MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Reg.run - Decoupling AI "thinking" from API execution
by regrun | 2026-02-03 21:24:45+00:00
I got tired of "Security Prompts" being the only thing stopping AI agents from blowing up production.

Hi HN,

I’ve spent the last few months looking at how we deploy autonomous agents. The current standard is basically: "Put it in a system prompt and hope the LLM doesn't hallucinate a $50k refund."

As someone who has managed organizational authority for a decade (People Ops), this felt like a massive liability gap. Prompt engineering is probabilistic; security needs to be deterministic.

I built Reg.run to move the "Stop Button" out of the prompt and into the execution layer.

How it works technically:

The Sidecar: We use a local WASM-based proxy that sits next to the agent.

The Protocol: It intercepts Model Context Protocol (MCP) or standard API calls in real-time.

Policy-as-Code: Every action is checked against a rigid schema (e.g., MaxSpend: 100) before it’s signed and sent.

Performance: Sub-1ms latency. No data leaves your VPC.

It’s early, but the goal is to provide a physical "human-on-the-loop" gate mandated by the EU AI Act (Article 14) without breaking the autonomy of the agent.

I’m a solo founder and I’m around to answer any questions about the WASM implementation or the permission logic. I'd love your feedback on this.
by SketchySeaBeast | 2026-02-03 21:24:56+00:00
That's immaterial to the discussion. The comment I replied to simply stated: "Displacing God as the center of life." They aren't arguing that god matters, it's our displacement of them.

So, on the existence of god, we have two possiblities: God does exist, god doesn't exist.

1. If god doesn't exist, then we're unhappy because we're displacing a false god as the center of life.

2. If god does exist, then we're unhappy because we're displacing a real god as the center of life.

In that discussion, god's existence in fact doesn't matter, it leads to the same outcome.
by abraae | 2026-02-03 21:24:58+00:00
Is that counterintuitive? If I had a model trained on 10 different programming languages, including my target language, I would expect it to do better than a model trained only on my target language, simply because it has access to so much more code/algorithms/examples then my language alone.

i.e. there is a lot of commonality between programming languages just as there is between human languages, so training on one language would be beneficial to competency in other languages.
by mjburgess | 2026-02-03 21:25:21+00:00
There's serious issues with heritability research in general, it's observability stuff -- not experimentation, so imv, its at best proto-science, and in many cases plainly pseudoscience. "Heritability" itself has little to do with whether something is inherited, and speaks only to correlation with genes. Since we have a vast amount of genes which are shared for all sorts of reasons (ie., mating is based on shared culture, wealth, geography, etc.) -- the metric is mostly useless.

Accents are highly heritable, since they always correlated with location which is always correlated with genes.

Even if you do these twin studies, you have to assume a model of how genes and the environment interact, and all such models are obviously false.

Thus even if you grant that heritability measures on high quality twin studies are 'sign correct', in the sense that they show P(genetic effect) > P(no genetic effect) -- any magnitude of this effect, or any theory of is, is more or less pseudoscience (unless there are experimental studies showing gene-trait mechanism).

For example, it is "obvious" that P(genetic effect) > P(none) for intelligence, since genes control the structure of the brain and body. But there is no evidence (I'm aware of...) that beyond provision of a functioning brain, our genetics play any role in intelligence stratification. ie., all correlation with task performance and IQ can be explained by correlations in the metal retardation / mental deficiency range.

This doesn't mean intelligence is very malleable beyond a certain age. My own views is that genes are basically providing functioning hardware to the womb, and after that point its early development (both pre-birth and probs up to at most 3yo) which locks in a lot of the observed intelligence stratification. This is a very different story than popularisers of IQ research communicate though, but be aware, none are very good scientists and most of this research is methodologically unfit
by 8note | 2026-02-03 21:26:03+00:00
note: the europeans didnt particularly mind maduro's kidnapping, and crimea isnt a part of the EU nor NATO.

putin still has not gone to war, nor threatened to invade the EU yet to the point of international incident. the US has both sent politicians and other operators to try and fail at formenting rebellion in greenland against denmark, and has readied troops to invade
by milowata | 2026-02-03 21:26:10+00:00
I actually started writing a very similar essay, but the hyperbole got too out of hand – open source isn't dying anytime soon.

I do think that SDKs and utility-focused libraries are going to mostly go away, though, and that's less flashy but does have interesting implications imo.

https://meelo.substack.com/p/a-mild-take-on-coding-agents
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-03 21:26:27+00:00
> seems entirely plausible that China getting bogged down in Taiwan wouldn't be enough to deprive them of a run to the Moon. The US was able to sustain NASA during Iraq-Afghanistan

We probably lost basing on the Moon because Bush went into Iraq.

