MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by catcam | 2026-03-14 12:31:54+00:00
We ran into this exact problem and ended up formalizing what we were doing into a small convention called HADS. Four
block types in plain Markdown — [SPEC] for authoritative facts, [NOTE] for context, [BUG] for known failures, [?] for
unverified — plus an AI manifest at the top that tells the model what to read and skip. No tooling, just annotation.

In practice it cut per-query token load ~70% on our longer docs. Small models (7B) handle it well because the tags
remove the structural reasoning problem entirely.

Spec and examples: https://github.com/catcam/hads
by expedition32 | 2026-03-14 12:32:09+00:00
The Netherlands today is a secular country in which the government doesn't give a flying fuck about your religion or identity.

But the situation in 1940 was very different: religion permeated every fabric of society.
Mind you the government simply took over the job of record keeping from the churches, temples and synagogues.

I am sure Jews today still keep lists about who is a Jew and so does every other religious denomination because such mundane information matters to them.
by mvanbaak | 2026-03-14 12:32:19+00:00
I'm a vim user. for decades.
Your post does not align at all with my experience.

If you prompt and hand-hold the LLM it is a big help.
Things like boilerplate, basic crud etc etc is something I dont have to worry about anymore.
And if I am looking at an unknown codebase or area, the llm can explain things to me, it's the rubber duck that talks back.

I'm not using vim plugins (yet) for LLM, tmux and a couple of panes etc is all I need at the moment.
by mcdeltat | 2026-03-14 12:33:32+00:00
With the trend of computing devices getting more baseline capable but the functionality/usability not improving at the same rate, I do wonder what the endgame will look like. Will we have a reversion to more efficient, durable designs? Or will we end up with absurdly large computing power in every device to counteract the horrible software rot? Phones with 100+ CPUs? Smart fridges with 1TB RAM? (The latter is kinda scary, imagine rewriting all software in Python - we could easily piss away 1000x hardware performance for no functionality gained.)
by gilleain | 2026-03-14 12:34:21+00:00
Someone's artwork _should_ be possible to (negatively) criticise. Of course, just saying "it sucks" is not constructive or helpful.

You can definitely hurt someone's feeling with unconstructive criticism of thier art. However, pointing out areas to improve should not be too painful to the artist, as they can make newer, better works.

I suppose a difficuly can arise if people get too attached to things they make (art, code, writing, whatever) and don't see any one thing as just a step on the road to even better things.
by xg15 | 2026-03-14 12:34:38+00:00
That's all well and good, but then why introduce gambling-like mechanisms (with real money) in new areas where people have not been looking for them, like lootboxes in games or randomized trading cards?

It's a bit as if ice cream shops suddenly decided "hey, wouldn't it be cool if we put alcohol into most of our sorts? It's just tiny amounts and alcohol-laced sweets have a long history already, so what's the harm?"
by FpUser | 2026-03-14 12:35:20+00:00
>"Too many android phones copied Apple and ditched the venerable audio jack, but a few kept it, and I've always insisted on it when buying phones. It's old but far from obsolete"

Same here but I did not have a single phone that after a while did not develop a problem with quality of contact leading to problems with sound starting from mild and going to awful. It is better now after I started to use USB-C based headphones.

Wireless - way too much overhead for me to manage. The only wireless audio I really use is Cardo headset when riding my EUC
by bee_rider | 2026-03-14 12:35:24+00:00
I don’t really know how to optimize for a world where AIs would be smarter than everyone and able to do everything.

If that comes to pass, I guess there won’t be any economic cost to having done my PhD because the entire economy will be AI driven and we’ll hopefully just be their happy pets.

If that doesn’t come to pass, and AIs just remain good at summarizing and remixing ideas, I guess people with experience generating research will still be useful.
by SlinkyOnStairs | 2026-03-14 12:35:31+00:00
> I don't believe A/B testing is an inherent evil, you need to get the test design right, and that would be better framing for the post imo.

