MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by silentsvn | 2026-03-11 11:11:02+00:00
Human-driven compaction is interesting — you sidestep the "what's worth keeping" problem by putting a person in the loop. The tradeoff I've hit is that agents running autonomously need it to happen automatically or coherence degrades fast between sessions.

For pruning we landed on a last-touched timestamp + recall frequency counter per memory. Things not accessed in N sessions that were weakly formed to begin with get soft-deleted. Human review before hard delete is probably better UX if your setup allows it.

Curious what "dead ends" look like in yours; conversational chains that didn't resolve, or factual ones?
by orangeboats | 2026-03-11 11:11:14+00:00
>What kind or ancient arm hardware are they using here?

I think that's the point being made here. ARM in the 2000s was not known to be fast, now it is.

RISC-V being slow isn't an inherent characteristic of the ISA, it only tells you about the quality of its implementations. And said implementations will only improve if corporations are throwing capitals at it (see: Apple, Qualcomm, etc.)
by silentsvn | 2026-03-11 11:11:27+00:00
You're right, and it's the part that keeps me up. We handle it with versioned writes — each memory has a createdAt, observedAt, and a validUntil that can be set explicitly or inferred from context. Temporal scope gets embedded as metadata: "as of last session" vs "persistent fact."

Causal ordering is harder. Right now we surface both conflicting versions during retrieval with timestamps and let the agent reason about which is authoritative. It's not a complete solution — the agent can still pick wrong without the right reasoning context.

What you're describing is architecturally the right answer. We haven't built proper write-ordering yet. That's probably where the next cycle goes.
by fakedang | 2026-03-11 11:11:41+00:00
You can't buy them off the bat from a petrostate. Heck, even China had to enter multi-year special negotiations with Saudi Arabia to even get a batch of oil sold in yuan terms. Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein were the two proponents of selling oil in euros, and look where that led them.

The spot market is different but that's not where most of the world's oil is sold.

> The oil states throw off huge amounts of profit and oil is such a big market you need the dollars reach to service it.

The oil states prefer dollars (and have pegged their currency to the dollar) solely because of a number of historical decisions that enabled dollar hegemony, which made the oil states peg their currency to the dollar and prefer the USD. That's changing now, but only very recently and at a snail's pace.
by raptor99 | 2026-03-11 11:11:58+00:00
lol You are actually trying to argue and say "Oh actually, I love how AI fucks up, it makes me keep on my toes."

That's like saying I love hiring fuck ups that randomly do out of context and out of ruleset work for me when I ask them to perform tasks.

I would also argue to you that "folks" have done more well to debate the upsides of AI. It is pretty much all I ever see when I come to this website any more the last couple of years. Oh, and by coincidence, the operator/owner of the website just happens to be at the helm of ChatGPT. How convenient.
by 1313ed01 | 2026-03-11 11:13:18+00:00
The Windows version (a legal, non-cracked, copy, even) runs well in QEMU. Pretty sure I managed to get it working in WINE as well at some point, but I prefer to have software running in QEMU as that tend to be much more install-and-forget rather than having to fiddle with settings or/and reinstall stuff every time there is an upgrade or I move to new hardware.
by krick | 2026-03-11 11:14:48+00:00
That's great and all, but the point is that there still isn't a single known (to the community of people trying to find the origins of that symbol, so, safe to say, the vast majority of people in general) appearance of the character in the actual text (i.e. used for its purpose), so if you have an example of a map/book/anything where this character was used, providing the link/scan/photo would be very appreciated.
by piva00 | 2026-03-11 11:15:06+00:00
Power users can use CLIs quite easily on macOS. The official documentation is geared towards the non-power users but information about most tasks a power user wants done in a CLI are available, it just requires a power user skill of searching for it.

It's a good filter, keep it simple and easy for the vast majority of people, and have tools for the advanced ones to use.
by vanillameow | 2026-03-11 11:15:08+00:00
> If the primary appeal of your VR universe is that your avatar can be an anthropomorphic banana, an anime girl, a furry, a giant penis with legs - that's never going to become a 300-million-user platform.

