MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by refulgentis | 2026-03-12 21:07:47+00:00
> just to show people it’s not this handicapped little machine

I used to think this way about Apple and its jarring to read with it 10-15 years behind me.

It reads as aggro and oddly tribalistic / sports fan-y.

(what people? who thinks its slower than an M1? who thinks you can't code on it? what will you coding on it prove to people that the benchmarks they read can't? with all that, why get so invested you're buying a machine you don't want to use day to day? what does "handicapped" mean in this context?)

Only sharing b/c I never understood why people would roll their eyes at me, and apparently I finally reached my own graybeard moment, and I am now rolling my eyes at both of my selves :)
by ibestvina | 2026-03-12 21:08:06+00:00
I think that "hovering the code" and "broken rhythm" are correlated, but still separate issues. There are parts of my code (e.g. vibe-coded mockups) that I don't look at the code of at all, and I don't care about it. There are others where I check everything in detail (same as if I were to review someones PR), and I think I have a very good grasp of that code.

But the broken rhythm problem persists regardless, and I find that issue to become more and more serious as LLMs are able to work for longer and longer on their own.

It might be that what we're experiencing now is just an uncanny valley, where they're not yet good enough for us managing them to work in similar ways as with other developers, but are good enough to allow us to switch our attention away from them while they work. But that attention span is mostly wasted, as the time between interactions isn't enough to e.g. work on something else, or read a book.

It's a stupid analogy, but currently it's similar to having a bathroom break every couple of minutes, and if this continues, most developers will probably start doomscrolling more and more.

I was wondering recently if there are some productive activities that might fit well into this rhythm, but I haven't found any yet. I guess sourdough baking is one such example, but there's only so much bread you can eat...
by JMC-FR | 2026-03-12 21:08:36+00:00
Thank you so much for this feedback — it really means a lot!

Yes, exactly: the goal is to make the governance layer fully explicit, auditable, and version-controlled instead of burying it inside prompts (where it's fragile, non-deterministic, and very jailbreak-prone).

Regarding your question about plugging in a domain-specific rules engine (medical workflows, financial processes, etc.):

The current architecture (detailed in EL-ARCH.md) is designed with *modularity in mind* right from the start.

The Governance Layer is meant to be:
- event-driven (receives standardized observations via Pydantic models)
- pluggable: applies a sequence of validators / rule-checks
- decision-oriented: returns ALLOW, DENY (with justification), or DELEGATE_WITH_CONSTRAINTS

So in theory, integrating a domain-specific engine should be reasonably straightforward:
1. Write a thin adapter that maps Elia events/facts → input format of the target engine
2. Translate the engine's output back into Elia decisions (ALLOW/DENY + explanation)
3. Register it as one of the rule modules in the Governance pipeline (via config or factory)

Examples of realistic integrations:
- Simple Python functions or small rule sets → very easy (days)
- Open Policy Agent (OPA), Rego policies → medium (1–3 weeks, mainly mapping + error handling)
- Drools, a lightweight Prolog-like, or even a small custom knowledge base → medium to hard depending on complexity
- Certified medical/financial rule engines → significantly harder (semantic mapping + validation/certification overhead)

For a medical workflow example (e.g. assisted prescription or diagnosis support):
- Rules could cover contraindications, max dosage, drug interactions, patient consent / GDPR/HIPAA constraints
- A combination of OPA + a SQLite-based drug DB or external API would already cover a lot of ground

Right now this is still at the *specification + high-level diagram stage* — Phase 0 (a minimal in-process skeleton) is planned but not started yet. I'm primarily an architect, not a full-time implementer, so concrete extensions like this would benefit enormously from collaboration.

Do you already have a preferred rules engine / policy language / framework in mind for your day-to-day work?
Knowing that would help a lot in prioritizing extensibility points in the spec and the upcoming Phase 0 prototype.

Thanks again — comments like yours are exactly why I shared this early!
by nine_k | 2026-03-12 21:09:01+00:00
Can a robot write a medicine prescription? A medical procedure prescription? If yes, that would be a game-changer. But the medical insurance providers would be very cautious about honoring these. Then, if things go wrong, what entity would be held accountable for malpractice?

