MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pie_flavor | 2026-03-13 19:25:30+00:00
Oldheads are not the exclusive group of people who have ever meant actual altruism by their open-source licenses. You can't just pick an attribute to dismiss an opinion based on. Creative control over the lineage of a line of code is just not something the open source world is very concerned with in aggregate.

Anti-AI sentiment comes primarily from slop PRs (and slop projects) along with the water use hoax; copyright concerns originate almost entirely from the art sphere, crossing over into the open source sphere by osmosis and only representing a small minority of opinion-havers therein.
by palmotea | 2026-03-13 19:25:33+00:00
> There's a deeper message here. I believe that countries around the world are moving towards a stance that the US is an unreliable partner and that their national security depends on not being reliant upon the US.

That's not a bad thing, because the EU has been a mooch since the end of the Cold War, at least. It's unfortunate it took two terms of Trump for them to finally chance their attitude.
by 9rx | 2026-03-13 19:25:49+00:00
> If someone with the political clout were to be willing to champion the work and guide the discussion appropriately while someone like me does the work, that's different.

There is unlikely anyone on the Go team with more political clout in this particular area than the one who has already reached out to you. You obviously didn't respond to him publicly, but did he reject your offer in private? Or are you just imaging some kind of hypothetical scenario where they are refusing to talk to you, despite evidence to the contrary?
by forinti | 2026-03-13 19:26:00+00:00
I make it very clear to those around me that no question is too stupid to be asked and nobody is going to be reprimanded for asking basic questions.

I once had an awful manager (a terrible human being overall) who wanted to censure people for their questions; I'm pretty sure he was trying to hide his insecurities and was actually in panic that his project decisions would be revised.

So I really don't want that kind of environment where I work.

PS. And that is the exact phrase I often use.
by shimman | 2026-03-13 19:26:21+00:00
I'm not saying it's so bad I don't recommend it, quite the opposite; but these things can be written in more performant languages. There's no reason why a cron job scheduler requires 500 mb of ram in idle. Same for the analytics. That is just a waste of resources.

Software can be drastically way less resource intensive, there is no excuse outside of wanting to exacerbate the climate crises.

This period of our history in the profession will be seen as a tremendous waste of resources and effort.
by Findecanor | 2026-03-13 19:26:33+00:00
Indeed, many who released source code under the GPL in the past did so with the conviction that the license itself would in some measure protect the source code itself — as source code — from being exploited by commercially entities.

The license was supposed to make derivative work feed back into improving the software itself, not to allow it to be used to create competing software.

Many of those are disappointed with leading free software / open source advocates such as Stallman for not taking a stance against the AI companies' practice.
by derefr | 2026-03-13 19:26:34+00:00
One might say that early Youtube was mainly thought of as a video pastebin that allowed (JS-assisted) hotlink-embedding into other pages. Youtube was to video as image-hosting sites like Imgur were to images. Which was important, in both cases, because not just video but even (HQ) images were hard to host yourself at the time, and also hard to send to other people without hosting them somewhere.

With both video and image-sharing sites, you didn't really expect the site itself to function as a social network that was worth "browsing." Rather, you expected the "front page view" to be an upload view; and from there, to take your uploaded assets and embed them onto a page to put them into proper context. And it's these webpages-that-contextualize-image/video-assets that you'd share links to, on forums and on early social bookmarking platforms (Fark, StumbleUpon, etc.)
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-03-13 19:26:39+00:00
To be honest, much of the lessons of this were something that we could've already looked back during all the wars humanity has fought all throughout history to learn from.

We are in here, because we didn't learn from our history. You feel this way because this is recent and its hitting everything all at once but I do feel like these were all very avoidable lessons. Being honest, I don't feel like we learnt anything new aside from seeing how the world is still trying to clutch itself back to stability even after all the instability Donald Trump is causing within the world (for better or for worse) and seeing how the world reacts to all of this live.

