MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by WarmWash | 2026-03-05 17:19:42+00:00
>why do you think all the LLM companies are trying to force these tools through corporate mandates that have been falling

Ironically if you actually read that study, the "MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing", they found that almost everyone was using AI tools they paid for.

>While official enterprise initiatives remain stuck on the wrong side of the GenAI
Divide, employees are already crossing it through personal AI tools. This "shadow AI" often
delivers better ROI than formal initiatives and reveals what actually works for bridging the
divide.
Behind the disappointing enterprise deployment numbers lies a surprising reality: AI is
already transforming work, just not through official channels. Our research uncovered a
thriving "shadow AI economy" where employees use personal ChatGPT accounts, Claude
subscriptions, and other consumer tools to automate significant portions of their jobs, often
without IT knowledge or approval.
The scale is remarkable. While only 40% of companies say they purchased an official LLM
subscription, workers from over 90% of the companies we surveyed reported regular use of
personal AI tools for work tasks. In fact, almost every single person used an LLM in some
form for their work. In many cases, shadow AI users reported using LLMs multiples times a day every day of their weekly workload through personal tools, while their companies' official AI initiatives remained stalled in pilot phase [1]

If you want to avoid info bubbles, read the reports, not just headlines and comments.

[1]https://mlq.ai/media/quarterly_decks/v0.1_State_of_AI_in_Bus... Section 3.3
by epolanski | 2026-03-05 17:19:51+00:00
Tariffs almost never make sense, unless it's an industry that's super important for your own survival.

Capitalism is about efficiency, and eventually there are going countries where producing certain items will always be more efficient. East asian countries have spent decades innovating and investing in their manufacturing capabilities.

Also, one thing that grinds my nerves are the narratives of trade balances that only focus on physical goods but conveniently ignore services.

US exports trillions in software, ai, music, videogames, financial services, cloud, and that's conveniently ignored.

Eventually tariffs come back biting those who issue them, because the moment your local industries don't need to compete anymore to survive, they have no incentives to innovate.
by veidr | 2026-03-05 17:19:57+00:00
I don't think that's what is being said, mainly? Like that's why Anthropic wants to have it in the contract(s) with the government?

At the same time, it is expressly illegal in some circumstances; that was the whole core of the Snowden revelations. The NSA and CIA are expressly curtailed from doing that by law — there are cases where they may surveil citizens with a court order, but not "mass" surveillance. There are some restrictions on the military along those same lines.

Keywords: Executive Order 12333, FISA, National Security Act, Posse Comitatus Act
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-03-05 17:20:07+00:00
That is not part of the conception of the BBC as a social good, a non-commercial institution that provides value to the UK (and the world).

You can argue that this conception has to change, and that's fine. But the BBC was established by the UK government, with stated intentions and goals, and it currently isn't and never has been seen as a "pay-to-watch" sort of thing.
by Wikipedianon | 2026-03-05 17:20:21+00:00
This was only a matter of time.

The Wikipedia community takes a cavalier attitude towards security. Any user with "interface administrator" status can change global JavaScript or CSS for all users on a given Wiki with no review. They added mandatory 2FA only a few years ago...

Prior to this, any admin had that ability until it was taken away due to English Wikipedia admins reverting Wikimedia changes to site presentation (Mediaviewer).

But that's not all. Most "power users" and admins install "user scripts", which are unsandboxed JavaScript/CSS gadgets that can completely change the operation of the site. Those user scripts are often maintained by long abandoned user accounts with no 2 factor authentication.

Based on the fact user scripts are globally disabled now I'm guessing this was a vector.

The Wikimedia foundation knows this is a security nightmare. I've certainly complained about this when I was an editor.

But most editors that use the website are not professional developers and view attempts to lock down scripting as a power grab by the Wikimedia Foundation.
by caconym_ | 2026-03-05 17:20:49+00:00
Isn't Lutnick literally the chief architect of Trump's tariff policy? I can hardly imagine anybody more responsible for creating this outcome besides Trump himself, who would presumably have appointed somebody else if Lutnick hadn't been available.

