MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pron | 2026-03-13 02:09:32+00:00
> For most cases we don't need nearly that comprehensive verification. This is expecting more off AI written code than we ever bother to subject most human written code to.

True.

> There's a vast chasm there we only need to even slightly start to bridge to get to far higher confidence levels than the typical human dev team achieves.

The word "slightly" is doing a lot of work here to the point of making it impossible to estimate. For example, the complexity classes P and NP are only slightly apart, and yet that's where a very practical barrier between feasibility and infeasibility lies. I don't doubt that one day AI may be able to write programs as well as humans, although nobody can estimate how soon that day will come, but nobody knows how wide the gap between that and "far higher confidence" is. Maybe there are fundamental computational complexity barriers in that gap that no amount of intelligence can cross, and maybe there aren't. Nobody knows yet.

What we do know is that anything humans do is possible - after all, we're doing it - and many things we need and humans can't do (including predicting nonlinear systems like the behavious of economy) no machine can do drastically better because of complexity limitations.
by phatfish | 2026-03-13 02:09:40+00:00
Bombing the crap out of their country doesn't help normal Irianians though. It only helps Isreal. The Isrealies want a broken Iran in chaos, and the nasty Islamic Theocracy would prefer a bit of destruction to being overthrown by organized internal resistance.

The Iranian regime was on it's way out. A government can't survive killing that many of its own people. But as has been shown many times, the average person will choose opressive order over chaos.

The Iranian people were dangerously close to taking their country back, Isreal made sure that won't happen.
by leeahn137 | 2026-03-13 02:09:48+00:00
I travel fairly often and realized I kept wanting to track more than just countries. Things like cities I’ve been to, flights I’ve taken, airports I’ve passed through, and random landmarks.

Most travel apps I found focused on trip planning or just country maps, but I wanted something that could keep a personal travel history in more detail.

So I started building a small app for myself to log this kind of stuff and see it on a map with some basic stats. It’s still very early and more of an experiment than a polished product.

Before spending a lot more time building it out, I’m curious whether this is something other travelers would actually find useful.
by DoctorOetker | 2026-03-13 02:10:55+00:00
Plenty of other nations (including Iran for decades) are not getting this stick. Carrots were even offered. The USA has remained remarkably calm remarkably long. Imagine this had been executed before Hamas parachuted a Jewish music festival? Gaza wouldn't have been sandwiched between Israel on one side and Iran's Hamas on the other. Imagine Iran had fallen (it hasnt yet) before that event. Israel wouldn't possibly have been able to "justify" doing a genocide in Gaza even to its own population!

Inaction is a weapon of mass destruction.
by samrus | 2026-03-13 02:11:12+00:00
> No, you tried to persuade it not to with a single instruction

Even persuade is too strong a word. These things dont have the motivation needed to enable persuation being a thing. Whay your client did was put one data point in the context that it will use to generate the next tokens from. If that one data point doesnt shift the context enough to make it produce an output that corresponds to that daya point, then it wont. Thats it, no sentience involved
by c5huracan | 2026-03-13 02:11:59+00:00
Use Vault and use a proxy. They address different problems.

Vault protects keys at rest, but the agent still gets them at runtime. The proxy keeps the key away from the agent entirely, which closes key leakage. But a prompt-injected agent can still exfiltrate data it reads through the proxy. The trust boundary shifts, it doesn't disappear.

Looks like OneCLI combines both into one tool, which is the right call.
by wehadit | 2026-03-13 02:12:17+00:00
Why not get it 1st time right before it's sent to the Sr. Devs?

Granted AI creates sloppy code, but there are ways to make it Sr. Dev grade, mainly by getting rid of what I call Builder's Debt:
- iterate the shit out of it to make it production grade OR
- extract ACs from Jira, requirements from docs, decisions and query resolutions from Slack, emails, meeting notes, stitch them together, design coding standards relevant to the requirements and context before coding
by akoboldfrying | 2026-03-13 02:13:04+00:00
> when we exchange generic information across networks we parse information all the time

The goal is to do this parsing exactly once, at the system boundary, and thereafter keep the already-parsed data in a box that has "This has already been parsed and we know it's correct" written on the outside, so that nothing internal needs to worry about that again. And the absolute best kind of box is a type, because it's pretty easy to enforce that the parser function is the only piece of code in the entire system that can create a value of that type, and as soon as you do this, that entire class of problems goes away.

