MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by idan | 2026-02-08 19:30:48+00:00
Hello HN! The Agentic Workflows project has been on the githubnext.com website for a while, and we recently moved the documentation and repo over to the `github` org.

This is early research out of GitHub Next building on our continuous AI [1] theme, so we'd love for you to kick the tires and share your thoughts. We'd be happy to answer questions, give support, whatever you need. One of the key goals of this project is to figure out how to put guardrails around agents running in GitHub actions. You can read more about our security architecture [1], but at a high level we do the following:

- We run the agent in a sandbox, with minimal to no access to secrets
- We run the agent in a firewall, so it can only access the sites you specify
- We have created a system called "*safe outputs*" that limits what write operations the agent can perform to only the ones you specify. For example, if you create an Agentic Workflow that should only comment on an issue, it will not be able to open a new issue, propose a PR, etc.
- We run MCPs inside their own sandboxes, so an attacker can’t leverage a compromised server to break out or affect other components

We find that there's something very compelling about the shape of this — delegating chores to agents in the same way that we delegate CI to actions. It's certainly not perfect yet, but we're finding new applications for this every day and teams at GitHub are already creating agentic workflows for their own purposes, whether it's engineering or issue management or PR hygiene.

> Why is it on github.github.io and not github.com?

GitHub Pages domains are always ORGNAME.github.io. Now that we've moved the repo over to the `github` org, that's the domain. When this graduates from being a technology preview to a full-on product, we imagine it'll get a spot on github.com/somewhere.

> Why is GitHub Next exploring this?

Our job at GitHub is to build applications that leverage the latest technology. There are a lot of applications of _asynchronous_ AI which we suspect might become way bigger than _synchronous_ AI. Agentic Workflows can do things that are not possible without an LLM. For example, there's no linter in existence that can tell me if my documentation and my code has diverged. That's just one new capability. We think there's a huge category of these things here and the only way to make it good is to … make it!

> Where can I go to talk with folks about this and see what others are cooking with it?

https://gh.io/next-discord in the #continuous-ai channel!

[1] https://githubnext.com/projects/continuous-ai/

[2] https://github.github.io/gh-aw/introduction/architecture/

(edit: right I forgot that HN doesn't do markdown links)
by 47282847 | 2026-02-08 19:31:08+00:00
> Until GDPR web professionals fought tooth and nail to keep modal dialogs out of web applications, mostly successfully.

Like the comment above rightfully states, GDPR does not require banners at all. It’s up to the site to decide if they want to (ab)use collected data for other purposes than what is required. If it was the goal of “web professionals” to avoid modals like you say, it could perfectly well be achieved also today. Also, don’t you remember all the popup dialogs and modal ads and “in your face subscribe to our newsletter before you can even see our content” that sites had, well before GDPR? So many that browsers had to basically disable popups? So much for “tooth and nail”.

None of the sites I’ve ever built require any cookie banners. Never have. I would refuse to build something that does, because the use cases that require them are unethical, unnecessary, and a cancer for society. Very simple.
by jonathanlydall | 2026-02-08 19:31:17+00:00
Slightly related, but fraudsters love using .svg attachments, typically the mails purport to be for an invoice which you need to log into your Microsoft account to be able to “securely” view.

I’m not sure if Exchange Online doesn’t scan them or something, but I landed up making a rule which blocks all emails with either .svg or .htm(l) attachments and to notify me when blocked.

Happens a couple of times per month for the our small company, no false positives yet.
by jlarocco | 2026-02-08 19:31:42+00:00
Home users are icing on the cake. Suing them for privacy is a bad look (see the RIAA), and using Windows and Office at home reinforces using at work.

On the other hand, since they own GitHub they can (in theory) monitor the downloads, check for IPs belonging to businesses, and use it as evidence in piracy cases.
by aurareturn | 2026-02-08 19:32:05+00:00
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1mmdlvh/why_4o_is_...

