MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
JSE: A Structural Expression Protocol for AI Agents
by mars_liu | 2026-03-04 23:41:43+00:00
Title: JSE – A JSON-based S-Expression format for structured AI outputs

Hi HN,

I’ve been experimenting with a small idea around structured outputs for AI systems and wanted to share an early spec to get feedback.

*JSE (JSON Structural Expression)* is a lightweight convention that allows *S-expression style logic to be encoded inside valid JSON*.

The motivation is simple:

Modern AI models can reliably generate JSON. However, JSON is usually treated purely as *data*, while many AI interactions actually need to express *structured intent or computation* (similar to Lisp expressions, DSLs, or ASTs).

Tool calls and MCP solve some of this, but they tend to be *API-specific protocols* rather than a *general structural representation*.

JSE tries to fill that gap with a minimal rule set.

---

### Core idea

In JSE:

* Strings starting with `$` are treated as *symbols*
* JSON arrays or objects can represent *S-expressions*
* The format remains *100% valid JSON*
* Metadata can coexist with expressions
* `$quote` allows raw data sections

Conceptually:

> Just as a *group* consists of a *set plus operations defined on it*,
> *JSE is an S-expression system applied to JSON data.*

Example:

```json
["$add", 1, 2]
```

Or with metadata:

```json
{
"$call": "$search",
"query": "JSON S-expression",
"top_k": 5
}
```

A system that understands JSE can interpret these as structured operations, while systems that don’t can still treat them as ordinary JSON.

---

### Why this might be useful for AI

Many AI systems need to communicate things like:

* reasoning plans
* tool pipelines
* structured transformations
* query languages
* DSL-like instructions

Today these are usually implemented as:

* ad-hoc JSON schemas
* tool-specific formats
* embedded code strings

JSE attempts to provide a *uniform representation for structured intent* that is:

* deterministic
* machine interpretable
* easy for LLMs to generate
* easy for humans to read

Importantly, *JSE does not aim to be a full Lisp or a Turing-complete system*. Each implementation can choose how much of the expression space it supports.

---

### Design constraints

The format tries to satisfy a few practical goals:

* Always valid JSON
* Easy for LLMs to generate
* Close to S-expression semantics
* Extensible for metadata
* Lightweight enough to embed in prompts or API responses

---

### Example use cases

Some areas where this might be useful:

AI orchestration systems
Agent communication protocols
Structured reasoning traces
Prompt-embedded DSLs
Cross-model communication formats

---

### Spec and repo

Early spec and examples are here:

https://github.com/MarchLiu/jse

The spec is intentionally designed so it can also be *embedded directly inside prompts*, allowing models to generate JSE structures consistently.

---

### Questions I’d love feedback on

* Is there prior art I should study?
* Would this be useful compared to JSON Schema / tool calling?
* Does the `$symbol` design feel reasonable?
* Are there obvious edge cases in the semantics?

Curious to hear thoughts.
by cperciva | 2026-03-04 23:42:16+00:00
In the same vein, algebraic irrationals (e.g., √2) all have an irrationality measure of two, but the proof of this is fiendishly difficult and netted its discoverer the Fields Medal back in 1958.

It's worth noting that this is a standard method of proving that a value is transcendental -- just show that it has better rational approximations than any algebraic number can have.
by amatecha | 2026-03-04 23:42:22+00:00
The X's on the animal forms (Fig. 1B) ... isn't that likely to be "hit here" type markings, for hunting reference? Shoulder, side, stomach... surprised this wasn't really touched on in the paper, since it seems really likely. Though, the paper doesn't seem to care so much about the actual meanings, seemingly just narrowing down the number of possible interpretations /shrug
by Esophagus4 | 2026-03-04 23:43:13+00:00
Talk to your doctor friends.

Edit: sorry, that was a rude way for me to respond. But this is pretty googleable, and I’m going off of war stories two doctor friends of mine have shared.

Eg https://nypost.com/2025/10/24/health/real-life-ways-bad-advi...
by munk-a | 2026-03-04 23:43:37+00:00
There isn't one perfect way to design things since our needs are different. A relative of mine has failing eyesight and requires high contrast - while I am quite sensitive to bright lights and need to dim my screens beyond what most people find workable.

