MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dinowars | 2026-03-13 11:01:51+00:00
If there was an accident an officer might give you a fine in both cases where I live. In the Porsche case they can say you broke the law and were speeding that led to the accident. But also in the case of old car or driver for failing to adjust your speed to the state of your vehicle and conditions of the road an wheather regardless of the speed limit.
by sarchertech | 2026-03-13 11:01:52+00:00
Because delegating doesn’t give me the level of control I want, the kind of people with the quality standards and capabilities I have are extremely expensive, and I like creating things.

If I had access to a factory of apprentices that I had total control of, I probably would outsource more of it. So on the surface it seems like I’d love AI, but these particular apprentices aren’t up to my standards, there are severe limitations on how much I can train them, and I get no joy from teaching them.
by kypro | 2026-03-13 11:04:02+00:00
> There are all these videos that are public, I'm allowed to watch them, but they were clearly not meant for me to watch.

I disagree. I think most people probably intended them to be public and thought it would be cool if people watched – that was the attitude back then. In the early stages of web 2.0 people who were online would share everything and anything. Social media was public by default and no one really had a problem with it.

It was in the years that followed the launch of the iphone and the mass-adoption of the internet that various incidents caused companies and people to realise they needed to be more careful about what was shared publicly online.

I think the appeal of these videos is that they're authentic and highlight something we've lost today, not that they're "voyeuristic".

Most videos people watch on YouTube today have high production value, even most TikTok creators which show up on the "For You" page are professional content creators. Additionally, this was back in an era where people didn't really care about their public/online persona, and act as such.

It's not just a time capsule... It an alternative reality where people are not overly self-conscious about their image and where the internet is full of real people sharing real and rather mediocre things that are happening in their life, rather than curated moments to serve the advertisement interests of corporations. And it's an alternative reality which existed just 15-20 years ago. These people are not that dissimilar from us, but live in a completely different, far more authentic world.
by corroclaro | 2026-03-13 11:04:11+00:00
This keeps happening in Europe with these mega-IT suppliers repeatedly getting exposed using very bad development practices. Sweden most recently had a major breach back in 2024 when the other large IT services supplier TietoEvry had their data centres breached and claimed "not actually an issue of security".

Several government organisations / regional authorities and companies were down. Last I heard several medical journals for whole municipalities were just destroyed.

Unfortunately, the public tender process encourages awarding contracts to these giants that repeatedly fail to deliver on even basic opsec and still believe in security-by-obscurity, are suspicious of things like zero-trust, follow outdated engineering practices. Sigh.
by CraigJPerry | 2026-03-13 11:04:14+00:00
My skills/domain/git.md looks like this:

Context: You are working with Git repositories.
- Commit messages follow Conventional Commits: type(scope): description
- Types: feat, fix, docs, refactor, test, chore, ci, perf
- Subject line max 72 chars, imperative mood, no trailing period
- Reference issue numbers when relevant

So it produces messages like:

$ git diff HEAD~1 | bin/ai-commit-msg
fix(guards): pass input to claude and tighten verdict handling
by gus_massa | 2026-03-13 11:04:15+00:00
OK, I have to agree. about author voice. Last year I wrote something in English and I used the autotranlation to make the Spanish version. Google translated it to es-es instead of es-ar. I had to go over it like 3 or 4 times to fix all the differences, and adjust the tone to a more informal one and select which technical words to keep unstranlated, and a few more details.

Anyway, the autotranlation saved a lot of time for the most common words and switching the noun-adjetive order.
by jon-wood | 2026-03-13 11:04:22+00:00
There are absolutely $599 laptops available from companies that aren't Apple but they've all made major compromises to get to that price in ways that people will notice.

