MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Barcable – We Built Agents That Automatically Load Test Your Back End
by iyang_steraflow | 2025-11-04 23:25:50+00:00
Hey HN, we’re Iyan and Datta, founders of Barcable. Barcable connects to your backend (HTTP, gRPC, GraphQL) and uses autonomous agents to generate and run load tests directly inside your CI/CD. No configs, no scripts. It scans your repo, understands your API routes, and builds real test scenarios that hit your endpoints with realistic payloads.

Docs: https://www.barcable.dev/documentation

We built this out of frustration. Every team we’ve worked with ran into the same issue: reliability testing never kept up with development speed. Pipelines deploy faster than anyone can validate performance. Most “load tests” are brittle JMeter relics or one-off scripts that rot after the first refactor.

Barcable is our attempt to automate that. It:

- Parses your OpenAPI spec or code to discover endpoints automatically - Generates realistic load tests from PR diffs (no manual scripting) - Spins up isolated Cloud Run jobs to execute at scale - Reports latency, throughput, and error breakdowns directly in your dashboard - Hooks into your CI so tests run autonomously before deploys

Each agent handles a part of the process—discovery, generation, execution, analysis—so testing evolves with your codebase rather than fighting against it.

Right now it works best with Dockerized repos. You can onboard from GitHub, explore endpoints, generate tests, run them, and see metrics in a unified dashboard.

It’s still a work in progress. We’ll create accounts manually and share credentials with anyone interested in trying it out. We’re keeping access limited for now because of Cloud Run costs.

We’re not trying to replace performance engineers, just make it easier for teams to catch regressions and incidents before production without the setup tax.

Would love feedback from anyone who’s been burned by flaky load testing pipelines or has solved reliability differently. We’re especially curious about gRPC edge cases and complex auth setups.

HN has always been a huge source of inspiration for us, and we’d love to hear how you’d test it, break it, or make it better. — Iyan & Datta https://www.barcable.dev
by protocolture | 2025-11-04 23:26:02+00:00
How do you figure?

Like theres plenty of information thats not public, but isnt confidential either. Accessing that information can be exceptionally lucrative. Now if that information is used to trade publicly traded shares, that can be criminal (the ethics of the situation are another matter) but if you were to instead, provide product or service on that basis, you are in fact just a well connected salesman. Not everything that doesn't go to a public tender is corruption.
by jgb1984 | 2025-11-04 23:26:06+00:00
You're falling into the false dichotomy that always comes up with these topics: as if the choice is between the cloud and renting rack space while applying your own thermal paste on the CPUs. In reality, for most people, renting dedicated servers is the goldilocks solution (not colocation with your own hardware). You get an incredible amount of power for a very reasonable price, but you don't need to drive to a datacenter to swap out a faulty PSU, the on site engineers take care of that for you. I ordered an extra server today from Hetzner. It was available 90 seconds afterwards. Using their installer I had Ubuntu 24.04 LTS up and running, and with some Ansible playbooks to finish configuration, all in all from the moment of ordering to fully operational was about 10 minutes tops. If I no longer need the server I just cancel it, the billing is per hour these days.

Bang for the buck is unmatched, and none of the endless layers of cloud abstraction getting in the way. A fixed price, predictable, unlimited bandwidth, blazing fast performance. Just you and the server, as it's meant to be. I find it a blissful way to work.
by gruez | 2025-11-04 23:26:23+00:00
>I would expect a newer device would have the trust root pinned in hardware (TPM, etc) and firmware updates would be have been authenticated.

