MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Fnoord | 2026-03-10 18:25:53+00:00
> I don't know why this got downvoted. I've already been so frustrated by HN LIDAR mindsets but holy shit

The extreme sides (proponents, opponents) are clear, opposites, and fight each other. More nuanced takes get buried as droplets in a bucket. Likely a goal.

> Human society exists because we value humans, full stop.

Call me cynic, but I do not believe every human being agrees with this sentiment. From HR acting as if humans are resources, to human beings being dehumanized as workers, civilians, cannon fodder, and... well, the product. Every time human rights are violated, and we do not stand up to it, we lose.

I have a very simple question as human right: the right for a human being to know the other side is a human being yes or no, and if not: to speak gratis (no additional fee allowed) to a human being instead. Futhermore, ML must always cite the used sources, and ML programmer is responsible for mistake. This would increase insurance costs so much, that LLM's in public would die, but SLM's could thrive.
by niemandhier | 2026-03-10 18:26:04+00:00
He talks about the Santa Fe institute and how they failed to carry their findings into the real world.

They did not.

They showed that for certain problems one could not do more than figure out some invariant and scaling laws. Showing what is impossible is not failure.

For the rest:
Modern gene networks and lots of biological modelling is based on their work as well as quite a few other things. That’s also not failure.

I agree that modern AI is alchemy.
by bell-cot | 2026-03-10 18:26:13+00:00
> “There is disagreement between NASA and SpaceX on whether the provider’s current proposed approach for landing meets the intent of the Agency’s manual control requirement,” [...]

> The report notes that during every one of the Apollo program’s crewed lunar landings, astronauts engaged the backup manual control method. (Of course, this occurred six decades ago, when flight software was considerably less sophisticated than today.)

Soo... How well has that "sophisticated" flight software performed, when landing unmanned probes on the moon in the past few years?
by Frieren | 2026-03-10 18:26:15+00:00
> "Trust" in this situation is a weasel word for surveillance

Is all security a weasel word for surveillance? You answer a valid argument with a meme. It is very unproductive.

How do you suggest to disallow children access to pornography, harmful content, etc? Or are you arguing that any solution is worse than the harm that bad actors in search of money and political gain are doing to children?
by ray023 | 2026-03-10 18:26:15+00:00
The website is absolutely atrocious, dark mode has pitch-black background with bold 100% white glowing text in foreground, shitty font, way to wide text.

Seriously how is lwn.net even still so popular with such an atrocious unreadable ugly website. Well yes I get the irony of asking that on HN (I use an extension to make it better).
by JohnFen | 2026-03-10 18:26:21+00:00
> “They are not held to the same legal requirements that doctors and health care institutions are,” Bitterman said of the AI companies.

This is why I wouldn't touch any health provider that involves genAI with a ten foot pole. The privacy protections involving actual doctors and health care institutions are inadequate already. I can't tolerate anything that has even fewer protections.

Particularly if they involve genAI companies, which in my opinion have more than demonstrated that they are not trustworthy to begin with.
by efsavage | 2026-03-10 18:26:29+00:00
Yegge's list resonated a little more closely with my progression to a clumsy L8.

I think eventually 4-8 will be collapsed behind a more capable layer that can handle this stuff on its own, maybe I tinker with MCP settings and granular control to minmax the process, but for the most part I shouldn't have to worry about it any more than I worry about how many threads my compiler is using.
by steelbrain | 2026-03-10 18:26:39+00:00
Hi HN!

I'm excited to show case an update to a personal project of mine. Its called ffmpeg-over-ip and it allows you connect to remote ffmpeg servers, so if you have one machine with a GPU (could be your windows gaming laptop, gaming PC, a macbook?) and a machine (or VM, docker container etc) without a GPU, you could use the remote GPU to do GPU-accelerated video conversion.

The way it works is pretty neat, there are two components, a server and a client.

