MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by numpad0 | 2026-03-10 17:42:20+00:00
It is a bad idea but not in the way you think. FHE hardware don't decrypt data on-chip. It's like using the Diffie-Hellman key exchange for general computation. The data and operations stay encrypted at any given moment while outside your client device.

The textbook example application of FHE is phone book search. The server "multiply" the whole phonebook database file with your encrypted query, and sends back the whole database file to you every time regardless of queries. When you decrypt the file with the key used to encrypt the query, the database is all corrupt and garbled except for the rows matching the query, thereby causing the search to have practically occurred. The only information that exists in the clear are query and the size of entire database.

Sounds fantastically energy-efficient, no? That's the problem with FHE, not risks of backdooring.
by kazinator | 2026-03-10 17:42:26+00:00
Simply to call a helper function and have it return, you need to create a lexical closure and pass that as the return continuation to that helper. Now since everything is being allocated off the stack, that makes the closure a bit cheaper: the environment is all on the stack, and so it is much the same as a frame link pointer plus return address. The difference is that the callee can run out of stack, and have to invoke a stack reset. During the stack reset, the previously cheaply allocated return continuation/lambda will be moved to the heap --- along with others like it up the call stack.
by jononor | 2026-03-10 17:42:34+00:00
Very nice development towards more open hardware. And super powerful at that. The verification technique is alos super interesting. Have ordered a small set to play with, and to support the project.

There are also several RISC-V microcontrollers on run 1 of Wafer Space, hopefully some of those will also be available online soon.
https://github.com/wafer-space/ws-run1
by Izkata | 2026-03-10 17:42:53+00:00
> Literate programming sounds like "you need to comment pretty much everything because code is generally hard to understand".

You and I read code. Came so naturally for me that I didn't realize others don't. But over the years and with some weird chats I've realized that for a lot of developers it's more like "deciphering code", like they're slowly translating a human language they only vaguely know - and it never even crossed their mind that it was possible to learn a programming language to the point you could just read it.
by bronlund | 2026-03-10 17:42:57+00:00
I disagree. This is like the invention of the steam machine which may be the most important factor in kickstarting the industrial revolution. I am pretty sure none of the guys who were there, had any clue as to how this was going to change the world, but I suspect at least some, knew that; this is something else.

People are bitching now about how AI has ruined coding, not understanding that for most people, there will be no code, no applications, no operating systems. AI will pretend to be all of that, and doing it way better.

This is half a year ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGiqrsv530Y
by hedora | 2026-03-10 17:42:57+00:00
A much better approach would be to hold platforms responsible if they allow a stranger that does not have explicit parental consent to communicate with or get information about a minor.

This would block the most common classes of abuse on platforms like Roblox, Fortnight, Lego (kids) Fortnight, YouTube Kids, Minecraft, and "educational" social networks / games.

Note that it doesn't require any centralized surveillance at all. Parents just need to control the kids' ability to create random accounts, by (for example) turning on parental controls as they already exist on most tablets/phones, and blocking app installation / email applications (or other 2FA vectors).

When the parent allows an account to be created, they just tick the "kid mode" box. This even works with shared devices that don't support multiple accounts (so, iPads and iPhones).
by cimi_ | 2026-03-10 17:43:02+00:00
> They get the team that built it and have more people on the AI initiative who are consumer-centric.

Who are comfortable releasing systems with horrible security, while proudly stating they never read the code? And with metrics that can be gamed by anyone, but that got reported to literally the entire world?

> The lesson here is to spend less time focused on doing what you think is the right thing and spend more time tinkering.

I'd say the lesson here is that clown world keeps on giving, but hey, maybe I'm just jealous ;)
by SlinkyOnStairs | 2026-03-10 17:43:15+00:00
The immediate problem is just cost. Open Source has no money, so any fancy AI solution is off the table immediately.

In terms of your plan though, you're just building a generative adversarial network here. Automated review is relatively easy to "attack".

