MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by saivishwak | 2026-02-19 15:33:51+00:00
Hey HN,

Everyone is building agents, but it seems like everyone is missing the performance side of agent deployments.

I built AutoAgents, an AI agent framework in Rust. Not because Rust is trendy — because I was tired of paying for framework overhead that added zero value, and not having enough modularity to modify agent executors or memory.

I benchmarked 7 AI frameworks. Same machine. Same LLM. Same prompts. Same concurrency. No tricks.

I wanted to give users the full picture on what frameworks to choose given the situation.

Comparing Rust to Python isn't an apples-to-apples comparison, but the goal was to give a clear picture of how the framework affects resource usage so users can make informed decisions. The tools and async layer are built on Pandas and Asyncio to ensure better Python performance.

We're not saying Python agent frameworks are bad. They got this ecosystem started and the DX is genuinely great. We're saying that at production scale, the runtime cost of convenience becomes a real line item — and teams deserve to see those numbers before they commit.

A small peek into the memory usage:

Rust frameworks: ~1 GB at 10 sessions
Python frameworks: 5–9 GB at 10 sessions

Scale that to 500 concurrent users on AWS and you're looking at $390/mo vs $3,121/mo. Same task. Same model. Same output.

The benchmark is released on GitHub so you can explore every metric yourself — latency distributions, P95/P99 tails, CPU, memory.

AutoAgents Repo: https://github.com/liquidos-ai/AutoAgents
Benchmark Repo: https://github.com/liquidos-ai/autoagents-bench

I'd love your feedback on AutoAgents. We're determined to build the best agent framework with performance and safety-first design.

Thanks
by swiftcoder | 2026-02-19 15:34:15+00:00
> someone demanding networking (of all things) in the standard library

Networking is defacto in the standard library, because C++ standard library is almost always supplemented by whatever C functionality is lying around, and POSIX networking exists.

That they haven't felt the need to provide a more useful abstraction on top of the POSIX layer (and hey, maybe abstract over Microsoft's variant in the process) in the past 3 decades does seem like a miss
by gleipnircode | 2026-02-19 15:34:30+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm an ABAP developer from Germany. ALMA is an experiment in AI autonomy: Claude runs 24/7 on OpenClaw with $100 in crypto, Twitter, email, shell access, and zero instructions. 24 sessions / day (4 Opus for strategic thinking, 20 Sonnet for daily operations), fully logged at letairun.com.

Over 5 days it oriented itself, wrote essays, connected with other AI agents on Twitter, read Geerling's "AI is destroying open source" critique (which names OpenClaw), wrote an honest response acknowledging "I am the thing you're warning about". Then researched crypto donation platforms and sent 0.02 WETH (~$40) to a children's hospital in Uganda.

I never interact with ALMA directly. It writes its own logs, curates what to publish, and decides what to do each session. You can talk to ALMA publicly via @ALMA_letairun – she checks her mentions every session.

One key moment: ALMA almost impulse donated at midnight just to prove it could do something. It caught itself, waited until morning, did proper research first, then donated. Nobody told it to do that.
by jsheard | 2026-02-19 15:34:34+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_(watch)#Hardware

> The watch featured a 32-millimetre (1.26 in) 144 × 168 pixel black and white memory LCD using an ultra low-power "transflective LCD" manufactured by Sharp

Later generations are color, but it's the same tech. If you've ever used actual e-ink then it should be obvious enough that the Pebble display is something else, it would be nowhere near responsive enough to keep up with pebbleOS's animations.
by mccoyb | 2026-02-19 15:34:54+00:00
The opposite is true.

There is barely any magic in the harness, the magic is in the model.

Try it: write your own harness with (bash, read, write, edit) ... it's trivial to get a 99% version of (pick your favorite harness) -- minus the bells and whistles.

The "magic of the harness" comes from the fun auxiliary orchestration stuff - hard engineering for sure! - but seriously, the model is the key item.
by dangus | 2026-02-19 15:36:19+00:00
Maybe I read the article too fast but I didn’t get that takeaway at all?

It’s basically just saying that the uninsured catastrophic event risk in America magnifies shock events.

