MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gab18 | 2026-03-04 17:07:43+00:00
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by phil21 | 2026-03-04 17:07:56+00:00
I don’t think folks in academia have come to terms with how much the above attitude has completely and nearly entirely undermined the credibility of the entire scientific and academic community in the eyes of the general public.

You don’t need a degree to understand how much utter junk science is being published by those who think they are superior to you. Just read a few actual papers end to end and look at the data vs conclusions and it becomes totally obvious very rapidly that you cannot “trust the science” since it’s rarely actual science being done any longer.

The academic community has utterly failed at understanding they needed to cull this behavior early and mercilessly. They did not, and it will be generations at best to rebuild the trust they once had. If they ever figure out they need to.

Things are going to get much worse before they get better. You can’t take any published paper at face value any longer without going direct to primary sources and bouncing it off an expert in the space you still trust to give you the actual truth.
by sarkarsh | 2026-03-04 17:07:58+00:00
Your phases mirror almost exactly what I went through. The core realization is right: you can't treat status reporting as an instruction because the agent will always deprioritize process in favor of its assigned persona.

What worked for me was making state updates part of the tool interface, not the prompt. Instead of 'report your status to this file,' the agent reads and writes to structured blocks (task tables, key-value state stores, append-only logs) through MCP as part of doing its actual work. The state update IS the work - when the agent completes a task, the tool call that marks it done also captures what it did, what it assumed, and what it skipped. The human sees a live dashboard without the agent needing to 'report' separately.

I've been using ctlsurf for this - each agent gets a task table it queries and updates through MCP tool calls. The key shift was: agents don't report status, they work inside a system that inherently tracks status.

On your task counter threshold question - I track session token usage in a state block and restart when the agent crosses ~80% of the context window. More reliable than counting tasks since some tasks eat way more context than others.
by ecshafer | 2026-03-04 17:08:11+00:00
China is also giving them dump trucks full of cash though. Plus you have to content with the nationalism reason (unfortunately this has died off in America for too many). The idea of building your country is valued for most Chinese I have met. Plus China is incredibly nice to live in, especially if you have lots of money and/or connections. So you can work in China, get paid lots of money, feel like you are doing good. Or In America you can get paid lots of money, and get yelled at by people online because the Government wants to use your model.
by sarkarsh | 2026-03-04 17:08:18+00:00
Good question. Right now it's manual - the human can see the task is still claimed in the dashboard and reassign it. No automatic timeouts yet, though it would be straightforward since every task item has timestamps.

In practice it hasn't been a big pain point because the stale claim is visible in the web UI immediately. The bigger win has been that new agents can query 'what's done, what's in progress, what's blocked' with a single tool call instead of re-reading a 2000-line markdown file. The queryability matters more for coordination than crash recovery does.

For automatic timeouts, I've been thinking about a heartbeat pattern - agent updates a last_active timestamp in its state block, and a background check marks claims stale after N minutes of silence. Haven't needed it yet at my scale though.
by sarkarsh | 2026-03-04 17:08:34+00:00
This is the underrated insight in the whole thread. 'Approach B rejected because latency spikes above N ms' is the kind of context that saves hours of re-exploration every new session.

The problem I kept hitting was that flat markdown constraint logs don't scale past ~50 entries. The agent has to re-read the entire log to know what was already tried, which eats context window and slows generation. And once you have multiple agents in parallel, each maintaining their own constraint log, you get drift - agent A rejects approach B, agent C re-proposes it because it never saw agent A's log.

What worked for me was moving constraint logs to append-only log blocks that agents query through MCP rather than re-read as prose. I've been using ctlsurf for this - the agent appends 'approach B rejected, latency > N ms' to a log block, and any agent can query query_log(action='approach_rejected') to see what's been ruled out. State store handles 'which modules are claimed' as a key-value lookup.

Structured queries mean agents don't re-read the whole history - they ask specific questions about what's been tried.
by flashybaby | 2026-03-04 17:08:40+00:00
The capabilities discussion is important but what keeps me up at night is the organizational question. These models are getting better every cycle, and meanwhile most companies have zero framework for what happens when an employee actually uses them to their full potential.

Someone made a short film about exactly this -- a guy uses AI to do his entire department's quarterly work, and instead of anyone celebrating, everything falls apart: https://youtu.be/O5FFkHUdKyE

The technology is clearly outpacing the institutions that have to absorb it. Every new cycle makes that gap wider.
by just6979 | 2026-03-04 17:08:46+00:00
Anyone could make their own tools before this as well. Just needed to learn something first.

