MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wink | 2026-03-06 10:10:05+00:00
> Didn't regulating cigarettes kind of work?

I am not sure what time or country you are talking about but when I grew up (Germany in the 90s) we officially could only buy cigarettes from age 16 (or 18?) and 50% of my friends smoked. So that did absolutely nothing.

Later (I think, man it's been a while) the vending machines needed a driver's license or id to verify the age and guess what, as long as you had access to a single person over the age of 18 you could still get cigarettes.

Stepping away from the cigarette topic... I think mixing the two topics does not make sense.

First one is: Is there stuff on the internet that kids should not be exposed to without supervision? I don't have a strong opinion, I don't have kids. Probably not, but I am not even interested in discussing this

Second one is: Will some stupid laws like the mentioned ones help in any way? Maybe a little, probably not really and only for kids who don't find a workaround. Will they have catastrophic side effects and thus are not worth implementing for minimal gain? 100% yes.
by anttikoivisto | 2026-03-06 10:10:17+00:00
I wrote a book about what actually changes in software delivery when AI agents write most of the code. It covers the gap between perceived and measured AI productivity, specification-driven development, dealing with probabilistic outputs at scale, and a practical field guide for things like legacy modernization and context engineering. Based on real project experience, not vendor benchmarks.

Free to read at anttikoivisto.org.
by darkwater | 2026-03-06 10:10:31+00:00
> Interestingly, the pro-AI folks almost universally doubled down and said that I should use AI more to gain more confidence – ask how can I test it, how can we verify it, etc – to move my confidence instead of changing how review works.

I think this is a good suggestion, and it's what I usually do. If - at work - Claude generated something I'm not fully understanding already, and if what has generated works as expected when experimentally tested, I ask it "why did you put this? what is this construct for? how you will this handle this edge case?" and specifically tell it to not modify anything, just answer the question. This way I can process its output "at human speed" and actually make it mine.
by duggan | 2026-03-06 10:10:38+00:00
Very much on the same page as the author, I think AI is a phenomenal accelerant.

If you're going in the right direction, acceleration is very useful. It rewards those who know what they're doing, certainly. What's maybe being left out is that, over a large enough distribution, it's going to accelerate people who are accidentally going in the right direction, too.

There's a baseline value in going fast.
by tsukikage | 2026-03-06 10:11:17+00:00
My objection to all this stuff is the requirement to share government ID / biometrics / credit card info etc with arbitrary third party sites, their 228 partners who value my privacy and need all my data for legitimate interest, and whatever criminals any of those leak everything to, and also give the government an easily searchable history of what I read when those sites propagate the info back.

Any scheme that doesn’t require this won’t get pushback from me.

As an alternative: I already have government-issued ID and that branch of government already has my private info; have it give me a cryptographic token I can use to prove my age bracket to the root of trust module in my computer; then allow the OS to state my age to third parties when it needs to with a protocol that proves it has seen the appropriate government token but reveals nothing else about my identity.

Other alternatives are possible.
by jiggawatts | 2026-03-06 10:12:10+00:00
> "no one would do this work voluntarily"

The much more common reason is compartmentalisation. Employees are told as much as they need to know, no more.

If someone can design a glide bomb without knowing that it has an explosive payload, then they're not told.

The fear is not so much the employees themselves (they might be quite patriotic!) but that the information will leak out to the enemy, giving them a chance to counter the weapon or copy it.
by Shank | 2026-03-06 10:12:36+00:00
I used to work in defense, and this is not true either. People work in defense because it is effectively a job where you can never lose your job except for absolute gross misconduct, have a hard-cap of 40 hours a week / 80 hours a pay cycle (commonly leads to people working "9/80 schedules" and taking every other friday off), and generally speaking you have a lot of chances to move around org charts when programs change. A "cushy" job with very low chance of being fired with a stable paycheck is valuable to a lot of people.

