MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by A_D_E_P_T | 2026-03-01 23:41:14+00:00
It's not hard at all when you acknowledge that such senses exist in the world, and that you (like others) possess them. As an aside it tends to foster a certain tendency towards empathy.

In essence, you're asking why there's an inside to being a self-modeling system. But "inside" isn't something extraneous, something additional -- rather, it's what "self-modeling" means.

Really the "hard problem" has a very easy answer, but it's a physical/functional answer, and dualists and obscurantists simply don't like it.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-03-01 23:41:17+00:00
Now ask a junior dev to design a concurrency implementation. To know the complete in my case AWS SDK and write a script in 3 minutes.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/boto3/latest/

Or do the same for IAC - same surface area - and use Terraform on one project, CloudFormation on another, and the CDK on a third and to generate code for you when you give them the correct architecture. It took me a day to do that before AI depending on the architectural complexity and I know AWS well (trust me on this). How long would it take me to delegate that to a junior dev? It took ChatGPT 2 minutes before I started using Claude just by my pasting a well labeled architecture diagram and explaining the goal.

It took me about 8 hours total to vibe code an internal web tool with a lot of features that if I had estimated before AI, I would have said a mid level developer would have taken two weeks at least. It wasn’t complex - just a CRUD app with Cognito authentication. How long would it have taken a junior developer?
by fuzzfactor | 2026-03-01 23:41:32+00:00
That's exactly right, you've got to be an unmistakable gentleman, which is just the opposite.

As everybody knows that's still often not enough, but why shoot yourself in the foot when you're trying to put your best foot forward?

I'll never forget the day some sophisticated gentlemen came to my school and introduced one of their big hit songs that night.

How there's 5 little words so many single women love to hear, "Hey Girl, What's Your Name?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09w6_q0Chxk

If you look at the lyrics it is a bit straightforward for the 21st century, I think the best approach now is to compress it to only 4 words, "Hi, What's Your Name?".

Even that can be a bit much in the wrong situation, so it can be good to seek out the opposite type of situation :)

You might keep that on your mind but from there let things try to imply the rest of the lyrics, especially the part that goes "Can I Be Your Friend?"
by steve_adams_86 | 2026-03-01 23:41:39+00:00
Especially in dietary studies. You either spend a lot on high quality, controlled studies where you can nail down parameters (takes a LOT of labour), or you spend on facilitating much larger studies where you make up for precision and control with volume.

There are trade offs in either case and some types of research where one is more suitable than the other. But the best case is a combination of the two, and it's exceedingly rare.

Maybe there are other options but this seems to be the polar nature of these studies from what I've seen.
by flockonus | 2026-03-01 23:41:40+00:00
Random is a very interesting concept. In relation to nature we seem to use "random" as anything we can't or are currently unable to model.

To call something random doesn't mean it's impossible to model, in fact all sorts of natural facts seemed random one day before being covered by a model. One very relatable example example is the motion of stars in the the night sky, which seemed random for ages, until the Copernican revolution.

The fact we have access to random() function in programming seems to trip many people. random() is a particular model implementation of random, but stuff in nature isn't random().

My point is, using "just random" to do work in any scientific explanation is a clutch.
by zdragnar | 2026-03-01 23:42:14+00:00
The problem isn't that the urgent request went through, it's that she requested hospice or palliative care and was denied. And, let's be honest, POA should not be sufficient to euthanize a person who is awake, aware, and revoked consent.

"Do no harm" has been replaced with "put them down if it's cheaper and we can get away with it"
Ask HN: How will most Anthropic customers respond to the supply chain risk?
by Poomba | 2026-03-01 23:42:40+00:00
Now that Trump/the administration has designater Anthropic a supply chainrisk and threatened every company that uses them, how do u think most companies that use Anthropic/Claude would respond?

Anthropic only has ~100 customers in federally focused industries (ie defense) [1] but it seems Trump is not just targeting “pure” federal contractors/agencies but anyone doing business with the govt. so that obviously includes a huge chunk of tech companies like Crowdstrike, Asana, Salesforce, Hubspot etc [2] and even non-tech companies

And how is the govt going to enforce companies to not use Anthropic? Are they going to audit the internal tool usage of thousands of companies?

