MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nearlyepic | 2026-03-12 17:03:07+00:00
Am I right in thinking that is not even "clean room" in the way people usually think of it, e.g. Compaq?

The "clean room" aspect for that came in the way that the people writing the new implementation had no knowledge of the original source material, they were just given a specification to implement (see also Oracle v. Google).

If you're feeding an LLM GPL'd code and it "creates" something "new" from it, that's not "clean room", right?

At the end of the day the supposed reimplementation that the LLM generates isn't copyrightable either so maybe this is all moot.
by atonse | 2026-03-12 17:03:20+00:00
IronClaw seems to do this natively, I like the idea in general, so it's good too see this pulled out.

I have few questions:

- How can a proxy inject stuff if it's TLS encrypted? (same for IronClaw and others)

- Any adapters for existing secret stores? like maybe my fake credential can be a 1Password entry path (like 1Password:vault-name/entry/field and it would pull from 1P instead of having to have yet another place for me to store secrets?
by wat10000 | 2026-03-12 17:03:35+00:00
It's a somewhat vaguely defined region. It often excludes India and the Middle East. It always excludes Europe, despite there being no sensible reason to consider them to be two separate continents.

Consider this sentence from the article: "Asia is particularly dependent on oil exports from the Middle East." That's a bizarre statement if you take "Asia" literally. The Middle East is in Asia. Is Saudi Arabia dependent on oil exports from the Middle East? Is Iran?
by fulafel | 2026-03-12 17:03:45+00:00
Sure, the usages aren't all flawed. But it's far more likely to see "Europe" doing something than "US" doing something in the headlines in similar cases, I feel.

Same goes for China, if a couple of companies do something, often in the headline it's just the general "China" doing it. For example we'll see China doing something with EVs whereas for the US we'd see Tesla doing something with EVs.
by boondongle | 2026-03-12 17:03:50+00:00
The issue is how do you interact with other industries/trades who protect their profit making potential.

Ok great - all software and networks are "free." How do you pay for Doctors and Plumbers and Electricians whose earnings are legally protected by the state but whose skill bases are also freely available to be used within the margin of error of a professional or a layman?

Issues like this are great to have conversations about, but if people don't start broadening the scope very quickly, it just turns into the IT/CS worker's worth going to 0 in a world where others worth are protected. And history states, if only 1 group sees the threat, the remaining trades/industries will let it die.
by throwaway2037 | 2026-03-12 17:03:56+00:00
I am blown away. Just 16 days ago, we were discussing this HN post: "FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47129361

In this post that I wrote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47131572 ... I theorised about how a company could reuse a similar technique to re-implement an open source project to change its license. In short: (1) Use an LLM to write a "perfect" spec from an existing open source project. (2) Use a different LLM to implement a functionally identical project in same/different programming language then select any license that you wish. Honestly, this is a terrifying reality if you can pay some service to do it on your behalf.
by etothet | 2026-03-12 17:03:56+00:00
Under "Prerequisites"[0] I see: "Get an Anthropic API key".

I presume this is temporary since the project is still in alpha, but I'm curious why this requires use of an API at all and what's special about it that it can't leverage injecting the prompt into a Claude Code or other LLM coding tool session.

[0]: https://codespeak.dev/blog/greenfield-project-tutorial-20260...
by fakedang | 2026-03-12 17:03:58+00:00
There's currently a gas crisis in India. A country that had a $10 billion investment in an Iranian port to trade oil and gas directly with them, except they decided to become America's bitch and halted the project after American sanctions.

Anyways, everyone's affected - gas cylinder booking requests which usually take a couple of days to fulfill currently have a 30 day period to fulfill in some major cities. Roadside vendors are shutting down temporarily, as are many restaurants.

At least EVs have had a good success rate in adoption, so commuting isn't as much affected. But freight is pretty much fucked.

Again, this is a country that could have gotten a sweetheart deal from Iran, just like China, but apparently decided to become a little bitch.
by lich_king | 2026-03-12 17:04:06+00:00
Almost every critique of the axiom of infinity is philosophical. I don't think you can just say "the axiom is sound, so what's your point". And you don't even get to claim that because of Godel's incompleteness theorem.