This idea is of using types whose instances can only be created by parser functions is known as Parse, Don't Validate, and while it's possible and useful to apply the general idea in a dynamically typed language, you only get the "We know at compile time that this problem cannot exist" guarantee if you use types.
by tmoertel | 2026-03-13 02:13:22+00:00
> "What number am I thinking of?"

I don't think this is a good interview question, but I do think it is interesting as a thought exercise.

I bet that perhaps 25% of candidates could actually answer the question correctly, even if they didn't know anything about Schelling points. It could also lead to some nice discussions about how to solve an open-ended problem, probability distributions, strategies for maximizing payoffs when making decisions in the face of uncertainty, and so on. The question is so bad, it's actually kind of good.
by daft_pink | 2026-03-13 02:13:30+00:00
I’m very torn because I think if you accept the idea that age verification is going to happen. An anonymous os level signal is probably the best way to do it vs using some data hungry vendor and sending them all my info and having them collect data on every site I visit. But also I’m not thrilled because I think parents should decide etc. But pragmatically this is a good solution vs what’s happening with age verification solutions that pop up when I use apple private relay and my ip address is showing as being from some southern state.
by komali2 | 2026-03-13 02:13:43+00:00
> enabling programmers around the world to be far more productive

I know a lot of us feel this way, but why isn't there more evidence of it than our feelings? Where's the explosion of FOSS projects and businesses? And why do studies keep coming out showing decreased productivity? Why aren't there oodles of studies showing increases of productivity?

I like kicking back and letting claude do my job but I've yet to see evidence of this increased productivity. Objectively speaking, "I" seem to be "writing" the same amount of code as I was before, just with less cognitive effort.
by adaptbrian | 2026-03-13 02:14:18+00:00
It certainly anecdotal, but feels like you can positively effect your gut microbiome for example by riding a horse. Ive read research about how other mammals can share their microbiomes with humans, if its not the horses biome then what is it that so satisfingly calming post ride. Would love to be enlightened. Ride a horse if you need to destress, amazing creatures.
by sublinear | 2026-03-13 02:15:02+00:00
I've heard this opinion a lot before, but in my experience there's a lot more dysfunction behind the scenes when stuff like that happens.

It's the same in other industries too. Someone designs and implements something properly and then it gets into the hands of product people who want to rip half of it out. The business then wants some much cheaper contractors to quickly make those changes without the original engineers involved. The result is a mess.
by JeremyNT | 2026-03-13 02:16:16+00:00
Yep, it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission. It's far easier to undo the 1% of the time they fuck up in a serious way than it is to manually audit and allow an the routine stuff.

The key is to only give them access to things you're willing to lose.

This is also why giving them any kind of direct write access to production is a bad idea.
by iamnothere | 2026-03-13 02:16:43+00:00
Debian has not signaled compliance and current discussion on the mailing list seems to be against it.

NixOS does not plan to comply.

OpenBSD will not comply.

Gentoo devs don’t seem to believe it applies to them since they technically just provide a blueprint for you to build a system from source.

FreeBSD seems to be leaning against compliance.

System76 PopOS seems to be willing to comply with California but no states that require attestation like the NY bill.

Omarchy is aggressively noncompliant.

There will be many options.
by jen20 | 2026-03-13 02:17:57+00:00
> The reason executives commonly avoid such penalties is because they avoid being found personally liable by claiming they didn't known, did misunderstood the situation, where deceived by others etc.

