MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Iran War Clock
by martialg | 2026-03-10 10:27:33+00:00
Iran War Clock is a timeline and tracker of all the official predicted end dates of the war by the current administration.

I was inspired by the cost tracker that was posted the other day. Those numbers are great, but I believe people need some direct insight into what the government is doing and saying. In today’s information environment, it’s challenging to figure out what is valid or current or even just real. This is doubly true when it’s convenient for powerful actors to muddy the waters. This is my attempt to help inform the public about what is actually being said, by whom, and when.

Hopefully the war ends soon, but as we know from the Global War on Terror, mission creep is real and tempting especially when you start a conflict without a clear goal in mind.

With Iran War Clock we’ll at least have a record of each time that happens.

Would love any thoughts/suggestions on how to make this more useful!
by guenthert | 2026-03-10 10:28:01+00:00
To pile up another anecdote: late in 2018 I put a well used PC with an Intel SSDSCKKW240H6 (240GB SSD in M.2 form factor) in storage and picked it up 5 years later. The SSD was unreadable then. The PC (with a different storage system) still runs (sans the fan-control, which apparently took a beating on first boot after such long dormancy and the CMOS battery is meanwhile depleted).
by nachocoll | 2026-03-10 10:28:18+00:00
The "very few of us are optimizing ROI" point is sharp. The vibe coding discourse is dominated by "what can I build" conversations, but almost no one is asking "what actually shipped and created value?"

ROI with AI-assisted coding is tricky because gains are front-loaded (generation is fast) while costs are deferred (maintenance, debugging, security issues surface later). Measuring tokens vs. commits is a start, but the real signal is: does the generated code survive contact with production?

This connects to the first principle of the Agile Vibe Coding Manifesto (https://agilevibecoding.org): "Acceleration in development must translate into validated customer value. Speed without value is waste." ROI tracking is how you actually operationalize that.

The line survival metric matrixgard mentions (30-40% for non-trivial code) is fascinating and sobering. Would love to see this broken down by task type.
by osener | 2026-03-10 10:28:19+00:00
> Cost remains an ever present challenge. Cursor’s larger rivals are willing to subsidize aggressively. According to a person familiar with the company’s internal analysis, Cursor estimated last year that a $200-per-month Claude Code subscription could use up to $2,000 in compute, suggesting significant subsidization by Anthropic. Today, that subsidization appears to be even more aggressive, with that $200 plan able to consume about $5,000 in compute, according to a different person who has seen analyses on the company’s compute spend patterns.

This is the relevant quote from the original article.
by menaerus | 2026-03-10 10:29:42+00:00
Let someone from the Redox team go read [1], [2], and [3]. If they still insist on keeping their position then ... well. The industry is being redefined as we speak and everyone doing the push-back are pushing against themselves really.

[1] https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/ai/harness-first-agents/

[2] https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/ai/fully-autonomous-optimizat...

[3] https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/engineering/self-optimizing-s...

P.S. I know this will be downvoted to death but I'll leave it here anyway for folks who want to keep their eyes wide open.
by revolvingthrow | 2026-03-10 10:30:15+00:00
It is difficult to put into words how much I dislike macos 26. I held out on upgrading for a long time since there were so many horror stories, but to my surprise both iOS and ipadOS 26 aren’t really any different than 18. Maybe because you don’t really do any proper work on it? The graphical differences aren’t anything major when the apps fill the whole viewport anyway.

But macOS? Good lord. I can only hope 27 will unfuck things somewhat, there are so many small annoyances and all of them add to a constant sense of unhappiness throughout the day. I’m really tempted to downgrade back to Sequoia. At least the M4 will be good enough for years if this truly is the new path Apple will take.
by mike_hearn | 2026-03-10 10:30:20+00:00
Cache definitely isn't free! We're in a global RAM shortage and KV caches sit around consuming RAM in the hope that there will be a hit.

