MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by input_sh | 2026-03-01 12:06:41+00:00
That 60 day limit was ignored so frequently in the past it might as well not exist.

Pretty much every attempt at stopping the president (from Clinton onwards) ends the same way: house votes on it, senate might agree with the slimmest of majority, it reaches the president's desk, president vetoes it, it goes back to the senate where it needs 2/3 majority to overthrow the veto, and it never gets that 2/3 majority.
by throwaway2037 | 2026-03-01 12:06:56+00:00
I think you are speaking about the last Shah's first son: Reza Pahlavi. You can read about his planned policy for Iran here: https://rezapahlavi.org/en

To quote:

> For the transition from the Islamic Republic to a national, secular, and democratic government

One idea is to transition to a secular democracy with a figurehead Shah like a northern European (or Japanese) monarchy. Also, my personal opinion: I think it is fine if they want to incorporate aspects of Islamic religious culture into their government. After all, it is their country. Example: The national parliament and political parties might be required to secular (at least in name), but they may wish to continue to support religious institutions using tax payer money, including masjids (places of prayer) and Islamic monasteries.

An interesting point of comparison: (1) Malaysia isn't really secular (but they may claim it); (2) Singapore is fully secular; (3) Indonesia is secular (or "pan-religious"), but is still largely guided by Islamic relgious culture in their democractic systems.
by ricericerice | 2026-03-01 12:07:55+00:00
After some research, I think I understand what you're getting at here - BERT being a model for encoding text but not architecturally feasible to generate text with it, which "LLMs" (the lack of definition here is resulting in you two talking past eachother), maybe more accurately referred to as GPTs, can do.

Also the irony of your comment when it in itself was confidently stated yet void of any content was not missed either - consider dropping the superiority complex next time.
by 0x00cl | 2026-03-01 12:08:34+00:00
I'm not sure what you mean by Socrates was proven dead wrong.

The study you linked doesn't show that people are becoming dumber because of LLMs, its just showing that when you offload tasks to these tools your brain engages less in that specific task, just like you'd do with a calculator, instead of doing complex calculations on paper, the calculator will do them for you, or when writing and using a spell-checker or using a search engine, instead of opening a book and searching. The question is whether in the long-term cognitive capacity is reduced, and like I said before this argument predates LLMs (All the way back to Socrates)

Also, take the study with a grain of salt as this is a small sample with only 54 participants for a single task on a short term study.

Personally, I believe LLMs just allows us to have a higher level of abstraction.
by atoav | 2026-03-01 12:10:14+00:00
Well as I said in 2026 before Trump got elected the firdt time: Trump will ultimately lead to fascism.

And fascism famously tries to align its industries with the state.

Now I made that judgement in my 2016 based on what I have read about the man and his character. I grew up in an Austrian province that was during my youth lead by back then one of the first European new-right politicians (Jörg Haider). So let's say I knew the type and the dynamics that would emerge around figures like this including the rich people who think they can control him and so on.

Trump is a textbook narcissist and as such of course he is going to treat the companies like a narcissist treats any person. The competition you will get is one of who can act the most submissive, who can bribe him the best.

Needless to say this is a style of governance that is economically unsustainable. But anybody with a decent idea of world history could have seen this from miles away.
by ablob | 2026-03-01 12:10:45+00:00
I once saw a visualization that basically partitioned decisions on a 2D plane.
From that perspective, decision trees might just be a fancy word for kD-Trees partitioning the possibility space and attaching an action to the volumes.

Given that assumption, the nebulous decision making could stem from expert's decisions being more nuanced in the granularity of the surface separating 2 distinct actions. It might be a rough technique, but nonetheless it should be able to lead to some pretty good approximations.
by komali2 | 2026-03-01 12:10:47+00:00
I think what they mean is that "responsibility to society" has been co-opted by capitalists such that even our own children are a resource we're expected to raise to further contribute to endless growth and someone else's profit margins.

