MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fatnoah | 2026-03-10 17:19:04+00:00
> As long as the penalties for data breach are a slap on the wrist and buying everyone one year of credit monitoring, no one will.

And, of course, that one year is totally useless when one is subject to multiple breaches per year. Throw in the fact that so many breaches aren't even with a company that affected individuals have a direct relationship with, and it becomes virtually impossible to fix this.

At this point, I'd be in favor of making any company that handles personal data pay in advance for the monitoring, and get refunded when they prove that that OR THEIR PROVIDERS haven't had a data breach.
by lapcat | 2026-03-10 17:19:35+00:00
> So most of the 'wealthy' people exist as such with social permission because they're employed in production, and if they fail at that job the wealth rapidly evaporates.

It's misleading to say "they're employed in production", using the present tense. Many were engaged in production, and some choose to remain engaged, but others don't. It doesn't seem to matter much. Bill Gates quit his job 20 years ago, claims to be trying to give most of his money away, yet he's still one of the wealthiest people in the world. The dude was already ultra-wealthy by age 30. Sure, he engaged in production for a number of years, but most ordinary workers have no choice but to engage in production for 40 or 50 years or their life at least.

The ultra-wealthy are not wage earners, paid by their labor. They are capital owners, and capital continues to earn returns regardless. If you're smart with your wealth and diversify, and by smart I mean not dumb—safe long-term investment doesn't take a genius—it's extremely hard to lose it all. That would happen only if you put all of your eggs in one basket. I'm not aware of too many riches to rags stories, except among professional athletes for example. But those athletes were wage earners rather than capital owners. They don't own the sports teams.
by raffaeleg | 2026-03-10 17:19:41+00:00
he agents that make money share one trait: they replace a specific, repeatable human workflow that someone is already paying for. Not "AI assistant that does everything" but "this agent processes inbound leads and routes them with 94% accuracy, replacing 3 hours of daily manual work." The ROI calculation is trivial when framed that way. Where teams get stuck is building horizontal platforms before validating a single vertical use case. Pick one workflow, measure the before/after, ship it. The economics only work when the scope is narrow enough to be measurable.
Show HN: A tool for arranging photos for home-printing without wasting paper
by beAbU | 2026-03-10 17:20:03+00:00
I have a printer, and sometimes I like to print some of our family happy snaps out as polaroid-style photos to stick to the fridge. I don't want to print the photo full size, and sometimes I want to do it straight from my phone or tablet, where things like using MS Word is a tad cumbersome.

This web-app allows for the arranging, resizing and cropping of photos on a sheet of paper, after which a printable PDF is generated which can be sent to the printer.

This way, you can run of a batch of photos in a single go, and minimize paper wastage, which is nice if you have the extra-premium photo paper loaded in the printer.

Up to now I've used a paid app for this when on my android tablet, but I was never happy with how it worked. Things like Word or other document/image editors felt too cumbersome for quickly setting up a batch of photos to print. So I decided to build my own.

It's super simple to use, mobile friendly (sort of), local only, offline capable with no external dependencies or a backend. I'm enamored with using web technologies for simple tools like this, that can be bookmarked and used on any device. The sad reality though is that many of these tools (these days) require an account, your data makes a round-trip to someone else's server or they apply a watermark to the output if you don't pay.

I'm happy to put this out for free, for the world to use. And I have zero desire to update or productise this any further. I look forward to solving my next asinine problem in this way, by creating some home-baked software that will probably see a peak user count of 1.
by onion2k | 2026-03-10 17:20:10+00:00
I.e. senior review is valuable, but it does not make bad code good.

I suspect that isn't the goal.

Review by more senior people shifts accountability from the Junior to a Senior, and reframes the problem from "Oh dear, the junior broke everything because they didn't know any better" to "Ah, that Senior is underperforming because they approved code that broke everything."
by biznickman | 2026-03-10 17:20:13+00:00
This is an awful read on this acquisition.

