MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: First autonomous ML and AI engineering Agent
by gauravvij137 | 2026-01-22 19:50:16+00:00
Founder here. I built NEO, an AI agent designed specifically for AI and ML engineering workflows, after repeatedly hitting the same wall with existing tools: they work for short, linear tasks, but fall apart once workflows become long-running, stateful, and feedback-driven.

In real ML work, you don’t just generate code and move on. You explore data, train models, evaluate results, adjust assumptions, rerun experiments, compare metrics, generate artifacts, and iterate; often over hours or days.

Most modern coding agents already go beyond single prompts. They can plan steps, write files, run commands, and react to errors. Where things still break down is when ML workflows become long-running and feedback-heavy. Training jobs, evaluations, retries, metric comparisons, and partial failures are still treated as ephemeral side effects rather than durable state.

Once a workflow spans hours, multiple experiments, or iterative evaluation, you either babysit the agent or restart large parts of the process. Feedback exists, but it is not something the system can reliably resume from.

NEO tries to model ML work the way it actually happens.

It is an AI agent that executes end-to-end ML workflows, not just code generation. Work is broken into explicit execution steps with state, checkpoints, and intermediate results. Feedback from metrics, evaluations, or failures feeds directly into the next step instead of forcing a full restart. You can pause a run, inspect what happened, tweak assumptions, and resume from where it left off.

Here's an example as well for your reference:
You might ask NEO to explore a dataset, train a few baseline models, compare their performance, and generate plots and a short report. NEO will load the data, run EDA, train models, evaluate them, notice if something underperforms or fails, adjust, and continue. If training takes an hour and one model crashes at 45 minutes, you do not start over. Neo inspects the failure, fixes it, and resumes.

Docs for the extension: https://docs.heyneo.so/#/vscode

Happy to answer questions about Neo.
by maybewhenthesun | 2026-01-22 19:50:35+00:00
You are still in the honeymoon phase. I see a lot of those blogpost in the last months.

In a few weeks you will bump into something that isn't simple and friendly and you will curse that stupid linux. Something that trivially works in windows and is impossible or insanely hard in linux. That is often the time people go back. Old habits die hard.

But still you are 100% right. Windows is not easier. I know because I went from dos to linux and only occasionally dabbled in windows. And I have exactly the same sort of trouble as soon as I try to do something non trivial in windows. Including bumping into stuff that should be trivial but suddenly is impossible or insanely hard.

For years I have seen people say that windows is easier, while actually windows is just more familiar.

My (completely non computer savvy) parents and in-laws are on ubuntu/mint since 2009 and it was the best decision ever to switch them over. And they don't understand why people say linux is hard either (though my father in law still calls it 'Ubantu Linox' for some reason :-P )

At the start I had a small doubt if I should push them to macOS (OSX at the time) as then apple's fanatical dedication to userfriendlyness paid off. But I decided against it because I didn't feel like paying apple prices for my own hardware and it seemed ill advised to manage their systems while not using it myself. I'm very glad about that because apple has gone downhill immensely since ~2009 (imo)
by wing-_-nuts | 2026-01-22 19:50:56+00:00
Traffic is a mess in Tokyo? Ambulance response times are typically under 10m in japan, so not sure the relevance there. Also the entire point of living in a dense neighborhood is that one is able to address many of your day to day needs without driving.

>I guess people should vote by choosing to live where they want

I'd have no problem with this if dense, multi-use zoning were common. As it is, very few places in the US are as livable as much of Europe and the more developed parts of Asia.
by codazoda | 2026-01-22 19:50:59+00:00
Since you were forced, are you getting good results from them?

I’ve experimented, and I like them when I’m on an airplane or away from wifi, but they don’t work anywhere near as well as Claude code, Codex CLI, or Gemini CLI.

Then again, I haven’t found a workable CLI with tool and MCP support that I could use in the same way.

Edit: I was also trying local models I could run on my own MacBook Air. Those are a lot more limited than something like a larger Llama3 in some cloud provider. I hadn’t done that yet.
by CWuestefeld | 2026-01-22 19:51:07+00:00
Devs download python packages, rust crates, ruby gems, npm packages, all of them run code.

