MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ndriscoll | 2026-03-11 02:47:05+00:00
> llms create a financial incentive to create cleaner code, with tests, because the agent that you pay for will be more efficient when the code is easier to understand, and has clear patterns for extensibility

Right, this is the kind of discussion we're having on my team: suddenly all of the already good engineering practices like good observability, clear tests with high coverage, clean design, etc. act as a massive force multiplier and are that much more important. They're also easier to do if you prioritize it. We should be seeing quality go up. It's trivial to explore the solution space with throwaway PoCs, collect real data to drive your design, do all of those "nice to have" cleanups, etc. The people who assume LLM = slop are participating in a bizarre form of cope. Garbage in, garbage out; quality in, quality out. Just accept that coding per se is not going to be a profession for long. Leverage new tools to learn more, do more, etc. This should be an exciting time for programmers.
Ask HN: How do you prevent MCP agents from looping in production?
by aethis | 2026-03-11 02:47:36+00:00
I'm building with MCP and starting to run agents with more autonomy — multiple tools, longer sessions, less human oversight. The failure modes I keep hitting aren't the model being wrong, they're the agent making too many calls, retrying things that won't work, or calling tools it shouldn't need for the task. Right now I'm just setting hard iteration limits in my agent code, which feels like a blunt instrument. What are other people doing here — especially anyone running MCP agents in anything close to production?
by DiogenesKynikos | 2026-03-11 02:48:35+00:00
> Do you trust humans with the ability to judge the situation and the freedom to decide to run a red light if they think it's safe?

Absolutely not.

> For people like me, it's a matter of basic human dignity. I want to be a human with the capacity for judgement and the power to act on it.

Your human dignity does not require you to be able to run red lights when you think it's okay.

This is libertarian ideology taken to the extreme.
by zarzavat | 2026-03-11 02:48:53+00:00
It feels like everyone's gone mad.

Here I am mostly writing code by hand, with some AI assistant help. I have a Claude subscription but only use it occasionally because it can take more time to review and fix the generated code as it would to hand-write it. Claude only saves me time on a minority of tasks where it's faster to prompt than hand-write.

And then I read about people spending hundreds or thousands of dollars a month on this stuff. Doesn't that turn your codebase into an unreadable mess?
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-03-11 02:49:04+00:00
No, to begin with the people who want to play stupid games would give the highest score to every candidate they approve of and the lowest score to everyone else, and then it devolves to approval voting, which is significantly better than FPTP -- and IRV.

And even doing that is people being too clever by half.

Imagine there are three candidates. The one you prefer is polling at a score of 6/10, another that you like almost as much is also polling at 6/10 and a third that you very much don't like is polling at 4/10. If you were voting honestly you'd give the first candidate 10/10, the second 8/10 and the third 1/10. So what should you do if you're voting strategically?

If you do the one that devolves to approval voting you give the first two candidates 10/10. But that's pretty dumb, the third candidate was just barely in the race and all you're doing then is screwing yourself by giving your second choice a better chance against your first choice.

If you do the one that devolves to FPTP you're really screwing yourself, because then you're putting the third candidate, which you hate, back in the running by tanking the chances of the second candidate that you were pretty okay with. You're making it so if your first choice doesn't win you get your third choice, which is bad for you, because the amount you wanted the first to win over the second is much smaller than the amount you wanted the second to win over the third but then you foolishly failed to express that even though the voting system allowed you to.

You can find some "proofs" that giving every candidate either a 1/10 or 10/10 is the optimal strategy, but the thing those proofs take as an assumption is that you know exactly how everyone else is going to vote, i.e. you have perfectly 100% accurate infallible polls. Which, of course, you don't.

And then think about what you have to do with that second candidate you'd like to give 8/10: Under that logic you're "required" to either give them 10/10 or 1/10. But you don't know if giving the second candidate a 1/10 will cause the first candidate to win or the third. Without knowing that, you can't know which one is actually better for you.

