MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-03-11 16:50:29+00:00
If you think Google is capable of making a singular coherent decision on a topic like this, you're dreaming. There's likely multiple competing visions.

That said: the goal with Google M&A remains the same as always. Take competition off the board. I don't know this company or how they compete with Google, but 80% chance that's the play.

They are culturally incapable of merging other people's tech into their own stack and have both the tendency to rewrite everything from scratch on their own bespoke technologies and also internal engineering teams that will bristle at having a foreign body invade their cathedral.

You could say it would be talent acquisition but most everyone who comes from a startup walks as soon as their golden handcuffs loosen and they can find something else to do. Going from startup to Google is usually torturous.

Been through this 15 years ago. I don't think anything has changed.
by pizlonator | 2026-03-11 16:51:12+00:00
> WebAssembly has a sandbox and was designed for untrusted code.

So does JavaScript.

> It's almost impossible to statically reason about JS code, and so browsers need a ton of error prone dynamic security infrastructure to protect themselves from guest JS code.

They have that infrastructure because JS has access to the browser's API.

If you tried to redesign all of the web APIs in a way that exposes them to WebAssembly, you'd have an even harder time than exposing those APIs to JS, because:

- You'd still have all of the security troubles. The security troubles come from having to expose API that can be called adversarially and can pass you adversarial data.

- You'd also have the impedence mismatch that the browser is reasoning in terms of objects in a DOM, and WebAssembly is a bunch of integers.

> There are dynamic languages, like JS/Python that can compile to wasm.

If you compile them to linear memory wasm instead of just running directly in JS then you lose the ability to do coordinated garbage collection with the DOM.

If you compile them to GC wasm instead of running directly in JS then you're just adding unnecessary overheads for no upside.

> Also I don't see how dynamic typing is required to have API evolution and compt.

Because for example if a browser changes the type of something that happens to be unused, or removes something that happens to be unused, it only breaks actual users at time of use, not potential users at time of load.

> Plenty of platforms have static typed languages and evolve their API's in backwards compatible ways.

We're talking about the browser, which is a particular platform. Not all platforms are the same.

The largest comparable platform is OSes based on C ABI, which rely on a "kind" of dynamic typing (stringly typed, basically - function names in a global namespace plus argument passing ABIs that allow you to mismatch function signature and get away with it.

> The first major language for WebAssembly was C++, which is object oriented.

But the object orientation is lost once you compile to wasm. Wasm's object model when you compile C++ to it is an array of bytes.

> To be fair, there are a lot of challenges to making WebAssembly first class on the Web. I just don't think these issues get to the heart of the problem.

Then what's your excuse for why wasm, despite years of investment, is a dud on the web?
by luplex | 2026-03-11 16:51:17+00:00
a few days ago, someone joked on Twitter that "Germany is launching an alternative to Claude Code, it’s called Klaus Programmieren and it will run on sovereign ai system with chips made in Germany. The project is currently in the planning phase but the Federal Government has already committed a record sum of 50 Million Euros" [1]

Well, someone else(?) made it real in a high quality vibe coded shitpost!

[1] https://x.com/runaway_vol/status/2027433937002254789?s=20
by fcloud | 2026-03-11 16:51:22+00:00
I intended to post in defense of manpages. I love manpages. I think most open-source manpages are high-quality, and a few are really outstanding.

"It's easier to ask an AI" can be true without implying that manpages are bad.

However, "man" the tool does have issues, and one of them bit me just now.

So, I didn't know about openssh client escapes like ~?. I thought, "surely that's in the manpage?" I opened the manpage (in less) and searched for "\~\?". No hits.

Of course, escape characters are documented in the manpage, and the string "~?" does appear. Why didn't search find it? Because man, in its infinite wisdom, decided to render every instance of "~" as some bizarre unicode not-tilde, which is visually similar but totally impossible to grep for.

This has also bitten me in the past with dash. DASH. A character that is critically important when documenting invocation options. man loves to convert it into something that looks like dash, prints like dash, but doesn't come up in search.

