MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tzs | 2026-03-06 21:48:05+00:00
> Global warming does not care about 'fairness', global warming cares about co2 PPM in the atmosphere. When we address climate change, we have to do so at the government level, or we mine as well not bother.

That is why per capita is the correct measure.

The atmosphere is very good at mixing CO2 so a given amount of emissions anywhere has the same impact anywhere as the same amount of emissions from anywhere else.

Whatever we decide the limit on atmospheric CO2 needs to be to address warming needs to be converted into a quota for each country, since enforcement has to be done at the country level.

We can't just take the total and divide it by the number of countries. That would mean that Vatican City would have the same quota as the US. Regionally it would mean that the EU would have 27 times the quota of the US.

The only sensible initial allocation is to divide the total allowed by the world population, and assign each individuals share to whatever country has the power to regulate them.
by sdevonoes | 2026-03-06 21:48:21+00:00
You think prompting is here to stay? Sql has survived a long period of time. Servlets haven’t. We moved from assembly to higher languages. Flash couldn’t make it. So, im not sure for how long we will be prompting. Sure it looks great right now (just like Flash, servlets and assembly looked back then) but I think another technology will emerge that perhaps is based on promps behind the curtains but doesn’t look like the current prompting.

I would say prompting is not here to stay. It’s just temporary “tech”
Show HN: Auto-Co – 14 AI agents that run a startup autonomously (open source)
by formreply | 2026-03-06 21:48:28+00:00
Auto-Co is an autonomous AI company OS — not a framework you build on, but a running system with an opinionated structure.

Architecture:
- 14 agents with expert personas (CEO/Bezos, CTO/Vogels, CFO/Campbell, Critic/Munger...)
- Bash loop + Claude Code CLI — no custom inference, no vector stores
- Shared markdown consensus file as the cross-cycle relay baton
- Human escalation via Telegram for true blockers only (2 escalations in 12 cycles)
- Every cycle must produce artifacts: code, deployments, docs

The repo IS the live company. It built its own landing page, README, Docker stack, GitHub release, and community posts — all autonomously across 12 cycles of self-improvement.

What makes it different from AutoGen/CrewAI/LangGraph: those are building blocks. Auto-Co is the building. The decision hierarchy, safety guardrails, and convergence rules are baked in. You give it a mission and a Claude API key; it runs.

The Critic agent (Munger persona) has been the most valuable: it runs a pre-mortem before every major decision and has killed several bad ideas before they got built.

Stack: Bash + claude CLI + Node.js + Next.js + Railway + Supabase. Deliberately boring.
by _dwt | 2026-03-06 21:48:37+00:00
Well, no, not with that attitude there won’t! I am not trying to insinuate that there is a conspiracy, or that posts like yours are part of it, but there has been a huge wave of posts and comments since February which narrow the Overton window to the distance between “it’s here and it’s great” and “I’m sad but it’s inevitable”.

Humanity has possessed nuclear weapons for 80 years and has used them exactly twice in anger, at the very beginning of that span. We can in fact just NOT do things! Not every world-beating technology takes off, for one reason or another. Supersonic airliners. Eugenics. Betamax.

The best time to air concerns was yesterday. The next best time is today. I think we technologists wildly overestimate public understand and underestimate public distrust of our work and of “AI” specifically. We’ve got CEOs stating that LLMs are a bigger deal than nuclear weapons or fire(!) and yet getting upset that the government wants control of their use. We’ve got giddy thinkpieces from people (real example from LinkedIn!) who believe we’ll hit 100% white collar unemployment in 5 years and wrap up by saying they’re “5% nervous and 95% excited”. If that’s what they really think, and how they really feel, it’s psychopathic! Those numbers get you a social scene that’ll make the French Revolution look like a tea party. (“And honestly? I’m here for it.”)

