MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by giorgiolc | 2026-03-10 00:29:20+00:00
I built Pug because calling APIs directly from AI agents (like Claude Code or OpenClaw) is often not great and requires writing custom glue code or heavy prompting.

Pug lets you turn any API or documentation into a high-quality CLI. This makes it much easier for AI agents to "understand" and execute tasks because the CLI provides a structured, predictable interface. It's essentially a shortcut to make any service compatible with the MCP or local agentic workflows.
by davnicwil | 2026-03-10 00:29:22+00:00
To push back on this, I actually don't think the real role of a university is to teach, per se.

The real role they play is something very different to everything that comes before in education, and a bit closer to everything in the world that will ideally come after: immersion in your field of choice in an environment full of curious peers who are variously a few steps ahead of you, all the way up to world class experts in the field doing research.

Parts of your interactions there may include being actively taught relevant things, but the more important goal is to let you explore this environment and the material (yes, with a bit of structure) and in doing so figure out how to learn on your own.

You absolutely should be able to get a degree with top marks without attending a single lecture, seminar, lab, whatever, just by reading the material and interacting with those around you less formally, and never being actively 'taught' anything.

Many in fact do something approaching this, particularly in the later years of a degree.
by metalcrow | 2026-03-10 00:29:55+00:00
> AI is a more complex machine, but still a machine. If you feed somebody'd work into a machine, what comes out is a derivative work.

I'm not sure that's true, legally speaking. If you fed it into a PRNG, the output seems to me like it would not be an obviously derivative work (i doubt you could copyright it but that's a separate question). So we have 1 machine that can transform something into non-derivative work, and another that leaves the result derivative. The line isn't likely going to be drawn as "did a machine do it or not", but on a fuzzy human line of how close the output seems to be to the original (IANAL).
by EdNutting | 2026-03-10 00:30:19+00:00
Inmos’ Occam-based verification of their FPU in collaboration with researchers at Bristol and Oxford iirc? Citation: http://people.cs.bris.ac.uk/~dave/formalmethods.pdf

David May was my PhD supervisor and always spoke very highly of Sir Tony Hoare.

Edit: I’m also lucky enough to have worked with Geoff Barrett, the guy that completed that formal verification (and went on to do numerous other interesting things). Some people may be interested to learn that this work was the very first formal verification of an FPU - and the famous Intel FPU bug could have been avoided had Intel been using the verification methods that the Inmos and University teams pioneered.
by adrianwaj | 2026-03-10 00:30:26+00:00
Also, “in most states, there is no regular procedure for reconsidering the guilt of a convicted defendant after death; that’s one reason why posthumous exonerations are so rare.”

https://exonerationregistry.org/sites/exonerationregistry.or...

In the end it's more about the appearance of justice than actually performing it. And even in the performance of it, it is still just that: a performance.

If you were to have capital punishment, I'd make prosecutors liable for any knowingly false accusations and the withholding of evidence. And even without that, things will change fast after a few posthumous exonerations anyway when the pitchforks of the deceased's relatives come out for the phony witnesses and corrupt cops.

It's called the "justice system" but how can people be so sure it is? Justice only for the rich or the "club members"? Is it audited? Who gets to hide or shield from it under the guise of "national security?"

I recently heard someone say: "Cops kill cops who don't trust other cops?" Why is that?
by esrauch | 2026-03-10 00:30:28+00:00
It's not at all obvious whether copyright net protects or destroys the little guy.

It definitely does some of both, and we have no obvious measure or counterfactual to know otherwise.

You also have to take into account not just if optimal reform or optimal dismantle is better, but the realistic likelihood of each, and the risk of the bad outcomes from each.

Protect even more conceptual product ideas seems pretty strongly like it will result in more of a tool for big guys only, it's patents on crack and patents are already nearly exclusively "big guy crushes small guy" tool, versus copyright is at least debatably mixed.
by bayarearefugee | 2026-03-10 00:31:02+00:00
> I hope the lawnmower goes bankrupt with this and the hostile WB take over.

Unfortunately there is no chance of that happening.

At his level of personal wealth there is no realistic scenario that leads to personal bankruptcy. In our current capitalist society once you're into the billions you're "too big to fail" and you have unlocked the infinite money glitch.

