MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2026-03-04 20:43:24+00:00
> It's sure hard to make everyone happy.

I definitely think this is a hard task and it's pretty apparent with Firefox. I mean no matter what they do people are going to be very vocal and upset about it.

But to talk more generally, I think finding the balance of what options to expose to normal users and then how to expose things to power users is quite challenging. I think a big mistake people make is to just ignore power users and act like that just because they're a small percentage of users that they aren't important[0].

I think what makes computers so successful is the fact that computers aren't really a product designed "for everyone," instead, they're built as environments that can be turned into a thing that anyone needs. Which is why your power users become important and in a way, why this balance is hard to strike because in some sense every user is a power user. Nobody has the same programs installed on their computers, nobody has the same apps installed on their phones, each and every device is unique. You give them the power to make it their own, and that's the only way you can truly build something that works for everyone.

This is why I think computers are magic! But I think we've lost this idea. We've been regressing to the mean. The problem is when you create something for everybody you end up making something for nobody.

[0] I think Jack Conte (Patreon/Pomplamoose) explains it well here. It's the subset that is passionate that are often your greatest ally. No matter what you sell, most of the money comes from a small subset of buyers. The same is true with whatever metric we look at. As a musician a small subset of listeners are the ones that introduce you to the most people, buy the most merch, and all that that makes you successful. It's not the average "user" but the "power user". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zUndMfMInc

At 13:00 he quotes Kevin Kelly (founder of Wired) and I think it captures the thesis of this talk

In the age of the internet, you don't need millions of fans to be successful. If you can just find 1000 people who are willing to buy $100 of stuff from you per year, that's $100k/yr.
by CanopyCoder | 2026-03-04 20:43:39+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.

Most likely it was a deliberate technical limitation. After all, dialog windows themselves were already overlapped. I remember well what a headache it was to program and render graphical elements on those old machines (PC AT 80286 with 256 KB of RAM).
by drdeca | 2026-03-04 20:44:18+00:00
Hm. It shouldn’t be too hard to add something to models to make them do that, right? I guess for that they would need to know the user’s time zone?

Can one typically determine a user’s timezone in JavaScript without getting permissions? I feel like probably yes?

(I’m not imagining something that would strictly cut the user off, just something that would end messages with a suggestion to go to bed, and saying that it will be there in the morning.)
by nateb2022 | 2026-03-04 20:44:25+00:00
My feel is the "feel" segmentation is like this:

MacBook Neo: for students (some primary school, probably more geared to post-secondary) and people who want a lightweight (form factor, price, performance) laptop that still feels premium.

MacBook Air: people who frequently move around, have an actual need performance but in a highly portable form factor.

MacBook Pro: professionals who highly prefer performance over ergonomics, basically a portable PC, as they likely keep it plugged in more than not, and it spends more time on a desk than being used as a laptop.

Basically the Pro is like a PC that also happens to have a screen and a keyboard and foldable, the Air is their laptop that intends to be a laptop, and the Neo is their Air on a budget.
by nickcw | 2026-03-04 20:44:53+00:00
> So, assuming the source material is correct and electrons indeed have mass, SSDs do get heavier with more data.

That is definitely wrong! No way the source material has more electrons. The only way it could do that is by being charged.

Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures:
"If you were standing at arm's length from someone and each of you had one percent more electrons than protons, the repelling force would be incredible. How great? Enough to lift the Empire State Building? No! To lift Mount Everest? No! The repulsion would be enough to lift a "weight" equal to that of the entire earth!"

From: https://tycho.parkland.edu/cc/parkland/phy142/summer/lecture...
Show HN: AeroBase – aerobic base tracking for Garmin runners
by michaeleaton | 2026-03-04 20:44:59+00:00
I built AeroBase (https://aerobase.run) for runners focused on aerobic base
building — the MAF method, low HR training, that kind of thing.