None of us are really contributing to each other when we work, or the commons, since that's all been purchased and is being rented back to us.
by CRConrad | 2026-03-01 12:11:01+00:00
I think you can make it make sense if you think of it as "writing in a speech popular at the time". Nowadays we (sometimes, often?) write the slang we speak; in the 1800s, people wrote (and perhaps spoke?) in more flowery sentences. Romance novels might seem written in stilted language to us now, but in their day they were kind of like writing in slang is now.
by throwaway2037 | 2026-03-01 12:11:35+00:00
> they're mostly secular as well

Can you help me to understand your meaning of "secular" here? My counterpoint that will explain: Many Persian Jews left during/after the revolution and moved to Los Angeles. Many of those families are practicing Jews. I would not describe people like this as "secular"; I would call them "religious". Do I misunderstand your point?
by goku12 | 2026-03-01 12:12:56+00:00
"if" he actually becomes a dictator?

When is that? When he declares himself the supreme dictator of the US? Or when he nukes another nation because of his racism?

Look around and compare with the Nazis. There is already the demonization and dehumanization of a large demographic group. There are concentration camps and extralegal police forces around already. Just like in Nazi extermination camps, the people who disappear into these ICE facilities are near impossible to trace again. There are already fatalities in there from inhumane living conditions, very bad food, lack of medical care and occasional premeditated murders. Even among the civilians, they see differently abled people as a burden, just as the Nazis did. Just as in Nazi Germany, there is an expansion of military power at the expense of the civilians and flouting of international laws. And just as in Nazi Germany, smart people who can see the writing on the wall are already on a mass exodus.

If you still believe that you're in a democracy, you forgot what happened on Jan 6, 2021. Their ego is too fragile to accept anything except their victory. There is zero chance that the despots will risk getting impeached, trialed and punished by the Congress and face the severe consequences of absolutely horrendous stuff they've committed so far. Even if the public opinion is overwhelmingly hostile towards them, they'll just claim election fraud. They have started efforts for that on multiple fronts with truly bizzare incidents being reported.

And let's talk about the BIG massive elephant in the oval office (besides the obvious one). Trump is NOT the main character, even though I'm sure that he doesn't know that. Look at what their mouthpieces are saying, their dubious billionaire friends are doing and their unelected psycho-minions are pulling off. This isn't just a dictatorship. This is a multi-generational authoritarian regime with clear succession plans. You're all distracted by just the beginning of a long chain of misery. And the beginning isn't even the worst. This is one thing where this regime is unlike the Nazis or the Fascists. Those regimes were controlled by the figure head who formed it - making them vulnerable to decapitation. This one is acting more like a secret society that puts someone in the front to act as their symbolic figure head. Removing the figure head isn't going to end the regime.

You're waiting for an imaginary signal when every alarm around you is screaming at you. The time for 'if' is long gone. That ship sailed a while ago.
by baxtr | 2026-03-01 12:14:16+00:00
I got the point.

I’m challenging the causal chain. I don’t think anyone would agree that the crusades in the Middle Ages caused the current state of the Middle East.

There is no way you can prove one or the other side. We can’t do controlled experiments with other worlds.

So it’s all guesswork. That’s why I’m challenging. I think that things are much less causally connected as people want to believe.
by mikkupikku | 2026-03-01 12:14:21+00:00
Incorrect. The only times America has formally declared war were the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II.

In the case of the Barbary Wars, Vietnam War, the Iraq War and War on Terror / Afghanistan War, etc... congress approved military engagement but DID NOT issue a formal Declaration of War.
by joshstrange | 2026-03-01 12:14:44+00:00
I’m pretty divided on “memory”. There are times it can feel almost magical but more often than not I feel like I am fighting with the steering wheel.

Whenever I’m in a conversation and it references something unrelated (or even related) I get the “ick”. I know how context poisoning (intentional or not) works and I work hard to only expose things to the model that I want it to consider.

There have been many times that I’ve started a fresh chat as to not being along the baggage (or wrong turns) of a previous chat but then it will say “And this should work great for <thing I never mentioned in THIS chat>” and at that moment my spidey-sense tingles and I start wondering “Crap, did it come to the conclusion it did based mostly/only on the new context or did it “take a shortcut” and use context from another chat?

