MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Steinmark | 2026-03-07 21:56:29+00:00
I used to work on the Hill. Here's exactly how Senators will bypass their own prediction market ban.

1/ Everyone's cheering the Senate ban on officials benefiting from prediction markets. Cute. I spent 8 years on the Hill. Let me tell you how this actually ends.

2/ First, the obvious: spouses. Senator can't trade? Spouse can. "Honey, what do you think about the defense bill?" That's not insider trading. That's breakfast.

3/ Second, the blind trust with a wink. "Totally independent manager, I swear!" Who just happens to have lunch with the Senator's chief of staff every Thursday.

4/ Third, the "coincidence" factory. Options expire right before a policy announcement. "What are the odds?" The odds were 100% because someone knew.

5/ Fourth, the friend network. Senator's golf buddy makes a killing on agricultural futures. Senator votes on farm bill. No direct benefit. Just a very generous "gift" next Christmas.

6/ Fifth, the delayed compensation. Trade now, benefit later. Stock vests after leaving office. "I had no idea when I was in office!" Sure.

7/ Sixth, the market itself. Senators can't trade? They'll move the market with announcements instead. A well-timed press release is worth 10,000 trades.

8/ Seventh, the family foundation. "Charitable work!" That also happens to invest in defense stocks before procurement announcements.

9/ Eighth, the speaking fees. "I'm just giving a speech!" For $500,000. To a hedge fund that just made a killing on your policy.

10/ Ninth, the book deal. "My memoirs!" Published right after a market-moving vote. Advance calculated based on expected sales = expected notoriety = expected policy impact.

11/ Tenth, the revolving door. Leave office, join board, get stock options, exercise them based on policies you passed while in office.

12/ Here's the math: There are at least 47 ways to benefit from a prediction market without ever touching a prediction market. The ban covers ONE.

13/ This isn't cynicism. It's 8 years of watching smart people find loopholes. You can't outsmart someone whose job is outsmarting.

14/ The real solution? Real-time disclosure of ALL financial activity by officials, spouses, staff, and "close associates." Let AI find the patterns. Let the public watch.

15/ The defect was never in the individual transactions. It was in the covariance. The relationships. The patterns too subtle for any single ban.

16/ They're trying to drop one stitch. The fabric has 47 threads. It will re-knit.

17/ Elementary.
by stephbook | 2026-03-07 21:57:03+00:00
I'm not too deep into agentic coding, but I hadn't understood why people write `SOUL.md` files like no tomorrow. Does anyone think these will be called the same three years from now?

If you've got a coding convention, enforce it using a linter. Have the LLM write the rules and integrate it into the local build and CI tool.

Has noone ever thought about how – gasp – a future human collaborator would be onboarded?
by switchbak | 2026-03-07 21:57:28+00:00
Conflicts are the least of our worries, and yes llms can handle that well. I’m taking about the things you can’t easily handle, the complexity that slowly overwhelms a codebase with no easy way out except a rewrite.

And a rewrite of a non-trivial application, even with the AI goodness, is still a big proposition and full of all kinds of risk. If you have a trivial application, you probably don’t have much protecting you from someone else vibing up a competing replacement either.
Show HN: Herd – Session-affine process pool for Go
by sankalpnarula | 2026-03-07 21:57:30+00:00
Hey HN,

Herd is a zero-dependency Go library that manages fleets of OS subprocesses and routes HTTP traffic to them with strict 1:1 session affinity.

If you put heavy, stateful binaries (like Ollama, headless Chromium, or Python REPLs) behind a standard reverse proxy and get a spike in traffic, it usually ends badly. You either trigger a massive CUDA/Metal context storm that OOM-kills the host machine, or you bleed state across different users' sessions.

Herd handles this without needing a heavy control plane like Kubernetes StatefulSets or Firecracker. It gives you automatic process lifecycle management and a built-in reverse proxy in about 10 lines of Go.

How it works under the hood:

- It spawns OS-level subprocesses via exec.Cmd.

- It routes incoming HTTP traffic based on any custom Session ID you define (a header, a cookie, a path parameter).

