MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by II2II | 2026-03-08 01:36:27+00:00
In the mid-1990's, I requested information from a major multinational corporation (IBM) that had a significant presence in my country. They somehow managed to mangle the six characters of a Canadian postal code, which alternates between letters and digits, into a five digit zip code. Making it even more perplexing, the envelope was addressed by hand and came from New York state. Some Americans seem to think that the rest of the world is a mirror of them, and will go through unusual contortions to maintain that belief. (To be fair: there is another level above that which is Anglo-centric, which allows for just enough variation between English speaking nations.)

I have seen websites that more-or-less takes the author's advice though. They are country specific. They are backed by the postal system's database. They present a list of addresses that match up with the postal code. They do not work very well when a particular address does not have a postal code. And yes, that happens.
by jongjong | 2026-03-08 01:36:58+00:00
All I can say is that people do seem to overestimate the impact of losing a war. Just like they overestimate the need to wage war in the first place.

The main outcome of a war is loss of lives and infrastructure. Political changes are minor; maybe they will start teaching the language of the invader in schools as an elective... Maybe restaurants will get new foods added to the menu. Maybe taxes will go up a little... Money will go to a different set of politicians.

But if you want a modern proof; look at Iraq and Afghanistan... Under US occupation for many years. They have the same people, same language, same culture, same everything as before... It's like they never lost any battles. Look at Germany after they lost WW2; they still speak German. Their cultural identity is still very strong; maybe it affected their foreign policy a little but apart from that, it's hard to tell.

War is truly useless except for those selling weapons and for a couple of big companies that are trying to acquire some mineral resources or securing some trade routes. There's really no other purpose.

My ancestors are from a country which (during the French revolution) had voluntarily changed 'ownership' from France to Britain and later back to France again. They still speak French. Nothing changed, at all, except for the fact that the elites conveniently avoided the Guillotine... Fast forward 300 years and you can't tell any cultural or economic difference at all from the other neighboring nations which remained under France and had experienced the Guillotine; same GDP numbers, same culture, same everything.

Anglo-Saxons like to make fun of the French for surrendering easily but as a regular citizen, it actually makes logical sense. I think it just shows that the government is better aligned with the interests of the people.

Strategic surrender is smart; if you know ahead of time which force is most powerful and can evaluate it objectively, you can save yourself the trouble of dying and you end up with a better outcome than you would have otherwise. It's risk management.

Of course, the Swiss are even smarter for staying neutral but France is too big to take a neutral stance (since it can actually make a difference) so they take one stance and then back-peddle if the tide turns.
Show HN: Apc-CLI – sync AI memory across Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot
by FZ2000 | 2026-03-08 01:37:20+00:00
I use 4-5 AI coding tools depending on the task. The thing that kept frustrating me: every tool stores its context in a different place, in a different format. Switch from Claude Code to Cursor mid-project and you start from scratch. Set up a new machine and you rebuild everything by hand.

apc-cli fixes this with three commands:

apc collect # extract skills, MCP servers, and memory from every installed tool
apc status # see what's in sync and what isn't
apc sync # push everything to all your tools

It handles: Claude Code · Cursor · Gemini CLI · GitHub Copilot · Windsurf · OpenClaw

No cloud account. Everything runs locally. API keys go to the OS keychain, not a config file. MIT licensed.

PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/apc-cli/

Happy to hear what's missing — especially if you use tools I haven't added support for yet.
by loloquwowndueo | 2026-03-08 01:37:45+00:00
I like how instead of just rephrasing the website’s premise to make it clear he only cares about the US, he added some ip-based geolocation to select a snarky response based on where you are. Essentially the site argues back to you if you’re not in the US or something. Why did this person even bother creating the website if he’s so hostile and angry.
by mdhowle | 2026-03-08 01:38:58+00:00
Mine is even simpler.

journal # opens 2026-03-07.md in vim
journal yesterday # opens 2026-03-06.md in vim
journal weekly # pipes 2026-03-01 – 07.md into vim
journal monthly # pipes 2026-03-01 – 31.md into vim
journal monthly last month # pipes 2026-02-01 – 28.md into vim

I added support for other editors. For the editors that don't support stdin, it creates a temporary file for the generated pages ("weekly", "monthly", etc.)

