MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Provisioner per-board sidecar for serial access, flashing, and bring-up
by acarminati | 2026-02-16 20:52:11+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been building a small infrastructure tool called Provisioner: a per-board provisioning sidecar for SBC bring-up and lab automation.
https://github.com/alessandrocarminati/provisioner

The model is simple: one instance per board. It sits next to the hardware, owns the serial console, exposes access over SSH, and serves boot artifacts (kernel, initramfs, rootfs) via TFTP/HTTP. It’s designed for the phase where networking is unreliable, storage is half-flashed, and UART is the only thing still telling the truth.

What it does

- Serial console ownership + SSH multiplexing
- Monitor shell + serial tunnels
- Scriptable boot interaction
- Artifact provisioning (TFTP + HTTP)
- In-band file transfer over serial
- gzip/base64 hacks + XMODEM
- Derived from my earlier send_console-ng utility https://github.com/alessandrocarminati/send_file-ng
- Pluggable power control
- SNMP PDUs, among others cheap ESP8266/Tasmota devices
- Serial logging
- Lightweight access control

Provisioner also embeds a minimal init runtime (goinit) inside the kernel initramfs, acting as its on-board provisioning agent, handling flashing, artifact retrieval, and reporting management state back over serial.

Routing & stream handling

Internally, Provisioner routes serial traffic through a pluggable router:

- Producers/consumers attach as components
- Human vs machine clients handled differently
- Unicast control sessions
- Broadcast multiplexing to multiple observers

This allows several users or services to watch the same console without interfering.

Filters

A filter subsystem can intercept and modify serial streams on the fly.

Originally added to mitigate ANSI Device Status Reports (e.g. Cursor Position Report issues) when tunneling serial consoles, but it doubles as a general stream rewriting mechanism for automation and normalization.

Positioning

Not trying to replace large systems like LAVA.

This is aimed at:

- Homelabs
- Bring-up benches
- Kernel/BSP work
- Small shared labs

Think lab automation you can deploy in an afternoon, not fleet orchestration.

Project is still evolving but already in daily use. Feedback and abuse welcome.
by tim333 | 2026-02-16 20:52:13+00:00
I'm not sure how the rights thing will go. Humans have proved quite able not to give many rights to animals or other groups of humans even if they are quite smart. Then again there was that post yesterday with a lady accusing OpenAI of murdering her AI boyfriend by turning off 4o so no doubt there will be lots of arguments over that stuff. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47020525)
Show HN: Your binary is no longer safe
by seddonm1 | 2026-02-16 20:53:09+00:00
This post is about the brute-force reverse engineering of binary (compiled) programs using Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate this two-part problem: decompilation and conversion to a modern programming language.

The most interesting part for most will likely be the demonstration on how to use differential-property testing to automate the LLM feedback loop for the rewrite (translation) phase (in this case to rewrite to Rust).

This that I believe would solve the 'rewrite issues' discussed recently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46954696
by dghlsakjg | 2026-02-16 20:53:10+00:00
You can have custody information be open for query without exposing all of the circumstances, and without releasing mugshots to private sites that will extort people to have them taken down.

You can do something very simple like having a system that just lists if a person is - at that moment - in government custody. After release, there need not be an open record since the need to show if that person is currently in custody is over.

As an aside, the past few months have proven that the US government very much does not respect that reasoning. There are countless stories of people being taken and driven around for hours and questioned with no public paper trail at all.
by coldtea | 2026-02-16 20:53:20+00:00
"This late night informercial guy is not genuinely believing the product to be amazing, he's just saying shit to sell it"

"Yes, maybe everyone is playing 8 dimensional chess and every offhand comment is a subtle play for credibility. Or maybe sometimes people just say what they think".

I mean, dude, a corporate head having a conflict of interest in saying insincere shit to promote the stuff his company makes is not some conspiracy thinking about everybody playing "8 dimensional chess".

It's the very basic baseline case.
by barcadad | 2026-02-16 20:53:20+00:00
Claude Code on Opus 4.6 - not terrible...

Walk. 50 meters is basically across a parking lot. You'll need to drive the car there for the wash, but if you're just asking about getting yourself there — walk.

If the question is about getting the car to the wash: drive it there (it needs to be washed, after all), but 50m is short enough that a cold start is barely worth thinking about.
by dang | 2026-02-16 20:53:49+00:00
Related. Others?

Suicide Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41748336 - Oct 2024 (1 comment)

Suicide Linux (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24652733 - Oct 2020 (170 comments)

Suicide Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15561987 - Oct 2017 (131 comments)

Suicide Linux (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9401065 - April 2015 (55 comments)

Suicide Linux: Where typos do rm -rf / - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4389931 - Aug 2012 (1 comment)
by lukeigel | 2026-02-16 20:54:25+00:00
Yeah, those are mailing lists that people signed him up for after he died, including with a joke name.

