MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by RcouF1uZ4gsC | 2026-03-06 01:34:02+00:00
> My, the world has changed.

No. Your tech experience was an aberration.

For almost all of history, including recent history, tech and military went together. Whether compound bows, or spears or metallurgy.

Euler used his math to develop artillery tables for the Prussian army.

von Neumann helped develop the atom bomb.

The military played a huge role in creating Silicon Valley.

However, to people who grew up in the mid to late 90s, it is easy to miss that that period was a major aberration. You had serious people talking about the end of history. You had John Perry Barlow's utterly naive Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace which looks more and more naive every year.
by nephihaha | 2026-03-06 01:34:25+00:00
BBC Question Time has been a joke for a while. One of the previous producers was actually busted for trying to source colourful characters for the audience, often from the far right or UKIP/Reform crew.

As I say above, apart from regional factors, the BBC has a built in bias against Scottish independence because it would lose 10% of its licence fee funding if it occurred.
by agent_invariant | 2026-03-06 01:35:25+00:00
Interesting data, especially the retry-escalation pattern. We’ve seen something very similar in internal testing the agent doesn’t interpret a failure as a boundary, it interprets it as a problem to route around.

Your “helpful lie” point is spot on. Once the agent gets into a failure state it will often try to resolve the narrative rather than the system state.

The mental model we’ve been experimenting with is similar to what you describe about infrastructure boundaries. Instead of trying to make the model behave better, we assume it will eventually do something unsafe and focus on what happens at the commit boundary.

In our case the agent can propose actions, but anything that mutates real state (DB writes, API calls, payments etc.) has to pass through a deterministic gate first. The gate doesn’t try to understand intent? it just enforces mechanical invariants like sequencing, replay protection, and bounded actions before a commit is allowed.

The interesting side effect is you get an append-only ledger of proposals, freezes, and commits, which ends up being incredibly useful for understanding how agents actually behave in the wild.

Your sandbox approach and this kind of execution gating feel pretty complementary. Sandbox prevents access to things the agent should never touch, and a commit boundary protects the actions it is allowed to attempt.

Do your logs show patterns where agents keep retrying the same action after a failure, even when the environment makes it impossible? That seems to show up a lot.
by SchemaLoad | 2026-03-06 01:36:10+00:00
The TPM holds the decryption keys and will unlock as long as all checks pass. Booting off the previously registered drive/kernel being one of them.

If this fails you can always manually input the decryption key and reregister with the TPM. The whole point of this setup is you can't just use a bootable USB to reset the devices password.
by cat_plus_plus | 2026-03-06 01:36:26+00:00
There are so many inference providers not working for Department of War. Even Alibaba and sure China has lots of issues but they are not bombing anyone now if that's your first priority. Or else, smaller US / European / Asian companies with pure civilian focus. SOTA open weights models they serve are perfectly suitable for coding and chat. I run a local Qwen3.5-122B-A10B-NVFP4 instance and it writes entire Android apps from scratch and that's a midsized model.
by AlotOfReading | 2026-03-06 01:37:46+00:00
I put engineering effort into handling bad hardware all the time because safety critical, :)

It significantly overlaps the engineering to gracefully handle non-hardware things like null pointers and forgetting to update one side of a communication interface.

80/20 rule, really. If you're thoughtful about how you build, you can get most of the benefits without doing the expensive stuff.
by plastic041 | 2026-03-06 01:38:18+00:00
It's ironic to debate whether 'clean rooming' or rewriting violates licensing laws when LLMs clearly violate all of them.

Also no one can prove that whether LLMs referenced original code or not, because LLM companies don't disclose what data they used. I'm pretty sure that well-known open source projects such as chardet has been included in the Claude dataset, but Anthropic won't say anything about this.
Self-Learning Customer Marketing
by davismartens | 2026-03-06 01:39:38+00:00
I rarely have a customer experience that genuinely feels delightful. Lately I've started to wonder why that is...
I get up sold on products when I'm not ready to buy, I receive emails about features I'd never use, and when I want have an issue it's impossible to find someone to talk to. This dynamic always struck me as weird.

