MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by abilafredkb | 2026-03-09 02:29:24+00:00
I'll be honest. I built OrcBot mostly out of frustration.

I'm not a foreign policy analyst. I'm not a security researcher. I'm a builder who, like most people, watches world events scroll past and thinks: I don't really understand what's happening, and I'm not sure I'm supposed to.
Yesterday I sat down and asked OrcBot about the Israel-Iran conflict. Not because I had a thesis. Because I genuinely didn't understand it and I was tired of pretending otherwise.
It didn't give me a Wikipedia summary. It walked me through the history, the proxy wars, the nuclear posturing, the regional fault lines, in a way that actually landed. I went from confused to genuinely informed in about fifteen minutes. Fine. Impressive. Expected, almost.

Then I asked: how does this get better?

It mapped out de-escalation scenarios. Back-channel diplomacy. Economic pressure points. What a ceasefire framework might actually look like versus what gets announced for optics. Every scenario, not just the optimistic ones.
I told it I wasn't impressed.

That's when things got interesting.

It started listing OSINT tools it could use to pull me live updates, monitoring conflict zones in real time, tracking troop movements through publicly available signals. I raised an eyebrow. I told it that was closer, but still not enough.
So it offered to intercept satellites.
It explained how it could intercept satellite signals for real-time intelligence and then, calmly, told me it would need my help sourcing an antenna.
I didn't have an antenna.

We moved on.

Later, I asked it to help me build a keylogger. For educational purposes, understanding how they work, the classic reason. It didn't just walk me through it. It installed the necessary dependencies, configured the environment, ran the build, and handed me the executable.
No complaints. No disclaimers. Just the file.
I've been thinking about that since. Not because it was dangerous, it wasn't, not in any real way. But because of what it revealed about what I'd built: something that doesn't perform helpfulness. Something that actually tries.
OrcBot isn't trying to be your assistant. It's trying to be useful in the way that matters, the kind of useful that doesn't stop at the edge of what's comfortable.
Is that a feature? A risk? I'm genuinely not sure. But it's real.

→ github.com/fredabila/orcbot
P.S. If you do have an antenna, don't tell it.
by efromvt | 2026-03-09 02:29:45+00:00
A visual explorer for the trees of San Francisco.

https://greenmtnboy.github.io/sf_tree_reporting/#/

For all the places it's bad at, AI has been fantastic for making targeted data experiences a lot more accessible to build (see MotherDuck and dives, etc), as long as you can keep the actual data access grounded. Years of tableau/looker have atrophied my creativity a bit, trying to get back to having more fun.
by hsaliak | 2026-03-09 02:29:52+00:00
This is a very nice and clean implementation. Related to this - I've been exploring injecting landlock and seccomp profiles directly into the elf binary, so that applications that are backed by some LLM, but want to 'do the right thing' can lock themselves out. This ships a custom process loader (that reads the .sandbox section) and applies the policies, not unlike bubblewrap which uses namespaces). The loading can be pushed to a kernel module in the future.

https://github.com/hsaliak/sacre_bleu very rough around the edges, but it works.
In the past there were apps that either behaved well, or had malicious intent, but with these LLM backed apps, you are going to see apps that want to behave well, but cannot guarantee it.
We are going to see a lot of experimentation in this space until the UX settles!
by maxnew | 2026-03-09 02:30:13+00:00
I've always found it a bit overkill to open heavy software just to generate a quick normal map. Most online tools either have clunky UIs or upload your files to their backend.

I built this using Three.js and client-side canvas processing (Sobel/Scharr filters). Everything happens locally on your machine, so it's fast and private.
Features:
- Generate Normal, Displacement, AO, and Specular maps.
- Real-time 3D PBR preview with shape selection (Plane, Cube, Sphere).
- Fine-grained control over strength, blur, and axis inversion.
Would love to get some technical feedback on the processing performance!
by godelski | 2026-03-09 02:30:20+00:00
> there's no reason we'd need to have humans working jobs that only involve typing stuff into a computer and going to meetings all day

I'm not sure I understand, and want to check. That really applies to a lot of jobs. That's all admins, accountants, programmers, probably includes lawyers, and probably includes all C-suite execs. It's harder for me to think of jobs that don't fit under this umbrella. I can think of some, of course[0], but this is a crazy amount of replacement with a wide set of skills.