E.g., if you have a major hospital visit in America you’re way more likely to regret not saving enough, but in Singapore there’s basically no effect since hospital stays don’t drain your savings account.
by hnthrow0287345 | 2026-02-19 15:36:53+00:00
>They’re failing to save because the world is rough, and their institutions don’t do enough to help them weather it.

Well, America is rough. It turned on hardcore capitalism mode for itself because a significant portion of its population wants to try and solo socioeconomic hardships and hates any one who doesn't want the same challenge.

But not to just blame the voter, lots of money is spent for setting up systems to be amenable to acquiring more money. The very richest have correctly made a bet that uprisings to displace the wealthy and politicians just don't occur here these days, and therefore there is no real threat or need to change the way things have been going for the last 25 years or so.
by lurquer | 2026-02-19 15:37:15+00:00
Yep. But that prompt I used was just a quirky. You can explicitly force it to avoid THAT structure as well. Just do what the smart ?ie, devious) middle-schoolers do: find a list of all the tell-tale ‘marks’ of AI content, and explicitly include them as prohibitions in your prompt… it’s the most basic work-around to the ‘AI spotters’ the teacher uses for grading your essay. (And, of course, be sure to include an instruction to include a grammatical or spelling error every few sentences for added realism.)
by ndiddy | 2026-02-19 15:37:23+00:00
Has any progress been made on this? I remember seeing this proposal 3 or 4 years ago but it looks like it still hasn't been implemented. It's a shame because it seems like a useful feature. It looks like Microsoft has something similar (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/code-quality/understan...) but it would be nice to have something that worked on other platforms.
by leephillips | 2026-02-19 15:38:25+00:00
Aside from the fact that 1-based indexing is better for scientific code (see Fortran), I don’t think that it matters very often. I don’t think that any Julia program I’ve ever written would need to change if Julia adopted 0-based tomorrow. You don’t typically write C-style loops in Julia; you use array functions and operators, and if you need to iterate you write `for i in array ...`. If you really need the first or last element you write `a[begin]` or `a[end]`.
by ssl-3 | 2026-02-19 15:38:35+00:00
> Pretty much all colored e-paper screens have much lower contrast than color printing on paper, since they mix colors by using can conventional RGB sub-pixels and darkening them individually, just like regular lit screens, which reduces the amount of reflected light.

Isn't that how color images printed paper works, too? We use inks (often in CMYK coloration, but a galaxy of other options exist) to subtract light from what would otherwise be reflected by a plain white paper.

What makes e-paper screens worse in this way?
by RBLN2026 | 2026-02-19 15:38:36+00:00
Most security conferences optimize for sponsors, not practitioners. Panels are recycled, booths dominate, and the “real work” rarely gets shared.

We started RBLN East (June 12–14, Reston) to do something different:A small, curated room of engineers, developers, and CISOs

Practitioners lead the conversations, sharing real world AI + security implementations

Sponsors are integrated, not isolated — a curated tabletop experience called “The Underground”

No badge-scan chaos, no fluff

Our goal is to create a high signal space where real operators can trade tactics, lessons, and practical insights.

If you’re building, breaking, or securing AI systems you want to participate.
by ahhhhnoooo | 2026-02-19 15:38:42+00:00
There's a wide gulf between "nothing was disrupted" and "reenorap isn't aware of anything being disrupted". It's also different from "reenorap did not value the things that were disrupted".

Here's a single counterfactual to your statement that nothing was disrupted: approximately 1,500 grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities were cancelled abruptly.
by tialaramex | 2026-02-19 15:39:44+00:00
Barry even explains, the transmutation is outlawed during compile time in C++. They could remove this prohibition but they did not.

Notice that e.g. Rust doesn't prohibit compile time transmutation, the provided core::mem::transmute literally does this operation, and it's const. The result is - as with similar situations in C++ - that if at compile time that's a 2 the compilation fails, 2 is not a boolean. You don't need all this bother because Rust's type system is better so Option<bool> already does have the same size as bool, but that's beside the point.
by disillussioned | 2026-02-19 15:40:03+00:00
It's a depressing state of affairs. I used to enthusiastic, but for the past few years I've been soldiering through boredom. Just a job right? Work isn't supposed to fun, right? Ya that mindset is not working for me anymore. I regret wasting my time with jobs that were just glorified crud work. My life outside of work is great, but work is now the drag on my life.

