MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
A small experiment in context aware storytelling on the web
by vibecoder21 | 2026-03-10 19:06:29+00:00
I recently stumbled across an interesting concept while browsing some indie storytelling projects online. It’s essentially a platform experimenting with context aware fiction short stories that subtly incorporate elements from the reader’s environment (time, device behavior, familiar digital patterns like messaging timestamps, etc.) to make the narrative feel more immersive.

What caught my attention wasn’t the story itself but the design idea behind it. Instead of building a full ARG or complex interactive game, the approach seems to rely on small contextual cues that readers already trust: things like system time, common app interfaces, and familiar UI behaviors. When those are blended into the narrative structure, it creates a strange effect where the reader briefly questions whether something is part of the story or just happening around them.

From a product/design perspective it feels like a lightweight way to experiment with interactive fiction without heavy infrastructure. You don’t need complex branching paths or game engines just clever writing paired with subtle contextual triggers.

The project I ran into was called pokostories, which seems to be exploring this idea with serialized short fiction.

Curious if anyone here has worked on similar approaches to narrative experiences on the web especially using simple browser or UI context to enhance immersion.
by pavon | 2026-03-10 19:06:37+00:00
Yeah. My problem with the em-dash is that it has too many uses (parenthetical statements, independent clause, verbal pauses) and as a reader you don't always know which one is intended until after you've read a bit past the em-dash, and might need to go back and reread the sentence once you figure out how it is supposed to be parsed. Use of semicolon and parenthesis are much clearer in contrast. The comma has the same problem to some extent. I would be happy if we could settle on consistently replacing some specific uses of comma with em-dash to make writing less ambiguous, but in the real world I find it clearer to just avoid the em-dash all around.
by codethief | 2026-03-10 19:06:42+00:00
Hi Ted, congratulations on shipping this! You clearly put a lot of thought into this!

> If the host wants the Mog program to be able to do I/O, it has to supply the functions that the Mog program will call.

Have you considered implementing this in terms of algebraic effects? After all, controlling side effects is not only useful at the boundary between host and agent-generated code but also within any given code base to separate pure from non-pure code. I suspect that functional code will be much easier to understand for LLMs at scale because of state locality. (I actually suspect the same for humans but it's hard to obtain good data to answer this.)
by TheGRS | 2026-03-10 19:07:03+00:00
The smartest thing they did with the US version of The Office after season 1 was to make Michael highly competent in sales and its longterm relationships. S1 and the UK version of the show viewed the boss as incompetent at every level, it was much more cynical. Making Michael marginally competent gives him an empathetic leg to stand on for the audience. Had they kept Michael exactly like David Brent it probably would have still been hilarious but flamed out around season 2 or 3.
by Groxx | 2026-03-10 19:07:09+00:00
this is equivalent to claiming that automation has no negative side effects at all.

we do often choose automation when possible (especially in computer realms), but there are endless examples in programing and other fields of not-so-surprising-in-retrospect failures due to how automation affects human behavior.

so it's clearly not true. what we're debating is the amount of harm, not if there is any.
by gus_massa | 2026-03-10 19:07:11+00:00
At some point the webpage says something like "You are deeper than the Mariana Trench" and also make a few jokes with other comparisons. I expect USA people to prefer to avoid SI units.

If the site where showing temperatures °C and °F option would be even more important. I can translate from feet and miles ($feets/3 and miles*1.5) and get a good estimation, but I can't translate from °F to °C in my head and know if I must use a hoodie or not.
by timmg | 2026-03-10 19:07:24+00:00
Somewhat orthogonal but: when do we expect "volunteer" groups to provide training data for LLMs for [edit: free] for (like) hobbyist kinds of things? (Or do we?)

Like wikipedia probably provides a significant amount of training for LLMs. And that is volunteer and free. (And I love the idea of it.)

But I can imagine (for example) board game enthusiasts to maybe want to have training data for games they love. Not just rules but strategies.

Or, really, any other kind of hobby.

That stuff (I guess) gets in training data by virtue of being on chat groups, etc. But I feel like an organized system (like wikipedia) would be much better.