They didn't acquire Moltbook because of the software. Meta is far behind on the AI front especially as it applies to usage adoption. OpenClaw has begun showing new consumer use cases and Moltbook is directionally down a similar path.

They get the team that built it and have more people on the AI initiative who are consumer-centric.

I've watched Matt Schlicht from the team always experiment with cool new use cases of AI and other technologies and now him and Ben have a bigger lab with resources to potentially spawn out larger initiatives.

The lesson here is to spend less time focused on doing what you think is the right thing and spend more time tinkering.
by obviouslynotme | 2026-03-10 17:20:47+00:00
I have enjoyed this article series many times in the past. Having been in all three classes, he got losers and clueless correct, but he is mistaken on the sociopaths.

1. Sociopaths don't recruit. They build fiefdoms and leverage social ties. How many times have you seen a random guy making minimum wage become senior management? Almost never. The exception to this is people who are hired to be in the running for senior management who are moved all over the company at a fast pace to get the lay of the land.

2. Losers are sociopaths who do not have the birthright to be sociopaths. Put the other way around, sociopaths are losers born into valuable social ties. Their natures are the same. Power corrupts. Most people never learn what they become with power. The clueless are the strange ones, the glue that holds everyone together and keeps the lights on.

3. As the author says, gametalk is obtuse discussion distinguished by the stakes involved. That is normal human social patterns, only distinguished by the stakes. If direct, straightforward discussion was the norm, we wouldn't need to use adjectives for it. The clueless are once again the outliers of the organization. The stakes and who gets to use them are the dividing line once again.

It's hard to think that most people are so selfish they would throw their group and others under the bus for benefits, but if you look for it, you will see it everywhere. Most people do not have the ability to exercise enough power to make it obvious.

Think about Resume Driven Development. Half of it is clueless people genuinely excited for Brand New Thing, but what about the rest? They know that in five years, companies will demand ten years of experience in Brand New Thing. So what do they do? They push for Brand New Thing wherever they can. This lets them accumulate leverage for their next job. Who does this hurt? Their company and everyone who has to deal with their Ball of Mud when they leave. This is the moral equivalent of some senior manager taking short-term gains at long-term loss to grab a fat bonus and fail upwards into another company.

I really enjoyed the series, but it has the same problems as other realpolitik subjects. Clueless will grab onto it thinking they can become the next Alexander the Great or Jeff Bezos and make a fool of themselves. The essential ingredients are never spoken out loud, and topics like this are always gross oversimplifications by their very nature.
by distances | 2026-03-10 17:20:48+00:00
This, and I curate a tree of MD docs per topic to define the expected structure. It is supposed to output code that looks exactly like my code. If not, I manually edit it and perhaps update the docs.

This is how I've found myself to be productive with the tools, or since productivity is hard to measure, at least it's still a fun way to work. I do not need to type everything but I want a very exact outcome nonetheless.
by troupo | 2026-03-10 17:20:50+00:00
Oh yes. That too. It's one problem after another in quite a few countries: ignore/neglect, make processes, regulations and subsidies opaque, all of this leads to huge construction times and corruption, declare nuclear non-viable.

China: "Nearly every Chinese nuclear project that has entered service since 2010 has achieved construction in 7 years or less." [1] Building over 40 reactors since 2005

[1] https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/chinas-impressive-...
by Verdex | 2026-03-10 17:21:42+00:00
Yeah, that's kind of what I'm wondering about.

It's an interesting story about how even though all metrics show massive losses actually they have massive gains.

Accounting is a rather mature field, so I figure that someone in the past has tried this stunt and there should probably be ways for dealing with it.

Or do they always flame out after losing all the money? Knowing the history here would be informative.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-03-10 17:21:48+00:00
The Windows equivalent solution is "open the registry editor and...", or worse, there isn't one, because the first person to fix it is going to need some technical competence and 36 hours if they have access to the source code, but if it's open source someone does it and posts the solution on the internet, whereas it would take a thousand hours without the source code, and then it's just an unresolved question on the Microsoft site with several other users saying "did anyone find a solution?" and no one saying yes. Or worse even still, you get a list of 50 wrong solutions none of which actually work because Microsoft doesn't want it fixed and keeps breaking it on purpose every time someone posts a workaround.

