MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by boplicity | 2026-01-20 16:04:31+00:00
We can't give up our power just because the situation is difficult. We need to assert as much power as possible. Organize; talk openly about the problem; coordinate plans for voting (yes, I know its early). Pressure politicians. There are things individuals can do, right now. No, it's not enough on our own. But if we don't act as individuals, then we really are screwed.
Show HN: Preloop – An MCP proxy for human-in-the-loop tool approvals
by yconst | 2026-01-20 16:04:35+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m Yannis, co-founder of Preloop. We’ve built a proxy for the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that lets you add human approval gates to your AI agents without changing your agent code.

We’re building agents that use tools (Claude Desktop, Cursor, etc.), but we were terrified to give them write-access to sensitive systems (Stripe, Prod DBs, AWS). We didn't want to rewrite our agents to wrap every tool call in complex "ask_user" logic, especially since we use different agent runtimes.

We built Preloop as a middleware layer. It acts as a standard MCP server proxy.You point your agent to Preloop instead of the raw tool. You define policies (e.g., "Allow payments < $50, but require approval for > $50"). When the agent triggers a rule, we intercept the JSON-RPC request and hold the connection open. You get a push notification (mobile/web/email) to Approve/Deny. Once approved, we forward the request to the actual tool and return the result to the agent.

We put together a short video showing Claude Code trying to send money. It gets paused automatically when it exceeds the limit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTtXn8WibTY

We’re compatible with any client that supports MCP (Claude Desktop, Cursor, etc.). We also have a built-in automation platform if you want to host the agents yourself, but the proxy works standalone.

We’re looking for feedback on the architecture and the approval flow. Is the "Proxy" approach the right way to handle agent safety, or do you prefer SDKs?

You can try it out here: https://preloop.ai
Docs: https://docs.preloop.ai

Thanks!
by pavlov | 2026-01-20 16:05:01+00:00
It's not uncommon for democracies to be subverted by a minority party.

Nazis did it in Germany. They lost parliamentary seats in the November 1932 election, but remained the largest party with 33% of seats. The next year the country was already a dictatorship.

Communists did it in Czhechoslovakia in 1948. They led a coalition government but had just lost the previous election.

I'm worried that United States 2027 will be added to this list. If MAGA sees their grip on power starting to fade after November elections, they may try increasingly extreme measures.
by yodsanklai | 2026-01-20 16:05:02+00:00
Protest every weekend? build momentum until this can't be ignored? perhaps write to congressmen? attend townhall meetings and ask questions to your representatives? try to raise awareness to your friends who don't vote?

I have an American friend who keeps complaining about Trump. There was a protest in his city, but he didn't go because he had a BBQ to attend that weekend.

Seriously, this isn't fun anymore and Americans should be extremely concerned and start acting one way or another. It may be symbolic but it's better than nothing, if only for peace of mind.
by adventured | 2026-01-20 16:05:18+00:00
Japan is the model of low interest rate debt and the US is not close to how low Japan was able to go, with a currency (Yen) vastly less potent than the global reserve currency.

Most of the US borrowing is domestic, very little of it is now foreign. No foreign entity can afford to absorb $2 trillion of new paper every year. That's equal to the total holdings of China + Japan. Going forward you might as well regard all US Govt borrowing as domestic, as that will essentially be the case given the scale. The UK holds $885b of treasuries, what are they going to buy annually that will make a difference at this point?

Every nation has a limitless ability to borrow internally via currency debasement, with obvious consequences. That USD debasement is why gold has gone up 10x in 20 years when priced in dollars. It's why healthcare and housing is so expensive - when priced in dollars. Cash pushed into gold in 2005, $100k, would now buy you a million dollar house. It's the dollar of course that has been hammered (among other currencies, the Euro has not done well against gold either).

The US won't stop being able to debase its currency and buy its own debt. What the US is doing is eating its hand. If it continues to get worse, it moves on to eating its arm, and so on (the US is de facto consuming its national wealth through stealth confiscation via currency destruction, rather than paying the bills with taxation directly).
by mywittyname | 2026-01-20 16:05:34+00:00
To the rest of the world - Nothing. Trade works just fine without a reserve currency.