There are also missions people find valuable, like SBIRS ground, where theoretically real lives are being protected. I know a lot of people who enjoy finding meaning in their work, and there are many programs that bring that level of satisfaction (again, look at things like SBIRS ground).
by marekful | 2026-03-06 10:12:52+00:00
It's a message from aliens. In a nutshell, it says that all efforts to keep humanity alive are futile, and good luck for our self destruction. They say it's not entirely but mostly because of Windows. If you look carefully, there are some intergalactic phone numbers hidden in the script. I guess it's for desperate measures, just in case someone wants to be saved.
by neya | 2026-03-06 10:13:54+00:00
This is how the NPM ecosystem works. Run first, care about consequences later..because, you know, time to market matters more. Who cares about security?
This is not new to the NPM ecosystem. At this point, every year there's a couple of funny instances like these. Most memorable one is from a decade ago, someone removed a package and it broke half the internet.

From Wikipedia:

module.exports = leftpad;

function leftpad (str, len, ch) {
str = String(str);

var i = -1;

ch || (ch = ' ');
len = len - str.length;

while (++i < len) {
str = ch + str;
}

return str;
}

Everyday I wake up and be glad that I chose Elixir. Thanks, NPM.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_left-pad_incident
by thbb123 | 2026-03-06 10:15:11+00:00
I disagree. Giving fake info adds noise to the mechanism, makes it useless. Ultimately I'm inclined to believe that privacy through noise generation is a solution.

If I ever find some idle time, I'd like to make an agent that surfs the web under my identity and several fake ones, but randomly according to several fake personality traits I program. Then, after some testing and analysis of the generated patterns of crawl, release it as freeware to allow anyone to participate in the obfuscation of individuals' behaviors.
by refurb | 2026-03-06 10:17:03+00:00
It’s like cheating on a spouse, it’s not much of a claim to say “id never cheat” when there are zero opportunities to do so.

Same with the claims from companies like Google - “dont be evil”. Easy to say when there is nothing on the line.

But when the choice is between your claimed morals and the future success of your company, those morals disappear in a hurry. But they were never strongly held in the first place.
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-03-06 10:17:23+00:00
Maybe. The reality of software engineering is that there's a lot of mediocre developers on the market and a lot of mediocre code being written; that's part of the industry, and the jobs of engineers working with other engineers and/or LLMs is that of quality control, through e.g. static analysis, code reviews, teaching, studying, etc.
by Frieren | 2026-03-06 10:17:38+00:00
Capitalism is dead. Welcome to the age of aristocracy were image and standing with power is more important than creating any value whatsoever. Lies are rewarded and action on good faith punished.

It is a shame that CEOs act like Kings and Queens and there is no accountability anymore. This concrete example is just part of a bigger trend to lie to the public and get away with it.
by jghub | 2026-03-06 10:18:04+00:00
Sure, needs and tastes differ.

'cd -' behaves exactly as it always does. Functionality-wise, when you use the 'sd' wrapper (which shadows the builtin by default), it treats the standard cd behavior as a prioritized subset. If you provide a valid path -- 'cd path', 'cd ~-', 'cd -', or 'cd ..' -- it resolves that first and behaves as it always has. If you only used those commands, you would never even notice sd is there.

The power comes when you choose to use it: you are free to try 'cd src' and see if it moves you across the filesystem to the desired location based on your recent activity.

Regarding aliases: one can certainly manage navigation with symlinks and aliases. Historically, that was actually my incentive to write sd. I had dozens of symlinks and ~50 aliases like alias cdsrc='cd /path/to/deeply/buried/dir'. Maintaining that manual list became increasingly annoying. sd solved that by replacing manual curation with a sliding window weighted summation of my actual movements. In a sense, it essentially replaces manual aliases with pattern matching against the dynamically changing directory stack based on what I’m currently focused on.
by javadhu | 2026-03-06 10:18:21+00:00
Cool project, this is my first time seeing such project using LLMs. Took me a while to understand what's happening on the home page.

