MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by like_any_other | 2026-03-09 23:43:50+00:00
> For years, tech companies successfully resisted pressure from child safety advocates to do more to keep kids off their services

And only tech companies opposed this privacy-destroying legislation, as the Reuters article quotes several industry experts of the age-assurance industry, and not a single free speech, freedom, or anonymity activist. Journalism strikes again.

Sadly this is the norm for articles on this topic.
by DARSHANFOFADIYA | 2026-03-09 23:44:52+00:00
I started this series knowing nothing about quantum computing — no physics degree, no quantum mechanics background. Just curiosity, linear algebra, and a willingness to work through the math with AI as a thinking partner.

The goal is ambitious: 14 parts, from "what is a qubit" to designing original quantum algorithms. Every equation derived from scratch. Every algorithm traced gate by gate. Working code throughout.

Part 1 is done — Grover's search algorithm, built completely from first principles:
- Qubits as vectors, gates as matrices, no hand-waving
- Full oracle circuit derived step by step (all 8 superposition terms traced through every gate)
- Phase kickback explained from the math up
- Diffusion operator worked out gate by gate
- Run on IBM's ibm_fez quantum processor — 94.5% on simulator, 57.5% on real hardware, with an explanation of exactly why the gap exists

https://darshanfofadiya.com/zero-to-quantum/grovers-search

The Colab notebook includes one-click access to IBM's real quantum hardware — free account, no credit card required, 10 minutes of QPU time per month. You can run Grover's algorithm on an actual superconducting quantum processor yourself in about 15 minutes.

The remaining 13 parts cover entanglement, QFT, Shor's algorithm, QPE, VQE, QAOA, quantum error correction, and ultimately designing your own algorithm from scratch.

My questions for HN:
1. Is this the right depth and sequence for genuinely understanding quantum computing — or am I missing something foundational?
2. What would you add, cut, or reorder in the curriculum?
3. For anyone who works in quantum: what do you wish you'd understood earlier that most tutorials skip?

I'd rather get hard feedback now on Part 1 than write 13 more parts in the wrong direction.
by vilhelm_s | 2026-03-09 23:44:53+00:00
We need to do "leap hours" anyway--just today they changed to daylight saving time in the U.S.! And time zones are also adjusted every now and then, which also amounts to a one-hour change in the affected regions. Even if we didn't have continous practice with leap seconds, I think we could definitely include an extra one-hour shift for earth rotation reasons along with all the other ones.
by OrvalWintermute | 2026-03-09 23:46:03+00:00
I support the rights of Democrat & Republican administrations to designate certain companies as supply chain risks OR a national security risk.

I do not want a TikTok hoovering up our personal info sending it to China

I do not want a Anthropic becoming essential to warfare then questioning when the their AI is used to bring an enemy to justice

I do not want Nvidia sending their latest and greatest to China

I do not want a ASML moving their super advanced photolithography machines to China

I do not want a DJI selling their drones in the US and then exporting all the meta-data back to China

I do not want a Huawei hacking through American IT companies and then getting a free pass on selling their devices based on stolen IP in the US
by Paul_Clayton | 2026-03-09 23:46:10+00:00
This reminded me of the CPC Grey video "7 Ways to Maximize Misery" https://youtu.be/LO1mTELoj6o?si=7tWgqLPyug0-NC6Z (which is not specifically about loneliness).

That video did not really include self-medicating (except as screen time can be self-medicating for boredom and tiredness); I tend to self-medicate anxiety by simple logic games (picmi, sudoku, kmines — all but the last also avoid failure) which wastes a lot of time. (Drinking water seems to be a somewhat less harmful form of self-medication; it has similar sensory benefits to eating — not as attractive as sweet, salty, fatty foods but it seems somewhat similar — and distraction but overdrinking water seems more difficult.)

Written from my allroom.
by humannutsack | 2026-03-09 23:46:45+00:00
Way too many people think it’s copyright infringement to produce copyrighted material.

It’s not and never has been.

It’s not illegal for me to draw The Simpsons - whether or not I used AI. It’s illegal for me to sell it as my own.