Like I said, I go out of my way to not “lead the witness” and so when the “witness” can peek at other conversations, all my caution is for naught.

I encourage everyone to go read the saved memories in their LLM of choice, I’ve cleaned out complete crap from there multiple times. Actually wrong information, confusing information, or one-off things I don’t want influencing future discussions.

The custom (or rather addition to the) system prompt is all I feel comfortable with. Where I give it some basic info about the coding language I prefer and the OSes that I’m often working with so that I don’t have to constantly say “actually this is FreeBSD” or “please give that to me in JS/TS instead of Python”.

The only thing that has, so far, kept me from turning off memory is that I’m always slightly cautious of going off the beaten path for something so new and moving so fast. I often want to have as close to the “stock” config since I know how testing/QA works at most places (the further off the beaten path you, the more likely you’ll run into bugs). Also so that I can experience when everyone else is experiencing (within reason).

Lastly, because, especially with LLMs, I feel like the people that over customize end up with a fragile systems. I think that a decent portion of the “N+1 model is dumber” or “X model has really gone downhill” is partially due to complicated configs (system prompts, MCP, etc) that might have helped at some point (dumber model, less capability) but are a hindrance to newer models. That or they never worked and someone just kept piling on more and more thinking it would help.
by boutell | 2026-03-01 12:14:54+00:00
Can confirm. I gave it a variant of the car wash question on a MacBook M4 with 32 GB of RAM. It produced output at a conversational speed, sure, but that started with 6 minutes of thinking output. 6 minutes.

On the plus side, it did figure out the question even without the first sentence that's intended as a bit of a giveaway.
by apatheticonion | 2026-03-01 12:15:01+00:00
> you'll see that we still haven't figured out how to do Rust UIs

This is really a symptom of the horrendous desktop GUI API landscape. I'd argue that Rust is syntactically actually very well suited to writing GUI applications - and better than most given the fearless concurrency you get with it.

MacOS is committed to making sure only developers are using Mac hardware and Apple languages to write GUIs - they feel deliberately combative to the prospect of cross platform applications

Windows? How do you even make a Windows GUI these days? Win32? WinUI? Winforms? The examples on the Microsoft website don't even compile when when using the supported languages.

Linux is pretty okay, if it weren't for Linux GUI programming being a mess of DEs. GTK-rs and QT are standard - but you'll never have something that looks consistent on every environment.

The only hope is WASM, but the standards body is busy figuring out how to make web assembly replace docker containers or something. It's barely usable and I've been dying to rewrite all my web applications in Rust.

This is why Electron is everywhere, it's the best we can do without going insane.
by vexorkai | 2026-03-01 12:15:20+00:00
This post made me realize I had zero visibility into where my Claude Code tokens were actually going, so I built a small companion CLI this morning: https://github.com/vexorkai/claude-trace

It parses ~/.claude/projects/*/*.jsonl and breaks usage down by session, tool, project, and timeline with cost estimates (including cache read/create split).

Context Mode solves output compression really well; this is more of a measurement layer so you can see where the burn is before/after changes.

Disclosure: I built it.
by sgt | 2026-03-01 12:16:37+00:00
I just don't get the resistance to Tahoe, and I speak as a macOS power user through a couple decades.

Been on Tahoe now for a few weeks. The new rounded corners bug me a bit, but aside from that it's been rock stable. The trick with macOS is of course not to immediately upgrade. Give it a few weeks before you go to a new release.

I've been through all the releases since Jaguar in 2003. There's been some ups and downs, and a lot of complaints, but I'd say it still remains the most rock solid UNIX™ desktop OS out there.
by dns_snek | 2026-03-01 12:17:03+00:00
> Immigration can totally be a problem, and voters in the western world increasingly ask their leaders to address it.

Stop equivocating. I didn't say that opposing immigration = fascism, I said that identifying marginalized groups, pinning all of the nation's problems on those groups and then persecuting, victimizing, terrorizing anyone who looks like they belong to one of those groups - that is fascist.

