MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tysonjeffreys | 2026-01-01 00:00:03+00:00
I wrote this as a conceptual architecture piece, not an empirical paper.

The core claim is that many failures in embodied AI and agent systems come from missing a baseline regulation layer beneath planning/learning — relying on correction alone leads to cascades under load.

I tried to keep it concrete with design patterns rather than metaphors. Curious how people here think about this relative to whole-body control, passivity, or active inference.
by dzonga | 2026-01-01 00:01:29+00:00
sometimes I wonder if people who write such articles know that 85% of commercial software is not for the Consumer Market but Enterprise / Businesses etc where unspoken, odd rules, mismatched integrations rule the day.

something "simple" as reverse ETL - a lot of value is locked within that - & you can even see players such as Palantir etc trying to bring unified data view with a fancy name etc

it's also the same reason Workday, Salesforce etc charge a lot of money
by raybb | 2026-01-01 00:01:51+00:00
There's an rule in the EU that says you can't feed the insects pork and then let those insects go on to be fed to pigs (same for beef and chicken). This is intended to prevent the transmission of diseases like Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (like "mad cow disease"). As I understand it, this rule isn't because we have shown it's dangerous to do the pig -> insect -> pig chain but rather because we haven't shown that it's safe. Arnold van Huis and his team at Wageningen University are putting quite some energy researching the safety and lobbying the EU to change the rules based on the findings. At one of the talks those folks they said it's basically a black box of trying to get what kind of science the regulators will consider acceptable.

As you might guess, making sure the food waste you feed the insects doesn't have _any_ animal proteins in it is quite logistically challenging and so afaik nobody is doing that at a large scale.

I did quite a bit of research into the history of insects in the food system, especially in the Netherlands. While I was rooting for Ynsect and other big players to figure something good out I believe that it's a problem much better suited to a smaller scale (perhaps on the city level). Basically, have the food waste from various stores brought to a facility to be fed to insects and then let those insects be turned into whatever (pet food, fish food, trendy protein bars).
by franga2000 | 2026-01-01 00:04:16+00:00
The tools very commonly don't work as advertised tho, but people still buy them because of the incredible promises of increased efficiency. And since it's usually not easy to measure, they keep paying, sometimes companies even force their employees to use it.

It's an even bigger grift from the POV of companies building AI into their products - investors pressure companies to add AI features, managers demand thing that aren't achievable, developers bodge things together because they know it's worthless, marketing sells it like it's perfect, customers don't actually want it so sales bundles it into every plan and increases the price. Number go up, everyone gets a promotion. The customer has no alternatives because everyone else is doing the same.
by axdithya | 2026-01-01 00:04:35+00:00
Hey HN,

I've spent the last few months building Lár (Irish for "core"). It's a Python framework for building AI agents, but heavily inspired by the philosophy of "Glass Box" engineering rather than magical "Black Boxes".

The Problem:
Most agent frameworks today (LangChain, AutoGen) feel like magic. They hide the prompt chains, the state transitions, and the retry logic. When they break in production, debugging is a nightmare.

The Solution:
Lár is designed to be the "PyTorch for Agents". It uses a "Define-by-Run" architecture where:
1. Agents are just directed graphs (Nodes + Edges).
2. Every state transition is immutable and logged.
3. The engine produces a JSON "Flight Log" that makes the agent 100% auditable (useful for 21 CFR Part 11 compliance in healthcare/finance).

Tech Stack:
- IDE Friendly: Clone, `pip install`, and run. Build an agent in minutes.
- Zero Friction Models: Switch from Cloud to Local in 1 line. Just change `"gpt-4"` to `"ollama/phi4"`. No code refactoring.
- Hybrid Architecture: We proved that using code for logic (instead of LLMs) makes Lár 60x cheaper and significantly faster than standard "Chain" frameworks.
- Enterprise Patterns: Includes 18 Core Patterns out of the box (e.g., A/B Testing, Resumable Graphs, Security Firewalls).
- Just-in-Time Integrations: Don't wait for API wrappers. Drag our "Integration Builder" prompt into your IDE and get a type-safe tool in 30 seconds.
- Air-Gap Capable: No telemetry, no hidden clouds. Run entirely offline.

