MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by buro9 | 2026-03-05 12:41:09+00:00
and in a single moment, the value of software patents to companies is fully restored... the software license by itself is not enough to protect software innovation, a non-trivial implementation can now be (reasonably) trivially re-implemented.

I'm sure most people here would agree patents stifle innovation, but if copyright doesn't work for companies then they will turn to a different tool.
by dathinab | 2026-03-05 12:41:45+00:00
the only crazy thing here is your comment

completely ignoring all existing technologies related to that topic to spout obvious nonsense about "cutting down trees and burying them" (which would bind active bio mass which isn't a grate idea, also that won't produce oil anyway not that this is relevant for the discussion)

various ways to reduce the carbon in the air do exist (and without trees)

and the carbon can be both recycled for other usage and literally placed in the earth, too

it is not rally a solution for climate change as it's very expensive to do. But this also makes it a good idea to "make companies pay for it" (at least if their carbon-equivalent output goes above a certain threshold). Because if they have the choice between very expensive carbon removal or reducing carbon output for a much cheaper price they will do the later; But in emergency/outlier situations they still can do the former, just at a very high price.).
by reedlaw | 2026-03-05 12:41:49+00:00
LLM-generated snippets of code are a breath of fresh air compared with much legacy code. Since models learn probability distributions they gravitate to the most common ways of doing things. Almost like having a linter built in. On the other hand, legacy code often does things in novel ways that leave you scratching your head--the premise behind sites like https://thedailywtf.com/
by Someone | 2026-03-05 12:42:19+00:00
> You had the files on paper, which is a very pleasant and ergonomic medium for reading. You can literally surround yourself with it, cover your desk, and easily move your eyes between dozens of functions. If you learn to keep order and stay oriented in that mountain of paper, you can be very effective.

That only works if your printouts aren’t too long, and contain the majority of the logic in your programs.

Today, the latter rarely is the case. Maybe, we need a way to print code with t selected documentation of called functions added?

That ‘selected’ would be a tricky problem, though. What I need to understand the code may not be what you need, or what I need a month from now.
by optionalsquid | 2026-03-05 12:42:20+00:00
> And it's used to power effect where you might not expect it (Stardew Valley mines).

Apparently Stardew Valley's mines are not procedurally generated, but rather hand-crafted. Per their recent 10 year anniversary video, the developer did try to implement procedural generation for the mines, but ended up scrapping it:

https://www.stardewvalley.net/stardew-valley-10-year-anniver...
by imiric | 2026-03-05 12:43:05+00:00
You're right. Automation often trades quality for speed and quantity.

The difference between automating the creation of software and automating the creation of physical products is that software is everywhere. It is relied on for most tools and processes that keep our civilization alive. Cutting corners on that front, and deciding to entrust our collective future to tech bros and VC firms fiending for their next payout, seems like an incredibly dumb and risky proposition.
by zabzonk | 2026-03-05 12:43:16+00:00
> It does not mean "as long as you never read the original code, whatever you write is yours"

I think there is precedence that says exactly this - for example the BIOS rewrites for the IBM PC from people like Phoenix. And it would be trivial to instruct an LLM to prefer to use (say, in assembler) register C over register B wherever that was possible, resulting in different code.
by ksl_dev | 2026-03-05 12:43:21+00:00
I've noticed an interesting problem among indie founders and creators.

A lot of people build small but valuable audiences:

- newsletters about startups or AI

- niche SaaS blogs

- developer communities

- Twitter/X audiences around specific tech topics

These audiences can become monetizable through sponsorships.

But there's a practical problem that almost nobody talks about:

How do you actually price them?

For example:

- a dev newsletter with ~3k subscribers

- a niche SaaS blog with ~20k monthly readers

- a founder community with a few thousand members

How do you translate that into a sponsorship price?

Do you charge CPM?
Flat placements?
Performance deals?

Most founders I know end up guessing.

They either massively underprice or avoid sponsorships completely because they don't know what a fair price looks like.

The core issue seems to be the lack of simple ways to translate audience size and engagement into an estimated sponsorship value.