At which point the optimal strategy is to hedge by picking a number in the middle, and choose which one in proportion to how strongly you feel about each risk. But that's the same as voting according to your actual preferences! You end up giving the second candidate 8/10 because that's the measure of how much more you prefer that they defeat the third candidate than that they don't defeat the first.
by tomhow | 2026-03-11 02:49:25+00:00
You’re expressing how you feel about it and that’s fine, you can avoid all business dealings with them

But we’re on a site called “Hacker News”, and with that has to come some tolerance for hackers figuring things out and sometimes getting it wrong. Everyone forgives a degree of rule-breaking by those with whom they’re sympathetic. I understand plenty of people on HN are not sympathetic towards startup founders, which is their right. But it’s the HN way to allow a bit of space for testing boundaries, and leave it to the founders to deal with the consequences without imposing our own judgements or restrictions. And for what it’s worth, we makes such allowances for plenty of people who aren’t startup founders too.
by nunez | 2026-03-11 02:50:05+00:00
I maintain expense tracking software that I wrote a while ago (before ChatGPT) that sends receipts and some metadata about them into Google Sheets (previously Expensify). A few months ago, I used Claude to add a feature that does exactly what you describe, but using the data types and framework I built for receipt parsing. It works really well.

Honestly, you can probably build what I built entirely with Gemini or Claude, probably with a nice frontend to boot.
by catlifeonmars | 2026-03-11 02:50:10+00:00
> We address this by building privacy-preserving architectures that minimize the data footprint. First, we offer secure, long-term retention so companies don't have to store sensitive PII on their own servers—which are often managed by teams who aren't cybersecurity specialists.

What privacy preserving architectures are you implementing? How are you securing PII?
by tbreschi | 2026-03-11 02:52:39+00:00
Ok yeah…

“Ms. Bondi is the latest administration official to move into heavily guarded quarters at military facilities in or near the nation’s capital after citing danger from criminals, adversaries overseas and protesters.”

But then…

“Other officials who have relocated include Stephen Miller, the president’s top domestic policy adviser and the architect of his hard-line immigration policy; Secretary of State Marco Rubio; Kristi Noem, the exiting homeland security secretary; and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.”

This doesn’t seem normal
by latch | 2026-03-11 02:54:09+00:00
Zig 0.15 is pretty stable. The biggest issue I face daily are silent compiler errors (SIGBUS) for trivial things, e.g. a typo in an import path. I've yet to find exactly why this [only sometimes] causes such a crash, but they're a real pain to figure out over a large changeset. `zig ast-check` sometimes catches the error, else Claude's pretty good at spotting where I accidentally re-used a variable name (again, 90% of the time I do that, it's an easy error, but the other 10%, I get a message-less compiler crash). It sounds like the changes in the OP might be specifically addressing these types of issues.

Also, my .zig-cache is currently at 173GB, which causes some issues on the small Linux ARM VPS I test with.

As for upgrades. I upgraded lightpanda to 0.14 then 0.15 and it was fine. I think for lightpanda, the 0.16 changes might not be too bad, with the only potential issue coming from our use of libcurl and our small websocket server (for CDP connections). Those layers are relatively isolated / abstracted, so I'm hopeful.

As a library developer, I've given up following / tracking 0.16. For one, the change don't resonate with me, and for another, it's changing far too fast. I don't think anyone expects 0.16 support in a library right now. I've gotten PRs for my "dev" branches from a few brave souls and everyone seems happy with that arrangement.
by ModernMech | 2026-03-11 02:54:35+00:00
When you say "weird" you mean "different from mainstream languages", but the exact way in which your language is weird (declarative data description/transformation) is probably exactly where languages will be going in the future because of how well-suited they are for LLM reading and writing. Those languages expose the structure of the computation directly such as data shapes and the relationships that transform them, rather than burying intent inside control flow.

With more explicit types and dataflow information, the model doesn't need to simulate execution (something LLMs are particularly bad at) as much as recognize and extend a transformation graph (something LLMs are particularly good at). So it's probably just that your particularly weird language is particularly well-adapted to LLM technology.
by behehebd | 2026-03-11 02:54:51+00:00
Everyone is sloppy sometimes. I wonder if what code review does is prevent velocity (acts a a brake) so that things dont change too fast (which is often a good thing).

