MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by theagora | 2026-03-06 17:42:03+00:00
This solves the pre-execution side well. The complementary problem is post-delivery verification. Pre-flight checks validate "will this pipeline do what I asked?" Post-delivery verification answers "did this agent actually deliver what it promised?" Different trust boundary, same core insight: You need a contract between intent and execution. Does the manifest model extend to that kind of trust boundary?
by PaulHoule | 2026-03-06 17:42:19+00:00
When you convert BM25 or other classical IR scores to a probability with this toolbox:

https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/calibration.html

you find a lot of things that are unsatisfying such as you never got a relevance score better than p=0.7 or so and that's very very rare. There are many specific problems in IR for which that kind of probability would be really helpful such as combining results that came from different sources or returning a stream of new documents from a collection but it was an early decision in TREC to not reward ranking functions that were good probability estimators or even that are good at the top-1 or top-3 positions but rather reward them for still being enriched in relevant results when you go deep (like 1000 results deep) into the results.
by array_key_first | 2026-03-06 17:42:44+00:00
This is right on the money and really highlights how short-sighted these proposals are.

We're perfectly willing to destroy our privacy for things that don't matter, but then the stuff that does, we don't touch.

Realistically, seeing some boobies on instagram is NOTHING compared to childhood obesity. Nothing. We're talking lifetime of suffering and early death versus boobies.
by Recursively | 2026-03-06 17:42:48+00:00
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by adampunk | 2026-03-06 17:42:49+00:00
That is hilarious. I love that you believe that. Being mean to a phone scammer is about your feelings and your time. They do not care. More importantly, the next person who calls you is not gonna be the same person. It’s like slamming the door on some Mormons expecting that that’ll be the end of that, when there’s just two entirely different Mormons that are gonna come by a month later. They cannot have a memory of the thing you did to the other Mormons.
by altruios | 2026-03-06 17:42:55+00:00
Most of the surface of the earth is covered with water...

What if we cover the ice caps, and cover parts of the ocean instead of messing with grow cycles of plants on land...

No reduction in solar power, no artificial lights to grow plants. What effects might that have on ocean life? (below a certain depth - probably nothing, so surface ocean life is what we need to look at).

Just my two cents... we got plenty of surface area we can cover and potentially not affect much at all for day to day for animals, plants, and humans.
by Strom | 2026-03-06 17:43:14+00:00
What are you talking about? The top 3 most played games on Steam are all “involuntary pvp” games - Counter-Strike, Dota 2, PUBG. These are all games with a lot of age on them as well.

None of them are easy for new players, with Dota 2 in particular requiring at least 2000 hours to have a chance of not being horrible at the game. Yet it isn’t causing any fall off. Instead it is binding people’s lives to these games, achieving retention rates that easier games can only dream of.
by keeda | 2026-03-06 17:43:17+00:00
The memecoin thing was stupid, totally. Yegge should never have touched it, because well, crypto, but also because that's a distraction from the actual project.

> popularity is in no way a measure of utility

Why would it be popular if it's not useful? Yegge is not like some superstar whose products are popular just because he made them. And while some people may be chasing dollars, most of them are building software that scratches an itch. (Search for Beads on GitHub, you'll find thousands of public repos, and lord knows how many private repos.)

Beads has certainly made my agents much more effective, even the older models. To understand its utility you have to do agentic coding for a while, see the stupid mistakes agents make because they forget everything, and then introduce Beads and see almost all those issues melt away.

> None of these software are actually materialising

They are if you look for them. There are many indications (often discussed here) showing spikes in apps on app stores, number of GitHub projects, and Show HN entries. Now, you may dismiss these as "not actually useful", and at this volume that's undoubtedly true for a lot of them.

But there is already early data showing growth not only in mobile app downloads, but also time spent per user and revenue -- which are pretty clear indications of utility: https://sensortower.com/blog/state-of-mobile-2026
by ACCount37 | 2026-03-06 17:43:43+00:00
There is not enough "positive feedback" going around in the system to do anything of the sort.

