MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rodchalski | 2026-03-06 21:07:53+00:00
The 'consent drift' failure mode here is underrated. Most implementations treat authorization as a session-level gate: did the user authenticate, and do they have permission? That check happens once, at the start.

But a long-running agent can receive user consent at step 1 and still be executing 45 minutes later at step 23 — with context that's fully stale. The user approved 'schedule a meeting' but the agent interpreted that as 'access my entire calendar, read all attendee info, send an external webhook, create a contact record.' Each step was technically within granted scope. The chain as a whole wasn't what was consented to.

One failure mode I'd add to your list: no kill switch. You can have tight scopes and fresh consent checkpoints and still have no mechanism to abort a running workflow mid-execution. Once the agent starts, it completes. Real agentic authorization needs interrupt capability — a way to revoke consent mid-chain when something unexpected happens at step 8.
by bonsai_spool | 2026-03-06 21:08:39+00:00
Thanks for pulling up data!

These numbers are incommensurate in a way that may not be obvious.

7% of the population doesn't tell you what population fraction is covered by such policies.

36% coverage is even harder—every child in the US is eligible for Medicaid, and such children may not always need it, or may move states after using Medicaid, in a way that makes them doubly counted.

80% of the working population is also less clear; is that 80% of policy-holders get their own policy through their own job? Or 80% of working-age people have a policy through some workplace, even if they are not working?
by hvb2 | 2026-03-06 21:08:45+00:00
> Whoever setup the robot's permissions did it wrong.

It doesn't have permissions of it's own. The way he's using it, it has his permissions.

Also, in order to be able to do deployments like that you need pretty wide permissions. Deleting a database is one of them, if you're renaming things for example. That stuff should typically not happen in prd though
by dathinab | 2026-03-06 21:09:24+00:00
> do it basically "out to sea", far enough away from humans that whatever negative effects are able to diffuse throughout the entire oceans

this is not how it works, like at all

pretty much all oceans are already at risk of ecologically collapsing even without climate change, and will be majorly affected by it (both directly and indirectly)

just because they are big doesn't mean thy can just compensate whatever you throw at them.

A huge problem being damage being not very visible to the average human until catastrophic (so humans are prone to not take actions). Like we already have gigantic dead zones all over the oceans.

Many effects of climate change fall into the "live will get very shitty but still survivable category".

But an ocean dying can lead to a chain reaction leading to a mass extinction event. Like not just a lot of animal dying, but a something like noticeable more then 50% of species going extinct. That includes most to all of humanities food supply.

Theoretically humans might be able to survive this, practically we are still speaking about a non negligible 2 digit chance for human extinction (not necessary directly by that, but other catastrophes like volcanoes, plagues or meteors still happen)

this are the kind of solutions with a high potential of having worse outcomes then not doing them
by Karrot_Kream | 2026-03-06 21:09:44+00:00
This seems wrong? Like if you look at a collection of open SWENG positions, most of them are maintenance roles at large companies. Greenfield software doesn't have the revenue needed to justify much headcount.

In my experience separating the roles out is silly if you're an engineer yourself. We do this a lot and that leads to silly mentalities. Greenfield developer vs maintenance engineer, MVP engineer vs Big Tech dev, FOSS hacker vs FOSS maintainer. Each of those dichotomies speaks to cultural differences that we humans amplify for no reason.

In truth the profession needs both and an engineer that can do both is the most effective. The sharpest engineers I've worked with over the years can hack new, greenfield stuff and then go on to maintaining huge projects. Hell Linus Torvalds started out by creating Linux from scratch and now he's a steward of the kernel rather than an author!
by smalley | 2026-03-06 21:09:56+00:00
The ECC information is stored in separate DRAM devices on the DIMM. This is responsible for some of the increased cost of DIMMs with ECC at a given size. When marketed the extra memory for ECC are typically not included in the size for DIMMs so a 32GB DIMM with and without ECC will have differing numbers of total DRAM devices.

