MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Heimdall – Open Source Observability Platform for MCP servers and apps
by arthurlee | 2026-01-29 14:12:19+00:00
Hi HN!

My friend and I have been working on this project for the past few days.

While building and deploying MCP servers, we found it hard to understand how they were actually being used by a model in practice. Even after deployment, it was often unclear whether the model was calling our MCP tools at all, or how it was interacting with them.

When things failed, we could not easily tell whether the issue came from our function definitions, our documentation, or how the model was interpreting and calling the tools.

So we built Heimdall to trace how models call and use an MCP server. It shows which functions are invoked, with what arguments, and in what order, so we can better understand model behavior and refine our MCP setup.

This is a very early-stage project, and there is still a lot to do. Feedback is very welcome.

Thanks for reading!
by JasonADrury | 2026-01-29 14:12:20+00:00
> He probably thinks the internet works on static 5k html pages, while the norm is 100kb, dynamically generated pages.

I just work on web stuff that people actually use. It's 2026, thousands of requests per second is nothing. You'll probably be fine even with stock apache2 and some janky php scripts.

A single gbit line will serve a 100kB page thousand times a second without issues.

Dynamically generated pages you can't easily serve at rates in excess of tens of thousands of requests per second from commodity hardware are extremely rare.
by maciejzj | 2026-01-29 14:12:39+00:00
ESA has done a lot of good for public benefit with the Sentinel-1/2 missions. I happen to work with remote sensing and Sentinel data has been my entry point to the field.

I hope that ESA keeps pushing forward even more. I am afraid that although Sentinel missions are great, ESA projects are a bit demo-like and limited in scope. Europe should focus on scaling up and applying the tech, not just proving that ambitious projects are possible for their own sake.
by Cyan488 | 2026-01-29 14:12:42+00:00
One of my first visible actions when working at a new company is to recommend the search software Voidtools Everything, and to set a 30 minute meeting to teach people how to use it.

For the next 6-12 months I get so much positive feedback about all the time that is saved while navigating the network drives.

I joke that the efficiency gains from its introduction organization-wide alone pay my salary!
by Aurornis | 2026-01-29 14:12:55+00:00
> Then as part of a new gym plan, started taking Omega 3+VitD daily, and I just felt a sense of calm and peace after a few weeks. The massive uptick in exercise probably also helped

I would bet that 95% of that improvement or more was due to the exercise.

Your anecdote is common: People start taking Vitamin D or fish oil as part of a bigger plan to have a healthier lifestyle and then they attribute success to the pills, not the lifestyle changes.
by jmclnx | 2026-01-29 14:12:56+00:00
Interesting question. I remember M/S sold or spun off Xenix, but I thought that was due to them wanting to focus on DOS and Windows.

Found this and the answer is "no" :) Seems they rid of it due to Bell Labs breakup, see "Transfer of ownership to SCO":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix
by defrost | 2026-01-29 14:13:01+00:00
Uhh, right, .... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWu7d5YqV9k

> He handed the pro-regime a major propaganda victory and the anti-regime nothing at best.

That's not even remotely true - currently the MAGA pro-Trump crowd is cleaving on gun rights .. the big lie about the need for ICE / DHS is unravelling and now Republican support for ICE is dropping.
by slgeorge | 2026-01-29 14:14:35+00:00
As a Brit when I started doing deals in North America one of the things I picked up was that I had to be explicit about disagreement OR where a decision was not being made yet. In the UK during a negotiation a 'silence' is not equal to agreement or disagreement, it's a NO-OP. If I didn't do this then prospective customers/suppliers in the USA would believe that I'd agreed to their request when from my perspective I had merely noted that they'd asked for something. Has anyone else run into this?

The other one that's confusing is that "tabling" something means the complete opposite.

I would separate 'politeness' and 'indirectness' a bit. I generally agree about 'politeness', there are plenty social forms that Brits still follow. For example I found the language/manner of New York attorneys pretty 'aggressive' the first few times.

