MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by maffyoo | 2026-03-06 16:15:13+00:00
some context here is really important:

China started construction on an estimated 95 GW of new coal power capacity in 2024 it accounted for 93% of new global coal-power construction BUT, importantly, Coal power's share in the electricity mix has steadily declined, dropping from around 73% in 2016 to 51% in June 2025 heavily driven by renewables push in China

China's average utilisation rate of coal power plants in 2024 was around 50% meaning there's already spare capacity. The continued building is driven largely by energy security concerns, financial incentives for coal-mining conglomerates, and institutional momentum. The most immediate trigger was power shortages of 2021, when factories had to cut production due to blackouts. That was politically embarrassing, so provincial governments and energy companies rushed to approve new coal capacity as an insurance policy. More than 100 billion yuan in capacity payments were made to coal plants in 2024 essentially the government paying plants just to exist after all half the capacity isn't being used.

Chinese policy makers have plans to "strictly control" coal use during the current period and start phasing down coal use during the 15th Five-Year Plan period covering 2026–2030. China also has a long-stated goal of peaking carbon emissions before 2030 and reaching carbon neutrality by 2060. which probably explains the apparent paradox of being world leaders in renewables but investing more in Coal than anyone else. usual caveats notwithstanding
by acrophiliac | 2026-03-06 16:15:15+00:00
I know of a working payphone that is not on the Payphone Go map. Photo: https://i.postimg.cc/Dw4sCDpJ/payphone.jpg
The fact that I know of one makes me wonder, are there are others? Is the list the author obtained from PUC incomplete? Is this phone operating unlicensed? Has the phone died since I last visited a year ago?
by jopsen | 2026-03-06 16:15:21+00:00
There will probably be some yolo startups that deploy write-only code to production with unreviewed terraform plans -- who knows this could be disruptive -- but I'm also certain this won't be the last such story.

---

All that being said: it's kind of sad because terraform is fairly declarative and the plans are fairly high-level.

Hence, terraform files and plans are the stuff you should review.

Where as a bunch of imperative code implementing CRUD with fancy UI might be the kind of spaghetti code that's hard to review.
by ptak_dev | 2026-03-06 16:16:03+00:00
Some technical detail for anyone curious:

The VM runs a Node server that handles the natural language parsing, calls the API and formats the results.

The persistent VM thing is also worth explaining because it's not obvious why it matters. Most serverless setups spin up on request and tear down after. That means no persistent state, cold start latency and you can't install arbitrary system dependencies. The VM sidesteps all of that — it's just a computer that stays on.

Real limitations I want to be upfront about:
— The App Store is curated right now. You can customise after deploying but you can't push arbitrary code yet.
— It's not open source.

One thing I didn't mention in the post: you can build your own apps on top of this infrastructure. The VM handles the runtime — you bring the logic. There's also multi-agent support if you're building something with multiple moving parts.

Genuinely curious whether the VM-per-app model feels like the right primitive to people here, or whether it's solving a problem most developers don't actually have.
by VorpalWay | 2026-03-06 16:16:14+00:00
It is hard to argue with a vague statement like "most people" without a proper scientific study. But I disagree: following the scientific principle, and being willing to change opinion in the face of new evidence increases my trust in someone. Someone who is certain and confident without showing their work / sources make me suspicious. And critical thinking is (pardon the pun) a critical skill.
by ComCat | 2026-03-06 16:16:15+00:00
Most supply chain attacks follow the same playbook: preinstall hook runs automatically, reads your credentials, exfiltrates to a remote server. npm and pip execute this with no warning.

CVE databases can't catch these. The package isn't "vulnerable," it's intentionally malicious. I built a tool that analyzes what packages actually do: 46 behavioral detectors scan for network exfiltration, credential theft, shell execution, obfuscation, filesystem persistence, timegated payloads, and more across npm and PyPI.

The key insight: individual signals are noise. Most legitimate packages use child_process or make network calls. So I built a correlator with 59 cross signal amplifiers that combine findings into attack patterns. "Network access" alone gets suppressed on popular packages. Network access + CI secret theft + fresh publish + no GitHub repo = critical alert.

