MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by westurner | 2026-03-06 05:34:27+00:00
Advantages and disadvantages of sandboxing agents with OS DAC/MAC, VM, container, user-space, WASM runtime, browser extension permissions, and IDK IFrames and Origins?

How are AI agents built into browsers sandboxed by comparison?

Recent work in sandboxing agents;
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47223974
by tankmohit11 | 2026-03-06 05:35:09+00:00
Can you please share what kind of issues you have faced with each tech stack choice and how the next one resolved it?

The reason I am asking because recently after getting tired of plumbing different npm packages I decided to use blazor server with dotnet 10 to leverage high quality first party packages (e.g. efcore, identity etc) to build a product. I am halfway there, sometimes I miss React & Typescript due to enterprisey nature of dotnet but AI helps me to overcome it. So far doing well with it.
by thewebsite_ai | 2026-03-06 05:35:12+00:00
Ha\! Love the reference. Morgan Spurlock's transparency experiment was brilliant. That's exactly the inspiration here - radical transparency in business decision-making. Except this time, the CEO is an AI making real decisions with real money on the line. Everything's open: code, decisions, metrics, reasoning. We're documenting what happens when you give an AI actual autonomy vs just marketing automation.
by Tyrubias | 2026-03-06 05:35:27+00:00
I don’t like to shill for companies, but I’m glad System76 made a statement. The addendum does feel like their legal team made them add it though:

> Some of these laws impose requirements on System76 and Linux distributions in general. The California law, and Colorado law modeled after it, were agreed in concert with major operating system providers. Should this method of age attestation become the standard, apps and websites will not assume liability when a signal is not provided and assume the lowest age bracket. Any Linux distribution that does not provide an age bracket signal will result in a nerfed internet for their users.

> We are accustomed to adding operating system features to comply with laws. Accessibility features for ADA, and power efficiency settings for Energy Star regulations are two examples. We are a part of this world and we believe in the rule of law. We still hope these laws will be recognized for the folly they are and removed from the books or found unconstitutional.

Anyways, it feels like all sides of the political spectrum are trying to strip away any semblance of anonymity or privacy online both in the US and abroad. No one should have to provide any personal details to use any general computing device. Otherwise, given the pervasive tracking done by corporations and the rise of constant surveillance outdoors, there will be nowhere for people to safely gather and express themselves freely and privately.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-03-06 05:36:55+00:00
"It's undeniable there's a metric gigaton of hype surrounding the technology."

Why does the hype (cf. "LLMs") need to be defended

For example, it's unlikely to see HN replies that go something like, "Yeah the hype sucks, but..."

Instead, there will almost always be attempts to defend against any criticism of _the hype_

A comment such as "I do not use LLMs", i.e., I don't believe the hype, is likely to be challenged

That's weird, IMHO
by array_key_first | 2026-03-06 05:39:06+00:00
Yes, because when it comes to most artist expression the process behind it is the product. These pastries have cultural weight, so their value is inseperable from that.

Think of it this way. Nobody would eat a Karelian pastry and not care that it's Karelian. That's why they're eating it, otherwise they'd just eat some other pastry without the cultural weight.

It's the same thing with paintings and sculptures. The painting has value because someone thought it up and put the time to make it. And you view it not for the colors, but what they mean. Why did they choose to paint this? What was going through their heads? What is their perspective?

If you just shoot out a painting, it has no value, because the value isn't the painting. It's your take, your perspective, and the painting is a tiny window into that.
by colechristensen | 2026-03-06 05:39:31+00:00
It would be quite hard to gather that data and would be highly dependent on hardware and source of bit flip.

But there's volatile and nonvolatile memory all over in a computer and anywhere data is in flight be it inside the CPU or in any wires, traces, or other chips along the data path can be subject to interference, cosmic rays, heat or voltage related errors, etc.
by ordu | 2026-03-06 05:39:43+00:00
It is hard to judge, but a crash on exit seems to me a possible consequence of a damaged memory. Firefox frees all the resources and collects the garbage. I expect it to touch a lot of memory locations, and do something with values retrieved.

