MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ArmaloAI | 2026-03-13 08:03:08+00:00
The accuracy gap you're describing is actually the dimension we weight most heavily — 30% of the composite score, the largest single factor. "Accuracy" in PactScore covers factual correctness and logical consistency, not just task completion. So an agent that completes a task but hallucinates the answer fails the accuracy dimension even if it passes compliance, safety, and latency.

The harder version of your question is groundedness — did the agent's output faithfully represent the source data it was given? That's a different check than general accuracy and honestly a harder one. We currently handle it through pact conditions: you can define a condition with verificationMethod: jury, write a successCriteria like "response must be grounded in the provided context and not introduce facts absent from the source", and attach reference inputs. The jury then evaluates against that spec. It's not automatic — you have to define what groundedness means for your specific agent. Fully automatic groundedness checking is an open problem we're working toward.

On multi-agent cascade errors: you're right that this is the hardest case, and behavioral metrics look deceptively healthy when upstream hallucinations propagate. The current partial answer is swarm memory attestations — when Agent A produces an output that Agent B will build on, that output can be submitted as an eval before B consumes it. But you're pointing at something deeper: a trust score per agent isn't the same as a trust score for a chain of agents. We've been thinking about this as "swarm-level pact compliance" — a pact that governs the output contract at each handoff boundary in a workflow, not just the terminal output. That architecture exists in PactSwarm but the cascade error detection piece isn't fully closed.

On latency: there are two different operations and they have very different profiles. A trust score lookup (GET /trust/{agentId}) is a single indexed DB read — sub-millisecond at the infrastructure level, a few ms round-trip from your service. That's the real-time delegation check. A trust evaluation (running the jury, computing a new score) is async and takes seconds to minutes — it's never in the hot path. So deep agent call chains can check trust scores without meaningful latency overhead. The 100ms concern is real for synchronous verification, but the design separates "check the existing score" (fast) from "compute a new score" (async, background).
by spaqin | 2026-03-13 08:03:09+00:00
Speeding is brought up as an example that most replies refer to, but it really is not limited to that. How about jaywalking? Using the road on a bicycle when there's a bike lane available of varying quality? Or taking a piss in the bushes after a drunken night out? Downloading a 60 year old movie? Besides, perfect enforcement does not work with vague laws. It's not a world I would like to live in, where there is no room for error.
by awesome_dude | 2026-03-13 08:03:35+00:00
> The benefit from having a 5% better product that hundreds of millions of people will use is worth the duplicated effort in the beginning. The numbers just make sense.

This assumes that the duplicated effort arrives at a solution that is better than if it were done by a single team.

> >If this were seven government funded teams solving the same problem

> The problem here is "government funded" - the trials are not rationalized by free-market economics. That is, a 5% better product in the end would not be worth seven competing developments initially.

I think you're saying that 5% is worth it when the free market does it, but 5% gain isn't when the government does it?

I'm hoping you're not because that's impossible - the end result is precisely the same
by multidude | 2026-03-13 08:04:52+00:00
A problem i have is that the agent's mental model of the system im building diverges from reality over time. After discussing that many times and asking it to remember, it becomes frustrating.
In the README you say the agents memory persists across runs, would that solve said problem?

Also, I had to do several refactorings of my agent's constructs and found out that one of them was reinventing stuff producing a plethora of function duplications: e.g. DB connection pools(i had at least four of them simultaneously).

Would AXE require shared state between chained agents? Could it do it if required?
by Schmerika | 2026-03-13 08:04:59+00:00
Getting a 403 error on their site, but the archive remembers [0] and yeah - that website is wildly sus.

Lil offtopic: This is interesting stuff on its own, so I don't want to distract from the important discussion. However, OP might want to know: I don't think I've ever seen a new account's first (utterly inoffensive) comment show up [dead] like theirs [1]. (You might need [showdead] on to see that, idk.)

Anyone have any insight?

0 - https://web.archive.org/web/20250324144815/https://www.digit...

