MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dmc258 | 2026-03-14 21:12:07+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a small tool that helps prepare journal club presentations from research papers.

In many labs, preparing a journal club involves:

reading the paper

summarizing key findings

identifying strengths/limitations

generating discussion questions

building slides

That process can take several hours. I wanted to see how much of that workflow could be automated while still producing something useful for scientific discussion.

The tool takes a PDF of a research paper and generates:

structured paper summary

key findings

discussion questions

reviewer-style critique

suggested follow-up experiments

markdown notes

PowerPoint slides

You can try it here:

https://jcqgfrontend-production.up.railway.app/

How it works

The backend pipeline roughly looks like this:

PDF parsing

The paper text is extracted and cleaned, then split into approximate sections (introduction, methods, results, etc.).

Chunk selection

Large sections are broken into chunks, and the most informative chunks are selected for analysis.

Chunk-level LLM analysis

Each chunk is summarized independently to extract:

section summary

methods/approach

key results

limitations

Global synthesis

Those chunk summaries are then passed to another model step that produces:

overall paper summary

key findings

discussion questions

follow-up experiments

Export generation

The structured output is converted into:

markdown report

PowerPoint slide deck

Tech stack

Backend

Python

FastAPI

OpenAI API

Frontend

Streamlit

Other pieces

PDF parsing

section chunking

structured JSON outputs

automated slide generation

Limitations

This obviously does not replace reading the paper.

It works best as a starting point for journal club preparation, not a final interpretation of the work.

Some current weaknesses:

figures and tables are not interpreted

some papers have unusual formatting that breaks section parsing

discussion questions can sometimes be generic

Why I built it

I'm a biomedical researcher and I spend a lot of time preparing journal clubs. I was curious how far LLM-based tooling could go in automating the "first pass" of literature analysis.

I'd love feedback on:

whether this would actually be useful in research groups

improvements to the summarization pipeline

better ways to structure scientific analysis prompts

ideas for integrating figure interpretation

Thanks for taking a look.
by chatmasta | 2026-03-14 21:12:20+00:00
What are you using for hosting and deploying the MCP servers? I’d like something low friction for enterprise teams to be able to push their MCP definitions as easily as pushing a Git repo (or ideally, as part of a Git repo, kinda like GitHub pages). It’s obviously not sustainable for every team to host their own MCP servers in their own way.

So what’s the best centralized gateway available today, with telemetry and auth and all the goodness espoused in this blog post?
by asdff | 2026-03-14 21:12:39+00:00
UBI doesn't make any sense when you imagine how it will play out. Let's consider what it actually implies on the face: labor has been obviated through automation and therefore humans no longer have a purpose on earth. UBI then amounts to a bribe paid to the remaining surviving masses of humanity so they don't go on to destroy all the automated economy and those who remain in control of the automated economy, if those are actually people in this future and not some statistical models running on their own. This is unsustainable. The masses of humanity will inevitably want a larger and larger bribe to sustain a standard of living in probably an inflationary environment. Eventually a tipping point will be reached where the models in charge of the planet determine it is more efficient to eliminate humanity than to continue paying increasing bribes.
by chmod775 | 2026-03-14 21:12:54+00:00
> The cushions especially are not that durable and should be considered consumables.

This is because they're mostly synthetic "leather", which doesn't last long. Everyone is probably familiar with how synthetic leather starts to flake off. Icky. If you get some pads made from real leather (usually lamb is the go-to choice) they'll last virtually forever. However since real leather is heaver and less porous, this changes the way they sound very noticably (makes them sound less open). If you use open/half-open headphones anyways, the difference won't be too extreme: just moves the sound closer to closed headphones. On closed headphones leather cups make it feel something is covering/plugging my ears. Uncomfortable. Would not recommend.

