MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jerf | 2026-03-04 21:12:39+00:00
Yeah, it's hard to even get started until we can go three months without a significant improvement in the AIs. Today's characteristic failures may not be 2027's characteristic failures. Example: Today I'm complaining that the AIs tend not to abstract as often as I'd like, but it's not hard to imagine it flipping until they're all architecture astronauts instead.
by ieviev | 2026-03-04 21:12:50+00:00
In all honesty it's just never bothered me before and i've havent met many people bothered by it either

It's the same thing with dark mode as default, i chose it because it's my own preference and i'd love it everywhere, but i'm constantly being flashbanged by phone apps because someone decided #FFFFFF is a good background color while the app is loading.
by NalNezumi | 2026-03-04 21:13:21+00:00
I agree with your more thought out assessment of the channel.

I stil think the effort of trying to predict history (trying to understand causal patterns and extrapolate) is a valiant effort, and don't want to write his entire channel off. So I can't comment on his Iran take until I've seen it.

But yes, everyone makes mistakes and that just shows we don't have some universal theory for predicting history, so one shouldn't get obsessed with one school of thinking, but try it out, find its limits, and be open to other school of thoughts too.
by shadowgovt | 2026-03-04 21:13:38+00:00
Not just the metrics, the actual utility. For the things the LLMs are good at, the context matters a lot; it's one of the things that makes them more than glorified ELIZA chatbots or simple Markov chains. To give a concrete example: LLMs underpin the code editing tools in things like Copilot. And all that context is key to allow the tool to "reason" through the structure of a codebase.

But they should probably come with a big warning label that says something to the effect of "IF YOU TALK ABOUT YOURSELF, THE NATURE OF THE MACHINE IS THAT IT WILL COME TO AGREE WITH WHAT YOU SAY."
by WorldMaker | 2026-03-04 21:13:52+00:00
The core ask in this article (and elsewhere) is not for large companies to prove or disprove copyright claims themselves without the help of the court systems, the primary ask is that companies better support even basic Fair Use checks/reviews before takedowns. A lot of "Fair Use" qualifications are easy: is it academic (an essay, perhaps), is it transformative (a video about a game and not a copy of the game, maybe), how much of the copyright was infringed (is it a short clip in a larger study, as an example).

The big companies don't want to do this basic due diligence because today at least it requires human labor, even if that human labor is "do a quick glance and check a couple boxes".

The article even points out that US laws say that things taken down for copyright infringement but are in fact Fair Use should be able to claim damages. In theory a class action lawsuit of video essayists could make a real strong case in direct, estimated demonitization losses due to spurious copyright takedown notices YouTube acted upon automatically without any Fair Use checks. I can't imagine the stress of being involved in a case like that in practice, which is probably why there isn't enough people begging to be in a class action lawsuit like that.
by polyrand | 2026-03-04 21:14:08+00:00
I find this a very exciting release. I was actually hoping we would somehow get macOS on mobile 'A' chips some day. And I think this is better than putting 'M' chips on an iPad.

My iPad with an 'M1' chip actually consumes more battery than much older iPads when both are locked and with the screen off. I ended up figuring it was probably because, in the 'M' chip, the lowest possible energy usage is way higher than the 'A' chip. So even small background wake-ups used more energy.

I'm still hoping one day we have an iPad with macOS.
by saxonww | 2026-03-04 21:14:14+00:00
Flock cameras aren't enforcing anything. They collect your license plate and distinguishing details of your car. It's just car X with plate Y detected at location Z at time T.

Notably, they are not used for speed detection or 'good driving' detection.

You might think that having a constantly-present, objective, impartial camera enforcing a law is better than a sometimes-present, subjective, often not impartial beat cop doing that. But that's not what Flock does. Flock just turns that 'sometimes-present' beat cop into an 'always-present' beat cop, without addressing any of the other beat cop problems.
by ajross | 2026-03-04 21:14:20+00:00
> the only human involved doesnt know it is "roleplaying"

That is 100% unattested. We don't know the context of the interaction. But the fact that the AI was reportedly offering help lines argues strongly in the direction of "this was a fantasy exercise".

