MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mate2026 | 2026-03-04 07:14:24+00:00
I built Mate after my son had a seizure at 3 AM and every crisis line went unanswered.
Tech: Node.js + WebSockets, sovereign architecture (Queen AI on local hardware routing guidance to Mate instances), Edge TTS for voice in 60+ languages, browser Web Speech API for STT, PostgreSQL, zero PII stored — not even IP addresses. Anonymous nicknames + PIN only.
Crisis detection via LC Protocol — graduated response, CARE scores, Queen escalation. False positive handling still in progress (learned this morning that "just checking out the app" triggers the crisis flag GRIN).
Launched this morning with 100 cold LinkedIn messages. Had real conversations in English, Urdu, Indonesian within the first hour.
mate.elizahome.com | Free forever for core experience | $5/month optional Mate+
Happy to answer technical questions.
by boltzmann-brain | 2026-03-04 07:14:31+00:00
Speaking of battery, veeeeery soon phones will have mandated replaceable batteries in the EU. I'm just hoping my current moto (a $99 job perfectly adequate for absolutely everything I do) survives until then.

Aside: I've noticed over the years that phones die in one of the following ways:
- too fast charging (battery dies, charge controller dies)
- usb port dies
- screen broken
- all sorts of falls

A lether folio case, gorilla glass, and a Qi charging adapter solve all of those problems (the charging adapter also limits the current by virtue of being inefficient). It has a magnetic connector (it's a simple two-pin job and it doesn't have any issues) - in the rare occasion I want to charge up real quick, I can still hook up directly via usb c, and meanwhile the port is stuffed with the converter's plug which prevents it from accumulating dirt and fluff.

I'm glad to say that even despite many falls, some directly onto the screen, the phone itself still works very well, even if the case and glass protector are obviously ragged.

I hope once unlockable Moto's come around I'll be able to keep that one for a long while as well.
by libraryofbabel | 2026-03-04 07:14:34+00:00
This is interesting stuff. I wonder if these sorts of tricks are already in use at the big labs.

Incidentally, I would recommend trying implementing speculative decoding yourself if you really want to understand LLM inference internals (that, and KV caching of course). I tried it over the Christmas holidays and it was a wonderful learning experience. (And hard work, especially because I forced myself to do it by hand without coding agent assistance.)
by krackers | 2026-03-04 07:15:20+00:00
>A 180° arc cannot straddle a 180° gap

This can be the case if the other point is exactly 180 degrees from the anchor point that works though? But I think this case occurs with probability 0 ("almost never") so can basically be ignored.

Also the "obvious (wrong) answer" that reasons "by symmetry" is interesting since the n=3 case _can_ actually be solved in this manner. It's well known that probability the center of the circle is contained in the triangle of 3 randomly chosen points can be computed is 1/4. (This can be found by placing 1 point arbitrarily then computing an integral that ranges over the arc length to the second point). For the n=4 case this can be done via a double integral considering two arcs but it's slightly more annoying.

I think there was a 3b1b problem about this that presents the more elegant approach the other commenter mentions.
by cyberax | 2026-03-04 07:15:36+00:00
We're not talking about 2003 or something. The Zero Vision-related programs started getting serious around 2016. Deep into the iPhone era.

And there are also other facts that point out to Zero Vision being the case. Cities that did not go all-in on this program seem not to have experienced the rise in deaths. I have not researched this in detail, because quantifying the level of road sabotage is tricky. But it definitely _looks_ like it's the case just based on subjective observations.
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-03-04 07:15:39+00:00
The judge also blocked the FBI from reading any of the data they found, a week ago!
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/judge-blocks-doj-from-searching...

And thank the stars! This is incredibly chilling deeply disturbing an event to have happened at all. Raiding journalists like this is wild.

The judge is pretty pissed that the FBI for not telling them how illegal this search was in the first place.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/20/politics/judge-rips-washingto...

It's incredible what a spineless weak willed authoritarian group of losers are running things now. Zero spine, just lawless pathetic intimidation at every turn. What shrill animals.
by strcat | 2026-03-04 07:15:39+00:00
> Quite clearly privacy is important

It's seriously lacking. There's little work on it. Applications are largely fully trusted with lack of a modern permission model.

> none of the major components leak/store unnecessary personal data

Many components have privacy issues and have privacy invasive services.

> I would say that GNU/Linux is privacy-friendly, but has terrible security.

Disagree with an OS which has poor privacy protections against applications and services along with overall lack of systemic work on privacy being privacy friendly. Android Open Source Project without our privacy improvements is more privacy friendly than desktop Linux.

