MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jaen | 2026-03-02 09:29:27+00:00
Really, how hard is it to follow HN guidelines and :

a) not imagine straw-man arguments and not imagine more (or less) than what was said

b) refrain from snarky and false ad hominems

None of what you said in no way conflicts with what I said, and again shows a fundamental misunderstanding.

Reasoning is (mostly) part of the post-training dataset. If you add a large majority of false (ie. paradoxical, irrational etc.) reasoning traces to those, you'll get a model that successfully replicates the false reasoning of humans. If you mix it in with true reasoning traces, I imagine you'll get infinite loop behaviour as the reasoning trace oscillates between the true and the false.

The original premise that truth is purely a function of the training dataset still stands... I'm not even sure what people are arguing here, as that seems quite trivially obvious?
Show HN: Bunny Calculator – A fast, free, and clean suite of web calculators
by priteshkoshiya | 2026-03-02 09:29:49+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m a full-stack developer, and I recently got frustrated with the current state of online calculators. Most of the top search results are bloated with heavy ads, slow to load, and have clunky, outdated UIs.

To solve this, I’m building Bunny Calculator: a growing suite of clean, fast, and completely free web calculators.

It is currently still in active development, but the core tools are up and running. My goal is to build a high-utility, ad-free "single source of truth" for everyday calculations (financial, health, conversions, etc.) without the terrible user experience.

I built this using [Insert your tech stack here, e.g., Next.js, Tailwind CSS, and Cloudflare Workers]. Focusing heavily on performance and programmatic SEO structure so each calculator has its own dedicated, lightweight page.

I’m sharing it here early because I’d love to get your harsh feedback before I do a wider launch:

UI/UX: Is the interface as intuitive as it should be?

Utility: What niche or obscure calculators do you find yourself constantly searching for that I should add to the roadmap?

Bugs: If you manage to break any of the current formulas, please let me know!

Thanks for taking a look.
by michalu | 2026-03-02 09:31:00+00:00
Very typical arrogance of the so-called modern "artist" mind - "it was an adventure for me", getting an assignment to complement a great work of art and making it about herself.

The problem with these modern artists is they're not working hard to improve a skill, but rather keep doing more of what comes easy hoping the world maybe recognizes their "natural genius" ... as a result they go hard on pushing that one thing unique to them (whatever it is, scriblles, splashes, infantile characters) ...

And yeah let's not forget the "you just don't understand modern art" shaming.
Show HN: Why LLM Personas Collapse and How Structural Identity Fixes It
by WujieGuGavin | 2026-03-02 09:31:41+00:00
LLMs can generate code, analysis, and dialogue, yet they still fail at maintaining a stable persona. Anyone who has built an NPC, assistant, or long running agent has seen the same pattern: the character begins coherent, then drifts, contradicts itself, or dissolves under pressure. The failure is not in prompts or fine tuning. The failure is architectural. We are trying to impose identity on a system that has no structural representation of identity.
The Persona / Character Structure Layer treats personality as a dimensional object rather than a text instruction. It is part of a seven layer structural protocol designed to convert raw data into interpretable structure and structure into controllable behavior. The persona layer is where structure becomes identity.
Personas fail
Prompt based personas collapse because they rely on surface conditioning. They have no internal constraints, no behavioral invariants, and no structural boundaries. When the model encounters novelty, the persona evaporates and the system reverts to its base distribution. A persona is not a style. It is not a tone. It is a stable attractor in behavioral space. Without structure, there is no attractor.
A structural persona
The persona layer encodes identity as a set of structural constraints:
• behavioral invariants
• cognitive asymmetries
• motivational gradients
• boundary conditions
• long range consistency rules
These constraints shape the agent’s behavior across time and context. The persona becomes a region of stable behavior, not a temporary prompt. This is the same reason simple NPCs in games often feel more consistent than LLM based characters: they have explicit state and structural rules. The persona layer brings that determinism to generative systems without freezing them.
What enables
A structural persona layer produces agents that do not drift, collapse, or contradict themselves. It supports:
• NPCs that remain coherent in long simulations
• virtual humans with persistent identity
• customer facing agents that maintain policy under stress
• multi agent systems with distinct, non degenerate characters
• narrative worlds where characters evolve without losing structure
This is not role play. It is behavioral stability.
The larger system
The persona layer sits within the WLM structural protocol:
1. Structural Language Protocol
2. World Model Interpreter
3. Agent Behavior Structure Layer
4. Persona / Character Structure Layer
5. Knowledge Structuring Layer
6. Metacognition Layer
7. World Generation Protocol
Each layer transforms unstructured signals into dimensional structure. The persona layer is the point where structure becomes a stable behavioral engine.
Last not least
As AI systems shift from chat interfaces to autonomous agents, stability becomes a requirement. An agent that cannot maintain identity cannot maintain trust. An agent that cannot maintain trust cannot operate in real environments. The persona layer is not a UX feature. It is an operating system layer for agentic AI.
Repository: https://github.com/gavingu2255-ai/WLM-Persona-Engine
by panick21_ | 2026-03-02 09:32:00+00:00
> This was in The Netherlands, which has one of the best public transport in the EU so I expect it to be worse elsewhere.

