MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by homeonthemtn | 2026-03-12 13:00:45+00:00
The general themes here are correct. There is, at a minimum, a derth of intelligence and responsibility both in the white house and across the country's leadership. There are no guards rails, no one looking out for anyone but their billionaire backers.

The idolization of billionaires as paragons of leadership has led to average men with above average income convincing themselves they're an inch short of god.

We'll need a correction, many corrections even, to put this fad to bed.
by pjmlp | 2026-03-12 13:01:04+00:00
Go through one of the more famous books to learn Scheme, in case you haven't yet been introduced into it.

"Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs"

https://web.mit.edu/6.001/6.037/sicp.pdf

See https://planet.racket-lang.org/package-source/neil/sicp.plt/... as well.
by carlosjobim | 2026-03-12 13:01:17+00:00
Casual users prefer using their smartphone instead of their laptop, because the smart phone unlocks instantly and is ready to go. Meanwhile, a PC laptop takes a few minutes to boot up, then when Windows has loaded it will hog all CPU and memory and all the internet bandwidth to download and install updates, while blasting the fans.

The user will make a pathetic attempt to open the web browser to do the hotel or flight or event reservation they wanted to do. Or open a document in Word. Everything is extremely slow because of the update running.

When the user has finished her task, she will close down the computer. Windows will cancel the update which was in progress, so that the user can have that same joyful laptop experience next month when she needs to use it again.

Is it any wonder that people prefer doing things on their smart phones, even with the tiny displays and no keyboards?

This is how the majority of consumers experience using a laptop. Then they try a Mac, where you just open the lid and go. If people knew this, then the consumer PC laptop market would die in three months.
by Robdel12 | 2026-03-12 13:01:26+00:00
I’ve been tempted to buy one and do “real dev work” on it just to show people it’s not this handicapped little machine.

I built multiple iOS apps and went through two start up acquisitions with my M1 MBA as my primary computer, as a developer. And the neo is better than the M1 MBA. I edited my 30-45 min long 4k race videos in FCP on that air just fine.
by throw0101d | 2026-03-12 13:01:37+00:00
> The resulting CO2 is relatively pure, and it's already captured. You can feed it into anther process (such as Urea) or sell it for carbonisation of drinks.

Makes for a pretty good refrigerant as well (R-744):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide#Refrigerant

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerant#Comparative_perfor...
by sd9 | 2026-03-12 13:01:39+00:00
You really can't model 5 data points with a linear regression or a step function. It's just not enough data. Not to mention the models are of different sizes / use cases, and from two different labs. I feel like what we've observed generally is that different labs releasing similarly sized models at similar times are generally pretty similar.

My personal experience is that Claude Opus is ahead of the rest as of now and since about mid 2025, but that's really just vibes. I use Claude Code too and it's hard to tell how much of the improvement is the model vs the harness.

I think the only reasonable thing to read into interesting comparison is the Sonnet 3.5 -> 3.7 -> 4.5. But yeah, you just can't draw a line through this thing.
by floo | 2026-03-12 13:03:07+00:00
thanks! none of the audio is AI generated, it's all human narration, mostly sourced from librivox. (credits show when clicking the info icon)

the idea of learning languages from AI didn't quite sit right with me. but that might be something to circle back to.

integrating learner dictionaries does sound like a fantastic idea. will definitely explore that!
by RobertoG | 2026-03-12 13:03:20+00:00
Why was Hezbollah created? From wikipedia: "Hezbollah was founded in 1982 by Lebanese clerics in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon"

Why was Hamas created? From wikipedia: "was founded by Palestinian Islamic scholar Ahmed Yassin in 1987 after the outbreak of the First Intifada against the Israeli occupation"

What about the Houthis? From wikipedia: "The formation of the Houthi organisations has been described by Adam Baron of the European Council on Foreign Relations as a reaction to foreign intervention."

But sure, the problem is Iran.

There is not evidence about that 20-30k civilians dead. I could say it was 3 and I would have the same proof that you have.