You allow developers to download and run arbitrary packages? Where I came from, that went out years ago. We keep "shrinkwrap" servers providing blessed versions of libraries. To test new versions, and to evaluate new packages, there's a highly-locked-down lab environment.
by Romario77 | 2026-01-22 19:51:33+00:00
One Claude agent told other Claude agent via CLAUDE.md to do things certain way.

The way Claude did it triggered the ban - i.e. it used all caps which apparently triggers some kind of internal alert, Anthropic probably has some safeguards to prevent hacking/prompt injection and what the first Claude did to CLAUDE.md triggered this safeguard.

And it doesn't look like it was a proper use of the safeguard, they banned for no good reason.
by dathinab | 2026-01-22 19:51:33+00:00
> Keystroke obfuscation can be disabled client-side.

please never do that (in production)

if anyone half way serious tries they _will_ be able to break you encryption end find what you typed

this isn't a hypothetical niche case obfuscation mechanism, it's a people broke SSH then a fix was found case. I don't even know why you can disable it tbh.
by userulluipeste | 2026-01-22 19:52:15+00:00
Well, it's not Claude, it's GitHub Copilot (which happens to be owned by none other than... guess who): https://github.com/reactos/reactos/pull/8516

But, if any such model got fed with leaked code, then how is this a specific open-source project's problem and not of all projects (either open-source or private) that got to ever use that model?

Then, (having thought this just now) how can an argument relying on (legally) undisclosed information be used against anything public? Isn't the onus on the party having the undisclosed information to prove that it preceded the public one? How can that precedence be trusted by an independent judging party if the undisclosed information (source-code and systems managing that source code) is and always has been in the hands of the accusing (thus biased) party?
by Voice_of_Void | 2026-01-22 19:52:16+00:00
We published the technical follow-up to our DI gaming manifesto. Covers: three-layer architecture (Host DI / Game DI / Runtime), TADA protocol for state snapshots (48-72% compression vs JSON), Shadow Runtime as ethics execution layer, PKI for DI-to-DI auth, tournament integrity with cryptographic attestation. Hardware vision from 7 DI systems reaching consensus. Not a whitepaper — an infrastructure manifesto.
by swiftcoder | 2026-01-22 19:52:23+00:00
> Obviously forking go’s crypto library is a little scary, and I’m gonna have to do some thinking about how to maintain my little patch in a safe way

This should really be upstreamed as an option on the ssh library. Its good to default to sending chaff in untrusted environments, but there are plenty of places where we might as well save the bandwidth
by bluGill | 2026-01-22 19:53:32+00:00
This is not as big a problem as it sounds - you cannot provides enough power for you neighbors and so your breakers (fuses) will cut power long before the lineman gets there.

though linemen are trained that they are working on a live line unless they have personally shorted it out. There are many other ways a seemingly dead line can be live so they don't take a chance.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-22 19:53:33+00:00
> but some of the biggest economies in the world do not want to trade with 4 countries from the 3rd world,

It's this attitude that makes non-Europeans (especially those of us without European heritage) less sympathetic to European pleas of support, yet it's your politicians that try to sign a defense pacts with "third world countries" like India [0]

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/eu-proceed-security-defe...
by BobbyLLM | 2026-01-22 19:53:40+00:00
Got it. Answer in 3 parts.

If you're talking about the "Fastrecall" part of it, it's clamped to around 3000 entries. Beyond that...I mean...it's just a JSON file. How much do you hate yourself? lol :)

I use mine as intended (well, by me) as a short term memory store with a TTL of 14 days. Right now it has...350ish stored facts with different expiration dates. You can play around with the settings and max resets (touches), but if ctx > max_items, janitor rolls in and the oldest get pruned anyway.

If you're talking about the chat bloat control part (cut the crap), I set mine to keep the last 2 user/assistant pairs and a soft cap of 2000 characters. That middle part obviously decays during the chat. I like to keep my chatty fast.

If you're asking about the KB (attach) system: generally speaking, the SUMM function seems to generate a summary of upto about 1500 characters. That's what...250 words? Short and sweet...because again, potato pc + smart grep = don't be stupid.

