MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Empusa – Visual debugger to catch and resume AI agent retry loops
by justinlord | 2026-02-07 07:18:04+00:00
OP here.

I’ve been running autonomous agents (OpenClaw/ReplyX) for lead gen, and I kept waking up to drained API credits because bots would get stuck in "zombie loops"—retrying a failed step (like a button click) until the timeout hit.

I actually wrote the fix for the loop detection logic in the OpenClaw repo itself (PR #9759), but I realized I needed a better way to visualize what was happening than scrolling through thousands of lines of JSON logs.

Empusa is a local dashboard (Next.js + SQLite) that helps with this:

Visual Timeline: Turns logs into a visual trace (Green=Success, Red=Fail, Yellow=Loop Detected).

State Snapshots: It records the agent's variable state at every step.

Resume Capability: If an agent crashes, you can grab the state JSON and resume execution from that exact step rather than restarting from zero.

It’s a simple MVP right now, but it solves the specific pain of "blind" agent debugging. Code is MIT licensed.

Would love feedback on the state management approach.
by hn_acker | 2026-02-07 07:18:50+00:00
> People today get a 50$ plane ticket and move straight to the Bay Area.

> You don't see why things need to change?

Are you asserting that the current system of legal immigration needs to change, with an unsubstantiated example of a rare $50 dollar plane ticket as if people can easily move to the US by plane? Do those people leave behind most of their belongings, or do they instead make multiple plane trips to move them? And what about all of the paperwork and approval and unpredictable waiting [1]?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46912126
by t-3 | 2026-02-07 07:20:08+00:00
Yeah, nobody's moving on. The media has spent decades pumping the fear of pedos because nothing attracts outrage like harm to children, and now here's a whole group of pedo scum going untouched and seemingly uninvestigated and they're all rich and well-connected so it's much more interesting than the local sex offender map.

Not to mention the numerous poorly-explained delays, flip-flopping, and all the strange maneuvers and excuses.
by HappMacDonald | 2026-02-07 07:20:10+00:00
Bitcoin transactions rely on mining to notarize, which is by design (due to the nature of the proof-of-work system) incredibly non-deterministic.

So when you submit a transaction, there is no hard and fast point in the future when it is "set in stone". Only a geometrically decreasing likelihood over time that a transaction might get overturned, improving by another geometric notch with every confirmed mined block that has notarized your transaction.

A lot of these design principles are compromises to help support an actually zero-trust ledger in contrast to the incumbent centralized-trust banking system, but they definitely disqualify bitcoin transactions as "deterministic" by any stretch of the imagination. They have quite a bit more in common with LLM text generation than one might have otherwise thought.
by Nevermark | 2026-02-07 07:20:55+00:00
If it makes the models smarter, someone will do it.

From any individual, up to entire countries, not participating doesn't do anything except ensure you don't have a card to play when it happens.

There is a very strong element of the principles of nature and life (as in survival, not nightclubs or hobbies) happening here that can't be shamed away.

The resource feedback for AI progress effort is immense (and it doesn't matter how much is earned today vs. forward looking investment). Very few things ever have that level of relentless force behind them. And even beyond the business need, keeping up is rapidly becoming a security issue for everyone.
by maxbond | 2026-02-07 07:22:16+00:00
Not having parity is a property they want, similar to Starlark. They explicitly want a less capable language for sandboxing.

