MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jascha_eng | 2026-03-11 19:15:00+00:00
Yes and even now if you tell the LLM any private information inside the sandbox it can jow leak that if it gets misdirected/prompt injected.

So there isn't really a way to avoid this trade-off you can either have a useless agent with no info and no access. Or a useful agent that then is incredibly risky to use as it might go rogue any moment.

Sure you can slightly choose where on the scale you want to be but any usefulness inherently means it's also risky if you run LLMs async without supervision. The only absolutely safe way to give access and info to an agent is with manual approvals for anything it does. Which gives you review fatigue in minutes.
by pydry | 2026-03-11 19:15:07+00:00
The fact that they did is likely why Trump fired one of his generals.

Ive worked in organizations like that where EVERYBODY knew something was a bad idea but upper management wanted to do it anyway. At some point you get frozen out if you dissent and nobody gives two halfs of a fuck about when it turns out you were right. Conformity is all that matters.

Even so a few people do publicly dissent.
by Aurornis | 2026-03-11 19:15:32+00:00
> You can spend $400 on a laptop and have a perfectly fine experience.

Or you could spend $200 more (or $100 more with edu pricing) and get a MacBook Neo which has significantly higher build quality, a much better screen, a great trackpad, and amazing performance.

Seeing how college students throw laptops in backpacks, that extra $100 (edu pricing) could very easily save them money in the long run.

> There are damn good Chromebooks in the $200-300 territory

Every once in a while I go looking for a Chromebook-level laptop for some extra purpose and I am never impressed by anything. The current selection is all ancient processors, bad screens, creaky build quality. If you must stick to a strict budget then these can work, but I wouldn't call them good.
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-03-11 19:16:20+00:00
Are you pointing out the irony that the fraud and harm being performed in DC by the current administration outweighs by great orders of magnitude the fraud and harm that is meant to be a racist distraction?

If so, bravo. If not, whelp, let me know when you escape the reality distortion field and we can grab a beer.
by alistairSH | 2026-03-11 19:16:40+00:00
Limit voters to one polling location. Problem solved.

That's what we do in the US. You are assigned a polling location based on your home address. You can't vote anywhere else. If you try, they turn you away.

You can do a provisional ballot (for people who recently moved, and poll data isn't updated, etc) and they validate your ID/address/etc later.
by thewebguyd | 2026-03-11 19:17:10+00:00
Prior to the tax, the bottom 20% of Washington earners pay between 13-17% of their income in state and local taxes through the regressive tax system. The top 1% of earners pay closer to 3%.

In absolute terms, yes, of course someone making $2M/year will spend a lot more money than someone earning $40k, but they don't spend 50 times more. They don't need 50 times more food, or 50 times more gas, etc.

For the $2M earner, any surplus likely isn't spent locally but is invested instead, which leaks the money out of the state into global markets.

And that's the problem with regressive tax codes in general, the tax base is disconnected from the state's actual wealth growth. Washington's regressive tax system makes the state fund itself using only money from the working class while the state's largest pool of potential revenue remains locked away in global markets.
by armchairhacker | 2026-03-11 19:17:46+00:00
Another example of a top comment that was definitely written by an LLM.

And to be clear, style isn't the only problem. This comment can be summarized as "WebAssembly can now interact with the DOM directly instead of through JavaScript, making it the better choice for more types of problems". One sentence instead of a paragraph of cliches ("...change how people think about this...chicken-and-egg loop..."), uncanny phrases ("...the hot-path optimization niche"), and inaccurate claims ("...the only viable use cases were compute-heavy workloads like codecs and crypto").

(For anyone who doesn't believe me, check the user's comment history)
by FrameworkFred | 2026-03-11 19:17:51+00:00
It would make sense that the holes were a convenient way of thinking and speaking about large quantities of goods such that tribes of people might want to exchange. It would be a very visual way of comparing dissimilar goods, like "1 hole has 50 alpaca skins and I need 200 for the shelter I'm planning to build, so I need 4" and "1 hole has 8 baskets of dried fish which can last 3 families thru the winter, so I need 3 for the nine families on the farm", etc.

