MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by josephg | 2026-03-08 19:00:18+00:00
How would a compiler toolchain ship a debugger for webassembly? It’s kind of impossible. The only place for a debugger is inside the browser. Just like we do now with dev tools, JavaScript, typescript and webassembly languages.

> The browser is already complex enough as it is and should be radically stripped down

I’d love this too, but I think this ship has sailed. I think the web’s cardinal sin is trying to be a document platform and an application platform the same time. If I could wave a magic wand, I’d split those two used cases back out. Documents shouldn’t need JavaScript. They definitely don’t need wasm. And applications probably shouldn’t have the URL bar and back and forward buttons. Navigation should be up to the developers themselves. If apps were invented today, they should probably be done in pure wasm.

> Web APIs are designed from the ground up for Javascript

Web APIs are already almost all bridged into rust via websys. The APIs are more awkward than we’d like. But they all work today.
by vineyardmike | 2026-03-08 19:00:29+00:00
> Minor thing that bothered me disproportionately: the constant syntax in the docs (x = 600) doesn't match what the parser actually accepts (x: 600).

You’re a better man than me. If the docs can’t even get the syntax right, that’s a hard no from me.

Also, fwiw, you’ve got a few points wrong about protos. Inspecting the binary data is hard, but the tag numbers are present. You need the schema, but at least you can identify each element.

Also, I disagree on the constructor front. Proto forces you to grapple with the reality that a field may be missing. In a production system, when adding a new field, there will be a point where that field isn’t present on only one side of the network call. The compiler isn’t saving you.

Fresh is more honest than better, and personally, I wouldn’t change it.
by thangalin | 2026-03-08 19:01:10+00:00
Of possible interest:

* https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2022/01/08/logging-code-smell/

* https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2026/02/03/lloopy-loops/

Both of these posts discuss using event-based frameworks to eliminate duplicative (cross-cutting) logging statements throughout a code base.

My desktop Markdown editor[1], uses this approach to output log messages to a dialog box, a status bar, and standard error, effectively "for free".

[1]: https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/keenwrite/tree/HEAD/src/main/j...
by scsh | 2026-03-08 19:02:21+00:00
Agreed, this got me thinking maybe I should try something similar with my own old macbook pro. They did mention that this was the first time they had soldered anything, so it's great that they went for it and it worked! So now it's just a matter of improving technique.

Long term, that may need to be redone. Really want less exposed wire in the final product, tin the tips of the wire first so they don't suck up the solder and trim to the appropriate length(only a bit bigger than the size of the pads at most). This is a good example on tinning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRPF4wpXX9Q And if you need to expose a lot of wire then just use some heatshrink so it's not exposed once you're done.

In a perfect world, you'd want to remove all the existing solder and then re-solder everything. But de-soldering can be its own skill and isn't always strictly necessary. Just something more to work toward.
by kakacik | 2026-03-08 19:02:23+00:00
Well, llms are way more stupid, doing things that even most juniors wouldn't do (and then you don't give PROD access to new junior hire, do you... most people are super careful with llms and simply don't trust them and don't let them anywhere near critical infra or data - thats seniority 101).

Which fundamental limitation do you mean? I haven't seen anything but slow, iterative improvements. Sure, if feels fine, turtle can eventually do 10,000 mile trek but just because its moving left and right feet and decreasing the distance doesn't mean its getting there anytime soon.

Parent mentioned way harder hurdles than iterative increments can tackle, rather radical new... everything.
OpenAI might end up on the right side of history
by shoman3003 | 2026-03-08 19:02:25+00:00
note: I am in MENA, am not with the military in any way.

when i first read the statement by Dario, i was shocked by the fact the military was so dismissive about Ai safety (not to mention privacy). Seeing anthropic resist the military, I felt so proud of being a claude user to the point I deleted gpt right away. it's nice to see your fav products sync with your values.

but today, after thinking more about it, i realized something. for a government to allow one Ai company to dictate terms, it opens up a precedent for Ai companies in the future to resist governmental oversight. that might not be a big deal in 2020s, but in 2030s by all estimations many Ai companies will be big enough to resist entire governmental structures. Maybe not the US or China, but they will definitely be big enough not to be easily influenced.

