MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mobrienv | 2026-03-08 22:31:09+00:00
Treating the act of refining text as a confession of shame misses the point of how writing works. Whether a draft begins as a model output, a dictation, or a scribbled note, the final responsibility belongs to the person who hits publish.

Improving prose to remove predictable patterns is the work of an editor. This process ensures the content is worth reading and respects the audience's time.

Comparing a software tool to "poisoning a well" turns a debate over style into a moral crisis that doesn’t fit the situation. If the information is accurate and the writing is clear, the water in the well is fine, regardless of the pump used to get it there. If the water tastes good, complaining about the plumbing is just a distraction.
by ramon156 | 2026-03-08 22:31:53+00:00
Considering it went through two major versions in mere hours, the changelog specifying POC changes (instead of spec changes) and for some random reason switched from WS to (fetch functions?) I'm pretty confident that there is no thought behind this.

I dig the idea, I dont dig the goal (reinvent email because it's "hard"?), and I don't dig everything after that.

Just write a spec at this point, the POC does nothing more than exist for existence sake
by dahart | 2026-03-08 22:33:22+00:00
> You can, for instance, tune instead to get pure fretted fifths between adjacent strings, and fretted octaves between strings one removed.

No, you can’t. If you tune so that octaves with one string between are correct everywhere on the neck, that will force the tuning to be 12 tone equal temperament, and a fifth in 12 TET cannot be a perfect fifth.
by VorpalWay | 2026-03-08 22:34:20+00:00
It is not just AGI that is poorly defined. Plain AI is moving goalposts too. When the A* search algorithm was introduced in the late 60s, that was considered AI, when SVM (support vector machines) and KNN (K nearest neighbor) were new, they were AI. And so on.

These days it is neural networks and transformer models for language in particular that people mean when they say unqualified AI.

It is very hard to have a meaningful discussion when different parties mean different things with the same words.
by ytoawwhra92 | 2026-03-08 22:34:59+00:00
> if you're imagining that this thing is conscious and knows that it's in doom... yeah definitely not.

I'm not imagining that (although one assumes their plan is to scale this up), but nonetheless there's something troubling to me about taking any living thing and wiring its senses up to a profoundly incomplete simulacrum of reality.

Of course we (as a species) have a long history of doing horrible things to living creatures in the name of science and progress.

These stories evoke a different feeling for me, though.
by nomel | 2026-03-08 22:35:44+00:00
It's a definition based on practical results. That's a good definition, because it doesn't require we already know the exact implementation. It doesn't require guessing, in a literal "put your money where your mouth is" way.

If it can do things as good as or better than humans, then either the AI has a type of general intelligence or the human does not.

Defining capabilities based on outcome rather than implementation should be very familiar to an engineer, of any kind, because that's how every unsolved implementation must start.
by killer32 | 2026-03-08 22:35:49+00:00
Lately, everyone has been sharing SKILL.md and AGENT.md files.

I think the more important layer is actually SPEC and MEMORY.

That is the idea behind this repo:

Ultimate Project combines two separate disciplines:

Beastmode -> the software engineering discipline

spec-kit -> the structure and organization of specs

Beastmode gives the engineering workflow.
spec-kit gives the project a clear spec foundation.

Putting them together creates a development loop where the system starts from specs, keeps context in memory, and follows a more structured implementation lifecycle.

Combination Repo: https://github.com/senolcolak/ultimate-project

beastmode: https://github.com/BugRoger/beastmode
spec-kit: https://github.com/github/spec-kit

For small project, a simple history file ./store-my-history in a dir works. For bigger projects, I think structured specs + engineering memory matter much more than prompt files alone.