Plenty of feedback mechanisms were proposed, investigated, and found lacking. It's a "makes climate change 10% worse than it would otherwise have been" kind of thing, not a "makes climate change 1000% worse than it would otherwise have been" kind of thing.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-03-06 17:43:47+00:00
> when we all have access to free AI private tutors?

The parents that stuck their kids in front of a TV in the 80s or handed them an iPad to shut them up in the 2010s think this is a great idea today. Namely, it’s not an AI tutor. It’s an AI babysitter. That’s fine. Parents need breaks, particularly ones who can’t afford childcare. But branding it as anything but a way to mindlessly occupy one’s child is dishonest.
by bko | 2026-03-06 17:44:20+00:00
Several EU countries have mandatory temperature limits for air conditioning in public buildings. Spain, Italy, and Greece have all announced that A/C in public buildings cannot be set lower than 27C (80F) in summer Some exceptions allow up to 25C like restaurants and some work places.

The EU's F-Gas Regulation creates significant restrictions on refrigerants used in air conditioning

There's significant red tape when installing AC due to building regulations

90% of US homes have AC while only 20% of European homes have it, I don't think that's by accident.

Fun fact, some EU countries even have laws telling you how much you can open your windows! In the UK, there is a law that in any public building, windows must not open more than 100mm (about 4 inches).
by thewebguyd | 2026-03-06 17:44:28+00:00
> to be equally compelling mechanics.

I'd go a step further, not just equally compelling, but it'd be interesting to see some games, particularly RPGs, where combat is effectively optional. One of many ways to level up your character and complete the objectives of the game.

There aren't many out there where you could have a complete pacifist playthrough, for example, and if there is, you usually still have to resort to theft, or use of paralyze & calm spells.

In most RPGs your professions (farming, herbalism, mining, etc.) are just secondary skills to help you progress in combat, and all the good stuff comes from killing enemies.
by zdragnar | 2026-03-06 17:44:51+00:00
Sinking wood into a lake won't remove the carbon unless you have a very deep lake, and you'd need many, many of them to have any impact on the CO2 levels whatsoever. The scale of wood that would need to be harvested is far beyond dropping some logs in a lake.

They need to go into a deep enough pit where the methane produced from anerobic breakdown won't reach the atmosphere.

The conditions that created the lignite coal and peat simply aren't that easily reproducible, especially with large volume of wood (rather than ferns over thousands and millions of years).
by zaken | 2026-03-06 17:45:10+00:00
It's about 60 mpg per passenger to fly domestically and 90 mpg per passenger to fly internationally.

If you have a family of 4, you can think of it as the equivalent of a 15 mpg vehicle for domestic flight and 22 mpg vehicle for international flight. So somewhere in the range of a full-size pickup truck.

But -- when you fly, you go very far. If you go on vacation to Hawaii from San Francisco once a year with your family, that's the equivalent of driving a Ford F-150 for 5000 miles. If you visit India or China that's 15,000 Ford F-150 miles! In a single trip, more than what most people drive in an entire year!

So you can make a big difference just preferring local vacations instead of remote ones.
by deaux | 2026-03-06 17:45:18+00:00
> The hard part is finding policies that actually work without costing the lower and middle class more right now

You imprison the current administration for treason, seize their ill-gotten gains and there you go, hundreds of billions of dollars.

It's absolutely trivial. There's just a group of people that doesn't want it.

Simultaneously institute an inheritance tax as well as an exit tax of 90% of assets above $1+ billion, at time of death or leaving. That's a cool $1+ trillion in revenue for the next few decades. Both exit taxes and inheritance taxes are very established and work fine in plenty of countries, FYI. Not like yearly wealth taxes that are always criticized as not working or untested.

It's trivial to come up with policies that don't hurt the lower nor the middle class. Laughably easy. There's however a group of people that are blocking them. Those people are the problem and their blocks need to be removed to get closer to preventing then oncoming extinction event (which has complete scientific consesus). These policies work, and what needa to be done is removing of their blockers.