But having worked for large brands, the truth is that most companies have no idea when and how to talk to their customers. They rely on a messy web of conflicting events and triggers that engage customers without context.

I’ve recently started working on that tries to fix this, by pulling customer events from every channel, derive important moments from sequences of events and trigger the right engagement based on your specific context, all while continually learnig what's important to customer and how to best engage them

Here's how this works in an e-commerce example (although this works for any type of brand): 2 customers may have abandoned their cart at checkout. Customer1 got an error during checkout, got frustrated and moved on, Customer2 just a regular session.

Today companies treat these 2 customers the same and just send a discount code after 24h when in reality you should investigate customer1's issue and let them know it was fixed so they can complete their transaction

I call these sequences of events that drive customers to do X vs Y, "moments". My thesis is that you can discover these moments and design customer engagement around them to build delightful experiences that feel like you're going above and beyond, tailored to the customer which improves revenue, retention and advocacy.

I would love to hear from anyone that has experience with this problem.

You can follow my journey at https://booly.co
by terminalshort | 2026-03-06 01:40:08+00:00
The author is not fairly compensated in that case, but if you buy the book, he is. If you bought books and learned to code from them and then went on to go found a startup that ended up being worth billions, you don't owe that author one dollar more than you already paid him when you bought his book. That's more like the AI case here.
by jmyeet | 2026-03-06 01:40:34+00:00
When people (myself included FWIW) warn about the dangers of American imperialism, it's because:

1. As President Eisenhower said in his farewell address in 1961 [1], every dollar spent on the military-industrial complex is a dollar not spent on schools or houses or hospitals or bridges;

2. Every American company with sufficient size eventually becomes a defense contractor. That's really what's happened with the tech companies. They're moving in lockstep with the administration on both domestic and foreign policy;

3. The so-called "imperial boomerang" [2]. Every tactic, weapon and strategy used against colonial subjects are eventually used against the imperial core eg [3]. Do you think it's an accident that US police forces have become increasingly militarized?

The example I like to give is China's high speed rail. China started building HSR only 20 years ago and now has over 32,000 miles of HSR tracks taking ~4M passengers per day. The estimated cost for the entire network is ~$900B. That's less than the US spends on the military every year.

I really what Steve Jobs would've done were he still alive. Tim Apple has bent the knee and kissed the ring. Would Steve Jobs have done the same? I'm not so sure. He may well have been ousted (again) because of it.

Then again, I think Steve Jobs was the only Silicon Valley billlionaire not in a transhumanist polycule with a more than even chance of being in the files.

[1]: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwigh...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_boomerang

[3]: https://www.amnestyusa.org/blog/with-whom-are-many-u-s-polic...
by cperciva | 2026-03-06 01:40:53+00:00
Yeah, I would definitely characterize it as an instruction following problem. After a few more round trips I got it to admit that "my earlier passes leaned heavily on build/tests + targeted reads, which can miss many “deep” bugs that only show up under specific conditions or with careful semantic review" and then asking it to "Please do a careful semantic review of files, one by one." started it on actually reviewing code.

Mind you, the bugs it reported were mostly bogus. But at least I was eventually able to convince it to try.
by aspenmartin | 2026-03-06 01:41:03+00:00
No, it's "this tool cannot be used by bad guys or good guys, but can be used by highly funded labs that do neuroscience". It's something that freaks people out until they gradually learn what is actually involved

https://ai.meta.com/blog/brain-ai-image-decoding-meg-magneto... [2023]
https://ai.meta.com/blog/brain-ai-research-human-communicati... [last year, focuses on decoding text]

^ There's a research team at Meta that studies this. You need an MEG -- thats $2-5M + the shielded room it lives in and the experts that can operate it.

EEG doesn't work due to low spatial resolution and how finicky it is to place the electrodes to get a good signal

The signals from neurons are just unbelievably tiny and are in an absolute sea of noisy trash. No one is ever going to read your thoughts without your consent (or by wrestling you into a big MEG, in which case you have bigger things to worry about). No one is going to be reading your dreams with any sort of accuracy either.
by qsera | 2026-03-06 01:41:32+00:00
>refuse to let their systems be used for war..