You already can get a good-quality medical advice "for nothing", unless it requires e.g. a blood test. The question is, how actionable such an advice is going to be, and how even the quality is going to be.
by miladyincontrol | 2026-03-12 21:09:32+00:00
Superachromat is the term you're looking for in terms of lenses corrected throughout IR to UV.
They're not actually that expensive if you know where to look, I got my Zeiss 250mm supeachromat for about $500 from a Japanese seller. Works a treat for full spectrum film work especially on a system that lets you swap between film backs, if not for the woeful cost of film these days.
by whilo | 2026-03-12 21:10:12+00:00
Hi HN - I’m the author of Stratum.

The headline benchmark result is that on 10M rows, Stratum is faster than DuckDB on 35 of 46 single-threaded analytical queries, despite running entirely on the JVM.

But the main idea is actually branchable tables: you can fork a table in O(1), keep copy-on-write snapshots, and query different branches through SQL.

It speaks the PostgreSQL wire protocol, so psql/JDBC/DBeaver work out of the box.

Benchmarks, methodology, and repo are linked from the page. Happy to answer questions.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-03-12 21:10:24+00:00
> The clinic is the collateral to the bank. VC stand to loose nothing

This is actually a case where using the correct terminology clarifies.

VCs don’t do LBOs. Private equity firms do. When their deals go bust they lose the equity they invested. That equity is the first layer to take a loss. When that happens, the lenders—whether they be banks or private credit firms—take over the company, often converting some of their previous debt into equity.

There is a lot of risk in LBOs. It’s why they have such a mixed record.
by tony_cannistra | 2026-03-12 21:11:05+00:00
Completely infuriating, but more of a commentary on the sad state of incompetent power-hungry law enforcement with tools they don't know how to use than the tools themselves.

Though, the question remains: are the tools built in such a way as to deceive the user into a false sense of trust or certainty?

_Some_ of the blame lies on the UX here. It must.
by alephnerd | 2026-03-12 21:11:11+00:00
Tbf, from what I've heard within my professional network and extended family, most bureaucrats who are not associated with BCA are functionally paralyzed right now because of the political changes going on - no one wants to put their name on some initiative that falls under the anti-corruption radar.

This paralysis has been going on for 2-3 years now and I know of an EV battery FDI project that shifted to Indonesia as a result of this paralysis. Even VinGroup and VinGroup tier companies aren't immune.
by WASDx | 2026-03-12 21:11:17+00:00
I think these limitations could be addressed by allowing trivial manual adjustments to the generated code before committing. And/or allowing for trivial code changes without a spec change. The judgement of "trivial" being that it still follows the spec and does not add functionality mandating a spec change. I haven't checked if they support any of this but I would be frustrated not being allowed to make such a small code change, say to fix an off-by-one error that I recently got from LLM output. The code change would be smaller than the spec change.

Cool idea overall, an incremental psuedocode compiler. Interesting to see how well it scales.

I can also see a hybrid solution with non-specced code files for things where the size of code and spec would be the same, like for enums or mapping tables.
by neoCrimeLabs | 2026-03-12 21:11:21+00:00
This makes me wish I took photos of Diversi-Dial (aka D-Dial) setups, which somehow impressed me more due to how much they accomplished with much much less hardware.

They were able to set up a 7 x 300baud modems in real-time chat system on an Apple ][ . The original marketing called it a CB (Citizens Band) Simulator. They were able to run up to 1200baud, but I never saw one of those functioning.

As if 7 people chatting through a single 6502 wasn't impressive enough, many of them dedicated one or two of their lines to interlinking with other D-dials.

Talk about an esoteric memory.

- https://www.ddial.com/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversi-Dial
by crazygringo | 2026-03-12 21:11:34+00:00
What "serious" tasks does banking involve?

I log in to transfer money, to take a photo of a check to deposit it, to check my balance.

All of that is fine on a phone screen. Actually, it's a lot easier to take the check photo.

