MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bigfishrunning | 2026-03-09 19:35:52+00:00
LLMs have the ability to convince you that they've "reasoned". sometimes, an application will loop the output of an LLM to its input to provide a "chain of reasoning"

This is not the same thing as reasoning.

LLMs are pattern matchers. If you trained an llm only to map some input to the output of John Steinbeck, then by golly that's what it'll be able to do. If you give it some input that isn't suitably like any of the input you gave it during training, then you'll get some unpredictable nonsense as output.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-03-09 19:36:18+00:00
This isn't a fix, this is a workaround.

It would be cool if people have better ideas, but someone criticizing this workaround doesn't need to suggest something better, and it's not weird for them to lack better ideas but still post. It's a hard problem. And "better than nothing" might get an idea approved but doesn't let it escape criticism.
by tharmas | 2026-03-09 19:36:43+00:00
The solid bad guy(s) here are BB and tRump (for bending over for BB). No US president has ever been so stupid as to allow an Israeli leader con them into a war with Iran.

Also, you are forgetting that BB/Israel wants the Gulf States to get into the War against Iran. So it is highly plausible that some of those hits are the Israeli's. The Israeli's are masters at subterfuge.
by NoGravitas | 2026-03-09 19:36:44+00:00
“optimism, where it is not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbor nothing but words under their shallow foreheads, seems to me to be not merely an absurd, but also a really wicked, way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the most unspeakable sufferings of mankind”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror
by shizzsosa | 2026-03-09 19:37:30+00:00
I'll never understand all the hate for email. What's so dreadful about it? Email has become my preferred communication medium.

There are many times I want to share longer, personal stories with friends, and sometimes those evolve into philosophical discussions about human nature. Other times it could be travelogues or lengthy discussions about art, e.g. my friends and I might go to museums and share our experiences over email, listing our favorite works and why.

I suppose I’m nostalgic for the epistolary culture of the Victorian era.
Long-form emails encourage the kind of reflection people once found in diaries and letters. I’m grateful to have found friends who share an appreciation for that virtue, but I consider that more of a miracle than anything else.
by bikalincanada | 2026-03-09 19:37:42+00:00
Hey everyone! I just launched Crawly - a web scraping and YouTube transcript API.

What it does:
- Scrape any URL and get clean Markdown with metadata. Handles JS rendering and anti-bot bypasses.
- Extract YouTube transcripts in plain text, timed segments, SRT, or VTT. Multi-language support built in.

It's pay-as-you-go at $0.001 per request. No subscriptions, credits never expire. You get 100 free credits to try it.

I also built an MCP server so Claude and Cursor can scrape pages and pull transcripts directly.

Check it out: https://crawly.bikal.co

Happy to answer questions!
by Aurornis | 2026-03-09 19:38:11+00:00
This is an article that you need to read critically, beyond the headline.

Even a few paragraphs down they say this:

> The optimal age to freeze eggs varies depending on the source and metric, but almost all sources agree it's sometime between 19 and 26.

So there's some heavy bias inserted already into the title.

The next chart shows a peak around 19, but if you read the fine print it's not a chart about eggs at all. The subtitle says it shows:

> probability of getting pregnant for couples not on birth control

Not the quality of eggs frozen. They're saying one thing in text and showing a chart of something else. If you can't imagine why couples in their early 20s might have a higher rate of pregnancy than couples in their 50s then you might want to think a little deeper about the factors that go into that.

The writeup then goes into polygenic embryo screening, which then jumps to improving IQ by selecting embryos, which gets to their final argument which is that it's easier to collect more eggs when younger. So freezing a lot of eggs when you're younger allows for more boosting of your child's IQ through genetic screening based on a company called Herasight's data. Herasight has been widely criticized for overselling their abilities. Also, why do so many rationalist writeups end up back at a conversation about genetics and IQ?
by simianwords | 2026-03-09 19:38:12+00:00
>If I trained (or, more likely, fine-tuned) an LLM to generate code like what's found in an individual's GitHub repositories, could you comfortably say it writes code the same way as that individual? Sure, it will capture style and conventions, but what about our limitations? What do you think happens if you fine-tune a model to write code like a frontend developer and ask it to write a simple operating system kernel? It's realistically not in their (individual) data but the response still depends on the individual's thought process.

