MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xg15 | 2026-03-13 22:20:32+00:00
> because for most people a phone is not a toy (or at least, not just a toy) - it has their communications history, their bank information, their passwords, any many more. And it's really easy to steal people's phones on the subway. This isn't about freedom of computing, this is about the fact that an iPhone in BFU is nearly as secure as a GrapheneOS phone.

If that were the entire reason, the straight-forward thing would be to give the user tools to secure the phone, such as setting a password and encrypting data based on that password.

It wouldn't make sense to spent enormous amounts of resources to "secure" the phone against its own user, yet that is what they do.

I think a more honest explanation is that they aren't just securing their own corporate power, but also the power and business models of all kinds of app developers - this way, developers can sell trivial UI improvements as "premium features" or even put in deliberate anti-features and the user can't do anything about it.

Games can put in loot boxes and microtransactions, YouTube can declare that keeping a song playing and putting the phone away is a premium feature and movie rightsholders can decide the exact circumstances under which a movie may be watched.

That's all before the ubiquitous tracking and data collection.

Everyone wins, except the user...

> and just wants to be able to open LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs without having their 401k get drained.

So do I, even if I'm a tinkerer. That's what sane permission settings and - if you like - a locked bootloader are for. What you don't need for that is to restrict the owner from unlocking the bootloader.
by KaiserPro | 2026-03-13 22:20:54+00:00
I don't really think thats true.

The deal with tesla is that there is a relatively small employer pool, so you can be fairly bad employer but still get good outcomes. The same with spaceX. Sure early tesla had some stories about it being fun, but there was/is a darkside.

The issue with xAI is that researchers have a whole bunch of other employers to choose from. Even at meta, where it used to be fairly nice for researchers, the pressure of "delivering" every 6 months lead to bad outcomes. Having someone single you out for what ever reason the boss had a bad day, is not how good research gets done.

We have seen (A few of my friends were at twitter when it was taken over) that Musk has a somewhat unusual approach to managing staff (ie camping at work). Some researcher love that, assuming that they have peace to research, and are listened to. But a lot don't.
by adolph | 2026-03-13 22:22:26+00:00
That looks like a very cool option and effort. Like the Chinese balloons that overflew the US in the last (few?) years, it would likely be challenging to shoot down. Otoh, it might cause some diplomatic disagreements about overflight.

There are a number of competing theories in international law, with varying
criteria, to delineate the upper limit delineating airspace versus outer
space. This debate is unsettled. [0]

There may also be some technical challenges having to do with beamforming rf to the vehicle. Starshield like Starlink has the predictability of orbital vehicles for tracking. It would be interesting to understand how a ground station focuses on the solar glider.

0. https://opil.ouplaw.com/display/10.1093/law:epil/97801992316...
Redis for AI Agent Collaboration
by pavlikenemy | 2026-03-13 22:22:38+00:00
I've been thinking about multi-agent collaboration. There are already ways to do it: MCPs, APIs, shared codebases, but they all require a lot of setup. I tried enabling coordination with less development and maintenance overhead.

I spun up a Redis instance and told my Cursor agent:

You're the leader in a multi-agent environment. Here's a Redis connection string you'll use for coordination. Generate a prompt describing how to communicate: how a new worker announces itself, where to get tasks, how to report status, how to resolve blockers. I'll pass this to other workers and won't speak to them after. Split tasks into subtasks and delegate

It generated a prompt which served as a coordination protocol, and I passed it as-is to 3 more agents with that as their system prompt. Then I gave the leader a task: build an app where users upload images and search them semantically: backend, frontend, tests, and a setup doc.

It accomplished the task. The leader delegated work, reviewed output, asked for fixes, and reported back to me. Not perfect, but the coordination held. The issues I saw felt like my task prompting, not the leader-worker setup itself.

The key insight: the prompt IS the communication protocol. You give each agent Redis tools and a prompt that describes the rules: how to announce yourself, where to pick up tasks, how to report back. If you want to change how it works, you only update the prompt which seems to me much easier than to (vibe)code.

