MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by toraway | 2026-03-13 05:25:08+00:00
It doesn’t help that a frequent recommendation on HN whenever someone complains about Claude not following a prompt correctly is to “ask Claude itself how to rewrite a prompt to get the result you want”.

Which sure, can be helpful, but it’s kinda just a coincidence (plus some RLHF probably) that question happens to generate output text that can be used as a better prompt. There’s no actual introspection or awareness of its internal state or architecture beyond whatever high level summary Anthropic gives it in its “soul” document et al.

But given how often I’ve read that advice on here and Reddit, it’s not hard to imagine how someone could form an impression that Claude has some kind of visibility into its own thinking or precise engineering. Instead of just being as much of a black box to itself as it is to us.
by throwaway27448 | 2026-03-13 05:25:28+00:00
Be serious. I don't care about any of europe; the rest of the west is doing just fine caring about it incessantly at the top of their voices regardless of who asked. My heart belongs in east africa.

I'll try to be more sensitive with what I capitalize—but I don't really give a damn about either ukraine or russia—both seem like far-right corrupt states that don't take care of their citizens well—though I do feel very sad for the humans caught between them.
by abustamam | 2026-03-13 05:26:28+00:00
What do you propose we do in the latter situation? The news isn't the value of the life that was (presumably lost). The news is the circumstances that made that loss possible. Human driver was maybe careless, or maybe didn't look. The child safety classes I took emphasized over and over again to look around your car and yard before backing your car out. This is a problem with a known solution that unfortunately still happens despite the best efforts to prevent it.

Waymo hitting a cat is obviously less tragic, but if it can hit a cat, what else can it hit? A toddler? A human? The wall of your kitchen? This is a problem that has no known solution; furthermore, it's a problem that the engineers at Waymo don't seem overly keen on solving quickly.
by ofrzeta | 2026-03-13 05:27:16+00:00
For the sake of argument let's assume we have a common goal: produce a software product that does its job and is maintainable (emphasis on the latter).

Now given that LLMs are known to not produce 100% correct code you should review every single line. Now the production rate of LLMs is so high that it becomes very hard to really read and understand every line of the output. While at the same time you are gradually losing the ability to understand everything because you stopped actively coding. And at the same time there are others in your team who aren't that diligent adding more to the crufty code base.

What is this if not a recipe for disaster?
by g-b-r | 2026-03-13 05:27:41+00:00
> The only way Claude can help improve your code cleanliness is if you write poor code?

No? You assert that it writes better code than the average software developer?

> Code coverage means nothing if you didn't carefully check every test? "and if everything was tested" do you know what code coverage is?

Do you know?

Code coverage only tells what amount of the code gets *touched* by the tests.

To achieve code coverage it's enough to CALL the code, it doesn't tell you anything about the correctness of the tests: they could all end with a return true, and a code coverage tool would be perfectly happy.

So, yes, if you don't carefully check the test suite that the agent writes, it might well be worthless (or simply much less useful than you assume it to be, more realistically).

With "if everything was tested" I meant that you also need to check if the agent wrote all the tests that are needed, besides verifying that the ones it wrote are correct.
by dqv | 2026-03-13 05:28:18+00:00
It's also why people start parroting the phrase "the purpose of a system is what it does". Look at where we are right now: a precipice before this becomes widely used in all forms of policing. We still have a chance to police the police's use of the AI.

The purpose of using AI to identify suspects in criminal cases is to ease the burden of manual searching for a suspect (or insert whatever the purpose of statement you want). Ok, but we're getting false positives that are damaging people's lives already in the early stages. And I don't want to hear "trust me bro, it will get more accurate" as an excuse to not regulate it.

At a minimum, we should enshrine the right to appeal AI and have limits on how it can be used for probable cause.

This isn't even the only recent case of this happening. There was another case of mistaken identity due to AI. [0] Sure 4 hours isn't the same as 5 months, but still this guy wanted to show multiple forms of ID to prove who he was! The bodycam footage was posted a few months back but never got traction here.

