Article URL: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/wildcard/jobs/ZSLVaaU-founding-engineer Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48849011 Points: 0 # Comments: 0

Windows 11 updates could soon include fixes for more security issues at once. Microsoft said in a blog post on Thursday that it's now using AI to "identify potential issues earlier," which means "customers will see a higher volume of security updates included in each security release." Hackers, even amateurs, have increasingly been using AI […]

About two weeks after OpenAI's GPT-5.6 was caught up in regulatory drama - rolled out only to government-approved organizations during a "limited preview" period - the company has received the Trump administration's greenlight for a public rollout of the model. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called it "the best model we have ever produced." To celebrate, […]

Devthropology is a passion project built on top of GitHub pull data. The name is a play on developer anthropology. Pull request data can be cut a lot of ways. The functionality has been built out of curiosity as I want to see different insights into codebases that I work on. Some of the data is typical and other parts I haven't seen elsewhere. I think of this as an improved GitHub Insights page, with faster performance, more detail, and a focus on how work moves through a codebase. The main enti

GitHub had over 14,000 repositories. Fewer than half had clear ownership. Here's how we gave every active repository a validated owner in under 45 days, archived the rest, and made ownership the foundation for everything that followed. The post How GitHub gave every repository a durable owner appeared first on The GitHub Blog .

The soft, oddly intimate home-chore robot has been given some very tactile hands.

Every system that does "semantic" anything — RAG pipelines, recommendation engines, image search, dedup — boils down to one operation: given this vector, find the closest ones out of millions. The vectors are embeddings, a few hundred to a couple thousand numbers each, and "closest" means closest in meaning. You'd assume the database either scans all of them (slow but correct) or uses some clever tree to jump straight to the answer. It does neither. Instead it deliberately settles for the approximately closest vectors — and that compromise is the entire reason vector search is fast enough to exist. Two algorithms do almost all the heavy lifting in practice, in pgvector, Qdrant, FAISS, and the rest: IVF and HNSW . Here's what they're actually doing under the hood, and how to choose between them. Why "exact" is off the table The natural objection is: why approximate? Just find the real nearest neighbor. In two or three dimensions you could — a k-d tree or similar structure prunes away big regions of space and finds the true closest point quickly. The trouble is that embeddings live in hundreds of dimensions, and high-dimensional space is deeply weird. It's called the curse of dimensionality . As dimensions grow, the distance to your nearest point and the distance to your farthest point drift toward being almost the same. Formally, the contrast (d_max − d_min) / d_min shrinks toward zero. When everything is roughly equidistant from everything else, a tree can't confidently say "skip this whole branch, it's too far" — the bounding regions all overlap, every branch looks plausible, and the search degrades into checking nearly everything. Exact indexes quietly collapse back into brute force. So we change the question. Instead of "prove you found the nearest," we ask "quickly find something very probably among the nearest." That's approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search, and it swaps a guarantee for speed. The quality knob becomes recall : of the true top-k neighbors, wh

I recently commented on Jonathan Lewis’s blog, Savepoint Funny , where I compared how PostgreSQL handles uniqueness differently: “PostgreSQL resolves uniqueness through heap tuple visibility". This deserves a more detailed explanation. In Oracle, unique indexes store unique entries because the B-tree key is the index key, preventing duplicates. Non-unique indexes add the ROWID to ensure that all entries are physically unique, even when indexed column values are duplicated. In PostgreSQL, all indexes, even unique ones, created explicitly by CREATE UNIQUE INDEX or implicitly to enforce a unique constraint, behave like non-unique indexes by appending the TID (tuple ID, similar to Oracle's ROWID) to the index key. This indicates that the index itself doesn't guarantee physical uniqueness, allowing multiple entries to have identical logical keys but point to different heap tuples. The actual uniqueness verification occurs at the heap level, not within the index entries. Initially, this might seem unusual—a unique index that permits duplicates. However, PostgreSQL requires this because of its MVCC system. MVCC allows duplicate entries to coexist in an index, since they can represent different versions of the same logical row. Still, PostgreSQL must guarantee that no MVCC snapshot views two rows with the same index key. Oracle doesn't face this issue because its MVCC implementation also versions index blocks, allowing a single index version to maintain unique keys. Let’s show that. Page inspect In PostgreSQL, the heap contains the table data, and index entries point to heap tuples. Visibility depends on the heap header, especially the transaction information. Index scans often visit the heap pages to check visibility, except for index-only scans, which use the heap's visibility maps as an optimization. B-tree indexes can store entries for multiple versions of the same logical row, including versions that are no longer visible to current snapshots. To ensure uniqueness, the

How I moved from a traditional web application mindset to exploring local-first architecture I wanted to build a simple software tool for my personal use. Nothing complicated. Something in the category of tools people build for themselves: A personal expense tracker A budgeting application A private knowledge management tool A personal organization system The important characteristic was this: The data belonged to one person. It was not a social application. It was not a collaboration platform. It did not need users interacting with each other. There was no requirement for: Public profiles Sharing updates Real-time collaboration Social features It was simply a tool that helped one person manage their own information. When I started thinking about building it, my first instinct was the most natural one for me. I am a web application developer. My comfort zone is building web applications. So my first thought was: "Why not build a Ruby on Rails application?" Something like: User | Web Application | Ruby on Rails API | PostgreSQL Database This is an architecture I have worked with many times. The workflow is familiar: Create models Build controllers Add authentication Store data in a database Deploy the application Access it from anywhere This is a proven architecture. For many products, this is exactly the right approach. But while thinking about this project, I asked myself a different question: Am I choosing this architecture because the problem requires it, or because it is the architecture I already know? That question changed the direction completely. Understanding The Actual Problem Before choosing technology, I wanted to understand the nature of the problem. What kind of application was I actually building? There is a big difference between building: A social network A marketplace A collaboration platform A communication application versus building: A personal tool A private utility A single-user productivity application In the first category, the server is the

