MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Multicomp | 2026-03-12 20:00:49+00:00
This is what I've been trying to get nanobot to do, so thanks for sharing this. I plan to use this for workflow definitions like filesystems.

I have a known workflow to create an RPG character with steps, lets automate some of the boilerplate by having a succession of LLMs read my preferences about each step and apply their particular pieces of data to that step of the workflow, outputting their result to successive subdirectories, so I can pub/sub the entire process and make edits to intermediate files to tweak results as I desire.

Now that's cool!
Show HN: I'm building niche AI agents with OpenClaw (Clawsify)
by Vanshfin | 2026-03-12 20:01:01+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been experimenting with OpenClaw recently and started building a small project called Clawsify.

The idea is simple: instead of one generic AI agent, create different agents and personas tailored for specific niches.

For example:

marketing agents

research agents

automation/task agents

niche-specific personas depending on the workflow

I’m also experimenting with different OpenClaw tools and boilerplates so builders can spin up agents faster without setting everything up from scratch.

Still early and mostly experimental, but I’m curious:

What kind of niche AI agents or personas would actually be useful to you?

Would love to hear ideas from others building with AI agents.
by jaredklewis | 2026-03-12 20:01:59+00:00
THe HN title seems very misleading to me. How is this, in any sense of the word, "formal?" I don't see that particular word used to describe this tool on the web page itself.

The site does describe it as a "programming language," which feels like a novel use of the term to me. The borders around a term like "programming language" are inherently fuzzy, but something like "code generation tool" better describes CodeSpeak IMHO.
by ryandrake | 2026-03-12 20:02:20+00:00
I guess the point is: How often do we really need actual angles in the code? Probably only at the very ends: input from users and output to users. Everywhere else, we should just be treating them as sin/cos pairs or dot/cross pairs. So when the user inputs an angle, immediately convert it to what the computer actually needs, store it that way throughout the computation, and then only if/when the user needs to see an actual angle would you need to convert it back.
by encom | 2026-03-12 20:02:21+00:00
>https://malus.sh/blog.html

An interesting read, however I'd like to know how to stop websites from screwing around with my scrollbars. In this case it's hidden entirely. Why is this even a thing websites are allowed to do - to change and remove browser UI elements? It makes no sense even, because I have no idea where I am on the page, or how long it is, without scrolling to the bottom to check. God I miss 2005.
Show HN: Slack but Usage Priced
by valliveeti | 2026-03-12 20:02:35+00:00
Hey,

Slack disrupted the workplace communication market, I think it's time to disrupt it again. Slack is slow and not really plugging into what in my view is the most important part of the communication platforms nowadays, context for llms and interaction with agents. I think there is a viable business model to be discovered where the basic infrastructure of communication is close to usage priced instead of outrageously per seat priced bundled in with features you will not use, but have to pay for.

Excited to hear what you think!
by fullstop | 2026-03-12 20:02:45+00:00
I was watching some travel show on PBS, which I can't recall the name of. They were going through Egypt and met up with a guy from the area who walked them through getting the local food.

So much of what they had looked the same as the food that you could find in Greece, but they were fiercely adamant that it was both different and better.

Anyway, it's Mediterranean food in my mind. :-)
by tomtom1337 | 2026-03-12 20:02:49+00:00
You could probably use just an X-scanner, and instead of a CCD line sensor, use a regular 2D image sensor if you used a "1 pixel wide" slit aperture to crop the image perpendicularly to the direction that the prism disperses the light. So instead of a single pixel being dispersed, you disperse a line.

You would reduce the time required by the root of the number of pixels you want (assuming a square image).

(This is what we do in momentum-resolved electron energy loss spectroscopy. In that situation we have electromagnetic lenses that focus the electrons that have been dispersed, so we don't have as bad a chromatic aberration problem as the other response mentions).

I would love to see e.g. a butterfly image with a slider that I could drag to choose the wavelength shown!!
by tavavex | 2026-03-12 20:02:58+00:00
You have a package delivery business. The business is stable and optimized, serving all houses in your city. Each courier has a route planned out that they follow each day. They take 8 hours to complete the route and deliver to each house along the way.

