MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Stint – Fire-and-forget AI agent orchestration
by niceguy1827 | 2026-03-13 17:55:58+00:00
I built Stint to let me give Claude goals and walk away. It automatically breaks tasks into parallel work, spins up multiple Claude workers in isolated git branches, and merges results when done. Think "fire-and-forget" development with a web dashboard showing real-time progress.

Unlike other frameworks, there's no complicated setup. Just queue goals and let the agents work. Each worker has its own context window and commits directly to git.

See https://github.com/ilocn/stint. Happy to take comments/feedback. Thank you!
by hackinthebochs | 2026-03-13 17:55:58+00:00
I mainly said America because I only feel qualified to speak on America. But I do think there is something uniquely American about seeing the march of "progress" as an ultimate ideal and stagnation in any form as a defeat. Economic and social progress is basically a founding ideal of American society and is a major driver of our success over the centuries. It permeates our culture in so many ways, e.g. the idea that your kids should have it better than you. So shaping the next generation by way of shaping the views of your kids, despite the potential mismatch between the ideal and the reality is seen as just a part of the march of progress.
by yorwba | 2026-03-13 17:56:02+00:00
Treating attention as a lookup operation is popular among computational complexity theorists (e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.03817 ) because it's easier to work with when you're explicitly constructing a transformer to perform a particular computation, just to demonstrate that tranformers can, in theory, perform it. That's also why there are no training details: the weights are computed directly and not trained.
by verdverm | 2026-03-13 17:57:05+00:00
I use ADK, a well thought through framework by a company that leads in both AI and engineering. They are the only company in existence with the experience in both to build a solid, production worthy agent framework.

People too focused on AI and what's popular are missing the forest for a tree. Most of the things I see being talked about as problems & solutions have already been taken care of with mature tooling choices and engineering practices. History and archeology are underrated skills in software.
by losvedir | 2026-03-13 17:57:31+00:00
Wyden has been special, as long as I can remember. I feel like a lot of us early tech people had something of a libertarian bent. I think to some extent I've grown out of it in my less idealistic older age, but the whole idea of freedom from the government, living your own life, not being spied on, still resonates with me, and Wyden has always been a champion of it to some extent. You used to have Ron Paul, and these days now Rand Paul and Thomas Massie sometimes waving that flag, too.

It was definitely swimming upstream in the post-9/11 days. I was hopeful for a while with Trump that we'd see more of a mainstream resurgence, but it's not looking like it to me anymore.

Anyway, I can only imagine what he's alluding to here...
by iamnothere | 2026-03-13 17:58:01+00:00
State governments cannot pass laws that violate freedom of speech. Code is (written) speech, despite attempts to attack this.

If you want to push really hard, we can come up with something extremely verbose (worse than COBOL) that is VERY obviously speech. “Define a variable named x. Set the value of x to 3. Add the value of y to x.”

Outcomes take a back seat to rights. Bad outcomes are sometimes the inevitable consequence of liberty.

If you want to try and license use of public Internet infrastructure, like public roads, go ahead. But most of the Internet is private. Free association and free speech rules, regardless of the occasional difficulties it creates.
by miyoji | 2026-03-13 17:58:08+00:00
I don't think it's "catering to them" to avoid passing laws that impose undue burden. For example, if you passed a law requiring a US passport to buy food in the US, and made it so all restaurants and grocery stores are required to check passports before selling food to anyone, I would be opposed to that law, and part of the reason is that I don't think it should be hard for anyone to get food, whether they have a US passport or not.

"Undocumented" doesn't mean "residing illegally" anyway, it just means "lacking documents", which is a state that many perfectly legitimate US citizens find themselves in. But we should want people who are here illegally and everyone else to be able to use the world wide web and computers regardless of their legal status, just like everyone should be allowed to eat and buy food regardless of their legal status, because that's just basic humanity.
by jgable | 2026-03-13 17:58:11+00:00
I suppose. My original comment should have been “doesn’t teach you how to program.” It would be great to do it the normal way first, then point out that it’s impossible to do without a contract of behavior in place, then start creating that instruction set and building up from there. It is in fact possible to program computers, so this method would teach what makes programming possible.
by cestith | 2026-03-13 17:58:41+00:00
Debian stable isn’t that much more version locked than CentOS or RHEL. Debian also has the Testing tier, which is semi-rolling. Or you could use Unstable. Or if you’re brave, you could use Nightly.

