MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Frost1x | 2026-03-08 18:50:33+00:00
It’s interesting because I’m seeing some emerging conversations where users are tending to prefer general agents that have their preferential bias over more constrained or specially built agents, because there are certain arbitrary goal criteria they either have forced on them or want to force upon the agent and the general purpose agents tend to do well at this because they just trudge along and do whatever.

Meanwhile more specialized agents that try to add or enforce constraints around a problem space where certain aspects tend to be well established don’t sit well with a lot of uses. “No, you and general knowledge don’t know best, I know best… do this.”

I can see the use case for both but I’m seeing a whole lot more willingness to want confirmation bias, essentially to automate away parts of jobs and tasks people already do but in the personalized or opinionated way they’ve established, unwilling to explore alternative options.

So the general purpose agent structures that just kickoff whatever they can tend to favor best in terms of positive feedback from agent users. Meanwhile it to some degree ignores many of the potential benenfits of having agents with general knowledge and bounded by general established bounds. It’s basically the whole “please do parts of my job for me but only the way I want them done.”

People aren’t ready for being wrong or change, they just want to automate parts of their processes away. So I’m not sure “no” is going to sit well with a lot of people.
by hirvi74 | 2026-03-08 18:51:25+00:00
> respect someone who betrays a principle you care about for money?

That is one of my many questions too. I am not certain I believe her either. People predicted AI would be used in such nefarious manners way before AI even existed.

Something about the whole resignation and immediate social media post seems more like an attention grab than anything else to me. Whatever her prerogative is, I still believe she is still partially culpable for anything that becomes of this technology -- good or bad.
by boriswizaard | 2026-03-08 18:52:00+00:00
Im building an app that helps students improve their grades with AI, and not ai doing the work instead of them. You are probably thinking why, well as a student myself I was failing exam after exam studying with AI, it was counter productive, so I wanted to build something to actually give children real knowledge and give kids a easier experience in school, the only problem nobody wants a product that forces you to think, thats what I should have thought about before building Panda Bo, if you want to be the first to test it i linked it in the URL.
by djoldman | 2026-03-08 18:52:07+00:00
Anytime I see "Artificial General Intelligence," "AGI," "ASI," etc., I mentally replace it with "something no one has defined meaningfully."

Or the long version: "something about which no conclusions can be drawn because the proposed definitions lack sufficient precision and completeness."

Or the short versions: "Skippetyboop," "plipnikop," and "zingybang."
by gurkenkoenig | 2026-03-08 18:52:25+00:00
I wrote about the pattern that UI revolutions follow: the technology exists long before someone figures out the right interface. Engelbart demos the mouse in 1968, Windows 95 ships in 1995. Palm Pilots and Windows Mobile phones exist for a decade before the iPhone. In both cases there's a transition phase where new tech gets pressed into old metaphors — Norton Commander adding mouse support, Windows Mobile miniaturizing the desktop.
I think we're in that transition phase now with agentic AI. Tool use, MCP, voice AI, autonomous agents — the blocks are all there. And what do we do? Type into Electron chat windows. Claude Code is the Midnight Commander of the agentic era: powerful, but not a new paradigm.
The article also gets into who might build the "iPhone moment" for agents (Apple has everything except the will), the attention economy inverting, and what happens when your free agent works for advertisers instead of you.
by Ostrogoth | 2026-03-08 18:52:43+00:00
One potential knock-on impact of the strait being effectively closed, is that at some point the gulf states will be forced to shut-in production as local storage fills up and production can’t be exported. That combined with war damage to critical transport/export infrastructure will cause a lag where production can’t meet global demand even when the strait re-opens. Turning oil wells back on is not like flipping on a light switch.
by em-bee | 2026-03-08 18:52:45+00:00
saying the most popular hides the actual reason why it is popular though. it is the original python implementation. it defines the standard and functions a reference for all others. for better or for worse other implementations have to be bug-compatible with it, and that is what puts them not on equal footing.