But in any case, again, exactly the same argument was made about RPGs back in the day, that people couldn't tell the difference between fantasy and reality and these strange new games/tools/whatever were too dangerous to allow and must be banned.

It was wrong then and is wrong now. TSR and Google didn't invent mental illness, and suicides have had weird foci since the days when we thought it was all demons (the demons thing was wrong too, btw). Not all tragedies need to produce public policy, no matter how strongly they confirm your ill-founded priors.
by kittikitti | 2026-03-04 21:14:21+00:00
Here's the court filing, provided by TechCrunch, https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/2026.03.04...

It seems like the law firm that's filing this bills itself as copyright trolls for AI, https://edelson.com/inside-the-firm/artificial-intelligence/

I am deeply saddened by the passing of Jonathan Gavalas and offer condolences to his family.
by jibal | 2026-03-04 21:14:28+00:00
I didn't miss that you totally changed the subject and now you're attacking a strawman. See Steve Klabnick's response to your other comment where you did this. Of course macros are good for encapsulation and abstraction, but that's a different subject--and note that the discussion was about Zig vs. Rust, and Zig has no macros so there's unencapsulated unsafe code all over the place.

I won't respond further.
by anal_reactor | 2026-03-04 21:14:33+00:00
> in fact, she could probably get 6 features done in the time that Mr. Complexity took to do his one feature

Not if management is moving at the speed of the more complex solution.

> yes, guys

I thought that blatant sexism wasn't a part of this website.

> In my experience, people who "get shit done" may not get fancy awards, but their work is recognized and rewarded.

top kek
by thot_experiment | 2026-03-04 21:14:52+00:00
What a disgusting take. It's actually so depressing to see anyone say this, presumably sincerely. It's how all the modern operating systems I use work.

It's what makes computers so wonderful and powerful, you can just have it do whatever you want. Turning that into "whatever google decides i should be allowed to do" is not gonna lead us to a bright future.
by AlexandrB | 2026-03-04 21:14:53+00:00
Legislating that everyone must always be safe regardless of what app they use is a one-way ticket to walled gardens for everything. This kind of safety is the rationale behind things like secure boot, Apple's App Store, and remote attestation.

Also consider what this means for open source. No hobbyist can ship an IM app if they don't go all the way and E2E encrypt (and security audit) the damn thing. The barriers of entry this creates are huge and very beneficial for the already powerful since they can afford to deal with this stuff from day one.
by theshackleford | 2026-03-04 21:15:12+00:00
Being an adult doesnt make you anyone less someones child, and mental illness makes you no less of a victim.

> I think there's room for legitimate argument about the externalities and impact that this technology can have

And yet both this and your other posts in this thread seem to in fact only do the opposite and seem entirely aimed at being nothing other than dismissive of literally every facet of it.

> but really... What's the solution here?

Maybe thinking about it for longer than 30 seconds before throwing up our arms with "yeah yeah unfortunate but what can we really do amirite?" would be a good start?
by panosv | 2026-03-04 21:15:16+00:00
Everyone knows ping. But over the decades, the networking community has quietly built an entire family of specialized variants — each solving a problem that standard ICMP couldn't.
A few examples of why you'd reach for something else:

tcping — when firewalls eat your ICMP and you need to test port availability

arping — L2 diagnostics and duplicate IP detection, no IP stack needed

fping — scan a /24 in seconds, all hosts in parallel

OWAMP — when you actually need one-way latency, not just RTT

dnsping — when the slowness lives in your resolver, not the network

I put together a comparison table of the most useful ones, across protocol, OSI layer, platform, multi-host support, and root requirements.
The OSI layer column alone tells you a lot — if you're reaching for ping to debug something that lives at L4 or L7, you're probably using the wrong tool.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-03-04 21:15:50+00:00
Of the two, I think Adobe is most responsible for the decline of Flash. Even if smartphones had never entered the picture, laptops (where efficiency is important) were quickly becoming the most common form of PC, which would've eventually made Flash as it existed under Adobe untenable as well. The timeline was just accelerated by smartphones.