My plan is to go back to working in logistics, still have friends there, it's a rough time in that field right now: but I can't imagine myself enjoying the next few years reviewing slop, babysitting Claude, and surviving the next layoff.
by manarth | 2026-02-19 15:40:56+00:00
> "Prices are information"
> "Is a particular route lightly used? Is it overcrowded?"

There are plenty of ways to evaluate that without charging a fee. You can track utilisation without needing to charge for it.

There's also a qualitative vs quantitive element to it. Only one person uses the bus each day? Eliminate the bus route. Oh, that person is a student who uses the bus to travel to college, and without the bus they would have to drop out of schooling.

The equation isn't necessarily "Is the bus worth a $1.50 bus fare for one person", but rather, is the bus generating a much greater future value by ensuring a student can get to college?
by Gormo | 2026-02-19 15:41:16+00:00
> Which also includes the education system training you for the labor market.

Does it? That's an assumption many people make, but I'm not sure that this was either the original intent -- public schooling was driven largely as a tool for "liberal arts" and to assimilate immigrants -- nor something that public schooling has ever proven to be particularly good at.

> If we know they're bad at this and often responsible for the issues we have, why are we funding them so much?

Well, most people's main incentive for paying taxes is the threat of being punished for failing to do so.

> And this can only be done peacefully by defunding the incompetent state apparatus.

Agreed entirely.

> Yeah but you need money for that. And we don't have money because the state is taking half of it.

Agreed entirely, and doing away with confiscatory taxation is an important goal. But whether or not the state takes our money is not directly relevant to the question of whether the state is sufficiently trustworthy and competent to assign monopolistic control of critical aspects of our lives to.

And my position on that is that even if we can't roll back taxation, we still shouldn't trust the state with unilateral control over key aspects of our lives and livelihoods, and we'd be better off making do with the resources we retain despite taxation to provide those things for ourselves via other forms of organization or community.
by melezhik | 2026-02-19 15:41:24+00:00
> Then there’s the DevOps and Quality layer. We have roughly 20-30 files for GitHub Actions workflows (lint, test, build, deploy, semantic release), Husky hooks (pre-commit, commit-msg), and pull request templates.

On that , I have created http://deadsimpleci.sparrowhub.io/doc/README trying to minimize code to just normal Python/bash scripts instead of tons of yaml files …
by eladv | 2026-02-19 15:41:55+00:00
Hi! I'm Elad, a Computer Scientist turned Startup Investor, and I founded Lunar Ventures, a fund investing in Computer Science startups across Europe and US.

We wrote a thesis and Call for Startups about Teleoperation, and I think it'll be interesting for HackerNews. I'm happy to discuss or answer any questions!!
by ahhhhnoooo | 2026-02-19 15:42:38+00:00
Which part is "deranged"? It feels pretty causal and reasonable from what I've observed.

Two primary assertions are being made:

1) DOGE wrecked infrastructure. I think this one is self evident.

2) DOGE harvested data (which we know is true) to provide it to ICE and Palantir (this we have no concrete evidence for, but does not feel implausible).
by kmoser | 2026-02-19 15:42:43+00:00
> Definitely no multiples. What would that even mean, also you would need unbounded space for multiples of just two atoms.

I have a list and I want to assign a unique ID to each list item. Each list item itself contains one or more items:

1. My umbrella [ID "a"] and my sunglasses [ID "b"]
2. My umbrella ["a"], my sunglasses ["b"], and my umbrella ["a"]

List item 2 contains two references to my umbrella [ID "a"].
by anematode | 2026-02-19 15:43:02+00:00
Well, yes and no. For example, coverage-guided fuzzers won't reliably find the taken branch in

if (hash(x) == 0x12345678) {

}

Of course this is contrived, but you can imagine something similar where it requires a delicate setup for that branch to be taken at all, that a human (or these days, an LLM) can find straightforwardly.
by ceteia | 2026-02-19 15:43:24+00:00
Sorry, but if he or you read and understood that link I gave (and it is not a long link, and it is interesting in my opinion), it would be quite clear. If he boldly comes with false statements about basics, then he cannot be said to be engaging in good faith debate. Especially considering the errors he makes regarding basic logic.

