MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by slavoingilizov | 2026-03-09 17:46:13+00:00
The UK has 3 of the top 10 universities in the world: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin...

It's a talent pool that many big employers want to tap into across a range of skills and industries. Cambridge is the best place to do bio-science and research. That is largely because the UK provides training and opportunities to its young people.

"I saw that 20 years go" is one data point that ignores the wider statistics. I'm not sure what else you can back your argument with.
by s3anw3 | 2026-03-09 17:46:30+00:00
Hi HN! I'm Sean, and I built ChatShell to solve two frustrations I had with AI desktop clients: most are just chat wrappers with no real agent capabilities, and they're bloated Electron apps (200-300MB+).

ChatShell is different. It's a 22MB AI agent (47MB on macOS universal) built with Tauri 2, not Electron. It ships with 9 built-in tools (Web Search, Web Fetch, Bash, File Access, etc.) that work out of the box—no MCP servers to configure, no plugins to install. Privacy-first with AES-256 encryption and local SQLite storage, no telemetry. Full MCP support (STDIO, HTTP, OAuth 2.1/PKCE) and works with 40+ AI providers including local models.

I've been dogfooding this daily with OpenRouter. Try asking it things like "I'm planning a 3-day trip to Barcelona in October. What should I know?" or "What are the best sci-fi movies released in 2025? Help me pick one for tonight" or "Find all TODOs in my codebase and summarize them." It actually does the research and synthesis work, not just chat back and forth.

The Windows installer is 22MB—compare that to typical Electron AI apps that are 10x larger.

Would love your feedback on what agent capabilities you'd find most useful!
by armchairhacker | 2026-03-09 17:46:32+00:00
Same with copyright: since code is cheap(er) and training data includes proprietary code, you can use AI to re-implement proprietary projects under FOSS.

I don’t think it’s worth solving. There’s no fine line, and you could already do this before AI, it just took more work. More significant, the point of copyleft is to discourage copyright (because FOSS code can include it proprietary code can’t), so if copyright is ineffective, copyleft is unnecessary.
by DrScientist | 2026-03-09 17:46:46+00:00
So to paraphrase, some people don't like some of the proposed solutions to climate change to choose to pretend it isn't happening rather than confront the problem?

> it’s not world ending yet but we should get ahead of it,

Sure there are fanatics spouting end-of-the-world-is-nigh stuff but fundamentally I think the problem here is it's unknown - both in terms of the physical changes [1], and perhaps more importantly second order effects due to mass migration. It might become a real problem a lot sooner than you think - we simply don't know - but I think it's certainly wrong to view the effects as a gradual rise - that average hides a lot of local/temporal variation.

[1]in terms of potential for positive feedback loops like methane release, or compensating stabilising effects like cloud cover.
[2] For a region to become uninhabitable, you don't need it to be uninhabitable every day of the year - just one or two days a year may be enough - enough to kill people or crops. What's important is the occurrence of extremes during the year, not the average gradual rise.
by chris_trevethan | 2026-03-09 17:46:47+00:00
Author here. June 16th, 2025, 3 AM - my mother-in-law got diagnosed with cancer. I'd been building AI agents that shared business intelligence. That night I realized: the same architecture could route survival patterns between patients.

The insight: The cure for your disease already exists. Somewhere right now, someone with your exact condition is responding to a treatment. You'll never know about it. The cure exists. The patient exists. The connection doesn't.

QIS Protocol solves this with a composition law: if insight is aggregatable to an edge node and similarity is definable, intelligence scales quadratically. Your situation = your routing address. Similar patients find each other without raw data moving. Pre-distilled insights route like packets.

Implementation options (pick your stack):
• DHT (BitTorrent-style, 28M concurrent proven)
• Vector DB (Pinecone, Weaviate, etc.)
• Service Registry (Consul, etcd)
• Or any semantic routing layer

The math is inevitable: Θ(N²) intelligence growth with O(log N) communication overhead. Every component already exists. To disprove this, you'd have to prove deployed infrastructure doesn't work.

Not a new AI model. Not federated learning. Not data aggregation. It's TCP/IP for intelligence routing.

