MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by imranq | 2026-03-10 20:05:48+00:00
Amazing write up and i wish more people showed the process for discovery which is often even more interesting than the result itself

Still the result is really interesting being able to stack abstract reasoning and get better performance and the heat maps to show the prob results

The academic literature seems to be catching up:

- *[SOLAR / DUS (Kim et al., 2023)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.15166)* — duplicated transformer layers to build a 10.7B model that outperformed 30B parameter baselines.

- *[The Curse of Depth (2025)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.05795)* — explains why this works: Pre-LN causes deep transformer layers to converge toward identity functions, meaning middle layers are where real computation happens, and duplicating them concentrates that capacity.

- *[Scaling up Test-Time Compute with Latent Reasoning: A Recurrent Depth Approach (Geiping et al., NeurIPS 2025)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.05171)* — takes the idea to its logical conclusion: a model trained with a single recurrent block repeated at inference time, scaling reasoning depth without adding parameters.
by close04 | 2026-03-10 20:06:17+00:00
I'm not telling you what can or cannot be done. I'm telling you that the example you chose to counter GP's "wild exaggeration" statement, was in itself an exaggeration. It doesn't make the point you think it makes. I'm telling you that if you want to change something, continuing to only do the thing that proved ineffective in the past won't cut it.

> Go to one of those countries and we'll see how long you can openly complain about government surveillance before you end up in jail.

Those people never had it any other way so their complaints are either "the usual", or come from people who can cause real trouble. Those people get silenced almost everywhere in the world. Want to know what Germany does if you "insult" a politician?

In Russia people openly complain about the government all the time, as long as this doesn't cause real trouble no one bats an eye. Russia has nowhere near the capability of the US and China to surveil people anyway. And in China most people don't openly complain because their lives are orders of magnitude better than just a few decades ago, many see it as the price for the better life.

"I'm not that bad yet" is never a strong argument. 50 years ago the press was "impeaching" presidents. Today presidents are "impeaching" the press. See the progress? It accelerates.
by magicalist | 2026-03-10 20:06:25+00:00
> But even better, tell it to create subagents to form red team, green team and refactor team while the main instance coordinates them, respecting the clean-room rules. It really works.

It helps, but it definitely doesn't always work, particularly as refactors go on and tests have to change. Useless tests start grow in count and important new things aren't tested or aren't tested well.

I've had both Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.3 recently tell me the other (or another instance) did a great job with test coverage and depth, only to find tests within that just asserted the test harness had been set up correctly and the functionality that had been in those tests get tested that it exists but its behavior now virtually untested.

Reward hacking is very real and hard to guard against.
by bbor | 2026-03-10 20:06:51+00:00
Well that anecdote is referencing the Scruffies v. Neat war[1], within which the nativism debate was merely a somewhat-archaic undercurrent.

IMHO, a lot of the more specifically anti-nativist sentiments of today are based in linguistics itself rather than philosophy, CS, or CogSci, where again it is part of a broader (and much dumber) debate: whether linguistics is the empirical study of languages or the theoretical study of language itself. People get really nasty when they're told that they work in an offshoot field for some reason, which is why I blame them for the ever-too-common misunderstandings of Chomsky -- the most common being "Universal Grammar has been disproven because babies don't speak English in the womb".

If Chomsky weren't so obviously right, this would be a worrying development! Luckily I expect it to be little more than a footnote in history, so it's merely infuriating rather than depressing.

[1] Minsky, 1991: https://ojs.aaai.org/aimagazine/index.php/aimagazine/article...
by aldousd666 | 2026-03-10 20:07:06+00:00
I don't disagree, but neither does the article. It's just talking about the fact that we previously considered anything that can't be easily and tersely written down as nearly or entirely intractable. But, as we have seen, the three body problem is not really a hum-dinger as far as the universe goes, it's not even table stakes. We need to be able to do the same kind of energy arbitrage on n-body problems that we do on 2. And now we have the beginnings of a place to toy with more complicated ideas -- since these won't fit on a blackboard.
by marktl | 2026-03-10 20:07:46+00:00
Https://Poolpilot.online

Managing our above ground pool this summer and small hot tub in winter and continually asking "why isn't this easier" led to the development of Pool Pilot. Scan a test strip with your camera, water care recommendation checklist generates and you can order more supplies if needed easily from Amazon. Basically met my personal need and hoping it will help others too.

