MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by galbar | 2026-03-03 18:14:14+00:00
This is something I've been wondering about...

If boilerplate was such a big issue, we should have worked on improving code generation. In fact, many tools and frameworks exist that did this already:
* rails has fantastic code generation for CRUD use cases
* intelliJ IDEs have been able to do many types of refactors and class generation that included some of the boilerplate

I haven't reached a conclusion on this train of thought yet, though.
by _pdp_ | 2026-03-03 18:14:52+00:00
I think the issue goes even deeper than verification. Verification is technically possible. You could, in theory, build a C compiler or a browser and use existing tests to confirm it works.

The harder problem is discovery: how do you build something entirely new, something that has no existing test suite to validate against?

Verification works because someone has already defined what "correct" looks like. There is possible a spec, or a reference implementation, or a set of expected behaviours. The system just has to match them.

But truly novel creation does not have ground truth to compare against and no predefined finish line. You are not just solving a problem. You are figuring out what the problem even is.
by usrusr | 2026-03-03 18:15:07+00:00
In analogy to suspension of disbelief I'd like to postulate suspension of genericity:

when I sink countless hours skimming text content in some The Elder Scrolls I'm not really convinced that much of it is a story worth consuming (my opinion of TES is lower than my number of gameplay hours might suggest), but I'm at least open to the idea that it might be. Thousands of players have paid good money for consuming those stories, do who knows, I might actually find something meaningful, perhaps something I'll one day connect with a real person about, so it's not necessarily a given that it's all just filler.

But when it's an LLM generating the story for me and only for me, there's no other possibility. It's a hamster wheel time sink and I can't even pretend that it's not.
by reactordev | 2026-03-03 18:15:21+00:00
I have a 16GB/512GB Air M1 (2020) because I knew I would need the extra space but this really makes me happy. A new Air, higher headroom, M5, is awesome. It’s not a MBP but it’s good enough for 95% of the daily stuff. If you aren’t running local agents this would be amazing.
by 80sdave | 2026-03-03 18:15:46+00:00
There is also another aspect of title that needs to be considered. A part of a company I used to work for did work with the banking industry. There is the meme of everyone is a VP at a bank, but for those of us who interacted with customers, we did have VP in our title, which caused internal angst, otherwise at some institutions it was seen as a snub to be dealing with anyone below a VP in title and did actually cause customer relationship problems. So sometimes there are business justification for titles outside of employee relations.
by Samueedwards1 | 2026-03-03 18:16:00+00:00
Apcher turns "GitHub repo + Slack workflow" → production Node.js ZIP you own.

Includes:
- Express server + full routes
- Watchdog (API drift detection, CVE scans via npm run apcher:full-scan)
- Retries, idempotency, peter-evans/create-pull-request@v6 for auto PRs
- `npm install && npm start` ready

$59/workflow. No subs, deploy anywhere.

Try it: apcher.dev
Give me you feedback
by sausagefeet | 2026-03-03 18:16:02+00:00
I agree with you. But I have to say, it is an uphill battle and all the incentives are against you.

1. AI is meant to make us go faster, reviews are slow, the AI is smart, let it go.

2. There are plenty of AI maximizers who only think we should be writing design docs and letting the AI go to town on it.

Maybe, this might be a great time to start a company. Maximize the benefits of AI while you can without someone who has never written a line of code telling you that your job is going to disappear in 12 months.

All the incentives are against someone who wants to use AI in a reasonable way, right now.
by nkko | 2026-03-03 18:16:07+00:00
FWIW I work at Steel (not the OP). While we’ve been iterating on the “right shape” for agent tooling, I’ve been building a benchmark harness to measure how different surfaces affect real web task completion: raw API context, CLI-only, opinionated “skills” (structured outputs + artifact capture), and combinations.

If you’ve run agents on the open web, I’d love suggestions for nasty-but-representative workflows to include in the benchmark.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2026-03-03 18:16:14+00:00
"I think these would be positive"

is fine. The problem is the rest of the sentence:

"...and I am the government, and I order you to broadcast my message, and also you can't say these other things I dislike, or I will revoke your ability to operate at all."

It's disappointing to see this point missed: this isn't a random person sharing their opinion, it is both government-mandated speech and literal censorship.
by angelorc | 2026-03-03 18:16:41+00:00
Hey HN, I'm Angelo, the author.

I've been building tools around AI agents and kept hitting the same wall: I needed to run untrusted code in isolation. Docker isn't a security boundary (shared kernel, container escapes are well-documented). Kata Containers and raw Firecracker give you real isolation but require serious setup - writing JSON configs, managing TAP devices, building rootfs images, setting up jailers manually.

I wanted something that just works:

curl -fsSL https://vmsan.dev/install | bash
vmsan create --runtime node22 --connect

That's it. You're inside an isolated Firecracker microVM with its own kernel, jailer, seccomp filters, and network namespace. ~125ms boot time.

