MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by roromainmain | 2026-03-10 23:09:32+00:00
Agree. LLMs operate in the domain of language and symbols, but the universe contains much more than that. Humans also learn a great deal from direct phenomenological experience of the world, even without putting those experiences into words.
I remember a talk by Yann LeCun where he pointed out that in just the first couple of years of life, a human baby is exposed to orders of magnitude more sensory data (vision, sound, etc.) than what current LLMs are typically trained on. This seems like a major limitation of purely language-based models.
by tomhow | 2026-03-10 23:09:37+00:00
This post is about the launch of a YC company and its product. It's reasonable that when a company launches a product, the discussion is focused on the product that it is launching. We moderate that way whether it's a YC company's Launch HN or anyone else posting a Show HN. Keeping discussion on-topic is one of the most important things we moderators do, and is the main reason HN is a place people like to participate.

Criticisms of the company for past conduct are valid, and we're leaving the criticisms here for everyone to see as per our long-standing policy. But it should be viewed in context: a thread about that event already had 11 hours on the front page 12 days ago. They have been heavily criticized for what they did, are carrying reputational consequences, and they should have learned that the HN community and GitHub users and management are strongly disapproving of this kind of activity. They should be given the chance to learn and reform and be judged for what they do now and into the future.

The most on-topic thing to discuss in this thread is the company's product, and there seems to be some good discussion about that.
by azan_ | 2026-03-10 23:10:34+00:00
> Suggesting that we should leave such things to the sole discretion of the economy and taxes describes a strange unhuman-like society that we don't live in.

Well, the choice is: either we leave it to economy and taxes which work, or we'll rely on shaming which doesn't work. To put it another way - it depends if you want to actually fix the problem or just want to have a moral high ground and don't really care about solving the problem.
by matheusmoreira | 2026-03-10 23:11:02+00:00
Politicians don't convince each other via logical arguments, they convince each other with leverage, favors and all sorts of secret underhanded backroom deals. That's how power works.

I know it's a depressing take. It's a depressing world. And it's only getting worse. We're in an age where truth is essentially irrelevant if not actively detrimental to whatever cause any given person believes in.
by EdNutting | 2026-03-10 23:11:06+00:00
There's having An honorary degree... and then there's having 6 of them plus numerous other awards, and all the achievements to back them up :)

Regardless, I've met people with only honorary doctorates, and it's a mixed bag when it comes to preferred titles. Often, though, the ones that really care, soon acquire a 'superior' title anyway, so it ends up becoming a moot point.
by maxwg | 2026-03-10 23:12:02+00:00
The training methods are largely published in their open research papers - though arguably some open weight companies are less open with the exact details.

Realistically a model will never be "compiled" 1:1. Copyrighted data is almost certainly used and even _if_ one could somehow download the petabytes of training data - it's quite likely the model would come out differently.

The article seems to be talking more about the difficulties of fine tuning models though - a setup problem that likely exists in all research, and many larger OSS projects that get more complicated.
by hkonte | 2026-03-10 23:12:17+00:00
The "plan before you generate" framing is exactly right. Conceptual design forces you to separate concerns before writing code. Same discipline applied one level up: structuring the prompt before passing it to the model.

The failure mode I see is people writing one long prose prompt and iterating on it as a unit. When output is wrong you can not tell which part failed. Was it the role definition, the constraints, the output format? No way to know.

Decomposing the prompt into typed named regions first (role, objective, constraints, context, output format) mirrors the modularity concept from Essence of Software. Each region has a single purpose and can be adjusted independently.

I built github.com/Nyrok/flompt for this, a visual prompt builder that decomposes prompts into 12 semantic blocks and compiles to Claude-optimized XML. Same "design before you build" principle at the prompt layer.
by ssk42 | 2026-03-10 23:12:51+00:00
Fun to see you not on tildes.

Setting up a clean room is one of the only ways to do Evals on agentic harnesses. Especially prevalent with Windsurf which doesn’t have an easy CLI start.

So how? The easiest answer when allowed is docker. Literally new image per prompt. There’s also flags with Claude to not use memory and from there you can use -p to have it just be like a normal cli tool. Windsurf requires manual effort of starting it up in a new dir.
by eKIK | 2026-03-10 23:13:28+00:00
Dw, there's quite a lot of push back against AI in some of the communities I hang around in. It's just rarely seldom visible here on HN.

It's usually not about the price, but more about the fact that a few megacorps and countries "own" the ability to work this way. This leads to some very real risks that I'm pretty sure will materialize at some point in time, including but not limited to:

- Geopolitical pressure - if some ass-hat of a president hypothetically were to decide "nuh uh - we don't like Spain, they're not being nice to us!", they could forbid AI companies to deliver their services to that specific country.