Ubuntu, Mint, PopOS, and others with Debian as an upstream are not Debian. They build their own packages on their own schedules.

Fedora is not “consumer grade RedHat”. It’s the rolling release upstream of RHEL, much like Debian Testing is upstream of Debian Stable.

The main reason Linux got a bad reputation was the tribalism of people going off half-cocked talking about their personal preferences without actually working with the alternatives and starting this sort of holy war diatribe.
by eslaught | 2026-03-13 17:59:01+00:00
Iteration is inherent to how computers work. There's nothing new or interesting about this.

The question is who prunes the space of possible answers. If the LLM spews things at you until it gets one right, then sure, you're in the scenario you outlined (and much less interesting). If it ultimately presents one option to the human, and that option is correct, then that's much more interesting. Even if the process is "monkeys on keyboards", does it matter?

There are plenty of optimization and verification algorithms that rely on "try things at random until you find one that works", but before modern LLMs no one accused these things of being monkeys on keyboards, despite it being literally what these things are.
by whimsicalism | 2026-03-13 17:59:04+00:00
it means that it is Americans voluntarily choosing to donate this money. it seems perfectly plausible to me that there are enough very pro-Israel Americans to fund an organization like AIPAC.

The key question is whether AIPAC is taking actions at "the direction or control” of Israel, but the money is pretty clearly not being sourced from Israel.
by icedchai | 2026-03-13 18:00:02+00:00
I've also worked for "consulting" and "product" companies. The PMs I've worked with at product companies have been competent. They understand the customer's needs. They spec out features and product mockups. They know how to work with developers.

The PMs I've worked with in consulting companies are clerical workers. They check a box and copy-paste updates into Jira with little-to-no understanding. It's a completely different world.
by rootusrootus | 2026-03-13 18:00:17+00:00
That's super handy, thanks for sharing the link. It looks like I can run more local LLMs than I thought, I'll have to give some of those a try. I have decent memory (96GB) but my M2 Max MBP is a few years old now and I figured it would be getting inadequate for the latest models. But llmfit thinks it's a really good fit for the vast majority of them. Interesting!
by nephihaha | 2026-03-13 18:00:41+00:00
There are several "holy grails" in British TV history.

Lost Doctor Who episodes are one of them. Dad's Army also has lost black and white episodes (the colour ones have been repeated ad nauseam all my lifetime).

I can think of a few others. Scotch on the Rocks was a political hit piece written by Douglas Hurd showing an armed Scottish uprising along the lines of Northern Ireland. It was supposed to frighten people away from Scottish nationalism, but ended up causing copycat incidents. It vanished shortly after being broadcast probably because of its unintended effects.

The ultimate would be some of the pre-WW2 television broadcasts. Most of these were broadcast in the London area and practically nowhere else. Almost no one had recording equipment back then.
by toast0 | 2026-03-13 18:03:01+00:00
Corporate spyware is pretty nasty, regardless of platform. When I was at FB, they had something that forced a kernel module that was incompatible with the next big OS release; and I had accidentally disabled the FB spyware scripts. I set /etc/hosts to immutable because I was tired of them fucking with it ... didn't realize that's why things were better for the next 3 months, until I did the major update and I had to fix things from safe mode ... where everything only barely works.

Microsoft also puts a lot of crap into a default install that you may want to disable. Windows 11 with some judicious policy editor settings isn't so awful.
by shadowgovt | 2026-03-13 18:03:07+00:00
Code is speech, but installing an OS someone else wrote on hardware you own is not code.