I’d be curious how others here are handling spec organization, memory, and iteration flow in agent-driven development.
by oersted | 2026-03-08 22:36:11+00:00
> The neurons serve as a biological filter: the training system translates screen pixels and ray-cast distances into electrical zaps, the living cells fire spikes, and those counts feed straight into a PyTorch decoder that maps them to Doom actions. The PPO agent, CNN encoder and entire reward loop run on ordinary silicon elsewhere. Cole’s ablation modes make the split testable, set decoder output to random or zero and the game still plays. The CL1 hardware interface works exactly as advertised. What remains unproven is whether 200,000 human neurons can ever carry the policy instead of just riding along.

Yeah… That’s quite the smoking gun.

So it’s quite likely then that the neurons are just acting as a bad conductor. The electrodes read a noisy version of the signals that go into the neurons, and they just train a CNN with PPO to remove that noise, get the proper inputs, and learn a half-decent policy for playing the game.

If this worked as advertised they shouldn’t need a CNN decoder at all! The raw neuron readout should be interpreted as game inputs directly.

Besides, they are not streaming the video into the neurons at all. Just the horizontal position of the enemies and the distance, or some variant of that. In that sense it’s barely more than pong isn’t it? If enemy left, rotate left, if enemy right, rotate right, if enemy center shoot. At a stretch, if enemy far, go forward, if enemy close, go back. The rest of the time just move randomly. Indeed, the behavior in the video is essentially that…

While we are at it, the encoded input signal itself is already pretty close to a decent policy if mapped directly to the keys (how much enemy left, center, right), even without any CNN, PPO or neurons.
by SLHamlet | 2026-03-08 22:36:15+00:00
"The US struck nearly 2,000 targets in the first 100 hours of the operation. That list was not generated on the fly but it was built months in advance. But managing, sequencing, and executing 2,000 targets simultaneously across multiple domains still requires algorithmic support that no human coordination chain can match unaided. More importantly: maintaining a database of 2,000+ target records and keeping every single one correctly classified is exactly the kind of task that gets delegated to automated systems..."
by jongjong | 2026-03-08 22:36:16+00:00
Well it sounds like you miss this other person. If they're still alive I would probably try to talk to them, explain your feelings and and let them know you want them back.

If the person is no longer alive then you need to allow yourself to grieve. You can allow yourself to revisit past times in your mind. You can keep their memory alive in your mind.

If the person broke up with you and doesn't want to get back together then try to focus on their negative personality traits. Nobody is perfect and you can surely find things that you are glad you don't have to put up with anymore. Focus on those things. Worst case, focus on how badly they treated you and reflect on what it says about their character... Maybe that will make them look less appealing. My experience is that when someone mistreats me (or others) in any way, it creates a natural deep dislike for them. Maybe focus on that.

Life is rarely fully comfortable. You're almost always dealing with something. The key is to not focus on the things that make it worse.
by notepad0x90 | 2026-03-08 22:36:31+00:00
> This is perfectly legal under the GPL. What's not legal is redistributing that software you modified but not giving _your_ users the same rights to modification that you yourself got.

That's still controlling what users do, and worse, it's what they do with modifications, not even your own original work!! and without even agreeing to a contract of such terms.

It's plagarism if the activity was done under some system that required attribution, or if they misrepresented the change's provenance. neither is the case.

I agree with you on EULA's, they've been rendered useless in some cases and jurisdictions. But at least EULA's have a software prompt that enters their users into an agreement. There is a reason they require you to scroll all the way down and read it before agreeing, it is because how inherently weak they are.

I don't necessarily think EULA's are good, but at least as a user, i actually agreed to them. No one is trying to force me to agree to an EULA simply because EULA.txt exists somewhere in the directory tree of the software. And even if they did and had legal grounds, I still would disagree with any terms I didn't explicitly agree to, or any terms of agreement that are lopsided to the advantage of one side.

copyleft is an attempt at corporate greedy litigious manipulative behavior, except the greedy party doesn't actually want money, they just want control.
by PunchyHamster | 2026-03-08 22:36:33+00:00
> That's a bit harsh, depending on how a person developed or where they worked they may not have had exposure to other facets beyond basic development. Beyond that, it might as well be magic.