All those things cost money in hardware or development time, so companies basically never bother. You're probably also letting all the stories about DRM on phones or whatever color your experience on IOT as a whole. TPM basically makes no sense to implement on anything that's not a PC. Not even phones use it.
by nostrademons | 2025-11-04 23:27:17+00:00
The point of high CEO salaries is to align their incentives with the board and shareholders (the people paying them), so that when they are faced with the decision of losing their job vs. fucking over the tens of thousands of people working with them to increase shareholder value, they choose to fuck over the people working with them. Most people would not normally make that choice; it takes a few tens of millions in stock options before someone might contemplate it.
by neom | 2025-11-04 23:27:32+00:00
The app is specifically for use in immigration enforcement operations under Section 287(g) agreements. 287(g) allows ICE to formally delegate certain immigration enforcement powers to state and local police, everyone still needs reasonable suspicion, it's just police now have immigration act they can work with, also immigration is often civil not criminal, creating the grey area I believe as the standard for what constitutes "reasonable suspicion" in immigration enforcement can be lower/different than for criminal law. They can do something like: Traffic violations (broken taillight, speeding 5mph over) + "nervousness" + "area known for undocumented workers" - then scan them with the app to verify their immigration status using 287(g).
by tpmoney | 2025-11-04 23:27:39+00:00
> It is not fair use when only a couple of oligarchs have the money and grifting ability to build the required data centers.

Seems like a good argument to not lock down the ability to create and use AI models only to those with vast sums of money able to pay extortionist prices from copyright holders. And let's be clear, copyright holders will happily extort the hell out of things if they can, for an example of this we can look to the number of shows and movies that have had to be re-edited in the modern era because there are no streaming rights to the music they used.
by Aloisius | 2025-11-04 23:28:21+00:00
Calling archiving the web for researchers dirty work is a bit much.

Unless something has changed since I was there, the crawler didn't intentionally bypass any paywalls.

The crawler obeyed robots.txt, throttled itself when visiting slow sites to avoid overloading them and announced its user agent clearly with a URL explaining what it was and how to block it if desired.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-11-04 23:28:32+00:00
The guy is obsessed with aviation. He's not just a casual pilot but he owns and flies a fleet of fighter jets and flew to space privately iirc. Like elon musk he appreciates the commercial value of space. No doubt he's is tremendously ambitious when it comes to space and genuinely cares about it. If you look past the whole billionaire thing etc, he sounds like a good pick to lead NASA.
by tracker1 | 2025-11-04 23:28:40+00:00
I always thought a cap of 100x the lowest paid employee as a raise all boats kind of thing. That said, I think stretch goals with generous monetary incentives should always be possible. If someone increases the value of a company by $10b, I'm not going to be upset if they make $100m, assuming they aren't doing anything shady, immoral or illegal.
by justsid | 2025-11-04 23:29:01+00:00
The damage on the ground is scary to look at. I think the only silver lining here is that it was "just" a sparser industrial area and there weren't any homes. I'm really curious about what the investigation will reveal in a few months. This doesn't look like a "regular" engine fire from a bird strike or so, you would normally expect the flames to come out the back and not over the wing. And at least in theory the MD-11 should be flyable with just two engines, although flames on a wing is probably "really really bad" just by itself already. Too early to speculate about what happened though.
by Bender | 2025-11-04 23:30:19+00:00
I only use KeypassXC. I only browse sites from workstations. The database gets backed up. That backup is replicated and also off site where no icky cloud can touch it. No 2FA involved. Disks use encryption with a long passphrase and no encryption headers. Disks are in lock boxes with biohazard stickers and logos for gain of function viral experiments. There may or may not be cheap pipettes and duct tape included.
by nomilk | 2025-11-04 23:30:49+00:00
Banning PG was a mistake [0]

> [George Hotz] I'm upset when I see PG get banned for mentioning mastodon

> [Elon] yeah, that was a mistake

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkNkSQ42jg4&t=42m14s

Meta note: it's worth listening to this historical 'space' in full (well, the first ~1h while Elon's on). The meta-pattern becomes obvious: people (esp nay-sayers) are outraged about ~20 different issues, X since addressed most of them, but the outrage-mob moved on to new issues, X will address them, and so on.