- The server (has the GPU) comes with a patched up ffmpeg and listens on a specified port
- The client (without the GPU) connects to the server, takes the file IO requests from the server and runs them locally.

ffmpeg doesn't know that its not dealing with a local filesystem, so this approach works with multiple inputs or outputs like HLS, and is perfect for home media servers like Plex or Jellyfin or Emby.

One server can offer up its GPU to as many clients as needed, all clients offer up their own filesystems for their requests, the server also comes with a static build of ffmpeg bundled (built from jellyfin-ffmpeg scripts) so all you have to do is create a config file, set a password and you're good to go!

It's been about a year and half since this was last submitted (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41743780). The feedback at the time was around the difficulty of sharing a filesystem between the machines so that should no longer be a problem.

This has been really useful in my local setup, I hope you find it useful. If you have any further questions, the website has some FAQs (linked in github repo), or you could post them here and I'll answer them for you!

Thanks!
by lovich | 2026-03-10 18:26:48+00:00
If you use AI to back it out, sounds like you’ve found an infinite feedback loop for those metrics.

Did industrial psychology die out as a field? Why do we keep reinventing the wheel when it comes to perverse incentives. It’s like working on a team working with scrum where the big bosses expect the average velocity to go up every sprint, forever, but the engineers are the ones deciding the point totals on tickets.
by michelangelo | 2026-03-10 18:27:03+00:00
> Why are people even so dumb to use TV apps for a fucking TV?

To address both the arrogant tone and the question itself: because sometimes people don’t have, don’t want to have or cannot use a computer connected to a TV.

Not everyone is a HN commenter with anger issues. Most of times these devices (TVs, streaming sticks and so on…) are used by normal folks that are not comfortable with computers.
by curt15 | 2026-03-10 18:27:08+00:00
>The fact that many independent national newspapers (including this article from CNBC) are openly calling-out the surveillance state and entering the debate into the public conscience should tell everyone that USA (and the West) is very different from Russia or China or Dubai.

For how much longer will they stay independent? Media empires love to consolidate; most of the largest video services will soon be owned by a fan of govt surveillance.
by hkonte | 2026-03-10 18:27:25+00:00
The dual-LLM split is the interesting part. By separating the engine model (game state) from the architect model (perception/strategy), you're giving each a scoped context instead of one giant prompt that tries to do both. That's where single-LLM approaches tend to collapse: the role bleeds across the context and you lose the behavioral boundary.

The same scoping problem shows up in prompt design more generally. When role, context, and output instructions all live in one flat string, the model treats them as a gradient, not distinct signals. Typed blocks with explicit labels keep them isolated.

I've been building flompt (github.com/Nyrok/flompt) for exactly this, a visual prompt builder that decomposes prompts into 12 semantic blocks and compiles to Claude-optimized XML. Different scale than your system but the same underlying idea. Open-source.
by alexbuiko | 2026-03-10 18:27:29+00:00
This is a brilliant breakdown of the 'Token Mix' paradox. It aligns perfectly with what we’ve been seeing while developing SDAG.

When you optimize for a structured context payload (like your dependency graph), you aren't just hitting the Anthropic pricing cache—you are literally reducing the routing entropy at the inference level. High-noise inputs force the model into 'exploratory' output paths, which isn't just expensive in dollars, but also in hardware stress.

We found that 'verbose orientation narration' (the thinking-out-loud part) correlates with higher entropy spikes in memory access. By tightening the input signal-to-noise ratio, you're essentially stabilizing the model's internal routing. Have you noticed any changes in latency variance (jitter) between the pre-indexed and ad-hoc runs? In our tests, lower entropy usually leads to much more predictable TTFT (Time To First Token).
Show HN: Railyard – open and secure runtime for Claude Code
by LunarFrost88 | 2026-03-10 18:27:39+00:00
We're a small startup (but have ~15 years of experience building software), so we try to run Claude Code as autonomously as possible. The goal is to spend most of our time talking to customers instead of babysitting the agent. But --dangerously-skip-permissions felt a bit too wild west for us.

So we built a runtime to make autonomous use safer. Railyard is an open-source runtime that sits between Claude Code and the shell and adds guardrails to agent commands.