It’s open source (Apache 2.0). I’d love to hear what you think about the "Audit-first" approach vs the current "Chat-first" trend.

Website: https://snath.ai
Docs: https://docs.snath.ai
Repo: https://github.com/snath-ai/lar

3 Killer Demos:

1. Self-Healing Code Agent: https://github.com/snath-ai/code-repair-demo
2. Glass Box RAG: https://github.com/snath-ai/rag-demo
3. Customer Support Swarm: https://github.com/snath-ai/customer-support-demo
by 578_Observer | 2026-01-01 00:04:54+00:00
You are technically correct. "Force" might be too strong a word.
However, in banking terms, we call this "Constructive Dismissal" of the project.
By attaching a condition (AI) that breaks the product's core value, the publisher effectively killed the deal while making it look like a negotiation.
The author had a choice, but it was a choice between "ruining the product" or "walking away."
by PerryStyle | 2026-01-01 00:05:04+00:00
It's not super complex. I ended up just modifying the locations of the layer toggle keys. In the default Miryoku layout, in order to switch the keys to a different layer on the right hand you need to hold a button on the left hand. I found this to be annoying since some actions like entering and using a navigation layer can be done on 1 hand.
by SQLite | 2026-01-01 00:05:27+00:00
If an I/O error happens with read()/write(), you get back an error code, which SQLite can deal with and pass back up to the application, perhaps accompanied by a reasonable error message. But if you get an I/O error with mmap, you get a signal. SQLite itself ought not be setting signal handlers, as that is the domain of the application and SQLite is just a lowly library. And even if SQLite could set signal handlers, it would be difficult to associate a signal with a particular I/O operation. So there isn't a good way to deal with I/O errors when using mmap(). With mmap(), you just have to assume that the filesystem/mass-storage works flawlessly and never runs out of space.

SQLite can use mmap(). That is a tested and supported capability. But we don't advocate it because of the inability to precisely identify I/O errors and report them back up into the application.
by viktree | 2026-01-01 00:06:06+00:00
> What did Cloudflare do to earn this trust?

dude who wrote the article works for Cloudflare. I'd say receiving a paycheck is a pretty good way to earn trust

It's just DNS. I'd say using cloudflare DNS is a step up from whatever the ISP's default DNS is. But if you're hawkish on Cloudflare, just use something else. There are plenty of good options
by jmward01 | 2026-01-01 00:06:52+00:00
Actually, solar and other renewables are making it easy to skip legacy hydrocarbon based infrastructure and the 'developing world' (not the west) is snapping it up [1]. Additionally, the big problem countries aren't really the developing world. China is rapidly hitting its targets and other than a brief moment where they threw up a lot of coal fired generation to meet immediate demand it looks like they will very rapidly decarbonize in the coming years and start having so much excess renewable energy that they will pay people to use it for manufacturing [2][3].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/30/climate/solar-south-afric...

[2] https://energy.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/renewable/g...

[3]https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/06/23/china-hits-1-tw-solar...
by krautburglar | 2026-01-01 00:06:54+00:00
After doing this for 25 years, I have come to the conclusion that one should stick to lightweight tools as much as possible. Complex ones are far more vulnerable to supply chain attacks--be they illegal ones from hackers, or legal ones from business. I have had so many great tools (open source and proprietary) rug-pulled from beneath me. Dev sells out, then the product is either retired or enshittified. What if someone tried to enshittify awk? Good luck with that. There are dozens to choose from. Even with LLMs, they can't enshittify them all.