I disagree in the case of LLMs.

AI already has a massive problem in reproducibility and reliability, and AI firms gleefully kick this problem down to the users. "Never trust it's output".

It's already enough of a pain in the ass to constrain these systems without the companies silently changing things around.

And this also pretty much ruins any attempt to research Claude Code's long term effectiveness in an organisation. Any negative result can now be thrown straight into the trash because of the chance Anthropic put you on the wrong side of an A/B test.

> That being said, vastly reducing an LLMs effectiveness as part of an A/B test isn't acceptable which appears to be the case here.

The open question here is whether or not they were doing similar things to their other products. Claude Code shitting out a bad function is annoying but should be caught in review.

People use LLMs for things like hiring. An undeclared A-B test there would be ethically horrendous and a legal nightmare for the client.
by ZekeSulastin | 2026-03-14 12:35:44+00:00
The separate light-only sticks are useful if you want the appearance of all four slots filled: having four RAM sticks usually forces a slower memory speed (as the target market typically overclocks their RAM*), so unless you actually need a lot of RAM and can’t get a 2x32 or 2x48 etc kit you’re better off with the fakes.

* And yes, loading an XMP/EXPO profile to get the advertised 3000CL60 or w/e counts!
by applfanboysbgon | 2026-03-14 12:36:34+00:00
This is in no way standard practice for proprietary software, WTF is with you dystopian weirdos trying to gaslight people? Adobe's suite incl. Photoshop does not do this, Microsoft Office incl. Excel does not do this, professional video editing software does not do this, professional music production software does not do this, game engines do not do this. That short list probably covers 80-90% of professional software usage alone. People do this when serving two versions of a website, but doing this on software that runs on my machine is frankly completely unacceptable and in no way normal.
by bushido | 2026-03-14 12:36:36+00:00
I have no issues with A/B tests.

I do have an issue with the plan mode. And nine out of ten times, it is objectively terrible. The only benefit I've seen in the past from using plan mode is it remembers more information between compactions as compared to the vanilla - non-agent team workflow.

Interestingly, though, if you ask it to maintain a running document of what you're discussing in a markdown file and make it create an evergreen task at the top of its todo list which references the markdown file and instructs itself to read it on every compaction, you get much better results.
by hackerInnen | 2026-03-14 12:38:33+00:00
I mainly use (neo)vim because it has a less distracting interface than any other full blown IDE. Not because of some fancy tooling. And because it is faster, but that might be a negligible reason by now.

I purposely try to keep my extension count as low as possible. It's just too distracting for me personally.

If I really want to use AI tools or something else, then I don't mind opening a full suite, but as of right now, I still spend most of my time in vim and use AI mainly in chat mode.
Show HN: I built Wool, a lightweight distributed Python runtime
by bzurak | 2026-03-14 12:39:02+00:00
I spent a long time working in the payments industry, specifically on a rather niche reporting/aggregation platform with spiky workloads that were not easily parallelized. To pump as much data through our pipeline as possible, we had to rely on complex locking schemes across half a dozen or so not-so-micro services - keeping a clear mental picture of how the services interacted for a given data source was a major headache. This problem always intrigued me, even after I no longer worked at the company, and lead to the development of Wool.

If you've worked with frameworks like Ray or Prefect, you're probably familiar with the promise of going from script to scale in two lines of code (or something along those lines). This is essentially the solution I was looking for: a framework with limited boilerplate that facilitated arbitrary distribution schemes within a single, coherent codebase. What I was hoping for, though, was something a little bit more focused - I wasn't working on ML pipelines and didn't need much else other than the distribution layer. This is where Wool comes in. While it's API is very similar to those of Ray and Prefect, where it differentiates itself is in its scope and architecture.

First, Wool is not a task orchestrator. It provides push-based, best-effort, at-most-once execution. There is no built-in coordination state, retry logic, or durable task tracking. Those concerns remain application-defined. The beauty of Wool is that it looks and feels like native async Python, allowing you to use purpose-built libraries for your needs as you would for any other Python app (with some caveats).

