MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: PolyMCP – a toolkit for MCP servers and agent integration
by justvugg | 2026-01-15 13:53:45+00:00
PolyMCP is a framework for building and interacting with MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers and for creating agents that can use those servers as dynamic tools.

Developing and managing MCP servers often involves several challenges:

Exposing Python functions as discoverable tools requires repetitive boilerplate.

Coordinating multiple MCP servers simultaneously is complex.

Debugging tools during development is hard due to limited visibility into calls and outputs.

Integrating agents with LLMs to automatically discover and invoke tools is usually ad-hoc.

PolyMCP addresses these challenges by providing:

Flexible tool exposure: Python functions can be served over HTTP, in-process, or stdio with minimal setup.

Inspector dashboard: Monitor tool invocations, metrics, and test calls interactively in real-time.

Agent integration: Support for multiple LLM providers and automatic tool discovery and invocation.

CLI and workflow utilities: Streamline project setup, testing, and execution.

PolyMCP reduces friction in MCP server development and multi-tool agent orchestration, offering a reliable framework for building intelligent, tool-driven systems.

Github: https://github.com/poly-mcp/Polymcp
by everyone | 2026-01-15 13:53:55+00:00
One of the benefits of the USA no longer being an ally is we should be able to ignore all this sort of bullshit in the EU now.

Cory Doctorow was talking about it recently.
https://youtu.be/3C1Gnxhfok0?si=OzjYwL16yLzQUwuY
by program_whiz | 2026-01-15 13:54:35+00:00
Is there an AI system with functionality at or equal to a human brain that operates on less than 100W? Its currently the most efficient model we have. You compare all of humanity's energy expenditure, but to make the comparison, you need to consider the cost of replicating all that compute with AI (assuming we had an AGI at human level in all regards, or a set of AIs that when operated together could replace all human intelligence).
Show HN: Stash: End-to-end encrypted file sharing with zero friction
by alepacheco-dev | 2026-01-15 13:54:51+00:00
I built Stash because I was tired of the usual tradeoff in file sharing: either force recipients to create accounts or give up on privacy.

How it works
1. Upload from the iOS, iPad or Mac app
2. Get a shareable link
3. Recipients download in the browser, no app, no account, nothing to install

Encryption model
Files are encrypted on device using AES 256 GCM before upload.
The encryption key lives only in the URL fragment (after #), which browsers never send to servers.
Even if the link is intercepted in transit, the file cannot be decrypted without the fragment.
The server never sees plaintext or keys.

Native Mac app
Built with Mac Catalyst and full bidirectional drag and drop.
Drag files onto the app to upload.
Drag files out of the app to save them anywhere.
No save dialogs, no friction. It feels like moving files in Finder.

What I optimized for
• No file size limits
• No compression, original quality preserved
• Links do not expire unless you delete them
• Native Apple UX for senders, universal browser access for recipients

The goal was something my non technical family could use to receive files securely without walkthroughs, accounts or app installs.

I would love feedback on the encryption approach and the UX, especially from people who have built or reviewed similar systems.

Web: https://stash-app.xyz
by samiv | 2026-01-15 13:54:54+00:00
When it became cheaper to publish text did the quality go up?

When it became cheaper to make games did the quality go up?

When it became cheaper to mass produce X (sneakers, tshirts, anything really) did the quality go up?

It's a world that is made of an abundance of trash. The volume of low quality production saturates the market and drowns out whatever high quality things still remain. In such a world you're just better of reallocating your resources from the production quality towards the the shouting match of marketing and try to win by finding ways to be more visible than the others. (SEO hacking etc shenanigans)

When you drive down the cost of doing something to zero you you also effectively destroy the economy based around that thing. Like online print, basically nobody can make a living with focusing on publishing news or articles but alternative revenue streams (ads) are needed. Same for games too.
by lotsofpulp | 2026-01-15 13:55:00+00:00
While I am prone to be against bans, I am curious how to deal with the biological problem of supernormal stimulus:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus

It is broadly accepted that you cannot educate a toddler or even young child to expect them to be able to self control all the time due to lack of brain development (frontal cortex or what have you).

