MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by orthoxerox | 2026-03-05 11:07:43+00:00
Clean room is sufficient, but not necessary to avoid the accusations of license violation.

a2mark has to demonstrate that v7 is "a work containing the v6 or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated straightforwardly into another language", which is different from demanding a clean-room reimplementation.

Theoretically, the existence of a publicly available commit that is half v6 code and half v7 can be used to show that this part of v7 code has been infected by LGPL and must thus infect the rest of v7, but that's IMO going against the spirit of the [L]GPL.
by fragmede | 2026-03-05 11:07:43+00:00
Yes, but the difference in degree, and how are material. The big showy Hyundai plant raid is an example of something that hasn't happened before. Under Obama there were I-9 audits of Infosys, and under Clinton there was a raid of a Filiberto's, but both of those weren't of foreign workers here to train Americans.
by servo_sausage | 2026-03-05 11:07:58+00:00
History of manafacturing philosophy is a pretty interesting lens;

I once had the chance to chatt with an old German colleague about the change in mentality over multiple decades. One thing he highlighted was the change from "lower error rate equals less waste, and higher final sale price" to "customer complaints or defect rates should be above a threshold, otherwise we are investing too much in the process control".

Particularly due to the desire to derisk the process; design by collaboration with the end user, and contracts with quality requirements, rather than the design being owned by the manufacturer.
by thendrill | 2026-03-05 11:08:22+00:00
Exactly....

I will just copy paste my comment from another thread but still very relevant>

Coding isn’t creative, it isn’t sexy, and almost nobody outside this bubble cares

Most of the world doesn’t care about “good code.” They care about “does it work, is it fast enough, is it cheap enough, and can we ship it before the competitor does?”

Beautiful architecture, perfect tests, elegant abstractions — those things feel deeply rewarding to the person who wrote them, but they’re invisible to users, to executives, and, let’s be honest, to the dating market.

Being able to refactor a monolith into pristine microservices will not make you more attractive on a date. What might is the salary that comes with the title “Senior Engineer at FAANG.” In that sense, many women (not all, but enough) relate to programmers the same way middle managers and VCs do: they’re perfectly happy to extract the economic value you produce while remaining indifferent to the craft itself. The code isn’t the turn-on; the direct deposit is.

That’s brutal to hear if you’ve spent years telling yourself that your intellectual passion is inherently admirable or sexy. It’s not. Outside our tribe it’s just a means to an end — same as accounting, law, or plumbing, just with worse dress code and better catering.

So when AI starts eating the parts of the job we insisted were “creative” and “irreplaceable,” the threat feels existential because the last remaining moat — the romantic story we told ourselves about why this profession is special — collapses. Turns out the scarcity was mostly the paycheck, not the poetry.

I’m not saying the work is meaningless or that system design and taste don’t matter. I’m saying we should stop pretending the act of writing software is inherently sexier or more artistically noble than any other high-paying skilled trade. It never was.
by noemit | 2026-03-05 11:08:53+00:00
Many people don't know this, but the Luddites were right. I studied Art History and this particular movement. One of the claims of the Luddites is that quality would go down, because their craft took half a lifetime to master (it was passed down from parent to chile.)

I was able to feel wool scarves made in europe from the middle ages. (In museum storage, under the guidance of a curator) They are a fundamentally different product than what is produced in woolen mills. A handmade (in the old traditiona) woolen scarf can be pulled through a ring, because it is so thin and fine. Not so for a modern mill-made scarf.

Another interesting thing is that we do not know how they made them so fine. The technique was never recorded or documented in detail, as it was passed down from parent to child. So the knowledge is actually lost forever.

Weavers in Kashmir work a similar level of quality, but their wool is different, their needs and techniques are different, so while we still have craftsman that can produce wool by hand, most of the traditions and techniques are lost.

Is it a tragedy? I go back and forth. Obviously the heritage fabrics are phenomenal and luxurious. Part of me wishes that the tradition could have been maintained through a luxury sector.

Automation is never a 1:1 improvement. It's not just about the speed or process. The process itself changes the product. I don't know where we will net out on software, and I do think the complaints are justified - but the Luddites were also justified. They were *Right*. Their whole argument was that the mills could not product fabric of the same quality. But being right is not enough.

