MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Muromec | 2026-03-12 00:56:17+00:00
So... For each election, I have to register anew and the agency in charge has a backoffice is cross-checking this against... something? I guess they would first look if I was voting the last time? What if my birth certificate or whatever is from a different place. Do they assume I'm not risking using a forgery over politics (it's a fair assumption I would say)?
by tharkun__ | 2026-03-12 00:56:33+00:00
Using AI for what and is it bad or good?

At this point, we think using AI and being able to use AI effectively is a skill in and of itself. When you're hired, you'll have access to AI. You'd be expected to be able to use said AI effectively.

So, we still give you a FizzBuzz. You can use AI. Even if we told you not to use AI, we know almost everyone would use AI. But you have to understand the FizzBuzz and be able to explain it to us and make changes to it "live". The amount of people that get weeded out just by having to explain the code they "coded themselves" is staggering (even pre-AI, even on a take home where you had no "OMG I suck at live coding" pressure).
by bombcar | 2026-03-12 00:58:55+00:00
It was sad but usable (and arguably is usable now, even me with all my crap is around 14 GB not counting cache, etc).

But then again I remember when 128 MB of RAM was simply unheard of largess; so huge that using much of it for anything but a RAM disk was hard to do (of course, I also had that problem back in the DOS era with 8MB).
by devnavigator | 2026-03-12 00:59:09+00:00
GPT-5.4 represents a major step forward in the evolution of large language models designed for real professional work. OpenAI describes GPT-5.4 as its most capable frontier model for knowledge work, combining advances in reasoning, coding, agentic workflows, and tool integration. Compared with GPT-5.3-Codex and GPT-5.2, GPT-5.4 shows measurable improvements across several important benchmarks, including GDPval, SWE-Bench Pro, OSWorld-Verified, Toolathlon, and BrowseComp.
by dangus | 2026-03-12 00:59:53+00:00
Just seems like it’s a solution for a problem I don’t have.

I have to learn a whole new language that’s only used for NixOS just to do things I already have no difficulty doing with existing tooling.

I enthusiastically say, no, I’ve never used it, because, like I said, having that kind of learning curve just to set up an OS is kind of insane. Doesn’t matter if it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.
by JCattheATM | 2026-03-12 01:00:19+00:00
> You and Kurt Vonnegut seem to disagree here. He made liberal use of em dashes and hated semicolons.

Got some samples you would care to share? I'm skeptical we disagree, honestly. One can have preferences for different writing styles, and write in a way that works with preferred punctuation rather than against it.

> The problem with your definition of "good writing" is that it's entirely subjective.

I disagree. Subjectivity is only true to a point. Someone might like Independence Day 2 more than Citizen Kane, but the latter is objectively a better film.
by linkregister | 2026-03-12 01:00:39+00:00
When it comes to the acumen of running a podcast, he excels beyond his peers. He hosts interesting guests. He researches their area of expertise meticulously and asks erudite questions. The show is well edited.

It is not unusual that a young person would succeed at performance occupations. A huge portion of the Top 40 pop songs are performed by people under 27.
by itissid | 2026-03-12 01:01:24+00:00
> are they fairly uniformly similar with gains in one or a few areas, or is it noisier with a lower overall loss?

It seems you want to know what median, 5-95 or 1-99 differences might be? I also wonder how the "residual" plot looks like. If there are too many residual data points for a scatter plot then a histogram might be useful to know the modes. I suspect that as loss decreases multiple modes should condense or altogether collapse into one.
by steve_adams_86 | 2026-03-12 01:01:35+00:00
That's a great point. I guess the key thing to determine is if a person is even reading content, or lurking so to speak.

I don't like this stuff. I suppose you can anonymize this data easily, but it inevitably requires a degree of spying on users. I know tracking usage like this wouldn't be anywhere near the top of the list in terms of creepy egregious stuff these platforms do, but I don't like the idea of it. Everything has become so invasive.
by marcosdumay | 2026-03-12 01:01:42+00:00
Not really. It started with hundreds of thousands of votes.

