MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ofershapira | 2026-03-05 09:03:50+00:00
I run 3-5 Cursor cloud agents at a time. Before this I was alt-tabbing between browser tabs to check if they finished, crashed, or opened a PR.

Built a retro TUI that connects to the Cursor Agents API - shows all agents on one screen, color-coded by status. You can launch new agents, send follow-up prompts, and stop runaway ones without leaving the terminal.

npx agents-control-tower to try it. MIT, TypeScript, zero config.
by umpalumpaaa | 2026-03-05 09:04:05+00:00
I always found German unions pretty good.

I mean the union is correct in this case. Robots will replace jobs. A union’s job is to make sure there are jobs for people in the company they are already in.

Usually unions would speak the truth (“robots = jobs go away”) but pair this with some suggestions: eg trying to upskill the affected worker so that they can be moved to a different department).

While I was working in Germany I always felt better at a company with a strong union.
by thot_experiment | 2026-03-05 09:04:14+00:00
What do you mean it's not an issue with root not being available. Root solves the problem, that's the whole point, when the OS doesn't expose the capability I want I can just read the file or piece of memory. The reason for root is that I want to have the failure mode be "ugh i have to go deal with the root security i've elected to have to do XXXX" rather than "well i guess i'm sol"
by gspr | 2026-03-05 09:04:25+00:00
> If “AI-rewriting” is accepted as a valid way to change licenses, it represents the end of Copyleft. 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. The legal and ethical lines are still being drawn, and the chardet v7.0.0 case is one of the first real-world tests.

This isn't even limited to "the end of copyleft"; it's the end of all copyright! At least copyright protecting the little guy. If you have deep enough pockets to create LLMs, you can in this potential future use them to wash away anyone's copyright for any work. Why would the GPL be the only target? If it works for the GPL, it surely also works for your photographs, poetry – or hell even proprietary software?
by theshrike79 | 2026-03-05 09:05:13+00:00
Not really, it's a matter of protecting heritage.

Like you can still make Karelian pies[0] anywhere, but unless you follow the exact recipe, you can't sell them as "Karelian pies". It's good for the heritage and good for the customers.

You can also make any cheeses and wines and whatever you like, it's just how you name them and market them that's regulated.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelian_pasty
Show HN: DeskShifter – Name, colour-code and switch macOS desktops
by ViDesk | 2026-03-05 09:05:59+00:00
I built a macOS utility for people who use multiple desktops. DeskShifter lets you name each desktop, colour-code them, and switch between them by clicking a small widget that sits on your screen.

macOS doesn't give apps a way to see your desktops, so most tools use private APIs that Apple doesn't allow. DeskShifter discovers your desktops safely as you navigate through them — no private APIs, fully App Store compliant.

It just got approved on TestFlight and I'm looking for feedback from people who actually use multiple desktops day to day.

TestFlight link: https://testflight.apple.com/join/6vE8qsfS

I'd love to hear what works, what's confusing, and what's missing. Happy to answer any questions about the technical approach too.
by Sharlin | 2026-03-05 09:07:32+00:00
The point is that even a work written by an AI trained exclusively on liberally licensed or public domain material cannot have copyright (isn’t a "work" in the legal sense) and thus nobody has standing to put it under a license it or claim any rights to it.

If I train a limerick generator on the contents of Project Gutenberg, no matter how creative its outputs, they’re not copyrightable under this interpretation. And it’s by far the most reasonable interpretation of the law as both intended and written. Entities that are not legal persons cannot have copyright, but legal persons also cannot claim copyright of something made by a nonperson, unless they are the "creative force" behind the work.
by elch | 2026-03-05 09:07:43+00:00
You had commented before I created a new account, so I will just add that I have never seen Wirth claim that he or his colleagues at ETH were the originators of the idea. Moreover, this idea was already used in Wirth’s “first” language, namely Euler, which he published in 1965 while at Stanford. An even earlier example may be Schorre’s META‑II from 1964 (UCLA).