And if these sets were available, I would expect the foundation model trainers would love to include it. And the results would be better models for those very enthusiasts.
by adrian_b | 2026-03-10 19:07:25+00:00
Pointers and indirect addressing were used in assembly languages and machine languages much earlier than that, perhaps even in some relay-based computers.

In any case, by 1954 already most or all electronic computers used this.

The only priority questions can refer to which are the first high-level programming languages that have used pointers.

In my opinion the first language having pointers with implicit dereferencing was CPL, published in 1963-08, and the first language having pointers with explicit dereferencing was Euler, published completely in 1966-01, but this feature had already been published in 1965-11. The first mainstream programming language, with a large installed base, which had pointers, was the revised IBM PL/I, starting with its version from 1966-07.

Thanks for the link to the book describing the "Kiev" computer. It seems an interesting computer for the year 1957, but it does not have anything to do with the use of pointers in high-level programming languages.

At the page indicated by you there is a description of what appears to be a symbolic assembler. The use of a symbolic assembly language was a great progress at that early date, because many of the first computer programs had been written directly in machine language, or just with a minimal translation, e.g. by using mnemonics instead of numeric opcodes.

However this does not have anything to do with HLL pointers and means to indicate indirect addressing in an assembly language have existed earlier, because they were strictly necessary for any computed that provided indirect addressing in hardware.

In the very first computers, the instructions were also used as pointers, so a program would modify the address field of an instruction, which was equivalent to assigning a new value to a pointer, before re-executing the instruction.

Later, to avoid the re-writing of instructions, both index registers and indirect addressing were introduced. Indirect addressing typically reserved one bit of an address to mark indirection. So when the CPU loaded a word from the memory, if the indirect addressing bit was set, it would interpret the remainder of the word as a new address, from which a new word would be loaded. This would be repeated if the new word also had the indirection bit set.

The assembly languages just had to use some symbol to indicate that the indirection bit must be set, which appears to have been "prime" for "Kiev".
by sodapopcan | 2026-03-10 19:08:27+00:00
The truth is in the middle somewhere, regarding tests at least (yes, your microservices story is insane).

I think the author could have been happier with the no-test decision if they had treated the initial work as a prototype with the idea of throwing it away.

At the same time, writing some tests, should not be seen as a waste of time since if you're even at all experienced with it, it's going to be faster than constantly reloading your browser or pressing up-up-up-up-up in a REPL to check progress (if you're doing the latter you are essentially doing a form of sorta reverse TDD).

So I dunno... I may be more in line with the idea that's a bit insane to prevent people from writing tests BUT so many people are so bad at writing tests that ya, for a go-gettem start up it could be the right call.

I certainly agree with your whole cost-benefit analysis paragraph.
by anigbrowl | 2026-03-10 19:08:36+00:00
A circus performer kept a troupe of monkeys and fed them 10 nuts each day. He fell on hard times and told the monkeys: 'from now on I can only give you seven nuts a day. I will give you three in the morning and four in the afternoon.' The monkey s were furious and raised a great clamor. 'Very well,' said the man, 'I will give you 4 nuts in the morning and 3 in the afternoon.' The monkeys were delighted.
by hkonte | 2026-03-10 19:08:42+00:00
The pedantic syntax focus vs. algorithmic reasoning problem usually comes from a loose role description. When "act as a senior engineer" is embedded in a prose system prompt, the model interpolates across all senior engineer behaviors.

Splitting it into separate blocks helps: a role block for the persona, a constraints block that explicitly rules out compiler-style syntax checks, a chain_of_thought block that prioritizes algorithmic reasoning. Each dimension is tunable without the others bleeding in.

I built flompt (github.com/Nyrok/flompt) for exactly this kind of tuning. It breaks prompts into 12 named semantic blocks so you can adjust one aspect cleanly. Might speed up the iteration cycle on your interviewer prompt.
by DaiTengu | 2026-03-10 19:08:50+00:00
There are two archives available. What ExecPC had before it was frozen in time, covering 1993-1997 or so, and an archive from "Starfleet HQ BBS"
https://breakintochat.com/collections/messages/fidonet/index...