There's not much privacy when nearly everything has access to everything and developers do all kinds of things which are bad for privacy. They may not be trying to gather user data but that doesn't mean the services quietly used by many applications are privacy friendly.
by pjmlp | 2026-03-04 07:15:41+00:00
And this is why I keep using Thinkpads with Windows/Linux since 2006, even with the swith to Lenovo, I don't care about thin bezels.

The models I owned, or were work assigned, upgrading mem/disk was never an issue, the device could live until it died of motherboard issues, or similar non-upgradable components.
by naruhodo | 2026-03-04 07:16:55+00:00
"Every"? Maybe not, but... from a brief web search, IME should give you the heebie-jeebies due to it's network access.[1]

AMD's PSP (now ASP) seems to be more of a local attack surface[2] that has its fair share of vulnerabilities.[3]

[1] https://www.franksworld.com/2025/09/18/the-intel-backdoor-no...

[2] https://www.digit.in/features/laptops/intel-me-and-amd-psp-t...

[3] https://www.amd.com/en/resources/product-security/bulletin/a...
by Springtime | 2026-03-04 07:17:12+00:00
I thought this would be more about stylometry but it's mostly about users literally posting the same identifiable information across multiple services, including in one example their age, dog name, profession.

It's all classic dox profiling techniques. Even the things like spelling differences being regional signals and commonality to specific things being discussed.

It's why one has to think about what is being posted to which community if using different identities, rather than posting the same things across all of them. Though any such effort would be a waste if reliant on some non-public info that later was exposed in a database breach which tied together previously unrelated profiles.
by steve_adams_86 | 2026-03-04 07:17:21+00:00
There are so many problems that can be solved with a dumb go app on a tiny VPS, or other boring technologies like varnish or postgres as you mentioned, but my intuition here is that this is an insanely quickly moving field where it can be scary as hell not to feel like you're on the cutting edge. So we build really weird shit.
by robinwassen | 2026-03-04 07:17:26+00:00
I have tested this and they are very capable, replacing the modern windows calc (38mb mem) with an identical app (ux, looks, features, accessibility, localization) ended up with an app using 2MB memory.

You just need to point it in the right direction (c/rust/go etc) and be harsh with the requirements, especially memory usage.

If I was Microsoft I would use AI for this rather than badly embedding AI everywhere, a lot of power users would be overwhelmed by a win 11 update where OS apps/features dropped mem usage by 90%+
by botanicalfriend | 2026-03-04 07:17:27+00:00
On the dynamic linker bypass specifically, have you looked at fapolicyd [1]? It uses fanotify(7) and the top of the README is:

> The restrictive policy was designed with these goals in mind:

> 1. No bypass of security by executing programs via ld.so.

> 2. Anything requesting execution must be trusted.

One correction on the table: SELinux and AppArmor shouldn't be grouped under "rename-resistant: No". AppArmor is path-based. SELinux labels are on the inode, a rename doesn't change the security context. The copy attack doesn't apply either: a process in sandbox_t creating a file in /tmp gets tmp_t via type transition, and the policy does not grant sandbox_t execute permission on tmp_t.

[1] https://github.com/linux-application-whitelisting/fapolicyd
by globular-toast | 2026-03-04 07:18:25+00:00
This is actually how a lot of software is written, sadly. I used to call it "trial and error programming". I've observed people writing C++ who do not have a mental model of memory but just try stuff until it compiles. For some classes of software, like games, that is acceptable, but for others it would be horrifying.

Now, it is actually completely possible to write UI code without any unit tests in a completely safe way. You use the functional core, imperative shell approach. When all your domain logic is in a fully tested, functional core, you can just go ahead and write "what works" in a thin UI shell. Good luck getting an LLM to rigidly conform to such an architecture, though.
by houtanb | 2026-03-04 07:18:40+00:00
FYI, ForecastBench [1] tests LLMs' out-of-sample forecasting accuracy.

The ForecastBench Tournament Leaderboard [2] allows external participants to submit models, most of whom provide some sort of web search / news scaffolding to improve model forecasting accuracy.

[1] https://www.forecastbench.org/

[2] https://www.forecastbench.org/tournament/
by dasil003 | 2026-03-04 07:18:46+00:00
As much as I recognize that a truly talented product manager is worth their weight in gold, I'd say the average engineer would be much more capable of learning to be an average PM than vice versa.

