MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hyperman1 | 2026-03-09 21:52:25+00:00
I've always thought the opposite: IP law was created to make sure creativity stays hard, and hence controllable by the elites.

Patents came along when farmers started making city goods, threatening guilds secrets. Copyright came when the printing press made copying and translating the bible easy and accessible to all. (Trademark admittedly does not fit this view, but doesn't seem all that damaging either)

To Protect The Arts, and To Time Limit Trade Secrets were just the Protect The Children of old times, a way to confuse people who didn't look to hard at actual consequences.

This means that the future of IP depends on what lets the powers that be pull up the ladder behind them. Long term I'd expect e.g. copyright expansion and harder enforcement, just because cloning by AI gets easy enough to threaten the status quo.
by greygoo222 | 2026-03-09 21:52:32+00:00
If you had kids earlier, you wouldn't get more time with the specific person you love that is your son, you'd get more time with a different son. No doubt you'd love your counterfactual son too. But you shouldn't feel bad for having done any wrong by your real kid. This is the only timeline he could exist in.

Bit of a thorny philosophical argument, maybe, but reasonable in this case.
Show HN: Lurk – local agent that gives AI tools context about what you're doing
by asanao | 2026-03-09 21:52:32+00:00
If you use Claude Code, Cursor, or ChatGPT — you already know the cold start problem. Every conversation starts from zero. Even with MCP
connectors, you're pulling from specific tools (Slack, Linear, GitHub) but none of them know what you were actually doing five minutes ago. You
still end up typing "I'm working on the payments refactor, I just changed three files, Sarah approved the pricing in Slack, and the ticket is
PROD-847."

lurk eliminates that. It's a local macOS daemon that continuously observes your desktop — window titles, screen content via OCR, git diffs,
calendar, input state — and serves a unified context to any AI tool. Not connector-by-connector. Everything at once, automatically.

The difference from connectors: Slack MCP gives you access to messages, but which ones? You have 47 channels. Google Drive gives you docs, but
which doc matters right now? lurk knows because it watched you read the pricing doc, switch to Slack to discuss it with Sarah, then open VS Code to
implement it. It connects the dots that individual connectors can't.

How it works:

- Swift daemon polls every ~3s (window titles, screenshots, input state)
- Python engine enriches events — 30+ app-specific parsers, activity classification, OCR via macOS Vision
- Reads your project's README on startup so it knows what the project actually is
- Git watcher captures real diffs — the actual code changes, not just file names
- MCP server for Claude Code/Cursor, HTTP API on localhost:4141 for everything else
- Chrome extension for one-click context injection into Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini
- Optional local LLM (Ollama) clusters activity into coherent work threads

What it doesn't do:

- No cloud. Everything stays on your machine.
- No telemetry. No accounts. No API keys required.
- Doesn't send your screen content anywhere — the consuming AI tool reads it locally.

npx lurk-cli onboard

github: https://github.com/lurk-cli/lurk
by reverius42 | 2026-03-09 21:52:36+00:00
Not sure why this should be true; the US Supreme Court recently chose to let precedent stand that AI creations are not copyrightable. https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court-de...

That also seems relevant for this whole discussion, actually -- if a work can't be copyrighted it certainly can't have a changed license, or any license at all. (I guess it's effectively public domain to the extent that it's public at all?)
by arionmiles | 2026-03-09 21:52:41+00:00
I decided to get back into reading two years ago and I picked this as one of the first ones to get started with, given it was a small book. I absolutely love Arthur C. Clarke's style of helping you visualize the grand scenes.

His books are more plot driven and the characters are pretty flat, but it's so damn fun to read through!

Morgan Freeman has been trying to get the movie adaptation made since early 2000s and wants to play Commander Norton. I had read that Denis Villenueve (the same director from the new Dune movies) was attached to direct the adaptation, but it seems like his schedule is really busy. He recently finished filming Dune Messiah and then he's got the next James Bond movie to deliver.
by mjr00 | 2026-03-09 21:52:50+00:00
Even if the stats are off by a factor of 10 it wouldn't matter. You could remove the numbers from the user axis entirely and it would paint the same story: there were massive user influxes after the 2024 US election and the inauguration in January, but user retention has been on a steep decline for the year+ since.

