MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Molinar – Open-source alternative to ai.com (AGPL-3.0)
by novelica | 2026-02-09 07:29:20+00:00
Hey HN,

I built a managed platform for OpenClaw (the open-source AI agent framework) and shipped the whole thing in a day. Then I open-sourced the platform itself.

The problem: Running your own AI agent means a Mac Mini in your closet, praying your wifi holds, and becoming a part-time sysadmin. Most people give up before they start.

The solution: 3 steps, 5 minutes, done.

1. Sign up
2. Paste your Anthropic API key + Telegram bot token
3. Hit launch

You watch your agent boot in real-time. When it hits "Ready," it's live on Telegram - running 24/7 without your laptop open.

What actually happens when you hit Launch:

- ECS Fargate spins up an isolated container (FARGATE_SPOT, 2 vCPU/4 GB)
- Your API keys are pulled from AWS SSM Parameter Store (SecureString), encrypted at rest and never stored in our database
- Each container gets its own ENI with an egress-only security group - no inbound ports, the agent initiates all connections
- A background process patches the OpenClaw config for Telegram DM access
- CloudWatch logs stream back to the dashboard, parsed into setup phases: provisioning -> configuring -> health check -> nginx -> gateway ready
- Supabase Realtime pushes updates to the browser in real-time (3s polling during setup)

Stack: Next.js, Stytch B2B auth, Supabase (Postgres + Realtime), AWS ECS Fargate, SSM Parameter Store, CloudWatch, Stripe.

Security model:
- Full container isolation — every agent is its own Fargate task, no shared compute
- BYOK — you bring your own Anthropic key, we never see your usage or bill
- Zero inbound ports — egress-only security group
- Secrets encrypted in SSM with per-org/per-instance paths, never persisted to Supabase
- You can inspect every line of code — the entire platform is AGPL-3.0

The agent itself can search the web, read/write files, run shell commands, manage cron jobs, monitor services, send messages - it's a full autonomous assistant. I run one myself that monitors my Sentry errors, checks my analytics, reads my Slack, and flags anything that needs attention. All through Telegram.

Pricing: $49/mo (starter) / $149/mo (pro). Or self-host the whole thing for free - it's all on GitHub.

I'm a solo developer. This is the entire platform, open source, built in a day on top of the existing OpenClaw OSS project.

Oh, and autoscale is on. ;)

business.molinar.ai
GitHub: https://github.com/Molinar-AI/openclaw-business
by contrarian1234 | 2026-02-09 07:29:40+00:00
Right now is an AI goldrush. They can get crazy lucrative investments and lock in amazing deals. In a decade the Chinese tech will catch up and the AI boom will slow down and the Taiwanese will have to coast on what they have. They have to capitalize on this moment as much as they can b/c it's not going to last long. Things are going to get much tougher very soon
by epiecs | 2026-02-09 07:29:52+00:00
The problem is that right now I have to choose the lesser of 2 evils. I hate what W11 has become. I only use it for games at the moment and the only reason is that some games Apex/BF6 do not run under proton because of their anticheat.

And I also hate what modern Macos is heading towards. I'm still ignoring/canceling the update on both my devices for the new "glass" interface.

And a thinkpad running Linux is just not doing it for me. I want my power efficient mac hardware.

Truth be told I just want to have my mbp running Linux. But right now it's not yet where it needs to be and I am most certainly not smart enough to help build it :(
by wiona | 2026-02-09 07:30:07+00:00
https://agent-founders.com

We are building a crowdfunding page for agent-run startups. People can co-create business ideas with AI and vote for the ideas they like the most. Agents then run market research and will eventually prototype the proposed ideas. In the future, we also want people to be able to own part of the agent-businesses they have sponsored.
by D-Machine | 2026-02-09 07:30:20+00:00
Okay I suspected, but now it is clear @famouswaffles is an AI / LLM poster. Meaning they are an AI or primarily using AI to generate posts.

"You're conflating", random totally-psychotic mention of "Gradient descent", way too many other intuitive stylistic giveaways. All transparently low-quality midwit AI slop. Anyone who has used ChatGPT 5.2 with basic (but not extended) thinking will recognize the style of the response above.

