News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

jancurn

Exactly. Once you start looking at MCP as a protocol to access remote OAuth-protected resources, not an API for building agents, you realize the immense value
Cool, adding this to my list of MCP CLIs:

  - https://github.com/apify/mcpc
  - https://github.com/chrishayuk/mcp-cli
  - https://github.com/wong2/mcp-cli
  - https://github.com/f/mcptools
  - https://github.com/adhikasp/mcp-client-cli
  - https://github.com/thellimist/clihub
  - https://github.com/EstebanForge/mcp-cli-ent
  - https://github.com/knowsuchagency/mcp2cli
  - https://github.com/philschmid/mcp-cli
  - https://github.com/steipete/mcporter
  - https://github.com/mattzcarey/cloudflare-mcp
  - https://github.com/assimelha/cmcp
Thank you! I guess I was fed up with lack of clients supporting enough MCP capabilities, so I had to build new one :)
Re:1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long on Thursday December 04, 2025 @03:38AM (#46145178)
You sent me down a rabbit hole: https://esolangs.org/wiki/APGsembly is mentioned in the book
Hey, this is Jan, founder of Apify.

We’re running a marketplace of 8,000+ tools called Actors for all kinds of web data extraction and automation use cases (see https://apify.com/store). Just last month, we paid out more than $500k to community developers who publish these Actors on the Apify platform.

The unit economics work for niche tools: scrapers for specific platforms, packaged open-source tools, MCP servers, or API wrappers. Too small for building SaaS around it, but developers earn a few thousand dollars per month as passive income.

We believe there can be many more such Actors. So we're putting $1M in prizes on the table to motivate developers to build new, useful Actors. Our bet is that 10,000 new specific tools can widely expand the capabilities of many AI agents and unlock a lot of value.

Hey HN,

This is Jan, the founder of Apify (https://apify.com/) — a full-stack web scraping platform.

With the help of Python community and the early adopters feedback, after an year of building Crawlee for Python in beta mode, we are launching Crawlee for Python v1.0.0.

The main features are:

- Unified storage client system: less duplication, better extensibility, and a cleaner developer experience. It also opens the door for the community to build and share their own storage client implementations.

- Adaptive Playwright crawler: makes your crawls faster and cheaper, while still allowing you to reliably handle complex, dynamic websites. In practice, you get the best of both worlds: speed on simple pages and robustness on modern, JavaScript-heavy sites.

- New default HTTP client `ImpitHttpClient` (https://crawlee.dev/python/api/class/ImpitHttpClient), powered by the Impit (https://github.com/apify/impit) library): fewer false positives, more resilient crawls, and less need for complicated workarounds. Impit is also developed as an open-source project by Apify, so you can dive into the internals or contribute improvements yourself: you can also create your own instance, configure it to your needs (e.g., enable HTTP/3 or choose a specific browser profile), and pass it into your crawler.

- Sitemap request loader: easier to start large-scale crawls where sitemaps already provide full coverage of the site

- Robots exclusion standard: not only helps you build ethical crawlers, but can also save time and bandwidth by skipping disallowed or irrelevant pages

- Fingerprinting: each crawler run looks like a real browser on a real device. Using fingerprinting in Crawlee is straightforward: create a fingerprint generator with your desired options and pass it to the crawler.

- Open telemetry: monitor real-time dashboards or analyze traces to understand crawler performance. easier to integrate Crawlee into existing monitoring pipelines

For details, you can read the announcement blog post: https://crawlee.dev/blog/crawlee-for-python-v1

Our team and I will be happy to answer here any questions you might have.

Re:Show HN: The Web Actor Programming Model on Wednesday March 05, 2025 @11:23AM (#43268687)
Hey all,

we’re publishing this whitepaper that describes a new concept for building serverless microapps called Actors, which are easy to develop, share, integrate, and build upon. Actors are a reincarnation of the UNIX philosophy for programs running in the cloud.

Our goal is to make Actors an open web standard. We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Here’s the corresponding GitHub repo: https://github.com/apify/actor-whitepaper

For this use case, you might use this ready-made Actor: https://apify.com/apify/website-content-crawler
For sure, simply store cookies after login and then use them to initiate the crawl.
Not yet, but it’s on the roadmap
There are many legitimate and legal use cases where one might want to circumvent blocking of bots. We believe that everyone has the moral right to access and fairly use non-personal publicly available data on the web the way they want, not just the way the publishers want them to. This is the core founding principle of the open web, which allowed the web to become what it is today.

BTW we continuously update this exhaustive post covering all legal aspects of web scraping: https://blog.apify.com/is-web-scraping-legal/

The main advantage (for now) is that the library has a single interface for both HTTP and headless browsers, and bundled auto scaling. You can write your crawlers using the same base abstraction, and the framework takes care of this heavy lifting. Developers of scrapers shouldn't need to reinvent the wheel, and just focus on building the "business" logic of their scrapers. Having said that, if you wrote your own crawling library, the motivation to use Crawlee might be lower, and that's fair enough.

Please note that this is the first release, and we'll keep adding many more features as we go, including anti-blocking, adaptive crawling, etc. To see where this might go, check https://github.com/apify/crawlee

Hey all,

This is Jan, the founder of Apify (https://apify.com/) — a full-stack web scraping platform. After the success of Crawlee for JavaScript (https://github.com/apify/crawlee/) and the demand from the Python community, we're launching Crawlee for Python today!

The main features are:

- A unified programming interface for both HTTP (HTTPX with BeautifulSoup) & headless browser crawling (Playwright)

- Automatic parallel crawling based on available system resources

- Written in Python with type hints for enhanced developer experience

- Automatic retries on errors or when you’re getting blocked

- Integrated proxy rotation and session management

- Configurable request routing - direct URLs to the appropriate handlers

- Persistent queue for URLs to crawl

- Pluggable storage for both tabular data and files

For details, you can read the announcement blog post: https://crawlee.dev/blog/launching-crawlee-python

Our team and I will be happy to answer here any questions you might have.

Older »