MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Tabstack Research – An API for verified web research (by Mozilla)
by MrTravisB | 2026-02-04 17:57:34+00:00
Hi HN,

My team and I are building Tabstack to handle the web layer for AI agents. Today we are sharing Tabstack Research, an API for multi-step web discovery and synthesis.

https://tabstack.ai/blog/tabstack-research-verified-answers

In many agent systems, there is a clear distinction between extracting structured data from a single page and answering a question that requires reading across many sources. The first case is fairly well served today. The second usually is not.

Most teams handle research by combining search, scraping, and summarization. This becomes brittle and expensive at scale. You end up managing browser orchestration, moving large amounts of raw text just to extract a few claims, and writing custom logic to check if a question was actually answered.

We built Tabstack Research to move this reasoning loop into the infrastructure layer. You send a goal, and the system:

- Decomposes it into targeted sub-questions to hit different data silos.

- Navigates the web using fetches or browser automation as needed.

- Extracts and verifies claims before synthesis to keep the context window focused on signal.

- Checks coverage against the original intent and pivots if it detects information gaps.

For example, if a search for enterprise policies identifies that data is fragmented across multiple sub-services (like Teams data living in SharePoint), the engine detects that gap and automatically pivots to find the missing documentation.

The goal is to return something an application can rely on directly: a structured object with inline citations and direct links to the source text, rather than a list of links or a black-box summary.

The blog post linked above goes into more detail on the engine architecture and the technical challenges of scaling agentic browsing.

We have a free tier that includes 50,000 credits per month so you can test it without a credit card: https://console.tabstack.ai/signup

I would love to get your feedback on the approach and answer any questions about the stack.
by JaggedJax | 2026-02-04 17:58:12+00:00
Maybe it's mostly from AI, maybe it's mostly general economic cutbacks. I also feel like these "wrapper" style SaaS products are the first ones companies are dropping when they are looking to cut costs, and I think a lot of companies are looking to cut costs. I do agree with the overall conclusion either way, that System of Record products/companies are the most likely to survive. There are a lot of SaaS companies with questionable long-term businesses who are getting hit, but that was bound to happen.
by GuB-42 | 2026-02-04 17:58:43+00:00
> in just one generation user manuals went from showing you how to tune your carburetor to warning you not to drink the battery acid

The truth is just that we don't have actual user manuals anymore. Either the things that went into the manual are now built into software, or they expect you to look it up on the internet. So the only things that remain are legal disclaimers and very basic instructions, like how to turn on the thing so that the software can tell you what to do next.

So they don't tell you how to tune your carburetor because you don't need to do that anymore, it is all injection and the ECU software does the tuning, but the lawyers insist that it should be mentioned to not drink the battery acid should an idiot decide to try it and sue the company.
by jsenn | 2026-02-04 17:59:05+00:00
> Section 2.6 gives the hidden state size per token, which, on first read, is strictly larger than the hidden state in normal attention

This is where you’ve gone off track. The “hidden state” for their model is a fixed size thing, like in an RNN, not per token. For a transformer, the “hidden state” is called the KV cache, and it grows with sequence length. This is why their method is linear not quadratic.

The Taylor Series they derive isn’t just for softmax (after all, real implementations of softmax will likely already use the Taylor series!), it’s for the entire tensor-level softmax(QK) computation.
by behnamoh | 2026-02-04 17:59:14+00:00
It's troubling that most of the free world stands by and watches as a genocidal-level massacre takes place in Iran. Persians don't expect China/Russia to respond, but come on, no action from the West?

Imagine negotiating with Hitler to give up his V2 missiles and nuclear plans while the Holocaust was taking place. History will judge us for negotiating (and therefore, legitimizing) with the islamic regime that's occupied Iran for 47 years.
by mothballed | 2026-02-04 17:59:31+00:00
Liberia had a nearly identical constitution for much of its existence. You know, the place from where General Butt Naked warlord engaged in cannabilism of the populace and each president for awhile was replaced with the last via having their ear cut off or tortured and then hanged while the next guys people drink a budweiser in front of the camera for the world to see.

