MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TemperaryT | 2026-03-04 01:14:00+00:00
You’re right that airpower alone will not change anything. But as you pointed out, putting troops on the ground does not automatically change the outcome either. If there is a lesson from the last few decades it is that the military is good at two things. Killing people and breaking their equipment. What it can do is create opportunities that political or covert efforts have to capitalize on.

Any military campaign needs a clear objective and an achievable end state with contingencies planned. Even then something unexpected will still happen. Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Iraq were all very different conflicts and the current situation is different again.

As for rebuilding their capabilities, that is not trivial. Iran is still operating aircraft that we retired decades ago, which says something about their supply constraints.

The outcome also does not have to be installing a perfect government of our choosing. A more realistic result would be a government the United States can work with and one that the Iranian people actually support. That could still include parts of the current system if major and unpopular things changed.

I am sure someone in the current leadership would like to be the person who reduced the influence of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, loosened the grip of the religious leadership, and ended the country’s pariah status while getting sanctions lifted and money flowing back into the economy.

That would probably be a better outcome than trying to export our model of government to yet another Middle Eastern country.
by quotemstr | 2026-03-04 01:14:04+00:00
Shame the keyboards have a copilot key. That doesn't sound so bad until you see that the thing emits a key chord, not a scancode, making it annoying to remap. But you can.

The most annoying part is that the key matrix isn't set up to 3-key rollover with the copilot key like it would be for a real modifier key. (I'd assumed they'd just keep the matrix they used when there was a modifier in that spot. Nope.) Consequently, some key combinations, e.g. ralt-rcontrol-spacebar, don't work. Press them, nothing happens. Infuriating.
by kerkeslager | 2026-03-04 01:14:15+00:00
> Don't even get me started on how easy it is to get a driver's license with no clue how to drive. If they wanted to reduce deaths they should start by raising the bar on license difficulty.

Retesting is vital, too. Every 10 years. And if you have something like 3 moving violations you should have to do some community service, and retake the test.

I don't believe in fines on individuals: if the punishment for a crime is a fine, that law only applies to the poor. If you insist on endangering the lives of the people around you, then you get the same inconvenience as anyone else.
by qingcharles | 2026-03-04 01:14:21+00:00
I remember watching a TikTok Live from someone walking the streets of Tehran a couple of weeks before the big protests started and it reminded me of those photos [1] of the Middle East from the 1970s. Most women were without any hair coverings, and it looked like the much more Westernized Arab areas. It was clear that the authorities had started to lose religious control of the major cities or had simply let it lapse at that point. You'd be hard pressed to see anyone who looked repressed on the surface at least.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-47032829
by godelski | 2026-03-04 01:14:48+00:00
> The only acceptable pro-AI response to the accusation of AI Slop is to join team Anti-Slop.

I'll never understand why this is controversial. Especially in techie and engineering communities. We of all people love to be grumpy. It's in our nature because the first step to solving problems is recognizing them. Sweeping shit under the rug is for business people who's only interest is money and have no care for the product
by BobbyJo | 2026-03-04 01:14:59+00:00
Nobody else in the thread is making an argument that relies on the distinction.

"Intelligence" is used most commonly to refer to a class or collection of cognitive abilities. I don't think there is a consensus on an exact collection or specific class that the word covers, even if you consider specific scientific domains.

LLMs have honestly been a fun way to explore that. They obviously have a "kind" of intelligence, namely pattern recall. Wrap them in an agent and you get another kind: pattern composition. Those kinds of intelligences have been applied to mathematics for decades, but LLMs have allowed use to apply them to a semantic text domain.

I wonder if you could wrap image diffusion models in an agent set up the same way and get some new ability as well.
by zdragnar | 2026-03-04 01:15:38+00:00
I had a run of I think 4 laptops that I never paid for. I bought a spendy windows surfacebook back in the day, and opted for the extended warranty. The screen went out about a week before the warranty expired, they couldn't replace the screen, and so refunded me the entire purchase price, plus the cost of the warranty... which then went to the next laptop.

