MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by i-blis | 2026-01-17 19:24:25+00:00
> Civic institutions—the rule of law, universities, and a free press—are the backbone of democratic life.

I disagree. The backbone of democratic life are the rule of law and freedom of speech, which makes a big difference. The press has historically been a counter-power inquiring into privileges and breaches of the rule of the law and thus promoted freedom of speech but almost only inasmuch it served the interest of the emerging merchant bourgeoisie . And we are long past that. Universities never have been liberal forces: they backed the Church and refused paradigm shifts. They still are very conservative even though in a peculiar sense, as leftist conservatives.
by lordnacho | 2026-01-17 19:24:35+00:00
> I'm curious: what have you actually learned from using LLMs to generate code for you?

I learn whether my design works. Some of the things I plan would take hours to type out and test. Now I can just ask the LLM, it throws out a working, compiling solution, and I can test that without spending my waking hours on silly things. I can just glance at the code and see that it's right or wrong.

If there are internal contradictions in the design, I find that out as well.
by yksanjo | 2026-01-17 19:25:06+00:00
Hi HN,

I built MCP Discovery API, an agent-native discovery layer for Model Context Protocol servers.

The problem: AI agents can only use tools you pre-configure. They can't discover new capabilities dynamically.

The solution: A semantic search API that returns the best MCP server for any task.

Example:
Query: "I need to send emails with templates"
Response: Gmail MCP server (87% confidence) + install: npx -y @anthropic/mcp-server-gmail

Features:
- Semantic search using OpenAI embeddings + pgvector
- Real-time performance metrics (latency, uptime)
- Side-by-side server comparison
- 24 servers indexed, 91 capabilities tagged

Tech: TypeScript, Supabase, Railway, MCP SDK

Live: https://mcp-discovery-production.up.railway.app
GitHub: https://github.com/yksanjo/mcp-discovery

Feedback welcome!
by LtdJorge | 2026-01-17 19:25:19+00:00
I have an LG OLED C3 as a monitor, 42". I may be able to distinguish separate pixels if looking at a '.' or something like that (a stuck pixel happened for a few weeks, which I could notice on a white background).

But the density is definitely enough for text for the distance required for such a screen size. At least when using grayscale AA, because OLED subpixel...
by SerafimKorablev | 2026-01-17 19:25:22+00:00
Thank you for the detailed feedback! Really appreciate you taking the time to share these points.

On point 4 (custom answers in Q&A): You're right, this is missing! I'll add the ability to write your own answers today or tomorrow.

On point 1 (scrolling): I pushed a batch of scroll fixes yesterday, but I see it's still not working optimally. We're actively working on improving this - it's definitely on our radar.

On point 2 (split windows): We're planning to add multi-window support soon - so you can have multiple chat windows open side by side, similar to how you'd work with multiple terminal windows, but with a nice UI. Stay tuned!

On point 3 (verbosity control): Great suggestion - sometimes you want to catch assumptions before they cause damage. Adding to our roadmap.

Thanks again, and glad you're finding it useful despite these rough edges!
by teiferer | 2026-01-17 19:25:47+00:00
I agree that big tech is and has been too powerful and too unregulated. But it's not "making everybody miserable". The world is not just black and white and HN is too much of an intellectually honest forum to just throw around such blanket statements. Which is why I called it out.

I also didn't say the 80s were dark ages. I was also around back then and life was fun. But none of what I wrote was easy or possible 20 years ago. You can try to nitpick but the point stands.
by lutusp | 2026-01-17 19:25:55+00:00
> Man, you really went ahead and tried to compare Minneapolis with Teharan.

It would help if you could spell "Tehran". Then notice that in either place you can be killed for annoying authority figures, without due process or recourse.

> This is got me laughing out loud.

I suspect that by 2028 you won't be laughing quite so loudly -- or at all.
by shrubby | 2026-01-17 19:26:58+00:00
Yup.

Plenty of solutions, but politicians will never make it happen.

