MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by schipperai | 2026-03-12 12:38:30+00:00
thank! and I agree with you on chain exfiltration - it's a hard one to protect against. nah passes the last few messages of conversation history to the LLM gate, so it may be able to catch this scenario, but it's hard from a guarantee. I plan to add a gate where an LLM reads scripts before executing, which will also mitigate this.

The right solution though is a monitoring service on your network that checks for exfiltration of credential. nah is just one layer in the stack.
by sensanaty | 2026-03-12 12:38:30+00:00
I love Rails, but after working for a few places with huge Rails codebases and then several other places with .NET and other frameworks with actual typing, I just can't go back to Rails for anything that isn't a personal project.

Working with a large codebase with an untyped codebase is just a nightmare, even with powerful IDEs like RubyMine that are able to cover some of the paint points. I wonder how good Sorbet is these days, though, especially the RoR experience
by Peritract | 2026-03-12 12:38:46+00:00
So in this case, you're able to detect how phrasing communicates shades of meaning, when you were not able to in the parent message. That's the whole crux of the discussion.

Regardless of how I feel you've misread my message, the fact remains that the way in which a message is expressed does change the import of the message, and that 'received' is not the same as 'understood'; you can't simply swap out parts without changing communication, and the way in which a message is expressed will--intentionally or otherwise--have an impact on the reader.

That's what people are calling out when they talk about the tone or voice of AI-generated text; it's something that many people notice and have a strong negative reaction to. You might not have that same reaction to the stimulus as other people, but that's beside the point: a lot of other people do, and they're also recipients of the communication.

Just as it is useless for me to point out all the places where I think you have misinterpreted my message in a rush to offence, asserting that there isn't a difference because you personally cannot detect one is not justified.
by postflopclarity | 2026-03-12 12:39:10+00:00
> "Drastic increases in capability have happened the last 3-6 months" have been a constant refrain.

well, yeah. because that's been the experience for many people.

3 years ago, trying to use ChatGPT 3.5 for coding tasks was more of a gimmick than anything else, and was basically useless for helping me with my job.

today, agentic Opus 4.6 provides more value to me than probably 2 more human engineers on my team would
by chriswarbo | 2026-03-12 12:39:50+00:00
> I believe, that if your definition of a choice stop working if we assume a deterministic Universe, then you need a better definition of a choice. In a deterministic Universe becomes glaringly obvious that all the framework of free will and choice is just an abstraction, that abstract away things that are not really needed to make a decision.

Indeed, I think of concepts like "agency", "choice", "free will", etc. as aspects of a particular sort of scientific model. That sort of model can make good predictions about people, organisations, etc. which would be intractable to many other approaches. It can also be useful in situations that we have more sophisticated models for, e.g. treating a physical system as "wanting" to minimise its energy can give a reasonable prediction of its behaviour very quickly.

That sort of model has also been applied to systems where its predictive powers aren't very good; e.g. modelling weather, agriculture, etc. as being determined by some "will of the gods", and attempting to infer the desires of those gods based on their observed "choices".

It baffles me that some people might think a model of this sort might have any relevance at a fundamental level.
by hermit_dev | 2026-03-12 12:40:14+00:00
I understand what you're saying, it's incredible technology and I use it everyday in my work, but we are too busy racing to one up each other and ignoring the critical safety components, which is extremely dangerous and irresponsible. Even Anthropic to your point, was supposed to be the safer AI company when they started out, but they continue to move away from that path slowly. The problem is the cat's out of the bag and people won't stop now unless something terrible happens. Question is, how bad of an event will it be?
by pqdbr | 2026-03-12 12:40:25+00:00
We've also been running Rails in production for 15+ years (since 2011) in two companies and it has been serving us greatly. Hiring is tough, but I definitely believe the stack makes up for it due to the productivity gains.

In late 2025 we decided to migrate one of them to Inertia. Public facing pages is already done, and we're 80% through migrating the logged in area (it's a huge app). We choose Vue.js.

