MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by joshdevon | 2026-03-10 13:06:21+00:00
The last six months of agent security have been a dumpster fire of vulnerabilities—from EchoLeak to CurXecute. Most current security relies on "prompt and pray" or sandboxing. Prompts are suggestions, not constraints. Sandboxes are a blunt instrument that often break agent utility.

At Unprompted conference, we released our work on a deterministic Reference Monitor for coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot CLI.

The Architecture:
We use local hook adapters to intercept events over stdio. These normalize agent-specific tool calls into a common Trajectory Event Model (Actions, Observations, Control, State).

Deterministic Adjudication with Cedar:
Instead of LLM as a judge, we use the Cedar policy language to authorize tool calls. Cedar allows us to write formally analyzable policies that return a binary ALLOW or DENY. It replaces probabilistic hope with a hard, deterministic boundary between the agent and your shell/filesystem.

Trajectory-Aware State:
A single request check misses the pattern. Our harness tracks state across the full execution history. If an agent reads a credential in step 1, the policy engine blocks it from calling an external API in step 10.

We’ve open sourced the hook implementations and policy packs for various coding agents:https://github.com/sondera-ai/sondera-coding-agent-hooks

Key Demos in the write-up:

--Blocking destructive commands in Claude Code.
--Stopping the lethal trifecta in Cursor.
--Enforcing Information Flow Control in Gemini CLI.
by thomasmillerGo | 2026-03-10 13:06:54+00:00
Hey HN,

You know that moment when your Mac fan starts screaming and you open Activity Monitor to find six Chrome Helper processes eating 4 GB of RAM? And you kill them, and thirty seconds later they're back?

That's what PIDKill automates.

You tell it which processes to watch. It scans at intervals you set (3–60s), and kills matches automatically. Daemon restarts itself? PIDKill kills it again. That's the whole idea.

Matching is fuzzy by default — "chrome" catches "Google Chrome Helper (Renderer)" because it checks executable names, localized display names, and paths. You don't need to know the exact process name.

Common targets people use it for:

- Chrome Helper processes hogging RAM
- Adobe Creative Cloud daemons that run even when you're not using Adobe
- Docker orphan processes after container stops
- Spotlight indexing (mds_stores) hammering your SSD
- photoanalysisd pegging CPU for hours after importing photos
- Xcode/Simulator zombie processes after crashes
- Microsoft Office background updaters
- Slack Helper eating memory while "idle"

v1.0.3 added Inspect — real-time disk and network I/O ranked by process, with record and replay. Useful for figuring out why your fan just spun up.

Native Swift + AppKit. macOS 12+. $3.99 one-time, not subscription. 3-day free trial with full functionality. One license covers 2 Macs.

Distributed via DMG with Apple Notarization (not App Store — wanted to keep the price under $5 without the 30% cut eating it).

Happy to answer questions about the implementation or take feature requests.
by samrus | 2026-03-10 13:07:00+00:00
The pitch isnt to try to squeeze money out of a product like altman does. Its to lay the groundwork for the next evolution in AI. Llms were built on decades of work and theyve hit their limits. We'll need to invest alot of time building foundations without getting any tangible yeild for the next step to work. Get too greedy and youll be stuck
by robertandrewp | 2026-03-10 13:07:14+00:00
The "one of the greatest inventions in computing" framing holds up when you look at what it actually did to financial math accessibility.

I've been implementing the functions Lotus 1-2-3 made mainstream as a REST API — amortization, NPV, IRR, compound interest — and the formulas are completely unchanged from 1983. Forty years of software evolution and the computation at the bottom has been stable the entire time.

What changed is only the interface layer: mainframe COBOL → Lotus cells → Excel formulas → Python libraries → REST endpoints. The spreadsheet era was the step that made financial math legible to non-programmers. Everything since has just been a different packaging of the same numbers.
What is Y Combinator Betting On?
by Rushalee | 2026-03-10 13:07:15+00:00
Someone on the internet pulled data on every single company from the last 5 YC batches. 793 startups. 1,625 founders.

Scraped their bios, tags, industries, partner assignments - everything.

And then ran the numbers and built a full interactive dashboard breaking all of this down.
by cjblomqvist | 2026-03-10 13:07:35+00:00
Totally. Tech neutral state incentives is the way to go for sure, everybody has different environment and context to consider (same within Sweden). Southern Europe has very different opportunities (much better situation for solar for example).