Indirectness, is definitely a thing - Brits speak to each other or signal disagreement in ways that's clear to another Brit, but maybe not others. The use of silence, but also some words that depending on tone can mean different things which I think is difficult for North American's to interpret.
by impure-aqua | 2026-01-29 14:15:35+00:00
On my Pixel 9a (also on GrapheneOS) the biggest limitation is it can't be set to higher than 1080p, and the upscaling algorithm with my 4K display (not sure where in the chain that happens, monitor or phone) was quite terrible to the point of text legibility being a concern.

The usage experience otherwise is quite good, it's perhaps my preferred way to sync data to and from my phone, I have it all stored on a NAS so I connect to my Type-C display (which has keyboard, mouse, and ethernet connected to its switch), fire up a terminal, type in my rsync commands, and my pictures & music are synced ~instantly at LAN speeds.
by dns_snek | 2026-01-29 14:15:36+00:00
> you can't interfere or comment effectively on the policies or processes of your water treatment plant

Of course you can! You can simply install a well, a water filtration/RO system to make poopy water drinkable, or move to a different town that better suits your water quality needs. You always have the option of taking matters into your own hands and the point of having a government is so that you don't have to, in the interest of boosting quality of life and productivity.

> throwing every problem down to the goverment feels like: i believe in animal rights so instead of going vegan i'll protest to the goverment make it illegal to kill sentient animals for products.

Yes - obviously? That's how "rights" work, what separates them from "personal beliefs" is existence of a law that prohibits (or stipulates) certain actions from other people.

If I say that murder is cruel and harmful to other people, is your suggestion that I simply abstain from murder instead of demanding legislation that prohibits it?
by LoganDark | 2026-01-29 14:16:09+00:00
When ChatGPT first released and jailbreaks were pretty easy, I was able to easily get some extremely good/detailed output from it, with very little errors or weirdness. Now even when I can get jailbreaks to work with their newer models, it's just not the same, and no open-source model or even commercial model has seem to come close to the quality of that very first release. They're all just weird, dumb, random or incoherent. I keep trying even the very large open-source or open-weights models, and new versions of OpenAI's models and Claude and Gemini and so on, but it just all sucks. It all feels like slop!

I'm convinced it's because that first ChatGPT release was probably trained on data almost entirely untainted by other LLMs, and it may no longer ever be possible to obtain such a dataset again. Every model feels so artificial and synthetic. I do not know for sure why this is, but I bet it has something to do with people thinking it's possible to programmatically generate almost half the dataset?! I feel like OpenAI's moat could have been the quality and authenticity of their dataset, since they scraped practically most of the internet before LLMs became widespread, but even they've probably lost it by now.

I haven't really internalized anything about "model collapse", other than that if you train an LLM on outputs from other LLMs, you will be training to emulate an imprecise version of an imprecise version of writing, which will be measurably and perceptibly worse than merely one layer of imprecise version of actual writing.
by atomic_reed | 2026-01-29 14:17:02+00:00
Brother, the tech market is coming up to reality.

You and your good reasoning, but it means nothing to me.

Many of us will seek new a profession indeed: AI engineer. AI engineers mostly write code, but they are superior to software engineers...from the eyes of investors.

AI engineers mainly build abstract stuff: SaaS. They kill who the investors currently love the most: managers. 90% all managers will be replaced. 100 managers can be replaced with 10 managers and 10 security guards.

Then they kill 70% of the doctors, lawyers, and salesmen.

Then they kill 50% of the software engineers.

Then white becomes blue, and the eyes shift towards energy, transportation, and construction. The AI engineer, writes code like an AI, and notices these giant companies are sick. They can lobby all they want but the AI engineer and the AI lawyer will win.

Everybody who laughs now about software engineers being replaced has become serious, for the AI engineer has replaced the software engineer.