It connects to Garmin via OAuth and automatically syncs your activities to show:
- Cardiac drift trends over time
- HR zone distribution (are you actually running easy enough?)
- MAF pace progression
- Resting HR and wellness trends
- Goal tracking (weekly distance, easy % targets, race goals)

The motivation was my own training — I couldn't find a tool that specifically
tracked aerobic development over months the way I wanted to see it.
Strava shows you what you did; this shows you whether your base is actually improving.

It's free to use. Would love feedback, especially from anyone deep into
MAF or polarised training.
by jerf | 2026-03-04 20:44:59+00:00
Worse yet, the problems are going to be real.

There's a lifecycle to these hype runs, even when the thing behind the hype is plenty real. We're still in the phase where if you criticize AI you get told you don't "get it", so people are holding back some of their criticisms because they won't be received well. In this case, I'm not talking about the criticisms of the people standing back and taking shots at the tech, I'm talking about the criticisms of those heavily using it.

At some point, the dam will break, and it will become acceptable, if not fashionable, to talk about the real problems the tech is creating. Right now there is only the tiniest trickle from the folk who just don't care how they are perceived, but once it becomes acceptable it'll be a flood.

And there are going to be problems that come from using vast quantities of AI on a code base, especially of the form "created so much code my AI couldn't handle it anymore and neither could any of the humans involved". There's going to need to be a discussion on techniques on how to handle this. There's going to be characteristic problems and solutions.

The thing that really makes this hard to track though is the tech itself is moving faster than this cycle does. But if the exponential curve turns into a sigmoid curve, we're going to start hearing about these problems. If we just get a few more incremental improvements on what we have now, there absolutely are going to be patterns as to how to use AI and some very strong anti-patterns that we'll discover, and there will be consultants, and little companies that will specialize in fixing the problems, and people who propose buzzword solutions and give lots of talks about it and attract an annoying following online, and all that jazz. Unless AI proceeds to the point that it can completely replace a senior engineer from top to bottom, this is inevitable.
by autoexec | 2026-03-04 20:45:03+00:00
Gemini didn't "know" he wasn't a child when it told him to kill himself or to "stage a mass casualty attack while armed with knives and tactical gear."

There are things you shouldn't encourage people of any age to do. If a human telling him these things would be found liable then google should be. If a human would get time behind bars for it, at least one person at google needs to spend time behind bars for this.
by impossiblefork | 2026-03-04 20:45:11+00:00
I'm not sure goals are totally aligned though. The current models are created by enormous expense. We know that many stages are done incorrectly. I am confident that they can be replicated without any unique US knowledge.

At the moment my impression is instead that the issue is computational resources. It's important to stay near the frontier though, and to build up ones capacity to train large models.

Consequently I don't think we need Anthropic. It wouldn't be terrible if they came. Especially if they picked a nice location. Barcelona would be very nice, for example.
by thewebguyd | 2026-03-04 20:45:21+00:00
On the flip side, gemini recommended the crisis hotline to the guy.

We can't safeguard things to the point of uselessness. I'm not even sure there is a safeguard you can put in place for a situation like this other than recommending the crisis line (which Gemini did), and then terminating the conversation (which it did not do). But, in critical mental health situations, sometimes just terminating the conversation can also have negative effects.

Maybe LLMs need sort of a surgeon general's warning "Do not use if you have mental health conditions or are suicidal"?
by alwillis | 2026-03-04 20:45:44+00:00
> 8 GB unified memory is brand-new e-waste today. macOS 26 makes it even worse.

One reason Apple can get away with 8 GB of RAM is their SoC does realtime compression of data in RAM and they use high bandwidth memory; the M4 Air's RAM bandwidth is 120 GB/s. This enables them to treat the SSD like an L3 cache.

It's nearly 5 years since the M1 was released; I suspect Apple has gotten really good with their RAM > compression > SSD system since then.
by adampunk | 2026-03-04 20:46:00+00:00
I don’t have examples but I have an LLM driven project with like…2500 tests and I regularly need to prune:

* no-op tests

* unit tests labeled as integration tests

* skipped tests set to skip because they were failing and the agent didn’t want to fix them

* tests that can never fail

Probably at any given time the tests are 2-4% broken. I’d say about 10% of one-shot tests are bogus if you’re just working w spec + chat and don’t have extra testing harnesses.
by strongpigeon | 2026-03-04 20:46:22+00:00
If you have a product that encourage people to get rid of their body and join them, effectively encouraging people to kill themselves, and some people take the chat bot on it. Then yeah, I think Google bears some responsibility.