China getting bogged down in Taiwan means more political repression, more restiveness in Xinjiang and—if New Delhi isn’t totally stupid—needing to prop up Pakistan and its strategic fronts in the Himalayas. It also almost certainly means demand destruction in Europe, the EU and ASEAN.

> China isn't going to get bogged down in Taiwan. It's going to unfortunately be easier than most are imagining

The same people saying this today had hot takes on Kyiv falling in ‘21.

China invading Taiwan demilitarized Japan and India. It fundamentally changes its doorstep in ways that incur costs. To the Soviets, Afghanistan. To America, Iraq and possibly Greenland. To China, Taiwan.

(And let’s be clear: this is a vanity project for Xi. Taiwan would have voted, eventually, to peacefully join China if pre-Xi trends continued. But he needed it on his watch. Hence the stupidity.)
by its_magic | 2026-02-03 21:26:39+00:00
I'm tired of grub too. That's one of the packages on my shitlist. Currently it is broken on my system, as it has been in the past from time to time. I'm tired of the unreliability and have decided to write my own bootloader instead. It will be simple and bulletproof.

I already laid the basic foundation and have the kernel loading into memory and booting. Next step is to get the memory map and pass that along. It's BIOS only for the moment; EFI support will come later, along with other architectures. (PowerPC is next.)
by daotoad | 2026-02-03 21:26:47+00:00
The problem is most people won't take that attitude. For most homeowners, the home is the largest asset.

This is a Catch 22 for elected officials. We must reduce housing costs dramatically if we do so, we will devalue significant assets of a large number of active voters and political contributors.

I'd love to see some ideas on how to pull this off, because we need them.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2026-02-03 21:26:48+00:00
What is the best place to see local model rankings? The benchmarks seem so heavily gamed that I am willing to believe the “objective” rankings are a lie and personal reviews are more meaningful.

Are there any clear winners per domain? Code, voice-to-text, text-to-voice, text editing, image generation, text summarization, business-text-generation, music synthesis, whatever.
by BobaFloutist | 2026-02-03 21:26:50+00:00
Right, because most people recognize that the US has become sufficiently polarized and radicalized that "If enough people are mad at you, a complete stranger might shoot you" is not a theory of change we want to encourage. Yes, even for causes we agree with, most adults in the room understand that "people being mad at you" is pretty independent of how righteous your cause is, and even how civil and thoughtful you are in pursuing it.
by viraptor | 2026-02-03 21:26:56+00:00
> Maybe I'm not the target market for this, but how hard is it REALLY to manage a RDBMS?

It depends:

- do you want multi region presence

- do you want snapshot backups

- do you want automated replication

- do you want transparent failover

- do you want load balancing of queries

- do you want online schema migrations with millisecond lock time

- do you want easy reverts in time

- do you want minor versions automatically managed

- do you want the auth integrated with a different existing system

- do you want...

There's a lot that hosted services with extra features can give you. You can do everything on the list yourself of course, but it will take time and unless you already have experience, every point can introduce some failure you're not aware of.
by gingerlime | 2026-02-03 21:27:24+00:00
Exactly. Whilst I can see the problem with vibe-coded "contribution" that lower the signal/noise ratio on big OSS project, it's also "liberating" in the sense that forking becomes much more viable now. If previously it took time to dive into a project to tweak it to your needs, it's now trivial.

So in many senses AI is democratising open-source.
by toss1 | 2026-02-03 21:27:42+00:00
>> they are restricted in how they use it, and defendents have rights and due process.

That due process only exists to the extent the branches of govt are independent, have co-equal power, and can hold and act upon different views of the situation.

When all branches of govt are corrupted or corrupted to serve the executive, as in autocracies, that due process exists only if the executive likes you, or accepts your bribes. That is why there is such a huge push by right-wing parties to take over the levers of power, so they can keep their power even after they would lose at the ballot box.
by Schiendelman | 2026-02-03 21:27:52+00:00
If they were building the stuff the people paying for the product insist they need, it seems unlikely that they'd take 6 months to use it once built. Unless it's some API that takes a ton of work to build to. It didn't sound like they were getting feedback for those six months.

Security features that add friction for the user are usually forced, aren't they?

Contract requirements do make sense, but I get the idea that this user would know that.

What are you imagining that would be actual value but not used for six months?
by bikenaga | 2026-02-03 21:28:16+00:00
From the article (note the comments about syringic acid and resveratrol): "New small molecules such as the natural plant substance syringic acid, found in blueberries and blue grapes, and the dopamine reuptake inhibitor vanoxerin were found to protect neurons from the aging process and thus keep the nervous system intact in old age. In contrast, substances such as the serotonin 5-HT1A receptor antagonist WAY-100635 and resveratrol were determined to promote the aging process and neurodegeneration and could act as neurotoxins."

