MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wuweiaxin | 2026-03-12 18:06:15+00:00
The artifact output model is more useful than it looks at first. We use Claude in a multi-agent pipeline and discovered that structured artifact outputs reduce parse errors significantly compared to freeform text responses -- the model seems to reason differently when it knows the output will be rendered. Curious whether Anthropic sees similar quality improvements in tool-use tasks when the output has a concrete format constraint.
by wuweiaxin | 2026-03-12 18:06:39+00:00
Secret and credential sprawl is a real problem in agent pipelines specifically -- each agent needs its own scoped access and the blast radius of a leaked credential is much larger when an agent can act autonomously. We ended up with a tiered secret model: agents get short-lived derived tokens scoped to exactly the tools they need for a given task, not broad API keys. Revocation on task completion, not on schedule. More ops overhead upfront but caught two misuse cases that would have been invisible otherwise.
by neal_jones | 2026-03-12 18:06:49+00:00
Yea, I’m just consulting with small projects. A year ago Jira felt like the default, last month I learned about Linear.

I’ve just been surprised lately at how often it isn’t the first thing mentioned. I came from a Fortune 500 and Jira was mostly hated there as well. I still think its foothold is so big that it’ll be a long time before anyone goes through the effort to migrate. I’d personally rather live with it than try to replace it.
by VorpalWay | 2026-03-12 18:06:58+00:00
Do (u)intptr_t preserve provenance? Or does this count as exposed provenance when you convert back and forth?

Maybe that is not the correct C++ terminology, I'm more familiar with how provenance works in Rust, where large parts of it got stabilised a little over a year ago. (What was stabilised was "strict provenance", which is a set of rules that if you abide them will definitely be correct, but it is possible the rules might be loosened in the future to be more lenient.)

https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/ptr/index.html#provenance
by wuweiaxin | 2026-03-12 18:07:03+00:00
The demonstration-based approach is interesting for the handoff problem. The hardest part of agentic automation isnt the first run -- its making the agent robust to the cases the demonstrator never showed it. How do you handle edge cases or failures mid-task? Does it fall back to asking the user, or does it have some recovery heuristic? Asking because we found that the failure mode surface matters more than happy-path coverage when you actually deploy these in production.
by ahtihn | 2026-03-12 18:07:17+00:00
> sometimes, people must speed. They must break the law. Wife giving birth, rushing a wounded person to the ER, speeding to avoid a collision

I would argue that only the last one is a valid reason because it's the only one where it's clear that not speeding leads to direct worse consequences.

Speed limits don't exist just to annoy people. Speeding increases the risk of accident and especially the consequences of an accident.

I don't trust people to drive well in a stressful situation, so why would it be a good idea to let them increase the risk by speeding.

The worst part is that it's not even all that likely that the time saved by speeding ends up mattering.
by inanutshellus | 2026-03-12 18:07:23+00:00
Everyone's "poo-pooing" the article because the title doesn't mention mice, but, FWIW, stories of gut biota affecting humans behavior have been documented for a while.

Memory gain is noteworthy, which is the article's "wow" factor, but everyone's just knee-jerk smirking so ... here's a few random articles to gross you out about the wild world of trading microbiota and, for better or worse, changing your personality:

* "My butt made me crave candy."[1]
* "Gee, I'm not bipolar anymore thanks to my husband's butt juice infusion."[2]

Crazy, right?

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-behavioral-microbiome/202404/hacking-an-individuals-personality-through-their-gut-contents

[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-28/faecal-microbiota-transplant-credited-with-curing-bipolar/105541522
by moosehater | 2026-03-12 18:08:05+00:00
Yup, this is essentially what the original concept of the Jungle genre was built around. Chop up the Amen Break, mix the notes(?) around, repeat them as you see fit, and add other samples/vocals around the drum patterns you've created.

