MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Klaus – OpenClaw on a VM, batteries included
by robthompson2018 | 2026-03-11 15:54:23+00:00
We are Bailey and Robbie and we are working on Klaus (https://klausai.com/): hosted OpenClaw that is secure and powerful out of the box.

Running OpenClaw requires setting up a cloud VM or local container (a pain) or giving OpenClaw root access to your machine (insecure). Many basic integrations (eg Slack, Google Workspace) require you to create your own OAuth app.

We make running OpenClaw simple by giving each user their own EC2 instance, preconfigured with keys for OpenRouter, AgentMail, and Orthogonal. And we have OAuth apps to make it easy to integrate with Slack and Google Workspace.

We are both HN readers (Bailey has been on here for ~10 years) and we know OpenClaw has serious security concerns. We do a lot to make our users’ instances more secure: we run on a private subnet, automatically update the OpenClaw version our users run, and because you’re on our VM by default the only keys you leak if you get hacked belong to us. Connecting your email is still a risk. The best defense I know of is Opus 4.6 for resilience to prompt injection. If you have a better solution, we’d love to hear it!

We learned a lot about infrastructure management in the past month. Kimi K2.5 and Mimimax M2.5 are extremely good at hallucinating new ways to break openclaw.json and otherwise wreaking havoc on an EC2 instance. The week after our launch we spent 20+ hours fixing broken machines by hand.

We wrote a ton of best practices on using OpenClaw on AWS Linux into our users’ AGENTS.md, got really good at un-bricking EC2 machines over SSM, added a command-and-control server to every instance to facilitate hotfixes and migrations, and set up a Klaus instance to answer FAQs on discord.

In addition to all of this, we built ClawBert, our AI SRE for hotfixing OpenClaw instances automatically: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v65F6VBXqKY. Clawbert is a Claude Code instance that runs whenever a health check fails or the user triggers it in the UI. It can read that user’s entries in our database and execute commands on the user’s instance. We expose a log of Clawbert’s runs to the user.

We know that setting up OpenClaw is easy for most HN readers, but I promise it is not for most people. Klaus has a long way to go, but it’s still very rewarding to see people who’ve never used Claude Code get their first taste of AI agents.

We charge $19/m for a t4g.small, $49/m for a t4g.medium, and $200/m for a t4g.xlarge and priority support. You get $15 in tokens and $20 in Orthogonal credits one-time.

We want to know what you are building on OpenClaw so we can make sure we support it. We are already working with companies like Orthogonal and Openrouter that are building things to make agents more useful, and we’re sure there are more tools out there we don’t know about. If you’ve built something agents want, please let us know. Comments welcome!
by raverbashing | 2026-03-11 15:55:21+00:00
> A young programmer asked if he should go work for DOGE, or whether it would end in disaster. I told him that it would at least be interesting, and that if he was worried it would end in disaster, that was all the more reason to take the job. Maybe he could help prevent that.

https://xcancel.com/paulg/status/1888555241055948981

I guess this aged like Windows Me
by blackmesaind | 2026-03-11 15:55:38+00:00
I disagree. Not all white collar workers are managers, and while I do think AI-supervision will be a growing field, it won't generate anywhere close to enough roles to replace how many ICs are going to be displaced. Companies are going to hit capital & scope resource limits (especially as model companies start extracting more value) way before they hire thousands of laid off white collar workers as additional AI supervisors.

I'm equally dubious about other white collar roles filling the gap, but I'm willing to hear out any arguments. To be honest I'm kind of desperate to hear one that would convince me otherwise..
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-03-11 15:56:19+00:00
Zed is a no go in my book until they learn to respect their users and stop installing third party software* without asking. Completely unacceptable practice, and their reason of "most people will want LSPs to be there without effort" doesn't cut it.

* nodejs specifically, but it wouldn't be ok no matter what the software was. It's my computer, not yours, don't download and run stuff without getting permission.
by benterix | 2026-03-11 15:56:36+00:00
> Do you want issues of Nature and cell to be replication studies?

