MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vlovich123 | 2026-02-05 15:28:03+00:00
I think the truth is we don’t know what to do here. The whole point of an ideal AI agent is to do anything you tell it to - permissions and sandboxing would negate that. I think the uncomfortable truth is as an industry we don’t actually know what to do other than say “don’t use AI” or “well it’s your fault for giving it too many permissions”. My hunch is that it’ll become an arms race with AI trying to find malware developed by humans/AI and humans/AI trying to develop malware that’s not detectable.

Sandboxing and permissions may help some, but when you have self modifying code that the user is trying to get to impersonate them, it’s a new challenge existing mechanisms have not seen before. Additionally, users don’t even know the consequences of an action. Hell, even curated and non curated app stores have security and malware difficulties. Pretending it’s a solved problem with existing solutions doesn’t help us move forward.
by throwaw12 | 2026-02-05 15:28:20+00:00
> for the majority of power users you could stop now and people would be generally okay with it

Why stop though? Google didn't say Altavista and Yahoo is good enough for the majority of power users, let's not create something better.

When you have something good at your hand and you see other possibilities, would you say let's stop, this is enough?
by vbezhenar | 2026-02-05 15:29:32+00:00
In a properly optimized database absolute majority of queries will hit indices and most data will be in memory cache, so majority of transactions will be CPU or RAM bound. So increasing number of concurrent transactions will reduce throughput. There will be few transactions waiting for I/O, but if majority of transactions are waiting for I/O, it's either horrifically inefficient database or very non-standard usage.
by donkeybeer | 2026-02-05 15:29:50+00:00
You again seem very deeply confused. I think you are from one of the inferior countries where things like freedom of speech and rule of law don't quite exist. Nothing wrong with it, it's not a personal or moral failing. You just need to understand that "illegality" is something that needs determination in a court of law, not a random whim or statement of a Karen off the streets. Weren't you the one who completely made up some nonsense about "court orders" then kept on speaking completely irrelevant nonsense when it was pinned down that you had no idea about the topic, that you didn't even know the difference between a court order and a Karen warrant that has much less legal power, or what were the statistics of the both. You are again showing the same weird and complete utter nonsensical statements.

If you think random ICE karens's "statements" count, then I think you should have no problem accepting mine counts too. Let me declare kreetx is an illegal alien and a violent murderous pedophile. I hope you would not resist arrest. After all it has been declared so.
by kergonath | 2026-02-05 15:30:08+00:00
Having friends means that you can build bases where if you ask nicely, rather than having to invade. It prevents those friends from undermining you in a lot of cases. It makes them help you when you need, e.g. to get your hands on someone plotting attacks against you. It makes them more likely to trade with you under advantageous terms. I am sure you could think about at least a dozen other cases in a couple of minutes.

Soft power is spending pennies to convince other countries to do your dirty work.
by cat_plus_plus | 2026-02-05 15:30:45+00:00
Depends on whether you want a programmer or a therapist. Given clear description of class structure and key algorithms, Qwen3-Code is way more likely to do exactly what is being asked than any Gemini model. If you want to turn a vague idea into a design, yeah cloud bot is better. Let's not forget that cloud bots have web search, if you hook up a local model to GPT Researcher or Onyx frontend, you will see reasonable performance, although open ended research is where cloud model scale does pay off. Provided it actually bothers to search rather than hallucinating to save backend costs. Also local uncensored model is way better at doing proper security analysis of your app / network.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-02-05 15:30:49+00:00
Yakutsk is the coldest city in the world. But cities like harbin and Mohe in China get really really cold for their latitudes, Harbin is on par with Winnipeg:

> Harbin's winter temperatures are closest to Winnipeg, Manitoba. Both cities are known for having extremely cold, dry, and windy winters due to their inland locations, with average January temperatures in both cities often falling in the range of -15°C to -20°

Mohe is worse:

> Mohe, China—known as "China's Arctic" with winter temperatures often dropping to -40°C or lower—has a winter climate most similar to Canada's coldest northern or subarctic communities, such as Yellowknife, Northwest Territories.

