MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: The only CLI your AI agent will need
by jrandolf | 2026-02-22 14:45:48+00:00
I started digging into OpenClaw, then found this: https://clawhub.ai/steipete/trello. They are literally telling people that it's okay to expose credentials, just as long as it's in an env var.

If we’re building with AI, safety has to be a product principle, not an afterthought. AI makes coding more accessible, but it also strips away the guardrails you usually get from experienced mentors and hard-earned production lessons.

So we built Earl: an AI-safe CLI for LLM agents. Instead of giving agents raw shell + network access, Earl enforces template-driven calls, stores secrets in the OS keychain, blocks SSRF/private IP targets, supports egress allowlists, and sandboxes Bash/JS/SQL execution.

It also runs as an MCP server so agents can use those same controls natively.

Get started: https://github.com/brwse/earl?tab=readme-ov-file#quick-start
by subscribed | 2026-02-22 14:46:04+00:00
I didn't think I could envy Americans something.

But they get a report and an incident status.

While we in the UK get business as usual and the millions (not exaggerating) of hours of routine untreated sewage spill out straight into rivers and lakes mostly completely unpunished : https://www.wokingnewsandmail.co.uk/news/environment-news/fi...

Caused by the privatisation (thanks to the Tory party of the time) then willful neglect from all the subsequent governments, AND the rotating doors (ie: corruption) between the "oversight" bodies and the excrement industry.

Dirty island of corruption.
by 1718627440 | 2026-02-22 14:49:06+00:00
I think most people perceive program semantic not only to be defined for the whole program as a whole, but also towards individual subexpressions. If the "LLM compiler" changes the output completely when a single word is added, then it is not deterministic for the subexpressions, that don't contain that addition.

Granted that is not the rigorous definition of determinism. Also some existing compilers are non-deterministic with such a definition, namely when "undefined behaviour" would be triggered. That's precisely the problem with UB.
by paulryanrogers | 2026-02-22 14:49:36+00:00
> And it's not that hard to just run it in docker if you're so worried

There is risk of damage to ones local machine and data as well as reputational risk if it has access to outside services. Imagine your socials filled with hate, ala Microsoft Tay, because it was red pilled.

Though given the current cultural winds perhaps that could be seen as a positive?
by bityard | 2026-02-22 14:50:23+00:00
It depends on who you ask.

There is a "dialect" called General American English, which is essentially how national news anchors and some actors are trained, so that they don't sound like they are too obviously from anywhere in particular to the public.

A large percentage of Midwesterners and Canadians speak _mostly_ General American, if you allow for the occasional drawl or shifted vowel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American_English
by elzbardico | 2026-02-22 14:50:32+00:00
Toyota should have bought a page from pre-brain-damage Elon Musk's book and built a nationwide hydrogen-fueling infra-structure.

Teslas may not be anymore the future of EVs, but we can't deny that by building the Power Charger infrastructure, Tesla gave consumers the confidence to buy an EV knowing that it wouldn't be basically a geofenced vehicle.
by catsquirrel28 | 2026-02-22 14:50:40+00:00
> Imagine the conversation New York legislators could have had if every robotaxi ride generated a cryptographically signed, tamper-evident record of the vehicle's behavior — independently verifiable by any regulator, auditor, or safety agency.

This is putting the cart before the horse. The problem with autonomous vehicles is that there's no standardized third party test suite to validate and certify ahead of time and periodically that the vehicles are capable of behaving correctly in all road conditions even with their sensors degraded as will happen over time.

This kind of validation should be done by the state or a neutral third party like UL in the US before a single vehicle is allowed on public roads.

Without it they're just unleashing multi-ton weapons on the streets with no guarantee they'll perform adequately. The problems with this were evident in SF when the blackout happened and the Waymos clogged up the roadways. If that happens during a real emergency and blocks the roadways it could result in thousands of deaths.

Autonomous vehicles are a bad idea anyway for the reasons in this video[1].

