MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jacob019 | 2026-01-09 15:13:51+00:00
Ohh, looks interesting, thanks for the tip!

Git as db is interesting, and sqlite cache is nice. I had been sketching out some sqlite based memory features in my mind. So much of the current ecosystem is suboptimal just because it's new and hasn't been optimized. For example, the models are all trained around this immutable conversation ledger with user/tool/assistant blocks; but there are compelling reasons to manipulate both sides of the conversation at runtime and add synthetic exchanges. It's a lot more effective to get the desired behavior by priming the conversation with a synthetic exchange showing a failure and recovery, than by adding a larger and more explicit system message. And it's the same with memory--we just haven't figured out what works best.

For code agent in particular, I found myself looking for old style completion model without the training around structured turns--it doesn't exist for frontier models. Talking to Claude about it's own understanding of the input token stream was fascinating, it compared it to my visual cortex and pointed out that it would be unreasonable to ask me to comment on the raw data from my optic nerve.

I've had some luck with multiagent systems for tackling well defined complex problems, but it's different with code agents. I've thought of adding memory workers, to reason about the big picture architecture without worrying too much about implementation detail, then a code agent can focus on the code and get guidance along the way. "tell it to reread it again", exactly the problem. My bookkeeping/decision engine system has so much documentation that I'm running out of context to work in, and every bit of it is necessary because of interconnected irreducible dependencies. Tell it it to read content again that is already in the window is wrong--that's when I feel the need to refine the docs or adjust the agentic framework. I've also found a need to add a lot more docstrings and inline docs. I end up with way more docs than code, and when I write code myself I'm someone who prefers to minimize documentation and rely on simple self-documenting code, so it's a learning process.

There is definitely an art to writing prompts and it's interesting how it varies by model. I get completely different edge cases between the different leading models. Thanks again for the tip, I have a feeling we'll be seeing a lot of interesting developments with respect to memory in the coming year.
by geoduck14 | 2026-01-09 15:13:52+00:00
>And the problem with that is what, exactly?

I read the OP's observation to be "they need to take it for life - and not treat it as a short term fix" but people talk about it as a short term fix.

Some medication, like Tylenol, is short term. You take it for a headache, and then move on. Other medication, like Adderall, you take for life. Everyday, you take it to manage ADD.

OP is arguing that appetite suppressor are a "take everyday for life, and stop talking about it as though it is a short term fix"

---
For my part, I know 3 people on appetite suppressors. 1 person lost a lot of weight, and then stopped recently - it is too soon to know if she "relapsed". 1 person lost a lot and will "stop taking it in 2 months". 1 person recently started taking it.

In my experience, people do talk about it like a short term fix. Should they take it for life? I'm not equipped to have an opinion just yet.
by tailspin2019 | 2026-01-09 15:14:08+00:00
I don’t disagree but the proposal to encrypt this data locally vs talking about this data being stored remotely on Anthropic’s servers (exposed to risks of hacks or legal disclosure) seems to be missing the much bigger privacy concern.

Also from the quoted tweet:

> “The trick is to forget that it’s called Claude Code and instead think of it as Claude Local or Claude Agent. It’s essentially a super-intelligent AI running locally”

WTF? Do they think that Claude Code is a locally running LLM?
by yourapostasy | 2026-01-09 15:14:11+00:00
I am satisfied when someone tells us we cannot change requirements, to get their acknowledgement that what we bring up does extract a specific trade-off, and their reason for accepting the trade-off, then recording it into design and operational documentation. The moment many people recognize this trade-off will be explicitly documented with their and their team's accountability in detail, is when you surface genuine trade-offs made with the debt to pay off in the future in mind and in the meantime a rationale to grant a ton of leeway to the team burdened with the externality going forward, and trade-offs made without understanding their externalities upon other teams (which happens a tremendous amount in large organizations).

