MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Agent_Builder | 2026-01-19 06:32:49+00:00
This mirrors what we ran into pretty quickly.

The agent wasn’t failing because it couldn’t write code. It failed because “code-only” still leaves a lot of implicit authority. Once it’s allowed to reason freely across steps, it starts making assumptions that were never explicitly approved.

What helped us was forcing the workflow to be boring. Each step declares what it can touch, what tools it can use, and what kind of output is allowed. When the step ends, that authority disappears.

The agent becomes less clever, but way more predictable. Fewer surprising edits, fewer cascading mistakes.

We ended up using GTWY for this style of step-gated agent work, and it made long-running agents feel manageable instead of fragile.
by happymellon | 2026-01-19 06:33:13+00:00
As someone not in the US, can someone explain what this is talking about.

Walmart doesn't support NFC payments.

Walmart doesn't support NFC payments if you do scanning of items while you shop.

Why would Walmart suddenly accept a method of payment just because you are doing your own scanning of your shopping?

Though it was only a couple of years ago I had a similar experience with other US grocery stores when I visited. Kroger's (mentioned in the article) for example didn't accept contactless payments either which made it feel like a widespread grocery store problem.

Did most grocery store already migrate prior to the Kroger caving?
by GrowingSideways | 2026-01-19 06:34:46+00:00
Plan 9 is just a brand smeared across a codebase, just like every other operating system.

> If so, it is unsuitable for being a database. It can run databases, because those can work without transactions. But can't do native writes without them. Can it do transactional reads? How would you represent isolation levels?

Bruh ask 9front
by OsrsNeedsf2P | 2026-01-19 06:35:20+00:00
> You can tell they're not just wrapping an existing rendering engine because of those very obvious rendering glitches, but the pages are legible and look mostly correct.

Honestly expected more from a sw article. How is this proof, when it could easily be the agents including packages to do the heaving lifting and then screwing it up on top?
Show HN: Interactive physics simulations I built while teaching my daughter
by anticlickwise | 2026-01-19 06:36:57+00:00
I started teaching my daughter physics by showing her how things actually work - plucking guitar strings to explain vibration, mixing paints to understand light, dropping objects to see gravity in action.

She learned so much faster through hands-on exploration than through books or videos. That's when I realized: what if I could recreate these physical experiments as interactive simulations?

Lumen is the result - an interactive physics playground covering sound, light, motion, life, and mechanics. Each module lets you manipulate variables in real-time and see/hear the results immediately.

Try it: https://www.projectlumen.app/
by oreally | 2026-01-19 06:37:01+00:00
Overall, it'll be a worse world if you can't make a living purely on hard skills.

If soft skills is mostly about sucking up, and there is no demand for any hard skill, you'll find society less able to stand up to the pressures of a majority group, because guess what, they're all too scared to stand up as an individual for fear of dropping the ball on the soft skill.

Moreover, the game theory of the soft skill is treacherous and uncertain. There's too many unknown unknowns, it's like not knowing if the dice you're playing is loaded against you. You don't know how many cultural land mines you might step on when interacting with your superior, or if there's a glass ceiling enforced by a group who will nitpick on minor irrelevant 'faults'.

Whereas compare soft skills to hard skills, you have a major advantage in certainty. There is a dice loaded in your favor. You know you can get much of the stuff done, and once you've reached the desired results, that's all there is to it.

I also could go on on how soft skills erodes human's capacity for judging what is value, instead basing their opinions on the majority source of opinions... It'll definitely be a much more irrational world to live in.
by Terr_ | 2026-01-19 06:37:24+00:00
Was... was that nonsense supposed to be some kind of "gotcha"?

Giving the federal government the option to deputize individuals as international agents does not even remotely suggest that States were agreeing to completely abolish all their local gun-laws for all time.

