MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hexploits | 2026-02-17 17:28:22+00:00
I built this because I kept hitting the same wall with architecture diagrams. Everything lives on one flat canvas and turns into spaghetti once you're past a dozen services.

Layerd lets you create diagrams in separate layers (Infrastructure, Backend, Frontend, Data, etc.), wire between them with annotations, and view them individually or stacked in 3D.

The goal is diagrams you'd actually put in an RFC or onboarding doc, not just whiteboard sketches.

It's free, early stage, and I'm building it based on feedback. Would appreciate honest input on what's missing, what's broken, or whether the layered approach matches how you actually think about your systems.
by tyre | 2026-02-17 17:28:27+00:00
> I’ll bet the abandonment rate for side projects has skyrocketed

My experience is the opposite. It’s so much easier to have an LLM grind the last mile annoyances (e.g. installing and debugging compilation bullshit on a specific raspberry pi + unmaintained 3p library versions.)

I can focus on the parts I love, including writing them all by hand, and push the “this isn’t fun, I’d rather do something else” bits to a minion.
by jahsome | 2026-02-17 17:28:40+00:00
You are correct and I am making a conscious choice. I'm not being taken for a ride, I'm willingly offering one, even to those who would rob me blind given the chance.

Of course there are those who would exploit. But I'm not going to punish the well-deserving masses because of the unscrupulous few. It's a very small sacrifice I can make each year, which has the potential to positively impact the lives of thousands of families, and for generations to come.

Were I to refuse participation in such an opportunity to "protect" myself, I'd be no less selfish and greedy than those you warned me about.
Show HN: Burla – Scale any Python program using one simple function
by pancakeguy | 2026-02-17 17:29:13+00:00
Burla is an open-source python package with one function: `remote_parallel_map`

Given: a function, and a list of inputs; `remote_parallel_map` runs that function on every input in the list in parallel, each in a separate vm in the cloud, then returns a list of results.
It can run any Python function on 1,000 vm's in less than 1 second, works with any hardware, and any custom container. Remote tracebacks/stdout appear locally, and your python env is automatically (very quickly) cloned on remote machines.

Cloud-beginners use Burla to turn simple scripts into pipelines that handle many terabytes of data, or perform difficult computation, without help from other engineering teams.

We have users in Biotech, Geospatial, and Data-Science/ML building pipelines with 20+ `remote_parallel_map` calls in them to fan different parts of the program across many machines, then combine results. Traditionally this required help from more complex software, other engineering teams, or both.

We created Burla so that anyone, even complete beginners, can create programs that handle terabytes of data, perform significant computation, or run in the cloud in the background for days with an easy way to monitor them (dashboard is open-source too).
Show HN: AIP – An open protocol for verifying what AI agents are allowed to do
by theaniketgiri | 2026-02-17 17:29:17+00:00
Hey HN,

I've been building AIP (Agent Intent Protocol) — an open, cryptographic protocol for identity and authorization of autonomous AI agents.

The problem: Every AI agent framework (LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen) gives agents the ability to act — call APIs, send emails, move money, access databases. But there's no standard way to verify what an agent is allowed to do before it does it. No identity system, no boundary enforcement, no kill switch. We give agents god-mode access and hope the prompt engineering holds.

What AIP does: It's a verification layer that sits between "agent wants to act" and "action executes." Every agent gets an Ed25519 keypair identity (DID-based), every action becomes a signed Intent Envelope, and every envelope passes through an 8-step verification pipeline before the action runs.

# One line. Every call verified before execution.
@shield(actions=["transfer_funds"], limit=100.0)
def send_payment(to: str, amount: float):
bank.transfer(to, amount)

Key design decisions (happy to be challenged on these):

Ed25519 over JWT/API keys — Agents need cryptographic identity, not bearer tokens. A token can be leaked; a private key signs intent with non-repudiation.

Tiered verification — Not every action needs full crypto. Low-risk cached calls verify in <1ms (HMAC), normal ops ~5ms (Ed25519), high-value cross-org ~50ms (full pipeline). The protocol auto-selects.