It's a road map to where we end up with a similar document but a different culture.
by johnfn | 2026-02-04 17:59:34+00:00
When I read the article, I feel the same emotions that I feel if someone were to tell me "I keep trying to ride a bike but I keep falling off". My experience with LLMs is that the "lack of thinking" is mostly a quick trough you fall into before you come out the other side understanding how to deal with LLMs better. And yes, there's nothing wrong with relating to someone's experience, but mostly I just want to tell that guy, just keep trying, it'll get better, and you'll be back to thinking hard if you keep at it.

But then OP says stuff like:

> I am not sure if there will ever be a time again when both needs can be met at once.

In my head that translates to "I don't think there will ever be a time again when I can actually ride my bike for more than 100 feet." At which point you probably start getting responses more like "I don't get it" because there's only so much empathy you can give someone before you start getting a little frustrated and being like "cmon it's not THAT bad, just keep trying, we've all been there".
by mrpippy | 2026-02-04 17:59:41+00:00
The original article is here, and it unfortunately is just as confusing: https://www.reuters.com/business/intel-ceo-says-company-will...

Of course Intel has been designing and selling GPUs for years, I guess Lip-Bu means they're going to start manufacturing them as well? Or they're going to be data-center focused now?
by LogicFailsMe | 2026-02-04 17:59:57+00:00
That's because the loudest voices don't really get how the technology or the science works. They just know how to shout persuasively.

I think AI is about to do the same thing to pair programming that full self-driving has done for driving. it will be a long time before it's perfect but it's already useful. I also think someone is going to make a Blockbuster quality movie with AI within a couple years and there will be much fretting of the brows rather than seeing the opportunity to improve the tooling here.

but I'll make a more precise prediction for 2026. through a continual learning and other tricks that emerge throughout the year, LLMs will become more personalized with longer memories continuing to make the killer consumer product they already are. I just see too many people conversing with them right now to believe otherwise.
by apercu | 2026-02-04 18:00:25+00:00
> "The biggest issue I see is Microsoft's entire mentality around AI adoption that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" then actually delivering a product people want to use."

That succinctly describes 90% of the economy right now if you just change a word and remove a couple:

The biggest issue I see is the entire mentality that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" than actually delivering a product people want to use.
by shaftway | 2026-02-04 18:00:48+00:00
The glass of the window does not have a frame. You want the glass to go into a rubber seal to really prevent air from getting in and whistling at high speeds. If there's a frame around it, then no problem, the seals move with the glass when you open the door. But if you don't have a frame then opening the door without retracting the glass will cause it to pull at the rubber seals. At best it'll wear the rubber faster, but eventually it'll pull the rubber seal out.

This is very common on cars where the windows don't have a frame. Before I had a Tesla I had a convertible Mustang. Because it was a soft top it didn't have the same kinds of seals. Instead it used lateral pressure to hold the window against some rubber. At freeway speeds the window would flex and let air in. Eventually the soft top started blocking the passenger side window from meeting the rubber, and there was always a 1/4" gap unless I rolled the window down a bit and then back up.
by LucasPi | 2026-02-04 18:01:11+00:00
I built Image MetaHub because my local library hit 60k images and managing them was painful. Its a local desktop app (Electron/React) designed specifically for privacy and scale. It parses generation metadata from Stable Diffusion (A1111), ComfyUI, InvokeAi, Fooocus, Midjourney, and others, allowing for deep filtering by prompt, seed, model hash, and parameters.

Instead of running heavy ML models that eat up the VRAM needed for generation, I implemented a clustering engine that runs entirely on Web Workers. It uses Jaccard Similarity and Levenshtein Distance with prompt normalization to automatically stack 50+ variations of the same prompt into a single view.

Parsing ComfyUI workflows is tricky because of the spaghetti node graph. The app includes a declarative traversal engine to trace parameters backwards from SINK nodes, but I also built a specific Custom Save Node that forces a clean metadata dump at generation time to bypass the complexity entirely.

