MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throw475787 | 2026-03-01 21:14:48+00:00
Talking to strangers without a good reason, is inpolite and border line illegal in many countries (for example recent street harassment ban in UK).

Author should know better. They seem to be well educated, and write about consent of filming.

Not everyone is interested in small "therapeutic" chitchat. I am not unpaid therapist, and I have no interest in other people problems or opinions.
by atleastoptimal | 2026-03-01 21:15:05+00:00
You're doing the common thing where multiple criticisms you have of LLM's are individually valid but mutually incompatible.

If the point was that an AI is a fancy Markov chain, then it would produce a more uniformly random distribution of random numbers (perhaps with 7 more often due to humans preferring that as it feels "more random")

However the idea that it's an issue that it always produces 7 implies that LLM's are not random enough, and rather have collapsed to a definite mode of thought which restricts stochastic variation.

Both cases taken together, you are claiming that LLM's are too random to be truly "intelligent", but also not random enough.

All of this is a distraction from the fact that LLM's can write thousands of lines of genuinely useful, novel code. I feel the only way to reasonably reconcile this with their varying failure cases is to entertain the notion that LLM's not "unintelligent", but merely a different kind of intelligence than humans, and will have distinct deficits and distinct aptitudes. (This isn't a comprehensive assessment, but it, as a general description, has more predictive power than claiming that LLM's are just a "slot machine")
by ylee | 2026-03-01 21:15:34+00:00
>The main value of modern ape coding appears to be recreational. Ape coders manifest high levels of engagement during coding sessions and report feelings of relaxation after succeeding in (self-imposed) coding challenges. Competitive ape coding is also popular, with top ranked ape coders being relatively well-known in their communities.

I have never been paid to write code, and my formal CS education is limited to AP Computer Science, and a one-credit Java class in college.
I wrote 20 years ago a backup script implementing Mike Rubel's insight <http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/> about using `rsync` and hard links to create snapshots backups. It's basically my own version of `rsnapshot`. I have deployed it across several of my machines. Every so often I fix a bug or add a feature. Do I need to do it given `rsnapshot`'s existence? No. Is it fun to work on it? Yes.

(I've over the years restored individual files/directories often enough from the resulting backups to have reasonable confidence in the script's effectiveness, but of course one never knows for certain until the day everything gets zapped.)
by yieldcrv | 2026-03-01 21:15:57+00:00
they could, slightly suboptimal way of doing it but its there

crypto anarchist papers described prediction markets to be used for something like this in the 90s, but there are several levels of infrastructure that didn't exist then

if you are predicting such things are occurring then you could also buy the no shares, making it the most egalitarian social mobility opportunity out there. I think the focus on bribery and corruption is distracting because people are imagining exclusion, but its the opposite at this point.

Imagine when the soviet union fell and only people that built relationships got dibs on all the assets and revenue streams to become "the oligarchs" almost overnight, but instead of only them, everyone paying attention could take part in it. That's what is happening now and the markets will continue existing autonomously
by xvxvx | 2026-03-01 21:16:06+00:00
An excellent essay. Very grim but honest and likely resonates with most people on some level.

America has been a cruel place to be poor since day one. I encourage everyone to read Howard Zinn’s ‘A People's History of the United States’ as it shows a more grounded history of this country. The US needs a workforce of starving, ill, desperate people in order to work. That’s how the system was built: on the backs of African slaves and the European poor.

The unspoken rule of this society is that everyone should rely on their family for help and not the government. This is why life is especially cruel for those with little to no family.