The axioms were not handed to us from above. They were a product of a thought process anchored to intuition about the real world. The outcomes of that process can be argued about. This includes the belief that the outcomes are wrong even if we can't point to any obvious paradox.
by sravyavedantham | 2026-03-12 17:04:26+00:00
Built this after finding $340/mo in
subscriptions I had forgotten about.

Scans your inbox via IMAP, detects 40+ services
plus unknown recurring charges via PayPal/Stripe
passthrough. Shows start date, next renewal,
trial end date, cancellation date.

v0.5.0: macOS menu bar app with color
indicators, multi-provider support (Outlook,
Yahoo, iCloud, Fastmail, ProtonMail, custom
IMAP).

Everything runs locally — no data leaves your
machine.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-03-12 17:04:28+00:00
I pay for https://karakeep.app/ (also open at https://github.com/karakeep-app/karakeep/), create a list per friend, and then share that list to the friend (who can also subscribe using an RSS feed). Items to share are added to the respective lists. URLs added via Karakeep are automatically captured and archived in my instance.

This model also enables federation between Karakeep instances, if so desired. Mobile apps are available.
Show HN: Understudy – Teach a desktop agent by demonstrating a task once
by bayes-song | 2026-03-12 17:04:35+00:00
I built Understudy because a lot of real work still spans native desktop apps, browser tabs, terminals, and chat tools. Most current agents live in only one of those surfaces.

Understudy is a local-first desktop agent runtime that can operate GUI apps, browsers, shell tools, files, and messaging in one session. The part I'm most interested in feedback on is teach-by-demonstration: you do a task once, the agent records screen video + semantic events, extracts the intent rather than coordinates, and turns it into a reusable skill.

Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3d5cRGnlb_0

In the demo I teach it: Google Image search -> download a photo -> remove background in Pixelmator Pro -> export -> send via Telegram. Then I ask it to do the same for Elon Musk. The replay isn't a brittle macro: the published skill stores intent steps, route options, and GUI hints only as a fallback. In this example it can also prefer faster routes when they are available instead of repeating every GUI step.

Current state: macOS only. Layers 1-2 are working today; Layers 3-4 are partial and still early.

npm install -g @understudy-ai/understudy
understudy wizard

GitHub: https://github.com/understudy-ai/understudy

Happy to answer questions about the architecture, teach-by-demonstration, or the limits of the current implementation.
by tavavex | 2026-03-12 17:04:49+00:00
What's this 'fun' you mention? As far as the incentives in our systems are concerned, anything that's not done in pursuit of monetary gain is certifiably insane. What really matters in life is using all the tricks, manipulation, abuse and loopholes to attain the biggest number in your asset counter. Anyone who doesn't follow the only thing that matters in life is alien, inhuman even. How do they not see it?
by hedora | 2026-03-12 17:05:49+00:00
I last used Atlassian stuff about a decade ago.

Did they ever get around to fixing basic bugs like "Jira and Confluence use different markdown dialects"?

They've had a decade to address those sorts of obvious problems that bite 100% of the end users of their stuff, and apparently employed over 1600 people during that decade. That's 160 centuries of person time. I wonder what it was wasted on, if not making their fairly small core product suite usable.

I think we're going to see more and more incumbent companies with big moats and terrible products get replaced with vibe coded solutions over the next year or two.
by the__alchemist | 2026-03-12 17:06:19+00:00
Hah. I think we're and the author of both articles on the same page about this. (I had to review my implementations to be sure). I'm a fan of all angles are radians for consistency, and it's more intuitive to me. I.e. a full rot is τ. 1/2 rot is 1/2 τ etc. Pi is standard but makes me do extra mental math, and degrees has the risk of mixing up units, and doesn't have that neat rotation mapping.

Very good tip about the degrees mapping neatly to fp... I had not considered that in my reasoning.
by keeda | 2026-03-12 17:06:32+00:00
I don't think it will, but I also think it's not all doom and gloom.

