MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bluGill | 2026-03-04 20:52:12+00:00
My companies makes potentially dangerous things like lawn mowers. We have a long set of training on how to handle safety issues that gets very complex. Our rules about safety issues is "design it out, then guard it out, and finally warn it out" - that is an ordered list so we cannot go to the next step until we take the previous as far as we can. (and every once in a while we [or a competitor] realize something new and have to revisit everything we sell for that new idea)

Courts will see these things for a while, but there have been enough examples of this type of thing that all AI vendors needs to either have some protection in their system. They can still say "we didn't think of this variation, and here is why it is different from what we have done before", but they can't tell the courts we had no idea people would do stupid things with AI - it is now well known.

I expect this type of thing to play out over many years in court. However I expect that any AI system that doesn't have protection against the common abuses like this that people do will get the owners fined - with fines increasing until they are either taken offline (because the owners can't afford to run them), or the problem fixed so it doesn't happen in the majority of cases.
by blinkybill | 2026-03-04 20:52:20+00:00
LLMs are limited by their interface which is usually chat/api. Once a web layer is placed in front of it LLM's can replace software entirely.

The question isn't when will software developers be replaced, but when will software be replaced? 18 months ago the models were dismissed as not good enough for complex development, today they are competently producing code.

If OpenAI/Anthropic integrate web end points into the LLM, introduce optimised models, internal data storage and pipelines, anyone could point their domain to an endpoint and serve up apps.
by ngruhn | 2026-03-04 20:52:37+00:00
I built a similar library in TypeScript (also based on regex derivatives). You can really built cool tools with complement / intersection. E.g.

1) regex equivalence checker (check if intersection of complements is empty):

https://gruhn.github.io/regex-utils/equiv-checker.html

2) password generator from regex constraints (16+ chars, at least on upper case char, etc). Just take the intersection of all constraints and generate random matches from that:

https://gruhn.github.io/regex-utils/password-generator.html
by vlovich123 | 2026-03-04 20:52:57+00:00
> Half the kernel is still built by individuals: people using gmail.com, personal domains, or university emails. The "corporate takeover" narrative is overstated. Companies contribute heavily, but the kernel remains a genuinely collaborative project.

Isn't the assumption here flawed? Someone may be employed by a corporation but still use their gmail/personal domain/university domain. This needs to be cross-correlated against some secondary source of employment data to give a more accurate picture.
by LeifCarrotson | 2026-03-04 20:53:13+00:00
Is the headline actually surprising to anyone? AI products that are currently live on a half dozen cloud providers are fueling thousands of people's various delusions right now.

No, the LLM itself is not a human, but the people running the LLM are real people and are culpable for the totally foreseeable outcomes of the tool they're selling.

The vendors will argue that the benefits that some people are gaining from access to those tools outweigh the harms that some other people like Jonathan (and like Joel, his father) are suffering. A benefit of saving a few seconds on an email and a harm of losing a life due to suicide are not equivalent. And sure, the open models are out there, but most users aren't running them locally: they're going through the cloud providers.

Same human responsibility chain applies to self-driving cars, BTW. If a Waymo obstructs an ambulance [1] then Tekedra Mawakana, Dmitri Dolgov, and the rest of the team should be considered to have collectively obstructed that ambulance.

[1]: https://www.axios.com/local/austin/2026/03/02/waymo-vehicle-...
by crazygringo | 2026-03-04 20:53:33+00:00
I don't know what to tell you. I change positions and move my iPad around a lot in ways that I can't do with my Macbook. Whether holding it up while in a recliner or airplane seat, resting it on my belly while in bed or on a couch... also it's in portrait mode which makes a huge difference too, so the top of the screen is higher.

It's smaller, it's lighter, it's by definition just way more flexible to use ergonomically. You can position it in lots of ways you can't position a larger 13" horizontal laptop.
by quotemstr | 2026-03-04 20:53:56+00:00
I like the comparison concept. It's like that "order of magnitudes every programmer should know" list, but applied to anyone who cares about energy.

