MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by azakai | 2026-03-08 19:43:47+00:00
> Wasm should be able to just talk to the browser directly.

Web APIs are designed for JavaScript, though, which makes this hard. For example, APIs that receive or return JS Typed Arrays, or objects with flags, etc. - wasm can't operate on those things.

You can add a complete new set of APIs which are lower-level, but that would be a lot of new surface area and a lot of new security risk. NaCl did this back in the day, and WASI is another option that would have similar concerns.

There might be a middle ground with some automatic conversion between JS objects and wasm. Say that when a Web API returns a Typed Array, it would be copied into wasm's linear memory. But that copy may make this actually slower than JS.

Another option is to give wasm a way to operate on JS objects without copying. Wasm has GC support now so that is possible! But it would not easily help non-GC languages like Rust and C++.

Anyhow, these are the sort of reasons that previous proposals here didn't pan out, like Wasm Interface Types and Wasm WebIDL bindings. But hopefully we can improve things here!
by gus_massa | 2026-03-08 19:43:52+00:00
I's estimating like 30 minutes per day.

It's not only the time to change them, also wash, dry, fold, store. Each part adds like 1 or 2 minutes for all the diapers, in particular folding can't be done in bulk. Probably wash the diapers with shit twice once to remove most of it manually (+ 1 or 2 minute) and one in the washing machine. The 10 minutes go away too fast.

An I remember my mother talking about boiling or blenching the diapers, add like 15 or 20 minutes 2 or 3 times per week (that's like 5 minutes per day). And I may be missing other hidden time sinks.
by Spivak | 2026-03-08 19:44:14+00:00
See this is a fun game because when you're fishing for a breakthrough you can predict tomorrow or 100 years. Nobody, even experts have any idea
until it happens and they're holding it in their hands. To have any kind of accurate prediction you would have to have already observed other civilizations discover AGI to say how close the environment is to even be capable of making the leap. We could be missing something huge, we could need multiple seemingly unrelated breakthroughs to get there. We're for sure closer, but we could still be miles away, GPTs might even barking up the wrong tree.

Why this discussion is already annoying and poised to get so much worse is because now hundred billion dollar companies have a direct financial incentive to say they did it so I expect the definition will get softened to near meaninglessness so some marketing department can slap AGI on their thing.
by torginus | 2026-03-08 19:45:02+00:00
I think languages with strong support for IDE type hints as well as tooling that takes advantage of it are a fairly recent phenomenon, except for maybe Java and C# which I think are regarded by the wider hacker community as uncool.

C++/C IDE support is famously horrible owning to macros/templates. I think the expectation that you could fire up VS Code and get reliable typescript type hints has been a thing only for a decade or so - for most of modern history, a lot of people had to make do without.
by tshaddox | 2026-03-08 19:45:14+00:00
Most display technologies output RGB light, which means you’re already forced into an output methodology that’s relying on deception purpose-built for human biology and psychology.

Because of that, the layer of your model concerned with the physical reality of light doesn’t seem super useful for basic image input and output.

But of course this layer is incredibly useful for stuff like computer graphics, where it is indeed the case that physically based rendering is widely used for offline CGI rendering (and increasingly for realtime video game rendering).
by BoxFour | 2026-03-08 19:45:21+00:00
They don’t even need to do that. Elon is almost certainly pushing Grok as hard as possible right now to them, and it’s not like this administration is especially concerned with running a fair procurement process.

So it’s probably some mix of two things:

1) A punitive “bend the knee us or we’ll destroy you,” which fits their track record.

2) Skepticism that Grok is actually as strong as the benchmarks suggest, which is also a pretty reasonable possibility.
by Tade0 | 2026-03-08 19:45:42+00:00
> You're definitely using the latest and greatest models?

Claude 4.6 opus high, specifically.

As for human brains: every self respecting neural networks 101 course is prefaced with "don't draw analogues to the human brain". And for good reason. Natural neural networks are fundamentally way more complex at every scale.