I mean the inherent appeal of VR is self-expression; being who you want to be, seeing the worlds you want to see. You won't get 300 million users with corporate slop either. That maybe works once, if ever, VR headsets become an interface suitable for white collar work, which they currently very much aren't, and then it wouldn't be the next Facebook - it'd be the next Microsoft Teams. Which is not really in line with Meta's other offerings, though they certainly wouldn't say no to it I guess. But I think a 500-user survey is all it would take to get a very clear signal that current VR is NOT about to replace Teams.
by nicbou | 2026-03-11 11:15:11+00:00
The way I see it, "from each according to their ability" is the right approach here. If you can afford 30% less flying, red meat etc, then it's your duty to do it. You don't need to make your cat go vegan; just... do what you can, even if imperfectly.

Shame is not necessary, but callous indifference is not acceptable. There is a middle ground where you treat it like a habit to improve, like a step count.
by rjmunro | 2026-03-11 11:15:36+00:00
There is no hardware encryption or decryption.

I encrypt some data and keep the key. I send the encrypted data to you (probably some cloud provider). I tell you to do some operations on the data. I don't tell you the key or what the data is or what the operations mean. You send the results back to me. I use the key to decrypt them.

You have helped me with my compute task, but the data you have is totally meaningless without the key, and only I have the key.

It's hard to believe that it's possible to make encryption where this can do useful work, but it is.
by silentsvn | 2026-03-11 11:15:39+00:00
Concurrent writes are the right problem to be solving. Most agent memory implementations assume a single writer and fall apart the second you have parallel tool calls or multi-agent setups hitting the same store.

Curious how you're handling write conflicts at the semantic level though, not just the database level. Two agents writing contradictory facts concurrently is a different problem than two agents writing to the same row. Does the resolution happen at the DB layer or does the application need to handle it?
by jiggawatts | 2026-03-11 11:16:09+00:00
> everybody who wants to learn about nature.

We can't avoid altering nature, especially when we expand our capabilities, which in turn lets us learn more about it. It's like quantum mechanics. Our act of observation affects the world.

And anyway, satellite constellations don't stop us learning about the universe. We can put telescopes in space. They're better than terrestrial telescopes! It's fine. We'll be okay, especially in the long run.

Please remember that change is only bad if it's change for the worse. Change in itself isn't bad.

More subtly: Change can make things worse for certain individuals, those with "night sky photography" as a hobby, or individual researchers working with solely with terrestrial telescopes. The motorcar was terrible for buggy whip makers too!

> I assume the majority of people in "industrialized states" haven't seen milky way with naked eyes if they cannot afford traveling to very remote areas (me included, despite I have a PhD in astrophysics, which makes me technically a grey-haired astronomer).

You really don't have to go that far, even from the most light-polluted places. Simply driving outside of the "greater city borders" will get you a more than good enough view to experience the awe.

> The big question is: Will the shift to orbit exclude a big part of mankind from participating? Capitalism most likely days "yes" and this is, in fact, a tragedy.

Satellite constellations in no shape way or form affect amateur astronomy, other than the "pretty pictures" aspect, and there's workarounds for that too.

It does upset professional astronomers, but I'm betting they'll adapt in the same manner that they've figured out workarounds for everything else. I suspect they'll end up using something like video capture and "median of 'n' frames" digital post-processing to filter out the satellites. Even space telescopes have to filter out noise due to radiation and the like! It's the nature of science.

I don't want this to come across the wrong way, but fundamentally: science never was "democratic", doesn't (really) pretend to be so, and especially modern science can't possibly be anything other than the plaything of very rich nation-states.

Historically, science was done by the wealthy. Lords, and the like.

These days, science is done with budgets in the millions or billions, especially astronomy where bigger and better telescopes are the name of the game.