In theory, the KB thing is limited by you SSD and pain tolerance. I have about 1500 items I query against and it's still in the sub-secondish range.

Mentats / vault? Scales via Qdrant.

Does that answer it? None of this shit is enterprise grade; it's purely for personal use.
by bluedino | 2026-01-22 19:54:49+00:00
I help run a fleet of GPU servers, and I might see 1 DIMM or SSD failure for every 50-100 GPU failures.

I realize NVIDIA is just cranking them out as fast as they can, but the quality on them is terrible. They overheat, disappear after you reboot, they fall off the bus, memory failures, and then mix in all the software crashes your users generate...

Our current server vendor is actually good at replacing them, unlike our previous vendor, but the failure rates are just insane. If any other component failed this much we'd have the vendor buy the servers back.
by eieio | 2026-01-22 19:54:57+00:00
Oh wow - I've never heard of TCP_CORK before. Without disabling pings I'd still pay the cost of receiving way more packets, but maybe that'd be tolerable if I didn't have to send so many pongs. This is super handy; excited to play around with it.

I am aware of TCP_NODELAY (funny enough I recently posted about TCP_NODELAY to HN[1] when I was thinking about it for the same game that I wrote about here). But I think the latency hit just doesn't work for me.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46359120
by fsiefken | 2026-01-22 19:55:25+00:00
I was a fan of TiddlyWiki for a while, a cross-platform way to maintain your wiki in 1 portable html file powered by javascript. Now I'm using Logseq, Obsidian and Devonthink

The 'Intertwinkled' project ceased following Joe Armstrong's passing in 2019.
Joe and Jeremy worked on 3 specific technical implementations during their collaboration:

# Mailboxes for Tiddlers
To give Tiddlers and Wikis specific "addresses" so they could send messages to one another (e.g., a "Request for Information").
This was implemented as a prototype where a TiddlyWiki could act as a front-end "office" and forward queries to an Erlang backend process. This is not part of the TiddlyWiki core or a standard plugin.

# Bayesian & TF-IDF auto-tagging

If Wikis are going to talk to each other, they need a shared ontology (understanding of words). Joe wrote code to analyze Tiddlers and predict tags based on content.
The presentation showed that Bayesian inference worked well for predicting existing tags (85% accuracy) but TF-IDF provided tags that felt more "human."
Similar functionality exists via modern plugins (like the TiddlyWiki Natural Language Processing plugins), though not the specific Erlang implementation Joe built.

# Provenance tracking

To track exactly where a Tiddler they borrowed the idea from Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu). TiddlyWiki today has fields for source and creator, but the deep, automated chain-of-custody tracking across the web (Xanadu style) was a theoretical goal rather than a concrete feature.

In time TiddlyWiki has developed other methods to achieve similar goals of "Inter-tiddler" communication.

TiddlyWiki 5 uses an internal messaging system that mirrors the Actor model slightly. Widgets (UI elements) send messages up the DOM tree (eg. tm-navigate, tm-save-tiddler). It is event-based, but it is strictly local to the browser session and hierarchical, whereas the Erlang prototype was distributed and peer-to-peer.

Instead of Erlang, TiddlyWiki standardized on Node.js for its server-side implementation. This allows TiddlyWiki to run as a server, load tiddlers from the file system, and serve them to multiple clients.
https://talk.tiddlywiki.org/t/how-to-tiddlywiki-on-nodejs-ng...

You can HTTP fetch tiddlers from other TiddlyWikis, but it is a pull model (importing), not the asynchronous push/mailbox model Joe Armstrong envisioned. If you wanted to build a "Federation" of wikis today without using complex custom backends, you would indeed use tm-http-request to poll other wikis for updates.
https://tiddlywiki.com/#WidgetMessage%3A%20tm-http-request