Also the brain indeed predicts, but also verifies and learns from the predictions. LLMs don't do that - not in real time at least.
by wongarsu | 2026-03-08 19:45:54+00:00
Even if we completely ignore the artistic and technical merit and complexity (which I would argue mostly moved to post-processing images) or the ability to catch or create the moments you want to capture, simply the fact that someone has to hold and point the camera makes it a job that will continue to exist. If you have a wedding and want pictures, someone has to take them. That won't be the bride or the groom, and shoving the responsibility onto one of the guests isn't nice (it would detract from their enjoyment of the event after all). So you hire someone to do it. Kind of like a job
by Screen8774 | 2026-03-08 19:45:54+00:00
IMPORTANT: Lets get a few things out of the way first. My app is not better than Whatsapp in any way. It hasnt been reviewed or audited. This app works by exchanging IP addresses... This app is NOT for anonymous comms.

The project is experimental and far from finished. It's presented for testing, feedback and demo purposes only. Use responsibly.

---

By leveraging WebRTC for direct browser-to-browser communication, it eliminates the middleman entirely. Users simply share a unique URL to establish an encrypted, private channel. This approach effectively bypasses corporate data harvesting and provides a lightweight, disposable communication method for those prioritizing digital sovereignty.

Features:

- P2P

- End to end encryption

- Signal protocol

- Post-quantum cryptography

- Multimedia

- file transfer

- Video calls

- No registration

- No installation

- No database

- TURN server

This project isnt finished enough to compare to existing tools like Simplex, Signal and WhatsApp... This is intended to introduce a new paradigm in client-side managed secure cryptography. Allowing users to send securely encrypted messages; no cloud, no trace.

Technical breakdown: https://positive-intentions.com/docs/technical/p2p-messaging...

Demo: https://p2p.positive-intentions.com/iframe.html?globals=&id=...

Docs: https://positive-intentions.com/docs/technical

NOTE: The app is currently working without setup, but as I look towards going into a saas-direction, I don't think I can avoid user registration.
by vessenes | 2026-03-08 19:45:58+00:00
Good thoughts. Welcome to the discourse.

A couple things to put out there - first, the US has a fairly strong rule of law that the government cannot compel speech -- essentially, while speech can be blocked/stopped, it's a hard rule of the republic that we cannot force certain speech - this is the legal theory for canary statements, by the way -- make your statement "I have not been forced to remove any user from this system by a secret court" -- and when it's no longer true, you remove the statement.

This speech concept extends to, say, software - a company can refuse to create software or tooling or what have you, if it chooses. What if a company has something deemed to be in the national security interest but does not wish to use it on behalf of the country? Traditionally we have both soft and hard power applied - soft - conversations, hearts and minds, perhaps threats, aimed at getting a company on board with the national goal.

Hard: Nationalization. The US has typically reserved nationalization for bailout / reworking pernicious economic incentives, but we have had some wartime nationalizations in the past -- Google tells me Western Telegraph and Smith and Wesson -- and Truman nationalized like everything basically whenever he wanted before and during the Korean War.

Nationalizing a valuable company like Anthropic which is research dominated is risky. You can't force research scientists to work; you could almost certainly find people to keep operating the inference. So you may get something today, and trigger a legendary set of Supreme Court cases, but you have no guarantee the goose will keep laying its golden eggs once Sec. Hegseth is in charge. I would guess this is going to be a very, very last resort even for the most aggressive of governments when there are credible alternatives in the economy. Under those terms, economics / market forces can do a lot of the work.

Upshot - I predict this is Sturm und Drang, and we'll see Anthropic figure out how to keep its gov contracts while oAI continues to work its way in to more government work simultaneously.
by linkregister | 2026-03-08 19:46:24+00:00
I think you are overindexing on the integer value given in the parent post, rather than seeing the essence that LLMs in their current form only excel on tasks they have been specifically trained for.