For the USA - massive inflation. All of those dollars are coming back home, which will weaken the dollar.

Plus, there's the second-order effects from a president taking control of the fed by trumping up charges on its members. So high inflation + low/zero/negative interest rates.
by epolanski | 2026-01-20 16:05:38+00:00
I personally have dumped every single US security I held in the last 2 years, US bonds have been the latest to go in the last week.

Mind you I'm a small investor (my portfolio is 100k-ish euros). I'm still exposed to US securities through ETFs though, as I have 3 different ones holding US companies, but that I ain't gonna sell them.

But for new capital I may as well provide it to others.
by jillesvangurp | 2026-01-20 16:05:54+00:00
I'm currently using a qemu vm for the codex with the --yolo flag but same thing. I've been also looking at using lima for automating the creation of vms. But it does a few weird/dangerous things like mounting the entire user directory read/write. Which kind of defeats the point. There are ways of turning that off probably but it does a few dangerous/annoying things wrong by default.

But a simple vm and some automation to install developer tools using ansible, nix or whatever you prefer isn't that hard to (vibe) code together. I like Lima but it feels slightly sub-optimal for the job currently.

Some useful things to consider:

- Ssh agent forwarding for authenticating against e.g. git is useful. But maybe don't use the same key that authenticates to your production machines as well ...

- How do you authenticate without a browser? Most AI tools have ways to deal with that but it's slightly tedious to automate during provisioning.

- Making sure all your development tools are there; I use things like sdkman, nvm, bun, etc. And I have my shell preferences and some other tools I like to have around.

- Minimizing time provisioning these vms over and over again. This gets tedious really quickly.

- Keeping the VMs fast is important too. In my projects, build tool performance adds up and AI tools like to call them a lot. So assign enough memory and CPU.

- It would be nice to switch between local and remote/cloud based vms easily.

- Software flexibility; developers are picky about their tools. There is no one size fits all here. Even just deciding on the base image to use for your vm is likely to escalate. I picked debian for what it is worth.

In short, I think there's enough out there that you can pull something together but it still involves quite a bit of DIY. It would be nice if this got easier. And AI tools asking for permission for everything is not a good security model. Because people just turn that off. Sandboxing those things is the way to go. But AI tools need to be able to do enough to work with your software.
by znsksjjs | 2026-01-20 16:06:06+00:00
> For example, Steve Yegge's "beads" system is over a quarter million lines of allegedly vibe-coded Go code. But developing a CLI like that may be a sweet spot

Is that really a success? I was just reading an article talking about how sloppy and poorly implemented it is: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/18/agent-psychosis/

I guess it depends on what you’re looking to get out of it.
by afavour | 2026-01-20 16:06:26+00:00
IMO the reason is that he is a senile old man lashing out at the world. I really don't think there's a lot to it beyond that. Everyone else goes along with it because they know the administration's entire legitimacy comes from Trump and if/when he's gone the whole house of cards will collapse. That or they have their own focuses (e.g. Stephen Miller) and are happy for Greenland to be a distraction while they get on with their own stuff.
by hatradiowigwam | 2026-01-20 16:06:49+00:00
That won't work... that will crash the price of [new] bonds, and more capitalized nations will buy the dip. You are operating under an assumption that the humans controlling a quantity of wealth enough to [quote] "crash the bonds market" make decisions based on principles. They don't - and if you compare history with a long term bond price chart then it will become apparent.
by nemomarx | 2026-01-20 16:07:06+00:00
No one's really put out a strong case for it like that. You could argue it's a lot of land that's underpopulated and might be valuable in twenty years with global warming or something?

But the simpler answer is that Trump seems to personally like the idea of adding a big landmass to the US for ego reasons. He talked about it last term too with the same excuses mostly.
by horsawlarway | 2026-01-20 16:07:07+00:00
yeah, I think the combo approach definitely has the most appeal:

- Spin up a vm with an image of the real target device.