The cooling will be terrible so that every 30 seconds the fans kick in at full speed, thermal throttling takes hold, and then it decides all is fine 30 seconds after that so you're working on a machine that's constantly cycling fan noise. The trackpad will suck, meaning you need to have a mouse precariously balanced somewhere anytime you're using it. It'll have some irritating BIOS feature you can't work out how to turn off that flashes a giant icon on the screen whenever you hit the caps-lock button. The casing will be plastic and snap where the screen hinges are screwed in after a year of light use. It may even be a Chromebook, making it a glorified tablet with an attached keyboard and (terrible) trackpad.

The thing Apple have done here isn't to release a $599 laptop, its to release a $599 laptop where the compromises are ones the average user buying a $599 laptop isn't going to notice everyday, while not compromising on the things they do notice. Its made of metal, the trackpad feels good to use, the keyboard is pleasant, and the battery is large enough that you're not carrying around a charger that weighs as much as the laptop itself.
by overfeed | 2026-03-13 11:04:26+00:00
> Ironically, that is an anti-democracy talking point.

There's always a cost/friction between internal democratic competition and external adversarial competition. This is why the US didn't (and doesn't) have direct voting on war declaration - hell, a handful of recent presidents decided that even Congress is too slow for them. You could argue that the lack of a referendum before declaring war is an "anti-democracy talking point"
by radarsat1 | 2026-03-13 11:05:18+00:00
> Is it speed?

> Is it that you can backprop through this computation? Do you do so?

With respect, I feel that you may not have read the article.

> Because the execution trace is part of the forward pass, the whole process remains differentiable: we can even propagate gradients through the computation itself. That makes this fundamentally different from an external tool. It becomes a trainable computational substrate that can be integrated directly into a larger model.

and,

> By storing points across nested convex hulls, this yields a decoding cost of O(k+log⁡ n).

and,

> Regardless of their eventual capability ceiling, they already suggest a powerful systems primitive for speeding up larger models.

So yes, and yes.

> Where are the benchmarks?

Not clear what they should benchmark it against. They do compare speed to a normal KV Cache. As for performance.. if it's actually executing a Sudoku solver with a 100% success rate, it seems pretty trivial to find any model doing < 100% success rate. Sure, it would be nice to see the data here, agree with you there.

Personally I think it would be really interesting to see if this method can be combined with a normal model MoE-style. It is likely possible, the router module should pick up quite quickly that it predicts the right tokens for some subset of problems deterministically. I like the idea of embed all sorts of general solvers directly into the model, like a prolog solver for example. In fact it never would have occurred to me to just go straight for WASM, pretty interesting choice to directly embed a VM. But it makes me wonder what "smaller" interpreters could be useful in this context.
by bayindirh | 2026-03-13 11:05:32+00:00
I agree with you that some people find this very rewarding, but this is not a given.

I for one, don't care whether anyone is impressed by my work. That's a nice bonus, but not a requirement. Instead, when I improve my work w.r.t. my previous one, the satisfaction I get is way bigger than an external validation. I seek my satisfaction inside myself.

That's completely true that I love discussing what I did with a competent technical expert, yet it's not why I'm doing this.
by dale_glass | 2026-03-13 11:05:42+00:00
> The web was objectively awful as a technology, and genuinely amazing, and nobody got into it because programming in Perl was somehow aesthetically delightful.

As an old school Perl coder, not true. Lots of people had a taste for Perl. TIMTOWTDI was sold as an actual advantage.

Perl caters to things almost nobody else does, like the way you have a negative "if" in "unless" and placing conditions after the code. So you can do things like:

frobnicate() unless ($skip_frobnicating);

Which is sure, identical function-wise to:

if (!$skip_frobnicating) frobnicate();

But is arguably a bit nicer to read. The first way you're laying out the normal flow of the program first of all, and then tacking on a "we can skip this if we're in a rare special mode" afterwards. Used judiciously I do think there's a certain something in it.