Worse than how quickly fabric and synthetic leather degrades is arguably that those cups can hardly be cleaned and even when not that old get icky quickly, with dirt stuck in fabric and fine cracks.
by pessimizer | 2026-03-14 21:13:16+00:00
No, the core premise of a union is to represent the interests of its members. You've confused a union with global communism, and delegimitized the ones that don't serve your interests instead.

For an extremely salient example, the purpose of coal miners' unions is to serve coal miners. The interests of coal miners don't necessarily align with everyone else's interests, and if the the interests of their union did, it would be a bad union.

If police are racist, police unions are either racist or not representative. The purpose of unions isn't to serve the purposes of upper middle-class liberal arts majors. You don't steer workers through their union, that's evil. If you want coal miners to prioritize the climate, or police to prioritize civil rights, you have to do it the traditional way - by convincing them. You might have to convince them to quit.

The idea that the police don't deserve a union because police unions would support your enemy is repulsive. Change the laws, maybe you wouldn't have to hire scum to enforce them.
by jacquesm | 2026-03-14 21:13:26+00:00
Yes, (1) dogwhistle for 'racism is ok' (2) my bodily autonomy beats you staying alive (3) see (1).

Note that I'm not an American, but I know a grifter and an asshole when I see one and trump is both, without a doubt. If you believe the two parties in the USA are equal in this sense then you are willfully blind at this point.

The number of people that are comfortable with outright racism and xenophobia on HN is scary, the number of people that are unable to see the hand behind the curtain during a time when we were very vulnerable and who seem to take their personal comfort above the health of others is scary as well. But I guess that what you get when you tell a good chunk of the world that they are movie stars authors and celebrities.

COVID was interesting: as pandemics go this was a mild one, and yet, we fucked it up and here you are using it as a plank in your argument that the government has too much power. Sorry, but if that was your takeaway then you really were not paying attention and you probably have no clue about biology.

If you have the time and the spare cash go buy the book Spillover, read it and then check the date when it was written. Also realize that it is about the next pandemic, not the previous one. It probably won't do your sleep any good but at least you'll be a bit better informed.

Clearly you're not stupid, this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46983287

was on the money. Now follow the money and see where it leads.

Also, and final note on this: from the perspective of many other countries the USA has a one party system, with one party as a milder version of the other, but that doesn't mean that that not-so-mild version does not have some material differences, and that some of those differences may well lead to destabilizing the country on a scale not seen since the last few hundred years.
by bigbadfeline | 2026-03-14 21:14:08+00:00
An outstanding summary of the most important trends on the web, yes, it's being turned into a one-way propaganda-pushing machine much like the mass media before it. AI and bot-farms made that transformation cheap and ubiquitous, the profit motive, aka bribery, takes care of the rest.

I don't think it's an unsolvable problem although new legislation is continuously being considered in order to make the solution harder. Still, not impossible.
Show HN: ngrep – grep plus word embeddings
by xnan | 2026-03-14 21:15:01+00:00
I got curious about a simple question: regular expressions are purely syntactic, but what happens if you add just a little bit of semantics?

To answer, I ended up building ngrep: a grep-like tool that extends regular expressions with a new operator ~(token) that matches a word by meaning using word2vec-style embeddings (FastText, GloVe, Wikipedia2Vec).

A simple demo: "~(big)+ \b~(animal;0.35)+\b" over Moby-Dick can find many ways used to refer to a large animal, surfacing "great whale", "enormous creature", "huge elephant" and so on. Pipe it through sort | uniq -c and the winner is, unsurprisingly, "great whale" :)

Built in Rust on top of the awesome fancy-regex, and ~() composes with all standard operators (negative lookahead, quantifiers, etc.). Currently a PoC with many missing optimizations (e.g: no caching, no compilation to standard regex, etc.), obviously without the guarantees of plain regex and subject to the limits of w2v-style embeddings...but thought it was worth sharing!
by vidarh | 2026-03-14 21:15:52+00:00
I use Haiku to classify my mail - it's way overkill, but also doesn't require training unlike a classifer. I recieve many dozens of e-mails a day, and it's burned on average ~$3 worth of tokens per month. I'll probably switch that to a cheaper model soon, but it's cheap enough the "payoff" from spending the time optimizing it is long.
by jordanb | 2026-03-14 21:16:19+00:00
Watching their demo video was the perfect encapsulation of "this was not made for users" I have ever seen. First of all the idea of hanging out in a digital world with Mark Zuckerberg is so bleak. I can't imagine a worse hang.