And a banking app is a whole lot more secure than a browser tab running extensions that might get hijacked, on a desktop OS whose architecture allows this like widespread disk access, keyloggers, etc.
by Rohansi | 2026-03-12 21:11:38+00:00
The runtime knows exactly where GC pointers are so I would assume that is what it does. It even knows precisely when locals are no longer needed so it can stop treating objects they refer to as reachable. It's instruction level, not based on scopes, so an object can be freed while it is still in scope if the code doesn't access it!

> How does C# guard against someone doing something silly like turning a pointer into a long and then back into a pointer again later?

I don't think it does. You can't do most of these things without using unsafe code, which needs a compiler flag enabled and code regions marked as `unsafe`.
by fluoridation | 2026-03-12 21:11:40+00:00
Good, good. Very virtuous of you.

What exactly are you asking for, just some commiserative platitudes? I don't think anyone is under the false impression that these are awesome jobs, but the fact is, they are jobs. The people doing them are getting paid to do them. Why would data labellers be more deserving of sympathy than any other type of office worker?
by jessetemp | 2026-03-12 21:11:41+00:00
Higher cost doesn't always indicate negative environmental consequences. It could be (and seems likely to me) that harvesting one cow's worth of plant protein is more labor intensive which isn't necessarily bad for the environment. If you compare two soy crops, one that uses herbicides and another that uses manual labor to pull weeds, the latter will be more expensive and better for the environment
by bmacho | 2026-03-12 21:11:55+00:00
> Just like with IPv6.

Yes, but the compatibility is very very easy to support for both hardware vendors, softwares, sysadmins etc. Some things might need a gentle stroke (mostly just enlarge a single bitfield) but after that everything just works, hardware, software, websites, operators.

A protocol is a social problem, and ipv6 fails exactly there.
by sshine | 2026-03-12 21:12:53+00:00
I think you have a fair point, but you bothered to give feedback for how this article could be more congruent as if a non-assisted writing process would not warrant similar feedback.

The number of blog sentences that end abruptly halfway through have drastically fallen since I applied AI to my writing process.

There is nuance beyond the feeling that you know the author because he either uses the em dash a lot, the word “comprehensive” a lot, uses bullet points with bold text a lot, or writes detailed summaries reiterating what was just said. I read a lot from that author and I could use a break.
by tzs | 2026-03-12 21:12:54+00:00
It's also widely believed that is a big part of why he vetoed a bill to fund the Arkansas River Valley water pipeline in Colorado, to bring much needed clean drinking water to rural communities in southeastern Colorado (communities that overwhelming voted for Trump all three times).

Another reason widely believed to be a significant factor is that it would benefit Lauren Boebert's district, and Trump wanted to punish her for siding with Democrats in the House on releasing the Epstein files.

The pipeline funding bill had been very bipartisan. It had passed the House by unanimous consent, and whatever the equivalent procedure is in the Senate.

There was an attempt to override the veto. The House vote was 248-177, which failed because a veto override requires 2/3 of the votes. It would have needed 283. All Democrats voted to override. It would have taken 71 Republicans to push it over, which would have been 1/3 of Republicans present. It only got 35, 1/6th of the Republicans.
by inanutshellus | 2026-03-12 21:12:55+00:00
"It's not my will, it's the will of the bugs in my butt!" yes, very "relieving."

I kid, ;) but I see your point. The idea that you might, say, struggle to resist candy and sweets and it's because some population of your gut biome is fighting for its life if you don't eat sugar... makes sense.

The idea that "I just cut sugar out for six weeks and my willpower to resist sugar went through the roof" ... not because your willpower changed, but because you killed that part of your gut biome.
by xenadu02 | 2026-03-12 21:13:00+00:00
"usually" and "typically" are doing a lot of heavy lifting here :)

Access to knowledge, equipment, and budget varied dramatically prior to widespread internet access. Someone setting up a BBS might not even know about multi-line modem cards or serial port expansions. Even if they knew about them they may not have been able to reasonably obtain them. Or they may have been operating on donations, surplus, or discount equipment. Or they simply may not have had the luxury of time to research all of that as user demand meant they were too busy laying tracks in front of the train.