But I am not quite sure if future will learn from these lessons given that its feeling to me like history doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes and we somehow don't really learn from the history to be honest.
by Aurornis | 2026-03-13 19:27:02+00:00
> He doesn't acknowledge that Anthropic, OpenAI, etc, are profiting while the original authors are not.

How is this different than any company that uses the open source software?

I find this argument hard to swallow. If open source contributors want to profit from their code being used and prevent big companies from using it or learning from it, open sourcing it would be an irrational choice.
by gwbas1c | 2026-03-13 19:27:04+00:00
"Secret Mall Apartment" is a documentary on Netflix that includes a lot of the videos that Townsend took during the whole project. (There's a few stills in the article.)

It's quite interesting to watch, because Townsend himself is quite the character. There's a scene where he's having an argument with his (now ex) wife that shows that Townsend has extremely different priorities than the typical person. (And why his first marriage failed, too.)
by Analemma_ | 2026-03-13 19:27:08+00:00
Contra the popular memes, I don’t think they’re losing money with every query sent (the money pit is capex on new models and hardware, but I don’t think inference itself is unprofitable), so this wouldn’t actually work.

I was already paying for Claude Max before the War Department fiasco, so there’s not much more I can do to hurt OAI apart from complain about it online, although I did persuade several people on various group chats I’m on to switch.
by wrs | 2026-03-13 19:27:31+00:00
Once again AWS waits an inexplicably long time to fix an obvious deficiency that the other providers solved long ago, and then does it in an inexplicably hacky way.

See also their recent innovation of letting you be logged into the console with up to five (???) of the many accounts their bizarre IAM system requires, implemented with a clunky system of redirections and magic URL prefixes. As opposed to GCP just having a sensible system in the first place of projects with permissions, and letting you switch between any of them at will using the same user account.
by MildlySerious | 2026-03-13 19:27:43+00:00
I am kind of peeved. I started a community there and diligently posted links to topical news, and it kind of became a reference to me. Like many others, I've put in some amount of effort.

Now it's gone, again. Without a head's up or a way to get a backup out of it, it seems like. Can't say I am a fan of that.
by imiric | 2026-03-13 19:27:58+00:00
Thinking of open source as a gift is such a strange take. It implies that the relationship is merely a transaction where the giftee is the beneficiary and the gifter is a philanthropist. It has subtle financial undertones, and a sense that gifters are somehow morally superior.

It is far healthier to see it as a collaboration. The author publishes the software with freedoms that allow anyone to not only use the software, but crucially to modify it and, hopefully, to publish their changes as well so that the entire community can benefit, not just the original author or those who modify it. It encourages people to not keep software to themselves, which is in great part the problem with proprietary software. Additionally, copyleft licenses ensure that those freedoms are propagated, so that malicious people don't abuse the system, i.e. avoiding the paradox of tolerance.

Far be it from me to question the wisdom of someone like Carmack, but he's not exactly an authority on open source. While id has released many of their games over the years, this is often a few years after the games are commercially relevant. I guess it makes sense that someone sees open source as a "gift" they give to the world after they've extracted the value they needed from it. I have little interest in what he has to say about "AI", as well.

Hey John, where can I find the open source projects released by your "AI" company?

Ah, there's physical_atari[1]. Somehow I doubt this is the next industry breakthrough, but I won't look a gift horse in the mouth.

[1]: https://github.com/Keen-Technologies/physical_atari
by trjordan | 2026-03-13 19:27:59+00:00
I utterly love Hammerspoon.

It's fun to combine with qmk [0], which gives you a bunch more options for hotkeys on your keyboard via layers. I've ended up with a layer where half the keyboard is Hammerspoon shortcuts directly to apps (e.g. go to Slack, to Chrome, etc.) and half of it is in-app shortcuts (like putting cmd-number on the home row, for directly addressing chrome tabs).

Between this and one of the tiling window manager-adjacent tools (I use Sizeup), I can do all my OS-level navigation directly. "Oh I want to go to Slack and go to this DM" is a few keystrokes away, and not dependent on what else I was doing.

