MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tony_cannistra | 2026-03-12 21:40:43+00:00
I agree with all that. Maybe the word isn't "blame," then. Surely there must be some code, perhaps moral or ethical, but ideally more rigorously enforcible, which ought to prevent the development of intentionally deceiving tools. Sure you could say this about all software, but that which can cause actual physical harm ought to be held to a higher standard.
by lich_king | 2026-03-12 21:40:45+00:00
> In practice this still doesn't mean 50 % of white collar can't be automated though.

Let me ask you this, though: what percentage of white collar jobs could have been automated or eliminated, if we wanted to, prior to LLMs?

Meta has nearly 80k employees to essentially run two websites and two mobile apps. There were 18k people working at LinkedIn! Many big tech companies are basically massive job programs with some product on the side, most employees supporting various aspects of the internal bureaucracy... administrative business partners, program managers, employee relations, tech writers, layers upon layers of management... engineers writing cafe menu apps, and on and on.

I can see AI producing shifts in the industry by reducing demand for meaningful work, but I doubt the outcome here is mass unemployment. There's an endless supply of bs jobs as long as the money is flowing.
by conartist6 | 2026-03-12 21:41:29+00:00
If it didn't erase accountability, how would it create any value?

Many people are treating this as a matter of philosophy, which it isn't.

At a primitive, physiological level if you delegate to AI and most of the time you don't get in trouble for it, the resulting relationship you have with the AI could only be called "trust".

If you're expected to be 40% more productive at your job, your employer is making it crystal clear that you will trust the AI or you will be fired. Even if nobody ever said it, the sales pitch is that AI does the work and people are mostly there to be their servants whose role is to keep them fed with decisions we want made but don't want to be responsible for making.
by sssilver | 2026-03-12 21:41:49+00:00
The supply/demand picture here is more complicated than it looks.

If AI displaces human educators, yes, their supply shrinks -- but we can't assume what direction its demand will go.

We've seen this pattern before: as recorded music became free, live performance got more expensive, and therefore much less accessible than it used to be.

What's likely to happen is that "worse" (read: AI) education will become much cheaper, while "better" (read: in-person) education that involves human connection-driven benefits will become much less accessible compared to what it is today.

Most people may be consider it a win. It's certainly not a world I'm looking forward to.
by xml | 2026-03-12 21:41:56+00:00
I'd like to add a few failure modes:

- LLM removes/disables/weakens tests (disallowing manipulation of tests is not really possible in Python since the language is too dynamic, so the entire execution has to be sandboxed, which makes timing more difficult)

- LLM mutates input, which might throw off some tests (for example, sorting an array where all values have been set to zero is easy), but this can easily be solved by copying the input to somewhere safe or regenerating it from a fixed random seed.

- LLM writes code that only passes the test cases and nothing else, often with a new special case inserted after every failed test. Randomizing everything seems to be a good defense, although it is not always easy to know beforehand what to randomize. Tensor shapes are obvious, but randomizing data distribution to prevent circumvention via precision downgrades is difficult.

And regarding "10. Baseline Kernel" from the article; I've had LLMs call __import__ or compile and obfuscate the code in order to circumvent tests. The proposed defense of static analysis is not quite sufficient here.

I can relate to all points mentioned in the article. They really do happen in practice, and many are also applicable to test-driven development with LLMs. Is there any benchmark to evaluate whether an agent solves a task "in the spirit of the prompt" instead of simply solving it to pass tests?
by mnahkies | 2026-03-12 21:42:01+00:00
I like to follow conventional commit style, and some repos I work on have CI checks for it. It's been fixed now, but for a long time the validator we were using would reject commits that included long urls in the body (for exceeding the width limit).

It was enraging - I'm trying to provide references to explain the motivation of my changes, all my prose is nicely formated, but the bulleted list of references I've provided is rejecting my commit.

I generally think it's in the category of a social problem not a technical problem - communicate the expectations but don't dogmatically enforce them
by munk-a | 2026-03-12 21:42:09+00:00
It's both. It's good to acknowledge that AI is easy to misuse in this manner but it doesn't detract from the fact that the ultimate responsibility lies in those that should be verifying the tool output.

