MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by markthered | 2026-03-05 13:06:29+00:00
The copyright argument is a sidetrack both in the PR comment thread and here. The issue opened claims the new code is based on the old code, and therefore derivative, and therefore must be offered in a modified version of the source code under the previous license, LGPL. The complaint is the maintainers violated the terms of LGPL, that they must prove no derivation from the original code to legally claim this is a legal new version without the LGPL license. Claim is if they or Claude read the old code (or of course directly use any of it) it is a license violation. “… in the release 7.0.0, the maintainers claim to have the right to “relicense” the project. They have no such right; doing so is an explicit violation of the LGPL. Licensed code, when modified, must be released under the same LGPL license. Their claim that it is a "complete rewrite" is irrelevant, since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code (i.e. this is not a "clean room" implementation).“ By this reasoning, I am genuinely asking (I’m not a license expert) if a valid clean room rewrite is possible, because at a minimum you would need a spec describing all behavior, which ses to require ample exposure to the original to be sufficiently precise.
by BloondAndDoom | 2026-03-05 13:06:30+00:00
One the topic procedural generation; rogue likes are all about it and new generation Diablo like games have definitely similar things, well respected new games like Blue Prince. There has never been such as successful period of time for procedural generation in games like now, and all of these are pre-AI. AI powered procedural generation is wet dream of rogue-like lovers
by qsera | 2026-03-05 13:06:35+00:00
>Me labeling "authentic" it or not should not affect it's artistic value.

The problem with automated imitation generators is that they can produce thousands of painting that imitate Van Gogh, but does not have the same soul.

It is the same reason why these things cannot create genuinely funny jokes. They cannot assess the funnyness of the themselves. They cannot feel, and cannot do the filtering based on emotion.

It is easy to recognize the emptiness of a joke, but not so easy for a painting, or some other form of art.

This is why it will never work for art. But the sad thing is that that will not stop them from being used to create art. Because it just needs to sell.

I would say that for art, at least for most of the movies, music etc, this was already the case. So nothing much to lose.
by dathinab | 2026-03-05 13:06:45+00:00
Nuclear power is a pain to build and maintain and un-build once it gets to old to reliable run it (the later part is commonly overlooked in cost calculations).

It is also a ~50 year investment.

This makes it not very attractive for companies and is why most nuclear power is state sub-ventioned.

Theoretically the US had something similar to a state bank to help companies to finance exactly such projects, but Trump/DOGE defounded it for publicity reasons which makes it even less likely for private nuclear power plants.

Many "we will use nuclear power" statements do rely on mini reactors. But AFIK pretty much all mini reactor projects have ended in dead ends so far. With promised at best working out on paper (and quite often not even there).

So my guess is: They will claim they want to use Nuclear and might even intend to do so. But in the end look at their balance sheets and risk calculation and go "nah, lets do coal/gas/oil". There probably will be some single public co-investment into a nuclear power plant which "happens" to also be government sponsored to keep up the pretense.
by larodi | 2026-03-05 13:07:59+00:00
nobody can tell and this is how we entered this very turbulent modern times of "everything can be retold" without punishment. LLMs already doing it at large, while original author is correct in terms of the LGPL, it is nearly impossible to say how different should expression of an idea be to be considered separate one. this is truly fundamental philosophical question that may not have an easy answer.
Show HN: CtxVault – agent memory isolation enforced outside app code
by FiloVenturini | 2026-03-05 13:09:00+00:00
I build multi-agent systems and after a while the memory problem started to feel like the thing nobody had really solved properly.

The obvious approach is a shared vector store with metadata filtering to separate what each agent can see. It works until someone writes a bug, adds a new code path, or bypasses the filter entirely — the boundary is only as strong as every line of application code that touches it.

The other thing that bothered me was visibility. Once agents start writing memory autonomously you have no idea what they actually know. If something goes wrong you're debugging a black box.

So I built something around vaults — separate directories with independent vector indexes. Access control is declared via CLI and enforced server-side on every request, independent of what the application code does. Agents write context at runtime and retrieve it semantically in future sessions without manual reindexing, and every vault is just a folder on your machine you can open, read, and edit at any time.

