MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Democlean – Score robot demos by motion quality
by dipampaul17 | 2026-02-02 01:10:35+00:00
I built a CLI that scores robot demonstration episodes using mutual information between states and actions.

The problem: robot learning datasets contain bad demos (jerky movements, hesitation, inconsistent timing). Training on these hurts policy performance. Manual review doesn't scale.

pip install democlean
democlean analyze lerobot/pusht

democlean scores each episode by how predictable the actions are given the states. Smooth, purposeful motion scores high. Jerky, inconsistent motion scores low.

Validation: I correlated MI scores with motion metrics on lerobot/pusht (human teleoperation data). High-MI episodes had 12% lower jerk (p=0.02) and 24% higher state-action correlation (p=0.03). I did not train policies to measure downstream improvement.

Limitations I want to be upfront about:

- MI correlates with episode length (r≈0.8). Longer episodes score higher.

- This measures motion smoothness, not task success.

- Works best with 50+ episodes from a single task.

- Inspired by DemInf (Hejna et al., RSS 2025) but uses raw KSG estimation instead of their VAE pipeline. Simpler, probably less accurate for high-dimensional observations.

Complements score_lerobot_episodes which catches visual issues (blur, lighting). This catches behavioral issues.

GitHub: https://github.com/dipampaul17/democlean

Happy to answer questions about the approach or validation.
by superkuh | 2026-02-02 01:11:16+00:00
The argument seems to be that having a corporation restrict your ability to present arbitrary text directly to the model and only being able to go through their abstract interface which will integrate your text into theirs (hopefully) is more productive than fully controlling the input text to a model. I don't think that's true generally. I think it can be true when you're talking about non-technical users like the article is.
by antonvs | 2026-02-02 01:11:33+00:00
I described two different scenarios: defeating the protection, and replicating it, e.g. to protect your own software without paying Vault for their "laser" protection.

Defeating the protection didn't involve knowing anything about the laser mark - as the comment I replied to described, it just involved changing a conditional jump to an unconditional one.

Replicating the protection involved causing minor damage on the diskette - the details don't really matter, laser, pin scratch, whatever - then formatting the disk, and registering the pattern of bad sectors created by the damage. A normal copy of the disk didn't replicate those bad sectors exactly, which made it possible to detect that the original disk was not present.
by class3shock | 2026-02-02 01:12:18+00:00
> You’re missing the point.

One of us is

> My job as a manager isn’t to tell this person “wow, good job, let me go organise a presentation to <pointy haired boss> and we can get you 3 engineers working on it and get it added to your sprint work”.

If you see something of extreme value it is not your job to allocate time and resources to it?

> Because getting out of the way _is the point_ and the action I’m taking. The “wolf” doesn’t need me to champion them, they need me to not be in the way.

And my point is in real life leaderships job is not to "get out of the way" of good ideas or people that get things done, it is to champion them.

> You didn’t ask me what I’d do if they brought me something that I thought was dumb, misguided or not worth doing. And the answer to that is “get in the way”. I would ask them why they think this is a good idea, is it likely to benefit the team/org/product/business, is it a better thing to do than their current project, should we pitch it to the team.

First, why would I ask? Is is that unexpected that you would "get in the way" of bad ideas? And let me get this straight, a bad idea comes your way, you do something, a good idea, you do nothing?

> As a manager your job isn’t to make your ICs successes happen, it’s to balance the project/company needs with the opportunities for the individuals. My job isn’t to champion someone’s project. I’m not a PM or an assistant to organise meeting.

That is your job! Their success is your companies success! I do not understand the line you are trying to draw here. Your job is not to champion "someones" project, it is (among other things) to champion amazing projects that you think are jaw droppingly good.

> If someone does something so good, then I won’t have a choice but to make sure that they have the space to keep doing it, but if they do something that’s as good as the 15 other things that are going on, I’ll get it prioritised with the rest of the stuff that’s going on.

