MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jltsiren | 2026-03-12 06:35:21+00:00
My original point was that replication attempts often fail, because the person trying to replicate the result is not an expert in the field, and they do not have enough time to devote to the effort. This is a common situation in fields that use results from other fields. If they don't have the time for proper replication, they probably don't have the time for publishing the attempt.

As for your point, I don't really understand what you are trying to say.
by toyg | 2026-03-12 06:35:28+00:00
Does anyone here remember WinerWatch? The tool Mark Pilgrim wrote, that monitored changes to blog posts by (the notoriously trollish) Dave Winer? It caused a big stir in the blogosphere in 2003, and Mark took it down very quickly after public blowback. I always thought it was pretty cool and he should have left it up.

One of the very few surviving posts on the matter: https://burningbird.net/forget-the-law-forget-the-technology...
by brabel | 2026-03-12 06:35:43+00:00
LLMs work better as translators than any non-AI translators though. Because they are able to translate not just words, but also capture the context of what's being said. If you translate a common phrase like "home, sweet home" to another language, it may or may not make any sense if you translate it word-by-word, like traditional translators would normally do... but LLMs know "what you mean" and will use the equivalent saying in the target language, even if that use entirely different words.
by wzdd | 2026-03-12 06:35:50+00:00
Online tests have very explicit grading criteria which you can be confident are applied equally. AI evaluations, as the linked video in the article points out, not only do not have explicit grading criteria but the companies promoting them can't even describe what it is.

So the meaningful difference is that unlike a test you don't know what it's looking for and you don't know if it's ranking you objectively.
by rekabis | 2026-03-12 06:36:02+00:00
> Anyone who knows what any of that means, or even to looks at those specs, are not in the market for this and should know better.

Why? I am a power user, and if I didn’t already have a copious stable of second-hand machines (a side effect of also being in the hardware end of IT), I would gladly pick one of these machines up as a “vacation/personal device”.

I mean, as a power user I am going to need high specs… for my work.

In my off time and on my vacation time, all I need is something that can connect to the Internet, let me do basic eMail and web surfing, and lets me connect remotely to my iron back in my office to keep a light touch on things.

And in that regard, this machine is perfect.

My issue with the device is in term of long-term ownership, where 8Gb RAM and 512Gb of storage isn’t going to get me all the way out to 7-8 years of usage in a comfortable manner. Even with light duties, imma gonna see the seams stretch uncomfortably so somewhere in the 4-6 year stage.
by KingMob | 2026-03-12 06:36:09+00:00
"Just use UTC" is another, albeit more subtle, falsehood programmers believe about date/time.

It's fine for distributed logging and computer-only usage, but fails in obscure ways once humans, time zones, travel, laws, and/or daylight saving time get involved.

If you're scheduling events for humans, and can't immediately list the reasons your app is an exception to the above, store the time zone to be safe. You probably don't have big data, and nobody will notice the minuscule overhead.
by pfannkuchen | 2026-03-12 06:37:14+00:00
Just in case: I am saying that the progress being referred to is progress in a particular direction, and that direction is a chosen one, and the choice is made by humans without any actual scientific basis.

Just like blasphemy etc in religion have no actual basis aside from being in a direction other than the direction of the religion.

To one group progress looks a lot different from what it looks like to another group, we can’t just say “progress” any more than we can say “blasphemy”.
by esjeon | 2026-03-12 06:37:37+00:00
A bit of an off-topic, but the social networking protocol should never be designed for the sake of the protocol itself, or it’ll not enjoy the networking effect. A protocol must offer direct benefits to users, so that they keep participating in the network. This participation is what eventually forms the network of people, a.k.a, society. I always pick BitTorrent as the most successful example of such networking protocol - people just wanted to download stuffs (e.g. movies and pxxxs) but ends up participating in the sharing network.

