MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Spivak | 2026-03-09 03:23:24+00:00
Well part of that is because STE folks aren't typically required to take any kind of theoretical maths. It's $Math for Engineers and it eschews theoretical underpinnings for application. I don't think it's any kind of failing, it's just different. My statistics class was a dense treatise in measure theory. Anyone who took the regular stats class is almost surely way better than me at designing an experiment, but I can talk your ear off about Lebesgue measure to basically zero practical end.
Show HN: Andon – Toyota Production System for LLM Coding Agents
by allnew_llc | 2026-03-09 03:23:40+00:00
LLM coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, etc.) have structural weaknesses: blind retry loops, volatile learning, silent
spec drift, and gate gaming. These aren't bugs in specific models — they're properties of goal-optimizing systems.

ANDON applies Toyota Production System principles to address this:

- Jidoka (autonomation): auto-detect failures and block forward-progress commands (git push, deploy)
- Kaizen (continuous improvement): force Five Whys root cause analysis, then standardize prevention rules
- Meta-ANDON: detect when the agent is stuck in a whack-a-mole debugging loop

Install: pip install andon-for-llm-agents

Works with any agent that supports hooks/callbacks. Apache-2.0 licensed.
by wannabebarista | 2026-03-09 03:23:46+00:00
I write quite a bit about books and papers I read. This ranges from contemporary work on privacy and machine learning to math, economics, and philosophy from the nineteenth century.

Several readers have asked for an easy way to get recommendations without working through long-form review articles.

Here's the first iteration of a simple recommender: https://bcmullins.github.io/reading/
Show HN: Chat AI Agent inside mobile device testing sessions
by krishpavuluri | 2026-03-09 03:23:50+00:00
We build RobotActions, a cloud device farm for Android/iOS testing. We just shipped a Chat AI Agent that lives inside the live device session.

What it does:

- During a session, you can ask "What's the XPath for this button?" and get a ready-to-use locator from the current screen
- Ask "Write an Appium test for this flow" → get test code generated from the live accessibility tree
- Type "tap the login button" in natural language → it executes on the real device
- Ask "Why is my test failing on this element?" → gets context from both vision and the accessibility snapshot

The agent uses a combination of screenshot vision and the device's live accessibility tree. The key insight is that most mobile test failures are locator issues or UI state issues — and an agent with full context of what's on screen right now can solve those immediately, without the engineer leaving the session to use a separate inspector tool.

Technical bits:
- Accessibility tree is captured per-frame during the session
- Agent has both visual context (screenshot) and structured context (a11y tree) simultaneously
- Supports Android (UIAutomator2/XPath/UISelector) and iOS (XCUITest/Appium)
- Session context is also exposed via API for CI/CD post-failure reports

Happy to discuss the architecture, especially the tradeoffs between using vision alone vs. vision + a11y tree for locator generation.
by fgfarben | 2026-03-09 03:23:53+00:00
> we force-breed, torture and kill animals and their children in the millions every day just for the pleasure of consuming meat, eggs and dairy products

We do the same thing to plants. Why do you have no qualms about killing plants to eat the food they accumulated for their young?

A grain of wheat and a chicken egg are evolutionarily and nutritionally, maybe even ontologically, indistinguishable from one another.
by yeag123 | 2026-03-09 03:24:05+00:00
I’m working on a tool to automate manual document workflows, specifically for industries like manufacturing where accounting paperwork is still a manual burden.

The workflow: Upload doc → LLM extracts structured data → Generate new doc from template.

It’s API-first, includes webhooks, and is built to be self-hosted/self-provisioned for privacy. Still very much a WIP, but looking for feedback on the feature set and the extraction accuracy.

