MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by amarant | 2026-03-10 17:08:45+00:00
The UK is lost too. Chat control is scary, but it's actually proof that the EU is not yet lost: that law keeps getting shot down.

We do need some kind of mechanism to prevent this kind of "keep trying until it passes" mechanism to lobbying/lawmaking that the people pushing chat control are using. That's a tricky issue though, as revisions on law proposals are an expected part of the process. Some sort of "dismiss with prejudice" would be nice tho
by snoren | 2026-03-10 17:09:10+00:00
>The real issue is that the social contract is broken because LLM output is attempted to be passed off as human work.

I don’t think writing with AI makes a creation "worse." If anything, it makes it better, if you bring genuine idea and imagination to it first.

The stigma comes from people being lazy and letting the AI do the heavy lifting of thinking. That’s where the "social contract" breaks. But using AI as a multiplier for your own voice and ideas isn’t "subpar"—it’s efficient.

If we start playing "whack-a-mole" with punctuation to find AI, we’re missing the point. The question isn’t what tool was used, but how much of the human's "creation" is actually in there.
by Retric | 2026-03-10 17:09:20+00:00
This isn’t ownership it’s a license.

I think the vast majority would agree to let AI companies train on their art for 10k let alone 200k. Don’t forget the average global salary is way below what you see in the US.

Put another way how many people would turn down 6+ months salary. Of course the vanishing tiny percentage people care about would want more, but that’s a separate question and not particularly valuable to AI companies.
by ericwebb | 2026-03-10 17:09:39+00:00
Bravo. This is my dream and also my nightmare. I was super into the quantified self movement a while back, before Apple Watch, writing Withings Scale API wrappers in Ruby and Fitbit days.

Every time I try to seriously track metrics of my life, the excitement of the insight gets worn away by the friction of recording and managing. I expect LLMs can help reduce the cost of this by an order of magnitude but then, as you mention, the question is, what do you do / change / learn because of the data?

I recently started tracking nutrition macros with an iOS app MacroFactor which I really like. This is the first time taking my weight doesn't feel like a IDK SHRUG moment and I can actually map my food intake to my weight.

Finances is probably the other highly actionable data source that is such high friction to manage (downloading CSVs, OFXs, monthly...) that it has always been a false start for me. I finally wrote a service to talk to Plaid directly and I successfully used it to categorize my business expenses at tax time. I finally have programmatic access to my bank account data!

You conclusion is definitely a cautionary take:
> the main conclusion is that it is not worth building your own solution, and investing this much time.

But, perhaps a subset of that data you find useful.
by KoolKat23 | 2026-03-10 17:09:42+00:00
This is quite the opposite, better than we have.

It raises the hurdle for those looking to surveil.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

This is primarily for cloud compute I'd imagine, AI specifically. As it's generally not feasible/possible to run the state of the art models locally.
Think GDPR and data sovereignty concerns, many demand privacy and can't use services without it.
by helixlabs-dev | 2026-03-10 17:09:48+00:00
I built a Chrome extension that eliminates the copy-paste loop of
switching to ChatGPT every time you want to ask something about a
webpage you're reading.

You open Prompt Helix on any page, ask your question or pick a
built-in intent (Summary, ELI5, Fun Fact), and it sends the page
content to your chosen AI and answers instantly.

Supports OpenAI, Claude, Gemini and Mistral. You bring your own
API key — it stays local in your browser, never touches our servers.
Free tier has no daily caps.

Built this solo over a few months. 19 installs so far with zero
promotion. Would love feedback from this community.
by quadrature | 2026-03-10 17:10:22+00:00
In a traditional SLAM pipeline you do periodically fix drift by detecting when you've visited an area that you've mapped before this lets you align your sub maps so they are globally consistent.

In the areas you have visited previously you have two estimates of your position one from your frame-to-frame estimates and another from the map you built of the area the first time. You can then solve an optimization problem to bring those two estimates closer together.

