MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thunky | 2026-03-01 20:19:02+00:00
> If each of us individually or as corporations should not be in the business of deciding what it "evil", who should be in that business?

This is easy imo. Two methods:

1. The law. It should not be legal for the US Govt to murder people at will. If it is legal, then of course they'll use tools to make it easier. Maybe AI, maybe Clippy. If they can't use AI then they'll fall back to using some other way of doing it like they've already been doing for several years.

2. Voting. For representatives that actually represent us and have our interest in mind rather than their own corrupt interests. And voting with our wallet against companies that do legal but morally bankrupt things.

Of course we're failing both of these hard right now. But imo the answer is not to give up and let corporations make the rules.

In other words, if it were legal for a normal citizen to murder anyone they wanted, of course they'll use Google Maps to help them do that. We don't put restrictions on how people can use Google Maps. Instead we've made murder illegal. We should be doing the same thing here.
by necovek | 2026-03-01 20:19:42+00:00
Ideas are obviously a prerequisite, but they aren't "worth anything" because there is so many of them and without them being executed well (or sometimes, executed at all), they don't really bring any value.

So really, they are comparatively cheap. I, for one, have hundreds of ideas, but always lacked the time to execute on 5% of them.
Show HN: Habitat – A Self-Hosted Social Platform for Local Communities
by carlnewton | 2026-03-01 20:20:15+00:00
Habitat is a free open-source, self hosted social platform for local communities. It is aimed at fostering local community discussions and discovery of areas of interest. This is why it is built primarily around location. A Habitat instance centers on a specific area, and the local community can make generic posts about that area, or they can make posts about specific locations in that area.

For some background reading you can find out:

- Why I wanted to build this: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/location-based-social-net...
- Some of the design decisions: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/building-habitat/
by jayu_dev | 2026-03-01 20:20:25+00:00
Not yet, currently it supports typescript path aliases and ESM imports/exports map. So industry standard I would say.

I don't think making plugins system is feasible because project focuses on performance. It's build in Go, so compiled language, so it's not easy to extend it like you can with JavaScript based tools.

But definitely I would like to support some reasonable amount of leading frameworks/build tools if they define some syntax / resolving mechanism that is beyond ESM specification.
by sheept | 2026-03-01 20:20:30+00:00
XML is a bit more special/first class to Claude because it uses XML for tool calling:

‹antml:invoke name="Read">
‹antml:parameter name="file_path">/path/to/file‹/antml:parameter>
‹antml:parameter name="offset">100‹/antml:parameter>
‹antml:parameter name="limit">50‹/antml:parameter>
‹/antml:invoke>

I'm sure Claude can handle any delimiter and pseudo markup you throw at it, but one benefit of XML delimiters over quotation marks is that you repeat the delimiter name at the end, which I'd imagine might help if its contents are long (it certainly helps humans).
by ticulatedspline | 2026-03-01 20:20:43+00:00
It's a lot of factors that kinda organically all work to create the market. supply/demand/"what the market will bear", along with assessments of land, labor and, some self reinforcement from the fact that many people don't actually own their home.

Land and labor are pretty easy to see, a brand new house simply has a cost and that cost helps dictate many things. Obviously nobody is paying $500K for something if you could build from scratch for $50K

Supply/demand. if nobody wants to move to an area obviously no matter how nice your property is it doesn't hold value. Or if the area is desirable then your property is worth more. Even with medium demand if there's no supply price goes up and it will go as high as the market will bear.

Then you have "I can't afford to sell for less". if you bought a $400k house and still owe $300k on it you're not going to want sell for less otherwise it would literally cost you money. If the market slumps you might just stay put until things get better. With a lot of stuck people this could get better because it will drive supply down until the market comes back to a level where people can afford to sell.