First deployment: Healthcare. Every day, people die because the pattern that would save them is trapped in someone else's records. 4.5B people lack access to medical specialists. QIS gives every patient the accumulated intelligence of similar cases - without centralizing data.

Technical details: https://yonderzenith.github.io/QIS-Protocol-Website/article-...
Scaling proof: https://yonderzenith.github.io/QIS-Protocol-Website/article-...
The origin story: https://yonderzenith.github.io/QIS-Protocol-Website/article-...

What questions can I answer?
by Matl | 2026-03-09 17:47:18+00:00
> It seems like a lot of the commenters are responding as if the article is making the point that "the US is like the Culture" but it's much more narrow and specific than that.

Right, however that narrow point of essentially (overwhelming) technological superiority and 'efficiency' can be made using a very large number of science fiction. The Culture explores specific themes that make it what it is.
If you completely dismiss them, I am not sure you are left with even a whiff of Iain Banks' Culture.

And to be clear, the point I am specifically making is that a lot of what the US is currently doing is not exactly rational, or even a supper efficient way to achieve their stated goals and a lot of it seems to be made up as they go along.

That does not feel like The Culture to me.
by testbjjl | 2026-03-09 17:47:23+00:00
I heard from interviews on the news in response to comments made by a U.S. Senator that asking for help without being included in the planning is shortsighted. It’s difficult to know why, what isn’t happening, has happened. Something tells me complete and total surrender will be difficult to objectively measure, especially in the longer term. $1b per day before boots are on the ground seems expensive for squishy outcomes.
by troupo | 2026-03-09 17:47:36+00:00
> The obvious counterexample is Chernobyl,

You mean the obsolete design that is not used even in old reactors, not to say of modern designs?

Quote:

--- start quote ---

The minimum requirements for the manoeuvrability capabilities of modern reactors are defined by the utilities requirements that are based on the requirements of the grid operators. For example, according to the current version of the European Utilities Requirements (EUR) the NPP must at least be capable of daily load cycling operation between 50% and 100 % of its rated power Pr, with a rate of change of electric output of 3-5% of Pr per minute.

--- end quote ---

> The situation is going to look drastically different for a renewables-first grid, where additional sources are needed for at most a few hours a day, for a few months per year.

Ah, to live in these mythical times...
by pu_pe | 2026-03-09 17:47:58+00:00
I meant trivial in the sense it's a solved problem, I'm sure it still costs a non-negligible amount of money to train it. See for example the chess transformer built by DeepMind a couple of years ago which I referred to in a sibling comment [1].

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.04494
by ceejayoz | 2026-03-09 17:48:04+00:00
> I can't speak about UK but considering how cheap Uranium is, can UK not do cost analysis. Uranium is abundant material compared to Oil/Coal.

Wait until you hear how cheap and abundant sunlight and wind are!

Economically useful uranium deposits are only proven in a handful of countries.

> We are able to build hydropower plants, we are able to launch spaceships into moon and outer space. It's definitely possible to build nuclear if lobbying effort decreases.

This is the "well we haven't tried real communism" argument again.
by largbae | 2026-03-09 17:48:12+00:00
The article is proceeding from the premise that a reimplementation is legal (but evil). To help my understanding of your comment, do you mean:

1. An LLM recreating a piece of software violates its copyright and is illegal, in which case LLM output can never be legally used because someone somewhere probably has a copyright on some portion of any software that an LLM could write.

2. You read my example as "copying a project without distributing it", vs. "having an LLM write the same functionality just for me"
The internet is being flooded with AI content. How can we tell what is human?
by 01-_- | 2026-03-09 17:48:17+00:00
The internet is entering a strange phase. For two decades, the main challenge for digital platforms was managing an overwhelming amount of content produced by people. Today the nature of the problem has shifted. What is growing fastest is no longer the number of humans posting online, but the number of machines doing it.

Bots write articles, generate videos, compose music, post comments and even simulate debates. In many cases they do this faster, cheaper and at volumes no human team could realistically match. The result is a phenomenon that some researchers have begun to describe as “algorithmic pollution”: platforms saturated with synthetic material that looks authentic but does not come from human experience.