Now, cars come along. With the new efficiencies, you find that now a courier takes only 6 hours to do their route. The number of buildings in the city has not increased, there's a cap to how much service you need to provide after which there's no longer any additional benefits. So, do you cut everyone's work day to 6 hours, or do you fire 25% of all couriers and re-route the rest so they now do 8 hour days on longer routes using cars?

Your solution assumes that the extra workforce immediately translates into free growth, but the growth of many businesses is constrained by outside factors. Here it would be the population of your served area.
by bombcar | 2026-03-12 20:03:06+00:00
The problem is that "all sides" agree that if the constitution was written today, surprise, surprise, it'd totally agree with them; the gun control people are sure that the 2nd wouldn't cover military weapons, the gun lovers are sure that it would mandate tanks for everyone.

But since having 300 million people have a detailed, nuanced discussion about anything is impossible, everyone works at the edges.
by hypeatei | 2026-03-12 20:03:08+00:00
> no mechanism in the constitution for canceling elections

Sure, but there's mechanism in real life that allows cancelling elections like sending your newly funded ICE goons to polling places. Ideally everyone follows the constitution but in reality (even looking at past administrations) there's nothing stopping the executive from taking an action and saying "oops guess we'll let the courts figure it out!"
by exmadscientist | 2026-03-12 20:03:35+00:00
I've been called out more than once for using too much italics in my writing.

But the trick is I usually write like I would speak. This leads to italicizing any word or phrase I'd speak emphatically. (Which, yes, I've also been called out for doing a lot when I speak. So what; I've also been told I'm good at getting my point across. I'll take it!) In any text important enough to go through multiple revisions, or to be written from the start with multiple revisions in mind, this characteristic is diminished. But most text is more throwaway, just like most speech, so it gets left a little rough.

This also tends to feel pretty natural. If you read LLM-written text out loud, or the prose TFA is talking about, it... does not feel natural at all. So what I'm trying to say is: some level of emphasis is just fine. Don't overthink it.
by 9rx | 2026-03-12 20:03:40+00:00
You can use deterministic simulation testing to reproduce a real-world race condition 100% of the time while under test.

But that's not the kind of test that will expose a race condition 1% of the time. The kinds of tests that are inadvertently finding race conditions 1% of the time are focused on other concerns.

So it is still not a case of a flaky test, but maybe a case of a missing test.
by ghostlyInc | 2026-03-12 20:03:46+00:00
Yes, I tried that.

I can run it in WSL, but since my development happens on Windows I have to copy the build output into the WSL environment and run it there. I automated it a bit, but it still adds noticeable overhead and slows down the feedback loop.

So I usually only test there when I suspect a Linux-specific issue (case sensitivity, paths, permissions, etc.).
by kle1nz | 2026-03-12 20:04:19+00:00
Hey HN, I built m1nd - a cognitive graph engine that gives LLM agents a nervous system instead of keyword search. The core idea: ingest any data (code, knowledge graphs, JSON) into a property graph, then query it with spreading activation across 4 dimensions (structural, semantic, temporal, causal). Noise gets cancelled via XLR differential processing, and the system learns from feedback via Hebbian plasticity (LTP/LTD on edge weights). 13 tools over MCP (JSON-RPC stdio), so any agent can call it. Domain-agnostic - works on code, research notes, supply chains, anything with entities and relationships. Key algorithms: - Spreading activation with configurable decay, hop limits, energy budgets - XLR noise cancellation (differential signal/noise CSR graphs) - Hebbian plasticity (correct results strengthen connections, wrong weaken them) - Standing wave resonance for harmonic analysis - Counterfactual simulation ("what breaks if we remove X?") Built in Rust. ~15,500 LOC. 159 tests. 3.8MB binary. GitHub: https://github.com/maxkle1nz/m1nd Landing page: https://maxkle1nz.github.io/m1nd/ Happy to answer questions about the activation model or the MCP integration.
by 0x457 | 2026-03-12 20:04:57+00:00
> The scope in parentheses is doing real work. `rejected(oauth-library)` lets you do `git log --grep="rejected(auth"` to find every rejected auth decision across history.

