MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Metamind – Cognitive architecture for LLM agents
by bikidev | 2025-12-22 17:40:05+00:00
Hi HN,
I built Metamind because I was frustrated with how stateless modern LLM interactions are. Every conversation starts from scratch, and existing memory solutions felt like overkill for what should be a simple problem.

What is it?
A self-contained memory system for AI agents that mimics human memory architecture:

- Episodic memory (conversations, experiences)
- Semantic memory (concepts, relations, knowledge graphs)
- Vector memory (HNSW-powered similarity search)
- Automatic memory consolidation, reflection, and decay

Key technical choices:

- Single Rust binary with single-file database (no Postgres, no Redis, no vector DB)
- Multi-user ready with complete data isolation
- HNSW for O(log n) vector search instead of naive brute force
- Cognitive processes: salience-based decay, memory consolidation, pattern detection

Why share this?
I'm genuinely curious:

- Is the "brain-like memory" approach interesting or just over-engineering?
- Are others frustrated by stateless LLM interactions?
- What memory/retrieval strategies have worked for you?
- Where would you take this architecture next?

I know there are limitations, but I wanted to share what's working today rather than wait for perfection. The core retrieval + consolidation loop feels genuinely useful.

Demo video (Skipped to Demo): https://www.loom.com/share/c187767b2d1e4e778bc41676c574408b?t=657
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-12-22 17:40:49+00:00
I mean you called to just let 80 year olds die. If they can't care for themselves, can't move around, and are left in constant pain, they end up just dieing.

Then you gave the wisdom 'older people use more medical care than younger people'. Like yeah, that is how life/the universe works. My old car requires more maintenance then when it was new. But funny thing about young people, they too will one day be the old person.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-22 17:40:56+00:00
> I can't load a single GitHub pull request without being accused of botting.

The only time I encountered this was after a power outage when my ISP's DHCP server handed me a new IP that was tainted. It felt like every major website was suddenly full of captchas.

Eventually I had to unplug the router for 24 hours until the ISP let go of my DHCP reservation. When I reconnected it gave me a new IP and the problems went away.
by zackmorris | 2025-12-22 17:41:53+00:00
I'll never forget the feeling of the whoosh when I was working as a furniture mover in the early 2000s and felt the implosion when a cardboard box collapsed and dumped a large CRT TV face-down on the driveway, blowing our hair back. When the boss asked what happened to the TV, I said it fell, and our lead man (who had set it on the box) later thanked me for putting it so diplomatically.

That was nothing compared to the time the CAT scan machine fell face down off the lift gate on the back of the delivery truck because our driver pushed the wrong button and tipped it instead of lowering it, but I missed the flack from that because I was on a move somewhere thankfully. Afterwords he was forever known as the quarter million dollar man.
by tracker1 | 2025-12-22 17:41:53+00:00
On changes, as I've mentioned in other threads, I don't think once a year is too bad... also, I'm an advocate of SSO as much as possible with a strong MFA (ideally push selection) option for work orgs. It reduces friction and can actually improve overall security if appropriately managed... that said, building internal apps that have appropriate application access is often harder still in these environments.
by themusicgod1 | 2025-12-22 17:41:59+00:00
I am. Copyright is fucking cancer and is one of the worst things if not the worst things that exists to make creating new things harder.

Making bits available isn't "taking artists ability to live in a financially viable way" any more than radio, LPs and player pianos was. If you are an artist who is trying to make art and live do more of that and don't waste peoples time arguing for copyright restricting other people's activity on websites like this one.
by goku12 | 2025-12-22 17:42:16+00:00
We used to carry paper pieces called 'bank notes' or 'bills' and round metal disks called 'coins' in a small leather pouch in our pockets called wallets. They were pretty effective for payments without much of an infrastructure. Even banks worked using paper documents and books.

I know this sounds a bit too condescending. But that's honestly not my intention. I just couldn't help it! Jokes aside, it's true that we often forget that these things can be done and were done without the internet. But more importantly, there are 2 dangerous implications for our over reliance on the internet for our financial activities. The first is that the government or a non-state actor can easily disrupt our commercial and personal activity unintentionally or as a retribution. We have effectively surrendered our financial autonomy to multiple powerful players.