Yet human contributors don't put up with having to game an arbitrary score system. StackOverflow imploded in no small part because of it.
by silisili | 2026-03-10 17:43:26+00:00
I've tried these as apps before, and they never worked that well unfortunately. Perhaps the ticks aren't loud enough, or phone mics aren't that great, or background noise gets picked up as ticks, who knows.

I bought and use the item linked below. It's big, and feels like tech straight out of the cold war era, but works great.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0081SSJZG
by brabel | 2026-03-10 17:43:32+00:00
Hm I agree completely. Even as someone who appreciates SLIME and emacs. IntelliJ and even VS Code are excellent, even if heavy. Just use it on a beefy laptop and it won’t feel slow and bloated at all. If you find it distracting, it’s because you don’t know which settings to use to make them just right for your taste. Both can behave as Notepad if you want.
by kerkeslager | 2026-03-10 17:44:04+00:00
> While working on Cutlet, though, I allowed Claude to generate every single line of code. I didn’t even read any of the code. Instead, I built guardrails to make sure it worked correctly (more on that later).

The "more on that later" was unit tests (also generated by Claude Code) and sample inputs and outputs (which is basically just unit tests by a different name).

This is... horrifically bad. It's stupidly easy to make unit tests pass with broken code, and even more stupidly easy when the test is also broken.

These "guardrails" are made of silly putty.
by arpit077 | 2026-03-10 17:44:24+00:00
Hey HN, big update on 3DIMLI – the no-code storefront builder for digital creators.

We just shipped two new product types: Software and Video. Creators can now sell software with built-in license key verification, and video content – all from their own branded storefront.

What's new:

• Software product type with license verification – creators can generate and manage license keys directly from the dashboard.

• Video product type – sell video courses, tutorials, stock footage, or any video content.

• Multi payment gateway support – connect Stripe, PayPal, or Razorpay. Payments go directly and instantly to the creator's account. We never touch the money. Zero commission.

3DIMLI is a storefront builder where creators own their brand, their customers, and their revenue. No marketplace fees, no middlemen. Just connect your payment gateway and start selling.

Still in beta and free to use. Would love feedback – what would make you switch from your current setup?
by crazygringo | 2026-03-10 17:44:47+00:00
OK, I see what you're saying, thanks for clarifying.

But headlines are short. This is so common even in mainstream news, I can't really complain about it. Especially when the full claim with "up to" is printed in the very first paragraph.

And the entire point of the article is not about which users max out their subscriptions. It's about conflating retail prices with actual costs.

So maybe the headline would be more accurate with "up to" in it, but the article itself is totally fine, and does not hinge on that distinction. The article is certainly not about a strawman.
by ctoa | 2026-03-10 17:44:58+00:00
The earliest neural network work on perceptrons was done in an applied contract lab for the US Navy, it was not done in an academic setting.

Backpropagation has been reinvented multiple times, because it is a basic application of the chain rule. The earliest recognizable usage of it is in control theory at NASA during the Apollo program.

It's a mistake to be dismissive of academic work which has been very important, but it's equally a mistake to think that academia is the sole source of foundational work.
by rosasalberto | 2026-03-10 17:45:26+00:00
It’s not public yet — the identity wallet is still in private beta.

The idea is that users control their identity. They create a Didit account where they can verify themselves, add credentials, revoke connections, or delete everything at any time. We don’t store raw biometrics or documents in the wallet layer — only derived attributes like estimated_age, is_human, is_unique, or a face embedding used for matching.

Services request specific scopes (similar to “Sign in with X”), like is_over_18 or is_human, and the user explicitly approves what gets shared.

On age detection: it’s mainly for low-risk age-gating (social, gaming, adult content, etc.), where asking every user for an ID kills conversion. For higher-risk cases you’d still use full ID verification.
by kazinator | 2026-03-10 17:45:41+00:00
Machine translations do not contain a literal quote of the source material, yet are covered by copyright. For instance, binary executables do not quote the source code.

