MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwaway17_17 | 2026-03-11 13:25:29+00:00
Thanks for the reply Andrew, I certainly did not mean to imply any issues with trustworthiness for Zig users or prospective adopters. Also, I absolutely did not intend to imply any negatives toward Zog’s evolution or this particular development on the compiler’s internals.

I enjoy all of the process and implementation content, i.e. videos, podcast, and blogs that yourself and contributors have provided through various platforms over the years. I made a comment from a relatively u informed place and it seems to have been taken as a negative remark on Zig or the language and compiler’s development. Apologies if it was seen that way yourself or other contributors.

As for Matthew, the work both planning and implementing these changes was clearly a large undertaking and I certainly applaud that and hope no one thought otherwise.
by dogcomplex | 2026-03-11 13:25:31+00:00
AI agents already interoperate between platforms, getting spun up and torn down by the thousands. But when one departs, there's no record - no portable proof beyond non-standardized internal platform logs. When one arrives somewhere new, there's no way to verify where it came from. Which means no unified tracking on multi-hops or complex calls between several platforms in an agent's lifecycle. Nobody knows the full picture, and nobody can track security if and when one of those agents starts doing something it shouldn't.

Think of our protocol as passport stamps for AI. EXIT creates signed departure records. ENTRY handles admission with policy-based verification, quarantine, and counter-signatures. Together they form the Passage Protocol.

This matters for boring, practical reasons: insurance underwriters can't price agent risk without departure history. GDPR requires erasure proof when agents carry PII across borders. Liability after an incident depends on departure conditions nobody records. And the receiving platform has no structured way to decide whether to trust an arriving agent. If you cant bound risk, you can't price reputation - and you can't insure security.

Transport stamps are our foundational layer (L0). Reputation scoring, trust systems, and insurance protocols compose on top. We deliberately didn't build those (yet) - but we built the plumbing they need. Everything an AI-led internet needs to build stable, auditable and self-regulated network security incentives - even if that might soon be moving faster than we can keep up with.

The same infrastructure has been needed for shipping receipts, professional licensing, vehicle registration, and internet domains - historically, this kind of infrastructure only really gets adopted after a major crisis. We'd prefer to get it in place before.

What's in the box:

- Ed25519 + P-256 (FIPS-compliant path)
- Three departure paths: cooperative, unilateral, emergency
- Policy engine with 7 admission presets (fail-closed default)
- Amendment and revocation (correct or invalidate records)
- GDPR erasure via crypto-shredding
- Offline verification without the origin platform
- On-chain anchoring via EAS, ERC-8004, Sign Protocol
- TypeScript and Python SDKs
- LangChain, Vercel AI SDK, MCP, Eliza integrations

What we're forcing the conversation on: agent lifecycle infrastructure. Today, the only "safe" option for running agents is containment, and containment doesn't scale. If you make departure and admission auditable, you make mobility viable. Without lifecycle records, only organizations with legal teams big enough to absorb unbounded liability will run agents. That's three companies. Maybe four.

- Submitted to NIST AI Agent Standards Initiative, March 2026
- 1,401 tests across 13 packages
- TypeScript + Python
- Zero users. This is day one.

Apache 2.0 · 14 repos · cellar-door.dev
by snek_case | 2026-03-11 13:25:38+00:00
That's the direction the field is already going with "agents". People want autonomous AI agents that are capable of acting independently and that have more and more capabilities. For example, something like Claude code, but that acts as a sidekick that is constantly running, and able to act without being prompted. That's what people are imagining when they talk about teams of agents. You act as a manager, but your coding agents are off working on various features and only check in periodically.
by mlugg | 2026-03-11 13:25:47+00:00
Hi, author of this devlog here! Not to dismiss concerns about breaking language changes, but there seems to be a bit of a misconception here that this compiler change was highly breaking and will require significant effort from Zig users to update for. Perhaps I unintentionally gave that impression in the devlog or the PR writeup, apologies if so---but it's not the case! Although there were breaking changes in this patch, they were quite minor: most users are unlikely to hit them, and if they do then they're straightforward to deal with.