I think you're making a good argument for why the regulation should be at the network-connect level and not the OS-account level, though, if the real issue is that networks are a shared resource with consequences for other people (which seems to be the issue). At that point, the OS collecting the data is just a convenience to satisfy the requirement for network access, not something that needs to be mandated.

> most of the Internet is private

True, but automotive licensing still applies to one's right to operate a vehicle on turnpikes. I believe the analogy here is that you might not need a license to set up an intranet.
by hinkley | 2026-03-13 18:03:15+00:00
Wise+intelligent people realize that intellectualizing every fucking thing in their life is a trap, and that they should rely more on other things. Not the least of which is buy-in, which is often not about rationality either.

It might take intelligence to notice the problem, but we all know people who haven’t and some who might never. My previous job has the oldest I’ve ever met and I wanted to strangle him at least once a week. I haven’t added anyone to my Do Not Hire list in over a decade. Except him. He made himself indispensable at every opportunity and had some of the most convoluted code (and vocabulary) I’ve encountered in a long time. I spent way too much time extracting his claws from code I’d written that he made an absolute hash of.
by AstroBen | 2026-03-13 18:03:22+00:00
It looks like Copilot has direct support for Ollama if you're willing to set that up: https://docs.ollama.com/integrations/vscode

For LM Studio under server settings you can start a local server that has an OpenAI-compatible API. You'd need to point Copilot to that. I don't use Copilot so not sure of the exact steps there
by tekla | 2026-03-13 18:03:24+00:00
It feels fast to you because you don't know what happened, and you are asking questions that have been answered by NASA already in public.

It was easy to find because they knew what valve was leaking.

It was not found beforehand because they don't have the ability to do the tanking test without rolling it to the launch pad and its very hard to know how a system responds to liquid hydrogen.
by jason_oster | 2026-03-13 18:03:24+00:00
This is an excellent observation and puts into words something I have barely scratched the surface of. Along with specifications, formal verification is another domain that received the "just automate it" treatment in the before times.

And because formal verification with LLMs is an active area of open research, I have some hope that the old idea of automated formal verification is starting to take shape. There is a lot to talk about here, but I'll leave a link to the 1968 NATO Software Engineering Conference [1] for those who are interested in where these thoughts originated. It goes deeply into the subject of "specification languages" and other related concepts. My understanding is that the historical split between computing science and software engineering has its roots in this 1968 conference.

[1]: http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/brian.randell/NATO/nato1968.PD...
by ahmed-fathi | 2026-03-13 18:03:24+00:00
The competing feedback loops point is the one that stuck with me. AI doesn't resolve the tension between stability and growth it just gives both sides more firepower. The negotiation stays just as hard.
Your "100 teenagers" framing is good but I'd push it further it's 100 teenagers each with a confident senior engineer in their ear. Which is worse, because it kills the self-doubt that makes juniors ask questions.
by bregma | 2026-03-13 18:03:28+00:00
"Digital" means you represent information using digits. Discrete numbers. "on/off" is binary. "Analog" means not using digits but instead an alternative (analogous) representation of the original data, usually continuous.

The grooves in a vinyl LP directly represent (are analogous to) the variations in sound pressure interpreted by our ears as sound. The grooves are continuously varying in direct proportion to the continuously varying sound waves. That's analog.

Converting analog video signals into a sequence of integral digits (even if it's pulsed-code modulation) is an analog-to-digital conversion, and storing those digits on a medium makes that a digital medium. It may just not be a binary digital medium.
by wat10000 | 2026-03-13 18:03:36+00:00
They could. It's very hard to enforce a cartel like that when there are a large number of competitors. It's a prisoners' dilemma with dozens or hundreds of participants. It only takes one defector to break it.

If you've ever shopped for car insurance, it should be pretty clear that there isn't a cartel holding prices high. Prices differ substantially across insurers, and are influenced by many other factors as well. Premiums are much lower if you have a clean driving record and no claims, or if you drive a car that's cheaper to repair, or less likely to cause injury, or you're of an age/gender with less propensity to crash, or live in an area with less automobile-related crime. Why would they give you lower rates for these things when they could just keep the premiums high and collect more profits?
by Mordisquitos | 2026-03-13 18:04:23+00:00
People want to find the missing episodes because of their historical value as actual human artistic creations, and not because they want to watch a thing that looks like an old missing episode.

