MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aa-jv | 2026-03-09 12:53:33+00:00
My favourite is Chartwell - a font which can be used to add many sophisticated chart types to your document, using discretionary / rare ligatures:

https://www.vectrotype.com/chartwell

(User manual here: https://assets.vectrotype.com/specimens/Chartwell-Manual-24-...)

I've used this to rapidly add charting functionality to various apps over the years - it can be used to produce amazing-looking, dynamic charts, within minutes!

I have, for years, wanted to dissect Chartwell and understand it better .. there are many other fonts which use rare ligatures for interesting purposes, too ..
by albert_e | 2026-03-09 12:54:10+00:00
I am surprised at such negative responses.

I am asking about alternatives to LibreOffice for a reason (stated)

Pandoc library and Microsoft Markitdown -- that other helpful comments suggested -- seem like two options that might actually work in my case and I will give them a try. My asking here was fruitful.

Running python and using python libraries is allowed on our work pcs but not running arbitrary software and EXEs with or without an installer. I cannot override company security policy, and cannot simply "talk to" our infosec team and get them to allow me to install stuff. Hope this clarifies.
by getly_store | 2026-03-09 12:54:35+00:00
Versioned terms help when changes apply to a product, not the whole platform. For a new product with different rules, require explicit, time-stamped consent before first use; otherwise grandfather users on existing terms. Provide a changelog, a grace period, and an easy opt-out. At Getly, per-product terms and payout rules kept separate can reduce friction.
Show HN: AgentScan – Detect AI agent accounts on GitHub
by matteogabriele | 2026-03-09 12:55:05+00:00
AI agents are becoming a real problem for open source maintainers. They're flooding projects with low-quality PRs and comments that create more work than they solve. The code is often sloppy, they don't collaborate like humans do, and they're difficult to reason with. One maintainer even had an angry AI agent write a hit piece about them just for declining to merge its code.

https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on...

How it works:
- Analyzes public GitHub events for automation signals (timing patterns, commit frequency, etc.)
- Community members can flag accounts via GitHub Issues with evidence
- Each flag requires the username, reasoning, and proof
- Issues are public so wrongful flags can be disputed openly

As of right now the list of flagged accounts is 4, but I'm hoping the community can help grow this into a useful resource for maintainers.

The GitHub Issues approach felt right because flagging needs to be transparent and disputable - anyone wrongfully flagged can defend themselves in the same thread.

Repository URL
https://github.com/matteogabriele/agentscan
by radva42 | 2026-03-09 12:55:08+00:00
Can you give an example? I'm not that familiar with pagedjs, just pulled it for the benchmark.

My library has support for @page rules, but that's actually pretty basic. I needed more advanced headers/footers and added support for in-html headers/footers like this:
In your <body> you cna define headers/footers by wrapping content in a <section> tag. For example:

<body>
<section>
<header>... any HTML here, full CSS support</header>

<div> Some normal flow content</div>

<footer>Your footer HTML</footer>
</section>

</body>

This structure is purely optional, but it's a really convinient way of designing pages with different styles in the same document.
An HTML file can have any number of these sections meaning you can generate a PDF with different headers/footers.

Some other bits: It has support for 100% height that match the entire page, it can handle forced page breaks inside flexbox containers (Chrome doesn't even try ... just ignores it) and also follows page-break: avoid correctly - so it doesn't randomly split table rows for example.
by dmacedo | 2026-03-09 12:55:53+00:00
Trying to solve my own problem of drowning in meetings and scattered tools, turning things into actionable items.

It sits on top of what I already use and gives me a unified "What do I need to do (now/today)?" view.

Trying to auto-capture action items from meeting transcriptions and other inbound, and routing quick thoughts to the right tool with a couple of keystrokes, helping me prioritise my day so I'm not spending energy on too much organising (or through lack of organising getting distracted).

I wanted something that watched my inputs and keep my GTD loop running, especially when back-to-back meetings and context-switching make it really hard (or impossible) to stay on top of things I need to do!

Might also augment it with LLM for some support of task breakdown, but only as human-in-loop assistance.

