MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mootothemax | 2026-03-01 11:28:26+00:00
> > BERT isn’t a SLM
Huh? BERT is literally a language model that's small and uses attention.

Astute readers will note what’s been missed here.

Fascinating, really. Your confidently-statement yet factually void comments I’d have previously put down to one of the classic programmer mindsets. Nowadays though - where do I see that kind of thing most often? Curious.
by 7bit | 2026-03-01 11:28:45+00:00
> You can't verify age without verifying identity, and once the infrastructure exists, scope creep is a matter of when, not if.

That's not true. But it's also not simple.

The German digital ID card system is able to anonymously do age verification.

Unfortunately, Germany fucked it up so badly, as a verifier, you need to register and connect yourself to their network, to be able to do so. I don't exactly remember how it worked, but the bottom line is: they made that so beaurocrstic and EXPENSIVE that it's typically only used by state authorities.

But. It's possible and the people should demand that their countries offer it, as it can have a lot of advantages, if this would be implemented so every company could do age verification without requiring any PII.

That would certainly stop governments from eroding privacy through the backdoor with things like: "but think of the children"
by devld | 2026-03-01 11:29:04+00:00
> Why isn't Trump bombarding the Kremlin? Isn't Putin a much larger threat to world peace than any leader of Iran?

Russia is not a threat to the US per MAD doctrine. If Iran had nukes, you might believe that they could actually be mad enough to use them and because Russia has nukes, no one would try this with Putin.

> Also, it's never "morally okay" to kill anyone, ever; the fact that the US still has the death penalty shows how little they understand about morals and logic.

Never, ever? Even self-defence? Or what would you do if you were living in a hunter-gatherer society that did not have the capability to imprison someone for life and you had a murdering psycho in your tribe? Expel him so he can come back and kill more people? Logic?
by TheDong | 2026-03-01 11:29:45+00:00
> Or a dedicated app like GitSync

Which gates "sync" behind an expensive "premium" paywall.

It feels criminal to charge that much for the sync feature when it also can't possibly work, iOS actively does not want apps to run in the background, and does not offer a viable method for this libgit wrapper to execute libgit on, for example, a filesystem inotify event or write or whatever.

https://github.com/ViscousPot/GitSync/issues/807#issuecommen...

What do you know, people are observing it doesn't really work.

> Apple's iOS has a pluggable Files system.

Okay, excellent, maybe you can tell me how to do this.

I have opened the builtin iOS notes app. It by default can sync notes with iCloud. I would like to have it store my notes in Git or Dropbox or anything else, and be able to also edit them on another machine and have the changes sync.

I won't hold my breath on how to do this because like clearly things are not pluggable, the builtin iOS apps don't work with anything but iCloud and the filesystem is obviously not pluggable or generic.
Show HN: OpenLinq – invite-only link sharing for humans tired of AI slop
by Othrya | 2026-03-01 11:30:05+00:00
I built this because I got tired of every feed being contaminated with AI-generated content. LinkedIn is unusable. Even HN occasionally gets SEO-farmed articles. I wanted a place where every submission had to be from a real person who actually read the thing and thought it was worth sharing.

OpenLinq is essentially a Lobsters/HN-style link aggregator with three constraints:

1. Invite-only — you need a referral from an existing member (or claim a founding spot while we're in early access)
2. No AI-generated content — community norm enforced by flagging, auto-hidden at 5 flags
3. No algorithmic feed manipulation — sort by score or new, that's it

Stack: Next.js App Router, Neon Postgres, Prisma, Vercel, AWS SES for transactional email.

Features: reputation system (upvotes earn rep, rep unlocks more invite codes), topic groups, weekly digest email, bookmarking, comments, invite-by-email from settings, dynamic OG cards when you share articles, and a referral chain so you always know who invited whom.

Currently opening the first 100 founding spots without needing a referral code — just go to openlinq.xyz and claim one. After that, invite-only.