I predict that the LLM will be regarded as a binary-like machine translation of the source materials.

Lossiness is a red herring. You can't claim that a JPEG photograph doesn't violate copyright because JPEG is lossy.
by vessenes | 2026-03-10 17:46:12+00:00
Just tried it. really cool, and a fun tech demo with rcli. I filed a bug report; not everything is loading properly when installed via homebrew.

Quick request: unsloth quants; bit per bit usually better. Or more generally UI for huggingface model selections. I understand you won't be able to serve everything, but I want to mix and match!

Also - grounding:

"open safari" (safari opens, voice says: "I opened safari")
"navigate to google.com in safari" (nothing happens, voice says: "I navigated to google.com")

Anyway, really fun.
by mrexroad | 2026-03-10 17:46:13+00:00
I’ve leaned heavily on em-dashes over the years to help reduce my lisp-worthy overuse of parentheses. My add brain loves adding tangents, (likely unnecessary) context, and excessive completeness. I like both em-dashes and parenthesis b/c they’re visually easy to parse and skim past if the reader finds the extra detail unnecessary.

Funny enough, my kid asked me to proofread their essay the other week, and I noted some awkward comma usage and inconsistent voice. We talked through options for breaking apart sentence clauses as well as punctuation that could do the heavy lifting—specifically semicolons and em-dashes. They thought the em-dash looked cool af and semicolons looked harsh. “I love em-dashes, they’re so cool!”, was fun to hear a middle schooler say.

Ofc their teacher said that their essay was “likely 85% AI assisted.” Fortunately, the change log showed continual revisions during school hours on a managed device (ChatGPT blocked). I emailed their teacher that I had proofed it, highlighted an awkward spot or two, and pointed my kid to grammar devices they could explore themselves and apply if they wished. No harm, no foul.

Fast forward, my kid and their friend were talking about it and the friend told them to do what they do: intentionally sprinkle in grammar / spelling mistakes. le sigh I suggested to them that LLMs can easily do that too and they’re better off just learning to write well as it’s em-dash today and something else tomorrow; that the worst thing would be to dumb down style/vocab/grammar for fear of appearing LLM generated.
by eddythompson80 | 2026-03-10 17:46:14+00:00
It’s not just technical content. Just the other day I was reading a post by an employed homes guy on r/seattle. The post was about his experience of being both newly employed but still homeless.

The post was full of “this is not a scheduling conflict problem, this is a structural issue with the city”, “this is not me asking for a handout, this is struggling to survive within the system”

While I get that he might have written a paragraph of his experience, and asked ChatGPT to clean it up or reword it, it was just… whatever.
by marssaxman | 2026-03-10 17:47:00+00:00
The constraints enforced in the language still matter. A language which offers certain correctness guarantees may still be the most efficient way to build a particular piece of software even when it's a machine writing the code.

There may actually be more value in creating specialized languages now, not less. Most new languages historically go nowhere because convincing human programmers to spend the time it would take to learn them is difficult, but every AI coding bot will learn your new language as a matter of course after its next update includes the contents of your website.
by tristor | 2026-03-10 17:47:13+00:00
> What would you build if on-device AI were genuinely as fast as cloud?

I think this has to be the future for AI tools to really be truly useful. The things that are truly powerful are not general purpose models that have to run in the cloud, but specialized models that can run locally and on constrained hardware, so they can be embedded.

I'd love to see this able to be added in-path as an audio passthrough device so you can add on-device native transcriptioning into any application that does audio, such as in video conferencing applications.
by hedora | 2026-03-10 17:47:27+00:00
On our TV, using the official YT app, it just rapid cycles through the first few seconds of each ad. As far as I can tell, this is part of a Google-operated display fraud scheme.

I wonder how the new standards will impact our user experience.