Think of it as a language for their use case with Python's syntax and not a Python implementation. I don't know if it's a good idea or not, I'm just an intrigued onlooker, but I think lifting a familiar syntax is a legitimate strategy for writing DSLs.
by SilverElfin | 2026-02-07 07:22:24+00:00
I don’t blame Canada for making changes in trade agreements and domestic policies in response to the sudden betrayal by Trump’s America. But at the same time, the strategy in the article feels random. So China can sell cars in Canada and how does Canada’s car industry gain from that? Encouraging South Korean auto makers to build in Canada would make sense, except that they’d also face tariffs when selling to consumers in America right? What’s the market to which Canada would export cars? Or is the idea to simply gain in other industries and let the Canadian auto industry die out?
by joshuamorton | 2026-02-07 07:22:25+00:00
I think there's two important things here:

1. You want to be forward looking, not backwards looking. Cutting services means less ridership means less revenue means cutting services means...etc. Bart is super useful for me during the week because headways from SF to West Oakland are often 5m. As I'm writing this (11 on a Friday) I missed a train and had to wait 20 minutes. Every seat on the car is also full, and while not packed, it's standing room only. If my choice is to wait 20 mins for the next train, other ways of getting places become a lot more appealing.

2. Government services should be good. This is good both because it makes people interested in using them (see 1) and because people who don't have other options deserve good services. The point of government is, at least in part, to serve those who can't serve themselves. I don't expect Bart to be revenue neutral for the same reason I don't expect CalFRESH to be.
by D-Machine | 2026-02-07 07:23:03+00:00
> I don’t get it, is this some kind of gotcha?

Only for people who think comparing TikTok to heroin is some kind of gotcha.

>Have you walked down the skid row of any large city? Heroin and well other drugs now are a problem, saying otherwise is delusional. Those people need help.

For sure. Two minutes from where I live, at a main intersection, they hang emergency Naloxone injection kits, in public, where anyone can grab them, on the trees and walls of buildings. I presume so addicts can save each other in cases of accidental overdoses.

Of what relevance was this all to TikTok again? And why are we comparing scrolling a phone app to literal actual heroin? Even when, empirically and factually, heroin is in fact not addictive for the majority of people?

Comparisons between TikTok and heroin are deranged and simplistic, but this is made all the more embarrassing when you realize that a dance with heroin is in fact more likely than not to just be... not the thing everyone is afraid of?
by wincy | 2026-02-07 07:23:20+00:00
I tried using the Microsoft azure devops MCP and it immediately filled up 160k of my context window with what I can only assume was listing out an absurd number of projects. Now I just instruct it to make direct API calls for the specific resources, I don’t know maybe I’m doing something wrong in Cursor, or maybe Microsoft is just cranking out garbage (possible), but to get that context down I had to uncheck all the myriad features that MCP supplies.
by Roark66 | 2026-02-07 07:25:55+00:00
My path was opposite...

Started in early 200x sysadmining Linux boxes. Moved to an MS gold partner that started with 6 employees and ended up with 45 by the time I left. So you can imagine the kind of work and solutions we did, started with mom and pop, ended up doing email systems for a 20k user system, also picked up vmware/sphere, perl scripting a big monitoring system for over a year and hacking old binary only legacy software to extract data, lots of extremely varied short term projects.

Then got onto the "Solutions Architect" career path. Did that for 6 years ending up in a big telco. I ended up being bored out of my mind just doing designs/tech sales/delegating all the "real work".

I decided to go into Devops and switch to contracting at the same time. I now realise that was over 10 years ago now.

I couldn't be happier with my job since then. It's 100% remote, It's hands on troubleshooting when things go horribly wrong, it's solving hard problems with automation and in last 2 years lots of AI when the clients decide to rip out a huge amount of integration and switch clouds/other software and so on every 2 years :-)

It pays a little less and definitely has less prestige than "Solutions" for a huge telco (and I no longer wear a suit at work), but I can definitely see myself being happy doing that for next 10 years (if the role still exists then).
by sickthecat | 2026-02-07 07:26:18+00:00
Built this over the past few weeks. It's a Bitcoin wallet where your keys live on an NXP SE050 secure element connected to a Raspberry Pi. All signing happens on the chip — private key material never touches the host. Web UI is only reachable as a Tor hidden service.

The SE050 communicates over I2C, which is plaintext by default, so the whole thing is wrapped in SCP03 (AES-128-CMAC + AES-128-CBC). NXP ships every chip with the same publicly documented factory keys, so if you don't rotate them on first use you're basically running without encryption. The setup wizard forces you to deal with this.

