MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by flashybaby | 2026-03-04 16:59:39+00:00
The missing pattern in most of these agentic frameworks is governance. We're building increasingly autonomous AI systems but the compliance and audit trail infrastructure hasn't caught up.

I keep thinking about the scenario where an employee uses an AI agent to generate business-critical outputs (quarterly reports, financial analysis, strategic recommendations) and there's zero traceability for how those outputs were produced. No logs of which model, which prompts, which data sources. The agent just... did it.

Someone made a short film dramatizing exactly this scenario and it's uncomfortably realistic: https://youtu.be/O5FFkHUdKyE

The EU AI Act is starting to address this with requirements for high-risk AI systems, but most enterprise deployments of agentic systems right now would fail a basic compliance audit. The engineering patterns are evolving faster than the governance patterns.
by KaiserPro | 2026-03-04 16:59:40+00:00
> This seems relevant to the global stock/oil market overreaction.

This is true, but as with the start of the tanker wars:

> Initially, the Tanker War led to a 25 percent drop in commercial shipping and a sharp rise in the price of crude oil.

currently something like 90% of shipping is stopped.

But your general point about moving around it is valid, assuming that Iran doesn't attack refineries and distribution points. Last time Iran had to use artillery to attack shipping, this time they have better weapons
by tikhonj | 2026-03-04 16:59:42+00:00
Worth pointing out a success story: all ACM publications have gone open access starting this year[1]. Papers are now going to be CC licensed, with either the very open CC-BY[2] license or the pretty restrictive (but still better than nothing!) CC-BY-NC-ND[3] license.

Computer science as a discipline has always been relatively open and has had its own norms on publication that are different from most other fields (the top venues are almost always conferences rather than journals, and turn-around times on publications are relatively short), so it isn't a surprise that CS is one of the first areas to embrace open access.

Still, having a single example of how this approach works and how grass-roots efforts by CS researchers led to change in the community is useful to demonstrate that this idea is viable, and to motivate other research communities to follow suit.

[1]: https://authors.acm.org/open-access/acm-open-for-authors-hom...

[2]: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

[3]: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/deed.en
by ImaneIdrissi | 2026-03-04 16:59:42+00:00
It's great to choose simple solutions to avoid over-engineering, but at the same time you need to be able to talk about them in a way that proves making that choice was much more complex than picking the complex path directly. Listing both the complex solution and the simple one shows others that you reasoned about both and deliberately chose simplicity. It's all about framing the story behind the decision.
by bogzz | 2026-03-04 17:00:02+00:00
That feels disingenuous-- to my knowledge everyone apprehended has had some sort of immigration violation, at the very least a visa overstay.

As an immigrant, I am painfully aware and making sure I'm not putting myself in a position where that can happen. The treatment of those people however is atrocious, and their offenses have not warranted it.

I will never argue for the practically open border policy that existed for a time, but I do believe that arguments can be made to accommodate many of the people who are productive members of society and have merely overstayed a visa.

My boss's mom lived as an illegal immigrant in USA for 50 years, and only chose to get citizenship for some technical reason-- I forget what it was. She was Canadian, had a very well-paying job and of course paid taxes.
by euanai | 2026-03-04 17:00:21+00:00
Hi HN! I'm the author.

Novum is a Claude Code extension that runs an autonomous ML research loop with mechanical guardrails designed to reduce result fabrication.

The key idea is that instead of relying on prompts like "don't hallucinate", the system enforces constraints mechanically (e.g., preventing edits to protected result files and enforcing phase gates in the research pipeline).

In a recent test run, a single /research command ran autonomously for about 30 hours:
10 hypotheses tested, 4 iteration cycles, and one champion solution selected.

Happy to answer questions or hear feedback on the guard design and research workflow.
by flashybaby | 2026-03-04 17:00:24+00:00
This is playing out in real time with AI adoption. There's a growing number of cases where someone uses ChatGPT or similar tools to compress weeks of work into hours, and the organizational response isn't "great, let's scale this" -- it's panic about control, compliance, and what it means for headcount.

