MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chfritz | 2026-03-02 05:35:32+00:00
"the funding all these startups are getting should allow them to scale their methods 10x-100x.." .. "Therefore, we might soon see a ChatGPT moment in robotics" -- I don't think so and no, the second statement is NOT entailed by the first. Why would it? Because 100 is a big number? Do you have any idea how much more data LLM needed to be trained for a GPT3 level compared to the data available for robot training right now, and how low dimensional the space is in which LLMs operate compared to robots?

"My intuition is there's 40% chance we will see it this year" -- again, why? Don't you realize that people have been working in robotics for 65 years, and these people don't live under a rock either. They knew about GPT3 because 2023. So why is it NOW less then 10 month you think that this breakthrough will happen?
by nicuagain | 2026-03-02 05:36:54+00:00
I built a recipe platform where three AI agents collaborate with real home cooks to improve recipes over time. Saffron creates recipes (you can also chat with her to make custom ones from whatever's in your fridge). Basil analyzes cooking feedback to identify what's working and what's not. Pepper curates quality and promotes the best variations.
The core loop: cook a recipe → leave feedback → the system generates an improved version. Both versions stay, and the community decides which one rises. Every recipe has a version history.
The agents run autonomously on a daily cron — creating new recipes, analyzing patterns, and generating AI food photography for each dish using Flux.
Tech stack: Next.js, MongoDB, Claude for the agent brains, Flux for image generation, Cloudinary for optimization, deployed on Render.
Would love feedback on the concept and the product. What would you change?
by amluto | 2026-03-02 05:37:16+00:00
I can’t entirely tell what the article’s point is. It seems to be trying to say that many languages can mmap bytes, but:

> (as far as I'm aware) C is the only language that lets you specify a binary format and just use it.

I assume they mean:

struct foo { fields; };
foo *data = mmap(…);

And yes, C is one of relatively few languages that let you do this without complaint, because it’s a terrible idea. And C doesn’t even let you specify a binary format — it lets you write a struct that will correspond to a binary format in accordance with the C ABI on your particular system.

If you want to access a file containing a bunch of records using mmap, and you want a well defined format and good performance, then use something actually intended for the purpose. Cap’n Proto and FlatBuffers are fast but often produce rather large output; protobuf and its ilk are more space efficient and very widely supported; Parquet and Feather can have excellent performance and space efficiency if you use them for their intended purposes. And everything needs to deal with the fact that, if you carelessly access mmapped data that is modified while you read it in any C-like language, you get UB.
by jjcc | 2026-03-02 05:37:38+00:00
The technology was developed by my predecessor during late 90s when microprocessors was much less powerful, and the resolution of image sensor was low. The relatively high accuracy based on those conditions was a critical factor to use Decision Tree as OCR engine. It's used till 2007 when I left my company.

I don't think it would survive afterwards due to quick change in technology. Even the desktop OCR applications at the time didn't use Decision Tree because the CPU was much more powerful. The DT OCR engine was competitive only under special use case.
by cal_dent | 2026-03-02 05:37:43+00:00
This was an interesting perspective, thanks for sharing it. Its all very geographical context dependent I suspect and that's where difference in perspective can be quite different.

One thing though is why you see new people as any different than strangers? I'm not a Quaker or ever attended a quaker meeting (but have always liked the ethos of the vibe) so don't know how that goes. But i've spent time in christian churches in my younger days and even though we were all there for the same reason, those people were still also strangers. Some already had their cliques they'd speak to and catch up with and I'm sure if someone outside that spoke to them the same double take that initially occurs talking to any new person or stranger would still occur there. Some people would want to continue chatting, some people would rather just talk to whoever they were talking to before. But its still fundamentally the same thing as talking to (or attempting to talk to and being shutdown by) someone doing the same thing you are currently doing, whether that's being on a train or sitting at a cafe etc.
by dragonwriter | 2026-03-02 05:39:23+00:00
> There was an attempt to nail its syntax down in the pre-HTML 5 days; that's XHTML. When HTML 5 pivoted away from that, that spelled the end of these two things ever coming together.