I'm sure there is a way to turn this "feature" off, and I'm about to spend a bunch of time figuring out what it is. But this is documentation for command-line tools. Silently destroying our ability to grep it should NOT be the default.
by robthompson2018 | 2026-03-11 16:51:30+00:00
We certainly have customers who work in sales, but that's not the only use case.

OpenClaw is capable of using ElevenLabs or other providers to make phone calls, but I personally haven't done this and as far as I know none of our customers have either. Is AI good enough at cold calling yet for this to work? I personally would never entertain such a call.
by 9wzYQbTYsAIc | 2026-03-11 16:51:35+00:00
Interesting, thanks for sharing.

I've been doing some DIY/citizen science type agent orchestration as well: https://blog.unratified.org/2026-03-06-receiving-side-agent-...

Not quite to the same scale, but I share the same sentiment - working through scripts instead of the LLM is an important key, I think.
by wiseowise | 2026-03-11 16:52:13+00:00
What surprises you?
Terminal UI is written in JS using Chromium. It’s not just plain Chromium, but it’s still funny that it’s pretty much same approach as universally (according to HN and Reddit) hated Electron.

https://youtu.be/uqehwCWKVVw?is=wBijGwdD2k2jIOu7
by netsharc | 2026-03-11 16:52:34+00:00
That reminds me of an interaction I had with a foreign exchange intern at my uni. I was working in an organization that organized these exchanges and I was giving him the orientation on his first day, including introducing him to his employer. The employer wanted him to write an email to some other person in the company, and he 1st wrote it with no caps n txtspeak, and when he was done he went back through it so it would have proper sentences...

It was flabbergasting..
by flohofwoe | 2026-03-11 16:52:45+00:00
I created and maintain a couple of WASM projects and have not experienced the problems you describe:

- https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/

- https://floooh.github.io/sokol-webgpu/

- https://floooh.github.io/visualz80remix/

- https://floooh.github.io/doom-sokol/

All those projects also compile into native Windows/Linux/macOS/Android/iOS executables without any code changes, but compiling to WASM and running in web browsers is the most painless way to get this stuff to users.

Dealing with minor differences of web APIs in different browsers is a rare thing and can be dealt with in WASM just the same as in JS: a simple if-else will do the job, no dynamic type system needed (apart from that, WASM doesn't have a "type system" in the first place, just like CPU instruction sets don't have a "type system" - unless you count integer and float types as a "type system"). Alternatively it's trivial to call out into Javascript. In Emscripten you can even mix C/C++ and Javascript in the same source file.

E.g. for me, WASM is already a '1st class citizen of the web' no WASM component model needed.
by chocochunks | 2026-03-11 16:52:49+00:00
Even if that negative study could save you one, two, three+ years of work for the same outcome (which you then also can't really do anything with)? Shouldn't there BE funding for replication studies? Shouldn't that count towards tenure? Part of the problem is that publications play such a heavy role in getting tenure in the first place.

I'm sure you can more narrowly tune your email alerts FFS.
by byt3h3ad | 2026-03-11 16:53:11+00:00
[from arxiv description] Fungal electronics is a family of living electronic devices made of mycelium bound composites or pure mycelium. Fungal electronic devices are capable of changing their impedance and generating spikes of electrical potential in response to external control parameters. Fungal electronics can be embedded into fungal materials and wearables or used as stand alone sensing and computing devices.
by mrob | 2026-03-11 16:53:30+00:00
Doing anything on a phone is a miserable experience, even compared to using a laptop, which is already a lot worse than a desktop with good input devices. IMO it's shocking how many professionals are willing to tolerate such bad interfaces. Compare how picky professional musicians are about the exact components and setups of their instruments. No amount of convenience should lure you into accepting touch screens.
by eqrion | 2026-03-11 16:53:37+00:00
I worked on the original interface-types proposal a little bit before it became the component model. Two goals that were added were:
1. Support non-Web API's
2. Support limited cross language interop
WebIDL is the union of JS and Web API's, and while expressive, has many concepts that conflict with those goals. Component interfaces take more of an intersection approach that isn't as expressive, but is much more portable.

