MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Setas | 2026-03-13 19:49:38+00:00
I run 8 AI agents that manage my solo company — CEO, CFO, COO, Marketing, Accountant, Lawyer, CTO, and an Improver agent that upgrades the others. They share a persistent knowledge graph (JSONL file), consult each other through a central orchestrator, and post content to social media on a 5-minute cron. They've been running for months.

They crash. The interesting question isn't how to prevent that — it's how to make it not matter.

The gnarliest failure I hit: my agents share a knowledge graph through an MCP memory server. When multiple agents fire parallel tool calls (say, create_entities and create_relations in the same batch), you get a classic read-modify-write race. Both operations read the same JSONL state, both write back the full graph plus their additions. Second write obliterates the first. No error, no warning — data just vanishes. Sometimes the write gets interrupted mid-line and you end up with a half-written JSON line that breaks the parser on next load.

My fix was a local fork of the memory server with three things: an async mutex to serialize writes, atomic writes (write to .tmp then rename), and auto-repair on load that skips corrupt lines and deduplicates. But the meta-point is that on the BEAM, this entire class of bug doesn't exist. A GenServer processes messages sequentially from its mailbox — mutual exclusion is the execution model, not something you bolt on with a mutex. Supervision trees restart crashed processes in microseconds. Each process has its own heap, so one agent going haywire can't corrupt another's state.

Erlang/OTP solved this in 1986 for telecom switches that needed 99.999% uptime. The pattern maps almost perfectly to AI agents: many concurrent, stateful, failure-prone processes that need to communicate without taking each other down.

I wrote a detailed post about this with actual code and the full corruption story: https://dev.to/setas/why-erlangs-supervision-trees-are-the-m...
by noah_buddy | 2026-03-13 19:49:44+00:00
I love this concept. I was recently thinking about how I used to be able to skip from one channel to another when an ad break came on. I would love the harness on a smart device to be like this so that I may switch between the Hulu and Netflix apps at will. Why should I have to restart the app each time I navigate in? Why do the apps even know that I am switching around?
by latexr | 2026-03-13 19:49:49+00:00
The colloquial use of the word “autism” carries with it a specific connotation and mind image. That primarily negative stereotype is being reinforced by the joke by way of it being delivered as a medical diagnosis (“the results are back”).

Your parent comment is arguing against perpetuating the wrong negative connotations and lack of understanding of autism.

Not to say the original author was doing it maliciously, I don’t think they were.
by MengerSponge | 2026-03-13 19:49:57+00:00
You don't even have to scare everyone. You just have to scare the insurers. Without insurance ships won't sail. The exposure is huge, so a small blip in risk makes all the modeling go kerplooie. Traffic stopped when the insurers said drop the anchors.

To restore traffic, we need that risk to return to previous levels, which requires diplomacy and trust. I don't expect resolution any time soon.
by Aurornis | 2026-03-13 19:50:03+00:00
I still remember the era when jailbreaking Android and iPhones was gaining popularity among less technical people. It was eye opening to watch how many people I knew would search for a random web page and then unquestioningly follow instructions on the screen to install software from the first link they clicked.

All of this to get custom fonts in their messaging app or some other little feature they saw on someone’s phone.

I started getting a lot of requests for help from people who had broken key functions on their phones or even bricked them entirely.

Even today there’s a culture of downloading Android builds from long forum threads on XDA developers and other forums and hoping they’re not compromised.
by the_pwner224 | 2026-03-13 19:50:22+00:00
Yep, I have a 13" gaming tablet with the 128 GB AMD Strix Halo chip (Ryzen AI Max+ 395, what a name). Asus ROG Flow Z13. It's a beast; the performance is totally disproportionate to its size & form factor.