This rationale of 'Iran is not democratic enough' (despise they have a constitution, a parliament and elections) but I will support Saudi Arabia (that light of human rights in the middle east) is nonsense.

All this is done for the geopolitical interest of USA, the oil and Israel. Anyone that say otherwise is taking us for idiots.
by aerhardt | 2026-03-12 13:04:03+00:00
I feel that two things are true at the same time:

1) Something happened during 2025 that made the models (or crucially, the wrapping terminal-based apps like Claude Code or Codex) much better. I only type in the terminal anymore.

2) The quality of the code is still quite often terrible. Quadruple-nested control flow abounds. Software architecture in rather small scopes is unsound. People say AI is “good at front end” but I see the worst kind of atrocities there (a few days ago Codex 5.3 tried to inject a massive HTML element with a CSS before hack, rather than proprerly refactoring markup)

Two forces feel true simultaneously but in permanent tension. I still cannot make out my mind and see the synthesis in the dialectic, where this is truly going, if we’re meaningfully moving forward or mostly moving in circles.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-03-12 13:04:05+00:00
It seems we're basically in agreement, not arguing!

The only quibble I have is whether "feeling good" is the right way to describe how evolution has made us choose to engage in exploration/etc. I don't think it's quite as simple as evolution making things that are good for us feel good, and making things that are bad for us feel bad.

There are a bunch of neurotransmitters and hormones that control how we behave. Evolution discourages us from doing things that are bad for us via a range of emotions including things like fear and disgust (not just "feeling bad"). Evolution also encourages us to do, or keep on doing, things that are good for us via a range of emotions such as enjoyment (this is a tasty fruit), contentment (this feels nice - I'll keep doing it) to curiosity, again not just "feeling good". I think curiosity and exploration (which may lead to learning and discovery, which are good for us) are based around attention and focus ... rather than feeling good, it feels interesting.
by orwin | 2026-03-12 13:04:07+00:00
I think what happened with static image generation is happening with LLMs. Basically the tools around are becoming better, but all the AI improvements stall, the error rate stay the same (but external tools curate the results so it won't be noticeable if you don't run your own model), the accuracy is still slightly improving, but slower and slower, and never reach the 'perfect' point. Basically stablediffusion early 2025
by gus_massa | 2026-03-12 13:04:18+00:00
> (At|Of|In|By|To|On|With) example, ...

All of them are comprehensible, but are wrong, nobody would use them. If a foreigner use them (the translated version) people will understand them, but it will sound odd. Depending on the context, people will correct it or just go on.

Perhaps "As" or "Like" are better, still not 100% accurate but almost.
by hananova | 2026-03-12 13:04:19+00:00
I used to work in test automation for a huge company with terribly annoying IT. I can tell you for a fact that our entire department had well-developed workarounds for the most annoying policies. We even had a few intune 0-days that we literally kept to ourselves to be able to do our jobs properly.

Because in the end, it’s not IT on the line for their odious policies causing late delivery, it was us.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-03-12 13:04:47+00:00
I'm interested by one (not for big data) but only 8 GB or RAM is kinda really sad.

My good old LG Gram (from 2017? 2015? don't even remember) already had 24 GB of RAM. That was 10 years ago.

A decade later I cannot see myself being a laptop with 1/3rd the mem.
by namibj | 2026-03-12 13:04:57+00:00
Do they make any promises about persistence of local NVMe after something like a full-region power outage yet?
Because if you can't do durable commit on a single-region cluster that will be just temporarily unavailable without loosing committed data if something like that happened, it's not quite there unless you still stream a WAL to storage that they do promise you will survive a full blackout of all zones that store (part of) the data.
by WickyNilliams | 2026-03-12 13:05:01+00:00
Abused is probably an understatement. The Tories made some extremely questionable and bizarre appointments in their recent terms. We have the son of Russian oligarch sitting there! Inexplicable advisors whose appointment is a mystery even after FOIA requests. And extreme partisans like Jacob Rees Mogg and Priti Patel.