For a concrete example, while testing this branch, I tried building ZLS (https://github.com/zigtools/zls/). To do that, the only change I had to make was changing `.{}` to `.empty` in a couple of its dependencies (i.e. not even in ZLS itself!). This was needed because I removed some default values from `std.ArrayList` (so the change was in standard library code rather than the language). Those default values had actually already been deprecated (with intent to remove) for around a year, so this wasn't exactly a new change either.

As another example, Andrew has updated Awebo (https://codeberg.org/awebo-chat/awebo), a text and voice chat application, to the new version of Zig. Across Awebo's entire dependency tree (which includes various packages for graphics, audio, and probably some other stuff), the full set of necessary changes was:

* Same as above, change `.{}` to `.empty` in a few places, due to removal of deprecated defaults

* Add one extra `comptime` annotation to logic which was constructing an array at comptime

* Append `orelse @alignOf(T)` onto an expression to deal with a newly-possible `null` case

These are all trivial fixes which Zig developers would be able to do pretty much on autopilot upon seeing the compile errors.

So, while there were a handful of small breaking changes, they don't seem to me like a particularly big deal (for a language where some level of breakage is still allowed). The main thing this PR achieved was instead a combination of bugfixes, and enhancements to existing features (particularly incremental compilation).
by Dwedit | 2026-03-11 13:26:28+00:00
Log Base 2 of 3 = ~1.5849625, so that's the limit to how well you can pack three-state values into bits of data.

For something more practical, you can pack five three-state values within a byte because 3^5 = 243, which is smaller than 256. To unpack, you divide and modulo by 3 five separate times. This encodes data in bytes at 1.6 bits per symbol.

But the packing of 5 symbols into a byte was not done here. Instead, they packed 4 symbols into a byte to reduce computational complexity (no unpacking needed)
by swiftcoder | 2026-03-11 13:26:48+00:00
> literally the richest man in the world... extreme returns for his investors

This isn't really a benchmark for effectiveness at anything beyond making money.

I don't think anyone would dispute that he has an eye for investments (helped along by a healthy dose of the ol' silver spoon), not to mention a certain flair for convincing Uncle Sam to pick up the tab (i.e. a significant part of Tesla's growth relied on federal EV subsidies, and NASA heavily buying SpaceX launch capacity).
by ragall | 2026-03-11 13:26:58+00:00
> If you could do the same checks and caching in a few hundred milliseconds it would only improve the usability for the cashier.

No it wouldn't. Those interfaces are permanent and only get restarted once a day or if the hardware has to be rebooted. Same for Emacs: there's absolutely no need to start the editor every single time.

> You haven't made a case for why some user interfaces shouldn't start instantly

I'm not making any case, we're not in court. Startup time is irrelevant and your fixation with it is really funny (up to a point).
by alphawhisky | 2026-03-11 13:27:21+00:00
Kudos dad/mom, that's a hard job. I feel like getting them exposed to technology and the dopamine generator that is games as a younger kid can help you teach more lessons around managing habits that can become maladaptive. Our world is increasingly engineered for addiction, and having conversations about self control starting young can help develop maturity. I know plenty of friends (2001 baby) that did not have access to internet/games until the 8th grade when the school provided laptops, and they STRUGGLED to handle the intensity of that distraction because they were never exposed and weren't taught healthy habits around technology. Exposure therapy is a great way to manage that.
by juleiie | 2026-03-11 13:27:39+00:00
It sounds different but it is great in its own right and priced adequately to how amazing it sounds. Maybe 'alternative' is a wrong word. I think I meant 1:1 replica.

