MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hackyhacky | 2026-03-12 16:57:03+00:00
> Someone still needs to review and test the code, and if the code is for embedded systems I find it unlikely.

I feel like you didn't understand my comment. I am predicting that there is no code to review. You simply ask the AI to do stuff and it does it.

Today, for example, you can ask ChatGPT to play chess with you, and it will. You don't need a "chess program," all the rules are built in to the LLM.

Same goes for SaaS. You don't need HR software; you just need an LLM that remembers who is working for the company. Like what a "secretary" used to be.
Ask HN: How are you using personal AI assistants with local coding agents?
by everfly | 2026-03-12 16:57:31+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been trying a workflow where a personal AI assistant handles task intake, and coding agents handle implementation.

In my setup, I use OpenClaw as the personal assistant layer: I can send it a voice or text note, and it turns that into a structured Markdown task card in my repo. Then VibeDeck, an open source local CLI I built, picks up those task cards, dispatches coding agents into isolated Git worktrees, and lets me review the results as PRs.

The main idea is to keep task capture, execution, and review separate:

- OpenClaw handles idea capture / task drafting
- VibeDeck handles local orchestration
- coding agents work inside isolated git worktree --orphan sandboxes
- the main branch is never modified directly

Repo: https://github.com/quentinzhang/vibedeck

Curious how others here are handling task isolation, context handoff, and branch safety for local AI coding agents.

Happy to answer technical questions.
by fluoridation | 2026-03-12 16:57:31+00:00
> I used to be very active on USENET and HN is relatively more centralized than a hypothetical "comp.programming.hackernews" newsgroup.

How so? Wouldn't comp.programming.hackernews concentrate discussion under a single heading and also be hosted from a single specific computer? This confuses me even further; I don't understand what you mean by centralization.

>For the phpBB forums where a lots of non-tech people discuss hobbies such as woodworking, guitar gear, etc., the decentralization perspective is the php forums and the centralization is towards big platforms such as reddit / Discord / Facebook Groups.

Surely by this interpretation HN is decentralized. It's a special interest (if relatively broad) forum just like those phpBB forums were. I ask again: is HN "centralized" just because you can't spin up your own copy of the software to use it to talk about gardening?
by tialaramex | 2026-03-12 16:57:35+00:00
Thanks! https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2025/p31...

(is the current version of that paper, the tracking ticket insisted there's a P3125R5 and that LEWG had seen it in 2025, but it isn't listed in a mailing so it might be a mirage)

You know it's a Hana paper because it wants this to be allowed at compile time (C++ constrexpr) but joking aside this seems like a nice approach for C++ which stays agnostic about future implementation details.
Show HN: Verge Browser a self-hosted isolated browser sandbox for AI agents
by zzzgydi | 2026-03-12 16:57:58+00:00
Built this because I wanted a better browser runtime for Openclaw, which can run on any server no only on Mac mini, emm.
When it needs me to login or perform some operations, I can simply use noVNC to operate, and then leave everything else to it.
by jandrewrogers | 2026-03-12 16:57:59+00:00
The idiomatic way to safely do pointer tagging in C++ works through uintptr_t.

If you don't care about portability or using every theoretically available bit then it is trivial. A maximalist implementation must be architecture aware and isn't entirely knowable at compile-time. This makes standardization more complicated since the lowest common denominator is unnecessarily limited.

In C++ this really should be implemented through a tagged pointer wrapper class that abstracts the architectural assumptions and limitations.
by tomtomtom777 | 2026-03-12 16:58:18+00:00
> If the result is always provably correct it doesn't matter whether or not it's different at the code level. People interested in systems like this believe that the outcome of what the code does is infinity more important than the code itself.

If the spec is so complete that it covers everything, you might as well write the code.

The benefit of writing a spec and having the LLM code it, is that the LLM will fill in a lot of blanks. And it is this filling in of blanks that is non-deterministic.
by hackyhacky | 2026-03-12 16:58:22+00:00
> It's better than the "Food Pyramid" and "MyPlate" which were the gov standards when I was growing up.

