MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lich_king | 2026-03-14 15:29:15+00:00
You can read the actual bill here: https://legiscan.com/MT/text/SB212/id/3212152/Montana-2025-S...

In essence, it doesn't really mandate anything; it says you should have a plan, and only for "critical infrastructure facilities":

"Section 4. Infrastructure controlled by critical artificial intelligence system. (1) When critical infrastructure facilities are controlled in whole or in part by a critical artificial intelligence system, the deployer shall develop a risk management policy after deploying the system that is reasonable and considers guidance and standards in the latest version of the artificial intelligence risk management framework from the national institute of standards and technology, the ISO/IEC 4200 artificial intelligence standard from the international organization for standardization, or another nationally or internationally recognized risk management framework for artificial intelligence systems. A plan prepared under federal requirements constitutes compliance with this section."

So it's essentially lip service to AI safety, probably to quell some objections to a bill that otherwise limits regulation of tech platforms.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-03-14 15:29:30+00:00
Plenty of people do.

AI is one of the few major general technological breakthroughs, comparable to the Internet and electricity. It's potentially applicable to everything, which is why right now everyone is trying to apply it to everything. Including developing new optimization algorithms, optimizing optimizing compilers, optimizing applications, optimizing systems, optimizing hardware, ...

Big AI vendors are at the forefront of it, because they're the ones who actually pay for the AI revolution, so any efficiency improvement saves them money.
by analog31 | 2026-03-14 15:29:46+00:00
I'd go further and say it's dangerously untrue. What I advise people is that your results are constantly decaying. Only a rate of progress that exceeds the rate of decay will get you out the door. Decay happens for a number of reasons:

* Your records are never good enough to completely replace your memory of what you did. The longer it takes, the more studies, readings, etc., that you will have to repeat.

* In physical and biological sciences, equipment breaks down, gets taken away, facilities get moved, etc. This stuff happens at a constant rate, and is a pure time cost.

* Technological progress gradually raises the bar for the minimum quality of some results, e.g., in computation. Even "theory" is highly computational these days.

There are also risks of career-ending accidents that can be treated as a constant risk per unit time:

* Your advisor dies, retires, gets promoted to administration, loses funding, changes jobs, gets embroiled in ethical / legal issues, etc.

* Some unexpected new result from another team or industry erases the relevance or novelty of your work.

* You get sick, have family crisis, etc.

* Burnout

Results are the wrong unit of measure. A better KPI is results per unit time. The people who look like they fucked around for 4 years then submitted a brilliant thesis were either working hard all along, or were just brilliant, which I certainly wasn't.

My then-fiancee and I were both grad students. We made a pact to meet at 7:00 every morning in the cafe across from the research building for coffee, to force both of us to stay on a work schedule.
by 9rx | 2026-03-14 15:29:47+00:00
> Look at what started this whole discussion.

If you are pointing out that there is no consistent definition for OOP, I agree. I've said so multiple times. Yes, the proof is in the pudding, as they say.

It is not clear where you think that might otherwise fit into our discussion? I, to the best of my ability, spelled out the historical definitions that we are talking about so that we had a shared understanding. What someone else may have defined the same words as is irrelevant.

I think we can agree that these dividing lines aren't even useful, but the history behind them is understandable. In the beginning there was imperative programming. Then came encapsulation, which didn't fit under imperative, so they named it functional to separate it from imperative. But then came Smalltalk, and it recognized that it doesn't fit under imperative or functional, so it gave itself the name "object-oriented".

If we could go back in time we'd realize that none of these names bring any significance [hence why there is no consistent definition] and throw them away. But we cannot go back in time. We could recognize today that they are just a historical curiosity and throw them away now, but it seems there is too much emotional attachment to them at this point.

So, if you want to use them to satisfy your emotional desires, you can! But you need to also explicitly define them each time so that the reader/listener understands what you mean by it. Failure to do so means they will pick their own pet definition, and then you will talk past each other. There is no commonality found around these terms because, again, any definition you choose (pjmlp's, mine, yours, anyone's) none of them convey any truly useful information, so any definition offered is never retained by anyone else.

> It's pjmlp's insistence that Rust is object-oriented.

It is, for some definition of object-oriented. But this perfectly highlights how there isn't useful information to be found in the use of the term. Even if we all agreed on what object-oriented means, what would you learn from it? Nothing, is what. It was a pointless statement and we can accept it as such.
by ahtihn | 2026-03-14 15:31:08+00:00
Dude you're complaining about the efficiency of free software.

Go write the software yourself, no one owes you anything.

Maybe if you had to actually write it yourself, you'd quickly figure out why people prefer "inefficient" languages for these things.

A cron job scheduler does not in fact require 500 MB of memory. You're just being disingenous, that software is doing a lot more than just that.
by GorbachevyChase | 2026-03-14 15:31:11+00:00
You can always code by hand as a hobby.