What vmsan does differently:

- *One-liner setup*: installs Firecracker, kernel, and rootfs automatically. No YAML, no JSON configs, no manual networking.
- *Docker images as VMs*: `vmsan create --from-image python:3.13-slim` converts any Docker/OCI image to a Firecracker rootfs and boots it. Cached locally for instant reuse.
- *Network isolation built-in*: `--network-policy deny-all` or custom allowlists with `--allowed-domain ".github.com"`. No iptables scripting.
- *Interactive shell without SSH*: WebSocket PTY via a lightweight Go agent inside the VM. Upload/download files over the same channel.
- *Automation-first*: every command supports `--json` for scripting and CI/CD pipelines.

Under the hood, each VM gets a /30 TAP subnet, runs inside Firecracker's jailer with cgroup limits, and communicates through a Go agent on port 9119. State lives in ~/.vmsan/ — no daemon, no background service.

Written in TypeScript (Bun), the Go agent is ~2MB.

Some use cases I'm targeting:
- AI agent code execution sandboxes
- Disposable dev/test environments
- Multi-tenant workload isolation
- CI/CD with untrusted build steps

I'm actively developing this and would love feedback - especially on the developer experience and any edge cases you hit. Happy to answer questions about the architecture or trade-offs.

Docs: https://vmsan.dev
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-03-03 18:16:51+00:00
If the driver's license can generate new anonymous tokens itself then anyone can hook up a driver's license to a computer and set up a service to sign for everybody. If it can't, whenever you want to prove your age to a service you need to get a new token from a third party, and then there is a timing correlation because you're asking for the token right before you use the service.

The article proposes a hypothetical solution where you get some finite number of tokens at once, but then the obvious problem is, what happens when you run out? First, it brings back the timing correlation when you ask for more just before you use one, and the number of times you have to correlate in order to be unique is so small it could still be a problem. Second, there are legitimate reasons to use an arbitrarily large number of tokens (e.g. building a search index of the web, content filters that want to scan the contents of links), but "finite number of tokens" was the thing preventing someone from setting up the service to provide tokens to anyone.
by happyopossum | 2026-03-03 18:17:17+00:00
> The 13 inch version is heavier than a ThinkPad X1 Carbon

And costs ~800 more for 16Gb/512 with a slower CPU and worse battery life.

As someone who spends his life on the road with a laptop, I strongly feel that anything that works for you under 3lbs is the sweet spot. The difference between 2.2 and 2.7lbs is miniscule in the grand scheme of my backpack.
by Zambyte | 2026-03-03 18:17:35+00:00
You seem to be unwilling to assign blame to the operator of hazardous machinery for running people over. Why is that? "They should know better"? Kids? Disabled people unable to use their mobility devices on the unplowed sidewalks? Animals?

If you cannot control yourself enough to slow down around people, you need to get out of the driver's seat. If you cannot stop before a potential crash, you were going too fast. 100% of the time. It literally does not matter if someone jumps in front of you. If you're going to choose the statistically most violent mode of transportation by multiple orders of magnitude, that is your responsibility.
by daxfohl | 2026-03-03 18:17:36+00:00
So, soon the sources will be out of business and the LLMs will have no information to look up.

I guess the future model is, LLMs pay for raw data and news to ingest and use on demand, and ignore the "free" internet. That seems like a good landing point, where quality info is rewarded and cheap spin is not. Of course cheap spin will continue to be produced, but hopefully won't be baked into the system.
by teknominds | 2026-03-03 18:18:10+00:00
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by subscribed | 2026-03-03 18:18:36+00:00
Well, but so is British administration for almost two decades now, it just has a more posh accent and doesn't routinely deport brown people yet.

The language of hate coming straight from the front bench or most important ministers, the harassment of the vulnerable and the utter evisceration of the right to assembly and free speech.

Maybe you heard of the Hyde Park - it has this place called Speaker's corner where free speech open-air public speaking, debate and discussions are allowed. It's dated to 1800's during the protests re: administration.

Sounds wild, right?

And you wouldn't be even half right.

A man holding an empty placard during the protest was threatened with arrest.

Several people were jailed for attending a zoom call (planning a nonviolent protest) for several years each. Almost 100 people were jailed for protesting the Genocide and the illegal proscribing of the protest group.

You read that right: if you were on the protest encouraging a genocide, you would be free to walk the street. If you were to protest killing entire families, targeting health workers and sniping children, you'd end up in prison.

Few years ago a man was detained for shouting "not my king!".

And this is far from all.

We're catching up
by lproven | 2026-03-03 18:18:37+00:00
Fair enough.

I tried it, twice.

2024...

https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/23/cachyos_arch_linux/

2025...

