MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gruez | 2026-01-15 05:03:12+00:00
>The point of the article is that he can set the C and D scales to the proportion he needs, one time, and then just move the slider around for each ingredient, rather than doing a different calculation for each ingredient.

Is punching a number into a calculator and then multiplying by M (memory function, for the scale factor) really that much work than carefully sliding tithe slider into position and reading/eyeballing the output?
by octoberfranklin | 2026-01-15 05:03:24+00:00
Frankly, both parties feel like the "elected administration runs this ship like its own personal party barge" when they're out of power.

If you don't like that, the only solution is to push for limited government next time you're in power.

Whatever power you put into the hands of the government is guaranteed to fall into your enemy's hands some day. This is a deliberate design feature of the US political system. It's the only way to get people to wake up for the need to limit government power.

A good start would be ending selective prosecution by restoring the original role of grand juries: to decide whether or not to hire a contract prosecutor for a single case. Public Prosecutors can be just like Public Defenders -- contractors of the court, with no discretionary powers.
by LudwigNagasena | 2026-01-15 05:03:35+00:00
That's a distinction without a difference, in the end you still have an arbitrary bash command that you have to validate.

And it is simply easier to whitelist directories than individual commands. Unix utilities weren't created with fine-grained capabilities and permissions in mind. Wherever you add a new script or utility to a whitelist, you have to actively think whether any new combination may lead to privileges escalation or unintended effects.
by nine_k | 2026-01-15 05:04:35+00:00
I wonder what prevents a GH action from connecting to your VPN (Wireguard is fine) and post tons of diagnostics right onto your screen, and then, when something goes badly wrong, or when a certain point is reached, to just keep polling an HTTP endpoint for shell commands to execute.

I mean. I understand, it would time out eventually. But it may be enough time to interactively check a few things right inside the running task's process.

Of course this should only happen if the PR contains a file that says where to connect and when to stop for interactive input. You would only push such a file when an action is misbehaving, and you want to debug it.

I understand that it's a band-aid, but a band-aid is better than the nothing which is available right now.
by Agent_Builder | 2026-01-15 05:06:04+00:00
We ran into the same tension while building GTWY.ai. The breakthrough for us wasn’t trying to enumerate “safe” commands globally, but scoping permissions to the step, not the agent. Instead of giving an agent ongoing SSH access with a command allowlist, each step declared exactly what it needed (read logs, run a specific query) and nothing more.

That reduced review fatigue a lot, because most steps became obviously safe by construction. Autonomy worked best when it was short-lived and purpose-specific, not continuous. The line for us ended up being: if the agent can surprise you, it has too much authority.
by strken | 2026-01-15 05:06:27+00:00
I think the argument is that commercial recipes in the US are written in proportional notation, e.g. 1:2:3 sourdough, but recipes in countries which use metric give units, e.g. 1kg:2L:3kg. I also note that if you add small proportions of an ingredient, e.g. salt, it might be easier to change units in metric (5g salt) while it would be easier to write proportionally in imperial (0.005 parts salt) if you were then going to scale to to a tonne/ton of dough.

I have no idea if this is true but it sounds like a coherent argument that isn't just volumetric vs mass units.
by jkaplowitz | 2026-01-15 05:07:49+00:00
All PDF security can be stripped by freely available software in ways that allow subsequent modifications without restriction, except the kind of PDF security that requires an unavailable password to decrypt to view, but in that case viewing isn’t possible either.

Subsequent modifications would of course invalidate any digital signature you’ve applied, but that only matters if the recipient cares about your digital signature remaining valid.

Put another way, there’s no such thing as a true read-only PDF if the software necessary to circumvent the other PDF security restrictions is available on the recipient’s computer and if preserving the validity of your digital signature is not considered important.

But sure, it’s very possible to distribute a PDF that’s a lot more annoying to modify than your private source format. No disagreement there.
by chopratejas | 2026-01-15 05:08:01+00:00
Author here. I built Headroom because I was spending $200/day running agents with tool calls.

