MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by noemit | 2026-03-06 10:26:04+00:00
I'm currently teaching a group of very curious non-technical content creators at one of the firms I consult at. I set up Codex for them, created the repo to have lots of hand-holding built in - and they took off. It's been 4 weeks and we already have 3 internal tools deployed, one of which eliminated the busy work of another team so much that they now have twice the capacity. These are all things 'real' engineers and product managers could have done, but just empowering people to solve their own problems is way faster. Today, several of them came to me and asked me to explain what APIs are (They want to use the google workspace APIs for something)

I wrote out a list of topics/key words to ask AI about and teach themselves. I've already set up the integration in an example app I will give them, and I literally have no idea what they are going to build next, but I'm .. thrilled. Today was the first moment I realized, maybe these are the junior engineers of the future. The fact that they have nontechnical backgrounds is a huge bonus - one has a PhD in Biology, one a masters in writing - they bring so much to the process that a typical engineering team lacks. Thinking of writing up this case study/experience because it's been a highlight of my career.
by javadhu | 2026-03-06 10:26:10+00:00
I always wanted to make such a tool for myself but never sat to actually build it. User experience was a breeze.

I see that there is no import button. Adding Import will help many of us to keep editing the same tree instead of building it from scratch everytime.
You can add a JSON export of the tree and then users can import this JSON to make edits.
I can also share this JSON with other family members.
by silverstream | 2026-03-06 10:26:42+00:00
This also compounds with npm's postinstall defaults. In this attack chain, the prompt injection triggers npm install on a fork, and postinstall scripts run with the
user's full permissions without any audit prompt.

So you end up with GHA's over-privileged credentials handing off to npm's over-privileged install hooks.

I've started running --ignore-scripts by default and only whitelisting packages that genuinely need postinstall. It's a bit annoying, but the alternative is trusting
every transitive dependency not to do something during install.
by tern | 2026-03-06 10:26:47+00:00
I am solidly in this "curious" camp. I've read HN for the past 15(?) years. I dropped out of CS and got an art agree instead. My career is elsewhere, but along the way, understanding systems was a hobby.

I always kind of wanted to stop everything else and learn "real engineering," but I didn't. Instead, I just read hundreds (thousands?) of arcane articles about enterprise software architecture, programming language design, compiler optimization, and open source politics in my free time.

There are many bits of tacit knowledge I don't have. I know I don't have them, because I have that knowledge in other domains. I know that I don't know what I don't know about being a "real engineer."

But I also know what taste is. I know what questions to ask. I know the magic words, and where to look for answers.

For people like me, this feels like an insane golden age. I have no shortage of ideas, and now the only thing I have is a shortage of hands, eyes, and on a good week, tokens.
by haspok | 2026-03-06 10:27:02+00:00
The most frequent crashes I have with Firefox are when I type in a text area (such as this one right now, or on Reddit, for example). The longer the text I type is, the more probable it is that it's going to crash. Or maybe it doesn't crash, just grinds to such a slow pace that it is equivalent to a crash.

My suspicion has always been some kind of a memory leak, but memory corruption also makes sense.

Unfortunately, Chrome (which I use for work - Firefox is for private stuff) has NEVER crashed on me yet. Certainly not in the past 5 years. Which is odd. I'm on Linux btw.
by alerighi | 2026-03-06 10:27:50+00:00
It's not the job of the operating system to protect children. Social media is bad even for adults, to my point of view why they don't address the source of the problem, banning what Instagram, TikTok, etc. is doing that is bad even for adults, and don't make laws that restricts even more what a person can do with their personal computer (if this law comes into effect it's like saying it would be illegal to run Linux or whatever OS that doesn't implement this bullshit)?

Well, surely because the government is full of investors in Meta and uses Meta for their propaganda, and possibly because the government wants more data to put on their databases that is used by ICE and other agencies.
by yanis_t | 2026-03-06 10:28:43+00:00
They will never admit it, but many are scared of losing their jobs.