Those who embrace and celebrate AI when there’s a chance it could lead to mass unemployment and suffering should take a long hard look in the mirror.
by problynawt | 2026-03-01 21:16:07+00:00
The system should not grind to a halt for a person because they did not fill out some paperwork

That such a trivial thing destines someone to endless debt and health issues is just cruelty. That it doesn't account for terrible parents when they are a constant like gravity itself is nothing more than the result of willfully ignorant politicians parroting tropes of long dead, less educated, and more ignorant politicians

Many politicians are intentionally in on the scam, erecting barriers so they can funnel wealth to rich corporations instead; look at this surplus from cutting education! Of course they don't say where the surplus came from so plainly. Mathematically air tight non-violent eugenics. Nevermind the meat suits engaged in such are useless themselves. Politicians are primarily just that, not also scientists and doctors. Just fuzzy VHS copies of historical story.

The system as a whole can be blamed for ignoring reality and coddling non-contributors. Boomers and GenX did not invent anything we rely on. Art, music, technology...etc etc... are centuries old.

But the contemporary elders act like reality itself is due to their existence. It's such a farcical concept. None of them are owed as none of them gave. They merely took the baton and redipped both ends in their own shit.
by gus_massa | 2026-03-01 21:16:27+00:00
Two feature requests:

Avoid asking the user + or . It's the easy and obviuos part. Just click 3, 7, 21 and the computer shold show for half a second and paint 21 as done.

Paint in a different color the numbers that are used in both grids. Now it's too hard to remember if I used all the 5.
by globular-toast | 2026-03-01 21:16:38+00:00
I've had some great conversations with random strangers on public transport and in shops etc. Oddly I'm a complete introvert with quite bad social anxiety and avoid social events like work parties etc. But I like talking to strangers I'll never see again. I think it's partly because I'm not trying to make an impression and I'm not there just to socialise. So it's a bit crap for me that people are withdrawing and not engaging in random chit chat as much. It's so easy to be lonely these days.
by UltraSane | 2026-03-01 21:16:40+00:00
If you live in the USA you are being incredibly hypocritical as the land was stolen from the Native Americans.

Approximately 900,000 Jews migrated, fled, or were expelled from Muslim-majority countries throughout Africa and Asia in the 20th century, primarily as a consequence of the establishment of the State of Israel. Most migrated to Israel. Do they go back to the Arab countries that kicked them out?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_...
by IshKebab | 2026-03-01 21:16:53+00:00
The problem with max speed is that while big legit ebike manufacturers respect it (e.g. you can't buy a Bosch ebike in the UK that will go above 15.5mph), you can easily get Chinese models that don't care, or you can mod other bikes that do fairly easily.

I don't know what the solution is tbh.
by veritas9 | 2026-03-01 21:17:08+00:00
Hey HN,
I built JournalistDB (journalistdb.com) to solve a problem I kept running into: finding the right journalist to pitch a story to is surprisingly hard.

PR folks, founders doing their own outreach, and researchers all need to find journalists by beat, publication, or location.

Existing tools are either expensive, outdated, or built for enterprise teams with bloated feature sets.

JournalistDB is a searchable database that lets you:

Find journalists by topic, outlet, or geography
See what they've been covering recently
Get contact info so you can actually reach them

It's free to get started. I'd love feedback on the search quality, data freshness, and anything that feels broken or missing.
by bigyabai | 2026-03-01 21:17:14+00:00
Only if you can't refute me.

I don't think my comment is controversial among most iPhone owners, it's only the hardcore ecosystem enthusiasts that debate it. Most people really do treat their iPhone and iPad like a set-top box or games console; it's the minority who rely on it for work. A passionate minority, certainly, but nowhere near the market share Windows and ChromeOS carved out. iOS and iPadOS compete from the sidelines, still struggling to displace (or match) Windows.
by ant6n | 2026-03-01 21:17:40+00:00
The party was forbidden, the symbols were forbidden. They hung the main leaders, quite publicly. It became a huge taboo, the ideology effectively died (for decades). A strong democracy was established, older democratic parties took over.