That said, and hot take: people shouldn't worry about energy independent of what they pay for it. The whole point of a price is to fold a complicated manifold of scarcity-allocation into a set of scalars anyone can rank against each other. Appealing to people's sense of justice or duty to get them to use less energy than they'd otherwise be willing to buy is just asking them to lead a less utility-filled life than they can because you think you can allocate scarcity better than the market. I can't, and you can't either. Nobody can.

If you claim that people should listen to moralized pleadings and not the market because prices don't internalize certain externalities, duty is on you to get those externalities accounted so they can properly factor into prices, not apply ad-hoc patches on top of markets by manipulating people's emotions.
by allreduce | 2026-03-04 20:53:58+00:00
Honestly I feel like something important was yanked from under my feet. Computers were always an escape for me, then a starting career, something that helped me get started in life. Wow, those things I learned while spending nights making things move on the computer are actually worth something. And now a lot of it is just gone, worthless, right when I started having a bit of success. That wasn't supposed to happen.

Not that I can complain much, worse things have happened to better people bla bla. But it's disorienting. I still have non-automatable skills and enjoy learning, but who says they are not going to come up with Claude Opus 4.9 or something and turns out it can do that too, ha ha.

How is a young person supposed to establish themselves in this new world?
by fragmede | 2026-03-04 20:54:05+00:00
If you think the nightclub that scans your driver's license magstripe isn't selling your data off, when they could be making money off of it? Between PatronScan,Intellicheck, Scantek, and TokenWorks, yeah a dingy bar where it's a dude visually checking isn't it, but a nightclub and quick swipe totally is.
by saalweachter | 2026-03-04 20:54:07+00:00
I call it "the tool maker's dilemma".

It's like being a wood worker whose only projects are workshop benches and organizational cabinets for the tools you use to build workshop cabinets and benches.

Like, on some level it's a fine hobby, but at some point you want to remember what you actually wanted to build and work on that.
by antimatter15 | 2026-03-04 20:54:26+00:00
Another fun calculation is that due to special relativity, a hard drive that is spinning gains a certain amount of mass due to the rotational kinetic energy and E=mc^2.

Assuming the platter is 100g, 42mm, spinning at 7200RPM, there is about 25J of rotational kinetic energy, whose mass equivalent is 2.8x10^-13g (0.28 femtograms).

Assuming 200 electrons per NAND floating gate with 3bits/cell TLC on a 2TB SSD, there would be 5.3x10^14 electrons, weighing about 0.5 femtograms.
by LikeBeans | 2026-03-04 20:54:49+00:00
A while back I wanted more menu options with Firefox so I made an extension [1]. Basically when you highlight a word or a sentence on a page a menu popups up with some options like to copy, search, or lookup on Google maps. Or whatever option you want. I use it often and find it useful.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/popup-tooltip...
by andreadev | 2026-03-04 20:55:09+00:00
The bit about multiplication being ~12x faster than addition is worth pausing on. In silicon, addition is the "easy" operation — but here the complexity hierarchy completely inverts. Makes sense once you think about it: multiplication decomposes into parallel byte-pair lookups (which neural nets handle trivially as table approximation), while addition has a sequential carry chain you can't fully parallelize away.

Funny enough, analog computing had the same inversion — a Gilbert cell does multiplication cheaply, while addition needs more complex summing circuits. Completely different path to the same result.

What I haven't seen discussed: if the whole CPU is neural nets, the execution pipeline is differentiable end-to-end. You could backprop through program execution. Useless for booting Linux, but potentially interesting for program synthesis — learning instruction sequences via gradient descent instead of search. Feels like that's the more promising research direction here than trying to make it fast.
by bena | 2026-03-04 20:55:20+00:00
My first question was: "Is this whitewashing LLM energy usage?"

And yes, that seems to be the undercurrent here. Complete with linking to themselves to validate the data they used to make their estimates.

Either these companies need to build these massive data centers that consume massive amounts of electricity OR these LLMs don't use a lot of electricity.