The bigger problem with Perl IMO is that it started as a great idea and didn't evolve far enough -- a bunch of things had to be tacked on, and everyone tacked on them slightly differently for no real benefit, resulting in codebases that can be terribly fragile for no good reason and no benefit.
by Habgdnv | 2026-03-13 11:05:49+00:00
Few years ago a huge NRA database was left public with admin/1234 or similar by the Bulgarian NRA. They government fined itself some non-trivial amount, then in the source/destination IBAN they put the same value and paid the fine. They managed to find someone to blame and it was not the person who left the database but the person who found it. Turns out that if you leave the PII of a whole country open to the public it is not your fault and you get to keep your cozy job. It is already unlawful to access that, so if someone access it - it is his fault - he broke the law.

Edit, i checked the facts: The Bulgarian government said that the it should pay too much to itself, and appealed the fine for few years until it somehow expired. And the guy (20 year at that time) they accused was later acquitted after they tried to ruin his life.
by raincole | 2026-03-13 11:05:57+00:00
The whole article is about how Apple is still special just like when he was a kid.

But anyway, I find it funny that author implies if a kid gets a MacBook Neo they will explore all the possibilities to use and customize it, but somehow the same kid won't try to push a Chromebook to its limit. It 100% matches my stereotype of how Apple fans view machines.
by PaulRobinson | 2026-03-13 11:07:53+00:00
I learned to code on my school's BBC Micro. [0]

8-bit. 16KiB of RAM. BASIC as the programming language. 640x256 resolution in 8 colours.

I could make that thing sing in an hour. It was hard to get it to do much, but then the difficulty was the fun thing.

By the time we got to the early 2000s and I could buy something with more RAM, CPU and storage than I could ever reasonably max out for the problems I was interested in at the time, I lost something.

Working within constraints teaches you something, I think. Doing more with less makes you appreciate the "more" you eventually end up with. You develop intuitions and instincts and whole skillsets that others never had to develop. You get an advantage.

I don't think we should be going back to 8-bit days any time soon, but in the context of this post, I want novices to try and build software on an A18 chip, I want learners to be curious enough to build a small word game (Hangman will do at first, but the A18 will let them push way, way past that into the limits of something that starts to feel hard all of a sudden), to develop the intuition of writing code on a system that isn't quite big enough for their ideas. It'll make them thirsty for more, and better at using it when they get it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro
by d--b | 2026-03-13 11:08:20+00:00
I sometimes wonder who is insane enough to be behind these schemes.

I mean what degree of alienation does it require to setup a website that claims to be about an advocacy group for children safety, while it is in fact a fake site for an org funneling lobbying money into passing laws that makes their boss more money. How can they live like this?

And then I remember the Monsanto lobbyists, the Sacklers' enablers, the cigarette people and the oil lawyers. I guess there is just a ton of people who are natural born minions.
by Qc17 | 2026-03-13 11:08:31+00:00
Hi HN!

I’ve been experimenting with programming language design and created a small language called LINE (Language with Intuitive and Natural Expression).

The idea is to make simple program logic easier to read and experiment with.

The interpreter is written in JavaScript and runs directly in the browser, so you can try it without installing anything.

There is also an online demo here:
https://qc-17.github.io/LINE

Right now the project is experimental, but I’m interested in feedback about the language design, syntax, and possible improvements.

If you enjoy playing with small languages or interpreters, I’d love to hear your thoughts!
by farfromrefuge | 2026-03-13 11:09:14+00:00
Hi HN,

I built OSS Document Scanner, a free and open-source mobile app for scanning documents and receipts.

It’s available on both iOS and Android and focuses on being simple, private, and fully usable offline.

Main features:

* Document and receipt scanning
* Automatic edge detection
* Export to PDF or images
* webdav/local sync of PDF/Images/Data
* No ads, no tracking

The project is fully open source and development is funded only through donations.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/oss-document-scanner/id6472918...
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.akylas.doc...

If you have any feedback, ideas,... please feel free to contribute at https://github.com/Akylas/OSS-DocumentScanner
I’d really appreciate feedback, feature ideas, or contributions from the community.
by amadeuspagel | 2026-03-13 11:10:00+00:00
This article is a strange combination of defending the macbook neo from stupid attacks, and making similarly stupid attacks on the chromebook, with no self-awareness (unless there's some level of irony I'm missing here, which, come to think of it, might well be the case).