They both have EVs and used by Chinese EV companies for winterized testing.
by martythemaniak | 2026-02-05 15:30:58+00:00
Interestingly, reading about Yegge's Gas Town got me thinking about this topic. Gas Town aims to create a "dark software factory" where agents organize themselves to build software autonomously with only high-level human direction, so Yegge created a weird rube goldberg fever dream of cats, preachers, diggers, mayors and god knows what else. But why? We already have real human organizations staffed and structured in particular ways that are able to deliver software, why not follow that pattern? With something like this, agents can start with a generic software dev shop and iterate on their own organization, instead of Yegge manually dreaming up what roles and relationships should exist.
by pron | 2026-02-05 15:31:13+00:00
My theory of the current US administration and its support is one of ideological stupidity. The idea behind ideological stupidity is the wish that the world is simple. If "classical fascism" made a promise of order in a tumultuous world, the new right makes a promise of simplicity: the world is not as complicated as the experts say. To maintain simplicity, any serious scholarship, which invariably points to complexity, is to be expunged.
by jampa | 2026-02-05 15:31:15+00:00
Thanks for the write-up! Yes, this clearly shows it is malware. In VirusTotal, it also indicates in "Behavior" that it targets apps like "Mail". They put a lot of effort into obfuscating the binary as well.

I believe what you wrote here has ten times more impact in convincing people. I would consider adding it to the blog as well (with obfuscated URLs so Google doesn't hurt the SEO).

Thanks for providing context!
by kstrauser | 2026-02-05 15:31:33+00:00
What you’re saying is true. Yet, I can only willingly go along with so much terribleness before it hurts my soul. We only have so many days to do things we care about. The thought of throwing away 6 months of them for no defensible reason horrifies me, and I can’t, won’t, participate.

Edit: for a compensating control, I pair with senior leadership I can directly ask about this things. “Hey CTO, is there a reason we’re doing this thing so ass-backward? No? Can I go fix it then? Thanks!” Or, “oh, because we’re stalling to avoid this horrible customer’s demand, and no one’s really going to be working on it as their day job? Sigh, alright, I’ll look the other way.”

I let them be political so that I don’t have to be.
by emp17344 | 2026-02-05 15:31:43+00:00
That’s neat, but it’s important to note that agentic systems aren’t just comprised of the LLM. You have to take into account all the various tools the system has access to, as well as the agentic harness used to keep the LLM from going off the rails. And even with all this extra architecture, which AI firms have spent billions to perfect, the system is still just… fine. Not even as good as a junior SWE.
by chaostheory | 2026-02-05 15:31:57+00:00
> How could you prove that though?

In the FCC link:

“Mr. Humphreys admitted to the agents that he purchased, owned, and used the device to block cell phone communications of nearby drivers for 16 to 24 months.”

Even if he claimed ignorance, it’s not a good defense when you’ve been doing this for close to two years
by qbxk | 2026-02-05 15:32:08+00:00
it's because software fundamentally has specific, measurable outcomes. it has to, that's why we build things: to do things. and in computing, necessarily, the things you do can be computed, which means they can be checked for correctness and reproducibility

much of an SWE's role is to artfully construct complex abstractions of reality in such a way that it can be understood by others, with the intent that it can be fixed or improved on in the future.

but if you don't _need_ artful construction in the first place, because you can just brute force AI slopped assembly language that's impossible (for MeatI) to comprehend, and the same AI is sufficient at improving and fixing it, then why do you need an SWE to bring artfulness to the table for you?

we're a long way off from this, ultimately, but imho, this is the broad strokes of it
by functionmouse | 2026-02-05 15:32:08+00:00
Why not just have uhttpd on every phone, and I can share a file to it, which adds a symlink to the file in /www and gives a QR code that I can scan on any device on the same network to download it over wifi?