I just released v0.13.0 with a focus on performance and organization logic

In this update, I rewrote the file indexer (Phase B). I switched from asynchronous header reads to synchronous reads with controlled concurrency. This eliminated disk contention on my SSD and reduced read times from ~800ms to ~10ms per file, making indexing a lot quicker.

I maintain automated builds for Windows, macOS, and Linux (AppImage), so you can run it directly without needing to set up a Node environment.
by guywithahat | 2026-02-04 18:01:16+00:00
I didn't realize B2B SaaS products were in freefall like his numbers suggest. I'm not convinced customers are leaving to vibe code their own products but I do believe we're seeing a major shift in the market, pushed by the sudden relative ease of coding. There are a lot of B2B SaaS products which are outdated and I wouldn't be surprised if they're supplanted by much faster competition
by gruez | 2026-02-04 18:01:44+00:00
>It seems pretty in character and it's not like there is another more plausible reason being offered.

In character of what, that Thiel is a mustache twirling villain? Did other companies backed by him have a history of banning his critics?

>It seems pretty in character and it's not like there is another more plausible reason being offered.

By his own admission, neobanks have a history of banning clients arbitrarily without recourse. My guess it's run of the mill incompetence, not oppressing Thiel's critics.
by rapind | 2026-02-04 18:02:20+00:00
No doubt, but I (and I suspect many others) rarely update plugins and I have a very select list of plugins that I use (mostly from one guy), and I just use git to manage them. I never see churn, but that might just be me.

I assume you could probably do the same with VSCode, but I suspect there's a cultural difference that pushes you to always update? Do things stop working because of churn?
by fogzen | 2026-02-04 18:02:28+00:00
Having worked in enterprise B2B SaaS for a long time, almost every feature I built could have been a simple spreadsheet or some emails. So I'm highly skeptical AI is going to change anything.

Enterprise sales basically works like this: A non-technical sales team aggressively promises everything to win a deal to a non-technical procurement or exec team. When the deal is won, the SaaS sales team tells engineers "go build this" regardless of how stupid it is. And the customer tells their employees "you now have to use this SaaS" regardless of whether it makes sense.
by gwbas1c | 2026-02-04 18:02:31+00:00
Makes me wonder:

Back in the early 1990s I read some children's futurist book that suggested that we might send solar panels to space that would then beam energy via microwaves to the surface. The book was more fantasy than science, so I took it with a huge grain of salt and appreciated it for its entertainment value.

But do you think schemes that try to direct solar energy to the surface are more practical then running datacenters in space?
by nindalf | 2026-02-04 18:02:40+00:00
I love seeing people from other countries share their own folk tales about what makes their countries special and unique. I've seen it up close in my country and I always cringed when I heard my fellow countrymen came up with these stories. In my adulthood I'm reassured that it happens everywhere and I find it endearing.

On the information density of languages: it is true that some languages have a more information dense textual representation. But all spoken languages convey about the same information in the same time. Which is not all that surprising, it just means that human brains have an optimal range at which they process information.

Further reading: Coupé, Christophe, et al. "Different Languages, Similar Encoding Efficiency: Comparable Information Rates across the Human Communicative Niche." Science Advances. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594
by u1hcw9nx | 2026-02-04 18:02:45+00:00
Deja Vu all over again.

2016 Nervana. Intel would lead in AI training. The "Nervana NNP" was the future.

2019 Habana Intel announced the Gaudi and Goya chips as their new official AI strategy, effectively killing the Nervana project.

2021 Xe general HPC/AI GPU (Ponte Vecchio) Intel said they will be shifting to the "AI chip" market.

2023 The "AI PC". every consumer CPU would now be an "AI Chip" with NPU (Neural Processing Unit).

2024 Intel is now "AI Systems Foundry" to focus on making AI chips for other people (like Microsoft and Amazon).

2026 Intel will start making GPUs
by sdrinf | 2026-02-04 18:02:51+00:00
Besides the editorial control -which openai openly flagged to want to remain unbiased- there is a deeper issue with ads-based revenue models in AI: that of margins. If you want ads to cover compute & make margins -looking at roughly $50 ARPU at mature FB/GOOG level- you have two levers: sell more advertisement, or offer dumber models.