It fits my needs perfectly. It removes the friction of note taking. It's easy to backup, search, convert the notes. If I want to use another editor like a WYSIWYG markdown editor, it's trivial to change.
by WBrentWilliams | 2026-03-08 01:39:14+00:00
Ehh... US-centric. Better to use significance order: Country, then postal (most countries have postal), then region, city, and street address. Best, however, is to _not_ separate the address into fields. Instead, allow a free text field for the person doing data entry to put in the address in _their_ format and then parse it on the backend. This gets you the most flexibility and allows you to encounter and handle corner cases by using (my favorite test data) public addresses from all over the world. _I_ routinely test my address entry by Googling McDonald's locations and feeding them into my system. Handle an inscrutable address like any other bad data and say, politely, that your system does not understand the data.

All that said, free-form entry is a hard sell. My _customers_ expect field data entry, so I implement field data entry. I just re-order my checks to be more forgiving until the data entry is complete.

I was implementing a customer service address entry using significance order 25 years ago. As I already _knew_ that I had a US-centric customer base (we sold long distance to sorority and fraternity members), entering US ZIP first saved a lot of time and more highly leveraged the US postal address cleaner that we had already purchased for our mass marketing mailers. The people working the call center _loved_ it, as they could focus more on their call turn-over than on data entry.
by ToukoTok | 2026-03-08 01:42:34+00:00
2,500+ US newspapers have closed since 2005. 213 counties have zero journalists. We built Port, submit a voice memo, photo, or text tip about your town and it becomes a structured article in ~3 minutes for about $0.05.

The pipeline: ElevenLabs transcribes → Gemini generates → Gemini reviews (checks claims against source material, flags gaps) → publishes. The review step is the interesting part, it actually catches when the AI hallucinates beyond what the source said.

We've got 68 articles across 15+ towns. Most are places where the paper recently died. The cost to serve a town is under $5/year, which changes the economics completely, you don't need ad revenue or subscribers to justify covering a place.

Not pretending this replaces real reporters. But for a town where the alternative is literally nothing, a structured article from a resident's firsthand account beats the Facebook post that disappears tomorrow.

Hackathon project by a couple students, rough around the edges. Happy to talk about the technical side or hear why this is doomed.

Here's Chesterton, Indiana — their 141-year-old paper closed last year: https://news.minir.ai/explore?town=chesterton

Main site: https://news.minir.ai
by 0xcafefood | 2026-03-08 01:43:29+00:00
In my experience, code validation (unit testing, code review, manual testing, etc.) was more of a bottleneck than producing code for the most part. This means that faster code generation wouldn't produce significant gains in throughput unless the code validation speeds up too. In my workplace, I've seen evidence that the people showing the biggest productivity gains from AI coding are now shipping enormous commits that are barely getting any validation. Given the Zeitgeist, others are for some reason more lenient towards that than they normally would be (or should be).
by qzira | 2026-03-08 01:43:31+00:00
When people talk about AI increasing developer productivity, they usually focus on the coding part.
In my experience, the bigger change happens after the code is written.
When you move from writing code to supervising agents, your output increases — but your cognitive load increases too.
Instead of writing every line yourself, you're now monitoring systems:
Did the agent go off-script?
Did it retry 50 times while I was asleep?
What did that run actually cost?
The strange part is that the mental burden doesn't disappear just because the agent is autonomous.
In some ways it gets worse, because failures become harder to notice early and harder to contain once they start.
It starts to feel less like programming and more like running operations for a team of extremely fast, extremely literal junior developers.
Curious if others are seeing the same shift.
by phil21 | 2026-03-08 01:43:41+00:00
> It's using the swarm as your own dev team.
reply

Managing high performance dev/ops teams is it's own form of a state of flow. In fact for me, it's much more addicting than any other as the outcomes are usually many multiples of any IC role you could have. Even crazier when you have a "follow the sun" team involved so there the work just gets sequentially handed off and is always in constant motion.

