MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jonathanlight | 2026-03-04 17:16:38+00:00
Hi HN — I'm one of the authors.

This paper looks at a problem that comes up in RL post-training of large models: the training data mixture (or curriculum) is often manually tuned and static, even though the policy keeps changing during training.

We propose Actor-Curator, a framework where a learned "curator" adaptively selects training problems while the actor policy is being optimized. The curator is trained to maximize a policy-improvement objective, effectively learning which data is most useful for improving the policy at each stage of training.

Conceptually it’s a co-adaptive system:
- the actor learns the policy
- the curator learns the training curriculum

Happy to answer questions or discuss!
by jonhohle | 2026-03-04 17:16:48+00:00
Not just durability, but ergonomics. My kids have crappy screens, literally the worst trackpad I’ve ever used, and awful keys that hurt my hands minutes after typing (but I go all day on my personal computer).

If schools are found to be neglecting a minimum standard of care by subjecting kids to hardware that causes long term physical issues, they would have wished they would spend a little more (it amortizes to about $20/student year difference the way our school district does it).
Show HN: Callzo – I built this to call home when I land abroad
by mayursinh | 2026-03-04 17:16:49+00:00
Every time I land at an international airport, first thing I want to do is call home. Just to say I'm here, I'm safe.

But my family isn't always online on WhatsApp. And calling normally from a foreign SIM costs a lot for an international number.

I built Callzo for that. Nothing like rocket science or latest AI buzz. Open a browser, call any number, done.

Tried it on my Japan trip. Called home when I landed. On the way back, a friend wanted me to check iPhone prices at the airport — called him through Callzo while I had Japan's internet running. Whole trip, I didn't even use 10 minutes.

That's what it is. Not an app you open daily. Just something quietly sitting there for the moments that matter — when you need a normal call to go through and your usual options don't cut it.
by GuB-42 | 2026-03-04 17:16:52+00:00
I think the correct answer would be to ask "why are they doing that and not using Google Sheets?".

There are a lot of good reasons for not using Google Sheets. Maybe the spreadsheet is using features that Google Sheet doesn't support, maybe one of the parties is in China, where Google services are blocked, maybe it is against company policy to use Google Docs, maybe they have limited connectivity.

It is good to acknowledge the obvious, off the shelf solutions, but if you are given a job, that's either because the customer did their homework and found out that no, it is indeed not appropriate, or, for some reason, they have money burning their pockets and they want a custom solution, just because. In both cases that's how you are getting paid. So, I don't consider "use Google Sheets, you idiot" to be an appropriate answer. Understand the customer specific needs, that's your job, even more so in the age of AI.

And maybe the interviewer will be honest and say "just assume you can't, this is just an exercise in software architecture".
Show HN: OpenKIWI (Knowledge Integration and Workflow Intelligence)
by pyerschris | 2026-03-04 17:17:05+00:00
I've always been passionate about AI and automation so when I first heard about OpenClaw I got excited.
But as a professional software developer for almost 20 years, and who currently leads a DevOps team I found the experience extremely frustrating: constant gateway restarts and "NO_REPLY" responses from my agents when I would simply ask "Are you there?".

So after using it for a bit the TLDR is that while I think OpenClaw and all the other AI driven automation tools like it are a genuinely powerful concept, they don't feel ready to be seriously used in a production environment.

So I'm building OpenKIWI as a framework to enable developers to build tooling with real tangible value (with security in mind from the start). A quick note on security - OpenKIWI runs all components in isolated Docker containers. Agents can only access files, and run tools that you explicitly allow them to. This project is still early in development, but is already providing real world value to msyelf and my teammates.