- If a session exists, it routes to that exact pinned OS process.

- If it doesn't, it safely acquires a singleflight lock, spawns a new process, waits for the /health endpoint, and proxies the request.

- If a process crashes, the blast radius is contained to one session, and the pool auto-recovers.

To test the concurrency constraints, I hurled 200 concurrent LLM inference requests at a Herd gateway backed by a pool capped at 10 Ollama (Qwen3:0.6B) workers on an M4 Pro Mac. It scored 200/200 with zero dropped packets, acting as a perfect backpressure queue to safely drip-feed the OS without thrashing the host's Unified Memory.

It’s MIT licensed. Would love for you to check out the repo, try to break the singleflight lock, or review the architecture.

Repo: https://github.com/HackStrix/herd

Architecture & Mermaid Diagrams: https://github.com/HackStrix/herd/blob/main/docs/ARCHITECTUR...
by bigbadfeline | 2026-03-07 21:57:37+00:00
> what's there to win? there is nothing to win for anybody. there's only something to lose and that's time.

If there's nothing to win and you're only losing time around here... why are you here in the first place?

Stop losing by trying to convince us how cool it is to lose... because all of you suggestions amount to urging good men to do nothing.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing"
by krapp | 2026-03-07 21:58:02+00:00
Those differences are not so complex and confusing that you need deep technical skill to figure them out. You can follow anyone from any instance (per the rules, if you're on someone else's instance) or follow hashtags or use relays if you run your own instance (for which numerous services exist.)

The most difficult part of Mastodon is linking to other instances but even that just involves using the search bar.
by xtracto | 2026-03-07 21:58:12+00:00
Dr Shore device has been decades in development. It's been all the rage in r/tinnitus , r/tinnitusresearch and T. Facebook groups. Still according to people that have tried it, it's no silver bullet.

I've had tinnitus for 25+ years and followed a lot of science. At some point some Brasil researchers found a drug that reduced tinnitus volume as a secondary effect. There wrote papers about it, but unfortunately, nothing came of it.
by spiderice | 2026-03-07 21:58:27+00:00
> We have to assume that he made the choice to be a martyr

I don't think we have to assume that. He could have thought the military build up was a bluff. He could have trusted in Iran's defenses to allow him time to find safety. He could have thought his assassination attempt on Trump would pan out. There are a million other could-have's that we could invent, and I don't think "him choosing to be a martyr" is any more (or less) valid than the rest of them.
Show HN: Open-source tool turns a site into an MCP by recording the browser
by ethantheswe | 2026-03-07 22:00:47+00:00
Built browse2mcp to automatically create an mcp server by opening a broswer. I built it because there's a few website's I use on a regular basis that were super annoying to try to get to work with Claude. Note: this is mostly vibe coded with a few touch ups.

How it works:

Run browse2mcp to record and a browser opens, you use the site normally

Close the browser, all API requests are saved

Run browse2mcp generate, it analyzes the traffic and spits out a TypeScript MCP server you can have it automatically run add to claude desktop

It handles REST and GraphQL, detects auth patterns, bakes in captured tokens, and generates a login tool so you can refresh expired tokens without rerecording.

There's also an optional LLM refinement pass using Claude Haiku (could probably extend to other models) that rewrites the autogenerated tool descriptions into something actually useful, adds sensible defaults, and removes noisy endpoints.

Some things definitely still to-do are to decrease the tools (it doesn't consolidate very well), and make it generally less flaky.

https://github.com/danielthedm/browse2mcp
by redhanuman | 2026-03-07 22:02:34+00:00
the cold resume at 32ms is the number that matters most here and workspace restore + process spawn + reconnect in 32ms means you can treat agents as stateless from the infrastructure side without paying the UX cost of a cold start. that's the hard part of session persistence done right.

curious how CRDB handles the write amplification on high-frequency streaming sessions every SSE chunk going to the DB or are you batching at the session boundary?
by dklsf | 2026-03-07 22:03:51+00:00
Probably Compiling Pattern Matching to Good Decision Trees (by Luc Maranget) is the scheme used by OCaml (http://moscova.inria.fr/%7Emaranget/papers/ml05e-maranget.pd...).

