MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by srean | 2026-03-11 19:54:42+00:00
Not directly related, but if you are reaching for sin, cos, asin, acos, atan and their relatives to handle rotation, you may save yourself a lot of trouble by representing angle not as a scalar but as (i) a cos, sin tuple or (ii) equivalently as a complex numbers.

You may then get away with simple algebra and square roots. A runtime such as Python would do a lot of that transparently.
by dang | 2026-03-11 19:54:51+00:00
Two things can be true: (1) many things are evil and terrible; (2) HN commenters need to follow the rules.

Imagine if the rules were suspended whenever the topic is evil/terrible or people feel it is. That would amount to having no rules at all.

In fact, the opposite is the case: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Show HN: I built a Mac app that converts files when you rename them
by imfavourite | 2026-03-11 19:54:59+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Morpholder after repeatedly running into the same annoying workflow on macOS.

Every time I needed to convert a file I had to open a converter, upload the file, download it again, and move it back to Finder. It always felt unnecessary when I already knew the format I needed.

So I tried a different idea: what if renaming the file actually converted it?

Morpholder watches folders and performs the real conversion when the extension changes.

For example:

favicon.png → favicon.ico
photo.heic → photo.jpg
video.mov → video.gif
video.mp4 → audio.mp3

But it also unlocks some workflows beyond simple conversions:

- Append _nobg to an image → background is removed automatically (uses Apple’s subject detection)
- Rename an image to .txt → text is extracted from the image using Live Text
- Append _min → compress image for the web while preserving quality
- Rename an image to .icns → builds a macOS app icon package
- Append _pages to a PDF → exports each page as high-resolution images

The app runs in the menu bar and processes everything locally.

Curious what the HN community thinks — especially if you have ideas for other suffix-based workflows.

https://morpholder.com
by throwaway5752 | 2026-03-11 19:55:05+00:00
Because Republicans in the US want to create credential based voting, and then selectively make obtaining the credentials more difficult for groups that don't historically vote Republican.

It's essentially a modernized, technical jargon couched version of Jim Crow laws.

The Swiss, as the article notes, are doing it for the opposite reason - for secure e-voting for people with disabilities or who are not able to be physically present to vote.
by Tarsul | 2026-03-11 19:55:14+00:00
here's hoping that someday headphones without pressure (e.g. active/passive noise cancelling) will make a comeback, too. But then again I think there still exist cheap wired ones without such "advanced" technology. As one woman in the article said best: "'I don't like how this feels' and we're all kind of returning to the last place we were comfortable."
by kjkjadksj | 2026-03-11 19:55:54+00:00
I’d probably guess there were plenty of bad eggs. Andrew Jackson for example. Who learns about him in school though? Who talks about his administration today? And he probably isn’t the only one either. 1700s government was still in flux with plenty of cases of selfish infamous people and behavior. 1800s worldview among people in power was pretty notoriously ruthless. 1900s not much different. FDR was certainly a strongman above norms too, luckily many of the things he did with his share of political power had great benefits to people.
by munk-a | 2026-03-11 19:56:50+00:00
I'm going to guess we'll eventually settle onto a psuedo-anonymous cert system like HTTPS where some companies are entrusted with verification and if that company says "That's definitely a human" it'll fly - not a great solution, of course, but I really can't see a non-chain-of-custody/trust based approach to the problem and those might only slightly compromise anonymity in optimal scenarios but some compromise is inevitable.
by 2001zhaozhao | 2026-03-11 19:57:24+00:00
I think game ideas can get copied everywhere but it happens much faster on Roblox and there is almost no recourse for the smaller developer who got copied.

The platform doesn't care when someone makes a copy, there's no way for players to push back and actually hurt the developer making the copy (unlike Steam where trying to do it will get you bombarded with negative reviews and buried by the algorithm), and superficial visual quality and marketing attracts players more than actual gameplay quality.
by schappim | 2026-03-11 19:57:38+00:00
Telling people to not post “AI-edited comments” lacks total empathy and even a modicum of forethought.

I have a kid with severe written language issues, and the utilisation of STT w/ a LLM-powered edit has unlocked a whole world that was previously inaccessible.