Fully local, pip installable.

github.com/Filippo-Venturini/ctxvault
by FiloVenturini | 2026-03-05 13:09:39+00:00
Previous Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47136585. That version had the vault abstraction but access control lived entirely in application code — which is exactly the problem I was trying to solve.

This version adds server-side enforcement: access rules are declared via CLI and checked on every request, independent of what the agent implementation does. The boundary doesn't disappear if you write a bug.

Also added MCP server support, so Claude Desktop can use it with no integration code.
by nDRDY | 2026-03-05 13:09:44+00:00
It is such an unreasonable idea! Ignoring the loss of biomass (and the fact that there would be no way to implement this scheme without providing a very unwelcome financial incentive to cut down trees wherever they are found), you'd use as much CO2 in the machinery required to cut the trees down and dig a big hole! Unless you're suggesting we do it all by hand? In which case, the picture of a crazed, doomsday cult is complete. I suppose at least it involves less murder than the Aztecs and their sacrifices.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2026-03-05 13:10:25+00:00
> Any developer could take a GPL-licensed project, feed it into an LLM with the prompt “Rewrite this in a different style,” and release it under MIT

Does this argument make sense? Even before LLMs, a developer could "rewrite this in a different style" and release it under a different license. Why are LLMs a new element in this argument?
by bko | 2026-03-05 13:11:04+00:00
Writing copy is painfully time consuming. AI just does it better, it's meant to communicate and people are not always great communicators. I know it'll write better copy than me.

Terminally online people need to get over this weird aversion to anything generated w/ help of AI. Do you have similar misgivings, like "this guy obviously used auto correct", or "he's using speech to text, I'm not reading anything unless its hand-written"

Get over it. It's here, it's useful, judge the product on its merits. I get if you see spam email messages that are overly tailored and ignoring them because the person obv didn't do the work. But this dude created a free app that looks pretty cool, maybe he didn't want to spend another few hours to create a pretty standard boilerplate website with app information.
by frisia | 2026-03-05 13:11:24+00:00
This was very interesting to read! My choice of drawing program now is Rebelle, which does have a "swarm" brush (they call them bristle brushes, designed to emulate real paintbrushes) and together with its physical simulation where paint applied on the canvas has a thickness instead of opacity, the results can look absolutely stunning. Have given me the itch to also experiment with simulation-based drawing programs.
by wepple | 2026-03-05 13:12:36+00:00
> It is there to reduce our agency, to make it easier to fire us, to put us in even more precarious position

Could be. It could also end up freeing us from every commercial dependency we have. Write your own OS, your own mail app, design your own machinery to farm with.

It’s here, so I don’t know where you’re going with “I’m unhappy this is happening and someone should do something”
Show HN: OptimizeQL- SQL Query Optimizer
by hura17 | 2026-03-05 13:12:46+00:00
Hello all,

I wrote a tool to optimize SQL queries using LLM models. I sometimes struggle to find the root cause for the slow running queries and sending to LLM most of the time doesn't have good result. I think the reason is LLM doesnt have the context of our database, schemas, explain results .etc.

That is why I decided to write a tool that gathers all inform about our data and suggest meaningful improvements including adding indexes, materialized views, or simply rewriting the query itself. The tool supports only PostgreSQL and MySQL for now , but you can easily fork and add your own desired database.

You just need to add your LLM api key and database credentials. It is an open source tool so I highly appreciate the review and contribution if you would like.

Feel free to check it out : https://github.com/SubhanHakverdiyev/OptimizeQL
by testbyhuman_tor | 2026-03-05 13:13:07+00:00
Most of the feedback here is about AI-generated copy, which is a valid signal from HN users but probably not representative of your actual target audience. If you're building for people with ADHD who struggle to keep in touch, their first 60 seconds in the app will tell you everything: can they import contacts and set up a first reminder without getting stuck?

jamilton already found a real onboarding bug on iPhone SE. Get 5 more people like that trying it cold and you'll learn more from watching them than from 50 HN comments about your taglines.
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-03-05 13:13:09+00:00
>like especially if they do what they have been doing recently (run their own generator, build their own power planes) a lot of this cost is implicit and as such very dodgeable. E.g. higher cost for gas power planes for other due to major increase of demand, higher medical cost due to more air pollution, higher fuel prices, etc. etc. (not even speaking about anything climate change).