those independent companies will eventually grow so large, no government can hope to tame them. i know that right now it seems impossible for a mere ccorp valued at less than a trillion to resist a government that spends 7 trillion each year. but zooming out, it feels likely that the next generation of Ai companies will be easily valued at 10T. if you look at a 2-year-old which just learned how to talk and suddenly he starts talking quantum, you can bet your a* he will grow up to be a powerhouse.

i know soft monetary power is very different than hard military power, but enough tokens of the first type can easily be converted into the second type if:
1. you have a sufficiently ambitious CEO.
2. the survival of the company is threatened in some way.
I am not talking about AGI here, but good old private equity that does whatever it needs to survive. ruled by suits that have more loyalty to shareholders than anyone or anything else.

at the end of the day, corporations are ruled by dictators (they have to be), governments are not (not in the West at least). maybe just maybe we should NOT trust private equity to seek anything but profits. governments are manipulative and bloody, but at least we can vote.
by AlotOfReading | 2026-03-08 19:02:31+00:00
I wish I could get Claude to stop every 15 seconds. There's a persistent bug in the state machine that causes it to miss esc/stop/ctrl-f and continue spending tokens when there's a long running background task or subagent. There's a lot of wasted tokens when it runs for 10, 15, 20 minutes and I can't stop it from running down the wrong rabbit hole.
by arter45 | 2026-03-08 19:03:08+00:00
The point is not forbidding discussion. Advice on important matters that may have serious legal or medical implications should be done by professionals who can be held accountable for their behavior, not sentence generators hosted by mostly unaccountable tech companies (which may be in another jurisdiction altogether).

Information is not siloed away by requiring license for legal or medical advice. It’s not like someone is hiding law codes or whatever.
by smt88 | 2026-03-08 19:04:00+00:00
Pichai is being evaluated for his effect on stock price. His shareholders don't care if every product and service they offer has gotten worse for users in the meantime.

Gemini keeping pace with Claude and ChatGPT is clearly some kind of management victory, because Zuckerberg and Musk don't seem to be able to do it despite having limitless cash to spend.
by pinkmuffinere | 2026-03-08 19:04:08+00:00
Ya, agreed. This makes me think that (long term) the ai race won’t be won on the merits of individual models, but on pricing — I think Google has a some strong advantages here because they know how to provide cheap compute, and they already have a ton of engineers doing similar things, so it’s a marginal cost for them instead of having to hire and maintain whole devoted teams.
by rurban | 2026-03-08 19:04:26+00:00
We did run it locally on a free H100, and it performed awfully. With vLLM and opencode. Now we are running gpt-oss-120b which is better, but still far behind opus 4.6, the only coding model which is better than our most experienced senior dev. gpt-5.3-codex is more like on the sonnet level on complicated C code. Bearable, but still many stupidities. gpt-oss is hilariously stupid, but might work for typescript, react, python simple tasks.

For vision qwen is the best, our goto vision model.
by woeirua | 2026-03-08 19:04:26+00:00
I feel like this is an outdated point of view now. Logs are clearly going to be read primarily by agents very soon, if they're not already now.

For example, we're experimenting with having Claude Desktop read log files for remote users. It's often able to troubleshoot and solve issues for our users faster than we can, especially after you give it access to your codebase through GH MCP or something like that. It's wild.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-03-08 19:05:01+00:00
What are we if we throw away the Constitution and allow the Government to punish people/companies that exercise their rights?

China's constitution includes freedom of speech and elections.

Funny thing when you put rights on hold today for 'reasons' they tend to just go away. Look at the US today versus pre 9/11. It's a completely different country with completely different attitudes about freedom and privacy and government over reach and power.
by yorwba | 2026-03-08 19:05:17+00:00
Yes, of course there are people in China who, when their job puts them in conflict with their ethics, will decide to do something ethical. I can't think of any war-related examples, since it's been a while since China was involved in any big wars, but I like the story of Liu Lipeng, who used to work as an internet censor: https://madeinchinajournal.com/2025/04/03/me-and-my-censor/
by falkensmaize | 2026-03-08 19:05:33+00:00
I always wondered - were the huge fines applicable because they shared the files, or because they downloaded the files? The two things were always conflated and poorly understood in media reports at the time.