But what if a significant portion or maybe even all humans’ brains never get to the point where all supernormal stimuli can be educated against, and it is just an inherent mechanical weakness?
by crote | 2026-01-15 13:55:15+00:00
With regards to the copper market: it keeps surprising me that some people seem to assume copper is a hard requirement for conducting electricity.

In reality copper is just convenient. We use it because it's easy to work with, a great conductor, and (until recently) quite affordable. But for most applications there's no reason we couldn't use something else!

For example, a 1.5mm2 copper conductor is 0.0134kg/m, which at current prices is $0.17 / meter. A 2.4mm2 aluminum conductor has the same resistance, weighs 0.0065kg/m, which at current prices is $0.0195 / meter!

Sure, aluminum is a pain to work with, but with a price premium like that there's a massive incentive to find a way to make it work.

Copper can't get too expensive simply due to power demands because people will just switch to aluminum. The power grid itself had been using it for decades, after all - some internal datacenter busbars should be doable as well.
by webdevver | 2026-01-15 13:55:41+00:00
not really an answer ofcourse, but what ive found to be quite fun is having the elixir linux source code open in Edge, and using the copilot side-window to just copy-paste it bits of code and asking it to walk me through it (select block of code, right click, "ask copilot".)

sort of like a modern-day "a commentary on the unix operating system". LLMs appear to be (probably unsurprisingly) very knowledgeable about Linux internals.
by JKCalhoun | 2026-01-15 13:55:50+00:00
There's also an 1802 Membership Card—which I knew as the COSMAC Elf Membership Card [1][2]. Switches and LEDs. I built one of these kits a decade ago but mine didn't work. (I still need to pull it out and try to debug it. For all I know I did assemble it correctly and there is just a RUN switch or something I did not know to flip.)

[1] http://www.sunrise-ev.com/1802.htm

[2] http://www.cosmacelf.com/gallery/membership-cards/
by sfifs | 2026-01-15 13:56:41+00:00
This take misses the real un-stated strategic mistake which is what I'm pretty sure Merz actually means but can't say aloud.

Shutting down nuclear reactors means you lose a source of plutonium that can be diverted to weapons manufacturing. You also lose nuclear engineers and workers with skills and knowledge to fabricate with fissile materials which you need to manufacture those weapons.

Similarly, the reason so many countries have a civilian rocket launching program in spite of having no chance in hell in beating SpaceX economically is to have scientists and engineers who can build missiles if needed.

These are just insurance policies. Both Japan and Korea have them for instance. As recent events have shown, countries without nuclear weapons are essentially defenceless against and dependent on those with them.
by torginus | 2026-01-15 13:57:01+00:00
These things never pan out.

The reasons why this almost never works is one of the following:

- They assume they can move hardware complexity (scheduling etc, access patterns into software). The magic compiler/runtime never arrives.

- They assume their hard-to-program but faster architecture will get figured out by devs. It won't.

- They assume a certain workload. The workload changes, and their arch is no longer optimal or possibly even workable.

- But most importantly, they don't understand the fundamental bottlenecks, which is usually memory bandwidth. Even if you increase the paper specs, like FLOPS total, FLOPS/W etc. youre usually limited by how much you can read from memory. Which is exactly as much as their competitors. The way you can overcome this is by cleverness and complexity (cache lines, smarter algorithms, acceleration structures etc), but all these require a complex computer to run with all those coherent cache hierarchies, branching and synchronization logic etc. Which is why folks like NVIDIA keep going on despite facing this constant barrage of would-be disruptors.

In fact this continue to be more and more true - memory bandwidth relies on transcievers on the chip edge, and if the size of the chips doesn't increase, bandwidth doesn't increase automatically on newer process nodes. Latency doesn't improve at all. But you get more transistors to play with, which you can use to run your workload more cleverly.

In fact I don't rule out the possibility of CPU based massively parallel compute making a comeback.
by the_af | 2026-01-15 13:57:15+00:00
> Why should I hire a dedicated writer if I have people with better understanding of the system?