Also it doesn't come with ring modulator nor ribbon. I think black corp synthesizers are inspired by the original vintage devices and are great on their own but there are justified reasons to also avoid them mostly because of common issues that arise when you buy a niche product from a tiny company thousands of kilometers away.
by graemep | 2026-03-11 13:28:02+00:00
Where in Asia do you have in mind? A few things I know off hand. Sri Lanka has a higher population density than Britain, Japan's is much higher than that, and Java has nearly the population of Russia in an area smaller than England (just England, not Britain or the UK). India and China are big, but have huge populations.

There is lots of "unused space" in places like Alaska or Siberia or deserts or mountains, but land is not a fungible commodity. Unused space is unused for a reason. In practice, almost all ownership of land is a zero sum game.
by boringg | 2026-03-11 13:28:38+00:00
It feels like the quality of reddit collapsed over the last decade and a lot of the reddit style posting has come over here. Especially the examples above. To be fair both the good and the bad.

The upvoting for political tribalism (whole political spectrum) is so truly mind bogglingly unintelligent and unoriginal. Its just brings the bar down.
by palata | 2026-03-11 13:28:53+00:00
The title is misleading. It's an e-voting PILOT. That's important. "Switzerland is running small-scale e-voting pilots in four of its 26 cantons", three of which were not affected.

From Wikipedia [1]:

> A pilot experiment, pilot study, pilot test or pilot project is a small-scale preliminary study conducted to evaluate feasibility, duration, cost, adverse events, and improve upon the study design prior to performance of a full-scale research project.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_experiment
by utopiah | 2026-03-11 13:29:00+00:00
> A lot of what one previously needed a SWE to do can now be brute forced well enough with AI.

I've never met those people. I've met a LOT of PM who tried. I've met a LOT of entrepreneur who also tried. They never cared, nor even understand, code. They only cared about "value" (and they are not necessarily wrong about it) so now they can "produce" something that does what need until it doesn't. When that's the case then they inexorably go back to someone else (might be a SWE, ironically enough, but might also be someone else like them they shift responsibility to, for money).

Brute force works until you have to backtrack, then it becomes prohibitively expensive until one has to actually grok the problem landscape. It's amazing for toy projects though, maybe.
by intrasight | 2026-03-11 13:29:39+00:00
It's not so much a "minimally viable LLM" but rather an LLM that knows natural language well but knows nothing else. Like me - as an engineer who knows how to troubleshoot in general but doesn't know about a specific device like my furnace (recent example).

And I don't think that LLM could just Google or check Wikipedia.

But I do agree that this architecture makes a lot of sense. I assume it will become the norm to use such edge LLMs.
by dchftcs | 2026-03-11 13:30:16+00:00
I don't think denying a ride to a stranger in a sketchy situation counts as being nasty. If it's not false accusations, it could be a knife at your throat or whatever (your example about male rape definitely doesn't help your case here).

Let's have a thought experiment.

If we take the prevalence of false accusations be several thousands a year (the lower end of the estimate), it would be between 1 to 2 incidents per 100k population in the US. For your UK statistics, I can't find a citation either - in terms of prosecuted cases you're perhaps right, again the buck doesn't just start with prosecution. Reported rape incidents can be up to 70k and prosecuted incidents is less than a tenth of that, and it's probably similar for false accusations - what I can find is an estimated prevalence of 3%, so in the UK it would be up to 2.1k among reported (not necessarily prosecuted) cases.

Incidentally, 1 to 2 per 100k is in the ballpark of rape statistics in low-crime areas, such as Hong Kong, Japan or Singapore. So the risk of rape in those areas is similar to the risk of false accusations in the US.

With this in mind, if a woman denies a ride to a strange man in Hong Kong in the middle of the night, does that mean she was nasty to the man? If you say yes, it's probably not the prevailing sentiment in those areas; if you say no, perhaps that can point to some cognitive bias.

For unions, sure let me know when you're able to set them up. Similarly, you can tell women in Hong Kong or Singapore to not worry about rape because you're going to do something to make the world better for them. But another important nuance is that unions won't help as much as you think they would. In the case of false accusations of pretty much anything, a lot of the damage is social, for people who are not already powerful; rape is an especially touchy topic that you would find fellow union members, especially female members, and sometimes spouses, to be less than sympathetic.
by pmf_hunter | 2026-03-11 13:30:28+00:00
Running 6 persistent agents on a VPS that handle business ops - not just code gen. They do market research, content creation, video scripts, knowledge management. Each agent has its own memory, tools, and instructions.