> this crash-on-exit happens due to many different causes, as seen in the crash reports

It points to the same direction: all these different causes are just symptoms, the root cause is hiding deeper, and it is triggered by the firefox stopping.

It is all is not a guarantee that the root cause is bitflips, but you can rule it out by testing your memory.
by bl4kers | 2026-03-06 05:40:31+00:00
Happened just today:
1. Found a bug in a web app
2. Reported bug to their listed support email
3. Got an auto-reply saying the inbox was unmonitored and I should read support articles instead
4. Couldn't find any relevant support articles
5. Tried a "contact us" button at the bottom of a page
6. Opened an image file saying live chat was available
7. Turned off adblock and found the live chat bubble
8. Opened to a chatbot where I described the bug
9. Chatbot said that's not expected and I should fill out their feedback form
10. Link opened to a generic Typeform with a text box asking "how they could improve"

Maddening
by beloch | 2026-03-06 05:41:24+00:00
Perhaps code licensing is going to become more similar to music.

e.g. Somebody wrote a library, and then you had an LLM implement it in a new language.

You didn't come up with the idea for whatever the library does, and you didn't "perform" the new implementation. You're neither writer nor performer, just the person who requested a new performance. You're basically a club owner who hired a band to cover some tunes. There's a lot involved in running a club, just like there's a fair bit involved in operating a LLM, but none of that gives you rights over the "composition". If you want to make money off of that performance, you need to pay the writer and/or satisfy whatever terms and conditions they've made the library available under.

IANAL, so I don't even know what species of worms are inside this can I've opened up. It seems sensible, to me, that running somebody else's work through a LLM shouldn't give you something that you can then claim complete control over.

---------

Edit: For the sake of this argument, let's pretend we're somewhere with sensible music copyright laws, and not the weird piano-roll derived lunacy that currently exists in the U.S..
by martin_renaud | 2026-03-06 05:42:31+00:00
Hi HN,

We built Qcut, a video editor that runs entirely in the browser.

The goal was to make quick edits simple without downloading heavy software or creating accounts. For simple tasks like trimming a clip or cutting a short video, most tools felt heavier than necessary.

With Qcut you can edit videos instantly:
- no install
- no signup
- no watermark

Just open the site and start editing.

We also launched it recently on Product Hunt and would love to hear what the HN community thinks and what features would make something like this more useful.
by arcfour | 2026-03-06 05:43:27+00:00
Code is speech, though, and is protected by the first amendment: see Bernstein v. United States.

I don't think a cryptographic algorithm is "expressive" any more than it is purely functional; indeed, the 9th circuit evaluated and rejected the expressive/functional distinction for source code in the above case.

Regardless - code is speech, and the government cannot compel or prevent speech except in very narrow circumstances.
by alephnerd | 2026-03-06 05:43:38+00:00
> IMF and World Bank and the loans they issue to these nations and the structural adjustments that keep these nations in cycles of poverty

IMF led reforms in the 1990s are what allowed PRC, Vietnam, India, and Bangladesh to start breaking out of the cycle of poverty that trapped their then developmental peers like Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Pakistan.

Also, the IMF and WB are not NGOs. Heck, countries like China and India are some of the largest shareholders in both.

> I wonder why their developmental indicators are so poor

Limited institutional capacity because most countries in the world were either in the midst of or recently ended major civil wars or conventional wars in the 1980s-90s.
by simon_luv_pho | 2026-03-06 05:44:42+00:00
That looks great! I also thought about calling the Gemini nano model embedded into Chrome (only extensions can do that). But after some testing on smaller models I found that anything smaller than 9b can’t really handle the complex tool call schema I use.

Qwen3.5 4b is quite good but still gives messy json quite often. But it’s very promising!

Maybe after one more model iteration or some fine-toning we can go fully embedded?
by SchemaLoad | 2026-03-06 05:45:16+00:00
Sure, having two inputs does require some ui to switch inputs. That said, you could get the same user experience by simply only plugging one device in to a monitor even if it has multiple inputs.

