MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Everyone is focusing on AI, we're focusing on humans
by ayoubdrissi | 2026-03-14 21:39:14+00:00
Well, as the title says, it seems that everyone is looking to build something AI related. I guess it’s the AI bubble. While AI is great in many industries, in language learning and exchange we believe humans are the core. Especially when wanting to achieve fluency. Talking to natives cannot be replaced by anything unless there is a very sophisticated AI that looks entirely like a human, acts like one, has the culture, and everything comes into place, which I believe is still too far away.

All I see right now are sloppy AI language learning buddies. At Lengpal we believe in culture, the spirit of the language, and the fun. Nothing in the world can replace interaction with another human being, learning about them, their language, and their culture.

So we built something that we thought was missing: a simple video chat tool for language exchange. Think of it as Google Meet but specifically for language exchange. It still surprises me that there is no such tool like this in the market. What could be the reason? Are we missing anything?

We know that language exchange is a big market. People do in-person exchanges every day worldwide. Hundreds of posts are published in language groups where people look for partners to exchange languages over video. But still, you only have Google Meet or Zoom, which were not built for this.

They are missing one important tool, which is a timer. Not just a running timer, but one that tells you what language is being practiced. They are also missing other important tools that help with language exchange. We have a whole roadmap for this.

For now, we built the MVP and we want to validate the idea. Then maybe this could be the next big thing in language learning and exchange.

https://lengpal.com/
by dh2022 | 2026-03-14 21:39:17+00:00
I beg to differ. The collapse of USSR was 100% caused by internal causes.

First was the abominable low productivity in oil/gas and agricultural sectors from 1950s through 1980s.

Then came the corruption of Brezhnev era. Andropov tried to get some reforms going: first against corruption and then some Chinese-style economic changes. But Andropov died very quickly.

Eventually came Gorbachev- who had good intentions. Unfortunately he prioritized political reforms over economic. He wanted economic reforms with no pain, something to show his people some progress. Unfortunately that was impossible so he ended up with some half baked ideas (like limit alcohol sales. Or letting factory managers keep their profits expecting the managers to invest profits in new technology- managers used the profits to pay themselves. Or introduce free markets pricing between factories-when managers complained they had to pay market prices on inputs and nobody were buying their outputs the result was to subsidize factories for both inputs and outputs)

The result of these Econ reforms was that the Soviet state was running out of money. (A humanitarian policy was that for the first time in Russia’s history bad agricultural results did not result in famine-for the first time the govt bought food on the international market paying in Western currencies)

Add a few ambitious politicians who did not want to take orders from the center (Yeltsin being the principal example, but also Kravchuk) and the process of dissolution already started by the Baltic independence could only end with total collapse.

The shock therapy you mention was designed, advocated, and ultimately implemented by Gaidar - a Soviet economist fully trained by the Soviet state.

Sorry for the long reply. If you are interested in this topic I recommend reading two books, both called “Collapse” one written by Gaidar, the other one written by Zubok.
by pdpi | 2026-03-14 21:39:27+00:00
DST shenanigans aside (we're in the "US has changed but Europe hasn't" window), 10:00 in SF is 18:00 in London. Meaning their peak time window is 13:00–19:00 London time, or 14:00–20:00 Berlin time.

So us European folks get promotional rates during the morning and evening.

EDIT: Actually, because the promo ends at the end of March, it'll all be within DST shenanigans. So peak times are 12:00–18:00 London, 13:00–19:00 Berlin.
by steve_adams_86 | 2026-03-14 21:39:36+00:00
3d printing is a great analog because there are so many critical considerations that are often missed or can't be accounted for in the prototype, but, it's alright because it's a prototype. The strain testing, durability, manufacturing at scale; none of that is properly addressed. Those might involved some serious, expensive challenges, too. But it's alright because you've got something in your hand that informs you whether or not those challenges are worth contending with. I really love this about LLMs and 3d printing.
by verteu | 2026-03-14 21:40:47+00:00
> if I could find a single instance of someone willing to vouch or share insight on having filled out a BLS survey, that'd cure a healthy chunk of skepticism

It comes from the Census bureau, a letter like this: https://old.reddit.com/r/frederickmd/comments/1p1j1my/did_an...

https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=%22current+population+...

