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Apple vs the Law

https://formularsumo.co.uk/blog/2025/apple-vs-the-law/
86•tempodox•1h ago•39 comments

OpenFront: Realtime Risk-like multiplayer game in the browser

https://openfront.io/
32•thombles•1h ago•4 comments

Show HN: Pangolin – Open source alternative to Cloudflare Tunnels

https://github.com/fosrl/pangolin
221•miloschwartz•10h ago•35 comments

Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY does not scale

https://www.recall.ai/blog/postgres-listen-notify-does-not-scale
422•davidgu•3d ago•166 comments

Batch Mode in the Gemini API: Process More for Less

https://developers.googleblog.com/en/scale-your-ai-workloads-batch-mode-gemini-api/
92•xnx•3d ago•27 comments

LLM Inference Handbook

https://bentoml.com/llm/
48•djhu9•5h ago•1 comments

The ChompSaw: A Benchtop Power Tool That's Safe for Kids to Use

https://www.core77.com/posts/137602/The-ChompSaw-A-Benchtop-Power-Tool-Thats-Safe-for-Kids-to-Use
158•surprisetalk•3d ago•94 comments

Btrfs Allocator Hints

https://lwn.net/ml/all/cover.1747070147.git.anand.jain@oracle.com/
9•forza_user•1d ago•1 comments

Show HN: Interactive pinout for the Raspberry Pi Pico 2

https://pico2.pinout.xyz
39•gadgetoid•3d ago•5 comments

What is Realtalk’s relationship to AI? (2024)

https://dynamicland.org/2024/FAQ/#What_is_Realtalks_relationship_to_AI
252•prathyvsh•16h ago•84 comments

Series of posts on HTTP status codes (2018)

https://evertpot.com/http/
35•antonalekseev•2d ago•6 comments

FOKS: Federated Open Key Service

https://foks.pub/
221•ubj•19h ago•46 comments

Flix – A powerful effect-oriented programming language

https://flix.dev/
265•freilanzer•18h ago•122 comments

Graphical Linear Algebra

https://graphicallinearalgebra.net/
236•hyperbrainer•16h ago•18 comments

Show HN: Cactus – Ollama for Smartphones

https://github.com/cactus-compute/cactus
140•HenryNdubuaku•13h ago•55 comments

Apple-1 Computer, handmade by Jobs and Woz [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdBKuBhdZwg
48•guiambros•2d ago•16 comments

Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

https://www.browseros.com/
211•felarof•14h ago•74 comments

Underwater turbine spinning for 6 years off Scotland's coast is a breakthrough

https://apnews.com/article/tidal-energy-turbine-marine-meygen-scotland-ffff3a7082205b33b612a1417e1ec6d6
167•djoldman•17h ago•154 comments

Show HN: I built a playground to showcase what Flux Kontext is good at

https://fluxkontextlab.com
51•Zephyrion•1d ago•14 comments

Red Hat Technical Writing Style Guide

https://stylepedia.net/style/
200•jumpocelot•17h ago•86 comments

Grok: Searching X for "From:Elonmusk (Israel or Palestine or Hamas or Gaza)"

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/11/grok-musk/
303•simonw•7h ago•162 comments

Orwell Diaries 1938-1942

https://orwelldiaries.wordpress.com/page/2/
107•bookofjoe•14h ago•60 comments

Foundations of Search: A Perspective from Computer Science (2012) [pdf]

https://staffwww.dcs.shef.ac.uk/people/J.Marshall/publications/SFR09_16%20Marshall%20&%20Neumann_PP.pdf
23•mooreds•3d ago•0 comments

Measuring the impact of AI on experienced open-source developer productivity

https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/
598•dheerajvs•15h ago•393 comments

AI coding tools can reduce productivity

https://secondthoughts.ai/p/ai-coding-slowdown
152•gk1•8h ago•136 comments

eBPF: Connecting with Container Runtimes

https://h0x0er.github.io/blog/2025/06/29/ebpf-connecting-with-container-runtimes/
53•forxtrot•13h ago•7 comments