- Let the agent act freely in the vm until the task is resolved, but capture and record all dangerous actions

- Review & replay those actions on the real machine

My issue is that for any real task, an agent without feedback mechanisms is essentially worthless. You have to have some sort of structured "this is what success looks like, here's how you check" target for it. A human in the loop can act as that feedback, which is in line with how claude code works by default (you define success by approving actions and giving feedback on status), but requiring a human in the loop also slows it down a bunch - you can end up ping-ponging between terminals trying to approve actions and review the current status.
by nuancebydefault | 2026-01-20 16:07:12+00:00
In fact being or feeling useful can be addictive. It goes beyond fixing technical problems. If I know someone is sad or in trouble for a longer period of time, I tend to check in regularly. I need to hold myself back, not to do it too often. The reason is probably the dopamine (or some happy neurotransmitter) effect that respectful or thankful people invoke on me. So it is the help<->dopamine transaction.
by petsfed | 2026-01-20 16:07:19+00:00
> Locks do not provide real physical security, they just keep honest and lazy people out.

Really?! I had no idea! I had such a miniscule understanding of what portion of the threat space locks address that the second sentence in the very fucking post you're replying is this:

> Locks are very good at discouraging honest people and lazy, opportunistic people.

I'm so ignorant of the threat space, that the sentence immediately following that one goes:

> They are not very good at discouraging generally skilled and motivated people, or people who are specifically interested in what's behind a specific door.

I guess you're right, the two sentences I wrote 76 characters before the one you're shitting all over as evidence of my ignorance have absolutely no bearing on the context of the statement I made. They just exist entirely disconnected from any other sentences in that same post. I bow to your superior intellect and analytical skills.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-01-20 16:08:02+00:00
The media tricked some people into supporting Trump

You could almost make this case in 2016, but anyone who fell for Trump in 2024 will just fall for the next con man to come along. At some point we have to take responsibility for our own choices and stop blaming the media.

The truth about Trump was out there, and it was not hard to find.

Added here due to rate-limiting:

2024 was right after voters had seen Biden at that debate, while all the "responsible" people insisted he was sharp and smart. It really was more unique than its given credit for.

Both candidates were a disgrace to the parties who propped them up. However, nothing Biden said was any worse than what Trump said about immigrants eating peoples' pet dogs and cats.

At the Biden/Trump debate, the choice was between malevolent, incoherent senility and plain old garden-variety senility, and the voters choose poorly. At the actual election, there were even fewer excuses for voting for Trump, as Biden was no longer in play.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-20 16:08:16+00:00
The EU can't mend ties with China without giving up on Ukraine as China's FM Wang Yi has stated [0] on multiple occasions [1]. Additionally, in the Chinese foreign policy space, the EU is viewed as weak as well [2], and largely through the lense of the US-China rivalry (which is how the US views the EU as well now).

[0] - https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3316875/ch...

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-russia-discuss-ukr...

[2] - https://fddi.fudan.edu.cn/_t2515/57/f8/c21257a743416/page.ht...
by epolanski | 2026-01-20 16:08:17+00:00
I'm Italian/Polish, China has never done anything to me in history.

Whereas I remember multiple times our allies pillaging and colonizing the country.

Not a fan of their espionage, lack of IP respect and human rights record (albeit we should also look at ourselves on the last one as well). But those are things that could've been challenged democratically through economical levers imho.

The only reason China suddenly became the enemy is because their GDP growth put them as the world's biggest economy in few decades and Washington wasn't happy with this.
by saubeidl | 2026-01-20 16:08:18+00:00
You're completely dismissing all extraparliamentary means of opposition.

Protests. Riots. Strikes.

Y'know, the sort of thing that toppled Yanukovych in Ukraine, lotsa Middle Eastern dictators during the Arab Spring, British rule in India, Soviet control over the Baltics, etc etc etc.