Look, I don't think you understand how LLM's work. Its not about fine tuning. Its about generalised reasoning. The key word is "generalised" which can only happen if it has been trained on literally everything.

> It's relevant for data it hasn't been trained on

LLM's absolutely can reason on and conceptualise on things it has not been trained on, because of the generalised reasoning ability.
by conductr | 2026-03-09 19:39:01+00:00
I went through it with my wife too and expecting a 19 y/o women to go through the IVF process as an insurance policy is a bit insane to me. In our modern, western society, this is age is still solidly childhood with not much definitive thoughts of future family, marriage, etc.

Governments need to make COL more affordable, birth rate will go up naturally
by mrguyorama | 2026-03-09 19:39:07+00:00
For some of us it's a fairly boring taste. Pepper plus vinegar plus sugar is basically spicy ketchup. That's good for some but not for others.

I like the taste of peppers but most hot sauces taste more like vinegar or capsaicin than actual peppers. I think I'm sensitive to vinegar, and my spice tolerance is not always high.

I find Chili crisp to get me what I want.
by ianburrell | 2026-03-09 19:39:09+00:00
HVDC is more efficient than you think, 3.5% losses per 1000km. Which means intracontinental is obviously good, and intercontinental will work in some situations.

Nuclear power is expensive, enough that “what about night” is solve by building extra solar and batteries. Also, renewables wreck the economics of base load power that needs to run all the time to pay back loan, but can’t compete with solar during the day.
by kazinator | 2026-03-09 19:39:27+00:00
It's a curious sentence and one of only two to mention timing, the other being the introduction's mention of the "unpredictable timing" of garbage collection.

Obviously it is true in a single threaded system. If the one and only thread executes a basic block of instructions, none of which call into memory management, or call any functions which might do that, then it holds that it's not interrupted by garbage collection.

If there are threads, and a stop-the-world discipline for GC, then obviously not.

Note that garbage collection itself can have a switch, not involving disabling interrupts. Of course, you wouldn't want to insert that around every block that doesn't need GC. I'm just mentioning that in order to note that we don't a heavy hammer like disabling interrupts in order to momentarily disable garbage collection.
When GC is disabled, it is still possible to allocate objects, but no garbage collection passes are invoked to reclaim storage. This means that if the allocator has exhausted the available heaps, since it is not able to run a garbage collection pass, it has to ask the system for more memory for a new heap.

I've used a switch like this around calls to a Yacc-generated parser, due to the Yacc stack being invisible to the garbage collector; newly allocated objects could be prematurely reclaimed as they are being "laundered" through the Yacc stack before being nailed into the abstract syntax tree.
by RunningDroid | 2026-03-09 19:39:41+00:00
Agreed, if you talk to members of a random sect then other sects range from explicitly heretical* to simply historically‡ or structurally wrong. And that's not including the political views of various sects§.

*: Mormons & Jehovah's Witnesses from the perspective of sects that follow the Niecene creed

‡: United Methodists from the perspective of Free Methodists

§: Unitarian Universalists are left-aligned, the Southern Baptist Convention is right-aligned
by jesse_dot_id | 2026-03-09 19:39:46+00:00
OpenClaw opens a wide attack surface on your digital life that cannot be remediated so long as hallucinations and prompt injection remain unsolved problems. Anything built on top of it is equally insecure and probably even more insecure.

I really don't want to yuck anybody's yums or step on dev work that I had nothing to do with, because I've been there and I know it sucks, but OpenClaw is barely secure enough to even play with in a sandbox. Giving it private information about your real business and real business contacts feels like an absolutely insane thing to do.

At best OpenClaw is like a toy... if the toy was a gun and it shot real bullets. This feels like playing Russian roulette with your livelihood.
by IronBacon | 2026-03-09 19:41:27+00:00
According to some hearsay, there is allegedly at least another one unpatched hypervisor exploit in recent firmware. Considering the OP's track record, I'm not surprised he's sitting on a full-chain jailbreak.