There's a pretty good set of diagrams and descriptions of the faults in this paper https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3725843.3756089.

Also to the parent: there's an updated public paper on DDR4 era fault observations https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10071066
by jghn | 2026-03-06 21:10:31+00:00
I don't disagree per se, but these are more or less the same tropes that we've seen over the last couple of decades, no? Especially the "hiring them on a trial basis is the absolute best if possible." part which has been an ongoing debate here on HN since at least the early teens.

I do feel like there's something *different* about the required skillset now, and it's not something that all engineers have even experienced ones. But I can't put my finger on what exactly it is. If I'm right though, classic interview techniques won't select for it because they never were intended to do so.
by Alsedarna | 2026-03-06 21:10:46+00:00
You'd be surprised how much discomfort people get acclimated to as just being normal and never end up diagnosing until something finally reaches the breaking point to forcing them in to see a doc. If it's been weighing on you for a while, you could probably gently broach it with something to the effect of "Hey man--I know there's no non-awkward way to put this, but I think your body might be digesting its own blood and I was worried about you and wanted to see if you were feeling alright."
by orthecreedence | 2026-03-06 21:10:56+00:00
> So what we get depends crucially on the power balance or imbalance between consumers and producers.

Gosh, if only consumers and producers were the same people. What could we call this new economic paradigm?

But no, economic monarchy is the only way to have Freedom (TM)(R), so let's slap on some easily-sidestepped regulations and keep going the same direction! It'll probably turn out fine.
by surgical_fire | 2026-03-06 21:11:14+00:00
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/hegseth-insists-the-iran-...

"No stupid rules of engagement, no nation building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win, and we don't waste time or lives," Hegseth said.

Words of your Secretary of War, not mine.

This is not a woke war. This is a war where you bomb schools and kill children.
by tcgv | 2026-03-06 21:11:16+00:00
Makes sense. You just reminded me of the article "Why Can’t Programmers... Program?" [1].

Before gen AI, I used to give candidates at my company a quick one-hour remote screening test with a couple of random "FizzBuzz"-style questions. I would usually paraphrase the question so a simple Google search would not immediately surface the answer, and 80% of candidates failed at coding a working solution, which was very much in line with the article. Post gen AI, that test effectively dropped to a 0% failure rate, so we changed our selection process.

[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
by ares623 | 2026-03-06 21:11:16+00:00
No no it makes sense. Hypothetical scenario: I, a high-level employee at a company just convinced my boss (or did we convince each other?) to spend $30k/year on Claude/Codex enterprise licenses. So far, the productivity gains have not been there and we're starting to sweat. So, I propose to my boss to build an internal version of $SaaS and call it a win. Galaxy brain.

Now some IC somewhere in the company who is at the end of his rope and sees the company as a dead end, sees an opportunity. Why not advocate for this project, get real experience building something greenfield in a brand new domain, strengthen their own resume, and finally have a way out of their strut? It's not like they're gonna stick around maintaining what they built.
by ValentineC | 2026-03-06 21:12:22+00:00
> On one hand, I think LLMs make it easier to discover explanations that, at least superficially, superficially "click" for you.

The other benefit is that LLMs, for superficial topics, are the most patient teachers ever.

I can ask it to explain a concept multiple times, hoping that it'll eventually click for me, and not be worried that I'd look stupid, or that it'll be annoyed or lose patience.
by kode-targz | 2026-03-06 21:12:25+00:00
It didn't though.
Not good software at least.
AI (which is what I'm guessing you're referring to here) is simply incapable of writing such mission -critical low-level code, especially for a niche and/or brand new ISA. It simply can't. It has nothing to plagiarize from, contrary to the billions of lines of JavaScript and python it has access to.
This kind of work can most definitely be AI-assisted, but my estimate is that the time gained would be minimal.
An LLM is able to write some functional arduino code, maybe even some semi-functional bare-metal esp32 code, but nothing deeper than that.
by anonzzzies | 2026-03-06 21:12:36+00:00
The ability to delete backups is wild. That simply should have have mfa on it by default. Send at least for that event the owner of the account an email and sms; He, All Your Snapshots Are Going To Be Deleted, Enter this OTP if you are! Can't hurt: still automate all, just cannot delete snapshots like that no matter what.
by pear01 | 2026-03-06 21:13:18+00:00
There is no such thing as an "unbiased will of the majority".