Personally, I think a possible angle of attack for a new practical social network protocol is data management, as the amount of data people generate, consume, store, and share is enormous these days. More like, manage data conveniently, and share them easily as a side-effect.
by lelanthran | 2026-03-12 06:38:47+00:00
> If clean-room re-engineering a MIT code base starting from a GPL one is legit, then AI has just made that the status quo for everything.

I agree; this is what I meant by "the value is being captured by someone else".

GPL provides the author with a specific value - you get back improvements. Using AI to launder that IP so that improvements don't have to be upstreamed is effectively capturing the value.
by liza_br | 2026-03-12 06:39:52+00:00
Looking for a CTO / Tech Lead

A startup producing short-form vertical video series for mobile platforms is looking for a CTO / Tech Lead to lead the technical side of the company.

Looking for someone who:
- Is based in the US (mandatory, no relocation and/or visa support)
- Has experience with video streaming, short-form video platforms, or similar media products
- Knows how to build and scale strong engineering teams and platforms

This is a foundational leadership role with real influence on the product and company growth.

CV: elizaveta.brovko@ngrs.com
by linkregister | 2026-03-12 06:40:33+00:00
I think that the skill of hand-writing software is still useful in 2026. The vast majority of programming is a module calling another API. This does not spark joy. Truly interesting classes of problems —application of algorithms or applying complex arcane knowledge— are often not handled well by LLMs. Also, what the author wrote really strikes a chord. We should write the exceptionally difficult sections ourselves so we understand how the software operates.

This reminds me of the observation that Anthropic's unsupervised LLM-generated Rust implementation of sqlite3 was correct for the subset of features they chose, but thousands of times slower (wall clock). Of course, performance will be the next skill to be targeted by expert-led RHLF, but this is a hard problem with many tradeoffs. It may prove to be time-consuming to improve.
by laughinghan | 2026-03-12 06:40:51+00:00
Does it bother anyone else when an article is so clearly written by an LLM? Other than being 3x longer than it needs to be the content is fine as far as I can tell, but I find the voice it’s written in extremely irritating.

I think it’s specifically the resemblance to the clickbaity writing style that Twitter threads and LinkedIn and Facebook influencer posts are written in, presumably optimized for engagement/social media virality. I’m not totally sure what I want instead, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the same tactics used in writing I admired, but probably much more sparingly?

What is it that makes tptacek’s writing or Cloudflare’s blog etc so much more readable by comparison? Is it just variety? Maybe these tactics should be reserved for intro paragraphs (of the article but also of individual sections/chapters might be fine too) to motivate you to read on, whereas the meat of the article (or section) should have more substance and less clickbaiting hooks?
by Xylakant | 2026-03-12 06:41:22+00:00
My 95% bet is that the attacker just gained access to an account with suitable privileges and then went on to use existing automation. The fact that it’s intune is largely irrelevant - I’m not aware of any safeguards that any provider would implemen.

So the options here are MDM or no MDM and that’s a hard choice. No MDM means that you have to trust all people to get things as basic as FDE or a sane password policy right. No option to wipe or lock lost devices. No option to unlock devices where people forgot their password. Using an MDM means having a privileged attack vector into all machines.
by ryandrake | 2026-03-12 06:42:08+00:00
Energy is definitely a better example than food. There is enough food produced to feed the entirety of humanity, probably several times over, but the social and political problem of who the food gets distributed to is the limiting factor, so hunger exists. Same is true for homes. There are enough homes to house everyone, yet homelessness exists. I'd argue we are already post-scarcity for many things, but distribution is socio-political and therefore deliberately uneven.
by zozbot234 | 2026-03-12 06:42:22+00:00
> "For tests of the type ran here, there appear to be major diminishing returns past Q4"

These statements are silly, because the only interesting comparison is among models with highly comparable on-disk sizes, or sizes for their active parameters. Obviously, a Q4 model is not going to be the same effectiveness as a Q6: no one sensibly expects that, you need to compare the Q4 with a smaller model. (The GP has the same problem of course.) I believe that once you do that kind of comparison, higher quantizations tend to do better up to Q2 or so for casual chat, maybe slightly more bits-per-param for agentic use cases where avoiding erratic behavior is important.
by aicoldtrail | 2026-03-12 06:42:32+00:00
I don't think I'm going to spend the time to paraphrase my worthwhile AI-applied work for such hypocritical rules.

