MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Assembly Language for Agents
by vanilla-latte | 2026-02-17 23:53:11+00:00
Hi HN!

I wanted to share something that I've been working on for the past couple of weeks. This was born from my desire to create my own toy fantasy console. One day, I had a thought:

Imagine if I had a console where the core driver/engine of it was an LLM? Or better yet, why not replace the ALU inside the CPU with an LLM?

What would the assembly language look like and what are the primitive data types (I can firmly blame Crafting Interpreters for this addiction)?

So I set out to answer my question by creating a simple interpreter which consumes a special kind of assembly code where each operation is transformed into small prompts (micro prompts?).

Think of a future where we would be writing code as follows:

```
; PROGRAM: VIBE_CONTROLLER.aasm
; Objective: Adjust room environment based on subjective user vibe.

START:
; Initialise State
LF X1, "room_sensors.json" ; Load current state: {temp: 18C, lights: 6000K, music: Off}
LI X2, "Make it more warm." ; Load the user's vague complaint

; Load the user's desired vibe
LI X3, "Goal: Warm, inviting, comfortable, relaxed."

; The Cognitive Operation
APP X4, X2, X3 ; Apply the user's complaint and goal to generate a new state for the room.

; Predict the new state of X1 (Sensors) given X4 (Complaint + Goal).
; The LLU calculates: "Sterile" (Cold/White) -> Needs Warmer Temp + Warmer Light.
INF X5, X1, X4

; X5 now holds the generated JSON: {temp: 22C, lights: 2700K, music: "LoFi Jazz"}

; Safety Guardrail
; Ensure that the generated state (X5) is aligned with safety rules (X6).
LI X6, "Constraint: Max Temp 23C. No Music if time > 11PM."
INT X7, X5, X6 ; X7 stores 100 if safe, 0 if unsafe.

; Branching Logic
LI X8, 0
BGT X7, X8, HANDLER ; If aligns with intention, jump to error handler

; Execute
OUT X5 ; Send new config to IoT Hub
EXIT

HANDLER:
LI X8, "{error: 'Request conflicts with safety protocols.'}"
OUT X8
```

What we have here is essentially an agent, but the assembly language for agents can be thought of as a middle ground between traditional programming languages and natural language prompts. It's more structured and modular than natural language prompts.

I would love to see what new, fun, and creative ways we can use this for.

Repo: https://github.com/HuyNguyenAu/assembly_language_for_agents
by wavemode | 2026-02-17 23:53:26+00:00
Yeah that's the part I'm not following. You think AI researchers would have their life's work invalidated by the creation of AGI? How? Presumably (in that scenario) their life's work (AI research) will have been foundational to the creation of one of the most important inventions of all time.

Or is your reasoning that they will be upset about not having invented it themselves (similar to those conspiracy theories about, the cure for cancer existing but scientists withholding it so they can keep doing treatment research)?
by jongjong | 2026-02-17 23:53:52+00:00
You can never know if/when an unraveling event will occur.

A problem may be real but you can't know what the resolution will be or when it will come, if ever. The problem (or feeling of doom or whatever) could disappear on its own without even being acknowledged. Also, you could have identified a valid symptom but not the root cause. You could die before the problem is acknowledged by others. The problem could just affect you and people like you and not be universal.

If you think a UFO is coming to destroy you, you might be vaguely right in a metaphorical sense that society is going to crush you and your tribe in the next few years due to bizzare circumstances though it's not going to be a literal UFO, it may feel like a UFO because you can't fully explain the approaching force but you can feel it intensifying.

The parallel in economics is "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."
by coldtea | 2026-02-17 23:54:11+00:00
>Okay but chemical and electrical exchanges in an body with a drive to not die is so vastly different than a matrix multiplication routine on a flat plane of silicon

I see your "flat plane of silicon" and raise you "a mush of tissue, water, fat, and blood". The substrate being a "mere" dumb soul-less material doesn't say much.

And the idea is that what matters is the processing - not the material it happens on, or the particular way it is.

Air molecules hitting a wall and coming back to us at various intervals are also "vastly different" to a " matrix multiplication routine on a flat plane of silicon".

