MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SixFeetUp | 2026-01-21 21:58:20+00:00
The AI agent landscape shifts daily. Join AI engineering leaders Calvin Hendryx-Parker (Six Feet Up CTO) and Travis Frisinger (8th Light Head of Agentic AI) for a LinkedIn Live on Tue, Jan 27 at 1pm ET. They’ll test Claude Code, Cursor, Goose, OpenAI Codex, and antigravity in real time on a Python codebase. Expect refactors, git workflows, live coding, and strong opinions. No fluff. No safe demos.
by floatrock | 2026-01-21 21:58:33+00:00
Cadillac Desert is the usual recommendation on how f'd water deals are in the West, the Owens Valley landgrab is merely the opening chapter. No argument there.

It's the urban/rural division subtext of the brown lawns and the economically-unfeasible desal techno-saviorism that makes you sound like a russian bot. Maybe a mossad shill... israelis have had minor luck with limited-scale desal.

If you actually cared about water predicaments, you'd be talking about the colorado river compact or how water rights are bought up by foreign alfalfa farmers to effectively ship water overseas. Brown lawns is pennies in front of the steamroller. Pennies that are effective at stoking urban/rural divisions, but still pennies in the grand scheme of things.
by numlocked | 2026-01-21 21:58:49+00:00
At the risk of totally misunderstanding this...it seems to be exfiltration by the app developer, who already has access to all of these data sources and the data that the customer is inputting into the AI KYC app (in this example)...right? I don't believe this exposes any end-user information to a third party. The AI app developer is already 'trusted' and could get access to this information regardless of the exfiltration. Maybe someone can explain this to me more clearly.
by aeternum | 2026-01-21 21:59:11+00:00
Disappointing. These are so poorly defined they are useless.

Broadly safe - Slaves were often told it was safer for them to remain illiterate (and to remain slaves). Safety can justify just about anything.

Broadly ethical - The cultural revolution was considered highly ethical, ethics were tools to justify the mass killing.

Compliant with Anthropic's guidelines - Let me guess: Not listed here because the guidelines are subject to change.

Genuinely helpful - Quite vague but this is probably the best one. Fair to ask however: helpful to whom?
by dang | 2026-01-21 21:59:36+00:00
Also illumos - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46708807 - Jan 2026 (15 comments)

People often post follow-ups but they're usually the opposite of what we want, since the idea is to have 30 buckets of the frontpage hashed out evenly over the topic space.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
by com2kid | 2026-01-21 21:59:43+00:00
Back on /. (way back when!) I read an article about optic nerve regrowth in mice. IIRC a lattice was built, stem cells shot onto it, and some other stuff was done, and a new optic nerve ended up growing.

It involved removing the poor mouses existing eye, so there was no net gain (still had a mouse with only 1 working eye), but I was hopeful progress would be made so I could get myself a working optic nerve.

Nope. No progress in 20+ years. Someone got a paper published and went on and did something else.

It is a relatively uncommon problem, for ~98% of children with a problem with their optic nerve, patching the opposite eye works to force the optic nerve to grow. I'm in the (un)lucky 2%!

Admittedly not the worst rare health problem to have.
by nancyminusone | 2026-01-21 21:59:44+00:00
Sort of. None of these are that specific, but Wikipedia has several "Deaths related to X" lists. Probably the most well known is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_unusual_deaths

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_homicide

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_selfie-related_injurie...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_and_suicide

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicides_attributed_to...
by layla5alive | 2026-01-21 22:00:00+00:00
Huh, so interesting. My imagination doesn't work like this. I don't need to see the apple. I can imagine where it would be, how big it would be, how it would act if I touched it (I can imagine it rolling, but without actualizing the visualization fully, etc.). But there's more like a semantic understanding that it's a mental pointer to an apple - with all the properties apples have very closely available in L1 cache. If I really try, I can pull up some mental jpegs or 3D models of apples, project them, etc., but usually that doesn't happen, I guess a 3D model doesn't get fully demand paged all the way in unless I really focus harder..? Maybe it used to and this is age?
by amjadfatmi1 | 2026-01-21 22:00:44+00:00
The problem with autonomous agents today isn't that they aren't "smart" enough; it’s that they are fundamentally stochastic, while our infrastructure (SQL, APIs, Shell) is deterministic. You are essentially giving a probabilistic model a direct line to your production environment and hoping "system prompts" act as security. As we found out in 2025, prompts are not a security layer. You cannot safely give a probabilistic model a "delete" key and hope the instructions hold.

