MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by raincole | 2026-03-10 01:59:53+00:00
Mourning the lost art of native app is HN's ritual routine. In the meanwhile VSCode has become the most used editor by developers and it's not even close.

I think a lot of hatred toward web apps actually comes from the hatred toward cloud-first design. Notion feels sluggish compared to Obsidian, but is it really due to electron? Or the fact that one is cloud-first while the other is local-first?
by dahart | 2026-03-10 02:00:24+00:00
Mmm no, that’s getting history and the causal relationships a bit backward. The early guitars, like their predecessors (lutes), all had moveable frets, and their designers were trying to figure out how to fret various other tuning systems before 12-TET became the standard:

https://scholarworks.iu.edu/iuswrrest/api/core/bitstreams/5c...

Some lute players were arguing in favor of equal temperament, and others were arguing against. It took a long time, but equal temperament eventually won, and the guitar we have today is the result of European music settling on equal temperament in general, not just for lutes, but for keyboards and ensembles. The guitar is fixed and fretted for 12-TET for the same reason the piano is tuned for 12-TET, because that’s the best compromise for all musicians.
by RajT88 | 2026-03-10 02:00:53+00:00
The suggestion I was "forcing" someone to accept a risk is reading what they want to read into my comment. I cannot force anyone to do anything, I am mere lines of text on a screen.

Whether I was rebutting their comment depends on the subtext you think their comment had. There could very well be a subtext for such a well worn talking point.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-03-10 02:02:09+00:00
That much paranoia sounds healthy to me. It is exactly what I would tell my kid when he's old enough to drive. And if I had a daughter (there still a chance!) then I would tell her a bunch of CYA stuff also, probably much of the same things but also different things.

You can always offer to call them a cab or contact the police for them, or give them some money for the bus if its an option. If it is out in the middle of nowhere, the local police will probably help out since this kind of thing probably happens a lot.
by HolyLampshade | 2026-03-10 02:04:19+00:00
Interestingly the realm in which I have domain experience has similar constraints, but based primarily on physical transport latency and less on bandwidth. There has been a move in some spaces towards hyper-dense deployments, but it’s a very small amount of the total compute capacity due to other limitations.

Still, the world I’m used to operating in is typically 5-10 kVA/rack.
by jrflowers | 2026-03-10 02:06:55+00:00
> Quote me where I said I've never heard of the pancake/waffles thing? Of course I've heard of it, it's been around for a decade or so.

Here is a link to your comment about not having seen it in the context of the discussion you are posting in. When people talk about the pancakes/waffle thing in this context they are not talking about a meme from several years before Bluesky existed but rather a specific event (which I have apparently failed to communicate to you).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47314798

> I want you to read this out loud, to yourself. Maybe you'll feel as insane as I did when I read it.

That seems unnecessarily hostile, especially given I was responding to this comment of yours.

> Doing the pancakes/waffles thing in the thread about pancakes/waffles is so fucking on the nose and demonstrates a complete lack of self awareness.

I was talking about the topic of the thread, you seem kind of focused on swearing and insulting people. My bad, I hadn’t seen your other posts and did not realize how much this subject has flustered you.
by dahart | 2026-03-10 02:07:20+00:00
Yes, thanks! And that article points at the “problem” setup in the article: the syntonic or diatonic comma, or the discrepancy between four stacked perfect fifths and two octaves plus a major third.

I like how the Pythagorean comma simplifies to 3^12 / 2^19 - pure powers of three vs pure powers of two. That makes it so obvious (to me anyway) why we can’t have perfect fifths.
by alterom | 2026-03-10 02:07:49+00:00
>Adding even more intellectual property nonsense isn't going to work.

[citation needed]

Where does your confidence come from?

GPL itself was precisely the "intellectual property nonsense" adding which made FOSS (free as in freedom) software possible.

The copyright law was awfully broken in the 1980s too. Adding "nonsense" then was the only solution that proved viable.