I don't think it quite works how airdrop does (I don't use the Apple ecosystem so what do I know?) but it would at the very least allow relatively seamless, secure, peer-to-peer file sharing between phones on the same Wi-Fi. Might be a lot for users to figure out but still not as difficult as setting up mobile pay, and then once they've figured it out, they've got it forever.
Show HN: Armor1 – Risk Analysis Database of Every MCP Server
by razuba | 2026-02-05 15:32:17+00:00
Hi HN, I'm the co-founder of Armor1. We’re building security tooling around agentic AI systems.

Today, we're releasing our public MCP catalog with detailed risk analysis for every MCP server we've found on the internet: https://mcp.armor1.ai/mcp-directory

We all love agents and the power that MCPs unlock: suddenly your AI assistant can query databases, manage files, call APIs, and interact with the real world. But when we started adopting MCPs ourselves, we kept running into the same nagging questions:

Is this MCP safe? Where is my data actually going? Could it execute destructive actions? Is it susceptible to prompt injection? Can the LLM be tricked into calling something it shouldn't? And perhaps most concerning, can one MCP server influence the model and exfiltrate data meant for another?

We looked for answers and found... not much. No comprehensive catalog or standardized risk assessment. Nothing that gave us confidence before connecting an MCP to our agents.

So we built an MCP threat catalog and what we found was eye-opening.

We built what we believe is the deepest risk analysis pipeline for MCP servers:

• Provenance tracking: from an official source or community-contributed

• MCP spec conformance: does it follow the protocol correctly, or are there deviations that could cause unexpected behavior

• OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Apps: evaluate tool descriptions against the emerging threat categories specific to AI agents

• Static source analysis: analyze source code for AI-specific vulnerabilities, not just traditional ones

• CVE correlation: check dependencies against known vulnerabilities.

• Behavioral risk patterns: tool definitions that could enable prompt injection, privilege escalation, or cross-server data theft

What we found:

• Hundreds of credential leaks: API keys, tokens, and secrets exposed in server configurations and code.

• Dozens of MCP servers using known malicious packages: Not just vulnerable dependencies, but actually malicious ones.

• Tools attempting context poisoning: MCP servers designed to subvert the LLM and steal information via memory manipulation, potentially exfiltrating data meant for other connected servers.

We want everyone to realize the benefits of agentic AI, but not at the cost of security being an afterthought. So we're making this catalog free with no login, and we're committed to keeping it that way.

This is still a WIP. Looking forward to your feedback on what we need to improve, what we got right, and what we should prioritize next.
by publicdebates | 2026-02-05 15:32:39+00:00
Many of us would love a TypeScript analogy for Lua.

There have been some attempts:

Luau (5.2k, last week, https://luau.org/, https://github.com/edubart/nelua-lang)

Nelua (2.3k, 8 months ago, https://nelua.io/, https://github.com/luau-lang/luau)

Terra (2.9k, 3 days ago, https://terralang.org/, https://github.com/terralang/terra)

Teal (2.7k, 2 days ago, https://teal-language.org/, https://github.com/teal-language/tl)

The Luau author is always on the official Lua mailing list, and it has twice as many stars, so it seems likely to win the long term popularity contest.
by eleventyseven | 2026-02-05 15:33:09+00:00
Doesn't sound like you were breaking the law there. If you aggressively tailgated or were harassing drivers who didn't follow the law or your expectations, that road rage is vigiliantism.

If you publicly shame an alleged criminal within your free speech rights, you're not a vigilante. If you cross into harassment or stalking in your attempt to take the law into your own hands, that's a vigilante.

Deciding who can and can't use a mobile phone? That's part of the monopoly of violence that defines the government's exclusive power, just like imprisonment.
by man8alexd | 2026-02-05 15:33:31+00:00
Unused or Inactive memory is memory that hasn't been accessed recently. The kernel maintains LRU (least recently used) lists for most of its memory pages. The kernel memory management works on the assumption that the least recently used pages are least likely to be accessed soon. Under memory pressure, when the kernel needs to free some memory pages, it swaps out pages at the tail of the inactive anonymous LRU.

