MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pabloceg | 2026-03-10 18:12:15+00:00
I recently had to plan a trip that involved hitting five cities across Europe in two weeks. Like many, I started with Google Maps to get a sense of distances, but it only showed driving routes, which wasn't helpful for comparing trains or flights. Then I tried Rome2Rio, which lists options but often lacks real-time prices, leaving me to hunt down costs manually. I ended up with a messy spreadsheet trying to compare times and prices for each leg, and it was taking forever to figure out the best order to avoid backtracking.

A friend mentioned explorinder.com in passing when I was complaining about this. I gave it a shot, and it basically automated what my spreadsheet was attempting. You input your cities, and it pulls actual transport data for trains, buses, flights, and driving, showing side-by-side comparisons with prices. What stood out was it suggested reordering my cities to optimize the route, saving me several hours of travel that I hadn't even considered.

For my trip, it ended up recommending a mix of trains and one overnight bus, which kept costs around 200 euros per person. The planning phase went from a multi-evening headache to something I wrapped up in an hour. I'm not affiliated with the site, but it's free and doesn't require an account, so it's worth a look if you're dealing with complex itineraries. The rest of the trip was smooth, and having a clear map link to share with my group made coordination easier. In the end, tools like this don't replace the fun of traveling, but they sure cut down on the pre-trip stress.
Ask HN: Does automatic multilingual support make sense for a launch platform?
by LeanVibe | 2026-03-10 18:12:19+00:00
With vibe coding tools, adding multilingual support has become surprisingly easy. If you ask a model to add languages like Spanish, Portuguese, German, or French, it can usually set up the i18n structure pretty quickly, even for projects with a lot of text.

One thing I’ve noticed is that once a site is indexed by Google, traffic doesn’t always come mainly from the US. Sometimes a significant portion comes from other countries through search. But most launch platforms or directories are English-only, so they don’t really help with discoverability in other languages.

Because of that, I tried something different with a project called LeanVibe. The idea is simple: you submit your product once in whatever language you prefer. The platform then automatically translates the content into the supported languages, and visitors see the interface and product description in their local language by default.

By the way, LeanVibe is not just a launch platform. It’s more like a community space with blogs, forums, the ability to follow people or products, and ways to find collaborators. My current thought is to extend the automatic translation to blog posts and forum discussions as well.

The downside is that this feature consumes quite a lot of LLM tokens and is heavier to operate than most other features on the platform.

I’m curious what people here think. Does automatic multilingual support actually help with discovery and growth for early-stage products, or is it unnecessary complexity for a platform like this?
by a456463 | 2026-03-10 18:12:32+00:00
In the US. There is no discourse and active criminalization of the people protesting pipelines, neutral markets and internet, right to own, etc. Even right to protest is under attack. What discourse? Private equity and monopolies is what everybody is willing to give away their comfort to. The effort of raising your own kids? Nah. I want govt to nanny me and everybody else. Better policing? Nah. We need the quick solution and surveill the neighborhoods. Better get back on your feet programs and social safety net for people needing it? Nah get off my backyard and take those homeless with you.

It is constantly people wanting convenience and vertical integration in favor of homegrown human solutions and then complaining that their rights are not met because of course they aren't. Corporations never cared for people.

Idk I feel like I writing a documentary. And not a response now
by RickJWagner | 2026-03-10 18:12:40+00:00
After I retired from programming I took a part time volunteer gig as a ‘Father Advocate’ at a pregnancy center. I talk with young men with a pregnant partner, preparing them for fatherhood.

There is a crisis in this workspace. Many young men grew up without a father, and they’ve missed out on decades of learning by example. They are often ill-prepared for the role of father and don’t really know what a father does. Their lives are often much less satisfying than they should be.

Please help raise awareness for this problem. Donate, volunteer, do what you can. The stories are heartbreaking and the path forward is often unclear. Every single one wants to break the cycle, but help is needed.
Show HN: VeilPhantom – Open-source on-device PII detection for AI pipelines
by nakaiwilliams | 2026-03-10 18:12:48+00:00
I built VeilPhantom, a Python SDK that detects and tokenizes PII before text reaches any LLM.

The problem: AI agents processing meetings, emails, support tickets are handling raw sensitive data. Names, salaries, medical details — all flowing through cloud APIs.

The solution: Detect PII on-device, replace with tokens ([PERSON_1], [AMOUNT_1]), send safe tokens to LLM, rehydrate response locally.

Interesting finding: In benchmarks (98 scenarios, 8 verticals, Claude Haiku), accuracy went UP with PII redaction — 91.5% → 93.3%. Token-structured input seems to help models parse arguments more reliably.

