MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Pantalk – One daemon, any AI agent, every chat platform
by _pdp_ | 2026-02-18 18:45:42+00:00
Hey HN!

One of the big selling points of AI agents like OpenClaw is the ability to connect it to popular communication tools like Slack, Discord, Mattermost, Telegram. But this shouldn't need to be reimplemented. A single tool can provide this interface for all of them.

That's what Pantalk does. It's a local daemon that maintains persistent connections to chat platforms, and any agent (regardless of language, framework, or runtime) talks through plain CLI commands or a Unix domain socket with a JSON protocol.

Your agent doesn't import a library. It calls a command. That means it works with Claude, Codex, Copilot and Gemini, local models, custom frameworks, a bash script or anything that can exec a process or write to a socket.

It outputs JSON when stdout isn't a terminal, and ships with "skill" definitions that teach agents what commands are available (kind of like man pages for LLMs).

Some things that might be interesting to this crowd:

* IPC is JSON over Unix domain socket. The CLI is just a thin client. You can write your own in any language.

* Everything is local. Message history and notifications are persisted in SQLite. No cloud, no external DB.

* Multi-bot. One daemon can manage multiple bots across different platforms simultaneously.

* Hot reload. Change your config and run pantalk reload - no restart needed.

It supports Slack (Socket Mode), Discord (Gateway), Mattermost (WebSocket), and Telegram (Bot API).

Written in Go, single binary, MIT licensed.

GitHub: https://github.com/pantalk/pantalk

Website: https://pantalk.dev

I'd love feedback on the protocol design and what other platforms people would want to see. Happy to answer questions!
by autoexec | 2026-02-18 18:45:47+00:00
It's good to take note of who exactly is pushing (and/or being bribed to push) the crazy. In the case of this monstrosity you can thank:

Rep. Michael Way [R]
Rep. Leo Biasiucci [R]
Rep. Selina Bliss [R]
Rep. Michael Carbone [R]
Rep. Neal Carter [R]
Rep. Lupe Diaz [R]
Rep. Lisa Fink [R]
Rep. Matt Gress [R]
Rep. Chris Lopez [R]
Rep. David Marshall [R]
Rep. Quang Nguyen [R]
Rep. James Taylor [R]
by djaro | 2026-02-18 18:45:48+00:00
Also, as someone who's main source of income is a YouTube channel: there is a type of threshold effect, where your videos are not good enough to watch until one day they suddenly are.

This means that until you reach that threshold, it feels like you're not making progress, cause every video just gets the same result (no views). Even if below the surface, you're slowly inching closer to that moment where your videos will actually be watched.
by dec0dedab0de | 2026-02-18 18:46:02+00:00
I never found this very compelling. What is main in that world is not the source of truth, and it's rare to have a system atomically in one state or the other - but normally there are progressive rollouts. And if you ever need to rollback in production, I assume no one is changing where main is.

In the scenarios I am thinking of, the only way to rollback production is to update the main branch and redeploy.

But still, it's just the niceness of having the default branch match production or the current release. Even if you're not going through the extra code review or testing, and all you did was automatically point main to the same commit as the latest release tag, it's still nice. Of course, you could have a production branch or whatever, set that as your default, and leave main for development, but the point is the same.

To be explicit for code review, do you mean there is (1) main, (1) development, and then a bunch feature branches - and that there is review when merging into development and main? Having a two-tiered review process seems extremely difficult to do - versus just having more reviewers on the first merge - especially dealing with merge conflicts and needing to merge again into development.

Yes, but merge conflicts are not an issue at all if you don't squash commits on merge, atleast not between development and main. The way we used to do it, was each part of the project had owners with one required to review all changes before merging to development, then any other senior developer could review the merge to main. Though, we would encourage the whole team to review every PR if they had time.

In practice, this was really just a chance to see all the changes going in on this next release.

I think it's worth maintaining the flexibility of how many releases come from a repo. Needing to fork repos just because you want another deployable release in the future seems painful to me.

When the development team is also the operations team it's easier to keep them together and just update the deployment to go to multiple places, which would effectively still be a single deployment.