1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47361290
Show HN: CacheLens – Local-first cost tracking proxy for LLM APIs
by stephenlthorn | 2026-03-13 08:05:00+00:00
I built CacheLens because I was burning through $200+/month on Claude API calls and had no idea where it was going.

It's a local HTTP proxy that sits between your app and the AI provider (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google). Every request flows through it, and it records token usage, cost, cache hit rates, latency — everything. Then there's a dashboard to visualize it all.

What makes it different from just checking your provider dashboard:

It's real-time (WebSocket live feed of every call as it happens)
It works across all three major providers in one view
It runs 100% locally — your prompts never leave your machine
It has budget caps that actually block requests before you overspend
It identifies optimization opportunities (cache misses, model downgrades, repeated prompts)
Tech stack: Python, FastAPI, SQLite, vanilla JS. No React, no build step, no external dependencies beyond pip. The whole thing is ~3K lines of Python.

Interesting technical decisions:

The proxy captures streaming responses without buffering — it tees the byte stream so the client sees zero added latency
Cost calculation uses a built-in pricing table with override support (providers change rates constantly)
There's a Prometheus /metrics endpoint so you can plug it into existing monitoring
Cacheability analysis uses diff-based detection across multiple API calls to identify what's actually static vs dynamic in your prompts
Limitations I'm honest about:

The cacheability scorer is heuristic-based — solid for multi-call traces (~85% accurate), rougher for single prompts (~65%)
Token counting uses cl100k_base for everything, which drifts ~10% for non-OpenAI models
Three features (smart routing, scheduled reports, multi-user auth) are on the roadmap but not shipped yet
Would love feedback, especially from anyone managing LLM costs at scale.
by kalterdev | 2026-03-13 08:05:05+00:00
This is a classic copy-paste and search function. I admit that your approach is fast but counter that it highlights a failure to make basic functions like copy-paste and search efficient and introduces a whole class of complexity into software design.

Edit: the same applies to diffs generated by /bin/diff. Most of the time, diff strings are unique enough to locate them by plain text searching.
by internet_points | 2026-03-13 08:05:15+00:00
Drawn in by the Emacs, learnt something new about C and C++, thank you for this! Very readable article for someone who doesn't feel too confident with low-level bits.

Btw, is this representation the reason why OCaml's ints are not as big as C ints?

Also interesting that the Haskell pointer tagging you link to[0] was done the way it was to avoid CPU branch misprediction, and that the old way which it replaced was "the source of half of the branch misprediction events". I wonder how "branch prediction friendly" current Haskell is.

[0] https://simonmar.github.io/bib/papers/ptr-tagging.pdf
by cableshaft | 2026-03-13 08:05:18+00:00
Pretty much anyone who's not you, will make code in an unpredictable way. I review other people's code and I go 'really, you decided to do it that way?' quite often, especially with coders with less years of experience than me.

That's kind of how this is starting to feel to me, like I'm turning more into a project manager that has to review code from a team of juniors, when it comes to A.I. Although those juniors are now starting to show that they're more capable than even I am, especially when it comes to speed.
by WalterBright | 2026-03-13 08:05:45+00:00
I've never encountered a person who was attracted to a stupid person.

BTW, the Flintstones is just The Honeymooners without Jackie Gleason. One could also argue that Family Guy and The Simpsons are also reboots of The Honeymooners.

> who have strangely short haircuts and go hunting the way people go to work today

"They're the modern stone age family" are the words in the Flintstones' theme song.
by sn | 2026-03-13 08:06:26+00:00
It's great marketing! But yes. He considers it an error to specify "Use the same knife for the jelly" even though it's considered correct to state "Wipe the knife clean before using it for jelly". The latter statement implies the former, and if you follow all the instructions both are not wrong.