Every command Claude runs goes through Railyard first. Most commands pass straight through. The ones that could cause damage (for example terraform destroy) get blocked or require approval.

Under the hood it runs commands inside an OS-level sandbox (sandbox-exec on macOS and bwrap on Linux) and applies deterministic rules. There’s no LLM scoring commands or guessing about intent — a command either matches a rule or it doesn’t. The check takes about 2ms.

By default it blocks destructive commands like terraform destroy or rm -rf, prevents access to sensitive paths like ~/.ssh, ~/.aws, and /etc, restricts certain network calls, and catches simple evasion tricks like base64, hex, or variable obfuscation.

It also snapshots file writes so you can roll back a session if something goes wrong.

In practice this lets us run Claude Code with --dangerously-skip-permissions, but with guardrails underneath so we can move fast without breaking or deleting production assets.

We built this because we wanted Claude Code to behave more like a software factory. Factories run at high volume, but only because the production line has quality and safety checks. Railyard is the guardrail layer that makes that possible for us.

Repo: https://github.com/railyarddev/railyard

It's MIT licensed and free to use. If you're experimenting with autonomous agents, feel free to clone it and try it out. I'm especially curious how people push or break these guardrails.

Happy to answer any questions about how it works.
by andrewstuart | 2026-03-10 18:27:44+00:00
I wouldn’t admit to this level of frankly incompetence.

Wildly swinging dogmatism on how to do software development that’s so wrong you have to throw it all away - then repeating this failure loop multiple times.

Doesn’t inspire any confidence in the person I wouldn’t get them to lead a project.

Why would you be so loud and proud about all this.
by bobjordan | 2026-03-10 18:27:47+00:00
I've been working on a large codebase that was already significant before LLM-assisted programming, leveraging code I’d written over a decade ago. Since integrating Claude and Codex, the system has evolved and grown massively. Realistically, there’s a lot in there now that I simply couldn't have built in a standard human lifetime without them.

That said, the core value of the software wouldn't exist without a human at the helm. It requires someone to expend the energy to guide it, explore the problem space, and weave hundreds of micro-plans into a coherent, usable system. It's a symbiotic relationship, but the ownership is clear. It’s like building a house: I could build one with a butter knife given enough time, but I'd rather use power tools. The tools don't own the house.

At this point, LLMs aren't going to autonomously architect a 400+ table schema, network 100+ services together, and build the UI/UX/CLI to interface with it all. Maybe we'll get there one day, but right now, building software at this scale still requires us to drive. I believe the author owns the language.
by pixl97 | 2026-03-10 18:28:20+00:00
>other people are reasonable like you

No AI needed. Spam on the internet is a great example of the amount of unreasonable people on the internet. And for this I'll define unreasonable as "committing an action they would not want committed back at them".

AI here is the final nail in the coffin that many sysadmins have been dealing with for decades. And that is that unreasonable actors are a type of asymmetric warfare on the internet, specifically the global internet, because with some of these actors you have zero recourse. AI moved this from moderately drowning in crap to being crushed under an ocean of it.

Going to be interesting to see how human systems deal with this.
by svstoyanovv | 2026-03-10 18:28:39+00:00
Have you tried, as Peter Steinberg suggested, "I ask for Specifications to be submitted, I can generate then the code based on that spec in a minute" - what we also find useful is exactly this, if a contributor wants to submit a PR he also submits a specification from a template that we have given. We have automated pipelines to verify the quality of that specification with GitHub Actions. That way, you can see the reason, deep thinking, insights, what the use cases were that the contributor tried solving, and the environment in which this was done.
by oceanplexian | 2026-03-10 18:28:44+00:00
> It's the difference between raw LLM output vs LLM output that was tweaked, reviewed and validated by a competent developer.

This is one of those areas where you might have been right.. 4-6 months ago. But if you're paying attention, the floor has moved up substantially.

For the work I do, last year the models would occasionally produce code with bugs, linter errors, etc, now the frontier models produce mostly flawless code that I don't need to review. I'll still write tests, or prompt test scenarios for it but most of the testing is functional.

