MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chrismorgan | 2026-03-02 04:39:38+00:00
From the prologue of The Lord of the Rings:

> Now it is a curious fact that this is not the story as Bilbo first told it to his companions. To them his account was that Gollum had promised to give him a present, if he won the game; but when Gollum went to fetch it from his island he found the treasure was gone: a magic ring, which had been given to him long ago on his birthday. Bilbo guessed that this was the very ring that he had found, and as he had won the game, it was already his by right. But being in a tight place, he said nothing about it, and made Gollum show him the way out, as a reward instead of a present. This account Bilbo set down in his memoirs, and he seems never to have altered it himself, not even after the Council of Elrond. Evidently it still appeared in the original Red Book, as it did in several of the copies and abstracts. But many copies contain the true account (as an alternative), derived no doubt from notes by Frodo or Samwise, both of whom learned the truth, though they seem to have been unwilling to delete anything actually written by the old hobbit himself.
by 1123581321 | 2026-03-02 04:40:42+00:00
This is a good article about some of the legal particulars. https://www.heraldnet.com/2026/02/24/snohomish-county-judge-...

The defense of the photos not being government business until accessed seems shaky. That the physical camera installations were purposeful intentions to conduct government business in those areas is a reasonable line; this doesn't set precedent for Google's information becoming public records because the police might do a google search, to use an extreme example.

The proposed legislative amendment that would exclude Flock footage from public records (which would make this judgment moot) makes sense in the light of red light cameras already being excluded by the same legislators. However, I'd like to see a more incisive law covering both that would compel a reasonable amount of public insight into the footage.
by rzzzwilson | 2026-03-02 04:40:43+00:00
Trust is highly subjective. A lot of people trust certain "flagship" sources like The Times (UK), NY Times, BBC, RussiaToday, Aljazeera, Reuters, etc, but they can have wildly different viewpoints on a particular point of news, yet they are all "trusted" by large numbers of people.

I understand that you want there to be a single source of news/opinion that everyone agrees is trustable, and that would be desirable, but in this era and any foreseeable future that's like wanting world peace: very desirable but ultimately unachievable for a myriad of reasons.
by miki123211 | 2026-03-02 04:40:50+00:00
And I think this makes sense.

XML is really great for text documents with embeds and markup, either semantic (this part of the paper is an abstract) or visual (this part of the document should be 14-point and aligned right). You can do this in JSON, but it's a pain.

JSON is great for representing data. If you have some data structures and two machines trying to exchange them, JSON is great for that.

TOML / yaml / hcl / JSON with comments are great at config. If you have a human writing something that a machine is supposed to understand, you don't want turning completeness and you don't want to deal with the pain of having your own DSL, those are great.
by rvz | 2026-03-02 04:41:14+00:00
> DoD started asking for the ability to do more stuff. That's the issue here.

The DoD (NSA) has crossed those lines before with big tech when they allowed mass domestic surveillance on their own citizens (PRISIM) in the past. They are willing to break laws to get the job done which probably in 10 years time those actions would be found illegal later. By then it would be too late.

Companies should expect that governments may try to bend or even break rules or laws under veiled pretenses.

So why expect that they would be any different today? It is the nature of governments.

Scorpion (DoD) tells frog (Anthropic) to help them cross the river on the condition that they won't kill them. If you knew that the Scorpion always breaches the contract first, why work with them in the first place?

> again, this story isn't about people that are against any military contract.

Gen AI mass surveillance conducted by the adminstration (or any) is already done by Google, Microsoft, AWS, Oracle and Palantir and soon xAI (via X). So again, no point is being made here.

Given all the above, the clear indication was OpenAI already signed a military contract last year. Why didn't the employees and insiders make an open letter pledging that AI should not be used for mass surveillance back then?
Ask HN: How long before AI become a deity?
by WheelsAtLarge | 2026-03-02 04:41:32+00:00
People are quick classify anything they can't unterstand as a god. How long before a religion is started with AI as its center? It's only a matter of time before it happens.

Here's an example from WWII.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult#:~:text=%5B7%5D-,Origin%20of%20the%20term%20and%20definitions,-%5Bedit%5D
by peteforde | 2026-03-02 04:41:56+00:00
It's wild to come back to this after a day away and have the takeaway from my attempt to answer the question with punditry about the size of my codebase from people who don't have any idea what my device does.

Answering this question directly puts me in an awkward spot because I realized last fall that there was absolutely no way that I could talk about what I'm working on in a way that can be associated with my product because there's so much anti-AI activism right now. That sucks, because I'd like to be "loud and proud" but I have a family to feed. I strongly suspect that versions of my story are playing out for hundreds of entrepreneurs right now.