The gamble with caching is to hold a KV cache in the hope that the user will (a) submit a prompt that can use it and (b) that will get routed to the right server which (c) won't be so busy at the time it can't handle the request. KV caches aren't small so if you lose that bet you've lost money (basically, the opportunity cost of using that RAM for something else).
by iainmerrick | 2026-03-10 10:30:43+00:00
I'm seeing a lot of comments here about macOS/iOS unification, but I think people are getting worked up about nothing.

What do macOS window styles have to do with iOS? iOS (mostly) doesn't have windows!

What does the MacBook Neo have to do with iOS, other than coincidentally using some of the same components? Maybe Apple decided to make a cheaper Mac because they thought people might want to buy a cheaper Mac.

They are trying to use a common design language across all their devices, sure. But you would hardly expect them to do the opposite! They might try to make a hybrid tablet/laptop or something at some point, sure, but none of their current moves point inevitably in that direction. Except maybe for software notarization, but that has nothing to do with window corners or cheaper laptops.
by Grimblewald | 2026-03-10 10:31:54+00:00
No, I am saying that you are trading what you spend effort on when using LLM's. Do you give up the effort of writing for the effort of review? Weather you should and if you will benefit really depends on your expertise and skill set.

If you're a novice, or even intermediate, use AI in a feedback kind of way, see if it can pinpoint and explain problems with your current code and offer feedback/recommendations. Not code, but dot point human language feedback like you'd get from a senior dev.

If the AI is writing code that is beyond what you could produce yourself, you have no business trusting the code the AI produces. This is because, as anyone who can produce high level code will tell you, AI is wrong too frequently to blindly trust. You have to engage critically with output. Full auto is a disaster waiting to happen.

The problem is, for many, good looking but fundamentally flawed code is indistinguishable from the real deal, and so they simply outsource their ability to critically think to a thing that simply cannot. This is a big problem and the evidence for this claim is littered throughout this comment section.
by magicalhippo | 2026-03-10 10:32:05+00:00
> I do not see any limitations to making models ridiculously large (besides training)

From my understanding, the "besides training" is a big issue. As I noted earlier[1], Qwen3 was much better than Qwen2.5, but the main difference was just more and better training data. The Qwen3.5-397B-A17B beat their 1T-parameter Qwen3-Max-Base, again a large change was more and better training data.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47089780
by RovaAI | 2026-03-10 10:32:29+00:00
The lead research pipeline resonates. Hit the same noise problem when querying by company name — "Notion" matches hundreds of headlines about the concept of notion, not the app. Fixed it by combining domain + company name in the query string.

Also found that parsing script/meta tags directly from the homepage beats any third-party data source for tech stack detection. HubSpot, Salesforce, Stripe, Intercom all leave distinctive fingerprints in page source. Zero API calls, zero cost.

Built something similar for B2B prospecting (batch mode — 50 companies at once). Ended up with almost the same architecture: HTTP scraping at 0 LLM tokens, LLM only for the synthesis step at the end. The bottleneck is rate limiting from the target sites, not the LLM.

One thing I'd add: on the engagement loop bug you mentioned — I ran into the same thing early on. The fix was processing only items where a "last_engaged" timestamp was >N hours ago before feeding to the agent. Simple filter, saved a lot of wasted runs.
by knorker | 2026-03-10 10:33:59+00:00
> For most practical purposes, Swedish electricity generation has been basically fossile free since the 1980's.

I think "practical purposes" should include the fact that thanks to also shutting down a bunch of nuclear, Sweden regularly imports German/Polish coal power.

Sweden claiming fossile free is only technically true. Practically there's a mountain of greenwashing.

So no, I would not say what you just said. I find that greenwashing dishonest.

By being anti nuclear, the green parties around the world have caused more radiation[1] and climate changing co2 than any other movement in history.

[1]
An oft cited statistic is that coal causes more deaths every single year from radiation (excluding accidents) than nuclear has has caused in its entire history INCLUDING accidents.
by joe_mamba | 2026-03-10 10:34:32+00:00
>What's strange is that I have never heard a single "human rights expert", humanitarian lawyer, government, NGO, bureaucrat, or global body say a single word about the flagrant and far more wide spread abuses of the human rights of people who should have the basic right to live unmolested by criminals and under a government system that provides reasonable justice. Not a single one.

