MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: What unicorns have in common – Lessons from a VC
by igor_ryabenkiy | 2026-01-21 16:48:43+00:00
I'm Igor Ryabenkiy, an author, serial entrepreneur, and venture investor. Over the past couple decades, I've backed 400+ startups, including early-stage bets on Miro, Deel, Turing, OpenWeb, PandaDoc, and others.

After watching even the strongest teams fail from distraction and drift, I started documenting what I saw work across the best ones. That eventually turned into a book: Unicorn Focus: The Key to Building Billion-Dollar Startups in the Age of AI.

It’s a tactical field guide on how to pick one idea worth building, how to define one core feature and message, how to avoid wasting time on things that don’t move the needle. I’ve included lessons from my own wins and mistakes, plus insights from founders I’ve backed: Andrey Khusid (Miro), Jonathan Siddharth (Turing), Nadav Shoval (OpenWeb), and others.

I’m sharing a free chapter here. Would love to hear what resonates or what you disagree with. Always open to feedback.

The full book is now live on Amazon (just search Unicorn Focus if you're curious).
by Alupis | 2026-01-21 16:49:16+00:00
I've contributed to Renovate in the past, helping bring new language support.

It was intimidating for me, being my first contribution to such a large-scale, widely-used project - but the team was absolutely wonderful to work with and guided me through the process, including multiple PR's and rounds of reviews.

The Renovate project has served as an example of how I want to structure and operate my own open source projects. On more than one occasion I've checked to see "how does Renovate [the project] handle this?"...

Big shout out to Michael Kriese (viceice)[1], the dude is an absolute machine. I don't know how he does what he does.

Also a huge shout out to Ryhs Arkins (rarkins)[2], creator of Renovate and a man with unlimited patience for my rookie questions.

Lastly, big shout out to HonkingGoose[3] (who's name we may never know), for turning my gibberish into proper documentation. What a legend.

Every one of my new projects uses Renovate. Not having to worry about having to check dependencies, manually bump them, etc. is a great thing even for small codebases. I highly recommend checking it out of you have not done so before.

[1] https://github.com/viceice

[2] https://github.com/rarkins

[3] https://github.com/HonkingGoose
by skrrtww | 2026-01-21 16:49:22+00:00
Does anyone have a mirror of the old Mac SETI client? setiathome_mac_3_08.hqx? I'd like to see if I can get it running again on my old iMac. Either the OS 9 or the early OS X one would work.

I checked the wayback machine and the download pages are still findable, but the client downloads are all FTP links and don't seem retrievable.
by kxbnb | 2026-01-21 16:49:25+00:00
Really cool approach to the containment problem. The insight about "capping the blast radius of a confused agent" resonates - decision fatigue is real when you're constantly approving agent actions.

The exfiltration controls are interesting. Have you thought about extending this to rate limiting and cost controls as well? We've been working on similar problems at keypost.ai - deterministic policy enforcement for MCP tool calls (rate limits, access control, cost caps).

One thing we've found is that the enforcement layer needs to be in-path rather than advisory - agents can be creative about working around soft limits. Curious how you're handling the boundary between "blocked" and "allowed but logged"?

Great work shipping this - the agent security space needs more practical tools.
by subscribed | 2026-01-21 16:49:40+00:00
Well, it took Juniper only 2 years find in 2015 the likely NSA implanted backdoors in their firewalls. Then the weakened Dual EC DRBG has been found.

Now (2023/2025) another two have been found.

Cisco equipment has been intercepted and implanted in the past.

So definitely "the community" can find things, sometimes it just takes ages.

