MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: A local runtime for stateless LLMs with persistent memory
by nodeEHRIS | 2025-12-12 16:06:42+00:00
I’ve been experimenting with a way to run stateless language models inside a persistent local runtime.

Problem: Context windows are ephemeral. Swapping or upgrading a local model discards accumulated memory and identity.

Approach: Treat the model strictly as a stateless inference engine. All continuity (memory, identity, recall) lives outside the model as structured, append-only events managed by the runtime.

At a high level: - Model-agnostic: swap local models mid-conversation without losing continuity - Explicit memory: all memory is written as structured events, not hidden states - Deterministic recall: context is assembled via a visible, inspectable pipeline before inference - Full observability: inspect exactly what the model sees on each turn - Local-first execution, no cloud dependency

I wrote a small reference specification focused on structure rather than implementation details: https://github.com/NodeEHRIS/node-spec

Short demo (12s) showing persistent memory across a local model swap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAr3J30JuE4

This is intentionally minimal and early. I’m mainly interested in feedback on architectural tradeoffs and where this breaks down compared to RAG, long-context approaches, or agent frameworks.
by Simulacra | 2025-12-12 16:06:48+00:00
I gave up on televisions about 10 years ago, they were all slow as molasses in January, underpowered, with atrocious interfaces. Nothing fluid or positive about any of them. I've got a 30 inch iMac in the bedroom that we watch everything on, much better than a television. I would be interested in purchasing a 52 inch iMac, hang on the wall, has all the media sharing and everything that televisions fail so much at.
by chrisweekly | 2025-12-12 16:07:06+00:00
Thanks. TIL.

FWIW, I meant it strictly in the generic vernacular sense in which I've encountered it: doing something because it has the outward form of something useful or meaningful, without understanding whether or how it works.

Given the problematic history you shared, it seems a new term is needed for this... maybe "Chesterson's Folly"? It's related to Chesterson's Fence (the principle that it's unwise to remove a fence if you don't know why it was erected). If you leave in place all "fences" you don't understand, and never take the time to determine their purpose, fences which serve no good purpose will accumulate.
by knorker | 2025-12-12 16:08:05+00:00
While you are of course 100% correct, in the context of discussing escape analysis I find it odd to say that it's essentially not "real".

Like any optimization, it makes sense to talk about what "will" happen, even if a language (or a specific compiler) makes no specific promises.

Escape analysis enables an optimization.

I think I understand you to be saying that "escape analysis" is not why returning a pointer to a local works in Go, but it's what allows some variables to be on the stack, despite the ability to return pointers to other "local" variables.

Or similar to how the compiler can allow "a * 6" to never use a mul instruction, but just two shifts and an add.

Which is probably a better way to think about it.

> So clearly you don’t need to think about the details of escape analysis to understand what your code does

Right. To circle back to the context: Yeah, OP thought this was due to escape analysis, and that's why it worked. No, it's just a detail about why other code does something else. (but not really, because OP returned the slice by value)

So I suppose it's more correct to say that we were never discussing escape analysis at all. An escape analysis post would be talking about allocation counts and memory fragmentation, not "why does this work?".

Claude (per OPs post) led them astray.
by mlyle | 2025-12-12 16:08:08+00:00
> A tripwire would send notifications in real time without the user needing to check.

c.f.

> > If any motion is detected by RPi's camera module or motion sensor, the server will delete those secrets immediately, in addition to sending push notifications to the web client.

It sends notifications in real time and tries to stay irrevocably tripped.
by WorldMaker | 2025-12-12 16:08:47+00:00
> In the video, the user is typing 'Thumbs up', and when they get to the first 'u' the keyboard shows a 'u' being pressed but a 'j' is inserted instead. Are you suggesting that, due to the way most people construct sentences, the OS thinks that 'thjmbs' is the most likely word? And then the next time the OS thinks that 'thhmbs' is the most likely word?

In addition to the other problems (the keyboard being too prone catching extremely subtle slides below UI response time), there certainly is the problem of when you crowd source enough data you crowd source all of their collective mistakes, too. In a lot of that raw data mistakes are going to be as common or more common than corrections and/or originally correct spellings.