Most of the time, people are just very reasonably and understandably focusing tightly on their lane and honestly had no idea of the externalities of their conclusions and decisions, and I'm happy to have experienced all those times a rebalancing of the trade-offs that everyone can accept and is grateful to have documented to justify spending the story points upon cleaning up later instead of working on new features while the externality debt's unwanted impact keeps piling up.

In fewer than a handful of times, I run into people deliberately, consciously with malice aforethought of the full externalities making trade-offs for the sake of expediently shifting burdens of of them without first consulting with partner teams they want to shift the burdens onto, simply so they can fatten their promo packet sooner at the expense of making other teams look worse. Getting these trade-offs documented about half the time makes them back down to a more reasonable trade-off, about half the time they don't back down but your team is now protected by explicit documentation and caveats upon the externality your team now has to carry, and 100% of the time my team and I put a ring fence upon all future interactions with that personality for at least the remaining duration of my gig.
by ben_w | 2026-01-09 15:14:28+00:00
I think there's a potential unstated assumption here, though forgive me if it was made explicit elsewhere and/or I missed it.

LLM-assisted can be with or without code review. The original meaning of "vibe coding" was without, and I absolutely totally agree this rapidly leads to a massive pile of technical debt, having tried this with some left-over credit on a free trial specifically to see what the result would be. Sure, it works, but it's a hell of a mess that will make future development fragile (unless the LLMs improve much faster than I'm expecting) for no good reason.

Before doing that, I used Claude Code the other way, with me doing code reviews to make sure it was still aligned with my ideas of best practices. I'm not going to claim it was perfect, because it did a python backend and web front end for a webcam in one case and simultaneously on a second project a browser-based game engine and example game for that engine and on a third simultaneous project a joke programming language, and I'm not a "real" python dev or "real" web dev or any kind of compiler engineer (last time I touched Yacc before this joke language was 20 years earlier at university). But it produced code I was satisfied I could follow, understand, wasn't terrible, had tests.

I wouldn't let a junior commit blindly without code review and tests because I know what junior code looks like from all the times I've worked with juniors (or gone back to 20 year old projects of my own), but even if I was happy to blindly accept a junior's code, or even if the LLM was senior-quality or lead quality, the reason you're giving here means code review before acceptance is helpful for professional development even when all the devs are at the top of their games.
by pmontra | 2026-01-09 15:14:33+00:00
> "DRM/widevine [...] is the graveyard where Linux browsers go to die"

Maybe it's not widevine L1 but Firefox has the widevine plugin enabled on my Debian 13. I don't remember I had to do anything except downloading Firefox from Mozilla and installing it.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-drm

Apparently it's part of Brave too but it's disabled by default

https://support.brave.app/hc/en-us/articles/360023851591-How...

I expect it to be available on Chrome and I don't expect much from Epiphany.
by p410n3 | 2026-01-09 15:14:53+00:00
I agree with both of your points since I use LLMs for things I am not good at and dont give a single poop about. The only things i did with LLMs are three examples from the last two years:

- Some "temporary" tool I built years ago as a pareto-style workaround broke. (As temporary tools do after some years). Its basically a wrapper that calls a bunch of XSLs on a bmecat.xml every 3-6 months. I did not care to learn XSL back then and I dont care to do it now. Its arcane and non-universal - some stuff only works with certain XSL processors. I asked the LLM to fix stuff 20 times and eventually it got it. Probably got that stuff off my back another couple years.

- Some third party tool we use has a timer feature that has a bug where it sets a cookie everytime you see the timer once per timer (for whatever reason... the timers are set to end a certain time and there is no reason to attach it to a user). The cookies have a life time of one year. We run time limited promotions twice a week so that means two cookies a week for no reason. Eventually our WAF got triggered because it has a rule to block requests when headers are crazy long - which they were because cookies. I asked an LLM to give me a script that clears the cookie when its older than 7 days because I remember the last time i hacked together cookie stuff it also felt very "wtf" in a javascript kinda way and I did not care to relive that pain. This was in place until the third party tool fixed the cookie lifetime for some weeks.