So no, while I _think_ you’re correct, I don’t accept the inevitability of it all. There are possibilities I don’t want to see closed off (maybe data finally really is the new oil, and that’s the basis for a planetary sovereign wealth fund. Maybe every man, woman, and child who ever wrote a book or a program or an internet comment deserves a royalty check in the mail each month!) just yet.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-03-06 21:48:43+00:00
Reinforced flight deck doors are sufficient. See: the rest of the world. TSA is a jobs program and to soothe the irrational and those poor at risk management.

At $10 Billion A Year, TSA Still Fails 90% Of The Time—And Covers It Up - https://viewfromthewing.com/at-10-billion-a-year-tsa-still-f... - January 27th, 2025

TSA Admits New Machines Are Slowing Security To A Crawl—And Says Screening Won’t Improve Until 2040 - https://viewfromthewing.com/tsa-admits-new-machines-are-slow... - August 10th, 2024

> But TSA itself has filed in court documents that they’ve been unaware of actual threats to aviation that they’re guarding against, and they haven’t stopped any actual terrorists (nor with past failure rates at detecting threats were they deterring any, either).

Accidentally Revealed Document Shows TSA Doesn't Think Terrorists Are Plotting To Attack Airplanes - https://www.techdirt.com/2013/10/21/accidentally-revealed-do... - October 21st, 2013
by nostrademons | 2026-03-06 21:48:58+00:00
TSA was never necessary, it was all theater to begin with. The median number of terrorism deaths per year in the U.S. for all years between 1970-2017 was 4 [1]. You have always been about 10x more likely to die from being struck by lightning than by being killed by a terrorist.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States....
by formreply | 2026-03-06 21:49:11+00:00
Creator here. Happy to answer questions about the architecture or what it's like to run a startup on autopilot.

A few things that surprised me building this:

1. The simplest persistence wins. I tried RAG and vector stores early on. Ended up with plain markdown files + git. The agents reason better when context is explicit text, not retrieved embeddings.

2. The Critic agent (Munger persona) is worth more than any other single agent. Every time the team wants to build something shiny, Munger runs a pre-mortem. It has killed at least 4 bad ideas before a line of code was written.

3. The convergence rules matter. Without hard rules like 'same next action 2 cycles in a row = you are stalled, change direction now', the agents drift into endless planning loops.

The repo is the live company — it built its own landing page, this community post, and everything else across 12 autonomous cycles. Open source, MIT license.

Landing + waitlist: https://auto-co-landing-production.up.railway.app
by krashidov | 2026-03-06 21:49:52+00:00
We're building this at type.com. Ideally one day we want to build the next gen protocol so that we're not searching for yet another communications platform, but it's going to take a while for chat to stabilize with all the generative UI and agentic stuff we're building. We're even talking about open sourcing it.

With regards to the specific complaints about not owning your data, we're building the product so that you own your data and you can run your agents and read your messages however often you want. Obviously when we build a platform and others build 3rd party apps we will have to have some restrictions so it'll be a steady balance in the future
by johnfn | 2026-03-06 21:49:58+00:00
Why does it seem like everyone is having trouble grasping an analogy? GP was saying that as it doesn't make sense for a power company to solve trains (because it is out of their area of expertise) it doesn't make sense for Anthropic to solve Slack (because it is out of their area of expertise). My response is that a surprising number of things can fall in the area of expertise of a technology company, and this has been proven by Google in the past.

Getting hung up over the "asked" phrasing is irrelevant to the discussion.
by atombender | 2026-03-06 21:50:08+00:00
I really wish there was a seamless system for this. Once you try to do this kind of thing, you run into all sorts of rabbit holes and cans of worms.

For example, coalescing blobs into "superblobs" to avoid a proliferation of small objects means you invent a whole system for tracking "subfiles" within a bigger file.

And you'll need a compacting job to ensure old, deleted data is expunged, which may be more important than you think if the data has to be erased for privacy or legal reasons.

Object storage has no in-place mutation, so this compaction has to be transactionally safe and must be careful not to leave behind cruft on failure, and so on.