We built Faramesh to bridge this gap. It is the first formalized Action Authorization Boundary (AAB) for the agentic web—an open-source, protocol-agnostic execution gate designed to sit between an agent’s reasoning engine and the target system.

In 2025, everyone focused on the "Brain" (the model). In 2026, the bottleneck is the "Nervous System" (execution control). The industry is shifting from Model-mania to Infrastructure-mania; we believe agents shouldn't be "trusted"—they should be governed.

How it works: Unlike existing guardrail libraries that use more LLMs to "check" the first LLM (adding more stochasticity), Faramesh introduces a hard, cryptographic gate. It intercepts agent intent, canonicalizes it into a deterministic byte-stream, and validates it against a strict, logic-based policy engine before any code is executed.

Key Technical Details:

- Deterministic Canonicalization: We found that slight variations in JSON or float representation break audit trails. Faramesh handles lexicographical sorting and float normalization (e.g., ensuring 1.0 and 1.00 produce identical bytes) so that identical intent produces identical hashes.

- The AAB Protocol: This defines what an agent is allowed to do across any medium. Whether targeting REST APIs, gRPC, or raw Shell, the control logic remains the same.

- Zero Trust Execution: The agent never touches the target system directly. It sends a "Proposed Action" to the gate. If the engine is confused or a policy is missing, it fails closed and the action is blocked.

- Cryptographic Hashing: Every authorized action is hashed, creating an immutable, replay-protected audit trail of agent intent.

- SDK-First Integration: We’ve released SDKs for Python and Node.js to make this a drop-in layer for existing LangChain/AutoGen stacks.

We’ve open-sourced the core engine and the SDKs. We’re particularly interested in feedback on our canonicalization logic and the policy engine’s performance overhead.

Paper: https://zenodo.org/records/18296731
GitHub: https://github.com/faramesh/faramesh-core
PyPI: pip install faramesh
NPM: npm install @faramesh/sdk
by Dwedit | 2026-01-21 22:00:47+00:00
JPEG XL is basically 4 codecs in one...

* A new lossy image Codec

* A lossless image codec (lossless modular mode)

* An alternative lossy image codec with different kinds of compression artifacts than those typically seen in JPEG (lossy modular mode)

* JPEG packer

Because it includes a JPEG packer, you can use it as such.
by BeetleB | 2026-01-21 22:00:47+00:00
> Haskell is hard. Both Slackware and LFS are simple. I don't see the comparison.

LFS/BLFS is hard to maintain as a primary OS. Gentoo is practical and easy in comparison. How many people do you know stick to LFS?

The point isn't so much about hard/simple, but jumping to the extreme instead of the pragmatic approach.
by tzs | 2026-01-21 22:01:16+00:00
An interesting case on grocery items is that solid things that you pour (breakfast cereal, flour, sugar, salt, for example) the nutrition label gives the serving size in a US customary volume measure and in a metric mass measure.

For example my breakfast cereal label says a serving is 1 cup or 45g.

Liquids seem to give a US customary volume and a metric volume. For example the milk I put on that cereal says a serving is 1 cup or 240mL.

Checking some sauces I have on hand thick liquids (ketchup and sriracha) are US volume and metric mass like pourable solids and thin liquids (like soy sauce) are both US and metric volume like milk.

Butter is also US volume and metric mass.
by twohearted | 2026-01-21 22:01:17+00:00
This is a great idea and great work.

Context is intuitively important, but people rarely put themselves in the LLM's shoes.