The fun technical bit: test strip chart colors can vary by manufacturer and even between production batches, but, the specific color chart that comes on a bottle should be accurate to those specific steps. Additionally, test strip colors are notoriously hard to match from photos. RGB comparison falls apart with lighting changes. After many interesting and considerations we calibrate of the specific test strip bottle and we use LAB color space and Anthropic's Claude vision model to read strips directly. This has worked exceptionally well in our testing and works with any brand;

The app also offers timers, history and much more. It has become a minor obsession.

React Native/Expo, Firebase backend, $10/year after 3 free tests (early tier pricing). Would love feedback from any fellow pool or hot tub owners.
by coder543 | 2026-03-10 20:07:49+00:00
Terrible relative to everything else that exists today. I have a neutral American accent.

Maybe you just don’t know what you’re missing? Google’s default speech to text is still bad compared to Whisper and Parakeet, but even Google’s is markedly better than Apple’s.

I cannot think of a single speech to text system that I’ve run into in the past 5 years that is less accurate than the one Apple ships.

Sure, Apple’s speech to text is incredible compared to what was on the flip phone I had 20 years ago. Terrible is relative. Much better options exist today, and they’re under very permissive licenses. Apple’s refusal to offer a better, more accessible experience to their users is frustrating when they wouldn’t even have to pay a licensing fee to ship something better. Whisper was released under a permissive license nearly 4 years ago.

Apple also restricts third party keyboards to an absurdly tiny amount of memory, so it isn’t even possible to ship a third party keyboard that provides more accurate on-device speech to text without janky workarounds (requiring the user to open the keyboard's own app first each time).
by jjk166 | 2026-03-10 20:08:02+00:00
That was literally Nazi Germany's strategy for defeating Britain. Use advanced submarines to stop trade cutting off supplies of food and fuel from abroad. The Allies just made ships faster than they could be sunk.

Today the US has 55 fast attack submarines, each of which can carry about 50 torpedos at a time. So with 100% of your subs deployed you can sink maybe 250 ships. The US has an inventory of about 1000 torpedos so you can do that about 4 times. Shanghai alone receives 230 ships per day. So The US submarine force is roughly capable of shutting down the equivalent of 1 chinese port for a few days. Realistically, your not even going to get anywhere near that. 30% of your subs are going to be out of service at any given time, more will be transiting between service bases and the war theater, only a portion of those can be spare for commerce raiding, it takes time to locate targets, and you will suffer attrition to ASW. After those first few days it becomes a race between US torpedo production and Chinese ship building. The US can produce 10 torpedos per month; China produces 15 ships per day.

Of course China isn't an island - it can import food from its neighbors by land connections. Nor is it even deficient in domestic food production capability. It grows 700 million tons of grain per year which is enough to sustain 3.8 billion adults. It imports a lot of food in peacetime because people want more than bare subsistence, and certainly interdicting trade will piss them off quite a bit, but it's not going to bring them to their knees.

The idea that in a peer war it will only be them suffering - their trade will be interdicted, their industrial centers will be bombed - and they won't have any means to strike back is exactly the complacency I was referring to. Maybe if war broke out tomorrow it would go that way, but that's merely an argument that China is not yet truly our peer. We must plan under the assumption that somebody, and it might not be China, will in the coming decades reach the point where they can tank a hit from us and hit back.
by sothatsit | 2026-03-10 20:08:10+00:00
I’d argue this social angle is not very nuanced or effective. Not all people who used Claude Code will be submitting low-effort patches, and bad-faith actors will just lie about their AI-use.