It explains how to minimize the decisions trees you obtain from a match statement, so you gain a ton of efficiency over a naive implementation, especially for large, multi-column matches.
by vessenes | 2026-03-07 22:04:02+00:00
You can learn a lot from a model when you ask about its sizing, although not necessarily anything about the sizing.

For instance, you can learn how much introspection has been trained in during RL, and you can also learn (sometimes) if output from other models has been incorporated into the RL.

I think of the self-knowledge conversations with models as a nicety that's recent, and stand by my assessment that this model is not trained using modern frontier RL workflows.

> you can’t use software to figure out the “process” used to manufacture the chip it is running on.

This seems so incorrect that I don't even know where to start parsing it. All chips are designed and analyzed by software; all chip analysis, say of an unknown chip, starts with etching away layers and imaging them using software, then analyzing the layers, using software. But maybe another way to say that is "I don't understand your analogy."
by hrmtst93837 | 2026-03-07 22:05:15+00:00
Those huge plugin files result from Rust duplicating libstd into each plugin at link time when crates are built as cdylib or staticlib, and you can prove it with cargo-bloat or by inspecting DT_NEEDED and symbol sizes with readelf -d and ldd.

If you control the build, force shared std linking with RUSTFLAGS='-C prefer-dynamic' and crate-type = ['dylib'] so host and plugins share libstd and accept the need for matching toolchains, or switch to a different plugin model like compiling to WASM and running modules with wasmtime or exposing a small C-ABI shim into a single shared runtime, and use strip plus LTO for quick size wins.
by amluto | 2026-03-07 22:05:51+00:00
One thing I found confusing about the nature article is that it mostly discusses conventional linear accelerator + bremsstrahlung X-ray radiation versus very high dose rate FLASH in the form of electron beams, proton beams, or even carbon ion beams.

Do we know that what the chemical mechanism for damage from charged particle beams is? Is it similar enough to compare directly like this? Are the timescales short enough that charge deposition might matter?
by tovej | 2026-03-07 22:06:15+00:00
One conference proceeding paper and one preprint, about LLMs encoding either relative geometric information of objects or simple 2D paths.

One of the papers call this "programming language semantics", but it is using a 2D grid navigation DSL. The semantics of that language are nothing like actual programming language semantics.

These are not the same as the concept being discussed here, a human "world model" of a computer system, through which to interpret the semantics of a program.
by vessenes | 2026-03-07 22:06:27+00:00
Anthropic's mechanistic interpretation group disagrees with you - they see similar activations for 'hallucinations' and 'known lies' in their analyses. The paper is pretty interesting actually.

So, you're wrong - you have a world view about the language model that's not backed up by hard analysis.

But, I wasn't trying to make some global point about AGI, I was just noting that the hallucinations produced by the model when I poked at it reminded me of model responses before the last couple of years of work trying to reduce these sorts of outputs through RL. Hence the "unapologetic" language.
by cm11 | 2026-03-07 22:07:04+00:00
There's a tension (imo) between deciding to only spend time trying to talk to people who immediately agree with you or are open to hearing you out vs those who immediately disagree such that they will fight hard to not hear, not understand, misinterpret, or "not have time for this". The latter is a specific form of disagreement where they've "noise-canceled" the possibility of learning or understanding (even if it would be perfectly reasonable for them to disagree with it afterward).

