MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nemo44x | 2026-03-08 23:02:14+00:00
Supervisor agent frameworks are going to be a big industry soon. You simply can’t have agents executing commands without a trusted supervisory layer examining and certifying actions.

All the issues we get from AI today (hallucinations, goal shift, context decay, etc) get amplified unbelievably fast once you begin scaling agents out due to cascading. The risk being you go to bed and when you wake up your entire infrastructure is gone lol.
by kbaranzini | 2026-03-08 23:02:30+00:00
Location: California, United States of America
Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Python, Flask, SQL, TypeScript, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, SQLAlchemy, Cerberus, Zope Utilities(interface/component)

Resume/CV: https://baranzini.dev

Email: obsidiancloud25@gmail.com

Full-stack engineer focused on decoupled, scalable, and testable systems using Clean Architecture and SOLID principles. Recently built a full-stack implementation using dependency inversion via zope.interface/zope.component to maintain 100% domain purity. All inspired by Robert C Martin's philosophies.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2026-03-08 23:02:33+00:00
As I said,

>> Embedded stuff varies, but frequently anything capable of running a general purpose OS (which IMHO is generally the line to call it a "computer") can have it replaced.

A microwave isn't generally viewed as a computer. In particular, if not even the manufacturer isn't running arbitrary code on it (only a tiny little program to do... microwave stuff...) then I view it as out of scope to an argument about artificially-restricted computers.
Show HN: LANscape – a fast local network scanner in Python
by mdennis281 | 2026-03-08 23:02:35+00:00
I built this tool as an alternative to Advanced IP Scanner since both the speed and configurability of it are underwhelming.
LANscape is highly configurable, allowing you to get into the weeds of what and how you are scanning subnets. I'm definitely looking for feedback on how I can make this better!
by jakehansen | 2026-03-08 23:02:53+00:00
Reading this, I cannot help but think about the LLM writing tropes that made the front page yesterday.

I have a feeling my brain chemistry has been permanently altered and I will forever be distracted by subconsciously rating the “LLM-ness” of everything I read.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47291513
by froggit | 2026-03-08 23:03:24+00:00
> utilizing a “hack it till it works”(tm) methodology.

Your post describes my coding perfectly. I don't have CS training of any type, never been formally involved in software development (recently started dabbling in OSS) and never used an LLM/agent for help (do use a local SLM for autocomplete and suggestions only).

Yet I can "code." I suspect a (pre-2023ish) software developer would likely tell me "go learn to code" if i asked for review. I don't know the formal syntax people expect to see and it has organization more typical of raging dumpster fires. Doesn't mean it's not code.
by caxap | 2026-03-08 23:03:55+00:00
There are no tricks because you're too smart to fall for your own tricks.

The one thing that works is the time buffer between your future self and now.

The real challenge is to override the sadness with new memories.

Doing all the things you listed (dog park / build sth. / books, etc) makes the time go by faster, especially if you find something you like.

Stay holed up, and the sadness keeps resonating, building its harmonics (reliving past images, what ifs).

Everyone has their own pace. Stay strong.

> fixed up the blinds or cooked pork steaks

I know how it feels. Wish you the best.
by bsder | 2026-03-08 23:04:27+00:00
> As a European I'm always baffled how Apple got so much market share among the actual techies and power users in the US.

Linux, historically, was terrible and then some; lots of us simply want to get on with life and not dork with the OS every day. If you didn't want to use Windows at your day job, that left OS X.

And, for a while, Apple hardware was quite nice. For a remarkably long time, you could get way cheaper high resolution laptop displays than the competition. The trackpads have always been far superior on Apple than Linux. And then the M-series came along and was also quite nice.

However, over time Linux has gotten better so it's now functional as a daily driver and reasonably reliable. And macOS has deteriorated until it's now probably below Linux in terms of reliability.

