MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I'm building an open-source AI agent runtime using Firecracker microVMs
by markoh49 | 2026-01-15 17:18:30+00:00
Hello Hacker News! I'm Mark. I'm building Moru, an open-source runtime for AI agents that runs each session in an isolated Firecracker microVM. It started as a fork of E2B, and most of the low-level Firecracker runtime is still from upstream.

It lets you run agent harnesses like Claude Code or Codex in the cloud, giving each session its own isolated microVM with filesystem and shell access.

The repo is: https://github.com/moru-ai/moru

Each VM is a snapshot of a Docker build. You define a Dockerfile, CPU, memory limits, and Moru runs the build inside a Firecracker VM, then pauses and saves the exact state: CPU, dirty memory pages, and changed filesystem blocks.

When you spawn a new VM, it resumes from that template snapshot. Memory snapshot is lazy-loaded via userfaultfd, which helps sandboxes start within a second.

Each VM runs on Firecracker with KVM isolation and a dedicated kernel. Network uses namespaces for isolation and iptables for access control.

From outside, you talk to the VM through the Moru CLI or TypeScript/Python SDK. Inside, it's just Linux. Run commands, read/write files, anything you'd do on a normal machine.

I've been building AI apps since the ChatGPT launch. These days, when an agent needs to solve complex problems, I just give it filesystem + shell access. This works well because it (1) handles large data without pushing everything into the model context window, and (2) reuses tools that already work (Python, Bash, etc.). This has become much more practical as frontier models have gotten good at tool use and multi-step workflows.

Now models run for hours on real tasks. As models get smarter, the harness should give models more autonomy, but with safe guardrails. I want Moru to help developers focus on building agents, not the underlying runtime and infra.

You can try the cloud version without setting up your own infra. It's fully self-hostable including the infra and the dashboard. I'm planning to keep this open like the upstream repo (Apache 2.0).

Give it a spin: https://github.com/moru-ai/moru
Let me know what you think!

Next features I'm working toward:

- Richer streaming: today it's mostly stdin/stdout. That pushes me to overload print/console.log for control-plane communication, which gets messy fast. I want a separate streaming channel for structured events and coordination with the control plane (often an app server), while keeping stdout/stderr for debugging.

- Seamless deployment: a deploy experience closer to Vercel/Fly.io.

- A storage primitive: save and resume sessions without always having to manually sync workspace and session state.

Open to your feature requests or suggestions.

I'm focusing on making it easy to deploy and run local-first agent harnesses (e.g., Claude Agent SDK) inside isolated VMs. If you've built or are building those, I'd appreciate any notes on what's missing, or what you'd prioritize first.
by exe34 | 2026-01-15 17:19:10+00:00
> If you want to start from square 1, using your own IP, you should be able to.

That's not remotely how any progress has ever been made in the history of the human race. Newton himself said he stood on the shoulders of giants. Or as Sagan said, to bake an apple pie from scratch, you have to first invent the Universe.

A clever patch to an existing thing is exactly how you get to the next big thing after enough patches.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-15 17:19:10+00:00
I would assert that Microsoft's management always behaved as if they repented to have added F# to VS 2010, with all the maintenance guarantees it implies, throughout the years they have searched how to sell it.

Nowadays CLR has effectively changed meaning to C# Language Runtime, and ironically the JVM is more lively as the original goal of the CLR back in 2001.
by jones1618 | 2026-01-15 17:19:20+00:00
I'm intrigued and might need something like this but...
Your splash page doesn't give much of an idea of what this app does (far less than what you said in the comment above).

IMO, I shouldn't have to create an account to see what an app has to offer. A few screenshots and a feature list might help me decide if creating an account is worth the trouble.

In general, how is this better than a spreadsheet of contacts or the contacts app on my phone?
by horsawlarway | 2026-01-15 17:19:31+00:00
Depends entirely on the model you want to run.

There are some absolutely useful things you can do with TTS/STT/Diarization/etc on even really minimal specs.

Some of those will run fine on RPis even without this new hat.