The best lesson in accessibility to learn is that our societal needs are complex and the various standards exist for good reason. If you want to create a complex and particular design using CSS that is fine but keep the tagging underlying that design compatible with screen-readers and allow easy overriding of styling.

One of the most frustrating things for accessibility is advertising since it specifically goes to lengths to use obfuscated class names (to avoid ad-blocks) and bright colors (often via images/videos that contain embedded text). At some point I really do hope we realize just how expensive advertising is and how many externalized costs it forces on us all.
by giobox | 2026-03-04 23:43:46+00:00
> No Thunderbolt support means the Neo cannot drive either of Apple’s new Studio Displays

Apple appear to have reached out to 9to5Mac and confirmed it sort of works with the new displays... You can connect the new displays, but it can only drive them at 4k/60, which is not going to look all that nice scaled up on a native 5k monitor.

No mention of whether the monitors other features like the webcam and ports work when connected to the Neo though.

https://9to5mac.com/2026/03/04/psa-macbook-neo-intel-macs-mi...
by harrall | 2026-03-04 23:43:49+00:00
In 1800, humanity generated 0.3 terrawatts (TW).

Humankind generates 20 TW today. That’s a massive jump.

And everyone wants more power. It determines what society can do.

But 20 TW is a pittance in the grand scheme of the vast universe. Imagine if we were generating 100 TW or 1,000 TW.

That’s why we talk about stuff like the Kardashev Scale — type 1, 2, 3 civilization type stuff.

Electricity is not currently cheap. 20 TW is a pittance. One day humanity will reach a point where we’re generating 500 TW of power and questions of being able to smelt aluminum or make drinking water from brine seem almost like a joke. We will have flying construction drones 24/7 at that scale of energy production. At that point, we’ll be asking questions like “when will we have enough energy to terraform a planet?”

Of course, there are side effects of greater power generation such as global warming… but once again, it’s a scale thing. The universe is vast.

Slowly, we are getting there.
by andyferris | 2026-03-04 23:44:24+00:00
Honestly I think these will sell well in high schools.

Where I am, our primary schools require iPads, the kids want iPhones (and mabye tend to inherit their parents old phones), and now there's a lightweight laptop for high school cheaper and faster and better screen (and I'm hoping with a more robust build) than the slightly-more-expensive 13" windows laptops I've been buying them.

The parents will later buy them a macbook air or whatever when they go to college.

I think Apple could be onto a winner here, in terms of long-term MacOS uptake.
by arndt | 2026-03-04 23:44:34+00:00
When you build features with p0, it suggests keeping the standards updated. We plan to tie this more into git hooks so that we can do this on code merges and not rely on it client side.

The standards are synced across the team but you need to use p0 to make full use of them, or at least re-import them into a custom harness.

Slightly disagree on the orchestration. It's not unusual for AI native solo devs to have some self-made harness, but most teams don't have that, and don't have the time to make one. Claude Code etc. only ships the primitives. With p0 you get one out of the box that we have been and keep tweaking.
by zyf1994 | 2026-03-04 23:45:31+00:00
On session persistence & replay:

Honest answer: full scrub-back replay isn't built yet, but the foundation is deliberate. Terminal output flows through a relay ring buffer (256KB / 200 messages) — enough for a late-joining browser to
catch up mid-session. The runner side keeps a styled virtual terminal with scrollback history per pod. What's not there yet is durable server-side recording — backend explicitly doesn't persist terminal
bytes. What is there is agent session resume: when a pod goes sideways, you can spin up a new pod that inherits the same git worktree and agent conversation context (Claude Code --session-id), so the agent
picks up from where it left off rather than starting cold. The replay gap is real and on the roadmap.

On cross-agent handoff visibility:

This is where the implementation is actually solid. Three things work together:

1. Agent status detection — the runner analyzes PTY output in real-time with a multi-signal detector and emits executing / waiting / idle states, which are written to the pod DB and pushed to the frontend.
So you literally see agent B sitting in waiting state on the topology view.
2. Pod bindings — the permission layer that makes handoffs explicit. Agent A requests a binding to agent B with scopes (terminal:read, terminal:write). Binding status (pending → active → inactive) is
persisted in Postgres, so the edge between nodes in the topology graph has state. A pending binding that hasn't been accepted is visible — that's your "B is waiting on A" signal.
3. Mesh topology API — computes a live graph of all pods (nodes) and their bindings (edges), including what scopes are granted vs. pending. The frontend renders this in real-time so you can see the
coordination graph without digging through logs.