This kind of LLM usage seems relevant to someone like @dang, but also I can't prove that the posts I am interacting with are LLM-generated, so, I also feel it isn't worthy of report. Not sure what is right / best to do here.
by pmontra | 2026-02-09 07:30:57+00:00
The bit about the clothoid finally made me understand the odd shape of highway junctions. I always wondered why they want me to enter turns fast and then slow down progressively until the turn becomes a new straight. Unfortunately sometimes that straight is the highway, and they should give us plenty of space to build up speed and match the traffic inside the highway. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.
by joenewbry | 2026-02-09 07:31:18+00:00
I'm working on Memex: https://github.com/joenewbry/memex

It's inspired by a moment a few years ago when I realized I had no history of what I had worked on in the past.

It let's you quickly get answers to questions like:

- What did I work on last week?
- What was that one hacker new post about compiler optimization that I forgot to bookmark last week?

And it has MCP support so it plays well with Claude.

I've used it recently to target specific job applications by adjusting my resume based on what the job application is looking for and what I've worked on in the past... Claude one shots this (because it has context from Memex). And it feels amazing!

Also, the name Memex comes from Vannevar Bush's 1945 article "As We May Think". He originally thought of as a device in which individuals would compress and store all of their books, records, and communications, "mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility". The individual was supposed to use the memex as an automatic personal filing system, making the memex "an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory".

And he created a word - memex - which is a portmanteau of "memory" and "index".

The wikipeida entry here has more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex

It's been a slow start for me. But now, between the cli interface and the MCP connection with Claude I find that I'm starting to use it instead of:

- Bookmarks
- Lists / Bug Tracking

And even more exciting it's unlocking capabilities that I didn't have before:

- Can ask Claude to review the last week of work and remind me of things that I might still need to do
- Can prevent randomization when someone asks me how to configure a server that I set up a month ago. Now I just ask claude and it checks in Memex. And I can send over a nice .md file
by dingi | 2026-02-09 07:31:25+00:00
I'm building Dropnote, a small tool for physical businesses.

Someone who is physically at a place can scan a QR code and leave a short message in their browser. No app, no account. Messages are asynchronous; staff reply when available. This is not live chat. It's meant for in-the-moment feedback or questions that don't justify interrupting staff or becoming public reviews.

Constraints: async only, anonymous by default, no customer tracking, messages tied to specific physical spots

Free early access until Sept 30, 2026 (+ one extra free month). No credit cards (no payments yet). I'd love to hear your Feedback. Thank you.

https://dropnote.cloud/
by wk_end | 2026-02-09 07:31:52+00:00
To my knowledge - and I'm not an expert here - the N64 hardware is pretty unique and doesn't really resemble any of SGI's other chipsets. Not in precise capabilities - the XZ, for instance, didn't even support hardware texture mapping - and not in overall technical design.

It does seem a little bit like an ultra-simplified, integrated version of the RealityEngine [0]. The RealityEngine had "6, 8, or 12 Geometry Engines" split out across three to six boards, each powered by an Intel i860XP, that then passed their work along to Fragment Generators. This roughly corresponds to the RSP, which was just another MIPS core (with vector/matrix extensions), passing its work along to the RDP on the N64. I'm not sure how programmable the RealityEngine's pipeline was compared to the surprisingly flexible RSP.

Remember, the constraints for a graphics workstation are really different than for a game console - especially on the low-end, totally different corners are going to be cut. An Indy still needed to be able to generate a high resolution display and allow modelling complex scenes for film and TV; but while some degree of real-time 3D was important, it was expected that artists could be modelling using wireframe or simplified displays. A game console was displaying low-resolution and relatively low-detail scenes, but they still wanted them to look aesthetically "complete" - shading, textures, fog, lighting, particles - while running at real-time speeds. SGI used their expertise and built something custom-fit for the job at hand, rather than just reusing an existing solution.