The problem: tools return huge JSON (search results, DB queries, file listings). Each response bloats context. By turn 10, you're paying for 100k+ tokens on every LLM call.

Existing solutions have a fundamental tradeoff:
- Truncation: fast but you might cut data the model needs
- Summarization: slow (~500ms) and still lossy
- Bigger context: just delays the problem, costs more

The insight behind Headroom:

You can't know which data matters until the model tries to use it. So instead of guessing, compress aggressively AND keep a retrieval path.

1. Smart compression - not random truncation. For JSON arrays, we keep errors (100%), statistical anomalies, items matching the user's query (BM25 + embeddings), first/last items. For code, we use tree-sitter AST parsing to preserve imports, signatures, types - output is guaranteed syntactically valid. For logs, we keep errors and state transitions.

2. CCR (Compress-Cache-Retrieve) - everything compressed gets cached locally. We inject a `headroom_retrieve` tool. If the model needs more data, it asks and gets it in <1ms.

The retrieval is what makes aggressive compression safe. In practice, the model almost never retrieves because the smart compression keeps what matters. But when it does need more, it can get it.

Results on my workloads:
- Search results (1000 items): 45k → 4.5k tokens (90%)
- Agent with tools (10 calls): 100k → 15k tokens (85%)
- Overhead: 1-5ms per request

Usage:

As a proxy (zero code changes):
pip install "headroom-ai[proxy]"
headroom proxy --port 8787
ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=http://localhost:8787 claude

Or wrap your client:
from headroom import HeadroomClient
client = HeadroomClient(OpenAI())

LangChain integration is one line.

Limitations I'm aware of:
- CCR adds memory overhead (LRU cache, configurable)
- AST compression requires tree-sitter (~50MB)
- Not battle-tested on all edge cases yet

Happy to answer questions about the compression algorithms, the retrieval mechanism, or anything else.
by nickdeis | 2026-01-15 05:08:56+00:00
I built something similar for handling transactions/savepoints in drizzle: https://github.com/nickdeis/drizzle-transaction-context

Other languages like python and golang have similar concepts, but AsyncLocalStorage has a really nice API suited for async programming. It also pairs really nice with drizzle's savepoint implementation since both AsyncLocalStorage and savepoints can be nested.
by bahmboo | 2026-01-15 05:09:04+00:00
This is not helpful. "everybody" and "everyone" and "no one" are meaningless catch alls. I understand where you are coming from but this is a very limited world view that does not add anything to the conversation. I am sure that where I draw the line is not where someone else will draw the line. We do not know "exactly" where to draw the line.
by jandrewrogers | 2026-01-15 05:09:37+00:00
They are likely referring to the scope of fine-grained specialization and compile-time codegen that is possible in modern C++ via template metaprogramming. Some types of complex optimizations common in C++ are not really expressible in Rust because the generics and compile-time facilities are significantly more limited.

As with C, there is nothing preventing anyone from writing all of that generated code by hand. It is just far more work and much less maintainable than e.g. using C++20. In practice, few people have the time or patience to generate this code manually so it doesn't get written.

Effective optimization at scale is difficult without strong metaprogramming capabilities. This is an area of real strength for C++ compared to other systems languages.
by caminanteblanco | 2026-01-15 05:10:26+00:00
I'm not sure what the use case for this is, but I've been using it as a inefficient messaging service with my girlfriend, ie:

https://c1ic.link/campaign_WxjLdF_login_page_2.bat

You seem to be able to encode arbitrary text, so long as it follows [A-Za-z0-9]+\.[A-Za-z0-9]+
by Nevermark | 2026-01-15 05:10:37+00:00
> I'm sure they can do more. I'm just not sure "more" has anything to do with dragging windows around.

You get one Mac "window", with all your other windows jammed into it, as is necessary for physical screens, but entirely unnecessary for real 3D space.

Those "windows" could be frames containing three dimensional graphs, design structures, the list goes on and on.

The combo of eye selection, gestures + keyboard and trackpad are already wonderful. They need a little smoothing out, but work great already.

