MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dhosek | 2026-03-02 02:46:23+00:00
I’m very much the inverse of you. I don’t use Android because I don’t want to have to worry about all the fiddly stuff that is involved with Android. I like that it’s not a big deal to migrate to a new phone, that I don’t have to worry about whether I’ll be able to get security updates in a year, or have to spend time disabling telemetry.

If I did want to do a lot of fiddling with the phone then sure, Android would be a better choice, but like I had said back in 2004, what I wanted more than anything else was a phone that would sync its contacts with my Mac.
by ehnto | 2026-03-02 02:47:33+00:00
LLMs are non-deterministic, you would end up with a different output even if you paste the same conversation in. Even if the model was identical at the time you tried to reproduce it. Which gets less likely as time passes.

Also, why would you need to reproduce it? You have the code. Almost any modification to said code would benefit from a fresh context and refined prompt.

An actual full context of a thinking agent is asinine, full of busy work, at best if you want to preserve the "reason" for the commits contents maybe you could summarise the context.

Other than that I see no reason to store the whole context per commit.
by borroka | 2026-03-02 02:47:39+00:00
This weekend, I received confirmation that, for data analysis and modeling, coding agents represent a qualitative leap forward comparable to the widespread adoption of personal computers.

I stopped doing scientific research years ago, but before moving on to other things, I had, like many others, I imagine, certain problems that I wanted to study, but given the lack of time and other concerns, I would never have picked them up again.
I launched Codex, and it managed to untangle old files and analyses, find datasets that I didn't know where they had ended up, launch analyses under my guidance, and build visualizations that would have taken me days, if not weeks, to complete.

Of course, I have experience, I know what needs to be done, and I had to correct some errors made by Codex (I am paying for Codex and Gemini now, but I could go back to paying for Claude too), but I was amazed by the quality of the analyses.

To give an example, I had a dataset of weather observations that I had downloaded from a website years ago, hundreds of time series across weather stations.
Codex managed to recover the missing time series, even though the website is no longer active, by first comparing the downloaded data with the data I had, and then also finding a digital elevation model.

Now I will guide Codex in developing a model of extreme events that will allow me to have a spatio-temporal model of extreme events that, without Codex, I would never have had the time or inclination to build.
by lightedman | 2026-03-02 02:48:03+00:00
I want to giggle like most everyone else with this comment...

...then I look at what I'm doing at my new job in nuspace (I jumped out of LEDs and LASERs,) and realize I'm one of the people that is tasked with making this some sort of a possibility, without having been explicitly told so.

Faaaaaaaaaaack me. Well, I have a chance to shine if I can talk sense into the right heads.
by mmh0000 | 2026-03-02 02:48:28+00:00
My first job was Call Center tech support for eMachines (through a random 3rd-party contractor called "Alorica") at a whopping $7.25/hr in 2003.

My next job after that was sales-drone at CompUSA for a whole 7.65/hr. But they had slightly better insurance. Then they went out of business. And my job after that was as a phone agent at Delta Airlines, starting at $8.50/hr and rising to $11.77/hr when I left.

It wasn't until 2007 that I got my first real tech-job. And it was still customer service. But it paid $15/hr and had "normal" insurance.

It had health insurance. Not great insurance, mind you, but insurance. It would cover ER-type emergencies and had something like a $100 co-pay for standard visits. It was basically "don't go to the doctor unless you're actually dying insurance," and if you're in generally good health, like I was, or the author of this article. It's "good enough".

I fully realize the insurance situation is f'ed. And those in less good health get quite screwed. But, this guy... This guy caused his a lot of his own problems.
by loeg | 2026-03-02 02:48:45+00:00
> I wasn’t comparing 6/7/8 with 10 and 11 but with 1 speed.

I covered 1 speed in my earlier comment (“single-speed”) too. There are some nice graphs at https://zerofrictioncycling.com.au/chaintesting/ (although that testing doesn’t cover single-speed chains).

> As for the chain you might be right, but a well maintained chain over time needs more work that many wants to invests.

Right! Totally reasonable to prefer not to maintain a chain.
by exogeny | 2026-03-02 02:49:05+00:00
There’s two different things to argue here.

