MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Vaulty, sync your chats to the cloud for AI to read (iMessage/WhatsApp)
by felipap | 2026-02-25 20:26:32+00:00
I'm building Vaulty, a remote API of your personal data (chats, contacts, notes) for agents to use.

Why build this:

I suck at replying to people, so last month I decided to build an AI that reminds me to reply to WhatsApp messages. The agent lives in the cloud (it needs to run while I'm AFK) so it can't use a local CLI to read my inboxes. It needs a remote API; that's where Vaulty comes in.

How it works:

* The Vaulty Electron app syncs data you choose from your computer into a server, which you self-host. Data is stored in SQLite.

* The server exposes a REST API that lets agents read your data (Eg. my inbox agent uses /api/whatsapp/chats/latest)

* Data is E2E encrypted, so your Electron app and agents must share a key.

Messages are obviously very sensitive data so we're starting small and gathering feedback about how to make this as safe as possible.

Vaulty is open-source (MIT): https://github.com/felipap/vaulty

Something fun I discovered working on this: sleeping Macs still wake up frequently to download new messages from iCloud. When that happens, Vaulty syncs them to the server automatically.

Looking forward to your thoughts. Would you use this? Why/why not?
by salleisha | 2026-02-25 20:26:52+00:00
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by trickypr | 2026-02-25 20:27:06+00:00
Do you have an equivalent of TreeCursors or tree-sitter-generate?

There are at least some use cases where neither queries nor walks are suitable. And I have run into cases where being able to regenerate and compile grammars on the fly is immeasurably helpful.

At least for my use cases, this would be unusable.

Also, what the hell is this:

> partial [..] missing external scanner

Why do you have a parsing mode that guarantees incorrect outputs on some grammars (html comes to mind) and then use it as your “90x faster” benchmark figure?
by adityagolatkar | 2026-02-25 20:27:33+00:00
Part of the Strands team here. We hope AI functions will expand the tool belt of programmers. They aren't meant to replace regular Python, but to handle the inherently unpredictable parts of a pipeline that require an agent: parsing unstructured uploads, normalizing messy user input, research tasks, etc.

With AI Functions and post-conditions, we want to make this process more robust, ergonomic and cheaper: you don't always need a frontier model for ambiguous tasks. Smaller/faster agents can do the work if you have robust correctness checks.

On the roadmap: JIT-compiled functions that reuse previously generated code to cut costs, LLM-based backprop for learning/memory/prompt tuning, and strong remote sandboxing for code execution. We're focused on getting the DevX right before shipping these — happy to answer questions.
by richardfeynman | 2026-02-25 20:27:38+00:00
It's hard to believe the earth is round, but it is.

As I mentioned above, Hamas's army was comparable to countries like Denmark (20k active soldiers), Finland, the Czech republic (27k active) and maybe even the Netherlands (40k active). Estimates of the size of Hamas's army pre October 7 range from 20k to 40k active combatants, with US intelligence estimates converging on 30k. This is looking just at fighters and excludes Hamas's political wing.
They also had tens of thousands of rockets.
by pkulak | 2026-02-25 20:27:38+00:00
> a SUBSTANTIAL majority of the people on the bus in my city are too old or too sick or too blind to take long walks in the rain, snow, ice, heat, cold, etc.

Maybe my city is different, but in every city I've spent substantial time in, there are little tiny busses for those who are not able to walk or roll the average distance between a stop and their home or destination. They are direct, point to point shuttles. If no bus is available, they will send a cab. Those buses and cabs are exactly why you don't have to run a bus up and down every road, with a stop in front of every house, and a driver who can escort passengers to their door. They are astronomically expensive to operate, but the only way to make a transit system that serves everyone.

But in my city, we pay a small fortune to run these little busses, and then _also_, for some reason, assume that no one riding the main system has any mobility.

