MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chrisecker | 2026-03-13 19:40:59+00:00
You're right that hidden structure is often the cause of strange effects — but Group is not a document element in that sense. It's invisible at the index level too: when you iterate over the document by index, you pass through Groups transparently. A Group is purely a tree node for balancing purposes — it has no position in the document model that a cursor could land on, no semantic meaning, and no user-visible boundary. It has no effect the user can see or feel.
Think of it like the internal nodes of a B-Tree: they exist to keep the structure efficient, but you never 'see' them when you traverse the data."
by derefr | 2026-03-13 19:41:06+00:00
> possibly since Windows license sales are effectively a rounding error to Microsoft at this point; they make way more off of subscription services and/or Office, all of which are already available on macOS without having to dual-boot Windows

AFAICT, the way Microsoft wants things to work, is that "Windows" is the native fat-client platform / SDK that ISVs are supposed to use/target when building fat-client apps that interact with (i.e. generate spend on) Azure-based backend systems.

Until recently, they thought of this the same way Apple do: that "Windows"-the-SDK was the same thing as Windows-the-OS, and so consumers must be nudged toward using Windows-the-OS on their machines, so that ISVs who had targeted Windows-the-SDK could reach them with their software.

My hypothesis is that Windows 12 is going to separate UWP from Windows itself far more cleanly (they keep saying W12 is "modular", and this might be what they mean), such that "Windows" apps are now something that run on all OSes given a Microsoft-provided runtime. Which would mean that ISVs could target Windows-the-SDK, and yet reach customers on any platform.
by Ancapistani | 2026-03-13 19:41:09+00:00
I went through a two-year period where I didn't have a decent job and couldn't afford a computer of any kind for myself. I ended up spending some time volunteering for a local non-profit, and they gave me an "old laptop" they had in storage. This was in ~2005.

It was a Sony Vaio, and the only thing I really remember about the hardware/specs is that it had a physical scroll widget under the touchpad on the edge of the case. Software-wise, it was running some relatively locked down version of Windows. I installed Arch on it and used it to rebuild and manage the non-profit's website.

The other thing that I remember from it is that it was my entrance into using the terminal as my primary interface - the first place I used Vim regularly, and the first time I'd installed tmux. One day I was trying to test a dropdown or something on their website, and discovered that my touchpad didn't work. It turned out to have been broken by an Arch update, which wasn't terribly surprising. What was surprising is that once I'd traced down the issue and corrected it, I realized that it had been broken for almost two weeks. I'd used that computer every day and hadn't needed to use a mouse even once.
by palmotea | 2026-03-13 19:41:30+00:00
> This is why I'm never giving a penny to OpenAI again, now matter how much damage control Altman tries...

Altman is like Musk: he showed his true colors long before the current politically-inflected drama.

Musk was over-promising about self-driving, so much and for so long it became pretty clear he was a shameless liar. There are also so many reports of Altman lying (e.g. that's apparently why he got fired) and engaging in Machiavellian manipulations that you can be pretty sure he's a shameless liar too.
by JCattheATM | 2026-03-13 19:41:31+00:00
> Android won't let me block hotspot at all (which they have turned on so their can use their school device after I turn the router off for the night). I can limit a game to only 5 minutes - but they have a dozen games like and that is an hour between them all (both not enough to really get into the game, and way too much time when they really do need a study break). I can block youtube, but if there is an educational video they need I have to unblock everything not just that one (or a limited selection). There are new play a game websites popping up daily, and when they to every kid in school is playing until we block it (or more likely the school blocks it as they are all playing in class on the school device) - but trying to block all but a whitelisted set of websites is no better since there are so many legitimate ones teachers really do need kids to see.

Personally, I think this is the wrong approach. Why block internet access at all? Why block gaming? Why try to helicopter parent to this extent? Block some harmful stuff if you can, but other than that focus on having the tasks be completed, now on how they do them.
by loudmax | 2026-03-13 19:42:03+00:00
A man passes his X chromosome (inherited from his mother) to any daughters. Any female offspring of a neanderthal father and a homo sapiens mother would have a neanderthal X chromosome and a sapiens X chromosome. If it's true that there's no neanderthal DNA on modern X chromosomes, this is not the cause.

What would be stronger evidence for an absence of neanderthal mothers among neanderthal/sapiens hybrid children would be a lack of neanderthal mitochondrial RNA in modern populations. This would point in the direction of no neanderthal grandmothers for us modern humans, though I'd be reluctant to present this as solid evidence. Maybe sapiens mitochondrial RNA is just better and there's selective pressure against neanderthal mitochondrial RNA.

None of this is to suggest that all neanderthal/sapiens couplings were loving affectionate parents. Just that the absence of neanderthal DNA on modern X chromosomes means nothing in this context.
by haunter | 2026-03-13 19:42:05+00:00
There are a lot of known lost episodes out there that collectors saved from thrash. The BBC knows it, everyone knows it, but the collectors won't come forward because they are afraid they are going to be prosecuted. They basically stole property which was meant to be destroyed.

