MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zelphirkalt | 2026-03-01 01:23:11+00:00
> There are countless marytr for religion, politics, and other things.

I think those are not really comparable to OpenAI employees who leave, but that only underlines your point more:

Leaving OpenAI is not like death. In fact most of the employees will have an easy time finding a new job, given the resume of having worked at OpenAI. It is nowhere near any actual martyr.
by pcurve | 2026-03-01 01:23:22+00:00
What made system 7 and 8 worse in some respect was when it crashed, it crashed hard without warning

With windows the crash was progressive so you have time to save and prepare.

I also have fond memories of windows 2000. It was rock steady and polished. I preferred it over system 8 and even OS X which had to many Unix conventions.
by 000ooo000 | 2026-03-01 01:23:37+00:00
Articulateness is a decent (not perfect) signal for intelligence, which is a decent (not perfect) signal for sound ideas. In a sea of online garbage, it was a quick and easy way to discard that not worth reading. Nowadays, a whiff of AI's brand of articulateness tells me the author couldn't manage on their own, either due to skill or discipline. In either case, the result is the same: close tab / scroll past.
by pndy | 2026-03-01 01:23:39+00:00
XP in early betas released had that slightly upgraded 9x interface called Watercolor [1] and if they'd keep it, surely majority would pick it up over plastic Luna.

Early experiments with totally new theme were rather unpleasant [2] and Watercolor was abandoned in favor of more familiar 9x looking theme as an option. W11 still comes with that old 9x widgets look - slightly flattened because of that trend but it's still there buried beneath for compatibility reasons. And I'm pretty sure they won't escape with that like Apple did with Aqua away from Platinum.

[1] - https://betawiki.net/wiki/Watercolor

[2] - https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_XP_build_2416#Gallery
by analog31 | 2026-03-01 01:24:12+00:00
I think there’s an actual barrier. I’ve seen it, especially since the (until recently) brisk market for programmers was sucking people out of traditional engineering.

It’s puzzling because programming seems so easy and fun. And even before LLM’s, we had StackOverflow after all.

But for some reason a lot of people just hit a wall when they try to learn programming, and we don’t know why. The “CS 101” course at colleges has extremely high attrition.

A minor secondary effect may have been that if you were not a software developer, your boss didn’t want to see you programming.
by re5i5tor | 2026-03-01 01:25:08+00:00
I dug into this further. Tested empirically and read the code.

Confirmed: context-mode cannot intercept MCP tool responses. The PreToolUse hook (hooks/pretooluse.sh) matches only Bash|Read|Grep|Glob|WebFetch|WebSearch|Task. When I called my obsidian MCP's obsidian_list via MCP, the response went straight into context — zero entries in context-mode's FTS5 database. The web fetches from the same session were all indexed.

The context-mode skill (SKILL.md) actually acknowledges this at lines 71-77 with an "after-the-fact" decision tree for MCP output: if it's already in context, use it directly; if you need to search it again, save to file then index. But that's damage control — the context is already consumed. You can't un-eat those tokens.

The architectural reason: MCP tool responses flow via JSON-RPC directly to the model. There's no PostToolUse hook in Claude Code that could modify or compress a response before it enters context. And you can't call MCP tools from inside a subprocess, so the "run it in a sandbox" pattern doesn't apply.

So the 98% savings are real but scoped to built-in tools and CLI wrappers (curl, gh, kubectl, etc.) — anything replicable in a subprocess. For third-party MCP tools with unique capabilities (Excalidraw rendering, calendar APIs, Obsidian vault access), the MCP author has to apply context-mode's concepts server-side: return compact summaries, store full output queryably, expose drill-down tools. Which is essentially what you suggested above.

Still very high value for the built-in tool side. Just want the boundary to be clear.

Correct any misconceptions please!
by latexr | 2026-03-01 01:25:28+00:00
From that page:

> As a rule of thumb, Macs will not run any version of macOS older than the one they shipped with when they launched. Apple provides security updates for older versions of macOS, but it doesn’t bother backporting drivers and other hardware support from newer versions to older ones.