The contrast in power between Mac-in-Vision vs. the iPad-like-apps in Vision is dismal. The former is power but artificially flat and constrained, the latter is toy but with huge interface potential. The obvious software imposed (not hardware) gap in the middle, when using both, is enormous.

The device is made for so much more. As in, real computing in the "spacial computing". Otherwise, it is just a toy or an expensive Mac screen replacement. A waste of what should be a huge new category win for Apple.
by eggplantiny | 2026-01-15 05:10:47+00:00
Hi HN,
I've been building autonomous agents and noticed a recurring failure mode: as business logic becomes more complex, even the most capable LLMs struggle to maintain consistency. I realized the problem isn't just the "brain" (the agent), but the lack of a structured "world" for it to inhabit.

Most current frameworks are Agent-Centric, forcing the agent to manage its own state, memory, and environmental rules all at once. This post explores a shift toward World-Centric Orchestration, where we prioritize the environment's state and rules first.

In this piece, I discuss:

- The Decoupling of Agency and Environment: Why the agent should be an "actor" within a world that enforces its own constraints.

- State-Driven Reliability: Using state machines to define valid action spaces, reducing the hallucination surface.

- Pheromone-Inspired Memory: A rough approach to managing long-term context using weighted relationship graphs and lexical indexing.

The "Mind Protocol" is my attempt to formalize this architecture. I'm curious to hear from others who are moving away from simple "loop-and-prompt" patterns—how are you handling state consistency and world-building for your agents?

I'd love to hear your critiques and thoughts on this approach.
by internetter | 2026-01-15 05:11:01+00:00
There's really no interpretation of this which isn't malicious, although, not to defend this behaviour whatsoever, I'm not entirely surprised by it. The only real value of archive.is is its paywall bypassing abilities and, presumably, large swaths of residential proxies that allow it to archive sites that archive.org can't. Only somebody with some degree of lawlessness would operate such a project.
by teraflop | 2026-01-15 05:13:04+00:00
Cool demo!

I notice that the stars don't seem to be rendered correctly. If you zoom out, you can see the sun's position relative to the stars. As you scroll the date slider through the course of a year, the sun should make a complete 360-degree revolution around the ecliptic. Or, when the camera view is locked to the sun, the stars should appear to revolve relative to the sun.

Instead, the sun appears motionless against the stars, regardless of the time of year. (If the demo used actual star positions, I would be able to point to how the sun was in the wrong constellation for a given date. But the starfield is randomly generated, so you have to actually observe the sun in motion to see the bug.)
by runako | 2026-01-15 05:13:57+00:00
> propose to run a malicious Bash command

I am not sure it is reasonably possible to determine which Bash commands are malicious. This is especially so given the multitude of exploits latent in the systems & software to which Bash will have access in order to do its job.

It's tough to even define "malicious" in a general-purpose way here, given the risk tolerances and types of systems where agents run (e.g. dedicated, container, naked, etc.). A Bash command could be malicious if run naked on my laptop and totally fine if run on a dedicated machine.
by notepad0x90 | 2026-01-15 05:14:03+00:00
I think a little semantic correction is due here, just to show how bad things are.

Terrorists do violence with the aim of seeing some political change or reaction. The change happens because the people making the change are so terrorized.

In this case, their objective was not to terrorize, and use the terror for change. they just stole, kidnapped and murdered for money.

Terrorists have an ideological goal. these people did it because they could. they don't even need the oil, oil prices low right now, more oil won't help.

It's obvious that they wanted a distraction from more pressing domestic issues. But there are many ways of achieving that, why did they do this? why are they attacking iran or trying to invade greenland.

