MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Enginerrrd | 2026-03-12 18:23:58+00:00
I think the people that dismiss this concern are just as bad and unscientific. It's a pretty decent Bayesian prior to assume that regular exposure to synthetic organic compounds in quantities or concentrations that hominids didn't receive exposure to in our evolution are likely to be potentially problematic. This is especially true when they don't occur naturally in any organisms biochemical processes and yet are active enough to interact with many of these things. This is OBVIOUSLY true for things used as pesticides / herbicides. We have evolved a natural aversion to areas where all the plants and animals are dead and rotting. There are good reasons for this to be a really good heuristic.

I'll go so far as to say that almost any pesticide or herbicide is likely to be bad for vertebrates and invertebrates alike. This is really likely the case for perservatives as well, for what should be obvious reasons.

It's really not that crazy to assume they're probably not good as a default assumption.

Go into a hardware store and almost every chemical, solvent, paint, etc. that you encounter is not good for you. Eat a salmon and enjoy billions of plastic particles. Open almost any prepackaged food and you'll be ingesting all manner of dyes, perservatives, anti-caking agents, etc. etc. etc. that simply weren't around in your food environment during our evolution. It's a surprisingly good baseline assumption that these things aren't likely to be good for you.

If you think about the study design and epidemiologic studies, it should be clear that it's going to be very difficult to prove harm in a lot of cases for things that are only a little harmful, or only harmful in combination, or harmful only after 20 years have passed since exposure, etc. ...except that the science is VERY clear: something (or lots of things) associated with "processed food" is really bad for you.
by quesera | 2026-03-12 18:24:23+00:00
Well, I've lived in four states in the last 20 years.

Anecdotally, the pronunciation popularity has split neatly along statewide-prominent political lines. For my four example states, three were correct/respectful, and one wrong/disrespectful.

Correct pronunciation has also had an inverse correlation with the rates of active/former military employment, which might be more directly indicative. And a positive correlation with education levels. So the answer is in there somewhere, I suspect.

National TV "news" programming might have a style guide which dictates pandering to the audience by speaking in real american, no matter how well-educated the hosts might be.
by cheema33 | 2026-03-12 18:25:15+00:00
What do people use Atlassian for these days?

Back in the day we used Jira a lot. But we also had GitHub accounts. The integration of the two wasn't great so we switched to GitHub issues and kicked Jira to the curb. This saved money and also a lot of hassle in trying to keep the two in sync. I am wondering if many others went a similar route.

We did use Confluence and I do miss it. I would love to find an opensource replacement for it that stores files in markdown format. Like Obsidian, but for teams.
by lxgr | 2026-03-12 18:25:21+00:00
> "ISPs used carrier‑grade NAT as a compatibility shim rather than a lifeline: if you needed to reach an IPv4‑only service, CGNAT stepped in while IPv4x traffic flowed natively and without ceremony."

What's the difference between that and dual stack v4/v6, though? Other than not needing v6 address range assignments, of course.
by lm28469 | 2026-03-12 18:25:25+00:00
The US had a joint nuclear program with Iran for decades... After the revolution they didn't even pursue nuclear weapons until they understood it was the only thing you can get to protect yourself from Israel and American bullying.

> before and thus instead of a genocide in Gaza!

Lmao yeah OK buddy, your dollars are financing both, and many more, atrocities
by owlcompliance | 2026-03-12 18:25:28+00:00
Such a sobering perspective. Thank you, sir. I need to think more about this because you're 100% right. Now that I think of it, there's people who are nice to me, but because they seem aloof at times, they rub me the wrong way. I could very well be that with to others; I see myself as nice, they see me as having no substance.

Your last two paragraphs really slapped me in the face too, in a good way. When I think about it that way, it really does change how I view other people talking negative about me. People talk negative about me? Cool, I'll be someone who you can count on never being that way towards them.