URL: https://fetchtext.io
by devonkelley | 2026-03-09 03:24:19+00:00
The funniest thing about this list is that it exists at all. We now have a cottage industry of people trying to sand the fingerprints off AI-generated text instead of just... writing the thing themselves. If your idea is good enough to share, it's good enough to spend 20 minutes actually writing. If it's not, a cleaner prompt isn't going to save it.
by Folcon | 2026-03-09 03:25:32+00:00
I've been slowly hacking on game ideas on and off for the better part of a decade and I've finally switched tracks and trying to seriously build something full time

I've given myself 6 months

It's a bit scary basically 180ing like this but I figure if I don't try it now I never will

I've already started prototyping various ideas, and to be honest just sitting down and spending time doing this has been really quite lovely

One thing I'm finding fun is slowly unearthing what I actually find interesting

I started with messing around in minecraft and tinkering with rimworld-like game ideas, but I'm slowly moving away from them as I've been tinkering more and more

Don't get me wrong, I do want to revisit them at some point in the future, but I do find myself circling more around narrative, simulations and zachlikes

It's a bit of an odd mix and in some ways they look like paradox style games, but I'm well aware that taking one of those behemoths on is going to be a bit silly, so I'm trying to slim down until I get to a kernel that I actually find enjoyable tinkering with

A toy if you will

Currently I'm trying to work out if there's anything interesting in custom unit design, basically unpicking how games like rollercoaster tycoon's coaster design maps to stats like excitement ratings and seeing how that might mix with old school point buy systems

It feels like it might be small enough to be a good toy and I'm having fun tinkering with it, but I have no idea whether other people will xD

It might honestly be too niche for anyone and I've successfully optimised for an audience of one :shrug:
by godelski | 2026-03-09 03:26:36+00:00
Sorry, I assumed the comment was clear, with your comment above. Here's what I meant:

> By your definition every machine has a type of general intelligence. Not just a bog standard calculator, but also my broom.

I really don't know of any human that can out perform a standard calculator at calculations. I'm sure there are humans that can beat them in some cases, but clearly the calculator is a better generalized numeric calculation machine. A task that used to represent a significant amount of economic activity. I assumed this was rather common knowledge given it featuring in multiple hit motion pictures[0].

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4846340
by diasks2 | 2026-03-09 03:26:46+00:00
I've been working on two small projects recently.

1. Live Kaiwa — real-time Japanese conversation support

I live in a rural farming neighborhood in Japan. Day-to-day Japanese is fine for me, but neighborhood meetings were a completely different level. Fast speech, local dialect, references to people and events from decades ago. I'd leave feeling like I understood maybe 5% of what happened.

So I built a tool for myself to help follow those conversations.

Live Kaiwa transcribes Japanese speech in real time and gives English translations, summaries, and suggested responses while the conversation is happening.

Some technical details:

* Browser microphone streams audio via WebRTC to a server with Kotoba Whisper
* Multi-pass transcription: quick first pass, then higher-accuracy re-transcription that replaces earlier text
* Each batch of transcript is sent to an LLM that generates translations, summary bullets, and response suggestions
* Everything is streamed back to the UI live
* Session data stays entirely in the browser — nothing stored server-side

https://livekaiwa.com

---

2. Cooperation Cube — a board game that rotates the playing field

Years ago I built a physical board game where players place sticks into a wooden cube to complete patterns on the faces.

The twist: the cube rotates 90° every round, so patterns you're building suddenly become part of someone else's board. It creates a mix of strategy, memory, and semi-cooperative play.

I recently built a digital version.

Game mechanics:

* 4 players drafting cards and placing colored sticks on cube faces
* The cube rotates every 4 actions
* Players must remember what exists on other faces
* Cooperation cards allow two players to coordinate for shared bonuses
* Game ends when someone runs out of short sticks

https://cooperationcube.com

---

Both projects mostly started as things I wanted to exist for myself. Curious what people think.
by gorgoiler | 2026-03-09 03:27:02+00:00
I have often heard that vote rigging is detectable on HN because the site software penalizes voting from accounts at the same IP address.

