MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by goku12 | 2026-03-02 04:13:56+00:00
> AI tooling can finally realize this for the Web

There was a concept named Web 3.0 a while ago, aka the 'Semantic Web'. It wasn't the crypto/blockchain scam that we call Web3 today. The idea was to create a web of machine readable data based on shared ontologies. That would have effectively turned the web into a giant database of sorts, that the 'agents' could browse autonomously and derive conclusions from. This is sort of like how we browse the web to do research on any topic.

Since the data was already in a structured form in Web 3.0 instead of natural language, the agent would have been nowhere near the energy hogs that LLMs are today. Even the final conversion of conclusions into natural language would have been much more energy-efficient than the LLMs, since the conclusions were also structured. Combine that with the sorts of technology we have today, even a mediocre AI (by today's standards) would have performed splendidly.

Opponents called it impractical. But there already were smaller systems around from various scientific fields, operating on the same principle. And the proponents had already made a lot of headway. It was going to revolutionize information sharing. But what I think ultimately doomed it is the same reason you mentioned. The powers that be, didn't want smarter people. They wanted people who earned them money. That means those who spend their attention on dead scrolling feeds, trash ads and slop.

> but it's a shame that so many companies who built their empires on the shoulders of those visionaries think the only valid way to browse is with a human-eyeball-to-server chain of trust.

Yes, this! But only when your eyeball and attention earns them profit. Otherwise they are perfectly content with operating behind your backs and locking you out of decisions about how you want to operate the devices you paid for in full. This is why we can't have good things. No matter which way you look, the ruins of all the dreams lead to the same culprit - the insatiable greed of a minority. That makes me question exactly how much wealth one needs to live comfortably or even lavishly till their death.
by alex-thinking | 2026-03-02 04:14:28+00:00
AI can answer almost any known question. But the questions that actually matter — the ones at the edge of human knowledge — still require genuine human intuition and creativity.
The problem is that real innovation has no good home outside of institutions. So I designed one: a platform where anyone can participate in rigorous, first-principles discussion of hard, unsolved problems. No credentials required — just the quality of your reasoning.
I haven't built it yet. The concept is one page: https://github.com/ALEX-13-Chen/Thinking---Together
What's wrong with this idea?
by vidoluc | 2026-03-02 04:14:33+00:00
SentryRF: Cognitive Counter-Surveillance
SentryRF is a professional-grade RF (Radio Frequency) situational awareness tool for Android. Unlike "camera finders" that rely on optical reflection, SentryRF operates at the signal intelligence (SIGINT) layer, detecting the digital footprint of surveillance hardware.

Core Capabilities:
Multi-Protocol Detection: Scans the 2.4GHz spectrum to identify AirTags, Tiles, SmartTags, and unbranded BLE trackers using high-fidelity manufacturer data parsing.

Behavioral AI Engine: Employs a local neural network to differentiate between "ambient noise" (a neighbor's headphones) and "threat patterns" (a device following your trajectory across multiple GPS coordinates).

Tactical Sound Locator: Uses an RSSI-weighted triangulation engine and haptic/audio feedback to guide users to a hidden device's physical location through signal gradient analysis.

Deep Hardware Analysis: Identifies rogue WiFi "Evil Twins," IMSI catchers, and unauthorized IoT devices using OUI lookups and chipset-family fingerprinting.

Privacy-Centric Architecture: All analysis, including ML retraining and database storage, happens 100% on-device. No RF data or location history ever leaves the handset.
by rerdavies | 2026-03-02 04:15:33+00:00
Except it doesn't capture the majority of uses of AI, in my experience. In my current practice, the the vast majority of AI use is autocompletions, or small inline prompts. ("Fix this error."; "Open an ALSA midi connection" (things that avoid a to trip into awful documentation); "if (one of the query parameters is "gear='ir') ..." (things that break flow by forcing a trip into excellent but overly verbose Javascript URL API documentation)). Only very occasionally will I prompt for a big chunk of code.
by goranmoomin | 2026-03-02 04:16:22+00:00
Have to say, this feels like Web 2.0 all over again (in a good way) :)

When having APIs and machine consumable tools looked cool and all that stuff…

I can’t see why people are looking this as a bad thing — isn’t it wonderful that the AI/LLM/Agents/WhateverYouCallThem has made websites and platforms to open up and allow programatical access to their services (as a side effect)?
by cj | 2026-03-02 04:16:23+00:00
URL is 404'ing. Another article..

