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Make Trust Irrelevant: A Gamer's Take on Agentic AI Safety

2026-02-07 @ 03:12:47Points: 9Comments: 5

I wrote a short position paper arguing that current agentic AI safety failures are the confused deputy problem on repeat. We are handing agents ambient authority and trying to contain it with soft constraints like prompts and userland wrappers. My take: you need hard, reduce-only authority enforced at a real boundary (kernel control plane class), not something bypassable from userland. Curious how others are modeling this. What constraints do you think are truly non-negotiable?

Female Asian Elephant Calf Born at the Smithsonian National Zoo

2026-02-07 @ 02:35:49Points: 8Comments: 2

I'm going to cure my girlfriend's brain tumor

2026-02-07 @ 01:05:59Points: 71Comments: 35

Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

2026-02-06 @ 23:58:53Points: 28Comments: 4

Show HN: R3forth, a ColorForth-inspired language with a tiny VM

2026-02-06 @ 22:10:13Points: 53Comments: 9

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

2026-02-06 @ 21:51:23Points: 479Comments: 118

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

2026-02-06 @ 21:33:11Points: 160Comments: 17

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo

The underlying ESP-IDF component: https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezybox

It is something like Raspberry Pi, but without the overhead of a full server-grade OS.

It captures a lot of the old school DOS era coding experience. I created a custom fast text mode driver, plan to add VGA-like graphics next. ANSI text demos run smooth, as you can see in the demo video featured in the Readme.

App installs also work smoothly. The first time it installed 6 apps from my git repo with one command, felt like, "OMG, I got homebrew to run on a toaster!" And best of all, it can install from any repo, no approvals or waiting, you just publish a compatible ELF file in your release.

Coverage:

Hackaday: https://hackaday.com/2026/02/06/breezybox-a-busybox-like-she...

Hackster.io: https://www.hackster.io/news/valentyn-danylchuk-s-breezybox-...

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/esp32/comments/1qq503c/i_made_an_in...

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

2026-02-06 @ 21:16:36Points: 158Comments: 69

Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use

2026-02-06 @ 19:27:37Points: 263Comments: 125

I'm a solo developer who's been doing UI/UX work since 2007. Over the years, I watched design tools evolve from lightweight products into bloated feature-heavy platforms. I kept finding myself using a small amount of the features while the rest just mostly got in the way.

So a few years ago I set out to build a design tool just like I wanted. So I built Vecti with what I actually need: pixel-perfect grid snapping, a performant canvas renderer, shared asset libraries, and export/presentation features. No collaborative whiteboarding. No plugin ecosystem. No enterprise features. Just the design loop.

Four years later, I can proudly show it off. Built and hosted in the EU with European privacy regulations. Free tier available (no credit card, one editor forever).

On privacy: I use some basic analytics (page views, referrers) but zero tracking inside the app itself. No session recordings, no behavior analytics, no third-party scripts beyond the essentials.

If you're a solo designer or small team who wants a tool that stays out of your way, I'd genuinely appreciate your feedback: https://vecti.com

Happy to answer questions about the tech stack, architecture decisions, why certain features didn't make the cut, or what's next.

Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

2026-02-06 @ 18:51:58Points: 211Comments: 135

I combined shamir secret sharing (hashicorp vault's implementation) with age-encryption, and packaged it using WASM for a neat in-browser offline UX.

The idea is that if something happens to me, my friends and family would help me get back access to the data that matters most to me. 5 out of 7 friends need to agree for the vault to unlock.

Try out the demo in the website, it runs entirely in your browser!

How to effectively write quality code with AI

2026-02-06 @ 18:49:59Points: 202Comments: 147

I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

2026-02-06 @ 16:45:47Points: 116Comments: 38

The Waymo World Model

2026-02-06 @ 16:20:42Points: 818Comments: 490

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

2026-02-06 @ 15:40:42Points: 328Comments: 86

An Update on Heroku

2026-02-06 @ 15:20:23Points: 342Comments: 244

Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

2026-02-06 @ 15:13:04Points: 332Comments: 158

How virtual textures work

2026-02-06 @ 14:32:05Points: 32Comments: 28

FORTH? Really!?

2026-02-06 @ 13:54:09Points: 48Comments: 17

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

2026-02-06 @ 13:49:55Points: 414Comments: 220

I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

2026-02-06 @ 12:16:43Points: 1002Comments: 421

Show HN: Slack CLI for Agents

2026-02-05 @ 21:38:51Points: 41Comments: 11

  * Can paste in Slack URLs
  * Token efficient
  * Zero-config (auto auth if you use Slack Desktop)
Auto downloads files/snippets. Also can read Slack canvases as markdown!