For example, someone might have done a lot of investigation to find the root cause of an issue, followed by getting Claude Code to implement the fix, which they then tested. That has a good chance of being a good contribution.

I think tackling this from the trust side is likely to be a better solution. One approach would be to only allow new contributors to make small patches. Once those are accepted, then allow them to make larger contributions. That would help with the real problem, which is higher volumes of low-effort contributions overwhelming maintainers.
Show HN: 2D RPG base game client recreated in modern HTML5 game engine with AI
by erkok | 2026-03-10 20:09:33+00:00
When I was much younger, I used to play a Korean MMORPG called Helbreath, and I also hosted a bunch of private servers for it. I eventually moved on, but I always loved the game’s aesthetics, its 2D nature, and its atmosphere. That may just be nostalgia talking.

The community maintained private server and client, which to my knowledge were based on leaked official files, were written in fairly archaic C++. If you’re interested in the original sources, I’ve included the main client and server files, Client.cpp and Server.cpp, in the reference folder. I always felt that if the project was rewritten in something more modern and better structured, a lot more could be done with it. But rewriting an MMORPG client and server from scratch is not exactly the kind of thing you do on a whim. That said, there was a guy who got pretty far with a C# rewrite and an XNA-based client, though that project is now also discontinued.

Now that AI has become quite capable, I decided to see how far I could get by hooking up the original assets in a modern HTML5 game engine. I wanted HTML5 because I figured a nearly 30 year old 2D game should run just fine in a browser. I ended up choosing Phaser 3 for a few reasons. Mainly, it's 2D only, free, HTML5 first (JS/TS), and code-first, which mattered because I wanted good Cursor integration for AI assistance. Another thing I liked was its integration with React, which let me build the UI using browser technologies and render the UI at native resolution on top of the WebGL canvas, rather than building the UI inside the game engine itself, which runs at 1024x576 resolution. The original game ran at 640x480.

After about 1.5 months of talking to AI on evenings and weekends, and roughly $200 worth of Cursor usage later, I finished hooking up the original assets in a modern game engine that seems to run just fine in a browser.

By "base game client", I mean that it's not fully hooked up in terms of how the full (MMO)RPG should function, but it does include all the original assets and core mechanics needed to provide a solid foundation if you want to build your own 2D (MMO)RPG on top of it. Continuing to build with AI should also work just fine, since this is how I managed to get that far. The asset library is quite rich, if you ask me, but there is one caveat: these assets are not in the public domain. They are still the property of someone, or some entity, that inherited the IP from the original developer, which is no longer in business. You can read more about that on the GitHub page.
by logicchains | 2026-03-10 20:09:34+00:00
>Last week I did about 4 weeks of work over 2 days first with long running agents working against plans and checklists, then smaller task clean ups, bugfixes and refactors. But all this code needs to be reviewed by myself and members from my team. How do we do this properly? It's like 20k of line changes over 30-40 commits. There's no proper solution to this problem yet.

Get an LLM to generate a list of things to check based on those plans (and pad that out yourself with anything important to you that the LLM didn't add), then have the agents check the codebase file by file for those things and report any mismatches to you. As well as some general checks like "find anything that looks incorrect/fragile/very messy/too inefficient". If any issues come up, ask the agents to fix them, then continue repeating this process until no more significant issues are reported. You can do the same for unit tests, asking the agents to make sure there are tests covering all the important things.
by hinkley | 2026-03-10 20:10:08+00:00
What ends up happening is that your most fundamental features end up rotting because manual testing has biases. Chief among them is probably Recency Bias. It is in fact super easy to break a launch feature if it’s not gating any of the features you’re working on now. If you don’t automate those, yes, you’re nuts.

One of the worst ones I ever encountered was learning that someone broke the entire help system three months prior, and nobody noticed. Because developers don’t use the help system. I convinced a team of very skeptical people that E2E testing the help docs was a higher priority than automating testing of the authentication because every developer used that eight times a day or more. In fact on a previous project with trunk based builds, both times I broke login someone came to tell me so before the build finished.