...so? You sit your ass down and learn. It might take a bit longer if you never touched shell but it's far easier than anything actual programming deals with, especially currently with set of ready or near ready recipes for every environment.
by bob1029 | 2026-03-08 22:36:48+00:00
I've done a lot of experimentation around brainfuck, this paper's specific variant, and applications to genetic programming.

My conclusions so far regarding the abiogenesis/self-replicator angle is that it is very interesting, but it is impossible to control or guide in any practical way. I really enjoy building and watching these experiments, but they don't ever go anywhere useful. A machine that can edit its own program tape during execution (which is then persisted) is extremely volatile in terms of fitness landscape over time.

If you are looking for practical applications of BF to real world problems, I would suggest evolving fixed sized program modules that are executed over shared memory in a sequential fashion. Assume the problem + instruction set says that you must find a ~1000 instruction program. With standard BF, the search space is one gigantic 8^1000. If you split this up into 10 modules of 100 instructions, issues like credit assignment and smoothness of the solution space dramatically improve. 8^100 is still really bad, but compared to 8^1000 its astronomically better.
by mobrienv | 2026-03-08 22:37:09+00:00
"Sharing the prompt" is a category error. It assumes the value of a piece is in the instructions given to the model, rather than the proprietary input or the iterative editing that follows. There is a hard line between using an LLM to generate content from a void and using it to synthesize specific ideas.

If someone asks a model to "write a post about X," they are outsourcing the thinking, which results in the homogenized voice everyone is tired of.
by pinkmuffinere | 2026-03-08 22:37:46+00:00
tbh I think this is an underappreciated aspect to human behavior in general. Adults will do the same thing, sometimes even if they are corrected as politely as possible (my coworkers pee in their pants just to spite me too!) I think a lot of our systems don't explicitly account for that. We have meetings where a "correct" decision is made, and then we immediately expect everyone to get over their ego and accept the decision. In my experience, alignment is greatly improved if there can be a buffer of 5-7 days after the meeting where the topic receives no discussion. People come back in a less emotional state, and suddenly play nice. Maybe the time away helps forget the emotions, while the merits of the different options are still remembered? It also helps to remove ownership of ideas, or even reassign the "good ones" to any potentially-butt-hurt parties!! It's dishonest but it works. Finally, just because I'm writing this doesn't mean that _I_ am immune from these, I see the same behaviors in myself.

Sorry for the soap box, just seemed somewhat topical.
by wtallis | 2026-03-08 22:38:14+00:00
No, CAV has nothing to do with encoding, and both analog and digital formats have used both CAV and CLV and hybrids of the two.

The legible text seen in the microscope images happens because of the combination of LaserDisc recording a raw and uncompressed encoding of the analog video signal, the way that LaserDisc used CAV to store an integer number of frames per track so that the image data for corresponding on-screen locations of subsequent frames would be aligned at the same radial position on the disc, and the credits scrolling vertically at constant speed.

If LaserDisc had used a digital encoding (especially a compressed encoding), the data on disc may still have had discernible patterns but the text would not necessarily have been legible. If it had used CAV but not stored a whole number of frames per track, then temporal and spatial locality on screen would not have corresponded so well to spatial locality on disc. And the vertically-scrolling credits are pretty much the only kind of content that can produce the recognizable and legible images on the disc surface.

I think the fact that the aspect ratio of the text came out approximately right probably is a consequence of the scrolling speed of the credits being chosen to suit the vertical resolution of the video. If the text had appeared squished in the microscope, it would probably have been moving too fast on screen to be clearly legible.
by antonvs | 2026-03-08 22:38:41+00:00
That's a cute hot take, but it most likely comes from not having come across an environment where this is needed, so instead you may have seen people cosplaying as much bigger companies.

A true platform team is responsible for implementing and maintaining an internal platform for automated deployment and operation of a company's software. The platform is essentially a product, where the customers are developers and anyone else who has a stake in the deployment, maintenance, and operation of the company's software - including the ops team! I.e. strictly speaking, an ops team is a customer of the platform built by the platform team.