Chromebooks have a linux VM where you can install anything, including GUI apps, and doing that is much more straightforward then installing something from the web on a mac. Download, right-click, install on linux. No scary warnings. No need to go to system settings.
by ProllyInfamous | 2026-03-13 11:10:12+00:00
My last W2 job (~2017, estimator) eventually provided me with a smartphone because they wanted me to immediately send pictures from jobsites. This is a fair business requirement; offhours, I'd leave the phone charging at work.

Bossman one day informed me that I'd need to start taking the phone home with me, to which I told him that would not happen: "my free time is my free time." He told me about this cool new tech that'd allow him to 'reach out' any time he had any questions — nah'brah, "I'll quit before doing that."

Eventually I held true.

----

Good luck in your own phoneless quest...
by fc417fc802 | 2026-03-13 11:10:41+00:00
IMO a better general solution is UUIDs and a petname system, at least as far as chat apps are concerned.

For buckets I thought easy to use names was a key feature in most cases. Otherwise why not assign randomly generated single use names? But now that they're adding a namespace that incorporates the account name - an unwieldy numeric ID - I don't understand.

In the case of buckets isn't it better to use your own domain anyway?
by hyperflowerer | 2026-03-13 11:11:22+00:00
I have really tried hard to figure out the counterfactual as being a good thing and it is just really hard to make the argument that we would have been better off with a deflationary collapse.

This is especially true from a global perspective. It would be a much more equal global economy but unimaginably poorer. The political consequences are unknowable but a deflationary collapse would not have had good political outcomes.

We largely shifted a nightmare into being a great time to be alive but take the good times completely for granted because we can't really know the nightmare we didn't see.
by srean | 2026-03-13 11:11:38+00:00
That's right. However, one disadvantage of using the tan value (the y/x ratio) over that of (cos,sin) tuple is that the former loses information on whether the y coordinates or the x coordinate was negative.

So, if you use the tan representation you have to carry that information separately. Furthermore, the code needs to correctly handle zero and infinity.

Tan of the half angle takes care of the first problem and is related to the stereographic transform. This works modulo one full rotation.
by sarchertech | 2026-03-13 11:11:59+00:00
I know someone who has a friend that works at Anthropic. He says that it’s essentially 2 companies. 1 that vibe codes everything and merges without understanding, and one that spends all their time putting out the fires created by the first company.

I think we’re destined to be #2 for a while. If it gets too bad, my plan is to move into a part of the industry where quality and reliability are non-negotiable. Or start my own company and compete against established players for the smaller customer base that’s willing to pay for quality.

I go out of my way to pay for quality projects even if (and often because) they have fewer features. I think there are probably enough of us to support a lifestyle business in many niches.

I also suspect as vibe coding introduces more bugs (we’ve certainly seen this at my current company) the people willing to pay for alternatives will grow.
by program_whiz | 2026-03-13 11:12:32+00:00
There's a simple solution. If a medical malpractice happens, law suit against the LLM company. If their license is revoked as part of that finding, unfortunately that applies to the "doctor" (e.g. ChatGPT).

Same for self-driving. Just hold each car like a normal driver, the owning AI company has liability. So after ~20 tickets and accidents in a week, a few ambulances being blocked, the only option is to revoke the driver's license (of which, all the cars share one, as they have the same brain).

This would make AI companies more cautious and only advertise capabilities they actually have and can verify. They would be held to the standard of a human. I think that's reasonable (why replace humans if the outcome is worse, and why reduce protections for individuals).

To make the analogy more clear: even if a telemedicine doc sees 10,000 patients a day all over the world, they would be held liable for any medical malpractice. Bad enough, and their license would be revoked, regardless of the fact that they see many patients all over the world. Same deal with AI / LLM -- if ChatGPT is making medical advice and it hurts someone, that's the same as a human doing so -- its malpractice and lawsuits can happen.