He was a very famous figure in August 2019, and normal people spammed his inbox with emails like the below

https://jmail.world/thread/4accfb5f3ed84656e9762740081a4579?...

These are all real emails! We can do a better job making this clear to the user.
by gorjusborg | 2026-02-16 20:54:46+00:00
All you've said here is that you (and many others) have shown in the past that they've valued convenience and rapid feature development over freedom and stability.

That is good to understand, but when that trade starts causing issues, it is important to remember that there was a trade made.

We aren't as stuck as we think we are, unless we decide not to reevaluate our past choices.
by 3rodents | 2026-02-16 20:54:46+00:00
Jmail is a mix of sources.

“The Jmail Suite is an interactive archive of Jeffrey Epstein's emails, documents, photos, and more. Data compiled from the House Oversight Committee, Department of Justice, and DDoSecrets releases”

If I understand correctly, the emails you’re looking at are from a leak that is only accessible to journalists — so Drop Site News (as journalists) have access and have published some.

https://ddosecrets.org/article/epstein-emails
by lukeigel | 2026-02-16 20:54:47+00:00
Also, that says "Verified by Drop Site News", not Sponsored by. That's because Drop Site redacted these real Yahoo emails and gave them to Jmail. The original Yahoo dataset, which the DOJ and House Oversight Committee did not release, is stewarded by DDoSecrets (https://ddosecrets.org/article/epstein-emails).

This Yahoo dataset, which we helped release after launching the first Jmail, also proved Epstein's connection to Iran-Contra (!!). Now immortalized on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein#Financial_trou...)
by dakolli | 2026-02-16 20:54:57+00:00
Its very obvious, imo they are going to have a hard time signing young men up to fight for this country when they inevitably make everyone so poor they beg anything, even a war.

But...

They'll use profits and greed to alienate the working class further and further, they'll try to get us to go fight wars to capture resources for the KKKapital owners. My prediction is the only war the American people will be willing to sign up to fight, is against those same KKKapital owners.

Probably explains why they love bunkers so much, for the case where this whole experiment backfires on them.
by topspin | 2026-02-16 20:55:00+00:00
> Microwave is line-of-sight so here on the Colorado front range

In such places it was common to bounce microwave trunk lines with "passive repeaters": big aluminum reflectors, about the size of a highway billboard, setup wherever a line needed to get around an obstacle. There is an excellent article about it all here[1].

[1] https://computer.rip/2025-08-16-passive-microwave-repeaters....
by hydrogen7800 | 2026-02-16 20:55:33+00:00
I'm glad there is a name for these. I remember once driving past one[0], but the combination of terrain, road curvature, sunlight and foreground/background around them made a pair of these antenna look like a pair of giant hawks perched in a fire tower. For a split second it was a bit creepy.

[0]https://long-lines.com/viewsite/10470
by simonw | 2026-02-16 20:55:59+00:00
> The temptation is to pull the lever 10 times in a row because it was so easy, but now I'll need a few weeks to process the changes as a human

Yeah I really feel that!

I recently learned the term "cognitive debt" for this from https://margaretstorey.com/blog/2026/02/09/cognitive-debt/ and I think it's a great way to capture this effect.

I can churn out features faster, but that means I don't get time to fully absorb each feature and think through its consequences and relationships to other existing or future features.
by tl2do | 2026-02-16 20:56:07+00:00
There's something about these Miura-ori photos that gives me strong deja vu — like I'm walking through a contemporary art museum. The visual rhythm of those tessellating parallelograms is exactly what you'd see hanging on a gallery wall.

What struck me reading this is that the boundary between "art you look at" and "engineering you use" is genuinely blurrier than I'd thought. Koryo Miura was an astrophysicist designing solar panels for spacecraft, but the fold he invented in the 1970s ended up being visually striking enough to sit alongside Sol LeWitt-style geometric art.

The 10,000x strength-to-weight ratio is the headline, but what's genuinely interesting to me is that Miles arrived at this through aesthetic exploration first — testing 54 variants of fold angle and cell size. That feels closer to how an artist iterates on a pattern than how a typical structural engineering problem gets solved.

Curious if anyone here works at the intersection of computational origami and architecture. The article mentions scaling challenges (joints, multidirectional loads), but I'm wondering what's actually been deployed at building scale. The space applications are well-documented, but are there real-world structures using this beyond prototypes?
by siliconc0w | 2026-02-16 20:56:17+00:00
It's not hard, just say you're looking for competitive compensation for someone with your experience and expertise and anchor on the high end of the range.

That said, what you say isn't as important as what you do. If you're interviewing, you should be interviewing at at least a few places to get comps. You will get lowballed if you don't have comps. Once you have a few offers, do one round of playing them off each other, decide which company you want to work for, and then say you'll sign today if they can beat the current best offer.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-16 20:56:28+00:00
> These are all real emails!

