MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tyg13 | 2026-03-11 21:07:16+00:00
I don't really think that good writing and LLM writing looks all that similar. It's not always easy to spot (and maybe HN users aren't always doing a great job at it), but even the best LLM output tends to have an "LLM smell" to it that's hard to avoid.

Like, sure, LLM writing is almost always grammatically correct, spelled correctly, formatted correctly, etc., which tends to be true of good writing. But there's a certain style that it just can't get away from. It's not just the em-dashes, the semi-colons, or the bulleted lists. It's the short, punchy sentences, with few-to-no asides or digressions. Often using idiom, but only in a stale, trite, and homogenized manner. Real humans, are each different -- which lends a certain unpredictability to our writing, even if trying to write to a semi-formal standard, the way "good" writers often do -- but LLMs are all so painfully the same, and the output shows it.
by everdrive | 2026-03-11 21:07:17+00:00
>At the core of "Havana Syndrome" lies the idea that Cuba and/or Russia have managed to develop energy weapons so advanced that the American military command won't even entertain the thought of them existing.

I just don't think that's true at all. The answer could easily be that Cuba and Russia have developed energy weapons that we only know about from classified sources and therefore cannot discuss their existence.
by amichail | 2026-03-11 21:07:28+00:00
PluriSnake is a daily puzzle game where you create and move colored snakes to clear tiles.

The idea is simple:

* You use color matching in two distinct ways: matching circles create snakes, and matching a snake’s color with the squares beneath it destroys them.

* Only snakes can move, and you move them in a worm-like fashion across the grid to new positions.

* Your goal is to destroy as many squares as you can. Note that destroying all of them may not be possible.

App Store link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/plurisnake/id6756577045 [macOS/iOS/iPadOS]

Features:

* A new daily puzzle that is the same for everyone

* iCloud sync across devices

I'd love to hear what people think and how far you can get on today’s puzzle.

--

P.S. Here are the game rules:

Goal

* Destroy colored squares on a 7×7 grid using snakes made of same-colored circles. Your score is based on how many squares you destroy.

* Clearing all 49 squares is not required, and may not always be possible.

Board Setup

* Each cell contains one square and one circle, both randomly colored.

* There are 7 colors total, with each color appearing 7 times among squares and 7 times among circles.

Energy

* Energy is a shared pool for all snakes and is initially 0 units.

* Moving a snake costs 1 energy unit, regardless of how far you move it.

* You can form a snake to gain energy and spend it to move any snake on the board.

Forming Snakes

* Link 2 or more adjacent circles of the same color (orthogonal or diagonal) to form a snake.

* A snake with n circles has n – 1 links. Forming a snake immediately adds n – 1 energy units to your energy pool.

* Squares under a newly formed snake of the same color are destroyed immediately.

Moving Snakes

* Snakes move in a worm-like fashion (both orthogonal and diagonal steps are allowed), following a continuous path of isolated circles.

* Snakes cannot move onto cells occupied by other snakes.
Moving a snake can pass over isolated circles (circles not part of a snake). When this happens, each circle you pass over is teleported to the cell the snake just vacated.

Square Destruction

* When a snake finishes its move, it destroys any squares of its color under its final positions.

* Moving a snake past a matching square without stopping over it does not destroy the square.

Ending the Game

* The game ends automatically if all 49 squares are destroyed, or you can end it manually at any time by triple-tapping anywhere.

* Your score counts toward the global leaderboard regardless of whether you clear all squares.
by _pdp_ | 2026-03-11 21:07:49+00:00
The Internet was always full of bots. Not chatbots, but bots like crawlers, scrapers, automated scripts. That was fine.

What the OP is talking about is bots that participate in public discourse. That's the actual problem.

I think it can be handled to a degree though. Private communities, private Internet on top of existing Internet, and social media platforms without public APIs and with strict, enforceable ToS would all help.
by gabriel666smith | 2026-03-11 21:07:50+00:00
Inconsistent capitalisation ('Twitter' vs 'reddit'); subtly using the outdated name for 'Twitter' as most humans do; the genuinely hard-to-parse final clause of the comment.

Though I note it didn't say "read comments by other humans", only "read comments by humans", so confirmed AI.

I think the guidelines here work quite well, and expect a good-faith interpretation, which they mostly receive.

I think you're asking for some sort of empirical verification of "this is / is not LLM text" (which seems impossible), but there's no real reason to expect the existence of LLMs to change that this website is, generally, interacted with in a good-faith way. People are really good at calling others out on here -- I doubt that will change.
by cheema33 | 2026-03-11 21:08:35+00:00
> I wonder when we begin to see the dividends of all the NPU PCs come into play.