And all of these factors can change at an interval of a few dozen miles so each little market can have very different factors and prices.
by greygoo222 | 2026-03-01 20:21:28+00:00
mRNA cancer vaccines are the most exciting new treatment about to hit the clinic. Moderna's Phase 2b intismeran autogene randomized trial found a 49% (!!!) reduction in the risk recurrence or death for patients with high risk melanoma already on standard treatment. Several Phase 3 trials are underway. mRNA vaccines have the potential to work for a wide variety of tumors.

(95% confidence interval is 0.294-0.887, wide but not too wide, n=157, to be expected for phase 2).

How they work is also completely fucking insane. Intismeran autogene is personalized for every patient via sequencing their tumor DNA. That's sci-fi shit. If you're not impressed by that, you should be. Fast and scalable DNA sequencing, neoantigen identification, RNA synthesis, none of this is easy and all of it relies on recent innovations across multiple fields.

The first proofs of concept for personalized vaccines like this date back to 2017[1] or 2015[2]. The process for designing the vaccines requires a machine learning algorithm first published in 2020[3]. Details of the algorithm aren't available, but it validated against data published in 2019[4], and there have been many recent advancements in algorithms and datasets for biotech ML that it likely relied on. As you might already know, mRNA vaccines were first tested in humans around the 2010s[5].

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature22991
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25837513/
[3] https://aacrjournals.org/cancerres/article/80/16_Supplement/...
[4] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7138461/
[5] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26082837/
by sublinear | 2026-03-01 20:21:30+00:00
Sorry, I'm not trying to be polarizing. I'm trying to emphasize what I've learned at the extremes. That can inform a choice much more clearly.

The outcomes of the children are directly correlated with the quality of the relationship the parents have. No relationship I've ever seen, then or now, seems to be stable enough to do much better.

In my case, they made up for it with love and attention that brought plenty of comfort but few answers. I know many people pine for that sort of thing, but it's very heavy for a child to go through. People often foolishly romanticize a life where anything seems possible as long as they feel supported. They think that support is the missing piece. What they don't think about is all the times that kid is going to walk directly into a wall and have to find the courage to not be mad at the wall or lose their shit and turn radical like those people on reddit. Love is not enough for hope, and hope is not a plan.

On the other end I had some friends whose parents brought plenty of answers without much love. Those people found some early success in life, but ended up restless and unsatisfied following someone else's path.

You can again say I'm being extreme, but my own experience with relationships is to bridge this gap is almost impossible. Trust is hard and must go both ways, and the current social climate makes it harder than ever. I am still young enough to give it time I guess. I'm not saying no to a family ever. I'm saying I don't know enough to be confident I can do better.

To be clear, I'm saying I've never met someone that has the curiosity and unyielding stubbornness to truly know something (in the Richard Feynman sense) while still being strong enough to be vulnerable and really love their family over all else. What few out there exist and meet that bar must then somehow find each other and commit. It's tough.
by srean | 2026-03-01 20:21:34+00:00
First time hearing about it, so cannot comment without reading further.

KGB and CIA had their noses in the affairs of every country, more so in the mid east, so cannot be ruled out.

Historical interest aside, that was not the point I made on this thread.

The point was justifying war on Iran upon the reason that they funded Hamas. So did Israel, they pretty much helped birth it. KGB may or may not be funding PLA, but that doesn't change who set up Hamas in the first place.

If reminding Arafat's Egyptian origin is to caste a shade, many in the Israeli government have European (often Polish) origin and surnames that they changed to fit their political career. Netanyahu included. So that cuts bothway.
by leohart | 2026-03-01 20:22:41+00:00
I have also found this as well. CLI outputs text and input text in an interactive manner, exactly the way that is most conducive to text-based-text-trained LLM.

I do believe that as vision/multi-modal models get to a better state, we would see even crazier interaction surfaces.

