MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Bender | 2026-03-12 15:38:24+00:00
Some figures estimate a ground force of 500K. That isn't really the problem though. We have about 700K+ violent criminals in prisons but they would have to be trained and serve combat tours in exchange for clemency. I do not know what percentage would be fit for duty. Beyond that we have millions that would volunteer for such an invasion. I have yet to see any movement on the underground missile cities. Those can not be reached by bunker busters or nukes. They are 500m under mountains. Their leaders could live in the underground cities for decades.

This propaganda channel [1] suggests we are destroying these complexes with a small bunker buster (BLU-109) but that does not align with the depth of 500m which the video even states is the depth of these missile cities. Something is off here.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYQJNpaZqmc
by lifis | 2026-03-12 15:38:29+00:00
As far as I can tell it's not a new language, but rather an alternative workflow for LLM-based development along with a tool that implements it.

The idea, IIUC, seems to be that instead of directly telling an LLM agent how to change the code, you keep markdown "spec" files describing what the code does and then the "codespeak" tool runs a diff on the spec files and tells the agent to make those changes; then you check the code and commit both updated specs and code.

It has the advantage that the prompts are all saved along with the source rather than lost, and in a format that lets you also look at the whole current specification.

The limitation seems to be that you can't modify the code yourself if you want the spec to reflect it (and also can't do LLM-driven changes that refer to the actual code), and also that in general it's not guaranteed that the spec actually reflects all important things about the program, so the code does also potentially contain "source" information (for example, maybe your want the background of a GUI to be white and it is so because the LLM happened to choose that, but it's not written in the spec).

The latter can maybe be mitigated by doing multiple generations and checking them all, but that multiplies LLM and verification costs.

Also it seems that the tool severely limits the configurability of the agentic generation process, although that's just a limitation of the specific tool.
by joe_mamba | 2026-03-12 15:38:35+00:00
>Meanwhile, the EU, Japan, SK, etc are moving towards renewables & nuclear as fast as they can.

Yeah, but current EU energy prices are as high as they ever been, so that doesn't help the EU manufacturing industry that in 10 years we'll be fossil fuel free, if they have to close shop in 12 months from the energy price hikes.
by phil21 | 2026-03-12 15:38:37+00:00
US Naval power has been drastically hollowed out - other than for strategic force projection for low intensity conflicts involving air strikes. Even for that, it's a shadow of what it once was.

This isn't the 1980's where we can surge 100 warships to an area of the world to deny the area or perform escort missions.

If we decided to 10x the Navy budget today and start building ships we'd be a couple decades out since we'd have to start from "train the ship building workforce" first principles to begin with.

Other than air power, the US has been operating off military (reputation) inertia for decades now.
by prpl | 2026-03-12 15:38:40+00:00
Waterfall came out when hardware and software had to be developed together, and appealed to traditional Engineering practitioners. You are right though, when the hardware constraints went away, software (more code) was cheaper and easier to ship in increments and iterate. But feature-rich products were still difficult to ship - and you had to pick and choose what things to spend your time on.

The SaaS-pocalypse is occurring versus investors don’t believe that to be true anymore.

I think they will still be wrong because ultimately people want people (particularly experts) to be held accountable for things - shipping high stakes software, running company ERPs/CRMs, and more.
by WJW | 2026-03-12 15:39:01+00:00
That is obviously true but doesn't mean as much as you seem to think. Washing laundry is also not much work but it adds up to a lot over the years, especially if you skip a few weeks of laundry every once in a while. That is not an excuse to not do it.

The answer is the same in both cases: acquire some discipline and treat maintenance with the respect it deserves.
by ninalanyon | 2026-03-12 15:39:03+00:00
> they're the only person who knows something quite important well enough.

Then either the organization needs to abandon that 'something' or create a structure that prevents such a situation arising.

If that 'something' is important then the organization has to provide some sort of guarantee of continuity or it is permanently just one road traffic accident from disaster. If it won't do that then it is tacitly admitting that the 'something' is not important.
by thisislife2 | 2026-03-12 15:39:20+00:00
From the American perspective it's a plus - If Russia is getting richer (when it desperately needs the cash) it has an incentive to not get involved in the Iran war (at least in the short-term). (Remember that just before the Iran invasion, US and some of its European allies were suddenly capturing Russian "shadow fleet" oil tankers and increasing pressure on India to cut down Russian oil, and its oil revenues dropped drastically). If Iran can be conquered, Americans gets richer, gain more influence in the middle-east and the Europe (to whom they'll sell the gas) while the Russians will lose much of their influence in the middle-east.