I imagine AI coding is like this for a lot of folks.
by jiggawatts | 2026-03-08 01:44:21+00:00
> Kudos to Lisa Su and the team.

They're a typical hardware maker unable to focus on software, which is why NVIDIA is now a multi-trillion dollar corporation and AMD is "just" a few hundred billion.

They've focused too much on CPUs and completely dropped the ball on AI and compute accelerators.

It's especially sad considering that the MI300 and related accelerators on paper are competitive with NVIDIA hardware, it's just that they have nowhere near the same software stack, so nobody cares.
by tom_ | 2026-03-08 01:45:04+00:00
Pretty much any Mac bought in the past 5 years can fulfil the requirements, which doesn't feel terribly unreasonable, and I bet the Intel case would be straightforward to cover too, and now you're catering for every Mac bought in the past 6 years.

Apple are dicks about making it easy to test on older macOS revisions, but I'm sure that'd actually be easier than you'd expect too. (I have a FOSS project that has macOS as a supported target. It targets OS X Mavericks, released in 2013. I don't have any easy way of testing anything older than macOS Ventura, released in 2022, and to be honest I don't really care to figure out how to do any better, but, last time somebody complained about OS X Mavericks incompatibility, and I fixed the problem, which was actually very easy to do: it did apparently work.) Put in a modicum of effort and I'm sure you can make this thing work for every Mac sold since like 2015, and there'd be a non-zero chance it'd work for some older ones too.

Thinking back to when BBSs were a thing, since that'd be on topic: perhaps Americans got a lucky break with the Apple II, in production from 1977-1993 (says Wikipedia) and seemingly a viable commercial platform for a measurable fraction of the period? For me, growing up in the UK in the late 20th century, the whole computer ecosystem seemed to get pretty much completely refreshed about every 10 years at the very most. Buy a BBC Micro in 1983: platform dead by 1990. Buy a ZX Spectrum in 1983: platform dead by 1991. Buy an Atari ST in 1985: platform dead by 1992. Buy an Amiga in 1986: platform dead by 1994. The PC was a bit of an exception, as the OS remained the same (for good or for ill...) for longer, but the onward march of hardware progress meant that you'd need new hardware every few years if you wanted to actually run recent software.

Anyway, my basic thinking is that if in March 2026 you are releasing some software that requires you to have a computer manufactured at some point in the 2020s, then this is hardly without historical precedent. It might even simply be the natural order of things.

Me? I set the displays to go to sleep after N minutes.
by vessenes | 2026-03-08 01:45:20+00:00
Introspection: all heard. As a practical matter, you can rl or prompt inject information about the model into context and most major models do this, not least I expect because they’d like to be able to complain when that output is taken for rl by other model training firms.

I agree that an intermediate non anthropomorphic but still looking at one’s own layers sort of situation isn’t in any architecture I’m aware of right now. I don’t imagine it would add much to a model.

Chip etching: yep. If you’ve never seen an unknown chip analyzed in anger, it’s pretty cool.
by butILoveLife | 2026-03-08 01:46:00+00:00
We've become cashiers.

My 6 year old is doing my job.

The best I can hope for is that HN article that said the word "Context".

I know the magic words "Make me a single page html js web app"... or "Install Virtual Box with Fedora Cinnamon using CLI"....

I'm 8x more productive than I was in 2022... And I jokingly say "I'm probably not going to have a job in 1 or 2 years"...

