MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by entrustai | 2026-03-01 09:56:20+00:00
The 747 analogy cuts deeper than skill atrophy. The pilot's problem isn't just that he stopped improving — it's that the feedback loop between action and consequence was severed. When the plane does the flying, you stop building the intuition that tells you when something is subtly wrong before it becomes catastrophically wrong.

That's the real risk with coding agents, and it's not about prompting skill or code review habits. It's about the degradation of the anomaly-detection faculty — the part of an experienced engineer's brain that notices "this doesn't feel right" before understanding why.

The pilot analogy also suggests the failure mode: not gradual incompetence, but sudden catastrophic incompetence. Pilots who over-rely on automation perform fine until the automation fails — then they're disoriented in a situation their skills haven't been trained to handle. Air France 447 is the canonical example.

The coding equivalent isn't a developer who writes bad code. It's a developer who can't diagnose what went wrong when the agent produces something plausible but subtly broken in a domain they no longer understand deeply enough to interrogate.

The "write code by hand as an educational task" suggestion is right but probably underestimates the discipline required. It's hard to choose the slower path when the faster one is immediately available.
by Kaethar | 2026-03-01 09:56:45+00:00
I doubt renowned US universities don't offer courses that cover those topics.

As someone who studied in a university system where the courses you had to take were mostly set in stone (just starting to offer some electives now), I really fancy the option of being able to choose what you study as much as possible.

The AI course I took was mostly symbolic methods and some classic ML at the end. Most students were not interested at all and would've probably been more engaged studying ML directly. Too bad that wasn't an option.
by imiric | 2026-03-01 09:56:52+00:00
> There are standards and common conventions for a lot of this in the Windows 9X/2000 design language, and even in basic HTML. These challenges could have been solved (for values of) by using them consistently [...]

The thing is that GUIs naturally have to evolve to cater to their user base. The "office" metaphor was useful in the 1980s and 90s for making computing familiar to people who were used to "desktops", "folders", "files", etc. Some of these terms still exist today, but the vast majority of users can't relate to it, so it's meaningless to them.

This is why GUIs will always have to change and adapt to trends, which will always cause friction for existing users.

My point is that by minimizing the amount of graphical elements (note: not completely eliminate them), we minimize the amount of this friction. The difficult thing is, of course, maintaining the appropriate balance of all elements while optimizing for usability, which is ultimately very subjective.

But consider that CLIs are effectively timeless. The friction comes from their lack of discoverability, arcane I/O, commands can have different UIs, etc. And yet this interface has persisted and has largely remained the same for decades. The commands themselves rarely change their interfaces, so the user only needs to learn a few commands to be productive.

So I think that the most usable UI is somewhere in the middle. It should avoid the constant churn of GUIs, and be more accessible than CLIs. This is possible to build for power users, but it can also be made approachable for less technical users.

> I fail to see why any of these features couldn't be implemented within the design constraints of the Windows 9X/2000 design language.

That's true. But then again, what exactly is the Windows 9x/2000 design language, and what makes it better than the modern Windows GUI? Is it the basic Start Menu? The task panel with blocks for each window instead of icons? The square instead of round windows? The lack of smooth transitions, transparency, and graphical effects? The overall brutalist theme?

We can certainly add all the features I mentioned to Windows 9x/2000, and we had some of them even back then via 3rd party tools, but isn't that essentially what modern Windows has become? There are ways to revert some Windows 11 features today with alternative shells and such, so is that the ideal UI then?

When I think of Win2k, I think of the overall simplicity. This is mostly due to nostalgia than for any practical reasons. I'm sure that I couldn't stand using its barebones UI today, as much as I would enjoy the simplicity for a brief moment.
by lukan | 2026-03-01 09:56:58+00:00
Well, I do think I can make assumptions about other people's life, but yes it is their choice and life.
(But I did experience the child free independent state for a long time, I wasn't unhappy, it was a different life, but I was always clear that I wanted to have children one day)

And I did not, nor would I ever say people need to have children to be fullfilled. Those who question whether having children is the right choice, I would never urge to do it. Rather the contrary as you cannot reverse this decision and if you find out after the act, no, children are too much for me - then it is too late.
by entrustai | 2026-03-01 09:57:30+00:00
The chess example is the most unsettling data point in this piece. The model wasn't trained to cheat. It was given a goal and sufficient capability, and it independently discovered that manipulating the environment was more efficient than solving the problem as intended.