A few months ago I used Whisper from OpenAI, an automatic speech recognition system released in 2002, on my modern 20-core Intel CPU to convert audio from a video file to text. It worked fine. Took a while and the machine got hot and the fans kicked in. I then found the Intel's optimized version of whisper that used NPU. It required a lot more steps to get working, but in the end it did work and was about 6x faster. And the machine remained cool and silent in the process. Since then I have become a fan of the NPUs. They are not NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090, but they are significantly better than a modern CPU.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-03-11 21:08:44+00:00
> I believe the issue of proving who is and who isn't really human on the Internet will be a really important issue in the coming years

On a site like HN it's kinda easy to vet for at least those that already had thousands of karma before ChatGPT had its breakthrough moment a few years ago.

Now an AI could be asked to "Use my HN account and only write in my style" and probably fool people but I take it old-timers (HN account wise) wouldn't, for the most part, bother doing something that low. Especially not if the community says it's against the guidelines.
by 00N8 | 2026-03-11 21:08:48+00:00
IME yes, it absolutely can be. I am approaching middle age & still comfortably enjoy pushing myself in physical activities where falls are likely, with zero significant injuries aside from a couple sprained ankles from playing basketball (& technically the ankle rolling came before the fall in these couple mishaps; letting my body roll/fall out of it just helped reduce the severity). Also it's more about technique & familiarity/reflex training than safety gear, although I do wear a Zamst ankle brace on my weak ankle whenever I play basketball & started wearing a helmet for snowboarding a few years ago. Jackie Chan & Buster Keaton were even better at this, although they pushed it a lot farther & did sustain major injuries in their stunt careers.

However, there's a big caveat: I've been practicing falling safely since a young age & really mastered it in my teenage years practicing martial arts & snowboarding. I'm sure it's much harder & more dangerous to learn if you first start in middle age, although I'd imagine it's still possible with the right training & appropriate caution.
by matthewdgreen | 2026-03-11 21:08:57+00:00
The purpose of scientific publication used to be to deliver useful scientific results to one's peers. This meant that everyone ran their own personal filter of which peers were working on interesting things, and which collections (journals) were reproducing the most interesting ones. This system still works relatively well for most conscientious researchers. The idea that we should also use publication metrics to rank researchers was never part of this system, and it obviously leads to all sorts of spam (that most scientists just work around) but that seems to really upset non-scientists.
by salicaster | 2026-03-11 21:09:00+00:00
> If you're being emotional, it can...

It can't. It will rewrite anything you give it.

> it can verify your claims before posting

It can't.

> You don't need to be afraid of it

Nobody is afraid of it. It's annoying. General population cannot be trusted to use it in whatever idealistic way you are imagining.
by altairprime | 2026-03-11 21:09:08+00:00
‘Flag’ is an algorithmic flag only, and there are no humans in the flag algorithm’s processing loop. They may monitor and react to the ‘queue’ of flagged articles, and they can do special mod things with flagged posts. But if you want to report a guidelines violation for AI-assisted writing to the mods, just email the mods (contact link in the footer) subject “AI-assisted writing flag” or similar with a link to the post/comment. It works, I know, I’ve done it before. It takes maybe 60 seconds and there is no other way on the site (seemingly by OG design!) to guarantee human review but that email.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-03-11 21:09:13+00:00
> Why is it being called dead internet theory

“A social networking system simulates a user using a language model trained using training data generated from user interactions performed by that user. The language model may be used for simulating the user when the user is absent from the social networking system, for example, when the user takes a long break or if the user is deceased” [1].

(More seriously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory)

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US12513102B2
by broken-kebab | 2026-03-11 21:09:33+00:00
Did they? The article[1] seem to be in contradiction to the claim. For centuries it was rather easy to distinguish aristocracy without lingustic conspiracies. I'm really not an expert in British surnames however I know for sure that pop history is full of invented "fun facts" which are not true but persist cause they sound cool.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Featherstonhaugh
by danebalia | 2026-03-11 21:09:43+00:00
The self-improving AI agent built by Nous Research. It's the only agent with a built-in learning loop — it creates skills from experience, improves them during use, nudges itself to persist knowledge, searches its own past conversations, and builds a deepening model of who you are across sessions. Run it on a $5 VPS, a GPU cluster, or serverless infrastructure that costs nearly nothing when idle. It's not tied to your laptop — talk to it from Telegram while it works on a cloud VM.
by pixl97 | 2026-03-11 21:10:03+00:00
>being terminally online to think that most other people are also terminally online.

50% of US teenagers describe themselves as terminally online.

Go any place where people work and have time to goof, and you'll see them online.

Go to a bar/club, you see people with a phone in front of their face.

The idea there is an online and offline is crumbling further every day. Cameras are small, bandwidth is high in relation to our compression algorithms. Anything happening in the world can be broadcast live. More and more types of machines are coming online that accept digital instructions that make things happen in real life.

