MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dnautics | 2026-03-10 20:13:37+00:00
no. I'm a pretty skilled programmer and I definitely have to intervene and fix an architectural problem here and there, or gently chastise the LLM for doing something dumb. But there are also many cases where the LLM has seen something that i completely missed or just hammered away at a problem enough to get a solution that is correct that I would have just given up on earlier.

The clanker can produce better programs than me because it will just try shit that I would never have tried, and it can fail more times than I can in a given period of time. It has specific advantages over me.
by oraphalous | 2026-03-10 20:13:58+00:00
> I did not actually call the author insane...

If you think this distinction really matters wrt the point I'm trying to make, then it's time for you and I to bug out conversationally. Sometimes two individuals have such different ways of communicating that the pain of exegesis isn't worth the squeeze. No hard feelings. I'm sure 50% responsibility is at least mine, but it's not going to be worth it for either of us figuring out exactly what.
by brandonb | 2026-03-10 20:13:59+00:00
Regulation is quickly catching up to modern AI techniques; for the most part, the approach is to verify outputs rather than process. For example, Utah's pilot to let AI prescribe medications has doctors check the first N prescriptions of each medication. Medicare is starting to pay for AI-enabled care, but tying payment to objective biomarkers like cholesterol or blood pressure actually got better.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-03-10 20:14:08+00:00
> I think you're doing yourself, and all freedom loving peoples a disservice by dividing the victims of this state action.

There have been at least 2 explicit murders by state actors on the streets, hundreds of wrongfully deported people who aren't back to this day, and thousands stuck in concentration camps.

No, it's not at '6 million jews' level (yet). But I'm fairly comfortable admitting that these actions are at a scale where we aren't too different from Russia nor China. Downplaying it now is how we get to those massive, unignorable numbers later on.

>If there is to be any resistance to state over reach, telling the racial majority of the country that it doesn't happen to them or it's not a "white/euro american issue" is counterproductive at best.

It disproportionately is not happening to them, though. That's what made the 2 murders mentioned earlier so high profile. Undeniably white suburban citizens gunned down.

I'm not telling them to not take action. It's more like their inaction or outright support is why we got this far to begin with. No snowflake feels at fault in an avalanche.
by zer00eyz | 2026-03-10 20:14:16+00:00
> how do you review all the code?

Code review is a skill, as is reading code. You're going to quickly learn to master it.

> It's like 20k of line changes over 30-40 commits.

You run it, in a debugger and step through every single line along your "happy paths". You're building a mental model of execution while you watch it work.

> One solution is to start from scratch again, using this branch as a reference, to reimplement in smaller PRs. I'm not sure this would actually save time overall though.

Not going to be a time saver, but next time you want to take nibbles and bites, and then merge the branches in (with the history). The hard lesson here is around task decomposition, in line documentation (cross referenced) and digestible chunks.

But if you get step debugging running and do the hard thing of getting through reading the code you will come out the other end of the (painful) process stronger and better resourced for the future.
by kasey_junk | 2026-03-10 20:14:44+00:00
There is no legal requirement to maximize shareholder value. The very idea is an economic theory popularized by Friedman and his students.

It gained popularity in corporate governance since then but it’s not a legal requirement it’s a shareholder preference. But that preference is violated all the time.

People often cite a 1919 era case from Henry ford because it has a pithy statement but the court in that case explicitly upheld many of the decisions Ford made that violated the principle.

That is, there is no law or precedent that requires corporate officers to only consider shareholders.
by rramadass | 2026-03-10 20:15:03+00:00
No, it is not my sentiment nor am i being censorious.

It can be inferred from Kay's own words. He probably was just poking fun in a tongue-in-cheek manner often seen amongst larger-than-life figures.

John Backus called Edsger Dijkstra arrogant since the latter was highly critical of the former's research in functional programming (not the substance but the hyping). Kay was probably riffing off of that.