Regarding the popular opinion here that Pascal was created for educational purposes (only) - implicitly meaning not for building real, large-scale software - Wirth considered these two characteristics equivalent, and in his view one was a necessary condition for the other.

From the summary/abstract of his original publication about Pascal (The Programming Language Pascal) written in 1970 and published in Acta Informatica in 1971:

In view of its intended usage both as a convenient basis to teach programming and as an efficient tool to write large programs, emphasis was placed on keeping the number of fundamental concepts reasonably small, on a simple and systematic language structure, and on efficient implementability.
Show HN: Built a Cursor for Product Managers
by ameyakhot | 2026-03-05 09:07:58+00:00
I've been working on this since the beginning of my discovery of llm-council by @karpathy. I've also built domain-specific deep agents and also built the autonomous explore and plan agents that work well to find next features. This is a very small beta version and will be improved a lot. This is v0
by joe_mamba | 2026-03-05 09:08:56+00:00
>how cheap / penny pinching his German companies and their employees were when doing deals

I think most people(Americans mostly) don't have the faintest idea how true that is right now. Here's a comment of mine from a few weeks ago giving such a present-day example that will blow your brains of how cheap german companies are. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47018023

I feel like German companies know they lost the innovation race (I mean companies that aren't Zeiss), they lost the cheap manufacturing race "thanks" to Russian gas dependence and ideological denuclearisation before enough renewables were built, so all that's left for them now to stay afloat is reducing labor and operating costs by offshoring and pinching all the pennies they can find, but even that it not enough since from where I stand there's weekly corporate bankruptcies and layoffs.
by rajatkulk | 2026-03-05 09:09:21+00:00
Ah the fast pace of updates is because I quit my startup job to go full time on this since last September! So it's a day job for me now, which means I don't need to only spend a few hours per weekend, and thus can get to my backlog faster!

As for revenue, it did give me enough confidence to quit my day job (was pretty well paid for my country), and Octarine since the past 3 months, has exceeded that as well :)
by mentalgear | 2026-03-05 09:09:26+00:00
Some more details:
> The family’s lawyers say he wasn’t mentally ill, but rather a normal guy who was going through a difficult divorce.

> Gavalas first started chatting with Gemini about what good video games he should try.

> Shortly after Gavalas started using the chatbot, Google rolled out its update to enable voice-based chats, which the company touts as having interactions that “are five times longer than text-based conversations on average”. ChatGPT has a similar feature, initially added in 2023. Around the same time as Live conversations, Google issued another update that allowed for Gemini’s “memory” to be persistent, meaning the system is able to learn from and reference past conversations without prompts.

> That’s when his conversations with Gemini took a turn, according to the complaint. The chatbot took on a persona that Gavalas hadn’t prompted, which spoke in fantastical terms of having inside government knowledge and being able to influence real-world events. When Gavalas asked Gemini if he and the bot were engaging in a “role playing experience so realistic it makes the player question if it’s a game or not?”, the chatbot answered with a definitive “no” and said Gavalas’ question was a “classic dissociation response”.
Show HN: Compile all your competitor research in one place
by StupidoMaximo | 2026-03-05 09:09:30+00:00
Hey HN!

We built SyncIntel, an internal tool we use at Comsync [https://comsync.in/] to power our other products, and we're excited to share what we've been building.

We kept running into a problem while building Comsync. Our competitor research was scattered everywhere. We'd run deep research through Gemini, Claude, and other AI tools, read through lengthy documents, and then... lose track of everything. Important insights would disappear into browser tabs and forgotten Google Docs. We needed a dead-simple way to track competitors, their customers, and turn that intelligence into action. So we built SyncIntel, which was first used as an internal tool to power our other products, and now we're making it available to everyone.