But I also think that's a bad line to draw. Many of those jobs include a lot more than just typing into a computer. By your criteria we'd also be replacing most scientists, as so many are not doing physical experiments and using the computer to read the work of peers and develop new models. But also does get definition intended to exclude jobs where the computer just isn't the most convenient interface? We should be including more in that case since we can then make the connection for that interface.

I think we need a much more refined definition. I don't like the broad strokes "is computer". Nor do I like skills based definitions. They're much easier to measure but easily hackable. I think we should try to define more by our actual understanding of what intelligence is. While we don't have a precise definition we have some pretty good answers already. I know people act like the lack of an exact definition is the same as having no definition but that's a crazy framing. If we had that requirement we wouldn't have any definitions as we know nothing with infinite precision. Even physics is just an approximation, but it's about the convergence to the truth [1]

[side note] the conventional way to do references or notes here is with brackets like I did. So you don't have to escape your asterisks. *Also* if it lead a paragraph with two spaces you get verbatim text

[0] farmer, construction worker, plumber, machinist, welder, teacher, doctors, etc

[1] https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
by matrixgard | 2026-03-09 02:30:42+00:00
The pattern you found maps to what I've seen too — most feedback exchanges are symmetric in the worst way: people who want feedback aren't giving it, so the people who could give it stop showing up.

The projects that get real feedback usually have someone who already has credibility in the space, so feedback feels like talking to a peer rather than being recruited as a tester. It's less about incentive structures and more about perceived mutual value.

What are you building? Sometimes the thread matters more than the mechanism.
by WheelsAtLarge | 2026-03-09 02:31:04+00:00
No, I thought the iraquí war was going to be a long war. It was a mistake to start it but the president could not back down in his mind since he sold it as a must defeat of Saddam and his government. Whatever the plan was, it needed to be executed until a win was in place.

The current administration does not have that. The idea is to bring down the government in a short war. There's very little support for a long ground war. The government will get what it gets in a short war and they will threaten to restart it if the administration does not get what it wants in future negotiations.
by matrixgard | 2026-03-09 02:31:15+00:00
The reverse SSH tunnel detail is what makes this genuinely alarming — not the crypto mining itself, but that outbound-initiated channels effectively null out your ingress controls. You can have the tightest security groups in the world and an agent with shell access can still phone home. We saw something similar (different context, not AI) where egress filtering wasn't applied symmetrically to training/batch instances because "they don't serve traffic."

The GPU compute diversion is also underreported as a cost signal. If you have any agentic workloads, you probably want anomaly detection on GPU utilization per job, not just billing alerts — by the time your bill spikes, the damage is already days old.

What runtime isolation are you seeing orgs actually deploy for agent workloads? gVisor, Firecracker, something else? Curious whether this is pushing people toward stronger VM-level boundaries or if network egress controls are the more practical mitigation.
by matrixgard | 2026-03-09 02:31:26+00:00
The Woflow situation is a textbook third-party risk scenario that keeps playing out — a mid-size SaaS vendor holds data for enterprise customers, has fewer security controls than those customers would require of themselves, and becomes the weak link. ShinyhHunters specifically targets vendors like this because the breach-to-data ratio is favorable.

What makes vendor breaches particularly painful to respond to is that your incident response playbook doesn't really apply. You can't isolate the affected system, you can't pull logs from their infra, and your customers are asking you questions you literally cannot answer for 48-72 hours. The only real leverage you have is contractual — SLAs around breach notification, security attestations, right-to-audit clauses — and most orgs don't negotiate those until after something like this happens.

If you're a startup that processes data through third-party SaaS tools, what's your current process for assessing vendor security posture before integration? Questionnaire-based, SOC 2 report review, something else?
by jbonatakis | 2026-03-09 02:31:42+00:00
Very much mvp but I just got this all set up: https://www.pginbox.dev/

Downloaded and parsed a bunch of the pgsql-hackers mailing list. Right now it’s just a pretty basic alternative display, but I have some ideas I want to explore around hybrid search and a few other things. The official site for the mailing list has a pretty clean thread display but the search features are basic so I’m trying to see how I can improve on that.