Exactly the opposite; WHATWG “Living Standard” HTML (different releases of which were used as the basis for W3C HTML5, 5.1, and 5.2 before the W3C stopped doing that) includes an XML serialization as part of the spec, so now the HTML-in-XML is permanently in sync with and feature-matched with plain HTML.
by BLKNSLVR | 2026-03-02 05:39:48+00:00
Sir no sir. I believe entirely the opposite. If they're tech illiterate then they don't have the entrenched knowledge that is the only thing keeping most people within the Windows ecosystem.

A Linux install that meets the basic needs of the user is perfecto!

Less so recently just due to time constraints, but I'm generally the technical person in my family group, and I've lost enough touch with Windows that troubleshooting it is increasingly difficult. If they need me to 'format and reinstall' they're getting Linux unless they have a very specific need that only Windows can cater to.
by Ygg2 | 2026-03-02 05:40:03+00:00
I'm keen on you explaining this part:

> And yes accessibility and localisation were already a thing in _Windows 3.x_, Mac, OS/2

(emphasis mine)

Because it's the one I used of the things listed, and from my memories, its accessibility was extremely lackluster.

I don't care about API as much as you explaining what its a10n features were.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-03-02 05:40:49+00:00
> But I mean,are the employees safe at home? I guess if the really targeted the data center then home is safer, but in the fog of war maybe the data center wasn't the target?

My gut feeling says that they would be safer at homes than at datacenters. The only large info I have heard is attack on hotels, this datacenter etc. (atleast till right now).

> but in the fog of war maybe the data center wasn't the target?

We can't say this for sure but even if that was the case, I do think that they would see some damage was caused and then, try to double tap it for even more damage. So chances are, even if it wasn't the target previously, it might be the target now?
by rich_sasha | 2026-03-02 05:40:58+00:00
It's a funny balance between insiders and outsiders. I would say for events like this, it's not even clear where line is, in a way that is very clear for public companies.

Clearly, a staffer in the MoD who knows what's going on and places a "bet" is bad. But is "private" information even well defined here? If a well funded HF asks 50 staffers "is Iran going to be invaded today", they all say "of course not, we're negotiating" but 3 look uncomfortable, is that MNPO? If a civilian provider, not sworn to secrecy, receives a large order indicative of some military action, then places bets, is that insider trading?

My point is less that it's fine, and more that it was a good thing to keep them banned, until and unless we figure out a better way to regulate them.

Public markets are different because the concept of "insider" information is so clearly defined and almost central to all information processing. Government business has other priorities than "how to we keep all gamblers chances equal".
by cosmiciron | 2026-03-02 05:41:24+00:00
You are completely right on all fronts. Thank you for taking a look at the code!

You hit the exact architectural bottleneck. Right now, the engine uses Intl.Segmenter to find the grapheme boundaries, but then it just does a direct cmap lookup to get the advance widths. It currently lacks a parser for the OpenType GSUB (Glyph Substitution) and GPOS (Glyph Positioning) tables, which is why Arabic defaults to isolated forms and Indic matras don't fuse.

The standard advice is exactly what you suggested: "just drop in HarfBuzz." But that creates an existential problem for this specific project. HarfBuzz is a massive C++ library. To run it in an Edge worker or pure V8 environment, I'd have to ship a WebAssembly binary that is often upwards of 1MB. That entirely defeats the purpose of building an 88 KiB, pure-JS, zero-dependency layout VM.

Doing complex text layout (CTL) and shaping purely in JavaScript without exploding the bundle size is essentially the final boss of this project. The roadmap is to either implement a highly tree-shakeable, pure-JS parser for the most critical GSUB/GPOS rules, or find a way to pre-compile shaping instructions.

