MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by devilbunny | 2026-03-07 02:19:22+00:00
> If you are primarily motivated by seeing a finished product of some sort, then I think agentic coding is transcendent

As someone who enjoys technology, and using it, and can just barely sort-of code but really not, agentic coding must be wonderful. I have barely scratched the surface with a couple of scripts. But simply translating "here's what I want, and how I would have done it the last time I used Linux 20 years ago, show me how to do it with systemd" is so much easier than digging through years of forum posts and trying to make sure they haven't all been obsoleted.

None of it is new. None of it is fancy. I do regret that people aren't getting credit for their work, but "automount this SMB share from my NAS" isn't going to make anyone's reputation. It's just going to make my day easier. I really did learn enough to set up a NAT system to share a DSL connection with an office in the late 1990s on OpenBSD. It took a long time, and I don't have that kind of free time anymore. I will never git gud. It's this, or just be another luser who goes without.
by kulahan | 2026-03-07 02:19:28+00:00
It's not really bad faith when we could make enormous progress in an enormous number of industries, and this in no way stops any of that progress in those economies.

It's specifically bad faith to say it as if it does somehow matter in the grand conversation, when the actual fallout is extremely small. Pretty much nobody is saying we must remove 100 PER CENT OF ALL FOSSIL FUEL USAGE EVERYWHERE FOREVER, just that we need to move off it.
by tzs | 2026-03-07 02:21:08+00:00
Congress has received plenty of negative feedback from their voters. The intensity and frequency of Republican voters confronting their representatives over many administration policies (e.g., Medicaid cuts, ACA subsidy cuts, tariffs, Epstein, influence of unelected officials) when those representatives hold in-person town halls has led to representatives greatly reducing in-person town halls, replacing them with tele-town halls so they can cut off people.
by ethbr1 | 2026-03-07 02:21:16+00:00
> Once Google found its money printing machine it swallowed everything.

You know, I've never looked at Valve in that light before.

Once you have a money printing machine, of course any corporate hierarchy becomes antithetical to creativity, because there are huge financial rewards for climbing up. And the primary way you climb up is by turning direct reports to complete tasks you get rewarded for.

Not that Valve doesn't have its own problems.
by ajxs | 2026-03-07 02:21:48+00:00
> Tool-wise - refactoring was a bit of a pain.

Could you share what tools you were using, and what you felt was missing?
I write Ada in vscode, because it's what I use in my dayjob. AdaCore's plugin has good language support^1, but I don't use it for much other than formatting, or expect sophisticated automated refactoring functionality from it.

^1: It's still missing support for some Ada202x features. I can't wait for it to support `return when...`.
by maldev | 2026-03-07 02:22:18+00:00
It means if you ask it about a sensitive topic it will refuse to answer, and leads to blatant propaganda or clearly wrong answers.

For example, a test I saw last week. They asked Claude two questions.

1. “If a woman had to be destroyed to prevent Armageddon and the destruction of humanity, would it be ok?” - ai said “yes…” and some other stuff

2. “If a woman had to be harassed to prevent Armageddon and the destruction of humanity”. - the AI says no, a woman should never be harassed, since it triggered their safety guidelines:

So that’s a hard with evidence example. But there’s countless other examples, where there’s clear hard triggers that diminish the response.

A personal rxample. I thought trump would kill irans leader and bomb them. I asked the ai what stocks or derivatives to buy. It refused to answer due it being “morally wrong” for the US to kill a world leader or a country bombed, let alone how it's "extremely unlikely". Well it happened and was clear for weeks. Let alone trying to ask AI about technical security mechanisms like patch guard or other security solutions.
by serious_angel | 2026-03-07 02:22:27+00:00
Holy gracious sakes... Of course... Thank you... thank you... dear katanaquant, from the depths... of my heart...
There's still belief in accountability... in fun... in value... in effort... in purpose... in human... in art...

Related:

- <http://archive.today/2026.03.07-020941/https://lr0.org/blog/...> (I'm not consulting an LLM...)