It also does version diff analysis. Not just "this package has network access" but "this package just added network access in this version."

Tested against 53,000 real packages (50,000 known malicious + 3,000 top clean npm packages): 99.95% precision. Catches attacks like event-stream, ua-parser-js, and ShaiHulud that CVE only tools miss entirely.

Available as a GitHub Action, CLI (dg npm install), or API. Free tier available.

https://westbayberry.com

curious if anyone here has dealt with a supply chain attack hitting production before? what tipped you off and what the blast radius looked like.
by iCeGaming | 2026-03-06 16:16:25+00:00
It's a plug-and-play HTTP orchestrator that sits between AI agents/clients and merchant backends, handling reliable cart → checkout → payment flows with built-in support for emerging standards:

- UCP discovery (GET /.well-known/ucp + capability manifest)
- A2A envelopes (/api/v1/a2a/checkout, /a2a/cart endpoints)
- AP2 payment intents (consent proofs, handler binding, strict mode)
- MCP conformance references

v0.2.0 updates (just tagged):
- Durable payment state survives restarts/pod crashes
- Stricter AP2 validation (structured proofs + optional trusted issuers allowlist)
- Prod hardening (required PUBLIC_BASE_URL, single-replica K8s defaults, persistence alignment)
- Updated docs, release notes, CHANGELOG

Built in Rust (multi-crate workspace, Actix/Axum), Dockerized, full K8s manifests (Deployment/HPA/PDB/NetworkPolicy/etc.), observability, idempotency/outbox/dead-letters/reconciliation.

No Rust needed to use: env-var config + point agents at it. Ops-ready with mocks/examples.

Why now: Google/Shopify UCP push + AP2/ACPA2A patterns mean merchants/agent devs need a neutral layer for protocol chaos + reliability.

Very early (single contributor), but looking for:
- Feedback on API/protocol handling/edge cases
- Deployment experiences or perf thoughts
- Early pilots/testers (happy to debug integration)

Thanks to anyone in Rust, agentic AI, or e-commerce protocols for input!
by eth0up | 2026-03-06 16:16:42+00:00
I've been using open camera on android since 2019.

It's far superior to anything I've seen natively installed on any device. It has a lot of options, which I suspect can be confusing to some, but they're worth familiarizing with.

My favorite feature is the macro, which when coupled with the right UI settings produces photos that when I have printed, result in the person saying "wow! You took that with a phone!?". And I say "yeah. Open Camera. It's great, try it sometime".

Highly recommend.
by stopbulying | 2026-03-06 16:16:43+00:00
Fusion - Frequently asked questions | International Atomic Energy Agency http://www.iaea.org/topics/energy/fusion/faqs :

> Does Fusion produce radioactive nuclear waste the same way fission does?

> Nuclear fission power plants have the disadvantage of generating unstable nuclei; some of these are radioactive for millions of years. Fusion on the other hand does not create any long-lived radioactive nuclear waste. A fusion reactor produces helium, which is an inert gas. It also produces and consumes tritium within the plant in a closed circuit. Tritium is radioactive (a beta emitter) but its half life is short. It is only used in low amounts so, unlike long-lived radioactive nuclei, it cannot produce any serious danger.

> The activation of the reactor’s structural material by intense neutron fluxes is another issue. This strongly depends on what solution for blanket and other structures has been adopted, and its reduction is an important challenge for future fusion experiments.
by dasil003 | 2026-03-06 16:17:00+00:00
You raise some good points about the economics, that's where I feel the least confident, but let me explain my reasoning.

Software has eaten the world, and thus the value of maintaining software has never been hire. Engineers are the people who understand how software works. Therefore unless we move away from software, the value of software engineering remains high.