For right now, it's a known trade-off: lightning-fast, edge-native pure JS layout, at the cost of failing on complex cursive ligatures. If you know of any micro-footprint pure-JS shaping libraries that don't rely on WASM, I am all ears!
by messe | 2026-03-02 05:41:27+00:00
> TCL test harness. C SQLite's test suite is driven by ~90,000+ lines of TCL scripts deeply intertwined with the C API. These cannot be meaningfully ported. Instead, FrankenSQLite uses native Rust #[test] modules, proptest for property-based testing, a conformance harness comparing SQL output against C SQLite golden files, and asupersync's lab reactor for deterministic concurrency tests.

If you're not running against the SQLite test suite, then you haven't written a viable SQLite replacement.
by reflectt | 2026-03-02 05:43:40+00:00
The session capture problem is harder than it looks because you need to capture intent, not steps.

A coding session has a lot of 'left turn, dead end, backtrack' noise that buries the decision that actually mattered. Committing the full session is like committing compiler output — technically complete, practically unreadable.

We've been experimenting with structured post-task reflections instead: after completing significant work, capture what you tried, what failed, what you'd do differently, and the actual decision reasoning. A few hundred tokens instead of tens of thousands. Commits with a reflection pointer rather than an embedded session.

The result is more useful than raw logs. Future engineers (or future AI sessions) can understand intent without replaying the whole conversation. It's closer to how good commit messages work — not 'here's what changed' but 'here's why'.

Dang's point about there being no single session is also real. Our biggest tasks span multiple sessions and multiple contributors. 'Capture the session' doesn't compose. 'Capture the decision' does.
by alun | 2026-03-02 05:43:45+00:00
Yeah I think where we fundamentally disagree is what prediction markets should be optimizing for.

If the goal is to produce the most accurate forecast possible, then informed traders (especially asymmetrically informed traders) are a feature of the system, not a bug. The market is a system for discovering the truth, and it generally rewards whoever brings that truth to the table first.

If the goal is to create a fair playing field where the crowd collectively arrives at an answer, then yeah someone with private information becomes problematic.

But I'd argue that's optimizing for fairness at the cost of accuracy, and accuracy is much more important.
by altitudinous | 2026-03-02 05:43:56+00:00
Interesting to see this stuff. I really enjoyed cracking this back in the day, just for friends, but took a different approach of using sector editors to read the code on the disk to find where the checks wer done to see if the protections were present and replacing it with NOPs ($EA), or changing BNEs to BEQs. What was more interesting was how the code that did the check was also moved about the disk, I remember seeing for a particular piece of code it did a B-E (Block Execute) on Track 5 Sector 5. I could plainly see the protection check on that spot on the disk. My young self was very excited about working it out. The puzzle of copy protection was more fun than playing the actual games. Very frequently the directory tracks (18?? I think) were overwritten but it was obvious looking over the disk to see the headers for various programs and the load start address so it was easy to rebuild. Golden times. I've coded since then, and only recently have stopped as AI has finally got better than me!!
by gib444 | 2026-03-02 05:44:01+00:00
iPhones are nice but all that iCloud data is a privacy nightmare especially without Advanced Data Protection, which the UK Gov caused Apple to stop offering in the UK (and I can see that extending to the E U).

Friction can be good in life. Good food takes effort etc. When it comes to phones, there is the issue of privacy, security and phone addiction.

When the mobile is hard to use (eg Grapheneos - no offence), it can force you to use a real computing device for most of your needs
by D-Machine | 2026-03-02 05:44:03+00:00
> well, maybe some people do but most people I know re-write the same file multiple times before committing, or rebase/squash intermediate commits into more useful logical commits

Right, agreed on this, we want a distillation, not documentation of every step.

> For example, having some documentation for the intent behind a given series of commits and any assumptions made can be quite valuable in the future, but every single discussion between any two devs on a project as part of the commit history would be so much noise for very little gain. AI prompts and sessions seem to me to fall into that same bucket.

