MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Perseids | 2026-03-12 11:47:29+00:00
> on-demand can never compete with mass production even if a big part of the mass produced stuff is discarded.

This is definitely not universally true. E.g. photos are very cheaply printed on demand. Even on-demand books are printed at reasonable prices. Sure, mass production is cheaper (both for books and pictures), but the value difference of the individual product is high enough to bridge the price gap.

For cloth this area has found little exploration. TFA covers production at niche scale. If you would mass produce the looms to reduce the capital expense and heavily lean into customer value, e.g. individual fittings via 3d scans, as my sister comment proposes, or even just letting me customize my sweater with motive, color choice, garment etc., this could radically change the cost to value ratio. The company that has published TFA sells extremely bland apparel in a shop that looks just like any mass produced clothing shop and leaves all of the customer value of custom production on the table.

Last but not least: This "3d knitting" seems to need only a fraction of the labor of traditional sewed clothes. If textile production didn't default to underpaid labor under precarious working conditions in low income countries, it would probably already be cheaper.
by aacid | 2026-03-12 11:48:12+00:00
I personally hate that I need to download app from every company for every service they offer.
On the other hand I love tje simplicity of opening webpage, do what I want to do there and forget it.
Probably 80% of app in my phone are used very rarely, often just once yet they still sit there, getting updates, requesting permissions and sometimes eating battery...
good web app can do everything native app can.
by alan_caelix | 2026-03-12 11:48:18+00:00
I've been looking into this recently. Specifically why drinking tea doesn't have the same jittery effects as coffee even though the caffeine content is similar.

And it all came down to the presence of L-Theanine in tea which is absent from coffee.

It's a remarkable amino-acid that influences GABA, dopamine and serotonin production.

Calm and focussed as opposed to running on high-adrenaline. Worth reading up on. :)
by _giorgio_ | 2026-03-12 11:49:11+00:00
Backprop kept producing wins. That bought it time.

“Wait longer” is not a blank check. In 2026, with Meta-scale talent, data, and compute, serious ideas should show strong intermediate results, not just theory.

Time is necessary, but it is not evidence. More compute does not replace insight, but it does speed up falsification.

So no, skepticism is not naive. If a research program still cannot point to a clear empirical advantage after years, “it just needs more time” stops sounding like science and starts sounding like insulation from the scoreboard.
by zknowledge | 2026-03-12 11:49:23+00:00
Super cool. Great collection in a clear visual setup. (I love map interfaces).

Quick note:

I went to utmost top of the map and clicked the (2) near Greenland. Quite clunky to actually get there as the map moved in and out. Selecting "Kap Erik Bunch" led me to the ArcGIS REST Services Directory with errors:

Unable to complete operation.
Unable to perform query operation

Still cool. Just sharing some user testing :)
by lionkor | 2026-03-12 11:49:42+00:00
If you feel the need to fix/edit your own comments with AI, keep in mind that this is not necessary at all. If someone can't figure out what you're saying, and don't care to try, they can run their LLM over it and have it summarize it with emojis, bullet points, and slightly changed content. You dont need to do that for all of us.
by silentsvn | 2026-03-12 11:50:00+00:00
The /compact trigger is a clean pattern — agent-initiated but human-confirmed. Makes the interface feel more like a review than an interruption.

The retroactive feeding of recorded sessions is underrated. That's basically supervised compaction - you're labeling what mattered in hindsight, which is almost always cleaner signal than in-flight decisions.

I suspect the labs are doing something like this at scale but the hard part is that "what mattered" is user-specific. A generic compaction model trained on aggregate data probably smooths over the individual coherence preferences that make it actually useful.

We ended up open-sourcing the memory layer as an MCP server (engram-mcp) if youre interested at how we handled the certainty/recall side.

Interested in what your session recordings look like structurally or are they raw transcripts or do you extract structure before feeding them in?
by halfcat | 2026-03-12 11:50:01+00:00
A flawless predictor would indicate you’re in a simulation, but also we cannot even simulate multiple cells at the most fine-grained level of physics.