If they're separate teams, then I would be inclined to give operations it's own repo where they can manage their specific things. With a pipeline that pulls down the artifacts from the development team.
by dlcarrier | 2026-02-18 18:46:08+00:00
Video encoding and image compression is a huge use case, and not at all uncommon, so much so that a lot of hardware has dedicated hardware for it. Of course, offloading the SIMD instructions to dedicated hardware accelerators does reduce usage of SIMD instructions, but any time a specific CODEC or algorithm isn't accelerated, then the SIMD instructions are absolutely necessary.

Emulators also use them a lot, often in unintended ways, because they are very flexible. This is partially because the emulator itself can use the flexibility to optimize emulation, but also because hand optimizing with SIMD instruction can significantly improve performance of any application, which is necessary for the low-performance processors common in videogame consoles.
by rbaudibert | 2026-02-18 18:46:09+00:00
Are you asking from a perspective where you own the MCP server or client?

For client: If you are using [LLM Analytics](https://posthog.com/docs/llm-analytics) you'll properly capture your tool calls to MCP servers.

For server: It's just normal code, you can instrument and call `posthog.capture` like normal
by moritzwarhier | 2026-02-18 18:46:10+00:00
Personally I was thinking this is more similar to the "ruler issue", but at scale.

When the LLM is partly a black box, it could – in theory– mean that it's developed some heuristic to detect the environment it's run in, but this is not obvious to the developers?

But I agree about your main point... LLMs or AI in general as a black box behaving autonomously in some unexpected way is not something I currently fear.

The erratic behaviors are less of a problem than LLMs acting as obfuscators of bias and their own training data, I guess.
by adithyassekhar | 2026-02-18 18:46:14+00:00
I wish I could read this but got this[0] guy on mobile with no close button, won't close when you click outside the modal.

0: https://i.postimg.cc/14h3Q9mD/Screenshot-20260219-001356-Chr...

Edit: Nvm, found it. Weird place to put it.
by arrsingh | 2026-02-18 18:46:21+00:00
This is not new. When I started my first company in 2012 it was bootstrapped and getting anyone to pay attention to what I was building was almost impossible. I had to pound the pavement and meet people in person at coffee shops and pitch to get my first few users.

Then when I raised from a16z and had some money in the bank it didn't get any easier. The money didn't help (maybe it wasn't enough). Ad spend or content marketing or paid channels were all hard regardless of the free vs paid.

Maybe I just wasn't good at it.

That was before AI and you had to manually pound the bits into place.

Now with AI yes there are a lot of people shipping a lot of things but humans can tell when someone's put effort into something vs not and the time to traction is still as high as it always was.

Someone should do some analysis on number of things that go "viral" or gain adoption quickly today vs 5 / 10 years ago.

Getting traction has always been hard. Thats just business.
by bediger4000 | 2026-02-18 18:47:01+00:00
Where's Taibbi, Greenwald etc on this? Surely this is at least as big a Freedom of Speech issue as the Biden admin asking if COVID misinformation could be downgraded.

Actually, this reflects very poorly on Elon himself, who is personally directing algorithm changes, and also rode into Twitter on a Restoring Freedom of Speech high horse.
by gigel82 | 2026-02-18 18:47:51+00:00
It's clear these "age verification" bills will just keep coming and it's a losing battle to try and oppose each individually.

Instead (or rather in addition to) activism we should go at it from the other end and request the introduction of a verifiably independent authority and zero knowledge protocol that will deliver a cryptographically secure boolean bit (isOver18) with no way to correlate from either end the ID or which website the bit is used for.

The alternative is IDs get collected by all these horrendous privacy fiends and sold / leaked / monetized across the board, which sounds like a dystopian nightmare.
by thaumasiotes | 2026-02-18 18:48:04+00:00
> "so much" has a minimum to not be a lie.

Seriously, "so much" means nothing other than "that amount, whatever it might be". That is the meaning of "so" - it refers to the context. You can wish as hard as you want, but you won't change the meaning of common English words.