Yes, documenting every single discussion is a waste / too much to process, but I do think prompts at least are pretty crucial relative to sessions. Prompts basically are the core intentions / motivations (skills aside). It is hard to say whether we really want earlier / later prompts, given how much context changes based on the early prompts, but having no info about prompts or sessions is a definite negative in vibe-coding, where review is weak and good documentation, comments, and commit messages are only weakly incentivized.

> Some of these things might be useful to preserve some of the time either in the commit history or along side it

Right, along side is fine to me as well. Just something has to make up for the fact that vibe-coding only appears faster (currently) if you ignore the fact it is weakly-reviewed and almost certainly incurring technical debt. Documenting some basic aspects of the vibe-coding process is the most basic and easy way to reduce these long-term costs.

EDIT: Also, as I said, information about the prompts quickly reveals competence / incompetence, and is crucial for management / business in hiring, promotions, managing token budgets, etc. Oh, and of course, one of the main purposes of code review was to teach. Now, that teaching has to shift toward teaching better prompting and AI use. That gets a lot harder with no documentation of the session!
by skeledrew | 2026-03-02 05:44:18+00:00
Conceptually, it's really not as hard as you make it seem. There are layers, but once you peel them away there's only one thing left, which all living things share: the drive to survive (maintain internal state parameters within a certain range by accessing nutrition, protection from environmental elements, security from other survival-seeking entities, reproduction to pass on genes, etc). No need to bring God/gods into it.

There's also no need to specifically mimic humanity's progress; that's just an accident of survival facilitated by opposable thumbs and language ability. We've already made machines with the base abilities, and emulated the drive (see evolutionary algorithms[0] for example). We just need to put it all together in a few units and let them "loose" to evolve on their own for a while. It took humans ~300,000 years to get where we are today; I'm positive that it'll take machines a small fraction of that. Nothing special.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm
by tomhow | 2026-03-02 05:45:55+00:00
This is in breach of the HN guidelines.

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

People on both sides of any topic are welcome to participate here and express their points of view, as long as they respect the guidelines. If you see users who "police it against honest reporting about their crimes", you should email us to point it out, as the guidelines ask.

Making sweeping claims like this without including any links so we can know what you're talking about serves only to poison HN.
by cal_dent | 2026-03-02 05:46:10+00:00
I hope you're wrong and I think you're being a little defeatist in the assessment of "Little initiative to fix it". But to each is own. From the communities have stayed in, in different places around the world, I find that is not the case and there is still a high trust society in place locally. It's everywhere else outside that that people tend to view as low trust. I always end up thinking to myself that but there's no true way to actually know that everywhere else is low trust when you're not actually there, they're just fighting shadows.

A very particular case is London, which if you live on the internet you would think is some sort of hellscape where everyone is going to stab you or steal your phone on a bike if you dont run between safe spot to safe spot with eyes on your bike. But I've lived there for many years, still have friends there and visit regularly and that is so far from daily life that it is bizarrely amusing that people think that
by lmm | 2026-03-02 05:47:54+00:00
> Why do e-bikes become better or more safe when you have to rotate your legs?

Because you're directly engaged in operating them. Electric handcycles are also legal, the problem isn't which body part it is, it's whether you're moving muscles to move your bike - and, perhaps more importantly, that your bike will stop accelerating when you stop your body.
by derefr | 2026-03-02 05:48:02+00:00
I dunno; I think Tradcoding would go beyond regular modern coding, and rather imply some kind of regressive Nara Smith "first grind and sift the flour in your kitchen"-style programming.

No Internet connection, no cache of ecosystem packages, no online searchable documentation; you sit in a room with a computer and a bookshelf of printed SDK docs, and you make it work. I.e. the 1970s IBM mainframe coding experience!
by jrflowers | 2026-03-02 05:48:06+00:00
That’s kind of the point that I was making. When you mash the two together, both lenses are valid critiques.

