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New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: What was it like for programmers when spreadsheets became ubiquitous?

Ask HN: What was it like for programmers when spreadsheets became ubiquitous? 4 by yodaiken | 0 comments on Hacker News. There have been a lot of attempts to move more of programming to end-users instead of professional developer over the years. Spreadsheets are interesting because they were a massively successful version of this and because of course we are living through the latest wave (AI/vibe coding). For those of you around when spreadsheets were taking off, what was it like? Was there fear that they would eradicate the need for professionally built software? Were there people who brushed them off as just toys?

New ask Hacker News story: Toolpack SDK, an Open Source TypeScript SDK for Building AI-Powered Applications

Toolpack SDK, an Open Source TypeScript SDK for Building AI-Powered Applications 2 by sajeerzeji | 0 comments on Hacker News. Just Released Toolpack SDK — a completely Open-Source unified TypeScript SDK for AI development If you've worked with multiple LLM providers, you know the pain: each has different APIs, different tool formats, different quirks. Toolpack SDK gives you a single interface across OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and Ollama. It comes with 77 built-in tools for file ops, git, databases, web scraping, code analysis, and shell commands. You can also create and integrate your own custom tools. The workflow engine plans and executes tasks step-by-step. You get Agent and Chat modes out of the box, plus the ability to create custom modes tailored to your needs. There's also a custom provider API if you want to add other LLMs. Full TypeScript support included. And if you prefer a terminal UI over code, the CLI gives you an interactive chat interface to work with AI and ...

New ask Hacker News story: Claude broke a ZIP password in a smart way

Claude broke a ZIP password in a smart way 4 by jgrahamc | 0 comments on Hacker News. Today, I was working on a project with Claude and it needed to open a ZIP file. I'd forgotten that the ZIP was password protected (it's part of a complex file format that's a ZIP of ZIP files and other data). Here's a redacted part of Claude's output: I'll attempt some common password variations based on the project identifiers and metadata I've found - the project ID itself, the certificate ID, the license number, and the names associated with the project. Try more project-specific passwords (Script) The password is "xxxxxxxxxxxx"! Now let me extract the files. What's interesting is the approach it took. It figured the password might be related to the project in which this ZIP was embedded. It made a list of possible passwords from the context and tried them all. And it worked. But the funniest part is that when I originally received this ZIP file I did ex...

New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: What's your biggest pain point when joining a new developer team?

Ask HN: What's your biggest pain point when joining a new developer team? 3 by KevStatic | 3 comments on Hacker News. I'm planning to make an AI tool which allows an organisations' developer to access all the files or detect references/calls for any doubts. Usually I feel like new coders in an org, have plenty of questions about the org's framework or operations in general. This makes them ask their seniors which they might not really like due to the wastage of time it would take. Hence, this entire workflow would be eliminated by having a custom AI-based platform for the same to ask all your queries on.

New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Is there prior art for this rich text data model?

Ask HN: Is there prior art for this rich text data model? 2 by chrisecker | 1 comments on Hacker News. I've built a rich text data model for a desktop word processor in Python, based on a persistent balanced n-ary tree with cached weights for O(log n) index translation. The document model uses only four element types: Text, Container, Single, and Group — where Group is purely structural (for balancing) and has no semantic meaning in the document. Individual elements are immutable; insert and takeout return new trees rather than mutating the old one. This guarantees that old indices remain valid as long as the old tree exists. I'm aware of Ropes, Finger Trees, and ProseMirror's flat index model. Is there prior art I should know about — specifically for rich text document models with these properties?

New ask Hacker News story: Enabling Media Router by default undermines Brave's privacy claims

Enabling Media Router by default undermines Brave's privacy claims 2 by noguff | 0 comments on Hacker News. So, Brave now enables Casting by default on desktop — and does so silently, without explicit notification or consent after an update? What fresh hell is this? A browser that markets itself as privacy‑first should not be turning on a network discovery feature by default as if it were a trivial setting. If the Brave team’s operational goal is to expand the browser’s attack surface (more than they already have) they’ve made a strong start. Forcing users to manually opt out of Media Router to protect their systems and data directly contradicts the principle of “privacy by default.” This is exactly the kind of behavior many users left Chrome to avoid. Media Router is not a harmless convenience toggle. Under the hood, it relies on automatic device discovery protocols such as SSDP and UPnP on the local network. That means the browser is actively participating in multicast discove...

New ask Hacker News story: What is the strongest open source model for coding against Opus 4.6?

What is the strongest open source model for coding against Opus 4.6? 2 by eeko_systems | 0 comments on Hacker News.