MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Swarm – Program a colony of 200 ants using a custom assembly language
by armandhammer10 | 2026-03-06 04:15:40+00:00
We built an ant colony simulation as an internal hiring challenge at Moment and decided to open it up publicly.

You write a program in a custom assembly-like (we call it ant-ssembly) instruction set that controls 200 ants. Each ant can sense nearby cells (food, pheromones, home, other ants) but has no global view. The only coordination mechanism is pheromone trails, which ants can emit and sense them, but that's it. Your program runs identically on every ant.

The goal is to collect the highest percentage of food across a set of maps. Different map layouts (clustered food, scattered, obstacles) reward very different strategies. The leaderboard is live.

Grand prize is a trip to Maui for two paid for by Moment. Challenge closes March 12.

Curious what strategies people discover. We've seen some surprisingly clever emergent behavior internally.
by LoganDark | 2026-03-06 04:15:46+00:00
Legal documents use "may" to allow for something. Usually it only needs to be allowed so that it can happen. So I read terms of service and privacy policies like all "may" is "will". "Your data may (will) be shared with (sold to) one or more of (all of) our data processing partners. You may (will) be asked (demanded) to provide identity verification, which may (will) include (but is not limited to) [everything on your passport]." And so on.
by cratermoon | 2026-03-06 04:16:14+00:00
Indeed the WCAG guidelines provide the following criteria

* The visual presentation of text and images of text has a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1, except for the following
* Large Text: Large-scale text and images of large-scale text have a contrast ratio of at least 3:1

Grey is not the problem. Low contrast is the problem.
by wokwokwok | 2026-03-06 04:16:29+00:00
On the other hand, the parent post is entirely correct.

What, I ask, is the point of having laws and rules if you can just ignore the ones you don't like?

Its just a name, who cares?

Not me.

…but, if you break the law, you break the law. Not maybe maybe who cares, its not me being water boarded, I dont care…

If you break the law. You break the law.

Otherwise, who gives a duck what congress says?

Just fire them all and crown Trump King of America.

I’m being facetious. …but maybe its more of a big deal than you superficially pretend it is.

It’s just another case of the administration blatantly breaking the rules.

…so, you know. If youre ok with no laws or rules, I guess its fine.

Seems a bit chaotic to me. I prefer my governing body to be… marginally bound by some kind of responsibilty to something or someone.
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-03-06 04:16:46+00:00
A couple times a year I get the joy of reading Kernel Newbies release notes for new kernels. And just being so delighted at all the amazing improvements happening. So many won't affect me or won't be big changes. But often there are amazing new capabilities and options too that do entice. Performance wins keep landing. Compatibility with other devices expands. Improvement is ongoing & continual. https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_6.17

It just takes my breath away, is existentially scary, to hear folks be ok with being totally stuck on place. With devices that use open source but which are so fundamentally dead, are tuned out from that amazing growing goodness, are shovelware devices thrown over the wall that never improves while time marches forward.

This would be totally unacceptable for anyone on a computer. But somehow on consumer devices, it's just expected and accepted that everything is just stuck where it is, that it's ok to be so so so much worse than what everyone else is doing. It sounds like such a miserable existence, and I think it's just gobsmacking that such apathy & pass giving gets a break.

Will some things break sometimes? Honestly I think that's way overblown a concern, but yes, some, a tiny bit of things will break. Especially at first. I tend to think the risk is generally quite small. And often with engineering, the way to deal with your hard parts is to keep doing them. If anything, I expect that the risk of staying where we are is huge: we have thousands or perhaps millions of different kernel trees out there, bespoke special magical trees, for various devices, forked from magical point in time vendor BSPs, with special magical changes that we have to keep perpetuating, while integrating important fixes. This all sounds ridiculously unstable and risky, and inordinately costly to maintain. It seems reckless and dangerous to stick to this absurd course, to do everything so badly, at such human cost. Getting the fricking drivers upstreamed, maybe getting rid of this ridiculous anti-support GKI layer that apparently does no good and only makes it easier to be bad at updating & negligence & caring: that would reduce risk. That would decrease society from having to test these thousands or millions of kernels, and let us create a known predictable focus for our energies and tests, rather than this madcap batshit infinite vendor diversity that GKI has only sort of tamed.

