MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by protocolture | 2026-03-10 22:37:52+00:00
If I buy a book entitled "How to make a table" and then make a table, the author does not own the table I made.

If I buy a book and use it to prop up a table, the author likewise does not own the table, or any works I undertake on that table.

If I buy a book and rip out the pages to make a collage, the US is the only legal jurisdiction where I run even slight risk of civil penalties.

An LLM is downstream of a book. Using a book to make an LLM does not confer any rights or privilges towards the LLM on the original author, just as using a hammer or nails dont permit the hammer or nail manufacturers any royalties on what I make, even if I build a hammer making machine with them. Theres no right to the works of people who build on your work without reproducing your work, at least outside of strict copyleft.

Its like demanding a cut from people who learned how to use photoshop by watching your photoshop tutorial youtube videos.

This is why the most successful cases against LLMs have been on the "Did they purchase the book" side of the fence, and not on the "What did they do with it" outside of the one case, where the legal company tried to use the LLM to 1:1 reproduce the content they had a limited license to, but thats obviously a no go and they should have known better.
by AngryData | 2026-03-10 22:38:53+00:00
To be fair you can keep a cow milking for LONG after it gave birth, but yields are a bit lower and baby cows are very valuable in themselves, which is generally the same kind of problem that keeps most bad farming practices going. Dairy farming is already a bottom of the barrel low margin business. And running a dairy farm while not maximizing calf output is like running a low-yield gold mine while dumping gem quality emeralds out with the tailings. Yeah it can be done, but you would be foolish not to do both, especially if it means your competitors across the road are able to squash your business with far higher capital returns after a few years.
by RRFDunn | 2026-03-10 22:38:54+00:00
Good take, and you're right that credential management is a separate layer from code-level permissions. Right now Aegis handles the "what code can it run" side: capability declarations control which operations a module can perform, and MCP tool outputs are automatically wrapped in tainted so they can't be used unsanitized. But the "what API keys does this agent have access to" question is more about infrastructure than language design. That said, the memory_access construct with encryption and scope enforcement could possibly be extended to handle credential storage, keys stored in a memory scope with read: [api_key] restrictions would only be accessible to modules that declare that scope. Definitely an area worth exploring further. Thx for the feedback
by repstosb | 2026-03-10 22:39:29+00:00
I agree, bash, sed, etc. are great, but a VM running inside a browser seems like the least efficient way to access them. Even if you're stuck on Windows, Cygwin has been a thing for 30 years now, and WSL for ten or so? There should be plenty of ways to set up a sandbox without having the simulate an entire machine.

It sounds like what you're really trying to recreate is the Software Tools movement from 50 years ago, where there was a push to port the UNIX/BTL utilities to the widest possible variety of systems to establish a common programming and data manipulation environment. It was arguably successful in getting good ports available just about anywhere, evolving into GNU, etc., but it never really reached its apotheosis. That style of clear, easy-to-read-and-write software was still largely killed off by a few big industry players pushing a narrative that "enterprise" has to mean relational databases and distributed objects. It would be FASCINATING if AI coding agents are the force that brings it back.
by doctorpangloss | 2026-03-10 22:39:42+00:00
What's the point of this?

A single CPU core on a 9500T or a Ryzen V1500B is fast enough to real-time re-encode 60mbps 4K H264 to 1080p 5mbps h264, aka, for a core use case - transcoding for web for Jellyfin over cellular, for example - you haven't needed hardware video engines on PCs for 9 YEARS.

I have no idea why people are so hung up on hardware video encoding. It's completely wrong. The quality is worse. The efficiency is a red herring - you will still use every CPU core for IO threads in ffmpeg, if you don't configure that away, which you do not. And it requires really annoying setup and premium features on stuff like Plex. It just makes no sense!

If latency is important to you, well then hardware engines make sense. But you are throwing away the latency sending it over the network. The only use case (basically) is video game streaming, and in that case, you'll have a local GPU.

I have never read one of these ffmpeg network hardware encode innovations to have an actual benchmark comparison to single thread software transcoding tasks.