I don't accept criticism of "global internet coming down from space" because it might stop someone from doing astronomy that is so poor that they can't even drive a few hundred miles to get a better view of the sky! They're not going to meaningfully contribute, no matter how noble their effort.
by apothegm | 2026-03-11 11:16:29+00:00
Yeah, the Intel Macs, despite using CPUs with worse power usage and thermal profiles than the AS chips, were thinner and lighter. The current machines are at least as heavy and bulky as 2010-era Macs.

Even the Air, whose whole selling point was supposed to be “thin and light”, now weighs over 3lbs. Far cry from the <1.5lb 11” Air — anyone remember that one? Amazing portable computer.
by TonyStr | 2026-03-11 11:16:29+00:00
Curious, how would this affect the production of things that have long supply chains, or require lots of manual labor? There are many things that require labor, like plumbing, irrigation, farming, transportation, brick firing, steel production, etc. where the product is either an intermediary step, or otherwise contributes to something that the worker doesn't themself benefit from. Who would create my car, computer, desk, house, etc. if people are only working for themselves? Maybe I misunderstood your comment
by fragmede | 2026-03-11 11:16:31+00:00
This trope also contains a trap, however. There have been major insights from people stepping outside their lane. Physicists went into econ and built a whole subfield called econophysics, with Pareto and Mandelbrot among them. Mathematicians have transformed biology with population genetics, which led scientists to predict how genes spread through populations. Or the SIR model for how infections spread. Hidden Markov models lead to gene finding. Closer to home, we have exceptional programmers making giant piles of money in finance, with Simons and his Medallion Fund returning some 66% before fees. And then there's Bitcoin.
by irishtel | 2026-03-11 11:16:43+00:00
The framing of "AI-related outages" is going to drive the wrong conversation. The question isn't whether the AI made a mistake — it's whether the review process, change controls, and blast radius gates were designed to handle agents acting at the speed and confidence of a senior engineer.

1,500 engineers flagged the tool wasn't ready. Leadership made adoption a KPI. Those two things together are the incident. The AI just executed.

When the process hasn't caught up to the blast radius the tooling can create, this is what you get. It's not new — Knight Capital, CrowdStrike — the pattern is always the same. Automation moves faster than governance.
by codingdave | 2026-03-11 11:16:56+00:00
> The LLM will suggest changes (design, architecture, functionality, ...) to your code, but will roughly use your pseudo code style.

So it will change your architecture, but keep your line-by-line logic? Is this like a self-driving car that takes you to the wrong destination, but accurately follows traffic laws on the way?

Give me the opposite - something that builds exactly what I designed, but has the freedom to get there in better ways than I suggest.
by silentsvn | 2026-03-11 11:17:00+00:00
Been saying this for a while. Vector similarity is the wrong primitive for agent memory. It finds things that sound related, not things that are actually relevant given current context and what the agent already knows.

The "ditching vector databases" framing is a bit dramatic since you still need embeddings somewhere, but the point stands that a raw vector store with no resolution layer is basically a pile of notes your agent can't reason about. You need conflict detection, certainty weighting, temporal scoping. Otherwise you're just building a fancier version of the same problem
by HSkribe | 2026-03-11 11:17:55+00:00
I’ve been working on a small defensive security tool and wanted to share it here.

It’s called Cloud Sync Decoy Monitor. The basic idea is pretty simple: it places decoy files inside cloud-synced folders like OneDrive or Google Drive, and if one of those files gets opened, it logs the event and can send an alert.

The phrase I kept using in my head while building it was “a GPS tracker for accounts.” That’s not literal, obviously. I just mean I wanted something that gives an early signal when activity gets close to the data itself, instead of only watching login history and auth events.

A lot of security tooling is really good at telling you when someone signed in. I was more interested in the next layer down: what happens when files inside a synced account start getting touched unexpectedly?

Right now the project includes:

a Windows desktop GUI
decoy deployment into detected OneDrive / Google Drive folders
a local receiver for callbacks
SQLite logging and JSON evidence output
optional signed beacons
rate limiting, dedupe, and retention cleanup
It’s still early and definitely rough around the edges. It’s Windows-first, Python-based, and more “useful prototype / open-source defensive tool” than polished product. But it works, and I thought the idea might be interesting to people here.

