MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwawayffffas | 2026-03-09 12:32:26+00:00
As far as I understand the state of the art as of 2-3 years ago, there is no reinforcement learning at all at any point. At least not in the dynamics.

What you do is you map the dynamics of your system, and solve them, that solution is a program that can produce torque inputs in joints to move the system in the way that you want.

You then create a sequence of desirable intermediate and end states. The program then does it best to achieve these.

The difference between atlas and the kawasaki robots, is that to achieve those states, the kawasaki robots use a program that attempts to stop all inertial rotations and movements in order to maintain full control of it's movements at all times.

While atlas and the chinese robots leverage the inertia and gravity to achieve their movements, again you do that by solving a large set of equations, no ML required.

The GP described a system of prerecorded motions, like a video game animation, if you try to do that, and have no controller to adjust to the real time environment, you are just going to tip over and continue doing the prerecorded motions. We saw that with the Russian robot last year.

You can use a real human that does the choreography as a way for capturing the desired intermediate states that is the step that might require ML.
by apothegm | 2026-03-09 12:32:49+00:00
Any time the autocomplete doesn’t understand what I’m trying to accomplish, so several times per hour.

LLMs will repeat the patterns they see, and I’m trying to whip a legacy codebase into decent shape before the next phase of feature growth, so no fully generative coding for anything beyond tests and throwaways until that’s done.

And TBH, while I adore neither having to type out the nits of syntax nor having to remember the details of certain APIs, I still get far more enjoyment from working at the code level than the prompt level. So a good AI autocomplete makes for very enjoyable and productive coding.
by pipnonsense | 2026-03-09 12:33:12+00:00
Neat ideas.

One thing I am exploring is that, with LLM (and enough $ to pay the tokens) you can filter out offenses and hate speech in player communications.

All typed message is effectively translated by the LLM as “coach speech” and what is put in the UI is the LLM output. Sure, it is not exactly the player words and can get expensive, but I think it can be a good solution
by BoredomIsFun | 2026-03-09 12:34:23+00:00
here right from the horse mouth: I get the irritation—when you’ve spent years learning to write, watching a prompt spit out 400 clean words in four seconds can feel like watching a conjurer pull your own wallet out of your pocket. But the “flatness” you’re reacting to is less an iron law of the model than a mirror held up to the prompt you feed it. If the instructions are “write something competent, quickly,” the machine will do exactly that: competent, quick, depth-free. It’s the textual equivalent of a hotel breakfast—edible, forgettable, optimized for no one’s palate in particular.

The same thing happens with human writers when the brief is vague and the fee is low. Ever skim a trade-journal article that feels like it was written on autopilot? The author probably was. The difference is that the human had to slog through the apathy hour by hour, while the model compressed the same anemia into milliseconds. Blame the brief, not the tool.

As for the “personal defeat” angle: I’ve never seen a chef hang up the apron because a food processor can julienne faster, or a mathematician quit because Wolfram Alpha factors quicker. The people who get replaced are the ones who were only ever doing the mechanical slice of the job. Everyone else uses the machine to skip the chopping and spend the saved time on seasoning, plating, or inventing a dish no recipe anticipated.

If you want prose with teeth, give the model something to bite: a weird metaphor, a forbidden angle, a voice it has to counterfeit. Then edit hard—same as you would a junior colleague’s draft. The result won’t carry your childhood memories, but it can carry your fingerprints, provided you’re willing to leave them.

Bottom line: the robot isn’t the rival; it’s the new kitchen hand. You can spend your energy cursing its knife skills, or you can teach it how you like the onions cut—then get back to the part of cooking that actually feels like yours.
by cryptoz | 2026-03-09 12:34:42+00:00
AST-based code modifications from LLMs: https://codeplusequalsai.com/

I'm interested in the idea that LLMs writing raw code and doing line-or-diff replacements will not be the future, but that having the LLMs modify the structure of the code may end up being the best.