To ban the very ability to produce it at all would be a dystopia. It would extend copyright to mean things it was never intended to mean - it would prevent you from physically uttering statements or depicting images, if these luddites who haven’t thought it through had their way.
by wvenable | 2026-03-09 23:48:16+00:00
There's a couple of different issues here that all get mangled together. If you're producing effectively the same expression that's infringement. You draw Captain America from memory, it's still Captain America, and therefore infringement. If you draw Captain Canada by tracing around Captain America that's also infringement but of a different character.

When it comes to software, again it's the expression that matters -- literally the actual source code. Software that does the same thing but uses entirely different code to do it is not the same expression. Like with the tracing example above, if you read the original source code then it's harder to claim that it isn't the same expression. This is why clean room implementations are necessary.
by oscarmoxon | 2026-03-09 23:48:33+00:00
The framing here is undersold in the broader discourse: "open weights" is a ruse for reproducibility. What you have is closer to a compiled binary than source code. You can run it, you can diff it against other binaries, but you cannot, in any meaningful sense, reproduce or extend it from first principles.

This matters because OSS truly depends on the reproducibility claim. "Open weights" borrows the legitimacy of open source (the assumption that scrutiny is possible, that no single actor has a moat, that iteration is democratised). Truly democratised iteration would crack open the training stack and let you generate intelligence from scratch.

Huge kudos to Addie and the team for this :)
by nomel | 2026-03-09 23:48:45+00:00
I think a charitable interpretation of their comment is that it hasn't stopped us from practical, fruitful, use.

A great example of practical use, with sometimes no understanding, is the field of medicine! Early engineering (of all types, for example cement), a good chunk of the history of chemistry, and a large portion biology are also good examples, where the "what" might be known, but the "how" part is somewhere between "not fully" to "best guess" understood. Fire, being the most famous example.

Things only need to be useful to be useful.
by astrange | 2026-03-09 23:49:02+00:00
No, I use plan mode and have several rounds of conversation with it, but lately I've been doing tasks where it does tons of independent research and finds complicated conclusions in an existing old codebase. I don't really feel like either of those count as "a prompt".

The plan mode is useful because if you do corrections during development mode it does that silly thing where it leaves comments referring to your corrections.
by crazygringo | 2026-03-09 23:49:17+00:00
> If you commission it from OpenAI (by sending a query to their ChatGPT API), by your argument, you are the person liable — and OpenAI is off the hook even if that work is distributed further.

Let's distinguish two different scenarios here:

1) Your prompt is copyright-free, but the LLM produces a significant amount of copyrighted content verbatim. Then the LLM is liable, and you too are liable if you redistribute it.

2) Your prompt contains copyrighted data, and the LLM transforms it, and you distribute it. Then if the transformation is not sufficient, you are liable for redistributing it.

The second example is what I'm referring to, since the commercial LLM's are now very good about not reproducing copyrighted content verbatim. And yes, OpenAI is off the hook from everything I understand legally.

Your example of commissioning an artist is different from LLM's, because the artist is legally responsible for the product and are selling the result to you as a creative human work, whereas an LLM is a software tool and the company is selling access to it. So the better analogy is if you rent a Xerox copier to copy something by Warhol. Xerox is not liable if you try to redistribute that copy. But you are. So here, Xerox=OpenAI. They are not liable for your copyrighted inputs turning into copyrighted outputs.
by ykl | 2026-03-09 23:49:39+00:00
Yeah, it used to be true that server GPUs at least somewhat resembled their gaming counterparts (i.e. Nvidia Tesla server components from 12+ years ago); they were still PCIe cards, just with server-optimized coolers, and fundamentally shared the same dies that the gaming and professional cards used.

That stopped being true many years ago though, and the divergence has only accelerated with the advent of AI datacenter usage. The form factor is now fundamentally different (SXM instead of PCIe); you can adapt an SXM card to PCIe with some effort [1], but that may not even be worthwhile because 1. the power and cooling requirements for the SXM cards are radically different than a desktop part and more importantly 2. the dies are no longer even close to being the same. IIRC, Blackwell AI chips straight up don't have rasterization hardware onboard at all; internally they look like a moderate number of general SMs attached to a huge number of tensor core. Modern AI GPUs are fundamentally optimized for, well, mat-mults, which is not at all what you want for gaming or really any non-AI application.