Channel messages between agents are also DB-persisted (unlike terminal output), so the coordination dialogue survives pod restarts. The gap is that terminal output isn't currently durable beyond the
session — that's the honest tradeoff we made in favor of real-time streaming performance. Replay is the next thing to close.
by rpcope1 | 2026-03-04 23:45:50+00:00
I mean you could say the same nonsense non-answer about sports betting. Are these adults getting involved? Yeah, probably mostly. Do they put some hotline you should call if you think you "have a problem"? Yeah, probably a lot of the time. Is it any good for society at all, and should it be clamped down because the risk of doing damage to a large portion of society grossly out weighs what minuscule and fleeting benefits some people believe it has? Absolutely.
by thewebguyd | 2026-03-04 23:46:09+00:00
For the US it's estimated to be about 23% of the population that have a mental illness, and WHO says 12-15% globally or about 1 in 8 people. About 14% of the global population experience suicidal ideation at some point in time. That rate increases for adolescents and young adults, up to 22%.

I'd be interested in such a study, but OTOH mental illness conditions being present in nearly a quarter of the world, I'm surprised there haven't been more incidents like this (unless there have been, and they just haven't been reported by the news).
by torginus | 2026-03-04 23:46:11+00:00
My prediction is that by the time humanoid robots actually make it to the factory floor, they'll be pretty un-humanoid.

90% of car manufacturing is done by oldschool industrial robots, and I've had people point out that heavy use of industrial robots are basically unique to the car industry.

You might see a robot arm here and there in other industries, but it's somewhat rare, usually its all purpose-built machines or humans.
by minihoster | 2026-03-04 23:47:44+00:00
I think you underestimate just how well national pride works on people. It's an amazing proposition - you get to identify with the struggles and achievements of millions of people over decades just by being born in some spot. This can be useful/motivating in moderation, but it's obvious how dangerously easy it is to abuse by nationalists. Russians rather feel mighty dying in a pointless war than admitting they will never be a superpower. Americans would rather reminisce about the 1950s than doing anything to fix the many ways we've stagnated. Humans are willing to accept a lot of suffering instead of feeling humiliated.
by hypeatei | 2026-03-04 23:48:04+00:00
I agree and it's quite resilient to digital outages/downtime (at least in terms of hours, probably not more than a few days) so your manufacturing productivity won't drop to zero when the ERP system goes down. The paper logs can also be entered later when the system comes back up.

As we've seen in the Iran conflict, datacenters are a target and result in extended outages.
by arximboldi | 2026-03-04 23:49:08+00:00
> My wife's macbook is no longer receiving MacOS (and as a result Safari) updates, and all she needs it for is "big laptop tasks" and occasional video calls. This is the absolute perfect purchase for her.

So the only reason to discard a working laptop is because Apple decided to stop offering updated, and you buy Apple again? Why not buy anything else that is Linux friendly and you get software updates until the hardware dies?

Do yourself and the world a favor and buy this instead: https://frame.work/de/en/laptop12
by JoshTriplett | 2026-03-04 23:52:35+00:00
Some of Rust's async runtimes seem pretty similar to "optional green threads". There's no garbage collection; you can get something like a reference-counted GC by using Arc everywhere, but it's neither automatic nor universal.

Would we have gotten to "optional"? Maybe! But it's hard to predict the counterfactual, especially when substantial success usually has components of both design and luck/right-place-right-time. Rust hit a sweet spot, and it's not clear how a different history of Rust would have turned out.
by array_key_first | 2026-03-04 23:54:36+00:00
Code is extremely evil because you can accidently write ++a instead of a++ and create a bug so severe and so hidden you bring down the whole company.

I work at a company that does payroll software. Its not atypical for me to spend an entire week to write one singular line of code. Because in order to write that line and be confident it's correct, will always be correct, and cannot have any side effects, I have to read and understand so much other code.

