MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wood_spirit | 2026-03-05 06:25:29+00:00
So I’ve got a lot warmer to believing that AI can be a better programmer than most programmers these days. That is a low bar :). The current approach to AI can definitely change how effective a programmer is: but then it is up to the market to decide if we need so many programmers. The talk about how each company is going to keep all the existing programmers and just expect productivity multipliers is just what execs are currently telling programmers; that might change when the same is execs are talking to shareholders etc.

But does this extrapolate to the current way of doing AI being in normal life in a good way that ends up being popular? The way Microsoft etc is trying to put AI in everything is kinda saying no it isn’t actually what users want.

I’d like voice control in my PC or phone. That’s a use for these NPUs. But I imagine it is like AR- what we all want until it arrives and it’s meh.
by JuniperMesos | 2026-03-05 06:25:56+00:00
Does eurosky fix this? Serious question. I don't approve of the private moderation of US-based social media, and I think that the ideal social media platform would be completely decentralized in all ways including moderation. But does any European law or social norm prevent eurosky.social from banning people who fail to put *'s in their slurs or use a euphemism for killing yourself?
by Foivos | 2026-03-05 06:26:57+00:00
Unless you use a dock, where you plug your things in the dock. Then you would want the "good" one to be the one of the back so it looks more clean and also have easier access to the slow port in the rare case you want to plug something there instead of the fast dock.

At least we should both be happy that it exists, no matter where it is placed! This is a big improvement over the macbook 12 with just one port. This was too low even when using a dock.
by otterley | 2026-03-05 06:26:58+00:00
I find the whole thing a little odd. They’re basically pledging to pay their electricity bills. So what? So does every business.

Saying they’re going to pay for generation and transmission adds little. That’s already baked into the charges! It’s like saying they’re going to finally pay for the farmers to grow the produce and the drivers to get the produce to market when they buy apples--as though spontaneous generation and teleportation was ever an option.
by JuniperMesos | 2026-03-05 06:27:08+00:00
Should the previous ownership of Twitter have been allowed to suspend all the accounts they did? And make all the other moderation decisions that inspired Musk to spend billions of dollars buying the site and changing its moderation policy? Plenty of people argued so at the time, generally because they broadly agreed with the moderation decisions the previous ownership was making.

I don't trust either an un-elected corporation or a government chosen by an electorate full of people I don't agree with not to censor my speech, or the speech I want to see. As far as I'm concerned all centralized social media platforms are vulnerable to censorship of some kind or another, and the best way around this is to build systems that make it as technically difficult as possible for a 3rd party to intercept a message one person broadcasts to willing listeners.
by larodi | 2026-03-05 06:28:40+00:00
There was this argument by someone the other day that Electron is so attractive, because native APIs are shit and too complex. On the other hand, all software, even simple stuff like messengers or app managers, seems so bloated thanks to Electron and similar frameworks. I like to think of these packaged webapps really as prototypes, and now start to imagine that agentic swarms can effectively translate them to native code, which would save resource both on the hardware and human-ware side.
by hrmtst93837 | 2026-03-05 06:29:51+00:00
I think the core mistake is conflating async with threading and with the GIL, which causes people to treat asyncio like a magic GIL remover. For reference asyncio landed in CPython with Python 3.4 in March 2014, while threads and the GIL predate that, so Python could do concurrent IO long before 2023. In my experience asyncio is cooperative IO concurrency, so you must yield with await or explicitly offload blocking CPU work to concurrent.futures.ProcessPoolExecutor or run_in_executor, and you protect shared state with asyncio.Queue or an asyncio.Lock rather than assuming tasks are isolated. I've found the most practical pattern is message passing for state and keeping CPU heavy work in a process pool, because chasing a blocked event loop in production is a miserable way to learn concurrency.
by toraway | 2026-03-05 06:29:57+00:00
The source for the poisoned apple story is Oppenheimer himself, and otherwise uncorroborated to be clear. He spent his life clearly racked by feelings of inadequacy, guilt and self-doubt.