Rumor had it that there is also some kind of social-network metric detecting when socially adjacent accounts (or alts) are engaged in astroturfing, the practice where a small cabal tries to pass themselves off as a broader grassroots campaign.

Flip that around though and the same metrics might allow new accounts to be meaningfully vouched for by existing ones.
by varworld | 2026-03-09 03:28:33+00:00
Current working on two new products:

* https://sprout.vision/ - AI generated Go-To-Market Strategy for launching your next venture. I have a Tech background with limited GTM experience, so I experimented with AI to learn about different strategies and decided to turn it into a simple product that will generate a comprehensive plan (500+ pages) to help you launch your next venture. Try it out, would love to hear your feedback, use the HN50 promo code for 50% off your order.

* https://pubdb.com/ - Reviving a 10 year old project, it’s meant to make research publications more accessible to mere mortals with the help of AI. I have lots of ideas I want to try out here but haven’t gotten around to it yet. Currently focused on nailing down the basics with an OCR indexing pipeline and generating AI summaries.
by wizardforhire | 2026-03-09 03:29:02+00:00
Just sharing observations it may help, it may not…

what I’m seeing is new or sleeper accounts that have been idle for over a decade with low (<99) karma getting into comment circles. Over the last couple of weeks i’ll see several top comments on articles with back and forth between other similar accounts… it’s got to the point that I check a user habitually before I even bother reading… and I have never hidden so many comments before getting to something substantive in the comments…

Like many here, I don’t wish to limit new users, but this does seem from my armchair perspective to be a pattern to be on the look out for.
Show HN: OpenVerb – A deterministic action layer for AI agents
by cplhancel | 2026-03-09 03:29:34+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been working on a project called OpenVerb, which explores an architectural idea for AI systems: separating reasoning from execution.

Most AI agent frameworks today focus on improving reasoning loops, planning, and orchestration (LangChain, LangGraph, etc.). But once an agent decides to perform an action, execution usually becomes a direct tool call, script, or API invocation.

That approach works, but it also creates some issues:
• custom glue code for every integration
• inconsistent action schemas
• limited determinism in execution
• difficult auditing and policy enforcement

OpenVerb experiments with treating actions as a protocol layer, not just function calls.

Instead of arbitrary tool calls, systems define structured verbs that describe:
• the action being performed
• required inputs
• expected outputs
• execution policies
• audit information

Conceptually the architecture looks like this:

AI Model / Agent Framework
↓
Reasoning Layer
↓
OpenVerb
(Action Protocol)
↓
System Execution

The idea is that agent frameworks control how the AI thinks, while OpenVerb standardizes how actions are executed.

Some existing projects touch related areas:
• Model Context Protocol (MCP) – tool and data discovery for AI systems
• LangGraph – deterministic reasoning loops for agents
• PydanticAI – structured schemas for agent outputs

OpenVerb is trying to explore something slightly different: a universal grammar for deterministic execution that could work across domains (software systems, spatial systems, robotics, etc.).

Still early and experimental, but I’d love feedback from people thinking about agent architecture or execution reliability.

Curious if others have explored similar ideas or if there are related systems I should look at.
by ddingus | 2026-03-09 03:30:12+00:00
These are some of the best interactions we have here.

For sure a problem worth considering.

I can't think of anything easy...

Only even remotely sensible thought I have at present:

We add a check box to replies created by new accounts. Maybe created by all accounts?

The prompt reads something to the effect of: I am mentioned in the article. And then they get to say how.

-This is my project
-I am mentioned by name
-Etc...

Whatever it is they wrote, appears somehow, maybe as a required line or something.

Others can see that and either flag the account or vouch.

This at least some what distributes the required attention load.

That said, I don't like it. Have nothing better, so here it is!

Then others seeing that
by hirvi74 | 2026-03-09 03:30:46+00:00
I concur. I am finally starting to snap out of a multi-year long depression spell myself. Now, I did not alter my diet nor exercise more. I drink the same amount as I did prior.