There would be as much value in an "AI-recreated" missing episode as there would be in taking the audio of a modern episode and using AI to create a new video track for it.
by MisterTea | 2026-03-13 18:04:27+00:00
I find it hard to believe the people who built Go, coming from designing Plan 9 and Inferno, would build a language where it is difficult to swap out a component.

I have this feeling that in their quest to make Go simple, they added complexity in other areas. Then again, this was built at Google, not Bell Labs so the culture of building absurdly complex things likely influenced this.
by hirvi74 | 2026-03-13 18:05:04+00:00
I use Apple's Container tool on macOS, and Podman on other OSes. I really like Apple's Container. The only issue I have currently is that there are some annoying networking bugs, but to my knowledge, the developers are aware of them. So, hopefully the bugs will be fixed before too long.

Every time I create/start a container, I have to override the container's default DNS server or access to the Internet is blocked/Domain Names will not resolve. A work around exists, and is not too bad, so I still get a lot of value of Container. There is no way I am installing Claude Code nor Node.js on my host machine, and thankfully, I am not forced to.
by WalterBright | 2026-03-13 18:05:21+00:00
> The US currently has something like 30x the proven oil reserves that Norway does

And 60x the population. And defends the world with defense expenditures.

> simply a 5% bite out of net worth

Once that door is open, there will be no end to it. Washington state enacted a 7% capital gains tax, and the next year raised it to 9.9%. Now they're close to enacting a 9.9% income tax.

> My understanding is that estate taxes generally have thresholds that have to be met before they kick in. Federal threshold is on the order of 10million, WA is 3 million.

If your estate is $1 billion, your estate tax will be:

35% of $997,000,000 + 40% of $990,000,000 = 74.5% effective tax rate.

> Sanders

said many times that billionaires should not exist

> that you can't take it with you as that you might have to loosen your grasp at death to render unto caeser.

You could take all the money from billionaires and it won't raise the general standard of living. You will also never have companies like SpaceX.
by verdverm | 2026-03-13 18:05:22+00:00
I don't want some other tooling messing with my context. It's too important to leave to something that needs to optimize across many users, there by not being the best for my specifics.

The framework I use (ADK) already handles this, very low hanging fruit that should be a part of any framework, not something external. In ADK, this is a boolean you can turn on per tool or subagent, you can even decide turn by turn or based on any context you see fit by supplying a function.

YC over indexed on AI startups too early, not realizing how trivial these startup "products" are, more of a line item in the feature list of a mature agent framework.

I've also seen dozens of this same project submitted by the claws the led to our new rule addition this week. If your project can be vibe coded by dozens of people in mere hours...
by mooreds | 2026-03-13 18:05:24+00:00
Cost, maybe? It is one thing to ship up a valuable satellite (which they all can do). But to ship up 1000s of satellites (and keep doing it in perpetuity, because IIRC they don't have a long lifetime[0]) gets expensive.

0: Looks like 5 years. https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites.html
by shevy-java | 2026-03-13 18:05:30+00:00
What I find interesting is how this legislation suddenly leads
to some open project give in and submit - see MidnightBSD
wishing to spy on people via a daemon now. Linux will probably
follow suit via systemd; an appropriate name would be
systemd-sniffy, to sniff for user data and warn the authorities
"WARNING - 15 YEARS OLD IS WATCHING SOME P..., SHUT DOWN THE
HOUSE!!!". And the legislation calls this safety. And freedom.

It is like in the novel 1984. But stupid. Probably more like
minority report - but also stupid. All aided by Meta bribing
lobbyists to do their bidding.
by idontwantthis | 2026-03-13 18:05:49+00:00
The problem is that they don’t pay their fair share. Farms get insanely low rates and grow things like alfalfa that doesn’t even feed people but requires an insane amount of water.

