MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2026-03-06 00:40:28+00:00
It's a bit crazy how much we look back at that time and what people thought was tin foil haty. But that was written in 2007, still 6 years before Snowden. 7 years before the Director of the NSA (Hayden) told Congress they kill people based on metadata.

The invasion of privacy has been slow, creeping, and just waiting for that Turnkey Tyrant. We fooled ourselves into thinking we'd never elect someone who would turn that key. But in reality the key has been slowly turning, until finally it opened the latch
by hunterpayne | 2026-03-06 00:41:12+00:00
Agreed, this is the real take away most people will be left with. Not only did we all pay higher prices, instead of using that money to pay off the debt we give it away to business managers who were never out that money in the first place. Politically, that doesn't accomplish what some think it does. Midterms are coming up in 8 months...and the results of the house are going to be drastic no matter which side wins. Either Trump can do what he wants or the government will be deadlocked and nothing will happen for 2 years. Neither seem like good outcomes.
by pixl97 | 2026-03-06 00:41:30+00:00
I mean, it sounds kinda like you're the one making religious arguments. My response is one mocking how poorly egotistical people deal with the AI effect.

Evolution built man that has intelligence based on components that do not have intelligence themselves, it is an emergent property of the system. It is therefore scientific to think we could build machines on similar principles that exhibit intelligence as an emergent property of the system. No woo woo needed.
by jesse_dot_id | 2026-03-06 00:43:48+00:00
Unsurprising.

If you don't want to receive the punishment for thought crimes, which is being threatened outright more loudly every day, it's increasingly difficult to actually have a dissenting voice online. Don't believe me? Set up a linux VM, Mullvad VPN with a killswitch, then run Tor browser. You MAY be able to get a TutaMail account, which requires a backup e-mail that disappears after a short period of time (allegedly), and then a Proton account with the TutaMail account as your required backup there, but all of the privacy-first "anonymous" services require some form of verification. Then, if the social media network isn't blocking you from signing up via a Tor exit nodes outright, you are immediately shadow banned.

I remain very annoyed with the massive number of engineers that are making it possible for people who can't figure out how to check their e-mail to utilize advanced technology to spy on us, steal our tax money, pervert the technologies we build, and indiscriminately murder innocent people.

We are a community of greedy ladder pullers and that's so disappointing.
by scuff3d | 2026-03-06 00:43:53+00:00
It could be. The amount of code you copy doesn't matter, just depends on context and if your work could now be considered derivative.

I said this else where, but I work with people who won't even look at GPL code because of the potential legal entanglements.

Yes let's. Corporations with billions of dollars behind them whole sale stole copy right work and licenced code to train models, and then turned around and sold the result with no attribution or monetary benefit given to the people they stole from. They knew what they were doing and relied on the legal system being slow enough that they could plant a flag in the market before legal challenges killed them.

It's an industry built on theft. By all rights they should have been sued/fined out of existence before it ever got this far. But if you have enough money you can make almost anything legal.
by drpixie | 2026-03-06 00:44:24+00:00
From Corsair

>> DDR5 technology comes with an exclusive data-checking feature that serves to improve memory cell reliability and increase memory yield for memory manufacturers. This inclusion doesn't make it full ECC memory though.

"Proper" ECC has a wider memory buss, so the CPU emits checksum bits that are saved alongside every word of memory, and checked again by the CPU when memory is read. Eg. a 64 bit machine would actually have 72 bit memory.

DDR5 "ECC" uses error correction only within the memory stick. It's there to reduce the error rate, so otherwise unacceptable memory is usable - individual cells have become so small that they are not longer acceptably reliable by themselves!
by seddonm1 | 2026-03-06 00:44:44+00:00
I am getting closer and closer to a full verified rewrite in Rust. I have also moved to a much easier sqlite relational structure for the backend.

I actually sidestepped the annoying btrieve problem by exporting the data using a
go binary [0] and I write it to a sqlite instance with raw byte arrays (blobs). btreive is weird because it has a dll but also a a service to interact with the files.

