MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by softwaredoug | 2026-03-12 20:27:44+00:00
This fits a consistent trend:

Unless Congress explicitly mandates something by law, they should expect an administration to unilaterally dismantle it. Congress delegated authority assuming it’s used in good faith and courts+executive have called Congress’s bluff.

In this case it’s a facility created by NSF, but Congress doesn’t explicitly say this HAS to exist. Therefore it won’t exist any longer.
by autoexec | 2026-03-12 20:27:55+00:00
I'd love to see their books to find out how they're burning that much money and then still digging a hole hundreds of millions deep. I suspect that they've got issues higher in the org chart than they're pruning, and I'd put more faith in the people they let go than the chatbots they want to bring in. I just hope they keep them internal because I have to endure both Jira and Confluence and I won't be looking forward to the aggressive nags to use more AI features nobody asked for.
by everdrive | 2026-03-12 20:28:06+00:00
>as we don't know and latching on to pet theories, even really smart ones, has never done anyone any good in general

I'd agree that really smart and plausible theories can turn out to be incorrect. But, I'm not sure I'd necessarily agree that plausible guesses aren't doing anyone any good. So long as theory is otherwise healthy (eg: eat vegetables and exercise regularly) then they might be doing some accidental good, and if they turn out to be correct, give people a bit of a head start.
by reaperducer | 2026-03-12 20:28:18+00:00
I can recall people being very impressed at unix systems being able to handle many clients

That seems odd to me, too, because before DOS and the Commodore 64/Apple ][ era, multi-user systems were everywhere.

Not just mainframes and minicomputers, but there were many dozens of multi-user systems based on CP/M, MP/M, and other operating systems. Even Tandy had them.

The revolutionary part of the "personal computer" era was that it was your "personal" computer. You finally didn't have to share it with anyone.
by Jtsummers | 2026-03-12 20:28:23+00:00
By dimensions, assuming the 2015 ("eleven year old") version, the 13" M4 MBA is 0.17" wider, 0.9" deeper, and 0.32 lbs heavier. Where it's harder to compare is thickness. The M4 is 0.44" thick where the Intel one was tapered (0.11"-0.68").

Kind of hard to see that as "HUGE" in comparison. Bigger? Yes, but not really huge.
by rkangel | 2026-03-12 20:28:32+00:00
> Assuming that we're talking about a unit test here

I think the categorisation of tests is sometimes counterproductive and moves the discussion away from what's important: What groups of tests do I need in order to be confident that my code works in the real world?

I want to be confident that my code doesn't have race conditions in it. This isn't easy to do, but it's something I want. If that's the case then your unit test might pass sometimes and fail sometimes, but your CI run should always be red because the race test (however it works) is failing.

This is also hints at a limitation of unit tests, and why we shouldn't be over-reliant on them - often unit tests won't show a race. In my experience, it's two independent modules interacting that causes the race. The same can be true with a memory bug caused by a mismatch in passing of ownership and who should be freeing, or any of the other issues caused by interactions between modules.
by siscia | 2026-03-12 20:28:48+00:00
What I found more useful is an extra step. Spec to tests, and then red tests to code and green tests.

LLMs works on both translation steps. But you end up with an healthy amount of tests.

I tagged each tests with the id of the spec so I do get spec to test coverage as well.

Beside standard code coverage given by the tests.
by danebalia | 2026-03-12 20:28:53+00:00
30 CVEs. 60 days. 437,000 compromised downloads. The Model Context Protocol went from “promising open standard” to “active threat surface” faster than anyone predicted.

Between January and February 2026, security researchers filed over 30 CVEs targeting MCP servers, clients, and infrastructure. The vulnerabilities ranged from trivial path traversals to a CVSS 9.6 remote code execution flaw in a package downloaded nearly half a million times. And the root causes were not exotic zero-days — they were missing input validation, absent authentication, and blind trust in tool descriptions.

If you are running MCP servers in production — or even just experimenting with them in Claude Code or Cursor — this article is your field guide to what went wrong and how to protect yourself.
CostRouter – Cut AI API costs 60% by routing to the cheapest capable model
by alex_1002 | 2026-03-12 20:29:01+00:00
Hey HN,

I built CostRouter because I noticed 70-80% of our AI API calls didn't need GPT-4o/5. Simple text extraction, basic Q&A, formatting — all going to the most expensive model.