What if individual developers pay for Claude Code personally? What if a company uses Azure or AWS Bedrock which routes to Claude? How would they handle those “edge cases”?

[1] According to Bloomberry (https://bloomberry.com/data/anthropic-claude/)
[2] many of these tech companies sell separate products to the government (https://www.hubspot.com/government and https://www.salesforce.com/government/)
by tombert | 2026-03-01 23:42:42+00:00
In my case it’s because forth is one of the only high-level languages that has a chance of running at a playable speed on the NES, and I just like the language in general.

If you look at old school development manuals for stuff like the C64 your options, to get decent performance for something you are writing it seems like the options were “forth” or “assembly”, and I find forth easier to reason about.

To answer the true essence of your question though, I wanted a forth compiler as a means to making an NES game, but after I got Codex to generate the compiler I kind of realize that what I actually wanted was the entire experience of making an NES game, including building the compiler.
by nobulexdev | 2026-03-01 23:42:49+00:00
Based off of all the feedback here, I have built a quick demo that shows the multi-party use case on why cryptography matters when a third party needs to verify compliance independently:

https://github.com/nobulexdev/nobulex/blob/main/demo/two-par...

Run it: npx tsx demo/two-party-verify.ts

Three steps: operator creates a covenant, claims compliance and then a regulator verifies the cryptographic proof without trusting the operator. That is the core of what Nobulex does. Everything else is tooling around this pattern. Appreciate the pushback, as it helped clarify what actually matters.
by rayiner | 2026-03-01 23:42:54+00:00
Those are misconceptions that are often repeated by people who have never needed these services and don't know what they offer.

> - free or greatly reduced cost of higher education

The University of Oregon (where the author went) has free tuition and fees for anyone who is Pell grant eligible. So does the University of Maryland (my state flagship). Georgia Tech (where I went) has free tuition for anyone who graduates a Georgia high school with over a 3.0.

> - replacing means-tested programs like Medicaid with universal versions. Medicare for all, for example, where you don’t have to jump through hoops or even opt in

Which country doesn't require you to opt in? The only two countries that have a truly universal system are the U.K. and Canada, and both require you to opt in, just like U.S. Medicaid.

> - cheaper housing, or public housing (god forbid!)

We have heavily subsidized housing, Section 8. We mostly got rid of public housing in preference to subsidizing rent. Very few people want to go back to government-run housing.
by laurencerowe | 2026-03-01 23:43:13+00:00
While I don’t think anyone should be allowed to take a 2150Wh home made battery on a train, I’m not sure why battery capacity should affect classification. Limiting power delivery makes much more sense.

Quite common for Bosch powered cargo bikes to allow fitting two 800Wh batteries and you can always carry spares. They’re just horribly expensive.

I’m very glad my US spec e-bike is 28mph/45kmph rather than 15mph/25kmph limited as I feel much more comfortable taking the lane closer to car speeds on residential roads even if I rarely go above 20mph.
by mhurron | 2026-03-01 23:46:10+00:00
> Would you be bothered if a stranger struck up a nice conversation with you?

Yes. If I am basically anywhere there are other people, I am there for a specific reason, and anyone trying to talk to me for anything else is bothering me. I've found that most people that try to start conversations with strangers are really poor at reading signals that their actions are unwanted and they only stop when you say something so out of their comfort zone they have no idea how to handle it. They just can't understand that people wouldn't want to talk to them.

And after this article and thread, we can add I don't want to be your practice dummy to the reasons you're bothering me.
by steve_adams_86 | 2026-03-01 23:46:45+00:00
My success with LLMs has increased quite a bit since I stopped using MCP servers. I credit it to a couple things:

One, far less context usage
Two, I replace it with better instructions to use the tools available.

The gist of it for me is that MCP is expensive and doesn't make up for better instructions using lighter weight tools.

Like the article mentions too, when you've got good tools available in the shell and good instructions for how to use them, the tokens required to do significant workloads is dramatically reduced specifically because the composability of tools in that environment is essentially unprecedented in computing.