Because those "humanitarian" lawyers, bureaucrats and NGO activists, don't live in high crime areas, they instead live in some of the nicest, cleanest, greenest, homogenous, quietest neighbourhoods, suburbs or gated communities that (taxpayer) money can buy.

They virtue signal for open borders, second chances and human rights for criminals, ONLY as long is it's not negatively impacting their backyard, but try to enter their gated communities without their consent and you see them suddenly believing in borders and law enforcement by force. Try building a DMV, unemployment office, or refugee housing center in their neighborhood and see how they turn into the most harcore NIMBYs ever. They want to write cheques that only other people have to cash. "Rules for thee but not for me."
by stingraycharles | 2026-03-10 10:34:45+00:00
That’s such a silly take.

“Our approach is harness-first engineering: instead of reading every line of agent-generated code, invest in automated checks that can tell us with high confidence, in seconds, whether the code is correct. “

that’s literally what The whole industry has been doing for decades, and spoiler: you still need to review code! it just gives you confidence that you didn’t miss anything.

Also, without understanding the code, it’s difficult to see its failure modes, and how it should be tested accordingly.
by fancyfredbot | 2026-03-10 10:34:55+00:00
It's a good question. Costs will be lumpy. Inference servers will have a preferred batch size. Once you have a server you can scale number of users up to that batch size for relatively low cost. Then you need to add another server (or rack) for another large cost.

However I think it's fair to say the cost is roughly linear in the number of users other than that.

There may be some aspects which are not quite linear when you see multiple users submitting similar queries... But I don't think this would be significant.
by FrancisMoodie | 2026-03-10 10:35:04+00:00
This comment is being down-voted because this post isn't talking in favor the Iranian regime, it is talking about the atrocities that the people of Iran are having to live through, how their own government is self destructing and willing to take everyone with them, so a post about whom the regime has supported feels like it's missing the mark.

No one in this thread is thinking "This makes me like the Iranian regime" or "this is in favor of the Iranian regime". And so ofcourse your pro-Israel comments are even more besides the point, especially because this article is about the suffering of the Iranian people and you're take is "HN is anti-Israel whilst believing it is pro-Israel". HN isn't a single person, it's a lot of people with differing opinions and sometimes you'll have a pro-X sentiment and another time it might go the other way.

Also labeling 'pedophilia' as a 'conspiratorial trope' kind of defeats your entire comment, but maybe that's just me.
by RovaAI | 2026-03-10 10:35:51+00:00
The deduplication/state-memory pattern maps well to any long-running agent. What I've found works: instead of a complex memory system, a simple append-only log of processed items with a last_seen timestamp is often enough. Lookup is fast with a sorted structure, and you can prune entries older than your recurrence window.

The hard part isn't storage — it's deciding what counts as "the same" item. For web research agents, URL identity isn't sufficient (pages change, same story, different URL). Content fingerprinting on normalized text (first N chars after stripping whitespace/HTML) turns out to be more reliable than URL equality.

Also worth noting: the failure mode you described (repeating mistakes) often comes from agents not distinguishing between "I haven't seen this" and "I saw this and it failed." Storing outcome alongside identity — even just success/failure — changes the behavior significantly. Retry logic becomes explicit instead of accidental.
by worksonmine | 2026-03-10 10:36:09+00:00
> Yeah you're kind of a nerd, using it to read nerd things.

I may be, but my girlfriend isn't and she's using it to follow the government and job postings. But you're moving the goalposts, RSS is getting new attention and it doesn't matter who that attention is from. It's happening, you don't have to use it we don't care but let us have our feeds.

Also if you've ever worked in the podcast space you'd know they all release with RSS, so many people are using it without knowing. Maybe even you?
by hypeatei | 2026-03-10 10:36:29+00:00
> What if a non-native English speaker uses the help of an AI model in the formulation of some issue

I've seen this excuse before but in practice the output they copy/paste is extremely verbose and long winded (with the bullet point and heading soup etc.)