That said, Brazilian elections are completely unverifiable. They don't seem to be false, but it's hard to say anything that would be different if they were.

When it started, at the 90s, the machines were at least simpler and possible to verify up to the firmwares. Nowadays, they are not.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-03-12 01:01:57+00:00
> So they're saying that the LLM cannot be the author, because LLMs cannot claim copyright.

They're saying that the LLM can't be the author.

Now suppose you supply the LLM with a prompt that contains human creativity, it performs a deterministic mathematical transformation on the prompt to produce a derivative text, and you want to copyright that, claiming yourself as the author. What happens then?
by emmelaich | 2026-03-12 01:02:02+00:00
There's a sort of prisoner's dilemma. If you make a fuss you'll get branded as anti-progress and sidelined. If you put your head down and just do what you're told you're a team player and will probably survive.

Aside, there's a lot of stuff online re McKinsey. I suggest searching HN plus also search "Confessions of a McKinsey Whistleblower" in your fave web search engine.

My favourite was the LRB article "When McKinsey comes to town" -- see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33869800
by pembrook | 2026-03-12 01:02:09+00:00
But the point is that, the computer flattened the sequential dependencies of that room full of people by doing all the work by itself.

If 15,000 calculations need to be done, the CPU doesn't need to wait on Bob to come back from lunch and do the next 20 calculations and doesn't need to wait on Alice to combine his work with the 20 calculations done by Jane.

The CPU does all 15,000 calculations instantly, by itself. This will be the same with AI agents.
by thin_carapace | 2026-03-12 01:02:15+00:00
atlassian suite was functionally fine prior to AI, i have noticed nothing but constant downgrades to the UX since. for example, summarizing a Jira ticket with AI achieves nothing useful (seeing as a Jira ticket is in itself a summarization) while burning compute, clogging the visual spectrum, and slowing down rendering. has anyone actually benefitted from AI being thrown everywhere in this service?
What on This List of Unsolved Problems in Physics Has Your Attention?
by ghastmaster | 2026-03-12 01:02:18+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_physics

I just today conceptually understood why quantum gravity is a perplexity. I knew the problem existed, but with a very limited mathematical background, did not really get it. I rely on conceptual understanding to comprehend the world around me and the problems of physics. Today the layman understanding clicked. As of right now, quantum gravity is my answer to my Ask.

I love when something clicks in the brain. Hope yours does the same! Understanding is
by rmunn | 2026-03-12 01:02:37+00:00
Converting between solar-based and lunar-based calendars is fraught with potential for ambiguity. The Buddhist calendar is a solar calendar, while the Hebrew calendar is lunar-based. So converting between dates in the Buddhist calendar and the international-standard (ISO 8601) calendar is typically easy (give or take some subtleties I won't go into for reasons of length). But converting between the Hebrew calendar and the ISO 8601 calendar, or the Buddhist calendar, involves figuring out when the new moon will be — and since the lunar cycle is 29 or 30 days, 12 lunar months add up to 354 days. So the lunar calendars, including the Hebrew calendar, typically add a "leap month" every two or three years in order to track the sidereal year.