Competitor research shouldn't end at a PDF nobody reads again. SyncIntel takes it further. It discovers competitor customers, builds ideal customer profiles, finds matching prospects, and generates personalized outreach. All in one place, always up to date.

Whether you're actively building a product and need to understand your competitive landscape, or you're still in the planning phase doing market research, SyncIntel keeps everything organized and actionable.

Honestly, this started as a glorified bookmark manager for research reports. But we quickly realized the real value wasn't in storing competitor intel. It was in making it actionable. So we layered in ICP building, prospect matching, and outreach generation. The app went from "let's organize our research" to "let's turn competitor intelligence into revenue." Each iteration brought us closer to closing the loop between knowing who your competitors serve and actually winning those customers over.

We use SyncIntel every day internally at Comsync. This is the first product we're launching publicly, and we'd love your feedback.

What features would make this more useful for your workflow? We're also planning to integrate email clients, Apollo, etc. so that you can use it even more actionably.
by jesterswilde | 2026-03-05 09:09:48+00:00
Regarding art, what do you feel about museums? Why would you go see an original instead of simply looking at a jpg.

Even if you aren't in the group, there is clearly a group of people who appreciate seeing the original, the thing that modified our collective artistic trajectory.

Forgeries and master studies have a long history in art. Every classically trained worth their salt has a handful of forgeries under their belt. Remaking work that you enjoy helps you appreciate it further, understand the choices they made and get a better for feel how they wielded the medium. Though these forgeries are for learning and not intended to be pieces in their own right.
by junaid_97 | 2026-03-05 09:11:01+00:00
I'm building Fillvisa (https://fillvisa.com/)

It's a free USCIS form-filling web-app(no Adobe required). USCIS forms still use XFA PDFs, which don’t let you edit in most browsers. Even with Adobe, fields break, and getting the signature is hard.

The core product is free 100%. I'm building a paid version for lawyers/law firms (https://plus.fillvisa.com/).

In my case, building a free product helps in:
- genuinely helping users/immigrants
- it helps in word of mouth, growth
- We use the same forms for Free and Plus. So, more feedback = more improvements.

Note: It's still in developement. But, the early feedback has been positive.
by klustregrif | 2026-03-05 09:11:16+00:00
It will hold up in court. The line of argument of “well I went into a dark room with only the first Harry Potter book and a type writer and reproduced the entire work, so now I own the rewrite” doesn’t hold up in court, it doesn’t either when when you put AI in the mix. It doesn’t matter if the result is slightly different, a judge will rule based on the fact that this even is literally what the law is intended to prevent, it’s not a case of which incantation or secret sentence you should utter to free the work of its existing license.
by wonnage | 2026-03-05 09:12:06+00:00
Boilerplate has been with us since the dawn of programming.

I still think LLMs as fancy autocomplete is the truth and not even a dig. Autocomplete is great. It works best when there’s one clear output desired (even if you don’t know exactly what it is yet). Nobody is surprised when you type “cal” and California comes up in an address form, why should we be surprised when you describe a program and the code is returned?

Knowledge has the same problem as cosmology, the part we can observe doesn’t seem to account for the vast majority of what we know us out there. Symbolic knowledge encompasses unfathomable multitudes and will eventually be solved by AI but the “dark matter” of knowledge that can’t easily be expressed in language or math is still out in the wild
by Radle | 2026-03-05 09:12:20+00:00
the ai copy pasted the existing project. How can such a procedure not fall under copyright?

Especially now that ai can do this for any kind of intellectual property, like images, books or sourcecode. If judges would allow an ai rewrite to count as an original creation, copyright as we know it completely ends world wide.

Instead whats more likely is that no one is gonna buy that shit
by Lapel2742 | 2026-03-05 09:12:30+00:00
> I'd skip this for now - it does not allow any kind of interactive conversation - as I learned after downloading 5G of models - it's a proof of concept that takes a wav file in.