We do have a great filter for this called a "dictionary", but as the above commenter laments companies have given up on "just autocorrect to dictionary words" for much more complex "learning" models and filtering them back to just dictionary words is antithetical to the (sunken cost) expense that went into training these models, and/or the KPIs and promotion incentives that keep prioritizing "AI" and giant crowd sourced data vats over simpler mechanics and local user specifics.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-12-12 16:08:47+00:00
I used to work in a fairly secure government data center. I was a facility electrician, but also sat on lower-level hire boards (i.e. blue collars). My RFID would grant me access anywhere across multiple facilities.

>It's the lack of communication when people are fired.

Arriving to work, I observed the long-time janitor, whom I'd helped hire and knew very well, stuck at the entryway. He was extremely helpful albeit not too bright — I had no reason to suspect his badge had been deactivated (==fired) so I badged him in (our offices adjoined).

Janny went to work, a typical Monday, following others to clean construction-related debris (he just thought his badge broke).

Not until he tried to return from lunch, was he informed that his employment had been terminated. When I asked the facility manager "WTF, dude?!" he made some snide remark about "ooops I forgot to tell him — don't worry they're able to land on their feet anywhere" (janny was a non-white citizen).

Started looking for a new jobsite immediately after this. Ignorance and hatred are odd bed-fellows.
by monerozcash | 2025-12-12 16:08:50+00:00
Regular OS X safari: Our tests indicate that you have strong protection against Web tracking.

>Your browser fingerprint has been randomized among the 378,837 tested in the past 45 days. Although sophisticated adversaries may still be able to track you to some extent, randomization provides a very strong protection against tracking companies trying to fingerprint your browser.

>Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys at least 18.53 bits of identifying information.

Anyway, this test doesn't really communicate the results very well. Yes, Tor browser stands out. No, it's not easy to differentiate between different Tor browser users via this kind of fingerprinting.
by MrBuddyCasino | 2025-12-12 16:08:57+00:00
And if that tickles your fancy, "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" [0] is an excellent miniseries from 1979 about a mole in MI6, perhaps the best spy series ever made. I didn't care about the movie much, so don't let this deter you, but Alec Guiness as George Smiley is a perfect match. John Le Carré thought so, too.

Oh and Patrick Steward plays "Karla" the soviet mastermind in this series and its successor "Smiley's People". Just a few seconds, but very memorable, its incredible really.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080297/
by eigenspace | 2025-12-12 16:10:01+00:00
Yes, but it's fairly light-touch moderation. Newly registered first packages go through some automatic checks, and if they pass all those checks they are put on a 3-day waiting period for community to give feedback or raise objections to the package, and then at the end of the 3-day period, if nobody blocks it, the package is registered.

One of the automatic checks is a name similarity check, and if the name is too similar to an existing name, then the package is blocked from being auto-merged. At that point, someone will look at it, and there'll be a discussion on whether or not the name is okay. A lot of the time, the response is just "this is a false positive" and the package is greenlit. Other times, there's a discussion on whether or not the name is acceptable, and some alternative suggestions are given.

_______________

There was a little episode recently where someone tried to register a package with the same name as an existing package, but with two letters tacked onto the end of the name. Their package was just a fork of an existing package, but with a minor patch applied becuase they were frustrated that maintainers of the existing package weren't responding to pull requests.

The system automatically flagged the name, and the person was initially upset that they couldn't just register their fork, but within a couple hours we tracked down a maintainer to fix the existing package, and then we added this person as a maintainer to the original package so that they could review and accept pull requests to the package themselves. I think this ended up being a better solution for everyone involved.
by catigula | 2025-12-12 16:10:03+00:00
They really lie.

Not on purpose; because they are trained on rewards that favor lying as a strategy.

Othello-GPT is a good example to understand this. Without explicit training, but on the task of 'predicting moves on an Othello board', Othello-GPT spontaneously developed the strategy of 'simulate the entire board internally'. Lying is a similar emergent, very effective strategy for reward.
Ask HN: Is writing without AI worse than sharing your medical records online?
by amichail | 2025-12-12 16:10:36+00:00
Every word, sentence, and phrasing choice reveals more than just your thoughts. It can show your education, whether English is your first language, how much you’ve read, and even aspects of your intelligence.

