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Show HN: FELF – AppImage-like single binaries without FUSE, root, or a runtime

Hello HN!I've always had a bad time redistributing programs that use shared libraries, AppImage in my opinion does too much, and a container is an overkill - not always integrates smoothly.I've moved to nix since long ago, but redistributing between nix and other distros or vice versa it's still a pain in the ass, more so if you want to run an alien app in nix or a nix app without the package manger in any other distro.For that, with the help of Claude, I've implemented a format that deduces at pack-time all the shared libraries a program needs, puts them, together with its own glibc and a patched dynamic linker into a single executable.This means that you don't actually need a runtime nor any special capability, it can run inside a FROM SCRATCH docker, alpine linux etc... And it also supports coreutils-like multiple programs accessible via symlinks, so it is a good fit for that purpose.You can just use:> felf pack $(which git) --output git.felfand you'll have already a git binary that works everywhere, no matter which distro you are building this from. This only packs the binary and their dependencies.Essentially, the effect is similar as if you LD_PRELOAD's all the libraries that it requires.In the end, we have been fighting these demons since long long ago, chroots/docker/appimage/flatpack/nix etc...So this xkcd applies: https://xkcd.com/927/I'm happy to share the project, I hope it inspires new discoveries/tools in this regard! Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50415219 Points: 2 # Comments: 0

Show HN: Open-source customer-facing agents

Hi, Dmitri from Radioso here, an open-source platform to design AI agents for customers and visitors in any channel, in the style of Fin/Ada/Decagon. The repo is https://github.com/radioso-ai/radioso and our website is https://radioso.aiToday, your choices are:1. Buy a very expensive service for your vertical (usually starting with $$ five figures monthly) 2. Get a cheap off-the-shelf chatbot that mostly answers FAQs 3. Build your own, and then also build the inbox, human handoff, audit trail and integrations around itAt Radioso we wanted an open-source option that combines the best of all 3. You can integrate it with your own software via API/SDK or your CRM, or run it standalone, either self-hosted or in our cloud.The engine runs multi-step interactions and takes actions: calling your APIs, updating records, booking things. Maybe you’ve tried Parlant; Radioso is the alternative “with batteries included”: RAG, audit trail, customer service inbox, and integrations like Slack and email.Under the hood it’s plain TypeScript + PostgreSQL, works with OpenAI/Anthropic/other models, and is licensed under Apache 2.0 which includes all features (The only thing we keep under EE license is the multi-tenant layer we use to run our own cloud).We have existing customers running it for technical Q&A, course booking, online product recommendations and goods returns, among others, some reaching 92% of conversations automated. We’re currently working on voice support so we can offer a call center.Our ambition is to be “the WordPress of customer-facing AI” :), where people can contribute their favorite plugins and benefit from the ecosystem.Longer term, we think browsing the web will mostly mean talking to your own agent, and when you need a service or a purchase, your agent will talk to the vendor’s agent to get things done. For this, Radioso already publishes an A2A Agent Card and we’re working on the rest. Your Radioso services are also callable over MCP, for customers who already use it.Thanks for your attention. We’d especially love to hear which integrations you’d want, whether you’d self-host it, and what’s stopped you from deploying a customer-facing AI agent so far. Tell us what you think. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50423820 Points: 1 # Comments: 0

Show HN: Pgxio – a tiny PostgreSQL layer inside Nginx

I built the first version of this stuff a decade ago as ethanolus (c2h5oh). And I've used it for most of my projects as a backend layer since then.The main motive is to eliminate unnecessary complexity from backend layers.How it works: a rust nginx module calls postgresql functions via non-blocking libpq io. There is an optional patch for libpq. It provides zero-copy for nginx-chained memory buffers - to avoid request body copies between nginx and libpq.Pgxio supports http2 and websockets. Realtime listen/notify updates from postgres without polling.How to try - code on github. Tested on Debian - FreeBSD validation in progress.It's alpha - so any feedback is welcome. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50425203 Points: 1 # Comments: 0

Show HN: Recap Studio – A Mac screen recorder for clean, polished demos

Hi HN, I made Recap Studio, a Mac app for recording demos and tutorials that look good without a video editor.You record your screen, camera and mic. Then you can zoom in on parts of the video, smooth the cursor, add a background, show the keys you press, and cut out mistakes. The newest feature keeps your face centered in the camera as you move. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50415185 Points: 1 # Comments: 0