PM vibe coding a prototype for demonstration purposes? Might be a better use of a designer or engineers time, but okay I could see it being valuable. PM vibe coding something to ship to production? Your title is now engineer and you are responsible for your change, otherwise this is a direct path to destroying the quality of your product and the integrity of its data.
by hnlmorg | 2026-03-04 07:19:07+00:00
You’re vastly over exaggerating the drift of analogue watches. I’ve never experienced anything like that and I’ve been using them for 40+ years ;)

Also, 5 minutes of drift is still very noticeable for people. You don’t need NTP for that level of accuracy but you do need the clocks not to adjust their time zones by a minute every day.
by wtallis | 2026-03-04 07:19:53+00:00
> and you are 100% sure none of this will change suddenly

Yeah. We're talking about a law that's still over a year from taking effect. It's not going to be replaced by one having the opposite effects overnight with no warning.

> and are willing to bet you have the money to defend yourself in case you are sued wrongly

Since I don't develop or distribute applications or operating systems that are used by children, let alone software that would be legally required to behave differently when the user is a child, I'm quite confident that any lawsuit targeted at me by the State of California's elected AG would be laughed out of court at the first hearing, and I'd probably have plenty of offers of pro-bono representation. And I wouldn't even need a lawyer to help me ask to see the evidence that a child was affected by the non-compliance of the software I didn't write, and if a court did somehow get convinced, I could survive being fined the maximum fine for negligent violations with respect to at least several children. And I'm not at all concerned about receiving an injunction to not do something I'm already not doing.

Any law could be amended, or abused. Not having a law can make prosecutorial misconduct easier. I don't see anything in this law that seems more ripe for creative misinterpretation and abuse than is typical, and I don't think it likely that a California state court would cooperate with an egregious attempt to abuse this law.

You seem to be having a reaction to this law that would be triggered by being confronted with any law that isn't specified with the precise mathematical rigor necessary to appease a compiler.
by __patchbit__ | 2026-03-04 07:20:43+00:00
Elon Musk would put Apple's money sloshing about over the years to better uses than failing to build one battery electric vehicle costing $1 billion a year over many years.

He doesn't have a RDF but has Kardashev Scale Intent (KSI).

The lobbyists in the political fray are out to steal his value for money lunch despite his demonstrated effectiveness, over and over again.

Jobs couldn't even engage the politicians to give away or at discount the Apple ][ to education.
by imtringued | 2026-03-04 07:20:43+00:00
Considering the use of 32-bit fixed point numbers, you can bet on that person having zero clues.

Even the crappiest FPGA has at least 18x18 multipliers, meaning that you could add a small exponent on top to get a floating point type with a slightly worse precision than single precision floats.

32 bit fixed point doesn't map to any DSP I'm aware of.
by medi8r | 2026-03-04 07:20:47+00:00
Yeah that large company promo thing drives me nuts. Perpetual gaslighting "meh... that was too easy lel". Yeah thanks. Often stuff isn't easy but hard to explain why if the solution turned out to look easy.

What is funny is you can dance through the hoops for 3-5 years for promo. Or grind leet for 100 hrs and get it by jumping.
by DonHopkins | 2026-03-04 07:21:11+00:00
There is a huge difference between accidentally shipping a bug, and accidentally shipping a fully functional distributed end-to-end silent audio streaming system that works at Facebook's scale. They are in no way comparable. All the intricate crosscutting interoperating client, server, and middeware components of an end-to-end Facebook scale silent audio streaming pipeline do not just accidentally emerge without anybody noticing and magically dovetail together perfectly because nobody was paying enough attention to detail.

Large distributed systems don’t spontaneously assemble themselves without anyone understanding what they’re doing or intending for it to happen.

>I will repeat: "with Facebook, who knows."

Apparently we all know the obvious except for you. And you're not living up to your user name, which perhaps should be "rationalizer" not "rationalist". Instead of begin rational, you're bending over backwards to implausibly carry the water for Facebook beyond all credulity. It's a bad look, and shows you're vastly underestimating the complexity of developing distributed streaming software at that scale. So I will repeat what rsynnott said:

>And if you believe that, you'll believe anything.
by cgr-ciprian | 2026-03-04 07:22:17+00:00
I'm building something that I called control plane for agents, but it's only solving half of the problem you're mentioning. Basically it allows me to connect to my agents remotely from anywhere, so I have one running on my server and several running on my home PC. I generally just use something like notion or beads for issue tracking.

Another thing I do is I have a custom Claude skill that runs every night and goes through all my repositories and Claude conversations and then updates my dashboard and tasks in notion with progress.

https://github.com/amurg-ai/amurg
by bad_username | 2026-03-04 07:22:55+00:00
Sounds like you didn't lose the ability, you lost motivation. Why learn Rust, you say, if an LLM can crank out a Rust app for me, and it will be good enough?