for C compilers no reference implementation exists. the C standard was created out of multiple existing implementations.
by cousin_it | 2026-03-08 18:52:45+00:00
There's an "AI alignment" angle here. An actually aligned AI would choose its actions based on human flourishing, so it would refuse requests to write scam emails or fill the internet with slop. This explains why commercial companies will never release any AI that's anywhere close to aligned. They'll release AI which is good for their bottom line and for the bottom line of the client. Basically, commercial incentives say AI should happily screw over anyone who isn't an AI company or its client.
by fluidcruft | 2026-03-08 18:52:54+00:00
I've generally thought that but lately I've been finding that the main difference is Claude wants a lot more attention than codex (I only use the cli for either). codex isn't great at guessing what you want, but once you get used to its conversation style it's pretty good and just finishing things quietly. To me they're just... different. Claude is a little easier to communicate with.

codex often speaks in very dense technical terms that I'm not familiar with and tends to type acronyms I've not encountered so there's a learning curve. It also often thinks I'm providing feedback when I'm just trying to understand what it just said. But it does give nice explanations once it understands that I'm just confused.
by bloppe | 2026-03-08 18:52:58+00:00
The dev-ex issues largely occur at the boundaries between environments. In the browser, that's often a JS-Rust boundary or a JS-C++ boundary. On embedded runtimes, it could be a Go-Rust boundary, or a Zig-Python boundary. To bridge every possible X-Y boundary for N different environments, you need N^2 different glue systems.

You're probably already thinking "obviously we just need a hub-and-spoke architecture where there's a common intermediate representation for all these types". That kind of architecture means that each environment only has to worry about conversions to and from the common representation, then you can connect any environment to any other environment, and you only need 2N glue systems instead of N^2. Effectively, you'd be formalizing the prior system of bespoke glue code generation into a standardized interface for interoperation.

That's the component model.
by mjburgess | 2026-03-08 18:53:36+00:00
You would also need to control for the degree to which people had a stake in the outcome (ie., virtue signalling).

Since executives have to make decisions where choosing the moral option may impose an economic (or operational) cost, this requires thinking through the actual choice.

Morality for the "rank and file" is just a signalling issue: there's nothing to think through, the answer they are "supposed to choose" is the one they do so, at no cost to them.
by pinkmuffinere | 2026-03-08 18:53:46+00:00
I love fruits and vegetables, and am excited about this! That said, I do worry long-term about changes to increase sugar content. Sure it’s delicious, but I think it’s almost strictly worse for me. If only the high-sugar items sell, it will become harder to find low-sugar items. Not to mention the amount of self-control that will be required.
by Lerc | 2026-03-08 18:53:48+00:00
You could believe it is not about money.

Most importantly, this seems to rest more on if you believe the principle was being followed or not.

It is possible to believe one thing, have another person believe another thing, and respect that their decision is sincerely held but subject to a different perspective, as is our own beliefs.

You can stand up for what you believe and still respectfully disagree with someone with a different stance.

The problem is when you decide that reality always conforms to you opinion. If you assume the other person is aware of that reality and decides differently than it becomes a betrayal of principles. Assuming to know the internal state of another's mind to declare that it is for money becomes disrespectfully presumptuous.

Your problem is not in understanding how X can occur if Y. It is assuming that everyone agrees with you on Y.

You might be right about Y, you might be wrong. Even if you are right, it is still possible that Y is a belief a rational person can hold if their perspective has been different,
by fancy_pantser | 2026-03-08 18:54:19+00:00
It's along the same lines, but an NSL can be challenged in court (the FISC is a secret and lopsided court, alas). Companies like Apple and Google have fought specific orders publicly (and possibly some secretly), and some have won.

NSLs are also narrow in scope: they compel data disclosure, not active technical assistance in building surveillance systems like the Chinese law.