I personally have always cared about DOM access, but the Wasm CG has been really busy with higher priority things. Writing this post was sort of a way to say that at least some people haven't forgotten about this, and still plan on working on this.
by 9wzYQbTYsAIc | 2026-03-11 16:53:46+00:00
https://github.com/safety-quotient-lab/psychology-agent <- I've been exploring ways to track decisions, making some interesting findings, at the homelab scale, at least.

The cognitive architecture, so to speak, for the LLM can make a huge difference - triggers and skills go a long way when combined with shell scripts that dual-write.
by al00sh | 2026-03-11 16:54:15+00:00
Getting the right number of events ie which events were significant enough to put on here with combat footage was a challenge as well. Particularly for the first day or two where a number of US bases and Iranian targets were hit. I think in particular I’ll try to add more manually for the first two days of the war. But other than those two days were there any specific events you think the AI missed?
Sometimes I think it makes the fair decision to combine certain incidents. For example today 3 ships were hit in the strait of Hormuz but I don’t expect three different events for that and I think the right thing would be one event.
by perfmode | 2026-03-11 16:54:15+00:00
The Euclid example is doing a lot of heavy lifting here and I don't think it holds up under scrutiny.

Euclid didn't invent points, angles, and lines. Those concepts were already in wide use among Egyptian and Babylonian practitioners for centuries before the Elements. What Euclid did was axiomatize and systematize existing geometric knowledge into a deductive framework. That's a significant intellectual achievement, but it's much closer to "refinement within a well-practiced domain" than it is to reasoning outside a training distribution. If anything it supports the parent comment's point.

There's also something off about saying these concepts "were never there to begin with." Geometric intuitions come from embodied spatial experience. Points, lines, and angles are formalizations of things humans already perceive and navigate physically. Calling that "going outside the training distribution" stretches the metaphor to the point where it stops being useful.

More broadly, you're responding to a claim about what typical human cognition looks like most of the time with an example of something a tiny number of extraordinary humans did once. The parent's point, drawing on Kahneman, is that most of what we call reasoning is fast, associative, pattern-based, and that even our "deliberate" reasoning is often post-hoc confabulation. Pointing out that humans can in principle construct novel formal systems doesn't really address that. It's like responding to "most people can't run a four-minute mile" with "but Roger Bannister did." True, notable, not a rebuttal of the original claim.

There's also a quiet conflation between "humans have the capacity to create new concepts" and "humans regularly reason outside their training distribution." Those are very different claims. The first is true and interesting. The second is what was being questioned, and you haven't engaged with it directly.
by adrian_b | 2026-03-11 16:54:25+00:00
I use cards like those described by you (with DAC cables) for connections between FreeBSD servers (actually between servers, regardless if they run FreeBSD or Linux).

However, I also need to connect some desktop/laptop PCs to a FreeBSD server, either for management or for transferring backups, where a cheaper Aquantia NIC is perfectly adequate, especially when the PC has only a 2.5 Gb/s or 5 Gb/s Ethernet interface.

In the past, I had to buy an Intel server NIC for one of my FreeBSD servers, despite the fact that I had a spare Aquantia NIC that would have worked fine, due to this driver problem.

I was not happy about it, so I am glad to hear now that a working driver is available.
by DrBazza | 2026-03-11 16:55:05+00:00
> memory bandwidth is always the bottleneck

I'm hoping that today's complaints are tomorrow's innovations. Back when 1Mb hard drive was $100,000, or when Gates said 640kb is enough.

Perhaps some 'in the (chip) industry' can comment on what RAM manufacturers are doing at the moment - better, faster, larger? Or is there not much headroom left and it's down to MOBO manufacturers, and volume?
by bombcar | 2026-03-11 16:55:45+00:00
My recall was that the 90s was pretty awesome, and the 00s fell into BURPS and large pieces and tie-in sets.

But I think most people either agree there was a dark ages where they went almost bankrupt and did some really questionable themes, or the best time was when they were a kid.