Like if the police officer can't read numbers, they can't do breathalyzer tests on people. If the AI can't be used responsibly, then it can't be used at all.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPUBXN2Fd_E
by scarecrowbob | 2026-03-13 05:28:31+00:00
You're right that they often do a lot of harm.

The point that you're missing is that, in a system where such abuses are possible, many of us really don't want one more tool in their box for them to fuck us with.

Like, they already prove themselves incompetent- giving the power to track anyone in the US via a distributed ALPR system just makes them more dangerous. Giving them all these "AI" based tools does the same.
by strken | 2026-03-13 05:29:01+00:00
> There might be a good reason why smart people want to avoid looking stupid ... The only plausible explanation is that our egos are fragile

I disagree with this, at least in how it regards ego as pointless.

Humans are tuned to win a delicate social competition by becoming popular and therefore having a bunch of kids with other popular (and therefore reproductively successful) people. The most plausible explanation is that our ancestors have been through millions of years of evolutionary selection to try to become the most popular in a social group by taking risks, but then cease all risk-taking and guard their position after they get there.

Ego is the mechanism by which this happens, but it's there for a reason. Social status is really, really important - if you don't buy the evolutionary reasons, it's still important for basic human connection. We haven't always lived in societies which are so open to failure, experimentation, or looking stupid.
by mmooss | 2026-03-13 05:30:57+00:00
> Chinese and Latin American food is almost never vegan.

I've seen plenty of vegan food in restaurants serving those cuisines, so that's not true. Why is it important to you to insist that vegan food is somehow difficult?

If you just mean 'in China', that's irrelevant to this conversation - only a small proportion of people here eat their Chinese food in China. But I acknowledge, lots of people on HN like to demonstrate their worldliness by making sure we know they've been to China, relevant or not.

> the best food is usually still non-vegan (lots of dairy and butter used)

It's a bit hard to make a definitive statement about what is 'best'. Personally, I much prefer Indian without all the ghee. That vegan food exists in many varieties is an objective fact, however.
by yunseo47 | 2026-03-13 05:31:05+00:00
While it's now relatively well-known that downloading and executing arbitrary code is dangerous, many still fail to recognize the risk when it's wrapped in agent skills and Markdown. This context likely explains why companies like Cisco, 1Password, and Snyk emphasize the dangers of agent skills.

I entirely agree with what you said. As has been the case with all types of security vulnerabilities, this too requires the comprehensive application of principles such as least privilege, sandboxing, and defense in depth. Thank you for your insightful comment.
by remarkEon | 2026-03-13 05:31:09+00:00
Well, if that was true then why does everyone get really mad when we try to restrict who gets to come to the United States?

I think, as a formative experience, most Americans should go through the "wow Europe is great (if you go to the right spots)" if only to understand the history and where America came from, and also the "awakening" that happens when one visits Japan. Their trains really do run on time!
by fc417fc802 | 2026-03-13 05:33:16+00:00
You seem to be intentionally ignoring the point I made. I never disputed that facial recognition software was used (ie involved).

The facial recognition tool didn't arrest her. It holds no authority, has no will of its own, and does not possess a corporeal form with which to enact change in the world. The only parties that could possibly be at fault here are various government agents who clearly acted with negligence, failing to uphold their duty to the law and the people.

If you're unable to rebut my point then perhaps you should consider that you might be in the wrong? If you're unwilling to entertain such a possibility then I wonder why you're posting here to begin with. What is your goal?
by unselect5917 | 2026-03-13 05:33:26+00:00
>It has gut feelings now?

I would say hard no. It doesn't. But it's been trained on humans saying that in explaining their behavior, so that is "reasonable" text to generate and spit out at you. It has no concept of the idea that a human-serving language model should not be saying it to a human because it's not a useful answer. It doesn't know that it's not a useful answer. It knows that based on the language its been trained on that's a "reasonable" (in terms of matrix math, not actual reasoning) response.