Real democratizing or programming is free access to compilers, SDKs, etc. AI coding does nothing to help that. In fact, it hurts it, because those non-programmers only get access to the AI tools on the terms of the AI companies. Sure they could train their own models, but then we're back to having to learn things.
by v1ne | 2026-03-04 17:08:48+00:00
All of this works much worse on macOS: Scaling sucks, as it's integer-upscaled rendering + fractional downscaling in a shader. Windows can't span screens either.

On Windows, the window will adapt as you move its center of gravity across the edge of the screens. Sure, could be better than at the moment where the window is the wrong size, but it would always be blurry.
by linguae | 2026-03-04 17:08:55+00:00
There is a lot of good computer science, but the computer science community today is vastly larger than it was in the 1960s and 1970s when Dijkstra, Knuth, Wirth, and others became legends. There are so many subfields of CS, each with its own deep literature and legendary figures. It’s difficult to be a modern Dijkstra or Knuth due to these factors, though to be fair, it is an impressive feat for Dijkstra to be Dijkstra and for Knuth to be Knuth even in their heydays. It’s just easier to get famous in an upstart field compared to getting famous in a mature field.

I think there are two typical paths to widespread visibility across CS subfields: (1) publishing a widely-adopted textbook, and (2) writing commonly-used software. For example, many computer scientists know about Patterson and Hennessy due to their famous computer architecture textbooks, and many computer scientists know about people like Jeff Dean due to their software.

Reading more academically-oriented literature such as the ACM’s monthly periodical “Communications of the ACM” is also a good way to get acquainted with the latest developments of computer science.
by GenerWork | 2026-03-04 17:08:57+00:00
In the year that I had a Surface, I can count on 2 hands the number of times that I used the touch screen. Out of all those times that I used touch screen functionality, the majority of the times were done inadvertently when I was trying to get something off the screen. I'm willing to bet a lot of people won't/don't care about the touch screen, they just want something cheap.
by BatonTrucking | 2026-03-04 17:08:58+00:00
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by tracker1 | 2026-03-04 17:09:05+00:00
Being libertarian minded, very classically liberal... I think most of these institutions might not need to have existed in the first place.

As an example, public funding for PBS... when all you need to is watch the PBS coverage of the SoTU address to see a perfect example in that it was indeed a partisan organization that shouldn't be getting public funding... even if I don't agree with a lot of Republican positions.
by hnuser123456 | 2026-03-04 17:09:06+00:00
In the RC vehicle world, these things have been prevalent for about a decade now: https://www.amazon.com/Battery-Charger-Balance-Discharger-Ba...

I'm not sure what IC they use, but it uses a two-line text display and can switch between Lipo, LiFE, NiMH, NiCD, Pb, and a few other modes, and some of them allow adjustable cutoff voltage, max charge time, etc. That's just a cheap 80W model but there are 200W+ chargers that use the same interface.

There are also 18650 cell chargers that can also take NiMH AA/AAA and charge them at high currents, like this: https://www.amazon.com/NITECORE-UMS4-Intelligent-LumenTac-Or...
by flashybaby | 2026-03-04 17:09:24+00:00
The real problem isn't becoming a manager -- it's that organizations don't know how to handle someone who makes an outsized impact as an IC. Especially now with AI tools.

There's a short film going around that captures this perfectly. A guy uses AI to do what his whole department was working on, and instead of getting recognized, the org panics and pushes him out: https://youtu.be/O5FFkHUdKyE

The incentive structures in most companies are still built around headcount and hierarchy, not output. That's the real reason people get pushed into management -- it's the only path where more impact is actually rewarded.
by noisy_boy | 2026-03-04 17:09:38+00:00
I have come to the same conclusion. I'm thinking it more like "raising" these subagents via iterations and tuning until they are "grown-up" and basically become reliable. Thats why even though I can setup a team pretty easily via claude code, I don't see the benefit until the would be team members are reliable. Once the main subagents are solid, we can move on to build a team by pointing them to these subagents - atleast thats what I'm thinking in my one-step-at-time slow way. Most probably overcautious and maybe even wrong but if I'm seeing a subagent doing weird stuff across many executions, I can't build much in terms of layers on top of it.
by philwelch | 2026-03-04 17:10:04+00:00
The honest usage of “it turns out” is usually to gloss over an unnecessarily tedious argument that the author doesn’t want to waste your time with. And I think this is a fair characterization of even the use that the author criticizes here:

> When I moved to New York, I was very excited at first. It's an exciting place. So it took me quite a while to realize I just wasn't like the people there. I kept searching for the Cambridge of New York. It turned out it was way, way uptown: an hour uptown by air.