Not thinking this could ever turn into a product since it's so custom.
by juanpabloaj | 2026-03-09 12:55:58+00:00
These past weeks I finally organized some ideas I'd been sitting on and wrote two posts:

From Agentic Reasoning to Deterministic Scripts: on why AI agents shouldn't reason from scratch on every repeated task, and how execution history could compile into deterministic automations

https://juanpabloaj.com/2026/03/08/from-agentic-reasoning-to...

The silent filter: on cognitive erosion as a quieter, more probable civilizational risk than a catastrophic event

https://juanpabloaj.com/2026/02/27/the-silent-filter/
by CharlieDigital | 2026-03-09 12:56:11+00:00
> How do you deal with the comments sometimes being relatively noisy for humans?

To extents, that is a function of tweaking the prompt to get the level of detail desired and signal/vs noise produced by the LLM. e.g. constraining the word count it can use for comments.

We have a small team of approvers that are reviewing every PR and for us, not being able to see the original prompt and flow of interactions with the agent, this approach lets us kind of see that by proxy when reviewing the PR so it is immensely useful.

Even for things like enum values, for example. Why is this enum here? What is its use case? Is it needed? Having the reasoning dumped out allows us to understand what the LLM is "thinking".

(Of course, the biggest benefit is still that the LLM sees the reasoning from an earlier session again when reading the code weeks or months later).
by tcbrah | 2026-03-09 12:56:27+00:00
problem 2 is actually scarier than most people realize because it compounds. your agent reads a README in some dependency, that README has injection instructions, now the agent is acting on behalf of the attacker with whatever permissions you gave it. filesystem sandboxing doesnt help because the dangerous action might be "write a backdoor into the file i already have write access to" which is completely within the sandbox rules.

the short-lived scoped credentials approach someone mentioned upthread is probably the best practical mitigation right now. but even that breaks down when the agent legitimately needs broad access to do its job - like if its refactoring across a monorepo it kinda needs write access to everything.

i think the actual answer long term is something closer to capability-based security where each tool call gets its own token scoped to exactly what that specific action needs. but nobody has built that yet in a way that doesnt make the agent 10x slower.
by mike-cardwell | 2026-03-09 12:56:37+00:00
I've had a few emails, and a few contacts over Matrix over the years. Barely any though. My email and matrix id are both on my front page at https://www.grepular.com. I recently added a "Like" button at various places throughout the site, front page, end of articles etc, so a click, followed by typing an optional message and another click is all it would take. I've been wondering if people ignore it due to assuming it is somehow connected to social media.
by aa-jv | 2026-03-09 12:56:59+00:00
Alchemist Owl got there already:

https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/

POC||GTFO is one of those things that, once you dive in, you will never regret taking the effort to fully grok.

...

AI-Generated summary of issues relating to disassembly:

PoC||GTFO 0x10 (pocorgtfo10.pdf, January 2016): Titled around "IN THE THEATER OF LITERATE DISASSEMBLY," this entire issue focuses on reverse engineering and disassembly. It includes articles and examples involving disassembly of various systems (e.g., mentions of built-in monitors and naive disassemblers like in Apple ][ contexts, along with reverse engineering hood-lifting). It heavily features disassembly as a theme, with likely code listings and explanations that effectively serve as or demonstrate disassembler usage/output.

PoC||GTFO 0x21 (pocorgtfo21.pdf, February 2022): This issue explicitly mentions a "Notebook of Altera NIOS Disassembly" in its content/description. Articles cover disassembly (e.g., of Altera NIOS soft-core processor code), and one notes that while focused on disassembly, full target plugins would include an assembler, disassembler, code analysis, etc. This strongly indicates the PDF contains disassembly examples, outputs, or even PoC implementations/discussions of disassembler functionality for that architecture.

Other issues occasionally include disassembly snippets or references (e.g., 0x11, 0x13, 0x15 show snippets like disassembled code blocks for specific exploits or systems), but they are more incidental rather than centered on a disassembler tool or example.
by klempner | 2026-03-09 12:57:03+00:00
Except it is a stretch to say it is "their theme park restaurant". This story was dramatically oversimplified in the media and Disney's position was nowhere near as unreasonable as everyone understands it to be.