So develop and fund and use AI but manually paraphrase things and don't cite AI?

It is best to cite a source and/or a method.

Do you think it is better to paraphrase and not cite AI?

I don't recall encountering posts on HN that I've wanted to flag as AI.
New technology to reduce risk of architect drift. Ask for feedback
by EfimovSD | 2026-03-12 06:43:04+00:00
I want to share what we’ve achieved working with architectural drift. Linters and tests help check code correctness and style, but they can’t effectively identify structural deviations that may accumulate over time and affect the long-term stability of a project. So, we asked ourselves how we can proactively manage such risks.

In the search for an answer, we came across an approach that takes into account not only the syntax and functionality but also the code structure. It’s based on analyzing changes in a project’s architecture by modeling its structural integrity. This method allows us to track deviations from the historical code structure, which is critical for long-term maintainability and scalability.

The foundation for this approach is the theoretical model PhaseBrain, which uses a toroidal representation to analyze the dynamics of structural changes. This allows us to capture deviations that are not visible to standard tools but can significantly impact the project’s architecture.

The translation of this theory into practice led to the creation of a tool that integrates into the code review process and analyzes changes in pull requests. This tool works with the code in the context of its historical structure, highlighting areas that may affect the architectural integrity of the project.

As a result, each PR is analyzed, and hidden dependencies and changes are identified that could be missed in traditional analysis. The system flags these changes as potentially dangerous to the structure and provides a report for further analysis. All of this happens within the familiar code review process.

The technology was implemented as a GitHub App, which is available on the GitHub marketplace.

We invite developers interested in this topic to test the proposed tool and share their experiences. Feedback would be very helpful for us.

Thank you for reading, and have a great day!
by Ogbon | 2026-03-12 06:43:26+00:00
Good morning!

I'm a solo UX designer from London, and I built Dopamine Detox to solve my own problem: losing 3+ hours a day to mindless scrolling.

What it does:
- Tracks time on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook in real-time
- One-click blocking (30/60/120 min sessions)
- AI predictions warn you BEFORE you fall into a binge (premium)
- Build focus streaks with gamified rewards
- 100% privacy-first – all data stored locally, never leaves your device

Technical stack:
- Chrome Extension Manifest V3
- Vanilla JS (no frameworks – keeping it lightweight)
- Local storage only (no backend, no servers, no data collection)
- Dynamic site tracking with content scripts
- Declarative net request API for blocking

Early results (2 weeks live):
- 56 installs from 85 page views (65.9% conversion rate)
- 12 weekly active users (89% retention)
- 58% of users are on ChromeOS (Chromebook students love it!)
- 0 uninstalls in last week

The most interesting technical challenge was building AI predictions without sending data to a server. I use on-device pattern recognition to predict when you're about to waste time based on your historical behavior.

Pricing: Free forever (5 sites), $19.99 one-time for premium (no subscription).

Chrome Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/dopamine-detox/emoh...

Website: https://dopaminedetox.uk

Would love feedback from the HN community – especially on:
1. Privacy approach (is local-only storage compelling enough?)
2. Pricing ($19.99 one-time vs subscription)
3. Features you'd want to see
4. Technical implementation suggestions

Happy to answer any questions about the build process, challenges, or anything else!
by ssokolow | 2026-03-12 06:43:36+00:00
By "game tutorials", I think they mean modern successors to the role GameFAQs used to play.

There is a combining character that, by its description, sounds like it should be implemented to do the desired thing (U+20DD Combining Enclosing Circle), but my fonts don't render it very well when I stuff geometric characters matching the PlayStation buttons into it.