For infra specifically: agents can run shell commands, manage Docker, deploy via git. The key insight was giving them narrow permissions per role rather than full root access. The research agent can read logs but can't deploy. The content agent can write files but can't touch infra.

Biggest risk isn't agents breaking things - it's agents confidently doing the wrong thing without telling you. So every destructive action requires confirmation, and all changes go through trash instead of rm.

Haven't used MCP servers much - direct tool access through the orchestration layer turned out to be simpler and more reliable.
by coldtea | 2026-03-11 13:30:45+00:00
People in everyday life are not evaluating rules. They evaluate cases, for whether a case fits a rule.

So, when being told:

"Which card(s) must you turn over in order to test that if a card shows an even number on one face, then its opposite face is blue?"

they translate it to:

"Check the cards that show an even number on one face to see whether their opposite face is blue and vice versa"

Based on this, many would naturally pick the blue card (to test the direct case), and the 8 card (to test the "vice versa" case).

They wont check the red to see if there's an odd number there that invalidates the formulation as a general rule, because they're not in the mindset of testing a general rule.

Would they do the same if they had more familiarity with rule validation in everyday life or if the had a more verbose and explicit explanation of the goal?
by wongarsu | 2026-03-11 13:31:10+00:00
Approximately as challenging as training a regular 100B model from scratch. Maybe a bit more challenging because there's less experience with it

The key insight of the BitNet paper was that using their custom BitLinear layer instead of normal Linear layers (as well as some more training and architecture changes) lead to much, much better results than quantizing an existing model down to 1.58 bits. So you end up making a full training run in bf16 precision using the specially adapted architecture
by Verdex | 2026-03-11 13:31:11+00:00
Yeah, in the past the limiting factor was the human suffering of the engineer who had to try and fit the sprawling nightmare fuel into their brain.

The machine doesn't suffer. Or if it does nobody cares. People eventually start having panic attacks, the machine can just be reset.

I suspect that the end result is just driving further into the wilderness before reality sets in and you have to call an adult.
by vova_hn2 | 2026-03-11 13:31:15+00:00
It's interesting that first they use words like "association", but then somehow switch to "more harmful" and "more detrimental".

As far a I can understand the study design, it can establish a correlation but bot a causal relationship.

So, instead of implying that using computer up to "2.4 h/day" decreases risk of dementia, but higher screen time increases it, we could as well conclude that dementia patients are either unable to use a PC (< 2.4 h/day) or unable to stop using a PC (> 2.4 h/day).

I'm not confident at all at my ability to interpret this study, since it is definitely not my area of expertise, so, please, correct me if I'm wrong.

Update #1, after reading the article more carefully:

> "First, as an observational cohort study, causal relationships cannot be inferred; observed associations may reflect residual or unmeasured confounding and reverse causation."

that's what I said

> Second, a single baseline self-report likely introduced measurement error, missed secular shifts in digital-media use, and lacked content/context; session fragmentation, breaks, concurrent media, timing (e.g., evening vs daytime), and device type were unavailable.

How much do we really trust a dementia patient's self-report on device usage? I wouldn't even trust a healthy person's self-report. I think that anyone who ever tried to track screen time on computer or on the phone can understand how unreliable are your intuitive guesstimates compared to actual measurements.
by shevy-java | 2026-03-11 13:31:46+00:00
This may make sense from their point of view, but from a user's point of view I do not understand why I would want my own operating system to spy on me so the government can get more data, which it may then hand over to others. Now the main problem is that governments become increasingly hostile to The People, but now downstream people suddenly act as surrogate-spy helpers, such as the MidnightBSD folks do. This is a simple case where people should globally reject criminal governments from spying on people.
by kprotty | 2026-03-11 13:32:17+00:00
Yes, I've written a few unsafe-focused crates [0], some of which have been modified & merged into the stdlib [1] [2] exposing them to the fringe edge-cases of Rust like strict provenance.