Imo they should be proposed and voted on by the house. That should at least offer some prevention of peerages as favours, as they quite clearly have been used.
Show HN: Buildwhat.org – Find the next tech idea
by jx887 | 2026-03-12 13:05:34+00:00
The idea came from noticing when reading tech news / comments and thinking "someone should build that".

So I wanted to automate this and track daily - I.e. come up with interesting ideas, provide a scoring and reasoning based on articles and discussions in the tech space.

> buildwhat.org
by em-bee | 2026-03-12 13:05:47+00:00
you can trust the tests that you have written, but what about the tests that you didn't write? can you be sure that your testsuite is complete?

when i do test driven development, all the thinking goes into the tests, and the actual code writes itself. LLMs hardly help make that any faster.

having a complete testsuite may make it easier to use LLMs for refactoring, and adding features, but then you still have to write he tests for the new functionality.
by roxolotl | 2026-03-12 13:05:53+00:00
I don't know that graph to me shows Sonnet 4.5 as worse than 3.7. Maybe the automated grader is finding code breakages in 3.7 and not breaking that out? But I'd much prefer to add code that is a different style to my codebase than code that breaks other code. But even ignoring that the pass rate is almost identical between the two models.
by jameskilton | 2026-03-12 13:06:03+00:00
In all seriousness, if I ever had access to a time machine, I would want to see what the world looks like now in the timeline that Al Gore became president. I fully suspect that September 11 is one of those events that, in Doctor Who parlance, is a static point in all timelines, so I want to see how Gore would have responded, and what ramifications that would have had over the next 20 years.
by blakesterz | 2026-03-12 13:06:26+00:00
"Most of the private credit loans were floating rate and tied to the federal funds rate, which has persisted at a high level over the past three years. Fitch pointed to this as a catalyst for last year's defaults."

I wanted to dismiss that and say ... but it's not really historically high. I suppose it really is not IF you look WAY back. It actually has persisted at a relatively high level if you look back to 2009, which is more than a short time now.

I guess it is fair to say the federal funds rate has persisted at a high level over the past three years now isn't it?

https://www.macrotrends.net/2015/fed-funds-rate-historical-c...

Also interesting to note, "Fitch recorded NO defaults in the software sector last year. The rating agency noted it categorizes software issuers into their main target market sectors when applicable."
by hrmtst93837 | 2026-03-12 13:07:01+00:00
The tough part is that the "core team" can't see inside most model updates so even if you have great tests, judgment calls by the model can change silently and break contracts you didn't even know you had. Traditional monitoring can catch obvious failures but subtle regressions or drift in LLM outputs need their own whole bag of tricks. If you treat LLM integration like any other code lib you'll be chasing ghosts every time the upstream swaps a training data set or tweaks a prompt template.
by danshalev7 | 2026-03-12 13:07:21+00:00
Hi HN, I work on FalkorDB, an open-source graph database.

We just launched FalkorDB as a Snowflake Native App. If you find yourself writing recursive CTEs and chains of self-joins to answer multi-hop relationship queries in Snowflake, this gives you Cypher instead. A variable-length path query that takes 80+ lines of SQL becomes about 3 lines of Cypher, and you run it from your Snowflake worksheet without moving data anywhere.

The way it works is you bind your tables through Snowflake's reference binding UI (scoped read access, no manual GRANT statements), and the FalkorDB engine runs on Snowflake Container Services with isolated compute, separate from your warehouse workloads. Data never leaves your Snowflake account.

We'd love to hear from anyone who has dealt with multi-hop traversals in Snowflake, whether you stuck with recursive CTEs, reached for dbt, or tried something else entirely.
by downsplat | 2026-03-12 13:07:32+00:00
For most situations, I deal with this by keeping dates as strings throughout the app, not objects. They get read from the db as strings, passed around as strings. If I need datetime calculations, I use the language's datetime objects to do it and convert right back to string. Display formatting for users happens at the last moment, in the template.

