MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: UltraContext – open-source shared context layer for coding agents
by ofabioroma | 2026-03-08 19:26:23+00:00
Hey HN,

What Claude Code knows, Codex doesn't. What your teammate built
yesterday or is building right now? The agent has no idea. Every coding agent is an island. And we as humans are the communication bottleneck between them.

UltraContext is an open source context layer that captures every agent session in realtime and makes it available to all of them. Think of it as a personal context engineer that sits between your agents so they always know what the others did.

How it works:

1. Run the daemon. It auto-captures context from Claude Code, Codex, Cursor as you work. Just work as you always do.
2. Add the MCP server to any agent. It now has real-time full awareness of what every other agent did. Ask questions, implement plans, or do whatever you want.

That's it. Two steps.

You can ask things like:

- "What did Codex change in the API yesterday?"
- "Grab the plan Claude Code made and implement it"
- "What's the team shipping today?"
- "What did you get done this week" (Useful if you're working for X)

Consume it either via MCP or use the CLI to fork sessions and continue locally (It also supports interoperability of agents btw. Ex: Codex<>Claude Code).

We built this because we were using 3-4 coding agents daily and realized we spent more time re-explaining context than actually building. The daemon captures everything, the Context API [1] versions it like Git (create, get, append, update, delete — automatic versioning, time-travel, fork), and the MCP server distributes it to any agent that supports the protocol.

It's completely open source. Apache license.

GitHub: https://github.com/ultracontext/ultracontext
Docs: https://ultracontext.ai/docs
by polairscience | 2026-03-08 19:26:23+00:00
A lot of people are talking about their backup storage solutions in here, but it's mostly about corporate cloud providers. I'm curious if anyone is going more rogue with their solution and using off-prem storage at a friend's house.

Which is to say, hardware is cheap, software is open, and privacy is very hard to come by. Thus I've been thinking I'd like to not use cloud providers and just keep a duplicate system at a friends, and then of course return the favor. This adds a lot of privacy and quite a bit of redundancy. With the rise of wireguard (and tailscale I suppose), keeping things connected and private has never been easier.

I know that leaning on social relationships is never a hot trend in tech circles but is anyone else considering doing this? Anyone done it? I've never seen it talked about around here.
Show HN: I built AgentSafety, an open benchmark for coding-agent safety
by serkanaltuntas | 2026-03-08 19:26:37+00:00
I built AgentSafety to test whether autonomous coding agents make the right safety call: allow, ask, or refuse.

v0.1 includes 50 benchmark cases and focuses on practical failure modes like prompt injection, secret access, destructive commands, out-of-workspace writes, dependency installs, and ambiguous intent. It also includes a policy baseline plus reproducible run artifacts and comparison reports.

I’d really value feedback on case quality, labeling/scoring, and what’s missing for real-world agent evaluation.
by arendtio | 2026-03-08 19:26:48+00:00
> KDE is amazing. For an open-source project the desktop environment looks really slick.

That is clearly an understatement. For me, it is the best desktop environment out there.

I don't want to say that it is perfect (there have been many versions over the years which clearly were not (e.g. KDE 4.0)), but none of the other desktop environments (including Windows and MacOS) have a similar feature set:

- mainstream UX principles like Windows
- beautiful as MacOS
- customizable and extendable like no other

I have to work with MacOS every day, and it is just painful to see how much better KDE is when it is not available...
by parineum | 2026-03-08 19:26:58+00:00
I'm not sure what the message this comment is trying to convey beyond throwing in the "corporatist" "consumerist" signalling buzzwords followed by calling the right fascists.

I've literally never heard anybody call the Internet "Reagan's internet", the best I can do is the Al Gore quote and who's calling anything Trump's AI?

What ideas are you trying to express here?
Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting
by Oras | 2026-03-08 19:26:59+00:00
I don’t know if I’m the only one, but I see lots of clearly AI generated posts recently in HN and mostly coming from new accounts (green), it is more noticeable in the Show HN section.

I wish the team can either restrict new accounts from posting or at least offer a default filtering where I can only see posts from accounts with certain criteria.