So in a way, writing without AI on social media can be even more exposing than posting your medical records online.

What do you think?
by thedougd | 2025-12-12 16:11:17+00:00
I took an ASIC design class in college, unfortunately with a heavy course load that didn't allow me to focus on it. For our final project we were given a numbered dictionary and asked to design a chip that would accept the characters on a 7 bit interface (ASCII), one character per clock cycle and output the dictionary number on an output interface but I can't remember how wide. We were graded on the size of the resulting ASIC and how many clock cycles it took from the last character in to the number on the output.

I started designing my modules, a ROM, a register with a ROM pointer, etc, etc, writing the Verilog and working out the clock sync between modules. Then I got 'lazy' and wrote a trie tree like implementation in Java, and have it spit out the whole tree in Verilog. It worked and just one clock cycle after the last letter my number would output. Fastest in the class! Also the most number of gates in the class. Surprised I got a 90 grade given I didn't use any of the advanced ASIC design the class taught. The TA didn't know what the hell they were looking at.
by hellojesus | 2025-12-12 16:12:00+00:00
I don't have an iPhone so haven't tried any of this, but can you not treat your kids devices like you would a business's?

It looks like normal user device enrollment with device management is optional, hence why I think business probably makes sense.

https://support.apple.com/en-sg/guide/apple-business-manager...

The you can force all traffic through a proxy.

https://support.apple.com/en-sg/guide/deployment/dep7ba46fcd...

And since you have root certs on the devices, you can decrypt traffic and uniquely identify devices and block internet from your central management, at any time, regardless if the phone is on your wifi vs a friend's vs mobile data.

I think it should work.
by fny | 2025-12-12 16:12:02+00:00
> slight change in json path syntax (can't think of any right now) can cause SQLite to not use this index

It's pretty fragile...

-- Just changing the quoting select * from events where json_extract(data, "$.type") = 'click'; -- Changing the syntax select * from events where data -> '$.type' = 'click';

Basically anything that alters the text of an expression within the where clause
by esseph | 2025-12-12 16:12:18+00:00
It's not RH/IBM, but you wouldn't know that because you didn't read anything about it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46244011

From the website;

Name History

In 1997 a research project at Cornell University was named the Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture (FEDORA). In 1998, Payette and Lagoze published an article about their work referencing Fedora, and later that year software with the same name was released to the public.
by jmpman | 2025-12-12 16:12:22+00:00
I’ve seen disks do off track writes, dropped writes due to write channel failures, and dropped writes due to the media having been literally scrubbed off the platter previously. You need LBA seeded CRC to catch these failures along with a number of other checks. I get excited when people write about this in the industry. They’re extremely interesting failure modes that I’ve been lucky enough to have been exposed to, at volume, for a large fraction of my career.
by tialaramex | 2025-12-12 16:12:48+00:00
C++ in particular has a thriving industry of people who'll come teach your team to write "proper" C++.

You've probably heard that "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it" and so of course we shouldn't expect such people to say "Don't write this in C++" when they can instead get paid to teach "How to write this in C++" for 2-3 days and feel like they made the world a better place on top.

It so happens Rust is my favourite language, or at least, my favourite general purpose language, but it's also true that I am currently mostly paid to write C# and I see absolutely no reason why I'd say "No, this should be Rust" for most work I do in C#
by ralferoo | 2025-12-12 16:13:05+00:00
Similarly, for my e-mail server, I manually add spammers into my exim local_sender_blacklist a single domain at a time. About a month into doing this, I just gave up and added * @* .ru and that instantly cut out around 80% of the spam e-mail.

It's funny observing their tactics though. On the whole, spammers have moved from bare domain to various prefixes like @outreach.domain, @msg.domain, @chat.domain, @mail.domain, @contact.domain and most recently @email.domain.