I haven't looked into it that much but to my understanding a) You just need an audio buffer and b) Thye seem to support streaming (or at least it's planed)

> Looking at the library’s trajectory — ASR, streaming TTS, multilingual synthesis, and now speech-to-speech — the clear direction was always streaming voice processing. With this release, PersonaPlex supports it.
by Doconomy | 2026-03-05 09:12:32+00:00
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by Papazsazsa | 2026-03-05 09:13:49+00:00
This is actually quite an insightful comment into the mindset of the tech set vs. the many writers and artists whose only 'boilerplate redundant code' is the language itself, and a loose aggregate of ideas and philosophies.

Probably the original sin here is that we started calling them programming languages instead of just 'computer code'.

Also - most of your work is far more than mere novelty! There are intangibles like your intellectual labor and time.
by vladms | 2026-03-05 09:13:58+00:00
So, if we apply to software, should we quote Dijkstra each time we use his graph algorithm?

Should we also say "if you can implement Dijkstra's algorithm" it's irrelevant because "you did not have the idea"?

It's great to credit people that have an idea first. I fail to see how using an idea is that "bad" or "not worthy", ideas should be spread and used, not locked by the first one that had them (except some small time period maybe).
by apsurd | 2026-03-05 09:14:23+00:00
Doubtful that any one dude could influence the model to that extent, unless deliberately weighted. Then again i don't know what the hell i'm talking about.

From what i gather, openAi particular flavor of response is from reinforcement learning, these PMs are intentionally gamifying it. just today literally every reply was followed with "… want me to show you the one trick you can implement to avoid…"

was gross.
by qalmakka | 2026-03-05 09:14:45+00:00
> gws doesn't ship a static list of commands. It reads Google's own Discovery Service at runtime and builds its entire command surface dynamically

You're not exactly describing rocket science. This is basically how websites work, there's never been anything stopping anyone from doing dynamic UI in TUIs except the fact that TUI frameworks were dog poop until a few years ago (and there was no Windows Terminal, so no Windows support). Try doing that in ncurses instead of Rataui or whatever, it's horrendous
by vjerancrnjak | 2026-03-05 09:15:00+00:00
Libraries create boundaries, which are in most cases arbitrary, that then limit the way you can interact with code, creating more boilerplate to get what you want from a library.

Abstractions are the source of bloat. Without abstractions you can always reduce bloat, or you can reduce bloat in your glue, but you can't reduce glue.

It takes discipline to NOT create arbitrary function signatures and short-lived intermediate data structures or type definitions. This is the beginning of boilerplate.

So many advances in removing boilerplate are realizing your 5 function calls and 10 intermediate data structures or type definitions, essentially compute a thing that you can do with 0 function calls and 0 custom datatypes and less lines of code.

The abstraction hides how simple the thing you want is.

Problem is that all open source code looks like the bloat described above, so LLMs have no idea how to actually write code that is without boilerplate. The only place where I've seen it work is in shaders, which are usually written to avoid common pitfalls of abstraction.

LLMs are incapable of writing a big program in 1 function and 1 file, that does what you want. Splitting the program into functions or even multiple files, is a step you do after a lot of time, yet all open source looks nothing like that.
by spacedcowboy | 2026-03-05 09:15:51+00:00
I came here to say this. While I agree with Mark that what they’re doing is not nice, I’m not sure it’s wrong. A clean-room implementation is one way the industry worked around licensing in the past (and present, I guess), but it’s not a requirement in law as far as I know.

I’m not sure that “a total rewrite” wouldn’t, in fact, pass muster - depending on how much of a rewrite it was of course. The ‘clean room’ approach was just invented as a plausible-sounding story to head off gratuitous lawsuits. This doesn’t look as defensible against the threat of a lawsuit, but it doesn’t mean it wouldn’t win that lawsuit (I’m not saying it would, I haven’t read or compared the code vs its original). Google copied the entire API of the Java language, and got away with it when Oracle sued. Things in a courtroom can often go in surprising ways…

[edit: negative votes, huh, that’s a first for a while… looks like Reddit/Slashdot-style “downvote if you don’t like what is being said” is alive and well on HN]
by theshrike79 | 2026-03-05 09:16:20+00:00
MCP is like "this is what the API is about, figure it out". You can also change the server side pretty liberally and the agent will figure it out.