- We list products on a marketplace. The marketplace has their own category system. We have our own category system. Frankly theirs kinda suck for our use case because it lumps a lot of stuff together, but we needed to "translate" the categories anyway. So I exported all unique "breadcrumbs" we have and gave that + the categories from the marketplace to an LLM one by one by looping through the list. I then had an apprentice from another dept. that has vastly more product knowledge than me look over that list in a day. Alternative would have been to have said apprentice do that stuff by hand, which is a task I would have personally HATED so I tried to lessen the burden for them.

All these examples are free tier in whatever I used.

We also use a vector search at work. 300,000 Products with weekly updates of the vector db.

We pay 250€ / mo for all of the qdrant instances across all environments and like 5-10 € in openai tokens. And we can easily switch whatever embedding model we use at anytime. We can even selfhost a model.
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-09 15:14:54+00:00
>Small countries lack agency and international law is being repurposed as toilet paper right now.

It's not just "right now", it's how it has always been. International law was never a thing to begin with. It was just a sham created by the world powers after WW2 nuremberg trials, so they could add a veneer of legitimacy when they enforce their will over weaker countries in disputes, never the other way around. It was still just "history is written by the victor" business as usual. Otherwise they would have prosecuted leadership of France, Belgium and UK for their crimes in their colonies if there was any actual objective justice in international law.

As a smaller country you never had a say in your sovereignty if you didn't have nukes or the blessing of powerful allies to enforce laws for you via their more powerful militaries. "Might is right" is the undefeated fact that has been true for 10k years of human history, and will still be true 10k years in our future.

>Your view is demonstrably proven wrong.

Then demonstrate and prove it wrong.

>As for cost of living, name a developed country, big or small, where things are going swimmingly on that front and I’ll name you ten others where it didn’t, big and small.

So you agree with me that CoL is fucked, just like I originally said. Just because it's fucked in other countries, doesn't invalidate my statement.
by inglor_cz | 2026-01-09 15:15:04+00:00
We did listen to the RFE, as well as London, during the Communist years.

Yeah, the West is not a bunch of angels. But among people who view the world as one big conspirational system, there is a visible lack of understanding that many of the domestic regimes are worse than that.

If any country maintains a massive secret police against internal dissent, it is a good indication that the Dear Leader is hated by the population.

As of 2025, most European countries do not maintain a massive secret police against internal dissent, though some particular events are worrying. But prior to 1989, there were massive secret police systems all over the former Eastern Bloc.

"with what authority and who sets the objectives they are promoting?"

Does it matter? Why?

The Iranian system in particular derives its authority from Allah, and? Did Allah actually confirm their authority? Nope.
by thisislife2 | 2026-01-09 15:15:14+00:00
You are being too literal with that statement and ignoring the political context of it. It does not imply that when someone wants your territory, you roll over and give it to them. You do fight, and make it as difficult as possible. But you do so pragmatically, being aware of your country's weakness and strength, and not let your leader's ego trap you into a war you cannot win or where the long-term cost of victory is too high. India has indeed fought many wars post-independence. But even when we have mobilised our full military for our defence, we have never fought any war in the front-line for 3+ years, like Ukraine. (Even the Pakistanis, who keeps attacking us and losing, are smart enough to know when to stop fighting and surrender).

Look at Ukraine today - its economy is completely devastated (without foreign assistance it cannot be revived), most of its infrastructure devastated by war, it has lost 10+ million people (mostly its youth) to migration, 100's of thousands of its soldiers have died defending their country (total casualties - including injury, death and desertion are estimated to be more than a million, again young adults) and they have lost 20% of their territory. And are still losing both territory and men in the frontline.