First of all, you are still talking about a single point to point example.

In the Netherlands you have the happiest drivers exactly because the government invests so much money into public transport and bikes. That takes massive amount of cars of the road, making it more pleasant to drive for you.

And thankfully data pretty clearly shows that people tend to take what is better for that situation mostly based on time. So the fact that so many people choice public transport (or bikes) is a clear indication that it works for some people. And that helps you as a driver. If everybody thought like you, it would be worse for everybody.

If on a society we followed your logic and everybody would drive, then you would have the problem the US has, just 10x worse because in Europe, unlike in the US we don't have cities splatted over so much space with gigantic roads everywhere.

Netherland is the perfect example that proves that large investment in public transit and biking pays of for everybody. I would argue cars are still subsidized to much. And Neiterlands while doing many things well still needs a huge amount of improvement, specifically outside the cities and Randstad.
by leoedin | 2026-03-02 09:32:11+00:00
Nobody is building ebikes that are physically speed limited by the motor windings. The top speed of a motor depends on load, and it's impossible to predict the exact load of a motor in a bike with a rider. Even if you could, the amount of excess torque available as you got near the top speed would be tiny - it wouldn't be fun to ride.

Speed limits are universally based on measured speed - either at the wheel or motor.
Show HN: FinMind One-Click Deployment (Docker and K8s and Tilt)
by eyedark | 2026-03-02 09:32:39+00:00
Spent the day building a universal deployment suite for FinMind. Refactored the broken K8s manifests, added Tilt support for local dev, and optimized the Docker production stack. Would love some feedback on the HPA logic!
by throwaway2037 | 2026-03-02 09:33:07+00:00
To be clear, when the OP wrote "Japan has bicycles with license plates", it is important to clarify the term "bicycle". It would more accurate to say "motorized bicycle". If you ride something that looks like a bicycle where you can power it only with a throttle button (no pedalling required), then it requires a license plate, at least in Tokyo. Explanation here: https://www.city.inagi.tokyo.jp/en/kurashi/zeikin/1002693/10...

Also, you can ask Google AI for more sources and info using this prompt:

japan when does a bike require a license plate?
by opan | 2026-03-02 09:33:15+00:00
I am familiar with nvim and fzf but not nvALT. Could you give me a brief explanation of the workflow here? Is fzf just used to jump between separate note files or what? Personally I have a general notes.txt as well as more specific ones like what I order at a specific restaurant or what I'm working on in a game. I don't use fzf with nvim, moreso with shell scripts.
by vessenes | 2026-03-02 09:33:53+00:00
I don’t know the answers to all of your questions - but I believe you’d benefit from some mathematical history books around the formalization of the real analysis; I’m not the best person to give you that history.