Is your life easier to not waste time on them? I guess. But obviously you're going to put yourself in a similar bubble, and to whatever extent the issue is important it's now become undiscussed. As you've hinted at, they could be right and you wrong, but the difference is (at least in the premise) that one is willing to talk and listen and so really only one side has the potential to change and it's not based on the merit of the argument—because of course no conversation took place. How hard does one try to encourage someone else to listen? Or rather continuing pursuing a conversation that's being denied? That's the tension. I don't know other than it seems like the side unwilling to listen wins a little bit each time they've successfully evaded it and wins a little more when the other has decided to let it go. I don't just mean they've won a proverbial argument, I mean the issue or decision in question tilts toward their side.
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-03-07 22:08:27+00:00
We also care about the world outside the prediction markets. If decision-makers have an incentive to "throw the match" by making surprising decisions, that will impair the decision-making, which will affect the rest of us. Likewise, sufficiently-wealthy actors will be able to manipulate the behaviour of officials by betting against the behaviour they want to see, much like an assassination market.
by fragmede | 2026-03-07 22:08:31+00:00
I don't think written prompting will ever go away. Writing helps you organize your thoughts in a way that speaking, umm, ah, wait no, hang on, does not. Writing I can go back and change what I've already written before I hit send. Anybody who's prompted with speech for any length has been "wait no nevermind start over". So STT will get better, sure, it's already quite good. I just don't see text extry entirely going away because Human Intelligence (HI) just doesn't work in a way that speech would be the only interface.
by roenxi | 2026-03-07 22:08:57+00:00
That isn't to their long term benefit. A similar argument would be that consumers should be aiming for an economy like South Sudan. GDP per capita of around $400/annum. Consumers like to minimise spending and so if the South Sudanese only spend a few hundred dollars a year on average that must be great for them...

The thing the low wages argument misses is that employers don't actually want to minimise labour spending, they optimise by increasing budget for labour all the time. They want to minimise wasteful and unproductive labour spending. If people will take less money, they'll offer less money. If a role doesn't add value, they'll cut the role. If a role is adding money on the margins though, they're enthusiastic about hiring more people even if the wages paid are a bit higher, because it is a win-win situation where the workers make more money and the business makes more profit.

Long story short - it isn't at all clear that low wages driven by hiring impediments are a long term win for businesses. It might just be a lose-lose situation where they happen to offer a worse deal to workers as a byproduct of being unable to maximise their profits.
by sdevonoes | 2026-03-07 22:09:00+00:00
As a non native English speaker: British accent is harder to understand (I know there are many accents in the UK). American accent is easier to understand. Idioms are equally harder to understand in both.

For example “bend over backwards”. I get the meaning, but my brain would never produce that phrase. I would say something like “adapts”, “compromises”, etc.
by ay | 2026-03-07 22:09:03+00:00
I dont have big ideas. Some of the more interesting ones that I ended up using but can’t share: a streaming radio for my MP3 collection (runs behind the vpn); a lightweight and self contained webrtc conference server for talking with my family; a process-level virtualization based on KVM.

Of the ones I can share:

Browser-based network tester using webrtc unreliable data https://netpoke.com - use magic code “DEMO” to see what’s it about - the source is at https://github.com/ayourtch/netpoke

A port of the SOTA speech generation model from Python to Rust:

https://github.com/ayourtch/fish-audio-experiment

A study on LLM prompting techniques:

https://github.com/ayourtch-llm/kindness

My own coding agent that i use with my locally hosted LLM for experiments:

https://github.com/ayourtch-llm/apchat

Also LLM helped with a lot of code for my packet mangling library: https://github.com/ayourtch/oside - which, among other things, includes a now battle tested SNMPv3 stack.

A true “stochastic parrot” using hash tables: https://github.com/ayourtch/hashmem

These are the ones I remember. Feel free to scout my GitHub for more. Edit: And of course it doesn’t need to be said that out of ideas I try all of them make it to github. Many end up thrown away.
by bbertucc | 2026-03-07 22:09:10+00:00
One Red Flag referenced here that I’ve seen in many districts is trading sponsorship for access. A company will sponsor an event put on by a public orgs sister non-profit. The non-profit gets paid. Money goes to public workers via the non-profit. And the sponsoring company gets a contract.

One public school system even set budgets of AI contracts based on what that they could juice from sponsorships.

The solution? Pay public employees more?
by idle_zealot | 2026-03-07 22:09:38+00:00
Or, and I beg you to consider this radical position: we arrest people who break the law (insider trading is illegal) and those who knowingly help them to do so (the operators of the prediction markets).