As for Ukraine, nobody in the west really cares for it - that proxy war has given all the dividends it can for the west (EU has cut off all economic ties with Russia, EU is now dependent again on the US for its energy thus making the US richer, EU's next generation have now been brainwashed to hate the Russians again, Finland and Sweden have been successfully pressurised to give up neutrality and join NATO, Finland and Sweden joining NATO means the Arctic Council is now dominated by NATO - Arctic is where the west will next try to cut off Russian influence, Ukraine - which had a large territory and the one of the largest military in Europe - has been cut down in size and is now totally economically and military dependent on the west in effect a vassal state) and the Ukraine war is a stalemate now, where Russians will make slow gains as their army grinds down and keeps losing soldiers - and that's a plus too. As Russia becomes weaker, another proxy war or even a direct attack against it can be waged later in the future (maybe after Putin?). American deep state always plans long term - Death by a 1000 cuts ...
by throwawaytea | 2026-03-12 15:39:40+00:00
Cool stuff.
Im actually a decent mechanic and it's what makes me dislike airplanes even more, especially the smaller private stuff.
I had a friend invite me over and over into his ultralight running a rotax motor. I never agreed to go because all I think about when I hear Rotax are all the jetskiis I knew in the 90s and early 2000s that would give you problems at least once every few lake outings. No thanks for that in the sky.
by naravara | 2026-03-12 15:39:46+00:00
Do you think “have a personal relationship with the farmer, slaughterhouse, and butcher” is a scalable solution? And if you happen to live near a cattle ranch and know your supply chain for beef, how are you going to establish a relationship with the guy selling you fish as well? Will you be making road trips to the coast to talk to some fishermen and ride along on their boats?

The instinct to see a bureaucratic system working poorly and resolving to opt out instead of fixing it is precisely why everything sucks right now. You can’t just work and vibe and spend your way out of living in an advanced industrial society.
by sublinear | 2026-03-12 15:40:30+00:00
> It precisely states the existence of some object than can be thought of as infinite but does not assign any semantics to it

Can you elaborate on this? I think many understand that the "existence of some object" implies there is some semantic difference even if there isn't a practical one.

I really enjoyed Wildberger's take back in high school and college. It can be far more intuitive to avoid unnecessary invocation of calculation and abstraction when possible.

I think the main thrust of his argument was that if we're going to give in to notions of infinity, irrationals, etc. it should be when they're truly needed. Most students are being given the opposite (as early as possible and with bad examples) to suit the limited time given in school. He then asks if/where we really need them at all, and has yet to be answered convincingly enough (probably only because nobody cares).
by alexc05 | 2026-03-12 15:40:33+00:00
this is really exciting and dovetails really closely with the project I'm working on.

I'm writing a language spec for an LLM runner that has the ability to chain prompts and hooks into workflows.

https://github.com/AlexChesser/ail

I'm writing the tool as proof of the spec. Still very much a pre-alpha phase, but I do have a working POC in that I can specify a series of prompts in my YAML language and execute the chain of commands in a local agent.

One of the "key steps" that I plan on designing is specifically an invocation interceptor. My underlying theory is that we would take whatever random series of prose that our human minds come up with and pass it through a prompt refinement engine:

> Clean up the following prompt in order to convert the user's intent
> into a structured prompt optimized for working with an LLM
> Be sure to follow appropriate modern standards based on current
> prompt engineering reasech. For example, limit the use of persona
> assignment in order to reduce hallucinations.
> If the user is asking for multiple actions, break the prompt
> into appropriate steps (**etc...)

That interceptor would then forward the well structured intent-parsed prompt to the LLM. I could really see a step where we say "take the crap I just said and
turn it into CodeSpeak"

What a fantastic tool. I'll definitely do a deep dive into this.
by nonameiguess | 2026-03-12 15:40:38+00:00
I'm always a bit confused in these discussions what is special about banking software of any kind at all. My bank has an app, but other than checking a balance every now and again, the only reason I use it is because it's also my insurance provider and I make claims through it. For actual banking, I don't really do any, through the website or the app. My pay is direct deposit. My purchases are on credit with payment details generally stored with the vendor; otherwise, I have cards or use the numbers. Monthly balance payoff is autopay. I had to go into the website once to set all that up however many years ago I don't remember, but people talk in these threads like they're in their banking apps directly moving money around all the time, actually making payments with the app. Why?
by h2zizzle | 2026-03-12 15:40:40+00:00
>It’s becoming The Capitol from Hunger Games.

DMV residents deserve jobs. The USDA provided valuable high school internships to many of my peers, and we did not go to the most well-funded school. Rural, low-population states already get tons of pork, and contend with much lower cost-of-living and housing prices, to boot.

Ragebait, and I'm starting to realize that your account exists largely for this reason. I wish there were a way to block users on HN.
by freediddy | 2026-03-12 15:40:45+00:00
If that's all you think tellers are then you're missing out on a lot of opportunities.

