MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gaigalas | 2026-03-01 18:08:33+00:00
Highly experimental prototype.

Uses a bunch of polyglot techniques and JavaScript isomorphism across unusual engines (osascript, gjs, JScript.net).

Technique can probably be extended to create cross-platform widgets in Cocoa, WinForms and GTK from a single JS source.

Architecture independent by design, requires no build or packaging, relies on OS infrastructure to run.
by pllbnk | 2026-03-01 18:09:08+00:00
I opened LinkedIn today (out of habit) and the first post was someone explaining how much Slack costs and that with AI every company can build their own Slack for $100. So that person decided to build an open source Slack clone using Claude Code. Granted, these were a few sane comments showing good alternatives that have already been built.

But for me it's been a signal that people have no imagination, so they are just burning tokens for no reason.
by AznHisoka | 2026-03-01 18:09:10+00:00
In terms of what companies are actually implementing, MCP isnt dead by a long time. Number of companies with a MCP server grew 242% in the last 6 months and is actually accelerating (according to Bloomberry) [1]

https://bloomberry.com/blog/we-analyzed-1400-mcp-servers-her...
by abeppu | 2026-03-01 18:09:15+00:00
Actually, when in the lifecycle of developing a treatment does anyone have a real idea of what cost will be? Can anyone know this yet?

In terms of where _prices_ are set, that negotiation is a function of efficacy relative to other things in the market right? If it ends up treating cancers that each already have a reasonably effective treatment, maybe the pricing isn't that high -- but if it is effective in cases where currently there are no options, the price should be high?

But for something that potentially works against a range of cancers, should we expect to see a sequence of more specific trials (i.e. one phase 1 for basic safety, a bunch of phase 2s for efficacy on specific cancer types, a sequence of phase 3s in descending order of estimated market value? And in 10 years, Alice and Bob with different cancers will pay radically different amounts for almost exactly the same treatment but with small variations in some aspect of the formulation so they can be treated as distinct products?
by lmeyerov | 2026-03-01 18:10:25+00:00
This feels right in theory and wrong in practice

When measuring speed running blue team CTFs ("Breaking BOTS" talk at Chaos Congress), I saw about a ~2x difference in speed (~= tokens) for a database usage between curl (~skills) vs mcp (~python). In theory you can rewrite the mcp into the skill as .md/.py, but at that point ... .

Also I think some people are talking past one another in these discussions. The skill format is a folder that supports dropping in code files, so much of what MCP does can be copy-pasted into that. However, many people discussing skills mean markdown-only and letting the LLM do the rest, which would require a fancy bootstrapping period to make as smooth as the code version. I'd agree that skills, when a folder coming with code, does feel like largely obviating MCPs for solo use cases, until you consider remote MCPs & OAuth, which seem unaddressed and core in practice for wider use.
by DANmode | 2026-03-01 18:11:06+00:00
I’m not sure if I like that argument, since the first moon landing mission, including code for the equipment, and operating Mission Control, could be done with a Claude Code subscription - now or soon.

A lot of people are going to die, and things are going to be ruined forever, neither of which anyone is used to, before we get back anywhere near this (whole economic investment by multiple countries).
by Leftium | 2026-03-01 18:11:10+00:00
> If anyone has experience bundling Python/MLX processes into macOS apps cleanly, I'd love to hear your approach.

This is an example python app wrapped in a (macOS) native shell using Electrobun: https://github.com/blackboardsh/audio-tts

Can you report how well Voxtral Realtime compares to the other currently supported streaming models? https://rift-transcription.vercel.app/local-setup

- Subjectively I've found Web Speech API feels the best (accuracy/latency), followed by moonshine medium

OpenAI Realtime WS API is on the roadmap, so I might be able to compare via RIFT in the future...
Show HN: Ccnotifs – macOS Claude Code Terminal Notifications (Tmux Friendly)
by polyphilz | 2026-03-01 18:11:12+00:00
A dead-simple macOS notification system for Claude Code.

