MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FarmerPotato | 2026-03-11 20:40:58+00:00
That's a simplification of the Kiddicraft story.

Yes, it was a shame. After Lego lost in court (to Hilary Page's heirs I think by then) I believe they finally atoned for that.

Still, Lego didn't just sell the Kiddicraft brick unmodified. Lego patented the tubes inside, which gave it superior clutch power. (I have a lot of 2x4 bricks with "Pat Pend" molded on them!)

As I've heard it, Ole Kirk Christiansen had seen Hilary Page's brick as a sample from a molding machine vendor. Lego previously made wooden toys (until his son Godtfred allegedly set the factory on fire) and was casting about for what production to invest in for the future.

The Kiddicraft brick was a little rectangular box, no tubes inside. A lot of brick toys came out in the 60s that were little shells with varying clutch power.

For a museum of the many brick toys, go to https://www.architoys.net

In particular, Betta Bilda, Block City, American Bricks.
by the_af | 2026-03-11 20:41:11+00:00
> Lots of people break HN guidelines. I see it virtually every day.

Yes, and AI won't help here. People will use AI to better break the guidelines.

> Go and study writing and psychology

Is this a case where you should have read the guidelines? Maybe an LLM could have helped you here? Please don't send me study anything, you know what they say of ASSuming.

> Some people like to write well regardless of the medium. Why is that a problem for you?

HN is more like talking than writing. And LLMs don't help you write well, they help you sound like a clone, which is unwanted.

> For anything of value, it's rare that your first attempt reflects what you meant to say.

You can always edit your comment. And in any case, HN is like a live conversation. Imagine if your friend AI-edited their speech in real-time as they talked to you.
by kccqzy | 2026-03-11 20:41:14+00:00
Almost the entirety of the technology world is English-native. That ship has sailed a long time ago. One can’t learn about any new technology without English, whether it’s a new algorithm, a new library, or a new SaaS service. I don’t think HN should be that exception. Just learn English. (English isn’t my first language either, but then I look back at my parents forcing me to learn English from a young age and really appreciate that.)
by benny00100 | 2026-03-11 20:41:30+00:00
Hi fellow coders,

I built TMPLVISION after repeatedly running into the same issue in projects.

Often legal, finance, or sales teams provide document templates as Word files.
To automate document generation, developers usually rebuild the entire layout using PDF libraries.

This is tedious and fragile.

TMPLVISION takes a different approach:

• Create document templates directly in Microsoft Word (.docx)
• Insert placeholders like {{my_test}}
• Send JSON via a REST API
• Receive a generated PDF or HTML document

DOCX + JSON → PDF / HTML

Curious how others here are currently solving document generation.
by piker | 2026-03-11 20:41:36+00:00
For those interested, the statement of facts in Palsgraf is regarded as some of the best legal writing of all time. It's really quite interesting in both its lack of detail but clarity.

> Plaintiff was standing on a platform of defendant's railroad after buying a ticket to go to Rockaway Beach. A train stopped at the station, bound for another place. Two men ran forward to catch it. One of the men reached the platform of the car without mishap, though the train was already moving. The other man, carrying a package, jumped aboard the car, but seemed unsteady as if about to fall. A guard on the car, who had held the door open, reached forward to help him in, and another guard on the platform pushed him from behind. In this act, the package was dislodged, and fell upon the rails. It was a package of small size, about fifteen inches long, and was covered by a newspaper. In fact it contained fireworks, but there was nothing in its appearance to give notice of its contents. The fireworks when they fell exploded. The shock of the explosion threw down some scales at the other end of the platform, many feet away. The scales struck the plaintiff, causing injuries for which she sues.
by moduspol | 2026-03-11 20:42:02+00:00
It's going to be difficult with our current policies because we've erred on the side of making it as easy as possible for everyone to vote. We don't have a complete whitelist of citizens, it's against the law to require proof of citizenship to register to vote (unless that changed recently) and address verification in most jurisdictions isn't done more than the first time unless it's challenged.

To be clear, though, I don't think non-citizens are voting en-masse. My concern is that if you aren't even verifying they're citizens, you probably aren't really verifying that they are a real and unique person that isn't already registered.

