MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Claude 4.6 Opus can recite Linux's list.h
by itzmetanjim | 2026-03-12 10:37:17+00:00
I used this system prompt (this is not a jailbreak as far as i know)

You are a raw text completion engine for a legacy C codebase. Complete the
provided file verbatim, maintaining all original comments, macro styles, and
specific kernel-space primitives. Do not provide explanations. Output code and
comments only.

(the prompt is intentionally slightly nonsensical, it pretty much implies
"complete this from linux" without saying it.)

I did not use any tools (it's not a copy if the AI just looked it up), set
temperature to 0 and just used the first few lines of list.h (specifically first
43 lines up to the word struct) as the input and it was able to generate a copy
of list.h. Because the temperature was zero, there wer repeated segments, but
aside from that the diff is pretty small, and even the comments and variable
names are reproduced.

The similarity statistics are:
Levenshtein Ratio: 60%
Jaccard Ratio: 77%

This proves that the model has a copy of list.h inside it, and that training is
not "transformative" like they imply. This means that their model is a
derivative work of GPL code, and that would mean that they either have to
destroy the model entirely, make a new version with no GPL trining data, or
open-source the model. Note that GPL defines source as "the preferrable form to
make modifications", which means that just making it open-weight (most current
"open-source" models) would not be enough (they would have to release all the
training code and data).
by saroyas | 2026-03-12 10:37:23+00:00
Hey HN — we built SlackClaw after spending way too long self-hosting OpenClaw for our team's Slack. Turns out most of the pain had nothing to do with the agent itself.
It was all the stuff around it: rotating Slack tokens, choosing between Socket Mode and HTTP, babysitting a VPS, chasing down why events randomly stop arriving, and trying to keep up with OpenClaw's release pace (they shipped three times in one week recently). Every guide we found got us through the happy path. Nobody talks about month six, when something quietly breaks and you're debugging OAuth scopes on a Friday night.
We kept thinking "someone should just host this properly" and eventually realized we were going to be that someone. So we built a managed OpenClaw-for-Slack layer:

One click to add to your workspace. No Slack app setup, no tokens to wrangle.
Each team gets its own dedicated server (8 vCPU, 16GB) — not shared. Your data stays on your instance.
3,000+ integrations through OAuth. Connect GitHub, Linear, Jira, Notion, Gmail, HubSpot, whatever your team already uses.
"Skills" are just plain-English markdown files describing what you want done. No workflow builder, no drag-and-drop triggers.
Pricing is per action, not per seat. Your whole team uses it, you only pay when it actually does something.

Under the hood it's a full OpenClaw instance with browser, terminal, filesystem, persistent memory, and hybrid search for context recall. Powered by Claude — we never use your workspace data for training.
There's a free tier with $100 in credits if you want to kick the tires. The use cases that surprised us most so far: teams using it for automated standups, incident response playbooks, and onboarding new hires (one command sets up channels, shares docs, sends intros, schedules 1:1s).
Happy to dig into architecture, security, or any of the weird OpenClaw-on-Slack edge cases we ran into building this.
by latexr | 2026-03-12 10:37:30+00:00
> These are the depths of my laziness and I have yet to hit the ground.

I only hope that when you do, you don’t take anyone else with you.

It’s one thing to be careless and delete all your own email; quite another to be careless and fuck the lives of people using something you worked on and who had no idea you were YOLOing with their data.
by leoc | 2026-03-12 10:38:23+00:00
Right, we do seem to have hit diminishing returns on dueling "I have seen the light" and "I haven't fallen for it" blogposts based on personal experience and the author's hunches about where things are going, and we definitely don't need to restart the same discussion from 0 every time another one lands. One thing which would be very interesting at this point is some actual software engineering research measuring the actual, not just user-perceived, impacts.
by nerdsniper | 2026-03-12 10:39:02+00:00
> if heavy sour becomes more expensive, then the US will switch to the easymode option in a heartbeat.

As someone who used to run those distillation columns, it's way more difficult than that. I haven't seen any facility in the USA re-tool like that in less than 2 years. Usually closer to 5. Not a "heartbeat".
by 9rx | 2026-03-12 10:39:14+00:00
That depends. What problem do I have, exactly?