They are the first line of human-to-human contact with customers. They are able to sell new services or upsell existing services to customers, especially with the customer's data right in front of them. A new pleasant conversation plus "Oh by the way, did you know that you could get service ABC that would help you?" is something that an LLM or ATM can't do reliably.

There's a tremendous amount of opportunity available with well-trained tellers.
by ceejayoz | 2026-03-12 15:40:45+00:00
Having never heard of Dolton before, I certainly can't speak to their specifics. School systems can be pretty huge orgs requiring significant management expertise; no one blinks an eye when a CEO gets pay for similar responsibilities.

I've heard enough about Texas's high school football culture and the pressures on administrators over it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Stadium_(Allen,_Texas) for example.
by marcuschong | 2026-03-12 15:40:50+00:00
That's a big problem with very specific manifestations. My startup helps customers handle regulatory compliance, also by forwarding complex questions to a pool of consultants.

We've compared now more than a hundred replies to that of GPT Pro, and the quality is roughly the same. Sometimes a little worse, sometimes a little better. Always more detailed. Never unacceptable.

But how to convince our customers that we have the right technology and know how to use it appropriately? We're trying, but it's not easy.

Part of that's accountability. In the event of the LLM producing rubbish, as rare as it may be, who is accountable? There is not a person and her reputation attached to it.
by twelve40 | 2026-03-12 15:40:57+00:00
that's kind of an ad hominem, but also beside the point: most bank apps (and websites) are actually absolute garbage, especially the top ones, just one example: the Citi app (on different phones) for a very long time refused to allow me to make a payment or change my password, so i had no choice but to use desktop. Somehow still, top banks' ugly websites seem to allow more functionality/fewer bugs than their mobile apps, which are very often just dumbed-down webviews or simplifications of their websites.
by Aurornis | 2026-03-12 15:40:58+00:00
> Will there be some number of people that learn about the license plate trackers and buy a $500 beater and park it on the right street to "beat them"? Also absolutely.

I believe they’re using LPR at drop off and pick up too, so parking a $500 junker somewhere isn’t a workaround. They would have to drive to the parked car every morning, transfer into it, drive it to school, return to the parking location, swap cars again, and then repeat the entire routine for pick up. It all technically could be done, but as a parent who knows what it’s like to hustle multiple kids to school in the morning I doubt this routine would be a common workaround.
by mimasama | 2026-03-12 15:41:10+00:00
> My memory list isn’t populated with things Smart Window learned since I enabled it. Oh no.

> It has activity going back months. We’re talking searches and website interactions from long before I enabled this. features.

> Firefox just handed that history to the AI models to plough from, without telling me upfront.

Pretty concerning that Mozilla at this point has made sharing all of your browsing history the default, without even asking you about it. This is a beta version, which is pretty much like a release candidate in Firefox, being the next version to be published after all. This shouldn't have reached beta at all.
by dylan604 | 2026-03-12 15:41:14+00:00
If you consider a website working fully laden with ads. I have yet to find an ad blocker that works on my iOS/iPad OS that works as well as on my computer. I also hate apps with all of their invasive data hoarding that is much more controllable on my computer. So to me, websites on mobile are broken as they are full of malware vectors that are not present when looking at the same website on my non-mobile device. For me, website === desktop only
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-03-12 15:41:30+00:00
> Private equity has to be effectively a 0 before private credit takes any losses

Technically yes. But the overlap between private equity as it's commonly described and private credit is slim.

> average "recovery rate" for senior secured loans is 80%

Oooh, source? (I'm curious for when this was measured.)

> A loan modified and extended with added PIK that ultimately gets repaid is not a "true" default

True. It's a red flag, nonetheless.

> Every Asset Manager today could go out tomorrow, mark NAVs down by 20% and suddenly there is no crisis

Correct. The question is if 20% is enough, and if a 20% markdown creates a vicious cycle as funding for e.g. re- or follow-on financing dries up.

You seem knowledgable about this. I'm coming in as an equities man. Would you have some good sources you'd recommend that make the dovish cash for private credit today?
by lithobraking | 2026-03-12 15:41:31+00:00
The data [1] says that the gov is fairly spread out. According to the OPM site, 7.4% of USDA employees work in the DC area. California has more USDA employees (10.3%) than DC.

Including all agencies, _87%_ of all federal employees work outside DC. Additionally, the percentage of DC workers seems to be going down over time, at least according to their data going back to 2016.

[1] https://data.opm.gov/explore-data/analytics/location
by toomuchtodo | 2026-03-12 15:41:42+00:00
> but current EU energy prices are as high as they ever been

This is factually inaccurate.