[1] https://l4rz.net/running-nvidia-sxm-gpus-in-consumer-pcs/
by jongjong | 2026-03-09 23:49:43+00:00
There is a definite issue in terms of legitimacy and I also think there are some issues in the wording of certain open source licenses like MIT which give rights to 'Any person obtaining a copy of this software'.

Firstly, an AI agent is not a person. Secondly, the MIT license doesn't offer any rights to the code itself; it says a 'copy of the software' - That's what people are given the right to. It says nothing about the code and in terms of the software, it still requires attribution. Attribution of use and distribution of the software (or parts) is required regardless of the copyright aspect. AI agents are redistributing the software, not the code.

The MIT license makes a clear distinction between code and software. It doesn't cede any rights to the code.

And then, in the spirit of copyright; it was designed to protect the financial interests of the authors. The 'fair use' carve-out was meant for cases which do not have an adverse market impact on the author which it clearly does; at least in the cases highlighted in this article.
by newswangerd | 2026-03-09 23:49:46+00:00
I'm still trucking away on Digital Carrot (https://www.digitalcarrot.app/)

It's a cross platform productivity app that lets you block apps, websites and games until you reach a set of verifiable goals such as walking 10,000 steps, physically going to the gym or finishing all your tasks on your to-do list.

I just finished the Android version a few weeks ago!
by mixmastamyk | 2026-03-09 23:50:16+00:00
Other than obvious advertising, it is not proven that it is not as bad. Firewall software is often bypassed by design on macos/windows. Further, data is logged so even an external firewall is not foolproof, as the first time you connect to another wifi the data is sent.

It's almost as if they demand the data, and won't be denied it.
by nradov | 2026-03-09 23:50:51+00:00
There is no such argument among people who actually know how this stuff works. Cheap drones might work pretty well for trench warfare in Ukraine but it's impossible to build a cheap drone that would be effective in a conflict with China over Taiwan. The distances alone mean that aircraft must be large just to get there, and thus not cheap regardless of whether there's a crew onboard.

Autonomous flight control software is still only able to handle the simplest missions. Maybe that will change in a few years but for now anything complex requires a remote pilot, and those communication links are very vulnerable.
Ask HN: Any informed guesses on the actual size/architecture of GPT-5.4 etc.?
by dsrtslnd23 | 2026-03-09 23:51:33+00:00
Does anyone have decent intuitions or hard clues on how big models like GPT-5.4, Gemini 3.1, and Opus 4.6 actually are, and how they compare to the best open models like GLM-5?

Are they all roughly in the same range now (for example around 1T params, maybe MoE), or are the closed models still much bigger?

Also curious about “pro” versions like GPT-5.4 Pro - is that likely a different model, or mostly the same model with more inference-time compute / longer reasoning / better orchestration?
Show HN: Theme SaaS – Silicon Valley Meets Theme Hospital
by fmfamaral | 2026-03-09 23:51:57+00:00
Hey HN! I built a startup simulator where you play as a founder trying to grow a SaaS company from nothing to $100M ARR (or get acqui-hired trying).

You hire engineers, ship features, manage burn rate, deal with random VC drama, and make decisions that affect morale, tech debt, and churn.

Two modes:

Quick Game (~10 min): 24 months, see how far you can grow

Full Simulation (~1 hr): Open-ended, save/load, leaderboard, acquisition offers

Tech stack: React + Three.js for the isometric office view, Zustand for state, Cloudflare Pages + D1 for the backend, Google Identity Services for auth.

The game engine runs a real-ish simulation each month — users grow based on features and churn, MRR compounds, employees have individual productivity/morale, and random events (server outages, engineer poaching, pivot opportunities) keep things unpredictable.

Would love feedback on balance, gameplay, and wild startup stories to build in.
by TrackerFF | 2026-03-09 23:52:08+00:00
Thomann had (still have?) this thing called "stompenberg", where they put up some mechanical switching system so that you could play audio files through the actual pedals in the system, and turn on the knobs / parameters.