That cycle repeated itself either two or three more times, up to today, and my current laptop is I think going to be the one that finally last long enough that I'll have to actually pay for my next upgrade.
by suzdude | 2026-03-04 01:15:38+00:00
And how many hundreds of millions has capitalism killed?

Considering American involved Wars:
American Civil War, Vietnam War, First Gulf War, Iraq War, World War 2

Considering how many millions have died due to unrestrained capitalism destroying ecosystem, contaminating air, water, soil?

Please do not pretend that capitalism does not promote nor allow the deaths of those who it is profitable to allow to die.
by wtallis | 2026-03-04 01:15:48+00:00
Support chatbots are pretty much the only scenario where "don't make me talk to your chatbot" is a problem in practice. If someone tries to use a chatbot to engage with me in a personal or professional discussion, I don't lose anything of value by simply ignoring them permanently. It's only when the party using the chatbot has something I want that I have any incentive to even consider playing along.
by dylan604 | 2026-03-04 01:16:08+00:00
Maybe you can get a Trump >100% discount from the bot if you keep at it.

It's unfortunate that you keep accepting their lower rate though. If a very small percentage of people are willing to continue paying even at slightly lower rates the the vast majority of people, it is still earning them money. Maybe you really didn't want to cancel? I always thought wanting to cancel was black and white, but you've turned it into shades of gray.
by devin | 2026-03-04 01:16:10+00:00
My work has turned into churning out a PR, marking it as a draft so no one reviews it, and walking away. I come back after thinking about what it produced and usually realize it missed something or that the implications of some minor change are more far-reaching than the LLM understood. I take another pass. Then, I walk away again. Repeat.

Honestly I'm not sure much has changed with my output, because I don't submit PRs which aren't thoughtful. That is what the most annoying people in my organization do. They submit something that compiles, and then I spend a couple hours of my day demonstrating how incorrect it is.

For small fixes where I can recognize there is a clear, small fix which is easily testable I no longer add them to a TODO list, I simply set an agent off on the task and take it all the way to PR. It has been nice to be able to autopilot mindless changesets.
by rlpb | 2026-03-04 01:16:12+00:00
Anybody can become an Ubuntu developer. This is one such Ubuntu developer discussing possible implementation of a law that affects them across multiple distributions in good faith while trying to respect privacy and maintaining users' ultimate control of their Free Software based operating systems.

Ubuntu has made no decision here. This is essentially one contributor seeking consensus on what sort of contribution in relation to this law might be acceptable to multiple projects. It is very far from "Ubuntu Planning <X>" and exactly how community driven projects are supposed to work.

Comments disparaging Ubuntu have fallen for Lunduke's clickbait in their ignorance.
by stephenr | 2026-03-04 01:16:26+00:00
> Anyone who cares about value isn’t getting a non-base model Mac. They are buying the silver shiny thing or their company is paying.

Or they value things differently than you do.

Like screen brightness. Or external IO. Or more than 64GB of memory. Or not being stuck with Windows. Or an SSD larger than 2TB.

> removable WiFi card

I could stick my hand into a wood chipper and still use the stump to count the number of people I've ever seen mention much less desire a removable wifi card in the decision making process about a laptop.
by paulryanrogers | 2026-03-04 01:17:37+00:00
> Trump is no saint, but you are turning him into a cartoonish villain.

I didn't claim Trump is any of those things yet. Though courts would agree that he's a racist (in his tenant policies, never mind his retoric), a felon (financial crimes), a fraud (sending nonprofit money to Bondi's campaign), obstructs the biggest pedo investigation ever (redacting even "don't"), and the 14th amendment would disqualify him from federal office--if he hadn't packed SCOTUS (who rule for him 90+% vs 90+% against in lower courts).

> That never stopped democrats from taking his donation checks, did it?

Democrats have plenty of blood on their hands. At least some of them continue to try to reform campaign financing. Modern Republicans seem to relish in the money laundering aspects, especially Trump.

> And if you do not agree with the outcome, then you are the tyrant.