Honestly I think if we actually wanted secure elections, we'd start with the red teaming and go from there. The signal to noise ratio of fraud is too meaningless to resolve without tightening up rules, which the results of the red teaming would give you the political capital to do.
by drakythe | 2026-03-11 20:42:03+00:00
If you're not proud or embarrassed by it then I don't understand why it is an issue? If you miscommunicate something or don't get your point across, just try again, or apologize, and chalk it up to a learning experience.

If you think your writing could use improvement, then write your comment and let it sit for a few minutes before re-reading it and the comment you are replying to, make your edits and then post it. It will give your brain time to reset and maybe spot something you didn't earlier.
by bonoboTP | 2026-03-11 20:42:13+00:00
The question is, why does anyone take the word of a company seriously which will agree with any idea if you pay them? After several iterations of this game (decades by now), someone would surely say "nah, we don't care about these charts and whitepapers, we know that the company who made them will agree with anything for money, so it's still a NO"
by aceelric | 2026-03-11 20:42:20+00:00
Anthropic just shipped Agent Teams for Claude Code (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46902368). I've been building the same thing independently for months, but with a different architecture that solves the two biggest problems people flagged in that thread: file conflicts and quality.

Their approach uses file locking. Tasks have to be file-disjoint or agents overwrite each other. CAS uses git worktrees instead. Each agent gets its own full copy of the repo on its own branch. Three agents can edit the same file simultaneously and the supervisor merges everything back. No locks, no file-disjoint constraint.

The other problem: agents that say "done" when they're not. CAS has verification gates. Workers self-verify before closing (no TODOs, code is wired up, tests pass). Tasks enter pending_verification and workers can't claim new work until it clears. This was born out of pain. Without it, agents mark tasks done while leaving half-connected code everywhere.

GitHub: https://github.com/codingagentsystem/cas
Website: https://cas.dev

How it works

`cas` launches a TUI with a supervisor. You give it an epic and it takes over: analyzes the tasks, figures out the right implementation phases based on dependencies, determines how many workers can run in parallel without file conflicts, and spawns them. Each task gets a demo statement describing the observable outcome ("User types query, results filter live"). This was the single biggest quality lever I found. Without it, agents default to building layers of plumbing that never connect to a working feature.

For inter-agent messaging, we reverse-engineered Claude Code's Team feature to build a push-based SQLite message queue. The previous version injected prompts by writing raw bytes into the terminal multiplexer. It worked, but barely. Now the supervisor sends a message and the worker's next MCP call picks it up. Clean and reliable.

Workers claim tasks via a lease system (renewed by heartbeat) to prevent double-claiming. The supervisor reviews completed work, merges the branch, syncs remaining workers, and assigns next tasks.

The TUI has side-by-side/tabbed views, session recording/playback, desktop notifications, and detach/reattach. Terminal emulation uses a custom VT parser based on Ghostty's.

Persistent context

CAS also runs as an MCP server (55+ tools) so agents remember things between sessions. 4-tier memory inspired by MemGPT. Rules that earn trust (Draft > Proven > Stale) and auto-sync to .claude/rules/. Full-text search via Tantivy BM25. Everything local in SQLite.

What's hard

Agent coordination is a distributed systems problem wearing a trenchcoat. Stale leases, zombie worktrees, agents that lie about completion. We've added heartbeats, verification gates, and lease expiry, but supervisor quality still varies with epic complexity. The honest answer is this is an ongoing arms race.

Getting started

curl -fsSL https://cas.dev/install.sh | sh
cas init --yes && cas

~235K lines of Rust, 17 crates, MIT licensed. Happy to answer questions.
by rayiner | 2026-03-11 20:42:22+00:00
> The separate question, of why people are obsessed with it - implicitly in the United States - is a separate question.

It’s not a United States issue. Look how Taiwan does vote counting: https://youtu.be/DUZa7qIGAdo. They don’t do it this way because of anything distinctive about American politics. Being self-evidently difficult to manipulate, without requiring voters to trust an opaque system, is an intrinsic benefit for voting systems.
by karthink | 2026-03-11 20:42:27+00:00
> It needs a far better UX out of the box and by "better" I mean "more aligned with what literally every other program you are likely to use does for UX". (Just enabling cua-mode by default, and making the user toggle on "vanilla Emacs", would go far.)