They only reach ~100k unique households per year, so you'd need to survey a few hundred people to find a respondent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_Population_Survey#Meth...

> Note, I'm in a massive sceptical shit phase at the moment

How might one distinguish such "scepticism" from ignorance?
by Analemma_ | 2026-03-14 21:40:59+00:00
Long ago in the ancient days of punchcards and IBM mainframes, you’d write your programs during the day, then submit them to run overnight and pick up your results in the morning. It would be funny and sort of romantic if time-based LLM pricing returned us to that: write your specs all day, run agents on them overnight, check out the results in the morning.
by da_chicken | 2026-03-14 21:41:05+00:00
Eh, this escaping problem was basically solved ages ago.

If we really wanted to make a UTF-8 data interchange format that needs minimal escaping, we already have ␜ (FS File Separator U+001C), ␝ (GS Group Separator U+001D), ␞ (RS Row Separator U+001E), ␟ (US Unit Separator U+001F). The problem is that they suck to type out so they suck for character based interchange. But we could add them to that emoji keyboard widget on modern OSs that usually gets bound to <Meta> + <.>.

But if we put those someplace people could easily type them, that resolved the problem.

But, binary data? Eh, that really should be transmitted as binary data and not as data encoded in a character format. Like not only not using Base64, but also not using a character representation of a byte stream like "0x89504E470D0A1A0A...". Instead you should send a byte stream as a separate file.

So we need a way to combine a bunch of files into a streaming, compressed format.

And the thing is, we already have that format. It's .tar.lz4!
by cd_mkdir | 2026-03-14 21:41:34+00:00
Not a lawyer, so the Go-To-Market side in the legal space has been a steep learning curve. If anyone here has experience selling/deploying air-gapped, on-prem solutions to highly risk-averse, non-technical clients (like law firms), I would love to hear your battle stories.

Happy to answer any questions about the math, the OCR pipeline, or the architecture!

Sandbox link again: https://exitprotocols.com/simulation/uplink/
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-03-14 21:41:58+00:00
> I'm UBI-curious, but surely inflation would be inevitable if everyone suddenly had $x more disposable income per year?

The money doesn't come from nowhere. It's a transfer payment. People who make a below average amount of money receive less than they're paying in tax, people who make an above average amount still receive the UBI but then the UBI is less than the amount of taxes they pay.

The result is not that "everyone has $x more disposable income per year" -- it's $0 on average, because lower income people have a little more and higher income people have a little less.

Notice that the existing welfare system already does this, but in the process creates a bunch of perverse incentives and income cliffs (you lose your benefits if you take a job or work more hours), leading to de facto marginal tax rates that are often >50% on lower income people when you account for benefits phase outs and in some cases they're >100%, i.e. if you make more money you make less money.

> Landlords and grocery stores and everyone else would raise prices because they know people can afford it.

That isn't how competitive markets work. If people had more money and a grocery store tried to raise prices, people would go across the street to the other grocery store.

It only works like that for products with fixed supply, i.e. things you can't make more of if the demand for them increases, because then if people have more money they have to outbid each other instead of sellers just producing more of what people are buying. This is one of the reasons zoning density restrictions screw people so hard -- land has fixed supply but housing doesn't, because you can build more than one housing unit on a piece of land. Unless the government bans that and mandates one unit per plot. Then people have to outbid each other. But your problem then is that, not people having more money. Notice that the same thing happens there if people get more money for any reason, e.g. more people go to college or the economy improves. It's a major problem that needs to be fixed regardless of what you use for transfer payments or if you do them at all.

> Who decides who gets to buy the best properties on Earth if money is no longer a factor?