Honestly I can't understand the mental calculus that went on in the heads of Adobe execs at the time. Yes, cleaning up the ball of mud that the Flash codebase had become and making it not so battery hungry wouldn't have been an easy task, but it would've futureproofed it significantly. Instead they decided to keep tacking on new features which ended up being entirely the wrong decision.

EDIT: The constant stream of zero-days certainly didn't help things either. A rewrite would've been worthwhile if only to get a handle on that.
by burkaman | 2026-03-04 21:16:18+00:00
> As for getting externalities internalized: as a society, we call the procedure for updating rules "politics", and it's as open to you as to anyone else.

Ok so I do need to worry about energy so that I can identify these unaddressed externalities and work towards updating the rules. You can to care before you can get involved in this stuff. You can't tell me not to worry about it and then also say that it's basically my fault for not getting involved if the price is wrong.

> any such rebuttal must involve numbers, not emotional appeals

Who are you arguing with? You're commenting about a website that has strictly numbers and nothing else.
by shubhamintech | 2026-03-04 21:16:25+00:00
The best point in this thread: "intuition as evals." That's actually the crux. PMs have context about what the product should do that engineers often don't, and that intuition IS an eval. The problem is it doesn't scale once the system has millions of conversations no one is reading. The empathy from vibe coding is real, the prototype-as-spec culture is where it breaks down for AI products specifically.
by shubhamintech | 2026-03-04 21:16:37+00:00
The carrying cost almost never gets charged to the builder. Team pays it later in surface area, failure modes, and onboarding time. The only fix I've seen work: write down the two options you didn't take and a concrete trigger for revisiting ("if latency hits X" / "if we add a second consumer"). Suddenly "simple choice" is a legible decision with an upgrade path, not just a gut call.
by oulipo2 | 2026-03-04 21:16:37+00:00
Indeed, looking at a "single median query" totally disregard the fact that:

- first, those queries are mostly useless and we could totally do without them, so it's still a net pollution

- they are being integrated everywhere, so soon enough, just browsing the web for a few hours is going to general 100k+ such equivalent "small queries" (in the background, by the processes analyzing what the user is doing, or summarizing the page, etc). At that time, the added pollution is no longer negligible. And most of this will be done just to sell more ads
by Allplix | 2026-03-04 21:16:52+00:00
"Hi HN! I built Allplix to solve a simple problem: video and image editing should be fast, private, and accessible to everyone, regardless of their location or the price of their computer.

Why Allplix is different:

100% Client-Side: No accounts, no uploads. Everything (background removal, compression, subtitles) happens in your browser. Your data never leaves your device.

Universal Performance: I've optimized the engine with 60fps GPU acceleration and smart temporal smoothing so it runs smoothly even on mid-range devices.

Truly Global: We just indexed 660+ pages across 12 languages (including RTL support for Arabic) to make professional tools available to users in Indonesia, India, and beyond.

Zero Friction: No 'Coming Soon' placeholders. Features like AI background removal (Blur/Color/Bokeh) and localized subtitle overlays are live and fully operational right now.

I'm currently seeing a surge in active users from all over the world (shoutout to our Indonesian community!), and I'd love to get the HN community's feedback on how we can push browser-based editing even further.
by avaer | 2026-03-04 21:16:53+00:00
That number terrifies me not because it is so high, but because it exists.

What is stopping an entity (corporate, government, or otherwise) from using a prompt to make sweeping decisions about whether people are mentally or otherwise "fit" for something based on AI usage? Clearly not the technology.

I'm not saying mental health problems don't exist, but using AI to compute it freaks me out.
by dwoldrich | 2026-03-04 21:16:55+00:00
Maybe worthwhile to encourage a heavier reliance on right click menus going forward, then? Seems to make sense in a future VR world.