Porting the Linux kernel to the PS5 is also an impressive flex, quite funny thinking that ten years ago, in 2016, fail0verflow did the same for the PS4...
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-03-09 19:41:34+00:00
"Fuel storage and reprocessing" isn't that much of the cost and a significant proportion of that is compliance costs and extreme safety measures. The pressure vessel is likewise a small minority of the cost.

Industrial control systems are fundamentally sensors, actuators and a computer. None of those is actually that expensive. Nobody should be paying a billion dollars for a valve.

Older reactors have somewhat high operating costs because they're so old, many of them were built more than half a century ago. Newer reactors often have higher costs because of the lack of scale. If you only build one or two of something you have to amortize the development costs over that many units, mistakes that require redoing work are being made for the first time, etc. Build more of them and the unit cost goes down.
by bigfishrunning | 2026-03-09 19:42:40+00:00
> And LLMs do have understanding.

They absolutely do not. If you "ask it how it came up with the process in natural language" with some input, it will produce an output that follows, because of the statistics encoded in the model. That output may or may not be helpful, but it is likely to be stylistically plausible. An LLM does not think or understand; it is merely a statistical model (that's what the M stands for!)
by jrowen | 2026-03-09 19:42:43+00:00
It's just the sad truth that these things are motivated first and foremost by violence and aggression towards other people. We're a little more civilized than some but really no different from any other bloodthirsty maniacs. There's just no need to be expending significant resources on killing people in other countries. Politicians run on platforms of fixing things at home and then do this shit. It's insane.
by g0xA52A2A | 2026-03-09 19:43:01+00:00
You may be interested in OpenBSD's pledge[1][2][3].

> Why trust a program to set its own capabilities?

An example may be that a program starts needing a wide range of capabilties but can then ratchet down to a reduced set once running, aka "privdrop".

> why isn't there a way to set capabilities from the parent process when execing?

There have been replies on other systems so just to stick with pledge which provides the abiliy to set "execpromises" to do this.

[1] https://man.openbsd.org/pledge

[2] https://www.openbsd.org/papers/eurobsdcon2017-pledge.pdf

[3] https://www.openbsd.org/papers/BeckPledgeUnveilBSDCan2018.pd...
by Stargx | 2026-03-09 19:43:29+00:00
I've been running 3–4 Claude Code sessions simultaneously and kept hitting the same problem: no way to see which session is thinking vs idle vs waiting for input, no visibility into context window usage across sessions.

So Claude built this: https://github.com/Stargx/claude-code-dashboard

*What it shows per session:*
- Token usage and cost (with correct per-model pricing)
- Status — thinking / waiting / idle / stale
- Context window usage as a visual progress bar
- Active subagents while they're running
- Which files the session is currently working on
- Expandable activity log
- Git branch and permission mode (AUTO-EDIT / YOLO)

*How it works:*
Claude Code writes JSONL session logs to `~/.claude/projects/`. The dashboard just watches those files and renders everything in a browser tab. No WebSockets, no build step, no cloud — just Node.js tailing local files and a single HTML file for the UI.

*Quick start:*
```
git clone https://github.com/Stargx/claude-code-dashboard
cd claude-code-dashboard
npm install && npm start
```
Then open http://localhost:3001

MIT licensed. Would love feedback — especially if you're on macOS or Linux and hit any issues with the session detection.
by danaris | 2026-03-09 19:43:34+00:00
Many, many people disagree with you.

It is not at all a logical, ethical, or emotional contradiction to say that we should have humanely-raised livestock whose purpose is to be slaughtered for meat. We can ensure that they are kept in healthy, safe, and humane ways during their lifetimes, and are killed as quickly, cleanly, and painlessly as we can reasonably manage.

And, um, the meaning of "humane" is only loosely related to "treat like a human." It means "treat well, view with compassion", and similar. We talk of things being "humane" or "inhumane" in how we treat each other, too. [0]

Humans have been raising meat animals with compassion and treating them well during their lifetimes for longer than we have had written language. Veganism/vegetarianism is not even physically an option for many people, excludes many cultures' traditional practices, and very, very often requires (or at least tends toward) supplementing with foods that are at least as unethical as factory farming practices.

