MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hkonte | 2026-03-11 00:40:32+00:00
Context overflow is the hardest one to test because you can't reproduce it in unit tests. It shows up in production after the Nth turn.

One mitigation that actually helps: keep your system prompt compact and explicitly structured. Plain prose instructions balloon over iterations as you add edge cases inline. When you decompose the system prompt into typed semantic blocks (role, objective, constraints, output_format), each addition goes to the right section and you can see the size growing. It also makes it easier to identify which sections are eating the most tokens.

I've been building flompt (github.com/Nyrok/flompt) for this, a visual prompt builder that decomposes prompts into 12 typed blocks and compiles to Claude-optimized XML. Keeping instructions structured is partly about quality, but the token budget discipline is a real side benefit.
by lathiat | 2026-03-11 00:44:53+00:00
Have been using that weekly since probably 20 years. Will change your life :)

My other favourite is I very often SSH with -v to figure out why the connection is hanging, you rapidly figure out if DNS is failing, the TCP connection doesn't open, it does open but no traffic flows at all or it opens and SSH negotiation starts but never finishes. You can learn a lot just from this about what is wrong.
by replooda | 2026-03-11 00:45:07+00:00
And the electrical grid surely has a lot to learn from well-managed, not-at-all-patently-evil behemoths run by something other than BS-sputtering SLMs who hadn't already forgotten (assuming they had ever even had something to forget to begin with) what it is like to be a normal person, let alone live like one and face anything resembling the day-to-day challenges one faces, before some of us old enough to drive trucks across state lines were even born.
by gerdesj | 2026-03-11 00:45:40+00:00
Had to look them up (WP), wasn't disappointed. We have the Monster Raving Loony Party in the UK.

One of the Rhino's Party policies stands out - are you sure Trump wasn't born a Cannuck and was stolen at birth by racoons and smuggled down south?

"Annexing the United States, which would take its place as the third territory in Canada's backyard (after the Yukon and the Northwest Territories—Nunavut did not yet exist), in order to eliminate foreign control of Canada's natural resources"
by wolvoleo | 2026-03-11 00:45:47+00:00
I thought they were interesting books but only the first one really captivated me. With the descriptions of Chiba and Straylight.

The sprawl itself didn't really feel real somehow and the stories were more bland and weird. The only character I really liked was Molly.

What really made cyberpunk shine for me was blade runner and the game.

I have only read the books recently though. I think a lot of shine has been taken away by parts of it not Science Fiction anymore. The same way I didn't like Star Trek TOS as a kid and I loved TNG (and I really hate the modern ones by the way)
by vova_hn2 | 2026-03-11 00:46:04+00:00
> security audits

If you are unable to run the multimillion training, then any kind of security audit of the training code is absolutely meaningless, because you have no way to verify that the weights were actually produced by this code.

Also, the analogy with source code/binary code fails really fast, considering that model training process is non-deterministic, so even if are able to run the training, then you get different weights than those that were released by the model developers, then... then what?
by ssl-3 | 2026-03-11 00:47:19+00:00
The very best part about English writing standards is that there are so many to pick from!

At the end of the day, it really is subjective: A reader either likes a style and/or finds that it is conducent to conveying meaning, or they do not.

(Speaking of unlikable styles, I'm just going to take the liberty to interpret the name-calling as your resignation on this matter. Have a nice day, comrade.)
by MayeulC | 2026-03-11 00:48:01+00:00
I typically just create a "new" connection in a separate tab when I want to add tunneling.

I put new in quotes because I use another little-known feature, "ControlMaster". Multiplexes multiple connections into one, it makes making " new" sessions instant (can also be configured to persist a bit after disconnecting). Also useful for tab-completing remote paths. It does not prompt for authentication again, though. And it's a bit annoying when the connection hands (can be solved with ssh -o close, IIRC).
by zelphirkalt | 2026-03-11 00:48:03+00:00
Probably all true, what you say about magit and so on. Message passing values would be an idea, but with the current situation, when 1 concurrent execution units, a process, finishes its job, how does its "private" potentially modified state get merged back into the main Emacs global state? Lets say the concurrently running process creates some buffers to show, but in the meantime the user has rearranged their windows or split their view, but the concurrent process doesn't know about that, since it was after its creation time. Or maybe the user has meanwhile changed an important Emacs setting.