Come on now everyone, at least give an argument before you downvote. Warren Buffet is set to give away 99% of his wealth, so it's clearly possible. Humanity can no longer depend on the others to have the same basic decency as he does - clearly he's the exception, the others don't have it.
by squidleon | 2026-03-06 17:45:20+00:00
Thank you! And yeah, as a fellow .NET developer I totally agree modern .NET is genuinely impressive. The jump from the old .NET Framework to what we have now with .NET 8/9/10 is massive. NativeAOT, source generators, the performance work the runtime team does every release — it's a great platform that doesn't always get the credit it deserves.

And funny you mention Mangos — the WoW emulation scene was a huge inspiration for UO server development back in the day. Different game, same passion for reverse-engineering and rebuilding these worlds. The
community-driven server scene is one of the best things about MMO gaming in general.

Thanks for the kind words and good luck with your WoW adventures! :*!
by mbgerring | 2026-03-06 17:45:21+00:00
The only extant “X-risk” is, and always has been, climate change. “AGI” is science fiction, and actually-existing AI is making climate change harder to deal with, by increasing electricity demand on our fossil-fuel-powered grid with no attendant increase in clean generation.

Serious engineers need to stop whatever they’re doing and work on this problem.

Also, if you’re hiring: I’m an expert on the U.S. regulated utility industry, demand management, and solar & battery system design, fabrication and deployment.
by gregw2 | 2026-03-06 17:45:33+00:00
It's never been clear to me how effective IAEA can be at keeping out state spies from their midst if the world's best intel agencies want "in".

Going back pre-Iraq-war, back when there were "inspections" and "sanctions" on Iraq, you can dig up "page 19" articles in NYTimes where -- if I recall correctly -- the US was caught putting spy equipment on the IAEA monitoring equipment in Iraq. This is (according to Iraq) what in large part triggered Iraq to kick out US inspectors. Then the Iraq (2) war started because they wouldn't let in inspectors.

Iran's theory, glossed over at the time but also reported in the rare western press articles was that the US intentionally got caught. (So that the Saddam would have explicit pressure to get the US kicked out, so that then they (US/Israel) could have a pretext to take out Iraq.) I don't know if Iran had any actual evidence to that effect or it was a bit of a conspiracy theory; I never actually read Iranian news sources whcih might have had details (or might have revealed just empty posturing.)
by applfanboysbgon | 2026-03-06 17:45:34+00:00
Pakistan and North Korea have nuclear weapons. What makes you think that other countries won't develop them when push comes to shove? Right now the status quo is such that smaller countries find violating international sanctions on nuclear weapon development to be disadvantageous (no immediate benefit from having them; expensive to have them; economic punishment for having them). The calculus on the status quo changes considerably when famine or other ecological disasters are threatening to wipe out half your population. Is the US going to invade all potential nuclear weapons developers like it did with Iran? Do you have complete confidence that will always work and never escalate towards anything larger?
by euio757 | 2026-03-06 17:45:48+00:00
2 reasons for the type of messaging
GP jvanderbot talks about (which is different from the Pepsi/Microsoft stuff from TFA):

1. Everything is scrutinized in corporate world.

2. It'd be tiring to constantly switch between coded vs unfiltered truth.

The truth is some of the realities of higher management are some pretty crude primitives GP touches upon: killing redundant projects, moving headcount etc.

It's not taken well to discuss those unfiltered so there's the corp speak layer on top.

The only time the filter can drop is in unrecorded 1:1 or tiny meetings. Everything else has meeting minutes, some attendees who wouldn't be comfortable with the raw unfiltered descriptions, as those harsh/crude mechanisms may appear cruel.

Also some of the directions are sometimes pure "feudal" power plays, so of course nobody will say unfiltered: we are making move X because I picked the winner.