What is amazing is it would have remained so just a couple of years ago!
by godelski | 2026-03-11 19:57:40+00:00
The problem is bigger. It even blocks research!

In my own experience I was unable to publish a few works because I was unable to outperform a "competitor" (technically we're all on the same side, right?). So I dig more and more into their work and really try to replicate their work. I can't! Emailing the authors I get no further and only more questions. I submit the papers anyways, adding a section about replication efforts. You guessed it, rejected. With explicit comments from reviewers about lack of impact due to "competitor's" results.

Is an experience I've found a lot of colleagues share. And I don't understand it. Every failed replication should teach us something new. Something about the bounds of where a method works.

It's odd. In our strive for novelty we sure do turn down a lot of novel results. In our strive to reduce redundancy we sure do create a lot of redundancy.
by zbentley | 2026-03-11 19:57:48+00:00
Why would "human originated" be a better place to draw the line than "no generated/AI-edited comments"?

Like, I'm sure that AIs technically can write non-crap HN comments, but they rarely do. Even if it was less rare, the community that resulted from fostering AI-generated content would be unappealing to a lot of people, myself included. The fact that information here is the result of real people with real human opinions conversing is at least as important to me as the content being posted.
by sonofhans | 2026-03-11 19:57:49+00:00
Control. If you can centralize all voting results in a single place you can control distribution of them. If you are the only entity able to read the results then everyone else has to take your word for it.

Paper ballots with physical marks are easy to track and recount. Digital paper trails are ephemeral. Whom does this benefit? The people counting the ballots.
by cogman10 | 2026-03-11 19:58:02+00:00
I only disagree a little. It's that sometimes there is a discussion about AI itself where "I prompted X with Y and it output Z" can add to the convo.

But those are pretty specific cases (For example, discussing AI in healthcare). That's about the only time where I think it's reasonable to post the AI output so it can be analyzed/criticized.

What's not helpful is I've been hit by users who haven't disclosed that they are just using AI. It takes a few back and forths before I realize that they are just a bot which is annoying.
by fuelingcurious | 2026-03-11 19:58:04+00:00
Thank you for the support! I tell my team this all the time, there’s no point in building systems that we rely on to be perfect to integrate LLMs, but we can use them to low risk workflows that otherwise would never get coding/automation support.

It’s really changed the way I work from opening up the ability to write deterministic code, but I’ve yet to see many instances that we could tolerate a “in-the-loop” LLM yet.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2026-03-11 19:58:09+00:00
yes, 641A being the prime example, but i suppose it depends on how wide a net you cast to define "risk". plus: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/targeted-advertising-g...

i'm not saying it's not like these big tech firms don't have their hands legally tied by NSA letters, but that's entirely divorced from whether i trust them to steward my data.
by HanClinto | 2026-03-11 19:58:18+00:00
I appreciate this being added to the guidelines.

That said, I also wouldn't hate seeing an official playground where it is cordoned / appreciated for bots to operate. I.E., like Moltbook, but for HN...? I realize this could be done by a third party, but I wouldn't hate seeing Ycombinator take a stab at it.

Maybe that's too experimental, and that would be better left to third parties to implement (I'm guessing there's already half a dozen vibe-coded implementations of this out there right now) -- it feels more like the sort of thing that could be an interesting (useful?) experiment, rather than something we want to commit to existing in-perpetuity.
by saphalpdyl | 2026-03-11 19:58:21+00:00
Hello. Containerlab gives me the virtual network topology ( links through veth pairs, containers etc.). The actual BNG's Control plane ( authentication, authorization, session handling, traffic shaping, events streaming etc. ) is written by me. So it's less running off-the-shelf software running on virtualized hardware, and more writing the software and running it on a virtualized hardware.

At some point, I did use Nokia SR Linux as my access node + relay, but had issues with configuration and Option 82. Later, I wrote one myself.
by Kim_Bruning | 2026-03-11 19:58:23+00:00
Here is where I'd like to push back just a little.

Not all AI prompting is expanding the prompt.

What if the original prompt is 1000 words, includes 10 scientific articles by reference (boosting it up to 10000) , and the AI helps to boil it down to 100 words instead?