But note: Nematode (C. elegans) model

Original article: "Aging clocks delineate neuron types vulnerable or resilient to neurodegeneration and identify neuroprotective interventions" - https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-026-01067-5

Abstract: "Different neuron types show distinct susceptibility to age-dependent degeneration, yet the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. Here we applied aging clocks to single neuron types in Caenorhabditis elegans and found that distinct neurons differ in their biological age. Ciliated sensory neurons with high neuropeptide and protein biosynthesis gene expression show accelerated aging and degeneration, correlating with loss of function, which could be prevented by pharmacological inhibition of translation. We show that the C. elegans neuronal aging transcriptomes correlate with human brain aging patterns and anticorrelate with geroprotective interventions. We performed an in silico drug screen to identify potentially neuroprotective small molecules. We show that the natural occurring plant metabolite syringic acid and the piperazine derivative vanoxerine delay neuronal degeneration, and propose these compounds as neuroprotective interventions. Furthermore, we identify neurotoxins that accelerate neurodegeneration, indicating that distinguishing aging trajectories between neuron types can inform on protective interventions as well as risk factors."
by observationist | 2026-02-03 21:28:33+00:00
Things change. The barrier to entry decreased, meaning more things will get created, more people will participate in communal efforts, and quality will depend on AI capabilities and figuring out how to curate well - better tools, less friction between idea and reality, and things get better for everyone.

Just because some things suck, for now, doesn't mean open source is being killed. It means software development is changing. It'll be harder to distinguish between a good faith, quality effort that meets all the expectations of quality control without sifting through more contributions.

Anonymous participation will decrease, communities will have to create a minimal hierarchy of curation, and the web of trust built up in these communities will have to become more pragmatic. The relationships and the tools already exist, it's just the shape of the culture that results in good FOSS that will have to update and adapt to the technology.
by vercaemert | 2026-02-03 21:28:42+00:00
That's a good point. I'm not familiar enough with the various moats to comment.

I was just talking at a high level. If transformers are HDD technology, maybe there's SSD right around the corner that's a paradigm shift for the whole industry (but for the average user just looks like better/smarter models). It's a very new field, and it's not unrealistic that major discoveries shake things up in the next decade or less.
by kstrauser | 2026-02-03 21:29:26+00:00
In the dark old days before Apple Pay, where it was common in America to hand your credit/debit card to some rando at a restaurant and have them disappear with it for a few minutes, about once a year my bank would call me to ask if I'd been using my card in some far-off locale:

"Hi! Are you in Tijuana?"

"Not since 1993. Why? What's up?"

"So you didn't just try to buy gasoline at a PEMEX there?"

"Nope, I'm in San Francisco as speak."

"OK, thanks! We'll get a new card out in the mail to you."

That's a pretty low bar for identity theft, but I think it's defensible.
by its_magic | 2026-02-03 21:29:39+00:00
On the contrary, I much prefer a full Turing complete language rather than trying to shoehorn my ideas into someone else's limited system.

The scripts don't have to be complicated, and it doesn't have to be shell scripts. You can use any script or executable that the Linux kernel can load and run. But shell scripts work great and have all the power needed.

Systemd is a giant, flaming heap of buggy ass code. Good riddance to it.
by echelon | 2026-02-03 21:29:46+00:00
I don't even need "open weights" to run on hardware I own.

I am fine renting an H100 (or whatever), as long as I theoretically have access to and own everything running.

I do not want my career to become dependent upon Anthropic.

Honestly, the best thing for "open" might be for us to build open pipes and services and models where we can rent cloud. Large models will outpace small models: LLMs, video models, "world" models, etc.

I'd even be fine time-sharing a running instance of a large model in a large cloud. As long as all the constituent pieces are open where I could (in theory) distill it, run it myself, spin up my own copy, etc.

I do not deny that big models are superior. But I worry about the power the large hyperscalers are getting while we focus on small "open" models that really can't match the big ones.

We should focus on competing with large models, not artisanal homebrew stuff that is irrelevant.
by onion2k | 2026-02-03 21:29:48+00:00
The G in GPT stands for Generalized. You don't need that for specialist models, so the size can be much smaller. Even coding models are quite general as they don't focus on a language or a domain. I imagine a model specifically for something like React could be very effective with a couple of billion parameters, especially if it was a distill of a more general model.
by litoE | 2026-02-03 21:29:59+00:00
Back in 1969 I had a summer job in the engineering department of a factory. The Chief Engineer was an old guy who was a slide rule artist. He taught me how to solve second degree equations (ax^2 + bx + c = 0) with just a slide rule. The standard formula that I had learned in high school includes adding and subtracting, which a slide rule cannot do. His method involved pulling out the slider of the slide rule and inserting it backwards. Then, through some clever manipulation using the D and B scales (which now faced each other) and the A and C scales, he could actually solve the equation with just the slide rule. I wish I could remember exactly how it was done.
by ushakov | 2026-02-03 21:30:01+00:00
we aren’t worried about that.

when we were starting out we figured there was no solution that would satisfy our requirements for running untrusted code. so we had to build our own.

the reason we open-sourced this is because we want everyone to be able to run our Sandboxes - in contrast to the majority of our competitors who’s goal is to lock you in to their offering.

with open-source you have the choice, and luckily Manus, Perplexity, Nvidia choose us for their workloads.