There is far too little skepticism around the magic box that solves all problems which is causing issues like this. It's not the fault of the AI (as if it could be assigned liability) for being misused, but this kind of misuse is far too common right now so scare stories like this are helpful and we should highlight the use of AI in mistakes like this.
by 1-more | 2026-03-12 21:42:10+00:00
This got me curious, and yeah it turns out Elm's dictionary implementation uses values, not pointers when retrieving values.

elm repl
---- Elm 0.19.1 ----------------------------------------------------------------
Say :help for help and :exit to exit! More at <https://elm-lang.org/0.19.1/repl>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> import Dict exposing (Dict)
> nan = 0/0
NaN : Float
> nan
NaN : Float
> nan == nan
False : Bool
> naan = 0/0
NaN : Float
> d = Dict.fromList [(nan, "a"), (naan, "b")]
Dict.fromList [(NaN,"a"),(NaN,"b")]
: Dict Float String
> Dict.toList d
[(NaN,"a"),(NaN,"b")]
: List ( Float, String )
> Dict.keys d
[NaN,NaN] : List Float
> Dict.get nan d
Nothing : Maybe String
> Dict.get naan d
Nothing : Maybe String
by bluGill | 2026-03-12 21:42:10+00:00
Age verification doens't solve my problems as a parent. Sure I'm worried about things like porn (I know some of the parents around me share a beer with their kids. I'm sure some give their kids porn. They might not buy tobacco, but only because that is now very out) - but that isn't my real problem. My real problem is my kids are using their devices to play game when they should do homework - often the games are just fine but only after the other things are done. (I'm sure this type of thing goes back to the first schools - kids reading the wrong scrolls.)

The parent controls on devices is terrible. Android won't let me block hotspot at all (which they have turned on so their can use their school device after I turn the router off for the night). I can limit a game to only 5 minutes - but they have a dozen games like and that is an hour between them all (both not enough to really get into the game, and way too much time when they really do need a study break). I can block youtube, but if there is an educational video they need I have to unblock everything not just that one (or a limited selection). There are new play a game websites popping up daily, and when they to every kid in school is playing until we block it (or more likely the school blocks it as they are all playing in class on the school device) - but trying to block all but a whitelisted set of websites is no better since there are so many legitimate ones teachers really do need kids to see.

When you read the above remember not only do I need a solution it needs to be one I can figure out. My degree is human-computer interaction and I'm not sure I can design something I as an expert could make work - but I still need something.

Again, this problem is not new. However parents are still mad about the situation and governments who don't really have any better ideas see a need to solve it.
by nuxi | 2026-03-12 21:42:14+00:00
golang doesn't statically link everything by default (anymore?), this is from FreeBSD:

$ ls -l axe
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 12830781 Mar 12 22:38 axe*

$ ldd axe
axe:
libthr.so.3 => /lib/libthr.so.3 (0xe2e74a1d000)
libc.so.7 => /lib/libc.so.7 (0xe2e74c27000)
libsys.so.7 => /lib/libsys.so.7 (0xe2e75de6000)
[vdso] (0xe2e7366b000)
by aziaziazi | 2026-03-12 21:42:17+00:00
Economy of scale and subsidies have a major influence on shelf prices. Is is a red flag to be a small producer and/or not profiting from public money? Some wouldn't cold-ban a product only base on it's price, especially if it's pioneering.

Being "certain that the negative environmental consequences are worse" seems an stretch from weak initial judgement.
by awesome_dude | 2026-03-12 21:42:34+00:00
I'm a little lost as to why seven teams duplicating effort is more "efficient" in any sense if the word than one or two teams working iteratively toward the same goal.

If this were seven government funded teams solving the same problem, people would lose their minds over the 'waste' But when private companies do it, we call it efficient market competition. The duplication is the same - we just frame it differently.

Edit: fixed some typos caused by fat fingers on a phone keyboard
by verdverm | 2026-03-12 21:42:45+00:00
Yes, very much so.

I've been able to get Gemini flash to be nearly as good as pro with the CC prompts. 1/10 the price 1/10 the cycle time. I find waiting 30s for the next turn painful now

https://github.com/Piebald-AI/claude-code-system-prompts
by mncharity | 2026-03-12 21:42:53+00:00
> I would love to see e.g. a butterfly image with a slider that I could drag to choose the wavelength shown!!