A lot of current BBSes may have archives from the last 10 years or so. I know mine does: https://warensemble.com
by Razengan | 2026-03-10 19:09:13+00:00
> there is plenty of science making clear that it does

Funded, ran, and interpreted by whom?

I can't remember the last time I bought anything just because of its ad, that I already did not know about or was going to buy anyway, nor I know anyone who did.

In fact, if I see an ad TOO often, it permanently turns me off the product or service.

The whole ads racket seems like a case of an emperor with no clothes at best, and a thin veil for mass surveillance at worst.
by IshKebab | 2026-03-10 19:09:14+00:00
I'm not sure I agree. If you have a blanket "you must disclose how you use AI" policy it's socially very easy to say "can you disclose how you used AI", and then if they say Claude code wrote it, you can just ignore it, guilt-free.

Without that policy it feels rude to ask, and rude to ignore in case they didn't use AI.
by tacostakohashi | 2026-03-10 19:09:23+00:00
It's an interesting question.

Email has morphed into something quite different from when it started, and was a good way for humans to send messages to each other. That use case has mostly been supplanted by SMS, whatsapp, the social media app of the day, etc.

These days, it's really only used for that purpose mainly inside organizations, and "public" email seems to be overwhelmingly marketing material and automated notifications, with only the sporadic message from a human being. It's kind of functioning as what people wanted RSS to be.

The cynic in me would say that it survives because it is an effective tool for marketing, and the subscriptions / recipients are controlled by the sender.
by dlcarrier | 2026-03-10 19:09:23+00:00
There's definitely enough transistors in there for a microcontroller. It only takes a few thousand. If you're building a custom integrated circuit in the first place, the cost of a microcontroller core is relatively low, and often the cheapest option. The alternative is to write the logic in a hardware description language (HDL) like Verilog, and implement it with logic gates.

The microcontroller approach uses a fixed number of transistors, with cheap mask ROM scaling with complexity, whereas the HDL approach scales its transistor usage with complexity. The HDL approach usually runs much, much faster, is far less error prone, and takes longer to develop.

Which approach is better depends a lot on the application.
by ajross | 2026-03-10 19:09:48+00:00
> i dont intend to be on the side of flipping mcdonalds burgers

So say the kitchen staff at every Denny's too. And yet...

The analogy is apt, but your coping strategy falls down because of numbers. There aren't a lot of spots for those "chefs" to get paid like they expect.

Most HN commenters might have gotten by over the past decades thinking they were "talented chefs", but were really more like the "short order cooks" whose jobs got eaten by fast food.
by brandonb | 2026-03-10 19:10:17+00:00
The prediction task is set up as predicting the next measured biomarkers based on a week of wearable data. So it's not necessarily predicting into the future, but predicting dataset Y given dataset X.

The specific biomarkers being predicted are the ones most relevant to heart health, like cholesterol or HbA1c. These tend to be more stable from hour to hour -- they may vary on a timescale of weeks as you modify your diet or take medications.
by iamjackg | 2026-03-10 19:10:28+00:00
I find the concept of LLM "brain surgery" fascinating, precisely because of how opaque the network is. One of the first things I did back when llama.cpp first got vision model support was hack the code to zero out (or otherwise modify) random numbers in the image embedding generated by the projector and then ask the LLM to describe the image. It was absolutely fascinating.

It would go from a normal description of the item in the picture to suddenly seeing people clapping in the background that were not there, or making up some other stuff. I kinda stopped after a while, but I should pick that back up and do a more coherent experiment to see if I can find any correlation between vector dimensions and "meaning."
by johng | 2026-03-10 19:10:53+00:00
I had an ACiD hat that I bought from their store around 1995 or 1996.. I wasn't in the group, I was in a much lesser known group and only did ASCII art. Never could get my ANSI stuff to look good but damn did I love that hat. It looked like this..... guess this cigar company ripped off their logo: https://www.cigarscity.com/cdn/shop/products/ACID-Black-Hat-...
Summry – I replaced my mess of Make.com automations with this
by tetianad | 2026-03-10 19:11:45+00:00
I work in competitive intelligence. Needed to track competitor releases, publications, regulatory changes.

