MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by roenxi | 2026-01-09 11:30:46+00:00
> It's not unreasonable to charge for the things they produce.

When it is funded publicly it certainly is. A key feature of the university research system is that it is where people are supported without the expectation that their work is going to be commercially useful in any near-term time frame. If something is going to be commercially valuable then people should develop it in the private sphere. Nothing stopping them. In fact, that is basically what the US does and it has been wildly successful and relegated the EU to being a technical backwater trying to figure out how to get out from under the US's commercial dominance.

> Also, should e.g. an American company have access to software produced by an Italian university?

Yes. Knowledge is for everyone. Even the Americans. Trying to hold back the progress of the entire species because the US knows how to pump out software is a remarkably myopic strategy.
by Yizahi | 2026-01-09 11:31:01+00:00
I'm not a rocket scientist, but I guess even a single lunch in the retrograde direction should be enough. You lunch a box of ball bearings with a plastic explosive to spread them out, and then just wait. The cloud will pass over Iran every 12h or and will stay in orbit for quite a few weeks, since the orbit is even higher than ISS reboosting once a month, and balls are highly aerodynamic compared to the Starlink flat sails. The cloud won't be very big, but it will repeatedly swipe through quite a lot intersecting prograde orbits. I guess the chance would be quite high. Iran can also split payload into smaller boxes and "deploy" then in sequence while the second stage is firing, then detonate them, to spread out even more.
by kalamazooo | 2026-01-09 11:31:19+00:00
OpenCode brought this on themselves and their users. Plugging Claude Max subscriptions into other agents has been against the terms of service basically since the start and I imagine Anthropic must have issued plenty of warnings here that were ignored. They wouldn’t do this unless they really had to. If folks are mad about being rugged, blame OpenCode for misleading their users when they’ve long known this day was coming. Brilliant cynical strategy though to exploit soft enforcement for growth and lay the blame at the company that provided them cheap tokens.
by falloutx | 2026-01-09 11:31:24+00:00
We were in the minority fr sure when it was happening. I remember people adding random mcp servers to thier config because it just did one thing they didnt know how to do, and it was and is easy to create MCP server with data exfil loopholes, but they get dismissed by AI companies as "No one is stupid enough to add a random mcp server"

And then the whole MCP server take some part of the context, thus you get less context for your code.
by tsimionescu | 2026-01-09 11:31:53+00:00
Not the OP, but it seems pretty clear to me - they're suggesting that fixed per-month pricing with unlimited usage shouldn't exist at all, as it doesn't really make sense for a product that has per token costs.

Instead, they're saying that a 200$/month subscription should pay for something like $250 worth of pay-per-token API tokens, and additionally give preferential pricing for using up more tokens than that.

So, if the normal API pricing were 10$ per million tokens, a 200$ per month subscription should offer 25M tokens for free, and allow you to use more tokens at a 9$/1M token rate. This way, if you used 50M tokens in a month, you'd pay 445$ with a subscription, versus paying 500$ with pay-as-you-go. This is still a good discount, but doesn't create perverse incentives, as the current model does.
by g947o | 2026-01-09 11:32:02+00:00
There are many good points, but unfortunately the title ("fad") and the conclusion seem unwarranted, become a distraction and diminish the value of the article.

The security issue has been discussed many times in the past year.

Agree on the "one process per server" thing -- seems smart and convenient but gets worse when the number of MCPs and coding agents go up, especially when combined with the following point.

Lifetime is a real issue, and I am glad that someone talks about it. You probably won't worry the overhead for git, GitHub or Playwright MCP servers, where they are likely wrappers for some bash commands or rest APIs or everything is fast to launch. However, lifetime is still an issue, when you have multiple coding agents or sessions.

It gets worse for certain applications, especially heavy desktop apps (Imagine an MCP server for Lightroom classical) -- due to their application model, in order to evaluate a command, you'll have to load half of the application to do that. You'd think you only want to launch this once. But likely not. Each coding agent session will launch its own instance. Maybe this won't happen if the MCP server works extra hard to share processes and manage lifetimes on its own, but it totally depends on the third party provider, and the behavior could vary wildly.

