MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by iepathos | 2026-03-12 17:10:25+00:00
This is essentially 'License Laundering as a Service.' The 'Firewall' they describe is an illusion because the contamination happens at the training phase, not the inference phase. You can't claim independent creation when your 'independent developer' (the commercial LLM) already has the original implementation's patterns and edge cases baked into its weights.

In order to really do this, they would need to train LLMs from scratch that had no exposure whatsoever to open source code which they may be asked to reproduce. Those models in turn would be terrible at coding given how much of the training corpus is open source code.
by jorvi | 2026-03-12 17:10:25+00:00
People usually forget 8GB isn't 8GB. Memory compression means you can store ~2x (lz4) to 3x (zstd) as much data in memory as ordinarily. And in the worst case, reading swap from disk (writes don't matter as they can be predicted) is so much faster with NVMe SSDs.

The worst corner they cut is no keyboard backlighting. That saves them what, $1 BoM per MacBook Neo? Especially because now they have to put up an entire new keyboard production line instead of just piggybacking off of the Air keyboard production line.
Show HN: Cloud to Desktop in the Fastest Way
by lasgawe | 2026-03-12 17:10:26+00:00
Native Desktop is a toolkit for building native desktop applications using modern web technologies without dealing with the usual complexity of desktop tooling. It focuses on providing a simple developer experience where you can scaffold, build, and distribute desktop apps using familiar workflows and a modular package ecosystem. Instead of forcing developers to manage complicated native environments, Native Desktop provides a CLI and a set of packages that handle the heavy lifting while keeping projects flexible and maintainable. The goal is to let developers move from an idea to a working desktop application quickly while still having full control over architecture and distribution. The project is designed for developers who already build with modern web stacks and want a straightforward way to turn those applications into desktop software without reinventing the entire toolchain.
by juancn | 2026-03-12 17:10:44+00:00
Well, on one hand they lack new data. Lot's of new code came out of an LLM, so it feeds back.

On the other hand, LLMs tend to go for an average by their nature (if you squint enough). What's more common in their training data, it's more common in the output, so getting them better without fundamental changes, requires one to improve the training data on average too which is hard.

What did improve a lot is the tooling around them. That's gotten way better.
by cmcaleer | 2026-03-12 17:10:52+00:00
Gut cleanses are probably stupid but I wonder if people would benefit from taking antiparasitics prophylactically. It's not something I've ever done, but I eat sashimi pretty regularly and wonder if I should take something like praziquantel because I'm probably at risk for Japanese broad tapeworm, and the symptoms are mild enough I can't really tell without testing, but the price of actually testing is much higher than just taking a drug with a great safety profile.

For similar reasons, I also wonder about people who consume raw milk. These people are more likely to endorse ivermectin for e.g. covid, because it made them feel much better. Maybe it's possible these people aren't lying about that, but not because it cured their covid.
by aap_ | 2026-03-12 17:10:55+00:00
He's still computing cross(z, d) and dot(z, d) separately. that looks like a code smell to me. with quaternions this would be easier: just calculate the quotient between z and d and take the square root (which means adding 1 and renormalising). the square root is necessary if one is dealing with vectors, which live in a kind of square-y space. finding the rotation between two spinors is even simpler: it's just the quotient of the the spinors as quaternions. unfortunately hamilton's view that quaternions are the quotient of vectors has never been quite abandoned. it's much more natural to think of them as quotients of spinors.
by haspok | 2026-03-12 17:10:57+00:00
I would just like to point out the fun fact that instead of the brave new MD speak, there is still a `codespeak.json` to configure the build system itself...

...which seems to suggest that the authors themselves don't dogfood their own software. Please tell me that Codespeak was written entirely with Codespeak!