Analyzing database trends through 1.8M Hacker News headlines

https://camelai.com/blog/hn-database-hype/
143•vercantez•3d ago•71 comments

Matt Trout has died

https://www.shadowcat.co.uk/2025/07/09/ripples-they-cause-in-the-world/
190•todsacerdoti•1d ago•57 comments

Diffsitter – A Tree-sitter based AST difftool to get meaningful semantic diffs

https://github.com/afnanenayet/diffsitter
119•mihau•19h ago•29 comments

Launch HN: Leaping (YC W25) – Self-Improving Voice AI

59•akyshnik•14h ago•33 comments
Open in hackernews

MCP Run Python

https://github.com/pydantic/pydantic-ai/tree/main/mcp-run-python
173•xrd•2mo ago

Comments

turnsout•2mo ago
Woof, use with care
mountainriver•2mo ago
Cool!
evacchi•2mo ago
cool!! you might also want to check out https://www.mcp.run/dylibso/eval-py

It's open source too :) https://github.com/dylibso/mcp.run-servlets/tree/main/servle...

We also use Wasm to sandbox all our servlets https://docs.mcp.run/blog/2025/04/07/mcp-run-security

(I work at Dylibso)

behnamoh•2mo ago
So their method of sandboxing Python code is to spin up a JS runtime (deno), run Pyodide on it, and then run the Python code in Pyodide.

Seems a lot of work to me. Is this really the best way to create and run Python sandboxes?

kissgyorgy•2mo ago
Not at all.
jononor•2mo ago
What is the best way? Or at least, a better way?
babush•2mo ago
I recall Shopify having a seccomp-based jail to run untrusted ruby code. But their use-case was very limited so they can get away with blocking almost every syscall.

Other than that... VMs? The fact that people consider JS/WASM engines good security sandboxes is a bit scary tbf.

simonw•2mo ago
I trust a WASM sandbox a whole lot more than I trust a Docker container sandbox.

WASM engines run in almost every browser on earth, billions of times a day. Security problems in those get spotted very quickly.

babush•2mo ago
It's a bit hard to do comparisons without going into threat models and all that _fun_ stuff :shrug:

For example, JS runs in almost every browser on earth too, yet it took V8 devs 2 years to find out that `Math.expm1()` could return -0.0 (https://chromium.googlesource.com/v8/v8.git/+/56f7dda67fdc97...). This is a cherry-picked example, and JS is clearly more complex than WASM, but still.

Just because stuff runs on a lot of devices doesn't mean it's more or less secure.

Linux runs on quite a few devices too, yet we still find bugs, people still don't ship updates to said bugs, yadda yadda yadda.

My point is just that lots of devs often skip the threat modeling and just think "I'll slap it in a WASM thingie an it'll be fine". Well good luck.

kissgyorgy•2mo ago
Landlock, cgroups on Linux
ehsanu1•2mo ago
gVisor
pansa2•2mo ago
It might be. CPython doesn't support sandboxing Python code, so the only option is to run the whole interpreter within a sandbox.
anentropic•2mo ago
It's what ChatGPT does apparently...

https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/10/chatgpt-canvas/

simonw•2mo ago
Not exactly - ChatGPT has two ways it can run Python code. It can use Pyodide and run it directly in the user's browser (for Canvas), and it can also run Python code on one of their servers in a Jupyter environment in a locked-down Kubernetes container (their "Code Interpreter" tool).

To my knowledge they don't yet have a run-Python-in-WASM-on-the-server implementation.

jamestimmins•2mo ago
What’s the purpose of Jupyter here? Isn’t that optimized for notebooks, which presumably wouldn’t be relevant on the server?
simonw•2mo ago
I think it's more about tapping into the Jupyter ecosystem of visualization libraries etc, plus the fact that there's lots of data analyst examples in the training data that come from notebooks.
jamestimmins•2mo ago
That's an interesting dynamic of the training data impacting the architecture. I wonder if this is a one-off or we see that in other areas as well.
fzzzy•2mo ago
I think this is inevitable. Whatever is most highly represented (correctly) will become even more dominant.
__mharrison__•2mo ago
So that's why it writes such bad pandas code...
pseudosavant•2mo ago
If there is a WASM build of the project, that is going to be the easiest and safest way to run that with untrusted user content. And Deno happens to be really good at hosting WASM itself. So, these are the two easiest tools to do this with.