The extra ram probably opens the door to a large number of vision/image models, which typically want a minimum of 16Gb, but do better with 24/32.

There are just a HUGE number of case specific models that do just fine on hardware at the RPi level, assuming you have the ram to load them.
by id34 | 2026-01-15 17:19:32+00:00
No, of course, but the issue comes in the next step. How do they put their "support" of science into practice? For some, that means supporting increased budgets for grants, education, or basic research. For others, that means "restoring trust" by adding partisan steps. "Trusting the experts is not science", as RFK said.

I find these types of survey questions almost useless - of course people will say they support science, or democracy, or freedom, or increasing support for families. The devil is always in the details.
by advisedwang | 2026-01-15 17:19:37+00:00
My understanding (and I couldn't get past the app paywall)

Is that Palantir is joining databases from many different federal and state agencies, including passport and driver license photos. The app then allows you to scan a phase and it finds a match. It returns information on the person found, including citizenship.

The existence of this technology means that ICE can grab anyone they want, scan their face, and instantly have (or not have) probable cause to arrest them. Without the app, there would be hours before probably cause could be established which makes justifying the detainment legally much harder. I.e without the app, ICE has to actually build a case or see something suspicious for each target. With the app, ICE can just mass sweep people.

Which should be illegal, but thanks to the shadow docket order on Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, is happening anyway.
by phkahler | 2026-01-15 17:19:57+00:00
First I have to choose one. Second I have to trust a 3rd party. Third, I have to figure out how to use/install it. All this for functionality that should be right there with all the other audio things that are bundled with it.

BTW I hate needing plug-ins or add-ons for other software too for similar reasons - Gnome comes to mind.
by zahlman | 2026-01-15 17:20:00+00:00
Sigh. Well, now that it's come up....

Fun thing about that. Whenever someone starts going off about how Zoe Quinn was supposedly mistreated and how that supposedly launched a "right-wing backlash against feminism" and a "misogynistic online harassment campaign", quiz them about the "jilted boyfriend" (as they typically put it) who wrote the post that supposedly set everything off. With remarkable consistency, they don't know his name (Eron Gjoni) or anything about his far-left political views, and will refuse to say the name if you ask. They have never read the post and have no idea what it says, and will at most handwave at incredibly-biased third-hand summaries.

I'm pretty sure I've even had this happen on HN.
by throwaway853578 | 2026-01-15 17:20:16+00:00
> You know what actually doesn't do a damn thing? Not doing a damn thing. Literally anything is better than nothing, just showing support is better than nothing. Talking about it is better than nothing.

That's fair. And I'm talking about it right now and everywhere else I can in safe ways.

As far as protesting goes, I agree with you. It is better than nothing. It does help show people they're not alone. But as I said mentioned, this isn't happening where I live. It would literally take me days to travel to Milwaukee or another hotbed. Some people are stronger than me and take time off and make other sacrifices to attend rallies, and I admire those people, but it's not feasible for me. Or I suppose a more truthful way of saying it is it's not worth it for me because of the sacrifices I'd have to make just for the chance of getting hurt or being added to a list.
by bigyabai | 2026-01-15 17:20:18+00:00
Nvidia is not a venture capital outlet. They are a self-sustaining business with several high-margin customers that will buy out their whole product line faster than any iPhone or Mac.

From TSMC's perspective, Apple is the one that needs financial assistance. If they wanted the wafers more than Nvidia, they'd be paying more. But they don't.
by LasEspuelas | 2026-01-15 17:20:27+00:00
This is the comment on the Mother Jones entry:
"There is consensus that Mother Jones is generally reliable. Almost all editors consider Mother Jones a biased source, so its statements (particularly on political topics) may need to be attributed. Consider whether content from this publication constitutes due weight before citing it in an article."

They acknowledge it is a biased source and they make a distinction between reliability and bias. Not familiar with the publication.
by ajsnigrutin | 2026-01-15 17:20:34+00:00
You don't need an ARM, and for the same price, before the RAM crisis, you could get many tiny PCs for the same amount of money, with proper SSDs and power supplies and in tiny form factors.

https://teampandory.com/2024/09/24/gmktec-g5-mini-pc-review-...