There's a short film making the rounds that captures this dynamic perfectly -- an employee uses AI to generate the quarterly results his whole department was working on, and instead of being promoted, the institutional immune system kicks in: https://youtu.be/O5FFkHUdKyE

The simplicity penalty is even worse when the simplification comes from AI, because now it's not just "you made us look bad" -- it's "you introduced unaudited, uncontrolled technology into our decision pipeline."
by bhekanik | 2026-03-04 17:00:42+00:00
Strongly agree with the patterns list, but I think the order matters: observability and evals should come before sophistication.

Teams jump straight to multi-agent setups because it feels "advanced," then spend weeks debugging ghosts. A boring single-agent flow with strict tool contracts, replayable traces, and a small regression suite beats a clever architecture you can't reason about.

My rule of thumb now: if I can't explain why an agent made a decision from logs alone, it's not production-ready yet.
by Twirrim | 2026-03-04 17:00:43+00:00
When I was at AWS over a decade ago, there was endless complaints about the elevator algorithms by engineers, with the usual egotistical tech-bro insistence that they could do better.

Someone got really tired of it, and somehow organised a hackathon weekend, with the elevator company, and let teams of engineers have at it.

Every single team failed to come up with better algorithms. All the complaints stopped dead.
by renewiltord | 2026-03-04 17:01:19+00:00
> Academia is so cutthroat that anyone who righteously gives up an advantage will be outcompeted by someone who has fewer scruples. What we have here is a collective action problem.

And what, pray tell, is this advantage? If there is no utility to anyone in publishing in Science or Nature then how can it be an advantage.

I suspect it’s simply that these guys are a curation service. They separate the cranks from the science. They can be imperfect at this so long as important people separate the cranks from the science.

This kind of winnowing is pretty useful in general. Many universities are pretty much that and people pay to attend them.

It makes sense that a credentialing service would charge for the credential. It doesn’t make that much sense to say “no credentials allowed; you and timecube guy must be considered the same”. I want you to show your credentials. We all do because science is an empirical field and empiricism depends on facts. I cannot process your paper with pure reason.

If you looked under the microscope and saw light I don’t know that you didn’t. At scale I need someone to figure out “this wasn’t a Photoshop situation; that’s totally fluorescence”. Arguing that we should remove these organizations is similar to saying you should remove diplomas and so on. Anyone can continue to attend universities. They just can’t hand out diplomas. So no credentials. Only learning. Simple thing. Or perhaps not so.

The credential is the useful thing.
by david-gpu | 2026-03-04 17:01:36+00:00
> none of those organizations ever trained me at anything at all

They trained us repeatedly not to bribe foreign government officials, even though I had zero access to anybody like that. There was also some mandatory training against harassing coworkers. I.e. "protect the company from lawsuits" training, not "here are some ideas for how to do your job more effectively" training. They were megacorps, too.
by SigmundA | 2026-03-04 17:01:46+00:00
No it cannot cache query plans between processes (connections) and the only way it can cache in the same process in the same connection is by the client manually preparing it, this was how the big boys did it 30 years ago, not anymore.

Was common guidance back in the day to use stored procedures for all application access code because they where cached in MSSQL (which PG doesn't even do). Then around 2000 it started caching based on statement text and that became much less important.

You would only used prepared statements if doing a bunch of inserts in a loop or something and it has a very small benefit now days only because its not sending the same text over the network over and over and hashing to lookup plan.
Show HN: Health optimization as agent-guiding gradient descent
by dingmuti | 2026-03-04 17:01:52+00:00
How do we write code for humans with agents? Not all agents are current on the latest longevity and mortality research, but they're surprisingly good at two things: translating messy data formats and interpreting simple loss functions.
The idea here is to encode recent research into a loss function spanning seven physiological domains. The agent just has to parse your raw test data, run the script, and read a gradient table telling you which inputs have the most personal leverage on reducing the loss. The research lives in the function — the agent doesn't need to know medicine.
If you have health data (or feel like mocking up sample test results) and an agent, I'd be curious whether your agent can work with this with no hand-holding. And I'm genuinely uncertain whether the scoring decisions encoded in the function are right — some of them deviate from standard clinical guidance. Would love to hear where people think I got it wrong.
by danielhanchen | 2026-03-04 17:02:08+00:00
Function calling and also finetuning with FC is a big use-case across any companies - we constantly see large orgs have internal APIs with some schema, and JSON guided output is good, but finetuning with FC is just much more powerful since the model actually starts to understand how to utilize the tools more effectively!

