MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Galanwe | 2026-02-11 19:57:52+00:00
> I honestly don’t think the models are as important as people tend to believe.

I tend to disagree. While I don't see meaningful _reasoning power_ between frontier models, I do see differences in the way they interact with my prompts.

I use exclusively Anthropic models because my interactions with GPT are annoying:

- Sonnet/Opus behave like a mix of a diligent intern, or a peer. It does the work, doesn't talk too much, gives answers, etc.

- GPT is overly chatty, it borderline calls me "bro", tend to brush issues I raise "it should be good enough for general use", etc.

- I find that GPT hardly ever steps back when diagnosing issues. It picks a possible cause, and enters a rabbit hole of increasingly hacky / spurious solutions. Opus/Sonnet is often to step back when the complexity increases too much, and dig an alternative.

- I find Opus/Sonnet to be "lazy" recently. Instead of systematically doing an accurate search before answering, it tries to "guess", and I have to spot it and directly tell it to "search for the precise specification and do not guess". Often it would tell me "you should do this and that", and I have to tell it "no, you do it". I wonder if it was done to reduce the number of web searches or compute that it uses
unless the user explicitly asks.
by assimpleaspossi | 2026-02-11 19:57:57+00:00
I found out that on Reddit people go there and ask things like this (someone asked recently): "My girlfriend and I are looking for something to do. Are there any protests going on today we can do to?"

Can you imagine people actually searching things out like that? These "people voicing concerns" are like that. Someone has to find something to be enraged about for the sake of finding something to do.
by jaggederest | 2026-02-11 19:59:28+00:00
30cm is just kinda cute. Try 600cm - you'll find a lot of A-frames up the mountain, where they routinely get >700cm of snow each year and generally no thaw until spring. Alaska, similarly, but there you'll find more domes and steep-roofed chalets, since it gets proper cold (-40) and insulation uber alles is the rule.

The other benefit of an A-frame is that the snow drifts deeply enough that winter-only cabins don't need as much insulation, because there's a 4m drift on all sides except the front.

Those kinds of places are also where you find "doors to nowhere" on the 2nd floor, because that's the winter access. One door at ground level for summer, one door ~1.5-2m up for winter.

I love visiting, but I'll never live there!
by JCattheATM | 2026-02-11 19:59:32+00:00
I'm not missing that distinction at all.

I think it's nonsense to harass people for technically illegal things that are not harming anyone.

I think it would be fantastic if Mikey was passive in filming actual illegal acts that had potential for death or injury.

I don't approve of him inserting himself into situations to try and intervene because I think that just increased the potential for an accident or other undesirable outcome.
by NinjaTrance | 2026-02-11 20:00:01+00:00
> Personally, I get creeped out by how many things CC is doing and tokens it's burning in the background. It has a strong "trust me bro" vibe that I dislike.

100% this.

It might be convenient to hide information from non-technical users; but software engineers need to know what is happening. If it is not visible by default, it should be configurable via dotfiles.
by Izikiel43 | 2026-02-11 20:00:09+00:00
> Biology and evolution are ruthless about this stuff, it edits it out as fast as it possibly can. That it's been so closely held is a very big sign for us that we need to tread extremely carefully.

As long as you have descendants, biology and evolution don't care, once that's done it's game over for them.

> That it's been so closely held is a very big sign for us that we need to tread extremely carefully.

It's been tested for over 20 years, the weight loss bit is the recent one.

> other countries do not have these issues with weight.

Yes they do, some are much worse than the US (https://data.worldobesity.org/rankings/), there are a lot of countries above 30% obesity rate.

> both know that the solution is not a pill

It's part of the solution, is how you help existing people with the issue.

Doing a restrictive diet is not easy (I know, I've been dieting since october, lost 15 pounds, but I can go on autopilot for this, which is not the case for others), it requires a lot of discipline that most people don't have, and our bodies are optimized to store calories, as well as being very efficient in consuming them, because for most of history famines were common, last ~100 years being the exception to the rule for most of the world population.