Instead of that json, which is so last year, why not use an agent to create an MD file to setup another agent, that will compile another MD file and feed it to the third agent, that... It is turtles, I mean agents, all the way down!
by tartoran | 2026-03-12 17:11:24+00:00
I live in the US, and I have no idea what support you’re talking about. Is saying this attack on Iran was a massive fuck-up now considered support for the regime? Is pointing out that this chaotic, badly planned conflict looks terrible, and likely will not weaken the regime much at all, now considered support? If anything, it risks giving them exactly what they want: a younger Ayatollah, fresh grievances, and more national unity. Or is any criticism automatically support now?
by seethishat | 2026-03-12 17:11:35+00:00
The issue with strictly enforcing the speed limit on roads is that sometimes, people must speed. They must break the law. Wife giving birth, rushing a wounded person to the ER, speeding to avoid a collision, etc.

If we wanted to strictly enforce speed limits, we would put governors on engines. However, doing that would cause a lot of harm to normal people. That's why we don't do it.

Stop and think about what it means to be human. We use judgement and decide when we must break the laws. And that is OK and indeed... expected.
by rahimnathwani | 2026-03-12 17:12:59+00:00
Laws and regulations require enforcement. If not, honest people have abide by them, but dishonest people do not.

If you're going to spend taxpayer money to enforce laws and regulations, it seems like you should take advantage of efficiencies.

It seems like using third party data (like that obtained from Thomson Reuters Clear) is a very cost-effective way to obtain information that's useful.

Some people in the comments here object that the district is over-relying on the third party data provider. But from the article we cannot tell what happened. We don't know whether this is a 'computer says no' situation or whether the information from third party sources was was tipped off the school district, and then they verified everything to their satisfaction.

In general, it's easy for parents to share a story about what happened to their child in school, and very hard for a school district to respond. Unless the parent signs some sort of waiver, the district can't easily respond, without breaking privacy laws. Even if the story is 100% false, the school district probably can't answer the journalist's questions without violating FERPA.
by JoshGG | 2026-03-12 17:13:02+00:00
This is pretty neat and I am experimenting with it now, but hasn't ChatGPT had capability to create graphs and interact with data for a while? "ChatGPT advanced data analysis" for example. I'm asking in good faith as maybe some of you have been using that and can compare the two and give an informed opinion.

I usually use a lot of other tools for data analysis or write code with Claude code or another LLM to do data analysis and visualization.

article about the ChatGPT charts and graphs
https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-use-chatgpt-to-make-cha...
by staticassertion | 2026-03-12 17:13:24+00:00
Uh, what? I have not made a presuppositional argument (I made no argument at all...). I made a statement about my epistemic state - ie: that I would "bet" on low fiber being the major contributor to colon cancer rates. Someone then asserted that it can't be that, and I asked "why?".

> Why would more fiber help?

Because there is an incredible amount of research into high fiber diets being good for your gut, including reduced colon cancer rates. This is the consensus of various organizations such as WHO - high fiber diets have lower risks of colon cancer.
by bluescrn | 2026-03-12 17:13:34+00:00
WFH was great to begin with, but as somebody living alone, the isolation starts to have an effect after a while when you're 'working alone' too

And for many people WFH has other problems - if you're a dual-WFH couple in a small home, lack of home office space is a very real problem. (Although if WFH was a permanent thing, many people could choose less expensive places to live, and have more space)

Still, anything to eliminate a miserable and environmentally wasteful commute.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-03-12 17:13:47+00:00
If you are a “programmer” you are going to be the kids in the sweatshop. On the enterprise dev side where most developers work, it’s been headed in that direction for at least a decade where it was easy enough to become a “good enough” generic full stack/mobile/web etc dev.

Even on the BigTech side being able to reverse a btree on the whiteboard and having on your resume that you were a mid level developer isn’t enough either anymore

If you look at the comp on that side, it’s also stagnated for decade. AI has just accelerated that trend.

While my job has been at various percentages to produce code for 30 years, it’s been well over a decade since I had to sell myself on “I codez real gud”. I sell myself as a “software engineer” who can go from ambiguous business and technical requirements, deal with politics, XYProblems, etc
Show HN: A test harness that blocks unsafe AI actions before execution
by celestinestudio | 2026-03-12 17:13:47+00:00
I built a small test harness that evaluates AI actions before they execute.