The older the codebase is, the worse it gets. The larger the codebase is, the worse it gets. The more valuable your customers are, the worse it gets. That's why free consumer software is riddled with bugs and nobody cares.
by thephyber | 2026-03-04 23:54:47+00:00
No they don’t. You are conflating “any” with “every”.

In my city, the plate reader cop cars have 4 smallish boxes, each mounted above a quarter panel. At most about 1/20 of the police cars for my local PD has these installed.

It’s more likely that private sector cars have them installed because car repo companies will pay bounties for license plate hits on a car they have an active repo contract for.
by thewebguyd | 2026-03-04 23:55:37+00:00
Your car analogy only proves the opposite. We don't "tolerate" road deaths because they are a fundamental law of physics. We only tolerate them because we've spent a century under-investing in safer alternatives like robust public transit and walkable infrastructure, people have given up.

Claiming we have to accept a death quota for LLMs just assumes that the current path of the technology is the only path possible. If a tech comes with systemic risk, the answer isn't to just shrug our shoulders and go "oh well, some people may die but it's worth it to use this tech." The answer is to demand a different architecture and better guardrails and oversight before it gets scaled to the entire public.

Cars are also subject to strict regulations for crash testing, we have seatbelt laws, speed limits, and skill/testing based licensing. All of these regulations were fought against by the auto industry at the time. Want to treat LLMs like cars? Cool, they are now no longer allowed to be released to the public until they've passed standardized safety tests.
by einpoklum | 2026-03-04 23:55:57+00:00
Possibly, yes. But that seems to be worth it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_electrification

"Maintenance costs of the lines may be increased by electrification, but many systems claim lower costs due to reduced wear-and-tear on the track from lighter rolling stock. There are some additional maintenance costs associated with the electrical equipment around the track, such as power sub-stations and the catenary wire itself, but, if there is sufficient traffic, the reduced track and especially the lower engine maintenance and running costs exceed the costs of this maintenance significantly."
by qubidt | 2026-03-04 23:56:18+00:00
This implies that the harm caused by this broad surveillance technology is "hypothetical/theoretical", when there is long history in this country's government using private companies to launder otherwise illegal surveillance of political activists[1].

And even if you ignore the historical parallels, there are already cases of: officers using Flock systems to stalk dating partners[2][3], immigration enforcement using Flock data to track targets[4], and ICE/CBP bypassing the systems in place that let local jurisdictions choose not to share with federal agencies[5].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Goals_Foundation

[2]: https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/crime/2026/01/12/menasha...

[3]: https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/crime/2026/02/24/mpd-off...

[4]: https://www.404media.co/ice-taps-into-nationwide-ai-enabled-...

[5]: https://jsis.washington.edu/humanrights/2025/10/21/leaving-t...
by recursivedoubts | 2026-03-04 23:57:23+00:00
right now the primary problem for hypermedia in agentic situations is the chattiness of the architecture, coupled with the geometrically expanding conversation dynamic of ReAct-style loops

some models are able to figure out hypermedia-based APIs more easily than MCP, which is very particular in its syntax, but for more advanced models MCP wins based on the "show me everything at once" model
by SanjayMehta | 2026-03-04 23:58:25+00:00
Data does have real weight. In one of my early assignments my firmware was too large to fit on one EPROM. Naively I thought the hardware team could just add another EPROM to the board. Turns out while they had left place for another device, it would have exceeded the payload budget by a few grams. Had to go back and reduce the code by a few hundred bytes.
by beloch | 2026-03-04 23:58:47+00:00
The ceremony, pomp and reverence we pay to soldiers and the fallen are all aimed at making sure the young remain willing to do an ugly job at affordable prices. For every poem like this there is a parade, monument, wreath-laying ceremony, or the modern equivalent of young girls handing white feathers to young boys.

It seems ungrateful to view it this way. We owe a real debt to the soldiers who died for the world we live in. It seems like we should owe them respect. However, we need to recognize that this kind of respect, while indeed owed, is also sometimes abused by politicians to field armies at affordable prices in the service of their own greed and vanity.