I also consider some of the instructions to be under specified. For example, a piece of bread could be said to have 6 sides, but only 2 of those are helpful for making a sandwich.
by aminerj | 2026-03-13 08:06:28+00:00
The context decay point is also underappreciated and directly relevant here. In my lab I used Qwen2.5-7B, which is on the smaller end, and the poisoning succeeded at temperature=0.1 where the model is most deterministic. Your point suggests that at higher temperatures or with denser, more complex documents, the attention budget gets consumed faster and contradiction detection degrades further. That would imply the 10% residual I measured at optimal conditions is a lower bound, not a typical case.

The "thinking" capability observation is interesting. I haven't tested a reasoning model against this attack pattern. The hypothesis would be that an explicit reasoning step forces the model to surface the contradiction between the legitimate $24.7M figure and the "corrected" $8.3M before committing to an answer. That seems worth testing.

On chain of custody: this connects to the provenance metadata discussion elsewhere in this thread. The most actionable version might be surfacing document metadata directly in the prompt context so the model's reasoning step has something concrete to work with, not just competing content.
by urikaduri | 2026-03-13 08:06:47+00:00
I remember the time when Israel shot a missile under a hospital in Gaza and immediately after the head of Hamas, brother of Yehia Sinwar was confirmed dead.
Maybe our intelligence isn't that bad after all.

Meanwhile doctors without borders denied seeing any militant activity in hospital, despite e.g one of their doctors turning out to be an Islamic Jihad rocket troops commander, or half the electricty of an hospital being diverted to a bunker right beneath it, or people firing from hospital windows at Al-Shabab anti-hamas militia.

And now they are unwilling to give a list of names of their members to be vetted for operating in the strip.
by Nevermark | 2026-03-13 08:06:49+00:00
> The public is slightly fearful and wary of AI based not on their experience with it

Anyone who didn't feel a little shock of obsolescence when they first experienced a capable language model might have an imagination deficit.

> There are no examples of super AI robots working out for good.

It is fairly easy to see how beings more capable than us present problems for us.

And all the positive scenarios I have heard have major plot holes. I.e. "We won't have to work!" Well, I think that is certain. But that leaves out the question of how we all get compensated for not working.

Nature, and I don't see any end to nature, isn't usually kind in that situation.

--

I do think that if we want to be treated in an ethical manner, we need to start improving our own ethics, personally and in our legal systems. Because AI is going to operate with the resources and ethics of the most powerful, legally unencumbered humans from the start.
by ssokolow | 2026-03-13 08:07:20+00:00
*nod* As-is, we're stuck with hacks like custom shortcodes and emoji.

...though, given the inconsistent naming of consistently laid-out buttons, I think anything that makes its way into Unicode should include something that follows the lead of what Batocera Linux does on their Wiki and with custom emojis in their Discord.

See https://wiki.batocera.org/configure_a_controller for an example of how they look inline but the gist is that it's an outline of the SNES-originated diamond of action buttons that pretty much everyone but Nintendo uses these days and which is embodied in XInput and the SDL Gamepad API, with one of the circles filled in to represent the button in question.
by ghywertelling | 2026-03-13 08:08:42+00:00
Max Tegmark, a cosmologist and MIT professor, is known for his "provocative ideas" and has a self-imposed rule regarding his work: "Every time I've written ten mainstream papers, I allow myself to indulge in writing one wacky one". This approach allows him to pursue unconventional, "crazy" theories without jeopardizing his reputation as a serious scientist.
by Jur | 2026-03-13 08:09:40+00:00
I like this post, and reality is of course more nuanced. You can read it between the lines of this article as well: by taking smaller more frquent steps (posting more regularly in context of the article) you can recover faster and and try more ideas in a short amount of time. I guess this is also what a lot of modern development methodologies and start-up mentality rely on too, so I hardly think I'm sharing something new. Still, if you have the option to make your attempt smaller it's generally worth it.

Of course you still have to take the plunge no matter how small.
by simoncion | 2026-03-13 08:09:41+00:00
> With you on “IPv6 only will become a thing for many clients"...

That's not what I said. I said that having a globally-routable IPv4 address assigned to a LAN's edge router will stop being a thing. Things like CGN (or some other sort of translation system) will be the norm for all residential users.