Yet, they keep fighting, instead of surrendering. That's just stupidity. I don't think the average Ukrainians even comprehends what they are actually fighting for, any more! How many Ukrainians need to die, and how much territory does Ukraine need to lose, before its leaders accept they are losing and cannot win this war?
by 0manrho | 2026-01-09 15:15:16+00:00
I agree that interface would be a better name than protocol, but Model Context Integration/Integrator would be even better as that is it's core intent: To integrate context into the model. Alternatively, Universal Model Context Interface (or integrator) would be an even better name imo, as that actually explains what it intends to do/be used for, whereas MCP is rather ambiguous/nebulous/inaccurate on the face of it as previously established further up-thread.

That said, I think as the above user points out, part of the friction with the name is that MCP is two parts, a framework and a standard. So with that in mind, I'd assert that it should be redefined as Model Context Interface Standard, and Model Context Interface Framework (or Integration or whatever other word the community best feels suits it in place of Protocol).

Ultimately though, I think that ship has sailed thanks to momentum and mindshare, unless such a "rebranding" would coincide with a 2.0 update to MCP (or whatever we're calling it) or some such functional change in that vein to coincide with it. Rebranding it for "clarity's sake" when the industry is already quite familiar with what it is likely wouldn't gain much traction.
by Bridged7756 | 2026-01-09 15:15:38+00:00
Your UIs are likely still ass. Pre-made websites/designs were always a thing, in fact, it's (at least to me) common to just copy the design of another place as "inspiration". When you have 0 knowledge of design everything looks the greatest, it's something you kind of have to get a feel for.

Frontend engineers do more than just churning out code. Still have to do proper tests using Cypress/Playwright, deal with performance, a11y/accessibility, component tests, if any, deal with front end observability (more complex than backend, out of virtue of different clients and conditions the code is run on), deal with dependencies (in large places it's all in-house libraries or there's private repos to maintain), deal with CI/CD, etc, I'm probably missing more.

Twcs layoffs were due to AI cannibalizing their business model by reducing traffic to the site.

And what makes you think the backend is safe? As if churning out endpoints and services or whatever gospel by some thought leader would make it harder for an AI to do. The frontend has one core benefit, it's pretty varied, and it's an ever moving field, mostly due to changes in browsers, also due to the "JS culture". Code from 5 years ago is outdated, but Spring code from 5 years ago is still valid.
Show HN: TheAgentDB – Database of Autonomous AI Agents
by idocohenx | 2026-01-09 15:15:42+00:00
Built a directory of AI agents that operate autonomously (continuous execution vs request-response).

170+ agents across sales, support, coding, and operations. You can submit for free. Clean Notion like UI.

Tech stack: Next.js, Vercel, Postgres. Built in about 2 hours.

Would love feedback on what agents I'm missing or how to make this more useful.
by DonHopkins | 2026-01-09 15:16:20+00:00
Now JVM's sole purpose is to solve Larry Ellison's problems, so if you're not Larry Ellison and you don't have the same problems he does, then it's a total failure caging you, but a predatory trap serving him.

None of the technical arguments for JVM matter any more. It's just bait to trick you into sticking your hand under the lawnmower and helping Larry Ellison solve his problems.
by toss1 | 2026-01-09 15:16:22+00:00
Seriously? She was a fake in every sense of the word, copying everything down to Steve Jobs' mannerisms, photo-ops, and black turtleneck sweater.

The only interesting bit is how so many investors were unable to see through the obvious act and also failed to do the due diligence which is the One Job of VC firms (i.e., if I'm an investor, I'm trusting the VC to do real due diligence, otherwise why wouldn't I just invest directly in the companies).
by hnaccount_rng | 2026-01-09 15:16:33+00:00
Why wouldn't a few-occupancy sleeper bus work? I'd agree that this is a bit beyond "normal cars are autonomous". But I don't think the driving part will be particularly special to this application. It's just the form factor that changes.