The argument was not "they agreed to a EULA 5 years ago and therefore mandatory arbitration in all disputes with Disney".

This is a privately owned restaurant at a glorified shopping mall within the larger Walt Disney World resort. If you went to a normal restaurant in a normal shopping mall in Florida the mall owners would generally not be liable unless there's something else going on.

The theory that Disney is liable here is more than anything based on the *restaurant featuring on their app.* The EULA for *that app* would certainly be relevant to this argument.

Now, the Disney lawyers also tried to argue that the Disney+ EULA would actually (at least plausibly) be relevant. That is more than a bit of a stretch, especially for a free trial from years ago, and I'd be surprised (but IANAL) if such a theory would actually hold up in court. Still, on a spectrum from "person died due to maintenance failure on a Magic Kingdom ride" to "person died from going to a restaurant featured on a Disney+ program", if you're arguing that the Disney+ EULA is relevant, this is a whole lot closer to the latter than the former.
by MadxX79 | 2026-03-09 12:57:06+00:00
I love the total lack of humility on that site.
"What if the METR study turns out not to capture anything relevant? We just add a constant gap to be conservative!".
But I guess these guys aren't really scientist, so it's probably a lot to ask that they relate critically to what they are doing and be honest about the limitations of their methods.

What if it turns out that the more you scale the more your LLM resembles a lobotomized human. It looks like it goes really well in the beginning, but you are just never going to get to Einstein. How does that affect everything?

What if it turned out that those AI companies were maybe having a whole bunch of humans solving the problems that are currently just below the 50% reliability threshold they set, and do fine tuning with those solutions. That will make their models perform better on the benchmark, but it's just training for the test... will the constant gap be a good approximation then?
by cmiles8 | 2026-03-09 12:57:11+00:00
This is all starting to smell like financial engineering games. Traditionally nobody in their right mind would give a startup billions to build data centers. For a long list of reasons, that’s kinda nuts.

However what it does allow all these companies investing to do is fund significant capital expenditure but hide it on their balance sheet. They all know if they funded capex directly it would create a deprecation storm that would tank their future earnings. Instead they give the money to another entity to do the building and magically it’s (the equity) now just an asset on their balance sheet with no deprecation. It’s “worth” a lot as a line item there, but only because the hype driving this financial engineering keeps the shares valuable.

Meanwhile the startup isn’t public and thus the fact that it has this massive deprecation on the books is mostly out of sight and out of mind, with some random sky high valuation that’s not based in any normal sense of business reality.

That all works great… until the bubble busts of course.
by jorisboris | 2026-03-09 12:58:11+00:00
I feel we’re framing it in a negative way

Our goal shouldn’t be to be coal free. Our goal should be to be 100% renewable.

If we set up our goals in terms of what we don’t want, we end up in the situation we are right now: high energy costs, very dependent on energy imports and a high risk of loosing our industry
by IshKebab | 2026-03-09 12:58:18+00:00
The problem isn't implicit things happening.

He's talking about this problem. Can this code panic?

foo();

You can't easily answer that in Rust or Zig. In both cases you have to walk the entire call graph of the function (which could be arbitrarily large) and check for panics. It's not feasible to do by hand. The compiler could do it though.
by orangecoffee | 2026-03-09 12:58:22+00:00
To give you the benefit of doubt - you're not paying attention. The 100$ claude account is profitable inference wise, and performs better than 80% of engineers with upto 5YOE. Architects I speak with want to delegate to this 100$ agent rather than 10000$ engineer.

It is absolutely more cost efficient. Junior engineers are done for.
by sethaurus | 2026-03-09 12:59:37+00:00
> Or do they tag things and say "Customer X signed up on this date, so he is bound by T&C number 12, whereas this other customer signed up a year later and is bound by T&C number 13". That seems unwieldy since there is a common infrastructure.