All of which means there are many potential ambiguities in converting between calendars, and the combinatorial explosion possible means they probably only want you to convert between non-ISO8601 calendars and ISO8601. It would be too easy to get corner cases wrong otherwise and not notice, I'm sure. So to convert a date from Buddhist calender to Hebrew calender, you'd probably have to do Buddhist -> ISO8601, then ISO8601 -> Hebrew. (I haven't had time to test that for myself yet, I'll post a correction if that turns out to be wrong).
by wetoastfood | 2026-03-12 01:03:11+00:00
I don't think they're measuring the _value_ of the work, just what it would've cost to have humans do it. How long would it take you to produce a report of a specific length on the history of changes to the White House approved by presidents over time that includes citations and links to sources? Let's say 40 hours? Boom. $100 per hour * 40 hours = $4,000 report and 1 weeks worth of effort produced in 15 minutes. Multiply this type of "work" by 400 and you have $1.6M in labor costs and 7.6 years of work.
by pdfernhout | 2026-03-12 01:03:18+00:00
Inefficiency all too often is celebrated by our society, as I wrote in 2010: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
"Also, many current industries that employ large numbers of people (ranging from the health insurance industry, the compulsory schooling industry, the defense industry, the fossil fuel industry, conventional agriculture industry, the software industry, the newspaper and media industries, and some consumer products industries) are coming under pressure from various movements from both the left and the right of the political spectrum in ways that might reduce the need for much paid work in various ways. Such changes might either directly eliminate jobs or, by increasing jobs temporarily eliminate subsequent problems in other areas and the jobs that go with them (as reflected in projections of overall cost savings by such transitions); for example building new wind farms instead of new coal plants might reduce medical expenses from asthma or from mercury poisoning. A single-payer health care movement, a homeschooling and alternative education movement, a global peace movement, a renewable energy movement, an organic agriculture movement, a free software movement, a peer-to-peer movement, a small government movement, an environmental movement, and a voluntary simplicity movement, taken together as a global mindshift of the collective imagination, have the potential to eliminate the need for many millions of paid jobs in the USA while providing enormous direct and indirect cost savings. This would make the unemployment situation much worse than it currently is, while paradoxically possibly improving our society and lowering taxes. Many of the current justifications for continuing social policies that may have problematical effects on the health of society, pose global security risks, or may waste prosperity in various ways is that they create vast numbers of paid jobs as a form of make-work."
by hermit_dev | 2026-03-12 01:03:54+00:00
I think honestly this has helped more than hurt Anthropic from a PR and marketing perspective. Sure it was a huge contract no doubt and obviously the government knows how good Claude is, but I applaud them for sticking to their guns. Despite Anthropic making some questionable choices (for example even though they announced it, saying that they will start training on user data starting last year unless you explicitly opt out was a bit out if left field for them among other things), it must have been some crazy stuff they were asking to do.
by yoyohello13 | 2026-03-12 01:04:01+00:00
I’ve got a coworker that is pretty heavy AI users, and not in a “guide it” type of way more of a “yolo” type of way. Reading his MR are insane. There is so much crazy indirection and weird wrappers that make the types work but ignore an obvious simplification.

Code works fine, but why use lots of code when little of code will do?
by dangus | 2026-03-12 01:04:07+00:00
My parents have 8GB and 16GB, respectively. The computer with 8GB is 6 years old and it was the base model at the time.

$450 in 2015 would have bought you a Dell laptop with 6GB of upgradable memory:

https://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/laptops/dell-inspiron-15-5...

My uncle bought a $350 trash Windows PC a couple years ago, literally the cheapest thing I could find on sale at Staples, and it came with 12GB of RAM.
by evangambit | 2026-03-12 01:04:26+00:00
Even with the same embedding sizes and vocabularies, there’s nothing that forces the meaning of dimension 1 of model 1 to mean the same thing as dimension 1 of model 2 — there are lots of ways to permute the dimensions of a model without changing its output, so whatever dimension 1 means the first time you train a model is just as likely to end up as dimension 2 the second time you train is as it is to be consistent with the first model.

Nobody here or on Reddit has mentioned this, maybe bc it’s too obvious, but it’s clear to me that the residual connections are an absolutely necessary component to making this merging possible — that’s the only reason dimension 1 of a later layer is encouraged to mean something similar to dimension 1 of an earlier layer.
by lo_zamoyski | 2026-03-12 01:04:27+00:00
> meet regularly to converse and debate

Senators play a similar role. Their aim is heavily weighted toward oversight and advisory. Gov’t in general is weighted in that direction, because governments govern which is mainly about being a kind of referee, maintaining the social order, and aiding human beings in attaining their end as human beings through legislation.