P.s. I have spent a lot of hours on this mainly to learn actual LLM capabilities that have improved a huge amount in the last year.

[0] https://github.com/barchart/go-btrieve
by al_borland | 2026-03-06 00:46:41+00:00
I think the hard part is understanding if “finished” software is still maintained.

I’ll pick on AppZapper here. It doesn’t need to do much, it’s a Mac app that finds the files related to an application and deletes them, for a complete uninstall. It released in 2006, with v2 coming out in 2010. The website looks like it’s still from that era and the last update was in 2020, almost 6 years ago. To be fair, it’s a cool app, from the “delicious” design era. It makes a ray gun “zap” sound as it uninstalls an apps, for no reason other than to be fun. It’s great.

Is it still in active maintenance with nothing to do, and there have been no meaningful changes in how apps are installed in the last 6 years, or has it been abandoned? I really don’t know. If I’m a new user trying to decide if I should pay $20 for this app, what do I do?

I don’t want updates for updates sake, as that leads to enshitification, but there needs to be some sign that a user isn’t throwing money at a dead product. Or in the ls example, developing a workflow around a dead tool.

A ran into a similar question with Yojimbo. It also launched in 2006. When v2 came out it was a paid upgrade and seemed fairly minor for how much was being charged (at least to a broke college student). It felt like they didn’t really care about it. But here we are 20 years later and it still seems to be going. But it was 14 years between v2 and v3, and the last release was in 2023. With 14 years of support, maybe that v2 would have been a worthwhile upgrade for me in hindsight, but when they go years without an update, I start to question if I should be looking to something with more support. Should a new user buy and invest time in putting their data into something that hasn’t been updated in 3 years, or is that a red flag?

These are the things I struggle with.
by singron | 2026-03-06 00:46:51+00:00
The "RPG Game" is hard to judge since it was produced over "multiple turns". The impressive version would be if it basically got a working game on the first attempt, and the prompter gave some follow-ups to tweak feel and style.

However, I think what actually happened is that a skilled engineer made that game using codex. They could have made 100s of prompts after carefully reviewing all source code over hours or days.

The tycoon game is impressive for being made in a single prompt. They include the prompt for this one. They call it "lightly specified", but it's a pretty dense todo list for how to create assets, add many features from RollerCoaster Tycoon, and verify it works. I think it can probably pull a lot of inspiration from pretraining since RCT is an incredibly storied game.

The bridge flyover is hilariously bad. The bridge model ... has so many things wrong with it, the camera path clips into the ground and bridge, and the water and ground are z fighting. It's basically a C homework assignment that a student made in blender. It's impressive that it was able to achieve anything on such a visual task, but the bar is still on the floor. A game designer etc. looking for a prototype might actually prefer to greybox rather than have AI spend an hour making the worst bridge model ever.
by crazygringo | 2026-03-06 00:47:37+00:00
To be fair, he doesn't really:

> And because it's a conservative heuristic we're underestimating the real number, it's probably going to be at least twice as much.

The actual measurement is 5%. The 10% figure is entirely made up, with zero evidence or reasoned argument except a hand-wavy "conservative".

Edit: actually, the claim is even less supported:

> out of these ~25000 crashes have been detected as having a potential bit-flip. That's one crash every twenty potentially caused by bad/flaky memory

"Potential" is a weasel word here. We don't see any of the actual methodology. For all we know, the real value could be 0.1% or 0.01%.
by Koffiepoeder | 2026-03-06 00:50:00+00:00
We have an OCR job running with a lot of domain specific knowledge. After testing different models we have clear results that some prompts are more effective with some models, and also some general observations (eg, some prompts performed badly across all models).

Sample size was 1000 jobs per prompt/model. We run them once per month to detect regression as well.
by mahirhiro | 2026-03-06 00:50:02+00:00
This is definitely a valid concern. Since I mostly built the app for myself I wanted to have 2 easy features.