> I don't see how he had a better view of the whole thing than anyone else.

Given the above, you really don't think Lutnick had a "better view" of the likely outcomes and timelines, including the Trump admin's planned and gamed out responses to certain outcomes, than the average Joe on the street? I think that's extremely, uh, naive.
by WorldMaker | 2026-03-05 17:20:49+00:00
Right, it is a limited right because it builds an artificial monopoly. Copyrights were intended to have a similar life cycle to the patent. It lasts for a few years, possibly with a single extension if you can prove certain things about how you are using it (that you are actually using it, not just squatting on it to prevent other people from working with it).

It is a bit broken that the term limits are so different today.

> a clear and simple expiration

> life of the author

> (at least in the US

I think you included several reasons it is not clear and simple. Life of the author is real hard to define and gets shifted by "work for hire" rules, especially because so many things subject to copyright beyond books don't/cannot have a single author.

On top of that, different countries have different definitions. The Berne Convention muddies the waters that "the strictest country's definition wins" but also provides carve outs for "when in my own country I only need to worry about my own country's rules" some of the time.

Different countries have different orphaned works laws, though the majority do not today believe copyright expires on orphaned works it just gets "lost" who owns the copyright. Most countries have "copyright is automatic" laws (and the Berne Convention supports that) and "copyright is assumed and must be disproven" laws (which again the Berne Convention supports). All three of these things make the question of "is this under copyright and by who?" far from clear. (As the article here goes at great length to provide just one example of such confusion and opaque expiration information.)

The world's copyright systems lost "clear and simple expiration" decades ago.
by sciencejerk | 2026-03-05 17:20:54+00:00
They're putting people in pens and then murdering them, and using Flock cameras to round them up.

I don't want this either. Might this be better attributed to politics/administration/policies? So maybe you're opposed to technologies that assist the governement with tracking people? If Flock starts solving missing abducted trafficked persons cases, would this sway your opinion? Or if the data is highly restricted?
by nabroleonx | 2026-03-05 17:21:24+00:00
that is a valid point. dbslice finds cycles in the fk graph and usually resolves them by nulling a nullable fk for insert order, then patching it back with deferred updates after inserts. if a cycle has no nullable fks, postgres output can still work when deferred fk checking is enabled and the cycle constraints are deferrable, otherwise it fails fast with a clear error.

traversal automatically pulls in parent records so you don’t end up with dangling references, and a validator (enabled by default) can double-check the slice before output. for complex joins, you can opt into subqueries in seed where clauses.

it covers a lot of messy cases, but i won’t claim it’s fully solved yet. there’s no automatic discovery of relationships that only exist in app code (beyond heuristic hints), and real production schemas will still surface new edge cases. it’s still early-stage, so the more people test it on messy production-like datasets, the faster i can iron those out.

i would also love to hear what you think of the implementation if you check out the code.
by fsckboy | 2026-03-05 17:21:42+00:00
>That was interesting, notwithstanding the editorialising comments by Tomasz Barański.

you are upset by these comments which this article's author chose to quote?:

As lead author Tomasz Barański explains, however, this transformation was far from sudden. "Nubia was not a marginal or isolated region of the Nile Valley, but a pivotal corridor connecting the Mediterranean world to sub-Saharan Africa. Rather than a civilizational dead end, Nubia functioned for millennia as a dynamic zone of movement for people, goods, and ideas. Through Nubia passed commodities such as gold, ivory, and enslaved people, but it also enabled the exchange of less tangible elements: technologies, religious beliefs, and political models.

"Moreover, Nubian communities were not passive recipients of outside influence; they actively shaped and adapted the flows passing through this corridor. This long history of exchange helps us understand later cultural transformations in the region, including Arabization and Islamization. These were not sudden ruptures, but part of a much older pattern of interaction, negotiation, and adaptation that has characterized Sudan throughout history."