Many engineers are terrible at documentation, not just because they find it boring or cannot put it into words (that's the part an LLM could actually help with) but because they cannot tell what to document, what is unneeded detail, how best to address the target audience (or what is the profile of the target audience to begin with; something you can tell an LLM but which it cannot find on its own), etc, etc. The Fine Article goes into these nuances; it's the whole point of it.

> "Write a manual for air travel for someone who never flew. Cover topics like buying a ticket, preparing for travel, getting to airport, doing things in the airport, etc"

Air travel is a well-known thing, surely different from your bespoke product.
by TheCapeGreek | 2026-01-15 13:57:54+00:00
Agreed, I do get the feeling there's a lot more underlying the author's problems than "just" extreme burnout at a deskjob. Software has been a relatively high leverage career path in the last decade; surely there were other paths he could have taken before hitting an absolute wall.

As other commenters have pointed out, this does seem like going from one extreme to another - especially once religion gets involved.

I wish Dylan well, though I do hope some deeper, more moderate self reflection takes place at some point.
by Storment33 | 2026-01-15 13:58:10+00:00
Yes I am seeing what your saying, it can start of simple and people will choose the path of least resistance and you'll end up with a ball of mud eventually. Fortunately I have not come across anything that bad yet.

I know it is a made up example, but I am not sure Python would improve the situation. I would be looking at either Docker or SBOMs to try and improve the situation and then hopefully the release process would become a lot simpler.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-15 13:58:40+00:00
The right? I never questioned anyone's right to do anything. I objected to instigation of others. To mob mentality. I don't object to going about your life and dealing with things on an individual basis as they come up.

The example seems off base. Wouldn't that be conspiracy to commit a crime?

Taking you at (what I assume to be) your intended meaning. Obviously you can contrive various situations that would be sufficiently alarming to the typical person to cause them to justifiably abandon their principles and attempt community organization. Someone posting things that don't fit your worldview and make you mad doesn't rise to that bar.
Show HN: Frontmatter Core – a build-time content layer for Astro
by adesane | 2026-01-15 13:58:47+00:00
Hello,

I built Frontmatter Core after repeatedly hitting the same problem: modern frontends and CMS don’t share the same model.

Astro components define structure through props.
CMS expect explicit content models.

Frontmatter Core scans Astro, Markdown and YAML files and extracts a stable, typed JSON Intermediate Representation that adapters or CMS can consume.

It runs at build time only:

- no runtime

- no client-side JS

- no database

- no CMS coupling

The idea is to keep:

- layout in .astro

- content in .md / .yaml

- structure expressed once, in code, then exposed as data

Adapters (PHP, flat-file CMS, headless CMS, etc.) plug into the same IR.

GitHub: https://github.com/withfrontmatter/frontmatter-core

Happy to answer technical or architectural questions.
by NickC25 | 2026-01-15 13:59:02+00:00
No, in China, the people running the platforms know what is acceptable and what's not. So, once the government tells them what's cool and what's not, the companies then police themselves.

Because unlike the US, where there are effectively no real consequences for companies that skirt the law, in China, the companies wouldn't dare try to skirt the law - executives in China know they can't bribe their way out of deliberately pissing off The Party when it comes to education.
by Zigurd | 2026-01-15 13:59:12+00:00
There are many milestones to go before in orbit refueling is possible, among them
:
1. What efficiency are you expecting without ground-based fuel chilling?
2. Have you solved for lack of gravity? Your fuel is sloshing around weightless.
3. The necessary tempo of refueling flights hasn't been reached with test flights, and is far greater than the maximum tempo reached by Falcon 9, impressive though it is.

These are just the big ones I can think of off the top of my head. Digging into the way that fuel tanks are prevented from crumpling while they rapidly empty of liquid methane probably reveals that that becomes much more complicated in micro gravity in orbit with multiple refueling connections to tanker flights. There are dozens of gotchas like that, and I don't think "they must've already planned for that" is an assumption supported by historical performance.
by Antibabelic | 2026-01-15 13:59:28+00:00
"Great design prompts require design vocabulary. Most people don't have it."