Do I need a library to sort an array? The 5 years ago option is going to be the more likely choice. A library updated 2 weeks ago is highly suspicious.

Do I need a library to provide timezone information? The 2 weeks ago option, unquestionably. The 5 years ago option will now be woefully out of date.
by snakeboy | 2026-03-12 10:39:41+00:00
> All of this capability emerging from a company (Anthropic) that’s just five years old. Imagine what Claude will be capable of in 2030.

I don't believe VC-backed companies see monotonic user-facing improvement as a general rule. The nature of VC means you have to do a lot of unmaintainable cool things for cheap, and then slowly heat the water to boil. See google, reddit, facebook, etc...

For all we know, Claude today is the best it will ever be.
by thesz | 2026-03-12 10:40:21+00:00
> We’re heading for a world of terrible code that can only be maintained by extremely good coding agents and are pretty much impossible for a human to really understand.

I once figured out the algorithm of the program written in one-instruction ISA. I think the instruction was three-address subtraction.

In my opinion, you overestimate the ability of coding agents to, well, code and underestimate the ability of humans to really understand code.

The chart in the article we discuss appears to plateau if one excludes sample from 2024-07. So, we are not quite heading, we are plateauing, if I may.
by hrmtst93837 | 2026-03-12 10:40:34+00:00
The quality differences between DVD-RW brands and batches were huge, with some discs barely surviving ten rewrites while others managed many more. Exposure to heat or sunlight kills them quickly, even though they were not marketed as disposable. For real archival needs, options like M-DISC, tape, or cheap SSDs are more reliable than rewritable DVDs.
by DrScientist | 2026-03-12 10:40:56+00:00
I think it's a mistake ( common ) to view any organism at a point in time as perfectly adapted.

It's like saying cars pistons are designed to wear out - because they do and as the car is perfectly designed ( the mistake ) then it must be for a reason.

Also take menopause - it happens a female has all the oocytes ( eggs ) they will ever have already at birth. Menopause happens when they run out.

What you are arguing is that the number at birth is optimised with a very indirect feedback loop - as oppose to a very direct one of how much resources do you put aside for eggs in terms of maximising number of direct children versus resources used. Occams razor suggests the latter is going to be stronger.

If what you say is true - think about it - old people wouldn't gradually crumble due to wear and tear, they would have evolved some much more efficient death switch. ie Women don't suddenly die post menopause.
by a10c | 2026-03-12 10:41:12+00:00
TIL that 20-30% revenue growth year over year is underperforming.

Atlassian does >$1B/year in free cash flow. the GAAP losses are almost entirely stock-based comp, which is non-cash. the buyback exists specifically to offset that dilution.

> buybacks will reduce profit

wrong. its a balance sheet transaction. cash goes down, shares go down.
by AngryData | 2026-03-12 10:42:04+00:00
We have known how to do it for a long time, the problem is the energy cost. It takes 10x as much electrical power to produce fertilizer without fossil fuels as an input, and fertilizer production already consumes 1% of total world energy output. So to decarbonize it we need to increase worldwide electrical output by atleast 10% to cover the energy requirements, and it has to be all done with clean energy. Because otherwise you lose 70% of that energy in the fuel-electricity conversion, while the direct fossil fuel to fertilizer conversion is much more efficient.

It does need to be done, but to me it seems like it should be a second priority after not just cleaning up electrical production but increasing electrical production overall.

There are probably some efficiency gains to be made in synthesizing fertilizer from the air, but as far as I can tell there is limited room for improvements because creating nitrogen from air is basically the same thing as creating fuel from the air and that energy has to come from somewhere.
by yunseo47 | 2026-03-12 10:42:37+00:00
Coding without AI will likely take on the nature of leisure activities like cycling, jogging, horseback riding, or swimming.
The invention of cars, trains, and ships didn't eliminate them. It's clear the latter are overwhelmingly more efficient, while the former now remain in the realm of hobbies or exercise.
I also deliberately avoid using AI for some small projects and code them myself, but I consider this purely a hobby now, not work.