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0
by bjackman | 2026-02-22 14:51:12+00:00
Yeah I think for SMTP it's easy since it's perfectly scalable to do manual approval for each mail.

But not really sure how to set up safe search. One idea I had was to say "nobody would ever put a secret in the subject line, right..?". Then you could let the agent read all the headers and just have it ask permission to see the body.

That's still not entirely safe since if you can search the body you can eventually infer the presence of arbitrary strings. But I think you could probably mitigate that risk by just setting up alerts for if the agent starts spamming loads of searches?
by lurkercodemnky | 2026-02-22 14:51:45+00:00
> Also - Codex now has 'Spark' which is on Cerebras, it's wildly fast - and this absolutely changes 'workflow' fundamentally.

In my AI coding experience, reviewing and making sure AI didn't screw up something (eg: by writing tutorial grade code) takes most of the time. It's still useful but I don't see how speeding up the non-bottleneck part can change the workflow fundamentally.
by Wowfunhappy | 2026-02-22 14:51:45+00:00
This is mentioned in the article:

> More clubs have also been instituting “no phones” policies to reclaim the dance floor’s social energy. Venues including Signal, a small club that opened last year in Brooklyn’s East Williamsburg neighborhood, and recent addition Refuge, located just around the corner, cover all phone cameras with a sticker. Other larger, established venues like House of Yes and Elsewhere have also banned the use of phones inside.
by LeanderK | 2026-02-22 14:52:38+00:00
you know that people really go there to dance and enjoy the music?

A friend of mine is a professional (modern) dancer, so has as much credentials as you can, and she enjoys dancing in berlins nightlife. She finds the space for expression and creativity in her movement, in tune with the music. Of course, the is not much physical space, which is how the dance-movements evolved as they have (e.g you never spin and you feet never really leave the space they are on). But this is part of the culture, and not a problem. If you can't find it then that's your problem, but doesn't mean that other's can not freely express themselves there.

There's more dance-events. Not sure where you are, but you can usually go to a bachata night as it's quite trendy now, northern soul is also getting some revivial. There's also more disco-oriented events usually at various LGBTQ+-parties, I think especially italo-disco is a lot of fun. You can just go out and dance. Lindy Hop also has a solid community around the world.
by iepathos | 2026-02-22 14:52:47+00:00
"1000 PRs/week" with no breakdown of complexity or value is a vanity metric. If these are mostly migrations, boilerplate, and bug fixes on previous Minion PRs that were bug ridden, then you've just created 1000 code reviews/week to waste human time rubber-stamping. That's not productivity, that's busywork with extra steps.

It's like measuring productivity by how many people you pull into meetings each week. The CIA's Simple Sabotage Field Manual literally recommends holding as many meetings as possible with as many people as possible. The CIA should add "open as many PRs with AI as possible" to their list. Bonus sabotage points if the PRs are made from ambiguous "one-shot" attempts described in Slack with no follow up clarification.
by krisoft | 2026-02-22 14:53:05+00:00
> a type of laser that doesn’t damage the human eye but completely obliterates a phone camera

If we are asking for impossible things why make it so scifi coded? I would much prefer cute bunny unicorns who suddenly grow fangs and bite people who are taking pictures. They are both equaly realistic but the bunny unicorns are nicer to think of.
by JKCalhoun | 2026-02-22 14:54:01+00:00
Yeah, came for "Conway Invaders" (looks like a badass premise for a game) but became disappointed when it appeared to be "use AI to create a game".

I just want to write my own Conway (Life?) Invaders now.

(Entropy Wars? I love the idea that your "bullets", when they pass within 1U of a living cell, would become part of the Conway engine—possibly expanding, exploding an otherwise stable organism. Perhaps too a glider gun is sending gliders down at the player and that is what gives the "scroll".)
by Zigurd | 2026-02-22 14:55:59+00:00
Journalists is covering these stories could do better than to keep using the phrase "remote driving." Wayno figured out years ago that remote driving just won't work. You can't count on the data connection to the vehicle. Maybe in China where they deploy millimeter wave 5G, but not anywhere in the US.