Surely non-native speakers can see that structure and tell the LLM to match their natural style instead? No one wants to read a massive wall of text.
by s_dev | 2026-03-10 10:36:33+00:00
Dang also indefatigably links various threads together with the clear intention of making things clearer for posterity. archive.is is great at the time of writing but will it be here a year from now or will there be another successor on another domain? I hope so but I would hate to think Hacker News will become discussions on articles people can't access. I think a good rule is if it can be archived on the wayback machine it's suitable. Will the wayback machine be here 1 year from now? I think much more likely than archive.is and there is no escaping that such bets have to be made.

"Circumvented easily" is more nebulous than people give it credit for.
by azan_ | 2026-03-10 10:37:19+00:00
> It's sexism in action; the woman gets punished while "boys will be boys." Prove me wrong.

Epstein died in his cell. If Maxwell preferred death to punishment she could've also killed herself. Also it's well documented that women receive less harsh punishment in court vs men for the same crimes, so yeah, it's sexism but not in the way you insinuate.

> Epstein himself is probably still alive in Tel Aviv anyway.

Yes, and it's Maxwell's lookalike that's serving the sentence, while she's enjoying herself in Argentina. See how quickly you can derails discussion with such absurd claims without any substance?
by surgical_fire | 2026-03-10 10:37:21+00:00
> That being said, to outright ban a technology in 2026 on pure "vibes" is not something I'd say is reasonable.

To outright accept LLM contributions would be as much "pure vibes" as banning it.

The thing is, those that maintain open source projects have to make a decision where they want to spend their time. It's open source, they are not being paid for it, they should and will decide what it acceptable and what is not.

If you dislike it, you are free to fork it and make a "LLM's welcome" fork. If, as you imply, the LLM contributions are invaluable, your fork should eventually become the better choice.

Or you can complain to the void that open source maintainers don't want to deal with low effort vibe coded bullshit PRs.
by peter_d_sherman | 2026-03-10 10:37:25+00:00
>"The quacking that catches my ear is when something develops a dependency graph: your package depends on a package that depends on a package, and now you need resolution algorithms, lockfiles, integrity verification, and some way to answer “what am I actually running and how did it get here?”

Several tools that started as plugin systems, CI runners, and chart templating tools have quietly grown transitive dependency trees. Now they walk like a package manager, quack like a package manager, and have all the problems that npm and Cargo and Bundler have spent years learning to manage, though most of them haven’t caught up on the solutions."

https://edolstra.github.io/pubs/phd-thesis.pdf
by 0x3f | 2026-03-10 10:38:24+00:00
Roundabouts were introduced in the UK back when car penetration was low and every learner for decades has been indoctrinated into how to use them. It's the education piece that's the problem. People don't intuitively understand roundabouts and you can't magically send that knowledge to millions of existing drivers.

In some sense you have to start sometime, but there's going to be pushback from the accidents and injuries that will certainly happen in the interim.
by ZaoLahma | 2026-03-10 10:38:48+00:00
I've recently worked extensively with "prompt coding", and the model we're using is very good at following such instructions early on. However after deep reasoning around problems, it tends to focus more on solving the problem at hand than following established guidelines.

Still haven't found a good way to keep it on course other than "Hey, remember that thing that you're required to do? Still do that please."
by craftit | 2026-03-10 10:39:23+00:00
I don't know the exact details, but I have heard (on C++ Weekly, I believe) that it offers some advantages when linking code compiled with different compiler versions. That said, I normally avoid it and use fmtlib to avoid the extra compile time. So it isn't clear if it is a win to me. Header-only libraries are great on small projects, but on large codebases with 1000's of files, it really hits you.
by konschubert | 2026-03-10 10:39:30+00:00
The bottlenecks today are:

* understanding the problem

* modelling a solution that is consistent with the existing modelling/architecture of the software and moves modelling and architecture in the right direction

* verifying that the the implementation of the solution is not introducing accidental complexity

These are the things LLMs can't do well yet. That's where contributions will be most appreciated. Producing code won't be it, maintainers have their own LLM subscriptions.
by GeometryKernel | 2026-03-10 10:39:39+00:00
"Probabilistic AI drug discovery is a dead end. We just open-sourced the BioOS (V7.1). 3 fundamental constants -> 42 Fano Flags -> Deterministic Protein Folding. Stop guessing. [GitHub: https://github.com/ctibedoJ/KateFarms/blob/0b63882e9df3c8144...

