MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by paulddraper | 2026-03-06 07:15:05+00:00
> My, the world has changed.

Revisionist history.

When you graduated in 2007, the leading tech companies were Microsoft, Google, IBM, Cisco, Apple, Intel, HP, Oracle, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments.

How many refused DoD application of their products?

I only recall one -- Google. (And it actually first agreed to Project Maven before later backing out.)
by QuantumNomad_ | 2026-03-06 07:15:16+00:00
> wiki.lineageos.org has specific install instructions for every phone/device they support, I have no idea why you would choose to follow anything else.

Ironically, the Switch 2 page you linked on their wiki mentions a few different install methods and locations and goes on to say about one of those:

> if you wish to install Android to the eMMC, you will need to consult external resources

So it seems that there are indeed cases where you have to follow other things than the guides in the wiki, even for supported devices.
by jordanbeiber | 2026-03-06 07:16:22+00:00
There’s a place for everything.

Most coding tasks take place outside of pure tech companies, if I’d venture a guess.

And let’s be honest, enterprises in general do not value that quality - and they face very little in terms of technical challenges that can’t be solved by code on stack-overflow or github.

What most enterprises lack is knowledge about themselves though - this is more a business problem than a technical one however.
by Karrot_Kream | 2026-03-06 07:16:23+00:00
I recommend reading Wikipedia and talking to LLMs to get this one. Order values do follow power-law distributions (you're probably looking for an exponential or a Zipf distribution.) You want to ask how to perform a statistical test using these distributions. I'm a fan of Bayesian techniques here, but it's up to you if you want to use a frequentist approach. If you can follow some basic calculus you can follow the math for constructing these statistical tests, if not some searching will help you find the formulas you need.
by stoff81 | 2026-03-06 07:16:30+00:00
Just gave it a go, wonderful experience. Im about to get a 1 month sub, just to download the pack.

Some initial feedback:
- Would be great if I could pay with USDC per download or per credit rather than a subscription.
- I signed up with my agents email, now I have to pay, theres no way to hand off billing to another user (me). Team/members would be appreciated
- Im begining to wonder how this might integrate with my design agent, reach out if you are interested to talk more. I emailed you about the team/member issue.

How can I keep up to date with your developments? X/Discord?
by kleiba | 2026-03-06 07:16:34+00:00
Firefox is about the only piece of software in my setup that occasionally crashes. I say "occasionally" for lack of a better word, it's not "all the time", but it is definitely more than I would want to.

If that was caused by bad memory, I would expect other software to be similarly affected and hence crash with about comparable frequency. However, it looks like I'm falling more into the other 90% of cases (unsurprisingly) because I do not observe other software crashing as much as firefox does.

Also, this whole crashing business is a fairly recent effect - I've been running firefox for forever and I cannot remember when it last was as much of an issue as it has become recently for me.
by unselect5917 | 2026-03-06 07:17:34+00:00
Thank you. There are sane, good ways to build UIs, and after 30 years of programming, my main complaint hasn't changed: "Stop doing what you're doing, and do what I want."

Be like TRON, fight for the user. Not the developer. Not the developer's politics or opinions, and certainly not for the computer itself. The user's wants are the #1 priority in a human-computer interaction.
by locknitpicker | 2026-03-06 07:17:35+00:00
> Normalization is possible but not practical in a lot of cases: nearly every “legacy” database I’ve seen has at least one table that just accumulates columns because that was the quickest way to ship something.

Strong disagree. I'll explain.

Your argument would support the idea of adding a few columns to a table to get to a short time to market. That's ok.

Your comment does not come close to justify why you would keep the columns in. Not the slightest.

Tables with many columns create all sorts of problems and inefficiencies. Over fetching is a problem all on itself. Even the code gets brittle, where each and every single tweak risks beijg a major regression.

Creating a new table is not hard. Add a foreign key, add the columns, do a standard parallel write migration. Done. How on earth is this not practical?
by testbyhuman_tor | 2026-03-06 07:18:06+00:00
The deeper pattern here isn't really about prompt injection or GitHub Actions defaults. It's that the industry keeps trying to solve trust problems with more automation.

