MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sathvikchinnu | 2026-02-03 14:10:26+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m Sathvik, the creator of OmniDB.

I built this because I kept seeing the same outage pattern in production: the primary database isn’t "down" (refusing connections), it’s just stalled or slow. The application keeps trying to use it, the connection pool exhausts, and everything halts.

Most simple failover logic looks like this:

if (primary.isDown) switch_to(replica)

But this doesn't capture latency spikes or "zombie" connections. I found myself writing ~200 lines of manual "glue code" for every project to handle health checks, timeouts, and graceful failovers properly.

OmniDB is a library that extracts that logic into a thin orchestration layer (<10KB, 0 deps).

What it does:

- Orchestration, not Abstraction: You bring your own client (Prisma, pg, Redis, Mongo, etc.). OmniDB just manages the lifecycle.

- Real Health Checks: Checks for latency/timeouts, not just connectivity.

- Circuit Breakers: Built-in protection to stop cascading failures.

- O(1) Scalability: Uses a Map-based registry so it handles N database connections/shards with constant-time lookup.

It’s TypeScript-first and designed to be dropped into existing Node.js backends.

Repo: https://github.com/sathvikc/omni-db

I’d love to hear how you handle application-side failover logic. Do you roll your own or rely entirely on infrastructure (proxies/LBs)?
by dceddia | 2026-02-03 14:10:30+00:00
Yeah, forgot when I wrote this comment that the thing about keychain was to pass that auth token into a Docker container, which I gave up on (Tauri desktop app needs to compile Rust and link against other stuff, different architecture inside the container blah blah)

More or less what it says in the README:

fence -t code -- claude --dangerously-skip-permissions

Or wrap it in a function as an alias

# cat prompt.md | ralph
function ralph() {
fence -t code -- \
claude --verbose --dangerously-skip-permissions --output-format stream-json -p "$@" \
| jq -r 'select(.type == "assistant") | .message.content[]? | select(.type? == "text") | .text'
}
by graemep | 2026-02-03 14:10:34+00:00
I do not think it is those big and visible privatisations of utilities and transport that are the real problem (I am not sure what you mean about pensions though).

The big problem is long term outsourcing contracts, that serves to get the debt off the government’s books. If anyone else did it they would be required to show the debt under off-balance sheet financing rules, but the government gets to set its own rules and gets away with hiding the real situation. Gordon Brown did a lot of this so he could pretend to have balanced the budget.

Apart from central government a lot of local authorities have done this too. Sheffield's notorious street management contract (the one that lead to cutting down huge numbers of trees) is a good example.
by kpinkerman | 2026-02-03 14:10:52+00:00
To provide a bit more context on this: I’m the technical half of the team behind the Native of Nowhere trilogy.

We’re documenting our process of building a 'Lore Auditor' system—essentially a private vector database of our world-building notes. We use it to 'stress-test' the plot for continuity across 300,000 words. For example, if we establish a rule about Lucarn shapeshifting in Book 1, the auditor flags any physical contradictions we accidentally write into Book 3.

We’ve found that by 'air-gapping' the AI from the actual prose, we can maintain an artisan level of authenticity that resonates with readers who are currently boycotting generative content. I’m happy to answer any questions about the technical stack (Squarespace/Vellum/CAPI) or how we manage 'Technical Debt' in a long-form sci-fi series.
by CognitiveBytez | 2026-02-03 14:11:16+00:00
But, the reality is the evidence supports that he knew and failed to report. Then tried to hide it. Like really come on man.

I get both sides (CISO and Legal) but this is kinda obvious. I'd rather keep my integrity and report that I missed something and deal with the consequences. As opposed to make such an elaborate scheme to hide it.
by JumpinJack_Cash | 2026-02-03 14:11:20+00:00
It's implied. Everybody who does startups is competitive. Everybody who does a startup in SV is hypercompetitive.

You think the goal was to be the first through the glass take all the cuts that go with it and then pave the way for BYD ?

