MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Frotag | 2026-03-08 03:17:33+00:00
Funny timing, I was just thinking about this over dinner while scrolling the wiki list on [clarke / seiun / nebula] awards for the thousandth time.

> [Post-sci-fi is] free to allow the science fictional elements of their stories develop slowly, to emerge only in the latter half of the text, or to remain an isolated thread in a larger tapestry, all of which are anathema to genre-machine publishing, which generally wants its spaceships front-and-centre early on, to reassure readers they’re getting what they paid for.

This has always bugged me. There's often an interesting synopsis like (below), but the actual story begins with ~200 pages of backstories. And altogether the actual problem / developments / solution could probably be detailed in a tenth of the page count after subtracting all the character drama.

> "When a signal is discovered that seems to come from far beyond our solar system [...] What follows is an eye-opening journey out to the stars to the most awesome encounter in human history"

But this synopsis is actually from a well known 80s novel [0] so I don't think this slow-burn type of writing has become any more or less common with post scifi. To be clear, I don't have a problem with character-focused stories (I've read a ton!), I just wish they were advertised that way.

At this point I'm finding new / unusual stuff to read by looking for the least liked books whenever recommendations come up. Anyways rant over. On a more positive note, the author's post has put of new names / titles on my reading list. I think my next read will probably be something by Ishiguro:

> [The Buried Giant] follows an elderly Briton couple, Axl and Beatrice, living in a fictional post-Arthurian England in which no-one is able to retain long-term memories. The couple have dim memories of having had a son, and they decide to travel to a neighbouring village to seek him out.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(novel)
by teslabox | 2026-03-08 03:17:56+00:00
I was looking at used video cards to use with Davinci Resolve, then I noticed that Intel's latest GPU was a good value. Last week I bought an Intel Arc B580 card.

What's the problem with Apple's .mov files and DaVinci? I just ran into this last night.

Handbrake has too many options, so I'll definitely try out your utility.
by skissane | 2026-03-08 03:18:23+00:00
> Give each country it's own NS in the TLD and give them the authority to update it

There are 193 UN member states. Then add to that the Vatican, Taiwan, and dozens of overseas (or otherwise special) territories having ISO 3166 country codes. Can you trust all those governments to reliably play their part in such a system?

This is part of why the current setup works - it isn’t dependent on the cooperation of any government agency to function.
by anonlinc77 | 2026-03-08 03:22:41+00:00
This is not true. War materially changes the lives of the people before and after regardless of whether or not their language in customs are noticeably affected in the short term. Would you rather be a West German in 1938 or 1960? What about if you were Jewish?

I think the Jews in France in 1939 would have wished their government put up a better fight and had better generals who actually used the radio.

Also, the statement that France was on the German side is not true. The Germans conquered most of France in the first part of the war and installed a puppet regime that was loyal to them. This does not mean France was on the side of Germany, it means the Vichy puppet regime was.

You clearly know a decent amount about history, yet your analysis is so starkly wrong it appears you have an agenda.
by smt88 | 2026-03-08 03:23:19+00:00
You think it's insane to consider social well-being? You don't want politicians to consider it at all? That makes you an extreme outlier, not me.

Social well-being is quantifiable with things like:

- all-cause mortality and disability rates

- polls of government approval

- consumer optimism

- marriage rates (as distressed people are less likely to get married)

- affordability
by firen777 | 2026-03-08 03:23:38+00:00
> most countries in the world

Can you provide actual statistic to support this claim instead of just saying hip anti-America rhetoric to sound cool?

There are a lot of legitimate criticisms regarding the US infrastructure. I'd even agree with a "most WEIRD countries in the world beat America..." take. But to omit the numerous less privileged countries, or even the less privileged majority part of supposedly powerful countries in order to clown on the US does not sit right with me.

North Korea is absolutely not one of them and you would know if you read even a slight bit about the stories from the defectors, or corroborate their stories with stories from Chinese merchants shipping supplies to North Korea and their interactions with North Korean soldiers.
by vaishak2future | 2026-03-08 03:24:06+00:00
Author here. We’ve reached the point where frontier models (along with agent harnesses) can perform verbal reinforcement learning over multimodal data to reason over failures and correct policies expressed as code to fix them in a targeted manner. This allows for generalizing across tasks and embodiments without having to collect massive teleportation datasets or having to update model parameters or perform reward engineering. I believe this opens up the path for general models to be more powerful than “robotics-first” foundation models. AMA.
by diyseguy | 2026-03-08 03:24:07+00:00
I recently had to get surgery at a local hospital with a cross on top and named after a saint. As I waited for my appointment, I noticed the walls were covered with quotes from donors. The lady who was working the desk was an unpaid volunteer from a local church. Out of curiosity, I looked up the financials for the hospital and saw that the board of directors and various executives (around 12 people) were pulling in multi-million dollar salaries. Of the $3B they had raked in from donations that year, they allocated around $300M to a program to help the local people in some ambiguous way. No mention of what happened to the remaining donations. The bill for my treatment was $60K, thankfully insurance covered most of it. Rather seems like charity washing an otherwise ordinary corporation including exploiting gullible people for free labor...
by hammock | 2026-03-08 03:24:51+00:00
Not sure why you’re being downvoted. There is not a country on earth without a nuke that has not been either attacked or pays a lot (whether it’s taking IMF loans, or assenting to coordinated central banking policy etc)