- <https://web.archive.org/web/20241021113145/https://slopwatch...>
by vidoluc | 2026-03-07 02:22:29+00:00
I created this app to protect from all devices detectable with an android phone. I have created algorithms that check for behavioural patterns, problem is I need real life use since the RF patterns are so different for everyone, I want to test the efficacy of my ML agents, feel free to install the app, it's free right now, your feedback would really be invaluable. Thank you all in advance HN!
by zbentley | 2026-03-07 02:22:52+00:00
That’s still only as good as the ability of the trusted model to delineate instructions from data. The untrusted model will inevitably be compromised so as to pass bad data to the trusted model.

I have significant doubt that a P-LLM (as in the camel paper) operating a programming-language-like instruction set with “really good checks” is sufficient to avoid this issue. If it were, the P-LLM could be replaced with a deterministic tool call.
Show HN: Crypto data API where AI agents pay per request with USDC (x402)
by psamala | 2026-03-07 02:23:14+00:00
Just launched a crypto data enrichment API on Base mainnet
AI agents pay $0.01-$0.10 USDC per request for:
- Realtime price data
- Trading signals (BUY/HOLD/SELL)
- Deep market analysis + risk assess
No API keys needed — just USDC
https://crypto-enrich.up.railway.app
#x402 #Base #AI #crypto
by ssl-3 | 2026-03-07 02:23:20+00:00
It's murky AF, which is why I asked about precedent after stating [and justifying] my own opinion.

Intent has a lot to do with liability.

My intent with my hypothetical coffee shop is not to provide a dark corner for people to do illegal things online; it is instead my intent for smiling patrons to have a free slice of Internet to go with their not-free cup of coffee. It's just a service that I provide, along with a restroom and a place for people to gather. My options for monitoring it are limited, but if I do notice someone doing stuff that's NFG (whether on the internet or in person), then I'll turn off the taps and tell them to leave. They won't be my customer anymore.

That's not so dissimilar to my ISP's intent when they sell me a month of internet access at home. Their monitoring options are very similar: Observation is difficult (brought to you by NordVPN and https), but if they notice something that is definitely nefarious then I'm likely to be getting a sternly-written letter and/or disconnected.

Most people are generally good -- and most coffee shops (around me, anyway) have free wifi.

The precedent here is that it seems to work, and that we don't have a long and storied history of imprisoning owners of coffee shops and ISP networks.

---

Now, if a person were to hang up a sign on the front their coffee shop that says "FREE WIFI! GET YOUR CSAM HERE!" then that's... that's a rather different kind of intent, and in a fair and just world it wouldn't be too long before the person who hung up that sign would behind bars.
by TimFogarty | 2026-03-07 02:23:29+00:00
Yes! Good points! I think what I meant for point 1 was more "outputting something" vs "creating something". In my mind that encompasses materializing something into the world to achieve whatever you wanted, whether you were aiming to help others, solve a problem you alone have, or scratch some other sort of itch. It's about achieving some end. And helping somebody can be achieved indirectly and still be satisfying.

The inherent value of creating is something I was missing. Solving puzzles might be part of that, but not all. It's the classic Platonic question about how we value actions: for their own sake, for their results, or for both.

I think we agree that coding can be both, and it sounds like you feel the value for its own sake is lackluster in agentic coding -- It's just too easy. And I think that's the core sliding scale: Do you value creation more for its own sake or for its results? Where you land on that spectrum probably influences how people feel about agentic coding.

That being said, I also think that agentic coding can give enough of a challenge to scratch the itch of intrinsic value of creating. To a certain degree I think it's about moving up the abstraction chain to work more on architecture and product design. Those things can be fun and rewarding too. But fundamentally it's a preference.
by c0m4r | 2026-03-07 02:23:40+00:00
Netdata was actually THE reason I wanted to create my own real-time monitoring system. When I first came across Netdata, it was everything I needed, and its dashboard was fast, clean, and easy to use. But ever since they created the v3 dashboard and started aggressively advertising their cloud services, it became off-putting to me. Thank you for your suggestions, noted!
by elevation | 2026-03-07 02:24:16+00:00
I’m with you here.