I know you mean well but really. It makes NO sense.
by ThroneCreator | 2026-03-10 22:39:52+00:00
I like the idea of recreating older MMORPG clients in modern browser tech. Running a full game client through WebGL + JS is surprisingly viable now compared to a decade ago.

Did you run into performance issues with rendering or networking once multiple entities are active on screen? I'm curious how far a browser-based client can realistically scale for MMO-style environments.
by gherkinnn | 2026-03-10 22:39:52+00:00
In practice, Iran posed a local threat. It wasn't Iran that exported Wahabism around the globe. Iran didn't fund the Mujahedeen, nor was it the source of IS. It wasn't Persians flying the jets of 911 nor were any Iranians or their allies tied to any terrorist attacks in Europe in my lifetime.

I find the Iranian regime despicable, as frankly any decent human should, and I am glad they don't have nukes.

But I do not see them as the international turbo villains they've been painted as.
by apsdsm | 2026-03-10 22:39:57+00:00
Do you really, honestly, have to be doing this stuff even when you sleep? To the point it hits you “wait is this even any good? Gee I don’t want to push out slop.”

If you don’t trust the agent to do it right in the first place why do you trust them to implement your tests properly? Nothing but turtles here.
by nine_k | 2026-03-10 22:40:04+00:00
To quote the article: «The defeated of the world theorize what they endure. In truth, the only critical thinking possible today is thinking from the standpoint of the defeated. This standpoint is not one of passivity, nor of victimhood. On the contrary, it asks: How can one think from within brokenness, from within the ruins, and still produce meaning, and even possibility?»

And further: “I do not want to exalt the past at the expense of my present and of my future.”
by SchemaLoad | 2026-03-10 22:40:53+00:00
So many times I get AI generated PRs from juniors where I don't feel comfortable with the code, I wouldn't do it like this myself, but I can't strictly find faults that I can reject the PR with. Usually it's just a massive amount of code being generated which is extremely difficult to review, much harder than it was for the submitter to generate and send it for review.

Then often it blows up in production. Makes me almost want to blanket reject PRs for being too difficult to understand. Hand written code almost has an aversion to complexity, you'd search around for existing examples, libraries, reusable components, or just a simpler idea before building something crazy complex. While with AI you can spit out your first idea quickly no matter how complex or flawed the original concept was.
Ask HN: How to "make it" as a newlygrad/junior?
by kartoffelsaft | 2026-03-10 22:41:42+00:00
Hello HN!

Over the past couple months I've made dozens of job applications and it's not turned into much, and from talking to some of my coevals I'm not alone. It really feels like me and my friends have been dropped onto an industry that has just shut the doors to anyone in our 0-2 yr. experience range. Needless to say, I'm pretty worried that it's going to be a year out from my graduation without being employed doing the thing I spent the past >4 years of my life studying.

So I'm stuck, wondering what do I do from here.

A bit about me if context is useful (although generally-applicable responses are preferred because I know I'm not alone):

- Graduated December last year
- Had a 3 month full-time internship for my capstone
- Feedback on my work was super positive
- Wasn't in the plan to get full employment right after (didn't fit in budget, and I have reasons to believe that that I won't get into)
- I'm mildly worried that not turning into full employment is a bad look
- Have many years of hobbyist experience preceding college/university
- The projects I did don't feel very portfolio-able, i.e. hard to explicitly show what I learned or how it's useful
- I can go either way on AI usage for code, but I know I have a strong distaste for "vibe" coding
- I'm "detail-oriented" in resume-speak and vibe coding exists in contempt for detail
- I've tried making use of my network, but the most common response has been "we really want to hire you but we'd need more funding to do so"

Currently the main thing I've been doing right now is a blog where I talk about mostly tech-related things and want to make a section where I talk about past projects, but don't know if that's the best thing to be doing with my time. I'd link the website here but I don't know the HN policy on links in posts; it's in my bio if you're curious.
by jmalicki | 2026-03-10 22:42:01+00:00
Japan debt/GDP is more than twice the US's.

https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/11792/what-lev...