And I bet they paid a bit of rent for the privilege. Pretty cool.
by dbg31415 | 2026-03-11 19:17:57+00:00
My take, after spending years in the prep-school-to-Ivy pipeline: it's not a lack of education, it's a signaling mechanic.

For most of us, grammar is a proxy for competence. We proofread because a mistake could cost us a grade, client, or a job. But the ultra-rich are basically operating post-economically. They aren’t trying to advance; they started rich and they’ll end rich, so they have absolutely no one to impress (and certainly not you).

When you grow up in an environment where friction is historically outsourced—where papers are bought, tutors do the heavy lifting, or SATs are taken by proxies—you never really get held to the same operational standards. You just learn to slop it across the finish line because the consequences for failure are zero.

So who are they trying to impress with their grammar? Nobody. It actually becomes a display of asymmetric leverage. Taking the time to craft a perfect, well-punctuated email screams, "I spent my valuable time optimizing this for you." A typo-ridden, lowercase, one-sentence reply sends the exact opposite message. It establishes a power dynamic where their two seconds of raw attention is the most valuable commodity in the exchange. Following spelling conventions is just middle-class anxiety; sloppiness is the flex. All conventions are for the plebs anyway.

Plus, low-fidelity communication gives them incredible optionality. A garbled, ambiguous text provides perpetual wiggle room. They weren't late or wrong, it was just a typo. It allows them to remain completely non-committal—just another way to maintain high status while shedding any actual accountability.
by fusslo | 2026-03-11 19:18:11+00:00
I wonder why the commenter discounts the idea that they were used to store things. Especially since the article gives evidence that things were stored in the holes:

"Hole soil analysis also found ancient pollens of maize – a key staple in the Andes – and reeds traditionally used for basket-making. In addition to this, there were traces of squash, amaranth, cotton, chili peppers and other crops that haven't been farmed on the arid land where Monte Sierpe sits. Because many of these plants produce little airborne pollen, it's unlikely they settled in the holes naturally."
by riskable | 2026-03-11 19:18:14+00:00
That's all fine and good but it would be nice even if we just replaced the plastics used in PCBs with something that can biodegrade and/or renders itself harmless after going into the waste. Truly biodegradable electronics would be ideal but even minor improvements would make a big difference based on the sheer amount of electronics that get manufactured and distributed across the world every day.

I remember reading about using magnesium instead of copper in PCBs a while back. I wonder what happened to that? Magnesium tracks on a fungus-based substrate would be fantastic (and neat!).
by whynotmaybe | 2026-03-11 19:18:16+00:00
Should be forced to Test on a 4gb machine.

A few years ago, I had two computers on my desk, my beefy dev with double screens and some good specs for the time and my test machine which was the standard given to every non dev, with a 1024x768 screen.

I couldn't say to the boss that the code was ready until I tested it on that machine, which was sometimes eye opening and why a 2Mb HTML page wasn't a good idea.
by pbhjpbhj | 2026-03-11 19:18:29+00:00
Here's my hypothesis from ignorance: I don't know much about South America but understand that they freeze dry potatoes on high slopes?

Perhaps they dry best in these holes, the community built them together, like building an oven or kiln, the regularity and sections of 50 holes allow to track whose produce is where; and maybe you sell them on at the same time.

Or, how about ice collection - each hole gets filled with water/snow, it freezes, the lumps are the right size for carrying back to an ice hole. Maybe they can slide them down the slope like a historical ice-cube dispenser.
by rchaud | 2026-03-11 19:18:52+00:00
The hedge is the Russia '98 play, which is already in various stages of progress.

1. Default on ruble-denominated debt (replace with dollar-denominated), and trigger a recession and currency crisis.

2. Military attack on a border state to fight secession (replace with narco-terror) and advance nationalist agenda.

3. Vote in a strongman who promises to take the country back from evil capitalist influence (replace with communist) and restore their rightful place in the pantheon of great civilizations.