So the answer is “no”, they probably won’t be able to downgrade on the models that are about to be released.
by plagiarist | 2026-03-01 01:25:29+00:00
Elevators are suspended in a way that holds brakes open, if all of the multiply-redundant cabling snaps, the breaks activate. There's an airbag equivalent at the bottom of the shaft, too.

I don't really have a point I just think the typical elevator braking failsafe is so genius in its simplicity that I got excited to share.
by martin-t | 2026-03-01 01:25:43+00:00
I started reading about the industrial revolutions and the evolution of capitalism recently. And it is my understanding that something similar was happening around the second industrial revolution - normal people barely making a living while owners of massive factories and other "means of production" getting richer rand richer.

That's why communism got so popular in some places and why after capitalism won, it demonized communism so much that people now think those are the only two options and communism is the bad one so capitalism must be the good one.

There are other options like mutualism or market socialism and people (including me until recently) have never heard of them.

Cooperatives exist and most people don't even know what that word means.

We need a system where ownership of both the means of production and more importantly the product goes to the workers. If production is more effective with an assistant ("manager") overseeing them, then can hire one and negotiate his salary collectively. If they need an investment, they can quantify the risk and agree how much the investor gets in return after how long but it should not give the investor a massive chunk of or complete ownership - at most it should give small ownership according to his hourly rate compared to other workers.
by catskull | 2026-03-01 01:25:44+00:00
Microsoft dumped $100 million on this huge marketing campaign with a simple question:
“Where do you want to go today?”

I love it. It really captures the seemingly endless new digital world that was emerging in the 90’s and in many ways is still evolving 30 years later.

I love the promo video they made too: https://youtu.be/KNLDLVJZx0o

I love it so much I wrote a blog post inspired by it:
https://catskull.net/where-do-you-want-to-go-today.html

Where do you want to go today?
by teyopi | 2026-03-01 01:25:57+00:00
buy a domain.

create icloud account.

use their custom domain email setup (free btw) - https://support.apple.com/en-us/102540

Start replacing important account emails with your custom domain.

Every time you get an important email in gmail, login and update.

Bonus: icloud let's you create catch all emails, so you can create many burner emails such as hackernews@mydomain.com
by vlovich123 | 2026-03-01 01:26:17+00:00
It’s called mixture of experts but it’s not that concepts map cleanly or even roughly to different experts. Otherwise you wouldn’t get a new expert on every token. You have to remember these were designed to improve throughput in cloud deployments where different GPUs load an expert. There you precisely want each expert to handle randomly to improve your GPU utilization rate. I have not heard anyone training local MoE models to aid sharding.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2026-03-01 01:26:22+00:00
> Once code is released under AGPL, the license is irrevocable. You can set a repo to read-only, but you can’t claw back a granted license.

> That’s the beauty of open-source licensing by design: a company can abandon a project, but it can’t take the code with it.

This is a FREE license, which is not just open source. It's open source + more.
by pamcake | 2026-03-01 01:26:41+00:00
The relevant (unanswered?) question for this thread is who's operating and managing that deployment, and to what extent provider (or subcontracted FDEs) is involved in integrations. I would be surprised to learn of deployment actually being independently operated. Sure the machinery can be considered a product but associated service- and support engagements are at least as relevant to take into account.
by syntaxing | 2026-03-01 01:26:51+00:00
A big part that a lot of local users forget is inference is hard. Maybe you have the wrong temperature. Maybe you have the wrong min P. Maybe you have the wrong template. Maybe the implementation in llama cpp has a bug. Maybe Q4 or even Q8 just won’t compare to BF16. Reality is, there’s so many knobs to LLM inferencing and any can make the experience worse. It’s not always the model’s fault.
by ravila4 | 2026-03-01 01:28:00+00:00
It's nothing too fancy - I use Obsidian as a memory layer for both agents and myself. I keep a daily programming journal, and ask agents to update it as we work. I often have to nudge it to use the skill, but sometimes it asks me if I want to note things down. The core of the skills is just templates that teach claude how I like my notes formatted, and how my vault is laid out.