First, yes, you’re right.

Second, they raised a shit ton of money under the bull case of mass consumer adoption, which is going to be impossible if that said consumer feels it is rigged.

Let’s all be real here; for 95% of their use cases both now and in the future, they’re a sportsbook. Which is fine! But they’re not going to get to anywhere near returning a multiple on their manic valuation until they act like one. And the first thing to do is to stop with all of the pseudo-academic bullshit about what a prediction market is. And the second is for them to hire someone, anyone, who knows even the first thing about sports because everyone even tangentially connected to this market knows that before six months ago, Tarek and Shayne couldn’t differentiate between a football and a buttplug.
by lumost | 2026-03-02 02:49:35+00:00
All limited exchanges end in annihilation, parties are required to tit for tat the exchange and it's really easy to run out of targets when you are using nukes - forcing an escalation.

If Taiwan was invaded, the only military targets for the US are in close proximity to major population centers. The response would be nukes on US Naval bases (in close proximity to US population centers). This would rapidly escalate to a full exchange. Or China would just use their nukes to achieve all military objectives in Taiwan.

Neither China nor the US plan to invade each other, or engage in any non-limited conflict. There is no rational reason for either to ever use nukes.
by lich_king | 2026-03-02 02:49:42+00:00
I'm not sure this analogy holds, for two reasons. First, even in the best case, chain-of-thought transcripts don't reliably tell you what the agent is doing and why it's doing it. Second, if you're dealing with a malicious actor, the transcript may have no relation to the code they're submitting.

The reason you don't have to look at assembly is that the .c file is essentially a 100% reliable and unambiguous spec of how the assembly will look like, and you will be generating the assembly from that .c file as a part of the build process anyway. I don't see how this works here. It adds a lengthy artifact without lessening the need for a code review. It may be useful for investigations in enterprise settings, but in the OSS ecosystem?...

Also, people using AI coding tools to submit patches to open-source projects are weirdly hesitant to disclose that.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-03-02 02:51:49+00:00
Okay. But that still doesn’t answer the question.

Why should I hire a junior who doesn’t know the what or the how. Instead of hiring a mid level developer who could be an excellent developer who can turn business requirements into code and is more than likely better at certain things than I am since they live and breathe it everyday and can both do the work without supervision and can offer valuable advice and say something that might convince me that I didn’t think things clearly?

Reminding you that the difference above a mid level developer and a “senior”/“senior+” is scope and ambiguity not necessarily technical depth in one area.

What does a junior developer bring to the table that I should use my open req on?
Ask HN: When do you expect ChatGPT moment in robotics?
by p1esk | 2026-03-02 02:53:02+00:00
Current humanoid robotic assistants are in early stage - somewhere around GPT2 level - they're starting to perform very simple, very narrow tasks, but stumble a lot, and still cannot do much. However, I've been tracking the progress in the last couple of years, and I feel that GPT3 level might already be happening, and some startups demonstrate impressive things (e.g. look up Generalist AI or Physical Intelligence). Plus the funding all these startups are getting should allow them to scale their methods 10x-100x to what has been tried so far. I'm not sure any additional research breakthroughs are actually needed to make the leap to usable products.

Therefore, we might soon see a ChatGPT moment in robotics - a commercial availability a physical robot that will be capable of performing useful tasks: cooking, cleaning, simple repairs, yard work, elderly care, etc. Just like ChatGPT-3.5, this won't be reliable, and the robots will still be clunky/dumb, but I think it will be obvious there's a step change/phase transition, where most people realize a paradigm shift is happening. Soon after that initial stage, it will lead to something globally transformative (like GPT4): think of how software engineers currently using Claude Code, but applied to physical world, for everyone, everywhere. Well, everyone who can afford a robot like that - I'm guessing it will cost like a premium car.