Meanwhile when the Linux solution is to open the terminal and type the thing, and you open the terminal and type the thing, it actually fixes the problem.
by ok_dad | 2026-03-10 17:21:53+00:00
The only issue to beat in mind is that visual inspection is only about 85% accurate at its limit. I was responsible for incoming inspection at a medical device factory and visual inspection was the least reliable test for components that couldn’t be inspected for anything else. We always preferred to use machines (likes big CMM) where possible.

I also use LLM assistance, and I love it because it helps my ADHD brain get stuff done, but I definitely miss stuff that I wouldn’t miss by myself. It’s usually fairly simple mistakes to fix later but I still miss them initially.

I’ve been having luck with LLM reviewers though.
by Sayuj01 | 2026-03-10 17:22:20+00:00
I wanted a way to access my mac terminal from my iphone without setting up any vpn or weird router rules and then buying a separate ssh app in app store.

So I built macky.dev as a fun side project.
When the mac app is running it makes an outbound connection to my signaling server and registers itself under the account. iPhone also connects to this same signaling server to request a connection to this mac. Once both the host and remote are verified it establishes a direct p2p webrtc connection.
by QuercusMax | 2026-03-10 17:22:33+00:00
A few years ago I was in a place where I couldn't type on a computer keyboard for more than a few minutes without significant pain, and I fortunately had shifted into a role where I could oversee a bunch of junior engineers mostly via text chat (phone keyboard didn't hurt my hands as much) and occasional video/voice chat.

I'm much better now after tons of rehab work (no surgery, thankfully), but I don't have the stamina to type as much as I used to. I was always a heavy IDE user and a very fast coder, but I've moved platforms too many times and lost my muscle memory. A year ago I found the AI tools to be basically time-wasters, but now I can be as productive as before without incurring significant pain.
by graemep | 2026-03-10 17:22:35+00:00
> but it's actually proof that the EU is not yet lost: that law keeps getting shot down.

Good things happen in the UK and US too and some bad laws get rejected. The overall trend is pretty clear though and is the same in the EU, and the rest of the west too.

Its not just one country or leader or political party. Its a cultural problem that affects the whole of the west. "We are going to hell slightly slower" is not a great place to claim to be.
by agentplaybooks | 2026-03-10 17:22:36+00:00
The failure modes that bit hardest in my production deployments were #4 and #5 -- context limit surprises and cascade failures.

Context overflow is insidious because agents don't error out. They just quietly make worse decisions as the window fills. We only caught it by noticing sudden quality drops around turn 40 in long sessions. No error logs. Just degraded output.

Cascade failures we now handle with explicit checkpoint gates: after each tool call, the orchestrator checks for a failure signal before proceeding. One bad tool call used to silently corrupt 3-4 downstream steps. Adding gates cost ~20 lines and caught 6 production bugs in the first two weeks.

A failure mode I don't see discussed enough: cross-session memory drift. Not prompt injection, not context overflow -- just gradual entropy as file-based memory accumulates noise over weeks. After 3-4 weeks of operation, briefs degrade because agents are drawing on stale context from past sessions.

Fix: weekly memory audits. Review what agents actually wrote down. Prune aggressively. Intentional compression beats automated recall every time.

I wrote up the full framework (including brief formats that prevent your #1 failure mode) here if useful: https://bleavens-hue.github.io/ai-agent-playbook/
by bengale | 2026-03-10 17:22:41+00:00
Ideological is the best way to describe the reaction by most people on here I think, counterproductive is another one. The reality is most normal people want children protected, unless we can come to the table with good options we are going to end up with a terrible one thrust upon us.

Slippery slope arguments and things like it are not going to convince people, "just parent your kids" is not going to convince people. Not because they're wrong, but because on balance they feel like the damage to children being exposed to this content is worse than the potential civil liberty issues.