It's amazing how powerful this stack is and how little you have to change in the backend.
by ndriscoll | 2026-03-12 12:40:33+00:00
Concise isn't specific enough: I've primed mine on basic architecture I want: imperative shell/functional core, don't mix abstraction levels in one function, each function should be simple to read top-to-bottom with higher level code doing only orchestration with no control flow. Names should express business intent. Prefer functions over methods where possible. Use types to make illegal states unrepresentable. RAII. etc.

You need to think about what "good taste " is to you (or find others who have already written about software architecture and take their ideas that you like). People disagree on what that even means (e.g. some people love Rails. To me a lot of it seems like the exact opposite of "good taste").
by snoren | 2026-03-12 12:40:51+00:00
You can spot AI writing now. Not because it's bad, but because it all sounds the same. Same cadence, same transitions, same careful optimistic closer.

The problem isn't tone. It's that your writing voice is made of dozens of interwoven patterns: sentence rhythm, punctuation habits, where your analogies come from, how you build and close an argument. A system prompt captures maybe 10% of that. The model smooths out the rest.
Ask HN: Devs, what would you want in an API Monitor?
by acrtic | 2026-03-12 12:41:50+00:00
Hey HN,

Im a first year CS student and ive been working on building my own SaaS API Monitor for the last 2 weeks but I've hit a road block or moreso I'm inna situation..

I've been posting about my product on various sites but have recieved next to no new users.

So I've decided to double down as that approach is clearly not working, maybe because I haven't really looked into what devs actually want in an API monitor since I had started this as something just to monitor my endpoints.

So here I am asking the Dev's out there what actually they expect from such monitors so I can build my product based on that.

Any and every bit of critisism and suggestions are open. If anyone wants to check my version out it's in my profile about me.

Thanks for taking the time to read!
by orwin | 2026-03-12 12:42:38+00:00
Iranian polls show that 20-25%
Iranians living in Iran support the IRGC, but due to how the questions were formulated, you can't know who would support a regime change.

Polls after the 12 day bombing campaign in 2025 showed that 60% disapproved the bombing. That means you probably have at least a 40% base of support for active overthroing, growing, to change the regime, which is larger than the current supporters. Maybe you could have done something with it. Wait until the previous Komenei died of his cancer instead of martyring him, and wait for the new nomination and the protests that would follow to strike (decapitation of the morality police, species to open the prisons, etc).

The way it was done just feels like the US wanted chaos and death, not meaningful change.
by davecoffin | 2026-03-12 12:42:48+00:00
I've been able to supercharge a hobby project of mine over the last couple months using Opus 4.6 in claude code. I had to collaborate and write code still, but claude did like 75% of the work to add meaningful new features to an iOS/Android native mobile app, including Live Activities which is so overly complicated i would not have been able to figure that out. I have it running in a folder that contains both my back end api (express) and my mobile app (nativescript), so it does back end and front end work simultaneously to support new features. this wasnt possible 8 months ago.
by sho_hn | 2026-03-12 12:43:51+00:00
My anecdotal experience is rather different.

I write a lot of C++ and QML code. Codex 5.3, only released in Feb, is the the first model I've that would regularly generate code that passes my 25 years expert smell test and has turned generative coding from a timesap/nuisance into a tool I can somewhat rely on not to set me back.

Claude still wasn't quite there at the time, but I haven't tried 4.6 yet.

QML is a declarative-first markup language that is a superset of the JavaScript syntax. It's niche and doesn't have a giant amount of training data in the corpus. Codex is the first model that doesn't super botch it or prefers to write reams of procedural JS embeds (yes, after steering). Much reduced is also the tendency to go overboard on spamming everything with clouds of helper functions/methods in both C++ and QML. It knows when to stop, so to speak, and is either trained or able to reason toward a more idiomatic ideal, with far less explicit instruction / AGENTS.ms wrangling.