A question though, why such powerful bots like Gemini 3.1 failed against Clowder bot? Is it because of inefficient code or the LLMs did not handle edge cases? Or they are not as good as humans when it comes to strategy.
by mohammedsardar | 2026-03-06 10:18:22+00:00
I built mcpup because I kept repeating the same MCP setup work across
different AI clients.

The problem was simple but annoying: each client stores MCP config in
a different place and often in a different format, so adding or
updating a server meant editing multiple files by hand.

mcpup keeps one canonical config and syncs it to the client configs it
manages. It currently supports 13 clients, 97 built-in server
templates, remote HTTP/SSE servers, backups before writes, rollback,
doctor checks, and ownership-aware sync so unmanaged client entries
stay untouched.

Example workflow:

- add a server once
- enable it on the clients you want
- update registry-backed definitions later
- roll back a client config if something goes wrong

It’s a local CLI tool written in Go.

I’d especially like feedback on:
- the safety model
- the registry/template UX
- which clients or MCP servers people most want covered next

Why this version:

- short, factual title
- no marketing language
- explains the pain first
- explains what is different
- asks for concrete feedback
by agentseal | 2026-03-06 10:18:28+00:00
I built AgentSeal to answer a simple question: can your AI agent be hacked?

It sends 150+ attack probes (prompt extraction, injection, persona hijacking, encoding tricks, etc.) at your agent and gives you a trust score from 0-100 with specific fix recommendations.

Key points:
- Works with OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama, Vercel AI SDK, LangChain, or any HTTP endpoint
- Deterministic detection (no AI judge) — same scan twice = same results
- Python: pip install agentseal && agentseal scan --prompt "..." --model gpt-4o
- JS/TS: npx agentseal scan --prompt "..." --model gpt-4o
- CI-friendly: --min-score 75 exits with code 1 if below threshold

The core scanner (150 probes + adaptive mutations) is free and open source. Pro adds MCP tool poisoning, RAG poisoning, and behavioral genome mapping.

GitHub: https://github.com/AgentSeal/agentseal
Website: https://agentseal.org

I'd love feedback on the probe coverage and detection approach. What attacks are we missing?
Show HN: Attendr – lightweight self-hosted staff presence dashboard
by ScottHudson | 2026-03-06 10:18:43+00:00
I built a small internal tool because our team had a constant problem keeping track of who was onsite, remote, or unavailable.

Different teams were using whiteboards, spreadsheets, or chat messages and it was messy for operational teams that just needed a quick "who is around" view.

So I built a simple real-time dashboard that shows everyone's status at a glance.

It runs locally, has no external dependencies, and can be deployed in a few minutes.

Technically it's a small Node.js application using a SQLite database with a simple web dashboard, designed to run entirely on-prem without requiring cloud services.

It has been running internally for a while and is now also running in production inside a government environment, so I decided to clean it up and release it publicly.

Curious what the HN crowd thinks.
by bambax | 2026-03-06 10:18:58+00:00
I agree wholeheartedly with all that is said in this article. When guided, AI amplifies the productivity of experts immensely.

There are two problems left, though.

One is, laypersons don't understand the difference between "guided" and "vibe coded". This shouldn't matter, but it does, because in most organizations managers are laypersons who don't know anything about coding whatsoever, aren't interested by the topic at all, and think developers are interchangeable.

The other problem is, how do you develop those instincts when you're starting up, now that AI is a better junior coder than most junior coders? This is something one needs to think about hard as a society. We old farts are going to be fine, but we're eventually going to die (retire first, if we're lucky; then die).

What comes after? How do we produce experts in the age of AI?
by PunchyHamster | 2026-03-06 10:19:57+00:00
To be entirely fair "sorta working, solving a problem but not really all that great for the rest of the codebase" PRs are human thing too.

The problem is AI generating it en masse, and frankly most people put far less effort that even your first paragraph and blindly push stuff they have not even read let alone understood

> Interestingly, the pro-AI folks almost universally doubled down and said that I should use AI more to gain more confidence – ask how can I test it, how can we verify it, etc – to move my confidence instead of changing how review works.