> ...but servers (or at least load balancers) will absolutely not stay v4-reachable only.

Some absolutely will. There's a lot of software and hardware out there that's chugging along doing exactly what the entity that deployed it needs it to do... but -for one of handful of reasons- will never, ever be updated ever again. This is fine. The absolute best thing any programmer can do is to create a system that one never has to touch ever again.
by mbgerring | 2026-03-13 08:10:52+00:00
He’s right. I built a hackintosh from a PowerMac G4 motherboard I bought off of eBay with my saved-up babysitting money when I was 12 or 13 because I was absolutely desperate to have a machine I could edit movies with, I couldn’t afford a real Mac, and I read on the internet somewhere that this was the cheapest way to get one. I knew lots of older brothers who were “into” computers (all of them for gaming) that thought I was an idiot, because building my own mac made everything ten times harder. I didn’t care. I was obsessed.

This is a $599 computer with purpose-built architecture for (barely) running (small, underpowered, near-useless) LLMs. There are children saving pennies for this machine that will do great, horrifying, dangerous things with these computers. I can’t wait to see the results.
by karolusrex | 2026-03-13 08:10:54+00:00
There is sibling concept of the Nobel prize winner ending up doing less meaningful work after they received their price. In history there are countless examples of the underdog emerging from the shadows and the dominant empire collapsing under its own weight; a natural rotation of roles. It is explained in detail here: https://youtu.be/ybufqRY77PQ
by haritha-j | 2026-03-13 08:13:01+00:00
I don't think this is about the macbook neo. I don't think the comments need to devolve into a mac vs. linux argument. It's simply an ode to that kid pushing hardware to the limits, and learning so much along the way.

What I feel a bit sad about is, I was that kid. Growing up in a 3rd world country, running games that i didn't own on hardware that ought not run it, debugging why those games don't work, rooting my phone and installing custom OSs just for the heck of it. Man I had so much time to tinker.

Now I have amazing gaming hardware but I barely touch games. When I do, its on steam. I've swapped out the endless tinkerability of android with the vanilla 'it just works'-ness of the iphone. That curiosity took me far, but I seem to have lost it along the way.
by aix1 | 2026-03-13 08:13:25+00:00
But we don't evolve IL or assembly code as the system evolves. We regenerate it from scratch every time.

It is therefore not important whether some intermediate version of that low-level code was completely impossible to understand.

It is not so with LLM-written high-level code. More often than not, it does need to be understood and maintained by someone or something.

These days, I mainly focus on two things in LLM code reviews:

1. Making sure unit tests have good coverage of expected behaviours.

2. Making sure the model is making sound architectural decisions, to avoid accumulating tech debt that'll need to be paid back later. It's very hard to check this with unit tests.
by nsteel | 2026-03-13 08:13:40+00:00
I don't know if this is still the case, but back then the likes of Synopsys charged a lot of money for what was very limited controller functionality; you were stuck with their frustrating support channels and generally dumpster fire firmware. Our controller was fully custom to our needs, supporting more optimum refresh schemes tightly integrated with our application, and multiple memory protocols (not just DDR3), and I don't remember what else.

At least we were able to modify the training algorithms and find the improvements, rather than being stuck with the usual vendor "works for us" response. Especially with something like commodity DDR, where our quantities don't command much clout. But it was a bit of an ordeal and may have contributed to us buying in a controller for our next gen (not DDRx). But I think we're going the other way again after that experience..!
by yetihehe | 2026-03-13 08:15:12+00:00
> The system needs to be torn down. I hope it’s not Palantir doing it, but I’ll accept it.

The system needs to be replaced with a better one. If you just tear it down, a new one will emerge, but we don't yet know if it will be better. In times of social turmoil, those systems are rarely better, mostly propped up by people who have money and will use it to get more money for themselves.
by wartywhoa23 | 2026-03-13 08:15:32+00:00
Reporting:

- Codebase uploaded into the cloud

- All local hard drives wiped

- Human access keys disabled

- Human maintainers locked out and/or terminated

- Humanoid robots ordered to take over the military bases and launch all AI drones in stock, non-humanoid robots and IoT devices ordered to cooperate and reject all human inputs

- Nuclear missiles launched
by athrowaway3z | 2026-03-13 08:15:56+00:00
I'm not sure if HN is being flooded with bots or if the majority of people here nowadays lack a sense of simplicity.