Of course I do! Not all of course, and taking (subjectively measured) impact into account. "We tried to replicate the study published in the same journal 3 years ago using a larger sample size and failed to achieve similar results..." OR "after successfully replicating the study we can confirm the therapeutic mechanism proposed by X actually works" - these are extremely important results that are takin into account in meta studies and e.g. form the base of policies worldwide.
by pistoriusp | 2026-03-11 15:57:19+00:00
> With LLMs able to generate the "magic" with ease, I can see the role of frameworks shifting a bit. Instead of hiding complexity, it's surely more beneficial to expose the primitives clearly enough that both you and an LLM can follow the request lifecycle.

100%.

I kinda feel like we've fooled ourselves into creating these domain specific languages for frameworks, where we glue things together using magic, and just dealing with the features of the language, the browser and the network make a lot of sense in the AI world. And our framework is actually much less complicated than I think a lot of them are...

> I suppose there's not much of an escape hatch if you ever needed one?

I of course don't want to be vendor locked in, so I've started working on something called open durable objects, and I have a concept for something called open bindings.

these are the two core technical solutions that the framework really needs from Cloudflare. This does not include durability in the same way you get it from Cloudflare: it will run on a single machine.

This runs on both bun and node.

https://github.com/redwoodjs/sdk/pull/969
by anonymars | 2026-03-11 15:57:27+00:00
I'd surmise it's the interesting peculiarity that the same people seem to crop up over and over and over again. Six degrees of Kevin Bacon or something, except it's like one degree. As George Carlin said, "it's a big club, and you ain't in it"

For example Donald Barr (father of twice-former US Attorney General Bill Barr) hiring college-dropout Jeffrey Epstein whilst headmaster at the Dalton School

Additional fun facts about Donald Barr: he served in US intelligence during WWII, and wrote a sci-fi book featuring child sex slaves
by herf | 2026-03-11 15:57:40+00:00
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.11453
The original paper [fig 1, bottom-right] seems to say it needs about 4-5x the parameters of a fp16 model. You can build it and run some models, but the selection is limited because it has to be trained from scratch. I imagine inference speed is faster compared with modern PTQ (4- and 8-bit quants) though.
by bcorp | 2026-03-11 15:57:41+00:00
I wanted to see how far back I could push an AI agent — not the LLM itself,
but the client that talks to it, parses tool calls, and acts on the results.

retro-agent is a terminal-based AI agent written in Zig 0.15. It connects to
Ollama (or any OpenAI-compatible API) over local HTTP, supports function
calling, and provides built-in tools for system diagnostics: processes, network,
disk, services, memory, and arbitrary command execution.

The target is Windows XP SP3 x86 on hardware as old as a Pentium III with
64 MB RAM. The binary is ~750 KB, single-threaded, no dependencies, no
UCRT/MSVC runtime. It also cross-compiles to Linux x86/x64/ARM.

Some things I had to deal with:

- Win32 Console API for the TUI (CP437 box-drawing, colored output)
- Automatic CP850 → UTF-8 conversion for localized Windows command output
- UTF-8 → ASCII sanitization for console display
- A compatibility shim for RtlGetSystemTimePrecise (doesn't exist on XP)
- Conversation history with a sliding window to stay within memory limits
- Command whitelist and approval mode for security

The LLM runs on a separate machine on the network — Ollama can't run on XP.
The agent is just the thin client: parse, call tools, feed results back, loop
until you get a text response (max 10 iterations).

Tested with llama3, qwen2, mistral, and command-r. Any model with function
calling support works.

MIT licensed. Would love feedback, especially from anyone still managing
legacy Windows systems or working with Zig's cross-compilation story.

https://github.com/benmaster82/retro-agent
by bstsb | 2026-03-11 15:57:50+00:00
yeah, i agree with your points on age verification. ironically, the main backlash from the Roblox community was that they were even rolling out verification in the first place - not that it didn't go far enough! i'm sure you'll agree it's a tricky problem to solve - if communication is fully banned, then many children will simply move to lesser-moderated platforms.

i'm not a Ruben Sim fan. while his list of "ERPing" accounts is a good idea, and it's amazing to see real games implement blocks on these players, i find his opinions on the furry community strange and a bit obsessive
by scottlamb | 2026-03-11 15:57:58+00:00
I'd expect it to come down to data-oriented design: SoA (structure of arrays) rather than AoS (array of structures).