When combined with a somewhat paradoxical large ego and occasionally fanciful reshaping of his own life story or exaggeration, it's entirely plausible (if not likely) that this was in reality a brief intrusive thought or a partially realized fantasy blown up into a catchy anecdote that better fit his self-image of being unable to control his typically human qualities of jealousy and envy.

If it was Sam Altman, we'd have heard the story from the guy he tried to poison, who instead of filing a police report thought it showed Sam was a real go-getter and offered him his first job as VP on the spot at the company he founded (later forced out by Sam replacing him as CEO, but still considers him a friend with no hard feelings).
by rtpg | 2026-03-05 06:30:17+00:00
It feels like we're fairly close yet so far. Lots of newer tools do have animation and tweening of arbitrary properties but then will just have bitmap image editors instead of a built-in vector editor for example. Or just make it really hard to tie all the stuff together.

The ease at which Flash CSx would just let you draw a circle in a spot, then click on it to get its script file and immediately add a little bit of behavior is magic for prototyping
by devinplatt | 2026-03-05 06:30:39+00:00
FWIW he gives his ethical reasoning on his website:

> Broadly, I am supportive of arming democracies with the tools needed to defeat autocracies in the age of AI—I simply don’t think there is any other way. But we cannot ignore the potential for abuse of these technologies by democratic governments themselves. Democracies normally have safeguards that prevent their military and intelligence apparatus from being turned inwards against their own population, but because AI tools require so few people to operate, there is potential for them to circumvent these safeguards and the norms that support them. It is also worth noting that some of these safeguards are already gradually eroding in some democracies. Thus, we should arm democracies with AI, but we should do so carefully and within limits: they are the immune system we need to fight autocracies, but like the immune system, there is some risk of them turning on us and becoming a threat themselves.

Basically, he's afraid that not arming the government with AI puts it at a disadvantage vs. other governments he trusts less. Plus, if Anthropic is in the loop that gives them the chance to steer the direction of things a bit (what they were kicked out for doing).

It's not the purest ethical argument, but I also would not say that there is a clearly correct answer.
by RajT88 | 2026-03-05 06:31:04+00:00
Frankly - how many phone calls do you really make and take these days?

It's vanishingly rare for me. I got a call from a friend today - but I think I otherwise only make or receive a legit phone call every few days. We use social media mostly. Work "calls" are on apps.

A family could probably get away with 2 phones easily, as long as they have home internet.

Now... When I was young and internet was over dial-up, having a single phone line for our whole family caused quite a lot of spats.
by lynx97 | 2026-03-05 06:31:10+00:00
I love how AI gave the command-line and TUI interfaces a kind of Second Renaissance. It is not just AI that loves CLIs. It is especially blind people like me, who still use a lot of text-mode tools for their implicit accessibility. I gave codex a whirl recently, and hey! No accessibility problems at all. Just works. A few years back, that would have been released as a GUI-only program and would have locked me out completely[1]. A blessing that text oriented interaction is becoming important again!!!

1: Strictly speaking, there are ways to access some GUI programs on Linux with a screen reader. However, frankly, most are not really a joy to use. The speed of interaction I get from a TUI is simply unmatched. Whenever I work with a true GUI, no matter if Windows, Mac or Linux, it feels like I am trying to run away from a monster in a dream. I try to run, but all I manage to do is wobble about...
by dang | 2026-03-05 06:31:19+00:00
Probably because of a good intention to help people understand it, but this is not the HN way. It's better when readers have to work a little: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....

We've reverted the title. But also re-upped the post, because about half of this thread is surprisingly good.
by anilgulecha | 2026-03-05 06:31:47+00:00
1 is claude-code1, outputs tests as text.

2. Dumped into a file.

3. claude-code that converts this to tests in the target language, and implements the app that passes the tests.

3 is no longer hard - look at all the reimplementations from ccc, to rewrites popping up. They all have a well defined test suite as common theme. So much so that tldraw author raised a (joke) issue to remove tests from the project.
by rsync | 2026-03-05 06:31:48+00:00
We require transfer switches, but they do not have to be automatic transfer switches.

In the United States, you are one small piece of sheet metal[1] away from any number of interesting power set ups on your side of the utility.