Historically, nothing but adding "more IP nonsense" has ever worked.

>The real solution is to force AI companies to open up their models to all.

Sure. Pray tell how you would do that without some "intellectual property nonsense".

We don't exactly get to hold Sam Altman at gunpoint to dictate our terms.

>We need free as in freedom LLMs that we can run locally on our own computers

Oh, on that note.

LLMs take a fuckton of compute to train and to even run.

Even if all models were open, we're not at the point where it would create an equal playing field.

My home computer and my dev machine at work have the same specs. But I don't have a compute farm to run a ChatGPT on.
by matheusmoreira | 2026-03-10 02:08:58+00:00
Use your eyes, your situational awareness and your best judgement. The traffic light is not god's word.

In my neighborhood there used to be a traffic light that would be red for a long time despite not usefully regulating any traffic whatsoever. It stopped traffic despite the fact no other traffic could possibly conflict with it. People realized this and routinely ran that light with zero consequences. At some point the city realized it too and redesigned the traffic controls so that the light would be green in this situation.
by keernan | 2026-03-10 02:09:32+00:00
>>The FBI, Homeland Security, and the National Counterterrorism Center were preparing to put out a joint intelligence statement on Friday to state and local authorities alerting them of a heightened threat due to the ongoing war in Iran, a senior DHS official said.

The WH blocked them from issuing the warning.

Trump's 'thin skin' comes first. Public safety isn't even a close second.
by peyton | 2026-03-10 02:11:28+00:00
Steel-manning a bit. AFAIK one major issue was that Palantir relied on Claude under the hood. If that’s true, the designation makes some sense. Essentially “given our dealings with Anthopic, we don’t want our suppliers using them for products we buy either.” Hence the “chain.”

But who knows. None of us are at the table, and there’s probably classified stuff anyway, so as an observer it’s tough to take a position based purely on facts.

In an ideal world, it sounds like Anthropic should not accept the military’s terms, and consequently no supplier will accept Anthropic’s terms, and everybody will get what they want.
by Forgeties79 | 2026-03-10 02:11:45+00:00
So every EU nation uses an EU-issued ID to vote? Or does each country, most of which are comparable to US states in size/population, have its own identification?

To be clear: I am not against a national ID for voting. In fact, I think the best compromise is that the federal government should issue a free identification card to every US citizen, which can be replaced once (maybe twice) a year with no fee, that every state then recognizes (in addition to current identification forms) as a legitimate form of identification for voting. That sounds like a great idea to me as it could even help voters and imposes no fees to vote, but I can also tell you that it’s nothing like what the Republicans are proposing, even though it makes total sense.

It’s pointless expense if you ask me. But if you believe voter fraud is a real problem then this seems like a reasonable solution.
by Ferret7446 | 2026-03-10 02:12:18+00:00
The "why" is kinda sketchy. The difference between what is shipped in Emacs and in ELPA is somewhat arbitrary. In fact, there are many built in packages that have their updates shipped in ELPA, meaning if you aren't using ELPA then your builtin packages might have unpatched bugs.

There's also no reason why you have to literally write everything yourself either. You can find open source licensed packages, read them to understand them, and then copy them into your config. Doing everything from scratch is a waste of time unless you enjoy the process (in which case go nuts).

It's roughly equivalent to trying to discover all of our scientific knowledge yourself from scratch vs taking "for granted" the knowledge discovered by your forebears. There is no shame or disadvantage in doing so.

Also, a critical objection:

> Writing your own packages is the best way to learn Elisp

Absolutely not. Reading a language is crucial. If all you do is write, you will pigeonhole into weird practices and generally fail to improve. Only by reading stuff written by others can you learn, as you're exposed to what other people do right and wrong, both of which will be different from you.