So, here we are. macOS and Windows do seem to be losing share to Linux, but only Linux cares. At this point, desktop/laptop revenue is dwarfed by everything else at both Microsoft and Apple.
by vjvjvjvjghv | 2026-03-08 23:04:31+00:00
A good economy is an economy that benefits most of the population and not just a few percent at the top. I would argue it should be a political goal to keep income distribution relatively stable.

A good economy is also relatively stable. Big booms with a crash following are very devastating to not-rich people. In a crash rich people lose a lot of paper money but not-rich people may have trouble affording shelter or food. Or middle class may lose their savings.
by outofpaper | 2026-03-08 23:04:54+00:00
If anything a CLU, a Command Line Utility would be the best thing to call the small programs that both van be run as one offs from the command line and have their output piped to other Command Line Utilities... I don't know why the term isn't being used more. CLU keep it simple. CLIs are a catch all from every single CLU up to MidnightCommander, Zork, Mosh, and OpenCode.
by Anamon | 2026-03-08 23:05:15+00:00
So how will progress be made in our field, in your scenario of the future?

It's both an obvious consequence of how they operate, and an easily observable reality, that even the best models utterly fail at any task that is even slightly outside of the space spanned by their training set. In this future, software in 2022 was as good and as capable as it was ever going to get. In which case -- fuck, I had higher hopes for what computers and software would be able to achieve when I started in this business 20 years ago, than this sorry state of affairs. We were finally getting some traction on the idea that we urgently need to work on security, reliability, stability, etc., and suddenly we're all supposed to be excited about heading full speed the other way.
by bombcar | 2026-03-08 23:05:55+00:00
Babies are incredibly difficult even in the best case. Sleep deprivation is intense. Breastfeeding is difficult. Adding in small additional difficulties adds up. "This is a bit more difficult" becomes a huge mess when you are on three hours of sleep and there are 10 different "this is a bit more difficult" things that people are suggesting to you.

Add this on top of any sort of complex baby (illness, allergies, colic, slow weight gain, etc) and suddenly the slightly less complex door dashing a warm bottle of formula becomes a godsend just to save a few minutes or a bit of mental load.

Anything can become normalized.
by yodon | 2026-03-08 23:06:02+00:00
Pretty sure if this gets any traction at all, it will immediately turn into a mix of Chatroulette and crypto scams.

See also Mythic Quest's discussion of TTP.[0] User Generated Content is only your friend if you have the resources to moderate it.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_xqyIMwbew
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-03-08 23:06:23+00:00
> you can already stuff-in more information than human can remember during whole lifetime

The human eye processes between 100GB and 800GB of data per day. We then continuously learn and adapt from this firehose of information, using short-term and long-term memory, which is continuously retrained and weighted. This isn't "book knowledge", but the same capability is needed to continuously learn and reason on a human-equivalent level. You'd need a supercomputer to attempt it, for a single human's learning and reasoning.

RL is used for SOTA models, but it's a constant game of catch-up with limited data and processing. It's like self-driving cars. How many millions of miles have they already captured? Yet they still fail at some basic driving tasks. It's because the cars can't learn or form long-term memories, much less process and act on the vast amount of data a human can in real time. Same for LLM. Training and tweaking gets you pretty far, but not matching humans.

> With LoRA and friends it's also already possible to do continuous training that directly affects weights, it's just that economy of it is not that great

And that means we're stuck with non-AGI. Which is fine! We could've had flying cars decades ago, but that was hard, expensive and unnecessary, so we didn't do that. There's not enough money in the global economy to "spend" our way to AGI in a short timeframe, even if we wanted to spend it all, even if we could build all the datacenters quickly enough, which we can't (despite being a huge nation, there are many limitations).