The future is suckless philosophy.
by Analemma_ | 2026-01-01 00:08:17+00:00
I know it's practically de rigeur to jump into the comments and immediately complain about methodology for any study that makes it to the front page, and I want to emphasize I don't distrust their findings, but I would like to see an equivalent study go out longer than 10 weeks. When I've been taking weightlifting seriously I feel like I don't even start to notice hypertrophy until 8-10 weeks. I feel like 6 months is the actual period where results would matter, to me, but I assume "subject compliance" is pretty difficult to get for such a timeframe, if you're really watching dietary intake and ensuring subjects go to failure (which, to its credit, this study did).
by armcat | 2026-01-01 00:09:08+00:00
I thought it was already well understood/researched that it's not the weights that matter, but effectively taking your sets to muscular failure. While one might think "I can do 50 reps with low weights" there is practical aspects to this - you don't wand to spend hours at the gym, and doing heavy weights at 5-7 reps is sufficient as long as you are close or at muscular failure.
by mschild | 2026-01-01 00:09:54+00:00
I get where you are coming from but at the same time if you use a potentially dangerous tool you should learn how to properly use it.

Just using a claw grip will significantly reduce your chance of injury.

I have seen more injuries from dull knives slipping on vegtable skin than too sharp knives.

That said, the mirror shine finish some enthusiasts go for is indeed over the top.
by sverhagen | 2026-01-01 00:10:04+00:00
Founders can be chasing a dream and in doing so mesmerize investors. Or they capitalize on that same dream being the investor's. Even if it's not viable, it can still be really fun company to work for and/or earn money at. Even if there is a small lane for that sort of flying machine, the sheer number of companies purportedly working on something like that is suspect. Given the huge costs for development and certification, and the small number of vehicles that will really get deployed (certainly for the first so many years), there must be many that are never going to make their money back. I worked for a drone-adjacent company and now my LinkedIn is swamped with these startups.
by BirAdam | 2026-01-01 00:11:07+00:00
Is there any evidence that Shockley was aware of Lilienfeld’s FET? I mean, given Shockley’s general disposition, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d stolen things, but we have his early prototypes and such to back up his claim of invention. The next step is to prove a through line to the modern era.

The Sumerians knew geometry, trigonometry, and other advanced mathematics. That knowledge perished, and then the Greeks rediscovered things. The Greeks then get credit because their work is what paved the way for all of us today. The same would apply to Shockley. If Lilienfeld’s work didn’t make it to the USA in time to have had an effect on development in the valley, then it doesn’t really matter for the US industry.
by BLKNSLVR | 2026-01-01 00:11:23+00:00
Ask them for their home address.

Ask them for their children's names and the school they go to.

Ask them their mothers maiden name, their first pets name, and they street name they lived on as a child.

Ask to film them going about their job (if they're law enforcement).

Ask them for a copy of their bank statement.

Ask to see their browsing history.

Ask for a key to their house.
by lkbm | 2026-01-01 00:12:22+00:00
I've signed up for plenty of these lists with per-site emails, and it's very rare for me to end up getting email from anyone but the list I signed up for. Might be different when shopping on international sites (though I doubt it's worse in the EU), but in the US, sites generally don't sell your email. More likely they'll leak it accidentally.
by journal | 2026-01-01 00:12:29+00:00
Before ~ 2022 it was around 100%. Now it's about 1% and it's not code. I might open a bracket once in a while to get it to complete, but mostly I'm wearing out my SPACE, TAB, and ENTER. Using LLMs when it's cheap is similar to investing in bitcoin. LLM prices will only go up from here.
by tim-tday | 2026-01-01 00:13:57+00:00
In the language of the moment AI means LLMS. The answer there is “never”

If you say autopilot that implies a wildly different technology. I think the first successful autopilot landing with passengers onboard happened last week.

Taking off is much easier than landing and if passengers aren’t involved…

I guess the question is not about technology (might be ready now) and is instead about regulation (when will the FAA allow fully autonomous flights).
I’m guessing the current generation of regulators will need to die before that happens so 25+ years.
by Xyra | 2026-01-01 00:14:15+00:00
Exactly, people want precision and control sometimes. Also it's very hard to beat SQL query planners when you have lots of material views and indexes. Like this is a lot more powerful for most use cases for exploring these documents than if you just had all these documents as json on your local machine and could write whatever python you wanted.

Yeah I've out a lot of care into rate-limiting and security. We do AST parsing and block certain joins, and Hacker News has not bricked or overloaded my machine yet--there's actually a lot more bandwidth for people to run expensive queries.

