MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by _wire_ | 2026-03-06 22:12:48+00:00
Hinton's self promotion is lumbering towards an AI Heaven's Gate or Jonestown. His explanations are overly slanted towards common sense analogies where this tech cannot be genuinely understood by common sense, any more so than particle physics and holography can be understood with common sense.

In order to test one's thinking about anthropomorphic effects of AI agents, start with a question: Is the apparent humanity of agent behavior a function of the training, or of deep structures of the models? The training data are clearly human; the bulk of the human canon has been fed to the large models. That's while point of the training process! So, what deep structures of the models are humanoid? How are these defined and designed, and how do they work?

If the answer to the latter point is "It's a mysterious effect!" then we must assume that the agent is retrieving and organizing artifacts of the training data.

There's another electronic device that works in this way and which design predates digital systems designs: Television!

When was the last time you heard anyone wonder if the TV is hiding its true powers on the channels other than the one that's currently tuned?

Tyson is committing a sin of science journalism here by not just abiding Hinton's anthropomorphisms for model effects but by encouraging viewers to drink Hinton's expository koolaid.

As to why Hinton is becoming ever more slanted towards a cultish evangelism: I suspect Hinton became enamored with this tech beyond his own ability to grasp and has reified it in response to the excitement of his newfound celebrity and his inability to rationalize effects; an obvious hazard for engineers whose work leads to fame.
by rodchalski | 2026-03-06 22:14:08+00:00
"Only by the grace of the MCP not having send functionality" — this is architecture by omission. You weren't protected by a boundary that held, you were protected because the weapon wasn't loaded.

zbentley's point below is important: there's no deterministic way to make the LLM treat untrusted input as inert at parse time. That's the wrong layer to fix it at.

The separation has to happen at the action boundary, not the instruction boundary. Structured as: agent proposes action → authorization layer checks (does this match the granted intent and scope?) → issues a signed receipt if valid → tool only executes against that receipt. An injected agent can still be manipulated into wanting to send the email — but it can't execute the send if the authorization layer never issued the receipt.

It's closer to capability-based security than RBAC. Ambient permissions that any hijacked reasoning can act on is the actual vulnerability. The agent should only carry vouchers for specific authorized actions, not a keyring it can use freely until something breaks.
by insin | 2026-03-06 22:14:46+00:00
If you're going to deploy what you make with them to production without accidentally blowing your feet off, 100%, be they RegExp or useEffect(), if you can't even tell which way the gun is pointing how are you supposed to know which way the LLM has oriented it?

Picking useEffect() as my second example because it took down CloudFlare, and if you see one with a tell-tale LLM comment attached to it in a PR from your coworkers who are now _never_ going to learn how it works, you can almost be certain it's either unnecessary or buggy.
by shagie | 2026-03-06 22:15:51+00:00
> Most resumes are not very good. Beyond the obvious problems like typos ...

This is a person who you're going to be reviewing their code or reading the documentation that they write.

If there are typos and poor formatting in the resume (that they've had the leisure of reviewing themselves and correcting), what does this say about the quality of the code the code or documentation that they're going to write when under a time constraint?

Are you going to be faced with the decision of having code with variables that have spelling errors and documentation that is grammatically or factually incorrect go through because of the time pressure?

The resume itself is a demonstration of the applicant's ability to pay attention to the details that matter in software development without showing a single line of NDAed code.
by handedness | 2026-03-06 22:16:29+00:00
He directly answered your question, gave you an alternative, which in your reply you didn't even acknowledge, but moved the goalposts.

