MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fulafel | 2026-03-11 06:03:12+00:00
> So I think it's untrue to say that Sweden doesn't rely on coal power. Without coal power it'd have regular blackouts.

The european grid is interconnected so it's basically all fungible. But it's not the case that there would be blackouts, since the price mechanism is used to match production, demand and return on production investments. So policy decisions to ramp down fossil generation result in investment decisions to new non fossil generation capacity.
by p0w3n3d | 2026-03-11 06:03:14+00:00
Yeah, my colleague recently said "hey I've burnt through $200 in Claude in 3 days". And he was prompting. Max 8hrs/day Imagine what would happen if AI was prompting.

As I like this allegory really much, AI is (or should be) like and exoskeleton, should help people do things. If you step out of your car putting it first in drive mode, and going to sleep, next day it will be farther, but the question is, is it still on road
by sidkshatriya | 2026-03-11 06:03:48+00:00
> The biggest issue I face daily are silent compiler errors (SIGBUS) for trivial things, e.g. a typo in an import path.

I don't use zig. My experience has been that caches themselves are sources of bugs (not talking about zig only, but in general). Clearing all relevant caches occasionally is useful when you're experiencing weird bugs.
by rswail | 2026-03-11 06:05:09+00:00
lol, ask the software industry whether or not their "past the point of caring" about the licenses on their software.

Whether it's an OSS license or a commercial license, both are dependent on copyright as the underlying IP Right.

The courts have so far (in the US) agreed with the Copyright office's reasoning.

Use an LLM as a tool, mostly OK.

Use it to create source from scratch, no copyright as the author isn't human.

Use it to modify existing software, the result is only copyright on whatever original remains.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-03-11 06:05:53+00:00
One of my specialties is AWS Connect based call centers

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47241412

I use LLMs to determine what a caller’s “intent” is. I do my best with my initial prompt and then I have the “business” test it and I log phrases that they use.

I then make those phrases my scripted test suite. Any changes in prompts or models get put through the same test suite. In my case, I give my customers a website they can use to test new prompts and takes care of versioning.

I also log phrases that didn’t trigger an intent and modify the prompt and put it back through the suite.
by georgefrowny | 2026-03-11 06:06:03+00:00
Indeed, the people who would like to spend hours and hours hanging out in the digital world like something out of Snow Crash are not generally the kind of people to want to hang out in a simulated corporate lobby under the watchful gaze of someone like Zuckerberg.

I'm absolutely sure there is a massive market (or at least user base) for a metaverse but until spending more time in VR than reality is mainstream, the audience is the underground clubbers and kids behind the bike sheds of the digital world.
by gorgoiler | 2026-03-11 06:06:31+00:00
I’ve been adding global listeners for click and keydown that call handleFoo(event) if event.target has a data-foo attribute.

The Invoker API seems like a neater way of handling the same pattern but I’m biased towards global event listeners because they work automatically on newly injected markup and they scale O(functionality) as opposed to per element listeners that scale O(elements). I’ll be the first to admit that the latter is more of an aesthetic choice rather than being based on any kind of performance statistics.
Ask HN: How are people forecasting AI API costs for agent workflows?
by Barathkanna | 2026-03-11 06:06:35+00:00
I’ve been experimenting with agent-based features and one thing that surprised me is how hard it is to estimate API costs.

A single user action can trigger anywhere from a few to dozens of LLM calls (tool use, retries, reasoning steps), and with token-based pricing the cost can vary a lot.

How are builders here planning for this when pricing their SaaS?

Are you just padding margins, limiting usage, or building internal cost tracking?
Also curious, would a service that offers predictable pricing for AI APIs (like a fixed subscription cost) actually be useful for people building agentic workflows?
by musicale | 2026-03-11 06:07:04+00:00
The iPad has a touchscreen, supports Apple Pencil, etc. but the observation that the iPad has been Apple's "budget" computing platform for a while is spot on. It is interesting that they have reformulated it into a Mac laptop (and also that A-series iPhone chips offer M1-class performance.)

Fortunately/unfortunately for Apple, the M1 MacBook Air from 2020 is still a great laptop.
by jameson | 2026-03-11 06:07:04+00:00
Wording Roblox trying to sell is deceiving.

Compare with other platforms. Payout model is as simple as platform takes % or fixed fee, rest is dev to keep. There's no verbiage that says dev share is 67% but you they actually get paid less.

What exactly goes behind the platform is platform's business, not the user. If developers are getting paid out $0.25 per dollar spent, that's the developers profit and rest is spent running the platform which is Roblox's concern.
by Nevermark | 2026-03-11 06:07:13+00:00
Because it isn't fake?

Those are real language models. Prompted into character by humans, but then given a lot of freedom.