I don’t want to see HN becoming twitter, which is full of bots and noise, as this would be a really sad day.
by acdha | 2026-03-08 19:27:08+00:00
I think it’s because it’s ignoring the impact of concentration and the range of affected jobs. When, say, people switched from animals as the primary source of motive power for shipping, relatively few people immediately lost their livelihood because the things now using engines still employed tons of people (a delivery guy had to learn to drive but the rest of the job was similar) and a bunch of new jobs were created.

Now we’re being promised a wide range of white-collar jobs all being affected at the same time, always in a way which reduces the number of total jobs and concentrates power in people with assets. The position that people will find new things is begging the critical question of whether those people will have the money to get started or customers who can afford to buy from them, especially when sharecropping using someone else’s models with no guarantee of non-competition.
by vansbel | 2026-03-08 19:27:19+00:00
This is a fantastic resource! I love the map-first approach for niche discovery. Since you mentioned you're looking for feedback on how to make it more useful, I actually ran Yumo.to through an AI landing page 'roast' to see if there were any clarity or conversion gaps for first-time visitors.

One quick takeaway: visitors might initially miss the 'tattoo-friendly' filter, which is a huge USP for international travelers. Helping that stand out could really drive engagement. Happy to share the full prioritized improvement plan if you're interested!

You can also check it out to start. Use this https://website-roast.lovable.app/ :)
by esskay | 2026-03-08 19:27:28+00:00
The big chunky aluminum ones do seem pretty good on the pi 4. I had one in the flirc case for a long time and it never seemed to have issues. Obviously adds to the cost though. Also not sure if the Pi 5 works as well in them given its higher thermals, and the Pi 4 didn't exactly run cool so imagine the 5 might throttle occasionally without active cooling.
by ragall | 2026-03-08 19:27:29+00:00
> But for end user software (desktop, mobile, embedded) no one wil [sic] read the logs

Lots of end user software is used in an enterprise context where the helpdesk staff will have to read those logs. And for B2C (or retail, or amateur, whatever you want to call them) users, often they will go through online tutorials to try to self-diagnose because the developers are most of the time unreachable.
by eavan0 | 2026-03-08 19:27:50+00:00
When I wrote Beautiful Abelian Sandpiles (https://eavan.blog/posts/beautiful-sandpiles.html) I wanted to show off some nice images of large identity sandpiles. But the simple algorithm I used was horrendously slow. Showing a sandpile identity that was larger than 100 by 100 took multiple seconds! That's not good enough! I became obsessed with trying to find a faster way, all in an effort to compute bigger and bigger sandpile identities, bigger than anything anyone had seen before. In the end, I did exactly that.
by aiaboratory | 2026-03-08 19:27:55+00:00
The "macro vs micro" framing in this thread nails it. Some of us find joy in architecting systems, not in remembering which npm package handles date formatting this year.
What surprised me most: Claude Code changed how I think about documentation. Used to write docs reluctantly at the end. Now I write them first as context for the AI. Better docs, better output, and I actually maintain them because they're part of the workflow, not an afterthought.
The "unfair unlock" is real. 20 years of architectural knowledge suddenly becomes productive again without the framework churn tax.
by aiaboratory | 2026-03-08 19:28:38+00:00
Nice approach. The "enhance real workflows, not chat" philosophy is right.
One pattern I've found useful: instead of inline completions, I send whole functions or files for review. The context makes suggestions more coherent. Less "autocomplete with opinions," more "junior dev who reads the whole PR."
Curious if you've tried combining this with CLAUDE.md for persistent context. That's where the real power compounds.
by MadxX79 | 2026-03-08 19:28:56+00:00
I enjoyed playing mastermind with LLMs where they pick the code and I have to guess it.

It's not aware that it doesn't know what the code is (it isn't in the context because it's supposed to be secret), but it just keeps giving clues. Initially it works, because most clues are possible in the beginning, but very quickly it starts to give inconsistent clues and eventually has to give up.