Something I've been meaning to build for a long time. Uses Claude Code hooks (Notification and Stop events) to shoot you native notifications when your input is needed, or when Claude Code has finished and is awaiting further instructions.

Supports tmux out of the box: clicking a notification focuses your terminal and chains tmux commands to bring you back to the exact pane that spawned the notification.

Notifications are suppressed if you're already focused on that specific pane.
by fooker | 2026-03-01 18:11:26+00:00
> I still don't know exactly what you mean

Straight forward quantization, just to one bit instead of 8 or 16 or 32. Training a one bit neural network is apparently an unsolved problem.

> The trees that correspond to the neural networks are huge.

Yes, if the task is inherently 'fuzzy'. Many neural networks are effectively large decision trees in disguise and those are the ones which have potential with this kind of approach.
by harrall | 2026-03-01 18:12:28+00:00
Yes but I consider that just a bug in the agents that use MCP servers.

It could just be fixed to compress the context or the protocol could be tweaked.

Switching to CLIs is like buying a new car because you need an oil change. Sure, in this case, the user doesn’t get to control if the oil change can be done, but the issue is not the car — it’s that no one will do the relatively trivial fix.
by dmilicic | 2026-03-01 18:12:42+00:00
As a software engineer, I've always cared about writing good code because I wasn't writing it for computers, I was writing it for other people who also work on it. However, since AI took over a few months ago, I've had doubts about whether this is a wasted effort.

I've been back and forth on this, but after working on a few AI-coded apps, I have, for now, confirmed my belief that it still matters whether the codebase is robust.

Firstly, I believed that it does not matter what's under the hood if it works. But I found that I can't make it work without the code being robust, testable, and maintainable to a certain degree.

Therefore, I am linking my article that explores this a bit more and shares what I think are the three most important points that you should still care about writing good code, which are:

1. AI will train on it - the most long-term reason, most people won't care, but it does affect everyone

2. You still need to do the final touches - it's probably not a good idea to prompt for one-line changes, it's like calling an electrician to change the lightbulb

3. Software is never done, and it should be easy to change - AI will struggle with more tokens, and you with more time, if your code is not of good quality

Anyway, I am just sharing my shower thoughts and hopefully will start an interesting discussion.

100% human written with AI used for spelling!
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-03-01 18:12:55+00:00
I use Gemini all the time, but I have to say it's got verbal diarrhea and an EXTREMELY annoying trait of wanting to lead the conversation rather than just responding to what YOU want to do. At the end of every response Gemini will always suggest a "next step", in effect trying to 2nd guess where you want the conversation to go. I'd much rather have an AI that just did what it was asked, and let me decide what to ask next (often nothing - maybe it was just a standalone question!).

Apparently this annoying "next step" behavior is driven by the system prompt, since the other day I was running Gemini 3 Thinking, and it was displaying it's thoughts which included a reminder to itself to check that it was maintaining a consistent persona, and to make sure that it had suggested a next step. I'd love to know the thought process of whoever at Google thought that this would make for a natural or useful conversation flow! Could you imagine trying to have a conversation with a human who insisted on doing this?!
by youniverse | 2026-03-01 18:13:46+00:00
My mind goes to simple solutions like established communities having a $1 entry fee, for privacy use a privacy crypto maybe but that's a decent amount of friction for average folk with the current UX.

Another interesting idea that comes to mind is that every post/comment made needs the user to physically use their fingerprint scanner on their device which I assume plenty of devices have already. As long ad it can't be spoofed it works but not sure about the details about reliably securing that.

It would be some friction but I feel like it would be fine?
by goodmythical | 2026-03-01 18:14:09+00:00
>as long as it provides the same capabilities.

That's fine if you definition of capabilities is wide enough to include model understanding of the provided tool and token waste in the model trying to understand the tool and token waste in the model doing things ass backwards and inflating the context because it can't see the vastly shorter path to the solution provided by the tool and...

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that performance, success rates, and efficiency, are all impacted quite drastically by the particular combination of tool and model.