Fake would be all of us typing to each other on this site and identifying as language models. At least, I am not a language model and I hope everyone else here isn't a language model.

In all seriousness, Moltbook is a start of something interesting and big. Maybe a very small start of something big, but already interesting.
by ehnto | 2026-03-11 06:07:20+00:00
Yeah it's about support contracts, which covers a lot of services actually such as maintaining security audited package repositories. But most importantly it's about support life cycles you can rely on for a long term investment of time and infrastructure outlays.

For example, RHEL 10 has a planned support phase out until 2035, with extended support available until 2038.

They do tend to have a different goal for their intial installation and configuration to consumer distros, with a focus on security and providing tools you will need in an enterprise hosting environment.
by pinkmuffinere | 2026-03-11 06:07:28+00:00
> Today, at 19, he’s collecting $400,000 a month for his creation... In the next 10 years, Colley’s goal is to earn enough to go back to making Roblox games as a hobby.

Lol if he waits like half a year he should have plenty enough to go make games as a hobby.
by phatskat | 2026-03-11 06:07:38+00:00
A rather simple game engine to look at is Love2D - I know you wanted 3D, but my main experience is over there. Really, the gist of an engine will be about the same either way.

An engine mostly handles a few basic things like device input, managing the screen (with niceties for things like buffers, sprite maps, etc), drawing, and sound.

Slightly more game-oriented are things like managing the game loop, having an update timer, or calculating collision detection.

3D engines quickly help to smooth out the frustration that is working in 3D in general - lighting, cameras, etc.

As someone else said in another reply: if you want to make a game, see if there’s an engine that works for you. If you want to make an engine, or have very specific needs that require the flexibility and optimization of a custom engine, do that.
by Crosseye_Jack | 2026-03-11 06:08:05+00:00
> The Xbox 360 had a massive piracy scene, but it was 100% offline only.

You could play pirated games online with the 360. The piracy was at the DVD Rom firmware level, replacing the stock firmware with one that basically changed the book type of the media. (And in later versions also mimicked other security checks preformed by the console to validate the authenticity of the disk)

However the DVD firmware mod didn’t break any digital signatures. It just allowed signed code to be executed from unauthentic media, so it only allowed piracy/backups not a full jailbreak allowing unsigned code. That was more the jtag/reset glitch era. Which was more “offline only” as it was easier for MS to detect and ban your CPU key from Xbox live, but because people were willing to pay for modded lobbies in games like Call of Duty (which allowed you to rank up much faster) and Xbox dying if you sneezed that them, there was a even a market for extracting the keys from dead consoles to sell to those selling modded lobbies.

You still ran a risk of getting your console hardware banned for doing the DVD firmware mod, but towards the end I believe MS threw in the towel (even after trying to embed the flash chip in the samr package as the DSP for the drive which resulted in the kamikaze hack before the drive got further exploited) because one method they tried to use to detect piracy had such tight tolerances that it caused legit customers with aging drives to be caught up in the ban wave and MS had to walk it back.

The head of Xbox security (who sadly is no longer with us, he was a good egg at heart) left Microsoft not long afterwards. Obviously stating he wanted to move on to other things, but the word around the community at the time was that he was shown the door.

Personally I don’t hold much to that story, this was so late in the consoles life that it seemed like it was trying to patch the hole in the titanic after it already sunk.
by sebmellen | 2026-03-11 06:08:20+00:00
Not only is it PII, it is also a biometric identifier under BIPA [0]. Perhaps moreso than a facial image alone (depending upon your interpretation of the law).

[0]: https://www.ilga.gov/Legislation/publicacts/view/095-0994

> "Biometric identifier" means a retina or iris scan, fingerprint, voiceprint, or scan of hand or face geometry. Biometric identifiers do not include writing samples, written signatures, photographs, human biological samples used for valid scientific testing or screening, demographic data, tattoo descriptions, or physical descriptions such as height, weight, hair color, or eye color.
by 2001zhaozhao | 2026-03-11 06:09:23+00:00
Every example like this makes it obvious that you can now use ML-like optimization approaches on well-specified, very-well-tested software problems with a clear optimization goal. Keep if it improves the objective while maintaining correctness, discard if it doesn't. AI-descent strikes again.

Maybe I should learn more about ML to have a better instinct on optimization methods in general, so I can actually build AI optimizers like these.
by himata4113 | 2026-03-11 06:09:38+00:00
I think the problem is that AI can generate 1-2k lines of junk and dress it up in a PR. But take it as someone who regulary maxes two x20 accounts: Once you get a workflow going especially cases when you want to satisfy a fixed amount of tests there is no going back.

The days of AI hardcoding things to past tests are going to be behind us as they gain the ability to generalize not just in their knowledge but problem solving instead, especially if you know how to hit AI where it hurts.