Some stuff I learned the hard way: if you create a key slot without ALLOW_DELETE in the policy bitmask, that slot is bricked forever. No recovery. NXP confirmed. I burned 4 of my first 16 slots figuring that out.

There's a full threat model in the repo if anyone wants to pick it apart. Looking for feedback from people who actually work with embedded security or hardware crypto. Tell me what I'm doing wrong, right or indifferent. I think it's pretty cool.
by bigtones | 2026-02-07 07:27:46+00:00
Great to see you're in Sydney Brendan, and let the haters hate.

You have done a brilliant job elevating your chosen specialty to the world, and encouraging and inspiring others in the industry for a long time - so you should be fairly compensated for that lofty position. I don't envy the late nights or very early mornings you have ahead of you on conference calls with SF, but good luck at OpenAI mate !
by wincy | 2026-02-07 07:28:00+00:00
Also important to note there is a time eventually that something is no longer a dupe, and people will still add previous discussions about it (often dang himself), because the previous conversations about the topic may be of interest. But unless some earth shattering research just came out in the last three days showing that lead is good for us, actually, it hasn’t been long enough for that to apply here.
by helterskelter | 2026-02-07 07:29:23+00:00
Yeah so I had family diagnosed with GBM and they went the denial route real hard. They got scammed out of mid six-digits by fraudsters offering some bogus cure, they didn't do anything on their bucket list, they spent the entire time telling themselves they were going to get better and didn't appreciate their last years at all, they didn't do things they had meant to do before they died because they were stuck with this idea that they could beat it. That sort of attitude can happen to family as well. Don't avoid reality by telling yourself you can fix it, because you'll miss what's important. In all overwhelming likelihood, you are not what oncology needed to cure GBM, and spending time and energy trying to cure it would be better spent with your loved one. This is it. This is what you have left with them. Get real.
by globular-toast | 2026-02-07 07:29:42+00:00
I don't get what "the complexity of a sandbox" is. You don't have to use Docker. I've been running agents in bubblewrap sandboxes since they first came out.[0]

If the agent can only use the Python interpreter you choose then you could just sandbox regular Python, assuming you trust the agent. But I don't trust any of them because they've probably been vibe coded, so I'll continue to just sandbox the agent using bubblewrap.

[0] https://blog.gpkb.org/posts/ai-agent-sandbox/
by slg | 2026-02-07 07:29:56+00:00
Fair enough, but my main response to that is that people need to support independent journalism. It's entirely possible I'm paying some fraud(s), but as someone who certainly spends more than the average person on online journalism, I trust the people I support at the very least know that putting their byline on an AI written article would be a career destroying scandal in the eyes of their current audience.
by hikkerl | 2026-02-07 07:30:36+00:00
>Multiculturalism isn't an asset because it's the most stable form of soceity, rather it's best we've figured out when the alternative is bloodshed between warring tribes

What on earth is the intention here? You think you're escaping conquest and destruction of your people and culture by... deliberately opening the floodgates to hordes of foreigners so that you can pretend it's okay because it's voluntary?

You're not escaping bloodshed, you're bringing it to your front door. And ensuring your extinction by making nihilistic excuses as foreigners pillage your country and colonise your lands.

Fast forward a few hundred years and there will be a monoculture again. Only, this time, it won't be yours.
by selvor | 2026-02-07 07:30:44+00:00
I like that the article mentions Manfred von Thun, his iteration over FORTH was a joy to use, spent many hours writing code with it. It's a breeze. It was the true mirror reflection of Lisp in FORTH, and helps one reap the benefits of concatenation without getting bogged down in the nitty gritty details as one often ends up dealing with in FORTH, at least in the beginning until a mature vocabulary is built for the problem.