Not to say that it's okay, and Japan's economy certainly has issues with stagnation due to the debt load, but it's also not a "we have imminent hyperinflation" kind of thing either.

The concern with the past five months isn't so much the level of debt, it's the rate of change - we're increasing it faster than in the past... and this isn't a COVID-level crisis or a 2008-style deep recession either where Keynesian logic might make more sense.
by DonHopkins | 2026-03-10 22:42:30+00:00
HyperLook was inspired by HyperCard and implemented for the NeWS window system in PostScript, and supported networking. I used it to implement SimCity for Unix.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS

SimCity, Cellular Automata, and Happy Tool for HyperLook (nee HyperNeWS (nee GoodNeWS))

HyperLook was like HyperCard for NeWS, with PostScript graphics and scripting plus networking. Here are three unique and wacky examples that plug together to show what HyperNeWS was all about, and where we could go in the future!

https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-go...

Alan Kay on “Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers?” and a discussion of Smalltalk, HyperCard, NeWS, and HyperLook:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/alan-kay-on-should-web-browser...
by yogthos | 2026-03-10 22:43:09+00:00
The whole point of the framework is to see what LLM oriented framework would look like. My argument is that the way code is normally structured is not conducive towards LLMs because context grows in unbounded way, and they end up getting lost.

The whole point of the 'slop' report is to have the LLM try implementing the features using both the traditional approach and the framework and then reflect on how it fared with each approach.
by rhubarbtree | 2026-03-10 22:43:10+00:00
Margins on software will no longer be what they were, that’s the point. Commoditisation means software values will head to zero. Margins will depend on factors unconnected to the software itself. For example, brand, distribution, network effects, lock on, proprietary data.

It doesn’t matter whether coding was “the bottleneck”. It’s irrelevant. Fact is it used to be expensive to create software and now you’ll be to create it for super cheap. Yes, it won’t be as good. But the price will be so low it won’t matter. This is what commoditisation means. Forget the economics of software as you know it, that has ended.
by ggm | 2026-03-10 22:43:50+00:00
In many ways it's purely symbolic because they are appointed not elected, and are not term limited. So, it's still a skewed, undemocratic chamber.

Inside the realms of "it's just complicated d&d" thinking of course an unelected, long lived upper chamber is like a pressure release valve combined with a rusty gate, and so inherently useful if you want to push back on lower chamber acts and make a lot of noise doing it.

That effect is less visibly useful when it's peers objecting to Voluntary Assisted Dying legislation on the grounds "my nanny doesn't like it"

(I know peers, both life and inherited. I believe many from both camps are serious people of good intent and significant skills. That doesn't negate much of what I said above)
by rakan1 | 2026-03-10 22:44:00+00:00
I've been building in the agent payments space and I'm curious what this community thinks.

Right now there are two camps:

Crypto/stablecoin camp (x402, Skyfire, etc.) where agents pay with USDC via new protocols. Problem is virtually zero merchants accept it today. You're betting on adoption that hasn't happened.
Card rails camp where agents get virtual Visa/Mastercard numbers and pay at existing merchants. Problem is traditional card infrastructure wasn't designed for programmatic autonomous spending.

The crypto side has gotten most of the attention but I keep coming back to a simple fact: VISA has like half a decade of infrastructure... Trust, reconciliation, etc...

Are card rails a temporary bridge until crypto merchant adoption catches up? Or is the existing payments network the obvious path because merchants will never voluntarily re-platform?
by adrian_b | 2026-03-10 22:44:26+00:00
That is not the correct way to test for integer overflow.

The correct sequence of instructions is given in the RISC-V documentation and it needs more instructions.

"Integer overflow" means "overflow in operations with signed integers". It does not mean "overflow in operations with non-negative integers". The latter is normally referred as "carry".

The 2 instructions given above detect carry, not overflow.