But also you’re right that even a pretty good (but not perfect) predictor doesn’t change the scenario.

What I find interesting is to change the amounts. If the open box has $0.01 instead of $1000, you’re not thinking ”at least I got something”, and you just one-box.

But if both boxes contain equal amounts, or you swap the amounts in each box, two-boxing is always better.

All that to say, the idea that the right strategy here is to ”be the kind of person who one-boxes” isn’t a universe virtue. If the amounts change, the virtues change.
by davrosthedalek | 2026-03-12 11:50:17+00:00
Taylor series have a quite different convergence behavior than a general polynomial approximation. Or polynomial fit for that matter. Many papers were written which confuse this.

For example, 1/(x+2) has a pole at x=-2. The Taylor series around 0 will thus not converge for |x|>2. A polynomial approximation for, say, a range 0<x<L, will for all L.
by Waterluvian | 2026-03-12 11:50:46+00:00
That’s how it works when you’re fighting a county like America. Do you think if the U.S. invaded Canada that we wouldn’t do flavours of the same?

America prosecutes wars depending on political popularity. Making it incredibly unpopular to do so is a very real strategy.

Not that I’m suggesting it isn’t still ugly and horrible to bomb civilian targets like girls’ schools.
by rafaelmn | 2026-03-12 11:51:11+00:00
The only reason you can "afford" anything is because other people do shit they would rather not, but do so for the money. If people could actually "afford to make choices" you'd find out pretty soon how dependent you are on others doing the dirty work for you to maintain your living standard.

Like sure things aren't perfect, not everyone is compensated proportionally to their contributions, no perfect markets and you can certainly improve things, but "I hate this planet" vibe when the default is hunter gatherer I feel like is majorly lacking perspective.
by taskset | 2026-03-12 11:51:16+00:00
Eric puts it well: LLMs already speak CLI fluently. MCP just adds transport, auth, and new failure modes on top of something that will work fine without it.

Claude Code is a CLI. That's the point. It's the same thing I see in so many Claude Code YouTube tutorials - the instructor running Claude Code inside VS Code — Electron wrapping Chromium wrapping Node.js just to reach a terminal. Three abstraction layers for zero benefit.

Same pattern at the protocol level.

Text in, text out, composable, inspectable. The Unix design approach is fifty years old and still relevant - it's the simplest and most direct method.
by tootie | 2026-03-12 11:51:42+00:00
It's a weird article. Foe one, the researcher says "they believe" the data belongs to IDMerit but apparently aren't sure. IDMerit denies it's the owner of the data nor is it any of their partners. And there's very few details about where or how they found this database. It's possibly some kind of hoax or ransom attempt? Or there's really just billions of unaccounted databases of private data just sitting all over the Internet.
by stared | 2026-03-12 11:51:44+00:00
I spend much more time refactoring that creating features (though, it is getting better with each model). My go-to approach is to use Claude Code Opus 4.6 for writing and Gemini 3.1 Pro for cleaning up. I feel that doing it just one-stage is rarely enough.

A lot of prompts about finding the right level of abstraction, DRY, etc.

An earlier example (Opus 4.5 + Gemini 3 Pro) is here: https://github.com/stared/sc2-balance-timeline

I tried as well to just use Gemini 3 Pro (maybe the model, maybe the harness) it was not nearly as good as writing, but way better at refining.
by AngryData | 2026-03-12 11:52:49+00:00
Ive heard that same criticism from working archeologists and anthropologists, especially relooking over old finds but still often used in current unexplained finds. Stick with weird holes drilled in it? Religious scepter. Stone dildo? Religious fertility symbol. Weird hermit hut foundation? Religious monk retreat.

But I think ancient peoples were far more practical and far less concerned over religion and gods than we like to pretend. Sure they might believe lightning are the gods being angry or meteors are the gods taking a dump above the earth or that it is just the nature of existence, they got no real way to explain such things. But that doesn't mean everyone spent all their extra time worrying about such things and furiously producing endless amounts of religious offerings and symbols.
by fredoralive | 2026-03-12 11:52:51+00:00
You could see all your accounts with an individual brand in one website / app, and doing things like opening new accounts online or applying for credit cards isn't exactly new functionality either. I'm sure Monzo is slicker because it isn't talking to a bunch of COBOL in the backend, but traditional banks aren't behind so that basic functionality is missing.