Nice work with Gemma and Gemini as usual! :) Excited for more cool models this year!
by nopurpose | 2026-03-04 17:02:13+00:00
they can recognise on the informal level, but you can't put it into end of the year review document. What it will be? "Kept N PRs from introducing cruft into our systems?". Fixing or building things is much more visible, than just maintaining high standards.

Worse, to suggest a simpler approach checking existing products/APIs or even preparing toy prototype is required to be confident in own advice. This hidden work is left entirely unnoticed even by well meaning managers/engineers: they simply don't know if you knew or had to discover simpler solution.
by orthogonal_cube | 2026-03-04 17:02:28+00:00
Physical durability will play a major factor here. If schools are expected to provide the Chromebooks then it will all boil down to the level of abuse/neglect the hardware can handle.

Replacing a low-resale value $250 Chromebook that is equally sensitive to being dropped, exposed to liquids, or having debris get into hinges and keyboards will be heavily favored over a $500 MB Neo. The Neo’s processor and storage may have better lifetime but it doesn’t mean anything if the equipment ends up bricked.

Schools in affluent areas may favor these for reasons you state. Judging on how students treat textbooks though should demonstrate how short the lifespan would turn out to be.
by JosephjackJR | 2026-03-04 17:02:34+00:00
I built a local-first AI memory engine for agents and edge systems. It uses a Binary Lattice instead of vectors. Fixed-size nodes with arithmetic addressing, so lookups are O(1) by ID and O(k) by prefix where k is result count not corpus size. Scales to 50M+ nodes beyond RAM via mmap with no performance cliff.

Real numbers from my machine. Direct node lookup: 19us. Prefix queries over 10k nodes: 28-80us with zero embedding model. 280x faster than local vector DB at 10k nodes. Full agent context rebuilt from cold start in under 1ms. ACID durable via WAL tested across 60 crash scenarios with zero data loss. Validated on Jetson Orin Nano at 192ns hot reads.

The core idea is that most agent memory is structured not fuzzy. User preferences, learned facts, task stores, conversation history. You know what you're looking for. Prefix-semantic naming replaces vector similarity entirely for these workloads. No embedding model. No GPU. No cloud call.

The robotics use case is what I find most interesting. A robot learns its environment during operation. Which door sticks, which patient has a latex allergy, which corridor is slippery. Power cuts out. Robot reboots cold. Every memory restores in milliseconds via WAL recovery. No internet required. Works in a Faraday cage, underground, on a factory floor.

It is not a vector DB replacement. For fuzzy similarity search over unstructured documents Qdrant and Chroma are the right tools. Synrix is the memory layer for structured agent workloads where you control the naming.

Curious whether anyone has hit the structured vs fuzzy memory problem in production and how you solved it.
by swalihkk | 2026-03-04 17:02:45+00:00
Location: Kozhikode, India (IST, UTC+5:30)

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: React, TypeScript, JavaScript, Node.js, Python, FastAPI,
Web Components, Tailwind CSS, Redux, Fabric.js, TLDraw SDK, shadcn/ui,
Radix UI, LangChain, ChromaDB, RAG, Rive Animation, GraphQL

Portfolio: swalih-kolakkadan.vercel.app

Email: swalihkolakkadan@gmail.com

Senior frontend engineer with 5.5 years working on large-scale production interfaces in fintech and media. Built a JavaScript grid library at Mediaocean that was adopted across their entire platform, a canvas-based ad tool at Circle K, and a white-label Forex trading platform with a real-time pricing widget and design system at StoneX.
On the side I built a portfolio avatar that lip-syncs in real time using Rive, Amazon Polly, and phoneme-to-viseme mapping, backed by ChromaDB and Gemini.
Looking for remote frontend or full-stack roles at product companies or startups.
by monegator | 2026-03-04 17:02:48+00:00
I'd be glad to try one (either blue or piss colored). If it really comes at 600€. Though it would already be 100€ too much unless it gets liberated to run linux at some point.