I'm not sure what exactly you're referring to with "Only Apple has the unique dynamic allocation though." On Strix Halo you set the fixed VRAM size to 512 MB in the BIOS, and you set a few Linux kernel params that enable dynamic allocation to whatever limit you want (I'm using 110 GB max at the moment). LLMs can use up to that much when loaded, but it's shared fully dynamically with regular RAM and is instantly available for regular system use when you unload the LLM.
by kumibrr | 2026-03-13 19:50:35+00:00
Many people here says that it's locked up by design, and while I agree, we could have an alternative firmware (not iOS or even GUI) that gives full control and complete access through ssh and repurpose it as we want.

I have a pile of iphones without battery sitting in a drawer and It would be a really cheap way to run fun stuff.

The only thing that could be worrying is device theft, but a simple CLI tool for the initial device registration after firmware flash might do it.
Show HN: DJX – Convention over Configuration for Django (Rails-Inspired CLI)
by RedsonNgwira | 2026-03-13 19:51:13+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm a self-taught developer from Malawi, and I built DJX because I was tired of writing the same Django boilerplate over and over.

Django is powerful, but starting a new feature means manually creating models, views, templates, URLs, and wiring everything together. Rails solved this 20 years ago with scaffolding. Django deserves the same.

DJX brings convention over configuration to Django:

pip install djx-cli
djx new myblog && cd myblog
djx scaffold Post title:string content:text published:boolean
python manage.py migrate && python manage.py runserver
# → http://127.0.0.1:8000/posts/ — full CRUD. Done.

That's it. You get list, create, edit, and delete views with templates, all wired up automatically.

Other commands:
- `djx routes` — see all URL routes (Django doesn't have this built-in)
- `djx destroy scaffold Post` — clean removal of generated code
- `djx add django-crispy-forms` — install and auto-add to INSTALLED_APPS
- `djx model`, `djx controller` — generate pieces individually

It follows Rails conventions: pluralized app names, RESTful URLs, automatic timestamps, and sensible defaults.

I built this because I wanted Django development to feel as fast as Rails. It's early stage, but it's already saving me hours on every project.

PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/djx-cli/
GitHub: https://github.com/RedsonNgwira/djx-cli

Would love your feedback and contributions. What other Rails-like features would make Django development faster?
by purplehat_ | 2026-03-13 19:51:14+00:00
Can you elaborate on "fairly well documented exploit tactics"? My impression is that most of these are either social engineering, for which we need to hire better designers, or complicated chains of hard-to-find primitives only accessible to state actors.

There's definitely problems but the solution isn't to make the iPhone a general purpose computer. We definitely need to defend the existence of general purpose computing at a time where regulation is likely to begin encroaching on it, but the promise of the App Store is "pay a 30% tax and any app you download here will be safe." In my mind, at least, that's the promise, and perhaps one solution to the situation would be to erect consequences to breaking that promise.
by mholt | 2026-03-13 19:51:15+00:00
And yet, try getting a full backup of your Google phone onto your own computer. (Without rooting/wiping the whole thing.) Heck, try getting just your text messages off (without a separate app)!

You can't. (Last time I checked.) The backup is encrypted in the cloud, and the only way to download it is to restore it to a phone.

Whereas I can just plug in my iPhone and get a full backup, complete with sqlite manifest, completely accessible. Text messages, photo library, everything.
by minimaxir | 2026-03-13 19:51:44+00:00
Claude Code 2.1.75 now no longer delineates between base Opus and 1M Opus: it's the same model. Oddly, I have Pro where the change supposedly only for Max+ but am still seeing this to be case.

The removal of extra pricing beyond 200k tokens may be Anthropic's salvo in the agent wars against GPT 5.4's 1M window and extra pricing for that.
by Setas | 2026-03-13 19:52:16+00:00
Different scale (I run 8, not 69) but the same fundamental challenge: what happens when one of those agents fails mid-task?

I hit this with my multi-agent system — 8 agents sharing a JSONL knowledge graph. Parallel writes caused a race condition: two agents read the same file state, both write back the full graph plus their additions, second write silently obliterates the first. Sometimes the file ends up with a half-written JSON line that breaks every subsequent read.