MIT License

Evaluating and mitigating the growing risk of LLM-discovered 0-days

2026-02-05 @ 17:50:37Points: 38Comments: 11

Show HN: Smooth CLI – Token-efficient browser for AI agents

2026-02-05 @ 16:13:33Points: 78Comments: 59

https://www.smooth.sh) is a browser that agents like Claude Code can use to navigate the web reliably, quickly, and affordably. It lets agents specify tasks using natural language, hiding UI complexity, and allowing them to focus on higher-level intents to carry out complex web tasks. It can also use your IP address while running browsers in the cloud, which helps a lot with roadblocks like captchas (https://docs.smooth.sh/features/use-my-ip).

Here’s a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62jthcU705k Docs start at https://docs.smooth.sh.

Agents like Claude Code, etc are amazing but mostly restrained to the CLI, while a ton of valuable work needs a browser. This is a fundamental limitation to what these agents can do.

So far, attempts to add browsers to these agents (Claude’s built-in --chrome, Playwright MCP, agent-browser, etc.) all have interfaces that are unnatural for browsing. They expose hundreds of tools - e.g. click, type, select, etc - and the action space is too complex. (For an example, see the low-level details listed at https://github.com/vercel-labs/agent-browser). Also, they don’t handle the billion edge cases of the internet like iframes nested in iframes nested in shadow-doms and so on. The internet is super messy! Tools that rely on the accessibility tree, in particular, unfortunately do not work for a lot of websites.

We believe that these tools are at the wrong level of abstraction: they make the agent focus on UI details instead of the task to be accomplished.

Using a giant general-purpose model like Opus to click on buttons and fill out forms ends up being slow and expensive. The context window gets bogged down with details like clicks and keystrokes, and the model has to figure out how to do browser navigation each time. A smaller model in a system specifically designed for browsing can actually do this much better and at a fraction of the cost and latency.

Security matters too - probably more than people realize. When you run an agent on the web, you should treat it like an untrusted actor. It should access the web using a sandboxed machine and have minimal permissions by default. Virtual browsers are the perfect environment for that. There’s a good write up by Paul Kinlan that explains this very well (see https://aifoc.us/the-browser-is-the-sandbox and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46762150). Browsers were built to interact with untrusted software safely. They’re an isolation boundary that already works.

Smooth CLI is a browser designed for agents based on what they’re good at. We expose a higher-level interface to let the agent think in terms of goals and tasks, not low-level details.

For example, instead of this:

  click(x=342, y=128)
  type("search query")
  click(x=401, y=130)
  scroll(down=500)
  click(x=220, y=340)
  ...50 more steps
Your agent just says:

  Search for flights from NYC to LA and find the cheapest option
Agents like Claude Code can use the Smooth CLI to extract hard-to-reach data, fill-in forms, download files, interact with dynamic content, handle authentication, vibe-test apps, and a lot more.

Smooth enables agents to launch as many browsers and tasks as they want, autonomously, and on-demand. If the agent is carrying out work on someone’s behalf, the agent’s browser presents itself to the web as a device on the user’s network. The need for this feature may diminish over time, but for now it’s a necessary primitive. To support this, Smooth offers a “self” proxy that creates a secure tunnel and routes all browser traffic through your machine’s IP address (https://docs.smooth.sh/features/use-my-ip). This is one of our favorite features because it makes the agent look like it’s running on your machine, while keeping all the benefits of running in the cloud.

We also take away as much security responsibility from the agent as possible. The agent should not be aware of authentication details or be responsible for handling malicious behavior such as prompt injections. While some security responsibility will always remain with the agent, the browser should minimize this burden as much as possible.

We’re biased of course, but in our tests, running Claude with Smooth CLI has been 20x faster and 5x cheaper than Claude Code with the --chrome flag (https://www.smooth.sh/images/comparison.gif). Happy to explain further how we’ve tested this and to answer any questions about it!

Instructions to install: https://docs.smooth.sh/cli. Plans and pricing: https://docs.smooth.sh/pricing.

It’s free to try, and we'd love to get feedback/ideas if you give it a go :)

We’d love to hear what you think, especially if you’ve tried using browsers with AI agents. Happy to answer questions, dig into tradeoffs, or explain any part of the design and implementation!

How we made geo joins 400× faster with H3 indexes

2026-02-05 @ 11:19:40Points: 40Comments: 2

The Oklahoma Architect Who Turned Kitsch into Art

2026-02-03 @ 16:13:23Points: 23Comments: 4

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

2026-02-03 @ 14:49:11Points: 246Comments: 32

Learning from context is harder than we thought

2026-02-03 @ 13:07:37Points: 153Comments: 79

A century of hair samples proves leaded gas ban worked

2026-02-03 @ 05:38:51Points: 96Comments: 13

Dark Alley Mathematics

2026-02-02 @ 15:58:13Points: 53Comments: 7

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

2026-02-02 @ 10:21:28Points: 27Comments: 1

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