You know the answer is simple, it's similar to why school-shooters shoot (but even they have twisted reasons and justifications that supposedly compelled them), it's simply that they're evil. They're not just evil, but coordinated evil. They picked a person who shot their dog because it wasn't violent enough to lead ICE/DHS, because they wanted that cruelty in power. The secdef himself has a sick combination of bloodlust and violence for the sake of it. Terrorists terrorize because of a goal, these people revel in the cruelty and suffering. If they were fiction villains, it wouldn't get published or made into a movie, because that level of evil will be unbelievable. They wouldn't believe millions will keep cheering them on.

i mean ffs, trump was mocking biden's cancer earlier, and the crowd went dead quiet. I mean if hitler or bin-laden get cancer, i might at best say they deserved it, or be glad perhaps. But mock them? how can anyone do that? Everyone can get cancer, how can you mock even your worst enemy with that?

I think the generation that learned the hard way that the only correct response to such evil is to destroy it, has passed away. We're having to re-learn these things, if only we could just learn from history.

I didn't think I'd see the day where I'd consider people in the government of my country and wonder if bin-laden might just have been a more decent person. If you had to choose a babysitter between the two, who would you choose? given all the accusations at least. I just hope things get better.
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2026-01-15 05:15:04+00:00
> If we take Denmark as the benchmark for rule of law, civic institutions, and good governance, which place looks more like that: Minnesota, or New Jersey?

Violent crime rate in 2024 according to the FBI DB (incidents per 100k population)

New Jersey - 217.7
Minnesota - 256.6

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

So I guess you’re an open borders person?
by hattmall | 2026-01-15 05:15:47+00:00
Don't forget "almost dying from toxic air pollution" too

I was in a similar situation and my solution was to just buy enough clothes and not get them dirty when wearing so that it would last me about 2 months between having to do laundry. But I didn't have communal laundry, I had to drive across town to a public laundry.
by applemelonjuice | 2026-01-15 05:16:30+00:00
Now this would be an interesting war. Regarding germany, almost all admnistrations from the smallest tows up to the government are busy uploading their data to US-clouds. They've just introduced the new e-health system where roughly 75% of all data (including encprytion keys) are stored on IBM systems (hello CloudAct) and so on, so the US can already access probably most of the country's data in a perfectly legally fashion. There wouldn't ever be a war because the US can simply shut down all the US OSses (long-term in a "nice" fashion by stopping export for software / security patches, or short-term by introducing nasty code in the updates). In practice, I wouldn't be surprised if they could shut down a typical country in a matter of hours if they'd really mean it.
by theamk | 2026-01-15 05:18:04+00:00
> Revoke Access

> To remove a team member:

> memevault access remove bob

> This immediately re-encrypts the vault with the remaining keys, locking Bob out.

Unless you rewrite the git history, force-push every branch, then do the same on every developers' computer (and ask Github support to garbage-collect your repo too), this actually does not "lock the Bob out", it just removes it from latest commit, but the Bob can still access every older commit.
by runako | 2026-01-15 05:18:23+00:00
> whitelist specific actions

> file writes

> construct a `curl`

I am not a security researcher, but this combination does not align with "safe" to me.

More practically, if you are using a coding agent, you explicitly want it to be able to write new code and execute that code (how else can it iterate?). So even if you block Bash, you still need to give it access to a language runtime, and that language runtime can do ~everything Bash can do. Piping data to and from the LLM, without a runtime, is a totally different, and much limited, way of using LLMs to write code.
by data-ottawa | 2026-01-15 05:18:39+00:00
I’ve been working on this.

MCP to ensure whoever is using the agent is authorized. Then I do sql cleaning and rewriting plus validation to ensure only validated query structures and no DDL/DML.

Then when the query is written I apply limits for budget (generally large reads).

Finally, the MCP uses a token with restricted access to a whitelist of tables, with either row level security enabled or table valued functions to apply additional constraints.

I make sure to hide all the sql statements that allow the agent to read table metadata and such.

And then it also needs to be approved by the user in the client.

I don’t think you can do this at scale for many users or low trust users, so they get read only parquet extracts with duckdb.
by nullpoint420 | 2026-01-15 05:18:44+00:00
Neat! It makes sense how more kernel/userspace abstractions would add more latency.

> If you are doing music on your Linux PC, I would like to know your best ping from some MIDI instrument to the headphones.