I don't want wars.

But tell me, what would you like your country to do when conflicts arise due to want of natural resources? Would you want your country to just give up that resource your people depend on, like may be 50/50?

Do you believe it will always be possible to settle on a solution in a peaceful way that works for everyone?
by t0lo | 2026-03-06 01:41:33+00:00
Use Mullvad Browser or Brave (both require no extensions to block ads, with mullvad browser being modelled off of tor. Use data traffic fingerprint obfuscation even behind vpn (yes they can tell if you're messaging, watching a video, torrenting, etc 90% of the time even behind vpn) use mullvads daita (makes packets the same size) or nymvpn (mixnet with tor like routing and in built delays). Tor doesn't protect against traffic analysis at all.
Show HN: SlideScholar-Turn research papers into conference slides in 60 seconds
by Lindadao | 2026-03-06 01:41:40+00:00
I built SlideScholar to solve a pain point I kept seeing: researchers spending 6-10 hours making slides for 15-minute conference talks.

Upload a PDF or ArXiv URL, pick your talk length, and get an editable .pptx presentation with assertion-evidence titles, extracted figures and tables, and speaker notes with timing cues.

Stack: Next.js frontend on Vercel, Python/FastAPI backend on Railway, Claude API for content planning, python-pptx for slide generation.

Free, no signup needed
by nawtagain | 2026-03-06 01:41:50+00:00
Fastmail requires payment meaning it is very closely tied to your identity. Proton is one of the very very few who do not tie a new email account to your identity via phone number, payment info or alternative email (which requires phone, payment info etc..).

Even proton only provides webmail free - pop3/imap/smtp require payment. But that's still better than 99.99% of other webmail - everyone verifies via some method that ties to your personal info.
by dzhiurgis | 2026-03-06 01:42:03+00:00
Speaking for Lithuania - we have something like 6 or 7 digital ID forms and until like last year or so - they all sucked, i.e.:

* Using your bank to login - well if you left country you generally close your bank.

* SIM card auth (similar to SMS, you get a code on your phone) - most popular, except same as above + doesn't work with eSIM.

* Chip card - requires reader, unclear software and certificates on card expire after 2 years which makes it useless if you moved abroad.

* Smart Id - scans your passport, does face scan and stays on your phone - pretty convenient, but turns out there are multiple levels of auth and this particular one isn't that useful...

* Contactless - the holy grail that's only been implemented recently - scan your id card/ passport using phone. I've only used it once, did require some esoteric software, but seems like a step in the right direction.

Bonus: e-gov forms actually predate mobile era. They have been built so long that you can forget trying to fill them on your phone. And if you do get to fill them, you'll most likely receive email that you need to come into the office for 'verification' which pretty much defeats entire system.
by galangalalgol | 2026-03-06 01:43:12+00:00
I can't recall a single Firefox crash in at least a decade. What are people doing? I run ublock origin, nothing else. I do sometimes have Firefox mobile misbehave where it stops loading new pages and I jave to restart it, but open pages work normally as do all other operations, so not a crash exactly. Happens maybe once a month

Edit: more context, I power cycle at least once a week on desktop and the version is typically a bit behind new. I also don't have more tabs open than will fit in the row. All these habits seem likely to decrease crashes.
by mechanicalpulse | 2026-03-06 01:43:26+00:00
> I think Blizzard could have also made the player base just as happy by [...] understanding the underlying problem.

I'm reminded of the 1995 interview in which Steve Jobs elucidated the fundamental reasons that Xerox missed its golden opportunity to own the computer industry and why former PepsiCo CEO John Sculley later ultimately failed at the helm of Apple.

It's fundamentally the same issue with a number of gaming conglomerates nowadays. These companies are more interested in increasing the sales of sugar water than making great games. Perhaps, then, it's not surprising in the least to learn that former Activision Blizzard boss Bobby Kotick was on the board of Coca-Cola for a decade.
by agent_invariant | 2026-03-06 01:45:02+00:00
Interesting approach, the governance loop is a cool idea, forcing the agent to periodically stop and re-read and creates checkpoint.