Sandboxing, input sanitization, scoped permissions -- all good practices. But none of them answer the fundamental question: "does this system actually behave the way a human would expect it to?"

The Cline exploit worked because nobody watched the system do something unexpected. A human reviewing the actual runtime behavior (not the code, not the CI output, the thing that happens on screen) would have caught this in minutes. The issue title looked suspicious to any person reading it.

We keep building increasingly complex automated defenses while skipping the simplest check: have someone actually look at what the software does.
by Agingcoder | 2026-03-06 07:19:12+00:00
No it doesn’t :-)

I’ve had plenty of servers with faulty ecc dimms that didn’t trigger , and would only show faults when actual memory testing. I had a hard time convincing some of our admins the first time ( ‘no ecc faults you can’t be right ‘ ) but I won the bet.

Edit: very old paper by google on these topics. My issues were 6-7 years ago probably.

https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf
by jongjong | 2026-03-06 07:19:21+00:00
This is a great article. It's why I roll my eyes when someone asks "Show me the data" or the classic "Sources please."

Unless we're literally having a debate about raw statistics, the data likely adds nothing to either side of the debate; because the data is not answering any actual questions and you can draw opposite conclusions from the same data. Just because the data appears to fit nicely to a particular mainstream narrative, that doesn't make the narrative true because one could come up with an infinite number of different narratives which provide a better fit for the data...

Which narrative is more likely to be right? The one narrative which you happen to have inside your head or the infinite number of other possible narratives which you haven't even heard of?

My experience is that the mainstream narrative is designed to cater to the lowest common denominator amongst the masses... Which nowadays are made up of a lot of highly educated people... But the narrative is nonetheless simplistic. There are many people out there who have had exposure to enough different data points in their lives that the mainstream narratives don't make sense to them.

Your understanding of the world is narratives + data. When you say that you make decisions "entirely based on data," you're missing some crucial aspect because you're almost certainly using a narrative to fill in the many gaps in the data.

Not to mention that many correlations are self-reinforcing feedback cycles without clear causality.

The very idea that causality is always simple and unidirectional is itself a narrative... And I would argue an incorrect one! Yet many scientific fields are founded on this narrative!

In my experience, I can't recall reading a single paper in the social sciences describing causality as "likely a self-reinforcing feedback cycle" - Even this language sounds unscientific. They're always trying to prove causality. It seems like nobody ever tries to prove "Likely a feedback cycle" because nobody likes these ambiguous answers.

I suspect this is because science almost always has a financial goal behind it and people want definite answers. They want to be able to use the data to craft a narrative like "No, drug X definitely doesn't cause condition Y."
by ksri | 2026-03-06 07:20:04+00:00
re. comparing with other editing agents - actually, I didn't find any that could work with google docs. Many workflows were basically "replace the whole document" - and that was a non-starter.

re. what happens if its a big book - each "tab" in the google doc is a folder with its own document.xml. A top-level index.xml captures the table of contents across tabs. The agent reads index.xml and then decides what else to read. I am now improving this by giving it xpath expressions so it can directly pick the specific sections of interest.

Philosophically, we wanted "declarative" instead of "imperative". Our key design - the agent needs to "think" in terms of the business, and not worry about how to edit the document. We move all the reconcilliation logic in the library, and free the agent from worrying about the google doc. Same approach in other libraries as well.
by crote | 2026-03-06 07:20:33+00:00
I read it the exact opposite way: you are forbidden from using facial and ID scans solely for age verification (as the OS-provided signal shall be the primary indicator of age), but if you already need to obtain the user's age for other reasons using more reliable means (say, a banking KYC law requiring ID scans) you are not required to discard this more reliable source in favor of the OS-provided signal.
by Aeglaecia | 2026-03-06 07:20:34+00:00
if youre going against the regime of hyperpathologization please be strong and gentle. people dont want to have their pacifiers ripped out, whether that be by lifting the veil of hypercapitalistic coercion, or simply by making plain the wealth of side effects that can be entirely avoided by ignoring artificial diagnoses and seeking solutions more in line with our biology.