The issue is that Lloyds Banking Group was basically bifurcated by app, so that the Lloyds app and website only had your Lloyds current / savings / credit cards etc. whilst the Halifax website and app only had Halifax current / savings / credit cards. They're clearly trying to merge things so you only need one app / website.

I noticed my soon to be closed nearest Lloyds branch gained a "Halifax customers can use this bank." poster in the window, I'm not sure if that's just a reaction to the fact that physical bank branches are getting kinda rare, or if it's really taken them about 17 years to merge the Lloyds and Halifax backend systems to the point where branches are interchangable.
by pjc50 | 2026-03-12 11:52:55+00:00
A lot of the hate for hydrogen is for a vehicle fuel where it's strictly inferior to batteries, partly because it's such a pain to handle, and partly because it's a "submarine" for natural gas derived H2.

Evolving hydrogen from electrolysis and then immediately turning it into ammonia is a much better idea; ammonia is easier to handle than H2 gas and already has a market.
by mcphage | 2026-03-12 11:52:59+00:00
> A reputation moat is still a moat.

It is, absolutely, but it’s a lot more shallow a moat than having a product quality moat.

> Lego prices will drop as soon as they are forced to by competition, and not before, and this is fine.

I agree, they’ll survive quite well. But the large profit margin they’ve grown accustomed to might disappear, and that probably doesn’t bode well for their management.

And heck, maybe they’ll stop shipping stickers on expensive sets, too. That would be nice.
by neomantra | 2026-03-12 11:53:03+00:00
I gave a similar presentation in January which covers the AI features that emerged in 2025 that culminated in the step-function in capability in Nov'25 and where I went from there.... (certainly my GitHub activity is bright green since)

The presentation was created with Claude Code to prove itself; never going back to Keynote/PowerPoint. Press 'X' key to disable "safe mode". Prompts are in the repo.

https://neomantra.github.io/presentations/GolangMeetupJan202...
by felix9527 | 2026-03-12 11:53:09+00:00
Exactly. The moment an agent touches prod, "we logged it" isn't enough — you need "here's the cryptographic proof of what happened, and you can verify it without trusting us."

Compliance teams (SOC 2, EU AI Act Article 12) will demand this. The nice part is RFC 6962 is already battle-tested at scale — Certificate Transparency processes billions of entries. Same math, different domain.
by tripzilch | 2026-03-12 11:54:49+00:00
Trying to keep things on topic, BTW, I found that LLMs are pretty good at picking up the kinds of context that makes this very obvious what is really being meant.

So you could use an LLM, privately, to soften people's opinions.

I just tried it for you, I won't copy it here cause the thread is about not using LLMs, but if you get too upset from somebody being simply direct and clear in their manner of speaking, the LLM is trained on enough American cultural baggage that it is very capable of softening that blow with the extra words you so dearly need to see past that red mist.

Someone might even be able to vibe code a browser plugin for it.
by the__alchemist | 2026-03-12 11:55:52+00:00
I think this is more subjective than the author makes it out to be. I take a third approach: You can change out Matrices for Quaternions for rotations and orientations. Then do almost every operation using these two types, and a few operation between them. The operation implementations are a mix of dot products, quaternion multiplication, trig etc.

I find this flow works well because it's like building arbitrarily complex transformation by composing a few operations, so easy to keep in my head. Or maybe I just got used to it, and the key is find a stick with a pattern you're effective with.
by danbruc | 2026-03-12 11:56:03+00:00
A flawless predictor would indicate you’re in a simulation [...]