1. The ability to snooze someone who I don’t feel like reaching out for a certain period of time
2. Having an easy mute global notifications option in the app and configurable per person

I was also considering the idea of grouping contacts to maybe say “hey out of these people you should reach out to someone next month”. Basically to keep you social/ in touch with someone.

I’m very open to feedback if you think folks might get tired of those too?
by stinkbeetle | 2026-03-06 00:50:10+00:00
This matches what I have long said, which is that adding ECC memory to consumer devices will not result in any incredible stability improvement. It will barely be a blip really.

As we know from Google and other papers, most of these 10% of flips will be caused by broken or marginal hardware, of which a good proportion of which could be weeded out by running a memory tester for a while. So if you do that you're probably looking a couple out of every hundred crashes being caused by bitflips in RAM. A couple more might be due to other marginal hardware. The vast majority software.

How often does your computer or browser crash? How many times per year? About 2-3 for me that I can remember. So in 50 years I might save myself one or two crashes if I had ECC.

ECC itself takes about 12.5% overhead/cost. I have also had a couple of occasions where things have been OOM-killed or ground to a halt (probably because of memory shortage). Could be my money would be better spent with 10% more memory than ECC.

People like to rave and rant at the greedy fatcats in the memory-industrial complex screwing consumers out of ECC, but the reality is it's not free and it's not a magical fix. Not when software causes the crashes.

Software developers like Linus get incredibly annoyed about bug reports caused by bit flips. Which is understandable. I have been involved in more than one crazy Linux kernel bug that pulled in hardware teams bringing up new CPU that irritated the bug. And my experience would be far from unique. So there's a bit of throwing stones in glass houses there too. Software might be in a better position to demand improvement if they weren't responsible for most crashes by an order of magnitude...
by WhyNotHugo | 2026-03-06 00:50:13+00:00
Somehow this whole ecosystem of tools always gives me a bad vibe, and I can't quite pinpoint why.

All the demos and videos are applications with lots of stacked pop-ups/modal windows, and things moving around continuously. It all reminds me of what we typically see in computers in TV shows or sci-fi films.

It just looks like a chaotic mess of things, and I get this really strong urge to just stay away from it all.
by joquarky | 2026-03-06 00:50:34+00:00
> what about caring for others, the world at large

30 years of experience in the tech industry taught me that this will get you nowhere. Nobody will reciprocate generosity or loyalty without an underlying financial incentive.

> What happened to sticking up for the underdogs?

Underdogs get SPACed out and dump the employees that got them there.
by Kye | 2026-03-06 00:50:44+00:00
I've taken to calling LLMs processors. A "Hello World" in assembly is about 20 lines and on par with most unskilled prompting. It took a while to get from there to Rust, or Firefox, or 1T parameter transformers running on powerful vector processors. We're a notch past Hello World with this processor.

The specific way it applies to your specific situation, if it exists, either hasn't been found or hasn't made its way to you. It really is early days.
by godelski | 2026-03-06 00:50:45+00:00
I know it's a cliché, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. People forget, most evil is created by good people trying to do good. The biggest trick the devil played was making us all believe evil is (always) easy to identify. But all the sayings are about how the devil is sly, tricks you, and sneaks up on you. All of that is to remind us how hard it is to do good. You don't have to be an evil person to create evil. Often you don't have to do anything at all, as inaction is still an action. Pull the lever or not, you've still made a decision.

The problem is so complex that every action you take compounds and extends far beyond what you realize. Especially as we're living in such a connected world. Those ripples propagate through all the ponds we've connected together.

I don't think it's money, convenience, or any of that. I think it's just that the world is getting more and more complicated. That our actions and inactions have larger and larger effects. We've done a lot of good, but we've also made it a lot easier to feel the flapping of a butterfly's wings on the other side of the planet.
by nl | 2026-03-06 00:51:31+00:00
This is a pretty interesting report.