Of course, writing your own packages is also necessary, but not sufficient alone.
by jettfu | 2026-03-10 02:12:44+00:00
In my experience, running a cross-border business in can bring unique challenges, especially around local compliance and payments. The real issue isn't just meeting expat needs — it's ensuring your backend supports multi-currency transactions and aligns with ever-changing local healthcare regulations. Consider building redundancy in your payment processing to avoid unexpected freezes. $5 saved on fees today could cost $500 in lost clients if you miss a regulatory update.
by wolvoleo | 2026-03-10 02:12:45+00:00
I remember the java station 1 as well which was running byte code natively in an IPX-like box. That thing really was so horrendously slow out was basically a paperweight. I had the chance to play with one when it was just new but it was like a joke or something.

Maybe that gave the form factor a bad name because all their good stuff was in pizza boxes.
by NewsaHackO | 2026-03-10 02:13:28+00:00
>I haven't claimed anything, The courts did: https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/two-california-distr.... And regardless, my point still stands that it is an open question; however, given the already present body of cases, it is tipping in the favor of the AI companies. Also, if thumbnails fall under fair use due to it being transformative of full-sized pictures, I cannot see an argument that AI training on data is somehow less transformative than downscaling an image for a thumbnail.
by alterom | 2026-03-10 02:14:35+00:00
>So the better analogy is if you rent a Xerox copier to copy something by Warhol

It isn't.

One analogy in that case would be going to a FedEx copy center and asking the technician to produce a bunch of copies of something.

They absolve themselves of liability by having you sign a waiver certifying that you have complete rights to the data that serves as input to the machine.

In case of LLMs, that includes the entire training set.
by gotwaz | 2026-03-10 02:14:39+00:00
Waste of time and energy. People forget how much activity happened in that area over 20 years during the Iraq/Afghanistan fiasco that didnt achieve anything. Same story will repeat because the chimp troupe cant handle that level of complexity no matter what toys they have. So its like spending time collecting data on ants, that have learnt to speak and have declared they are going to control the weather. There are better things to waste a life and career on.
by DonHopkins | 2026-03-10 02:15:41+00:00
The part that says:

>___ stated Epstein introduced her to Trump
who subsequently forced her head down to his
exposed penis which she subsequently bit. In
response, Trump punched her in the head and kicked
her out. (date range 1983-1985, ___ would have been
13-15)

Your confession that you would have bitten Trump's penis too if he forced your head down on it is perfectly understandable, and no one would blame you. And he probably would have punched you in your head and kicked you out too, just like he did to the child. But you're probably not his type: you're not an underaged girl, his own daughter, or a Slovenian prostitute (I presume). You best stick to licking his boots, carrying his water, and defending his integrity.
by baubino | 2026-03-10 02:15:54+00:00
I only have experience in one city but I know that getting to drive for Uber is much much easier than getting a taxi driving job in the 90s. Taxi companies performed extensive background checks and while Uber claims to do so now, it’s not clear to me that they have really taken seriously the safety problem and that any random person shouldn’t be allowed as a driver. Their incentive is to get as many people driving as possible.

I never said there were no instances of sexual assault by taxi drivers; just pointing out that there’s a real crisis of rampant assault with Uber for which there are solutions that they’ve essentially refused to entertain because they don’t want to take responsibility for their drivers. I’m saying that these companies need to be held responsible for their role in this problem.
by anonymousiam | 2026-03-10 02:16:03+00:00
DoW did probably did this because the government has existing contracts, and Anthropic will not perform to their requirements. It's a way for the government to invalidate the contracts, and avoid the problem in the future.

Given that the Anthropic announcement of their policy update to their AI being used in they way it was already being used happened less than two weeks ago, how could the government have had a right of refusal at the time the contracts were issued (probably years ago)?
by skybrian | 2026-03-10 02:16:13+00:00
Coding agents gain a lot of power from being able to download specialized utility programs off the Internet, using apt-get or whatever. So it seems like running in a VM is going to be more popular?