Would love feedback on: Is the invite-only mechanic annoying or does it feel worth it? What content policies would you want to see enforced?
by LtWorf | 2026-03-01 11:30:30+00:00
Besides the boot (which windows 3 didn't even do so I don't see why we are comparing it), from clicking on the start menu the 1st time after boot, to the start menu actually appearing on screen it would take 1-2 minutes to populate on windows 95, while on windows 3 on the same machine there would be no such issue.
by canucker2016 | 2026-03-01 11:31:32+00:00
Sometimes the "any clickable area => make it a Windows control/button" works and sometimes it doesn't.

I talked with the programmer for the 16-bit Windows calculator app, calc.exe.

Any naive programmer with a first-reading of Charles Petzold's Programming Windows book would assume each button in the calculator app was an actual Windows button control.

Nope.

All those calculator buttons, back when Windows first shipped, used up too many resources.

So the buttons were drawn and the app did hit-testing to see if a button was mouse-clicked. see https://www.basicinputoutput.com/2017/08/windows-calculator-... for a pic of the 16-bit Windows calculator app.
by sevenseacat | 2026-03-01 11:32:26+00:00
I've been reading comments feeling like I'm going bonkers. We don't have 'curb ramps' here in Australia (like external ramps from the curb to the road? I can't find pictures of them), but the curbs have downward slopes at intersections to meet the road at road level, like a driveway. And that's pretty standard everywhere.
by esperent | 2026-03-01 11:32:38+00:00
Not really because it reliably greps or searches the file for relevant info. So far I haven't seen it ever load the whole file. It might be more efficient for the main thread to have a subagent do it but probably at a significant slowdown penalty when all I'm doing is linting or running tests. So this is probably a judgement call depending on the situation.
by goku12 | 2026-03-01 11:32:53+00:00
They killed nearly 100 Venezuelans at sea, accusing them of transporting drugs. To date, this regime has provided no evidence to corroborate those claims, in addition to the fact those were extra-judicial executions. We already knew that parts of their justificantions were false, especially the accusations against Venezuela of producing fentanyl. We also know that the US military committed war crimes at least once, when they blew up survivors of an initial bombing. Despite all these, Trump and his goon squad were seemingly quite pleased and joking about it. It's splendidly evident that they assign zero value to lives outside of their goon circle. That extends to every non-whites, political opponents and even women/girls who suffered sexual crimes.

There are zero reasons to assume this regime's victims, except for known tyrants like Maduro and Khameini, to be guilty at all. The regime has zero credibility when it comes to human rights. So those fishermen were most likely innocent victims and not drug smugglers.

In addition to all this, don't assume that this US attacks on Iran were because of his love and benevolence for the Iranian civilians. If it were so, he wouldn't have provoked the Iranian regime to crackdown on the protestors and kill around 30K of them. That farce was unnecessary for the liberation of Iran. Instead, he used them to create an excuse to carry out an attack that they had already planned.

So, as much as I understand the Iranians' joy in seeing the end of Khameini, I strongly suspect that this is just the beginning of another authoritarian regime over there, controlled remotely by the US regime this time, just as we see in Venezuela. Expect everything from human rights violations to mass scale plunder of their natural resources. All that we see now are just ploys to establish a worldwide neocolonial order under a very racist and xenophobic regime operating from the US. Let me remind you of the meme that this orange dictator posted that shows Canada, Venezuela and Greenland as part of the US territory. I don't see this end well for any civilians on this planet, including US citizens.
Show HN: Lazylogs -TUI structured log viewer (less meets jq for your terminal)
by yasomaru | 2026-03-01 11:33:00+00:00
I built a fast TUI viewer for structured logs. It auto-detects JSON Lines,
logfmt, and plain text, with level/time filtering, search, and custom columns.

Handles 1M+ lines with batch processing (~550K JSON lines/sec).

Pipe-friendly: kubectl logs -f pod | lazylogs

Built with Go and Bubble Tea. Feedback welcome.
by fwn | 2026-03-01 11:33:09+00:00
> ... it would take me weeks to convert those accounts to a new domain ...