The premise of that has always been pretty ridiculous. You can reduce the scarcity of some resource by making it more abundant, and that's generally a good thing. Good luck removing all scarcity from all resources. That's not a real thing.
by sequoia | 2026-03-14 21:42:00+00:00
> There’s no more or less dignity to it than being a waitress or checkout clerk.

Do you imagine this is how the workers feel about it? Do you think they tell their friends "I seduce western men online for pennies an hour" the same way they'd say "I am a waitress?" You can ignore this fact if you wish, but these jobs carry a social stigma and most people would prefer not to role play intimacy with men online if there were another option.

"Sex work is work" is like saying slavery could theoretically be OK under some circumstances (We're all born under legal obligations, how is slavery different etc etc.). A tortured theoretical argument could be made to support either of these, but in reality we know that slavery is unconscionable because of the indignity and brutality of it, regardless of theory. "Sex work" is the same: in reality it is a dangerous and unpleasant job (that overlaps with slavery a lot, incidentally) done mostly be vulnerable women, and that they're often abused and left injured by it. See this article before you go saying prostitution is benign and harmless, this stance is divorced from reality: https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/human-trafficki...
by embedding-shape | 2026-03-14 21:43:08+00:00
Does it make sense that continents share the same moment (but obviously different times)? I'm assuming they have services hosted everywhere, the services in the US doesn't have the same peak hours as the ones in Europe. Timezones shouldn't matter that much here no?

Edit: It does seem like it's just one specific moment in time, is this all about US servers?
Show HN: I built a TUI that dissolves Git branches away in Thanos style
by armen99 | 2026-03-14 21:44:11+00:00
Hi

I am Armen.

I built deadbranch - a Rust CLI/TUI for safely cleaning stale git branches. Uses ratatui for the TUI.

Main feature in v0.3.0: when you delete branches, they dissolve in a Thanos-style particle effect (Flash -> Dissolve -> Settle). Branch deletions run in a background thread so the UI stays responsive.

Why a TUI for this? It is safer by default (only deletes merged branches, protects main/master/dev/stage), lets you preview deletions, has fuzzy search/vim navigation and has fun UI features.

Repository: https://github.com/armgabrielyan/deadbranch

Would appreciate feedback!
by xorcist | 2026-03-14 21:44:17+00:00
Is the Git Book part of the git repo?

Is the Linux Doc Projec part of the kernel?

No. For good reasons. The only people who insists all doc must live in the same repo as the code are the ones who does not value documentation.

Note, that in both examples above there is a documentation in the main repo, but not all documentation lives there.
by duskwuff | 2026-03-14 21:45:24+00:00
The biggest savings for a service like GMail are going to be based around deduplication - e.g. if you can recognize that a newsletter went out to a thousand subscribers and store those all as deltas from a "canonical" copy - congratulations, that's >1000:1 compression, better than you could achieve with any general-purpose compression. Similarly, if you can recognize that an email is an Amazon shipping confirmation or a Facebook message notification or some other commonly repeated "form letter", you can achieve huge savings by factoring out all the common elements in them, like images or stylesheets.
by 8note | 2026-03-14 21:45:42+00:00
Why the desire to reinvent the wheel every time? Agents can do it accurately, but you have to wait for them to figure it out every time, and waste tokens on non-differentiated work

The agents are writing the mcps, so they can figure out those http and ftp calls. MCP makes it so they dont have to every time they want to do something.

I wouldnt hire a new person to read a manual and then make a bespoke json to call an http server, every single time i want to make a call, and thats not a knock on the person's intelligence. Its just a waste of time doing the same work over and over again. I want the results of calling the API, not to spend all my time figuring out how to call the API
by mothballed | 2026-03-14 21:45:50+00:00
FDR essentially pioneered the modern use of the omnibus bill by threatening to veto any assistance to the poor/elderly that didn't include social security. Basically his goal was to make the poor starve if social security didn't pass, and blackmail politicians into being forced to vote for it.