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/humane
by red-iron-pine | 2026-03-09 19:43:46+00:00
> Not at all. The US doesn't have the political will to commit the monstrous acts required to stomp out an insurgency, and we, as the big bad empire on the global stage, can't help but inspire insurgents.

until recently, the US generally tried to at least pay lip service to human rights. plus occupations are a great way to funnel money.

can't pretend to be pro-democracy at home when you're exterminating Afghan villiages, and wastelands don't need contractor money to build new schools.
by overfeed | 2026-03-09 19:44:08+00:00
> Being able to coat efficiently run frontier models is i think, not a high priced endeavor for an org

Running proprietary model would make you subject to whatever ToS the LLM companies choose on a particular day, and what you can produce with them, which circles back to the raison d'etre for the GPL and GNU.

Until all software copyright is dead and buried, there is no need for copyleft to change tack. Otherwise there rising tide may rise high enough to drown GPL, but not proprietary software.

Open source is easier to counterfeit/license-launder/re-implement using LLMs because source code is much lower-hanging fruit, and is understood by more people than closed-source assembly.
by IncreasePosts | 2026-03-09 19:44:18+00:00
No, you don't always have the right to say nothing at all. Courts can compel testimony and punish you if you don't.

And you plead the 5th after going under oath. And you can't just plead the 5th to any question. If the prosection puts you under oath and asks you your name, you can't plead the 5th to that
by jrm4 | 2026-03-09 19:44:20+00:00
Doomed from the start. It took me a while to figure this out, but ATProto is generally a bad idea; maybe even worse than Twitter.

Which is to say, it provides a more robust model for your (true) information and data to be exploited by others than even the Twitter model.

The Mastodon-slash-email model that relies on individual servers is better because decentralization is safer -- Those models bear more genuine "ability to delete" and more "plausible deniability."
by simianwords | 2026-03-09 19:44:22+00:00
this is outdated stuff from 3 years ago.

> If you trained an llm only to map some input to the output of John Steinbeck

this is literally not possible because the llm does not get generalised reasoning ability. this is not a useful hypothetical because such an llm will simply not work. why do you think you have never seen a domain specific model ever?

if you wanted to falsify this claim: "llm's cant reason" how would one do that? can you come up with some examples that shows that it can't reason? what if we come up with a new board game with some rules and see if it can beat a human at it. just feed the rules of the game to it and nothing else.

here is gpt-5.4 solving never before seen mathematics problems: https://epochai.substack.com/p/gpt-54-set-a-new-record-on-fr...

you could again say its just pattern matching but then i would argue that its the same thing we are doing.
by thrance | 2026-03-09 19:45:23+00:00
Politely, you should reconsider your views on immigration. Immigrants (even illegal ones) are on average less violent than native citizens, and net positives to the economy. Their constant scapegoating in the public discourse was always going to lead to this senseless violence the World is currently experiencing. Playing into this populist view of the issue reinforces this vicious cycle.
by bityard | 2026-03-09 19:45:25+00:00
What? No way. Yes, a lot of airline pilots were former military, but I know several people who are airline pilots and did not come from "very rich" families.

Flying is not in any way some kind of high-status luxurious job. It can be grueling, with intensive and continuous training, wacky shifts, very strict rules, lots of time away from family, long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. You can lose your career over a minor mistake that snowballed into a incident due to factors out of your control. Minor health issue? Need mental help? Better get those fixed in secret or you probably won't fly again.

In my line of work, a major mistake would bring down an internal website at a big company for a little while. An airline pilot's major mistake would kill himself and a hundred-plus people.

I can't fathom why anyone who is rich would want to be an airline pilot. It's a shit-ton of work, stress, and risk for not much reward. You gotta love to fly in order to stick with it. If the rich want to fly, they just do the training and buy a plane, they don't need to do it for a living!
by teamonkey | 2026-03-09 19:45:34+00:00
I think the problem with SAT solvers is that they’re complicated, in terms of computation and also how easy it is to understand by someone who didn’t study formal methods.