Technical details:
- Shade V7: 22M param PhoneticDeBERTa (DeBERTa-v3-xsmall + Double Metaphone embeddings)
- Trained on 72M words of meeting/business data
- 7 detection layers (NER, gazetteers, regex, NLP, contextual)
- 19 PII token types
- 6ms average overhead
- 97.1% F1 on meeting transcripts

The phonetic embeddings help catch ASR-mangled names across cultures — "Nkosinathi" transcribed as "Ink Casino Thea" still gets detected.

pip install veil-phantom

Docs + benchmarks: https://helloveil.com/sdk
GitHub: https://github.com/helloveil/veil-phantom

Apache 2.0. Happy to answer questions about the architecture or training approach.
by throw0101d | 2026-03-10 18:12:54+00:00
> How does Linux have a monoculture? You'd think it is anything but "mono" with all the distros.

The kernel, systemd, most mainstream distros use glibc, a whole bunch of GNU utilities, GCC being the default on many distros. Versus a different kernel, different libc, different utilities (gawk vs One True Awk), clang default.
by dang | 2026-03-10 18:13:17+00:00
It's normal for HN to be preoccupied with the major technical trend of the moment, and this is unquestionably the biggest technical trend in many years.

People can argue about where to insert it in the list, but it is certainly in the top 5 of many decades (smartphones, web, PCs, etc.) That's why it's inescapable.

Your complaint isn't really about simonw's comment, but rather the fact that it was heavily upvoted - in other words, you were dissenting from the community reaction to the comment. That's understandable; in fact it's a fundamental problem with forums and upvoting systems: the same few massive topics suck in all the smaller ones until we get one big ball of topic mud: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-03-10 18:13:18+00:00
Besides building web apps for internal use, I’m never going to let AI architect something I’m not familiar with. I could care less whether it uses “clean code” or what design pattern it uses. Meaning I will go from an empty AWS account to fully fledged app + architecture because I’ve been coding for 30 years and dealing with every book and cranny of AWS for a decade.

But I would never do the same for Azure.
by emotiveengine | 2026-03-10 18:13:43+00:00
I maintain a few small open source projects and the PR quality went off a cliff once AI coding tools got popular. People generate something that compiles and looks reasonable but is wrong in ways that take me longer to explain than to just fix myself.

The weird part is I use AI heavily for my own code and it's great. But I know the codebase since I wrote it from scratch. Someone who doesn't know it feeding prompts to Copilot produces code that passes lint and still misses the point entirely.

Hashimoto locking contributions to vouched users makes total sense. The old assumption was that effort implied understanding. That's just not true anymore.
by matheusmoreira | 2026-03-10 18:14:43+00:00
In my city there are segments where I can see several kilometers ahead, including the traffic lights and their associated roads and traffic.

If you can't understand the fact it's safe to run a red light when you can see the roads are clear for several kilometers ahead of you, then I simply don't know what else to say.

Even police does this while roaming about on patrol.

Honestly, these arguments sound like cartoon logic. Guy looks both ways and sees the roads are clear but on the exact second he starts to cross the street 10 cars materialize out of nowhere at 200 km/h and nearly run him over just to teach him a lesson. This isn't how the world works.
by derbOac | 2026-03-10 18:14:47+00:00
The thing about arts and AI is that it's one place where the stochastic parrot criticism has never really stopped being accurate to me.

I think backlash against the stochastic parrot idea has always been based on a bit of a strawman — what's being parroted can be pretty abstract and broad in scope, down to reasoning strategies and personality. But with art in particular, I always feel like it's broadly imitating something from elsewhere.

In those AB tests in the linked essay for example, the options are all pretty prototypical genre music samples being compared against one another. Even the fact that they have pretty accurate prototypical labels says something about how prototypical they are, and you can always find something pretty stereotypical of a genre to compare against to play "gotcha" or make it more difficult. It's just not interesting or relevant to me to test whether you can tell the difference between cliched music samples from a human or cliched music samples from AI.

Real art is often like that — you have writers and musicians who follow genre conventions for a variety of reasons — but the most interesting art happens in the margins in ways that are unexpected.

The essay is worth reading for its argument that music is fundamentally a participatory activity — this is something else on my mind lately about live performance art in general, and the implications of that for understanding certain societal trends. But sometimes I think the discussion of AI and art is really missing the boat in other ways as well, ways that apply to AI in general.
by gshulegaard | 2026-03-10 18:14:48+00:00
I don't know, it's a pretty leap for me to consider AI being hard to distinguish from human contributions.

