The Palantir app helping ICE raids in Minneapolis
The article discusses Palantir, a data analysis platform used by ICE to identify and target neighborhoods for immigration raids. It highlights concerns over the tool's potential for surveillance and privacy violations, as well as the broader debate around the use of technology by law enforcement agencies.
Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage
Apple is in a fierce battle with competitors to secure chip production capacity from TSMC, the world's largest semiconductor manufacturer. The article explores Apple's efforts to maintain its technological edge by ensuring a steady supply of advanced chips for its products.
‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid
The article discusses Palantir, a data analytics company whose software is used by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to identify and target immigrant communities for deportation raids. It examines the ethical concerns around Palantir's technology being utilized by law enforcement agencies for surveillance and enforcement purposes.
UK offshore wind prices come in 40% cheaper than gas in record auction
The UK government held a record-breaking offshore wind auction, securing a total of 8 gigawatts (GW) of new offshore wind capacity at historically low prices. This auction demonstrates the growing competitiveness of offshore wind as a renewable energy source and the UK's commitment to transitioning to a clean energy future.
OBS Studio 32.1.0 Beta 1 available
OBS Studio, the popular open-source software for recording and streaming, has released a new beta version 32.1.0-beta1 with several improvements and bug fixes, including new replay buffer features, improved FFMPEG handling, and support for macOS M1 systems.
JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3
JuiceFS is an open-source distributed file system that provides a POSIX-compatible interface and is designed for high-performance cloud storage. It supports multiple cloud storage backends, including Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, and Microsoft Azure Blob Storage, and is optimized for cloud-native applications.
GitHub Incident
The article provides an update on the recent GitHub service disruption, explaining that the company is investigating the root cause and working to restore full functionality across its platform.
Supply Chain Vuln Compromised Core AWS GitHub Repos & Threatened the AWS Console
The article discusses the CodeBreach vulnerability found in AWS CodeBuild, which could allow attackers to execute arbitrary code and gain unauthorized access to sensitive data. The researchers at Wiz discovered and reported the vulnerability, which has since been patched by AWS.
Data is the only moat
The article discusses the importance of data as a strategic asset and key competitive advantage in the modern business landscape. It emphasizes that companies should focus on collecting, analyzing, and leveraging data to drive innovation and stay ahead of the competition.
Denmark's struggle to break up with Silicon Valley
Denmark has declared war on Big Tech companies, aiming to assert its digital sovereignty and limit the influence of large tech firms on the country's digital landscape. The Danish government is pushing for new regulations and policies that would give the country more control over its digital infrastructure and data.
Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop
The article discusses an issue with the Tldraw application where the UI does not update when the user selects an object in the canvas. The main focus is on resolving this bug and improving the overall user experience of the application.
Americans Overwhelmingly Support Science, but Some Think the U.S. Is Lagging
The article discusses a survey that found most Americans strongly support science, but a significant portion believe the U.S. is lagging in scientific advancements compared to other countries. The survey also highlighted differing attitudes towards science among political parties and demographic groups.
Show HN: Gambit, an open-source agent harness for building reliable AI agents
Hey HN!
Wanted to show our open source agent harness called Gambit.
If you’re not familiar, agent harnesses are sort of like an operating system for an agent... they handle tool calling, planning, context window management, and don’t require as much developer orchestration.
Normally you might see an agent orchestration framework pipeline like:
compute -> compute -> compute -> LLM -> compute -> compute -> LLM
we invert this so with an agent harness, it’s more like:
LLM -> LLM -> LLM -> compute -> LLM -> LLM -> compute -> LLM
Essentially you describe each agent in either a self contained markdown file, or as a typescript program. Your root agent can bring in other agents as needed, and we create a typesafe way for you to define the interfaces between those agents. We call these decks.
Agents can call agents, and each agent can be designed with whatever model params make sense for your task.
Additionally, each step of the chain gets automatic evals, we call graders. A grader is another deck type… but it’s designed to evaluate and score conversations (or individual conversation turns).