The second major problem is if we ever face a post-apocalyptic situation with regards to modern technology. We already have only a few fabs that can meet the global demand for advanced ICs. We have already seen our vulnerability to one of them when a flood there caused supply chain disruptions and a slump in even automobile markets. HDD and SSD manufacturers have similar weaknesses. Meanwhile, DRAM manufacturers are placing all their (gambling) chips in the AI hyperscaler market, threatening to disrupt every market from smartphones, laptops and consumer appliances to military and commercial jets, ATC, shipping, railway signalling, telecom infrastructure, etc. The technology apocalypse isn't that farfetched and we are extremely vulnerable to it.
by uecker | 2025-12-22 17:42:26+00:00
Regarding "restrict", I don't think one puts it everywhere, just for certain numerical loops which otherwise are not vectorized should be sufficient. FORTRAN seems even more dangerous to me. IMHO a better solution would be to have explicit notation for vectorized operations. Hopefully we will get this in C. Otherwise, I am very happy with C for numerics, especially with variably modified typs.

For C++, yes, I agree.
by Ajedi32 | 2025-12-22 17:42:31+00:00
Just as we have anti-defamation laws despite freedom of speech being a constitutionally protected right, you can have gun control laws despite carrying guns being a constitutionally protected right. I don't think that makes what I said untrue. Such laws (in both cases) are kept on a very short leash, both from a legal and a cultural perspective.
by ModernMech | 2025-12-22 17:42:38+00:00
> Seems kind of insane to critique the number can't expand to infinity rather to acknowledge it expanded until we got to the point

Well that's what I'm trying to understand. So you're making an argument from the perspective of the political landscape in the 70s and 80s, and you'd like to return us to a federal level 50 - 100 years ago.

Your argument might have been more persuasive in the 80s, but today it's clear that the government is actually vastly more efficient than it has been in the last 80 years, serving a larger population with fewer government employees; there are over 100M more people living in the USA as there were 40 years ago, yet government employment levels remain the same. Returning back to pre-1980s or even 1920s level of government would leave the USA completely at the mercy of corporations (which for some that's the whole point, so maybe that's a good thing from your perspective, but I wouldn't choose that outcome).
by gruez | 2025-12-22 17:42:51+00:00
>Way to interpolate. Kudos to your reach! I just was pointing out that it's likely that the employee responsible was here. The diving is highly unlikely to be triggered by a single employee (unless it was that "employee").

Sorry, I thought you were the OP, which made the claim of

>Way to interpolate. Kudos to your reach! I just was pointing out that it's likely that the employee responsible was here. The diving is highly unlikely to be triggered by a single employee (unless it was that "employee").
by kiliantics | 2025-12-22 17:42:54+00:00
Check out forum.woodenboat.com to read from a lot of amateurs taking on the project, just be warned that the rabbit hole is alluring and very deep.

It's typically not recommended to self-design, the physics gets technical and there are a lot of free working plans out there including by famous naval architects.

Most people start out with simpler designs using plywood and fiberglass but, due to my aforementioned disdain for a lot of modern approaches, I personally went with a traditional oak frame, cedar plank, copper rivet construction. It is very time consuming but I'm enjoying the journey. I chose a flat-bottomed sail boat design (dory) to make it a little easier on myself.

There are endless variations on the concept of a "wooden vessel that can be propelled through water" idea so it really depends on your interests and tastes. It's a "form follows function" situation too, so you also need to consider your use case -- engine, oar, sail; ocean, river, lake; etc.
by VirusNewbie | 2025-12-22 17:43:08+00:00
>In the 90s inflation-adjusted salaries were still rather high. A 75k USD salary in 1995 is roughly 150k USD today. And the median house was less than a third of your income. And in the 90s there was even more demand for programmers.