RE: duckdb. I have a wonderful time with ChatGPT talking to duckdb but I have kept it to inmemory db only. Do you set up some system prompt that tell it to keep a duckdb database locally on disk in the current folder?
by umairnadeem123 | 2026-03-01 20:23:55+00:00
> I tried to avoid writing this for a long time, but I'm convinced MCP provides no real-world benefit

IMO this is 100% correct and I'm glad someone finally said it. I run AI agents that control my entire dev workflow through shell commands and they are shockingly good at it. the agent figures out CLI flags it has never seen before just from --help output. meanwhile every MCP server i've used has been a flaky process that needs babysitting.

the composability argument is the one that should end this debate tbh. you can pipe CLI output through jq, grep it, redirect to files - try doing that with MCP. you can't. you're stuck with whatever the MCP server decided to return and if it's too verbose you're burning tokens for nothing.

> companies scrambled to ship MCP servers as proof they were "AI first"

FWIW this is the real story. MCP adoption is a marketing signal not a technical one. 242% growth in MCP servers means nothing if most of them are worse than the CLI that already existed
by johnea | 2026-03-01 20:24:01+00:00
So glad to see a mention of Smedley Butler!

He has been a long time hero of mine.

After a career pillaging for US corporate interests abroad, he realized he was being used, and presented his "pamphlet" to the US legislature, and toured giving anti-war speeches.

War _is_ a racket!!!

The fact that we're still dismembering and incinerating each other, to decide which rich asshat gets the goods, is the primary indicator that humans are still a primitive primate species...
by bgentry | 2026-03-01 20:24:23+00:00
The important quote from the timeline:

Mar 01 9:41 AM PST

We want to provide some additional information on the power issue in a single Availability Zone in the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region. At around 4:30 AM PST, one of our Availability Zones (mec1-az2) was impacted by objects that struck the data center, creating sparks and fire. The fire department shut off power to the facility and generators as they worked to put out the fire. We are still awaiting permission to turn the power back on, and once we have, we will ensure we restore power and connectivity safely. It will take several hours to restore connectivity to the impacted AZ. The other AZs in the region are functioning normally.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-03-01 20:24:23+00:00
> Seems like it should be somewhat easier to nuke 50 datacenters than it would be to hack and disrupt 1000s of different services.

The bigger part of me seems that if we someone nukes 50 datacenters all at once or say all of Amazon's datacenters at once, then the data stored in there would simply be gone and given so many datacenters are located in Virginia,USA iirc or just so many companies being reliant on few datacenter providers.

The larger threat to me with the lose of data is firstly the panic within public fronting services but also, with Hedge Funds, Pension funds or banking datacenters who might be using these and if they lose the data, then its gonna cause even more public mayhem.

Some might be saying oh off-site backups exist but there has atleast been one instance, where a single Google accident had led to massive issues for a 135 Billion $ pension fund.

Relevant Kevin Faang video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GOAUyipnM4 [Google Accidentally Deletes $135 Billion Pension Fund, Chaos Ensues]
by thegrim33 | 2026-03-01 20:24:37+00:00
The walls have really been closing in recently with lots of sites blocking VPNs now. It's getting pretty annoying. Although it did help me finally quit Reddit - every time I click a Reddit link and that smug fedora-wearing avatar appears on the screen and tells me I've been blocked, I can just close out and do something else rather than getting sucked up into it.
by oofbey | 2026-03-01 20:25:20+00:00
The confusing thing here is that there are two distributions involved here. There's the distribution over the vocabulary (possible values of each token) and the distribution over the sequence of tokens in each document.

Here, the KL Divergence is calculated over the vocabulary's distribution - for a specific token, it is measuring how much the quantized model's predictions differ from the reference model. 0 means a perfect match (no loss of quality from quantizaton), and some large number like 4 nats meaning the quantized model's predictions for that token differ substantially from the reference model.

The 99.9% is taken over the sequence of tokens. So it ranks all the tokens in a corpus, and it effectively finds the token with the worst predictions (relative to the reference model) out of every 1000 tokens. That's the 99.9%ile part.
by networked | 2026-03-01 20:25:25+00:00
The column-number switch on the site is a clever idea, but I don't think it works. The columns are limited to a fixed height in rem, shorter with more columns. This forces readers to scroll down each column and then back up to continue.

