MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ben_w | 2026-03-05 20:53:11+00:00
> I don't trust either an un-elected corporation or a government chosen by an electorate full of people I don't agree with not to censor my speech, or the speech I want to see.

A government *always* has this power, constrained only by their constitution (not just the American big-C Constitution, but anywhere that would have e.g. a court that can tell the government "no").

Allowing corporations to censor is to grant this power to additional actors, without the oversight or limitations the creators of a constitution place upon subsequent governments within that constitution.

> As far as I'm concerned all centralized social media platforms are vulnerable to censorship of some kind or another, and the best way around this is to build systems that make it as technically difficult as possible for a 3rd party to intercept a message one person broadcasts to willing listeners.

Even America deems some speech to be unlawful.

Copyright infringement, NDAs, and non-disparagement clauses in contracts being the easy example where some private actor can invoke the power of the state to silence a certain category of speech.

Speaking personally, I think copyright should be much shorter (perhaps 20 years or so, perhaps variable with medium as news often stops being important after just a matter of days, but novels and music can remain relevant for a lifetime); I can understand why NDAs should exist, but I think they should also be time-limited; and I think non-disparagement clauses are exactly the kind of thing which any proponent of free speech should consider harmful.
by nowittyusername | 2026-03-05 20:53:13+00:00
Personally what I am more interested about is effective context window. I find that when using codex 5.2 high, I preferred to start compaction at around 50% of the context window because I noticed degradation at around that point. Though as of a bout a month ago that point is now below that which is great. Anyways, I feel that I will not be using that 1 million context at all in 5.4 but if the effective window is something like 400k context, that by itself is already a huge win. That means longer sessions before compaction and the agent can keep working on complex stuff for longer. But then there is the issue of intelligence of 5.4. If its as good as 5.2 high I am a happy camper, I found 5.3 anything... lacking personally.
by solid_fuel | 2026-03-05 20:53:33+00:00
Putting aside the discussions of who will actually see any money returned, I will note that this haul covers about 100 days of war with Iran. ($1 Billion per day is the initial assessment from the Pentagon.) [0]

For anyone who was still under the illusion that the tariffs would make any impact on the government debt, hopefully this illustrates that both the tariffs and the ridiculous DOGE effort were never really about the budget.

[0] https://iran-cost-ticker.com/
by adamtaylor_13 | 2026-03-05 20:53:36+00:00
Writing out a thought I had, someone please critique my reasoning here...

What if Anthropic just shrugged, dissolved the company and open-sourced all of the Opus weights? Could this harm OpenAI and advance AI in a reasonable way?

Look I know it's an insane idea. I'm just curious what the most unhinged response to this might be.
Show HN: Docker pulls more than it needs to - and how we can fix it
by a_t48 | 2026-03-05 20:53:49+00:00
Hi all!

I've built a small tool to visualize how inefficient `docker pull` is, in preparation for standing up a new Docker registry + transport. It's bugged me for a while that updating one dependency with Docker drags along many other changes. It's a huge problem with Docker+robotics. With dozens or hundreds of dependencies, there's no "right" way to organize the layers that doesn't end up invalidating a bunch of layers on a single dependency update - and this is ignoring things like compiled code, embedded ML weights, etc. Even worse, many robotics deployments are on terrible internet, either due to being out in the boonies or due to customer shenanagins. I've been up at 4AM before supporting a field tech who needs to pull 100MB of mostly unchanged Docker layers to 8 robots on a 1Mbps connnection. (and I don't think that robotics is the only industry that runs into this, either - see the ollama example, that's a painful pull)

What if Docker were smarter and knew about the files were already on disk? How many copies of `python3.10` do I have floating around `/var/lib/docker`. For that matter, how many copies of it does DockerHub have? A registry that could address and deduplicate at the file level rather than just the layer level is surely cheaper to run.