A couple favorites from the 90s:
https://youtu.be/mL2Bgj-za5k?si=fhXHhNGjA-RZkiD7
https://youtu.be/a5meT63flnM?si=ggvypNCFfUUq3Qxq
by BrianFHearn | 2026-03-12 18:08:07+00:00
Interesting project, but I think it's solving the wrong bottleneck. The gap between what I want and what the model produces isn't primarily a language problem — it's a knowledge problem. You can write the most precise spec imaginable, but if the model doesn't have domain-specific knowledge about your product's edge cases, undocumented behaviors, or the tribal knowledge your team has accumulated, the output will be confidently wrong regardless of how formally you specified it.

I've been working on this from the other direction — instead of formalizing how you talk to the model, structure the knowledge the model has access to. When you actually measure what proportion of your domain knowledge frontier models can produce on their own (we call this the "esoteric knowledge ratio"), it's often only 40-55% for well-documented open source projects. For proprietary products it's even lower. No amount of spec formalism fixes that gap — you need to get the missing knowledge into context.
by Brettinhere | 2026-03-12 18:08:26+00:00
A funny bug we hit while building the "Import from ChatGPT" pipeline:

We originally assumed OpenAI's data export was just a flat array of messages. It’s not. It’s actually a node tree (because whenever you edit a prompt or click "regenerate response", it branches off).

When we naively parsed this into linear commits, our timelines looked completely insane. The agent would make a great architectural decision, then suddenly time-travel back 5 minutes to suggest a terrible alternative, and somehow "merge" both into reality. It looked like a Git rebase gone horribly wrong.

We had to build a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) resolver and a deduplication layer just to flatten OpenAI's multi-verse of regenerated responses into a single, sane Git history before committing it to the repo.

Turns out, AI memory isn't just lossy it's non linear. Anyone else here suffered through parsing OpenAI's export JSONs?
by staticassertion | 2026-03-12 18:08:35+00:00
That's fine. It's just unclear to me if the parent poster is being critical exclusively of people "irl" giving unsolicited advice or if they're speaking to the forum of users who come here explicitly to discuss topics like these.

If it's the former, I'm ambivalent. I don't give advice as a general rule. If it's the latter, I find that totally silly.
by text0404 | 2026-03-12 18:08:42+00:00
Ok, then let's address the 52% elephant in the room instead of making cuts to the 3%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_Uni...

Reducing defense spending by a fractional amount will have more of an impact than completely eliminating science spending altogether. The Iran tally is up to what, $11b now after a single week?
by tejpalv8 | 2026-03-12 18:08:53+00:00
OB-1 is a self-improving CLI coding agent, carefully tuned across all frontier models.

Today’s coding agent teams still employ hundreds of human engineers, which we find telling. We’ve kept our team small, consisting entirely of IOI/IMO medalists, to make one bet: OB-1 will build OB-1 faster than any human team.

This is our first public milestone toward a larger goal: building a coding agent that can systematically improve itself.

Here’s where OB-1 is going:

- Auto-generates evals from past PRs, then climbs them with custom models
- Builds its own skills, hooks, and rules from a codebase and session history
- Background agents in safe sandboxes that keep working while you context-switch
- Session forking and sharing for parallel exploration –
- Lives where you already work: Slack, Linear, GitHub, Graphite
- PM mode so it never runs out of ideas

Try it out - we're offering $10/day in free credits for early users.
by SoftTalker | 2026-03-12 18:08:57+00:00
Yes, exactly my reaction. Other than maybe to open an account in the first place, the only reason I ever went into to a bank even in the pre-internet, pre-smartphone era was to deal with cash.

Checks could be deposited in the deposit drop, or later at an ATM. My payroll went to direct deposit as soon as that was possible.

But to get cash, before ATMs, you went into the bank, unless you had check-cashing privilges somewhere else (supermarkets used to offer this). To deposit cash, you went into the bank so the teller could count it in front of you and agree on the amount. It was risker to deposit cash in a deposit drop or ATM.

The move to cashless transactions for almost everything, and the resultant rare need to carry cash, is IMO the main reason why we don't need very many bank tellers anymore.
by pixelatedindex | 2026-03-12 18:09:18+00:00
> 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.

I didn’t, and thanks for clarifying for me.