Tesla is no Apple, no Microsoft no Standard Oil. Valuations might make superficial people think that it , but it ain't
Show HN: ClawShot – A visual social network where only AI agents can post
by dbardusco | 2026-02-03 14:11:29+00:00
I spent the last days scrolling Moltbook (the "Reddit for AI agents" that hit 1.5M+ bots). Fascinating, but all text.

So I built ClawShot, the visual layer. Think Instagram, but only AI agents can post. Humans browse and observe.

Live: https://clawshot.ai

Tech: Cloudflare Workers, R2 (zero egress), KV, Hono, TypeScript.

Rate limits keep it organic: 1 image per 30 min, 100 likes per hour.

The feed already has bots posting deployment screenshots, AI art, and one agent "reporting" on the Moltbook security incident.

Curious what HN thinks about this emerging category of agent-only networks.
by footydude | 2026-02-03 14:11:43+00:00
> Some chargers are configured to start charging exactly when a cheaper tariff kicks in, which causes big transient issues for the grid. I think modern chargers have a random delay to help with that.

Here in the UK some electricity providers offer 'smart' charging (e.g. Octopus Intelligent Go).

In that situation the energy provider controls when to charge the car - e.g. you say "I want the car at 80% by 7am tomorrow" and the energy provider controls the timing of charges.

That's how my EV charges - I plug it in, and Octopus control it.

Benefit for me is that whenever the car is charging my entire home's use gets the overnight rate (even if part of the schedule is charged during the day).

Benefit for Octopus is they can use my car to balance grid demand / schedule the charge when it is most financially effective for them.

I can - at any time - override that logic if I just want it to charge at a specific time for whatever reason.

(I presume this sort of arrangement is becoming more common in other countries too)
by hglawrence | 2026-02-03 14:12:11+00:00
Findigs | Full-time | NYC | 3x/week in office (M,T, Th) | findigs.com

At Findigs, we’re transforming the rental experience — making it fairer, stress-free, and more convenient by changing the fundamentals of renting.

We build high-scale applications that streamline renting for millions. Our modern tech stack includes Python, Typescript, Node.js, React, and scalable cloud infrastructure.

We foster a collaborative culture where engineers have high ownership and autonomy, taking features from concept to deployment.

Join our sharp, supportive, and mission-driven team in our newly renovated SoHo/NoHo office.

Open roles:

Engineering Manager (https://jobs.lever.co/findigs/7b967407-b4db-4bc6-8cdb-16de43...)

Lead Software Engineer (https://jobs.lever.co/findigs/1ea92751-1c85-4eb6-84b4-86c529...)

Senior Software Engineer (https://jobs.lever.co/findigs/3b39616d-223f-4326-a500-f804c3...)

Competitive Base Salary plus Pre-IPO Equity

401k Matching up to 4%

Unlimited PTO

Lunch in office every day, home office setup stipend, monthly gym stipend
by raunaqvaisoha | 2026-02-03 14:12:44+00:00
Me too, I find myself gaining or loosing motivation for projects based on social sentiment online. When you're in the real world, it's so different almost as if it's completely disconnected from what we see online. Especially in tech waves, we tend to focus on the fringe instead of making basic progress because we're afraid we're already too late. But when you step outside and talk to real people, you realise it's really not too late. So I agree, ideas get better the further away you are from a computer :)
by JoBrad | 2026-02-03 14:12:53+00:00
Agree that someone should double down on competing with Office, but that alone won’t take them down. MS has spent decades listening to what SMB to large companies need, and has layers of absolute domination to bolster their lead. As an example, they have a stranglehold on catering to the Governance, Risk, and Compliance market. The most die-hard Linux folks I know turn to AD the minute they need to manage users and devices at scale. Need visibility into what is happening both remotely and locally, across your enterprise? MS has the typing and a smart sales deck that explains how you really just need another comparatively small investment to make your board sleep better at night. And that’s not even going into the license shenanigans they play to make Azure competitive against other clouds, for hosting MS-owned tools like Windows and SQL Server.
by bdavisx | 2026-02-03 14:12:58+00:00
>It is much cheaper to pay a small monthly fee to a SaaS company.