[0] https://qmk.fm/
by ProllyInfamous | 2026-03-13 19:28:21+00:00
I'm not usually one to whine, but agreed; additionally, add contrast to the modifiers (e.g. processor select). First thing I did when I visited was scale the website to 150%

Super impressive comparisons, and correlates with my perception having three seperate generations of GPU (from your list pulldown). Thanks for including the "old AMD" Polaris chipsets, which are actually still much faster than lower-spec Apple silicon. I have Ollama3.1 on a VEGA64 and it really is twice as fast as an M2Pro...

----

For anybody that thinks installing a local LLM is complicated: it's not (so long as you have more than one computer, don't tinker on your primary workhorse). I am a blue collar electrician (admittedly: geeky); no more difficult than installing linux.
by rootusrootus | 2026-03-13 19:29:21+00:00
It seems like when someone does a historical analysis of the wealth of these past tycoons, they often don't do a simple inflation calculation, they relate the wealth to the GDP of the US at the time. By that measure, both Rockefeller and Carnegie were quite a lot more wealthy than single-digit billions, though maybe not quite the same level as Elon Musk.

What makes Musk's wealth really incredible is how much of it is based on hot air (TSLA).
by jcims | 2026-03-13 19:29:41+00:00
Got some great results for a rather broad domain in the first pass.

HN is going to tend towards negative/constructive feedback, for me the only issue is that the mouse interaction is a bit wonky. Took me a minute to realize that i could select different mouse modes. With that I'd say I'd echo TheTaytay's comment about mouse interaction and for me generating docx (which was the output of my agents, haven't even explored explicitly asking for something else) creates a bit of a barrier to use the content for me. Markdown or even HTML would be helpful.

But these are just minor nits, love the concept and great execution.
by kittikitti | 2026-03-13 19:29:45+00:00
I'm going to guess warrantless search of all of our data, retention policies, and the worst part is who gets access to search through it. Basically, I speculate that anyone under a loosely defined classification would be able to access it legally. I also think there's a bunch of information and password sharing between people who don't even have a clearance for it. Perhaps sprinkle in abusing this system for personal or political reasons.

My word of caution is if you do have access to these systems or a shared password, tread very carefully.
by D-Machine | 2026-03-13 19:29:50+00:00
The model isn't trained, it isn't differentiable (read carefully to the end: they say their model might still work if they made it differentiable, but they don't know), and it isn't clear IMO it could ever be made trainable (what is your loss function that scores a "partially correct" program / compiler?).

You need non-linearity in self-attention because it encodes feature / embedding similarities / correlations (e.g. self-attention is kernel smoothing) and/or multiplicative interactions, it has nothing to do with determinism/indeterminism. Also, LLMs are not really nondeterministic in any serious way, that all just comes from tweaks and optimizations that are not at all core to the architecture.
by commandlinefan | 2026-03-13 19:29:55+00:00
> a very first-world problem

Actually I really wish this had existed while my father was still alive! Toward the end of his life, he had developed pretty debilitating Alzheimers, but he still liked to watch TV. The problem was, modern TVs were way too complex for him to use. My mom had to come in the room and put on DVDs for him pretty much all day. I'm sure he could have figured out how to channel surf by himself if that had been an option.
by elicash | 2026-03-13 19:30:18+00:00
I thought this HN discussion was worth revisiting in the context of vibe coding. I don't think any of it fits a pro-AI or anti-AI view, that's not what this is. I just think a lot of the same themes show up and it's interesting to see how folks were thinking about it a few years ago.

It also interested me that really only one person brought up AI.
by shimman | 2026-03-13 19:30:26+00:00
Dude, the $2k solution is not only worse than postiz they charge an additional thousand for each channel.

It's just garbage software, I brought it up as an example IDK why. Commentators here like knowing snippets about other industries in the profession, I know I do at least.

But to answer your Q, yes I do expect a cron job schedule, analytics, and a CRM not to require 8 gig of ram in order to not barf on itself too hard.

These things are incredibly resource intensive for their actual jobs. The software is incredibly wasteful.