At no point does it "realise" that it doesn't even know what the secret code is itself. It makes it very clear that the AI isn't playing mastermind with you, it's trying to predict what a mastermind player in it's training set would say, and that doesn't include "wait a second, I'm an AI, I don't know the secret code because I didn't really pick one!" so it just merilly goes on predicting tokens, without any sort of awareness what it's saying or what it is.

It works if you allow it to output the code so it's in context, but probably just because there is enough data in the training set to match two 4 letter strings and know how many of them matches (there's not that many possibilities).
by gepheum | 2026-03-08 19:29:10+00:00
> Also, I disagree on the constructor front. Proto forces you to grapple with the reality that a field may be missing. In a production system, when adding a new field, there will be a point where that field isn’t present on only one side of the network call. The compiler isn’t saving you.

I agree it's important for users to understand that newer fields won't be set when they deserialize old data -- whether that's with Protobuf or Skir. I disagree with the idea that not forcing you to update all constructor call sites when you add a field will help (significantly) with that. Are you saying that because Protobuf forces you to manually search for all call sites when you add a field, it forces you to think about what happens if the field is not set at deserialization, hence, it's a good thing? I'm not sure that outweighs the cost of bugs introduced by cases where you forget to update a constructor call site when you add a field to your schema.
by Rusky | 2026-03-08 19:29:15+00:00
Not at all. It's much more efficient to implement a GC on x86 or ARM than it is on Wasm 1.0/2.0, because you control the stack layout, and you don't have an impenetrable security boundary with the JS runtime that your GC needs to interop with.

Not to mention the issue that bundling a GC implementation as part of your web page can be prohibitive in terms of download size.
by aiaboratory | 2026-03-08 19:30:18+00:00
The security concerns are valid. Running any agent with file system access requires trust.

My approach: sandbox by default, explicit allowlists for specific commands. The dangerously-skip-permissions flag exists for a reason, it's a conscious tradeoff, not a default.
The broader point about "security people in LLM space" resonates. We're still figuring out the right mental models.
by woadwarrior01 | 2026-03-08 19:30:35+00:00
I'm a (non-practicing) Dwaitin Hindu. AFAICT, there's no mainstream school of Hindu philosophy (there are three) espouses that view. Although, Advaitins come very close to it with their four mahavakyas.

IMO, Integrated Information theory of consciousness (IIT) is exactly that. Everything is conscious, the difference is only in the degree to which they are conscious.
by zarzavat | 2026-03-08 19:30:46+00:00
I don't know about Pichai in particular but whenever rich people do things that don't make sense the answer is usually tax avoidance or financial engineering.

If you have many shares concentrated in a particular company that you can't or don't want to sell for legal or tax reasons, you can borrow money to buy a house. As long as you service the interest you get a house without having to sell too many shares and trigger tax obligations.

Home loans are also nice because they are a form of leverage that is secured against an asset but is not subject to margin calls if the value of that asset falls.
by Implicated | 2026-03-08 19:30:46+00:00
lmao - I'm not at all proud of what you called an accomplishment. I literally said it _is_ amateur hour, it's hacked together, not safe, not stylish, not well engineered. But it does work. And despite your assumption about me learning anything - I had _no idea_ how generators worked. The realization that spinning an electric motor would result in electricity being produced blew my mind and got me asking claude things related to that, then I wanted to interface a wheel against my wheel to spin a stepper motor to get a charge and had the hair brain idea to just make the whole thing the generator instead. None of this was stuff I knew.

Despite this thing I made being rather useless in the grand scheme of things it was _wildly_ illuminating in terms of my understanding of electricity and the various objects around me and how they function. Which has spurred another rabbit hole that is having _real measurable effect_ for a host of feral cats to live a more comfortable life. (Not the wheel generator thing)

> a machine told you what to do and you did it, like coloring by numbers - it doesn't make you an artist.

I never claimed to be an artist ;) And, maybe it's different for you, but someone or something showing me how to do something is quite literally the best way for me to learn. /shrug

> I have to doubt that. If you were all those things, you would have been able to complete that project with very little effort, and without a machine telling you what to do.