Without this function, we have activity with little reflection spurred by politicians pandering to the mob.
by lossyalgo | 2026-03-12 01:04:56+00:00
That reminds me of one of the biggest IMO missing feature of Wordle: They never give a definition of the word after the game is finished! I usually do end up googling words I don't know (which is quite often) but I'm guessing I'm one of the few who goes to the trouble. I've even written to The New York Times a couple times to suggest adding a short definition at the end as I honestly feel like a ton of people could totally up their vocabulary game and it surely could be added with minimum effort (considering they even added a Discord multiplayer mode).
by Retric | 2026-03-12 01:05:01+00:00
I was being sarcastic with my how ridiculous post.

> mistakes if you see any

https://create.roblox.com/docs/monetize-experiences

First no mention of the float between purchase of Roblox and transactions, but whatever platforms regularly pull that one.

As to Hollywood accounting. There is no single exchange rate between dollars and Roblox on a platform, a 5$ purchase = 5:4 on App Store, but a 100$ purchase is a 1:1. https://www.roblox.com/upgrades/robux

Of course they ignore this only saying app stores and payment platforms get a 22% cut. Ok sure you have some average numbers of Roblox per dollar and then work out an exchange rate sure that’s reasonable.

But wait on that page: users can now receive up to 25% more Robux when purchasing through gift cards, computer, or web. This extra Robux translates into higher revenue shares on Robux purchased on those channels. (As high as 25% or less than 7%) So now they aren’t averaging the exchange rate instead doing yet another calculation even though a 20$ purchase on their store has a worse exchange rate than a 200$ purchase on the App Store…

Meanwhile an account with 6k Roblox at time of purchase may have been filled by some gift cards and some App Store purchases at different ratios over time while the user is spending money on the platform meaning that 6k doesn’t actually correspond cleanly to either App Store or gift cards Roblox…

But like trust US bro even if we aren’t saying what the actual formula is it’s fine. I can’t help but wonder what the actual numbers look like if such a lopsided deal is still presented with such weasel wording.
by tharkun__ | 2026-03-12 01:05:58+00:00
I do think we have to distinguish two things though.

It's not really bad to ask someone to do a design session with them and "build their product with them from scratch" isn't inherently bad. That's actually pretty neat if you ask me.

What's bad is if there's only a single answer and that's whatever they actually built themselves, which might be a pile of thrown together startup poo that was never cleaned up. But you have the same problem with all sorts of "needless trivia" type questions.

And then do you really want to work at a company, where you can't have a proper "pros and cons of different approaches" type of discussion? If you got hired, you'd have those kinds of discussions with them on an ongoing basis. Bad on the company for letting that person do the hiring but they got what they deserved so to speak.

Just to make an analogy:

If they simply ding you for using 4 spaces coz they use 8, that's bad.

If they ask you why you use 4 spaces, they use 8, give them pros and cons and are there any other approaches and what are the pros and cons of those? That's a good interview so to speak. As an interviewer I would give bonus points if the candidate says something like "I used 4 spaces because I thought that's what you guys were probably using coz everyone's moved away from 8 spaces but secretly I love usings tabs and setting tabwidth to what I want but in reality it really really doesn't matter as long as it's consistent across the codebase as humans can get used to almost everything and this one isn't worth fighting over. Linters and formatters exist for a reason".
by deaux | 2026-03-12 01:06:21+00:00
None of these include a mention of meaningful economic impact.

> Being perfect at verifying UBI eligibility would require a large government infrastructure, just like today, so you can't claim that the U part makes it super cheap to administer.

It's already in place regardless of UBI, so it doesn't add meaningful costs.

Of course it's never going to be perfect, absolutely nothing is. Why even mention that? What matters is the impact of it being imperfect.

Compare it to the impacts of tax evasion, or wage theft, and they'll be completely negligible.
by dangus | 2026-03-12 01:06:35+00:00
My main point isn’t about caring or not, the point is that 4GB RAM in a laptop/desktop is incredibly rare for how outdated it is.