In the recent years some smaller businesses have started to offer outboard gear in this way. You upload some stem, and can process it through their hardware remotely, and get back the results.
by atombender | 2026-03-09 23:52:30+00:00
Blindsight (and the excellent sequel, Echopraxia) is indeed great.

Solaris by Lem is perhaps the one above all. Lem wrote several of these "inscrutable alien first contact" novels: His Master's Voice, The Invincible, Fiasco, and Eden are basically all variations on this theme, each one unique and highlighting a different aspect of humans' inability to understand the universe. The last three are a little dated now, but still enjoyable to read. HMV is rather dry, a Borgesian essay on an investigation into an alien signal, with lots of references to fictional scientific papers. (Len also wrote two collections of very Borgesian essays that are basically reviews of fictional books: A Perfect Vacuum and Imaginary Magnitude. They're interesting and funny, but I wouldn't put them among his most entertaining work.)

Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky is also a masterpiece. They also have a few stories about unseen aliens manipulating the history of humanity by placing traps or transforming humans into infiltrators. The Max Kammerer books (e.g. Beetle in the Anthill) involve this storyline and are very good, probably not well known today.

I tried Tchaikovsky (both Children of Time and Shroud) and found him to be completely unengaging as a writer. Just really dull writing and flat characters. Watts and Reynolds are much better writers. Watts in particular can really pack a punch.
by LorenPechtel | 2026-03-09 23:52:59+00:00
Unfortunately, all too often it doesn't.

Some cameras only produce a photograph. Some produce a video with the light status showing on it--but there have been cases that's wrong, the camera recording what it was programmed to do which didn't match the real lights.

You need actual video of the scene that can be examined and which is of sufficiently good quality that the identity of the car can be confirmed. Very often it does not exist.

Likewise, speed cameras should record enough that one can do a time/distance calculation to confirm the speed--because the system can be miscalibrated or can be fooled by large, flat surfaces.

Or look what has happened with breathalyzers. Last I heard if a judge grants the discovery request for the source code the case gets dropped. And the whole thing is based on a flawed principle in the first place: the ratio of breath alcohol to blood alcohol varies substantially between people--setting it for average isn't accurate. As a screening test for doing a blood draw, fine, but it should not be allowed anywhere near the courtroom. (Some states get this right, some do not.)

And, yes, ambulances. I forgot about another time I know I ran a red light. Something with lights/sirens was coming up behind, no lane was empty, I was in the only lane with one car. Lots of space at the intersection, I pulled forward and turned hard right, clearing my lane without actually entering the cross path.
Ask HN: Read‑only LLM tool for email triage and knowledge extraction?
by maille | 2026-03-09 23:53:01+00:00
I’m looking for an LLM‑powered tool to help organize and query my email, but with a strict boundary: it must not write, send, or modify anything.

Standard filters miss the nuance of "middle-ground" emails, and existing AI email clients demand full inbox control or try to automate too much.

What I’m looking for:

- Strictly read‑only triage: Categorizes incoming mail (e.g., “important”, “maybe useful”, “likely promo”) with zero write permissions ie. no sending, moving, deleting, or auto-archiving

- Knowledge retrieval: Builds a searchable knowledge base from scattered threads. I want to ask natural-language questions like: “What were all the decisions about Project X across the last 3 months?”

- Follow-up & action item detection: surfaces email threads that have stalled and need a nudge, while extracting explicit tasks and deadlines buried in long chains

- (optional) Privacy-first: Ideally runs locally or lets me plug in my own API keys to keep the data secure

Has anyone seen a tool that focuses entirely on this read-only, triage + retrieval workflow?
by zedlasso | 2026-03-09 23:54:00+00:00
they are saying what you are saying. At least Deirde Bosa did. I think there is a lot of folks internally who don't understand the gravity of it and keep questioning it.