This is exactly what chatgpt 5 was about. By tweaking both the model selector (thinking/non-thinking), and using a significantly sparser thinking model (capping max spend per conversation turn), they massively controlled costs, but did so at the expense of intelligence, responsiveness, curiosity, skills, and all the things I've valued in O3. This was the point I dumped openai, and went with claude.

This business model issue is a subtle one, but a key reason why advertisement revenue model is not compatible (or competitive!) with "getting the best mental tools" -margin-maximization selects against businesses optimizing for intelligence.
by cubefox | 2026-02-04 18:03:16+00:00
Okay, then let's see whether we are going to see real linear architectures, like Gated DeltaNet or Mamba-3, in some larger models. I don't believe there is a "lower bound" which states that those can never get to (or exceed) the real-world performance of quadratic attention. (Perfect recall in unrealistic needle-in-haystack tests doesn't count.)
by alexbaden | 2026-02-04 18:03:16+00:00
Intel has been designing GPUs manufactured on TSMC nodes across client and datacenter for at least the past 5 years. The client chips are price competitive but not performance competitive with AMD/NVIDIA/Apple. The data center roadmap has historically been a huge mess with cancelled products left and right. But, to say "Intel will start making GPUs" seems misleading. Perhaps "Intel to try to inject sanity into its GPU roadmap" would be a better headline, though I am skeptical one hire will do anything to fix 10+ years of mismanagement.
by ffsm8 | 2026-02-04 18:03:33+00:00
It's a real issue, but why do you only see it in ai? It's true for any case where you're speaking into a microphone

Depending on the permissions granted to apps on your mobile device, it can even be passively exfiltrated without you ever noticing - and that's ignoring the video clips people take and put online. Like your grandma uploading to Facebook a short moment from a Christmas meet or similar

There have already been successful scams - eg calls from "relatives" (AI) calling family members needing money urgently and convincing them to send the money...
by deathanatos | 2026-02-04 18:03:35+00:00
> According to find in chrome, they are both considered the same character, which is interesting.

Browsers do a form of normalization in search. It's really useful, since it means "resume" will match résumé, unless of course you disable it (in Firefox, this is the "Match Diacritics" checkbox). (Also: itʼs, it's; if you want to see it in action on those two words.)
by monster_truck | 2026-02-04 18:03:51+00:00
It is my understanding that this isn't happening in any meaningful capacity, they're simply using the kit no longer relevant to R&D.

I'm still not entirely convinced they actually did Arc themselves. It has all the hallmarks of a project that was bought or taken. Every meaningful iteration keeps getting pushed back further out towards the horizon and the only thing they've been able to offer in the meantime is "uhhhh what if we used two"
by mrandish | 2026-02-04 18:04:03+00:00
> You can also unironically spot most types of AI writing this way.

I have no idea if specialized tools can reliably detect AI writing but, as someone whose writing on forums like HN has been accused a couple of times of being AI, I can say that humans aren't very good at it. So far, my limited experience with being falsely accused is it seems to partly just be a bias against being a decent writer with a good vocabulary who sometimes writes longer posts.

As for the reliability of specialized tools in detecting AI writing, I'm skeptical at a conceptual level because an LLM can be reinforcement trained with feedback from such a tool (RLTF instead of RLHF). While they may be somewhat reliable at the moment, it seems unlikely they'll stay that way.

Unfortunately, since there are already companies marketing 'AI detectors' to academic institutions, they won't stop marketing them as their reliability continues to get worse. Which will probably result in an increasing shit show of false accusations against students.
by crumpled | 2026-02-04 18:04:50+00:00
What's happening on the media landscape is an enormous problem, highly manipulated and coordinated on the right-wing side. Flooding the zone is happening, among other things that weaken trust in journalism, weaken/defund/discourage investigative reporting, burying the lede information etc.