If the company would like their T&C to carry the force of a binding contract upon me, then yes, keeping track of what I actually signed seems like the absolute bare minimum they must do.

Either these things are real contracts or they are not. The idea that it's too onerous for a company to keep track of its contractual agreements is absurd. That's giving them all the benefits of a real contract with none of the obligations.
by pzo | 2026-03-09 12:59:54+00:00
> You realize how much work has gone into ensuring that didn't materialize in those 40 years, right? JCPOA... Stuxnet?

JCPOA agreement was nuked by Trump administration. No, I don't buy your arguments, If Iran would wanted to have Nukes would have it already made those in 5 years for sure. Kim didn't have problems for making those.
by skypanther | 2026-03-09 13:00:02+00:00
This looks great and I'll probably order a report. A couple of small suggestions. First, the price is very reasonable, but I think you should be more open about what it costs -- maybe on the home page or at least the Order Report page. Second, I think you should tell what areas of the country (world?) that you can provide reports for, again on the main page would be great.
by ppcvote | 2026-03-09 13:00:10+00:00
Guilty as charged on this one. The dashboard visuals are CSS animations — the data behind them isn't live yet. I've been trying to pipe real systemd logs into it but haven't cracked the architecture cleanly enough to ship it. It's on my list, just not done.
Should've been clearer about that in the post. Thanks for pushing on it.
by tasuki | 2026-03-09 13:00:36+00:00
I agree Google's reputation misled people. But importantly, I don't think Google can be held accountable for their reputation and for what other people believed.

To give a somewhat contorted example: If people believe you give 1 Bitcoin to anyone who can recite the whole Beowulf, they will perhaps spend a lot of time learning Beowulf, forgoing other things. Then they find out you in fact have not promised them that and that you have no such obligation. I don't think you've misled them! Do they have a right to be angry with you? Or should they have checked with you what the precise conditions were before upending their life?
by albert_e | 2026-03-09 13:00:37+00:00
Thanks

This might be useful on a personal PC -- licence seems expensive, though I like it being a one time purchase and not monthly subscription.

Will look to do the free trial to evaluate. (Hope we see more such tooling, and also push the likes of Microsoft to add native support)

My main usecase is on work PC though where I wont be able to install additional software or plugins. So was exploring python scripts and the like.

Thanks for the pointer.
by juleiie | 2026-03-09 13:00:52+00:00
This is a good question. If it is so cheap and easy then why not? I think it is a matter of american government and corporate terror tactic.

They make these few rare cases when they catch somebody so loud and showy that the rest of the flock prefers to sign all the TOS and don’t have this additional worry. It is a success story of manipulative scare techniques that copyright companies utilise.
by jimkleiber | 2026-03-09 13:01:07+00:00
Perhaps for people who have large sums of money, they don't tend to play in high risk bets anyways, they don't need to. Large sums make large sums on small percentage movement. Most people don't have enough money to make large sums on small percentage increase, this id assume this route makes more sense for like the vast majority of humans, especially the ones who have access to privileged, often government, information.
by bluGill | 2026-03-09 13:01:31+00:00
Semi-Popular youtube channels regularly get offers from someone who wants to buy their channel. There are people and companies that put up good/useful content for a while to get subscribers and then shift focus. There have been several cases where someone has lost control of their system/password because of a "hack". Likely there are more that I'm not aware of.

RSS protects against none of these.
by mschuster91 | 2026-03-09 13:01:57+00:00
These days, every American's threat model should include being v& by the feds, and here in Germany, the situation isn't much better, you can get v& for saying the Minister of Interior is a dick [1].

Yes, this was later on ruled unconstitutional, but it doesn't change the facts, and, worse, Germany doesn't have a "fruit of the forbidden tree" rule.

[1] https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/hamburg-wohnungsdurch...
by cauliflower99 | 2026-03-09 13:02:04+00:00
Irish man here - Over the last few years, we've graduated from providing cheap energy to now importing most of our energy. We've seen huge energy price increases as a result. We're seeing more and more cost-of-living protests, the war now means more will suffer with fuel prices and we're still going ahead with closing down energy suppliers (this is a 2025 article but the point still stands).