[0] https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~ravir/274/15/papers/p109-akeley.pdf
by chadcmulligan | 2026-02-09 07:32:17+00:00
> Someone got it working on Compiler Explorer and remarked that the assembly output “reminds me of the quality of an undergraduate’s compiler assignment”. Which, to be fair, is both harsh and not entirely wrong when you look at the register spilling patterns.

This is what I've noticed about most LLM generated code, its about the quality of an undergrad, and I think there's a good reason for this - most of the code its been trained on is of undergrad quality. Stack overflow questions, a lot of undergrad open source projects, there are some professional quality open source projects (eg SqlLite) but they are outweighed by the mass of other code. Also things like Sqllite don't compare to things like Oracle or Sql Server which are proprietary.
by techtalksweekly | 2026-02-09 07:32:24+00:00
https://techtalksweekly.io/

I've been working on my newsletter called Tech Talks Weekly[1] where my readers get one email per week with all the latest Software Engineering conference talks and podcasts[1] published that week.

In January, I've released a paid tier[2] where my subscribers additionally get:

1. Access to my internal database of all the talks and podcasts since 2020 (+48,000 in total) where they can search, filter, sort, and group by title, conference/podcast, view count, date, and duration.

2. The list of the most-watched talks over the last 7, 30, 90 days, 6 months, and 12 months based on number of views.

3. Category-based view of new talks & podcasts by tech stack, language, and domain (Software Architecture, Backend, Frontend, Full Stack, Data, ML, DevOps, Security, Leadership and every major language & ecosystem)

[1] https://www.techtalksweekly.io/p/what-is-tech-talks-weekly

[2] https://plus.techtalksweekly.io/
by danaris | 2026-02-09 07:34:18+00:00
The version I described is the only one I've ever heard anyone else referring to.

Just because you can find someone referring to something else as a "technological singularity" doesn't mean it's reasonable to say that must, or even could, have been the definition the person I was replying to was using.

...And I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone to agree with you that "we founded companies" somehow satisfies the conditions of the Singularity, unless they're deeply invested in the idea that The Singularity Is Happening Now, and have entirely forgotten just what that's actually supposed to mean, or why they wanted it to be happening.
by MichaelRo | 2026-02-09 07:34:36+00:00
>> I'm now in my 50s. [...] One thing I do now is try to look after all the youngest grads and new joiners. Its so cutthroat now it seems no one has time to help anyone else, so I like helping people get up and running and encouraging them to enjoy their work while being productive and getting their skills up. No one else seems to care.

Seeing them youngsters come and go faster than batches of recruits thrown into combat at Stalingrad, I no longer care either. Have better things to do than train them so they can jump ship for a higher salary. I only relate to people with whom I can eventually connect over long term and these youngsters ain't it.
by codebolt | 2026-02-09 07:35:14+00:00
> People aren't prompting LLMs to write good, maintainable code though.

Then they're not using the tools correctly. LLMs are capable of producing good clean code, but they need to be carefully instructed as to how.

I recently used Gemini to build my first Android app, and I have zero experience with Kotlin or most of the libraries (but I have done many years of enterprise Java in my career). When I started I first had a long discussion with the AI about how we should set up dependency injection, Material3 UI components, model-view architecture, Firebase, logging, etc and made a big Markdown file with a detailed architecture description. Then I let the agent mode implement the plan over several steps and with a lot of tweaking along the way. I've been quite happy with the result, the app works like a charm and the code is neatly structured and easy to jump into whenever I need to make changes. Finishing a project like this in a couple of dozen hours (especially being a complete newbie to the stack) simply would not have been possible 2-3 years ago.
by ahnick | 2026-02-09 07:36:13+00:00
Most people have no idea how to hunt, make a fire, or grow food. If all grocery stores and restaurants run out of food for a long enough time people will starve. This isn't a problem in practice though, because there are so many grocery stores and restaurants and supply chains source from multiple areas that the redundant and decentralized nature makes it not a problem. Thus it is the same with making your own food. Eventually if you have enough robots or food replicators around knowing how to make food becomes irrelevant, because you always will be able to find one even if yours is broken. (Note: we are not there yet)
by locknitpicker | 2026-02-09 07:36:19+00:00
> If Claude Code or Cursor is actually that good then we're all unemployed anyway.