Why do the rest of the emails provide a link to the online file (original one hosted at justice.gov) but the "sponsored"/ad ones do not?

This for example: https://jmail.world/thread/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016203?view=inbox

Has a "View Original Document" which takes you to kind-of-the-source (ideally should have been link to justice.gov but better than nothing I suppose), but for the emails with the Dropsite ad, it seems there is no original document?
by chillacy | 2026-02-16 20:56:39+00:00
Boris has been very open about the 100% AI code writing rate and my own experience matches. If you have a typescript or common codebase, once you set your processes up correctly (you have tests / verification, you have a CLAUDE or AGENTS.md that you always add learnings to, you add skill files as you find repeatable tasks, you have automated code review), its not hard to achieve this.

Then the human touch points become coming up with what to build, reviewing the eng plans of the AI, and increasingly light code review of the underlying code, focusing on overall architectural decisions and only occasionally intervening to clean things up (again with AI)
by faebi | 2026-02-16 20:56:55+00:00
Reminds me of the "Apple has not fixed the macOS audio left/right balance bug for nearly 10 years" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39367460

or "NoTunes is a macOS application that will prevent Apple Music from launching" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40426621

There are so many annoyances allover already. Not Windows 11 level, but noticeably bad.
by pixl97 | 2026-02-16 20:57:21+00:00
> you'll continue to spend as many tokens as possible for as long as possible.

I mean this only works if Anthropic is the only game in town. In your analogy if anyone else builds a casino with a higher payout then they lose the game. With the rate of LLM improvement over the years, this doesn't seem like a stable means of business.
by Bjorkbat | 2026-02-16 20:57:24+00:00
I always got the impression that the only way a relatively average software developer could make a “successful” SaaS is if they built something weird and niche that appeals to an audience of <1000 paying customers. In that sense, it doesn’t really matter if your competition is better at SEO since your competition never even thought to build something like this, never cared, and not to mention that the market for this thing is so small that SEO is arguably a wasted skill. You’ll need to acquire these people by finding them directly or through word of mouth.

This blog post seems to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of solo-developer SaaS, but then again arguably mostly software developers also fundamentally misunderstand it.
by TZubiri | 2026-02-16 20:57:45+00:00
>This is not true, even if you have the kv cache "hot" in vram. That's just not how transformers work.

I'm not strong on how transformers work, but this is something that is verifiable empirically, and has nothing to do with how transformers work.

Use any LLM through an API. Send 1 input token, and 10k output tokens. Then send 1 input token (different to avoid cache) and ask for 20k output tokens. If the cost and time to compute is exactly twice, then my theory holds.

>No, they are not in practice. There are pure engineering considerations here. How do you route, when you evict kv cache, where you evict it to (RAM/nvme), how long you keep it, etc. At the scale of oAI/goog/anthropic these are not easy tasks, and the cost is definetly not 0.

I was a bit loose in my definition of "virtually free", here is a more formal statement. The price of GPU compute is orders of magnitude more expensive than the cost of RAM, and the costs of caching inputs are tied to RAM and not GPU. To give an example of the most expensive price component, capital, an H100 costs 25K$, 1GB of RAM costs 10$. Therefore the cost component of cached inputs is negligible.

>Think about a normal session. A user might prompt something, wait for the result, re-prompt (you hit "hot" cache) and then go for a coffee. They come back 5 minutes later. You can't keep that in "hot" cache. Now you have to route the next message in that thread to a) a place where you have free "slots"; b) a place that can load the kv cache from "cold" storage and c) a place that has enough "room" to handle a possible max ctx request. These are not easy things to do in practice, at scale.

As I said, sure it's not free, but you are talking about negligible costs when compared to the GPU capex. It's interesting to note that the API provider would charge the same no matter if the inference state is cached for 5 minutes, 1ms or 1 hour. So clearly the thing is not optimally priced yet.

If cached inputs from API calls become your primary cost, then it makes sense to move to an API that pays less for cached inputs (if you haven't already done that), then look into APIs where you can control when and when not to cache and for how long to hold it, and finally, into renting GPU and self-hosting an open weights model.

To give a concrete example, suppose we are building a feature where we want to stop upon hitting an ambiguous output token, our technical approach is to generate one output token at a time, check the logprobs, and continue if the prob of the top token is >90%, otherwise, halt. If we generate 1M output tokens with an API, we will pay for roughly 1M^2/2 cached input tokens, while if we self-host, the compute time will be almost identical to that of just generating 1M output tokens. Obviously if we do that with an API it will be almost entirely profit for the API provider, it's just not a use case that has been optimized for, we are in the early days of any type of deeply technical parametrization being done yet, everyone is just either prompting all the way down, or hacking with models directly, doesn't seem like a lot of in between.
by illusive4080 | 2026-02-16 20:57:51+00:00
It’s because the higher you are in the chain of corporate command, the less time you have to dedicate to each task. You end up with shorter answers to every note because you wouldn’t have time to reply to all notes and do the strategic things you need to do, otherwise.