Without spaces:
△⃝□⃝×⃝○⃝

With two spaces between each one so you can see how "enclosing" is getting interpreted:
△⃝ □⃝ ×⃝ ○⃝

For the Markdown renderer I'm working on to replace WordPress for my blog, I resorted to shortcodes which resolve to CSS styling the `<kbd>` tag with `title` attributes to clarify and the occasional bit of inline SVG for things where I didn't want to specify a fixed font to get sufficient consistency, like PlayStation button glyphs.

https://imgur.com/a/1EPm7QV
by adrianwaj | 2026-03-12 06:43:57+00:00
Why not just build something in the crypto ecosystem while you wait? Coins are cheap (compensation potential) and you can fast-code things.

Recently:
https://www.ethnews.com/nasdaq-and-kraken-are-building-a-pla...
https://oasis.net/blog/vibe-code-with-oasis https://github.com/orvexpay

Also, one can expect to see Linux on handheld soon (Mecha Comet.)

Also lots of crypto activity in the prediction markets.

I was thinking about some type of app when overseas to deal with translation and commerce combined. Maybe it could tie in with localized prediction markets and local produce?

The alt-season could be soon - once gold enters its bear phase.
by londons_explore | 2026-03-12 06:45:00+00:00
Kinda sad that this was done less than 1000 years ago at presumably great human efforts, yet we have forgotten why we even did it.

Lack of record keeping is the key problem.

Will someone 1000 years from now know what you spent your lifetime working on? Will your lifetimes work also be a mystery to future generations and will they shrug and say "all this computer code must be for religious sacrifice, we can see no other purposes for it"?

Is there any way we can make the current era of humanity the 'well documented one', for example by etching all our digital data into diamonds to last millions of years?
by nytesky | 2026-03-12 06:45:16+00:00
I always carry Bluetooth headphones because I find using the phone in the OG style generally problematic.

If I am not at home relaxing, I’m calling a business, a doctor, a school or spouse for logistics. Which likely means I need to read some code or schedule on my calendar — which without headset means speakerphone.

Additionally, the speakerphone and handset speaker are colocated by the ear — so when my kid engages FaceTime mid-call it trills at high volume at my ear (or if spouse happened to trigger find my phone to REALLY get my attention). This hasn’t happened to often, but enough and unpleasant enough that I am gun shy about handset phone use.

Finally, it is tiring holding it up to your ear, phones or old could be crooked under the neck to free that hand for a spell, but now these huge phones must be tightly held right up to your ear to hear.

I’ve definitely had issues with proximity sensor too, and you can’t lock with side button — that ends calls in handset mode.
by casey2 | 2026-03-12 06:46:50+00:00
For the same reason you wouldn't write POSIX compliant code in a project that doesn't require it. There is no gain. You are absolutely braindead if you think wasting your time looking up the correct grammar is helpful to anyone. Like literal fucking completely braindead. A walking ghost

While you sit in homeostasis ruminating on the consequences of a misplaced comma someone else snatched up your deal
by merl1n | 2026-03-12 06:46:56+00:00
Pretty sleek! The fact that you have to manually add folders to watch destroys the magic a bit IMO. Would it be possible to just watch the whole user folder and what would be the performance implications?

Also can it differentiate between a user renaming a file and a potential background job programmatically modifying files? I could imagine this leading to some weird results when multiple applications are "fighting" over the same file ...
by zarzavat | 2026-03-12 06:47:24+00:00
Yeah prompting doesn't work for this problem because the entire point of an LLM is you give it the what and it outputs the how. The more how that you have to condition it with in the prompt, the less profitable the interaction will be. A few hints is OK, but doing all the work for the LLM tends to lead to negative productivity.