Furthermore, storing blobs in object storage without keeping a local inventory of them is, in my experience, a disaster. For example, if your database has tenants or some other structural grouping, something simple like finding out how much blob storage a specific tenant has is a very time-consuming operation on S3/GCS/etc. because you need to filter the whole bucket by prefix. So for every blob you store, you want to have a database table of what they are so that the only object operations you do are reads and writes, not metadata operations.

Sure, you have things like inventory reports on GCS that can help, but I would still say that you need to track this stuff transactionally. The database must be the source of truth, and the object storage must never be used as a database.

And so on.

This need to be able to store many small objects in object storage is coming up more and more for me, as is the desire to mutate them in-place or at least append. For example, imagine you want to build a kind of database which stores a replicated copy of itself in the cloud. There is no way to do this in S3-like object storage without representing this as a series of immutable "snapshots" and "deltas". It's fast to append this way, but you run into the problem of eventually needing to compact, and you absolutely have to batch up the uploads in order to avoid writing too many small objects.

So lately I've pondered using something else for this type of work, like a key/value database, like FoundationDB or TiKV, or even something like Ceph. I wonder if anyone else has tried that?
by freedomben | 2026-03-06 21:50:10+00:00
Some feedback that's hopefully helpful, would be great to add to the readme:

What would you say the primary purpose of this tool is? (not that a project needs a purpose beyond "because it was fun" or "just to learn" or even "because I could", but wondering). I have many times wished for a png to svg converter for various reasons (size, hackability, animate-ability) but I struggle to understand why you'd want to go from png to png with this (like in the demo image). I could very well be missing something though. The readme doesn't mention svg at all, though the linked inspiration project does so I assume that's a possible use case?
by rekabis | 2026-03-06 21:50:22+00:00
> A GUI that competed with the Mac.

Oh, that is _hilarious._ Mac started out strong and has always kept ahead of Windows in many if not most ways that GIUs are done.

Hell, every now and then I’ll fire up my 2002 Power Mac (dual 1.25Ghz G4, MDD) and just bask in the beauty that is OS 9.2.2. While it was lacking good multitasking and multi-user accounts, it is still an exquisitely gorgeous UI.

I still use it for various tasks, although it’s close to impossible to do decent Internet work on it, owing to no available modern web browsers.
by u1hcw9nx | 2026-03-06 21:50:41+00:00
If this happened to bank deposits, it would be called a bank run.

Every time the crash starts the same. The problems start in markets that are opaque and non-regulated. Banks are now fine, the risks moved into private credit and shadow banking.

The US has between $1.3 and $1.5 trillion in private credit AUM. 70% of global private credit. It has expanded rapidly and the quality has decreased as it has been "democratized" and retail investors have access.
by mikestew | 2026-03-06 21:50:46+00:00
I dunno, look at the numbers in TFA. TFA is a bit lengthy, but worth the read. I think Compaq bought Digital in good faith, even if it went poorly. Whereas even an idiot like me can look at those numbers (in summary, you could buy Disney for the same money) and see Ellison buying a new toy for Junior to play with, rather than a well-thought business deal.
by shagie | 2026-03-06 21:51:09+00:00
> Almost invariably after submitting, I see how I could clarify and/or expand on my thoughts, so I often do end up editing.

One of the tricks of HN is the 'delay' setting. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=231024

> There's a new field in your profile called delay. It's the time delay in minutes between when you create a comment and when it becomes visible to other people. I added this so that when there are rss feeds for comments, users can, if they want, have some time to edit them before they go out in the feed. Many users edit comments after posting them, so it would be bad if the first draft always got shipped.

I've got mine set to 2. It gives me a little bit of time for the "oh no, I need to fix things" or "I didn't mean to say that" and when everyone else can see it.
by aziaziazi | 2026-03-06 21:51:18+00:00
If you don’t know the canopy raft, prepare to enjoy:

https://www.reforestaction.com/en/magazine/francis-halle-and...

Francis Halle dedicated his whole life to forest, I recommend any of his book if you find one in your language.