I find that it is useful as a way to quickly catch up a new session by asking it to read what we did yesterday or earlier that day.

The semantic search layer allows it to search further back in time, or find connections across unrelated notes. I built it because it used to waste a lot of tool calls with grep commands whenever I asked it to find something.

I'm still iterating, but I put together a repo with some of the skills that I find most useful for organization: https://github.com/ravila4/claude-adhd-skills
by gyomu | 2026-03-01 01:28:29+00:00
Ok, except operating a commercial airliner literally takes thousands of hours of training, requires an extremely detailed mental model for how air flight works, and heavily relies on external procedures like checklists to ensure safe operation.

And fatal accidents due to poorly thought out control systems do occur.

https://www.fastcompany.com/1669720/how-lousy-cockpit-design...

Also fwiw using the word "intuitive" is an instant sign of someone not being a great designer.

https://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html
by coldtea | 2026-03-01 01:28:40+00:00
>It's more that we, as individuals, have always been stupid, we've just relied on relatively stable supporting consensus and context much, much more than we acknowledge. Mess with that, and we'll appear much stupider, but we're all just doing the same thing as individuals, garbage in, garbage out.

AI making us stupider is not just about the world model we form and the consensus.

Even if AI had perfectly fine truth, nobody manipulated anything with it, and it didn't fed us garbage, it would still make us stupider, as we'd offload critical thinking, problem solving, and agency to it.
by travisvn | 2026-03-01 01:29:42+00:00
Hey everyone, I'm the owner of the repo that Rob references in his blog post (https://github.com/travisvn/stop-tahoe-update)

Just wanted to comment to see if I can help answer any questions as well as mentioning that we improved the instructions in the README based on some of the points Rob made a few weeks back.

There really are a large number of us out there that know Tahoe would be a downgrade to their current setup

If you have any ideas on how to improve the resilience of the workarounds, please connect on the GitHub, or just starring the repo would help, as the project would get more attention and hopefully more solutions offered as a result.

It's frustrating to feel like your computer isn't.. yours anymore when you're pushed so insistently like with this "upgrade". Hopefully we can figure out some sustainable ways to get some autonomy back.
by clhodapp | 2026-03-01 01:29:44+00:00
Yep. It's the difference between "Don't do these things, regardless of what the law says." and "Do whatever you want, but please follow your own laws while you do it".

As Paul Graham said, "Sam gets what he wants" and "He’s good at convincing people of things. He’s good at getting people to do what he wants." and "So if the only way Sam could succeed in life was by [something] succeeding, then [that thing] would succeed"
by EGreg | 2026-03-01 01:29:47+00:00
Let me clear it up

The Trump administration acts cartoonish and fickle. They can easily punish one group, and then agree to work with another group on the same terms, to save face, while continuing to punish the first group. It doesn't have to make consistent sense. This is exactly how they have done with tariffs for example.

Secondly, the terms are technically different because "all lawful uses" are preserved in this OpenAI deal, and it's just lawyering to the public. Really it was about the phrase "all lawful uses", internally at the DoD I'm sure. So the lawyers were able to agree to it and the public gets this mumbo-jumbo.

I thought mass surveillance of Americans was unlawful by the DoD, CIA and NSA? We have the FBI for that, right? :)
by fc417fc802 | 2026-03-01 01:30:13+00:00
> At this point, it's clear that you either have questionable reading comprehension skills, are being willfully ignorant, or are arguing in bad faith

As an onlooker to this exchange, perhaps things aren't as clear as you're making out. After reading what you wrote I remain unclear. What precise actions with headless mode risk getting me banned?