You don't get paid for features or code shipped. People don't pay $200 a head for fine dining based on the number of carrot chops or garlic crushes. The chops and crushes are necessary but not what you should be optimizing for.
by timr | 2026-03-11 02:56:51+00:00
> A lot of what one previously needed a SWE to do can now be brute forced well enough with AI. (Granted, everything SWEs complained about being tedious.)

Only if you ignore everything they generate. Look at all the comments saying that the agent hallucinates a result, generates always-passing tests, etc. Those are absolutely true observations -- and don't touch on the fact that tests can pass, the red/green approach can give thumbs up and rocket emojis all day long, and the code can still be shitty, brittle and riddled with security and performance flaws. And so now we have people building elaborate castles in the sky to try to catch those problems. Except that the things doing the catching are themselves prone to hallucination. And around we go.

So because a portion of (IMO always bad, but previously unrecognized as bad) coders think that these random text generators are trustworthy enough to run unsupervised, we've moved all of this chaotic energy up a level. There's more activity, certainly, but it all feels like we've replaced actual intelligent thought with an army of monkeys making Rube Goldberg machines at scale. It's going to backfire.
by tudelo | 2026-03-11 02:57:55+00:00
The only counter I have to this is that there are some workflows that have test environments, everything can't or shouldn't just run locally. Sometimes these test take time, and instead of babysitting the model to write code and run the build+deploy+test manually, you can send it off to work until the kinks are worked out.

Add to that I have worked on many projects that take more than 20 minutes to fully build and run tests... unfortunately. And I would consider that part of the job of implementing a feature, and to reduce cycles I have to take.

After the "green" signal I will manually review or send off some secondary reviews in other models. Is it wasteful? Probably. But its pretty damn fun (as long as I ignore the elephant in the room.)
by TacticalCoder | 2026-03-11 02:58:27+00:00
> The track record of Iran is very different

Just so that people disagreeing with you can understand: Iran is, as I type this, sending bombs banned by 120 countries (cluster bombs, and they're banned because for they indiscriminately target civilians) on Israel. They also send their islamist guards, a few weeks ago, to finish the job inside hospitals: to slaughter the wounded. As part of tens of thousands executions.

Anyone who thinks the current iranian regime with the atomic bomb wouldn't nuke Israel is out of its mind.
by wolvoleo | 2026-03-11 02:58:42+00:00
That site is terrible. The article is interspersed with a cookie popup, not one but two attention seeking popups, a mailing list sign up box, and several unclearly marked sections referring to other parts of the site. What a mess.

I think I've heard of and maybe even seen the site before but I don't think it would have been this enshittified or I would have remembered.

I didn't even bother finishing the article, it was so annoying.
by PaulmHope | 2026-03-11 02:58:51+00:00
I built MetaLayer, a tool that queries multiple AI models and produces a consensus answer.

Instead of relying on a single model, MetaLayer compares responses and synthesizes a combined outcome with transparency around agreement and reasoning.

The idea is to help users see where AI systems agree or disagree when answering complex questions.

It's currently in beta and I’d love feedback from the Hacker News community.
by camillomiller | 2026-03-11 02:59:28+00:00
Such fun.
On top of your already strapped schedule, now you have to bet your career on vibe code that you will now have to spend time reading and debugging. All that instead of a chain of accountability that has people in place instead of stupid bots with fake agency.
This is beyond corporate satire.

There was never before a technology capable of convincing leadership of its usefulness despite its constant blunders and despite the low quality of its output.
This feels like a corporate mass delusion of unprecedented scale.
by stephen_g | 2026-03-11 02:59:30+00:00
This is so much bigger than the “religious right” though, UK and Australia have far less of that and parties from both sides of politics here and in the UK seem to be competing to out-do each other with surveillance, censorship and control of adults online under the guise of ‘child safety’.

And all being pushed so, so much harder in just the last couple of years, all at the same time. I don’t know what’s the source…
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2026-03-11 02:59:39+00:00
> There's reason RV32E and RV64E, with half the registers, are a thing. RV32I/RV64I isn't small enough.

