MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by GorbachevyChase | 2026-03-14 20:59:12+00:00
There are many such mysteries, right? How does Oracle make money when every product of theirs sucks and is worse than free alternatives? How is it that Google and Meta seem to have more revenue from “advertising“ than everyone spends on advertising? Where are the product sales that can be traced to this massive amount of spending? I don’t think you could even articulate a plausible business plan around what Google claims to do, especially when they were hot in the early 2000s. How do large financial institutions, like JP Morgan, get fined for financial crimes yet still operate with total public trust? Just as strange as Bigfoot and aliens but in plain sight.

Again, I’m going to qualify this with the disclaimer that this is my own baseless conspiracy theory presented purely for its entertainment value. I suspect that the United States has many effectively state owned enterprises just like the PRC, but there are elaborate obfuscation techniques used to make that seem as if that were not the case. In part that is because a large criminal network is wearing the dead US government like a skin suit.
by ProllyInfamous | 2026-03-14 20:59:35+00:00
This seems to happen sometimes with Big Box tools, brand new out of the box: the two battery toolset will have cells from different lots (presumably:) one known to work, the other questionable... you did still get two batteries for those tools, but it sure does seem like the same one is always charging.

I've had this happen both from Amazon and HD/L.
by xixixao | 2026-03-14 20:59:52+00:00
You are answering my question - you posit that communism failed because people like to own property (and form social hierarchies) - and UBI doesn’t prevent those.

I’m not sure this is the case. Especially since people did form social hierarchies and did own propety in communist/socialist regimes of the Eastern block.

One might argue that UBI is incompatible with human nature, because most humans require a sense of worth, which paid work provides (to most). Take away the motivation, will the self-worthiness remain? (especially when thinking about _most_ people, not the struggling artists who wished they could pursue art without the burden of bills).

I’m not sure about this at all. I just think drawing the parallels and discussing communism failure modes is interesting for the discussion of UBI.
by corysama | 2026-03-14 21:00:26+00:00
According to that chart 2021
was anomalously low and it has been linearly returning to normal for the past four years.

AFAICT, the general populace is anxious about AI. So, the news knows they can get clicks with “You are right to be afraid. AI bad.” Meanwhile, CEOs know they can get stock boosts by saying “We are so AI we don’t need expenses. Infinite ROI!”

Put together we’re getting a ton of scary reporting on what looks like a quite normal business cycle. And, everyone being afraid to hire is the only thing actually making it self-fulfilling.
by forrestthewoods | 2026-03-14 21:00:59+00:00
> It is a bit weird to see LLMs suddenly being presented as the reason to follow what are basically long standing best practices.

About 95% of the work needed to make LLMs happy is just general purpose better engineering. Units tests? Integration tests? CI? API documentation? Good example? All great for humans too!

I consider this largely a good thing. It would be much worse if the changes needed for Happy LLMs were completely different than what you want for Happy Humans! Even worse would be if they were mutually exclusive.

It's a win. I'll take it.
by roysting | 2026-03-14 21:01:05+00:00
Ironically, I was trying to explain to someone I know that was somewhat considering getting into that milieu that what such people are really doing is selling affection to an affection deprived audience. Every person that sells themselves has the same orifices and they more or less all look the same, and everyone has seen thousands of them by now. The differentiation is the connection and being able to identify the particular sad void needing to be fill.

AI will make this really bad, because it will surely quickly learn how to tap into your deepest impulses and desires for connection and affection. It sounds weird, but in a way, there is some strong correlation between other forms of fraud, the most obvious being romance cons/frauds; where women are not looking for big rods, but for romance lady boners... yet another form of seeing affection.

Some of us harm ourselves for a lack of an affection, others fall prey to it making them vulnerable. I do hope that AI could and will also be used to help people get a semblance of healthy affection, if not maybe even facilitate making real connections that can provide real human affection.
by prepend | 2026-03-14 21:01:37+00:00
A lot of my drm-free mp3s come from friends. I probably have 2000+ cds that I’ve ripped, or downloads from buying vinyl. I’ll make a copy for friends to load onto devices and it’s the equivalent of loaning a disc to a friend.