This threat, while not yet realized, is very real from a strictly economic perspective.

AI or not, any tool that improves productivity can lead to workforce reduction.

Consider this oversimplified example: You own a bakery. You have 10 people making 1,000 loaves of bread per month. Now, you have new semi-automatic ovens that allow you to make the same amount of bread with only 5 people.

You have a choice: fire 5 people, or produce 2,000 loaves per month. But does the city really need that many loaves?

To make matters worse, all your competitors also have the same semi-automatic ovens...
by mdnahas | 2026-03-06 10:28:43+00:00
> How do you know what to say?, usually I can start the conversation but I don’t know where to take it after.
Some ideas:
Ask what they’re passionate about.
Talk about what you’re passionate about.
Say you’re trying to improve yourself and ask if there is anything they’ve learned lately about life that you should know.
Ask for their advice/opinion on a recent problem you’ve faced or something that surprised you recently.

>How do you get over the feeling that you are wasting their time?
First, hold up a mirror: do you feel your time is wasted when someone talks to you? Second, everyone benefits from bonds and talking enables trust. Even if the relationship is temporary, it brings comfort. Think of two people at an airport going out on different planes. Even a short conversation with someone makes them trust enough to let the other watch their heavy luggage while they go to the bathroom.

>Finally, how do you end the conversation when you're still going in the same direction or waiting at the same place?
Yeah, this is always a little awkward. You can just say something like “It’s been nice talking to you. I’m going to go back to reading my book.” Sometimes I’ll make a polite fib like saying I’ve got to think about an important presentation or have some pressing emails that I need to read.
by rileymat2 | 2026-03-06 10:30:19+00:00
It is a bit different than what we are discussing, but intent plays a huge role in Western justice. The same physical action can lead to vastly different outcomes.

A high profile interesting example of this is the assassination attempt on Brett Kavanaugh. If you look at the details none of the actions would have been an attempt if not for the intent.

It is an interesting thought experiment as to how many actions you have to take for a crime that you don’t commit to be charged as an attempt or more broadly as conspiracy and at what point people are allowed to change their mind. We see this in terrorism cases pretty frequently.
by imtringued | 2026-03-06 10:31:02+00:00
Fully agreed. rkyv looks like something that is hyper optimizing for a very niche case, but doesn't actually admit that it is doing so. The use case here is transient data akin to swapping in-memory data to disk.

"However, while the former have external schemas and heavily restricted data types, rkyv allows all serialized types to be defined in code and can serialize a wide variety of types that the others cannot."

At a first glance, it might sound like rkyv is better, after all, it has less restrictions and external schemas are annoying, but it doesn't actually solve the schema issue by having a self describing format like JSON or CBOR. You won't be able to use the data outside of Rust and you're probably tied to a specific Rust version.
by sureglymop | 2026-03-06 10:32:00+00:00
At the end of last year I started to feel a little burned out and seemingly had lost my curiosity, motivation and passion for computers.

I started again with something I don't do at my day job, assembly and low level programming. It's been a blessing to learn and realize that things can actually be much simpler at that level. I'm especially interested in anything that actually needs one to drop down to assembly level and can't be done in some low level languages. E.g. implementing coroutines, jit compilation, self modifying binaries etc. I don't think I'll ever be able to use this knowledge professionally but more importantly, it's fun! Any more ideas for fun stuff are welcome. :)
by aa-jv | 2026-03-06 10:32:04+00:00
It came from an elite Western imperial group which has the blood of millions on its hands, anyway, which anyone looking at Nobel as a propaganda mechanism can see quite clearly. Other countries were, indeed, bullied into accepting the US' illegal war crimes, crimes against humanity, and violations of human rights at immense scale, because the US is a bully which uses its formidable military industrial complex to subdue nations considered inferior by America's ruling elite.
by wink | 2026-03-06 10:34:59+00:00
I was recently made aware you should be able to use Powertoys (as maybe the only way) to remove the innate win+space shortcut and override it with e.g. your launcher.

