MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sejje | 2026-03-09 22:20:49+00:00
I have noticed a severe uptick in bad semi-truck drivers on the interstate since COVID, I'll agree at least with that part.

The local cops here have always just run plates for stolen vehicles. Getting a ticket is almost unheard of. I don't know what their deal is, but you can speed right past them in the other lane, or if they're just parked on the corner.

I'm guessing you still can't pass them on a two-lane road without poking their ego.
by tavavex | 2026-03-09 22:21:00+00:00
I am in software. It's just that the bargaining power of juniors and new grads has fallen through the floor, but companies are still not willing to hire any of us. I would even work the full 7 work day/week schedule (despite all its negative effects) for CA$100k - which was once considered to be just an okay rate for a mid-level dev. I bet that many people I know would also take that offer.
by acheron | 2026-03-09 22:21:02+00:00
Re: 2001

> Clarke wrote the movie screenplay with Kubrick

I don’t think this is true? I thought the two of them sat together and worked out the plot, and then Kubrick went off and wrote the screenplay and Clarke went off and wrote the novel. So neither is really “based on” the other.

Anyway though, Rama is great, yes. I’m skeptical of the idea of a movie adaptation but Denis Villeneuve is probably the right one to try to pull it off.
by maxerickson | 2026-03-09 22:21:22+00:00
I'm furious that 10% of my federal income taxes end up going to California's bullshit, I can't imagine what it would be like having to live there.

Your taxes getting evenly distributed is one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that removing California from the US would either increase your taxes or require reductions in federal spending.
by arjie | 2026-03-09 22:21:23+00:00
The sequels are pulpy and quite sleazy to be honest. I read them some decades ago but there are ex-beauty-queens in a tiny human colony who must have sex with everyone else to keep the population going or some such stuff. You moved from top-grade cosmic level thought to whether X or Y is sleeping with Z. It's not that the subject is not meaningful. It's just like if you were reading about WW2 in some book and the first part talks about Hitler's invasion of Poland in a strategic sense and then everything else is about the affairs among the officers' wives or something.
by zimpenfish | 2026-03-09 22:21:23+00:00
> This is fun and neat, and looks fantastic, but the generated maps are basically nonsensical, aren't they?

WFC lets you address that though with extra constraints. e.g. my bot today generated a church inside a river loop[0] - completely useless! But I could add a rule that says "if you place the church-above-river tile, the tile above that cannot be anything horizontally blocking" (obviously after tagging any relevant tiles as "horizontally blocking" in the tileset) and that would prevent "church in a river loop" situations.

(I've already been working on some extra rules because, e.g., I don't like the one-edge-castle-wall tiles being placed next to each other - you get tiny pasty shaped castles and I hate them.)

[0] https://social.browser.org/fileserver/01E5NFWNPGZWNJ0DS1WE88... - bottom 3 rows, just past halfway across
by conductr | 2026-03-09 22:21:30+00:00
It is crazy but it’s also quite true. People eschew true adult responsibility for much longer these days. It’s a macro trend.

I know there’s a lot of “whys” but not getting married, not having kids, living with parents, etc all compound to remaining a child in some sense and this is continuing well into the 20s and even 30s for a large portion of the demographic.

When it comes to 19 y/o women the fact most internet people would find it gross that 1) highly fertile and 2) desired by old men - is a reality. We tell old men these women are too young yet also won’t admit it’s because they are in some sense still children.
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-03-09 22:21:37+00:00
We have never had an online open public space where each of us has our voice, can shape our experience, can use our own compsable moderation, can integrate with whatever apps we choose.

How, in spite of having no data on what it would be like, people are so confident that leaving shared open connected mediums behind is the only way to go is such a mystery to me.

The radio station I'm on just played a modem tone, Mountain Chill Radio. But I was already gearing up to write what an amazing era this has been, how incredible a rise it has been that we can connect & talk, with so many people. My dialtone travels so much further & that is glorious. I have no idea, feel like I would have no chance to build a good private network for myself, that my life would stagnante and closed, if I had to build my networks myself in private, smuggling the light of my soul to others rather than being able to let it out.