Correct. The root of the problem is that corporate interests influence government regulation. [1] That hasn't changed. What has changed is which industry is offering the largest bribes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
Show HN: I lost billable hours forgetting timers. I turned my calendar into a DB
by sergentrif | 2026-03-12 16:58:23+00:00
Hi HN, I’m Adrien. I run a dev agency and work as a fractional CTO. I lost too much billable hours simply because I forgot to start or stop a timer. It’s a friction point that fails exactly when you're most focused on deep work.

I realized my calendar was already a perfect, 100% accurate log of my week. If a meeting or a task happened, it’s in my agenda. So I built Timescanner to turn those [Client] tags in my calendar into invoices.

Why I built it this way:

- Privacy by design: your calendar is the database. We don't store your events on our servers. It’s a Google Calendar / iCal parser that keeps your data where it belongs.

- Zero new habits: if you already use your calendar to manage your day, you’re already 100% done with time tracking.

- Simplicity over complexity: it's a straightforward parser. No "AI guessing", no complex backend. No additional cognitive load.

Happy to answer any questions about how to use your calendar to track your time (and be productive)!
by quesera | 2026-03-12 16:58:34+00:00
There's no reason for Italy and Iran/Iraq to be pronounced similarly.

But FWIW, the EYE-rack thing is because GWB (most recently) intentionally mispronounced the name of the country, in a "real american" kind of way, and also to annoy SAD-dumb Hussein as a kind of "we're stupid but we're going to kill you anyway" kind of psyop.

Americans of other political persuasions usually pronounce the names correctly.
by byproxy | 2026-03-12 16:58:48+00:00
This is unfortunate, because (and probably much to the article writer's chagrin), I am a fan of making use of the formatting tools available for a given platform. When convenient, I love using an em/en-dash. And, when I'm up for it, italicizing and bolding words to convey prosody. It just feels right.

Now, though, I may be dismissed as an LLM (probably as an older model that can't quite use them formatting tools effectively).
by cuu508 | 2026-03-12 16:58:54+00:00
> We are all making a continual and ongoing grave error

> Blindly translating those centuries of laws into rigid, free enforcement is a terrible idea for everyone.

I understand your point that changing the enforcement changes how the law is "felt" even though on the paper the law has not changed. And I think it makes sense to review and potentially revise the laws when enforcement methods change. But in the specific case of the 55 mph limit, would the consequences really be grave and terrible if the enforcement was enforced by a robot, but the law remained the same?
Show HN: Fixing Agent / LLM Context Decay in VS Code with Git Worktrees
by gbro3n | 2026-03-12 16:59:20+00:00
In a previous post, I introduced VS Code Agent Kanban. The key idea in this extension is the formalisation of a plan, todo implement flow that required the agent to converse in markdown files that I'd been using for a while - but manually managing the files (The reasoning and benefits of that flow are covered in the linked post). This post covers the evolution of that process to the use of Git Worktrees.
by Waterluvian | 2026-03-12 16:59:26+00:00
Yeah, I've always seen it as a hot potato issue. I think a lot of people who don't play ball on dealing with climate change aren't deniers, they just want the next guy to have to do the work. It's very, very hard to sell to anyone, "this is going to be incredibly costly and painful for you and you won't enjoy any of the benefits. Your grandkids might."
by a_e_k | 2026-03-12 16:59:32+00:00
My take as a graphics programmer is that angles are perfectly fine as inputs. Bring 'em! And we'll use the trig to turn those into matrices/quaternions/whatever to do the linear algebra. Not a problem.

I'm a trig-avoider too, but see it more as about not wiggling back and forth. You don't want to be computing angle -> linear algebra -> angle -> linear algebra... (I.e., once you've computed derived values from angles, you can usually stay in the derived values realm.)

Pro-tip I once learned from Eric Haines (https://erich.realtimerendering.com/) at a conference: angles should be represented in degrees until you have to convert them to radians to do the trig. That way, user-friendly angles like 90, 45, 30, 60, 180 are all exact and you can add and subtract and multiply them without floating-point drift. I.e., 90.0f is exactly representable in FP32, pi/2 is not. 1000 full revolutions of 360.0f degrees is exact, 1000 full revolutions of float(2*pi) is not.
by FireBeyond | 2026-03-12 16:59:45+00:00
Which "war"? While there are the current "debates" about whether this is a war, the US hasn't declared war on anybody since WW2.

