MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by barnacs | 2026-01-09 11:16:42+00:00
That's probably why a boundary (like MCP) is useful. Imagine maintaining the critical application logic the "old fashioned way" and exposing a MCP-like interface to the users so that they can have their LLM generate whatever UI they like, even realtime on the fly as they are engaging with the application. It's a win-win in my mind.
by Draiken | 2026-01-09 11:17:42+00:00
> CC isn't just the TUI tool. It's also the LLM behind it.

No, Claude Code is literally the TUI tool. The LLMs behind are the models. You can use different models within the same TUI tool, even CC allows that, regardless of the restriction of only using their models (because they chose to do that).

> consider that OC can focus 100% of their efforts on their coding tool.

And they have billions of dollars to hire full teams of developers to focus on it. Yet they don't.

They want to give Claude Code an advantage because they don't want to invest as much in it and still "win", while they're in a position to do so. This is very similar to Apple forcing developers to use their apps because they can, not because it's better. With the caveat that Anthropic doesn't have a consolidated monopoly like Apple.

Can they do that? Yes.

Should they do that? It's a matter of opinion. I think it's a bad move.

Is it embarrassing? Yes. It shows they're admitting their solution is worse and changing the rules of the game to tilt it in their favor while offering an inferior product. They essentially don't want to compete, they want to force people to use their solution due to pricing, not the quality of their product.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-09 11:17:47+00:00
> Do you honestly believe that all of these funding programs are beyond the point of "decency"?

Yes, they currently fund people working full-time on contributing to FOSOS. If that's no "beyond decency", I don't know what is. Are you expecting these people to end up flush with cash, or what's the issue?

> how do you attract experts in the field with 50k EUR grants?

Because most of us experts actually care about what we work with, not how much we get paid. Once you reach a certain level of income so you're financially safe, increasing that generally doesn't increase your happiness that much, so most of us focus on being fulfilled in other ways, mainly about caring about the work we do.

As someone who used to work full-time in FOSS, it is a great feeling to contribute to something not just because it pays, but because it actually improves something in real life. I can't speak for everyone, but this is still mostly why I do FOSS.

I think fundamentally there seems to be a difference between "European FOSS" and "American FOSS" where the latter focuses more on basically CV-driven FOSS projects, with the hope of the FOSS leading to you somehow getting paid more in some for-profit company. While European FOSS seems to mainly be concerned about making things sustainable, grow a healthy community, and remaining FOSS long-term.
by nosianu | 2026-01-09 11:18:43+00:00
This has nothing to do with JS! I wish that idea would die.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

It's not just about them (link, Oracle), there is terrible code all over the place. Games, business software, everything.

It has nothing to do with the language! Anyone who claims that may be part of the problem, since they don't understand the problem and concentrate on superficial things.

Also, what looks terrible may not be so. I once had to work on an in-house JS app (for internal cost reporting and control). It used two GUI frameworks - because they had started switching to another one, but then stopped the transition. Sounds bad, yes? But, I worked on the code of the company I linked above, and that "terrible" JS app was easy mode all the way!

Even if it used two GUI frameworks at once, understanding the code, adding new features, debugging, everything was still very easy and doable with just half a brain active. I never had to ask my predecessor anything either, everything was clear with one look at the code. Because everything was well isolated and modular, among other things. Making changes did not affect other places in unexpected ways (as is common in biology).

I found some enlightenment - what seems to be very bad at first glance may not actually matter nearly as much as deeper things.
by hermitcrab | 2026-01-09 11:19:25+00:00
Macro photography is a fascinating hobby, revealing a whole new world under your nose. And you don't have to go any further than your garden or local park to go on safari.

It requires a bit of kit:

-digital camera (I use a Nikon D7000)

-macro lens (I use a Laowa 100mm). A standard lens won't be able to focus close enough.

-flash (I use a Godox). You need a decent flash to get enough light for a sharp photo. Ambient light won't cut it.