I was looking into using WASM in Python yesterday for some image processing. It requires pulling in a full WASM runtime like wasmtime. Still better than calling out to native binaries like ImageMagick, but definitely more complicated than doing it in Deno. If I was writing it myself I'd do Deno, but LLMs are so good at writing Python.

kmangutov•2mo ago
Interesting to understand what is possible in this Deno/Pyodide environment. For example sklearn works despite being quite an involved dependency [1]. Another side to this is data input/output, which seems possible with a low level interface [2]. Very exciting that (a simple) end-to-end ML experience is now possible in the modern browser.

[1] https://www.erp5.com/NXD-Blog.Scipy.and.Scikit.Learn.Compile... [2] https://donatstudios.com/Read-User-Files-With-Go-WASM

achierius•2mo ago
Definitely not the safest: the safest way would be to spin up another VM. The hardware-level virtualization guarantees are much stronger than what any JS runtime could provide
ridruejo•2mo ago
It’s one of the best ways, at least on the sandboxing front. Hard to beat Wasm at that
simonw•2mo ago
I've been trying to find a good option for this for ages. The Deno/Pyodide one is genuinely one of the top contenders: https://til.simonwillison.net/deno/pyodide-sandbox

I'm hoping some day to find a recipe I really like for running Python code in a WASM container directly inside Python. Here's the closest I've got, using wasmtime: https://til.simonwillison.net/webassembly/python-in-a-wasm-s...

singularity2001•2mo ago
one wasmtime dependency and a self contained python file with 100 loc seems reasonable!

much better than calling deno, at least if you have no pip dependencies...

just had to update to new api:

# store.add_fuel(fuel) store.set_fuel(fuel) fuel_consumed=fuel-store.get_fuel()

and it works!!

time to hello world: hello_wasm_python311.py 0.20s user 0.03s system 97% cpu 0.234 total

lopuhin•2mo ago
it's pretty difficult to package native python dependencies for wasmtime or other wasi runtimes, e.g. lxml
Already__Taken•2mo ago
yeh if you can't shove numpy in there its not really useful.
antonvs•2mo ago
I was interested in how this compares in a kind of absolute sense. For comparison, an optimized C hello world program gave these results using `perf` on my Dell XPS 13 laptop:

       0.000636230 seconds time elapsed
       0.000759000 seconds user
       0.000000000 seconds sys
That's 36,800% faster. Hand-written assembly was very slightly slower. Using the standard library for output instead of a syscall brought it down to 20,900% faster.

(Yes I used percentages to underscore how big the difference is. It's 368x and 209x respectively. That's huge.)

Begrudgingly, here are the standard Python numbers:

    real    0m0.019s
    user    0m0.015s
    sys     0m0.004s
About 1230% faster than the sandbox, i.e. 12.3x. About an order of magnitude, which is typical for these kinds of exercises.
singularity2001•2mo ago
haha, 99% is startup time for the sandbox, but yeah, python via wasm is probably still 10-400 times slower than c.
fzzzy•2mo ago
Great, thanks for your post! I got it working too. This is going to be incredibly handy.
abshkbh•2mo ago
https://github.com/abshkbh/arrakis

Will come with MacOS support very soon :) Does work on Linux

Tsarp•2mo ago
I tried this path and found that MacOS has horrible support on firecracker and similar.
abshkbh•2mo ago
Crosvm (our original Google project) and its children projects Firecracker, Cloud-Hypervisor are all based on top of "/dev/kvm" i.e. the Linux Virtualization stack.

Apple's equivalent is the Apple Virtualization Framework which exposes kvm like functionality at a higher level.

Tsarp•2mo ago
Atleast on macos cant the sandbox-exec be used similar to what codex is doing?
simonw•2mo ago
Yeah, I got excited about that option a while back but was put off by the fact that Apple's (minimal) documentation say sandbox-exec is deprecated.
fzzzy•2mo ago
OpenAI's Codex CLI uses it on macOS. It's in typescript but maybe I'll take a look at what they do and port it to python.

[edit] looks really simple, except I'll have to look into how their raw-exec takes care of writeableRoots: https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/0d6a98f9afa8697e57b9bae...