I'm already seeing vibe-coded internal tools at an org I consult at saving employees hundreds of hours a month, because a non-technical person was empowered to build their own solution. It was a mess, and I stepped in to help optimize it, but I only optimized it partially, making it faster. I let it be the spaghetti mess it was for the most part - why? because it was making an impact already. The product was succeeding. And it was a fundamentally different product than what internal tools were 10 years ago.
by user34283 | 2026-03-05 11:09:06+00:00
This thread is largely pointless political back-and-forth were predictably the comments with a more positive opinion on current US immigration enforcement will be flagged.

To get back to the original point, personally I doubt sentiment on US immigration enforcement would be so significant a deterrent for Chinese talent, who may not share the political views of the American left for whom this is a big concern.
by treetalker | 2026-03-05 11:10:01+00:00
I'm still running a 2017 13" MBP. Only reasons I'm considering a new box are (1) security updates; (2) certain software no longer running on Intel chips (ahem, OmniFocus, BOO); and the keyboard (one of the problematic ones) is on its last legs, even after several keycap replacements (which Apple has always done for free, to its credit — but the hinges are starting to break, so simply putting on new caps is not going to be an option anymore).

I'm hesitant to buy something running Tahoe. But even still, it's a toss-up: besides opening up Mac Silicon software compatibility, the low-tier Neo would be about 3x faster than the 2017 machine with roughly the same quality screen, for half of the original, non-inflation-adjusted price of the 2017 MBP. (With Costco pre-order, $575 non-academic price after factoring in the standard discount and the $15 shop card.) That's pretty nuts.

The 8 GB unified memory is not a big deal for office and web uses; the 256 GB drive is not a big deal with everything on Dropbox; and the lack of Touch ID is a feature when considering current Fourth and Fifth Amendment precedent and the hijinks of the current administration.

Not bad for a couch computer that can still easily crank out legal work, and that can be tossed in a backpack without worrying too much about damage or replacement.

I'm tempted to pick one up and install Asahi Linux on the old machine.
by mft_ | 2026-03-05 11:10:40+00:00
> It's not surprising that people have little interest in talking to AI if they're being lied to.

I read that and it sounds like the typical nonsense script that customer service agents the world over use to promise-not-promise and defuse a customer's frustration.

Is AI the one lying, or is it just mimicking what passes for customer service in our approaching-dystopian world these days?
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-03-05 11:10:48+00:00
> Is there progress happening in that trajectory?

There was a recent Hackernews post which had a novel approach about making agents interact with GUI/computer-use

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47125014: The First Fully General Computer Action Model : https://si.inc/posts/fdm1/

Hope this helps
by hnlmorg | 2026-03-05 11:12:38+00:00
It isn’t incompatible. It’s just a massive superset of what is needed.

JSON offers simplicity

YAML offers readability

XML offers a massive feature set.

For what we need 99% of the time, simplicity and/or readability is a much higher requirement.

As for TOML, I honestly don’t understand why anyone likes that.
by mikkupikku | 2026-03-05 11:12:39+00:00
> Counterpoint: Oblivion, one of the first high-profile games to use procedural terrain/landscape generation, seemed very soulless to me at the time.

Is that even a counter point? Nobody in their right mind would ever claim that procedural generation is impossible to fuck up. The reason Minecraft/etc are good examples is because they prove procedural generation can work, not that it always works.
by LadyCailin | 2026-03-05 11:12:48+00:00
Uh, no? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...

Just because you have a failure of imagination for how government should work, doesn’t mean it can’t work. And stifling innovation is exactly what I want, when that innovation is “steal from everyone so we can invent the torment nexus” or whatever’s going on these days.
by danaris | 2026-03-05 11:12:49+00:00
I don't think the answer to that is to discourage posting US-centric stories about serious political issues. I think the answer is to encourage people from other countries to post theirs, too.

We need more understanding of each other and of each other's situations, not less. The more we tech people bury our heads in the sand about politics—every country's politics—the more likely we are to create more situations like the one we're in today.
by corimaith | 2026-03-05 11:12:54+00:00
I find the panic over RAM prices to be overestimated. 32GB DDR5 RAM is around $500 which is comparable to to the 9800x3D. Sure it sucks that it increases by around 4x, but when you factor in the overall price of a top end PC at around 1000-2000, especially for the lion's sum of the GPU, the increase is marginal.

This only effects a very narrow slice of highly budget conscious consumers trying to build high end PCs at razor thin margins.
by Perenti | 2026-03-05 11:12:58+00:00
Interesting. Seems you are automating my qwen workflow. Every output stage is verified through mathematical proof whenever possible, before being fed to the next step in transforming ideas into code. Except for when qwen decides to go in a very unusual direction, its working reasonably well at producing provably correct code. It's slowish though, with lots of nested iterations, and when qwen goes strange it takes a lot of effort to get it back on task.
by endymion-light | 2026-03-05 11:13:52+00:00
Haha it's a good analogy, i'm being a little bit argumentative for the sake of it potentially.