That sort of terminology might have flown back in the 18th century with Rousseau and the like speaking of a "general will" but in today's era of social science, it has about as much force as invoking divinity.

Everyone has bias. The idea of a general will is largely fiction and was discredited at the time.

Our system is based on coercion, costs and trade-offs and nothing more. That is human history. You may have some rights (perhaps a right to privacy, it is debatable) but this is really just the three core components dressed up in reverse. The freedom of speech for instance is simply to codify the idea that the state silencing you is intolerable. Intolerable is eventually meaningless unless it is backed up by costs and coercion against the state which they will seek to avoid.

When the state violates such "rights" flagrantly sometimes the people are called to manifest this aspect of "intolerable".

That's what a revolution is.

Failing that you need to convince people. And in so doing if you aim to find some "unbiased will of the majority" you are wasting your time.

You would be better off with a lobbyist. Surely such a person would not so readily engage in such fiction regarding how democracy actually works, and would thus be more effective in achieving your goals.
by danny_codes | 2026-03-06 21:13:20+00:00
Physically that’s not the case.

Scaled up nuclear power could be had for $3-4B a gigawatt/h. We waste say $1T a year on basic things, like not having universal healthcare. So a simple policy change would let us build about 300 reactors a years, after some scaling period. The excess energy can be used to turn C02 back into oil.

It’s not technically that difficult, we just chose to waste money on stupid things and rich people toys instead.

Energy abundance is simply the choose to build nuclear power plants at scale
by gvldev | 2026-03-06 21:13:38+00:00
The article says "elephant feces have a volume of 20 liters, nearly a thousand times more than a dog's, at 10 milliliters." Is 10K nearly 20K?

Regardless, modern dog breeds vary in size wildly, and I'm curious how they standardize the average fecal volume across the sizes. My dogs are most certainly not expelling just 10 milliliters... I can't imagine that number is even accurate for small dogs.
by gambit_robotics | 2026-03-06 21:13:44+00:00
Hi HN — I’m Nicole, cofounder of Gambit Robotics (with Eliot Horowitz, cofounder/CTO of MongoDB).

We’re hiring a Founding Senior Full-Stack Engineer to join us in our NYC office.

Gambit is building an AI kitchen assistant that mounts under a range hood and uses computer vision and thermal sensing to understand what’s happening in a pan and guide cooking in real time.

We’re looking for an experienced engineer who enjoys owning systems end-to-end and working across backend, product, and infrastructure in a small team. You’ll be working directly with the founders building software that interacts with sensors, hardware, and AI models in real kitchens.

More info: https://www.gambitrobotics.ai/careers

Email: nicole@gambitrobotics.com
by godelski | 2026-03-06 21:14:21+00:00
Why ask Anthropic?

Why not build on something better like Matrix? Or Signal?[0] Or even Keybase?

I really do agree we need to move away from Slack and Discord, but I'm also very confused why the call to action is to Anthropic. IMO we should really be pushing for open systems so that nobody can take it from us. Otherwise we repeat the cycle again and again. There's some good protocols to start on. I'd also say this is a good reason to make sure that the things you work on are hackable. It's how we combine different domains of expertise.

[0] see the Molly project, you don't have to use Signal's servers
by pscanf | 2026-03-06 21:14:30+00:00
As a user, I'm of course very excited about v7. As a developer of an app that _integrates_ TypeScript, however, I feel a bit uneasy seeing the API feature still marked as "not ready" on the roadmap.