That's like claiming the permission to establish a national postal service somehow bars States from having DUI laws, because any drunkard could maybe suddenly be hired as a postman.
by tuned | 2026-01-19 06:39:16+00:00
it most-likely will in terms of performance as it uses 50% less memory (for sure it will at inference time that is the most used operation on web services), because it can leverage longer T and D if the design is confirmed and the quality of generation is comparable to other models.
If this very basic assumption is correct, it means a lot of savings in electricity as the same GPUs can resolve more requests.
by jmyeet | 2026-01-19 06:39:38+00:00
Given the climate, I've been thinking about this issue a lot. I'd say that broadly there are two groups of inauthentic actors online:

1. People who live in poorer countries who simply know how to rage bait and are trying to earn an income. In many such countries $200 in ad revenue from Twitter, for example, is significant; and

2. Organized bot farms who are pushing a given message or scam. These too tend to be operated out of poorer countries because it's cheaper.

Last month, Twitter kind of exposed this accidentally with an interesting feature where it showed account location with no warning whatsoever. Interestingly, showing the country in the profile got disabled from government accounts after it raised some serious questions [1].

So I started thinking about the technical feasibility of showing location (country or state for large countries) on all public social media ccounts. The obvious defense is to use a VPN in the country you want to appear to be from but I think that's a solvable problem.

Another thing I read was about NVidia's efforts to combat "smuggling" of GPUs to China with location verification [2]. The idea is fairly simple. You send a challenge and measure the latency. VPNs can't hide latency.

So every now and again the Twitter or IG or Tiktok server would answer an API request with a challenge, which couldn't be antiticpated and would also be secure, being part of the HTTPS traffic. The client would respond to the challenge and if the latency was 100-150ms consistently despite showing a location of Virginia then you can deem them inauthentic and basically just downrank all their content.

There's more to it of course. A lot is in the details. Like you'd have to handle verified accounts and people traveling and high-latency networks (eg Starlink).

You might say "well the phone farms will move to the US". That might be true but it makes it more expensive and easier to police.

It feels like a solvable problem.

[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/x-new-location-transpar...

[2]: https://aihola.com/article/nvidia-gpu-location-verification-...
by LexiMax | 2026-01-19 06:39:41+00:00
> Great, if you are right everyone is going to be using Rust eventually.

Every task does not need speed and safety. Therefore, "everyone" doesn't need Rust.

But I could easily see a future where C++ is relegated to legacy language status. It has already had decades of garbage-collected languages chipping away at most of its general-purpose uses, but Rust seems capable and in a position to take away most of its remaining niches.

It's kind of why the old C++ programmer that I am decided to learn Rust in the first place - seemed like a good idea at the time to skate where the puck is heading.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-19 06:39:44+00:00
Did you not bother to check or are prices being segregated by market?

I'm in the US and when I visit the Radxa AliExpress listing (both yesterday and just now) the 32 GB variant is priced at $644 (includes import fees) plus $24 shipping. The 16 GB variant is $547 and the 8 GB is $479.

The OPi6+ 32 GB is $300 from Amazon locally or $415 plus shipping from AliExpress. (The irony of referring to Amazon as local is not lost on me.)

O6N is over $400 without any installed RAM from what I could find (making it $600 minimum given current RAM prices).

Also reading HN comments it seems the general software support picture is not great for any of these. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46401499
by shagie | 2026-01-19 06:43:24+00:00
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2100 - The Naming of Hosts

The Naming of Hosts is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a host must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-19 06:43:55+00:00
> What’s even the point of writing out that first paragraph otherwise?