Will they just halve the length of time each video is run and charge for twice as many impressions? They could also just run the ads in the background (with the video displayed over it + ad audio muted).
by omoikane | 2026-03-10 17:47:44+00:00
You can also get a dog to factor 15, see pages 9-11 of this paper:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44608622 - Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with a VIC-20, an Abacus, and a Dog (2025-07-18, 25 comments)
by mrguyorama | 2026-03-10 17:48:50+00:00
How is a Linear stream of symbols able to capture the relationships of a real world?

It's like the people who are so hyped up about voice controlled computers. Like you get a linear stream of symbols is a huge downgrade in signals, right? I don't want computer interaction to be yet more simplified and worsened.

Compare with domain experts who do real, complicated work with computers, like animators, 3D modelers, CAD, etc. A mouse with six degrees of freedom, and a strong training in hotkeys to command actions and modes, and a good mental model of how everything is working, and these people are dramatically more productive at manipulating data than anyone else.

Imagine trying to talk a computer through nudging a bunch of vertexes through 3D space while flexibly managing modes of "drag" on connected vertexes. It would be terrible. And no, you would not replace that with a sentence of "Bot, I want you to nudge out the elbow of that model" because that does NOT do the same thing at all. An expert being able to fluidly make their idea reality in real time is just not even remotely close to the instead "Project Manager/mediocre implementer" relationship you get prompting any sort of generative model. The models aren't even built to contain specific "Style", so they certainly won't be opinionated enough to have artistic vision, and a strong understanding of what does and does not work in the right context, or how to navigate "My boss wants something stupid that doesn't work and he's a dumb person so how do I convince him to stop the dumb idea and make him think that was his idea?"
by alfanick | 2026-03-10 17:49:20+00:00
I'm not looking for STT->AI->TTS, I'm looking for truly good voice-to-text experience* on Linux (and others). Siri/iOS-Dictation is truly good when it comes to understanding the speech. Something this level on Linux (and others) would be great, yeah always listening, maybe sending the data somewhere, but give me UX - hidden latency, optimizing for first chars recognized - a good (virtual) input device.
by ChadNauseam | 2026-03-10 17:49:28+00:00
You can do all the steps I mentioned as a random contributor. I've done it before. But I agree that donations are better than just prompting claude "implement this feature, make no mistakes" and hoping it one-shots it. Honestly, even carefully thought-out feature requests are much more valuable than that. At least if the maintainer vibe-codes it they don't have to worry that you deliberately introduced a security vulnerability or back door.
by myrmidon | 2026-03-10 17:49:33+00:00
All of them? You see sub-replacement birthrates in basically every halfway wealthy nation, there's almost no exceptions.

I'd argue that the primary cause is that children no longer provide direct value
to the family they're raised in; their roles as supplemental labor during adolescence and as "pension plan" have been devalued/taken over by institutions, while the costs for raising them have only increased.
by bigyabai | 2026-03-10 17:49:37+00:00
> there will need to be trust at some point in the system

This is why you don't have a technologically effective solution, here. "Trust" in this situation is a weasel word for surveillance, just like the pinkie promise that Client Side Scanning would never be abused by the government. Trust would not stop child abuse, or meaningfully prevent access to online pornography. Trust is not a technical solution, it's a political goal.

If you have a productive suggestion, now is the time to voice it. All of the non-technical hand wringing is not helpful either, and feeds into the slippery slope logic that HN should be avoiding.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-03-10 17:50:13+00:00
> I've done nothing to argue that the harm isn't real, downplayed it, nor misrepresented it.

You're literally saying that the upsides of hallucinanigenic gifts are worth the downside of collapsing society. I'd say that that is downplaying and misrepreting the issue. You even go so far to say

>Telling people "no AI!" (even if very well defined on what that means) is toothless against people with little regard for making the world (or just one specific repo) a better place.

These aren't balanced arguments taking both sides into considerations. It's a decision that your mindset is the only right one and anyone else is a opposing progress.
by slopinthebag | 2026-03-10 17:50:56+00:00
Re. productivity, if LLM's are a genuine boost with 1/3 of the work, neutral 1/3 of the time, and actually worse 1/3 of the time, it's likely we aren't really seeing performance improvements as 1) people are using them for everything and b) we're still learning how to best use them.

