MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by duskdozer | 2026-03-13 13:23:35+00:00
Maybe you aren't required to, but there can tend to be downsides to the other methods in practice:

credit card:
- often extra fees or minimums for nontrivial expenses
- privacy of course

direct debit:
- payee gains ability to debit any amount, and while resolution plays out, you are stuck with the consequences
- limited ability to cease payments

check:
- fixed payment amount; violating this would be clear fraud not attributable to "mistakes" that can happen with DD
by api | 2026-03-13 13:24:39+00:00
That's one of the most disappointing things to me. These people have such resources and the limit of their vision is: bang young girls, accumulate bling, push divisive hateful politics, start wars.

That's it. That's the best they can do.

Even nominally selfish far-sighted things like genuinely funding a deep research program for life extension is not really something they're into. I mean some of them are "into" it in that they talk about it and occasionally toss money at things but they're not interested in funding or being involved in the kind of multi-year high-focus moonshot program it would actually take to deliver. The problem is that's hard and it takes a long time when banging girls and winning power games is instant dopamine.

It makes me keep thinking of paperclip maximizers. It's like we are paperclip maximizers, only our paperclips are sex and dopamine hits from winning power games. A paperclip maximizer with such resources would squander it all on paperclips, and we squander it all on these goal functions built in by evolution. Are we actually intelligent or just clever animals? We can seek what we want, but we don't think much about what we want to want.
by BenoitP | 2026-03-13 13:24:55+00:00
> the whole process remains differentiable: we can even propagate gradients through the computation itself. That makes this fundamentally different from an external tool. It becomes a trainable computational substrate that can be integrated directly into a larger model.

IMHO the key point at which this technique has an unfair advantage vs a traditional interpreter is here.

How disruptive is it to have differentiability? To me it would mean that some tweaking-around can happen in an LLM-program at train-time; like changing a constant, or switching from a function call to another function. Can we gradient-descent effectively inside this huge space? How different is it from tool-calling from a pool of learned programs (think github but for LLM programs written in classic languages)?
by BloodAndCode | 2026-03-13 13:24:59+00:00
this is great timing for me — i actually have an algorithms & data structures course this semester.
seeing implementations in typescript instead of the usual pseudo-code or java/python is really nice. makes it much easier to actually run the code and play with the ideas while learning.
curious — did writing this in typescript change how you approached any of the classic structures? some of them feel a bit awkward with generics in certain languages.
by tsss | 2026-03-13 13:25:34+00:00
You could get high quality medical advice 20 years ago on the internet, or 40 years ago in the library. Doctors aren't there to give you advice, they are mostly gate keepers. Every person who's chronically ill knows that doctors are totally useless for anything beyond the 10 most common diseases and primarily exist to approve or reject your pleas for lab work. They won't go away, neither will psychotherapists and all the middle managers that can be easily automated, because their real purpose is not the practical work that they do.
by PaulHoule | 2026-03-13 13:26:07+00:00
"In other words, AI is not only capital intensive—it is labor destructive."

I feel here something is a bit off, like everything is all mashed up together. Something that hasn't happened since 1983 is "unprecedented" and Marxism-Leninism has made peace with the Prisoner's dilemma and the mindset of the young republican college-educated man who pushes crypto and pop economics.
by jmye | 2026-03-13 13:26:21+00:00
Genuine questions: what do you think the request was? To build the plan? To prepare the commit? Do you never have a second thought after looking at your output, or realize you forgot something you wanted to include? Could it be that they saw "one new function", thought "boy, there should really be two... what happened?" and changed their mind?

To your original comment, it would be like calling your intern to ask them to order lunch, and them letting you know the sandwich place you asked them to order from was closed, and should they just put in an order for next Tuesday at an entirely different restaurant instead? And then that intern hearing, "no, that's not what I want" saying "well, I don't respect your 'no'" and doing it anyways.