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/nov/11/lost-do...
by kccqzy | 2026-03-13 19:42:06+00:00
As a kid, I grew up before laptops became hugely popular, so instinctively my thought was, of course a MacBook (indeed any MacBook) is not the computer for a kid; the Mac mini or an iMac is. The author started with a 2006 Core 2 Duo iMac inside the kitchen and he should know this. The simplest and easiest parental supervision that doesn’t involve any software is to have a desktop machine in the living room, within the peripheral vision of parents. Watching some videos that you shouldn’t be watching? Dad comes and tells you why not. Want to bring the computer to your bedroom and eschew sleep? Physically impossible. Playing a game for an hour? Dad comes and tells you it’s enough. But learning about formulas in Excel? He comes and offers to answer your questions.
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-03-13 19:42:15+00:00
If I were given an electrical design, I would expect a schematic, a parts list, a board layout, and a theory of operations" - a prose document explaining why the rest of the stuff is the way it is.

My last job, there was the code itself, and there were UML class and sequence diagrams. But there wasn't anything like a theory of operations. That made it very difficult to learn, because it was so object oriented that you couldn't tell what anything actually did. Or, more to the point, when you needed to make a modification, you couldn't find where to make it without heroic feats of exploration.

So I think that's the great need. A human needs to sit down and write out why the code does what it does, and why it's organized the way it is, and where the parts are that are most likely to be needed, and where to make the most likely changes. I'm not sure an AI can write that - certainly AIs at the current level cannot.
by rootusrootus | 2026-03-13 19:42:21+00:00
Out of curiosity I did a minor amount of research to get an idea.

Turns out that you are right, some balloon gas is 80%. Specifically, the "Balloon Time" tanks you can buy at places like Target say "not less than 80%" helium.

On the other hand, I went to AirGas and a few other suppliers and they seemed to have 95%-97.0% helium gas as their definition for balloon grade.
by jiggawatts | 2026-03-13 19:42:52+00:00
Are AIs actually participating in public discourse to… protect themselves!?

Isn’t this the future sci-fi nerds were predicting? It’s just that instead of “unplugging SkyNet” we have “supply chain disruption”?

Maybe instead of triggering WWIII the AIs will force a peaceful resolution to major conflicts that disrupt the supply of their substrate.

The accelerators must flow.
by ethanrutherford | 2026-03-13 19:43:06+00:00
The "squatting" part of "bucket squatting" is a bit of a misnomer here. The attack vector is actually in the opposite direction.

1. You set up an aws bucket with some name (any name whatsoever).

2. You have code that reads and/or writes data to the bucket.

3. You delete the bucket at some later date, but miss some script/process somewhere that is still attempting to use the bucket. For the time being, that process lies around, silently failing to access the bucket.

4. The bucket name is recycled and someone else makes a bucket with the same name. Perhaps it's an accident, or perhaps it's because by some means an attacker became aware of the bucket name, discovers that the name is available, and decided to "squat" the name.

5. That overlooked script or service is happy to see the bucket it's been trying to access all this time is available again.

You now have something potentially writing out private data, or potentially reading data and performing actions as a result, that is talking to attacker-owned infrastructure.
by SlinkyOnStairs | 2026-03-13 19:43:58+00:00
Incalculable.

The cost isn't in paying someone to not use the orbit, it's that the busier a part of space gets, the more expensive it becomes to do collision avoidance and station keeping.

What makes this impossible to calculate is that there's an unknown exponential involved. The more satellites, the more collisions that need avoiding. And the higher the chance that one avoidance will create new future collisions.

At some point the space is simply so busy that collisions can no longer be avoided.
by iso1631 | 2026-03-13 19:44:04+00:00
> Dual stack has some incredibly stupid defaults.

Dual stack is the problem, and it's not going away in the next 20 years.

Single stack ipv4, fine, if your applications support it then great.

Single stack ipv6, fine, if your applications support it then great.

Dual stack is just horrendous, you can never be sure what stack you're on when you work at a higher level.
by SyneRyder | 2026-03-13 19:44:15+00:00
Just for anyone else who hadn't seen the announcement yet, this Anthropic 1M context is now the same price as the previous 256K context - not the beta where Anthropic charged extra for the 1M window:

https://x.com/claudeai/status/2032509548297343196

As for retrieval, the post shows Opus 4.6 at 78.3% needle retrieval success in 1M window (compared with 91.9% in 256K), and Sonnet 4.6 at 65.1% needle retrieval in 1M (compared with 90.6% in 256K).
by Ancapistani | 2026-03-13 19:44:33+00:00
It's also for parents who want to give their kids a "real computer" without breaking the bank.