I'll constantly see people say that while all these agentic tools sound cool, they have no idea what to do with them other than chat. So here's my most recent use case, plus a few others:

One of my responsibilities is to write a monthly risk assessment report for all the infrastructure my team manages.
I do this by reviewing all the bulletins on cisa.gov, and comparing the recent CVEs to the services we manage. I've been doing this for years.
This month, instead of my normal workflow of crawling through bulletins and capturing data by hand I decided to spend that time writing a plugin for OpenKIWI. Now, I tell an agent "Generate the monthly CISA report for February 2026" and it does all the work for me.

A few more use cases:
1. Weekly GitHub Pulse: Every Monday at 9am: query the user’s repos via the GitHub API, run a sentiment/issue trend analysis, and post a concise digest to WhatsApp. This keeps the team up to date without manual “status update” calls.
2. Daily Google Tasks Sync: Every day at 6 pm: pull all tasks due today, flag overdue ones, and send a gentle reminder to the user’s phone. Acts like a personal assistant that never forgets deadlines.
3. Automatic code quality scans. Every night, run a static analysis tool to flag critical issues and publish a summary.

You can check out OpenKIWI here: https://github.com/chrispyers/openkiwi

The onboarding experience is designed to be as easy as possible. You should be up and running in less than 5m.

And if you have ideas for plugins, or a real world workflows that you think OpenKIWI could help automate I'd love to hear about them!
by elric | 2026-03-04 17:17:10+00:00
Every time some security related protocol relies on DNS for its magic (looking at you, ACME), I lament the state of DNS providers. They all have different APIs, with different levels of security. Most at least offer some kind of REST API with API tokens for auth, which is relatively easy to set up.

Many of those (not looking at any particular Germans..) however only offer a single API token across all DNS zones, which is awful when you're managing many zones. One compromised API token = hundreds of compromised zones.

Would be nice if more DNS providers offered granular API tokens, at least on a per-zone basis and ideally on a per-record basis within a zone.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-03-04 17:17:11+00:00
This is 2026. iPhones use standard USB C headphones, you can charge your phone at the same time while using your wired headphones using MagSafe and you can even by low end $59 Beats Flex headphones that have all of the Apple magic.

I’m going to need HN geeks to get over analog headphones from the 60s
by Aurornis | 2026-03-04 17:17:20+00:00
> it's has spent a fair bit of time going through an infinite seeming loop before finally unjamming itself.

I think this is part of the model’s success. It’s cheap enough that we’re all willing to let it run for extremely long times. It takes advantage of that by being tenacious. In my experience it will just keep trying things relentlessly until eventually something works.

The downside is that it’s more likely to arrive at a solution that solves the problem I asked but does it in a terribly hacky way. It reminds me of some of the junior devs I’ve worked with who trial and error their way into tests passing.

I frequently have to reset it and start it over with extra guidance. It’s not going to be touching any of my serious projects for these reasons but it’s fun to play with on the side.
by MarcelOlsz | 2026-03-04 17:17:54+00:00
This song bangs, looping this all day. What a throwback. Reminds me of ytcracker/digitalgangster days. Also reminds me of Das Racist. Thanks for posting this lol. Love that grime-ish electro beat.

Can you email me? Would love to chat/get more tunes from you.
by blobbers | 2026-03-04 17:17:56+00:00
Haha. This title: Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity

This was the model at my last job. The "director" of software had strong opinions about the most random topics and talked about them like they would be revolutionary. His team was so far from the product teams they would just build random crap that was unhelpful but technically demo'ed well. Never put into practice. Promoted for 4 years, then fired.
by just6979 | 2026-03-04 17:18:13+00:00
CS programs have high attrition rates because programming or "coding" has been touted as easy money for a couple few decades now. When people find out it's not so easy, they bail. Holding a few layers of abstractions in your head is not something that everyone does easily.

Just as keeping most of the structure of a 4-novel-long story in your head is not something everyone can do, hence why being a successful author is not something that everyone can do. Start telling everyone that being a novelist is easy money, though, and you'll see Comp 101 courses filling up and the attrition rate correspondingly go through the roof.
by 1024core | 2026-03-04 17:18:20+00:00
FAANGs are notorious for promoting complexity, and the results are there for all to see.