However, blood work showed I was deficient in Vitamin-D. So, I added some herculean dosage of fish-oil and prescription Vitamin-D to my life. After about 3 months or so, I am really starting to feel much better and I am starting to notice more productivity gains. The weather is warming up in my area too. That always helps.
by devonkelley | 2026-03-09 03:31:00+00:00
25% regression rate on the best model is the number people should be sitting with here. That means 1 in 4 commits from your agent is breaking something that used to work. In any human team that would get you a serious conversation. We keep benchmarking agents like they're taking a test but the actual failure mode in production is slow accumulation of regressions nobody catches until the whole thing is on fire.
by C6JEsQeQa5fCjE | 2026-03-09 03:31:57+00:00
No ethnic cleansing will be required, and the dissolution of apartheid South Africa tells us how things will play out. Once the state is degraded enough, they will largely all emigrate on their own since the jewish supremacy that is currently in full swing will be no longer. They will not want to live in a state where others have equal rights. The few who don't mind it will remain and live on with the majority that currently enjoys little to no rights.
by cmontella | 2026-03-09 03:33:32+00:00
I think that's exactly what is meant, and it's a great example. The two places where literate programming have shined most are 1) documentation because it's a natural fit there and you can get away with having little programs rather than focusing on a book-length narrative as Knuth had originally purposed it for. But also 2) notebook programming environments especially Jupyter and Org mode. I think programs structured in these notebooks really are perfectly situated for LLM analysis and extension, which is where the opportunity lies today.
by jimbokun | 2026-03-09 03:34:04+00:00
This does seem exciting at first glance. Just write the narrative part of literate programming and an LLM generates the code, then keep the narrative and voila! Literate programming without the work of generating both.

However I see two major issues:

Narrative is meant to be consumed linearly. But code is consumed as a graph. We navigate from a symbol to its definition, or from definition to its uses, jumping from place to place in the code to understand it better. The narrative part of linear programming really only works for notebooks where the story being told is dominant and the code serves the story.

Second is that when I use an LLM to write code, the changes I describe usually require modifying several files at once. Where does this “narrative” go relative to the code.

And yes, these two issues are closely related.
by kvaranasi_ | 2026-03-09 03:34:26+00:00
Consider you have logs at ~100k/hour. And you are looking for a log that you have never seen before or one that is rare to find in this pool of 1000s of look-alike errors and warnings.

I built a tool that flags out anomalies. The rarest of the rarest logs by clustering them. This is how it works:

1. connects to existing Loki/New Relic/Datadog, etc - pulls logs from there every few minutes

2. Applies Drain3(https://github.com/logpai/Drain3) - A template miner to retract PIIs. Also, "user 1234 crashed" and "user 5678 crashed" are the same log pattern but different logs.

3. Applies IsolationForest(https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.en...) - to detect anomalies. It extracts features like when it happened, how many of the logs are errors/warn. What is the log volume and error rate. Then it splits them into trees(forests). The earlier the split, the farther the anomaly. And scores these anomalies.

4. Generate a snapshot of the log clusters formed. Red dots describe the most anomalous log patterns. Clicking on it gives a few samples from that cluster.

Use cases: You can answer questions like "Have we seen this log before?". We stream a compact snapshot of the clusters formed to an endpoint of your choice. Your developer can write a cheap LLM pass to check if it needs to wake a developer at 3 a.m for this? Or just store them in Slack.
by daxfohl | 2026-03-09 03:34:28+00:00
Actually it occurs to me that even if we did have AGI, or even if ASI, heck if ASI even moreso, we'd still need desk jobs to maintain the guardrails.

Intelligence is one thing, being able to figure out how get a task done (say). But understanding that no, I don't want you to exploit a backdoor or blackmail my teammate or launch a warhead even though that might expedite the task. Or why some task is more important than another. Or that solving the P=NP problem is more fulfilling than computing the trillionth digit of pi. That's perhaps a different thing entirely, completely disjoint with intelligence.