We are going to create incredible value to humanity. 8x rate. I don't know what our hourly will be.
by vessenes | 2026-03-08 01:48:30+00:00
I asked Gemini for a literature search and it came back with this:

References
Chen, R., Arditi, A., Sleight, H., Evans, O., & Lindsey, J. (2025). Persona Vectors: Monitoring and Controlling Character Traits in Language Models. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2507.21509
Cited by: 97

Greenblatt, R., Denison, C., Wright, B., Roger, F., MacDiarmid, M., Marks, S., Treutlein, J., Belonax, T., Chen, J., Duvenaud, D., Khan, A., Michael, J., Mindermann, S., Perez, E., Petrini, L., Uesato, J., Kaplan, J., Shlegeris, B., Bowman, S. R., & Hubinger, E. (2024). Alignment faking in large language models. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2412.14093
Cited by: 237

Templeton, A., Conerly, T., Marcus, J., Lindsay, J., Bricken, T., Chen, B., ... & Henighan, T. (2024). Mapping the Mind of a Large Language Model. Anthropic Transformer Circuits Thread. https://transformer-circuits.pub/2024/scaling-monosemanticit...

Gemini thinks it’s the mapping the mind paper but I thought it was more recent than that - I think mapping the mind was the original activation circuits paper and then it was a follow on paper with a toss off comment that I noted. I didn’t keep track of it though!
by stingraycharles | 2026-03-08 01:49:20+00:00
You’re reading too much into the AI generated prose. Just a little bit later they say about “why raw markdown”:

“Every note app eventually dies. When it does, your notes should survive. Plain .md files will outlive every app, every company, every format war.”

Which doesn’t make a lot of sense — it’s still a format being rendered, otherwise I may as well use notepad.
by hirvi74 | 2026-03-08 01:49:46+00:00
I disagree. I also believe you might be equating your preferences with necessities. Much of what you listed is absolutely not needed, and often just brings in more external dependencies of questionable benefit. Take AutoMapper, for example, I cannot stand the tool, but many people enjoy it. I (sarcastically) bet many were thrilled when Jimmy, the maintainer decided to change to a paid license years after its release and heavy adoption.

I would argue .NET is roughly just as feature packed as many other frameworks, if not more so. I am glad many popular 3rd-party libraries are not baked into .NET. I do not want frameworks to be rife with garbage no one needs. Keep them lean and keep them mean.

Though, I will agree with you on logging. I do believe that the 3rd-party solutions are better.
by jiggawatts | 2026-03-08 01:50:21+00:00
> I don't even know where to start parsing it.

If it helps, the key part is: "that it is running on".

You can't use software to analyse images of disassembled chips that it is running on because disassembled chips can't run software!

A surgeon can learn about brain surgery by inspecting other brains, but the smartest brain surgeon in the world can't possibly figure out how many neurons or synapses their own brains have just by thinking about it.

Your meat substrate is inaccessible to your thoughts in the exact same manner that the number of weights, model architecture, runtime stack, CUDA driver version, etc, etc... are totally inaccessible to an LLM.

It can be told, after the fact, in the same manner that a surgeon might study how brains work in a series of lectures, but that is fundamentally distinct.

PS: Most ChatGPT models didn't know what they were called either, and tended to say the name and properties of their predecessor model, which was in their training set. Open AI eventually got fed up with people thinking this was a fundamental flaw (it isn't), and baked this specific set of metadata into the system prompt and/or the post-training phase.
by bigDinosaur | 2026-03-08 01:51:54+00:00
Describing Germany's loss in WW2 as 'affecting their foreign policy a little' represents a profound disconnect with reality, which is that WW2 fundamentally reshaped the entire world, cemented the US as a superpower, set up the USSR for its rise, split Germany in two (with major political effects to this day), ended European empires (UK, French), and ultimately brought about the EU. And those are just some of WW2's effects, which would have all gone completely different directions if Germany or Japan had won.
by brucehoult | 2026-03-08 01:53:32+00:00
Making insider/true expert information public more quickly in the form of influencing prices in a toy market is THE ENTIRE POINT of prediction markets.

Read the original papers on them.

http://li.mit.edu/Stuff/CNSE/Paper/Hanson90.pdf

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3216893

https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/insiderbet.pdf
by justsomehnguy | 2026-03-08 01:54:38+00:00
>> Compared to Depeche Mode and other bands that only get better with age, Metallica just play the same old songs or worse

Hah!