Karpathy himself has publicly stated that AGI itself is only possible with a new paradigm (that his group is working toward). He claims RHLF and attention models are near the end of their logarithmic curve. The concept of the "self-training AI" is likely impossible without a new kind of model.

We will likely see some classes of human skills completely taken over by LLMs this decade: call centers (already capable in 2026), SWE (the next couple years). Bear in mind the frontier labs have spend many billions on exhaustive training on every aspect of these domains. They are focusing training on the highest value occupations, but the long tail is huge.

It will be interesting to see if this investment will be obviated by a "real AGI" capable of learning without going through the capital-intensive training steps of current models.
by serf | 2026-03-08 19:46:36+00:00
>That zinc spark.

it's not a literal spark. it was a florescence caused by an expulsion of zinc ions during egg cortical reaction in the midst of FluoZin-3, a dye that binds to zinc and fluoresces.

I think that experiment does a bad job at explaining that, because every damn person in the world is using that as some kind of 'spark of life' analogy when really there is no easier way to prevent triploidy than to force everything away for a moment.
by fragmede | 2026-03-08 19:46:41+00:00
They missed the boat with ChatGPT, the research paper for it initially came from Google. There's no real focus between Android, ChromeOS, and Fuschia. The AI results box was possible a decade ago, but not giving money to the sites the info was gotten from was too far a stretch. How I feel is that the company doesn't really know what it's doing, there's no real leadership. KilledByGoogle is a website. With Stadia the technology was there but didn't have the right backing to make it in the market. Though it turns out those GPUs are useful for GCP for AI, so that might have been the real reason. He's just not much of a leader. He doesn't need to go full Elon, but some amount of character would be nice.
by randycupertino | 2026-03-08 19:46:46+00:00
Corgan thinks maybe it was the CIA, however the more obvious answer is this was fallout from the 1996 telecommunications act, which removed restrictions on how many radio stations a company was allowed to own in a set market.

With the restrictions lifted, clear channel and Viacom bought up an enormous number of radio stations and now currently open about 50% of all US radio stations between them, and standardized the music played across the entire market.
by justsomehnguy | 2026-03-08 19:47:14+00:00
> But if your software is successful (especially if it gets distributed to other people), most of the people running it won't be the developers, they'll only be operating it.

The biggest problem is what when you wrote a code for a 'totally obvious message' you yourself was in the context. Years, year, heck even weeks later you would stare at it and wonder 'why tf I didn't wrote something more verbose?'.

Anecdote: I wrote some supporting scripts to 'integrate' two systems three times - totally oblivious the second and the third times what I already did it. Both times I was somewhere 60% when I though 'wait I totally recognize this code but I just wrote it! What in Deja-vu-nation?!'.
by dummydummy1234 | 2026-03-08 19:47:15+00:00
So the risks are different. If China does mass surveillance on us citizens, then what are the potential downsides? China can do targeted influence campaigns in the us, China can do targeted espionage in the us.

The harms that come from this are against us national security as a whole, the harms are not to individuals and civil liberties. Even if both China and US governments are bad actors, then the fact that China is spying on Americans will not affect Americans civil liberties.

On the other hand if the United States does mass surveillance on Americans, then that can be used by bad actor administrations to suppress dissent, throw people who disagree in prison, suppress speech. Essentially the government has the targeted ability to suppress civil liberties.

So it is very different, because the incentives and potential downsides are different. Similar with companies. Google does not have the ability to lock you up for your Google search, the federal government does (if you are American).

It's the same with Nato/allies, it's not about the country, it's about the spying governments ability and incentives to act on the information.

We don't want the stasi, but imagine a world where the stasi instead had millions of files on Scottish people. What is the worst the stasi could do? What is the worst they would be realistically incentivised to do?
by _alternator_ | 2026-03-08 19:48:07+00:00
Devils advocate take: I think the quality of the ShowHN projects are in fact getting higher, at least the ones that land in the front page. The issue is that projects that used to take weeks, months, or even years of work now can be done in a weekend or so. It’s been democratizing, but it also means that when we look at these posts we (rightly) see that these new projects aren’t that much effort _with AI assistance_.