I guess in my view - the main alternative you'd have beforehand is just to drown.

For me, AI sits in a space where if you know how to use it, it can tell you all the thin spots of the ice accurately. You can then verify those spots, but there's a level of personal responsibility of verification.

I'd agree there's currently a ton of people that are using these tools to essentially just find the specific route - but i'd argue those people probably shouldn't be skating in the first place, and would've fallen one way or the other.
by staticman2 | 2026-03-05 11:14:05+00:00
This is exhausting. Claude read the article.

Said article is not about a loan backed by a security agreement. That eliminates law.com definition 1.

Law.com definition 2 is silent on whether pledges are binding.

Thus ended your research.

I don't know why you care if Claude.com is authoritative. Law.com isn't either, the authoritative legal references are paywalled. A law dictionary, as we've demonstrated by law.com's second definition's vagueness, isn't necessarily even the correct reference to consult.

Your failure, I suppose, is that you provided worse information than Claude. I suppose you should have typed "Don't cite Claude please" and moved on.
Show HN: I made a to-do list app where users use LLMs to rewrite their front end
by maxharrison | 2026-03-05 11:14:24+00:00
To-do apps are the canonical overengineered demo. This one leans into that - and offloads the overengineering to you.

This is mostly an experiment, but I've put a bit of effort making it into a little platform people can play around with.

With the advances of LLMs being able to one shot some frontend code, I thought it would be a fun experiment to have a end-user facing vibe coding app, following the ideas of malleable software.

It allows users to change the full theme and design from a single prompt, but also and more importantly, allowing the end-users to add features such as categorisation or kanban.

Please let me know any feedback, try to break it etc.

(posted on crappy internet 3800m above sea level)
by zarzavat | 2026-03-05 11:14:45+00:00
I fondly remember the browser in F-script Anywhere was fantastic for debugging your own apps and reverse engineering other people's.

Smalltalk is how computing should have been: an open book. I hope that one day we can rediscover that magic, we surely have the computing power available to do so.

https://www.chromium.org/developers/f-script-anywhere/
by andy_ppp | 2026-03-05 11:15:15+00:00
"not consistently candid in his communications"

I've now moved to Claude and it's much better actually, if like me you hate their fonts (Anthropic Sans) select System fonts in the Claude preferences and you can use this snippet in Safari's Settings -> Advanced -> Stylesheet to make everything your default system font:

[data-theme=claude] * {
font-family: system-ui, sans-serif !important;
}
by SigmundA | 2026-03-05 11:15:51+00:00
I think you should read carefully, this only applies to prepared statements within the same session, which is exactly what I have been saying. There is no global cache, and if you reset the session it's gone.

This controls whether prepared statements even use a cached plan at all. Other database can do this with hints and they can skip parsing by using stored procedures which are basically globally named prepared statements that the client can call without preparing a temporary one or they can do prepared but again this is typically a waste of time because parsing enough to match existing plans is fast (soft vs hard parse in Oracle speak). They have many more options with more powerful caching abilities that all clients can share across sessions.

The only time PG "automatically" caches the plan is when it implicitly prepares the plan within a PL/pgsql statement like doing a insert loop inside a function, its still is only for the current session.

You don't seem to understand that most other commercial "big-boy" RDBMS cache plans across sessions and that nothing has to be done for them to reuse between completely different connections with differing parameters and can still have specialized versions based on these parameters values vs a single generic plan.

At least now you admit prepared statements are in-fact the only plan cache in PG and seem to make a gotcha out of an option an option to disable that cache.

You can see various discussions on pg-hackers, here is one where the submitter confirms everything I have said and attempted to add the auto part but not tackle the much harder sharing between sessions part and was shot down, I don't believe much has change in PG around plan caching since this post and even has a guy that worked on DB2 talking about how they did it: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/8e76d8fc-8b8c-14b...
by danlitt | 2026-03-05 11:15:57+00:00
I am pretty sure this article is predicated on a misunderstanding of what a "clean room" implementation means. It does not mean "as long as you never read the original code, whatever you write is yours". If you had a hermetically sealed code base that just happened to coincide line for line with the codebase for GCC, it would still be a copy. Traditionally, a human-driven clean room implementation would have a vanishingly small probability of matching the original codebase enough to be considered a copy. With LLMs, the probability is much higher (since in truth they are very much not a "clean room" at all).