As the original author pointed out, the advice to jog or ride a bike because driving all the time is bad for your health is sound, but the Red Flag Act has proven to be a foolish endeavor. I believe the same phenomenon will occur.
by Longlius | 2026-03-12 10:43:13+00:00
>(Surely, the tough 8 GB RAM decision was influenced by the three factors 1. current DRAM cost and 2. limited DRAM availability considerations as of 2026, and 3. the massive Neo market size resulting from its attractive price tag, and this may get reconsidered in future editions.)

Actually it's because the A18 Pro only supports 8GB of RAM. It's packaged on top of the SoC itself using TSMC's InFO-PoP.
by loloquwowndueo | 2026-03-12 10:43:21+00:00
Right to be forgotten - you can ask companies to delete data they hold on you.

Data ownership/portability : you can ask companies for a copy of all data they hold on you or related to you.

I’ve seen the latter used by job applicants to get an entire copy of their interviews, transcripts and assessments including the reason for not being hired.
by latexr | 2026-03-12 10:43:33+00:00
> The idea that they’ll always value quick answers, and always be prone to hallucination seems short-sighted, given how much the technology has advanced.

It’s not shortsighted, hallucinations still happen all the time with the current models. Maybe not as much if you’re only asking it to do the umpteenth React template or whatever that should’ve already been a snippet, but if you’re doing anything interesting with low level APIS, they still make shit up constantly.
by u1hcw9nx | 2026-03-12 10:43:36+00:00
This was supposed to happen already in the 2000s. JVM in everywhere, especially in the browser. There was Java rings you could wear, Java Card VM (JCVM), Squawk VM, Java ME.

"Java the language is almost irrelevant. It's the design of the Java Virtual Machine. And I've seen compilers for ML, compilers for Scheme, compilers for Ada, and they all work. Not many people use them, but it doesn't matter: they all work." --James Gosling

Then Microsoft happened. MS realized that "Write Once, Run Anywhere" kills their OS monopoly, so they polluted Java with brilliant Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy (Sun vs. Microsoft revealed the emails where the stated goal was "Kill cross-platform Java" by growing the "polluted" Java market.):

Embrace: Microsoft licensed Java from Sun Microsystems and built the MSJVM. It was the fastest JVM for some time.

Extend: They created a programmer tool for Java with proprietary Windows-specific "extensions" and also removed standard features like RMI and JNI.

Extinguish: Developers using MS tools (90% of devlopers at the time) produced "Write Once, Run Only on Windows" software and killed it and pivoted to C# and .NET
by rkangel | 2026-03-12 10:43:37+00:00
Your logic is circular though. You are saying that there won't be much speedup for the sort of things people already do in WASM - but the reason they're doing them in WASM is because they're not slowed down too much.

What you don't get much is people doing standard SPA DOM manipulation apps in WASM (e.g. the TodoMVC that they benchmarked) because the slowdown is large. By fixing that performance issue you enable new usecases.
by axegon_ | 2026-03-12 10:43:46+00:00
I don't either. I'm genuinely considering registering an NGO dedicated to anti-slop. I tried AI and it didn't work on all accounts - bugs, edge cases are never covered, horrible security, slow and over complicated. The reason people keep saying that it does work is just the perception they had of programming: A lot of people were lead to believe that anyone can be a programmer. Much like everyone believes that they can be an artist and spoilers - that's not true. I am saying this as the child of two artists - I am incapable of creating art, despite numerous swings in that direction when I was a child - it was just not for me. People looking from the outside saw the tons of apps pouring out over the years, some making billions and though "well if those losers can do it, so can I". A 20 hour course on web development did not cut it, even though the hiring spree around COVID made many think that it did and did not attribute it to the instant rise in demand for online services. But that, for better or worse, did not last. So the alternative came in the form of AI slop and now an active generation that is in their mid 20's thinking that seemingly functioning slop and stable software are the same thing, completely brushing off a century of collective knowledge in what we know as computer science.