Of course this was all predicated on the other prong, which was the 'switch in time that saved 9' where he also threatened to pack the courts to ensure it was found 'constitutional'. FDR was quite ruthless in his destruction of constitutional and democratic controls, and now so much of our government depends on it that it's effectively politically impossible to unwind.
by operatingthetan | 2026-03-14 21:45:51+00:00
Anthropic's models are obviously superior at coding right now but using 2-3 $20 accounts between different providers is still a very effective way to get good value. Gemini CLI and Codex seem to be at least 2x more permissive on usage. The models are good enough.

Plus we are technologists, we want to try out different stuff and compare.
by redgridtactical | 2026-03-14 21:45:56+00:00
Fair point on single-sourcing, but the difference is that Lockheed doesn't have a consumer business that creates geopolitical incidents on Twitter. Traditional defense contractors are purpose-built for that relationship. With Starlink, you've got a commercial network serving 80+ countries that also happens to be critical military infrastructure. Starshield helps on the SLA side, but the underlying constellation is still shared. What does "good contracts" even look like when the asset is literally in orbit and serving both markets simultaneously?
by sofixa | 2026-03-14 21:46:15+00:00
What's there to get? People, overwhemingly men, pay for adult content from performers, majority women.

It often involves a supposedly personal touch (like chatting with (someone pretending to be) them, or being able to pay for custom content).

Nothing really exceptional in any way other than scale, democratisation (anyone of age can sign up to post content) and the digital transformation. Back in the day people used to buy porn magazines with their niche preferences, and write in letters to share their stories / fantasies and get responses back.
by cogman10 | 2026-03-14 21:46:20+00:00
There will never be a cited reason for increases, but here's 2023 where basically all insurers filled for a 10% increase in premiums. [1]

Since the 2022 covid bill which significantly increased the subsidization of premiums, health insurers have found various reasons to increase their premiums by inflation beating numbers.

That's obviously a "the market will bear it" situation.

The ACA was a big bill that did a lot. I'm not talking about all of it, but rather the premium subsidization along with the covid premium increase which both expired in 2026.

Look, the premiums expiring was bad. IDK if that was clear from my earlier comment. But there's a fundamentally unaddressed issue with insurers in general where they charge not based on competition or the cost of service, but based on what consumers can bear. Profit incentives for healthcare in the US are completely misaligned with providing good general healthcare. The ACA premiums are a bandaid over an artery laceration. Better than nothing, but that thing is going to very quickly start bleeding through. You can keep slapping on band-aides, but ultimately you'll be looking at more damage if you don't just address the issue.

[1] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/an-early-look-at-w...
by vcodes | 2026-03-14 21:46:36+00:00
great question:

1. telecom trace logs are huge in volume. Even the 1M context window won't be sufficient. To give you a perspective - a 2 minute modem activity could lead to 25 million lines of traces.

2. Hypothetically, let's say there ever was a AI model which had enough context window to accommodate that kind of volume, it's still a one shot analysis. Every telecom trace is different (even if taken from same device). There are bursts of errors, there's a ton of noise (more than 80%) and < 20% signal. LLMs can't differentiate between the two.

3. Telecom traces can be proprietary, requiring dedicated on-prem solutions that only SaaS can deliver. Further, a SaaS approach is essential to meet enterprise requirements, guarantee accuracy and consistency, and most importantly integration into engineering workflows - because, at the end that's the important point, which is to reduce the time spent by engineers in an org on mundane tasks.

4. For bugreports, the same logic applies. One-shot analysis is insufficient and causes hallucinations. In addition, Android bugreports are super fragmented - OEM variations, Android variations, proprietary Android changes and their logs, huge volume of logs and the need for orchestration, dedicated focus on the fast evolving Android landscape (1 new release every year).