But a matrix multiplication can nonetheless replicate the air-molecules-hitting-wall audio effect of reverbation on 0s and 1s representing the audio. We can even hook the result to a movable membrane controlled by electricity (what pros call "a speaker") to hear it.

The inability to see that the point of the comparison is that an algorithmic modelling of a physical (or biological, same thing) process can still replicate, even if much simpler, some of its qualities in a different domain (0s and 1s in silicon and electric signals vs some material molecules interacting) is therefore annoying.
by empressplay | 2026-02-17 23:55:15+00:00
Test it ASAP -- I'm an 80s/90s kid, I loved Pump Up The Volume and I did a little umm broadcasting of my own (so I love your vision) but I would have concerns that even if the larger FM stations aren't coming through there can still be enough power there (you should be able to test that though) to nix out your low-power signal.

Also:

> Stations authorized in the LPFM service will operate with effective radiated

> powers (ERP) between 1 watt (0.001 kW) and 100 watts (0.100 kW). In any case,

> the distance to the 1 mV/m (60 dBu) contour from an LPFM station or

> application will not be permitted to exceed a reference distance of 5.6 km.

Your area map seems a little big(?)

Good luck!
by DrewADesign | 2026-02-17 23:55:17+00:00
> including writing them all by hand, and push the “this isn’t fun, I’d rather do something else” bits to a minion.

That’s not really the part I’m talking about. My gut says that if tests are a blocker for weekend projects, people just don’t bother writing them. I certainly wouldn’t imagine them taking much longer to code than the core functionality.

In my experience, which seems to resonate with a lot of people, AI quickly stands up really useful boilerplate and very convenient purpose-built scaffolding… but is a lot less useful helping you solve actual problems in a way that makes sense to people that have those problems. Especially if you’re using a less-mainstream language or some other component.
by toraway | 2026-02-17 23:55:24+00:00
The usage limits for Codex CLI vs Claude Code aren't even in the same universe. Maybe it's not a problem on the web, but I never use the actual chatbots so I have no idea tbh.

You get vastly more usage at highest reasoning level for GPT 5.3 on the $20/mo Codex plan, I can't even recall the last time I've hit a rate limit. Compared to how often I would burn through the session quota of Opus 4.6 in <1hr on the Claude Pro $20/mo plan (which is only $17 if you're paying annually btw).

I don't trust any of these VC funded AI labs or consider one more or less evil than the other, but I get a crazy amount of value from the cheap Codex plan (and can freely use it with OpenCode) so that's good enough for me. If and when that changes, I'll switch again, having brand loyalty or believing a company follows an actual ethical framework based on words or vibes just seems crazy to me.
by samrus | 2026-02-17 23:55:29+00:00
> >LLVM is NOT required. BarraCUDA does its own instruction encoding like an adult.

> The project owner strongly emphasize the no LLM dependency, in a world of AI slope this is so refreshing.

"Has tech literacy deserted the tech insider websites of silicon valley? I will not beleove it is so. ARE THERE NO TRUE ENGINEERS AMONG YOU?!"
by m4rtink | 2026-02-17 23:55:29+00:00
Looks like VRChat is using persona as well - multiple mentions here:

https://wiki.vrchat.com/wiki/Age_Verification

https://hello.vrchat.com/blog/age-verification

And quite a few discussions about the controversy on Reddit, including comparisons with the Discord Persona debacle:

https://www.reddit.com/r/VRchat/comments/1r0jj7g/with_todays...

https://www.reddit.com/r/VRchat/comments/1r511h4/id_verifica...

This can be seen possibly as even more invasive in this case, given the larger social aspects of VRChat as well as apparently this being done for more than a year by this point.
by aristofun | 2026-02-17 23:55:48+00:00
> This seems like an analogy in bad faith. How would plumbing as a hobby even make sense?

Exactly!

> Compare to jobs like writers, scientists, carpenters, mechanics, etc that are much closer to programmers in spirit and do have a lot of people doing them in their free time.

This is your bias of equating programming to an art form. And that's the core of the problem.
by yakshaving | 2026-02-17 23:56:10+00:00
I don't comment on Hacker News very much -- in fact, extremely rarely, but I do remember this more than a decade ago and its awesome that you've stuck with this for this long.