If they are somehow licensed, well then that license can be revoked. We would revoke a human's license for a single offense in some cases, the same should occur with AI.
by graemep | 2026-03-13 11:14:00+00:00
> Actually, it's up to the individual what they prefer.

If referring to a group you cannot use a term that all individuals prefer as they will have different preferences. In general certain terms are not used - for example one for black people is never even written out in full by Americans. If one person said "I am fine with being called that" does not mean the rest of us should use it because most people find it offensive.

> I don't like being labeled an "American".

Being called an American Indian (which is necessary to avoid ambiguity) also means you are labeled an American.

"American" is also derived from the name of someone problematic (he even took part in a slaving raid) but that is another issues.
by zimpenfish | 2026-03-13 11:14:57+00:00
> There's also the fact that there's a lot less social pressure for young people not to look stupid.

Also also they tend to be less financially "tethered" for want of a better word - mortgages, families, children, etc. - which makes it easier for them to be risky (consciously or not) about what/who/where they work on/with.

Probably not likely to be jumping from your stable 9/5 to a startup when you've got your semi-detached with 4 kids.
by woodenbrain | 2026-03-13 11:15:20+00:00
This resonates with me. I got into development exactly because I wanted to make things useful to me, with limited background in programming, over 20 years ago. Tech eventually got in the way. I was so bored with sandboxes, entitlements, signing apps, etc. The joy was gone. Now I am developing a new app with AI help. I may not be using the tools optimally but I don't care, it's a process. And it's a lie that this is a fast process. I have been working on one app for months, and now I have a pretty solid new app to show for it. Looking for MacOS Apple Music users for beta testers, BTW. Please have a look. https://www.woodenbrain.com/grooves.html
by butILoveLife | 2026-03-13 11:16:15+00:00
Why is it against HN rules to say the following:

>Apple is no longer selling veblen goods, I need to short their stock

>All this fuss about a multi-day old computer seems like marketing inorganic/astroturfing/reputation management company.

>Apple ownership is a walled prison

>You could get a laptop with an Nvidia GPU, 16gb ram, 512 ssd... or a 'cheap' Macbook.

>Why are these getting flagged? Is HN bought?

Now, I can see a few of these getting flagged, you arent allowed to call out astroturfing. HN needs to make money somehow. But some of these are weird.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-03-13 11:18:41+00:00
But you already have a domain for whatever you're doing so presumably that's going to be a threat either way.

For particularly high risk activities if circumstances permit you can sidestep the entire issue by adding a layer of verification using a preshared public key. As an arbitrary example, on android installing an app with the same name but different signing key won't work. It essentially implements a TOFU model to verify the developer.
by mobilejdral | 2026-03-13 11:19:07+00:00
I spent the entire time reading it pondering the same thing.

1. The article presents that calling out to a tool like python is "expensive" because of the overhead of forking a process, loading up the python env etc, but why not just eliminate that overhead and embed WebAssembly so this "tool call" is near zero? This feels very similar to the discussion in the 90's around the overhead of threads v.s. processes or kernel space v.s. user space. Could even go further and have a running beam vm so the LLM can write elixir which is ideal for LLM's that stream out code? Elixir programs will be a lot shorter than webassembly.

2. The core argument stated is "A system that cannot compute cannot truly internalize what computation is." The idea being that it could write a program, execute it and by seeing all of the steps maybe even part way through stop and change its mind or when writing new programs write them better, aka be able to debug on the fly?

3. Not mentioned, but there is a 3rd x factor that LLM's will use this new found computation engine to do overall better at "thinking". Computing in very unexpected ways and to unexpected problems. Maybe it would do dramatically better at some benchmark because of this?

Unfortunately these are not explored and it is just an execution engine even resulting in the conclusion stating "arbitrary programs can be compiled directly into the transformer weights, bypassing the need to represent them as token sequences at all." which goes to point number 1 of if we are compiling to weights why not just optimize the tool calling?