We calculated that capping personal emissions (mostly doable via peer pressure should we get this moving as normal people) to some top 1 percent 25 metric carbon ton and going plant based would get us net-zero while additionally getting rid of the zillionaire problem and adding extra 50-100 gigaton rewilding effect to the table.

With no bigger than marginal effect on anyone's QOL.

But we're SOL as the propaganda machines of the zillionaires keep dividing normal people to fake dichotomies.
by asdff | 2026-01-17 19:27:19+00:00
I think a good question to ask, is if these schools would have paid for cliffnotes for all their kids. The answer is of course “no,” not only due to the presumed expense but also the fact cliffnotes are the easy way out of having to use your brain in English class. AI is no different. Kids are using it as an easy crutch to cram and avoid actually learning to study material, not as some research tool like it is pitched. It is like worse than wikipedia, and somehow everyone in education had such strong feelings about wikipedia but are rolling out the carpet for chatgpt school wide subscriptions.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-17 19:27:22+00:00
The catastrophic predictions made by many who want to address climate change - implying actual human extinction - left the door open for such accusations. Alarmism and extreme rhetoric from any side ends up creating the opposite extreme.

But what’s weird to me is the effects are apparent now. Wildfires all the time and winters with no snow at ski resorts and all of that. Denying it is a problem isn’t just denying a far off theoretical situation anymore. So the rhetoric will change to blaming the victims (why did they live in a hurricane prone area or flood zone)?
by estearum | 2026-01-17 19:27:57+00:00
Wow gee wiz, it’s almost like my original comment was: go do some reading.

Regarding the “no way to undo” and the “violent snap back”, we know the desire albedo effects dissipate and therefore require continuous maintenance.

However, these aerosols also cause hard-to-reverse reactions to other things like damaging the ozone layer and causing rain pattern shifts.

Yeah, most climate catastrophe scenarios are of the severity you describe. This one is not.

The entire point of SAI is to “save up” damage to the environment. So over 100 years of SAI and then stopping, you will incur 100 years of atmospheric and temperature changes within a few months.

And that’s only over a hundred years. If we depend on this and do it for a thousand years, now it’s a thousand years of damage applied in months.

This is far, far, far faster than any biological system evolves. Sure maybe some microbes that can survive in a gigantic range of environments could survive, but no, probably no complex life forms would.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-01-17 19:28:06+00:00
That said, they don't seem to be "actual, literal Nazis"

Agreed. The actual, literal Nazis showed their faces. These are just plain hired thugs.

For those who insist on Nazi analogies, ICE is SA, not the Gestapo. Another apt comparison might be to Sinclair Lewis's 'Minute Men' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Can%27t_Happen_Here).
by thesz | 2026-01-17 19:28:19+00:00
[1] https://towardsdatascience.com/llm-powered-time-series-analy...

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02389

[3] https://arxiv.org/html/2402.10835v3

Some links from the top of Google search.

Take a look here, also, it's an important law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law

It is possible for LLMs to learn Bernford's law, implicitly. So they will be non-null predictors of time series data, because time series data is also Bernford-law-distributed [4].

[4] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017EGUGA..19.2950T/abstra...
by FloorEgg | 2026-01-17 19:28:24+00:00
Same. Also no expert.

My intuition is that if we carefully reverse what we have been doing it's a lot less scary to me than rolling dice on adding something new.

the geoengineeing strategies that make sense to me are ecosystem restoration, not novel climate manipulation.

- converting solar energy to reforestation via automation

- solar powered robots digging demi-dunes in Sahel

- industrial CO2 capture, economically extracting the CO2 and converting it into something more valuable and environmental sustainable

In other words, using scalable and novel technology to carefully reverse the changes we have made rather than adding to them.
In other words, undoing the damage we have done by targeting and repairing the damage itself instead of the consequences.
by calmbonsai | 2026-01-17 19:28:27+00:00
I've heard of "being followed" by a mountain lion out of curiosity or, perhaps, scavenging when ill, but never a full-day stalk.