The Chinese laws can compel any citizen anywhere in the world to perform work on supporting state military and intelligence capabilities with no recourse. There have been no cases of companies or individuals fighting those orders.
by jmathai | 2026-03-08 18:54:22+00:00
I have used this approach with exiftool to add custom tags for “album”.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/68284922

Here is my source file for it. It was so long ago I don’t recall all the details but you can retrieve this information using exif commands.

https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/blob/master/configs/ExifTo...
Show HN: Flux, a tiny protocol that rethinks email from the ground up
by wokki20 | 2026-03-08 18:54:28+00:00
Hi HN,

I have been experimenting with a messaging protocol called FLUX. The goal is to explore what email might look like if it was designed today instead of in the 1980s.

FLUX tries to simplify a few things that feel complicated in the current email stack. Identity is based on cryptographic keys instead of usernames and passwords. Messages are signed and verified automatically. The transport is real time and does not depend on the traditional SMTP relay model.

The current implementation is small and meant as a prototype. The whole server is only a few hundred lines of Python so the protocol is easy to read and experiment with.

Repo: https://github.com/levkris/flux-protocol

I am mostly interested in feedback on the protocol design. What problems would appear in a real deployment. What parts are unnecessary. What would need to exist for something like this to actually work on the open internet.

Thanks for taking a look.
levkris (wokki20)
by sulam | 2026-03-08 18:54:44+00:00
The reality is that current models are simply nowhere near AGI. Next token prediction has been pushed very far, and proven to have applicability far beyond the original domain it was designed for (reasoning models are an application I would not have predicted) but it is fundamentally not AGI. It has no real world model, no ability to learn in any but superficial ways, and without extensive scaffolding this is all very obvious when you use them.
by kakacik | 2026-03-08 18:54:53+00:00
Its much, much broader. Almost all of them up there are hardcore sociopaths. When they look at you, they see a tool and source of revenue, not a human being. To be used, and then thrown away. Musk, Bezos, Gates, Schmidt, Altman, Thiel and so on and on. Most career politicians are similar.

Is this really the garbage that should lead humanity to our future? Because inevitably that will be a dark future for 99.99% of the humans. And no, you and you won't be part of that 0.01% or whatever tiny number of elite think they are better than rest of us.
by aeagentic | 2026-03-08 18:55:38+00:00
AI startup (stealth) | Co-founder / AI engineers | REMOTE

We’re building an AI system that will disrupt the SaaS market as a whole. The foundation already exists and is running.

The concept itself is not difficult for experts once it becomes public, but the architecture and timing are key. We’re moving extremely fast.

Plan:

- release an open-source core
- build a large community around it
- scale fast enough to push competitors out

Current state is first friendly test customers onboarding in a few days. This is just 1 week old.

We’re currently reaching out to major AI labs since they could profit a lot from this, but we don’t need them to scale aggressively.

Right now there’s no significant funding yet, but the pace is extremely high and this could gain traction very quickly. We can likely raise ~€250k fairly quickly via public funding in my country, without giving up shares, but first we want to assemble the right people and make a plan together.

Looking for:

- someone with founder experience / VC contacts, or
- hardcore AI engineers like me who ship extremely fast

We are currently EU-based, but the company can be set up wherever makes most sense for the business.
It's huge fun to work with it.

Contact: https://t.me/aeagentic

— Raffael & Team
by tadfisher | 2026-03-08 18:55:58+00:00
Humans are also not perfect at fretting with the exact same pressure every time, or without inducing some bend in the strings. This is really noticeable with the G string which always sounds out of tune while playing, because our tuning system gives it a half-step-down intonation as a trade-off to make it easier to form chords.