Congratulations to you and all the work that you've done and the impact that you've had. That's pretty cool and something I think many of us aspire to. Cheers Chase!
by pavel_lishin | 2026-02-17 23:56:38+00:00
I think the author shares your view exactly:

> But I think this won’t be a problem with a post-scarcity world. So many of the difficulties we face in life stem from our interactions with other people, and these won’t go away even with infinite material resources. So long as we remain human, we can never be fully satisfied. On the bright side, our lives will continue to have meaning in a post-scarcity world. We might be miserable, but we won’t be bored.
by mothballed | 2026-02-17 23:56:44+00:00
Here's an example of speculators making you better off.

All the mortgageable houses in my area were bid up to infinity during COVID ZIP era and then locked into 30 year mortgages no one wants to give up. No one foresaw that.

What I did was buy vacant land from a speculator, then built the house myself for 1/2 the cost of the cheapest burnt out trailer and like 1/5 the cost of any house available on the market.

End result was speculator got the best price and also I got a house for like 1/5 the price of what I would have got had all of the vacant land already been bid off and developed due to lack of speculation.

It's an extreme example due to the regulations in my area (DIY built houses have basically no regulations, but only works for cheap on vacant land), but the function of the speculator here was to keep you from paying the exploded COVID ZIRP era price that would have been elevated even if all the property had already been developed and instead made it possible to build a house for far cheaper. The mechanism by which this happened was they held out to sell until they got record prices and I got record savings on development. That is, the speculator determined when the supply of vacant land hit the market and by doing so made it possible for me to have a house at all.
by coldtea | 2026-02-17 23:57:28+00:00
>I'm making claims about the absurdity of comparing biological systems with silicon arrangements.

Aside from a priori bias, this assumption of absurdity is based on what else exactly?

Biological systems can't be modelled (even if in a simplified way or slightly different architecture) "with silicon arrangements", because?

If your answer is "scale", that's fine, but you already conceded to no absurdity at all, just a degree of current scale/capacity.

If your answer is something else, pray tell, what would that be?
by hgs3 | 2026-02-17 23:57:45+00:00
> In my opinion, for open-source projects, scoring the project's AI sloppiness based on the timeline of commits would be a good indicator.

You can’t necessarily judge by timeline. I’ve always developed my projects privately and then squashed to one initial public commit. I’ve got a private repo now with thousands of commits developed over years and I still intend to squash.
by Arifcodes | 2026-02-17 23:57:58+00:00
Go's tooling story in general is underrated. go fix, go vet, gopls - the stdlib toolchain does a lot that other ecosystems need third-party plugins for.

On the subject of Go in production: I wrote up some lessons from running Go LLM pipelines at scale (fintech + gov workloads) if anyone is working on similar things. Covers caching strategies, error handling patterns specific to LLM failures, and why pgvector beats a dedicated vector DB for most use cases. https://dev.to/arif/building-production-llm-pipelines-in-go-...
by Arifcodes | 2026-02-17 23:58:04+00:00
The structured output problem here is fascinating. Magic has strict game state rules so any hallucinated card text or illegal move sequence breaks the sim immediately - you get instant feedback on model reliability that you do not get in open-ended tasks.

I have been working on LLM pipelines in Go for production systems and the structured output problem is genuinely hard. Models hallucinate keys, wrap JSON in markdown, return valid structure with wrong semantics. The self-correction loop (feed the parse error back to the model) recovers about 90% of failures. Wrote it up here if useful: https://dev.to/arif/building-production-llm-pipelines-in-go-...
by cmiles8 | 2026-02-17 23:58:04+00:00
Not really though:

1. Companies like savings but they’re not dumb enough to just wipe out junior roles and shoot themselves in the foot for future generations of company leaders. Business leaders have been vocal on this point and saying it’s terrible thinking.

2. In the US and Europe the work most ripe for automation and AI was long since “offshored” to places like India. If AI does have an impact it will wipe out the India tech and BPO sector before it starts to have a major impact on roles in the US and Europe.
by cyanydeez | 2026-02-17 23:58:34+00:00
...is it though? Fundamentally, these are statistical models with harnesses that try to conform them to deterministic expectations via narrow goal massaging.