> Cameras that automatically capture images of vehicle license plates are being turned off by police in jurisdictions across Washington state, in part after a court ruled the public has a right to access data generated by the technology.

https://www.geekwire.com/2025/washington-state-cities-turn-o...
by btbuildem | 2026-03-02 04:16:54+00:00
I haven't been able to make a coherent argument against MCP, so I've settled for "I just don't like it".

CLI tools have an edge in that their definition live in model weights; MCP requires a portion of the context for tool definitions.

Having an extra server just to orchestrate the tools, I don't like it.

For anything that does not have a native CLI tool -- just write a wrapper, a shell script, whatever performs the task adequately. It folds into the workflow nicely. Leveraging decades of unix tooling philosophy has its benefits.

Having a shell runner is just... simpler. And as another comment mentions, you can create users for the various agents to restrict their access to things, almost as if that's what users were meant for!
Show HN: I built open source Gmail organizer because I refused to pay $30/month
by mafia15 | 2026-03-02 04:18:08+00:00
For the past few weeks I was looking for a decent Gmail tool but everything good costs $25-30/month and forces you to leave your Gmail inbox entirely. I also didn't trust where my email data was going.
So I built NeatMail. It lives inside your Gmail, no new inbox to learn.
What it does:
- Auto-labels incoming emails instantly (Payments, University, Work etc — custom or pre-made)
- Drafts replies automatically for emails that need a response, right inside Gmail
- Everything is customizable — fonts, signature, labels, privacy settings
The model is built in-house. Open source so you can read every line. Your data never hits a third party server.
It's in beta. Looking for honest feedback from people who live in their inbox.
GitHub: https://github.com/Lakshay1509/NeatMail
Try it: https://www.neatmail.app/
by jptoor | 2026-03-02 04:18:21+00:00
Interestingly think I just came to the opposite conclusion after building CLIs + MCPs for code.deepline.com

Where MCPs fit in - short answer is enterprise auth for non-technical users.

CLIs (or APIs + Skills) are easier + faster to set up, UX is better for most use cases, but a generalized API with an easier auth UX (in some cases, usually the MCP Oauth flow is flaky too).

So feels like an imperfect solution, but once you start doing a ton of enterprise auth setups, MCP starts to make more sense.
by skydhash | 2026-03-02 04:18:59+00:00
> Why should I hire a junior who doesn’t know the what or the how.

I'm not saying you should. It's the business model that will answer that question. But the traditional wisdom was that juniors are not costly and have few obligations tying them down. And juniors don't stay junior.

And some may know the what and the how, at least technically. What they may lack may be just how to develop their skills further to be useful in a professional settings. It's easy to learn programming languages, tools, libraries and frameworks when you have a lot of free time. And they're not asking to be your protégés, you're just training them to be useful for your team.
by grayhatter | 2026-03-02 04:19:35+00:00
> This just feels like the "we should make the justice system harsher to deter crime" argument but applied to software engineering.

Ignore that feeling, it's wrong. Because it's not what I'm arguing for. Reasonable is a load bearing qualifier.

It doesn't feel like the people making the decisions that meaningfully contribute to causing harm to other people, ever have to deal with the fallout or repercussions for their unfortunate choices. Deincentivizing that behavior is my goal. And I'll unfortunately take iterative or suboptimal options at this point. I don't like it, but I do want to try to be realistic.
by mitchellh | 2026-03-02 04:19:37+00:00
I'm not concerned with it.

The real goal isn't for Alacrity or Kitty or WezTerm or any other terminal to use libghostty. I think over the long term, terminal emulator user bases dwindle down to niche (but important) use cases.

