MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dekhn | 2026-03-11 21:13:09+00:00
Note that my field is biophysics (quantitative biology) while yours is physics and CS. Those are done completely differently from biology; with the exception of some truly enormous/complex/delicate experiments that require unique hardware, physics tends to be much more reproducible than biology, and CS doubly-so.

Replication of an experiment and finding image fraud are kind of done as two different things. If somebody publishes a paper with image fraud, it's still entirely possible to replicate their results(!) and if somebody publishes a paper without any image fraud, it's still entirely possible that others could fail to replicate. Also, most image errors in papers are, imho, due to sloppy handling/individual errors, rather than intentional fraud (it's one of the reasons I worked so hard on automating my papers- if I did make an error, there should be audit log demonstrating the problem, and the error should be rectified easily/quickly in the same way we fix bugs in production at big tech).

This came up a bunch when I was at LBL because of work done by Mina Bissell there on extracellular matrix. She is actively rewriting the paradigm but many people can't reproduce her results- complex molecular biology is notororiously fickle. Usually the answer is, "if you're a good researcher and can't reproduce my work, you come to my lab and reproduce it there" because the variables that affect this are usually things in the lab- the temperature, the reagents, the handling.

See
https://www.nature.com/articles/503333a (written by Dr. Bissell).
by jmyeet | 2026-03-11 21:13:28+00:00
Fentanyl has become a huge issue with street drugs. It's being laced in other drugs. It's an incredibly strong opiate and because the mixing is imprecise, it can be easy to overdose unintentionally.

What's more interesting is the hysteria around fentanyl, which is completely made up and has no basis in fact, but is perpetuated by police unions and media outlets who are likely currying favor with police unions or just trading on the hysteria.

In it's purest form, fentanyl can exist in a powder or liquid form. I could give you a massive quantity of either and you could handle them completely fine. How do I know this? Because health workers do this all the time. It's like handling talcum powder. I mean you would probably want to wash your hands and you wouldn't want to lick it but there are no fumes and you can't be poisoned or dosed just by being in the same room as fentanyl in any form.

Yet this completely made up fear has caused law enforcement officers to believe they've suffered from fentanyl exposure. For example [1]:

> Results

> Nearly all leaders and officers interviewed wrongly believed that dermal exposure to fentanyl was deadly and expressed fear about such exposure on scene. Officers had a lack of education about fentanyl exposure and faulty or dubious sources of information about it.

and [2]:

> Police in the United States have told implausible stories about airborne fentanyl exposures for years. The real symptoms appear related to panic attacks and the psychological trauma of policing.

So something that's completely made up can lead people to create their own symptoms. It also fits the narrative of people believing their jobs are more dangerous than they actually are.

So, back to Havana Syndrome. I've always been convinced that it's completely fake. There are probably people who like the narrative because it makes the Russians or Cubans scary with some unknown tech. And that means you need to research your own versions, right?

One possibility I might believe is that these people were exposed to something most likely from the CIA itself. You might say "the CIA wouldn't do this to their own". Think again [3].

So to believe any of this I want these people to release their medical records and have some independent medical analysis. Does the author really have TBI? Was there some other cause? Did this person suffer, say, an injury in a motor vehicle accident and is intentionally or unintentionally blaming it on Havana Syndrome?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09553...

[2]: https://www.leidenlawblog.nl/articles/police-panic-and-fenta...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra
by sjs382 | 2026-03-11 21:13:45+00:00
The hubris of buying a domain to loudly demonstrate that you don't understand the complexities of a topic. And then you don't even put your name on it...

Anyways, further reading:

https://aldavigdis.dev/2023/03/25/falsehoods-programmers-bel...

https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood?tab=readme-ov...
by Tharre | 2026-03-11 21:13:46+00:00
> But Clawbert seems like a worse attack vector than just getting OpenClaw itself to execute the malicious instructions. OpenClaw already has root access.