Here's what I can describe: it's an ESP32-P4 based consumer device with about 45 ESP-IDF components that all communicate over an event bus. There's a substantially modified LVGL front-end with a 3D rendering engine and SVG-like 2D animation in front of a driver for a customized variation of the ST7789. There is substantial custom code for both USB host and client functions across various modes of operation. There's custom drivers for several sensors and haptic feedback. There's a very elaborate menu UI system which is also backed by a BBS style terminal configuration system for power users. There's an assignable action system with about 40 actions that all have their own state machines and a lot of mutex locking. There's a very involved and feature-dense trigger scheduling system. There's a very flexible data stream routing matrix. There's a full suite of command line scripts for most functions. There's a self-hosted web app for configuration that also implements a screen share functionality via an HTML canvas object so that I can record videos of what's happening on the device with OBS without having to point a DSLR at it from a gantry.

Honestly, I could go on and on, but all of the people who think that 600kloc is a lot [sight unseen] are following YouTube tutorials and can eat me.

I responded to you because you asked politely. I hope it was an interesting reply.
Is anyone compressing AI models for the 4B people without GPUs or internet?
by yashpxl | 2026-03-02 04:42:24+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm a 20yo solo builder from India,

I got frustrated that every capable AI model
assumes you have a GPU, a credit card, or
reliable internet. None of those are true for
most of the world — including me.

So I started digging into the compression literature and ways through which i can solve this problem

What I found:
- DeepSeek distilled 671B reasoning into 1.5B
that runs on a laptop
- TRM (Samsung, 2025) beat DeepSeek R1 on
ARC-AGI with 7M parameters by iterating
instead of scaling
- RWKV runs in constant memory with no
quadratic attention cost
- GRPO lets you specialize a tiny model on a
narrow domain in hours on CPU

The techniques exist. What doesn't exist:
a systematic effort to apply all of them together,
specifically for low-resource languages and
low-end hardware, and give the results away free.

I'm building this. Calling it KIRO.

The goal is simple: take every major open source
frontier model, compress it into domain-specific
versions under 500MB, and deploy them offline
on the cheapest Android hardware available.

Starting with math/physics education
because that's the problem I know personally.
Expanding to healthcare triage, legal aid,
and agricultural advisory.

Currently running my first experiment on my i3
— R1-1.5B vs Qwen-7B on Hindi math problems.
Will post results when training finishes.

Two honest questions for HN:

1. Is anyone else working on this specific
intersection — compression + low-resource
languages + offline deployment?

2. What would make this genuinely useful vs
just technically interesting to you?

Everything will be open source.
by Georgelemental | 2026-03-02 04:44:16+00:00
> Some people think that the present crisis was inevitable because of the flaws inherent in the Zionist program from the start.

Those people are correct. Kahane was right: a democractic Jewish state on territory inhabited mostly by non-Jews is an impossibility. Pick at most 2, but you cannot have all 3. If you wish to keep the Jewishness of the state (i.e. Zionism), you must either abandon democracy, change the population of the territory (ethnic cleansing/genocide), or both.

There are plenty of Israelis like the author—who are genuinely good people, who have no other land, and who love their country because any good person should strive to do so. Their attitude is understandable. They deserve a better country to love, one not built on Zionism.
by amarant | 2026-03-02 04:44:34+00:00
My current thinking is based on boris tanes[1] formalised method of coding with Claude code. I commit the research and plan.md files as they are when I finally tell Claude to implement changes in code. This becomes a living lexicon of the architecture and every feature added. A very slight variation I do from Boris's method is that I prefix all my research and plan .md filenames with the name of the feature. I can very quickly load relevant architecture into context by having Claude read a previous design document instead of analysing the whole code base. I'll take pieces I think are relevant and tell Claude to base research from those design documents.

[1] https://boristane.com/blog/how-i-use-claude-code/
by mcdeltat | 2026-03-02 04:44:56+00:00
> You get to decide how people see you. Hair, clothes, body language, smile, is 90% of how people decide whether they want to interact with you.

I see what you're getting at, but also this take kinda annoys me because it falls into the bucket of implying a personal fault. If people don't socialise with you then it must be because you do or don't do X, Y, Z. "Just do X" and you'll become a social butterfly.