But other than that, it was all about working in a digital office, being advertised to, etc. They had this scene where one of Zuck's definitely-real friends is excited about "this new street art" on the digital wall that jumps off the wall and they interact with it. Imagine having popup ads that jump up at you when you're walking (gliding?) down the street!
by Analemma_ | 2026-03-14 21:16:34+00:00
The insanely competitive market for LLMs is great for us, but if I were one of the investors in these companies it wouldn't exactly fill me with confidence that my $500 billion spent on datacenters and Nvidia cards is going to get repaid ten times over like they're claiming. I'm still getting very strong "this is a commodity; margins will be driven inexorably to zero" vibes from these products.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-03-14 21:16:35+00:00
> Yeah dude, "Rendering, AI, code compiling,..." is not the target market for this device. It's just not.

None of the people who want to do those things but can't afford a more expensive machine will ever attempt to do them on the machine they can actually afford then, is that right?

> Right, which is completely and utterly unrealistic.

"Unrealistic" is something that doesn't happen. This is something that happens if you use that machine in a particular way, and there are many people who use machines in that way.

> He had the sort of load that would be more typical - web-browsing, playing games, writing the occasional thing in Pages, streaming video, etc. etc.

Then you would have a sample size of one determined by all kinds of arbitrary factors like whether any of the games had a large enough working set to make it swap, how many hours were spent playing that game instead of another one etc.

The problem is not that it always happens. The problem is that it can happen, and then they needlessly screw you by soldering the drive.
by Waterluvian | 2026-03-14 21:17:15+00:00
I was so confused by the CD drives of that era. They all had a volume wheel and a headphone jack, but never once did I experience those working. The audio CDs were always “owned” by the OS, which piped the audio through the normal channels out my speakers or the PC headphone jack.

I imagine the existence of those means that CD drives had their own DAC and other logic. I guess there was an idea of wanting to play CD audio without it being a PC concern? Or on PCs without audio capability?
by jacquesm | 2026-03-14 21:18:12+00:00
Yes, they are no longer even pretending to hide, I think that's the thing that really changed. Up to a few years ago there would always be the figleaf. Now, they're just stating openly what they're up to and nobody bats an eye. It's an extreme case of the normalization of deviance. And in a way that is the answer to that age old question: "How could they let it happen?" when contemplating Germany ca. 1936.
by jwilliams | 2026-03-14 21:18:25+00:00
I have moved towards super-specific scripts (so I guess "CLI"?) for a few reasons:

1. You can make the script very specific for the skill and permission appropriately.

2. You can have the output of the script make clear to the LLM what to do. Lint fails? "Lint rules have failed. This is an important for reasons blah blah and you should do X before proceeding". Otherwise the Agent is too focused on smashing out the overall task and might opt route around the error. Note you can use this for successful cases too.

3. The output and token usage can be very specific what the agent needs. Saves context. My github comments script really just gives the comments + the necessary metadata, not much else.

The downsides of MCP all focus on (3), but the 1+2 can be really important too.
by somat | 2026-03-14 21:18:28+00:00
See also: postscript. The document structure extensions being comments always bothered me. I mean surely, surely in a turing complete language there is somewhere to fit document structure information. Adobe: nah, we will jam it in the comments.

https://dn790008.ca.archive.org/0/items/ps-doc-struc-conv-3/...
by menix | 2026-03-14 21:18:39+00:00
One aspect I think is often overlooked in the CLI vs. MCP debate: MCP's support for structured output and output schema (introduced in the 2025-06-18 spec). This is a genuinely underrated feature that has practical implications far beyond just "schema bloat."