I am not, unfortunately. I've always wanted to get into digital music production, but sadly DAWs have always been elusive to me.
by marcus_holmes | 2026-01-15 05:22:06+00:00
I compare this to the alcohol rules.

We recognise that children drinking alcohol is not a good thing. Adults drinking alcohol is also not a good thing, but that's up to them.

But the countries with the best relationship to alcohol are the countries that also have flexible rules about children and alcohol; most of Europe allows children to drink alcohol in a restaurant with their parents from around 12-14, and order it themselves from around 16. Alcohol is widely available, and cheap. Generally these countries don't experience binge drinking or drunken behaviour, and while alcohol consumption is high, it's not so problematic.

The Anglosphere has way more problems with binge drinking and drunken behaviour, and part of the reasons for that is that we enforce strict limits around alcohol consumption. We have strong age limits on alcohol purchases, and strong limits on who can sell alcohol and when they can sell it. There's a very authoritarian attitude to alcohol restrictions. This means that when Anglo kids hit the age limit that they're allowed to buy alcohol, they hit it hard and binge on it, with all the harms that happen because of that.

Enforcing a strong authoritarian limit on social media will have the same effect, I think. Children will have no training on how to deal with social media, no exposure to social media in limited, controlled, circumstances with the support of their parents. They'll hit 16 and be given full access to the entire range of platforms, and they'll overdo it and binge on it, with all the harms that happen because of that.

We need to get better at educating our kids on how to deal with harmful stuff. Banning it until they're "adult" isn't an answer because it doesn't train them on how to have an adult relationship to this stuff.
by locknitpicker | 2026-01-15 05:22:06+00:00
> But on the other hand in many 'urban' neighborhoods, there's far less motivation to take care of things - and once you remove the external actors going in there to do what little they already do, these places would fall into an even more pitiful state very rapidly.

You're letting your prejudice get in the way of making a rational argument. There is no difference between what you chose to call "urban" and any other place, be it rural, suburban or urban. You don't see people taking care of their surroundings because you only get to see a snapshot of it's current state, not what others have done in the recent and not so distant past.

Of course OP is silly in making the mistake of believing UBI will get all people working on urban waste management fired and out of a job. It's like believing that if a service provides a free tier, all other services will suddenly vanish. But presuming people don't care about their surroundings because they live in an 'urban' neighborhood reflects a problem that's about prejudice and not UBI.
by Nevermark | 2026-01-15 05:22:36+00:00
For whatever reason, Apple delivered the hardware. But kneecapped the software.

They seem to see everything since the iPhone as a kiosk first, computer second. Which makes some degree of sense, Mac with keyboard/trackpad assumed vs. iOS/touch (with optional keyboard/trackpad) and covering many smaller sized screens.

But the Vision has much wider interface and interaction potential than Mac, not less. If Apple would let the Pro version of Vision, be a Spacial Mac. The new power high end.

(With a Vision Air, for the iOS-like, consumer, lower end market.)
by majormajor | 2026-01-15 05:24:06+00:00
Compared to the suggestion of a calculator + scale (or a voice assistant, IMO), I think the annoying part is when you hit weird fractions, especially in the US.

Random dumb example: say you need 6/7ths of 3/4 of a tablespoon of table salt... or 0.64 tablespoons. That's not gonna be a common measuring device.

Look it up in terms of grams, though, call it 20g per tablespoon (or measure the original amount in grams if you like), multiple by .64, get 12.8g, use your scale to get ~13. I'm more confident in my ability to get 13g with my scale than I am to get 0.64 tablespoons (half + half of a quarter is what I'd have to use with my measuring stuff, and the "half of a quarter" is annoying when they're rounded and all...). If your voice assistant can take care of the conversions, it GREATLY speeds it up too.

(The observant could respond here that 0.64 tablespoons is damn close to 2 teaspoons and so this example off the top of my head is dumb. Which is true, but frankly I have to look up a bunch of those sorts of things any time I try them, and it could've landed on something more awkward like 0.4 tablespoons total.)