[edit2] lol raw-exec doesn't do anything at all with writeableRoots, it's handled in the fullPolicy (from scopedWritePolicy)

fzzzy•2mo ago
I cleaned up the output of asking Gemini 2.5 Pro to rewrite it in python, and it seems to work well:

https://gist.github.com/fzzzy/319d6cbbdfff9c340d0e9c362247ae...

3abiton•2mo ago
> I'm hoping some day to find a recipe I really like for running Python code in a WASM container directly inside Python.

But what would be the usecase for this?

simonw•2mo ago
Running Python code from untrusted sources, including code written by LLMs.
3abiton•2mo ago
I see, the way I would approach is it by running a client on in a specific python env on an incus instance, with LLM hosted either on the host or another seperate an incus instance. Lately been addicted to sandboxing apps in incus, specifically for isolated vpn tunnels, and automating certain web access.
5rest•2mo ago
The demo looks really appealing. I have a real-world use case in mind: analyzing an Excel file and asking questions about its contents. The current approach (https://github.com/pydantic/pydantic-ai/blob/main/mcp-run-py...) seems limited to running standalone scripts—it doesn't support reading and processing files. Is there an extension or workaround to enable file input and processing?
jjuliano•2mo ago
I am nowhere near as big or as popular as Pydantic, but this is my solution - https://kdeps.com/getting-started/resources/python.html
redleader55•2mo ago
The author states:

> The code is executed using Pyodide in Deno and is therefore isolated from the rest of the operating system.

To me personally, the premise is a bit naive - it assumes that deno's WASM VM doesn't have exploits, that pyodide doesn't have bugs, etc. It might as well ask the LLM to produce javascript code and run it under deno and then it would be simpler.

In the end, the problem is one of risk budget. If you're running this in a VM you control and it's only you running your own prompts on it, maybe it's "good enough". If on the other hand, you want to sell this service to others who will attack your infrastructure, then no - it's not even close to be enough.

Your question is a bit vague because it doesn't explain what "best way" means for you. Cheap, secure, implementable by a person over a weekend?

fragmede•2mo ago
The answer, I think, is to push running the VM back onto the user, and build on top of Fabrice's JS Linux and run the sandbox on the user's machine. That way at the very worst they can escape and steal their own cookies from the browser process the VM is running on/in.
achierius•2mo ago
> premise is a bit naive - it assumes that deno's WASM VM doesn't have exploits, that pyodide doesn't have bugs,

Eh, I wouldn't call this naive. Two points:

1. Pyodide bugs should not be a huge concern here. As long as your python code is executing on top of a JS runtime, the runtime is what matters first and foremost from a security pov.

2. Yes, it's possible for Deno to have bugs. But frankly: it's much less likely to than most any other method for doing this sort of sandboxing. Deno sits on v8, which is the engine used by Chrome, and there are very few applications in the world which have a closer eye and larger dedicated security budget than Chrome. V8 can have bugs, sure, but I would expect they (along with JSC and maybe SpiderMonkey) will have far fewer than any other runtime for a serious dynamic language on the market today.

Yes, a VM would be better (and frankly, when you're talking about running Python on top of a JS runtime, might not even be less performance), but the reason why is not that they "have fewer bugs".

kodablah•2mo ago
There just aren't good Python sandboxing approaches. There are subinterpreters but they can slow to start from scratch. There are higher-level sandboxing approaches like microvms, but they have setup overhead and are not easy to use from inside Python.

At Temporal, we required a sandbox but didn't have any security requirement, so we wrote it from scratch with eval/exec and a custom importer [0]. It is not a foolproof sandbox, but it does a good job at isolating state, intercepting and preventing illegal calls we don't like, and allowing some imports to "pass through" the outside instead of being reloaded for performance reasons.