> but he would have to be pretty bad off to come to that belief.

Well, did you hear that the dead are walking around with no arms and no legs because they were blown off? Trump said that, a few days ago.
by everdrive | 2026-03-12 16:59:47+00:00
>I lean toward "people got better at not dying from everything else."

Unfortunately, that doesn't seem the be the case here, and the article goes into this. Deaths due to colorectal cancer under 50 simply used to be incredibly uncommon. Younger people were simply not screened for it. The rise is not solely relative to other forms of death, but in absolute terms has increased.
by memcg | 2026-03-12 17:00:00+00:00
The school district uses Thomson Reuters Clear to verify residency. Thomson Reuters Clear uses LPR data.

"School District 126’s contract with the license plate reader company shows it’s paying a total of $41,904 for a 36-month-long contract that began in December of 2024 -- the same month that Sánchez and her daughter moved into their new Alsip home."

Per a Google search my county:
For the 2025–2026 school year, Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) charges nonresident tuition of
$21,668 for elementary school and $20,214 for secondary school. Nonresident students must apply through the International Admissions and Enrollment office, and not all schools are open to tuition-paying students.

My wife worked in the office of an elementary school for 20 years and verified residency, custody, restraining orders and more. She shared many stories about people gaming the system. People will cross state and county lines to access a better school or one closer to work.
by fladrif | 2026-03-12 17:00:00+00:00
Satire is too dangerous to be presented outside of its community. This honestly should've been left within FOSDEM.

It's great within the context of people who understand it, enlightening even. Sparks conversations and debates. But outside of it ignorance wields it like a bludgeon and dangerous to everyone around them. Look at all the satirical media around fascism, if you knew to criticize you could laugh, but for fascists it's a call to arms.
by mlhpdx | 2026-03-12 17:00:07+00:00
I strive to be understood, and my streams of thought are often weird and generally intractable. Nobody really wants to read that; nobody wants the deep threads required to explain it.

I value reading novel and interesting thoughts and ideas. I don't feel "tricked" when I read something of substance or thought provoking, even if LLM generated and decorated with the platitudes and common forms for dull readers.
by koliber | 2026-03-12 17:00:16+00:00
Sometimes you can pay someone who has done this before, and you're both happy. The person is happy that their experience helps them get a job. The company is happy that you get someone with the needed experience.

If I want to hire a driver, I can train someone who does not know how to drive, or hire someone who has experience as a driver. I can do either, but I'd prefer to do the latter in most cases.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-03-12 17:00:29+00:00
> where you take some bad loans and mix them together to get a "less risky" loan, since the chance of them all defaulting at once is less than the chance of all but one defaulting

Yes. This is mathematically sound.

> those are then recursively repackaged until they have an A+ rating, or some such nonsense, right?

AAA-rated CLOs performed with the credit one would expect from that rating.

The problem, in 2008, wasn't that the AAA-rated stuff was crap. It was that it was ambiguous and illiquid.

> I'm guessing there's no rule that says you can't intermingle these things across separate "independent" securities, even if the two securities end up containing fractions of the same underlying bad loans

Defining independence in financial assets like this is futile.

> there's no chance of correlated defaults in a bucket of bad business loans that's structured this way

Software companies being ravaged by AI fears.

> replace "housing loans" with "unregulated securities" and note that my description switches from describing the 2008 financial crisis to describing the Great Depression

It also describes a lot of successful finance that doesn't reach the mainstream because it's phenomenally boring.
by succeed-hiring | 2026-03-12 17:00:29+00:00
Succeed | Lead Engineer (AI-First Development) | Remote (Europe preferred) | Full-time

Succeed is building a platform that helps high-school students discover academic opportunities around the world — summer schools, competitions, programmes and university experiences. Our goal is to reach one million students over the next few years.

We’re hiring a lead engineer to take technical ownership of the platform as we move from MVP to market. You’ll be the only full-time engineer working directly with the founders and product designer.

The role is well suited to a strong recent graduate or early-career engineer who enjoys building systems end-to-end and experimenting with AI tools in development (Claude, Claude Code, etc.).