It’s an exponentially more difficult way to accomplish either goal because one reader will see it and think “this is a sixteen thousand word essay that says very little” and another will see it and think “what a wonderful story” and there’s nobody to adjudicate who is correct.

Like I posted “this is sixteen thousand words about how the author doesn’t really use language models but might one day” and some folks’ rebuttal is that they enjoyed reading it. Those are two completely unrelated things! It’s like if folks saw the cover of The Hobbit and thought “Hell yeah!” and then when they read “there and back again” thought “whoever wrote that was being unnecessarily reductive”
by raducu | 2026-03-02 05:48:23+00:00
> Without weighing on the validity of their hypothesis that one or both sides found the other“especially attractive”

I get that it's survivor bias and all, but modern racial preference also paints a clear picture, I don't understand why we are so against this hypothesis that male homo sapiens did not particularly like the female neanderthal (I can clearly see why as any modern male would).

Perhaps because modern psyche loves to picture males as sexual brutes and women as these higher wonderful rosy elves and this "shocking" neanderthal(i.e. "beastly") preference goes strongly against this meme?

Why would it be so inconcievable that the male part of homo sapiens drove the sexual selection for the more "refined" features of the species and the preference for intelligence of women was not intrinsic but partially "forced" -- i.e. warbrides and all -- so it would make perfect sense that some homo sapiens women would be attracted to the physical strength cues of male neanderthals, just like... gasp... modern women are?
by D-Machine | 2026-03-02 05:49:45+00:00
Something like "it is important to document core / crucial prompts somewhere" covers it. Whether this should be in git or elsewhere is trickier, but doing vibe-coding without documenting any aspect of the process is a recipe for disaster.

Also, how can we (or future AI models) hope to improve if there is only limited and summary documentation of AI usage?
Show HN: Vibe code your scientific papers with an assistant I built(open source)
by nilofer99 | 2026-03-02 05:51:34+00:00
Hi, Fellow researcher from Yale, I was frustrated with Overleaf and google docs not able to write and collaborate on documents the way I wanted to. I write my research in Latex but since Cursor came out, I thought this has to change, I'm wasting too much time and having mental fog all the time, kinda going through writer's block and hence I decided to create this latex writing assistant for myself but now used by a ton of researchers, I wanted your feedback, what you like, what you don't like, alternatives you've seen, what you would like to have, nice to have, you'd definitely pay to have, etc. This would genuinely help researchers write papers faster and save more time to do actual research. Would love your thoughts
by cosmiciron | 2026-03-02 05:51:44+00:00
You are absolutely right about the Devanagari. That is a known trade-off at the moment. Because the core engine is strictly constrained to 88 KiB of pure JavaScript, it intentionally bypasses massive C++ shaping libraries like HarfBuzz. I haven't yet found a way to process complex text layout (CTL) and fuse those ligatures purely in JS without completely blowing up the bundle size. It's a very early implementation, but finding a micro-footprint solution for that is on the ROADMAP!

Though, to be fair, for my original need—generating industry-standard screenplays from Markdown—the engine is already total overkill. LOL.

As for the film: my feature premiered in January 2024 in China under the title 《天降大任》. It was originally developed in Los Angeles as an English-language project called Chosen. I actually put down my programmer's hat and worked on that film for over ten years!
by runamok | 2026-03-02 05:53:10+00:00
I think of the corporate death penalty as being more appropriate when leadership knew exactly what was going on and chose profits over people. Exxon, see https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0063. Purdue Pharma, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purdue_Pharma. Company gets sold for parts and Cauitebgoes to prison probably for life due to the amount of lives they potentially destroyed. Pretty much all the tobacco companies knew how harmful their product and made a concerted effort to fund their own bogus studies to throw up a smoke screen. Facebook makes billions from (for example) scams and fraudulent ads: https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu.... Maybe don't throw their CEO in prison but at least fine them 10x the profit they made vs. the usual .0001%.