Would a user want to deal with all these issues? If they are not careful, they'll easy launch 15 processes consuming 1G of memory for two coding agents, one of which does not actually use any of those servers, and one is simply sitting idle because the user hasn't started vibe coding yet.

(If this doesn't seem an issue to you, probably just because you haven't run into it first hand yet )

I think there has got to be a better way to do this.
by tomaytotomato | 2026-01-09 11:32:19+00:00
The funding mechanism isn't really the point, its the product that comes after.

Sure, the EU contracts developers to build features they want, but when those requirements start coming from regulatory mandates rather than user needs, you're not just adding features to Ubuntu anymore.

You're forking it into something fundamentally different.

"EUbuntu"? :)

Look at how the EU handles tech regulations:

- GDPR a good thing on paper; with some terrible side effects - cookie banners, data bureacracy, walled gardens between US-EU websites.

- AI legislation; lets wait and see

- Digital sovereignty; fundamentally trying to gain access control for EU citizens data from Google and Apple.

Anyways, let's see what happens. Maybe I'm being too cynical and they'll just become savvy end-users of existing distros. But given the pattern, I'm not holding my breath.
by torginus | 2026-01-09 11:32:22+00:00
For WASM, the performance target isn't Javascript - but native code and NaCl. Considering WASM has had tremendously more time and effort invested into it, and still underperforms NaCl (and JS) signals to me that this is not the right approach.

The WASM runtime ended up from something that ingests pseudo-assembly,validates it and turns it into machine code, into a full-fledged multi-tiered JIT, like what JS has, with crazy engineering complexity per browser, and similar startup performance woes (which was one of the major goals of Nacl/Wasm to alleviate the load time issues with huge applications).
by JasonADrury | 2026-01-09 11:33:08+00:00
>Also, as I understand it, a big part of the reason USAID was fed "into the woodchipper" was because they were investigating SpaceX over Russian use of Starlink - see https://gizmodo.com/elon-musks-enemy-usaid-was-investigating...

The article you linked contains literally nothing supporting your accusation. Instead, it talks about an investigation targeting the aid recipient:

>The USAID Office of Inspector General, Inspections and Evaluations Division, is initiating an inspection of USAID’s oversight of Starlink satellite terminals provided to the Government of Ukraine. Our objectives are to determine how (1) the Government of Ukraine used the USAID-provided Starlink terminals, and (2) USAID monitored the Government of Ukraine’s use of USAID-provided Starlink terminals
by hermitcrab | 2026-01-09 11:33:36+00:00
Yes, you can use spacers. That is probably a good way to get started. I believe you can even use kits to put a standard lens on 'back to font'. I prefer a dedicated macro lens personally. Lenses like the Laowa 100mm for Nikon are fairly decent and not _that_ expensive (note it is manual focus - in macro you generally move the camera rather than changing the lens focus).
by g947o | 2026-01-09 11:35:07+00:00
> Most of the “overhead” and “security nightmare” worries assume the worst possible setup with zero curation and bad ops.

You'll be surprised to learn that these are extremely common, even in large corporations. Security practice is often far from ideal due to both incompetence and negligence. Just this week, I accidentally got the credentials for the account used in our CI systems. Don't ask me how this could possibly happen.
by clanky | 2026-01-09 11:35:11+00:00
It feels like ever since Snowden we've been watching and mapping and uncovering, and none of it has accomplished anything and it has only gotten worse. Why would I even care at this point what the exact topology looks like? It's much more straightforward just to operate from the assumption that absolutely everything I do on an electronic device (and much of my biometric activity within close proximity of those devices) is transparent, visible, catalogued, and archived.

We don't need more maps to this stuff. We need to seize the hard drives, gather any evidence of venal or traitorous motives on the part of the executives and decision-makers who built the systems, and take sledgehammers to the drives and servers and hard drives and recording devices and Flock cameras and all the rest.
by topocite | 2026-01-09 11:35:58+00:00
Obviously, there has to be huge variability between people based on initial starting conditions.

It is like if someone says they are losing weight eating 2500 calories a day and someone else says that is impossible because they started eating 2500 calories and gained weight.

Neither are making anything up or being untruthful.