Ember Energy: European electricity prices and costs - https://ember-energy.org/data/european-electricity-prices-an... (updated daily)

Ember Energy: Wind and solar generated more power than fossil fuels in the EU for the first time in 2025 - https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/wind-and-solar-gener... - January 22nd, 2026

Bloomberg: How Europe Ditched Russian Fossil Fuels With Spectacular Speed - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/ukraine-n...
| https://archive.today/yxGp2 - February 21st, 2023

> But what the past year has shown is that it’s possible to go harder and faster in deploying solar panels and batteries, reducing energy use, and permanently swapping out entrenched sources of fossil fuel.

> Solar installations across Europe increased by a record 40-gigawatts last year, up 35% compared with 2021, just shy of the most optimistic scenario from researchers at BloombergNEF. That jump was driven primarily by consumers who saw cheap solar panels as a way to cut their own energy bills. It essentially pushed the solar rollout ahead by a few years, hitting a level that will be sustained by EU policies.

(Europe has enough wind potential to power the world, their energy constraints are deployment rate of renewables, battery storage, and transmission)
by MBCook | 2026-03-12 15:41:58+00:00
I agree I don’t think it’s going to be something people really do.

I just thought it was neat. It’s a phone chip, we’ve never been able to do stuff like this on an Apple phone chip before. No one was porting this to the iPhone to run there.

In my mind this is purely a curiosity article, and I like that.
by toraway | 2026-03-12 15:42:03+00:00
Using LLM drafted writing often reduces the amount of effective information conveyed even if the output is perfectly formatted, fluent English.

When I receive an LLM written email at work, I start to question every specific detail because I have no idea if it actually came from the writer (and is therefore important), or was inserted as filler by a computer (and therefore irrelevant).

It wouldn’t be as much of a problem if everyone carefully edited the LLM output themselves before sending (although voice, tone, emotional context clues would still be elided). But in practice that doesn’t happen so you’re left with a mostly unreliable interlocutor.
by tialaramex | 2026-03-12 15:42:05+00:00
Unlike C++ all of Rust's primitive types get the same first class treatment as your user defined types and so the appropriate API is provided as methods on pointer types. For this you want ptr::map_addr which takes a callable (such as your own function for this mapping or a lambda) to fiddle with the pointer.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/primitive.pointer.html#method....

Rust's MIRI is able to run code which uses this (a strict provenance API) because although MIRI's pointers are some mysterious internal type, it can track that we mapped them to hide our tags, and then later mapped back from the tagged point to recover our "real" pointer and see that's fine.

This isn't an unsafe operation. Dereferencing a pointer is unsafe, but twiddling the bits is fine, it just means whoever writes the unsafe dereferencing part of your codebase needs to be very careful about these pointers e.g. making sure the ones you've smuggled a tag in aren't dereferenced 'cos that's Undefined Behaviour.

It's clear to me how this works in Rust, it's just unclear still in C++
by freedomben | 2026-03-12 15:42:25+00:00
I am/was a huge Ruby fanboy, and I used Rails a lot and loved it (though had some criticisms around too much "magic"). I made the jump to Elixir/Phoenix around 8 years ago, and have loved it. Phoenix to me basically "fixed" all the things I didn't like about Rails (basically opacity and hard-to-find-where-it's-happening stuff due to someone metaprogramming aggressively). I will admit that I've been a functional programming fan for a very long time too. I always write my ruby code in a functional style unless there's a good reason not to (which is increasingly rare).

I still love and use ruby a ton for scripting, and still reach for Sinatra for super simple server needs, but Phoenix is my go-to stack these days.

I've also found the Elixir community to be amazing in the same ways the Ruby community is/was. It's not all roses, for example there's not as many libraries out there. Distribution is also not awesome so for example I currently use ruby or rust when writing CLIs. But for anything distributed (especially web) Phoenix is amazing.

This is a self plug, but I did a conference talk introducing Ruby veterans to Elixir/Phoenix some years ago. It's probably aged a bit, but should still be pretty accurate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPWMBDTPMkQ

The original conference talk is here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSoz7q37KGE), though the made-for-youtube version above is better because it's slightly updated, and I didn't run out of time :-)
by morpheuskafka | 2026-03-12 15:42:37+00:00
This "feels like" first sentence / "curious if" ending question patterns seems to be coming from some LLM? I have seen the same across several online communities suddenly and frequently as of a few weeks ago. Notably the use of "I've seen" and "feels like" suggest the model is either prompted to act as a person or is one of the older models not strongly trained not to.
by the_duke | 2026-03-12 15:42:56+00:00
I think many have adopted "spec driven development" in the way you describe.

I found it works very well in once-off scenarios, but the specs often drift from the implementation.
Even if you let the model update the spec at the end, the next few work items will make parts of it obsolete.

Maybe that's exactly the goal that "codespeak" is trying to solve, but I'm skeptical this will work well without more formal specifications in the mix.