Something like this ($155) cost less than the Pi + case + power supply + nvme addon board + ssd, and it also runs windows and any other x86 OS.
by seanw444 | 2026-01-15 17:20:43+00:00
I'd be interested to know as well. I may be in the minority, but I'll take a FOSS project with 80% of the features over a proprietary one with 100% of the features, almost every time. The philosophy of freedom is usually more important to me than squeezing out every last drop of functionality in exchange for a black box that I have to pay for and rely on some company that may or may not exist in a few years to develop it.
by cogman10 | 2026-01-15 17:20:57+00:00
> Why are Americans so passive?

Decades of copaganda paired with police brutality. A fairly large portion of americans view anyone with a badge as "the good guy" by default.

But, I think people are also fearful about what happens after the riots start. Nobody is excited about Trump using a riot as an excuse to declare martial law and deploy the military everywhere. There's still some hope that cities and states will step up and do their job. These ICE agents can and should be prosecuted.

> Are people inside the country not getting the same news we're getting on the outside?

They aren't. And unfortunately a LOT of US media is sanewashing. We have dedicated channels like fox news which are basically framing everything as "violent protesters attacking the police for trying to arrest bad guys". But even centrist and slightly left mainstream media is bending over backwards to give excuses and "both sides" this. Doing things like using a lot of passive language or just not reporting on the raids all together. You basically need to be online or tuned in to alternative media to learn about this stuff.

There's also the very simple and real fact that fascists already have the power. People are scared. There's about 30% of the citizenship who could literally drive a car through a protest or open up fire who'd be completely protected by the state for those actions. Most of the people that'd do that are already employed by ICE.
by Sleaker | 2026-01-15 17:20:57+00:00
I'm still not quite sure how UK law impacts the US. I was hoping for explicit examples of someone actually being removed from power because they were critical of the president. I think that would be pretty big news and the closest I have heard was one of the ex-military standing congresspeople being threatened with reduced military benefits, or legal action, but not actually anyone being removed from a position.
by ceejayoz | 2026-01-15 17:20:58+00:00
Same thing happened to Sears.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/4385-failing-to-plan-h...

> He radically restructured operations, splitting the company into thirty, and later forty, different units that were to compete against each other. Instead of cooperating, as in a normal firm, divisions such as apparel, tools, appliances, human resources, IT and branding were now in essence to operate as autonomous businesses, each with their own president, board of directors, chief marketing officer and statement of profit or loss. An eye-popping 2013 series of interviews by Bloomberg Businessweek investigative journalist Mina Kimes with some forty former executives described Lampert’s Randian calculus: “If the company’s leaders were told to act selfishly, he argued, they would run their divisions in a rational manner, boosting overall performance.”
by 827a | 2026-01-15 17:21:04+00:00
They're booked out by the people making these bulk deals. Apple has significant weight to throw at TSMC, Micron, etc when it comes to negotiating both capacity and price; far more than the DIY manufacturers. The same laws apply to Nvidia, Quallcomm, and AMD.

The sub-argument to this is that graphics cards will drive up fab prices for other packaged silicon products; this has probably been true for the past two years, but its very likely that we'll see this change in 2026. Even if theoretical demand stays high (which is debatable, but not for today): every major AI lab is sitting on warehouses of gigawatts of ready silicon, with nowhere to power them, so real demand will drop as the bottlenecks of data center construction and power delivery are solved. Those problems will take another few years. Even if these companies have the money and want to spend it: It makes zero sense to buy cards today, to have them sit in a warehouse for two years, when you can sit on the cash and buy newer-generation cards in a year.

I would bet very real money that, sometime in 2026, we will see Nvidia reduce or cancel a committed fab order from TSMC.
Ask HN: Why did forum culture die?
by nthypes | 2026-01-15 17:21:17+00:00
I've been thinking about how vibrant web forums used to be in the 2000s and early 2010s - specialized communities with deep expertise, long-running threads, inside jokes, and real relationships. Places like Something Awful, vBulletin forums for every niche hobby, phpBB boards for gaming clans, even early Reddit.
Now most of that energy has moved to Discord servers, subreddits, or died entirely. The few surviving forums feel like ghost towns.