Well the assumption was that you could secure OpenClaw or at least limit the damage it can do. I was also thinking more about the general usecase of a AI SRE, so not necessarily tied to OpenClaw, but for general self hosting. But yeah probably doesn't make much of a different in your case then.
by zahlman | 2026-03-11 21:14:05+00:00
I suppose I should put my comment here instead of at top level.

Exactly when was this point added? It seems somehow not new, but on the other hand it was missing from an archive.today snapshot I found from last July. (I cannot get archive.org to give me anything useful here.)

Edit:

> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.

> If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.

Perhaps these points (and the thing about trivial annoyances, etc.) should be rolled up into a general "please don't post meta commentary outside of explicit site meta discussion"?
by steve_adams_86 | 2026-03-11 21:14:40+00:00
It's a drag for sure, but, what were you doing/going to do with it? You almost never posted, and when you did, it didn't contribute to anything.

If I owned a site like X, I'd want some way to reclaim user names in cases like these. I don't doubt X is sneaky or gross about it, but it's a reasonable need too.

Putting the name on a marketplace is weird. I'd simply free it up if it was my platform, and send a note to the original owner explaining what happened. Though I'd send warnings as well.

Something like 'Hey, you haven't [met an engagement metric] for [n period of time]. We're going to shut down your account to make space for other people'. People could game this, sure, but I suspect it would be better than what happened to you.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-03-11 21:15:03+00:00
> Dumbing down language is dumbing down period

I agree. But I don’t always see it as dumbing down. James Joyce’s Portrait starts out with a lot of nonsense, that doesn’t mean it’s dumb or dumbed down. It’s just communicating something that is best described that way. Even to an erudite audience.

I have expertise in some topics. I don’t think of communicating that in lay terms to be dumbing down. The opposite, almost: finding good analogies and expressing them clearly is a lot of fun, even if what comes out the other end isn’t particularly sophisticated.
by TheAmazingRace | 2026-03-11 21:15:04+00:00
I know Lenovo has their issues, but out of all the non-Apple laptop companies, they are by far the best out there. And to their credit, they do try to listen to customer feedback.

Also, AFAIK, Lenovo still has their ThinkPad designs developed by a design think-tank lab in Japan that they own (and IBM still has a bit of influence here as well) so I know Lenovo still gives somewhat of a damn in trying to develop a solid laptop.
by colechristensen | 2026-03-11 21:15:14+00:00
Russia developed a less lethal directed energy weapon which is essentially a microwave oven radio signal switched off and on very quickly (likely something like a GHz signal with a highly directional antenna being switched at kHz)

Eyewitness reports at the Maduro kidnapping raid and a recent leak in the last few days regarding the US purchasing such a weapon from Russia and testing it at least on animals tie all of this together.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-military-tested-device-that-...
by mzelling | 2026-03-11 21:15:20+00:00
The landing page design reminds me of Perplexity's ad campaigns. It's a clean look. I'd find your product more enticing if you framed your offerings more around evaluation + automatic optimization of production agents. There's real value there. The current selling points — trace sessions, track tool calls, measure token usage, and calculate costs — seem easily implementable at home with a bit of vibe coding.
by Heliodex | 2026-03-11 21:15:27+00:00
> What are you, their PR agent?

To clarify, no <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47334849>. I don't have any affiliation with Roblox Corporation, and I hope this will be able to make clear to you that my intention is to debate this matter in good faith.

> It doesn't really matter if you agree that it does. It is a fact that it does.

This isn't particularly constructive. Roblox publishes monthly updates on their safety status including statistics on the whole platform <https://about.roblox.com/newsroom>, and more in-depth statistics are also available for specific experiences <https://devforum.roblox.com/t/4028415>. There isn't any similarly concrete evidence to claim that Roblox directly facilitates links between child sexual abusers and children, so the difference between opinion and fact from that side of the argument is moot.
by rustystump | 2026-03-11 21:15:30+00:00
Everyone here is so far from a normie it is almost painful. Dead internet is an outcome of supply and demand.