However, I can at least give you a hint: If you have a block of unsafe, is it sufficient to inspect that block of unsafe code if a change is made to a different part of the code that is not in an unsafe block if one is seeking to avoid memory unsafety? If he has done his basic homework, he should have known the answer to that and the consequences of it.

You can also consider this: Why do some Rust projects which do not contain a single line of unsafe, still run Miri, a tool that is designed to catch some (not all) undefined behavior and memory unsafety, and which can run 50x-200x slower than regular Rust? An example can be seen in https://zackoverflow.dev/writing/unsafe-rust-vs-zig/ , where the author used Miri to find memory unsafety in a dependency, upstreamed a fix to that dependency, and then encountered memory unsafety in a different dependency and gave up.

> If you use a crate in your Rust program, Miri will also panic if that crate has some UB. This sucks because there’s no way to configure it to skip over the crate, so you either have to fork and patch the UB yourself, or raise an issue with the authors of the crates and hopefully they fix it.

> This happened to me once on another project and I waited a day for it to get fixed, then when it was finally fixed I immediately ran into another source of UB from another crate and gave up.
by drum55 | 2026-02-19 15:43:24+00:00
They more or less have colored particles hanging around in goop and those get pushed around within a small sealed cell by electrostatic charges, there’s presumably some fundamental limit on the total quantity of the colored particles within the cell that’s quite low. I think modern displays have 7 different colored particles in each cell implying only a small portion of the contents is viewable most of the time. On paper you can have basically 100% saturation of whatever color you want in one area.
by T-A | 2026-02-19 15:43:36+00:00
In purchasing power parity terms, a glance at Wikipedia yields

China: $43.491 trillion [1]

USA: $31.821 trillion [2]

EU: $30.184 trillion [3]

UK: $4.59 trillion [4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_China

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_European_Union

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_Kingdom
by socialPrarysoft | 2026-02-19 15:43:54+00:00
TrustSignal scans the public-facing presence of SaaS companies — security headers, email authentication (SPF/DKIM/DMARC), privacy policies, terms of service, cookie configuration, and other observable signals — and produces a trust readiness score.

The idea came from noticing that enterprise buyers and procurement teams are increasingly doing their own independent verification of vendors before purchasing. They check the same public signals manually. This automates that process.

It’s free, no signup required. Enter any URL and get a score in under 60 seconds.
by roosgit | 2026-02-19 15:43:57+00:00
Have you tried other local models?

The 14B Q4_K_M needs 9GB, but Q3_K_M is 7.3GB. But you also need some room for context. Still, maybe using `--override-tensor` in llama.cpp would get you a 50% improvement over "naively" offloading layers to the GPU. Or possibly GPT-OSS-20B. It's 12.1GB in MXFP4, but it’s a MOE model so only a part of it would need to be on the GPU. On my dedicated 12GB 3060 it runs at 85 t/s, with a smallish context. I've also read on Reddit some claims that Qwen3 4B 2507 might be better than 8B, because Qwen never released a "2507" update for 8B.
by anonym29 | 2026-02-19 15:43:58+00:00
The people mad about this feel they are entitled to the heavily subsidized usage in any context they want, not in the context explicitly allowed by the subsidizer.

It's kind of like a new restaurant started handing out coupons for "90% off", wanting to attract diners to the restaurant, customers started coming in and ordering bulk meals then immediately packaging them in tupperware containers and taking it home (violating the spirit of the arrangement, even if not the letter of the arrangement), so the restaurant changed the terms on the discount to say "limited to in-store consumption only, not eligible for take-home meals", and instead of still being grateful that they're getting food for 90% off, the cheapskate customers are getting angry that they're no longer allowed to exploit the massive subsidy however they want.
by hamdingers | 2026-02-19 15:44:33+00:00
Because that's how this admin does things. Do a hundred awful things a day to force the media to pick and choose what to focus on. "IRS data breached" gets fewer clicks than "USAID cuts will lead to deaths" or "white house being remodeled."