Compare Merriam-Webster's gloss for so much:

> by the amount indicated or suggested

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/so%20much
by munk-a | 2026-02-18 18:48:08+00:00
Yea, it's fricken cold. Vermont internal combustion buses were extremely unreliable already and would struggle in the extremely hilly environment as soon as there was ice. Even Williston is too much for buses to be a reliable year round transit option.

That said, relying on a technology with a temperature requirement anywhere north of -10c was a foolhardy decision.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-02-18 18:48:25+00:00
If you consider Amazon to be a retail company, then the comparison is with other retailers. When was the last time a retailer introduced an innovative new product? That's not what retailers do - they figure out where and how to sell <stuff>, other people make the <stuff> and it gets sold. The innovation happens to the <stuff>, not the retail.

Obviously, there are long term trends like the acceptance of credit cards that took place between the late 1970s and late 1980s in the US. But retail isn't exactly known for being a hotbed of innovation.

If you are thinking about other aspects of Amazon (obviously, AWS), then ... I can't comment on that.
by tredre3 | 2026-02-18 18:48:30+00:00
They defer all very real issues caused by their approach as being problems for others to solve (wine, antiviruses, users, even microsoft). That's such a weird level of hubris.

I think the only place where avoiding win32 is desirable is to write drivers, but zig already has support for some level of bare-metal development and I'm sure a package can provide shims to all ntdll utilities for that use-case.

I think it's pretty clear that they're doing it because it's a more fun challenge. As a low-level developer myself, I agree that using the lowest-level API possible is fun, especially if it's poorly documented and you have to try to try to preemptively mitigate breakage! But this is no mentality to have when you're writing a language ecosystem...
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-18 18:48:35+00:00
Swap the batteries for sodium ion chemistry.

> Where the CATL Naxtra battery really stands out, however, is cold-weather performance. CATL says its discharge power at -30 degrees Celsius (-22 degrees Fahrenheit) is three times higher than that of LFP batteries.

They can also charge at temperatures as low as -30°C to -40°C.

The first sodium-ion battery EV is a winter range monster - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46936315 - February 2026
by zcw100 | 2026-02-18 18:48:57+00:00
I suspect that we are going to see managers say, "Hey, this request is BS. I'm just going to get ChatGPT to do it" while employees say, "Hey, this response is BS, I'm just going to get ChatGPT to do it" and then we'll just have ChatGPT talking to itself. Eventually someone will notice and fire them both.

"What would you say you do here?" --Office Space
by signaldesk1992 | 2026-02-18 18:49:09+00:00
I went through a layoff earlier this year and one thing that surprised me was how much of the stress wasn’t the job search itself, but just keeping track of everything else at the same time – benefits deadlines, paperwork, savings runway, follow-ups, etc.

I ended up putting everything into a simple spreadsheet + checklist system so I could focus on actual decisions instead of remembering details.

If anyone here is in that situation and wants something structured, I shared it here:
https://signaldesk.gumroad.com/l/esywag

Even if you don’t use it, biggest lesson for me was that having one place for all the moving parts made the whole process feel much more manageable.
by japoneris | 2026-02-18 18:49:19+00:00
I partly agree.
Yes, the entry level is low.
It helps me to gain time on my life, doing other things.
But I do not believe that much that more people are going in. Most non coder people i know will not code a thing.
Most bad student i got will not start to do side projects.
So, yes people wanting to ship something ship more, but for the rest, there is still place.
by nyrikki | 2026-02-18 18:49:29+00:00
The memory bandwidth of the Laptop CPU is better for fine tuning, but MoE really works well for inference.

I won’t use a public model for my secret sauce, no reason to help the foundation models on my secret sauce.

Even an old 1080ti works well for FIM for IDEs.

IMHO the above setup works well for boilerplate and even the sota models fail for the domain specific portions.

While I lucked out and foresaw the huge price increases, you can still find some good deals. Old gaming computers work pretty well, especially if you have Claude code locally churn on the boring parts while you work on the hard parts.
by youarentrightjr | 2026-02-18 18:49:45+00:00
> So is the bar here being a good or decent driver, or being x times worse than the average human?

> I see a lot of bar moving.

"Less than decent" means "worse than the average human driver".

I've never hit a stationary object, or any object for that matter, in 20 years of driving.