Again, this is not a reflection of anything bad about Bluesky as a user. IMO a smaller and more focused is a good thing for the actual community, hence why I read/post on HN and not Reddit or Twitter. However as an investor there's basically no way to interpret those statistics as anything but bad.
by Fnoord | 2026-03-09 21:52:55+00:00
If a programmer ends up in jail, it is kind of important to know why, so we can assess if we want to run/use their software. So without writing the details I found out, the alleged crime (if it is the same person) is a crime we as society disagree with, very much. But it isn't related to cybercrime in a sense where it can hurt this software project directly.
by jjee | 2026-03-09 21:52:56+00:00
Let me guess.
You just type code for a living and feel your livelihood is threatened?

Seriously get your head out of your butt. If I can have a great vision and get it executed that could cause serious positive disruption and it doesn’t require me a thousand engineers to produce and get it to market, how and why is that a bad thing?

This is something everyone should strive for.
by dusted | 2026-03-09 21:52:58+00:00
I made this little DSL that's transported by the typescript syntax, but made for declaring interfaces between a typescript application and a backend.
The code-generator spits out angular classes and typescript types for use by the web app, and it spits out a node backend class that you fill with the handlers for that interface. It also spits out a qt widget with the web application inside it, complete with functional plugin for the qt designer so you can drag your widget into existing UI layouts.

So you can use it to write UIs in web and use them either as regular Qt widgets or as stand-alone webapps with regular node backend.

It's really the wrong way around if you think about it.. using an inferior technology (web) for the UI part.. But somehow people prefer typing CSS and downloading gigabytes of boilerplate instead of just using a WYSIWYG designer.. I don't get that part..
by big_toast | 2026-03-09 21:53:03+00:00
Is there any discussion somewhere about adding in the data that makes the x.com/twitter recommend/ranker so functional?

The "Grok-based Transformer"[0] that uses P(click/dwell/not_interested/photo_expand/video_view) seems pretty important and I can't tell how atproto is capturing it. I use @spacecowboy17.bsky.social‬'s For You and from what I understand that feed wouldn't get that data?

[0]:https://github.com/xai-org/x-algorithm?tab=readme-ov-file#sc...

(I also struggle with the omni-purpose likes - endorsement, approval, discover-algorithm-input. Maybe a more prominent more/less button addresses this, but then provides less network signal.)
by sofixa | 2026-03-09 21:53:04+00:00
> It's quite likely that in about 5 years most military installations will have a mix of weapons to intercept those systems - and depending on a number of factors you could easily end up back at low performance drones being so reliably intercepted as to be a waste of munitions to deploy.

That's unlikely. Anti-drone defences will only improve, yes, but autonomous drone swarms numbering in the thousands to tens of thousands are doable today, and few weapons systems can handle the rate of launch/fire required to combat that. Especially if there are follow-up waves mixing drones and heavy missiles against which your anti-drone defences wouldn't be enough.

> WW1 after all was based on exactly this thinking: surely the volume of an army would overcome the machine gun.

But building a cheap kamikaze drone costs much less than building a human.
by Analemma_ | 2026-03-09 21:53:10+00:00
Officially, all the Rama sequels were co-authored by Clarke and Gentry Lee. Clarke claimed that Lee did virtually all the writing and he was only a consultant, although AFAICT the only source for this claim was in an interview many years after they were published, presumably after Clarke was aware of their negative reception, so who knows how much of that is true vs. reputation management.

But yeah, they're awful. I read them when I was 12-13 and it was one of my first introductions to the idea that sequels to great books could be so bad (and then for some reason I went on to read the Brian Herbert Dune prequels, which are even worse). Read the first one, and pretend it stopped there.
by BeetleB | 2026-03-09 21:53:32+00:00
I won't doubt your statistics. In practice, my experience is that it really is distributed.

I just went to my feed (only people I follow), and although mastodon.social showed up a few times, the majority of users I interact with are on distinct servers. So out of 20 people, I see 17 different servers.

