MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jmward01 | 2026-03-01 06:46:45+00:00
I have never used AI to generate an answer for HN but just this once I thought it would be good to hit ChatGPT specifically and ask it for 'a list of times Sam Altman has gone against his word.' Here was its response:

Shift from Nonprofit Mission to For-Profit Orientation – OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit with a charter focused on “benefit to humanity,” but under Altman it created a capped-profit subsidiary, accepted large investments (e.g., from Microsoft), and critics (including Elon Musk in a 2024 lawsuit) argue this departed from that original mission. A federal judge allowed Musk’s claim that Altman and OpenAI broke promises about nonprofit governance to proceed to trial.

Nonprofit Control Reorganization Drama (2023) – In November 2023, the original nonprofit board cited a lack of transparency and confidence in Altman’s candor as a reason for firing him. He was reinstated days later after investor and employee pressure, highlighting internal conflict over governance and communication.

Dust-Up Over Military Usage Policies – OpenAI initially had explicit public policies restricting AI use in “military and warfare” contexts, but those clauses were reportedly removed quietly in 2024, allowing the company to pursue Department of Defense contracts — a turnaround from earlier language that appeared to preclude such use.

Statements on Pentagon Deal vs. Prior Positioning – In early 2026, Altman publicly said OpenAI shared safety “red lines” (e.g., prohibiting mass surveillance and autonomous weapons) similar to some competitors, but hours later OpenAI signed a deal to deploy its models on classified military networks, leading critics to argue this contradicts earlier positioning on limits for military use.

Regulation Stance Shifts in Congressional Testimony – Altman has advocated for strong regulation of AI in some public settings but in later congressional hearings opposed specific regulatory requirements (like mandatory pre-deployment vetting), aligning more with industry concerns about overregulation — a shift in tone compared with earlier support of regulatory frameworks.
by ashishdhiman23 | 2026-03-01 06:47:50+00:00
The dynamic budget negotiation idea is interesting. One thing I've found working with on-device AI models is that the "budget" isn't just about what the device can handle in theory — it shifts meaningfully between runs on the same hardware.
Ran MobileNetV2 100 times on a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and got 83% latency spread. Cold start was 2.689ms, steady state median was 0.369ms. The first couple of runs are basically a different device thermally.
Curious how Composite Budget Contracts handle that kind of within-session variance. Do you re-negotiate after warmup or is the contract set once at initialization?
by ashishdhiman23 | 2026-03-01 06:48:56+00:00
Nice results on the compression ratio. One thing worth measuring alongside file size is actual on-device inference behavior after quantization.
We ran FP32 and INT8 variants of a similar-scale model on Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 through Qualcomm AI Hub. Inference barely changed (0.176ms vs 0.187ms) but peak memory actually went up slightly (121MB vs 124MB) which was counterintuitive. The file was 70% smaller but runtime characteristics didn't follow the same pattern.
Would be interesting to see TFLite inference timings on actual mobile hardware alongside the size numbers. Compression without on-device profiling can be misleading.
by Sharlin | 2026-03-01 06:49:02+00:00
Mixing red and green should be avoided. There’s no problem using either alone. Human color vision is the least sensitive to blue light, so a blue indicator led has to be made brighter than an equivalent red or green led to be as visible in bright ambient lighting. But that makes blue leds disastrous in low light, where the opposite is the case (vision is the most sensitive to blue). Of course there never was any reason for blue standby lights except the fact that blue leds had novelty value and looked futuristic compared to boring old red and green leds.
by saghm | 2026-03-01 06:49:22+00:00
No, I want the government to prove that they understand the limitations of software that they're purchasing to use to kill people, and I want AI companies to be clear about what they think those limitations are. Just because it would be legal to use software for something doesn't mean it's capable of doing it safely, and there's absolutely no reason that the government is in a better position to judge that than the people who make it and literally have a financial incentive to lie about it. If they're that confident it wouldn't be safe to use it for that, maybe it's a good idea to consider that.
by rnjn | 2026-03-01 06:49:29+00:00
Your organisation has invested millions in observability tools. You have dashboards for everything. Your teams dutifully instrument their services. Yet when incidents strike, engineers still spend hours hunting through disparate systems, correlating timestamps manually, and guessing at root causes. When the CEO forwards a customer complaint asking “are we down?”, that’s when the dev team gets to know about incidents.