Yes a bunch of previous nazis made it back into power and politics, but they didn't call themselves nazis or acted like nazis. But also, the country as a whole took a very different path after wwii.
by chris1993 | 2026-03-01 21:17:48+00:00
Similarly, I started using Claude to add some features to an native app on iOS and Android in early January. That was so successful (tooks days instead of weeks) I started applying it to client work and basically haven't written any substantial code since. A big change from around 40 years of writing code pretty much every day and I'm enjoying the increased velocity from not having to web search for API and CSS syntax details.

My son, working in another dev company, reports the same - he basically hasn't written much actual code for about three months. It's a massive change.
by FINDarkside | 2026-03-01 21:18:08+00:00
> then you should create an example repo that shows the playwright CLI and playwright MCP add the same number of tokens to context and that both are equally configurable in this respect

That's just implementation detail of how your agent harness decides to use MCP. CLI and MCP are on different abstraction layers. You can have your MCP available through CLI if you wish so.
by 2muchcoffeeman | 2026-03-01 21:18:54+00:00
Easy for you to say. I’ve almost hit a couple stupid kids on an e-bikes with throttles riding on suburban roads at night with no lights.

And I’m seeing more and more fuckwits ride fast on side walks and accelerate to jump of the sidewalk and into traffic. Almost hitting unsuspecting people on the sidewalk.

Community needs to police itself. Otherwise it’s just going to be waiting for a critical mass of deaths.
by ylee | 2026-03-01 21:18:59+00:00
> This is meant to insult AI skeptics, let's not pretend to be idiots.

Only an idiot would read the piece in that way.

>It should be flagged and taken down.

Even if it really did "insult AI skeptics" (and, again, no one with any reasonable ability to comprehend wit and satire would take it that way), how is that justification to get it "flagged and taken down"?!?
Ask HN: How to approach new people in 2026?
by tavro | 2026-03-01 21:19:09+00:00
i recently read an article in the guardian about how casual conversations with strangers are becoming increasingly rare. the piece argued that smartphones and post-pandemic habits have made people less likely to interact with strangers in everyday places.

this made me think about my own situation. i have been fortunate to meet many great people through university and work, and i generally feel comfortable talking with people in those environments. but outside of structured settings it is a different story. i live in sweden, where approaching strangers in public is already culturally uncommon. it can feel even harder if you did not grow up here and do not already have established social circles. public spaces often feel socially “closed”. people are polite but tend to keep to themselves.

so i am curious how others approach this today. how do you meet new people outside of work or school in 2026? do you ever start conversations with strangers in public, and if so how? are there environments where this works better than others? for people living in more reserved cultures (like scandinavia), what strategies have worked for you? would love to hear what has worked for others.

:o)
by bicx | 2026-03-01 21:19:31+00:00
This is my own proposal, based on my own experience in helping guide a startup through adoption of Claude Code across all roles. Right now, Claude does very little to encourage safe secret handling, which seems like a significant miss. Most engineers know how to mitigate risks of secret exposure (or avoid giving Claude secrets at all via proxies and such), but non-engineers simply don't have that learned skillset.

Of course, none of this prevents Claude from running scripts that read and expose secret values at runtime. However, with LLMs building and testing so much software, this is one proposed piece to help reduce some vectors of exposure.

[Note: my submission was written with assistance from Claude.]
by wenc | 2026-03-01 21:19:35+00:00
> RE: duckdb. I have a wonderful time with ChatGPT talking to duckdb but I have kept it to inmemory db only. Do you set up some system prompt that tell it to keep a duckdb database locally on disk in the current folder?

No, I don't use DuckDB's database format at all. DuckDB for me is more like an engine to work with CSV/Parquet (similar to `jq` for JSON, and `grep` for strings).

Also I don't use web-based chat (you mentioned ChatGPT) -- all these interactions are through agents like Kiro or Claude Code.

I often have CSVs that are 100s of MBs and there's no way they fit in context, so I tell Opus to use DuckDB to sample data from the CSV. DuckDB works way better than any dedicated CSV tool because it packs a full database engine that can return aggregates, explore the limits of your data (max/min), figure out categorical data levels, etc.