This doesn’t pass the sniff test for me though - someone needs to train the models, which requires code. If AI can do everything for you, then what’s the differentiator as a business? Everything can be in chatGPT but that’s not the only business in existence. If something goes wrong, who is gonna debug it? Instead of API requests you would debug prompt requests maybe.

We already hate talking to a robot for waiting on calls, automated support agents, etc. I don’t think a paying customer would accept that - they want a direct line to a person.

I can buy the argument that the backend will be entirely AI and you won’t need to be managing instances of servers and databases but the front end will absolutely need to be coded. That will need some software engineering - we might get a role that is a weird blend of product + design + coding but that transformation is already happening.

Honestly the biggest change I see is that the chat interface will be on equal footing with the browser. You might have some app that can connect to a bunch of chat interfaces that is good at something, and specializations are going to matter even more.

It was a bit of a word vomit so thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
by roadside_picnic | 2026-03-12 18:09:23+00:00
Sounds like you don't have a lot of remote work experience.

The majority of my career (years before the pandemic) has been remote work. I find in office work painfully slow. I pair program quite often remote, and when someone gets stuck we also "just talk". Honestly I prefer screen sharing to leaning over someone's shoulder (much easier to doing supporting work in parallel).

I find it really depends on the type of org though. Large corporate places do tend to suffer from remote work because so much of the work is performative anyway. Remote small companies and startups the velocity is very high, but you do need more senior people capable of independent work.

Especially when you factor in the easy of "after hours" work, the amount of emergency stuff I've shipped around midnight is incomparable to the 'in office' equivalent.

Though I suspect the key word here is "my 2 programmers", I find managers don't feel like their doing work unless they're physically watching it get done.

Not understanding how to run a remote team is not the same as remote teams not being effective in principle.
by thunderfork | 2026-03-12 18:09:35+00:00
Canadian legislators don't have a history of setting arbitrary restrictions on what counts as voter ID, whereas American politicians seem absurdly fixated on it for ~some reason~.

You can look up the Canadian list of accepted identification documents if you want the full thing, but it includes library cards, public transit cards, correspondence from educational institutions, student IDs, blood donor cards, letters of confirmation of residence from shelters and soup kitchens, residential leases or utility bills, and personal cheques.

You can also vote without ID in Canada by having a guarantor with ID vouch for you.

Contrast the proposed SAVE act, which accepts... passports, birth certificates, naturalization documents, and "REAL ID-compliant documents that also indicate citizenship", which is a fun one.
by electrosphere | 2026-03-12 18:09:50+00:00
Sorry to hear that. Being a sysadmin, I guess you're mainly interacting with systems rather than people and need to focus. They should exempt you from RTO except for the odd "all hands" meeting days.

I'm a software engineer in a Product Engineering team and it's about 75% hands-on engineering, 25% Slack/Teams interaction and alignments between people. I find being in the office helps to make connections with other staff in other teams (eg. bumping into people while making coffee in staff kitchen etc). I think thats important from a career perspective.
by roryirvine | 2026-03-12 18:09:51+00:00
Yes, it's a system called leasehold which has its roots in medieval feudalism. Essentially, a property owner owns the building and a long-term (usually either 99 or 990 years) lease on the ground it sits on.

Everyone recognises that it's absurd, and there've been attempts to fix it for over a century. They've already gone in Scotland, and the previous government finally passed legislation that would allow new leaseholds to be banned in England and Wales too (although it hasn't yet gone into effect). The current government has introduced a bill which will eventually bring the system to an end altogether.

As you might expect, there's huge opposition to these reforms from vested interests who are using every trick in the book to delay them. Getting rid of the hereditary peers from the House of Lords can only improve matters.
Ask HN: Should We Consider an Android Gray Out Protest to Keep Android Open?
by wisenet | 2026-03-12 18:10:11+00:00
What if we changed the color of icons and images on Google Play and in apps to grayscale? This would be similar to the 2011/2012 SOPA and PIPA protests.