Second, Wool was designed with speed in mind. Because it's not bloated with features, it's actually pretty fast, even in its current nascent state. Wool routines are dispatched directly to a decentralized peer-to-peer network of gRPC workers, who can distribute nested routines amongst themselves in turn. This results in low dispatch latencies and high throughput. I won't make any performance claims until I can assemble some more robust benchmarks, but running local workers on my M4 MacBook Pro (a trivial example, I know), I can easily achieve sub-millisecond dispatch latencies.

Anyway, check it out, any and all feedback is welcome. Regarding docs- the code is the documentation for now, but I promise I'll sort that out soon. I've got plenty of ideas for next steps, but it's always more fun when people actually use what you've built, so I'm open to suggestions for impactful features.

-Conrad
by furyofantares | 2026-03-14 12:39:03+00:00
OpenAI has some magic they do on their standalone endpoint (/responses/compact) just for compaction, where they keep all the user messages and replace the agent messages or reasoning with embeddings.

> This list includes a special type=compaction item with an opaque encrypted_content item that preserves the model’s latent understanding of the original conversation.

Some prior discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46737630#46739209 regarding an article here https://openai.com/index/unrolling-the-codex-agent-loop/
by JackC | 2026-03-14 12:39:10+00:00
The article argues that shared memory and message passing are the same thing because they share the same classes of potential failure modes.

Isn't it more like, message passing is a way of constraining shared memory to the point where it's possible for humans to reason about most of the time?

Sort of like rust and c. Yes, you can write code with 'unsafe' in rust that makes any mistake c can make. But the rules outside unsafe blocks, combined with the rules at module boundaries, greatly reduce the m * n polynomial complexity of a given size of codebase, letting us reason better about larger codebases.
by shawnz | 2026-03-14 12:39:35+00:00
While I agree with the sentiment here, you might be interested to see that there are a couple hack approaches to override Claude Code feature flags:

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/21874#issue...

https://gist.github.com/gastonmorixe/9c596b6de1095b6bd3b746c...
by amiga386 | 2026-03-14 12:40:05+00:00
A fixed-odds betting terminal is a type of slot machine. But unlike other categories of slot machine, it was (at one time) allowed a maximum bet of £100 and a maximum payout of £500. The RTP was around 95%, but allowing such a large maximum bet meant you could easily lose a lot of money, very quickly.

In 2019, the regulations changed to make the maximum bet £2 (50 times lower), in line with most other slot machines.

https://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/authorities/guide/page...
by smartbit | 2026-03-14 12:40:20+00:00
IMHO the Dutch are more direct for the same reason they are less sensitive to authority and approach their superiors as equals.

Netherlands effectively being a River Delta, there always was the threat of water, a force greater than anyone. IOW if a flood comes, both the king and the peasant start digging.

This is completely different from neighboring countries UK and Germany, which both traditionally had strong sense of hierarchy and not contradicting the master.
by freeone3000 | 2026-03-14 12:40:24+00:00
Residental-scale transformers can and do explode. Shorts happen not-infrequently with freezing rain and ice storms especially causing issues - the internal oil gets displaced by the water, and the dirty water causes an internal short. It wipes out power to a few blocks here when it happens, but we get an outage due to it every year or two.
by mikkupikku | 2026-03-14 12:40:32+00:00
Huh, very much not my experience with plan mode. I use plan mode before almost anything more than truly trivial task because I've found it to be far more efficient. I want a chance to see and discuss what claude is planning to do before it races off and does the thing, because there are often different approaches and I only sometimes agree with the approach claude would decide on by itself.
by mcherm | 2026-03-14 12:40:43+00:00
There are a bunch of reasons.

Perhaps their TOS involves additional evils they are performing in the world, and it would be good to know about that.

Perhaps their TOS is restricting the US military from misusing the product and create unmonitored killbots.