I'm curious when this will happen, and what will be the short and medium term consequences of having physical world assistants? My intuition is there's 40% chance we will see it this year, and 70% by the end of next year. I'm pretty sure (90%) we will have somewhat useful robots in people's houses within 3 years. I do realize this might sound very optimistic, but it would had been just as optimistic to predict ChatGPT two years before it was released.
by daemonk | 2026-03-02 02:53:44+00:00
I did this in the beginning and realized I never went back to it. I think we have to learn to embrace the chaos. We can try to place a couple of anchors in the search space by having Claude summarize the code base every once in a while, but I am not sure if even that is necessary. The code it writes is git versioned and is probably enough to go on.
by docjay | 2026-03-02 02:54:05+00:00
“It works great aside from the multiple failure modes.” ;)

That’s the sign that your prompt isn’t aligned and you’ve introduced perplexity. If you look carefully at the responses you’ll usually be able to see the off-by-one errors before they’re apparent with full on hallucinations. It’ll be things like going from having quotes around filenames to not having them, or switching to single quote, or outputting literal “\n”, or “<br>”, etc. Those are your warning signs to stop before it runs a destructive command because of a “typo.”

My system prompt is just a list of 10 functions with no usage explanations or examples, 304 tokens total, and it’ll go all the way to the 200k limit and never get them wrong. That took ~1,000 iterations of name, position, punctuation, etc., for Opus 4.6 (~200 for Opus 4.5 until they nerfed it February 12th). Once you get it right though it’s truly a different experience.
by boringg | 2026-03-02 02:54:24+00:00
Clarifying question -- what do you mean Gollum was not yet a Hobbit? I don't think he ever was - but a river folk before the ring deprived him wasn't he? I never read first edition so I suspect there are some differences as you allude. (ring not being the ring).

Actually - in the creative process did he kick off the Hobbit then expand into the world building as an after thought and turn the one ring into this wild expansive creative endeavor? I always assumed it had been pre-built in his mind then spilled out in ink (As a sequence of events).
by not_the_fda | 2026-03-02 02:54:34+00:00
I build these and have one at my house.

Its been interesting.

Had some teenagers try to blow it up with fireworks.

Have to constantly remove proselytizing, mostly christian, pamphlets from it.

Had to buy a stamp https://littlefreelibrary.myshopify.com/products/self-inking... so drug addicts don't clear it out sell the books to buy smack.

Other than hat its been mostly self sustaining.
by loeg | 2026-03-02 02:54:40+00:00
We’ve moved the goalposts from “Food, beer, and cat litter would be too heavy for a bike.”

Also, my grocery stores are 0.7, 1.1, and 1.6 miles away, not that it matters. 5 miles is just not very much time at 20-28 mph. I think theft and weather/comfort are bigger obstacles to most people than distance.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-03-02 02:55:21+00:00
Got unflagged. Really speaks to HN's priorities when slop can get unflagged but negative news against the tech overlords is "too political".

>Irrespective of who wrote it or how it was written, the essay is packed with wisdom.

As always: if they can't be bothered to write, why am I bothered to read it?

Especially on this topic. I know the exact fear mongering and catch phrases it's going to say here. "AI is here to stay", "you need to get with the times or get out", etc. There's nothing new nor wisdom in this.
by saidinesh5 | 2026-03-02 02:55:25+00:00
I think the main difference due to weight boils down to you riding in one gear lower when not using assistance.

On flat roads, I usually ride on 3rd or 4th gear (out of 7), now i ride in 2nd or 3rd.

But where i ride, the road isn't even and has a lot of steep slopes. There I'm on 1st gear all the time anyway and the assistance i get totally saves my knees, and ensures I'm not all sweaty when i reach my destination. Even compared to the light weight regular bicycles i rode before, this is better.
by m348e912 | 2026-03-02 02:56:51+00:00
This AI website demo is very unappealing and does a good job showing how bad the user experience could end up, but I think there is a place for ADs in AI that I would very much welcome. But it would be different than you would expect.

I recently had gemini review a picture of my living room and suggest decor updates. It did a great job and generated some very appealing mockups. I then asked AI where I could find the pieces it recommended. It couldn't tell me and I am not sure they even could be found.