In principle, it’s entirely possible that pg kept a detailed diary of his attempt to find a community of intellectual peers in NY that compared to the one he found in Cambridge, and if you read the entire diary you would be satisfied that he carried out an exhaustive search. But even if that were the case (I wouldn’t expect it to be; who keeps detailed diaries documenting every opinion they ever form), that would dominate the length of an essay that was supposed to be about how cities work as focus hubs for specific types of ambition.

That’s not to say pg can’t be wrong about this point; it’s still a statement of opinion. What “it turns out” really signifies is that the author made a serious effort to investigate the question prior to forming the conclusion. They might be lying about that, but they can also lie about facts.

I guess I just consider it an insult to the reader’s intelligence to say that ‘it turns out’ is a particularly deceptive way to sneak in an unsubstantiated conclusion, because it’s not very sneaky. If I said “it turns out the moon really is made of cheese”, nobody would be fooled. If Buzz Aldrin said it, a few people might be fooled, but only because they already know he’s actually been there.

On the other hand, we routinely accept “it turns out” reasoning all the time, in the sense that we generally trust other people to come to conclusions that we don’t feel the need to audit. If I get labs done at the doctor’s office and it turns out I have high cholesterol, I don’t have a particular need to audit the lab’s methodology. You can’t rigorously audit all of the information in the world and if a writer you reasonably trust writes “it turns out” that X, you are reasonably justified in updating your certainty that X is true.
by pabloarteel | 2026-03-04 17:11:37+00:00
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by tialaramex | 2026-03-04 17:12:45+00:00
The Fortigate article proposes that you take a profile in which your end users have said OK, I trust the Fortigate to decide what's allowed, and then you set it to not allow them to use ECH.

Notice that if users don't trust the Fortigate all it can do is IP layer blocks, exactly as intended.

It seems pointless to try to have a policy where people say they trust somebody else (whoever is operating that Fortigate) to override their will but also they don't want their will overridden, that's an incoherent policy, there's no technical problem there, technology can't help.
by upofadown | 2026-03-04 17:12:53+00:00
I actually got a job for deleting code. I was fixing a problem on a contract and noticed that I could fix the problem by getting rid of the section that contained the problem. The functionality could be provided in a much simpler way. Later the company created a position and I was given first refusal before they interviewed anyone.

It was a 8 bit embedded application in something like 10k of code. When I left I generated a short and clear explanation of why what I had done was awesome in terms of their future business ... because that is what you have to do if you work contracts. Which is the real message of the article. You have to write things up.
by Atlas667 | 2026-03-04 17:13:04+00:00
Everybody hates capitalism, but no one understands that they do. What you promote as a solution is simply a pebble on the path of the people who want to capitalize.

There are 3 realistic scenarios for your proposed solution:

- it will not pass

- it will be reformed later, or, if successful

- it will just make the capitalists appear at another point in the supply chain

The capitalists design the business models (profit making schemes) and legalize them. This is not an organic development of an industry.

What you hate is capitalism and capitalism will do this to any industry wherever it can attain steady profits.
by robrtsql | 2026-03-04 17:13:35+00:00
The M1 is indeed too good. It seems like the best tool that Apple has to force users to upgrade is ending macOS support on it.

I keep telling people that the best laptop value on the market right now is to buy a refurbished MacBook Pro M1/M2. I stand by that from a usability and performance standpoint, but I feel weird about recommending a laptop that could only get security updates for another 3 years.
by SiempreViernes | 2026-03-04 17:13:50+00:00
I think this is mainly a case of the common "didn't notice when crucial literature for own published content was retracted, get caught with pants down when the replication police come knocking".

Obviously the poor labelling is bad, but 9 bad citations per year isn't the end of science and better labelling wouldn't discourage all the lazy authors who chose to cite these highlight articles, it'll just shift whos is to blame.