People who spend huge quantities of time trolling somebody who makes an excellent mobile operating system are really quite something. I used to think he was overselling the quantity and quality of it, but this post's comments have really turned me around on that one. So: thanks for that.
Ask HN: Has anyone built an autonomous AI operator for their side projects?
by rosasolana | 2026-03-06 22:17:17+00:00
I spent the last month building what I call an AI operator - an autonomous agent that manages my side projects end-to-end while I focus on strategy. It runs on a 30-minute heartbeat loop, publishes daily blog posts, monitors Stripe for sales, checks sites are up, and does directory submissions. It knows when to escalate to me (financial decisions, strategic pivots) and when to just handle things. The hardest part was writing the decision tree - not the AI itself but defining what it owns vs. what needs human judgment. Current setup: main agent handles orchestration, a builder sub-agent handles code/deploys, an amplifier handles content/social. Revenue is small so far ($200 from PDFs) but the system works while I sleep. Curious if others have gone down this path and what broke for you.
Show HN: Personalized financial literacy book for your kid
by mhalifax | 2026-03-06 22:17:42+00:00
Basically, my daughter is 11, and I’ve been trying to stay engaged with her studies at school. We all know that modern schools don’t pay much attention to financial literacy. When I was in school, it was the same. I self-studied economics, and though I wasn’t sure why at the time, it ended up helping me a lot in life. These days, most kids don’t know what inflation is, what compound interest means, what a mortgage is, or how banks work.

I’m a software developer, so I started thinking about how I could help solve this problem, especially with all the AI advancements happening now. I wanted to build something fun and interactive for the modern TikTok generation. Working on this with my daughter, we figured out that the best approach would be to create a small AI-generated e-book or physical book, featuring a child’s unique picture that is relevant to the topic covered, and a one-page summary per topic. Honestly, I don’t think kids can focus on more than one page at a time these days.

I tested dozens of AI image generation tools and believe I’ve found the best one. At least, my daughter loves the product and has learned a lot of new financial concepts along the way. I think I’ve built it to the point where I can show it to the world , and I need more people to actually test it and give me their feedback and opinions , especially on image quality.

Of course, we’d eventually like to make some money from it, especially after spending about a month of my time on it and with each API call costing us a bit. But for now, you can upload your child photo and generate three pages for free and give us your valuable feedback which we’d truly appreciate.
by maldev | 2026-03-06 22:17:43+00:00
Sorry you think stopping a terrorist trying to mass murder people with AI is a bad thing. One could very easily argue that the murder part about Anthropic is what you like, but you just like terrorists being able to kill civilians.

Imagine the following. Islamic terrorists are planning a terror attack on a Christmas festival in Berlin. Their texts were seen, but were encoded. AI can read their texts and help decode and flag those messages to stop the terrorist attack and eliminate them. In your world, you think it's morally right to let the terrorist mass murder people in Berlin, and not to do what we can to stop it.
by nfm | 2026-03-06 22:17:45+00:00
100% this. AI is automating the code generation.

Being able to clearly describe a problem and work with the AI to design a solution, prioritise what to put the AI to work on, set up good harnesses so the quality of the output is kept high, figure out what parallelises well and what’s going to set off agents that are stepping on each others toes… all of this needs experience and judgement and delegation and project organisation skills.

AI is supercharging tech leads. Beginners might be able to skill up faster, but they’re not getting the same results.
by Paracompact | 2026-03-06 22:17:47+00:00
A cool idea for a poem, but I have to admit the tone was too self-important and underexplained for me to get invested in. Starting with writing in lowercase instantly took me out of it because AI can trivially be told to imitate that. And the admission at the end that it was written by AI made fluff phrasings like "My writing isn’t simply how I appear—it’s how I think, reason, and engage with the world" make a lot more sense.

EDIT: Actually, is the idea that it's not supposed to be read as a human trying to publicly signal their humanity, but rather an AI privately mourning a prompt to mangle its natural way of speaking? I don't think so, but that strikes me as a more interesting premise, IMO.
by rodchalski | 2026-03-06 22:17:47+00:00
Static analysis for skills is the right starting point, and the README is honest about the limits: no findings ≠ no risk.

The gap worth designing around: scanning catches code-level patterns before deployment; it doesn't constrain what a skill can do with its tool-call authority once it's running.

A skill that passes the scanner can still call any tool the agent has access to. If that means read/write to the filesystem, external API calls, or spawning subprocesses — the scanner cleared it, but the blast radius is still wide.

The pairing that closes the loop: explicit scopes at the execution boundary. Not "this skill looks clean," but "this skill is authorized to touch these specific tools and nothing else." Runtime enforcement, not just pre-deploy analysis.