Future generations can be helped by better food culture and education, and that's the other part of the solution, long term.
by dgacmu | 2026-02-11 20:00:19+00:00
They know what people type into their tools, but they don't know what in the output users read and focus on unless they're convening a user study or focus group.

I personally love that the model tells me what file it has read because I know whether or not it's headed in the generally right direction that I intended. Anthropic has no way of knowing I feel this way.
by _factor | 2026-02-11 20:00:28+00:00
My retiring coworker’s words before he ironically retired to snowboard, paints the problem clearly:
“Not my problem. The kids can deal with it.”

No snowflake feels responsible for the avalanche, but this attitude ensures that no one will take it seriously.

His kids will grow up with temperatures rising more and more uncomfortably, but until it can undeniably kill them or their children.. not my problem.
by bsder | 2026-02-11 20:01:34+00:00
> Cynically, this is classic product management: simplify and remove useful information under the guise of 'improving the user experience' or perhaps minimalism if you're more overt about your influences.

Cynically, it's a vibe coded mess and the "programmers" at Anthropic can't figure out how to put it back.

More cynically, Anthropic management is trying to hide anything that people could map to token count (aka money) so that they can start jiggling the usage numbers to extract more money from us.
by melling | 2026-02-11 20:02:42+00:00
It’s discussed in the first few minutes. That’s basically all I watched. One of the first points she tries to make is that people claim that Feynman is one of the top physicists of all time, comparable to Einstein and Newton. She tries to set us straight.

Anyway, I’m a big Feynman fan. My Discord handle is feynman1918.
by bayindirh | 2026-02-11 20:02:44+00:00
There are currently no power efficient and scalable ways to remove carbon dioxide from air or water.

Renewables are considered woke technology which mock old and masculine fossil fuel tech, which feel threatened by all these white spinny things, hence renewable energy projects are being actively discouraged or canceled altogether.

You know, we'd be all woke and weird if our cars don't have 8 cylinders and make wroom sounds. Same for our chimneys and power architecture. Woke electrons should be banned. We need masculine, fossil based electrons, which are more powerful per electron than wind/solar based fluffy/hippie ones.
by GuestFAUniverse | 2026-02-11 20:03:01+00:00
Fail2ban has decent jails for Apache httpd.
And writing a rule that matches requests to nonexistent resources is very easy -- one-liners + time based threshold.
Basically you could ban differently according to the http errors they cause (e.g. bots on migrated resources: many 404 within a minute, Slowloris is visible as a lot of 408).
by wafflemaker | 2026-02-11 20:03:18+00:00
While talking about Norwegian ways to keep warm in winter you can't forget their wool underwear (ullundertøy), which is not underwear (but is often made of wool).

It's a set of pants and a long sleeve, worn right on your underwear/body. It greatly improves your heat comfort in winter, which I quickly learned the first time out of town in cold with Norwegians. They take it as a given that everyone owns a set.

There's also a hi tech version called superundertøy, which is good at channeling sweat away from body in addition to keeping you warm.

Ullundertøy is very warm. I haven't put mine on yet this winter (only using regular long johns), as temperatures haven't fallen below -15*C yet (and it's been coldest winter so far this decade). But I'd wear it if going outside for longer and planning on staying stationary.
by smartmic | 2026-02-11 20:03:25+00:00
It is important to keep reminding ourselves that climate change is a real problem for humanity and that each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions. It is a problem that requires solutions, but implementing these solutions involves so much inertia that it can sometimes be painful.

And let's contrast that with the AI hype. It's more the opposite, a kind of solution to problems we didn't really have, but are now being persuaded we do. It would be sensible to invest an equal share of the resources currently being pumped into AI with uncertain outcomes into the complex issue of climate change. And, no, AI won't solve it; unfortunately, it only makes it worse.
by addled | 2026-02-11 20:03:33+00:00
I remembered enjoying the book, so having not read it in a long time, I tried sharing Surely You're Joking with my kids at bedtime.

That chapter wasn’t the only thing I ended up skipping or heavily editing.

* Picking a room at Los Alamos with a window facing the women’s housing, but being disappointed that a tree or something blocked his view. (Wasn’t he also married at this point?)