General purpose AI models can never meet the requirements of specialized, mission critical domains that logcat.ai targets.
by philipp-gayret | 2026-03-14 21:47:30+00:00
I don't condone it but the best marketing I've ever seen and which gets to the top of Reddit every week is a company that runs a paid IQ test website. They post some type of outrage bait and it always gets traction. Practically nobody in the comments can tell; they're all focused on how some imaginary character in an image is boasting about an IQ score of 99.
by MorkMindy74 | 2026-03-14 21:47:57+00:00
The most interesting part of this is section III — the idea that LLMs don't need to be AGI candidates themselves to accelerate the path to AGI. They just need to speed up the researchers working on the correct branch of the tech tree.
This seems underappreciated. Most of the "LLMs are a dead end" vs "LLMs will become AGI" debate treats these as exhaustive options, but there's a third path: LLMs as a force multiplier for whatever paradigm actually works. A neurosymbolic researcher who ships 3x faster because of LLM coding assistants is a very different scenario from LLMs becoming AGI on their own.
The jaggedness question (question 3) is the one I find hardest to dismiss. The gap between what AIs find easy and what humans find easy has been narrowing, but it's still wide in ways that matter. Whether that gap closes or persists seems like the crux of the whole debate.
by CharlieDigital | 2026-03-14 21:48:12+00:00
1. The part where you are providing 100 tools instead of a few really flexible tools

2. The part where you think your agent is going to know how to use 100 CLI tools that are not already in its training dataset without using extra turns walking the help content to dump out command names and schemas

3. The part where, without a schema defining the inputs, the LLM wastes iterations trying to correct the input format.

4. The part where, not having the full picture of the tools, your odds of it picking the same tools or the right tools is completely gambling that it outputs the right keywords to trigger the tool to be used.

5. The part where you forgot to mention that for your agent to know that your 100 CLI tools exist, you had to either provide it in context directly, provide it in context in a README.md, or have it output the directory listing and send that off to the LLM to evaluate before picking the tool and then possibly expanding the man pages for several tools and sub commands using several turns.

Don't get me wrong, CLIs are great if its already in the LLMs training set (`git`, for example). Not so great if it's not because it will need to walk the man pages anyways.
by mothballed | 2026-03-14 21:48:25+00:00
It was specifically sold as 'insurance' to the public around the time it was being passed.

Well except for a short period where that was going to be deliberated on by the courts, where they stopped calling it insurance since SCOTUS indicated this insurance wouldn't be constitutional, so instead they put it under general welfare clause but then changed up their rhetoric immediately after it was found constitutional back to it being insurance again.

Also the people that wrote the bill later admitted they intentionally wrote it in a confusing as way to evade public and judicial scrutiny.
by redgridtactical | 2026-03-14 21:48:35+00:00
That's the part that makes allied nations nervous. If you're running military comms through Starlink and the US decides to play hardball in some trade dispute, your entire C2 network just became a bargaining chip. Ukraine showed how quickly access decisions become political. I think we'll see European and Asian allies start investing in their own LEO constellations specifically because of this - nobody wants their military dependent on another country's CEO.
by kybernetikos | 2026-03-14 21:49:06+00:00
> you need humans to run datacenters.

As far as I can tell from random articles online, it seems that as a rule of thumb, you need about 6 humans +1.5 humans per megawatt. Now, if you have to house those people in space or fly them up whenever they have to do anything, that's going to destroy your budget. If you assume a level of automation that makes that unnecessary, that you need to also assume that same level of automation in earth based data centers too, and everything that goes with that.
by Kaliboy | 2026-03-14 21:49:17+00:00
I've managed to ignore MCP servers for a long time as well, but recently I found myself creating one to help the LLM agents with my local language (Papiamentu) in the dialect I want.

I made a prolog program that knows the valid words and spelling along with sentence conposition rules.

Via the MCP server a translated text can be verified. If its not faultless the agent enters a feedback loop until it is.

The nice thing is that it's implemented once and I can use it in opencode and claude without having to explain how to run the prolog program, etc.
by danny_codes | 2026-03-14 21:49:20+00:00
They’ve gotten better at addiction-engineering. Like making super-cocaine, it’s not a good thing. Essentially they took a dubiously ethical business and ramped it into, “actively harmful to almost everyone”. Any reasonable country would ban half the ads that make it onto FB/Insta. FB themselves admit 10% of their ad traffic is literal scammers.