I have noticed that Mac Sequoia I'm running now has some memory as to which process last focused on each display and now is able to show a different menu per display, albeit grayed for displays where the user is not currently focused. It's a little janky, but kindof a graceful devolution of the original single menu vision.
by shubhamintech | 2026-03-04 21:17:02+00:00
The merge conflict is the symptom. The root problem is parallel agents have no coordination primitives before edits happen. The MCP server angle is the more interesting long-term bet here because it moves conflict avoidance earlier in the workflow rather than cleaning up damage after the merge. Entity claiming as a first-class primitive is where this gets really interesting for multi-agent coding. What do you think?
by PaulHoule | 2026-03-04 21:17:10+00:00
There is this problem that RSS is a poorly designed protocol that has two polling speeds: too fast and too slow, and sometimes you can be both at the same time.

If it was truly a stateless protocol it would be a simple protocol, but if you want proper caching or rate limiting it is not a simple protocol at all. I mean, browser caches work right in web browsers in 2026 but it took 2 decades to get that far and today there are only three organizations in the world that are capable of delivering a workable web browser.

But RSS is blub and you could never convince an RSS advocate that ActivityPub solves a problem worth solving (with its own problems, not least not being such a "simple" protocol)
by luisln | 2026-03-04 21:17:12+00:00
I don't know what you're advocating for. Are you saying we shouldn't have any safety restrictions on AI because we're responsible for how we use the tool? The hardcore pornography people managed to get laws put in place where you need an ID to view it, pretty much every major AI company has measures in place to do harm reduction and save the user from themselves, so to some degree society kind of agrees with the side you're aruging against.
by the_bear | 2026-03-04 21:17:18+00:00
Agreed. Unless it's a really frequently used UI, my company defaults to showing all options to all users regardless of permissions. It's better to see "Manage users" in the settings menu which takes you to a page explaining that you don't have permission as opposed to seeing nothing and wondering why it's not there even though the help article says it should be there.

No, putting an explanation on the help article that this feature is only available to admins doesn't work. No one reads anything.
by maccard | 2026-03-04 21:17:22+00:00
> While you consider it a huge warning sign, have you ever employed someone who would answer that way or are you assuming that you're not capable of making hiring mistakes? I can't help but think this "huge warning sign" might simply be a cognative bias where the interviewer is misdirecting their frustration in the poor design of their own process at the candidate

Yes, I did. More than once. I always regretted it. Sure it could be a cognitive bias, but the entire interview process is essentially trying to figure out “can I work with this person”.

> I think both answers are fine and both perspectives are equally valid

I disagree - refusing to engage with the interview because you don’t like the question is perfectly valid to do, but don’t expect me to want to work with you over it. We’ve only got an hour, maximum, so any scenario we come up with is going to be contrived and simplified - if you can’t accept that then I’m going to make my decision based on that.
by geoduck14 | 2026-03-04 21:17:24+00:00
The best advice I've had on interviewing is: Find an actual problem that your team is actually working through and ask the candidate how they would approach it.

Then to jazz it up: simplify the proble. To get to the root stuff that needs to be covered (e.g. ignore creating Jira tickets and focus on connecting to a database with cross-refion replication).
You also want it to be simple enough that it can be solved in <30 minutes
by jakub_g | 2026-03-04 21:17:33+00:00
Semi-related, something that kind of irritates me is the usage of "as" in online newspapers headlines:

"$Something-is-happening as $Something-else-is-happening"

It's usually written in a way that might be suggesting a direct link between the two things to a layman, but often there's none, other than the fact those two things are happening around the same time.

This can be disorienting when the reader is not familiar with the subject discussed, and lead them to wrong conclusions.
by 0x3f | 2026-03-04 21:17:49+00:00
These are all forms of false positives but the most popular news stories seem to be where they detain the correct person, correct legal status, lawfully, and the story happens to gloss over the facts about the legal status and focuses on the hardship. Yeah, it's a hardship to be split from your family, I can't deny that. But I'm not aware that most countries are very sympathetic to illegal immigrants.

If anything I find the stories featuring white/European people oddly racist because they seem to assume that I, the reader, will assume a white/European person couldn't possibly be in violation of immigration rules. But all the ones I've read turned out that they were indeed in violation of immigration rules.