Here[1] are some 31-band hyperspectral images of butterflies. Numpy/pillow can unpack the .mat files into normal images. Then perhaps vibecode a slider, or just browse the band images?

[1] http://www.ok.sc.e.titech.ac.jp/res/MSI/MSIdata31.html (includes 8 butterfly 31-band hyperspectral visible-light images). These butterflies are also their VIS-SNIR dataset, and others.

I knew of the site having explored "First-tier physical-sciences graduate students are often deeply confused about color. Color is commonly taught, starting in K... very very poorly. So can we create K-3 interactive content centered around spectra, and give an actionable understanding of color?"
Show HN: Push-to-talk dictation for Android apps and terminal workflows
by pol_avec | 2026-03-12 21:43:23+00:00
I built this because MacWhisper is not available on Android and voice typing on Android is pretty bad. Moreover Gemini does not allow you to edit transcripts before they are auto-sent.

I like my SwiftKey keyboard though, so I did not want to replace that. So the only way was to make a floating push-to-talk button on top of any app.

You tap the overlay, speak, tap again, transcribe, and insert text into the currently focused field.

It supports local on-device transcription, cloud transcription with your own OpenAI key, and optional post-processing/cleanup for punctuation, formatting, prompts, commands, etc.

A nice use case for me has been Termux / terminal workflows on Android. You have a "dev mode" where you can just say "command mode" and anything after it will be converted into a proper CLI command.

The app is open source. No backend — in cloud mode requests go directly from the phone to OpenAI using the user's own API key.

Repo: https://github.com/kafkasl/phone-whisper
APK: https://github.com/kafkasl/phone-whisper/releases
by Hackbraten | 2026-03-12 21:43:35+00:00
Spotify requires Widevine CDM to run, and Firefox doesn't come with Widevine on Debian-based distros. The .so hasn't been available on arm64 except for ChromeOS. You can rip the .so out of ChromeOS (that's what RaspberryPi OS did). But ChromeOS uses its own flavor of libc so a couple of patches to glibc are required.

Same thing with YouTube. A few months ago, YouTube started to require Widevine CDM if one uses the m.youtube.com site. I can't use the non-mobile site on my phone for performance issues, so I'm essentially locked into Widevine for watching YouTube, too.
by jijji | 2026-03-12 21:43:44+00:00
forcing the OS to authenticate the age of the person using the machine? age verification can easily be done by using the DMV as a conduit or using login.gov as a conduit or using id.me as a conduit. these interfaces are already used by dozens of government agencies to authenticate citizens of the United States, and there doesn't need to be any special software installed on the machine
by ahmed-fathi | 2026-03-12 21:43:46+00:00
No single paper nails that exact claim. SWE-bench Princeton does show that models struggle significantly with real-world issues requiring changes across multiple files and functions which points in that direction. But the local vs global framing is mostly practitioner-observed, not a formally tested hypothesis yet. Fair point, I should have hedged it. https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.06770
by bethekidyouwant | 2026-03-12 21:44:01+00:00
I read the article and I don’t really understand… she was held in a jail in Tennessee but the article states they flew her to North Dakota? And somehow she’s a fugitive so that’s why she doesn’t get bail? but she’s a fugitive held in her own state in a holding facility? But then when they release her, she’s in North Dakota? So if some state says you’re a fugitive your home state will just hold you in jail until they come and put you on an airplane? Is that correct?
by recursivecaveat | 2026-03-12 21:44:02+00:00
Even if she was a read ringer (clearly not the same person to any human who glances at the image), common sense should tell you that among 340,000,000 Americans there are a lot of lookalikes. Clearly there's a kind of stupid belief in the mystic powers of an AI and a callous disregard for the well being of suspects. No one should be dragged 1000 miles and held for months based on a facial match, especially when exculpatory evidence was easily available.
by thegrimmest | 2026-03-12 21:44:14+00:00
> This is garbage hypercapitalist/libertarian ideology.

Go on then, how do you decide what people deserve? How do you negotiate with others who disagree with you?

> examples above like public libraries

I agree! The nice part about all these mechanisms is that they’re voluntary.