This works... it shows the launcher. But I still find myself with the wrong language selected every couple days, I have a feeling it does not fully work when I use win+space inside an RDP connection or.. somewhere else.

Mildly infuriating if you can't just disable OS-level shortcuts.
by nwellnhof | 2026-03-06 10:35:20+00:00
First of all, you have to realize that it's impossible to measure inflation and purchasing power objectively. It always depends on a highly subjective (and gameable) basket of goods. But inflation and purchasing power are a thing, so it's a bad idea to ignore them. You just have to keep in mind that all these economic time series are a lot less accurate than they seem.

But if you want to account for purchasing power, it doesn't make sense to ignore inflation. So the "GDP, PPP (current international $)" data which the article refers to seems mostly useless to me. You really have to adjust for inflation as well (constant $) and the picture will become quite clear:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.PP.KD?locat...
by dagss | 2026-03-06 10:36:07+00:00
I think there is a drastic difference between being once off exposed to bad images, and an algorithm making a choice of whether to subtly over time expose the Pokemon-interested child to racist Pokemon videos vs non-racist Pokemon videos on Tiktok. (Or anorexic Pokemon videos, or..)

Amount of time spent and repeated exposure being the key.

The question is really what kind of human is raised, rather than raw exposure as such.

So for that reason things are different IMO than than 20 years ago.

Yes, of course some people would fall into internet forum rabbit holes 20 years ago, and papper-letter-friend-induced rabbit holes 100 years ago. But it did help that it was like 5% of the population instead of 95% of the population spending their time there.

Regarding your last point, I don't necessarily disagree (again I didn't check up on this law, I care more about the laws in my own country), but I think arguing against the law will go better if one does not display naivety when making the arguments

Don't say "it will be better if all kids are exposed to everything early" (it won't), instead say "the medicine will not work and anyway the side-effects are worse than the sickness it intends to cure" (if that is the case).
by rasz | 2026-03-06 10:36:31+00:00
Not these drones. Factories are in fact HUGE, very far away and staffed by scammed migrants and children. Yelabuga is ~1000 miles from Ukraine.

https://www.euronews.com/2025/07/21/russia-ramps-up-drone-pr...

African women tricked into making Russian drones https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdrzdpre058o

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/07/25/europe/russia-secretive-d...

Ukraine managed to hit it couple of times, but they would need tens of Tomahawks to properly deal with the place

https://english.nv.ua/russian-war/drones-hit-yelabuga-in-tat...

Ukraine war: Deepest Ukraine drone attack into Russian territory injures 12 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68712158
by amelius | 2026-03-06 10:36:48+00:00
The kind of tool that I'm waiting for would allow me to log into a machine remotely, then reboot it once into a provided image (which could then run Linux in a ramdisk). I.e., take over the entire machine until it is restarted again. Does something like this exist?

I want something like "kexec" but taking over the entire hardware at the lowest possible level.

Edit, found this:

https://github.com/marcan/takeover.sh

But it's not as low level as I hoped, though it keeps the network running which is nice :)
by nicoburns | 2026-03-06 10:37:14+00:00
Would you consider being a contract killer (i.e. a hitman) ethical? What about being a creator of CSAM? Because those are both examples making money by providing others with what they want. And if we followed free market principles to their logical extreme then both of those would be allowed.

I think most people would agree that this would not be even remotely ethical. Nor would it lead to higher living standards than a more restricted market economy.
by mdnahas | 2026-03-06 10:37:21+00:00
I lived in NYC for a decade. This is very true on the street, but less true waiting in a subway station, and even less true in a neighborhood bar. The more public, there is a “market for lemons” effect in conversation. The more it resembles a private club or a group suffering a common injustice, the more reliably good the conversation is. A crowd on an MTA platform where a train hasn’t shown up in 50 minutes can get pretty chatty.
by dragonwriter | 2026-03-06 10:37:26+00:00
> So you're saying LLMs don't count as an original work and so have zero copyright protection?