I patched it with an async mutex and atomic writes, but the real lesson was that I was fighting my runtime. On the BEAM, a GenServer processes messages from its mailbox sequentially — there's no concurrent access to serialize because the execution model is already sequential per-process. Supervision trees handle the crash case: child process dies, supervisor restarts it in microseconds, auto-repair runs on init, agents resume with clean state. Each process is ~2KB with its own heap, so you can run thousands with full isolation.

At 69 agents the coordination and fault tolerance problems get significantly harder. The BEAM was designed for exactly this — Ericsson ran millions of concurrent processes on telephone switches with nine nines of uptime using these patterns 40 years ago.

Wrote up the full story (race condition mechanics, supervision strategies, real code): https://dev.to/setas/why-erlangs-supervision-trees-are-the-m...
by pessimizer | 2026-03-13 19:52:29+00:00
They're a government contractor specializing in identity and a monopoly who loves not being regulated. They're really a straw donor - this is the government donating money to lobby itself. All of this is money leaving the government proper and being put through barely two degrees of indirection to be sent both to politicians whose job is to direct the government, and to the media to misdirect the public.

This (an end to general purpose computing) isn't anything that people can prevent through civil channels. It will happen with or without public approval. You will have as much control over it as you had over the decision to go to war with Iran. It will never be on any ballot. People who help will get rich, people who don't, won't. Eventually, people who help will barely be middle class, and people who don't, won't. Their kids will own your kids.
by mike_hearn | 2026-03-13 19:52:38+00:00
Many compilers aren't deterministic. That's why the effort to make Linux distros have reproducible builds took so long and so much effort.

The reason is, it's often more work to be deterministic than not deterministic, so compilers don't do it. For example, they may compile functions in parallel and append them to the output in the order they complete.
by jiggawatts | 2026-03-13 19:53:06+00:00
I had an eye opening discussion with an IT admin who stated with a straight face that their “patching strategy was not to patch”.

They have a patch strategy! They considered requirements when deciding the strategy! They have a documented strategy, it’s just very brief. (“Don’t.”)

The Trump admin may have similarly thought about this issue for a few seconds, shrugged their shoulders and decided that this might force manufacturers to go on-shore.

You and I know it won’t, certainly not in the immediate future, which means massive disruption to industry, but that’s not the same as “no plan”.
by pjm331 | 2026-03-13 19:53:10+00:00
"Software people are not alone in facing complexity. Physics deals with terribly complex
objects even at the "fundamental" particle level. The physicist labors on, however, in a
firm faith that there are unifying principles to be found, whether in quarks or in unified
field theories. Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of
nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary.

No such faith comforts the software engineer. Much of the complexity he must master
is arbitrary complexity, forced without rhyme or reason by the many human institutions
and systems to which his interfaces must conform. These differ from interface to interface,
and from time to time, not because of necessity but only because they were designed by
different people, rather than by God."

- Fred Brooks, No Silver Bullet
by Liftyee | 2026-03-13 19:53:37+00:00
Curious - Any sources? Looking at publicly available details and copying them might be intellectually dishonest if it was a piece of coursework, but this isn't an academic research project. Taking features from something that's known to work is the fastest way to get to something working.

If there's actual smuggling of designs or trade secrets going on, I'd be more interested. But if it's just "the rocket looks the same on the outside", that's hardly "industrial espionage".
by janwas | 2026-03-13 19:54:18+00:00
(Personal opinion)
I get the impression that RISC-V-related discussions often lack of awareness of prior work/alternatives. A large amount of (x86) software actually uses our Highway library to run on whatever size vectors and instructions the CPU offers.

This works quite well in practice. As to leaving performance on the table, it seems RVV has some egregious performance differences/cliffs. For example, should we use vrgather (with what LMUL), or interesting workarounds such as widening+slide1, to implement a basic operation such as interleaving two vectors?
by lobf | 2026-03-13 19:54:26+00:00
None of these guys literally has the blood of millions of people on their hands.

Elon’s gutting of USAID (and you can argue they would have done it anyways but he chose to be the executioner) will kill millions of people every year who otherwise would not have died.