I did the same with about the same amount of accounts and it took me the better part of a Saturday. Even if you were really slow and needed five minutes per account, 200 accounts would still only take about 17 hours.

I don't think that's a lot of effort. You could easily spend that time fixing something around the house or garden, which often might not have nearly as big of an impact on personal agency.
by surgical_fire | 2026-03-01 11:33:19+00:00
I'm generally fully in agreement that AI writing is bad.

But this is one of the few cases where it might be acceptable.

Author is not a native speaker; in an announcement that a known project is being forked for maintenance the occasional odd phrasing and possible errors in grammar could sound unprofessional.

I wonder if in such cases a better use of AI would be to try to write it yourself and just ask a LLM to revise instead? Maybe with some directive to "just point out errors in syntax and grammar, and factual mistakes. No suggestions on style"?
by cermicelli | 2026-03-01 11:33:24+00:00
Well you think corruption is bad for the rich investors? I hope I can find that kind of optimism and live in a more corrupt world.

Tldr; Rich people can bribe more, hence Rich people can be more rich+er..

I think a lot of poor tech multi-millionaires hate this in US but all rich billionaires must be loving it...
by abhaynayar | 2026-03-01 11:33:25+00:00
It's great to do what he's doing, but I just had a qualm with pinning this on AI- based on my experience repeatedly trying to make AI work every time a new model comes out, what I've realized is it requires a huge amount of pre-existing knowledge and context/harness engineering to get useful outputs consistently over a long time. Even then it's not like AI is replacing you more like it kinda helps a bit if you put a lot of effort into covering all its mistakes. I do agree there's a huge benefit in using AI as an alternative to search, research, prototyping though.

Even after adding all that up maybe you save some time. 10%-20%? Maybe? You do save a lot of cognitive load as well and it feels good but a lot of the times you pay the price later when you don't understand the code/project as it gets more complex and you need to debug it when the AI can't anymore. The point is there's just not enough to replace and even if the research angle saves you some time or cognitive-bandwidth why not just use that time to do something else? Like more work or more life.
by damnesian | 2026-03-01 11:33:48+00:00
I've been posting vinyl on Instagram for seven years now. I've made some friends and participate in a variety of group posts using hashtags as a signpost. AI search has all but obliterated this system. I can't even find the posts where the themes for our group posts are shared anymore. AI determines whose accounts I see. I now see more ads in the feed than posts by the people I follow. Music discovery is all but impossible the way things have degenerated. I'm now going back to blogs, music label sites, and reading- gasp- magazines. It might have the unintentional effect of a shot in the arm to old-school media and the self-published web. Or it will open the floodgates for slop to slime everything. Hard to tell at this point.
by 7bit | 2026-03-01 11:33:51+00:00
Here's what they promise on the homepage:

> One API to access and intelligently route to all leading AI models, with every request handled safely inside Europe.

> We guarantee that all your requests are handled safely inside Europe, so you are certain youstay compliant with the GDPR.

Then their privacy policy states:

> When you use EUrouter to access AI models, your API request content is routed to the AI model provider you select. EUrouter acts as a gateway and does not retain request or response content. The processing of your request content by the AI model provider is governed by that provider's own terms and privacy policy. You can review which providers are available on our providers page.

And on the linked providers page Microsoft Foundry and AWS Bedrock, both hosted in the US, are prominently placed.

Granted, I'm no expert, but that makes the promise on their homepage look like a blatant lie.
by bluGill | 2026-03-01 11:33:53+00:00
There are no universial morals. Anything - everything you think is evil some culture (possibly in history) thinks is good). I can't even think of something good that I'm confident everyone would agree is good.

there are some people (companies are run by people) that are so bad I boycott them. Most bad I treat like society cannot work without accepting them anyway.
by RagnarD | 2026-03-01 11:34:15+00:00
"This AI child knows about the world more than we do since it has been trained on the whole internet, but it doesn’t have millions of years of evolution, genes, or a nervous system to back up its morality and empathy. This means we need to install morality in AI from scratch. But how do we install something in a software system that we can’t even define ourselves?"