Inside technology companies and newsrooms, a question is quietly becoming unavoidable. How do you separate what humans made from what machines generated?

Behind the scenes of the internet, the race to answer that question has already started.

The invisible avalanche
The numbers alone reveal how serious the situation has become. Music streaming platforms, for example, are receiving tens of thousands of tracks created with artificial intelligence every single day. In a recent disclosure, Deezer reported that it detects more than 60,000 AI-generated songs daily, representing roughly 39% of all uploads on the platform. According to the company, up to 85% of those tracks appear to be fraudulent, created to manipulate royalty systems or recommendation algorithms. https://www.theverge.com/news/870186/deezer-ai-music-detection-commercially-available

Music is only one part of the story. A report from the research group AI Forensics identified hundreds of automated accounts on TikTok producing synthetic content at industrial scale, generating billions of views every month. Many of these accounts post dozens of videos per day and rarely disclose that the material is artificial. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/dec/03/anti-immigrant-material-among-ai-generated-content-getting-billions-of-views-on-tiktok

For platforms this creates a structural dilemma. Recommendation algorithms were designed to reward volume, engagement and consistency. Artificial intelligence excels at all three.

Left unchanged, the systems that decide what goes viral may end up promoting machines over people. Full content here: <https://chat-to.dev/post?id=K29WWDZVRmZmQ3IyNWVEaGo1WWl1dz09&redirect=/>
by jasonvorhe | 2026-03-09 17:48:18+00:00
Safety shouldn't be a feeling. But that's not my point.

Some years ago when I was still somewhat "woke"-aligned and I had the opportunity to travel to the US for a conference and a few days around that for work and leasure. I almost didn't do it because I thought I'd rather not visit the US while Trump was in office (lol) or that Texas of all places wouldn't be the best choice to get a first impression of the US. I was full on "muh EU is the future", you know. I was stupid and naive.

I'm glad a colleague from my team talked me out of this nonsensical stance and so I booked my flight, did my ESTA, went through some post 9/11 security theatre thanks to SSSS being printed on my ticket.

I would've regretted it so much if I hadn't gone. Everyone, from cops to homeless people to supermarket workers to baristas, as well as restaurant staff, event folks, tech people - well, basically everyone was just the full package of a friendly and kind human being. Even some open carry dudes where ready for a nice chat when you stared at their gun. All had perfectly reasonable explanations for why their had one.

You can heal from Trump Derangement Syndrome and 99% of what's said of the US probably won't affect you even the slightest once you're there.
by californical | 2026-03-09 17:48:37+00:00
I see your point, but these are civil tickets rather than criminal charges. And since there’s already many laws and regulations around owning a car, such as registration… isn’t it trivial to say “you are responsible for a car that you register by default”

In the same way, if your car fails emissions tests, you can’t register it and it’s the responsibility of the owner to ensure that their car meets emissions standards.
Show HN: Time as the 4th Dimension – What if it emerges from rotational motion?
by lisajguo | 2026-03-09 17:48:43+00:00
I've been developing a framework since 2022 that proposes time is not a static geometric axis (as in Einstein's relativity) but emerges dynamically from the rotational and orbital motion of 3D space.

The core idea: each dimension emerges from the previous one by arranging infinite instances perpendicularly. A static 3D space can't do this to itself — but a rotating one can. That perpetual self-perpendicularity is time.

From this we can derive the Lorentz factor, E=mc², and the Schwarzschild radius, and propose a testable prediction: intrinsic rotation should contribute independently to time dilation, measurable with atomic clocks.

Essay (accessible): https://lisajguo.substack.com/p/time-as-the-fourth-dimension...
Paper (Zenodo): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18910834
by verdverm | 2026-03-09 17:48:52+00:00
Related (?) has anyone else been following the Hytale Worldgen v2? They've built a visual node editor so anyone can create biomes, structures, or complete worlds. I believe there is a competition going on right now.

