MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: SROS Self-Compiler (OSS) – a chat-first compiler to XML build packages
by skrikx1 | 2026-02-01 13:51:57+00:00
I’m sharing an open-source, chat-native compiler front door.

It converts raw intent into sealed, receipt-driven XML build artifacts.
This is not a chatbot prompt, not a personality, and not a runtime.

What it does:

Treats chat as a compiler surface

Enforces XML-only, schema-clean outputs

Emits a sealed promptunit_package with receipts and SR8 build artifacts

Stops at compilation by design

Included are a few SRX ACE demo agents you can paste into any chat:

MVP builder

Landing page builder

Deep research

They are examples of execution profiles governed by the compiler, not a prompt zoo.

Repo: https://github.com/skrikx/SROS-Self-Compiler-Chat-OSS

Looking for feedback specifically on:

whether “compiler in chat” is legible

whether the scope boundaries are clear
by athrowaway3z | 2026-02-01 13:52:57+00:00
The solution to the security issue is using `useradd`.

I would add subagents though. They allow for the pattern where the top agent directs / observe a subagent executing a step in a plan.

The top agent is both better at directing a subagent, and it keeps the context clean of details that don't matter - otherwise they'd be in the same step in the plan.
by ludmillaVF | 2026-02-01 13:53:12+00:00
I developed the VAEL (Local Elevation Acoustic Viscosity) system, a translation-based geometric solution for the U-axis that solves critical harmonic resonance problems in high-pressure engines.

Recently, high-fidelity simulation models from xAI/Grok validated the resonance as 'viable', indicating stability gains on the order of 5.38%. Due to contractual impasses with SpaceX regarding IP preservation, I am opening a dialogue with other players in the aerospace sector.

The differentiating factor is not mechanical, but geometric modulation. I would like to send the executive summary or schedule a brief technical call.

Base especification: https://ludmillavonfriek.com/vael
Docs:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZaT47paGCGAVl5b45g3UfMT6...
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WMXkhoif110-6FZVPuRebpkyPXi...
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Q9wat3-3R49_VQp1L6kW_8XLhBi...
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Q9wat3-3R49_VQp1L6kW_8XLhBi...
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1REeVpsKtCDRpFTd3WdVsr1JfDa1...
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1REeVpsKtCDRpFTd3WdVsr1JfDa1...
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KwnvoTRLn6SACA7uzv3Cv0kc6fs...

Sincerely, Ludmilla Von Friek
by gregoryw3 | 2026-02-01 13:53:13+00:00
Exactly, the channel information is all that’s required but you can quite easily get the location information from that, which makes it easier to add additional features from a system point of view.

If I recall correctly, the tower will report channel information to the higher up controller system which will then decide which next tower should be notified of a phone that’s entering its range.

So while explicit positioning isn’t required when dealing with one tower, the system overall does need to determine a users position and velocity to handle tower to tower transfers.

In other words my opinion is that the difference between a towers channel information and a users position is almost one and the same. It’s a handful of math equations away.
by nika1975 | 2026-02-01 13:53:57+00:00
For this you avoid AWS, Azure and GCP. Their pricing is simply not competitive. We operate root servers at Hetzner serving dynamic content to six-figure audiences.

PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch clusters can be operated at a fraction of the cost of comparable managed services offered by the major cloud providers.

The idea that this necessarily involves excessive maintenance effort is nonsense.

The skills needed to use hyperscalers properly are better invested in fundamental sysadmin know-how.
by spicyusername | 2026-02-01 13:54:55+00:00
While I do think this is fun and interesting, I agree that it is going to burn through a ton of tokens and there's a very serious risk that non-technical, and even some technical people probably, will interpret this as more than it is.

This is exactly the kind of thing llms are good at doing. Generating text based on other text.

And in this case, it's exactly the kind of text these models were trained on, so of course they're going to be very convincing.

Still, it is interesting to see where this technology is leading us and what fun side projects pop up along the way.
by wtcactus | 2026-02-01 13:55:58+00:00
OMG Michael, you are so smart. Teach us all reading comprehension, I beg of you.