The real goal is for higher-level tooling (GUI or browser) that utilizes terminal-like programs to have something like libghostty to reach for. I think this represents the much, much larger ecosystem out there that likely touches many more people. For example, Neovim's terminal mode, terminal multiplexers, PaaS build systems, agentic tooling, etc. You're seeing this emerge in force already with the awesome-libghostty repo.

libghostty would still be useful for traditional terminal emulators to replatform on, and for example xterm.js is seriously looking into it (and I'm happy to help and even offered their maintainer a maintainer spot on libghostty). But, they're not the goal. And if fragile egos hold people back, it's really not my problem, it's theirs.
by spaqin | 2026-03-02 04:21:01+00:00
Low trust is easier to sell for, to try to fill in the hole you might have without enough meaningful social interactions; it's easier to market when you don't have anyone in your close circle to talk you out of spending money unnecessarily. It's easier to manipulate when you don't have enough contacts with others to band together against a common enemy.

The dangers of daily life, while real in some way, have been over-represented in the media, and now we're given the tools to completely avoid them. Whether on purpose or not (bad news sell much better than good news, after all), these are the consequences we're just seeing.
by stuxnet79 | 2026-03-02 04:21:53+00:00
> do you ever start conversations with strangers in public, and if so how? are there environments where this works better than others?

Nowadays, I don't, but I grew up in an environment that was different. Speaking to strangers was a norm, not something that merited attention. Modern western culture is extremely anti-social these days. I would say I'm naturally reserved but my tolerance and comfort level in situations where I have to integrate my life with others is high.

My answer may not be of great help, but if you are struggling with this I would really encourage you to move to a completely different environment (i.e. Latin America) where the norms are different. In my opinion this is not something an individual can easily solve. It's a cultural issue. Culture can take a lifetime / generation to change and that's if the people collectively decide it's worth changing.

If we get real, the loneliness epidemic is something we foisted on ourselves. Striving to avoid any awkwardness or discomfort is precisely why social life is so sterile these days. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
by somenameforme | 2026-03-02 04:22:16+00:00
I don't really think immigration is a long-term solution, because of the scale issue - which most greatly underestimate. We're talking about needing a never-ending stream of hundreds of millions of people. And you'd ideally want people that speak the language, have at least some basic skills, and so on. It's not particularly realistic, even before getting into the social chaos that such would cause.

And it becomes even less realistic if you look outward to times when this becomes necessary. Japan is a good example of this issue. Migrating to Japan is not difficult. The only meaningful barrier is learning basic Japanese. Beyond that, after just 5 years of residency you can even apply for citizenship which has a very high acceptance rate. And there are a ton of 'Japanese enthusiasts', many of whom already speak basic Japanese.

And many of them have tried to migrate, but they don't last at all. They quickly realize that a Japan in decline is not the Japan in their mind. Getting paid $1500 a month to work a job with extremely high expectations and demands in a country with a median age of 50 (and increasing), isn't exactly the Japan they built up in their minds.
by cadamsdotcom | 2026-03-02 04:23:32+00:00
Very cool idea.

But it’s a pain to review..

I suggest adding Stop & PreCompact hooks to your agent which give it the log and ask it to review its own actions in case it did anything unsafe or unexpected. It can check what it sees against what it remembers and tell you if anything stands out.

Or you could give the transcript and log to a new model and have that one do a review.. but either way the goal is to reduce your cognitive load.

Even cooler is when you notice you can have the model provide recommendations - and make its own plan to incorporate them :)

For an example, here’s what I’m doing with transcripts: https://codeleash.dev/docs/self-reflection
by jonah-archive | 2026-03-02 04:26:16+00:00
I've been thinking about that illustration of Smaug for nearly 40 years and I never knew where it came from (I didn't recall it was from a Tolkien-related thing, but I remember it vividly otherwise)! I must have seen it at a friend's or the library since as far as I know we never had these at home.
by D-Machine | 2026-03-02 04:30:04+00:00
Obviously yes, at least if not the prompts in the session, some simple / automated distillation of those prompts. Code generated by AI is already clearly not going to be reviewed as carefully as code produced by humans, and intentions / assumptions will only be documented in AI-generated comments to some limited degree, completely contingent on the prompt(s).

Otherwise, when fixing a bug, you just risk starting from scratch and wasting time using the same prompts and/or assumptions that led to the issue in the first place.

Much of the reason code review was/is worth the time is because it can teach people to improve, and prevent future mistakes. Code review is not really about "correctness", beyond basic issues, because subtle logic errors are in general very hard to spot; that is covered by testing (or, unfortunately, deployment surprises).