This means a combination of two circuit breakers is now your transfer switch. This is legal with all utilities and NEC compliant, etc.

If you are willing to sacrifice perfectly uninterrupted power, you can dramatically simplify your grid tie - and open up many other possibilities on your side of the physical interlock.

[1] https://www.daierswitches.com/products/sd-200vl-generator-in...
by kshri24 | 2026-03-05 06:33:44+00:00
> LLM ingestion comes under fair use

I don't think so. It is no where "limited use". Entirety of the source code is ingested for training the model. In other words, it meets the bar of "heart of the work" being used for training. There are other factors as well, such as not harming owner's ability to profit from original work.
by jim33442 | 2026-03-05 06:35:06+00:00
Records and pattern-matching didn't exist back then and are only used in new codebases. That isn't enough to fix it anyway.

The error handling alone makes me not want to use Go. Seems like entire vision of Go was being the opposite of C++ in every way, and that resulted in something halfway decent, but it unfortunately doesn't use exceptions. You get stuff done in fewer loc than in Java at least, and the GC just works without having to tune it.
by not_your_vase | 2026-03-05 06:36:50+00:00
Well, I could just cover it with duck tape.

But no Home/End, PgUp/PgDown, Print Screen, merged Delete and Insert... where to start.

Edit: just noticed that the power button is just also next to Backspace. Hahahaha, I remember when keyboard-manufacturers loved to put power/sleep buttons just above the arrow keys. How many times I pressed them accidentally. I hated that viscerally.
by samrus | 2026-03-05 06:37:04+00:00
> The ownership void: If the code is truly a “new” work created by a machine, it might technically be in the public domain the moment it’s generated, rendering the MIT license moot.

Im struggling to see where this conclusion came from. To me it sounds like the AI-written work can not be coppywritten, and so its kind of like a copy pasting the original code. Copy pasting the original code doesnt make it public domain. Ai gen code cant be copywritten, or entered into the public domain, or used for purposes outside of the original code's license. Whats the paradox here?
by microtonal | 2026-03-05 06:37:57+00:00
So what if a frontier model company trains two models, one including 50% of the world's open source project and the second model the other 50% (or ten models with 90-10)?

Then the model that is familiar with the code can write specs. The model that does not have knowledge of the project can implement them.

Would that be a proper clean room implementation?

Seems like a pretty evil, profitable product "rewrite any code base with an inconvenient license to your proprietary version, legally".
by groggo | 2026-03-05 06:38:06+00:00
I live in Sausalito just north of SF. We have a few cameras on the way into town. Seeing this map actually makes me feel safer. Sure there are hypothetical privacy issues, but for me they're easily outweighed by safety. I don't really get the issue. Ideally this information would be available to law enforcement, but would require a warrant. Is the problem that they can access all of this data without a warrant now?
by jiggawatts | 2026-03-05 06:38:55+00:00
Yes.

Even the latest NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs are general purpose, albeit with negligible "graphics" capabilites. They can run fairly arbitrary C/C++ code with only some limitations, and the area of the chip dedicated to matrix products (the "tensor units") is relatively small: less than 20% of the area!

Conversely, the Google TPUs dedicate a large area of each chip to pure tensor ops, hence the name.

This is partly why Google's Gemini is 4x cheaper than OpenAI's GPT5 models to serve.

Jensen Huang has said in recent interviews that he stands by the decision to keep the NVIDIA GPUs more general purpose, because this makes them flexible and able to be adapted to future AI designs, not just the current architectures.

That may or may not pan out.

I strongly suspect that the winning chip architecture will have about 80% of its area dedicated to tensor units, very little onboard cache, and model weights streamed in from High Bandwidth Flash (HBF). This would be dramatically lower power and cost compared to the current hardware that's typically used.

Something to consider is that as the size of matrices scales up in a model, the compute needed to perform matrix multiplications goes up as the cube of their size, but the other miscellaneous operations such as softmax, relu, etc.. scale up linearly with the size of the vectors being multiplied.