It's crazy how emotionally attached people are to 4o. I wonder if through prompt instructing, OpenAI can get GPT 5 series to talk more like 4o for these people?
by tizzzzz | 2026-02-08 19:32:32+00:00
Who Bears the Cost?
Users lose access to a promised product and get only inferior alternatives.
No compensation for lost value; customers effectively subsidize management’s overspending and crisis response.
Enterprise and research users face reproducibility issues and broken integration promises.
Legal, Regulatory, and Broader Industry Questions
Do such abrupt discontinuations and broken availability statements constitute deceptive practices under FTC or California consumer protection law?
Should enterprise or consumer contracts guarantee minimum model lifecycles?
Is this decision motivated by genuine product strategy—or by urgent financial engineering to improve numbers ahead of a regulatory deadline?
What are the implications for AI governance, reproducibility, and user trust if leading providers can unilaterally break product commitments?
Discussion Points

1.For enterprise customers: have you received enforceable model availability guarantees?
2.Has anyone experienced systematic service degradation prior to the discontinuation?
3.How should regulators treat sudden AI product sunsets affecting millions of users？

Why This Matters
This goes far beyond individual Subscription funds subscriptions. It raises fundamental issues for the AI industry:
Corporate accountability: Can providers simply break public product promises with impunity?
Regulatory frameworks: Should AI product availability be a legally enforceable commitment?
Consumer protection: Are users entitled to pro-rated refunds or remedies when sold “as available” subscriptions are suddenly discontinued?
Industry governance: What does this mean for market competition, trust, and sustainable innovation?
Rather than being remembered as a pivotal moment for AI industry governance, OpenAI’s shift toward B2B monetization—at the expense of transparency, continuity, and user trust—should serve as a stark warning.
It demonstrates how easy it is for organizations to abandon “benefiting humanity” in favor of profit, and how little protection ordinary users have when those priorities change.
by helterskelter | 2026-02-08 19:32:45+00:00
The temperature difference should in principle increase thermodynamic efficiency. You get loss of MPG from other factors though mentioned in the link, like increased friction of moving parts, idling to warm up (0MPG), defrosters/seat heaters, lower tire pressure, denser air to drive through, winter fuel mixes which may not have as much energy, etc.
by zbentley | 2026-02-08 19:33:26+00:00
Fair (and you’re basically describing the xz hack; vouching is done for online identities and not the people behind them).

Even with that risk I think a reputation based WoT is preferable to most alternatives. Put another way: in the current Wild West, there’s no way to identify, or track, or impose opportunity costs on transacting with (committing or using commits by) “Epstein but in code”.
by spankalee | 2026-02-08 19:33:31+00:00
This happens with all agents I've used and package.json files for npm. Instead of using `npm i foo` the agent string-edits package.json and hallucinates some version to install. Usually it's a kind of ok version, but it's not how I would like this to work.

It's worse with renaming things in code. I've yet to see an agent be able to use refactoring tools (if they even exist in VS Code) instead of brute-forcing renames with string replacement or sed. Agents use edit -> build -> read errors -> repeat, instead of using a reliable tool, and it burns a lot more GPU...
by hn_acker | 2026-02-08 19:33:47+00:00
I erroneously used "H1B" as a shorthand for employment-based immigration. While H-1B provides a pathway to permanent residency, it is a non-immigrant visa until the State Department approves the visa holder's residency application. The EB visa line (such as EB-3 and EB-1) are immigration visas from the start.

To make my previous comment better fit with what I intended to communicate at the time, I would correct my previous comment by replacing:

- What makes family sponsorship a "loophole" to H1Bs, when family sponsorship could instead be framed as an equivalent form of legal immigration with a different purpose?

with

+ What makes family sponsorship a "loophole" to employment-based immigration, when family sponsorship could instead be framed as an equivalent form of legal immigration with a different purpose?

and replacing

- Accepting the "low skill" framing and setting aside the fact that family-sponsored immigrants can have "high skill" without proving it through the H1B process,

with

+ Accepting the "low skill" framing and setting aside the fact that family-sponsored immigration-seekers can have "high skill" without proving it to the government through the "high skill" pathways,

.
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2026-02-08 19:33:51+00:00
Outside of the obvious, the tragedy of the young woman losing her life, the fact that the scammers likely will not be impacted at all, etc. a couple of other thoughts.