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/20/cachyos_distrowatch/

It's fine but it does nothing I especially want or need. Alpine is faster, for instance.
by alexc05 | 2026-03-03 18:18:51+00:00
> This isn’t a bubble inflating. It’s capital and intelligence relocating.

Is this GPT? this kind of not X but Y pattern is a real code smell for slop and can cause someone to immediately bounce out of your writing. The pattern can really feel hard hitting when you're reading what GPT put in front of you, but others are REALLY starting to reject it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

https://saigaddam.medium.com/it-isnt-just-x-it-s-y-54cb403d6...

https://www.blakestockton.com/dont-write-like-ai-1-101-negat...

Like it or not this can lead people to immediately reject your entire message, shut down and stop reading.
by bitwize | 2026-03-03 18:18:58+00:00
Whenever Steam's web site asked me for my date of birth before allowing me to view a game trailer, I would punch in January 1, over 10 years after my actual date of birth (still well within grown-ass man territory because I'm geriatric in gamer years). Because they don't fucking need to know exactly when I was born. Only that I'm old enough.
by Samueedwards1 | 2026-03-03 18:19:21+00:00
Apcher generates proprietary Node.js code you own and self-host ($59/workflow).

Think "Cursor for backend workflows" — prompt → production ZIP with Watchdog/CI/etc. baked in.

Generator stays at apcher.dev; output = yours forever, no license restrictions beyond standard use. No success tax—you run it 1M times on your infra.
by fsh | 2026-03-03 18:19:23+00:00
Any interaction between light and matter can be modeled as absorption and re-emission (stimulated or spontaneous) of photons. In this picture, there is not much difference between a photon traveling through the sun or through a piece of glass, and the analog makes physical sense. Since photons are massless elementary particles, they are indistinguishable and their number is not conserved. The notion of "the same photon" is questionable in any case.
by Terr_ | 2026-03-03 18:19:26+00:00
To disagree and recycle some past writing:

> Yeah, I have a particular rant about this with respect to older generations believing "kids these days know computers." [...] they mistake confidence for competence, and the younger consumers are more confident poking around because they grew up with superior idiot-proofing. The better results are because they dare to fiddle until it works, not because they know what's wrong.
by giwook | 2026-03-03 18:19:48+00:00
Out of curiosity, what are some good use cases for a MBP now with the MBAs being so powerful?

I can think of things like 4K video editing or 3D rendering but as a software engineer is there anything we really need to spend the extra money on an MBP for?

I'm currently on a M1 Max but am seriously considering switching to an MBA in the next year or two.
by renewiltord | 2026-03-03 18:19:57+00:00
Bro. The used M1 mini and studio are all gone. I was thinking of buying one for local AI before openclaw came out and went back to look and the order book is near empty. Swappa is cleared out. eBay is to the point that the m1 studio is selling for at least a thousand more.

This arb you’re talking about doesn’t exist. An m1 studio with 64 gb was $1300 prior to openclaw. You’re not getting that today.

I would have preferred that too since I could Asahi it later. It’s just not cheap any more. The m4 is flat $500 at microcenter.
by bikenaga | 2026-03-03 18:20:11+00:00
Original title: "*The Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale: Development, validation, and associations with workplace outcomes"

Abstract: "From boardrooms and brown bags to emails and earnings calls, business culture often seems overrun by 'corporate bullshit,' a semantically empty and often confusing style of communication in organizational contexts that leverages abstruse corporate buzzwords and jargon in a functionally misleading way. At best, corporate bullshit can sometimes seem harmless. At worst, it can disrupt organizational and employee effectiveness in numerous ways including obstructing clear communication, increasing employee disengagement, tarnishing a company's reputation, and exposing businesses to potential financial and legal risks. Here, results from four studies (total N = 1018) report the construction and validation of the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale (CBSR), a novel measure of individual differences in susceptibility to corporate bullshit. Results show that corporate bullshit receptivity is distinct from a general affinity for corporate speech, negatively associated with measures of analytic thinking, and positively related with other bullshit-related constructs in theoretically-consistent ways. Importantly, corporate bullshit receptivity is positively associated with several workplace perception variables and is a robust negative predictor of work-related decision-making. Overall, the findings establish the CBSR as a valid and reliable tool to aid researchers and practitioners in examining the causes, correlates, and consequences of receptivity to bullshit in organizations."

PhysOrg article: https://phys.org/news/2026-03-workers-synergizing-paradigms-...
by jasomill | 2026-03-03 18:20:21+00:00
Incidentally,

In November 2015, solicitor Myles Jackman said that performing a sexual act with a dead animal would not be illegal under the Sexual Offences Act 2003. He stated that possessing a photograph of such an act would be illegal under the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 if it was produced for pornographic purposes, but not if the purpose was "satire, political commentary or simple grossness".
by k9294 | 2026-03-03 18:20:22+00:00
I've been experimenting with Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite and the quality is very good.