The 90s catalogs rocked in a way that no website ever can, though.
by 9rx | 2026-03-11 16:55:47+00:00
Go is modern/faster Python.

- It was explicitly intended to feel dynamically-typed

- Tries to live by the zen of Python (more than Python itself!)

- Was built during the time it was fashionable to use Python for the kinds of systems it was designed for, with Google thinking at the time that they would benefit from moving their C++ systems to that model if they could avoid incurring the performance problems associated with Python

- Often reads just like Python (when one hasn't gone deep down the rabbit hole of all the crazy Python features)
by danzheng | 2026-03-11 16:56:00+00:00
Hi all — I’m Dan, founding team at clockwork.io. Today we launched TorchPass! We'd love to get your feedback.

tl;dr: we built TorchPass because large distributed training jobs fail a lot, and checkpoint restart is expensive. TorchPass addresses this by migrating the state from failed resources to spares.

In large GPU clusters, even small failures (a GPU falling off the bus, a node crash, a network link flap) can bring down an entire distributed training job. And once you get into clusters with hundreds or thousands of GPUs, something is almost always failing. Research from Meta suggests mean time to failure drops to about 7.9 hours for a 1,024-GPU cluster. And when a single failure occurs, the entire distributed job crashes.

The usual recovery model is to take frequent checkpoints during training, and recover from the most recent checkpoint when a failure occurs. But:

all work since the last checkpoint is lost
time is wasted replacing nodes and checkpoint reloading
more time is lost restarting the entire distributed job

TorchPass uses a different approach: instead of restarting the job, it migrates the failed training rank to a spare GPU and resumes training at the same step.

TorchPass supports planned migration (triggered pre-emptively when an imminent failure is detected) or unplanned migration (triggered by a hard failure). Further details about how it works can be found here:https://clockwork.io/blog/torchpass-workload-fault-tolerance...

We ran a 3,000 step training benchmark using TorchTitan Llama-4 MoE Scout (109B) on 64 H200 GPUs with random failure injection to compare checkpoint restarts, TorchPass and TorchFT.

TorchPass completed in 405 min
Checkpoint restart completed in 818 min.
TorchFT in 930 min

Checkpoint restart was slower mainly because of the time taken to restore from checkpoint, restart the training and recompute the work since the last checkpoint.

TorchFT lost almost no time due to the failures, but was slower because it introduced a significant per-step overhead because it requires the using gloo (rather than NCCL) for cross replica all reduce operations.

Happy to answer questions about the implementation and benchmarks.
by VanCoding | 2026-03-11 16:56:08+00:00
A big step in the right direction, but I still don't like the API, here's why:
Especially in JavaScript where I often share a lot of code between the client and the server and therefore also transfer data between them, I like to strictly separate data from logic. What i mean by this is that all my data is plain JSON and no class instances or objects that have function properties, so that I can serialize/deserialize it easily.

This is not the case for Temporal objects. Also, the temporal objects have functions on them, which, granted, makes it convenient to use, but a pain to pass it over the wire.

I'd clearly prefer a set of pure functions, into which I can pass data-only temporal objects, quite a bit like date-fns did it.
by cruffle_duffle | 2026-03-11 16:56:37+00:00
Sorting Lego is such a pain in the ass. I have like a huge stash from when I was a kid. Back then we just had it all in a few tubs and dug to find a part. But somehow now I feel I must sort them… but the “right way” is ill defined and kind of sucks the joy out of playing (especially disassembling)

And there is no “right way” that I’ve even found. Sort by color and now the little pieces fall to the bottom and are hard to dig for. The best I can see is part type and size… maybe… even then it sucks out the fun. I want to build cool shit with my daughter not spend every moment of Lego time sorting. There is no joy in sorting…

Maybe I just revert back to the “big tub” approach.

I dunno. Thanks for listening to my TED talk I guess.
by 0x457 | 2026-03-11 16:57:04+00:00
Lego was always expensive.

> many sets feel like display models than something you can play with.

That's because they are. There probably never been this many adults building lego than today.

> The Mindstorms/NXT line had huge potential but then just sort of fizzled out.