A couple comments, though - first, all mathematics is linguistics and arguably it is all sleight of hand - that said the word “gaps” that you’ve rightly pointed out is vague is a journalists word standing in for a variety of concepts at different times.

The existence of the irrationals themselves were a secret in ancient greece - and hence known for thousands of years, but the structure of the irrationals has not been well understood until quite recently.

To talk precisely about these gaps, if you’re not a mathematical historian, you have to borrow terminology from the tools that were used to describe and formalize the irrationals -> if former concepts about the lines sound hand-wavy to you, it is because they WERE handwavy. And this handwaviness is about infinity as well, the two are intimately connected. In modern terms, the measure of the rationals across any subset of the (real) number line is zero - that is the meaning of the “gaps”. There is, between any two rationals, a great unending sea where if you were to choose a point completely at random, the odds of that point being another rational is zero.

EDIT: for a light but engaging read about topics like this, David Foster Wallace’s Everything and More is excellent.
by kossisoroyce | 2026-03-02 09:34:09+00:00
The motivation was edge and latency-critical use cases on a product I consulted on. Feature vectors arrived pre-formed and a Python runtime in the hot path wass a non-starter. You're right that for most pipelines the transformation step is the bottleneck, not inference, and Timber doesn't solve that (though the Pipeline Fusion pass compiles sklearn scalers away entirely if your preprocessing is that simple). Timber is explicitly a tool for deployments where you've already solved the data plumbing and the model call itself is what's left to optimize.
by sergiogasquez | 2026-03-02 09:34:26+00:00
Hey everyone! I’ve been tinkering with an open-source alternative to the Tindeq called Crimpdeq! Built from scratch using an ESP32-C3 and with [firmware written in Rust](https://github.com/crimpdeq/crimpdeq-firmware/). I've also created a
[PCB](https://github.com/crimpdeq/crimpdeq-pcb) and a [3D case](https://github.com/crimpdeq/crimpdeq-case).

To make it easy for others to build their own, I wrote a step-by-step [book](https://book.crimpdeq.com/) that walks through the full process, including how to prototype one by salvaging a crane scale.

Let me know what you think, or better yet, jump in and help make it even better!
by autoexec | 2026-03-02 09:35:25+00:00
> Everett Mayor Cassie Franklin said the city disagrees with the ruling and is concerned about who could obtain the footage. “We were very disappointed,” Franklin said. “That means perpetrators of crime, people who are maybe engaged in domestic abuse or stalkers, they can request footage and that could cause a lot of harm.”

These people are fooling themselves if they think that keeping the cameras but not allowing the public to see the data will stop domestic abuse or stalkers. We've already seen these cameras used to stalk people and it wasn't random members of the public doing it, it was police officers. As long as this data is being collected it will be abused. If not by the public, then by police, or by Flock employees, or by hackers. The only way to protect people is to not gather the data at all. Anyone who keeps these cameras doesn't actually care about the public's safety.
by lan321 | 2026-03-02 09:36:13+00:00
In my experience it just boils down to:

1- You need a ton of internal knowledge so it doesn't really matter what they know past the basics.

2- Testing gets expensive with seniors

3- You can't get mid-senior level employees you like. I see very often companies having really high requirements for hiring leading to the only candidates passing being friends of employees. Juniors pass easier via the 'he's motivated to learn' path.

4- Juniors bring a motivation with them. Seniors tend to generally care less so a couple of energetic juniors can get them moving a bit quicker. Especially if you find a good one, since a senior really doesn't want to get outperformed by a fresh graduate. Also, since they usually suck at politics, it's easier to prod them about why things aren't working than the seniors who've played the blame game for 20 years and have perfected the art of dodging responsibility.
by samrussellbg | 2026-03-02 09:36:57+00:00
thanks :) the braiding approach is super clever too, this was one of those weird moments where you find something and then have to triple check your results because how could i accidentally find something better than the algorithm that hasn't been touched in decades...

the part i really like is that it gives us small improvement on the pclmul too, as the non-accelerated algorithm doesn't really stand a chance against the accelerated opcode on newer hardware so it probably isn't going to see much use in practice. however... i think hardware solutions could possibly benefit (e.g. ethernet cards)
by Doublon | 2026-03-02 09:36:59+00:00
Interesting!