Way too many people think that it's really thinking and I don't think that most of them are. My abstract understanding is that they're basically still upjumped Markov chains.
by marcobambini | 2026-03-13 05:34:23+00:00
No, the library is intentionally minimal on that front. It generates and validates keys but doesn't track any metadata about them. Keys are plain C strings, so detecting "time to compact" is straightforward on the caller's side:

- Key length is the most natural signal, just strlen(). If your base62 keys are typically 3-5 characters and you start seeing 15+, that's a reasonable trigger.

- Max key length in the list is cheap to track if you're already iterating for display or sync.

Keeping that policy out of the library is intentional. What counts as "too long" depends entirely on the application. A SQLite column with a B-tree index cares about different thresholds than an in-memory CRDT. And the right moment to compact (sync boundary, idle tick, batch write) is an app-level scheduling decision the library has no business making.
by fpoling | 2026-03-13 05:36:43+00:00
One non-trivial problem with async in Rust is that it leads to code that allocates on one CPU and free memory on another. That kills a lot of optimizations that system allocators try to do with CPU local caching and harms performance badly especially on fat servers with a lot of CPUs. When one hits this problem, there is no easy solution.

Ideally using an allocator per request would solve this issue, but Rust has no real support for it.

A workaround that works is to stop using async and just use a native thread per request. But then most crates and frameworks these days use async. So indeed async abstraction us very leaky regarding the cost.
by tombert | 2026-03-13 05:39:09+00:00
Queue obligatory Weird Al: https://youtu.be/SMhwddNQSWQ

I'm human so I'm certainly not immune to social anxiety or embarrassment from looking stupid, but I have been trying to do a manual override that for the last year.

Something it took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize is that the first draft of nearly everything I do is bad. The first draft of my code is usually bad, the first draft of an essay I write is usually bad, the first version of something I draw is usually bad. If I don't allow myself to look stupid, even if only for the first draft of something, then I'll never accomplish anything. Doing something crappy is a means to doing something not-crappy.

I don't think I'm alone with this. There appears to be some ambiguity on who actually first said this, but there's an adage of "There's no great writing, only good rewriting".
by pfannkuchen | 2026-03-13 05:39:12+00:00
Yeah but don’t major problems usually take the form of debt chains being forcibly unwound? Like default happens somewhere, expected money doesn’t land, that next entity who was receiving the debt money that defaulted defaults on something because now they can’t pay, expected debt payment money from them doesn’t land, that next entity etc.

So I think it’s not about how much of the debt is this, it would be about how intertwined it is with other things.

I’m not claiming it’s major btw, I’m just clarifying that in my understanding it could be a small percent but still end up causing default cascades, or it could be a large percent and not, depending on the debt graph.
by ncr100 | 2026-03-13 05:39:21+00:00
From an inclusivity perspective, can more people than "programmers" be enlisted to write specs?

We are putting people out of work. Why not employ MORE people to do LESS, by sharing the responsibility? A group activity, perhaps?

Eg make room in this spec > program development workflow for, say, ... Tech Writers. Add them to the development team to ensure the language is right for the LLM ahead of time!
by HDThoreaun | 2026-03-13 05:40:44+00:00
In Chicago subrubs school funding is largely based on local property taxes. Expensive neighborhoods have better funded schools. Of course there's also federal funding for poor schools so really the worst funded schools are the ones where everyone is lower middle class but the best funded schools are in the richest districts. Of course as you point out parental involvement is more important than funding, but they tend to be correlated and funding still matters.
by abahgat | 2026-03-13 05:41:42+00:00
I totally fell for the "obscene memory" trap myself. My first encounter with suffix trees outside of a textbook was for an ITA Software 'Instant Search' puzzle. The requirement was sub-0.1ms search on a large string database, I went straight for a generalized suffix tree. Then I realized they had asked for the solution to fit within a 1GB heap. :(

I wrote up the full 'war story' of how I had to profile the heap and optimize the node representation (shaving bytes off the edge storage) just to get it to boot without an OOM error: https://www.abahgat.com/blog/the-programming-puzzle-that-got...

