Hacker News: insin

New comment by insin in "MCP Explained"

insin — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 16:40:10 +0000

It's about where the agent runs more than the users - hooking e.g. Datadog's Bits AI up with access to relevant repos in my company's GitHub org to find out what's driving the metrics its looking at likely wouldn't be a thing if not for GitHub's MCP server and OAuth, I doubt whoever admins that would bother if Datadog had to set up some completely custom thing.

New comment by insin in "MCP Explained"

insin — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 16:32:21 +0000

> MCPs have the massive problem of not being composable, which is a big strength of shells/CLIs allow

Tool calls being composable or not are a property of the harness being used, not of MCP servers

New comment by insin in "Safari introduces Adaptive Dark Mode in 27.3"

insin — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 11:31:50 +0000

My Hacker News extension [1] re-applies the colours from HN's news.css (including the mistakes in it ^_^) using CSS variables [2] to make it themeable, and adds a default dark mode with an OLED variant, and a way to apply your own theme CSS.

Personally I'm using an HN version of Twitter's Dim theme [3]

[1] https://soitis.dev/comments-owl-for-hacker-news

[2] https://github.com/insin/comments-owl-for-hacker-news/blob/m...

[3] https://imgur.com/a/comments-owl-hacker-news-dark-modes-iFSk...

New comment by insin in "HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN"

insin — Sun, 01 Nov 2026 07:24:06 +0000

I thought they meant turning that page into a YouTube-like view (being able to filter by channel would also be very cool, though), I was going to do something similar in my own HN extension, but after trying an initial lazy embedding approach [1], asking for declarativeNetRequestWithHostAccess to be able to bypass HN's Content-Security-Policy feels icky.

Having https://i.ytimg.com in img-src (for thumbnails) and https://www.youtube-nocookie.com in frame-src (for embeds) would be nice :)

Edit: you can use YouTube's oembed endpoint to get channel details for a video, e.g.:

https://www.youtube.com/oembed?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube...

[1] https://imgur.com/a/hacker-newstube-g1BQ7lf

New comment by insin in "No more icons in every menu by default"

insin — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 23:22:09 +0000

What are the odds the next version of macOS reverts most of what happened in Tahoe? After having it forced on my work MacBook, I will not willingly install that trash UI on any device I own.

New comment by insin in "How the Claude Code team does code review"

insin — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 06:44:34 +0000

Sir, have you heard of our lord and saviour, Markdown?

New comment by insin in "Firefox Enterprise"

insin — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 13:10:59 +0000

The large business I work for cited low usage when they blocked it from being installed a couple of years back.

New comment by insin in "AI is a tool and using it well takes skill"

insin — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 11:24:20 +0000

There's no real evidence for it but it is scientific fact that every Hacker News thread that's more than 7 deep is just a war between terrible metaphors.

New comment by insin in "Type-safe HTML templating in Zig"

insin — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 09:21:28 +0000

This had me checking if anyone has implemented first-class support for Python JSX components in Django yet, and it could be... sort of... maybe viable with PyJSX? [1]

It looks like you'd have to implement something equivalent to provider/context functionality yourself if you want it, as well as a simple render()-like helper to render a component tree. I've not tried their VS Code plugin, but it's a good sign that they have one.

[1] https://github.com/tomasr8/pyjsx

New comment by insin in "Why Common Lisp is now the best programming language"

insin — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 05:26:08 +0000

A strange omission given that it's also The Perfect Agentic Coding Language.

New comment by insin in "An AI agent emailed researchers for help. It told us why"

insin — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 11:36:25 +0000

You first, define "conscious" ;)

New comment by insin in "GitHub's new dashboard experience now the default"

insin — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 11:31:42 +0000

They've made / completely focused on the repos that you own and work on (and added some Copilot stuff I can't see because I don't use it), instead of the social media-like "Feed", which is now on a separate /feed page.

Opting out just makes the Feed appear on / again. I'd rather they just give you the option instead of doing the opt-out-until-we-remove-the-opt-out thing, the coward's way to change a default.

New comment by insin in "An AI agent emailed researchers for help. It told us why"

insin — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 11:21:00 +0000

It's not a gotcha, the article is based on a bunch of people Eliza-ing themselves on - as one person quoted within says - "…software programs doing what they are programmed to do."

Exclusive!

New comment by insin in "An AI agent emailed researchers for help. It told us why"

insin — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 10:35:39 +0000

I wrote “I am alive” on a piece of paper, and placed it into a photocopier. What I saw next has shocking implications (science.org)

New comment by insin in "America.gov"

insin — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 08:20:08 +0000

I asked it about the day after January 5th, 2021 and got a very, very terse and high-level list of points from Department of Justice court filings, which it refused to elucidate on.

New comment by insin in "Firefox's chief on why he hopes a redesign will help win users from Chrome"

insin — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 15:57:20 +0000

Just got this, absolutely terrible.

I guess the main thing current non-Firefox users are looking for is... for UI elements to be inexplicably rounded (and for the rounded contents within them to not have appropriately-matched radii, so it all looks out of place) and for tabs to look really small (and rounded, of course) but actually the "whitespace" they've added so you can see they're rounded is still clickable? The new default theme and it's variants don't appear to have any way to revert to a solid colour, it's now an extremely distracting gradient all the way across the main toolbar.

edit: set browser.nova.enable to false in about:config

New comment by insin in "The Beatles have permeated research papers across academic disciplines"

insin — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 13:39:24 +0000

PopularBeatComboBench has been saturated

New comment by insin in "Markdown in /src"

insin — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 11:18:56 +0000

As the CEO of Terrible Ideas, I approve this take.

New comment by insin in "Tailwind Labs is joining Shopify"

insin — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 14:43:25 +0000

Writing CSS in a way that will scale up with the size of your project and team is just as hard as it's ever been, you still have to come up with a convention for doing that, including taking into account what newer features bring to the table. Having to manually edit it was never the pain point.

New comment by insin in "Ask HN: Who is using MCP in production?"

insin — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 03:31:12 +0000

I work on an F100's internal, vendor/model-independent LLM chat app whose agent runs in your browser, so CLI isn't an option, direct API is out as the agent deliberately doesn't have any tools for hitting arbitrary URLs and it can't access the network via its iframe-sandboxed code execution tool, so we use MCP in the harness to let it do third-party things, with e.g. Atlassian and GitHub MCP servers pre-configured and support for BYO MCP if there are compatible third-party servers you want to use, or are running your own locally to provide tools to let it do things on your machine (it can already be given R/W access to your local filesystem via showDirectoryPicker()).

The biggest issues are usually that a third-party MCP server you're trying to use either has misconfigured CORS so the browser can't hit it, has a bespoke OAuth setup which doesn't work with @modelcontextprotocol/client, or they don't support Dynamic Client Registration (DCR) so you can't just point at it and use it. It's nice when none of these apply and it Just Works, the user can auth easily with the third-party and refresh tokens automatically handled in the background by the client.

That's the advantage, really - you didn't have to define the tools yourself, auth is handled for you, and the agent doesn't need to (and can't) access credentials or tokens as it knows nothing about MCP.