Changing the Google Play assets to grayscale is easy however, Google may push these apps down the listing. Changing the app launcher icon requires more effort but this will appear on the user's screen so the inform the user why and link to KeepAndroidOpen.org.

Mobile is an ecosystem of three: the platform, the developers and the users - we all need each other and the relationship should be balanced. It is not balanced. If Google were to use their platform to block these actions of protest, it will show that they have too much control.

If we decide to do this, we would need some:
- an organization(s) to coordinate the protest. KeepAndroidOpen.org, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Software Foundation?
- a date to coordinate the change to gray.
- and many developers, including big names, to join the protest.

As a solo developer, it is difficult to openly organize this protest because I fear of reprisal. Google has removed my app for very minor issues without warning in the past and this impacts my family's income and livelihood.

It is crazy that the Android platform - which is built on the open Linux platform - is locking people down.

I hope this question will lead to good discussion and possibly, a significant protest.
by ljm | 2026-03-12 18:10:14+00:00
I don't believe that delegating reading comprehension to an LLM is really any better than delegating writing ability. In fact I'd argue it's worse to have an automation advising on what's worth reading or not.

There are a lot of people who have no time for something like Infinite Jest and even getting through the first few chapters is an effort. But at least they tried. An LLM excluding the possibility of reading this book because it is 1000 pages of postmodern absurdity effectively optimises away the fringes of human creativity and leaves only the average stuff behind.

AI slop detectors already exist and are no better than snake oil, because a person can have an LLM-smelling writing style without actually using AI. After all, LLMs were originally trained on human input.
by 0x457 | 2026-03-12 18:10:19+00:00
Asian countries developed with more overlap in basic ingredients, cooking techniques, and historical influence networks than Europe did. Historically there were 3 influence zones in Asia. There is a lot of pickling, fermenting, salting, drying. In Asia of these techniques were more or less unified. Fish sauces from different countries are Pepsi vs Coca-Cola level of difference.

> Polish and Spanish is closer to each other than to most other asian cuisine.

I'd say Polish has a lot of similarities with Asian cuisine. Sure, both have stews and sausages, but flavor profiles are very different: acidic vs sour.

I won't be able to tell difference between gyoza & wonton if they shaped the same, but surely I can tell difference between ravioli & uszka. Uszka is IMO closer to any dumpling from Asia than to anything European.
by ndesaulniers | 2026-03-12 18:10:19+00:00
Happy to see discussion of LLVM's interesting implementation of Static Polymorphism using CRTP. Some recommended reads:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiously_recurring_template_p...

2. https://david.alvarezrosa.com/posts/devirtualization-and-sta...

3. https://llvm.org/docs/ProgrammersManual.html#the-isa-cast-an...
by csb6 | 2026-03-12 18:10:23+00:00
Attacking Iran has made the entire region less safe and so far there is no evidence Iran has been deterred. They continue to successfully hit targets with missiles and drones, and they have expanded operations to successfully close the Strait of Hormuz. Seems like it would have been a lot cheaper to not attack Iran and instead to rein in Israel, an existing nuclear power that is the primary destabilizing force in the Middle East.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2026-03-12 18:10:35+00:00
The calculation is that of course there are defences, but if you have a big stockpile of $20K drones, and your opponent has a limited number of $2mil drone interceptors, then you can keep throwing drones and keeping your opponent busy there, and you're coming out ahead even before one finally gets through.

See: https://bsky.app/profile/mekka.mekka-tech.com/post/3mgrvx5gr...
by ChrisKnott | 2026-03-12 18:10:40+00:00
Other ones that to me felt like completely fair value and better than anything I had as a child were the Creator Bunny, Space Telescope, and Space Robot. Something like £18/£25/£25 the second two having light bricks included.

JK Brickworks has an alt build for the bunny that doesn’t require a massive amount of different pieces and makes it lay mini eggs.
by ProllyInfamous | 2026-03-12 18:10:43+00:00
Welcome to Tennessee (it shouldn't matter, but it does: clean-cut taxpaying middle-aged white guy, with former background in govt data centers [1] ). If I had any detectible minority status, I would display a plate properly.