No-one seems to like this style, but I find it much simpler than converting on db read/write and passing datetime objects around.
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-03-12 13:07:38+00:00
> The problem with erasing biases is that you cannot look at any statistics. The internet and training set can be free of any form of -ism, and the models would still be expected to have biases. In fact it's something desirable, because statistical inferences are a valuable tool.

I’m sorry but I can’t let you get away with this terrible argument and conclusion. No one argues for completely erasing bias (especially the scientific form of the word bias), that’s a strawman.

Strong proponents argue that we should all be aware of our biases, and attempt to adjust our opinions and behavior according to the results of that exercise of self-reflection. Stronger proponents might even argue that the inability to perform this exercise of self-reflection is a path to bigotry.

Being racist AF isn’t something that you can excuse with “statistical inference”, and your comment sounds like it’s flirting with that concept. It’s the intellectually juvenile pseudo-philosophy that the techbro scene is absolutely riddled with like a malignant sexually transmitted infection, all the way up to Mu$k and Thi€l.

Back to LLM world, the issue is that there is no diversity in its bias: one LLM, one bias. If everyone uses the same dozen or so state-of-the-art LLMs, then all of our processes will have the same dozen or so biases. That would kind of suck if you were a member of a group that those LLMs happened to be biased against. LLMs are also famously not capable of self-reflection, barring the Rube Goldberg machines that people have built on top of them to simulate thought processes.
by cmiles8 | 2026-03-12 13:07:54+00:00
Private credit is cracking and lending standards are tightening behind the scenes. If you’re not building cash reserves right now you’re going to wish you had. The distressed opportunities ahead go to whoever kept dry powder while everyone else was chasing growth.

If your business is light on free cash flow (ie everyone in AI at the moment) buckle up as there are storm clouds ahead. If you’re running a business that relies on external cash (VCs, loans/bonds, etc) to keep things going things will get very ugly.
by JCattheATM | 2026-03-12 13:08:05+00:00
> An internet search will provide it to you readily.

I'm not interested in doing the work to support your point for you.

> Your point about Citizen Kane and Independence Day 2 is nonsensical, and presumes we all have the same goals when consuming entertainment. I'm not going to engage in that argument.

It's not nonsensical at all, makes no presumptions and makes the point perfectly. You don't want to engage because you are unable to do so, which is absolutely fine.
by sigbottle | 2026-03-12 13:08:15+00:00
LLM's have 100% gotten better, but it's hard to say if it's "intrinsically better", if that makes sense.

> OpenAI’s leading researchers have not completed a successful full-scale pre-training run that was broadly deployed for a new frontier model since GPT-4o in May 2024 [1]

That's evidence against "intrinsically better". They've also trained on the entire internet - we only have 1 internet, so.

However, late 2024 was the introduction of o1 and early 2025 was Deepseek R1 and o3. These were definitely significant reasoning models - the introduction of test time compute and significant RL pipelines were here.

Mid 2025 was when they really started getting integrated with tool calling.

Late 2025 is when they really started to become agentic and integrate with the CLI pretty well (at least for me). For example, codex would at least try and run some smoke tests for itself to test its code.

In early 2026, the trend now appears to be harness engineering - as opposed to "context engineering" in 2025, where we had to preciously babysit 1 model's context, we make it both easier to rebuild context (classic CS trick btw: rebooting is easier than restoring stale state [2]) and really lean into raw cli tool calling, subagents, etc.

[1] https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/tpuv7-google-takes-a-s...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_panic

FWIW, AI programming has still been as frustrating as it was when it was just TTC in 2025. Maybe because I don't have the "full harness" but it still has programming styles embedded such as silent fallback values, overly defensive programming, etc. which are obvoiusly gleaned from the desire to just pass all tests, rather than truly good programming design. I've been able to do more, but I have to review more slop... also the agents are really unpleasant to work with, if you're trying to have any reasonable conversation with them and not just delegate to them. It's as if they think the entire world revolves around them, and all information from the operator is BS, if you try and open a proper 2-way channel.