Let's see who is right in 2035. Your intelligence, or my fantasy.
by NoGravitas | 2026-01-29 14:17:15+00:00
IMO, this is a not-wrong but less insightful perspective on what Ed Zitron talks about in The Rot Economy. Cycles of overhiring and layoffs happen, but they're not the core mechanism. AI isn't the cause, but it's also not a scapegoat. It's just the current placeholder, like blockchain and the metaverse, that allow companies to have their valuation based on growth rather than profit.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-rot-economy/
by Aurornis | 2026-01-29 14:17:20+00:00
This is not true. Caffeine is not necessarily helpful for ADHD. It has a different mechanism of action from ADHD stimulants. They are not interchangeable. Not all stimulants help ADHD.

Also there’s a growing trend of diagnosing every focus problem as ADHD when many patients might have focus problems secondary to another condition like anxiety. It’s sadly all too common to find someone who believes they have ADHD due to TikTok self diagnosis or even a lazy doctor’s diagnosis but their core problem is actually anxiety. For these people, stimulants of any kind can actually worsen focus even if then provide a short term perception of helping due to the energy boost.
by dennis_jeeves2 | 2026-01-29 14:17:36+00:00
Interesting point, there is at least one theory out there which says that neither sunlight nor Vitamin D is necessary if an individual is really healthy. The ones that feel better on the Sun and/or Vitamin D are people who are at least mildly unhealthy and it's of form of addiction where the individual ought to keep taking something to just not feel miserable.
by semiquaver | 2026-01-29 14:17:54+00:00
> Till ~2010, a layoff was a sign of failure. It meant the CEO messed up.
>
> In 2024, a layoff is a signal of “discipline.” Companies lay off thousands, and their stock price jumps.

Citation needed. Author started their career after 2010 so they are not basing that on personal experience. In my experience this is not true.
by f33d5173 | 2026-01-29 14:18:06+00:00
There has to be a clause for "willful disregard for the truth", no? Having your lying machine come up with plausible lies for you and publishing them without verification is no better than coming up with the lies yourself. What really protects them from fraud accusations is that these blog posts were just content marketing, they weren't making money off of them directly.
by janpeuker | 2026-01-29 14:18:47+00:00
I had the exact same experience with HSBC, with a little twist: I was really impressed by their 100% online signup process with digital government ID which took less than 10 minutes. The process was extremely smooth, except for a very scammy sounding verification phone call. Within 1 day I had a digital card for Apple Pay and within 3 days a courier handed my my physical debit card. I liked the app too. I hadn't consented to marketing mail but HSBC decided to send me some "welcome upsell" anyways, which was returned as I refuse marketing mail. Immediately my card and account were blocked which sent me down the same experience as OP describes here.
by humanfromearth9 | 2026-01-29 14:18:51+00:00
The first thing I would do in case of depression is to make sure that the patient's energy levels are good and that mitochondria and other energy-related biochem phenomena work as expected.

I know first-hand that low energy-levels and lacking energy production mechanically lead to depression.

Also, look at how people (children also) experience the world and their relationships and their stresses when they are tired (or even just hungry) compared to when they are fit...

Fix those, and the depression might be gone.

This is not bashing against anti-depressants, they play their role to. But in some cases, energy-management is key.
by re-thc | 2026-01-29 14:19:01+00:00
> By contrast, engineers mostly require a laptop and company hoodie...

> That low marginal cost

Not true. That's how everything falls apart. Scaling software teams isn't simple. There's lots to account for. Do you just assume everyone commit to the same file and let it crash?

The more people, the more work is required to standardize, organize, document and fix gaps. You can say you're already at scale and things "should" be done but they never are. You hire a team into a specific area to find it was a giant hack supported by a part-timer and as you try to fix it the problems keep escalating.
by slfnflctd | 2026-01-29 14:19:10+00:00
> open a laptop and work

I'm still convinced we are going to need dedicated roads - or lanes at the very least - and dedicated parking/waiting areas for this to be feasible on a truly large scale.

However, it may be easier than we think-- they've already done something like this for rideshare drivers in many places, and it wouldn't necessarily need to be much more complicated than that.
by Someone | 2026-01-29 14:19:13+00:00
FTA:

“A high-level athlete doesn’t need to see a sports doctor.