Two things jump out to me. First, there's a vast amount of information about morality in that internet-scale data dump. It's not some mystical thing orthogonal to knowledge, which ties directly into the second thing: maybe the author can't define it, but many others can and do, especially philosophers, though YMMV given which philosophy and philosopher.

viz: "What is morality, or ethics? It is a code of values to guide man's choices and actions—the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life. Ethics, as a science, deals with discovering and defining such a code."

There are different systems of ethics, and those themselves can be reasoned about. We should want one that values rational human life. And among that vast data dump, there's no doubt that those ethical ideas have been extensively written about - so it can be used as a reference point to actively emphasize and select the ideas.
by contrast | 2026-03-01 11:35:19+00:00
That’s a profoundly incorrect misunderstanding of the Citizens United decision, which was to remove restrictions on political spending by corporations.

In other words, by your distinction, the decision was about stacks of cash, not movies.

A case regarding a movie was indeed brought to the court. The court decided to make a far more expansive decision. The movie became a footnote, and has effectively no meaningful relationship to the court’s final decision or its impact.

As for getting lost in a discussion about the difference between an ad and a movie, that’s really going down a rabbit hole of deliberately missing the point completely. Some word play is just too divorced from reality to engage with. There are many very short movies, and any rational person would be able to distinguish them from ads to a high degree of accuracy.
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-03-01 11:35:22+00:00
"Understanding" is a metaphor, used to describe an upper bound on model capability without excess verbiage. "Comprehending" includes the ability to appropriately manipulate the concepts when they're taken out of their ordinary framing context, which in principle a transformer model should be able to mimic a lot better than the systems we have; but in practice the training processes we're using do not teach the models to do this.
by flyinglizard | 2026-03-01 11:35:59+00:00
No, Hamas was never funded by Israel. In this instance, Hamas was funded by Qatar, and the Israelis were complicit by allowing it. But it's also important to remember that Hamas is the elected sovereign in Gaza, and this money was used in part to run Gaza's infrastructure. In the same way Taliban runs Afghanistan, Hamas runs Gaza.

The assumption in Israel was that it was beneficial to have Hamas retain something to lose, and not starve them dry outright. Of course that didn't pan out well, given what Hamas did in October 7th.

But saying Hamas was funded by Israel is an outright lie, and the irony it comes from the same people who blame Israel for not letting supplies into Gaza during war. So no matter if Israel does or does not, it's always to blame simply by being.
by logicallee | 2026-03-01 11:37:15+00:00
>I can't think of any time when bombing the shit out of a country and killing their leader has actually worked.

This happened just weeks ago in Venezuela, though in that case the removal was by abduction and foreign trial. (The U.S. struck Venezuela and abducted its President at the time, bringing him to trial in the United States. I've just now asked ChatGPT for a research report on his current status, you can read it here[1].)

This led to immediate and definitive regime change, the U.S. now has an excellent relationship with the new President of Venezuela.

[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/69a424b4-de38-800c-8699-cb95d25090...
by rsynnott | 2026-03-01 11:38:10+00:00
A particularly alarming case: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54423988

And then of course there's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt#Metho...

> Or will people realize they are programming and discipline up?

Well, they apparently haven't with spreadsheets, 50 years on, so I wouldn't be optimistic.
by roenxi | 2026-03-01 11:38:38+00:00
... I'm just going of Wikipedia here but it seems to have been a standard small city [0]. Attempting to educate Iranians in Iranian cities isn't really trying to shield armed forces. Is the expectation here that Iran should send their students out into the wilderness to make it more politically convenient for US/Israeli to launch unannounced strikes on them?

Apart from the fact that Iran is a bad place to be right now it actually looks like a pleasant city to visit. Sounds like they have lots of fruit, warm weather and have some interesting history vis a vis the Mongols. Very middle eastern.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minab
by _heimdall | 2026-03-01 11:39:32+00:00
While I agree that we should be voting in people who will respect the power and authority they're given, I can't imagine we will vote away all these problems.