The main issue is that the depth of field (the area in front and behind the bit your are focussing on) is tiny. Usually well under a millimetre. Which makes focussing quite a challenge. Thankfully digital photos are effectively free and you can just delete the blurry ones.

It is also quite challenging to get close enough to insects to photograph (you need to be within a few mm).

There are plenty of good videos on YouTube to get you started, if you are interested.
Show HN: iKrypt – send a secret once (the key never hits our server)
by alphatesterguy | 2026-01-09 11:19:27+00:00
Hi HN

I built iKrypt after realizing how often passwords, API keys, and other sensitive info still get shared over Slack DMs or email with “I’ll delete it later”.

iKrypt is a zero-knowledge, one-time secret sharing tool:

- Secrets are encrypted in the browser
- The server stores only ciphertext
- The decryption key lives only in the URL fragment (never sent to the server)
- Links expire by time or view count
- Optional email notification when a link is first opened

This is intentionally not a password manager or vault — it’s for quick, one-off handoffs where you don’t want sensitive data living forever in chat history.

Built with:

Next.js (App Router)
Web Crypto (AES-GCM)
Server-side expiry & view enforcement

Live here: https://ikrypt.com

Would love feedback on:

the encryption model

wording/claims around “viewed vs opened”

whether this solves a real problem for you, or what’s missing

Thanks for checking it out
by integralid | 2026-01-09 11:20:19+00:00
>The spirit is good, but that software has cost good money to produce, and universities are dependent on external revenue

Obviously, but most of university research - at least in Europe - is funded by public money. The idea is that research funded by public money should be public by default, unless there's a reason to do otherwise.

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

Yes, of course.
by sph | 2026-01-09 11:20:43+00:00
More than a fad, MCP is a reinvention of Smalltalk. Of course an automated agent doesn't want to communicate through other autonomous systems via text or binary protocols. There should be a unified way of executing high-level commands (i.e. message passing) to other systems. A global RPC mechanism, if you will.

MCP is simply a crappy implementation of this idea because our programming environments do not expose global remote function call mechanisms with well-defined protocols. The "everything is a file" idea is quite limiting these days.

Speaking of Smalltalk, I always imagined that you could integrate LLMs/actual artificial intelligence by giving them access to the internal data and telling them what you want to do, rather than calling a method. Instead of:

a := Point x: 0 y: 0
b := Point x: 5 y: 7
distance := a distanceTo: b

You would do:

a := Point x: 0 y: 0
b := Point x: 5 y: 7
distance := a llm: "You are a point object. Please calculate the distance to the argument." arg: b

Wouldn't that be neat? But alas, we're still writing software as if it's the 1970s.
by SkyBelow | 2026-01-09 11:20:50+00:00
If someone seems to have productivity gains when using an AI, it is hard to come up with an alternate explanation for why they did.

If someone sees no productivity gains when using an AI (or a productivity decrease), it is easy to come up with ways it might have happened that weren't related to the AI.

This is an inherent imbalance in the claims, even if we both people have brought 100% proof of there specific claims.

A single instance of something doing X is proof of the claim that something can do X, but no amount of instances of something not doing X is proof of the claim that something cannot do X. (Note, this is different from people claiming that something always does X, as one counter example is enough to disprove that.)

Same issue in math with the difference between proving a conjecture is sometimes true and proving it is never true. Only one of these can be proven by examples (and only a single example is needed). The other can't be proven even by millions of examples.
by skerit | 2026-01-09 11:21:09+00:00
> Anthropic shouldn't have an all-you-can-eat plan for $200 when their pay-as-you-go plan would cost more than $1,000+ for comparable usage. Their subscription plans should just sell you API credits at, like, 20% off

I have the "all-you-can-eat" plan _because_ I know what I'm getting and how much it'll cost me.

I don't see anything wrong with this. It's just a big time-limited amount of tokens you can use. Of course it sucks that it's limited to Claude-Code and Claude.ai. But the other providers have very similar subscriptions. Even the original ChatGTP pro subscription gives you a lot more tokens for the $20 it costs compared to the API cost.