If you’re suggesting that The Engineer’s actions should be constrained entirely by his own conscience and social pressure, then we agree. No laws or compulsion required.
by hudtaylor | 2026-03-12 21:44:17+00:00
I run a full AI operations stack on an M4 Mac Mini — ClawdBot (Claude), OBS streaming a 24/7 WebGL simulation, Chrome for browser automation, 16 cron jobs, the whole thing. $599 machine.

Reality check: it works remarkably well for AI agent orchestration. The unified memory architecture means the agent, browser, and streaming can coexist without the memory wall you'd hit on x86. But running OBS alongside everything else does make it laggy — I've got an M5 MacBook Air (32GB) incoming and I'm planning to swap the Mini for a 64GB model to give more headroom.

For anyone considering Apple Silicon as an AI dev machine: the sweet spot is 64GB unified memory minimum if you want to run an agent + browser automation + anything else simultaneously. 32GB works but you feel the pressure. The M-series efficiency means you can leave it running 24/7 without worrying about your power bill, which matters when your AI agent literally never sleeps.
by stockresearcher | 2026-03-12 21:44:35+00:00
Be very, very careful.

Lenovo’s on-site service has changed into a massive security risk. They changed the terms within the last year or two. You have to give one of their contractors full remote admin access to your computer to “run diagnostics” before they’ll dispatch the onsite repairman.

This used to be a service worth every penny. But now: read the fine print carefully.
by munk-a | 2026-03-12 21:44:46+00:00
We also need to question how many people might go through the same process without eventual exoneration and how much going through this process costs individuals. Being falsely prosecuted comes usually imparts a permanent black mark in search results about the person (outside of places with sane laws like the EU) as well as causing stress or permanent injury.

Wrongly arrested individuals with mental disabilities have a history of physical abuse in jail potentially to the point of death.
by lucastonelli | 2026-03-12 21:45:06+00:00
Hey, there!

I've just launched Simple Blog API for people to be able to manage posts, publications articles and similar without hassle, and I'm looking for some tips on how to get my first customer. Care to help? Criticism will help as well xD.

What I have right now is very simple, but I hope to get it somehwere better.
by kazinator | 2026-03-12 21:45:07+00:00
Because it has an updating-feed-like structure, in which new items can appear.

Knowing that there are (N) new items is so useful (to some people), that as far back as the 1990s, we developed technology called "RSS" to give you this superpower over a website that doesn't provide anything of the sort. One that simply updates with new stuff when you hit refresh, with no UI to indicate what is new/changed.
by phendrenad2 | 2026-03-12 21:45:09+00:00
Whoever they are, they're staying VERY quiet. Usually, the group that's agitating for some stupid law or another isn't satisfied to simply slip it to lawmakers, they usually take to social media and post about how great the law is and praise said lawmaker for proposing it.

I'm watching, whoever you are. You can't hide forever. Your ego will eventually betray you.
by James_K | 2026-03-12 21:45:15+00:00
import Mathlib
def Goldbach := ∀ x : ℕ, Even x → x > 2 → ∃ (y z: ℕ), Nat.Prime y ∧ Nat.Prime z ∧ x = y + z

A short specification for the proof of the Goldbach conjecture in Lean. Much harder to implement though. Implementation details are always hidden by the interface, which makes it easier to specify than produce. The Curry-Howard correspondence means that Joel's position here is that any question is as hard to ask as answer, and any statement as hard to formulate as it is to prove, which is really just saying that all describable statements are true.
by hudtaylor | 2026-03-12 21:45:31+00:00
I run an AI agent that deploys production code across 4 live products. The self-correction capability is real but undersold in these debates.

Examples from the last month: the agent found its own API keys in environment files after initially claiming it didn't have them (lesson: grep before asking). It caught itself about to run a destructive database migration on a shared production instance and stopped. It fixed 8 broken RSS feed configurations that had been silently failing for weeks without anyone noticing.

The pattern I've found: AI doesn't need to be perfect at writing code. It needs to be honest about what it doesn't know, aggressive about testing its own work, and operating under clear constraints about what's destructive vs. safe. We maintain a file called AGENTS.md with "sacred rules" — things the agent can never do without explicit approval. Database migrations, pricing changes, anything with --accept-data-loss.