If someone is paying you for your work results, that you find it interesting or fun is orthogonal. I get the sense from the commentary section here that there’s a perception that writing programs is an exceptional profession where developer happiness is an end unto itself, and everyone doing it deserves to be a millionaire in the process. It just comes across as child-like thinking. I don’t think many of us spend time, wondering if the welder enjoys the torch or if a cheaper shop weld is robbing the human welder of the satisfaction of a field weld. And we don’t shed so much ink wondering if digital spreadsheets are a moral good or not because perhaps they robbed the accountant of the satisfaction of holding a beautiful quill in hand dipped expertly in carefully selected ink. You’re lucky if you enjoy your job, I think most of us find a way to learn to enjoy our work or at least tolerate it.

I just wish all the moaning would end. Code generation is not new, and that the state of the art is now as good at translating high-level instructions into a program at least as well as the bottom 10% of programmers is a huge win for humanity. Work that could be trivially automated, but is not only because of the scarcity of programming knowledge is going to start disappearing. I think the value creation is going to be tremendous and I think it will take years for it to penetrate existing workflows and for us to recognize the value.
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2026-03-14 15:31:48+00:00
> While alcohol can be used that way, it is not designed for that purpose

Alcohol was not designed. However, marketing campaigns for alcoholic beverages are very much designed. Though I agree that prohibition against drinking won't ever work and would never support it, I do think that prohibition against alcohol advertising and marketing would be a beneficial to society. You are allowed to drink, but you can't try and manipulate people into drinking.

> I would also claim that its addictive potential is lower all things considered.

The addictive potential of alcohol is higher because it is directly chemically affecting the brain. It also causes physical dependencies as well as mental ones. These two often work together and combined are more powerful then the sum of the parts. What is also true is that people who have a genetic propensity for addiction are both more likely then others to become addicted to alcohol, drugs, gambling, or any other usual suspects. Loot boxes are ultimately causing the most damage to the same population subset as alcohol is.
by tyleo | 2026-03-14 15:32:18+00:00
I disagree with the premise. It made all engineering easier. Bad and good.

I believe vibe coding has always existed. I've known people at every company who add copious null checks rather than understanding things and fixing them properly. All we see now is copious null checks at scale. On the other hand, I've also seen excellent engineering amplified and features built by experts in days which would have taken weeks.
by jacAtSea | 2026-03-14 15:32:28+00:00
Thank you everyone for your kind comments.

I didn't 'code' or read any CS related for almost a year. I agreed that now I didn't need more 'input' course material, but rather a 'learn and output' way to rebound.

Since last October, I have been using github co-pilot(because its free, unemployed) to write little python project helper for my finance admin and other daily stuff. Initially I had to 'plan' with AI, broke tasks into smaller tasks and modified a few things. I haven't 'written' a single line of code since January as the model is so powerful they can step thru the changes and debugging. Granted this is a very small project.

I aslo think contributions to the opensource projects would be helpful, for the sake of mental health and having 'real' practice.

I am also thinking about might be start with some opensource project that I have used, e.g. like pyarrows, pandas, jupyter for python, and spark for scala. However, I think I am actually more interested in building a system together, rather than writing 'libraries'.

Do you know how I can find one? I had tried searching via google but its not effective. I guess I don't know how.

I have also tried to find 'volunteer jobs' but not very successful. Again, I think I might not know 'where' to look.

I think my mind is still all over the place after the burnout so would need some brain power from the community.

Thank you!
by zer00eyz | 2026-03-14 15:32:29+00:00
"AI" (and calling it that is a stretch) is nothing more than a nail gun.

If you gave an experienced house framer a hammer, hand saw and box of nails and a random person off the street a nail gun and powered saw who is going to produce the better house?

A confident AI and an unskilled human are just a Dunning-Kruger multiplier.
by aziaziazi | 2026-03-14 15:32:42+00:00
I'm glad you talk about that. Let's look some data:

PDCAAS [0]
Soy 0.92 - Beef at 0.94 (Beef 2% better)

DIAAS [1]
Soy 0.91 - Beef 1.116 - Whole milk 1.14 (Beef 23% better, Caw milk 25% better)

WATER footprint [2]
Soy Milk is 28% of caw milk (Soy 257% better)
Soy Burger is 28% of caw milk (Soy 1329% better)

CALORIC / PROTEIN fed population [3]
MAD (mean American diet) 341m - Plant-Based 531m (plant 56% better)

0: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digestible_Indispensable_Amino... No data for Soy PDCAAS in that page and Beef has a different number as the first source. The difference isn't significative though.