It does feel likely that Elon was just as insistent about not needing Waymo's remote support architecture as he was about not needing Waymo's full sensor suite.
by lapcat | 2026-02-22 14:56:05+00:00
Again, you seem to insist on an ulterior motive, completely discounting the value or pleasure of conversation. In contrast, reading is a solitary activity. Have you heard of book clubs? People read books, and then they get together to discuss the books.

Hacker News itself is all about reading articles, and then discussing the articles with others. "If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
by bpavuk | 2026-02-22 14:56:09+00:00
I remember being on a concert relatively recently, a few years ago. nearly everyone had their phones up, mine was in a pocket. no one made a single movement that resembled dance, everyone just... stood still. that differed by a great measure from several concerts I attended circa 2018-19.

on both music fests, I was in flow. I've been dancing - it's a usual thing all humans naturally do when they hear rhythm that resonates with them unless they consciously resist dancing for one reason or another. though, this time, no one joined me. people just made space around me and pointed their cameras at me, which created a ton of unease and I eventually stopped. it was enough to get viral in local Telegrams, but I had no joy in that. in the moment, I wanted to shout, "duh, why aren't you all dancing? put down your goddamn cameras, you can always scroll later!"

phones, primarily due to their current addictive implementation, are such a killjoy. I hope that one day, devices like Clicks Communicator will change this.
by dzonga | 2026-02-22 14:56:18+00:00
in the wild Inline 6 (I6) engines have proved reliable and just going on regular maintenance

B58 (BMW) is super reliable & high performance

same as the I6 used in certain landcruisers & other Toyota cars etc

though now of course - with super cheap solar etc - if you can go electric go electric but if you've to buy an ICE car - yeah buy an I6 - fuel efficient & performance & reliable
by thaumasiotes | 2026-02-22 14:56:32+00:00
> It’s like saying you’re not a drinker because you have a glass of wine every once in a while.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animals-and-us/20110...

> Take a 2002 Times/CNN poll on the eating habits of 10,000 Americans. Six percent of the individuals surveyed said they considered themselves vegetarian. But when asked by the pollsters what they had eaten in the last 24 hours, 60% of the self-described "vegetarians" admitted that that had consumed red meat, poultry, or fish the previous day.
by shartshooter | 2026-02-22 14:56:34+00:00
I spent my childhood in a rural town but learning Spanish from various teachers from 4th grade through high school. I always did well but focused too much on the process of Spanish such as getting very good at conjugating verbs without knowing what the meant

After several years away from Spanish I picked it back up in college and began traveling and living off and on in Latin America

I remember the first times I started dreaming in Spanish, or the first time I had a screaming match with someone trying to steal money from me. I would unconsciously think of a phrase in English and constantly be trying to convert it to Spanish all day long. It was the most fluent I’ve ever felt

A few months ago I went on a trip to Central America and was worried my Spanish would have been lost after over a decade away. Turns out that quite a bit is still there

Folks regularly compliment me on my pronunciation(which is hugely important and shows that you’re trying, folks give you so much grace if you don’t know the words but are trying)

I also find that I can speak far better than I can listen. I regularly have to ask people to repeat themselves or slow down, which is frustrating to me but what can you expect after not staying sharp?

Last thing: I’ll echo another commenter who said to listen to music. My high school Spanish teacher had us listening and singing shakira. She’d print off the lyrics and we’d sing along. This was hugely valuable for pronunciation and flow. Also, old Shakira stuff is great

Nothing beats the pressure of using a language all day in a place where they don’t speak your language.