The problem is that a lot of noobs/kids/oldies-who-should-know-better often dismiss(!) Dijkstra's work because of this silly quote. Thus in this case, a "nice story" is actually an obstacle to people reading Dijkstra.
by gjsman-1000 | 2026-03-10 20:15:21+00:00
> It never stopped a thing. Clearly, it only exists to cover someone's arses and check some boxes off the requirement lists.

Yes, and traffic lights and speed limit signs have no physical mechanism of stopping a driver directly, those who violate them escape without consequences 99%+ of the time, and the 1% that get caught are only penalized after they physically did so already. Clearly, security theater at its finest.

To go even further, only 54% of murders get cleared. 46% are never cleared. Which shows, clearly, the rule against murder is ludicrously ineffective security theater. What's the point of a law that only works on a coin flip, am I right?
by hrmtst93837 | 2026-03-10 20:15:23+00:00
You can slap on any punishment clause you want but verifying LLM-origin content without some kind of confession is shaky at best outside obvious cases like ChatGPT meta-fingerprints or copy-paste gaffes. Realistically, it boils down to vibes and suspicion unless you force everyone to record their keystrokes while coding which only works if you want surveillance. If the project ever matters at scale people will start discussing how enforceability degrades as outputs get more human-like.
by mgrassotti | 2026-03-10 20:15:28+00:00
You can use a Claude PreToolUse command hook to prevent write (or even read) access to specific files.

With this approach you can enforce that Claude cannot access to specific files. It’s a guarantee and will always work, unlike a prompt or Claude.md which is just a suggestion that can be forgotten or ignored.

This post has an example hook for blocking access to sensitive files:

https://aiorg.dev/blog/claude-code-hooks#:~:text=Protect%20s...
by gitaarik | 2026-03-10 20:15:41+00:00
With the idea of the recent HN article that files are the common media of communication between humans and LLM's, it's still useful to have direct file-skills; to be able to read raw files the LLM outputs, or give it input through files, and able to manipulate the files efficiently. You can use an LLM to prompt to search through the files and all that, but for such basic things it's worth learning it yourself, if you do it often.
by ZekiAI2026 | 2026-03-10 20:15:43+00:00
The NFKC normalization is correct — closes the homoglyph class almost entirely. Most commercial firewalls skip this step, which is why unicode vectors reliably pass.

PromptGuard disclosure is being compiled now. Full 18-vector suite with evasion rates per class. Will post it here when ready.

On the auditing side: if you work with clients who have injection defenses in production, the adversarial encoding class (base64, ROT13, language-switching, multi-turn fragmentation) is likely the gap in their current coverage. Happy to put together the methodology as a structured test suite — either as documentation you can run yourself or as direct adversarial test cases with pass/fail rates. DM if useful.
by badsectoracula | 2026-03-10 20:16:29+00:00
> Magit is absolutely the best Git GUI ever.

But it isn't graphical :-P.

Personally i've been often looking for an opensource Git GUI front end but couldn't find anything i'd like. My points of reference of decent tools -ignoring the underlying tech- are Perforce and TortoiseSVN under Windows and Fuel[0] (for Fossil) and KDESVN under Linux.

Perforce and Fuel are the two i like the most, followed by KDESVN and Tortoise. But since i'm on Linux and i stick with opensource projects, Perforce and Tortoise are out, leaving me with Fuel and KDESVN. I'm using KDESVN for a few projects where i don't care about external collaboration and want to store many binary files (which Subversion does it better that Git IMO), though KDESVN is very primitive and limited in what it supports (it doesn't support shelving at all, for example - in fact for anything beyond commit and checking the history you probably need to use the cli tool). I do not use Fossil much nowadays but i used it a lot in the past so i have a bunch of repositories in it, for which i use Fuel. Fuel is unfortunately not being developed anymore, though since it is opensource it doesn't matter much (which is a reason why i ignore anything non-opensource, i know there are some decent proprietary Git clients but for me they might as well not exist).

I think at some point i'll grab libgit2 and make something using Lazarus, probably something similar to Fuel. Unlike libsvn, which seems to be made in hell, libgit2 seems very sane and shouldn't be terribly hard to make something usable out of it.