You cannot have democracy under tyranny. And if a country elects an aspiring dictator (who earlier lead a mob to overthrow an election result, sent fake electors, demanded votes be "found", demanded vote counting be stopped while he was ahead, etc) then I suppose it ceases to be a democracy thereafter.

Regardless, I'm not advocating illegal acts, despite the fact that Trump commits them on the regular. I'm advocating the exercise of freedom of speech, expression, and association in opposition to a (hopefully term limited) tyranny.
by ilamont | 2026-03-04 01:17:44+00:00
I used to work as a technology journalist. A guy from the business side always used to say, “there’s no way we are leaving money on the table“ as justification for putting ad modules, video players, lead generation forms and other junk around our articles. We had no say in the matter.

Someone from the financial times did a test about the impact of this garbage on read times and brand loyalty. This was maybe 15 years ago. Of course the more ads shoehorned onto the page, the worse the metrics were.
by tialaramex | 2026-03-04 01:17:47+00:00
It's completely crazy to use passwords when you needn't. Passwords are a human readable shared secret, they were already obsolete when SSHv1 was invented last century.

From the outset SecSH (SSHv2, the thing you actually use today and if you're younger, likely the only thing you ever have used) has public key authentication as a Mandatory To Implement feature. Implementations where that doesn't work aren't even SSH, they're garbage.
by codingdave | 2026-03-04 01:17:57+00:00
> I'm convinced someone out there has figured out the playbook for turning cloud credits into serious money.

Yeah, the cloud provider figured that out. They shell out credits fairly freely to almost anyone who asks, knowing that one of two things will happen:

1) The recipient won't have a clue what to do with them, and it doesn't cost them much of anything at all to have offered them.

2) The recipient will find a way to turn them into profit, get themselves tied in to their selected vendor, and then become a profit center for the cloud platform.

Don't get me wrong, it is nice to have the credits. But it is a sales tactic - their cost to acquire you as a customer is just their actual underlying costs on whatever resources you spend. Win-win if you can make something of it, but the reason you aren't finding canned playbooks on what to do with them is that if you really knew how to turn them into profits, you never would have needed them in the first place.

So stop trying to minmax your profits, and just go play with the services. Learn everything you can, spend those credits to self-educate, and now you have more experience and skills to offer your next gig, which probably will pay better than starting a side project anywa.
by zmgsabst | 2026-03-04 01:18:00+00:00
Okay — but did they try to address that, eg, via easy to remember pass phrases? Or were they hacks pushing that complexity nonsense that XKCD called out as midwit math?

https://xkcd.com/936/

Passwords are the ultimate example of technologists turning in substandard bullshit and then blaming users for “holding it wrong”. If that’s Microsoft’s largest problem, they’ve deserved every call.
by godelski | 2026-03-04 01:19:01+00:00
> People demand free support.
> When I worked at Microsoft

Last I checked windows was a paid product...

Last I checked the common nicknames were "Microslop" and "Winblows"

Maybe if Microslop spent more time improving their product they'd spend less money and time on support.

Sorry, I have no empathy for a multi trillion dollar company that's shoving things down our throats. I'm sorry you had a frustrating experience as an employee but my feelings about a mega corp are very different. It's like watching someone wipe away their tears with hundred dollar bills
by trinsic2 | 2026-03-04 01:19:27+00:00
Im making the distinction, not that poster.

We are on our way to death camps.(maybe that's an over exaggeration, but we are still in a really bad place)

Secondly dissapearing people without due process is what this administration is doing. This is not about illegal immigrants, that's just a pretext for an all-out war on our constitutional freedoms. The fact that you are parreting those lies shows exactly what kind of agenda you have. Look around you if you are in fact interested in the truth of the matter.

And yes I am doing something about it. Resist and unsubscribed and training myself on non-complianace with freedomtrainers.

What are you doing? Ohh yes, parreting bullshit while the country gets destroyed. Good luck with that.
by tombert | 2026-03-04 01:19:47+00:00
I guess what frustrates me is how much people seem to have amnesia with anything involving tech. In a week or two this will fade from the collective consciousness, and OpenAI will be unaffected and they'll release new features and people will start subscribing again.