The actual meaning of a "clean room implementation" is that it is derived from an API and not from an implementation (I am simplifying slightly). Whether the reimplementation is actually a "new implementation" is a subjective but empirical question that basically hinges on how similar the new codebase is to the old one. If it's too similar, it's a copy.

What the chardet maintainers have done here is legally very irresponsible. There is no easy way to guarantee that their code is actually MIT and not LGPL without auditing the entire codebase. Any downstream user of the library is at risk of the license switching from underneath them. Ideally, this would burn their reputation as responsible maintainers, and result in someone else taking over the project. In reality, probably it will remain MIT for a couple of years and then suddenly there will be a "supply chain issue" like there was for mimemagic a few years ago.
by mentalgear | 2026-03-05 11:16:21+00:00
Oh the "pledges" - tell me again how the Billionaire's Giving Pledge - the ultimate "pinky promise" of the 1% - is going?

Launched in 2010 by Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett, it was sold as a historic shift in philanthropy. Fast forward to 2026, and the data suggests it’s been more of a "Wealth Preservation Society" than a massive wealth redistribution event.

This will be just as trustworthy. We need laws - not merely rhetoric pledges !
by spwa4 | 2026-03-05 11:16:39+00:00
This is effectively why people want agents, right? To be able to bypass all the stuff companies "optimize", ie. the ad-filled websites. The inserted extra conversations that now literally get triggered BECAUSE you're chatting to someone else. The ...

In other words: this is the FANGs worst enemy. This is adblock * 1000, as far as consumers are concerned.
by detritus | 2026-03-05 11:16:58+00:00
I bought such a thing for my daughter and it's great fun but this old codger will never cease to be amazed at how much tech is available for such a small amount of money - the digital camera functions normally, takes video too, the system has basic games and a vivid LCD screen and there's a thermal printer - all in a cute moulded package. £25 ours cost.
by mikkupikku | 2026-03-05 11:17:25+00:00
I think that's true, but something even more subtle is going on. The quality of the LLM output depends on how it was prompted in a way more profound than I think most people realize. If you prompt the LLM using jargon and lingo that indicate you are already well experienced with the domain space, the LLM will rollplay an experienced developer. If you prompt it like you're a clueless PHB who's never coded, the LLM will output shitty code to match the style of your prompt. This extends to architecture, if your prompts are written with a mature understanding of the architecture that should be used, the LLM will follow suit, but if not then the LLM will just slap together something that looks like it might work, but isn't well thought out.
by swiftcoder | 2026-03-05 11:17:32+00:00
> if you've ever looked at chardet's source code

If you wish to be able to claim in court that it is a "clean room" implementation, yes.

Clean room implementations are specifically where a company firewalls the implementing team off from any knowledge of the original implementation, in order to be able to swear in court that their implementation does not make any use of the original code (which they are in such a case likely not licensed to use).
by dannersy | 2026-03-05 11:17:41+00:00
You're cherry picking. The open world games aren't as compelling anymore since the novelty is wearing off. I can cherry pick, too. For example, Starfield in all its grandeur is pretty boring.

And the users may not care about code directly, but they definitely do indirectly. The less optimized and more off-the-shelf solutions have seen a stark decrease in performance but allowing game development to be more approachable.

LLMs saving engineers and developers time is an unfounded claim because immediate results does not mean net positive. Actually, I'd argue that any software engineer worth their salt knows intimately that more immediate results is usually at the expense of long term sustainability.
by vntok | 2026-03-05 11:18:14+00:00
The parent is specifically talking about producing boilerplate code -a domain in which LLM excell at- and not having had any success at that. It's therefore not a leap of logic to assume they haven't put (enough) effort into getting better at prompting first, which is perfectly fine per se but leans towards a skill issue and not an immutable property of gen AI.

The uncomfortable fact remains that one cannot really expect to get much better results from an LLM without putting some work themselves. They aren't magical oracles.
by daoboy | 2026-03-05 11:18:54+00:00
"The researchers tested their framework on nearly 1,000 LinkedIn profiles to see if it could match them to accounts on Hacker News. These were profiles where the real-world identity was known to the team, who removed names, links, and other obvious identifiers from the bios.

The AI-powered framework successfully linked accounts with up to 67% accuracy at 90% precision, whereas the best non-AI methods struggled to succeed."