I also started to build something similar for us, as an PoC/alternative to Glean. I'm curious how you handle data isolation, where each user has access to just the messages in their own Slack channels, or Jira tickets from only workspaces they have access to? Managing user mapping was also super painful in AWS Q for Business.
by eesmith | 2026-03-02 09:37:02+00:00
Determining where the cameras are placed and what to alert on are also important and unresolved issues.

Simply getting alerts from a camera can cause people to believe that the area is a high-crime area, when it's merely a consequence of having a camera there.

Poor people are more like to be in public areas than rich pedophiles who can buy an island or ranch so they and their friends can enjoy wonderful secrets out of the eye of any Flock camera.

If the camera alerts on AI facial recognition for wanted criminals, and facial recognition causes disproportionally higher false alerts for people of south Asian heritage than of Anglo-Norman heritage, then systemic racism is built into the system, which we should all mind.
by subscribed | 2026-03-02 09:37:18+00:00
They address this issue specifically (don't have the links now, I'm sorry) - basically one of the "must haves" for the hardware to be considered good enough (meaning pixels have it and new motos will have it) is a hardware capability of the strict separation between the os and devices, ie baseband unable to influence the os (snoop/inject stuff, etc).

Don't remember that at the moment, it should be one of the requirements they list under "future hardware" In the FAQ.
by nephihaha | 2026-03-02 09:37:45+00:00
London has been getting inward investment for centuries, not just recently. Even today its prestige is partly from being a former imperial capital (like Vienna or Paris).

If you look at the geography of London it makes for a good port area for bringing goods to and from continental Europe, but it no longer does that like it used to. In the past it was highly dependent on coal from Yorkshire, South Wales etc and materials from elsewhere whether wool or metals. In the 1980s, the London stock market was bankrolled by North Sea oil, mostly in northern English and Scottish waters. Nowadays, London's chief thing is the finance industry and stock market, but that is not location dependent at all, and very easily transferred somewhere else which puts London in a more unsafe position than it realises. Like most major cities, it consumes a great deal of energy and gets its water from elsewhere (and some recycling).
by fc417fc802 | 2026-03-02 09:38:32+00:00
It can be made to work (as you point out), and the core idea is great, but the implementation is terrible. You have to stop and think about struct layout rules rather than declaring your intent and having the compiler check for errors. As usual C is a giant pile of exquisitely crafted footguns.

A "sane" version of the feature would provide for marking a struct as intended for ser/des at which point you'd be required to spell out every last alignment, endianness, and bit width detail. (You'd still have to remember to mark any structs used in conjunction with mmap but C wouldn't be any fun if it was safe.)
by voidUpdate | 2026-03-02 09:40:01+00:00
> "It wasn't perfect, but 60% of the words were judged intelligible by testers"

I don't understand this part. Are they trying to pull the audio of the words out of the brain or something? I'd think it would be easier to use a dictionary of words, and use some machine learning to try and pull out the most likely next word from the brain activity, in which case 100% of the words would be intelligible
by keiferski | 2026-03-02 09:40:05+00:00
A tip from a past life working a customer service / food service job:

Learn a few words in a variety of languages. They are great conversation starters / expanders – I made a lot of actual friendships by talking to people (after taking their orders), asking them where they’re from, and then knowing a few words in their language. Nothing makes people happier than hearing someone speak their native language, no matter how poorly.

This was in a university town, so knowing a couple words in Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, etc. was useful.
by ctolsen | 2026-03-02 09:40:18+00:00
I'd challenge that assertion. LLMs still produce very bad results with greenfield work, so that seed was generated by people who had both creativity and skill a thousand times before. Having a glimmer of an idea that you've probably seen more or less intact somewhere else and getting an AI to take it from that point is much closer to Milli Vanilli than any actual creative work.
by vessenes | 2026-03-02 09:40:52+00:00
Oh man, it’s on the extensive backlog. :) I’m just about to put it up for people to play with, though, so you can clone it and use it or just ask claude to tell you about it.