Started with Make.com. Built ~15 scenarios: pull sources, filter, summarize with GPT, email results. It worked. Until it became my second job. Scenarios broke silently. Only I could fix them. Every new tracking need meant another afternoon building another fragile workflow.

Then during a major industry event, all hands were on deck and the automations were sitting broken. Our CEO walked into a partnership meeting and found out our main competitive advantage had already been shipped — by the exact competitor sitting across the table. Nobody caught it.

So I built Summry properly.

You pick topics, choose tone and schedule, get a digest. Context-aware — no repetition across sends. No scenarios to maintain, no single person who "knows how it works."

Stack: Next.js, Supabase, Gemini for generation, Perplexity for sourcing.

Live now. 3 topics free → https://summry.io

Happy to answer questions, especially about the painful parts.
by thomasmg | 2026-03-10 19:11:47+00:00
I would be very interested in this research... I'm trying to write a language that is simple and concise like Python, but fast and statically typed. My gutfeeling is that more concise than Python (J, K, or some code golfing language) is bad for readability, but so is the verbosity of Rust, Zig, Java.
by abraxas | 2026-03-10 19:11:58+00:00
I agree with the sentiment but want to point out that the biggest drive behind UML was the enrichment of Rational Software and its founders. I doubt anyone ever succeeded in implementing anything useful with Rational Rose. But the Rational guys did have a phenomenal exit and that's probably the biggest success story of UML.

I'm being slightly facetious of course, I still use sequence diagrams and find them useful. The rest of its legacy though, not so much.
by galaxyLogic | 2026-03-10 19:12:01+00:00
Doesn't the big idea behind OpenClaw etc. come down to whether LLM knows what it doesn't know?

If it knows it doesn't know something it can ask someone else, presumably some other LLM-agent, or actually a Reddit-like community of them. Just like people ask questions on Reddit?

I'd prefer an LLM which asks from someone else if it doesn't know the answer, than one that a) pretends it has the correct answer, or b) assumes and tells me the answer is unknowable?

I think it's a big idea. Why didn't they think about it earlier.
by verdverm | 2026-03-10 19:12:04+00:00
Law is always nuanced and contextual. This is also a temporary restraining order, which means no verdict has been reached. The "jury is still out" on this one.

The judge finds Amazon likely to succeed on the merits for this case that involves specifics in how Perplexity worked, especially for the impact on other business activities, such as meeting their existing contractual relationships with advertisers.

The last paragraph does seem to indicate a strong yes to your last questions.
by opan | 2026-03-10 19:12:14+00:00
(n)vim can also do this, if you've set up an ssh alias in your ssh config for your multi-hop destination you just list it where the hostname would go. e.g.

nvim scp://remotemachine/.config/emacs/init.el

For the same reason you can use sshfs, sftp, and rsync with multi-hop. Gotta love openssh!
by eks391 | 2026-03-10 19:12:17+00:00
This is neat. I had a conversation recently basically concluding that "it would be nice if an identity solution existed where [everything you just said, consolidation of identity, but only providing the minimum for regulation, like age, location, or is-human, depending on the law a site is trying to follow], instead of [all the gross examples of identity consolidation abuse seen today and the source for ID company distrust]". I hope luck for you, so your product both maintains the vision long term, sustains market share for longevity purposes, and sets a standard for others to follow.
by h3lp | 2026-03-10 19:12:43+00:00
Any competent computer engineer can design a much better ISA than RISC-V.

Hello, my fellow bitter old man! I have to respectfully disagree, though. Firstly, RISC-V was actually designed by competent academic designers with four preceding RISC projects under their belt. The tenet of RISC philosophy is that the ISA is designed by careful measurement and simulation: the decisions are not supposed to be based on gut feeling or familiarity, but on optimizing the choices, which they arguably did.