A $5/vps should be enough to host every suite of software a small business needs. To think otherwise is extremely out of touch. We're talking about 3 concurrent users max here, software should not be buckling under such a light load.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-03-13 19:30:35+00:00
Later: “The document also shows the Starlink subsidiary registered a net income of only $72.7 million for 2024. The year prior, the subsidiary incurred a net loss of $30.7 million. However, the financial statement notes the subsidiary purchased nearly $2.3 billion in Starlink hardware and services from the SpaceX parent last year.”

Those figures, to my understanding, include cost of services and launch in COGS.
by Mofa1245 | 2026-03-13 19:30:51+00:00
LLM non-determinism is a silent killer for production data.

A prompt tweak or model update can shift an extraction from:

amount: 72

to:

amount: "72.00"

Nothing crashes. Your pipeline just sends incorrect numbers downstream.

I built Continuum to treat AI workflows like unit tests.

It records a known-good run and replays it deterministically in CI. If any step output drifts, verification fails.

Local-first CLI. No SaaS.

Example included: invoice extraction pipeline with deterministic replay.

Repo:
https://github.com/Mofa1245/Continuum
by Aurornis | 2026-03-13 19:30:54+00:00
Can you cite an actual example of a FAANG company using X for Y that is also primarily attributable to a single developer? That is, someone who can say "uses my X"?

Not a community-developed project with a lot of contributors, but a software that would realistically qualify as being mostly attributable to one person?

Redis is an easy example, but the author of that doesn't need to say "Netflix uses my X" because the software is popular by itself. AI being trained on Redis code hasn't done anything to diminish that, as far as I can tell.
by Mofa1245 | 2026-03-13 19:31:12+00:00
I built this after running into a recurring issue with LLM pipelines.

Small prompt changes would fix one extraction but silently break another. Nothing threw an error – downstream systems just started receiving slightly different JSON.

Traditional unit tests didn't help because the raw LLM output itself was changing.

Continuum records the full workflow run (LLM call, parsed JSON, etc.) and replays it deterministically so CI can catch drift before production.

Curious how others are handling this problem in real systems. Are people snapshot-testing LLM outputs today?
Ask HN: How do you look for rare log patterns and RCA?
by kvaranasi_ | 2026-03-13 19:31:40+00:00
Hey, I'm just curious. I know that there is a feature in Datadog that shows new log patterns formed and disappeared. So when something goes wrong, what is it that developers look for beyond this? It should be pretty straightforward to find an error in the haystack. By looking at novel error patterns, right?

When was the last time you had to spend hours debugging to find the root cause?
by tw04 | 2026-03-13 19:32:22+00:00
>it's an ugly process that produces great and greatly uneven value to humanity

That'd be far more believable if it weren't for the fact a vast majority of the research is publicly funded for those drug companies. They have no issues selling their drugs for less money in other markets while still turning a profit. And there's absolutely no indication they'd cease to exist with just outrageous profits, not "crippling entire economies" level profits.
by skrebbel | 2026-03-13 19:32:37+00:00
This is because Carmack doesn't really do OSS, he just does code dumps and tacks on a license ("a gift"). That's of course great and awesome and super nice, but he's not been painstakingly and thanklessly maintaining some key linux component for the last 20 years or something like that. It's an entirely different thing; he made a thing, sold it, and then when he couldn't sell more of it, gave it away. That's nice! But it's not what most people who are deep into open source mean by the term.
by hogwasher | 2026-03-13 19:32:53+00:00
When I started using them, they did this by checking against Paypal, with whom (admittedly to my regret) I had already verified myself. I wasn't asked to provide a copy of my ID to them directly, at least, or to provide it anew to one of those random ID verification companies that are popping up out of the woodwork.

It also just bothers me less in this case than in most because, no matter who you buy from, if you ever need to verify ownership of your account/domains, you may eventually be asked to show ID/verify your identity anyway, and if you can't prove you're the person who bought the domain then you risk losing it (say, by not being able to regain control of it after it is stolen). And if it's a domain you've tied your email or business to, and you've pre-payed 10 years, that would suck majorly.