You don't get both. If LLMs don't require a lot of electricity, then why are we building so much more capacity? If all of that capacity is required, then what is the real cost of sending a query to these LLMs?
by aetherspawn | 2026-03-04 20:55:42+00:00
Great, electrical and mechanical engineers are already underpaid, under appreciated and overworked.

I’ve always found it amusing that lawyers and accountants flash their license around with pride, put it in their email signatures, etc. and it provides authority for them. When people see chartered lawyer or accountant, they respect that person and take their advice.

An engineering license, on the other hand, is so rarely talked about and never quoted in email signatures and the like. And even as a chartered engineer, people really just treat you like a mechanic or a trade and mostly ignore your advice anyway. Yet, it takes the longest to get, and has the most exams/hardest subjects, except for Doctors.

Anything to make an Engineering license worth more is good in my books.
by kelseyfrog | 2026-03-04 20:55:54+00:00
Yes. Regular everyday people are not capable of doing this due to tech illiteracy.

People are not saying to themselves, "I could figure this out and I'm choosing not to." They don't even know it exists.

We have influenze vaccines and still, with their own lives on the line, hundreds of thousands of people die from the flu. The inconvenience is showing up at a Walgreens or CVS. They can't do it. We're expecting folks to understand mac and domain based allow lists?

Let me ask you this, if you asked your parents how they would secure their network for their grandchildren, that they would accomplish this solution on their own?
Show HN: I built a tamper-evident evidence system for AI agents
by Slaine | 2026-03-04 20:56:03+00:00
The demo loads two runs directly in your browser — no signup, no uploads, no network calls after page load.

Frank: a conservative agent. Verification returns VALID.
Phil: an aggressive agent with tampered evidence. Verification returns INVALID and points to the exact line where the chain breaks.

The problem I was solving: when an AI agent does something unexpected in production, the post-mortem usually comes down to "trust our logs." I wanted evidence that could cross trust boundaries — from engineering to security, compliance, or regulators — without asking anyone to trust a dashboard.

How it works:

- Every action, policy decision, and state transition is recorded into a hash-chained NDJSON event log
- Logs are sealed into evidence packs (ZIP) with manifests and signatures
- A verifier (also in the demo) validates integrity offline and returns VALID / INVALID / PARTIAL with machine-readable reason codes
- The same inputs always produce the same artifacts — so diffs are meaningful and replay is deterministic

The verifier and the UI are deliberately separated. The UI can be wrong. The verifier will still accept or reject based on cryptographic proof.

Built this before the recent public incidents around autonomous agents made it topical. Happy to answer questions about the architecture, the proof boundary design, or the gaps I'm still working on.
by gdubs | 2026-03-04 20:56:27+00:00
As I see my kids bring home Chromebooks from school, it has made me recently nostalgic for the Apple of the 90s in terms of their presence in education. Using my Science teacher's Performa to play Sim Ant after we finished our assignments, (or Oregon Trail before that on the lab of Apple IIs) – not to mention HyperCard, etc.

Anyway, updating my priors a bit with this Neo laptop. This feels like it could maybe spark some renewed excitement over Apple as a student / classroom device. If nothing else, the price makes it more of an option.
by eterm | 2026-03-04 20:57:04+00:00
It's possible that it already is, given there are already signs of the US administration leaning on AI. Perhaps they're leaning a bit too heavily and getting the kind of confirmation / feedback they crave?

If they then feedback to the AI the outcomes of current actions, who knows where that'll lead next?

I've seen some code reviews go like,

"Why did you write this async void"

"Claude said so".

Is that so far from:

"Why did you use nukes?"

"ChatGPT said so".

It's entirely possible that humanity simply follows AI to their doom.

Does that make me an AI doomer?
by mamcx | 2026-03-04 20:57:15+00:00
After reading the article I think the point stand. Not always but for example when working doing a RDBMS all the abstractions are active inhibitors and even hostile to do what should be done (easier) without all that.

And then you need to know that "no, all that IO sys call not do what you want, how yow want neither how is documented or even practiced by most" to take the most obvious case.