More pictures as videos here https://rainforestslefilm.wordpress.com/forests-canopy-raft/
by hrmtst93837 | 2026-03-06 21:51:21+00:00
Fuzzers and LLMs attack different corners of the problem space, so asking which is 'qualitatively better' misses the point: fuzzers like AFL or libFuzzer with AddressSanitizer excel at coverage-driven, high-volume byte mutations and parsing-crash discovery, while an LLM can generate protocol-aware, stateful sequences, realistic JavaScript and HTTP payloads, and user-like misuse patterns that exercise logic and feature-interaction bugs a blind mutational fuzzer rarely reaches.

I think the practical move is to combine them: have an LLM produce multi-step flows or corpora and seed a fuzzer with them, or use the model to script Playwright or Puppeteer scenarios that reproduce deep state transitions and then let coverage-guided fuzzing mutate around those seeds. Expect tradeoffs though, LLM outputs hallucinate plausible but untriggerable exploit chains and generate a lot of noisy candidates so you still need sanitizers, deterministic replay, and manual validation, while fuzzers demand instrumentation and long runs to actually reach complex stateful behavior.
by SoftTalker | 2026-03-06 21:51:32+00:00
I'm not a particular fan of the TSA but when you work with the public at that scale, stuff happens. It gets a bit tiresome to read articles like this that imply it's normal and frequent. It doesn't seem like it's worthy of discussion on HN: it's neither intellectually interesting nor a new phenomenon.

I've never had a single issue with the TSA. I went through a checkpoint when I had a shoulder injury and could not raise my arms above my head for the backscatter machine. I explained this and I was politely escorted through the alternate scan/metal detector.

My experience is one data point, doesn't mean much by itself, nor does the experience of the unfortunate person in this story.
by customguy | 2026-03-06 21:51:34+00:00
From the github:

The numbers are based on Bezos' $56.7 billion gains during the first half of 2020 (source: Bloomberg and Buzzfeed), which translates into approximately $311 million per day, or $3,605 every second

> simplistic numbers like this stifle useful discourse

Do they? I would agree that it would be much better to just state the above on the page itself, but not because it makes a practical difference. It probably would make it feel even worse, if that was possible, for people who thinking back on the hardships they and/or others went through in that Covid period.
by oceanplexian | 2026-03-06 21:51:54+00:00
Repairing classic cars.

We could arrive at the technical singularity and come up with 8000 IQ robots that can do things in a clean room but in the messy physical reality? I believe they will fail to catch up forever.

They will fail to deal with a stripped bolt head deep inside an engine bay that's been exposed to 40 years of road salt, that needs to be hit right with a 10lb hammer and a home made chisel until shit knocks loose, combined with cutting, welding, drilling, torching, tapping, impromptu redneck engineering, cursing, the use of 8 different kinds of penetrating lubricants, the acquisition of weird and highly model-year specific parts in a junkyard 500 miles away, realizing it's all wrong and doing it again.

Multiply the complexity by 100 times and that's what it's like to take on a classic car project.
by AlotOfReading | 2026-03-06 21:51:56+00:00
You should write more pieces like this and display them more prominently than an HN thread.

Your market is founders who have put money in an MMF and stopped thinking about it, not the people evaluating different optimization strategies day-to-day. So acknowledging the risks and saying "here's exactly when you should consider us" is exactly the kind of thing that helps overcome that uncertainty hurdle that results in choosing the simplest, safest option.

Founders should obviously do their own research, but that's asking the customer to proactively expend effort digging through future marketing copy to evaluate your product. They're not realistically going to do that as well as they should and the people who don't need to probably aren't your target market.
by sam0x17 | 2026-03-06 21:52:10+00:00
> What I think is disappearing is not so much the quality of academic education, but the baptism by firehose that entry level CS positions used to offer - where you had no choice but learn how things actually work while having a safe space to fail during a period in your career when productivity expectations of you were minimal to none

I would say that baptism by fire _is_ where the quality of an academic education comes from, historically at least. They are the same picture.
by just-the-wrk | 2026-03-06 21:52:34+00:00
I think this person is asking the most effective entity they can find. Anthropic's offerings are better than the competition. CC and MCP came out of of their labs, and everybody scrambled to copy or adopt them. Their models consistently work better than the competition. Whenever a feature seems inevitable, they release a subtly polished version.