It’s the most tangible example I've run into of where theoretical O(n) space complexity meets the reality of object pointer overhead.
by elzbardico | 2026-03-13 05:42:40+00:00
Somewhat related I find it very funny how some people who identify as conservatives absolutely abhor dailight saving times as something which is "unnatural".

Well, there's nothing more natural than waking up earlier and resting later in the summer, while doing the contrary in the winter. Dailight Savings looks to me like at least an attempt of humans to try to follow the natural rythm of sunrise and sunset as "God intended us to do". Why are you against DST? Are you some sort of communist bureaucrat that want to impose us this government clock instead of respecting God's nature laws?
by derefr | 2026-03-13 05:42:53+00:00
In every implementation I've seen, the link only becomes clickable if you hold down a modifier key. By default, the links are just text. Which should make intuitive sense, because otherwise it'd be breaking existing semantics, as it would e.g. make it impossible to highlight the underlying text to copy-and-paste. (Or to send a click event to the underlying PTY-controlling process-group leader when mouse reporting is active.) I presume your "somehow" happened to involve you holding whatever modifier key your terminal emulator required.

Also, sounding isn't a weird sex thing per se; it's a mundane (and somewhat painful) medical procedure. One that some people happen to coincidentally have a kink for, mostly due to the discomfort involved. But "some weird people having a kink for medical procedure X" is true of many/most medical procedures.
by Ajakks | 2026-03-13 05:43:01+00:00
You have a great site! I really enjoyed the articles I read - especially the one about your friend replacing you, that was absolutely fantastic and is one my favorite reads about AI thus far.

I hope your friend, having trained one of his personal AI to be you, at least consumes more dynomight content now!

I wish all us were as reflective as you are here:

"I keep finding myself unconsciously treating AI as an anomaly—as a weird thing that’s happening right now before the world goes back to being “normal”. But we aren’t going back. This is how it’s going to be. Like this but more so."
by glyco | 2026-03-13 05:43:12+00:00
> That is exactly what hereditary peerage is. The few, by definition. The aristocracy.

Not true at all - there's nothing special about having a rich land-owner in your ancestry - most people do.

In fact, now, after a few centuries of reversion to the mean, the hereditary peers are the only people in government who are representative, in the statistical sense.

(Not that this is related in any way to the actual reason why this is being done - the actual motive is that a hereditary peer is necessarily British, and Starmer hates the British and wants them disenfranchised so that he can continue with their destruction. But that's another story..)
by Retric | 2026-03-13 05:44:15+00:00
The safest street designs still result in automobile fatalities. You can at best mitigate the issue with better street designs but not address the underlying issue.

Failing to acknowledge cars as the root cause may be comforting, but it blinds you to viable solutions.

Indoor shopping malls for example solve many of the issues with cars by forcing people to move around on foot in a little island surrounded by a sea of very low density parking. They are’t perfect solutions, but they still saved a lot of lives and time.

Saying people are misusing a new technology is just another way of saying that technology is flawed. This doesn’t mean you can’t utilize it, but pretending flaws don’t exist has no value.
by HDThoreaun | 2026-03-13 05:45:31+00:00
Chicago public schools completely cut bus service during covid. Not sure if the suburbs did as well but it wouldnt surprise me. I lived 3 miles from my high school in the city and was one of maybe 5% of students who biked in the winter, it was pretty terrible. Suburban high schools have zero public transit access so the options are school bus(that might no longer exist), bike in the winter(terrible), or drive.
by alwa | 2026-03-13 05:46:04+00:00
Plus, one careless human is one careless driver—they’re off the road, or at least chastened.

If the Waymo Brain would kill this cat, it suggests that every one of their thousands of vehicles would kill the cat in the same situation. And that individual Waymo’s presumably not off the road…it presumably just got a little scrub-down and got back out there.

The optimistic frame is, teaching one Waymo to avoid this in future teaches all of them. But I think the gut-level moral reaction has more to do with the former frame.