Based on my personal experience, I don't know if I buy it. I guess I'm a regular enough guy, but seriously almost never, across my whole life, does someone invoke random socialisation with me. Yet I know people who can't even take the bus without strangers striking up conversations and hassling them, while they are actively trying to be antisocial. What magic trick are these people performing? Can I learn the same trick? What if I don't want to perform it? I think the reality is that for some (many?) people, it just doesn't work out and it's not necessarily due to any particular flaw.
by umairnadeem123 | 2026-03-02 04:45:07+00:00
IMO this is solving the wrong problem. the session log is just noise - its like attaching your google search history to a stackoverflow answer to "prove" you did the research. nobody wants to read 500 lines of an agent going back and forth debugging a race condition.

the actual problem is that AI produces MORE code not better code, and most people using it aren't reviewing what comes out. if you understood the code well enough to review it properly you wouldn't need the session log. and if you didn't understand it, the session log won't help you either because you'll just see the agent confidently explaining its own mistakes.

> have your agent write a commit message or a documentation file that is polished and intended for consumption

this is the right take. code review and commit messages matter more now than they ever did BECAUSE there's so much more code being generated. adding another artifact nobody reads doesn't fix the underlying issue which is that people skip the "understand what was built" step entirely.
by hatmanstack | 2026-03-02 04:45:37+00:00
Completely agree. Until recently I only let LLMs write my commit messages, but I've found that versioning the plan files is the better artifact, it preserves agentic decisions and my own reasoning without the noise.

My current workflow: write a detailed plan first, then run a standard implement -> review loop where the agent updates the plan as errors surface. The final plan doc becomes something genuinely useful for future iterations, not just a transcript of how we got there.
by enveil | 2026-03-02 04:46:09+00:00
I built Enveil because I kept seeing the same security problem on every team I worked on: .env files committed by accident, shared over Slack, or copied between machines with no control over who has what.

Enveil stores environment variables in a SQLCipher-encrypted vault and injects them directly into your process at runtime via syscall.Exec. No .env file is ever created — secrets never touch disk as plaintext.

For teams it includes a self-hosted server. One developer pushes the secrets once with `enveil server push`, everyone else connects and runs their apps normally without ever having a .env file on their machine. Values are encrypted on the client before being sent — the server never sees plaintext.

A few technical decisions worth discussing:

- SQLCipher over application-level encryption so the entire database is encrypted, including table names and variable names
- Argon2id for key derivation (64MB memory, 4 threads)
- AES-GCM for transport encryption
- Daemon that holds the master key over a Unix socket so you type your password once per session
- Pre-commit hook with Shannon entropy analysis to catch secrets before they reach version control

https://github.com/MaximoCoder/Enveil

It is MIT licensed and still early. I would genuinely love to hear suggestions, criticism, and ideas from this community — there is a lot I want to improve and outside perspective would help a lot.
by kaycey2022 | 2026-03-02 04:46:47+00:00
This was rough to read. No wonder a growing number of people in your country hate immigrants so much.

Although, rationally speaking they are not be the cause of so much misfortune. People should do whatever they can to get ahead. No one should accept poverty. As long as you don’t cut the throat of other innocents, it’s all fine.

One thing I would say is don’t put yourself down - like good things aren’t for you. I wouldn’t frame it as you don’t deserve. Everyone deserves a good life. Deserve takes you down a self destructive path. But because of the circumstance if your birth, you can’t have it - now.
by alun | 2026-03-02 04:46:51+00:00
The actual economic theory behind prediction markets (if you read Robin Hanson's work, efficient market hypothesis, etc.) is that these markets work precisely because informed traders bring private information into the price. That's literally the core mechanism that underpins them.

Yes prediction markets represent "wisdom of crowd", and they do this by rewarding people who contribute correct information. So informed traders are the ones making the system work, and they're putting actual money on the line to back up their claim. Without them you're just left with uninformed guesses, which isn't really "wisdom of crowds", it's noise.
by wging | 2026-03-02 04:47:08+00:00
Regarding the noise you mention, I wonder if memento's use of the git 'notes' feature is an acceptable way to contain or quarantine that noise. It might still not add much value, but at least it would live in a separate place that is easily filtered out when the user judges it irrelevant. Per the README of the linked repo,

> It runs a commit and then stores a cleaned markdown conversation as a git note on the new commit.

So it doesn't seem that normal commit history is affected - git stores notes specially, outside of the commit (https://git-scm.com/docs/git-notes).

In fact github doesn't even display them, according to some (two-year-old) blog posts I'm seeing. Not sure about other interfaces to git (magit, other forges), but git log is definitely able to ignore them (https://git-scm.com/docs/git-log#Documentation/git-log.txt--...).

This doesn't mean the saved artifacts would necessarily be valuable - just that, unlike a more naive solution (saving in commit messages or in some directory of tracked files) they may not get in the way of ordinary workflows aside from maybe bloating the repo to some degree.
by raphlinus | 2026-03-02 04:47:57+00:00
Unfortunately, your complex script shaping for Arabic and Devanagari is wrong. The Arabic is missing the joining (all forms are isolated), and the Devanagari doesn't have the vowels combining (so you see those dotted circles).