Anyway, my comment was in response to the extreme comment (parent) about how all rich countries became rich using fossil fuels - implying that that's the more or less only way to transition from poor to rich. I think it's important to note that that's not necessarily the case. You don't need to destroy the environment to go from poor to rich, even though a lot of countries historically have done it that way (also noteworthy that they did it without knowing about the consequences for the environment).
by KellyCriterion | 2026-03-10 13:07:36+00:00
OP is right!

Most designers see themself above others because they are somehow good in putting different elements together and say: This is great.

And for whatever reason, even the most worst youngster designers consider themself to be gurus, like everybody who learnt coding yesterday wouldnt say "Im John Carmack".

Designers are a special type of people
by riffraff | 2026-03-10 13:08:09+00:00
some projects (I came across Mastodon's policy[0] which they say was inspired by ghostty and others) which have a more relaxed policy of basically "LLMs are ok so long as you understand what they did, and you own it".

But I think different projects have different needs.

[0] https://github.com/mastodon/.github/blob/main/AI_POLICY.md
by butILoveLife | 2026-03-10 13:08:13+00:00
Are you and Redox just going to fall behind? Projects that used to take months take days or hours.

It seems well intentioned, but lots of bad ideas are like this.

I was told by my customer they didn't need my help because Claude Code did the program they wanted me to quote. I sheepishly said, 'I can send an intern to work in-house if you don't want to spend internal resources on it.'

I can't really imagine what kind of code will be done by hand anymore... Even military level stuff can run large local models.
by nyoki | 2026-03-10 13:08:23+00:00
Pablo Enoc:

"When I first started using RSS, I thought I’d found this great tool for keeping tabs on news, current events, and stuff I should and do care about.

After adding newspapers, blogs, magazines, publications, YouTube channels and release notes from software I use, I felt a false sense of accomplishment, like I’d finally been able to wrangle the craziness of the internet into a single app, like I had rebelled against the algorithm™.

But it didn’t take long to accumulate hundreds of posts, most of which I had no true desire to read, and soon after I abandoned my RSS reader. I came back to check on it from time to time, but its dreadful little indicator of unread posts felt like a personal failure, so eventually I deleted it entirely."
by staticman2 | 2026-03-10 13:08:28+00:00
> If you took Einstein at 40 and surgically removed his hippocampus so he can't learn anything he didn't already know (meaning no online learning), that's still a very useful AGI.

I like how people are accepting this dubious assertion that Einstein would be "useful" if you surgically removed his hippocampus and engaging with this.

It also calls this Einstein an AGI rather than a disabled human???
by hkonte | 2026-03-10 13:08:33+00:00
The CV-to-job-search demo is a good showcase. For multi-step workflows like this, one issue I've run into is that the agent instructions degrade across steps. The initial task description is clear, but by step 5 the model is interpolating intent from earlier context rather than following explicit instructions.

Structuring the task prompt into named blocks (objective, constraints, expected output format per step) before the workflow starts makes each step much more reliable. The agent has less to infer.

Built github.com/Nyrok/flompt to help with this, a visual builder that decomposes instructions into semantic blocks and compiles to Claude-optimized XML. Useful for defining the "task shape" before handing it to an agent.
by rkangel | 2026-03-10 13:08:43+00:00
The nursery has clear times that it is "open". I must drop off my child between A and B O'clock in the morning, and I must collect them between X and Y O'clock in the afternoon. Like a shop - they are allowed to have opening hours.

The issue is that they can't just close when they want if there's a child still there. So they have to have some way of enforcing these rules on parents. A "per minute" fine seems appropriate, so that it's more the later you are. And you need the fine to be enough that it is punitive enough, when considered against the income of your parents. Otherwise it provides no incentive. Ours is not $300 (more like $30), but it seems fair.
by landl0rd | 2026-03-10 13:08:47+00:00
Actually you can slice out a lot of things. It's even a GAAP metric, i.e. one of the common baseline that public companies are required to report, known as gross margin, literally just (revenue - cogs) / revenue. It is distinct from net margin, but both are useful and low gross vs net margin say very different things concerning the long-term prospects of the business.
by alex_duf | 2026-03-10 13:08:48+00:00
Exactly, I stopped reading when I saw the flying stats. There are people who still haven't clocked where our climate is headed.