It's a huge difference. It might be the result of very specific optimization, or perhaps simultaneous advancements in the harness play a bigger role, but in my books my kneck of the woods (or place on the long tail) only really came online in 2026 as far as LLMs are concerned.
by foobarian | 2026-03-12 12:44:19+00:00
The biggest problem I ran into without a code formatter is that team wasted a LOT of time arguing about style. Every single MR would have nitpicking about how many spaces to indent here and there, where to put the braces, etc. etc. ad nauseam. I don't particularly like the style we are enforcing but I love how much more efficient our review process is.
by curiouscube | 2026-03-12 12:44:39+00:00
There is a decent case for this thesis to hold true especially if we look at the shift in training regimes and benchmarking over the last 1-2 years. Frontier labs don't seem to really push pure size/capability anymore, it's an all in focus on agentic AI which is mainly complex post-training regimes.

There are good reasons why they don't or can't do simple param upscaling anymore, but still, it makes me bearish on AGI since it's a slow, but massive shift in goal setting.

In practice this still doesn't mean 50 % of white collar can't be automated though.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-03-12 12:44:50+00:00
Continual learning isn't a "fundamental limitation" or unsolvable problem. Animal brains are an existence proof that it's possible, but it's tough to do, and quite likely SGD is not the way to do it, so any attempt to retrofit continual learning to LLMs as they exist today is going to be a hack...

Memory and learning are two different things. Memorization is a small subset of learning. Memorizing declarative knowledge and personal/episodic history (cf. LLM context) are certainly needed, but an animal (or AI intern) also needs to be able to learn procedural skills which need to become baked into the weights that are generating behavior.

Fine tuning is also no substitute for incremental learning. You might think of it as addressing somewhat the same goal, but really fine tuning is about specializing a model for a particular use, and if you repeatedly fine tune a model for different specializations (e.g. what I learnt yesterday, vs what I learnt the day before) then you will run into the catastrophic forgetting problem.

I agree that incremental learning seems more like an engineering problem rather than a research one, or at least it should succumb to enough brain power and compute put into solving it, but we're now almost 10 years into the LLM revolution (attention paper in 2017) and it hasn't been solved yet - it's not easy.
by thomascgalvin | 2026-03-12 12:45:25+00:00
Anecdotally, I haven't seen any real improvement from the AI tools I leverage. They're all good-ish at what they do, but all still lie occasionally, and all need babysitting.

I also wonder how much of the jump in early 2025 comes from cultural acceptance by devs, rather than an improvement in the tools themselves.
by philistine | 2026-03-12 12:45:32+00:00
> The iPad line makes a lot more sense when you’re just shopping and realize you’re just on a price ladder.

That is ultimately what keeps saving Apple from turning into Dell. They want to offer you one model per price point. You'd be hard-pressed to find two iPads, Macs, iPhones with the exact same price. There's always a price difference with Apple, which helps immensely.
by butlike | 2026-03-12 12:46:40+00:00
I've thought about #2 a lot (well, with less hilarious-in-my-mind iconography), but the issue with becoming fertilizer is human->human diseases. Also if you normalize the behavior, it comes back to bite you during plagues where the crops will become diseased.

Ultimately I land on: there's enough 'gotchas' with decomposing human remains where I think a graveyard will do. Though, I wish the casket wasn't necessary.
by DonHopkins | 2026-03-12 12:46:57+00:00
The character Beauchamp ("BEE-jum") Day in Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City is a softening of the English aristocratic way ("Bee-chum") of the French spelling Beauchamp ("boh-SHON" as the French would say).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76tVgne0gOA