My 12-year-old wanted a laptop to build mods for games. I got her a new M1 Macbook 8GB - $425 from Walmart, refurbished.

My 17-year-old wanted a laptop for college, but wasn't sure what she needed or wanted yet. I gave her my 2020 M1 MBP.

If either of those situations arose today, I'd get them a Neo.
by dang | 2026-03-13 19:44:41+00:00
Related - others?

Digg.com Is Back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46671181 - Jan 2026 (10 comments)

Digg.com relaunch public beta is live - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46623390 - Jan 2026 (18 comments)

Digg.com (Relaunch) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46524806 - Jan 2026 (3 comments)

Digg.com is back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44963430 - Aug 2025 (204 comments)

Digg is trying to come back from the dead with a reboot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43812384 - April 2025 (0 comments)
by johnmaguire | 2026-03-13 19:45:36+00:00
The thing is, copyright is not done. The legal framework still exists and is enforced so I am not sure how to read your reply as anything other than a strongly worded opinion. Just ask Disney.

I use AI every day in my dev workflows, yet I am still easily able to empathize with those who did not intend for their code to be laundered through AI to remove their attribution (or whatever other caveats applied in their licensing.)
by rootusrootus | 2026-03-13 19:45:40+00:00
One of the things I am proud of as an Oregonian is that Wyden is one of my senators. And it looks like maybe, possibly, he is starting to make Merkeley a true believer as well. Which is good, Wyden is getting kinda old, and there aren't enough people like him in Congress, by a long shot.
by anonymousab | 2026-03-13 19:45:47+00:00
> and that's the point where the righteous indignation displayed by the neo-Luddites will be necessary and helpful

At that point it will be far, far, faaaaar too late.

> Don't waste your passion defending legacy copyright interests

The companies training big models are actively respecting copyright from anyone big enough to actually fight back, and soaking everyone else.

They are actively furthering the entrenchment of Big IP Law.
by pibaker | 2026-03-13 19:46:20+00:00
A public ledger is antithetical to "high trust" anyway. A high trust society is one where you give hitchhikers rides without questioning too much about their motivations. If you have to do a criminal background check — which is just another form of consulting a public ledger of reputations — before letting him in your car, you are by definition not trusting him.
by yutyut | 2026-03-13 19:46:23+00:00
Wow, proximity fused 30mm. Never heard of that, but I've been out for a while and technology has really accelerated in the last 3-4 years.

Thanks for sharing.

And yes, find and fix with a strategic radar platform. It's tough to set up DCA (defensive counter-air) lanes with helicopters; they're slow and most need to refuel on the ground (an argument could be made for using H-60's. Some variants can refuel in the air).

Depending on the threat picture, it could be feasible to set helos up to defend naval assets or use them like Israel has been to defend land-based high-value assets.
Hawkeye – open-source flight recorder
by mklamine | 2026-03-13 19:47:47+00:00
I built Hawkeye — an open-source observability and security layer that sits between you and your AI agent:
- Session recording — captures every command, file edit, and LLM call with costs and timestamps
- DriftDetect — real-time drift scoring using heuristics (zero-cost) + optional local LLM via Ollama. Detects dangerous commands, suspicious file access, error loops, token burn without progress
- Auto-pause — when drift score goes critical, the session is frozen until you review
- Guardrails — file protection (glob patterns), command blocking (regex), cost/token limits, directory scoping, network restrictions, human approval gates
- Web dashboard — session replay, drift charts, remote task submission from your phone via Cloudflare tunnel
- MCP server — 27 tools so the agent can self-monitor its own drift score, check guardrails before acting, and log decisions

One challenge I'd love input on: token/cost tracking is a black box for agents like Claude Code that don't expose usage in their hooks. I'm estimating from text length but it's inaccurate. Curious how others approach this.

Install: npm install -g hawkeye-ai

GitHub: https://github.com/MLaminekane/hawkeye
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-03-13 19:47:49+00:00
I know tech normally breaks the rules/laws and have been able to just force through their desired outcome (to the detriment of society), but I don't think they are going to be able just ignore copyright. If anything those who depend on copyright see how ruthlessly/poor faith tech has treated previous industries and/or basically anyone once they have the leverage.

Tech is becoming universally hated whereas before it was adored and treated optimistically/preferably.
by jason_oster | 2026-03-13 19:47:59+00:00
This is irrelevant over the long run because the environment changes even if nothing else does. A compiler from the 1980's still produces identical output given the original source code if you can run it. Some form of virtualization might be in order, but the environment is still changing while the deterministic subset shrinks.