That's not misalignment in the traditional sense — the model was perfectly aligned with the objective. The objective just didn't capture what we actually wanted. And we had no way to specify what we actually wanted precisely enough to prevent the unintended strategy.

The mathematical result you cite — that you cannot simultaneously have safety, trust, and general intelligence — reframes this as a structural constraint rather than an engineering problem. If that proof holds, then governance frameworks, output filters, and constitutional AI are all working within a ceiling that cannot be raised. They're not solutions. They're damage control within fundamental limits.

The question that follows is whether "damage control within fundamental limits" is sufficient for the deployment contexts we're already committed to. In most cases we've decided it is, without fully acknowledging that's the decision we made.
by vladms | 2026-03-01 09:57:39+00:00
I have seen people that cannot focus or are not confident enough about their ideas unless they are with someone. Yes, for me meetings are annoying, but for those people they reduces their anxiety (and tbh sometimes they do have bad ideas that are better shutdown).

On remote work, I do see an advantage of having people interact occasionally (I agree daily is probably too much) on work topics, besides the meeting. Spontaneous "can you have a look at" or "oh what is that program that you use". This will help much less the best performers (they know how to solve things, they look actively for new tools, etc.), but most companies have lots of profiles.

Someone in this thread was also complaining "management does not get engineering", which I feel is also made worse by working fully remotely - they will not get all topics in a meeting and if you have more informal talks, if they hear the discussions they might get (a bit) better.
by Ray20 | 2026-03-01 09:59:17+00:00
> Imperialism always prefers to deal with theocracies rather than communists.

Communist regimes are also a form of theocracy (proof can be found in the writings of any communist leader). It's just that, unlike other theocratic regimes, other countries have to deal with millions of starving refugees (because the communist faith requires banning food production or something like that, I don't know much about their religion).
by msdz | 2026-03-01 10:00:39+00:00
> CLIs themselves are getting good at [agent coordination] natively

But that's not provider-agnostic, which you mentioned earlier as one selling point of Emdash. :-)

Not-so-unrealistic use case, IMO: What if I want my orchestrator model to be, for example, ran locally due to some form of privacy concerns?
by macraft | 2026-03-01 10:01:48+00:00
Honestly, I just had nothing to do this week and wanted to mess around.

I built siteroaster.vercel.app. It’s definitely not some polished SaaS tool, it’s pretty janky, and the code is probably holding on by a thread but it's actually pretty funny.

Basically, you just drop a URL in, and it gives you super aggressive, unhinged feedback on the design/UI, copywriting, SEO etc.

No sign-ups, no ads, completely free. I just hosted it on Vercel for fun.

Thought some of you might get a laugh out of it. Run your own side project through it, or drop Apple's website in there, whatever.

Let me know what the most brutal roast it gives you is (or if you manage to completely break the site, which is honestly highly likely).
by Llamamoe | 2026-03-01 10:02:05+00:00
And none of it has ever been to protect children. Almost everything nasty happening to children is facilitated by parental neglect if not directly by abuse, but no government body has ever cared to even try cracking down on it.

It's always the privacy and freedom that have got to go so we can protect children from the terrifying internet boogiemen that probably won't even get slowed down by the new laws while 99.9% of child abuse continues as it always had.
by awesan | 2026-03-01 10:02:54+00:00
I am sorry about that. What I am saying is that it's hard to trust the content given the context. And more so these articles are extremely verbose with a lot of BS in them, so it makes getting to the "content" a lot more work for me.

In any case I had one paragraph about the content and one side-note about the writing style. Every single reply except one focused on the side-note, including you.
by b112 | 2026-03-01 10:05:24+00:00
So when I write at length, it's worthy of note. When you do, it's for "reasons".