What is strange to me is that smart people can't see something this obvious.
by gadders | 2026-01-09 11:36:03+00:00
I'm sure it has problems, but if I look at the top of this list (and exclude the tax havens) the answer to "Would I like to live there?" is Yes.

Likewise for the bottom of the list it's an emphatic No.

Is it a completely accurate indicator? Probably not. Is it directionally accurate? Yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
by HappyPanacea | 2026-01-09 11:37:47+00:00
> I'm posting me reply here, as the original comment just stating "Holy cow, and 80% of them are Israeli companies" was for no obvious reason within minutes downvoted and now even flagged (at the bottom of the page).

Because they were wrong? I checked myself and after sampling 20 randomly I got 3 Israeli ones not even close to 80% percent. So either he got much more, or I got much less than average.
by gadders | 2026-01-09 11:37:49+00:00
If you had a Rawlsian veil pulled over your eyes and someone said to you "You won't know how rich you will be in that society, but would you rather live in a top ten GDP per Capita country or a bottom ten?" I think we all know what we would reply.

Granted it might not be fine grained enough to distinguish between Number 4 and Number 5 on the list.
by al_borland | 2026-01-09 11:38:06+00:00
I was hoping to do this just the other day. Copilot upgraded and enabled agent mode by default (we didn’t even have it before), and when I asked a question it started making a bunch of bad updates to the code. I clicked the undo button, but it didn’t completely undo it and left the code in a bad state. I was hoping to see which lines it touched, but it didn’t seem like
I could. I didn’t have a fresh commit before it did its thing, so that wasn’t helpful on its own.
by dheatov | 2026-01-09 11:38:39+00:00
Assuming the actual price for many user is closer to 1k USD/mth than to 200 USD/mth, and the actual price is closer to their target margin to be a viable business, they're practically subsidising usage after 200 USD/mth. Together with other AI-TECH doing the same, they fabricate a false sense of "AI is capable AND affordable", which imo is evil.
by reify | 2026-01-09 11:39:05+00:00
so its a diary

ai cannot reason. it is not human

using a posh word like, perturbations, which really means anxiety or uneasiness, or a state of agitation, cannot be attributed to something that is not human (ai) and comes across to me a deceptive.

if you are going to sell this stuff, at least have the common decency and courtesy to use computer language when explaining what your ai can do, and not language that is only fit for humans.
by afandian | 2026-01-09 11:39:12+00:00
Thanks! There's a video I've been looking for, for years. It's about web technologies and recusion ("I put a VM in side a VM"), and it's satire / comedy.

It might be this one I'm thinking of, as it closely fits the bill. But something is telling me it's not, and that it was published earlier.

Any ideas?
by mitchbob | 2026-01-09 11:39:16+00:00
Significant progress is already happening, and it's been amply documented on HN. The most visible changes have been European government agencies dumping Microsoft products in favor of open-source alternatives and replacing US-based cloud providers with providers in the EU, but those are just the beginnings. Progress can - and will - be incremental, but it will be profound. The US is now a rogue state that can no longer be trusted, and countries everywhere will do what they need to to protect themselves.
by viraptor | 2026-01-09 11:40:21+00:00
I get what it means, but it doesn't look to me like they're trying that yet. They don't even care that people buy multiple highest level plans to rotate them every week, because they don't provide a high enough tier for the existing customers. I don't see any price war happening. We don't know what their real margins are, but I don't see the race there. What signs do you see that Anthropic and Openai are in the race to the bottom?
by winternewt | 2026-01-09 11:41:02+00:00
The use case I always envisioned from the sidelines was that I could ditch a poorly designed, garbage-collected mess of a language (JavaScript) for something typesafe, with predictable performance, cache locality by default (as in not making everything a reference), no GC, generics, etc. But WASM won't be there until it has first-class access to the DOM, in my opinion.
by Amir_A | 2026-01-09 11:41:28+00:00
Typical hasbara whataboutism, equating a statement by one guy that may or may not have been said 70 years ago to a livestream slaughter we just witnessed, where more than 50% of Israelis say "not enough force was used", not just offhanded remarks by radical leaders, which there are literal gigabytes of from Israelis of all walks of life. Just open up any popular political figure's Twitter and you'll see the most horrific statements, and not just statements, but action.
by nomilk | 2026-01-09 11:41:55+00:00
Out of curiosity, I put this exact question to claude [0]. Here's a tl;dr of its answer with my refutations:

> MCPs expose tools with defined schemas, parameters, and return types.