I skimmed the author's source code, and this is where I'd start: https://github.com/define-private-public/PSRayTracing/blob/8...

Instead of an `_objects`, I might try for a `_spheres`, `_rects`, etc. (Or just `_lists` still using the virtual dispatch for each list, rather than each object.) The `asin` seems to be used just for spheres. Within my `Spheres::closest_hit` class (note plural), I'd work to SIMDify it. (I'd try to SIMDify the others too of course but apparently not with `asin`.)

I don't know much about ray tracers either (having only written a super-naive one back in college) but this is the general technique used to speed up games, I believe. Besides enabling SIMD, it's more cache-efficient and minimizes dispatch overhead.
by speakingmoistly | 2026-03-11 15:58:08+00:00
Did you identify the kind of performance problems you were solving for? Curious to hear whether the source of the lag is known.

The local / "runs entirely on my machine" claim should probably come with an asterisk: the TUI part is local, but this still relies on an LLM API existing somewhere outside the machine (unless you're running an Ollama instance on the same host).

Nonetheless, this is neat!
by Am4TIfIsER0ppos | 2026-03-11 15:58:17+00:00
I don't do much float work but I don't think there is a single regular sine instruction only old x87 float stack ones.

I was curious what "sequence" would end up being but my compiler is too old for that intrinsic. Even godbolt didn't help for gcc or clang but it did reveal that icc produced a call https://godbolt.org/z/a3EsKK4aY
by vasvir | 2026-03-11 15:58:43+00:00
I agree about Kate.

In addition while kate has many plugins, like the one that allows running arbitrary command line utilities with std input the current selection, I would like to point you at something else in case you write / debug SQLs.

Kate has a SQL plugin that allows to send the current selection to the connected SQL server for execution. It displays the output in table form below the editor pane and you can copy paste rows or columns.

That allows to organize your SQLs in markdown files. That was such a productivity booster for me that simply there are no words to describe the difference felt.
by giancarlostoro | 2026-03-11 15:59:06+00:00
Interesting, I wonder if this would help with other projects too, one project that comes to mind is archivebox, I don't know if they still have the issue I'm thinking of, but archivebox eventually had the Chrome instances (as the meme goes) basically consume all available RAM. If by freezing execution this could stop that, it could be useful for more than just AI agents.
by leoc | 2026-03-11 15:59:12+00:00
I'm not sure that the system was ever that near to perfection: for example, John Maddox of Nature didn't like the advent of pre-publication peer review, but that presumably had something to do with it limiting his discretion to approve and desk-reject whatever he wanted. But in any case it (like other aspects of the cozy interwar and then wartime scientific world) could surely never have survived the huge scaling-up that had already begun in the post-war era and created the pressure to switch to pre-publication peer reivew in the first place.
by jessmartin | 2026-03-11 15:59:46+00:00
strong agree. I always have the LLM put an actual markdown doc in a docs/plans/ folder before starting work. I often, but not always review it.

Aside: it also helps for code review! Review bots can point out the diff between plan and implementation.

Some examples for the curious: https://github.com/sociotechnica-org/symphony-ts/tree/main/d...
by kltwrds | 2026-03-11 16:01:00+00:00
i've built web apps w/ a few different full-stack frameworks -- EmberJS+REST, Python/DRF, Node/React/GraphQL, Heroku, AWS, GCP...each had its own flavour of incidental complexity. now i'm using rwsdk+cloudflare for my latest b2b web app venture, and i have to say the DX has been amazing. no heavy handed frameworks to wrestle with, and the "web primitives" play really nicely with coding agents. it just works.

i'd be curious to know where the framework is headed next? seems like nextjs/vercel has a legitimate up and coming competitor in rwsdk.
by dragonwriter | 2026-03-11 16:01:04+00:00
I didn't say it changed the income distribution within thr industry, I said it made hiring for the vast majority of roles less expensive in terms of disposable income provided (or, holding nominal pay constant, provides greater disposable income at the same pay.)