I get that you may have to see family abroad or maybe indulge for a holiday, but this is "I'm using an airplane to commute" kind of level.

And here I am trying to book my train tickets to go to London instead of flying even though it costs three times as much just to avoid a few kg of CO2 (among other things), it's making me angry.
SHOW HN: A usage circuit breaker for Cloudflare Workers
by ethan_zhao | 2026-03-10 13:09:00+00:00
I run 3mins.news (https://3mins.news), an AI news aggregator built entirely on Cloudflare Workers. The backend has 10+ cron triggers running every few minutes — RSS fetching, article clustering, LLM calls, email delivery.

The problem: Workers Paid Plan has hard monthly limits (10M requests, 1M KV writes, 1M queue ops, etc.). There's no built-in "pause when you hit the limit" — CF just starts billing overages. KV writes cost $5/M over the cap, so a retry loop bug can get expensive fast.

AWS has Budget Alerts, but those are passive notifications — by the time you read the email, the damage is done. I wanted active, application-level self-protection.

So I built a circuit breaker that faces inward — instead of protecting against downstream failures (the Hystrix pattern), it monitors my own resource consumption and gracefully degrades before hitting the ceiling.

Key design decisions:

- Per-resource thresholds: Workers Requests ($0.30/M overage) only warns at 80%. KV Writes ($5/M overage) can trip the breaker at 90%. Not all resources are equally dangerous, so some are configured as warn-only (trip=null).

- Hysteresis: Trips at 90%, recovers at 85%. The 5% gap prevents oscillation — without it the system flaps between tripped and recovered every check cycle.

- Fail-safe on monitoring failure: If the CF usage API is down, maintain last known state rather than assuming "everything is fine." A monitoring outage shouldn't mask a usage spike.

- Alert dedup: Per-resource, per-month. Without it you'd get ~8,600 identical emails for the rest of the month once a resource hits 80%.

Implementation: every 5 minutes, queries CF's GraphQL API (requests, CPU, KV, queues) + Observability Telemetry API (logs/traces) in parallel, evaluates 8 resource dimensions, caches state to KV. Between checks it's a single KV read — essentially free.

When tripped, all scheduled tasks are skipped. The cron trigger still fires (you can't stop that), but the first thing it does is check the breaker and bail out if tripped.

It's been running in production for two weeks. Caught a KV reads spike at 82% early in the month — got one warning email, investigated, fixed the root cause, never hit the trip threshold.

The pattern should apply to any metered serverless platform (Lambda, Vercel, Supabase) or any API with budget ceilings (OpenAI, Twilio). The core idea: treat your own resource budget as a health signal, just like you'd treat a downstream service's error rate.

Happy to share code details if there's interest.

Full writeup with implementation code and tests: https://yingjiezhao.com/en/articles/Usage-Circuit-Breaker-for-Cloudflare-Workers
by dingleberry | 2026-03-10 13:09:33+00:00
i use slimv instead

i think the powerful feature is not (only) merely sending code to repl

but the suggestion for function's parameter as the function is updated to repl

for example:
(defun xyz (a &option b &rest c &key d)
)
;then send this with ,d (vim+slimv) to swank server

the next time i type (xyz ... vim status bar conveniently states:
(xyz a &optional b &rest c &key d)

both happen whether i start typing (xyz in repl or in vim; that's it, the function parameters show up as suggestions in repl and in editor
by abustamam | 2026-03-10 13:09:55+00:00
I agree, to an extent. It reminds me of the Simpsons meme[1]: it's the children who are wrong!

But sometimes timing is indeed wrong, not because of anything you did, but just because no one wanted it _yet_. Google Glass from a few years ago comes to mind. Now Meta has a similar idea and it does seem successful, much to society's dismay.

But sometimes it is worth asking, "does the idea actually suck and that's why no one likes it? Or is it actually a good idea that is muddied with other issues that no one likes?"

The article doesn't make it clear that they were that introspective.

[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/am-i-so-out-of-touch
by butILoveLife | 2026-03-10 13:10:19+00:00
I genuinely feel bad for you. At least it isnt difficult to make the transition to AI Agent coding. Even untrained people are able to do it.