The TL;DR is that there is little measurable impact (and I'd personally add "yet").

To quote:

"We find no systematic increase in unemployment for highly exposed workers since late 2022, though we find suggestive evidence that hiring of younger workers has slowed in exposed occupations"

My belief based on personal experience is that in software engineering it wasn't until November/December 2025 that AI had enough impact to measurably accelerate delivery throughout the whole software development lifecycle.

I have doubts that this impact is measurable yet - there is a lag between hiring intention and impact on jobs, and outside Silicon Valley large scale hiring decisions are rarely made in a 3 month timeframe.

The most interesting part is the radar plot showing the lack of usage of AI in many industries where the capability is there!
by pizza234 | 2026-03-06 00:51:40+00:00
>> In other words up to 10% of all the crashes Firefox users see are not software bugs, they're caused by hardware defects!

> Bold claim. From my gut feeling this must be incorrect; I don't seem to get the same amount of crashes using chromium-based browsers such as thorium.

That's a misinterpretation. The finding refers to the composition of crashes, not the overall crash rate.
by latexr | 2026-03-06 00:51:49+00:00
I’m not the person who made the claim, but a basic web search led me to this page on their blog:

https://proton.me/blog/data-privacy-abortion

Quote (emphasis theirs, in bold):

> Switzerland is a fundamentally different environment. Two of the things Switzerland is most famous for are also highly conducive to data protection: privacy and neutrality.

> When a law enforcement agency in the US requests user data from a Swiss company, it is illegal for that company to provide the data. At Proton, we reject all data requests from foreign agencies.

> Proton and other Swiss companies will only hand over user data when ordered to do so by a Swiss authority. And even then, Proton’s general policy is to challenge data requests whenever possible and only comply after all legal remedies have been exhausted.

So maybe your parent poster is confused? They do claim that being Swiss protects them from requests from foreign entities, but not Swiss entities. Which is what happened here, the Swiss authorities asked Proton for the data, then they handed it to the FBI.

Has Proton challenged the data and “only complied after all legal remedies have been exhausted”, though? That’s another question.
by pixl97 | 2026-03-06 00:51:53+00:00
>annoyed with the massive number of engineers that are making it possible

Where you one that voted for laws that protected our privacy?

Where you one that upvoted comments in forums that said software engineers needed a standard ethics?

Where you one that downvoted every post saying we should have unions in software so we can protect ourselves as a group.

Or were you greedy like the rest of us saying, I don't want any of those things because I can make more money without it.

This is were the hunt for more money has taken us, and it only gets worse from here.
by measurablefunc | 2026-03-06 00:52:02+00:00
Me & a few friends are constructing a long ladder to get to the moon. Our mission is based on sound scientific & engineering principles we have observed on the surface of the planet which allows regular people to scale heights they could not by jumping or climbing. We only need a few trillions of dollars & a sufficiently large wall to support it while we climb up to the moon.

There are lots of other analogies but the moon ladder is simple enough to be understood even by children when explaining how nothing can emerge from inert building blocks like transistors that is not reducible to their constituent parts.

As I said previously, your time will be much better spent convincing people who are looking for another religion b/c they will be much more susceptible to your beliefs in emergent properties of transistors & data centers of sufficient scale & magnitude.
by lich_king | 2026-03-06 00:52:34+00:00
> I disagree. It's worth asking why some people find brand watches beautiful? Where did they get their sense of aesthetic? Were they born with a congenital preference for RM 16-01 Citron?

There's plenty of art that's celebrated, but also kinda weird and ugly. Is "Vertumnus" by Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1591) also a product of the "brand age"? What about various gargoyles and grotesques on old church buildings?

Some people just like weird art, maybe because they think it reflects their own quirky or rebellious nature. Some of these people have money. I don't see why we need some sort of a cynical theory of a "brand-obsessed culture" at the center of it. How many people do you know who are obsessed with brands? We might have a brand or two we like, typically because we like the way the products look or work. That's about it.