And it's not just data centers, it's all sorts of industry. My local gravel and concrete plants run their "big stuff" off generators because the cost of the utility drop for their amperage doesn't make sense. And nobody will connect the dots between these choices and the requirements we've saddled utilities with. They're spinning up generator not because it's cheaper per watt, but because they're not operating on the 40yr timeline you need to be in order for the red tape you have to go through to put in permanent infrastructure to pencil out.

I'm an abutter for a utility project and I've gone to the meetings for and it's an absolute massive boondoggle. My energy bill is going to reflect god knows how many hundreds of billable hours it takes for these hired lawyers and engineers to prove to the system that they're not gonna fuck over any endangered frogs by widening the cut to meet some industry standard that changed over the past N year and dumping culverts and fill in some places where streams criss cross it.

Literally nobody involved cares. The abutters don't care. The town wants it to go forward because it's all trivial and it's not like it won't be their ass if they block an upgrade to industry standards and something happens. The system is just going through the motions. The city engineer grills them about petty bullshit because it's literally his job. They know he will and they have the answers but he makes a show out of the subjective things. Ditto for the conservation commissioner. It's like the Israel missiles meme. One side is my tax dollars and the other side is my energy bill. We're all doing this because some slimy politicians wanted to pander to some shortsighted big picture ignoring environmentalists 50yr ago and beurocacy has perpetuated and grown itself since. No public interest is served by this.

And the cherry on top is that at the margin, we get shit like generators that don't need to exist because the cost of the alternative is driven up to the point the fuel inefficient (and also dirty) solution makes sense.
by deaux | 2026-03-05 13:13:30+00:00
It's been well known for a while that car tires are the biggest single source of microplastics, but it's nice to have more numbers backing this up.

This is one of multiple reasons why Electric cars are much closer to ICE cars in the overall combination of sustainability and societal effects than they are to trains and subways. It's like

[ICE cars---Elec Cars---------------------------Trains/Subways]

yet even on the relatively informed HN I often see people pretend it's more like

[ICE cars-----------------------Elec cars-------Trains/Subways]

I think it's most of it is because EVs are shiny and cool and represent technological progress and people feel attached to certain brands. That, along with personal convenience/privilege.
by Pannoniae | 2026-03-05 13:14:01+00:00
That's not what a derivative work means, though. Being exposed to something doesn't mean you can't create original work which is similar to it (otherwise every song or artwork would be a derivative work of everything before it)

People do cleanroom implementations as a precaution against a lawsuit, but it's not a necessary element.

In fact, even if some parts are similar, it's still not a clear-cut case - the defendant can very well argue that the usage was 1. transformative 2. insubstantial to the entirety of work.

"The complaint is the maintainers violated the terms of LGPL, that they must prove no derivation from the original code to legally claim this is a legal new version without the LGPL license."

The burden of proof is on the accuser.

"I am genuinely asking (I’m not a license expert) if a valid clean room rewrite is possible, because at a minimum you would need a spec describing all behavior, which ses to require ample exposure to the original to be sufficiently precise."

Linux would be illegal if so (they had knowledge of Unix before), and many GNU tools are libre API-compatible reimplementations of previous Unix utilities :)
by andai | 2026-03-05 13:14:33+00:00
Yeah, there's two approaches to rendering Flash vector art.

You can turn the curves into polygons, or render them to textures. Ruffle, I recall, makes everything polygons (so it's a little chunky if you zoom in?), and Super Meat Boy rendered everything to textures.

I'm not sure what the actual flash player did, which seems to have pretty decent performance relative to Ruffle in my testing.