Carry is needed for multi-word operations, and these are also painful on RISC-V, but overflow detection is required much more frequently, i.e. it is needed at any arithmetic operation, unless it can be proven by static program analysis that overflow is impossible at that operation.
by lizknope | 2026-03-10 22:44:29+00:00
I think the bigger question is does RISC-V need to be fast? Who wants to make it fast?

I'm a chip designer and I see people using RISC-V as small processor cores for things like PCIE link training or various bookkeeping tasks. These don't need to be fast, they need to be small and low power which means they will be relatively slow.

Most people on tech review sites only care about desktop / laptop / server performance. They may know about some of the ARM Cortex A series CPUs that have MMUs and can run desktop or smartphone Linux versions.

They generally don't care about the ARM Cortex M or R versions for embedded and real time use. Those are the areas where you don't need high performance and where RISC-V is already replacing ARM.
by ProllyInfamous | 2026-03-10 22:46:01+00:00
I live in one of the few US regions where our electric provider also provides fiber internet to every single customer (EPB, Chattanooga).

Even ramshackel cabins in the middle of nowhere can get gigabit internet (25+ syncronous, actually). ISP giants have effectively lobbied to prevent this from expanding outside of the electric-provider's supply area, despite ready availability and demand.

It's a racket.
by aray07 | 2026-03-10 22:46:06+00:00
yup, agree - i spend most of my time reviewing the spec. The highest leverage time is now deciding what to work on and then working on the spec. I ended up building the verify skill (https://github.com/opslane/verify) because I wanted to ensure claude follows the spec. I have found that even after you have the spec - it can sometimes not follow it and it takes a lot of human review to catch those issues.
Ask HN: What's your favorite "what would SWEs do in 1-3 year from now?"
by itissid | 2026-03-10 22:46:11+00:00
LLM driven stacks by Anthropic and OpenAI are aiming for a monoploy on labor replacement by driving Claude Code, Codex development at rates never seen before, there would be likely a reordering of what SWEs do in the near future(1-3 years).

What's your futuristic version of how this would turn out? Try justifying your answer e.g. by citing previous re-organization of labor during such upheavals, applying economic/market theory or precedent.

My favorite one(right now) is: As traditional SWEs jobs lose pricing power, compensations for SWEs in traditionally non-tech companies(think coca-cola or nike) will become more stark, like Sales commissions based on being able to communicate effectively with AI to steer it or solve bugs created by AI will be bid in a highly competitive market. The best solution will be tested and the bounty winner will go home happy. STEM based immigration to US/UK will fall off a cliff. The most successful of IT companies will go through a series of M&A and competition will intensify in a second race to the bottom on cost and margins will compress.

In larger tech companies, AI will need a lot more steering and here things would be less stark, engineers will make new features requiring to steer AI more often.

Market wise, Private Equity(Direct lending/BDCs) will see a renewed focus on acquiring companies to use AI to make things ever more efficient —the large number of growing private companies will be lapped up by them — and investment in this sector will increase evermore.

Please add your own fav. scenario :)
by 47282847 | 2026-03-10 22:46:22+00:00
> Even your most hippie communist commune requires giving in order to receive.

I was born into a hippie commune and the basic premise was that everybody gives voluntarily by mere existence and free desire to do so, and that whatever ends up being given can be taken/distributed. There was no “requirement to give” since what you provide often cannot even be identified or accounted for. Maybe you’re a good listener, or good in helping with the kids. And so on.

Apart from commune experiences: I do believe every human has a deep-seated desire and need to contribute positively to their social environment. You don’t need to be forced or nudged to do it; you get sick/depressed if you’re not allowed to bring your talent to the table and grow.

And more back to your point: I disagree with the notion that every giving and taking is (or needs to be) a distinct and direct transaction. Even in capitalism. The money/time a person “saves” on “freeloading” will be “spent”/given back elsewhere.
by adrian_b | 2026-03-10 22:46:29+00:00
There was no hyperbole in what I have said.

The sequence of instructions given above is incorrect, it does not detect integer overflow (i.e. signed integer overflow). It detects carry, which is something else.

The correct sequence, which can be found in the official RISC-V documentation, requires more instructions.