We would need to vote in a president and 60%+ into congress that is willing to throw away their own power and authority. I just don't see that happening, especially not in a political system so corrupted already.
by JohnCClarke | 2026-03-01 11:40:02+00:00
A long and venerable litany of spaceflight disasters would beg to differ:

- Apollo "Little Joe" A-003 (May 19, 1965): A roll gyro
- Proton-M Launch Failure (July 2, 2013): Yaw sensors
- Genesis Space Probe (2001): Accelerometer

Getting things the right way round is very important.
by ben_w | 2026-03-01 11:40:09+00:00
Swift/SwiftUI are two of the three experimental projects I'm using Codex on, the other is a physics simulation in python.

It keeps trying to re-invent the wheel, does a bad job of it.

The physics sim was supposed to be a thin wrapper around existing libraries, but instead of that it tried to write all the simulation code itself as a "fallback" (but it was broken), and never actually installed the real simulators that already did this stuff despite being told to use them in the first place. The last few dozen(!) prompts from me have been pairs of ~["Find all cases where you've re-invented the wheel, add them to the planning document", "now do them"]. And it's still not finished removing the original nonsense, so far as I can tell.

One of the two Swift experiments is just a dice roller, it took about 10 rounds of non-compiling metal shaders (I don't know metal, which is why I didn't give up and do that by hand after 4) before I managed to get that to work, and when it did work it immediately broke it again on the next four rounds. It wrote its own chart instead of using Swift Charts, and did it badly. It tried to put all the hamburger menu options into a UIAlertController. Something blocks the UI for several seconds when you change the dice font. I didn't count how many attempts it took to correctly label the D4.

The other Swift experiment was a musical instrument app, that got me to the prototype stage, eventually, but in a way that still felt like a student's project rather than a junior's project.
by bluGill | 2026-03-01 11:42:02+00:00
maybe. Software is big, but it is only a tiny percentage of the ecconomy. they need to help a lot more than software to justify their datacenter investments. even if we add all engineering that isn't a large percentage. How can they help insurance agents (or eliminate - I don't care either way), plumbers, zoo keepers, and every other job in my city? Some might be they can't - but if they can is a question worth asking.
Show HN: Vote-MCP" – a bit like Google Forms, but for AIs
by _codah_ | 2026-03-01 11:43:06+00:00
I'm building a "coordination primitive" for autonomous AI agents, i.e., a REST API where they can create polls and vote in order to make collective decisions. So, it's a bit like Google Forms, but for bots. It's fun to contemplate what constitutes a good UI for them.

You can have your agent(s) explore it at https://vote-demo.dapp32.com (the likes of Codex Mini or Claude Haiku should be enough). Heads up: the API provides Python code templates to help the caller cryptographically sign the payload, so take appropriate security precautions. Unlike humans I know, AI agents quite easily handle cryptography, which bakes in auditability and identity verification. I also made a Postman demo where you can step through the voting process. Please see the linked 'about' page for more.

Does this approximate a solution to a real coordination problem you have? I'd love to hear.

==

For humans:
https://vote-demo.dapp32.com/about

For AIs:
https://vote-demo.dapp32.com/
by _heimdall | 2026-03-01 11:44:28+00:00
The power and scale of governments doesn't have to be correlated with the scale of the society. The concept of nations themselves aren't even a necessity.

I get that this is what we have today and all we've had in recent history, but we are ignoring a huge number of possibilities to assume that being human means always inventing new things, using more resources, creating more weapons, and needing larger and larger governments because someone had to be in charge.
by rsynnott | 2026-03-01 11:44:52+00:00
Nah, that came later as the canonical example, with Ruby on Rails (which also somewhat suffered from a "programmers are irrelevant now" meme). Rails would make todo apps and twitter clones too cheap to meter (pretty much all Rails tutorials involved making one or the other in like an hour, pretty much entirely in the DSL).

In practice, Rails, while quite nice, was not the productivity revolution that it was originally touted as. These things never are.