One thing we kept seeing is agents are very good at convincing themselves they followed the protocol even when they didn’t. Self-checking helps, but we eventually started treating the agent’s reasoning as advisory rather than authoritative.

The pattern we’ve been exploring is separating what the agent believes it did from what the system actually allows to execute. The agent can generate tests, retry, and self-correct, but any action that mutates real state still passes through an external gate enforcing deterministic constraints.

Your layered architecture probably makes that easier since the execution boundary between the agent and the browser interface is already well defined.

How well does the “never makes that mistake again” mechanism hold up in longer sessions? In our experience agents sometimes rediscover the same failure modes once enough context drift accumulates.
by eth0up | 2026-03-06 01:46:48+00:00
>"it's increasingly difficult to actually have a dissenting voice online."

If willing, I would appreciate some examples, actual or hypothetical. I have left a few comments regarding my concerns over AI and have been surprised by the hostile reactions. Much of my research kindof revolves around a central concern matching your statement. But my perspective is in a vacuum, out of touch with what others are dealing with. Feel free to ignore this if not comfortable.
by chickenimprint | 2026-03-06 01:47:22+00:00
You can't get paid doing them.

If coding goes away, decades of experience become worthless instantly. Not all of it, but the vast majority, enough to justify starting over in another career.

In that world, it will have become more cost-effective for most companies to spend most of their budget on inference vendors and employ a few low-paid LLM wranglers, even if the final output is of terrible quality. No point in competing for that kind of employment experience with that kind of pay.
by hirvi74 | 2026-03-06 01:47:30+00:00
The word is in most online dictionaries for what it is worth. It's also used in Biblical texts, albeit only a handful of times. I do agree it's not a true assessment of an LLM's overall reasoning. No person I have ever asked that riddle to has gotten it correct. Then again, that is probably partly the point of the riddle.

I would like to reiterate that both Claude and GPT answered correctly. It was just bizarre how Claude got a initial, minor detail incorrect, but reasoned enough to get the more difficult answer correct.
by userulluipeste | 2026-03-06 01:47:58+00:00
"The signal shifts from «I can afford this» to «I was invited to spend my money here.»" "the signal isn't wealth but access"

The most shocking aspect here is the mindset of these people that come to value this access, and the fact that they have to have their own self-perceived worth at some lower (i.e. improvable) level in comparison. It has to be, otherwise the value of that access can't make much sense, otherwise that association to a brand (as chosen not chooser) can't be perceived as something of value. The only (sane) question worth asking, knowing that about the people falling into this game is - do I want to count myself as one of them?
Ask HN: Why is integrating external partners to Jira so hard?
by dnlh_lvg | 2026-03-06 01:48:43+00:00
I keep hearing the same thing across aerospace/defense and other regulated B2B programs. Even when both companies use Jira internally, the moment a customer (or other external partner) suggests “let’s just share a Jira project,” it turns into a weeks/months-long IT + infosec ordeal… so teams fall back to email + Excel trackers.

If you’ve lived this, I’d love detailed stories. Some conversation starters:

>> What exactly made it hard? (SSO/IdP, user provisioning, domain policies, MFA, VPN, IP allowlists, Atlassian Access, SCIM, contractors, etc.)

>> Is the blocker usually IT, security, compliance, procurement/vendor risk, or the Jira admins themselves?

>> Jira Cloud vs Jira Data Center: which is worse for external collaboration and why?

>> What are the common “policy red lines” that cause a hard no? (least privilege, separation of tenants, auditability, data residency, CUI/ITAR, SOC2, etc.)

>> What workarounds did you end up using instead (shared spreadsheet, shared mailbox, separate “shadow Jira,” Confluence page, etc.) and what broke?

>> If you did make cross-org Jira work, what was the setup that finally passed and how long did it take? If you didn't make it work, what happened?