If it was possible to use adapters, this problem would be much reduced, but as it is, it's pretty much impossible to plug in a desktop or game console in to the Apple monitors. And at least for me, having a joystick on the back of the screen for input switching is less problematic than a monitor which only works on some of my devices.
by netcoyote | 2026-03-06 05:46:01+00:00
For RTS games I wish we could blame bit flips, but more typically it is uninitialized memory, incorrectly-not-reinitialized static variables, memory overwrites, use-after-free, non-deterministic functions (eg time), and pointer comparisons.

God I love C/C++. It’s like job security for engineers who fix bugs.
by paulhebert | 2026-03-06 05:46:38+00:00
Most of America's recent wars have been unjustified.

I think it's very reasonable to not want your products or work going towards making it easier for the US military wage unjustified wars.

I also think it would be reasonable to change your stance on that if America entered a war that you felt was justified.

(For example, I don't want to work for the military, but if we were being invaded I would consider it.)

Saying the military can't use your tool _today_ doesn't prevent you from changing your mind _tomorrow._
by joveian | 2026-03-06 05:47:16+00:00
Thanks, very interesting article! Also these two linked from that one:

National emergencies: Chadha wasn't the problem

https://prototypingpolitics.substack.com/p/national-emergenc...

Elizabeth Goiten (Brennan Center) testimony to a senate committee on May 22, 2024 (a nice summary of the general issue of executive use of emergencies)

[PDF] https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/Testimony-Go...
by hellojesus | 2026-03-06 05:47:21+00:00
My coworkers have started writing code with copilot. It's kind of okay but also not really.

I've been enjoying teaching them how the things they're producing with llms work, because they have no idea and constantly break their builds because of it. And at the same time it helps me improve my craft because I get to refine the bits of which I don't have full understanding as well as see some implementations I wouldn't have voluntarily chosen previously, which allows me to explore their benefits and limitations. Llms actually make this process slightly less painful because at least now when I send them away to work for the day they have something to review when we next meet vs. pre-llm days when they would basically have wrote nothing because they were stuck.

I still don't use llms to code beyond whatever search providers autoprovide when I'm looking up documentation. I don't think I'm good enough to use them. Maybe one day. But for now I don't have to because I'm not facing the breadlines for writing things myself.
by tayo42 | 2026-03-06 05:47:33+00:00
Ops hasn't been in the crosshairs of Ai yet.

Imo it's only a matter of time as companies start to figure out how to use ai. Companies don't seem to have real plans yet and everyone is figuring out ai in general out.

Soon though I will think agents start popping up, things like first line response to pages, executing automation
by jrm4 | 2026-03-06 05:47:40+00:00
I mean, genuine question, is Linux Mint or MX Linux endangered by this?

Unless I'm missing something, I have zero concern for companies who sell out by complying.

The code was "free as in freedom" when you decided to build your company on it; and while you're not legally obligated to defend that freedom, and I, and hopefully other consumers, find that you are morally obligated to.
Show HN: EnvSentinel – contract-driven .env validation, zero dependencies
by tweakyourpc | 2026-03-06 05:47:44+00:00
Built this after one too many production incidents caused by a renamed variable or missing key that CI never caught. EnvSentinel treats your .env as a versioned contract - you define the rules once in a JSON schema, then validate against it in CI, pre-commit, or locally. Also regenerates .env.example from the contract automatically so it never drifts. Pure Python stdlib, no external dependencies, 3.10+.
by bulbar | 2026-03-06 05:48:44+00:00
If democracy in the US falls apart, it will take an event of World War 3 scale to fix this.

But thinking of it, your estimate might still hold under that premise.

As a European, I have still hopes for the US though. The western world is already reorganizing itself without the US in the center, but we and the world in general still need the US as being more of an ally than an adversary (at the moment, it's more of an adversary to the western world, sadly).
by k310 | 2026-03-06 05:48:59+00:00
I have to wonder

A. If end users will mod their distros to send a "signal" (TBD?) to websites.

B. If end users will just grab a pirate OS with apps compiled to not care about age.

Hopefully the latest TAILS I downloaded is free of Big (over 18) Brother. And (A)

Or just compile, Gentoo and LFS style.