You’re experiencing observability theatre, the expensive illusion of system visibility without its substance.
by bawolff | 2026-03-01 06:49:34+00:00
> The US isn't ever going to leave anyone, let alone Iran, alone. The options are a) fight and cease to exist and b) don't fight and cease to exist.

Well i think this is true in the present moment, i think its also important to recognize that we got to this point by a series of decisions that Iran made. They boxed themselves into this corner via long term strategic blunders.

E.g. if they threatened US & israeli interests less (i.e. did not support proxy groups), US and Israel probably wouldnt find it worth it to go this far. Alternatively if they paid more attention to the home front and kept their people happy, there would be less pressure for them to not lose face during negotiations which might allow them to make concessions they cant currently.
by baxtr | 2026-03-01 06:50:58+00:00
I am old enough. Iraq is not perfect today but so much better than it was. Go talk to Iraqis and see for yourself.

It costs us some time, money and lives to get to this point. But Saddam (a tyrant who killed his own kind in masses with gas and started wars with neighbors) staying in power would have been way worse for the wider region.
by foxglacier | 2026-03-01 06:51:04+00:00
Can someone explain what the drama is? From what I can tell, OpenAI donated to Trump's campaign then won a contract with his government. Anthropic lost that contract because they had some morality redlines they refused to relax. Where exactly is the badness in there?

Is there evidence the donation cause them to win the contract? Seems like the evidence is that their competitor backed out, no?

I suspect this is a conspiracy theory feeding on people's pre-existing hatreds.
by Nevermark | 2026-03-01 06:51:13+00:00
So don’t stand up for ethics and safety where there isn’t a law?

Nobody is prosecuting the DoD with non-laws here. But one company is using their legal right to refuse to facilitate great harms.

> Not rely on the goodness of Sam Altman.

Who said anything about that?

Of course we don’t want to rely on Altman. For anything. But it would still be better if he would stand up for safety.

Your logic is backwards.

If we don’t want to rely entirely on a centralized government alone, increasingly interested only in the power of its most powerful, increasingly willing to bend its own laws and give itself impunity, then a widespread cultural enforcement of safety by many and all actors is a necessity.
by holoduke | 2026-03-01 06:51:25+00:00
Your Gemini or Opus question got send to a Texas datacenter where it got queued and processed by a subunit of 80 h200 140gb 1000w cards running a many billion or trillion parameter model. It took less that 200ms to process a single request. Your Claude cliënt decided to spawn 30 sub agents and iterated in a total of 90 requests totalling about 45000ms. Now compare that to your 100b transistor cpu doing something similar. Yes that would be slow.
Ask HN: Is there something like Google style guide for AI-only coded apps?
by robrenaud | 2026-03-01 06:51:37+00:00
The Google style guide for C++/Java/Python are opinionated, hard fought, wise, and they elimate a large source of errors while minimizing harmful, unneded inconsistences. They picked a style that made great realistic use of the best cognition at the time.

The intent is still great, but now we should think about writing good general rules for building programs that are essentially all AI generated. What generic wisdom leads to flexible, auditable, composable and robust apps and systems?
by notpushkin | 2026-03-01 06:52:44+00:00
> Run the script as described in the project's Read Me

I don’t think this warrants a whole installer script – if you replace UUIDs by hand, you can as well read through the .mobileconfig file and make sure you understand what the profile does, then double click it to install :)

Note that you might also want to remove some other entries from the profile, as, from a glance, those might still delay minor updates by 30 days. (Or does `forceDelayedSoftwareUpdates=false` make these harmless?)
by lioeters | 2026-03-01 06:53:28+00:00
Taking the metaphor further, the traditional way of programming was to manually encode the logic, and the new way is to program the environment and context to let the correct program emerge through the constraints. The stricter and more precise the constraints, the closer the result is to what you want.