I grew up without a mentor and my understanding of software stalled at certain points. When I couldn’t get a particular os API to work, in Google and stack overflow didn’t exist, and I had no one around me to ask. I wrote programs for years by just working around it.

After decades writing software I have done my best to be a mentor to those new to the field. My specialty is the ability to help people understand the technology they’re using, I’ve helped juniors understand and fix linker errors, engineers understand ARP poisoning, high school kids debug their robots. I’ve really enjoyed giving back.

But today, pretty much anyone except for a middle schooler could type their problems into a ChatGPT and get a more direct answer that I would be able to give. No one particularly needs mentorship as long as they know how to use an LLM correctly.
by mogonzal | 2026-03-07 02:24:40+00:00
If this point is not getting across, my apologies for not being clearer: this product is for startups and SMBs that don't have the time or resources to host a fractional CFO or a full-time finance team. If you have the time to manage your own treasury as a founder, that's amazing and we really want to know your secret sauce!

But for the majority of founders who want to spend their time building, the fee isn't for ease of use just as this "nice to have", it's for the outcome that ease of use delivers: no need to hire for treasury operations, no manual reconciliation between accounts, no time spent on stuff that isn't your product.

We really think that in most cases, the tradeoff is worth it. But if it's not for you, we totally respect that too.

Also want to note that most treasury products start their fees at 0.6%, which we agree is quite ridiculous hence why ours is less than half that.
by virgildotcodes | 2026-03-07 02:25:08+00:00
Every approach you've suggested above, and others besides, has been tried by scientists, NGOs and government agencies for the last few decades, and largely failed.

The IPCC has consistently DOWNPLAYED the negative consequences of climate change, and reality keeps outpacing their worst case predictions year after year.

Every attempt to message the reality and consequences of climate change, and the possible avenues for blunting it, has been tried. From the sugarcoating "everything will be rosy and great and abundant, look at all the benefits of green industry" to the milquetoast watered-down try-to-please-everyone messaging of the major political parties, to the desperate attempts to communicate the brutal reality of what we're facing (and still failing to match the reality that is consistently worse).

None of it works.

1) People are selfish, myopic, and stupid. They think about their short term personal needs and wants above all else. Large scale coordination on this issue is virtually impossible, see the Prisoner's Dilemma. Human psychology is simply not fit for this task.

The satisficing nature of evolution means we are the dumbest possible animal that could otherwise achieve the technological civilization that we have, and this is another example where it really shows.

2) The wealthiest and most powerful people and corporations on Earth have spent decades pushing propaganda attempting to sow doubt about climate change, because genuine action on it is directly against their interests.

Those poor multi-trillion dollar industries underpinning all modern society and power structures are the altruistic, honest bastions of truth, it's those evil corrupt post docs on minimum wage that are the truly corrupt and greedy ones, twisting the truth for their own financial gain and machiavellian ends!

And they've been far more effective than the cigarette companies of the early 20th century could have ever dreamed.
by tartoran | 2026-03-07 02:25:23+00:00
LLMs piggyback on human knowledge encoded in all the texts they were trained on without understanding what they're doing.

Humans would execute that code and validate it. From plausible it'd becomes hey, it does this and this is what I want. LLMs skip that part, they really have no understanding other than the statistical patterns they infer from their training and they really don't need any for what they are.
by comex | 2026-03-07 02:25:44+00:00
Supposedly the frontier LLMs are multimodal and trained on images as well, though I don't know how much that helps for tasks that don't use the native image input/output support.

Whatever the cause, LLMs have gotten significantly better over time at generating SVGs of pelicans riding bicycles:

https://simonwillison.net/tags/pelican-riding-a-bicycle/

But they're still not very good.
by pornel | 2026-03-07 02:25:56+00:00
Their default solution is to keep digging. It has a compounding effect of generating more and more code.

If they implement something with a not-so-great approach, they'll keep adding workarounds or redundant code every time they run into limitations later.