I think the current solutions for running things in separate threads are only for external tools. I guess to do more, a kind of protocol would need to be invented, that tells a process exactly what parts of the copied global state it may change and when it finishes, only those parts will be merged back into the main process' global state.

Maybe I understood things wrong and things are different than I understood them to be. I am not an Emacs core developer. Just a user, who watched a few videos.

Tramp can be sped up a bit. I remember seeing some blog posts about it. I guess if you need to go via more than 1 hop, it can get slow though.

What is the problem with mono repos?
Show HN: Readhn – AI-Native Hacker News MCP Server (Discover, Trust, Understand)
by xodn348 | 2026-03-11 00:49:05+00:00
I felt frustrated finding high-signal discussions on HN, and I started this project to better understand how this community actually works.

That led me to build readhn, an MCP server that helps with three things:

- Discover: find relevant stories/comments by keyword, score, and time window

- Trust: identify credible voices using EigenTrust-style propagation from seed experts

- Understand: show why each result is ranked, with explicit signals instead of a black-box score

It includes 6 tools: discover_stories, search, find_experts, expert_brief, story_brief, and thread_analysis.

I also added readhn setup so AI agents can auto-configure it (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and others) after pip install.

I’d love feedback on:

1) whether these ranking signals match how you evaluate HN quality,

2) trust-model tradeoffs,

3) what would make this useful in your daily workflow.

If this is useful to you, starring the repo helps others discover it:
https://github.com/xodn348/readhn
by ch4s3 | 2026-03-11 00:50:16+00:00
Australia is below the OECD median affordability[1] and the birth rate is 1.48. France is more affordable still and has WAY more services and the birthrate is barely better at 1.56. There's no correlation between housing affordability and birthrates.

[1]https://www.oecd.org/en/data/datasets/oecd-affordable-housin...
by joegaebel | 2026-03-11 00:51:37+00:00
I've found the best way to achieve that is to force the agent to do TDD. Better to get it to do Outside-in TDD. Even better to get it to run Outside-in TDD, then use mutation testing to ensure it has fully covered the logic.

I've written about this and have a POC here for those interested: https://www.joegaebel.com/articles/principled-agentic-softwa...
by tonyhb | 2026-03-11 00:52:08+00:00
Inngest's Durable Endpoints aim to solve the durable API problem without messy DB txns, all within some tolerance: https://www.inngest.com/docs/learn/durable-endpoints.

Other than that, yes, durable execution does all of this for you.

TLDR on Durable Endpoints: you can automatically use steps in API endpoints which checkpoint state in the BG, and then retry on failure. This means you can run jobs in the background _somewhat_ transactionally (somewhat because there's delay between checkpointing) to minimize any tradeoffs here. And, if you want full transactionality, don't buffer checkpoints in the BG and instead do it synchronously.

Also, Redis is good for medium scale load. We're hitting millions of RPS (aggregated) on our services (I work at Inngest) and it doesn't scale so well at this load, at all. We had to invest in other infra.
by pmarreck | 2026-03-11 00:52:14+00:00
Sorry, but this is user error.

1) Most people still don't use TDD, which absolutely solves much of this.

2) Most poople end up leaning too heavily on the LLM, which, well, blows up in their face.

3) Most people don't follow best practices or designs, which the LLM absolutely does NOT know about NOR does it default to.

4) Most people ask it to do too much and then get disappointed when it screws up.