Many BBSes ran on 1-2 lines per PC because that's what they understood how to build or the hardware they had access to. You might be surprised at just how many lines some BBSes setup this way had!

People forget there was a time that anything outside the standard PC was extremely expensive, often had flaky or nonexistent software support, locked you into a fly-by-night vendor that might go out of business tomorrow, was only available via a distributor who wanted to have you talk to a "sales consultant" before they'd sell you something, etc. Many many people chose sub-optimal implementations because it was an off-the-shelf PC they could replace at any time with trivially simple software requiring no special CONFIG.SYS drivers or TSRs to fiddle with. Especially if you'd ever been burned previously.
by caditinpiscinam | 2026-03-12 21:13:43+00:00
There are no non-confusing options, but some of those are still clearly worse than others.

What should sorted([3, nan, 2, 4, 1]) give you in Python?

A) [1, 2, 3, 4, nan] is an good option

B) [nan, 1, 2, 3, 4] is an good option

C) An error is an good option

D) [3, nan, 1, 2, 4] is a silly, bad option. It's definitely not what you want, and it's quiet enough to slip by unnoticed. This is what you get when Nan != NaN

NaN == NaN is wrong. NaN != NaN is wrong, unintuitive, and breaks the rest of your code. If you want to signal that an operation is invalid, then throw an error. The silently nonsensical semantics of NaN are the worst possible response
by like_any_other | 2026-03-12 21:14:02+00:00
The US spends the 5th most in the world on education per-pupil: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...

They even spend the most on minorities: "Black and Latinx total per pupil expenditures exceed White total per pupil expenditures by $229.53 and $126.15, respectively" - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23328584198724... (see Table 1 for details)

(I admit I don't understand the deep wisdom behind presenting absolute differences in amounts, and omitting the amounts themselves, but from the rest of that article, and from the 1st link, we can see that per-pupil spending is in the $10k+ range, so a difference of $200 is negligible. In other words, it would be unfair to call Black and Latinx students privileged because of this.)

Whatever the reason for the sorry state of US education, lack of funding isn't it.
by hackthemack | 2026-03-12 21:14:06+00:00
If the site is not responding, can always try the way back machine.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220207120422/https://rachelbyt...

I remember dialing up to a BBS in the area in 1990 that had 4 phone lines. That was amazing at the time when most BBS only had 1 line.

But I do remember downloading text files FILE.IDZ about other BBS, and reading some magazines that mentioned other BBS systems that had 32 and more phone lines but you had to pay. That seemed like it was just on another level in another part of the world that seemed like fantasy compared to the area I was in.
by glkindlmann | 2026-03-12 21:14:07+00:00
As a standard for floating point representation and computation, IEEE 754 solved multiple long-standing serious problems better than anything that came before it. I don't think its sensible to judge it with a PL design lens like "principle of least astonishment"; certainly not as if IEEE754 is a peer to Rust or Python. Or, you could learn about the surprise, frustration, and expense involved in trying to write portable numeric code in the 1970s, prior to IEEE 754:

https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/ieee754status/754st...
by mort96 | 2026-03-12 21:14:11+00:00
A fully statically compiled Linux ARM64 binary which only interacts with the kernel through syscalls should run no problem on ARM64 Android. From the kernel's perspective, there is no difference between a "Linux binary" and an "Android binary" because the kernel in Android is Linux.

Most programs want to interact with various system libraries and system services though. Android and your typical desktop Linux system share pretty much nothing aside from the kernel.
by Ajakks | 2026-03-12 21:14:14+00:00
I personally would get whatever metal in space, so weight is not the issue - solving this problem would also create almost immediately chunks of rocks that could also be dropped. In all reality, anything can be "setup" to be a weapon - many ways have been identified here.

All required innovations - of which, most are not out of reach in the slightest, all of that tech would be immensely valuable, literally everything we do to secure space superiority will be actual gains - not smaller microchips equivalent innovations - entirely new machines, entirely new economies of scale - there is no equivalent military tech that we can develop on earth.