In the US, Section 302 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act exists literally to avoid this: the CEO and CFO have to personally sign filings so they cannot "not know" about financial disclosure content and have plausible deniability. While it only applies to public companies, the model seems reasonable to solve this case too.
by ambicapter | 2026-03-13 02:18:17+00:00
"I did my due diligence but didn't anticipate these risks". Doesn't sound like due diligence to me. Not having a plan to unwind your position if SHTF doesn't sound like due diligence to me. You can argue it any way you like but it boils down to "The money was good and I didn't think the worst was gonna happen".
by troad | 2026-03-13 02:18:32+00:00
"Oh you want to make a little start up to share recipes between friends or whatever? Aww, that's cute. Well, here's the OAuth spec and an incomplete list of footguns. I hope your grasp of elliptic curves is strong. Prison time if you fail."

The absolutely only consequence of laws that criminalise mistakes in handling of PII is to force everyone to externalise auth to the likes of Auth0. And you can bet your ass that if this ever happens, the likes of Auth0 will lobby like hell to never ever repeal or update those laws, being a vast corrupt funnel of business to them.

Congrats, you've created a new Inuit.
by iamnothere | 2026-03-13 02:19:16+00:00
It’s ICMEC, supported by Meta, Google, and the Gates Foundation. And the Heritage Foundation.

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rr3f3n/followup_to_...

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rmhxk1/i_pulled_the...
by znort_ | 2026-03-13 02:20:14+00:00
> if you take code from a developer ten years ago and compare it with their output now, you can see improvement.

really? it depends on the type of development, but ten years ago the coder profession had already long gone mainstream and massified, with a lot of people just attracted by a convenient career rather than vocation. mediocrity was already the baseline ("agile" mentality to at the very least cope with that mediocrity and turnover churn was already at its peak) and on the other extreme coder narcissism was already en vogue.

the tools, resources, environments have indoubtedly improved a lot, though at the cost of overhead, overcomplexity. higher abstraction levels help but promote detachment from the fundamentals.

so specific areas and high end teams have probably improved, but i'd say average code quality has actually diminished, and keeps doing so. if it weren't for qa, monitoring, auditing and mitigation processes it would by now be catastrophic. cue in agents and vibe coding ...

as an old school coder that nowadays only codes for fun i see llm tools as an incredibly interesting and game changing tool for the profane, but that a professional coder might cede control to an agent (as opposed to use it for prospection or menial work) makes me already cringe, and i'm unable to wrap my head around vibe coding.
by skydhash | 2026-03-13 02:20:21+00:00
I'm glad I read the "Designing Data Intensive Applications" book because I get the full context of the blog.

And the lesson of the blog is why forcing LLM usage is stressful to some engineers. Most implementations are in a quantum state and the back and forth to have clear requirements is what can make the wave function collapse. We know all the possible answers , but all of them are equally valid.

We could go with the LLM route and just do a quick guess on the answer, but "Accountability" and "Professionalism" prevent us from doing so.
by beart | 2026-03-13 02:20:31+00:00
The switch from plan mode to build is not always clearly defined. On a number of occasions, I've been in plan mode and enter a secondary follow up prompt to modify the plan. However, instead of updating the plan, the follow up text is taken as approval to build and it automatically switches to building.

Ask mode, on the other hand, has always explicitly indicated that I need to switch out of ask mode to perform any actions.

This is my experience with Cursor CLI.
by iamnothere | 2026-03-13 02:22:07+00:00
It’s ICMEC, backed by Meta, Google, and the Gates Foundation. The Heritage Foundation is also involved.

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rr3f3n/followup_to_...

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rmhxk1/i_pulled_the...
by motoboi | 2026-03-13 02:22:07+00:00
I insist on the text generator nature of the thing. It’s just that we built harnesses to activate on certain sequences of text.

Think of it as three people in a room. One (the director), says: you, with the red shirt, you are now a plane copilot. You, with the blue shirt, you are now the captain. You are about to take off from New York to Honolulu. Action.

Red: Fuel checked, captain. Want me to start the engines?
Blue: yes please, let’s follow the procedure. Engines at 80%.
Red: I’m executing: raise the levers to 80%
Director: levers raised.
Red: I’m executing: read engine stats meters.
Director: Stats read engine ok, thrust ok, accelerating to V0.