The only consolation is the lawnmower is 81 and thus is going to be dead soon (even the mega-wealthy can't plastic surgery themselves out of this outcome, at least not yet) and he can't take any of it with him. But all indications point to his progeny having aspirations to be even more damaging to society than he has been.
by redgridtactical | 2026-03-10 00:32:02+00:00
I've started building better, simpler tools for military use. Every soldier who's touched a DAGR (AN/PSN-13) knows the pain — $2,500, weighs a pound, UI from 2003, and half the time you're fighting the device instead of navigating. I built Red Grid MGRS to put the same core land nav capabilities into a phone app.

What it does:

Live 10-digit MGRS grid
Dead reckoning, two-point resection, pace count, back azimuth
Magnetic declination (auto or manual)
Waypoint lists with bearing/distance and a wayfinder arrow
6 radio report templates (SALUTE, 9-Line MEDEVAC, SPOT, CASEVAC, ICS 201, CFF)
NATO phonetic voice readout
NVG-compatible green theme
Fully offline — zero tracking, zero network calls, zero data collection. On the App Store. Open source on GitHub.

What surprised me is how little effort this actually took to build. The MGRS math, geodetic calculations, report formats — it's all public domain stuff that's been around for decades. The military is full of overpriced, outdated systems doing things a modern phone handles better. I'm hoping this sparks some genuine innovation, because the people who depend on these tools deserve better than what they're getting.
by vladdoster | 2026-03-10 00:32:04+00:00
Location: Nashville, TN
Remote: true
Willing to relocate: boston || nashville
Technologies: Python, Django, IaC, Terraform, Golang, CI/CD, Azure/AWS, {ba,z}sh, Lua, Springboot,
Redis, Docker, Open Service Broker, {,non}relational & vector dbs, shared services, SOA
Email: mvdoster@gmail.com

resume: https://linkedin.vdoster.com && http://github.com/vladdoster

sr. cloud software engineer @ Mastercard (5 years)

Designed and built Platform-as-a-Service for microservice workloads running on Azure and AWS
to migrate on-prem workloads to the cloud. The platform operates globally, allowing teams to
deploy to several Azure-backed regions worldwide. Helped plan and create regional landing zones
in Azure for application teams wanting to perform globally. Designed platform components using
Terraform, Go, and Node; developed support tooling using Bash, Python, and Azure CLI. De-risk the
platform by addressing security vulnerabilities and ensuring the platform is PCI compliant.

api/devops software engineer @ Harvard Medical School (2 years)

Worked as part of the DevOps team to manage a 15k core CentOS HPC cluster. Designed and implemented
Python-based security scanning pipeline to securely deploy & run Apptainer images via SLURM.
Coordinated cross-team emergency patching eﬀorts. Collaborated with researchers and engineers across
3-letter institutions to deliver secure research infrastructure. Built CI/CD Pipelines with GitHub, Jenkins,
to automate code builds, testing, and deployments. Wrote Puppet modules to manage configuration of HPC fleet.
Wrote custom Puppet module & Python scripts to automatically remediate Tenable findings.

full-stack software engineer @ Global Prior Art (3 years)

Used Django, Celery, Selenium grid, and AWS API Gateway for IP rotation to scrape USPTO patent PDFs,
apply CV for data extraction, and generate reports with relevant claims, saving employees 4-5 hours daily.
Wrote E2E black-box/fuzzing unit tests. Automated on-premise deployment via Github Actions and Ansible.

maintainer @ Zinit (5 years)

Develop and maintain a zsh plugin manager on Github with 4k stars. Implemented unit tests,
containerization, bug fixes, and new features.
See: https://github.com/zdharma-continuum/zinit

contributor @ Open-source documentation (5 years)

Contributed hundreds of documentation corrections and enhancements to 400+ open source projects.
by looselygoosy | 2026-03-10 00:32:22+00:00
I've been through six egg retrievals. I've probably been lucky in the the physical effects weren't bad for me (but I've had/have endometriosis so I'm pretty used to just dealing with pain and discomfort). The emotional effects were harder. Not just the stress of not knowing whether it was even going to work (most times it didn't), but also the hormonal shifts resulting in rapid mood swings and irritability - which my partner found hard to deal with.
by wahern | 2026-03-10 00:32:36+00:00
> The distinction of stack vs heap objects is an old distinction that is deeply encoded in the semantics of C. It's not obvious that's the right choice.