Debugging is about doing cheap tests first to prune the problem space, and slower tests until you find the culprit. Testing often forgets that and will run expensive tests before fast ones. Particularly in the ice cream cone.

In short, if you declare an epic done with zero automation, you’re a fucking idiot.
by masteranza | 2026-03-10 20:11:47+00:00
A few years ago I've made this simple thought experiment to convince myself that LLM's won't achieve superhuman level (in the sense of being better than all human experts):

Imagine that we made an LLM out of all dolphin songs ever recorded, would such LLM ever reach human level intelligence? Obviously and intuitively the answer is NO.

Your comment actually extended this observation for me sparking hope that systems consuming natural world as input might actually avoid this trap, but then I realized that tool use & learning can in fact be all that's needed for singularity while consuming raw data streams most of the time might actually be counterproductive.
by nikolasdimi | 2026-03-10 20:11:47+00:00
https://github.com/VoidenHQ/voiden

Today I released the community plugins for Voiden.

This is a big one because one of the things I dont want is the API tool to become bloated with new features - so I want to allow anyone to build plugins to grow the tool.

docs: https://docs.voiden.md/docs/plugins/build-a-plugin
by libraryofbabel | 2026-03-10 20:11:52+00:00
Thanks for saying this. It never ceases to amaze me how many people still talk about LLMs like it’s 2023, completely ignoring the RLVR revolution that gave us models like Opus that can one-shot huge chunks of works-first-time code for novel use cases. Modern LLMs aren’t just trained to guess the next token, they are trained to solve tasks.
by Izkata | 2026-03-10 20:11:55+00:00
> Not content with winning his day in court, Mr Argarkov is now taking matters further and trying to sue Tinkoff Credit Systems for 24 million rubles (£470,000) over its failure to honour the contract he created. For its part, the bank is counter-suing Mr Argakov for alleged fraud.

> [..]

> The court is set to review Mr Argakov’s case next month.

Followup a few days later, they both withdrew their claims: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2013/08/14/man-who-outwitted-...
by eatsyourtacos | 2026-03-10 20:12:02+00:00
I have been building a game via a separate game logic library and Unity (which includes that independent library).. let's just say that over the last couple weeks I have 100% lost the need to do the coding myself. I keep iterating and have it improve and there are hundreds of unit tests.. I have a Unity MCP and it does 95% of the Unity work for me. Of course the real game will need custom designing and all that; but in terms of getting a complete prototype setup.... I am literally no longer the coder. I just did in a week what it would have taken me months and months and months to do. Granted Unity is still somewhat new to, but still.. even if you are an expert- it can immediately look at all your game objects and detect issues etc.

So yeah for some things we are already at the point of "I am not longer the coder, I am the architect".. and it's scary.
by scarmig | 2026-03-10 20:12:04+00:00
The miasma theory of disease, though wrong, made lots of predictions that proved useful and productive. Swamps smell bad, so drain them; malaria decreases. Excrement in the street smells bad, so build sewage systems; cholera decreases. Florence Nightingale implemented sanitary improvements in hospitals inspired by miasma theory that improved outcomes.

It was empirical and, though ultimately wrong, useful. Apply as you will to theories of learning.
by lordmathis | 2026-03-10 20:12:27+00:00
Sure, Claude and other SOTA LLMs do generate about 90% of my code but I feel like we are not closer to solving the last 10% than we were a year ago in the days of Claude 3.7. It can pretty reliably get 90% there and then I can either keep prompting it to get the rest done or just do it manually which is quite often faster.
by thomastjeffery | 2026-03-10 20:12:51+00:00
Enough of what distortion? Could you be more specific?

Is it conservatives' success that liberals fail to represent your interests? Probably. Is that success a result of conservatives actually succeeding to represent your interests? Unlikely.