On the other hand, I can understand leaving it as the last thing to do, after the foundation has set. Also, the TypeScript team has really done an amazing job all these years with backward compatibility, so that is extremely reassuring.

Maybe my uneasiness is just impatience to get to use the sped-up version in my app as well! :)
by simonw | 2026-03-06 21:15:03+00:00
That matches an observation made in that report from the recent Thoughtworks retreat: https://www.thoughtworks.com/content/dam/thoughtworks/docume...

> The retreat challenged the narrative that AI eliminates the need for junior developers. Juniors are more profitable than they have ever been. AI tools get them past the awkward initial net-negative phase faster. They serve as a call option on future productivity. And they are better at AI tools than senior engineers, having never developed the habits and assumptions that slow adoption.

> The real concern is mid-level engineers who came up during the decade-long hiring boom and may not have developed the fundamentals needed to thrive in the new environment. This population represents the bulk of the industry by volume, and retraining them is genuinely difficult. The retreat discussed whether apprenticeship models, rotation programs and lifelong learning structures could address this gap, but acknowledged that no organization has solved it yet.
by metalliqaz | 2026-03-06 21:15:10+00:00
The Ada stronghold is aerospace and defense systems. So these may or may not be legacy systems, but they are safety-critical or mission-critical systems that rely on long standing well defined development processes. That inflexibility means that advancements in the technology are very slow to creep into usage. That goes not only for the languages/compilers but also the silicon and everything in between.
by petercooper | 2026-03-06 21:15:18+00:00
Or, you know, Vibe code your own.

Right. If these tools are so good (and they are) there should be numerous better-than-Slack apps by now that let you do exactly what you want. It doesn't take Anthropic to make it. (At our company, we cheated and edited 37signals' Campfire instead because we got sick of Slack's ads pushed into our paid instance.)
by FitchApps | 2026-03-06 21:16:12+00:00
This. I'm also using an LLM very similarly and treat it like a knowledgeable co-worker I can ask for an advice or check something. I want to be the one applying changes to my codebase and then running the tests. Ok, agents may improve the efficiency but it's a slippery slope. I don't want to sit here all day watching the agents modify and re-modify my codebase, I want to do this myself because it's still fun though not as much fun as it was pre-AI
by orthecreedence | 2026-03-06 21:16:45+00:00
> If electricity is 3x as much as gas per kWh the heat pump should be less expensive to operate.

This would be true if heat pumps were free. But "less expensive to operate" needs to justify cost of installation over some measurable period of time. If electricity is 3x more expensive than gas, and the heat pump is 3-4x (2.5-3.5x realistically) then you're barely squeeking by except on the days when the pump is most efficient (when it's already warm out). That 3.5 - 3 leaves 0.5, amortized over the lifetime of the heat pump...might not even pay for installation.

So, make heat pumps free or energy cheaper, I guess.
by Koshkin | 2026-03-06 21:17:06+00:00
> Android is one of the most popular operating systems in the world.

More accurately, "as of December 2025, Android, which uses the Linux kernel, is the world's most popular operating system with 38.94% of the global market, followed by Windows with 29.99%, iOS with 15.66%, macOS with 2.14%, and other operating systems with 10.78%."
by rep_lodsb | 2026-03-06 21:17:20+00:00
It has nothing to do with being unable to run 16-bit code, that's a myth.

https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/modify_ldt.2.html

Set seg_32bit=0 and you can create 16-bit code and data segments. Still works on 64 bit. What's missing is V86 mode, which emulates the real mode segmentation model.
by krapp | 2026-03-06 21:17:44+00:00
>Practically nobody targets civilian building with expensive precision munitions! They’re expensive! There’s limited supply! Targets are chosen to maximise the military effect.