And to add to your Crypto AG, Anom was also a nice example of the sting like this.
by pregnenolone | 2026-01-21 16:49:47+00:00
They’re useful for attestation, boot measurement, and maybe passkeys, but I wouldn't trust them to securely handle FDE keys for several reasons. Not only do you have to trust the TPM manufacturer – and there are many – but they also have a bad track record (look up Chris Tarnovsky’s presentation about breaking TPM 1.x chips). While parameter encryption has been phased out or not used in the first place, what's even worse is that cryptsetup stores the key in plaintext within the TPM, and this vulnerability remains unaddressed to this day.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.14717

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/37386

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/27502
by observationist | 2026-01-21 16:49:56+00:00
By the time they've figured out how to properly document and annotate the process of removing their collective head from their ass, the US and China will have moved well past completion of several cycles of the AI revolution. The EU is fundamentally broken because they are led by people who have never accomplished things, with credentials from institutions that have forgotten how to teach and train and prepare for the real world. They have fully embraced the credentialism and pompous titles in lieu of competence and effectiveness, have leeched off of their wealthy and successful citizens, and made progress or dynamic change impossible.

The leeches and bureaucrats don't care about actually accomplishing things, about ending corruption, or fixing any of the real world problems experienced by the citizens of the EU. They just want their grift to continue, to feel morally and intellectually superior, and to feel the validation of exercising power over their subjugates. Because they know better, and their education is superior, and if everyone would just listen to the experts, the whole world would just get along and run smoothly.

Everywhere else in the world that allows people to actually do things - and the Europeans that "just do things" in defiance of all the idiots in charge - will own the world in ten years. The EU will be a sad little footnote about the dangers of bureaucratic overreach and pompous elitism.
by JohnFen | 2026-01-21 16:49:59+00:00
It's already spread. Where I work (in the US), we manufacture industrial machinery that is heavily tech-dependent. The increased memory prices are biting us hard. On top of the increased costs from tariffs that we've been forced to eat, this is looking to be a hard second punch on top of the first.

Layoffs are coming soon, and there's a serious question about whether the company can survive unless it leaves the US.
by networked | 2026-01-21 16:50:50+00:00
> If you do it daily, in-house, for your own products... you might just have the title "Art Director."

"Art director" seems accurate for what a skillful, particular user of art generators does.

I have also thought that since people find "director" lofty (thanks to auteur theory?) and therefore pretentious to assume, one could borrow "producer" from Vocaloid: https://vocaloid.fandom.com/wiki/Producer (alternative front end: https://antifandom.com/vocaloid/wiki/Producer).
by haunter | 2026-01-21 16:50:53+00:00
If you want programming games I can highly recommend TIS-100 and SHENZHEN I/O from Zachtronics though mind you after a point you might as well just do your day job :D

https://store.steampowered.com/app/370360/TIS100/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/504210/SHENZHEN_IO/
by scottLobster | 2026-01-21 16:50:53+00:00
Yeah I remember a few projects attempting "grid computing", where the idea was distributing application threads across CPUs over freaking ethernet.

Have to say that would be a fun puzzle to try and optimize for, but network latency would always be a hard physical constraint no matter how fast. Maybe some niche use cases, but then multi-core CPUs and GPU processing really took off and I guess it just got even less useful.
by omarluq | 2026-01-21 16:50:58+00:00
CC-Relay is Multi-provider proxy for Claude Code that enables simultaneous use of multiple Anthropic-compatible API endpoints, API keys, and models.
Why?

Claude Code connects to one provider at a time. But what if you want to:

- Pool rate limits across multiple Anthropic API keys?

- Save money by routing simple tasks to Z.AI or local Ollama?

- Never get stuck with automatic failover between providers?

- Use your company's Bedrock/Azure/Vertex alongside personal API keys?
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-21 16:51:05+00:00
Oh alright! Now things are more clear!

Now it does make sense, I do think that Europe should look at Open source more too and contribute as such.

I do agree with what you are saying but supposing the geopolitical spat between America and Europe, It doesn't make sense to me why European countries might trust Indian subsidiaries of American companies.

Sure they might sound sovereign but in reality, they aren't. SO what's the point?