One thing engineers can do to fight this, and I think it's mentioned in the article, is to write extensive documentation. Bosses in these companies are too lazy to dig into solutions and figure out for themselves; so they resort to proxies like the number of lines of code, number of pages in the design doc, etc.

Unfortunately, some of us who aim for simplicity are also averse to writing long docs; but with the advent of LLMs, there is some relief in sight.

My career has suffered a lot in terms of promos, etc. because I hate complexity.
by Narushia | 2026-03-04 17:18:20+00:00
I agree that the features should ideally be provided by the base system so that the user does not have to "hack them in" with root-powered apps. But the reality is that most Android "distros" simply do not support the features that I would consider basic functionality. I mainly root for three reasons:

- Backing up all app data via Neo Backup. Android has an auto-backup feature that backs up app data to the user's Google Drive, but unfortunately the app developer can simply opt out of this, and the user cannot do anything about it. This means that app data may be lost when migrating to a new phone, as the app data is stored in directories that are not accessible in the filesystem without root.

- High-quality call recording via Call Recorder. For some reason, some (most?) phones do not allow apps to access the raw incoming audio stream. Non-root apps have to rely on capturing the other end through the microphone, which is horrible.

- /etc/hosts-based ad blocking while using a VPN via AdAway. DNS-based ad blocking is possible via apps like AdGuard, which use a local VPN to accomplish this. Unfortunately, Android only allows one VPN connection at a time, which means that without root I would not be able to use a VPN for any other purpose while simultaneously blocking ads.

---

I have no experience with GrapheneOS, so I'd be interested to hear if these features are possible on it without rooting. If not, can I request these features somewhere?
by D-Machine | 2026-03-04 17:19:10+00:00
I fear you are right here, and that the problem is far more dire than much of academia realizes. I know enough highly intelligent people (some even with family / spouses in academia, surprisingly) that are otherwise very e.g. left / liberal / progressive and open, that are still basically saying academia needs to be gutted / burned down.

I've no idea what the actual stats are on faith in academia overall today, but I don't think it is looking good.
Show HN: Kasbah Guard – Free browser extension that catches secrets on GenAI
by AdnaneA | 2026-03-04 17:19:14+00:00
Show HN: Kasbah Guard – Free browser extension that catches API keys before you leak them

We just launched Kasbah Guard, a free browser extension that detects and blocks 50+ secret formats (API keys, tokens, credentials, AWS keys, GitHub PATs, etc.) using ML entropy scoring + context filtering.

It runs 100% locally in your browser (no server calls, no data collection). We built this because existing tools (like Snyk) only catch ~30 secret types, and regex-based detection has too many false positives.

Key innovation: Naive Bayes multi-feature classifier that analyzes Shannon entropy, character transitions, bigram frequency, and context to distinguish real secrets from test fixtures and docstrings.

Live on Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera, Safari. All 5 browsers use identical detector.js (263+ tests passing).

Happy to answer questions about the ML model, false positive suppression, or why we built this.

https://bekasbah.com
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kasbah-guard/...

Would love HN feedback!
by matsemann | 2026-03-04 17:19:28+00:00
I've just spent a few weeks making a tool in our software to replace a complicated google sheet, and it was surprisingly hard. I think the most important thing was that our designer really figured out what the tool should do. If we've just replicated what they have and made a columnar editor of sorts, we would've just made a less flexible tool for them. But in the end, we made something not even resembling what they had, but which actually solved the core issue, and I think that's important.

And when you take away their sheet, you better be ready to support them. If they need to track new data, they could just add a new column in their sheet. Now they have to talk with tech. If tech blocks operations, they're quickly back to their sheets. The tool made by tech should be an enabler, not something to force compliance or whatever.