I mean, look at all the reputational damage that has happened with Microsoft and Google throughout the years; it's so common that it's basically ignored now.
by Wowfunhappy | 2026-03-04 01:19:53+00:00
I don't understand what "should" means in this context.

Personally, I still can't quite believe that any of this is possible. A computer should be unable to write any prose at all. If it can, but it defaults to a certain tone of voice and needs to be prompted a bit to do something else... okay? I guess that's how it is.
Show HN: Augur – A text RPG boss fight where the boss learns across encounters
by thutch76 | 2026-03-04 01:20:01+00:00
I've been building Augur as a solo side project for the last month or so. It started as an experiment to see if I could make "boss fight" that learned from all comers, but still felt genuinely fair to play. The original plan was to build a simplistic jrpg style turned-based encounter engine, but I quickly pivoted to a text based interface, recalling my early experiences with Adventure and Zork. That naturally led to incorporating an LLM, and it turned into something I find pretty fun, so I'm sharing it.

The core idea is simple: you play a text-based boss encounter against a character called the Architect, set in a strange library. You can fight, sneak, persuade, or try something I haven't thought of. Turns are mechanically resolved with d100 rolls, conditions track injuries instead of HP, and objects in the world have physical properties the LLM reasons about. The "engine" is property-based instead of tables of rules, and I've found that to yield some novel gameplay.

The part I'm most interested in exploring is the learning. The Architect builds impressions from what it actually perceived during an encounter, stores them as vector embeddings, and retrieves relevant ones at the start of future encounters. It's lossy on purpose — more like human memory than a database lookup. If a tactic keeps working, the Architect starts recognizing the pattern. If you sneak past undetected, it remembers losing but not how.

The technical foundation for all of this is a dual-LLM turn loop. Each turn makes two model calls: an engine model that sees full game state and resolves mechanics, then an architect model that only receives what it has actually perceived (line of sight, noise, zone proximity). The "information asymmetry" is structural and deliberate — the architect model literally cannot access state the engine doesn't pass through the perception filter.

I tried the single-LLM approach first and it didn't work. No matter how carefully you prompt a model to "forget" information sitting in its context window, it leaks. Not to mention the Architect had the habit of adopting God Mode. So splitting the roles made the whole thing feel honest in a way prompt engineering alone couldn't.

This is my first HN post, and this is a real launch on modest infrastructure (single Fly.io instance, small Supabase project), so if it gets any traffic I might hit some rough edges. There's a free trial funded by a community pool, or you can grab credits for $5/$10 if you
want to keep going. It's best experienced in a full desktop browser, but it's passable on the two mobile devices I've tested it on.

Playable here: https://www.theaugur.ai/

I'm happy to go deeper on any of the internals — turn flow, perception gating, memory extraction, cost model, whatever is interesting.
by kerkeslager | 2026-03-04 01:20:14+00:00
> That’s reality, you aren’t going to change that unless you start executing people that speed, and that isn’t a realistic solution.

This is an adult conversation, please think before you type absurdities like this.

If (A) there was enough enforcement to actually catch people that speed, and (B) the punishment was rehabilitative (you have to clean up the roadway you were endangering people's lives on and take a class to retest for your license) there would be far fewer speeders.

> What you’re arguing for is akin to operating industrial machinery without safeties

No, actually, I'd love if we redesigned roads so people instinctively drive slower. I'm not arguing against that in any way.

All my post was doing was insisting that if you're going to blame someone, you place blame where it belongs. You're blaming people doing what they should be doing instead of the people endangering everyone around them.
by ChildOfChaos | 2026-03-04 01:20:58+00:00
Bit disappointed with this release.

I have a iMac 5k that I want to replace with a Mac mini or Studio, but monitors for Mac's are difficult since you need 5k at 27" or even 6k at 32" to keep th pixel density and then they aren't many options.