The site should imitate newspapers either more or less closely. In either case, first limit column height to something like 80% of the viewport. More closely: split the document into multiple newspaper-style pages. The reader will only need to scroll vertically once per newspaper page. Less closely: use unlimited columns with horizontal scrolling. This way, the reader only needs to scroll vertically to bring the columns into view.

Keep the switch to select column width.
by jandrewrogers | 2026-03-01 20:25:40+00:00
Modern mines have programmable target discriminators that use multiple sensor modalities in addition to a programmable self-destruct. A cow or a goat herder usually won't set these off.

Many types of sophisticated mines cannot be trivially cleared with line charges or engineering vehicles. Soviet style mines can be cleared this way but aren't the only kind that exist.

This tech isn't sophisticated but it costs money and requires maintenance. Many militaries don't use them because they want weapons that can sit in a warehouse for 50 years with zero maintenance.

The military purpose of mines is not to kill anyone. It is to deny use of space in order to shape the battlefield and trap the adversary in areas where they are exposed to other weapons. Mines are highly effective at this purpose and will be for the foreseeable future against almost all adversaries. This is not controversial.

The "expert" in the linked article has no background in mine warfare, only EOD. This became obvious when I was reading the article because it presented an unexpectedly naive understanding of mine warfare. That perspective might make sense if your only experience is clearing old Soviet mines and IEDs but it doesn't generalize.
by ndriscoll | 2026-03-01 20:25:54+00:00
What is your point here? Yes, if I were to pay for a movie or show, I would find it unacceptable if it were to contain paid product placement. Do you think prominent logos in media are an accident?

And youtube could easily ban third party sponsors in their ToS, have all advertising on their platform go through them, and completely remove it for paying customers. Just like Netflix can refuse to host any shows with product placement. It's entirely their own product decision to allow ads in their "ad free" offering.
by bawolff | 2026-03-01 20:26:17+00:00
Maybe, but also the strike was super telegraphed. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that when USA pulls its embassy staff from israel, britian pulls its embassy staff from iran and USA creates the biggest build up of military hardware in the region in 20 years, that shit is about to go down.

Especially when everyone notices the polymarket bets that win big but nobody notices the ones that fall on their face. There is huge survivorship bias in these sorts of analyses
by jeroenhd | 2026-03-01 20:26:20+00:00
Plans were changed last minute because an opportunity arose to take out Iran's leader. It was obvious something was going to happen, but not what or when. The American war fleet deploying would've served as an effective containment strategy if the US military would do another simple kidnapping like they did in Venezuela.

The large protests passed their peaks a while ago. The American military has been deploying to the area for a while. This attack could've happened any day in the past weeks, or it could've taken another couple of weeks of shit flinging, slow escalation, and meaningless threats from Iran's government.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-03-01 20:26:45+00:00
For context, I don’t want this to sound bitter. The first time I was single as an adult was from 1996-2002 and dating apps weren’t a thing. The second time I was single was from 2006-2011 and I wasn’t really trying to date and spent most of the time getting my head back in the game and just hanging out with female friends until I started dating my now wife who I met at work. Even she had to make the first move.

That being said as five foot four guy, the chance of me having any success on a dating app at the time from everything I know would have been basically 0 no matter what. “Working on myself” would have done no good. I was objectively in great shape as a part time fitness instructor and I just run my first (and last) two half marathons before I met my wife.