I think it would be a mistake to look at this solely through the lens of history. Yes, the historical record is unbroken, but if you compare the broad characteristics of the new jobs created to the old jobs displaced by technology, they are the same every time: they required higher-level (a) cognitive (b) technical or (c) social skills.

That's it. There is no other dimension to upskill along.

And LLMs are good at all three, probably better than most people already by many metrics. (Yes even social; their infinite patience is the ultimate advantage. Prompt injection is an unsolved hurdle though, so some relief there.)

Plus AI is improving extremely rapidly. Which means it is probably advancing faster than most people can upskill.

An increasingly accepted premise is that AI can displace junior employees but will need senior employees to steer it. Consider the ratio of junior to senior employees, and how long it takes for the former to grow into the latter. That is the volume of displacement and timeframe we're looking at.

Never in history have we had a technology that was so versatile and rapidly advancing that it could displace a large portion of existing jobs, as well as many new jobs that would be created.

However, what few people are talking about is the disintermediating effect of AI on the power of capital. If individuals can now do the work of entire teams, companies don't need many of them. But by the same token(s) (heheh) individuals don't need money, and hence companies, to start something and keep it going either! I think that gives the bottom side of the K-shaped economy a fighting chance to equalize.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2026-03-12 17:06:36+00:00
Try Eclipse OpenJ9 (former IBM) instead of the 'default' JVM, and compare impacts of different settings of them?

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenJ9 )

Maybe jumbo-frames for your LAN, but I wouldn't expect too much from that.

Since you're already running Arch, try including CachyOs's highly optimized repositories, kernel, interesting scheduling options, and endless other goodies?

It's not for gamers only. One doesn't even need to use most of their utilities for noobs, though some are convenient, like switching through schedulers and their settings with a few clicks.
by ekidd | 2026-03-12 17:06:39+00:00
I have actually very convincingly recreated a moderately complex 70s-era mainframe app by having an LLM reimplement it based on existing documentation and by accessing the textual user interface.

The biggest trick is that you need to spend 75% of your time designing and building very good verification tools (which you can do with help from the LLM), and having the LLM carefully trace as many paths as possible through the original application. This will be considerably harder for desktop apps unless you have access to something like an accessibility API that can faithfully capture and operate a GUI.

But in general, LLM performance is limited by how good your validation suite is, and whether you have scalable ways to convince yourself the software is correct.
by LeifCarrotson | 2026-03-12 17:07:00+00:00
Absolutely! We're not all making that error, I've been venting about it for years.

"Costs matter" is one way to say it, probably a lot easier to digest and more popular than the "Quantity has a quality all it's own" quote I've been using, which is generally attributed to Stalin which is a little bit of a problem.

But it's absolutely true! Flock ALPRs are equivalent to a police officer with binoculars and a post-it for a wanted vehicle's make, model, and license plate, except we can put hundreds of them on the major intersections throughout a city 24/7 for $20k instead of multiplying the police budget by 20x.

A warrant to gather gigabytes of data from an ISP or email provider is equivalent to a literal wiretap and tape recorder on a suspect's phone line, except the former costs pennies to implement and the later requires a human to actually move wires and then listen for the duration.

Speed cameras are another excellent example.

Technology that changes the cost of enforcement changes the character of the law. I don't think that no one realizes this. I think many in office, many implementing the changes, and many supporting or voting for those groups are acutely aware and greedy for the increased authoritarian control but blind to the human rights harms they're causing.
by IshKebab | 2026-03-12 17:07:06+00:00
Once I got really detailed feedback from an interview for a job I didn't get. It really took me by surprise! I didn't even have to ask.

It was quite interesting too because the things they'd inferred about me - stuff that I had understood or not understood - were just plain wrong. I didn't get everything right, but some bits I did understand fine, they thought I didn't.

I'm not sure what to take from that, other than that it's not about knowing stuff, it's about convincing someone else that you know stuff.

Also I'm about to do a hardcore leetcode interview. Wish me luck. (I'm probably going to fail; I'm pretty great at programming but only average at leetcode.)
by pphysch | 2026-03-12 17:07:08+00:00
> Why not enact measures like this to curb the pollution and CO2?