It seems like 2026 will go full zoom with AI tooling because the goal is to replace devs, but hopefully AI agents become actually nice to work with. Not sycophantic, but not passively aggressively arrogant either.
by Ian_Kerins | 2026-03-12 13:08:53+00:00
A lot of the discussion around the /crawl endpoint seems to miss a key detail in the docs. The crawler explicitly identifies itself as a bot, respects robots.txt, and does not bypass CAPTCHAs, WAF rules, or Cloudflare Bot Management.

So technically it’s a nice managed crawling system, but in practice it only works on sites that already allow bots to crawl them. For many real-world data extraction use cases, the problem isn’t crawling infrastructure, it’s dealing with sites that actively block bots. In those cases you still need traditional scraping approaches.
by saulpw | 2026-03-12 13:09:12+00:00
Mine has been disputed several times (because it changed due to name change and wasn't updated). There is a very clear mechanism to dispute that decision, and in fact that's why they ask for your phone number and/or email on the envelope--so when they want to dispute it, they have a way of contact for you to do what's necessary to make the ballot count (provisionally, only if the race is close enough for your vote to matter).
by tonipotato | 2026-03-12 13:09:45+00:00
Cool project. The deterministic layer first → LLM only for edge cases is the right call, keeps it fast for the obvious stuff.

One thing I'm curious about: when the LLM does kick in to resolve an "ask", what context does it get? Just the command itself, or also what happened before it? Like curl right after the agent read .env feels very different from curl after reading docs — does nah pick up on that?
Show HN: Smart Local Search – open-source local AI search for files and photos
by dan99nik | 2026-03-12 13:10:00+00:00
I built Smart Local Search – a privacy-first local AI search tool.

It finds files, photos and code by describing them.

Everything runs locally:
- no cloud
- no telemetry
- open source

GitHub:
https://github.com/dan99nik/smart-locale-search
by mothballed | 2026-03-12 13:10:02+00:00
Well it only took 5 years of destroying responsible savers with every policy imaginable to make sure they get crushed by those who availed themselves of the negative real rate loan inflation machine. How many people are left remaining that were dumb enough to take that strategy and are still standing? If you were operating on a cash basis for the last 5 years you were mostly wiped out by people leveraged to the 9s on debts and meanwhile your buying power was erased.
by FrustratedMonky | 2026-03-12 13:10:06+00:00
That was the structural problem.

But it was swept under the rug, it was hidden by market constantly going up.

Ponzi schemes can hide in a market going up, because nobody is trying to pull money back out.

Suddenly everyone wanting their money, and the shortfall suddenly become apparent.

Oil prices suddenly made everyone try to pull money out, and 'woops there is nothing here'.
by utopiah | 2026-03-12 13:10:58+00:00
> automatic programming can be evaluated as producing the same results regardless of the user using it.

That's something I've argued here several time and that's actually rarely done. Namely it's totally different when a non-developer use such tool for programming vs when a (senior) SWE does. That's a fundamental point which IMHO a potential for (non-riskfree) augmentation versus replacement. Replacement though makes for excellent narrative (if not scapegoat) yet if the tool is "productive" (with KPIs to agree on) only with skilled staff that it's not the reality, just a "wish".
by zozbot234 | 2026-03-12 13:11:01+00:00
The latest open LLMs, released around Chinese New Year are quite amazing, including wrt. smaller models that can be run seamlessly even on a cheap Macbook Neo. These smaller models aren't good enough for agentic use cases or coding yet (though the Qwen A3B models are something to watch since they might become viable even on that hardware!) but they'll be quite OK for more casual uses of AI.
by giarc | 2026-03-12 13:11:22+00:00
What I don't see mentioned here is the number of resumes and cover letters written by AI. I've also interviewed people where it was obvious they were using some sort of AI tool to assist in answering questions. So the criticism goes both ways.

This is why I only schedule in person interviews now. Then neither party can use AI and there's something about meeting people in real life to get to know them.