Right but how many programmers were making even 150k back then, even if they were 10x geniuses? I don't think even high level ICs at IBM or Microsoft were making that much. Even inflation adjusted, that's lower than the medain at FAANG these days.
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-22 17:43:14+00:00
I think it's the memory which is the bottleneck more so than processing speed and the obvious levers to push on are:

- more memory efficient models

- a whole system approach to getting better performance out of a less capable model

- more memory

the memory crisis, Micron shutting down a beloved brand that built trust over almost 30 years, and all of that is an economic externalization of memory as the bottleneck.
by sowbug | 2025-12-22 17:43:43+00:00
A little off topic, but I remain naively hopeful that the horror you describe will keep Spotify from going down the same road Netflix did once content owners decided to get into the streaming business themselves, so that streaming a movie today requires you to "change the channel" to whichever service offers that movie.

Can you imagine your favorite playlist needing to swap among 10 apps, each requiring a $10/month subscription?
by Aurornis | 2025-12-22 17:43:46+00:00
> I wish Spotify welcomed or collaborated with these archival initiatives.

Spotify licenses the music in their library under specific terms. They don't own it. They can't just decide to give out freely on their own terms.

> Anna's Archive does not compete with Spotify in any way.

I think HN often underestimates the breadth of casual piracy among the general public who want to avoid paying $10/month for a service. There are already numerous tools to stream TV shows and movies from torrents on demand. I have no doubt the same will appear for a giant archive of Spotify music. A lot of people will jump at any chance to cancel their Spotify subscription if they can get close to the same access for free.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-12-22 17:43:58+00:00
In some ways that's true.

But when it comes to git repos, an LLM agent like claude code can just clone them for local crawling which is far better than crawling remotely, and it's the "Right Way" for various reasons.

Frankly I suspect AI agents will push search in the opposite direction from your comment and move us to distributed cache workflows. These tools just hit the origin because it's the easy solution of today, not because the data needs to be up to date to the millisecond.

Imagine a system where all those Fetch(url) invocations interact with a local LRU cache. That'd be really nice, and I think that's where we'd want to go, especially once more and more origin servers try to block automated traffic.
by to11mtm | 2025-12-22 17:44:13+00:00
> With compressed air, you just release the air back to the atmosphere.

The issue with compressed air is that you have to build more of the system to handle higher pressures and/or have a more robust regulator design, plus the pressures required to compress CO2 back to liquid are typically lower than what you'd need to store a useful final volume compressed air...

Also, As far as having an 'open loop' (i.e. venting to atmosphere), that's typically got it's own problems, mostly that when you need new air you have to make sure it's 'pure', not just things like dust but even whether there's water vapor.
by hyperadvanced | 2025-12-22 17:44:25+00:00
Same. I find that if I can piecemeal explain the desired functionality and work as I would pairing with another engineer that it’s totally possible to go from “make me a simple wheel with spokes” to “okay now let’s add a better frame and brakes” with relatively little planning, other than what I’d already do when researching the codebase to implement a new feature
by maerF0x0 | 2025-12-22 17:44:34+00:00
As a taxpayer I'm tired of funding everyone's project. Especially in private institutions which have billions under management and are ran like hedge funds, and not increasing their intake. Time to fix the deficit and kill off our debt.

If the rebuttal is "yeah but advancements improve the economy" -- The private sector can fund projects which are opportunities with an economic basis, they can take the risk and they can see if it is profitable in the market (ie beneficial)

If the rebuttal is "How will America stay competitive?" We cant seem to keep trade secrets anyways. [1]

[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-64206950

Edit: Also the 4 years at a time thing is probably a better choice too, because it makes them less twitchy politically. You get your 4 years, regardless of who's team is in office. This should be a win regardless of your affiliation.
by unethical_ban | 2025-12-22 17:44:36+00:00
Spotify's (and the other huge streamers) main selling points are its catalogue, it's recommendations/auto playlists. Other features like steaming quality, UI, and network effects are also at play.

