MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hunter2_ | 2026-03-09 23:07:14+00:00
If the law is such that the owner is guilty regardless of who was driving, but the owner can opt to reassign the fine to the driver if they have the willingness and the evidence to do so, then proving innocence isn't really what's happening if the driver opts to do it.

That said, if merely being the owner of a tool is sufficient to be guilty of whatever infraction someone else performs with said tool, that has 2 problems beyond the whole "proving your innocence" debate:

1. Why stop climbing up the chain at the current owner when you could keep climbing and say it's all the fault of the manufacturer? I jest, but this illustrates why, despite my first paragraph, it's indeed only sensible that the driver be at fault, so the government must prove who was driving.

2. Why treat cars differently from, say, weapons?
by ylohnitram | 2026-03-09 23:07:42+00:00
Hey HN,

I am building Agentis, an AI-native programming language written in vanilla Rust. Instead of treating prompts as external library calls, "everything is a prompt" is a core language primitive.

There is no standard library. No string.split(). If an agent needs to process data, it asks the LLM.

I also completely fused the language with a VCS. Code isn't stored in text files; it's a binary, SHA-256-hashed DAG.

A few core concepts I implemented:

1. Cognitive Budget: Every operation costs fuel. This prevents runaway agent loops and forces efficient prompt design.

2. Evolutionary Branching: I use explore blocks to fork execution. If a solution passes the validate block, the branch survives. If it fails, it's silently discarded.

3. Content-Addressed Code: Since the AST is hashed, there are no merge conflicts. You import by hash.

I just completed Phase 4 of my implementation and am currently gearing up for Phase 5. The CLI supports local models (Ollama), Claude, Anthropic API, etc.

It’s highly experimental, and I'm at the stage where I'd love to discuss these core concepts with the community and find people interested in collaborating.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this architecture, the evolutionary branching, or the VCS model.
by Apocryphon | 2026-03-09 23:08:07+00:00
Foundation as a series is already somewhat uneven and less than “pure.” Asimov pulled a Lucas and cluttered it with sequels and prequels that muddled it with connections to his robot novels. Then there’s the additional books by other writers. And if you want to get real picky, Second Foundation gets real pseudoscientific with the pseudo-psionics compared to the first two books.
by mhink | 2026-03-09 23:08:09+00:00
One nitpick I noticed:

> String Slicing
> You can extract a substring using bracket syntax with a range: s[start:end]. Both start and end are byte offsets. The slice includes start and excludes end.

Given that all strings are UTF-8, I note that there's not a great way to iterate over strings by _code point_. Using byte offsets is certainly more performant, but I could see this being a common request if you're expecting a lot of string manipulation to happen in these programs.

Other than that, this looks pretty cool. Unlike other commenters, I kinda like the lack of operator precedence. I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to be not a huge problem, since LLMs generating code with this language would be pattern-matching on existing code, which will always have explicit parentheses.
by foresto | 2026-03-09 23:08:26+00:00
> Also, the LGPL text doesn't say "work based on the library".

It does, about a dozen times.

Are you perhaps referring to LGPL3? I think the relevant license under discussion here is LGPL2.1.

https://github.com/chardet/chardet/blob/6.0.0/LICENSE

I'm not well versed in copyright case law, so I won't argue with the rest of what you wrote. Thanks for elaborating on your thoughts.
by steve_adams_86 | 2026-03-09 23:08:30+00:00
Right, this is probably the most compelling case for Mog. TypeScript is a beast. Everything you've mentioned here has been an obstacle for me at some point(s) or another.

I didn't mean to suggest there's no need for Mog either. I love to see developments like this. Deno is a practical solution for me today, but I see why it isn't a perfect forever-solution too.
by panny | 2026-03-09 23:08:33+00:00
Both sides are wrong on this actually. Computer generated code has no copyright protection.

>The U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) and federal courts have consistently ruled that AI-generated works—where the expressive elements are determined by the machine, even in response to a human prompt—lack the necessary human creative input and therefore cannot be copyrighted.