The point: the ragey mob is never satified, X moves very quickly (partly due to it's willingness to try things, and occasionally fail in the short term) but this strategy is long-term optimal.
by stuffn | 2025-11-04 23:31:43+00:00
> Lairmore said he "could feel it through his ballistic vest" and it "exploded all over" him after the Subway stack hit him. He said he "could smell the onions and mustard" on his uniform, and even had an onion string hanging by his police radio later that night. The fast-food mustard, he said, stained his shirt.

The first test of a hypersonic subway apparently.

On one hand, yes, it's probably simple battery given how loose the definition is. But the lengths at which this guy goes into how traumatized he is by a subway sandwich, juxtaposed by the intimidating posture border patrol is trying to project, is absolute comedy gold.

> Dunn's attorneys later pressed Lairmore on two gag gifts that his coworkers bought him after the incident, including a plush submarine sandwich and a "felony footlong" patch that Lairmore said he put on his lunchbox.

His own buddies were clowning on him.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-11-04 23:32:27+00:00
I guess you could make the argument that we haven't proven AI can't do a CEO's job until we test it... it would make an interesting experiment, at least.

But it also kind of reminds me of the DAO hype a few years ago where people suggested decentralized, blockchain-based organizations could be the org structure of the future. (Not realizing that they were just putting a co-op on a blockchain :) )

Now that I think about it, I do hope someone tests this theory out. It would be very interesting to see. You could probably start by saying "You are the CEO of a lemonade stand. Your goal is to maximize revenue while [constraints]..."
by harry8 | 2025-11-04 23:32:42+00:00
Think about using a modern x86-64 cpu core to run one process with no operating system. Know exactly what is in cache memory. Know exactly what deadlines you can meet and guarantee that.

It's quite a different thing to running a general purpose OS to multiplex each core with multiple processes and a hardware walked page table, TLB etc.

Obviously you know what you prefer for your laptop.

As we get more and more cores perhaps the system designs that have evolved may head back toward that simplicity somewhat? Anything above %x cpu usage gets its own isolated, un-interrupted core(s)? Uses low cost IPC? Hard to speculate with any real confidence.
by legitster | 2025-11-04 23:32:48+00:00
It could be true that the market can continue to grow well past 15% above fundamentals for the indefinite future. But the more it goes up, the more improbable it becomes.

If you've flipped heads three times in a row, you're right that I would look foolish saying the next one can't be heads. But at the same time you cannot keep flipping heads forever.
by fennecbutt | 2025-11-04 23:33:16+00:00
But aren't you shunning OP for their view that his homophobia and misogyny is wrong and he shouldn't be supported for that reason?

As a gay man I was looking forward to reading this article because the topic sounds interesting. I'll go to war about this every chance I get.

Oh, so good religion is to hate gays, fine. Well my religion is to hate Christians and I'll secretly support and lobby for their rights to be taken away, I'll lend my voice to all the others so we can shout that Christians should not exist. Fair is fair, right?
by corefinder | 2025-11-04 23:33:33+00:00
I'm surprised that people still aren't discussing Github Copilot baked into VSCode. I pair agent mode + Sonnet 4 + Sequential Thinking + Tavily MCP servers and it works wonders. I recently prototyped the first version of our SaaS with this setup in a minimal amount of time. Also worth nothing, the pricing is extremely reasonable. Free credits + pay per use. I frequently max out the free tier and have never spent more than $40 per month.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-11-04 23:34:23+00:00
Its not actually that hard to get your own server racked up in a data centre, I have done it. Since it was only one box that I built and installed at home I just shipped it and they racked it in the shared area and plugged the power and network in and gave me the IP address. It was cheaper than renting from someone like hetzner, was about £15 a month at the time for 1A and 5TB a month of traffic at 1gbps. Also had a one off install fee of £75.

At the time I did this no one had good gaming CPUs in the cloud, they are still a bit rare really especially in VPS offerings and I was hosting a gaming community and server. So I made a pair of machines in a 1U with dual machines in there and had a public and private server with raid 1 drives on both and redundant power. Ran that for a gaming server for many years until it was obsolete. It wasn't difficult and I think the machine was about £1200 in all, which for 2 computers running game servers wasn't too terrible.

