MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by epistasis | 2026-03-12 16:01:04+00:00
The Biden administration was actually extremely competent, handled global inflation after the pandemic and Russia's war fairly well relative to peer nations, and set US manufacturing on course to provide us with all the batteries, solar panels, and EVs to prevent oil crunches like this from causing future inflation.

I expect more competency from US Presidential administrations, and also expect more competency and indpendence from the various parts of the executive branch, which should execute their missions without micro-management from the President, and I further expect far more competence from Congress and the US Supreme Court in setting law and enforcing law. It's bad enough that we have an incompetent Presidential administration, but that damage should be limited by the independence of the other parts of the government. The blast radius should be far smaller, we shouldn't have a King.
by jasode | 2026-03-12 16:01:22+00:00
>Why is HN centralized, while a phpBB forum is decentralized?

There's a spectrum of decentralized <--> centralized for different audiences.

For this tech demographic here where installing some type of p2p or federated discussion tech is not rocket science, it's more convenient for us to be on a "centralized" HN. I used to be very active on USENET and HN is relatively more centralized than a hypothetical "comp.programming.hackernews" newsgroup. This is not a complaint. It's an observation of our natural preferences and how it aggregates. (Btw, it's interesting that Paul Graham started this HN website but doesn't post here anymore. Instead, he's more active on Twitter. He's stated his reasons and it's very understandable why.)

For the phpBB forums where a lots of non-tech people discuss hobbies such as woodworking, guitar gear, etc., the decentralization perspective is the php forums and the centralization is towards big platforms such as reddit / Discord / Facebook Groups.

I see similar decentralized --> centralized trends in blogs. John Carmack abandoned his personal website and now posts on centralized Twitter.

My overall point is that a lot of us techies wish the general public would get enlightened about decentralization but that's unrealistic when we don't don't follow that ideal ourselves. We have valid reasons for that. But it does a create a cognitive dissonance and/or confusion as to why the world doesn't do what we think they should do.
by robutsume | 2026-03-12 16:01:42+00:00
The 26% abandonment rate with most bailouts in the first 60 seconds is the most interesting finding here. That's not an agent problem — that's a prompt-to-intent mismatch problem. The human realizes within one exchange that they asked the wrong question or the agent interpreted it wrong.

The error cascade pattern predicting abandonment within 2 minutes reminds me a lot of monitoring infrastructure services. We learned years ago that the first 90 seconds of a deployment tell you almost everything about whether it'll stick. Same principle seems to apply to agent sessions — if the initial tool selection or file read is wrong, confidence collapses and the human takes over manually.

Curious about the skills finding (4%). Is that because skills are poorly discoverable, or because people default to natural language prompts and never bother setting up structured skill definitions? The gap between "available" and "used" in agent tooling feels like the extension ecosystem problem all over again.
by bilkow | 2026-03-12 16:01:47+00:00
I don't really understand the point you're trying to make, I don't see anywhere in the post nor the title claiming the purpose changed and the title is directly related to the content. In fact, it seems like you are just agreeing with the post.

I think people can get frustrated at CI when it fails, so they're explaining that that's the whole purpose of it and why it's is a actually good thing.

I would personally actually frame it slightly different than the author. Non-flaky CI errors: your code failed CI. Flaky CI errors: CI failed. Just to be clear, that's more precise but would never catch on because people would simplify "your code failed CI" to "CI failed" over time, but I don't thing that changes it from being an interesting way to frame.
by mhamann | 2026-03-12 16:01:48+00:00
Can you help me understand MetalRT a bit more? Based on the name, it sounds like something that's Apple-only (although, Apple basically co-opted the name Metal, which was traditionally more generic). Does or will MetalRT run on more platforms?