I am happy to be online. I am proud of my "data", my voice, my app records. There's some less pleasant less shiny corners! But it is mad incredible that I get to do this live, that I get to have so many edges of connection and serendipity. People provide the most wild interesting comments and suggestions and topics, ongoingly. I benefit so much from them sharing their lives.

I spiritually believe deeply that we have our light to share with the universe. To turn your nose up at sharing, to renounce & see only evil, to let the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt, this spectre of the closed/bad/no-good controlling systems shape our thinking here is a pandora's box: I say you are shutting the door right as hope is finally trying to get out.
by iamnothere | 2026-03-09 22:22:10+00:00
This is unjust BS and discriminates against poor families.

Using this line of thinking, it will be a short time until you’re responsible for what a criminal does with your stolen vehicle; after all, you failed to secure it.

I hope you get exactly what you’re asking for, and all the implications thereof (but in a state far from me). I feel certain you won’t enjoy it.
by SteveNuts | 2026-03-09 22:22:24+00:00
I am constantly amazed at how many people blatantly run red lights now. It used to be that people would sometimes press their luck on a yellow a little bit, but now it'll be red for several seconds and people will still just drive right on through.

I'd love if the police enforced this insanely dangerous behavior instead of trying to catch people going 10 over on the highway.
by crazygringo | 2026-03-09 22:22:37+00:00
> Training an LLM inherently requires making a copy of the work.

But that's not relevant here. Because the copyleft license does not prohibit that (and it's not even clear that any license can prohibit it, as courts may confirm it's fair use, as most people are currently assuming). That's why I noted under (1) that it's not applicable here.
by tomhow | 2026-03-09 22:23:10+00:00
Can anyone find any more authoritative sources for this story than I can?

The original source submitted was https://www.idnfinancials.com/news/61918/zuckerberg-has-fini..., with the headline Zuckerberg has “finished” with Alexandr Wang, worth US$14 billion.

The second paragraph says “According to a report by Times of India...”. I found that article - https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/mar... – and changed the URL and title on this submission (though I find it hard to read the article without freezing/crashing Chrome on my quite-new Apple laptop).

I can't find a source for the claim that Zuckerberg has “finished” with Alexandr Wang in either article. Nobody is quoted using the word “finished” or making any other assertions about Wang's status at Meta. It all just seems to be IDN Financials handwavingly connecting dots to create a sensationalist story and headline.

Also, the Times of India article says “According to The Wall Street Journal...”, which must mean this article: Meta to Create New Applied AI Engineering Organization – https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-to-create-new-applied-ai-en....

That article also makes no assertions about Wang's status at Meta.

As that article is the original source for this whole story, it should be the URL and title for this submission. But I can't get an archive link for it.

For now I'm downweighting this submission and I want the last 30 minutes of my life back!
by rfw300 | 2026-03-09 22:23:18+00:00
More likely: this is a transitional phase where our previously hard problems become easy, and we will soon set our sights on new and much harder problems. The pinnacle of creative achievement in the universe is probably not 2010s B2B SaaS.

It is entirely possible, however, that human beings will not be the primary drivers of progress on those problems.
by sarchertech | 2026-03-09 22:23:18+00:00
They whole “you can just throw LLMs at the test suite and regenerate the code” thing needs to die excuse it can’t work for any software that has users. A test suite cannot feasibly cover every observable behavior. Every time you regenerate the code this way you’ll change a huge chunk of the thousands of little observable behaviors that aren’t fixed in place by the test suite. You can’t do this if you have users.

Similarly to your directions analogy, I’ve been using the the analogy id trying to ensure that a 1000 restaurant franchise produces the exact same peanut butter sandwich for ever customer.