So I expect over time we will see genuine performance improvements, but Amdahl's law dictates it won't be as much as some people and ceo's are expecting.
by _heimdall | 2026-03-10 17:52:17+00:00
> Sorry but this is just too surface-level of an understanding of how law actually works that I can't justify engaging with it.

This comes off a bit strangely when you go on to engage with the discussion. It seems unnecessarily dismissive.

Legal precedent within the US does not stop at state lines. A ruling in Florida is applicable present in California.

My argument here, though, isn't that California's approach is illegal or would be overturned if challenged based on this Florida precedent. My point was simply that the state, California in this case, is claiming effectively new authority by playing word games to get around precedent that could otherwise deem their use of traffic cams illegal.

I'm still not sure how you can so blanketly deem automated traffic enforcement a net good. There are a ton of details that would matter, from how its implemented and overseen to how tight or broad the authority is and what that means for future use of the same authority.
by vova_hn2 | 2026-03-10 17:52:29+00:00
This is really funny and I do feel ashamed for my laziness.

I didn't expect ChatGPT to make such trivial mistake, although, I have no idea which model do they use on the free plan these days.

The correct code is, of course:

text.replace("—", "\U00010EAD\U00010EAC")

...in case anyone is curious.
by lurn_mor | 2026-03-10 17:52:32+00:00
I blogged about the shift to 'local only' web apps that seem to be proliferating: http://www.undr.com/understatement/2026/feb13_web_apps_work_...

With a future of ChromeOS Flex running on millions of older hardware, the browser is the new 'App Store'.

...and congrats on reducing your dependency on third party tools!
by vizzier | 2026-03-10 17:53:00+00:00
Alas, tubers feel the need to add sponsorships these days through either greed or reduced google revenue. Premiums "skip frequently skipped section" is about as easy as it can be to skip over them without blocking them entirely, short of using sponsorblock.

I'm not sure where the legality lies with them being able to skip it automatically if you're a premium user, I'd imagine their uploaders wouldn't be happy though.
by 0x3f | 2026-03-10 17:53:36+00:00
That's not how I read the transformer stuff around the time it was coming out: they had concrete hypotheses that made sense, not just random attempts at striking it lucky. In other words, they called their shots in advance.

I'm not aware that we have notably different data sources before or after transformers, so what confounding event are you suggesting transformers 'lucked' in to being contemporaneous with?

Also, why are we seeing diminishing returns if only the data matters. Are we running out of data?
by ajay-b | 2026-03-10 17:54:29+00:00
Does anyone have a good study as to how much advertising is too much advertising? There are some content creators on YouTube I enjoy watching but it's an ad every five minutes and it just ruins it all. For some, I've reached the point where I don't bother watching anymore because the ads are just too much. I sympathize with creators wishing to make money, but ... it's just becoming relentless. I'd love to see a study or even better YouTube internal analysis of how much viewers are willing to take before they just say enough.
by b5chm1d7 | 2026-03-10 17:54:42+00:00
Every game naturally evolves into a meta game.

The players that continue to play the game as it was designed become increasingly frustrated by the meta players who are able to play in new ways incompatible with the game’s intended vision.

But I think no attempt to eliminate the meta ever really works, because the game is a player itself, and the whole thing is more dynamic and ever-changing than it seems regardless
by saltybytes | 2026-03-10 17:55:19+00:00
That's right! It's called "merit order" [0]. Best scenario would be to either decouple the gas price from the price of electricity or get rid of the merit order system altogether. The gas price jacks up the price of kWh by so much that alternative energy providers (wind, hydro, solar,...) are making fortunes! The EU is not interested to change that although Spain and Portugal swolled the penalty for suspending the merit order system. Something I find to be long overdue in other EU countries as well since the elevated price for electricity drives inflation. A lot. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merit_order
[1] https://www.eurelectric.org/in-detail/electricity_prices_exp...