This is such a shit situation to be in, and Android brings shame to computing, and if it's going to be so bad at Linux, it ethically doesn't deserve to have Linux. It is breaking the pact of what Linux can and should mean, and betraying consumers, by letting itself be a product that rots into obsolescence like this. This is a techno-spiritual sin, and it is a mortal sin.
by tdb7893 | 2026-03-06 04:18:06+00:00
I went to a military high school up until 2011 and never remember hearing it. My dad and grandpa were military for 20 years each and I've never heard either say it. It definitely hasn't been used broadly in the US for very long (maybe in very specific circles). Even my friends who work as engineers for defense contractors now have never called people "war fighters" around me.
by Slow_Hand | 2026-03-06 04:18:50+00:00
For the first time this year (and nearing 40) I'm teaching myself web development and learning to code - and I love it. I like the problem solving, and the creativity, and having the facility to build things for myself.

The threat of LLMs undermining my opportunities in the work pool are never far from my mind as I move towards a seemingly burning building, but you know what? I will do it regardless, because even though my prospects for employment may be diminished I'm enjoying the craft, and I like being creative with it.

I intend to embrace LLMs as an augmentation of my will once I get a good grasp on how to code proficiently. Maybe I'm too late for the heyday of coding by hand, but if these tools allow me more power to solve the ACTUAL problem, then that's alright. The point is to solve problems, right? Not to write code.
by marcus_holmes | 2026-03-06 04:20:00+00:00
Good points, interesting.

I think this is probably neuroscience vs psychology. We can explain a lot with neuroscience, but two people with essentially identical brain chemistry can have very different psychology. There are people out there who have beliefs and cognition processes that I find completely incomprehensible despite having the same brain and even sharing a language.

I'm not sure how I'd have a meaningful conversation with an animal that has such a different worldview. I guess there's a simple level of conversation, like that which we have with dogs - fetch the stick, good boy, food, need to wee, love the human, etc. But if that's the limit of what we can discuss with dolphins (or an actual AI) then I'd be disappointed.
by wewewedxfgdf | 2026-03-06 04:20:40+00:00
The Anthropic CEO/team should have learned to just say nothing.

Or more importantly - say something that says nothing.

When you say nothing to politicians like this then eventually the story moves elsewhere.

But these guys had to put a stake in the ground and yell it out loud.

In politics you must know when to speak and what to speak and how to speak without speaking.
by kayleighb1 | 2026-03-06 04:20:51+00:00
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Show HN: Yappy – A Python TUI to automate LinkedIn yapping
by jienweng | 2026-03-06 04:22:08+00:00
Hey HN,

I got tired of the performative culture on LinkedIn. The platform mostly feels like people just yapping at each other all day to farm engagement, so I decided to build a CLI tool to do the yapping for me. It's called Yappy (because we just yap yap yap).

It is an open-source Python TUI that automates your LinkedIn engagement directly from the command line. It logs in, reads your feed, and uses the Gemini API to generate context-aware comments and drop likes based on your prompt parameters. Everything runs completely in the terminal, so you never actually have to look at the feed yourself.

I know AI-generated comments and web scraping are controversial, and LinkedIn's TOS strictly prohibits this kind of automation. This is built purely as an experimental toy project and a proof-of-concept for integrating LLMs with terminal interfaces. If you actually decide to run it, definitely use a burner account, as LinkedIn will likely restrict you if you run it too aggressively.

I am mostly looking for technical feedback on the Python code architecture and the TUI implementation.