If the exponential curve continues I think everyone needs to prepare for a step function change. Debian may even cease to be relevant because AI will write something better in a couple of hours.
by dang | 2026-03-10 18:28:58+00:00
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47320600, which was (originally) posted a bit earlier and has more background. We'll put the current links in the top text there as well.

Sorry ottomengis! We do still intend to make a karma-sharing system for cases like this. In the meantime, it does tend to even out in the long run.
by dlcarrier | 2026-03-10 18:29:24+00:00
Unless I'm missing something, the pertinent license-plate misreading happened when the vehicle was pulled over. It's one thing if a false positive shows a stolen vehicle or license plate where it isn't, but all that means is any resources put into locating it will go wasted.

Pulling over a vehicle, and incorrectly thinking it is stolen, is an entirely different and much greater mistake. In this case the actual vehicles actual license plate did not match anything stolen.

I'm against law enforcement vehicles having continuously-operating license-plate cameras, but if there were cameras to identify the vehicle currently being pulled over, I'd be fine with that, as it would likely have a much, much lower error rate than the human chain currently doing the verifying.
by HexDecOctBin | 2026-03-10 18:29:57+00:00
> Language features like templates are not the issue – the Standard Library is.

What sins does STL commits that make it slow if templates themselves are not slow, and what kind of template code doesn't bloat compile times? In my experience, C++ libraries are usually one order of magnitude or more slower to compile than equivalent C ones, and I always chalked it upto the language.
by observationist | 2026-03-10 18:30:19+00:00
Regarding DRM, You could use stream ciphers and other well understood cryptography schemes to use a FHE chip like this to create an effectively tamper-proof and interception proof OS, with the FHE chip supplementing normal processors. You'd basically be setting up e2ee between the streaming server and the display, audio output, or other stream target, and there'd be no way to intercept or inspect unencrypted data without breaking the device. Put in modern tamper detection and you get a very secure setup, with modern performance, and a FHE chip basically just handling keys and encapsulation operations, fairly low compute and bandwidth needs. DRM and attestation both, as well as fairly dystopian manufacturer and corporate controls over devices users should own.
by coder543 | 2026-03-10 18:30:30+00:00
> Siri/iOS-Dictation is truly good when it comes to understanding the speech.

What...? It is terrible, even compared to Whisper Tiny, which was released years ago under an Apache 2.0 license so Apple could have adopted it instantly and integrated it into their devices. The bigger Whisper models are far better, and Parakeet TDT V2 (English) / V3 (Multilingual) are quite impressive and very fast.

I have no idea what would make someone say that iOS dictation is good at understanding speech... it is so bad.

For a company that talks so much about accessibility, it is baffling to me that Apple continues to ship such poor quality speech to text with their devices.
by MereInterest | 2026-03-10 18:30:42+00:00
> Emacs is not primarily a TUI program (although it does have a TUI with the -nw). The TUI version of emacs lacks visual customizability and introduces unnecessary overhead (terminal!). Use the GUI.

Can you elaborate on this? I tend to use emacs exclusively in the terminal, since I'm often using them on remote workstations. For remote workstations, I can (a) open files using TRAMP, (b) open a remote GUI with X11 forwarding over SSH, or (c) open a remote TUI. TRAMP doesn't always play nicely with LSP servers, and remote TUIs are much, much more responsive than X11 forwarding.

Locally, the performance of emacs depends far more on the packages I load than on the GUI vs TUI, so I'm interested in hearing what overhead there would be.
How to clarify the EUPL compatibility clause?
by patemmschmitz | 2026-03-10 18:30:43+00:00
The (2017) EUPL-1.2 compatibility clause is as follow:
"If the Licensee Distributes or Communicates Derivative Works or copies thereof based upon both the Work and another work licensed under a Compatible Licence, this Distribution or Communication can be done under the terms of this Compatible Licence. For the sake of this clause, ‘Compatible Licence’ refers to the licences listed in the appendix attached to this Licence. Should the Licensee's obligations under the Compatible Licence conflict with his/her obligations under this Licence, the obligations of the Compatible Licence shall prevail."