So then, as you say, being able to specify exactly what you want becomes the central skill of programming - I mean, describe the behavior not in terms of the final code, which is an implementation detail, but how it interacts with a given environment. That was always the case since in higher-level languages, including C, what we write is not the final code, which is technically the compiled result.

A difference I notice is that, now, even junior devs are expected to be the "mentor" to language models - teaching and guiding them to generate well-written code with plenty of tests, asserts, and other guardrails. In another comment someone said, breaking down a large program into smaller modules is useful - which is common sense, but we now have to guide an LLM to know and apply best practices, design patterns, useful tricks to improve code organization or performance, etc.

That means, it would be valuable to codify best practices, as documentation in Markdown as well as described in code, as specs and tests. Programming is becoming meta-programming. We're shifting emphasis from assembling genetic code manually to preparing the environment for such code to evolve.
by teleforce | 2026-03-01 06:54:08+00:00
This is possible but not for training but fine-tuning the existing open source models.

This can be mainstream, and then custom model fine-tuning becomes the new “software development”.

Please check out this new fine-tuning method for LLM by MIT and ETH Zurich teams that used a single NVIDIA H200 GPU [1], [2], [3].

Full fine-tuning of the entire model’s parameters were performed based on the Hugging Face TRL library.

[1] MIT's new fine-tuning method lets LLMs learn new skills without losing old ones (news):

https://venturebeat.com/orchestration/mits-new-fine-tuning-m...

[2] Self-Distillation Enables Continual Learning (paper):

https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19897

[3] Self-Distillation Enables Continual Learning (code):

https://self-distillation.github.io/SDFT.html
by jMyles | 2026-03-01 06:54:30+00:00
> The federal government has the total combined power and scale that it does because we are a massive and complex modern nation. That's inevitable.

Perhaps massive and complex (I'd say complicated) nation-states inevitably create industrial complexes, but it's certainly not inevitable that nation-states grow so large (or even exist) in 2026.

The idea that we still need soverign-esque entites across entire continents, when we can now communicate and coordinate instantly across them, and use cameras to documents truth all around us at all times, is just downright silly.

We can reduce states to the size that you can walk across in a day or two, and everybody will be much happier and healthier.
by npn | 2026-03-01 06:55:32+00:00
what gut? we are already doing that.
there are a lot of "tiny" LLMs that are useful: M$ Phi-4, Gemma 3/3n, Qwen 7B... There are even smaller models like Gemma 270M that is fine tuned for function calls.

they are not flourish yet because of the simple reason: the frontier models are still improving. currently it is better to use frontier models than training/fine-tuning one by our own because by the time we complete the model the world is already moving forward.

heck even distillation is a waste of time and money because newer frontier models yield better outputs.

you can expect that the landscape will change drastically in the next few years when the proprietary frontier models stop having huge improvements every version upgrade.
by michaelbrave | 2026-03-01 06:55:33+00:00
I'm still in the process of having to write letters to lawmakers about the stupid 3D printer law, now I'm going to have to write letters for this stupid thing too. Like how hard is it to take a day to have a conversation with someone that just knows a little bit about these things, a hobbyist even. The minimal amount of question asking, hell they could even ask an LLM and it would still give a better answer.
by locknitpicker | 2026-03-01 06:58:34+00:00
> Just very unclear who any of these services are for.

These services are for Microsoft, to serve Microsoft's business needs at the customer's expenses.

Look at Azure and how it designed it's products around the concept of accounts. Azure is supposed to be a cloud provider but their offering is built around charging customers for provisioning dedicated hardware that users then can run their apps on.

Even their function-as-a-service offer requires you to pay por the dedicated hardware where to deploy your event handlers.

If you look at Azure as Active Directory/Entra ID attracting and locking in enterprise accounts, you start to see these service account products as a way to price gouge customers. You have customers locked in with the auth system who then have to manage competing pressures such as "I need to keep my azure resources independent of other teams/projects" and "why do I need to pay 100$/month for a dedicated app service plan with two cores if all I want is a small internal app that might run the occasional background job"
by sherr | 2026-03-01 06:58:47+00:00
There are alternatives to sudo other than the new Rust version here.