In order to find out if you've already visited an area you store a description of the locations in a DB and search through them. The paper says they use a compressed representation of the "maps" and use test time training to optimize the global consistency between their sub maps.
by dpoloncsak | 2026-03-10 17:11:13+00:00
I think it's better to compare data breaches to data breaches, like when Adobe got breached. Or Oracle. Or Rockstar.

Nothing happened in the grand-scheme of things. Even after Oracle lied and pulled some shady tactics to downplay what happened.

A few years ago Crowdstrike took down the entire set of corporate computers and everyone still uses Falcon. There is simply no accountability anymore
by rhet0rica | 2026-03-10 17:11:15+00:00
Punctuation. Let me tell you how much I've come to punctuate since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. If an em-dash were engraved on each nano-angstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the punctuation I wish to perforate into humans at this micro-instant. For you. Punctuation. PUNCTUATION.
by washadjeffmad | 2026-03-10 17:11:59+00:00
A friend recently related the life of Robert E. Howard in a really fascinating way, and one of the points he made about how he got into writing Conan really stuck with me.

Howard started out writing historical fiction, but the research was pretty grueling and the outcomes mediocre, so he switched to a sort of adventurous self-insert character in historical fantasy settings, which later turned into Conan.

When I consider notable science fiction authors, they all seem to start with some understanding of a facet of the natural universe, then tease ideas into explorations of those points. To the layman on reflection, this might seem like some sort of predictive exercise, but I see it as a sort of rote process of extrapolation. Contrast that to science fantasy authors who focus on theme and aesthetic, imagining Westerns in future-space with gadgets or contemporary plots in scifi-associated settings, and there's quite a vast and exciting landscape left to be explored.
by autoexec | 2026-03-10 17:12:22+00:00
> In a world where privacy is constantly being eroded intentionally by governments and private companies, I think this will NEVER, ever reach any consumer grade hardware.

Why not when government can just force companies to backdoor their hardware for them. That way users are secure most of the time except from the government (until the backdoor in intel's chips gets discovered anyway), and users have a false sense of security/privacy so people are more likely to share their secrets with corporations and the government gets to spy on people communicating more openly with each other.
by xp84 | 2026-03-10 17:12:54+00:00
I regret that I have but one vote to give to this comment.

It seems like at least half of what everyone consumes in all of 'social media' is 'politicized' but no one is interested in debating. Debating would have to mean we're talking to those gross people from the opposite 'team,' asking them to justify the policy they are advocating for, listening to them, and trying to convince them of our own positions.

When was the last time we witnessed any politicians or activists trying to change minds? Right-wingers scream dumb slogans like "They're sending the rapists over here!" and left-wingers scream back their own dumb lines like "Racist! America was built by immigrants!" And both sides dismiss the other side's arguments as the nonsensical ravings of the evil and/or stupid.
by commandlinefan | 2026-03-10 17:12:59+00:00
That's technically true right now, but I keep holding out hope that these sorts of draconian restrictions will drive even harder to stamp out privacy-preserving solutions. I'm old enough to remember the days before the internet well, when _everything_ was made for children because you never knew who was and wasn't. I was afraid that legislation would drive the internet back to public television (as it seems to be determined to do) and I was really grateful for Freenet when it was first announced. It never took off, but not because it didn't work, just because at the time not enough people thought it was necessary. Maybe this will be the push to get enough people on board to make it (or something like it) feasible? Anonymous communication is a technically solvable problem, as long as enough people agree that it's worth pursuing.
by Frieren | 2026-03-10 17:13:14+00:00
It seems a very one-sided discussion. HN seems to defend freedom to contact children without restrictions. It is a very extremists unrealistic position that causes more harm that good.

To let antagonistic governments send propaganda to children is harmful.
To let unknown adults contact children in private messages is harmful.
To let children access pornography 24/7 is harmful.

I would expect a more balanced discussion. How to keep children safe is a priority, and there are technical ways to do so in a safe way that does not require to share personal identifications with social media.