Would love to hear your thoughts. Roast my code or drop a PR if you find the concept funny.
by msla | 2026-03-06 04:23:34+00:00
More to the point, if they required 2FA every time you tried to modify the JS, nobody would do it because it would be too annoying. "Username, password... oh, the 2FA just timed out, gotta wait for the next one... what, that doesn't work? Does it want the old one? Oh... now it wants the next one... just a second... "
by falkensmaize | 2026-03-06 04:24:26+00:00
I don’t see definitive evidence that there is some kind of Moore’s law for model improvement though. Just because this year’s model performs better than last year’s model doesn’t mean next year’s model will be another leap. Most of the big improvements this year seem to be around tooling - I still see Opus 4.6 (which is my daily driver at work) making lots of mistakes.
by hax0ron3 | 2026-03-06 04:26:16+00:00
The late 90s were full of media that questioned reality and authority - like X-Files, The Matrix, Dark City, all sorts of websites about conspiracy theories and UFOs, etc. The zeitgeist was full of speculation about hidden truths. The cultural mood was defiant and sardonic. There was rap, rap-rock, Beavis and Butthead, Fight Club, Office Space... One of the most popular pro wrestlers in the world played a character who beat up his boss and gave him the middle finger. Then after 9/11 it kinda seemed like suddenly the TV shows were all about cops and soldiers. Admittedly, my memories might be somewhat deceiving me. But I do feel that the mood suddenly shifted, much more than the actual damage done to America by the attack should have justified.
by fnordpiglet | 2026-03-06 04:26:24+00:00
5.4 is the one fine tuned for autonomous mass murder, automated surveillance state, and money grabs at any cost. It’s really hard to lump that into the others as it’s a fairly unique and specialized feature set. You can’t really call it that tho so they have to use the numbers.

I’m pretty glad I’m out of the OpenAI ecosystem in all seriousness. It is genuinely a mess. This marketing page is also just literally all over the place and could probably be about 20% of its size.
by jonas21 | 2026-03-06 04:26:26+00:00
2007 was 19 years ago. If you step back another 19 years, you'll find that the major tech companies of the era had huge defense contracts: IBM, HP, Oracle, SGI, Texas Instruments, etc. Not only that, the development of many technologies we take for granted today -- like integrated circuits, the Internet, even Postgres -- were directly funded by the DoD. Much of the growth of Silicon Valley in the early days was a direct consequence of working with the military.

Throughout the history of the tech industry, this seems to have been the norm. The era you're describing is an anomaly, when the biggest companies pivoted away from hard tech toward consumer apps and ads.
by sailfast | 2026-03-06 04:26:47+00:00
Are we in "A Brand Age" or does The Brand Age occur only in different spaces after a technology becomes ubiquitous and like a utility, so the only way to command a premium is branding?

What things are not quite there but will have their Brand Age next? AI? Spaceships?

I'm also a bit confused as to whether there's judgment in the article though. He's applauding branding as a survival technique, but also saying it's silly and vestigial. So if we find ourselves in a Brand Age because we've succeeded in solving the last really hard problem we should... drop everything and find another problem so we can move it into the Brand Age?

Either way - thoughts were provoked so thx for that.
by vharuck | 2026-03-06 04:27:22+00:00
https://apps.naaccr.org/data-dictionary/data-dictionary/vers...

771 columns (and I've read the definitions for them all, plus about 50 more that have been retired). In the database, these are split across at least 3 tables (registry, patient, tumor). But when working with the records, it's common to use one joined table. Luckily, even that usually fits in RAM.
by randallsquared | 2026-03-06 04:28:12+00:00
Ender's Game the novel, but I would say that it's not actually super relevant. First, the original short story was 1977, and then Card expanded it into a novel which was published mid-1980s. The point in the story is that kids are sensitive, and supergenius kids more so, and that they don't want to interrupt performance with concerns about guilt. But Real Genius wasn't about that! It was about an anti-war stance born of the Vietnam War and creative-class hatred for Ronald Reagan's presidency.
by gz09 | 2026-03-06 04:28:33+00:00
Absolutely, it's a very common technique :)

I wasn't sure about writing the article in the first place because of that, but I figured it may be interesting anyways because I was kind of happy with how simple it was to write this optimization when it was all done (when I started out with the task I wasn't sure if it would be hard because of how our code is structured, the libraries we use etc.). I originally posted this in the rust community, and it seems people enjoyed the post.
by moregrist | 2026-03-06 04:30:56+00:00
I suspect there’s a middle ground that involves either keeping tests more proprietary or a copyright license that bars using the work for AI reimplementation, or both.

