MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vladdoster | 2026-03-10 21:57:42+00:00
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by program_whiz | 2026-03-10 21:57:55+00:00
they can be continuously updated, assuming you re-run representative samples of the training set through them continuously. Unlike a mammal brain which preserves the function of neurons unless they activate in a situation which causes a training signal, deep nets have catastrophic forgetting because signals get scattered everywhere. If you had a model continuously learning about you in your pocket, without tons of cycles spent "remembering" old examples. In fact, this is a major stumbling block in standard training, sampling is a huge problem. If you just iterate through the training corpus, you'll have forgotten most of the english stuff by the time you finish with chinese or spanish. You have to constantly mix and balance training info due to this limitation.

The fundamental difference is that physical neurons have a discrete on/off activation, while digital "neurons" in a network are merely continuous differentiable operations. They also don't have a notion of "spike timining dependency" to avoid overwriting activations that weren't related to an outcome. There are things like reward-decay over time, but this applies to the signal at a very coarse level, updates are still scattered to almost the entire system with every training example.
by Jtsummers | 2026-03-10 21:57:57+00:00
This is amusing when paired with the CTO's admission that he ran his team horribly, directing them to not write tests, and that they have to scrap all their work:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47324691

Maybe if their product were better they wouldn't need to rewrite it, they could use it to improve itself.
by A04eArchitect | 2026-03-10 21:57:58+00:00
The C++ vs Rust debate often misses the point of instruction-level optimization. I’ve been stress-testing a sub-85ns audit logic on a budget 3GB RAM ARM chip (A04e) for 10.8T datasets. Using Rust’s zero-copy and custom memory mapping, I’m getting latencies that usually require hand-tuned assembly in C++. The safety didn't cost me performance—it actually forced a better memory architecture. Has anyone else pushed ARM's L1 cache this hard for high-throughput validation?"
by david_iqlabs | 2026-03-10 21:58:01+00:00
The interesting challenge with AI assistants inside technical tools is grounding the responses in real system signals. If the model is just interpreting natural language prompts, it tends to produce generic advice. But if the assistant is tied directly to system telemetry or query results, it becomes much more useful.

In experiments I’ve been running, the pattern that seems to work best is deterministic signals first, then a constrained AI layer that interprets those signals rather than inventing analysis.
by array_key_first | 2026-03-10 21:58:36+00:00
I agree, we shouldn't be optimizing for the case where a child steals a credit card. That's just not in the threat model. I mean, they could steal IDs too, and children can already steal credit cards and buy, like, vbucks or whatever. Which probably causes more tangible real-world harm than seeing a pair of boobies or whatever we're trying to protect against.

However, I still think credit cards are overkill. They reveal way too much information, including addresses. I wouldn't trust most companies with my credit card either, at least not online. In person it's different, the scanners are secure especially if you use tap to pay. But online, you just have a pinky promise that your info isn't being stored.

Frankly, I'm getting sick and tired of being put in the situation where I have no choice but to just blindly trust people to do the right thing. Obviously, it's not working, and we need real solutions.
by anonnon | 2026-03-10 21:58:54+00:00
> Realistically, there’s a lot in there now that I simply couldn't have built in a standard human lifetime without them.

I have yet to see a study showing something like a 2x or better boost in programmer productivity through LLMs. Usually it's something like 10-30%, depending on what metrics you use (which I don't doubt). Maybe it's 50% with frontier models, but seeing these comments on HN where people act like they're 10x more productive with these tools is strange.
by paganel | 2026-03-10 21:58:57+00:00
> off work trees and running all the agents that I could afford,

I still think that we, programmers, having to pay money in order to write code is a travesti. And I'm not talking about paying the license for the odd text editor or even for an operating system, I'm talking about day-to-day operations. I'm surprised that there isn't a bigger push-back against this idea.
by jacquesm | 2026-03-10 21:59:38+00:00
Bit manipulation instructions are part and parcel of any curriculum that teaches CPU architecture. They are the basic building blocks for many more complex instructions.

https://five-embeddev.com/riscv-bitmanip/1.0.0/bitmanip.html

I can see quite a few items on that list that imnsho should have been included in the core and for the life of me I can't see the rationale behind leaving them out. Even the most basic 8 bit CPU had various shifts and rolls baked in.
by paulddraper | 2026-03-10 22:01:28+00:00
> The only "real difference" between a criminal offense where they "can" jail you but usually just fine you is procedural.

While you can be jailed for disobeying a court order, it's self-imposed arrest. You are released upon compliance.