It will be very difficult to explain to people why this is not the same as alcohol being age-gated and you having to prove your identity to access it. Technically there should be no real reason we cannot do age attestation without fully revealing our identities anyway, there will need to be trust at some point in the system but the reality of the real world is that there is already and it's far less secure than we'd like.
by oxygen_crisis | 2026-03-10 17:22:55+00:00
Windows NTP client uses UDP port 123 as both the destination and source port, rather than letting the OS assign an ephemeral source port.

Many ISPs (e.g. AT&T Fiber) block UDP traffic with source port 123 to mitigate NTP amplification attacks.

Most people won't notice that problem since low-end consumer routers tend to mangle the source port when they perform outbound NAT. The ISP-provided router will generally do this itself until you enable "DMZ+" or "IP Passthrough" or some similarly-named mode, as home networking experts will typically do so they can manage NAT and firewalling on their own devices.

If a Windows laptop can sync and the wired Windows desktops can't, your wi-fi AP might be doing the necessary source port mangling.

If you add a NAT rule to your router to change the source port for NTP traffic, you should get time sync working.
by pear01 | 2026-03-10 17:23:01+00:00
Europe is not an ancient civilization. It is a continent and politically, an amalgamation.

Most of the "Western" civilizations old enough to attempt comparison with China were not European in the modern sense at all. The classic example is usually Rome, which treated most of Europe as barbarians to colonize and enslave. The engine and wealth of the empire was along the Mediterranean. Ancient Rome was thus really a Mediterranean power not a "European" one. I think you could successfully argue Romans had more in common with other ancient Mediterranean powers or even ancient Mesopotamians than modern Europeans.

As to the rest of your points true enough. It is well known that today's Europeans find themselves in between a rock and a hard place given the current split between American and Chinese hegemony.
by lowsong | 2026-03-10 17:23:10+00:00
> you're admitting that businesses do see SWE as cogs in a wheel and seasonally try to replace them...

Not quite. I agree that companies will try to do this, but every company that has tried to treat engineering staff as replaceable units of person-hours has failed.

> Metrics, performance reviews, sprint velocity, delivery timelines, all orbit around observable artifacts because those are what management systems can actually track objectively and equitably. It's a handy abstraction just like looking only at the ins/outs of a logic gate as opposed to looking at the implementation and wiring.

Yes, and these metrics are, usually, worthless.

It's not that companies and managers will not try to replace engineers with AI. I'm sure they will. I'm sure many will be laid off because "AI does it cheaper now".

My point is that companies that have gone down this route in the past have failed, and AI is no different. Companies that lean strongly into AI as a workforce replacement will fail too.
by Terr_ | 2026-03-10 17:23:36+00:00
Assuming you mean this crash [0], it reads to me more like a confluence of bad events versus a big fundamental design flaw in the THERAC-25 mold.

I feel the current proliferation of LLMs is going to resemble asbestos problem: Cheap miracle thingy, overused in several places, with slow gradual regret and chronic harms/costs. Although I suppose the "undocumented nasty surprise" aspect would depend on adoption of local LLMs. If it's a monthly subscription to cloud-stuff, people are far less-likely to lose track of where the systems are and what they're doing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_4590
by vivzkestrel | 2026-03-10 17:23:49+00:00
- if i had a time machine i would go back in time and prevent openclaw from ever being made,

- perhaps do one step better and go back and prevent transformers architecture from ever being made

- no wait let me go one more step back and prevent web 3 and blockchain from ever being made

- no no wait, lets go back further and prevent bitcoin from ever being made, maybe even figure out who satoshi is when he s publishing that paper

- dang no we need to go further and stop social media from ever being conceived

- last stop wait, let us stop the dawn of the internet

- sorry i ruined the entire timeline by trying to change one small thing havent I?
by mindslight | 2026-03-10 17:24:17+00:00
> Fascism, at least as the Nazi's defined and implemented it, is the belief that a socialist economy will work when the people have a similar genetic likeness.