To fix this you'll need Harfbuzz or something similar. Taking a quick look at the code, it seems like you're just doing a glyph at a time through the cmap. That, uh, won't do.
by fuball63 | 2026-03-02 04:49:05+00:00
Author writes an interesting, nuanced, wide-reaching essay about AI and society, with a main theme being about AI and its impact on our humanity.

All other top level arguments offer AI summaries that miss all of the interesting, nuanced, wide-reaching topics about AI and its impact on our humanity, and complain it was too long to read.

Truly a gem of irony.
by 827a | 2026-03-02 04:49:11+00:00
IMO: This might be a contrarian opinion, but I don't think so. Its much the same problem as asking, for example, if every single line you write, or every function, becomes a commit. The answer to this granularity is, much like anything, you have to think of the audience: Who is served by persisting these sessions? I would suspect that there is little reason why future engineers, or future LLMs, would need access to them; they likely contain a significant amount of noise, incorrect implementations, and red herrings. The product of the session is what matters.

I do think there's more value in ensuring that the initial spec, or the "first prompt" (which IME is usually much bigger and tries to get 80% of the way there) is stored. And, maybe part of the product is an LLM summary of that spec, the changes we made to the spec within the session, and a summary of what is built. But... that could be the commit message? Or just in a markdown file. Or in Notion or whatever.
by saghm | 2026-03-02 04:50:09+00:00
That would depend on who your users are and what they're using their program for. My point is that the context of who is using the program, how they're using it, and what they're using it for are what actually matters, because most of the time, software that no one uses is by definition useless. There are circumstances where that might not apply, like code used as part of education or training (whether in a formal course or a project someone writes specifically because they're trying to learn something from the process) or when the purpose is aesthetic or humorous, but I'd argue that whatever process makes sense for them doesn't necessarily bear any resemblance given how different the goals are.
by D-Machine | 2026-03-02 04:51:58+00:00
It should be a distillation of the session and/or the prompts, at bare minimum. No, it should not include e.g. research-type questions, but it should include prompts that the user wrote after reading the answers to those research-type questions, and perhaps some distillation of the links / references surfaced during the research.

Prompts probably should be distilled / summarized, especially if they are research-based prompts, but code-gen prompts should probably be saved verbatim.

Reproducibility is a thing, and though perfect reproducibility isn't desirable, something needs to make up for the fact that vibe-coding is highly inscrutable and hard to review. Making the summary of the session too vague / distilled makes it hard to iterate and improve when / if some bad prompts / assumptions are not documented in any way.
by dlubarov | 2026-03-02 04:53:07+00:00
Even if Israeli Jews whose ancestors once lived in Poland were interested in immigrating to Poland, where 90% of Jews were murdered, Poland has not offered them citizenship. Would you like them to disappear?

Do you apply the same logic to all the immigrants from Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, etc.? Do you categorically oppose all immigration, or only when it's Jewish families?
Show HN: Visualize Git commit histories as animated force-directed graphs
by wwhxd | 2026-03-02 04:53:33+00:00
Visualize and analyze complete Git commit histories as animated force-directed graphs. See how commit density, branch activity, and contributor participation evolve over time.

Live site: https://nshcr.github.io/git-commits-threadline/

This project helps you quickly inspect:

- repository growth over long time ranges

- branch structure and active thread distribution

- contribution patterns across maintainers and collaborators
by shevy-java | 2026-03-02 04:53:53+00:00
Well ... it looks more like a midget-man than a hobbit. But what exactly is a hobbit? In the movie "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" from 2001, the hobbits shown pissed me off. When they started to jump on the bed, I started to root for Sauron. It got much better in the movie "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" from 2012 but even then they look mostly just like midget humans, with a bit of an elfish touch (and I hated the elves in the movie from 2001; the depiction was just lame). The only hobbit-like entity I liked was Gollum.

So how does a hobbit really look like? "Tolkien presented hobbits as a variety of humanity, or close relatives thereof".

So based on this, while Tove's pictures look more like a parody, I don't really see it as intrinsically wrong. It's just less of a "standard" depiction - Tolkien could have assumed hobbits to be anything but midget-humans, but they are mostly midgets with stronger feet.
by fgfarben | 2026-03-02 04:54:00+00:00
A heavy battery makes an ebike extremely unpleasant to pedal manually. You should try it.

I built almost exactly the same size pack (2 kWH) as Jacques in 2020 on a hybrid road bike and hated it so much that I only rode it 20 times or so. The battery still sits in the corner of my house doing nothing.