> Opposing socialism isn't "fascist"

Again, stop equivocating. I didn't say that opposing socialism is fascist, I said "aggressively anti-socialist", as in, violent anti-socialist rhetoric. Similar to the previous point.

> afaik the Trump admin has done nothing significant about it

That's wholly detached from reality. The only reason he hasn't dismantled all of the social programs yet is because the courts have stepped in and intervened when he tried. See: USAID, withholding SNAP funding, Medicaid, the whole DOGE disaster.

> Again, all of those measures are very superficial and nothing like what real fascism did in Italy or what Nazis did when they came to power. You can't reason just with outrage and headlines.

Those are the core qualities of fascism. I get it, you don't like being called a fascist so you sea-lion about the differences to distract from the overwhelming similarities.

Even when Trump dismantles the judicial branch, people like you will maintain that the US isn't fascist because people aren't speaking Italian like they did in fascist Italy, or German like they did in nazi Germany.

I feel comfortable saying this because we're not just disagreeing on whether the US is fascist right now and there's still room to have argue there, but we're disagreeing on whether Trump has a fascist agenda and whether he's actively working to transform the US into a totalitarian regime following the fascist playbook, which he absolutely is.
by throwaway2037 | 2026-03-01 12:17:03+00:00
> because of his pre-9/11 mismanagement

I'm not here to defend GW Bush. He did many stupid things. But I don't recall a lot of criticism around his "pre-9/11 mismanagement". Can you offer some specifics? The hunt for Osama Bin Laden started (at least) with Clinton and continued with GW Bush. Unfortunately, neither was able to stop him before the 9/11 attacks.
by otabdeveloper4 | 2026-03-01 12:17:08+00:00
BERT is one example of a language model that solved specific language tasks very well and that existed before LLM's.

We had very good language models for decades.
The problem was they needed to be trained, which LLM's mostly don't. You can solve a language model problem now with just some system prompt manipulation.

(And honestly typing in system prompts by hand feels like a task that should definitely be automated. I'm waiting for "soft prompting" be become a thing so we can come full circle and just feed the LLM with an example set.)
by lapcat | 2026-03-01 12:17:19+00:00
> I don't get where the reputation came from, maybe from an era that was already only mere memory when I started to use it.

Peak Mac design was 20 years ago, before iPhone. That was where the reputation came from.

Since iPhone became Apple's darling, and especially since Steve Jobs died, the Mac UI has been systematically wrecked, year by year. iPhone design has also been systematically wrecked since Jobs died. Tim Cook clearly had no idea what he was doing when he put hardware designer Jony Ive in charge of software with iOS 7, something that Jobs never did with Ive.
by deaux | 2026-03-01 12:17:52+00:00
Thank you! That helped me understand. Hobbies that you regularly do, and an LLM is continuously helpful for, benefiting from memory.

Personally, I would still be wary of the black box aspect -not knowing what it does remember and what it doesn't - so I would probably still use projects to make it more deterministic. But that's probably being overcautious and unnecessary in most common cases.
by elihu | 2026-03-01 12:20:36+00:00
Whether or not one would accept deaths of civilians to get rid of Khamenei, I don't think anyone should accept a school full of children being blown up for no obvious reason. If there was somehow a reason why Khameni could not have killed without attacking that school, then those reasons should be plainly spelled out and evidence presented. As things stand with the limited information we have now, it just looks like a war crime with no strategic upside.
by eszed | 2026-03-01 12:20:53+00:00
> most filthy, corrupt, bribed politicians and corrupt public servants... feel filthy and miserable.

Citation most definitely needed.

I agree with your ultimate point that some people can't be bought, and I aspire to be one of them - though I don't think anyone actually knows until they face a temptation with a life-changing upside - but spare me the "evil-doers are always punished, even if it's in ways we cannot see" rhetoric. Sociopaths, at least, are just fine (in fact show happier than the average person on standard "life satisfaction" metrics), and I'll put it to you that there are a lot of ways that both you and I don't perfectly live up to our highest ideals (do you own anything that's plausibly been manufactured by slave labor? Have you bothered to check? Or, if not that one, have you sold everything you own and given it to the poor?) and we both feel pretty good about ourselves, am I right?