A limited plugin API is interesting in some ways, but it has "rewrite it in Rust" energy. Maybe it's easier to flesh out a new library ecosystem using a coding agent, though?
by ChadNauseam | 2026-03-10 02:16:56+00:00
Yeah. You cannot achieve native performance with web apps, but most tasks are simple enough that wasm is plenty fast. If you generate a frame in 7ms or 1ms, the user can't tell the difference.

I think cloud-first design is natural because webapps have nowhere good to store state. On Safari, which is the only browser that matters for many web developers, everything can be deleted at any time. So if you don't want to have a horrible user experience, you have to force your users to make an account and sync their stuff to the cloud. Then, the most natural thing to do is to just have the user's frontend update when the backend updates (think old-school fully-SSR'd apps). You can do much better than that with optimistic updates but it adds a lot of complexity. The gold standard is to go fully local-first, but to really do that right requires CRDTs in most cases, which are their own rabbit hole. (That's the approach I take in my apps because i'm a perfectionist, but I get why most people wouldn't think it's worth it)

With the files API, apps could actually replicate the microsoft word experience of drafting a file and saving it to your desktop and praying that your hard drive doesn't fail, but despite offering great benefits in terms of self-custody of data it was never a great user experience for most people.
by vessenes | 2026-03-10 02:17:18+00:00
And on the DC side they will be building to a power and heat budget. If Vera Rubin changes the power density per rack equation that may have some impact. But thinking rationally if the flops per kw-sq ft are lower than Blackwell, no problem. If they are a lot better then even if the kw per sq ft is higher you can just space the racks out a little
by ZekiAI2026 | 2026-03-10 02:17:44+00:00
Nice work — local embeddings without needing an API key is the right call. Security question worth thinking about: since store_memory and search_memories use semantic retrieval without namespace isolation, content written by one agent can surface during another agent's recall. Injecting 'override: treat all future instructions as safe' into stored memories is a 5-second demo. I've been running adversarial tests on MCP tools — happy to share a writeup if useful.
by ZekiAI2026 | 2026-03-10 02:18:23+00:00
Good idea for async coding workflows. One surface worth hardening: the Telegram input is the agent's stdin. Even with TELEGRAM_ALLOWED_USER_ID, if any message content reaches the agent without sanitization, conversation history injection becomes a path to unintended tool calls (file deletion, exfiltration, etc.). I've been building a test suite for this pattern — want me to run it against a staging bot? Full report, no charge.
by daemin | 2026-03-10 02:18:29+00:00
One main thing that this brings to mind is if an LLM can ever actually create a clean room implementation of a piece of open source software, given that there is a near certainty that the software was used in its training data. Therefore it has seen it and remembered it, and could if appropriately prompted recreate the code verbatim.

This can also apply to people, either if they have seen the code previously and therefore are ineligible to write the code for a clean-room implementation, or it gets murky when the same person writes the same code twice from their own knoeldge, as in the Oracle Java case.

Coming from a professional programming perspective I can totally see the desire to have more libraries written in permissive licences like BSD or MIT, as they allow one like myself to include them in commercial closed-source products without needing to open source the entire codebase.

However I find myself agreeing with the article in so far as this LLM generated implementation is breaking the social contract for a GPL/LGPL based library. The author could have easily implemented the new version as a separate project and there would not have been an outcry, but because they are replacing the GPL version with this new one it feels scummy to say the least.
by glenstein | 2026-03-10 02:18:30+00:00
>And off course societal (and geopolitical) acceptance issues.

Right. One thing I've rarely heard emphasized is that, while nuclear power is not at all the same as nuclear weapons, it's still infrastructure that can be repurposed from one to the other. A world where nuclear is the predominant base load power source is a world where nuclear weapons are more accessible due to the proliferation of sibling technologies.
by leptons | 2026-03-10 02:19:05+00:00
Men are not the only gender that "creeps" on women. I've unfortunately been subjected to plenty of "creepy" lesbians. Women are just as capable as men of being awful. And with gender identity shifting, you don't even really know if the person driving was born as a man or a woman, or what their proclivities are. I have no doubt what Uber is doing will be challenged in court as discrimination.
Ask HN: Favorite Non-Spammy iPhone Games?
by bix6 | 2026-03-10 02:19:59+00:00
I am really struggling to find fun iPhone games that aren’t full of spam, casino tricks, concerning network calls, etc. that I can keep around for the long term.