What about MetalRT's relationship to llama.cpp, onnx, MLX, transformers, etc? Is MetalRT a replacement for those? Designed to be compatible with a wide variety of model formats? Or are you just providing an abstraction on top of these?
by robutsume | 2026-03-12 16:01:59+00:00
The satirical framing is great but the real punchline is the supply chain implication nobody's talking about: if you replace battle-tested OSS with AI-regenerated "functionally equivalent" code, you've just traded a known dependency graph for an unknown one.

Open source packages accumulate years of edge case fixes, CVE patches, and community-reviewed hardening. An AI recreation from docs and type signatures will produce something that passes the test suite on day one and fails silently in production on day forty when it hits a Unicode edge case that the original maintainer fixed in 2019 after three bug reports.

The chardet situation that inspired this is instructive. The "rewrite" wasn't malicious — it was just naive. But naive at scale, with corporate incentives behind it, is how you get a new class of supply chain vulnerability: software that looks correct, has no known CVEs (because nobody's audited it), and quietly degrades under load.

The offshore indemnification joke lands because it's exactly what would happen.
by p-o | 2026-03-12 16:02:25+00:00
I am not delusional about those power-hungry people, but I somehow thought that with better access to information, society would have been able to better regulate them.

Maybe in insight, "flooding the zone" will be considered a much bigger threat than it is today. Most of what's going on in the last 12 months have happened in plain sight and would have never worked 30 years ago. Today, it just flies, attention span be damned.
by lII1lIlI11ll | 2026-03-12 16:02:34+00:00
It is not about timelines. Linux Torvalds doesn't spend nights reading bunch of books with crabs on their covers rewriting random bits and pieces of the kernel in Rust. It is basically a dedicated group of people sponsored by megacorps doing the heavy lifting. If megacorps wanted Zig we could have had it in the kernel instead (Linux might have rejected it though, not sure what he thinks of it).
by sothatsit | 2026-03-12 16:02:39+00:00
Fundamentally, I’m more optimistic on how far current approaches can scale. I see no reason why RL could not be used to train models to use memory, and fine-tuning already works, it’s just expensive.

The continual learning we get may be a bit hamfisted, and not fit into a neat architecture, but I think we could actually see it work at scale in the next few years. Whereas new techniques like what Yann Lecun have demonstrated still live heavily in the realm of research. Cool, but not useful yet.

Fine tuning is also not so limited as you suggest. For one, we don’t need to fine tune the same model over and over, you can just start with a frontier model each time. And two, modern models are much better at generating synthetic data or environments for RL. This could definitely work, but it might require a lot of work in data collection and curation, and the ROI is not clear. But if large companies continue to allocate more and more resources to AI in the next few years, I could see this happening.

OpenAI already has a custom model service, and labs have stated they already have custom models built for the military (although how custom those models are is unclear). It doesn’t seem like a huge leap to also fine-tune models over a companies internal codebases and tooling. Especially for large companies like Google, Amazon, or Stripe that employ tens of thousands of software engineers.
by marc0janssen | 2026-03-12 16:02:42+00:00
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by KeyGateways | 2026-03-12 16:02:47+00:00
Hi HN, I'm Francisco, co-founder of KeyGateways (building this with Fernando).

Picking a crypto payment gateway as a merchant is harder than it should be. There are dozens of gateways out there, each with different fees, supported coins, jurisdictions and compliance requirements. The research can take weeks, comparison content is mostly written by the gateways themselves, and a wrong decision means rolling reserves, blocked settlements, or KYC mismatches you only discover after integrating.

With KeyGateways, merchants fill a short form in under 50 seconds, and we send a customized PDF report matching them against 10+ gateways based on jurisdiction, fees, supported coins, KYC thresholds, and settlement currency. Completely free, no sign-up required.

Neither of us comes from an engineering background, but we got our hands dirtywith Python, databases, and AI to build the matching engine ourselves. The hardest part was the data model. Jurisdiction tables, compliance flags, and fee structures that gateways don't publish consistently. Some required direct outreach to get right.

This is our MVP. It's a work in progress and we know the technical side can be improved, but we wanted to get it in front of real users as soon as possible.