- It’s strange that we still haven’t setup any sort of authenticated form of communication with official parties. Email/phone call scams have been around for a long time. They’re very easy to fall prey to. There’s no reason our phones shouldn’t be able to inform us that a certain number is officially from the IRS, Cops, Verizon, etc.

- This is a form of Swatting. Delivery companies, and also the police, etc need to do better in ensuring the people demanding services are where they’re demanding the service and/or the person who lives there is aware and genuinely needs to be visited.
- We need a bit of a broken windows policing for online/digital scams. The reason they are blowing up is there is hardly a risk of being caught. And the cost/benefit analysis probably suggests that th police really shouldn’t be involved in most of the individual cases or expend too many resources. However, this blows up the number of cases so the aggregate cost does indeed grow too high. So there needs to be an effort to prosecute and expend resources even on low level cases so the criminals get the message that they’re not gonna get away with it.
by bopbopbop7 | 2026-02-08 19:34:12+00:00
Just because you are in an echo chamber of juniors using LLMs doesn't mean the rest of the industry is like that, or that even LLMs effective. AI companies have insane marketing budgets and are going to IPO this year, of course they want to make it seem like everyone is doing it, FOMO works on the masses.

Studies like the MITRE one have shown that LLMs decreases productivity even though developers think it increases it. Doesn't seem like he is missing much.
by Kim_Bruning | 2026-02-08 19:34:19+00:00
Oh wow, that's like responding politely to an "Arkell v Pressdram" reference.

There's no human in the loop.

I mean, I realize it would be insulting if there was a human in the loop.

But there's evidently no human in the loop. And there's no high power AI in the loop either.

(my own AI helper caught this immediately :-P )
by SecurityGeekYY | 2026-02-08 19:34:53+00:00
Most security models still assume the network is visible and then try to control access on top of it.
This CSA paper argues for the opposite: hiding network infrastructure entirely — no routable IPs, no exposed ports, no DNS answers — until identity is verified at the session layer.
The idea builds on SDP and SPA, but reframes zero trust around invisibility first, especially against automated and AI-driven reconnaissance.
by 8n4vidtmkvmk | 2026-02-08 19:35:24+00:00
I'm not the parent but if you know you want to merge a PR "within a few seconds" then you're likely to be merging in bad changes.

If you had left it at know you want to reject a PR within a few seconds, that'd be fine.

Although with safety critical systems I'd probably want each contributor to have some experience in the field too.
by MarkusQ | 2026-02-08 19:36:36+00:00
Intrinsically good, but in conflict with some larger, out of band concern that the contributor could have no way to know about? Upvote to take the sting out of rejection, along with a note along the lines of "Well done, and we would merge is it weren't for our commitment to support xxx systems which are not compatible with yyy. Perhaps refactor as a plugin?"

Also, upvotes and merge decisions may well come from different people, who happen to disagree. This is in fact healthy sometimes.
by tatersolid | 2026-02-08 19:37:15+00:00
Perhaps it was actually an authorized drone?

Here in the USA quad-copter drones are used to inspect powerlines and other infrastructure; I see them a few times per year in my area. I don’t see why they wouldn’t use drones to visually inspect train tracks as well. Very cost effective and energy efficient alternative to manual inspection in a vehicle of some kind.
Show HN: Nick the Groq – AI Poker Coach- Open Source
by hotrod46 | 2026-02-08 19:37:19+00:00
A fully featured game of poker with bots - with an AI coach that explains what your next move should be, based off your cards, the moves other individuals have taken, and your position wrt the dealer

Contribute here: https://github.com/hotrod462/Poker-Coacher
by nine_k | 2026-02-08 19:37:24+00:00
I don't think that trust is easily transferable between projects, and tracking "karma" or "reputation" as a simple number in this file would be technically easy. But how much should the "karma" value change form different actions? It's really hard to formalize efficiently. The web of trust, with all intricacies, in small communities fits well into participants' heads. This tool is definitely for reasonably small "core" communities handling a larger stream of drive-by / infrequent contributors.
by ck2 | 2026-02-08 19:37:51+00:00
sorry it requires a little detective work