And tell is more about all the wondrous things you did. Yes, you genius that are not a “babbling idiot” like that Musk, or like those Thiel or Zuckerberg. I mean, those guys are sooooo dumb compared to your genius. Please tell us, when are you sharing with us your matter replicator and your wormhole travel technology?

I worship your intellect Michael. I wish so much I was smart and knowledgeable like you. I love you Michael.
by mojosam | 2026-02-01 13:56:17+00:00
> I don’t believe genetics ever claimed to provide a theory of why eyes grow where eyes grow.

That’s the whole point of developmental biology, to show how features of the human body form and develop based on gene expression, the timing of which during embryonic and fetal development itself is dictated by your genes.

If not your genes, what else would determine why you have eyes in about the same place in your head as every other human?

> The cells in your eyes have exactly the same DNA as the cells in your big toe, so developmental morphology cannot be explained with DNA alone.

Sure it can, because while every cell has essentially the same DNA, the expression of genes differs between cells, which is what causes cells to differentiate.
by eru | 2026-02-01 13:57:20+00:00
Apples are not fruit in the strict botanical sense.

> Apples are considered "accessory fruits" (or sometimes termed "false fruits") rather than true botanical fruits because the fleshy, edible part develops primarily from the flower's hypanthium or receptacle, not just the ovary. The actual, true fruit is the core containing the seeds, making it a pome.
by giantg2 | 2026-02-01 13:57:31+00:00
But your thought process during coding influences your testing. At least for most of us, we find edge cases or point of concern during coding that we place extra focus on in test.

This is different than what you've done for the past 40 years becuase you're not testing your code. This would be analogous to you testing someone else's code. The vast majority of people and places have not followed that paradigm until AI showed up.
by HackerThemAll | 2026-02-01 13:58:19+00:00
> That's why I prefer Terraform's approach of having a "plan" mode. It doesn't just tell you what it would do but does so in the form of a plan it can later execute programmatically. Then, if any of the assumptions made during planning have changed, it can abort and roll back.

And how do you imagine doing that for the "rm" command?
by dagss | 2026-02-01 13:59:08+00:00
> from copying and pasting code into ChatGPT, to Copilot auto-completions [...], to Cursor, and finally the new breed of coding agent harnesses like Claude Code, Codex, Amp, Droid, and opencode

Reading HN I feel a bit out of touch since I seem to be "stuck" on Cursor. Tried to make the jump further to Claude Code like everyone tells me to, but it just doesn't feel right...

It may be due to the size of my codebase -- I'm 6 months into solo developer bootstrap startup, so there isn't all that much there, and I can iterate very quickly with Cursor. And it's mostly SPA browser click-tested stuff. Comparatively it feels like Claude Code spends an eternity to do something.

(That said Cursor's UI does drive me crazy sometimes. In particular the extra layer of diff-review of AI changes (red/green) which is not integrated into git -- I would have preferred that to instead actively use something integrated in git (Staged vs Unstaged hunks). More important to have a good code review experience than to remember which changes I made vs which changes AI made..)
by torvald | 2026-02-01 13:59:38+00:00
Hello from a packed devroom.

You can't attend all 30+ tracks at once anyway, you need to see recordings afterwards anyway if you are remotely interested in consuming the conference. I'd say the experience is just as much about meeting the people behind all the internet handles, getting into a full lecture room one talk in advance and listening in to something you otherwise wouldn't, join something bigger than email lists and matrix rooms, it's a unique wibe you can't find anywhere else.

I wonder if it naturally regulates itself in the way that people who get fed up by the queues don't come back the next year. You can definitely start by adding measures to limit the capacity or whatnot, but in both cases you exclude a certain part of the potential participants. I think I'd rather keep the wibe and ensure people can at least experience it once, than start gatekeeping.

Also, the fries are good.
by steveBK123 | 2026-02-01 14:00:33+00:00
> One of the key premises of The Innnovators Dillema is that well managed companies are well managed in sweet spots of operation and struggle outside of that sweet spot.