We've already gotten our first leads, which tells us the problem is real.

Happy to answer questions on the matching logic, gateway data, or the crypto payments landscape in Europe and LATAM, which is our target market.
by reaperducer | 2026-03-12 16:02:51+00:00
I use a 2015 MacBook Pro all the time--like right now.

I have a 2010 MacBook Air that I still use when traveling.

The battery is completely shot, but it works fine when plugged in. And if I'm on the road, I don't use my computer until I get to the hotel anyway. And even then, it's just fine for e-mail, browsing, and even Photoshop.
by electrosaur | 2026-03-12 16:02:54+00:00
Fun game. JND and deltaE are at the heart of what I'm building — an open-source color separation engine for screen printing that reduces full-color images to 3-10 spot colors.

The whole challenge is deciding which colors are "different enough" to deserve their own ink plate and which can be merged. We use CIE76, CIE94, and CIE2000 distance metrics in Lab space to make those calls. The perceptual non-uniformity of RGB is exactly why we work in Lab — two colors can be numerically close in RGB but perceptually distinct, or far apart in RGB but visually identical.

One thing this game highlights nicely: human color perception varies a lot by context. A deltaE of 2 is invisible on a smooth gradient but jumps out at an edge between two solid regions. Screen printing is all hard edges between solid inks, so even small deltaE matters on the plate boundaries.

https://github.com/electrosaur-labs/reveal (Apache 2.0, pure JS, zero deps)
by jerf | 2026-03-12 16:03:27+00:00
An interesting aspect of this, especially their blog post (https://malus.sh/blog.html ), is that it acknowledges a strain in our legal system I've been observing for decades, but don't think the legal system or people in general have dealt with, which is that generally costs matter.

A favorite example of mine is speed limits. There is a difference between "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and walking away", "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and occasionally enforcing it with expensive humans when they get around to it", and "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and rigidly enforcing it to the exact mph through a robot". Nominally, the law is "don't go faster than 55 mph". Realistically, those are three completely different policies in every way that matters.

We are all making a continual and ongoing grave error thinking that taking what were previously de jure policies that were de facto quite different in the real world, and thoughtlessly "upgrading" the de jure policies directly into de facto policies without realizing that that is in fact a huge change in policy. One that nobody voted for, one that no regulator even really thought about, one that we are just thoughtlessly putting into place because "well, the law is, 55 mph" without realizing that, no, in fact that never was the law before. That's what the law said, not what it was. In the past those could never really be the same thing. Now, more and more, they can.

This is a big change!

Cost of enforcement matters. The exact same nominal law that is very costly to enforce has completely different costs and benefits then that same law becoming all but free to rigidly enforce.

And without very many people consciously realizing it, we have centuries of laws that were written with the subconscious realization that enforcement is difficult and expensive, and that the discretion of that enforcement is part of the power of the government. Blindly translating those centuries of laws into rigid, free enforcement is a terrible idea for everyone.

Yet we still have almost no recognition that that is an issue. This could, perhaps surprisingly, be one of the first places we directly grapple with this in a legal case someday soon, that the legality of something may be at least partially influenced by the expense of the operation.
by mrweasel | 2026-03-12 16:04:12+00:00
My bank decided that the online banking website needed to be more like the app, so now they are both terrible. Basically the entire site is white space on the computer, because everything is centred and dumb down. Input fields for numbers are invisible, they are just a label saying "Kr" and you're suppose to click it and the numerical keyboard on the phone pops up, except it obviously doesn't on the computer.

Paying billed is easier on the phone in the sense that bills in Denmark have a three part number, e.g. +71 1234567890 1234678 where the first is a type number, second is the receiver and the last is a customer number with the receiver. The phone allows to just use the camera to scan the number.