"Do X" -> "Here are the anticipated actions (which might deviate from your explicit intent), should I implement?" -> "no, that's not actually what I want"

is a clear instruction set and a completely normal thought pattern.
by jcranmer | 2026-03-13 13:26:36+00:00
Recall for a minute that floating-point arithmetic is inherently inexact, and it is thus pretty rare that you query for equality using an == operator rather than a relative or absolute error check (both of which involve < or > against a non-NaN value and thus would fail anyways for NaN). No, the main reason to ever actually use == on floating-point is if you're doing a bunch of tests to make sure expressions get the correct exact result (so you're expecting the inexactness to resolve in a particular way) or if you're doing non-computational stuff with floats (such as using them as keys in a map), at which point it becomes a problem that x != x is ever true.

> If you would want such a facility in a program, then it is not enough to propagate just a floating-point value. You would have to define a custom data type and accompany the FP value by another value that encodes its provenance.

IEEE 754 was way ahead of you. The entire rationale for the existing of NaN payloads was to be able to encode the diagnostic details about operation failure. And this suggests that you really want is the rule that NaNs are equal only to other NaNs with the same payload but are unordered with respect to everything else.

From the research I've done, it seems that the main reason that x != x for NaNs isn't some deep theoretical aspect about the properties of NaNs, but rather because IEEE 754 wanted a cheap way to test for NaN without having to call a function.
by mvdwoord | 2026-03-13 13:26:42+00:00
haha yes, the grand seismic risks (economic risk in single digit percentages of the profits available) but not talking about not using them, they are actively and very costly going to fill them with concrete to ensure in the future (even in whatever extreme scenario) they cannot be used again. On top of the fact that we suckered ourselves into long term agreements which led to having to sell our own gas, far below market price to other countries. Full blown retardedness, and the moral high ground was theirs.

And our German neighbors, I can still see them laughing at the Orange Man Bad... Boo hoo... what a shitshow.
by JKCalhoun | 2026-03-13 13:27:16+00:00
I like that.

I also like a two-pronged approach which includes taxing the billionaires out of existence. I haven't heard any significant downside to doing that. All the more so when weighed against the possible upsides.

I think what frustrates me above all else is that we, as a society, as a people, could have it so much better.

We could all be living in such a better world but for the allowances we make for the most sociopathic and greedy among us.
by iamnothere | 2026-03-13 13:27:17+00:00
In the past: everyone wanted the easy money. There’s probably a good opportunity for this now given tech layoffs and the pivot to AI. The best model is probably a variant of FOSS + paid support/consulting/hosting. I think I came across a couple of co-ops doing this in the past but they didn’t heavily advertise their structure.

Nobody will get rich from it but you could build a decent life.

Edit: found a list, posted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47364221
by philipwhiuk | 2026-03-13 13:28:24+00:00
1. What a wildly capitalist take on the loss of confidentiality for personnel data.

2. If you get breached, you have a problem. If everyone gets breached it starts to look more like cost-of-business (and that might be cheaper than a cyber firm that doesn't actually fix the problem [but looks good on audits])

3. I wonder if the breached data is entering AI corpuses. Will I be able to ask OpenAI "Does Joe Bloggs, 75 Penn Ave NY have an underlying health conditions I should know about"
Show HN: Using AI to generate accurate illustrations for physiotherapy site
by ashmil | 2026-03-13 13:28:35+00:00
Hi HN,

My wife is a physiotherapist, and a while back, she decided to start compiling her clinical experience and patient care knowledge into a resource site, Heal And Move. The goal was to share clear, actionable articles on various physical conditions, rehabilitation plans, and specific exercises.

The Bottleneck:
The biggest hurdle we immediately ran into was visuals. Explaining a specific stretch or joint movement through text alone is tough. Relying on generic stock photos often doesn't accurately reflect the proper form or the specific muscle groups being targeted, and hiring medical illustrators for every single post just wasn't scalable.

The AI Solution:
Recently, we started integrating AI image and video generation into her workflow, and it's been a massive unlock. She can now translate her domain knowledge into precise prompts to generate accurate anatomical illustrations, exercise demonstrations, and step-by-step videos.