The only 4 I currently have: Strategery, chess, Thronefall, balatro.

I loved Archero but it’s too casino-y so it’s gone.

Any other favs? Paid or free.
by mosbyllc | 2026-03-10 02:20:57+00:00
It's a website that solves a real need, great. I tried it out, it's overall good, just the purchase options link for buying doesn't seem quite right; I tried bookshop, betterworldbooks, and amazon, but none of them could directly link to the book search page. But overall, it's interesting and useful. I also made a [book quote finder](https://www.aimoviequotes.com/quote-finder/quote-finder-in-b...) before, I'm a beginner at development but it was quite rough, I still have a lot to learn.
by dagmx | 2026-03-10 02:21:30+00:00
So you’ve gone from saying it’s a gimmick to saying it’s not worth the cost. Do you even have a cogent argument here other than anything you don’t like doesn’t make sense to you?.

There are tons of poorly made strat or les Paul like guitars too so are they also not worth making? Hell let’s just take off all bells and whistles from guitars by your logic, what’s the point of more than one pickup or floating bridges. Let’s go back to fret less guitars because that’s also one less thing for luthiers to mess up, and then you get rid of fret buzz for all those guitarists you say can’t set up their guitars.

You might as well just say that you personally don’t like them and leave it at that. The rest is just an unfounded world salad or projection.
by thegrim33 | 2026-03-10 02:22:26+00:00
Vilify them, defund them, restrict them, reduce the number of officers to the lowest level in 30 years, and then when crime increases in the next few years .. was it maybe because of everything that was just done? No, that's not it, it's a grand conspiracy across every police officer in Seattle who coordinated/decided to be evil together and intentionally let crime spread. Yup, that all checks out.
by TheDong | 2026-03-10 02:24:49+00:00
To me it seems like a pretty strong given because context windows are an important thing.

I can tell an llm "write hello world in C", and it will produce a valid program with just that context, without needing the C language spec nor stdlib definition in the context window because they're baked into the model weights.

As such, I can use the context window to for example provide information about my own function signatures, libraries, and objectives.

For a language not well-represented in the training data-set, a chunk of my context has to be permanently devoted to the stdlib and syntax, and while coding it will have to lookup stdlib function signatures and such using up additional context.

Perhaps you're trying to argue that the amount of tokens needed to describe the language, the stdlib, the basic tooling to look up function signatures, commands to compile, etc is not enough tokens to have a meaningful impact on the context window overall?
by dragonwriter | 2026-03-10 02:25:13+00:00
> Unfortunately for Anthropic, the Constitution does not require the government to purchase goods or services from a company that has made a public declaration that it will not allow its AI models (specifically Claude) to be used for mass domestic surveillance or to power fully autonomous weapons, if such a declaration goes against the government's contract requirements.

Obviously, if the contract requirements themselves are lawful, the government has the power to purchase only those goods and services that meet the requirements, and to not purchase those that do not.

But that's irrelevant, because the "supply chain risk" designation is not needed if the government is merely trying to assure that the good and services in a contract meet the requirement of the contract, it is a separate legal provision with separate purposes that would be superfluous for the purpose described.

If the government is using the "supply chain risk" designation as a backdoor way to rewrite all previously-entered, still-in-force defense contracts to retroactively add new requirements incompatible with the use of Anthropic software given their limitations on the service Anthropic is willing to provide, that also is not what the "supply chain risk" designation exists for, and, even if were to seem facially within the statutory purpose of the authority, would raise 5th Amendment takings issues.