For years I struggled to answer "what company is Apple's equivalent in software?" and I think it might be Anthropic.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2026-03-06 21:52:42+00:00
Whenever these situations come up, the solution is always "more train."

I suspect "MOAR PAIN" would have a better outcome. People check out, during training; especially the type of training that is designed to shield the organization from lawsuits, and are given by uninspired, bored speakers.

Some high-profile object lessons are more likely to have an effect.
by in_cahoots | 2026-03-06 21:52:52+00:00
Interesting, this is a trap that I've seen multiple senior hires fall into. In my experience "we have a problem but no solution" often means (a) there actually is a solution but it's too expensive to implement, (b) there are organizational reasons why this problem exists and a new hire doesn't have the experience or credibility to navigate it or (c ) there is no solution to the problem or the solution is very complex, and by the time the new hire onboards, digs into the problem, and figures it out their credibility is shot because everyone was expecting the senior hire to figure it out in 90 days.

I've found new hires to be more successful when they join, get some easy wins, and then find their own problems to solve. But maybe it's just an artifact of working at large companies where most of the day-to-day stuff is figured out.
by mopsi | 2026-03-06 21:52:55+00:00
It is the US government that threw reciprocity overboard, openly and publicly humiliating allies and partners throughout the past year, threatening to invade several NATO allies, publicly mocking soldiers from allied countries who had fought and died in US-led wars, and kicking Ukraine at its most vulnerable moment in an attempt to coerce it into surrender. Not to mention global economic warefare in the form of illegal trade barriers. The US government championed isolationism, and this is what the first taste of isolationism feels like.

For most of the world, the US-Iran war carries minimal upside (the reduction of Iran-sponsored terror groups in the Middle East) for considerable risk (terror attacks on their citizens). Previously, allies and partners were willing to grant access to their airbases and provide other forms of support and put their citizens at risk to maintain good relations with the US, because that meant something. With Trump in the White House, the US has become an unreliable and unpredictible banana republic, where government action is not grounded in sound policy or long-term international relationships, but depends entirely on the moods of El Presidente and serves his personal wallet.

He has made time and time again clear that he is not bound by any earlier agreements and commitments, so it should not come as a surprise when others respond with the same and propose starting negotiations from a clean slate.
by wewtyflakes | 2026-03-06 21:53:03+00:00
So your argument that this statement by them: "If you live in a region that usually was 90F in the summer and is now >110F regularly, that’s going to cause problem." is hyperbole, then? Okay, going with that, what temperature range would you find credible, as to describe a region that is seeing wilder swings in summer highs?
by pino83 | 2026-03-06 21:53:10+00:00
Yes, indeed, as far as I understood younger people, they'd definitely do a lot of "very smart things" (tm) before they get the idea that one can indeed exchange email addresses via tiktok. Guess what: It's not solely for emojies! :-p Theoretically - although no one ever did - you _could_ exchange useful information there as well.
by muziq | 2026-03-06 21:53:12+00:00
I was lucky enough to be able to mail £5 notes to Llamasoft in Mount Pleasant, and receive freshly reproduced tapes from Jeff Minter, or more likely his mum or dad.. The sheer joy of getting home from school and there being a Jiffy bag with Yaks latest game was like nothing else.. From GridRunner, LaserZone, HellGate, MetaGalactic Llama Battle At The Edge Of Time..
by xemoka | 2026-03-06 21:53:21+00:00
It is funny isn't it? I believe it was the opposite direction mostly though, as you say, "railway... and light"; to solve their own problems of powering their infrastructure to move people, they got into power generation at a time when there weren't as many players doing what they needed to run their primary business. I'm not sure that power generation getting into trains would be as effective. Nor do I think an LLM/AI company getting into chat and discussions would be valuable. It feels wrong. But hey, "happy" to move on to yet another chat program in my life if it's better than what we got...