Done properly, this automates away a lot of what ops teams and "devops teams" do, because it allows fully automated self-service by developers. Developers should be able to create new environments and deploy new and existing services without opening tickets to some other team. Those environments and services are fully compliant out of the box with company policies and architectural decisions.

People sometimes think that this means that if you let devs submit PRs for terraform files and, say, k8s configs, that that's a "platform". But no, that's just shifting that kind of work to developers, it's not automating it. Under the hood, a platform might use those tools, but if deployment of environments and services requires interacting directly with generic tools that can be configured however a developer wants, that's not an internal platform.
by ziml77 | 2026-03-08 22:38:47+00:00
This is the way I like to do it. I know bloating the logs too much can be a problem, but it's even worse if you're lacking information to reconstruct what happened when there ends up being a problem. And only providing that detail when there's an error isn't enough. What if the issue never triggered an error in the application and it was only caught later on either by a person seeing something was off or by an error a downstream system?

Also it's helpful to log before operations rather than after because if a step gets stuck it's possible to know what it's stuck on.
by estimator7292 | 2026-03-08 22:40:43+00:00
The remarkable 2 is entirely separable from the cloud bullshit. You have root SSH access out of the box and the community has several sync replacement options for most needs.

You can also install a terminal emulator and do all the usual linux CLI stuff like vim and SSH on a pleasant e-ink display.

The keyboard does have a good feel, but I hate the layout and it's a bit too fiddly.
by andrepd | 2026-03-08 22:40:45+00:00
> Non scrupulous ebikers rip through pedestrian sections.

You're right. A car driver would never rip through a crosswalk or kill someone.

That argument is stupid. Cars kill several times more people than ebikes ever will. It's nonsensical to be worried about a minor issue while treating a much more serious one as a fact of life.

> you obviously dont live in a dense city with e bike delivery.

Yeah but I do. The thing is I also live in a city with bike infrastructure, so bikes (delivery or not) can move safely without annoying anyone.
by Timon3 | 2026-03-08 22:41:03+00:00
The presence of the ground is very important because it's a solid body you can get crushed against! The fear of falling down and getting trampled is a major source of panic in bad crowd conditions. That alone makes a big difference.

This isn't about complex topological problems, it's about the square-cube law. In a 3d environment, the direction of movement of any individual covers a much smaller portion of their possible movement directions. This means it's much easier to form a "wave" in 2d, and this wave covers a much larger portion of their potential movement options.

Doesn't this obviously mean a 3d crowd is much less likely to crush an individual? And even if we're only talking about bird-on-bird collisions, head-on collisions make up a much smaller portion of all possible movement vectors.

Regarding your plane example - birds don't explode upon most collisions, and I'd assume they can easily recover from many angles a plane couldn't.
by skinnymuch | 2026-03-08 22:41:21+00:00
I have the opposite problem. Spending time with people is difficult for a few years now. Even though I was born in the west and have only known this world. Now I will be leaving the west soon.

Something I’ve wanted to do for reasons for 1-2 years. I will usually say it’s because of my finances/possible recession. That is a helpful practical benefit. Reasons due to a series of life events that “broke” my worldview during and right after the pandemic causing this [purposeful] loner situation are the actual reasons.

I wish I didn’t feel this way. It sucks never wanting to talk or hang out with the remaining people I am in touch with.
by Anamon | 2026-03-08 22:41:39+00:00
Forget about checking Safe Browsing. Try reporting phishing sites to Google if you really want a reason to hate them.

I report all (manually verified) phishing sites I get spam for to Safe Browsing, then automatically check the listing status daily, and re-report every week if it's still not blacklisted. Usually, takedown by hosters is faster. Phishing sites that stay up long enough often go for 3-4 months before Google finally deems it apt to block them. I think the entire Safe Browsing team consists of one overworked, underpaid intern.