> For some definitions of AGI

Changing the goalposts is dangerous. A lot of scary real-world stuff is hung on the idea of AGI being here or not. People will keep getting more and more freaked out and acting out if we're not clear on what is really happening. We don't have AGI. We have useful LLMs and VLMs.
by dahart | 2026-03-08 23:06:36+00:00
Wanting to play in any key and not be locked into a key automatically pushes musicians toward equal temperament, even when playing solo, and even on a violin. Saying no one’s forcing you is technically true but sounds pretty naive, and (forgive the pun) tone deaf to me; there’s no realistic alternative for modern music. Some people do choose to play with other tuning systems on occasion, but there’s a reason why 12 TET is so popular and widespread.
by gnanagurusrgs | 2026-03-08 23:06:49+00:00
This is the right problem to solve. At Arcade, we see the same gap — agents get shell access, API keys, and network by default. The permissions model is backwards.

sandbox-profiles is a solid primitive for local agents. The missing piece in production is the tool layer — even a sandboxed agent can still make dangerous API calls if the MCP tools it has access to aren't individually authed and scoped.

The real stack is: sandbox the runtime (what Agent Safehouse does) + scope the tools (what we do with JIT OAuth at the MCP layer). Neither alone is enough.

Nice work shipping this.

https://www.arcade.dev/blog/ai-agent-auth-challenges-develop...
by kkfx | 2026-03-08 23:07:27+00:00
The need for a functioning digitalised society, because the current one is digitalising slowly, decades behind technological potential, and poorly at that, so it doesn't work; the result is a lethal inefficiency that is making society itself increasingly unmanageable, with a level of social fracture that I fear is irreparable.

Oh, sure, office suites aren't the only cause, nor the main one, but they are a contributing factor. The model of giving a computer to secretarial staff without any training, which is why this software was created in the first place, has now been extended to almost all "office" workers, and well, it's among the causes of our decline.

We haven't worked with sheets of paper, pages, suspended folders (as directories are rendered in file managers on average), and so on for a long time now; it's high time, then, that the modern General Magic, the Office model, stop screwing everyone over. This won't be understood anytime soon, and the result will be a state of affairs even worse than the present.
by SsgMshdPotatoes | 2026-03-08 23:07:28+00:00
I'm hoping to do a show HN soon on something I've been working on, but my account is currently only 6 days old. Tips?

Btw, restricting new accounts (based on karma/age/whatever) could be combined with the option to ask mods for permission somehow, although that'd have to be done in a way that that doesn't become too much work.
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-03-08 23:07:59+00:00
Yeah, exactly. Thirteen years ago, I was a lurker. No account, because why would I make an account just to read? But when I wanted to say something badly enough, I made an account. (I think the first thing I did is post an Ask HN about functional programming, so "no posting for X time" might have turned me away.)
by basilikum | 2026-03-08 23:08:02+00:00
Requiring accounts to be a certain age does not help and will only affect legitimate users. The slopsters will simply create accounts, wait a bit and start posting then.

Actually cross the will out. They are already doing this to avoid the green smell. This account replied to me today. 4 months old, but only started posting today.
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=BelVisgarra

Oh damn, that's the one who posted the AskHN about the verified job portal on the frontpage today. Either this is some chilling still in build up, or it's an actual human being with severe LLM slop impersonation derangement syndrome.
by trane_project | 2026-03-08 23:08:04+00:00
I think full literate programming is overkill but I've been doing a lighter version of this:

- Module level comments with explanations of the purpose of the module and how it fits into the whole codebase.

- Document all methods, constants, and variables, public and private. A single terse sentence is enough, no need to go crazy.

- Document each block of code. Again, a single sentence is enough. The goal is to be able to know what that block does in plain English without having to "read" code. Reading code is a misnomer because it is a different ability from reading human language.

Example from one of my open-source projects: https://github.com/trane-project/trane/blob/master/src/sched...
by tombert | 2026-03-08 23:08:47+00:00
It just feels a little victim-blamey. Google manipulated thousands of people, and they got screwed in the process. Should they have known that big corporations are evil? Maybe, but I'm not going to blame someone who was misled by dishonest people.

If you're agreeing that they misled people by using their reputation in a way that's dishonest, how are they "not guilty"?
by zozbot234 | 2026-03-08 23:08:52+00:00
Some uses of higher-kinded types (though not all of them) can be addressed by leveraging Generic Associated Types (GAT).