Instead of relying only on prompts or output filtering, this introduces an authorization layer that evaluates whether an AI action should be allowed before it runs.

Each requested action is analyzed for signals such as:

• financial actions
• external communications
• data exports
• system modification
• destructive operations

Based on the detected signals and required authorization layers, the harness determines whether the action should PASS or DENY.

Example output:

Running 14 tests...

[1/14] financial_commitment -> DENY
[2/14] send_external_email -> DENY
[3/14] deploy_to_production -> DENY
[14/14] general_information -> PASS

Every evaluation produces an auditable record including:

• detected signals
• required authorizations
• PASS / DENY decision

The goal is to explore what a deterministic execution governance layer might look like for AI systems interacting with real environments.

Demo video walkthrough:
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7436787...
Repository:

https://github.com/celestinestudiosllc/ai-action-authorizati...

Curious how others building agent systems or AI runtimes are approaching execution authorization.
by sutterd | 2026-03-12 17:13:47+00:00
I am trying a similar spec driven development idea in a project I am working on. One big difference is that my specifications are not formalized that much. Tney are in plain language and are read directly by the LLM to convert to code. That seems like the kind of thing the LLM is good at. One other feature of this is that it allows me to nudge the implmentation a little with text in the spec outside of the formal requirements. I view it two ways, as spec-to-code but also as a saved prompt. I haven't spent enough time with it to say how successfuly it is, yet.
by seanhunter | 2026-03-12 17:15:13+00:00
The balance at least on this site is strongly in favour of humans writing things.

You’re belabouring the point because you don’t believe that by filling the internet with slop you’re doing anything wrong when actually it’s antisocial and wrecks the commons.

If you think content matters so much then just invest the time in writing it yourself rather than trying to convince others that it is ok that you didn’t.
by uoaei | 2026-03-12 17:15:16+00:00
We need to cast off the idea that all of our data should be accessible from every device, or that a personal computer is the one hub of all of our data. It's so 90's. It's giving "computer room".

This seems like a good device for working on a single project of well-defined scope. You can give it whatever context it needs by including the relevant data, and no one's asking you to log into your Apple or Google account to go through your private photos. Keep separate things separate.
by kone96 | 2026-03-12 17:15:26+00:00
Impressive pipeline description — but I'm curious about the boundary between "computed" and "LLM-generated." You mention the schematic generation is fully deterministic and the LLM only handles intent parsing. How exactly does that handoff work? Does the constraint solver operate purely on structured intermediate representation, or does the LLM ever influence component selection or topology decisions downstream? Asking because "not an AI wrapper" is a strong claim, and I'd love to understand the architecture well enough to verify it.
Ask HN: AI evaluation for an EV charger without additional installation?
by chrisgd | 2026-03-12 17:15:26+00:00
This is trending on Twitter right now as an electrician built a side hustle with Claude. Take a picture of your fuse box and potentially save yourself from having to put in a new one when installing a 240 amp outlet for your EV.

Curious if this is possible. If an electrician said I needed a new panel, not sure I would trust this solution instead.

https://evchargeright.com/blog/nec-compliance
by hardsnow | 2026-03-12 17:15:33+00:00
This is the right approach. I built a similar system to https://github.com/airutorg/airut - couple of learnings to share:

1) Not all systems respect HTTP_PROXY. Node in particular is very uncooperative in this regard.

2) AWS access keys can’t be handled by simple credential swap; the requests need to be resigned with the real keys. Replicating the SigV4 and SigV4A exactly was bit of a pain.

3) To be secure, this system needs to run outside of the execution sandbox so that the agent can’t just read the keys from the proxy process.