It’s much easier to figure out the primitives that your employees understand and then use those primitives to describe exactly how to build a sandwich than it is to write a massive specification that describes what they should produce and just let them figure it out.
by riedel | 2026-03-09 22:23:21+00:00
Actually this is not as easy as it sounds. Quite a few companies opt not to go into 'Kurzarbeit' because it means that you go under extra scrutiny as it is only there to stop major layoffs, which would cost our social insurance system even more. There is typically enough mechanisms to make it unattractive enough, that even unions accept unpaid leaves instead.
IMHO there is bigger productivity problems. After COVID sick leave has massively increased. Many women do not work as much as they want because child care is still sketchy. There is often simply no incentive to work more because engineering careers are quite limited: general pay compared to expenses is really good, but top performers earn considerably less than in other countries.
by filoleg | 2026-03-09 22:23:37+00:00
I don't have much meaningful info to contribute to this, but it is interesting to observe how the rollout of the red light cams happens in different places, and how it eventually turns out.

IIRC there was a point in time roughly around ~2017 when it happened in Redmond WA (i.e., in the town that the Microsoft HQ is in). I might be off by a year or two, but it doesn't really change the overall point.

TLDR: in under 2 years, that whole red light cam initiative got canceled and reverted, because the local stats showed that it just made things more dangerous on the roads (by significantly increasing the rate of rear-ending accidents at traffic lights).
by josalhor | 2026-03-09 22:23:42+00:00
I think the direction we are going, the GPL is going to fade away. I think people will look at this like writing a book and claiming the ideas in the book cannot be copied. This debate is not that different from the ones going on in the music industry. I open sourced my latest software as Apache 2.0 after debating a lot about this. Unless the FSF wins in court in the next <=2-3 years, there is no coming back from this.
by lukan | 2026-03-09 22:23:52+00:00
For instance, there is a abandoned open source project, I would have liked to see revived, https://www.wickeditor.com/
(a attempt at recreating flash with web technology). Current official state in the repo: outdated dependencies, build process, etc.

I looked into doing it manually, but gave up. Way too much dirty work and me no energy for that.

Then I discovered that claude CLI got good - and told it to do it (with some handholding).

And it did it. Build process modernized. No more outdated dependencies. Then I added some features I missed in the original wick editor. Again, it did it and it works.

A working editor that was abandoned and missed features - now working again with the missing features. With minimal work done from my side (but I did put in work before to understand the source).

I call this a very useful result. There are lots of abandoned half working projects out there. Lots of value to be recovered. Unlike Haskell, Agents are not just busy with building agents, but real tools.
Currently I have the agents refactor a old codebase of mine. Lot's of tech dept. Lot's of hacks. Bad documentation. There are features I wanted to implement for ages but never did as I did not wanted to touch that ugly code again. But claude did it. It is almost scary of what they are already capable of.
Ask HN: Value and demand for space-manufactured products?
by dnlh_lvg | 2026-03-09 22:24:10+00:00
I'm exploring a startup idea around in-space manufacturing (ISM) in low Earth orbit using automated, modular payloads (free-flyers or commercial stations like Starlab/Axiom). The core thesis is leveraging microgravity to produce materials that are meaningfully superior to Earth-made versions in small-but-high-value batches (no need for mass production in orbit).

Three specific product swimlanes that are viable (all hybrid model: grow superior version in space → return to Earth → use/expand on Earth):

1. Pharma/biotech crystals: Novel polymorphs or ultra-pure API crystals (e.g., for monoclonal antibodies, small molecules) with better solubility, stability, bioavailability, or controlled release. Think reformulating IV drugs into injectables or enabling new patents on blockbusters.

2. Semiconductor seeds: Ultra-pure wide/ultra-wide bandgap crystal seeds (GaN, SiC, AlN, etc.) grown defect-free in microgravity. These propagate into larger terrestrial boules with dramatically lower dislocations/impurities → better power electronics, RF devices, radiation-hardened chips for AI, defense, EVs, 5G/6G.

3. Regenerative medicine constructs: Vascularized thick tissues, artificial retinas (protein-based), or patient-derived organoids (brain, heart, liver) that self-assemble better in microgravity (no gravitational collapse/sagging). End uses: therapeutic implants (e.g., for blindness, organ failure bridges), or premium 3D disease models for faster/more accurate drug screening.

Questions for HN (especially if you're in pharma R&D, semiconductor materials, defense electronics, regenerative biotech, or related fields):

>> Would your organization pay a meaningful premium (e.g., 5–50× terrestrial equivalents per gram/kg, or royalties/licensing) for access to these space-made materials/constructs once qualified?