Even the metadata is a huge proprietary data dump. Not sure how you think apple, Google, Amazon or an upstart budget streaming service couldn't use this to better compete against Spotify.
by lenerdenator | 2025-12-22 17:44:43+00:00
If there was one critical miscalculation the West (particularly the US) made in the last 40 years, it was thinking that investment in China would equal liberalization and democratic reforms. There was a mistaking of capitalism for human rights. While it is a human right to own property and use it to rationally pursue one's self-interests, that does not mean that capitalism in its current form is conducive to that for the greatest number of people, or to the evolution of other human rights in the societies in which capitalism is practiced.

If investment was the key to liberalization, we would have seen far greater investment behind the then-fallen Iron Curtain, where countries had actively turned their backs on command economies. The cynic in me thinks that capital didn't like just how that had turned out. If a country's people could either violently (Romania) or peacefully (almost everywhere else) remove such totalitarian systems of politics and economics, they could also reject methods of accumulating capital that might run afoul of their values.

China, on the other hand, had not moved away from command economics at the time. Instead, the result was state capitalism. People were free to try new things that could create economic expansion, but only in a way that served the needs of the state. Anything else would be handled with the same totalitarian methods that political dissidents and class enemies were once handled with under Mao. While this has ebbed and flowed over the years, it essentially remains the system in place.

Lai is a victim of this miscalculation.
by PunchyHamster | 2025-12-22 17:45:10+00:00
It's cute you think short cycles are somehow better in gas turbines and compressors and that you will restart the whole thing constantly to fill short term demands

> In these discussions please keep in mind that frequency regulation, short term and long term shortage are different applications with different needs.

The comparison is valid; If you want to fill hour to hour demand or add some frequency regulation, an inverter with a bunch of batteries is far, far better than this

> You don’t want to used pumped hydro for short term storage because the rapid cycling will drive up the maintenance costs. You actually hear about hydro power plants talking about installing batteries to reduce wear.

They are still cycled daily, that's the entire point of them that even worked pre renewables - load up on cheap night energy and unload it with demand. Renewables just flipped that to load in solar peak.

And putting few hours worth of batteries to reduce cycling is beneficial in both of those cases.
by ethin | 2025-12-22 17:45:10+00:00
I agree and I think that everyone agreeing or disagreeing with you (and sysadmins everywhere) would be perfectly fine with these AI crawlers (well, mostly...) if these corporations wrote them properly, followed best practices and standards, and didn't effectively DDoS servers or pretend to be what they aren't. Because that is, ultimately, what these AI companies are: very effective, for-sale, legal DDoSers. But they are not written properly, do not follow best practices and standards, and DDoS everything you aim them at, and even go as far as pretending that they're things they aren't, hide behind residential IP addresses (which I'm pretty sure could potentially be illegal because, you know, that risks getting people who have no idea what AI even is in trouble), etc. I don't think AI will replace search now just because so much of the world is blocked from them now, and that is only to increase I'm sure. And, honestly, I doubt there is anything these AI companies could do to make sysadmins actually trust them again anymore.
by shevy-java | 2025-12-22 17:45:20+00:00
The sinomarxist mono-party is kind of doing their powerplay here.

The interesting thing is that the "two systems, one state" claim
was revealed to have been a lie. I can kind of understand the
position of China too, mind you - after all there was a war against
the UK empire and they forced ceding territory (e. g. Hong Kong).
But that still does not nullify the local's people preferences,
and Beijing simply bulldozered through by force here. That's the
total antithesis to freedom. Xi will focus on Taiwan next - that
is also clear. It is in the "DNA" of the sinomarxistic philosophy
(though one can wonder how much marxism with chinese focus is
still left; it's kind of capitalistic led by a dictatorship.
Oddly enough the USA is also transitioning to this by the tech-bros
oligarchs.)