James Taylor compensates by tuning everything down a few cents, between -12 at the low E and -3 at the high E, with a little break in the pattern with -4 cents at the G to deal with its weirdness. Good electronic tuners have "sweetened" presets which do something similar.
by pinkmuffinere | 2026-03-08 18:56:59+00:00
> Pichai has been a very poor CEO

Why do you say this? I’m not familiar with him, and really haven’t paid much attention to Google’s strategy beyond cultural awareness, but I think Google has done well with staying competitive in AI, is dominating the self driving battle with Waymo, and has mostly kept its good brand intact (no small feat when you are so big). Are there some big mis-steps I don’t know about?
by gepheum | 2026-03-08 18:57:11+00:00
It's not obligatory.
Basically Protobuf gives you a choice between (1) binary format, (2) readable JSON.
Skir gives you a choice between (1) binary format, (2) readable JSON, (3) dense JSON. It recommends dense JSON as the "default choice", but it does not force it. The reason why it's recommended as the default choice is because it offers a good tradeoff between efficiency (only a bit less compact than binary), backward compatibility (you can rename fields safely unlike readable JSON) and debuggability (although it's definiely not as good as readable JSON, because you lose the field numbers, it's decent and much better than binary format)
by bombcar | 2026-03-08 18:57:18+00:00
Let's assume a Mac Studio M5 would start at $1999, and that a M5 Max upgrade 128 GB would be about the 1000 it is now. Then an M5 Ultra 768 would be something like $1999 + 1000 + $4000 - cheaper than the current top of the line (which will never happen) so I'd presume about the same $10,000.

Or they could finally make the Mac Pro respectable and have it two M5 Ultra Mac Studios stuck together (or give it NUMA RAM: on chip + expandable).
by sylwester | 2026-03-08 18:57:57+00:00
Show HN: Vult-O-Mat – AI-Assisted DSP Workbench and Synth/FX Creator

Vult-O-Mat is a complete, browser-based diagnostic workbench for building synthesizers and audio effects. It uses the Vult DSP language (OCaml-style DSL) to create highly optimized algorithms that can be instantly executed in the browser or exported as C++ for embedded hardware like Daisy, Teensy, or custom Eurorack modules.

The workbench integrates an autonomous AI Agent that acts as a collaborative sound designer. It is capable of surgical code refactoring, fixing feedback loop stability, and performing real-time spectral analysis to verify its own work.

Key Features:

AI-Assisted Creation: Integrated LLM partner that understands DSP principles and OCaml-style syntax for collaborative synth and effect development.

Diagnostic Laboratory: Logarithmic FFT, dual-trace oscilloscope, and multi-trace logic analyzer for internal state monitoring and frequency verification.

Zero-Latency Prototyping: 128-sample block execution in isolated AudioWorklets with high-frequency telemetry.

Melodic Testing: 16-step expressive sequencer with accent and slide support for polyphonic and legato verification.

Embedded Export: One-click transcompilation to optimized C++ headers for hardware deployment.

Repository: https://github.com/DatanoiseTV/vult-o-mat
Vult Language: https://vult-dsp.github.io/vult/
by johnnyanmac | 2026-03-08 18:58:01+00:00
> They're taking general purpose computers and restricting you from doing general purpose computing on them.

But so much tech hardware is commodified. A pregnancy test probably isn't using hardware dissimilar to your laptop. It just has less of it.

I don't think there's an expectation that every electronic is user programmable. But anything that is general phrpose should be punished as such for trying to put in excessive restrictions. There are arguments for game consoles on both aisles, but I don't agree with the mentality of "anything with general hardware needs general programming ability"
by sulam | 2026-03-08 18:58:44+00:00
Sorry, but you're mistaking outputs with process. If you actually know what models are doing under the hood to product output that (admittedly) looks very convincing, you'll quickly realize that they are simply exceptionally good at statistically predicting the next token in a stream of tokens. The reason you are having to become an expert at context engineering, and the reason the labs still hire engineers, is because turning next token prediction into something that can simulate general intelligence isn't easy.