There was a recent death in our "backyard" though https://vt.co/news/us/details-emerge-solo-hiker-killed-by-mo... that was, clearly, the result of a planned attack by a teenage male so, perhaps, their behavior is changing.

Still, it's so rare, we don't have enough modern data.
by eh_why_not | 2026-01-17 19:28:31+00:00
Good article. I found this part the most damning:

> "We know that richer communities and schools will be able to afford more advanced AI models," Winthrop says, "and we know those more advanced AI models are more accurate. Which means that this is the first time in ed-tech history that schools will have to pay more for more accurate information. And that really hurts schools without a lot of resources."

... and am somehow reminded of the movie Gattaca.
by lotu | 2026-01-17 19:28:48+00:00
You say that like someone that has been coding for so long you have forgotten what it's like to not know how to code. The customer will have little idea what is even possible and will ask for a product that doesn't solve their actual problem. AI is amazing at producing answers you previously would have looked up on stack overflow, which is very useful. It often can type faster that than I can which is also useful. However, if we are going to see the exponential improvements towards AGI AI boosters talk about we would have already seen the start of it.

When LLMs first showed up publicly it was a huge leap forward, and people assumed it would continue improving at the rate they had seen but it hasn't.
by kshri24 | 2026-01-17 19:28:49+00:00
I wouldn't say it is a tree as such as at least trees are deterministic where input parameters (seed, environment, sunlight) define the output.

LLM outputs are akin to a mutant tree that can decide to randomly sprout a giant mushroom instead of a branch. And you won't have any idea why despite your input parameters being deterministic.
by themafia | 2026-01-17 19:29:41+00:00
> We need to avoid reaching tipping points that will cause non-recoverable damage to the earth system.

Then I'd be far more worried about nuclear war than minor temperature excursions. Aside from that "non recoverable" damage happens every day. What do you think mining is?

> Actual global average temperatures is what should be measured.

On average it was 10 degrees Fahrenheit cooler last year than it was the previous where I live in northern CA.
by pan69 | 2026-01-17 19:29:52+00:00
The M24 was the first computer my family purchased. My dad worked for a bank and in the mid eighties they were modernising that bank and offered employees an option to buy a PC. Since contract went to Olivetti, we got the M24. I remember the evening we picked it up and installed it on the living room table, but I can't clearly remember what year that was, I think it was 1986. My first explorations into programming were on that thing. I must have spent countless of hours with it. An 8086, 640kb of RAM and two floppy drives. Good memories.
by redeeman | 2026-01-17 19:30:39+00:00
X11 is not gone yet, XFCE is working on wayland support, and in addition to that, there are projects that work on allowing X11 window managers to run on wayland.

XFCE just has not updated.

If this is a "linux problem", then what about android and ios? its a million times worse, but somehow thats a perfectly good situation for a consumer product?
by genewitch | 2026-01-17 19:31:27+00:00
picked four stations at random[0] and it's just precip numbers, no temps, no humidity, no insolation, etc.

are you sure you linked what you think you linked?

[0] /by-station and then unclutched my scroll wheel and spun it for arbitrary amount of time, re-engaged clutch and clicked what was under the cursor. repeated 3 more times. i did a fifth, where the one i was looking at was identical to the fourth one, but had a 1 in the least significant portion of the station ID instead of a 4, in case it was like, "4" is precip, "1" is temps, and i happened to click "4" 4 times in a row.
by immibis | 2026-01-17 19:31:34+00:00
There's a clear pattern where comments containing certain words are flagged much more often than comments containing mildly cens-red versions of those words. Could be HN itself but if we assume HN isn't lying about how its algorithm works (a big assumption) then it must be user flag bots.

It's not just my comments - you see something similar with headlines on the front page that contain certain names like El-n M-sk. They will accumulate hundreds of points and comments and then be cens-red.
by pera | 2026-01-17 19:31:36+00:00
"Borrow" is an interesting choice of word, see for example this:

/// The quirks mode of the document.
#[inline]
pub fn quirks_mode(&self) -> QuirksMode {
self.quirks_mode
}

https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/blob/3e5bc78b075645...