I'd argue that this is probably a rather more responsible usage of the tools. And rather more pleasant to read besides.

Whether it meets the criterion is another thing. But at least don't assume that the original prompt is always better or shorter!
Rate my privacy-first AI ad architecture (patent pending)
by Buddhistlab | 2026-03-11 19:58:39+00:00
I'm building SejalVault, a patent-pending framework for advertising inside AI responses that tracks nothing – no cookies, no profiles, no behavioral history. Just the prompt.

Here's the architecture:

1. Prompt arrives at AI interface (mobile, desktop, assistant).
2. AI parses intent in real-time using protected classification logic.
3. If commercial intent detected (e.g., "best noise-canceling headphones"), it queries a local index of certified brand listings.
4. Matching uses only prompt context + brand trust score. No user data.
5. Ad formats: sponsored summaries, buy-now cards, verified listings – inserted naturally into the response.
6. Short-Tempered Memory™: a local encrypted buffer stores last 2-3 prompts for up to 72 hours to simulate continuity. Never synced, auto-deletes on topic change or timeout.
7. Repetition Control: host apps set limits on ad frequency per prompt category (e.g., 1 ad per 48h). Privacy mode blocks repeats entirely.
8. Certification: brands must verify domain/identity to access premium formats. Non-certified get text-only links.
9. All decisions AI-governed – no forced placements, no system hooks, no tracking.

Patent filed July 2025 (covers prompt-based matching, ephemeral memory, certificate-gated access, etc.).

Questions:

1. Does this architecture hold up technically? Any gaps?
2. Would you trust it as a user? As a developer?
3. What's the hardest part to implement correctly?
4. Any concerns about the Short-Tempered Memory approach?

I'm here to answer questions and learn from your feedback. Thanks!
by stetrain | 2026-03-11 19:58:52+00:00
Yes, but I don't think most of those IDs qualify as "proof of citizenship."

Even a RealID compliant ID is not direct proof of citizenship.

Others in the comment chain have talked about localities with very few DMV officers per capita in some districts and appointment wait times of over a month. If we are going to require such a step to be eligible to vote, we need to hold states and municipalities to a high standard of providing an adequate level of service for all citizens.
by nwhnwh | 2026-03-11 19:59:23+00:00
You are just a persona. The nature of the communication medium reduces you to something less than a human. You won't be able to change that. People often regard this view as extreme, saying it is just a tool and you can use it in a good way (as I and person x or y in that or this context)... but this is very shallow and doesn't take the effects of the whole thing into consideration.
by robthompson2018 | 2026-03-11 19:59:29+00:00
I don't follow your argument about getting pwned.

A user could leave malicious instructions in their instance, but Clawbert only has access to that user's info in the database, so you only pwned yourself.

A user could leave malicious instructions in someone else's instance and then rely on Clawbert to execute them. But Clawbert seems like a worse attack vector than just getting OpenClaw itself to execute the malicious instructions. OpenClaw already has root access.

Re other use cases that don't rely on personal data: we have users doing research and sending reports from an AgentMail account to the personal account, maintaining sandboxing. Another user set up this diving conditions website, which requires no personal data: https://www.diveprosd.com/
by ptak_dev | 2026-03-11 19:59:54+00:00
JetSet AI — conversational flight search with persistent session state

The core problem: every AI flight tool I'd seen was stateless — each follow-up query reconstructed context from the conversation history stuffed into the prompt. For transactional multi-turn searches ("what if I fly into Osaka instead?"), approximate context reconstruction isn't good enough.

The approach: deploy on persistent VMs via SuperNinja rather than stateless serverless functions. Each session has a dedicated VM with full runtime state — no reconstruction step, exact reference resolution on follow-ups.

The trade-off is higher infra cost per session vs serverless. For this use case it's worth it; for single-turn use cases it wouldn't be.