CostRouter is an API gateway that scores each request's complexity (0-100) and routes it to the cheapest model that can handle it:

- Simple queries → Llama 4 Scout ($0.0001/1K tokens)
- Medium → Gemini 3 Flash ($0.0005/1K tokens)
- Complex reasoning → stays on GPT-5.2 or Claude Opus

Integration is one line — just change your base_url:

client = OpenAI(
api_key="crx_live_...",
base_url="https://cost-router-alex10020s-projects.vercel.app/api/v1"
)

Pricing: we charge 10% of what we save you. If we save you $0, you pay $0.

In a 100K request/month test:
- Before: $3,127/mo (all GPT-5.2)
- After: $1,245/mo
- Net savings after our fee: $1,694/mo

Tech stack: Next.js, Supabase, Vercel. The routing engine scores prompt complexity based on length, keyword analysis, and structural patterns, then maps to the cheapest model above the quality threshold.

Would love feedback on the routing approach and pricing model.

https://cost-router-alex10020s-projects.vercel.app
by jacquesm | 2026-03-12 20:29:22+00:00
The OS that was running on these is irrelevant, the important part is the BBS software.

And these usually ran quite a few lines per box, sometimes they would use external racks of modems, but I'm not seeing that here so maybe these were using internal modem cards, so maybe 6 per box, but if they were using external modems it could easily be 12 or more, with the PC cards hosting multiple serial ports, 4, 6 or even 8 per card.

Typically a card would have a single large connector at the back and then a pigtail with a DB9 or DB25 (yes, I know) for every modem.
by ptak_dev | 2026-03-12 20:29:43+00:00
You are right that LLMs are uniquely broad in what they can do compared to previous waves -- but I think the "no dimension left to upskill along" framing understates human adaptability.

What is more likely is that the valuable skills shift toward things LLMs cannot own: relationships, physical presence, institutional trust, creative taste, and domain judgment that comes from years of actual experience. The bank teller analogy is actually a good one -- the tellers who survived became relationship managers, not better cash-counters.

The practical challenge for workers in transition is not really "what skills should I learn" -- it is "how do I reframe what I already know for a different role." That translation step is where most people get stuck. Your skills might be directly applicable to a new role but your resume still reads like your old one.

That is partly why I built a tool that does this through conversation -- you describe your background and the role you are targeting, and it helps reframe your experience accordingly: https://super.myninja.ai/apps/6de082c7-a05f-4fc5-a7d3-ab56cc...
Ask HN: How do you cope with the broken rythm of agentic coding?
by pauletienney | 2026-03-12 20:29:48+00:00
I used to seek focus and concentration while coding. It was not always easy to reach this flow state but I knew it was possible.

I am now using agentic coding quite a lot. The honeymoon is finishing and I am starting to dislike some facets of it. I think the main setback is the rythm.

Writing some specs/prompts, launching the agent, confirming quite atomic actions and waiting 10 to 30 seconds until the next question/confirmation. Those very small wait times do not let me reach a concentration state.

I feel I am hovering the code. I am not deep into it as I used to be.

Do you feel the same? Did you find a way to change this?
by dasil003 | 2026-03-12 20:29:58+00:00
This is spot on. I'm always amused when people talk about how much staffing a given product "needs". That's not how headcount works or even system design works.

What actually happens is that company headcount grows based on how much money they make (or how much they raise), this justifies hiring more people. Then, structure is added, both to systems (eg. microservices), and to operations (eg. jira, workday, salesforce, etc) so that communication overhead doesn't grind everything to a halt. Then, once the business stops growing, headcount must shrink. This may take a long time, and it will be couched in all kinds of corporate bullshit to try to preserve morale and investor sentiment, but that is all window-dressing.
by romanhoffmann | 2026-03-12 20:30:01+00:00
Good question.

In my own projects I actually front-load a lot of the planning. The pipeline behind codn.dev is a good example of that — the planning phase was longer than the actual prompting.