WFC is brute-force-simple, but because it’s simple it’s quite computationally inexpensive (unless it hits a lot of dead-ends) and I wouldn’t be surprised if it could often find an adequate solution quicker than a SAT solver. At least for games, where a result doesn’t need to be perfect, just good enough.
by jono_irwin | 2026-03-09 19:45:43+00:00
Yeah that’s fair. For weights specifically there often isn’t a huge dedupe win across versions since retraining tends to change most of them. That said, we generally don’t advocate including model weights in container images anyway. The main benefit for us is avoiding the need to pull the full image up front and only fetching the data actually touched during startup. On the latency side, reads happen over a local network with caching and prefetching, so the impact on request latency is typically minimal.
Show HN: VectorLens – See why your RAG hallucinates, no config
by gustav-proxi | 2026-03-09 19:45:52+00:00
I built VectorLens because I was tired of "log file archaeology" every time my RAG pipeline hallucinated. Usually, when an LLM gives a wrong answer, you're stuck guessing which retrieved chunk misled it—or why the right chunk was ignored.

Existing observability tools either require a cloud signup, an enterprise contract, or heavy manual instrumentation of your code. I wanted something that stayed local and just worked.

The Solution: Three lines of code

Python
import vectorlens
vectorlens.serve() # Open http://127.0.0.1:7756
# Your RAG code runs as-is (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, ChromaDB, FAISS, etc. are auto-intercepted)
How it works technically:

Zero-Config Interception: It monkey-patches common LLM and Vector DB clients. You don't have to change your functions or wrap your calls; it intercepts the data flow automatically.

Local Hallucination Detection: It uses sentence-transformers (a 22MB model) to compare the LLM’s output sentences against the retrieved context. If the similarity is too low, it's flagged as a hallucination.

Perturbation Attribution: To figure out "why," it measures how the output changes when specific chunks are removed or modified. This gives you a clear score of which data points actually drove the response.

Fully Local: No data leaves your machine. The dashboard is a local React app updated via WebSockets.

Why use this over other tools?

Privacy: No cloud uploads or API keys for the debugger itself.

No Vendor Lock-in: Works with local models (Ollama/Mistral) just as easily as it does with GPT-4.

Speed: It runs detection in a background thread, so it doesn't block your main application logic.

I’m looking for feedback on the attribution accuracy and if there are specific Vector DBs you'd like to see supported next.

GitHub: https://github.com/Gustav-Proxi/vectorlens
by conductr | 2026-03-09 19:45:55+00:00
The grandparent situation is sad af. It's also pretty sad being a mid-40s year old dad that doesn't have the energy to keep up with their kid. I pitched a little league game yesterday and it wiped me out. Also, the fact I (and you) will not know our grandchildren very well also is quite sad.

If my son has his first kid the same age I had him, I'll be in my 80s when that kid is starting little league (or that age). Then, factor in the fact that I don't know of any men in my family that have lived past 80 and it gets really grim. They were all heavy smokers and drinkers I remind myself with fingers crossed.

The most sad part for me, is I realized by delaying parenthood - I was just being selfish - and the net result is I minimized "shared time on earth" with the person I love the most. It's easy to say I wouldn't have been a good parent or I wanted X job/income first, but it's all just excuses and selfishness.
by s_dev | 2026-03-09 19:46:03+00:00
Paywall links shouldn't be allowed on Hacker News. It's not possible to subscribe to every service that could be theoretically be submitted. We're not all on $350k SV wages either.

That said it's hard to gauge this story as it's a one sided affair, author maybe 100% in the right but that can't really be determined.
by verdverm | 2026-03-09 19:46:08+00:00
Since developing on ATProto, one thing I have hoped for is less of this "winner take all" world. I think the protocol can be for much more than social media, could do dropbox if permissions and private data are designed well. This comment by the main protocol dev working on this does not inspire confidence on my part.

https://bsky.app/profile/dholms.at/post/3mfsehg6ius2a