When thinking to update the EUPL (enlarging the list of compatible licenses i.e. to new ESA licenses) the compatibility clause may warrant clarification, not a change: some have questioned whether there is a risk of circumventing network distribution (or SaaS) coverage. The new wording could be as follows (but any suggestion for improvement and brevity would be welcome):

"If the Licensee Distributes or Communicates Derivative Works or copies thereof based upon both the Work and another work already licensed under a Compatible Licence this can be done, in so far the Compatible license imposes to do so, under the terms of this ‘Compatible Licence’, which refers to the licences listed in the appendix attached to this Licence. Should the Licensee's obligations under the Compatible Licence conflict with his/her obligations under this Licence, the obligations of the compatible license shall prevail, provided that the rights granted for in Articles 2 and 3 of this License, as well as its definition of ‘Distribution or Communication to the public’, are not considered as invalid further restrictions. This clause applies to the specific derivative work only and may not be used for the purpose of relicensing the original work."

Thanks for comments!
by linguae | 2026-03-10 18:30:53+00:00
I was just thinking about this a few days ago, but not just for the CPU (which we have RISC-V and OpenPOWER), but for an entire system, including the GPU, audio, disk controllers, networking, etc. I think a great target would be mid-2000s graphics and networking; I could go back to a 2006 Mac Pro without too much hardship. Having a fully-open equivalent to mid-2000s hardware would be a boon for open computing.
by nicola_alessi | 2026-03-10 18:31:19+00:00
Interesting framing — hadn't thought about it from the inference routing angle but it maps well to what the data shows.
On latency variance: yes, significantly. Cost standard deviation across runs dropped 6-24x depending on task type. The most extreme case was a refactoring task: baseline sigma $0.312 vs $0.013 with pre-indexed context. Duration variance also dropped in 6 out of 7 tasks. I didn't measure TTFT specifically but the overall duration went from 170s → 132s with much tighter clustering around the mean.
The stabilization effect is probably the most underrated finding. Everyone focuses on the average cost reduction, but the predictability improvement matters more for production workloads — you can actually forecast spend instead of hoping the agent doesn't go on an exploration tangent.
What's SDAG? Curious about your setup.
by oscarmoxon | 2026-03-10 18:31:28+00:00
Compute costs are falling fast, training is getting cheaper. GPT-2 costs pocket change to train, and now it costs pocket train to tune >1T parameter models. If it was transparent what costs went into the weights, they could be commodified and stripped of bloat. Instead the hidden cost is building the infrastructure that was never tested at scale by anyone other than the original developers who shipped no documentation of where it fails. Unlike compute, this hidden cost doesn't commodify on its own.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-03-10 18:32:10+00:00
Yeah I am wondering the same thing.

I was gonna comment about this guy and iharnoor which is 7 month old account who literally only said "lets go" here

This sort of makes me even more suspicious john especially iharnoor

I wasn't responding because I was making archive link of all of this so that even messages deleted can have some basis of confirmation.
by dheera | 2026-03-10 18:32:14+00:00
TBH I'm not opposed to the government knowing where I live. Having ways to find and lock up actual criminals is not a bad thing.

I'm also not opposed to certain private businesses or financial institutions needing to know who I am. Having ways to identify financial criminals is not a bad thing either.

What I'm vehemently opposed to is these private businesses needing to know where I live. They are not the ones doing the locking up. That's what the government does. Private businesses can identify individuals without needing to know their residential addresses.
by pixl97 | 2026-03-10 18:32:25+00:00
> are worth the downside of collapsing society.

At least in the US, society has been well on it's way to collapse before the LLM came out. "Fake news" is a great example of this.

>It's a decision that your mindset is the only right one and anyone else is a opposing progress.

So pretty much every religious group that's ever existed for any amount of time. Fundamentalism is totally unproblematic, right?