That is different from incarceration, for which you continue to serve the sentence even when the original crime is not repeated.
by carefree-bob | 2026-03-10 22:01:40+00:00
Why do you think the charter of the UN says that all the power is invested in the security council and each of the great powers have a veto there?

It's almost as if the UN is the creation of the Great Powers, as a meeting ground where they can coordinate their actions, and is not intended to be some authority that tells the great powers what to do.

I don't know where these people learned alternate histories of the UN as being some kind of force that can keep nations in check.

It was never intended to play that role, and the UN Charter forbids it explicitly.

The real problem with the UN is that it is obsolete even for the role it was empowered to play, because with the advent of videoconferencing and abundant communication, it simply has no meaningful role to play. What it has become now is a jobs program where well connected people can obtain diplomatic posts and party in New York while not paying any parking tickets. That's literally all the UN is right now.
by blazingjolt | 2026-03-10 22:01:58+00:00
Hi HN. I’m one of the people working on this.

ACTIS is an open standard for generating verifiable evidence from autonomous transactions.

It defines things like signed transcripts, hash-linked negotiation rounds, and portable evidence bundles so transactions can be independently verified.

Curious to hear feedback from people building agent systems or payment infrastructure. Would love to see where you think there can be improvement
by oraphalous | 2026-03-10 22:03:06+00:00
> Yes, starting with tests without market fit can also be fatal. But calling anything done without tests is just a slower poison.

I think we are pretty close to agreement here. I'd be interested in what you have experienced in the realm of front-end testing though - whether you think things are just as cut and dried in that realm (that's another discussion though).

And I'll also accept the point about skill in test writing that improves the cost-benefit analysis. I'll also cop to not having that kind of practiced ability at testing to the level I would personally like. But it's chicken / egg. A lot of folks get their start at scrappy start ups that can't attract the best talent. And just can't afford to let their devs invest in their skills in this way. Hell - even established companies just grind their devs without letting them learn the shit they need to learn.

I feel a victim of this to some degree - and am combating it with time off work which I can afford at the moment. One of the things I'm working on is just understanding testing better - y'know, so I can in the future write a SKILL.md file that tells Claude what sort of tests it should write. lol...
AI is to software as power tools are to woodworking
by danfunk | 2026-03-10 22:03:11+00:00
Power tools did not remove people. They make woodworking accessible to more people. They make more complex projects possible. They make furniture less expensive. We don't have less jobs because of power tools. And with power tools came a proliferation of hardware stores to support all the people suddenly empowered to try their hand.

To take the analogy further, agents are like factories. Yes the drill can do the work on it's own, when it's on an assembly line, getting exactly the right part at the right time at the right angle. But it is insanely hard and expensive to set up a factory, and when it is done, it produces one thing.

Shit will change. But that is exactly what I liked about this industry to begin with. And people are highly motivated by fear, so the manipulators and influencers peddle it for all they are worth. There is nothing to fear here. It's just a new kind of tool for you to pick up, if you have the courage and heart to do so.
by jarcer | 2026-03-10 22:04:31+00:00
Hi HN,
A lot of crypto infrastructure already exists: stablecoins work, DeFi liquidity is real, and global settlement is faster than ever.
But DeFi still has a distribution problem. There’s a lot of capital onchain, yet most everyday users never reach it because the entry point is still built around trading apps, wallets, tokens, bridges, and network complexity.
We started Olie because we think the main bottleneck isn’t the rails anymore ,it’s the product layer.

Olie is a global dollar account built on USDC. Instead of interacting with exchanges or crypto-native tools, users interact with a simple dollar balance that works more like a modern banking app.
If DeFi is going to reach mainstream users, we think it has to become invisible in the user experience.
by hackyhacky | 2026-03-10 22:04:35+00:00
> On the other hand, detecting integer overflow in software is extremely expensive, increasing both the program size and the execution time considerably,

Most languages don't care about integer overflow. Your typical C program will happily wrap around.

If I really want to detect overflow, I can do this:

add t0, a0, a1
blt t0, a0, overflow

Which is one more instruction, which is not great, not terrible.
by pjerem | 2026-03-10 22:05:07+00:00
I was asking which tool, not which, not which model.

For the same model, you can just have it generate dad jokes or use it in a tool like OpenCode or Cursor or Zed or Cline or … and make it program complex things.