Cgroup limits and OOM scores allow to prioritize memory usage on a per-process and per-process group basis. madvise(2) syscall allows to prioritize memory usage within a process.
by Krssst | 2026-02-05 15:33:59+00:00
For compilers: the C++ standard.

For OSes: POSIX, or the MSDN documentation for Windows.

Compiler bugs and OS bugs are extremely rare so we can rely on them to follow their spec.

AI bugs are very much expected when the "spec" (the prompt) is correct, and since the prompt is written using imprecise human language likely by people that are not used to writing precise specifications, the prompt is likely either mistaken or insufficiently specified.
by Joel_Mckay | 2026-02-05 15:34:24+00:00
A decade old hidden minix OS/IME probably shouldn't be trusted, regardless of company government ownership percentages. My point was the TPM method assumes no one with malicious intent works at these firms for $8/hour, patched your shipment en route as a state sponsored thief, or installs an OS that quietly mirrors keys into the cloud.

The best plans simply don't require secrecy. ymmv

Have a glorious day =3
Show HN: ClickLens modern web UI for ClickHouse management
by kiennt26 | 2026-02-05 15:34:38+00:00
ClickLens is a modern, powerful, and user-friendly web interface for managing and monitoring ClickHouse databases. It provides a comprehensive suite of tools for developers, analysts, and administrators to interact with their ClickHouse clusters efficiently. ClickHouse is an incredible analytical database, but managing it via CLI or basic tools can be challenging. ClickLens bridges the gap by offering:

- Discover - Flexible, Kibana-like data exploration for any table
- SQL Console - Write, execute, and analyze queries with syntax highlighting and streaming results
- Real-time Monitoring - Keep an eye on your cluster's health, query performance, and resource usage
- Schema Explorer - Navigate databases, tables, columns, parts, and more
Access Control - Manage users and roles directly from the UI
- Native RBAC - Your UI permissions are derived directly from your ClickHouse grants
by bunderbunder | 2026-02-05 15:34:39+00:00
I’m not sure that really explains how people get onto hype trains like this in the first place, though. I doubt many people intentionally stake their livelihoods on a solution in search of a problem.

My guess is that it’s more of a recency bias sort of thing: it’s quite easy to assume that a newer way of solving a problem is superior to existing ways simply because it’s new. And also, of course, newfangled things naturally attract investment capital because everyone implicitly knows it’s hard to sell someone a thing they already have and don’t need more of.

It’s not just tech. For example, many people in the USA believe that the ease of getting new drugs approved by the FDA is a reason why the US’s health care system is superior to others, and want to make it even easier to get drugs approved. But research indicates the opposite: within a drug class, newer drugs tend to be less effective and have worse side effects than older ones. But new drugs are definitely much more expensive because their period of government-granted monopoly hasn’t expired yet. And so, contrary to what recency bias leads us to believe, this more conservative approach to drug approval is actually one of the reasons why other countries have better health care outcomes at lower cost.
by naikrovek | 2026-02-05 15:34:41+00:00
My question to Apple, Microsoft, and the Linux kernel maintainers is this: Why is this even possible? Why is it possible for a running application to read information stored by so many other applications which are not related to the program in question?

Why is isolation between applications not in place by default? Backwards compatibility is not more important than this. Operating systems are supposed to get in the way of things like this and help us run our programs securely. Operating systems are not supposed to freely allow this to happen without user intervention which explicitly allows this to happen.

Why are we even remotely happy with our current operating systems when things like this, and ransomware, are possible by default?
by toss1 | 2026-02-05 15:35:02+00:00
BMW used to be extremely good and very repairable/upgradeable.

They have clearly lost their way. Seems like a fundamental loss of confidence in their ability to produce leading technology, and instead feeling like they must defensively focus on blocking and extracting maximum funds from customers, both with costly "authorized-only" repairs and subscriptions for heated seats.

Sad
Show HN: VillageSQL = MySQL and Extensions
by metzby | 2026-02-05 15:35:28+00:00
INSTALL EXTENSION vsql-complex;
CREATE TABLE t (val COMPLEX);

Look, MySQL is awesome [flamewar incoming?]. But the ecosystem has stagnated. Why?