This is evidenced by the end of your paragraph in which you admit that you are focused only on a couple (or perhaps a few) models. But even then, throw them a tool they don't understand that has the same capabilities as a tool they do understand and you're going to burn a bunch of tokens watching it try to figure the tool out.

Tooling absolutely matters.
by unconed | 2026-03-01 18:14:14+00:00
>Despite the quick spread of agentic coding, institutional inertia, affordability, and limitations in human neuroplasticity were barriers to universal adoption of the new technology.

Blaming lack of adoption purely on regressive factors follows the same frame that AI firms set. It isn't very effective satire for that reason.

It couldn't be that there is something essential and elementary that is wrong with the output, no... all these experienced experts are just troglodites and wrong and we should instead tag along with the people who offloaded the parts of their work they found tough to a machine the first chance they got.

There's no such thing as ape coding. There's still just coding, and vibe coding.
by torginus | 2026-03-01 18:14:30+00:00
I think the idea of 'junior' needs to be refined a bit. By the time I got my first job I've been coding for years, and have built rather substantial things.
In fact, in terms of pure coding ability, I was probably past the initial, fast part of my growth.

As should have others, which the university education system should have made sure.

The fact that some people come out of 4+ years of software engineering education utterly clueless means that they somehow managed to dodge having to build anything, I think means that they will never get good at any point in time, as they either were very talented at dodging having to build things, and I don't think that talent is going to abandon them, or they couldn't really grasp the basics in an environment designed for just that.

With that said, I think you can see for most juniors, what you can expect out of them in terms of pure coding ability - sure a lot of them have room to grow, but I've met so many great people who were very young, yet were useful from day one.

In fact, if you have the willingness to grind away at some problem, that puts you ahead of a significant amount of the pack. I have had the misfortune of working with people who lacked any demonstrable skill, and had coping strategies for having to deal with any sort of hardship. Getting useful work out of them was a challenge in of itself.

These people managed to get the years in to be considered senior, and are probably dispensing their wisdom 'mentoring' juniors somewhere else, and are no longer expected to actually contribute to meaningful issues.
by skydhash | 2026-03-01 18:15:02+00:00
> Codev isn’t an AI model. It’s not a coding assistant. It’s not a VS Code extension. It’s a set of CLI tools, protocols, and infrastructure that orchestrates existing AI coding tools (Claude Code, Gemini CLI, OpenAI’s Codex CLI) into a structured workflow.

Thanks for the clarification, I couldn't have guessed otherwise.
by NBJack | 2026-03-01 18:15:09+00:00
It has been a while, but I remember a project of mine trying to port a FTP client to a 'secure compiler' (this was long before Rust and probably a distant ancestor of Checked C). In theory, if I could successfully port it, it would be much more resilient to particular kinds of issues (and maybe even attacks). This was in the era where formal proof coding was trying to take off as well in the industry.

After wading through an impressive number of compiler errors (again, it was technically compatible) and attempts to fix them, I eventually surrendered and acknowledged that at the very least, this was beyond my abilities.

I probably would had gotten much further just rewriting it from scratch.
by shevy-java | 2026-03-01 18:15:33+00:00
I disagree with OpenAI.

I think ALL those mega-money seeking AI organisations need to be
designated as supply chain risk. Also, they drove the prices up
for RAM - I don't want to pay extra just because these companies
steal all our RAM now. The laws must change - I totally understand
that corporations seek profit, that is natural, but this is no
longer a free market serving individual people. It is now a racket
where the prices can be freely manipulated. Pure capitalism does
not work. The government could easily enforce that the market
remains fair for Average Joe. It is not fair when the prices go
up by +250% in about two years. That's milking.
by dnautics | 2026-03-01 18:15:33+00:00
what honestly is the difference between an mcp and a skill + instructions + curl.

Really it seems to me the difference is that an mcp could be more token-efficient, but it isn't, because you dump every mcp's instructions all the time into your context.