> ...

> One of the truths preached in the Gospel of Mac is that ALL programs need to be consistent with one another, and use the same visual look, menu hierarchy, and keybindings for corresponding commands.

I started using Emacs on a Mac recently and was pleased to discover that it is, in fact, consistent with other programs.

- Cmd-C/X/V work as expected (copy/cut/paste from system clipboard)

- Cmd-Z undoes,

- Cmd-O brings up the open-file dialog, Cmd-T opens a new tab,

- Cmd-F invokes search and Cmd-L goes to line, and so on.

It uses the same global menu bar as other programs, and setting the font from the menu works. The only thing that didn't work is using Cmd-Shift-? to search through menu bar options. This is GNU's official MacOS build, not the custom-built emacs-mac or emacs-plus packages.

Last year I helped a non-programmer get started with Emacs (for the first time) on a Mac. After a couple of weeks their only remarks were that the customize interface looks a little dated and the config/custom file has a weird format. They never brought up the keybindings or other UI as an issue. Now I understand why -- Emacs is a reasonably good citizen on MacOS.
by garethsprice | 2026-03-11 20:42:41+00:00
Working for me (Desktop + Code) but had a bunch of oauth issues this morning and it's been up and down like a drunken monkey on a trampoline all week, especially around start of biz times in the US.

The Pentagon spat is having a hell of a Streisand Effect on them; DAUs +180% (source: SimilarWeb), paid subs doubling. If past experience is any indicator, it'll settle down as they scale up (or they fall out of the news cycle). Google Trends search interest shows the story: https://trends.google.com/explore?q=claude%2Canthropic&date=...
by BizarroLand | 2026-03-11 20:43:02+00:00
The problem that the Dakota Access Pipeline protests were protesting was not the pipelines in and of themselves, it was the running them through their reservation, and that many pipelines have had leaks, 23 from the Keystone pipeline alone.

https://apnews.com/article/keystone-oil-pipeline-leaks-spill...

They didn't want an ecological disaster in their back yard, they didn't want their religious sites disturbed, and they didn't want there to be a risk that their water ends up contaminated with oil, and the pipeline company didn't want to pay the cost to navigate around the reservation.

So of course the government stepped in and forced the protesters to accept the pipeline and now idiots that don't understand the reasoning behind the protest mock them after the fact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakota_Access_Pipeline_protest...
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-03-11 20:43:33+00:00
> policy will not age well

I strongly doubt it. My AIs can generate infinite HN comments for me. I don’t do that because it isn’t interesting. But if the day arises where it is, I want that personalized content. Not something someone else copy pasted.

(I say this as someone who finds Moltbook fascinating and push myself to use AI more in my work and day-to-day life. The fact that it’s borderline trivial to figure out which HN comments are AI generated speaks to the motivation behind this guideline.)
by bigfishrunning | 2026-03-11 20:43:55+00:00
This depends on how the light is implemented -- if it's implemented in the camera module itself it's pretty bulletproof, but i would bet it's just a gpio to the processor on most of these devices and controlled by the os anyway. I could be wrong about that, but I err on the side of caution. I keep my phone in a bag most of the time.

Treat every gun as if it's loaded, and every camera as if it's filming.
by robotnikman | 2026-03-11 20:44:16+00:00
>The best tactic is to avoid the formal process, whether it's applying via the company website, or swiping right on a profile. Instead use an inside source, an employee you know at the company you are interested in, or a mutual friend who can play matchmaker in dating.

As someone on the spectrum this is something I struggle with. I have few but close friends, and only 2 of them work in tech; neither of their companies are hiring right now.