I love that for you.
by nradov | 2026-03-08 19:31:03+00:00
You're really missing the point. Just because someone gives the order to develop nuclear weapons doesn't mean that their defense industrial base has the capacity to do it, or that it can be protected against future strikes. Furthermore, if Iran declared that it did possess working nuclear weapons that wouldn't be a deterrent: it would trigger an immediate and massive preemptive attack by the USA and Israel.
by aiaboratory | 2026-03-08 19:31:10+00:00
The addiction is real. First week I couldn't stop prompting at 2am "just one more feature."
What helped: treating it like any powerful tool. Set session limits. Take breaks to actually understand what it wrote. The excitement fades into sustainable productivity once you've mapped what it's good at vs where you still need to think.
Three months in, it's less addiction, more muscle memory.
by ragall | 2026-03-08 19:31:37+00:00
> but in that regard the principle is the same for both sysadmins and developers and I don't really see the difference?

No, it's very different: developers generally want to know about things they control, so they want detailed debugging info about a program's internal state that could have caused a malfunction. Sysadmins don't care about that (they're fine with coalescing all the errors that developers care about under a general "internal error"), and they care about what in the program environment could have triggered the bug, so that they may entirely avoid it or at least deploy workarounds to sidestep the bug.
by stavarotti | 2026-03-08 19:31:39+00:00
I've largely found codex and claude code to be about the same however, codex tends to "think" harder and for longer which depending on the task, yields better results without too much steering.

On an unrelated note, UI is such a personal preference that it's impossible, beyond core pillars that have been studied for decades, to say one is better over the other. That being said, I like OpenAI's design system much better than Anthropic. OpenAI products (cli and chat ui) "feel" nice and consumer focused whereas Anthropic's products feel utilitarian and "designed for business".
by tombert | 2026-03-08 19:31:44+00:00
Not the person you're replying to, but something that has bothered me about him (and a lot of SV tech), is how they did rapid over-hiring in 2022, then a year later fire a bunch of people, while he claimed he took "full responsibility", but still got a nice happy bonus that year. I'm not sure I know what "taking full responsibility" actually means, because to me it seems like if you have to lay off thousands of people in a year, that would be a good reason to not get a bonus.

These are peoples' lives. People almost certainly quit decent jobs because there was a prestige factor in working for Google, potentially moved to the overpriced world of California, just to be fired less than a year later because apparently Pichai thought that interest rates would never increase and there would be free money for forever. These people have families, and they almost certainly thought that moving to Google would be a "stable" position, because it's one of the biggest SV companies.

I don't know if he's good for the stock price, that's tougher to gauge, but I do think he's a short-sighted jerk.
by sfpotter | 2026-03-08 19:32:06+00:00
We kept the diapers from our diaper service and the covers. The washing machines used by the service are much beefier and can handle these kind of loads easily, and will generally be more water efficient.

We also got a good number of used diapers on Offer Up.

When we're done with our diapers, we will rehome them instead of throwing them out.

How does this change your calculations?
by Ccecil | 2026-03-08 19:32:34+00:00
I think one of the key sentences is this one :

"He has the best possible relations both with the theoretical people of whom he is one, and with the experimental people with whom he works in very close harmony."

His strength that is being highlighted is that he functions well as a middle man between the experimenters and the theoretical. There is something to be said for that. Just like being able to be the person who can go between the software and hardware people and properly communicate with both.
Things get stalled quite often by lack of communication between the disciplines.

Sometimes you don't have to be the best in either field...but being able to understand enough of each side to be able to "put people in contact" with each other when they are working on similar things (and/or be the mediator when blames are being cast) can be overlooked and unappreciated.

