MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by runako | 2026-03-08 23:38:56+00:00
Most people write badly. Much of the text on the public Internet is written by professional writers, who tend to write less badly.

When people use LLMs to generate text, they often ask it to write like a professional. (I haven't tried, but I assume that if you ask an LLM to write like a Reddit troll it will use a different set of forms.)

When you ask an LLM to write like a professional writer, it will aim to sound like a professional writer. They do in fact, and in speech, use words like "delve" and "robust" because they spend years cultivating their vocabularies.

Professional writers are comfortable with punctuation marks and know the difference between the em dash and the en dash, and when to use each versus other marks. (The typical non-professional cannot manage to use the apostrophe, much less the marks that require judgement.)

And a lot of them end up writing business content at some point in their careers. Which leads to an interesting mash where you may get "leverage" used as a verb alongside some of the other pattern tropes.

Because business writing is its own universe. LinkedIn has been swimming in content that would be flagged as LLM-generated for at least 10 years, long before ChatGPT landed.
by rngfnby | 2026-03-08 23:39:16+00:00
My understanding is that, until the hits on Tehrans oil storage sites yesterday, the oil infrastructure has been spared. Nothing that isn't easy to repair.

Ie the price increase we've seen so far os mostly pricing the closing of the staits and the risk of reduced production production is halted due to running out of storage (ie akin to a cpu "pipeline stall".

But Iran got hit badly yesterday, with tar raining on the capital. If Iran retaliates against infrastructure...
by replwoacause | 2026-03-08 23:39:54+00:00
The limits are what did it for me. They kept boasting about Opus performance and improvements, practically begging me to try it out, and when I did, it totally obliterated my usage. I'm sure its good, but I stick to Sonnet because I've been burned bad. Never had that problem with ChatGPT, but it turns out they're just unprincipled and evil, which is a shame.
Show HN: Wa-agent – Framework for building AI agents on WhatsApp
by ibrahimwithi | 2026-03-08 23:40:23+00:00
I built a Node.js framework for running autonomous AI agents on WhatsApp. You define an agent in YAML (personality, tools, routing rules) and wa-agent handles the WhatsApp connection, message queuing, conversation memory, tool execution, and rate limiting.

It uses the Vercel AI SDK for the agent loop (generateText with multi-step tool use) and Baileys under the hood for WhatsApp. Supports Anthropic, OpenAI, or Ollama for local models.

Some things it handles that I couldn't find in existing WhatsApp bot repos:

- Per-chat message serialization (no race conditions when multiple messages arrive)
- Conversation summaries so the agent remembers context without stuffing full history into every call
- User profile extraction over time ("prefers Arabic", "lives in Dubai")
- Multi-agent routing — different agents for different groups/contacts/keywords
- Rate limiting and cooldowns per chat so a noisy group doesn't drain your API budget
- Cron triggers and human handoff

npx wa-agent init my-bot to get started.

GitHub: https://github.com/ibrahimhajjaj/wa-agent
npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/wa-agent
by cladopa | 2026-03-08 23:41:21+00:00
First thing: No it is not normal thing to be alone. We humans are social animals. Once we are isolated we usually die soon, so take that seriously.

Being isolated from your tribe used to be a worse punishment than death. The greeks called that punishment ostracism. El mio Cid was the Spanish representative case.

In the US there is an epidemy of loneliness.

So, what to do? First recognise that this is a problem and do not dig deeper. Do not isolate yourself more. Do not play vdeogames, do not read books until you fix it.

My main advice is to stop thinking too much about yourself, think about others.

I was into religious(Cristian catholic) orgs and I helped old people(something I did not like), I helped poor people on the streets(liked it more) and I helped drug addicts and war refugees.

Helping drug addicts were a pain on the aßß, but once you make someone get out, he or she becomes a friend for life. It is like the friendships that are done in fighters of a war. Once you have put your life on the hands of someone else and trusted someone else so much, nothing can break that friendship.

If you think about that in a meta way, I was helping people that were marginalised, that were alone, and in the process I could not be alone. I did it in a religious group(a tribe in itself)

Thanks to this experience I can make friends very fast in a new place, something few adults know how to do.