I didn't do this because it was necessarily cheaper, I did it because I couldn't find a cloud server to rent with a high clockspeed CPU in it. I tested numerous cloud providers, sent emails asking for specs and after months of chasing it down I didn't feel like I had much choice. Turned out to be quite easy and over the years it saved a fortune.
by gambiting | 2025-11-04 23:34:44+00:00
Because in some companies the CEO compensation is a significant portion of the expenses so obviously cutting it would free up cashflow to do other things - but also on a simple human level hearing about yet another CEO getting tens or hundreds of millions in compensation while they announce how sad they are they have to let go 10% of their workforce is just simply gross. I think even in private companies you are allowed to care when this happens, and voice your displeasure with this clearly visible idiocy of the situation.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-11-04 23:34:51+00:00
> Freedom refers to a potentiality.

And tariffs and sanctions refer to what?

> A free market is a means towards a competitive market because it lowers the artificial barriers to entry into the market. Those barriers imposed by the universe simply are...

Are you talking about tariffs or about banning the sale of semiconductor equipment to China, so they can't compete in the market for high performance chips? Is that "a means towards a competitive market" or is it "barriers imposed by the universe"?

That's an interesting universe you live in.
by ergocoder | 2025-11-04 23:35:03+00:00
> I’d even say it’s a fiduciary duty to act on this sooner rather than later.

You said it like nobody hasn't attempted it. Many people are trying to solve this. They've replaced small mechanical works like scheduling meetings and reaching out already.

The majority of CEO job is excellent judgement and motivating people. It's difficult to replace that function.

A lot of CEOs are founders and owners. You can bet they want the business to run by itself, so it would free up their time to go do something else. That's the dream. You do realize that these people will earn regardless who runs the business, right? because they are significant shareholders. In a way, you wish for CEOs/founders to be much much much richer.
by oxag3n | 2025-11-04 23:35:18+00:00
> ...like a Joycean inner monologue or the flow of sense memories in a Proustian daydream. Or we might mean reasoning: working through a problem step by step.

Moving goalposts will be mostly associated with AI I think: God -> ASI -> AGI -> inner monologue -> working through a problem step by step.

Why fixating on a single human trait like thinking? The only reason trillions are "invested" into this technology is building a replacement for knowledge workers at scale. We can extend this line of thought and make another article "AI has knowledge", at least in a distilled sense, it knows something, sometimes. Cargo cult...

It's very easy to define what's actually required - a system that can show up in a knowledge worker's environment, join the video call, greet the team and tell about itself, what it learned, and start learning in a vague environment, pull those invisible lines of knowledge that lie between its colleagues, getting better, collaborating, and finally replacing all of them.
by tczMUFlmoNk | 2025-11-04 23:35:40+00:00
College athlete Lia Smith died by suicide last week after years of targeted harassment and attacks from the people we're talking about. At some point, when the institutions of power do everything they can to demonize your existence, strip you of your accomplishments, and vilify you publicly—across millions of people nationwide—it doesn't matter whether you call it murder or not. The deaths rack up all the same.
by fennecbutt | 2025-11-04 23:35:48+00:00
And why should we make the effort when they make none?

Rule of the biggest tribe with the biggest sticks still applies even today I suppose.

But one day...religion is dying out, slowly but surely. I can't wait for the day when the religious have to face what they dished out. I have no patience to teach people that who I am isn't worthy of death or admonishment again and again.
by pixl97 | 2025-11-04 23:35:53+00:00
We don't have continuous learning machines yet so at least understanding new things, or being able to further link ideas isn't quite there yet. I've always taken the idea of understanding as taking an unrefined idea, or incomplete information, applying experimentation/doing, and coming out with a more complete model on how to do said action.