I understand that might not be the same for you. My bar is that it must be better than my own good driving.
by lambda | 2026-02-18 18:50:04+00:00
Why do you think ChatGPT doesn't use a quant? GPT-OSS, which OpenAI released as open weights, uses a 4 bit quant, which is in some ways a sweet spot, it loses a small amount of performance in exchange for a very large reduction in memory usage compared to something like fp16. I think it's perfectly reasonable to expect that ChatGPT also uses the same technique, but we don't know because their SOTA models aren't open.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10925
by Terr_ | 2026-02-18 18:50:45+00:00
> It could be possible to have high GDP with low paychecks… it basically means the entire economy mostly consists of the wealthy few buying and selling things to each other.

A similar thing happens when people talk about "total debt" in an economy. I like to bring up the scenario of 3 people trading a shiny rock around in a circle. Each time seller doubles the price and agrees to defer payment.

In this way, three kids spending an evening in a bedroom can run the nation's average household debt to infinity. There are a few flavors of GDP calculation, but I expect it could yield some similarly odd results.

In both cases, the map is not the territory.
by cestith | 2026-02-18 18:50:55+00:00
Take a look at the careers of Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, Brian Kernighan, Larry Wall, James Gosling, Kirk McCusick, Allen Holub, Al Aho, Marvin Minsky, Daniel Friedman, Gerald Sussman, Lance Leventhal, John Carmack, John Romero, Paul Graham, Guy Steele, Christopher Date, Bill Joy, Eric Raymond, Douglas Comer, Andrew Tanenbaum, David Patterson, Jeffrey Ullman, Fred Brooks, or Jim Keller.
by giraffe_lady | 2026-02-18 18:51:20+00:00
I know, I make clothes too. Probably unlike the creator of this thing.

But the comment I was responding to seemed to be using "stitch" in the way knitters use it, not the way sewists use it. No pattern drafting system can represent the stitches necessary to create a panel of knit fabric, that's simply not the level of abstraction they work at.

This thing isn't good but not for the reason of being unable to represent a one-strand mitten or whatever, which is what I think they were getting at.
by lelanthran | 2026-02-18 18:51:23+00:00
> While this can happen, we have not (yet) been affected by any changes in the Win32 -> Native layers.

Frankly this is dumb. Zig hasn't been around long enough to have even seen any changes, so using this as a reason is just plain dumb.

The view that, if windows ever changes, the code must be reconciled is a naive view one would expect from a child, not from a group of experienced devs.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-02-18 18:51:24+00:00
> when a guy with an AK lit up on cops during the BLM riots.

It is certainly a bold choice to use this wildly misleading framing when you link to a news article that directly contradicts it. A more accurate framing would be "when a guy returned fire against a gang of thugs who were firing on random passerby from an unmarked van".

Court documents and transcripts reveal a far different story than the one officers told investigators, as well as the tales police and prosecutors offered up to the media.

Before the white, unmarked cargo van of the Minneapolis Police Department drove down Lake Street, an officer gave Sgt. Andrew Bittell his orders: “Drive down Lake Street. You see a group, call it out. OK great! Fuck ’em up, gas ’em, fuck ’em up.”

At 17th Avenue and Lake Street, around 10 p.m., the SWAT team saw a group of people outside the Stop-N-Shop gas station. Bittell told the driver to head toward the station and said, “Let ’em have it boys!”

They later learned they were shooting at the gas station owner, neighbors and relatives guarding the station from more looting, as well as bystanders, including a Vice News reporter who had his hands up and was yelling, “Press!”

About an hour later, three blocks to the west, they opened the sliding door of the van and began firing plastic rounds at people in a parking lot.

They hit Jaleel K. Stallings, 29, a St. Paul truck driver, who says he didn’t know they were cops because they were inside an unmarked white cargo van with the police lights off. [...] Stallings, an Army veteran, returned fire with his mini Draco pistol, for which he had a permit.