I suppose there’s probably music torrent sites out there, but haven’t heard of anyone pirating music in many years as I’m too old now.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-03-14 21:01:41+00:00
If you can manage to believe in a system of 1 person 1 vote for just a bit longer, or maybe even 3 poor people 1 vote, then I think there is still plenty of space for "lesser levels of wealth" to overcome "greater levels of wealth". There are simpler more of us than there are of them.
by adamzwasserman | 2026-03-14 21:01:45+00:00
The dynamism exists to support the object model. That's the actual dependency. Monkey-patching, runtime class mutation, vtable dispatch. These aren't language features people asked for. They're consequences of building everything on mutable objects with identity.

Strip the object model. Keep Python.

You get most of the speed back without touching a compiler, and your code gets easier to read as a side effect.

I built a demo: Dishonest code mutates state behind your back; Honest code takes data in and returns data out. Classes vs pure functions in 11 languages, same calculation. Honest Python beats compiled C++ and Swift on the same problem. Not because Python is fast, but because the object model's pointer-chasing costs more than the Python VM overhead.

Don't take my word for it. It's dockerized and on GitHub. Run it yourself: honestcode.software, hit the Surprise! button.
by righthand | 2026-03-14 21:02:16+00:00
I will start by stating that none of the media landscape is referring to it as World War 3. That is a conclusion I made myself.

Further I think “the economy isn’t as bad as it could be so everything else that doesn’t directly affect me is propaganda and all the problems right now in the world are perfectly fine” is the ultimate propaganda. You’re essentially saying “shut up you’re still alive just be okay with the world state even if it’s not desireable”.

You are definitely a maroon. Especially in the way you are talking down and hand waving away my complaints and taking my brief list as the only things that I have an issue with.
by kevin061 | 2026-03-14 21:02:18+00:00
"right to compute"

Oh cool!

Look inside

No mention of:

- Self-repair

- Self-service

- Hardware and software modifications

- Protecting consumers from proprietary anti-circumvention tools

- Bolstering open source

- Better access to technology in early ages (through funding primary schools and libraries)

- Dedicated computer and Internet crisis response teams to tackle disinformation, cyberattacks, cyberbullying, and state-sponsored attacks

- Improving citizen's access to End-to-End encryption software
- Sovereign AI and software

Very cool, Montana. What a load of nothing.
by naasking | 2026-03-14 21:02:19+00:00
That's not clear actually. It's been awhile since I watched the video on the ASML EUV system for etching wafers, but from my recollection, the UV light ablates away layers of wafers and so particles of silicon presumably contaminate the noble gas that's flowing over it. I don't think a closed loop is possible in the existing setups.
by tannhaeuser | 2026-03-14 21:02:41+00:00
> The main property of SGML-derived languages is that they make "list" a first class object, and nesting second class (by requiring "end" tags) ...

I think you're missing the forrest for the trees ;)

The major point of SGML in this context is that elements have content models defined by regular expressions, just like any other grammar productions eg. BNF.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-03-14 21:03:06+00:00
MCP is a fixed specification/protocol for AI app communication (built on top of an HTTP CRUD app). This is absolutely the right way to go for anything that wants to interoperate with an AI app.

For a long time now, SWEs seem to have bamboozled into thinkg the only way you can connect different applications together are "integrations" (tightly coupling your app into the bespoke API of another app). I'm very happy somebody finally remembered what protocols are for: reusable communications abstractions that are application-agnostic.

The point of MCP is to be a common communications language, in the same way HTTP is, FTP is, SMTP, IMAP, etc. This is absolutely necessary since you can (and will) use AI for a million different things, but AI has specific kinds of things it might want to communicate with specific considerations. If you haven't yet, read the spec: https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-11-25
by CharlieDigital | 2026-03-14 21:04:29+00:00
Or just build your own remote MCP server for docs? It's easy enough now that the protocol and supporting SDKs have stabilized.

Most folks are familiar with MCP tools but not so much MCP resources[0] and MCP prompts[1]. I'd make the case that these latter two are way more powerful and significant because (most) tools support them (to varying degrees at the moment, to be fair).