What killed forum culture? Was this inevitable, or did we lose something valuable? Are there examples of forums that are thriving today?
by ronsor | 2026-01-15 17:21:28+00:00
I don't think people realize how important incremental improvements are. Before open-source software took off, everyone either licensed a proprietary library or invented an ad-hoc solution. If the proprietary library was discontinued, you often couldn't extend or improve it (and even if you could, you couldn't share your changes), so you started over, either from scratch or with another vendor redoing the same work.

This is also why we have so much e-waste: once a manufacturer ditches a product, its usefulness is permanently limited, both by law and practicality. Copyright expires eventually, but so far in the future that we'll all be dead by then.
by konne88 | 2026-01-15 17:21:33+00:00
I do believe that Wikipedia is one of the least biased sources out there, but there is definitely bias. Here is a concrete example. Compare the introduction paragraph of the English circumcision article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumcision) with the German one (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zirkumzision).

The English intro talks a lot about medical advantages of the procedure: "reduced rates of sexually transmitted infections and urinary tract infections. This includes reducing the incidence of cancer-causing forms of human papillomavirus (HPV) and reducing HIV transmission among heterosexual men in high-risk populations by up to 60%; ... Neonatal circumcision decreases the risk of penile cancer.[14] ... Some medical organizations take the position that it carries prophylactic health benefits that outweigh the risks," and has one sentence of it being controversial worldwide "others hold that its medical benefits are not sufficient to justify it."

The German one has not a single sentence in the intro about advantages, but a whole paragraph on how it's controversial. "Die Zirkumzision als Routineeingriff ist besonders bei Minderjährigen umstritten, ... Von vielen Kinderschutzverbänden und einem Teil der Ärzteorganisationen wird die nicht medizinisch begründete Beschneidung abgelehnt, da sie den Körper irreversibel verändere und bei nicht einwilligungsfähigen Jungen nicht im Einklang mit Gesundheitsschutz und Kindeswohl stehe.[6] Im angelsächsischen Bereich gibt es schon länger eine gesellschaftliche Debatte zwischen Gruppen von Gegnern der Beschneidung („Intaktivisten“-Bewegung) und Befürwortern. Umstritten sind insbesondere medizinischer Nutzen und Risiken, bei Kindern auch ethische und rechtliche Aspekte sowie die Beurteilung im Hinblick auf die Menschenrechte, vor allem das Recht auf körperliche Unversehrtheit."

I'm not sure who's right, but it's hard to not see some bias here.
by senordevnyc | 2026-01-15 17:21:40+00:00
Biden was ostensibly too old when he became President, but he hadn't started the obvious decline that we all witnessed in 2024.

And I still would much rather have had Biden for those four years than have had to face what we're facing now with Trump back then. Except with Trump being 4 years farther away from death than he is now...
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-01-15 17:21:54+00:00
> Then Europe is a bunch of countries, most of them speaking different languages, with way more difference in culture than the states of the US. I'm not sure it matters though, it really isn't relevant, but probably the wrong thing to bring up regardless, when the reality looks the opposite than you seem to think.

There's certainly more cultural similarity across the US, but that doesn't mean there isn't a sense of emotional and geographic distance. Remember that the typical riot participant is not a political theorist who has some deep theory of how discharging their duty will enact change, just an average guy who's mad as hell about what's happening and not going to take it anymore.
by gus_massa | 2026-01-15 17:22:45+00:00
You want to rove that 8 is too much or too few?

It looks relevant, so I think it will be welcome. I sugest to try, but obviously I don't know if it will get many upvotes.

Remember to read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html , in particular avoid too overhyped titles like "amazing", "the best", ...