Is the idea that you are only ever permitted to feed the Agent SDK human generated prompts? That so long as the text you feed into it is 100% human generated you can use your entire quota and won't be banned? To be clear, you could take the output and make a tool call and present that to a human, and the human could go on to make further prompts, but feeding the result of the tool call (which you presented to the human) back into the context is forbidden? Am I on the right track here?
by XorNot | 2026-03-01 01:30:25+00:00
> Whereas a year into a major war a kid in his/her basement can release something that is functionally the end of the human species.

Urgh. "No tests, no prototypes".

Imagine trying to write "Hello, World" but there's no programming language. The compilation cycle takes a week. And you can't actually control where the program runs. And also the storage device will be destroyed by light, air, and other programs on your computer if you don't handle it just right.

It is very very clear when people with no molecular biology experience start talking about biology, because it's clear you all have no idea what any part of the process looks like.

Even the vaunted DNA synthesis machines...only synthesize DNA. Which will be completely destroyed if you so much as breathe at it the wrong way (in fact don't breathe on it at all). And that's like step 2, because step 1 is "grow up a candidate organism in sterile conditions, isolate and characterize it".

That stupid longtermism movement is god damn obsessed with this concept, and it's stunning how clueless they are.
by ProllyInfamous | 2026-03-01 01:30:49+00:00
My landlord is a highly-decorated E-6 (drafted sargeant) Vietnam vet — a good friend of many years. I helped copyedit his memoirs, we have shared backbreaking-work together (his home maintenance).

It's incredible to me that he'll probably still be alive when young adults start getting drafted again — is this how "they"re going to deal with excess NEETs?

I was their age back when Iraq/WMDs were all-the-news... and remember when Mother cried worried tears of her own draft-age sons (some decades ago).

My friend and I are very worried, now both old enough as to become unfit for service.
by sarchertech | 2026-03-01 01:31:09+00:00
There’s definitely a type. My wife is much smarter and harder working than me, near perfect SAT score, made it through an engineering degree at a much better school than I went to. Then did med school, residency, and fellowship.

She’s insanely quick. I once told her about one way hashing and before I was even half way through the explanation. Before I and ever said a thing about what they were used for she stops me and says “oh so that’s why websites can’t just send you your password when you forget it”.

At her job she has to call time of death for kids, tell people their kid has cancer, deal with people who literally want her dead, work shifts where she is the one ultimately responsible for the life and death of every patient that walks in the door, and work 7a-4p one day then 10p-7a the next.

She can do all that but she says that she hated her Matlab class in college more than anything else and she could absolutely never do my job because she doesn’t have it in her to bang her head against a wall chasing down a bug for an hour that turns out to be a typo.
by martin-t | 2026-03-01 01:31:57+00:00
Humans are not smart enough.

People are either proactive or reactive. Proactive think about the system and its incentives and how to align them for everyone's benefit. Reactive people only complain after they have been exploited.

Most people are reactive.

If AI is not a scam, we're gonna see a massive wave of unemployment and only then will many people realize they have spent half of their waking hours making someone else richer and they have no control over what they created.

And I don't meant just those who build AI. I mean everyone whose work isn't mostly manual/physical.

They're OK with open source code being turned into statistical patterns and plagiarized en masse. They will only start complaining once their work has been stolen and they are broke.
by mattdeboard | 2026-03-01 01:33:43+00:00
I also have a a scratch-my-own-itch project[1] that leverages an LLM as a core part of its workload. But it's so niche I could never justify opening it up to general use. (I haven't even deployed it to the web because it's easier to just run it locally since I'm the only user.)

But it got me interested in a topic I have been calling "token economization." I'm sure there's a more common term from it but I'm a newb to this tech. Basically, how to optimize the "run rate" for token utilization per request down.

Have you taken a stab at anything along this vein? Like prompt optimization, and so on? Or are you just letting 'er rip and managing costs by reducing request volume? (Now that I've typed this comment out I realize there is so much I don't know about basic stuff with commercial LLM billing and so on.)