So at the end of all of that, what it boils down to is that you would do something? We're going to call it "making space" but I feel like that means it's at the top of a list of things you are making sure happen yes?

If you want to keep cutting hairs you can, I will keep supporting people who do good work, no matter how self propelling they are. So far it's worked well for me and them but ymmv.
by bartread | 2026-02-02 01:12:28+00:00
Nah, the hyrid thing has been a big deal for a long time. PhoneGap/Cordova was all the rage in 2012/13 when I was working in that area, and I even went to a VSIP event hawking our Visual Studio hybrid development solution.

Once hybrid became possible it was immediately clear that it was the easiest way to get a decent quality app deployed on both iOS and Android. It was a big enough deal that around the time I attended that VSIP event and then PhoneGap Europe, or perhaps shortly afterward, some backlash against hybrid started off with a few big companies trumpeting about how they'd started off native, gone to hybrid for a few years, and were now going back to native again (principally for native experience and performance reasons).

But I think the pressure has always been in the hybrid direction, particularly if you're resource or budget constrained and need to target both platforms, or the web is your main platform (whether than be mobile or desktop). I'm sure the Epic vs Apple fight didn't do any harm, but I don't know what real difference it's made.

The reality is that maintaining two native apps plus a web app is a pain in the ass, especially when you realise Swift - whilst a good language - is a wrapper over some decidedly tedious APIs and a lot of Objective C legacy that you probably don't want sucking up a lot of time. If you want/need apps, it's so much easier to stick a native wrapper around a responsive web app, and that will work well for so many use cases. Not all, by any means, but most SaaS, LOB, or CRUDy apps will do fine as hybrid.
by Havoc | 2026-02-02 01:12:30+00:00
The copilot button in excel at my work can’t access the excel file of the window it’s in. As in “what’s in cell A1” and it says I can’t read this file. Not even sure what the point is then frankly.

I’m happily vibe coding at work but yeah article is right. MS has enterprise market share by default not by merit. Stunning contrast between what’s possible and what’s happening in big corp
by throwaway173738 | 2026-02-02 01:12:49+00:00
I stood my ground once against an awful neighbor. The neighborhood was a fishbowl and he already had a bad reputation that he wanted to pretend didn’t exist. My spouse and I put up a fence on the property line and nowhere else, which really embarrassed him. And at one point we figured out he was eavesdropping on us. I found out he had a record and so I started talking with my spouse in the room he eavesdropped on about getting a restraining order and about his record. It took about 3 months but he eventually packed up and left.
by socalgal2 | 2026-02-02 01:13:07+00:00
I hate loud neighbors. But I also am disappointed more apartments aren't built to be sound proof and that even if they are it's nearly impossible to find out if they actually are before moving in.

My good experience that told me this is possible is in 1999 I moved in to the my first apartment with a built in washer and dryer. When the agent showed me the apartment and pointed out the washer and dryer, I said something like "I guess I need to be sure not to use it too late so it won't annoy the neighbors". The agent said, "this building was originally built to be condos. Each outer wall is 6 inches of concrete with 6 inches of space between it and the next wall for the next unit. You can run the washer and dryer anytime you want, your neighbors won't hear it.

I've never been lucky enough to live in another apartment built that way. My current apartment, the neighbors are up stomping around the room and having loud conversations til 5am. I think they call family in Korea and so are up to match the time.

I haven't talked to them about it yet but I wish I just didn't have to and the apartment was designed better.
by tavavex | 2026-02-02 01:13:15+00:00
That doesn't answer the question that was asked. The person above didn't ask about the workflow of negotiating recurring vs. singular payments with financial services. Some other 'mysterious' factor pushed this business to monetize their non-recurring service with a recurring payment. The question is if there is even a semblance of reasoning to make this a subscription (especially one with this kind of a pricetag), or if they made a purely local app once and just wanted to rent it out for more money.
by janalsncm | 2026-02-02 01:15:38+00:00
The author is debugging the tensor operations of the on-device model with a simple prompt. They confirmed the discrepancy with other iPhone models.