For Parquet, I just point DuckDB to the 100s of GBs of Parquet files in S3 (our data lake), and it's blazing fast at introspecting that data. DuckDB is one of the best Parquet query engines on the planet (imo better than Apache Spark) despite being just a tiny little CLI tool.

One of the use cases is debugging results from an ML model artifact (which is more difficult that debugging code).

For instance, let's say a customer points out a weird result in a particular model prediction. I highlight that weird result, and tell Opus to work backwards to figure how the ML model (I provide the training code and inference code) arrived at that number. Surprisingly, Opus 4.6 is does a great job using DuckDB to figure out how the input data produced that one weird output. If necessary, Opus will even write temporary Python code to call the inference part of the ML model to do inference on a sample to verify assumptions. If the assumptions turn out to be wrong, Opus will change strategies. It's like watching a really smart junior work through the problem systematically. Even if Opus doesn't end up nailing the actual cause, it gets into the proximity of the real cause and I can figure out the rest. (usually it's not the ML model itself, but some anomaly in the input). This has saved me so much time in deep-diving weird results. Not only that, I can have confidence in the deep-dive because I can just run the exact DuckDB SQL to convince myself (and others) of the source of the error, and that it's not something Opus hallucinated. CLI tools are deterministic and transparent that way. (unlike MCPs which are black boxes)
by guax | 2026-03-01 21:20:00+00:00
Ai might bring forward the standardisation we never had. If coding dynamics shift enough then all the opinions about libraries and engines and frameworks might get less focused on readability and more on efficiency and easy composition by Ai.

Security gets outsourced to audited layers and Ai does the stupid boring jobs of gluing them together. Some developers become more specialised and niche, some pivot to product, some pivot to other areas.

There are plenty of people who joined software for the payout and hate it. Plenty of people who grown to hate it over time.

I've been enjoying using it to figure out toy projects but paying an API and depending on a service to code is very sour. I really hope hardware specialises and local models become good enough. Gate keeping development on centralised services would be a loss for everyone and ripe for dystopian outcomes.
by mikeponders | 2026-03-01 21:20:07+00:00
If you think about it, Godot fits very well and is very, very cross-platform. It brings somewhat more but you can strip it down to only the necessary, throwing away the 3D stuff and keeping only what you use. It includes a scripting language and the GUI stuff. Someone could actually build a specific solution with it!

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/engine_details/develo...

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/editor/usin...
by atleastoptimal | 2026-03-01 21:20:54+00:00
It costs money to run AI models. The company serving you tokens has to make it up somehow.

This demo however undersells the tactically insidious way ads could be run in an AI chat. All it would need to do is merely recommend a product at a slightly higher percentage. In fact the chat could be biased in imperceptible ways which drive the user's thinking, aims and behavior patterns towards an outcome which leads them to seeking out a specific brand, website, app, etc. In aggregate, the ads are served, just not without making it ever obvious.

Even if there is "auditing" on the behavior of models, it is possible to train preferences into models without any of those preferences being specifically stated in the training data:

https://alignment.anthropic.com/2025/subliminal-learning/

And it seems that in very subtle ways, this holds true for humans too.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6430776/

> In 8 experiments on 5 prominent and diverse adversarial imagesets, human subjects correctly anticipated the machine’s preferred label over relevant foils—even for images described as “totally unrecognizable to human eyes”.
by sillyfluke | 2026-03-01 21:21:07+00:00
>Iran which is why Israel struck at daytime because

Israel struck because they had info that some people were going to be at a specific place at a specific time. One would suppose they could have chosen Saturday for another reason only if they had the luxury of continuous intelligence providing multiple options with equal chances of success. In that case, choosing that day to avoid unnecessary economic volatilty for you and your allies makes sense.
by austin-cheney | 2026-03-01 21:21:14+00:00
> you’d think someone in the building might have flagged that suing a small independent magazine over unflattering-but-accurate reporting would only guarantee that millions more people read it.