I started with a very simple Astro project and then gradually designed the publishing workflow around it: content schema, frontmatter structure, SEO generation, deployment pipeline, etc. Only after that foundation existed did I start using LLMs to help with parts of the implementation.

The pattern I describe in the article is less about "one prompt shipping", and more about what happens once the feedback loop becomes very fast. Even with a plan in place, the prompt → result → tweak cycle can become surprisingly sticky.
by hunter2_ | 2026-03-12 20:30:15+00:00
Oddly enough, many Canadians use the word "American" to refer to Unitedstatesians, so presumably they'd use it to describe cuisine that same way (as in, poutine is Canadian but disco fries are American). This is extremely analogous to the Asia conversation, in that of course people know the term comes from the continental scale, but using that scale is less common, so it must be specifically invoked.

And then you've got Puerto Ricans, who are definitely US'ian but eat more like the non-US'ian Americans, so who knows what they would think of if you ask about American food, but it wouldn't surprise me if Contiguousunitedstatesian is the default (i.e., the same cuisine the Canadians would be referring to).
by CamperBob2 | 2026-03-12 20:30:37+00:00
If I can run 50,000 fixed tasks that cost me $0.834/hr but OpenAI is costing $37/hr and the automation takes 40x as long and can make TERRIBLE errors why the fuck would I not move to the deterministic system?

Because you'll be outcompeted by people who make the best of the nondeterministic system.
by input_sh | 2026-03-12 20:30:59+00:00
"American" is as broad as Asian and even more annoying. I ate some great food in Surinamese restaurants, but I'm guessing that's not what you meant by using that word.

The same goes for "European", Nordic cousine is very different than the Balkan cousine, which is very different than the Iberian cousine and so on.
by adrian_b | 2026-03-12 20:31:21+00:00
Even when your personal budget would allow spending more for food, a price that is higher than that of meat is a serious red flag, indicating that it is likely that such a substitute for meat has greater environmental consequences than producing meat.

There are 3 reasons for avoiding meat. One is the ethical reason, because during the last century meat production has transitioned everywhere to using methods that can hardly be considered anything else but continuous torture. There are also certain health risks associated with meat and there is also the reason that the real cost of meat may be greater than it appears to be, due to negative environmental consequences (i.e. pollution).

If some kind of protein extract or some kind of fake meat is more expensive than real meat (per protein content), you can be rather certain that the negative environmental consequences are worse than for real meat, because the higher cost is likely to be determined by the consumption of more energy and of various kinds of chemicals during the production of the meat substitute.
by stackskipton | 2026-03-12 20:31:25+00:00
>This has been studied to death. European shipyards have similar labor costs to a lot of America. They still build cheaper ships faster than we do. Same for Korea.

Europeans provide direct subsidy compared to American subsidy of just requiring certain ships to be built in America. Also, looking at recent trends, Europe has fallen out of favor as well with rise of Japan/Korea/China (https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/industrial-policy-lessons-shi...)

Also worth noting that Japan/Korea/China HEAVILY subsidize their ship building as well.

>And yet here we are, entirely dependent on foreign shipyards for basically any meaningful production.

Sure, because despite the subsidizes, economics was always going to make US ships unattractive.

>The Jones Act killed American shipping.

There is zero evidence that this did it because all evidence says if you repealed it, all shippers would just buy Chinese ships, flag them under flag of convenience and staff them all with overseas worker where they make 2000USD/yr.

BTW, there are Congressional proposals out there now called Ships for America Act (https://garamendi.house.gov/media/press-releases/garamendi-k...)

However, they are all just handing massive bags of money to shipbuilders. My guess is you have similar opposition.
by morphology | 2026-03-12 20:32:00+00:00
I don't get the benefit. Yes, agents should not have access to API keys because they can easily be fooled into giving up those API keys. But what's to prevent a malicious agent from re-using the honest agent's fake API key that it exfiltrates via prompt injection? The gateway can't tell that the request is coming from the malicious agent. If the honest agent can read its own proxy authorization token, it can give that up as well.