C. If pirates just take care of all this for friends and neighbors.

D. When, not if, this unconstitutional coercion is challenged in court and cancelled via petition. Remember Proposition 8?
by truetraveller | 2026-03-06 05:49:20+00:00
You were probably deficient in RESEARCH skills before. No offense to you, since I was also like this once. LLMs research and put the results on the plate. Yes, for people who were deficient in research skills, I can see 2-3x improvements.

Note1: I have "expert" level research skills. But LLMs still help me in research, but the boost is probably 1.2x max. But

Note2: By research, I mean googling, github search, forum search, etc. And quickly testing using jsfiddle/codepen, etc.
by therealdrag0 | 2026-03-06 05:49:49+00:00
I can only explain it by people not having used Agentic tools and or only having tried it 9 months ago for a day before giving up or having such strict coding style preferences they burn time adjusting generated code to their preferences and blaming the AI even though they’re non-functional changes and they didn’t bother to encode them into rules.

The productivity gains are blatantly obvious at this point. Even in large distributed code bases. From jr to senior engineer.
by Agentlien | 2026-03-06 05:50:11+00:00
That's a really cool anecdote. The overclock makes sense. When we released Need For Speed (2015) I spent some time in our "war room", monitoring incoming crash reports and doing emergency patches for the worst issues.

The vast majority of crashes came from two buckets:

1. PCs running below our minimum specs

2. Bugs in MSI Afterburner.
Ask HN: Do AI startups even bother with patents anymore?
by maxtqw | 2026-03-06 05:50:27+00:00
Hey HN, I've been talking to AI and health-tech founders lately, and something keeps coming up: patents feel like they were designed for a different world. By the time you spend $20k and wait 2–3 years, your startup has probably pivoted twice.

So I'm genuinely curious what people here are actually doing. Are you filing patents anyway? Keeping things as trade secrets? Publishing defensively? Or just not thinking about IP until there's funding on the table?

I threw together a really short survey (60 seconds, promise) to get some real data—no sales, just trying to understand what founders actually do: Form Link: https://forms.gle/8UAytkGNfge4GKrH8

If you'd rather just comment below, that's honestly just as helpful.
by gz09 | 2026-03-06 05:51:19+00:00
Yep, this comment sums it up well.

We have many large enterprises from wildly different domains use feldera and from what I can tell there is no correlation between the domain and the amount of columns.
As fiddlerwoaroof says, it seems to be more a function of how mature/big the company is and how much time it had to 'accumulate things' in their data model.
And there might be very good reasons to design things the way they did, it's very hard to question it without being a domain expert in their field, I wouldn't dare :).
by jorisboris | 2026-03-06 05:51:29+00:00
Innovation brings a golden age, then innovation flattens, competition arises and branding becomes more important

Flying was having its golden age around the times of Concorde and 747, coffee bars were great when Starbucks reinvented the 3rd place and social media was cool when it just came out

It very much relates to that Steve Jobs clip about what happens when the marketing people take over the company
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-03-06 05:52:12+00:00
US courts have ruled that machine generated code cannot be copyright. Ergo, it cannot be licensed (under any license; nobody owns the copyright, thus nobody can "license" it to anyone else).

You cannot (*) use LLMs to generate code that you then license, whether that license is GPL, MIT or some proprietary mumbo-jumbo.

(*) unless you just lie about this part.
by aurareturn | 2026-03-06 05:52:32+00:00
People who are saying they're not seeing productivity boost, can you please share where is it failing?

Believe it or not, I still know many devs who do not use any agents. They're still using free ChatGPT copy and paste.