This tool:

- Given two docker images, one you have and one you are pulling, finds how much data docker pull would use, as well as how much data is _actually_ required to pull

- Shows an estiimate for how much time you will save on various levels of cruddy internet

- There's a bunch of examples given of situations where more intelligent pulls would help, but the two image names are free text, feel free to write your own values there and try it out (one at a time though, there's a work queue to analyze new image pairs)

The one thing I wish it had but haven't gotten around to fitting in the UI somehow is a visualization of the files that _didn't_ change but are getting pulled anyhow.

It was written entirely in Claude Code, which is a new experience for me. I don't know nextjs at all, I don't generally write frontends. I could have written the backend maybe a little slower than Claude, but the frontend would have taken me 4x as long and wouldn't have been as pretty. It helped that I knew what I wanted on the backend, I think.

The registry/transport/snapshotter(?) I'm building will allow both sharing files across docker layers on your local machine well as in the registry. There's a bit of prior art with this, but only on the client side. The eStargz format allows splitting apart the metadata for a filesystem and the contents, while still remaining OCI compliant - but it does lazy pulls of the contents, and has no deduplication. I think it could easily compete with other image providers both on cost (due to using less storage and bandwidth...everywhere) as well as speed.

If you'd be interested, please reach out.
by 0123456789ABCDE | 2026-03-05 20:54:15+00:00
maybe gp's use of the word "lots" is unwarranted

https://artificialanalysis.ai indicates that sonnect 4.6 beats opus 4.6 on GDPval-AA, Terminal-Bench Hard, AA Long context Reasoning, IFBench.

see: https://artificialanalysis.ai/?models=claude-sonnet-4-6%2Ccl...
by scottlamb | 2026-03-05 20:54:32+00:00
I don't think the author intended "code simplicity" as an end unto itself but a way to reduce cache pressure. He popped into the 2016 discussion [1] to say:

> Another benefit of this design overlooked is that individual cores may not ever need to read memory -- the entire task can run in L1 or L2. If a single worker becomes too complicated this benefit is lost, and memory is much much slower than cache.

I think this is wrong or at least overstated: if you're passing off fds and their associated (kernel- and/or user-side) buffers between cores, you can't run entirely in L1 or L2. And in general, I'd expect data to be responsible for much more cache pressure than code, so I'm skeptical of localizing the code at the expense of the data.

But anyway, if the goal is to organize which cores are doing the work, splitting a single core's work from a single thread (pinnned to it) to several threads (still pinned to it) doesn't help. It just introduces more context switching.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10874616
by john_strinlai | 2026-03-05 20:54:33+00:00
no one is trolling in this comment chain.

i found kibone's reply to a hypothetical musing as if it was some counterpoint in a debate instead of a simple expansion on their comment to be off putting. we had some comments back and forth and we both came out of it just fine. weird of you to add on this little insult to an otherwise pretty normal exchange.
by __jl__ | 2026-03-05 20:54:36+00:00
What a model mess!

OpenAI now has three price points: GPT 5.1, GPT 5.2 and now GPT 5.4. There version numbers jump across different model lines with codex at 5.3, what they now call instant also at 5.3.

Anthropic are really the only ones who managed to get this under control: Three models, priced at three different levels. New models are immediately available everywhere.

Google essentially only has Preview models! The last GA is 2.5. As a developer, I can either use an outdated model or have zero insurances that the model doesn't get discontinued within weeks.
by pino83 | 2026-03-05 20:54:36+00:00
After reading some parts of this thread, all I can recommend is the following: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/539867-never-argue-with-an-...

(I'm sure there are various German things to criticize or to make fun of. Much of what I read here, however, says more about the (US?!) authors, though.)
by bananamogul | 2026-03-05 20:55:29+00:00
"that lead to a chat bot being used to identify a school for girls as a valid target"

Has it been stated authoritatively somewhere that this was an AI-driven mistake?

There are myrid ways that mistake could have been made that don't require AI. These kinds of mistakes were certainly made by all kinds of combatants in the pre-AI era.
by gucci-on-fleek | 2026-03-05 20:55:53+00:00
> Any user with "interface administrator" status can change global JavaScript or CSS for all users on a given Wiki with no review.