2: > The water footprint of the soy milk product analysed in this study is 28% of the water footprint of the global average cow milk. The water footprint of the soy burger examined here is 7% of the water footprint of the average beef burger in the world.

https://www.waterfootprint.org/resources/Ercin-et-al-2012-Wa...

3: > [caloric and protein] At 3% in both metrics, beef is by far the least efficient [...] legume-dominated plant-based diets substitute beef with a dietary shift potential of ≈190 million [current US] individuals.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/1...

Obviously the production method of soy/burger/milk is significant, however others sources show rougtly the same order of magnitude: https://watercalculator.org/water-footprint-of-food-guide/

> depends on your body's protein needs.

For an higher protein/calorie ration, Quinoa is in range of soy' water footprint, and legume protein concentrates fit as well.
by alephnerd | 2026-03-14 15:32:49+00:00
I'm not hip but I am much younger than much of HN (heck my sibling is in their mid 20s), but even I'm getting old and increasingly out of touch.

And that's what happens - tastes change and mindsets change.

People who were born in 1993-97 are already planning to or are already married, and planning to have their first child (the median age for a woman having their first child in America is around 27-28 [0]), and have a different set of tastes and views than someone who was at a similar stage in their life in late 2000s or early 2010s.

Based on the references I see on HN, a large portion of commenters seems to be in their 40s to 50s, with some younger straddlers in their late 20s or early 30s.

[0] - https://www.axios.com/2025/05/07/birth-rate-states
by staticassertion | 2026-03-14 15:32:53+00:00
> if we found a way to make the hard parts easier and prevent software projects from devolving into balls of chaos and complexity.

I don't really believe this is possible. Or, it's the sort of thing that gets solved at a "product" level. Reality is complicated. People are complicated. The idea that software can exist without complexity feels sort of absurd to me.

That said, to your larger point, I think the goal is basically to eliminate the middle class.
by multidude | 2026-03-14 15:33:13+00:00
I haven't tackled payments, but I've run an agent with SSH access to a production server and real API keys for a few weeks. The trust question you're circling ("would you trust an AI with $500") is the interesting part. My answer so far: yes for reversible actions, not yet for irreversible ones. Deleting a file, sending an email, making a payment — these need a different approval model than reading a database or running a query. The hard problem isn't capability, it's building infrastructure that distinguishes "can do" from "should do without asking.

And i want to build an agent capable to do automated investment. so, to the question "has" anyone...?" i believe yes, my role model is Jim Simons from Renaissance. He did.
Ask HN: Multi-tenancy for Markdown-based agentic systems
by paragarora | 2026-03-14 15:34:14+00:00
So I've been looking at how companies are building their agentic setups - OpenClaw, Claude Code type systems. And one thing I keep seeing is everyone is storing memory/config/state as markdown files on disk instead of a proper database. OpenClaw literally keeps conversations, memory, skills all as .md and YAML files. Claude Code has this whole CLAUDE.md hierarchy thing where it reads markdown at the start of every session.

For single user this makes total sense - you can git track it, grep it, read it in any editor. Super clean.

But what happens when you're doing this for multiple clients? Like if you're running an agency or building a SaaS on top of this pattern?

Should we be doing one folder per client and calling it a day? What about when memory files keep growing and your context window is getting stuffed? How do you make sure Client A's stuff doesn't accidentally leak into Client B's session?

For anyone who's actually doing this in production — what's working? Separate workspaces? Containers? Some hybrid thing? Or did you just give up on markdown and go back to a database?

Genuinely curious, not finding much real-world experience on this.
by tlively | 2026-03-14 15:34:22+00:00
Andy jests, but I would actually like to add nominal types to Wasm (along with type imports to make them usable). No proposal yet, but maybe later this year.

This blog post mentions that you can kind of emulate nominal types by putting all your types in one rec group, but then it brushes that off as inferior to using exceptions. (Which is hilarious! Good work, Andy.) What it doesn’t make clear is that people actually use this rec group trick in practice. There are two ways to do it: you can put literally all your types in one rec group, or you can emit minimal rec groups with additional “brand types” that serve no purpose but to ensure the groups have different structures. The former solution is better for code size when the entire application is one module, but the latter solution is better if there are multiple modules involved. You don’t want to repeat every type definition in every module, and using smaller rec groups lets you define only the types that are (transitively) used in each module.

The Binaryen optimizer has to ensure that it does not accidentally give distinct types the same structural identity because that would generally be observable by casts. Most of its type optimizations therefore put all the types in one rec group. However, it does have a type merging optimization that takes the casts into account[0]. That optimization is fun because it reuses the DFA minimization code from the original equirecursive type system we were experimenting with for Wasm GC. We also have a rec group minimization optimization[1] that creates minimal rec groups (by finding strongly connected components of the type definition graph), then ensures the types remain distinct first by using different permutations of the types within a rec group and then only as necessary by adding brand types.