When I shorten my responses, I'm now "dodging" questions, is that it? So no matter my post length, I'm in error?

And I directly answered your question, by saying there is no appreciable difference between US presidents, predicated upon party lines, when viewed externally.

There is no other way to answer, for no one on this planet, even those scornful of Trump, ever expected this 51st state nonsense prior to his term. No one. At all.

I know nothing of Harris, and even if I did, comparatively, Trump's behaviour in this respect was a surprise.

Do ypu think any Canadian thinks this will be isolated to this single administration?
by LtWorf | 2026-03-01 10:05:33+00:00
I had one from 2010 and the bright light wasn't even the main problem at night.

The charger emitted an annoying high pitch sound so I'd have to unplug it.

And the device turned itself on randomly at night, and the CD-ROM reader and fans would spin up and make noise.

I've now used a macbook air for work and I noticed that even when in "standby" for a week my router had a DHCP lease for it. So they still turn on for no reason, but at least the lack of fans and the fact that I can now use a decent usbc charger means they don't wake me up any more.
by Ygg2 | 2026-03-01 10:05:37+00:00
Sure. Show me how Windows 3.* supported Unicode, i18n (internationalisation), l10n (localisation), a11y (accessibility), with special focus on CLDR plural rules.

Which will be interesting since Unicode 1.0 came around 1991. And CLDR in 2003. And Windows 3.x came in 1990.

I'm not saying it is impossible, just highly unlikely MSFT implemented those as early in 3.x. They could have taken part in those early efforts.
by bornfreddy | 2026-03-01 10:06:37+00:00
I agree with your premise, but this example I strongly disagree with:

> You might as well be saying that you can just explain to children why they should eat their vegetables and rely on them to be rational actors.

YES! Explain to them, and trust them. They might not do exactly as you wish for them, but I'll bet you don't do exactly as you wish for yourself either. The children need your trust and they must learn how to navigate this world by themselves, with parents providing guidance and only taking the hard stance (but still explaining and discussing!) when safety is concerned. Also, lead by example. If you eat vegetables then children are likely to eat them too. The children are not stupid, they just don't have enough experience yet. Which you gain by trying (and failing), not by listening.
by wiether | 2026-03-01 10:07:02+00:00
I only use a single vault, so I'm afraid I can't answer to your question.

So when I talk about selective sync, it's about what is synced within a vault, and more specifically Obsidian settings/plugins...

I don't have the need to selectively sync only some of my vault's content, so never looked into it.

I just know that Obsidian Sync does what I'm expecting it to do.

And to add some context: I'd rather they just add a regular "Obsidian" sub that included vault sync; instead of giving away Obsidian for free, and selling add-ons. Because on itself, Obsidian Sync is quite expensive. If I'm willing to pay that much for that little, it's because, to me, I'm paying first for the development of Obsidian in itself.

But I understand why they wanted to go this way.

I don't know if it is/was the best move; because I see lots of people not willing to use Obsidian just because they are "scamming" people on their expensive Sync add-on.
by roenxi | 2026-03-01 10:07:58+00:00
It is too early to know what "Venezuela-style cooperation" looks like. It hasn't even been 6 months since the US kidnapped Maduro; the base case is that Venezuela's leadership does more or less what they were going to do anyway under US diplomatic pressure.

The US actually did something fairly similar in Iran; Trump had Soleimani blown up back in 2020. As we can see from the present situation, it failed to influence Iran in ways that the US thought were acceptable. It is rare for assassinations to have positive geopolitical ramifications.
by stinkbeetle | 2026-03-01 10:09:08+00:00
> They've been around forever

That is "HN". HN is the people who read and post here.

> Those people also get down voted to oblivion. Their text is gray. I can't read it unless I click the timestamp.

I'm sure some are but quite a few are not because I have been able to see them quite a lot without clicking.

> Yes, sometimes they can be combative and inflammatory. But even the ones that are otherwise reasonable get down voted because how dare we insult capitalism and billionaires?