I'm 99% sure that grep won't find your commit because you rejected "oauth-library" and grepping for "auth" rejection. Given that LLM will make up category name, it will just get worse unless there is deterministic enforcement.

All of this really feels like people that never wrote code starting doing it via agents and started reinventing already solved issues.
by FpUser | 2026-03-12 20:05:04+00:00
>" Why do we act like this is a monolithic concept?"

Under "we" you mean white / the westerners? Because the majority of us do not give a flying fuck about other parts of the world. Not important enough. One can easily see how our media reacts to tragedies on one one side comparatively to the other.

As for food. I live in Toronto and can clearly distinguish between quite a few different "Asian" cuisines.
by bonco56 | 2026-03-12 20:05:31+00:00
I have a few apps on Google Play and the App Store with AdMob ads, and running Google Ads and Apple Ads campaigns. It was quite a hassle to manually track how my apps are doing profit-wise. You cannot plug ad costs data into revenuecat or google analytics.

I couldn't find any analytics tool that could combine all the data together, so I built my own. I've been using it for some time now, and figured I'd put it here, maybe other indie devs find it useful.
by throw0101d | 2026-03-12 20:06:03+00:00
> The new players would each get a /24 and everyone would say that's "enough".

From where?

All then-existing IPv4 addresses would get all the bits behind them. There would, at the time, still be IPv4 addresses available that could be given out, and as people got them they would also get the extend "IPv4x" address associated with them.

But at some point IPv4 addresses would all be allocated… along with all the extended addresses 'behind' them.

Then what?

The extended IPv4x addresses are attached to the legacy IPv4 addressed they are 'prefixed' by, so once the legacy bits are assigned, so are the new bits. If someone comes along post-legacy-IPv4 exhaustion, where do new addresses come from?

You're in the exact same situation as we are now: legacy code is stuck with 32-bit-only addresses, new code is >32-bits… just like with IPv6. Great you managed to purchase/rent a legacy address range… but you still need a translation box for non-updated code… like with CG-NAT and IPv6.
by xg15 | 2026-03-12 20:06:17+00:00
What irks me a bit at the way the Bitter Lesson is interpreted is that seemingly it didn't just throw out handcrafted model/feature generation, but also any attempt to interpret the learned models and features.

Like, in theory, this should be the absolute best time for people interested in analyzing unstructured data: Here there is this wealth of open-weight models, trained on half the internet that must have developed all kinds of absolutely insane feature detectors for all kinds of media: Programming languages, human-language prose, images, audio, video, whatever you want!

In practice, the models are mostly treated as black boxes and the weights as inscrutable. Which is why we now have the weird situation that our models are able to understand incredibly subtle and abstract semantic concepts in text - but the pre- and postprocessing is still on the level of regexes and string heuristics like 50 years ago. There doesn't seem to be any inbetween.
by Ukv | 2026-03-12 20:06:21+00:00
> The commercial bots seamlessly traverse between AI, auto-respond and human. It's very much an ensemble method.

This seems unlikely to me, given it'd increase costs and the response times would make it obvious.

The messages presented in the original source appear to be people expecting to be talking to a real person, likely on a dating app. The relation to AI is only speculative, and mostly in the direction of "my messages may be used to train a chatbot to replace my job of deceiving people" - which is plausible.

> That's why people pay for it over just downloading an abliterated model from hf with system prompt hacking.

I'd assume convenience, fine-tuning, and using a larger model than it's feasible for most people to run locally.
by antonvs | 2026-03-12 20:06:39+00:00
This long post is demonstrating that Knuth’s advice, “premature optimization is the root of all evil,” is still one of the first heuristics you should apply.

The article describes a couple of straw men and even claims that they’re right in principle:

> Then someone on the team raises an eyebrow. “Isn’t that an extra function call? Indirection has a cost.” Another member quickly nods.

> They’re not wrong in principle.

But they are wrong in principle. There’s no excuse for this sort of misinformation. Anyone perpetuating it, including the blog author, clearly has no computer science education and shouldn’t be listened to, and should probably be sent to a reeducation camp somewhere to learn the basics of their profession.