4. Come to power and intimidate/co-opt independent media into docile acquiescence, convince corporations to do your bidding in exchange for favorable treatment, restructure elections to your advantage.
by enraged_camel | 2026-03-11 19:19:24+00:00
>> The number of overlapping iPad models and variants, for example, is getting kind of crazy these days.

One of the first things Steve Jobs immediately did after returning to Apple in 1997 was to kill most of Apple's product line-up, which had exploded in his absence.

Too bad he's not around to save them from the same over-segmentation anymore.
by claudiulodro | 2026-03-11 19:19:31+00:00
Engineering Ethics is a standard required class in any engineering discipline and a whole field of discussion. The ethics of working on military stuff (or even just government stuff) is nowhere near as cut and dry as your question seems to imply.

For example:

- What if the country asked you to develop technology to track and hack journalists or political rivals the administration doesn't like?

- What if the country asked you to develop chemical weapons? Is it different if the weapons would be used on their own population or only on external "enemies"?

- What if the country asked you to personally assassinate a civilian of another country? What if they asked you to create a program that would do that? What if they asked you to simply create a list of targets, and you knew they'd be assassinated?

- What if the country asked you to build something in an unsafe way that you're pretty certain will cause harm to people?

- What if the country asked you to make a public statement lying about the purpose behind what you're building?
by FrustratedMonky | 2026-03-11 19:19:31+00:00
Maybe the problem is if you are working for someone else.

If you are toiling on your farm to survive. Or even hunting/gathering for food. You do need to work to live. So a slave to life? All life is a burden? Even Buddhist have 'all life is suffering'.

But toiling in an office, is usually for someone else's benefit. You are only getting a fraction of your work back in pay. So if you are 'trapped', unable to change, and working for someone else's benefit, then a 'slave'? (wish I had some Marx quote to fit here).

It is bit of slippery slope, since i'm not trying to include every person that just complains about working because they would rather play video games.

And yet, in a market system, the 'rat race', we all do have a sense that we are 'slaves to the system'.
by ogogmad | 2026-03-11 19:19:50+00:00
Chebyshev polynomials cos(n arcos(x)) provide one of the proofs that every continuous function f:[0,1]->R can be uniformly approximated by polynomial functions. Bernstein polynomials provide a shorter proof, but perhaps not the best numerical method: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_polynomial#See_also
by Amorymeltzer | 2026-03-11 19:19:51+00:00
Indeed! He specifically cites Yanis Varoufakiss, dubbing this technofeudalism. If I may quote Doctorow a bit:

>Varoufakis defines capitalism as a system designed to preference profit over rent.

[snip]

>The feudal era wasn't defined by the absence of profits--rather, what made feudalism "feudal" was the triumph of rent over profits. When the interest of rentiers conflicted with the aspirations of capitalists, the rentiers won. Likewise, the defining characteristic of the capitalist era was not the abolition of rents, but rather the triumph of profits. When capitalism's philosopher-theorists lionized "free markets," they didn't mean "markets that were free from regulation," they meant "markets that were free from rents."

[snip]

>This is Varoufakiss technofeudalism exemplified. It's an economic system in which the majority of value is being captured by people who own stuff, at the expense of people who do stuff.... The fight between technofeudalism and technocapitalism is a fight over whether the landlord or the café owner takes the value that's created by the barista.
by zarzavat | 2026-03-11 19:20:01+00:00
The manufacturers don't care about display quality, because displays are hard and expensive. Apple has enough volume that they can get a custom panel.

Users on the other hand, they definitely care about display quality more than they care about RAM. The display is the part you look at!

If you're in store and there's a Neo with a crisp 200 PPI screen and a Windows laptop with a cheap screen but more RAM, the vast majority of consumers will choose the laptop with the better display. People make purchasing decisions based on feels and the Neo has great feels.
by MisterTea | 2026-03-11 19:20:05+00:00
> where generations have grown up opening baseball card packs and blind boxes and bags, and then trading and selling the items they receive.