The PS4 came out in 2013 and has 8GB of RAM. In case you need help counting, that’s 13 years ago.

And that’s an optimized game console with no general purpose operating system and limited multitasking capability.

10 years ago, Samsung phones were shipping with 6GB of RAM. Not many phones even physically last that long.

My uncle bought a $350 trash Windows PC a couple years ago, literally the cheapest thing I could find on sale at Staples, and it came with 12GB of RAM.
by Nevermark | 2026-03-12 01:06:40+00:00
The evidence that something wrong is beyond credible.

You may be right, that one diagnosis doesn't have the evidence of another issue you point out. But that is diagnosis. That there is a problem is certain.

It's a complex issue. But a decision has to be made, to either deal straightforwardly with a complex issue, or in a deceptive, avoidant, or secretive manner.

This isn't a choice that removes fundamental complexity, but being direct about problems avoids a lot of manufactured complexity.

If someone is suffering long term life changing mental symptoms, in what sense does the cause make it mental health vs. not mental health? Obviously, it is a mental health issue whether caused by physical or psychological malfunctions.

There is no "winning" for sufferers, in any scenario. But there is better support, or less support.

Generally competent people insisting they are dealing with something serious, should be taken seriously.

--

You may have identified the non-medical systemic problem here:

A strong case could be made that black and white "mental illness" disqualifications for any job are devastatingly out of step with reality and going to damage the careers of people it shouldn't. There should be some means of getting the all clear after any episode, given reasons to believe it has been resolved.

Beyond careers and people suffering unnecessarily, this also critically motivates people responsible for security and safety to hide and bury real problems!

How does that help institutions with safety and security concerns?
by slopinthebag | 2026-03-12 01:06:43+00:00
This makes sense to me based on personal experience. LLM's will do anything to pass tests and get a working result, and it will do very weird things in order to get there. For fun I've tried to get it to do stuff while being purposely ambiguous about the implementation details and sometimes the stuff it does makes me literally laugh out loud. It can write some very strange code.

But hey, the tests pass!

If I force it to use plan mode for everything and babysit it, it can work really well, but it's really just acting as a faster typer for me, which is great. But it requires an experienced dev steering it.
by karim79 | 2026-03-12 01:07:08+00:00
I see. So AI is reducing the number of jobs in the tech sector because fewer people are needed to ship stuff (thanks to AI). And since fewer people are needed across the tech sector then we don't need things like Jira anymore because it can all be done on post-its or Google sheets or something, so there's no need for Atlassian accounts anymore. And Atlassian can now do more with less thanks to AI.

I can't wait for Atlassian physical sticky-notes to take over.

[Edit: grammo and formatting]
by asdff | 2026-03-12 01:07:23+00:00
"The FBI warned police departments in California in recent days that Iran could retaliate for American attacks by launching drones at the West Coast, according to an alert reviewed by ABC News.

“We recently acquired information that as of early February 2026, Iran allegedly aspired to conduct a surprise attack using unmanned aerial vehicles from an unidentified vessel off the coast of the United State Homeland, specifically against unspecified targets in California, in the event that the US conducted strikes against Iran,” according to the alert distributed at the end of February. “We have no additional information on the timing, method, target, or perpetrators of this alleged attack.”"

https://abcnews.com/US/fbi-warns-iran-aspired-attack-califor...
by andyferris | 2026-03-12 01:08:21+00:00
It's definitely a product for the middle class, not the poor ("broke students" vs "mom bought me this laptop").

The distinction is a lot of (most?) Apple products are _expensive_ for middle class buyers, while this represents good value.

If it's well designed and robust, it might be a great machine to buy second hand in 3-5 years.
by briantakita | 2026-03-12 01:08:59+00:00
> LLMs are a cancer on human thought and expression.

LLMs help to express what many people dont have the energy or ability to express. It also has a broader scoped view of protocol...It does not have emotions, which often leads to less than optimal discourse.

In many ways, it help those who are challenged in discourse to better express themselves...rather than keeping silent or being misunderstood.