Vocabulary is just the surface. Beneath it is an understanding of how to achieve your goals with design. How to make things that are easy to use, accessible, that create a certain impression.

Does this website (presumably made with the help of these AI tools) show this kind of understanding of design? Not really. It's chaotic, the text is often hard to read and there is a ton of fluff, both in terms of visuals and copy.

There is a "Frequently Asked Questions" section and a "Popular" $100 tier in the "Support the Project" section, even though this project seems to be brand new. Why lie to the reader?
by haritha-j | 2026-01-15 14:00:09+00:00
My counterpoint would be that social media has a network effect. Its a lot harder for a parent to ban their own child from social media when all of their peers are on it, because it turns the child into a social outcast, at the worst years of someone's life to be a social outcast.

Also "do something, but not to the voters" is an invalid argument in this case. Anti-immigration policy is a good example of "do soemthing but not to the voters". This is do something to the only people in the voter's life that the voter cares about even more than themselves.
by alias_neo | 2026-01-15 14:00:46+00:00
In the UK, it's expensive, and it's not the technology, it's everything else. I don't see how that can improve unless the installation costs come down, and I don't know how that could/would happen.

I had solar installed last year, at the end of the summer, it cost roughly £14,000 for a system that can produce 6.51kWp and with 12kWh of battery storage (about 10kWh usable).

The 465W all-black panels (14 of them) I had installed are a little under £100 each to buy off-the-shelf, that accounts for 10% (£1400) of the cost of my system.

The batteries and inverter together another roughly £3.5k, so, about £9k of that cost was not for "solar and battery tech", a good chunk of it, somewhere around 40% of the total was labour, and the rest in scaffolding. Even if we allocate say another £1k to "hardware"; rails, wire, switchgear etc, that's still £8k easily.

Even if the hardware was free, £8-10k installation costs seems prohibitively expensive for the average UK household, unless you were totally wiping out your monthly bills and could pay it off over the lifetime of the system.

I suspect part of the issue in Australia is the same; I believe (perhaps incorrectly) you have a lot more sun down there so I'd expect the scale of installation to be higher.
by jasongill | 2026-01-15 14:00:51+00:00
It's not "made by a third party" - it's sold as a first-party add-on, by Raspberry Pi on their own website, in a Raspberry Pi branded package.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/ai-hat-plus-2/

It's no more "made by a third party" than any other electronics device made by a contract manufacturer.
by kroaton | 2026-01-15 14:00:54+00:00
I remember thinking the same thing and this articles goes over most of the arguments here - https://milvus.io/blog/why-im-against-claude-codes-grep-only...

When it came out and I think it was Boris from Anthropic that said they experimented a lot with Vector Search and grep just worked better.

You can try it out using the Claude-Context MCP - https://github.com/zilliztech/claude-context
by Fiveplus | 2026-01-15 14:01:12+00:00
The funniest part is beyond the typo, the complete lack of physical intuition from the analysts who circulated this. 500,000 tons is roughly the weight of 1.5 Empire State buildings. If your rack busbars weigh more than the structural steel of the facility housing them, you have a geotechnical engineering crisis on your hands. It is wild that we reached a point where financial modeling is so decoupled from physical reality that nobody paused to ask if the floor would collapse.
by goodthink | 2026-01-15 14:01:14+00:00
Reading this book brought me a better understanding of "the expression problem" and the use of the visitor pattern as its solution. This led me to (finally) grok the use of Class _Heirarchy_ Inheritance[0] as a solution not requiring visitors. In Newspeak[1], classes can contain nested classes, so when you subclass a class, you inherit the nested classes as well. This blog post discusses the same feature affording Free Object Algebras [2].

[0] https://blog.bracha.org/primordialsoup.html?snapshot=Amplefo...
[1]https://newspeaklanguage.org
[2]https://blog.bracha.org/primordialsoup.html?snapshot=Amplefo...
by lapcat | 2026-01-15 14:01:17+00:00
> It is not because of secondhand smoke. The latter informs where we can smoke, such as (not) around a hospital.