Sheets are so, so flexible. This can be really hard to replace. At the same time, they're also brittle with little system support. Like the example above, what if you assign someone not working that day to a boat? Or accidentally put two boats in the same location? Lots of small issues that proper tooling could handle, especially when backed with more data inside the system.

What made the operators happy to use my tool in the end was that they didn't have to punch so many numbers. They would copy paste numbers from various systems into their sheet every hour to keep track. The tooling pulls it in real-time.

So we replaced this one sheet, because it would help them a lot. But their other sheets we're leaving untouched for now. Nothing to gain by moving them. So judge each sheet individually.
by kshri24 | 2026-03-04 17:20:33+00:00
> I’m starting to think that’s going to be personality and feel and polish, but turned up a notch. That’s what I used to do when I started writing apps, but in some ways I have really toned it down in favor of OS alignment.

That's all that is really required. I mean look at the Microslop fiasco. They ruined a perfectly good editor: Notepad with AI slop. But this is not reflecting in their sales. They still are showing record revenues.

Just because a competing product exists does not mean your product is suddenly obsolete. There will always be people who will want to buy (provided the market is not oversaturated). Because that is how humans do things. AI won't change that behavior overnight [1]. Look around you and you will see every product you hold in your hand has at least 5-10 competitors.

[1] Think about all the things that are still not computerized and which requires you to fill some or the other form of paperwork. We have had computers for over nearly 6 decades now. We STILL have physical forms that we fill from time to time. Computerization was touted to revolutionize this and yet here we are. Still not achieved 100% digitalization. The same will happen with AI as well. There is this initial burst of excitement (which is the phase we are in) until reality sets in and that's when people will learn how to best use the technology. What you are seeing today (vibe coding et all) is NOT IT.
by underlipton | 2026-03-04 17:20:36+00:00
It's well-known that the FBI and CIA had information that, if they'd been more amenable to collaboration, probably would have led them to the conclusion that an attack was imminent. The entire reason why the DHS was created was because the jealous compartmentalization of each agency's intelligence is why we didn't catch it.

Some quick temperature-check reading from around the time of the 9/11 Commission: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/weekinreview/the-world-an...
by troupo | 2026-03-04 17:21:02+00:00
> I’m saying I don’t think there’s something special about “big picture” information processing tasks, compared to in-detail information processing tasks, that makes them uniquely impossible for LLM.

LLMs can do neither reliably because to do that you need understanding which LLMs don't have. You need to learn from the codebase and the project, which LLMs can't do.

On top of that, to have the big picture LLMs have to be inside your mind. To know and correlate the various Google Docs and Figma files, the Slack discussions, the various notes scattered on your system etc.

They can't do that either because, well, they don't understand or learn (and no, clawdbot will not help you with that).

> The other objections seem mostly to be issues with current tooling, or the sort of capacity problems that the LLM developers are constantly overcoming.

These are not limitations of tooling, and no, LLM developers are not even close to overcoming, especially not "constantly". The only "overcoming" has been the gimmicky "1 million token context" which doesn't really work.
by QBitFlow | 2026-03-04 17:21:20+00:00
Hey — this is exactly the problem I've been solving with QBitFlow (https://qbitflow.app). Full disclosure: I'm the founder, but your post describes our use case so precisely I'd feel weird not chiming in.

The short version: QBitFlow is non-custodial — we never touch your funds. Instead of the processor model (Coinbase Commerce, NOWPayments) where they receive payments and forward them minus fees, customers pay directly to your wallet. Smart contracts handle the authorization and verification logic on-chain.

For your specific case (one-time USDC payments with verification):

• Customer sends to your address, smart contract confirms amount + receipt
• You get webhooks/API callbacks when payment is confirmed — no polling Transfer events yourself, no reorg handling, no retry logic
• Works on Ethereum and Solana today (more chains coming, L2s on the roadmap)

On fees: we charge 1.5% flat normally, but I can offer you 0.75% for 6 months (extendable) since you'd be an early adopter. Compare that to the 0.5-1% you'd pay Coinbase Commerce/NOWPayments — except they also custody your funds and add withdrawal friction. At 0.75% on your $10k example, that's $75 vs building and maintaining your own brittle webhook infra.