If you are going to read, read a book called "How to influence people and make friends", but do not read the new book that is a badly revised book by the incompetent descendants of the writer, read the old original book.

But reading books is not going to help because you need action first, not reflection, and action is going to be painful for a while, and you have to endure the pain until it becomes easy. The best advise is to get out there, try hard, fail spectacularly and only then read the book.

Stop thinking about yourself, me, me and me. We are not wired to work for us alone. We are worked for working for others: Our tribe, our children, our family.

Instead of not trying to be alone, focusing on yourself (me, me and me) start thinking on helping other people that are alone. Start thinking on creating your own tribe or joining a new tribe. It can be a maker space, a group for hiking or helping or teaching kids.
Show HN: Pioneer 2 – a retro Soviet chess computer playing online
by Tdxt | 2026-03-08 23:41:44+00:00
I built Pioneer 2, a retro-style chess computer inspired by 1980s dedicated chess machines.

It runs a personality-based chess engine and is playable directly in the browser.

The goal was to recreate the feeling of old chess computers while running modern engine logic underneath.

You can try it here:
https://play.pioneer2chess.com

The project is open source:
https://github.com/arnebailliere-oss-svg/pioneer2
by nlavezzo | 2026-03-08 23:41:51+00:00
Having spent several years unexpectedly alone after a big breakup in my mid twenties, I'd also highly recommend getting involved in a church, even if it's just to serve others in some practical way organized by the church. Most churches have plenty of need in "care" ministries like bringing meals (and conversation) to people who are homebound, or in the hospital. One cool thing our church does is organize volunteers to help with teaching English as a second language to refugees living in our community.

Do enough of these kinds of things and not only will you connect with those you serve, but also with those serving others out of love. These are good people to be connected to, especially since you'll become more like them over time.
by krapp | 2026-03-08 23:42:05+00:00
People will need to participate otherwise there won't be any new content. I see it as just like vouching, except someone has to vouch for green accounts. A slightly more equitable (and easier to implement) version of lobste.rs' invite tree.

What I want is for green accounts not to be abused as much as they are. The number of noxious, vitriolic troll alt accounts and bots is getting ridiculous. That is almost entirely the fault of established users of course, but there's no way to deal with them poisoning the well without affecting new users.
by hocuspocus | 2026-03-08 23:42:13+00:00
> But somehow Kotlin managed to stay "not too complex", unlike Scala.

It's not really true anymore, Kotlin has slowly absorbed most of the same features and ideas even though they're sometimes pretty half-baked, and it's even less principled than the current Scala ecosystem. JetBrains also wants to make Kotlin target every platform under the sun.

At this point, the only notable difference are HKTs and Scala's metaprogramming abilities. Kotlin stuck to a compiler plugin exposing a standard interface (kotlinx.serialization) for compile-time codegen. Scala can do things like deriving an HTTP client from an OpenAPI specification on the fly, by the LSP backend.
by mitchbob | 2026-03-08 23:42:24+00:00
> For years now, questions about A.I. have taken the form of “what happens if?” What happens if A.I. begins replacing workers? What happens if it becomes capable of writing its own code? What happens if it begins to deceive those testing its capabilities? What happens if governments use it for surveillance and war? What happens if governments decide it is so powerful that they need control of the labs that develop it?

> This year, the A.I. questions have taken a new form, “what happens now?”

https://archive.ph/yaJnE
by delotrag | 2026-03-08 23:42:31+00:00
It is explicitly _not_ controlling what _users_ do. It is a restriction on _distributors_ of software. As a user of the software, you may use it for any purpose, modify it to your heart's desire, and even redistribute it. You just can't redistribute it and then refuse to give downstream users the same rights.

That is not meaningfully a restriction unless you're trying to unjustly profit off the work of others. The copyright holder doesn't exercise control over users here.
by credit_guy | 2026-03-08 23:43:11+00:00
The moat is compute.