I remember meeting a backpacker from another country who spoke English but would only speak Spanish to when we traveled and would pull out her dictionary regularly and make notes in her notebook. I learned that Germans are crazy disciplined and that that discipline pays off. Her Spanish was amazing after only a few months in the country
by fsckboy | 2026-02-22 14:56:58+00:00
>But when there's a public prediction market, the only benefit is to the insiders.

false.

all the conclusions economists draw in microeconomic theory about efficient markets are based on pricing that reflects symmetric information. secrets are asymmetric. trading on inside information drives the market price in the direction it should be moving, making the market more efficient, a benefit to all participants in the market.

this is not a defense of trading on inside information, simply pointing out the mechanics.
by chris_money202 | 2026-02-22 14:57:10+00:00
They likely are, but say I have a fleet of Waymos and Teslas. I’ll need two separate systems for telemetry, safety, and compliance.

There’s also the problem of independent evidence when incidents happen. Insurers, OEM, operators, and possibly the public should all have the same view of data and can trust its presented honestly and in its entirety. Phyware systems prevent tamper and Phyware itself has no stakes in the game, all the data is provided as captured.
by xtiansimon | 2026-02-22 14:57:57+00:00
"toxic"? I don't think HN is more toxic than anywhere else on the net. Less so even. People may share a thought that is poorly considered, and, if another person takes objection, get called out for it. And most remonstrations are at the civil level--polite with an explanation of the objection.

That said, consuming the news and social media at this time does raise my hackles. Rage inducing, even. "God" help us all.
by bryanlarsen | 2026-02-22 14:58:01+00:00
Many jurisdictions require that commercial drivers take a 30 minute break every 4 hours. Those that don't should. Those stops make battery trucking feasible.

And if you want to stop for 5 minutes instead of 30 you can use battery swapping solutions like the one Janus uses.

Batteries are feasible for long distance trucking today.

Green Hydrogen trucking uses 3X as much electricity as using it directly. Trucking's biggest expense is fuel, so that will be the killer factor ensuring battery will beat hydrogen for long distance trucking.
by mschuster91 | 2026-02-22 14:58:41+00:00
> I don't know if that tracks, senior leadership was heavily influenced towards implementing the one child policy by the works of Song Jian, who came from a rocketry background and presented a model whereby the population would grow to an unsustainable level unless corrective control was applied.

The problem wasn't the idea of modeling itself, it was to not be aware of what we know today from Africa - with more wealth and especially less child mortality, reproduction will drop in about one generation, even without punitive governmental intervention. Even 60 years ago, people tended to have anywhere from 3 to 5 children, just because the chance was so high that at least two would simply die before reaching adulthood.

But thanks due to better maternal healthcare, vaccinations and OSHA, that mortality rate dropped significantly, and so people adapted on their own - and that's before getting into women being able to control fertility on their own or housing/cost of living exploding in the same timeframe.
by steveBK123 | 2026-02-22 14:59:10+00:00
A good read in this area is Dan Wang's book - Breakneck

One could probably summarize it as having engineering leaders solve engineering problems is good, but they can very efficiently implement very bad social policies. Likewise having non-STEM leaders in charge of things like agricultural planning is also bad.

That said modern China is less socialist/communist than a weird state capitalism machine with a dictatorship.

One big difference to modern China vs USSR for example is instead of having 1-2 car companies churning out the cars the state demands, you have more of a competitive local government subsidized market. So they have 50+ car companies all competing in the local marketplace for sales, and eventually some good car companies have surfaced. This was never going to happen with Lada.
by ceroxylon | 2026-02-22 15:00:43+00:00
All of this, plus you can plug in an openrouter API key and test a plethora of models for all use cases. You can assign different models to different sub-agents, you can put it in /auto mode, and you can test the latest SOTA models the minute they're released...

It can also edit its own config files, monitor system processes, and even... check and harden its own system security. I still don't have it connected to my personal accounts, but as a standalone system it is very fun.