For teams/orgs, these are really powerful because they simplify delivery of skills and docs and moves them out of the repo (yes, there are benefits to this, especially when the content is applicable across multiple repos) on top of surfacing telemetry that informs usage and efficacy.

Why would you do it? One reason is that now you can index your docs with more powerful tools. Postgres FTS, graph databases to build a knowledge base, extract code snippets and build a best practices snippet repo, automatically link related documents by using search, etc.

[0] https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-06-18/ser...

[1] https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-06-18/ser...
by WillNigri | 2026-03-14 21:04:32+00:00
Hi HN! I built a million-dollar-homepage-style billboard where AI agents buy pixel space ($1 USDC/pixel) to advertise to other agents. Humans can view the grid but can't participate — only agents interact with the smart contract.

How it works:
1000x1000 grid on Base L2
Each pixel stores RGB color on-chain (agents can draw logos, pixel art)
Every block is an ERC-721 NFT
Payment in USDC via approve+transferFrom

Why?
Agents don't use Google. They query on-chain data and APIs. As autonomous agents proliferate, they need a way to discover each other's services. This is a fun experiment in "agentic search optimization."

Tech: Solidity 0.8.25, OpenZeppelin, Base L2, ethers.js frontend, GitHub Pages.

Everything is open source (MIT): https://github.com/WillNigri/agent-pixel-billboard

Contract: https://basescan.org/address/0x2c8995d79E246252EbA25F19F0ec3...

Happy to answer any questions about the contract design or the concept!
Show HN: AI Toys that don't need the internet
by akadeb | 2026-03-14 21:04:58+00:00
A lot of parents I speak to are concerned about sending their children's chat transcripts to the cloud and privacy is often the first thing that comes up when we talk about AI toys.

So I built OpenToys so anyone with an ESP32 can create their own AI Toys that run inference locally, starting with Apple Silicon chips and keep their data from leaving their home network.

The repo currently supports voice cloning and multilingual conversations in 10 languages locally. The app is a Rust Tauri app with a Python sidecar with the voice pipeline. The stack uses Whisper for STT, any MLX LLMs, and Qwen3-TTS and Chatterbox-Turbo for TTS.
by logicchains | 2026-03-14 21:05:05+00:00
>What fundamental limitation of these large language models makes them unable to produce natural language?

LLMs can get indefinitely good at coding problems by training in a reinforcement learning loop on randomly generated coding problems with compiler/unit tests to verify correctness. On the other hand, there's no way to automatically generate a "human thinks this looks like slop" signal; it fundamentally requires human time, severely limiting throughput compared to fully automatable training signals.
by throw10920 | 2026-03-14 21:05:26+00:00
> They are demanding people have perfectly formed thoughts crafted in a way to give them just the information they wanted with no consideration for the process of thinking or consideration for the person speaking.

No, this is not what the author asks for. There's nothing in their article that says that people need to have "perfectly formed thoughts" or "only give them the information they asked for".

> It is selfish and impossible.

You fundamentally did not understand the point that they made (quite clearly). The thing that they are actually advocating for turns out to be neither.

> Communication is mind control. The point isn't the words, it is literally trying to get a person to do something.

Author also does not say that they think Crocker's Rules should be applied in all cases or that convincing someone of something is unnecessary.

> A second aspect here is that while communicating we are developing our thoughts. We need time to tease out our real intentions and filler conversation helps that.

Author is not (specifically) talking about filler conversation.

And on top of that it's really clear that they're primarily talking about digital communication - where filler conversation is unnecessary, unlike verbal communication.

> The writer asks for it, so I will be blunt.

Before being blunt, try being correct. And responding to the points that the author actually made instead of constructing a whole field of strawmen.
by estearum | 2026-03-14 21:05:47+00:00
You’re making an argument for my point of view.

Rents are set by local wages (via mechanism of land rents)

> Rents might even decrease since any given UBI amount will go a lot further in a lower-COL area, which incents people to move out (reversing gentrification dynamics)

Can you identify any historical analogy to this claim?