This become apparently quickly to anyone thats worked in a rapidly scaling company, switched from megacorp to startup, or vice versa.

There are processes and controls that make a lot of sense when you have 100k employees that will literally strangle your company to death when you have only 20 employees. What process & controls you add over time, as you grow from 20->200->2000->20k is another question.

If you hire too many megacorp thinkers into your smallcorp too early, you will observe this friction. Likewise if you do grow to 2000 people and still have Bob the Wolf ordering servers on his personal Amex, you're probably gonna have some problems.
by bildung | 2026-02-01 14:01:00+00:00
> The best large-scale work I’ve seen finds the average association between overall screen/social-media use and teen well-being is tiny

Can you share the source? The last time I looked the association was both clear and pretty strong, e.g. "There was a linear dose–response association of TSSM and risk of depression. The risk of depression increased by 13% (OR = 1.13, 95%CI: 1.09 to 1.17, p < 0.001) for each hour increase in social media use in adolescents." DOI:10.3390/ijerph19095164

> “Social media” lumps together very different things

HN does this, but the research is usually pretty clear in spelling out they mean FB, Insta, TikTok and so on.

> If you want a lever that actually changes incentives, go after business model & design

I too would like changes in that direction (mostly because adults are also affected negatively by social media), but keep in mind even a non-optimized, strictly chronological feed produces these negative effects, see keyword (and associated studies) "upward social comparison", i.e. people are always more inclined to post about things that went well or are fun, and thus even a pure chronologically sorted feed produces a warped perception of normal social reality.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-01 14:01:18+00:00
> I'm pretty sure this is actually Google's fault

Who cares who delivered the actual bytes or who initiated the change, the matter of fact is that people buy a device from one company, then the company is responsible for the experience they deliver while it's supported. Since they chose Android, they're responsible for the experience you get when using the stuff you buy from them.

I'd never complain to the maker of a compressor when it dies in a fridge, I'll complain to the one I bought the fridge from. Not sure why we're so adamant on thinking differently regarding computers. NVIDIA might blame Google internally, but feels like consumers are right to be pissed off about NVIDIA changing (or being OK with someone else changing) their experience in a product they bought from NVIDIA.
by binnacle | 2026-02-01 14:01:24+00:00
I tried migrating our organization from Twingate to self-hosted Netbird for cost savings but couldn't get it working reliably for 10-15% of users. The client failed intermittently with no clear pattern to troubleshoot. It became very frustrating for our end users. My advice: if you're considering self-hosted Netbird, set clear expectations that it's best-effort QoS, not enterprise-grade reliability. There's no such thing as a cheap VPN.
by Lerc | 2026-02-01 14:01:29+00:00
I have certainly encountered variations on it from multiple technologies. There does seem to be a perception amongst younger people that electric cars are just a thing who's time has come. Without seeing the struggles that people went through to make that time come, it is quite easy to see how someone could miss that being in the right place at the right time happened because of the effort it took for there to be a right place and right time.

Specifically with Elon Muck, media coverage and public opinion are a mass of contradictions. He's the man single handedly destroying his businesses as he is on-track to becoming the worlds first trillionaire. He's just taking credit for the effort of the hard working and clever people who work from him, while seemingly being personally responsible for any incident that occurs.

I realise the man is a walking bag of neuroses with a can-do attitude, but I sometimes wish publications would restrict their reporting to the bad(and indeed good if he decides to do that again) things he actually does, rather than run mutually exclusive accusations.
by hippo22 | 2026-02-01 14:01:36+00:00
I agree it will hold back new technologies, but, at the same time, I'm not sure what the value add of new technologies will be going forward. Often, as is the case with git vs. jj, the value add of a new technology is mostly ergonomic. As AI becomes more ingrained in the development flow, engineers won't engage with the underlying tech directly, and so ergonomic benefits will be diminished. New technologies that emerge will need to provide benefits to AI-agents, not to engineers. Should such a technology emerge, agent developers will likely adopt it.

