MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Forja – Remote Docker Builders on AWS
by noqcks | 2026-03-10 15:15:27+00:00
Hello HN. I got sick of docker builds on my mac taking forever, so I built forja.

Forja is an ephemeral Docker builder that runs entirely in your own AWS account. It spins up real EC2 instances for each build (`c7a` for AMD64, `c7g` for ARM), builds your image with BuildKit, pushes cache layers to S3, and then tears the machine down.

Here’s how it works:
- The CLI asks AWS for a fresh EC2 instance with a pre-baked AMI (boots in ~5 seconds, ready to build in ~30).
- It sets up mutual TLS on the fly: for each build it creates a short-lived CA, issues client/server certs, drops them in S3, and both sides mutually auth before any data moves.
- BuildKit runs on the remote box, pulls/pushes cache layers to S3 so future builds stay fast even though every machine is ephemeral.
- When the build finishes or fails—or even if you Ctrl+C—the instance self-terminates and the certs disappear with it.

Let me know what you think!

Cheers,
Benji
by rlnorthcutt | 2026-03-10 15:15:44+00:00
I built analyzerepo to solve the "cold start" problem for both new developers and AI agents. Whether you are jumping into a legacy codebase or trying to make Claude Code actually useful on day one, you usually spend the first hour just trying to figure out where the entry points are and how the pieces fit together.

This is a Go-based CLI that points Claude at any GitHub or local repo to generate three specific, high-context Markdown files:

1) ONBOARDING.md: A human-readable guide that maps out the project’s purpose, language stats, file tree, and a "doc library" of existing .md files. Hand this to a new contributor to save an hour of verbal walkthroughs.

2) ANALYSIS.md: A per-file audit that classifies roles (e.g., entrypoint, core, util) and provides structured improvement suggestions. Each suggestion includes a done_when condition specifically optimized so you can paste the block directly into a Claude Code prompt for a working implementation.

3) CLAUDE.md: A project-specific context file that Claude Code reads automatically to understand your architecture and conventions instead of being generically cautious.

Key Features:

- Zero Dependencies: No runtime or language install required; it’s a single binary.
- Smart Selection: It uses Claude to identify the most structurally significant files instead of hitting token limits with junk files.
- Flexible Backend: It automatically detects your ANTHROPIC_API_KEY or uses your existing Claude CLI installation.

I’d love to hear how this handles your repos or what other "AI-native" documentation formats would be useful for your workflow.
by faxmeyourcode | 2026-03-10 15:15:44+00:00
If you treat LLMs as generic transformers, you can fine tune with a ton of examples of input output pairs. For messy input data with lots of examples already built, this is ideal.

At my day job we have experimented with fine tuned transformers for our receipt processing workflow. We take images of receipts, run them through OCR (this step might not even be necessary, but we do it at scale already anyways), and then take the OCR output text blobs and "transform" them into structured receipts with retailer, details like zip code, transaction timestamps, line items, sales taxes, sales, etc.

I trained a small LLM (mistral-7b) via SFT with 1000 (maybe 10,000? I don't remember) examples from receipts in our database from 2019. When I tested the model on receipts from 2020 it hit something like 98% accuracy.

The key that made this work so well is that we had a ton of data (potentially billions of example input/output pairs) and we could easily evaluate the correctness by unpacking the json output and comparing with our source tables.

Note that this isn't running in production, it was an experiment. There are edge cases I didn't consider, and there's a lot more to it in terms of accurately evaling, when to re-train, dealing with net new receipt types, retailers, new languages (we're doing global expansion RN so it's top of mind), general diversity of edge cases in your training data, etc.
by coldpie | 2026-03-10 15:16:21+00:00
> but if AI is just as good, doesn't that just mean more good PRs?