And then this:

/// The quirks mode of the document.
pub fn quirks_mode(&self) -> QuirksMode {
self.stylist.quirks_mode()
}

https://github.com/servo/stylo/blob/71737ad5c8b29c143a6c992a...

It seems ChatGPT is still copying segments of code almost verbatim, although sometimes it does weird things, compare these for example:

https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/blob/3e5bc78b075645...

https://github.com/servo/stylo/blob/71737ad5c8b29c143a6c992a...
by asdff | 2026-01-17 19:32:04+00:00
Why not use the textbook to
work through assigned problems? As a kid I would have been tempted to use AI because studying seemed tough. But as an adult on the otherside, I understood that I am only responsible for what is taught to me, or in other words, everything is solveable based on what is taught and you have all the pieces you need to do it if you pay attention in class and to assigned readings. I don’t think I fully appreciated that until halfway through college. Felt like a cheat code when I did. Like “oh thats how to get an A, it was all so simple all along.”
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-01-17 19:32:43+00:00
> The problem with that arrangement (even in thought experiment land, where I'm happy to perform these steps every day) is that all the evil server needs to do to trick me is to put a doctored copy of the Times in that one newspaper stand.

Your analogy is analogous, and that's exactly the same problem as with the blockchain! Unless you're maintaining your own Bitcoin full node, your integrity comes from the provenance: "my lightweight client trusts this full node not to lie to me". This is the same as your "one guy to sample the papers".

All you need to do is grab a copy of the day's paper from your local convenience store, and compare your results with the Times website and two randomly-selected peers (selected from a distribution carefully chosen to ensure that each day's graph is connected). Any discrepancy will be obvious, and undeniable (since you have the physical artefact as a certificate of duplicity), so anyone who discovers a discrepancy can blow the whistle. If no whistle is blown, then either there was no discrepancy, or there is a big conspiracy (i.e., one large enough that blockchain wouldn't have saved you either).

The problem is not all that difficult. The main advantage of Bitcoin is that it's a good enough solution that many people don't feel the need to think about the problem any more – even though it's a marginal improvement over the prior art, with major downsides of its own.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-17 19:32:51+00:00
>But why do you think having more money will fix that insecurity?

Because it'd be nice for rent to not cost 80% of my part time income and spending hours just looking for full time work.

>Have you considered not participating?

Sure, but tech is too full of hyoerindividualist egos to collectively bargain. We'll burn the world down before we come to that point.
by bigbadfeline | 2026-01-17 19:32:53+00:00
> You cannot negotiate with a bully.

You can and you should, in order to make your case known, it's simple politics. Huffing and puffing while drowning in moral indignation isn't much different from the other side's approach. And don't jump the gun just because of some silly post somewhere on silly soc media.

I have never seen an official EU statement about US-EU-NATO relations that actually makes sense. What I see is kicking the ball back and forth moving in the same general direction.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-17 19:32:57+00:00
One requires more electricity than the other, and custodians of somewhat different skills. A sysadmin is a librarian and custodian with technology skills. If you can vault and custodian physical archives at scale, you can do the same for digital data (imho, based on experience with both). You’re simply building resilient systems on durable primitives.

I’m hopeful for a future where you can potentially carry all recorded knowledge on a device and media you can fit in something somewhat human portable [1]. But until then, humans interested will maintain and continually improve archival and information retrieval systems to preserve and make accessible knowledge.

[1] SPhotonix – 360TB into 5-inch glass disc with femtosecond laser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46268911 - December 2025 (27 comments)
by themafia | 2026-01-17 19:33:02+00:00
> is the ozone layer repair.

Which was, stop using CFCs, and stop venting them into the atmosphere to "dispose" of them. We also stopped lighting rivers on fire for mostly the same reasons, stop dumping industrial waste in them.

> I guess we should just accept it and adapt?

Ocean shipping produces more pollution than most countries. There are only like 5 countries that produce more carbon than the worldwide shipping fleet. If they cared then "cheap crap from China" wouldn't exist.