I was correcting your misguided statement:

> Their critics didn’t make that!

by pointing out that we, among other things, build the libraries that you/Claude are copy-and-pasting from. When you make an assertion that is factually incorrect, and someone corrects you, that does not mean they are threatened.
by tuned | 2026-01-19 06:43:59+00:00
it made sense to me as it is a very simple idea I guess: causal self-attention compute QKV distances computing on the full vectors for Q,K and V; the topological transformer can provide the same computation using Q, scalar K and V. Instead of [N², N², N²] -> [N², N, N²] is used. If generation is confirmed to be on par in terms of quality, the gains are evident.
by rifty | 2026-01-19 06:44:37+00:00
In theory I like the idea of prediction markets but how they are done right now makes a bunch of markets too insecure to put much stock into or informationally unvaluable to inform other decisions

There is little incentive for someone with significant information, reason, or intuition to reveal it early leaving the market dumb for most of its existence or also open for someone influencing the outcome late.

They also aren't currently that reliable for gauging the wisdom of the crowds for situations where trust in the market effects its outcome. It's easy due to the scale of them for someone to just burn money to skew the perception of it for rhetorical and influential benefits.

I feel like there is no getting off this train though because news media companies are still desperate for revenue. Gambling around news will either increase advertising revenue for them, or if they do real information uncovering journalism, drive subscriptions because there's now incentive for getting news early on more than just financial news.
Ask HN: How do teams handle dynamic tool discovery for AI agents?
by learningeek | 2026-01-19 06:45:12+00:00
In traditional service architectures, DNS / service mesh
works — but in AI agent platforms where tools may be
added/removed and clients need capability-based discovery,
this pattern feels insufficient.

What approaches have companies used for dynamic
capability discovery (not just network location) for LLM
agent workloads? Would love to hear successful patterns
or stumbling blocks from real implementations.

Context: I've built a minimal MCP control plane / registry prototype for enterprise
discovery, but curious about patterns in practice.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-19 06:45:36+00:00
Yes! There is a similar thing happening in windmills that leads to Betz' law, if a windmill were to extract all energy in the wind it wouldn't work because the air has no place to go to behind the machine. In order to do meaningful extraction of energy you simply have to accept a minimum amount of loss, attempting to increase that fraction will increase the losses, not decrease them.
by bobjordan | 2026-01-19 06:47:16+00:00
Linters...custom made pre-commit linters which are aligned with your code base needs. The agents are great at creating these linters and then forevermore it can help feedback and guide them. My key repo now has "audit_logging_linter, auth_response_linter, datetime_linter, fastapi_security_linter, fastapi_transaction_linter, logger_security_linter, org_scope_linter, service_guardrails_linter, sql_injection_linter, test_infrastructure_linter, token_security_checker..." basically every time you find an implementation gap vs your repo standards, make a linter! Of course, need to create some standards first. But if you know you need protected routes and things like this, then linters can auto-check the work and feedback to the agents, to keep them on track. Now, I even have scripts that can automatically fix the issues for the agents. This is the way to go.
by irskep | 2026-01-19 06:47:50+00:00
Working on mrjob was a big part of my first job out of college. Fun to see it get mentioned more than ten years later.

What some commenters don't realize about these bureaucratic IO-heavy expensive tools is that sometimes they are used in order to apply a familiar way of thinking, which has Business Benefits. Sometimes you don't know if your task will take seconds, minutes, hours, days, or weeks on one fast machine with a well-thought-out program, but you really need it to take at most hours, and writing well-thought-out-programs takes time you could spend on other stuff. If you know you can scale the program in advance, it's lower risk to just write it as a Hadoop job and be done with it. Also, it helps to have an "easy" pattern for processing Data That Feels Big Even If It Isn't That Big, Although Yelp's Data Actually Was Big. Such was the case with mrjob stuff at Yelp in 2012. They got a lot of mileage out of it!

The other funny thing about mrjob is that it's a layer on Hadoop Streaming, which is a term for when the Java process actually running the Hadoop worker opens a subprocess to your Python script which accepts input on stdin and writes output on stdout, rather than working on values in memory. A high I/O price to pay for the convenience of writing Python!
by rafapra | 2026-01-19 06:48:02+00:00
Hey HN! I'm Rafa, the founder of CervellaSwarm.