If you believe the outputs of LLMs are derivative products of the materials the LLMs were trained on (which is a position I lean towards myself, but I also understand the viewpoint of those who disagree), then no, that's not a good thing, because it would be a license violation to accept those derived products without following the original material's license terms, such as attribution and copyleft terms. You are now party to violating the original materials' copyright by accepting AI generated code. That's ethically dubious, even if those original authors may have a hard time bringing a court case against you.
by ogurechny | 2026-03-10 15:17:02+00:00
Should be phrased as “Despite the ham-fisted bans, overheating DPI boxes, and propaganda (from both sides, and it is not always clear who is better at scaremongering), a lot of people learned to not give a fuck”.

Like, obviously, Instagram has been blocked for a long time, and, obviously, everyone who is obsessed with that social network keeps using it, including the rich kids of the top crooks (a.k.a. “the elites”) who can't miss a chance to drool over some dress they wore on a private concert of a Western pop star in Dubai (suspiciously never announced in media), and, obviously, the censors are making a fuss about it for the hundredth time, promising to fine anyone who does business there into oblivion to make users move to the competing local services that have been lobbying that under pretext of politically correct patriotic alignment.

I would advise everyone to familiarise yourself with tools like zapret. You'll need them sooner than you think.
by criddell | 2026-03-10 15:17:11+00:00
Tony's An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming[1] is the first academic paper that I read that I was able to understand when I was an undergrad. I think it unlocked something in me because before that I never believed that I would be able to read and understand scientific papers.

That was 35ish years ago. I just pulled up the paper now and I can't read the notation anymore... This might be something that I try applying an AI to. Get it to walk me through a paper paragraph-by-paragraph until I get back up to speed.

[1]:https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/363235.363259
by mrbungie | 2026-03-10 15:17:39+00:00
The same way niche/luxury product and services compare to fast/cheap ones: they are made with focus and intent that goes against the statistical average, which also normally would take more time and effort to make.

McDonalds cooks ~great~ (edit: fair enough, decent) burgers when measured objectively, but people still go to more niche burger restaurants because they want something different and made with more care.

That's not to say that an human can't use AI with intent, but then AI becomes another tool and not an autonomous code generating agent.
by Bridged7756 | 2026-03-10 15:17:47+00:00
I can see the value of doing this but I think that this is a case of the 80-20 rule. Just the low effort 80, which could be keeping a journal where you reflect on how you felt a given day, why that might be, and what steps to take to avoid it from happening (or keep it happening) should get you pretty far.

Most of the things that really hinder my productiveness and happiness are the same things that everyone tells you about; sleep, diet, sunlight, not being stuck indoors all day, socializing. And most of these can be improved by making changes to my habits.

Other than that, is that I think that it's important to get into the habit of self reflection. Having a feedback loop on my own life has helped me find out what works and what doesn't. It's too easy to just go through the days slogging through and not making any changes because you don't even realize what's going on.
by broDogNRG | 2026-03-10 15:17:57+00:00
Would like to point out GenX is middle management age in the US.

It isn't the senile crowd running things anymore. It's 50-60 year old Thiel, Musk, health insurance CEO, crowd.

Professional consumer crowd that's taken the baton and never invented anything of their own. Electric cars and rockets, the internet, and society post-WW2 were originally grandpa's ideas.
by Plasmoid | 2026-03-10 15:18:00+00:00
Fun story - at Oxford they like to name buildings after important people. Dr Hoare was nominated to have a house named after him. This presented the university with a dilemma of having a literal `Hoare house` (pronounced whore).

I can't remember what Oxford did to resolve this, but I think they settled on `C.A.R. Hoare Residence`.
by tzury | 2026-03-10 15:18:00+00:00
I changed the URI to show the US data and was surprise by the fact Virginia surpassed California [1], so I looked into Virginia [2] and realized, mostly are automated bots from AWS and other US-East based region

1. https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/us?dateRange=52w
2. https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/6254928?dateRange=52w
by graemep | 2026-03-10 15:18:26+00:00
There is a large scale switch to non-fossil fuel energy sources. We are probably close to peak oil anyway so there is no choice with oil. A lot of countries have abandoned coal, and while some continue to build coal power there is no reason to think the current trend will continue as alternatives get better.