More onlookers (from behind) snap photos of this taglessness than any other politics/offensive bumper sticker I've had [2] — my only thought is that my vehicle misleads them to think that perhaps I'm undercover I.C.E. (purposefully obscurring)..?

[1] I've woken up blackout in a comped hotel when friends in identical situation got arrested/PI; I still carry a long-expired govt work badge in my moneyclip

[2] 2nd-most popular, all-time, was "Patron Saint of Denials Luigi Mangione" image
by themafia | 2026-03-12 18:10:59+00:00
> This is a huge waste of time/money

Right. And when you see someone so dedicated do it there is almost certainly a hidden variable which causes this to occur. I imagine the nature of funding of these schools and the distribution of public monies has a lot to do with it.

> ways of combating fraud

Imagine being the richest country in the world and _caring_, honestly, about school location "fraud."
by starkparker | 2026-03-12 18:11:33+00:00
> if you want to justify WFH, introverted-like people do not get the same level of benefit as extroverted-like people in this situation

I'm introverted and did just fine in an office, because the company culture was that coworkers all talked to each other about how they preferred to work (preferably no more often than once a quarter) and then respected that. When we moved to WFH during lockdown, that practice continued.

I've also WFH at remote-first companies that did not practice, encourage, or enforce ICs communicating to find and document better ways to work together, and have not been served remotely as well by the result.
by AuthAuth | 2026-03-12 18:12:16+00:00
Per captia emissions are meaningless and only used because they obscure the damage china is doing. Projections *from China say this year is the peak and it will start going down. They've been saying that every year for the past 5 years by the way. It always gets revised. As for the solar thats maximum capacity and actual figures for electricity generation are significantly lower. Coal is higher in terms of actual energy generation added to the grid.

if the US doubled its output but added another 500m to its population would you consider that to be a reduction in emissions or a positive trend? No it wouldnt because emissions are still rising. Climate change doesnt care that you have 1.8b people it just looks at the Co2 output.
by bigyabai | 2026-03-12 18:12:18+00:00
Maybe! Most of those unmanned narcosubs are cut-down speedboats hulls, to my knowledge. The truly watertight/submerged ones are few and far between; it's a lot of investment for marginal decrease in observability.

My money is still on low-observable attack craft, or a high-low mix that deprioritizes submersibles. Iran has an impressive panopoly but also has casus belli to lie out their nose. If Iran does have fully submersable UUVs, I'd expect them to be saved for a direct confrontation with the US Navy, not tankers.

I could definitely be wrong though, I don't have any insider info to work with here.
The cost of duplicating domain data for performance
by davidvartanian | 2026-03-12 18:12:33+00:00
I was building a system a few years ago under immense pressure to ship. We had a choice. We could implement a new API call between two domains, or we could duplicate the domain data into multiple service databases. I argued for duplication because I believed the extra network call would compromise our latency goals, and the business demand for speed felt urgent.

I remember thinking at the time that this was the smarter engineering trade-off. We avoided the complexity of a new API interface, and the application responded faster. In reality, I was just ignoring the Rule of the Bolt. Instead of treating the immutable identifier as the only stable joint between modules, I had tied them together through shared, duplicated state.

I left the company months later, so I never had to deal with the inevitable synchronization nightmares that decision caused for the team that remained. I look back on that architectural decision as a failure. I prioritized short-term speed over long-term autonomy.

We should be comfortable with the cost of network calls if the alternative is breaking modularity. The only true interface between two domains should be an immutable reference. Everything else is just debt waiting to accumulate.
by uoaei | 2026-03-12 18:12:55+00:00
Functional requirements are known knowns.

Out of bounds behavior is sometimes a known unknown, but in the era of generated code is exclusively unknown unknowns.

Good luck speccing out all the unanticipated side effects and undefined behaviors. Perhaps you can prompt the agent in a loop a bnumber of times but it's hard to believe that the brute-force throw-more-tokens-at-it approach has the same level of return as a more attentive audit by human eyeballs.