Maybe they have some proprietary technique for rendering curves quickly on a GPU? (I read a paper on rendering curves, and there's OpenVG, which I think came later and nobody uses?)
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2026-03-05 13:14:33+00:00
> Who in their right mind would give the benefit of the doubt?

I'm saying that we should give Anthropic the benefit of the doubt that when they say "our deal with Palantir doesn't cross our red line", we should believe Anthropic, that they have gotten an assurance from Palantir that they wouldn't use it domestically. I'm NOT saying we should give Palantir the benefit of the doubt.

I wasn't commenting on "is giving AI to Palantir a good idea" (I don't think it is), I was commenting on "should we conclude that Anthropic is being dishonest because they claimed they have red lines but work with Palantir" (I think it's unclear, but there's a plausible explanation in which they're not being dishonest, but possibly naive, so give them the benefit of the doubt).
by d4rkp4ttern | 2026-03-05 13:15:05+00:00
Interesting, in my Arc browser, I just tried File -> open -> upload -> blah.md and it does seem to render fine. This exact thing did not work a few weeks ago, meaning the various header markers etc showed up as raw "##" etc, and I had to further select something like "open as new doc" to finally make it look good.
Show HN: Porchsongs.ai; Rewrite chordcharts/lyrics with AI to make them personal
by river_otter | 2026-03-05 13:15:06+00:00
I posted porchsongs here about a month ago as a self-hosted Docker project. A few people looked at it, but I get that spinning up docker containers and configuring stuff is sort of a big ask.

So I went ahead and built it into an actual hosted platform. Core is still fully usable and OSS but now I offer a hosted option.

I'M OPENING IT UP VIA AN INVITE CODE.
Here's one for the first 100 HN users so my LLM token budget doesn't immediately go to zero haha:

PORCH-7F95BB

tl;dr backstory. I'm a guitarist who loves playing songs on my porch over the summer, and I wanted a platform that let me:

1. Easily access a library of chord charts i like to play and render cleanly on my phone so I can use that to read the music
2. AI assisted rewriting so that I can make songs more personal or quickly sketch up a song. A year ago LLMs struggled but Claude Sonnet and Opus 4.6 are EXCELLENT. I was shocked at how good they are

What's changed since my last post:
- You can just sign up and use it now via Google OAuth or email magic link
- Rewrites stream back in real-time
- Personal song library to keep your versions
- The OSS repo is still there: https://github.com/njbrake/porchsongs

Happy to talk about the tech or whatever else. Building a truly working public OSS core and a private 'hosted' codebase was a very education process that I learned a lot from building.

Building and connecting stripe, GCP, nano.tech, resend, sentry, etc was a lot of fun (and also a lot of work )
by noemit | 2026-03-05 13:16:25+00:00
You're right in that we kept the best examples (as coding museums will do in the future) but the best of something is a benchmark. It is striking that modern automation, even hundreds of years later, can't touch what a skilled craftsman could do in the past.

With programming, we documented a lot of it, so it's unlikely to go the way of fine weaving. People will always be able to learn to think and be great programmers.

Maybe if the wool weavers had internet, they could have blogged, made youtube videos, and cataloged their profession so it could last Millenia.
by sheepscreek | 2026-03-05 13:16:54+00:00
Who cares, this is how the American justice system works. AFAIK - only DAs and govt (sometimes) look out for people’s interests, and the occasional class action lawsuits. Many civil liberties cases were one black man or black woman, or a woman, fighting against some company/establishment/govt and that ended up benefiting all others (equal rights, right to vote, right to abortion, etc).

In this case, all other businesses get the same terms as Epic. In my eyes that’s a win, better than the system that existed before.
Ask HN: Is claw-generated code copyright-able?
by g-clef | 2026-03-05 13:17:29+00:00
Given the US Supreme Court's decision to leave a lower court ruling in place, it seems that the Copyright Office's guidelines (humans must be involved or it's not eligible for copyright) are the official law of the land. That means that code (or other "works") generated purely by prompting an LLM (or made autonomously by one) are not eligible for copyright.