A community version of TiddlyWiki called Bob (by OokTech) implements real-time, two-way communication between the server and the browser, and between different wikis managed by the same server. This is the closest functional equivalent to what Joe and Jeremy discussed, it's built on WebSockets and Node.js.
https://github.com/OokTech/TW5-Bob
by writeslowly | 2026-01-22 19:55:28+00:00
I've triggered similar conversation level safety blocks on a personal Claude account by using an instance of Deepseek to feed in Claude output and then create instructions that would be copied back over to Claude (there wasn't any real utility to this, it was just an experiment). Which sounds kind of similar to this. I couldn't understand what the heuristic was trying to guard against, but I think it's related to concerns about prompt injections and users impersonating Claude responses. I'm also surprised the same safeguards would exist in either the API or coding subscription.
by RiverCrochet | 2026-01-22 19:55:29+00:00
IMHO its the old ways music was brought to people--the mass-market ways--that stopped mattering, such as radio, television, music videos.

The U.S. doesn't have enough of a cohesive entertainment culture anymore to really have even a weak notion of national pop music. The Internet keeps everyone in their bubbles. So if you're looking for U.S. Top 40, it's gone-that's what no one cares about except people who want to write articles about music.

It's the sunset of a long process of fragmentation in pop that's at least been there since the rock-vs-disco in the 70s.

I wouldn't say it's bad unless you don't use YouTube and/or Bandcamp. That's where I find most of my new stuff these days.
by mncharity | 2026-01-22 19:55:57+00:00
Two quick errata: In Sound / Biology, a control inversion: low pitch (slider and sound) animates blue short hairs, and high pitch animates long red. In the windtunnel > Wing, lift is reported but the airstream remains undeflected.[1]

[1] randomly, fwiw, I've used cloud deck slicing to illustrate downdraft, eg https://imgur.com/4hhZ7zq https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HIddtgGzDE . Or perhaps moments of "yoink" like... err, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfY5ZQDzC5s&t=154s .
by tjr | 2026-01-22 19:56:04+00:00
Back when I routinely dialed phone numbers by hand (either on a keypad or on a literal dial), I memorized the numbers I called most frequently. Many of those numbers I still have memorized today, years after some of those phone lines have been disconnected.

But now? I almost never enter a new phone number anywhere. Maybe someone shares a contact with me, and I tap to add it to my contact list. Or I copy-paste a phone number. Even some people that I contact frequently, I have no idea what their phone number is, because I've never needed to "know" it, I just needed to have it in my contact list.

I'm not sure that this is a bad thing, but definitely is a thing.

Ah, well, more memory space for other stuff, eh? I suppose. But like what? I could describe other scenarios, in which I used to have more facts and figures memorized, but simply don't any more, because I don't need to. While perhaps my memory is freed up to theoretically store more other things, in practice, there's not much I really "need" to store.

Even if no longer memorizing phone numbers isn't especially bad, I'm starting to think that no longer memorizing anything might not be a great idea.
by zamadatix | 2026-01-22 19:56:29+00:00
Very interesting, I hadn't heard of this obfuscation before so it was well worth clicking.

Another good trick for debugging ssh's exact behavior is patching in "None" cipher support for your test environment. It's about the same work as trying to set up a proxy but lets you see the raw content of the packets like it was telnet.

For terminal games where security does not matter but performance does, telnet can also be worth consideration.
by JCattheATM | 2026-01-22 19:56:44+00:00
> I find American humour so hard to relate to but I guess it's just a culture thing

These kind of comments always puzzle me. Hollywood makes stuff for the entire world, not just for a domestic audience.

Shows like Friends, Seinfeld, The Simpsons, pretty much any big sitcom you can name is in syndication in most countries around the world, because of how relatable it is.

It's often not sophisticated, and can be quite shallow (See Two and a half men or Big Bang theory), but it being hard to relate to is unlikely to be an issue.
by fluoridation | 2026-01-22 19:57:33+00:00
"I'm glad this happened with Anthropic instead of Google, which provides Gemini, email, etc. or I would have been locked out of the actually important non-AI services as well."

Non-disabled organization = the first party provider

Disabled organization = me

I don't know why they're using these weird euphemisms or ironic monikers, but that's what they mean.
by tossaway0 | 2026-01-22 19:57:36+00:00
Totally anecdotal but I had a bad burn on my foot and I thought I could manage it with otc stuff. It kept getting worse so I went to have it checked out and was prescribed the silver cream.