And by that definition, maybe we are in the neighborhood of AGI already. The things can already accomplish many challenging tasks more reliably than most humans. But the lack of wisdom, emotion, human alignment, or whatever we want to call it, lead it to accomplish the wrong tasks, or accomplish them in the wrong way, or overlook obvious implicit requirements, may cause people to view it as unintelligent, even if intelligence is not the issue.

And that may be an unsolvable problem because AI simply isn't a living being, much less human. It doesn't have goals or ambitions or want a better future for its children. But it doesn't mean we can never achieve AGI.

Oh, and to your first question, yes it's a huge number of jobs, maybe half of jobs in developed nations. And why not? If you can get AI to do the work of the scientist for a tenth of the price, just give it a general role description and budget and let it rip, with the expectation that it'll identify the most promising experiments, process the results, decide what could use further investigation, look for market trends, grow the operation accordingly, that's all you need from a human scientist too. Plausibly the same for executives and other roles. Of course maybe sometimes the role needs a human face for press conferences or whatever, and I don't know how AI would be able to take that, but especially for jobs that are entirely internal-facing, it seems like there's no particular need for a human.
by rahimnathwani | 2026-03-09 03:34:29+00:00
When GPT-4.5 came out, I used it to write a couple of novels for my son. I had some free API credits, and used a naive workflow:

while word_count < x:
write_next_chapter(outline, summary_so_far, previous_chapter_text)

It worked well enough that the novels were better than the median novel aimed at my son's age group, but I'm pretty sure we can do better.

There are web-based tools to help fiction authors to keep their stories straight: they use some data structures to store details about the world, the characters, the plot, the subplots etc., and how they change during each chapter.

I am trying to make an agent skill that has two parts:

- the SKILL.md that defines the goal (what criteria the novel must satisfy to be complete and good) and the general method

- some other md files that describe different roles (planner, author, editor, lore keeper, plot consistency checker etc.)

- a python file which the agent uses as the interface into the data structure (I want it to have a strong structure, and I don't like the idea of the agent just editing a bunch of json files directly)

For the first few iterations, I'm using cheap models (Gemini Flash ones) to generate the stories, and Opus 4.6 to provide feedback. Once I think the skill is described sufficiently well, I'll use a more powerful model for generation and read the resulting novel myself.
by soni96pl | 2026-03-09 03:34:58+00:00
This feeling of loneliness is hard to fill. It takes time. I'm a pretty lonely person for other reasons, I go out and have friends but I find that there is too much noise in my mind and the moments of genuine connection are rare. I'm now reading books on chan (zen) and learning to cultivate and enjoy a more peaceful mind. I've finished therapy and been a psychiatric patient for years. Nothing worked until it did. It's constant education. I'm not claiming to be cured or healthy, but I'm happy. I can imagine how hard it is for you becoming so sudden.

There's definitely a lot of paths you can explore. There is therapy, philosophy, experiences. You can go to therapy to find answers. Even to find a first step. You can read any sort of books to find myriad new ways in which you could perceive the world and yourself in it. And the experiences come along the way. If you are taking the effort that is good. To take up effort you need to see the future. Seems like you believe in it, but wish to see it clearer. Just know that at the beginning of the path nothing is clear, but time is the only constant. And that every feeling is there to tell you something but you only need to recognize it. If it's still there trying to break through, let it through. With every move you make progress. Be kind to yourself.

Good luck my friend.
by gruez | 2026-03-09 03:35:01+00:00
>how Amazon and other hyperscalers can promise you virtual machines whose memory cannot be touched even in the case the host is compromised (and, by extension, also if the feds arrive to v& your server).

Even if we take those promises at face value, it practically doesn't mean much because every server still needs to handle reboots, which is when they can inject their evil code.