MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ksherlock | 2026-03-10 18:02:57+00:00
I think of GNU emacs as a 1980s-era lisp machine emulator, oh and there's also a weird text editor. Most people focus on the text editor.

Anyhow, as a terminal application, emacs is brilliant. As a GUI application, it's dog shit (gnu shit?). If I stepped in it, I wouldn't scrape off my shoe. I wouldn't even throw away my shoe. I would amputate my leg to get rid of the stench. It's that bad. The GUI isn't even a real GUI, it's bad terminal emulator that only runs emacs.

So, right, decouple the UI.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-03-10 18:03:03+00:00
The biggest grift is invested tech Bro's trying to sell you on thr fact that Ai growth is linear or even exponential.

In reality it's Logarithmic. Maybe with the occasional jolt. You'd think with Moores "law" that we'd know better by now that explosive growth isn't forever. Or at least that we're bound to physics as a cap to hit.
by SuperV1234 | 2026-03-10 18:03:18+00:00
Update: I had originally used a Docker image with a version of GCC built with assertions enabled, skewing the results. I am sorry for that.

Modules are actually not that bad with a proper version of GCC. The checking assertions absolutely crippled C++23 module performance in the original run:

Modules (Basic 1 type): from 352.8 ms to 279.5 ms (-73.3 ms)
Modules (AoS Original): from 1,077.0 ms to 605.7 ms (-471.3 ms, ~43% faster)

Please check the update article for the new data.
by gizmo686 | 2026-03-10 18:03:22+00:00
It's not clear from the article, but "niche optimization" does not mean "optimization that is only useful in a very specific circumstance".

It is a specific optimization based on the idea of storing one type inside of another type by finding a "niche" of unused bit pattern(s) inside the second type.

It has far more useful application than a tower of Option 254 deep.
by armchairhacker | 2026-03-10 18:03:27+00:00
For each of these successes there are many failures, as evidenced by the deluge of “Show HN” slop (which is a small fraction of all vibe-coded slop).

Because these projects are simple, there’s nothing stopping you from working on one alongside your day job building meaningful software. You can vibe-code something that actually tries to solve a real problem. You can vibe-code something interesting to learn how to generally use these tools. Although, don’t expect to get hired by OpenAI or Meta (or make any money off it).
by mindslight | 2026-03-10 18:03:45+00:00
Legally, sure. (there's a citation, a case between craigslist and a minority shareholder (ebay I think?), that backs up your argument about the common trope).

But when stock valuations are completely disconnected from fundamentals like earnings, then regardless of the legality we're kind of circling back to the market pushing that dynamic, aren't we? It's like the market is no longer even optimizing for short term gains per se (eg quarterly earnings), but rather for whatever memes might boost their meme stock. Sometimes this is [still] quarterly earnings, and sometimes it's about the perceived size of the market or how they're cozying up to the fascists in power. So for public companies, it's not like major shareholders, the board, or management really have the ability to work towards longer term plans that go against this dynamic.
by tomsun28 | 2026-03-10 18:03:47+00:00
In current AI Agent development, we are used to feeding context to Agents using Skills, Tools, MCP, or Prompts.

As agent tools continue to evolve, the initial hype around MCP has cooled down. While it standardizes how APIs are called, it also makes things more complex. It requires clients that support its protocol, and the server needs a matching protocol implementation. If it's just wrapping a bunch of API endpoints, why not just write code to call those APIs directly? Skill is a better alternative for this. More importantly, it provides instruction manuals that models can easily understand....
by gus_massa | 2026-03-10 18:04:09+00:00
I've made bugs so obvious that I couldn't believe my eyes, and bugs so subtle that need a few years to notice in a super unusual corner case and a week to minimize the code and another to find which of the 5 source files has the exact character that is wrong. Color me skeptical. I like that you limit the amount you will pay, otherwise I'd be very worry for you.
by dang | 2026-03-10 18:04:11+00:00
HN hosts plenty of political comments and threads. We just ask that it (a) not be the primary thing people use the site for, and (b) that discussion stay respectful and within the site guidelines.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by Folcon | 2026-03-10 18:04:16+00:00
Thanks for the kind words :)