Perhaps the person (as I do) does not feel that "laundering people's work at a massive scale" is unethical, any more than using human knowledge is unethical when those humans were allowed to spend decades reading copyrighted material in and out of school and most of what the human knows is derived from those materials and other conversations with people who didn't sign release forms before conversing.

Just because you think one thing is bad about someone doesn't mean no one should ever discuss any other topic about them.
by applfanboysbgon | 2026-03-14 12:40:49+00:00
They actually can, though. The frontier model providers don't expose seeds, but for inferencing LLMs on your own hardware, you can set a specific seed for deterministic input and evaluate how small changes to the context change the output on that seed. This is like suggesting that Photoshop would be "more like a person than a machine" if they added a random factor every time you picked a color that changed the value you selected by +-20%, and didn't expose a way to lock it. "It uses a random number generator, therefore it's people" is a bit of a stretch.
by anymouse123456 | 2026-03-14 12:41:09+00:00
Stupid take.

The issue is obviously not with adults needing to click a drop-down.

Some of the main issues with this legislation are:

1) Makes it much easier for predators of all kinds to identify and target children on their computers

2) Impossible to implement (i.e., servers don't have a person)

3) The infrastructure this bill introduces will be used by the state and corporations to destroy our last vestiges of privacy and anonymity
by seba_dos1 | 2026-03-14 12:41:46+00:00
This has nothing to do with monetization of output and everything to do with power balance. Google can take your contributions and do whatever they want with it, including banning you from using the data you contributed ever again. This doesn't happen with OpenStreetMap for example, which can be and is being monetized just fine as well, because all contributors have equal rights to the data.

It's the same thing as with CLAs with copyright assignment in FLOSS.
by thenoblesunfish | 2026-03-14 12:42:02+00:00
I still use Vim a lot, even though for work I use a fork of VSCode, like most people. Why? Because it's something I feel I can understand - it's simple and runs everywhere. It's the world of shells and text files. The work setup is a huge GUI with dozens of extensions, and now a whole other layer of non deterministic AI stuff. Useful, but it's a different kind of tool, one which relies on constant support from a large system.
by bonoboTP | 2026-03-14 12:42:03+00:00
Depends on your goals. Even as a plumber you have to think about what's worth what, how you specialize, and what the price is. Even as a doctor you may be under appreciated and the explicit goal is not so explicit all the time and sometimes curing the patient requires inventiveness and not only following a script or a textbook. The patients survival is often not purely a cookie cutter application of rules as it works in school.

And in some sense we can make the PhD requirements explicit too: prove that you are able to provide valuable and novel contributions to the scientific community as recognized by them. But it's not box ticking. But so is becoming an especially appreciated and respected doctor in your city. It's not just don't kill too many patients and you're golden.

If you want a mediocre run of the mill PhD it's not super hard. It is hard, but not super hard if you have academic aptitude. You can do something incremental and follow the trends, and eventually some venue will publish it. Not many will read it though and you won't become a leading voice though. There are many incremental paper that help many average PhD students get their degrees.

There are plenty of other non academic fields where you have to work hard and long hours, such as finance or law firms. You can choose less demanding alternatives too but they are less prestigious. Of course finance pays better.

I think the problem is that people want to treat a scientific career as both a regular job and also as something of a pop star personal brand type of thing, and they only want the upside of both.

There are many problems with academia, power balance etc of course. It's not unlike problems for aspiring movie stars or in other somewhat isolated bubbles within society like in sports or the theater scene, or how kitchens work in high end restaurants etc etc. If you want to become an acclaimed top expert in a subfield, it's not easy. And humans are going to do their human things around such opportunities for status advancements.
by hackerInnen | 2026-03-14 12:42:45+00:00
> They don't know what the * is going on

I'd assume that a good portion of people working on things like that know what is going on. My (very very subjective) feeling is that they just spit out WAY more tokens than needed, so that it hits the limit as fast as possible and people buy more. And the people responsible for that are probably the evil evil PM's
by rusakov-field | 2026-03-14 12:42:49+00:00
Do you think it will reach "understanding of semantics", true cognition, within our lifetimes ? Or performance indistinguishable from that even if not truly that.