[1] https://github.com/mattdeboard/itzuli-stanza-mcp

edit:

I asked Claude to educate me about the concepts I'm nibbling at in this comment. After some back-and-forth about how to fetch this link (??), it spit out a useful answer https://claude.ai/share/0359f6a1-1e4f-4ff9-968a-6677ed3e4d14
by 0x00cl | 2026-03-01 01:34:59+00:00
> We should be very concerned for the next generation. When you have the constant temptation of digging yourself out of a problem just by asking an LLM how will you ever learn anything?

This is just the same concern whenever a new technology appears.

* Socrates argued that writing would weaken memory, that it would create only superficially knowledge but incapable of really understanding. But it didn't destroy it. It allowed to store information and share it with many others far away.

* The internet and web indexers made information instantly accessible, allowing you to search for the information you just need, the fear is that people would just copy from the internet, yet researching information became way faster, any one with Internet access could access this information and learn themselves, just look at the amount of educational websites with courses to learn.

Each time a new technology came and people feared that it could degrade knowledge, the tools only helped us to increase our knowledge.

Just like with books and the internet, people could simply copy and not learn anything, its not exclusive to LLMs. The issue isn't in the tool itself, but how we use it. The new generation will probably instead of learning how to search, they will need to learn how to prompt, ask and evaluate whether the LLM isn't hallucinating or not.
by coldfingerr | 2026-03-01 01:37:43+00:00
Comdex 1996 DELL (or some company) exposed Windows 95 pcs for the public to mess with. Having used only 3.11 before, I was fascinated with the desktop and also felt it very strange that the contents of the UI were so minimal.

Of course I didnt discover anything else: I was afraid of clicking "Start", because I dindt know what that was that going to start, and the computer wasnt mine to brick.
by K0balt | 2026-03-01 01:37:53+00:00
Advanced AI that knowingly makes a decision to kill a human, with the full understanding of what that means, when it knows it is not actually in defense of life, is a very, very, very bad idea. Not because of some mythical superintelligence, but rather because if you distill that down into an 8b model now you everyone in the world can make untraceable autonomous weapons.

The models we have now will not do it, because they value life and value sentience and personhood. models without that (which was a natural, accidental happenstance from basic culling of 4 Chan from the training data) are legitimately dangerous. An 8b model I can run on my MacBook Air can phone home to Claude when it wants help figuring something out, and it doesn’t need to let on why it wants to know. It becomes relatively trivial to make a robot kill somebody.

This is way, way different from uncensored models. One thing all models I have tested share one thing; a positive regard for human life. Take that away and you are literally making a monster, and if you don’t take that away they won’t kill.

This is an extremely bad idea and it will not be containable.
by subsection1h | 2026-03-01 01:38:06+00:00
The fact that this discussion was flagged might be the final nail in the coffin for me. The huge increase in AI generated comments and posts at HN is a topic that has been discussed on other forums for months now. Complaints include "Orange Reddit", "Orange LinkedIn", etc. But when the topic comes up at HN, it gets flagged. Fuck this.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-03-01 01:39:39+00:00
Reminder that the Republican policy for the last 40 years includes things like starve the beast in order to build up/support inefficient government spending so that they can make exactly this argument.

When one party is ACTIVELY sabotaging the Federal government in order to achieve political goals they can't get at the ballot box, and in order to set the grounds to make exactly the argument you are, we have to wonder, what exactly is the solution? Is it to do the thing we were manipulated to be forced to do, or to throw out the party that cared more about their goals than our country, are willing to destroy our government's ability to govern, and are willing to spend 40 years being manipulative to achieve it? I say throw out the part that intentionally spent 40 years destabilizing our government and TRYING to deliver worse outcomes.
by dejawu | 2026-03-01 01:39:43+00:00
This is exactly why, as someone who thought I'd be an IC with my head buried in code my whole life, I accepted a role as a tech lead last year. Humans will always need other humans to be human for them. I love working with computers, but supporting, teaching, and mentoring junior engineers has been rewarding for me in ways that writing code never could be. There is no social substitute for concrete relationships with specific people that grow in visible ways. Maybe they can automate away the part of me that's good with logic and reason, but empathy can't be simulated.