It's getting better, but prices are very high and a big issue with the 5k 27" monitors is that they are stuck at 60hz, Apple announced an approved offering here, but it's very expensive for the XDR and ideally I'd like to upgrade to 6k at 32" and have 120hz but that just seems unobtainable at the moment.
by belorn | 2026-03-04 01:21:05+00:00
Some of the speed bumps-like techniques here in Sweden will do more than just be a bump, it will severely damage the tires if you don't slow down. Curbs that require the driver to make very tight turns for example can be made from fairly sharp stone with an clear edge. A SUV/pickup truck can speed over it, but the trip to the repair shop will make it less fun.

They added some square-like flower pots in the middle of a lovely road next to where I live in order to force drivers to make a double S turn. Those are made from sharp rust-painted steel, and most of the corners are now painted with other peoples car paint. The only way to make it through is to drive at walking speed, which basically everyone do.
by nullable_bool | 2026-03-04 01:22:20+00:00
I use Sequelize at work and have used drizzle for a few personal projects and I can say that I really like the following:
- Native TS integration
- The migrations system is wonderful
- The API is more intuitive, imo.
I think it comes down to personal preference to use any/none of these tools, but I liked it enough to donate some space cash to the project.
by thutch76 | 2026-03-04 01:22:46+00:00
Builder here, happy to answer questions about any of the internals.

If you want to dig deeper on the architecture, I wrote up the dual-LLM design and the memory system on my engineering blog:

- https://www.conecrows.com/blog/augur-soft-launch — covers the dual-LLM turn loop, perception gating, and why the single-LLM approach failed
- https://www.conecrows.com/blog/augur-memory-v1 — covers impression extraction, vector embeddings, and lossy synthesis

The stack is Fastify, Next.js, Supabase (Postgres + Auth), and both OpenAI and Anthropic models for the engine and analysis. Encounters cost roughly $0.08–$0.15 per turn (internal cost) depending on state complexity and encounter length.
by gajjanag | 2026-03-04 01:23:08+00:00
> That's why you need to put your scope

The problem is, "scope" is often equated to "how many people worked in my empire" rather than "how much business value did my work X generate".

The two things are vastly different, and I have seen the distinction/oversimplification play out over and over in my own career as well as many others around me.

As an extreme on the "individual technical expert side", there are things out there that can pretty much only be accomplished with a few people around the world who possess the dedicated expertise. These results can't be replicated by a cobbled together team of 10 or 100 people even though the latter sounds more impressive for "scope".

Some organizations do a decent job of recognizing these different "archetypes", many don't.
by hmeh | 2026-03-04 01:24:41+00:00
Substantial | Senior/Staff Software Developer | REMOTE (US) | Contract (potential for full-time)

Substantial is a technology consulting company. I'm looking to add someone to my team working with a long-time client on legal technology. We're a serious, collaborative team working in what we refer to as a Lean/post-agile way. We're looking for someone with 10+ years of experience, ideally in both the front end and the back end.

Technology: Ruby, Rails, Event Sourcing, JavaScript, Stimulus/Turbo
Practices: Collaborative development (pairing, mobbing), TDD, end-to-end ownership, UI/UX design, user interviewing, etc.

If you'd like to learn more about how we work, I have several articles on the subject: https://github.com/aaronjensen/software-development/

Reach out to me directly if you are interested: aaron [at] substantial.com
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-03-04 01:25:36+00:00
> why do people hate on AI writing but LOVE AI coding?

People don't like AI writing because it reads like something written by corporate drones rather than actual humans.

People love AI coding for a couple of reasons. First, code doesn't read like prose. You don't complain about how code reads. (OK, people do, but the point of code is to execute.)

Second, people love AI coding because it's fast. It gets the code written far faster than a human would write it.

But isn't that true of AI writing as well? It gets the text written far faster than a human would write it.

So my "aha" moment: The people complaining about AI writing are the readers, and the people loving AI coding are the writers. When humans have to read that AI-written code, will they still love it? (Or can AI actually read and revise code well enough that nobody will ever have to get there?)