Part of the problems is that the "things just compose really well" point becomes gradually less and less applicable as you involve the lower-level features Rust must be concerned with. Abstractions start to become very leaky and it's not clear how best to patch things up without a large increase in complexity. A lot of foundational PL research is needed to address this sensibly.
by pinkmuffinere | 2026-03-08 23:08:55+00:00
To be clear, I wouldn't filter people just because they have different views than me (the goal is to automate the detection, to avoid the effort of reading all the comments -- I should mostly not be in the loop). But I have come across accounts that openly admit to being sock-puppets (eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47242156). These sorts of accounts I would highlight.

Likewise for guideline-abusers. I don't really know what heuristic you would use to detect rules abuse, but I imagine there are at least some clear violations that could be detected.

Finally, I think I'd make one account for sock-puppets, another for guidelines-abusers, etc, so people can 'subscribe' to whatever degree of 'highlighting' that they want.
by ajb | 2026-03-08 23:09:04+00:00
Unfortunately python does add features in a drip-drip kind of way that makes being behind an experience with a lot of niggles. This is particularly the case for the type annotation system, which is retrofit to a language that obviously didn't have one originally. So it's being added slowly in a very conservative way, and there are a lot of limitations and pain points that are gradually being improved (or at least progressed on). The upcoming lazy module loading will also immediately become a sticking point.
by maplethorpe | 2026-03-08 23:09:07+00:00
I'm kind of going through the opposite. I was alone until 38, and then suddenly I wasn't alone anymore. I'm now realising that I did indeed develop an effective strategy to combat loneliness over the years.

What you need is a personal project. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking this needs to be something with significant utility, but that's a lot of pressure to put on yourself. My recommendation is to make your project as specific to your life as you want, and as dumb as you want. It could be a radio station localised only to your house, or a chat app for you and three other people, or a mechanical toy for a friend. Then find some friends or a community you can share that thing with when you're done.

Think about what it would be fun for you, specifically, to do, or to make, or to achieve, go do that thing, and then share it. This technique got me through 38 years of loneliness (mostly) unscathed, so I'm confident it can work for others too.
by the_biot | 2026-03-08 23:09:19+00:00
Very true, I see people increasingly polarized on this topic. I also see it in the rollercoaster of votes on my post.

If it wasn't clear, I think we're (as a society) destroying ourselves by believing in all this generative AI crap, even contrary to the evidence of how wrong it often is, the hallucinations, the awful quality etc.

I think we're witnessing the death of intellect: when you discard the evidence in favor of something that only looks right but is nonsense, there's no telling where it will end. If your profession requires you to think and produce output accordingly, but suddenly nobody thinks wrong answers matter, then your profession no longer exists.

Standing up against it and refusing to accept any form of AI anywhere is the only reasonable thing to do. And I don't know if it will make a difference.
by solaire_oa | 2026-03-08 23:09:45+00:00
I created a Firefox plugin which takes HN commenters'/submiters' account create date and sort/scales the order/points based on its creation since 2009 (older accounts get more weight). Optionally, the plugin just puts "spoiler" text over accounts created after a certain date (say, 2023 or so).

Unfortunately, I was not able to "reorganize" comments/posts in a manner that I felt was particular "better", and didn't keep the plugin, for whatever that's worth.

I think it would be more prudent to overlay a web-of-trust, where accounts which submitted links/comments that you upvoted are then given significantly higher priority in other threads/feeds (unfortunately downvotes are not made apparent on HN, but factoring downvotes would also help.) Exposing your web-of-trust may also assist others in determining trusted content.

Perhaps this web-of-trust approach is dystopian on the order of MeowMeowBeenz, but I have not heard any other practical solutions to the disintegration of trust which is upon us.