IMO, Rust is good for modeling static constraints - ideal when there's multiple teams of varying skill trying to work on the same codebase, as the contracts for components are a lot clearer. Zig is good for expressing system-level constructs efficiently: doing stuff like self-referential/intrusive data structures, cross-platform simd, and memory transformations is a lot easier in Zig than Rust.

Personally, I like Zig more.

[0] https://crates.io/users/kprotty

[1] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/95801

[2] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/a63150b9cb14896fc22f9...
by glhaynes | 2026-03-11 13:33:14+00:00
If you're addressing this to me: you need to separate my description of how I perceive things from any effort/desire on my part to make that come to pass. I don't expect to stand to gain if AI continues to get better at coding — most likely just the opposite; this is the first time in my career that I've ever felt much anxiety about whether I'd be able to find work in my field in the future.

There are many others like me who share this expectation, and, while we certainly may be wrong, it's not because of some sinister plan to make the prophecy come true. (There are certainly some who do have sinister/profit-seeking motives, of course!)
by neuralkoi | 2026-03-11 13:33:19+00:00
This post feels a bit ideological in nature. There are recurring processes at organizations to assess someone's fit in a given role. Generally when someone is no longer performing as expected, they're given time to correct their ways or retrain. If the organization has no system in place, then it really falls on the organization. I wonder if the author overestimates the amount of people who really want to be in a role they're not good at.
by bell-cot | 2026-03-11 13:33:28+00:00
True.

But for 99% of Americans, "affordability crisis" is the ratio between the wages they receive and the prices they have to pay.

So if you could (say) roll back rents to pre-RealPage levels - from the PoV of the ~25M rent-burdened (and worse) Americans, would that meaningfully differ from receiving a huge wage increase?
by shevy-java | 2026-03-11 13:33:29+00:00
That may be a rationale, but then they act to help governments spy on people. This is a no go. I understand that the government created that problem, but they should just refuse acting as proxy-sniffer for governments here. Who in his or her sane mind would want age-spying daemons to run on their systems? Next thing the BSDs will do is to support systemd ... then we can integrate the sniffing and call it systemd-kiddie-protector.c.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-03-11 13:33:58+00:00
I think you're conflating mechanism and function/capability.

I'm not sure what I wrote that made you conclude that I thought these models are not learning anything from their RL training?! Let me say it again: they are learning to steer towards reasoning steps that during training led to rewards.

The capabilities of LLMs, both with and without RL, are a bit counter-intuitive, and I think that, at least in part, comes down to the massive size of the training sets and the number of novel combinations of patterns that means they can potentially generate.

In a way it's surprising how FEW new mathematical results they've been coaxed into generating, given that they've probably encountered a huge portion of mankind's mathematical knowledge, and can potentially recombine all of these pieces in at least somewhat arbitrary ways. You might have thought that there are results A, B and C hiding away in some obscure mathematical papers that no human has previously considered to put together before (just because of the vast number of such potential combinations), that might lead to some interesting result.

If you are unsure yourself about whether LLMs are sufficient to reach AGI (meaning full human-level intelligence), then why not listen to someone like Demis Hassabis, one of the brightest and best placed people in the field to have considered this, who says the answer is "no", and that a number of major new "transformer-level" discoveries/inventions will be needed to get there.
by throwaway17_17 | 2026-03-11 13:34:05+00:00
I made one of the comments that seems to be perceived a critical of the changes (I made a statement about the seemingly brief paragraph on changing semantics). As I replied to Andrew, I will tell you: the PR had a large amount of planning and implementation that seems of great quality. I certainly did not intend to discredit you or the obviously large amount of work you have done previously or on the change. I guess that will teach me to post without even more caveats.