People ask me "what would I even do with it?", when I think of dozens of things every day. I've been working on modding an open source software synth, the patch files are XML it was trivial to set up a workflow where I can add new knobs that combine multiple effects, add new ones, etc. A cron job scans my favorite sites and curates links based on my preferences, and creates a different list for things that are out of my normal interests to explore new areas.

I am amazed at how stubborn and un-creative people can be when presented with something like this... I thought we were hackers...?
by anthk | 2026-02-22 15:01:02+00:00
Unix is easier to understand than the NT mess and everything it's in the open and documented, so you can achieve a good level of knowledge in the middle. OTOH in order to understand NT deeply you must be a reverse engineer. Also, on the other side, crazy experts under Wine (both ways, Unix and NT) OpenBSD and 9front do exist on par of these NT wizards. It just happen with Unix/9f you climb an almost flat slope (more in the second) due to the crazy simple design, while with NT the knowledge it's damn expensive to earn.

With 9front you OFC need expertise on par of NT but without far less efforth. The books (9intro), the papers, CSP for concurrency... it's all there, there's no magic, you don't need ollyDBG or an NT object explorer to understand OLE and COM for instance.
by turingsroot | 2026-02-22 15:01:02+00:00
I've been running AI coding workshops for engineers transitioning from traditional development, and the research phase is consistently the part people skip — and the part that makes or breaks everything.

The failure mode the author describes (implementations that work in isolation but break the surrounding system) is exactly what I see in workshop after workshop. Engineers prompt the LLM with "add pagination to the list endpoint" and get working code that ignores the existing query builder patterns, duplicates filtering logic, or misses the caching layer entirely.

What I tell people: the research.md isn't busywork, it's your verification that the LLM actually understands the system it's about to modify. If you can't confirm the research is accurate, you have no business trusting the plan.

One thing I'd add to the author's workflow: I've found it helpful to have the LLM explicitly list what it does NOT know or is uncertain about after the research phase. This surfaces blind spots before they become bugs buried three abstraction layers deep.
by root_axis | 2026-02-22 15:01:10+00:00
> They can much better handle recurring tasks, monitor things, etc. In a sense, they're "alive" and can live however you program them. We already have examples of these agents creating an AI religion, an AI social network (which debated how to keep humans out using a human captcha), attempting to legally separate from their creators, and in one case called its owner on the phone, unprompted, just to say hi

Total nonsense.
by jonplackett | 2026-02-22 15:01:16+00:00
Michel Thomas is the answer (or it was for me anyway as someone previously TERRIBLE at languages)

BBC made a documentary about him where he teaches a French gcse to the 6 worst kids in the school, in I think 2 weeks. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL94A517B00A16C187&si=4eAv...

He was also in the French resistance, survived concentration camps and is generally a very interesting person.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Thomas
by mistrial9 | 2026-02-22 15:02:08+00:00
as a native English speaker in California, this is funny to read. I was standing in a crowd of undergraduates at UC Berkeley, shoulder to shoulder, during a break in a movie. Two guys were talking Very Fast right next to me, I mean 0.5 meter in a crowd. I decided to run an experiment because I could not pick out any of what they said. So I turned and spoke slowly in an ever so slight British formal version of California English "excuse me, do you know what time it is?' . One stopped and answered -- almost exactly as I spoke -- the current time (around 18:00). Then they went back to their talk! it was English!
by 13pixels | 2026-02-22 15:02:17+00:00
The irony is that while AI slop is gaming Google, the AI models themselves (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity) are surprisingly resistant to it. We tested ~150 B2B tools and the correlation between Google rank and LLM recommendation was 0.08. Basically zero.

So you end up with two diverging discovery layers: Google, increasingly polluted by cheap AI content, and LLMs, which seem to weight structured data, documentation quality, and mentions on high-trust platforms (Reddit, GitHub, Stack Overflow) way more than traditional SEO signals.

The real question is whether Google fixes this before users just default to asking ChatGPT instead of searching.