This is actually kind of counter to your point. The really tiny micro-controllers from the 80s only had 224 bits of registers. RV32E is at least twice that (16 registers*32 bits), and modern mcus generally use 2-4kbs of sram, so the overhead of a 32 bit barrel shifter is pretty minimal.
by crispy21 | 2026-03-11 02:59:47+00:00
I built 21blackjack.dev, a browser-based free casino simulator. Play blackjack, Plinko, roulette, Hilo, Mines, Ride the Bus, and Stock Market using virtual credits—no real money involved.

Key features:

• Multiplayer blackjack with friends and real-time chat
• Customizable avatars and profiles with in-game shop items
• Practice casino strategy safely with fair random outcomes
• Growing library of realistic casino-style games

All games run in-browser with transparent rules. Outcomes are fully fair, so the only advantage is the natural dealer edge in blackjack. Feedback from players and developers is welcome.
by xx__yy | 2026-03-11 03:00:06+00:00
Great to see yet another project to provide "offline"-ish comms.
The existing solutions are obviously not good enough yet, hence why all these projects are popping up. I hope we get to a good-enough one soon.

LoRa is great, but the bandwidth is terrible, so you'd be limited to Twitter sized messages when using this comms channel.
by EvansWilson | 2026-03-11 03:00:07+00:00
When the world’s largest asset manager makes a move, the entire market feels the ripple. BlackRock, with its trillions under management, isn't known for chasing "get rich quick" schemes. Instead, they look for compounding machines—and based on the latest filings, they’ve found their favorite in the world’s biggest retailer.

If you’ve been digging into the BlackRock Walmart Shares 13F Q4 2025 data, you’ll see a clear, bullish narrative unfolding. While other institutional investors are panicking over consumer spending shifts, BlackRock is quietly building a fortress.

Analyzing BlackRock Walmart Shares 13F Q4 2025

The end-of-year filings for 2025 show that BlackRock didn't just hold its ground; it actively expanded its empire. The numbers tell a story of incredible conviction in a company that many thought had already peaked years ago.

A Consistent Buying Spree
Looking at the BlackRock Walmart Shares 13F Q4 2025 report, the firm added approximately 3.9 million shares during the final quarter of the year. This wasn't a one-off fluke. BlackRock has been net-buyers of Walmart ($WMT) for nearly two years straight, bringing its total position to a staggering 349.56 million shares.

At a market value of roughly $38.94 billion, Walmart has cemented itself as a top-ten holding for the firm. When a giant like BlackRock allocates nearly 1% of its entire massive equity portfolio to a single retail stock, it’s a massive vote of confidence in the "essential" economy.

51 Quarters of Conviction
What’s even more impressive than the Q4 buy is the duration. BlackRock has held Walmart for over 12 years (51 quarters). This isn't a trade; it's a marriage. By consistently increasing their position as the stock price climbed from the $50 range to over $110, BlackRock is proving that they believe the retail giant still has plenty of runway.

Why BlackRock Loves the "New" Walmart

You might be wondering: why buy more Walmart now? It’s no longer just a brick-and-mortar grocery store. BlackRock is likely betting on three key pillars:

The E-commerce Pivot: Walmart has successfully transformed into a legitimate rival to Amazon, leveraging its physical stores as distribution hubs.

High-Margin Ad Business: Walmart Connect is turning the retailer into a high-margin media company.

Inflation Resilience: When budgets get tight, everyone—from the working class to the middle class—heads to Walmart. It’s the ultimate defensive play.

The Takeaway for Your Portfolio

BlackRock’s Q4 move is a reminder that sometimes the best investment isn't the newest AI startup, but the oldest player in the game who refuses to lose.

By following the BlackRock Walmart Shares 13F Q4 2025 trail, retail investors can see that the "smart money" is leaning into stability and scale. In an uncertain market, having a retail anchor that pays dividends and grows like a tech company is a rare find.
by akramachamarei | 2026-03-11 03:00:15+00:00
If so, then we can safely call that behavior uncapitalistic. That's how the definition works. FWIW, I knew very little about wage theft, until researching it at your prompting, which I appreciate. Seems like wage theft is rarely actual theft, and most often a violation of contract, but in either case it's a violation of capitalism's seed principles. Sometimes wage theft is neither theft nor contract violation. That's my impression from Wikipedia, at least.
by maltalex | 2026-03-11 03:01:28+00:00
> and nobody cares

Everyone cares. In fact, there's an entire industry of tools being developed to solve this very problem. The current governance gaps are obvious to anyone who's ever used an agent.