I’d really appreciate feedback, especially on:

whether this threat model is useful
where this would break down in the real world
false positive / false negative concerns
packaging and distribution
integrations I should prioritize
Repo: https://github.com/HSkribe/CSDM

If people find it interesting, I’m happy to keep improving it.
by mike_hearn | 2026-03-11 11:18:16+00:00
Even if governments were perfect at ID verification it wouldn't change the argument above, right? Being perfect at verifying UBI eligibility would require a large government infrastructure, just like today, so you can't claim that the U part makes it super cheap to administer.

But no government is close to perfect. Here are some examples for your edification.

The UK doesn't even know how many people are living there, and it's an island. There's no centralized identity scheme and during COVID more people came forward for vaccination in some age bands than theoretically existed at all.

Germany fails at reliably verifying that people who turn up for a language test as part of naturalization are the same people being given citizenship: https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/69787/germany-police-ar...

All countries struggle with basics like "is the recipient of the welfare dead". Here's a specific case where Italy didn't notice it should stop paying out a state pension (a form of UBI) for years after death, with the fraudster only getting busted when he tried to dress up as his own mother: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/25/italian-man-dr...

Paying out money to dead people is a very common problem. Here's an EU report on all the basic ways countries get defrauded by failing to track basic facts about identities:

https://www.ela.europa.eu/sites/default/files/2025-03/SSC_fi...

"Common fraud and error cases include falsified documents (birth, marriage and death certificates), identity fraud and falsified non-payment certificates"

Even in UBI, there would be a strong expectation that each person only receives it once. But checking stuff like that requires a huge bureaucracy.
by zesterer | 2026-03-11 11:18:35+00:00
Author here. Off the top of my head:

- Software is simpler than you think when you boil it down. There's a massive incentive to over-sell the complexity of the problem a solution is trying to solve, to pull in users. This is true both for proprietary products and, to a lesser degree, FOSS. You can probably replace most of the tools you use day-to-day in a weekend or two - provided you keep practising the art of just building stuff. I'm not saying that you should, but it's worth keeping in the back of your head if a tool is driving you mad.

- You can achieve 80% of the functionality with 20% of the work required to build an off-the-shelf solution. In a surprising number of cases, you can do the same with 20% of the integration cost of an off-the-shelf solution. A lot of software is - to put it quite bluntly - shit (I include a lot of my own libraries in this list!). There are probably only a few hundred really valuable reusable software components out there.

- Aggressively chase simplicity and avoid modularity if you want to actually achieve anything. The absolute best way to never get anything useful out of a project is to start off by splitting it into a dozen components/crates/repositories. You will waste 75% of your time babysitting the interfaces between the components rather than making the thing work.

- Delete code, often. If you look at the repo activity (https://git.jsbarretto.com/zesterer/zte/activity/code-freque...) you'll see that I'm deleting code almost as much as I'm adding it, especially now that I've got the core nailed down. This is not wasted effort: your first whack at solving a problem is usually filled with blunders so favour throwaway code that's small enough to keep in your head when the time comes to bin it and make it better.

- It is absolutely critical that you understand the fundamental mode of operation of the code you've already written if you want to maintain development velocity. As Peter Naur said, programming is theory-building and the most important aspect of a program is the ineffable model of it you hold in your head. Every other effort must be in deference to maintaining the mental model.
by KronisLV | 2026-03-11 11:19:10+00:00
> they are left with no one who understands a sprawling tangled web of code that is 80% [random people that I can't ask because they don't work here anymore and they didn't care to leave docs or comments] generated, then we'll see who laughs last.

Yes, this matches my experience with codebases before AI was a thing.
by nh2 | 2026-03-11 11:19:19+00:00
`EnableEscapeCommandline` only controls the <Enter>~C commandline.

The reason that is disabled in current OpenSSH by default is OpenBSD `pledge` support:

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/280793/what-att...