Edit: Elsewhere in this thread HackerSmacker was mentioned, which is what I'm describing. That's exciting, I'll be trying it out later.
by mrcwinn | 2026-03-08 23:09:48+00:00
Uh no, not at all. First of all, America is a Republic. Republics with capitalist economies express power through property ownership, not simply voting. I’m actually arguing ownership is more powerful than even a vote, though you’d certainly want both. You can tell this true by observing that a billionaire in America is more powerful and influential than a factory worker, even though they have the same vote in the democracy.
by state_less | 2026-03-08 23:10:30+00:00
Oil spiked to $110/barrel on the WTI front month futures contract this afternoon, a $20 jump up from Friday. At this pace we'll be at $150 a barrel in a week or two. If oil infrastructure keeps getting hit, even if the strait of hormuz is reopened, it'll take a long time to recover from. That's on top of the continued call for regressive tariffs and a weakening labor market. I think we're heading for a recession unless things turn around quickly, which I'm not seeing any indication of.

I'm curious if we'll get TACO Trump, or if he'll double down on this?
by coldtea | 2026-03-08 23:10:37+00:00
>So, this all then implies that 'intelligence' is then a commodity too? Like, I'm trying to drive at that your's, mine, all of our 'intelligence' is now no longer a trait that I hold, but a thing to be used, at least as far as the economy is concerned.

This is obviously already the case with the intelligence level required to produce blog posts and article slop, generade coding agent quality code, do mid-level translations, and things like that...
Show HN: I built a free AI watermark remover – no signup, no ads, no bullshit
by Lusrodri | 2026-03-08 23:11:17+00:00
I got tired of watermark removers that either:
- Ask you to create an account just to try
- Show you the result and then lock it behind a paywall
- Bombard you with ads

So I built Goodbye Watermark. Upload an image, watermark is gone, download it. That's it.

It's free. No signup. No tricks.

https://goodbyewatermark.com

Would love brutal feedback — especially on quality of results vs. other tools you've tried.
by stuartjohnson12 | 2026-03-08 23:11:33+00:00
It failed on Reddit because Reddit is maintained by a bunch of volunteers to whom Reddit provides woefully, woefully, horrifically underdeveloped tooling to automate their communities in a more nuanced way. Hacker News has three advantages. First, it is moderated by the same people who build the tooling, so the incentives are aligned. Second, it is an enormous source of soft power for a venture capital firm with the resources, incentives, and likely the competence and capacity to keep it running smoothly. Third, the scale is smaller and is not tied to hardline revenue constraints like CPM, user LTV and DAU-maximization which restrict what Reddit can do.
by myrmidon | 2026-03-08 23:12:20+00:00
Again, I'm not arguing that China is doing extremely well regarding CO2 intensity of their electricity. My point is that they perform pretty on par with most comparable countries.

Looking at CO2 per kWh (a much better metric if you want to boil country comparisons down to a single number) you will find that they are not doing significantly worse than most nations in their weight-class (GDP wise), and in fact doing better than quite a few.

Australia, South Africa, Poland, India, Indonesia and basically all of the middle east is doing worse than them. Even rich nations with heavy renewable commitments like Germany are barely 40% lower, and this is frequently negated by higher per-capita electricity use (like it is with the US).

In my view, not many wealthy western nations are actually in a position where they can demand significant improvements from China in this metric without getting laughed at (except France, Scandinavia, Spain). If you look at nations with more than twice the GDP per capita (and a headstart in development) it is more than reasonable to demand that they be at least below 50% of (current) Chinese CO2 intensity (in my view).

I strongly believe that we see so few actual demands in this regard (and so little progress in more direct CO2 taxation schemes) because most nations realize that they live in a figurative glass house. E.g. if the whole EU was at french emission levels, we'd be much more likely to see import tariffs linked to metrics like this, effecting improvement all over the world. Pointing the fingers at China on the other hand is neither accurate nor effective.
by pocksuppet | 2026-03-08 23:13:17+00:00
ActivityPub is a terrible protocol. The protocol isn't what the specs are, and there's not even a consensus de-facto spec beyond "what Mastodon does". Atproto is a bit better.

Atproto is terrible at decentralization however, because of the model where data is stored decentrally, but accessed centrally, in big servers that need to be aware of all the data. In the ActivityPub model there isn't such a thing as "all the data" - you see what you see.