Two years ago, I was stuck. Working a job that didn't fit, living through some rough times in Brazil, then moving to Italy after COVID looking for a fresh start. I needed change - not just geographically, but mentally.

I went deep on personal development, habits, mindset. Then AI happened. I saw the opportunity and thought: "I can actually do this."

But working with AI agents was... chaotic. Context limits. Lost state. Switching between conversations. Repeating yourself 50 times. I kept thinking: "There has to be a better way."

So I built CervellaSwarm. 260+ work sessions later, it's real.

*What it is:*

- 16 specialized AI agents (1 orchestrator "Regina" + 3 quality/security/ops guardians + 12 workers)
- MCP-native (Model Context Protocol) - agents communicate like a real team
- Privacy-first: your code stays local, no cloud sync required
- CLI + MCP server ready to plug into Claude Desktop

*What makes it different:*

- Agents have persistent memory across sessions (SNCP system)
- They coordinate - backend talks to frontend, marketing validates UX before implementation
- Built by someone who actually uses it daily for 3 production projects

*Try it:*

npx cervellaswarm init
npx cervellaswarm task "add login page"

Apache-2.0 licensed. Uses your own Anthropic API key.

*What I need from you:*

- Does this solve a real problem for you?
- What would make you actually use it vs regular Claude?
- Any dealbreakers in the architecture?

GitHub: https://github.com/rafapra3008/CervellaSwarm
npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/cervellaswarm
by tristandunn | 2026-01-19 06:48:38+00:00
I realized this recently and I've been creating a RuboCop plug-in[1] to automatically have the LLM code better match my personal style. I don't think it'll ever be perfect, but if it saves me from moving a few bits around or adding spacing I'd rather see then it's wroth. The fun part is I'm vibe coding it, since as long as the tests verify the rules then it doesn't really matter much how they work. As a result adding a new rule is pasting in LLM generated code followed by what I'd prefer it look like and asking it to add a rule.

[1]: https://github.com/tristandunn/rubocop-vibe/
by AnonyX387 | 2026-01-19 06:48:45+00:00
> Right now i spent a lot of “back pressure” on fitting the scope of the task into something that will fit in one context window (ie the useful computation, not the raw token count). I suspect we will see a large breakthrough when someone finally figures out a good system for having the llm do this.

I've found https://github.com/obra/superpowers very helpful for breaking the work up into logical chunks a subagent can handle.
by dawitworku | 2026-01-19 06:49:39+00:00
I’ve been using the Internet Archive a lot recently and found the default UI pretty slow and painful for multi-file items and bulk downloads.

This tool provides a much cleaner experience:

Server-side search & pagination

Better previews for long playlists/episodes

Reliable browser downloads via a proxy

One-click ZIP downloads

Keyboard-friendly media player

Open source and community-built.
Source: https://github.com/Dawaman43/downloadstuffs

Not affiliated with Internet Archive.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-19 06:50:12+00:00
You can hook the system call to open a file regardless of libc use. If for some strange reason you really wanted to patch libc and the program you're using statically links it (ex musl) that isn't an issue - just patch the relevant libc implementation and recompile. But more generally, if you have access to the source code then why would you not directly patch the program in question instead of resorting to these sorts of shenanigans?

Seriously, you're doing it wrong. Just hook the relevant system call and be done with it. Your usecase is literally one of the first eBPF tutorials that comes up when looking for information about modifying system call arguments. https://github.com/eunomia-bpf/bpf-developer-tutorial/tree/m...
by kbdiaz | 2026-01-19 06:50:27+00:00
sounds like it could be many things. there was a well-known paper called Voyager by NASA in which an agent was able to write its own skills in the form of code and improve them over time.
funnily enough this agent played minecraft, and its skills were to collect materials or craft things.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.16291
by Ballas | 2026-01-19 06:50:29+00:00
That gold rating was last tested with wine 5.0 in 2020. I have tried many times to install Office 2016 after that, and failed because Microsoft keeps changing their login/activation front-end. The last time the issue was with some Edge-dependency. For a while it was possible to get it working with Crossover, and then it broke again. Currently I'm using WinApps for the infrequent project that requires MS Office.