Seems like it would be impossible to prove substantial damages from one individual downloading an album, because you have only lost the potential single sale. No different than a kid stealing a single CD in terms of lost revenue.

Sharing the song on Kazaa or Limewire or Napster however means that they could have potentially illicitly provided the album to thousands or even millions of potential customers, more akin to stealing a truckload or even a whole store full of cds. In that case, it does seem plausible that you could prove (or at least convince a judge/jury) significant damages more in line with the exorbitant punitive sums.

Since they “caught” you by setting up fake peers that recorded your ip when sharing, I always assumed it was the latter that actually got people in trouble.
by gepheum | 2026-03-08 19:05:45+00:00
Thank you so much for taking the time to dig into the compile source code and the thorough comment you left.

For dense JSON: the idea is that it is often a good "default" choice because it offers a good tradeoff across 3 properties: efficiency (where it's between binary and readable JSON), persistability (safe to evolve shema without losing backward compatibility), and readability (it's low for the reasons you mentioned, but it's not as bad as a binary string). I tried to explain this tradeoff in this table: https://skir.build/docs/serialization#serialization-formats

I hear your point about the tagline "like protos but better" which I hesitated to put because it sounds presumptuous. But I am not quite sure what idea you mean to convey by "fresh"?
by HotHotLava | 2026-03-08 19:05:45+00:00
It's an ironic situation; logically what should be the moat are the models, costing hundreds of millions of investment cost to train and operate so it would make sense if we see different provider focusing in different directions.

But right now we have 3-5 top contenders that are so evenly matched that the de-facto sticking point is mostly the harness, ie. the collection of proven plugins/commands/tools/agent features that are tuned to the users personal workflow.
by the_gastropod | 2026-03-08 19:06:15+00:00
1. Id guess an average cloth diaper gets reused more than 100x

2. Think about the mass differences you’re comparing here. A standard plastic grocery bag is about 5 grams of material. A standard cloth bag is around 250. Cloth vs disposable diapers are approximately the same amount of material. This is the “gotcha, vegan! Iceberg lettuce is less efficient on a CO2 per calorie basis than beef! Eat more steak to be greener” type of argument.

3. You’re doing the thing contrarians often do of only counting one side of the ledger, while hand waving away the other. Disposable diapers require water, tree growing, tree cutting, tree transport, tree processing, bleaching, transport, packaging, product transport, disposal transport, disposal processing, etc etc. for each time a diaper is used. Really think about the full cradle-to-grave cycle of these things. Reusables must be washed, yes. But they, importantly, don’t require any of the other steps, which is, y’know, extremely significant. It’s not even remotely plausible single-use diapers are more resourceful than cloth ones.
Ask HN: TikTok scraping – maximize signal when only 5% of content is useful?
by alliewithane | 2026-03-08 19:06:56+00:00
Hey everyone.

I'm working on a machine learning project that needs a lot of TikTok video data that has to do with ads and behavior. I'm gonna do a bunch of transcription and analyses on individual videos after getting their ids.

I'm facing a problem right now. I estimate only about 5% of the data fetched by tools like ensembledata through the degrees of freedom it allows (individual hashtag / keyword search.)

I understand this possibly is a confounding problem.

My question is has anyone here worked on something similar? How did you approach this?

Did you use iterative/stratified sampling?

Thank you!
Show HN: I built a real-time OSINT dashboard pulling 15 live global feeds
by vancecookcobxin | 2026-03-08 19:07:33+00:00
Sup HN,

So I got tired of bouncing between Flightradar, MarineTraffic, and Twitter every time something kicked off globally, so I wrote a dashboard to aggregate it all locally. It’s called Shadowbroker.