AI is predictive at a token level. I think the usefulness and power of this has been nothing short of astonishing; but this token prediction is fundamentally limiting. The difference between human _driven_ vs AI generated code is usually in design. Overly verbose and leaky abstractions, too many small abstractions that don't provide clear value, broad sweeping refactors when smaller more surgical changes would have met the immediate goals, etc. are the hallmarks of AI generated code in my experience. I don't think those will go away until there is another generational leap beyond just token prediction.

That said, I used human "driven" instead of human "written" somewhat intentionally. I think AI in even its current state will become a revolutionary productivity boosting developer aid (it already is to some degree). Not dissimilar to a other development tools like debuggers and linters, but with much broader usefulness and impact. If a human uses AI in creating a PR, is that something to worry about? If a contribution can pass review and related process checks; does it matter how much or how little AI was used in it's creation?

Personally, my answer is no. But there is a vast difference between a human using AI and an AI generated contribution being able to pass as human. I think there will be increasing degrees of the former, but the latter is improbable to impossible without another generational leap in AI research/technology (at least IMO).

---

As a side note, over usage of AI to generate code _is_ a problem I am currently wrangling with. Contributors who are over relying on vibecoding are creating material overhead in code review and maintenance in my current role. It's making maintenance, which was already a long tail cost generally, an acute pain.
by vadelfe | 2026-03-10 18:14:54+00:00
It survives because it already solves the basic problem well enough. You can reach almost anyone and communicate without needing to join a platform or build a network first.

It’s simple, open, and relatively low-pressure compared to most modern communication tools. A lot of newer products try to improve it, but often they’re mostly adding layers rather than solving a fundamentally missing capability.
by a456463 | 2026-03-10 18:14:56+00:00
I know some idiots that read newspapers and technical papers and yet would rather have company like discord providing safety for their new born daughter but would vote for small govt republicans (or democrats, i don't care, it's just a label that is applicable now. they are mostly all the same) and do nothing about calling out the actual child predators and taking proper action against them. It is bonkers
by gnabgib | 2026-03-10 18:15:14+00:00
I hope you aren't using your @EmptyDrum (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47320046) and @HalfEmptyDrum (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47285062) accounts to upvote this. Please pick one account and stick to it, HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
by deafpolygon | 2026-03-10 18:16:12+00:00
i am never buying another smart tv again. we all should vote with our wallet, but alas — such is life.

i will be replacing my existing (3 year old tv) when its time with a pc monitor and yes, i will go down in size. i’ve found that really large tbs aren’t really adding that much and dominate your house the minute you walk in.
by scottlamb | 2026-03-10 18:16:14+00:00
There are lots of reasons to read through source code you never edit or recompile: security audits, interoperability, learning from their techniques, etc. And I think many of those same ideas apply to seeing the training data of a LLM. It will help you understand quickly (without as much experimentation) what it's likely to be good at, where its biases may be, where some kind of supplement (transfer learning? RAG? whatever) might be needed. And the why.
by DiogenesKynikos | 2026-03-10 18:16:19+00:00
The reason is that it increases traffic safety.

It's even possible to set the cameras up in such a way that they only store data when a traffic violation occurs. That would address the surveillance issue.

I have a strong sense that the primary objection people have to red light cameras is that they don't like getting caught running red lights, and that the surveillance argument is a rationalization, not the real objection.
by thisislife2 | 2026-03-10 18:16:43+00:00
I read an interesting piece on this war somewhere that claimed that the Iran war is the first war that the US is waging without first politically appealing to its public. Historically, US administrations used to present some justification for a war and politically mobilise its citizens to support a war. And only then used to go to war (even if it wasn't usually called "war" - https://9gag.com/gag/amowD7v#comment ).

This is genuinely worrying. It shows contempt towards (American) democracy. Worse still is what it means - is this because of the changing nature of warfare?

AI, drones, missiles, missile-shields etc. means that unless you want to occupy a territory, you don't really need to send your army / troops to a country any more to "punish" them. If you aren't going to put boots on the ground, you don't have to worry about body bags returning home and generating (unmanageable) political anger. Thus, politicians (from superpowers) who hold a contempt for the general public may feel that there is no need any more to get the public's approval for a war as these "ungrateful" citizens aren't anyway going to volunteer for a war without a reasonable justification. The Gaza genocide has already shown that unless the victims are "white, blue-eyed blonde Christians like us" ( https://www.newslaundry.com/2022/02/28/europeans-with-blue-e... ) western politicians are genuinely not going to care about such kind of war crimes. Combine that with extremist right-wing views of a new wave of imperialism (that is all about "regime" changes and killing leaders to install puppets) all stemming from the right- in the US, a multi-polar world order doesn't just seem like a "nice idea" but a political necessity.
by Esn024 | 2026-03-10 18:17:04+00:00
>It's kind of funny because Telegram is used by Russian military to coordinate a lot of things, so they complain a lot about the block.

