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bpolania

1,644 karma · joined December 20, 2010

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bpolania··on Show HN: Bulwark – Open-source governance layer for AI agents (Rust, MCP-native)
You asked a question, I gave you an answer. You can actually install it and run it with claude and the github MCP. You can also easily integrate it to OpenClaw.
bpolania··on Show HN: Bulwark – Open-source governance layer for AI agents (Rust, MCP-native)
not sure why you say this, if you don’t like it don’t use it, if you can create your own, do it, or just check the repo and try it, you might find it useful
bpolania··on Show HN: Bulwark – Open-source governance layer for AI agents (Rust, MCP-native)
Fair question. Yes, you can absolutely generate a basic proxy with an LLM, the gap is in the stuff that's hard to get right and boring to maintain. Policy hot-reload without dropping in-flight requests (ArcSwap, not "restart the process"). Tamper-evident audit with blake3 hash chains, not just append-only logs. Credential injection where the agent process literally never sees the secret, not env vars. Content inspection that runs bidirectionally without buffering entire responses into memory. Correct TLS MITM for the HTTP proxy mode with dynamic per-host certs. An LLM will generate something that works for a demo. We created 409 tests including property-based testing with proptest, because the failure modes in a security proxy are subtle, off-by-one in glob matching, race conditions in policy reload, Content-Length mismatches after redaction. Same reason, for example, you use nginx instead of asking your AI to write an HTTP server. The first 80% is easy. The last 20% is where credentials leak.
bpolania··on Show HN: Bulwark – Open-source governance layer for AI agents (Rust, MCP-native)
Yes! You are right about the three primitives and that's basically Bulwark's core loop.

On idempotency: right now Bulwark observes but doesn't enforce dedupe. Every request gets a unique event ID in the audit log, and you can see retries in the session timeline, but there's no automatic "this looks like the same create_issue call from 2 seconds ago, block it."

It's on the roadmap and I think it needs to be two things: (1) a configurable dedupe window per tool pattern (you want it for create_charge but not for list_issues), and (2) content-aware hashing so it's not just "same tool + same action" but "same tool + same action + same arguments within N seconds."

The tricky part is that some tools are intentionally non-idempotent, posting the same Slack message twice might be deliberate. So it probably needs to be opt-in per rule rather than global. Would love to hear what patterns you've seen cause the worst double-fires.

bpolania··on How Bad Off Is Oil-Rich Venezuela? It’s Buying U.S. Oil
Some of your point are consequences not causes. For example: the reason Venezuela is using the US imports as dilutants for its heavy oil is because bad management of the industry, it wasn't always like that, you can say the same about the debt, Venezuela is not screwed because of the debt, it has debt because it's screwed.
bpolania··on How Bad Off Is Oil-Rich Venezuela? It’s Buying U.S. Oil
Venezuela doesn't have a 2nd amendment, but the lack of guns is certainly not the reason, if anything is the excess of guns in the street, what people in America don't understand is that the government will always be better armed than the population, Syria is a good example.

What keeps totalitarian governments is will to power, how much os the government willing to risk against the population. Owning a gun is not the same as being willing to die.

bpolania··on How Bad Off Is Oil-Rich Venezuela? It’s Buying U.S. Oil
First step is to reduce public spending and fight corruption, just very basic steps will bring significant improvement.

Then, welcome foreign and local investment: privatize most of the industries that were nationalized and are now idle, and fix labor laws a little, this also include liberalization of currency, enforce property laws so private companies feel safe investing in the long term.

When can this happen? As of today no sooner than 2019 when the next presidential elections will take place. Unless a coup is on the table but I don't see that happening.