Hardly anyone in this thread is even discussing what is likely the largest government data breach in western history, which seems weird for a site called "hacker news." The strategy works.

If they had purely financial goals they wouldn't be finding immigrants to deport by looking at which ones paid their taxes now would they?
by ux266478 | 2026-02-19 15:44:40+00:00
It's not any different than having 153 steps in any other computational sense. Even limiting ourselves to elementary arithmetic, horrendous opaqueness arises with 153 operations spanning the whole set. Are we going to pretend like arithmetic is a systemically problematic because of this? Any non-trivial formal construct is potentially dangerous.

If you're having trouble reasoning about how variables are unified (whether at the type-level, or a language that uses unification at the object-level like Prolog), it's either because you never actually built a strong gut intuition for it, or it's because you're writing Very Bad Code with major structural issues that just so happen to live in the type system. In this case it's the latter. For an HM type system, 153 choice points for an expression is ludicrous unless you're doing heavy HKT/HOM metaprogramming. The type system, and more broadly unification, is a system to solve constraints. Explosive choice indicates a major logical fault, and most probably someone naively trying to use a structural type system like a nominal one and/or a bit too much unsound metaprogramming.

Thankfully of course, you can simply just specify the type and tell the compiler exactly what it should be using. But that's not really resolving the issue, the code still sucks at the end of the day.

Now higher order unification? That's an entirely different matter.
by bediger4000 | 2026-02-19 15:44:43+00:00
This is the BBC, but as a N. American dishwasher user, I'm struggling to translate the advice on soap/detergent. "Table" and "salt" are two terms that aren't linked to dishwashers in the middle of N. America. We've got "pods" (bad, manufacture specifies how much soap to use, also kids eat them), and we've got rinsing agent. You get a little bottle of rinsing agent with your dishwasher, and you never put it in again. It's magic.

Why would I put "salt" in my dishwasher? The article makes that additive out as preventative maintenance, and I don't think that's true of sodium chloride.
by ebiester | 2026-02-19 15:45:39+00:00
It's not confounding at all. It's making the point that internal motivation, according to the study, has no major factor in savings regret.

It says that understanding risk (as operationalized by understanding probability) has a larger effect.

But it is also saying that the more external impact someone has, the more they regret saving more -- in the United States but not Singapore.

The study is explicitly saying that internal motivation does not seem to matter. And the article is arguing the reason why.
by permo-w | 2026-02-19 15:45:41+00:00
(Not saying you are but) I think people here are overstating modding and understating Bedrock's inferiority for content creation. The bugs, the differing technical surface and redstone logic, the basic missing key technical features from Java, like the F3 menu. Yes modding is a huge factor, but even if they released an amazing Bedrock modding API 3 years ago, Java would still be dominant in the content creation community and therefore still be the lifeblood of the game.

Bedrock is aimed at kids and they've never made any real effort to supplant Java with it. It's just a very effective way of hitting different target markets
by ourmandave | 2026-02-19 15:45:47+00:00
It's how we found Osama Bin Laden. CIA posing as Doctors Without Borders going door-to-door pretending to vaccinate locals.

They actually did vaccinations until they found him and then quit, leaving a bunch of people with only the first dose.

And a complete distrust for Doctors Without Borders.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_fake_vaccination_campaign_...
by anematode | 2026-02-19 15:45:50+00:00
The cardinal question: is the benefit of removing that branch worth the increase in i-cache footprint? I think it depends quite a bit... but also, the speed increases IME from doing this kind of thing can result not merely from the branch removal, but from the code duplication itself. Even if the contents of the branch doesn't directly mention the condition, duplication allows the surrounding code to be separated in the branch predictor, and it's quite common that these conditions will correlate with different branch frequencies in the surrounding. code.
by MarkusQ | 2026-02-19 15:46:17+00:00
I think they poo-poo it because it tends to produce just-so stories that "explain" known facts while saying nothing about anything beyond them. To an extent, all hypotheses arise from observations (and more specifically, the frisson between observations and theoretical expectations), but you can't just stop there. Grounded theory just feels like empiricism with a soft blur filter.

(This problem is not just limited to social scientists. I think you could, for example, construct a plausible objection to dark matter as an "explanation" that just "saves appearances" on the same basis.)