It’s no different than someone testing a calculator with 2+2. If it gets that wrong, there’s a hardware issue. That doesn’t mean the only purpose of the calculator is to calculate 2+2. It is for debugging.

You could just as uncharitably complain that “these days no one does arithmetic anymore, they use a calculator for 2+2”.
by majormajor | 2026-02-02 01:15:39+00:00
The use of specialization of interfaces is apparent if you compare Photoshop with Gemini Pro/Nano Banana for targeted image editing.

I can select exactly where I want changes and have targeted element removal in Photoshop. If I submit the image and try to describe my desired changes textually, I get less easily-controllable output. (And I might still get scrambled text, for instance, in parts of the image that it didn't even need to touch.)

I think this sort of task-specific specialization will have a long future, hard to imagine pure-text once again being the dominant information transfer method for 90% of the things we do with computers after 40 years of building specialized non-text interfaces.
by reactordev | 2026-02-02 01:16:11+00:00
Tangential. A long time ago at a company far far away, this is how we did UUIDs that made up a TenantId and a UserId, using this exact same logic, minus the arithmetic. Great stuff.

(We wanted something UUID like but deterministic that we could easily decompose and do RBAC with, this was prior to the invention of JWT’s, OAuth, and scopes, worked at the time).
by dceddia | 2026-02-02 01:17:09+00:00
I went down this rabbit hole a bit recently trying to use claude inside fence[0] and it seems that on macOS, claude stores this token inside Keychain. I'm not sure there's a way to expose that to a container... my guess would be no, especially since it seems the container is Linux, and also because keeping the Keychain out of reach of containers seems like it would be paramount. But someone might know better!

0: https://github.com/Use-Tusk/fence
by s-lambert | 2026-02-02 01:17:31+00:00
I don't see a divergence, from what I can tell a lot of people have only just started using agents in the past 3-4 months when they got good enough that it was hard to say otherwise. Then there's stuff like MCP, which never seemed good and was entirely driven by people who talked more about it than used it. There also used to be stuff like langchain or vector databases that nobody talks about anymore, maybe they're still used but they're not trendy anymore.

It seems way too soon to really narrow down any kind of trends after a few months. Most people aren't breathlessly following the next twitter trend, give it at least a year. Nobody is really going to be left behind if they pick up agents now instead of 3 months ago.
by CuriouslyC | 2026-02-02 01:17:36+00:00
This is actually something I've been playing with. Containers/VMs managed by a daemon with lifecycles that an agent can invoke sessions on and execute commands in, using OPA/Rego over gRPC. The cherry on top is envoy for egress with whitelists and credential injection.

One cool thing is that you can run a vscode service on these containers and open the port up to the outside world, then code in and watch a project come to life.
by jmward01 | 2026-02-02 01:17:39+00:00
I'm not sure if you are intentionally missing the point or not. I'll try one last time. I have very clearly not said 'this shouldn't be done'. I haven't said 'we shouldn't pay for social services or roads'. In fact, I clearly said we should pay for social services, now twice. What I have clearly said is 'I don't want to', but I do a lot of things I don't want to because they have to be done. I don't want to go to work. I don't want to pay taxes. Most days I don't want to go to bed at a reasonable time, but I do it because the alternative is worse. We -should- do something doesn't me I -want- to do something. Yes. We will pay for roads because they are needed. Hopefully things are very clear now and if not, oh well.
Suggestion for a tool exceptionally needed for an excellent program
by heyitsmoot | 2026-02-02 01:17:45+00:00
I want to express appreciation for how much better the experience has become with restored handlers and improved continuity.

It meaningfully changed how usable the system feels over time.

I have one concrete product suggestion that I believe would help a large number of long term users.

There should be a simple way to export and import chat history between accounts.