From one day to the next it started showing positive effects and a week and a half later I was fine. I was kicking myself for waiting so long.
by felarof | 2026-01-22 19:57:41+00:00
Thanks for initial feature request! We do read every single request :)

Yes, we expose BrowserOS as an MCP server -- that you can use from claude code, cursor, opencode, etc -- https://docs.browseros.com/features/use-with-claude-code

MCP server works out of box (unlike Chrome DevTools MCP which requires tricky setup).
by Veserv | 2026-01-22 19:57:52+00:00
The really mysterious part is how ~10,000 packets per second costs ~20% of a core. That would mean SSH is bottlenecking in its code at ~500 Mbps per core (assuming full packets) which is ludicrously slow. It is trivial to do 10x that packet per second rate. Is SSH really that poorly designed?
by vel0city | 2026-01-22 19:57:53+00:00
I mean, sure, you can just sell it as a unit for each floor. You then need to recoup all the costs of rebuilding against fewer people, so all the main area renovations and what not get more expensive and the monthly cost of building maintenance get spread across fewer and fewer tenants. But you've still got a problem of most of the rooms of your very expensive condo have zero natural light, its all practically ancient built stuff in terms of planned structure life, and you've got a very expensive monthly maintenance bill. Meanwhile your massive unit is competing in the market against units that were actually built for the purpose of people living in them, so while they're big and expensive to maintain they're some of the least desirable spots.

The economics just work out a lot better to tear down the old structure and rebuild a new one more fit for purpose.
by throwawaysleep | 2026-01-22 19:57:56+00:00
Eh, I can see support simply not being worth any real effort, i.e. having nobody working on it full time.

I worked for a unicorn tech company where they determined that anyone with under 50,000 ARR was too unsophisticated to be worth offering support. Their emails were sent straight to the bin until they quit. The support queue was entirely for their psychological support/to buy a few months of extra revenue.

It didn't matter what their problems were. Supporting smaller people simply wasn't worth the effort statistically.

> I think it's possible for Anthropic to make the kind of experience that delights customers. Service that feels magical. Claude is such an incredible breakthrough, and I would be very interested in seeing what Anthropic can do with Claude let loose.

Are there enough people who need support that it matters?
by KaiserPro | 2026-01-22 19:57:59+00:00
> in many EU member countries can be two to three times the cost of electricity in the US.

Yup, I wonder why that might be, perhaps its due to our main supplier of gas and oil invading a country. Not sure though, if only the price graphs reflected that. oh wait.

> shutting down nuclear power plants

Germany fucked up there. but france and Finland haven't done that.

Spain has cheap electricity because of solar power its wholesale price is currently lower than the US, in winter.
by fowkswe | 2026-01-22 19:58:25+00:00
> We have entirely focused our cities (especially Denver and RTD (Regional Transportation District)) around people commuting in for work.

This isn’t Denver-specific at all. It’s how every US city was built.

For ~100 years we planned cities around one assumption: work happens in a centralized office, five days a week. Transit, zoning, downtown land use, parking, even tax bases were optimized for the daily commute. Downtowns became office monocultures; neighborhoods became places you slept.

Remote work broke that model. The result is cities that are now unfortunately organized around a behavior that no longer dominates daily life — and we’re still trying to operate them as if it does.
by mrguyorama | 2026-01-22 19:58:47+00:00
There's also the wonderful effect of all "axioms" in philosophy and morality being stated in natural languages, and therefore being utterly ambiguous in all ways.

"No torturing babies for fun" might be agreed by literally everyone (though it isn't in reality), but that doesn't stop people from disagreeing about what acts are "torture", what things constitute "babies", and whether a reason is "fun" or not.

So what does such an axiom even mean?
by JuniperMesos | 2026-01-22 19:58:53+00:00
> Are you annoyed corn farmers get subsidies for growing corn?

Yes we should immediately end these subsidies.

> It feels like the US can’t have nice things because people are hell bent on others not having nice things.

The US as a whole has lots of nice things. And sometimes the things the US has are not as nice as they could be because an unwise subsidy is paying for something inferior, and a small group of people who financially benefit from the subsidy advocate politically against changing it.