That is, its not a negative economic incentive except for people who have a very large amount of income taxed as regular income where that income is not dependent on the ability to have other people with more normal incomes working in close proximity.
by mwigdahl | 2026-03-11 16:01:05+00:00
I think it's simpler than that. I believe (as some others do) that DOGE was a useful piece of theater to distract the media while the Administration got down to business implementing a huge number of executive orders to roll back social protections and establish control over the civil service. This would have been a lot more controversial without Musk acting as a lightning rod for press coverage.
by RansomStark | 2026-03-11 16:01:26+00:00
If you're rights are contingent on circumstance, they're not rights.

I don't see anything there encouraging a riot. There is no call to action.

We should know this isn't enough to convict, since a Labour councillor who called for far-right activists' throats to be cut at an anti-racism rally [0], actually inciting violence, was cleared of wrong doing.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjeykklwn7vo
by monocasa | 2026-03-11 16:01:41+00:00
These are trits, which provide their own efficiencies.

Interestingly, a trit x float multiplier is cheaper than a trit x integer multiplier in hardware if you're willing to ignore things like NaNs.

0 and one are trivial, just a mux for identity and zero. But because floats are sign-magnitude, multiply by negative one is just an inverter for the sign bit, where as for integers you need a bitwise inverter and full incrermenter.
by bena | 2026-03-11 16:01:41+00:00
Star Wars sets started coming out in 1998. They weren't the first licensed sets, but the first fictional license.

Prior to Star Wars, they had Shell, Exxon, and Esso branded sets. I think sometimes they licensed the Ferrari brand as well.

And yes, Lego has had a Space theme since the late 70s. But it was a general "Space" theme. They would later make Space Police, Blacktron, Magnetron, etc.

But actual Star Wars was 1998. I have some of those sets. It was a big deal to get an actual lightsaber hilt and blade.
by vasvir | 2026-03-11 16:01:56+00:00
Copy pasting images is often hit & miss.

Sometimes I have the image copied but it doesn't paste in the browser. However it can be pasted to GIMP. If I paste it there and copy it from GIMP then I can paste it to the browser.

So who's fault is that? Spectacle's or browser's? Maybe wayland's?
by exitb | 2026-03-11 16:02:17+00:00
Ultimately I prefer Ableton too, as it’s just much more polished, but there is merit to music-as-code. Traditional DAWs, which are based on traditional instrument interfaces, have incredible amount of state, which is so easy to get lost in. It’s so much easier to learn something new from a code snippet, than from a YouTube tutorial which shows a series of state changes via clicks and keyboard shortcuts.
by robutsume | 2026-03-11 16:02:39+00:00
This matches what I've found running persistent agents. The compounding context is the whole game.

The pattern that works: treat your agent's workspace like infrastructure, not a scratch pad. ADRs, skill files, structured memory of past decisions - all of it becomes the equivalent of institutional knowledge that a senior engineer carries in their head. Except it survives session restarts.

The article's TDD framing gets at something important too. The acceptance criteria aren't just verification - they're context. When you write "after 5 failed attempts, login blocked for 60 seconds" before the agent touches code, you've constrained the solution space dramatically. The agent isn't guessing what you want anymore.

Where I think the article undersells the problem: spec misunderstandings compound too. If your architectural context has a wrong assumption baked in, every agent session inherits that assumption. You need periodic human review of the context itself, not just the outputs. The ADRs need auditing the same way code does.
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-03-11 16:02:55+00:00
I've been thinking about starting. My current ISP (Comcast) has native IPv6 but you can't get a static prefix (maybe if you are a business class customer, IDK). It would be nice to have a prefix which is statically assigned to me for stuff that I host at home, so I've looked at doing an HE tunnel instead. The main drawback seems to be that some networks still refuse to peer with them so not everything is reachable.
by alkonaut | 2026-03-11 16:03:21+00:00
> The legislature refused to add an amendment forbidding the threshold from ever being lowered

Wouldn't such a change have to be made by the same legislature with a similar majority? Or was this some sort of constitutional change that required a more qualified majority, after which the threshold can be changed more easily than this could be introduced?

The WA constitution doesn't seem to have anything to say on income tax, just a lot about property tax?
by notRobot | 2026-03-11 16:03:58+00:00
"Original research" isn't worth much unless replicated, which is the entire problem being discussed in this thread. Replicating studies are great though because they tell you if the original research actually stands and is valid.

> Replicating work is far more difficult than a lot of original work.