[…]

Professional athletes benefit from much better […] medical support than novice or amateur runners”

So, which is it? You might say their “specific programme that includes dietary measures, recovery phases and processes” is medical support but doesn’t involve doctors, but if you do, I think that’s playing with words.
by aleph_minus_one | 2026-01-29 14:19:41+00:00
>
But factory workers usually require specialized machinery, tooling, and physical capacity, which makes overhiring slower, harder and more constrained. Those investments force more deliberate planning.

>
By contrast, engineers mostly require a laptop and company hoodie... That low marginal cost makes it far easier to hire aggressively on expectations and unwind just as aggressively when those expectations change.

Software engineers also need

- specialized machinery (at least when they have to upload to some computation cluster or cloud), think for example of the costs for GPU/TPU clusters for AIs at the moment

- tooling: depending on the sector, the license costs for the sector-specific business software can be similar as expensive as specialized machinery

- mental capacity (instead of physical capacity)
by radiator_1451 | 2026-01-29 14:19:43+00:00
I'm not surprised that The Lancet is slow or unwilling to correct the record after falling for yet another fraud.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraudulent_Lancet_MMR_vaccine-...

[2] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
by bborud | 2026-01-29 14:19:47+00:00
On average car insurance is cheaper in Germany, but I am unsure if this has anything to do with the required inspections. (Since it is mandatory anyway, it isn't a differentiator). I think it may be more about how insurance is structured and dealt with.

For instance US has a civil tort based system which tends to push prices up quite a bit because outcomes are entirely unpredictable. In Germany insurance is not litigation centric, so there are literally no punitive damages, pain-and-suffering awards are modest and predictable and compensation is based on standardized tables. So insurance cases very rarely make it anywhere near courts.
by add-sub-mul-div | 2026-01-29 14:19:50+00:00
> if your CEO asked you for a report, and you delivered fake data, do you think he would be satisfied with the excuse that AI got it wrong?

He was likely the one who ordered the use of the AI. He won't fire you for mistakes in using it because it's a step on the path towards obsoleting your position altogether or replacing you with fungible minimum wage labor to babysit the AI. These mistakes are an investment in that process.

He doesn't have to worry about consequences in the short term because all the other companies are making the same mistakes and customers are accepting the slop labor because they have no choice.
by poulpy123 | 2026-01-29 14:19:52+00:00
You're right. I think the current AI direction is a dead end for real artificial intelligence, so it is not the thing that will replace all jobs, but the day a machine with the real cognitive capacity of a 5 year old exists is the day almost all of humanity becomes useless.

And before that the current direction is still enough to massively hurt the world because there will be less and less places for us humans.

Another point I noticed that nobody is talking around us is the technology adoption rates. When the car industry started, decades happened between the early users and cars being ubiquitous in the population (especially taking into account the world and not the richest countries). So a sizeable part of the transportation industry that was ultimately replaced by cars had the time to adapt, move to other jobs or arrive at the end of their work life.

But now the technology goes from its few first users to being used by everyone and their cats in years if not months. There is absolutely no time to adapt, love over or endure things until you don't work anymore.
by matsemann | 2026-01-29 14:19:55+00:00
I have one in my name, and living in Norway I would've thought we were better at handling "special" characters in names, given that people here are named Bjørn and Åse and Kjærsti. Like, old legacy systems often handle those names, and I would assume they then used Latin-1 (ISO 8859-1) which have æøå and also ü. But for some reason my name has been stuck in loads of systems growing up. Things like porting my phone number not working because the system borked on my name. Or not being able to order something because the system asking for a credit report then jumbled my name so they got nothing in return. Or just because "name doesn't match the one on the card", but it's a system along the way stripping my name. Sigh.
by sangkwun | 2026-01-29 14:20:08+00:00
Ironically, I think vibe coding actually increases the value of curation and trust.
More AI-generated apps and content = more noise. The bottleneck shifts from "can I build this?" to "what's actually worth my attention?"
SaaS that survives will likely be the ones that:

Help users filter signal from noise
Build trust through human judgment or curated sources
Solve problems that require ongoing, reliable data — not just one-off generation

I'm building in this space myself (an AI-powered news digest tool), and the core bet is exactly this: people don't want more content, they want less but better.
The vibe-coded clones might replicate features, but they can't replicate trust or a curated network of sources.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-29 14:20:34+00:00
> Tea, especially green tea, doesn’t have the same caffeine bioavailability as coffee – otherwise people would abuse it just as much as coffee

You can absolutely get high doses of caffeine from tea if you really want to. It comes down to the type of tea, how much is used, and how strong it’s brewed.