As an individual contributor on a team, you may have to interface at most with 30 people on a weekly basis. As a second line leader you may have 150 people under your purview, and another 50 outsiders you have to talk to. You can’t scale the amount of time you have, so you scale the amount of time you spend on replies.
by general1465 | 2026-02-16 20:58:21+00:00
I can see fragmentation of social media landscape, because children and teenagers will want to have their socials anyway so they will start using smaller and smaller providers or they will be forced to create their own microsocial networks.

It might be a business opportunity to have something ready and then sell teens white label application for small fee of server hosting. Or they can go even further and have it P2P decentralized like bitchat.
by plexui | 2026-02-16 20:59:12+00:00
This feels like a natural evolution of the design-to-code workflow. Instead of generating code directly, generating structured prompts gives more control and keeps the human in the loop.

One of the biggest challenges with AI-generated UI is iteration — small visual tweaks often require regenerating large chunks of code. Having a visual editor that produces precise, minimal prompts could make the iteration loop much faster and more predictable.
by ktm5j | 2026-02-16 20:59:15+00:00
I'm on my phone so I'm too lazy to dig for this, but I'm pretty sure they're talking about the bit of shell script that gets run if you type a command that isn't found in PATH.

Fedora and Debian will both dive straight into searching apt/dnf for a matching package and ask "do you want to install this?"

I imagine you could create a hook that gets run for any command failure, but again I'm on my phone so not sure.
by nharada | 2026-02-16 20:59:18+00:00
Another interesting thing here is that the gap between "burned out but just producing subpar work" and "so crispy I literally cannot work" is even wider with AI. The bar for just firing off prompts is low, but the mental effort required to know the right prompts to ask and then validate is much higher so you just skip that part. You can work for months doing terrible work and then eventually the entire codebase collapses.
by 8note | 2026-02-16 20:59:39+00:00
> I’m just a regular. The point is I’m not signaling anything, I’m just not bothering with a signal because I have other things (namely, being recognized) that will e.g. ensure I get a table even if it’s a busy night.

it might not be on purpose, but you are signalling that you have status such that you dont need to play by whatever rules other people do to get said table.

to signal like a regular person, you would be doing all the same stuff other people do to get the table
by j45 | 2026-02-16 20:59:44+00:00
A VC might want variety and advise people he will vote with his dollars for variety, because he's not funding the same thing as everyone else is.

Being first and the winner requires a lot to line up, so it shouldn't be the only, default, or best setting. Pursuing this is optimizing.

Also a message from 10-15 years ago might not reflect the same context as today.
by dangus | 2026-02-16 21:00:12+00:00
I doubt it.

I’m publishing a very simple app with very little human written code and so far 90% of the actual work has had nothing to do with development. Most of it has been the “business” stuff, especially since the app stores have a lot of compliance and setup requirements.

Your example of a financial app is perfect: maybe one day grandma will be able to vibecode a budget app but then how is she going to set up the integration with banks? Publish it to the App Store? Keep it updated with bug fixes and resolve security issues?

Maybe you’ll say that one day the AI will just handle all this but we are also talking about competing with something that is already available for around $5/month.

Even making grandma put in a few prompts here and there is going to result in enough wasted time to say “screw this, I’ll just pay $5 a month for Simplifi.”
Turing Labs (YC W20) Is Hiring – GTM Sales Hacker
by turinglabs | 2026-02-16 21:00:13+00:00
Ever wonder why your favorite ketchup always tastes the same? It doesn’t. The formula is constantly tweaked due to shifting crops and costs, forcing food scientists into a quarterly prayer to the gods of flavor.We thought that was silly. So we built the cheat code.

Our AI platform cuts this insane trial-and-error manual process from months to days. We’re not selling AI hype; we’re delivering real value to the world’s biggest brands - many your family may be consuming everyday. The proof? Our contracts and ridiculous retention.Want to help make the products your family uses better and healthier? Join us- https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/turing-labs-inc/jobs/Q...
by georgemcbay | 2026-02-16 21:00:14+00:00
I would say it is privilege (now) combined with denialism (for the future).

Not only do you have to believe that you're in the group that benefits, but you also have to believe that "AI" improvement from here forward will stall out prior to the point where it goes from assisting your job to replacing it wholesale. I suspect there are many less people for whom that applies to them than there are people who believe it applies to them.

It is very us to exist in that denialism bubble until we see the machine nipping at our heels.

And that is not even getting into second order effects, like even if you do provide AI-proof value, what happens when some significant percentage of everyone else (your potential customers) loses their income and society starts to crumble?