Also, I think that building LLM-powered webapps should earn the dev per token call; so I've built a margin into token costs where the end user is charged 2x the provider's token costs, and then I get 20% of the remaining and the dev gets 80%.
by jahala | 2026-03-09 12:34:54+00:00
Have been tinkering with a few different projects:

- Tilth: Smart(er) code reading for humans and AI agents. Reduces LLM token use and cost by ~40% (benchmarked)
https://github.com/jahala/tilth

- mrkd: Native macOS .md viewer (+preview in Finder) that imports iTerm2 and VSCode themes
https://github.com/jahala/mrkd

- O-O: Self-updating articles concept with polyglot (bash/html) files. No server, no database.
https://github.com/jahala/o-o
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2026-03-09 12:35:32+00:00
> As an aside, I don't think there is any backing out of this war. If somebody launched a missile at your country and killed hundreds of schoolgirls, and destroyed ships on diplomatic missions while leaving the survivors to drown, while also assassinating your country's leader (but not out of any intention of liberation), would you just let things go because they stopped bombing? Of course you wouldn't. Your country would continue to retaliate. And it is trivial to punish America. Even if America unilaterally decided to "declare peace" and withdraw from attacking Iran, Iran has every reason to continue locking down the gulf and making Americans pay the price. Unlike with tariffs, there is no backing down from these price increases even if Trump gets cold feet. But, even so, there is no reason to believe it will move the needle on his base. There is already talk of "short term pain for long term gain" among those who realise this.

Yeah, that's a good point. And the fact that the new leader's closest family members were killed in the attack won't help. But I suppose the Iranian regime might want some stability, and the Gulf countries are very interested in the end of the war because for them it's pretty much an existencial treat. So maybe there's a scenario where Trump gets to declare a GREAT VICTORY because he supposedly destroyed Iran's nuclear capability or whatever, Iran gets money from the Gulf countries and the regime gets stability, and the Gulf countries get... well, avoiding ruin.
by sidewndr46 | 2026-03-09 12:35:38+00:00
I'm not really pro-UK or pro-anything in Europe, but most of Europe was built out before modern sewage treatment. Or for that matter the germ theory of disease. It's more than easy to understand why rivers have untreated sewage is dumped into rivers. At the time of construction, it was state of the art.

The US in unusual in that most of it's population boom happened after modern sanitation. Yet we still have areas that discharge sewage into rivers on and ongoing basis.
by madaxe_again | 2026-03-09 12:36:15+00:00
Pumped storage hydro is extremely cheap and efficient and has been around for more than a century. LiFePo4 batteries are now cheap enough that they're a cost-competitive alternative. Flywheel storage plugs the inertia gap nicely.

The tech exists - it's mostly just a matter of political will. The economics already justify it. People are making considerable money by starting up BESSs (Battery Energy Storage Systems) and doing time arbitrage on energy.

cf. Iberia, who recently learned that effective storage and intertial pick-up is integral to a stable and efficient power network, and are now spending heavily on both.
by ben_w | 2026-03-09 12:36:33+00:00
> I would rather wait for official stats before claiming victory.

You sure about that?

With your recent comment history, you've been claiming victory for your rhetorical position without waiting for official stats, and deny the stats which do exist as "propaganda".

That is in fact why I noted my newer reference was pointing to the same domain as you were using to claim yours.

As an aside: It's not like this is even a proper environmental victory condition yet, see my other links on that, just that the rate at which CO2 is going up (due to China) is not itself going up. "Victory" happens when atmospheric CO2 goes past 400 ppm again, this time downwards.
by persumentor | 2026-03-09 12:36:56+00:00
Interesting methodology.

Using DXA to measure body composition is a solid choice, since it gives reasonably precise estimates of lean mass distribution compared to simpler methods like BIA.

What caught my attention more is the dietary control part. Self-reported dietary logs, even with photos and interviews, can still introduce variability, especially over a 16-week intervention.

In studies trying to link exercise with skin-related outcomes, dietary factors (protein intake, micronutrients, total energy balance) can be a pretty significant confounder. It would be interesting to see how tightly those variables were controlled or normalized in the analysis.
by dinowars | 2026-03-09 12:37:54+00:00
I used to have a good deal for years at Orange. They tried to get me on a new contract (slightly expensive) for a while, but at some point they just decommissioned the old program, basically they cancelled the old contracts and migrated everyone to the new plan. It was a minor change to me so went with it, then later they started to hike prices on the new plan, eventually I cancelled and left them after about 20 years.
by rgoulter | 2026-03-09 12:38:01+00:00
I've used CH32X035 (which is practically CH32V00x plus USB and some other things) at the hobbyist level (no-frills keyboard PCB designs).