I think it’s entirely reasonable to release a test suite under a license that bars using it for AI reimplementation purposes. If someone wants to reimplement your work with a more permissive license, they can certainly do so, but maybe they should put the legwork in to write their own test suite.
by majormajor | 2026-03-06 04:31:16+00:00
> That’s setting aside that on HN you’d get shadowbanned for even posting the clip of BLM leaders describing themselves as “trained Marxists” and BLM itself as Marxist in ideology. Apparently, no matter how politely you state facts, if HN froths irrationally in response it is an “inherent flamewar”.

Funny how you mention this like you expect everyone to take for granted that Marxist=bad and worth "hiding" etc... whereas negative reactions are likely due more towards that internal judgement discrediting yourself, vs trying to "hide the Marxism."

You think you can discredit people by saying "they're Marxists!" and yet you think people today are uniquely bad snowflakes about views they don't like. You're proposing that people are more likely to cry thoughtcrime now than in the past, by inadvertently exposing how you've bought into this idea of how just invoking the name of some old philosopher is worth demonization and has been for DECADES in many western countries...

Specs and logs, motes and beams.

Which specific points from which specific Marx texts piss you off so much?

(It's also funny that you didn't actually link to any of the things you stated. I don't care about the things you brought up enough to go hunting for them myself to try do prove or disprove you, but... do you really think saying "I can't cite these simple facts without getting in trouble" *without even citing them, just asking us to believe you that they're easily cite-able, is gonna go over so convincingly?)
by jmyeet | 2026-03-06 04:32:26+00:00
Just so we're on the same page, the GP was reeferring to "baby boomers", as in people born 1945-1965. Maybe you know that and that's when you were born. I don't know. But "boomer" has taken on a slang meaning the latest few years for someone who's simply not tech-savvy or is otherwise out-of-touch.

Generational politics has definite limits and isn't absolute but it's also true that the Baby Boomer generation as a whole enjoyed the great opportunities and wealth generation opportunities in history. They fled to the suburbs, subsidized by the government every step of the way, and then basically pulled up the ladder behind them. They also refuse to quit.

And then when crime receded (and there are multiple theories for why this happened), they moved back into the city, bought up all the real estate and then blocked building affordable housing there too.

I personally have a theory that the parting gift of the Baby Boomer generation will be to get rid of Social Security and Medicare since they don't need it anymore.
by recursivecaveat | 2026-03-06 04:32:49+00:00
Yeah, I really do not think that governments are seriously stymied by the fact that the Amish don't have SSNs or that you only enter your name, DoB, phone, email, address, and state driver's license number to get a bank account instead of a federal ID number. If we really want privacy we need to firmly enshrine this stuff into law instead of slapping random data and hoping that makes privacy invasion too clumsy.
by SilverElfin | 2026-03-06 04:34:40+00:00
I do not want a digital ID normalized. It’ll lead to a world where everywhere you go, you need to identify yourself. And those that don’t will be marginalized and locked out of everyday basic services. There is an entire industry pushing this, and I’ve been seeing a phrase “id/acc”. Like to accelerate identification. It’s the opposite of privacy and anonymization. It’s evil.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-03-06 04:34:52+00:00
> Also mainland China does not recognize Taiwan

By this logic, America not recognising by the sovereignty of Venezuela, Iran and Cuba—and Israel of Palestine, as well as vice versa—makes everyone an a-okay actor!

> there's absolutely nothing those western powers can do about it. Just like Russia's assertion over the West tring to nove it's NATO armies to its western borders in the Ukraine

Russia is a spent power and geopolitical afterthought because of Ukraine. Its borders with NATO have increased massively, all while reducing its security, economy and demography.