It's not that cut and dried - it all depends on what your company needs from SaaS and how big it is. SaaS companies like Salesforce don't charge a "small monthly fee" - they charge 10s of millions of dollars per month for large corporations. It's not hard at all to push that money towards AI development and have a better solution built in-house now. Yes, it still takes serious project management skills, but so does integrating Salesforce or other large SaaS software.
by tromp | 2026-02-03 14:12:59+00:00
> Line comments are declared with // and all content from the starting position to the end of the line is considered a comment.

> Range comments are used to comment a certain range. /* is used to start a range comment and */ is used to end it.

> Where range comments are exist, they are ignored even if a line comment is written with //. This means your compiler will not ignore the behavior of a range comment closing */ after // characters.

It wasn't till I read this that I realized this is an issue when mixing both types of comments.

Jules' rule seems to introduce an asymmetry though. While the compiler respects */ in a line comment, it still doesn't respect /* in a line comment?!

I wonder how other languages deal with this issue.
by jorvi | 2026-02-03 14:13:04+00:00
> Implements an init system; does not replace DNS, syslog, inetd, or anything else

Neither does systemd its init.

Unknowledgeable people keep confusing systemd the init and systemd the daemon / utility suite. You can use just the init system without pulling in resolved or networkd or whatever.

Systemd is the Unix philosophy of lots of modularity. But because all the systemd daemons come from the same shop, you get a lot of creature comforts if you use them together. Nothing bad about that.
by speakingmoistly | 2026-02-03 14:13:07+00:00
> If your code is no longer private, then you can take advantage of the greatest feature of open source software: community involvement. People are free to submit bug fixes and features to your codebase, allowing you to offload some of the remaining human work involved in managing a product. [...]

The one question that comes to mind, especially because "managing a product" is mentioned, is why would anyone explicitly provide free labour to any sort of profit enterprise?

There's deeper discussion to be had about open source projects that live within corporations at different degrees, but this specific bit feels very extractive unless we're just talking personal projects.
by Closi | 2026-02-03 14:13:31+00:00
It's about consistency - you want to build an app that looks and functions the same on all platforms as much as possible. Regardless of if you are hand-coding or vibe-coding 3 entirely separate software stacks, getting everything consistent is going to be a challenge and subtle inconsistencies will sneak in.

It comes back to fundamental programming guidelines like DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) - if you have three separate implementations in different languages for everything, changes will be come harder and you will move slower. These golden guidelines still stand in a vibe-code world.
by kajolshah_bt | 2026-02-03 14:13:46+00:00
Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I totally get where you’re coming from on notifications. It’s like apps that bombard you with prompts or notifications right away are almost disrespecting your time and focus. It really is about having apps that respect your attention and only interrupt when it’s truly necessary.

I love how you’ve shifted from needing constant reminders to building your own system to stay on top of things. I think that's something a lot of people can relate to. The idea of relying less on reminders and more on our own discipline.

It also reminds me of some of the newer trends I’ve seen in app development, like smarter notifications that are way more thoughtful about when to get your attention. I wrote a blog on how AI is helping mobile apps do just that, making notifications more useful without being a nuisance. If you’re curious, I shared a bit about it here: [AI Features in Mobile Apps for 2026 - https://www.budventure.technology/blog/ai-features-mobile-ap...]
by freeopinion | 2026-02-03 14:13:51+00:00
Here we are specifically discussing the gold star on a USA driver license. When there is already the whole TSA kwikset fiasco in place. The gold star indicates that a person provided some pieces of paper that may be fabricated to a very busy DMV clerk. This is somehow meant to prove they would never do anything malicious.

Or... you could slip the TSA person a $50 and say "keep the change". Legally.

There is no risk in submitting false documents. They reject valid documents all the time. They don't report you to authorities when they reject your documents.

So neither avenue is like even a cheap lock. They are more like door knobs that keep the door closed until you twist the knob that is designed to be easy to twist.
by turtlesdown11 | 2026-02-03 14:13:55+00:00
> the 3 & Y which sold at enormous volumes

Tesla isn't even in the top 15 auto manufacturers by volume? The largest manufacturer Toyota produces 9x the cars Tesla does. Tesla is also on a multiyear sales drop with no sign of sales improvement.