In the rare case that Claude doesn't figure out good workflows on its own, you can just make a skill or add instructions to CLAUDE.md and the results are remarkably good
by borhensaidi | 2026-03-01 23:46:48+00:00
I got frustrated with LangChain being impossible to audit (500+ transitive dependencies, 100K+ LOC), so I built picoagent — an AI agent framework with only numpy and websockets as external dependencies.

The interesting technical decision: instead of prompting the LLM to pick a tool, I use Shannon Entropy (H(X) = -Σp·log₂(p)) on the softmax score distribution over available tools. If entropy is above 1.5 bits, the agent asks for clarification instead of guessing. In my tests this cuts false positive tool calls by 40-60%.

The threshold adapts over time using a simple online learning system that tracks success/failure rates per session — no external data sent anywhere.

Other things that might be interesting to HN:
- Zero-trust sandbox with 18+ regex deny patterns blocking rm -rf, fork bombs, sudo, reverse shells, path traversal
- Dual-layer memory: numpy .npz vector embeddings + LLM consolidation to MEMORY.md (no Pinecone, no vector DB)
- The entire entropy gate is 64 lines of readable Python
- 5 chat channels (Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Email) with unified memory
- MCP-native (Model Context Protocol) stdio server
- Hot-reloadable Markdown skills via SIGHUP

It's early and rough. I'm looking for feedback on:
- Is 1.5 bits the right entropy threshold or should it be dynamic from day one?
- What dangerous shell patterns am I missing in the sandbox?
- Is the dual-memory approach (vector + markdown consolidation) worth the complexity?

GitHub: https://github.com/borhen68/picoagents

Happy to answer questions about any of the implementation decisions.
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-03-01 23:47:55+00:00
I actually think webmcp is incredibly smart & good (giving users agency over what's happening on the page is a giant leap forward for users vs exposing APIs).

But this post frustrates the hell out of me. There's no code! An incredibly brief barely technical run-down of declarative vs imperative is the bulk of the "technical" content.

I find this developers.chrome.com post to be broadly insulting. It has no on-ramps for developers.
by adampunk | 2026-03-01 23:48:28+00:00
There appears to be a cottage industry in pumping out "LLMs will eat your skills; listen to me, the wise senior engineer with the same anxieties" pieces.

https://www.ivanturkovic.com/2026/02/25/ai-made-writing-code...

That's the same style. Plays well there, tho, it seems. Even when an agent writes it.
by blurbleblurble | 2026-03-01 23:48:34+00:00
Racism sucks and I'm bothered by it tremendously. For example the dog whistles in bored ape yacht club were obnoxious to say the least. But I don't think this is that. This is a silly satire on the ways people are getting tripped up on a fallacy, taking the concept of "ai" as being an autonomous force separable from people way too seriously. It's not of course. It's another iteration of the same old tools.
by Marsymars | 2026-03-01 23:48:41+00:00
Apple Music has actually gone to "completely unusable" for my use.

I use it (or did, pre-Tahoe) to play iTunes-shared music over my network. Since Tahoe, it will play a couple (plus or minus a handful of songs) and then just stop rather than transitioning to the next song.

I've been listening to the actual radio for the past couple months because I haven't had the time to work out how to play my network-shared music.
by loeg | 2026-03-01 23:49:06+00:00
Sick. Would be interested in any followup.

The off-the-shelf pack I was looking at if I had to make an ebike for commuting (if my employer ends WFH) was about 1100 Wh (about half the homemade pack in the article): https://www.ebikessentials.com/collections/batteries/product...
by ethanpil | 2026-03-01 23:49:09+00:00
Asked Grok to ELI5 the abstract:

*Okay, kiddo, imagine this like a fun science experiment about breakfast!*

Scientists wanted to know:
*"Does what you eat for breakfast matter a LOT when you're trying to lose weight?"*

They got 19 grown-ups who were carrying extra weight. Each person tried *TWO different "big-breakfast" diets* for 28 days each (like a month).
- Both diets made people eat *most of their food early* (45% at breakfast, then less and less during the day).
- The only big difference? The *breakfast itself*!