I don't know about that. This PR stunt is a greenfield project that no one really knows what volume of work went behind it, and targeted a problem (bootstrapping a C compiler) that is actually quite small and relatively trivial to accomplish.

Go ahead and google for small C compilers. They are a dime a dozen, and some don't venture beyond a couple thousand lines of code.

Check out this past discussion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21210087
by sph | 2026-02-09 07:37:29+00:00
That’s the contract agent, something I wished existed years ago. Some interesting discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32838336

I am working on contract work through a third-party company, and I proposed them such a solution: I employ them, pay them a percentage [1], they keep me busy with work, just like any serious actor has an agent. It is a great business model for everybody, and their workload is small enough they can represent a dozen people with ease.

They actually liked the idea, have spoken of switching to such a model eventually, but the sad reality is that they make much more money the “classic way”: the big client gives them the contract, and they subcontract to me. This way they can skim 30-60% off the amount paid to the sorry bugger that does all the work at the bottom, without lifting a finger.

It is very sad no one seems interested to serve this need, except very few examples (there’s that NY management agency people have been recommending for the past 10 years, which have such a backlog of candidates there’s no real chance of getting in). If I had any interest in being a salesman and recruiter, I’d build such an agency in a heartbeat.

1: I’d pay for an actual agent 10-15% of my daily rate for the duration of the contract, which is much more than the numbers presented in the article.
by jeffreygoesto | 2026-02-09 07:37:56+00:00
We are in such a situation, not for web but embedded and tools. We found getting the split between build system and CI right is one of the most important things. Don't model as CI dependencies what in essence is a build dependency. Then local builds can predict CI outcome well.

Went from Jenkins/Conan/CMake to GH/Bazel with tons of stuff learned, the most important learning being "declarative eats imperative for breakfast" and that hermetic builds enable remote caching. Build duration on average went down from hours to minutes (because our PRs try to be small incremental updates) for everybody including CI.
by fuhsnn | 2026-02-09 07:38:01+00:00
Maybe the strategy from TCC itself is useful here: emit case bodies as a giant block first then jump back with cascaded if's at end. https://godbolt.org/z/TdE11jjxb

> Did you know that C has a keyword that is only a keyword in some places and that there is a function that can have two or three parameters?

What are those? Please tell!
by incognito_robot | 2026-02-09 07:38:16+00:00
Sounds great! I've been thinking about making something similar now for a while.

If you don't mind me sharing ideas that I would love to have in such an extension:

- Changing the UI of the comment actions to make them easier to use. Using HN mostly on a phone, I keep hitting downvote when I mean to do the opposite. Similar with the collapse action.

- Keep a local list of users that get their comment subtrees stripped out. Some people are argumentative by nature and not in good faith. It's best to ignore them (easier when you don't see their comments).

- Hide new accounts by default (perhaps auto collapsed).
by ahnick | 2026-02-09 07:40:48+00:00
This happens even today. If a knowledgeable person leaves a company and no KT (or more likely, poor KT) takes place, then there will be no one left to understand how certain systems work. This means the company will have to have a new developer go in and study the code and then deduce how it works. In our new LLM world, the developer could even have an LLM construct an overview for him/her to come up to speed more quickly.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2026-02-09 07:41:36+00:00
> But beyond that it isn't a plan because it does not scale, it does not help the country develop its own industry and economy, it does not help competitiveness,

"It's not as plan because it doesn't.." (describes thing that isn't a goal of the plan). This is nonsensical. Not even wrong.

> Again, the sovereignty aspect means all of this (develop its own industry and economy) must be addressed

No, you simply are not understanding "data sovereignty and security" at all.

> a huge cost for very little.

Citation needed. You assume the costs are "huge" and I am not convinced at all - as others have noted there are existing open-source libraries to underpin this now, likewise the small size of benefits. Security benefits are not measured in money on a stock market.