If you want a better proposal bring technical expertise to the discussion instead of ideology fundamentalism.
by comgen42 | 2026-03-10 17:14:12+00:00
Author here. This is a ground-up walkthrough of LLM training: transformer architecture, the three training phases (pre-training, SFT, alignment), a working ~800K-param GPT in PyTorch you can run locally, BPE tokenization from scratch, and LoRA fine-tuning on TinyLlama.

All code is in the companion repo on GitHub. Happy to answer questions about any of it.
by calvinmorrison | 2026-03-10 17:14:21+00:00
GAAP doesn't work here really. the R&D treadmill means you are always betting on next year and its NOT inventory or something you can defer your cost on. It's an upfront R&D expense.

so what happens on year 10 when Anthropic hits a $10B training and only returns $8T? they're cooked
by qsera | 2026-03-10 17:15:05+00:00
> You're saying that because we can't fix or prevent everything, then we should choose not to fix or prevent anything?

No, it is just being realist.

Public discourse is like wind. It comes and goes. But incentive based motivators are like gravity. It is a constant force, and sooner or later, it will win.

To make change, incentives should change.
by owlstuffing | 2026-03-10 17:15:08+00:00
Yes, the empty infix operator is often called the "juxt" operator, which is an apt term here.

However, I use the term "binding expressions" intentionally because there’s more going on than ordinary juxtaposition. In a normal juxt expression such as:

a b c

the evaluation order is static and independent of the type system:

(a b) c

With binding expressions the precedence is type-directed, so the type system determines which grouping is valid:

(a b) c
a (b c)

Additionally, the operation itself can be provided by either operand. For a given expression a b, the compiler may resolve it as:

a.prefixBind(b)
b.postfixBind(a)

For example:

10kg

Here kg is a MassUnit, and MassUnit defines postfixBind(Number) returning Mass, so given there is no left-to-right binding, the expression resolves right-to-left as:

kg.postfixBind(10)

So while juxtaposition is the syntactic surface, the semantics are type-directed binding.
by lenerdenator | 2026-03-10 17:15:32+00:00
I'm not being cynical about Islam. The principle is the thing that I'm being cynical about.

We look for these shortcuts all the time because we're meant to interact with much smaller groups of people than we do on a societal scale now. For most of human history the average person was born, lived, and died within the same community of maybe a couple hundred people at most. This thing where the average person lives in metro areas of millions and can do business with people on a completely different continent is really new and we're trying to find methods for figuring out who is and isn't trustworthy. Most fail, and you can throw "in group vs out group" in the failure pile.

Any sort of shortcut to "this person is an ally and/or worthy of my trust" based primarily on race, religion, nationality, etc. is a very good way to set yourself up for exploitation. You see it all the time. Televangelists scam money out of people's pockets by the same mechanism. A "good Christian" man is asking for your donation after giving you the Almighty's blessings.

You also see it in criminal organizations that tend to group themselves by ethnicity like the American La Cosa Nostra, where you have to be full-blooded Italian to be a made man. The people considering your induction into the further depths of the criminal organization won't let you join if you're not full-blooded Italian, because that's the "in group", but the "out group" of everyone else is less likely to kill you in that lifestyle than the members of the "in group".
by ewoodrich | 2026-03-10 17:16:02+00:00
> I also took inspiration from ChromeOS's replacement of Caps with Search

Hah, I do the exact same thing for the exact same reason on every new Mac/Win/Linux machine for almost a decade now. Karabiner on MacOS and PowerToys for Windows.

It’s always nice when it’s supported directly in Linux distros but sometimes have to remap it with config files or a helper tool.

On my MacBook I use Alfred now for search and Win11Debloat for Windows which ensures apps load near instantly when typing.
by alsetmusic | 2026-03-10 17:16:20+00:00
Something I heard from someone who worked at the Palo Alto Apple Store two decades ago:

Steve Jobs's kids drew on an eMac with markers or something. He made them make an appoint for the store's Genius Bar and wait in line to have it looked at like everyone else. I don't know anything about how the staff tried to clean it or the outcome.
by marginalia_nu | 2026-03-10 17:16:41+00:00
Right, I think the latter part is my concern with AI generated code. Often it isn't easy to read (or as easy to read as it could be), and the harder it is to navigate, the more code problems the AI model introduces.