The impression I get of WCH and their CH32 line is it ... draws heavy inspiration from STM32.

WCH provide English translated datasheets and reference manuals. They're fine.

Their own recommended toolchain is a fork of GCC. But as far as I can tell, they haven't shared their changes anywhere. The specifics of the changes they've made are a bit beyond my understanding, though.

With the open source distributions of GCC toolchains work just fine. I've built Rust crates as firmware libraries for them.

That the CH32X035 is very simple to design for (& low cost) means I'd rather make use of it for hobbyist keyboard PCB designs compared to the RP2040.
by d1sxeyes | 2026-03-09 12:38:41+00:00
OP double negated - cursive is the norm for Russians of all ages.

Russian cursive is actually not that bad to read for the most part. Russian “print” is super awkward because all the characters are very angular.

There are some differences between generations (younger generations are more likely to write “т” in handwriting whereas the “correct” form looks more like a Latin “m”, but with obvious examples excluded (like the above), it just takes learning as a separate alphabet.
by AutoAPI | 2026-03-09 12:38:45+00:00
PostalAgent - https://PostalAgent.com – direct mail automation for people who've given up on email open rates.

Email averages ~20% open rates on a good day. A postcard sitting on someone's kitchen counter for two weeks is hard to compete with. I've been building out the programmatic side. API, Zapier, and native integrations with Jobber and Zoho so you can trigger physical mail from the same workflows you already use for email.

Shopify integration is almost out the door too, which opens up a lot of interesting abandoned cart and win-back use cases for stores whose customers have opted out of email.

No bulk minimums, no design software needed. If anyone here wants to give it a try, reply or email me and I'll set you up with some free credits to get started.
by ta_4304545 | 2026-03-09 12:38:45+00:00
Standard Hacker News is heavily "moderated" these days (if not by the mods themselves then by mobocracies misusing tools), which means that anything that falls outside the Happy Silicon Valley / Everything Is Good / Nothing Is Wrong narrative will get flagged and buried.

As a result, sadly, it's become basically a Reddit style echo chamber, where negative news is suppressed. Often, the justification is "it's politics!", as perhaps might be the case here. Despite the fact that Silicon Valley's products, and Silicon Valley itself, are becoming more entangled with "politics" and the US government than ever.

There are better tools than Reddit to see what gets swept under the moderation rug, at least.
by wearebilig | 2026-03-09 12:39:12+00:00
Given everything happening in the world at the moment, it is easy to go down into spiral of doomscrolling on social media about what's going to happen with the war in Iran, or when AI will replace your job.

But there is a better alternative to stay informed - newsletters!

Newsletters provide well-thought, balanced content that stimulates thinking instead of alarmist, engagement driven posts on social media.

Newsletters also allow you to check all the important news in one go instead of endlessly scrolling Twitter.
by krautsauer | 2026-03-09 12:39:39+00:00
The "caveats" section in its docs hints at it, but to be explicit: no_panic is a band-aid that can break when changing optimizer options or compiler/llvm version. It's not a good option for library crates, e.g.

That being said, I'm not at all happy with all the complexity and ecosystem fragmentation that async brought. I understand what you're saying. But surprise panics is a bit of a pain point for me.
by gwbas1c | 2026-03-09 12:40:22+00:00
Once I graduated from school, I found it hard to make friends. My mid-20s were very lonely when I moved for work.

A few things I did:

I periodically had roommates. This wasn't the same experience as a college roommate, but at the time it helped with the loneliness.

I started going to tech meetups. (I lived in Silicon Valley.) This ultimately was where I met most of my friends.

(When I worked from home,) I would occasionally work out of a hacker space. After I changed jobs, I remained a member and went to social events. This was where I met the rest of my friends.

I volunteered.

---

Some things that didn't work for me, but might work for you:

I tried going to church. (In my case I found a hippy interfaith that focused on world religions instead of Christianity.) This didn't last very long for me for reasons that I won't discuss here; but if you find a community that you like, it can work wonders. Churches are fundamentally social organizations.