Las Vegas recycles almost 100% of its indoor water usage and minimizes outdoor usage. They pay you to remove your lawn and almost all of them are gone.
by MintPaw | 2026-03-13 18:05:56+00:00
I did this too, I have pi that downloads and combined a bunch of rss feeds every 30min (cron) and downloads the vids, I browse them with Thunderbird on my desktop, I inject a special link to the mp4 on my pi. So I can just watch vids at 192.168.1.106/videos/X.mp4 using the Firefox mp4 player.

Did it in ~300 lines of node.js, was trying to learn how to use JS for server stuff, seemed like a good idea at the time. It still works 5 years later, but it stands as a reminder to me to never use async/await.
by O1111OOO | 2026-03-13 18:06:17+00:00
> It isn't a good way. You are fearmongering.

I think the user raises valid concerns that should be discussed.

Freenet (~2000) did something similar. They distributed and cached content across all participating nodes. Users were storing encrypted fragments of other's data. It was notorious for distributing illegal content.

I recall that at the time, users were concerned about illegal content winding up on their computers - even if they weren't directly - knowingly - downloading those resources.

As I looked a little deeper just now, I'm discovering that courts have generally been lenient on unknowing participants - that intent and knowledge do matter. It's still a legal grey area (from some basic research I just did - maybe someone else can add to this).

I would still be concerned about a corrupt agency (in some fascist environment) pressing charges or insinuating illegal activity regardless of intent.
by NortySpock | 2026-03-13 18:06:49+00:00
I tried the Zed editor and it picked up Ollama with almost no fiddling, so that has allowed me to run Qwen3.5:9B just by tweaking the ollama settings (which had a few dumb defaults, I thought, like assuming I wanted to run 3 LLMs in parallel, initially disabling Flash Attention, and having a very short context window...).

Having a second pair of "eyes" to read a log error and dig into relevant code is super handy for getting ideas flowing.
by briffle | 2026-03-13 18:07:09+00:00
I have seen what happens with garbage-in/garbage-out in databases, so this kind of stuff terrifies me. I often think of a case where we had a person listed twice in our database, with same address, birthday, etc, only thing different was gender, and last 2 digits of SSN were transposed..

After we 'fixed' the issue a few times, they BOTH showed up to our office.

Both Named Leslie, born on same day, a few small towns apart, same last name and home phone since they had been married. Back then, SSN were handed out by region sequentially, so one had the last two digits 12 and the other 21.
by phba | 2026-03-13 18:07:27+00:00
The primary goal of these efforts is to control communication and the flow of ideas. Information is a control mechanism, since we act on what we believe.

In history we had four media revolutions (printing press, radio, television, Internet), each greatly disrupting and reshaping society. This is the fifth (social media and maybe AI).

All these revolutions had the same theme: increased reach of information, increased speed of transmission, increased density (information amount per unit of time), and centralization of information sources.
Now we seem to reach the limits of change.
No more reach, since our information networks span the entire globe.
No more speed, since transmission times are close to how fast we can perceive things.
The only things left to change are even more centralization and tighter feedback loops (changing the information based on how the recipient reacts).

Given all that, this media revolution might be the last one, so there is a gold rush among the elites to come out on top.
by drodman | 2026-03-13 18:07:32+00:00
In general you do need to be aware of any agent-level rate limits as well as any ingestion limits from the provider. We do some pretty careful sampling and aggregations for most metrics, logs, and traces we store and as mmcclure said in this case it was the rules on the node agents themselves throwing the errors. The volume logging on some of the critical paths of the service got high enough that the logs were dropped due to our configured rate limits.
by everfrustrated | 2026-03-13 18:07:43+00:00
I think the OVH datacenter was also built of wood and right next to another "independent" datacenter which also burned down when the fire spread.

OVH is about cheap, not quality.

Like hetzner they come from the vps/hosting end of the market which is all about cutting corners, packing vms, overselling, etc. Very much the cowboy end of the market.