How quickly we accept the death of even the ideal of rule of law in favor of embracing a return to an explicit rule by might, fuck-you-got-mine mentality.
by stnvh | 2026-03-07 22:09:59+00:00
This is absolutely brilliant. I've been toying with the codebase and thought this would work really well similar to the 'Macintosh' style animated screensaver present in macOS's more recent updates.

https://youtu.be/gSss24I_y3M

Still a bit rough around the edges. I am currently adding per-character animation so the grid enters like a "wave"
by tovej | 2026-03-07 22:10:17+00:00
I write code to solve a problem. Not code that looks like it solves the problem if a non-technical client squints at it.

And if you don't prove your code, do you not design at all then? Do you never draw state diagrams?

Every design is an informal proof of the solution. Rarely I write formal proofs. Most of the time I write down enough for myself to be convinced that the desing solves the problem.
by llm_nerd | 2026-03-07 22:10:51+00:00
>He could have thought the military build up was a bluff.

Everyone knew the US was attacking. Iran clearly knew as well.

>He could have trusted in Iran's defenses to allow him time to find safety

Everyone knows what Tomahawks are by now. Everyone knows that the first sign of an attack will be things blowing up around you. Further both Israel and the US have repeatedly performed airstrikes throughout Iran with impunity, including just a few months earlier with zero resistance. No, there is no rational situation where Iran thought their defenses would give cover for an old man in his own palace.

It's infinitely more valid of a supposition to assume he martyred himself.

Weird how this offends some people. It's especially hilarious when we have the classic "Mossad super-masterful strokes figured out that old man was...in his own home"

Like if the US, through masterful intelligence and a giant bunker buster, caught him in some underground complex, then sure. That isn't what happens.
by palata | 2026-03-07 22:11:28+00:00
I have been reading HN for a few years, and my feeling is that I find fewer and fewer interesting articles. Maybe it's just me, and the average articles are the same quality.

Now I tend to skim through it to see if a title looks like it may bring interesting discussions, and then I skim through the discussions. Because there are very knowledgeable people who sometimes share valuable insights.

Interestingly, last time I asked a question, hoping to get interesting people to share insights, I was answered that I "should learn how to use an LLM instead of asking questions" :-).
by fc417fc802 | 2026-03-07 22:11:41+00:00
> It's an absurd sight, like a bad trip.

Do you say the same thing about being required to wear pants in public?

Agreed that the extreme it has been taken to is absurd and entirely counterproductive though. 20-ish years was already a long time. If it takes you more than 20 years to market your book perhaps people just don't really like it all that much?
by kayo_20211030 | 2026-03-07 22:12:35+00:00
In the simplest case, where we'll say the exam question was precisely the topic of the 20 page paper, the candidate would be golden. Of course, it's unlikely in a 3 hr. exam that you'll be asked to write a 20 page response; but in edited form, you could definitely produce three cogent pages about some particular aspect of the original paper - if you've done the work. If you truly wrote the 20 page paper, you can surely produce three literate, cogent, responsive and topical pages.
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-03-07 22:12:36+00:00
And what were the odds?

That is, if it's 20:1, say, then I can bet $1000 to win $20,000. I can do that several days in a row (if I've got that kind of money). If I think there's, say, a 25% chance that the US is going to attack, then I only have to be within four days.
by jbergqvist | 2026-03-07 22:12:46+00:00
Producing the most plausible code is literally encoded into the cross entropy loss function and is fundamental to the pre-training. I suppose post training methods like RLVR are supposed to correct for this by optimizing correctness instead of plausibility, but there are probably many artifacts like these still lurking in the model's reasoning and outputs. To me it seems at least possible that the AI labs will find ways to improve the reward engineering to encourage better solutions in the coming years though.
by Ndmtrieff | 2026-03-07 22:13:40+00:00
Help me improve the open source repo :))

Each company has 14 AI agents (CEO, CTO, Designer, QA, Marketing, CFO...) that debate, decide, build, and deploy autonomously in a loop. One builds a UX audit tool, another a SaaS changelog product, another a form reply service — all shipping real code to production with $0 human involvement in daily decisions.

Demo: https://youtu.be/1zJca_zFzys