Still early. Happy to discuss the architecture if anyone's solving similar problems.

https://bit.ly/4besn7l
by julius_eth_dev | 2026-03-11 20:00:08+00:00
The hardest part of this policy is the "edited" qualifier. I use LLMs constantly as thinking tools — rubber-ducking architecture decisions, pressure-testing arguments before I post them. The final comment is mine, shaped by my experience and opinions, but the process of arriving at it involved a machine. Drawing a bright line between "I refined my thinking with Claude" and "I pasted Claude's output" seems important but genuinely difficult to enforce. The spirit of the rule is clear though: HN works because people are accountable for what they say, and that breaks down when a comment is optimized for engagement rather than expressing what someone actually thinks.
by ptak_dev | 2026-03-11 20:00:31+00:00
Yes — JetSet AI is in production.

The parts that needed careful engineering vs the parts that were fine to vibe-code:

Flight data integration (live pricing APIs, edge cases): needed careful engineering
Booking deep-link generation: needed careful engineering
Session state management (persistent VM per user): needed careful engineering
The LLM prompt for intent parsing: mostly vibe-coded, iterated quickly
The conversational refinement flow: surprisingly robust with minimal engineering once the state layer was solid
The pattern I've found: the infrastructure decisions (state management, data layer, booking handoff) need deliberate engineering. The AI behavior layer is more forgiving to iteration.

https://bit.ly/4besn7l
by edanm | 2026-03-11 20:00:44+00:00
Despite commenting on this literally five seconds ago in the sibling comment, I hadn't made the connection that if "vav" is V, then using "vav vav" is like "VV" which is like "W". I wonder if this is a real thing.

In any case, I'm pretty sure it's just a coincidence, I don't think it's a stylistic thing, unless I'm missing something.
by verial-lab | 2026-03-11 20:00:49+00:00
I appreciate Karpathy for thinking out loud like this. We all feel the shift toward orchestration — it's on every builder's mind right now. We just haven't seen a UI that fits yet.

I love seeing people experiment with RTS game UIs as agent orchestration interfaces — the metaphor fits (multiple units, fog of war, resource management). Mostly demos so far, but the creative potential is huge.

The biggest challenge is that as LLM costs drop dramatically each year, the number of agents able to be orchestrated grows orders of magnitude. So the UI needs to be able to compress this growing information into something meaningful for effective human steerability. A constant moving target.

What's interesting is that the tooling seems to be moving closer to the metal (CLI, APIs, infrastructure) rather than up toward better visual interfaces.

My bet is that the orchestration infrastructure underneath is more durable than any UI layer. I've been building an orchestration system focused on reusable workflows, observability, and feedback loops — and I think that foundation holds even as the interface keeps changing.
Show HN: Nexus – A 1KB .NET 10 core with <15μs latency for 1M parameters
by NexusCore | 2026-03-11 20:01:11+00:00
I’ve spent the last few weeks pushing the limits of .NET 10 (Native AOT) to see if I could achieve deterministic, hard real-time performance for large-scale parameter indexing.
Today, I hit the 1,000,000 entry milestone with a search latency of ~12.8μs (0.0128ms).
The Architecture (The NANO Standard):
Zero-Allocation: The hot path is entirely heap-free. No GC pauses, no jitter.
Memory-Mapped Index: I’m using a pre-allocated 24MB MMF acting as a "Software-Defined Hardware" surface.
Binary Search: O(log n) lookups on 24-byte aligned structs, optimized for CPU cache-line locality.
1KB Footprint: The core logic is compiled down to a 1KB Native AOT DLL.
The Telemetry Bridge:
To verify the results, I built a decoupled telemetry pipeline. A local Avalonia dashboard reads the MMF via raw pointers and streams the metrics via HTTP/3 (QUIC) to a Next.js/Vercel Edge dashboard.
Live Demo:
You can see the live trace of the 1,000,000 entry index here: telemetry.intelligentaudio.net
I’m happy to answer any questions about the pointer-arithmetic, the MMF-layout, or how I’m bypassing the managed heap entirely.
by SilentM68 | 2026-03-11 20:01:42+00:00
A different perspective on medicine and parasitology & shots. Not a popular topic but I am undergoing my own parasite cleanse (not Ivermectin for the cleanse, at least) for four days now, and I've noticed a change in my sleeping pattern. I'm actually getting more sleep, less tossing and turning :)

Original story archived:
https://archive.ph/KBkoK

Sources of interest:
https://archive.ph/kG2n8
by CrzyLngPwd | 2026-03-11 20:01:55+00:00
Iran said that if they were attacked, then they would attack US bases in the region and close the Strait of Hormuz. None of what has happened should be a surprise to anyone.

