daa6b9797...
by christiangenco | 2026-01-29 20:11:01+00:00
Perhaps you could, but you probably always could've built a clone of any SaaS app you wanted, it's just become faster.

I'm reminded of the infamous Dropbox Hacker News comment[1]. If you're looking at stuff like this thinking "what's the point? I could just make that myself" then you're not the target audience in the same sort of way Ikea isn't trying to sell stuff to carpenters.

This is true even when the barrier to entry in making these sorts of systems has gotten way lower.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
by nippoo | 2026-01-29 20:11:13+00:00
There's only about 400MJ of energy in each beam, so that's about 110kWh. The beam is dumped a couple of times a day - so it's on the order of a ~10kW continuous source if spread over the whole day. Which isn't nothing, but is about the same heat as generated by an average single datacentre rack...
by d--b | 2026-01-29 20:11:15+00:00
Tesla can compete with BYD all right. They have a better brand, they are still a status symbol. They could totally build the best cars if they wanted to.

But competing with BYD would mean becoming "just a car company". And that's what Tesla can't do. Too many promises have been made, the stock's been pumped too high, and there is no way a just-a-car company can justify that market cap. Their only way is to go for the moonshot now. Maybe once the moonshot fails, stock goes down to "normal", and Tesla can compete with BYD.