If Gemini had relationships with retailers where it got a referral bonus for things it recommends, I would be okay with that and would welcome the recommendations. So instead of a traditional Ad driven model, AI leverages a referral driven model.
by barthelomew | 2026-03-02 02:57:12+00:00
AI (VLM-based) radiology models can sound confident and still be wrong ; hallucinating diagnoses that their own findings don't support. This is a silent, and dangerous failure mode.

Our new paper introduces a verification layer that checks every diagnostic claim an AI makes before it reaches a clinician. When our system says a diagnosis is supported, it's been mathematically proven - not just guessed. Every model we tested improved significantly after verification, with our best result hitting 99% soundness.

We're excited about what comes next in building verifiably correct AI systems.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-03-02 02:58:26+00:00
>This has probably been beaten to death, but I think this is the biggest disciminating question between "pro ai" and "against ai" in the software world is: "Dp you do (this) becuase you like writing code, or because you like building things for the world?"

I do this because I want to build quality software. AI to the extent people are trying to push it cannot achieve that. So I'm pro-buildinig and anti-AI.

I spent my years in this domain learning how to optimize code, and AI meanwhile doesn't always make compileable code. Let alone correctly functioning code (step 0 in optimizing: "make sure it actually works first")
by qsera | 2026-03-02 02:59:50+00:00
But isn't the link shared by that comment doing exactly that

https://sulbhajain.medium.com/why-llms-arent-truly-determini...

>The Thinking Machines research team showed it’s possible to fix this. They built batch-invariant kernels for RMSNorm, matrix multiplication, and attention, integrating them into the open-source inference engine vLLM.

>The outcome: 1,000 identical prompts, 1,000 identical outputs. Perfect reproducibility.

??
by rvz | 2026-03-02 03:01:00+00:00
This is hardly surprising given that OpenAI already signed a military contract.

No-one cared, when they should written the open letter earlier.

But then recently, Claude was already used by the administration for the operation in Venezuela [1] alongside Palantir. Anthropic did nothing at the time and again, no-one cared.

Now everyone cares when Anthropic finally said no? The decision for the contract was already predetermined for OpenAI, even with the open letter.

So the question is, why wasn't the open letter done last year when they signed that first military contract?

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/17/openai-mi...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/14/us-milita...
by daxfohl | 2026-03-02 03:01:03+00:00
I think so. If nothing else, when you deploy and see a bug, you can have a script that revives the last N commits and ask "would your change have caused this?" Probably wouldn't work most of the time, but it might sometimes and you'd have a fix PR ready before you even answered the pager. And it's cheap, so why not.

Maybe not a permanent part of the commit, but something stored on the side for a few weeks at a time.
by chainbuilder | 2026-03-02 03:01:19+00:00
Most dating platforms optimize for engagement metrics: infinite scroll, algorithmic ranking, behavioral tracking, and swipe velocity. Floor113.com takes a different approach — structural scarcity, tiered visibility, and deterministic discovery rules.

Instead of feeds and AI matchmaking, the platform is organized into 113 vertical floors.

Floors 0–112 operate nationally

Floor 113 is globally capped at 100 members

No waiting list

No guaranteed promotion

Advancement is position-based, not time-based

This creates a constrained access model rather than an engagement optimization loop.

Architecture Philosophy: Constraints Over Algorithms

Traditional dating systems rely on:

Collaborative filtering

Behavioral scoring

Machine learning ranking models

Engagement amplification

Floor113 removes all of that.

Discovery is governed by:

Floor level

Geographic partition (country → city)

Prime access level

Hard occupancy caps

There is no AI feed reshuffling. No shadow boosting. No invisible ranking layer.

Visibility is structural.

Scarcity as a System Primitive

Floor 113 is globally capped at 100 occupants at any given time.

That cap is absolute.

There is:

No waitlist

No lottery

No auction

No artificial churn cycle

If a spot opens, it opens. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.

Scarcity is enforced as a system rule, not as marketing language.

Deterministic Discovery Model

Non-prime members:

National-only visibility

No advanced filtering

Prime members:

Country and city targeting

Cross-border discovery

Access to higher visibility floors

No engagement farming.
No swipe addiction mechanics.
No infinite surface area.

Climbing has value because visibility is constrained.

Why This Model?