No, it does not. Replace the human with a computer entering the room, the predictor analyzes the computer and the software running on the computer when it enters. If the decision program does not query a hardware random source or some stray cosmic particle changes the choice, the predictor could perfectly predict the choice just by accurately enough emulating the computer. If the program makes any use of external inputs, say the image from an attached webcam, the predictor also needs to know those inputs well enough. The same could, at least in principle, work for humans.
by t43562 | 2026-03-12 11:57:42+00:00
Being out of touch with the electorate is the thing they have as a feature over the house of commons.

i.e. they're not trying to win the next election.

They're also not there because of the favours they've done existing politicians.

I don't think this is "great" but it does make me wonder if the people who want an end to herditary peers are really going to like what they get.
by frozensecurity | 2026-03-12 11:57:48+00:00
I wrote a deeper technical breakdown of these specific risks and the math behind the "recovery black hole" here: https://frozensecurity.com/blog/the-hidden-risks-of-using-a-...
TL;DR: Unlike your 24-word seed, a passphrase has no checksum. One typo during setup means you are sending funds into a cryptographic black hole. Digital security is useless if you fail at physical resilience.
by frereubu | 2026-03-12 11:58:04+00:00
I presume the database exists, but some of the details don't add up. IDMerit say "IDMERIT’s systems and security infrastructure have never been compromised", "there has never been a data breach or exfiltration from [our partners'] systems during, before, or after this event" and "IDMerit does not own, control or store customer data". But Cybernews says that they "promptly secured the database" after being notified. Cybernews also didn't give the reason why they thought this was to do with IDMerit (unless I missed it). I can't quite make head nor tail of it.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-03-12 11:58:18+00:00
IRL proof of work. Elegant solution.

I recall seeing one where you had to send a specific payload to an https endpoint to apply (or it might have been an automated screen immediately after the application was submitted). Forcing potential candidates to briefly open the curl manpage seemed like a similarly elegant solution to me. I doubt it works as well in the era of LLMs though.
by shmeeed | 2026-03-12 11:58:40+00:00
I'm absolutely with both of you, but I'd like to point out that non-native speakers often tread a very fine line. They need to fear sounding either too convoluted or a bit of a simpleton. Proficiency levels vary wildly, and not everybody in the audience is as receptive and welcoming to slight mistakes as you are, even tough I have to admit HN in particular is pretty tolerant.

I for one don't think I'll ever AI-wash my texts or use AI translations verbatim. If everybody else did, it would certainly be a sad loss of diversity, but IMO it's only going to make the people who put in their own effort stand out more. Hopefully in a positive way. Time will tell if we're a dying breed.

I'm afraid the need for anybody to learn foreign languages will be subject to much change and discussion for upcoming generations.
by dxuh | 2026-03-12 11:59:13+00:00
I agree that use of trigonometry is almost always a smell, but e.g. in games there are so many cases where angles are just more useful and intuitive. I just grep-ed for "angle" in a game of mine and I find it for orienting billboard particles (esp. for particles a single angle is much better than a quat for example). Also for an FPS camera controller. It's much simpler to just store a pitch and a yaw and change that with mouse movement, than storing a quat. You can't really look at a quat and know what kind of rotation it represents without opening a calculator. And I also use it for angle "fudging" so if you want to interact with something if you are roughly looking at it, you need to configure an angle range that should be allowed. It just makes sense to configure this as an angle, because we have some intuition for angles. So I guess for computations angles are probably usually wrong, but they are great for intuition (they are low-dimensional and linear in amount of rotation). That makes them a better human interface for rotations. And as soon as you computations start with angles, of course they find their way into the rest of the code.
by mcphage | 2026-03-12 12:00:00+00:00
> but I've never heard of them, possibly because they don't spend as much on marketing as lego

It’s a newer brand—they changed their name to it some time last year. But they seemed to spend a lot on advertising last Christmas—at least on YouTube, it seemed like tons of reviewers were talking about their sets. That’s how I found out about them, at any rate. And I’ll say—the one I got came together nicely, and looks great. The tons of lights are just, really neat.

> when I hear "lego knockoff" I think of the shitty ones, because I've never seen a Lego knockoff that wasn't shitty.