I am not aware of any evidence that current trends will continue for another 74 years.. Ten years, certainly, but not for three quarters of a century.
by wastemaster | 2026-03-10 15:18:36+00:00
Happy to answer questions about failure modes, where we draw the line between retrieval and operational decisions, and which constraints actually reduced risk in production. The main lesson for us was that “don’t hallucinate” is too soft for real operations. We had to replace soft prompting with hard boundaries: verified data only, checks for critical actions, and escalation before collecting fulfillment details for anything unverified.
by ivankra | 2026-03-10 15:18:43+00:00
VPNs are widespread in Russia, so they probably misattribute a good chunk of the traffic.

"By 2025, about 41% of Russian internet users were relying on VPNs — one of the highest adoption rates in the world." [1]

[1] https://cepa.org/article/blocked-and-bypassed-russians-evade...
by phaser | 2026-03-10 15:18:47+00:00
Reminds me of the people of the future in Mike Judge’s “Idiocracy” who watch large TVs where most of the space is taken by advertising.

It’s amazing how this one turned morphed from humor into an eerie warning of the future in 20 years.

https://youtu.be/YqQ6D0Bu-a8
by MachineMan | 2026-03-10 15:18:50+00:00
The tools of slavery have evolved but the overall end goal has not. The almost cliché slavery depiction of the chain and whip had evolved into the coolie system, the offshoring system and the kafeel system. The office is simply a part of that family of exploitation methods. There is a difference between serving the collective good and being a slave.

Many of us want to work on something greater than ourselves, to contribute to society not out of selfishness or lifestyle, but to genuinely help society function and make people happy. Many of us aspire to make a small dent in the universe with something great, something that can stand the test of time, building a thing in defiance of our own mortality in the hopes that our ancestors remember us, learn from us and run with the torch of civilization, to improve the human project to a level of greatness that we may ourselves never witness. In a way, to create is one of the highest forms of self expression as a human.

This is entirely different from reality, where retirements are wiped out by financial sorcerers, after decades of fulfilling your end of the social contract, trading in your productive years to a company that _does not care about you OR your community_, where run away inflation, debt and taxation are used to funnel capital to other competing nations or a unwitting fifth column whether that is transmigrasi in Indonesia, the influx of Indians in Texas or the mass refugee stream to Europe caused by US-Israeli inflicted wars, which has already surpassed in numbers the transatlantic slave trade, the endless wars that balance domestic unrest with a common enemy to rally around the flag, and the accompanied transfer of wealth across nations as these warmongers decide which country gets axed to serve the greater powers. There is no saving for retirement, there is no freedom, there is only bondage, death and taxes.

Meanwhile, the collective fruit of western society is plundered through the illegal pirating of the intellectual output of millions of creatives who poured everything they have in it, and it is plundered by the very same class of people that sued common folk for pirating software, music, movies and books. Aaron Swartz would roll over in his grave to see how the government supports companies like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic who rely on plagiarizing IP at scale.

The collective fruit of an entire civilization’s labor is plundered before your very eyes right before they launch it into a cataclysmic war that wipes away the very people who dedicated their lives to the sciences and humanities in order to further the human project. To deal such a low blow is an atrocity that is worse in its impact than the plantation system, it is reminiscent of the bronze age collapse that leveled ancient Egypt.

No good deed goes unpunished, as Ozymandius found out the hard way.
by gehdhffh | 2026-03-10 15:18:53+00:00
The ruling capital class has decided that it is in their best interest for copyright to not be an obstacle, so it will not be. It is delusional to pretend that there is even a legal question here, because America is no longer a country of laws, to the extent that it ever was. I would bet you at odds of 10,000 to 1 that there will never be any significant intellectual property obstacles to the progress of generative AI. They might need to pay some fines here and there, but never anything that actually threatens their businesses in the slightest.