* Starting a new Uni faculty position and hanging out at student dances, dismayed that girls would stop chatting & dancing with him when they learned he was a prof and not a fellow student.

* Hanging out at strip clubs to practice his drawing skills.

* Considering a textbook sales rep’s offer to help him find “trouble” in Vegas.

So maybe that one chapter turns around some at the end, but it’s not the only cringe-worthy moment in the book, and I can see why some people may have an overall negative opinion.

If I were going to do this with my kids now that they are teens, I wouldn’t filter as much and use the more questionable events as points of discussion.
by idopmstuff | 2026-02-11 20:03:35+00:00
But you have no idea if they've convened user study or focus groups, right?

I'll just reiterate my initial point that the author of the post and the people commenting here have no idea what information Anthropic is working with. I'm not saying they've made the right decision, but I am saying that people ought to give them the slightest bit of credit here instead of treating them like idiots.
by mrandish | 2026-02-11 20:04:32+00:00
> Recent updates say this was a unilateral call by FAA because DOD was refusing to coordinate with them for creating safety corridors for DOD drones and/or HEW usage.

This is the first explanation I've seen that fits the odd facts perfectly. This is the kind of thing that happens when two regional bureaucracies collide. The FAA has long-standing mechanisms for coordinating military use of airspace with commercial and civilian flight operations.

But instead of the usual DEA border interdiction, the administration is now tasking the military to drive this. Military commanders on a new high-priority mission to intercept drones which can attempt to cross the border anytime and anywhere realized coordinating with the FAA would require committing to active corridors and time windows in advance, limiting their mission success and resisted. The FAA realized that could lead to lots of last minute airspace restrictions, flight cancellations and increased risk of a mistake resulting in downing a civilian flight.

The regional FAA administrators responsible for flight safety around El Paso decided to escalate the dispute by simply shutting down all civilian flights, knowing that would get immediate national attention. It was an extreme action but one that's within their purview if they can't guarantee the safety of the airspace. I'm sure they expected it would put political pressure on the military to limit operations and it worked. In a sense, it also helps the military commanders because being ordered to accept FAA operational limitations gives them cover if it reduces their mission effectiveness below what they'd promised. That's probably why the military wouldn't agree on their own without it being ordered from above. They're the ones responsible for deploying expensive new anti-drone tech in field ops for the first time. Future budgets and careers are on the line.
by uncharted9 | 2026-02-11 20:04:33+00:00
I tried this prompt with all the major AI models that I know and have installed, and only GLM from Z.ai and Gemini 3 Flash could answer it. Even in that case, Gemini 3 Flash gave a bit more nuanced answer, but every other model like Claude Opus 4.5, Chat GPT, Grok - everything failed.
by rkrisztian | 2026-02-11 20:05:06+00:00
Thank you for saying this. If you want to know the answer to what causes climate problems, you need to go back to the era of dinosaurs, where CO2 levels were multiple times higher than today. Trees could thrive because they could breathe in a lot of CO2. Dinosaurs got so big because there were plenty of food. How could dinosaurs happily live with such high CO2 levels? The key is that there were plenty of forests. Peter Wohlleben's book "The Power of Trees: How Ancient Forests Can Save Us if We Let Them" explains how forests naturally circulate water.
by kqr | 2026-02-11 20:05:12+00:00
The kind of noise also makes a huge difference. Chroma noise looks like ugly splotches of colour, whereas luma noise can add positively to the character of the image. Fortunately humans are less sensitive to chroma resolution so denoising can be done more aggressively in the ab channels of Lab space.

Yes, this simulation exaggerates a lot. Either that, or contains a tiny crop of a larger image.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-02-11 20:05:21+00:00
Finally, an AI article I enjoy. Give me nice bulleted summaries (and actually accurate content, unlike most blog posts) over 6-page paragraphs any day.

I know some people want to ban AI posts, but I want the opposite: ban any post until AI has looked over it and adds its own two cents based on the consensus of the entire internet & books it's trained on.
by screye | 2026-02-11 20:05:26+00:00
NYC's city budget is larger than every state apart from California, Texas, NY. At $115B, it equals Florida. By numbers alone, he's very influential.