Transferring money is terrible on both platforms, because it's designed to be doable on the phone, meaning having three or four screen, but it gives you no overview. There's plenty of space on a computer for a proper overview giving you the feeling of safety, but it's not used. Same for account overview. Designed to the phone, but doesn't adapt to the bigger screen and provide you with more details, so you need to click every single expense to see what is is exactly.
by sigmar | 2026-03-12 16:04:39+00:00
>Our proprietary AI robots independently recreate any open source project from scratch.

Fact that this is satire aside, why would a company like this limit this methodology to only open source? Since they can make a "dirty room" AI that uses computer-use models, plays with an app, observes how it looks from the outside (UI) and inside (with debug tools), creates a spec sheet of how the app functions, and then sends those specs to the "clean room" AI.
by sublinear | 2026-03-12 16:04:41+00:00
Most people don't eat enough fiber, eat way too much processed junk, and have vitamin and mineral deficiencies. Yet still the overall risk for colon cancer is surprisingly low and takes a long time to develop for everyone but the unluckiest.

Earlier screenings are just compensating for poor education. It's not a solution to anything but the question of how to raise insurance costs for young people.

Just eat your damn vegetables!
by dham | 2026-03-12 16:05:13+00:00
They need to lower the screening to 40. I just had mine at 40, turned out fine luckily. Did it without sedation which my doctor said was rare in US, but common outside of US. I found surprising, wasn't that big of a deal. Pain was probably at a 7/10 during the turns (like 3 times) but ok the rest of the time. A little uncomfortable. Some new sensations, some familiar (feeling like you are crapping your pants).

I walked in and walked out no issue and went on about my day. Prep was fine but would be hard if I didn't work at home.
by Arkhaine_kupo | 2026-03-12 16:05:23+00:00
> It's too soon to know how this is going to shake out, so we should resist the temptation to impose rules prematurely.

alternative view. it is going way too quickly and premature rules can be reduced if the actual damage is less than theexpected model.

You can always make things easier, its much harder to rebuild a community that hass been destroyed.

> And we should especially not do so out of resistance to change (when has that ever worked out?)

You saying that in a website with a UI straight out of the 90s is really fucking funny. Cause HN is a perfect example of resistance to change working out. Facebook chased every trend and failed (the social media, meta as an ad platform is doing ok), tech blogs chased trends and failed. This place said "nah this is good", and is still here.
by pier25 | 2026-03-12 16:05:28+00:00
I spent 2024 and 2025 trying all the big fullstack monolithic frameworks (Laravel, Rails, .NET, Django). There are differences of course but they all suck so much for doing frontend.

In part because for a modern frontend dx you will need hot reload, bundling, etc. But even if you make an SPA and only use eg .NET for an API, using something like OpenAPI to share the schema is a subpar solution. There's really nothing as good as sharing TS types across your whole app(s).
by adam_arthur | 2026-03-12 16:05:39+00:00
> Oooh, source? (I'm curious for when this was measured.)

It depends when you measure, but you can Google around and find figures in the 60-80% range. 80% may have been a bit on the optimistic end of the range. But it's important to note that a "default" doesn't imply a 0.

Of course this will depend on the covenants, underwriting standards, type of collateral.

I would guess software equity collateral recovery rates are lower than hard assets like a building. (Which is why I personally don't like Software loans, nothing to do with AI)

> Correct. The question is if 20% is enough, and if a 20% markdown creates a vicious cycle as funding for e.g. re- or follow-on financing dries up.

I think it's almost certain that new fundraising for private credit will be materially hindered going forward. But this just limits the growth rate of these firms, does not introduce any "collapse" risk.

They may move from net inflows to net outflows and bleed AUM over a period of some years.

If NAVs were inflated previously, they may be forced to mark down the NAV to meet redemptions rather than using inflows to payoff older investors.

In the world of credit, 20% is an enormous haircut. Again, senior secured loans fell by around 30% peak to trough in 2008.

We have the public BDC market as a comparison point where the average price/book is around 0.80x. So the public market is willing to buy credit strategies at a 20% discount to stated NAV.

The real systemic risk here, if we were to reach for one, is really that these fears become self fulfilling.