We're not dealing with a rational or competent military chain of command. We're dealing with people who believe they're bringing about the Biblical Second Coming and that rules of engagement are "woke." These are literally cartoonishly evil people. They probably chose targets by asking Grok.
by bigyabai | 2026-03-06 21:18:19+00:00
You are conflating so many things in this post that it's hard to interpret your reasoning. Companies don't "believe" in anything besides profit, the extreme minority of software companies prioritize anything else. Besides self-employment there really aren't many opportunities for you to conscientiously object.

If you want to stop managing other people's AI slop, consider a lower-level role that doesn't hinge on your seniority. Even before AI, being a "good programmer" consigned you to 24/7 code review. If you can't compete in that kind of environment, your best option is to go indie.
by batat | 2026-03-06 21:18:23+00:00
So it’s neither "yes" nor "no", but some kind of philosophical note somewhere in-between a "Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS Released" and "CodeWeavers tests their ARM64 compatibility on System76" that isn’t even linked to noticeable on the main page.

I mean Wikipedia hung some huge banners to raise awareness, the German wiki even had a "blackout" because of "Directive 2019/790", there was something similar on Reddit etc. I don't expect them to leave the US market or anything like that, but also I don’t even know what to say, as if everyone has already resigned.
by gamerson | 2026-03-06 21:18:34+00:00
From the article...

> Claude has a glaring limitation: it only does 1:1 conversations. In business, work happens in groups. Today, if I want Claude's help with something that came up in a Slack thread, I have to relay the context between Slack and Claude by copy-pasting. This is absurd. I am not a sub-agent!

It seems to me that LLMs/Chatbots are engineered for one thing above ground-level truth and that is attention. The more people you bring into a shared context, the harder it seems it would become to retain people's attention.

Here is my anecdotal evidence for this: when I chat with a chatbot, I find its answers and line of thinking, relevant, compelling, and worth engaging with. However, when people share with me their "chatbot links" and I read their conversations with it, I have "yet" to find one compelling or worth engaging with. Maybe the newer models are good enough to retain the "attention" of a large group, but I don't see this happening.
by layer8 | 2026-03-06 21:19:08+00:00
I wasn’t talking about segregating roles, but about personal preference. People do tend to prefer building new stuff over maintaining projects long-term, and I’d like the scale to tip a bit on that. Linus is indeed a good counterexample: He didn’t leave Linux after 1.0 to build the next new thing. But the latter is what developers in practice often prefer doing.
by dryadin | 2026-03-06 21:19:14+00:00
This reminds me of a story from the punch card era. A software company was moving offices. The movers were given a list of items to move. They asked about all the data and were told that the data has no weight. On moving day, the movers were surprised to find heavy boxes of punch cards. When they complained, the programmers told them that the data is in the holes.
by simonw | 2026-03-06 21:19:14+00:00
Human teachers make mistakes too. If you aren't consuming information with a skeptical eye you're not learning as effectively as you could be no matter what the source is.

The trick to learning with LLMs is to treat them as one of multiple sources of information, and work with those sources to build your own robust mental of how things work.

If you exclusively rely on official documentation you'll miss out on things that the documentation doesn't cover.
by mjr00 | 2026-03-06 21:19:56+00:00
> How many offers did you receive? Companies have also adopted your strategy: interviewing candidates "to see what's out there" - there's a job I interviewed for that's still open after 10 months.

On the hiring side, at least in tech: interviewing really sucks. It's a big time investment from multiple people (HR, technical interviewers, managers, etc).

I'm not saying it's impossible that companies are interviewing for fun, but it seems really unlikely to me anyone would want to do interviews without seriously intending to hire someone.
by SoftTalker | 2026-03-06 21:19:59+00:00
There was a time when medicine put a lot of focus on the smell and consistency of bowel movements. There's probably something to it but we have better diagnostics now. That said, normal bowel movements can have a bit of an odor but it should not be strong or particularly foul-smelling. If it is, consider changing your diet or getting it checked out if that doesn't help. I found that just cutting out fast foods made that particular bodily function nearly odorless.