But he's less a British aristocrat than a brittle prep-school martinet in a cheap tie who rants at a secretary over three typos like a duke defending the realm, sneers about Kelly girls and office decor as if guarding the Social Register, treats sleeping with his own employee as proof of authority, and then sneaks off to bathhouses while running his typing pool with equal parts class anxiety, closet panic, and a middle manager's superiority complex.
by egwor | 2026-03-12 12:47:19+00:00
I think it depends on what you're using it for. If it is a simple kubernetes config then the model doesn't matter too much. Contract that with writing the scenario for a backtest for an algo that trades on a venue: it is not the same complexity and the basic models are terrible. I've had it tell me that it has added tests to find that they're just stubs!
Opus seems to be getting there, but on more complex tasks the others are a complete waste of time.
by ordersofmag | 2026-03-12 12:47:43+00:00
Even if one-shot LLM performance has plateaued (which I'm not convinced this data shows given omission of recent models that are widely claimed to be better) that missing the point that I see in my own work. The improved tooling and agent-based approaches that I'm using now make the LLM one-shot performance only a small part of the puzzle in terms of how AI tools have accelerated the time from idea to decent code. For instance the planning dialogs I now have with Claude are an important part of what's speeding things up for me. Also, the iterative use of AI to identify, track, and take care of small coding tasks (none of which are particularly challenging in terms of benchmarks) is simply more effective. Could this all have been done with the LLM engines of late 2024. Perhaps, but I think the fine-tuning (and conceivably the system prompts) that make the current LLM's more effective at agent-centered workflows (including tool-use) are a big part of it. One-shot task performance at challenging tasks is an interesting, certainly foundational, metric. But I don't think it captures the important advances I see in how LLM's have gotten better over the last year in ways that actually matter to me. I rarely have a well-defined programming challenge and the obligation to solve it in a single-shot.
by Spooky23 | 2026-03-12 12:48:38+00:00
I expressed that poorly. I mean the internal components.

The MacBook Neo has 2 configuations. The MacBook Pro has several, but the SOC funnels those configurations into a few paths and segments the market. You can't get a "base" MacBook Pro with 128GB of ram or a large SSD. Dell will sell whatever the components allow you to do, usually only limited by the hardware.
by josephg | 2026-03-12 12:48:50+00:00
Yep this has been my experience too.

I tried GPT3.5 for translating code from typescript to rust. It made many mistakes in rust. It couldn't fix borrow checker issues. The context was so small that I could only feed it small amounts of my program at a time. It also introduced new bugs into the algorithm.

Yesterday I had an idea for a simple macos app I wanted. I prompted claude code. It programmed the whole thing start to finish in 10 minutes, no problem. I asked it to optimize the program using a technique I came up with, and it did. I asked it to make a web version and it did. (Though for some reason, the web version needed several rounds of "it doesn't work, here's the console output").

I'm slowly coming to terms with the idea that my job is fundamentally changing. I can get way more done by prompting claude than I can by writing the code myself.
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-03-12 12:48:55+00:00
Sure thing, but at the same time, there's creativity and then there's work; I could creatively write things in C or assembly for the art of it, but that isn't what my employer pays me to do. I could do my job in notepad or `ed` and type every character myself, but that's inefficient.

Same goes for art (which is often what it's compared to), some part of art is creative, but the vast majority of art that people get paid salaries for is "just work"; designing a website, doing graphics work for a video game or TV production, that kinda thing.

tl;dr, AI won't replace artisans but it's a tool that can help increase productivity / reduce costs. Emphasis on can, because it's a lot more complex than "same output in less time".
by Nursie | 2026-03-12 12:48:57+00:00
They're there because someone a long time ago was wealthy and probably had ties to one or more monarchs.

This is not a basis for holding power in any country that calls itself democratic. This idea that they are somehow above everyday concerns and that's a good thing is some sort of weird retcon, and if we're going to use unmitigated cynicism to impugn the validity of action of other office holders who are elected, or who have got to the lords through prominence in public life, then allow me the same here: they're just there to pursue the interests of the landed gentry and hold back progress on issues like fox-hunting. And they have done exactly this in the past. The fact they're not trying to win an election means they are entirely free to pursue selfish aims.

There's no virtue in maintaining the privileges of these alleged 'nobles' to interfere in the running of the state.

What they’re going to get is 92 fewer (to use the modern parlance) nepo-babies having access to the levers of power. It’s something to celebrate.
by speedgoose | 2026-03-12 12:49:15+00:00
I get your point, but I don’t know if big data is the right term anymore.

Many people like to think they have big data, and you kinda have to agree with them if you want their money. At least in consulting.

Also you could go well beyond a 16TB dataset on a single machine. You assume that the whole uncompressed dataset has to fit in memory, but many workloads don’t need that.