It's also interesting watching the common parts before the @. Most recently I've seen a lot of marketing@, before that chat@ and about a month after I blocked that chat1@. I mostly block *@domain though, so I'm less aware of these trends.
by lysace | 2025-12-12 16:13:13+00:00
Fighting extremist terrorism requires tough measures. This one is a bit extra though:

> If the software cannot be deployed remotely, the law authorizes officers to secretly enter a person’s home to gain access.

Clear Das Leben der Anderen vibes. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others)

However: As usual, the devil is in the details. How much suspicion is required, what's the process, etc. (I assume that a judge needs to sign off.)
Eight Capital X YC F25
by rchachra | 2025-12-12 16:13:21+00:00
The future of AI isn't copilots. It's agents. That's the thesis behind our Y Combinator F25 investments. After meeting 90+ companies leading up to Demo Day, Eight Capital Management invested in 18 founding teams building the agentic AI stack: The Infrastructure Layer Hyperspell (YC F25) (Memory for AI Agents) Soren (YC F25) (AI Evaluation) s2.dev (Real-time Streaming Data) Lemma (YC F25) (Continuous Learning) Bear (YC F25) (Agent Marketing) Aspect (YC F25) (Multimodal Understanding) Vertical AI That Replaces Workflows Semble AI (YC F25) (Construction Design) Automax AI (Real Estate Appraisals) Codyco (YC F25) | AI Receptionists for Hotel Groups (Hotel Reservations) Zavo (YC F25) (Restaurant POS) ComplyDo (YC F25) (Enterprise Compliance) Global Enterprise AI Bolna (YC F25) AI (Voice AI for India's 1.4B people) Leadbay (YC F25) (Lead Discovery) Unsiloed AI (YC F25) AI (Document Parsing) Expected Parrot (Customer Simulation) Security & Dev Tools Veria Labs (YC F25) (AI Pentesting – founded by #1 US hacking team) Clad Labs (YC F25) Labs (The Brainrot IDE) Consumer AI Sorce (YC F25) (AI-Powered Job Search – Tinder for Jobs) What makes this batch special? → MIT Sloan School of Management professors building AI → 4x founders with 2 exits → The #1 competitive hackers in America → Teams that scaled Zomato, Uber, and Citadel Securities The AI wave is real. These founders are building it. Congrats to all 18 teams! hashtag#YCombinator hashtag#DemoDay hashtag#AI hashtag#Startups hashtag#VentureCapital
by michaelmrose | 2025-12-12 16:13:46+00:00
Such a waiver would be equally insane given the fraud and malfeasance that goes on every day it would be like signing a waiver saying whatever happens in the world is your fault for a drivers licence.

Instead how about we simply continue to make reasonable laws regarding behaviour and holding individual people and companies responsible when they violate the law.

Whilst we are at it we can keep content filtering for pre teens and imposed by parents and accept that teens are going to figure out how to get to the real internet at some point.
by nradov | 2025-12-12 16:14:02+00:00
Have you ever actually been to Europe? Public transit is pretty good in first-tier cities like Vienna / Stockholm / London where tourists spend most of their time. But out in the smaller cities and rural areas where regular people live there's very little public transit except for slow and inconvenient buses. So everyone drives. Or if they're too poor to afford a car then they just don't go anywhere.
by SilverElfin | 2025-12-12 16:14:54+00:00
Children are always used to justify legislation that violates freedoms:

> The “Keep Our Children Safe Act,” would require adult sites to verify the ages of users located in the state. It is generally similar to numerous AV laws already in effect in U.S. states or pending in state legislatures.

But this part goes further than other states:

> HB 2112 additionally mandates that sites subject to its AV rules must display “information pertaining to the youth health risks associated with adult content” on their landing pages and in advertisements for the site, as well as contact information for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration helpline.

Surprising since Washington state is supposedly progressive culturally unlike some other states that are more Christian conservative.
by lylejantzi3rd | 2025-12-12 16:15:28+00:00
I would pay for a guaranteed technical interview. You still have to pass the interview, so it would make sure people are more careful about where they apply.