>> What specific pain points (yield, defects, vascularization failure, formulation limits, supply-chain risks) would make this worth pursuing vs. sticking to Earth methods?

>> Which of the three lanes feels most compelling / urgent to you right now, and why? (Or is there a fourth lane I'm missing?)

>> Rough ballpark: What volume/pricing would make it interesting for early adoption (e.g., qualification batches, pilot programs)?

>> Any obvious showstoppers (regulatory, reentry survival, cost, timeline) that kill the idea?

I'm not selling anything yet, just trying to validate whether there's real demand before sinking more time/money. Background: idea stems from following Varda, Redwire, United Semiconductors, LambdaVision, NASA InSPA awards, etc.

Thanks for any candid thoughts — technical skepticism, customer perspectives, or "this is nonsense because X" all welcome.

(If you're in one of these spaces and open to a quick DM/chat, even better.)

Thanks!
by larodi | 2026-03-09 22:24:19+00:00
this question should've been posed earlier when first LLMs were training. many people chose to ignore the question, and now, several distillation epochs later, it is not a question that matters, as both yes/no are true, and not true.

is it legitimate for millions of people to exploit, expound on knowledge that was perhaps, to begin with, not legitimate to use? well they did already, who's to judge the commons now?
by withinboredom | 2026-03-09 22:24:36+00:00
1000 years from now, someone will discover these discs and wonder why we wrote text so small and so many times across the disk. They’ll say the rainbow is for artistic effect and the repetition for religious reasons.

Some people will argue that it is for primitive digital technology and be called crazy people. Nobody will be allowed to study it except for those who go to the right schools or have the right connections.
by dexwiz | 2026-03-09 22:24:50+00:00
I'd all the Southern Reach trilogy (quadrilogy? now) to this list. It's more on the cosmic/eldritch side, but similar sense of unknowable.

SPOILER WARNING

My interruption is that Area X/The Crawler is a probe built to study and build a bridge back to its creator. Area X is expanding because it's the inside of a wormhole. But whatever is on the other side is long dead, and the probe is acting on instinct.
by NewsaHackO | 2026-03-09 22:25:50+00:00
>Has the model really performed an extreme transformation if it is able to produce the training data near-verbatim? Sure, it can also produce extremely transformed versions, but is that really relevant if it holds within it enough information for a (near-)verbatim reproduction?

I feel as though, from an information-theoretic standpoint, it can't be possible that an LLM (which is almost certainly <1 TB big) can contain any substantial verbatim portion of its training corpus, which includes audio, images, and videos.
by aboutphilippe | 2026-03-09 22:25:56+00:00
Author here. I wrote this because I kept seeing teams solve agent context by stuffing prompts or calling N APIs per request—fine for demos, breaks at scale.

I wanted to put a name to the alternative I have in mind: a context plane—infrastructure that builds, stores, and serves context so agents get the right context per entity with one API (store + cache, entity-first, S3-compatible object storage, Rust).

I'd love feedback from the community: how are you solving context for agents today, and what would you recommend or do differently?
by Terretta | 2026-03-09 22:26:08+00:00
> Newly-registered domains are not generally an issue with enterprise users.

I take it this means enterprise users are not generally needing to do anything legit-for-work on a newly registered domain.

Enterprise clicks on newly registered domains tend to be (a) being phished or smished or cryptomined or whatever, or (b) someone reading X or Bsky or HN or ProductHunt's vibe code of the date -- things the enterprise would also like to have blocked.

Consider the CloudFlare/Proofpoint/NextDNS/etc. domain block on new domains much like updating one's HN home page to https://news.ycombinator.com/classic …
by kccqzy | 2026-03-09 22:26:26+00:00
If you have multiple threads, you almost certainly have mutexes. If your fork happens when a non-main thread holds a mutex, your main thread will never again be able to hold that mutex.