It seems the only sound solution is to have a sidecar attached to the agent and have the sidecar authenticate with the gateway using mTLS. The sidecar manages its own TLS key - the agent never has access to it.
by Joel_Mckay | 2026-03-12 20:32:19+00:00
It is usually the IP licensing, as spinning a board isn't always complex.

Note, it is actually easier to profile a known dram chip set bonded to the PCB. A lot of products already do this like phones, tablets, and thin laptops.

Where as SSD drives being a wear item, should be removable by end users. =3
by adamzochowski | 2026-03-12 20:32:30+00:00
Makes perfect sense .

NaN is a special type indicating one can't reason about it normal way.

It is an unknown or value that can't be represented.

When comparing, think of it like comparing two bags of unknown amount of apples.

One bag has NaN count of apples

Other bag has NaN count of apples

Do the two bags have equal number of apples?

I wish all languages used nulls the way SQL does.
by wmf | 2026-03-12 20:32:33+00:00
ISPs can still get /24 of IPv4 today for free even after it "ran out". This comes from space that was set aside before runout. https://www.arin.net/participate/policy/nrpm/#4-10-dedicated...

This IPv4x thing is bullshit but we should be accurate about how it would play out.
by xpe | 2026-03-12 20:32:57+00:00
Hello and welcome. I appreciate your philosophical background; we need more of that around here imo. In a totally unrelated question /s, have you seen the movie Get Out by Jordan Peele? :P For philosophical discussions of AI, I much prefer the Alignment Forum. For thoughtful, critical, charitable discussion, I recommend LessWrong by leaps and bounds, as long as one doesn't demand brevity. Also, the bar for participation can feel higher other there. I'm ok with that because it encourages people to build up a lot of shared foundations for how we communicate with each other.
by 0x457 | 2026-03-12 20:33:20+00:00
Sounds like whoever is scheduling meetings need to adapt to a new asynchronous environment whereas many meetings isn't necessary.

I'm not saying everyone must be WFH or that everyone must have a home office. I'm just having hard time imagining how two people cannot WFH in a 1-bedroom apartment. Unless both of them work in a call center.
by mbrumlow | 2026-03-12 20:33:25+00:00
Nope. The clinic is the collateral to the bank. VC stand to loose nothing.

It does not happen overnight. But what happens is after they take control of the clinic or company they change the sales model to boost reoccurring revenue, this then allows the clinic or target company to take loans out. Because they look good on paper. The company then pays VC back when then pays bank back.

This can be done in about 6mo to 1 year process with some companies. The initial out of pocket expense is small and paid back very quickly.

I also forgot. Sometimes they will take the newly owned company and merge it. During that process they extract more money and load more debt onto the remaining entities, again making the VC money.

In some cases they can even get huge tax benefits by loading the company with debt which offsets the tax bill of the final entity.

When these transactions are done, within the span of a day multiple companies are created and merged and absolved.

There is little to no risk for the VC
by archagon | 2026-03-12 20:34:03+00:00
Sounds a bit like the transnasal esophagoscopy I opted for recently in lieu of an upper endoscopy. Thin tube through nose, then down into the esophagus. Uncomfortable while threading it through (chest pain, like swallowing a sharp tortilla chip), but ultimately not a big deal, and done in-office in about 15 minutes.
by cogman10 | 2026-03-12 20:34:50+00:00
That labor cheapness is enabled by a cheapness of cost of living. Those things all tend to feed onto each other.

> I always feel sad about these people, trapped in an economic system that forces them into useless labour when they could spend their time learning actually useful skills.

It's useful labor. Yes you could do it yourself, but it gives them a job which they can ultimately use to afford food and where they live.

I mostly only feel bad for kids doing that sort of labor as it means they aren't getting an education. But for an adult? It speaks to something a bit right about their economic situation that they can stay a float by merely fetching items in a store.