Curious how other founders here approach this.

If you run a newsletter, blog or niche tech audience - how do you price sponsorships?
by isaacgbc | 2026-03-05 12:44:35+00:00
Thanks! That is the challenge.

Each memory type handles chaos differently: working memory overwrites (no pileup, latest state wins), semantic memory deduplicates automatically via cos similarity so dup knowledge merges instead of accumulating, and episodic memory is append-only but scoped by agent + session + time range so you can always filter to exactly what you need. The mess stays queryable. Want to try it?
by jmyeet | 2026-03-05 12:44:46+00:00
This is really a state law issue and there's really no solution for spiralling energy costs other than nationalizing utilities or otherwise making them into state or municipal entities, much like municipal broadband.

Take the case of Duke Energy in North Carolina, which illegally raised rates too much. Utilities prices are supposedly regulated but utilities work around this by simply moving costs to things they can charge whatever for (eg transmission costs vs energy costs).

The NC Court of Appeals ruled that Duke Energy's actions were illegal BUT there would be no refunds for customers [1], in part because lawmakers passed a law to allow them to do this retroactively [2]. Also, if Duke Energy had to repay customers they can simply raise prices to recoup those costs even though the money was improperly charged in the first place.

So consumers will keep paying for the infrastructure to connect up these data centers and will keep subsidizing the ongoing energy costs.

[1]: https://www.wcnc.com/article/news/local/no-refunds-for-duke-...

[2]: https://sustaincharlotte.org/press-release-nc-lawmakers-over...
by uyzstvqs | 2026-03-05 12:45:03+00:00
No, training and inference are two separate processes. Training data is never redistributed, only obtained and analyzed. What matters is what data is put into context during inference. This is controlled by the user.

AI/ML is complex, so as a simpler analogy: If I watch The Simpsons, and I create an amusing infographic of how often Homer says "D'oh!" over time, my infographic would be an original work. AI training follows the same principle.
by AdrianB1 | 2026-03-05 12:45:12+00:00
I am probably too old for this, so I don't understand the purpose of this app. As life goes on, old relationships are either maintained naturally or fade away, new ones replace them, etc. If I don't remember or feel like calling someone, I don't. The only thing I need an app for, is to keep track of birthdays, any calendar can do that.

Genuine question: for someone who finds this useful, how and why?
by myrmidon | 2026-03-05 12:45:42+00:00
I can see that argument applying to wind, but for solar its the opposite because that is really easy to get closer to consumers than a conventional plant ever could be (i.e. on the rooftop).

At this point, I don't believe in a nuclear renaissance, because it seems to me that nuclear power got left behind too far; catching up in cost metrics is already hard enough, but matching growth rates (in "installed TWh/a" of wind/solar) seems virtually impossible by now. The only remaining holdouts (China, US, France, ...) are basically doing it as a hedge and/or to keep/obtain related engineering capabilities (and at the very least an easy path toward weapon-grade material).

It is clear to me that no one "actually believes" in nuclear power (by stating clearly: we are solve gonna current and future energy problems by mainly relying on freshly built nuclear power), so I can only see its relevance dwindling (I'd argue that China comes closest, but even they are much more in the hedging/securing capabilities category than anything else).
by techpression | 2026-03-05 12:46:03+00:00
I’m a hard core rogue-like player (easily over a thousand hours at least in all the games I’ve played) but even so I can admit that hey have nothing compared to a well crafted world like you’d find in From Software titles or Expedition 33, or classic Zelda games for that matter.
Making a great world is an incredibly hard task though and few studios have the capabilities to do so.
by hypercube33 | 2026-03-05 12:46:06+00:00
I love me some Windows 2000 but when I got to XP I was running it with a BeOS theme. My peak of windows ux may be around Windows 10 Beta 1 - combined 7/8/10 transparent and start menu and was super fast. That said beta 1 of Win11 was also super fast so that makes me wonder what they broke under the hood.
by NikolaNovak | 2026-03-05 12:46:10+00:00
>> fantastic thing everyone wants

I wouldn't normally comment on such stuff as it's clearly a personal preference, but just to underline that it is in fact a preference vs everyone, I have used keyboard lighting exactly once in the ~decade it's been available to me. On a laptop with predictable keyboard, it genuinely doesn't matter to me.