Not checking for overflow in C programs is a serious mistake. All decent C compilers have compilation options for enabling checking for overflow. Such options should always be used, with the exception of the functions that have been analyzed carefully by the programmer and the conclusion has been that integer overflow cannot happen.

For example with operations involving counters or indices, overflow cannot normally happen, so in such places overflow checking may be disabled.
by nomel | 2026-03-10 22:46:35+00:00
> But they are not doing enough to protect children from predators

My understanding is that the recent improvements are face scans, and limited communication to people within a few 4 year windows.

They've also increased moderation of chat significantly.

What low hanging fruit do you see? What's the "ideal" system? Seems like a hard problem, if any sort of cooperative communication/play is involved.
by jandrewrogers | 2026-03-10 22:46:42+00:00
The mapping of the physical world onto a computer representation introduces idiosyncratic measurement issues for every data point. The idiosyncratic bias, errors, and non-repeatability changes dynamically at every point in space and time, so it can be modeled neither globally nor statically. Some idiosyncratic bias exhibits coupling across space and time.

Reconstructing ground truth from these measurements, which is what you really want to train on, is a difficult open inference problem. The idiosyncratic effects induce large changes in the relationships learnable from the data model. Many measurements map to things that aren't real. How badly that non-reality can break your inference is context dependent. Because the samples are sparse and irregular, you have to constantly model the noise floor to make sure there is actually some signal in the synthesized "ground truth".

In simulated physics, there are no idiosyncratic measurement issues. Every data point is deterministic, repeatable, and well-behaved. There is also much less algorithmic information, so learning is simpler. It is a trivial problem by comparison. Using simulations to train physical world models is skipping over all the hard parts.

I've worked in HPC, including physics models. Taking a standard physics simulation and introducing representative idiosyncratic measurement seems difficult. I don't think we've ever built a physics simulation with remotely the quantity and complexity of fine structure this would require.
by momojo | 2026-03-10 22:47:24+00:00
I'm surprised the point/comment ratio is this skewed. There's so much meat in the post to chew on. I like your writing. This was one of those blogs where I can tell you spent a massive amount of time on the technical, but simplified it to layman's terms. I hope you keep putting out stuff :).

I have a couple questions:

1. I think this quote should be raising *many more* eyebrows.

> The astounding thing about Goliath wasn’t that is was a huge leap in performance, it was that the damn thing functioned at all. To this day, I still don’t understand why this didn’t raise more eyebrows.

You put a cat's brain into a dog's head and its still breathing! It didn't flatline immediately! Is yesterday's news? This seems like the biggest take away. Why isn't every <MODEL_PROVIDER> attempting LLM-surgery at this moment? Have you noticed any increasede discourse in this area?

2. You mentioned you spent the beginning of your career looking at brains in biotech. How did you end up in a basement of GPU's, working not in biotech, but still kind of looking at brains?

Again, great post!
by SilverElfin | 2026-03-10 22:47:28+00:00
The article has more details than just the headline. For example:

> Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), said that interest payments on the debt are expected to exceed $1 trillion this year, and will surpass $2 trillion by 2036.

That’s very concerning. There’s no plan to run balanced budgets and stop deficits. And no plan to reduce debt. And no plan on economic competitiveness against China. American politics is mostly dominated by irrelevant things that won’t fix the fundamental problems that will come to affect us in the future.
by Animats | 2026-03-10 22:47:51+00:00
It doesn’t matter how much I label myself. If I’m a demisexual goblincore Gen Z Swiftie, I guarantee there are still others like me.

With enough ad and cookie blocking, it gets weird. Youtube Shorts decided for a while that I really want to watch videos of semi-automatic pipe welding tools being used by Asian women. At least twenty of those. Now that's niche.

Before that, there was a batch of rock crusher videos from India.

This week, the welding tools and rock crushers are gone,
but there are many ads for cruise lines. Also, ads for cat food. I don't have a cat.

With tracking blocked, but an IP address that changes infrequently, that's apparently what the ad system does - tries batches of some random subject and see if there's any response. It can't lock onto anything effective.