So, yes, this is a case where this quote is on point.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-03-04 20:57:22+00:00
One topic I have not seen discussed is why CDNs, one by one, stopped allowing "domain fronting" yet ECH, developed by people working at CDNs, essentially uses a similar tactic, i.e., two hostnames, only one of them actually needed

In truth ECH sends three: Host header + real SNI + dummy SNI
by davidvartanian | 2026-03-04 20:57:27+00:00
I've been thinking about this exact tension for the past few years while building tools for operational efficiency.
The real predictor of long‑term pain isn't complexity per se; it's interdependence. LLMs make writing code cheap, but they don't instinctively architect for modularity. They'll happily generate a tightly‑coupled monolith that "works" today but becomes a coordination nightmare tomorrow (same as with human-implemented poor architectures).
What I've observed (Prof. Christensen's modularity framework applies here) is that teams that treat LLMs as "fast writers" but enforce "good enough" modular interfaces (clear boundaries, well‑defined jobs‑to‑be‑done for each component) can scale without the usual debt explosion. Teams that let the LLM dictate the architecture end up with a "house of cards"; every change risks cascading failures.
So the measurable signal I'd look for isn't lines of code or even cyclomatic complexity; it's change‑propagation distance. How many other files/modules need updating when you modify one? That's a proxy for interdependence, and it's something static analysis can actually track.
On LLM‑based evaluation in CI: I'd trust it for spotting obvious anti‑patterns (e.g., "this function is 500 lines") but not for judging architectural coherence. That still requires human context about the business's actual jobs‑to‑be‑done.
Have others found useful heuristics for measuring interdependence in real codebases?
by fc417fc802 | 2026-03-04 20:57:31+00:00
Let's just clarify that visitors don't have the same rights as citizens. Whether or not you agree with the current administration's policies hopefully we can agree that it is entirely reasonable for them to deport foreign political dissidents more or less at their discretion.

If you want to put this to the test try crossing the Canadian border and when they ask you the purpose of your visit respond that it's to attend a protest.
by habinero | 2026-03-04 20:57:41+00:00
> At the same time, the public demands more oversight and constraints on police , which reduces their ability to enforce the law

Don't make excuses for them. If you're legally allowed to kill people on purpose, you (should) get oversight and tight constraints. We don't because of a lot of reasons, but we should

They get paid six figure salaries for not actually doing a whole lot, they can manage.
by Sabinus | 2026-03-04 20:57:42+00:00
"we don't think you'll fit in and follow the rules and you have to constantly prove that you can"

I speculate that if you were a permanent minority instead of a visiting inconvenience, then that 'nice' racism you describe would metastasize into the type of racism you see in the USA. It's more friction from time and exposure added on. And, you know, slavery.
by szmarczak | 2026-03-04 20:58:23+00:00
> Quoting one of your videos: "After 21 months, seeing these artifacts is certainly annoying". If I spend $3k on a monitor, it should _not_ be annoying after 2 years.

Why are you insisting to spend 3k? I've already said that 1k is enough. Also he said "but generally speaking it hasn't been a noticeable problem in most tasks". In the same productivity scenario, with a gray background, IPS backlight bleeding would've been even worse (unless you win the lottery and there's little to no bleeding). RTings showed this on many monitors (unfortunately they paywalled everything due to AI [1]).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DshOOs39vA

> It is an unavoidable part of how OLED works.

True.

> OLED is not the way to get there.

I'm not a screen scientist so I'll refrain from making a statement like this. I don't have anything to add. I guess we'll see how it pans out in the future.
by hrmtst93837 | 2026-03-04 20:58:28+00:00
I think most of these writeups are packaging familiar engineering moves into LLM-shaped language. In my experience the real value is operational: explicit tool interfaces, idempotent steps, checkpoints and durable workflows run in Temporal or Airflow, with Playwright for browser tasks and a vector DB for state so you can replay and debug failures. The tradeoff is extra latency, token cost and engineering overhead, so expect to spend most of your time on retries, schema validation and monitoring rather than on clever prompt hacks, and use function calling or JSON schemas to keep tool outputs predictable.
by simonw | 2026-03-04 20:58:34+00:00
> And there are going to be problems that come from using vast quantities of AI on a code base, especially of the form "created so much code my AI couldn't handle it anymore and neither could any of the humans involved". There's going to need to be a discussion on techniques on how to handle this. There's going to be characteristic problems and solutions.