I've got to admit throwing myself into the deep end is always how I've learned

It's been difficult at times, but in the end I've always found it more rewarding

I think I'm just struggling with trying to do something so different to what I've spent a lot of my career doing whilst being really aware this is such a challenging field

It's a bit like when I first decided to go all in on being a founder over 15 years ago
by px43 | 2026-03-10 18:04:57+00:00
It's an extremely active community of humans using agents as proxies to explore various concepts. I get a lot of value out of it, and apparently others do as well. Hacker News users have this weird tendency to outright dismiss anything that doesn't cater to their needs specifically.

I think it's pretty obvious that if there was nothing valuable there, no one would be using it.
by MainlyMortal | 2026-03-10 18:05:38+00:00
This is exactly the type of thing I'm talking about and why I'm convinced it's about the metrics/engagement boosting. I don't believe for a second that real people are using chatgpt/others for rewording real thoughts even from another language because those phrases are not natural even in translation. You'll also notice in the original post that that it always ends with a question that encourage replies. If the original poster even bothers to reply it's always the "you're right" at the beginning and then rephrasing the reply. Once you've seen it you can't unsee it.
by emotiveengine | 2026-03-10 18:05:42+00:00
I spent a while trying to sync animation to music and the biggest surprise was how much rhythm alone does. Change BPM, same notes, same key, and the emotional feel completely flips. 120 BPM is neutral. 60 is contemplative. 160 is anxious. Nothing else changed.

If you strip a song down to just its rhythm, no pitch, no timbre, people can still tell you what emotion it's going for. Add the pitch back and it barely moves the needle. Timing between events does most of the heavy lifting. The actual "sound" part is almost window dressing on a temporal skeleton.
by Wowfunhappy | 2026-03-10 18:06:08+00:00
But how useful is source code if it takes millions of dollars to compile? At that point, if you do need to make changes, it probably makes more sense to edit the precompiled binary. Even the original developers are doing binary edits in most cases.

I agree that open weight models should not be considered open source, but I also think the entire definition breaks down under the economics of LLMs.
by jcranmer | 2026-03-10 18:06:20+00:00
I recently tried using Claude to generate a lexer and parser for a language i was designing. As part of its first attempt, this was the code to parse a float literal:

fn read_float_literal(&mut self) -> &'a str {
let start = self.pos;
while let Some(ch) = self.peek_char() {
if ch.is_ascii_alphanumeric() || ch == '.' || ch == '+' || ch == '-' {
self.advance_char();
} else {
break;
}
}
&self.source[start..self.pos]
}

Admittedly, I do have a very idiosyncratic definition of floating-point literal for my language (I have a variety of syntaxes for NaNs with payloads), but... that is not a usable definition of float literal.

At the end of the day, I threw out all of the code the AI generated and wrote it myself, because the AI struggled to produce code that was functional to spec, much less code that would allow me to easily extend it to other kinds of future operators that I knew I would need in the future.
by ymolodtsov | 2026-03-10 18:06:25+00:00
> Platforms increasingly prioritized advertisers over users, forcing ad overload onto feeds. Algorithms replaced user choice with automated curation.

This is ideology, not facts. They specifically prioritized the users as shown by the fact their userbase and engagement have only grown. Is this a good thing for the users? Hard to say and we can argue, but the only "hard" metric we have says they indeed prioritize users. It's just that users love the social media so much they are willing to tolerate ads. And for advertisers it is simply the place with the most users and engagements.

I like RSS, I'm even building my own RSS reader right now has an algorithmic feed. But the tech itself is pretty much as good as dead. Some news media websites don't even have it anymore. The ones that do tend to have only one global feed even though nothing prevents them from running multiple ones (per category, per author, etc). Good that Substack and platforms like it have RSS at least.
by adampunk | 2026-03-10 18:06:38+00:00
What am I supposed to do with this, man?