All this code is public domain. Your employees can publish "your" AI generated code freely and it won't matter how many tokens you spent generating it. It is not covered by copyright.
by lordfrito | 2026-03-09 23:08:36+00:00
Interesting, the Wikipedia article has this to say

Mere customer satisfaction, or lack thereof, is not enough to justify a BFOQ defense, as noted in the cases Diaz v. Pan Am. World Airways, Inc. and Wilson v. Southwest Airlines Co. Therefore, customer preference for females does not make femininity a BFOQ for the occupation of flight attendant. However, there may be cases in which customer preference is a BFOQ – for example, femininity is reasonably necessary for Playboy Bunnies. Several breastaurants like Hooters have also used such requirements of femininity and female sex appeal under a BFOQ defense. Customer preference can "'be taken into account only when it is based on the company's inability to perform the primary function or service it offers,' that is, where sex or sex appeal is itself the dominant service provided."

So basically the question to ask it "Is it a bona fide occupational qualification that the driver be female?" Seems like a high standard to reach. Arguments based on "feels" as in "I don't feel safe around this kind of person/employee" seem like the very kind of discrimination that the law has tried hard to eliminate. It's pre-judging someone based on sex, and deciding that they aren't safe even though they haven't done anything. I understand that women are often harassed, but the law already has a process for dealing with harassment.

I predict this kind of thing (apps that allow customers to discriminate on the basis of protected class) will spread and eventually be challenged in court. Curious how this will all play out and become settled law.
by crazygringo | 2026-03-09 23:08:55+00:00
> I just think we could have transitioned away at the turn of the previous century... and saved ourselves a lot of pain.

I mean, that's a hugely provocative statement that needs to be backed up with some level of analysis.

You need to look at all of the industries and products that would have become impossible, and what the ramifications of that are.

Even today, you're basically proposing that entire industries, such as long-distance air travel, effectively disappear. And that sea shipping effectively regresses to sailing ships? I can't even imagine how one could begin to perform an even remotely plausible analysis, given how much each industry relies on other industries, and how difficult it would be to estimate how other technological advances would have developed instead.
by rs545837 | 2026-03-09 23:08:56+00:00
Ah right, array ordering not key ordering. That's a different beast. You're making a deliberate semantic choice because you know your consumers are order-invariant. We can't really do that at our level since function ordering in code is usually meaningful to the language. Your use case needs domain knowledge about the consumer, which is exactly why an option makes sense there.

If you do end up comparing semantic toolings I'd love to hear what you find. The space is weirdly fragmented between syntax-aware, normalized-AST, and domain-specific (dyff/jd). Everyone calls it "semantic" but they're solving pretty different problems.
by anonym29 | 2026-03-09 23:09:08+00:00
I'm referring to very real obligations that we are all held to under the justification of "the social contract" such as taxation and being drafted into military service, not social niceties.

We are held to these obligations as seriously and as legally as we are held to real contracts, but unlike the bedrock that constitutes the basis for the legitimacy of all real contracts, these obligations are imposed upon us with no opportunity for consideration, consent, or rejection.
by readthenotes1 | 2026-03-09 23:10:02+00:00
I do not remember any of those books stopping for a several page lecture unrelated to any plot point.

Most of what I remember is the author using the action of the story to carry the point across.

The same is true of Star Trek ToS, and most of what I remember from deep space nine.

It is not that I am opposed to the ideas of flexing sexuality and politics in science fiction- quite the opposite. Take for instance, the culture series by Iain Banks. Fantastic work where If there is some lecturing done, it seems to fit smoothly into the flow of the work.
by alterom | 2026-03-09 23:10:06+00:00
>Legal liability is completely unchanged.

It's changed completely, from your own example.

If you comission art from an artist who paints a modified copy of Warhol's work, the artist is liable (even if you keep that work private, for personal use).

If you commission it from OpenAI (by sending a query to their ChatGPT API), by your argument, you are the person liable — and OpenAI is off the hook even if that work is distributed further.

I'm not going to argue about the merits of creativity here, or that someone putting a prompt into ChatGPT considers themselves an artist.

That's irrelevant. The work is created on OpenAI servers, by the LLMs hosted there, and is then distributed to whoever wrote the prompt.