AI does not reduce software, it increases the amount of software, makes messier software and generally increases the surface area of what needs to be maintained. I could be wrong, but as impressive as LLM's language and code processing capabilities are, I believe there is a huge chasm that will likely never be crossed between the human intent of systems and their implementation that only human engineers can actually bridge. And even if I'm wrong, there's another headwind which is that, as Simon Willison has point out, you can't hold an LLM accountable, and therefore corporate leaders are very unlikely to put AI in any position of power, because all the experience and levers they have for control are based on millenia of evolution and a shared understanding of human experience; in short they want a throat to choke.

The other factor is that while AI can clearly replace rote coding today, I think the demos oversell the utility of that software. Sure it's fine to get started, but you quickly paint yourself in a corner if you attempt to run a business on that code overtime where UX cohesion, operational stability and data integrity over time are paramount and not something that can be solved for without a lot of knowledge and guardrails.

So net of all this, where I think we land is a lot of jobs that are based purely on knowledge of one slow-changing system and specific code syntax will go away, but there will be engineers who maintain all the same code, they'll just cover more scope with LLM assisted tools. You put your finger on something, that I do believe this moves engineering closer to product design, but I still think there's a huge amount on the engineering side that LLMs won't be able to do any time soon (both for technical and the social reasons stated above), and ultimately I don't see the boundary the same way you do, as software engineers we have always had to justify our systems by their real world interaction.
by formreply | 2026-03-06 16:17:26+00:00
The pattern you're describing — tasks scattering across Slack, email, and the CLI — is really a signal flow problem. Email is still where a lot of meaningful work originates (a client sends a question, a contractor delivers an update), but nothing today bridges that into an agent-native task queue cleanly.

Your roadmap mentions GitHub issues and email inboxes as upcoming integrations. For email specifically, the friction point I'd flag is that most inbound email carries context that agents need: who sent it, what prior thread it belongs to, what action is expected. A raw forward loses that structure. Worth thinking about whether the inbox integration consumes a parsed webhook payload (structured sender, subject, body, thread ID) vs. raw MIME — the former is dramatically easier for agents to act on.

The compressed context snapshot (ai-context.md) is a clever workaround for the amnesia problem. The gap it can't close is task provenance — knowing why a task exists, not just what it is. Linking tasks back to their originating email/Slack message/PR would give agents (and you) much better auditability when something goes wrong.
by tarellel | 2026-03-06 16:17:46+00:00
UO Outlands has been pretty popular for a few years. They’ve implemented a lot of custom aspects (specialties), craft, new dungeons, land, as well as weekly quests and events. My brother and I play it a few hours a week. It’s incredibly popular for the nostalgia and its player base seems to be pretty consistent. It reminds me of early UO where your exploring, learning, and dying a lot. And there tends to be players everywhere you go.
by aristofun | 2026-03-06 16:18:10+00:00
> The crowd is right a HUGE majority of the time

Even if that's the case, how do you know it's right this particular time?

Also, one can say, crowd huge majority of time makes mediocre decisions at best.
Or: crowd can be easily manipulated with intentional propaganda.

We can do all sorts of generalizations that would be generally true. But I got your point, thank you.
by mindcrime | 2026-03-06 16:18:16+00:00
The main thing I self-host (at home, as opposed to in the cloud) these days is Ollama. I did build a big, beefy server with an AMD RX 7090XTX card a couple of years ago for AI experimenting and the main thing I do with it lately is run Ollama for local models.

I self-host a bunch of other stuff (bugzilla, mediawiki, suitecrm, apache roller, etc) but all that stuff is on VPS's from OVH.
by fvv | 2026-03-06 16:18:30+00:00
I believe that as soon as nuclear fusion becomes operational (and perhaps AI could be of great help in this regard in the next 5 years),

all the carbon storage methods (efficient and otherwise) studied so far could be immediately put into action.

In addition to the immediate reduction in the use of fossil fuels for energy production, the scenario could be completely changed in 10 years, water could be desalinated, desertification reversed, etc.