I have seen many arguments supporting the destructionists (aka trumpists) from that exact vein. From the longstanding abstract "immigrants come here and sit on welfare" and "we need to take care of our own" to specifically supporting the recent pogroms as necessary before we can do things like fix healthcare or restore employees' negotiating power. So even by your definition, it seems eminently reasonable to describe the destructionist movement as fascist. And the point isn't to use the label, drop the mic, and consider the topic solved. But rather it's to have a basic dialogue so that we can discuss constructive solutions for opposing it - and that's basically how it's being used in the original post, regardless of your tone policing.

(On the idea itself, I'd say it's preposterous to think that the corpos that drive our politics are going to suddenly switch to supporting socialism if only we racially purify our society, but there are unfortunately a lot of true believers. I'd say the dynamic is more like the only point of the socialist aspect is to assuage people's consciences for having rejected their empathy here and now)
by titzer | 2026-03-10 17:25:17+00:00
I can't tell if you're serious or if you really think someone who has a family on another continent and is running two companies on opposite coasts is some kind of victim of their circumstances and needs a special keyboard warrior to comment on HN in support of them, lest they face the consequences of a little more tax that they'll never miss or some social shaming.

I'm sorry, I don't want HN to to be the place where we get into a fight over the mildest inconvenience for people who are already living extravagant lifestyles.
by dnhkng | 2026-03-10 17:25:41+00:00
Here's an extract, the core TL;DR for a feel of the article.

"And now for the weirdness: There was never the case where any Transformer layer would have seen the output from a future layer!

Layer 10 is trained on layer 9’s output distribution. Layer 60 is trained on layer 59’s. If you rearrange them — feeding layer 60’s output into layer 10 — you’ve created a distribution the model literally never saw during training.

The astounding thing about Goliath wasn’t that is was a huge leap in performance, it was that the damn thing functioned at all. To this day, I still don’t understand why this didn’t raise more eyebrows.

Experimentally, this proved that layers were far more interchangeable than anyone had reason to expect. The internal representations were homogenous enough that the model could digest out-of-order hidden states without collapsing. The architecture was far more flexible than a rigid pipeline.

Between the Base64 observation and Goliath, I had a hypothesis: Transformers have a genuine functional anatomy. Early layers translate input into abstract representations. Late layers translate back out. And the middle layers, the reasoning cortex, operate in a universal internal language that’s robust to architectural rearrangement. The fact that the layer block size for Goliath 120B was 16-layer block made me suspect the input and output ‘processing units’ sized were smaller that 16 layers. I guessed that Alpindale had tried smaller overlaps, and they just didn’t work.

If that was true, maybe I didn’t need to teach a model new facts to make it smarter. I didn’t need fine-tuning. I didn’t need RLHF. I just needed to give it a more layers to think with."
by qsera | 2026-03-10 17:25:47+00:00
> If they submitted bad code...

The core issue is that it takes a large amount of effort to even assess this, because LLM generated code looks good superficially.

It is said that static FP languages make it hard to implement something if you don't really understand what you are implementing. Dynamically typed languages makes it easier to implement something when you don't fully understand what you are implementing.

LLMs takes this to another level when it enables one to implement something with zero understanding of what they are implementing.
by malfist | 2026-03-10 17:25:55+00:00
> previously having overhired

Funny way of saying that Jassy told people he doesn't like the culture of a larger amazon.

Also, if we overhired in 2020-2022, why the hell are we still correcting it in 2026? Did none of the layoffs in 2023 on do the job?

Just an all around failure of leadership with no ownership.
by astahlx | 2026-03-10 17:26:02+00:00
Tony advised me to make money with the software model checker I have been writing. In contrast to the typical practice to make these tools open source and free for use. Would have loved to learn more from him. He was a great teacher but also a great and sharp listener. Still remember the detour we made on the way to a bar in London, talking too much and deep about refinement relations. RiP.