Stack currently includes Supabase, PostgreSQL, n8n, APIs and webhooks.

Fully remote. Europe-friendly time zones preferred.

Apply here: https://joinsucceed.notion.site/lead-engineer-ai-first-devel...
by Mooshux | 2026-03-12 17:00:30+00:00
Nice primitive. Giving agents their own inboxes, phone numbers, and virtual cards fills a real gap. One missing piece though: those services all need upstream API keys (Twilio, Stripe, etc.) to work. Without scoped credentials per agent, a compromised Clawcard deployment leaks access to all of them.

We've been running scoped key injection for OpenClaw agents: the agent gets a runtime token scoped to just the APIs/services it needs, nothing more. Rotation is automatic on compromise. Relevant mechanics here: www.apistronghold.com/blog/chatgpt-plugin-database-admin-rights-ai-agent-permissions
by scottlamb | 2026-03-12 17:00:32+00:00
That distinction is what I was getting at with "if that statement came from the third party (rather than the school district misinterpreting the raw data themselves)".

If the company just provided the raw data, they may be in better legal shape. But I'd say either they or the school administrator libeled the family. (Of course, I'm not a lawyer.) Even if the company did provide only the raw data, I wonder if libel is somehow implied in its contracted/intended use. And I'm really hoping for the legal bloodbath outcome, because this is unconscionable.
by GaelFG | 2026-03-12 17:00:38+00:00
Not from the article : Before you walk in, a supercomputer predicted which choice you'd make, and put $1000000 in the opaque box if it predicted you'd take just the one, or $0 if it predicted you'd take both.

So the amount of money in the black box don't change whatever you REALLY pick.
Either the predicator would have guessed you'd pick both and there is 0$ in black box, in that case you have interest to take both boxes and win $1000 which is better than zero.

Or it predicted you would only take the black box, put $1000000 in it and then again you win more by taking the two boxes.
by harrisi | 2026-03-12 17:00:42+00:00
I wrote a fix for node that got upstreamed a few years ago on a Lenovo Thinkpad 3 Chromebook. I'm actually commenting from it now. It's not a workhorse by any means, but for $99, it's not bad. A 1.1GHz Celeron processor with 4GB of memory is able to compile projects like node, python, Erlang, etc. without much hassle. It just takes a lunch break :)

Any modern Mac is more than capable. I had the baseline M1 Macbook Air that I did work on as well, just to see how that fared. Much better than this machine - 10x the price, but more than 10x the performance. This one is great as a "I don't mind if I break it or lose it" device.
by bregma | 2026-03-12 17:01:05+00:00
Warping a loom by hand is a nightmare of repetitive tweaking, drawing each warp end through a heddle and adjusting the tension, one by one and back again. It's like restringing and tuning a guitar with hundreds of strings.

Even hand knitting is slightly better -- cast 250 stitches on to a circular needle then start the next row, only to find 10 rows later you've twisted it and are now knitting a Moebius sweater. Rip it out and repeat (sometimes referred to as "frogging" or "tinking").

Yeah, knitting machines are satisfying in many ways.
by denjuro | 2026-03-12 17:01:18+00:00
Author here.

Panorama Engine is an experiment around deterministic analytical execution.

The goal is to make analytical decisions reconstructible after execution by treating every run as a sealed deterministic cycle producing a verifiable snapshot.

Originally developed for financial research workflows but the architecture is domain-agnostic.

Interested in feedback from people working on analytical pipelines or reproducible ML workflows.
by happytoexplain | 2026-03-12 17:01:19+00:00
I think this is a little disingenuous. The way they've used the person's race in the sentence is really common, and we understand in those cases that it may or may not come from a racist place in the writer's heart, and we really only have cues/heuristics/history to go on.

E.g. if I mention that race X commits more crime, the reason I'm saying it and the context and my tone and wording all inform you of whether I am saying that from a place of honesty (trying to make things better for everybody, including race X), or a place of hatred for race X.