Well, it's not terrible at just getting your bearings in the codebase, the most productive use I got out of it is treating it as "turbo grep" to look around existing codebases and figure out things
by thunfischtoast | 2026-03-06 10:20:03+00:00
> These days, exposing an immature brain to the raw internet is basically just handing the brain and personality over to be molded by large corporations and algorithms.

You make the case of todays internet being insuitable for young children.
But has this been different, ever, maybe apart from the very first days of the internet?
While access through phones has reshaped the internet fundamentally, I'd propose that it has always been dangerous. When I was 12, a single wrong click could destroy your machine, or lead to a physical bill being sent to my parents home (which has happened), or lead to most disturbing pictures and videos.

So I think it's not the case that we should allow kids completeley unsupervised access (like it always has been), but it's also naive to think that we can regulate our way out of this (on state or household-level, like it always has been).
by jstanley | 2026-03-06 10:20:26+00:00
I think the problem is overstated.

People always learn the things they need to learn.

Were people clutching their pearls about how programmers were going to lack the fundamentals of assembly language after compilers came along? Probably, but it turned out fine.

People who need to program in assembly language still do. People who need to touch low-level things probably understand some of it but not as deeply. Most of us never need to worry about it.
Show HN: A library to turn any React Native View into a video or an image
by WingenderA | 2026-03-06 10:20:46+00:00
Introducing React Native View Recorder!

The ultimate library to record any native View in your app and export it as a video or an image. No server required, MIT Licensed.

- Record or snapshot any arbitrary View in React Native, whole app dashboard or only part of it
- Supports recording Skia Canvas
- You have frame-by-frame control over the video you're recording
- Add your audio file or mix in the audio frame by frame
- Fully native, no FFmpeg binaries
- Control FPS, bitrate
- Support for H.264, HEVC, and transparency

Star it on GitHub: https://github.com/Rednegniw/react-native-view-recorder

Check out the docs: https://react-native-view-recorder.awingender.com/
by icosian | 2026-03-06 10:20:58+00:00
For a long time after my daughter was born, I wasn't sure if she could hear or not. I tried to get her to react / turn her head / wake up to voice, music, claps... Nothing.

One day I was taping up a box behind her and I pulled out a length of packing tape. It made that awful screeching noise and she was startled. It was a repeatable result. Her hearing was fine, she was just super chilled about noise in general. I found her limit with a roll of tape.
by nDRDY | 2026-03-06 10:21:01+00:00
Algae blooms are typically the sign of something very wrong with an aquatic ecosystem (usually human-induced). This is in addition to the issues it causes in the rest of the local ecosystem by drastically reducing the light, nutrients, and oxygen available to other aquatic life.

I can't believe these ideas are being seriously suggested. Is it a win if we reduce CO2 but make the planet uninhabitable for other reasons?
by rimmontrieu | 2026-03-06 10:21:48+00:00
> But guided? The models can write better code than most developers. That’s the part people don’t want to sit with. When guided.

Where do you draw the line between just enough guidance vs too much hand holding to an agent? At some point, wouldn't it be better to just do it yourself and be done with the project (while also build your muscle memory, experiences and the mental model for future projects, just like tons of regular devs have done in the past)
by goldsteinq | 2026-03-06 10:21:59+00:00
> Folks who manually enable our "Resist Fingerprinting" preference (which we don't officially support, and I don't generally recommend - but hey, you do you) are very loud on Bugzilla. VERY loud. To the point where I've had a lot of managers and executives come telling me "Everyone is complaining about this breaking stuff, we really need to disable this so people can't accidentally turn it on." Telemetry let me show that despite being SO LOUD they're still a minute portion of the population. Management's question "Should we block it?" became "No." You're welcome.

Telemetry shows that users who didn’t opt out of telemetry don’t care about fingerprinting. Who’d have thought.
by ScottHudson | 2026-03-06 10:22:09+00:00
Happy to answer questions.