[0]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/binaryen/blob/main/src/passes...

[1]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/binaryen/blob/main/src/passes...
by graypegg | 2026-03-14 15:34:26+00:00
I haven't found anyone pushing back on it at all, which has been making me a bit nervous! There was a HN post about it, though it didn't get any traction. [0] Seemingly nothing in any of the usual rails community areas either. It's going to make recommending rails confusing because that pitch really does make it unclear what rails is even aiming to do.

And yeah you're right, like what is the difference at that point? If the pitch is "AI agents write this", then the obvious response is "well why would I not use what has more training data then?".

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47272953
by joe_mamba | 2026-03-14 15:34:54+00:00
Everyone knows they aren't "that" rare. What's rare is a country willing to poison its environment to extract and refine them. China used to be that, but now they aren't, so the west is looking for friendly nations to replace China.

That's where Ukraine comes in since they have bigger issues right now than environmental concerns and are desperate enough to be easily exploitable by the western powers that used to exploit China when it was weak. It's how it works.
by pclmulqdq | 2026-03-14 15:34:55+00:00
This is the archetype I have seen for most fans of Tesla and people who think they make good cars. They assume a $50,000 car (their current Tesla) should compare with a $20,000 car (their previous Honda/Mazda). The Tesla market is also the market with BMWs and Porsches, and dollar for dollar you get a lot more from a BMW than a Tesla.
by foldr | 2026-03-14 15:35:32+00:00
It reminds me a bit of the endless discussions among analog photographers regarding the different chemicals and methods that can be used for developing black and white film. Everyone is, of course, convinced that their particular development method achieves optimal results. But no-one ever really does any proper controlled tests.

An old photography handbook from the 1950s drily remarks that the proliferation of developing agents "merely increases the number of different methods by which identical results may be obtained".
Show HN: Hedra – an open-world 3D game I wrote from scratch before LLMs
by maxilevi | 2026-03-14 15:35:46+00:00
With the current inflow of LLM aided software, I thought I would share a cool "hand-coded" project from the previous era (I wrote this in highschool so roughly ~8 years ago).

Hedra is an open world 3d game written from scratch using only OpenGL and C#. It has quite a few cool features like infinite generation, skinned animated mesh rendering, post processing effects, etc. Originally the physics engine was also written from scratch but i swapped for the more reliable bulletphysics.
by Twey | 2026-03-14 15:36:06+00:00
Message passing is a type of mutable shared state — but one that's restricted in some important way to eliminate a certain class of errors (in Erlang's case, to a thread-safe queue with pairwise ordering guarantees so that all processing on a particular actor's state is effectively atomic). You can also pick other structures that give different guarantees, e.g. LVars or CRDTs make operations commutative so that the ordering problems go away (but by removing your ability to write non-commutative operations). The big win for the actor model is (just) that it linearizes all operations on a particular substate of the program while allowing other actors' states to be operated on concurrently.

Nobody argues that any of these approaches is a silver bullet for all concurrency problems. Indeed most of the problems of concurrency have direct equivalents in the world of single-threaded programming that are typically hard and only partially solved: deadlocks and livelocks are just infinite loops that occur across a thread boundary, protocol violations are just type errors that occur across a thread boundary, et cetera. But being able to rule out some of these problems in the happy case, even if you have to deal with them occasionally when writing more fiddly code, is still a big win.

If you have an actor Mem that is shared between two other actors A and B then Mem functions exactly as shared memory does between colocated threads in a multithreaded system: after all, RAM on a computer is implemented by sending messages down a bus! The difference is just that in the hardware case the messages you can pass to/from the actor (i.e. the atomicity boundaries) are fixed by the hardware, e.g. to reads/writes on particular fixed-sized ranges of memory, while with a shared actor Mem is free to present its own set of software-defined operations, with awareness of the program's semantics. Memory fences are a limited way to bring that programmability to hardware memory, but the programmer still has the onerous and error-prone task of mapping domain operations to fences.
by chmod775 | 2026-03-14 15:36:10+00:00
You just steamrolled on, pretty much ignoring the comment you are replying to, made unkind assumptions, and put words in my mouth to boot. I don't mind some aggressive argumentation, but this misses the mark so completely that I have really no idea how to have a constructive conversation this way.

> where the AI wrote some code some way and I had to ask why, it told me why

I just explained that it cannot tell you why. It's simply not how they work. You might as well tell me that it cooked you dinner and did your laundry.

> the code improves.

We can agree on this. The iterative process works. The understanding of it is incorrect.

> It sounds like you either have access to bad models or you are just imagining what it’s like to use an LLM in this way

Quoting this is really enough. You may imagine me sighing.

> Also, pretending that the LLM is still just token predicting

Strawman.

Overall your comment is dancing around engaging with what is being said, so I will not waste my time here.