I always assumed tokens over the API cost that much, because that's just what people are willing to pay. And what people are willing to pay for small pay-as-you-go tasks vs large-scale agentic coding just doesn't line up.

And then there's the psychological factor: if Claude messed up and wasted a bunch of tokens, I'm going to be super pissed that those specific tokens will have cost me $30. But when it's just a little blip on my usage limit, I don't really mind.
by ehnto | 2026-01-09 11:21:13+00:00
No one said it was complicated, and you might be imagining that I care more than I do. However if you can't understand why having a feature of a paid product removed is dissatisfying, then I cannot help you understand any further.

I am surprised that anyone would think the "product" is the web interface and cli tool though, the product is very clearly the model. The difference in all options is merely how you access it.
by _flux | 2026-01-09 11:21:22+00:00
Aren't Anthropic in control of all the legitimate clients? They can download a new version, possibly automatically.

I believe the key issue here is that the product they're selling is all-you-can-eat API buffet for $200/month. The way they manage this is that they also sell the client for this, so they can more easily predict how much this is actually going to consume tokens (i.e. they can just put their new version of Claude Code to CI with some example scenarios and see it doesn't blow out their computing quota). If some third party client is also using the same subscription, it makes it much more difficult to make the deal affordable for them.

As I understand it, using the per-token API works just fine and I assume the reason people don't want to use it because it ends up costing more.
by reify | 2026-01-09 11:21:31+00:00
I dont know what types of therapy or therapist this person has enaged with, they are talking a load of bollocks.

yes, betterhelp is shit and a rip off for clients. Charging monthly fees that only a percentage is paid to the therapist, extra money is paid when the therapist replies to a text messages, but most therapists have a life and choose not to reply to text messages because they know it is unhealthy for the therapeutic alliance and the development of the therapeutic relationship.

My concern with all online therapy is the day that they get hacked, and they will. All that private video footage becomes readily available online. Can you imagine the horror of seeing yourself online talking about being sexually abused as a child.

The most fundamental requirements of all therapy is confidentiality, there is no confidentiality online, therapist, who work online are putting all clients at risk and should be struck off by their professional bodies.

Extract from the BACP Ethical Framework on confidentiality:

https://www.bacp.co.uk/events-and-resources/ethics-and-stand...

this is not therapy!

but the modern capitalist enshittifcation of therapy in general and the exploitation of vulnerable clients.

therapists do not tell client what to do!
therapists do not tell clients to trust them
therapists do not warn against co-dependency
therapists do not encourage clients to call and text them
therapists do not teach people how to date
therapists are not available 24/7
therapists do not act like proud parents
therapists do not work solely with the inner child
therapists do not treat clients like children
therapists do not speak to clients like a baby
therapists do not treat clients like a toddler
therapists do not "actually" love their clients
therapists do not miss their clients
therapists do not have favourite clients

on and on.

In my 20 years as a practicing psychotherapist I have never heard so much shit.

How about trying a local therapist and not some online bullshit money making machine.
It is cheaper and safer.
by hagbard_c | 2026-01-09 11:22:09+00:00
Your entire (recent - I did not dig down deeper) comment history consists of fomenting against Israel, Zionists and Jews. I think Reddit is a better fit for that kind of rhetoric but your downvote-happy comrades seem to disagree. A shame, really, that the supposedly intelligent members of this 'hackers' forum allow themselves to be led by the nose by this or that faction just as long as that faction knows how to get them to feel virtuous. Intelligence, it seems, is not what it is cracked up to be. Narrowly targeted intelligence without wisdom is a sure path to creating the behaviour seen here,

Now begone to Reddit, foul fiend.
by mike_hearn | 2026-01-09 11:22:14+00:00
It's because the model companies believe there's no way to survive just selling a model via an API. That is becoming a low margin, undifferentiated commodity business that can't yield the large revenue streams they need to justify the investments. The differences between models just aren't large enough and the practice of giving model weights away for free (dumping) is killing that business.