On my Linux,

cat<Enter>~.

closes the connection as expected, and no ~ is shown in the terminal.
by reincoder | 2026-03-11 11:19:45+00:00
I work for IPinfo. The accuracy you see is inferred data actually. Our IP address location should not perfectly pinpoint anyone, unless that IP address is a data center of some sort. The highest accuracy for a non-data center IP address is usually at the ZIP code level. In terms of carrier IP addresses, currently we do one data update per day. If we did more, I guess the accuracy of mobile IP addresses would improve, but on an overall scale, it would be quite miniscule.

Our country-level data (which is free) is 10-15 times larger than the free/paid country-level data out there. We constantly hear that the size of the database is an issue. The size is a consequence of accuracy in the first place. So, it is a balancing act.
by piva00 | 2026-03-11 11:19:48+00:00
I personally won't allow full control for a long time.

On the other hand LLMs have been a very good tool to build bespoke tools (scripts, small CLI apps) that I can allow them to use. I prefer the constraints without having to think about sandboxing all of it, I design the tools for my workflow/needs, and make them available for the LLM when needed.

It's been a great middle ground, and actually very simple to do with AI-assisted code.

I don't "vibecode" the tools though, I still like to be in the loop acting more as a designer/reviewer of these tools, and let the LLM be the code writer.
by JumpingVPN2027 | 2026-03-11 11:20:26+00:00
Hi HN,

Building a VPN where session is the stable anchor, transport is volatile/replaceable.

Pushed new 60-second demos:
- Multipath failover (one path dies → seamless switch)
- Path kill & recover
- Distributed ownership takeover
- NAT rebinding test

Also: basic UDP echo server runs in Termux on Android phone.

Repo: https://github.com/Endless33/jumping-vpn-preview

Short video (UDP test): https://vm.tiktok.com/ZNRuY8uug/

Looking for feedback on:
- session vs tunnel-centric approach
- invariants / state machine
- next: QUIC + real multipath

What do networking / Go people think?
by nonameiguess | 2026-03-11 11:20:37+00:00
Why would they lie? Hacker News simply has this bizarre blind spot about what Fortune 500 companies do and what computers are that run Linux. One of their biggest customers is Chick-fil-a using k3s for the their point-of-sale network. I'm sure there are approximately zero employees interacting with the system that realize that, but it's still there.

Also, from my own experience, SUSE used to have nearly all of the US geointelligence processing because of the HPC connection mentioned elsewhere with CrayOS, but that went away when DNI forced everyone onto the CIA's private AWS service, which only had RHEL AMIs available. The national labs and more niche intelligence processing that can't run in the kinds of machines AWS provides still make heavy use of it.
by in_a_hole | 2026-03-11 11:20:43+00:00
The linked document is a copy edited version of a 3 part blog post series which you can read here:

1) https://quantumfrontiers.com/2026/01/06/has-quantum-advantag...

2) https://quantumfrontiers.com/2026/01/25/has-quantum-advantag...

3) https://quantumfrontiers.com/2026/02/28/what-is-next-in-quan...
by embedding-shape | 2026-03-11 11:21:02+00:00
> Eh I feel like there are some features where you just have to get in the weeds to even design it and the code review

I agree, but those are separate tasks completely (in my view) compared to "Someone writes code that goes into production", usually called "spikes" or something else to differentiate them from "normal" tasks. They're quite literally just about exploration and figuring out the design, before the "real" work starts.
by Terretta | 2026-03-11 11:21:42+00:00
> The entire Apple universe is smaller than the world or even just the github part of the world

As of 2023, GitHub had 100M active users total.

As of a decade ago (2016) Apple already had 782 million total iCloud users, with 73% or 570 million of them authenticated to iCloud.

By 2023, Apple has 973 million paying subscribers.
by reitzensteinm | 2026-03-11 11:22:45+00:00
It's all about relative difficulty. It's not trivial to convince LLM vendors to include your pet new language in their internal synthetic datasets, and you can build your own and publish it but it'll be fiddly and expensive.

But compared to the immense amount of effort that goes into convincing a critical mass of humans to learn and write about your new language, and using _that_ material to train an LLM, I think it's fair to say things have gotten easier, not harder.