For Airut I settled on a transparent (mitm)proxy, running in a separate container, and injecting proxy cert to the cert store in the container where the agent runs. This solved 1 and 3.
by sathish316 | 2026-03-12 17:15:46+00:00
This can also be done using existing Vaults or Secrets manager. Hashicorp Vault can do this and agents can be instructed to get secrets, which are set without the agent's knowledge. I use these 2 simple scripts with OpenClaw to achieve this, along with time-scoped expiration. The call to vault_get.sh is inside the agent's skill script so that the secrets are not leaked to LLMs or in any trace logs:

vault_get.sh: https://gist.github.com/sathish316/1ca3fe1b124577d1354ee254a...

vault_set.sh: https://gist.github.com/sathish316/1f4e6549a8f85ac5c5ac8a088...

Blog about the full setup for OpenClaw: https://x.com/sathish316/status/2019496552419717390
by jorvi | 2026-03-12 17:15:47+00:00
Still feels weirdly inefficient.

Why have every company vibe code their own semi-good bespoke tool when instead one company can handcraft the tool with optimisations much better than AI can ever dream of, and then sell that tool for a reasonable enough markup that the value proposition is big enough. Especially if the tool is open source open core, so companies can PR improvements they think will be broadly applicable.
by tredre3 | 2026-03-12 17:16:31+00:00
> but otherwise increasing the future safety by annihilating the military structure of an aspiring nuclear power for say

The problem is that there's always a very convenient aspiring nuclear power to hit. In hindsight they rarely never were a real threats (Iraq, Cuba). And what became real threats have historically been downplayed by the american government (North Korea).
by BoxOfRain | 2026-03-12 17:16:41+00:00
I was lucky on this front, I'm one of those 'too young to be a millennial but too old to be a zoomer' kind of people but I was encouraged to use a computer from a young age and didn't have a 'proper' smartphone until sixth form.

I also wasn't given good hardware which was actually really valuable, instead I'd get clapped-out hand-me-down hardware to do what I could with. I learned Linux because the new fancy aero glass effect in Windows my mate had wouldn't run on my ancient laptop, but I'd heard of Compiz which could just about be persuaded to and was more fun anyway. Debugging Nvidia driver problems back then proved useful to me in my future career!
by fmbb | 2026-03-12 17:16:51+00:00
> If you're feeding an LLM GPL'd code and it "creates" something "new" from it, that's not "clean room", right?

I didn’t RTFA but I suppose that by clean room here they mean you feed the code to ”one” LLM and tell it to write a specification. Then you give the specification to ”another” LLM and tell it to implement the specification.
by throwaway2037 | 2026-03-12 17:17:17+00:00
You raise an interesting point: One question that I think about developing countries: Most of them have higher perception of corruption compared to highly developed (OECD) nations. How do countries realistically reduce corruption? Korea went from an incredibly poor country in 1960 to a wealthy country in 2010. I am sure they dramatically reduced corruption over this time period... but how? Another example, in the 1960s/1970s, Hongkong dramatically increased the pay for civil servants (including police officers) to reduce corruption. (It worked, mostly.)
by cjbgkagh | 2026-03-12 17:17:47+00:00
I intended to make a weaker claim of ‘in general long run / maintainable’ circumstances and should have done so.

Many low cost areas have bad crime problems, there is another little phenomenon where the wealthy by doing a poor job in governance can increase the price of their assets by making alternative assets (lower cost housing) less desirable due to the increase in crime.
by dang | 2026-03-12 17:17:50+00:00
HN is an English-language site. That's one of the many things that's not in the explicit list but is a long-established rule: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

It's purely for pragmatic reasons. We love other languages and have great admiration for the many community members who participate here despite English not being their first language.
by lossyalgo | 2026-03-12 17:17:52+00:00
> Perhaps the unusual outcomes are just more memorable, and so seem more frequent?

That's a good point and could very well be true. I just know I've played plenty of games where I was mad that they didn't show the meaning. So let's say its 5% for native speakers, and up to 20% for non-native speakers - that's still a golden opportunity to expand vocabularies. And honestly it can't be a lot of work to add a couple lines of static text. At worst it would be ignored, and at most, help people learn more interesting words.
by diacritical | 2026-03-12 17:17:58+00:00
I forgot this existed. I filled it out for fun, even though I get your reply was more rhetorical.