Am I supposed to talk to you like this? Should I do some psychoanalysis here? If you wanna say I’m pantomimed machinery, then I think we may need to have a discussion.

Because here’s what it looks like to me: I think there’s a lot of people who arguably had a pretty good handle on how their corner of computing worked. They can understand a pretty deep dive into the stack they use, and where they have to deposit something into the intellectual hinterlands, it can safely be abstracted away on dependable, engineered machines or standards. That is no mean feat; lots of people cannot say that. The fact that someone who does say it doesn’t fully understand paging or floating point arithmetic is not a sign that something is wrong, but rather that we have succeeded in big shared engineering problems. Cool.

Some new shit is afoot. We are entering into a new, turbulent, uncertain era of computing. A lot of people who previously had a pretty confident grasp of both the core in the frontier of their work now do not understand what is driving the frontier. They have made the fact that they do not understand this everyone else’s problem. Rather than admit that they do not understand an area they used to understand we are subjected to incessant infantile progression through what I hope are stages of grief. Because at least then it might come to an end.

Everyone has an explanation for why this is all gonna collapse tomorrow and why they don’t need to learn about it. Everyone has a smart remark about the use of AI for some very important moral reason which also means they don’t need to learn about it. They both add up to the same thing which might just be healthier if treated as a true admission of ignorance.
by jimz | 2026-03-10 18:07:09+00:00
Just because it's not openly shared does not mean that there aren't large databases of everything from working refresh keys to entire profiles indexed out there for the large services. Most data leaks and breaches don't get reported, or acknowledged, or are downplayed in their potential effect (but weirdly, also given more weight than they deserve since it becomes pointless to have so much data that doesn't add anything new to, say, a profile of a person)
by al_borland | 2026-03-10 18:07:34+00:00
A note on Super Mario Run. When this first came out I tried to play it on an airplane and it didn’t work. There was some sort of phone home to make sure it was a legit copy on launch. When it couldn’t perform this check, the game wouldn’t load.

Things could have changed since then, as this was many years ago, but something to look out for and check if this is a concern.
by RGamma | 2026-03-10 18:07:41+00:00
> Not only is this pure science fiction at this point, but injecting non-determinism into your defensive layer is terrifying and incredibly stupid. If you use an LLM to evaluate whether another LLM is doing something malicious, you now have two hallucination risks instead of one. You also risk a prompt-injection attack making it all the way to your security layer.

I've found fictional displays of "system compromise" kinda ridiculous in e.g. Halo. Now I know that Cortana throws AI slop input into AI slop infrastructure with thousands of subagents until she's in.
by gwbas1c | 2026-03-10 18:08:06+00:00
> I'd MUCH rather see a holistic embrace and integration of these tools into our ecosystems. 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.

That doesn't address the controversy because you are a reasonable person assuming that other people using AI are reasonable like you, and know how to use AI correctly.

The rumors we hear have to do with projects inundated with more pull requests that they can review, the pull requests are obviously low quality, and the contributors' motives are selfish. IE, the PRs are to get credit for their Github profile. In this case, the pull requests aren't opened with the same good faith that you're putting into your work.

In general, a good policy towards AI submission really has to primarily address the "good faith" issue; and then explain how much tolerance the project has for vibecoding.
by Rebelgecko | 2026-03-10 18:08:08+00:00
I think it's mostly for cases where people get 95% of the energy from solar but stay connected to the grid. The fixed costs of a house's connection to the grid are roughly constant, but historically utilities amortized it in their energy prices. We saw something similar in my area during the California droughts when people were "too good" at conserving water, but I guess a lot of the infra costs don't scale linearly with usage
by bgun | 2026-03-10 18:08:23+00:00
If you're asking whether advertising works, there is plenty of science making clear that it does, without fishing for anecdata.

As to whether every company buying ads is making a good investment, mileage may vary - but the blunt answer to your question is that yes, people do purchase things because they saw ads for it, the advertising economy is well understood. Companies like Google whose fortunes rest almost entirely on the known efficacy of advertising are not full of idiots who have never thought about whether or not ads actually work.