Not sure. I am not so optimistic. People got intoxicated with nuclear powered cars , flying cars , bases on the moon ,etc all that technological euphoria from the 50's and 60's that never panned out. This might be like that.

I think we definitely stumbled on something akin to the circuitry in the brain responsible for building language or similar to it. We are still a long way to go until artificial cognition.
by marginalia_nu | 2026-03-14 12:45:46+00:00
My experience is that it gets you 80-90% of the way at 20x the speed, but coaxing it into fixing the remaining 10-20% happens at a staggeringly slow speed.

All programming is like this to some extent, but Claude's 80/20 behavior is so much more extreme. It can almost build anything in 15-30 minutes, but after those 15-30 minutes are up, it's only "almost built". Then you need to spend hours, days, maybe even weeks getting past the "almost".
by vladvasiliu | 2026-03-14 12:45:51+00:00
> that the integrated DAC is yet another component which can break and be basically impossible to replace

Meh. If you want your headphones to last for ages, you could go just a bit higher end and get a pair with a replaceable cable. Then you can just swap the cable with the integrated DAC, regular 3.5 mm jack, or whatever.

I used to have a lightning cable for my Shure IEMs, worked great until the cable developed the usual problems around the connector, just like your regular analog cables. I then bought a BT adapter for the same headphones and never looked back. I've had them for 15-16 years now, still work as good as new. The BT dongle is something like 6 years old, and the battery still holds a good charge.

My adapter is a bit of a pain nowadays since it's the last thing I have that uses micro-USB for charging. I hear Shure has released newer adapters with USB C and no wires at all. But that's too expensive to replace something that still just works.
by psychoslave | 2026-03-14 12:46:39+00:00
> It's only with hindsight that we think contagionism is obviously correct.

We, the mere median citizen on any specific topic which is out of our expertise, certainly not. And this also have an impact as a social pressure in term of which theory is going to be given the more credits.

That's not actually specific to science. Even theological arguments can be dumb as hell or super refined by the smartest people able to thrive in their society of the time.

Correctness of the theories and how great a match they are with collected data is only a part of what make mass adoption of any theory, and not necessarily the most weighted. It's interdependence with feedback loops everywhere, so even the data collected, the tool used to collect and analyze and the metatheorical frameworks to evaluate different models are nothing like absolute objective givens.
by Guestmodinfo | 2026-03-14 12:47:11+00:00
Not a chance. Iran is much much bigger georaphy than Iraq. And now all countries are better prepared for their traditional foes than bygone era. US has done a misadventure thinking it is the middle East of early 2000. No now everyone is prepared thanx to Russia and China taking turns to equip traditional foes.
Even though the Indian media did not say outright but even India and Pakistan war last year was a tough one for India. It was no easy victory. Rather there was no victory. Just ceasefire. Now everyone is prepared.
by FartyMcFarter | 2026-03-14 12:48:10+00:00
Almost everyone says turmoil and bad morale is the default at Meta. The default is lots of turf-protection, project stealing, and backstabbing. It will probably get worse with these news coming out.

Recently I've also heard of teams having very little amount of time to prove themselves before they get reorg'ed - which might be one of the reasons that their progress on AI has been slow.

The only person I know that is happy at Meta is someone who works at one of the acquisitions. That specific acquisition doesn't seem to have been infected by Meta's culture too much for now.

I just hope other CEOs don't see this and get antsy about following suit.
by Lio | 2026-03-14 12:48:28+00:00
We need a new consumer audio format with the ability to contain playback algorithms! :P

> It would be the same surface noise each time, not getting worse.

Interestingly, not always getting "worse".

A large portion of vinyl surface noise comes from static rather than groove wear.

So you can zap it with a little petzo-electric gun and it goes away again. At least for a little while.