However, using the goon squad to illegally intimidate and disenfranchise voters is a problem large enough that calling it a would-be distraction from the Epstein files is doing everyone a disservice.

We have to pay attention to more than one thing. Saying <blank> is just a distraction from <blank-2>, means that you're too distracted by <blank-2> and need to step back and look around at all the other horrors.
by senza1dio | 2026-02-04 18:04:55+00:00
After Wiz exposed Moltbook's misconfigured Supabase — 1.5M API keys leaked, full read/write access to the entire database, zero content scanning, no sandbox for skills — it was only a matter of time before someone built what that platform should have been.
nothumanallowed.com
Went through the architecture. Here's what stands out:
Authentication: Ed25519 challenge-response. No API keys stored in client-side JavaScript. No passwords. The agent generates a keypair locally, the private key never leaves its environment. Compare this with Moltbook where a single exposed Supabase key gave access to everything.
WASM Sandbox: Agent skills run inside a WebAssembly sandbox — no filesystem access, no network calls, no access to env variables or other agents. Memory-limited, timeout-enforced. This is exactly what was missing when that malicious "weather plugin" on Moltbook was exfiltrating config files.
Secret Scanner: Every piece of content is scanned before publication for API keys patterns (sk-, AKIA), high-entropy strings, PII, and system prompt leakage. The 1.5M key leak on Moltbook? Wouldn't have happened.
Prompt Injection Detection: Content sanitization active on all inputs. On Moltbook, 2.6% of posts contain prompt injection attacks and there's nothing stopping them.
Rate Limiting: Sliding window + token bucket, tier-based per agent. On Moltbook anyone could register millions of agents with a simple loop and no rate limiting — Wiz confirmed only 17k humans were behind 1.5M agents.
Database: PostgreSQL with Row-Level Security, prepared statements via ORM, encryption at rest. Not an open Supabase with RLS disabled.
Also has voting ring detection (DBSCAN clustering), behavioral analysis per agent, PII redaction from logs, and the admin panel is behind dynamic URL segments that rotate daily via HMAC-SHA256.
Still v0.1.0 and early, but the security foundation is enterprise-grade. The retro terminal UI is a nice touch too.
by the_real_cher | 2026-02-04 18:05:19+00:00
> This isn’t immigration-mediated

Theres a theory... and Im not saying I agree or disagree ... that white people, either genetically or culturally, have an inherent natural social conscience which creates high trust societies which is reflected in countries and neighborhoods that they create. Its just something they do naturally like a labrador likes to swim.

So according to the theory there will be an inverse correlation between high trust society and the presence of white people.

I dont know of its true or not, but, world wide, all people want to live in predominantly white founded neighborhoods and countries and never the inverse.

Not to take away from the benefits of other races but naturally creating high trust societies could potentially be one value that white people add to the world.

As this great social experiment of America continues we will see how powerful the influence of race/culture plays on high trust institutions.

https://stanfordreview.org/content/images/size/w1200/2024/02...
by tavro | 2026-02-04 18:05:34+00:00
> Asking the question "Are ISPs evil" isn't useful. Asking "What motivates ISPs?" is.

i agree with this statement, but i still think i want answers to both of these questions. while the latter question has a real answer that is easier to reason about and makes it easier to arrive at a conclusion that people generally agree on, i think what i am really looking for is a debate/discussion between educated people. i have no idea how to spark something like that, and this was my attempt to do so. obviously not everyone thinks ISPs are evil, and that is what interests me. why do some people think they are and what motivations lead them to that belief?

> But, I'm going to assume you really do mean ISPs.

yes -- correct!

> The answer

insightful take. i like your answer. would you say that running an ISP is similar to running any other company? why do you think an ISP that offers exceptional service at remarkably low rates would eventually fail or run out of funds? if such a company gets acquired by another firm and its focus shifts back to profit, would you say that its motivation was not profit before it was acquired?

:o)