Which honestly is also a grift to get kids to spend their parents cash on objects that in reality have no real value. The loop hole is the trading aspect and the fact that you aren't really gambling but simply buying a pack of cards. It just so happens that some packs may contain "valuable" collector cards. That is by design to create artificial scarcity and stir FOMO in the collectors who rush out and spend big money trying to find the rare cards.
Show HN: Daub – A rendering spec for AI-generated UIs (two files, no build step)
by kulesh | 2026-03-11 19:20:14+00:00
Most UI frameworks solve the wrong problem — they help developers build interfaces faster. DAUB bets on the next problem: AI generating interfaces directly.

The core idea: instead of writing component code, you describe a UI in structured JSON. DAUB renders it. No compilation, no virtual DOM diffing. The spec is the UI.

What shipped so far (v3.13):
- daub.css + daub.js: 76 components, 20 theme families, two CDN links, zero build step
- JSON-Render spec: AI outputs structured JSON, DAUB renders a live interface — already working in the Playground
- 7-stage generation pipeline: analyze → scaffold → generate → selfCheck → verify → repair → visual diff
- 189 pre-made blocks across 34 categories with multimodal RAG retrieval
- MCP server on Cloudflare edge: generate_ui, render_spec, validate_spec, get_component_catalog — any MCP client (Claude, Cursor, custom agents) can generate DAUB interfaces without writing a line of component code

What's coming:
- v3.14: Action bindings — buttons that POST to real endpoints, forms with submit handlers, shareable URLs, version history. Generated UI becomes functional and outlives the session.
- v4.0 (Intent Engine, in progress): "I need to track my expenses" → spending dashboard with charts, filters, input form. Context-aware: location, time, history inform the output.
- v5.0 (Agent Runtime): multi-agent orchestration where one agent fetches data, another picks layout, a third wires actions. The interface is a byproduct of understanding, not a thing you build.

The underlying bet: as AI generates more of the interface layer, value accrues to whoever owns the rendering spec that agents target. DAUB wants that spec to be small, inspectable, text-diffable, and easy for both humans and models to work with — not locked inside a framework.

It's not competing with React or shadcn/ui. It's the layer underneath whatever generates the UI.

Playground: https://daub.dev/playground.html
Roadmap: https://daub.dev/roadmap
MCP server + GitHub: https://github.com/sliday/daub

Happy to get into the spec format, the complexity-routing pipeline, or how the MCP integration actually works.
by nomel | 2026-03-11 19:20:29+00:00
Sure, but increasing something like fucking coal power plants isn't some instantaneous event that could start and stop at any time, putting some ambiguity at the moment between "increased" and "increasing". If plants are or will be built, it's because it's planned for development. That '-ing' isn't just present tense, it's there for the continuous/progressive aspect of it.
by 9rx | 2026-03-11 19:21:08+00:00
> one part trying to find common ground for Java, Modula, C++

The primary common ground is that their functions have encapsulation, which is what separates it from functions without encapsulation (i.e. imperative programming). This already has a name: Functional programming.

The issue is that functional, immutable programming language proponents don't like to admit that immutability is not on the same plane as imperative/functional/object-oriented programming. Of course, imperative, functional, and object-oriented language can all be either mutable or immutable, but that seems to evade some.

> SmallTalk

Smalltalk is different. It doesn't use function calling. It uses message passing. This is what object-oriented was originally intended to reference — it not being functional or imperative. In other words, "object-oriented" was coined for Smalltalk, and Smalltalk alone, because of its unique approach — something that really only Objective-C and Ruby have since adopted in a similar way. If you go back and read the original "object-oriented" definition, you'll soon notice it is basically just a Smalltalk laundry list.

> how term is used.

Language evolves, certainly. It is fine for "object-oriented" to mean something else today. The only trouble is that it's not clear to many what to call what was originally known as "object-oriented", etc. That's how we end up in this "no its this", "no its that" nonsense. So, the only question is: What can we agree to call these things that seemly have no name?
by andrewstuart | 2026-03-11 19:21:14+00:00
>> Hermann Simon — the founder of Simon-Kucher, one of the world’s most respected pricing consultancies — was one of the few people who did reply. He told me directly: we have no structured process. No structured process. At a firm that has advised thousands of companies on their most important strategic decisions.