Hence, as models scale into the trillions of parameters, the matrix multiplications ("tensor" ops) dominate everything else.
by larodi | 2026-03-05 06:38:56+00:00
For more than six months now, s.o. is (perhaps accidentally) paying my mobile bill. I have two sim cards, one is data, almost unused. Called the operator twice, concerned that a granny is messing the user ID, or that s.o. is trying to impersonate me by paying the bills and then claiming ownership. Two times reps. assure me that they have no clue who does the payment as it arrives from a partner network taking cash payments only, and that it is impossible for anyone person to claim ownership of the SIM.

And while the amount is not a large one, it is still very suspicious this keeps going on, even after two very long calls with the support. I'm going to soon speak to the partner network, but it is appalling how much these people are not interested in who actually gives their enterprise money. They're only there to take it.
by jim33442 | 2026-03-05 06:40:24+00:00
Any company that's 10 years old will have code that's 10 years old in every language they use. And every language has some flaw that was "fixed last year" but that's not relevant in a mature codebase. Mostly old code will keep working, but there are exceptions like Python 2->3 breakage that deserves all the criticism it got.
by wincy | 2026-03-05 06:41:04+00:00
I mean, I’m a pretty ADHD guy, very in the moment, and although I sporadically invite friends or old colleagues to catch up for lunch, I mean to do it regularly, but I might forget to invite them for years at a time, so this might be good for me. I could really used an “Anki for lunch”, spaced repetition reminders for people in my Rolodex, as it were.
by Andromxda | 2026-03-05 06:41:57+00:00
No, this is incorrect. The GrapheneOS NetworkLocation client (https://github.com/GrapheneOS/platform_packages_apps_Network...) is using Apple's request format and performing the calculations locally, similar to how it's done on iPhones. The proxy is just an entry in the nginx config: https://github.com/GrapheneOS/grapheneos.org/blob/main/nginx...

The data is cached for roughly 15 minutes. https://grapheneos.org/features#:~:text=It%20caches%20the%20...

GrapheneOS plans to scrape Apple's database and make it downloadable, so Wi-fi positioning could be done fully locally.
by mafia15 | 2026-03-05 06:42:08+00:00
I spent weeks looking for an app to manage my Gmail/Outlook better. Every decent option was $25-30/month and forced me to switch to their inbox entirely. I also had real concerns about where my email data was going most apps are vague about this.
So I built NeatMail. It lives inside your Gmail/Outlook, no new inbox to learn.
It auto-labels incoming emails instantly with custom or pre-made labels. It drafts replies automatically for emails that need a response, right inside Gmail/Outlook. The model is built in-house. Everything is open source, read every line of code yourself.
Your data never leaves your inbox. No third party ever sees it.
It's in beta. Looking for honest feedback from people who live in their inbox.

GitHub: https://github.com/Lakshay1509/NeatMail

Try it: https://www.neatmail.app/
by jsunderland323 | 2026-03-05 06:42:21+00:00
I'm working on a CLI now.

The pattern I used was this:

1) made a docs command that printed out the path of the available docs

$ my-cli docs

- README.md

- DOC1.md

- dir2/DOC2.md

2) added a --path flag to print out a specific doc (tried to keep each doc less than 400 lines).

$ my-cli docs --path dir2/DOC2.md

# Contents of DOC2.md

3) added embeddings so I could do semantic search

$ my-cli search "how do I install x?"

[1] DOC1.md

"You can install x by ..."

[2] dir2/DOC2.md

"after you install..."

You then just need a simple skill to tell the agent about the docs and search command.

I actually love this as a pattern, it work really well. I got it to work with i18n too.
by zozbot234 | 2026-03-05 06:43:27+00:00
If you ask a LLM to derive a spec that has no expressive element of the original code (a clean-room human team can carefully verify this), and then ask another instance of the LLM (with fresh context) to write out code from the spec, how is that different from a "clean room" rewrite? The agent that writes the new code only ever sees the spec, and by assumption (the assumption that's made in all clean room rewrites) the spec is purely factual with all copyrightable expression having been distilled out.
by Kim_Bruning | 2026-03-05 06:43:45+00:00
I'm going to leave the above stand even with downvotes. It's first time I've tried to express quite this opinion, and it's definitely a tricky one to get right.