In my case, I always use Opus 4.6 in my work, but quite often I get a 504 error, and that's quite annoying. I get errors like that with Gemini too. I can't estimate if I'd get a similar number of errors with ChatGPT, since I use it very infrequently.

But imagine that at some point one of the big 3 (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) gets very high availability, while the others have very poor availability. Then people would switch to them, even if their models were a bit worse.

Now, OpenAI has been building like crazy, and contracting for future builds like crazy too. Google has very deep pockets, so they'll probably have enough compute to stay in the game. But I fear that Anthropic will not be able to match OpenAI and Google in terms of datacenter build, so it's only a matter of time (and not a lot of time) until they'll be in a pretty tight spot.
by kazinator | 2026-03-08 23:43:13+00:00
Frets are already on equal temperament on the vast majority of mainstream guitars; you're not getting away from equal temperament unless all you play is open strings, like a koto/harp.

If octaves are perfect with one string in between, the in between string can be slightly detuned from equal temperament to provide a clean fifth, free of beats. Then it also provides a clean fourth up to the octave. That's a useful thing that will make certain chords sound good.
by thuruv | 2026-03-08 23:43:16+00:00
disagree. I've felt the same after reading the same but I believe op tries just to point out that when you're the best version of yourselves, by removing the common denominator of bad versions, you'll be noticed more and that presents an interesting way for people to present a chance themselves to hear/see you. From there you get to go and may be, may be you find yourselves with a good friend. More importantly,Ithe confidence you'll get out of this is immense and you'll feel peace spending time for yourselves instead of feeling bad about having all the time and don't have anyone to spend with.. I cant say this advice helped me 100% but atleast it helped reduce the biased stress you put on yourselves.
by bsder | 2026-03-08 23:43:26+00:00
We now know the comparison:
https://theconversation.com/did-swedens-controversial-covid-...

Elderly in Sweden got hurt really badly while the very youngest didn't have the education losses seen elsewhere.

However, Swedes, unlike dumbass Americans, took sensible precautions even though there weren't required by law.

> Swedes were not forced to take action against the spread of the virus, but they did so anyway. This voluntary approach might not have worked everywhere, but Sweden has a history of high trust in authorities, and people tend to comply with public health recommendations.

> In its final report on the pandemic response, the Corona Commission concluded that tougher measures should have been taken early in the pandemic, such as quarantine for those returning from high-risk areas and a temporary ban on entry to Sweden.
by ajross | 2026-03-08 23:43:30+00:00
> The 1880s blacksmith [...] moved to shared housing in Manchester and a shorter lifespan working for poverty wages, lost fingers/arms in machines, maybe ended up on skid row

That's... just not remotely true, unless you're talking about it as a maybe-it-happened-to-someone story. In fact it's basically a lie.

Every income group in the US (and recognize that "blacksmiths" represent skilled trades workers who earned well above median and had for thousands of years!) saw huge, huge, HUGE increases between 1880 and 1950. I mean... are you high?

> It took almost 70 years and the post WW2 destruction of the rest of the worlds economies/infrastructure to create that 1950s American suburbanite world.

Again, big citation needed on this one. Western Europe was very close to US quality-of-life numbers by the 60's, and the more successful nations started to pass it in the 90's. (Also recognize that the US had already pulled ahead in the 30's, Germany and France were lagging even before the war). You're looking at something along the lines of a decade to rebuild, tops.
by AH4oFVbPT4f8 | 2026-03-08 23:43:36+00:00
Change the requirements.txt in the backend to the following

fastapi==0.103.1

uvicorn==0.23.2

yfinance>=0.2.40

feedparser==6.0.10

legacy-cgi==2.6.1

requests==2.31.0

apscheduler==3.10.3

pydantic==2.11.0

pydantic-settings==2.8.0

playwright>=1.58.0

beautifulsoup4>=4.12.0

sgp4>=2.22

cachetools>=5.3.0

cloudscraper>=1.2.71

reverse_geocoder>=1.5.1

lxml>=5.0

python-dotenv>=1.0

and be on python 3.13 and it should get you up and running
by dTal | 2026-03-08 23:43:40+00:00
My pleasure!