Duh? I mentioned second-hand smoke in the context of "public smoking bans," by which I meant smoking in buildings and other public areas. That has nothing specifically to do with children. So it appears that once again you misunderstood my comment.
by NalNezumi | 2026-01-15 14:01:25+00:00
>Meanwhile there are documented benefits especially for youth who are members of marginalized groups (e.g. LGBTQ).

This is a thin veiled propaganda that the likes of Zuckerberg quote all the time but is misattributed. Those marginalized group of people had benefits in finding like-minded people online, mostly through forums etc. (side point: same benefit exist for marginalized group such as white supremacist)

But that's social NETWORK, and not social MEDIA. Almost all benefit people that defend social media spout is simply a social NETWORK benefit. The only advantage social MEDIA have is personalized ad, for people that like that. Everything else you get by reimplementing old, boring social network without "the algorithm".
by literalAardvark | 2026-01-15 14:01:33+00:00
They can't do math?

ChatGPT 5.2 has recently been churning through unsolved Erdös problems.

I think right now one is partially validated by a pro and the other one I know of is "ai-solved" but not verified. As in: we're the ones who can't quite keep up.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07421

And the only reason they can't count Rs is that we don't show them Rs due to a performance optimization.
by elil17 | 2026-01-15 14:01:57+00:00
Yes, it may not be good. However, that study used thin material samples - and those are particularly vulnerable to UV. Thicker materials are more resistant because the UV doesn't penetrate into them.

If you want to deploy UV in a specific space (think conference room or hospital ward), I don't think the problem is that hard. There are coatings you can put on top of existing plastics which protect them from UV light. However, I imagine that customer education around managing risk to plastics is going to be a key issue for UV companies if they are to succeed.
by CableNinja | 2026-01-15 14:02:11+00:00
Id be more curious on finding out what AI bots can access my site, so i could stop it.

At the public disclosure of chatgpt i immediately went and added a block in my nginx config. I would ideally like to block them all.

Im currently relying on UA and have a tiny if statement in my config that tells every ai ive blocked my server is simply a teapot
by sosojustdo | 2026-01-15 14:02:51+00:00
I've been working on a tool specifically to handle these messy PDF-to-Markdown conversions because I ran into the same issues with tables and multi-column layouts.

I’ve optimized https://markdownconverter.pro/pdf-to-markdown to handle complex PDFs, including those tricky tables that span multiple pages and 2-column formats that usually trip up tools like Docling. It also extracts embedded diagrams/images and links them properly in the output.

Full disclosure: I'm the developer behind it. I’d love to see if it handles your specific datasheets better than the models you've tried. Feel free to give it a spin!
by MandieD | 2026-01-15 14:03:36+00:00
Seeing fewer rooftop solar installations when I visit my home state (Texas) than I see in the one I live in (Bavaria) is a trip. Yes, I know that electricity is far cheaper there than here, but as much electricity as air conditioning eats, and as big as those roofs are (panels are cheap; it's the system that's expensive), it should balance out.

Anecdotally, a ton of solar has gone up in the last four years here in Germany, both rooftop and, increasingly, in what were likely canola fields for biodiesel along highways - at first driven by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the need to reduce natural gas consumption, but now by how absolutely cheap those panels are. Too bad they're not being made here...

My favorite installation so far: a large field in SW Germany, with the panels high enough for cattle to wander and grass to grow under them. The cattle were almost all under those panels, munching away - it was a hot day.
by V__ | 2026-01-15 14:04:19+00:00
This is true, but I don't think the reason for his proclamation. It would be very unlike him.

For better or worse there is zero chance that Germany starts a nuclear weapons program. The public sentiment just won't allow that unless we are already at war, in which case it is too late. Besides that, nuclear weapons are stationed in Germany already. France and the UK are next door, so I am also not sure if it would actually benefit Germany at this point.