Thing is, we need to have ways to reason about how LLMs interact with human emotions.

Sure: The consciousness and sentience questions are fun philosophy. Meanwhile purely the affect processing side of things is becoming important to safety engineering; and can't really be ignored for much longer.

This is pretty much within the realm of what Anthropic has been saying all along of course; but other companies need to stop ignoring it, because folks are getting hurt.

I hope at least this much is uncontroversial.
by sheept | 2026-03-05 06:44:07+00:00
This feels completely speculative: there's no measure of whether this approach is actually effective.

Personally, I'm skeptical:

- Having the agent look up the JSON schemas and skills to use the CLI still dumps a lot of tokens into its context.

- Designing for AI agents over humans doesn't seem very future proof. Much of the world is still designed for humans, so the developers of agents are incentivized to make agents increasingly tolerate human design.

- This design is novel and may be fairly unfamiliar in the LLM's training data, so I'd imagine the agent would spend more tokens figuring this CLI out compared to a more traditional, human-centered CLI.
by jarek83 | 2026-03-05 06:44:38+00:00
BMW's most recent infotainment is a big step backwards to me in both areas - aesthetics and UX. Its previous generation was one of the best in the market also in both. I literally don't consider buying the newest 4-series just because of it, especially of the ultrawide driver's "monitor" - it's just so ugly, and I regret it, since on the outside the car appeals me so much more. I'd rather spend the same on previous year model with better specs.
by cobound | 2026-03-05 06:44:42+00:00
I've been reading threads like "Are you using an agent orchestrator?" and have been seeing the same pattern: engineers building traffic light protocols, semaphores, and serialization hacks to stop agents from overwriting each other.

These aren't engineering problems.
They're topology (math) problems.

Formally proved in Lean 4: if your agent communication graph contains a cycle, coordination failure is mathematically guaranteed: not hard, not unlikely, guaranteed.

The obstruction is H¹(K;ℤ) ≠ 0.

When H¹ = 0 (forest): coordination is feasible, O(n) solvable
When H¹ ≠ 0 (cycles): no engineering fix helps

Check your multi-agent topology for free before you build:

pip install cobound-validator
cobound-validate your_agents.yaml

Returns FEASIBLE or OBSTRUCTED in milliseconds, shows the cycle, suggests minimum edge removals.

Formal proofs (2,433 theorems, zero sorry statements):

github.com/coboundinc/cobound

I’m an Independent researcher and happy to go deep on the topology or why specific orchestration patterns fail.
by vladich | 2026-03-05 06:45:01+00:00
That's exactly what I said above - just turn this thing off. The reason is that even if your generic plan is better than 5 custom plans before it, that doesn't guarantee much. With probability high enough to cause troubles, it's just a coincidence, and generic plans in general tend to be very bad (because they use some hardcoded constants instead of statistics for planning).

This behavior is often a source of random latency spikes, when your queries suddenly start misbehaving, and then suddenly stop doing it. If you don't have auto_explain on, it will look like mysterious glitches in production.

The few cases when they are useful are very simple ones, like single table selects by index. They are already fast, and with generic plans you can cut planning time completely. Which is kinda...not much. There are more complicated cases where they are useful, involving Postgres forks like AWS Aurora, which has query plan management subsystem, allowing to store plans directly. Then you can cut planning time for them. But that's a completely different story.
by satvikpendem | 2026-03-05 06:45:43+00:00
Finally seeing more movement on effects or what started as keyword generics, there was a big blog post a few years ago but not much public facing news although of course they've been working on it as Yoshua says in the post.

I truly do wish we get closer to Ada and even Lean in terms of safety, would be great to see all these theoretical type system features become reality. I use the `anodized` crate right now for refinement type features, and who knows, maybe we get full fledged dependent types too as there aren't many production languages with them and certainly not popular languages.
by ofrzeta | 2026-03-05 06:46:08+00:00
So, nothing to see here. From what I understand the robots are doing pick and place. In the video the robot also gets passed a part from a human worker. So nothing here makes any sense and the tasks could solved with conventional robotics. I guess it is good that the robot can be moved but for this you don't need a two-legged humanoid balancing.