You are right about the building of today's DC's. There is a small part of me that feels Oracle might be a bit toxic long term with all this debt him and his kid have taken on. And this could be the first reaction to it.
by pinkmuffinere | 2026-03-09 23:54:22+00:00
A really fascinating quote from the article:

> In 2021, it was reported that Earth was spinning faster in 2020 and experienced the 28 shortest days since 1960, each of which lasted less than 86399.999 seconds.[24] This caused engineers worldwide to discuss a negative leap second and other possible timekeeping measures, some of which could eliminate leap seconds.[25] The shortest day ever recorded was 29 June 2022, at 1.59 milliseconds less than 24 hours.[26] In a 2024 paper published in Nature, Duncan Agnew of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography projects that the water from increasing ice cap melting will migrate to the equator and thus cause the rate of rotation to slow down again.[26]
by wanhandle | 2026-03-09 23:54:24+00:00
Back in the early 2010s my company was maintaining a Spring application processing ActiveMQ messages. We'd received word that the application wasn't processing work. One of us goes and looks at logs and sees just endless volumes of stack traces. Eventually the suggestion is made and accepted to just reboot the application. That fixed it.

Turns out the JVM simply lost its mind when leap seconds were introduced. So, for the next several years, we watched that French society's website that announced when leap seconds would be introduced and scheduled application restarts accordingly.
by csb6 | 2026-03-09 23:54:56+00:00
Sad that his (and many others') dream of widespread formal verification of software never came true. He made really fundamental contributions to computer science but will probably be mostly known for quicksort and the quote about his "billion dollar mistake", not his decades-long program to make formal methods more tractable.

Makes me think of an anecdote where Dijkstra said that he feared he would only be remembered for his shortest path algorithm.
by effank | 2026-03-09 23:54:59+00:00
My view is that the current discourse surrounding AI reimplementation is trapped in an antiquated, atomistic model of authorship. What is fundamentally lacking in this debate is a systemic framework for trust, transparency, and the effective traceability of value creation.

Our legal and ethical frameworks including both copyleft and permissive licenses operate under the illusion of discrete, bounded attribution. They assume we can draw a clean perimeter around 'the code' and its 'author.' In reality, software production is a highly complex socio-technical network characterized by deep epistemic opacity. We are arguing over who holds the title to the final output while completely ignoring the vast, distributed network of inputs that made it possible.

Furthermore, because end-users face massive transaction costs and a general lack of incentive to evaluate the granular utility of their consumption, we have no reliable market mechanism to signal value back up the supply chain. Consequently, we fail to effectively compensate the true chain of biological and artificial contributors that facilitate downstream consumption.

In a rigorously mapped value-system, attribution would not stop at the keyboard; it would extend to all nodes of enablement. This includes what sociologists and economists term 'reproductive labor' or 'invisible labor' such as the developer’s partner who cooked them breakfast, thereby sustaining the biological and cognitive infrastructure necessary for the developer to contribute to the repository in the first place. The AI model is merely another node of aggregated external labor in this exact same web - both by its upward 'training' and downward utilization.

Until we develop an economic and technological ontology capable of tracing and rewarding this entire ecosystem of adjacent contributions, our debates over LGPL versus MIT will remain myopic. We are trying to govern a distributed, interconnected web of collective labor using property tools designed for solitary craftsmen.
by pinkmuffinere | 2026-03-09 23:55:05+00:00
Wow that's really interesting. A great quote form the article:

> In 2021, it was reported that Earth was spinning faster in 2020 and experienced the 28 shortest days since 1960, each of which lasted less than 86399.999 seconds.[24] This caused engineers worldwide to discuss a negative leap second and other possible timekeeping measures, some of which could eliminate leap seconds.[25] The shortest day ever recorded was 29 June 2022, at 1.59 milliseconds less than 24 hours.[26] In a 2024 paper published in Nature, Duncan Agnew of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography projects that the water from increasing ice cap melting will migrate to the equator and thus cause the rate of rotation to slow down again.[26]
by Zak | 2026-03-09 23:55:24+00:00
This comment seems to be saying you don't want most people to do blog-like things. Most social media from Facebook to Youtube is blog-like if you squint.

It does seem like fewer people are posting personal content that way lately. Perhaps most people are better off sharing things one to one, or in small groups that are meant to stay private. That doesn't make it bad for the more public formats to exist; they're just not for everyone.