Even Xi couldn’t fuck over China as thoroughly as Putin has Russia. But Xi going on a vanity crusade into Taiwan would essentially write off China’s ascendancy as a military and economic superpower this generation.

> if mainland China did choose to reassert it's rightful authority in Taiwan against the colonial powers

An aging dictator invading a democracy. I guess at least Deng chose a quarry he could crush [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests...
by duc_minh | 2026-03-06 04:36:46+00:00
> Sometimes the best optimization is not a clever algorithm. Sometimes it is just changing the shape of the data.

This is basically Rob Pike's Rule 5: If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident.(https://users.ece.utexas.edu/~adnan/pike.html)
by brianwmunz | 2026-03-06 04:36:54+00:00
The no-LLM-in-CRUD-path thing makes sense...I've seen teams hit real latency walls routing every memory operation through inference.
What's your thinking around retrieval patterns? Most agent memory systems I've worked with end up needing vector similarity for semantic search but also structured queries for stuff like "all conversations from last week." Are you planning to support both or staying vector-focused?
by komali2 | 2026-03-06 04:37:14+00:00
No, you're right, and I distinctly remember the conspiracy theorists and counter culture thinkers immediately circling around "this is going to be used to restrict our freedom." And of course they were absolutely right.

I also remember it was the worse possible cultural faux paux to indicate you thought invading foreign nations wasn't a good response to 9/11. I mean go look at the votes for invasion of Iraq, damn near 2/3 of both the house and Senate in favor. Every radio blaring patriotic songs, every school doing patriotic projects, every brown kid living in hell.

It sucked, bad.
by altairprime | 2026-03-06 04:37:43+00:00
Reminds me of surgery teams trying to argue (with pre-/post-menopausal and trans women) that estrogen shouldn’t be taken before surgery because of the clotting risks — of a hormone that has simple coin-flip odds of being irreversibly present in their patients, and is also considered by many surgical teams to correlate with different clotting behaviors than men. (Not necessarily more clots, but certainly not the same ones they’re accustomed to.)

Long-term, I expect the headline would likely be improved by stating instead:

“NASA zero-gee sim reaffirms that women have different clotting behaviors than men”

But selling that argument to U.S. researchers is an entire problem of its own; perhaps another presidential cycle.
by keeda | 2026-03-06 04:39:15+00:00
> No productivity studies of individual developers tackling tasks show a 10x speedup; results tend to be anywhere from +20% to minus 20%.

The only study showing a -20% came back and said, "we now think it's +9% - +38%, but we can't prove rigorously because developers don't want to work without AI anymore": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47142078

Even at the time of the original study, most other rigorous studies showed -5% (for legacy projects, obsolete languages) to 30% (more typical greenfield AND brownfield projects) way back in 2024. Today I hear numbers up to 60% from reports like DX.

But this is exactly missing the point. Most of them are still doing things the old way, including the very process of writing code. Which brings me to this point:

> There have been absolutely zero indicators that this is true.

I could tell you my personal experience, or link various comments on HN, or point you to blogs like https://ghuntley.com/real/ (which also talks about the origanizational impedance mismatch for AI), but actual code would be a better data point.

So there are some open-source projects worth looking at, but they are typically dismissed because they look so weird to us. Here's two mostly vibe-coded (as in, minimal code review, apparently) projects that people shredded for having weird code, but is already used by 10s of 1000s of people, up to 11 - 18K stars now. Look at the commit volume and patterns for O(300K) LoC in a couple of months, mostly from one guy and his agent:

https://github.com/steveyegge/beads/graphs/commit-activity

https://github.com/steveyegge/gastown/graphs/commit-activity

It's like nothing we've seen before, almost equal number of LoC additions and deletions, in the 100s of Ks! It's still not clear how this will pan out long term, but the volume of code and apparent utility (based purely on popularity) is undeniable.