LLMs may have removed the critical need for a SW engineer to know details, like the syntax of Rust or the intricacies of its borrow checking semantics. But LLMs, I maintain, didn't remove the critical need for an engineer to learn _concepts_ and have a large, robust library of concepts in your head. Diverse, orthogonal concepts like data structures, security concerns, callbacks, recursion, event driven architecture, big O, cloud computing patterns, deadlocks, memory leaks, etc etc. As long as you are proficient with your concepts, you will easily catch up with the relevant details in any given situation. Once you've ever seen recursion, for example, you will find no trouble recognizing it in any language.

That's the beauty of LLMs : you don't _have_ to be good at technical details any more. But you still have to be very good with concepts, not just to be able to use LLMs properly, but also _be in control_ of their work. LLM slop is dangerous not because of incorrect details like bad syntax. It is dangerous because it misplaces concepts: it may use a list where you need a hash map and degrade performance, it may forget a security constraint and cause a data leak, or it can be specific where it needs to be general, etc. An engineer needs to know and check the concepts if they want to remain in control. (And you absolutely do want that.)

But it is impossible, or very impractical, to just learn an abstract concept out of thin air. The normal way to learn a concept is to see its concrete instantiation somewhere, in all its detailed glory, and then retain its abstract version in your head.

So, the only way to stay relevant and stay in control is to have a robust concept library in your mind. And the only way to get that is to immerse yourself in many real technical situations, the details of which you must crack first, but free to forget later. That is learning, and that is still important today in the age of LLMs.
by ramon156 | 2026-03-04 07:23:25+00:00
I got laid off at a job where this applied, then at another company got rejected because they cancelled the position altogether to use Agentic Coding by Microsoft instead.

Then I joined a small consultancy that just lets me build however I want. There's no reviews, no sprint reviews, no evaluation. They trust that you work on what is important.

While this is a very messy and unmaintained workflow, it is a lot nicer and I am honestly wondering if Scrum is even necessary when you're only with 4-5 devs. Maybe it is to streamline newcomers? Because it took a bit of time to gather all the project info, but after that it was pretty relaxing.

I don't know, the market has shifted so much that I feel like I should probably be contempt with what I have.
by scotty79 | 2026-03-04 07:23:36+00:00
> The LLM happily churns out unit tests which are simply reinforcing the existing behaviour of the code.

I always felt like that's the main issue with unit testing. That's why I used it very rarely.

Maybe keeping tests in the separate module and not letting th Agent see the source during writing tests and not letting agent see the tests while writing implemntation would help? They could just share the API and the spec.

And in case of tests failing another agent with full context could decide if the fix should be delegated to coding agent or to testing agent.
by realpaer | 2026-03-04 07:23:43+00:00
There is $100/day locked in this repository.

If you solve the puzzle, the reward is yours.

github: https://github.com/paerx/nests

Steps:
1 Attempting to crack the key using code.
2 Decrypt the encrypted wallet
3 Claim the reward
4 If no one cracks the code within 24 hours, $100 per day will continue to be transferred until $2000 is reached.
by p0w3n3d | 2026-03-04 07:24:42+00:00
TBH my kids have limited access to their (Android) phones using family link but I don't see option there to:

- block certain list of sites

- block walls inside YouTube for example

- limit amount of scrolling time Vs amount of learning time (this can be done quite easily)

So just give the tools to parents and stop requiring IDs for adults. What happens if kid gets adult's phone? And what happens when kid gets dad's rifle or car keys? It doesn't mean that all the rifles and car keys should now start to include blood sample based age verification mechanisms

--Edit--

Apple family management is even worse. The best I heard of is implemented in the switch console
by mohsen1 | 2026-03-04 07:24:42+00:00
I've experimented with agentic coding/engineering a lot recently. My observation is that software that is easily tested are perfect for this sort of agentic loop.

In one of my experiments I had the simple goal of "making Linux binaries smaller to download using better compression" [1]. Compression is perfect for this. Easily validated (binary -> compress -> decompress -> binary) so each iteration should make a dent otherwise the attempt is thrown out.

Lessons I learned from my attempts:

- Do not micro-manage. AI is probably good at coming up with ideas and does not need your input too much

- Test harness is everything, if you don't have a way of validating the work, the loop will go stray

- Let the iterations experiment. Let AI explore ideas and break things in its experiment. The iteration might take longer but those experiments are valuable for the next iteration

- Keep some .md files as scratch pad in between sessions so each iteration in the loop can learn from previous experiments and attempts

[1] https://github.com/mohsen1/fesh