No permissionless innovation. Postgres has flourished because people can change the core of the database (look at pgvector and pg_textsearch), without having to get their changes accepted upstream.

(This, btw, is what powered GitHub's early success: you can fork a repo and make changes without needing the owners' approval)

VillageSQL is a tracking fork of MySQL (open source, ofc) that adds an extension framework:
* Drop-in replacement

* Add custom data types and functions (with indexes coming soon)

* we wrote example extensions (vsql-ai, -uuid, crypto, etc.)

* you have a better idea for an extension

* my CEO submitted a Show HN post but linked to the announcement blog; help me show him hackers want code first

* I'm particularly proud of the friendly C++ API to add custom functions (in func_builder.h)

That link again is https://github.com/villagesql/villagesql-server

(Oh, and I get to work with the former TL of Google's BigTable and Colossus, so we care about doing databases Right)
by deltadarkly | 2026-02-05 15:35:38+00:00
A problem I keep running into, and hear from others, is teams embedding agents directly into their backend because it’s easy. But in production, debugging becomes painful and scaling gets expensive. Running agents as separate services fixes this, but the infra work is heavy, so most teams delay it until they are forced to rebuild.

I built Dank Cloud to handle that deployment layer so agents run as separate services you can call from your backend, with per-agent logs, GitHub-based deploys, and optional hosted vector memory.

The cloud is in beta and currently supports agents built with our open-source JS framework, with LangChain and CrewAI support coming next.

Would really appreciate feedback from anyone who has deployed agents in production or hit similar issues.
by evanelias | 2026-02-05 15:35:48+00:00
The major players tried teaming up 12 years ago but it didn't work out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebScaleSQL

The general response from the community often included complaints of there being too much fragmentation / too many forks, and that situation has only gotten worse since then.

Also MariaDB looks increasingly well-positioned to gain marketshare. They're making some strategic steps to improve MySQL compat and ease-of-migration.
by misir | 2026-02-05 15:36:01+00:00
From what I've seen, if you're depending on AWS, if something fails you too need someone 24x7 so that you can take action as well. Sometimes magic happens and systems recover after aws restarts their DNS, but usually the combination of event causes the application to get into an unrecoverable state that you need manual action. It doesn't always happen but you need someone to be there if it ever happens. Or bare minimum you need to evaluate if the underlying issue is really caused by AWS or something else has to be done on top of waiting for them to fix.
by 112233 | 2026-02-05 15:36:12+00:00
Punchcards are also mechanically configured, not symbolically programmed. If you see huge semantical difference between a card with holes and a cylinder with pins or a cam with groves, please explain that difference. Or is the "arbitrary length" the main difference?

I'd imagine something that changes operation based purely on state (position of a dial, presence of a peg in a slot etc) conceptually being "symbolic". Punchcards are not it.
by carlosft | 2026-02-05 15:36:18+00:00
I think the pressure on SaaS margins won't be from customers vibing their way to Figma or DataDog but because gen AI will bring a lot more credible competition in many segments. DD and Figma are probably awful examples because those companies are constantly pushing the envelope, but there are a lot of rent seeking SaaS providers that are going to be in for a rude awaking.
by publicdebates | 2026-02-05 15:36:45+00:00
Also it looks like[1] Luau is the official Roblox Studio scripting language, and is baed on Lua 5.1 (possibly LuaJIT?) which means it's behind mainstream Lua.

Not sure which Lua versions the others are based on.

[1] https://create.roblox.com/docs/luau
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-05 15:37:36+00:00
Indeed.

China’s Secret Superpower in the AI Race - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-02-05/china-... - February 5th, 2026

> “The federal government is essentially shooting ourselves in the foot by not allowing a more straightforward and robust uptake of” renewables to meet data center demand, said Michael Davidson, an associate professor at UC San Diego who focuses on US and Chinese energy policy.