The fundamental issue is that a plurality of humans pref the direction things have gone and are moving in. Is it a good direction? By this crowd’s standards, no.

To be clear, i dont like either but when i watch the speed kids swap between 5 insta accounts and 3 reddit accounts, it seems the majority are happy with it.
by Nevermark | 2026-03-11 21:16:26+00:00
If that is so, why not acknowledge that the current working theory is that it is psychogenic, but that doesn’t make it any less real.

The fact that psychogenic illness is not simply “weak” people, but a real phenomenon, strongly supports the fairness and necessity of offering treatment.

The wikipedia article says when authorities publicly take the effects seriously it can induce more cases. But the example was of getting help from a witch doctor, which was a remarkably dysfunctional “validation” to add to an already complex problem.

Another very dysfunctional “validation”: official denial, avoidance, obvious lack of work on solutions or mitigations, and all the trappings of a cover up!

Being direct has so many benefits, vs indirect denial or bad faith “treatments”.

It would be a reassuring response, to those in the same context without symptoms who are concerned about their own health.

Direct responses, with care given, are also in a better position to find treatments for psychogenic symptoms, preventative practices that reduce vulnerability, or alter working theories of cause, as any other evidence emerges.

Chronic anxiety and anxiety attacks are “psychosomatic” on an individual basis. But very real, often caused or impacted by working conditions, and important to diagnose and treat. Psychogenic illness should be the same. “Illness” is not a cause limited concept.
by armchairhacker | 2026-03-11 21:16:43+00:00
AI slop

> The uncomfortable truth is that...

> ...that the real question isn't...

> Corporate resistance...introduces friction at the infrastructure layer

And check comment history (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=julius_eth_dev)

Sometime yesterday, or further back, someone has decided to run a bot experiment (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patchnull, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079)
by bonesss | 2026-03-11 21:17:19+00:00
Back then the day Yahoo was a manually curated index of submitted & verified sites with search capabilities.

Wild-ass business idea: what if Yahoo 2026 recreated Yahoo 1996 and also any of the video sites it bought up back in the day get relaunched as deshittified ad-selling mechanisms to fund the whole thing… there’s gotta be Yahoo 1996 money in whatever scraps YouTube is missing.

It used to be faster and easier to follow actual content.
by littlestymaar | 2026-03-11 21:17:21+00:00
Anonymity is important for many things. But on the flip side it's responsible of many issues with the internet today, because it makes moderation pretty much impossible (anyone can always just create a new account).

What we're missing is a way to have cryptographically secure pseudonymity: you log in to a website, you don't give any information whatsoever, but you cannot make two different accounts.
by MeetingsBrowser | 2026-03-11 21:17:25+00:00
Now define useful, specifically in the context of a comment on hackernews.

An LLM summarizing the contents of a blog post might be useful to you, but is a comment here the right place for something you could geneate on your own?

I would guess for most people here, real insight or opinions from others is the "useful" aspect of reading hackernews comments.

Using LLMs to generate or refine comments only moves things further away from that goal (in my opinion).
by robotswantdata | 2026-03-11 21:17:32+00:00
Welcome change, there is enough AI slop on the internet already.

I come here for thoughtful discussion, a break from the relentless growing proportion of ai slop emails I get from people clearly vibe working.

Not edits for tone or clarity, 400+ word emails full of LLM BS they clearly haven’t checked or even understood what they have sent. Annoyingly this vibe slop is currently seen as a good KPI.
by dang | 2026-03-11 21:17:34+00:00
We aren't in the least asking people to not use AI. We're asking them not to post AI-generated or AI-edited comments to Hacker News.

By all means make good use of LLMs and other AI. What counts as good use? The world is figuring that out, it will take years, and HN is no exception (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). We just don't want it to interfere with the human conversation and connection that this site has always been for.

For example, it has always been a bad idea and against HN's rules when users post things that they didn't write themselves, or do bulk copy-pasting into the threads, or write bots to post things.