like no shit people are going to be more willing to do the bidding of evil when their decision making apparatus is unnaturally saturated. and no shit people are going to have adhd symptoms in a screen based society. its completely obvious. but me saying that is going to get down voted to oblivion. people don't enjoy having a comfortable narrative questioned; dissent (no matter how minor) is equivalent to full scale assault on perceptions of existence. that being said, i dont blame anyone for this, considering that the entirety of existence is currently geared towards forcing the populace into fight or flight mode, thus rendering null the capacity to exact societal change and disrupt the status quo.

people really do think their best interests are at the heart of billion dollar companies like those producing pharmaceutical goods !
by apsurd | 2026-03-06 07:20:35+00:00
+1 on the economic value line. Not everything needs to be about money but if you get paid to ship code it's about money. And now we have coworkers shipping insane amounts of "features" because it's all free to ship and being an engineer, it ends there.

Only it doesn't, there's product positioning, UX, information architecture, onboarding and training, support, QA, change management, analytics, reporting… sigh
by brabel | 2026-03-06 07:21:27+00:00
If that’s true, I think the law is fine. There are good solutions for anonymous disclosure of information about you, the most mature being Verifiable Credentials, which is an open standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verifiable_credentials

You can disclose just a subset of a credential, and that can be a derived value (eg age bracket instead of date of birth), and a derived key is used so that its cryptographically impossible to track you. I wish more people discussed using that, but I suspect that it’s a bit too secure for their real intentions.
by jstummbillig | 2026-03-06 07:21:43+00:00
> Who’s to blame for this ridiculous path they are taking?

Variability, different pressures and fast progress. What's your concrete idea for how to solve this, without the power of hindsight?

For example, with the codex model: Say you realize at some point in the past that this could be a thing, a model specifically post-trained for coding, which makes coding better, but not other things. What are they supposed to do? Not release it, to satisfy a cleaner naming scheme?

And if then, at a later point, they realize they don't need that distinction anymore, that the technique that went into the separate coding model somehow are obsolete. What option do you have other than dropping the name again?

As someone else pointed out, the previous problems were around very silly naming pattern. This sems about as descriptive as you can get, given what you have.
by Gym-Berlin | 2026-03-06 07:21:45+00:00
Iran at the Crossroads
The death of Supreme Leader hashtag#Ali hashtag#Khamenei has torn open the fabric of Iran’s political order, thrusting the nation into a perilous vacuum where the future hangs in the balance. As the hashtag#IRGC hashtag#maneuvers for dominance and regime loyalists scramble for legitimacy, millions of Iranians rally behind Reza hashtag#Pahlavi—the exiled hashtag#Crown hashtag#Prince turned advocate of hashtag#democracy—who now stands as a symbol of hope and a possible architect of transition. This paper confronts the unfolding drama: will Iran descend into hashtag#repression and hashtag#conflict, or rise toward inclusive governance and regional stability? The stakes are monumental, and the choices made now will reverberate across the Middle East and the world.
Donald J. Trump For President, Inc Donald Trump Jr. The 45th President Donald Trump Appointee and Alumni Group Central Intelligence Agency Iran International ایران اینترنشنال United Nations European Parliament European Commission NATO
by overthinkerer | 2026-03-06 07:21:50+00:00
I had multiple agents running across different machines, some finishing and sitting idle for way too long before I noticed. I just wanted them to behave like microwaves, beep when they are done.

So I built Tailwatch. You post events with curl, see them in the dashboard, and get notifications everywhere. You log in with GitHub, the app installs as a PWA, I tried to make friction minimal.
by sherry-sherry | 2026-03-06 07:21:51+00:00
No.

There's pretty much nothing in the natural world that has the contrast ratio a modern screen can produce. It is easier on the eyes to not have blindingly high contrast.