(On a laptop with unpredictable keyboard, light is mitigating, not fixing the problem :)
by rapnie | 2026-03-05 12:46:21+00:00
> it's not like SOAP+WSDL actually worked well either, it was always unreliable

This is comparable to saying that "multiplayer distributed architecture at scale" never worked well and was unreliable. All depends what your needs are and how the design and implementation satisfies them. SOAP+WSDL were part or a larger technology vision of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) with all the complexities of distributed architecture. And the attempt was to make all of that open standards based.

I worked in Print at the time at one of the largest companies (now gone bust), and can confidentally say that SOAP+WSDL worked perfectly for us, and made it way more reliable to tie all these very specialized printing equipment with archaic languages and interfaces together, increasing productivity and efficiency of the entire print process.
by jacquesm | 2026-03-05 12:46:24+00:00
> it isn't clear how/if llm is different from the brain

It's very clear: the one is a box full of electronics, the other is part of the central nervous system of a human being.

> but we all have training by looking at copywrited source code at some time.

That may be so, but not usually the copyrighted source code that we are trying to reproduce. And that's the bit that matters.

You can attempt to whitewash it but at its core it is copyright infringement and the creation of derived works.
by dormento | 2026-03-05 12:46:43+00:00
I think its a matter of the chonkers feeling like you're getting what you're paying for. "This thing is so expensive! WHY is it so thin?"

Of course the zeitgeist keeps changing and what made sense yesterday might look like madness for those that aren't following things closely. As for myself, I very much prefer "slightly chonkier, but better heat dissipation" (coming from owning an intel mb pro and using it on my lap often).
by ajewhere | 2026-03-05 12:46:58+00:00
Israel (and US/UK no doubt) tries to engineer a civil war in Iran so that "they kill each other", because this way the biblical prophecies (I dont mean some specific prophecy regarding Iran) will be fulfilled.
Yes, it is that crazy, and yes, it is that evil.

I lived in Israel for long enough to know (yes, of course there are also normal and decent people there, the problem is that they do not decide anything and progressively cannot raise their voice).
by conartist6 | 2026-03-05 12:47:01+00:00
I don't either, but I guess we're both about to find out. There only surety is that there will be moves and countermoves. As far as I could tell the best thing we could do right now is fund software-legal organizations like the EFF which are likely to be the ones to litigate the test cases. What's hurting us most right now is we don't know what law means in this context, so we don't fully understand the scale of what we need to protect against or what tools we have that the courts will recognize
by K0balt | 2026-03-05 12:47:09+00:00
I’ve been thinking a lot about this. I think that AI software automation tools are disproportionately more useful in greenfield work done by small or tiny organizations. By an order of magnitude, maybe 2 in some cases.

What that means is anyone’s guess, but it seems like it should result in a Cambrian explosion of disruptive new companies, limited in scope by the idea space.

The thing about small teams is, with a few exceptions, the biggest challenges are typically funnels for users and product-market fit, overcoming and exploitation of network effects, etc… so even in small orgs, if you make 30 percent of the problem 4x faster/smaller you still have the other 70 percent which is now 92.5% of the problem.

This applies even more acutely in larger organizations… so for them, 99.99 percent of the problem remains.
by jghub | 2026-03-05 12:47:38+00:00
The Mozilla approach is a clever optimization for large-scale databases (like browser history), but it relies on a specific decay model that can be represented as a point-in-time value I believe.

I chose a different path for sd for two reasons:

Mathematical Fidelity: The power-law convolution of the cd event "time series" with a power law kernel yielding (S = sum 1/(t-ti)^p) provides a more nuanced ranking of "burst" activity vs. "long-term" habits than a single-point frecency score. Calculating this over a window (N=1280) allows for a "steep" decay (this p≈10 default) that handles context-switching more naturally.