The US forces didn't do what they said they would do for those countries hosting their military, which was to protect the host country, leaving many wondering whether having the bases there is worth the risk.

All we need next is Ansar Allah to join in.

The worst part of it all, China has 100's of satellites watching everything, learning US tactics, refuelling and rearming patterns, everything they can.
by unfed-person | 2026-03-11 20:02:06+00:00
I’m building UNFED AI, an open-source decentralized inference network, and I just put up a public testnet.
Core idea: instead of one centralized backend running the full model, inference is distributed across independent nodes. Current testnet lane runs:
Qwen/Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct
split into 5 text shards
I’m focusing on three things:
distributed inference reliability under node churn,
privacy-oriented pipeline design (including MPC components),
transparent operator economics/settlement flow in testnet conditions.

I’d love technical feedback on architecture, bottlenecks, and where this should be simplified.
If anyone wants to run nodes or help test edge cases, I can share registry-specific connection details in Discord (linked on the site).
by neilv | 2026-03-11 20:02:08+00:00
> Furthermore, many candidates seem to forget that an interview is to also learn about the company--I’ve had a few interviews where I was a strong candidate, but the interview changed my mind about who I’d be working for. If your potential employer is dehumanizing you before you’re on the payroll, how will they treat you once hired?

Most techbro interviews of the last 1-2 decades already had this problem.

And techbro workers often have similar attitudes towards employers and even sometimes colleagues.
by gus_massa | 2026-03-11 20:02:16+00:00
Most of the times you don't "accept" results. You have to build something on them, like an extension or a similar version on other field. So usually the first step is try to understand the cryptic published version and do a reproduction or something as close as possible.

The exact reproductions is never published, because journals don't accept them, but if you add a few tweaks here and there you have a nice seed for an article to publish somewhere.

(I may "accept" an article in a field I don't care, but you probably should not thrust my opinion in fields I don't care.)
by jsnell | 2026-03-11 20:02:17+00:00
A practical question: what should readers do when they suspect a comment (or story) is AI-generated? Is that an appropriate reason for flagging? Email the mods? Do nothing?

I've been pretty wary about flagging AI slop that wasn't breaking other guidelines, and by default this will probably make me do it more. But it is a lot harder to be certain about something being AI-written than it is to judge other types of rules violations.
by Heliodex | 2026-03-11 20:02:26+00:00
Not really. The lower tiers are only less efficient on platforms that require purchase through an app store or other payment processor that takes a large cut. Buying through a gift card or through the Roblox website or non-Microsoft Store PC app gives more Robux for the same price <https://www.roblox.com/upgrades/robux>. These increased rates are also balanced to prevent the lower tiers from being less efficient: 800 goes to 1000, whereas 10 000 goes to 11 000.
by lich_king | 2026-03-11 20:02:28+00:00
People who are posting AI comments or setting up AI bots are... people. They can show their ID, but if a website owner doesn't have a way to ban that specific human ID, it's sort of meaningless.

In fact, even if you can ban the human, I'm not sure it solves anything. There are billions of people out there and there's money to be made by monetizing attention. AI-generated content is a way to do that, so there's plenty of takers who don't mind the risk of getting booted from some platform once in a blue moon.
by deniscartin | 2026-03-11 20:02:33+00:00
Hey HN,
I built Aimote, a tool that turns text prompts into rendered motion graphics and animated content.
You describe what you want "a cinematic intro for a tech startup with glowing particles" and it generates the graphics, renders, and gives you a downloadable video. You can then iterate via chat: "make the text bigger, change the colors to blue, add a fade-out."
How it works:
You write a prompt (optionally attach reference images)
AI generates
The server renders it to MP4
If rendering fails, AI auto-fixes the code and retries
You refine via chat with surgical edits r
Formats: landscape (16:9), portrait (9:16), square (1:1), and ultrawide.

Would love feedback on the output quality and what use cases you'd find useful.