It does seem like a glaring contradiction, but it's actually not. In the West, at least, climate rhetoric is a tool primarily to discipline and control the masses through fear, with actual concern for the climate a distant secondary factor. This is why those elites can cry crocodile tears for the environment while also riding on private jets to private islands and staying mum about intentional environmental disasters caused in the ongoing wars (which they support, of course).

In the current fuel crisis, mandatory WFH is also an attempt to manage populations through controlled demand-destruction, which avoids more volatile forms of demand-destruction that result in unrest, like not being able to afford food.

From an (cynical) governance perspective, there is no contradiction here.
by Ntrails | 2026-03-12 17:07:15+00:00
Yeah, I'd have to go slower????

Anyway. I come from the UK where we've had camera based enforcement for aeons. This of course actually results in people speeding and braking down to the limit as they approach the camera (which is of course announced loudly by their sat nav). The driving quality is frankly worse because of this, not better, and it certainly doesn't reduce incidence of speeding.

Of course the inevitable car tracker (or average speed cameras) resolve this pretty well.
by dylan604 | 2026-03-12 17:07:30+00:00
At one point, humans had not stepped on the moon. At one point, we didn't know about antibiotics. At one point....

It doesn't matter what used to be, we're discussing what is now. We now have mobile devices that are much cheaper for people to obtain than a computer. For most, that device is more powerful than a computer they could afford. Arguing the fact that a vast number of people's only compute device is their mobile is just arguing with a fence post. It serves no purpose.
by Schmerika | 2026-03-12 17:07:30+00:00
Yeah, that one right there.

It takes a truly abnormal degree of intelligence/deviousness to manipulate global narratives.

That doesn't mean you have the basic bare minimum intelligence/decency to at least try and leave the world a better place than you found it; a concept most 'simpler' folk understand with a minimum of guidance.

The Epstein class are 'intelligent' enough to rationalize away their misdeeds in all sorts of ways, sometimes even intentionally - but not intelligent enough to realize that they're doing so, or what they're losing.
by ironmagma | 2026-03-12 17:07:39+00:00
Location: Seattle, WA / Portland, OR
Remote: No
Willing to relocate: Yes
Technologies: Typescript, Golang, Python (Django/Flask), C#, React, C (certification in C)
Résumé/CV: https://philippeterson.com/resume
Email: peterson@sent.com

Savvy ex-YC startup Software Engineer, great at taking a project from 0 to 1 and 1 to 10. My background was initially in React and the frontend world, but I've since transitioned to being a more Go/backend-heavy developer working on high-throughput systems. Clocking in at 9 years of experience, I have worked the full gamut, from early stage startups to Fortune 500 companies — and would love to join a team focused on building a great product for the user. You might want to hire me if you have a need for someone who has both business/finance intuition and also software skills.
by atmavatar | 2026-03-12 17:08:10+00:00
That's about as useful and true as "a programmer losing his/her job to AI is always a good thing".

There certainly exist bad regulations and bad bureaucrats, but many (most?) regulations are written in blood, whether it be from employees, customers, or merely innocent bystanders, and there needs to be a group of people who facilitate said regulations.

I'm all for aggressive and continuous re-evaluation of regulations and downsizing bloated bureaucracies, but blanket "all bueeaucrats/regulations are bad" sentiments gets us ineffectual and grifting BS like DOGE, and it creates the very real possibility we'll have to re-learn bloody lessons down the road.

Knee-capping the USDA will almost certainly to lead to some very painful education in the future.
by scottious | 2026-03-12 17:08:16+00:00
Agreed. I care enough about it to sell my car, stop buying stuff I don't need, give up most meat, and live in a small energy efficient house.

However I do know people who really do not care. They may say they care but their actions and voting record show that in fact they don't care (or don't want to make it a real priority). But those same people get very upset when they're stuck in traffic
Show HN: PipeStep – Step-through debugger for GitHub Actions workflows
by photobombastic | 2026-03-12 17:08:21+00:00
Hey HN — I kept seeing developers describe the same frustration: the commit-push-wait-read-logs cycle when debugging CI pipelines. So I built PipeStep.