As I'm still so far behind in the LLM tech in terms of how it works, so I don't know what to think of this article, but my experience with using them as a user to generate FORTH code was often a failure. They just can't get it right, most likely due to lack of training data. OTOH, I also found writing FORTH as a human way more difficult than any other language I used, even more so than hand written assembly. But it amortizes itself fairly quickly, and things get a lot easier after a point (what I called earlier as vocabulary maturity). But more importantly writing FORTH code is way more fun and satisfying to me somehow.
by jellojello | 2026-02-07 07:31:38+00:00
Hence why both together make the solution waymo chose. The proof is in the pudding, Waymo's have been driving millions of miles without any intervention. Tesla requires safety drivers. I would never trust the FSD on my model 3 to be even nearly perfect all the time.

Lidar also gives you the ability to see through fog and as it scans, see the depth needed to nearly always understand what object is in front of them.

My Model 3 shows "degraded" or "unavailable" about 2% of the time i'm driving around populated areas. Zero chance it will ever be truly FSD capable, no matter the software improvements. It'll still be unavailable because the cameras are blinded/blocked/unable to process the scene because it can't see the scene.

While you're right, washer fluid works usually on the windshield, it doesn't on the side cameras, and yea hdr could improve things, it won't improve depth perception, and this will never be installed on my model 3..

Lidar contributes the data most needed to handle the millions of edge cases that exist. With both camera and lidar contributing the data they are both the best at collecting, the risk of the very worst type of accidents is greatly reduced.

I don't see these stats https://waymo.com/safety/impact/ happening for tesla anytime soon.
by KevinChasse | 2026-02-07 07:32:13+00:00
Bastion isn’t designed for convenience or multi-device sync — it’s a deterministic, stateless cryptographic protocol. The master isn’t a human-memorable password; it’s a 256-bit root secret. Lowering it to a “password” breaks the threat model.
Unlike consumer vaults, Bastion explicitly enforces domain-separated salts, memory-hard derivation (Argon2id + PBKDF2), unbiased sampling, and versioned rotation — all provable invariants, not heuristic convenience. Syncing or masking passwords like 1P is a different design class: it trades third-party trust for usability.
This isn’t a strawman — it’s an architectural choice to remove server-side attack surfaces and guarantee deterministic, stateless password generation.
by jiggawatts | 2026-02-07 07:33:43+00:00
The volume of journal papers published isn't well-correlated with progress, sadly.

I have a physics degree and I regularly read the latest published research. Please don't make ad hominem attacks.

> How long has scientific inquiry about physics been going on? In that frame, is 50 years a long time or a short time?

Unlike all other sciences, on a long horizon, eventually Physics will be "completely solved", with no more fundamentals to discover, only applications, which are generally considered other sciences or engineering. We far from achieving this end-state.

The point is that we made giant strides every few years for decades, and then... nothing. The field has hardly advanced since the 1970s!
by withinboredom | 2026-02-07 07:33:46+00:00
They run an election based on a platform. You are voting for the person and the platform. They aren’t there to do your wishes, but to accomplish their agenda the people “agreed” was the best of all options that election cycle.

Sometimes this agenda is altruistic, like reducing crime. Sometimes it is populist, or social, or even fascist. Even then, elected officials are supposed to have limited power, not unlimited power. In some (many, depending on where you live) cases, they’re not even accountable to the people — the people can’t recall them, to remove them is a political act by other parts of government.
by bombcar | 2026-02-07 07:34:41+00:00
The land value argument is downstream of the real issues - some people don't want change and fight it.

If it was purely a money question you could just get some billionaire to go around buying out entire neighborhoods, redeveloping them, and turning around and selling them off for a profit (because they'd be worth more, right?) - the fact that this is not being done either means there's a great new startup or there are other issues.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-02-07 07:36:39+00:00
No, really, think about it. A touch screen is literally one component plus a computer you need anyways. Buttons need scaffolding, they need to be wired, etc. If you are designing a new car today, figuring out where all those buttons go for each model is a chore, it makes production more complicated, it requires more logistics vs just a touch screen.