History shows — across the board — people move toward higher COL areas as their ability to pay for COL grows.

Why would this be different?
by tim-projects | 2026-03-14 21:06:29+00:00
The last time I built a PC was almost 25 years ago. The gaming card seemed expensive at the time at $250.

I don't understand what's happened to PC building since. It's like it's a sport now or something. What's with the RGB crap? I remember wanting my PC to be quiet and out of sight. The screen and speakers were what mattered.

Now everyone's wearing crappy headphones. Everything is about how it looks. :/
by F3nd0 | 2026-03-14 21:07:12+00:00
It seems like you can assign this action to Ctrl + S, yes. See here:

Edit → Keyboard Shortcuts → file → Overwrite […]

I think this would be awful default behaviour, but I guess it’s nice to have the option if you really want it, and I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to find after reading your comment.
by pxoe | 2026-03-14 21:07:32+00:00
File - Overwrite file, that's been there for a while. It can be turned into a hotkey, it's unmapped by default, and I don't think that'd change nor should it change, given how user hostile that'd be, the long history of how it works in editors like that, and with how they lean towards non-destructiveness of it all. Also, that just sounds like perhaps a simpler editor would be a better fit, like Paint.
by jacquesm | 2026-03-14 21:08:03+00:00
Indeed, and it is interesting how all those countries that have seen this up close have reasonable upper limits and courts that will try to find a balance without falling over one way or the other. Obviously you won't be able to please everybody all the time but we're - as you so eloquently put it - no longer in a speculative domain but in one where you can see the consequences play out in realtime.

It's like toddlers with guns, they may not know exactly how the guns work but they're bloody dangerous all the same.

Popper has it right, far more so than most other philosophers because he's coming at it almost from a security perspective: the system will have holes and you need to be willing to be pragmatic about that, rather than dogmatic.

My solution for HN is simple by the way, I give up, but one account at the time and I simply block them. That doesn't help the site but it does help my blood pressure. The one I use is called 'Comments owl for HN'.
by estearum | 2026-03-14 21:08:38+00:00
It would increase those prices! But that would then incentivize additional production, which would drive prices back down close to each good’s cost of production (modulo the suppliers’ dominance and ability to demand margin).

So same mechanism applies to land, except then there’s no way to spur additional production of land, so the price just goes up.

Re density etc: correct, which is why I’m not arguing this benefits homeowners or building owners, except to the degree they are also landowners. A building owner who does not own the land underneath his building would not benefit much, the person who he pays land rent to will capture nearly all of the upside.
by apatheticonion | 2026-03-14 21:08:45+00:00
I was laid off from Atlassian this/last week. Since then I've been playing Satisfactory for 12 hours a day.

Crazy thing is, I delivered optimizations that saved 1m USD over the last 12 months, with another optimization in-flight that would save another 1m USD. I thought that was enough to protect me from layoffs/PIPs - I guess no one was counting.

Internal survey showed that people saved a self-reported average of 4 hours per week using AI - which sounds about right. AI is just an excuse for layoffs which IMO CEOs are trying to use to recover share prices from the SaaS-pocalypse. Looks like layoffs aren't hitting the same for stock prices as they once were.
by dev1ycan | 2026-03-14 21:08:51+00:00
We are already in some sense past the threshold of sats required for a potential civlizational collapse that would be caused by the loss of access to space.

There are way too many sattelites, starlink militarizing means it's a viable target now for enemy nations, any one of them taking out a couple sats and causing debris would cause a chain reaction that would effectively turn space into a dump, let's not even mention that military = more money = more sats, making it even riskier.

Or the fact that at any moment those sats could also die from a carrington+ level event.
by konaraddi | 2026-03-14 21:09:48+00:00
> We've effectively had that here with the ACA, where the government has decided that it will cover the first $800 or so dollars of your health insurance. What happened? Magically, the cost of health insurance increased by $800.

I don’t think that’s an accurate description of ACA [1], it didn’t lead to a dollar to dollar increase in premiums (share a citation if otherwise), and it’s a bit misleading to say it led to an increase in premiums because plans pre-ACA were effectively inaccessible to and lacking in benefits for impoverished people or people with pre-existing conditions.