Of course then again skills frequently doesn't get triggered.

just seems like coding agent bugs/choices and protocol design?
by bastawhiz | 2026-03-01 18:16:09+00:00
Let's say you visit a site that doesn't use H2. That's now nearly a megabyte (up from 24kb) of data across the six connections that HTTP/1.1 establishes.

You're on LTE? You have high packet loss over a wireless connection? The initial TCP window size is ~16kb in a lot of cases, now you need multiple round trips over a high latency connection just to make the connection secure. You'll probably need 3-4 round trips on a stable connection just for the certificate. On a bad connection? Good luck.
by onoht | 2026-03-01 18:16:27+00:00
This piece hit something I've been trying to articulate for months.

The part about the identity shift from builder to reviewer - that's the real thing nobody's talking about. I spent years getting good at turning thoughts into code. That's a craft. There's a rhythm to it, a kind of flow state you hit when the problem and the solution start locking together.

Now I spend most of my time evaluating code I didn't write, catching issues I didn't create, in systems I didn't design. The volume is higher. The satisfaction is lower.

The HBR study numbers track with what I'm seeing around me. 83% saying AI increased their workload. That's not a bug, that's the whole point. We made code production faster, so now we produce more code. Nobody stopped to ask if that was actually the bottleneck worth solving.

The thing that gets me is the pretense. Everyone talks about AI making engineers more productive. But if you look at what's actually happening, we're not producing better software. We're just producing more of it, faster, with the same number of people. That's not productivity - that's volume.

What's being lost is the time to think. To sit with a problem long enough that you actually understand it before you start implementing. The old friction of writing code manually gave you that thinking time by default. Now you have to fight for it.
by soulofmischief | 2026-03-01 18:17:02+00:00
I hope this comment is sarcastic.

LLMs are able to ingest numbers. And not just Arabic numerals; Did you know that there are other kinds of number systems?

Believe it or not, they also ingest multimedia. You don't need the English language to talk to a language model. Anything can be a language; you can communicate using only images.

And for that matter, modern LLMs are great at abstract math (and like anything else the results still need proofreading).
by marliechorgan | 2026-03-01 18:17:14+00:00
Author here. The core idea is using the latest low-latency STT/TTS/LLMs along with structured output to separate out OpenClaw tasks and text for TTS. Most current voice agents either talk OR call tools, never both at once. By using structured output, the same LLM call can stream text to TTS while simultaneously dispatching commands to an agentic backend (OpenClaw) in parallel. A few very simple tricks but seems to work better than anything else I've seen!
by greygoo222 | 2026-03-01 18:17:26+00:00
Both patient participation in clinical trials and compassionate use of experimental treatments are fairly common for cancer patients, with various accessibility barriers. (One issue with the latter, for example, is that the incentives aren't lined up for companies to provide unapproved drugs to dying patients, you're way more likely to get a horrible complication that leads to bad press than a miraculous recovery).

Here's an insightful blog series about Jake Seliger's experience participating in clinical trials. He was a regular HackerNews user who passed away in 2024: https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/please-be-dying-but-not-...
by sillyfluke | 2026-03-01 18:17:27+00:00
> It sounds exactly like how someone would respond if they've been swimming in legal memos for months.

I think you're being highly speculative. The part you quoted from the WaPo doesn't even state the defense official was complaining about about any "legalese" reponse, that seems like a projection on your part. The only info you gave in your comment about what Dario said is only a defense official's paraphrasing. It seems a simply case of Dario refusing to give a blank check in all scenerios whereas the defense official, for maximum impact, chose to portray "not having a blank check" as "having to call Anthropic" in every case
where "help" is given by an LLM. The appearance of "misunderstanding" you're seeing in the media is not about the parties' misunderstanding of what the other side wants, it's simply a fallout from each side fighting to control the narrative.
by rayiner | 2026-03-01 18:18:02+00:00
I think it’s just wagging the dog: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wag_the_Dog.