Perfect example:

> you can't trust anything they put out

Yeah, that screams "missing TDD that you vetted" to me. I have yet to see it not try to pass a test correctly that I've vetted (at least in the past 2 months) Learn how to be a good dev first.
by kccqzy | 2026-03-11 00:52:42+00:00
Yes it does depend on the circumstances. You are free to waste your own time to try this at the copyright office, but from my perspective, this project's "100% LLM output" where the human element is just writing prompts and steering the LLM is the same circumstance as my linked case where the human prompted Midjourney 624 times before producing the image the human deemed acceptable. The copyright office has this to say:

> As the Office described in its March guidance, “when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the ‘traditional elements of authorship’ are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user.”
by 8note | 2026-03-11 00:52:52+00:00
i got me a windows mcp setup running in a sandbox, so it can look at screenshots, see the UIA, and click things either by coordinate or by UIA.

i let it run overnight against a windows app i was working on, and that got it from mostly not working to mostly working.

the loop was

1. look at the code and specs to come up with tests
2. predict the result
3. try it
4. compare the prediction against rhe result
5. file bug report, or call it a success

and then switch to bug fixing, and go back around again. Worked really well in geminicli with the giant context window
by hkonte | 2026-03-11 00:53:30+00:00
The output structure problem and the input structure problem are related. MDMA solves the output side: when the LLM knows the spec, it generates valid, parseable components. The input side has the same issue. Vague system prompts produce inconsistent outputs regardless of how good your output parser is.

I've been building flompt (github.com/Nyrok/flompt) to handle the input half, a visual builder that decomposes prompts into typed semantic blocks (role, constraints, output_format) and compiles to Claude-optimized XML. Pairing structured input with a structured output spec like MDMA is the right direction. Both ends of the loop get explicit schema instead of hoping the model infers correctly.
by burntoutgray | 2026-03-11 00:54:24+00:00
ISAs fail to gain traction when the sufficiently smart compilers don't eventuate.

The x86-64 is a dog's breakfast of features. But due to its widespread use, compiler writers make the effort to create compilers that optimize for its quirks.

Itanium hardware designers were expecting the compiler writers to cater for its unique design. Intel is a semi company. As good as some of their compilers are, internally they invested more in their biggest seller and the Itanium never got the level of support that was anticipated at the outset.
by dangus | 2026-03-11 00:54:52+00:00
At this point, the same old shell is a problem.

The notch has aged poorly. Seeing the MacBook Neo launch without a notch has been interesting.

A notch with facial recognition would have been maybe worth that use of space, but it’s just an average webcam and nothing special ever arrived.

I also think that the MacBook Pro models are a little heavy and maybe even a little thick for what they are. There’s probably innovation to be had in some kind of update to the thermal management system.

I see systems like the ASUS Zephyrus G14/G16 doing some amazing work on fitting crazy high power draw hardware into a compact and light form factor, and while I know Apple would never optimize that far in the direction of additional noise, it’s still something I think about.

The MacBook Pro having no innovation in thermal management in 5 years has been fine because they make some of the most efficient chips on the market, but it also means that Apple has been under-optimizing for the golden silicon they have on their hands.
by dillydogg | 2026-03-11 00:54:57+00:00
These are pretty common, physiologic structures associated with infections. They can be just a handful of cells on a slide or be quite large, and I don't know what they found in these infections. I didn't read the original paper. The ectopic lymphoid structures go away after the infection resolves. It seems that the immune system has ways to set up mini lymph node architecture right by the site of infections, which is very sensible. The same process is going on in a more organized way in the draining lymph node in parallel. Research into these was really hot in the 2010s, but people don't seem to be as into them anymore (but my research has also transitioned to innate immunity from adaptive, so it's likely that I'm no longer in that universe).

In general, it doesn't surprise me that when you prime the innate immune system, the adaptive immune system works well. The problem is that pathogens have an incredible suite of tools ready to evade these mechanisms. The doses of the pathogens are typically insanely high too, which I do not think model natural infections well. Anyways, this is intriguing, so I'll take a look at the original paper one of these days. Vaccine research generally is so boring. It's like, we vaccinated, and it worked, or didn't, no mechanism.
by captainkrtek | 2026-03-11 00:55:05+00:00
One challenge with code review as an antidote to poor quality gen-AI code, is that we largely see only the code itself, not the process or inputs.

In the pre-gen-AI days, if an engineer put up a PR, it implied (somewhat) they wrote their code, reviewed it implicitly as they wrote it, and made choices (ie: why is this the best approach).