We also have test agents you can define on a deck-by-deck basis, that are designed to mimic scenarios your agent would face and generate synthetic data for either humans or graders to grade.
Prior to Gambit, we had built an LLM based video editor, and we weren’t happy with the results, which is what brought us down this path of improving inference time LLM quality.
We know it’s missing some obvious parts, but we wanted to get this out there to see how it could help people or start conversations. We’re really happy with how it’s working with some of our early design partners, and we think it’s a way to implement a lot of interesting applications:
- Truly open source agents and assistants, where logic, code, and prompts can be easily shared with the community.
- Rubric based grading to guarantee you (for instance) don’t leak PII accidentally
- Spin up a usable bot in minutes and have Codex or Claude Code use our command line runner / graders to build a first version that is pretty good w/ very little human intervention.
We’ll be around if ya’ll have any questions or thoughts. Thanks for checking us out!
Walkthrough video: https://youtu.be/J_hQ2L_yy60
My Gripes with Prolog
The article discusses the author's critiques of the Prolog programming language, including its lack of modularity, opaque error messages, and challenges with abstraction and encapsulation. The author argues that while Prolog has unique strengths, it also has significant limitations that can hinder its broader adoption.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem Says People Should Be Prepared to Prove US Citizenship
The article discusses South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem's statements regarding U.S. citizenship and identity following the recent police shooting in Minnesota, highlighting the political debate surrounding these issues.
Show HN: The Hessian of tall-skinny networks is easy to invert
It turns out the inverse of the Hessian of a deep net is easy to apply to a vector. Doing this naively takes cubically many operations in the number of layers (so impractical), but it's possible to do this in time linear in the number of layers (so very practical)!
This is possible because the Hessian of a deep net has a matrix polynomial structure that factorizes nicely. The Hessian-inverse-product algorithm that takes advantage of this is similar to running backprop on a dual version of the deep net. It echoes an old idea of Pearlmutter's for computing Hessian-vector products.
Maybe this idea is useful as a preconditioner for stochastic gradient descent?
Remails: A European Mail Transfer Agent
The article discusses the concept of 'remails', which are letters that are redirected to a different address than the original intended recipient. It examines the history, legality, and practical implications of this practice in the context of postal services and personal privacy.
Show HN: Tusk Drift – Turn production traffic into API tests
Hi HN! In the past few months my team and I have been working on Tusk Drift, a system that records real API traffic from your service, then replays those requests as deterministic tests. Outbound I/O (databases, HTTP calls, etc.) gets automatically mocked using the recorded data.
Problem we're trying to solve: Writing API tests is tedious, and hand-written mocks drift from reality. We wanted tests that stay realistic because they come from real traffic.
versus mocking libraries: Tools like VCR/Nock intercept HTTP within your tests. Tusk Drift records full request/response traces externally (HTTP, DB, Redis, etc.) and replays them against your running service, no test code or fixtures to write/maintain.
How it works:
1. Add a lightweight SDK (we currently support Python and Node.js)
2. Record traffic in any environment.
3. Run `tusk run`, the CLI sandboxes your service and serves mocks via Unix socket
We run this in CI on every PR. Also been using it as a test harness for AI coding agents, they can make changes, run `tusk run`, and get immediate feedback without needing live dependencies.
Source: https://github.com/Use-Tusk/tusk-drift-cli
Demo: https://github.com/Use-Tusk/drift-node-demo
Happy to answer questions!
European military personnel arrive in Greenland as Trump says US needs island
The article discusses the development of a new pain relief medication that has the potential to be more effective and have fewer side effects than traditional opioid painkillers. The medication, which is still in the early stages of research, works by targeting a specific receptor in the brain to reduce pain without the addictive properties of opioids.
Iran's internet shutdown is now one of its longest ever, as protests continue
Iran's internet shutdown, one of the longest in the country's history, has continued as protests over the death of Mahsa Amini persist. The article discusses the impact of the prolonged internet disruption on communication and access to information during the ongoing civil unrest in Iran.