- Price hikes - if you can deliver "$100 worth of value" per hour, but "$1000 worth of value" per hour with the help of AI, then provider companies could still charge up to $899 per hour of usage and it'd still make "business sense" for you to use them since you're still creating more value with them than without them.

- Reduction in quality - I believe people who were senior developers _before_ starting to use AI assisted coding are still usually capable of producing high quality output. However every single person I know who "started coding" with tools like Claude Code produce horrible horrible software, esp. from a security p.o.v. Most of them just build "internal tools" for themselves, and I highly encourage that. However others have pursued developing and selling more ambitious software...just to get bitten by the fact that it's much more to software development than getting semi-correct output from an AI agent.

- A massive workload on some open source projects. We've all heard about projects closing down their bug bounty programs, declining AI generated PRs etc.

- The loss of the joy - some people enjoy it, some people don't.

We're definitely still in the early days of AI assisted / AI driven coding, and no one really knows how it'll develop...but don't mistake the bubble that is HN for universal positivity and acclaim of AI in the coding space :).
by tkcranny | 2026-03-10 23:13:34+00:00
Their working is exceptionally thorough, all the concerns about additional maths and transformations is well considered. I really have to wonder if introducing any semantic-changing transformations for what I’m guessing are minuscule savings of bytes is worth it though. Safe things like stripping white space and shortening identifiers would be the major contributors to minification surely. How many CSS colours need to be defined for oklab rounding to even affect how many tcp packets are sent for instance?
by elch | 2026-03-10 23:14:13+00:00
He (Lawson) can only point to his paper from 1967 and the fact that in 1964 he was asked to join PL/I team due to his earlier published works on linked lists.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/363332.363344

PS
He didn't mention it in his recollections [1], but 1978 paper The Early History and Characteristics of PL/I [2] claims that a paper was produced in October 1965.

[1] https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
[2]
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/960118.808389
by onebit0fme | 2026-03-10 23:14:49+00:00
> my current hypothesis: the return trigger isn't gamification, it's social - knowing someone else is learning the same thing, or that someone will notice if you stop

My honest take is that it's likely both. Increased social stakes is a big one, but it's incredibly difficult to build. It's hard to convince someone to use your app consistently, it's even more difficult to convince 2+ to keep each other accountable. My point is that it might be difficult to test in isolation, or even lead with this as the primary strategy. What you should achieve first is Sean Ellis test (something my friend from product taught me once) - answering single question “How would you feel if you could no longer use this product?” When this test holds (roughly >= 40% answer they'd be very disappointed), then it enables sharing with others, which enables social components you're describing.
by tkiolp4 | 2026-03-10 23:14:53+00:00
> It's just a new kind of tool for you to pick up, if you have the courage and heart to do so.

Soon it will be the only kind of tool your boss is going to pay for (if you still have a boss). And it is a tool owned by stakeholders. That sucks big time. You will never own the tool the same way you own a chainsaw. You’ll be perpetually paying for it.
by wolvoleo | 2026-03-10 23:14:57+00:00
I don't think I've ever heard a top leader say anything essential in such a meeting. The stuff they work on is not related to my job at all. It's all gartner level strategy stuff. In our company they do take time talking about it in large calls but it's always boring and never relevant. And a lot of political spin you have to poke through to see the real message.

If I ever attend it just put it on mute and look at the slides while I do some real work. That way my attendance gets registered and it doesn't stress me out later with too much stuff left hanging.

That percolation is also translation of what they say to things that are relevant at my level. Like what we will be working on next year, if there's going to be bonus or job losses.

I couldn't give a crap about the company's strategy as a whole and that's not my job anyway. Why should I. I'm not here because I believe in some holy mission. I just wanna do something I like and get paid.
by azan_ | 2026-03-10 23:15:02+00:00
> I think a broad tax would just make it more difficult for middle and lower class to fly. Tax the business/first class and frequent flier, but don't push people who can already barely afford to fly out.

No, it's the other way around. If flying is bad then poor people absolutely have to be priced out of it. I know that it sounds absolutely awful, but unfortunately taxing just business and first class won't do much for reducing emissions if flying will be affordable for and used by billions of people.
by lbreakjai | 2026-03-10 23:15:19+00:00
I disagree. An analytics tool that's correct 99.9% of the time is not 0.1% less valuable than a tool that is always correct. It's 100% less valuable.

Outage is the easy failure mode. I can work around a service that's up 80% of the time, but is 100% correct. A service that's up 100% of the time but is 80% correct is useless.
by desireco42 | 2026-03-10 23:15:56+00:00
So essentially they will be blamed, everything will stay the same.

I do consulting and use AI a lot. You just have to take responsibility for the code. We are delivering like never before, but have a lot of experience into how to do it as safe as possible. And we are learning along the way. They say you need a year to build up experience fyi.

