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Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

https://www.spritely.institute/hoot/
2•AlexeyBrin•1m ago•0 comments

What the longevity experts don't tell you

https://machielreyneke.com/blog/longevity-lessons/
1•machielrey•2m ago•0 comments

Monzo wrongly denied refunds to fraud and scam victims

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2026/feb/07/monzo-natwest-hsbc-refunds-fraud-scam-fos-ombudsman
2•tablets•7m ago•0 comments

They were drawn to Korea with dreams of K-pop stardom – but then let down

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgnq9rwyqno
2•breve•9m ago•0 comments

Show HN: AI-Powered Merchant Intelligence

https://nodee.co
1•jjkirsch•11m ago•0 comments

Bash parallel tasks and error handling

https://github.com/themattrix/bash-concurrent
2•pastage•11m ago•0 comments

Let's compile Quake like it's 1997

https://fabiensanglard.net/compile_like_1997/index.html
1•billiob•12m ago•0 comments

Reverse Engineering Medium.com's Editor: How Copy, Paste, and Images Work

https://app.writtte.com/read/gP0H6W5
2•birdculture•18m ago•0 comments

Go 1.22, SQLite, and Next.js: The "Boring" Back End

https://mohammedeabdelaziz.github.io/articles/go-next-pt-2
1•mohammede•23m ago•0 comments

Laibach the Whistleblowers [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6Mx2mxpaCY
1•KnuthIsGod•25m ago•1 comments

Slop News - HN front page right now hallucinated as 100% AI SLOP

https://slop-news.pages.dev/slop-news
1•keepamovin•29m ago•1 comments

Economists vs. Technologists on AI

https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/p/economists-vs-technologists-on-ai
1•econlmics•31m ago•0 comments

Life at the Edge

https://asadk.com/p/edge
3•tosh•37m ago•0 comments

RISC-V Vector Primer

https://github.com/simplex-micro/riscv-vector-primer/blob/main/index.md
4•oxxoxoxooo•41m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Invoxo – Invoicing with automatic EU VAT for cross-border services

2•InvoxoEU•41m ago•0 comments

A Tale of Two Standards, POSIX and Win32 (2005)

https://www.samba.org/samba/news/articles/low_point/tale_two_stds_os2.html
3•goranmoomin•45m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Is the Downfall of SaaS Started?

3•throwaw12•46m ago•0 comments

Flirt: The Native Backend

https://blog.buenzli.dev/flirt-native-backend/
2•senekor•48m ago•0 comments

OpenAI's Latest Platform Targets Enterprise Customers

https://aibusiness.com/agentic-ai/openai-s-latest-platform-targets-enterprise-customers
1•myk-e•50m ago•0 comments

Goldman Sachs taps Anthropic's Claude to automate accounting, compliance roles

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/anthropic-goldman-sachs-ai-model-accounting.html
3•myk-e•53m ago•5 comments

Ai.com bought by Crypto.com founder for $70M in biggest-ever website name deal

https://www.ft.com/content/83488628-8dfd-4060-a7b0-71b1bb012785
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•54m ago•1 comments

Big Tech's AI Push Is Costing More Than the Moon Landing

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-spending-tech-companies-compared-02b90046
4•1vuio0pswjnm7•56m ago•0 comments

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/07/ai-spending-economy-shortages/
2•1vuio0pswjnm7•58m ago•0 comments

Suno, AI Music, and the Bad Future [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8dcFhF0Dlk
1•askl•59m ago•2 comments

Ask HN: How are researchers using AlphaFold in 2026?

1•jocho12•1h ago•0 comments

Running the "Reflections on Trusting Trust" Compiler

https://spawn-queue.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3786614
1•devooops•1h ago•0 comments

Watermark API – $0.01/image, 10x cheaper than Cloudinary

https://api-production-caa8.up.railway.app/docs
1•lembergs•1h ago•1 comments

Now send your marketing campaigns directly from ChatGPT

https://www.mail-o-mail.com/
1•avallark•1h ago•1 comments

Queueing Theory v2: DORA metrics, queue-of-queues, chi-alpha-beta-sigma notation

https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/queueing-theory
1•jph•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: Hibana – choreography-first protocol safety for Rust

https://hibanaworks.dev/
5•o8vm•1h ago•1 comments
Open in hackernews

Show HN: I built an AI agent that turns ROS 2's turtlesim into a digital artist

https://github.com/Yutarop/turtlesim_agent
30•ponta17•8mo ago
I'm a grad student studying robotics, with a particular interest in the intersection of LLMs and mobile robots. Recently, I discovered how easily LangChain enables the creation of AI agents, and I wanted to explore how such agents could interact with simulated environments.

So, I built TurtleSim Agent, an AI agent that turns the classic ROS 2 turtlesim turtle into a creative artist.

With this agent, you can give plain English commands like “draw a triangle” or “make a red star,” and it will reason through the instructions and control the simulated turtle accordingly. I’ve included demo videos on GitHub. Behind the scenes, it uses an LLM to interpret the text, decide what actions are needed, and then call a set of modular tools (motion, pen control, math, etc.) to complete the task.