Perhaps they don’t understand what a compiler does, I don’t know, but whatever it is, they need to be broken down and rebuilt from the ground up.
by zinkem | 2026-03-12 20:06:50+00:00
I believe this research is totally true-- I had a lot of memories come back after

1. I stopped drinking heavily and using other drugs, i.e. marijuana

2. managed my diet to avoid heartburn without medication

3. schedule my meals so it was easier to sleep at night (always eat something for breakfast when I wake up)

I did not need any "poo infusion" or anything.

I had a gal bladder removal that didn't fix the problems the doctors thought it would and got a lot smarter about the kinds and variety of food I eat.

I believe alcohol in particular was really screwing up my gut biome and entire digestive system.
by chowells | 2026-03-12 20:06:58+00:00
I think I agree with what you're getting at, though I usually phrase it differently: indirection is not abstraction. A good abstraction makes it easier to understand what the code is doing by letting you focus on the important details and ignore the noise. It does this by giving you tools that match your problem space, whatever it may be. This will necessarily involve some amount of indirection when you switch semantic levels, but that's very different from constantly being told "look over there" when you're trying to figure out what the code is saying.
by hn_acc1 | 2026-03-12 20:07:40+00:00
This 1000x. "Free" is only a viable business model if the govt funds it. Otherwise, the $$ has to come from somewhere else in the company - how long will it take for the company to lose interest in a loss-leader when they're making $$ from other parts?

Look at all the deprecated Google products. What happens when Gemini-SaaS makes billions from licensing to other companies, and Gemini-Charity-for-the-poors starts losing money?

Sadly, the bigger the $$ in the tech pie, the more we have attracted robber barons, etc.
Show HN: RestaRules – A robots.txt for how AI agents interact with restaurants
by selfradiance | 2026-03-12 20:07:40+00:00
RestaRules is an open standard that lets restaurants publish machine-readable conduct rules for AI agents. Any agent — voice, booking, concierge — checks a /.well-known/agent-venue-rules.json file before acting.
The rules cover things like: must the AI disclose it's not human? Which channels are allowed (phone, web, SMS)? What's the party size limit before a human gets involved? Are deposits required? What are the retry limits?
Think of it as robots.txt, but instead of "don't crawl this page," it's "don't book a table for 12 without calling the host stand first."
Why now: AI voice agents are already calling restaurants. NY and Philadelphia passed anti-bot reservation laws. The EU AI Act (August 2026) requires AI-to-human disclosure. Restaurants have zero standardized way to set boundaries.
The repo includes a v0.2 JSON Schema, a validation SDK, a CLI checker, a reference agent, and a browser voice demo where you can hear an agent fetch live rules and obey them.
Live demo: https://selfradiance.github.io/restarules/demo/voice/
Live rules file: https://selfradiance.github.io/restarules/.well-known/agent-...
Built solo with no prior coding experience using AI coding agents (Claude Code). Happy to answer questions about the standard or the process.
by zdragnar | 2026-03-12 20:07:48+00:00
Here's the comment I replied to:

> Source: actually ran a fucking election precinct. Non-citizens aren’t casting ballots illegally.

So, you can see people are actually claiming that it doesn't happen. Further,

> It's already a crime, and we seem to be pretty good at catching it.

How can we be good at catching it if it is too hard for our own citizens to actually get proof that they are citizens? We hear about the cases that happen, but we don't hear about the people go go undetected, because they go undetected.
by TheCoelacanth | 2026-03-12 20:08:08+00:00
27th amendment was about congressional salaries and had basically no effect on governance.

26th amendment lowered the voting age to 18 for state and local elections and had no effect on national elections (statute already set the national voting age as 18, but courts prevented it from applying to state and local elections).

25th clarified presidential succession to work exactly how everyone had already assumed it to work for over a century, so for practical purposes did nothing.

24th in 1964, which outlawed poll taxes as a criteria for voting, was the last amendment with any effect on national governance.
by habinero | 2026-03-12 20:08:33+00:00
And you're not likely to see any either, frankly, because you buy SaaS when you don't want to DIY.