PipeStep parses your GitHub Actions YAML, spins up the right Docker container, and gives you a step-through debugger for your run: shell commands. You can:

- Pause before each step and inspect the container state
- Shell into the running container mid-pipeline (press I)
- Set breakpoints on specific steps (press B)
- Retry failed steps or skip past others

It deliberately does not try to replicate the full GitHub Actions runtime — no secrets, no matrix builds, no uses: action execution. For full local workflow runs, use act. PipeStep is for when things break and you need to figure out why without pushing 10 more commits. Think of it as gdb for your CI pipeline rather than a local GitHub runner.

pip install pipestep (v0.1.2) · Python 3.11+ · MIT · Requires Docker

Would love feedback, especially from people who've hit the same pain point. Known limitations are documented in the README + have some issues in there that I'd love eyeballs on!
by inder1 | 2026-03-12 17:08:36+00:00
debian's stance actually makes more sense than a ban. you can't detect the origin of a contribution reliably. what you can do is hold the contributor accountable for what they submit. the problem is when people use that accountability structure without the skill to back it up. the asymmetric warfare framing in the comments is right: the cost to submit low-quality PRs is near zero now. but the cost to review them didn't change. the maintainer burden goes up, not down. that's the pattern worth paying attention to: AI compresses the cost of producing output, but the responsibility for output quality doesn't compress with it.
by sergentrif | 2026-03-12 17:08:58+00:00
Thanks! I really appreciate it. Honestly, my goal was to build a ghost SaaS, something you don't actually have to use or visit daily.

I'm tired of multiplying tools, I wanted a tool that stays invisible. You just use your calendar, as you already do, and run an analysis at the end of the month when you need to send your invoices.
by tavavex | 2026-03-12 17:08:59+00:00
This is extremely good satire. Question is, why hasn't anyone done this for real? There's enough people with the right knowledge and who would love to destroy open source for personal gain. Is it that this kind of service would be so open to litigation that it would need a lot of money upfront? Or is someone already working on this, and we're just living out the last good days of OSS?
by slibhb | 2026-03-12 17:09:43+00:00
Can you link the data? I don't buy it.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11720530/ says there's a higher rate of AF in older, male althetes but a lower risk of stroke compared to similar aged, non-athletes.

At any rate, the data doesn't seem clear enough to claim that "distance running bad for you" or "any distance over 50K is bad for you".
by WalterBright | 2026-03-12 17:09:44+00:00
An acquaintance of mine was a private pilot. Took off one day, flew into a storm, crashed and died. Another friend took a chance and flew into icing conditions, and nearly crashed. He said he'd never make that mistake again.

My dad flew F-180s in the Korean War. It was the first operational US jet fighter. It had straight wings (not swept) and had a powerful engine.

He related to me that if you exceeded a certain speed, the airplane would suddenly "pitch up" and fold the wings back. You had to be very careful not to overspeed, which (of course) was very difficult to do in a diving attack. (He said he kept one eye on the target, one eye on the altitude, and one eye on the airspeed.) Anyhow, mission one of his buddies had a Mig on his tail and could not shake it. He decided that he'd deliberately induce the pitch up, and hope that would get him out of the jam. He did, pitched up, the Mig couldn't follow it, and miraculously the wings stayed on.

He carefully flew it back to base. The wings were bent up, and the airplane was scrapped.
by anonMcKinsey | 2026-03-12 17:10:00+00:00
The product that I am referring to that companyX makes was probably used today, in some form, by >80% of the global population this morning.

Everyone would recognize it. Cartoons have made jokes about these product since the dawn of animation.

CompanyX makes is the premier manufacturer of these.

Think as pervasive and obvious as sneakers made by Nike, but it wasn't footwear.

And yet only one person in a team of a dozen consultants had ever heard of the company they'd been hired for.
by atonse | 2026-03-12 17:10:07+00:00
Wow, I asked it to build me a simple diagram explaining agile development and it did an amazing job. Wow it felt magical to watch that diagram slowly animating to life.

Like a much prettier version of Mermaid.

Kudos, Anthropic. Geez, this is so nice.

Now I'm going to ask it to draw a diagram of a pelican riding a bicycle, why not?