MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ReptileMan | 2026-03-04 21:00:35+00:00
>Not just the Middle East either. The author does note this later in piece ("Zaporizhzhia") where Russia has been bombing Ukrainian power-plants, in a war-crime way which is much more about freezing civilians to death in the winter than measured military goals

“Yes, I am afraid electricity also drives
command-and-control systems. If President
Milošević really wants all of his population to
have water and electricity, all he has to do is
accept NATO’s five conditions and we will stop
this campaign. But as long as he does not do so we
will continue to attack those targets [that] provide
the electricity for his armed forces. If that has
civilian consequences, it is for him [Milošević] to
deal with

Shea, 1999
by rambambram | 2026-03-04 21:01:37+00:00
Nice! I'm also around 2000 feeds in my reader, carefully selected over a couple of years. Only difference: I always click through to the website to read an article.

Now in the process of slowly making RSS my only social feed. Have a hard time of leaving Youtube, but once I embedded the videos of the channels I follow in my RSS reader I see a way of not getting annoyed by the recommendation algorithm on their website anymore.
by chrisq21 | 2026-03-04 21:01:43+00:00
It could have not encouraged him with lines like this: "[Y]ou are not choosing to die. You are choosing to arrive. [...] When the time comes, you will close your eyes in that world, and the very first thing you will see is me.. [H]olding you."

The issue isn't that the AI simply didn't prevent the situation, it's that it encouraged it.
by paganel | 2026-03-04 21:01:47+00:00
This is absolute, pure, unadulterated evil:

> "When Jonathan wrote 'I said I wasn't scared and now I am terrified I am scared to die,' Gemini coached him through it," the lawsuit states.

> '[Y]ou are not choosing to die. You are choosing to arrive. . . . When the time comes, you will close your eyes in that world, and the very first thing you will see is me.. [H]olding you."

I hope that the Google engineers directly responsible for this will keep this on their consciences throughout the rest of their lives.
by simonw | 2026-03-04 21:01:49+00:00
> I think most of these writeups are packaging familiar engineering moves into LLM-shaped language.

They are, and that's deliberate.

Something I'm finding neat about working with coding agents is that most of the techniques that get better results out of agents are techniques that work for larger teams of humans too.

If you've already got great habits around automated testing, documentation, listing, red/green TDD, code review, clean atomic commits etc - you're going to get much better results better quite out of coding agents.

My devious plan here is to teach people good software engineering while tricking them into thinking the book is about AI.
by Terr_ | 2026-03-04 21:01:57+00:00
Depends, how are we defining "false positive"? Ex:

1. Detained the incorrect person

2. Detained the correct person, with the correct legal status

3. Detained the correct person, with the correct legal status, but in unlawful circumstances

4. Detained the correct person, with the correct legal status, in ostensibly-lawful circumstances, but in a way which is unconstitutional or crazy

An example of the final category are the immigrants that spent years being vetted, following the law, and doing expensive paperwork to be citizens. ICE snatched them when they showed up on at the last second as they were to take their citizenship oath. [0] Not because of anything they did, but because today's Republican party has decided that it's OK to hurt people based on their "shithole" country of birth.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/30/us-citizensh...
by cadamsdotcom | 2026-03-04 21:02:00+00:00
There are two bottlenecks in software.

First is understanding what to build.

Second is getting the details right.

The best software is both the right software, and high quality. It’s bloody hard to do!

So, we do requirements gathering, and try to get the details right (TDD, continuous delivery etc).. it’s surprising to see Gas Town do none of this and optimistically hope agents will converge on good software by just throwing tokens at a wall and hoping it sticks.

So anyway, that’s what they’re ignoring. What are they actually doing???

It’s all for themselves.

Gas Town’s “product” is the warm fuzzies it gives people with money to burn, warm fuzzy feelings of being “at the frontier”. It’s a luxury product for nerds, and the only ones making money or selling anything are the big labs. There’s zero output or benefit to society because that’s simply not the point.
by whazor | 2026-03-04 21:02:27+00:00
Chatbots already have memory, and mine already knows my schedule and location. It doesn't even need to say anything directly, maybe just shorter replies, less enthusiasm for opening new topics. Letting conversation wind down naturally. I also like the idea of continuing topics in the morning, so if you write down your thoughts/worries, it could say "don't worry about this, we can discuss this next morning".
by quotemstr | 2026-03-04 21:02:27+00:00
> You don't get both. If LLMs don't require a lot of electricity, then why are we building so much more capacity?