bpolania··on How Bad Off Is Oil-Rich Venezuela? It’s Buying U.S. Oil
People who lives in Venezuela saves in US$ and exchange dollars for bolivars when they need liquidity in local currency.
bpolania··on How Bad Off Is Oil-Rich Venezuela? It’s Buying U.S. Oil
In Venezuela price control is not ideological is a stupid move to try to rein inflation.
bpolania··on The Man Who Studies the Spread of Ignorance
I found the reason, I found the article on LinkedIn, if you compare both links you'll see that mine is different because linkedIn added some stuff at the end of the url.
bpolania··on My Favorite Public Data Sources
Yes. I used the GDELT data set in a Geo-intelligence hackathon and it's very powerful, just have in mind that if you use Google BigQuery (actually the easiest way to use the data set) it will cost you money.
bpolania··on The Cheese Board Collective
I'd join a cooperative-like startup, definitely
bpolania··on The slinky machine: a slinky escalator
Hey Matthias, I came to the video through MAKE Magazine that so far has been a legitimate source of information to the maker community, I tried to edit the post but I couldn't next time I'll double-check that.
bpolania··on China Devalues Its Currency as Worries Rise About Economic Slowdown
The main difference is that the Chinese government restricts or blocks several types of transactions, western central banks try to influence the market using specific policies, so it depends on what you define as "intervention", but in general terms Chinese currency do float freely but the government has more power to change its value artificially, for example, there's no "official" price of the US Dollar or the Euro, the Fed doesn't decrees a price for its currency, it can't do that because firms in the US are independent from the central government, on the other hand the Chinese government can set whatever official price they want and since it has almost complete control over the bigger firms it can force the market to accept it at least as a reference price, they have used that power in the past to keep their currency low and keep Chinese exports as competitive as possible
bpolania··on Linear Algebra for Data Scientists
Well, I think it has to do more with what the industry is demanding. I think that even if you know your linear algebra you're not a scientist either, perhaps in the long run we will see, data engineers, scientists, consultants and technicians.
bpolania··on Einhorn: Netflix overvalued, soared on 'bad news'
I think the problem may be that people will have more and more binge watching alternatives in other platforms too. For example, right now in HBO and AMC I could watch The Brink, True Detective, Vice, Halt and Cath Fire and Humans, a few weeks ago I could add Silicon Valley and Games of Thrones, so I'm definitely consuming less Netflix right now, actually I'm considering joining only when House of Cards or Lillyhammer have a new season.
bpolania··on Indiegogo Greek Bailout campaign
At first I thought it was some kind of joke, but I really doubt that they actually think that they'd be able to make it, unless the ECB gets an Indiegogo account =)
bpolania··on I haven’t had a smartphone for more than two years…and it’s been great
I have had a smartphone for the last 6 years and it's been freaking awesome!
bpolania··on Is Uber really cheaper than a taxi?
Don't know there, but here in Miami is definitely cheaper than taxis
bpolania··on Y Combinator submitted a regulatory filing for a new venture fund
They've published some numbers in the past (http://tcrn.ch/1d1iB8Y) but this new move could be because they think they are missing from not being involved in later stages of rgeir own startups and those that weren't not accelerated by them.
bpolania··on Coinbase Launches Instant Bitcoin Buying and Selling
I did a lot of mining very early in the game, then I sold most of them and started back but mainly as a trader in Coinbase, it's as safe as any exchange can possibly be, it has government compliance (so there's small chance that they will seize my money) and I can use my bank account/debit card to buy coins, so if you want to start safe, Coinbase is good advise.
bpolania··on Plug anti-PRISM solution raises half a million dollars in 9 days on Kickstarter
thanks!
bpolania··on Plug anti-PRISM solution raises half a million dollars in 9 days on Kickstarter
In this case what exactly does anti-PRISM means? How I see it it would be PRISM 2.0, since the NSA will now not only have access to your cloud files, now it will have access to your personal physical drives.

will I need to have a Plug account to access my drives? Will I be able to access those drives from outside my house or office? Will my users/password for that account will be stored at some king of Plug centralized server?

bpolania··on Brainfuck programming language
I'd like to see a Brainfuck Hackathon!
bpolania··on Aaron’s Law Takes Shape
I think I wasn't clear enough on this point. I wasn't implying that Aaron's case was directly pressured by businesses, actually I said in my post that in his case the affected parts, i.e. MIT, JSTOR, et al, decided to not push anymore.

When I talked about "businesses" I was referring to the constant pressure they apply for regulators to punish these kind of practices, as the case of Andrew Auernheimer shows, he was also prosecuted for access publicly available information perhaps with the same severity they did with Aaron. Both cases demonstrate a common practice that initiated by the necessity of businesses of cover their backs against these "intrusions", and in both cases also the prosecutors went out of their ways to set an example.

bpolania··on Aaron’s Law Takes Shape
Not much. This is not about him doing something dangerous, this is about a government agency trying to set an example clearly pressured by businesses.

In Aaron´s case it wasn't even the affected part putting the pressure, but a whole industry that feels threatened by what 'hackers' can do with easy-to-access information. They don't feel threatened by google because if it infringes a law they know they can sue and settle for several millions, but they know they can't stop hackers sitting in a computer in their homes or a public library, so they need to scare them away with preemptive strikes.

It Aaron's dead results in a change of this policies, not only lives but innovation will be saved and at least his dead won't been in vain. Hopefully.

bpolania··on Unbreakable Cryptography in 5 Minutes
The article explains an implementation of a Vernam Cipher, it's not intended to solve the most important questions in cryptography.

I don't understand how "introduce someone into the field by showing them what questions the field is actually trying solve" could do any good, it's like saying that the first subject in Physics 101 should be the unified field theory instead of Newtonian physics.

bpolania··on Unbreakable Cryptography in 5 Minutes
XRDS Crossroads is a magazine blog for students, the article presents an actual topic explained for those interested, I think it targets an important part of Hacker News demography and it makes an excellent job in encouraging students to go ahead and develop their own crytographic solution, so I don't know what are you so angry about the article
bpolania··on Unbreakable Cryptography in 5 Minutes
Not sure why that happens, I think is an issue with page itself since the link points to the general article.
bpolania··on Ask HN: In LAMP, can we replace Apache?
If your problem is one of performance, specially if it's related to dynamic content, I think nginx is a very good option in terms of flexibility, lighthttpd performs better than Apache in some cases but if your requirements are specific you may need some configuration with ngnix and a high-performace server like FastCGI or Starman.

perhaps you don't know but this is part of a common problem for large implementations, it's usually known as the c10k problem, you may want searching that term to find more detailed information

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