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7760937/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3534764/

> "An X-ray diffraction study found that EPA and DHA exert different effects on the lipid bilayer of cell membranes. EPA readily incorporates into the cell membrane core and stabilizes it, whereas DHA does not"

> "Why does this matter? Cell membranes are essential for cellular function: not only do they provide structural support for cells, but they also facilitate cell-to-cell communication and nutrient/toxin transport. Different effects of EPA and DHA on membrane stability likely elicit different effects in cell signaling. A second study revealed that in addition to stabilizing cell membranes, EPA is also protective against harmful reactive oxygen species and lipid peroxidation"

basically EPA modulates the immune system, DHA does not
by m463 | 2026-02-08 19:37:54+00:00
> With something more descriptive like, "Escape from Shawshank" or just "Prison Break" people would have been more interested to see it.

But maybe that would have killed the real market for people who wanted a deep subtle movie.

Despite its disappointing box-office returns ...

...It went on to become the top rented film of that year.

also

While finances for licensing the film for television are unknown, in 2014, current and former Warner Bros. executives confirmed that it was one of the highest-valued assets in the studio's $1.5 billion library.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shawshank_Redemption
by colechristensen | 2026-02-08 19:38:01+00:00
There are a bunch of things going on, and some people's measure of efficiency needs work.

1) winter blend fuels have less energy per volume, that doesn't make your engine any less efficient by energy but it does by volume of gas

2) lots of temporary cold effects: fuel vaporization, thick lubricants, etc. these things become less of a problem as the engine warms up but some energy is still lost on long drives

3) air resistance: all aerodynamic forces are linearly proportional with air density. At a constant pressure there's about a 15% difference in air density between the hottest and coldest places you can drive (and thus 15% less drag on a hot summer day than a cold winter day). aerodynamic forces are proportional to the square of your velocity and they become the largest resistive force around 50mph -- so at highway speeds you're losing efficiency because you have to push more air out of the way

4) energy used to maintain temperature: this is hard to calculate but some engine power is lost because the energy is used heating up the engine block and lost to the environment

5) the Thermodynamics 101 engine efficiency goes UP with increased temperature, but it's got a lot of real world effects to compete with, no spherical cows and all
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2026-02-08 19:38:23+00:00
Umm, it’s incredibly easy to blame the shooter because in those 999,999 cases the shooter was not effectively kidnapping the person they were supposedly afraid of.

This guy didn’t just shoot the delivery person whom they were afraid of.

He didn’t let her drive away even after she was clearly scared, explained she was simply an Uber driver, showed no evidence of weaponry and just wanted to drive away.

There’s a reason he wasn’t just convicted of killing the Uber driver but also of kidnapping.
by trimethylpurine | 2026-02-08 19:38:34+00:00
It's not a choice. Making kids eat from a food bank and sleep in a shelter is morally inferior to working at Microsoft. You're saying, repeatedly, that they should make your morally inferior choice and they deserve to be judged if they don't. Only a monster could call that a choice.

Look at yourself:
>Having kids is also a bullshit excuse. Choosing comfort over conscience is your prerogative but you’re just teaching your kids the same values.

Your conscience tells you that children should be forced to sleep in shelters and eat from food banks just so that you won't have to see ads when you use Microsoft Windows.

Please DON'T teach anyone your values. Your moral compass points to the trash.

I'm out bro. Cheers.
by johnvanommen | 2026-02-08 19:38:36+00:00
> What you're forecasting is a scenario where total output has substantially increased but no one's hiring or able to start their own business.

I said labor would have “lower value” after AI progresses further and further.

My statement reflects that increased productivity means that fewer people are required to generate the same amount of economic output.

You twisted my statement and said “nobody is hiring.”