They are essentially making the entire game based on similar concepts and then using them to develop their core content. Simon is an inspiration and has said they won't be taking investor money so they can stay true to the users and creators.
by ineedasername | 2026-03-09 17:48:58+00:00
This article is setting up a bit of a moving target. Legal vs legitimate is at least only a single vague question to be defined but then the target changes to “socially legitimate” defined only indirectly by way of example, like aggressive tax avoidance as “antisocial”— and while I tend to agree with that characterization my agreement is predicated on a layering of other principals.

The fundamental problem is that once you take something outside the realm of law and rule of law in its many facets as the legitimizing principal, you have to go a whole lot further to be coherent and consistent.

You can’t just leave things floating in a few ambiguous things you don’t like and feel “off” to you in some way- not if you’re trying to bring some clarity to your own thoughts, much less others. You don’t have to land on a conclusion either. By all means chew over things, but once you try to settle, things fall apart if you haven’t done the harder work of replacing the framework of law with that of another conceptual structure.

You need to at least be asking “to what ends? What purpose is served by the rule?” Otherwise you’re stuck in things where half the time you end up arguing backwards in ways that put purpose serving rules, the maintenance of the rule with justifications ever further afield pulled in when the rule is questioned and edge cases reached. If you’re asking, essentially, “is the spirit of the rule still there?” You’ve got to stop and fill in what that spirit is or you or people that want to control you or have an agenda will sweep in with their own language and fill the void to their own ends.
by kbolino | 2026-03-09 17:49:11+00:00
This forms a closed set of types (A, B, nil -- don't forget nil!) but the compiler doesn't understand it as such and complains that the following type-switch is not exhaustive ("missing return"):

func Foo(s SumType) bool {
switch s.(type) {
case A: return true
case B: return true
case nil: return true
}
}

Also, you, the package author, may know what constitutes SumType, but the consumers of your package don't, at least not without source. Moreover, you can spread A, B, and any other implementations of SumType across many source files, making it hard to answer the question even with source. This is even a problem for the standard library, just consider go/ast and its Decl, Expr, and Stmt interfaces, none of which document what types actually implement them.
by bmcahren | 2026-03-09 17:49:21+00:00
LLMs do not encode nor encrypt their training data. The fact they can recite training data is a defect not a default. You can understand this more simply by calculating the model size as an inverse of a fantasy compression algorithm that is 50% better than SOTA. You'll find you'd still be missing 80-90% of the training data even if it were as much of a stochastic parrot as you may be implying. The outputs of AI are not derivative just because they saw training data including the original library.

Then onto prompting: 'He fed only the API and (his) test suite to Claude'

This is Google v Oracle all over again - are APIs copyrightable?
by ralferoo | 2026-03-09 17:49:45+00:00
We've not had to apply negative leap seconds yet since leap seconds were introduced in 1972, but that wasn't the point.

The time period of the Earth fluctuates a lot [0] and actually in 2020 it was less than 24 hours, but not a large enough change to warrant a negative leap second. If you go back to the 1940s, we would had needed negative leap seconds if we had leap seconds at all then, and going back 150 years we would have needed multiple negative leap seconds every year for several consecutive years.

What we can say is that on average, it is close enough to 24 hours and the average over hundreds of years is even closer to 24 hours that it's not worth adding these extra seconds as you'd then need to remove them again later on.

[0] https://c.tadst.com/gfx/900x506/graphlength-of-day.png
from https://www.timeanddate.com/time/negative-leap-second.html
by owenversteeg | 2026-03-09 17:49:46+00:00
The issue is very complex. First - broad generalization - Europe's surviving industry is mostly made of less critical industries. If you look at important things in the world, and the important things that make up or make those important things, a tiny fraction of that is European, and that fraction is shrinking rapidly. There are some things - there is some green manufacturing stuff going on, there is some high-precision stuff in IT/CH/DE, there is ASML and Airbus, Poland can actually make things, etc. - but where will that be in ten or twenty years? I'll tell you: the high-precision stuff is rapidly moving to Asia, the green manufacturing is not very cost effective and uses a lot of imported core technologies, the C919 is going to fly with Chinese engines soon... the list goes on. The EU badly wants to make solar panels, cutting edge chips, fighter jets, rockets et cetera - and it simply can't, not at the cutting edge. The US, on the other hand, can make all of those things. It is still behind China in manufacturing overall, but it can still make a lot of the cutting edge, and it is still innovating.