If you're interested in LLM+robotics, ROS, or just want to see a turtle become a digital artist, I'd love for you to check it out:

GitHub: https://github.com/Yutarop/turtlesim_agent

Looking ahead, I’m also exploring frameworks like LangGraph and MCP (Modular Chain of Thought Planning) to see whether they might be better suited for more complex planning and decision-making tasks in robotics. If anyone here is familiar with these frameworks or working in this space, I’d love to connect or hear your thoughts.

Comments

dpflan•8mo ago
Forgive me for asking, but im always curios about the definition of “agent”. What is an “agent” exactly? Is it a static prompt that is sent along with user input to an LLM service and then handles that resposne? And then it’s done? Is an agent a prompted LLM call? Or some entity that is changing its own prompt as it continues to exist?
karmakaze•8mo ago
It depends on how you look at it. If the output 'it' is a drawing, then the agent is the thing doing the drawing on the user's behalf. In more detail the output thing are commands, so then the agent would be what's generating those commands from the user's input. E.g. a web browser is a user agent that makes requests and renders resources that the user specifies.
ponta17•8mo ago
Thanks for the thoughtful question! The term “agent” definitely gets used in a lot of different ways, so I’ll clarify what I mean here.

In this project, an agent is an LLM-powered system that takes a high-level user instruction, reasons about what steps are needed to fulfill it, and then executes those steps using a set of tools. So it’s more than a single prompted LLM call — the agent maintains a kind of working state and can call external functions iteratively as it plans and acts.

Concretely, in turtlesim_agent, the agent receives an input like “draw a red triangle,” and then: 1. Uses the LLM to interpret the intent, 2. Decides which tools to use (like move forward, turn, set pen color), 3. Calls those tools step-by-step until the task is done.

Hope that clears it up a bit!

paxys•8mo ago
To put it more simply, "agent" is now just a generic term to describe any middleware that sits between user input and a base LLM.
latchkey•8mo ago
This really brings back memories. The first computer language I learned as a child was Logo. My grandfather gifted me a lesson from a local computer store where someone came out to his house and sat with me in front of his Apple II.

I was too young to understand the concepts around the math of steps or degrees. While the thought of programming on a computer was amazing (and later became an engineer), I couldn't grasp Logo, got frustrated, and lost interest.

If I could have had something like this, I'm sure it would have made more sense to me earlier on. It makes me think about how this will affect the learning rate in a positive way.

pj_mukh•8mo ago
Haha this is so incredibly cool.

One thing I might’ve missed, what are the “physics” universe? In the rainbow example the turtle seems to teleport between arcs?

ponta17•8mo ago
Thanks! Great question.

TurtleSim itself doesn't simulate real-world physics — it allows instant position updates when needed. In this project, the goal was to create a digital turtle artist, not to replicate physical realism. So when the agent wants to draw something, it puts the pen down and moves physically (i.e., using velocity commands). But when it doesn't need to draw and just wants to move quickly to another position, it uses a teleport function I provided as a tool.

That's why in the rainbow example, you might see the turtle "jump" between arcs — it's skipping the movement to get to the next drawing point faster.

moffkalast•8mo ago
That's pretty cool, but I feel like all of the LLM integrations with ROS so far have sort of entirely missed the point in terms of useful applications. Endless examples of models sending bare bone twist commands do a disservice to what LLMs are good at, it's like swatting flies with a bazooka in terms of compute used, too.

Getting the robot to move from point A to point B is largely a solved problem with traditional probabilistic methods, while niches where LLMs are the best fit I think are largely still unaddressed, e.g.:

- a pipeline for natural language commands to high level commands ("fetch me a beer" to [send nav2 goal to kitchen, get fridge detection from yolo, open fridge with moveit, detect beer with yolo, etc.]

- using a VLM to add semantic information to map areas, e.g. have the robot turn around 4 times in a room, and have the model determine what's there so it can reference it by location and even know where that kitchen and fridge is in the above example

- system monitoring, where an LLM looks at ros2 doctor, htop, topic hz, etc. and determines if something's crashed or isn't behaving properly, and returns a debug report or attempts to fix it with terminal commands

- handling recovery behaviours in general, since a lot of times when robots get stuck the resolution is simple, you just need something to take in the current situational information, reason about it, and pick one of the possible ways to resolve it

ponta17•8mo ago
Thanks a lot for the thoughtful feedback — I really appreciate it!

I think there might be a small misunderstanding regarding how the LLM is actually being used here (and in many agent-based setups). The LLM itself isn’t directly executing twist commands or handling motion; it’s acting as a decision-maker that chooses from a set of callable tools (Python functions) based on the task description and intermediate results.

In this case, yes — one of the tools happens to publish Twist commands, but that’s just one of many modular tools the LLM can invoke. Whether it’s controlling motion or running object detection, from the LLM’s point of view it’s simply choosing which function to call next. So the computational load really depends on what the tool does internally — not the LLM’s reasoning process itself.

Of course, I agree with your broader point: we should push toward more meaningful high-level tasks where LLMs can orchestrate complex pipelines — and I think your examples (like fetch-a-beer or map annotation via VLMs) are spot-on.

My goal with this project was to explore that decision-making loop in a minimal, creative setting — kind of like a sandbox for LLM-agent behavior.

Actually, I’m currently working on something along those lines using a TurtleBot3. I’m planning to provide the agent with tools that let it scan obstacles via 3D LiDAR and recognize objects through image processing, so that it can make more context-aware decisions.

Really appreciate the push for deeper use cases — that’s definitely where I want to go next!