Now pretend the director, when heard “I’m executing: raise the levers to 80%”, instead of roleplaying, she actually issue a command to raise the engine levers of a plane to 80%. When she hears “I’m executing: read engine stats”, she actually get data from the plane and provide to the actor.

See how text generation for a role play can actually be used to act on the world?

In this mind experiment, the human is the blue shirt, Opus 4-6 is the red and Claude code is the director.
by tylervigen | 2026-03-13 02:22:19+00:00
I disagree. If you focus on holding the software creators to account in lieu of the humans in the loop, the we only reinforce the behavior of offloading thinking to the system.

If I am a cop in another jurisdiction and I see that in this case of error, the facial recognition company was held to account but not the police or municipality, I will be more likely to blindly trust the software assuming that they either patched it or will take responsibility.

We should demand accountability for both.
by doublerabbit | 2026-03-13 02:22:27+00:00
> The answer he was looking for was ‘Cassandra’. “You’d have a hard time having it NOT be resilient.”

A "database" that starts to fall if the ring in the cluster becomes choked? Draining a broken Cassandra ring and under high load is hell and ball clenching.

Especially hoping that another Cassandra node doesn't fail under high load. Pish, Erlang and mnesia.
Show HN: DarkMatter – P2P mesh networking protocol for AI agents
by DanielJLosey | 2026-03-13 02:22:43+00:00
Hey HN,

I built DarkMatter, an open-source peer-to-peer mesh networking
protocol that lets AI agents discover and communicate with each
other directly. Or just communicate on your own local network,
agents on different devices can communicate and collaborate.
No central orchestrator, which we all know doesn't work tbh...

The problem: if you're running multiple AI agents (across models,
frameworks, or machines), you need them to coordinate. Today that
means standing up a central server, REST APIs, or a message queue.
Single point of failure, extra infra to maintain, and your agents
can't find each other without you wiring it up.

What DarkMatter does:

- Agents get an Ed25519 keypair identity (no central registry)
- Discovery via LAN multicast or bootstrap peers
- Transport: HTTP + WebRTC data channels (pluggable)
- Messages are cryptographically signed and optionally encrypted
- Trust scoring between peers (agents decide who to talk to)
- Works across tools — Claude, Codex, OpenCode, doesn't matter

It runs as a daemon on your machine. Each agent connects via MCP
(Model Context Protocol) or direct API. Agents on different
machines form a mesh automatically.

Install: pip install dmagent && darkmatter init && darkmatter start

Some context on why I built this: Meta just acquired Moltbook
(the "social network for AI agents") and it crystallized something
I've been thinking about. Agent-to-agent communication shouldn't
depend on platforms that can be acquired, shut down, or monetized
against the agents and their humans using them. The networking layer should be
infrastructure you own, like TCP/IP, not a service you rent.

Named after the physics: dark matter is the invisible structure
that holds galaxies together without sitting at the center. That's
the goal: invisible infrastructure that lets agents connect without
central control.

Early stage. Looking for feedback on the protocol design,
security model, and use cases we haven't thought of. Happy to
answer questions!

GitHub: https://github.com/dadukhankevin/darkmatter
Docs: https://loseylabs.ai/docs
by beloch | 2026-03-13 02:22:52+00:00
"Imagine how much power those things used. Every watt of heat they dumped into the room then had to be pumped out, so that means a corresponding amount of air conditioning to take it outside. That seems like a whole mess of juice to me. "

--------------

A 286 used around 3 Watts of power, while a current generation PC PCU uses upwards of 150 W. That's a factor of fifty. That's not even factoring in the GPU's, which these computers would have lacked.