"doas" [1] comes from OpenBSD and is a smaller (LOC) tool, easier to audit and keep secure (supposedly). Also available for Linux.

Also "run0" [2], another alternative that comes from the Linux/Systemd camp, using "polkit" and is similar to "systemd-run".

[1] https://man.openbsd.org/doas.1

[2] https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/257/run0.ht...
by hakfoo | 2026-03-01 06:59:02+00:00
I understand the Fitt's Law concepts behind a top menu bar, but I wonder if this is a scenario with moving goalposts.

On a 1984 Mac, you had like 512x384 pixels and a system that could barely run one program at a time. There was little to no possible uncertainty as to who owned the menu bar. (Could desk accessories even take control of the menu bar?)

But once you got larger resolutions and the ability to have multiple full-size programs running at once, the menu bar could belong to any of them. Now, theoretically, you should notice which is the currently active window and assume it owns the menu bar, but ISTR scenarios where you'd close the window but the program would still be running, owning the menu bar, or the "active" window was less visually prominent due to task switching, etc.

The Windows design-- placing the menu inside the window it controls-- avoids any ambiguity there. Clicking "File-Save" in Notepad couldn't possibly be interpreted as trying to do anything to the Paintbrush window next to it.
by segmondy | 2026-03-01 06:59:45+00:00
It's right there https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/qwen3.5/gguf-benchmarks I looked at the weights before. It's not PR fluff, they made it clear by showing how it really affected various tensors terribly.

"MXFP4 is much worse on many tensors - attn_gate, attn_q, ssm_beta, ssm_alpha using MXFP4 is not a good idea, and rather Q4_K is better - also MXFP4 uses 4.25 bits per weight, whilst Q4_K uses 4.5 bits per weight. It's better to use Q4_K than MXFP4 when choosing between them."

The Q4 quants had a mixture of mxfp4 leading to worse outcomes.
by goku12 | 2026-03-01 07:00:07+00:00
I haven't used Samsung phones in a while. So I didn't realize that the situation got this bad. That's ample enough reason to continue the 'haven't used Samsung' part indefinitely. Yet another brand hits the do-not-buy list. But at this point, I think it's worth choosing a brand that explicitly supports reflashing and customizability, rather than taking a chance with all these leaches.
by tadfisher | 2026-03-01 07:00:38+00:00
Maybe the disconnect, then, is that you don't consider programming to take place in the real world. I don't share that experience, any more than someone coding batch jobs on punch cards or an author committing chapters via typewriter. Maybe the medium has parts that only have meaning within our minds, but we are real (dammit!) and we punch out those characters with our real hands and we get frustrated and deal with impedance mismatches and want to scream and laugh and cry. There is a piece of us that lives in what we build. It's evidence that we are real.

This ties in with your second point. There are uncountably many ways to accomplish the goal of making a chair or writing a program. And if you are a carpenter working on a one-off matched dining set for a fickle client, the problem might not be as clear as even many software tasks are. Your skill and experience is highly likely to play into the eventual form and structure of the finished work. The customer might not know where you hid the dovetail joints or dominoes, but they can absolutely notice the grain continuity and lack of obvious engineered joinery evident in a factory piece.

If you don't care, then fine! You can focus on the other things that bring you joy. But I hope you can appreciate that some of us want to experience solving these problems with a bicycle for the mind instead of a Waymo.
by burnt-resistor | 2026-03-01 07:01:01+00:00
Oddly enough, I couldn't find my paper copy but found a $4 one shipped on the interwebs. It's a tiny book and to the point.\

See also:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars

- The Business Plot: Smedley D. Butler, Anti-Democratic Dissidence, and the Recession of the American Right 1932-1936 by Grant Stone 2021 [pdf] https://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/3259?v=pdf

- (Another article about the Business Plot.. rich people who desired fascism in America) https://connecticuthistory.org/gerald-macguire-and-the-plot-...
by millionclicks | 2026-03-01 07:01:05+00:00
Google’s style guides were built to keep humans from making messy code.