I disagree with the other comments that you are necessarily advocating that everyone gets a nuke. Not every state has to be fully free and sovereign. The world has never worked that way (now of course the striving and tension will always be there, the world is dynamic and people forget that)
by cvoss | 2026-03-08 03:25:12+00:00
I used to live in just such a place. Went to the city center to apply for a library card, thinking "of course I can get a card here, I live in Foo City and this is the Foo City Public Library." I was asked for my street address, and she pulled out a binder of street names to check (yes it was analog, in the year 2016 A.D.). I was not within the city limits and was denied a card.
by lurkercodemnky | 2026-03-08 03:25:29+00:00
Thanks for correcting me -- the correlation is weaker than I would expect; though I will stand by my original commentary on the broader cultural issues.

It would be interesting to contrast how much of them are STEM vs other "real world degrees" that get a job (accounting, hotel management or whatever) vs the "liberal arts" degrees.

> The WEF report identified China, India, the United States, Russia, Iran, Indonesia, and Japan as the top seven STEM graduate-producing countries in the world.

I think the US (and probably Germany too) is an outlier here because of the number of immigrants who arrive to study STEM degrees.
by overgard | 2026-03-08 03:25:32+00:00
I won’t take credit for this insight, but as someone else pointed out, everyone oversimplifies other people’s jobs. To PMs engineers are just code monkeys that they won’t need soon. To engineers, PMs are the guys that manage Jira. Designers are the fussy people that make things look pretty. The reality is all these jobs have intricacies AI absolutely sucks at but those intricacies are lost in the larger discussion.

As a coder though, I’ll point out this is why the “AI solved coding” shit drives me crazy. You only believe that if you don’t know how to code or you have an agenda.
by colesantiago | 2026-03-08 03:25:42+00:00
Good.

However, RSS doesn't make money for journalists and reader view just bypasses paid content.

How does this support the works of writers?

In my view they will just turn off RSS (Which is being scraped for free by content violating AI scrapers for free) and go towards more hard paywalls.

I expect more of them to adopt the hard paywall format like The Information.
Show HN: I built a $5/mo Jobber alternative for solo carpenter
by Mike_Handyman | 2026-03-08 03:26:48+00:00
I'm a solo carpenter. I was paying $150+/month for field service software and hated it — too bloated, too expensive for a one-person operation.
So I built FieldFlow. My rules:

$5/month flat. No per-user fees. Ever.
Invoicing, scheduling, client management — the three things I actually need
Every piece of feedback gets acted on fast. No ticket queue, no roadmap committee — just me

Jobber starts at $39. Tradify is $47/user. I want to build something that solo contractors can actually afford, and I'm willing to keep the price at $5 forever if that's what it takes.
I use it myself daily. That's the only quality filter I trust.
Brutal feedback welcome.
https://fieldflow-nine.vercel.app/auth
Show HN: Yumo.to, a map of 19,652 onsens in Japan
by katagamistudio | 2026-03-08 03:27:00+00:00
I built Yumo.to because I wanted a map-first way to discover onsens in Japan without digging through booking sites.

It currently covers 19,652 onsens across all 47 prefectures, built by merging national datasets, prefecture and municipal open data, OSM, and water-chemistry sources into one searchable map.

You can filter by tattoo policy, prices, opening hours, access, and some water data, and each detail page links back to its sources. I’d especially appreciate feedback on search quality, missing data, and which filters or trip-planning features would make it more useful.
by apitman | 2026-03-08 03:27:13+00:00
This is very close to my fist build. I believe 3600+ in my case.

Edit: ok I looked it up because I was curious and newegg never deletes anything from order history. Athlon 64 3200+ and 6600GT. Windows XP Home with Service Pack 2. I got a great deal on a case+enermax power supply at Fry's Electronics.
by Frotag | 2026-03-08 03:29:34+00:00
There's a subreddit called /r/hfy for more positive scifi. It tends to be indie stuff and I think it goes a little too far in the other direction but at least some of the top-voted ones are interesting.

Off the top of my head...