Writing prompts and writing code takes about the same amount of time, for the same amount of text, plus there's the extra time that the LLM takes to accomplish the task, and review time afterwards. So you might as well just write the code yourself if you have to specify every tiny implementation detail in the prompt.
by hansvm | 2026-03-12 06:47:30+00:00
> examples

One such question (obviously tailored to the role I'm hiring for) is asking whether SoA or AoS inputs will yield a faster dot-product implementation and whether the answer changes for small vs large inputs, also asking why that would be the case.

I typically offer a test with a small number of such questions since each one individually is noisy, but overall the take-home has good signal.

> why not test that directly?

The big thing is that you don't have enough time to probe everything about a candidate, especially if you're being respectful of their time and not burning too much of yours. Your goal is to maximize information gain with respect to the things you care about while minimizing any negative feelings the candidate has about your company.

I could be wrong, but vibe coding feels like another skill which is more efficient to probe indirectly. In your example, I would care about the prompt/session, mostly wouldn't care about the resulting code, and still don't think I would have enough information to judge whether they were any good. There are things I would want to test beyond the vibe coding itself.

In particular, one thing I think is important is being able to reason about code and deeply understand the tradeoffs being made. Even if vibe coding is your job and you're usually able to go straight from Claude to prod, it's detrimental (for the roles I'm looking at) to not be able to easily spot memory leaks, counter-productive OO abstractions, a lack of productive OO abstractions, a host of concurrency issues LLMs are kind of just bad at right now, and so on. My opinion is that the understanding needed to use LLMs effectively (for the code I work on) is much more expensive to develop than any prompt engineering, so I'd rather test those other things directly.
by okcdz | 2026-03-12 06:47:36+00:00
I think WASM's real problem is language fragmentation. For 3D apps, C++ makes sense. But Go and other GC languages don't perform well on WASM - they implemented their own GC anyway. And honestly, I don't see the advantage of writing web apps in Rust over JS. The ecosystem, tooling, and debugging are all better with JS.
by nake89 | 2026-03-12 06:47:37+00:00
Yeah, it's quite bad. Just some of the classics:

- "Why This Matters"

- "That's accurate, but it's only half the answer — and the less interesting half"

- "this isn't an edge case. It's routine."

I'm at the point, I would just rather read something somebody actually wrote even if it's not grammatically perfect and has lots of spelling mistakes.
by rswail | 2026-03-12 06:48:25+00:00
> Decent package manager, brew is awful compared to apt.

Use Macports. Installs itself properly out of the way in /opt. Works with the Apple frameworks (eg Python), allows multiple versions of software to be installed in parallel (using port select).

> Window snapping can only be done on Apple keyboards not on external keyboards.

Yes, you need some free 3rd party apps for affordances that should be built in. Hardly a deal breaker.

Rectangle allows you to set the hotkeys for window snapping and sizing for example.

As for scroll directions, yes, it's different to Windows, but it's the same on the Mac and iPhone. Didn't take very long to adjust.

Agreed that the new Settings app is a PITA and obviously inherited from iOS and sucks, but how often are you accessing Settings?
by mrtksn | 2026-03-12 06:49:48+00:00
> The blog you reference has inaccuracies. Drones are generally not shot by THAAD is a glaring one

It's obvious that the author doesn't mean THAAD but Patriot, which are indeed used against drones. You can tell that by the missle cost the author mentions, which is 1/10th of the THAAD missle. As the argument is a cost effectiveness argument the logic holds, just replace THAAD with Patriot.

Even though Ukraine offered their cost effective solution, they have a war to fight so any serious capacity increase will probably take months if not years and these things are not static and are quickly shaped on the battlefield so the Gulf states and Israel and USA will need to develop talent that is on the battlefield, like Russia and Ukraine did.
by diffeomorphism | 2026-03-12 06:50:15+00:00
The apple pricing ladder is all about the confusingly named overlap.

The Air with more ram costs just a bit less than the pro non-pro. But then maybe you want the pro pro? Or do you need the pro max? Oh, and the ultra will come later but not for laptops. Also it will then be a smaller number M but ultra.

Oh, and the iPad air is, of course, heavier than the pro because "air".