Now NYC is a over-regulated mess that faces gridlock from both unions and the state representatives. In practice, it makes the NYC mayor a cog-in-the-machine. The real task for a NYC mayor is consensus building first, and allocation of funds second.
by itintheory | 2026-02-11 20:05:27+00:00
> ODB

Ol' Dirty Bastard? I jest, but I think the theory behind wanting an 'On-board Diagnostics' [1] connection would be to get data from the vehicle. You can get cheap bluetooth OBD-II adapters to transmit that info to your phone, it's not a given. I don't know much about electric cars, but if you want your phone to know the fuel level in an ICE vehicle then you'd need this kind of connection.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-board_diagnostics
by bayindirh | 2026-02-11 20:05:29+00:00
For me, it's a hard problem.

For business trips, the choice is between two hours and two days, and unfortunately my body goes haywire if I don't eat some meat at least a couple of days per week (talking about 200g/300g total though. Not kilos of it).

On the other hand, I'd happily take trains as more high speed lines open in my country, and reduce meat consumption to bare minimum my body can tolerate.

For personal transportation, going fully electric won't be possible due to my circumstances, but I'd happily switch to a hybrid which would convert 75% of my in-city travel to electric (which I'm actively planning to do).

I also work on projects which tries to reduce footprint of data centers and computation, so there's that.
by mjr00 | 2026-02-11 20:05:51+00:00
Of course. The use of mass surveillance in the movie is not-so-subtly referencing the PATRIOT Act. But again, it's presented as a moral dilemma, and multiple protagonists acknowledge that it's far too powerful to exist, and its use is a last resort. It falls into the larger theme of Joker pushing Batman to violate his ethics for the greater good.

One could argue that because it was successfully used to catch Joker, the movie concludes that mass surveillance is sometimes necessary to stop evil, but it's at least presented as a dilemma. A massive corporation coming out and saying "mass surveillance is awesome because you can find lost pets" is a crazy escalation of the surveillance state.
by baq | 2026-02-11 20:05:51+00:00
Nothing new under the sun.

We can't cut emissions fast enough politically, but we can race towards economically viable fusion power which would solve the problem from the supply side and would make industrial scale carbon sequestration not insane, for a century or so, until waste heat itself can't be radiated fast enough even in 250 ppm CO2 atmosphere - but that's a problem for the XXII century.
by jeffybefffy519 | 2026-02-11 20:05:59+00:00
I really think the key to addressing climate change should have started 20 years ago in a lot of primary schools, whereby the curriculum includes subjects that are more tailored to solving problems with capturing or converting C02 (eg sciences) so that these students are thinking about these problems when graduating and starting businesses to solve the challenges (hopefully with gov incentives at same time).
by wqaatwt | 2026-02-11 20:06:03+00:00
> That is definitely not true

What can I say.. look up the council of Paderborn and canon law in general during the period.

> impossible that an "official position" would be held and revoked later

You don’t know much about the Catholic church do you? That’s kind of its thing…

> No impossible or nonexistent practice could be condemned or punished, right?

Belief in witchcraft and supernatural was of course widespread.. that’s why the church considered it heresy that they had to crack down on. Since effectively it challenged the legitimacy of Christian faith..

> examine the article I cited

Which you surely did not bother reading yourself.

> does not mean "nonexistent" or "impossible".

Belief in witchcraft is logically incompatible with non Gnostic Christianity, since only God can perform miracles.

> of scientists who were also clergymen

Yes, scientific method as we know it was to a large extent developed by Christian theologians back in those days. Not sure what does that have to do with magic and witchcraft?
by Carrok | 2026-02-11 20:06:16+00:00
I've started composting. I'm sure that'll outweigh the average Vegas visitor's emissions. /s

I'm being a bit facetious obviously, but it does feel a bit like tilting against windmills. We need policy and systemic changes, if we're relying on individuals to all collectively start doing the "right thing", we're sunk.
Show HN: PolyMCP – Expose Python functions as MCP tools
by justvugg | 2026-02-11 20:06:17+00:00
Hi HN,

I built PolyMCP, an open-source framework around the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that lets you expose existing Python functions as AI-callable tools — without rewriting them or adopting a custom SDK.