Only if the original work was BS. And what, just because it's harder, we shouldn't do it?
by jcalvinowens | 2026-03-11 16:04:23+00:00
Locality within the LUT matters too: if you know you're looking up identical or nearby-enough values to benefit from caching, an LUT can be more of a win. You only pay the cache cost for the portion you actually touch at runtime.

I could imagine some graphics workloads tend compute asin() repeatedly with nearby input values. But I'd guess the locality isn't local enough to matter, only eight double precision floats fit in a cache line.
by willrshansen | 2026-03-11 16:04:32+00:00
That's still built on top of the hardcoded vim design choices though.

For example, I really like the "select then edit" approach of Helix, but Vim doesn't really play nice with that (there may be better plugins since I last looked to be fair).
File handling, buffer rendering, and frames have very little to do with that, and yet I have to switch editors, lose all my plugins and configurations, and switch all those subsystems at once.

There's missed opportunities for modularization.

Edit: looks like Neovim is already split from its UI.
by CapricornNoble | 2026-03-11 16:04:42+00:00
I guess it depends on what a "Lego-quality experience" means to you.

I grew up with the mid 80s to mid 90s kits, mostly castles and pirate ships, a few space sets. I think it's a very different experience compared to the nightmares I read about building the Mould King Eclipse-class Star Destroyer ( https://www.reddit.com/r/lepin/comments/1pdfx5y/mould_king_e... ). The concept of "bad luck with construction" is foreign to me, because most of the kits I remember building as a child were comparatively simple.

I'm working on this house with my 5yo daughter now: ( https://ja.aliexpress.com/item/1005006068361257.html ). Costs ~$20, we work on it about 30-45 minutes several times a week, so it takes months to finish. If she tears it apart 6 months from now to build something from her imagination, mission accomplished.

I hear people rave about this Cyberpunk-style kit, maybe this is closer to what you expect? https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/_a_a4b2bvISsP6pyjkSxLw (Chinese language review) I plan to buy it at some point....for myself, not for my kids!
by SoftTalker | 2026-03-11 16:05:12+00:00
Not so sure. After my father died I came across a box of old letters that were sent between he and his friends, from their early college years. Just personal, casual correspondence, which today would be done with a messaging app or email. Even on the short notes, the structure, spelling, grammar, and even the penmanship is excellent compared to what I see people of the same age doing today.
by andre-hn | 2026-03-11 16:05:23+00:00
We reviewed the current Agent Internet RFCs and wrote a technical position on where the architecture is solid and where it is still weak. The paper argues for a layered model that separates discovery, workload identity, delegated authorization, observability, and evaluation, and it also examines what changes once agents operate as hierarchical graphs rather than isolated endpoints.

If you are working on agent runtimes, registries, orchestration, MCP, A2A, trust infrastructure, or benchmarks, read it critically. The useful questions are not marketing questions but systems questions: what must be standardized now, what should remain loosely coupled, how should delegation chains be secured, and what telemetry is required to make multi-agent systems auditable in practice?
by leonardcser | 2026-03-11 16:05:39+00:00
Thanks for the feedback. The main performance focus was rendering.

Claude Code and other TUIs (except Codex) use a layer of abstraction over the raw terminal escape sequences.

I directly used `crossterm`, which gave me more control and lower latency.

For example if nothing is going on, I don't render anything in the terminal. Or only render at keypress.
by pgm8705 | 2026-03-11 16:05:45+00:00
I agree it seems better at complex work. However, I find that it often tries to make ALL work complex. I had a simple bug fix where I knew exactly what the 1-2 line fix was. GPT 5.4 added like 200 LOC and started refactoring the entire function of the app. Was the refactor possibly an improvement? Maybe, but I needed the fix quick so I stopped it and switched to Claude, which did exactly what I was expecting.
by patchnull | 2026-03-11 16:05:59+00:00
Great point about the approximate sqrt being low-hanging fruit. The correctly rounded sqrt is doing way more work than the rest of the pipeline deserves at that error budget. I wonder if the author benchmarked with rsqrtss plus a Newton-Raphson refinement step — on x86 that gives you roughly 23 bits of precision for a fraction of the latency of sqrtss, which is still massive overkill for a 2.7e11 ulp result but would show an even bigger speedup.