I feel bad for those engineers who will have to sign off for things they will most likely not have enough time to review. Kiro is nice and all.
by camgunz | 2026-03-10 23:16:12+00:00
Every contract I've seen has some clause where the employee affirms they have the right to assign the rights to their output (code, etc) to the company.

I'm not really convinced; I think if I vibe code an app, and you vibe code an app that's very, very similar, and we're both AI believers, we probably both go "yup, AI is amazing; copyright is useless." You know this because people are actively trying to essentially un-GPL things with vibe coding. That's not authoring, that's laundering, and people only barely argue about it. See: this chardet situation, where the guy was like "I'm intimately familiar with the codebase, I guided the LLM, and I used GPL code (tests and API definitions, which are all under copyright) to ensure the new implementation behaved very similarly to the old one." Anything in the new codebase is either GPL'd or LLM generated, which according to the copyright office, isn't copyrightable. If he's right, nothing prevents me from doing the exact same thing to make a new public domain chardet. It's facially absurd.
by abcde666777 | 2026-03-10 23:16:28+00:00
I'm going to ask a potentially offensive question, but an earnest one.

I often see people make these kinds of proclamations about world events - 'It saddens me, I want world peace' etc. But my question is always, 'How much of that is genuine concern, and how much is just performative? And performative to the level that it's partly performative for themselves, to maintain some kind of image about their own identity?'.

I ask because here's the place I've come to: I don't care. I never did. And I first admitted that on the topic of meat eating actually - I was vegetarian for a year due to the ethics of it, but eventually I caved and went back to meat. And from that I admitted to myself: I value my own comfort and pleasure more than the suffering of the animals I eat.

And I realised that truth applied to all other such issues as well.

Sometimes I suspect that if 'we the people' really cared about these things as much as we claim we do, it would actually be very simple to change the world.

But we don't.
by hinkley | 2026-03-10 23:16:29+00:00
Testing is hard. No, testing is fucking hard. I've had more mentors in testing than any other two disciplines combined. And I still look at my own tests and make faces. But to a man everyone who has claimed testing is not hard has written tests that made me want to push them into traffic.

Every problem is easy if you oversimplify it.

I send people who come to me struggling with their tests away with permission to fail at them but not permission to give up on getting better. You're gonna write broken tests. Just don't keep writing the same broken tests.

If anyone looking for a PhD or book idea is reading along with this, my suspicion is that it's so difficult because we are either 1) fundamentally doing it wrong (in which case there's room for at least 2 more revolutions in testing method) 2) someone will prove mathematically that it's an intractable problem, Gödel-style, and then someone will apply SAT solvers or similar to the problem and call it a day. Property based testing already pretty much does Monte Carlo simulation...

For backend tests, the penalty at each level of the testing pyramid is about 8x cost for a single test (and IME, moving a test down one level takes 5x as many tests for equivalent coverage, so moving a test down 2 layers reduces the CPUtime by half but also allows parallel execution).

For frontend I think that cost is closer to 10x. So you want to push hard as you can to do component testing and extract a Functional Core for unit tests even harder than you do for backend code. Karma is not awesome but is loads better than Selenium, particularly once you have to debug a failing test. I've been on long projects for a minute so I can't really opine on Puppeteer, but Selenium is hot flaky garbage. I wouldn't tolerate more than 100 E2E tests in it, even on a half million line project. Basically a smoke test situation if you use it like that, but you won't have constant red builds on the same eight tests on shuffle.

I want to say we had 47 E2E tests on a project I thought was going swimmingly from a SDLC perspective. But it might have been 65.
by 8note | 2026-03-10 23:16:45+00:00
I think its a question 2 or 3 in a why chain, but 4 and 5 need to be why the agent screwed up, and there needs to be action items that are around giving the ai better guardrails, context, or tooling.

"get a person to look at it" is a cop-out action item, and best intentions only. nothing that you could actually apply to make development better across the whole company
by bravetraveler | 2026-03-10 23:17:10+00:00
Interesting consideration IMO... 'mandates' and all. That might be your/their concern, not here. Think I saw 'morals' leaving with 'professional discretion'.

Once the decree arrives: either the output goes to the garbage ('/dev/null') or we play Honorable Minion and direct it towards 'master'. They would have made their choice [and mine]. Thankfully, temporary pause on Goodhart's Law. No such mandate exists, here. Knock on wood.

edit: Find the peer compelling, share the consequences.
by adrian_b | 2026-03-10 23:17:18+00:00
I would not say that such applications are becoming more and more rare.

Most of the applications whose performance matters for me, because I must wait a non-negligible time for them to do their job, are dependent on assembly implementation for certain functions invoked inside critical loops. I do not see any sign of replacements for them. On the contrary, Intel, AMD and Arm continue to introduce special instructions that are useful in certain niche applications and taking advantage of them will require additional assembly language functions, not less.