Specifically, about detecting the overflow: the familiar, classic approach of a hardware overflow (V) flag is well known to be suboptimal, because of its effect on speculative and OoO implementations. RISC-V has enough primitives to handle an explicit overflow checking, and they are consistent with performance techniques such as branch prediction and macro fusing, to the point of having asymptotically vanishing cost--there can be no performance penalty. Even more so, the RISC-V code that does NOT care about overflow can completely ignore these checks.
by sodapopcan | 2026-03-10 19:12:44+00:00
Yes. TFA author could have gone into it with this mindset and treated the initial work as a prototype with the idea of throwing it away and would have been happier about it.

> but tests make a whole lot more sense when you know what you're building.

It's very true. This is a "gotcha" a lot of anti-TDDers always bring up, and yet some talk about "prototyping == good" without ever making the connection that you can do both.
by older_code | 2026-03-10 19:12:52+00:00
We're getting close to launching a SaaS version of Dovre (dovre-cyber.com). The essential tier will have a monthly cost of about $500. Customers can tune log ingestion and retention, and add services (MDR and more tools) according to their needs, all with transparent pricing. We're planning to sell directly to businesses, including small ones, but we've also taken care to include tools that make it suitable for reselling by MSPs and MSSPs, with or without their services added on top. We don't have SAT as part of the initial service offering, but it's on the roadmap, and will likely be added after the release of our email security gateway, scheduled for later this year. Feel free to reach out if you have questions or comments - I'd love to get your input on the ideal solution with regard to tool coverage, pricing and how to consume them. We don't have all the answers, but we're doing all we can to make a difference.
by basket_horse | 2026-03-10 19:13:32+00:00
This has been my experience exactly. V1 was custom built for a single client and they loved it. As we tried to expand to multiple clients the v1 was too narrowly scoped (both in UX and code architecture) so we did a full rewrite attempting to generalize the app across more workflows. V2 definitely expanded our client pool, but all our large v1 customers absolutely hated it.

We never did a full v3 rewrite, but it took about 4 years and many v3 redesigns of various features to get our legacy customers on board.
by pdonis | 2026-03-10 19:13:49+00:00
> I also don't think poverty is a complex problem, but that's a minor point.

I'm not sure it's a minor point. I don't think poverty is a "complex" problem either, as that term is used in the article, but that doesn't mean I think it fits into one of the other two categories in the article. I think it is in a fourth category that the article doesn't even consider.

For lack of a better term, I'll call that category "political". The key thing with this category of problems is that they are about fundamental conflicts of interest and values, and that's a different kind of problem from the kind the article talks about. We don't have poverty in the world because we lack accurate enough knowledge of how to create the wealth that brings people out of poverty. We have poverty in the world because there are people in positions of power all over the world who literally don't care about ending poverty, and who subvert attempts to do so--who make a living by stealing wealth instead of creating it, and don't care that that means making lots of other people poor.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-03-10 19:14:38+00:00
No in my case the “how” is

1. I spoke to sales to find out about the customer

2. I read every line of the contract (SOW)

3. I did the initial requirements gathering over a couple of days with the client - or maybe up to 3 weeks

3. I designed every single bit of AWS architecture and code

4. I did the design review with the client

5. I led the customer acceptance testing

> We as an industry have been able to offload a lot of “how” via deterministic systems built by humans with expert understanding. LLMs

I assure you the mid level developers or god forbid foreign contractors were not “experts” with 30 years of coding experience and at the time 8 years of pre LLM AWS experience. It’s been well over a decade - ironically before LLMs - that my responsibility was only for code I wrote with my own two hands
by thomastjeffery | 2026-03-10 19:14:42+00:00
Engagement is not discourse.

This is the core strategy of the alt-right playbook. By replacing discourse with engagement, the logical structure of politics becomes meaningless, and victory becomes automatic.

The playbook worked. The alt-right is in power now. We won't get the power back by playing the very game they destroyed.

So yes, this started as a different situation, but in the end, power is power.