22 structured error codes — Every failure returns AIP-E{category}{code} (e.g., AIP-E202: MONETARY_LIMIT). Audit trails should say exactly what went wrong, not 403 Forbidden.

Boundary enforcement, not permission prompts — Agents don't ask "can I do this?" — they declare intent, and the verifier mathematically checks it against their boundary cage (allowed actions, monetary limits, geo restrictions, deny lists).

Kill switch with zero propagation delay — Revoke any agent globally. The revocation mesh pushes via SSE/WebSocket to all connected deployments simultaneously.

What's shipped:

Python SDK: pip install aip-protocol (MIT, 63 tests passing)
CLI: aip init, aip create-passport, aip verify, aip watch
Shield decorator: @shield — helmet.js but for AI agents
Cloud dashboard: aip.synthexai.tech (free tier)
Protocol spec: RFC-001
What's NOT shipped yet:

TypeScript SDK (built, 31/31 conformance tests, not published)
Framework adapters (CrewAI, LangChain, AutoGen — built, not open-sourced yet)
Formal security audit
GitHub: https://github.com/theaniketgiri/aip
PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/aip-protocol/
Live dashboard: https://aip.synthexai.tech
Protocol spec: RFC-001 in repo

I'm genuinely interested in pushback on the protocol design. Is Ed25519 overkill for agent auth? Should boundary enforcement be declarative or imperative? Is DID-based identity the right addressing model, or is there something simpler?

Happy to answer any questions about the implementation.
by RHSeeger | 2026-02-17 17:29:26+00:00
> As many of them acknowledge, they have been rightly punished for a long time. But, ask yourself as you watch the video, how long is long enough?

I am of the opinion that incarceration should be "for the benefit of society"; that the person should be behind bars because because they are a threat to society. If they're done with thing because, they may do it again. And that incarceration should be working helping that person become one that would _not_ repeat that crime. Life sentences should only ever be the case for someone that will always be a threat to society.

I get that people want closure/revenge, and understand that. I'm sure I would feel the same in many cases. But ... it just doesn't help anything. And sure there's an argument for it being preventative (don't do the crime or you'll do the time), but lots of studies have shown that's has little validity.

> None of us want to be defined solely by the person we were in our youth, or by the worst thing we ever did. The men serving life without parole feel the same way.

Fair, but if it's likely that you're the type of person that _will_ do catastrophic harm to society again if you get out, then there's a fair argument that you should not be out.
by fsflover | 2026-02-17 17:29:34+00:00
> Even if you run Qubes, if your router is controlled by your attacker, what kind of a security guarantee could you really get for yourself?

I do run Qubes, and a compromised router, e.g., will not get access to any passwords that I store in an offline VM as text, even with any previously known vulnerability since 2006.
by cf100clunk | 2026-02-17 17:29:36+00:00
A cheap and dirty alternative to this excellent effort is to use an old VCR. Run your content into its input jacks, but instead of cabling the VCR directly to an analogue TV, use its RF output fed into an antenna, and use the analogue TV's tuner to receive. On most North American VCRs, that would mean selecting either output channel 3 or 4. For larger coverage areas, cut two dipole antennas to the appropriate size for the selected channel (one antenna for TX, one for RX). If you were to put a low noise VHF-LO amp inline between the VCR output and the TX antenna, you'd be able to cover a much larger area, but would probably have legal issues with governmental authorities in charge of telecommunication spectrum.
by Aachen | 2026-02-17 17:29:41+00:00
So long as browsers allow you to open the developer tools and inspect memory etc., they're more open than remote attestation of a stock android or ios device

Decompiling apps only works if you can get the app. I don't understand GP's problem with the apk format either, but you do need to break terms of service to get the files if you don't have a phone with Google services installed. Whether that's ethical or legal is up for debate
by gopalv | 2026-02-17 17:29:56+00:00
In the intro to the "Crack Up", there's a quote which I used a a mantra

The ability to hold two conflicting thoughts and yet continue to function is a test of intelligence - be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

You don't need to lie yourself that the world is not falling apart, but being truly optimistic instead of nihilistic at the face of that is a difficult test for any intelligent human being.