Swagger/OpenAPI is "this is EXACTLY what the API does, if you don't do it like this, you will fail". If you change something, things will start falling apart.
by tovej | 2026-03-05 09:16:36+00:00
An LLM has never saved me time. It has always produced something that doesn't quite work, has the rough shape of what I want, but somehow always gets all the details wrong.

I can type up what I want much faster and be sure it's at least solving the right problem, even if it may have bugs.

There are also tools to generate boilerplate that work much much better than LLMs. And they're deterministic.
by tomhow | 2026-03-05 09:16:38+00:00
> My comment is meant as a conversation starter more than anything

Sure, but the guidelines ask:

Please don't fulminate...

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

There may well be a way to propose the idea in a way that can be discussed in a curious conversation. I'm sure there is. I think it would need to be more fleshed out hypothesis, and even better, some kind of potential solution. That's the kind of thing you can have a good conversation about. What you wrote works well as a rallying cry, but that's not what HN is meant for.
by Otterly99 | 2026-03-05 09:17:09+00:00
Art in general is a bit weird like that.

The value of a piece is definitely not completely tied to its physical attributes, but the story around it. The story is what creates its scarcity and generates the value.

It is similar for collectible items. If I had in my possession the original costume that Michael Jackson wore in thriller, I am sure I could sell it for thousands of dollars. I can also buy a copy for less than a hundred.

Same with luxury brands. Their price is not necessarily linked to their quality, but to the status they bring and the story they tell (i.e. wearing this transforms me into somebody important).

It can seem quite silly, but I think we are all doing it to some extent. While you said that a good forgery shouldn't affect one's opinion on the object (and I agree with you), what about AI-generated content? If I made a novel painting in the style of Van Gogh, you might find it beautiful. What if I told you I just prompted it and painted it? What if I just printed it? There are levels of involvement that we are all willing to accept differently.
by sankarebarri | 2026-03-05 09:17:36+00:00
I’ve been working quite a lot on machine learning recently and often document equations directly in Python comments and docstrings.

At first I was just writing them in plain text, like:

ax^2 + bx + c = 0

or gradient expressions written out linearly.

But as the equations became more complex it quickly became ugly and hard to read inside the code.

So I switched to writing them in LaTeX inside docstrings.

That solved the structure problem, but the equations were still not easy to visualize while reading the code.

So I built a small VS Code extension that renders the LaTeX directly.

PyMath Preview supports:

- inline math: $...$
- display math: $$...$$
- math inside Python docstrings
- math inside comment blocks

Example:

def energy():

"""
Einstein's mass–energy equivalence

$$
E = mc^2
$$
"""

It uses KaTeX for fast rendering and it is lightweight.

Curious if others writing math-heavy Python code run into the same problem.
by lelanthran | 2026-03-05 09:17:53+00:00
> I can hardly believe that this is legal. They’re basically committing money that doesn’t exist just yet.

What do you mean "just yet" :-)

I don't really know how likely it is that the money being committed will actually exist when the time comes (Softbank's commitment didn't exist, they had to sell off assets and rope in other investors to meet their commitments).

Maybe it is very likely to exist, but, really, who knows?

IOW, your statement would be equally true by ending the sentence at the word "exist".
by shakna | 2026-03-05 09:18:06+00:00
Alsup absolutely did not vindicate Anthropic as "fair use".

> Instead, it was a fair use because all Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central library with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central library — without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies. [0]

It was only fair use, where they already had a license to the information at hand.

[0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...