Btw, the HN mods (who are also the HN devs) use AI extensively and will be doing so a lot more. The limits on that are not technical; they have to do with (1) how much work we still do manually—the classic "no time to do things that would make the things that take all our time take less of it"; and (2) the amount of psychic rewiring that's required—there's a limit to the RoA (rate of astonishment) that any human can absorb. (It's fascinating how technical people are suffering the most from that this time. Less technical people have more experience being hit by disorienting changes, so for them the current moment is somewhat less skull-cracking.)

Getting this right doesn't mean replacing human-to-human interaction, it means we should have more time for that, and do a better job of supporting HN users generally, YC founders who want to launch on HN, and so on. The goal is to enhance human relatedness, not diminish it.
by matthewdgreen | 2026-03-11 21:17:41+00:00
According to those reports, the US military tested it for more than a year on animals, and found that they suffered similar patterns of brain damage. They didn't just get a device and say "wow, this looks like a bunch of very suspicious electronics, too bad we can't turn it on!"

Naturally the testing claims from insiders could be specious. But once you go down the road of distrusting stories told by spooks, so could the purchase of a weapon in the first place. The CIA might not even be a real thing.
by varenc | 2026-03-11 21:17:44+00:00
LLMs are AI. Markov text generators from the 1970s/80s are AI. Face recognition software like FaceID is AI. Many of people behind LLMs got degrees under departments with AI in their title.

AI is just computers doing things which we typically associate with human intelligence, and having a conversation with a computer that effectively passes the Turing test, is definitely AI. If LLMs aren't AI, then AI isn't a useful term. (though agreed that LLMs aren't AGI, which I assume is what you're thinking of)

Wikipedia's list of AI applications: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence#Applic...
by theshrike79 | 2026-03-11 21:17:45+00:00
I've written tens of thousands of lines of code, autogenerated documentation with LLMs and use AI Agents daily.

But when I argue on the internet, it's always a 100% me.

And if I get a wiff of LLM-speak from whoever I'm wrestling in the mud with at the moment, they'll instantly get an entry in my plonk-file. I can talk with ChatGPT on my own thank you very much, I don't need a human in between.

"But my <language> is bad... that's why I use LLMs"

So was mine when I started arguing with strangers on the internet. It's better now. Now I can argue in 3 different languages, almost 4 =)
by abtinf | 2026-03-11 21:17:47+00:00
FWIW I think “Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.” is different from the others.

It’s an instruction for how to use the site. It’s helpful to have it in the guidelines for when the flag feature should be used. Without it, the flag link is much more ominous.

Maybe it could be consolidated with the flag-egregious-comments rule?

Edit to add: IMHO it is not at all obvious on this site that flagging stories is meant to be roughly the equivalent of downvoting comments (and that flagging comments doesn’t have a counterpart at the story level).
by browningstreet | 2026-03-11 21:18:20+00:00
I keep wishing for a public place to put a formatted version of my LLM threads. I have long conversations with LLMs that usually result in some kind of documentation, tutorial, or dataset. Many of them are relatively novel, but I haven't created a place for them yet.

And no, I wouldn't think an HN post is it either.. I'm just saying, there should be a good place to post the output of good questions asked iteratively.
by ekidd | 2026-03-11 21:18:57+00:00
> I haven't seen this much hype and hopium since the dot com boom.

The notion that 99% of the workforce and military will be AIs isn't "copium", it's grounds for absolute terror. One of two things will be true:

1. The AIs will be controlled by the Epstein class, who will then have no use for most of humanity, either as workers or soldiers.

2. Or the AIs will be controlled by the AIs themselves, which also seems worrisome.

Really, any situation where 99% of the workforce and military are AIs should be deeply concerning, for reasons that should be obvious to any student of history or evolution.

And, sure, maybe we won't get there in our lifetimes. But if we did, I wouldn't expect an automatic utopia.
by girvo | 2026-03-11 21:18:59+00:00
> I guess they don’t care about anything enduring as long as they can grab some quick cash on the way out.