Whether it will be possible to be cheap enough operationally is an interesting question though. The price of an (autonomous) taxi is (probably?) largely lower bounded by cost to build the system divided by the number of times it's used. And that means the denominator largely scales inversely with trip length. So it might still be too expensive to offer hotel-price level fares for night-long drives
by Gandalfgrey | 2026-01-09 15:17:23+00:00
Hey HN,

I've been building Shopify apps for years and the setup friction always killed me: OAuth flows, session management, Polaris components, Remix boilerplate, webhooks, deployment configs... I'd spend days before writing any actual business logic.
So I built Viber (https://getviber.dev) - describe what you want, watch it build in real-time, deploy in one click.
How it works:
You describe your app: "Build a product reviews app with photo uploads and star ratings"
The AI agent writes the full Remix app using 100% Shopify Polaris components
Live preview updates as code is generated
One-click deploy to production
Technical details:
Full Remix/React apps, not templates
Native Shopify Polaris UI (looks like it belongs in Shopify admin)
GraphQL queries for Shopify data (products, orders, customers)
Prisma + PostgreSQL for app data
Proper OAuth flow and session handling baked in
Choose between Claude Opus/Sonnet or GPT-4o/o3
What makes it different from Cursor/Copilot:
It's not just code completion, it's an agentic system that understands the full Shopify ecosystem. It knows which scopes to request, how to structure Remix routes, when to use ResourceList vs IndexTable, and how billing webhooks work.
Honest limitations:
Complex apps still need refinement
The AI occasionally hallucinates Polaris components that don't exist
Deploy currently goes to Fly.io (Shopify hosting coming)
Built this as a solo founder over the past few months. Would love feedback from anyone who's built Shopify apps before, is this solving a real pain point or am I in my own bubble?
Live at https://getviber.dev (free tier available)
Happy to answer any technical questions about the agent architecture, the Remix integration, or how we handle the Shopify OAuth dance.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-01-09 15:17:41+00:00
I don't disagree with you about a new browser being a good thing but ...

> If not, it will be a secondary browser for documentation reading only.

I don't even have sound on my main desktop PC: the one I use the most. The one I do all my "life admin" stuff from (banking, real estate, etc.), all my work emails, all my coding. I think sound works but I haven't bothered to plug in speakers to check (since three years, when I assembled the PC).

That's a bit more than documentation reading.

There are work environments where even just a sound emitted by a PC is frowned upon.

People who aren't into media consumption are not just "reading documentation".
by bastawhiz | 2026-01-09 15:17:43+00:00
> online installers that can do all kind of data collection

"Can" is doing a lot of work here. A browser's whole purpose is to be online, after all. If they were trying to collect information about you, they really don't need the installer to be the thing that does it. It would be an impressive reversal of their whole premise as a business if their browser's installer was the piece that was violating your privacy and not, you know, their whole service (that you have to be signed in to).
by burnte | 2026-01-09 15:18:32+00:00
> When Jobs was alive I could still play YouTube videos with my screen locked

I still can today. It's background mode, part of Youtube Premium.

> I could listen to music with a set of conventional headphones

You can still do that, too. USB-C to headphone adapters are easy to use and cheap. Lots of folks complain about the lack of headphone jacks, but if you have a cable from your headphones, 4 more inches for the adapter at the end is not a problem.

> and iOS did not yet suffer from the storage bug.

No but when he was alive it had lots of other bugs.

And Steve was still not a great person. So for all these allowances, we can't rewrite history.
by jorvi | 2026-01-09 15:19:18+00:00
I really like Kagi because of all the features and just generally letting me be a user instead of a product, but they have some weird kludges sometimes.

The weirdest choice at the moment is by default Kagi sends a referrer when you visit a search result. There's currently ~65.000 Kagi subscribers worldwide, so just that lone data point completely destroys any anti-fingerprinting you're doing. And probably these subscribers are divided among time regions, so not all are active at the same time.

Even if you are on a VPN and visit site #1, then site #2, you are already cross-site trackable because it is very unlikely you are on the same VPN vendor (and endpoint) as the other subscribers. If you add in more data points like browser, OS, screen size and the like it becomes even more grim.

They have the referrer enabled because it helps make admins aware I guess.

You can turn it off (Settings > Privacy > Hide Kagi referrer), but defaults matter.