The incurred computational overhead is indeed there, but modest: in my tests I see about 9ms for stack recomputation with the default window (N=1280) compared to total real time for the cd action (including pattern matching and executing the cd) of about 22ms (I am on ksh, in bash it is about 30ms).
even when increasing that window to 2^14 (8192) the stack recomputation (scoring/ranking) takes only about 20ms (so the basic algorithm is indeed O(N) but the the bottleneck is rather the sub-shell overhead, not the math. So moving to O(1) would save not much (5ms?) I guess.

The "Attention Span" Logic: By using a fixed window of ≈1000 events for the "attention span" (short term memory) and falling back to the full ≈10000-event log (the long term memory) only if no match is found, sd rarely ever does not find a matching dir (and is usually right picking it).

So you are right, doing the O(N) computation does impose a cost but it is indeed modest and negligible for the task at hand (I am quite sensitive to "command lag" I think, but 30, even 60ms is still "prompt" for me).
by matrixgard | 2026-03-05 12:48:25+00:00
The workers.dev bypass is a known gap — Cloudflare's zone-level WAF doesn't apply to the workers.dev subdomain by default, so anything you've built in front of your real domain is irrelevant once a bot figures out the direct route. You already hit this. The fact it adapted after 403s suggests it's not just a passive crawler either, it's doing something closer to active probing.

UA-based blocking will always be a game of whack-a-mole for this. Cloudflare's bot score (available in the Workers environment as `cf.bot_management.score`) is a lot more durable — you can rate-limit or challenge anything under 30 without caring what UA they claim. Pair that with a Turnstile challenge on any endpoint you actually need to protect, and you remove the attack surface entirely rather than blocking individual bots.

Longer term, the workers.dev exposure is worth auditing across all your workers, not just this one. What does your other worker surface look like — are these all behind your main domain or do other workers have the same split-zone problem?
by dathinab | 2026-03-05 12:48:30+00:00
it actually is a bad idea if you look into the details

trees aren't just carbon, they are bio mass/nutrition

and if you constantly remove bio mass you sooner or later run into issues

(Which we already do in some places, e.g. when over using fields (see US dust storms), or with some managed Forrest getting increasingly more unstable not just because of warmed climate but also because of removing dead treas leading to an interruption of the natural nutrient recycling (and insect habitats) leading to Nutrition deficiency in the long run.)

but we do have working carbon removal technologies, they are just not cheap

hence why you want companies to pay for them, it gives them a huge reason to reduce emissions instead
by ismail | 2026-03-05 12:48:32+00:00
Agree with most of what he says. Fundamentally, we are relational and moral beings.

In Africa there is the concept of Ubuntu "I am because we are". Identity and personhood arises within community, rather than being constructed indivudually.

I think we need to differentiate between self-help in the modern sense, and viewing the self as a continuous process of engaging in meaningful activities, within community, with purpose that helps cultivate virtue. i.e "Becoming"

When self-help is treated as only individual optimisation, without any ultimate end it risk becoming self-referential.

Philosopher Charles Taylor describes a similar shift with modernity that he calls "Disengaged reason" [0]. Where reason is disconnected from moral frameworks, that once helped orient us.

The deeper issue may be Self-help/Improvement that is often not contained within these larger frameworks of meaning, that answer:

To what ultimate end?

[0] https://www.academia.edu/26548899/Disciplinarity_and_Islamic...

previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46743214

also here:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ismaildhorat_a-new-world-does...
by marginalia_nu | 2026-03-05 12:48:36+00:00
A lot of that is just that English along with much of western vernacular wasn't given standardized spelling until fairly recently, as most of the important writing was done in Latin.

If you get past the weird spelling it's still fairly understandable.