I'm sorry. I really didn't mean to come at you that hard, but I'm going to leave it stand - it's not truly personal - because I think moral fables (ie, "do the right thing and you'll be happy") aren't true, and thus are counter-productive. Acting morally is hard, and often (usually?) comes at a personal cost. It's more honest to tell people that.
Show HN: Fyrer – lightweight tool to run multiple dev servers concurrently
by notcalc | 2026-03-01 12:23:14+00:00
Hey HN,

i built `fyrer`, a small CLI tool that can run multiple development servers concurrently using a simple `yml` config.

i kept running into the issue of multiple terminals while working on multi service project, fyrer helps with that issue.

what you need to do is -

define `fyrer.yml` in the root of the project like:

```
# fyrer.yml

installers:
- dir: ./project1
cmd: pip install -r requirements.txt

services:
- name: server1
cmd: python -m http.server 8000
dir: ./project1
env_path: .env.local
env:
PORT: 8000
ENV: dev

- name: server2
cmd: npm start
dir: ./project2
watch: true
quiet: true
ignore:
- "node_modules/**"
- "*.db"

```

run `fyrer` in root of the project and that's it

would love some feedbacks.
by ajsnigrutin | 2026-03-01 12:23:31+00:00
Syria was an interesting one for me... Not in the typical american modus-operandi of destroying countries that are not american banana republics, but in actually supporting Al-Qaeda there...

US is full of people who've lost family members, friends, their own limbs, have PTSD and worse when they fought Al-Qaeda... and now their own politicians are shaking hands and taking photos with them.

Then another shooting spree will happen and the media will be asking "what radicalized him?"..
by permo-w | 2026-03-01 12:23:34+00:00
>Them, not him, I thought? The Master had several henchmen.

I'll admit part of the difficulty there was that I'd skipped the ends of earlier chapters because they were too easy, so I was missing some context like this

>Foes, fiends? (Ger. "Feind" and Swe. "fiende" both mean "enemy", so I've always thought that's the original meaning of Eng. "fiend" too.)

Foes sounds right yeah. I think there was another word at some point where a prefixed "I" seemed to indicate that the thing was "to me", and -an feels right to be an old plural form. I can't think of any straight away but instinctively I feel like there are words in modern English that pluralise similarly, perhaps in the names of some old organisations?

>Spouse -- almost wrote "wife" there, but that could have been confusing in this context -- of some old king of Wessex or something, innit?

That's the one. I don't remember exactly who they were but my memory is that she managed to be the spouse of two Anglo-Saxon kings, sometime not too long before William arrived
by ruszki | 2026-03-01 12:23:50+00:00
That’s also an option. The left to right flow is better for the sake of autocomplete and comprehension: when you start to read your right to left version, you don’t know what is p, then row, then mat. With left to right, this problem doesn’t exist.

One for sure, both are superior to the garbled mess of Python’s.

Of course if the programming language would be in a right to left natural language, then these are reversed.
by throwaway2037 | 2026-03-01 12:24:13+00:00
Honestly, I am disappointed that your comment was downvoted. You raise a good, if uncomfortable, point. I too tire of the well-worn phrase: "XYZ is illegal under international law". To me, interntional law is only useful for medium-sized (population-wise) states and smaller. Once you are a nation with a large population, then you can afford a large military and do whatever you want. Sure, people won't always like what you do, but there is very little they can do to stop it. Look at all the crazy shit that US, China, and Russia has been up to in the last 10 years -- plenty of violations, but few teeth to stop it. Even Israel, which is a very small state, but backed by a global superpower, has done many terrible things in Gaza.
by joefourier | 2026-03-01 12:25:29+00:00
You can actually generate surprisingly coherent text with minimal finetuning of BERT, by reinterpreting it as a diffusion model: https://nathan.rs/posts/roberta-diffusion/

I don’t see a useful definition of LLM that doesn’t include BERT, especially given its historical importance. 340M parameters is only “small” in the sense that a baby whale is small.