So they all want to be product companies. OpenAI is able to keep raising crazy amounts of capital because they're a product company and the API is a sideshow. Anthropic got squeezed because Altman launched ChatGPT first for free and immediately claimed the entire market, meaning Anthropic became an undifferentiated Bing-like also-ran until the moment they launched Claude Code and had something unique. For consumer use Claude still languishes but when it comes to coding and the enormous consumption programmers rack up, OpenAI is the one cloning Claude Code rather than the other way around.

For Claude Code to be worth anything to Anthropic's investors it must be a product and not just an API pricing tier. If it's a product they have so many more options. They can e.g. include ads, charge for corporate SSO integrations, charge extra for more features, add social features... I'm sure they have a thousand ideas, all of which require controlling the user interface and product surface.

That's the entire reason they're willing to engage in their own market dumping by underpricing tokens when consumed via their CLI/web tooling: build up product loyalty that can then be leveraged into further revenue streams beyond paying for tokens. That strategy doesn't work if anyone can just emulate the Claude Code CLI at the wire level. It'd mean Anthropic buys market share for their own competitors.

N.B. this kind of situation is super common in the tech industry. If you've ever looked at Google's properties you'll discover they're all locked behind Javascript challenges that verify you're using a real web browser. The features and pricing of the APIs is usually very different to what consumers can access via their web browser and technical tricks are used to segment that market. That's why SERP scraping is a SaaS (it's far too hard to do directly yourself at scale, has to be outsourced now), and why Google is suing them for bypassing "SearchGuard", which appears to just be BotGuard rebranded. I designed the first version of BotGuard and the reason they use it on every surface now, and not just for antispam, is because businesses require the ability to segment API traffic that might be generated by competitors from end user/human traffic generated by their own products.

If Anthropic want to continue with this strategy they'll need to do the same thing. They'll need to build what is effectively an anti-abuse team similar to the BotGuard team at Google or the VAC team at Valve, people specialized in client integrity techniques and who have experience in detecting emulators over the network.
by ktallett | 2026-01-09 11:23:12+00:00
It is not a silly question at all, a companion book with working and answers makes perfect sense. Universities and academic institutions who create things like this were often very wary as they often reuse these questions in classes and alternate the same questions over a span of 5 years. As realistically to test a small module of a subject the actual amount of viable questions in that question pool is rather few.
by austin-cheney | 2026-01-09 11:23:27+00:00
I was a web developer from about 2006-2023 and all I remember was decline and insecurity. For most of that the backend was Java and the Java people were deathly afraid of JavaScript, not always but certainly more than 90%. The JavaScript people were afraid of everything. Insecurity was everywhere.

I have since switched to enterprise API management and it has been great. I blame two things for the greatness: 1. Everybody has to obtain a certification, 2. It’s more operationally focused.

Everything related to web development always felt like a race to the bottom. Almost nobody seemed competent to do the work and the goal was always delivery in the most minimal capability imaginable.

There was a bright spot though. When I was the A/B test engineer for this major dot com life was great. I just built out experiments that defaced the production web site. There were many times the super hacky experiment code was less defective and executed faster than the real code that eventually rolled out to production.
by rambambram | 2026-01-09 11:24:31+00:00
The EU has Schleswig-Holstein (a German state) as an example; office software and email replaced by open source alternatives. Look overthere, I would say. But overthere is a politician who actually understands what he is talking about.

I don't feel the need to provide governments/politicians with open source software who think like this: "open source – which is a public good to be freely used".

Start understanding how this works, because your American and Chinese counterparts do a better job at this.