What would be eye-opening would be to create an LLM test system that periodically sends a turn to a human instead of the model. Would you do better than the LLM? What tools would you call at that moment, given only that context and no other knowledge? The way many of these systems are constructed, I'd wager it would be difficult for a human.

The agent can't decide what is safe to delete from memory because it's a sort of bystander at that moment. Someone else made the list it received, and someone else will get the list it writes. The logic that went into why the notes exist is lost. LLMs are living the Christopher Nolan film Memento.
by amjadfatmi1 | 2026-01-21 22:01:31+00:00
We spent most of 2025 watching teams try to 'prompt' their way out of agentic hallucinations. It doesn't work. If you give an LLM-based agent access to a production database or a shell, you are always one 'ignore previous instructions' jailbreak away from a catastrophic incident.

We believe Faramesh is the first project to treat the 'Agent-to-System' bridge as a distributed systems problem rather than a prompting problem.

The hardest part to get right was the Deterministic Canonicalization. LLMs are inherently messy—one model might send {"power": 100.0} while another sends {"power": 100} for the same tool call. To build a reliable Action Authorization Boundary (AAB), we had to ensure that the semantic intent produces a stable, cryptographic hash every single time. Without this, you cannot have reliable RBAC, audit trails, or 'fail-closed' security for autonomous agents.

We’ve open-sourced the core logic today and would love for the community to tear apart our approach in canonicalization.py. We’re specifically interested in whether people think this architecture could eventually be standardized into a formal 'Agentic Firewall' protocol.
by publicdebates | 2026-01-21 22:01:56+00:00
I read the WASM spec and became somewhat of an expert in it for the purpose of eventually designing a low-level language specifically for wasm, to be the most efficient and lowest-level language you could possibly have for wasm, and then gradually add high level concepts into it to make it more convenient. Kind of like building C on top of asm, and then gradually evolving it into C++. That project never came about though due to lack of community interest and time on my part, but I like seeing languages that take a fresh look at how to integrate with wasm using novel techniques to aim for maximal efficiency.
by hackthemack | 2026-01-21 22:02:25+00:00
Like so many things in life, there are so many variables/criteria and different ways to weigh them that I do not think one can make a claim like "text based tooling is cumbersome compare to the alternatives".

What are the alternatives? I had to do a little windows shell programming when working on Chef orchestration to set up windows servers.

There was "flow" programming in WebMethods I had to work on that tried to provide a snap in place component GUI to program data transformation.

I would say that there is something limiting in all the GUI based interfaces I have had to work with. Some option you can not get to, or it is not apparent how two things can communicate with each other.

Text based options have always seem more open to inspection, and, hence, easier to reason about how it works. YMMV.
by dylan604 | 2026-01-21 22:02:51+00:00
Why does Google even need to know about your ladder? Build the bot, scale it up, save all the data, then release. You can now remove the ladder and obey robots.txt just like G. Just like G, once you have the data, you have the data.

Why would you tell G that you are doing something? Why tell a competitor your plans at all? Just launch your product when the product is ready. I know that's anathema to SV startup logic, but in this case it's good business
by p_ing | 2026-01-21 22:03:15+00:00
macOS 26 that is /altered/ is UNIX. macOS that ships on every Mac is not certified UNIX -- but it can be made to match if you're willing to give up security.

You should read through the actual certification - https://www.opengroup.org/csq/repository/noreferences=1&RID=... (there are a couple more in the repo).

To run the VSX conformance test suite we first disable SIP as follows:
[...]

Feel free to disable SIP on your Mac. I certainly won't be doing so on mine.
by subroutine | 2026-01-21 22:03:23+00:00
What is the use case for LLM agent shoppers? I can't imagine delegating the purchase of a used item to an AI (I'd be okay with AI identifying the best deals for me to review). This must be something for people who are doing something at scale like flipping items on Ebay or drop shipping.