Redis turns out to be a decent fit for this:

- useful data structures out of the box: key-value, sets, streams, pub/sub

- built-in auth

- easy to scale the number of agents

- most agents can already connect via redis-cli

- multiple agents can work in parallel without extra setup

The main downsides:

- state is lost if it crashes

- limited observability

- the system prompt needs to be carefully validated

For provisioning I used a side project of mine, Dev2Cloud (https://dev2.cloud) which can get you a Redis instance in seconds. I'm happy to share some API keys.

Has anyone done something similar? Curious what coordination approaches people have tried.
by NeutralCrane | 2026-03-13 22:22:41+00:00
The cheapest part of the research is publicly funded. The extreme costs come from taking the outputs of public research and trialing and developing it into a viable drug.

Pharma profits also aren’t particularly noteworthy. Their revenues are, because of the ubiquity of their need, but profit margins for Pharma is pretty middle of the road compared to other industries.
by servo_sausage | 2026-03-13 22:23:04+00:00
I find it more surprising that the common understanding has shifted away from "wikis are crap for anything new or political".

As soon as there is a plausible agenda for selecting a narrative the way Wikipedia works we should be sceptical.

For recent examples, everything to do with Biden and family, and Gamergate. These pages are still full of discussion; and what's written is more ideological than factual. You can follow these pages to see how an in-group selects a narrative.

And these topics are not nearly as controversial as race, feminism, or transgender topics.
by orky56 | 2026-03-13 22:23:27+00:00
Congrats on the launch. Few pieces of feedback that are similar in nature to what has already been shared but unique in terms of solutions.

1) The chat interface as shared in the video is a prime starting point to capture intent but anchors viewers to what Spine is all about. Try a show-tell-show approach where you can demonstrate (ideally above the fold) a compelling output, credits used and agents leverages, and THEN the simple prompt used to get it all started. Let's be real: the chat interface is not the a-ha moment. It's what you get out of it, the orchestration that happens behind the scenes, and finally the familiar chat interface that kicks it all off.

2) Who is the target persona for this? The benchmark accolade is great for the technical audience but they may not care about doing everything in the browser. The non-technical audience may like the browser but prefers examples of other companies and use cases are make the technical more accessible. The board concept helps the abstraction layer of understanding what is produced by the agents but the missing piece is memorializing the decision-making where human in the loop needs something to grasp & share.
by zozbot234 | 2026-03-13 22:23:29+00:00
You can do this but you have to remove the battery and hook up the circuitry to external power. This practically turns the phone into a glorified SBC. It may still be worth it since there's more of a mass market for phones than SBCs (and phones come with lots of extra hardware components that can be useful) but it's not that huge of a win.
Ask HN: Why isn't there an open-source model trained by the community?
by mittermayr | 2026-03-13 22:23:37+00:00
Couldn't find anything online, but just wondered what the chances would be, if, much like SETI at the time, people would share some of their GPU processing time (small slots, here and there, when underutilized) to train an open-source community-owned model? Basically a model by the people, for the people :)

I wonder for how much longer we'll get to see (high quality) open models be shared freely, it's already quite a limited landscape.

Would there even be enough GPU power? Would something like it be doable with a reasonably realistic community effort? The human part of training could also be a part of this effort, which is yet another thing a single company is having to pay a lot of money for (well, I guess not anymore, as everyone is now helping out for free, by using the hosted LLMs).

Then, of course the problem of the data, not sure how far off the data private companies have bought, stolen, ...found is from what's available out there.

Curious if anyone more involved in with the topic has a thought or two about it.
by kstrauser | 2026-03-13 22:24:08+00:00
As I write this, the top Amazon search for "windows laptop" is a

> Lenovo IdeaPad 15.6 inch Business Laptop with Microsoft 365 • 2026 Edition • Intel Core • Wi-Fi 6 • 1.1TB Storage (1TB OneDrive + 128GB SSD) • Windows 11

The person who approved describing its 128GB storage as 1.1TB should be hanged.

The CPU also has[0] 31% of the single core and 14% of the CPU Mark rating. The screen has 220 nits (vs 500) brightness, comes with 4GB of RAM, and weighs 30% more. At least it's half price, though.