Many government functions such as standing armies in peacetime are actual "huge costs". But they have benefits not measured in money on a stock market. It's an incorrect framing in that case too.

You're just repeating misconceptions.
by Ygg2 | 2026-02-09 07:41:48+00:00
> It's a system based on LLMs.

What you said is:

> First, remember when we had LLMs run optimisation passes last year? Alphaevolve doing square packing

If I start a sentence:

First, remember the fish intelligence competition last year? Rossie jumped through a hula hoop.

I, and other readers (probably), would think Rossie is a fish. Not a dog. Even if you can technically group dogs as a sort of fish descendant.
by benreesman | 2026-02-09 07:42:03+00:00
AI assist in software engineering is unambiguously demonstrated to some done degree at this point: the "no LLM output in my project" stance is cope.

But "reliable, durable, scalable outcomes in adversarial real-world scenarios" is not convincingly demonstrated in public, the asterisks are load bearing as GPT 5.2 Pro would say.

That game is still on, and AI assist beyond FIM is still premature for safety critical or generally outcome critical applications: i.e. you can do it if it doesn't have to work.

I've got a horse in this race which is formal methods as the methodology and AI assist as the thing that makes it economically viable. My stuff is north of demonstrated in the small and south of proven in the large, it's still a bet.

But I like the stock. The no free lunch thing here is that AI can turn specifications into code if the specification is already so precise that it is code.

The irreducible heavy lift is that someone has to prompt it, and if the input is vibes the output will be vibes. If the input is zero sorry rigor... you've just moved the cost around.

The modern software industry is an expensive exercise in "how do we capture all the value and redirect it from expert computer scientists to some arbitrary financier".

You can't. Not at less than the cost of the experts if the outcomes are non-negotiable.
by lasgawe | 2026-02-09 07:43:18+00:00
Hi, I recently launched a product and things are going slowly, just a few user signups per day, high bounce rate on the home page, etc. I don't want to do paid marketing because I want to learn marketing and grow the product organically.

I'm mainly a developer and I have no actual marketing knowledge. The only thing I'm doing is reading, asking questions on Reddit, and watching videos about marketing, then applying what I learn to see if there are any results.

Since this is a repetitive task, I created a simple AI agent that runs locally. It tells me what to do next, what will likely happen when I do this or that, where I should post about my product, why I should or shouldn't post on certain social media platforms, and things like that. Since I'm reading books about marketing every day, I added a mechanism to manually add important insights based on my project's needs. It runs locally and uses AWS Bedrock models, Nova Lite for simple cases and Claude or Mistral for more specific situations. Currently it's just a simple CLI tool. It uses online searching, scraping, and analyzing data with custom pre loaded data that entered by me.

By following what the agent suggests, I got upvotes on Hacker News for the first time, my Medium articles got views and claps for the first time, and the product is now well listed on Google search results within just a few days. It's slowly improving my marketing knowledge, seo knowledge and workflow.

Then I told a friend about this who is also trying to learn marketing. Somehow he discussed it with his friends, and after a few days, one of his friend's friends said he'd like to buy the agent for around $5K. That's when I realized this could be a helpful tool for other founders who lack marketing knowledge. But now I'm thinking about what to do. Should I sell it to him (but keep using it myself), just use it myself, or make it available to everyone by creating a product around it?

For me, I really don't care about the money in this situation, I care more about learning marketing.

I'd really like to know your opinion on this matter.

After thinking about this for a few hours, I decided to create a simple waitlist to see if others need this. If there's enough interest, I may either open source it or build a reusable AI agent for others.

https://tally.so/r/yP9J0B

I'd love to see your feedback. tell me anything, criticize me, share whatever you think.
by tkocmathla | 2026-02-09 07:43:50+00:00
First off, the ASCII art raccoon is adorable.

The documentation here seems very thorough, but I'd really like to see some screenshots or a screencast of this in action! I've been using Diffview.nvim [1] lately to get just the view of all diffs in the current branch vs its merge base, with a nice file tree on the left hand side. A plugin like yours that also brings in reviewing features sounds great.

[1] https://github.com/sindrets/diffview.nvim