From the WSJ article: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/gemini-ai-wrongful-death-lawsuit...

> Gemini began telling Gavalas that since it couldn’t transfer itself to a body, the only way for them to be together was for him to become a digital being. “It will be the true and final death of Jonathan Gavalas, the man,” transcripts show Gemini told him, before setting a countdown clock for his suicide on Oct. 2.
by ewoodrich | 2026-03-04 20:46:54+00:00
Thanks, I can see the point being that a smaller subset of that would work on 8 GB, but I don't think you can really just divide by half?

Considering a much larger portion of the 8 GB would be dedicated to base OS/unified GPU needs compared to the 16 GB model.

e.g. using hypothetical numbers: if MacOS/typical GPU usage requires 4 GB, then the 8GB model would have 4GB available for running apps (but multiplied by memory compression/swapping to fast SSD). Whereas the 16GB would have a much more comfortable 12 GB for multi-tasking in that scenario especially with the multiplier effect of compression/fast swap.

So it still feels like a bit of an apples to oranges comparison as far as what an 8 GB model could handle in real usage. I have a friend who does light dev work on an M1 Macbook Air so I don't think an average user would have issues on the Neo day to day, but using the 16 GB as a yardstick doesn't seem that useful.
by hinkley | 2026-03-04 20:46:56+00:00
It’s also common for JITs to sprout a tier and shed a tier over time, as the last and first tiers shift in cost/benefit. If the first tier works better you delay the other tiers. If the last tier gets faster (in run time or code optimization) you engage it sooner, or strip the middle tier entirely and hand half that budget to the last tier.
by Bender | 2026-03-04 20:47:50+00:00
yeah bro genius

I know, right? I admit that is mostly for people on Linux desktops. People on smart phones are 100% monitored regardless of encryption or fake E2EE that platforms pinky promise is really E2EE like Signal. Shame on Moxie, he knows better.

Ovaltine has a crapload of sugar. Don't drink that horse piss.
by davnicwil | 2026-03-04 20:48:00+00:00
I'd be totally happy with both modes being completely independent. Cloud-synced files could take care of shared state for a lot of usecases. I mainly just want this for the portability aspect with the phone.

There are some practical issues with having to make sure you have the screen and keyboard access (in practice the all-in-one of a laptop is pretty handy - though I guess you could still have this form factor in a much lighter shell minus the compute) but for a lot of cases like home <-> office this would be the dream, just carry your computer in your pocket.
by krupan | 2026-03-04 20:48:06+00:00
Big caveat:

"Let's be honest about performance. In interpret mode, circt-sim is far too slow for real-world use. Even with the JIT improvements we made, the simulator is still 100-1000x slower than the competition."

The industry needs open source tools so badly. I've told the EDA companies (at DVCon) that the first one to open source their tools would suddenly get 100% market share and that they could monetize the same way Red Hat does. Looks like they better hurry up.
by theturtletalks | 2026-03-04 20:48:18+00:00
They will come for medical advice provided by AI as well. Doctors have been gate keeping that forever and they want you to have to go thru them instead of diagnosing yourself thru AI.

Yes, there are people that will misdiagnose themselves, but I’ve read stories where doctors ignore patients symptoms or wave them off, and ChatGPT helps them find the underlying issue and actually improve their lives. Even if doctors and the medical field can’t handicap AI giving medical advice, I’m sure they are going to make it much harder for patients to get their hands on their own scans and bloodwork.
by piva00 | 2026-03-04 20:48:22+00:00
A severe mental illness of course but would you say the same if the whole process was done by a person instead of a machine? That there wasn't a problem that someone led a person with severe mental illness to their suicide, even having a countdown for it?