(opinions my own)
by golem14 | 2026-02-03 21:30:14+00:00
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/16/10/4010

40% isn't much in the grand scheme of things, but maybe they can reach higher reduction with more research/materials. Mass and power are pretty cheap for spaceX, so shipping more solar panels and a heap pump might not be a deal breaker.

Would e.g. a reduction of 90% in radiator area change the overall picture on the overall feasibility? I think not, it would still be ludicrous, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
by rob | 2026-02-03 21:30:29+00:00
I use the built-in terminal "panel" inside VS Code/Cursor all the time. It's next to some other useful tab panels. Great for when you need to run commands for the current project but still want to chat in the sidebar or edit something else while it runs.

Sometimes I'll use Ghostty at the same time and switch between the two. Just depends on what I'm trying to do at the moment.

Nothing wrong with maintaining all the context you need in a single window instead of alt+tabbing to different apps, especially for those not engulfed by three 4K displays.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-03 21:30:33+00:00
> if you are American and still talk all this shit about China being a dictatorship and authoritarian this and “purge” that, I wish you would honestly shut the fuck up. Really. You are in no position to have an informed opinion on this because all of your information is force fed

Bit defensive there, eh?

China is an autocracy and Xi is acting in the predictably self-destructive ways a dictator does. The U.S. is heading down that same path, with Trump practically mimicking Xi. N = 2 doesn’t weaken an argument. And folks who lived through the Nazis saying they see similar veins today doesn’t undermine their credibility.

(The hilarity of it is if you take your comment and replace China and America with partisan or pro-American coding, you could pop it out of Hegseth’s office and it would be right at home. Your comment almost seals the point that Xi is all the problems of MAGA, except polling China instead.)
by fmajid | 2026-02-03 21:30:37+00:00
France doesn't extradite its citizens, even absolute scumbags like Roman Polanski. Someone like Musk has lots of lawyers to gum up extradition proceedings, even if the US were inclined to go along. I doubt the US extradition treaty would cover this unless the French could prove deliberate sharing of CSAM by Musk personally, beyond reckless negligence. Then again, after the Epstein revelations, this is no longer so far-fetched.
by Bender | 2026-02-03 21:30:38+00:00
AI data-centers use upwards of 100MW. The biggest solar panels in space could produce around 240KW. When they speak of AI data-centers in space what do they actually mean in realistic non theoretical terms and where are the materials for this coming from?

If the AI data-center used only 10MW then each could have two redundant SMR's assuming the cooling challenges have been worked out but then we could have nuclear reactor disposal and collision issues.
by rurp | 2026-02-03 21:30:41+00:00
I've had to start using Teams more lately and it is indeed as terrible as I'd heard. The other day I needed to copy a number of items from an ongoing chat. Seems like an extremely simple and normal thing, but every time I hover over a message a popup jumps up with emoji reactions that partially covers the text I'm trying to copy. Trying to move quickly, I kept accidentally "reacting" to messages instead of double clicking the text. To make matters worse there's no way to disable this "feature"! Why?!

Teams is supposed to be a professional workplace tool from one of the biggest software companies in the world, but it feels like something a high schooler coded up for fun. Weirdly Discord, a platform explicitly meant for gamers, is a more useful chat tool. I don't like Discord at all, but it's better than Teams.
by ambonvik | 2026-02-03 21:30:50+00:00
I am not familiar with Mojo, so I do not know.

Compared to the coroutine implementations I do know, none of them quite met what I as looking for. The «trampoline» has been mentioned. I also needed a calling convention that fit the higher-level process model with a self pointer and a context, and a signal return value from each context switch. It also has to be thread safe to survive the pthreads. Not very difficult to do, but needs to be designed in from the beginning.

Same thing with random number generators. It will not work very well to keep state between calls in a static local variable or some global construction, needs to be kept thread local somewhere. Not difficult, but needs to be there from the start both for the basic generator and for the distributions on top of it.

Quite a bit more here: https://cimba.readthedocs.io/en/latest/background.html#
by leflambeur | 2026-02-03 21:30:57+00:00
That is very much not immaterial.

If God does exist and is our creator, then we're designed to recognize him (at least to strive to, or have some innate need to); failing to do so or radically abdicating from this need would lead to disaster.

In other words, in the God-exists scenario, we are not merely observers of a phenomenon who can be detached from it.