The goal is simple:
If you already have working Python code, you should be able to make it accessible to LLM agents in minutes.

What it does

PolyMCP introspects regular Python functions and exposes them as MCP tools automatically. No decorators required. No framework lock-in.

It grew into a small ecosystem:
• PolyMCP (core) – Turn Python functions into MCP tools
• PolyMCP Inspector – A visual UI to browse, test, and debug MCP servers
• MCP SDK Apps – A lightweight way to build AI-powered apps with tools + UI resources

Why I built this

While experimenting with MCP and AI agents, I found that integrating existing codebases was often the painful part.
Most solutions require rewriting logic around a specific SDK or heavily annotating functions.

PolyMCP focuses on:
• Minimal intrusion into existing code
• Clean separation between business logic and AI tooling
• Easy debugging via a visual inspector

Example use cases
• Expose internal APIs or legacy scripts to LLM agents
• Automate operational workflows
• Build internal copilots over real systems
• Prototype AI agents that interact with production services

Works with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Ollama (including local models).

It’s still evolving and I’m actively iterating.
I’d really appreciate feedback — especially from people building agents or experimenting with MCP in production environments.

GitHub:
• Core: https://github.com/poly-mcp/PolyMCP
• Inspector: https://github.com/poly-mcp/PolyMCP-Inspector
• SDK Apps: https://github.com/poly-mcp/PolyMCP-MCP-SDK-Apps

Happy to answer technical questions.
by RandomGerm4n | 2026-02-11 20:06:20+00:00
I think it would be a mistake to reject Matrix outright. Even if it's not perfect, it would still be a good starting point from which to build something better. Besides, you don't have to replace Discord with the perfect solution, just with something that's better than Discord and where there's no company behind it that can steer it in a negative direction again, as happened with Discord.
by rekabis | 2026-02-11 20:06:21+00:00
An excellent idea.

But I don’t have any kind of a Google account, nor would I want one. Because yes, the video stream is uploaded encrypted, but Google has no qualms about handing over data to US authorities. Encryption can always be trivially broken later with nation-state scale tools.

I do have a paid Sync.com account, of about 50Gb, for cloud data under Canadian sovereignty. Yes, the current fascist regime in America can still yoink that data under five-eyes agreements, but it is more difficult than a yoink from a domestic provider.

I also have a paid account under filen.io, which places some of my data outside of five-eyes jurisdiction. And while that platform has had stability and reliability issues, at least the stored data can’t be bullied out of a German-only company with a German data centre.

And I have even been looking into various other services, such as Tresorit, pCloud, and Infomaniak, which are Swiss companies with Swiss data centres.

So yeah. I’m excited to see a product like this. It’s needed.

But while what you have built is likely an excellent start, I would strongly recommend you extend storage options to cloud storage vendors that cannot be compelled by America’s current fascist regime.

Basically, if a cloud storage company has incorporation anywhere on American soil, it is not safe for your product to use. It can be compelled to divulge a user’s data. And with the resources of a country the size of America, cracking file encryption isn’t a significant barrier.

I mean, yes - let users decide. Many will likely continue to use Google Drive. I would caution against removing it owing to its low barrier to entry. Maybe even a warning banner upon linking, to make the dangers of using it clearer, or have two groups of cloud storage options in a drop-down: safe non-five-eyes/non-American ones first (in green), with problematic, American-owned ones after (in yellow or red).

But please, give the more intelligent and security-aware users better storage options.
by chasil | 2026-02-11 20:06:24+00:00
What is generally not understood is that our current icehouse phase is rare.

'A "greenhouse Earth" is a period during which no continental glaciers exist anywhere on the planet... Earth has been in a greenhouse state for about 85% of its history.

'Earth is now in an icehouse state, and ice sheets are present in both poles simultaneously... Earth's current icehouse state is known as the Quaternary Ice Age and began approximately 2.58 million years ago.'

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