If I use Claude Sonnet on duck.ai I will have hard time generating something interesting. The same model in OpenCode does all my programming work.
by abdelhousni | 2026-03-10 22:05:10+00:00
Mind you it was in 2021 ... quote :

"The U.S.-led global war on terror has killed nearly 1 million people globally and cost more than $8 trillion since it began two decades ago. These staggering figures come from a landmark report issued Wednesday by Brown University’s Costs of War Project, an ongoing research effort to document the economic and human impact of post-9/11 military operations."
by classichasclass | 2026-03-10 22:05:55+00:00
As a counterexample, I point to another relatively boring RISC, PA-RISC. It took off not (just) because the architecture was straightforward, but because HP poured cash into making it quick, and PA-RISC continued to be a very competitive architecture until the mass insanity of Itanic arrived. I don't see RISC-V vendors making that level of investment, either because they won't (selling to cheap markets) or can't (no capacity or funding), and a cynical take would say they hide them behind NDAs so no one can look behind the curtain.

I know this is a very negative take. I don't try to hide my pro-Power ISA bias, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't like another choice. So far, however, I've been repeatedly disappointed by RISC-V. It's always "five or six years" from getting there.
by gnarlouse | 2026-03-10 22:06:06+00:00
I'm literally about to stop using the internet and go back to using cash for everything. These people can promptly (and sharply) go fuck themselves. so sick of mankind turning into a farm of the have-nots for the haves to profit off of.

And I'm sick of being strapped to a population of have-nots that are too fuck-dumb to do anything about it.
by Jtsummers | 2026-03-10 22:06:11+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47317568 - A submission by this person's company where they say they'll refund you if a bug makes it past their system. Given how buggy their own system apparently is (to the point they're scrapping all the code), perhaps it's not such a smart offer on their part.
by jplusequalt | 2026-03-10 22:06:25+00:00
>I don't think "LLMs making us dumber" is a real concern. Yes, people will lose some skills. Before calculators, adults were probably way better at doing arithmetic.

But it's a problem of scale.

Calculators are very specific tools. If you are trying to run a computation of some arithmetic/algebraic expression, then they are a great tool. But they're not going to get you far if you need help understanding how to file your taxes.

LLMs are multi-faceted tools. They can help with math, doing taxes, coding, doing research, writing essays, summarizing text, etc. Basically anything that can be condensed into an embedding that the LLM can work with is fair game.

If you're willing to accept that using a tool slowly erodes the skill that tool was made for, then you should also accept that you will see an erosion of MANY skill you currently have.

So the question is whether this is all worth it? Is an increase in productivity worth eroding a strong foundation of general purpose knowledge? Perhaps even the ability to learn in the first place?

I would argue no a million times over, but I'm starting to think that I'm an outlier.
by linsomniac | 2026-03-10 22:07:30+00:00
One component I haven't seen discussed here is that you also likely can't use them for anything but entirely off-grid setups. I've heard that in our locality, and I think this is pretty common around the US, that they won't permit you, and the utility won't allow grid tie of anything at all sketchy, including UL listed panels you buy used.
by donkeybeer | 2026-03-10 22:07:53+00:00
We don't yet know who did that and that happened only after Amerisarel's unprovoked invasion and war of aggression on Iran while in the middle of duping them about taking part in peaceful negotiations. Its a perfectly fine military action in the middle of a war. It didn't happen before Amerisrael assaulted Iran.

I'd worry more about the belligerent psychotic middle eastern country that has estimated 200 nukes but still refuses to acknowledge their existence or allow any inspections. A country with nukes that lies about them and jailed the person who exposed the nuclear program is an existential threat to the entire earth. Iran is nothing in comparison.

edit: I see there was an older event after reading 'seanmcdirmid' s comment, however not knowing anything of it, I won't comment on that.
by sumerc | 2026-03-10 22:07:57+00:00
It sits in your menu bar — hold a hotkey, speak, release, text appears in whatever app you're focused on.

Supports Groq Whisper, OpenAI Whisper, and Deepgram streaming. Sub-second transcription with detailed timing breakdowns.

Started as a vibe-coding project with AI, turned into
something I use every day for all my speech-to-text(mostly with different coding Agents)

Pure Go, minimal dependencies. Homebrew installable: brew
install sumerc/tap/zee
by metalcrow | 2026-03-10 22:08:38+00:00
I agree! But that's exactly my point: 1 type of machine is ok, another isn't, so it is not just a matter of all machines make derivative work. To draw the line more carefully is an open question. I would be surprised if a machine that "uses information sent into it in a substantive way" is a perfect deliminator. OTTOMH musicians might present some compelling objections.
by cmeacham98 | 2026-03-10 22:08:38+00:00
KYC is generally a force for good because it prevents fraud. While it is not reasonable for Discord to collect your identity that is a fair requirement for a bank account because money laundering is a serious problem worth preventing.