Combined with the fact that the media will be confused about how to respond. You’ll have Iranian diaspora celebrating, like Venezuelans did after the capture of Maduro, making it impossible for the media to frame this simply in terms of “Trump is racist.” As a result, the whole thing will get memory holed, just like the Venezuela attack.
by throwup238 | 2026-03-01 18:18:15+00:00
In my experience most biotech companies working on promising drugs and therapies don’t want to touch the exemption with a 30 foot pole. Since they raise most of their money from the public to fund clinical trials, a single bad reaction could generate enough bad PR to derail fundraising and kill the drug. Sticking to clinical trials allows them to control that blast radius so even though the FDA approves >95% of applications, in practice very few drugs are available that way.
by nunez | 2026-03-01 18:18:57+00:00
> Here is something that gets lost in all the excitement about AI productivity: most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code.

> Not managing code. Not reviewing code. Not supervising systems that produce code. Writing it. The act of thinking through a problem, designing a solution, and expressing it precisely in a language that makes a machine do exactly what you intended. That is what drew most of us to this profession. It is a creative act, a form of craftsmanship, and for many engineers, the most satisfying part of their day.

> Now they are being told to stop.

Yeah, so what I've been realizing from witnessing the Rise of the Agents™ is that there are tons of developers that actually don't like writing code and were in it for the money all along. Nothing wrong with money --- I love the green stuff myself --- but it definitely sucks to have their ambivalence (at best) or disdain (at worst) for the craft imposed on the rest of us.

Feel free to replace `writing code` for most work functions that are enjoyable for some that are being steamrolled by Big AI atm (writing, graphic design, marketing copy, etc.).
by scuff3d | 2026-03-01 18:19:27+00:00
I mean... It takes 10 minutes of testing to know this is bullshit. At least in the near term. I've sat with an agent and played the part of a vibe coder. Not looking at the code, frankly providing more guidance and feedback then a vibe coder could, and even in a thousand line app it falls to absolute shit fast. It does get something that "technically" works, but it will collapse in on itself in no time.

The act of designing software might be changing, less writing the actual code, but someone who knows what the fuck they're doing still has to guide the ship.
by eoskx | 2026-03-01 18:19:48+00:00
"Anthropic’s team was relieved to hear that the government would be willing to remove those words, but one big problem remained: On Friday afternoon, Anthropic learned that the Pentagon still wanted to use the company’s AI to analyze bulk data collected from Americans. That could include information such as the questions you ask your favorite chatbot, your Google search history, your GPS-tracked movements, and your credit-card transactions, all of which could be cross-referenced with other details about your life. Anthropic’s leadership told Hegseth’s team that was a bridge too far, and the deal fell apart. Soon after, Hegseth directed the U.S. military’s contractors, suppliers, and partners to stop doing business with Anthropic. The list of companies that contract with the military is extensive, and includes Amazon, the company that supplies much of Anthropic’s computing infrastructure. The Department of Defense did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Anthropic referred me to the company’s statement addressing Hegseth’s remarks.”
by appsoftware | 2026-03-01 18:20:06+00:00
?? I'm using my own remote MCP server with openclaw now. I do understand the use case for CLI. In his Lex Friedman interview the creator highlights some of the advantages of CLI, such as being able to grep over responses. But there are situations where remote MCP works really well, such as where OAuth is used for authentication - you can hit an endpoint on the MCP server, get redirected to authenticate and authorise scopes etc and the auth server then responds to the MCP server.
by kldg | 2026-03-01 18:20:24+00:00
I'm kind of curious how you.... I guess, interpret the responses to when you send someone AI-assisted content. I previously thought "I don't care if it's AI or not; quality is quality", but I'm increasingly taking the position that I do care, and intentionally have started ignoring comments and especially product reviews where you get the formatted 2-4 sentence paragraphs with formal tone and rule-following. It's come to the point where as long as you don't write as poorly as Epstein, I want the errors. Actually, I'm getting so weird and romantic about it, that I think I'd argue having errors and unusual style shows an openness and vulnerability that's now a necessary gate price; like journalists have so many tools available to them, but they still make typos, factual errors in articles they have no business writing about, and fail to quote people properly -- that's great, I think.