Misses the point. When you’re a sociopath the goal is to always look good and wage war when you don’t, even when you are at fault. The Streisand Effect is far too distant to fit into the calculus.
by nunez | 2026-03-01 21:21:25+00:00
So, as you saw, this provoked the age-old parenting vs CF "debate." (There isn't a right answer.)

I'm child-free by choice, so I can only offer the CF perspective. If you're a parent who wants to better understand our viewpoint, or if you're not a parent but are on the fence about kids, I recommend reading "Childfree by Choice" by Dr. Amy Blackstone. It's an extremely comprehensive book that deeply explores why we choose this life and how we find fulfillment beyond the material benefits that come with this decision.

(I want to be clear: There are loads of happy and very fulfilled parents out there, and it is possible to have a rich life with kids!)
by JeremyNT | 2026-03-01 21:21:47+00:00
I think the issue is they used to make progress at a snails pace and you had plenty of teachable moments.

Now anybody can vibe code something that seems to work with a million landmines.

How can they develop the intuition around this given that they don't know what they don't know? How can we review it and help them get there?

Maybe we can figure it out, but I'm not sure it's easy or obvious.
by bigyabai | 2026-03-01 21:22:10+00:00
I don't know, maybe I read the site guidelines? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

It's pretty clear that your current purview of usage is against the comment guidelines. You're skating on thin ice behaving like that.
by Atomic_Torrfisk | 2026-03-01 21:23:00+00:00
Are you actually EU? You know we are not one homogeneous state right? There are currently 27 nations, in which policy and circumstance varies between even at a regional level. There is immense poverty in some nations, notably Spain or Italy, but even Germany. I've seen it first hand, its heartbreaking.

https://www.statista.com/chart/30411/share-of-people-at-risk...

/rant

Edit: Why downvote? debate me. Its so childish to suppress comments you do not agree with.
by lII1lIlI11ll | 2026-03-01 21:23:15+00:00
> This labor was, pre-war, a bunch of poor, uneducated serfs (basically slaves).

This is incorrect. Serfdom in Russian empire was abolished in 1861, long before the revolution. Peasant literacy rates, while still poor, had been gradually improving after that.

> Also the USSR had invested leading up to WW2 in agriculture outside Ukraine (since the Nazis controlled it).

What? Not only Ukraine was controlled by Bolsheviks at the start of WW2 its territories have also been extended with parts of Poland and Romania annexed by Soviets between the start of WW2 and the so-called "Great Patriotic" phase of the war.
by entrustai | 2026-03-01 21:24:19+00:00
Your experience is the theorem, not just an anecdote.

The secure compiler relocated complexity into the porting process — and that relocated complexity turned out to be harder than the original problem. Rewriting from scratch would have been cheaper because you'd be working with complexity you generated and understood, rather than auditing complexity the tool imposed.

This is exactly the dynamic playing out now with LLM-generated code at scale. The syntax is free. The verification is expensive. And the verification is harder precisely because the complexity isn't yours — it arrived from a system whose reasoning you can't inspect and whose decisions you didn't make.

What you ran into in that FTP port is what every engineering team using LLMs for production code will eventually run into. You just got there thirty years early.
by kenty | 2026-03-01 21:24:52+00:00
It's indeed pretty interesting how our society has normalized being. what I would say is antisocial by the norms of previous generations in the form of the gen z stare.
Funnilly I remember a situation where I got a job offer from somebody from an older generation and I just stood still and stared for 1 minute. Not because I wanted to be disrespectful but because I was processing the information and I was simply so baffled that I forgot the social dance of showing the thinking on my face and doing thinking sounds (if you know you know). This led to the other person holding a lecture on how you should respond that you do not have a response yet but I thinking. I ended up accepting.