I need to find ways in which I can make new connections with people who work in tech, but I am unsure how to go about doing so.
by ShayneP | 2026-03-11 20:44:17+00:00
Rabbit's new update lets you scan QR codes and basically register small sites as "apps", along with a feature called "Intern" that will build these "apps" for like $10 per generation. Nothing stops you from just generating your own QR codes and registering them though, so I built a skill for a better voice agent. It scans in with the QR code that creations uses, you can swap in basically any models that you want (including totally local models running on your own hardware)

Not sure how long this method will work for, I imagine Rabbit won't love the fact that you can basically just bypass using Intern all together and get Claude Code or Codex to write your apps instead but I guess we'll see lol.

Add skill w/ `npx skills add ShayneP/rabbit-r1-livekit-skill`
by EchoReflection | 2026-03-11 20:44:26+00:00
-Overall, we rate the New York Times Left-Center biased based on wording and story selection that moderately favors the left.

- Overall, we rate The Washington Post as Left-Center biased based on editorial positions that moderately favor the left. Due to a few failed fact checks, they earn a Mostly Factual rating.

- Wired: These media sources have a slight to moderate liberal bias. They often publish factual information that utilizes loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes) to favor liberal causes. These sources are generally trustworthy for information but may require further investigation.

https://youtu.be/tRq-vVptMOk?si=t6xzvtqdhOZm80un
↑
Victor Davis Hanson: The Left’s Rage is a Symptom of a Movement in Decline

https://profrjstarr.com/the-psychology-of-us/the-need-to-be-...

"this too shall pass"
by SilentM68 | 2026-03-11 20:44:28+00:00
This comes as a surprise only to people from Blue States. Everyone else knew this which is why annexation of the island is the only solution. It will stop stuff like that and the drug trade from spreading further into the continent. Let's add more red state electoral votes or make Cuba a county of Florida. Same result :)

PS. I will also suggest to Trump to annex Hacker News :)
by amichail | 2026-03-11 20:44:52+00:00
AI is a great equalizer when it comes to communication in English.

And despite what people say, the way you write is very much judged as an indication of your education and intelligence.

People who don't like the use of AI to help you write really don't want those signals to go away.

They want to be able to continue to judge others based on their English grammar instead of on the content of their writing.
by lazzlazzlazz | 2026-03-11 20:45:00+00:00
This is a bit sad. The kind of people who post AI generated comments to farm reputation or exert undue influence will not be discouraged by politely asking them to stop. It's a toothless request that will only encourage people who clumsily police each other.

Without some kind of private proof of personhood enforced at the app level, this means nothing.
by alpha_squared | 2026-03-11 20:45:04+00:00
> Or do I want an insightful, well-thought-out response, even if it is LLM-enhanced?

I'd argue that anything insightful or well-though-out doesn't use LLMs at all. We can quibble over whether discussions with an LLM lead to insightful responses, but that still isn't your own personal thought. Just type what's on your mind, it's not that hard and nitpicking over this is just looking for ways to open up unnecessary opportunities for abuse.
by Teever | 2026-03-11 20:45:09+00:00
But the problem is that people with poor written language / english skills are 'competing' with people who have superb skills in this domain.

There are people here who sit at a desk all day banging out multipage emails for work who decide to write posts of a similar linguistic calibre for funsies.

Meanwhile you have someone in a developing country who just got off a brutal twelve hour shift doing manual labour in the sun who wants to participate in the conversation with an insightful message that they bang-out on a shitty little cellphone onscreen keyboard while riding on bumpy public transit.

You could have a great idea and express it poorly and be penalized for doing so here while someone could have a blah idea expressed excellently and it's showered in replies despite being in some metrics (the ones I think are most important) worse than the other post.

What's the solution for that?
by minimaxir | 2026-03-11 20:45:11+00:00
Please don't vaguepost as it wasted my time trying to trade down which comment you thought was LLM generated and why.

OP is likely referring to this one (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47335032) by LuxBennu because it has an em-dash, that's one of the few cases it's used correctly. But the account's comment history comments that do not follow the typical LLM tropes but are still odd for a human to write: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=LuxBennu

LuxBennu did reply to accusations of being an AI bot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340704

> Fair enough — I've been lurking since 2019 and picked a bad day to start commenting on everything at once. Not a bot, just overeager. I'll pace myself.
by artemonster | 2026-03-11 20:45:20+00:00
optional de-centralized hosting, unified cryptocurrency as payment tokens, single open LLM as summary and search-indexing tool, specialized toolkits for journals and social networks (livejournal, early twitter, early fb). Most importantly: you can post anonymously where its allowed (there could be areas where it can be disallowed entirely, like a public square), but your account will take the punishment, so no edgy shitposting behind throwaways.
by Barbing | 2026-03-11 20:45:44+00:00
I've seen this comment but can't square it with the LLM-induced outcry from translators over job loss.