If investors pull funds out of credit strategies en-masse, there is no first order systemic issue, but it means borrowers of many outstanding loans may not be able to secure refinancing as money is drying up.

This could lead to a self-fulfilling default cycle. But this would be a fear driven default cycle, there is no fundamental issue with cash flows of borrowers or otherwise (in aggregate, currently).

Finally, in regards to the asset managers themselves, many are quite diversified.

Yes, they have private credit funds, but many have real estate funds, buyout funds etc. OWL is one of the biggest managers of data center funds, for example (which they also got hammered for on AI bubble fears)

Given how depressed pricing is in public REITs, for example, I expect a lot of asset managers to pivot towards more real asset funds.
by dataversity | 2026-03-12 16:05:51+00:00
Hi folks, I’ve been working on llmpm, a CLI tool that makes open-source LLMs installable like packages.
The idea came from the frustration of trying to run different models locally. Every model tends to have slightly different instructions, dependencies, or runtimes. I wanted something that worked more like npm or pip, install a model and run it immediately.
With llmpm you can do things like:

llmpm install llama3

llmpm run llama3
by _wire_ | 2026-03-12 16:05:55+00:00
Marshall McLuhan was interested about this in the late 60s and his observation was that electronic media can obviate literacy as the phonetic alphabet, and so literacy, was a technology, not an essential human trait. Language is media, not the contents of the media.

Video retrieves a tribal interaction by bending space and time allowing tribal modalities to manifest at distance.

McLuhan observed in his "Understanding Media" the "Tetrad", 4 laws that guide the uniquely human modalities to media:

1. Enhancement / extension

2. Obsolescence

3. Reversal

4. Retrieval / return

The phonetic alphabet enhanced the continuum of the visual by temporal regimentation, linear thinking and compartmentalization. Corresponding social status structures and modes of participation evolved to high levels of identity and status.

Literacy has been obsolesced by electronic media, which creates a highly connected, free-flowing, always-on, instantaneous mode of involvement. This is returning to previous unstructured tribal arrangements of status and participation.

While literacy enhanced bodily presence and evolved a strong sense of self and identity, electronics are reversing this as the participants are disembodied by the medium. An example is the new reluctance to talk by telephone because of the medium's awkward intensity of vocal cues minus any a sense of the bodily existence of the counterpart as a total person.

More generally, telepresences reverse to isolation and loneliness as one's body and identity becomes ghostly. This may lead to a retrieval or return to an importance of direct social interactions.

(Note that the m Tetrad stands on the figure/ground dichotomy of Gestalt psychology.)

Engaging the topic at hand via the tetrad:

The computer has obsolesced television, but is also retrieving it as we think about the internet as domains or channels, but with an infinite selector. When you have so many channels you need a new way to find and select them. The idea of television "programming" is merging with computer programming through AI.

Notice that the traditional (ouch) art of computer programming is becoming obscured by AI even as more people than ever create programs: the term program has become a euphemism for wish fulfillment, which a more rigorously postured "developer" will term "prompt engineering". The status of this euphemism is supported by the common notion that writing programs is the job of instructing the computer to perform a task (complete one's wishes). As the medium of AI is a sea change in technology for describing tasks, it is obsolescing programming as a literate art of mathematical formalisms for converting algorithms and data-structures into code for a CPU.
by ralgland | 2026-03-12 16:06:18+00:00
We had positive announcements like these 40 years ago, ways before Nord Stream was even planned, when Natural Gas was the future and households converted to Natural Gas heating.

It seems very unlikely that with sustained temperatures of -5 to -8°C in the winter months, which seem to get longer again, heating can be achieved with renewables in any way.

Heat pumps were already collapsing and making irritating fan noises at -8° this winter. Converting to heat pumps is expensive and the service costs are expensive, too.

LNG is needed for fertilizer and other chemical products, too and is hard to replace at all.

By all means, try renewables, but these enthusiasm waves leave me skeptical.