You can try the full flow in test mode without spending anything: https://qbitflow.app/docs?section=test-mode — takes about 5 minutes to see if it fits your setup. I'm also happy to do a full onboarding walkthrough if you want to go deeper.

And honestly — even if QBitFlow isn't the right fit for your stack, I'd love to hear your feedback. You've clearly thought about this problem more than most, and that kind of input is gold for us at this stage.

Happy to answer any technical questions here or via email.
by carlos-menezes | 2026-03-04 17:21:30+00:00
Location: Portugal

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Code (TypeScript, NodeJS, JavaScript, Rust, Python, React, NextJS, Electron, C++) & tools (Docker, Redis, SQL, Jest, Storybook, Git, Vercel)

Résumé/CV: https://www.carlos-menezes.com/cv.pdf

Email: see CV
by dataflow | 2026-03-04 17:21:44+00:00
> If you buy a used phone every year from someone buying a new phone every year, it means that you both use one phone every two years, right? It's a lot worse than buying a new phone and keeping it for 8 years.

Because when someone says "buy used" they're obviously telling you to buy the antiques your grandma used to love back in the day on an annual basis. Anything newer than that especially from the last year or two would be new and insane to consider, especially if you keep it more than a year. You really owned me with the flawless argument there.
by e-topy | 2026-03-04 17:21:44+00:00
You can. GitHub is about to hit zero nines of uptime[0].
But feedback like that is far too late to be useful.
Maybe (principal or senior) engineers should be the ones to judge, and be trusted by management that their foresight is worth pushing the deadline?

[0]: https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/
by mghackerlady | 2026-03-04 17:21:49+00:00
That kind of thing is for someone with governing experience to solve. I suppose revoking them every now and then would be good, and maybe for ease of minting new unique codes they could loosely be tied to location. I'm not too worried about that, as your IP could be used in a similar way and the services shouldn't be reading the codes themselves regularly anyway
by dragonwriter | 2026-03-04 17:22:22+00:00
The idea that copyright applies solely to distribution is a popular myth, but it has no support in the actual copyright law. The core exclusive rights in copyright are (in the US, 17 USC § 106):

---

(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;

(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;

(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;

(4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly;

(5) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly; and

(6) in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.

---

OTOH, distributing copies created in violation of copyright is a good way to cause legally-cognizable harms to the copyright holder that will increase the potential damage award when you are found liable for copyright infringement, and it also makes it much more likely that someone will notice the infringement in the first place. But its not where the law, on its own terms, begins to apply.
Doing any of those without permission (unless it falls into one of the exceptions to copyright protection, like fair use) is a violation of copyright.
by kid64 | 2026-03-04 17:22:33+00:00
Sorry, the lack of vision I referred to related to Obsidian's leadership -- unserious D&D kids largely unconcerned with usability, performing security theatrics with sync e2ee while their users data is regularly at risk of mass exfiltration via their insanely dangerous community plugin ecosystem.

The on-screen appearance of the feature you're referring to may be visual and coherent, I'm just pointing out that users frequently cite theoretical or anticipated benefits of this feature, not real ones.
by BugsJustFindMe | 2026-03-04 17:22:38+00:00
> Charge habits with batteries make a huge difference.

> Hot take: people should get used to, and expect to, replace device batteries 1 or 2 times during the device lifetime.

I agree that people should get used to replacing device batteries, but if you accept that then you should just stop worrying about charge habits. An MBP that doesn't have a defective or extreme-heat-damaged battery should stay above 80% battery capacity for at least 600 charge cycles without any special care at all. That's many years of regular charging, and 80% capacity is still good for all day usage.