True, but there aren't very many interface administrators. It looks like there are only 137 right now [0], which I agree is probably more than there should be, but that's still a relatively small number compared to the total number of active users. But there are lots of bots/duplicates in that list too, so the real number is likely quite a bit smaller. Plus, most of the users in that list are employed by Wikimedia, which presumably means that they're fairly well vetted.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&format=json&...
by easygenes | 2026-03-05 20:56:02+00:00
This is very much in line with what I found fascinating about optimizing microgpt for speed (0). Or rather, what I was able to do with it after doing so. It's so small and so fast to train, you can really dig deep into the optimization landscape. I've spent all my free time this past week digging into it.

0: https://entrpi.github.io/eemicrogpt/
(The writeup is from a few days ago, and I'm still running experiments before I do a big rewrite. Slowrun is good food for thought.)
by coldtea | 2026-03-05 20:56:17+00:00
>Licenses exists for a reason

Yes, and the choice of license for a project is made for a reason that not necessarily everybody agree with.

And the people who don't agree, have every right to implement a similar, even file-format or API compatible, project and give it another license. Gnumeric vs Excel, for example.

It's so disgusting to see people who are either malicious or non mentally capable enough to understand this.
by lukeschlather | 2026-03-05 20:56:59+00:00
> If you wanna get your thing to rewrite curl or something, that's again really weird but fine, but just don't share it or try to make money off of it.

The whole point of the GPL is to encourage sharing! Making money off of GPL code is not encouraged by the text of the license, but it is encouraged by the people who wrote the licenses. Saying "don't share it" is antithetical to the goals of the free software movement.

I feel like everyone is getting distracted by protecting copyright, when in fact the point of the GPL is that we should all share and share alike. The GPL is a negotiation tactic, it is not an end unto itself. And curl, I might note, is permissively licensed so there's no need for a clean room reimplementation. If someone's rewriting it I'm very interested to hear why and I hope they share their work. I'm mostly indifferent to how they license it.
by measurablefunc | 2026-03-05 20:57:36+00:00
If you listen to the people who believe real AI is right around the corner then any software can be recreated from a detailed enough specification b/c whatever special sauce is hidden in the black box can be inferred from its outward behavior. Real AI is more brilliant than whatever algorithm you could ever think of so if the real AI can interact w/ your software then it can recreate a much better version of it w/o looking at the source code b/c it has access to whatever knowledge you had while writing the code & then some.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-03-05 20:57:50+00:00
>Moreover, the days when you as an IC can sit quietly in a corner and churn out code from coffee and jira tickets are rapidly coming to an end.

It was never really like that for me in my domain. But yes, that ended almost 3 years ago for me. I don't think hiring is on my horizon, but I'm looking at long term means to be my own boss.

Just need a few more years first to prepare the jump and pay off debts.
by hax0ron3 | 2026-03-05 20:57:51+00:00
I am a political moderate who dislikes both the Democrats and Republicans. I think that I have been fair to the Trump administration in the past, including occasionally defending them from some of the less reality-based accusations against them.

I canceled my ChatGPT subscription a couple of days ago. In my opinion the Trump administration has become far too much of an "imperial Presidency" in its acts of war and its attempts to bully companies. It is also corrupt on a massive scale. I distrust anyone who thinks "yes, I'd like to work with this administration".
by lapcat | 2026-03-05 20:57:57+00:00
> So we should celebrate, and learn from, the occasional success.

What success? It's too late. The time for decisive action was decades ago. The worst case scenario is occurring now. Humanity totally failed to avert a disaster. We've already blown past the global temperature thresholds that scientists warned about. Now we're going to have to deal with the consequences. There's no going back in time to prevent it. This was never a problem that we could wait on for "the occasional success."
by PaulHoule | 2026-03-05 20:58:43+00:00
It is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

Back in the 1990s there was a comic strip in Z Magazine where some child care workers were commiserating on their inability to afford childcare and that somehow the problem was caused by "capitalism".