Models run locally are distributed by whoever trained them.

If you train a model on whatever data you legally have access to, and produce something for yourself, it's one thing.

Distribution is where things start to get different.
by rob74 | 2026-03-09 23:11:18+00:00
Those "perfectly safe" reactors were hopelessly outdated (the ones last shut down in 2023 were built from 1982 to 1988/89) and nearing the end of their useful life. What no one mentions about nuclear power in Germany: since they weren't allowed to start a nuclear weapons program of their own, one of the reasons for having a civilian nuclear program was already missing, so the German nuclear plants were mostly showcases of Siemens nuclear technology. Once Siemens decided to completely withdraw from this sector in 2011, there was no pro-nuclear lobby in Germany anymore, so the fate of the remaining nuclear reactors was sealed, although some more political theater followed (and still continues).

Of course, this was just the final chapter of a story that began way back in 1986, when Chernobyl led to no further reactors being built in Germany and other countries shelving their plans for nuclear power. If you think the situation in Germany is curious, then look at Austria, who already in 1978 decided to "temporarily" mothball a 100% completed nuclear power plant, a decision which turned permanent in 1986 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Austria). Or Italy, which shut down all four of its nuclear power plants (from the 60s and 70s) by 1990 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Italy).
by thomashabets2 | 2026-03-09 23:11:21+00:00
Yeah. But it still means wandering into de facto unsupported territory in a way that pledge/unveil/landlock does not.

Your example may be true, but I'm guessing it's not a guarantee. Not to mention if one wants to be portable to musl or cosmopolitan libc. The others inherently are more likely to work in a way that any libc would be "unsurprised" by.
by ValentineC | 2026-03-09 23:14:04+00:00
My biggest fear with macOS right now is that because there's no LTS version, I'll eventually be forced to upgrade in 2-3 years if I want to use some new apps compiled by some hipster developers who use Xcode 28/29 and don't care about old versions.

Homebrew doesn't support any macOS version that isn't supported by Apple either.
by catlikesshrimp | 2026-03-09 23:14:10+00:00
Suggestion 1: Accounts can only upvote once a day. Accountscan only downvote twice a day. Spam account farming uses upvotes to boost spam accouts in the same farm, hence restricting upvotes. About downvotes, if they aren't somewhat restricted, they will be used to appreciating spam accounts by devaluing legitimate users.

Suggestion 2: Missing AI hype is better than drowning everything else in AI hype, IMHO. Temporarily block AI themes from "Show HN"
by fc417fc802 | 2026-03-09 23:15:07+00:00
They come into relevance about the time the phrase "despite what the courts may say" was uttered. The intent behind the phrase "you can pry it from my cold dead hands" is roughly the same.

Of course I think that armed revolution over ToS is utterly laughable. But I'm merely answering your question.

For an example of a situation the phase actually applies to, consider "despite what the courts may say we are removing the flock cameras".
by minimaltom | 2026-03-09 23:15:39+00:00
Is your (1) description of clean room implementation, and (2) description of what was done, actually correct?

(1): my understanding was that a party _with access to copyrighted material_ made the functional spec, which was communicated to a party without access [1]. Under my understanding, theres no requirement for the authors of the functional spec to be 'clean'.

(2) Afaict, they limited the AI to access of just the functional spec and audited that it did not see the original source.

Edit: Not sure if sharing the 'test suite' matters, probably something for the courts in the unlikely event this ever gets there.

[1] Following the definition of clean room re implementation as it relates to US precedent, ie that described in the wikipedia page.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-03-09 23:15:56+00:00
We will need to re-regulate and adjust but talking about it ahead of time and moving forward intelligently is laughable? talking about how the last huge revolution played out initially is laughable? Come on. And yes, when you are talking about the start of something you normally only have a handful of examples. That is how things start, with a few instances.

You didn't know basic level history, called me liar, then a cherry picker for using the gold standard example.