As for getting good semantic queries for different domains, one thing Claude can do besides use our embed endpoint to embed arbitrary text as a search vector, is use compositions of centroids (averages) of vectors in our database, as search vectors. Like it can effortlessly average every lesswrong chunk embedding over text mentioning "optimization" and search with that. You can actually ask Claude to run an experiment averaging the "optimization" vectors from different sources, and see what kind of different queries you get when using them on different sources. Then the fun challenge would be figuring out legible vectors that bridge the gap between these different platform's vectors. Maybe there's half the cosine distance when you average the lesswrong "optimization" vector with embed("convex/nonconvex optimization, SGD, loss landscapes, constrained optimization.")
by mschild | 2026-01-01 00:14:17+00:00
Throw away any cutting board thats not wood. (Bamboo being the exception although I dont know if bamboo is wood?)

Plastic cutting boards will contaminate whatever you are cutting on it with a load of micro and, in many cases macroplastics.

Seriously, give your plastic board some action without food on it and then carefully collect the shavings.
by bigbadfeline | 2026-01-01 00:14:18+00:00
> The tools work as advertised and are currently priced way cheaper than they cost to create?

Well, that's the grift problem right there - some people use public funds to subsidize a product, undermine the competition, front-run and scalp the hardware market, create inflation for everything, misallocate capital and deprive other assets of investment, all the while attempting a vendor lock-in at somebody else's expense.

Why would anybody see any of these as good is beyond me.
by ashishb | 2026-01-01 00:14:32+00:00
> Has anyone given it a try?

Yes, I don't think this will persist caches & configs outside of the current dir, for example, the global npm/yarn/uv/cargo cache or even Claude/Codex/Gemini code config.

I ended up writing my own wrapper around Docker to do this.
If interested, you can see the link in my previous comments. I don't want to post the same link again & again.
by thisgetsit | 2026-01-01 00:14:47+00:00
Thoughtless story-mode idolatry is exhausting.

Ontologically he is just a single old dude with few real skills having lived a life of affluence.

He sits high in the political hierarchy of the day, has personally achieved little more than that. Been bailed out by that political hierarchy. His wealth is a politically correct hallucination. He has no Scrooge McDuck vault of treasure. We all been conditioned to believe his name in the digital ledger has a much bigger float value associated with it.

All he has built is a Halo effect; he's an aura farmer. His hands have not seen the work that provided his clothes or food. His accomplishments being ephemeral political narrative may have effectively never happened.
by lll-o-lll | 2026-01-01 00:16:04+00:00
> another overlooked feature is that it now keeps track of its state and maintains all the unsaved files that are open in it, allowing me to use it as a momentary place to jot down things that I want to remember but that I don't want to save in a txt file.

There are plenty of apps that do exactly this. Sublime was the best of them that I know.

Notepad was great for the opposite reason. It is ephemeral. I can use it as a scratch pad for passwords and what not, with the comfortable knowledge that it’s all cleared away next reboot.

You can bring classic notepad back, it’s still there, so that’s what I do.
by Analemma_ | 2026-01-01 00:17:21+00:00
> Liberals vehemently opposed the idea, calling it 'regressive', meaning it would be socially backwards,

That's not what "regressive" means in the context of taxation. A "regressive tax" is one that takes a successively higher proportion of your income/wealth the poorer you are, while a progressive tax is one which takes a higher proportion of your income/wealth the richer you are. This is standard vocabulary in economics.
by bethekidyouwant | 2026-01-01 00:17:56+00:00
The group that did lower reps with higher weight, had the better one rep max at the end of the study, but they didn’t measure if the higher rep group had greater endurance. Which seems a bit odd, considering their conclusion is both groups grew the same amount of muscle which fine but if the muscle is adapted for something different in each group, you would want to capture that.
by array_key_first | 2026-01-01 00:18:01+00:00
I feel like we can round down fractions of a cent to zero. In practice, it's basically zero.