A lack of "capitalism" is more like it. The automobile changed the world because Henry Ford spent money to build a car factory so productive that the workers there could afford to buy the cars they make and thus the car changes the world. In the case of child care there isn't any technical or business innovation that can make it affordable enough for the person who does the job so it will remain forever a service only the rich can afford.
by 9rx | 2026-03-05 20:58:47+00:00
> I have never seen fuzzing being done as part of a documented process in a project I worked in

Fuzzing, while useful in the right places, is a bit niche. Its close cousin, property-based testing, is something that is ideally seen often.

However, it starts treading into the direction of the same kind of mindset required to write Lean, Rocq, etc. I am not sure the average bootcamp grad can handle writing those kinds of tests. At least not once you move beyond the simple identity(x) == x case.
by onion2k | 2026-03-05 20:59:16+00:00
They MUST have access ALL THE TIME, no matter the downside.

The problem is that the downside is incredibly small (government isn't interested in most citizens) until it's suddenly massive (government is interested in you.) That makes it very difficult for people to build a mental model of why it's a problem: because in all seriousness it genuinely isn't unless you're either fighting the system, you're a criminal, or you have a level of perception where you can understand that other people are a threat to the government and you have empathy for them or you can see that the government might see you as a threat to in the future. Most people can't or won't understand about that.

You can't really blame them. Mobile devices are useful beyond 'looking stuff up'. Maps, communication, banking, etc are huge upsides to counter the probably very small (if you ignore empathy) downside for most people.
by M0HD197 | 2026-03-05 20:59:45+00:00
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by strongpigeon | 2026-03-05 21:00:06+00:00
> Google essentially only has Preview models! The last GA is 2.5. As a developer, I can either use an outdated model or have zero insurances that the model doesn't get discontinued within weeks.

What's funny is that there is this common meme at Google, you can either use the old, unmaintained tool that's used everywhere, or the new beta tools that doesn't quite do what you want.

Not quite the same, but it did remind me of it.
by Someone1234 | 2026-03-05 21:00:14+00:00
If it is actually that important, then maybe more effort should be made so it isn't "low quality." Cannot be very important to them if they're disinterested in presenting an intellectually compelling argument about it.

PS - If you think I am not sympathetic to what they're raising, you're very much mistake. But they're not winning anyone new over their side with this flamebait.
by vladich | 2026-03-05 21:00:51+00:00
It's definitely different, and for Postgres specifically, they may complement each other. SLJit can be used for low latency queries where codegen time is more important than optimizations, also for other platforms like s390x / PPC / SPARC, etc. AsmJit can be used for SIMD optimizations for x86_64 and ARM64. MIR is kinda in the middle - it does auto-allocations of registers, doesn't support SIMD, but also it's multiplatform.
by diacritical | 2026-03-05 21:00:51+00:00
I agree, I made it too black and white. I should've said that some, probably most (in my opinion), of such decisions are made with productivity in mind, whether it's in the form of team cohesiveness or favorable view of management, but some are just because managers have the best interest in mind for their subordinates.

OTOH, if you've witnessed how most managers talk about their employees to one another, it's with a cold calculating language. Sure, a manager may feel bad for firing an employee, but first and foremost is the business analysis of whether it makes sense to do so - just pure math and predictions.

Personally, if I was in a management position and an employee asked me for a cigarette, I would happily give it to them. In fact, a few times a week I give a few cigarettes to 1 person who is not my employee, but who I talk to from time to time. I don't gain anything from this and I give them cigarettes because they are on a tight budget.