So maybe we should just be honest about this: our standards have raised. We want to see Show HN posts that require effort and dedication, that require more than a few hours of prompt flogging.
by mmarian | 2026-03-08 19:48:26+00:00
Oh, this is actually very helpful for me! I have an AI copilot extension for LibreOffice Writer and I need to export the doc to a text file before sending it to the LLM. The problem is that I lose the semantic formatting (eg heading).

Link to the extension for anyone curious: https://extensions.libreoffice.org/en/extensions/show/99471
by azakai | 2026-03-08 19:48:28+00:00
> How would a compiler toolchain ship a debugger for webassembly?

You can integrate external debuggers, like Uno documents here:

https://platform.uno/docs/articles/debugging-wasm.html

I assume that uses some browser extension, but I didn't look into the details.

You can also use an extension to provide additional debugging capability in the browser:

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/wasm
by neom | 2026-03-08 19:48:41+00:00
I almost emailed dang this morning to offer to help out tho I'm not particularly technical. Few solutions I thought of: 1 - honeypot, hide some links llms can follow if stuff gets posted in it, unlikely to be a human. 2 - Make an captcha that only llms can answer, I recently made 2 social networks, one that humans couldn't join by making the submission question too difficult to figure out quickly. 3- Use an LLM to detect LLMs, the other social network I did for fun (that a small number of people use), an llm that looks for moderation issues does a good job of flagging them. 4- Invites but vary the number you have to give out by account age + karma. The first 3 seem like they'd stop some % for some time, but eventually get old.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2026-03-08 19:49:16+00:00
Human sensory data doesn't correspond -- not neatly, and probably not at all -- to LLM training data.

Human sensory data combines to give you a spatiotemporal sense, which is the overarching sense of being a bounded entity in time and space. From one's perceptions, one can then generalize and make predictions, etc. The stronger one's capacity for cognition, the more accurate and broader these generalizations and predictions become. Every invention, including or perhaps especially the invention of mathematics, is rooted in this.

LLMs have no apparent spatiotemporal sense, are not physically bounded, and don't know how to model the physical world. They're trained on static communications -- though, of course, they can model those, they can predict things like word sequences, and they can produce output that mirrors previously communicated ideas. There's something huge about the fact, staring us right in the face, that they're clearly not capable of producing anything genuinely new of any significance.

This is why AGI is probably in world models.
by squibonpig | 2026-03-08 19:49:22+00:00
>I'm pointing out the hypocrisy and the focus people have on developed countries is just signaling.

It's not. Many/most people who live in developed countries live lifestyles which use outsized amounts of resources and put lots of carbon into the atmosphere. They're also well-positioned to use their wealth to stop doing that.

>A weird anti-west sentiment from people who almost exclusively live a wealthy life in the west.

Not exactly from people who live a wealthy life in the west. More educated people in general are more likely to understand the complicated issue of climate change. Wealth and education have a close relationship.

>I'm not an expert, but from what I have read I believe humans do have an effect on climate. However this doesn't mean that any draconian measure that would essentially impose one world government and population control (which is the inevitable outcome of all of this) is preferable.

If multiple nations collaborating is your definition of one world government then okay, but no it wouldn't lead to that lol. What?

>But more importantly I'm anti stupid measures like restricting air-conditioning because they make a negligible impact and literally kill 100k+ people a year.