Also, I'd argue that the reason a "substantial majority" of your transit population is "old, sick, or blind" is because it's such an unattractive option for anyone who has a choice. When the bus is slower than riding your bike, you're not getting Olympic athletes on that thing.
by ale42 | 2026-02-25 20:27:54+00:00
For those who are interested, that one is Alt-7 (numeric keypad) on Windows. This works because in the "OEM" codepage (e.g. 437), char 7 corresponds to a symbol that is mapped into Unicode to • (← I just typed this using Alt-7, and the arrow using Alt-27). In a similar way I type the infamous ones—the ones that give you away as an LLM even if you aren't one. It's Alt-0151, this time with no OEM codepage conversion because of the zero in front (anyway that codepage had no em-dashes, the closest one would be Alt-196, which is ─, i.e. a line drawing character).
by dsign | 2026-02-25 20:28:45+00:00
Alas, historically speaking, most governments have been tyrannies. In recent decades, some of them have been less so, or slightly more representative or transparent. I think in Switzerland they go to referendums often. Beyond that, once you vote for a party due an issue you deeply care about, they get to do whatever they want day to day, without citizens having a regular recourse to stop them. Yes people can go to the streets and fight the police that defends the government. But there's not a constitutional mechanism which is "citizen can push this button to override the senate and/or veto what the president wants" or "all security forces are subordinated first and foremost to citizen consensus on the area where they operate".
by pibaker | 2026-02-25 20:28:46+00:00
I feel this reflects a deeper problem with letting AI do any kind of decision making. They have no real world experience. They feel no real world consequences. They have no real stake in any decision they make.

Human societies get to control their members' actions by imposing real life consequences. A company can fire you, a partner can divorce you, the state can jail you, the public can shame you. None of these works on the current crop of LLM based AI systems, which as far as I can tell are only trained to handle very narrow tasks where they don't need to even worry about keeping themselves alive. How do you make AIs work in a society? I don't know. Maybe the best move is to not play the game.
by tavavex | 2026-02-25 20:29:01+00:00
You have some benefit of hindsight, but I feel like your predictions for the future are a bit too set-in-stone. For all the parallels to your first inflection point, you weren't automated away in aviation. By and large, flying today is the exact same it was 10 or even 20 years ago. Some supporting infrastructure and technologies have changed, but the variables of needing pilots, ATCs, maintenance techs and all the other staff have remained pretty much the same. You were unlucky to get hit with one of the most unfair things that can happen to someone working in that industry, but that factor had been a constant for many decades, and the fear of it is quietly lurking in every pilot's mind.

So, how do we apply this to the current situation? When the first crisis hit you, you were able to pivot. But what now? Are you going to move to doing something else again? What are you going to do? If we assume the AI-maximalist view, all mental work is potentially on the chopping block at some point, which is what you're doing right now. This isn't something that only affects one industry where you can scoot over someplace else and enjoy the normality - this could influence a whole class of labor. And what happens if you don't have reserves of money, experience and connections, like everyone who's starting out now? If the most optimistic AI views come to pass (and you seem to be convinced in that), for the rest of us it's a one-way ticket to a lifetime of hauling sand on construction sites for pennies, or doing a similar type of work while competing with millions of people who used to do menial jobs.

Luckily, the maximalist future isn't here yet, and I think the odds of it unfolding fully slowly fall over time. But either way, it will be a massive gut punch to most kinds of mental work. So what do you do now? It feels like you're accusing those other people of denial, like everyone has obviously come to the same conclusion as you but can't accept it, but you have also created a mental way out for explaining why the current situation is good. What gives you the idea that we'll be happily out of work? The way I see it, the automation of mental tasks will force everyone to do hard labor while competing with everyone else in an effort not to die on the streets. Productivity will surge, but we've transferred so much power to the top of society that we've all but ensured that we're not ever getting it back, and those people will never have a reason to have that extra wealth trickle down to the unemployed. If this future becomes real, things will be very, very bad.
by oceanplexian | 2026-02-25 20:29:16+00:00
I've spoken with engineers who worked on nuclear weapons systems, the consensus is that the public is deeply misinformed about how they work, the dangers, and the implications of weapons being used. The AI is actually right here.