I really appreciate your words. Where ever you are, God bless you and hope you're having a great day (I'm about to go get my third coffee #notashamed).
by alephnerd | 2026-03-12 18:25:53+00:00
My mom doesn't cook bhunai - she's pushed for a low oil household since I was a kid and is extremely health conscious verging on "crunchy".

I've also done bhunai with electric stovetops and ceramic cookware like Dutch ovens and green pans and gotten close enough to an authentic taste - the marginal differences that exist are due to differences in ingredients in the US (eg. lower milkfat percentages, onions instead of shallots, different cultivars of vegetables, etc) and some inexperience of non-Westerners with Western cookware.

It's a very solvable problem. For example, the Indian restaurants my parents like and feel taste "authentic" use electric stovetops as well in the back, but discriminate on ingredients and masalas.
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-03-12 18:26:03+00:00
>When someone outside of America thinks of American food, do you think they will think of Cajun gumbo, TexMex, Clam Chowder, or something you'd find on the menu at McDonalds?

Statistically this random non-american is some sort of Asian. Therefore the answer is finger lickin good.
by ljm | 2026-03-12 18:26:09+00:00
Is this not the difference between using AI as an aid to organise yourself, as opposed to using AI as a total replacement for your thoughts or your writing and therefore removing the personal touch?

The bone of contention is that the signal:noise ratio on GPT's output is super low and there is no way to tell the difference between a thoughtful GPT post and slop, and given how easy it is to post at volume with low-effort AI posts, there is a bias towards caution rather than acceptance.

At best it's a case-by-case affordance to use AI as opposed to a blanket rule.
by bayes-song | 2026-03-12 18:26:32+00:00
That’s exactly the hard part, and I agree it matters more than the happy path.

A few concrete things we do today:

1. It’s fully agentic rather than a fixed replay script. The model is prompted to treat GUI as one route among several, to prefer simpler / more reliable routes when available, and to switch routes or replan after repeated failures instead of brute-forcing the same path. In practice, we’ve also seen cases where, after GUI interaction becomes unreliable, the agent pivots to macOS-native scripting / AppleScript-style operations. I wouldn’t overclaim that path though: it works much better on native macOS surfaces than on arbitrary third-party apps.

2. GUI grounding has an explicit validation-and-retry path. Each action is grounded from a fresh screenshot, not stored coordinates. In the higher-risk path, the runtime does prediction, optional refinement, a simulated action overlay, and then validation; if validation rejects the candidate, that rejection feeds the next retry round. And if the target still can’t be grounded confidently, the runtime returns a structured `not_found` rather than pretending success.

3. The taught artifact has some built-in generalization. What gets published is not a coordinate recording but a three-layer abstraction: intent-level procedure, route options, and GUI replay hints as a last resort. The execution policy is adaptive by default, so the demonstration is evidence for the task, not the only valid tool sequence.

In practice, when things go wrong today, the system often gets much slower: it re-grounds, retries, and sometimes replans quite aggressively, and we definitely can’t guarantee that it will always recover to the correct end state. That’s also exactly the motivation for Layer 3 in the design: when the system does find a route / grounding pattern / recovery path that works, we want to remember that and reuse it later instead of rediscovering it from scratch every time.
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-03-12 18:26:33+00:00
I pretty much dislike WFH and for many of the reasons you mention and more, so took a local in-office job last year after being at home since COVID. I was excited to return to a more social environment until I found that "the office" itself was itself entirely problematic. Cheapass flatpack desks all rammed in together. No noise or sound proofing, giant sweatshop room. Sub-par monitors and equipment generally. Grumpy coworkers complaining constantly about the very conversations (both on-topic and off-topic/non-work) that I came in to have a chance to experience again.

And half the staff was just WFH anyways, or remote, so the collaboration opportunities... diminished.

I even saw this happening at Google before I left there, which had formerly been a ... luxury office. Packing people in like sardines, forcing people to "reserve" desks. Bad parking and/or transit situations.