There clearly should be, but that is not the world we live in.
Show HN: Ash, an Agent Sandbox for Mac
by amsha | 2026-03-10 15:19:29+00:00
Ash is a macOS sandbox that restricts AI coding agents. It limits access to files, networks, processes, IO devices, and environment variables. You can use Ash with any CLI coding agent by wrapping it in a single command: `ash run -- <agent>`. I typically use it with Claude to stay safe while avoiding repetitive prompts: `ash run -- claude --dangerously-skip-permissions`.

Ash restricts resources via the Endpoint Security and Network Extension frameworks. These frameworks are significantly more powerful than the sandbox-exec tool.

Each session is driven by a policy file. Any out-of-policy action is denied by default. You can audit denials in the GUI app, which lets you view out-of-policy actions and retroactively add them to your policy file.

Ash also comes with tools for building policies. You can use an "observation session" to watch the typical behavior of a coding agent and capture that behavior in a policy file for future sandbox sessions. Linting, formatting, and rule merging are all built into the Ash CLI to keep your policy files concise and maintainable.

Download Ash at https://ashell.dev
by antonyh | 2026-03-10 15:19:47+00:00
Aside from the concept of adults masquerading as non-adults, nothing so long as those spaces are moderated fully. I have no problem with skipping the verification, but I do question the moderation of most services.

The problems start when the space become not-for-children and identity validation is mandatory to use them, which will exclude people like me who categorically refuse to hand over personal secrets in order to have access. It does not warrant the inherent risk involved with granting access to personal details unrelated to the service offered. I reckon this will happen when someone decides it's better commercially to make a service adult-only than to moderate non-adult accounts. It's a slippery slope, and a predictable next step once adult have become accustomed to handing over papers for some services to have to do it for many, if not all.
by theptip | 2026-03-10 15:19:53+00:00
> disclosure if "a significant portion of the contribution is taken from a tool without manual modification", and labeling of such contributions with "a clear disclaimer or a machine-readable tag like '[AI-Generated]'.

Quixotic, unworkable, pointless. It’s fundamentally impossible (at least without a level of surveillance that would obviously be unavceptable) to prove the “artisanal hand-crafted human code” label.

> contributors should "fully understand" their submissions and would be accountable for the contributions, "including vouching for the technical merit, security, license compliance, and utility of their submissions".

This is in the right direction.

I think the missing link is around formalizing the reputation system; this exists for senior contributors but the on-ramp for new contributors is currently not working.

Perhaps bots should ruthlessly triage in-vouched submissions until the actor has proven a good-faith ability to deliver meaningful results. (Or the principal has staked / donated real money to the foundation to prove they are serious.)

I think the real problem here is the flood of low-effort slop, not AI tooling itself. In the hands of a responsible contributor LLMs are already providing big wins to many. (See antirez’s posts for example, if you are skeptical.)
by adampunk | 2026-03-10 15:19:53+00:00
This two week project did not displace GCC, one of the most complex pieces of machinery built by man, so the conclusion on hacker news is that AI is fake.

What you’re seeing is a shibboleth. If you can make the above claim without choking, then you’re a member of the tribe. If it seems so outlandish that honor and sense demand you point out the problems, you’re marked as an enemy.
by unconed | 2026-03-10 15:20:20+00:00
This article's timeline is mostly accurate, but contains a few inaccuracies:

- Unified toolbar and titlebar dates from much earlier... it was 10.4, not 10.7.

- The brushed metal look was supposed to be applied to "appliance-like" apps as opposed to "document-like" apps... But Apple was never able to stick to that rule themselves.

There are a few design ideas that always turn out to be bad when implemented, but which designers seem to have to learn the hard way. Transparency is the biggest one, but I guess so is excessive rounding now.
by Panda4 | 2026-03-10 15:20:56+00:00
As someone who is not from the west or a rich company, I always wonder how can westerns afford "search of a new adventure" in terms of time and money.