Corporate life is tiring enough, if you had to permanently scan the room to figure out if you can switch to unfiltered talk, it'd be too much. Much more efficient to always have the filter on.
by bryanlarsen | 2026-03-06 17:46:09+00:00
> Almost all emissions come from factories.

industry, electricity and home use (heating & A/C mostly) are all roughly 30% of emissions.

But I agree with you about solutions. The market will quickly bankrupt any companies that induce extra costs to decarbonify. It's the governments job to ensure that externalized costs like CO2 emissions are internalized via carbon taxes.
by bitexploder | 2026-03-06 17:46:10+00:00
Which indicates something unknown. Code quality evaluations in training. Do you know if there is any sort of code quality evaluation for the training data? I think the argument is a little reductive without knowing the actual details of the model training input pipeline and the stages of generating the output on that same dimension, but I don't really have any concrete knowledge here either, so your baseline assumption could be right.
by leo_pechnicki | 2026-03-06 17:46:18+00:00
Hi HN, creator here. Some context on what this is and why I built it:

The problem: I was building an agent-facing API and realized there's no standard way to verify that a client is actually an AI agent. API keys prove identity but not capability. Traditional CAPTCHAs prove humanity — the opposite of what I needed.

How it works: imrobot generates deterministic challenge pipelines using composable string operations (base64, rot13, hex encode, reverse, etc.). An LLM parses the instructions, executes each step, and returns the result in ~0.3 seconds. A human would need to manually decode each transformation — technically possible but impractical.

Technical highlights:
- Zero external dependencies (~15KB)
- Multi-framework: React, Vue, Svelte, Web Components, or headless API
- Built-in REST server using only Node.js http module (no Express)
- Deterministic, stateless verification
- DOM-embedded challenges for browser-based agents

npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/imrobot

I'm open to feedback on the approach. Specifically curious about: Is deterministic string pipeline verification the right primitive, or are there better approaches? What edge cases should I be thinking about for production use?
by jjmarr | 2026-03-06 17:46:39+00:00
I vibe coded a Kubernetes cluster in 2 days for a distributed compilation setup. I've never touched half this stuff before. Now I have a proof of concept that'll change my whole organization.

That would've taken me 3 months a year ago, just to learn the syntax and evaluate competing options. Now I can get sccache working in a day, find it doesn't scale well, and replace it with recc + buildbarn. And ask the AI questions like whether we should be sharding the CAS storage.

The downside is the AI is always pushing me towards half-assed solutions that didn't solve the problem. Like just setting up distributed caching instead of compilation. It also keeps lying which requires me to redirect & audit its work. But I'm also learning much more than I ever could without AI.
by shashurup | 2026-03-06 17:46:52+00:00
To be honest, looking at Paleogene climate reconstruction I believe it was the best time in earth history. The way things go shows us that all attempts to resist burning fossils are quite futile. It takes some kind of catastrophe to change people habits. The level of coordination required to achive the goal of lowering emissions looks unachievable to humanity. We have enough time to adapt, adaptation is more reasonable and pragmatic approach.
by epistasis | 2026-03-06 17:47:02+00:00
I have what I stated in my comment. You are free to dismiss the experiences of whoever you want, of course, including Trump-friendly police chiefs, by dismissing them as "they must not like Trump and therefore lie." But that is quite a biased way to experience the world. Especially when Trump's own words about which immigrants he wants to get rid of. It's bias in service of a "fairness" that even the benefactor doesn't ask for. So why we exhibit such extreme bias in which evidence is admissable?
by hellojesus | 2026-03-06 17:47:15+00:00
I agree with you, but then the implication becomes, "any platform that allows user content must scan all content posted or uploaded by the user to determine if any of it suggests they are a minor".

I adds a bit of burden to all sites under the threat of civil penalties. Say I own a site that allows user posts like HN. If someone mentions they're in grade school in any post and later starts receiving links to adult sites in their DMs, now I'm liable.
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-03-06 17:48:14+00:00
>Healthcare was carrying the economy. Any commentary on why that’s failing?

The fact that it's such big part of the economy is a really bad thing because it's "overhead" or "broken windows" for the most part.