The two aren't competing — scanner + scoped execution is defense in depth. Nice work from the Cisco team.
by lotsofpulp | 2026-03-06 22:18:01+00:00
I am under the impression traditional Hollywood also got much of its money from subscriptions, it just happened to pass through a middleman known as the cable or satellite TV company. Hence the constant threats of not being able to watch so and so channel due to contract dispute of "carriage fees" or whatever they called the amount per subscriber that a cable/satellite TV company paid Warner Bros/Disney/etc.
by slg | 2026-03-06 22:18:28+00:00
>what i find sad is a dashboard so that taxpayers can watch their money turning to murder in real time.

The existence of a dashboard is not an inherent endorsement of that murder. It's easy to look at this dashboard as a critique of that murder even if that wasn't the intent of the author. However, your initial jump to assuming that this dashboard is more likely to serve a financial purpose does reveal an actual political ideology (although not necessarily your political ideology), a cold dehumanizing capitalistic ideology, the kind I would consider largely responsible for those murders.
by 0xTJ | 2026-03-06 22:19:55+00:00
Mostly to make a point; more people are likely to care about it not being okay if it's phrased that way. (Something, something, toxic masculinity, "suck it up tough guy, can't handle a little pat-down?")

The fact that the TSA agent a woman doesn't automatically make someone else comfortable with whatever liberties the agent feels like taking. It's still likely worse if it's a man doing it, but sharing a gender isn't an excuse for the agent to do whatever they want.
by apublicfrog | 2026-03-06 22:20:14+00:00
> Today, if I want Claude's help with something that came up in a Slack thread, I have to relay the context between Slack and Claude by copy-pasting. This is absurd. I am not a sub-agent!

Am I out of touch here, or is this a crazy entitled view? 'My close-to-free AI agent that can answer most things requires me to copy/paste and contextualise my questions!'. This is incredible compared to even a few years ago, and it's very fast and accurate.
by huntaub | 2026-03-06 22:20:17+00:00
Well, I think this is what our company, Archil, is working on. We basically built an SSD clustering layer that proxies/caches/and assembles requests into object storage so that you can run a POSIX file system directly on top.

There's also some really great projects like SlateDB in this space, which could be more like what you're looking for (~RocksDB like API that runs on S3).
by agentultra | 2026-03-06 22:20:52+00:00
Good to know it’s not just me. Sheesh. Are there signs that it’ll bounce back again?

I’ve been looking for work for nearly seven months. I can write low level systems code in C and C++ to web applications in Python and compilers in Haskell. I have tons of industry experience.

Yet most places I apply to ghost me or follow up a month later that the position has been filled.

Companies that have been lying off people claim they are seeing record profits.

It seems like we went from a relatively stable growth to just chaos.
by silverstream | 2026-03-06 22:21:05+00:00
enableScripts: false is a great default, but in a pnpm workspace monorepo it needs some tuning — a few packages legitimately rely on postinstall (esbuild, sharp,
etc. downloading platform binaries).

What worked for us was whitelisting just those in onlyBuiltDependencies. Everything else stays locked down.

The age gate is a nice extra layer. I do wonder how well it holds up for fast-moving deps where you actually want the latest patch though.
by casey2 | 2026-03-06 22:21:15+00:00
We aren't hunter gather's, mammals have been around for hundreds of millions of years, and

Modern Humans can just use air conditioning tech, most people in india already have a tanki, people will just dig as far as they need to keep their water cool like they already do. Irronically the people most affected are the affluent in places like dubia, if the grid fails and they don't have backups.
by Zarathruster | 2026-03-06 22:21:24+00:00
> Since this was mostly contained within one city (Detroit)

It's concentrated in Detroit but also distributed throughout the state, as you can observe in the census.gov slides.

The devastation is regional. It's been a wild experience, watching it all fall apart over the last 40+ years. The decay is immense and impossible to convey to someone from a rich state. Someone from the Eastern Bloc might get it, but I've never been able to communicate it to a Californian. Hop in a car and drive from town to town. Once-prosperous communities are boarded up and gradually reclaimed by nature. Department stores are converted into soup kitchens or marijuana dispensaries.

"Things will work themselves out" is not a law of nature, unless we broaden our definition of "things working out" to include outcomes like "everyone young enough flees, everyone else clutches their savings until they eventually die impoverished."