Why not get Independent Indian developers and the startup culture established around it (Although one of the issues I feel with this approach is that VC capital does include America, personally I wish to stay away from much of VC money)

> It's more derogatory to EU initiatives than India. All these flashy announcements hide the fact that most businesses and organizations in the EU continue to operate using non-EU developed software and continue to do so. Yet any attempt at building a durable long term foundation a la the Draghi report is ignored, as Draghi himself pointed out a couple months back [2].

Agreed.

I do feel like a reason why I wanted to establish EU company was to show my acknowledgement of Open source and privacy focus and to get more EU businesses interested. But right now, I feel like I am way more willing to have Open source or at the very least if restrictive, then creating source available software & still having an EU presence & an appreciation towards it.

But like, EU definitely needs to focus on Open source offerings more so than looking for EU alternatives in general which as you mention might be built using closed source products of American companies. It still doesn't effectively prevent the lock-in or worries in case of a geopolitical spat for EU in reality but only on the papers.

To be honest, I am open to open sourcing much of my products (ideologically) but the problems I feel in open source is that its hard to even make a developer salary comparatively even in India.

Open source definitely needs more funding. Probably EU can fund Open source without any bias could be great too?
by andsoitis | 2026-01-21 16:51:11+00:00
That’s tautology, of course.

More insightful is how you judge whether or not you could win. And when to have audacity to go against what others beleive your chances are for success.

Also, “win” as a concept is deceptive. Unlike a finite game (like chess or go or poker), the game of business is infinite - there’s no “end of game” that declares a winner. Winning is more about staying in the game as long as possible.
by ofabioroma | 2026-01-21 16:51:18+00:00
Yes. That's a core use case. You can either use a separate tree or even nest contexts. It's very powerful for sub-agents like the one Claude Code has built in with the Explore and Task subagents

On UltraContext, you'll do it like this:

// Shared context all agents read/write to

await uc.append(sharedCtx, { agent: 'planner', content: '...' })

await uc.append(sharedCtx, { agent: 'researcher', content: '...' })

// Or fork into separate branches per agent

const branch = await uc.create({ from: sharedCtx, at: 5 })

Schema-free, so you can tag messages by agent, track provenance in metadata, and branch/merge however you want. Full history on everything.
by kxbnb | 2026-01-21 16:51:38+00:00
Nice work on Fence! The network/filesystem restriction approach is exactly what's needed for running untrusted commands safely.

We're working on similar containment problems but at the API/MCP layer at keypost.ai - enforcing what outbound calls an agent can make rather than what local filesystem/network it can access. The two layers complement each other well.

The "restrictions as code" pattern is powerful. Are you thinking about extending to other resource types (API calls, token budgets, etc.)?
by logifail | 2026-01-21 16:52:16+00:00
Sorry, but I'm not convinced that the EU is actually capable of reducing regulation.

There are some who talk the talk, but when it comes down to it, the behemoth that is the Brussels (and Strasbourg!) machine will never accept reducing its influence.

Re: Strasbourg, ditching the EU Parliament in Strasbourg completely would a really great first step to indicate that the EU is serious about cutting waste. However, the French have a veto, so it will never happen.

https://www.euronews.com/2019/05/20/eu-parliament-s-114m-a-y...
by johnfn | 2026-01-21 16:52:26+00:00
No, it's not necessary to pay 200/mo.

I haven't had an issue with a hallucination in many months. They are typically a solved problem if you can use some sort of linter / static analysis tool. You tell the agent to run your tool(s) and fix all the errors. I am not familiar with PowerShell at all, but a quick GPT tells me that there is PSScriptAnalyzer, which might be good for this.

That being said, it is possible that PowerShell is too far off the beaten path and LLMs aren't good at it. Try it again with something like TypeScript - you might change your mind.
by jeffbee | 2026-01-21 16:52:48+00:00
It depends on what "this" you meant, but in general the ways of netbooting an OS are many and varied. You'd have to declare what kind of root device you ultimately want, such as root on iSCSI.