An imperfect solution is to require every mutex created to be accompanied by some pthread_atfork, but libraries don’t do that unless forking is specifically requested. In other words, if you don’t control the library you can’t fork.
by eddyg | 2026-03-09 22:26:48+00:00
Does Ghostty have iTerm's native tmux integration feature yet?⁽¹⁾ That is a killer feature these days.

Other things in iTerm that I've come to rely on:

- Instant Replay

- Scrollback timestamps

- Scrollback annotations

- Completion from anything in scrollback (Cmd-;)

- Global search across all tabs

- Automatic profile switching (via shell integration) when ssh'ing to different machines

- Keyboard-based select/copy mode (to avoid having to select with the mouse)

I'm sure I'm missing other stuff, but these things make it hard to switch from iTerm (which has always been a powerhouse for me!)

⁽¹⁾ https://iterm2.com/documentation-tmux-integration.html
by jleyank | 2026-03-09 22:26:56+00:00
I assume this is a move to hire people more palatable to the state by eliminating the competition. Or to score political points independent of the cost on the actual instruction. The world isn’t swimming in masters and PhD level people who want to start their career in Florida - there aren’t that many to draw from to start anywhere and the weather isn’t a high priority. Can they get startup funding, can they get ongoing funding to get students and researchers? These are the pertinent questions.

And I thought at the moment that the us as a whole was deemphasizing such funding. If this is correct, Florida will be unable, probably unwilling to make up the loss.
by kn100 | 2026-03-09 22:27:08+00:00
Recently built https://entrycast.com/ - there are other products kind of like it on the market already but I had some specific use cases I wanted personally, and decided rather than making it just for me, I'd for the first time in my life make it something others could buy too. No customers so far, but I don't really mind, to be honest!
by michaelt | 2026-03-09 22:27:10+00:00
> The idea that AI enforcement won't be just as corrupt and capricious as any other form of government run extortion is bonkers. [...] Private, unaccountable companies with effectively no oversight

In the specific case this thread is about - that of red light cameras - presumably the camera produces a photograph showing a red light, a vehicle going through it, and the vehicle's license plate. Plus a video, showing the light was orange for the legally required amount of time, and showing the absence of any exceptional circumstances (e.g. ambulances).

As law enforcement goes, that really seems like the least capricious, highest oversight law enforcement I can imagine.
by jameshilliard | 2026-03-09 22:27:18+00:00
> As for a preemptive attack, which I imagine you meant would be nuclear since they're already giving it all they've got with their non-nuclear attacks, it is already clear that Israel and USA don't have a way to stop Iran's faster missiles, and they would have no way to prevent Iran nuking Tel-Aviv and Haifa in return.

Israel generally has fairly solid intelligence in Iran and would almost certainly take whatever action is necessary to prevent Iran from building a Nuke...potentially all the way up to using small tactical nukes in targeted strikes on nuclear facilities if conventional attacks would be insufficient. Any preemptive attack would likely occur before Iran actually were acquire a viable nuclear weapon.
by nothanii | 2026-03-09 22:27:25+00:00
Hi HN — I built Sorca a voice-first AI therapy companion for between-session mental health support.

What it does:

Real-time voice sessions powered by ElevenLabs Conversational AI — talk to an AI that listens, reflects, and asks Socratic questions
7 evidence-based therapy modalities (CBT, ACT, IFS, person-centred, Socratic, psychodynamic, motivational interviewing)
Daily mood check-ins, PHQ-9/GAD-7 outcome tracking, relapse prevention toolkit
Therapist dashboard for clinical oversight — session notes, risk flags, voice transcript review
UK NHS-aligned: crisis contacts (Samaritans 116 123, SHOUT 85258), stepped care pathways, GDPR data export
not a replacement for therapy, but a companion that helps you process
by curt15 | 2026-03-09 22:27:39+00:00
The TikTok ban upheld by the courts was a law enacted by Congress, not an executive action, specifically targeting Tiktok. The legal challenges were all about the law's constitutionality.

This dispute challenges the executive's action, not the underlying law (10 USC 3252). Anthropic does make some constitutional claims regarding the 1st and 5th amendments, but they also advance procedural challenges under the Administrative Procedures Act and statutory arguments about whether the law authorized the action.