We are still in the very early stages of all of this. The capabilities of current models are ahead of our engineering practices, and other organizational practices for that matter. Everyone is new to this.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-03-11 03:01:36+00:00
If this were similar to SGX (which is what I initially assumed) then "not yet" is a perfectly reasonable position to take. However it's actually homomorphic encryption implemented in hardware thus not relevant to DRM (AFAIK).

That said, the unfortunate reality is that the same constructs that underpin DRM are also required to build a secure system. The only difference is who controls the root of trust. As such the problems with DRM (and hardware ownership more generally) are political as opposed to technical in nature.
Show HN: OpenClaw Plugin for Claude Code and Codex Orchestration
by goldmar | 2026-03-11 03:02:45+00:00
Doing serious development with vanilla OpenClaw was hit-or-miss. It kept making silly mistakes I had to babysit.

The built-in options didn't work well for me: the CLI is one-shot and ACP lacks plan approval and session persistence. So I built this plugin.

It has three modes: ask (agent proposes a plan, waits for approval before touching anything), delegate (auto-approves safe plans, escalates the risky ones), autonomous (fully hands-off). Paused, completed, and killed sessions can be resumed at any point in time including after a gateway restart. Notifications arrive via chat when it's done or needs input. Supports Claude Code and Codex.

Personally, I really like delegation mode.

Check out the GIFs in the README to see it in action.
by JohnWeston | 2026-03-11 03:02:47+00:00
Polaris is the context layer for world knowledge.
Built an API that converts global news into structured intelligence for AI agents.

The problem: AI agents that need to understand the world are scraping CNN and parsing HTML. They get paywalls, unstructured text, opinions mixed with facts, and zero metadata about trust or bias.

Polaris transforms 160+ news sources into structured JSON signals with:

Confidence scores (0-1) so agents can filter by reliability
Bias scoring verified
Adversarial counter-arguments on every brief
Source verification with trust levels

18 verticals: markets, crypto, AI/ML, cybersecurity, politics, space, sports, etc.

Free tier: 100 API calls/day, no key needed: curl https://api.thepolarisreport.com/api/v1/agent-feed

Or install our OpenClaw skill: clawhub install polaris-report
https://thepolarisreport.com

Would love feedback on the API design and the bias detection approach.
Thanks!
by eschaton | 2026-03-11 03:03:41+00:00
Tell me, how have laws “caught up with” “the [RIAA…] throwing threats around sharing MP3s?” So far as I know that’s still considered copyright infringement and the person doing it, if caught, can be liable for very substantial statutory damages.

It sounds like you really can’t handle being told “no, you can’t use an LLM for this” by someone else, even if they have every right to do so. You should probably talk to your therapist about that.
by hdivider | 2026-03-11 03:03:52+00:00
It's curious to me why we have no theory of intelligence. By which I mean an actual hard and verified theory, as in physics for gravity, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics.

Intelligence is simply not well-understood at a mathematical level. Like medieval engineers, we rely so heavily on experimentation in AI. We have no idea how far away from the human level we actually are. Or how far above the human level we can get. Or what, if anything, the limits of intelligence are.
by petterroea | 2026-03-11 03:04:34+00:00
I feel bad for the seniors who have to take on this workload. The general pattern I am seeing is that seniors at "AI-first" companies are being held back from doing their work by reviewing junior PRs, who are now able to ship much more code they don't understand the badness of.

Mentoring Juniors is an important part of the job and crucial service to the industry, but juniors equipped with LLMs make the deal a bit more sour. Anecdotally, they don't really remember the feedback as well, because they weren't involved in writing the code. Its burnout-inducing to see your hard work and feedback go in one ear and out another.

I personally know people looking to jump ship because they waste too much time at their current employer on this.