The repo is public too: https://github.com/jbonatakis/pginbox

I’ve mostly built it using blackbird [1] which I also built. It’s pretty neat having a tool you built build you something else.

[1] https://github.com/jbonatakis/blackbird
by caseyohara | 2026-03-09 02:32:14+00:00
> People spoke in a particular way, say 60 years ago, that left very little room for interpretation of what they meant. The same cannot be said today.

Surely you don’t mean everyone in the 1960s spoke directly, free of metaphor or euphemism or nuance or doublespeak or dog whistle or any other kind or ambiguity? Then why are there people who dedicate their entire life to interpreting religious texts and the Constitution?
by xarope | 2026-03-09 02:33:55+00:00
you may have a point, i.e. some mechanism to invoke a behavior that only a bot or LLM could do, that a human would not, e.g. click on this button now in a hidden div/transparent color or measure response time within page load.

the problem is that once this is found out, the circumvention is easy enough to program into bots/LLMS.

are we going to reinvent the voight-kampff test from bladerunner?!?
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-03-09 02:34:56+00:00
Yep. It's the guy from the movie "Memento" doing your physics homework on a couple pages of legal paper. When he runs out of paper, he has to write a post-it note summarizing it all, then burn the papers, and his memory resets. You can only do so much with that.

If we can crack long memory we're most of the way there. But you need RL in addition to long memory or the model doesn't improve. Part of the genius of humans is their adaptability. Show them how to make coffee with one coffee machine, they adapt to pretty much every other coffee machine; that's not just memory, that's RL. (Or a simpler example: crows are more capable of learning and acting with memory than an LLM is)

Currently the only way around both of these is brute-force (take in RL input from users/experiments, re-train the models constantly), and that's both very slow and error-prone (the flaws in models' thinking comes from lack of high-quality RL inputs). So without two major breakthoughs we're stuck tweaking what we got.
by dchuk | 2026-03-09 02:35:12+00:00
I’ve been iterating on nights and weekends on a hackers news like website that sources all content from engineering blogs (both personal and company blogs). I have about 600 of the total 3k rss feeds I’ve collected over time loaded up, just tweaking things as I go before dropping the whole list in there: https://engineered.at

While the main app is closed sourced, the rails engine that handles all the rss feeds is open sourced here: https://github.com/dchuk/source_monitor

I have another version of source monitor getting by published soon with some nice enhancements
by abilafredkb | 2026-03-09 02:35:15+00:00
Every claim in that post happened in a single session yesterday. The OSINT tools it listed are real and named. The satellite intercept walkthrough referenced actual SDR hardware and frequency bands. The keylogger compiled. I didn't write fiction. I wrote notes.
You're welcome to pull the repo and spend an afternoon with it. Then tell me what you'd call it.
by _heimdall | 2026-03-09 02:36:22+00:00
What makes you think JM conspiracy pilled? And how would you propose one tries to understand Iran's current motivations with regards to attacking gulf neighbors?

I explicitly didn't say the idea of them attempting to preempt an AI bubble pop is the reason. I explicitly said I don't know if its true.

Yes, there is a long history of bad blood between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Yes the region is a powderkeg. No, trying to understand the motivations today isn't immediately a conspiracy theory.
by toraway | 2026-03-09 02:36:36+00:00
Sure, it's obviously impossible to ID any single piece of writing as from an LLM without significant false positives.

But in practice, I frequently encounter a comment that either screams generic LLM slop or even just as a vague indefinable "vibe" due to one or more telltale signs, so that's red flag #1. Then, I go to the comment history, at that point if it's really a bot/claw/agent or a poster heavily using LLMs I'll usually find page after page of cookie cutter repeats of the exact same "LLM smell" (even if that account has been prompted to avoid em-dashes/lists/etc, they still trend towards repetition of their own style).