You might want to check yourself before you tell people to stop, call them liars, cherry pickers, or make claims. No need to mis-represent me. My point is that 70 years of upheaval prior to the modern version of the world get ignored in the discussion. My point is that original people impacted, the proverbial blacksmith or buggy whip maker that 'adapted' had worse, shorter lives because of adapting.
by theultdev | 2026-03-09 23:16:26+00:00
It made PHP 5-7 usable in production, otherwise it would have died before we got to modern PHP.

Of course it wasn't merged in, it was a separate compiler, it certainly inspired future optimizations though.

But the point is, it was a very useful stop-gap solution for the community.

Also would like to highlight that they have contributed a lot to PHP upstream in addition to that.
by archagon | 2026-03-09 23:16:34+00:00
If you truly believe "those days" are over, you're in for a depressing few decades as the world moves on without you. Most reasonable people — even white people like myself — are disgusted by the sort of rhetoric that Musk retweets and endorses on a daily basis[1]. It is, without any exaggeration, literal Stormfront shit as I remember from a decade ago. We will fight this putrid garbage and we will win.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/12/elon-musk...
by kennethallen | 2026-03-09 23:16:59+00:00
> This isn’t parser-style backtracking

How is this different from backtracking? You're doing a depth-first search over possible interpretations. The grammar is just expressed in the type system instead of usual spec formats.

Critiques in other comments are accurate. This is a tooling nightmare, but also probably a nightmare to read. Consider an expression like

2026 March 10 to 13

What's the binding precedence? Does this mean March 10 through March 13, or midnight to 1 PM on March 10th? I think this breaks down outside of trivial examples that are better achieved in other ways.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-03-09 23:17:08+00:00
> (Also, holy cow. What a durable machine.)

This. There was also a story and a video, about 10 years ago (?), of a Commodore 64 still used at a car shop in Poland to compute stuff related to tires/wheels settings (degrees/angles, something like that). The C64 had basically been used every day the shop was opened for 30 years. It could still be in use. Or maybe it got retired because the owner of the shop retired (and hence, in a way, outlived the mechanic).
by salawat | 2026-03-09 23:17:54+00:00
YES. Thank you! Someone else "See"s! Heavens above, I'm not alone! The extraction machine is centralizing far too effectively! Society runs when stochasticly speaking, there is a large enough pool of parallel decision makers that aren't having a derp day that major systems aren't all configured stupidly at the same time! It's like ensemble based modeling! We know it works! The redundancy is worth it.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2026-03-09 23:18:09+00:00
I never thought I would see the day, but my stodgy, lumbering company just banned new Oracle databases. Everyone hates Oracle, and only does business out of necessity. I think more and more companies are trying to extricate themselves from Oracle legal, so Oracle needs a new way to leech onto corporations for the coming decades. AI is the best play in sight.
by lnrd | 2026-03-09 23:18:46+00:00
It's amusing to always have this US-centric view touted as some ultimate truth while lacking any nuance.
I live in Germany and here there is absolutely an expectation of privacy in public spaces. The individual rights (privacy) are balanced with the collective rights (freedom of press) and both are allowed to exist, because based on the context of the situation one right can prevail on the other. To give you some simple examples: if I go to a public event, a political manifestation, then no: no expectation of privacy. But if I am walking around with my family in a park, yes there's absolute expectation of privacy even if I'm in a public space. Context matters and it's impossible to have just one broad and vague rule covering anything. Also keep in mind that a public figure automatically has lower expectations of privacy than a private citizen. While I can sue a paper for publishing a picture of me slacking at work, a public figure most likely cannot or would lose in court because the right of the people to get informed of his behavior is higher than his right for privacy. Who gets to decide? A healthy judiciary system, not "those in power".

Another interesting nuance of the law in Germany is: it's almost always illegal to take pictures or video of people that show their suffering or struggle. You cannot take a video of a man having a mental breakdown for example. Is this universal? No, of course a journalist will take a picture of a suffering man in the cold to send a message about inequality. If he ever will be sued it will be the judge to decide if in this specific instance the right of the individual or the right of the collective right should prevail.
by refulgentis | 2026-03-09 23:19:17+00:00
Really cool writeup, really appreciated it -

Only thing that my hangry self took issue with -

"When I first read this as a teenager, I came away with a huge sense of wonder... When I re-read it many years later as an adult, I didn’t quite get that same sense of wonder, but maybe that’s because I’m more jaded now.