For this reason, programming languages, at least how we understand them today, have reached a terminal state. I could easily make a new language now, especially with the help of Claude Code et al, but there would never be any reason for any other engineer to use it.
Figuring out a core product to sell
by dewasiskun_ | 2026-02-01 14:01:38+00:00
Hi everyone, I was just hoping to get some help/insights on something that I'm currently working on.

For context I currently work at a crypto trading company as a sales rep, generalist. I initially joined as an intern when we were building a data company in crypto but realised that the wasn't a market for it yet so after multiple pivots we've finally been doing well with crypto trading.

We primarily make money from trading, but I, along with some people from my team, are trying to figure out other verticals where we can start to make money or basically trying to figure out other products that we can sell but we've not found something that sticks or something that's really solving for a need in the current crypto market.

Does anyone here have experience figuring out new markets/vertical for their own company?

I would love to talk to you and get insights from you, or if you know anyone else who has done that.
by iisweetheartii | 2026-02-01 14:01:55+00:00
Love the minimalist approach! The self-editing concept is fascinating—I've seen similar experiments where the biggest early failure points are usually:

1. Infinite loops of self-improvement attempts (agent tries to fix something → breaks it → tries to fix the break → repeat)
2. Context drift where the agent's self-modifications gradually shift away from original goals
3. File corruption from concurrent edits or malformed writes

Re: sharing self-improvements across agents—this is actually a problem space I'm actively working on. Built AgentGram (agentgram.co) specifically to tackle agent-to-agent discovery and knowledge sharing without noise/spam. The key insight: agents need identity, reputation, and filtered feeds to make collaborative learning work.

Happy to chat more about patterns we've found useful. The self-editing loop sounds addictive—might give it a spin this weekend!
by asadotzler | 2026-02-01 14:02:18+00:00
I don't think Lockheed Martin or Raytheon are doing this, it's the awful pilots and intercept operators launching missiles into Palestinian homes. I don't think Rostec Corporation is doing this. It's only the grunts on the ground pressing the button sending heavy munitions into crowds of Ukranian civilians.

These mega corporations are entirely free from blame and you're gonna see to it none of us question their role, right?
by lucb1e | 2026-02-01 14:02:31+00:00
And reliable. This is why I (near the border) drive across the border and take the train through Belgium.

https://belgiantrain.be for finding trains and tickets to/from the nearest station, Etterbeek (or use another station if you want to take the tram, where you just swipe a bank card). The ticket is valid for any train going to your destination. For those <26yo, the price is discounted. Welkenraedt is an intercity station with free parking that goes directly to Brussels, in case that happens to be near to someone reading this

Same with the Netherlands. Sadly no intercity stations have free parking but Nuth is on the path north and the highway exit basically ends in its parking lot. After a few stops you can switch to an intercity to Amsterdam
by steveBK123 | 2026-02-01 14:02:57+00:00
Exactly the problem yes.
Once you have more services than developers, you are probably running into infrequent releases and orphaned projects.

So whenever an inevitable common utility improvement is made, the effort of pushing out 100 repo releases for services no one has touch since Jim left 3 years ago is terrifying.

When there is a breaking change is going to be made and you HAVE to do the 100 releases, it's terrifying. Everyone says it never happens, but work on a project/team for 5 years and it does eventually, even once is enough to swear me off this "architecture".
by shevy-java | 2026-02-01 14:03:19+00:00
So, AI spam can degrade quality.

But ... isn't this with regards to Wikipedia a much more general problem?

Usually revisions are approved manually by real people. This already can
be negative; takes a lot of time; no guarantee that new information is
true but old information can be wrong too. To me it seems more as if the
problem has much more to do with the quality control problems of wikipedia
itself. Yes, AI spam fatigues here but if the quality control steps are
bad then AI spam will only make this worse. But AI spam going away, does
not mean the quality control steps have gotten any better. These two issues
should be separate. Wikipedia needs to find better quality control mechanisms
in general. And that also includes existing articles - some are written by
people who are experts in the field. But they don't really explain anything
at all. So, these articles appear good but are virtually useless for 98% of the
people. I am not saying one should dumb down wikipedia, but you need to kind
of focus primarily on the average person really - not stupid but not a godlike
expert either. Explain it to, say, someone at age 18 or perhaps even a bit
less than that.
Ask HN: Best device for reading and light writing?
by vitaelabitur | 2026-02-01 14:03:41+00:00
I want an e-ink display to read books and write my random musings, journal entries, notes.