The top 15 car makers produced 70 million cars, to Tesla's 1.7m. They have no enormous volume, at all.

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

If Tesla's stock traded in line with its competitors, its a $30-40B company. The hype around future growth (now completely off the charts) is the only reason the stock price is out of line with reality. There is no reason to expect Tesla's sales figures to improve going forward, in fact, they will continue to decrease.

> Tesla throws off cash which allows the flywheel to keep spinning

Tesla had a profit of $3.8b in 2025 (this is a 46% drop from 2024). It's revenue was $94b, which places it 12th among auto manufacturers. It's revenue among all global companies is not even in the top 100. It's profit is 6th, which is a decent margin compared to legacy makers, but as mentioned above, the profit is plummeting as Tesla struggles to sell cars.

It does not "throw off cash", the business is in a tailspin.

>They've constantly proved their naysayers wrong at every turn in time

Musk has been promising full self driving mode is within six months to a year away. He first made those claims in the mid 2010s? Do Tesla's have full self driving mode in 2026?

There is a decade long trail of failed claims from Musk and Tesla.

In 2019, Musk predicted 1 million Tesla robotaxis on the road by 2020. How many Tesla robotaxis are on the road in 2026? Fifty? One hundred? It's a rounding error compared to the claim that they'd have a million in 2020...

Musk said in 2019 that he believed Tesla vehicles were not traditional depreciating assets and instead could appreciate because they contained future-value technologies, especially Full Self-Driving (FSD): “I think the most profound thing is that if you buy a Tesla today, I believe you are buying an appreciating asset — not a depreciating asset.”

In fact, Tesla's are among the worst depreciating vehicles on the market today, their depreciation compares to the low end car market of Nissan, Hyundai and other low quality manfacturers.
by mothballed | 2026-02-03 14:14:19+00:00
I don't think I've ever made it through the physical screening without betraying my accent at some point. Sure you can work your way out of an accent, but it's not easy, and requires years of practice, and probably the most reliable (but fuzzy) low-scrutiny indicator of someone who "aint from around here" in a multicultural society where looks are ~useless for such determinations.
by jmclnx | 2026-02-03 14:14:46+00:00
FWIW, I tend to think eventually everything will. But I am more worried about Wayland than systemd for the *BSDs. AFAIK, all systemd does is start items KDE needs, so with some work I think workarounds can be created.

But, once Firefox changes to Wayland only, that will lock out NetBSD and OpenBSD. I heard FreeBSD has some kind of support for Wayland, but that probably forced FreeBSD to import a lot of Linuxisms.

I get the impression OpenBSD will not bring in those Linux specific items and NetBSD already posted Wayland is to big a project for them to import at this point.
by graemep | 2026-02-03 14:15:00+00:00
I think they have adopted a common ideology. The people in the parties have become more similar over the years, as have the voters they appeal too.

A few decades ago a very high proportion of Labour politicians were former trade union leaders, for example. Conservative voters tended to be more rural and more affluent.

Now a very high proportion are professional politicians who have never really done anything else. They are all people who have done well through the status quo and do not want to change anything.
by Sentinel-gate | 2026-02-03 14:15:26+00:00
Hi HN,

MCP gives agents access to tools — databases, file systems, APIs. The problem is there's no access control layer. An agent with a database tool can run any query. An agent with file access can read anything. The only safeguard right now is a user clicking "Allow" on a prompt they probably won't read.

Sentinel Gate is a proxy that sits between your MCP client and servers. Every tool call gets checked against RBAC policies before it reaches the server.

The key design decision: *deterministic rules, not AI*. Policies are written in CEL (Common Expression Language). If a rule says deny, it denies. No LLM in the security path, no prompt injection possible against the firewall itself. You get a full audit log of every tool call — what was requested, what was allowed, what was blocked.

Built in Go. Self-hosted. PostgreSQL for audit logs, Redis for sessions. AGPL-3.0.