By the way, don't come lazily asking for input. Go out proactively and find the answers yourself.
by liampulles | 2026-01-09 11:24:44+00:00
At the last few places I've worked, we've seen most users engaging with our mobile app, and so it has made sense to develop a mobile app with flutter or kotlin multiplatform (or similar) for our broad userbase and then to use good ol' backed templated HTML for administrative sites rather than an SPA. Doing backend templating with good ol forms and what not is still a pretty good way to develop normal, boring websites.
by topocite | 2026-01-09 11:26:38+00:00
People would say the same thing about Glass or Reich.
People would say the same thing about Messiaen or Ligeti.
People would say the same thing about Schoenberg or Webern.

If your expectation of good food is In-N-Out Burger, you might think praise of a three star Michelin restaurant is performative too.

I am not even much a fan of Richard but he is absolutely one of the greatest musical geniuses of the past 50 years bar none.

Avril 14th is my favorite. Clearly Satie influenced but maybe even a little sweeter than Satie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxTdTaNIUxo

Also consider Satie himself is exactly the type of musician people would have said praising is performative at the time. He wasn't taken seriously as a real musician much at all in his life.
by vidarh | 2026-01-09 11:27:28+00:00
That would seem to be a very good reason for them to make Claude Code good enough that people would prefer doing that over the inverse...

But also, they're a bit schizophrenic about what they want Claude Code to be. Their Claude Agent SDK[1] explicitly let you use streaming JSON to/from Claude Code to use it as a headless backend including with your subscriptions.

[1] https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview
by eitau_1 | 2026-01-09 11:27:55+00:00
Sad reality of replacing plain old text boxes with "smarter" re-implementations: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/WebEditingVsCut...

Some (including the most popular: codemirror) go as far as putting themselves inside "natural" selection flow: they're interpreting mouse inputs, cancelling default behavior and selecting text themselves (programmatically via setSelectionRange). And Firefox deliberately ignores such selection: https://searchfox.org/firefox-main/rev/edb7c6118aa4fc5b09d84...
by tkgally | 2026-01-09 11:28:03+00:00
> I feel like I'm the only person on this site that doesn't use AI for coding.

I’m surprised by that. One reason I follow discussions here about AI and coding is that strong opinions are expressed by professionals both for and against. It seems that every thread that starts out with someone saying how AI has increased their productivity invites responses from people casting doubt on that claim, and that every post about the flaws in AI coding gets pushback from people who claim to use it to great effect.

I’m not a programmer myself, but I have been using Claude Code to vibe-code various hobby projects and I find it enormously useful and fun. In that respect, I suppose, I stand on the side of AI hype. But I also appeciate reading the many reports from skeptics here who explain how AI has failed them in more serious coding scenarios than what I do.
by tomtomstuder | 2026-01-09 11:29:30+00:00
Hey HN,

I've spent the last four years building InvMon, a cross-platform desktop app for investment tracking, portfolio monitoring, and performance analysis — designed to keep all financial data local with no cloud syncing.

InvMon consolidates multiple brokers and accounts, supports multi-currency portfolios, and provides advanced performance charts, rebalancing tools, and custom watchlists. It integrates with Interactive Brokers® for real-time quotes and optional portfolio sync, but everything runs locally on your machine.

Why I built it: existing tools either lock data in the cloud (privacy risk) or lack depth for serious portfolios. I wanted something that could handle multiple accounts, histories, and analytics without sending anything to a server.

Technology Stack

* Java & Eclipse RCP (SWT/JFace) UI
* Native installers for Windows & macOS (Linux needed? - let me know)
* Local data storage with optional IBKR connectivity (portfolio sync / order submission)
* Market data via IBKR connectivity or via the built-in market data interface
* Embedded H2 database
* Custom Swing-based charting engine (using SWT_AWT bridge)
* Custom XML-based UI framework
* Custom testing framework allowing to record user actions in the application, save them to a script and execute the script as part of a JUnit test

There's a free plan and affordable full version plans. See here: https://invmon.com/plans/

I've developed most of it pre-AI. But now (using Claude Code), I can add powerful new features quickly. Contact me for feature requests via the website!

Greetings from Switzerland and have a great 2026!