The reason the 'Epstein class' are able to get away with crimes is because in recent US elections the US voted to elect politicions that intentionally are not investigating those crimes and even pardoned some criminals convicted of them.
by dataflow | 2026-03-10 22:08:46+00:00
Except it seems to be arguing in the exact opposite direction, and about the other side of the problem?

Those in favor of gun control aren't trying to lower human responsibility, they're trying to place stricter limits on the guns than the status quo. Those against gun control are trying to loosen limits on the guns.

Here this person is proposing making individual responsibility stricter compared than what it is today. And they're not arguing for loosening limits on the tech either.

Isn't that practically the opposite of your analogy?
by gavinray | 2026-03-10 22:09:58+00:00
As an American, I hear "8 trillion dollars in debt" and it seems like monopoly money.

Nobody lets you borrow 8 trillion dollars without paying some of it back.

As far as I'm concerned, it's a made-up number, it's only gotten bigger every moment I've been alive, and nothing ever comes of it.

When the universe dies, the US national debt will be at one gajillion...
by jiggawatts | 2026-03-10 22:10:03+00:00
The science fiction vision of our future is orbiting factories, massive space stations where you can take a holiday, captured asteroids mined for their precious metals, space elevators, etc...

Many people think that this is realistic, eventually.

The eventually is starting now.

How exactly did people think it would happen? Someone clicks their fingers and we live in a sci-fi universe suddenly? Or that magically the entire space industry will restrict their orbits to a few narrow bands to preserve the oh-so-precious long exposure views of sunsets forever?

These articles are just futile bleating.

The future just isn't going to wait for grey-haired astronomers to catch up.

PS: If we can launch satellite constellations cheaply enough to cause an issue for terrestrial telescopes, then almost by definition we can launch telescopes to space at a low enough cost to solve the problem and get a better vantage point without the pesky atmosphere in the way.
by gonzalohm | 2026-03-10 22:10:10+00:00
That's probably dependent on your specific area of work. For most projects, It's okayish to deploy code with bugs. There will be future releases that fix those bugs and add improvements. Obviously that's not the case with high risk systems like space rockets software and similar.

With other engineering professions, all projects are like that. You cannot "deploy a bridge to production" to see what happens and fix it after a few have died
by dougdonohoe | 2026-03-10 22:10:59+00:00
I had asked about Hugo in the first prompt, and it told me what it was, and then my prompt was:

"Huh, could you build my functionality using Hugo [link to repo]? I mean I'm using dynamic JS features"

And the above was the response. I didn't put more than 10 seconds thought into it. The commenter claimed I could build the site with less code with a tool I had never heard of and I was curious if I had missed something.
by lovich | 2026-03-10 22:11:14+00:00
I don't think you're a lunatic.

If you look at the luddite rebellion they weren't actually against industrial technology like looms. They were against being told they weren't needed anymore and thrown to the wolves because of the machines.

The rich have forgotten they are made of meat and/or are planning on returning to feudalism ala Yarvin, Thiel, Musk, and co's politics.
by roughly | 2026-03-10 22:11:22+00:00
There's a lot of ink in this spent on how Poverty, Climate Change, Urban Decay, and Financial Markets are Complex Hard Complicated problems.

The problem with these is they're also problems where there are actors profiting from the failure to fix the system - the issue isn't that we don't understand the complex nature of the domain, it's that the components of the system actively and agentically resist changes to the system. George Soros called this Reflexivity - the fact that the system responds to your manipulations means you can't treat yourself and the system as separate agents, and you can't treat the system as a purely mechanistic/passive recipient of your changes. It's maybe the biggest blind spot for people who want to apply the rules and methods of physics to social issues - the universe may be indifferent, but your neighbors are not.
by JBorrow | 2026-03-10 22:11:26+00:00
Yeah, having your agent write 3x the code in exhaustive tests (I tried this recently and got 600 lines of tests for my 100 lines of code!) sure makes things look great, but when you actually look at the content of the tests they’re meaningless. Good tests validate the use of design patterns, ensure that dependencies hold, and are meaningful (e.g. shortcut debugging by setting up useful state) when they break.
by rmason | 2026-03-10 22:11:29+00:00
Link: https://archive.is/ZRt12

I grew up in Detroit in the fifties and sixties. Although I no longer live there it still feels like home and I return home.

From the beginning of the crack epidemic in the mid-eighties through the city's bankruptcy in 2012 Detroiters refer to those as the lost years. Everything slowly started falling apart and then it sped up. This story is about the human toll that happened. Things are a world better but the city is still slowly, determinedly coming back.