Barański notes that further discoveries may yet follow: "Preliminary analysis of the letters from Building A.1 suggests distinct patterns in the circulation of correspondence, hinting at a coherent communication network. This network encompassed not only the city's religious and administrative elites, but possibly also the leaders of nomadic groups herding flocks in the surrounding regions."

Additionally, he adds, "the discovery of this seemingly inconspicuous scrap of paper, when situated within the larger context of gift-giving culture and traditional royal patronage navigating local micropolitics, provides a vivid example of how archaeological fieldwork continues to produce material that bridges the gap between material culture and written history."
by hackerwhosemans | 2026-03-05 17:21:44+00:00
I built Nodes as a solo developer after Discord's 2025 data breach exposed government IDs submitted for age verification.

The core idea: your identity is a cryptographic keypair, not a database row. Messages sync P2P via GunJS, DMs are E2E encrypted with ECDH/AES-256-GCM, voice uses WebRTC mesh with LiveKit SFU fallback, and files share through IPFS.

Tech stack: Tauri v2 + React + TypeScript + GunJS + WebRTC + IPFS

It's a beta. Channel messages are signed but not encrypted (DMs are). No mobile app yet. SECURITY.md documents the threat model and known limitations honestly.

Happy to answer questions about the architecture or crypto decisions.
by zdragnar | 2026-03-05 17:21:46+00:00
The assumption is not the variation in the nutrient counts, but in the link to obesity.

The rise in obesity has much stronger correlating factors than CO2 levels- diet and sedentary lifestyle being far stronger.

This is especially obvious when looking at the cited study:

> The new study evaluated 18 types of commonly grown rice to see how they would respond to elevated levels of carbon dioxide. In the experiments, the researchers increased ambient carbon dioxide levels to concentrations between 568 and 590 parts per million. Currently, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations hover around 410 ppm—but at the rate they’re currently rising, they could reach the high levels used in the study by the end of the century, if action isn’t taken to curb them.

The study examines the behavior at levels of C02 we don't currently have. The decline in nutrients has, thus far, been too small to have the impact on obesity we've already observed.
by rembal | 2026-03-05 17:21:50+00:00
The pyramids in the article are missing "energy" and "capital": in the world where intelligence becomes a commodity only those two matter. Capital to buy the hardware and install it, and energy to run it. Models already are a commodity, and "physical is the new king".

As a side note, if you believe that because of the agents doing most of the work we will face the problem of what do we do with the all the free time (with presumably UBI in place), please contact me, I have a bridge to sell you.
Whats your strategy to stay productive post layoff?
by d675 | 2026-03-05 17:21:59+00:00
Hola,

Got laid off again this week — number four, if we’re counting. Two as a mechanical engg in 2020, and now #2 as a SWE.

I’m back on the grind with Leetcode, getting ready for a FANG interview coming up. Have already extended it a month, will extend another couple months. Don't get many chances so I can't blow it.

In the meantime, maybe time to dive into an AI hackathon in SF.

My usual strategy’s pretty simple: fire off applications, tap the network (not much in tech), and take it one move at a time.

The first transition — from Mech Eng to SWE after that 2020 layoff — was wild. I’d already started rebuilding a web app with the Spotify API — Python, Flask, Heroku, OAuth, the works. Entered a hackathon, technically “won” because no one else finished — my kind of win.

Personal project opened the door to a remote gig in Europe, from Canada, as a QA Automation Engineer. Moved into DevOps and junior SRE work… until the company went under. Landed another remote role a few months later.

And now? Back to the drawing board — but with a bit more experience.

How do you approach this?
by lacker | 2026-03-05 17:22:18+00:00
This part of the essay makes me feel moved by the author's situation.

> I am sitting down after a long walk outdoors. It should have been relaxing, but I was processing - processing another interview pipeline that has fallen through. I'm in my 6th month of unemployment, despite job hunting 40 - 60 hours a week, starting literally the day I was laid off - because the company needed to make cuts and remote workers were top of the list.