Most platforms scale infinitely and optimize for time-on-app.

Floor113 intentionally limits the top layer and replaces algorithmic ranking with structural differentiation.

It treats access control as the core product.

The open question:

Can a vertically constrained, scarcity-based system compete with infinite-feed engagement models?

Or is removing the algorithm the real differentiator?
by mojomark | 2026-03-02 03:02:04+00:00
How do I know this entire thing isn't AI generated?

Why can't we just have a third party vetting service for true content, where the content is labeled with a serial number and URL, and I can just look it up on the third party service's site to confirm it's validity (and if the content has no serial number watermarked on it, then I just ignore it as false)???
by KnuthIsGod | 2026-03-02 03:04:50+00:00
"In her illustrations in Bilbo – en hobbits äventyr, Jansson concentrated on the landscapes, she was not as interested in the characters of the story.

She even made some of the characters especially tiny to elevate the landscapes.

The illustrations consisted more of her impression of the story than literal repetitions, which many Tolkien fans found unsatisfying.

According to them, Jansson overlooked many of the central characteristics of the characters.

...she edited the pictures many times to avoid them being too much like the Moomin illustrations.

However, the readers saw the illustrations as more Jansson like than truly Tolkien like."
by notnullorvoid | 2026-03-02 03:06:09+00:00
Because that would make too much sense, and MCP is trendy. Also probably more likely is people don't want to spend effort creating sensible http APIs, instead they like using frameworks like Next.js that strongly couple client and server together.

Jokes on them though if they want this to work, they'll have to add another API, but now on the client code and exposed through WebMCP.
by FireBeyond | 2026-03-02 03:07:39+00:00
Agreed, tbh.

In Seattle, the most ritualistic abusers of the HOV lanes are large SUVs and trucks with only a driver in them.

Also, ex-paramedic, three cases fairly similar, but the one I found most egregious, was us going lights and sirens on I-5 heading to Harborview, heavy heavy rain. Traffic on the freeway slowly but steadily goes right. Cue a single-occupant Escalade accelerate up, overtake us on the inside and pull into the HOV lane to take advantage of the cleared freeway in front of us.

For bonus irony points, licence plate holder: "Don't drive faster than your angels can fly", lady, you just overtook an ambulance in emergency mode.

We actually called that one in. Some satisfaction as we rolled by her a few minutes later, pulled over with a state trooper having lit her up, who points at us and shakes his head at her.
by throw4847285 | 2026-03-02 03:08:27+00:00
I think a lot about the scene in Minority Report where a machine scans the main character's eyes in order to serve him targeted Gap advertising. It is even funnier because I assume Gap paid for that product placement, with seemingly no awareness that the movie would depict the ad as dystopian.

AI advertising is far more terrifying than that. Imagine using everything that has been gleaned from a person's psychology to pressure them into purchasing certain products.
by nszceta | 2026-03-02 03:09:49+00:00
I have been trying to force LLMs to work with geometries for over a month and it's so hard. Even the best LLMs have an extremely poor sense of geometric relationships in my testing. I would also stay away from mesh based CAD like OpenSCAD and go straight for build123d which operates on real solid models (BREP): https://build123d.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html
by abustamam | 2026-03-02 03:12:23+00:00
Many "news sites" are pretty hostile to me as someone with an adblocker. So I add them to my deny list of sites to never visit or hear from.

I once made the mistake of adding the site to the deny list of uBlock... The ads were so annoying I couldn't read the article anyway. So, never again.

Anyway, you're right in that I'll never share articles from those sites to people who don't use ad blockers.
by reincarnate0x14 | 2026-03-02 03:14:34+00:00
In the original version, there is minimal physical description of Gollum (it was dark after all) and the ring was simply a magic ring that granted invisibility. Gollum lost it and IIRC he just let Bilbo go. They whole idea of him being some hobbit-like creature corrupted by the One Ring was not present at all. It was one of a series of fairy-tale adventures no more important than the trolls turning to stone. Bilbo needed a way to sneak around Smaug, so he found a magic ring.

It's doubtless still possible to find that version, I read it in an old country library that had it on the shelf since the 1950s.