If Claude is just the new high level programming language, in terms of prompting in natural language, the challenge is that we're not reviewing the natural language, we're reviewing the machine code without knowing what the inputs were. I'm not sure of a solution to this, but something along the lines of knowing the history of the prompting that ultimately led to the PR, the time/tokens involved, etc. may inform the "quality" or "effort" spent in producing the PR. A one-shotted feature vs. a multi-iteration feature may produce the same lines of code and general shape, but one is likely to be higher "quality" in terms of minimal defects.

Along the same lines, when I review some gen-AI produced PR, it feels like I'm reading assembly and having to reverse how we got here. It may be code that runs and is perfectly fine, but I can't tell what the higher level inputs were that produced it, and if they were sufficient.
by overfeed | 2026-03-11 00:55:10+00:00
> I can see street-view using it to perfect the 3D analysing of the photo-video they catch with there google-car.

Waymo recently announced[1] a World Model that does exactly this: using footage from a single-camera dashcam, it can predict/simulate multiple inputs that would have been sensed by a Waymo vehicle on the same travel path (i.e. multiple camera angles, Lidar cloud, etc). On top of this, the model can be prompted to customize the scenario (adding an elephants or a tornado were the example given)

1. https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-f...
by alfg | 2026-03-11 00:55:57+00:00
This is pretty neat. I was experimenting something similar with my ffmpeg frontend to connect to the local machine (and remote) to run arbitrary encoding jobs, thus offloading the encode tasks to another machine, but still with a queuing mechanism locally.

The project is https://ffmpeg-commander.com for generating ffmpeg commands, but with an experimental backend to offload the tasks.

Do you support chunked encoding across multiple servers? It would be a great feature to support larger video files.
by maxglute | 2026-03-11 00:56:04+00:00
PRC has CONUS conventional strikes now, bump 20 refineries and US lose 50% of oil, everything down stream from transportation to industry to agriculture, comparable to to hypothetical three gorges. Hypothetical because US doesn't have munitions to penetrate gravity damn as thick as three gorges (gbu57 included), nor any survivable platforms that can deliver fires at scale to PRC. Ultimately, US MIC not remotely calibrated for PRC sized adversary. So the real answer is now that PRC can conventionally hit US, given PRC have 4x more concrete to crack, varied energy mix vs CONUS dependence on oil, US more strategically vulnerable (from energy to input for calories). At peer war scale, 1 dam might as well as be 20-30 refineries. Extrapolate to other CONUS targets, boeing, f35, spacex manufacturing, data centeres, payment processors... i.e. strategic infra US spent 50 years to sustain hegemony. US more to lose from less set targets and less ability to reconstitute. PRC loses most of PLAN they can rebuild in a few years, US loses most of USN and it will take decades. PRC has 4x more nodes for same relative level of homeland disruption, arguably has better fire projection than US in actual shooting war, as in none of US projection assets can likely survive to deliver fires at scale, vs sheltered PRC global strike missile complex that skips middle men delivery platforms. TLDR global strike = CONUS is Japan now. PRC is also Japan, but PRC is 4 Japans.
by hinkley | 2026-03-11 00:58:38+00:00
My best unit tests are 3 lines, one of them whitespace, and they assert one single thing that's in the requirements.

These are the only tests I've witnessed people delete outright when the requirements change. Anything more complex than this, they'll worry that there's some secondary assertion being implied by a test so they can't just delete it.

Which, really is just experience telling them that the code smells they see in the tests are actually part of the test.

meanwhile:

it("only has one shipping address", ...

is demonstrably a dead test when the story is, "allow users to have multiple shipping addresses", as is a test that makes sure balances can't go negative when we decide to allow a 5 day grace period on account balances. But if it's just one of six asserts in the same massive tests, then people get nervous and start losing time.
by pradn | 2026-03-11 00:58:40+00:00
I'm glad you remember it as well! I didn't think to see if there was a recording or something of this talk, until now. It looks like the text of the talk was published here: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/DijkstraMemorialLectures/Tony...

And the talk wasn't a random talk, but a memorial talk for Dijkstra: "The 2010 Edsger W. Dijkstra Memorial Lecture". I forgot this aspect as well!
by captainkrtek | 2026-03-11 00:58:41+00:00
There seems to be so much value in planning, but in my organization, there is no artifact of the plan aside from the code produced and whatever PR description of the change summary exists. It makes it incredibly difficult to assess the change in isolation of its' plan/process.