Nothing about C requires a contiguous stack, and there are perfectly standard C environments where the stack isn't contiguous, where call frames are allocated dynamically and managed (singularly or in groups) as a linked-list, e.g. some mainframe environments, gcc's segmented stacks, etc. C's automatic ("stack") variables are defined in terms of their lifetime, which is basically lexical.
by muyuu | 2026-03-10 00:32:40+00:00
deleting published stuff in any sort of decentralised network is always going to be limited at best

there is just no way to police what happens to data that is broadcast, which doesn't remove control away from the reader

it's annoying because in the abstract it's something everybody has the potential to need and need badly, but if you're afraid to put something out there to your name/pseudonym you really shouldn't
by whycome | 2026-03-10 00:32:40+00:00
Sometimes people look back on slavery as an institution and wonder "how did they ever do that?"
But the thing is, it was so ingrained economically and culturally.

In a hundred years (or less?) we will look back on meat from tortured animals with similar incredulity.

The abolitionist movement coincided with the industrial revolution. Maybe accessible meat replacements will have the same result.
by theultdev | 2026-03-10 00:34:07+00:00
Flagged for being offtopic and political flamebait for no reason. Has nothing to do with the TFA.

Side note: do you seriously believe that garbage?

Same old photos, same claims with no evidence, same anonymous phone calls.

Point to the actual smoking gun if you're going to post that drivel. But you can't because there isn't anything of substance there.

This is tabloid stuff. Doesn't belong here. You would think a user with that much karma would know that.
by sfpotter | 2026-03-10 00:34:33+00:00
With the service we used, they picked up and dropped off diapers once per week using a big truck. They also drove around to do the same for many other people at the same time. You can't call this diaper delivery "constant". And if the emissions from this are significant, you could always use an electric van.

How are you feeling: do you still think this is something only for performative environmentalists or "trad wives"? Neither of these descriptions apply in even the remotest sense to my wife or I.
by lkjdsklf | 2026-03-10 00:35:46+00:00
> There already are LLMs with open weights that are better at code than state of the art closed source models from a year ago.

A year ago, the "state of the art" models were total turds. So this isn't exactly good news

Not to mention the performance of local LLMs makes them utterly unusable unless you have multiple tens of thousands to invest in hardware (and that was before the recent price spike). If you're using commodity hardware, they're just awful to use.
by sfpotter | 2026-03-10 00:36:41+00:00
The truck would come by once a week to pick up all of our dirty diapers and drop off a new set of clean diapers. The service provided a bucket with a cloth bag inside of it that had enough capacity for one kid for a week. Packaging up = closing the lid of the bucket and leaving it outside the door of our apartment. They would drop off a new one of these buckets full of clean diapers each week (visiting many other people at the same time). Beyond all the environmental benefits, living in the city this was actually super convenient.
by ogou | 2026-03-10 00:37:24+00:00
A RAG-powered chatbot API that answers questions about a developer's professional background. I built it with Hono, LangChain, Mistral AI, and SQLite. I serve it on a Svelte site for my dev portfolio, but it works as a general API as well.

I dumped all my job background info into it: resumes, LinkedIn, cover letter snippets, GitHub repos, recommendations, projects, languages, volunteering, personal work, and even the story of building the thing itself.

It uses structured markdown files I created from all that as a RAG context. It doesn't automatically ingest LinkedIn or other services.

Here it is live:

https://joshuacurry.dev/

Here is the anonymized and secured API repo for general release:

https://github.com/lucidbeaming/chatjc
by trcarney | 2026-03-10 00:38:51+00:00
Don't get me wrong, this is a cool idea but the main complexity with DAGR is around the SAASM functionality which you can't do on a phone, at least not a publicly available one.