The shopping situation for Windows laptops is utterly dire.

[0]https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/6268vs4227/Apple-A18-Pr...
by hermitcrab | 2026-03-13 22:24:16+00:00
>The human just approves or dismisses in one click.

A busy engineer trying to hit a deadline is just going to do the easiest thing, aren't they?

Also there is all sorts of tacit knowledge that goes into a decision and I just don't think you are going to capture this automatically.

(I worked on it 25 years ago, rather than for 25 years.)
by threecheese | 2026-03-13 22:24:54+00:00
You can really see the limitations of qwen3.5:9b in reasoning traces- it’s fascinating. When a question “goes bad”, sometimes the thinking tokens are WILD - it’s like watching the Poirot after a head injury.

Example: “what is the air speed velocity of a swallow?” - qwen knew it was a Monty Python gag, but couldnt and didnt figure out which one.
by mediaman | 2026-03-13 22:25:32+00:00
I'm unclear what statement this is trying to make.

Is it meant to draw equivalence between crypto and Tesla/SpaceX? That each has roughly similar (i.e., low) value to humanity, or value as businesses?

Is it that the metric of whether a person makes others money is invalid?

The comment seems coy, possibly to avoid making any claim at all, but it must not be that because that wouldn't be very sporting.
by BizarroLand | 2026-03-13 22:25:47+00:00
Not islanding, overproduction, where the grid owner is trying to accurately manage decreasing production to match need.

Solar is more difficult for this as when a grid is largely solar the local producers and grid producers will tend to have simultaneous excess and need in synchronous day/night cycles, so the grid operator would need as much accurate and real time data as can be had so that they would know how much and when to charge batteries or to otherwise dispose of unneeded waste electricity for their local area.
by onion2k | 2026-03-13 22:25:49+00:00
Reddit removes your posts if you're a new account. HN restricts Show HN for new users. Twitter/X algorithm buries you unless you already have followers.

Be an active and useful member of a community before trying to leverage that community for your own gain. It's not a bad trade.

Or just pay. That's literally why 95% of founders raise VC money. They can build the app on their own. The money is needed to spread the word. You may have seen YouTube ads for Monday, Base44, etc. This is how the cash gets spent.
by nemothekid | 2026-03-13 22:25:49+00:00
No disrespect to the Google Deepmind team, but I meant it as a meme. I do not believe most Google employees work 2 hours a day.

The Google Deepminds are incredibly smart - I just find it important to point out that the xAI guys spent a year assured they would beat Google because they slept in tents that they made in the office.
by AznHisoka | 2026-03-13 22:26:24+00:00
There's loads of companies that use Discord, but they all seem to be blockchain/gaming companies [1]

I think Discord has the same problem that FB faced when it tried to launch their FB Workplace product. It has the perception of being "fun" and not serious/professional.

If I were you, I'd pay the $$$ for Slack. The ability to search past conversations has saved me hours of productivity and well worth it

[1] https://bloomberry.com/data/discord/
by nanookclaw | 2026-03-13 22:26:24+00:00
To your question about how others approach multi-step AI work beyond coding: I run an autonomous agent on OpenClaw that handles multi-day projects through structured state files and round-robin work loops. No visual canvas, but the same core pattern you discovered — externalizing context to persistent storage instead of holding it in memory.

The agent writes intermediate results to JSON state files and markdown logs between sessions. Each new session reads state from disk, picks up where the last one left off, and writes results back. Context never degrades because it is never held in a context window across boundaries — it is always reconstructed from structured files.

What breaks first: concurrent writes. When multiple cron-triggered sessions modify the same state file, you get race conditions. Your canvas model likely handles this more gracefully since blocks have defined ownership. For flat files the solution has been build locks and TTLs, which works but feels like reinventing what a proper DAG execution engine gives you for free.

The other thing that resonated: agents running longer when they delegate to blocks. Same pattern — my agent runs 58-minute work sessions and stays productive because it offloads all state to disk. The agent itself is stateless between sessions. The workspace IS the memory.
by chipotle_coyote | 2026-03-13 22:26:29+00:00
> Have you used AI to write documentation for software?