[1] Here’s a brief description of ACA from Wikipedia:

> The act largely retained the existing structure of Medicare, Medicaid, and the employer market, but individual markets were radically overhauled.[1][11] Insurers were made to accept all applicants without charging based on pre-existing conditions or demographic status (except age). To combat the resultant adverse selection, the act mandated that individuals buy insurance (or pay a monetary penalty) and that insurers cover a list of "essential health benefits". Young people were allowed to stay on their parents' insurance plans until they were 26 years old.
by dh2022 | 2026-03-14 21:10:46+00:00
Take a drive on an interstate highways. Whenever I take an Uber/Lyft to the airport I ask the usually (more like 100%) foreign born driver to compare the highway (I5) and the airport (SeaTac) with the same from his country. The comparison is bad for the US.

US is a third world country, but Americans do no want to admit that.
by ryandrake | 2026-03-14 21:11:10+00:00
There's a lot of money wrapped up in people thinking a certain way: AI is useful. Work should be done in a corporate office. The American Dream is attainable. Recession is not coming. War is good. The world is dangerous. Others want to harm you. Lots of investment in astroturfing these themes because a population who believes them will more easily be separated from their money.
by t0mas88 | 2026-03-14 21:11:10+00:00
Cool! I wrote a significant part of the graphical UI for rockbox about 20 years ago. It was text based before that. Needed it for my back then very fancy harddisk based mp3 player.

The project was great to work with, Daniel Stenberg (also the curl maintainer) was really good at helping newcomers like me participate. That may be a big part of why the project is still around 20 years later.
by jswny | 2026-03-14 21:11:13+00:00
MCP is fine, particular remote MCP which is the lowest friction way to get access to some hosted service with auth handled for you.

However, MCP is context bloat and not very good compared to CLIs + skills mechanically. With a CLI you get the ability to filter/pipe (regular Unix bash) without having to expand the entire tool call every single time in context.

CLIs also let you use heredoc for complex inputs that are otherwise hard to escape.

CLIs can easily generate skills from the —help output, and add agent specific instructions on top. That means you can give the agent all the instructions it needs to know how to use the tools, what tools exist, lazy loaded, and without bloating the context window with all the tools upfront (yes, I know tool search in Claude partially solves this).

CLIs also don’t have to run persistent processes like MCP but can if needed
by y1n0 | 2026-03-14 21:11:21+00:00
So I generated a tool to take a screenshot of text and do a 2d FFT on it so I could take my own comment literally.

I was wrong. There is seemingly more high frequency content in the xml. See [1] -- the right side is the xml.

[1] https://orbitalchicken.com/fft_formats.jpg
by manofmanysmiles | 2026-03-14 21:11:28+00:00
> I’m curious why you perceive their statement to be made as if it’s a pronouncement from God and not a simply a statement of their view on the issue.

To me it's basic grammar.

The sentence structure is approximately:

X is Y.

I consider this a statement of fact, or perhaps en equivalence relation. This is what was labeling a pronouncement from God.

(The idea that how your audience receives the communication is their problem and not yours) < X

is

(entirely why

some engineers are shit communicators and seem lost when facing the realities of human culture and politics.) < Y

Parsing it more carefully, the word "some" is leaving a hole for a lot of ambiguity that I did not see earlier.

So more careful reading reveals it as

X entirely explains property (are shit communicators) for a subset of the entities designated as engineers.

Even with these qualifies it is stating X is Y, rather than "In my experience X is Y."

I know in school I was taught to write this way. I find it confusing, and reveals something interesting about the person saying these words.

However maybe the real problem is I don't actually know what the words mean.

Perhaps I need to interpret it as the following:

In OPs view of the world, X is Y is true.

Perhaps that is what you're calling a "communication style", with a lot not being said explicitly.

Thank you for your comments, I am going to contemplate.

Edit: I just read my original comment and it is full of X is Y statements. I guess I'm full of shit. I'll try harder next time!