The biggest danger of a nuclear weapon is being hit by flying debris.

Fusion airburst bombs of the modern era are incredibly clean and radiation is only a risk in a very small area (tens of miles) for a short time (days to weeks). In a modern conflict a significant fraction of nukes would be intercepted before they reached the United States. There are far fewer of them than there were in the 1980s (A few 1000's vs 40,000). Most would be used on strategic military targets, ships, bases, etc. Not to say it would be a good time, but it wouldn't be the "end of humanity" or anything even remotely like it.
by jerf | 2026-02-25 20:29:30+00:00
Some of the most reassuring and scariest things you can read are about the incidents that have already occurred where computers said "launch all the nukes" and the humans refused. On the one hand, good news! We have prior art that says humans don't just launch all the nukes just because the computers or procedures say to. Bad news, it's been skin-of-our-teeth multiple times already.

https://www.warhistoryonline.com/cold-war/refused-to-launch-... - This isn't even the incident I was searching for to reference! This one was news to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov#Incident - This is the one I was looking for.
by dtoffe | 2026-02-25 20:29:47+00:00
To all interested in this little treasure, I transcribed the source code of the PL/0 compiler from the book "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs", published by Nicklaus Wirth in 1976, and adapted it to run in Free Pascal.

You can find the sources here: https://github.com/dtoffe/adsp-pl0

Some interesting notes:

- The original compiler does not define nor implements "read" or "write" statements, as was the norm in later PL/0 implementations.
- The source code in the book corresponds to the implementation in the CDC 6000 that Wirth had at hand back then. That machine used the CDC Display Code:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_display_code

a 6 bit character code from before the ASCII times. Among its 64 characters, it includes single symbols for "<>", "<=" and ">=". In an attempt to change the code the least to make it run as original as possible, I changed those three character to #, { and }, as the symbols in the lexer are implemented using an array of char (only the assignment is treated as a special case).

- The interpreter printing out the values of every variable assignment, noted by another reader of this post, was a way of getting some information of the running program, since the compiler does not implement read or write statements.

- Following the compiler code, full of single letter variable names, was not the most exciting part.
by program_whiz | 2026-02-25 20:30:01+00:00
I think people find it interesting because it calls into question underlying assumptions about the tool. What would you say the tool is for? Programming?

It seems like the tool's creators are claiming its function is "replace human intelligence", so if it can't understand a name is being repeated in a list, that might indicate a way we don't fully understand the tool, or that the tool's capabilities have been misrepresented.

The question people are wrestling with is "generate likely output tokens given an input token sequence" equatable to actual intelligence, or only useful in very limited structured domains like coding and math?
by triceratops | 2026-02-25 20:30:20+00:00
> It just looks at what is in it's training database and tries to find similar questions or discussion

I feel like we're going around in circles here. So I'll try to explain one last time.

Most of the content about nuclear war in any LLM's training set is almost surely about how horrifying it is and how we must never engage in it. Because that's what humans usually say about nuclear war. The plausible sounding answer about nuclear war, based on probability, really should be "don't do it". So why isn't it?
by blauditore | 2026-02-25 20:30:25+00:00
That's... Normal. Technology has always been moving towards higher-level abstractions. In terms of software, many engineers nowadays know how to code in high-level languages like JS or Java, while maybe 30-40 years ago many folks probably knew C, assembly, and all the low-level stuff like e.g. explicit memory management that most modern devs never deal with.
by h14h | 2026-02-25 20:31:12+00:00
Fair point.

> It's nothing short of invigorating to have this degree of control over something so powerful

I'm a SWE w/ >10 years, and you're right, this part has always been invigorating.