*Diet 1: High-Fiber Breakfast* (think lots of fruits, veggies, oats, beans — the "rough, chewy" stuff)
*Diet 2: High-Protein Breakfast* (think eggs, yogurt, chicken, beans — the "filling, muscle stuff")

### What happened?

1. *Weight loss*
- High-fiber breakfast diet → people lost *more weight* (about 11 pounds / 4.87 kg)
- High-protein breakfast diet → people lost *a bit less* (about 8.5 pounds / 3.87 kg)
→ So the fiber one won for dropping pounds!

2. *Feeling hungry*
- High-protein breakfast was the *winner* here. People said they felt *fuller and less hungry* all day.

3. *Tiny bugs in your tummy (gut bacteria)*
- High-fiber breakfast made the *good bugs* super happy and grow way more!
(Special helpful ones like "Bifido", "Faecalibacterium" and "Roseburia" — they make a healthy tummy juice called butyrate.)

### Super simple takeaway (the ELI5 version):

- Eating a *big breakfast* helps you lose weight (way better than skipping it or eating late).
- If you want to *lose the most weight* and keep your tummy bugs healthy → load up on *fiber* at breakfast.
- If you want to *feel the least hungry* → load up on *protein* at breakfast.

Both are good! The scientists basically proved:
*Breakfast is the boss of your day.* Make it big, and whether you pick the "chewy veggie" version or the "eggy" version changes what wins — more weight gone, less hunger, or happier belly bugs.

Pretty cool, right? Breakfast isn't just food... it's like a remote control for your body!
by Forgeties79 | 2026-03-01 23:49:25+00:00
I get where you’re coming from but as somebody who has bounced between three different major NLE’s, a lot of these tools are not radically different from each other.

The differences are pretty substantial sometimes don’t get me wrong, but your previous experience usually carries over in more ways than it doesn’t and you’re able to get up and running with like…80% of proficiency you had on your preferred program after a month I’d say.

GIMP isn’t quite that smooth of a transition and you can feel it. I don’t think it’s necessarily a fault or something they should spend resources addressing, but it is noticeable
by mueslix | 2026-03-01 23:49:54+00:00
Great. You added my project to your site without asking, then cold-emailed me about it, and wrapped the whole thing in a thin layer of "congratulations". Let me be direct: this is not flattering. It's spam.

On top of that, you're asking me to pay to "boost" something I never requested, and to help amplify your marketing on Hacker News. Essentially the holy trinity of:

1. Unsolicited outreach
2. Monetizing someone else's work without consent
3. Trying to recruit the very people you spam as your distribution channel

That's not community building. That's growth hacking at the expense of maintainers.
by TZubiri | 2026-03-01 23:50:23+00:00
Here's a negative signal I'm seeing often:

When a developer that usually consumes the language starts critiquing the language.

I could go on as to why it's a bad signal, psychologically, but let's just say that empirically it usually doesn't come from a good place, it's more like a developer raising the stakes of their application failing and blaming the language.

Sure one out of a thousand devs might be the next Linus Torvalds and develop the next Rust. But the odds aren't great.
by reenorap | 2026-03-01 23:50:48+00:00
I was using Tesla Summon in my car parking lot. It had pulled out of the spot and started to turn to leave the spot when a truck entered the row. My Tesla couldn’t move because of the truck and I couldn’t do anything else so it was a deadlock. Normally if a person was caught in this situation they would have just parked back into the spot or reverse and straighten out but it had already started moving forward so I guess it just froze instead of reacting and there was no option to park back to get out of the way and unblock. Sure the truck could have pulled out but I think the guy was confused why the car was moving with someone in there and just stayed where he was.

Luckily the range of Summon isn’t very far so I ran over, apologized and took control of the car but it just goes to show how many real edge cases there are in real life and software can’t account for many of them.
by grayhatter | 2026-03-01 23:51:02+00:00
You don't have a scripting language in your toolbox that you're comfortable with?

I would probably say a shell is "the correct tool for the job" but other than the appeal to authority, or appeal to tradition. There's not a great argument for a shell script over a language you're already comfortable with.

There are hundreds of examples that are easier or faster in python than shell.