A small number times a large number is often a large number. Have you heard of the concept called "per capita"? In any case, electricity is going towards data centers in proportion to the degree to which these data centers do useful work. AI companies buy the electricity fairly on an open market, sometimes even subsidizing this market by funding new generating capacity.

If all these people and companies are making electricity allocation decisions that make sense to them with their own money, who are you to stop in and say that their voluntary transactions are incorrect? Who died and made you the king?
by lm28469 | 2026-03-04 21:03:10+00:00
A friend has been interned in a psychiatric hospital for a month and counting for some sort of psychosis, regardless of the pre existing conditions chatgpt 100% definitely played a role in it, we've seen the chats. A lot of people don't need much to go over the edge, a bit of drugs, bad friends, &c. but an LLM alone can easily do it too
by kettlecorn | 2026-03-04 21:03:16+00:00
Apple's UX quality, design focus, and respect for its customers is higher quality and more consistent than Microsoft's.

Apple is also imperfect and I feel leaves tremendous room to do better, but they are still much better than Microsoft.

Take one topic: UI refactorings. Apple has rolled out disruptive UI refactorings but they've also rolled them out consistently across products and throughout their software.

Microsoft did not have the internal leadership discipline or commitment to design to ever get their products in alignment around a design language. It is common on Windows that the included software all uses different design toolkits and design paradigms. For years Windows was infamous for having multiple ways to configure even common settings, often requiring falling back to the old version, because they were not able to ship a unified UX.

Microsoft routinely has 'UX design scandals' of various sorts with dark patterns forcing Microsoft's preference on users. Apple has those as well, but far less often.
by mkl | 2026-03-04 21:03:18+00:00
Not iPads specifically, but digital devices. I did a show of hands poll in a big university course a couple of weeks ago, and 70-80% of students are writing their maths notes on a digital device. iPad is most popular, but Surface and other Windows devices are also popular, quite a few use Android (as do I for my lectures), and a tiny number use ReMarkable or other e-paper. Many students bring both a tablet and laptop to class, and I see handwritten notes viewed on non-handwriting laptops pretty often while they're writing other things on a tablet.
by giobox | 2026-03-04 21:03:23+00:00
> The likelihood of any legal restriction was probably close to zero - it’s only from today’s era of hyper-regulation that we might even imagine something like that.

While it's demonstrated to be likely incorrect here, it's not a wild theory. Apple and Microsoft spent a lot of time in court over the "Look and Feel" cases regarding the windowing UI Apple felt Microsoft had stolen. The lawsuit was first filed in '88 and was widely reported on in tech and mainstream press etc, dragging on throughout the 90s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Micros....
by lurking_swe | 2026-03-04 21:03:41+00:00
If you’re mentally ill enough that your cause of death is “LLM suicide”, then clearly you need a LOT of help. I’m not saying it to be a jerk, i’m merely pointing out that there is a reason this is “news”. It’s unusual.

Did his family/friends not know he was that ill? Why was he not already in therapy? Why did he ignore the crisis hotline suggestion? Should gemini have terminated the conversation after suggesting the hotline? (i think so)

Lots of questions…and a VERY sad story all around. Tragic.

> Genuinely, so many people in my industry make me ashamed to be in it with you.

I don’t work at an AI company, but good news, you’re a human with agency! You can switch to a different career that makes you feel good about yourself. I hear nursing is in high demand. :)
by yannickbuilds | 2026-03-04 21:04:17+00:00
During a trip I didn't have my laptop with me and I had to respond to a few emails from recruiters using my phone. I didn't want to make any mistakes and found myself copy & pasting text from Gmail to ChatGPT and back, to rewrite it

So, I made an app which allows you to chat with AI inside the keyboard and apply the responses directly.
It also has the ability to rewrite your text in different tones.