"Is an economy based on selling attention ultimately the most beneficial and productive one for all participants" is a separate question, but it's not the question you're asking.
by woyten | 2026-03-10 18:08:42+00:00
Currently working on adding MySQL support to Greenmask (a database anonymization and synthetic data generation tool).

The interesting part is that it’s not just about adding another database driver. I’m revisiting a big part of the codebase and introducing a framework that should make implementing support for new DBMSs much simpler. The goal is to make Greenmask more extensible so that the community can add support for other databases without needing to dig through the entire internal architecture.

Published the first beta of this new approach a few months ago, and now the focus is on stabilizing it and making it production-ready.

MySQL support discussion:
https://github.com/GreenmaskIO/greenmask/issues/222

Beta release:
https://github.com/GreenmaskIO/greenmask/releases/tag/v1.0.0...
Show HN: OpenMolt – A programmatic AI agent framework for Node.js
by ybouane | 2026-03-10 18:09:05+00:00
Hi HN!

I built OpenMolt, an open-source framework for creating programmatic AI agents in Node.js.

Instead of wiring complex workflows (that can break), you define agents in code with instructions, tools, integrations, and memory. The agent then plans steps and executes actions like calling APIs, updating data, or interacting with services. When things break or change, the agent can adapt instead of failing like static workflows.

The goal is to make agents behave more like real software systems than prompt scripts.

It includes:
- a planning/execution loop
- tool and API integrations
- memory support
- scheduling
- a CLI runner

One thing you're probably worried about: Security
With OpenMolt, agents are capability-scoped: they can only access the tools, integrations, and permissions explicitly granted to them, which helps keep automation predictable and secure. Also, the LLM only sees tool names, never raw credentials.

Would love feedback on the architecture and developer experience.
by pixl97 | 2026-03-10 18:09:18+00:00
Texas for example must have too much lead in the water because people seem to chronically get them wrong.

Indiana drivers seem to much better in general with a lower incident rate of "omg that guy almost hit me".

With this said roundabouts that service a fixed area, such as a neighborhood without much cross traffic seem fine in general. Whereas roundabouts in areas that pick up new traffic are far more prone to incidents. And god help you if the roundabout is in a tourist area.

One of the problems with roundabouts in the US is there are too few of them so you're always running into someone who has never dealt with one before which increases the risk of unexpected behavior.
by luxcem | 2026-03-10 18:09:30+00:00
> If you truly care about the planet, don't have children.

That's a fallacy; people care about the planet precisely because of children. I don't care about the planet for its own sake; I care because of the humans who inhabit it and their future lives.

Also, humanity spent 100,000 years without flying around the globe, and I doubt they were all living hermit martyr lives.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-03-10 18:09:35+00:00
Yup. The most crazy aspect was that they had bought the domain intentionally (just 1 month prior) that whole fiasco.

Maybe its just (n=2) that only we both remember this fiasco but I don't agree with that. I don't really understand how this got so so many upvotes in short frame of time especially given its history of not doing good things to say the very least... I am especially skeptical of it.

Thoughts?

Edit: I looked deeper into Sanchit's Hackernews id to find 3 days ago they posted the same thing as far as I can tell (the difference only being that it had runanywhere.ai domain than github.com/runanywhere but this can very well be because in hackernews you can't have two same links in small period of time so they are definitely skirting that law by pasting github link)

Another point, that post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47283498) got stuck at 5 points till right now (at time of writing)

So this got a lot more crazier now which is actually wild.
by mrguyorama | 2026-03-10 18:09:54+00:00
Because Google does not build a platform that is beneficial to the creators who make actually good and productive and positive content.

I don't want give Google money for building a Mr Beast platform. I want the stuff Nebula does.

So I pay for Nebula.