Context: I’m trying to understand the true root causes and failure modes -- whether this is mostly technical (identity + permissions) or mostly organizational/policy, and what parts are actually solvable.
by senadir | 2026-03-06 01:48:57+00:00
Since Pearl Harbor, the US has done 100% of the attacks on other people's soil; even 9/11 was a response to what the US did in other countries, so it stands to say that defending your country is very different from giving weapons to the Department of War, to conduct war, and most likely supply them to its Middle East ally, who will also use them to start wars, kill civilians and children.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-03-06 01:49:41+00:00
I like how you're being downvoted for pointing out an objective, documented fact. [1]

Of course an important corollary is that Trump did not, in fact, tell anyone to drink bleach or Lysol. His supporters were stupid enough to do it on their own initiative, at Trump's mere suggestion that it was worth looking into.

1: https://www.poison.med.wayne.edu/updates-content/kstytapp2qf...
by randerson | 2026-03-06 01:50:06+00:00
Hypothetically if we had a choice between sending in humans to war or sending in fully autonomous drones that make decisions on par with humans, the moral choice might well be the drones - because it doesn't put our service members at risk.

Obviously anyone who has used LLMs know they are not on par with humans. There also needs to be an accountability framework for when software makes the wrong decision. Who gets fired if an LLM hallucinates and kills people? Perhaps Anthropic's stance is to avoid liability if that were to happen.
by kstrauser | 2026-03-06 01:51:07+00:00
I agree completely. When I'm thinking of my friends, I'm quick to contact them. But when life gets busy and I'm heads-down doing stuff for weeks at a time, anything outside my line of sight tends to get forgotten about.

Frankly, "just remember to do X" strikes me like "have you ever tried just not having cancer" in terms of useful advice. And given the number of generalized to-do apps like Reminders, OmniFocus, Todoist, etc., it seems like there's a huge market for people who need an app to remind them of stuff.
by XCSme | 2026-03-06 01:51:14+00:00
I actually made it, so I'm not sure if it has credibility, but the tests are simply various (quite simple) questions, and models are just tested on it. I am also surprised Gemini 3 Flash does so well (note that only the MEDIUM reasoning does exceptionally well).

When I look at the results, it does make sense though. Higher models (like Gemini 3 pro) tend to overthink, doubt themselves and go with the wrong solution.

Claude usually fails in subtle ways, sometimes due to formatting or not respecting certain instructions.

From the Chinese models, Qwen 3.5 Plus (Qwen3.5-397B-A17B) does extremely well, and I actually started using it on a AI system for one of my clients, and today they sent me an email they were impressed with one response the AI gave to a customer, so it does translate in real-world usage.

I am not testing any specific thing, the categories there are just as a hint as what the tests are about.

I just added this page to maybe provide a bit more transparency, without divulging the tests: https://aibenchy.com/methodology/
by bradleyjg | 2026-03-06 01:51:26+00:00
If you graduated in 2007, your classmates were born around 1985. Their parents were mostly born in the mid 50s to the mid 60s and came to political consciousness either during the Vietnam War or immediately thereafter. No war since has been even close to as unpopular or frankly as salient. It’s the passing out of cultural relevance of that war that you are noticing.
by pcchristie | 2026-03-06 01:51:29+00:00
I remember the first time I experienced this was an iOS app called Task Eater. It was simple To-dos. Attractive, snappy, everything you could need. The dev released a "final update" where he basically declared it was done. This was pretty early iOS (iPhone 4 era?).

The only problem is he never updated it to roll forward to future iOS version/iPhone models and it hasn't been usable for years (and years).

This made me search it up - the world moves so fast it's difficult to find any information on it whatsoever.
by thaumasiotes | 2026-03-06 01:51:55+00:00
> And yes Moët (the champagne) is pronounced "moh-ett" in France and by French speakers.

https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/Mo%C3%ABt

> Moët \mɔ.ɛ\

> Nom de famille.

For the champagne, we see this heading the French wikipedia page:

> Moët & Chandon (prononciation /moɛt‿e ʃɑ̃ˈdɔ̃/) est une maison de Champagne fondée en 1743

But that doesn't imply that there is a /t/ pronounced in "Moët" when not followed by a vowel; that's just normal French liaison. The explicit liaison marker in the phonetic spelling strongly implies that there isn't a /t/ under other circumstances.

This is all wiki information though - do you have a better source?