Not only is there really no conceivable way to ignore the strategic advantage once considered, the long-term economic payoff is actually reason enough alone to pursue the radical idea of a "space battleship" - I can think of about 20 ways to cause significant global issues with one measly space battleship.

As a hypothetical alone, it has reason enough to warrant a substantial amount of the 1.5 trillion defense budget the Pentagon plays with.
Ask HN: Does code style matter much anymore?
by travisgriggs | 2026-03-12 21:14:33+00:00
We've spent years espousing that code isn't just for compilers to consume, it's meant to be read by humans, in the moment and later. I've been at this for 35 years.

With the advent of agent generated code, everyone's seeing a lot of code generated, in part at least, with the help of the agent. I'm currently reviewing some code done by a junior developer. It's in a somewhat legacy (6 years old?) Swift code base. The submission is out of step with the conventions of the rest of the code base, and has lots of "best practice" things, but that aren't really relevant to the current problem. And the object design is terrible.

But, the code works fine and fits the desired bill.

I find myself wondering, in an age where LLMs reason about and generate the code, how much value should I place in code/structure readability? It's a very intrinsic value for me. But maybe this is a case where one's aged experience becomes a liability, where spaghetti code isn't a problem anymore of the LLMs reason about code differently. What are others doing?
by hrmtst93837 | 2026-03-12 21:14:44+00:00
Focusing on flashy breakthroughs hides the issue that bigger models and merge benchmarks rarely translate to reliability in real codebases. For routine merges, subtle regressions and context quirks matter more than headline progress. Unless evals stress nasty scenarios like multi-file renames with tricky conflicts, the numbers are mostly for show. Progress will plateau until someone tunes for the boring, messy cases that waste dev time.
by Eisenstein | 2026-03-12 21:15:11+00:00
Justice is part of a moral framework. Law is part of a procedural framework. You can structure the law to try to optimize for justice, but the law has never been about morality, the law is about keeping society operating on top of whatever structure is dominant.

Example: the Supreme Court ruled in Ozawa v. United States in 1922 that a Japanese descended person could not naturalize as a US citizen despite having white skin because he was not technically Caucasian. The next year in 1923 they ruled in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind that an Indian descended man could not natural despite being Caucasian because his skin was not white.

Why did the court give two contradictory reasons for the rulings which would each be negated if the reasoning were swapped? I wouldn't say it was for justice. It was because America at that time did not want non-white immigrants, and what 'white' is, is a fiction that means something completely different than what it claims to mean, and the justices were upholding that structure.
by rpcope1 | 2026-03-12 21:15:40+00:00
There's no way this isn't a slam dunk case to sue the piss out of the Fargo Police, probably the US Marshals and maybe other orgs. The woman in the surveillance phone clearly looks way younger, among the many other obvious signs this woman didn't do it. I hope she wrings at least several million dollars out of the government.
by bloomingeek | 2026-03-12 21:16:06+00:00
I'm a tech loving boomer, I always use my PC for banking, ordering, etc. My wife, however, almost always uses her cell, which is great for when we are traveling. Even though we're only five years apart in age, she's lite years ahead of me with a cell. I freely admit part of my reluctance for using my cell is the mobile tracking ability of companies.
by throwaway23293 | 2026-03-12 21:16:16+00:00
It is just sad to see hn becoming this abomination...

Site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

---

Is it really an "illusion" anymore???
by notahacker | 2026-03-12 21:16:46+00:00
Interesting to see this change between uses (the bounding boxes are better than the heatmaps I saw the first time I tried it!)

The AI struggles a bit with less generic terms. It correctly realised Radcliffe Camera was a building, but tagged another building as well and guessed wrong for Balliol Library (I guess the models haven't seen it from above). On the other hand I was pleased it tagged narrowboats and didn't tag them as fish when I asked it to find fish on that tile...
by vinkelhake | 2026-03-12 21:16:53+00:00
This is "just" about providing the official Chrome binary to ARM64 "desktop" Linux.

You've been able to build and run Chromium on ARM Linux for a long time (I'm running it right now), it's just that they haven't provided an officially branded Chrome.

This is a good thing. While Chromium works well, there are a few things (like syncing) that is a bit of a pain to set up.