That sounds really tough, and I'm sorry the author finds themselves in this situation. Six months sounds grueling.

I think the interview process is likely to be completely overhauled in the age of AI. I don't really know what will happen. I used to be in favor of the standard code-at-a-whiteboard approach, but nowadays the actual work is even further from that. But I haven't seen an AI-aware interview process yet that seems like an improvement.

At any rate, these systematic changes are likely to come too late for the author. Hang in there. Maybe it's time to consider a bigger change, like moving cities and looking for in-person work. I like working remotely but it's harder to get a remote job, and the in-person stuff does have upsides. Good luck out there.
by seanhunter | 2026-03-05 17:22:22+00:00
Say I suggest something : Play a valid game of chess at club level (elo approx 1200 say) using algebraic notation.

Then you’re either going to say it can or you’re going to say that requires more than 10000 tokens.

This isn’t an interesting conversation and I don’t think you are presenting this challenge in good faith for the reason I gave above.
by hedora | 2026-03-05 17:22:46+00:00
Extortion rackets come in many forms.

For example, NCR (National Cash Register) used to have their sales people "accidentally" break competitive machines (dropping them on the floor was common -- these were old precision mechanical adders), then offer an NCR machine as a "free" replacement.

You could argue this wasn't extortion. What are the damages? The replacement machine was higher value, so the shop was "made whole", and was only temporarily without a cash register. Of course, the competitor got screwed out of support contracts + renewal, and it was made very clear to the stores they had to play ball. (Unless they wanted to buy a replacement, and watch it also get smashed.)

It's the same with the tariffs:

Adopt a bunch of Trump dictated policies, or they steal your money (the mechanism is not providing exemptions). Later, they "refund" the payments (so, no further court action), but somehow the money does not go back to the people that it came from.

Ignoring the businesses that sold their rights to collect, all sorts of prices have skyrocketed in the last year. The consumers that are paying the increased amounts at retail are not going to see a cent of this settlement. Where is my check?

Also, it's unclear how many Supreme Court justices changed their votes because of the sold rights to collect refunds. The company involved gave a lot of money to Trump and conservative campaigns, and many of the justices are in his pocket. It's also unclear if they bribed the justices directly, since that's not public data.

On top of that, when these "securities" were sold, it could have been made clear that they would come with favoritism in the future. Did businesses that paid up get special exemptions? Were they threatened with intimidation that then didn't happen because they sold the rights?

All of the above is standard practice with this administration. They had the benefit of the doubt, but burned through it years ago.
by pkaral | 2026-03-05 17:22:55+00:00
I have been following GLP1 drugs for a long time, and I have a close family member who benefits. I think it is safe to say that it is hands down the most important new class of drug in ages (think milestones like penicillin). The sad thing is that it is misunderstood:

1. "It is a cure" - no, it isn't. Once you're off them, you're likely to be even less equipped for maintaining energy balance than before. So you need to stay on them, either for life or until you are really able to rework your own habits and overcome that 10(?) year period where the body is frantically pumping chemicals into your bloodstream that signal to get back to the old body composition.

3. "It is for obese people" - no, it is for everyone who struggles with energy balance in their diet. The relative availability and affordability of food that stimulates overeating means that these drugs are for a huge part - probably the majority - of the population.

Exercise and sleep have even better benefits than glp1 drugs, but that is not an argument against them.
by everforward | 2026-03-05 17:23:17+00:00
The studies I’ve seen seem to indicate that tariffs can work but are like running with scissors.

The artificially reduced competition will spur buying domestic products, but can also make domestic producers complacent. They don’t develop new features because they have an almost captive audience, until foreign producers advance enough that people will pay the tariff premium for better foreign products.