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/32973/synchronizing-minds-...

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/67180/here-be-dragons-book...
by crabmusket | 2026-03-08 03:30:29+00:00
> (The use of such cottagecore terminology for a process that requires being an ongoing client of a hundred-gigabuck, planet-burning megacorporation rubs me in many wrong ways.)

I hadn't noticed this - great point. To be fair the "home cooked meal" metaphor comes from 2020, predating genAI coding[1]. But even then, CPUs themselves are so normalised that we just kind of... forget how vertiginously complex the entire supply chain is.

[1] https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
by satvikpendem | 2026-03-08 03:30:33+00:00
I'm talking about the concept of transformation, not the specific legal language, which, again, I said is not worth discussing, because the legal concept of intellectual property is not useful.

No, not just now, since forever. I suppose Stallman being right all along is about this concept. And just to be clear, I'm not a supporter of current closed source AI companies, like I said I want to see open models succeed.

As I asked above, it really does look like no one can explain why LLM training is bad, besides saying it's bad. Therefore I will continue to reject IP as a concept.
by koito17 | 2026-03-08 03:30:42+00:00
Correct. Mercari is known as an outlier among Japanese companies in that there are teams working mostly in English. Amongst non-Japanese devs, its known as one of the "easiest" companies to get into since there is no Japanese language requirement. Rakuten (Japanese equivalent of Amazon) is also like this, but again, a big tech outlier.

Even among both of these companies, note that it's just engineers and the PMs of those teams that get to use English. Many customer-facing roles will still require fluent Japanese (e.g. sales, customer support, etc.).

Mercari is as representative of the average Japanese company as Amazon is to the average American company. That is to say, they are not representative at all of how most Japanese companies operate.
by throwup238 | 2026-03-08 03:31:32+00:00
You're confusing the concept of concentrated load and the uniform load for a floor or room. See page 7 of the HUD guide [1], but local building codes may be stricter. Materials like floor boards must be able to support 250-300 lbs in the center between supports, but that's very different from a whole floor supporting 250 psf.

If you manage to squeeze 400 people weighing an average 150 lbs each into the average 400 sq ft apartment room, it will probably suffer structural damage unless it's a on a solid ground floor. That's one of the factors that goes into calculating the room and building "occupancy limit" signs you see in public places.

[1] https://www.huduser.gov/publications/pdf/res2000_2.pdf
by mmastrac | 2026-03-08 03:32:18+00:00
Has anyone felt like the news out of this war has been more tightly controlled than other recent conflicts by multiple orders of magnitude? Russia/Ukraine news is everywhere, Israel/Lebanon, etc, but this one is zipped up tightly.

The platforms/news orgs must all be getting pretty serious orders on reporting, because even Gulf Wars I and II had more getting out.
by naomi_kynes | 2026-03-08 03:32:25+00:00
The "chief scientist + junior engineers in tmux sessions" framing is interesting as a communication architecture problem.

Once you have more than a handful of concurrent experiments, the question becomes: how does the chief scientist reliably get status from the juniors without polling tmux output constantly? And when a junior finds something surprising — a result that changes the research direction — how does that signal propagate back quickly enough to stop wasted compute on now-irrelevant branches?

The tmux channel works well for low concurrency. At higher concurrency it starts to look like the same problem as multi-agent coordination in production systems: you need something closer to pub/sub than session polling.

Curious how you're thinking about the feedback loop design as you scale the number of concurrent junior agents.
by satvikpendem | 2026-03-08 03:32:36+00:00
It is not worth taking seriously people who have very niche complaints that don't even use your software, believe me. It's the same as some people here who complain that they disable JS and some web app doesn't work, like yeah, no shit. Catering to these people will just frustrate you and make you more likely to give up creating the product.
by spopejoy | 2026-03-08 03:32:39+00:00
Please don't throw around random "a study that showed" about cancer treatments and chemotherapy. If you really think it needs to be shared, share the study and while you're at it, check in with a good oncologist or knowledgeable friend too. In my ~10 years of enduring chemo and other treatments, the amount of garbage you have to wade through from "well meaning" anecdata like "wheat grass" or "smoke huge bongloads" or "don't eat sugar" makes an already horrible process worse.

And yes I checked this with my onc at MSK. Dietary glucose in particular -- if you cut out enough sugar to starve cancer cells you would be doing lots of damage elsewhere as well.
Plenty of AI hype, but not much useful software?
by YounesDz | 2026-03-08 03:33:40+00:00
I’ve followed BetaList and similar directories for years, and I regularly read side-project posts here on Hacker News.

With the explosion of AI coding assistants, I expected a noticeable increase in useful small SaaS tools and practical software. But honestly, I’m not sure I see it.