I get it when employers face financial or real estate crunches. But in the last 10-15 years (I've been working for 30) -- even pre-COVID -- I feel like some switch went off in tech industry leadership brains that is just outright disrespectful. Paying high salaries to engineers and then providing them with uncomfortable accommodations. Makes little sense to me.

I'm back to WFH and the isolation that comes with it. In part because the office environment was actually not what I was hoping for. Because the industry ruined it.
by cwillu | 2026-03-12 18:26:53+00:00
> Maintainability and understandability only show up when you’re deliberate about them. Extracting meaning into well-named functions is how you practice that. Code aesthetics are a feature and they affect team and agentic coding performance, just not the kind you measure in the runtime.

> And be warned: some will resist this and surrender to the convenience of their current mental context, betting they’ll “remember” how they did it. Time will make that bet age badly. It’s 2026 — other AI agents are already in execution loops, disciplined to code better than that.”

Hard disagree: separating code from its context is exactly how you end up in the situation of needing to “remember”. Yes, helper functions and such can be useful for readability, but it's easy to overdo it and end up with incomprehensible ravioli code that does nothing terribly complicated in a terribly complicated manner.
by mrguyorama | 2026-03-12 18:26:55+00:00
Absolutely not. There are tens of millions of Americans who have jumped full speed onto the "It's not even happening" train, let alone the "It's actually a good thing because plants" or "It's not our fault" or "We can't fix it so we shouldn't try" or "It's too expensive to fix and I can't do long term math" trains.

And this is a massive reversion too. In the mid 2000s republicans were openly advocating that we needed to do something about climate change and that it was a serious problem and then we opened the cash floodgates to American federal politics and would you look at that, oil companies have a lot of cash.

Keep in mind that the real cost of transitioning is very likely to be less than what we spent on the stupid oil wars of the 2000s. We can literally afford it now, let alone if we hadn't burned all that cash bombing the desert because of oil politics.

Oil companies themselves are fine to be "Energy" companies and invest in Solar and other renewables. They will be profitable just fine. Our country is tearing itself apart over a lie to ensure they remain more profitable.
by avidiax | 2026-03-12 18:26:56+00:00
One thing I've wondered about is IR fluorescence photography.

I've seen some examples in document forensics where a page that looks blank (or at least the ink is unrecognizably smudged) because of water exposure is completely legible with an infrared photo illuminated by UV.

I suspect there must be a hidden world only visible in IR and UV (and long-wave IR, e.g. "thermal").
by Twey | 2026-03-12 18:28:02+00:00
The problem with precise law enforcement is that the legal system is incredibly complex. There's a tagline that ‘everybody's a criminal’; I don't know if that's necessarily true but I do definitely believe that a large number of ‘innocent’ people are criminals (by the letter of the law) without their knowledge. Because we usually only bother to prosecute crimes if some obvious harm has been done this doesn't cause a lot of damage in practice (though it can be abused), but if you start enforcing the letter of every law precisely it suddenly becomes the obligation of every citizen to know every law — in a de facto way, rather than just the de jure way we currently have as a consequence of ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse’. So an increase of precision in law enforcement must be preceded by a drastic simplification of the law itself — not a bad thing by any means, but also not an easy (or, perhaps, possible) task.
by hvoetsch | 2026-03-12 18:28:19+00:00
Hi HN,

I started experimenting with an idea:

What would a programming language look like if it was designed
for autonomous coding agents as well as humans?

Most languages today assume a human is writing the code.

Valea explores:

- structured JSON compiler diagnostics
- deterministic formatting
- minimal syntax ambiguity
- simple ownership rules
- tooling designed for agents (AST export, diagnostics APIs)

The goal of the first milestone is simple:
show that an AI agent can generate, repair, and compile
a Valea program autonomously.

The compiler is still very early, but feedback on the idea
and language design would be really helpful.
by 0x457 | 2026-03-12 18:28:29+00:00
> People don't really think "my priority is 8.3 inches"

I have 12.9" iPad Pro, my priority was thunderbolt and screen size, but mainly screen size (battery life is given on Apple devices).