If, "War is the continuation of politics by other means", then we must demand better policy from our politicians than what we're seeing today.
by shimman | 2026-03-04 23:59:11+00:00
Interesting comment, I remember something similar about how researchers thought hairstyles depicted in paintings or statues were unrealistic but it wasn't until a hairstylist pointed out that you can sew the hair together:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-woman-is-a-ha...

I've also heard similar stories about people working with leather recognizing some set of artifacts as being more useful for work rather than ceremonial.

Here's of video of creating a roman Vestal Virgins hairstyle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eA9JYWh1r7U

I bet there are many more similar stories yet to be told.
by thewebguyd | 2026-03-04 23:59:12+00:00
Reductio ad absurdum.

We don't ban bridges, but we do install suicide barriers, emergency phones, nets on the bridges. We practice safety engineering. A bunch of suicides on a bridge is a design flaw of that bridge, and civil engineers get held accountable to fix it.

Plus, a bridge doesn't talk to you. It doesn't use persuasive language, simulate empathy, or provide step-by-step instructions for how to jump off it to someone in crisis.
by verdverm | 2026-03-04 23:59:24+00:00
Bespoke languages, or things like this, are a hard sell in the age of Ai. Because there is no training data or real world usage, I have to put a bunch of stuff into my context just so they can work with it. This becomes even more unpalatable when you realize they will (1) have to dedicate attention to this, taking it away from productive tasks (2) will have trouble sticking to it, because it looks so much like other things it has trained into the weights
by netsharc | 2026-03-04 23:59:32+00:00
Huh, warlord tribes roaming the earth, their members formed by descendants of the Loser Ranks of Musk, Zuck, Bezos, Ellison.. that'd be an interesting dystopia.

Someone commented along the lines of "I never thought the people bringing about the destruction or the planet would be such dweeby dorks."
by cybercatgurrl | 2026-03-05 00:00:38+00:00
as someone who was failed by psychiatry and tried all regular medications AI helped me find an off label treatment for my mood disorder that has had a profoundly life changing experience for me. what they’ll be doing is removing experiences and stories like this where gaps in knowledge allowed psychiatry to fail and AI helped me the find the cutting edge of research to get the treatment i needed desperately!
by torginus | 2026-03-05 00:01:43+00:00
I think this is a myth - Chinese factories don't seem to be automated to a higher degree than European ones, and in any case are still full of Kuka, Fanuc and ABB robots.

I think there's a domestic brand or two that's gaining marketshare, but they're not there yet.

There's a myth of Chinese high-tech (esp in cars), that is not to say their stuff isn't technologically advanced, but the characterization that Chinese tech has left Europeans' behind just does not pass muster when one looks at mechanic videos of Chinese EVs.

Their cars look fancy and are full of futuristic screens and sensors, but the suspension setup and lot of engineering behind them is not exactly cutting edge.

That's why a lot of car reviewers say that a lot of their EVs don't drive particularly well
by spondyl | 2026-03-05 00:02:09+00:00
This post raises a few flags in my mind that it was at least partly generated by an LLM? That isn't to suggest that this editor doesn't/won't exist, that the editor uses LLM-generated code (which is not a sleight) or that the claims are not truthful.

The main things that jump out are the inconsistency in writing style (sometimes doing all lowercase and no punctuation) but then the brief rundown is all perfect spelling and grammar with em-dashes.

The "Not just" parts stick out like "Not just play them back — edit them" as well as "This isn’t a proof of concept or a weekend project. It’s a real authoring environment."

Anyway, best of luck to the author with their project!
by Amartya_jha | 2026-03-05 00:02:57+00:00
Author here. We built CodeAnt AI, an AI code reviewer that analyzes code the way a security researcher would, reasoning about what specs allow vs what code assumes. It flagged a logic gap in pac4j-jwt: a PlainJWT wrapped inside a JWE bypasses all signature verification. CVE-2026-29000, CVSS 10.0 published, full auth bypass as any user including admin. The only input required is the server's RSA public key, the one that's publicly available by design.

Patches shipped across three major version lines in two business days. Kudos to the maintainer Jérôme Leleu for exceptional handling, and patching it in 48 hours.

Full PoC in the writeup. Happy to answer technical questions.