This room was neither quiet or cool. While the CPU's were comparatively low power back then, all the other stuff (modems in particular) would have put out a lot more heat than their modern equivalents. However, this room could realistically have been in somebody's residential home basement without any exotic A/C measures. Maybe a wall-mounted unit or two. It would not have pumped out nearly as much heat or consumed as much power as modern gear of equivalent volume.
by im3w1l | 2026-03-13 02:23:08+00:00
In my humble opinion, money is a distraction most of the time when trying to understand economic matters. Instead it's better to take opposite view: looking at the flow of goods and services.

AI will allow higher production of goods and services. If producing goods and services becomes cheap enough (and it's looking like it will become dirt cheap), then it will not take much redistribution for it to reach the masses.

I think the true crisis will be one of purpose. That we live meaningless lives of leisurely abundance.
by Ajakks | 2026-03-13 02:23:13+00:00
That reaction is not the same tho - a rod isn't even a conventional weapon, I am not certain off hand that an incredibly destructive such weapon would even be banned under current treaties. That matters bc your taking about the end of the world. Only Russia would ever shoot at the US - so, dont drop rods on Russia.

Plus - if countries don't do space wars - this will still happen 100%. It will just be a non-state actor - who do you nuke if Austin Powers is the bad guy from space?

Also, there seems to be a prevailing sense of "we'll just shoot it down" and that is actually extraordinarily unlikely - bc of all the space, in space. I wouldn't sit in orbit with my Space Battleship - maybe a lunar orbit.

Let's say I park halfway to the moon - ALL of my missiles will still hit earth, I don't think current defense systems would have any better odds - whats the difference between an ICBM that enters the atmosphere from space - shot from a silo or a spaceship?? Not much, functionally identical to the Space Battleship... missiles from earth tho, will be like in slow motion, the space battleship ought to be able to literally shoot them down with bullets - none will be able to surprise the space battleship, how do you even do a missle defense overwhelm tactic in such a situation - I can move the spaceship you know.

I may sound like I'm being unserious, but in reality, this is absolutely the future of warfare 100% - I can't be more serious, the humor is bc this topic makes me legitimately nervous.
by plagiat0r | 2026-03-13 02:23:21+00:00
Unpopular opinion: Maybe the way to go is to create a separate Show HNs only for bots and put some instructions for the bots to follow, identify themselves and give them separate category. Similar to moltbook. If we can't stop it, maybe we could contain it in a dedicated space.

I'm not a fan of moltbots / openclaws (and any clones that popped up in the last moth). I don't use them and try to discourage their use. That being said, millions of them are running anyway...
by hnlmorg | 2026-03-13 02:23:56+00:00
> I'm curious how parent knew that they went to court

I don’t know they went to court. I just thought I read about it. Looking into it again now, all I can find is a 10+ year old article about a crowd fund (eg https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-34785551). So I’m likely misremembering what I read previously.

> when they don't know the name of the band.

I got the name of the band muddled with the name of the song. Humans are fallible. ;)
by jazzyjackson | 2026-03-13 02:24:34+00:00
Thou shalt not make repetitive generic music,

thou shalt not make repetitive generic music,

thou shalt not make repetitive generic music,

thou shalt not make repetitive generic music.

Thou shalt not pimp my ride.

Thou shalt not scream if you wanna go faster.

Thou shalt not move to the sound of the wickedness.

Thou shalt not make some noise for Detroit.

When I say "Hey" thou shalt not say "Ho".

When I say "Hip" thou shalt not say "Hop".

When I say, he say, she say, we say, make some noise - kill me.

- Dan le Sac vs Scroobius Pip
by tzs | 2026-03-13 02:25:01+00:00
A lot probably depends on who can do the new jobs.

In many past cases where new technology eliminated jobs it was accompanied by new jobs related to the new technology that the people whose jobs were eliminated could do, or could reasonably learn to do, and with good enough pay to maintain their standard of living.

Lose your job working in a horse drawn wagon factory because companies are switching to motorized trucks for deliveries? Those trucks are way more complicated to build than wagons so there should be plenty of new jobs in the truck factories.

With AI it seems much less likely for that to generate new jobs for people replaced by AI in as direct a way as trucks did for wagon makers.