This is where it becomes relevant: upstreaming hardware support, if someone wants to add / fix a bug and they successfully test it and it works there has to be some kind of middle ground where the PR should be justified and worth the effort of a review, but the person submitting the PR possibly has no idea about what they're talking about and just has to trust AI.

I do not have an answer to that except for limiting the size and scope of such PRs. Possibly require previous work being acknoledged (hand made) rather than AI generated to validate that you at least know what the PR is about and what it does.
by latentsea | 2026-03-11 06:09:52+00:00
There's a lot of 'single serve' software being written now by AI. People using Claude Code to make stuff that solves problems they have. It's wild watching people who don't know how to code just use it to solve problems they have. Even if the solutions can be considered awkward by traditional software engineering standards, to the people just looking to solve their problems, that doesn't matter, so long as it works. I'm a software engineer by trade and don't know shit about ML, but I want a nice tool to be able to do RLHF / DPO on Z-Image, so I'm working with Claude to build one, and so far it can use ComfyUI to generate the image pairs, and allows you to pick A vs. B then start a training run with layer offloading enabled so it fits in 16GB VRAM, and I haven't finished a training run yet, but steps are increasing and loss is changing so... I dunno... I see lots of software being created that wasn't before.
by throwaway27448 | 2026-03-11 06:11:20+00:00
> Fake would be all of us typing to each other on this site and identifying as language models

This absolutely is a staple of moltbook.

> In all seriousness, Moltbook is a start of something interesting and big.

Sure, if you think fraud is interesting and big.

In the meantime let's have fun bro https://soundcloud.com/mjfresh/500-gouyad-ft-colmixddkeyz
by abustamam | 2026-03-11 06:11:44+00:00
I don't quite follow. People don't go on Google and search for midieval history and pretend they wrote the Wikipedia article on it because they found it on Google.

People _do_ use LLMs to make art in someone else's style (knowingly or unknowingly) and claim it as their own creation.

Also, I wouldn't say the creators of LLMs are competing with artists. The users of LLMs are. Arists don't make LLMs, they make art, and people who use midjourney and such make art.

But I'd argue that creators of LLMs are still liable for the harm people cause using their tools. Perhaps not legally, but certainly ethically.
by pipeline_peak | 2026-03-11 06:12:50+00:00
This feels like the first time Apple’s walled garden approach has paid off in the desktop arena.

With a cheaper Windows alternative to the MacBook Neo, your options are inferior battery life with AMD 64, or Windows Arm’s inferior compatibility.

I doubt Microsoft is holding developers hands when transitioning to Arm the way that Apple does. Not to mention they’ve been using their own chips.
by saghm | 2026-03-11 06:13:57+00:00
It's hard to that this objection seriously. The publication is literally called the Financial Times. It's not exactly crazy for them to think that their readers might care about the entity that shows up the stock ticker rather than how the company happens to divide up things internally.

Even if it weren't a finance publication, I have trouble imagining you making this argument if a headline said something like "Google deals with outages in the cloud" because of the idea that it's misleading to refer to it as anything other than GCP. I think you're fundamentally not understanding how people communicate about this sort of thing if you actually think that someone saying "Amazon" is misleading in any meaningful way.
by Ekaros | 2026-03-11 06:14:15+00:00
And from slightly different view. What we make is not output of modern mass production. With highly tuned and most of time perfectly matching parts build into one unit.

Instead we make pre-mass production bespoke products where each part is slightly filled and fitted together from bunch of random components. Say the barrel can't be changed between two different handguns. We just have magic technology to replicate the single gun multiple times. Does not mean it is actually mass-produced in sense say our current power tools are.
by prerok | 2026-03-11 06:15:33+00:00
Indeed, they are two separate concepts.

I write lots of automated tests, but almost always after the development is finished. The only exception is when reproducing a bug, where I first write the test that reproduces it, then I fix the code.

TDD is about developing tests first then writing the code to make the tests pass. I know several people who gave it an honest try but gave up a few months later. They do advocate everyone should try the approach, though, simply because it will make you write production code that's easier to test later on.
by DiogenesKynikos | 2026-03-11 06:17:28+00:00
Based on the US State Department cables that Wikileaks released all the way back in 2010, Russian fear of NATO expansion into Ukraine was not just a talking point.

Internal State Department cables from the embassy in Moscow say that entire Russian security and political establishment viewed it as a critical national security threat.

In particular, take a look at this cable: https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08MOSCOW265_a.html. Here's an excerpt:

> Ukraine and Georgia's NATO aspirations not only touch
a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia's influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.