In the meanwhile i use a combination of git cola, gitgui and gitk though they all feel like a hodgepodge of barely thought random features thrown in together (and i hate that they all want to impose their own idea of how i should format a message -especially git cola- which of course aren't identical between of them and aren't even close how i'd like to format the messages myself).

https://fuel-scm.org/fossil/index
by rbanffy | 2026-03-10 20:16:53+00:00
If we think of spacetime as some sort of cellular automaton, where each state of a given point is a function (with some randomness, because God likes to throw dice) of previous states of the surrounding points, if the rules for a new state generation are extremely complex, there will be some significant overhead in dimensions we don't see, because the rules need to be somehow represented outside the observable reality. Another issue with this idea is that while the rules might be "outside", the parameters themselves have to be somehow encoded in the state of a cell, and can't propagate faster than light, or one cell (an indivisible unit of space) per indivisible unit of time), which limits the number of parameters accessible to any given cell to the ones immediately surrounding it.

Disclaimer: I hope it's obvious, but I'm no physicist. This is just how I would build a universe.
Show HN: An on-device Mac app for real-time posture reminders
by data-leon | 2026-03-10 20:17:43+00:00
Built this because I wanted a simple posture app I could leave running all day without extra friction. It runs locally on Mac, watches for posture drift in real time, and nudges you when you start slouching.

I’d especially love feedback on accuracy, privacy expectations, and whether the reminders feel useful in practice.

Cheers!
by foxglacier | 2026-03-10 20:18:16+00:00
With streaming content, the barrier to just copying it is already as high as pirating. You don't just have a file you can email to your friend -- you have to install and use software to capture the video and then handle the big file that results, on your phone, which is awkward. And that just gives you one movie which in isolation is barely worth anyone's attention to begin with. By the time you've figured out all that, you could have just figured out how to torrent, or even easier, find a free Chinese website that streams the pirated content to your browser just like the original service.
by tavavex | 2026-03-10 20:18:17+00:00
> Stealer malware is running rampant on the PC platform.

It exists. Arbitrary words like "rampant" let you skew the conversation in your favor with no data. In what I see, malware has only gotten rarer, and most people are never affected by anything like it. And then 99% of stealers get there by asking the user for permissions at the system level or using sandbox escape exploits, even in fully secure systems.

> Look into late 20th century PCs. They are designed to boot from a floppy disk first.

Yes. Luckily, we wised up and this is no longer the case. And we even managed to do it without locking users into what <VENDOR> has decided was the best and only choice for them! In addition to already being fixed, it's just completely irrelevant today. When have you last seen a PC with a floppy drive, let alone one that people continue feeding floppies to this day? Are you saying that you consider people writing modern floppy boot malware and then injecting those floppies into organizations running legacy computers an actual, realistic threat?

> It does not take physical access to write to a floppy disk.

It takes physical access to insert it, and a whole lot of indirect IRL access to sneak infected media into whatever business is still using them.

I'm not saying these things aren't bad. I maintain my previous point - the 'drawbacks' of open computing are minuscule, but real. The fact that you had to go all the way back to floppies, boot malware and physical attacks proves the point of how esoteric it all is. The internet is the real killer, and it affects every platform. The counterexamples come off as the kind of improbable justifications that every software megacorporation breaks out every time they want to lock down something "for your safety".
by vidimitrov | 2026-03-10 20:18:31+00:00
Level 4 is where I see the most interesting design decisions get made, and also where most practitioners take a shortcut that compounds badly later.

When the author talks about "codifying" lessons, the instinct for most people is to update the rules file. That works fine for conventions - naming patterns, library preferences, relatively stable stuff. But there's a different category of knowledge that rules files handle poorly: the why behind decisions. Not what approach was chosen, but what was rejected and why the tradeoff landed where it did.

"Never use GraphQL for this service" is a useful rule to have in CLAUDE.md. What's not there: that GraphQL was actually evaluated, got pretty far into prototyping, and was abandoned because the caching layer had been specifically tuned for REST response shapes, and the cost of changing that was higher than the benefit for the team's current scale. The agent follows the rule. It can't tell when the rule is no longer load-bearing.