Like understanding how to bake a cake. I can have a simplistic model, for example taking a box cake and making it. Or a more complex model, using the raw ingredients in the right proportions. Both of these have some level of understanding on what's necessary to bake a cake.

And I think AI models have this too. When they have some base knowledge on a topic, and you ask a question that can require a tool without asking for a tool directly, they can suggest a tool to use. Which at least to me make it appear the system as a whole has understanding.
by rufus_foreman | 2025-11-04 23:35:56+00:00
>> if returns on inherited wealth outperform growth, then the percentage of growth captured by the wealthy grows over time

This is a non sequitur. There are many situations where returns on inherited wealth outperform growth, and the share of growth "captured" by the wealthy does not grow.

For example, some people give away some or all of their wealth and instead of leaving it to an heir. Inherited wealth is not automatically invested, some of it is spent. Inherited wealth can be split among many heirs, in which case returns would need to be much larger to keep inherited wealth from diminishing.

In addition, while returns on wealth in general might outperform growth, people who inherit wealth and invest it do not always invest it wisely (not part of your non sequitur, but an objection to the argument in general).

Did Piketty address these issues that aren't captured by his rather simplistic formula of "r > g"? Along with the fact that what his theory predicts (increasing share of wealth being inherited) has not been happening? The great fortunes of our time are made, not inherited.
by tracker1 | 2025-11-04 23:35:59+00:00
Ideally, it's similar to any commissioned sales position, just with larger numbers as it's based on the performance of the company as a whole not just one set of sales connections. The more you increase the overall value of the company, the more you get. You increase the value of the company by $10B, your commission of 1-5% is $100-500m in stock, so even your wealth is tied to the success of the company.

IMO, the role of government this is to establish societal baselines in terms of criminality of certain actions and to ensure a baseline of competition. Actually acting on the former and the latter... the former by affecting the financial wealth of executives and board members when a company's neglegence harms society. The latter by not giving outsized govt contracts to a single provider for anything and to establish that if there are restrictions (medication, for example( that multiple providers/manufacturers must be present in the market, and that a certain portion is produced domestically (for security).
by asdefghyk | 2025-11-04 23:36:01+00:00
re ".....AI training and the thing search engines do to make a search index are essentially the same thing. ...."

Well, AI training has annoyed LOTS people. Overloaded websites.. Done things just because they can . ie Facebook sucking up content of lots pirate books

Since this AI race started our small website is constantly over run by bots and it is not usable by humans because of the load.. NEWER HAD this problem before AI , when just access by search engine indexing .....
by abeppu | 2025-11-04 23:37:29+00:00
I encourage you to read the Anthropic blog post, which includes situations like:

- hallucinating conversations with fictitious people

- role playing as a real person and telling them they are present in meatspace, or claimed to have visited a fictional location

- hallucinating details of an account involved in payments

- both ignoring lucrative opportunities and accepting loss-making deals

- making commitments before having done any research

While yes, the skills to run a vending machine and lead a company are not exactly the same, I think the nature of failures discussed means they would likely affect both roles.

I think there's every possibility that a present-day AI allowed to act as CEO would make mediocre choices for some period and then decide that it was a character in a scifi novel selling bespoke space-yachts to comet-mining magnates.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-11-04 23:37:40+00:00
Technically the individual tattoo artist needs a license to reproduce the IP (unless the studio released the likeness into the public domain), but it's small potatoes and these IP holders know that the free promotion helps them infinitely more than whatever they'd get from trying to enforce IP licenses.

But the AI companies are making billions off of this (and a lot of other) IP, so it totally makes sense for the IP holders to care about copyright protection.
by farsa | 2025-11-04 23:37:43+00:00
The distinction is more clear when indexing actual text and applying tokenization. A "typical" index on a database column goes like "column(value => rows)". When people mention inverted indexes its usually in the context of full text search, where "column value" usually goes through tokenization and you build an index for all N tokens of a column "column:(token 1 => rows)", "column:(token 2 => rows)",... "column:(token N => rows)".