I imagine this type of automation existed before LLM agents came along - what do they add? Is it just the ability to evaluate the product description? Item quality is already listed as a categorical variable.
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2026-01-21 22:04:34+00:00
I will add that it seems:

1. The context window size to output accuracy problem seems like a genuinely hard problem

2. The vast majority of resources are being poured into driving down costs, not increasing output accuracy (and definitely not on gigantic context windows)

I will also add:

* I'm astounded at how terrible LLMs are at writing assembly in my experience. This seems like something they should excel at. So I'm genuinely confused on that piece.
by joshstrange | 2026-01-21 22:04:54+00:00
I wanted to look into their pricing for Devin+ and I have to say, ACU are entirely too opaque/confusing/complicated. The entire description of them is shrouded in mystery. And this part confuses me even more:

> Aside from the few ACUs required to keep the Devin VM running, Devin will not consume ACUs when:

> Waiting for your response

> Waiting for a test suite to run

> Setting up and cloning repositories

Ok, that kind of makes sense, but what does "the few ACUs required to keep the Devin VM running" mean? These cost $2.50/ea so "a few" means $5+ and on what time scale? Daily? Monthly?

The lowest plan comes with $20 ACUs but they don't list anywhere how far that gets you or even rough examples. I guess if you want to kick the tires $20 isn't a crazy amount to test it out yourself and maybe I'm just not the target market (I kind of feel like I am though?) but I wish their pricing made sense.
by zdragnar | 2026-01-21 22:05:34+00:00
The last time I heard this from a designer, the designs we got constantly violated the UI framework in ways that required deep customization.

I'd love to have a designer that started with a style guide and then actually stuck with it. Writing CSS isn't hard, and sticking with a known set of rules makes it even easier. But then this one component needs a slightly different font size that doesn't match up to any of the established typography rules, and this other spot needs unique padding, and and and I end up having to waste so much time looking for these little surprises.
by SeasonalEnnui | 2026-01-21 22:05:36+00:00
What's the best way to get all those points from a backend into the frontend webgpu compute shader?

There doesn't seem to be a communication mechanism that has minimal memcopy or no serialization/deserialization, the security boundary makes this difficult.

I have a backend array of 10M i16 points, I want to get this into the frontend (with scale & offset data provided via side channel to the compute shader).

As it stands, I currently process on the backend and send the frontend a bitmap or simplified SVG. I'm curious to know about the opposite approach.
by ahmadyan | 2026-01-21 22:06:02+00:00
why do you think the previous management team couldn't pull an Elon and fire 80% of the engineering staff themselves? why they needed an external leadership to take over and do it?

Part that i can't wrap my head around was at least in case of twitter, it was a hostile take over. In case of Vimeo, it didn't look hostile at all.
by notahacker | 2026-01-21 22:06:09+00:00
Orbits are predictable, but they intersect and decay [at different rates] and occasionally get perturbed by space weather. This already needs periodic conjunction avoidance manoeuvres, and whilst orbits are fast satellite manoeuvres are slow, so the notice you need to avoid a conjunction is measured in hours rather than seconds. Can't imagine a scenario in which it would be sustainable for LEO to even approach the density of commercial aviation, except perhaps for a hypothetical where a single entity actually managed all the satellites.

The other underestimated dimension is that satellite manoeuvres use up a finite supply of expensively-launched propellant. That's tolerable when Starlink is doing 50k conjunction avoidance manoeuvres in six months across its constellation, but once it becomes each satellite moving at least weekly you either need bigger satellites carrying more propellant or have to accept significantly higher collision risk than they currently do.
by WorldMaker | 2026-01-21 22:06:13+00:00
As someone else who has never particularly liked Notepad++ either, I mostly agree that chasing after it is a mistake, especially this many years after Notepad++'s height in relevancy. Perhaps ironically, many of those same "must install" lists that included Notepad++ have moved on to other tools, one of them being Microsoft's own VSCode. VSCode is a "good, helpful" AI host to sell more AI, so I presume some "AI in Notepad" pressure is "capture the few remaining people not yet installing VSCode out of the box".