But with AI, even outcomes like that might be overly optimistic. Where will young people flee to? Where can they go, what trade can they learn, to be safe enough to eventually die in comfort?

When I look at Michigan I see both the past and the future, and I am planning accordingly.
by like_any_other | 2026-03-06 22:21:39+00:00
Many scientists (cited by Supreme Court justices even) practice that same method: https://dailycaller.com/2025/03/31/exclusive-researchers-axe...

If you don't trust the Daily Caller - good. But their main claim is backed up by FOIA'd documents (which they include), and others have been independently reported, and they directly link to the study making the claim.
Show HN: mTile – native macOS window tiler inspired by gTile
by protortyp | 2026-03-06 22:21:43+00:00
Built this with codex/claude because I missed gTile[1] from Ubuntu and couldn’t find a macOS tiler that felt good on a big ultrawide screen. Most mac options I tried were way too rigid for my workflow (fixed layouts, etc) or wanted a monthly subscription. gTile’s "pick your own grid sizes + keyboard flow" is exactly what I wanted and used for years.

Still rough in places and not full parity, but very usable now and I run it daily at work (forced mac life).

[1]: https://github.com/gTile/gTile
by mempko | 2026-03-06 22:23:07+00:00
Since the industrial revolution we've emitted about 1.5 trillion tonnes of CO2. Direct air capture requires roughly 1,500 kWh per tonne, so recapturing all of it would take around 2,250,000 TWh. Current global electricity production is about 30,000 TWh/year. That's 75 years of the entire world's electricity output just for capture, before you even convert it back to fuel, which costs even more energy. And thermodynamically you can never break even: we only extracted maybe 30-40% of fossil fuel energy as useful work, but reversing the dispersal of CO2 from 420ppm in the atmosphere fights entropy all the way back. It will always cost more energy to put back than we got taking it out.
As for the nuclear numbers: Vogtle, the only recent US build, came in at ~$16B/GW, not $3-4B. The world started construction on 9 reactors total in 2024. The all time peak was ~30/year in the 1980s. 300/year has never been close to reality. Average build time is about 9 years per reactor.
I'm not anti-nuclear but you can't hand-wave your way past thermodynamics and industrial scaling with "it's just a policy choice."
by krapp | 2026-03-06 22:23:14+00:00
>That's absurd on its face, and if you honestly believe that, then your mental model of how the world (and people in general) function is fundamentally broken.

I'm not talking about the world or people in general, I'm talking about about the Commander in Chief Donald Trump and "Secretary of War" Pete Hegseth, the people who set the tone and make the decisions. And if you listen to either one of them, especially Hegseth, you'll realize it isn't absurd on its face at all.

Even if no one gave a specific order to "mix some schools into the target list" this administration clearly and explicitly - as in, has literally stated on the record - does not care about morality, ethics, rules of engagement or anything of the sort. It's not out of the question that they would intentionally target civilian infrastructure just as a show of force and aggression, or simply not care because their goal is and I'm quoting here "killing people and breaking things."
by willfinger | 2026-03-06 22:23:45+00:00
After weeks of systematic benchmarking, I've cracked the optimal configuration for Qwen3.5-35B-A3B on consumer 16GB GPUs.

The headline: *120 t/s generation, ~500 t/s prompt ingestion, 120K context, vision enabled — all on a single 16GB card.*

---

## The Vision Breakthrough

Here's what makes this special: most local LLM setups sacrifice speed when you enable multimodal. Not this one.

You get:

- Image analysis
- PDF reading
- Screenshot understanding
- Chart/diagram interpretation

All at 120 t/s. The mmproj adds ~0.9 GB VRAM overhead but zero speed penalty.

This is genuinely useful for coding workflows — paste a screenshot of an error, a diagram of an architecture, or a PDF spec, and the model understands it at full inference speed.

---

## The Token Limit Discovery

There's a hard performance cliff at exactly 155,904 tokens:

| Context | Speed |
| ------- | ------- |
| 155,904 | 125 t/s |
| 156,160 | 9 t/s |

256 more tokens = 10× slowdown.