Last week I open sourced FableCut , a Premiere-style video editor that runs in the browser and that AI agents can operate. It hit the front page of Hacker News ( thread ), and the questions there made me realize the interesting part isn't the editor. It's one design decision: the project file is the interface. The usual way, and why I flipped it Most AI video tools hide the edit behind an API. You call addClip() , applyFilter() , and the tool owns the state. If you want a human to touch the result, you build a whole collaboration layer. FableCut does the opposite. The entire timeline lives in one JSON document, project.json : media, clips, tracks, keyframes, transitions, markers. The editor UI reads it. The export renders it. And anything that can write JSON can edit video: Claude Code through MCP, a Python script, jq , or you with a text editor. { "id" : "c_title" , "kind" : "text" , "track" : "V3" , "start" : 0 , "duration" : 2.2 , "props" : { "text" : "HANDMADE" , "font" : "Bebas Neue" , "glow" : 45 , "textAnim" : "letter-pop" } } That clip is a glowing kinetic caption. There is no API call that creates it. Writing it into the file IS creating it. SSE as a doorbell, not a data channel The first question on HN was "what's the benefit of SSE here?" Fair question, because the SSE channel does almost nothing, and that's the point. The server watches the project file with fs.watch , debounces 150ms, and pushes the literal string change to the browser. No payload. The browser re-fetches the project and re-renders. The whole mechanism is about 15 lines on a bare node:http server. Why not WebSockets? Because the data only flows one way. Everything that writes (the UI, an agent, a shell script) goes through REST or the filesystem. The browser only ever needs to hear "something changed, go look." An event with no payload can't arrive out of order, and a missed event costs nothing because the next fetch has the latest state anyway. The revision counter, or: how a human and

TLDR; I got tired of babysitting N terminal tabs of five different coding-agent CLIs. So I built agentproto — one daemon that drives Claude Code, Codex, Hermes, opencode, and Mastra through the same lifecycle, and actually supervises them. Why I built a daemon to drive every AI coding agent from one interface I have a confession: at any given moment I have Claude Code, Codex, and Hermes running in parallel terminal tabs, and I cannot remember which flag spawns which, which one eats --prompt , which one needs --cwd vs cd , and which one will hang forever if I close the laptop lid. simonw described the feeling on Hacker News recently — "Today I have Claude Code and Codex CLI and Codex Web running, often in parallel" — and called it a real jump in cognitive load compared to a year ago. aantix asked, also on HN: "how does everyone visually organize the multiple terminal tabs open for these numerous agents in various states?" I didn't have a good answer. So I built one. It's called agentproto . It is one daemon and one CLI that drives any coding-agent CLI — Claude Code, Codex, Hermes, opencode, Mastra, and a few more — through the same start / prompt / monitor / kill lifecycle, so you stop memorizing five different CLIs. On top of that lifecycle it adds the supervision layer people keep hand-rolling by hand: durable policy gates, nested orchestration, and multiplexed fan-in monitoring. MIT, no paid tier, the daemon itself is an MCP server. This is the story of why it exists. The hand-rolled watchdog The sharpest signal while I was building this came from other people independently re-inventing the same primitives in tmux scripts. On r/ClaudeAI, Confident_Chest5567 posted a writeup of orchestrating agents via tmux panes with a watchdog that resets dead sessions — "a swarm of agents that can keep themselves alive indefinitely." In the same thread, IssueConnect7471 (18 upvotes) described wiring a Redis pub/sub heartbeat plus dead-letter respawn between tmux panes, and arriv

In Tutorial 1 Duke dashed for coffee with arcade physics. Now he sets the cup down for a calmer contest: Duke Jack , a game of blackjack. A card game has none of that arcade motion — cards sit on the felt and the rules decide who wins. This tutorial shows how the same Game Builder pattern (visual data + an onUpdate companion) handles a card game, where your code reads the cards and runs the table instead of simulating movement. We'll build a felt table, deal a real hand, and wire up the complete blackjack rules: hit, stand, the dealer's draw, and the win/lose decision. What is Codename One? Codename One is an open-source framework for building native iOS, Android, desktop, and web apps from a single Java or Kotlin codebase. Learn more at codenameone.com . If you haven't set up a project yet, the project setup in Tutorial 1 applies verbatim — only the mode changes (board mode isn't the default, so the -Dmode=board flag is required here): mvn cn1:create-game-scene -DclassName = com.example.dukejack.DukeJack -Dmode = board mvn cn1:gamebuilder Why board mode for cards? Board mode is the Game Builder's grid mode: you place elements on a flat board of cells instead of a free-scrolling world. That's a natural fit for a card table — the felt is a tile layer, and each card is an element you position by hand, carrying its own rank , suit and faceUp data. There's no physics and no camera to chase; the layout is the game state, and your rules read it. (Board mode can also tilt the grid into an isometric view through IsoProjection for tabletop games — for cards we keep it flat and top-down.) Step 1 — A card-table scene Pick New scene → Board . You get a Board (tile) layer for the table surface and a Pieces (entity) layer for the cards. Keeping the felt and the cards on separate layers matters: the felt is static grid data, while the cards are objects your rules deal, flip, and clear. A small grid (here 8×5) is all a card table needs. Step 2 — Lay the felt Select the Board layer,