An AI style guide should be about keeping humans from inheriting messy systems.

If code is mostly generated, the rules shouldn’t obsess over formatting. They should enforce structure, contracts, reproducibility, and tight diff boundaries. The AI can write the implementation — it shouldn’t be allowed to invent the architecture.
by beart | 2026-03-01 07:01:07+00:00
There is a self-hosted live sync plugin. It's rough around the edges but it mostly works and is actively maintained, if you are willing to self-host a sync server.

I say mostly works, because there are a lot of "gotchas" and the configuration and set up are a bit intimidating for the clients (the server is simple to host).

I used it for a while and it was fine, but I decided the cost of coffee per month is worth not having to maintain it, and I switched to paying for their sync service.
by opan | 2026-03-01 07:02:02+00:00
I have some nostalgia for XP, especially the Zune theme (separate download, black+orange recolor of the default), but due to the Classic theme being available in so many versions and often using it either for more performance or easier ricing (can easily swap the colors and fonts via official settings), I'm also nostalgic for the Win95 or so UI. I think 2000 was the oldest I remember actually using, but I used XP a lot and 2000 not very much.

In the last decade+ of using GNU/Linux, I've also become very attached to bitmap fonts and simple solid colors, while I've grown to dislike curves and transparency. So sometimes I see a screenshot of some very old Mac OS version I never even used, and it just looks good, sharp, and clean to me, no real nostalgia involved.

I think SerenityOS's vision of a unix-like environment with classic Windows UI is genius. I don't follow the project that closely, but on paper it does seem like a good idea.
FYI ChatGPT Plus credit if you delete before term ends
by pbnjay | 2026-03-01 07:02:24+00:00
I cancelled my subscription yesterday but it was going to last through March 11. Got my data export today so I just went ahead with deleting my account (figuring the next 10 days was a sunk cost).

I just got a pro-rated refund of $6.78 for the remainder of the term, so FYI if you want to stick it to them even more!
by larusso | 2026-03-01 07:04:46+00:00
I feel they sit of on the opposite end of the OP here. One wants to write out specs to control the agent implementation to achieve a one shot execution. Other side says: let’s won’t waste time of humans writing anything.

I’m personally torn. A lot of the spec talk and now here in combination with TDD etc feels like the pipe dreams of the mid 2000. There was this idea of the Architect role who writes UML and specs. And a normal engineer just fills in the gaps. Then there was TDD. Nothing against it personally. But trying to write code in test first approach when you don’t really have a clue how a specific platform/system/library works had tons of overhead. Also the side effect of code written in the most convenient way to be tested and not to be executed. All in all to throw this ideas together for AI now…
But throwing tokens out of the window and hoping for the token lottery to generate the best PR is also not the right direction in my book. But somebody needs to investigate in both extremes I say.
by crabmusket | 2026-03-01 07:05:10+00:00
Couldn't you Ender's Game a model? Models will play video games like Pokemon, why not Call of Duty? Sorry if this is a naive question, but a model can only know what you feed it as input... how would it know if it were killing someone?

EDIT: didn't see sibling comment. Also, I guess directly operating weaponry is different to producing code for weaponry.

I guess we'll find out the exciting answers to these questions and more, very soon!
by jbloggs777 | 2026-03-01 07:05:22+00:00
It would be exhausting, if it were always necessary. If you spend the time up-front to properly define goals and requirements in a machine+LLM verifiable way, then the agents can manage it in isolation or with minimal oversight, and present a working result that meets those criteria.

BUT: How many people do you know who can achieve sufficient clarity up front? It is a skill (or set of skills) that needs developing. It can also mean the difference between spending $20 in tokens versus $2000, and/or throwing away the result and starting from scratch again (you don't really want to touch an AI generated codebase with fundamental design flaws if you value your time and sanity)

In the meantime, deliberate checkpoints for human review are still a good idea.

My theory: behind every "10x AI coder" is a long trail of expensive failures that never made the light of day, but which they are learning from. The early adopters will therefore have a competitive advantage.