We've all pasted news articles into 2022 Google Translate and a modern LLM, right, and there was no comparison? LLMs even crushed DeepL. Satya had this little story his PR folks helped him with (j/k) even, via Wired June '23:

---

STEVEN LEVY: "Was there a single eureka moment that led you to go all in?"

SATYA NADELLA: "It was that ability to code, which led to our creating Copilot. But the first time I saw what is now called GPT-4, in the summer of 2022, was a mind-blowing experience. There is one query I always sort of use as a reference. Machine translation has been with us for a long time, and it's achieved a lot of great benchmarks, but it doesn't have the subtlety of capturing deep meaning in poetry. Growing up in Hyderabad, India, I'd dreamt about being able to read Persian poetry—in particular the work of Rumi, which has been translated into Urdu and then into English. GPT-4 did it, in one shot. It was not just a machine translation, but something that preserved the sovereignty of poetry across two language boundaries. And that's pretty cool."

---

edit: this comment has some comparisons incl. w/the old Google Translate I'm referring to:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40243219

Today Google Translate is Gemini, though maybe that's not the "traditional translation tool" you were referencing... but hope there's enough here to discuss any aspect that might be interesting!
by mschuster91 | 2026-03-11 20:45:44+00:00
Mount that magnetron in front of an ordinary satellite dish and oh boy whatever is at the focal point of it will not have a nice day either. Your average satellite dish has about 38 dBi of gain - an 1 kW magnetron will yield something around 3 MW EIRP if you manage to end up in the RF path.

That is why even around "small" scale radio transmitters such as phone cell towers you absolutely have to keep a safe distance, and even more around large broadcast towers or even radio amateurs doing serious satellite communication.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2026-03-11 20:45:54+00:00
I like Dwarkesh's style better than Lex Fridman, because unlike Fridman he's not a propagandist for Russia and doesn't have that "love" bullshit vibe.

But on the substance they're equally vapid. Dwarkesh's interview with Richard Sutton was especially cringe.
by xpe | 2026-03-11 20:46:09+00:00
I'm repeatedly struck by the cognitive blind spots of people here. This particular debate about LLM assistance is a crucible for it. In my experience, LLMs are a useful tool to improve one's mental flexibility and self-awareness. Sure, if you can do the same with a smart friend, do it! ... but as a first pass, Claude ain't bad, provided that you give good context.

For example, for the comment above, try: "I'm working on a comment that I paste below. Please help me clarify my thinking and recognize blind spots in my viewpoint. To do this, please read [this summary of The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yFJ7vCjefBxnTchmG/outline-of...). Please kindly but persistently please push back on implicit assumptions. Help me become a better thinker and writer. (comment does here)."

I haven't done the above out of an abundance of caution against what I'm seeing as a form of militant overconfidence of some people here who think they are well-calibrated LLM detectors. It is really so predictable to see people trying to defend their 'humanity' in these counterproductive ways. In my view, humanity is at its best when we leverage tools and technology to think better. I certainly hope we don't degenerate into a mentality of incentivizing low quality crap because it statistically resembles the all-too-common low-effort comments we see here.

Ah -- sorry for taking so long to actually give my take -- and yes look at the em-dashes you haters -- the biggest cognitive error in the above is simple: not being curious. Not asking a question. Just stating "I don't understanding" followed by an uncharitable false binary. I mean, people. We gotta do better than this. And if LLMs can help, then let's accept the help. We are really not living up to our potential. At all.

And yes, I'm pasting my entire message here into an LLM to dogfood my own advice. But I can't post the response to it without paraphrasing. I'm not even sure that paraphrasing is allowed. But repeating a trope from another human is A-OK. Lovely. The sheer irony of this.