Personally, I feel that "smartOS does not support booting from a local block device like a normal, sane operating system" might be a drawback and is a peculiar thing to brag about.
by nwilkens | 2026-01-21 16:53:32+00:00
SmartOS is the core operating system for Triton datacenter -- https://www.tritondatacenter.com; Triton is the orchestration of SmartOS compute nodes.

Code + issues are active under https://github.com/TritonDataCenter (smartos-live, illumos-joyent, triton, etc.), and docs are at https://docs.smartos.org/.

SmartOS is released every two weeks, and Triton is released every 8 weeks -- see https://www.tritondatacenter.com/downloads

And Triton object storage will have S3 support in the next release!
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-21 16:53:37+00:00
> Thing is, image generators might be better than when SD came out years ago, there's been zero progress on actually meaningfully integrating AI into artists' workflow.

That’s an interesting opinion, but I have no idea what, other than ignorance, it is based on.

> The problem is AI assisted art does not yet exist the same way you can get an LLM to help you finish a project you started by hand, where you can arbitrarily decide how much control you want to exercise over the output.

Except it exactly exists in that way, and (while the tooling was more clumsy than today) it has at least since SD1.5 was SOTA.

If you are judging image generation rolling by the native web interfaces provided as the public face of the big hosted models, you really have no understanding of what is out there, and if you aren't doing that, I don't know where your claims could come from.
by syawaworht | 2026-01-21 16:53:51+00:00
I think the wrong lesson to draw for this is that it's just a systems problem. Somehow if we do a different song and dance, the outcome will be different. I've been thinking that the end state of capitalism and communism are not that different - what is the difference between wealth that you can't spend in a million lifetimes and "no" wealth at all? The endpoint is the same, the game becomes about relative power over others, in service of an unending hunger.

Capitalism is the manifestation of the aggregate human psyche. We've agreed that this part of our selves that desires to possess things and the part that feels better when having even more, is essential. This is the root we need to question, but have not yet dared to question. Because if we follow this path of questioning, and continue to shed each of our grasping neuroticisms, the final notion we may need to shed is that we are people, individual agents, instead of nonseparate natural phenomena.

We will have to confront that question eventually because we will always have to face the truth.
by ACCount37 | 2026-01-21 16:54:19+00:00
Do you understand the magnitude of the thing are you asking for?

Trying to maintain a civilized discussion about modern politics is like walking a tightrope. You can say "anyone who knows what a tightrope is sees that falling off it would be bad", and it's true, but, does saying that mean that you'll avoid the fall? The failure mode is extremely obvious but not at all easy to avoid.

If you don't have an intuition of "politics are inherently corrosive to human minds", I suggest you get one. It's not impossible to have a civilized discussion of politics, but it is unlikely and unnatural and unstable. It's very, very, very hard to set up and maintain an environment like this in practice.
by kxbnb | 2026-01-21 16:54:20+00:00
Congrats on the 1.0 launch! The workflow and agent composition primitives look well-designed.

Curious about the observability story - when agents make tool calls, how do you debug what actually got sent to external APIs? We've found that's often the hardest part of agent development - the "it works locally but fails in production" debugging loop.

Great to see more production-ready agent frameworks emerging. Will be following the project!
by tga | 2026-01-21 16:54:24+00:00
Indeed, the current state of affairs is rather sad.

To employ a regular (non-management) employee in Spain (and it applies anywhere else in Europe), an Estonian company would to at least have a local address, then register and maintain regular contact with several authorities there (chamber of commerce, social administration, tax office). The bureaucratic overhead makes it practically impossible to have employees across several countries (definitely as a small company), the only practical option is to pay an employer of record ~600 EUR/month extra (significant salary difference) only for the joy of maintaining the employment paperwork.