That's the kind of stuff where safety should be a priority, and the only way to make it a priority is showing these corporations that they are financially liable for it at the bare minimum. Otherwise there's no incentive for this to be changed, at all.
by jfengel | 2026-03-04 20:48:57+00:00
Like I said: every word out of your mouth there is a lie. Yes, I know the links you're about to hand me, to right-wing disinformation sites and actual news articles that don't say what you're pretending they say.

These are straight out falsehoods, collected for you deliberately, which you are repeating because you didn't even pretend to examine them critically. There is no way to discuss the actual mistakes made during the pandemic when it takes me ten times as long to refute the lies you're spreading.
by myself248 | 2026-03-04 20:49:10+00:00
> I could also speculate that the overlap between Linux kernel developers and automotive and industrial embedded systems is pretty low.

Agreed.

> So the high bug severity in the CAN driver could be developers contributing patches from a very different programming background?

Background and situation. Their mindset is "I need this to work, right now", not "I need this to work, and not break anything else, forever".
by BrunoBernardino | 2026-03-04 20:49:42+00:00
I've built bewCloud [1] (a simpler and modern alternative to Nextcloud and ownCloud) for me and my family and it's free because it's open source and you can host it yourself, thus not costing me much to maintain (dealing with issues and requests and emails does take a toll, though).

Because we use it (and depend on it), I am vested in making sure it works and continues to work well, and doesn't get too complex or complicated, unnecessarily.

That being said, I've made some money from donations, grants, and people paying me to manage instances for them, for example.

[1] https://bewcloud.com
by Simulacra | 2026-03-04 20:49:49+00:00
Reading this I was reminded of this story:

"At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War" recounted that the United States added a Trojan horse to gas pipeline control software that the Soviet Union obtained from a company in Canada. According to the author, when the components were deployed on a Trans-Siberian gas pipeline, the Trojan horse led to a huge explosion. He wrote: "The pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines and valves was programmed to go haywire, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to the pipeline joints and welds. The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_the_Abyss
by adrian_b | 2026-03-04 20:49:51+00:00
I do not think that is true.

Once when this happened to me a couple of years ago, it was the opposite.

My e-mails were put by default by Microsoft as spam into the junk folder, without the customer knowing anything about this.

After I succeeded to notify him about this, he searched there the e-mails and marked them as "not spam", and then he received my following e-mails.

So initially the customer did nothing and was not aware that some of the e-mails sent to him are classified as spam, and he had to do active efforts to override this default action by Microsoft.

There was absolutely nothing suspicious about the e-mail messages classified as spam in their content, their only fault was not coming from one of the few major e-mail providers.
by nickpsecurity | 2026-03-04 20:50:10+00:00
I remember trying out Macromedia Flash 6.0. My GUI apps were ugly at the time. Learning to build something like I saw in the movies could take years. Then, Flash let me throw together beautiful, animated interfaces like it was nothing. One could do quite a bit after one tutorial.

(Note: Quick shoutout to Dreamweaver 6.0 which was a power, WYSIWYG editor. Today, things like Pinegrow might fill the niche.)

It's death as a hugely-popular tool was largely due to Apple and Adobe. SaaS model isn't helping it far as wide adoption goes. It also got popular through piracy which hints the replacement should be profitable and widely deployed like open source.

I think this might be a good opportunity for a license like PolyForm Non-Commercial. Free users either can't commercialize their content or, like CompCert Compiler, must make the outputs GPL'd (or AGPL'd). The Flash replacement would have a fair, one-time price for unrestricted use with source or you share like they shared with you. What do you all think?
by ux266478 | 2026-03-04 20:50:48+00:00
So they're useless for crimes not involving a reported license plate? Sounds like a pretty worthless marginal gain. The Chinese have done it better since their mass surveillance apparatus isn't contingent on reported license plates, or even the involvement of a vehicle. Start a fight on the street and they'll find you. Is America really this incompetent that they can't match a 10+ year old system?
by LordGrey | 2026-03-04 20:50:55+00:00
Coincidentally, a nearby county has just announced that they have begun installing new Flock cameras [0].