I know some people who like expensive watches. They talk about the design a lot more than they talk about who made it.
by agent_invariant | 2026-03-06 00:52:42+00:00
I've been approaching this from a slightly different angle: treating the problem less as "agent alignment" and more as an execution boundary problem.

Instead of trying to force the model to behave via prompts or policies, we assume the model will eventually propose something unsafe. The trick is making sure it can't commit irreversible actions directly.

So the pattern we've been experimenting with is:

agent proposes an action

proposal goes through a deterministic gate

gate checks things like replay, state advancement, spend ceilings, etc.

only then does the real-world action execute

In practice this looks more like a transaction firewall than a prompt guardrail.

The LLM can reason however it wants, but anything that changes real state (payments, DB writes, API calls) has to pass through the gate.

It doesn't solve the reasoning problem, but it makes the commit boundary deterministic, which removes a lot of the scary failure modes like duplicate actions or retries gone wild.

Still early experiments, but the model behaving badly becomes much less dangerous if it literally can't execute without passing the boundary.
by karlhills | 2026-03-06 00:53:05+00:00
Hi HN!

I built Settle It because small group decisions often turn into long message threads. Someone asks something like “Pizza or Thai?” and suddenly there are 20 back-and-forth messages before anyone decides.

The goal was to make something lighter than most poll tools: you type a sentence, it becomes a poll, and you share the link. No accounts or setup.

I’ve been using it with friends and family for things like dinner plans and movie nights and it’s been surprisingly helpful.

Curious if people here find it useful or if there are situations where you’d use something like this.
by cweagans | 2026-03-06 00:53:21+00:00
Well, okay, you can select two specific words to fuel your apparent outrage if you'd like, but if you actually read the entire sentence, you'll see that there is some critical context that you're missing: "you have to physically touch it to activate it in the same way that you'd have to touch the Touch ID sensor."

I did not claim that it was the same security scheme or that it's biometric or anything like that. I did claim that you have to physically touch it to activate it.

Edit to add:

re 'Yubikey Nano is a "thing you have", TouchID is a "thing you are".', I would argue that your finger is in fact a thing you have. The loss of a finger might change a little of who you are depending on the circumstances that led to you losing said finger, but these both fall into "thing you have" territory for me. I don't think it's wise to consider Touch ID much more than that, personally.
by beachy | 2026-03-06 00:53:43+00:00
I held off migrating from ChatGPT to Claude Code due to being a laggard that lived in the Eclipse world. I didn't believe what I was told that I wouldn't be writing code any more. Pushed into action by recent PR gaslighting from OpenAI, I jumped to claude code and they were right - I barely venture into the IDE now and certainly don't need an integration.
by qsera | 2026-03-06 00:54:22+00:00
No no, you don't understand. People can misunderstand. But they will not, for example, proceed to drive a car as if they have attended driving lessons when they have not.

They might misremember, but they can know, for sure, if they have NOT come across some information. So if you ask someone if they know where `x` is, they might have came across that info, and still be wrong. But they will know if they have never come across it.

A neural network will happily produce an output when when the input is completely out of range of the training data.
by nickjj | 2026-03-06 00:55:31+00:00
> You’re a person who runs arch, that means most likely your requirements for a computer are VERY different than the target for this Mac

I do software development, video + image editing, writing and gaming. My requirements are it runs well, I can depend on it and I don't mind if it has a fan.

I only replied because the OP's comment made it seem like it's difficult to find a good laptop in the $600 range. If macOS is optional you can get quite decent specs.
by crazygringo | 2026-03-06 00:57:22+00:00
That's not how any management position works, which is what an editor is.

You're responsible for verifying that the output looks sane and that processes are good and appear to be followed.

You can't double-check every tiny detail. That's absurd. At some point, you simply have to rely on the word of your employees, and fire them and do damage control if it turns out they're not following procedures but claiming they are.

You seem to be asking for an impossible level of quality control, with the budgets available.