I also agree that you should be able to make a DAGR 2 that is much smaller and more powerful but it would always have to be a standalone device.
by bayarearefugee | 2026-03-10 00:39:33+00:00
Please provide a list of all multi-billionaires who have somehow managed to lose any significant portion of their wealth outside of a divorce combined with bad marriage planning. And even in those rare cases, they don't approach bankruptcy.

It isn't that they get bailed out by the government (like the banks in 2008), it is that at the scale of their wealth there is no realistic way to lose it fast enough to make any significant negative difference when the neutral state of wealth at that scale is to snowball ever larger (mostly because we refuse to tax it appropriately).
by madeofpalk | 2026-03-10 00:40:43+00:00
It absolutely does! In law and the courts

> The court held that making RAM copies as an essential step in utilizing software was permissible under §117 of the Copyright Act even if they are used for a purpose that the copyright holder did not intend.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vault_Corp._v._Quaid_Software_....
by SequoiaHope | 2026-03-10 00:40:57+00:00
Strong disagree. There absolutely are “more humane” methods but they are still not humane. Forced separation of mothers from their children (standard practice) and killing the animals before their natural death are two inhumane features of even “free range” practices.

There is no humane way to kill a creature against its will.

To be clear, free range represents a major improvement over the unconscionable horrors of factory farms, but it is not flatly “humane” without qualification.
by engelo_b | 2026-03-10 00:41:07+00:00
The ripple effects for automotive liability will be interesting to watch here. For a long time, insurance companies have viewed these citations as an easy signal for high-risk behavior. If that signal is now legally 'poisoned fruit' in Florida, it likely makes the move toward private telematics tracking your actual braking and speed via apps even more inevitable for the carriers. They are going to want that risk data one way or another, and private tracking bypasses the due process issues of municipal cameras.
by EdNutting | 2026-03-10 00:41:26+00:00
“Inspired by” is an understatement of the century lol. David May and Sir Tony worked very closely together to enable the architecture to be as pure a runtime for CSP as you could get - at least in early versions of the architecture and accompanying Occam language. It expanded and deviated a bit later on iirc.

Source: David loved to tell some of these stories to us as students at Bristol.
by Leftium | 2026-03-10 00:43:23+00:00
How does this compare to another beautiful way to frame time + c that really made sense to me:

- Everything is moving through space-time at c: c is not a limit; it's just the speed everything moves

- Things that don't appear to be moving in the physical dimensions have most or all of c spent in the time dimension

- Things that move very fast in the physical dimensions have little or none of c spent in the time dimension

- I think this is similar to your section explaining time dilation, but doesn't require rotation: https://lisajguo.substack.com/i/190415584/time-dilation

---

Other questions:

- Does this theory explain why we seem to only be able to travel through time in one direction? Why does the angle/direction of rotation (not) matter?
by usrusr | 2026-03-10 00:43:26+00:00
> Plus you then also need to get them all to rotate so that you can get the efficiency of normal flight.

Not when you simply don't use them for horizontal flight. You just shut the VTOL hatches and forget that you aren't a conventional airplane until you want to land but there isn't an airstrip.

Winged operation has to be efficient, no doubt about that. But hovering does not need much endurance when it's only for getting away from the ground and setting down.

Electric has the power density, even more so when you don't need the power for a long time (heat buildup, no need for an equilibrium). Electric suffers from energy density, but that's where the winged mode comes in (old fashioned jet turbine, with the generator slightly larger than usual so that you'll have full batteries for the short landing hover)
by redgridtactical | 2026-03-10 00:43:34+00:00
Great point — you're absolutely right that SAASM is the critical differentiator, and that's not something any civilian device can replicate. Red Grid MGRS runs on standard L1/L5 GPS, so it doesn't have the anti-spoofing or encrypted PPS capability that makes the DAGR essential in contested environments.

That said, the vast majority of DAGR usage I see isn't in GPS-denied or spoofed environments — it's in land nav training, patrol planning, calling in grids on routine ops, and reporting. For those use cases, a phone with good civilian GPS (3-5m accuracy now with dual-frequency) handles it fine.

I'd love to see a DAGR 2 that's smaller and cheaper while keeping SAASM though...here's to hoping we get more options
by justinclift | 2026-03-10 00:44:26+00:00
> The dispute drew responses from two prominent figures in the open source world.