COuple of years ago I was sipping beer in some local bar and there were some music video running on a TV. Aged angsty men with an "AMERICA YEAH bald eagle screech" vocals and visuals. "What a lame Metallica copycats" I thought. And then the title card shown up...
by riteshpuj2013 | 2026-03-08 01:55:19+00:00
One idea that comes my mind - create a note with full context of what went through during the development and then ask LLM to use that note and actual code to quiz yourself so that you can understand if you have got enough grasp. While doing this exercise, it will add some friction and build some memory of what you did. You can also understand what additional documentation you would need to be able to get grasp of what you did, when you read code again in future.
by maldev | 2026-03-08 01:56:00+00:00
I just don’t want to engage with someone trying to do a gotcha and replying a 1 liner to a longer discussion. I don’t think they’re engaging in good faith.

It’s pretty simple. We give the government the power of force to help have a society. We have limits on that.

So, AI for terrorists, our enemies, wars? Unlimited.

AI that go against civil liberties for Americans? Bad.

AI that harms people. Bad.

The issue is “harm” is subjective and taken over by the wokeness comment. Harassing women shouldn’t instantly be flagged as harmful. Asking hard questions shouldn’t be seen as harmful. Asking how to make a bomb, harmful.

I’ve answered many questions and I’m answering yours. More than happy to stand up for my beliefs and work towards making my country the best it can be. I spent my career in DoD, I’ve written my congressman about DHS overreach on Americans. And I’ve been to active combat zones. I also find what’s happening in Europe disgusting and can’t believe how my ancestral home is being decimated. But when I go I see many who are scared to speak up in their repressive regimes and love how us Americans have freedoms.
by yellowapple | 2026-03-08 01:57:23+00:00
> that the cost of catching cheaters is significantly higher than the cost of cheating

This is tackling the problem from the wrong direction. The right direction would be to make it harder to cheat in the first place. For example: if the student submits an essay, and that student is able to coherently and accurately answer any questions asked about the essay in a face-to-face conversation, then that student is probably the genuine author of that essay.
by j45 | 2026-03-08 01:57:33+00:00
Underrated comment.

Even if AI with autonomous agentic development made something that worked at the average of code quality, I wonder if the code might be a little more sturdy, predictable, and the compromise is a little more verbose for the level that works for the AI to manage it.

Humans would then help oversee the input, insight, and extension and improvement above and below that.

AI could be a baseline.
by Waterluvian | 2026-03-08 01:58:39+00:00
That really sounds like micro managing jr. developers.

I wonder if the interface for this kind of thing might be better presented as a sort of JIRA ticket system. Define a dependency graph of work with the ability to break down any ticket into more tickets or change priority or relationships etc.

Though I think the micro manage part still doesn’t fit into that model. You’d need the code-level view and not just a ticket covering the tests that satisfy the spec and
performance goals.
by dkechag | 2026-03-08 02:01:04+00:00
I wrote the article. I would NEVER tell anyone to use Oracle, as the vendor lock in and strong-arming and pricing is ridiculous. That said, I am hosting small projects on Oracle Cloud, due to the super low cost. I can just move them whenever they decide to be naughty, I am not using an oracle DB or anything proprietary, just linux VMs with my own mysql setup.
by zackify | 2026-03-08 02:02:00+00:00
I just ran some massive tests on our own CI. I use AMD Turin for this on gcp, which was noted as one of the fastest ones in the article.

The most insane part here is that the AMD EPYC 4565p can beat the turin's used on the cloud providers, by as much as 2x in the single core.

Our tests took 2 minutes on GCP, 1 minute flat on the 4565p with its boost to 5.1ghz holding steady vs only 4.1ghz on the gcp ones.

GCP charges $130 a month for 8vcpus. ALSO this is for SPOT that can be killed at any moment.

My 4565p is a $500 cpu... 32 vcpus... racked in a datacenter. The machine cost under 2k.

i am trying hard to convince more people to rack themselves especially for CI actions. The cloud provider charging $130 / mo for 3x less vcpus you break even in a couple months, it doesn't matter if it dies a few months later. On top of that you're getting full dedicated and 2x the perf. Anyways... glad to see I chose the right cpu type for gcloud even though nothing comes close to the cost / perf of self racking