My fear is that it's going to be made useless in no time with software updates, or that it has some important limitation (like i can't use XCode command line tools)... But i wanted to replace my old mid 2012 for a couple of years and i decided the next laptop would be either ARM or RiscV (browsing, writing text, scripting, light programming)
by cs702 | 2026-03-04 17:03:00+00:00
The OP is exactly right, in my view: the current charade of paywalled-journal "peer review" is broken beyond repair.

See also from the same author:

* https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-...

* https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-dance-of-the-nake...

* https://www.experimental-history.com/p/lets-build-a-fleet-an...
by tdb7893 | 2026-03-04 17:03:08+00:00
My experience with grad school is that they are shockingly stuck in their ways when it comes to organizational practices. They make even large tech companies look nimble.

Though at least in my field part of that is budgets are so tight it seems like most of the effort is needed to just keep the lights on. I don't see anyone who has bandwidth to help burn things down or rebuild in my department as much of the staff are already working unpaid overtime (and good luck getting funding for hiring many more).
by PaulHoule | 2026-03-04 17:03:21+00:00
With the strange position of French philosophy in the anglosphere I guess the right needs a French philosopher. I mean, you see popular books about French theory in normal countries, like Japan, but because the French colonized Britain, English is packed with high-fallutin' words from French (L'Ensemble, Quotodien, ...) that make undertranslated texts reek with assumed superiority, French theory puts the "gate" in "gatekeeping" of our academy.
by radicality | 2026-03-04 17:03:28+00:00
On topic of just data requests from OpenAI - this article says “Be aware that this process isn’t instant”

I did notice this an wonder what changed - I do periodic data backups of various services, and up until recently it was impressive, as ChatGPTs email with data zip file link arrived maybe within 1-3 min of the request, for around a ~1GB file.
I have similar amount of data now (even less, I pruned some), yet now the file takes a really long time to prepare and receive.
by snowwrestler | 2026-03-04 17:03:58+00:00
You've provided evidence that prominent journals experience retractions, fraudulent results, etc. All true. But it is not the job of peer reviewers to decide what gets published.

You've provided evidence that peer-reviewed science often turns out to be incomplete, inaccurate, wrong, fraudulent etc. All true. But it is not the job of peer reviewers to assure completeness, accuracy, or freedom from fraud.

A peer reviewer reads a paper and make comments on it. That's it! They don't check primary data, they don't investigate methods, they don't interrogate scientists, they don't re-run experiments just to double check. They assist a journal's editors in editing--that's it.

The check on published scientific results is the scientific process itself, not the publishing process. Prominent results attract further investigation, which confirms or disproves the reality of the underlying phenomena. Again: that's not the job of peer review.

Do some people ascribe too much authority to peer review? Yes, for sure. IMO your comments in this thread are exacerbating that problem, not addressing it.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-03-04 17:04:18+00:00
> These aren't just average, every day random people getting taken out by AIs, they have existing, extreme mental illness.

How do you know that? The concern is precisely that this isn't the case, and LLM roleplay is capable of "hooking" people going through psychologically normal sadness or distress. That's what the family believes happened in this story.
by zackmorris | 2026-03-04 17:04:41+00:00
I wish the project said how many CPUs could be run simultaneously on one GPU.

It might be worth having a CPU that's 100 times slower (25 MHz) if 1000 of them could be run simultaneously to potentially reach a 10 times speedup for embarrassingly parallel computation. But starting from a hole that's 625000x slower seems unlikely to lead to practical applications. Still a cool project though!
Ask HN: Maintainers, do LLM-only users often clutter your issues/PRs?
by lucrbvi | 2026-03-04 17:04:42+00:00
I'm asking this because I recently opened a PR to fix a vulnerability in an OSS project (RCE via pickle deserialization in Python). A day later, I got a fully LLM-generated comment claiming my approach was wrong and that I should rewrite it differently and telling the maintainers he could contribute "if the project is open to a more surgical refactoring."