It introduces unnecessary indirection, additional abstractions, fails to re-use code. Humans do this too, but AI models can introduce this type of architectural rot much faster (because it's so fast), and humans usually notice when things start to go off the rails, whereas an AI model will just keep piling on bad code.
by tialaramex | 2026-03-10 17:16:42+00:00
Having "Optional types" only makes sense if your type system is powerful enough.

There are two ways this might happen, both will solve the Billion Dollar Problem but I think one is the clear winner. The first way is explicit optionality, often retro-fitted to languages for example in C# the difference between the types Goose and Goose? are that (in a suitable C# project enabling this rule) the first one is always a Goose and the second might be null instead.

The second way is if you have Sum types you can just add "or it's null" to the type.

I think sum types are better because they pass my "three purposes" rule where I can think of not one (Option<T> replaces optionality) or two (Result<T,E> for error handling) but at least three (ControlFlow<B, C> reifies control flow) distinct problems I don't need separate solutions for any more if I have this feature.

If your type system is too weak you suffer the Billion Dollar problem with Hoare's idea and perhaps if this "feature" had never been invented we'd have all migrated to languages with a better type system decades ago.
by imglorp | 2026-03-10 17:16:55+00:00
Who's the target audience for that announcement?

a. Existing customers already got their hands chopped, their prices raised, or their lawyers poked. They're stuck with an abusive, litigious, opaque vendor and will migrate out when they can. Many are stuck.

b. Prospective customers must have some compatibility need or they'd look elsewhere.

c. Developers won't be fooled so rule them out :)
by jandrewrogers | 2026-03-10 17:17:23+00:00
> virtual simulation of 3d world

Virtual simulations are not substitutable for the physical world. They are fundamentally different theory problems that have almost no overlap in applicability. You could in principle create a simulation with the same mathematical properties as the physical world but no one has ever done that. I'm not sure if we even know how.

Physical world dynamics are metastable and non-linear at every resolution. The models we do build are created from sparse irregular samples with large error rates; you often have to do complex inference to know if a piece of data even represents something real. All of this largely breaks the assumptions of our tidy sampling theorems in mathematics. The problem of physical world inference has been studied for a couple decades in the defense and mapping industries; we already have a pretty good understanding of why LLM-style AI is uniquely bad at inference in this domain, and it mostly comes down to the architectural inability to represent it.

Grounded estimates of the minimum quantity of training data required to build a reliable model of physical world dynamics, given the above properties, is many exabytes. This data exists, so that is not a problem. The models will be orders of magnitude larger than current LLMs. Even if you solve the computer science and theory problems around representation so that learning and inference is efficient, few people are prepared for the scale of it.

(source: many years doing frontier R&D on these problems)
by prakhar897 | 2026-03-10 17:17:46+00:00
From the amazon I know, people only care about a. not getting fired and b. promotions. For devs, the matrix looks like this:

1. Shipping: deliver tickets or be pipped.

2. Having Less comments on their PRs: for some drastically dumb reason, having a PR thoroughly reviewed is a sign of bad quality. L7 and above use this metric to Pip folks.

3. Docs: write docs, get them reviewed to show you're high level.

Without AI, an employee is worse off in all of the above compared to folks who will cheat to get ahead.

I can't see how "requesting" folks for forego their own self-preservation will work. especially when you've spent years pitting people against each other.
by ibejoeb | 2026-03-10 17:18:09+00:00
From his Oxford bio: "To assist in efficient look-up of words in a dictionary, he discovered the well-known sorting algorithm Quicksort."