I also have iPad Mini where my priority was...bigger than the biggest iPhone, smaller than regular iPad.

> The killer use-cases for tablets seem to be drawing and media consumption, but not only is drawing not a huge market, these two aren't at odds. Both are better with a better, bigger screen.

It's like all-season tires, does not exceed in any particular field. I use my iPad for casual CAD with 3d printing in mind, it works great. I also use it as a bedroom screen on stand by the bed. Can two separate devices do a better job? Yes, but I don't need

> For laptops the buckets are portability and performance.

iPads not bucketed like this because you're not buying iPad for performance.

> I think the iPad's lineup could be simplified to just one model, but I understand Apple want's to have several for marketing and price-ladder delineation, like it does with the iPhone

Sure they can. This would lead to less overall sales. Right now 11" buyer have whole 3 feature set selections to choose from. I'd get rid of Pro, but not everyone needs 11" and Air features.
by lchengify | 2026-03-12 18:28:46+00:00
Two anecdotes I'll share:

First: Most people believe it was Netflix that killed Blockbuster, but that's not strictly correct. It was the combination of Netflix and Redbox that really sealed the deal for Blockbuster (and video rental generally). It normally takes not one, but at least two things to really fill the full functionality of a old paradigm. Also it's human nature to focus heavily on one thing (Blockbuster was aware of Netflix) but lose sight of getting flanked by something else.

Second: Not listed here is how banks themselves have changed to be almost entirely online, which in many cases is more of a outsourcing play than a labor destruction play. My favorite example of this is Capital One, where the vast majority of their credit card operations literally cannot be solved in a branch. You must call them to say, resolve a fraud dispute. Note that this still requires staffing and is (not yet) fully automated, just not branch staffing. It doesn't make sense to staff branches to do that.
by theamk | 2026-03-12 18:28:49+00:00
from the very post you are replying to:

> but how many people would (1) remember to export their private key and (2) won't lose it with their device?

How does this help with either of those options? for example, I am on the phone, and imagine I've remembered to download the key... if my phone breaks, it'll be deleted. I also need to store it somewhere - google drive? password manager?

So yes, it could be solved but it would be more like "1-liner + few manual steps user must do", and there will be no guarantees that user will do those steps. So maybe people who are really invested into the new network or maybe crypt-owners who are used to manager their private key will do it, but most people will just loose their friend lists once they get a new phone or clear storage.
by jonahx | 2026-03-12 18:28:56+00:00
Yes, I didn't mean to imply non-technical people need to suck it up and get comfortable with Unix man pages, say. I don't think that's possible on a large scale. But what might be possible is people learning to understand the invisible servitude they live under, and their lack of power over their own digital lives, and to start caring. That is a social and educational problem. If that happened, I believe the UX problems with self-owned software would mostly take care of themselves (and in many instances that is already the case, or nearly so).
by kaizenb | 2026-03-12 18:29:25+00:00
No idea. But I've integrated their API to a commercial project (https://bookmarker.cc) without any issues. Users are exploring The Met Collection and save images to their library directly in the app.

> Through The Met Collection API, users can connect to a live feed of all Creative Commons Zero (CC0) data and 406,000 images from the The Met collection, all available for use without copyright or restriction. The Met Collection API is another foundational step in our Open Access program, helping make the Museum's collection one of the most accessible, discoverable, and useful on the internet. The Met Collection API is where all makers, creators, researchers, and dreamers can now connect to the most up-to-date data and images of artworks in The Met collection, representing five thousand years of human history.

source: https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/met-collection-api-2
by butILoveLife | 2026-03-12 18:29:32+00:00
I know what you mean. I'm not sure why my office doesnt have distractions. We take breaks, but its not like when I was at a fortune 20 company where I'd spend an hour drinking coffee and catching up with people in other departments.