We kind of see that freedoms are being eroded. I don't know if
that was always the case, or whether it just happens now more
rapidly so; or is reported more often, but in the late 1990s
I would say we had more freedoms, globally, than right now.
Somehow the trend is going towards less freedom. Putin invading
Ukraine, occupying land and killing people there is also highly
similar to the pretext of the second world war, with the invasion
of the Sudetenland by Germany, and then the Gleiwitz lie to sell
the invasion of Poland. I think the only real difference here is
that more countries have nukes. And smaller countries are kind of
put in a dilemma now, since they can not offset bigger countries
without nukes.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-22 17:45:23+00:00
Its a gravity problem. Gravity doesn’t care whether you like it or not when you land after jumping out of a 70 story building. You can either choose to accept gravity exists and not jump out of a 70 story building - or jump and die.

My manager’s job is not to manage my career. The last time I was a “pull tickets off the board maintained by someone else” developer was over a decade ago. Even then my project manager was different than my actual manager. My manager didn’t look at the Jira board for all of his reports are across teams to know what they were doing.

You still had to tell him yourself during 1 on 1s on high level. But even then, what were you going to tell him? “I pulled some well defined tickers off of a Jira board and I deserve a promotion?” There are so many people that are good enough to do that on either the enterprise CRUD side or the BigTech side, why should you be promoted for that?

On the other hand, except for my stint at BigTech between 2020-2023, I was already at the top of the technical IC chain as far as responsibility. There was no place to be promoted to. I have broad initiatives that I’m responsible for and still the manager just knows that things are running smoothly and the stake holders are happy. They definitely aren’t keeping up with my day to day work.

To be honest, outside of BigTech, worrying about promotions aren’t worth the effort, do your job, build your resume and hop to another job if you want more money. But even then, you can’t hope to get ahead in your career if you are content with just being a ticket taker and not taking on responsibilities that require you to navigate corporate culture.

I would much rather play the game than spend months grinding leetCode trying to pass coding interviews.

Right this second, I have reason to believe that I would have a greater than even chance of getting into Google via GCP in their internal consulting division based on a combination of experience (not with GCP in particular), soft skills, network, and knowing how the game is played than a hands on developer would trying to get in by being able to “codez real gud”.

I don’t because I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than work in any large company again and I’m damn sure not going back into an office.

Again, not because I’m smarter, I’ve accepted the game for what it is.
by thewebguyd | 2025-12-22 17:45:37+00:00
I never understood the point/market for gaming laptops. They seem popular enough for OEMs to still keep them around, but in almost every way you are much better off with a desktop if you need that much compute.

They can't be used on battery; the discrete GPU will chew through your battery in minutes. They are heavy, loud, hot.

Tried one for a while a long time ago, hated it. I never wanted to bring it anywhere it was so heavy and bulky, so I figured what's the point in having a laptop if I never want to take it with me.

Got a powerful desktop for gaming now, and my portal device is either my iPad or a Macbook air, and I can just remote into my desktop anytime I need.
Show HN: CleanCloud – Read-only cloud hygiene checks for AWS and Azure
by sureshcsdp | 2025-12-22 17:45:44+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m a solo founder and SRE background engineer. I built CleanCloud to solve a problem I kept seeing on teams I worked with: cloud accounts slowly filling up with orphaned, unowned, or inactive resources created by elastic systems and IaC — but nobody wants tools that auto-delete things.

CleanCloud is a small, open-source CLI that:
- Scans AWS and Azure accounts in read-only mode
- Identifies potential “hygiene” issues (unattached EBS volumes, old snapshots, inactive CloudWatch logs, untagged storage, unused Azure public IPs, etc.)
- Uses conservative signals and confidence levels (HIGH / MEDIUM / LOW)
- Never deletes or modifies resources
- Is designed for review-only workflows (SRE-friendly, IaC-aware)

What it intentionally does NOT do:
- No auto-remediation
- No cost optimization / FinOps dashboards
- No agents, no SaaS, no ML
- No recommendations based on a single risky signal

This is early-stage and I’m explicitly looking for feedback from SREs / DevOps folks:
- Are these the right problems to focus on?
- Are the signals conservative enough to be trusted?
- What rules would you actually want next?

Repo (MIT licensed): https://github.com/sureshcsdp/cleancloud

If this looks useful, a helps a lot. Brutally honest feedback welcome.

Many Thanks
Suresh