I’ll admit I leaned way too hard into the "movie hacker" aesthetic for the UI, but the actual pipeline underneath is real. It pulls commercial/military ADS-B, the AIS WebSocket stream (about 25,000+ ships), N2YO satellite telemetry, and GDELT conflict data into a single MapLibre instance.

Getting this to run without melting my browser was the hardest part. I'm running this on a laptop with an i5 and an RTX 3050, and initially, dumping 30k+ moving GeoJSON features onto the map just crashed everything. I ended up having to write pretty aggressive viewport culling, debounce the state updates, and compress the FastAPI payloads by like 90% just to make it usable.

My favorite part is the signal layer—it actually calculates live GPS jamming zones by aggregating the real-time navigation degradation (NAC-P) of commercial flights overhead.

It’s Next.js and Python. I threw a quick-start script in the releases if you just want to spin it up, but the repo is open if you want to dig into the backend.

Let me know if my MapLibre implementation is terrible, I'm always looking for ways to optimize the rendering.
by gritzko | 2026-03-08 19:07:56+00:00
(Author) There is always an option to fall back to the general-text codec that breaks a text into tokens. That one is used for many things (e.g. Markdown). If that fails (non UTF8), there is the general-blob final-fallback codec (the git mode).

The way it makes an AST tree is non-lossy. It puts everything into the tree, just breaks it into a token-tree. In fact, it stamps ids on the nodes, so merges do not get confused by renames, formatting changes and similar things.There is value in preserving structure this way that repeat parsing can not provide. In big-O terms, working with such an AST tree and a stack of its patches is not much different from stacks of binary diffs git is using.

The general thinking here is this: as we have to juggle and recombine more and more of AI authored change sets (which we had not fully evaluated yet, esp in relation to one another), it is critical that k-way merges and repeat-merges are as seamless, non-intrusive and deterministic as humanly possible. Because linearization is a huge performance bottleneck, here and everywhere.

If I have k independent changesets, I have k^2 unplanned interactions and 2^k unplanned change combinations.

The project is experimental at this point. So, intended for general experimentation, not general use yet. The value I see in it is the core format/protocol for storing versioned source code in an indexed and structure-aware database anyone can build applications on top of.
by gavinray | 2026-03-08 19:08:08+00:00
About 6 years ago, I had a thought:

"There are billions of small devices, like Smart TV's, IoT devices, Smart Thermostats that sit idle most of the time. What if you could combine their unused computing power to do distributed ML model training?"

With RAM and storage becoming commodities, I'll be interested to see if we see efforts to utilize existing internet-connected devices that would otherwise go unused as compute resources.
by actsasbuffoon | 2026-03-08 19:08:14+00:00
Not sure if I’m misunderstanding your claim. A string does vibrate as the sum of the string’s harmonics. That’s how pinch harmonics work, and they wouldn’t work if that wasn’t the case.

You poke a spot where a given harmonic doesn’t vibrate, and that takes energy away from the other harmonics that do need to vibrate at that spot.

If we’re just talking about visually being able to see them, I suppose that’s a different question. Maybe on an incredibly low pitched string, or with a strobe light playing at a synced frequency? But in terms of what the string is doing, it is vibrating as the sum of its harmonics.
Show HN: YourCycleKeeper – a client-side privacy-first period tracker
by pythonime | 2026-03-08 19:08:18+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a small open-source project called YourCycleKeeper, a privacy-first period tracker that runs entirely client-side.

The motivation was simple: I noticed that many period tracking apps request extensive permissions and integrate multiple third-party trackers.

I wanted an alternative where:

- no accounts are required

- no data leaves the device

- no analytics or tracking scripts are included

- everything runs locally in the browser

So this app works entirely client-side and stores data locally.

The project is still in beta but usable, and I’m planning an Android APK version soon.

Demo:
https://yourcyclekeeper.web.app/period-tracker/

Intro:
https://yourcyclekeeper.web.app/

Source:
https://github.com/pythonime-lab/yourcyclekeeper

I’d really appreciate feedback from the HN community, especially around the architecture and privacy model.
by krapp | 2026-03-08 19:09:11+00:00
If the mods think your definition of "off-topic" and "spam" is too broad they will remove your flagging rights and your flags will simply stop working.