I wish in the US that it was possible for someone to make a living doing doordash or instacart.
by JuniperMesos | 2026-03-12 20:35:04+00:00
Is putting a bunch of red light cameras in a black neighborhood to catch and fine red-light runners an anti-black policy because it imposes automatic punishment on black drivers who are running red lights? Or pro-black because it helps secure the safety of black pedestrians who deserve not to have people breaking traffic laws around them? What if it turns out that even though the neighborhood is black the car traffic on that street has a greater percentage of non-black drivers than the neighborhood population? What if it turns out that black people run red lights at a rate much higher than other races everywhere in the country, so no matter where you put up red light cameras it will always catch and fine a disproportionate number of black drivers?

Regardless of whether you approve or disapprove of automatic red light cameras, you can construct an argument that either having them or not having them is the policy that is actually racist against blacks.

More generally, whether automated law enforcement is good or bad depends highly on how good or bad the law is, which people legitimately disagree about; and also how reliable the automatic enforcement is.
by wavefunction | 2026-03-12 20:35:11+00:00
Billionaires don't seem to create anything new when they're billionaires. You look at companies like Google or Meta and they acquire companies and teams but what sort of truly successful projects and products did they create from whole. It seems like a string of failures, canceled projects and lackluster product offerings to me.

If we can tell poor people how to behave for their own good then we can certainly help billionaires out too by taxing them back to creativity.
by jacquesm | 2026-03-12 20:35:22+00:00
I don't know what you're trying to achieve with your endless stream of 'but' 'but', but in general if there is a problem you find the right door to escalate and you keep bugging them until they fix things.

Resetting an alarm is going to look 'real good' if at some point the place burns down and for sure the building is insured somewhere and for sure that information is something you could dig up. If there is no unit owner and no HOA then multiple tenants will need to band together and get something going, initially we weren't talking about tenants at all, you brought that up and since then you've been tilting at windmills because nothing satisfies your needs. Obviously I won't be able to come up with workable scenarios for each new restriction that you impose because you can keep that up forever.

I'm not in the 'oh, I will just give up because I can't be arsed to solve this safety issue' group, if it really is an issue - and I'm going on the assumption here that it is - then someone will care about that. The key is to locate the someone and then to state your case, and when one method doesn't work to come up with another one that gets you closer.

Learned helplessness is not a solution to anything.
by EvanAnderson | 2026-03-12 20:35:23+00:00
For sure. I knew people who ran multi-line BBS's on DOS PCs under DESQview, just like that (running Searchlight BBS, in my case). I know of a four line that was just using multiple external modems and non-standard IRQ's for COM3 and COM4 (since, by default, COM1/3 and COM2/4 share an IRQ).
by abreslav | 2026-03-12 20:35:48+00:00
> * model transforms text into a formal specification

formal specification is no different from code: it will have bugs :)

There's no free lunch here: the informal-to-formal transition (be it words-to-code or words-to-formal-spec) comes through the non-deterministic models, period.

If we want to use the immense power of LLMs, we need to figure out a way to make this transition good enough
by quintu5 | 2026-03-12 20:35:49+00:00
This is one of the issues I’ve attempted to tackle with the Mermaid Studio plugin for IntelliJ.

It provides both syntax guides and syntax/semantic analysis as MCP Tools, so you can have an agent iteratively refine diagrams with good context for patterns like multi-line text and comments (LLMs love end-of-line comments, but Mermaid.js often doesn’t).
by icedchai | 2026-03-12 20:36:12+00:00
Portmasters were very popular. Later on the ISP I worked with moved on to Ascend boxes which had digital modems (T1 / PRI lines.)

PRI was a huge step. The "individual modem" days were a mess. Each modem had a serial cable, phone line, and power brick. I remember doing some maintenance in one of the POPs. There were at least 100 modems, stacked on a cheap plastic shelving unit. The shelving unit was sagging from the weight and heat of all the modems.

This early POP was haphazardly built, so no cable management. I remember a river of phone cables coming out of the wall. The power bricks were also crazy. We had power strips 2 or 3 levels deep, making it a hazard to even get behind the rack without tripping on something.
by archagon | 2026-03-12 20:36:17+00:00
FYI, there is an alternative, depending on what you need it for: https://jamiekoufman.com/tne-transnasal-esophagoscopy-is-the...

However, doctors who do it are a bit hard to come by.

With a esophagogastroduodenoscopy, I think the main issue is the gag reflex, not necessarily the pain.