As many of you know, getting AI to render anatomically correct limbs and specific physiological poses without looking like body horror takes some trial and error. But by iterating on the prompts, she’s now able to produce high-quality, custom visuals that perfectly match her clinical articles. It has completely removed the visual bottleneck from her content creation.

I'd love for you to take a look. We're open to any feedback on the site, the visual accuracy of the AI-generated assets, or any thoughts from those who have tinkered with fine-tuning models for health/fitness illustrations!
by Aurornis | 2026-03-13 13:28:58+00:00
Both alcohol and marijuana have direct actions on the brain. That’s why people consume them.

They do not exert their primary effects via microbiome modulation. This is obvious because the effects occur nearly immediately upon consumption, whereas microbiome change from what you consume is a gradual process.

The question I have is: Why has microbiome become the explanation for everything? What would lead you to believe that microbiome would be the explanation for this, when the direct action upon the brain is so much more direct and obvious? Microbiome is an interesting area of research but how did we get to this point where some are ignoring the obvious and trying to construct alternative microbiome based explanations for things like alcohol and marijuana impairing memory?
by Tklaaaalo | 2026-03-13 13:29:03+00:00
I believe if there is one agent setup which works well, it will take over a lot of PMs immediadly.

Like a agentic system which asks you in slack about an update, collecting JIRA Ticket infos, formualting reports and sending them out etc.

OpenClaw was one signal that people want this and are building this, gastown was another (earlier version of this).

Missing are the proper aligned frameworks and best practices. But thats just a question of time what components will make it. Its just a agent runtime we need and finetuning of agents, agent personas, skills and a meta agent schema
by khafra | 2026-03-13 13:29:21+00:00
I think it's much more likely that the AI turns out not to be as compliant as the capital owners expect, and they die too.

However, that's not useful in predicting what capital owners will do, because they follow their local incentives. "If everyone keeps doing X, we will all be worse off" does not help unless you can create local incentives that point toward an equilibrium where everyone stops doing X.

In this case, no capital owner is individually better off by unilaterally refusing to chase more efficient returns on their capital. We would need an international agreement, with enforcement mechanisms, like I mentioned above.
by lflin00 | 2026-03-13 13:29:24+00:00
I built a tool that detects when two functions or classes implement identical logic even if they have different names, variable names, or are written in different languages. A Java function and a Python function that do the same thing produce the same hash.
It works by translating any language to Python via LLM, then applying alpha equivalence — stripping all variable names and hashing the canonical AST structure. Same hash means same logic, guaranteed.
This week I added class-level detection using Merkle tree hashing and an MCP server so Claude Code can check its own output against your codebase before creating duplicates.
Live demo: https://sri-engine-7amwtce7a23k7q34cpnxem.streamlit.app
GitHub: https://github.com/lflin00/SIR-ENGINE
by FrankWilhoit | 2026-03-13 13:29:45+00:00
Spanish "new" = nuevo, nueva . "nova" is not a Spanish word. You are right that the connotations of any non-word may not be determined by the most obvious decomposition into syllables. But "Honda 0" (car) hits entirely differently from, say, "Coke Zero". (btw, "honda" is Spanish for "deep".)
by rich_sasha | 2026-03-13 13:30:05+00:00
> pretty much anti-russian propaganda

Russia bit of the prophecies:

> [...] If my requests are [not] heeded, Russia [...] will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred; the Holy Father will have much to suffer; various nations will be annihilated.

I'm not sure it is fair to call it propaganda when it is bang on the money. Even the Holy Father bit checks out, seeing how John Paul II narrowly survived a KGB-sponsored assassination attempt.
by brnt | 2026-03-13 13:30:13+00:00
The .NL gTLD used to work like that for personal registrations (ie individuals without a business registration). $name.NNN.nl where you were allowed to choose the number.