I went to Burning Man twice. The community operates similar to a church. For various reasons, it didn't work for me, but if you're on the same wavelength of a Burning Man or "local burn" group, it can work for you.

I would often sit at the bar for 1-2 hours in the afternoon and have 1-2 beers. Sometimes I had great conversations, but it never lead to friendship.
by khy34 | 2026-03-09 12:41:16+00:00
My intuition tells me that llm’s combined with SWE’s with really amazing fundamentals will kill the code monkeys.

And frankly? That’s the best outcome. Code monkeys (in my view that’s an individual who writes out code just to complete a jira ticket) are a liability. Not only that but each additional person you have in an org means more noise creation.

The code base should not be elongated nor complicated. I’m not even a SWE by trade, rather a CEO, and this is my preferred outcome.
by Forgeties79 | 2026-03-09 12:41:37+00:00
I canceled all of our subscriptions about two years ago and set up a Plex server. I don’t love the direction Plex is going in so I’m teeing up to flip to Jellyfin, but still, it has been so much better than dealing with all of these companies and nonsense.

I feel like we can’t even call it “advertising“ anymore. It’s such a misnomer. It’s basically data fracking and psychological warfare to make us all into little addicts. This whole industry built around chasing “the attention economy” is a social blight.
by einr | 2026-03-09 12:41:45+00:00
No, it's not?

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/interactive-publications/e...

crude oil and petroleum products (37.7%)
natural gas (20.4%)
renewable energy (19.5%)
solid fuels (10.6%)
nuclear energy (11.8%)

(2023 numbers)

So natural gas was just barely more than renewables in 2023, but according to the source below the line was crossed in 2025 and renewables now provide more than all fossil fuels put together:

https://electrek.co/2026/01/21/wind-and-solar-overtook-fossi...
by duxup | 2026-03-09 12:41:55+00:00
The AI factor here is interesting to me.

I don't know if AI is the cause of software quality decline at MS or even Nvidia. My guess is that it is really (like all things) a leadership issue, but AI could be a big part too.

What is wild to me is that for me on a small team in a small company AI has been a boon to software cleanup, security, quality. I'm not blindly letting AI run amok, I read and test everything it outputs. Even with that I'm moving much faster and cleaning up misc security bits that I knew existed / just couldn't get around to faster than ever.

The contrast between my personal experience and the big corp "we're doing everything with AI" sermons while we watch quality take a nosedive is interesting.

More to the point of the article, yeah my Microsoft experience when it comes to Windows has been almost universally negative for years now. It's sad to say as I still fondly remember the days of Start Me Up, and even if uncool I used to love working in Windows. Now it feels like an OS pointed AT me that I have to dodge every change :(
by jacquesm | 2026-03-09 12:42:45+00:00
This is a SNR discussion, the N has just gone up an order of magnitude and may well go up multiple orders of magnitude more to the point that communication between people will be drowned out by non-people attempting to communicate with people. It's the spam problem all over again.

I predict the outcome will be roughly the same: a more or less working set of LLM filters that allow you to filter out LLM output at the price of some false positives and some false negatives. Coming soon to a browser near you: the Bye AI Plugin.
Show HN: LocaShot – Localize App Store screenshots in 30 languages, 30 seconds
by saylamsafak | 2026-03-09 12:43:01+00:00
I built LocaShot to solve a problem I kept seeing: indie developers
skipping App Store localization entirely because recreating screenshots
in Figma for every language is too painful.

The approach: instead of rebuilding layouts, the AI detects and
translates text directly inside the existing screenshot image — fonts,
positions, and design stay intact. Output is store-ready for both
App Store and Google Play.

Stack: Symfony backend, n8n for workflow orchestration, fal.ai for
the AI image editing, Sharp for resizing (Apple simplified their
screenshot requirements in Sept 2024 — only 2 base sizes needed now).

Supports 30+ languages. Free tier available.

https://locashot.app
Show HN: DalVideo – Screen recorder with offline AI captions and built-in editor
by arigaram | 2026-03-09 12:43:33+00:00
Hi HN, I built DalVideo, a screen recorder for Windows with offline AI features.