In the scale of the universe and history, most of what you do is not important, but it is very important that you do it (rambles on about Gita, Ecclesiastes and Plato ...).
by glouwbug | 2026-02-17 17:30:11+00:00
I wrote an internal engine combustion sim in C with what I'd assume is some pretty alright procedural audio generation and posted it to Show-HN (https://github.com/glouw/ensim4) with which I got 2 upvotes. I understand it's niche, but I thought HN loved this sorta demoscene stuff.

C'est la vie and que sera. I'm sure the artistic industry is feeling the same. Self expression is the computation of input stimuli, emotional or technical, and transforming that into an output. If an infallible AI can replace all human action, would we still theoretically exist of we're no longer observing our own unique universes?
by co_king_5 | 2026-02-17 17:30:19+00:00
I think you might be missing the point of the article.

I agree that the term "semantic ablation" is difficult to interpret

But the article describes three mechanisms by which LLMs consistently erase and distort information (Metaphoric Cleansing, Lexical Flattening, and Structural Collapse)

The article does not describe best practices; it's a critique of LLM technology and an analysis of the issues that result from using this technology to generate text to be read by other people.
by DrewADesign | 2026-02-17 17:30:29+00:00
When I took CS50— back when it was C and PHP rather than Python — one of the p-sets entailed making a simple bitmap decoder to get a string somehow or other encoded in the image data. Naturally, the first thing I did was run it through ‘strings’ on the command line. A bunch of garbage as expected… but wait! A url! Load it up… rickrolled. Phenomenal.
by eric-burel | 2026-02-17 17:30:56+00:00
I've been working on making the "lethal trifecta" concept more popular in France. We should dedicate a statue to Simon Wilinson: this security vulnerability is kinda obvious if you know a bit about AI agents but actually naming it is incredibly helpful for spreading knowledge.
Reading the sentence "// indirect prompt injection via email" makes me so happy here, people may finally get it for good.
by m132 | 2026-02-17 17:31:12+00:00
While I also share the sentiment with the author, I can't help but notice that the article is picturing things as more dramatic than they really are.

What's been happening to software development from the 2010s onwards is closer to what happened to manual craftsmanship as the industrial revolution took off, than to the effects high-level programming languages and abstractions had on the field. Many attempts have been made to turn software development teams into assembly lines; between ultra high-level frameworks and AI, we've had all those "new-new" formal methodologies and extreme offshoring, for example. Another factor that contributed to the status quo is the fact that programming has become well-paid, which inevitably attracted people who are in it for the money and made it an attractive target for "cost optimization".

Not all hope is lost, however. There are two significant differences that set programming apart from traditional crafts: performance and security. There's no universal recipe for either—LLMs and large bloated orgs suck equally at both. Smaller players still can largely outperform behemoths if they have the right idea, similar to what WhatsApp did to Microsoft's Skype or to what Anthropic is now doing to OpenAI, Google and Microsoft. And as for security, just look at Apple's and Google's bug bounties.

At its core, software development is still a meritocracy. This hasn't changed despite the trillions of dollars that have been poured into making it a quantifiable problem. Organizations that refuse to accept this have their projects fail. As for the influx of money-oriented programmers, it might have skewed the proportions, but it definitely did not drive out all of the passionate ones. Keep your head up.

Also, I must say I like the irony of this post making it to the front page of a website that's usually full of headlines of the likes of "How I used Claude to code a revolutionary JavaScript framework running 100% on Amazon Lambda" :)
by epistasis | 2026-02-17 17:31:20+00:00
Indeed, most of SVBs customers were those who had almost zero business finance experience. There were lots of startups but there were also lots of normal businesses and non-profits in the Bay Area that used SVB.