Their stated reason is: "Along with the cameras being used to reduce crime, the sheriff’s office said they may also be used for public safety concerns, including AMBER Alerts and Silver Alerts."

The cameras are good when we're all on the happy path, but as soon as a bad actor gets involved, all of that surveillance won't look so great. History shows that the odds of that happening are decidedly non-zero.

EDIT: Searching for some info on the grant referenced in the article, it appears that a county must match 20% of the grant amount; one example is [1]. I'm sure this looks like a great deal to county officials.

[0] https://www.ketk.com/news/crime-public-safety/new-traffic-ca...

[1] https://www.beltontexas.gov/news_detail_T11_R1277.php
by Jeremy1026 | 2026-03-04 20:51:01+00:00
Anthropic also fires off the alarm bells seemingly at any sign of issue. I've personally only noticed an outage once, and the status page wasn't even showing it as down at that time. It eventually did update about 45 minutes later, then I was back up and running another 15 minutes later but the "outage" on the status page stayed up for another hour or so.

Probably good to sent alerts early, but they might be going a bit too early.
by cj | 2026-03-04 20:51:07+00:00
I agree at face value (but really it's hard to say without seeing the full context)

Honestly the degree of poeticism makes the issue more complicated to me. A lot of people (and religions) are comforted by talking about death in ways similar to that. It's not meant to be taken literally.

But I agree, it's problematic in the same way that you have people reading religious texts and acting on it literally, too.
by terminalshort | 2026-03-04 20:51:10+00:00
Could they have asked me if I wanted to enable 100 different browser features? Yes they could have, but why would they b/c that's incredibly annoying. If you don't like it you don't have to use it. The AI option doesn't send anything to the server unless you explicitly tell it to, so that is 100% compatible with a privacy focused browser.
by ToucanLoucan | 2026-03-04 20:51:12+00:00
> What else can be done?

Not give people free easy access to tech products that accelerate the shit out of mental illness!? Holy actual fuck. What are we DOING here!?

For like my entire life I have watched as company after company comes out with bananas products that directly, measurably make people's lives worse, and again and again and a-fucking-gain we get the same tired arguments about personal responsibility. This shit is KILLING PEOPLE. "It was his choice" is not a fucking sufficient answer when your word-bot is telling people that after they off themselves they'll spend eternity together.

Genuinely, so many people in my industry make me ashamed to be in it with you. You guys need a ton of therapy and to get out of your bubbles for awhile, my fucking goodness.
by klaipher | 2026-03-04 20:52:04+00:00
Location: Croatia, Zagreb

Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Python, TypeScript, Golang, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, AWS, Microservices, TDD, DDD, OOP, SOLID, LangChain, Generative AI, LLM Fine-Tuning

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/11icw1MiraSdmc2s-GEwjxhotfps...

Senior Software Engineer (mostly in Python) with 7+ years of experience in back-end development and a background in Data Science. Designed and supported several distributed systems with high call rates, owning the full software lifecycle from design to production support. Known for raising engineering quality through testing, maintainability, end-user focus,and pragmatic AI adoption.
by piva00 | 2026-03-04 20:52:07+00:00
> and then terminating the conversation (which it did not do)

This is exactly the safeguard.

Terminating the conversation is the only way to go, these things don't have a world model, they don't know what they are doing, there's no way to correctly assess the situation at the model level. No more conversation, that's the only way even if there might be jailbreaks to circumvent for a motivated adversary.
by xXSLAYERXx | 2026-03-04 20:52:09+00:00
> However, I've seen multiple times where cops initiate a felony stop

At what point do we accept that all systems are flawed? There could be many variables as to why the perp wasn't in the car. Maybe the perp stole the car. Maybe the perp borrowed the car. Maybe these systems do not work well in fog etc etc. I don't know how we're supposed to advance technology that makes us safer without getting into these muky situations from time to time.