My feed will not be impacted much if mastodon.social dies.
by lukan | 2026-03-09 21:53:40+00:00
"Or projects that make it easier to use AI"

I get the sentiment, but this is natural with a groundbraking new technology. We are still in the process of figuring out how to best apply generative LLM's in a productive way. Lots of people tinker and share their results. Most is surely hype and will get thrown away and forgotten soon, but some is solid. And I am glad for it as I did not take part in that but now enjoy the results as the agents have become really good now.
by easterncalculus | 2026-03-09 21:53:47+00:00
Yeah here's the problem with this argument:

1. People want him banned for any and no reason, so this is a post-hoc justification. The same people (let's be real, likely including you) wanted Singal banned the second he made his account.

2. This change.org petition, despite proving how many uninformed people will blindly click agree on a petition, proves nothing about how Singal broke literally any rule anywhere, in law or on Bluesky.
by slopinthebag | 2026-03-09 21:53:53+00:00
> Speaking in the context of solving a problem: does AI need to write beautiful code? No. It needs to write code that works. The code doesn’t need to be maintainable in the traditional sense. If you have sufficient tests, you can throw some LLMs at a pile of “bad” code and have them figure it out.

Code doesn't need to be "beautiful", but the beauty of code has nothing to do with maintainability. Linus once said "Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships." The actual hard part of software is not the code, it's what isn't in the code - the assumptions, relationships, feedback loops, emergent behaviours, etc. Maintainability in that regard is about system design. Imagine software as a graph, the nodes being pieces of code and the edges being those implicit relationships. LLM's are good at generating the nodes but useless at the edges.

The only thing that seems to work is to have a validation criteria (eg. a test suite) that the LLM can use to do a guided random walk towards a solution where the edges and nodes align to satisfy the criteria. This can be useful if what you are doing doesn't really matter, like in the case of all the pet projects and tools people share. But it does matter if your program assumes responsibility somewhere, like if you're handling user data. This idea of guardrail-style programming has been around for a while, but nobody drives by bouncing off the guardrails to get to their destination, because it's much more efficient to encode what a program should do instead of what it shouldn't, which is the case with this type of mega-test-driven-development. Is it more efficient to tell someone where not to go when giving directions as opposed to telling them how to get there?

Take the Cloudflare Next.js experiment for example - their version passed all the Next.js tests but still had issues because the test suite didn't even come close to encoding how the system works.

So no, you still need to care about maintainability. You don't need to obsess over code aesthetics or design patterns or whatever, but you never needed to do that. In fact, more than ever programmers need to be concerned with the edges of their software and how they can guide the LLM's to generate the nodes (code) while maintaining the invariants of the edges.
by integralid | 2026-03-09 21:54:22+00:00
It goes in one direction only.

Companies can take open-source software and make a proprietary reimplementation. You can't take a proprietary software and make an open source GPL version.

I am absolutely certain that if you tried you would be sued to oblivion. But big company screwing up open source is not even news anymore. In fact I (still) believe that the fact that even though LLMs were trained on tons of GPL and AGPL or even unlicensed software it's considered ok to use LLM code in proprietary projects is example of just that.
by danso | 2026-03-09 21:54:39+00:00
The user you're responding too lists a "blood test viewer" [0], which looks to be a tool that turns his blood test PDFs into structured and analyzed data. You're saying that unless he continuously revises/upgrades the code, it's still "abandonware" even if it meets his needs for the near future?

[0] https://github.com/skorokithakis/dracula
by oniony | 2026-03-09 21:54:50+00:00
I really enjoyed Rendezvous with Rama when I read it as a sixteen year old. The sense of awe, the scale, the mystery: it was great. But nothing much happened and the story didn't really go anywhere interesting.