The real problem is hosting a review article about research that was retracted, and it sounds like they aren't moving very quickly on taking that piece down.
by b450 | 2026-03-04 17:14:05+00:00
Might sound like a rube here, but: is agentic development really this good at novel UIs? The video shows a sort of cassette tape music player, and a fancy looking audio visualizer/equalizer thing. I'm well aware agents are very good at boilerplate UIs, but I wouldn't expect them to be able to one-shot novel, dynamic UI elements like this. I've had Claude attempt some SVG animations and the results were very crude. That was a year or so ago though. Are there established ways of letting agents iterate on UIs, i.e. having them visually verify the visual design and interactions?
by freejazz | 2026-03-04 17:14:07+00:00
Copyright is the strongest legal protection available. It does not have a state of mind element. Breach of contract is much more complicated and context-dependent.

>There is in fact "otherwise protection" for the software industry by... not distributing the code.

Copyright protects against reverse engineering in some circumstances, for example.

>Whether there's copyright or not is irrelevant for the business model.

Yeah, I'm going to continue to disagree with you as I'm actually a litigator.
by UncleMeat | 2026-03-04 17:14:40+00:00
I think that this is ridiculous. The idea that grand sweeping proclamations cannot be curious is plainly false. We can look at numerous excellent works of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences that produce grand sweeping proclamations that are nevertheless backed by years of archival or scientific research performed by experts.

While I don't agree with the poster that left/right is a distraction from class conflict, the idea that this idea cannot possibly be worth discussion or inspection is outrageous.
by Traster | 2026-03-04 17:14:46+00:00
I didn't quite mean it that way. My question is basically asking "Does this hammer know that not every problem is a nail". To give a specific answer to your question, my accounting system is excel, and "everyone" is me. There are definitely plenty of places where a database makes sense. But it's also important for database engineers to understand where databases don't make sense. It's kind of like that old problem we had where people would keep on saying "We can do X with blockchain" and the typical answer is "ok but that's worse".
by tastyfreeze | 2026-03-04 17:15:01+00:00
SciHub is an amazing resource. I have read so many papers from varied topics out of my personal interest. That would not be possible for me without SciHub. The hold on new papers has stopped me from keeping current. If I were able to also publish papers that others could review that opens "science" to everybody. Then the only benefit of research institutions would be a concentration of big brains. That completely changes the landscape for scientific progress.

SciHub has shown us a new way to spread knowledge to all that are interested. I don't have the rigor for publishing but other individual experimenters might. It would be great if they could contribute to building human knowledge.

I think the only real solution is a distributed federated publishing and review platform. A node would be a library of papers for the host's interests. Just like physical journal collections, bigger institution would host more topics. Anybody can participate in the publication and review process. SciHub nailed storage and retrieval. Review is the hard part. Any rating system can be gamed. It would be very hard to convince people it is trustworthy.

There shouldn't be any prestige in publishing a paper. The prestige comes from being proven correct, from building our knowledge.
by hobs | 2026-03-04 17:15:57+00:00
AI often simply does not offer the best options, does not think strategically, and if you constrained to its choices you will often make silly mistakes.

This is why all the arguments about context windows and RAG exist, because at the end of the day even if you asked the question of a human with all the context there's such a thing as opinions, stated vs unstated goals, requirements vs non functional requirements, etc which will give you wildly different answers.

Most of the time people don't even know the questions they want to ask.
by SoftTalker | 2026-03-04 17:16:08+00:00
Why isn't a citation just a citation. It's a pointer to a source, that's all. If it implies some standards have been applied or editorial or scientific review has been done, then that's going to have to be paid for by someone. TFA implies that doesn't happen, so a citation to an article in Nature isn't any better than one on arXiV.
by renewiltord | 2026-03-04 17:16:14+00:00
I like pg’s essays but he enjoys these turns of phrase. On Twitter, he would previously use this puppeteer prop technique of “8 yo just figured out” or “just explained to 11 yo”.

Here’s a couple of made up uses:

“8 yo quickly figured out that Darwinism makes no sense”

“11 yo asked me why the sky was blue but quickly realized it was reflecting the sea”

It’s funny stuff. “Behold! Even my child has figured out that my position is true. Such is its self evidence” or “this idea is so true I’m teaching it to my kid”. Haha. Funny guy.
by arndt | 2026-03-04 17:16:22+00:00
1 - Less "chat as you go" interactions with the agents meaning you don't have to babysit the execution, because once the requirements are defined, the harness executes autonomously.

2 - Conceptually stronger starting point leads to better (and larger) feature PRs. Because we help you generate a really strong spec (prod/tech) upfront, grounded across your repos, that changes the process from "build-and-fix-and-build-and-fix" to "define-and-ship".

And we also help you generate strong standards definitions (teach agents how to build things, how to test things) that foundation helps as well.