It's a scam. They want to monopolize the economy and they're using your environmental consciousness as the wedge to push you against your own best interests.
by dust42 | 2026-01-17 19:33:32+00:00
30 years ago I attended a university lecture in an economics class and the professor spoke about the economic consequences of global warming - some places will be better off and plenty of places will be worse off. There will be water shortages in some places, while heavy rainfall in others. He presented it as a given fact that the global warming is coming - and pretty much the whole audience was shocked. Finally someone asked if he really thinks that it is unavoidable. And his answer was yes, that is human nature. As long as fossil fuels are there and cheap to explore someone will use them.

30 years later it looks like he was right.
by 0xCE0 | 2026-01-17 19:34:18+00:00
I feel this is a major turning point for how entities can/will behave from now on towards Trump's wants/decisions. Now it is publicly proved, that you cannot trust deals made with Trump, because they can be just invalidated at a moment's notice. Only bad deals to be made, so why would any reasoned entity agree to those. World will not take threats seriously any more, and will defend themselves.

Maybe missions in Venezuela, Iran etc. was accomplished so easily, that it blurred the judgment of what could be done. But those countries are different than a conglomerate of 450 M people / 27 countries. And now military and economic thinking/domains/threats were also mixed. "Weak EU leaders" can and are now forced to unite as one strong resistance.
by furyofantares | 2026-01-17 19:34:19+00:00
My kid has had a public-school-provided Windows laptop since 3rd grade. I don't doubt chromebooks are the majority but I can't find any consistent stats on how wide the margin is.

Even if it had been a chromebook, it's still massively more computer exposure than my generation got. We got to play Oregon Trail on an Apple IIe once a month or whatever until high school, when we might use Wordperfect on occasion.

I would expect that whether a generation becomes computer literate will depend on whether they use computers in work or daily life.
by wonnage | 2026-01-17 19:34:31+00:00
I see this sentiment of using AI to improve itself a lot but it never seems to work well in practice. At best you end up with a very verbose context that covers all the random edge cases encountered during tasks.

For this to work the way people expect you’d need to somehow feed this info back into fine tuning rather than just appending to context. Otherwise the model never actually “learns”, you’re just applying heavy handed fudge factors to existing weights through context.
by dijit | 2026-01-17 19:34:41+00:00
You’re absolutely right that sysadmin jobs moved up to new levels of complexity rather than disappeared. That’s exactly my point.

Kubernetes didn’t democratise operations, it created a new tier of specialists. But here’s what’s interesting: a lot of that adoption wasn’t driven by necessity. Studies show 60% of hiring managers admit technology trends influence their job postings, whilst 82% of developers believe using trending tech makes them more attractive to employers. This creates a vicious cycle: companies adopt Kubernetes partly because they’re afraid they won’t be able to hire without it, developers learn Kubernetes to stay employable, which reinforces the hiring pressure.

I’ve watched small companies with a few hundred users spin up full K8s clusters when they could run on a handful of VMs. Not because they needed the scale, but because “serious startups use Kubernetes.” Then they spend six months debugging networking instead of shipping features. The abstraction didn’t eliminate expertise, it forced them to learn both Kubernetes and the underlying systems when things inevitably break.

The early 2000s sysadmin managing physical hardware is gone. They’ve been replaced by SREs who need to understand networking, storage, scheduling, plus the Kubernetes control plane, YAML semantics, and operator patterns. We didn’t reduce the expertise required, we added layers on top of it. Which is fine for companies operating at genuine scale, but most of that 95% aren’t Netflix.
by tmnvix | 2026-01-17 19:34:53+00:00
Drive less.

CO2 output per person in the US (all sources including industry, etc): ~13-14,000kg

Average distance driven per year per capita in the US: ~20,000km

Average CO2 output of current private vehicle fleet: ~250g/km

Therefore, over one third of total CO2 output per person is personal vehicle use. Considering only CO2 output due to personal choices driving has to be well over half.

Most people don't - or refuse - to consider the obvious choice to take personal responsibility. Drive less.