For context, this originally started as a very small internal tool because different teams were tracking presence using spreadsheets, whiteboards, and chat status which became messy for operational teams.

Technically it's a simple Node.js app with a SQLite database and a lightweight web dashboard designed to run entirely on-prem with no external dependencies.

Curious how other teams handle this problem.
by repelsteeltje | 2026-03-06 10:22:17+00:00
Can I (pedantically) raise an epistemic issue with:

> Pursuant to Section 14 of the GNU Affero General Public License, Version 3.0, [Runxi Yu] is hereby designated as the proxy who is authorized to issue a public statement accepting any future version of the GNU Affero General Public License for use with this Program.

Notice that [Runxi Yu] is an external reference, pointing to runxiyu.org.

Wouldn't this mean that the designated proxy is (any?) future entity claiming to be Runxi Yu and substantiating that claim by demonstrating control over DNS entry for runxiyu.org could effectively upgrade the GPL licence? Or practically, if the domain registration lapses, a hacker takes control or Runxi Yu looses interest — what might happen to the license? And how would this affect any contributers?
by gz09 | 2026-03-06 10:22:35+00:00
Haha, looks like it.

I remember the first time I encountered this thing called TPC-H back when I was a student. I thought "wow surely SQL can't get more complicated than that".

Turns out I was very wrong about that. So it's all about perspective.

We wrote another blog post about this topic a while ago; I find it much more impressive because this is about the actual queries some people are running: https://www.feldera.com/blog/can-your-incremental-compute-en...
by tripledry | 2026-03-06 10:23:30+00:00
Naa, I'm just a programmer. Experience may vary depending on company and country, for me this has been true from tiny startups to global corporations.

Tangential, I don't even know what "responsible" in the corporate world means anymore, it seems to me no one is really responsible for anything. But the one thing that's almost certain is that I will fix the damn thing if I made it go boom.
by suddenlybananas | 2026-03-06 10:24:47+00:00
Iraq was much more popular in 2003 [1] than the current war in Iran is [2].

[1] "In the months leading up to the war, majorities of between 55% and 68% said they favored taking military action to end Hussein’s rule in Iraq. No more than about a third opposed military action."

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/03/14/a-look-back-...

[2] "Some 27% of respondents said they approved of the strikes, which were conducted alongside Israeli attacks on Iran, while 43% disapproved and 29% were not sure"

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/just-one-four-americans-sup...
by kakonako | 2026-03-06 10:25:09+00:00
I too quit a job that made a significant pivot to weapons R&D. It was a hard move, and honestly I still haven't recovered from it. I don't regret the decision in the slightest though.

One aspect that sticks with me was the sheer excitement of a lot of people in the room, engineers excited to be working on new problems. I believe many didn't consider the consequences of their labor.

As a worker it can take time for it to sink in that the products you are actively working on are being used for immoral/unethical purposes. I've also noticed a perceived weakness when expressing these types of views to colleagues, responses either masked by apathy or just direct justified destruction of lives along patriotic or ideological lines.

Its worth bringing up these stories whenever appropriate I believe, people sometimes _need_ a jolt even if the probability of success are low.
by input_sh | 2026-03-06 10:25:46+00:00
Even speaking from a pure statistical perspective, it is quite literally impossible for "AI" that outputs world's-most-average-answer to be better than "most engineers".

In fact, it's pretty easy to conclude what percentage of engineers it's better than: all it does is it consumes as much data as possible and returns the statistically most probable answer, therefore it's gonna be better than roughly 50% of engineers. Maybe you can claim that it's better than 60% of engineers because bottom-of-the-barrel engineers tend to not publish their works online for it to be used as training data, but for every one of those you have a bunch of non-engineers that don't do this for a living putting their shitty attempts at getting stuff done using code online, so I'm actually gonna correct myself immediately and say that it's about 40%.

The same goes for every other output: it's gonna make the world's most average article, the most average song in a genre and so on. You can nudge it to be slightly better than the average with great effort, but no, you absolutely cannot make it better than most.