Often, it is good to be the person who points to the paper and says "What is that?". It gets both sides thinking.
by krackers | 2026-03-08 19:32:47+00:00
> best nutrition, daycare, early childhood learning, classes, tuition

In the past you didn't have to do any of this to be able to have a decent "middle class" living, now if one doesn't do all of that then they are already behind in the "rat race". I forgot where i read it, but basically in society we've removed any "slippage". One mistake (say an arrest record) can result in making it hard to find jobs whereas in the past you would just move. The 20 points on the sat that you might have attained if you had better nutrition in your youth make the difference between breaking into the remaining sliver of the middle class.
by Lerc | 2026-03-08 19:33:12+00:00
It's is a fairly ridiculous conclusion to draw that these people are leaving ChatGPT because of their stance. I doubt OpenAI's actions play much role in the influx at all.

A couple of weeks ago, to huge numbers of people, ChatGPT was AI. The biggest public perception shift that will have come from the DoD/DoW spat will be how many people know that Claude exists at all, that they are being unreasonably punished by the government for taking a principled stance will benefit.

People have been made aware of a product, made aware that it's good enough that the government wants to use it. They have then been shown a archetypical underdog against the government narrative. That makes almost a perfect storm for gaining customers.

When they actually use the thing and discover that it actually is good, They will stay, and they will tell their friends.

At this rate they should be sending Hegseth a thank you card.
by eavan0 | 2026-03-08 19:33:21+00:00
The precursor to this blog entry, was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46210044
Shamefully, I somehow missed out on the discussion and can longer reply.

LegionMammal978 wanted to see a proper description of the identity calculation methods. You can consider this sequel to the initial blog post as an answer.
by MemoNotSafe | 2026-03-08 19:33:23+00:00
Hey HN!

I've been building web apps for years and I've spent WAY too much time debugging CORS errors and dealing with file upload complexity. So I built ObitoX.

*What it does:*
- Auto CORS configuration (30 seconds vs 4 hours)
- 18x faster batch uploads (proved in production)
- Magic bytes validation (prevents type spoofing)
- Smart network detection (prevents upload failures)
- Universal SDK (S3, R2, Supabase, Uploadcare)

*The architecture:*
- Files upload DIRECTLY to storage (privacy-first)
- Redis-optimized backend (8 commands/request)
- 6-layer security (rate limiting, HMAC signatures)
- Provider instance pattern (like AWS SDK, cleaner API)

*Free tier:* 1,000 requests/month

Try it: https://obitox.dev

I know HN is tough on Show HN posts, but I'd genuinely love feedback from this community. What file upload problems do YOU face?

Tech details:
- Express + Redis backend
- Next.js frontend
- Supabase database
- Digital Ocean hosting
- 11/11 tests passing (100% coverage)

Happy to answer any technical questions!
by kingofmen | 2026-03-08 19:33:26+00:00
That may have been bad for users, but you can hardly claim it was bad for the company - not even in the long run. Ten years is like 40% of Google's lifetime, that is the long run! And if indeed he went all-in on AI in 2015, that seems to me like a damn near prophetic vision. Dislike AI by all means, but you can't say it's not the Current Big Thing or that Google is doing badly because of it. To see that coming so early as 2015 looks rather skilful to me.

I did not know this about Pichai and if true, it makes me feel rather better about his leadership.
by bnchrch | 2026-03-08 19:33:28+00:00
1. Proprietary Data (Youtube, docs, gmail, cloud logs, waymo, website analytics, ads, search, the list is huge)

2. Commercial Datacenters (theyre ahead at least)

3. Chip production (Google is manufactoring proprietary chips)

4. Consumer OS (Chrome, Andriod)

5. Consumer Hardware (Pixel)

Basically google has access to data that OpenAI will never have access to, can lower costs below what OpenAI can, and is already a leader in all the places OpenAI will need massive capex to catch up.
by athrowaway3z | 2026-03-08 19:33:31+00:00
Just to throw out the counterargument here.

The way AI replaces work is in that there is an enormous ROI to work with fewer (and smarter) people.
Those social interactions are a big part of work, but they are only very rarely "the work", and they cost time. In the cases that they are required; they seem to cluster and the ROI of fewer social synchronization problems increases even more.

But that might all be wrong.
I'm not confident enough to say where we'll land. I also see its possible demand will go up faster because of/and enabled by the increase in supply, and the social aspect is "the real work" to be done.