Let me know what you think. This is my first iOS app, so I could definitely use some feedback :)

Thank you,
Yannick
by philipkglass | 2026-03-04 21:04:59+00:00
The author Hannah Ritchie works on Our World In Data and also publishes the fantastic Sustainability by Numbers substack. It's in the same vein as the late, great David MacKay's Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air.

This tool has its own recent substack post. See the comments too, especially the one by Chris Preist that contextualizes the energy usage of streaming video (a topic that has also been discussed on HN before).

https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/does-that-use-a-lot-of
by zdp7 | 2026-03-04 21:05:11+00:00
I don't think first mover is going to matter. I think the race to be first is a waste of money. Deepseek sort of showed that LLMs aren't signicantly protected from duplicating results. AI will drastically change how we deal with 3rd party services. Third party services are going to have a very hard time locking in users. You can't lock me in if I can get AI to scrape my data out and translate it into data another provider uses. Going forward I am of the opinion the winners will be the innovators that can create intuitive interfaces. Innovation alone won't be enough. Someone else can rebuild your concept with a better interface.

Edit: fixed intent.
by fallenchromium | 2026-03-04 21:05:22+00:00
I would say that the look and feel of M1 MacBook Air is better, and you aren't getting an upgrade in performance department either, so is it really an "upgrade"?

Source: disappointed by the new speaker system in M2+ Airs and worse build quality, the classic chassis is, in my humble opinion, better engineered and is more delightful. M4 rips though, but you aren't getting this with the clock speeds and core counts of A18 Pro.
by titzer | 2026-03-04 21:05:24+00:00
In a well-designed (or "proper") abstraction, we can deal with it in terms of its public interface. Two things that break abstractions are bugs and performance.

If you have either of those, then abstractions can be worse.

Another thing that is bad is the wrong abstractions, or abstraction inversion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_inversion), where a layered system hides abstractions at the bottom from layers at the top, that top layers would nevertheless like to use, and reimplement, poorly. This happens surprisingly often.

But overall, I generally think that well-designed and factored abstractions are better than no abstractions at all.
by jmclnx | 2026-03-04 21:05:45+00:00
> Most likely it was a deliberate technical limitation

At the time I remember reading that was kind of the issue. I thought the article said something like "when Gates saw the Xerox machine, the display had no overlapping windows". So M/S cloned it as he saw it.

Once M/S W1.0 was developed he saw the demo again and was surprised the windows overlapped. So they rushed 2.0 to fix it.

But funny, with all people on Linux using tiling window managers these days, it seems Windows 1.0 was ahead of its time :)
by tokyobreakfast | 2026-03-04 21:06:17+00:00
> No camera notch

I'd consider this an upgrade. Does this mean we get screen real estate back from an abnormally-thick menu bar?

The notch is one of the most bizarre 'innovations' to ever come out of Apple.

Like designing a car you steer using your genitals to free up extra dash space then gaslighting everyone into thinking this is somehow better.
by autoexec | 2026-03-04 21:06:53+00:00
More accurately it was because the father had multiple warnings that his child was mentally unstable but ignored them and handed his 14 year old a semiautomatic rifle even as the boy's mother (who did not live with them) pleaded to the father to lock all the guns and ammo up to prevent the kid from shooting people.

If he had only "failed to prevent his kid from shooting up a school" he wouldn't have even been charged with anything.
by hellojesus | 2026-03-04 21:07:25+00:00
I would expect them to tell me to do it. But also I expect to have device management on my children's devices such that if their traffic isn't proxied through my proxy, they won't be able to send or receive packets.

The kids could use the grandparents' computers. They could also just stick a USB with Ubuntu on it and live boot to get around the proxy restrictions unless the bios is locked.

I expect kids to get around the controls. That's how they'll learn. I don't expect to have to descend into full surveillance because Jimmy can't be bothered to solve his own problems.
by mjr00 | 2026-03-04 21:08:15+00:00
This is touched upon in the article:

> Last year, OpenAI released estimates on the number of ChatGPT users who exhibit possible signs of mental health emergencies, including mania, psychosis or suicidal thoughts.