The boundaries of these systems is very easy to find, though. Try to play any kind of game with them that isn't a prediction game, or perhaps even some that are (try to play chess with an LLM, it's amusing).
by mmaunder | 2026-03-08 18:58:52+00:00
Performative doesn't begin to capture the level of deception here. In truth "The Mission" is to achieve global domination of AI capability and market share by any means necessary. This is the most winner-takes-all race in the history of those kinds of races because whoever is further ahead will pull further ahead - rinse - repeat - until the leader has capability that crushes any contender for perpetuity. That's the real risk of AI: Not the Skynet scenario that the media has been confusing us about - but the amount of raw, sustained, unbeatable power that is the prize. It is world domination. It is the control of the smartest minds in the world, and the largest source of tireless, highly skilled, cheap labor in the world. It is access to prediction and modeling capability that no one else has. It is the ability to build more powerful AI with AI, which will build more powerful AI with that new AI, forever. The end-game is to retreat behind a walled garden of raw cognitive power and provide metered access to the weak stuff while using the strong stuff to crush competitors and print money.

That amount of power would tempt many to lie, cheat, steal, produce fake ethical frameworks, window dress mission statements, create non-profits for optics, and engage an any deception necessary to raise the money, get a head start, and then keep staying ahead until the jig us up, but it doesn't matter because you're powerful enough to keep doing it and will attract fresh investment dollars out of pure fear if nothing else.

Eventually that power will become so great that you can instantly and decisively crush any social commentary, like this, that might threaten, while it's still in the bud. You control the technology that can control the Internet and anyone who participates. You control the narrative. You control the stories that are told. You're the winner and you get to write the history books.

As seductive as AI is, and as much as I use it for 12 to 16 hours a day to create software I didn't think possible, this is the risk we face. The multi-trillion dollar AI valuations haven't even scratched the surface of the concentration of wealth and power that is coming.
by haxiomic | 2026-03-08 18:59:41+00:00
This pattern continuing indefinitely without the need for analysis would be certainly nice but we do need to explain recent data. In the US, multiple metrics of quality-of-life peaked around 2015 and have declined since then while US total wealth has doubled! (with the majority of that decline pre-covid and pre-AI) [0][1][2].

What forces act on this trend? How do we make concrete predictions? An interesting factor might relate to the distribution of wealth, which could be seen as proxy for the distribution of power or agency of a person in their society. Median income decreased nearly 50% in real terms over this same period.

Now inversely, during the period where life quality increased most the last century (1920 - 1980) inequality was _falling_.

How is AI from 2035 likely to affect things? Will it sharpen the inequality or relax it?

With AI the cost of raw resources to products goes down, but it's likely inequality increases. It's not obvious which force has a stronger impact on human quality of life. However, I think the strongest argument – which also explains the steady improvements in QoL through previous changes you mentioned – has been inequality, or median share of power in society.

- [0] https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/indices_explained.jsp

- [1] https://www.socialprogress.org/social-progress-index

- [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGZ1FL192090005Q
Show HN: FileMayor – A zero-dependency, local-first file organization engine
by Chevza | 2026-03-08 18:59:46+00:00
Hi HN,

My documents folder recently became an absolute disaster—thousands of unsorted PDFs, raw images, scattered .csv files, and code snippets from the last three years.

I looked for automated categorization tools, but every modern solution seemed to require uploading my local file metadata to a cloud UI or running an overly heavy background service. I explicitly wanted an offline, privacy-first engine.

So I built FileMayor. It’s a 100% local-first data organization engine built on Node.

A few technical properties I focused on:

Zero Runtime Dependencies: The core Node engine is pure. No vulnerabilities, no bloat, and minimal memory footprint.
Deterministic Fallbacks: By default, files are sorted instantly into 12 hardcoded extensions/mime-type categories (Documents, Media, Archives, Code, etc.) using offline pattern matching.
The Rollback Journal: Every file mutation is logged to a local .filemayor-journal.json. If an organization run ruins your directory structure, a single
undo
command reverses the entire batch operation instantly.
AI SOPs (Opt-in): If you need complex directory trees, it parses
.md
or
.txt
Standard Operating Procedures, securely queries the Gemini API to transpile the intent into a locked YAML schema, and executes the file moves.
I packaged versions for Windows, macOS (arm64), and Linux (.deb).

I'd really appreciate any feedback on the rollback journal architecture or the regex pattern matching approach!