There are warnings throughout the cable that Russia may decide to invade Ukraine over the issue of NATO enlargement. In other words, the claim that this is just a Russian talking point is itself just a talking point.
by pinkmuffinere | 2026-03-11 06:17:33+00:00
> The travel offers him a fresh perspective. It shows him that his work “isn’t that big a deal. It’s not the end of the world because ultimately there’s people walking down the streets of Sydney right now who don’t care about my Roblox game performing 50% worse.”
> Colley has indulged, just a little. Last year, after the Roblox developer conference, he took a private jet to Las Vegas with some friends. Did he place any bets? “I’m not old enough,” he says, “but I had people gambling next to me.”

Honestly it's encouraging to hear that some teenage millionaires have some very reasonable views, it certainly goes against the stereotype of young wealth. I hope these aren't the exceptions that prove the rule.
by duskdozer | 2026-03-11 06:17:54+00:00
The AI hype machine is pushing the "inevitability" and "left behind" sentiments to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance, and they have the profit and power incentives to do so and drive mass adoption. It is far from certain that AI will be indispensable or that people will "fall behind" for not using it.

Why would the AI-fans even care if others who decide not to use it fall behind? Wouldn't they get to point and laugh and enjoy the benefits of "keeping up"? Their fervor should be looked at with suspicion.
by Duralias | 2026-03-11 06:19:58+00:00
The SteamDB player number for VRChat is kind of underselling its size since half the player base is on other platforms, primarily running it standalone on Meta Quest.
A few days ago it reached 156k across all platforms because of some event that is outside my sphere of interest. And VRChat is generally above 100k per day peak nowadays.
https://metrics.vrchat.community/?orgId=1&refresh=30s&from=n...

But it is definitely limited by hardware and while it is constantly growing, its growth is dependent on there being a supply of relatively cheap hardware.
by gf000 | 2026-03-11 06:20:03+00:00
Exceptions travel up the stack on their own. Given that most error cases can't be handled immediately locally (otherwise it would be handled already and not return an error), but higher up (e.g. a web server deciding to return an error code) exceptions will save you a lot of boilerplate, you only have the throw at the source and the catch at the handler.

Meanwhile Go will have some boilerplate at every single level

Errors as values can be made ergonomic, there is the FP-heavy monadic solution with `do`, or just some macro like Rust. Go has none of these.
by arjie | 2026-03-11 06:20:10+00:00
They say so in the article but you need a teensy bit more to make the connection. Here's the ELI5 version and then a link to too much detail:

You can have a Th1 or a Th2 reaction. One produces one kind of reaction and the other produces a different kind of reaction. And they both inhibit the other. It's a mechanism whose purpose (to the degree purposes exist) is to identify which kind of problem you have and apply as much energy as possible to that because they each fight different kinds of enemies. You'll see in the article they say:

> Allergic reactions are caused by a type of immune response known as Th2 response. Unvaccinated mice showed a strong Th2 response and mucus accumulation in their airways. The vaccine quelled the Th2 response and vaccinated mice maintained clear airways

Neither of these are immune (haha) to causing problems. Th1 was historically associated with multiple sclerosis. Obviously if your detection mechanism is broken you will create more and more of the wrong kind because of the fact one kind can beat the other with numbers but also because the wrong one won't even get the mis-detected enemy (which might not even be an enemy - and be harmless) out.

The too-much-detail: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC27457/

> Th1-type cytokines tend to produce the proinflammatory responses responsible for killing intracellular parasites and for perpetuating autoimmune responses. Interferon gamma is the main Th1 cytokine. Excessive proinflammatory responses can lead to uncontrolled tissue damage, so there needs to be a mechanism to counteract this. The Th2-type cytokines include interleukins 4, 5, and 13, which are associated with the promotion of IgE and eosinophilic responses in atopy, and also interleukin-10, which has more of an anti-inflammatory response. In excess, Th2 responses will counteract the Th1 mediated microbicidal action. The optimal scenario would therefore seem to be that humans should produce a well balanced Th1 and Th2 response, suited to the immune challenge.

> Many researchers regard allergy as a Th2 weighted imbalance, and recently immunologists have been investigating ways to redirect allergic Th2 responses in favour of Th1 responses to try to reduce the incidence of atopy

There's a lot of detail to it. After all, it's an emergent evolved device that we carry, but that's the rough shape of it. You can create one kind of immune response and simultaneously shut down another kind.
by deminature | 2026-03-11 06:22:15+00:00
All of Apple's software is rotting, from OSX to iOS to the developer tools. Massive bugs like the keyboard no longer working properly [1] are left unresolved for years. Whichever executive or engineering leader used to keep the quality bar high must have left or stopped paying attention. There also seems to be little culture of quality and ownership at the IC level.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hksVvXONrIo