So I feel about it more or less how I feel about my bank needing ID, personally. But I definitely get why others may not agree/may have a different use case to begin with.

I think also there is a big problem with scammers using stolen credit cards to buy domains, which they use to send phishing email or operate malicious websites. Preventing this at least makes way more sense as a motive than "protect the children by identifying all of them".

If you buy from elsewhere, you can find a way to avoid the ID verification, but most places will only take digital payment, so they still probably end up with your card number and name.

I'm not a fan at all of age verification laws and websites requiring ID, but this one I tolerate, personally. But I won't blame anyone for not doing the same.
by GeoAtreides | 2026-03-13 19:33:10+00:00
everyone with a paid house and a fat 401K is pretty chill with AI, and giving gifts and being all so generous

meanwhile, in the trenches, rent and bills are approaching 2/3 of paycheck and food the other 2/3, while at the same time the value of our knowledge and experience are going down to zero (in the eyes of the managerial class)

'ai training magnifies the gift' ... sure thing ai training magnifies a lot of things
by D-Machine | 2026-03-13 19:33:17+00:00
Nope, they encoded or compiled in a simple VM / WASM interpreter to the transformer weights, there is no training. You'd be forgiven for this misreading, as they deliberately mislead early on that their model is (in principle) trainable, but later admit that their actual model is not actually differentiable, but that a differentiable approximation "should" still work (despite no info about what loss function or training data could allow scoring partially correct / incomplete program outputs).
by xyzzy_plugh | 2026-03-13 19:33:35+00:00
You are conflating many things here. A locked bootloader does not imply you cannot run unsigned software in user space. There are also many phones that do allow you to unlock the bootloader. I have a drawer full of them.

Finally, the ability to allow you to unlock your phone bootloader or to run custom firmware has nothing to do with the silicon. It's a software choice. The trusted software could most certainly decide to disable these safeguards.
by BiamOS | 2026-03-13 19:33:59+00:00
I spent the last two weekends hacking together BiamOS (https://github.com/BiamOS/BiamOS) because I’m tired of how static our workspace still is.

I'm an automation engineer, and I wanted to see if I could move from the "fragmented web" to a Single View Era. Instead of just jumping between isolated SaaS silos, BiamOS uses a built-in Chromium webview with persistent sessions (Ghost-Auth) so the local LLM can interact directly with the DOM.

The goal isn't just another browser; it’s a desktop layer where the AI "reads" your active context (Gmail, Notion, Slack) and generates a unified UI based on what you’re actually doing. It’s about making the apps disappear into a single, agentic dashboard.

Stack: Electron 34, React 19, Hono, SQLite.

It’s early alpha, but I’m curious: Do you think the future of OS design lies in "Generative UI" replacing traditional window management?
by incanus77 | 2026-03-13 19:34:10+00:00
Hammerspoon is the glue that holds my Mac together. For a starter list of things to do with this app, a partial list of the things that I'm using it for:

- Dumping all open Safari tabs to an Obsidian doc
- Adding 'hyper' (Ctrl-Opt-Cmd) keybinds to pop a new window for:
- Safari
- Finder
- Terminal (Ghostty)
- VS Code
- Notes
- Editing Hammerspoon/AeroSpace/Sketchybar config
- Reloading Hammerspoon config
- Reloading Sketchybar
- Quitting all Dock apps except Finder
- Screen lock
- System sleep
- Opening front Finder folder in VS Code
- Opening front Safari URL on Archive.today
- Showing front Safari window tab count
- Showing front app bundle ID
- Posting notification about current Music track
- Controlling my Logi Litra light (various color temps/brightnesses)
- Starting/stopping a client work timer
- Tying it to AeroSpace for:
- Pushing a window to another monitor
- Performing a two-up window layout
- Swapping those two windows
- Closing all other workspace windows
- Gathering all windows to first workspace
- Ensuring some background apps stay running if they crash
- Prompting to unmount disk images if trashed
- Binding into Skim to jump to specific sections of spec PDFs using terse Markdown URLs