Similarly, with tens of thousands of police forces in the US, some are going to be duds and incompetent. That’s the status quo. What’s new is the “match” tools deployed at scale and with unqualified confidence. If this tool made such a shaky match in one case, it’ll make the same degree of mismatch in countless others. That’s what makes it a bigger story, and a bigger deal.
by antod | 2026-03-13 05:47:07+00:00
I think the rise of Facebook was possibly my first sense that our victory for "open" on the web was going to be short lived. Eg our (well not mine, I never used it) comms were moving to proprietary platforms.

Then with AWS our infra was moving to proprietary platforms. Now our dev tools are moving to expensive proprietary platforms.

Combined with widespread enshittification, we've handed nearly everything to the tech bros now.
by brucehoult | 2026-03-13 05:47:31+00:00
Rubbish.

The "G" extension for everything you want to run shrink-wrapped binaries on a standard OS has been there since the May 7 2014 "User Level ISA, Version 2.0", which is before RISC-V started to be promoted outside of Berkeley e.g. at Hot Chips 26 in August 2014, and the first RISC-V workshop in January 2015 in Monterey.

The name "G" has morphed into now (along with the C extension) being called "RVA20", which led to "RVA22" and "RVA23", but the principle is unchanged.

"An integer base plus these four standard extensions (“IMAFD”) is given the abbreviation “G” and provides a general-purpose scalar instruction set. RV32G and RV64G are currently the default target of our compiler toolchains."

pp 4-5 in

https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-...
by rapnie | 2026-03-13 05:47:45+00:00
Can we ascribe it all to ego, I wonder, or is it just one of several mechanics at play, albeit an important one. A Dutch saying is that there's a lid for every pot ("op elk potje past een dekseltje") i.e. that the most unlikely people still manage to find a partner and form a family. That very clumsy person who stutters, and is perceived by an ego-driven person as "a loser" still finds someone who thinks they are adorable and attractive.
by sansii | 2026-03-13 05:47:52+00:00
I've been using a voice-to-text app on android that replaces my keyboard. I love it because on mobile I can speak faster than I type, but it does produce perfectly written text with no grammar mistakes and better flow and structure. So it doesn't write my speech 1:1. It has made writing on my phone much more fun and increased my productivity and decreased my threshold for commenting on forums. But now I guess I won't be using it on HN in the future...

(Disclaimer: I did not use it for this comment)
by polywanna | 2026-03-13 05:48:31+00:00
This is such a wildly incel-like reply. I disagree 100%. This social competition you speak of is something insecure people have manufactured. It exists only for the people who think it exists. People don’t want to look stupid because they usually have a need for intellectual validation developed in pre teen years. My god free yourself from this false belief that everything is a social competition, you don’t need to stress yourself out.
by tombert | 2026-03-13 05:49:18+00:00
It was iTerm, and yeah I it did require a modifier key.

I had gotten it in my head that the way that you highlight a line in iTerm (and I have no idea where I heard this or why I thought it) was holding command and clicking on the line. It was a mistake I made exactly once.

I am afraid I didn't investigate sounding after I saw the horrifying image; I only learned the name for it after I described the image to someone and they told me what it was; I guess I assumed it was just a weird sex thing, I didn't realize that there was any practical medicine stuff to it.
by brucehoult | 2026-03-13 05:49:43+00:00
There is nothing "belated" about it.

The "G" extension for everything you want to run shrink-wrapped binaries on a standard OS has been there since the May 7 2014 "User Level ISA, Version 2.0", which is before RISC-V started to be promoted outside of Berkeley e.g. at Hot Chips 26 in August 2014, and the first RISC-V workshop in January 2015 in Monterey.

The name "G" has morphed into now (along with the C extension) being called "RVA20", which led to "RVA22" and "RVA23", but the principle is unchanged.

"An integer base plus these four standard extensions (“IMAFD”) is given the abbreviation “G” and provides a general-purpose scalar instruction set. RV32G and RV64G are currently the default target of our compiler toolchains."

pp 4-5 in

https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-...
by helloplanets | 2026-03-13 05:49:50+00:00
This is also what's called the beginner's mind, Shoshin. [0] One of the core concepts of Zen Buddhism. Tangentially related would be the concept of no-mind, Mushin. [1]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-mind