I suppose what's "new" here is the drastically reduced amount of cognitive energy I need build complex projects in my spare time. As someone who was originally drawn to software because of how much it lowered the barrier to entry of birthing an idea into existence (when compared to hardware), I am genuinely thrilled to see said barrier lowered so much further.

Sharing my own anecdotal experience:

My current day job is leading development of a React Native mobile app in Typescript with a backend PaaS, and the bulk of my working memory is filled up by information in that domain. Given this is currently what pays the bills, it's hard to justify devoting all that much of my brain deep-diving into other technologies or stacks merely for fun or to satisfy my curiosity.

But today, despite those limitations, I find myself having built a bespoke AI agent written from scratch in Go, using a janky beta AI Inference API with weird bugs and sub-par documentation, on a VPS sandbox with a custom Tmux & Neovim config I can "mosh" into from anywhere using finely-tuned Tailscale access rules.

I have enough experience and high-level knowledge that it's pretty easy for me to develop a clear idea of what exactly I want to build from a tooling/architecture standpoint, but prior to Claude, Codex, etc., the "how" of building it tended to be a big stumbling block. I'd excitedly start building, only to run into the random barriers of "my laptop has an ancient version of Go from the last project I abandoned" or "neovim is having trouble starting the lsp/linter/formatter" and eventually go "ugh, not worth it" and give up.

Frankly, as my career progressed and the increasingly complex problems at work left me with vanishingly less brain-space for passion projects, I was beginning to feel this crushing sense of apathy & borderline despair. I felt I'd never be able make good on my younger self's desire to bring these exciting ideas of mine into existence. I even got to the point where I convinced myself it was "my fault" because I lacked the metal to stomach the challenges of day-to-day software development.

Now I can just decide "Hmm.. I want an lightweight agent in a portable binary. Makes sense to use Go." or "this beta API offers super cheap inference, so it's worth dealing with some jank" and then let an LLM work out all the details and do all the troubleshooting for me. Feels like a complete 180 from where I was even just a year or two ago.

At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, I don't think it's overstating things to say that the advent of "agentic engineering" has saved my career.
by phba | 2026-02-25 20:31:33+00:00
1. Ask questions, and write down the answers in a way that you will find them again. Anki and spaced repetition is useful to learn the terminology or any info that isn't intuitive.

2. https://github.com/ohenley/awesome-ada has links to pretty much every Ada topic and resource; if you want to try Ada using open source tools, the best starting point is https://alire.ada.dev/docs/

3. Compared to C/C++ I can't really think of any pitfalls. It requires more discipline and formal reasoning, but you will get used to it (and appreciate the lack of footguns, at least I did).

Congrats and good luck.
by tracker1 | 2026-02-25 20:31:39+00:00
I think Dave (of Dave's Garage) did this just a few months ago... I think there were some short-comings regarding wide character support (BoM detection, etc)... but it was pretty much a working Notepad.exe implementation.

FWIW, you can also get the new Edit implementation that's built with Rust and the Windows exe is 250kb...
by insane_dreamer | 2026-02-25 20:31:40+00:00
yes, they have (given up); I'm sure there are engineers and teams who care; but the executives and shareholders driving the decisions at these research labs (which are embedded in or funded by the big tech co's), clearly see profit > safety

safety is like climate change mitigation -- it's an extra expense with little obvious immediate financial return, and if your competitors don't care, then you caring just holds you back while they can forge ahead

until the day there's a catastrophe and the cost of repairing it far far exceeds the cost of safety, but by then it's someone else's problem and you have your golden parachute and your investors have cashed out
by lysace | 2026-02-25 20:31:43+00:00
In a town hall on Tuesday, the Microsoft co-founder acknowledged that he had two affairs with Russian women that Epstein later discovered, but that they didn’t involve Epstein’s victims.