I think the essay will be something like: adding structure post-hoc lets you build intelligence into the datastore as an architectural matter, not just rely on connections being made during use-time inference, using an embedding with links like this is much different than bulk embedding search, and we need some sort of tests to understand if this helps in practice, although it a) feels pretty good and b) it’s VERY nice to be able to refer to and modify the agents “mid term” memory directly in any event.

Anyway you’ve triggered me enough to say I’ll try and get the repo published today so people can look at it.
by jacobajit | 2026-03-02 09:40:59+00:00
The distinctions drawn here are particularly interesting in China.

Somewhere like Shanghai, you'll see ~70% of traffic in "bike" lanes are what appear to be electric mopeds.

But if you look closer, all of these mopeds technically have tiny attachment points for pedals. Government regulations allowed e-bikes to be driven unlicensed (but with a special green license plate, unlike the US!) and wherever bicycles are allowed. At the same time, the delivery industry and commuters wanted something stable, capable of carrying cargo/passengers. So the form factor adopted was that of mopeds, while vestigial pedal attachments were provided in order to pass as "e-bikes" under the regulatory criteria. Example. [0]

In practice, using pedals on these made for a clunky experience so they were not usually attached at all. The other main regulatory criterion was that these have to be limited to <= 25 km/h, unlike true mopeds/motorcycles. In practice, these speed limiters were also removed, setting up a cat-and-mouse game between police and riders.

The rule requiring the vestigial pedals was finally removed a few months ago, meaning that the ontology of "e-bikes" is pretty different in China now. [1] (Pedal-assist traditional bike frames also exist, but they share space with the larger mopeds in bike lanes and bike parking. True electric mopeds and motorcycles also exist, but they are effectively regulated out of existence in big cities.)

At the end of the day, top speeds are more determinant of whether different modes of transportation can coexist than pedals or form factor.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/r4HAUJDQT1w
[1] https://chinamotorworld.com/chinese-e-bike-new-standard/
by lukan | 2026-03-02 09:42:36+00:00
Don't talk to me though, while I am trying to do focused work ...

Or other people who are really busy right now, but in general yes, most people enjoy random interactions and talks. And most people do have interesting things to share. You have to have genuine interest, though. Don't force it - but be open for it. Make eye contact first and then you might connect. It is astonishing how many grim looking people suddenly start to smile and act friendly, if you just start a friendly conversation with them. Even if it is just a exchange of a simple comments.
by fennecbutt | 2026-03-02 09:43:17+00:00
Nah just sounds like people can't handle what they say being questioned as per usual. We should never take offense to being asked to clarify or explain when someone thinks we're wrong.

I'd only be vaguely offended if they had no grounded reason to think that I'm wrong (and they'd be calling me out for the sake of calling me out).

Communicating ideas is a part of tribalism too. Good brain chemicals when the tribe agrees and bad brain chemicals when they disagree.
by spider-mario | 2026-03-02 09:43:20+00:00
https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/xhtml.html

“Warning!
Using the XML syntax is not recommended, for reasons which include the fact that there is no specification which defines the rules for how an XML parser must map a string of bytes or characters into a Document object, as well as the fact that the XML syntax is essentially unmaintained — in that, it’s not expected that any further features will ever be added to the XML syntax (even when such features have been added to the HTML syntax).”
by autoexec | 2026-03-02 09:43:54+00:00
> Google definitely does not want you to have this valuable capability. If you stop looking things up, then you won't be looking at their search engine, their ads, and their recommendation algorithms.

Google is very interested in knowing about whatever you're interested in, and in knowing when, how often, and for how long you're interested in those things. In addition to looking at their search engine, their ads, and their recommendations, you're also feeding them more and more data about you.