With AI, at least as it is currently implemented, there is no learning, as such, so this removes much of the value of code review. But, if the goal is to prevent future mistakes, having some info about the prompts that led to the code at least brings some value back to the review process.

EDIT: Also, from a business standpoint, you still need to select for competent/incompetent prompters/AI users. It is hard to do so when you have no evidence of what the session looked like.
by clearleaf | 2026-03-02 04:31:44+00:00
Samsung phones are the most bloated pieces of shit I have ever seen. Mine came with an app just to view the msn.com web site and it couldn't be uninstalled. You have google and samsung in a tug of war over every single thing the phone does. I thought my home button was breaking because of how unresponsive it was, but it turned out it just waits for a sequence to trigger such and such unwanted AI assistant or whatever the hell. It's a crapshoot whether you accidentally launch google assistant or bixby or some other crap service you never even heard of.
There are touchwiz sound effects that I hear in public and to this day it sends a chill down my spine because it brings me back to so much miserable time spent with that abomination of electronics.
by hedora | 2026-03-02 04:32:24+00:00
US life expectancy flattened out over the last 15 years, so I think that means all-cause-mortality is roughly flat per 100,000 too.

https://www.macrotrends.net/datasets/global-metrics/countrie...

Combined with your data, that implies that whatever wins we got from decreased cancer rates (e.g., less smoking) or improved treatment have been squandered elsewhere (probably obesity / heart disease).

If life expectancy had dropped over that time, then I guess it could be that cancer was as deadly as ever.

I wonder what the deal is with Greenland in your dataset. Lots of smoking? Lots of radiation?
by ExoticPearTree | 2026-03-02 04:34:56+00:00
There is plenty of good reasoning executed badly from a PR perspective.

It is (now) called the Department of War for a reason: It needs to be able to kill people very fast and cheap. Autonomous weapons platforms do that: you give them a geofenced area and let them kill everything that moves in said area. No loss of human pilots, no fatigue.

If Anthropic they had any ethics concerns they would not have signed up the Pentagon as client in the first place.

My guess is that they wanted to have their cake and eat it too.
by somenameforme | 2026-03-02 04:37:36+00:00
Reinforcement learning requires a well defined goal and a well defined way to quantitatively measure progress along that goal. In reality these don't exist without a hand of God guiding you. In the case of machine learning that hand of God is our own. Even given infinite processing power, you could not construct a reinforcement learning system that would mimic humanity's progress - it simply is a nonstarter due to the nature of reinforcement learning itself.
by notatoad | 2026-03-02 04:37:40+00:00
as a website operator, i want my website to not experience downtime and unreliability because of usage rates that exceed the rate at which humans load pages, and i want to not be defrauded.

if you want to access my website using automated tools, that's fine. but if there's a certain automated tool that is consistently used to either break the site or attempt to defraud me, i'm going to do my best to block that tool. and sometimes that means blocking other, similar tools.

if the webMCP client in chrome behaves in a reasonable way that prevents abuse, then i don't see a problem with it. if scammers discover they can use it to scam, then websites will block it too.
by dboreham | 2026-03-02 04:38:15+00:00
I've thought about this, and I do save the sessions for educational purposes. But what I ended up doing is exactly what I ask developers to do: update the bug report with the analysis, plan, notes etc. In the case there's a single PR fixing one bug, GitHub and Claude tend to prefer this information go in the PR description. That's ok for me since it's one click from the bug.
by abound | 2026-03-02 04:38:18+00:00
> There were entire classes of Hacker News submissions that I refused to read the comments on. Including the comments about this article, should such comments ever materialize.

The author has made the correct call. There's a pretty deep irony that all the top-level comments at the time of this writing are about how the article is too long. It's quite clearly not trying to succinctly convince you of a point, it's meant to be a piece of genuinely human writing, and enjoyed (or not!) on the basis of that.
by hedora | 2026-03-02 04:38:31+00:00
I'd think AI and tech could solve the problem pretty easily, assuming the study authors could get access to the health records of everyone that was not in the study (and could therefore generate control cohorts by looking at large samples of comparable patients outside the experimental group).

This is done for targeted advertising all the time. Frustratingly, the surveillance capitalism industry is precisely the reason the dataset you'd need probably shouldn't exist.