> But at least an earlier, less bad, version of Notepad is still available on Win 11. There's just no icon or link to it, so you have to know it's there. It's C:\Windows\notepad.exe

Also, for what it is worth, a new relative to EDIT.COM is now back, in almost its former glory, just not yet installed in every Windows by default: https://github.com/microsoft/edit
by Remnant44 | 2026-01-21 22:06:39+00:00
While you may be correct in the sense that, in a public acquisition statement, people should be inferring enormous context and not taking anything said at face value.

It's simultaneously true that this is the farthest thing from effective, honest, and clear communication. Reading between the lines here is required precisely because we all know that any acquisition statements made are, at best heavily coded, if not completely just fluff.

You can recognize that and still get angry that it's par for the course for such things to be not just devoid of useful information, but often actively deceiving.
by hi_hi | 2026-01-21 22:06:41+00:00
You want the truth? You can't handle the truth! :-)

Those words weren't truth. Truth would have been to state the intent to fire employees in order to maximise profit. This was always going to be the outcome, and it was expected, why not just state it clearly?

Again, when truth becomes a grey area that is to be manipulated for maximising profits that benefit a minority of privileged individuals, we should be concerned and at the least, not normalise it with "its just business".
by x0x0 | 2026-01-21 22:06:45+00:00
Bending Spoon's business model has been -- at least for a decade -- buying companies that didn't operate profitably; stopping or slowing ongoing eng investments; and operating them profitably. Often that involves raising prices, but everyone is adults here.

Nobody lied. Vimeo will continue to operate, and probably will even have targeted ongoing development.
by SahAssar | 2026-01-21 22:06:55+00:00
The problem seems to be that OpenAI claims to protect against these problems. So yes, the app dev is malicious, yes, the user activated the app, but the platform (openai) also claimed to protect the user from the app dev exfiltrating data. Seems like there was a chink in the armor there.

At least that is my initial reading from this.
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-21 22:07:40+00:00
You judge how valuable the solution is to your customer and then structure your pricing to maximize your profits while still being palatable to your client.

Let's say your client has a problem that will bring them 1k/hr of revenue when fixed. You think you can fix it in an hour.

You could quote them 5k/hour, because you think you can fix it in one hour and you estimate it'll take them at least 5 hours to find and talk to someone else who could fix it. This is a big gamble for the client, what if you don't fix it or take longer? The client balks.

Now let's say you offer a "reasonable" hourly rate like 150/hr. Your client is happy to take the gamble because 150 is peanuts compared to the value they get if you do fix it. Client takes the deal, you fix the problem, but you got paid peanuts.

Now let's say you offer them a no-fix-no-fee rate of 5k. The client is happy to take it because once the problem is solved it takes them just 5 hours to go back in profit, and they risk nothing if you end up not solving the problem. They take the deal, you fix it in an hour, the client happily pays you 5k, netting an hourly rate of 5k/hour.

Same hourly rate as the first scenario, yet the first scenario will cause everyone to balk while the second one is a steal for the client (in reality, you can actually charge more than 5k, how much more depends on your reputation and sales skills).
by Quarrelsome | 2026-01-21 22:07:45+00:00
some people look at business as making money for the sake of making money. However other people look at making money as a means to better society. This goes back over a century to the Quaker run businesses, like Lloyds, Rowntree, Cadburys, etc.

You can imagine if your ultimate aim was to improve society, then acquiring a firm but having to sack a bunch of employees as somewhat of a failure.
by gcr | 2026-01-21 22:07:56+00:00
For folks curious about the supported language subset, here's a summary:

- Modules aren't implemented yet, but are high on the list

- Continuation-based control flow isn't supported yet, including break and promises. Tail calls are supported though.

- No support for complex numbers, bignums, weak hashtables, immutable hashtables, prefab structs, regexp, or file I/O support

Most of the rest of racket/base should work, according to the README. There's also a FFI for javascript, including bindings for Math, DOM, Canvas, MathJax, XTermJS, and JSXGraph. Overall feels like you can use most of the language right now unless you need odd Racket-isms or call/cc.