Some guys just haven’t won the genetic lottery to succeed on dating apps. Again I’m not bitter as one of the relatively few straight male fitness instructors, it wasn’t hard to date during my first stint of singleness
by ThrowawayR2 | 2026-03-01 20:27:33+00:00
It already happened. The old timers correctly observe that modern applications are bloated and inefficient because of all the heavyweight frameworks, excessive abstraction layers, and "left-pad culture" where external dependencies are pulled in to do the most trivial things but that these things enabled less capable developers to effectively build software to fulfill industry demand. LLM-only coders are just the next step in the devolution.
by jcgrillo | 2026-03-01 20:29:59+00:00
IIUC part of the reason ballistic missiles have multiple warheads is that some of them detonate high up to knock out air defenses and other electronics allowing the rest to fall through to their targets. The last time we tried this experiment as a species was the starfish prime tests in 1962 which caused some electrical havoc in Hawaii. These days our systems are probably more delicate and sensitive? All that is to say, in a scenario where nukes are going off I'm not sure you'd even need to target any datacenters in particular.. they're probably all toast by default.
by cortesoft | 2026-03-01 20:30:38+00:00
The traditional espoused financial market purpose of these prediction markets is based on the premise that actors on it will have inside information.

The point is for business with vested interests (and therefore often inside information) to use these markets to hedge for things that will materially affect their profitability.

For example, in this case, suppose you ran a company that was shipping goods through the Middle East, and a war would disrupt your business. You would then place bets on there being a war, so that if it does happen you will recover some of your losses. You might know inside information because your work in the region, but that is expected.
by mzajc | 2026-03-01 20:30:58+00:00
Interesting stuff! It's a little odd that gzip itself won't display (or sometimes even write) these values. Another tool that displays some of these values is file(1), at least with Debian's libmagic-mgc, for example:

gzip compressed data, was "file.txt", last modified: Sun Mar 1 20:21:34 2026, from Unix, original size modulo 2^32 5

gzip compressed data, extra field, has comment, last modified: Wed Dec 20 10:30:35 2017, from Unix

(weirdly enough, it doesn't show the actual comment string)
by sheept | 2026-03-01 20:31:05+00:00
I agree, it's always been unsettling to see any[] on hover, even though it gets typed in the end.

I think one reason might be to allow the type to be refined differently in different code paths. For example:

function x () {
let arr = []
if (Math.random() < 0.5) {
arr.push(0)
return arr
} else {
arr.push('0')
return arr
}
}

In each branch, arr is typed as number[] and string[], respectively, and x's return type is number[] | string[]. If it decided to retroactively infer the type of arr at declaration, then I'd imagine x's return type would be the less specific (number | string)[].
by techblueberry | 2026-03-01 20:31:27+00:00
While this is obviously has truth to it, I also don't buy it whole hog. While I think nostalgia is a powerful force, there's a simultaneously powerful force to feel like you're not prone to it. Oh, nothing is new under the sun.

First of all, there's been substantive shifts in the business model of say cinema such that they literally aren't able to make the kind of movies they used to make. Matt Damon talked about this explictly: https://www.reddit.com/r/Filmmakers/comments/ozj2ov/matt_dam...

Second I think music is an interesting category. There's a relatively global phenomenon that classic rock from the 60's to the 90's is like peak Americana. I've heard it almost everywhere I travel.

As a child of the 90's, who did feel that newness teenage obsession with alt rock of the early 90's. I can in retrospect tell you that was not the best age for music, not close. I would probably reference like three things. The classical music of the 1600-1900's, the Modern Jazz age of the like 50's to 70's, and the aforementioned classic rock of the 60's to 90's.

They really just don't make it like they used to. There's a reason WBD just sold for like $90 billion.

Finally I will add, I think there's maybe something adjacent to what your talking about which isn't just the subjective feeling of newness, but an objective one. I think, especially if you're something of a nerd, the the era when things are most changing has an emotional quality to it that can't be beat. Do I want to go back to the 80's-90's era of technological development and listen to Michael Jackson on a walkman, or the pre-social media and streaming internet, or playing video games in an arcade? Maybe not with the memory and hedonic adaptation of someone living in 2026. But if I can live in that world without that memory and the subjective experience of not knowing what was coming? Absolutely. And i think that experience would be better in the 80's and 90's then it would be in other eras. I think a non-negligible number of kids these days feel like they missed out on something not living through those eras.