Sure, but neither of those is an IP Lawyer.

The actual IP Lawyer who turned up and tried to engage, Richard Fontana, had his issue closed:

https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/334

Richard's point was this (quoted below):

---

FWIW, that case is not really relevant to what we are/were talking about here.

The question is whether you are truly an "author", or whether there was no (human) author.

The general legal consensus has been that generative AI output is not copyrightable (without some special facts of some sort, perhaps).

> If all of this code was somehow not copyrightable because someone wrote a prompt instead of directly editing the code, that would have pretty huge implications.

That's exactly it. Your act of applying the MIT license with your copyright notice
to code that you did not "directly edit" has enormous implications.
by Sleaker | 2026-03-10 00:44:47+00:00
Isn't the whole thing sidestepping another issue? If the code was rewritten with an AI, then it becomes a non-copyrightable work? Hasn't this already gone through the courts? So isn't the resulting library de facto public domain, even if the maintainer wants to try and attach a license to it?

Edit: looks like an IP lawyer had this exact issue on the GitHub and it was closed.
by EdNutting | 2026-03-10 00:44:53+00:00
It’s also worth highlighting that the mathematical purity of the designs were also partly the problem with them. As a field, we’re still developing the maths of Effects and Effectful Algebras that are needed to make these systems both mathematically ‘pure’ (or at least sound to within some boundary) and ALSO capable of interfacing to the real world.

Transputer and Occam were, in this sense, too early. A rebuild now combining more recent developments from Effect Algebras would be very interesting technically. (Commercially there are all sorts of barriers).
by scottlamb | 2026-03-10 00:45:16+00:00
I've eyed Axis cameras but they're pricy (particularly for large sensors) and don't seem to come in the turret form factor I prefer. E.g. the AXIS M4317-PLVE is a dome and $717 at newegg. Kinda a weird model actually—180/360 degree view which isn't what I'd want. But I haven't found anything that is at a price I'd like to pay myself, let alone recommend to others for home use.

Vivotek's a bit more reasonable but still. The (brand new?) Vivotek VIT04A-W is the closest I've found—1/1.8" sensor, 4MP, turret, $535 on jmac.com.

These Ubiquiti models seem really nice in terms of hardware specs and and very reasonably priced. $200 for a 1/1.8" sensor turret, $479 for a 1/1.2" sensor turret with extra AI features. Same general price bracket as Dahua, I think.
by bakugo | 2026-03-10 00:45:21+00:00
I just went and read one of his recent posts at: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/5/chardet/

The entire thing is just quotes and a retelling of events. The closest thing to a "take" I could find is this:

> I have no idea how this one is going to play out. I’m personally leaning towards the idea that the rewrite is legitimate, but the arguments on both sides of this are entirely credible.

Which effectively says nothing. It doesn't add anything the discussion around the topic, informed or not, and the post doesn't seem to serve any purpose beyond existing as an excuse to be linked to and siphon attention away from the original discussion (I wonder if the sponsor banner at the top of the blog could have something to do with that...?)

This seems to be a pattern, at least in recent times. Here's another egregious example: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/21/claws/

Literally just a quote from his fellow member of the "never stops talking about AI" club, Karpathy. No substance, no elaboration, just something someone else said or did pasted on his blog followed by a short agreement. Again, doesn't add anything or serve any real purpose, but was for some reason submitted to HN instead of the original tweet[1]. The original link was eventually submitted a whole 9 hours later[2] and superseded it, but of course, it still had to contain a link to Simon's blog in the body, too.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47099160

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47096253
by aziaziazi | 2026-03-10 00:45:21+00:00
I depends the beans and their freshness. If soaked and not 2yo+, it’s less than 1 hour for most of them. 30 min is enough for azuki and chickpeas if soaked 48h.

There’s other tricks: various beans can be found in the form of instant powder or flaskes (1 min watering - no cooking) semolina (5 min watering - no cooking) and pre steamed (no watering - 10/20 min cooking). I bring those to hike on the mountain and use gaz only to make them hot. Mixed with cereals semolina, spices, herbs and oil/nuts its the perfect submit meal.