It's easy to think of DIY software as "free" because you don't pay seat licenses, but DIY is expensive like a free yacht is expensive. It's a bottomless pit of money and time and upkeep.

Even if it's simple to implement, you still have to support it, update it, get people to use it, be on call if it tips over, teach people to use it, be forced to take it over when the person who wrote it leaves, etc, etc, etc

IT is a cost center and isn't staffed at the level of your revenue generator eng teams. You don't buy SaaS because you don't have other options, you buy SaaS to throw money at a vendor to take care of a problem for you, so your IT people can do the work you actually want them to do and not dick around rebuilding software that you already have.
by goldenjm | 2026-03-12 20:08:38+00:00
Hey- I just saw your comment here 61 days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46560110) and can't reply there, so I'm replying here since this is your latest post.

You requested that we add inverting colors to PDF mode on Paper2Audio. I have good news: we added it (other users requested it too). It is in the main menu when you have our PDF view open. Please let me know anytime if you have any questions or feedback.

- Joe, Paper2Audio Founder
by Philpax | 2026-03-12 20:09:27+00:00
There's not really an exact science to it, but manually-optimised code is usually more structured/systematic to make it easier for the human author to manage the dependencies and state across the board, while automatically-optimised code is free to arrange things however it would like.

As an example of the kinds of optimisations that the best human programmers were doing before compilers took over, see Michael Abrash's Black Book: https://www.phatcode.net/res/224/files/html/index.html - you can intuit how a human might organise their code to make the most of these while still keeping it maintainable.
Ask HN: Do you struggle analyzing large log files with AI due to token limits?
by DrTrader | 2026-03-12 20:09:40+00:00
I've been working on a tool that compresses log files for
AI analysis. In my tests, I reduced a 600MB log file down
to 10MB while preserving 97% of the semantic meaning —
the AI could still understand the full context, errors,
and patterns.

The approach uses symbolic encoding specifically designed
for how LLMs process information, not just standard
compression.

Curious if others face this problem regularly:

1. Do token limits stop you from feeding full logs to AI?
2. What's your current workaround?
3. Would a tool like this be useful in your workflow?

Not selling anything — just trying to understand if this
is a real pain point before building further.
by reaperducer | 2026-03-12 20:10:27+00:00
Depends on the exact date.

I never worked with DOS BBS systems, so I can't say about this photo specifically, but the ones I did work with had between one and four dialup modems hooked up to each machine, depending on its capabilities. They did "networking" through a store-and-forward messaging system. It wasn't networking as we'd recognize it today.
by evolve2k | 2026-03-12 20:11:13+00:00
I like these conventions. Another personal practice I us the body for is where I’ve relied on any webpages; blogs, issue reports, stack overlap pages etc to help the commit come together.

The example of using one library over another, especially if research has gone into which to choose, regularly involves say finding a good article that compares the alternatives.

I’ll say though that I usually include links to more notable references, I won’t usually commit refs to a libraries own docs and more obvious stuff; revealing and keeping references to resources found that went towards getting it done are what I keep and add to commit body.

Maybe there’s spaces for useful references to be added to the spec/conventions.
Personally I usually show links like this after the body message.

Example of the commit body:

refs(oath-library):

www.something.com/picking-a-thing
by ux266478 | 2026-03-12 20:11:38+00:00
In vulgar American English, "Asia" mostly just refers to the wider Confuciosphere + some parts of Central Asia (though rarely thought about.) Most Americans will look at you funny if you call Pakistan or Jordan Asian, because that's not how we use the word.

> China alone has several distinct cuisines. Why do we act like this is a monolithic concept?

When someone is talking about "Chinese food", they almost certainly are talking about the cuisine established by Chinese immigrants in their country, not food as it exists within China. This isn't unique to China.

More American vulgarism fun facts, "Chinese" wasn't pan-Chinese until somewhat recently. It pretty much exclusively meant Cantonese outside of very specific contexts, like geopolitics. This changed slowly starting in the 1970s, but emphasis on slowly and it still persists in interesting ways today.