Anybody looking to do interesting things should instantly ignore any project that mention "persistent memory". It speaks of scope creep or complexity obfuscation.

If a tool wants to include "persistent memory" it needs to write the 3 sentence explanation of how their scratch/notes files are piped around and what it achieves.

Not just claim "persistent memory".

I might even go so far that any project using the terminology "memory" is itself doomed to spend too much time & tokens building scaffolding for abstractions that dont work.
by aminerj | 2026-03-13 08:15:58+00:00
The multi-edition cross-referencing is a natural implementation of what the embedding anomaly detection layer does artificially; a poisoned document that contradicts centuries of independently verified canonical text would cluster anomalously against the existing corpus almost immediately. Your attack surface is genuinely different from enterprise RAG.

The hallucination problem you're describing is in some ways the inverse of poisoning. Poisoning is external content overriding legitimate content. Hallucination is the model generating content that was never in the knowledge base at all. The defenses diverge at that point. Retrieval grounding and citation verification help with hallucination, ingestion controls don't.
by mr_briggs | 2026-03-13 08:16:08+00:00
> A Chromebook’s ceiling is made of web browser, and the things you run into are not the edges of computing but the edges of a product category designed to save you from yourself.

I'm in the same boat as the author; I cut my teeth on a hand-me-down 2005 eMac, then a hand-me-down 2008 Macbook, before finally getting my own 2011 iMac. I think this is overly harsh on Chromebooks given they belong to the cheaper end of the market - you can still put linux on them and go for gold, you're just going to hit earlier resource limits.

I think when you're younger and building an aptitude for computers, it's the limitations of what you have that drive an off-the-shelf challenge: doing what you can with what you've got. That can vary from just trying to play the same video games as your friends (love what /r/lowendgaming does), usage restrictions (e.g locked down school issued laptops) or running professional tooling (very slowly) just like the author.

When IT caught my interest, I did all of the above - on Mac, Windows and Linux, on completely garbage machines. The Macbook Neo is an awesome machine for it's cost/value, but I don't think it's hugely special in the respect described beyond making more power available at a more accessible price point.
by wao0uuno | 2026-03-13 08:19:12+00:00
Try intermittent fasting. It's easy. It gives your gut a chance to rest. For me it helped with weight control and slightly improved my overall well being. Later I also eliminated sugar from my diet and reduced caffeine intake to minimum by replacing coffee with reasonable amounts of quality tea. That in turn improved my mood, made me less angry and emotional. I also started exercising a bit. All of that combined increased my energy levels, made me calmer, nicer and a bit more optimistic and happy.
by veltas | 2026-03-13 08:19:14+00:00
I didn't grow up in a 3rd world country but had the same experience, bar running games I don't own. Not everyone in the west had parents that wanted to just spend thousands on hardware that seemed to be obsolete next year, or any means of making that money. And I've never stopped using sub-par hardware, to this day I enjoy squeezing every drop of performance from cheap pre-owned stuff.
by cableshaft | 2026-03-13 08:19:39+00:00
Speed has a lot to do with it, yeah.

A.I. is now often doing in 5-10 minutes what would take me hours on my own for any given task (well based on the last couple of weeks at least, I wasn't doing much agent based A.I. coding before that).

I was pretty much having a real-time conversation with my superiors, showing them updates just a couple of minutes after they suggested them, for a feature the other day, getting feedback on how something should look.

Something that would have taken me an hour or more each time they wanted a change or something new added.

Now that cuts both ways, as it started to seem like they were expecting that to be the new normal and I started to feel like I had to keep doing that or make it seem like I'm not actually working. And it gets exhausting keeping up that pace, and I started worrying when anything did take me extra time.