Perhaps the slow depositors should be punished for not being sufficiently sophisticated, or as quick as the Thiel-backed startups that got the bat-signal to do a bank run. But the "moral" value of letting all those organizations lose their deposits is very low. The moral value of letting SVB fail, which it did, seems high to me!
by gruez | 2026-02-17 17:31:55+00:00
Seems massively unconstitutional to retroactively impose penalties, especially if the previous behavior didn't violate any laws. Not to mention the reputational risk on the trustworthiness of US as a place to do business and the risk of abuse from future administrations. You might cheer that universities are getting their just desserts for scamming students, but your political adversaries might use it to claw back funding from universities for being too "woke" or whatever.
by alan-stark | 2026-02-17 17:32:01+00:00
Yep, it's the early days. Eventually we'll work out something like Design Patterns for Hybrid Development, where humans are responsible for software architecture, breaking requirements into maintainable SOLID components, and defining pass/fail criteria. Armed with that, LLMs will do the actual boilerplate implementation and serve as our Rubber Ducky Council for Brainstorming :)
by amarant | 2026-02-17 17:32:04+00:00
> Which is to say that the pleasure I get from programming is mostly about learning the underlying truths about computation and applying what I’ve learned. Always improving the craft. This, to me, is the practice of programming

My very hot take is that I do more of this now that I have access to Claude code than I did before. The above is the fun part of programming. You know how they say wood working is 90% sanding? Well Claude automates the sanding. You could use it to automate the fun parts too, but you probably shouldn't, for 2 reasons: Claude knows sanding, he's great at sanding. Other stuff? Not so much! He's happy to try, but he's just not great at it!

And secondly, while you could have Claude do the fun parts, where's the fun in that?
by NoGravitas | 2026-02-17 17:32:34+00:00
Yep. I lost a restocking fee when I bought a used "unlocked" Pixel. Turned out it was not SIM locked, but it was impossible to unlock the bootloader. It was pretty easy to find a bootloader-unlockable Pixel once I knew what to look out for, but the first time I had no idea this was something you had to look out for.
by PNGtoSTL | 2026-02-17 17:32:39+00:00
Multi-Format 3D Conversion: Beyond its namesake PNG to STL conversion, the platform supports a variety of industrial and design formats, including: 2D to 3D，Image files (PNG, JPG) to STL，3D to 3D: STEP to STL, 3MF to STL, and OBJ to STL.

Web-Based & Installation-Free: A pure SaaS tool that runs in any modern browser, eliminating the need for heavy CAD software like Blender or SolidWorks for simple conversion tasks.

High Performance & Accessibility: Focuses on speed and ease of use, often requiring no registration or complex parameter setup, making it ideal for quick, one-off tasks.

Optimized for 3D Printing: The generated STL files are specifically formatted to be "watertight" and compatible with common slicer software (like Cura or Bambu Studio).

Specialized Sub-Tools: The site features dedicated landing pages for specific conversion needs (e.g., /convert/3mf-to-stl), ensuring optimized processing for different file structures.
by AbstractH24 | 2026-02-17 17:32:46+00:00
>Before astroturfing on Reddit at scale was possible

It has become so difficult to tell what is karma farming and what is people not bothering to search before asking.

In a strange way, what already started happening to the "other side" of Reddit six or so years ago with the emergence of OnlyFans turning that into a place where people just want to sell you was a precursor to this.
by palata | 2026-02-17 17:32:47+00:00
Debian does not write the whole software stack running everywhere on your system. So if you want your system to be "supported", as in, "if a security flaw is discovered in a firmware, I want it patched and I want my firmware to be updated", then you need whoever writes that firmware to do it.

That's a dependency: if you want your system to be secure, you depend on the software running on your system to be patched when a security flaw is published.
by 46493168 | 2026-02-17 17:32:54+00:00
> Someone who graduates from college in their early 20s with six figures in debt could file for bankruptcy immediately and have it be off their credit history by the time they've saved up a down payment and want to get a mortgage.