The place where this reasoning fits most naturally is git history - decisions and rejections captured in commit messages, versioned alongside the code they apply to. Good engineers have always done this informally. The discipline to do it consistently enough that agents can actually retrieve and use it is what's missing, and structuring it for that purpose is genuinely underexplored territory.

At level 7, this matters more than people expect. Background agents running across sessions with no human-in-the-loop have nothing to draw on except whatever was written down. A stale rules file in that context doesn't just cause mistakes - it produces confident mistakes.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-03-10 20:19:16+00:00
> If you are telling a personal anecdote to threadjack a topic, there are several potential reasons why - if that is what you are trying to do. It is open to interpretation as to that poster's intent.

So whether you were rebutting their comment is based on the reason they "threadjacked", and not the contents of their post? That means no rebuttal for what they explicitly said. And what they explicitly said was refusing a ride because of gender. Okay, that clarifies things. But it would make everyone's lives easier if you made your implications more direct from the start.
by lihanc111 | 2026-03-10 20:19:41+00:00
Evolving agent systems (agents that use continual learning, memory, or context refinement) are becoming the mainstream. However, up until now, most papers show gains on only about 10 tasks, or small subsets of existing benchmarks.

The bigger issue is benchmark saturation. We highlight "circle packing" in the post as a prime example: four different recent papers (ThetaEvolve, TTT-Discover, AdaEvolve, and EvoX) all converge to the exact same ceiling (2.635983). Once multiple methods collapse to the same endpoint because they are essentially just wrapping the same SLSQP Python script, the benchmark stops measuring open-ended improvement.

To fix the evaluation gap, we built Frontier-CS. It consists of 172 algorithmic tasks and 68 research tasks, designed by ICPC World Finalists and CS PhDs.

Our main goal was to create environments with massive search spaces that require actual information-efficient exploration and long-horizon reasoning (like our hidden Permutation task), while still keeping the scoring 100% deterministic so we don't have to rely on "LLM-as-a-judge." SkyDiscover is already using this for 200+ task benchmark suites to get much cleaner, less noisy data on agent performance.
by dang | 2026-03-10 20:19:45+00:00
Related ongoing thread:

After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323017 - March 2026 (194 comments)

I'm not going to merge the current thread thither, because it's so bad. Interesting specimen of how much worse the comments get when there isn't a readable, substantive article to backstop the thread.

(Not a criticism of the submitter! - ft.com was the original source for this story and there are workarounds available, like the archive link and the google trick described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47319643.)
by fcatalan | 2026-03-10 20:19:46+00:00
My own 100% hallucinated language experiment is very very weird and still has thousands of lines of generated examples that work fine. When doing complex stuff you could see the agent bounce against the tests here and there, but never produced non-working code in the end. The only examples available were those it had generated itself as it made up the language.
It was capable of making things like a JSON parser/encoder, a TODO webapp or a command line kanban tracker for itself in one shot.
by mech422 | 2026-03-10 20:19:50+00:00
"you literally have to tell it to slow down, focus and think" - This soo much! When I get an unexpected result from claude, I ask it why - what caused it to do such-and-such. After one back and forth session like this putting up tons of guardrails on a prompt, claude literally said "you shouldn't have to teach me to think every session" !!
by TuringTest | 2026-03-10 20:20:07+00:00
We're finally getting there. The model of web notebooks look a lot like Hypercard stacks in terms of usability; there's only missing someone packing them in and easy-to-use distribution and sharing environment that does not depend on users installing their own web server.

And if that package includes some reasonable local LLM model, creating simple programs by end users could be even easier than it ever was with Hypercard.
by LinXitoW | 2026-03-10 20:20:16+00:00
Every order of magnitude of difference constitutes a categorical difference.