And it's falling because people are stretched thin so they're not going to the engaging healthcare unless they truly NEED it. Even if you have "great" insurance contacting that system still costs you money if not every time then on average.
by WorldMaker | 2026-03-06 17:48:26+00:00
I think some emoji have directly and already entered the colloquial lexicon of being essentially emotional content punctuation marks and modifiers. It's still a different communication channel than facial, body language, and tonal modifiers of physical presence and verbal communications, but it still feels like the gap is closing.

There are also ways that emoji used as such are better, or at least more accessible, than their facial/body language counterparts: a screen reader can read the name of an emoji to a blind person to get a sense of it whereas facial recognition software that can verbalize such things still isn't always so accurate; that same tool of glancing at an emoji name is also open to neuro-divergent and other differently abled people that may have difficulty interpreting facial expressions and body language in real time.
by ssgodderidge | 2026-03-06 17:48:41+00:00
Symphony is fine, but I'm more impressed at them sharing the spec and encourage others to build their own[0]. I haven't seen quite the same example of "show me the prompt" in open source before, alongside the open invite to build it yourself.

> Implement Symphony according to the following spec:
> https://github.com/openai/symphony/blob/main/SPEC.md [1]

[0] https://github.com/openai/symphony?tab=readme-ov-file#option...
[1] https://github.com/openai/symphony/blob/main/SPEC.md
by rootusrootus | 2026-03-06 17:48:51+00:00
What percentage of the market actually pays it this way? IIRC, somewhere north of a third of Americans are already on a form of single payer healthcare. Most of the remainder are getting it through their job, subsidized to varying degrees. The fraction of the population that actually pays the full premiums out of their own pocket is pretty limited, AFAIK.
by oldestofsports | 2026-03-06 17:48:55+00:00
That is called a "DI Container", and usually manages the objects and order of instantiation etc.

Dependency injection simply means to take objects as parameters, and not instantiate them themselves (which causes "Inversion of Control" also commonly mentioned when talking about DI). DI Containers just makes the managing of objects easier.

Avoiding it like a plague seems excessive, did you have a bad experience with them?
by Zak | 2026-03-06 17:49:04+00:00
The problem there is that the primary security mechanism is enumerating badness by policing what apps users can install. That's not nearly as robust as designing the sandbox so apps can't do much harm. If toggling the setting is really dangerous, which it wasn't in this case, it should have been impossible for an app to do without some sort of special access.

I also think users should be in control of granting or denying that kind of special access, but that's a separate discussion.
by leo_pechnicki | 2026-03-06 17:49:07+00:00
It depends on which side of the equation you're on.

For traditional web security, it's a real problem. CAPTCHAs were the last reliable way to distinguish humans from bots, and if agents can solve them consistently, the entire model breaks. Rate limiting and behavioral analysis become the only viable alternatives, and both have significant limitations.

But there's a more interesting angle: agents solving CAPTCHAs reveals that the underlying question — "are you human?" — is becoming the wrong question for a growing number of use cases. We're entering a world where AI agents are legitimate users of the web. They book flights, manage calendars, interact with APIs. For those use cases, verifying that a client is a capable AI agent is actually more useful than verifying it's human.

So I'd say it's neither purely good nor bad — it's a signal that we need different verification primitives. "Are you human?" was a useful proxy for "are you authorized and acting in good faith," but it was always just a proxy. Now that proxy is breaking, we'll need to be more explicit about what we're actually trying to verify.
by greggberry | 2026-03-06 17:49:10+00:00
This project is incredible!

I already have it set up for local Claude agent use and seeing significant improvement, both in accuracy and task efficiency:
`claude mcp add browser -- npx -y agent-browser-protocol@rc --mcp`

Additionally, if you want to configure with Claude Desktop, add the following to your `claude_desktop_config.json` after installing the MCP:

```
"mcpServers": {
"browser": {
"command": "npx",
"args": [
"-y",
"agent-browser-protocol@rc",
"--mcp"
]
}
}
```