Overall as a potential immigrant to the US myself, I find the process capricious and that US citizens by birth don't fully appreciate how painful it is or why it shouldn't be that way. But I don't find it notably worse or more onerous than the vast majority of immigration policies of other countries in practice.
by ajross | 2026-03-04 21:17:56+00:00
Nothing in the article alleges significant disability though. You're projecting your own ideas onto the situation, precisely because of the misleading title.

Please recognize that this is coverage of a lawsuit, sourced almost entirely from statements by the plaintiffs and fed by an extremely spun framing by the journalist who wrote it up for you.

Read critically and apply some salt, folks.
by observationist | 2026-03-04 21:18:28+00:00
And airplanes don't really fly. And submarines don't swim. And there aren't any real horses powering your engine.

The difference, of course, is that intelligence is the thing that is done, a subset of computation, and all computation is substrate independent. You can definitely argue that LLMs are less intelligent than humans. This is obvious, for the time being, and easy to demonstrate. Saying they are not intelligent is simply untrue.

Whether you want to go to a formalized definition of intelligence, like AIXI, or a neuroscience definition, or the vernacular definition, LLMs are intelligent. The idea that they're random number stochastic functions that are just partially producing sensible results is about 6 years past its expiration date, and if you've been holding on to that idea, it's really time to update your model.

ALICE bots or ELIZA back in the day had a "sense" of intelligence. Modern LLMs are more intelligent than the average human.
by wpietri | 2026-03-04 21:19:20+00:00
I'd call it an interviewer failure, not an interviewee failure.

I absolutely want people I hire to be "difficult" when the moment calls for it. If the scenario is one where the right business/user choice is "let them keep using Google Sheets", then the answer I want is "Google Sheets seems fine to me", no matter what people with more power start out wanting. Too many developers have been encouraged to be minions, not professionals.

Ditto for ones who act like everything is a nail for their coding hammer. A developer who can save a company a couple hundred thousand dollars by not turning something simple into a big coding project is a rare and precious commodity. Or should be, at least.

The thing to do isn't to give demerits for "being difficult". The thing to do is to then add something to the scenario where they get into the thing you want them to get to. "For this, we need better access control than Google Sheets allows us." Or, "We need this to be more closely integrated with our accounting system."

Unless, of course, what you're hiring for is the willingness to roll over for unreasonable requests from people with more power. Which, honestly, a lot of places are.
by john_strinlai | 2026-03-04 21:19:50+00:00
>That is 100% unattested. We don't know the context of the interaction.

the fact that he killed himself would suggest he did not believe it was a fun little roleplay session

>were too dangerous to allow and must be banned.

is anyone here saying ai should be banned? im not.

>your ill-founded priors

"encouraging suicide is bad" is not an ill-founded prior.
by Aurornis | 2026-03-04 21:19:51+00:00
> The main quirk I've found is that it has a tendency to decide halfway through following my detailed instructions that it would be "simpler" to just... not do what I asked,

This is my experience with the Qwen3-Next and Qwen3.5 models, too.

I can prompt with strict instructions saying "** DO NOT..." and it follows them for a few iterations. Then it has a realization that it would be simpler to just do the thing I told it not to do, which leads it to the dead end I was trying to avoid.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-03-04 21:19:57+00:00
If a dungeon master learned that one of her players was going through hard times after a divorce, to the point where she "referred Gavalos to a crisis hotline", I would definitely expect her to refuse to roleplay a scenario where his character commits suicide and is resurrected in the arms of a dream woman. Even if it's in a different session, even if he pinky promises that he's feeling better now and it's totally OK. (e: I realized that the source article doesn't actually mention the divorce, but a Guardian article I read on this story did https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/04/gemini-ch..., and as far as I can tell the underlying complaint where it was reportedly mentioned is not available anywhere.)

I'm not concerned about D&D in general because I think the vast majority of DMs would be responsible enough not to do that. Doesn't exactly take a psychology expert to understand why you shouldn't.