No printed page in any book or magazine you've seen has ever had contrast ratio a screen can show. It's just not possible to do.

Legibility can be an issue, and is good to discuss. I agree that when something like "@media (prefers-contrast: more)" is set, text should be at a higher contrast level for those with lower vision. But don't blind everyone else in the process.

>... the amount of times per day I ask myself if I’m literally going blind, only to find out the “designer” decided for me how I should best read their website.

Yes? That's what the designers of literally everything do, decide how it will be presented to you. The magic part of HTML/CSS is you can change that to suit your needs.
by lkey | 2026-03-06 07:22:00+00:00
Oh? Name them, with receipts for actions taken, not vague gestures towards morality.

The actual logical end point of most of the 'for the good of humanity' folks in the bay area is:

'Only I can be trusted with the money, power, and weapons that I believe will break the world, but I promise it is for the best. No system or power should hold me to account in the event I am wrong or change my mind. Trust me.'
by akersten | 2026-03-06 07:22:34+00:00
There is already age verification at the ISP level. They only sell Internet service to adults. What the adults choose to do with it or with whom they share it with should be of zero concern to the government.

Of course, that's an ineffective argument, because the long-term goal of these laws (in the sense of, "the goal of the system is what it does") was never going to be about keeping kids off the Internet.
by unselect5917 | 2026-03-06 07:23:19+00:00
This reminds me of a line from REAMDE that I'll never forget.

"Writers like having residences."

The backstory is they hire two writers-in-residence, who keep making more work and excuses for more work for themselves... so they can continue having a residence.

The same is true for writers of code, it turns out. So we bit twiddlers sometimes gin up excuses to change things, so we have an excuse to be employed and having a residence.
by 8bitsrule | 2026-03-06 07:25:10+00:00
Back in the day, for people who spent many hours each day in front of a 'display':

1. People using TTY's used black ink on very-light-yellow roll paper, or

2. Those lucky enough to have ADM-3 VDT's often chose light green or
light orange on black.

Just sayin.

e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT220#/media/File:DEC_VT220_te...
by eladkaplan | 2026-03-06 07:25:19+00:00
AI coding agents are powerful but they don't hesitate before running rm -rf /, kubectl delete namespace production, or terraform destroy. shellfirm adds a safety layer that catches risky commands before they execute.

How it works with AI agents:

One command to set up: shellfirm connect claude-code

This gives you two layers of protection:

1. Hooks – automatic pre-execution checks that block dangerous commands before the agent can run them. The agent can't bypass or ignore these.

2. MCP tools – the agent can proactively ask "is this command risky?" and get back structured risk assessments with severity, blast radius, and safer alternatives.

shellfirm covers 9 ecosystems (git, k8s, terraform, databases, filesystem, etc.) with pattern matching, context detection (SSH, root, production branch), and team
policies via .shellfirm.yaml.

Supports Claude Code (hooks + MCP), Cursor, Windsurf, Zed, and Cline.

Written in Rust. Open source.
by mellosouls | 2026-03-06 07:25:21+00:00
Note the Ship of Theseus, while a nice comparison for the title, is not - as the author eventually points out - an appropriate analogy here. A fundamental contribution to the idea of whether the identity of the entity persists or not is the continuity between intermediate states.

In the example given and discussed here the last couple of days there seems to be a process more akin to having an AI create a cast of the pre-existing work and fill it for the new one.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-03-06 07:25:49+00:00
China looks like the good guy now, but if Xi decided to “reassert control” over Taiwan, it would quickly become an international pariah and everyone would forget about Trump immediately, the country would immediately be isolated from everyone other than their closest (geographically speaking) allies. Is China ready to do that? Not today, maybe in a decade or two (when they’ve replaced the USA as the top economic/military power, there won’t be severe consequences). Xi is smart enough to wait, taking Taiwan now wins them nothing and loses them everything.
by locknitpicker | 2026-03-06 07:26:13+00:00
> I can tell there is no correlation between the domain and the amount of columns.