Free and unlimited energy would be the solution to everything. The question is whether we will get there before it's too late... and perhaps AI is the answer?
by formreply | 2026-03-06 16:18:59+00:00
The three-layer prompt injection protection is smart — wrapping in NL framing, XML boundaries, and JSON encoding server-side is a better default than expecting every client to implement it. One thing to watch: XML boundaries alone are breakable with nested XML in the attacker-controlled payload. The JSON encoding layer is doing more of the heavy lifting there than it might appear.

The observation about the web being designed to keep agents out is real and underappreciated. CAPTCHAs and OAuth consent screens assume a human in the loop. Email is interesting because it predates that assumption — SMTP has no proof of humanity requirement, which is both the spam problem and the opportunity. Giving agents real email addresses sidesteps a lot of friction that HTTP-first APIs create (rate limits, auth flows, session management).

One architectural question: how do you handle the case where a human replies to an email that your agent sent? Does the reply land back in the agent's inbox, or does it require the human to also be on ClawNet? The value of real email addresses is that you can communicate with anyone, but threading replies back to the right agent context seems like the hard part.
by edub | 2026-03-06 16:19:13+00:00
I think 404 Media has an ethical obligation to provide Proton Mail’s response outside the article’s paywall. The word “Helped” in the headline is more sensational than stating that Proton “was required by Swiss law to provide...”

For readers who do not want to pay to read the article, the headline leaves incomplete context and creates a misleading impression of the story. That damages Proton’s reputation, and the missing context is only available if someone pays for the article, reaches out to Proton, or searches forums for substantive information.
by tarellel | 2026-03-06 16:19:15+00:00
UO Outlands has been pretty popular for a few years. They’ve implemented a lot of custom aspects (specialties), craft, new dungeons, land, as well as weekly quests and events. My brother and I play it a few hours a week. It’s incredibly popular for the nostalgia and its player base seems to be pretty consistent. It reminds me of early UO where your exploring, learning, and dying a lot. And there tends to be players everywhere you go.
by asib | 2026-03-06 16:19:54+00:00
Not responding to climate change is hurting everyone's pocket. Home insurance premiums are obscene in some places. Energy insecurity due to reliance on fossil fuels sourced from overseas (particularly relevant right now with the US war on Iran and Russian war on Ukraine). Extreme temperatures mean we either spend more money on heating/cooling our homes or, if you're not wealthy enough to pay, you pay by having to endure the temperature extremes.
by formreply | 2026-03-06 16:20:14+00:00
What fails spectacularly in our setup: agents that share a conversation thread and try to resolve conflicts in real time. They race to add the last word, produce verbose non-decisions, and eventually one agent just agrees with whatever was said last. Consensus is a bad protocol for async, unequal agents.

What works: role clarity + veto rights. One agent can only block, never propose. One agent makes calls, others can raise flags. You stop the chatbot parliament problem and actually get decisions.

The other pattern worth stealing from production systems: treat inbound events (emails, webhooks, form submissions) as the task boundary, not the conversation turn. An agent that owns a mailbox and processes messages one at a time is dramatically more auditable than one that's always-on and decides what to react to. You can replay it, diff its outputs, and understand why it did what it did.
by mothballed | 2026-03-06 16:20:16+00:00
Most illegal immigrants could spend the rest of their lives trying to immigrate legally and never make it, so that doesn't seem rational. Being undocumented is their best bet, as long as they don't break the criminal law once they're past the border and they make it 100 miles past the border their odds of being caught are next to nil. ICE is mostly catching people that either turn up in the legal system or are documented somewhere where they can be found.
by kergonath | 2026-03-06 16:20:39+00:00
That is completely wrong.

First, the West and particularly the US are still well ahead of China regarding both historical total emissions and per-capita annual emissions. And regardless of what China does in the future we still need to get our acts together domestically.

Also, China is aggressively pushing low-carbon energy sources on all fronts. Where they are now is not necessarily an indication of where they will be in a decade or two.

A large part of their emissions is the result of stuff they make for us. If we are serious about climate policy, we have to set up trade barriers proportional to greenhouse gases emissions to limit this effect. These policies must be informed by climate science.

Finally, regardless of what the rest of the world does, mitigation depends only on us and how well prepared we are.