That's essentially the thing we are calling "cognitive debt".

I have a chapter with one small thing to help address that here - https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-pattern... - but it's a much bigger topic and will require extensive exploration by the whole industry to figure out.
by XorNot | 2026-03-04 20:59:05+00:00
Frankly we're pretty manipulable by communications is the thing.

Which makes sense - the goal of communications is to change behavior. "There's a tiger over there!" Is meant to get someone to change their intended actions.

Lock anyone in a room with this thing (which people do to themselves quite effectively) and I think think this could happen to anyone.

There's a reason I aggressively filter ads and have various scripts killing parts of the web for me - infohazards are quite real and we're drowning in them.
by MathMonkeyMan | 2026-03-04 20:59:22+00:00
A former coworker was evaluating the cleanliness and structure of some non-free GeoIP data that took the form of several large CSV files. He was writing nested loops in Go that parsed the CSV and evaluated the predicates that interested him, and it was arduous and not going as quickly as he would like.

I told him to slurp it all into a sqlite database and to express his data integrity questions as SQL queries.

It was still a pain in the ass for him, but leveraging that tool made things go a lot better.
by lbreakjai | 2026-03-04 20:59:49+00:00
How much of that is true, and how much of that is to cover and protect the actual humans on the ground feeding most of the intelligence?

I doubt they'd let their secret leak so soon into the conflict if it was even half as useful as the articles I read claim. Now on the other hand, if I wanted the Iranian counterintelligence to waste time investigating and even taking the cameras offline ...
by NalNezumi | 2026-03-04 21:00:16+00:00
Maybe I should've added a line break between the sentence.

I'm fully aware of prof Mearsheimers credential, and what realism is. I'm also aware that the biggest proponent of realism with the most power at hand, was Henry Kissinger. Not the brightest shining beacon.

Their worldview is funny. A self fulfilling prophecy kind of take that is most often used to justify heinous behavior by saying "well everyone is doing it" and take a selective look at history and deriving some universal theory of international politics.

So I think the "using one parameter to explain everything" is an apt description of him. A hallmark of pop social science gifter pattern is when they try to apply that one thing to everything. Mearsheimer isn't (wasn't?) that until the podcast fame inevitably asked questions to him that is outside his expertise and audience capture, inevitably, kicked in
by nobleach | 2026-03-04 21:00:23+00:00
I convinced one boss to let me spike out a project with it. I was in love with OCaml at the time. OCaml's docs are... I'm just going to say it, they're terrible. F# on the other hand, has fantastic docs. In the end, the only real gripe I had was the significant whitespace. I'm just not a fan.
by BrunoBernardino | 2026-03-04 21:00:29+00:00
As a contributor, I haven't run into anything like that, but I haven't contributed to high-visibility OSS repos in the last few months, I believe.

From the other side (OSS maintainer here), I've had some issues, PRs, and emails which are clearly LLM-generated.

While they provoke in me a terrible first impression, I try to keep an empathic attitude and justify it by, for example, considering that some people might be able to read and understand code, thus make requests and suggestions, but not be fluent in English, so they don't feel comfortable not using these tools to assist them.

That being said, if it's clearly a bad, long, complicated, or unintelligible request, suggestion, or contribution, I'll reject it. It's my project, and many people trust me to not make terrible decisions, so if I don't understand it, I'll not accept it. You're always free to fork the project and move on with your changes.

Finally, I'll just say that my OSS projects have less than 2k stars in total in GH (one of them being 1.1k stars), so I might be too small to be targeted "to death" like I've read some projects to have been. If that happens, I'd probably close access to the code unless you pay a one-time fee.