I eagerly read the sequel, hoping it would unveil the mysteries, but it felt like it was not written by Clarke at all (I suspect Lee wrote it all). Instead of wonder, sci-fi and reveal, it was more about the human relationships of the astronauts and less about the sci-fi.
by hamasho | 2026-03-09 21:54:50+00:00
Hmm.. so this is not the same category with computer use or browser use. I love the idea. Well defined and controlled sandbox is really useful.
Off topic but I’m disappointed by computer use and browser use when I tried three months ago. They couldn’t complete many basic tasks. Especially browser use, it easily failed slightly unorthodox website. It can’t find select box implemented by div, stacks in infinite loop when the submit button is disabled, and it even failed to complete the demo in its own readme! I’m okay with open source projects a bit buggy, but a VC funded company, which already has the fancy landing page, provides the service to big corps, and offers paid plans, should at least make sure the demo works.
by Maxatar | 2026-03-09 21:54:53+00:00
V8 is a JIT compiler that uses the Ignition [1] interpreter and only compiles sections of code down to machine instructions once they've been marked as hot via TurboFan [2].

V8 can also go back and forth from machine instructions back to bytecode if it identifies that certain optimization assumptions no longer hold.

[1] https://v8.dev/docs/ignition

[2] https://v8.dev/docs/turbofan
by verdverm | 2026-03-09 21:54:56+00:00
Given what OP describes

> Our biggest pain point with hosting agents was that you'd need to stitch together multiple pieces: packaging your agent, running it in a sandbox, streaming messages back to users, persisting state across turns, and managing getting files to and from the agent workspace.

The k8s ecosystem already handles most this and your agent framework the agent specifics. What you are talking about is valid, though a different axis imo. Quality and guardrails are important, but not discussed by OP.
by autoexec | 2026-03-09 21:55:04+00:00
> Stop buying it

That's my policy, but there's a sucker born every minute and they are buying these products so anytime you are in or near their homes or anywhere a microphone or camera can see you (even one mounted on some idiot's head) you're at risk. Even worse, both people and corporations typically don't disclose their use of those devices when you enter their homes/businesses either.
by spenvo | 2026-03-09 21:55:11+00:00
This looks like a slop article. It seems to be referring (without a link) to https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/mar... which itself appears to be referring to this (without a link) https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-to-create-new-applied-ai-en...
Neither of these articles include the word "finished" in them.
by richard_chase | 2026-03-09 21:55:34+00:00
I was pulled over for having a non-obstructive frame on my license plate. The officer said they interfere with the red light cameras. He then presented me with a screwdriver and gave me the option of getting a ticket or taking it off. I took the screwdriver and he watched me take it off. I lost a freedom due to a shitty ml model.
Show HN: UnifyRoute – Self-hosted OpenAI-compatible LLM gateway with failover
by unifyroute | 2026-03-09 21:55:34+00:00
Hey HN,

I built UnifyRoute because I kept running into the same problem:
rate limits, quota exhaustion, and provider outages were breaking
my LLM-powered apps at the worst times.

UnifyRoute is a self-hosted gateway that sits in front of your LLM
providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) and handles routing, failover,
and quota management automatically — with a fully OpenAI-compatible
API, so you don't change a single line of your existing code.

What it does:
- Drop-in OpenAI-compatible API (/chat/completions, /models, etc.)
- Tier-based routing: define which providers to try and in what order
- Automatic failover when a provider fails or hits quota
- Web dashboard to manage providers, credentials, and usage
- Self-hosted — your API keys never leave your infrastructure
- Works with any tool that supports OpenAI's API (LangChain,
LlamaIndex, etc.)

Quick start (Docker):
git clone https://github.com/unifyroute/UnifyRoute.git
cd UnifyRoute && cp sample.env .env
./unifyroute setup && ./unifyroute start
# Dashboard at http://localhost:6565

It's open source under Apache 2.0.

Happy to answer questions about the architecture or design decisions.

https://github.com/unifyroute/UnifyRoute
by azakai | 2026-03-09 21:55:50+00:00
> LLMs do not encode nor encrypt their training data. The fact they can recite training data is a defect not a default.

About this specific point, it is unclear how much of a defect memorization actually is - there are also reasons to see it as necessary for effective learning. This link explains it well:

https://infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/memorization-vs-gener...
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-03-09 21:56:00+00:00
Meh. People are going to antagonize themselves. Trying to win em all is a fools game.