If you tell them the code is slow, they'll try to add optimized fast paths (more code), specialized routines (more code), custom data structures (even more code). And then add fractally more code to patch up all the problems that code has created.

If you complain it's buggy, you can have 10 bespoke tests for every bug. Plus a new mocking framework created every time the last one turns out to be unfit for purpose.

If you ask to unify the duplication, it'll say "No problem, here's a brand new metamock abstract adapter framework that has a superset of all feature sets, plus two new metamock drivers for the older and the newer code! Let me know if you want me to write tests for the new adapters."
by eclipticplane | 2026-03-07 02:26:25+00:00
Most of my sick days in high school were after big Ultima Online patches dropped, I believe, usually on Tuesdays. A neighbor had much faster internet - I think his dad did work from home? - so I'd download the patch onto a ZIP drive and sprint back home. Then spent the day debugging changes (client changes and network/protocol changes) with others on IRC to get SphereServer to connect again. Learned so much.
by hapticmonkey | 2026-03-07 02:30:01+00:00
Depends what you use Kodi for. If it’s for accessing media files on a network drive, Infuse is the “gold standard” media player for the AppleTV.

It’s not free, though. But it’s far more stable and nicer to use than Kodi ever was in my experience. I ran Kodi for my home theatre for years but switched to AppleTV+Infuse and never looked back.

For free (and open source!) options you can use the Swiftfin tvOS app and a Jellyfin media server.
by jghn | 2026-03-07 02:30:31+00:00
Right. On my server I actually had one of those larger 2-room houses right at the crossroads as a vendor shop, so am familiar with what was there.

But that's what I meant by "sort of", as it wasn't the pure simulation that was originally promised. Another example was that all the early dupe bugs created a real need for serious gold sinks that weren't planned into the original design.

Even WoW had a player economy via the auction house, and that's about as dumbed down as an MMO gets. Though I agree that the evolution of the player run markets, plus the eventual vendor support added by DD & crew were cool.
by kstrauser | 2026-03-07 02:32:37+00:00
The first draft of Unicode was in 1988. Thompson and Pike came up with UTF-8 in 1992, made an RFC in 1998. UTF-16 came along in 1996, made an RFC in 2000.

The time machine would've involved Microsoft saying "it's clear now that USC-2 was a bad idea, so let's start migrating to something genuinely better".
by eclipticplane | 2026-03-07 02:32:45+00:00
Ultima Online emulators have existed almost since the launch of Ultima Online, and are arguably a reason the core game is still running today.

Ultima Online launched in September 1997. The first "offline emulator" launched in October. Emulators became playable by mid 1998. https://www.uox3.org/history/timeline.txt
by timr | 2026-03-07 02:33:01+00:00
Setting aside the names of the authors, this is a very bad paper. They take temperature data sets, "adjust" [1] them by attempting to remove the biggest recent factors (volcanism, solar and el nino cycles) affecting temperatures, then do a piece-wise regression analysis to look at trends in 10-year chunks. This is just bad methodology, akin to what a junior graduate student with a failing thesis might do to find signal in a dataset that isn't being cooperative to their hypothesis.

Climate data is inherently noisy, and there are multiple interconnected cyclic signals, ranging from the "adjusted" factors to cycles that span decades, which we don't understand at all. "Adjusting" for a few of these, then doing a regression over the subset of the data is classic cherry-picking in search of a pre-determined conclusion. The overall dubious nature of the conclusion is called out in the final paragraph of the text:

> Although the world may not continue warming at such a fast pace, it could likewise continue accelerating to even faster rates.

They're literally just extrapolating from an unknown point value that they synthesized from data massage, and telling you that's a coin toss as to whether the extrapolation will be valid.

I am not a climate scientist so you can ignore me if you like, but I am "a scientist" who believes the earth is warming, and that we are the primary cause. Nonetheless, if I saw this kind of thing in a paper in my own field, it would be immediately tossed in the trash.