It won't surprise you the scheme never caught on and has been decommissioned (you can now register any available domain as an individual as well). The difference is probably few people use a personal TLD, but many use a name on some social media.
by troelsSteegin | 2026-03-13 13:30:33+00:00
The Percepta stuff would seem to demonstrate a mechanism for implementing "thinking". I don't understand how foundation models implement "thinking", but my intuition is that models are specifically trained for matching on and following procedural patterns. A task in a given domain can be performed through an associated and encoded procedure. The model holds all the linkages, as weights, that allows a procedure to be conditionally incrementally generated and performed. Does anyone have any insights about how LLM "thinking" is trained and coded?
by Aurornis | 2026-03-13 13:30:34+00:00
Yes, there are some interesting potential mild modulations that can occur with microbiome change.

That paper commits one of the major sins of many microbiome papers which is to attribute all benefits of diet change to the microbiome. Like the parent commenter it gets drawn to the idea that all changes in the body can be traced back to the microbiome and assumes that it explains everything, but that’s obviously not true.

However, when someone is taking two powerful substances with direct brain action and known modulators effects on memory, blaming anything else in the body is bad logic.
by terryf | 2026-03-13 13:31:06+00:00
Yes! This is exactly the point - machinistic enforcement makes no sense in case of speed limits. All laws about driving explicitly say that at the end of the day it's the driver's responsibility to drive safely and if they cause an accident, then they are at fault in some cases even if they followed the speed limit.

The point is that whether you drove dangerously is not a strict, machinistic "if-then" assessment. Automatic enforcement of speeding is ridiculous when viewed in this context.

And the people saying "yes but there is more energy in a faster vehicle" have clearly not felt the difference between driving a car with drum brakes vs modern brakes.
by MSFT_Edging | 2026-03-13 13:31:30+00:00
> Physical businesses have liability if they provide age restricted items to children.

These are often clear cut. They're physical controlled items. Tobacco, alcohol, guns, physical porn, and sometimes things like spray paint.

The internet is not. There are people who believe discussions about human sexuality (ie "how do I know if I'm gay?") should be age restricted. There are people who believe any discussion about the human form should be age restricted. What about discussions of other forms of government? Plenty would prefer their children not be able to learn about communism from anywhere other than the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

The landscape of age restricting information is infinitely more complex than age restricting physical items. This complexity enables certain actors to censor wide swaths of information due to a provider's fear of liability.

This is closer to a law that says "if a store sells an item that is used to damage property whatsoever, they are liable", so now the store owner must fear the full can of soda could be used to break a window.
by nivertech | 2026-03-13 13:31:52+00:00
Claude Code's /voice mode isn't very accurate comparing to other speech-to-text (e.g. Google Translate).

Also it takes about 500ms to activate after you press SPACE, so the initial words are missed out. It took me some time to realize it.

Does Handy has a better speech-to-text accuracy? Is there an activation delay?
by iamcalledrob | 2026-03-13 13:32:27+00:00
Somehow I missed that, oops. I see that the library samples a maximum of 250K pixels from the input buffer (I jumped over to the project readme)

That being said, this is sampling the fixed-size input buffer for the purposes of determining the right colour. You still have to load the bitmap into memory, with all the associated footguns that arise there. The library just isn't making it worse :) I suppose you could memmap it.

Makes me wonder if the sub-sampling is actually a bit of a red herring, as ideally you'd want to be operating on a small input buffer anyway. Or some sort of interface on top of the raw pixel data, so you can load what's needed on-demand.
by dns_snek | 2026-03-13 13:32:30+00:00
My plan is that we don't let it get far enough that a small group of people gain control of a fully integrated robotic supply chain powering an unbeatable war machine. If it comes to that then the world is already doomed.

In practice this currently means voting for political options who can correctly identify concentration of power as the root cause of most of our current and future problems, and who pledge to actually do something about it.
by monsterxx03 | 2026-03-13 13:32:32+00:00
I built something in a similar space: Linko (https://github.com/monsterxx03/linko), a transparent MITM proxy with a webui that lets you see what's actually being sent between Claude Code and LLM APIs in
real time.