Which isn’t what I said.
by grumple | 2026-02-08 19:38:54+00:00
One of the first bugs I found - and fixed - at my current job instantly made us an extra 200k/year. One line of code (potentially a one character fix?), causing a little bug nobody noticed, which I only saw because I like to comb through application logs, and caused by a peculiarity of the data. Would an LLM have written better code? Maybe. But I've seen a lot of bad code churned out by LLMs, even today. I'm not saying every line matters - particular for frontend code - but sometimes individual lines of code, or even individual characters, can be tremendously important, and not be written in any spec, not tested with all possible data combinations, or documented anywhere. At a previous job, I spent several days unraveling another one-line bug that was keeping a multi-million dollar project from running at all. Again, totally non-obvious unless you had a tremendous amount of context and were running a pretty complex system to figure it out, with a sort of tenacity the LLMs don't currently possess.
by autoexec | 2026-02-08 19:39:07+00:00
Most of the things you call "way cheaper" have massive costs that aren't reflected in the price tag. The TVs, phones, and IoT appliances are spying on you 24/7 and pushing ads in your face. In terms of quality, much of that is highly debatable.

If you compare a call over the newest iphone to a call over a rotary phone from 60 years ago guess which one gave users better call quality? I don't remember who made the joke about advertisers going from "You can hear a pin drop!" to "Can you hear me now?" but that sums up the problem very well. TVs are bigger but still can't do everything CRTs could (color accuracy, contrast, variable resolutions). We have faster hard drives with SSDs but with limited numbers of writes and they lose data when not powered. Everything is just trade offs. Some things have been improved, some things have gotten worse, but however good things are right now you can bet they will be made worse going forward. Enshittification is real and increasing all the time.
by gpm | 2026-02-08 19:39:10+00:00
It's the majority, but overwhelming or not surprisingly appears to depend on car model, at least per some calculations someone on reddit ran [1].

I'd add though that rolling resistance tends to be higher, on average, in winter too. When there's often a bit of snow on the roads... Less so on high speed highways admittedly.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/l2cq6b/comment/...
by TSiege | 2026-02-08 19:39:15+00:00
> Do you enjoy brick laying and calculating angles around doorways? You're the engineer. Do you want to be the architect hiring engineers, working with project managers, and assessing the budget while worrying about approvals?

These are inherently different levels of power. I'm not sure how your example is supposed to be the opposite when you compare someone laying bricks to someone making hiring and firing decisions about groups of people. Your scenario is fundamentally a power imbalance
by adrian_b | 2026-02-08 19:40:28+00:00
It is impossible for sodium-ion batteries to reach the same energy density as the best lithium-ion batteries.

So lithium-ion batteries will never be replaced in smartphones or laptops by sodium-ion batteries.

But there are plenty of applications where the energy density of sodium-ion batteries is sufficient. Eventually sodium-ion batteries will be much cheaper and this is why they will replace lithium-ion batteries in all cheap cars and for most stationary energy storage (except when lower auto-discharge is desired).
by TacticalCoder | 2026-02-08 19:40:30+00:00
>Ah yes, GPLv3 is now Microsoft’s fault?

You are missing the point. It's the fault of those who pushed SecureBoot down our throats (and don't get me wrong: I use SecureBoot) to have decided that Microsoft had both a free-pass to have its certs by default in every UEFI out there but no other certs.

So users either have to understand how to enroll their own certs or to use a shim signed by... Microsoft.

Let's not forget that we're talking about the company responsible for Windows 11 here.
by mschuster91 | 2026-02-08 19:40:50+00:00
> The US administration has basically told them to do so.

Any US automaker relying on Trump staying in office is playing with fire. Yes, you may see reduced or zero press releases and budgets for EV research being "reallocated" on paper so the toddler in chief doesn't get a public tantrum - but assuming there will be free and fair elections this year, it is highly, highly likely that Congress will be solid blue and reinstate a lot of what Trump has cut down, only this time as an actual law that is far harder to cancel than executive orders.

And everyone not hedging for this possibility will wreck their company's future.