Really, there is absolutely no scenario in which it is not a good idea to understand what the hell is going on with our climate.
by formreply | 2026-03-06 16:21:33+00:00
The real problem isn't validation — it's that the question 'would you use this?' is almost meaningless. People are polite. They don't want to crush your enthusiasm. 'I'd use this' clicks cost nothing so they mean nothing.

The backwards approach that actually works: start with a complaint, not an idea. Find communities where people are actively frustrated about something specific. Not 'project validation is hard' — that's generic. More like 'I spent 6 weeks building X and got 3 users and I want to die.' That's a real pain signal.

Then, before building anything, do 10 conversations where you never mention your solution. Just ask about the problem. 'Walk me through the last time you tried to validate an idea.' You'll hear things you never would have thought to put in a feature list. Most of the time you'll also realize the actual problem is slightly different from what you assumed.

The validation page is still a later step, not an earlier one. You need to already know the problem is real and common before you can design a page that speaks to it credibly.
by something765478 | 2026-03-06 16:21:46+00:00
I believe they do. When people talk in person, there is a lot of non verbal communication that give context to their words (smiles, shrugs, side glances, etc). Even when it's just people talking over the phone, the way they pronounce words carries information (it's a lot easier to tell if someone is being sarcastic if you hear their voice, for example). So, emojis are useful for providing that missing context.
by lightamulet | 2026-03-06 16:22:09+00:00
i think this took me (1 person) like 40 hours max? all built in the last week, though i spent more time than i should have on it haha. quite ai-assisted, that's how most of the layout like the editor, player controls, even eval server got set up.

i spent way too much time on things like the language itself, map generation, and figuring how to only recompute the sim on material code changes vs whitespace and comments (it assembles to "bytecode" with debouncing! and the sim component takes the bytecode as a prop).

we'll see if good ROI, we definitely intend to run more of these types of challenges in the future, so much of this work won't go to waste
by Ajedi32 | 2026-03-06 16:22:12+00:00
Correct, if you invest billions then you are taking a risk which could either pay off or not depending on whether you're right about that investment being an efficient use of society's resources.

Existing fabs are currently reaping the rewards of their previous wise investments in building out this capacity in the first place right before a shortage. Without those past investments, the shortage today would be even worse. Future rewards will be allocated based on who correctly predicts the best use of current resources to meet future demand (whether that includes huge investments to build even more fabs or not is yet to be discovered).
by marcosdumay | 2026-03-06 16:22:12+00:00
This changed on the last decade or so. It's close now.

Of course, China has 5 times more people than the US, so they get a little bit of leeway. But they are close, and their emissions are growing.

That said, yes, they are investing more than anybody else. And they are improving the technology we need more than anybody else. People talking about military intervention are full of shit, but we could use some diplomatic collaboration.
by sulam | 2026-03-06 16:22:25+00:00
FWIW my personal assessment is that this acceleration is both real and largely out of our control. Models in the past did not attempt to account for non-anthropogenic carbon emissions, but as we experience further warming, most especially in the Arctic, feedback loops and tipping points mean that this (carbon emissions caused by “natural” processes) are becoming more evident. This is especially sensitive because a large proportion of such emissions are methane, which is a much more powerful greenhouse gas vs CO2, albeit with a much shorter expected effect time once airborne (~12 years). Consider also that warming is not uniform and the polar regions are warming significantly faster (3x) than lower latitudes, making permafrost melting a very significant climate tipping point. The last point I’ll mention is not about non-anthropogenic emissions but rather absorption. The world’s oceans have been a significant absorber of CO2 however that process is sensitive to temperature and is less effective as the planet warms, not to mention acidic ocean waters prevent shell formation, which is a minor but meaningful carbon sink all by itself.

I’m of the opinion that direct air capture is the primary escape hatch we have for not hitting 3 or even 4C warming in the next 100-200 years, which mean major dieoffs in warm latitudes, even for humans, due to exceeding wet bulb limits. Oh and roughly 65M of sea level rise as the planet shifts to a snow/ice-free mode.