Exception being maybe stuff like Shakespeare, but a huge part of what makes that inaccessible is that his writing is full of references to current events, double entendres, and various 17th century memes. It's a bit like showing South Park's world of warcraft episode to someone from the 2400s.
by matrixgard | 2026-03-05 12:48:41+00:00
The Annex III vs general purpose distinction is doing a lot of heavy lifting here that most teams aren't thinking about yet. If your agent is making or substantially influencing decisions in employment, credit, education, or critical infrastructure, you're in the high-risk bucket with the full 25-item checklist. If it's general purpose AI (GPAI), you're under a different regime entirely with lighter obligations unless it's "systemic risk" tier. Getting this classification wrong in either direction is expensive — either you over-engineer compliance for something that doesn't need it, or you show up to an audit in August having built the wrong controls.

The part teams consistently underestimate is the human oversight requirement under Article 14. It's not just logging that a human was in the loop, you have to demonstrate the human had meaningful ability to override, and that the system was designed to make that possible. That's an architecture decision, not a documentation task, and you can't bolt it on after.

What's the actual deployment context here — are you shipping this to customers who then run agents against EU data subjects, or is this internal tooling?
by aosnsbbz | 2026-03-05 12:49:15+00:00
A big difference is cutting quality for the sake of mass production when it enables creating more necessities for people to live is a good thing. It is a good tradeoff. Cutting quality to make previously deterministic software more non deterministic does not improve anyones life except Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and the rest of the billionaire class.

I have no doubt in the future there will be a class of vibe software and it will be known as distinctly lower quality than human understood software. I do think the example you describe is a good use of vibing. I also think tech orgs mandating 100% LLM code generation are short sighted and stupid.

A lot of this push for “slop” is downstream of our K shaped economy. Give the people more money and quality becomes a lot more important. Give them less, and you’re selling to their boss who is often insulated from the effects of low quality.
by 4esop | 2026-03-05 12:49:16+00:00
As a developer, the AI I use most daily isn't a chat app. Same for most devs I know. I don't have aggregate data, but the "AI app = chat app" premise feels increasingly off.
The post classifies WhatsApp as a core utility — but WhatsApp has 40x Slack's users while Slack's ARPU is orders of magnitude higher. Some estimates put their total revenue in a similar range, though neither company discloses standalone figures. Leading in WAU and being the highest-value utility aren't the same thing.
by lesam | 2026-03-05 12:50:34+00:00
If it's lasted 10 years and someone is still using it after all that time, that seems like a pretty good signal there's a lot of value in the 'garbage'?

I've seen a lot of 'fixes' for 10 year old 'garbage' that turned out to be regressions for important use cases that the author of the 'fix' wasn't aware of.
by graemep | 2026-03-05 12:51:18+00:00
> humans can't either as they haven't produced it. If there is guaranteed no one which can claim ownership it often seen as being in the public domain.

Says who?. The US ruling the article refers to does not cover this.

It is different in other countries. Even if US law says it is public domain (which is probably not the case) you had better not distribute it internationally. For example, UK law explicitly says a human is the author of machine generated content: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47260110
by bsza | 2026-03-05 12:51:31+00:00
Sorry, but that sounds like a witch hunt to me, not modern law. Isn't the burden of proof on the accuser? I.e. the accuser has to prove that "this piece of code right here is a direct refactoring of my code, and here are the trivial and mechanical steps to produce one from the other"? And if they present no such evidence, we can all go home?
by petercooper | 2026-03-05 12:51:40+00:00
The actual meaning of a "clean room implementation" is that it is derived from an API and not from an implementation

I know you were simplifying, and not to take away from your well-made broader point, but an API-derived implementation can still result in problems, as in Google vs Oracle [1]. The Supreme Court found in favor of Google (6-2) along "fair use" lines, but the case dodged setting any precedent on the nature of API copyrightability. I'm unaware if future cases have set any precedent yet, but it just came to mind.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_....
by aosnsbbz | 2026-03-05 12:52:51+00:00
It was really eye opening seeing they’re able to eat raw eggs and (to maybe a lesser degree of safety) raw chicken because their society requires high standards of cleanliness in food production. We are literal cattle over here in the states.

Though, given Amodei and Altman’s behavior (along with the rest of the billionaire class) that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.