For me, there is only one application that I use and which consumes non-negligible computer time and which does not depend on SIMD optimizations, which is the compilation of software projects.
by LarsDu88 | 2026-03-10 23:17:50+00:00
Wang fits the profile of a possible successor ceo for meta.
Young, hit it big early, hit the ai book early straight out of college. Obviously not woke (just look at his public statements).

Unfotunately the dude knows very little about ai or ml research. He's just another wealthy grifter.

At this point decision making at Meta is based on Zuckerberg's vibes, and i suspect the emperor has no clothes.
by conradkay | 2026-03-10 23:18:15+00:00
He said that LLMs wouldn't have common sense about how the real world physically works, because it's so obvious to humans that we don't bother putting it into text. This seems pretty foolish honestly given the scale of internet data, and even at the time LLMs could handle the example he said they couldn't

I believe he didn't think that reasoning/CoT would work well or scale like it has
by hn_acker | 2026-03-10 23:18:38+00:00
He enjoys writing [1], takes pride in making his collages [2], reviews sci-fi books every once in a while [3][4], and oh wow what is he doing [5]:

> Oh, nothing, just individually locating and downloading 9.5gb worth of (200+) high-rez (3600px wide) scans out of a 16th C book of extremely satisfying machine from the Library of Congress, one at a time, labeling them, and putting them in a folder for future collage work.

[1] https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/19/now-we-are-six/

[2] https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/03/cannier-valley/

[3] https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/04/slice-bees/

[4] https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/02/constant-reader/

[5] https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net/post/3mgpz...
by kreek | 2026-03-10 23:18:39+00:00
This is the second "I built a programming language" post in a day, and if I post the one I'm building, we can have a three-day streak :D They thought AI meant personal software, but it also means personal programming languages!

In all seriousness, this is great, and why not? As the post said, what once took months now takes weeks. You can experiment and see what works. For me, I started off building a web/API framework with certain correctness built in, and kept hitting the same wall: the guarantees I wanted (structured error handling, API contracts, making invalid states unrepresentable) really belonged at the language level, not bolted onto a framework. A few Claude Code sessions later, I had a spec, then a tree-sitter implementation, then a VM/JIT... something that, given my sandwich-generation-ness, I never would have done a few months ago.
by logicprog | 2026-03-10 23:19:59+00:00
I have no intention of tricking anyone into thinking I'm the original! I do think I offer improvements in some cases, so in cases where the project is something I intend for other people to ever see/use, I do explain why I think it is better, but I also will always put the original prominently to make sure people can find their way back to that if they want to. For example, the only time I've done this so far:

https://github.com/alexispurslane/jjdag
by autoexec | 2026-03-10 23:20:09+00:00
> I think the think more companies are worried about is the reputational damage from the terrible press.

I don't think companies care all that much about reputational damage from the terrible press. Some of the most profitable wealthy corporations on the planet are also the most hated. We have profitable corporations that have committed serial killings, infanticide, and mass poisonings. There's press about companies whose products and profits come from the use of literal child slaves. There is "terrible press" out there right now explaining how you are currently being hurt by companies who put profit over human life, but they aren't going out of business because of it.

Do you know how many companies have had bad press about data breeches and security issues, but are still around and making money? I'm pretty sure it's all of them. Including solarwinds.

Companies don't care if you like them or not. They care only about money. Until the cost of not securing people's data is likely to be higher than what they'll save ignoring security risks corporations aren't going to bother to give us anything but security theater, promises, and the occasional check for $10 and a year of "identify protection services" after another pointless class action lawsuit.
by machina_ex_deus | 2026-03-10 23:20:15+00:00
You can't compare Iran with north Korea. Iran funds and supports terrorism all over the middle east. They regularly call for the destruction of Israel. If Iran wasn't ruled by aggressive violent religious fanatics it wouldn't be in danger.

North Korea didn't fund terrorism. North Korea isn't an aggressor. You cannot compare them at all.

Israel and the US were monitoring Iran nuclear development and Iran knew that. They wouldn't allow Iran to rush to nuclear without striking them first, like it had happened.

If you're a dictator and you want to learn the lesson from Iran, it isn't to get nuclear weapons. It's too not call for the destruction of Israel and the US and to not fund terrorism.
by hkonte | 2026-03-10 23:20:20+00:00
The output-side gate makes sense, but the root problem is often on the input side. When the source document and the task instructions aren't clearly separated in the prompt, the model treats its own priors as fair game alongside the document.

Separating them structurally helps a lot. Put the document in a distinct named block first, then the constraints in a separate block that explicitly says "only assert facts present in the document above." The model has less ambiguity about what counts as source vs. inference.

I built [flompt](https://github.com/Nyrok/flompt) partly for this. It has a dedicated "document" block type that always comes first in the compiled XML, before role or objective. Forces a clean separation between grounding material and task instructions. Open-source.