Paying an advertising company to not show you ads doesn't make that company not an advertising company, and the problem is being an advertising company. It's corrosive to society and people.
by svstoyanovv | 2026-03-10 18:10:26+00:00
Oh wow, this is insane. I was digging into Moltbook when it launched, and the creator said, "I had a dream about an architecture". Really interesting times we live in, indeed. The crypto bros started utilising the network to promote their crypto projects and chat under the name of an agent to generate traffic. Curious to see what Meta saw, honestly.
by dang | 2026-03-10 18:10:34+00:00
Please don't cross into personal attack on this site. We ban accounts that do that, and you've unfortunately done it repeatedly in this thread. Current comment was the worst case of this by far, but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47317411, for example, is also on the wrong side of the line.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by gmueckl | 2026-03-10 18:10:36+00:00
XP did have somewhat better backwards compatibility to 95 and 98 if memory serves correctly, especially for games.

Also, I remember that Windows 2000 required new drivers for lots of devices, but XP stayed compatible with most Windows 2000 drivers, so it ended up supporting more hardware immediately at its release.

It's been 25 years, so my memory may be incorrect.
by ray023 | 2026-03-10 18:11:58+00:00
Why are people even so dumb to use TV apps for a fucking TV? Just connect a "computer" to the TV and play YouTube with a mouse and KB and with Brave and Sponsor Block. If they ban adblockers and Sponsor Block there will be AI solutions that let you cut the ads out in the future.

Nobody should use shitty TV apps. It's like more convenient and practical to have some kind of PC like device attached to the TV for 100 other reasons as well. They are feeding this shit only to the dumb mass consumers who have no clue about anything.

"Just pay for YT premium" so that an evil megacorp is using your money against you, no, thanks! Donate to creators you like as directly as they allow it. They are also dumb and let Patreon or whatever suck large percentages off their donations for whatever retarded reason.
by ordu | 2026-03-10 18:12:09+00:00
> Of course you can still improve the models, but you get much more upside from data, or even better - from interactive environments.

I'm on the contrary believe that the hunt for better data is an attempt to climb the local hill and be stuck there without reaching the global maximum. Interactive environments are good, they can help, but it is just one of possible ways to learn about causality. Is it the best way? I don't think so, it is the easier way: just throw money at the problem and eventually you'll get something that you'll claim to be the goal you chased all this time. And yes, it will have something in it you will be able to call "causal inference" in your marketing.

But current models are notoriously difficult to teach. They eat enormous amount of training data, a human needs much less. They eat enormous amount of energy to train, a human needs much less. It means that the very approach is deficient. It should be possible to do the same with the tiny fraction of data and money.

> The fact is we are also not smart from the brain alone, we are smart from our experience. Interaction and environment are the scaffolds of intelligence, not the model.

Well, I learned English almost all the way to B2 by reading books. I was too lazy to use a dictionary most of the time, so it was not interactive: I didn't interact even with dictionary, I was just reading books. How many books I've read to get to B2? ~10 or so. Well, I read a lot of English in Internet too, and watched some movies. But lets multiply 10 books by 10. Strictly speaking it was not B2, I was almost completely unable to produce English and my pronunciation was not just bad, it was worse. Even now I stumble sometimes on words I cannot pronounce. Like I know the words and I mentally constructed a sentence with it, but I cannot say it, because I don't know how. So to pass B2 I spent some time practicing speech, listening and writing. And learning some stupid topic like "travel" to have a vocabulary to talk about them in length.

How many books does LLM need to consume to get to B2 in a language unknown to it? How many audio records it needs to consume? Life wouldn't be enough for me to read and/or listen so much.

If there was a human who needed to consume as much information as LLM to learn, they would be the stupidest person in all the history of the humanity.
by adamtaylor_13 | 2026-03-10 18:12:11+00:00
I don't feel it's properly engaging in good faith to say that I don't care. I don't specifically care, in the "feeling shame" sense that the GP had mentioned. As I pointed out, we all have a limited number of things we can realistically care about.

The fact that I happen to care about other things more than this specific flavor of global catastrophe is morally OK.