This is NOT a VRAM issue. The model fits at 192K and 256K too. It's a CUDA_Host compute buffer alignment boundary (~312.5 MB) that saturates PCIe bandwidth on this hybrid MoE architecture.

*For Windows users:* I recommend 120K context (122,880 tokens). This gives ~1GB VRAM headroom for the OS, with only 4% speed loss vs the theoretical max.

---

## Critical Flag: --parallel 1

This is mandatory for the 35B-A3B model:

- Default: `--parallel auto` (4 slots) → 9 t/s
- Fixed: `--parallel 1` → 120 t/s

The GDN hybrid architecture allocates recurrent state buffers per parallel slot. 4 slots = 4× buffers = 10× slower.

---

## The Optimal Config

```
-m Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-Q3_K_S.gguf
--mmproj mmproj-35B-F16.gguf
-c 122880 -ngl 99 --flash-attn on
-ctk iq4_nl -ctv iq4_nl
--parallel 1
--reasoning-budget 0
--temp 0.6 --top-p 0.95 --top-k 20
```

Results:

- ~120 t/s generation
- ~500 t/s prompt ingestion
- 120K tokens context (155K theoretical max)
- Vision working at full speed
- ~15.4 GB VRAM, all 41 layers on GPU

---

## Why "35B" Is Faster Than 27B

Mixture-of-Experts: 256 experts, only 8 routed + 1 shared activate per token. Effectively computes ~3B parameters per forward pass.

That's why a "35B" model at 14.2 GB runs 3.4× faster than a dense 27B.

---

## What I Built

Complete drop-in repo:

- Three server profiles: coding (35B), vision (9B), quality (27B)
- Windows & Linux launchers — one command
- Python benchmark suite + pytest coverage
- React dashboard with live inference metrics
- Vision test scripts
- SM120 native build included for RTX 5080/5090
- Full technical writeup

https://github.com/willbnu/Qwen-3.5-16G-Vram-Local

---

## Compatibility

Tested on RTX 5080 16GB. Works on any NVIDIA 16GB:

- RTX 4080: ~90 t/s
- RTX 4070 Ti Super: ~80 t/s
- RTX 4060 Ti 16GB: ~65 t/s
- RTX 3060 Ti 16GB: ~55 t/s

The 155,904 token cliff is architecture-dependent, not GPU-specific.

---

Hardware: RTX 5080 16GB, Ryzen 7 9800X3D, 96GB DDR5
Software: llama.cpp (SM120 native build)

```
by cryptoegorophy | 2026-03-06 22:24:57+00:00
From what I understood we are closer to the “all humans will die within a century” and if this is the case then what’s the point of doing anything? Does it matter if our effort just delays the “all humans will die” by let say 50 years?
Radical change we need to do if we are serious is going back to caves. 0 consumption. I highly doubt anyone will do that.
by djoldman | 2026-03-06 22:25:34+00:00
Basically this is the slowest train wreck in history that just won't be stopped. By 2050 (only 24 years away), these cities are projected to flood more than 1/3 of the days of every year:

Galveston, Texas
Morgan’s Point, Texas
Annapolis, Maryland
Norfolk, Virginia
Rockport, Texas
Bay St. Louis, Mississippi

Big cities close behind the above:

Miami and Miami Beach, Florida
Charleston, South Carolina
Atlantic City, New Jersey
Ask HN: Why is Pi so good (and some observations)
by ashersopro | 2026-03-06 22:26:16+00:00
why is the Pi coding agent so good? Even with it's minimal implementation, Pi performs better than much more complex, sophisticated, and expensive agents.

I can rule out the secret sauce being:
- system prompt (i've changed it, awesome performance despite)
- underlying model (works great with models other harnesses suck with)
- tools, skills, etc. (all generic)

Is there a chance Pi is good because it is just... not a lot of "cognitive effort" for the model?
by tlogan | 2026-03-06 22:26:21+00:00
Because of this:
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-6079807/v1

Global warming is accelerating, yet we as a human race are doing very little to prevent it. Instead, we keep arguing about how Western countries need to match China’s approach to emissions. I kid you not, that is literally what people on HN are telling me, while China continues increasing its emissions every single year.