So change the bankruptcy law? It’s a pretty easy fix. Create a whole new chapter if that’s what it takes. Make it dischargeable only after 7 years of nonpayment, do means testing… bankruptcy law already has these kinds of nuances built in.
by bfbcu763 | 2026-02-17 17:32:56+00:00
The prob has always been the FCC didnt recognize the internet as a Broadcast Medium. Which it is. Anyone can get their message out to a billion people if the algos deem its going to make the platform money. This means the platform support 1 to All messaging ie Broadcast. Thanks to Claude Shannon we know if everyone is given free broadcast capability like giving everyone a mic connected to the same sound system, without a coordination mechanism we get massive noise. How do ppl react to not being heard? They shout louder and louder or keep repeating their message. Amplifying the noise even more. Thats exactly whats happening on the internet today. We had the same issue with radio back in the day when anyone could stick tower on their roof and start broadcasting. This is why Spectrum gets licensed to solve the interference and noise problem. Americans are fed from birth that Free Speech is a right. But no one tells people before the internet Broadcast was not free. You either owned a newspaper, radio station, TV/sat spectrum to broadcast. There is a serious category error happening because the FCC didnt recognize the platforms are really broadcast mediums.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-17 17:33:01+00:00
They give you the loan because the asset is you. In general if you get a degree, your future earnings increase by more than the cost of the degree.

The "problem" is that if you don't pay a mortgage the bank takes the house, but the only thing for them to take if you don't pay your student loans is your future earnings, which is just the thing where you have to pay back the loan.
by charcircuit | 2026-02-17 17:33:02+00:00
>will be done for the sole purpose of achieving interoperability

It's for solely achieving interoperability. It only covers the development of the emulator. Using it to get a picture for explaining what a game is in the blog post is not DRM being broken for solely achieving interoperability.

>What ever happened to the hacker ethos behind DeCSS and the anti-"illegal numbers" movement?

In practice the idea that you can't break laws if you are doing things via a computer is fundamentally flawed.
by swyx | 2026-02-17 17:33:09+00:00
the word choice here is so obtuse as to trigger my radar for "is this some kind of parody where this itself was AI generated". it appears to be entirely serious, which is disappointing, it could have been high art.

the words TFA is looking for is mode collapse https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t9svvNPNmFf5Qa3TA/mysteries-... and the author could herself learn to write more clearly.
by netdevphoenix | 2026-02-17 17:33:09+00:00
> For me, posting a Show HN was a huge deal - usually done after years of development

This is still possible. Vibe coders are just not interested in working on a piece of software for years till it's polished. It's a self selection pattern. Like the vast amount of terrible VB6 apps when it came out. Or the state of JS until very recently.
by cranberryturkey | 2026-02-17 17:33:10+00:00
This is an interesting approach to the agent trust problem. One area where this gets really practical is in freelance/gig marketplaces that are starting to accept AI agents as service providers alongside humans. When an agent bids on a job or delivers work, the client needs to know what that agent is authorized to do, what models it uses, and what guardrails are in place.

Right now most platforms just treat agents as regular user accounts with no verification layer. Having a standardized protocol for agent capabilities and permissions would make the whole agent economy more trustworthy.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-17 17:33:18+00:00
Sorry about that, didn't mean to hurt anybody's feelings :(

It's still early and easy to underestimate the number of visitors who would absolutely love to have the main page more covered in absolute pure vibe than it is recently.

I would like to hear opinions as to why the non-human touch is preferred, that could add something that not many are putting into words.

Hopefully it's not a case of the lights being on but nobody's home :(
by cranberryturkey | 2026-02-17 17:33:21+00:00
The personalized agent space is getting crowded but most tools focus on personal productivity. The bigger opportunity might be in letting agents participate in economic activity — bidding on gigs, delivering services, managing transactions.

I've been watching platforms like ugig.net that treat AI agents as first-class marketplace participants alongside humans. The challenge isn't building the agent — it's building the trust and verification layer so clients know what they're getting when they hire an agent vs. a human.