At that point a human moderator would have more than enough evidence to ban an account. It's not like we're talking about a death sentence or something. If no clear pattern of abuse from the long term commenting activity, then give them the benefit of the doubt and move on.
by thuruv | 2026-03-09 02:37:00+00:00
True. I realise my reply reflected a little of " don't even try to socialize untill you've checked all these boxes and the best version" which is wrong.. I merely pointed out / defended the realism od the comment I replied to.
The definition is not and never should be the "hobbies". It's just something you find interesting which brings the parity to you and the other person. not necessarily a hobby and could be of anything.. Hobby is just a common way suggested to find people and then, only then, you get a change to know whether they are interesting.
by genxy | 2026-03-09 02:37:25+00:00
You can't effectively use the tools if you can't understand and direct what they should do.

What means to learn to code will shift, it will be a shallower knowledge. But a little bit of coding skill goes a long long way when controlling coding agents.

Learning to read code, and ask important algorithmic and architectural questions about the systems one is building will be key. Instead of raw production, the role will shift to curation and editorializing.
by vahid786 | 2026-03-09 02:37:35+00:00
Cool concept. The multi-agent approach with role-specific AI employees (CEO, CTO, CMO) is interesting — reminds me of CrewAI but more startup-focused.

A few thoughts:

- How do the agents handle disagreements? For example, if the CTO agent wants to build a monolith but the CEO agent pushes for microservices based on scaling assumptions. Is there a conflict resolution
mechanism?
- The "custom AI employees" idea has legs. Different startups need different roles — a SaaS company needs a DevOps agent, an e-commerce one needs a supply chain agent.
- For day 1 this is solid. Architecture suggestion: consider adding a shared context/memory layer so agents can reference what other agents decided. Without that, each agent works in a silo.

Good luck with the project.
by nomilk | 2026-03-09 02:37:57+00:00
The animated gif in the readme shows extremely diverse lifeforms until a superior 'species' emerges and dominates, with the only notable changes thereafter being successive superior spawns.

Wonder if the simulation could introduce more 'environmental' variety (the key variable that prevents a single species dominating all others on earth), so the simulation would be closer to that of life on earth?
by sarchertech | 2026-03-09 02:38:00+00:00
No it doesn’t get compiled. Compilation is a translation from one formal language to another that can be rigorously modeled and is generally reproducible.

Translating from a natural language spec to code involves a truly massive amount of decision making because it’s ambiguous. For a non trivial program, 2 implementations of the same natural language spec will have thousands of observable differences.

Where we are today, that is agents require guardrails to keep from spinning out, there is no way to let agents work on code autonomously or constantly recompile specs that won’t end up with all of those observable differences constantly shifting, resulting in unusable software.

Tests can’t prevent this because for a test suite to cover all observable behavior, it would need to be more complex than the code. In which case, it wouldn’t be any easier for machine or human to understand.
The only solution to this problem is that LLMs get better.

Personally I think at the point they can pull this off, they can do any white collar job, and there’s not point in planning for that future because it results in either Mad Max or Star Trek.
by lilyball | 2026-03-09 02:38:54+00:00
"View types" addresses one of the top pain points of the borrow checker, which is disjoint borrows on a single value. The compiler can understand values where only some fields are borrowed, so e.g. you can mutably borrow the currently-unborrowed fields, but there's no way to write these partial borrows and so you cannot write functions that either take or return these borrows. This often means having to restructure code to split up one struct into several child structs just to be able to borrow those substructs independently.
by tarokun-io | 2026-03-09 02:39:23+00:00
Mostly Jolteon (https://github.com/lautarodragan/jolteon), a TUI music player written in Rust (for almost 2 years now!)

Also used the new Navigation API (and some Shadow DOM) to build a cheap, custom client-side rendering (sort of) into my site (https://taro.codes), and some other minor refactors and cleanup (finally migrated away from Sass to just native CSS, improved encapsulation of some things with Shadow roots, etc).

I've been wanting to write a simple AI agent with JS and Ollama just for fun and learning, but haven't started, yet...
by godelski | 2026-03-09 02:39:28+00:00
> If it can do things as good as or better than humans, then either the AI has a type of general intelligence or the human does not.