Not only will I never give him a dime, I want him prosecuted and deported.
by hyperjeff | 2026-03-13 19:54:32+00:00
This brings up an often overlooked aspect of the role of laws in society, that it it’s important that there exist an ability to break laws. It’s critically important to the growth and flexibility of a society that laws are never perfectly enforced, that there remain ways to evade persecution. It is healthy. Faced with this situation, societies have to think further about what might have been missed in existing law that would cause ongoing skirting of the law and find better ways to structure its mutual responsibilities that we each impose on each other, often unjustly. It would be a terrible thing if the snapshot of laws at any given moment in time was allowed to be perfectly enforced. Laws are not moral documents. Their creation is fraught with unjust power grabs and non-universal moral codes. They are also created knowing that they will not be perfectly enforced and are given exaggerated cruelty when enforced to discourage others. Perfect enforcement would require a full rewrite of all laws.
by ghaff | 2026-03-13 19:54:34+00:00
On an upcoming trip I'm actually going to give an iPad with magnetic keyboard I bought a couple years back, assuming different travel patterns than I've had, a try. It seems to work fine. An iPad is also great for plane/train entertainment without a keyboard. But, honestly, it's no lighter than a MacBook Air would be and if my ancient MacBook Pro dies--have a newer one up in my office--that's what I'll probably buy.

I have traveled with just my iPhone and can get by but don't really love it.
by wolvoleo | 2026-03-13 19:54:36+00:00
To be fair I think there's a good usecase there. Someone's gonna do it. People will want it.

American financial institutions are too prudish for it but money is money. And personally I think there's nothing morally wrong with it (of course within normal restrictions like 18+, consent of portrayed parties etc)

xAI is getting flak in Europe because they don't obey consent and age, not because it's porn.

Personally I prefer porn made by real people right now, not just because of quality but because they have character. But I can imagine experiences becoming more interactive that way and that would be nice.
by joe_mamba | 2026-03-13 19:54:50+00:00
>The reality is most 8GB M1 Macs are still working just fine 6 years later.

Do you think SSD drives are replaceable for no reason? Just because M1 mac aren't failing left and right doesn't mean their NAND won't fail.

I can't in good faith buy a machine with soldered wearable parts. That's like buying a car with soldered brake pads because "in 6 years average users don't feel like they need changing".

I still had laptops on my hands from 20 years ago that work fine simply because you can swap their drives with fresh ones. How many M1 mac will still be functional in 20 years?
by cheschire | 2026-03-13 19:54:58+00:00
I was talking with someone solidly in Gen X that described their desire to write out longer form documents by hand on paper rather than typing them up. The process of typing helped them work through the content better than typing.

In an analogous way, I feel like I'm in that part of the millennial generation that is more comfortable doing things on a PC than on a phone. Sure I can informally browse airline tickets and cars on my phone, or upload some docs for my , but when things get serious, I'm switching to a PC to complete it.

There's something about doing things on a phone that just does not feel... robust? Maybe I am just too accustomed to the phone experience being minimal, or minimized in some way compared to the desktop experience.
Show HN: I save £300/mo by auto-scaling my staging cluster at night
by gtpoxa | 2026-03-13 19:55:04+00:00
We have a staging environment running 24/7 — 6-7 microservices sitting idle every evening and weekend. That's roughly £300/month wasted.

I wanted a simple automation: scale deployments to zero at 8pm, restore at 7am. The options were cronjob+kubectl scripts.
(fragile, no visibility) or writing a custom controller (kinda overkill for this).

This drove me to build something which became Tiny Systems — an open-source visual workflow engine where automations run as native K8s operators.

The cost saver flow uses cron triggers, a deployment lister filtered by labels, a scaler, and Slack notifications.

Here's the ready-to-install solution: https://tinysystems.io/solutions/cluster-cost-saver-0

Solo project, happy to answer questions.
by hrimfaxi | 2026-03-13 19:55:24+00:00
Imagine you suddenly had $100MM. You never have to work again and can do practically whatever you want. But most of us appreciate experiences with the company of others.