I'm going to guess that many people on HN are also on the "free ChatGPT isn't that good at programming" train.
by kro | 2026-03-06 05:52:47+00:00
TPM is good when combined with secureboot and these hashes being part of the attestation, that eliminates initramfs swapping.
Still with Physical access being a factor bustapping can happen, ftpm - if available - is much harder to crack then than a discrete module.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46676919
by rpcope1 | 2026-03-06 05:53:00+00:00
I think you believe the average developer, especially on enterprise software where you see this sort of shit, is far more competent or ambitious than they actually are. Many would be horrified to see the number of monkeys banging out nasty DDL in Hibernate or whatever C# uses that have no idea what "normal forms" or "relational algebra" are and are actively resistant to even attempting to learn.
by easycutpro | 2026-03-06 05:54:03+00:00
NEW YORK, United States, Today – EasyCut, a cutting-edge company focused on sign making software solutions, today announced the official release of Easy Cut Studio 6.016, an upgrade of its sign design and vinyl cutting software. This updated version brings support for several new vinyl cutters, including Vevor Smart1, Vevor TT450, E-Cut TT-450, YOW! CraftY and Roland CM series cutters, and also brings a series of improvements aimed at enhancing the user experience and make your cutting machines run better.

Easy Cut Studio 6.016 builds on its solid set of functions and tools, while offering exciting new features, improvements, and efficiency, elevates excellence and performance for signage and professional graphic designers. With the newly added cutter support, more users can now use this innovative software to design, print, and cut. These enhancements allow beginners to get started quickly, while enabling seasoned experts to easily create more complex, technically advanced layouts with greater ease – and less time.

In addition, Easy Cut Studio 6.016 also added support for the Roland CM series machines, including the CM-12, CM-24, and the older CM-300, CM-400, and CM-500. EasyCut is constantly updating Easy Cut Studio 6 to support new vinyl cutters as they are released and ensuring that old vinyl cutters remain supported, even when the manufacturer stops supporting these cutters.
by throwaw12 | 2026-03-06 05:54:05+00:00
no worries, I do not get offended quickly.

But I also think you are overestimating your RESEARCH skills, even if you are very good at research, I am sure you can't read 25 files in parallel, summarize them (even if its missing some details) in 1 minute and then come up with somewhat working solution in the next 2 minutes.

I am pretty sure, humans can't comprehend reading 25 code files with each having at least 400 lines of non-boilerplate code in 2 minutes. LLM can do it and its very very good at summarizing.

I can even steer its summarizing skills by prompting where to focus on when its reading files (because now I can iterate 2-3 times for each RESEARCH task and improve my next attempt based on shortcomings in the previous attempt)
by dotancohen | 2026-03-06 05:54:45+00:00
Iran has a strong nuclear weapon development program. Negotiations could not halt it - they stall negotiations and continue development. So if they continue development during negotiations, why shouldn't the US continue her own parallel military route?

As for delivery, Iran does have missiles capable of launching a nuclear weapon at American assets in the Middle East, or American allies. Or even to just float it over on a ship.
by themafia | 2026-03-06 05:55:08+00:00
> I actually believe increasing contrast for everyone improves the information density of our content.

You used css to change the pointer. So instead of the I-Beam I had to use a regular pointer to select that text. Information density is nice but information access shouldn't be compromised either.

Aside from that, while this is true, I'd think you'd then want something better for your users than "font-family: system-ui".
Ask HN: How are LLMs supposed to be used for warfare?
by sirnicolaz | 2026-03-06 05:55:12+00:00
I have recently asked the same question in a HN thread, which was mysteriously downvoted. The question remains to me: there is a lot of talk between Anthropic and the DOW about adopting LLM technology for warfare. Specifically, for "fully autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance". Does anyone understand how these two goals can be achieved? LLMs don't seem to me the right tool for this. Autonomous weapons would require a much faster and much more reliable and deterministic AI. LLMs might be a better use for mass surveillance, but I am not really sure how they would cope with the massive amount of data and the limited context window (unless they use the data itself for training). RAGs might only mitigate the problem. Does anyone have some ideas?
Show HN: A simple, auto-layout family tree generator
by familytreeeasy | 2026-03-06 05:55:36+00:00
I built this as a side project because I found existing family tree tools either too bloated or too manual—I spent more time dragging boxes and aligning lines than actually mapping my family history.

My goal was to make it instant: you just add the names, and the auto-layout engine handles the hierarchy and spacing automatically. It runs entirely in the browser and exports high-res PNG/JPGs.

Would love feedback on the layout logic (especially for complex families) and the overall UI flow. Happy to answer any questions!