Compare this to Microsoft Defender. The time it takes for a site I report there to get blocked is usually measured in hours, not weeks. This is one thing MS actually seems to be running decently.
Show HN: Engram — a brain-inspired context database for AI agents
by oldschoolai | 2026-03-08 22:42:15+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been working on Engram, a persistent context layer for AI agents and LLM sessions.

The inspiration came from a simple problem: when you work with LLMs for a long time, context collapses. Conversation history gets too long, summaries drift, and models forget or mix up earlier decisions. It becomes even worse when multiple agents or different models are involved.

Engram is an attempt to treat AI memory more like how human memory works:
* knowledge is stored incrementally
* related concepts reinforce each other
* context is reconstructed when needed rather than replaying the entire past

Instead of storing conversations as raw text or chunks, Engram commits information into a persistent context structure and then materializes the relevant pieces when a model needs them.

Some other capabilities built so far:
* multi-agent updates to the same context
* evolving knowledge instead of append-only memory
* context reconstruction across long sessions
* working across models (e.g. start in ChatGPT, continue in Claude)

Repo:
https://github.com/softmaxdata/engram

Would love feedback from people building agents or long-running AI workflows. Happy to answer questions or run experiments people suggest.
by tonymet | 2026-03-08 22:42:22+00:00
this is great and I have a feature request: A "refresh VM" feature that exports your home dir + packages into a new VM instance.

I've tried Optimize-VHD but renewing the VM this way frees up disk and speeds up the VM as well. None of the WSL settings for sparse disk / disk shrinking seem to work well.

Here's what I usually do

$ tar -czf /mnt/c/Temp/home-backup.tgz $HOME
$ apt list --installed > /mnt/c/Temp/packages.txt

delete the VM, create a new one, reverse the process.

$ tar -cxf /mnt/c/Temp/home-backup.tgz -C $HOME
$ apt update
$ cat /mnt/c/Temp/packages.txt | xargs apt install
by tavavex | 2026-03-08 22:42:31+00:00
That's how all these vendors justify their actions once they decide it's time to kill off their competition and impose arbitrary limitations. But how real is this "damage", actually? How big do you think the overlap between 'users who want to install custom operating systems', 'users who have no idea what they're doing' and 'users who would loudly complain after an obvious mistake on their own part' is? The #1 source of reputational damage for vendors is people breaking something within their controlled environments. The bar to run a custom OS is already so high for average people that it will never matter or be a social engineering attack vector, just because of how niche it is. We've been able to run anything on PCs for over 40 years, custom firmware for phones goes back at least 25 years, and despite all of this, the world hasn't gone up in flames yet. The security pressure exists, but it's minimal compared to everything else. The real reasons are profit-driven.
by palata | 2026-03-08 22:43:35+00:00
> I had some Scala 3 feelings when reading the vision, I hope Rust doesn't gets too pushy with type systems ideas.

I don't know if it is true or not, but my feeling is that Scala brought a lot of new ideas. But as I read somewhere, "Scala was written by compiler people, to write compilers", and I can understand that feeling.

Kotlin came after Scala (I think?) and seems to have gotten a lot of inspiration from Scala. But somehow Kotlin managed to stay "not too complex", unlike Scala.

All that to say, Rust has been innovating in the zero-cost abstraction memory safe field. If it went the way of Scala, I wonder if another language could be "the Kotlin of Rust"? Or is that Zig already? (I have no idea about Zig)
by alpaca128 | 2026-03-08 22:43:59+00:00
There's a difference between Apple's mobile devices which are an actual walled garden, and Mac OS which (begrudgingly) still lets you install and run pretty much anything. It has a nice terminal, no driver issues, and is not nearly as distracting and annoying as modern Windows (still has more than enough bugs and quirks though). And once update support runs out I can install Linux on it.

iPads are a completely different world and really feel not just restrictive but the whole ecosystem constantly tries to push you towards subscriptions for everything, including the OS which conveniently offers the only sane backup solution that can cover all apps. It incentivises content consumption and giving up control over one's data. Not my cup of tea.