At some point your manager is going to force you to AI code. At best you can try to find some healthcare or finance company that is too cheap to buy a machine that can locally run 400B models.
by thomasmillerGo | 2026-03-10 13:11:03+00:00
Maker here. Some technical context:

Process discovery uses sysctl + NSRunningApplication. Kill signals go through POSIX kill() with SIGKILL — no graceful shutdown, just immediate termination. For the I/O monitor, I'm polling per-process disk and network stats via IOKit.

The fuzzy matching was the trickiest part. macOS processes often have different executable names vs. what Activity Monitor shows (localized display names). PIDKill checks against the executable name, the display name, and the full path — so partial input like "chrome" or "adobe" usually catches what you want.

I went with DMG + Gumroad license keys instead of the App Store. At $3.99 the 30% cut would have made it hard to justify the time spent maintaining it.

One thing I'm still iterating on: the Inspect tab (I/O monitor) can record activity and replay it frame-by-frame. It's useful for debugging intermittent disk/network spikes, but I'm not sure how many people will discover it. Feedback welcome on that.

Question for HN — what processes drive you crazy on macOS? I seeded the initial use cases from my own pain (Xcode, Simulator, Adobe, Chrome), but I'm sure there are offenders I'm not thinking of.
by FrustratedMonky | 2026-03-10 13:11:50+00:00
Either side of an analogy can have factors at different scales. But it can still be a valid analogy.

If you are saying that because slavery was much worse, then modern slaves should just suck it up and work harder. Then that isn't really helping is it?

This is kind of the argument "others have had it worse, so lets not try to make anything better for people today".
by philipswood | 2026-03-10 13:12:42+00:00
I'm not sure that "it is clear that Claude does not have those things".

I AM sure that it is hard to conclusively show that Claude has experience and consciousness. Even Claude isn't sure about that.

But while it is absolutely true that "it is a word calculator" - unless you hold the position that human consciousness isn't neural[1]- I don't see how this is any different from saying saying humans beings are neural activation pattern calculators.

If you're sure that your consciousness isn't neural - then fine: Claude isn't made of the right stuff so couldn't possibly be. But state your assumption up-front.

If one opens up a person and looks at their nervous system the single neurons look complicated, but not especially mysterious.

Given how shockingly little we understand the brain/mind it is hard to be sure that we are certain enough of how we work and given how little we know how LLMs work at any of the many layers above the raw architecture either position can be reasonably held, but not convincingly argued/demonstrated.

Feel free to think Claude isn't conscious - I can't prove to you it isn't. And the amount of theory we still need to learn to be able to is vast.

But don't expect me to be _certain_ that it isn't and couldn't be - you simply can't show that convincingly either.

[1]
Penrose thinks we have a quantum nature - so sure no classical computer can be then.
Some like Rupert Sheldrake think it's a field phenomenon - very woo maybe Claude has a morphic field as well?
Lots of people are sure we have a supernatural soul/spirit. One then needs to take up Claude's status with the Creator.
by Noaidi | 2026-03-10 13:12:53+00:00
If you are not sick, tracking your life like this is, like he said, is useless. Enjoy your life!

On the other hand, if you are sick like me, charting your long term heath data from doctors visits and photographing skin issues can lead to great discoveries. I have been diagnosed with Erythrocytosis and a susceptibility to mycobacteria infection which caused pulmonary nodules and skin lesions. Only after showing my data collection to my doctor. Since I have mental illness they constantly over looked my physical issues so I needed hard data to convince them of my ideas.

For those curious, I have an minor IL12B deficiency and a partial immune deficiency leading to mildly elevated levels of DexoyATP which is partially corrected with zinc supplements.
by drewg123 | 2026-03-10 13:12:56+00:00
If you're installing FreeBSD today, use 15.0

Or just run -current in production, like we do. See https://people.freebsd.org/~gallatin/talks/OpenFest2023.pdf

Or https://papers.freebsd.org/2019/fosdem/looney-netflix_and_fr...
by xvxvx | 2026-03-10 13:13:05+00:00
Sounds like some more Musk bullshit to me. You run a skeleton crew that allows Nazi propaganda to proliferate but find time to suspend 800M accounts?