And, I think, consumers would like to balance both cost and quality. The problem is cost is obvious, quality is purposefully obfuscated. You really can't tell what is or is not quality software without spending an unreasonable amount of time and requiring an unreasonable amount of knowledge. Same with most modern physical goods.
by mothballed | 2026-01-01 00:18:14+00:00
I don't want a society where you have to be a hero to produce mass benefit to others. I want a society where greedy people feel like they have to serve the needs and wants of others to fulfill their greed.

I don't know to what extent Buffet does it. Nor does our current quasi-fascist society where the government is highly embedded with industry and regulating who is the winner and who is the loser and then taxing/inflating the working class to make sure they stay afloat.

But in the idealistic version of America, it is supposed to be a place where becoming a billionaire means you are not just producing billions of profit for yourself, but billions of value for others. That every deal, both sides are better off. This is what we aspire to, the whole ideal towards voluntary trade and capitalism as a method a tide that rises almost all boats and at the very least doesn't involve sinking another boat lower.
by RAMJAC | 2026-01-01 00:18:21+00:00
Sorta, I went into this not really knowing how to implement an emulator: https://github.com/RAMJAC-digital/RAMBO

With the NES there are all sorts of weird edge cases, one of which are NMI flags and resets; the PPU in general is kinda tricky to get right. Claude has had *massive** issues with this, and I've had to take control and completely throw out code it's generated. I'm restarting it with a clean slate though, as there are still issues with some of the underlying abstractions. PPU is still the bane of my existence, DMA, I don't like the instruction pipeline, haven't even gotten to the APU. It's getting an 80/130 on accuracy coin.

Though, when it came to creating a WASM target, Claude was largely able to do it with minimal input on my end. Actually, getting the WASM emulator running in the browser was the least painful part of this project.

You will run into three problems: 1) "The Wall" when any project becomes large enough, you need the context window to be *very* specific and scoped, with explicit details of what is expected, the success criteria and deliverables. 2) Ambiguity means Claude is going to choose the path of least resistance, and will pedantically avoid/add things which are not specced. Stubs for functions, "beyond scope", "deferred" are some favorite excuses to not refactoring or implementing obvious issues (anything that will go beyond the context window, Claude knows, but won't tell you will be punted work). 3) Chat bots *loooove* to talk, it will vomit code for days. Removing code/documentation is anathema to Claude. "Backward compatibility", deprecated, and legacy being its favorite.
by stackghost | 2026-01-01 00:18:31+00:00
What a terrible and entirely unconvincing argument.

"$unhealthy_thing is not subject to restrictions, therefore $other_unhealthy_thing should also not be"? lol. lmao, even.

Should we let children purchase cigarettes? Alcohol? Cannabis? Cocaine?

The BMI epidemic in America tells me maybe we should ban sugary drinks.

At some point, society draws a line between what it deems acceptable and what it does not. In two generations it is virtually assured that we/our grandchildren will look back on Facebook and TikTok the way we currently look at the tobacco industry. The way I know this is because the CEOs don't let their kids dogfood their products. Famously, Steve Jobs wouldn't let his kids have an iPhone. Mark and Cecilia didn't let their kids use socials.

These are bad products designed to be deliberately addictive, and it turns out they're really only good at making people feel shitty and giving teen girls eating disorders.
by newyankee | 2026-01-01 00:19:17+00:00
In today's world there is a roadmap for a < 20 year transition for the entire world if planned and executed collectively.

However Chinese domination, global geopolitics being changed and fossil fuel industries and countries still being extremely large and powerful make even choosing the obviously cheapest (and incidentally clean) option difficult in many parts of the world.

Nonetheless, it seems much more optimistic today in 2025 than say 2015 speaking purely based on where technology stands
by bawolff | 2026-01-01 00:19:34+00:00
It should be noted that the ICC has not as of yet alleged that anyone has comitted genocide in palestine. All the (public) accusations thus far have been for lesser crimes. There is a big difference between what randos on social media are alleging and what the ICC prosecutor is alleging.

Furthermore, everyone has the right to be pressumed innocent until proven guilty. That includes people accused of international crimes like genocide or crimes against humanity.

(To date, the only person the ICC has ever accused of genocide is Omar al-Bashir from Sudan)