No, I'm saying that your explanation of what makes something a derivative work is wrong. Now, personally, I think there is a very good argument that LLMs and similar models, if they have a copyright at all, do so only because of whatever copyright can be claimed on the training set as a work of its own (which, if ti exists, would be a compilation copyright), as a work of authorship of which it is a mechanical transformation (similar to object code having a copyright as a consequence of the copyright on the source code, which is a work of authorship.) Its also quite arguable that they are not subject to copyright, and many have made that argument.

> So anyone running those models can just freely copy them if they have access to them?

I'm not arguingn for that, but yes that is the consequence if they are not subject to copyright, assuming no other (e.g., contractual) prohibition binds the parties seeking to make copies.

> And, of course, it means distillation attacks, even if they do turn out to copy the OpenAIs/Anthropic/... model are just 100% perfectly legal?

Distillation isn't an “attack” and probably isn't a violation of copyright even if models are protected, they are literally interacting with the model through its interface to reproduce its function; they are functional reverse engineering.

Distillation is a violation of ToS, for which there are remedies outside of copyright.

> I mean paying someone to break into the DC and then putting the model on torrent would allow anyone downloading it to use it, legally.

Paying someone to break into the DC and do that would subject you to criminal charges for burglary and conspiracy, and civil liability for the associated torts as well as for theft of trade secrets covering the resulting harms, even without copyright protection.

> Plus, if this is true, it would be a loophole. Plus this is totally crazy.

Its not a “loophole” that copyright law only covers works of original authorship, it is the whole point of copyright law.

> It would be great if courts declared WHAT is the case.

If there is a dispute which turns on what is the case, courts will rule one way or the other on the issues necessary to resolve it. Courts (in the US at least) do not rule on issues not before them, except to the extent that a general rule which resolves but covers somewhat more than the immediate case can usefully be articulated by an appellate court.)

> But they won't, because copyright only protects massive companies.

Leaving out any question of whether the premise of this claim is true, the conclusion doesn't follow from it, since “what is the case” here is the kind of thing that is quite likely to be an issue between massive companies at some point in the not too distant future, requiring courts to resolve it even if they only address the meaning of copyright law for that purpose.
by vintermann | 2026-03-06 10:37:30+00:00
I was absolutely disgusted by stuff like 24 and zero dark thirty when it came out. "If you cut the throat of the terrorist's son he'll break down and tell you where the bomb is" - they expected the audience to treat that as plausible narrative, and a lot of them clearly did.

A lot of the war propaganda from back then is also depressingly similar to what gets pumped out now: you can't argue with success, you don't want to be on the losers' side do you?
by input_sh | 2026-03-06 10:38:23+00:00
And those mediocre engineers put their work online, as do top-tier developers. In fact, I would say that the scale is likely tilted towards mediocre engineers putting more stuff online than really good ones.

So statistically speaking, when the "AI" consumes all of that as its training data and returns the most likely answer when prompted, what percentage of developers will it be better than?
by embedding-shape | 2026-03-06 10:38:31+00:00
> But in all seriousness, ants are smarter than they look.

I'd argue the opposite, ants are dumber than they look. You look at a random ant stack in the forest and it looks like they're smart, but that's only when they're "controlled" by the collective, individual ants themselves are pretty dumb in the end, but it's hard to see as typically we always see them around/in their stacks in nature.
by pydry | 2026-03-06 10:39:07+00:00
>I just can’t compete in speed and thoroughness

I certainly know engineers for which this is true but unfortunately they were never particularly thorough or fast to begin with.

I believe you can tell which way the wind is blowing by looking at open source.