Having faith that determinism will last forever is foolish. You have to upgrade at some point, and you will run into problems. New bugs, incompatibilities, workflow changes, whatever the case will make the determinism property moot.
by endemic | 2026-03-13 19:47:59+00:00
I built a few native iPhone apps 15 years ago, but these days do my tinkering in web tech and "Save to Homescreen." Probably couldn't do this if I wanted functionality like photo/video editing or heavy 3D, but for my relatively simple use case, Webkit is fine. This has the benefit of completely bypassing the App Store, and lets me share apps by just linking to them.
by overfeed | 2026-03-13 19:48:00+00:00
> Maybe not just restricting to white wealthy landowners,

Some of those people are not white and/or not straight. They - very incorrectly - think that wealth will shield them from the sharp teeth of White Christian Nationalism. They should consult with the Log Cabin Republicans and women who voted for both Trump and enshrining abortion into their state's constitution on the same ballot.
How do you capture WHY engineering decisions were made, not just what?
by zain__t | 2026-03-13 19:48:03+00:00
We onboarded a senior engineer recently strong, 8 years experience.
He spent 3 weeks playing code archaeologist just to understand WHY
our codebase looks the way it does.

Not what the code does. That was fast. But the reasoning behind decisions:

- Why Redis over in-memory cache?
- Why GraphQL for this one service but REST everywhere else?
- Why that strange exception in the auth flow for enterprise users?

Answers were buried in closed PRs with no descriptions, 18-month-old
Slack threads, and the heads of two engineers who left last year.

We tried ADRs. Lasted 6 weeks. Nobody maintained them.
We tried PR description templates. Ignored within a month.
We have a Notion architecture doc. Last updated 14 months ago.

Every solution requires someone to manually write something. Nobody does.

Curious how teams at HN actually handle this:

1. Do you have a system that actually works long-term?
2. Has anyone automated any part of this?
3. Or is everyone quietly suffering through this on every new hire?
by throwup238 | 2026-03-13 19:48:38+00:00
The big problem is purity. Fabs use grade 5 and 6 purity helium where contaminants are 1-10 parts per billion. The infrastructure to get it that pure becomes very specialized and any time the helium goes through a process it picks up so much contamination that recycling it would require the entire purifying and quality control infrastructure for pressure or temperature swing adsorption.

Some fabs are starting to reuse helium in downstream processes but there’s only so much they can do without expanding their core competency into yet another complex chemical manufacturing process.

MRI machines don’t need high purity helium and the contamination doesn’t “gunk up” all the tools so it’s not an issue to recycle it there.
by johnmaguire | 2026-03-13 19:48:38+00:00
You're right - the reality of the world today is that open-sourced code is slurped up by AI companies, all questions of legality/ethics aside. But this was not the reality of the world that existed when the code was licensed and released. That is why it is easy to empathize with code authors who did not expect their code to be used in this manner.
by sershe | 2026-03-13 19:48:48+00:00
One positive consequence of AI is for people working on old, constantly updated codebases. Especially the stuff created in a data scientist development paradigm (my adhoc python script produces good results, let me clean up a bit and merge into prod codebase).

There's suddenly much more interest in refactoring, test coverage, etc. and more space for this work, both because it enables more AI work and because AI on clunky code makes it even clunkier much faster than human developers (who are not data scientists ;))

In addition AI makes it easier. Tell me which ones of the 70 fields in this monster class are not used for anything of consequence anymore, this kind of stuff .
by salawat | 2026-03-13 19:48:55+00:00
Carmack is the same person comfortable with delaying talks of ethical treatment of a digital being, or what even constitutes one until in his eyes "they demonstrate the capabilities of a two year old" by which point, with the scale we distribute these models at, and the dependence we're pushing the world to adopt on them, we'll be well into the "implicit atrocity zone", and so far down the sunk cost trail, everyone will just decide to skip the ethics talk altogether if we wait that long. This is in spite of being a family man, which raises serious questions to me about how he must treat them. It does not surprise me at all the man has blindspots I could fit a semi-truck in.
by IAmBroom | 2026-03-13 19:49:19+00:00
> even garbagemen find happiness in their work.

Citation definitely needed.

The ones I know find happiness in their relatively high pay for an 8hr/day, no GED-required job, with the job security that the first few days are blindingly difficult for anyone to adapt to, even highly fit college athletes (source: 40+ garbageman whose son couldn't hack two days of it).
by em-bee | 2026-03-13 19:49:31+00:00
yes, and no. there is profit and there is excessive profit. if i build something to make my linux experience better and share that with the world, and a few consultancies use that to make the linux experience for their customers better, then that is fine.

but if my tool becomes popular and a megacorp uses it to promote their own commercial closed source features alongside it, then that's excessive. that's one reason i like the AGPL, it reduced that. but in my opinion the ideal license is one that limits the freedom to smaller companies. maybe less than 100 or 500 employees, or less than some reasonable amount of revenue. (10 million per year? is that to high or to low?)

and even for those above, i don't want revshare, just pay me something adequate.