Maybe we'll get some decent lawmakers sometime soon, and problems like that will be fixed via legislation. They'd need to ban the root-cause of the problem. I'm guessing it's more likely the current congress will let private companies steal + sell everyone's info instead.
by red75prime | 2026-03-02 04:38:31+00:00
Reasoning allows to produce statements that are more likely to be true based on statements that are known to be true. You'd need to structure your "falsehood training data" in a specific way to allow an LLM to generalize as well as with the regular data (instead of memorizing noise). And then you'll get a reasoning model which remembers false premises.

You generate your text based on a "stochastic parrot" hypothesis with no post-validation it seems.
by onion2k | 2026-03-02 04:38:51+00:00
My first thought was that you could just obfuscate the code and that would stop the LLM. So I tried. I put the following into ChatGPT 5.3:

What does this JavaScript do?

function _0x2dee(_0x518715,_0xdc9c42){_0x518715=_0x518715-(0x639+0x829+-0x332*0x4);var _0x4f9ec2=_0x1aec();var _0x2308f2=_0x4f9ec2[_0x518715];return _0x2308f2;}var _0xbdf4ac=_0x2dee;function _0x1aec(){var _0x472dbe=['65443zxmXfN','71183WPtagF','1687165KeHDfr','406104dvggQc','156nrzVAJ','4248639JiaxSG','log','484160Wfepsg','149476dlIGMx','yeah','9NphkgA'];_0x1aec=function(){return _0x472dbe;};return _0x1aec();}(function(_0x1654d4,_0x9dbc95){var _0x57f34f=_0x2dee,_0x4990aa=_0x1654d4();while(!![]){try{var _0x2eed8a=parseInt(_0x57f34f(0x1a2))/(-0x15b9+0x1d2e+-0x774)+-parseInt(_0x57f34f(0x19a))/(0x1*0x13e8+-0x1cb2+0x466*0x2)+parseInt(_0x57f34f(0x1a1))/(0xa91+0xa83+-0x1511)*(-parseInt(_0x57f34f(0x19f))/(0x1d*0x153+-0x15b7+-0x2*0x856))+-parseInt(_0x57f34f(0x1a4))/(0xc4c+0x13*-0x12f+0xa36)+parseInt(_0x57f34f(0x19b))/(0x3d*0x2f+-0x595*0x4+0xb27)*(parseInt(_0x57f34f(0x1a3))/(-0x9*0xca+0x1a4*0x15+-0x577*0x5))+parseInt(_0x57f34f(0x19e))/(0xfc3+-0x1cfd+0x1*0xd42)+parseInt(_0x57f34f(0x19c))/(0x70f*0x1+0x1104+-0x180a);if(_0x2eed8a===_0x9dbc95)break;else _0x4990aa['push'](_0x4990aa['shift']());}catch(_0x42c1c4){_0x4990aa['push'](_0x4990aa['shift']());}}}(_0x1aec,-0x3cdf*-0xd+-0x1f355*0x3+0x9*0xa998),console[_0xbdf4ac(0x19d)](_0xbdf4ac(0x1a0)));

It had absolutely no trouble understanding what it is, and deobfuscated it perfectly in on it's first attempt. It's not the cleverest obfuscation (https://codebeautify.org/javascript-obfuscator) but I'm still moderately impressed.
Show HN: Action Relay – Every App Intent as an MCP Tool
by TarqDirtyToMe | 2026-03-02 04:38:59+00:00
Action Relay is an MCP server that reads the intent metadata Apple embeds inside every App Intents-enabled .app bundle and exposes them as MCP tools automatically. Execution is done by generating workflows on the fly which means you do not need to create shortcuts beforehand.

This is a proof of concept to bring what I've been waiting for from Apple Intelligence to life.

It requires disabling SIP, AMFI and uses private APIs and entitlements so it is not meant for real world use.

The reverse engineering and development code was done completely with Claude Code. I was very impressed with its willingness to take on this kind of reverse engineering task with no objection.
by mirawelner | 2026-03-02 04:39:28+00:00
I actually disagreed with that particular point made in the article, because I don't really see myself as somebody who sees value in craft and artistry, I just want effective code that works (which imho LLMs cannot create).

But after reading this comment section... I mean if enjoying well written prose counts as enjoying craft and artistry I guess I do then? Damn.