Other than being flooded with PRs high profile projects have not seen a notable difference - certainly no accelerated enhancements. there has definitely been an explosion of new projects, though, most of dubious quality.

Spikes and research are definitely cheaper now.
by theshrike79 | 2026-03-06 10:39:09+00:00
The thing that separates AI Agents from normal programmers is that agents don't get bored or tired.

For most engineers the ability might be there, but the motivation or willingness to write, for example, 20 different test cases checking the 3 line bug you just fixed is fixed FOR SURE usually isn't there. You add maybe 1-2 tests because they're annoying boilerplate crap to write and create the PR. CI passes, you added new tests, someone will approve it. (Yes, your specific company is of course better than this and requires rigorous testing, but the vast majority isn't. Most don't even add the two tests as long as the issue is fixed.)

An AI Agent will happily and without complaining use Red/Green TDD on the issue, create the 20 tests first, make sure they fail (as they should), fix the issue and then again check that all tests pass. And it'll do it in 30 minutes while you do something else.
by throwaway2037 | 2026-03-06 10:40:38+00:00
> Nike couldn't be the global brand it was today if it directly managed all its factories.

This is a weird statement to me. Replace "Nike" with "Intel". Intel manages all of its factories and is a global brand. (Yes, I know they recently outsourced some chip manuf to TSMC, but Intel was surely a global brand in the 1990s.) I don't get it. What am I missing?
by syrek | 2026-03-06 10:40:43+00:00
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by koakuma-chan | 2026-03-06 10:40:57+00:00
No, it doesn't. I get this error in console

Uncaught (in promise) Error: WebGL2 is required but not available.
setupGL https://alibaba.github.io/page-agent/assets/SimulatorMask-B8...
K https://alibaba.github.io/page-agent/assets/SimulatorMask-B8...
<anonymous> https://alibaba.github.io/page-agent/assets/SimulatorMask-B8...
nt https://alibaba.github.io/page-agent/assets/SimulatorMask-B8...
maskReady https://alibaba.github.io/page-agent/assets/PageAgent-oX13Jj...

Because I have WebGL disabled.
by dragonwriter | 2026-03-06 10:41:12+00:00
Yes, and the other thing you have to do for this to be applicable to you is choose to be an "operating system provider", as defined in the law.

If you don't want to write, hire someone to write, pay someone to provide an implementation that has already been written, or acquire an implementation already written that is available without payment, such an API, you can simply choose not to do what is defined as being an “operating system provider”, and no obligation attaches,

No one is putting a gun to your head and forcing you to do labor to write code for an API.
by mothballed | 2026-03-06 10:41:40+00:00
US has given more aid to Ukraine than any other country, and has $400M more allocated for this year. So lets cut the bullshit about excluding all the times anything other than $0 was supplied -- it's putting a major spin and presenting things in a deviously false way.

This kind of rhetoric is why we're bitter about it. We give the most out of anyone, yet there is still this sort of welfare queen bullshit of vell vwhat have you done for uz lately when something simple is asked back like some help with drones. Despite giving more than anyone, the best thanks we can get is "but that one time, you gave us $0, so none of this counts" and by the way, if you want drones then fuck you pay me. The sense of smug entitlement is off the charts.

You're unwittingly displaying why the kind of lies Trump told to get elected worked. Of course Trump was totally being fraudulent about his "no new wars" rhetoric (his rhetoric about having Europe pick up their share did have some truth), but there's a reason why his rhetoric worked.
by keiferski | 2026-03-06 10:41:52+00:00
No, that isn’t what my comment suggests at all, on any level.

I don’t think you can have intelligent ethical opinions if you disparage and ignore the field that studies ethics (philosophy.)

Seems pretty straightforward to me.

I think there are definitely many positions with which I disagree, but are nonetheless well-thought through and coherent.

But it seems pretty clear that the people making these decisions haven’t done the work of thinking it through, and are instead just trying to maximize money. That’s my claim, at least.