If I had to guess, we are such a small office that its obvious if someone is distracted and I can nudge them back to work.

Saying all of this outloud, you are making me realize I have the office style of a panopticon. At least my workers seem to genuinely like working.
by elevation | 2026-03-12 18:29:47+00:00
Private equity is huge inflation driver. I'm thrifty, and for years I enjoyed a $10/mo phone provider, ~$12.39 with taxes. I even evangelized this carrier with some young parents who were struggling to get financial traction while paying off student loans.

Our affordable plan came to an end when the rates tripled! Turns out a private equity firm bought the company, jacked the rates on every customer, and sold it off again. This was not a fundamental cost being passed on in slightly increased fees -- it was private equity extracting millions from the people who can afford it the least. Across my financially optimized life, I see this happening repeatedly.

Personally, I can afford a more expensive cell phone bill. But I would imagine that many who have a $10/mo plan do not have many other options. I would like to punish the banks who are funding attacks on consumers. If by no other means, than letting them fail.
by nonameiguess | 2026-03-12 18:30:20+00:00
Sort of. The point of Vault is you're supposed to actually use RBAC and least privilege and store NPE credentials that are properly scoped to the actions you're comfortable automating, which your NPE then gets a certificate to fetch on demand, rather than just giving it your own personal root credentials that can do anything.

We're going to see this reinvented thousands of times in the next few months by people whose understanding of security is far poorer than HashiCorp's, via implementations that are nowhere near as well-tested, if tested at all.
by bwestergard | 2026-03-12 18:30:20+00:00
"Baumol's cost disease hurts the lower classes by restricting their access to services like health care and education, and LLMs/agents make it possible to increase productivity in these areas in ways which were once unimaginable."

You've expressed very clearly what LLMs would have to do in order to be economically transformative.

"If you can get high quality medical advice for effectively nothing, if you can get high quality individualized tutoring for free, that's a pretty big game changer for a lot of people. Prices on these services have been rising to the stratosphere over the past few decades because it's so difficult to increase the productivity of individual medical practitioners and educators. We're entering an era that could finally break this logjam."

It's not that process innovations are lacking, it's that product innovations are perceived as an indignity by most people. Why should one child get an LLM teacher or doctor while others get individualized attention by a skilled human being?
by fastaguy88 | 2026-03-12 18:30:21+00:00
Re self-correcting science. In the area I am most familiar with (basic life sciences), correction happens pretty quickly. But I don’t worry about public policy much.

But I’m comfortable arguing that where science intersects with policy, fraud plays a very minor role. I suspect that most policy “mistakes” (policies that were adopted and then reversed) are more about the need for a policy in the absence of data (covid and masks), or subtle tradeoffs (covid and masks), or a policy choice that seems slightly better than an alternative (mammography) but also has poorly understood harms. Policy involves politics, and science unfortunately plays less of a role than one might like (and fraudulent science an even smaller role). This is not my field, but I cannot think of policies that were reversed because of discoveries of fraud (perhaps thalidomide and other drug approvals).
by Amezarak | 2026-03-12 18:30:55+00:00
Coalitions are pretty static in most parliamentary democracies except sometimes when forming governments post-election.

The 51% is for the coalition, not the party. That’s what you’re missing. CoC Republicans for example have temporarily sacrificed their immigration policies to retain legislative influence - and they are a check on the Trumpist wing passing whatever anti-immigrant legislation they want, because they too cannot act without at least tacit support from the CoC wing.

The “major party” is from a systems perspective no different than a European parliamentary governing coalition.
by superxpro12 | 2026-03-12 18:31:02+00:00
As someone who's life is currently being affected directly by PE middle-manning something I spend a LOT of time on, I am sensitive to this issue.

IF you have problems with the vocab and terms, fine. But I have seen personally this issue in my life, that is affecting my bank account.

And we have seen example after example of these LBO's ruining otherwise functioning businesses. It's happening. All over the place.