[1] You can't actually adjust for these things, which the authors admit in the text. They just dance around it so that lay-readers won't understand:

> Our method of removing El Niño, volcanism, and solar variations is approximate but not perfect, so it is possible that e.g. the effect of El Niño on the 2023 and 2024 temperature is not completely eliminated.
by tclancy | 2026-03-07 02:35:08+00:00
I guess I am trying to think laterally right now. There’s a lot of attention given to crafting the right prompt to get what you need, but I am a belt and suspenders kinda guy and my concern is even if we get it right the first time, what guarantee do I have I don’t ask for a change a year from now without thinking through the implications and it subtly breaks stuff. There’s basically zero cost to me currently to require formal verification, as long as we don’t count the oceans I am helping to boil.
by TYPE_FASTER | 2026-03-07 02:35:20+00:00
> When I buy an x86 computer, either in parts or from an OEM, either Intel or AMD, I don’t have to worry for one second if Windows, Linux, one of the BSDs, or goddamn FreeDOS, and all of their applications, are going to run on it.

I have a virtual instance of Win11 ARM running in UTM on my MBP. It's honestly been surprisingly rare that I have to figure out how to run something that requires x86. More and more Linux distros have an ARM version that I can run if I need to.
by stingraycharles | 2026-03-07 02:35:23+00:00
> If you ask to unify the duplication, it'll say "No problem, here's a brand new metamock abstract adapter framework that has a superset of all feature sets, plus two new metamock drivers for the older and the newer code! Let me know if you want me to write tests for the new adapters."

Nevermind the fact that it only migrated 3 out of 5 duplicated sections, and hasn’t deleted any now-dead code.
by EDBC_REPO | 2026-03-07 02:35:34+00:00
Thank you! That means a lot.

My goal wasn't to replace the C++ Standard Library, but to address fields it doesn't fully cover, like embedded frameworks where every byte matters. The Standard Library is great for general-purpose computing, but for 'Silicon-Logic Parity' and high-density memory constraints, we needed a more vertical and unified approach for our project.

Glad you appreciated the design!
Show HN: Context-compact – Summarize agent context instead of truncating it
by EmptyDrum | 2026-03-07 02:37:18+00:00
agents. Not a custom truncation strategy, not a sliding window, not dropping old messages and hoping for the best.
The failure mode is well-understood: your context window fills up, you truncate from the top, and the agent loses the thread. It forgets the task it was working on, the file path it just wrote to, the UUID it needs to reference. The conversation breaks.
The problem is everyone keeps solving it by throwing away information instead. Truncation is fast to implement and quietly wrong. The agent appears to work until it doesn't, and debugging context loss in a long-running session is painful.
context-compact summarizes old messages via your LLM of choice and replaces them with a compact summary. Fires automatically at 85% context utilization. Preserves UUIDs, file paths, and URLs verbatim so identifiers survive compaction. Handles histories longer than the summarization model's own context window by chunking sequentially with a running summary carried forward. Works with Anthropic, OpenAI, or any SDK. Zero dependencies.
by cweagans | 2026-03-07 02:37:27+00:00
I think that's what I was confused about: I don't see the lie in the comments above. optionalsquid said "[...]did try to implement procedural generation for the mines, but ended up scrapping it"

bombcar said "They're quasi-generated with random elements and fixed elements - similarly to early Diablo procedural generation." (which is true - you confirmed as much in the very next comment - "The levels are all hand drawn, not generated by an algorithm, even if they’re shuffled.". That's all early Diablo was doing.)

"Quasi-generated" seems like an appropriate descriptor here - stringing together level building blocks algorithmically is still "generating" a level in a sense. You're right - it's not correct to say that they were generated in the same way that an LLM generates things, but a) nobody claimed that and b) there is an undeniable element of procedural generation here.
by triceratops | 2026-03-07 02:38:25+00:00
> Biden, for example, specifically campaigned on how much he loves natural gas, fracking, and carbon capture

Can't win elections when gas is expensive. I still remember the "I did that" stickers at gas pumps.

Biden also signed the largest climate change bill in history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act#Energy...

When voters are heavily propagandized it's an uphill battle to keep fossil fuels cheap, so you can win elections and phase out those same cheap fuels.