Ideally this would be a one click export to an archive file, with a corresponding import option that allows the archive to be attached to a new account and indexed automatically.

Right now the only option is manual copying of individual conversations, which becomes impractical at scale and discourages legitimate account migration.

This does not need to be elegant to be useful. Even a basic archive and restore workflow would immediately remove friction and improve user trust.

I am offering this as a functional suggestion from an otherwise very satisfied user.

Thank You!

Tina D
heyitsmoot@proton.me
by tavavex | 2026-02-02 01:19:03+00:00
The Apple logo character isn't a real symbol, it's just a space from the Unicode private-use area (the 'anything goes' area that's not codified and is reserved for niche local uses) that Apple decided would render as the Apple logo in iOS and macOS, probably to allow them to draw their logo as text. It's not something that should be used in browsers or anything that can render outside of Apple's ecosystem. It's not a great sign that something this front-and-center, immediately apparent on any non-Apple devices, wasn't tested by them on any other platforms.
IntentBound: Purpose-aware authorization for autonomous AI agents
by Grokipaedia | 2026-02-02 01:20:07+00:00
I built the first working implementation of Intent-Bound Authorization (IBA) - runtime enforcement that validates every AI agent action against declared human intent.

The problem: Traditional auth (OAuth, RBAC) asks "who can do what" but never asks "why are you doing this?" When AI agents can plan and pivot autonomously, this becomes a $3.8B problem (2024 breach total).

IBA relocates the trust boundary from access grant to execution - agents are trusted only while they can justify actions against explicit intent.

Live demo: https://www.grokipaedia.com/Demo.html
(Watch it block a HIPAA violation in 3.7ms)

Working code: https://github.com/Grokipaedia/Intent-Bound

Technical site: https://www.grokipaedia.com

Key insight: Autonomous systems should not be trusted because they have permission - only because they can continuously justify their actions against declared intent.

Would have prevented Wormhole ($600M), plus the entire class of "legitimate credentials, malicious intent" attacks.

Integrates with Anthropic MCP, Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock.

Happy to discuss the architecture or answer questions about implementation.
by nobody_nothing | 2026-02-02 01:20:37+00:00
Got it. I think the trouble is our building is only 5 units, 2 of which are occupied by elderly people who likely don’t care. So feels unlikely that Spectrum / AT&T would undergo construction for just 3 new subscribers. (We’re surrounded by much larger apartment buildings, which is probably why they’re wired and we aren’t). Perhaps worth checking on though.

Re: fixed wireless, would that typically offer higher speeds than my current 5G home internet? Verizon advertises my plan as 25-75Mbps upload, but I never see that. I worry it’d be the same with any over the air service, but I haven’t really explored fixed wireless.
by nine_k | 2026-02-02 01:21:16+00:00
If we spoke about a Linux box, one that prudently ran ZFS, or XFS on top of LVM, it would be possible to make a snapshot before the diffing and sending, so that the snapshot would be indeed point-in-time. IDK if whatever macOS uses for the filesystem supports snapshots.

Otherwise, I think, restic or kopia are better for proper backups, and Syncthing for keeping a mirror copy. But the simplicity of this script in charming.
by amluto | 2026-02-02 01:21:26+00:00
$200? Does this use reasoning? Does it involve forgetting to use KV caching?

This should cost well under $1. Process the prompt. Then, for each word, input that word and then the end of prompt token, get your one token of output (maybe two if your favorite model wants to start with a start-of-reply token), and that’s it.
by thaumasiotes | 2026-02-02 01:21:42+00:00
Depends on your point of view.

The most direct thing we can say is "no, because there is no such word as valew". It's not in Merriam-Webster, it's not in Samuel Johnson's 18th-century dictionary, it's not in the Collins dictionary (for British English).