Also, if I, as a hypothetical manager, realized a lot of my employees would take an offer for free coffee, cigarettes, pure nicotine, beer or another drug, I would give it to them as long as it didn't hurt productivity too much. Of course some drugs like alcohol could hurt short term productivity, but it would make them happier overall, which would have positive long term effects. If asked why I do this, I would say that I'm both giving them out of my good will and to increase productivity, which would be true.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2026-03-05 21:01:16+00:00
Clicking through links eventually led to https://lowrisc.org/ibex/ -

> Ibex® is a small and highly configurable open-source RISC-V embedded processor available under an Apache 2.0 licence. It is formally verified and very well validated, and it has excellent toolchain integration, which has led many companies to use it in their commercial SoCs.

> [...]

> Ibex is the main CPU in the OpenTitan® root of trust, which has brought the quality of the design and documentation to new heights.

So that's neat.
by fredgrott | 2026-03-05 21:01:57+00:00
There are reasons why I measure code quote input unquote via testing and static code analysis:

1. re-establishes mind mapping of the code base
2. separates out noise from signal.
3. makes it a breeze to refactor to reduce code complexity.

Notice anything yet?

If I replace the AI code input with my own curated techniques from known and measured code sources in long-term I save more time than those who rely upon AI vibe coding.
by echoangle | 2026-03-05 21:02:17+00:00
Does it really matter? Can you not destroy unarmed military assets? Is a transport truck carrying food for soldiers off limit?

And for the intelligence sharing to locate the ship thing: do people really believe the US intelligence apparatus needs help finding a 95m long ship, especially since it was known to be at the fleet review? I don’t think you can get a ship anywhere without the US knowing if they want to.
by josephg | 2026-03-05 21:02:26+00:00
If you write program A that does something, and I look at what your program does and write program B that does the same thing, have I copied your program? So long as I didn’t copy any of the lines of code in program A directly, no. At least, not according to copyright law. A copyright on Netscape navigator doesn’t apply to internet explorer or chrome. They’re all “copies” of Netscape navigator. But copyright applies to the work. New work? New copyright.

If you want that, get a patent. A patent on one h264 encoder applies to all h264 encoders.

There is a chance the courts or the legislature will decide differently. But until then, we should assume the existing law of the land holds.
Ask HN: Anyone using "Deep Agents" for production or operational tasks?
by codecracker3001 | 2026-03-05 21:03:18+00:00
Is anyone using deep agents (LangChain or others like Claude Code, Codex) internally in their company or for real work that is non-coding?

I'm building one for a specific task, mainly to run through cron (but users can also chat/ask/provide feedback), and I'm trying to understand best practices.

Can anyone share any examples? I'd like to see something that is not a research agent, a coding agent, or a data/financial analyst agent, but something that does real work.
by SolubleSnake | 2026-03-05 21:03:38+00:00
It's one reason I am actually going to continue pursuing the 'physical engineering' side of my career rather than the software development (software 'engineering' side of it).

I studied CS at UCL years ago but worked mostly in teams with electrical, chemical, and mechanical engineers and on projects relating to various things in relation to various different industries as different as pharmaceutical and ship building. During that time I got qualified as a CAD engineer among other things I was required to by my employer(s).

Now, when I look at software jobs and the way software developers are being interviewed...I just can't. You would never ask eg a mechanical engineer in an interview 'so, you say you know SolidWorks? Ok, design me a sphere with a chamfered cylinder extruded from the centre of the top. It should be chamfered at a 46 degree angle to a plane passing through the centre of the sphere. Also, sweep a five pointed star around the sphere at the point that is midway above the plane and the top of the sphere'.

This is effectively what Leetcode tests etc are asking. It is a waste of everyone's time because they will either do it and think 'ok, that was weird' or they will refuse and think the company is insane.

There should just be accepted certifications for software development AND THEY SHOULD BE HARD. They should be very much failable and you should expect good people still to fail once or twice (like engineering or medical exams). Then just ignore the Leetcode stuff. It serves no-one.

Then all it really comes down to is frameworks etc and if someone is familiar with that particular framework or not. Just let people qualify out of this stupid algorithmic vetting process because it's utterly daft in the context of most jobs.