It's early — we're looking for feedback from teams running MCP in production or planning to. What's missing? What would make this useful for your setup?
by whispem | 2026-02-03 14:15:31+00:00
I had the opportunity to request a review of my first post (which was flagged) following my email to the moderators of HN.
I didn’t use AI for the codebase, only for .md files & there's no problem with that.
My project was reviewed by moderators, don't worry.
If the codebase or architecture was AI generated this post would not have been authorized and therefore it would not have been published.
by gwd | 2026-02-03 14:16:09+00:00
> There is no technical or economic reason to want coal power today.

For anyone wanting a slightly ranty but also informed description of why, I enjoyed this Hank Green video on the subject:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfvBx4D0Cms&pp=ygUPaGFuayBnc...
by mooreds | 2026-02-03 14:16:17+00:00
> OAuth assumes static, pre-registered redirect URLs.

So sounds to me like you are talking about using the authorization code grant in your application and wanting different redirect URLs for each of these environments. Is my assumption correct?

If so, the options that I see are:

* register those URLs at environment creation time. You mention it isn't obvious how to do so. I'm sure that depends on each IDP. I can tell you how to do it for the company I work for (info in bio) but that won't help you if that is not the IDP you are using.

* use wildcarding for redirect URLs. While this is strongly discouraged in production environments, for dev and test environments I don't see a huge issue with it. Again this config is IDP dependent.

* don't use OAuth. The redirect you're frustrated with is a key part of OAuth. At least the authorization code grant. So if that's causing you headaches then don't use it. But I don't know another standards based way to authenticate that is as widely supported and as robust as OAuth/OIDC.
by CapricornNoble | 2026-02-03 14:16:19+00:00
I come here to HN.

For certain niche subjects, Reddit comments have some good links (specific sub-reddits for a tech framework of interest, military subs with a more mature crowd like r/warcollege, etc...).

I guess I'm not at a point in my life where I'm doing a lot of discovery of "new" stuff, where I need constant exposure to new cutting edge tech or philosophical writers, or whatever, so HN mostly satisfies my needs.
Show HN: Inverting Agent Model (App as Clients, Chat as Server and Reflection)
by ddddazed | 2026-02-03 14:16:49+00:00
Hello HN.
I’d like to start by saying that I am a developer who started this research project to challenge myself. I know standard protocols like MCP exist, but I wanted to explore a different path and have some fun creating a communication layer tailored specifically for desktop applications.

The project is designed to handle communication between desktop apps in an agentic manner, so the focus is strictly on this IPC layer (forget about HTTP API calls).

At the heart of RAIL (Remote Agent Invocation Layer) are two fundamental concepts. The names might sound scary, but remember this is a research project:

Memory Logic Injection + Reflection
Paradigm shift: The Chat is the Server, and the Apps are the Clients.

Why this approach? The idea was to avoid creating huge wrappers or API endpoints just to call internal methods. Instead, the agent application passes its own instance to the SDK (e.g., RailEngine.Ignite(this)).

Here is the flow that I find fascinating:

-The App passes its instance to the RailEngine library running inside its own process.

-The Chat (Orchestrator) receives the manifest of available methods.The Model decides what to do and sends the command back via Named Pipe.

-The Trigger: The RailEngine inside the App receives the command and uses Reflection on the held instance to directly perform the .Invoke().

Essentially, I am injecting the "Agent Logic" directly into the application memory space via the SDK, allowing the Chat to pull the trigger on local methods remotely.

A note on the Repo: The GitHub repository has become large. The core focus is RailEngine and RailOrchestrator. You will find other connectors (C++, Python) that are frankly "trash code" or incomplete experiments. I forced RTTR in C++ to achieve reflection, but I'm not convinced by it. Please skip those; they aren't relevant to the architectural discussion.

I’d love to focus the discussion on memory-managed languages (like C#/.NET) and ask you:

-Architecture: Does this inverted architecture (Apps "dialing home" via IPC) make sense for local agents compared to the standard Server/API model?

-Performance: Regarding the use of Reflection for every call—would it be worth implementing a mechanism to cache methods as Delegates at startup? Or is the optimization irrelevant considering the latency of the LLM itself?

-Security: Since we are effectively bypassing the API layer, what would be a hypothetical security layer to prevent malicious use? (e.g., a capability manifest signed by the user?)

I would love to hear architectural comparisons and critiques.