The "no LLM" stance makes sense if you don't have guardrails. With the right constraints, AI-assisted code is faster AND safer than solo human development — because the agent never gets tired, never rushes before a deadline, and never thinks "I'll test that later."
by SlinkyOnStairs | 2026-03-12 21:46:41+00:00
> and to what extent is that legally acceptable.

De-jure, not at all.

Parallel creation is a very minimal defense to copyright infringement claims. It is practically impossible to prove in humans, to much annoyance of musicians. "Go prove in a court that you have never heard this song, not even in the background somewhere".

LLMs having been trained on all software they could get their hands on will fail this test. There is no parallel creation claim to be had. AI firms love to trot out the "they learn just like humans" which is both false and irrelevant; It's copyright when humans do it to. If you view a GPL'd repo and later reproduce the code unintentionally? Still copyright infringement.

De-facto though, things are different. The technical details behind LLMs are irrelevant. AI companies lie and frustrate discovery, whilst begging politicians to pass laws legalizing their copyright infringement.

There won't be a copyright reckoning, not anymore. All the dumb politicians think AI is going to bail out their economies.
by opo | 2026-03-12 21:46:42+00:00
Qualified immunity doesn't apply to criminal cases. It is used to defend against civil suits. It is unfortunately very easy to find many cases where it leads to injustice. For example:

>...Abby Tiscareno, a licensed daycare provider in Utah, was wrongfully convicted of felony child abuse when a child under her care suffered brain hemorrhaging. After calling emergency services, subsequent medical tests supported these findings. However, during her trial, requested medical records from the Utah Division of Child and Family Services (DCFS) were not provided. It wasn’t until a civil suit that Ms. Tiscareno saw pathology reports suggesting the injury could have occurred outside of her care. She was granted a new trial and acquitted. Her subsequent lawsuit for due process violations, alleging that DCFS failed to provide exculpatory evidence, was dismissed due to lack of precedent indicating DCFS’s obligation to produce such evidence.

https://innocenceproject.org/news/what-you-need-to-know-abou...
by mothballed | 2026-03-12 21:47:15+00:00
>* "Insane." Psychiatric hold. Three days. Due process on paper, not in practice. Police in my town can and do use this if they don't like you.

A friend of mine was committed longer than 3 days without council or the ability to represent themselves in the hearing. Apparently the whole process of being committed is ex parte in practice in some states.

At one point when I was brought to a hospital on false drug charges, they brought in nurses to curse and angrily make criminal accusations at me, trying to bait me into saying something to verbally defend against such brutal personal attacks so they could use it against me. I watched as two physicians carefully watched for my reaction and managed to just respond in the kindest way possible because I realized they were basically baiting me to do something to write up as evidence to support a committal.
by keybored | 2026-03-12 21:47:31+00:00
git int-trailers compatibility is a nonsense phrase. You don’t care about compatibility with a helper tool. You care about the tools that use them... and git log uses them.

> The format is optimised for agent querying and human readability

Yours is key value pairs. Trailers are key value pairs. The git log can be read by humans and agents... what’s even the differentiator here?

Agents that read English. But every little minutia of programming now needs something “for agents and humans”? Which is like colon-separated key value pairs... except they also have a scope in parens. Which makes all the difference to agents? tuts
by antdke | 2026-03-12 21:47:44+00:00
Yeah, anyone who’s used LLMs for a while would know that this conversation is a lost cause and the only option is to start fresh.

But, a common failure mode for those that are new to using LLMs, or use it very infrequently, is that they will try to salvage this conversation and continue it.

What they don’t understand is that this exchange has permanently rotted the context and will rear its head in ugly ways the longer the conversation goes.
by lbeckman314 | 2026-03-12 21:47:54+00:00
Good competition for Fatih Karakaya (@runners_pie)!

https://www.instagram.com/p/DCuSImnocL7 (November 23, 2024)

> Fatih is a master pastry chef and marathon runner, and he baked a Sachertorte during his marathon at the Ring Running Series at the Hockenheimring.

> Fatih ist Konditormeister und Marathonläufer und hat während seines Marathons bei den Ring Running Series am Hockenheimring eine Sachertorte gebacken.