It's been really helpful for me to debug my own sessions and understand what the model is seeing (system prompts, tool definitions, tracing tool calls etc.).
by Aurornis | 2026-03-13 13:33:00+00:00
Cutting sugar doesn’t kill 100% of the gut biome either. It doesn’t kill gut biome at all, actually, it just changes some of the proportions. Those parts of the microbiome are most likely still there, just in different ratios.

Antibiotics are a far more powerful and faster modulator of gut biome, therefore if the above was true we’d see similar effects occurring more rapidly with antibiotics than diet.
by ugtr3 | 2026-03-13 13:33:04+00:00
Excellent post!

“I'm also concerned about the second-order effects. Because switching into the often-required deep mental focus is very difficult (borderline painful), I've seen many, many people reach for LLMs in those moments instead, first a little, then entirely. I've watched people copy/paste API docs into Gemini prompts to explain them. I've watched people unable to find syntax errors in code and paste it into ChatGPT to fix it. I'm confident I'm not the only person who's observed this, and it's a little maddening it's not getting more play”

That’s exactly why I stopped using LLM’s. Then people turn around and say “but.. you’ll get left behind.”

Yeah, nah. I value my ability to hold concepts and reason deeply and sit in those painful moments - I’m not letting go of this conditioning that pays dividends over the long term.
by eddd-ddde | 2026-03-13 13:33:18+00:00
I disagree. I used to do a lot of math years ago. If you gave me some problems to do now I probably wouldn't be able to recall exactly how to solve them. But if you give me a written solution I will still be able to give you with 100% confidence a confirmation that it is correct.

This is what it means to understand something. It's like P Vs NP. I don't need to find the solution, I just need to be able to verify _a_ solution.
by surgical_fire | 2026-03-13 13:33:30+00:00
> haha yes, the grand seismic risks (economic risk in single digit percentages of the profits available)

If I lived in the region I wouldn't really care if the economic risk is single digit percentage. I would prefer my house to keep standing.

> they are actively and very costly going to fill them with concrete to ensure in the future (even in whatever extreme scenario) they cannot be used again.

I think you are arguing in bad faith. If you hollow the underground, filling it with something is a way to mitigate the seismic risk.

> And our German neighbors, I can still see them laughing at the Orange Man Bad.

Okay, I see now that talking to you is a waste of time.

Have a great afternoon.
by PeterisP | 2026-03-13 13:33:52+00:00
What I'm confused about is how the proposed bills would apply to servers.

Like, in general, a software change to add an "age class" attribute to user accounts and a syscall "what's this attribute for the current user account" would satisfy the California bill and that's a relatively minor change (the bad part is the NY bill that allegedly requires technical verification of whatever the user claimed).

The weird issue is how should that attribute be filled for the 'root' or 'www-data' user of a linux machine I have on the cloud. Or, to put aside open source for that matter, the Administrator account on a Windows Active Directory system.

Because "user accounts" don't necessarily have any mapping (much less a 1-to-1 mapping) to a person; many user accounts are personal but many are not.
by tclancy | 2026-03-13 13:33:55+00:00
Christ on a crutch, had they donated $25k or something you'd figure it was just a rounding error, but why this much from a company that isn't profitable? This is doing nothing to disabuse me of my theory 90% of "Startup Culture" is just an excuse for rich people to move money around. "Need to get your stoned mope of a C student a head-start on a resume that will let him stay gainfully employed? Well, I just brokered a VC deal for these kids that want to throw micro-concerts in parking spaces, we'll get your boy in as Senior Music Programmer."
by khafra | 2026-03-13 13:34:29+00:00
We're absolutely not there yet, algorithmically or with compute. Algorithms keep getting better, though, despite the bitter lesson; and data centers keep getting bigger.

If you showed a conversation between Terry Tao or Steve Yegge and their AI collaborators to someone from 2021, they would consider it beyond obvious that it's AGI. Today, we know they still have some shortcomings; but in another 5 years, what looks to us today like it's beyond obviously ASI may well be enough for catastrophic, irrecoverable outcomes.