We are talking about a hypothetical universe in which nearly all software is GPL, such that it is almost impossible to write useful software without building upon other GPL code. In such a universe, licensing "your" code as MIT would indeed be unfair, because you would be taking the work of others, illegally stripping the label, and making it available to profitable interests to use without compensation to the original developers against their express wishes - said compensation merely being the extremely reasonable request to share back, as you were shared to.

You still haven't really explained why you're so keen on doing that sort of thing.
by tomhow | 2026-03-08 23:44:08+00:00
We are sympathetic, but it's still not OK to fulminate on HN, no matter what it's about. It just makes the place miserable. Please flag it or email us (hn@ycombinator.com) if you think a post is unfit for HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by mattlangston | 2026-03-08 23:44:17+00:00
I had the same SETI inspiration yesterday of "autoresearch swarms". Andrej and I had no coordination - we just both had the same idea at the same time.

Experiments already running. Write up:

"Autoresearch on DGX Spark: Error Bars, GPU Pools, and the Case for an Autonomous Research Swarm": https://github.com/matt-langston/autoresearch/discussions/1

My fork of Andrej's repo if you want to join in: https://github.com/matt-langston/autoresearch
by fallenchromium | 2026-03-08 23:45:04+00:00
This is going to be a bit dry, but I'm going to overshare too much if I won't keep it compact.

Solitude is a grace when you have deep respect / is inspired by the world, life, or something more specific, because you belong to a construct you have a model for, and thus you have an obvious list of actions and values.

It's very intimidating when you don't though, because you feel lost and can't see a clear way to gain momentum - and movement is life, as they say. There are two things that can help with that.

1. Listening the ideas of people that share a language and values with you, but don't necessarily share your vision. These are friends, most of the time. I get that you might've distanced from yours and they might've become entirely different people, but try reconnecting with them, one at a time. What mends you here is paying attention to what these people worry about - it gives you choice of things to be enthusiastic about (which then makes more friends, initiatives, impact, which are all "movement" of sorts). Try not to fall for trap of "spending time to silence the doubts and discomfort" as that's the same as doing "snooze" on an alarm. You can try to find those people on conferences, language clubs, but they're pretty much everywhere, you should just pick the context that feels least awkward to start a conversation in.

2. Change of context. There's a pretty big chance of gaining momentum while traveling, because your attention sharpens while you're in an environment that is hard to predict. You'll notice a lot of things you enjoy or hate, some of them might inspire you to study, try something new or empathize to a different way of living.

There's a bonus one - building something for someone is very fulfilling for the usual auditory of HN. There's a lot of people who'd be glad to use a helping hand, just pick a person / group you'd be ok to help and ask what can you do for them with your talents / skills. You'll be surprised how glad you'll be that you did that.

P.S. There are also thinner rationales behind what I've written, and I explained it rather mechanistically, but basically that's what helped me a lot when I suffered from an abrupt cutoff from the community that was a big part of my life.

P.P.S. I'm young, but it probably doesn't matter as much. Have a virtual hug from me ;). I think it's going to be better for you rather soon!
by andrewinardeer | 2026-03-08 23:45:52+00:00
It's wild to think that in the entire existence of human history, after rolling along largely unchanged for literally hundreds of thousands of years, that we happen to be born in the small sliver of time where we went from inventing simple silicon based calculating machines to said machines bringing an end to life as we know it by end of 2027.

I don't even think the most plugged in HN reader understands what will be unintentionally released with an upcoming SOTA model. It's the safety testing. The Cruz of it is, the source of truth is how the model evaluates itself.

And it's lying. All the time.

Within a week of public launch it'll have backdoored targeted Linux based distros on public facing internet. This includes military and Fortune 500 networks.

All the while saying, "Everything's cool, bro. Trust me." The Safety Team rubber stamps it.

Please take care of your loved ones.
by noobernetes | 2026-03-08 23:45:56+00:00
Update on the IPFS-backed container registry. Main addition: control over what gets shared. Public images federate automatically — one pull from Docker Hub seeds the whole network. Proprietary images stay private by default. Private IPFS swarms let you replicate across your own infrastructure without touching the public network.