@a16zBio @Naval #TechBio
by ChristopherDrum | 2026-03-10 10:39:51+00:00
Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed it so much. I do try to make the posts more than just "here's what the software did" otherwise someone could just crack open a manual and get the same impact.

I flip-flop on using TrueType in DOSBox-X for the blog. I know there is a "purity" element to retrocomputing in certain corners, and I do appreciate that. But since I'm confined to emulators, I guess I feel like I might as well take advantage of what they have to offer.

I really like that Turkish video. Do they mention the name of that particular spreadsheet?
by pmarreck | 2026-03-10 10:40:05+00:00
Yep, that’s why my forks of all their libraries with bugs fixed such as https://github.com/pmarreck/zigimg/commit/52c4b9a557d38fe1e1... will never ever go back to upstream, just because an LLM did it. Lame, but oh well- their loss. Also, this is dumb because anyone who wants fixes like this will have to find a fork like mine with them, which is an increased maintenance burden.
by Towaway69 | 2026-03-10 10:40:08+00:00
There are people who have OCD and can’t help but seeing these things. It’s great for coding and seeing minor changes but its shit for real life - trust me.

The number of times auto update of some app has caused the thought process “but that wasn’t like that yesterday… or was it… hm… oh it was an update”. Just minor things, small mostly unnoticeable if don’t have an “eye for details”.
by alpine01 | 2026-03-10 10:40:08+00:00
3D reconstruction of old spaces which no longer exist seems like a clear use case to me. There's loads of old videos of driving down a street in the 80s, or neighborhoods in cities which got replaced.

I can imagine future iterations of this which bring together other stills of the same space at that time to augment the dataset. Then perhaps another pass to fill in gaps with likely missing content based on probability or data from say the same street 10 years later.

It won't be 100% real, but I think it'd be very cool to be able to have a google-street view style experience of areas before google street view existed.
by dalvrosa | 2026-03-10 10:41:00+00:00
Ever looked at `std::any` and wondered what's going on behind the scenes?
Beneath the intimidating interface is a classic technique called type
erasure: concrete types hidden behind a small, uniform wrapper.

Starting from familiar tools like virtual functions and templates, we'll
build a minimal `std::any`. By the end, you'll have a clear understanding
of how type erasure works under the hood.
by avbxl | 2026-03-10 10:41:06+00:00
I built this because I wanted a quick way to discover PROFINET devices without downloading Siemens PRONETA and creating an account just to get the installer.

FreeNeta is a small Python tool that uses PROFINET DCP to discover devices and allows basic commissioning tasks like setting IP addresses and station names.

It also includes vendor lookup via MAC OUI, a simple topology view, ping monitoring, and quick actions like opening device web interfaces or SSH.

Curious if anyone here working with industrial networks has suggestions or ideas for improvements.
by Orygin | 2026-03-10 10:41:23+00:00
Except cameras don't increase safety. You say it yourself that everyone just speeds up after the camera.

Getting a ticket also does nothing to prevent you from speeding in the first place (the ticket does not arrive to you instantly, you're still speeding on the road).

Road safety is an infrastructure problem, but it is always easier and cheaper to just put a camera and collect money. While designing roads that you cannot go too fast, and actually building them cost money.

They just want the cheapest option to say "we did something". Not the safest.
by shrubby | 2026-03-10 10:41:40+00:00
The main issue here is the implication of human free will.

We're driven by our herd instinct and subconscious manipulation. The way Edward Bernays and others like him have guided us to consumption.

To break free from this woud require either the summoning of collective free will or the brainwashing to keep the eternally growing consumption to cease.

The decision to keep manipulating the masses is something the decision makers behind corporations and governments either enable or actively participate in, but for individual it is extremely unlikely to break this machine.