If that's true, then it was really stupid of them to allow things to get to that point. Look at the US -- they had no tolerance for a major social media app (TikTok) to be outside their own control, and they weren't even in a major war at the time. It seems obvious that if you ARE in a major war, you wouldn't want your main social media and messaging app to be under the control of somebody (Pavel Durov) who was recently arrested by a member (France) of the military alliance you're fighting against (NATO), when it is unclear what deal he may have made with that government to be released from prison. It seems obvious to suspect that the price of his freedom may have been a backdoor that allows the opposing military to read all the messages your own people are sending.

The real failure of Russia's is that, unlike the US, they have been systematically unable to keep its own top tech talent supportive of their own government. The top US tech companies have been only too eager to do almost anything their government asks of them, with only some rare and tepid pushback (such as that by Anthropic recently), that seems to get severely punished when it does happen. So there has been no need for the US government to go to the extents that Russia is going to now, simply because they were able to coopt their top talent into working for and with the state (with some rare exceptions like Snowden, and I'd say the "damage" from that has been pretty successfully contained).

The Chinese government may have had some issues with that as well, considering what happened with Jack Ma (though I don't know much about it).
by orthogonal_cube | 2026-03-10 18:17:58+00:00
> The stigma comes from people being lazy and letting the AI do the heavy lifting of thinking.

This is essentially my point. The AI emits an answer and people will, in turn, copy and paste the result as-is. It’s a repeat all over again of people simply copy-pasting something from Wikipedia and trying to pass it off as their own.
by WorldMaker | 2026-03-10 18:18:07+00:00
A Martian sol (day cycle/rotation) is > 24 hours (by about 40 minutes). Locked in seconds seems to be the easiest for general use mathematically. 24 hours in a day is a bit of a leftover from sundials and 12 being one of the easiest large fractions of a circle and the Earth day was never really a universal anyway, just an accident of where and roughly when we lived. On the other hand, the modern metric second is now defined at exactly 9,192,631,770 periods of Cesium-133 for atomic clocks and other reasons, so a locked second is useful for a lot of reasons.
by js8 | 2026-03-10 18:18:36+00:00
I disagree with the article. I think it is always possible to come up with reasonably small theories that capture most of the given phenomena. So in a sense, you don't need complex theories in the form of large NNs (models? functions? programs?), other than for more precise prediction.

For example - global warming. It's nice to have AOGCMs that have everything and the carbon sink in them. But if you want to understand, a two layer model of atmosphere with CO2 and water vapor feedback will do a decent job, and gives similar first-order predictions.

I also don't think poverty is a complex problem, but that's a minor point.
by sarchertech | 2026-03-10 18:19:08+00:00
It’s not about hand crafted code or even code performance.

We know from experimentation that agents will change anything that isn’t nailed down. No natural language spec or test suite has ever come close to fully describing all observable behaviors of a non-trivial system.

This means that if no one is reviewing the code, agents adding features will change observable behaviors.

This gets exposed to users as churn, jank, and broken work flows.
by latexr | 2026-03-10 18:19:20+00:00
The point I’m making is there are tons of solutions. Deterministic, fast, low-energy, customisable. Which is why I said “I have to wonder what the heck other devs were doing”. As in, have you never looked for a solution to your frustration? Hard to believe there was nothing out there before which wouldn’t have improved your Git command-line experience. Like, say, one of the myriad GUI tools which exist.

> Because it’s custom there is no standard curriculum you could point me to etc.

Not true. There are tons of resources out there not only explaining the solutions but even how different people use them and why.

If I sat with you for ten minutes and you explained me the exact difficulties you have, I doubt I couldn’t have suggested something.
by smj-edison | 2026-03-10 18:20:10+00:00
From the article:

> On the topic of films, I wanted to follow up with Tony a quote that I have seen online attributed to him about Hollywood portrayal of geniuses, often especially in relation to Good Will Hunting. A typical example is: "Hollywood's idea of genius is Good Will Hunting: someone who can solve any problem instantly. In reality, geniuses struggle with a single problem for years". Tony agreed with the idea that cinema often misrepresents how ability in abstract fields such as mathematics is learned over countless hours of thought, rather than - as the movies like to make out - imparted, unexplained, to people of 'genius'. However, he was unsure where exactly he had said this or how/why it had gotten onto the internet, and he agreed that online quotes on the subject, attributed to him, may well be erroneous.

Somewhat off-topic, but it's cool hearing this from someone who's contributed so much to the fields of programming and mathematics. It makes me hopeful that my own strugglings with math will pay out over time!