As far as I can tell, that is basically all AI-related businesses. Including those non-AI ones jumping on the bandwagon to throw all their employees in the bin and expect 10x productivity somehow: if they are right and these tools do become that good, well the economy as we know it is over as white collar knowledge work disappears.

But hey, we made money in those few years right!
by beardbound | 2026-03-11 21:19:41+00:00
Wow, they're actively removing data off the app on your phone? Good reason to never use MS authenticator for anything important. This is also assuming that they're never wrong about this, and that it is foolproof with no false positives.

It seems that there's a big difference between "not supported" and actively removing account/auth data from someones phone. This has made me reconsider my 2fa providers. I might have to look at some sort of hosted option that doesn't have this issue. I wonder what the policies are for this kind of thing with authy and okta (and other major 2fa auth platforms).
by danebalia | 2026-03-11 21:19:43+00:00
We're currently in a shift from using models, which excel at particular tasks, to using agents capable of handling complex workflows. By prompting models, you can only access trained intelligence. However, giving the model a computer environment can achieve a much wider range of use cases, like running services, requesting data from APIs, or generating more useful artifacts like spreadsheets or reports.

A few practical problems emerge when you try to build agents: where to put intermediate files, how to avoid pasting large tables into a prompt, how to give the workflow network access without creating a security headache, and how to handle timeouts and retries without building a workflow system yourself.

Instead of putting it on developers to build their own execution environments, we built the necessary components to equip the Responses API (opens in a new window) with a computer environment to reliably execute real-world tasks.

OpenAI’s Responses API, together with the shell tool and a hosted container workspace, is designed to address these practical problems. The model proposes steps and commands; the platform runs them in an isolated environment with a filesystem for inputs and outputs, optional structured storage (like SQLite), and restricted network access.
Show HN: A crowdsourced wiki tracking design origins in Pickmon
by lion__93332 | 2026-03-11 21:19:44+00:00
I built https://pickmonfans.com/ to document the massive controversy surrounding the new game "Pickmon."

Beyond the surface-level drama, I'm interested in the technical and legal implications of such a release in 2026. How do we define "inspiration" versus "infringement" when assets look this familiar?

The site includes a visual database for side-by-side comparisons and a legal tracker for the ongoing IP debate. Built with Cloudflare's edge stack for speed. Curious to hear your thoughts on the legal future of such projects.
by RHSeeger | 2026-03-11 21:19:53+00:00
> So who should police that?

I don't have the right answers. I don't know that there _is_ a right answer.

> Whoever labels adult only and does not care is not wishing to put the effort to police that it actually is not.

Or they're unwilling to risk the consequences of making a mistake.

> the fact that I am not allowed to post some stupid adult-looking meme.

But, in my example, you don't lose the ability to post some stupid adult-looking meme. You lose the ability to post ANY meme. Because the risk of someone posting something over the line is that the entire server is suddenly adult only. And for something like a game server, that's can be a catastrophic change; it can destroy the community.

Is being able post memes that important? No, probably not. But giving up the entire ability to do something fun, that doesn't cause any real harm, because someone might do something stupid... and the response to that will be a full nuclear destruction of your community. Yeah, that part sucks.
by joe_mamba | 2026-03-11 21:20:06+00:00
>Pointlessness of this war aside

It's only pointless as long as you ignore their legitimate attempts of building nukes. If you don't want them to have nukes, then military action is the only way to stop them unfortunately. Because if/once they do get a nuke, it'll be impossible to stop them after that, and they'll hold the entire middle east hostage, so might as well do everything you can to prevent that before it happens.

>Iran has generally been an active and persistant threat for many US firms long before this war began

I doubt this. Iran's leadership, like any dictatorship, just wants to be left alone to subjugate its people and enjoy the masses of wealth and power they have. When you're in such a privileged but fragile position, you don't go around poking the hornet's nest looking to start a fight with the biggest military in the world, because it would mean your end.

But Iran will probably retaliate now that they got attacked. OR, it will be a false flag to justify boots on the ground. IDK.