Flush handles have to do with creating a recess in the body for normal handles. It’s just easier to cut a hole.

I’m guessing you aren’t willing to consider that the car companies are just being thrifty rather than extravagant, but ya, it’s a win win for them if they can save on costs at the same time as being seen as fancy.
by KevinChasse | 2026-02-07 07:38:01+00:00
Bastion’s cryptography isn’t AI-generated. The system follows well-established cryptographic primitives and protocols: PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA512 for deterministic password derivation, Argon2id for local key stretching, AES-256-GCM for encryption, and Shamir Secret Sharing over a prime field for secret splits. All design decisions are documented, and the code is open-source for verification."
by jenadine | 2026-02-07 07:38:45+00:00
> C is not just low level friendly, but low level out of the box. That is the level that all C must be written in

No, it is not:

- People use for/while loop, for example, instead of the "low level" 'goto'

- C compiler compute pointer aliasing, assume operations don't overflow, etc., in order to optimise your code: What you write doesn't translate directly to assembly.

- Some low level operations cannot even be represented in pure C (without using __asm__ extension escape hatch)
by fsiefken | 2026-02-07 07:39:05+00:00
I helped my mother out with a computer, gave her a mac after she called twic a wee about a windows popup. Eventually she became a grandmother, and later in old age, with dementia she stlll using the mac more or less successfully to google and e-mail.
Intentionality, coordination are important for keeping cognitive faculty.
It all sounds so easy, but letting her send e-mail through voice could create confusing situations.
by donkeybeer | 2026-02-07 07:41:06+00:00
He's done this fucked in the head stupidity with me too, he says utterly random not-even-wrong things out of his ass and keeps mindlessly repeating them as if he didn't hear anything when asked to cite actual case law or statistics. He has literally no idea how American legal system works and makes up absurd crap like filming cops is illegal or makes up crap about ICE agents having "court orders". When I cornered him on this asking him how many were actual court orders and how many legally null internal ICE "Karen" warrants proving he has no fucking idea, he kept repeating his retardation in circles. He still doesn't seem to understand the idea that police cannot and is not granted any powers to decide what is illegal, that is a matter of the courts. He also cited some absurd crap about deportations reducing crime again showing he is making up absurd crap out of his ass, for in many studies immigrants are shown to commit less crimes so deportation would increase the per capita crime rate.
by keepamovin | 2026-02-07 07:41:17+00:00
Since the community has been loving my slopmaxxing so much lately - lapcat I'm gonna beat you to it this time:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=dosaygo-studio

11 posts!

But also since the mods have voiced their displeasure, and to some clearly this kind of humorous slop-nod is not what this place is meant for, I think this will be the last of these little escapades.

So, it is with much joy that this series bids you all adieu, and I thought I'd let it go out with the ultimate meta reference - HN turned to slop? These posts are all slop? Now it's made real.

Please enjoy Gemini Pro 3's rewrite of the current front page in pure slopmaxxing style.
by numpad0 | 2026-02-07 07:41:27+00:00
What makes general OS difficult on a SoC is usually the lack of hardware virtual<->real RAM address translation accelerator, the MMU.

I guess it's not that important if developers had no raw pointer access so that object can be anywhere dynamically assigned(Java!!! also JavaScript and all interpreted langs). But basically all desktop OS apps are written in C and they always want single consistent virtual addresses to jump around in and none of apps work without the hardware dynamic translation.
P2P crypto exchange development company
by sonniya | 2026-02-07 07:41:57+00:00
We are a P2P crypto exchange development company focused on building secure, user-centric trading platforms. Our expertise lies in creating decentralized environments where users can trade directly with confidence and transparency. By emphasizing robust architecture, compliance readiness, and seamless user experience, we help businesses launch reliable peer-to-peer exchanges. Our development approach prioritizes scalability, security, and performance, enabling platforms to grow with market demand while maintaining trust, efficiency, and long-term sustainability in the evolving crypto ecosystem.