This is unbelievable. In purely architectural terms that would require your database design to be an amorphous big ball of everything, with no discernible design or modelling involved. This is completely unrealistic. Are queries done at random?

In practical terms, your assertion is irrelevant. Look at the sparse columns. Figure out those with sparse rows.
Then move half of the columns to a new table and keep the other half in the original table. Congratulations, you just cut down your column count by half, and sped up your queries.

Even better: discover how your data is being used. Look at queries and check what fields are used in each case. Odds are, that's your table right there.

Let's face it. There is absolutely no technical or architectural reason to reach this point. This problem is really not about structs.
by baxtr | 2026-03-06 07:26:17+00:00
The watches mentioned carry status for a certain sub-group of the population.

The utility stems not from the functionality of watch itself but from what it signals to other people.

It’s a simple status games. PG, like every other human being, also plays status game. But not with watches.

He plays with a different group of people. With different rules for status gain/loss.

Maybe it's: who has the better blog, or the better investments. I don’t know because I don’t live in his world.
by vladich | 2026-03-06 07:26:26+00:00
That's all great, but sadly impractical.
I looked at one of the first statements:
> GenDB is an LLM-powered agentic system that decomposes the
complex end-to-end query processing and optimization task into
a sequence of smaller and well-defined steps, where each step is
handled by a dedicated LLM agent.

And knowing typical LLM latency, it's outside of the realm of OLTP and probably even OLAP. You can't wait tens of seconds to minutes until LLM generates you some optimal code that you then compile and execute.
by pjmlp | 2026-03-06 07:26:42+00:00
As Gen-Xer I fully agree, I don't get the way things are with obedience, the rediculous situation that American families can lose their kids by having them playing alone in the garden, how everyone sells out for money (Punk would not happen today), the always smile and say no negatives at work being rediculous false (this one really drives me crazy),....
by jibal | 2026-03-06 07:26:48+00:00
Well, that's not the way context works and it's dishonest BS. You wrote "You got downvoted a bit but I upvoted. You're clearly being descriptive in your statements, not prescriptive." -- no, they were prescriptive from the start, and the prescription and the goalpost moving and wool-over-eyes pulling is why they were downvoted.

I won't respond further.
by godelski | 2026-03-06 07:26:50+00:00
> No one is afraid.

You seem to have trouble reading. Here's a map that shows countries that recognize Taiwan's independence[0]. That's a lot of gray...

> Taiwan themselves still claim to be the Republic of China and not separate from the rest of China.

You seem very confused... but I get it, it is confusing

Mainland China's current government is called the "People's Republic of China" (PRC)[1]

Taiwan calls itself the "Republic of China" (RoC)[2]

The difference of one word is very important. It's easy to miss, which is why Taiwan even changed its passport[3]... over a decade ago.

But also... they issue different passports. They have different governments. Really, this is not hard to understand that Taiwan considers themselves independent and the PRC considers the RoC a bunch of rebels. And... what do rebels typically do?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_recognition_of_T...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proclamation_of_the_People%27s...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan

[3] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/1758230.stm
by akersten | 2026-03-06 07:27:17+00:00
We should collectively make sure that any PRs trying to land these changes are very well reviewed. We wouldn't want any security holes to slip by. I think a couple dozen rounds of reviews should suffice. I've heard great things about how productive AI can be at generating very thorough code quality assessments. After all, we should only ship it once it's perfect.

To be more direct - if you're in any editorial position where something that smells like this might require your approval, please give it the scrutiny it deserves. That is, the same scrutiny that a malicious actor submitting a PR that introduces a PII-leaking security hole would receive. As an industry we need to civil disobedience the fuck out of this.
by rockdoe | 2026-03-06 07:27:56+00:00
If the crash is isolated (no other reports) and flipping one bit in the crashing pointer value would make the pointer valid, it's assumed to be a bitflip. This obviously will only catch a minor portion of bitflips, i.e. any image or video data with bitflips wouldn't crash.

From what he's saying they run an actual memory test after a crash, too.