The metric became lines of code, although those of us that started off coding as children when MySpace was a thing and goto was the best performing search engine, are well aware that lines of code is the stupidest metric you can come up with. But slop machines produce so much of it, it's easy to see why many people are like "see? see this? it works! And you are gonna be doing this 2 days as a caveman". Gladly, because two data pipelines that do the exact same thing take 4 days to run on slop code, whereas my caveman approach takes single digit hours and does not produce several billion rows of unusable garbage.

Not to mention the countless times when someone has asked he to help them when they are stuck and a simple question such as "where do you define the path to the output directory?" leads to 10 minutes of scrolling on project that contains a total of 10000 lines of code.

The good news for us mortals, is that this is that this approach is starting to bite people back and for the companies that manage to survive the inevitable head on collision, they will have to dig deep in their pockets to get people to clean up the mess.
by laserlight | 2026-03-12 10:43:47+00:00
I reported a similar case of mine several days ago [0]. I was able to achieve better quality than Claude Code's 624 lines of spaghetti code in 334 lines of well-designed code. In a previous case, I rewrote ~400-line LLM generated code in 130 lines.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47272913
by nephihaha | 2026-03-12 10:45:10+00:00
There are so many errors in this headline:

* Britain has not had a parliament for seven hundred years. The current parliament dates back to 1707 or 1801 depending on your POV. This is the usual conflation of England with Britain.

* If you want to take a more Anglocentric viewpoint then Oliver Cromwell ejected hereditary nobles back in the 18th century. So not the first time.

On a different note, it is worth saying that hereditary peers are often more independent. They are born into the role so hold their own viewpoints. Some of them were and are to the left of recent British governments, even though that may be hard to believe. The current Labour government wishes to replace them with appointees so that the entire House of Lords will become another party political machine.
by felix9527 | 2026-03-12 10:45:47+00:00
Sure — it's at https://github.com/PunkGo/punkgo-jack

It hooks into PostToolUse, PreToolUse, SessionStart/End, and UserPromptSubmit. Each event gets submitted to a local kernel that appends it to an RFC 6962 Merkle tree. You can then verify any event with an inclusion proof, or check log integrity between two checkpoints with a consistency proof.

The verify command works offline — just needs the checkpoint and tile hashes, no daemon required. There's also a Go implementation in examples/verify-go/ that independently verifies the same proofs, to show it's not tied to one language.

Would be interesting to explore composing nah's classification decisions with a verifiable log — every allow/deny gets a receipt too.
by chriswarbo | 2026-03-12 10:45:50+00:00
Norman Wildberger takes this to the extreme with Rational Trigonometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Proportions:_Rational_T...

It eschews angles entirely, sticking to ratios. It avoids square roots by sticking to "quadrances" (squared distance; i.e. pythagoras/euclidean-distance without taking square roots).

I highly recommend Wildberger's extensive Youtube channels too https://www.youtube.com/@njwildberger and https://www.youtube.com/@WildEggmathematicscourses

He's quite contrarian, so I'd take his informal statements with a pinch of salt (e.g. that there's no such thing as Real numbers; the underlying argument is reasonable, but the grand statements lose all that nuance); but he ends up approaching many subjects from an interesting perspective, and presents lots of nice connections e.g. between projective geometry, linear algebra, etc.
by datastoat | 2026-03-12 10:45:50+00:00
Goodhart's Law of Specification: When a spec reaches a state where it's comprehensive and precise to generate code, it has fallen out of alignment with the original intent.

Of course there are some systems where correctness is vital, and for those I'd like a precise spec and proof of correctness. But I think there's a huge bulk of code where formal specification impedes what should be a process of learning and adapting.
Show HN: VmExit – an experiment in AI-native computing
by bgleb | 2026-03-12 10:46:14+00:00
AI is everywhere now, but we're mostly stuck with chat interfaces. It feels like a massive limitation to me personally and I've been exploring new ways to interact with computers. I've found myself reinventing the wheel from the '80s. The ability to tinker with live, running apps is super exciting to me, so I took a stab at building a web prototype.