Engineers are bad at making tooling, we're even worse making ephemeral tooling we're willing to throw away. Contrasted with other makers, you have machinests who gladly make a one off tool to make a single process easier.

The more 'correct way' than a shell script, is something simple and composable. A large unwieldy shell script that you can't make simple changes in, is terrible design, and it's a mistake to allow that inertia to gain speed.

It's not exactly a complete refutation but something I've been thinking about recently.
by altairprime | 2026-03-01 23:51:38+00:00
Corporations are person-like entities, so there’s a plausible argument to be made. The states seem loathe to be precedent-setters in triggering evaluations of this argument, though, so I don’t know of any supporting cases yet. Whoever’s first will see corporate tax revenue fall off a cliff once a corporation can be subjected to community service, so they have a lot of self-interest in not prosecuting these violations.
by wooptoo | 2026-03-01 23:51:38+00:00
Hi Nick, first of all thank you for your work and dedication through the years.

Second, I found this entirely by accident just now:
https://www.sovereign.tech/programs/fellowship

> For the duration of the fellowship, one “maintainer-in-residence” will be employed up to full-time (32-40 hours per week) as part of the Sovereign Tech Agency team.
> This option offers the maintainer the personal and professional advantages of being part of team, as well as the stability of being employed to continue working on critical FOSS infrastructure.
> This position is only available for maintainers located in Germany,
by krackers | 2026-03-01 23:52:02+00:00
All system prompts are already wrapped in specific role markers (each LLM has its own unique format), so I'm sure every lab is familiar with the concept of delimters, in-band vs out-of-band signalling and such.

It'd not clear why within any section XML markers would do better than something like markdown, other than claude being explicitly post-trained with XML prompts as opposed to markdown. One hypothesis could be that since a large portion of the training corpus is websites, XML is more natural to use since it's "learned" the structure of XML better than markdown. Another could be that explicit start/end tags make identifying matching delimiters easier than JSON (which requires counting matching brackets) or markdown (where the end of a section is implicitly defined by the presence of a new header element).
by A_D_E_P_T | 2026-03-01 23:52:02+00:00
The kneejerk response would be: Are you not conscious at this present moment? If we were to modulate your spatiotemporal senses with drugs or a lobotomy, do you doubt that you would be very differently conscious, or perhaps entirely unconscious?

I mean, there is a credible first-person answer to that question of yours, which each man can answer for himself.

But considered more seriously, the "hard problem" is an artifact of treating experience as a separate thing that needs to be generated. If you accept that self-modeling systems bounded in space and time exist, you've already accepted that experience exists -- because experience is what such a system is, from the inside. There's no second step where experience gets added. The question "why is there experience?" is exactly akin to "Why is there an interior to four walls and a roof?" The interior isn't a separate thing; it's necessarily constitutive.
by FireBeyond | 2026-03-01 23:52:15+00:00
"We want to suppress voters under some false boogeyman of 'illegal voters'. You are refusing to give us data which we need to do this, so instead, we'll keep ICE in your cities who have been shown to have no issues with escalating violence, until you do."

I struggle to believe you cannot connect those dots.

In addition, why would ICE enforcement in a city go away because voter rolls are turned over? Is illegal immigration in Minnesota a problem worthy of active enforcement or not?

In other words, oppression of citizenry to advance the efforts of a government to suppress voting that it dislikes.
by aziaziazi | 2026-03-01 23:53:09+00:00
Not sure if you’re straw manning intentionally so I’ll imagine the best: a misreporting of his words. Here they are:

> One winter when my roommate and I both were navigating our latest setbacks, we couldn’t make ends meet and we literally went hungry. There just was no money for food. We would go to the catholic food box donation center and they gave me a box, but I was vegan and the box was full of garbage Spam and Frank and Beans type stuff that I ended up just settting out on the curb. I would rather go hungry than develop health problems from filling up on ultraprocessed hydrogenated oil government peanut butter.

Being hungry isn’t starving, the way being out of breath is different from suffocating.

> Humans are omnivores, veganism is a choice

To understand his choice to not eat the box we might paraphrase him: "humans are natural whole food eater, not UPF eater".

It depends on what "human" definition is used: homo sapiens (biologie)? A poor American (context)?