I wrote this to a discord on the 7th:

> i know it's so obviously stupid, but i like that they are having fun with being online, even if it is at their users expense. and omg the users are so so awful to them, so much. again, it seems obviously bad to do, but i can't help but want them to keep at having fun online anyways.

That was in semi private. I'd spin it a little differently now, emphasizing more the Douglas Adams nature of it all:

> In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people angry, and been widely regarded as a bad move.

I see how this has been a bad taste for some. And I don't want to belittle your feelings here at all. Yes being more correct would be the wise obvious choice.

Ultimately though I think these team member's are more beholden to remaining human, having fun, enjoying themselves, and creating (to credit another soul in the discord) personal moderation & filter systems (not top down enforcement) such that they can enjoy being a "main character" online (like it or not), even in the midst of strident focused directed continual hostility.

Props to the team. Please keep posting. Sorry about humanity. Sorry to people who are upset and turned off by this. No one is perfect, we work with what we got, and our responses are human and our own and valid, whether they are the wisest sharpest most all correct choice or no.
by zem | 2026-03-09 21:56:01+00:00
I remember 3001 mainly for the bit about deism vs theism, which is one of my favourite throwaway passages in all of sf.

8<-------------------

"You said that all the old religions have been discredited. So what do
people believe nowadays?"

"As little as possible. We’re all either Deists or Theists."

"You’ve lost me. Definitions, please."

"They were slightly different in your time, but here are the latest versions. Theists believe there’s not more than one God; Deists that there is not less
than one God."

"I’m afraid the distinction’s too subtle for me."

"Not for everyone; you’d be amazed at the bitter controversies it’s aroused.
Five centuries ago, someone used what’s known as surreal mathematics to
prove there’s an infinite number of grades between Theists and Deists. Of
course, like most dabblers with infinity, he went insane."
by morninglight | 2026-03-09 21:57:50+00:00
WordPad was good for this on Windows - maybe too good.

AbiWord looked like it might be similar on Linux, but never kept up.

There is a very light weight, free program called "The Guide" which is also good for notes

https://portableapps.com/apps/office/the_guide_portable

https://theguide.sourceforge.net/

It hasn't been updated for about 8 years, but it doesn't require installation and we have found it very useful.
by arjie | 2026-03-09 21:58:11+00:00
In my case, what I like to do is extract data into machine-readable format and then once the data is appropriately modeled, further actions can use programmatic means to analyze. As an example, I also used Claude Code on my taxes:

1. I keep all my accounts in accounting software (originally Wave, then beancount)

2. Because the machinery is all in programmatically queriable means, the data is not in token-space, only the schema and logic

I then use tax software to prep my professional and personal returns. The LLM acts as a validator, and ensures I've done my accounts right. I have `jmap` pull my mail via IMAP, my Mercury account via a read-only transactions-only token and then I let it compare against my beancount records to make sure I've accounted for things correctly.

For the most part, you want it to be handling very little arithmetic in token-space though the SOTA models can do it pretty flawlessly. I did notice that they would occasionally make arithmetic errors in numerical comparison, but when using them as an assistant you're not using them directly but as a hypothesis generator and a checker tool and if you ask it to write out the reasoning it's pretty damned good.

For me Opus 4.6 in Claude Code was remarkable for this use-case. These days, I just run `,cc accounts` and then look at the newly added accounts in fava and compare with Mercury. This is one of those tedious-to-enter trivial-to-verify use-cases that they excel at.

To be honest, I was fine using Wave, but without machine-access it's software that's dead to me.
by angry_octet | 2026-03-09 21:58:43+00:00
This is a great argument for fines indexed to the price of the car, and non-linearly with speed and value and repeated occurrences.

Fine = 2 ^v^2 ^n^2 ^p^2

Where v is velocity % higher than the speed limit, n is the number of speeding occurrences in the past 12 months, p is the normalised price of the vehicle. Obviously these parameters could be tweaked.

The result should be that frequent violations cost much more, cost is proportional to the increased danger, and rich people feel the cost of violations.