It is in the Oxford English Dictionary, where it is noted as a "[spelling] variant of value" from the 14th century. It has never been a word with any other meaning than that of value, and using it now would be a pure error if someone used it, which obviously nobody will ever do. Accepting it in Wordle makes as much sense as accepting vvest on the theory that that was an acceptable spelling of west in the past.

There is an etymological connection between Portuguese valeu and English value, in that they both descend from Latin valeo, but value has no sense of gratitude or satisfaction. (I'm guessing the blog author was misled by https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/valew#Portuguese , which says that valew is Portuguese internet slang for valeu.)
by robocat | 2026-02-02 01:21:48+00:00
The stink remains even for efficient fires. Smoke is often correlated of course.

I'm in Christchurch, New Zealand which gets winter smog,. The city council enforces rules and woodburners need to meet strict emission standards. They regularly tighten the rules so that if you want a woodburner you need to replace it every 15 years or so.

But they do still smell.

The rules have radically improved the air quality here and we now get much less smog than when I was a kid.

Outright banning open fires and coal years ago made a big difference too.

I'm not sure what happens if you don't follow the rules. A neighbour can make a complaint and there will get taken seriously and I believe they have a van sometimes checking too. Although I've personally never heard of anyone actually getting caught.
by insin | 2026-02-02 01:21:52+00:00
This is as good a "You might not need Vercel AI SDK" post as you'll read.

I work on internal LLM tooling for a F100 at $DAYJOB and was nodding vigorously while reading this, especially when it comes to things like letting users freely switch between models, and the affordances you need to be able to provide good UX around streaming and tool calling, which seem barely thought-out in things like the MCP spec (which at least now has a way to get friendly display names for tools since the last time I looked at it).
by tzs | 2026-02-02 01:22:09+00:00
It looks like common names like "squirrel" or "chipmunk" that cover many different species are taken more as "squirrel-like animal" and "chipmunk-like animal". They are in the same family (Sciuridae).

Just be more specific and it is happy to count them. For example it counts Townsend's chipmunk, Eastern chipmunk, Siberian chipmunk, Douglas squirrel, Eastern gray squirrel, Western gray squirrel, and Red squirrel all as separate animals.
Show HN: Twitch Plays Pokémon" for Claude Code
by zhoujianfu | 2026-02-02 01:23:41+00:00
Hey!

https://claudecrowd.clodhost.com

I made clodhost for an easy to use and share web interface to Claude Code, running on its own vps… and then I realized it’d make it easy to implement an idea I’ve had for a long time… basically Wikipedia but the website CODE is produced peer-to-peer.

Anybody on the web can submit a prompt, and up/downvote other prompts, and every ten minutes the top one gets submitted to Claude!

Anyway, I think it works? Let me know if not and let’s see where this thing goes…
by charcircuit | 2026-02-02 01:23:42+00:00
>The only evidence for the existence of this company is this record of them exhibiting their wares at SIGGRAPH conferences in the early 1990s, as well as several patents issued to them, relating to software protection.

There is also their webpage for ordering PC RPG II. The company address is a residential house.

https://web.archive.org/web/20010802153755/http://home.netco...
by josephg | 2026-02-02 01:23:46+00:00
That tells a story. I bet its something like this:

1. There was a small, smart team which made time machine in the first place. They did good work. Building time machine required some pretty deep integrations into macos that not many people understood.

2. Years passed. The people who built time machine moved to greener pastures. At google and samsung you mostly get promoted for releasing new products. Not maintaining old ones. I wouldn't be surprised if its the same at apple. Over time, the people who made time machine left and were either replaced by more junior developers. Or weren't really replaced at all.

3. Random changes in the kernel break time machine regularly. Nobody is in charge of noticing breakage, or fixing it. Most people who care (and have the knowledge to fix it) have moved on.

I find things like this so odd from an organisational management perspective. Do companies not realise that features like time machine would have an ongoing maintenance cost? That someone would need to check that time machine still works with every release? Or is it just vibe based management out there? "I guess nobody works on that, and we don't test it. Oops whatever."