How many people in the world have such big datasets to analyse within reasonable time?

Some people say extreme data.
by webhosting4u | 2026-03-12 12:49:44+00:00
Like many sellers, I list my records on Discogs.
But I always felt the browsing experience for buyers could be much better.

So I built a small web app that connects to my Discogs inventory and lets people explore the records in a much cleaner way.

You can:

• search quickly
• filter records easily
• sort by different fields
• browse everything in a simple interface

Basically the goal was to make vinyl digging a bit nicer than scrolling through the default marketplace list.

You can try it here:
https://spacerecordshop.gr

It’s powered by the Discogs API and automatically reflects the records I have listed for sale.

Curious to hear feedback from other vinyl collectors.
by birdsongs | 2026-03-12 12:49:50+00:00
Inflammable made me so angry as a child/teen when I found out. I read it in our encyclopedia set but we didn't have a dictionary, and this was pre-internet.

It was in the context of hydrogen and I could have sworn it was flammable. But here is this encyclopedia telling me it's INflammable. It's... not flammable? Looked it up in the school library.

Thank you, that memory came up from the depths of time. Probably haven't thought about that in 30 years. Funny how we sometimes just didn't know stuff, and couldn't find out back then.
by nahime | 2026-03-12 12:50:07+00:00
Hi HN,

I built lazyagent because I was juggling 6–8 coding agent sessions (Claude Code, Cursor, etc.) across different terminals and tabs, and it was getting impossible to quickly answer "which agent is doing what right now?".

Lazyagent is a terminal UI written in Go (using Bubble Tea) that shows all your coding agent sessions in a single view. You can:

- see the status of each agent at a glance
- follow logs/outputs in real time
- quickly jump into the right terminal when you need to intervene

It runs locally, is fully open‑source, and doesn’t require any external backend or account.

I’d love feedback on:

- what information you’d like to see per session (logs, diffs, task state, something else?)
- what multi‑agent / multi‑repo workflows you currently have
- which integrations are missing to make this genuinely useful in your day‑to‑day setup

Repo and README with install instructions are here:
https://github.com/illegalstudio/lazyagent

I’ll be in the thread to answer questions and collect feedback (especially critical ones).
by camdenreslink | 2026-03-12 12:50:39+00:00
From my personal experience, they have gotten better, but they haven’t unlocked any new capabilities. They’ve just improved at what I was already using them for.

At the end of the day they still produce code that I need to manually review and fully understand before merging. Usually with a session of back-and-forth prompting or manual edits by me.

That was true 2 years ago, and it’s true now (except 2 years ago I was copy/pasting from the browser chat window and we have some nicer IDE integration now).
by orwin | 2026-03-12 12:50:41+00:00
The UK population was _very_ weary of Churchill and his decision to involve the UK in WW2. You had the UK nazi party that was lobbying the industrialists, and the moscow-aligned communist party that was putting pressure on the laborers. Churchill would have lasted at most half a year after Dunkerque, and and much more pro-nazi PM could have been named. But the German airstrike campaign radicalised the UK population. Because the fucking Nazis couldn't bear to have decisions like 'who to bomb' taken by non-nazi, they replaced all the capable men with idiots yesmen.
by tim333 | 2026-03-12 12:50:46+00:00
The internet is not dead though - it's bursting with life, both human and LLM claw like. It's only going to get more so as time goes on. Re:

>Can we go back to an internet like this? I guess we can’t.

Gary Brolsma is still at it with Numa Numa (2023) https://youtu.be/ZBKm1MBsTbk. There's just a bunch of other stuff out there too.
by happytoexplain | 2026-03-12 12:51:28+00:00
It's the difference between correctness and tone/character/semantics (tone and character do affect semantics). We need to do things we don't quite mean in subjective spaces, to learn. Developing yourself is wonderful, but presenting a writing style that does not yet represent your learned tone feels disingenuous to the reader and harms the tone of the whole conversation. Iterate privately, or with friends/family/mentors, using LLMs if you believe it helps.