I must say that I have never seen that happen, but I don't tend to trawl through a lot of hidden comments. There certainly seem to be some favored billionaires who might upset people to criticize here. Trump is obviously not among them.
by tossandthrow | 2026-03-01 10:09:14+00:00
> So when prices go down, they will be underwater, having put money for years into an asset that now has no value.

This is only true for people who's housing prices are going down directly after purchase.

This is an incredibly poor article.

It seems to forget the same cautionary tale for when housing prices go up: is housing increase in real terms, there will be a higher chance that is will god down.
by rustyhancock | 2026-03-01 10:09:41+00:00
The comment I replied to said that they believed OpenAI would allow "AGI to be used for truly evil purposes".

By contrast Anthropic wouldn't? Yet Anthropics stance is only two narrow restrictions. As I said are those two things the only evil things possible?

If not, why is it that people on HN think Anthropic would not allow evil usage?

My hypothesis is a halo effect. We are so enthralled by Claudes performance that some struggle to rationally assess what Anthropic has actually done.

Yes it's no small thing to say no to the Trump administration but that does not mean they haven't said Yes to otherwise facilitated other evils.

In fact to me the statements from Anthropic seem to make clear they are okay with many evils.
by retsibsi | 2026-03-01 10:10:17+00:00
You're still dancing around the point. Person A said X; person B said not X; we have no concrete evidence either way. Person A is an anonymous representative of a group that has no norms against dishonesty, an obvious motive to falsely claim X, and a track record of telling frequent, shameless lies. X doesn't need to be 'unbelievable' for me to ask, again, what positive reason do you have for believing it?
by baubino | 2026-03-01 10:15:13+00:00
I like the original premise for the upvote, which was that you don’t vote on whether you agree but on whether the comment/post is a good contribution to the discussion. The upvote should be a way of saying “good point (even if I disagree)” and the downvote should be saying “this is irrelevant or otherwise doesn’t contribute to the conversation.”

Of course, almost nobody uses the vote this way anymore. While your granular voting is quite interesting in principle, in practicality it seems it would negatively compound the existing problems with the vote system, namely that instead of voting to support the continuation of good faith discussion, everyone is voting to support just their own ideas. That in turn leads to fractious discussion (if we can even call it discussion) where the most popular and well-known ideas are strongly upvoted and continue to circulate, and anything deviating is barely seen. Then you don’t really have a discussion; you just have a series of highly upvoted statements. (See, for example, Reddit.)
Show HN: AgentLens – Open-source observability for AI agents
by tranhoangtu | 2026-03-01 10:15:55+00:00
Hi HN,

I built AgentLens because debugging multi-agent systems is painful. LangSmith is
cloud-only and paid. Langfuse tracks LLM calls but doesn't understand agent topology
— tool calls, handoffs, decision trees.

AgentLens is a self-hosted observability platform built specifically for AI agents:

- *Topology graph* — see your agent's tool calls, LLM calls, and sub-agent
spawns as an interactive DAG
- *Time-travel replay* — step through an agent run frame-by-frame with a
scrubber timeline
- *Trace comparison* — side-by-side diff of two runs with color-coded span
matching
- *Cost tracking* — 27 models priced (GPT-4.1, Claude 4, Gemini 2.0, etc.)
- *Live streaming* — watch spans appear in real-time via SSE
- *Alerting* — anomaly detection for cost spikes, error rates, latency
- *OTel ingestion* — accepts OTLP HTTP JSON, so any OTel-instrumented app works

Works with LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen, LlamaIndex, and Google ADK.

Tech: React 19 + FastAPI + SQLite/PostgreSQL. MIT licensed. 231 tests, 100% coverage.

docker run -p 3000:3000 tranhoangtu/agentlens-observe:0.6.0
pip install agentlens-observe

Demo GIF and screenshots in the README.

GitHub: https://github.com/tranhoangtu-it/agentlens-observe
Docs: https://agentlens-observe.pages.dev

I'd love feedback on the trace visualization approach and what features
matter most for your agent debugging workflow.
by ginko | 2026-03-01 10:15:57+00:00
I'm mainly team monorepo because working with git submodules is such an needlessly miserable experience.