There is nothing special about tea that breaks the rules of caffeine. It comes down to the content of the leaves, quantity, and extraction into water.

> while even a light coffee or a caffeine pill is clearly noticeable

Caffeine pills generally have really high dosages, FYI. Even light coffee drinkers can be caught off guard by how much caffeine is in a typical off the shelf caffeine pill.
by jillesvangurp | 2026-01-29 14:20:35+00:00
This stuff is complex. There are no magic potions or hacks that work for everyone. No amount of positive thinking can fix physiological issues that you have because of some underlying condition. But it's quite possible to create new issues as a side effect of being depressed, stressed, chronically exhausted, etc. So, working on those issues is probably smart.

And each of those things can be caused by physiological issues as well. You might feel stressed because you don't sleep well. You might sleep poorly because you suffer from e.g. sleep Apnea. Which in turn might be because of a mix of physiological and other reasons (diet, weight, alcohol abuse, etc.).

Or you might be working too hard, which makes you stressed and causes you to lose a lot of sleep. Different causes that have similar results. Including long term physiological results. Your brain can actually get damaged if you chronically abuse it or neglect it. Many "between the ears" type problems are actually physiological.

Root causing your issues enables you to deal with them properly instead of fighting the symptoms.

Anyway, I take vitamin D and a few other things. Getting yourself checked out regularly once you hit middle age is a good idea. There's a lot of stuff that is long term lethal that a checkup can detect early. And some of it is fixable. I have the usual cardio vascular challenges that many people struggle with because of a combination of genetics, age, and life style. And indeed a vitamin D deficit.

I was also recommended to consume more omega-3 as well. Eat salmon. Work some flax/chia seeds in your breakfast. I put flax seeds in my yogurt and use it as a thickener in sauces as well. You have to grind it to dust for it to get absorbed properly. Dirt cheap and it doesn't mess with flavor/texture too much. I keep a jar of ground flax seeds in my fridge. Takes 2 minutes to top it up every 1-2 weeks or so with some freshly ground seeds.

But I'm also aware that me being a stressed startup founder has health consequences that a few pills and suplements won't fix for me. I need to actively make sure I get my rest and sleep. I deal a lot better with stressful situations when I'm well rested. And I seem to be better at avoiding getting in to those as well. And I feel happier. Sometimes the best thing I can do for my company is having a proper weekend or going to bed early enough that I can get my 8 hours of sleep. You can survive on 4 hours (been there done that), for a while. But most people are not at their peak performance if they do that. And it's not good for you to work yourself to exhaustion all the time.
by cameronh90 | 2026-01-29 14:20:45+00:00
I think my average level of useful focus is just simply higher with caffeine. I was off it for three years, which is well beyond the time it would take to lose any tolerance, but never really reverted back to the same level of focus that I get with caffeine.

I'm not sure my overall focus over time is higher with caffeine, but it does allow me to nudge more of it into the useful part of my day. However I'm a fast metaboliser of caffeine, and it doesn't impact my sleep at all, so could be that there's a genetic component to one's experience here.
Show HN: UpDog – Menu bar app to monitor your dev environment health
by heartrock | 2026-01-29 14:20:56+00:00
I got tired of running `docker ps`, `kubectl get pods`, and checking if my local services were up every time I started working. So I built UpDog — a macOS menu bar app that monitors Docker, databases, HTTP endpoints, Kubernetes, and more.

It shows a simple traffic light in your menu bar and lets you see the status of all your services at a glance.

https://updog-3b484.web.app/

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