I think a big contributor to inability to do something like that is that I wake up go to work, return home rest a bit, go to sleep and repeat. I always wonder how can someone break out of this cycle if they are too tired after work.
by bbminner | 2026-03-10 15:21:15+00:00
To my surprise, even sophisticated means of traffic masking like amnezia and vxray get disrupted frequently, requiring hopping around self hosted solutions and updating ones setup periodically. That's waaay beyond what most people are capable of. I am fortunate to have some tech worker acquaintance who live next to my family members, otherwise there'd be no way for me to for example guide them through setup and re-configuration remotely. Still, this setup gets disrupted every month or so requiring manual intervention.
by diacritical | 2026-03-10 15:21:42+00:00
> Being vegan is easy for someone who does hard physical work, so they have to eat more than 3000 kcal per day. In that case, eating enough proteins that come from plant sources will still leave enough in the energy budget to also eat other food, for a complete diet.

> On the other hand, if you have a sedentary lifestyle, working in the front of a computer, it is impossible to eat enough protein without eating too many calories.

Anecdotal counterpoint - I've done hard physical work for ~2 years. For ~10 years before that and for about 1.5 after I stopped the physical work I've been spending most of my days sitting in front of the computer with the occasional walk to the grocery store. No sport or hiking or fitness.

I don't eat TVP or other condensed protein food. I don't count calories or even consciously decide when to eat protein rich food. Sometimes I'll even just eat pasta or other food relatively low in protein and rich in carbs and calories. Yet, I'm in the same physical health as I've always been. Not athletic, but normal weight - the type of weight an annoying aunt would see and say "ooh, you gotta eat more". :) The first BMI calc I tried put me right in the middle of the green zone (yes, I know BMI is not that important). And I could return to the same physical work if I wanted to.

Besides my anecdotal counterpoint, there are many sources online you can find where people discuss their diet, how much it costs and their lifestyle.

> The solution was to extract at home gluten from wheat flour, to supplement the proteins provided by lentils or other legumes.

> any starchy vegetables, e.g. potatoes or sweet potatoes or rice, and any starchy fruits, e.g. bananas, had to be forbidden.

That seems very extreme to me. Were you trying to be a bodybuilder or maintain some low body fat or something while maintaining this sedentary lifestyle? I eat potatoes, sweet potatoes and bananas all the time.

> I gain weight extremely easily if I exceed my allowable daily energy intake.

If that's the case, why not spend some of the calories on exercise? Although I find it hard to believe that with my current and previous sedentary lifestyle I expend enough calories to not care what I eat on a vegan diet, but you gain weight "extremely easily". Do you have some rare disease, if you don't mind my asking? Cause the only fat people I know are the ones who overeat, regardless of diet. Even if they start blaming "slow metabolism" or something else, it's obvious when you see them eat.

> There are plant protein extracts, but those are at least 3 to 5 times more expensive than cheap animal protein, e.g. chicken breast.

Economy of scale and subsidies.

> There already exists a technology for making whey protein concentrate otherwise than by the filtration of milk, i.e. by extracting it from a culture of genetically-modified Trichoderma fungus.

Interesting. Although I don't see myself buying it, I'll look it up.

> fake meat

It's as real as you can get. "Fake meat" would be TVP prepared like meat. You wouldn't say "fake whey protein" if you extract it from genetically-modified Trichoderma fungus.
by graemep | 2026-03-10 15:21:47+00:00
> If you believe the outputs of LLMs are derivative products of the materials the LLMs were trained on

In that case a lot of proprietary software is in breach of copyleft licences. Its probably by far the commonest breach.

> You are now party to violating the original materials' copyright by accepting AI generated code. That's ethically dubious

That is arguable. Is it always ethically dubious to breach a law? If not, which is it ethically dubious to breach this law in this particular way?
by idealloc_haris | 2026-03-10 15:21:58+00:00
I think that's definitely true to a degree, but I think the think more companies are worried about is the reputational damage from the terrible press. Look at Solarwinds (not a data breach, but similar press around it). It erased hundreds of millions in shareholder value and the company was taken private at pennies on the dollar in the aftermath. There's real risk there.