I sorta agree that that's the wrong approach. The issue here is generally large industrial producers and corporations who produce most of the carbon. That said, they are responding to demand from consumers, so attacking demand is a valid way to approach the problem.
by teaearlgraycold | 2026-03-08 19:49:41+00:00
I also love the compute modules for their size. Stick one on a nano base board and they’re half the size of a Pi 5. TBH the standard Pis are a bit frustrating with all of the IO. I do not believe the average purchaser is using one as a PC replacement and wants 4 USB ports and 2 HDMI ports. I’ve never seen one in use like that. They are mostly servers or driving a single display without any user input.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2026-03-08 19:49:50+00:00
The guidelines haven't even been updated to say that AI generated posts and submission aren't permitted even though it's been the policy for a couple of years now if one searches for postings by the moderators. So outsiders and new HN users have no reason to know that it's not allowed. I'm sure there are reasons for it but the inaction is all very mysterious from an outsider perspective.
by Darrengineer | 2026-03-08 19:49:54+00:00
I know this is eight days later, but I just want to give sincere applause to this comment. I think this is the first time I've seen 'literally' used in what can be described as "correctly" (i.e., in line with the etymological root).

All those using it to mean 'factually' are out there making a farce of the language. A farce!
by tadfisher | 2026-03-08 19:49:58+00:00
Neither lost nor forgotten! It's the basis for the "Thidell Formula 1" temperament [0], which is what produces those squiggly frets on expensive guitars. It also works well for multiple keys (at the expense of others), making it a compromise for a range of music rather than a single song.

0: https://www.guyguitars.com/truetemperament/eng/tt_techdetail...
by guywithahat | 2026-03-08 19:50:16+00:00
Yeah my job is currently protected due to being clearance work but if we could use AI to its fullest extent we would certainly have too many employees. Perhaps the scope will just increase but until then I see people getting laid off.

Obviously in the long run this is good, more productivity per employee is always better, but short term jobs are changing and people are likely getting laid off (or will at least have more free time)
by nsbk | 2026-03-08 19:50:37+00:00
My off-prem backups are in a Tailscale connected NAS at my parent's house. I'm in the process of talking a friend into having Tailscale configured to host more off-prem backups at his place as well. I'm moving out of iCloud for photo library management and into Immich. I really don't want to lose my photos and videos hence the off-prem backups. Tailscale has been a blessing for this kind of use case
by c-hendricks | 2026-03-08 19:50:39+00:00
I run similar (gitea, scrypted+ffmpeg instead of frigate, plex instead of jellyfin) plus some Minecraft servers, *arr stack, notes, dns, and my VM for development.

It's an i7-4790k from 12 years ago, it barely breaks a sweat most hours of the day.

It's not really that impressive, or (not to be a jerk) you've overestimated how expensive these services are to run.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-03-08 19:50:47+00:00
My point suggests that there is enough Ram to go around in an ideal world even with LLM's but its rather that stocking up Ram could give you so much benefit over your enemies within this space and leverage that you have no reason not to.

So it isn't there isn't enough ram to go around (period) but rather an ideology similar to this town ain't big enough for the two of us (OpenAI vs Anthropic/Google/Chinese-Open-Weights-Models)

Atleast that's my understanding of the situation and I can be wrong about it too for what its worth.
by bombcar | 2026-03-08 19:51:05+00:00
Technically you should kill as many as possible "for the environment".

What we're really seeing in all this is so many parents are insecure in their parenting and decisions that they feel the need to jump to "do it my way or you're the literal devil."

If we take the charitable view, it's that things like "cloth diapers saved so much money I'm sad others don't try it" - which may be entirely true. But trying to use things like "if you use a diaper you are the cause of climate change" is something beyond.
by stratos123 | 2026-03-08 19:51:08+00:00
Kokotajlo in particular is notable for being the guy who quit OpenAI in 2024 in protest of their policy of requiring researchers to abide by a non-disparagement agreement to retain their equity. In the end OpenAI caved and changed their policy, but if he was lying all along to inflate the value of his shares, it would have been quite a 4d chess move of him to gamble the shares themselves on doing so.
by vitus | 2026-03-08 19:51:27+00:00
> if indeed he went all-in on AI in 2015, that seems to me like a damn near prophetic vision.

Also note that 7 years later, when ChatGPT came out, built on top of Google Brain research (transformers), Google was caught flat-footed.

Even supposing that Pichai really had the right vision a decade ago, he completely failed in leading its execution until a serious threat to the company's core business model materialized.