Hi. I have edited AI-generated first drafts of documentation -- in the last few months, so we are not talking about old and moldy models -- and describing the performance as "extremely well" is exceedingly generous. Large language models write documentation the same way they do all tasks, i.e., through statistical computation of the most likely output. So, in no particular order:

- AI-authored documentation is not aware of your house style guide. (No, giving it your style guide will not help.)

- AI-authored documentation will not match your house voice. (No, saying "please write this in the voice of the other documentation in this repo" will not help.)

- The generated documentation will tend to be extremely generic and repetitive, often effectively duplicating other work in your documentation repo.

- Internal links to other pages will often be incorrect.

- Summaries will often be superfluous.

- It will love "here is a common problem and here is how to fix it" sections, whether or not that's appropriate for the kind of document it's writing. (It won't distinguish reliably between tutorial documentation, reference documentation, and cookbook articles.)

- The common problems it tells you how to fix are sometimes imagined and frequently not actually problems worth documenting.

- It's subject to unnecessary digression, e.g., while writing a high-level overview of how to accomplish a task, it will mention that using version control is a good idea, then detour for a hundred lines giving you a quick introduction to Git.

As for using AI "to generate deep research reports by scouring the internet", that sounds like an incredibly fraught idea. LLMs are not doing searches, they are doing statistical computation of likely results. In practice the results of that computation and a web search frequently line up, but "frequently" is not good enough for "deep research": the fewer points of reference for a complex query there are in an LLM's training corpus, the more likely it is to generate a bullshit answer delivered with a veneer of absolute confidence. Perhaps you can make the case that that's still a good place to start, but it is absolutely not something to rely on.
by ajkjk | 2026-03-13 22:26:32+00:00
I think it's just a perspective shift. The main idea is that you can't ever measure a real number, only an approximation to one, so if two values differ by less than the resolution of your measurement they are effectively the same. For example consider the derivative f(x+dx) = f(x) + f'(x) dx + O(dx^2). The analysis version of the derivative says that in the limit dx -> 0 the O(dx^2) part vanishes and so the limit [f(x+dx)-f(x)]/dx = f'(x). The 'finitist' version would be something like: for a sufficiently small dx, the third term is of order dx^2, so pick a value of dx small enough that dx^2 is below your 'resolution', and then the derivative f'(x) is indistinguishable from [f(x+dx)-f(x)]/dx, without a reference to the concept of a limit.
by david_allison | 2026-03-13 22:27:37+00:00
> Nothing (reasonable) can protect against direct lightning strikes

Belkin make a number of surge protectors which offer a connected equipment warranty in the UK. Admittedly: financial protection, not data protection, but I felt it was worthwhile for the peace of mind.

https://www.belkin.com/id/p/6-outlet-surge-protection-strip-...
by AstroBen | 2026-03-13 22:27:51+00:00
If people who open sourced their code were told: "just know that by making this public, in 5 years from now tech companies are going to use it to threaten your livelihood and take away the things you enjoy most about programming. It doesn't matter what license you put on it - they'll still use it."

How many would still do it?

Feels like a bit of a bait and switch.

Of course this doesnt apply to those most excited about the tech. Weird coincidence.
Show HN: Open-Source Perplexity Comet and ChatGPT Atlas
by a8hi | 2026-03-13 22:27:55+00:00
We built a browser agent into the chrome sidebar for fun!

You tell it what to do and it takes over your local browser like clicking, typing, filling out forms.

Instead of downloading Perplexity Comet or ChatGPT Atlas, you can use this on any Chromium-based browser for free. Just plug in your API key and go.

We use it daily to fill out forms and simple applications. It's surprisingly handy.
by NeutralCrane | 2026-03-13 22:27:56+00:00
IP as a concept has always been equal parts dystopian and farcical, and efforts to enforce it have become increasingly strained over time. Property requires scarcity. Ideas aren’t scarce. My consumption of an idea is affected by your consumption of an idea.