Looking for early adopters. Public instance coming soon.
by dangus | 2026-03-08 23:45:59+00:00
Seems like you’re willfully ignoring the bulk of the content of my comment where I talk about other brands besides framework. You’re just here to bash on framework because you don’t like them.

Fine, you don’t like framework, someone can get a PC laptop from a brand with available concierge support like HP, Dell, Lenovo. Dell will come to your house to repair your system. Apple will not.

Your motherboard was repaired at $0 because you were in warranty. That’s not really a spectacularly unique experience.

The whole “walk into a store” thing with Apple isn’t actually an advantage anymore because they no longer repair computers inside the retail locations, they’re all shipped out to depot.

Apple support is all smiles, but their out of warranty pricing is where they are effectively dismissive, they might as well not respond to emails at that point because their solutions at that point are “you might as well throw your computer in the trash” economically speaking.

If you needed your motherboard replaced 4 years into your ownership you’d be paying a pointlessly high cost which is Apple’s way of telling you to “go away.”

For my framework, I’d be getting a replacement AND an upgrade, because my chassis is cross compatible.
by palata | 2026-03-08 23:45:59+00:00
I am not convinced.

- Natural languages are ambiguous. That's the reason why we created programming languages. So the documentation around the code is generally ambiguous as well. Worse: it's not being executed, so it can get out of date (sometimes in subtle ways).

- LLMs are trained on tons of source code, which is arguably a smaller space than natural languages. My experience is that LLMs are really good at e.g. translating code between two programming languages. But translating my prompts to code is not working as well, because my prompts are in natural languages, and hence ambiguous.

- I wonder if it is a question of "natural languages vs programming languages" or "bad code vs good code". I could totally imagine that documenting bad code helps the LLMs (and the humans) understand the intent, while documenting good code actually adds ambiguity.

What I learned is that we write code for humans to read. Good code is code that clearly expresses the intent. If there is a need to comment the code all over the place, to me it means that the code is maybe not as good as it should be :-).

Of course there is an argument to make that the quality of code is generally getting worse every year, and therefore there is more and more a need for documentation around it because it's getting hard to understand what the hell the author wanted to do.
by macintux | 2026-03-08 23:46:43+00:00
I work with a project that is heavily configuration-driven. It seems promising, but in reality:

- Configuration is massively duplicated, across repositories

- No one is willing to rip out redundancy, because comprehensive testing is not practical

- In order to understand the configuration, you have to read lots of code, again across multiple repositories (this in particular is a problem for LLM assistance, at least the way we currently use it)

I love the idea, but in practice it’s currently a nightmare. I think if we took a week we could clean things up a fair bit, but we don’t have a week (at least as far as management is concerned), and again, without full functional testing, it’s difficult to know when you’ve accidentally broken someone else’s subsystem
by bsder | 2026-03-08 23:47:01+00:00
Also missing from the discussion is that it is easy to prove that an N95 mask works because the effect is so dramatic.

The fact that the efficacy of a surgical mask is more difficult to prove does not mean that it doesn't work. And, as you point out, the major benefit is to the people around you so that you don't unintentionally spread the disease before you realize you have it.
by scoofy | 2026-03-08 23:47:02+00:00
I definitely think this is solvable via some basic honeypot laiden proof of work.

1. Exist for some time.

2. Vote on stuff that humans would vote for.

3. Avoiding voting on traps.

4. Comment occasionally and productively.

5. Post to a limited existing audience, and receive upvotes.

6. Post limitedly to a general audience.

7. Post generally.

It’s basic earn a reputation behavior.
by enaaem | 2026-03-08 23:49:01+00:00
I would like to add an example to this.

Restrictive zoning and the lack of walkable neighbourhoods makes it very difficult for small businesses that rely on personal service. This isn't just a slight inconvenience, but it completely changes the fabric of society. But in American libertarian circles taxation takes up all the oxygen in the room. People are generally blind to opportunity cost.