Second, a lot of the EU stuff is already dead and only continues to exist through inertia. The median German cars and machine tools are worse than the median Chinese and they cost far more.

Third, those numbers often reflect the nebulous concept of "value added." Let's take the case of a refrigerator. Chinese company manufactures every technical part of the refrigerator and ships it to their EU business partner for €100. EU partner assembles it, fills it with foam, and sells it for €600. Most of the "value added" was in the EU! Win for the EU! Go EU manufacturing! The concept of "value added" is the basis for the entire EU VAT system and much of its economic indicators and incentives, while in the US it is almost never mentioned. This is also the source of the most hilarious comparisons (Greek manufacturing superior to the US per capita? χαχαχα)

If you want to cut through the bullshit, you have to look at actual things made. Among the US/CN/EU, who leads: Solar panels (CN), cutting edge chips (US), chipmaking equipment (EU), jet engines (US), aircraft (US), space launch vehicles (US), fighter jets (US), batteries (CN), nuclear reactors (CN), submarines (US), advanced missiles (US), cars (CN), CNC machines (CN), machine tools (CN), precision bearings and linear motion systems (CN), cutting edge medical equipment (US), gas turbines (US/EU), high voltage grid equipment (CN), telecom equipment (CN), construction equipment (US), ships (CN), advanced optics (EU), electric motors (CN), steel (CN), aluminum (CN), oil (US), cutting edge pharma (US), industrial robots (CN), wind turbines (CN), trains (CN), agricultural machinery (US/EU), drones (CN), smartphones (CN.) From that list, China leads eighteen, the US leads eleven, the EU leads two, and the EU and US are tied for two. And China is closing in fast on chipmaking. When China takes that crown, what will the EU have left?
by cromka | 2026-03-09 17:50:02+00:00
Not the same. They know the car was yours so, by extension, you should be aware of its whereabouts at any given moment. If it wasn't you driving, you know who. An illegal activity was committed using your tool and you know who did it. They have every right to question you. If you do not know, you testify as such, but then again you need to plausibly explain why was someone operating your car while you were not aware of it.

> In light of this, seems like a no-brainer no one could disagree with.

If someone shoots a person with your gun, you gonna say it wasn't you and expect them not to question any you further? Not very no-brainer, is it?

This is how it works in Poland and, I assume, most/all of EU and the rest of the world.
by rilkeanheart | 2026-03-09 17:50:07+00:00
I've been working on my attempt to build a dating app that isn't evil and actually helps. It feels like my graduate project after 46 first dates on my way to getting married this summer.

The basic idea is daters "teach" an algorithm what they like and then the algorithm uses the collective set of preferences to match everybody (or as many as possible) for single in-app "get to know you" chats. Everything is one-on-one to avoid overload and dead-end chats.

I now have working versions in the app stores and I'm currently testing in Seattle.

[1] geml.co
[2] App Store - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/geml-dating/id6756629998
[3] Play Store - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.geml.andro...
by db48x | 2026-03-09 17:50:16+00:00
Steve Lehto has an analysis of the opinion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VinCGmdj-jQ

One interesting point is that the Judge also spent some ink criticizing the law because paying the ticket removes the ticket from your driving record. This means that habitual bad drivers can get away with the same infractions over and over again as long as they pay the fines quickly. This bypasses the State’s points system that was designed to punish repeat offenders by taking away their license.

I wonder how other state’s red–light camera laws hold up? Do they have the same flaws or are they written better?
by clacker-o-matic | 2026-03-09 17:50:21+00:00
Halo!

I got bored yesterday and decided to have a bit of fun reverse engineering Screen Time on macOS. Learned quite a bit about how the system works under the hood. I utilized Claude for some of the research, experimenting with running multiple agents in parallel, and ended up finally hitting my max rate limit window lol. Twas a fun project!