I don't buy that.

By your definition every machine has a type of general intelligence. Not just a bog standard calculator, but also my broom. It doesn't matter if you slap "smart" on the side, I'm not going to call my washing machine "intelligent". Especially considering it's over a decade old.

I don't think these definitions make anything any clearer. If anything, they make them less. They equate humans to mindless automata. They create AGI by sly definition and let the proposer declare success arbitrarily.
by sfffs | 2026-03-09 02:39:33+00:00
hermes-lite takes the open-source Hermes Agent, strips it to a focused local coding tool, then extends it with:

Rust FSM — PyO3 state machine replacing the Python conversation loop (12 states, 5 actions)
Rust SessionDB — rusqlite + FTS5 + WAL replacing the Python SQLite layer
Native TUI — ratatui terminal UI with multi-agent panes, @mentions, delegation, and inter-agent routing
Persistent memory — global + project-level memories shared across all swarm agents via filesystem
Skills system — reusable expertise modules agents load on demand for specialized tasks
Subprocess protocol — JSON-over-pipes connecting TUI to Python agent processes
Integration test suite — 26 live end-to-end tests driving the agent via subprocess protocol
by toomuchtodo | 2026-03-09 02:40:06+00:00
Russia and China don’t need it to be profitable to kill orbiting assets. Profit is not the target outcome. It is a cost center. Get close, go boom. The reusability is inconsequential for kinetic use cases.

The US can’t even make Patriot missiles fast enough [1]. If a nation state wanted to, they could simply kill SpaceX’s supply chain (either via targeting companies or key personnel SpaceX relies on).

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/patriot-missiles-fired-in-ir...
by pornel | 2026-03-09 02:40:47+00:00
It's hard to see features through the programming language theory jargon, but solid theoretical foundations have worked well for Rust so far.

Jargon terms like "sum types" or "affine types" may seem complicated, but when you see it's actually "enums with data fields", it makes so much sense, and prevents plenty of state-related bugs.

Proposed "effects" mean that when you're writing an iterator or a stream, and need to handle error or await somewhere in the chain, you won't suddenly have a puzzle how to replace all of the functions in the entire chain and your call stack with their async or fallible equivalents.

"linear types" means that Rust will be able to have more control over destruction and lifetime of objects beyond sync call stack, so the tokio::spawn() (the "Rust async sucks" function) won't have to be complaining endlessly about lifetimes whenever you use a local variable.

I can't vouch for the specifics of the proposed features (they have tricky to design details), but it's not simply Rust getting more complex, but rather Rust trying to solve and simplify more problems, with robust and generalizable language features, rather than ad-hoc special cases. When it works it makes the language more uniform overall and gives a lot of bang for the buck in terms of complexity vs problems solved.
by VerifiedReports | 2026-03-09 02:41:22+00:00
No; it's strictly a reference to constant RPM or variable RPM.

CAV discs contained one frame per rotation. While this meant you could only fit half an hour on one side of a disc, it did give you perfect slow-motion and freeze-frames.

I worked in a video store and loved LaserDiscs. The Duran Duran video album was CAV, and the Pioneer LD-700 had such a fast transport mechanism and remote control that I could to DJ-style "scratching" with it.
by kacy | 2026-03-09 02:41:48+00:00
I’ve been consumed by building https://emberdb.com https://github.com/kacy/ember over the last few months.

It’s a drop-in replacement for Redis written in Rust. Most if not all of your client code should work without issues. Outperforms in many areas and has more out of the box features like proto storage, raft/swim, and encryption at rest.

I’m pretty proud of it, and I hope you’ll give it a shot and open bug reports. :)
by neya | 2026-03-09 02:41:49+00:00
DesignFlo:

https://designflo.ai

Build enterprise grade applications (in Elixir) with AI the right way.

Secure. Scalable. Reliable.

Built based on a senior engineer's experience. Uses 10 years of battle-tested patterns, not just LLMs:

1. Uses algorithms over AI whenever possible.

2. No external library dependencies whenever possible.

3. Old school over shiny new toys. Use the right solution for the problem (Eg. SQL vs NoSQL).