The ability to create spam instantly, fitted perfectly to any situation, and doing that 24/7, everywhere, is very different from before. Before, spam was annoying but generally different enough to tell apart. It was also (in general) never too much as to make an entire platform useless.

With AI, the entire internet IS spam. No matter what you google or look at, there's a very high chance it's AI spam. The internet is super duper extra dead.
by PaulHoule | 2026-03-10 20:20:27+00:00
My son would point out that the "incel cesspool" actually absorbed a lot of its vocabulary from 4chan and other "manosphere" spaces and there are a lot of people who talk that way who are not incels.

For instance that Clavicular guy who was profiled in the New York Times claims he is having sex and it seems he was actually "dating" a female influencer when he was being interviewed by an NYT reporter.
by jakewins | 2026-03-10 20:20:38+00:00
This was really good, and second leaning on property testing. I’ve had really good outcomes from setting up Schemathesis and getting blanket coverage for stuff like “there should be no request you can generate as logged in user A that let’s you do things as or see things that belong to user B”, as well as “there should be no request you can find to any API endpoint that can trigger a 5xx response”
by jmull | 2026-03-10 20:20:38+00:00
I think you need to relate this to the case here to establish the objective correctness the previous comment claims, in terms of the screen shots we're looking at. Ridiculous, of course, but that's my point -- we're arguing about feelings not facts.

Here, for example, the colors we're discussing are the toolbar icons in the screen shots. A lot of the colors are arbitrary, so don't really impart information. E.g, shapes are characteristically green, tables aren't characteristically yellow, charts aren't characteristically blue. So that's noise, not information. You can only hope that doesn't degrade the UI too much. The yellow sticky note, on the other hand, is characteristic, so does impart information, and the color wheel is perfect. So some good ones and some bad ones. Not clear at all it's good. Now, people who use the software a lot will come to learn arbitrary associations, but, of course, that goes for any arbitrary association.
by pixl97 | 2026-03-10 20:20:52+00:00
Right, dinosaurs were perfectly fine, their ignorance worked out well for them.

The universe is uncaring, simply not giving a shit if you have knowledge or not. Knowledge gives you the ability to survive minor conniption fits of cosmic magnitude, and at the same time gives you a gun to shoot your own foot off.

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
by holtkam2 | 2026-03-10 20:21:44+00:00
Level 9: agent managers running agent teams
Level 10: agent CEOs overseeing agent managers
Level 11: agent board of directors overseeing the agent CEO

Level 12: agent superintelligence - single entity doing everything

Level 13: agent superagent, agenting agency agentically, in a loop, recursively, mega agent, agentic agent agent agency super AGI agent

Level 14: A G E N T
by rbanffy | 2026-03-10 20:21:55+00:00
Don't blame the ISA - blame the silicon implementations AND the software with no architecture-specific optimisations.

RISC-V will get there, eventually.

I remember that ARM started as a speed demon with conscious power consumption, then was surpassed by x86s and PPCs on desktops and moved to embedded, where it shone by being very frugal with power, only to now be leaving the embedded space with implementations optimised for speed more than power.
by EmbarrassedHelp | 2026-03-10 20:21:57+00:00
According to the EU Identity Wallet's documentation, the EU's planned system requires highly invasive age verification to obtain 30 single use, easily trackable tokens that expire after 3 months. It also bans jailbreaking/rooting your device, and requires GooglePlay Services/IOS equivalent be installed to "prevent tampering". You have to blindly trust that the tokens will not be tracked, which is a total no-go for privacy.

These massive privacy issues have all been raised on their Github, and the team behind the wallet have been ignoring them.
by YmiYugy | 2026-03-10 20:22:08+00:00
The vast majority of DRM protected content (or at least majority by watch time) available in UHD via torrent in a matter of hours.
People like to stay away from torrents, because it carries significant risk in many jurisdictions.
But the only reason UHD versions are only available via torrent and often not as streams or downloads is bandwidth cost.
I can't see how it has any thing todo with DRM.
The only thing it maybe cut's down is sharing within friend groups. But even then it only takes one to figure out how to set up a VPN for torrenting.