Does that mean that all code generated by the OpenClaw agents, can't be "open source"? (because it's not eligible for copyright at all) What about reports/code/etc generated autonomously by LLM agents? Can any company claim code as an asset in an acquisition if the code itself isn't own-able (because it's public domain according to the copyright office)?

I confess to being surprised at the repeated "coding agents wrote 90% of our code last quarter" statements from CEOs...those sound like court-admissible statements that they don't own copyright on their own code.
by DonHopkins | 2026-03-05 13:18:08+00:00
I love Ian Hubert's demos of green screening in Blender.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxD6H3ri8RI

His Blender Conference talk about photogrammetry / camera projection / projection mapping was fantastic:

World Building in Blender - Ian Hubert

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whPWKecazgM
First PR Concierge – AI that matches your GitHub skills to open source issues
by boweii | 2026-03-05 13:18:19+00:00
I built this after watching friends give up on open source because the "good first issue" filter still returns 100+ intimidating issues with no context.
You paste your GitHub URL → it analyses your repos and languages → matches you to real good-first issues from popular repos → and for any issue you click, Gemini generates a 3-step roadmap: where to look, what to change, and how to test.
There's also an encouragement engine that writes you a personalised pep talk before you submit your PR — sounds silly, but it actually helps.
Live: first-pr-concierge.vercel.app
GitHub:https://github.com/Boweii22/First-PR-Concierge
I would greatly appreciate any constructive criticism, particularly regarding the accuracy of the matching process.
by benjosaur | 2026-03-05 13:18:25+00:00
yes exactly. with proper configuration (e.g. /sandbox with normal claude code) it is impossible for the agent to escape.

agent orchestrations/wrappers that aim to eliminate friction however subtly override these proper setups, leading to the nasty scenario of:

1) you assuming anthropic's /sandbox is keeping you safe
2) the model reaffirms your belief in that /sandbox is keeping you safe
3) you are not safe
4) you leave your agent running overnight and goal drift deletes your os
by Broken_Hippo | 2026-03-05 13:18:41+00:00
It isn't that it isn't enjoyable, but it just isn't enjoyable in the same way. How often do you view the jokes in shakepear's work as raunchy or sexual? Do you think younger teens get the jokes? Do you think anyone explains it to them?

It is more akin to watching television from a different culture. I am American, live in Norway, with my Norwegian spouse. We wind up watching British television from time to time. We find the jokes funny, but we both realize that we are missing references to people and places - but understand the gist of the jokes.

The difference between shakespear and modern times is even larger - you don't always know they are jokes because you don't realize they are referencing anything. Still enjoyable, but a different story without as much comedy.
by Moldoteck | 2026-03-05 13:18:51+00:00
Now you are being mean, or are engaging in discussions to spread misinformation

"And their power plants were in trouble in the last hot summer because the rivers were too hot to be used for cooling" - this does imply that cooling was not possible. You said nothing about the fact it's just a legal limit. Nor did you specify what/how many NPP exactly got modulated. Is "their" supposed to mean all? A bunch?

"And that will be a big problem when people turn on their AC in a heat wave but the power plants can’t power up because they don’t have enough cool water." - this implies it's both a major problem during heatwaves and/or that it's unfixable, both being false.

"> being a major deal, when it affects only 0.2% of generation per year

Interesting choice of time period. Energy problems are rarely viewed from a yearly perspective." - did you omit on purpose LITERALLY the following text "during a period when EDF is net exporting about 14GW to the neighbors" ? France is largest net exporter on the continent both yearly and in summer in particular. You are free to inspect energy charts data.

"That time and money can be used for decentralization." - french generation is already sufficiently decentralized. They can decentealize even more by building more plants across the country.

"Drones will get cheaper and cheaper and more capable and many nuclear power plants aren’t built for that threat" - nuclear plants are built or upgraded to withstand airplane impacts, a drone would barely scratch the outer reinforced concrete.

All your statements are either made on purpose to mislead (especially considering how you dismiss your own statements or omit crucial parts of text quoting me) or you are communicating your thoughts in a very unoptimal way...