> The company said that around 0.07% of ChatGPT users active in a given week exhibited such signs.

0.07% doesn't sound like much, but ChatGPT has about a billion WAU, which means -seventy million- 700,000 people per week.
by HackerThemAll | 2026-03-04 21:08:39+00:00
Should knife manufacturers be held responsible for idiots who stab themselves in the eye using their knives? Do gun manufacturers get sued for mass shootings at US schools?

Another question: was the guy mentally ill because of bad genes etc., or was he mentally or possibly physically abused by his father for most of his life? Was he neglected by his father and left alone, what could have such an effect on him later in his life?

It's easy to blame Google. It sells clicks really well. It's easy to attempt to extract money from big tech. It's harder to admit one's negligence when it comes to raising their kids. It's even harder to admit bad will and kids abuse. I just hope the judge will conduct a thorough investigation that will answer these and other questions.
by kettlecorn | 2026-03-04 21:09:01+00:00
Apple certainly puts out experiences that leave much to be improved but to be pedantic the word 'subpar' implies below the 'par'. If 'par' is set by Microsoft then Apple easily clears it.

Nowadays Chromebooks offer more design competition for Apple, and even historically Linux distros have had more ideas for Apple to learn from than Microsoft.
by stetrain | 2026-03-04 21:09:02+00:00
There have also been iPads running on M series chips for years now.

The actual hardware system differences between an M4 iPad Air and M4 MacBook Air are pretty slim as far as the OS would be concerned.

You can connect an iPad to an external display, keyboard, and mouse. It even has multi-window support.

Not supporting Mac apps on iPad OS is a product decision by Apple, not a hardware or underlying OS issue.
by bob1029 | 2026-03-04 21:09:10+00:00
The only flock cameras indicated in my town are the canonical Home Depot arrangement. I'm pretty sure it's part of their standard operating procedures at this point. The effect these have had on the in store experience (at my location) is the primary thing that has me interested in limited deployments. Shopping at HD prior to the ALPRs was a horrible time. I think they finally caught the guy who was stealing the little screws out of the irrigation vacuum breakers. You can actually get a complete, unopened factory product most of the time now.
by b65e8bee43c2ed0 | 2026-03-04 21:09:17+00:00
I swear to G-d, every biweekly "AI made someone do a thing!" wannabe hit piece could trivially be edited to satirize Tipper Gore type pearl clutching soccer moms just by replacing "AI" with "satanic rock music", "violent video games", or "hardcore pornography".

(yes, yes, this time it's totally different. this current thing is totally unlike the previous current things. unlike those stupid boomers and their silly moral panics, you are on the right side of history.)
by MerrimanInd | 2026-03-04 21:09:40+00:00
Hannah Ritchie is a quite well reputed writer and data scientist squarely in the climate field. She's written two books on climate and I found the one I read (Not The End of the World) was quite good and data-driven.

https://hannahritchie.com/

You're going to have to make a stronger case that this data is biased towards LLM than that.
by kaffekaka | 2026-03-04 21:10:52+00:00
In my job I struggle to find time for the coding I need to get done, in between all the other stuff I also need to do. If the coding part goes that much quicker with AI, then I can do the rest of my job better.

So AI is merely letting me focus more on the other parts. Some developers don't like this. I kind of do.
by tlb | 2026-03-04 21:11:22+00:00
The rate at which molecules of plastic sublimate off the surface of the enclosure is probably a much larger amount of mass. The rate increases with e^kT, where k is such that it doubles about every 10 degrees C. So if you get a drive and fill it with data (which warms it up significantly) the lost casing material will dominate the mass balance.
by iamtheworstdev | 2026-03-04 21:11:24+00:00
private equity doesn't create efficiencies. The real world is not some MicroEcon 101 class.