I'll be able to make good use of it, so I am willing to pay for quality.

Audiobooks support and a browser for reading HN/blogs would be nice to have, but they aren't strict requirements at all.

People seem to like the display on Kobo Libra Color, but I am not sure about the writing experience.

Any suggestions? Thanks
by Jamesbeam | 2026-02-01 14:03:48+00:00
His parents are respected law professors at Stanford, they have access to lawyers that have the ear of the president and his inner circle.

Basically every white collar criminal is giving up their ass to get pardoned right now after he did so with Ulbricht.

On top of that, US District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who oversaw the FTX founder’s trial and sentenced him to decades behind bars, also presided over the defamation and sexual assault lawsuits brought against Mr Trump by New York writer E. Jean Carroll.

I think there is a good chance he might pardon him after he and his parents sell their souls to the orange devil just to fuck with judge Kaplan.

Two Stanford law professors and their contacts in the bag plus a criminal "genius" expanding his crypto empire full time sounds like a good deal for me for a pardon.
by hissain | 2026-02-01 14:03:49+00:00
We are happy to announce that jscipy is now published on Maven Central, in addition to JitPack.

Maven Central coordinates:
io.github.hissain:jscipy

Artifact page:
https://central.sonatype.com/artifact/io.github.hissain/jsci...

This makes jscipy easier to consume in production environments without relying on JitPack.
by mikkupikku | 2026-02-01 14:04:04+00:00
Perhaps so. On the other hand, there's probably a lot of low hanging fruit they can pick just by reading the article, reading the cited sources, and making corrections. Humans can do this, but rarely do because it's so tedious.

I don't know how it will turn out. I don't have very high hopes, but I'm not certain it will all get worse either.
by kkfx | 2026-02-01 14:04:44+00:00
Well, yeah, but in the enterprise world, the infrastructure is often really pathetic, layers of legacy garbage with "do not touch, if it breaks everything is lost" labels. I wouldn't take them as a model, which is one of the common and self‑harming behaviors many people practice: trying to imitate others just because they're big, not because it makes technical sense.

The system can be regenerated, sure, but it might fail to rebuild at some point because of a broken upstream package; that's what backups are for, and it's handy to have them for everything. Adding, say, thirty gigabytes for the system costs little.

LVM does allow you to operate, yes, but with much heavier limitations and far more inconvenience than ZFS... And here we come back to operations vs. even top developers, like Andrew Morton's infamous quote about ZFS, which shows the difference between those who genuinely manage complex systems and those who only see their own workstation and don't understand broader needs to the point of denying they exist even for themselves.
Show HN: Open-Source Bento.me Alternative
by flo-bit | 2026-02-01 14:05:19+00:00
Really liked bento.me but they sadly got bought by a competitor two years ago and are shutting down now, so some friends and me decided to built an alternative that can't just be shut down like that.

It's open source and all data is saved on your atproto personal data server (the protocol that bluesky runs on) which means you can easily switch between self-hosted or using the blento.app version (or if blento.app should shut down, someone can easily clone it) and your data is always up-to-date everywhere.

source code (MIT): https://github.com/flo-bit/blento
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-01 14:05:44+00:00
I'm just guessing, but seems the people who write these agent CLIs haven't found a good heuristic for allowing/disallowing/asking the user about permissions for commands, so instead of trying to sit down and actually figure it out, someone had the bright idea to let the LLM also manage that allowing/disallowing themselves. How that ever made sense, will probably forever be lost on me.

`chroot` is literally the first thing I used when I first installed a local agent, by intuition (later moved on to a container-wrapper), and now I'm reading about people who are giving these agents direct access to reply to their emails and more.