That's a small niche in today's world, a child is too young for arduino/feather/cyberbrick/whatever.
by tracker1 | 2026-03-11 16:57:15+00:00
I'm not sure what it would take and/or how the reaction would be to 3rd party "bank" player(s) inside the game offering real exchange rates sitting in between and suing if Robox killed their account and took their "Robux" with it. Assuming players can exchange Robux inside the game without issue.. I'm guessing they take a cut on all transactions, which is kinda sus/garbage itself.
by leventilo | 2026-03-11 16:57:16+00:00
Interesting that AMI is betting on video-first world models. A 4-year-old learns physics mostly through interaction, pushing, dropping, breaking things, not just watching. Vision helps but the feedback loop from acting in the world seems at least as important. Still, glad someone is putting $1B on a fundamentally different bet than "more text, bigger model."
by bayarearefugee | 2026-03-11 16:57:20+00:00
> Running a startup seems like it would entail way more hours worked and way more pressure, even if you were making better money.

It is also ignoring scalability issues in the sense that if a large number of people now working regular jobs in tech are forced down this path, the amount of competition among these startups would be astronomical which would result is downward pressure on both the ability to fundraise and the ability to generate revenue for your particular startup.

Impossible for me to believe each individual startup founder would find some profitable niche to fit into.
by mizmar | 2026-03-11 16:57:37+00:00
I would mention stb_textedit.h, but I would not recommend it. It was an interesting thing to study. but the library has many shortcomings and is pain to integrate and use. It is used in ImGui, but somewhat modified. Just to illustrate the flaws - it can't be used with utf-8 bytes easily, there is a large switch on keyboard shortcuts to trigger actions so you have to fake keyboard input to script things, the default word boundary detection is pretty bad, and there is no way to nicely provide double or triple click selection.

The two notable functions are stb_text_locate_coord() and stb_textedit_find_charpos(), which connect the physical x,y coordinates with position in text buffer. They both iterate lines of text - accumulating y position; and the chars of last line - accumulating x position.

For windowing, drawing and OS integration, SDL with SDL_ttf is actually pretty good. SDL3_ttf API got an improvement and no longer requires zero-terminated strings so you don't need to relocate every chunk.
by SoftTalker | 2026-03-11 16:57:42+00:00
I once spent some time learning the proper usage of em-dashes, en-dashes, and hyphens, and tried to be conscientious about using them properly in my writing. Little did I know it would be wasted effort in the LLM era, when competent writing actually became a negative.

Not only are we losing the ability to communicate clearly without the assistance of computers, those who can are being punished for it.
by dhblumenfeld1 | 2026-03-11 16:58:37+00:00
V interesting. Does the passport have history of what the agent has done in the past and if so, how are you able to verify that work? Specifically thinking about agents that may work across different systems.

Might be worth checking this out: https://www.8004.org/ it's more crypto specific but trying to tackle the problem of verifying an agent cross platforms.
by renewiltord | 2026-03-11 16:58:40+00:00
A lot of things are easy if you ignore the incentive structure. E.g. a lot of papers will no longer be published if the data must be published. You’d lose all published research from ML labs. Many people like you would say “that’s perfectly okay; we don’t need them” but others prefer to be able to see papers like Language Models Are Few-Shot Learners https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165

So the answer is that we still want to see a lot of the papers we currently see because knowing the technique helps a lot. So it’s fine to lose replicability here for us. I’d rather have that paper than replicability through dataset openness.
by ihumanable | 2026-03-11 16:58:52+00:00
In the author's own analogy of blacksmithing and metallurgy, I see an interesting parallel.

Humans worked metal for a long time and you can make better and better forges without knowing the metallurgy of why the result is better. If I make the fire hotter the metal comes out better, and I can get to work making forges that produce hotter and hotter fire.

LLMs could in this analogy be the forge. We can make them bigger and bigger and get better and better answers out, in the same way a pre-metallurgy human could make their forges hotter and hotter and get better and better metal out.

But the hottest forge doesn't mean you get metallurgy.