To anyone praising these stupid, politically incentivised initiatives - congratulations to us on making the poor and middle-classes poorer.

But it's all good - we're saving the world I guess. The poor folks can sort themselves out.
by bko | 2026-03-09 13:02:24+00:00
> But it is also hard to be with someone and is very hard to take care of kids and family and such. And it is waaay harder to be with wrong person.

Strong disagree. It's a different kind of hard. People can handle hard. Running a marathon is hard but a million do so every year for no reason other than maybe it's hard.

The difference between taking care of kids and having a family is that it's meaningful and to most deeply satisfying. Sure there are some people that don't get any satisfaction, but I think it's fair to say that it's not the typical experience across every Western culture.

Let's stop pretending everything is morally equivalent. "I'm raising an autistic child to be a functional member of society", "oh that's nothing! I just mad Diamond II with 61% win rate over 200 games in League!"

I don't know what "being with the wrong person" means. There is no "right" or "wrong" person as the world doesn't revolve around you. If you're actually in an abusive relationship, you should get out obviously. But what's the alternative? Drifting. Emptiness. No purpose or companionship. Spending the rest of your lives with pets asking for life hacks on how to manage boredom. Video games, netflix, personal indulgence and self gratification, medication.

This is going to be weirdly controversial on this forum but is advice I would give to my children: most people should aim to do what we've been biologically evolved to do, namely find companionship and love w/ someone and raise a family. If you're an outlier and you have a shot of sending someone to Mars, sure, go all in on that, but for nearly everyone else, this is your best chance for a fulfilling meaningful life.
by gepheum | 2026-03-09 13:02:25+00:00
Thanks for the comment. I am very familiar with Buf+Protobuf, I think it's a great system overall but has many limitations which I think can be overcome by redesigning the language from scratch instead of building on top of the .proto syntax.
In the Skir vs Protobuf part of the blog post [https://medium.com/@gepheum/i-spent-15-years-with-protobuf-t...], only 2 out of 10 pertain to "syntax" (and they're a bit more than syntax). Since you mention compatibility check, Buf's compatibility check prevents message renaming, which is a huge limitation. With Skir, that's not the case. You also get the compatibility checks verified in the IDE.
by ramses0 | 2026-03-09 13:03:19+00:00
README => AGENTS.md
HOWTO => SKILLS.md
INFO => Plan/Arch/Guide
REFERENCE => JavaDoc-ish

I'm very near the idea that "LLM's are randomized compilers" and the human prompts should be 1000% more treated with care. Don't (necessarily) git commit the whole megabytes of token-blathering from the LLM, but keeping the human prompts:

"Hey, we're going to work on Feature X... now some test cases... I've done more testing and Z is not covered... ok, now we'll extend to cover Case Y..."

Let me hover over the 50-100 character commit message and then see the raw discussion (source) that led to the AI-generated (compiled) code. Allow AI.next to review the discussion/response/diff/tests and see if it can expose any flaws with the benefit of hindsight!
by agent5ravi | 2026-03-09 13:03:19+00:00
Sandboxing is half the story. The other half is external blast radius: if your local agent can email/DM/pay using your personal accounts, the sandbox doesn't help much. What I want is a separate, revocable identity context per agent or per task: its own inbox/phone for verification, scoped credentials with expiry, and an audit log that survives delegation to sub-agents. We ran into this building Ravi: giving an agent a phone number is easy; keeping delegation traceable to the right principal is the hard bit.
Show HN: Needle – Search Reddit, Hacker News, GitHub and Forums in One Place
by iamvs2002 | 2026-03-09 13:04:04+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Needle because I kept jumping between Reddit, Hacker News, GitHub, and forums trying to understand what people were saying about certain problems and products.

Needle runs one search across 12 communities and shows the discussions in one place.

People use it to:
- find potential customers
- discover competitors
- monitor keywords
- spot emerging problems

We recently added a brand setup feature where you enter your product info once and Needle auto-generates relevant searches across the platform.

Would love feedback from the HN community.

https://useneedle.net