I haven't found official benchmarks yet, but you can find Gemini 3 Flash word error rate benchmarks here: https://artificialanalysis.ai/speech-to-text/models/gemini — they are close to SOTA.

I speak daily in both English and Russian and have been using Gemini 3 Flash as my main transcription model for a few months. I haven't seen any model that provides better overall quality in terms of understanding, custom dictionary support, instruction following, and formatting. It's the best STT model in my experience. Gemini 3 Flash has somewhat uncomfortable latency though, and Flash Lite is much better in this regard.
by parl_match | 2026-03-03 18:20:43+00:00
What a ridiculous exaggeration.

I said you don't have to do every task, not do no tasks.

> Have you ever thought that with 80% of web traffic coming from mobile, you might be the outlier?

Wow, snark too. In recent years, I've taken a much more luddite stance against mobile device usage for my own mental wellbeing. Maybe other people should follow suit.

"You should do your taxes on the train". No, I don't think that I will. You're free to stress yourself out like that. Have fun.
by chasil | 2026-03-03 18:20:49+00:00
Well, everybody has 1777 as /tmp (with the sticky bit).

$ ll -d /tmp
drwxrwxrwt. 20 root root 4096 Mar 3 12:19 /tmp
$ mkdir mytmp
$ chmod 1777 mytmp
$ ll -d mytmp
drwxrwxrwt. 1 luser lgroup 0 Mar 3 12:19 mytmp
by jrmg | 2026-03-03 18:21:10+00:00
There was nothing at the article’s URL for a day or so after it was pulled (on a holiday weekend, FWIW), which I agree isn’t great. But there is, now, a page up at the article’s original URL:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/after-a-routine-code-reje...

with a locked comment leading to the Editor’s statement:

https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retractio...

I disagree with the idea that the misleading article text should remain up after a retraction.
by jm4 | 2026-03-03 18:21:11+00:00
Many retailers increase their prices by multiples of the tariff increase rather than a straight passthrough so that they can maintain their margins. It's probably why a lot of the biggest retailers with monopolies aren't complaining much about tariffs. They mostly keep the same margin and actually increase revenue. Meanwhile, it's been incredibly damaging to small businesses and consumers. Functionally, tariffs have been a massive wealth transfer.
by ranbuch | 2026-03-03 18:21:26+00:00
To preempt a few completely valid questions I know this crowd will ask:

"Isn't this just post-selection bias?" Yes, absolutely. It is intentional statistical conditioning toward lower-energy states. The thesis I am exploring is whether that structural bias survives deep into hardware decoherence when global expectation values fail.

"Does this actually improve VQE convergence?" I haven't run a full 500-step optimizer loop on 133 qubits to prove full convergence, because doing so on IBM's Pay-As-You-Go tier would cost roughly $100,000. This data is from a single-shot, unoptimized ansatz to prove the filter successfully extracts a cooling delta from the infinite-temperature limit.

I'm currently looking at ways to calculate tighter bootstrap confidence intervals on the retained subset to further prove non-random structure. Open to any critiques on the physics or the statistical boundaries here!
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-03-03 18:21:27+00:00
> M5 also features faster unified memory with 153GB/s of bandwidth

I was about to write a post mourning how much I wish Panther Lake really could compete, but lacked the memory bandwidth to offer a real challenge. But supposedly it can go up to 9600MT/s which would bring Panther Lake to ~150GB/s.

I am curious what the NPU on M5 has. The 50 TOp/s on Panther Lake is... fine. Apple is really seeing huge success with MLX, with an adoptable software stack that the PC world is super struggling to deliver.
by yesterdayjones | 2026-03-03 18:21:41+00:00
These comments are full of people who are not and have never been journalists talking about editorial processes they don't understand. I was a journalist before AI (and have since pivoted to software development), so I feel the need to correct a mistaken assumption.

1. An editor's role is not to make sure all quotes are accurate to what the source spoke or wrote. They are not babysitters. It's a higher-level position that is supposed to ensure that the article makes sense; that the sources are sufficient in number and are credible; that the story covers the assigned topic, etc. Your job as an editor is _not_ to babysit your reporters. Reporters are given a large degree of freedom and are expected to have sufficient education/training and ethical grounding* to do their jobs independently. What seems to have happened here is a lapse in judgement that happened while the reporter was sick and on a deadline. Pressure's a bitch.

2. This is certainly more of an opinion, but AI tools have zero place in any profession that relies on information integrity (law, journalism). The reporter shouldn't have used it, and the editors and editorial processes are not at fault, especially when Ars already forbids AI-generated content.

* I'm aware people think reporters are liars with agendas. You don't need to say it.