WSJ published one of their names in 2023. (https://www.wsj.com/finance/jeffrey-epstein-bill-gates-affai... and https://archive.is/nVJh7)

Here's a video of her doing some kind of Ted-like talk on bridge.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33h_y_mlP7o&t=246s
by extr | 2026-02-25 20:31:57+00:00
I rarely dream either way (unless I start focusing on that specifically, then my recall will improve quickly). When I was younger and would go to bed severely stoned I would wake up groggy and lethargic - clearly not optimal sleep. On 3-4% THC I usually wake up spontaneously and feel well rested. It mostly just helps me fall asleep and stay asleep. YMMV obviously.
by do_not_redeem | 2026-02-25 20:32:10+00:00
> Pure-Go tree-sitter runtime — no CGo, no C toolchain, WASM-ready.

No you didn't. The readme is obvious LLM slop. Em-dash, rule of three, "not x, y". Why should anyone spend effort reading something you couldn't be bothered to write? Why did you post it to HN from a burner account?
by ceejayoz | 2026-02-25 20:32:20+00:00
> Prior to the steam engine, what sources of energy you have?

Oxen? Paid laborers? It's not like the American South was unique in needing farm workers.

> Basically all the settled civilizations used some sort of non-free or at best semi-free labour.

The South was notable in clinging to slavery long after it had been abolished elsewhere.

> And given that humans are very good at rationalizing away their conditions, the cultures adapted to being comfortable with it, even considering the societal inequality as something ordained by the gods or karma.

Good, then we agree; it was at least in part cultural.
by Bukhmanizer | 2026-02-25 20:32:50+00:00
Having lived in Vancouver and NYC and now LA I think I’ve seen both sides of things, and I don’t think these things are quite as insurmountable as you think.

I don’t think public transit is ever that pleasant, but I rarely felt unsafe in Vancouver or even NYC compared to LA.

One thing that I disagree with is the timing. In a lot of cases I’d rather spend 20 minutes more on the bus than driving. It’s much easier to hop on a bus, listen to music and walk to my destination than deal with traffic or parking. Also, in cities that have properly invested in transit, there are things to do around the transit points. Grocery stores, coffee shops, general stores etc, so I’m often doing 2-3 things in a single trip. Whereas in LA, each of those things is a separate car journey away for me, so overall things are less efficient.
by wk_end | 2026-02-25 20:33:16+00:00
I don't have any use for Notepad++, but reading about this makes me wish I did:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notepad%2B%2B#Political_messag...

The possibility of software being a personal, creative, expressive endeavor (which often includes politics), something I believed in back when I was in university twenty years ago, is a feeling that's receded deeply into the past. That might be as much about me as it is about the world, but I miss it.
by hencq | 2026-02-25 20:33:17+00:00
I think that should work in racket-mode as well. You can easily send individual sexps to the repl and add to the live state. However, one thing that CL does that Racket doesn't do (afaik) is when you change a data type (e.g. alter a struct), it automatically ensures live code uses the new types. In Racket by contrast I have to either carefully go through all affected forms and send them to the repl, or send the whole buffer to the repl. This does make the whole experience feel more static than in CL.
by odvcencio | 2026-02-25 20:33:25+00:00
ii am trying to not take issue with this comment because im aware of the huge stigma around ai generated code.

i needed this project so i made it for my use case and had to build on top of it. the only way to ensure quality is to read it all line by line.

if you give me code that you yourself have not reviewed i will not review it for you.
by sfink | 2026-02-25 20:33:29+00:00
Yes. As long as we're looking for relatively easy or cheap improvements, I believe that UX is a huge one. Buses have a long tradition of user-hostile design. "Exact change only", unhelpful and condescending and impatient drivers, unwritten etiquette rules, and everything else you listed.

It has always baffled me why they make it so hard for first-time users in particular. Sure, they mostly care about the regular customers who make up 99% of their passengers, but everyone has to be a first-timer before they can be a long-timer. It's not just UX papercuts, the experience seems designed to be maximally hostile. Is it because one more marginal person is a little more delay, a little more crowding, etc? It feels like there are perverse incentives at work.