The idea that Claude/Cursor are the new high level programming language for us to work in introduces the problem that we're not actually committing code in this "natural language", we're committing the "compiled" output of our prompting. Which leaves us reviewing the "compiled code" without seeing the inputs (eg: the plan, prompt history, rules, etc.)
by dweinus | 2026-03-11 00:59:03+00:00
Spoiler alert: they spent it all.

According to the federal report yesterday:

> CBO estimates spending totaled $621 billion, or $18 billion more than February 2025. Revenue totaled $314 billion, which is up $17 billion from the same time last year due to an increase in collections of customs duties from tariff policies and increased income and payroll tax receipts.
by x0x0 | 2026-03-11 01:00:26+00:00
most websites, particularly those behind cloudflare, are very restrictive even to crawlers that obey robots. Proof: a ton of my time over the last year, and my crawlers very carefully obey robots.

It's hard to see how this isn't extorting folks by offering a working solution that, oh, cloudflare doesn't block. As long as you pay Cloudflare.
by woadwarrior01 | 2026-03-11 01:00:35+00:00
> Apple M3 or later required. MetalRT uses Metal 3.1 GPU features available on M3, M3 Pro, M3 Max, M4, and later chips. M1/M2 support is coming soon. On M1/M2, RCLI automatically falls back to the open-source llama.cpp engine.

So, no support for M5 Neural Accelerators, eh? (Requires Metal 4) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
by Ferret7446 | 2026-03-11 01:01:20+00:00
Our foreparents of FOSS (e.g. RMS) fought to destroy copyright. Copyleft was a subversive mechanism to "neutralize" copyright using the laws of copyright against itself.

Hypothetically, I think this trail of suggestion of treating specs as intellectual property would simply destroy copyright for software, which is what we (the people who believe in FOSS) want. There is already case law protecting specs (e.g. Java)
by saghm | 2026-03-11 01:01:53+00:00
If I'm reading their chart right, they have barely half as much memory for their RISC-V machine compared to any of the others? I don't know enough to know whether it's actually bottlenecked by memory, but it's a bit odd to claim it's slower, give those numbers, and not say anything about it. I'd hope they ruled that out as the source of the discrepancy, but it's hard to tell without confirmation.
by aakashgupta101 | 2026-03-11 01:02:51+00:00
I maintain a Manifest V3 Chrome Extension (SyntaxAI) that acts as a text expander for LLM prompts. Recently, I shipped an update adding support for dynamic variables (e.g., {{tone}}) inside the expansion logic. I also rebranded from the generic "Prompt Manager."

Since the push, users are uninstalling. I haven't changed permissions, and my local tests (esbuild + TypeScript) show no errors with the DOM injection or Shadow DOM UI.

Has anyone experienced a sudden drop just from changing the extension name/icon in the manifest? Do users just assume it's malware and purge it?

What is the current best practice for capturing silent runtime errors in MV3 content scripts? Standard try/catch is swallowing errors, and I can't use remote scripts due to CSP.

Is setting up a custom endpoint for telemetry worth the effort over bundling something like PostHog?
by mr-wendel | 2026-03-11 01:03:09+00:00
I've spent a fair amount of time contracting -- this issue is even more relevant here. While I wasn't spending very much on AI tools, what I did spent was worth every penny... for the company I was supporting :).

Fortunately, there was enough work to be done so productivity increases didn't decrease my billable hours. Even if it did, I still would have done it. If it helps me help others, then it's good for my reputation. Thats hard to put a price on, but absolutely worth what I paid in this case.
by arjie | 2026-03-11 01:03:23+00:00
Oh man, I was hoping I could offer a nicely-crawled version of my site. It would be cool if they offered that for site admins. Then everyone who wanted to crawl would just get a thing they could get for pure transfer cost. I suppose I could build one by submitting a crawl job against myself and then offering a `static.` subdomain on each thing that people could access. Then it's pure HTML instant-load.