Quotes like this won’t lead to people replying to you.

Herman would likely be unhappy to see this published from what he probably considered a private email exchange.

Since you’re only 15 years old I’ll give you the most important business tip you’ll get - respect your clients and potential clients, don’t quote them in public without their permission, NEVER say anything that might make someone look bad, especially if they went to the trouble to reply to your cold email. That’s the basic of sales.
by dangus | 2026-03-11 19:21:45+00:00
The most recent Just Josh Tech podcast episode mentioned this: the longer this chassis has been around, the more PC manufacturers have started closing the gaps.

I really like how that podcast talked about the MacBook Neo as well. Some very non-technical users really do hit the 8GB memory wall and notice sluggishness just doing modern web browsing. A lot of early YouTubers have been doing reviews as quickly as possible (almost certainly being directly supplied by Apple with review units) singing the praises of the machine, but it's not that hard to find a 16GB-equipped Macbook Air for not much more money and that's a much better buy.
by db48x | 2026-03-11 19:22:18+00:00
You don’t need your ISP to assign a static prefix just to have static addresses on your home network. Instead choose your own prefix inside the fd00::/8 block. There is a procedure using hashing that you can follow to help guarantee that your prefix is unlikely to be shared with anyone else, but you don’t actually need to use it. Configure your router to advertise that prefix in addition to any prefix assigned by your ISP and all of your computers will give themselves an address in both prefixes. If you set your servers to base their address on their mac address, then every one of your servers will have a single unique address. Your client machines can keep their privacy–aware addresses that change frequently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_local_address

For my network I wanted something I had some chance of remembering so I consulted a dictionary and ended up with fdbe:aded:cafe:babe::/64.
by awesome_dude | 2026-03-11 19:22:43+00:00
As per my previous comment - we are discussing stochastic systems.

By definition, they involve variance that cannot be explained or eliminated through simple repetition. Demanding a 'deterministic' explanation for stochastic noise is a category error; it's like asking a meteorologist to explain why a specific raindrop fell an inch to the left during a storm replication.
by thepryz | 2026-03-11 19:23:11+00:00
As a lifetime Mac user, I will say that the last few updates to MacOS have made me start looking towards linux. Ignoring the many sins of liquid glass, Disk utility is almost nonfunctional, as are many of the built-in utilities. Sure I can use the command line tools but to me it's a concerning trend that highlights poor attention to detail that the Mac was always known for.
by john_strinlai | 2026-03-11 19:23:17+00:00
i sort of get it. or, at least, i can empathize with it.

my dad (in his 80s) ends 50%+ of his sentences in an ellipses. most people i know my age find it a bit jarring (is he mad? expecting more information?). and its not just him, ive met several people around the same age who have a similar habit in their writing.

so, when i had a similar conversation about coming across as rigid/negative with my emails, i figured it was a similar phenomenon between the younger generation and my generation as my generation and my dads. now i typically end with a "thanks!" to coworkers instead of "thanks.". not a big deal for me if it makes other people happier.
by gopher_space | 2026-03-11 19:23:34+00:00
Sometimes timing is your moat and that's all you need. That being said I'll probably start limiting my public releases to revolve around standards I want implemented.

I'm rethinking the sources of value moats are built around. It seems like the landscape is changing and dimensions such as location, perspective, experience, and attention weigh more than they used to.

> but how long before somebody simply saw that feature and replicated it?

This is a good example. The, idk, "value store" of your org just switched from products and services to the employees who understand your process from a couple angles and can write well.
by Aurornis | 2026-03-11 19:23:35+00:00
> Maybe not to you, but to many people Apple signals luxury. It signals trust.

In some countries Apple is (or was) a status symbol of luxury, but I haven't observed that much in the United States. Macs and iPhones are both mainstream and affordable. AirPods can be bought for $100 on sale. These are commodity items now, not symbols of luxury.

Now, most people go to Apple because they see it as a premium option, not a status symbol or luxury. If you get AirPods or an iPhone you know what you're getting. If you buy those $50 wireless earbuds on Amazon your expectations are lower.