The really fun part happens if a managing director moves. Then the company is considered to have a permanent establishment in Spain, needs now to maintain ALL administration like a Spanish company, and to comply with Spanish corporate law, in parallel to what it was already doing at home. Both countries' laws apply, both expect taxes, and it is not even clear cut how much of the company activity and profits should be taxed by the company's home country and how much by the director's country! And having multiple managing directors in several countries is probably an exercise in frustration.

Then, if the director has enough and moves somewhere else, it all starts again in the new country (and you also have the headache, costs, and risks of closing the Spanish entity).

The EU may have free travel, but you can basically forget actually freely moving around as a small business owner, the company administration is prohibitively complicated.
by borenstein | 2026-01-21 16:54:29+00:00
Thank you! Rate limits are an interesting topic with Claude Code right now. The Max subscription has them, and the API does not; but the Max subscription is an all-you-can-eat buffet, and the API is not. yolo-cage was built to be compatible with the Max subscription while remaining TOS-compliant because it wraps the official CLI with no modifications. That has so far meant for me that the experience is _too_ rate limited.

That said, I have not yet started playing with MCP servers. I suspect that they are completely broken inside yolo-cage right now, as they almost certainly get stopped by the proxy.
by cthalupa | 2026-01-21 16:55:12+00:00
> Maybe some people think of it that way. I don't know. I've never asked those questions about any art I consume. I just think something like, "wow, this looks nice, it must have taken a while" or "what would it take to make something like this, I wonder"

I think this raises an interesting question about form vs. function in art.

I was running a AD&D game on Friday. At one point, I was holding up the book to show the artwork of a monster to the group. None of us were looking at it and taking the time to contemplate the effort involved, thinking it must have taken a while, etc. I'm sure some people do - old school D&D art is definitely an area that a subset of the hobby is passionate about - but the majority of people are looking at it to help with formulating things in their mind's eye, getting a feel for things, etc.

But I will appreciate a piece of "standalone" art in a very similar manner as to how you describe.

Do most readers spend appreciable time looking at the art on the cover of their book? Do people spend a ton of time looking at album art while listening to music on Spotify? How about the art in a video game - how much of it is the point vs. something that facilitates the point - the last few times I loaded up Dwarf Fortress, it was the ASCII tileset, not the graphical version.

Do AI creations have a place where the art is supposed to be functional vs. being made for the sake of being art?
by rovr138 | 2026-01-21 16:55:28+00:00
> That's also a list of achievements with no links without any information regarding how much if any volunteer contributed computing has contributed to them.

That's papers that are citing them. The reason for no links is explained on the page,

> The distribution rules for published papers vary by the publication in which the paper appears. Due to these rules, a public web-source of each paper may not be immediately available. If full version is not linked below or available elsewhere on the Internet (Google Scholar can be helpful for this), most, if not all of these publications are freely available at a local municipal or collegial library. These articles are written for scientists, so the contents are fairly technical.
by munk-a | 2026-01-21 16:55:39+00:00
Oh, it will - but they don't care. I'm sure they'll eek out 1.5b from their 1.3b acquisition and be happy as clams.

It certainly is depressing to look at what was built and what could be made of it but most of the folks with money lack the creativity or skill to actually build a lasting business. Just burn it down and rob it on the way out - such is the modern economy.
by jstanley | 2026-01-21 16:55:42+00:00
> Should we apply this logic to selling illegal drugs?

Yes, of course.

Selling drugs is also a private transaction between two people that does no harm to anyone else.

If the people buying or selling drugs are harmful to others in the rest of their life, that's on them. It shouldn't be used as a fig leaf to negatively impact people who can buy and sell drugs responsibly.
by yodsanklai | 2026-01-21 16:55:43+00:00
Thanks for noticing this. I got the same feeling when reading this. It may not sound like much, and it doesn't mean it's an insufferable place to work, but it's a hint it might be.

Rant: On a similar note, I recently saw a post on Linkedin from Mistral, where they were bragging to recruit candidates from very specific schools. That sounded very pretentious (and also an HR mistake on several levels IMHO).