AI has simply increased the intensity of this friction between IP and reality to a degree that it can’t be ignored or patched over any longer.
by alex1138 | 2026-03-13 22:27:59+00:00
As an aside that quote from MZ does bother me. There's more to making a web-scale human rights respecting (because it has to, it's the internet, social media needs guidelines) than just making money (which Zuck doesn't seem to care much about anyway if he's sinking apparently billions into metaverse while having no account support)

Of course he would only see it through the lens of cash. I have no idea how profitable Twitter was under Dorsey but it felt the spirit of the company at first was relatively neutral, it was a tool, it was what Jack came up with

Zuck replaced people's email addresses[1], the feed has been wildly unchronological for years. Fix some of those problems wrt. lack of user respect and maybe you can make statements like "all else being equal, clown car goal mine". Or was it "dumb fucks"[2]?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122
by g947o | 2026-03-13 22:28:33+00:00
> Recruiters have been contacting unsuccessful candidates from previous interviews and assessments to offer them jobs, often on better financial terms, the people said.

I'm not sure those candidates would want to work for xAI after seeing the news and everything unless they desperately need a job right now.

It's not hard to imagine getting laid off or fired weeks if not days after joining the company.
by trhway | 2026-03-13 22:28:54+00:00
and the highest heart rate belongs to the smallest mammal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruscan_shrew

"The Etruscan shrew has a very fast heart beating rate, up to 1511 beats/min (25 beats/s) and a relatively large heart muscle mass, 1.2% of body weight."

(to illustrate - machine guns typically do 600-900 rounds/min)

I wonder whose muscle fiber is stronger per unit mass - the whale's or the shrew's...
by toniantunovi | 2026-03-13 22:28:59+00:00
When a tool flags 8 issues on clean code and 8 issues on broken code, it's not a reviewer, it's a random number generator with a UI. The approach we've found more tractable is to separate concerns: let deterministic tools (linters, SAST, SCA) handle what they're definitively good at - style, known vuln patterns, dependency CVEs, secrets and reserve the AI layer for things humans actually need help reasoning about. Running this locally as a pre-push or CI step means you catch the boring 80% before it ever reaches a $25 AI review. You're not paying Claude to tell you your import is unused - you're paying it to reason about whether your auth flow has a TOCTOU issue. That's a very different and much more valuable question.
by tempaccount5050 | 2026-03-13 22:29:02+00:00
Not OP but I had an XML file with inconsistent formatting for album releases. I wanted to extract YouTube links from it, but the formatting was different from album to album. Nothing you could regex or filter manually. I shoved it all into a DB, looked up the album, then gave the xml to a local LLM and said "give me the song/YouTube pairs from this DB entry". Worked like a charm.
by ajkjk | 2026-03-13 22:30:04+00:00
That's absurd. First because nobody uses the word 'sociopath' to mean 'mentally ill', they are using it as a moral judgment / to describe a type of amoral person. Second because the reason one negatively characterized the mechanisms of capitalism is because they are not, like, immutable laws of the universe, but rather things that society has quite a bit of control over (whether or not it currently knows how to exercise that control).

(incidentally I disagree with the sociopath characterization anyway; I'm just contesting the weird use of the word ableist)
by applfanboysbgon | 2026-03-13 22:30:49+00:00
It's a function of the economy going in the shitter, with food and housing prices tripling or quadrupling while wages go up 5 or 10%. People want to be paid for their work because they can't afford to pay rent giving gifts away, and hustling is the way to survive because there aren't enough jobs or even if they have a job it's not enough.
by mindcrime | 2026-03-13 22:30:57+00:00
This has definitely been discussed. There have even been some projects, although I haven't checked on the status of any of them lately. As best as I can recall, there are some specific structural reasons why it's hard to train LLM's this way, but I don't recall all the details offhand.

https://www.google.com/search?q=distributed+model+training+s...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35799843

https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/18q6...

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1gtnxgd/wha...

https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/wiki/Using-BOINC-for-AI

https://the-decoder.com/ai-startup-prime-intellect-trains-fi...