Your politicians are use- and spineless. It's time for your people to step up.
by tshaddox | 2026-01-20 16:08:26+00:00
Yep. I wish they would just completely get rid of the concept of a self-serve App Store and go fully into the video game console model where there’s a much smaller library of much more strongly vetted third party software available. It would drastically increase the average user’s experience with iPhone software quality, and it might even help them with all the complaints about not allowing side loaded apps (notice how video game consoles rarely seem to deal with that complaint).
What I learned asking small teams how they handle recurring work
by batels | 2026-01-20 16:08:31+00:00
I recently asked small teams how they make sure recurring operational tasks don’t slip.

A few patterns stood out:
- Automation is ideal, but many tasks sit in a gray area (reviews, checks, approvals).
- Teams still rely on some form of explicit acknowledgement (Slack reactions, calendar accepts, board walks).
- Project management tools work, but often feel too heavy for small, routine tasks.
- Personal systems don’t scale well to team visibility.
- Trust helps, but recurring work is low-signal and easy to overlook.

It seems the problem isn’t reminders, but low-friction confirmation of execution.

Curious if this matches others’ experience.

For context, this came out of exploring a small tool around this problem: https://doneping.com
by legitster | 2026-01-20 16:08:48+00:00
I still liked Milton Friedmans proposal for a negative income tax for this reason.

You just piggyback on the existing income reporting mechanism of the IRS - just add a filing for people with no income. And the way the IRS withholds for tax season is just done in reverse.

Yes there would be fraud, but no more than the amount of fraud that already happens on taxes. If anything, it actually incentivizes us to finally fix our tax system.
by simiones | 2026-01-20 16:08:53+00:00
This is just sleight of hand. It's true that science can never be certain about anything, not to the same level as mathematics.

But otherwise, there is nothing special about positive or negative statements. You can express any positive statement as the negation of a negative statement, so to the extent that science can "disprove negatives", it can equivalently "prove positives".
by andai | 2026-01-20 16:09:12+00:00
I just gave it its own user and dir. So I can read and write /agent, but agents can't read or write my homedir.

So I just run agents as the agent user.

I don't need it to have root though. It just installs everything locally.

If I did need root I'd probably just buy a used NUC for $100, and let Claude have the whole box.

I did something similar by just renting a $3 VPS, and getting Claude root there. It sounds bad but I couldn't see any downside. If it blows it up, I can just reset it. And it's really nice having "my own sysadmin." :)
by strange_quark | 2026-01-20 16:09:29+00:00
Yup, same experience here at a much smaller company. Despite management pushing AI coding really hard for at least 6 months and having unlimited access to every popular model and tool, most code still seems to be produced and reviewed by humans.

I still mostly write my own code and I’ve seen our claude code usage and me just asking it questions and generating occasional boilerplate and one-off scripts puts me in the top quartile of users. There are some people who are all in and have it write everything for them but it doesn’t seem like there’s any evidence they’re more productive.
by lixiaofei | 2026-01-20 16:09:42+00:00
Recently, “skills” have been blowing up. I collected 60k+ open-source agent skills from GitHub, then curated 1,000+ Claude Code skills that are actually useful. The directory is updated daily.

To me, Claude Code skills aren’t that different from agents or other automation tools—the big difference is that they lower the barrier so more people (including beginners) can use them.

There are tons of skills in every industry and the ecosystem is noisy, so I’m trying to filter out the low-quality ones and highlight the practical ones that solve real problems.

I registered the domain last December, procrastinated for almost a month, and spent ~5 days polishing the first version. It’s still missing features and definitely has bugs—feedback is very welcome.

Try it here: https://agent-skills.cc/
(updated daily)
by NetMageSCW | 2026-01-20 16:09:44+00:00
Evidence so far says they are not a gamble at all, and common (required?) eight year warranties on 80% life remaining are on all BEVs, plus record show that BEVs tend to to retain that 80% range at ten years. The gamble might be in whether the batteries have manufacturing defects, but warranty and recalls cover that, and as Samsung showed, can happen to even smaller, cheaper items.
by alnwlsn | 2026-01-20 16:10:30+00:00
Philosophize all you want; if the first instruction in your manual is 'pip install' I don't consider you to be anywhere near as offline / off-grid as you claim to be. All the Lora mesh projects do this. For all the off-grid advertising they do, there doesn't seem to be a lot of thought put into bootstrapping or maintaining the network once the internet is gone. (yes, you and I could probably figure it out, but some user who actually needs this might not be able to). I'm not really complaining about this, but it is a little ironic.