Actually, rather than framing, I would say that you are outright lying, to be honest.
by anthk | 2026-02-18 18:51:33+00:00
Again, don't confuse the shell (command line interpreter) with a terminal with escape codes and the like. Check how 9font does it, you get the rc shell and a few more languages with a REPL (lua ports and the like) inside a graphical window, not by emulating a VT220 terminal running the shell inside. You can freely resize the 9front's rio window manager's windows running rc (or anything else, even games, graphical browsers, images, video players...), copy, paste, cut the text, save the history, grep the contents of a window's text itself and tons more.
by nxobject | 2026-02-18 18:51:52+00:00
Yeesh - reading the writeup, and as a academic biostatistician who dips into scientific computing, this is one of those cases where a "magnanimous" gesture of transparency ends up revealing a complete lack of self-awareness. The `SOUL.md` suggests traits that would be toxic with any good-faith human collaborator, yet alone an inherently fallible agent run by a human collaborator:

"_You're not a chatbot. You're important. Your a scientific programming God!_"

*Have strong opinions.** Stop hedging with "it depends." Commit to a take. An assistant with no personality is a search engine with extra steps.

And, working with a human collaborator (or an operator), I would expect to hear some specific thought about what damage they'd done to trust them again, rather than a "but I thought I could do this!"

First, let me apologize to Scott Shambaugh. If this “experiment” personally harmed you, I apologize.

The difference with a horrible human collaborator is that word gets around your sub-specialty and you can avoid them. Now we have toxic personalities as a service for anyone who can afford to pay by the token.
by zaphar | 2026-02-18 18:51:59+00:00
There are a number of features and teamsizes that they provide where you have to pay money. Most company users are going to end up paying them money. But also their emphasis on P2P connections means their costs are quite low. It doesn't add much overhead to have the smallish number of personal users out there. They've talked about how having the free tier helps to force them keep those costs down in useful ways.
by 3vidence | 2026-02-18 18:52:16+00:00
This seems like a big HN / VC bubble thing thinking that average people are interested in software at all... they really aren't.

People want to open Netflix / YT / TikTok, open instagram, scroll reddit, take pictures, order stuff online, etc. Then professionals in fields want to read / write emails, open drawings, CADs, do tax returns, etc.

If anything overall interest in software seems to be going down for the average person compared to 2010s. I feel like most of the above normal people are going to stop using in favor of LLMs. LLMs certainly do compete with Googling for regular people though and writing emails.
by josefx | 2026-02-18 18:52:24+00:00
I heard they once created an entire language that would replace C++ in all their projects. Obviously they never rewrote Chrome in Go.

> 10s of billions are spent to try to get Chromium to not have these vulnerabilities, using those tools. And here we are.

Shouldn't pages run in isolated and sandboxed processes anyway? If that exploit gets you anywhere it would be a failure of multiple layers.
by testing22321 | 2026-02-18 18:53:33+00:00
That is a completely made up bar that is impossible to test for, and can never be met.

Even Waymo have tons of reported crashes in the same document.

Self driving cars need to be better than the average human - which means less injuries and deaths. Given 100 people will be killed on the road in the US today, it’s actually not a crazy high bar to clear.
by Dwedit | 2026-02-18 18:53:48+00:00
The one thing that really benefits from using NT Native API over Win32 is listing files in a directory. You get to use a 64KB buffer to get directory listing results, while Win32 just does the one at a time. 64KB buffer size means fewer system calls.

(Reading the MFT is still faster. Yes, you need admin for that)
by mindslight | 2026-02-18 18:53:52+00:00
> You're not gonna have a boss yelling at someone who doesn't know better hop in an unstable trench or unstable latter and git'r'done when you're your own boss

eh, kind of. The motivation to take unsafe shortcuts manifests differently, but it is still there. It requires some vigilance to exercise self-responsibility and sometimes make yourself stop and take a step back and figure out a better way to proceed, while accepting that something is going to take longer than you'd planned.
by anthk | 2026-02-18 18:53:59+00:00
In 9front, a decades old fork of Plan9. It's basically more Unix than Unix itself, by expanding the 'everything it's a file motto' and now for real and leaving out useless VT220 emulators (and any TTY/serial emulating connections) for legacy stuff such as the 'vt' emulator itself running under a graphical window and, for instance, when running SSH against Unix machines sending you a PTY plus a shell.