Wonder seems to have fallen out of favor with sci-fi writers."

Has it? Approaching it de novo, it sounds much more likely that you are immune to wonder - i.e. apply Occam's Razor to: A) I don't get wonder from this book that used to give me wonder B) I don't get wonder from recent SciFi books.

Then there's the second thing, ignoring Occam's Razor: "Recent SciFi books don't have wonder" doesn't follow from A and/or B, it's another premise that could justify B.

FWIW I feel the same way re: wonder getting older. My excuse is we've just seen too much training data, i.e. some things don't have an explanation and that's fine and there's nowhere to go with it.
by _carbyau_ | 2026-03-09 23:19:20+00:00
Sure. Do it as an increasing-upon-recurrence, two part fee though.

1st offence = base fee

2nd offence = base fee + minimal % of wealth fee

3rd offence = base fee + higher % of wealth fee

offences thereafter = goto 3rd offence until some breaking point condition like gaol/jail.

Otherwise the rich will happily pay to do whatever the hell they want.
by dimitrios1 | 2026-03-09 23:19:24+00:00
I would wager that the vast majority of people commenting here about the pitfalls of AI, especially as it relates to governance and laws, are heavy users of AI, recognize the import and value it brings, and find ways to utilize it more themselves, so not sure using an ad-hominem dismissal of very valid objections are going to be effective.

(side bar: the phrase "anti-<whatever> luddites" is way, way overused, especially here. Let's get more creative, people!)
by teleforce | 2026-03-09 23:19:27+00:00
Perhaps any new language targetting GPU acceleration would consider TILE based concept and primitive recently supported by major GPU vendors including Nvidia [1],[2],[3],[4].

For more generic GPU targets there's TRITON [5],[6].

[1] NVIDIA CUDA 13.1 Powers Next-Gen GPU Programming with NVIDIA CUDA Tile and Performance Gains:

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-cuda-13-1-powers-ne...

[2] Nvidia Tilus: A Tile-Level GPU Kernel Programming Language:

https://github.com/NVIDIA/tilus

[3] Simplify GPU Programming with NVIDIA CUDA Tile in Python:

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/simplify-gpu-programming-w...

[4] Tile Language:

https://github.com/tile-ai/tilelang

[5] Triton: An Intermediate Language and Compiler for
Tiled Neural Network Computations:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3315508.3329973

[6] Triton:

https://github.com/triton-lang/triton
by tialaramex | 2026-03-09 23:19:42+00:00
I mean, the EIA says "U.S. generation fueled by coal increased by 13% in 2025 to 731 BkWh"

The article you linked is mostly about a model of 2026 and 2027 and sure, in the model coal goes away but that's not a fact about coal it's just a model.
by tomasz-tomczyk | 2026-03-09 23:20:20+00:00
Late to the thread but I've been excited to be building crit to help reviewing plans & output from LLM agents - it has boosted my productivity a lot personally and I had a lot of nice feedback from other experienced engineers finding value in it - turns out while terminal is a nice way to chat with agents, GitHub-esque PR review wins for long markdown and diff view :)

It's MIT open source, offline first, single binary

https://github.com/tomasz-tomczyk/crit/
by zelphirkalt | 2026-03-09 23:20:21+00:00
I only remember from my last Django project, that I started out thinking: "OK, I will do things properly, no many-to-many relationships..." then at some point saw the need for them, or manually creating the intermediate relation and at that point using the Django way was what I was supposed to do. But then I got errors for some things I wanted about not being supported by SQLite.

The project is here: https://codeberg.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/web-app-vocabulary-tra... But I left it unfinished and a quick grep does not yield comments or something that explains why at some place I do something to circumvent the SQLite problems. I remember though, that I basically swore to myself, that I would not ever use SQLite in production with Django ORM. And if I am not using it in production, then testing also better should not be using it, because one should test with the same RDBMS as runs in production, or risk unexpected issues suddenly only happening in production. So SQLite is out for anything serious in Django projects for me.