Show HN: Record, branch, and compare command runs in stdlib-only Python

Hi, this is a package I developed for keeping track of short toy-model development cycles and explaining what changed between runs.The core idea: commands run through the package, and their declared parameters (or injected parameters with --substitute) and outcomes go into a dependency-free ledger stored in the project. Because that ledger lives in the project directory, it has worked well for passing context between different agents. I’ve also found some use for it in CI work. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50417782 Points: 3 # Comments: 0

Structuring Survey Histories for LLM Digital Twins: A Controlled Study of Background, Decision Procedure, and Evaluation Profiles

arXiv:2611.08730v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based digital twins aim to predict how individuals would respond in new settings from representations of their prior responses. Existing evidence that compression of survey histories need not reduce predictive accuracy suggests that representation structure, rather than information volume alone, may be an important design choice. We study BDE, a fixed representation that organizes each respondent's survey history into Background, Decision procedure, and Evaluation. We evaluate it on Twin-2K-500 (Toubia et al., 2025) by predicting each respondent's held-out answers on 17 tasks. In a paired evaluation with 100 respondents, a fully inferred BDE profile improves overall accuracy over the raw survey transcript by 1.27 percentage points (pp) on gpt-5.4-nano (p < 0.01) and 1.19 pp on gpt-5.4-mini (p < 0.001). Three analyses then examine the schema, extraction depth, and component composition. Against a length-matched free-form profile written from the same transcript by the same extractor, BDE improves pricing accuracy on both simulators (2.15 pp on nano, p < 0.01; 1.38 pp on mini, p < 0.05), while its overall advantage is significant only on nano (1.05 pp, p < 0.05). Allowing deeper inference during extraction yields no statistically significant gain on either simulator. By contrast, adding Evaluation to a Background--Decision procedure profile improves overall accuracy by 1.44 pp on nano (p < 0.001) and 1.22 pp on mini (p < 0.001). These results indicate that the advantage over raw transcripts is not explained by compression or length alone, and attribute it primarily to profile composition rather than deeper extraction.

Transporting the Past: An Optimal Transport View of Backtracking Counterfactuals

arXiv:2611.08682v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study backtracking counterfactual inference for Structural Causal Models (SCMs) through the lens of optimal transport. In SCMs, a factual observation generally induces a posterior distribution over exogenous variables, making counterfactual inference inherently distributional. We introduce two complementary frameworks that transport this posterior onto the set of exogenous configurations satisfying a desired counterfactual query. The first constructs a natural pointwise projection and is suitable when the transported exogenous distribution can be used directly. The second enforces mutual independence among counterfactual exogenous variables, so that the transported variables remain interpretable as genuine exogenous noises of the same SCM. We show that both frameworks are consistent with the original backtracking counterfactual principle, and we propose marginal, penalty-based, and hard-constrained solvers for finite-posterior settings. Synthetic experiments on non-bijective SCMs illustrate the geometry of the problem and reveal trade-offs among transport cost, counterfactual constraint satisfaction, and preservation of exogenous independence.

UniExit: A Unified Latency-Aware Early-Exit Runtime for Heterogeneous Edge AI

arXiv:2611.09159v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Edge applications increasingly combine CNN-based perception with edge-deployable Transformer-based language models, but deploying such heterogeneous workloads on resource-constrained devices is challenging because inference latency varies with both input difficulty and runtime hardware state. Early-exit inference reduces computation by terminating at intermediate stages, yet existing methods are often model-specific and rely on static latency profiles that become stale under dynamic edge conditions. This paper presents UniExit, a unified latency-aware early-exit runtime for heterogeneous edge AI. UniExit abstracts CNN blocks and Transformer layers as ordered stages and applies a common latency-aware routing policy while retaining model-specific quality mechanisms. It predicts the cost of reaching the next exit from runtime state and inference progress to make budget-aware continue-or-exit decisions. UniExit combines runtime-state-aware latency prediction, cache-based prediction reuse, trend-aware fallback, and CNN-specific exit stabilization to provide low-overhead and robust online control. We implement UniExit on multiple edge and edge-cloud platforms and evaluate it with representative CNN and Transformer-based language-model workloads. Across single-workload, concurrent heterogeneous, and edge-cloud settings, UniExit consistently improves deadline satisfaction and latency-accuracy trade-offs over existing progressive inference baselines, while reducing redundant exit-module computation and task-level energy consumption.

v0.13.3

Open WebUI v0.13.3 introduces agent-based automations with terminal and folder persistence, allows changing terminals and folders mid-chat, adds Brazilian Portuguese translations, and fixes issues including incorrect file tab behavior, agent visibility in model pickers, clipboard functionality over HTTP, DeepSeek reasoning mode compatibility, tool call labeling consistency, knowledge search punctuation handling, and Docker image build reliability.