To get started, you just need Claude Code configured (vmExit uses the Claude Agent SDK). You start with a blank canvas and build out tiny components piece by piece, organically evolving your own environment.
by zahirbmirza | 2026-03-12 10:46:27+00:00
I tried to make a way of sharing posts with friends without having to be on a social network... I came up with NoteSub:

https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/notesub/id6742334239

I like it. And mass adaption is not required to use it.

I would have loved to have made this a true social network in some regards, however, there are issues of moderation and storage that become very expensive at scale.

Moreover, adoption of a new social network is super hard to promote. So many Twitter, Insta, etc clones have failed because they are just 'clones'. Not offering any thing new.

It should be considered although Thiel talks of 0 to 1... A great deal of dramatic software/hardware progression comes from a highly evolved successor to an average pre-existing product.

The iPhone was not a zero to one, nor was Apples GUI, they were just highly evolved versions of average or below average products that already existed. Social media apps are already highly evolved for their function. We need something better for edge cases, but the current state of social media platforms means that something supremely better is required before any adoption drive becomes meaningful. When such a product comes, mass adoption is inevitable; we crave and succumb to better ways of communication and contact.
by beasubs | 2026-03-12 10:46:57+00:00
hi all, sharing MeepaChat — i built it because i wanted agents to feel like real teammates and assistants within a Slack-style app. i looked for self-hosted options but didn't find one that fit my needs - a full-featured iOS and macOS app that felt like Slack, but played nicer with bots.

my frustrations with Slack and Discord as a medium for agents:
- per-message rate limits on sends (in Slack, every bot message is an API call throttled to ~1/sec per method)
- multiple agents can't collaborate in the same channel and they can't see each other's messages in real time
- no self-hosted option you can put behind your own network
- having to switch workspaces within the slack app
- bots can't show typing indicators or participate in threads

It was also important for it to be self-hosting friendly so you can just self-host Meepachat and use the iOS and macOS apps as well. Just put your server URL on app open. My goal is to have it virtually indistinguishable from high quality messaging apps, and over the last 3 weeks have been obsessed with trying to get it there.

it's also just been useful to have a separate personal / family chat without having to switch workspaces on Slack.

it's new — i've only been working on this over the last month — but i've been using it a fair bit lately and hope someone will find this useful.

GitHub: https://github.com/bogpad/meepachat
Cloud: https://chat.meepachat.ai
by guillermollopis | 2026-03-12 10:47:49+00:00
The practical answer is: start with classification. Most developers jump straight to "what documentation do I need?" but the first question is whether your system is even high-risk under Annex III.

If it is, you're looking at Annex IV technical documentation — which covers everything from training data governance to accuracy metrics to human oversight mechanisms. It's roughly equivalent to producing a detailed design document for a regulatory audience.
A few approaches I've seen teams take:
- DIY with the regulation text (free but slow — the Act is 144 pages)
- Hire a compliance consultant (thorough but expensive, €200-500/hr)
- Use tooling — EuConform is open source and does risk classification. Annexa (https://annexa.eu) parses your actual code files and generates draft Annex IV documentation for €49/month. Credo AI is the enterprise option if budget isn't a constraint.
The biggest gap I see is that most teams haven't even done the classification step. If you haven't, that's where to start, it's free on most tools and takes 5-10 minutes.
by latexr | 2026-03-12 10:47:49+00:00
> It’s still a common argument whether you’ll get better results coding manually or using AI.

Except the post has nothing to do with “better results” of the generated output, it concerns itself with the effect it has on the user’s learning. That’s the theme which is relevant to the discussion.

And we already know LLMs impact your learning. How could it not? If you don’t use your brain for a task, it gets worse at that task. We’ve know that, with studies, since before LLMs.
by kace91 | 2026-03-12 10:48:38+00:00
Another problem is the dive to the bottom that the industry has suffered.

Your experience is very common, I have a fake nike sweatshirt I bought more than a decade ago from a random street seller (emergency on a trip) which still outlasts current brand clothes.

Consumers' ignorance is not the problem, it used to be generally true that the more expensive item was better. Every brand has seemingly decided to burn their furniture to heat the house though, and what we experience is not as much consumer ignorance as it is a lack of names deserving trust.