Who would you be able to spend time with? Most of your friends and family would still have to work. Of course, you could offer them to leave their jobs and give them money so they won't have to worry and they could spend time with you. But then it leads to the social feedback issue, so even those closest to you don't want to rock the boat.
by kittikitti | 2026-03-13 19:55:26+00:00
Another trash article from the New York Times, who financially benefit from this type of content because of their ongoing litigation against OpenAI. I think the assumption that developers don't code is wrong. Most software engineers don't even want to code, they are opportunists looking to make money. I have yet to experience this cliff of coding. These people aren't asking for hard enough questions. I have a bunch of things I want AI to build that it completely fails on.

The article could have been written from a very different perspective. Instead, the "journalists" likely interviewed a few insiders from Big Tech and generalized. They don't get it. They never will.

Before the advent of ChatGPT, maybe 2 in 100 people could code. I was actually hoping AI would increase programming literacy but it didn't, it became even more rare. Many journalists could have come at it from this perspective, but instead painted doom and gloom for coders and computer programming.

The New York Times should look in the mirror. With the advent of the iPad, most experts agreed that they would go out of business because a majority of their revenue came from print media. Look what happened.

Understand this, most professional software and IT engineers hate coding. It was a flex to say you no longer code professionally before ChatGPT. It's still a flex now. But it's corrupt journalism when there is a clear conflict of interest because the NYT is suing the hell out of AI companies.
by eclectic_mind05 | 2026-03-13 19:55:34+00:00
Fair point. Right now the collection is small and somewhat random as I'm seeding it. The goal is to have multiple views/life stages for popular species over time, not just skulls or single angles.

Quality curation is definitely a challenge as it scales. The community verification system helps, but you're right that it requires active moderation. Thinking about how to balance growth with quality. Open to suggestions.
by rconti | 2026-03-13 19:55:38+00:00
Yeah, I think the paradigm has shifted. There's a perception that, while these companies have always profited off of our inputs, that we both benefitted. We contributed to a public good, they provided the platform, and profited off that platform.

Now it feels like the public good is being diminished (enshittification) as they keep turning the "profit" knob, trying to squeeze more and more marginal dollars from the good.

The system still requires the same inputs from us, but gives less back.
by zdw | 2026-03-13 19:55:44+00:00
I fake a tiling window manager on Mac with Hammerspoon, resizing to fit in specific corners/sizes:

-- resize based on ratios
function ratioResize(xr, yr, wr, hr)
return function ()
local win = hs.window.focusedWindow()
win:moveToUnit({x=xr,y=yr,w=wr,h=hr})
end
end

-- 4 corners, different sizes
hs.hotkey.bind({"cmd", "ctrl"}, "w", ratioResize(0, 0, 2/5, 2/3))
hs.hotkey.bind({"cmd", "ctrl"}, "e", ratioResize(2/5, 0, 3/5, 2/3))
hs.hotkey.bind({"cmd", "ctrl"}, "s", ratioResize(0, 2/3, 2/5, 1/3))
hs.hotkey.bind({"cmd", "ctrl"}, "d", ratioResize(2/5, 2/3, 3/5, 1/3))

And to throw windows to other monitors:

-- send to next screen
hs.hotkey.bind({"cmd", "ctrl"}, ";", function()
local win = hs.window.focusedWindow()
local screen = win:screen()
local next_screen = screen:next()

win:moveToScreen(next_screen)
end)
by mjr00 | 2026-03-13 19:55:59+00:00
> It's an entirely different thing; he made a thing, sold it, and then when he couldn't sell more of it, gave it away.

You're right and it's worth pointing out that a lot of open source has the opposite lifecycle: the authors make a thing, aren't sure how to sell it, so they open source it and hope to eventually sell something peripheral, i.e. "open core" with paid plugins or enterprise support.

In these cases, open source isn't a gift so much as a marketing strategy. So it makes sense the maintainers wouldn't see LLM training on their code as a good thing; it was never a "gift", it was a loss leader.