X is a graveyard. There is almost nothing worthwhile on there. Shame BlueSky turned out to be garbage, otherwise the last holdouts would have bailed on X.
by petcat | 2026-03-10 13:13:26+00:00
I've seen skills on the various skillz marketplaces that specifically instruct the LLM-generated text to replace emdashes with hyphens (or double-hyphens), and never to use the "it's not just <thing>, it's <other thing>" phrasing.

Also to, intentionally introduce random innoccuous punctuation and speling errors.
Show HN: Local-first firmware analyzer using WebAssembly
by asabil | 2026-03-10 13:13:31+00:00
Hi HN,

I just wanted to share what I have been working on for the past few months: A firmware analyzer for embedded Linux systems that helps uncovering security issues running entirely in the browser.

This is a very early Alpha. It is going to be rough around the edges. But I think it provides quite a lot of value already.

So please go ahead and drop a firmware (only .tar rootfs archives for now) and try to break it :)
by rswail | 2026-03-10 13:13:45+00:00
I think you need to read the report from the US Copyright office that specifically says that it's *not* (c) copyright of the operator.

It doesn't matter if the "change this variable name" instruction ends up with the same result as a human operator using a text editor.

There is a big difference between "change this variable name" and "refactor this code base to extract a singleton".
Show HN: DD Photos – open-source photo album site generator (Go and SvelteKit)
by dougdonohoe | 2026-03-10 13:13:48+00:00
I was frustrated with photo sharing sites. Apple's iCloud shared albums take 20+ seconds to load, and everything else comes with ads, cumbersome UIs, or social media distractions. I just want to share photos with friends and family: fast, mobile-friendly, distraction-free.

So I built DD Photos. You export photos from whatever you already use (Lightroom, Apple Photos, etc.) into folders, run `photogen` (a Go CLI) to resize them to WebP and generate JSON indexes, then deploy the SvelteKit static site anywhere that serves files. Apache, S3, whatever. No server-side code, no database.

Built over several weeks with heavy use of Claude Code, which I found genuinely useful for this kind of full-stack project spanning Go, SvelteKit/TypeScript, Apache config, Docker, and Playwright tests. Happy to discuss that experience too.

Live example: https://photos.donohoe.info
Repo: https://github.com/dougdonohoe/ddphotos
by kentonv | 2026-03-10 13:13:49+00:00
> flatbuffers and capnproto are in the game of trying to make serialization to binary format as efficient as possible.

Little-understood fact about Cap'n Proto: Serialization is not the game at all. The RPC system is the whole game, the serialization was just done as a sort of stunt. Indeed, unless you are mmap()ing huge files, the serialization speed doesn't really matter. Though I would say the implementation of Cap'n Proto is quite a bit simpler than Protobuf due to the serialization format just being simpler, and that in itself is a nice benefit.

The recently-released Cap'n Web jettisons the whole serialization side and focuses just on the RPC system: https://blog.cloudflare.com/capnweb-javascript-rpc-library/

(I'm the author of Cap'n Proto and Cap'n Web.)
by abrooks43 | 2026-03-10 13:13:50+00:00
Most organizations don’t actually know how work gets done.

Processes live in people’s heads, scattered documents, outdated diagrams, and endless meetings. When companies try to improve operations or implement new systems, they spend weeks or months running discovery workshops just to figure out how things currently work.

I built ClearWork to solve this.

ClearWork uses AI to capture the tribal knowledge across teams and systems asynchronously and turn it into structured artifacts teams can actually use — things like process maps, diagrams, SOPs, requirements, and KPIs.

Instead of running dozens of interviews and manually documenting everything, teams can run automated discovery that gathers input from employees, analyzes documents and recordings, and generates the outputs needed to plan projects or improve operations.

One of the big problems with process documentation is that it immediately becomes outdated. So we recently added Collaboration Spaces, which turn ClearWork into a centralized, AI-enabled knowledge base where teams can:

• Store process maps, documentation, diagrams, and KPIs
• Govern and version process artifacts
• Continuously collect feedback from subject matter experts
• Automatically schedule reviews so documentation evolves as the business changes

The goal is simple: help organizations actually understand how their business operates so they can improve it.

I’d love feedback from the HN community — especially from people who’ve dealt with process mapping, enterprise discovery, or messy internal documentation.