Upvote the wrong things too often and your upvotes will stop voting.

Downvote the wrong things too often and your downvotes will stop working.

Vouch for the wrong things and your vouches will stop working.

Everything you can do here is a privilege contingent on moderator assessment. Go against the flow at your own peril.
by NobodyNada | 2026-03-08 19:09:48+00:00
> you built what was basically a raspberry pi with a microcontroller by hand, and you had to use the dumb speaker and controller to make your own music firmware to produce notes

This sounds like they were most likely bit banging square waves into a speaker directly via a GPIO on a microcontroller (or maybe using a PWM output if they were fancy about it). In that case, the audio frequency will be derived directly from the microcontroller's clock speed, and the tolerance of an internal oscillator on a microcontroller can be as bad as 10%.
by ignoramous | 2026-03-08 19:10:22+00:00
chardet is a Python module ... with 170 million downloads ... licensed under the GPL. A different developer ... to include it in the Python standard distribution ... [reimplemented] it. With [Claude] ... in 5 days ... the reimplementation ... [has] better performance.

May be LLMs learning from all of the FOSS code out there, and out-performing a team of domain experts, is helping us realise the promise of free as in beer.
by pinkmuffinere | 2026-03-08 19:11:27+00:00
Without taking a stance on whether their search has improved or degraded, we can observe that the same claim (“search is so degraded it’s unusable”) has been common for like 5 years at this point. If it’s really such a problem, why haven’t people already switched? Google’s search is at 90% market share [1]. Surely if it was perceived as a problem to customers there should be some measurable effect?

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share
by JoshTriplett | 2026-03-08 19:11:28+00:00
The Rijksmuseum is incredible, but also huge; the kind of museum you pick a small fraction of to see in any given trip. There are also several smaller museums that you can see in a day.

The Mauritshaus is a small museum in a converted manor, containing an incredible number of famous paintings, notably by Vermeer and Rembrandt.

Folks here might also appreciate the M. C. Escher museum.
by gepheum | 2026-03-08 19:11:49+00:00
Skir has exactly the same goals as Protobuf, so yes, that sentence can apply to Protobuf as well (and buf.build).
I listed some of the reasons to prefer Skir over Protobuf in my humble opinion here: https://medium.com/@gepheum/i-spent-15-years-with-protobuf-t...
Built-in compatibility checks, the fact that you can import dependencies from other projects (buf.build offers this, but makes you pay for it), some language designs (around enum/oneof, the fact that adding fields forces you to update all constructor code sites), the dense JSON format, are examples.
by CuriouslyC | 2026-03-08 19:11:50+00:00
Don't give Pichai credit for that. Google had the strongest ML research org on the planet before he took over, and it had Demis, arguably the best researcher in the field (and it had Geoffrey Hinton before that). The fact that goog was so far behind OAI despite Demis blazing frontiers was a major management failure.

Sundar's enshittification has also juiced short term share prices at the cost of long term health. It might turn out to be a decent decision for search because it's in the midst of being disrupted, but that's a happy accident for Sundar, not 4d chess (and you can argue the enshittification hastened the disruption).
by twirlip | 2026-03-08 19:12:03+00:00
Back in the long-ago times, I saw ordinary people fight tooth-and-nail to keep their WordPerfect on DOS instead of switching to Windows and Word, despite it requiring those overlays kept above their keyboard function keys and being non-WYSIWYG. Ordinary people aren't neophiles, nor is Word especially intuitive. They simply want what that app to which they are familiar.
by lostlogin | 2026-03-08 19:12:22+00:00
> And having everything virtualized on a single box is a pretty easy and highly flexible way get going and experiment. Also if it's on a ZFS backing makes "reset/rollback world" quite straight forward with minimal understanding given you can just use the same snapshot mechanism for that as you do for all other data.

Docker-compose isn’t a backup, but from a fresh ubuntu server install, it’ll have me back in 20 mins. Backing up the entire VM isn’t too hard either.

I was n a really sweet spot and then ESXi became intolerable. Though in fairness their website was alway pure hell.