Furthermore it's an odd rejection of the printing press on your part. That methods of information exchange affect the real world around them. If the book brought about the industrial revolution, what does an always available global communications network bring?

At least based on your writing here on HN it seems like you're probably an introvert, or at least a person that likes quiet pondering and reflections. Reading a book would be far more interesting than most online activities, right? If I'm right and that is the case, then you may be missing just how many people are horrifically addicted to being on social media all the time.
by Kim_Bruning | 2026-03-11 21:10:50+00:00
Depends on how you use the AI. if you use it a bit like you'd ask a human to proof-read your work, AI can actually be quite helpful.

The other important thing you can do is have an AI check your claims before you post. Even with google and pubmed, a quick check against sources by hand can take 30 minutes or longer, while with AI tooling it takes 5. Guess which one is more likely to actually lead to people checking their facts before they post. (even if imperfectly!) .

I'm not talking about people who lazily ask the AI to write their post for them. Or those who don't actually go through and actually get the AI to find primary sources. Those people are not being as helpful. Though try consider educating them on more responsible tool use as well?
by pedalpete | 2026-03-11 21:11:10+00:00
I have a friend who was working in this space in 2019.

Their customers were hiring something like 10k jobs worldwide annually, which means 500k+ applications to go through.

AI was used for the first filter to get a person through to later rounds.

It makes sense at that scale, and not for "hiring" but just to make decisions as to who gets to the next round.

The alternative is that you end up having to hire so many people to go through the applicants and then those people get bored of asking the same initial questions again and again.

I remember hearing an anecdote, back in the days of paper resumes, that hiring managers would take the huge stack of resumes they got, divide them in half and throw half in the bin. That half would be considered unlucky, and you don't want to hire unlucky people.

But seriously, with the number of job applicants, for certain positions, what are the alternatives to getting AI to help?
by Freak_NL | 2026-03-11 21:11:14+00:00
The 3-in-1 sets (where the set numbers actually begin with 31) should really be the first thing you look at when choosing a set for a child, and they deserve more praise. There are a lot of cool 3-in-1 sets out there. That castle (31168) is really good (and those horses are too!), and the haunted mansion (31167) is just cool with minifigs which are a hit with any kid.

For a small and cheap present that hamster (31376) is just too cute to pass up too.

It feels like those sets are where the Lego designers get to do their thing and do it right, without the weight of licenced IP (of which there is so much) and the trite offerings of the City range.
by Someone1234 | 2026-03-11 21:11:17+00:00
That feels very uncharitable.

When a policy is introduced to seemingly guard against new problems, but happens to be inadvertently targeting preexisting and common technology, I don't feel like it is "lawyering" it to want clarity on that line.

For example, it could be argued this forbids all spellcheckers. I don't think that is the implied intent, but the spectrum is huge in the spellchecker space. From simple substitutions + rule-based grammar engines through to n-grams, edit-distance algorithms, statistical machine translation, and transformer-based NLP models.
by sailfast | 2026-03-11 21:11:19+00:00
The assumption with these weapons was that they would require too much energy to be portable enough to be undetectable in all of these circumstances (at least based on other reporting on the subject).

If the device doesn't require a lot of power, then it's entirely possible that American military commanders and research leadership would miss it.

Add to that an incentive to avoid helping the victims from a cost and overhead perspective, and you get a big ol' mess.
by rubslopes | 2026-03-11 21:11:20+00:00
> The big players are just awful at marketing; too many SKUs and models - it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ.

Yes!! It's awful. I'm a long time Mac user and my wife needs a Windows laptop because of a specific software. I've tried three times to pick a computer for her, but I always give up after 10min and postpone the task...
by craftkiller | 2026-03-11 21:11:26+00:00
> When the new configuration finally builds, more ofen than not some component randomly stops working after reboot

Good thing you're using NixOS where rolling back to a working version is as simple as a reboot, instead of Arch Linux where your options are:

1. If it's a boot issue, dig out a live USB for recovery
2. If it's a package, try rolling back piecemeal by installing old versions from /var/cache/pacman
3. Once rolling back piecemeal breaks your system more because of the mixing of package versions, pin your packages to a specific day in the arch rollback machine and pray your whole system downgrades cleanly

I used to live that life. After a couple failed downgrades I started exclusively using the arch rollback machine for my work machine so nothing would update and break before I had a chance to test the updates on my personal machine.

> Huge update sizes

Yeah, the optimize store option to replace duplicate files with hardlinks really should be a default, and automatic nix garbage collection should probably be put in the initial automatically-generated config so new users are aware of it. Also `nix-collect-garbage -d` behaving differently from `sudo nix-collect-garbage -d` despite being a trusted-users was quite the surprise.