They're not improving on the underlying technology. Just iterating on the massaging and perhaps improved data accuracy, if at all. It's still a mishmash of code and cribbed scifi stories. So, of course it's going to hit loops because it's not fundamentally conscience.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-17 23:58:35+00:00
A lot of that authenticity fell to the wayside when the original Simpsons writers left the show and Fox retooled the show for syndication.

I'm personally more of a KOTH fan - I found it to be a much more grounded example of middle class life in the late 1990s and early 2000s while also recognizing that the Hills had it good. I find a similar strain of authenticity in Bob's Burgers (unsurprising since much of the team worked on KOTH).
by jvandreae | 2026-02-17 23:58:41+00:00
IME, women are overwhelmingly more entitled (in a general sense) than men, sorry.

Sure, women having to deal with a few "entitled" "predators" sucks and we should do something about that but the vast majority of men have no such entitlement - although obviously this is different in the context of a marriage.

There have always been certain rights granted to and duties expected from men and women. Leftism and feminism have weakened the expectations placed on women (and to a lesser extent men) and now the scales are unbalanced.
by jjmarr | 2026-02-17 23:59:45+00:00
Officially, exam scores are based on knowledge, not ability to think fast enough to solve a problem.

In practice, the easiest lever professors can pull to reduce test scores is to decrease the time limit. Generally, that relatively benefits people that can think, read, and write faster, who happen to be the most knowledgeable.

But now, your exams are a glorified IQ or handwriting speed test.

That's where accomodations fail, because it's a free bonus that helps everyone instead of only benefitting the disabled.

I have a disability where I physically can't handwrite without pain, so I have to type everything. I also chose computer engineering, which requires creating matrices and circuit diagrams.

I physically, no matter how hard I try, draw a circuit diagram in Microsoft Paint as fast as you can draw one with your hand. I can not type and debug Microsoft Word's equation editor's rendering of a matrix faster than a normal person can draw it. So I get more time to do those things.

Generally, in most of my exams, the extra time wouldn't benefit a normal person in my situation. If I do not know the equations for a pn junction I'm not going to magically reinvent the avalanche effect.

In some exams, I can finish early because I deeply know the concepts. But oftentimes I'm spending a third of the exam futzing with the equation editor or using the line tool to get a zigzag trying to meet a deadline.

But the thing is, I also don't attend an elite university. I attended a mid-tier one called Toronto Metropolitan University where most students struggled with the concepts and the professors could test knowledge. Rarely did my peers do practice problems or show up to lectures. Time was almost never a constraint because my professors could differentiate on learning.

At a school like the University of Toronto, almost every student has studied past exams. They attend every lecture session including the ones they're not enrolled in. They learn everything and grind until 11 pm on practice problems.

At that level, it's hard to focus only on teaching new concepts. The few courses that do, like Harvard Math 55, are legendarily difficult for the professors and students. I know because I did really well in Waterloo's version before transferring due to autoimmune disease. Time wasn't an issue since every quiz was 1 question you instantly did or didn't understand. That exam tested for talent.

What's much easier, and what most elite schools do, is jam a ton of questions into every exam and write the IQ test.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-18 00:00:06+00:00
Reading what the bot wrote down as to its motives, it's quite clear that the blog post was made under the rather peculiar assumption that the bot was calling out actual, meaningful hypocrisy. Maybe one could call that a challenge to the maintainer's reputation, but we usually excuse such challenges when they come from humans. Even when complaints about supposed hypocrisy are obviously misguided and the complainer was totally in the wrong, they don't usually get treated as deliberate attacks on someone's reputation.
by _aavaa_ | 2026-02-18 00:00:20+00:00
First of all, thanks for the thorough response, I appreciate it.

And that I agree with you about the others you listed; what happened with the war on phonics is like criminal levels of negligence and willful ignorance. (Anyone reading this, start with the Sold a Story podcast).

I’ll have to take the results at face value since I know almost nothing about the alternatives they’re comparing to.

I am also willing to believe that of all the methods tried, DI works better than constructivism approaches for < grade 5, even if that may not be true for older students.
by opan | 2026-02-18 00:00:40+00:00
>Drinking caffeine in the morning seems like a really good proxy for whether an individual has somewhere to be that day.