Then it’s a catch-22. Domestic producers are behind on technology so killing the tariffs will bankrupt them, but raising the tariffs only leans into their complacency.
by lynndotpy | 2026-03-05 17:23:37+00:00
Canada has always been appealing for people who were set on the United States but taken aback by the political climate. This goes back decades (famously in the AI space, Reagan is why Canada got Hinton instead of the US) but is exacerbated as of late. China also has pretty amazing investment in tech companies and research institutions, but Mandarin doesn't yet enjoy the same widespread adoption of English

Big caveat that I have the perspective of just one US-based former academic.
by dspillett | 2026-03-05 17:23:51+00:00
> Also the language that has made me millions over my career with no degree.

Well done.

> Also the language that allows people to be up and running in seconds (with or without AI).

People getting up and running without any opportunity to be taught about security concerns (even those as simple as the risks of inadequate input verification), especially considering the infamous inconsistency in PHP's APIs which can lead to significant foot-guns, is both a blessing and a curse… Essentially a pre-cursor to some of the crap that is starting to be published now via vibe-coding with little understanding.
by maybewhenthesun | 2026-03-05 17:24:01+00:00
Nothing went 'wrong' per se. they just massively underestimated how much work it would be.

Stuff was badly documented. The documentation that existed was outdated compared to the existing code. Not all executable matched the source code they were supposedly built from. It was unclear if this was because of old compiler bugs, new compiler bugs or (probably) because the source code in the backups was not the actual source code used to compile the exes and that sourcecode was long since lost to time. etc etc

I can't remember the details, it's 20 years ago.
by slibhb | 2026-03-05 17:24:14+00:00
> It's also, for example, the studies finding that when companies adopt AI employees' jobs get worse. More multitasking, more overtime, more burnout, more skills you're expected to learn (on your own time if necessary), more interpersonal conflict among colleagues. And this is not being offset by anything tangible like an increase in pay.

Can you share those studies? I'm pretty skeptical of this effect. I find that AI has made my job easier and less stressful.

In general, I think your atittude is not realistic, it's just general pessimism about the world ("everything new is bad") that is basically unfounded.
by maxekman | 2026-03-05 17:24:39+00:00
Thanks for sharing! I’ll definitely check it out.

I just LLM-built an A2A package which is a GenServer-like abstraction. I however missed that there already was another A2A implementation for Elixir. Anyway, I decided to leave it up because the package semantics were different enough. Here it is if anyone is interested: https://github.com/actioncard/a2a-elixir
by epolanski | 2026-03-05 17:24:44+00:00
> Absolutely absurd that we’re at this point.

It's not really, this is the result of having a flawed democratic system.

What do Turkey, Philippines, Russia, Belarus, Hungary, Nicaragua, etc and now US have all in common?

They are ALL presidential or semi-presidential republics where a single person "rules" without needing to face opposition in a parliament nor even requiring support from its own party.

Winner-takes-all democracies, aren't democracies if only part of the electors is represented in the executive.

Presidential republics are super dangerous, they combine the perils of dictatorships with a cherry on the cake of being able to claim popular mandate.

Seriously, it's not a coincidence that the last parliamentary republic to turn into an authocracy has been Sri Lanka 50+ years ago.
by kbolino | 2026-03-05 17:25:02+00:00
Where and how they spent their money is on p. 21 of this PDF [1] which can be obtained from this official source [2]. This is just a high-level breakdown, but it does illustrate that, for example, more than twice as much is spent on "Donation processing expenses" ($7.5M) as "Internet hosting" ($3.1M), and that the largest line item, by far, is "Salaries and benefits" ($106M).

[1]: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/W...

[2]: https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2023-2024-annu...
by constantius | 2026-03-05 17:25:17+00:00
I'm an avid reader of history books (antiquity, middle ages), and I'd say I'm very picky, trawling through reviews and recommendations from trusted sources before deciding on a book.

I have already come across books that were a slog to read because of the author's simplistic worldview or obvious contrarian agenda (so I can definitely relate), but I've also read some masterpieces (for example, Kaldellis I believe is solid).

Unfortunately I don't count any historians among my friends, so I'd welcome any recs from you for authors that are the least bad, or a teardown of main antiquity/middle ages historians.