0 - https://github.com/temporalio/sdk-python?tab=readme-ov-file#...

achierius•2mo ago
Out of curiosity, why did you need a sandbox if you didn't have any security concerns?
necovek•2mo ago

  > but it does a good job at isolating state, intercepting and preventing illegal calls we don't like
Sounds like they put the reason just there.
kodablah•2mo ago
Sibling quoted the proper part. It's to help people keep code deterministic by helping prevent shared state and prevent non-deterministic standard library calls.
fzzzy•2mo ago
At least we have subinterpreters now. Even if they are slow that is a really good thing.
jacob019•2mo ago
Indeed. What ever happened to user mode linux?
samuel•2mo ago
I spin up a docker container using the docker API. I haven't used gvisor because I don't expect the model to try kernel level exploits. If it were the case, we're already doomed.
m3047•2mo ago
Having watched the repeated immolation of blissful innocence since smart email clients would run whatever smart (OLE? Smart? I'm kidding.) document was delivered, this is going to be so much fun in a trainwreck kind of way.
bigbuppo•2mo ago
I keep seeing this MCP thing and I'm really happy that people are getting into Burroughs mainframes rather than that stupid AI crap.
snoman•2mo ago
That’s a pretty obscure/dated reference to the Master Control Program that ran on Burroughs mainframes.

I suspect the downvotes are for “… stupid AI crap.”

bigbuppo•2mo ago
...and that still runs on Unisys Libra systems, doing the sort of boring but important work that keeps the world running, such as processing unemployment benefits for the people that are going to be laid off of the AI companies once everyone realizes AGI isn't going to happen and GenAI is the new leaded gasoline.
someguy101010•2mo ago
Nice! I'm working on a way to do this for javascript using v8 https://github.com/r33drichards/mcp-js. Right now this works but there is some significant jank.
_pdp_•2mo ago
Bookmarked it. We took another approach which provides more flexibility but at the cost of slower spin up. Basically we use firecracker vm. We mount the attachments and everything else into the vm so that the agent can run tools on them (anything on the os) and we destroy the machine at the very end. It works! It is also as secure as firecracker goes.

But I like using WASM especially in a hosted environment like Deno. It feels like a more scaleable solution and probably less maintenance too with the downside that that we wont be able to run just any cmd.

I am happy to provide more details and point to the tool is anyone is interested. It is not open-source but you can play with it for free.

retinaros•2mo ago
its like u using lambda
singularity2001•2mo ago
Why not Pyodide directly in python?
simonw•2mo ago
I haven't found a supported, documented way to do that yet. I'd love to find one.
Cluelessidoit•2mo ago
Hi, I don’t really know anything honestly, but I do remember an ai I running on my laptop using xpip or xpython as a contained environment I think it’s a single instance, would that work or is that close???
yahoozoo•2mo ago
All of these Agent frameworks are already overwhelming. Insert joke about parallels to the JavaScript ecosystem.

What agent framework is truly the top dog? Is it just working with the big model providers native frameworks, such as OpenAI’s Agents SDK?

jamesralph8555•2mo ago
How secure is this? I tried building something similar, but it was taking too long to setup a fully virtualized solution like kata container or firecracker.
simonw•2mo ago
I hacked around with this a bit and figured out a way to get it to spit out logging of the prompts and responses to the server: https://gist.github.com/simonw/54fc42ef9a7fb8f777162bbbfbba4...

Short-ish version:

    ANTHROPIC_API_KEY="$(llm keys get anthropic)" \
    uv run --with devtools --with pydantic-ai python -c '
    import asyncio
    from devtools import pprint
    from pydantic_ai import Agent, capture_run_messages
    from pydantic_ai.mcp import MCPServerStdio

    server = MCPServerStdio(
        "deno",
        args=[
            "run",
            "-N",
            "-R=node_modules",
            "-W=node_modules",
            "--node-modules-dir=auto",
            "jsr:@pydantic/mcp-run-python",
            "stdio",
        ],
    )

    agent = Agent("claude-3-5-haiku-latest", mcp_servers=[server])

    async def main():
        with capture_run_messages() as messages:
            async with agent.run_mcp_servers():
                result = await agent.run("How many days between 2000-01-01 and 2025-03-18?")
        pprint(messages)
        print(result.output)

    asyncio.run(main())'
Output here: https://gist.github.com/simonw/54fc42ef9a7fb8f777162bbbfbba4...

I got it running against Mistral Small 3.1 running locally too - notes on that here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/18/mcp-run-python/

neuroelectron•2mo ago
Crap but it's mcp so being good isn't the point anyway