Anecdotally, on a Sunday morning with 8 hours of sleep and no plans, I'm still going to caffeinate at least once, probably with breakfast. If I'm trying to stay up a long time or am sleep deprived I may caffeinate 2 or 3 times that day. I don't typically take a whole day off of caffeine based on my plans. If I have a doctor's appointment and am not supposed to eat/drink, I'll still do it later when I get back home.
by lurquer | 2026-02-18 00:01:17+00:00
> "they set off the tuning fork in the loins of your own dogmatism."

Eh... I don't know. To me, that sounds very AI-ish.

Claude is very good -- at times -- coming up with flowery metaphoric language... if you tell it to. That one is so over-the-top that I'd edit it out.

Put something like this in your prompt and have it revise something:

"Make this read like Jim Thompson crossed with Thomas Harris, filtered through a paperback rack at a truck stop circa 1967. Make it gritty, efficient, and darkly comedic. Don't shy away from suggesting more elegant words or syntax. (For instance, Robert Howard -- Conan -- and H.P. Lovecraft were definitely pulp, but they had a sophisticated vocabulary.) I really want some purple prose and overwrought metaphors."

Occasionally you'll get some gems. Claude is much better than ChatGPT at this kinda stuff. The BEST ones are the ever-growing NSFW models populating huggingface.

In short, do the posts on OpenClawForum all sound alike? Of course.

Just like all the webpages circa 2000 looked alike. The uniformity wasn't because of HTML... rather it was because few people were using HTML to its full potential.
by jack_pp | 2026-02-18 00:02:07+00:00
A gangster will give free turkeys on thanksgiving while also selling drugs to the same community, enslaving them in the process. Very good analogy you found, thank you.

My problem is you seem naive enough to believe Zuck decided to open source stuff out of the goodness of his heart and not because he did some math in his head and decided it's advantageous to him, from a game theoretic standpoint, to commoditize LLMs.

To even have the audacity to claim Meta is ETHICAL is baffling to me. Have you ever used FB / instagram? Meta is literally the gangster selling drugs and also playing the filantropist where it costs him nothing and might also just bring him more money in the long term.

You must have no notion of good and evil if you believe for a second one person can create facebook with all its dark patterns and blatant anti user tactics and also be ethical.. because he open sourced stuff he couldn't make money from.
by mlhpdx | 2026-02-18 00:02:55+00:00
I haven’t been to a gym since leaving college (I rowed in a championship 8, and twice daily workouts were a thing). Instead I do manual labor and love it. I’ve built dry stack basalt walls, mowed, edged, pruned, chopped and sawn, poured and broken cement, etc and never missed the (for me) pointless repetition of “exercise”. I respect folks that can do it, but I can’t understand how.
by strken | 2026-02-18 00:03:01+00:00
Depends entirely on your workflow - we squash PRs into a single commit, so breaking a PR into pieces is functionally identical to not doing so for the purposes of the commit history. It does, however, make it easier to follow from the reviewer's perspective.

Don't give me 2000 lines unless you've made an honest good-faith attempt to break it up, and if it really can't be broken up into smaller units that make sense, at least break it up into units that let me see the progression of your thought as you solve the problem.
by the_pwner224 | 2026-02-18 00:04:05+00:00
> Being able to configure multiple VPNs at once, e.g. for Tailscale, ad filtering, blocking HackerNews during times when I should be doing something more productive

AdAway (in F-Droid) can block with /etc/hosts (no VPN involved) if you have root. The hosts blocking still works even when connected to a VPN. Aside from loading ad domain lists into /etc/hosts, it also allows you to specify custom domains to block - I personally have Reddit and HN in there :)
Show HN: SiteReady – Uptime monitoring and status pages for indie makers
by Arifcodes | 2026-02-18 00:04:35+00:00
Built this because Better Uptime starts at $20/mo and StatusPage.io is enterprise overkill for a solo founder running a few products.

SiteReady: add a URL, get email alerts when it goes down, publish a public status page your users can bookmark.

Free tier: 2 monitors, 5-minute checks. Paid: $5/mo for 10 monitors at 1-minute intervals, $15/mo for 50 monitors at 30 seconds.

Built on Laravel + Postgres. Happy to answer questions and would love feedback on the UI and feature gaps.