Key technical details:
- AI captions powered by OpenAI Whisper, runs 100% offline – supports 99+ languages
- AI noise removal (RNNoise) in real-time
- Smart Trim: auto-detects and cuts silent sections
- Built-in editor (trim, split, delete) so you don't need a separate tool
- Hardware encoding: NVENC, AMF, QuickSync – up to 4K@120fps
- Codecs: H.264, H.265, AV1 in MP4/MKV
- Drawing overlay, keystroke display, webcam PiP for tutorials

Built with .NET 10 + WPF, FFmpeg 7.1 (LGPL), Whisper.net.

Free version includes all features (5-min recording limit, no watermark). Pro is $29.99 one-time.

No telemetry, no cloud, no subscription. All AI processing stays on your machine.

Download: https://daolh.dev/products/dalvideo/

I'd love feedback on the UX and what features you'd want next.
by getly_store | 2026-03-09 12:43:49+00:00
I built a digital goods marketplace (templates, fonts, 3D, code, etc.) with two features I couldn't find elsewhere:

1. Crypto payouts: Sellers can receive USDT/USDC on Ethereum, Tron, BSC, Polygon, or Solana. Payouts go out on the 1st and 15th
of each month via NOWPayments Mass Payouts API.

2. 90% revenue share for the first 3 months (80% after). Compare: Envato 45-62.5%, Gumroad ~87%, Creative Market 60%.

Tech stack: Next.js 16 (App Router), PostgreSQL (Neon serverless), Drizzle ORM, Stripe + NOWPayments, NextAuth v5, OpenAI
embeddings for search, Google Veo for AI video generation.

Some interesting engineering decisions:
- No interactive transactions (Neon HTTP driver limitation) — everything uses idempotency keys instead
- 32 cron jobs on Vercel edge for background processing
- AI semantic search using text-embedding-3-small (1536 dims) with cosine similarity
- AutoPilot bot: 13 modules that auto-generate blog/social content, discover creators for outreach, and scan for pirated
products (DMCA)

678 categories, multi-language (EN/RU), 117 database tables. All custom-built, no SaaS dependencies.

Source: closed source for now, but the entire API is documented and we offer developer API keys with webhooks.

Would appreciate feedback, especially on the crypto payout flow and the AutoPilot concept.

https://getly.store
by bloppe | 2026-03-09 12:44:02+00:00
Luckily, the CM exists as a well-decoupled layer on top of core modules, which are just basic numeric types. So people can pretty easily just ignore the whole thing if they don't like it.

But for the other 99% of devs who just want to exchange strings across various language boundaries without quadratic glue complexity, we have the CM.
Show HN: Auto LLM Ranker – Describe a task in English and get ranked models
by gauravvij137 | 2026-03-09 12:44:46+00:00
I got tired of picking LLMs based on vibes and leaderboards that don't reflect real workloads, so I built this.

You describe a task in plain English. The tool generates a test suite for that specific task, discovers candidate models via OpenRouter, benchmarks them in parallel, and uses a Judge LLM to score every response across 5 dimensions: accuracy, hallucination, grounding, tool-calling, and clarity.

Output is a ranked top 3 with average latency per model and a task-specific system prompt optimized for the winner.

A few things I learned while building it:

- Score and latency rarely correlate. The best model for accuracy on coding tasks was almost never the fastest. This tradeoff is completely task-dependent and impossible to see from benchmarks that don't reflect your workload.
- The Judge LLM approach is surprisingly consistent but introduces positional and familiarity bias. Using one model to score others isn't perfect, but it's far more reproducible than manual eval. Open to ideas on how to reduce judge bias without blowing up the cost.
- Model discovery matters more than I expected. The top performers on generic benchmarks often weren't the top performers on narrow tasks.

Stack: Python, OpenRouter for model access, MIT licensed.

https://github.com/gauravvij/llm-evaluator

Happy to answer questions on the design decisions.
by ben_w | 2026-03-09 12:45:04+00:00
• Rogue-like FPS running in the browser

• Dice roller app

• Decompiling a trail cam app so that we don't need to use the stupid UI in the stupid app

• Woodworking. Not code, actual wood. Taking some pine logs I got from the neighbour's trees when they fell over and turning them into a bench and two tables.

• Job hunting?