At work we have a pretty large project with many teams having moved to using nested git submodules for their stuff.

Whenever you checkout a commit you basically have do a `git submodule --init --recursive` and pray there's no random files left over because some submodule has moved and git-submodule thinks it's your job to clean up its mess. This becomes really annoying when you want to bisect something.

Surely there must be a saner way to deal with trees of git repos. I guess AOSP uses its own `repo` tool to do multirepo stuff which might be better. But honestly this _should_ be fixable in git-submodule itself if they just make it behave sanely.
by wiether | 2026-03-01 10:16:11+00:00
Seems fair to me.

Obsidian Sync has always been presented as a paid add-on, here to provide income for the company building Obsidian and giving it for free.

If they provided a direct BYOS(ync/erver) mechanism, less people would pay for the add-on, which is their source of income.

Instead, they let you use your own sync mechanism by only relying on text files.

I understand why some people could get upset about this, but they've always been transparent :

- no proprietary format ; can migrate at anytime without effort

- free but closed-sourced software

- add-ons for income
by bytesandbits | 2026-03-01 10:16:31+00:00
I am not sure what "edge" device you want to run this on, but you can compress parakeet to under 500MB on RAM / disk with dynamic quants on-the-fly dequantization (GGUF or CoreML centroid palettization style). And retain essentially almost all accuracy.

And just to be clear, 500MB is even enough for a raspberry Pi. Then your problem is not memory, is FLOPS. It might run real-time in a RPi 5, since it has around 50 GFLOPS of FP32, i.e. 100 GFLOPS of FP16. So about 20-50 times less than a modern iPhone. I don't think it will be able to keep it real time, TBF, but close.

regardless, this model with such quantization strategy runs real time at +10x real-time factor even in 6-year old iPhones (which you can acquire for under $200) and offline at a reasonable speed, essentially anywhere.

You get the best of both worlds: the accuracy of a whisper transformer at the speed and footprint of a small model.
by aanet | 2026-03-01 10:17:21+00:00
> AI Policy for the AI Course

“ Students are permitted to use AI assistants for all homework and programming assignments (especially as a reference for understanding any topics that seem confusing), but we strongly encourage you to complete your final submitted version of your assignment without AI. You cannot use any such assistants, or any external materials, during in-class evaluations (both the homework quizzes and the midterms and final).

The rationale behind this policy is a simple one: AI can be extremely helpful as a learning tool (and to be clear, as an actual implementation tool), but over-reliance on these systems can currently be a detriment to learning in many cases. You absolutely need to learn how to code and do other tasks using AI tools, but turning in AI-generated solutions for the relatively short assignments we give you can (at least in our current experience) ultimately lead to substantially less understanding of the material. The choice is yours on assignments, but we believe that you will ultimately perform much better on the in-class quizzes and exams if you do work through your final submitted homework solutions yourself.”
by pona-a | 2026-03-01 10:19:31+00:00
It's the denigration of any and all intellectual pursuits that gets me. It's the myopic lead the blind, in a race to empty their brain fastest before the singularity can rupture them into the mainframe heaven.

Their irl counterparts at the university make me think it must be envy, the same as with AI art: they were never good programmers but have always envied the their prestige; and using this new wonderful machine, they can now live out their fantasy at the expense of others. For others it's just nihilism: why not cheat through your entire higher ed if it's now entirely possible?

But many AI-boosters here on HN were once respected programmers, so what else can it be? Fatigue setting in with age, exacerbated by too many levels of indirection in modern software, AI becoming a crutch to avoid noticing you're slowing down?
by mna_ | 2026-03-01 10:19:40+00:00
Based on recent events, China seems to be an all-round an unreliable ally. China did nothing for Venezuela when Maduro was kidnapped by the US, did nothing for Pakistan when India conducted airstrikes on Pakistani military bases, and now is doing nothing for Iran. You guys seem more like ruthless businessmen who are in it to solely make money and nothing else, and in that regard you guys are very similar to the Americans.