Why? Because when you pair output schema with CodeAct agents (agents that reason and act by writing executable code rather than natural language, like smolagents by Hugging Face), you solve some of the most painful problems in agentic tool use:

1. Context window waste: Without output schema, agents have to call a tool, dump the raw output (often massive JSON blobs) into the context window, inspect it, and only then write code to handle it. That "print-and-inspect" pattern burns tokens and attention on data the agent shouldn't need to explore in the first place.

2. Roundtrip overhead: Writing large payloads back into tools has the same problem in reverse. Structured schemas on both input and output let the agent plan a precise, single-step program instead of fumbling through multiple exploratory turns.

There's a blog post on Hugging Face that demonstrates this concretely using smolagents: https://huggingface.co/blog/llchahn/ai-agents-output-schema

And the industry is clearly converging on this pattern. Cloudflare built their "Code Mode" around the same idea (https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode/), converting MCP tools into a TypeScript API and having the LLM write code against it rather than calling tools directly. Their core finding: LLMs are better at writing code to call MCP than at calling MCP directly. Anthropic followed with "Programmatic tool calling" (https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/code-execution-with-mc..., https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/tool-us...), where Claude writes Python code that calls tools inside a code execution container. Tool results from programmatic calls are not added to Claude's context window, only the final code output is. They report up to 98.7% token savings in some workflows.

So the point here is: MCP isn't just valuable for the centralization, auth, and telemetry story the author laid out (which I fully agree with). The protocol itself, specifically its structured schema capabilities, directly enables more efficient and reliable agentic workflows. That's a concrete technical advantage that CLIs simply don't offer, and it's one more reason MCP will stick around.

Long live MCP indeed.
by anthk | 2026-03-14 21:19:01+00:00
pigz it's damn fast on compressing. Also, a Vax with NetBSD can
run gzip. So here is it. Go try these new fancy formats on a Vax, I dare you.

And, yes, I prefer LZMA over the obsolete Bzip2 any day, but GZIP it's like the ZIP of free formats modulo packaging, which it's the job of TAR.
by zozbot234 | 2026-03-14 21:19:20+00:00
> Can you identify any historical analogy to this claim?

It's difficult because the main driver is clearly towards increased urbanization, driven by the high productivity of urban jobs. But if you're planning to live mostly on your UBI and work less if at all, you won't care as much about that. There were several "back to the land" movements in the history of modern developed countries, and the early stages of succesful gentrification - often involving comparatively marginalized folks and highly mobile groups, such as artists and youths - demonstrate a similar dynamic that can ultimately lead to the flourishing of new urban areas as the stages of gentrification progress.
by vova_hn2 | 2026-03-14 21:19:27+00:00
Saw a funny video [0] in the music-adjacent part of YouTube about an Instagram trend when man record themselves playing a musical instrument (usually guitar), then use AI video editing to turn themselves into scantily clad women and use these videos to lure people into viewing their adult content (also AI generated).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqrJgjrBV2I (it's a very short video, only 45 seconds)
by icegreentea2 | 2026-03-14 21:20:16+00:00
The article argues that space and AI dominance meaningfully threatens China's second strike (mobile land based ICBMs) survivability, which would bias China to act more proactively (ie, more hair trigger) in escalation scenarios.

Chinese and Russian developments (HGVs, FOBs, the Russian "superweapons" like Poseidon) are all destabilizing to an extent. But as long as none them challenge/hold at risk the US second strike capability (a robust C2 network and the SSBN fleet), they won't be massively destabilizing.

For what it's worth, HGVs that could strike the US from China still need to be launched off what are effectively ICBM class rockets. The launch signatures would almost certainly be detected.

And finally, let's not even get started with what Golden Dome would do to strategic stability.