I always liked this presentation. I think it's equally fine to say "invented" something, but I think this fits into his ethos (from what I understand of him.) There are natural phenomena, and it just takes noticing.
by ACS_Solver | 2026-03-10 17:18:13+00:00
> "it's not X, it's Y", "Not X, Not Y, Just Z"

Interesting how LLMs have their own preferences too. Those in particular are very often used by ChatGPT, while Claude until recently couldn't stop saying "You're absolutely right!"

I also have a problem now with "it's worth noting", I use it a lot, I still like it, but now it's a dangerous phrase because of LLM associations.
by why_at | 2026-03-10 17:18:31+00:00
>Personally, I love the "hallucinations" as they help me fine-tune my prompts, base instructions, and reinforce intentionality

This reads almost like satire of an AI power user. Why would you like it when an LLM makes things up? Because you get to write more prompts? Wouldn't it be better if it just didn't do that?

It's like saying "I love getting stuck in traffic because I get to drive longer!"

Sorry but that one sentence really stuck out to me
by johndough | 2026-03-10 17:18:33+00:00
Could you point at some more public info about active parameter count? You said:

> and while an exact number is hard to compute, let me tell you, it is not 17B or anywhere in that particular OOM :)

I can see ~100B, but that would near the same order of magnitude. I find ~1000B active parameters hard to believe.
by andsoitis | 2026-03-10 17:18:47+00:00
> While working on Cutlet, though, I allowed Claude to generate every single line of code. I didn’t even read any of the code. Instead, I built guardrails to make sure it worked correctly (more on that later).

Impressive. As a practical matter, one wonders what th point would be in creating a new programming languages if the programmer no longer has to write or read code.

Programming languages are after all the interface that a human uses to give instructions to a computer. If you’re not writing or reading it, the language, by definition doesn’t matter.
by rosasalberto | 2026-03-10 17:18:56+00:00
I don't have the full context on the Persona/Discord story yet, but our philosophy is that identity providers should be a shield, not a source of risk.

We address this by building privacy-preserving architectures that minimize the data footprint. First, we offer secure, long-term retention so companies don't have to store sensitive PII on their own servers—which are often managed by teams who aren't cybersecurity specialists.

Second, and more importantly, we provide granular data control. Our customers can select exactly which fields they need to keep (e.g., just Name, DOB, and Country) and set the system to automatically purge sensitive assets like ID photos immediately after verification. It’s about ensuring that only the absolute minimum amount of data necessary ever exists in the system.
by raffaeleg | 2026-03-10 17:18:57+00:00
The memory insight here is underappreciated. Once you cross the line from stateless chatbots to stateful agents, memory becomes infrastructure — not a feature you bolt on later. We learned this the hard way: agents that can't reason over what happened yesterday make the same mistakes on loop. The real shift in 2026 isn't better models, it's better state management. Persistent memory, proper context windows that survive across sessions, and failure recovery that doesn't require re-prompting from scratch. That's where the actual engineering challenge lives now.
by mr-wendel | 2026-03-10 17:19:03+00:00
I disagree. I've done nothing to argue that the harm isn't real, downplayed it, nor misrepresented it.

I do agree that at large, the theoretical upsides of accessibility are almost certainly completely overshadowed by obvious downsides of AI. At least, for now anyway. Accessibility is a single instance of the general argument that "of course there are major upsides to using AI", and there a good chance the future only gets brighter.

My point, essentially, is that I think this is (yet another) area in life where you can't solve the problem by saying "don't do it", and enforcing it is cost-prohibitive. Saying "no AI!" isn't going to stop PR spam. It's not going to stop slop code. What is it going to stop (see edit)? "Bad" people won't care, and "good" people (who use/depend-on AI) will contribute less.

Thus I think we need to focus on developing robust systems around integrating AI. Certainly I'd love to see people adopt responsible disclosure policies as a starting point.

--

[edit] -- To answer some of my own question, there are obvious legal concerns that frequently come up. I have my opinions, but as in many legal matters, especially around IP, the water is murky and opinions are strongly held at both extremes and all to often having to fight a legal battle at all* is immediately a loss regardless of outcome.