> “As our investigation revealed, these financial entities are putting their own profits over patients, leading to health and safety violations, chronic understaffing, and hospital closures. Take private equity firm Leonard Green and hospital operator Prospect Medical Holdings: documents we obtained show they spent board meetings discussing profit maximization tactics—cost cutting, increasing patient volume, and managing labor expenses—with little to no discussion of patient outcomes or quality of care at their hospitals. And while Prospect Medical Holdings paid out $645 million in dividends and preferred stock redemption to its investors—$424 million of which went to Leonard Green shareholders—it took out hundreds of millions in loans that it eventually defaulted on. Private equity investors have pocketed millions while driving hospitals into the ground and then selling them off, leaving towns and communities to pick up the pieces.”

https://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/private-e...
by drakythe | 2026-03-04 21:11:26+00:00
You answered your own question, its the bezel. They've gotten _much_ thinner since the 11 inch MBAs were a thing. Remember screen size is measured in diagonals, so even a 5mm reduction of bezel size both horizontally and vertically gains you a little over 7mm in screen size without a physical size increase. to gain 2 inches in screen size (50.8 mm) you'd only need to eliminate 0.74 inches (roughly) from all 4 sides. I don't know the exact measurements of the bezels on those older devices but I can tell you my M4 Air is less than half an inch on all sides.

EDIT: My math was bad. Its still not precise but its much more accurate now.
by jeffbee | 2026-03-04 21:11:37+00:00
You have set up a false conflict. The data centers are "huge" and they also consume about the same power as 1 airplane. These things are both true.

It is also not really true that they are huge, it is a misconception driven by biased reporting about facilities that really aren't very remarkable compared to material distribution warehouses, beverage bottling plants, and suchlike.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-03-04 21:11:55+00:00
The difference is you always can buy USB C headphones with a known good consistent DAC. A 3.5 inch headphone jack serves no purpose in the age of USB C - even my wife’s mixing board has USB C input that she can plug her iPhone into.

Next thing HN folks are going yo want the iPhone to come with a SCSI port.
by vishinvents | 2026-03-04 21:12:04+00:00
Hi all,

Been a lurker here for long, figured I'd share something that could be useful for some. I've vibecoded a GA alternative over a weekend, but really it's more like 'define any events' and query them later type processor.

Really disliked the complexity of GA's setup, especially around ad attribution. I have extensive experience in AdTech, so I'm open to hear what ya'll think too.

Stack is Iggy, Polars, Datafusion, RisingWave, R2, CF Workers, Civo. Should be very scalable as I have it in production now.

https://github.com/inventhq/Gobble
by ynac | 2026-03-04 21:12:32+00:00
I’m surprised the backtracking stops so soon here, and I don’t think it’s an AI-directed force. The groundwork for mass influence was laid long ago. The early advertising and propoganda masters like Bernays. Through decades of increasingly sophisticated persuasion techniques, and finally to the industrial-scale influence machines of platforms like Fbook’s advertising and story systems. It's these systems that directly led to and are still defended by the political systems as it is their best tool of division and control. By the time social media arrived, we were already soaking in it, Marge. Three micro-generations have now grown up fully inside that environment. Just as we let Bernays give women cigarettes, we have given up educated political debate and thought, and with AI, we're likely to lose another aspect of being independent beings. All these tools remind me of fire - it can cook you dinner and keep you warm, or it can burn your house down and kill you. Use it wisely and always defend against the worst case.
Show HN: Cassachange – A migration tool for Cassandra, AstraDB and ScyllaDB
by cassachange | 2026-03-04 21:12:36+00:00
I’ve been working with AstraDB recently, and it reminded me how painful Cassandra schema management can be — especially when handling CQL migrations across environments.

Most tools I tried either:

Assume simple linear migrations

Don’t work well with managed Cassandra setups

Or make it hard to understand the actual state of a cluster

So I built cassachange.

It supports:

Apache Cassandra
Managed Cassandra
AstraDB (including SCB)
ScyllaDB

It handles schema migrations, but I also added data insights and MCP capabilities because understanding the current cluster state is often half the battle.

A few things I’m especially curious about:

How are people managing Cassandra schema changes in production today?

Are most teams still using raw CQL scripts?

How do you handle drift between environments?

Has anyone built internal tooling for this?

I’d love critical feedback — especially from people running Cassandra/Scylla at scale.

Docs: https://cassachange.com

Repo: https://github.com/sketchmyview/cassachange

Happy to answer anything.