After posting, add a comment explaining you are the author and you are going to reply questions and provide more info if requested. People is usually more friendly here when the author is in the comment thread.
by technothrasher | 2026-01-15 17:22:50+00:00
I've been exploring making a camera trap to put out in my woods, to see if I can get a good photo of the very illusive bobcats we've got around here. I went out to California last month on a photo tour to get some nice shots of less skittish cats, and it gave me the motivation to continue my build of the camera trap. I just today received the custom little PCB I designed to read an IR sensor and have an STM32G convert it to focus and shutter release signals for the camera. I built the board up this morning and am getting ready to fire it up with my J-Link debugger probe attached and start the work on the firmware.
by scarecrowbob | 2026-01-15 17:22:53+00:00
So, from my perspective, there were in fact a number of "religious wars", but the folks who lost all ended up on reservations or murdered and in mass graves. I mean 650K folks died in the mid 19th century in a single 5-year war. And that's not counting how we might code the Atlantic slave trade or the post-reconstruction violence, or labor violence into that history.

As a person who has been involved with an riot in a small town, I think that, in the deep unconscious of most folks in the US, is something structure:

"well, there wasn't violence in the 19th and early 20th and mid 20th and late 20thC century... well okay, there was violence but they put folks who were resisting into mass graves or incarceration and everyone was better off for it".

That is, consider that the obverse of your claim might be true:

the violence committed by the US has been so totalizing that it's victims have never even counted as victims and that holocaust so complete that it only exists in the subconscious of white US citizens.

I find that idea to be a very easy way to understand why white folks are so passive and pro-authority.
by rvz | 2026-01-15 17:22:56+00:00
Yes indeed. 6 years of non-stop outages across the platform every month.

Even self-hosting would have been more stable than sitting on GitHub as predicted more than half a decade ago. [0]

Now there is no 'CEO of GitHub' to contact this time (Satya does not care).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803
by UebVar | 2026-01-15 17:23:12+00:00
The interview started with the most mundane question "Who are you?", and the very first sentence of Wales is either a lie or misleading. The journalists asks for clarification (thats a journalists job, btw), and in his second sentence of the interview Wales insults the journalist. I'm pretty sure who is the jerk here.

It also was Wales who bought up the topic, not the journalist. If he considers it a stupid topic he does not want to talk about, why is it the very first thing he talks about?
by exabrial | 2026-01-15 17:23:41+00:00
It's societal. I don't really have a way I can translate it for someone raised in the Western culture.

Counter example:

While westerners would look at 996 with confusion, Chinese would look at Western "intellectual property" constructs with confusion. To them it's not "copying", it's they figured out a better way to do it and the rest is fair game.
by munchhausen | 2026-01-15 17:24:11+00:00
This makes me so upset. I do not understand why do we even let American companies into our economies. Why are the taxis in my city riding under the flag of Uber, why is there an Airbnb renting out downtown apartments online, from across the Atlantic.

These companies don't even pay tax here. This is highway robbery.

Maybe, years ago, there was innovation involved. Yes, when Uber started here, it was a pretty novel idea to order a taxi through a mobile app. It was a question of time but they were the first to do it. Ok.

That was then. We don't need them anymore for anything, thanks to open-source SW. Especially nowadays, when a team of 10 people can put together a decent Uber in half a year, tops. Many young people here understand this. We will not let this go on.
by mmmBacon | 2026-01-15 17:24:13+00:00
By what metric is the US lagging? By any objective measure we can see the dominance of US technology. I think it’s most of the rest of the world that’s being left behind; Europe in particular. If what you’re saying is true the US economy would also be flagging but it’s not. If what you’re saying is true, you’d see the list of the world’s most valuable companies dominated by non-US firms.

I think you are confusing the current climate of immigration enforcement and reform with being anti-immigration. The US will continue to draw top talent because the US is where the bulk of the opportunities are and will be for at least the next 5 years.

It’s been widely discussed that the immigration system has been abused, especially by the tech industry. This reform started under Obama. The current outcry is a reaction to the most recent federal election. Reform does not mean the US is anti-immigrant. It may mean lower levels of immigration that’s more selective for talent.