Unfortunately, if this became standard, interview scams would skyrocket. It would become very difficult to tell if you're giving your money to an entity who wants to hire vs a scammer who wants to collect the "entry fee" from as many people as possible.
by lm28469 | 2025-12-12 16:15:48+00:00
> I’m assuming many farmers would prefer feeding it into stable vats of algae or fungus than dealing with the risks of another epidemic-induced chicken cull.

Many farmers don't have the financial means to redesign their entire pipeline to move from birds to fungus. "farming" is in the name but I also suspect there is nothing in common between raising chicken in cages and mushrooms in sterile containers in term of know-how, maintenance, &c.
by phantasmish | 2025-12-12 16:15:53+00:00
The US (where “open borders” are often characterized as national “suicide” by right-wing figures) had open borders well within living memory.

By ship? No. But you’re from Argentina and made it all the way up to the Rio and want to cross to work on US farms or whatever? Yeah whatever man, totally fine, just walk in. Anyone from the Americas was welcome, no waiting, no la migra hunting them, no nothin’

We didn’t change that until the ‘60s, and the only reason it didn’t cause a ton of problems immediately (farms at that time were already heavily dependent on migrant labor operating a bit under the table, and their lobbies were not quiet on the issue) was that enforcement was and has been, at times (and especially at first) mostly rather half-assed.
by lunias | 2025-12-12 16:15:53+00:00
The names have always been quirky, but the new names mostly seem to be chosen for some branding / marketing reason (which I don't like). You can basically put "[any noun] javascript library" into google and find something. The space is so saturated that the names have become more and more disconnected from what they describe. Someone should go create labubu.js so people are less inclined to do so themselves. You can benchmark it with matcha (not to be confused with matcha.css).
by weli | 2025-12-12 16:16:24+00:00
Yep! Something a bit counterintuitive on circuit design is that dedicated transistors will always beat reusing existing components. If we do reuse existing components like ALUs, multipliers, or state machines, we save on chip area but pay the penalty in clock cycles. Your approach was the extreme version of this tradeoff. You essentially unrolled the entire dictionary lookup into pure combinatorial logic (well, with registers for the input characters). One clock cycle latency because you weren't doing any sequential searching, comparing, or state machine transitions just racing electrons through logic gates.
by WorldMaker | 2025-12-12 16:17:09+00:00
It's extra fun because the account it needs is a Microsoft Account because Microsoft acquihired SwiftKey for the lovely Windows Soft Keyboard in Windows Phone 7/8/10 and still accessible in Windows 11 even as form factors that make good use of it continue to disappear and people also don't learn that you can still switch it to "phone mode" for one hand swipe-typing because they don't have a device where they regularly need to type on a soft keyboard.

The big reason after years of SwiftKey use I finally uninstalled it is because it became too much of an ad vector for "you should use Mobile Edge and have you tried our new Bing Mobile app yet". I also haven't used it in a couple of years, but I'd be surprised if it doesn't have some Copilot button or buttons somewhere now.
by craftkiller | 2025-12-12 16:18:16+00:00
If you're using postgres, couldn't you just create an index on the field inside the JSONB column directly? What advantage are you getting from extracting it to a separate column?

CREATE INDEX idx_status_gin ON my_table USING gin ((data->'status'));

ref: https://www.crunchydata.com/blog/indexing-jsonb-in-postgres
by rramadass | 2025-12-12 16:18:20+00:00
No; I had already refuted this in my earlier comment.

Language is a product of Geography and Culture to express a "Philosophical Worldview". Mere study of its Phonology, Morphology, Syntax and Grammar are not enough. What is important is whether a given language has specialized technical vocabulary to express specific concepts/ideas i.e. the "complexity of semantics" involved. These are usually context/culture dependent.

As an example, compare the language of the Xhosa people living in equatorial Africa with that of the Chukchi people living in the Arctic Circle. It should be obvious that they each have concepts expressed via language unique to their Geography/Culture and which are unknown to the other.

As another example, consider the Sanskrit word Karma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karma). It is impossible to understand this word in all its connotations (it actually is a stand-in for a whole lot of concepts) without having an idea of Reincarnation which is specific to Hinduism/Buddhism philosophical worldviews.