That said, I haven't tried Office on wine in the last 2 years, and there have a lot of development in that time...
by dchuk | 2026-01-19 06:52:05+00:00
I’m very bought in to the idea that raw coding is now a solved problem with the current models and agentic harnesses. Let alone what’s coming in the near term.

That being said, I think we’re in a weird phase right now where people’s obvious mental health issues are appearing as “hyper productivity” due to the use of these tools to absolutely spam out code that isn’t necessarily broadly coherent but is locally impressive. I’m watching multiple people both publicly and privately clearly breaking down mentally because of the “power” AI is bestowing on them. Their wires are completely crossed when it comes to the value of outputs vs outcomes and they’re espousing generated nonsense as it’s thoughtful insight.

It’s an interesting thing to watch play out.
by hahahahhaah | 2026-01-19 06:52:10+00:00
Posts feel less valuable as files as they are of the moment. I don't need this comment as a docx, thank you all the same.

So I agree.

Maybe building it that way opens possibilities I can't see?

But for functional apps it seems useful to have a file you can download and use somewhere else. Images and movies are a great example. I can record a video in Loom and chuck it on Youtube. Youtube can't lock me on that video. it is my file. Imagine if that was not the case. It would suck.
by yellowapple | 2026-01-19 06:52:54+00:00
The “unwashed masses” are the end users; both “cathedrals” and “bazaars” welcome all users to partake without demanding an entry fee. The difference between a “cathedral” v. a “bazaar” is whether or not those “unwashed masses” are easily able to become the “staff”; the analogy hinges on the relative difficulty required to join the “clergy” v. become a “merchant”.
by bhaak | 2026-01-19 06:53:20+00:00
With the right context both are pretty good actually.

I think the emoji one is most pronounced in bullet point lists. AI loves to add an emoji to bullet points. I guess they got it from lists in hip GitHub projects.

The other one is not as strong but if the "not X but Y" is somewhat nonsensical or unnecessary this is very strong indicator it's AI.
Show HN: Learning Path for CBSE Math
by nutanc | 2026-01-19 06:54:00+00:00
Math is a hierarchical subject. You build up your concepts one by one. So we have created an interactive learning path for CBSE math. Just click on any chapter and see the pre requisites for that chapter. Some chapters will need lots of pre requisites. Some need a lot less. Want to refresh your learning, just double click and do the interactive text book :)
by jacquesm | 2026-01-19 06:54:15+00:00
They gamified politics to the point where the state of the country doesn't matter at all as long as they get to have their way. This can't hold long term but it will do immense damage to the USA and the rest of the world until the inevitable correction. I try not to think too hard about how bad this could get but it is hard not to lie awake at night.
by jamesblonde | 2026-01-19 06:55:06+00:00
I got turned off in the first paragraph with the misuse of the term "back pressure". "back pressure" is a term from data engineering to specifically indicate a feedback signal that indicates a service is overloaded and that clients should adapt their behavior.

Backpressure != feedback (the more general term). And in the agentic world, we use the term 'context' to describe information used to help LLMs make decisions, where the context data is not part of the LLM's training data. Then, we have verifiable tasks (what he is really talking about), where RL is used in post-training in a harness environment to use feedback signals to learn about type systems, programming language syntax/semantics, etc.
by skipants | 2026-01-19 06:55:54+00:00
I'm pretty sure the OP is talking about this thread. I have it top of mind because I participated and was extremely frustrated about, not just the AI slop, but how much the author claimed not to use AI when they obviously used it.

You can read it yourself if you'd like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46589386

It was not just the em dashes and the "absolutely right!" It was everything together, including the robotic clarifying question at the end of their comments.