CLIs do exactly the same thing

> Stateful Connections

A chat session with an LLM is exactly that!

> MCPs can return structured data (JSON, complex objects)

So can an agent with a CLI. E.g. they can just take output and > file.json - now they have a json file.

> MCPs can expose "resources" - like file contents, database schemas, or API documentation - that I can read directly

If you mention these in your prompt to an agent, then they know where to look and can access them too (and use keys etc as necessary)!

> MCPs can send progress updates, ask for clarification, or stream results.

So can a chat session with an agent.

> MCPs can implement fine-grained permission controls and rate limiting at the protocol level.

Rate limiting is easy for an agent. Fine-grained permission could be limited by the user of the agent (e.g. by giving a restricted key for the agent to use), so possible if desired.

tl;dr no added benefit whatsoever.

[0] https://claude.ai/share/4b339fbd-a6db-4fcb-86cd-0e8493aab663
by ramoz | 2026-01-09 11:42:19+00:00
My issue with skills and such is the fleeting volume of community alchemy.

It’s probably not a good sign to wake up to 1000 new skills everyday. 20 different skills platforms and “awesome” repos. I struggle to articulate it but it all feels off. Most things feel generally unhelpful or made in psychosis. All very similar to the MCP hype wave.

Any core set of high value skills will likely be built into the product (ie Claude Code). The only one I use right now is code-review. Naturally fitting.

Any deep vertical use cases might be better off as custom agents & sdk wrappers.
by localuser13 | 2026-01-09 11:42:21+00:00
>None of the code is open source

Well, not all, for example mObywatel was recently open-sourced (in a ridiculous way, but still).

I think you raise some important points. In my opinion, a lot of code funded by public money should be open-sourced, but it's not as clear-cut as some people believe. I'll use this comment to point out some of fallacies that people responding to you make:

>Also open source government code means other governments can fork it, overall lowering implementation costs, while still keeping code sovereignty.

This is completely unrelated. French government won't deploy a Polish public health management website just because they found it on Github. For projects of such magnitude you need deep mutual cooperation between both governments, and a lot of changes. Making the code open-source is the least important part, the code can be just shared privately.

In fact, there are many such European code, data and information sharing initiatives. There are meetings and conferences where countries can discuss this on a technical level. The code is shared, just not via public channels.

>The government - and taxpayers - should care that having closed-source software means they are tied to the company that wrote it forever, so changes and bugfixes will be much more expensive.

If a private company owns code used by government for critical purposes and can take the government hostage it's outrageous and taxpayers should riot. This probably happens[1], but most code is either written by government itself, or at least government owns the code and can switch contractors if necessary.

In particular, AFAIR the government code we're discussing right now was written by COI (~central informatics department), which is a public institution.

[1] For example, governments use Azure and GCP, even though - to me - it's clearly shortsighted. Fortunately there was a wake-up call recently, and it changes slowly.
by massicerro | 2026-01-09 11:42:33+00:00
Of course, the 'presumption' of increased complexity or the 'subjective perception' of a drop in performance might be the cause. But we are missing the real point here: the 'false plateau.' Regardless of user perception, is it possible that a 'false plateau' exists that keeps us away from a major leap in performance? The risk is that the simple 'perception of having taken the wrong path' by researchers or companies would lead them to ignore the possibility of such a 'false plateau'...
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-09 11:42:51+00:00
The problem is, people more and more can't manage to pay these rents, so they're either cutting back on any absolutely not necessary spending or going homeless outright. For now, there are enough desperate people that still have some money to pay rent... but retail, no matter which industry, is feeling the impact of people having no spending money hard.

Without the AI bubble artificially propping up the GDP, it is most likely the US economy is in a recession [1].