If politics were structured by reason, then liberals might stand a chance at losing that game. Wouldn't that be nice? Of course, that would imply a deserving winner, which is sorely missing from our post-reason situation.
by mym1990 | 2026-03-10 20:12:56+00:00
For the few times that I have tracked myself doing various activities, I have found that I didn't even need to do anything with the data, I was actively changing habits whilst I knew I was being monitored. For example, I wore a GCM for a few weeks and I found it difficult to live my "normal" day to day lifestyle. I wanted to do the things I felt were "right" and "healthy". Whether or not that is a good thing or not is a different topic, but just my 2c.
by ModernMech | 2026-03-10 20:13:00+00:00
The reason it works so well is that everyone’s “personal unique language” really isn’t all that different from what’s been proposed before, and any semantic differences are probably not novel. If you make your language C + transactional memory, the LLM probably has enough information about both to reason about your code without having to be trained on a billion lines.

Probably if you’re trying to be esoteric and arcane then yeah, you might have trouble, but that’s not normally how languages evolve.
by david_iqlabs | 2026-03-10 20:13:10+00:00
It's exactly the experience I had while building iQWEB.

I spent months trying to make an executive narrative generated by AI, but eventually moved away from that approach. The results were often inconsistent or overly generic, which made it difficult to rely on the output for serious reporting.

In the end I shifted to a fully model-driven approach where the narrative is built directly from structured signals and scoring logic. That made the reports far more accurate and evidence-based, and it keeps the output consistent from scan to scan.
by matheusmoreira | 2026-03-10 20:13:10+00:00
It's pointless. Very few people will be convinced by arguments. Refuting someone's entire belief system will not lead them to reevaluate their lives and follow us as though we were Jesus. This just doesn't happen.

The reason for this is people believe things without actually thinking about them. People manage to believe in things that are mutually exclusive. Debating them will just make them hate you for your air of superiority.

Discourse is useful for validating one's own beliefs. Throw ideas out there and if others can't refute them then they are probably good ideas. I don't think there is any other use.
by ritlo | 2026-03-10 20:13:16+00:00
I never use them to replace a comma, certainly, and only rarely a colon.

I find parenthesis often awkward or too heavy, so may use the m-dash to replace those. Especially if what might have been a parenthetical is going to terminate a sentence, an m-dash is much cleaner, as it doesn't need a closing mark, and a terminating paren right before a period looks awful. For long potential-parentheticals that do terminate before the end of the sentence, the m-dash takes up more visual space and marks the beginning and end more-visibly, making for easier scanning. One ought probably re-write to avoid parenthetical statements most of the time in the first place, when there's time, but sometimes they're desirable for stylistic reasons, or just because one lacks the time to improve a draft.

I also use it as a "classier" version of the ellipsis. It doesn't replace every use, but it replaces very-casual, colloquial use of that mark as a kind of harder-comma. Looks much better, I think, and serves the same purpose.

As for the semicolon, I'd never shy away from the semicolon when I can get away with it, but use them rarely nonetheless. I don't think I ever replace them with the m-dash, though. As inline list separators they're great and an m-dash would be an awful replacement, while as soft-periods, they're fine, though most of the time I just use a full period—but not an m-dash, not if a semicolon could have worked.

I do think they're more at-home in, say, fiction than technical writing, but I like having them in my toolbox in any case.
by ACCount37 | 2026-03-10 20:13:32+00:00
Oh, definitely. They could put the foot down and end this pointless charade swiftly. But if Google and Apple had the balls to go against the big media, the world would look very differently.

They are, in fact, the big media themselves now. They have the power, and more than enough of it. No streaming service can afford to skip having an app on iOS or Android - all Apple has to do is crack the whip. Say "this DRM is no longer compliant with our device policy and will be phased out by 2030" and there goes that.

But they still act like they're weird web teens who can't raise a voice against the big media boys without getting bullied for it.

That, or they believe this DRM charade serves them - and user experience can go suck a dick.