There's simply no need to go pointing fingers right now. The reality is that all sides are taking various self-interested actions that in the absence of communication or coordination will lead towards less stable environments. No side has the ability to compel the others to not take these actions, and so the best we can do is try to anticipate the new operating environments and be ready for them as best we can.
by HDThoreaun | 2026-03-14 21:20:18+00:00
Meta ad spend increases 10% every year. Their products have had non stop continual successes for decades at this point. If fb and insta never changed and were solely relying on tailwind you could say they havent had any success, but this clearly is not true imo. Their family of apps have changed a lot, mostly for the worse imo, but it has led to massive increases in ad shows and spend per ad show.
by absoluteunit1 | 2026-03-14 21:20:41+00:00
> Should you focus on SEO in the early days of your startup? Probably not

I would completely disagree with this (product dependent).

If your product is a consumer app - I would highly prioritize and understand SEO before even having a product complete. Develop a good understanding of SEO around your product domain and niche.

If it’s a B2B - then yes, I would agree.
by itsmaxn | 2026-03-14 21:20:55+00:00
I built Valyris to help founders determine a defensible startup valuation before fundraising.

The tool analyzes a pitch deck and applies several VC valuation frameworks such as Berkus, Scorecard, Risk Factor, VC Method and Comparables to generate a valuation range and investor-ready report.

Curious to hear how founders here approach valuation before seed rounds.

https://valyris.app
by AznHisoka | 2026-03-14 21:21:21+00:00
I am not sure where the OP is hearing that the hype cycle is dissipating, but MCP adoption is actually accelerating, not decreasing [1]

More than 200% growth in official MCP servers in past 6 months: https://bloomberry.com/blog/we-analyzed-1400-mcp-servers-her...
by itsmaxn | 2026-03-14 21:21:40+00:00
Hi HN, I'm the founder of Valyris.

The idea came from repeatedly seeing early-stage founders struggle with one question before fundraising: what valuation can they reasonably defend in front of investors?

Most founders either guess a number or rely on loose comparables, while investors typically evaluate startups using structured frameworks (Berkus, Scorecard, VC Method, etc.).

Valyris tries to make those frameworks accessible to founders. You upload a pitch deck and the system applies multiple venture valuation methods to generate a structured report with valuation ranges, benchmarks and risk analysis.

I'm especially interested in feedback from founders who have recently gone through seed fundraising. How did you determine your valuation before talking to investors?
by CharlieDigital | 2026-03-14 21:22:41+00:00
We built our own (may open source eventually).

MCP is effectively "just another HTTP REST API"; OAuth and everything. The key parts of the protocol is the communication shape and sequence with the client, which most SDKs abstract for you.

The SDKs for MCPs make it very straightforward to do so now and I would recommend experimenting with them. It is as easy to deploy as any REST API.
by jacquesm | 2026-03-14 21:23:03+00:00
I have one of those 'flying lawnmowers' here and I'm not sure you would like to get up close and personal with them. They are super dangerous even when they are nominally under your control. But I agree with you that on the larger canvas the astroturfing will in spite of being more bloodless will do far more damage.

People are just not ready for being skeptical against this, they've barely gotten used to phone scams and now they have astroturfing and deepfakes to contend with.
by jsunderland323 | 2026-03-14 21:23:16+00:00
I think direnv would actually play nicely with what we're working on https://coasts.dev. It's for isolating docker-compose runtimes so you can run multiple localhost runtimes and assign them to your various worktrees.

We specifically don't solve the env vars per directory problem, so this is really cool to see.

It's crazy the see the amount of hackery we're all having to figure out with worktrees, way cool to see all these solutions popping up.
by eucyclos | 2026-03-14 21:23:17+00:00
Not should, can't. The assertion I'm referring to is that once something can be rationally discussed it's no longer a taboo, and once a culture has no taboos it has no real vitality or potential for growth left.

Nothing there about causing cultural decline, just evidence of it, and thereby limits on the kind of culture that can host the attitude you describe.