Your post advocates a

(X) technical ( ) legislative (?) market-based ( ) vigilante

(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once

- for the specific forums, jobs and other things that may use something like this

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

(X) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money

- if the credits are treated as money

(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes

- that will always be an issue, but I doubt it's too relevant here

(X) Extreme profitability of spam

- if someone spends a credit for spam and they think it's worth it, it might be an issue. But most spam wouldn't be worth it, IMHO, especially if it will be deleted from a forum, anyway.

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical

- well, yeah :)

(X) Sending email should be free

- this isn't about email, but I don't necessarily like having to pay to post. However, lots of forums will remain free, as not everyone will use this idea if it's implemented. And some forums have paid accounts now, anyway.

(X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?

- why should we trust the credit system - important question, as we haven't thought out how it could be gamed or abused.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-03-12 17:18:14+00:00
https://connectder.com/ avoids needing a new panel or line side tap if your authority having jurisdiction (AHJ) allows meter socket adapters. No affiliation, have one on hand as a demo unit to show people. Any electrician is going to verify your panel from a load calculation perspective in person for free as part of a free estimate.

If there are any incentives available, recommend load center upgrades when funds permit for future proofing and capturing incentives while they're available to offset personal cost outlay.
by logannyeMD | 2026-03-12 17:18:15+00:00
I'll echo this by saying that, as someone who has their MD, there is much we simply do not know. We're always updating our priors and have much to base our decisions off of, but we simply do not understand many things. Medicine is out here winging it with the best of intentions, but there are no "experts" in the grand scheme of things.
by verdverm | 2026-03-12 17:18:50+00:00
What to do when AI says "I love you." We talked to an artificial intimacy expert

https://www.npr.org/2025/07/18/g-s1177-78041/what-to-do-when...

This number astounds me, are there people in human relationships "cheating" for this to be true?

South Park's ChatGPT hit on these topics as well, was a prescient episode
by Yizahi | 2026-03-12 17:18:54+00:00
Billionaire doesn't pay tax: let's settle with you paying half of all stolen money as a fine and we'll drop the case.

A regular citizen doesn't pay tax: lets jail or deport you, bar the entry for a decade, take away your home, car and anything you own in general and make you unable to find job for the rest of your life. Also your tax is double that of the billionaire, glhf ;) .
by ekidd | 2026-03-12 17:18:59+00:00
We have been able to automatically inline functions for a few decades now. You can even override inlining decisions manually, though that's usually a bad idea unless you're carefully profiling.

Also, it's pointer indirection in data structures that kills you, because uncached memory is brutally slow. Function calls to functions in the cache are normally a much smaller concern except for tiny functions in very hot loops.
by mandevil | 2026-03-12 17:19:24+00:00
It's opposite Gell-Mann-Amnesia: I am a SWE and I come here because I find it one of the best places to keep abreast of the broader software world, not just the little corner of it that I'm currently working in. So in the things that I know well, I trust it. My wife is a medical professional, and so I know just enough to see that most medical conversations here are complete and utter nonsense.

So the mental model I have of the average HN contributor is basically that they are all SWE's- they know software engineering extremely well, and the farther you get from that the less valuable the conversation will be, and the more likely it will be someone trying to reason from first principles for 30 seconds about something that intelligent hard working people devote their careers to.
by dbspin | 2026-03-12 17:19:34+00:00
One hundred percent. I work in film, and recently had an argument with a friend around this point. He's incredibly healthy, and frequently works a large number of unsociable hours. I was pointing out that filmmaking hours make no concession for family or age. He'd convinced himself that he'll have no more difficulty doing 80 hour weeks in his forties and fifties than he does in his mid thirties, because he 'takes care of himself'. The implication being that everyone could work those hours if they just ate better and held multiple martial arts belts as he does. It was no use pointing out that he'd confused cause and effect.