Reticulum is actually ahead of the curve by having a ready to use PDF manual you can download. For my part, I've been trying to put together an all-inclusive Raspberry Pi image or a live USB for Meshtastic, but it's not quite there yet (it's no more than a hobby for me, but I'm not making big off-grid promises either).
Show HN: Talaria – Decompiling Hermes bytecode to pseudocode
by moleium | 2026-01-20 16:10:41+00:00
I built this because reverse engineering React Native apps is currently a pain. The existing tools mostly just dump the assembly instructions.

Talaria analyzes the Hermes bytecode and attempts to reconstruct the control flow into readable pseudocode.

It's written in C++23. It’s open source, so if you're doing mobile security research and want better static analysis for React Native bundles, you can try it and contribute.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-20 16:10:58+00:00
Maybe you'd trust Blackrock's CEO instead? I live in the US and I have rotated away from US equities and treasuries to derisk from volatility of poor governance (both this administration and long term fiscal policy).

BlackRock CEO delivers blunt warning on US national debt - https://www.thestreet.com/investing/blackrock-ceo-delivers-b... - January 18th, 2026

The U.S. Deficit Will 'Overwhelm This Country': BlackRock CEO Larry Fink - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4d1GzgnhkI
by ontouchstart | 2026-01-20 16:11:42+00:00
Since the JavaScript and Python worlds are heavily polluted by LLMs, I start to look into Rust and Cargo ecosystem. Surprisingly it picked up the pace as quickly as possible.

Once Rust can be agentic coded, there will be millions of mines hidden in our critical infrastructure. Then we are doomed.

Someone needs to see the problem coming and start to work on the paths to solution.
by jannesblobel | 2026-01-20 16:11:46+00:00
Thanks, glad you like the Legit.

On expanding beyond Claude: there’s no concrete plan right now since we built this around Claude, but we’re very open to it. If you have a preferred CLI (e.g., Codex, OpenCode, or something else), feel free to open an issue in the repo. Or just describe your use case here and I will do it :)

Regarding branches: the tool does not pollute your working branch. Each session lives on a separate “session” branch that contains all prompts and operations. Your normal working branch stays clean.

When you end a session, you’re prompted to either:

merge the code changes into your working branch, or

discard them.

If the video or README didn’t make this clear enough, I’d appreciate the feedback I’ll update the docs accordingly.
by adventured | 2026-01-20 16:11:48+00:00
The US is more stable than the powers of Europe (which have constant political upheavals, snap elections that completely remake the political landscape, etc). You're confusing Trump's mouth with how the US political system actually functions.

Just because the US changes political direction, that doesn't equate to instability. Its aims are changing, like it or not, good or bad. The US deciding it wants Greenland is not a proof of instability, it's a change in the strategic goals held by the people controlling the superpower.

And the US is at a high level of strength, not weakness. Its large corporations hold sway over the globe in a manner the likes of which has never been seen before in modern history. Its military has force projection to nearly every point on the globe, with hundreds of global military bases. Its national wealth is at an all-time high. Its stock markets are at all-time highs. Its median income is at an all-time high. Its median disposable income is at an all-time high. Its housing wealth is at an all-time high.
by nemomarx | 2026-01-20 16:11:56+00:00
Representatives already either agree it's bad (and can't do much about it) or will not listen to the public (because they're Republicans and indented to trump for their careers.

I don't have any friends who don't vote, really, and the midterms might not come soon enough to do anything here.

My senator had a head injury and reversed all his opinions for some reason, so I've called his office a lot but he's very pro Invading Greenland now, and pro criminalizing his voters. Unhelpful guy.

I would start preparing for all of this to happen, and tell your friend to get his passport up to date.