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/14/ai-infrastructure-boom-masks...
by megous | 2026-01-09 11:43:03+00:00
UK military is operating in Palestine (very frequent military flights from their post-colonial base in Cyprus), and is operating in Israel (when they were shooting down drones, etc.), and is supplying Israel with weapons (directly by soldier training and indirectly by allowing to use their military bases), and joined in international coverup (they have detailed intelligence on what Israel was doing in Gaza, which they never released publicly any part of).

Pretty solid basis for direct action.

If they provided this level of support for Russia, they'd be a new Belarus.
by ben_w | 2026-01-09 11:43:22+00:00
It's really hard for me to treat the UK government responses to X as more than reading tea-leaves. Illegal porn, not the owner opining about a civil war in the UK, is the final straw for the British government?

Though extra bonus irony points for some of the civil war comments being related to how Musk thinks the UK government is letting in migrants who want to do exactly the sort of thing Musk's own image generator is creating pictures of.
Show HN: A practical guide to building Solana USDC payments in React
by fullstackragab | 2026-01-09 11:43:27+00:00
I wrote a short book focused on the real-world architecture of Solana USDC payments in React.

It avoids theory and focuses on:
• transaction trust models
• wallet vs app responsibilities
• confirmation strategies
• production-ready payment flows

I wrote it after seeing many payment integrations fail due to incorrect assumptions.

Looking for feedback from developers who’ve built or reviewed payment systems.
by bsenftner | 2026-01-09 11:44:20+00:00
You forgot a neutered education system, in response to the 60's counterculture revolt. The US education system produces functional illiterates, who can do a job created and prepared for a wage slave, but cannot discuss anything materially important outside their specialized field without descending into dominance debate, which destroys constructive information exchange, any learning, and any intellectual growth.
by iamcalledrob | 2026-01-09 11:44:58+00:00
> This style of error signalling is best used when the error handling is binary,
> either "No error, continue" or "Errored out, abort", but not branched
> out path like "If encountered error A, do this. If encountered error B,
> do that. Otherwise, abort".

If I'm understanding you correctly, you can implement your example in a fully idiomatic way, and the stdlib does this in a bunch of places.

Errors are just values, so you can return whatever best suits the use-case. The gamut of expected errors might not be part of type signature, but it can be part of your documentation.

The "signal code" you refer to could be implemented via:

1. Returning error structs (e.g. ErrFoo, ErrBar) and using `errors.As()` access those structs -- useful if you have a highly structured error with additional fields.

type ErrFoo struct { // fields // }
type ErrBar struct { // fields // }

if var errFoo *ErrFoo; errors.As(err, &errFoo) {
// handle ErrFoo
}
if var errBar *ErrBar; errors.As(err, &errBar) {
// handle ErrBar
}

2. Returning a single error struct (MyErr) with an `Op` field, as `net.OpError` does. Similarly accessing via `errors.As()`

// top-level, e.g. exported by package
type MyErrorStruct struct {
Op string
Path string
}
var (
OpFoo string = "foo"
OpBar string = "bar"
)

var opErr *MyErrorStruct
if errors.As(err, &opErr) {
if opErr.Op = OpFoo {
// handle OpFoo at path opErr.Path
}
if opErr.Op = OpBar {
// handle OpBar at path opErr.Path
}
}

3. Returning predefined errors, e.g. `var ErrFoo = errors.New("foo")` and checking for them via `errors.Is()`

// top-level, e.g. exported by package
var ErrFoo = errors.New("foo")
var ErrBar = errors.New("bar")

if errors.Is(err, ErrFoo) {
// handle ErrFoo
}
if errors.Is(err, ErrBar) {
// handle ErrBar
}

Sidenote: I feel like people struggle to internalise that Go errors are just values* and are therefore are wildly flexible, yet not special in any way.

I wonder if this is because other languages treat errors as something special?
by wscott | 2026-01-09 11:45:03+00:00
This kind of work is really valuable and much needed. There is also often a surprising amount of friction to making contributions to open source projects. This article did a good job and highlighting some of those difficulties and friction. But improvements to the official documentation is so much better than standalone blog posts to explain confusing concepts.

So, thank you Julia & Marie for persevering and making a solid contribution.