Generally when a writer inserts a person's race flippantly like in the parent's quote, it comes from a place of pettiness, at least partially (and yes, you can be racist against your own race). In particular, this is a good example of a common format used when speaking sarcastically or bitterly about, specifically, white people (sounds like "a room full of old white men" or "angry white lady"). It's now particularly obnoxious, since its usage has largely outgrown the legitimate grievances which inspired it.

It's important to be extremely careful about this kind of "reverse racism" - yes, the point is that the target race is privileged in some way, so it feels more harmless than "regular" racism. But "reverse racism" becomes "regular racism" very, very fast, and the cute shine drops off of it like a rock. I think we're well into crossing that big fuzzy line at this point (and for the past decade, in fact).
by ozozozd | 2026-03-12 17:01:20+00:00
Also, employing “infinite intelligence” by splitting it into “workers” and organizing them into firms cannot be farther than a paradigm change.

It’s strictly an attempt to shoehorn the new tech into an existing paradigm, just because right now the system prompt makes an “agent” behave differently than the one with a different prompt.

It’s unimaginative to say the least.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-03-12 17:01:37+00:00
I've done something similar for queries. Comments:

* Yes, this is a language, no its not a programming language you are used to, but a restricted/embellished natural language that (might) make things easier to express to an LLM, and provides a framework for humans who want to write specifications to get the AI to write code.

* Models aren't deterministic, but they are persistent (never gonna give up!). If you generate tests from your specification as well as code, you can use differential testing to get some measure (although not perfect) of correctness. Never delete the code that was generated before, if you change the spec, have your model fix the existing code rather than generate new code.

* Specifications can actually be analyzed by models to determine if they are fully grounded or not. An ungrounded specification is going to not be a good experience, so ask the model if it thinks your specification is grounded.

* Use something like a build system if you have many specs in your code repository and you need to keep them in sync. Spec changes -> update the tests and code (for example).
by smallmancontrov | 2026-03-12 17:01:48+00:00
The regulators were modeling a scenario where private credit was dragged down by a problem elsewhere in the economy, not one where the rest of the economy was dragged down by private credit. Everyone understands that center of a financial implosion is always worse than its effects on the broader economy, but regulators aren't tasked with stopping the explosion at ground zero, they are tasked with stopping contagion dominoes from falling, so that's what they model.
by parineum | 2026-03-12 17:02:10+00:00
> You could also use an OS that doesn't tend to have dodgy updates that brick your system, such as most Linux distro.

I haven't done it recently but back when I was learning Linux, I definitely bricked my fair share of installations updating and installing things.

It was probably fixable to a more experienced person but it wasn't to me.

Linux is a lot of things but brick-proof for novice users isn't one of them.
by throwaway82931 | 2026-03-12 17:02:38+00:00
> when I have my 2 programmers in office

I'd like to think that you see "my 2 programmers" as "my team" but I've come to expect phrasing like "when we have our 2 programmers in office". That perspective emphasizes that we're all in this together, rather than serfs working for the benefit of the lord.

The "my programmers" phrasing plays into my prejudice that one reason you like having "your programmers" in office is the exhilaration you feel in seeing them at your beck and call.
by Mooshux | 2026-03-12 17:02:44+00:00
Sandboxing agent execution on the host is table stakes now. The bigger gap is external blast radius: even a perfectly sandboxed agent with full API keys can still nuke prod if compromised. Scoped credentials limit what it can actually touch.

Example from a recent plugin incident: agent had DB admin rights because it inherited the deployer's token. Scoped per-tool keys + blast radius audit fixes that. https://www.apistronghold.com/blog/chatgpt-plugin-database-a...
by bilsbie | 2026-03-12 17:03:01+00:00
I wish we’d all go to four day work weeks.

Over My whole life, 5 out of 7 full days of work always felt so daunting and almost dehumanizing.

But 4/7 is mentally close to half and just feels way different qualitatively. If you have a job you mostly like, 4 days a week feels really sustainable.
by fixxation92 | 2026-03-12 17:03:06+00:00
"I have a tendency to go down rabbit holes when faced with problems - give me a minor inconvenience and I’ll happily spend weeks building something far more elaborate than the situation warrants."

You don't know how happy I was to read this... I thought I had a serious problem with getting distracted with my "projects" but it seems this is much more normal than I thought ;-)