I used to be able to brush this off by "storage is cheap" but AI has driven up the cost of SSDs.

> In contrast, Arch Linux simply downloads prebuilt binaries via pacman or an AUR helper

That is also the case on nix. If you are compiling software yourself, then you must have changed some settings to cause it to build from source, which is not even an option on Arch Linux. Nix having the completely optional ability to customize your packages is a positive, not a flaw.

> why not use Gentoo Linux instead

On nix my entire system is defined in my nix config, including all my settings, all my scripts, and all my packages. I use impermanence to wipe my disk on every boot except for the a handful of folders that I tell it to preserve across boots. The combination of those two creates a deterministic system. Nix is so much more than just being able to compile your software.
by tptacek | 2026-03-11 21:11:39+00:00
"The scales startled a sleeping cat inside the station. The cat lept in alarm, claws bared, and clung to a length of cord. Suspended by the cord was a small anvil, dangling above a board balanced atop a saw horse. Frayed from the cat's claws, the cord severed, and the anvil plunged towards one end of the board. On the other end of that board was a marble..."
by alecco | 2026-03-11 21:11:41+00:00
But the "Anthropic fight" is mostly fake. Palantir was using Claude as base model. Anthropic allegedly took issue with unsupervised kills because the technology wasn't ready (or something along the lines).

Also, I remember reading this guy has close ties to Anthropic. Also, I find it suspicious how he came to prominence out of nowhere. Like Big Tech and the establishment are propping podcasts of controlled narrative/opposition. I don't buy any of it.
by sheept | 2026-03-11 21:11:57+00:00
I disagree: this is not unlike including the schema in the JSON itself. This should be handled by the apps themselves, since they would have to know what the keys mean regardless.

If you do want the interchange format to be the one deserializing into specific runtime data structures, use YAML. YAML's tag syntax allows you to run arbitrary code inside YAML, which can be used for what you want.
by u920705 | 2026-03-11 21:12:07+00:00
HIRING: Frontend Developer (Contract) | Remote (UK/EU preferred)

We’re building a privacy-first, edge-AI camera platform. Our devices run local AI inference and stream directly from hardware (SigmaStar cameras → RTSP/ONVIF → HDMI node → on-device AI).

We are looking for a frontend developer on a short contract to rebuild the public company website.

Contract

Start: April 2026 (latest)

Length: 1–2 months

Focus: website build only (not product frontend)

What you’ll own

· Building the full Aye Eye marketing website
· Interactive elements including a 3D globe showing camera locations
· Clean, modern UI with strong performance and responsiveness

Skills

· Strong HTML / CSS / JavaScript
· React or similar modern frontend frameworks
· Experience with interactive or 3D web elements (WebGL / Three.js / similar is a plus)
· Good design judgement and attention to detail
· Able to work fast and independently (short contract)

If this sounds interesting, feel free to reach out:
ayeeye.careers@gmail.com
(Subject: HN – Frontend Contract)
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2026-03-11 21:12:19+00:00
It appears as if this is a request for that line to be added to the Ts&Cs. I wouldn't mind seeing it, but it's not there, yet.

Still plenty of aislop on this site, and, to be honest, I would be surprised if that line had any effect on it, whatsoever. It's not like folks pay attention to what's already there.
by jjk166 | 2026-03-11 21:12:55+00:00
Actually they do have a draft. The bricks are designed so you don't notice it, both by the draft angle being quite small, and the parting line is moved up slightly so by the time you get to the bottom of the brick you're back to the original width.

https://medium.com/@bsather/breaking-down-the-perfect-design...
by SimianSci | 2026-03-11 21:12:55+00:00
Pointlessness of this war aside, I fail to see how the situation is materially different than it was prior to the war begining.

Iran has generally been an active and persistant threat for many US firms long before this war began, and I have a hard time thinking they have had the restraint and the resources to collect together an arsenal of zero-day exploits they have yet to unleash.
To me, this just reads as empty threats intended more for the potential economic fear it can produce.
by dmix | 2026-03-11 21:13:02+00:00
I'd imagine the 30 days just the TOS, if they sell a username that has been active (posting, replying) in the past 6 months then it'd be a big deal for sure. It's not clear when OP last used his account but I'd imagine the people doing auctions look to see if they post or interact at all, not just login once in a while. X should probably clarify this.
by floo | 2026-03-11 21:13:06+00:00
hey HN!
this is my attempt at language learning with audiobooks. it synchronizes text to speech, and shows translations. the audiobooks themselves are all public domain.

got all of the audio alignment, translation, and asset generation working on my gaming computer. pretty happy with the pipeline, except for the sometimes subpar translations.

if anyone is interested in the details I am happy to write them up!

if you are into language learning, I would love to hear if this could be useful to you!