The cheap-o ones you get like at the dollar store, absolutely. But Chinese manufacturers have been making good quality knockoffs for a while. A decade at least? I bought my first knock-off technic set around 10 years ago, and it was 90% the quality of Lego at 25% the price. But the quality has only gotten better since, and is now totally on par with Lego. Admittedly, the price has gone up, too.
by MrWiffles | 2026-03-12 12:00:11+00:00
Something I never quite understood: differentiate between BEAM process and operating system process. The OS has launched one (in theory) BEAM Erlang VM runtime process with N threads; are we saying “process” here to try to emulate the OS process model internally within the BEAM OS process, when really we’re talking about threads? Or a mix of threads and other processes? I’m imagining the latter even cross network, but am I at least on the right track here?
by minraws | 2026-03-12 12:00:26+00:00
Want to try to do anything more complicated? I have seen a lot of delusional people around, who think their skills are still on the same level, but in interviews they bomb at even simple technical topics, when practical implementations are concerned.

If you don't code ofc you won't be as good at coding, that's a practical fact. Sure, beyond a certain skill level your decline may not be noticeable early because of the years of built-in practice and knowledge.

But considering every year there is so much more interesting technology if you don't keep improving in both hands-on learning and slow down to take stock, you won't be capable of anything more than delusional thinking about how awesome your skill level is.
by bigblind | 2026-03-12 12:00:37+00:00
I like this a lot!

One thing I found as a somewhat experienced solver of cryptic crosswords, is that it was confusing that I couldn't just type an answer. I skipped the tutorial/lesson, because I didn't want an explanation of how cryptic clues work, I just wanted to solve one. So a little, inline explanation for first time visitors on how to solve them on this site might be good.
by pmkary | 2026-03-12 12:01:12+00:00
Not only are they a decade late while everyone expected WASM to liberate us from JS, and it ended up being a useless toy in JS whose improvements would have been crushed by having to send all progress to JS to apply it, but then giving it access to DOM is also something you'll realize wasn't enough a decade later. Flutter doesn't need DOM; it has all of its own engine. The browser should give the whole viewpoint to the WASM so that apps can directly implement their own GUIs. And then there will be an app revolution. You can directly port your GUI to the web and have it work. No more your GUI as a WASM worker that has to have its frames painted by JS on a canvas; direct painting. You could have wxWidgets, GTK, Flutter, ... all working insanely fast, insanely beautiful. And then people can do amazing things. Imagine a web alternative that is powered by maestro Knuth's TeX; imagine operating systems as web pages, imagine alternative layout systems that do not have to rely on Web events and frame timing. That is all if the browser allows for WASM to bypass the web part and do it itself.
by rickdeckard | 2026-03-12 12:02:08+00:00
yeah, I expect they use the camera as a make-shift ambient light-sensor, just with a lower frequency than a illumination sensor would be used (due to power consumption impact), and with overall lower accuracy (lower dynamic range, reduced FoV, very bad accuracy in low-light/bright conditions,...).

This pretty much matches the described experience in the article that Gruber had, as he mentions he had to adjust brightness up and down at least twice every day...
by ordu | 2026-03-12 12:02:50+00:00
> Which also renders the entire paradox somewhat moot because there is no choice for you to be made.

Not quite. You did choose your decision making methods at some point in your life, and you could change them multiple times till you came to the setup of Newcomb's paradox. If we look at your past life as a variable in the problem, then changing this variable changes the outcome, it changes the prediction made by the predictor.

> The existence of a flawless predictor means that you do not have a choice after the predictor made its prediction

I believe, that if your definition of a choice stop working if we assume a deterministic Universe, then you need a better definition of a choice. In a deterministic Universe becomes glaringly obvious that all the framework of free will and choice is just an abstraction, that abstract away things that are not really needed to make a decision.

Moreover I think I can hint how to deal with it: relativity. Different observers cannot agree if an observed agent has free will or not. Accept it fundamentally, like relativity accepts that the universal time doesn't exist, and all the logical paradoxes will go away.