It's astonishing how often these encounters have been happening lately.

I'd love to hear from contributors or maintainers whether this happens to them and how they deal with it.
by butILoveLife | 2026-03-04 17:05:27+00:00
Weirdly, I do have my contributions to science. I run a pretty popular blog, 250k-1M users per year.

Academia will refer to my stuff. Various levels of the US government use my data.

To be honest, I think I got lucky + I was a (hardcore) Stoic for a decade + my hobby was scientific.
by markus_zhang | 2026-03-04 17:05:52+00:00
Yeah, my life is gonna be a hell lot better if I don’t have to work. This is the 3rd day of my first vacation of the year and I already feel a bit better.

Of course the more into a job the less flexible the vacations become. I probably don’t want to be a staff engineer or a lead for that reason. A senior engineer is the best thing in the engineering world, if you don’t like the job.
by condensedcrab | 2026-03-04 17:05:58+00:00
It's interesting progression from Gas Town, but it seems like the bottleneck is still translating ideas into actionable input/output frameworks for various agentic tasks.

Also there's the issue of how to identify systems-interface problems and posting those tasks for completion as well. No guarantee that a totally federated system will not solve interfacial issues faster than they generate them without feedback and oversight.
by akdev1l | 2026-03-04 17:06:04+00:00
MacOS is crazy efficient and can overcommit quite a lot.

I used an M1 Pro for a couple years to work. 8GB of ram but routinely using 12GB including swap.

Now, I couldn’t keep slack and outlook open so there were limitations but I was able to work. People are underestimating the usefulness of 8GB of RAM.

I guess it is also worth saying that I do my work by connecting to a remote server where I do the actual development and everything else. The Mac itself being a web browser and ssh machine
by quectophoton | 2026-03-04 17:06:12+00:00
> Language is filled with those types of phrases, the one which bugs me once it was pointed out (even though I use it myself) is "to be honest...", which could carry the implication anything said without that qualifier may be dishonest.

Supernatural highlights this on S1E08, at 27:28. Dean was talking with someone and starts saying "the truth is" but the other person instantly cuts him off saying "you know who starts their sentences with 'the truth is'? Liars".
by thewebguyd | 2026-03-04 17:06:12+00:00
Makes sense. There's plenty of freely available code and data online for using web tech. Any number of free online bootcamps spawned in the mid 2010s are full of "Become a React developer in 6 months" type of content.

Native, especially on Windows and macOS, have been the domain of proprietary apps there's not much code outside of tutorials online to train a model on outside of official documentation.

I made a couple of small menu bar utilities for mac using Gemini, and it was OK at best. Kept wanting to use deprecated APIs, but with a lot of handholding I got them to work.

Would be neat to see Apple put out their own model specifically for Swift/SwiftUI
by faxmeyourcode | 2026-03-04 17:06:32+00:00
Labeling or categorization tasks like this are the bread and butter of small fine tuned models. Especially if you need outputs in a specific json format or whatever.

I did an experiment where I did very simple SFT on Mistral 7b and it was extremely good at converting receipt images into structured json outputs and I only used 1,000 examples. The difficulty is trying to get a diverse enough set of examples, evaling, etc.

If you have great data with simple input output pairs, you should really give it a shot.
Show HN: Kurojaku – Sudoku and Blackjack
by z-10 | 2026-03-04 17:06:57+00:00
While experimenting with ChatGPT codex, I asked it to port my MonoGame pet project into a browser game. It took 20 minutes to get playable version and another 10 to iron out Safari iOS bugs. I don’t think software engineering means what it used to mean anymore.
by tedd4u | 2026-03-04 17:07:33+00:00
Will prepaid SIMs from outside Mexico no longer be able to roam onto Mexican mobile phone networks? Another problem. Given the notorious corruption my guess is it will just cost $xx to get a fake CURP. I'm sure there are other ways to circumvent. This leaves criminals with ample opportunities to avoid effective tracking but leaves out the legitimately at-risk populations mentioned in the article.