HN users have always built impressive things. One example I remember: a developer who quickly built a simple website to help his family find COVID vaccine appointments, it cost about $50 to build. Stories like that show how many practical builders are here.

Yet even with AI making coding easier, the quantity (and quality) of useful tools doesn’t seem to have increased dramatically.

It reminds me of this line from Charles Bukowski:

"but as God said,
crossing his legs,
I see where I have made plenty of poets
but not so very much
poetry."

Sometimes it feels like a modern version might read:

"as VC-backed tech said,
sitting on their laurels,
I see we created a lot of AI hype
and vibe-coding platforms
but not so much
useful software."

What do you think the real bottleneck is now? Ideas, distribution, taste, persistence; or something else?
by fragmede | 2026-03-08 03:33:58+00:00
Why read someone else's books? LLMs are the ultimate choose your own adventure story generators. Give it a scenario and some characters and some conflict and generate your own story. Sit down with ChatGPT and just have a good story time for yourself for a couple of hours going however you want to go. Want to focus on action and adventure? Or do you want interpersonal drama? Or both? You decide!
by avaer | 2026-03-08 03:34:20+00:00
I don't know why people are talking so theoretically. This was months ago.

My friends have startups, I know a lot of engineers. The startups have been laying off people for months, and many of my engineer friends don't have jobs anymore.

Teams are already ruined. I just don't think the companies are. In many cases this seems like rational reallocation of capital to AI, and in a VC funded ecosystem you're failing at your job if you're not following the math.

I think you must have a very cushy job if you're still armchair speculating about this.
by saghm | 2026-03-08 03:34:49+00:00
> if err != nil is no more or less verbose than if x > y. You may have a point that Go could do branching better in general, but that isn't about errors specifically.

In practice though, there's not nearly as many cases where someone needs to repeat `if x > y { return x }` a bunch of times in the same function. Whether the issue is "about errors" specifically doesn't really change the relatively common view that it's an annoying pattern. It's not surprising that some people might be more interested in fixing the practical annoyance that they deal with every day even if it's not a solution to the general problem that no one has made progress on for over a decade.
by tired-turtle | 2026-03-08 03:35:26+00:00
Would the world be safer (or more endangered) if Iran had a nuclear weapon? Not sure if North Korea is a good example, but is that not a detente? Bad for the NK people, but not a geopolitical crisis.

I cannot wrap my head around the current crisis except that it serves as a (deniable) mechanism for hindering China’s ability to stockpile oil, thereby stalling an invasion of Taiwan. Total guess.

edit: As a hypothetical. I’m not suggesting Iran has nuclear weapons.
by alephnerd | 2026-03-08 03:36:14+00:00
> Has anyone felt like the news out of this war has been more tightly controlled than other recent conflicts...

Internet access in Iran has been spotty after the massacres in January.

Also, even Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza-Lebanon news and "OSINT" is tightly controlled - the legal, logistical, and technical tools needed to limit access and control of information are well in the reach of any nation now, and even most police departments across much of the world.
by vessenes | 2026-03-08 03:37:53+00:00
On the skill side, personalities could be fun:

"You are Yann Lecun's last PhD candidate, and he hates you and you hate JEPA. You are determined to prove that a non-world model can reach AGI. In order to get your PhD you have to be creative and come up with new ideas. Remember without it, you're stuck."
by GauntletWizard | 2026-03-08 03:39:02+00:00
Who cares if it works in places that won't play nice? They're digging their own grave if they don't publish, and only hurting themselves. The nice thing about massively distributed systems is that they can be as reliable as the people who depend on them need them to be, with the relevant authorities having the option to be as real or as clowny as they want to be.

That said, I would never respect the DNS TTL of such a scheme, for my own use cases. I'd query each of them once an hour, latch the last response forever, and delay propagation of a new response for a full week that it stayed stable before serving the new record.
by btown | 2026-03-08 03:39:05+00:00
I don't know what sales numbers look like, but from my perspective as a casual reader who's been trying to keep up with Hugo Award nominees of recent years... science fiction may not be trendy on BookTok, but it's far from dead.

Sure, fantasy has "corrupted" the Hugos, but there's plenty of hard science fiction, and science fiction that grapples with societal questions at large. Arkady Martine's Memory Called Empire and Desolation Called Peace, both Hugo winners, are incredibly thoughtful depictions of societies on the verge of disruption from new technology. Ryka Aoki's Light From Uncommon Stars, a 2022 Hugo nominee, while somewhat of a sci-fi-fantasy genre crossover, is both harrowing and exhilarating in its discussion of gender through a speculative lens (content warnings apply).

If you're looking for whether innovative science fiction is being adapted into popular media - the Three Body Problem (2015 Hugo winner) and the Murderbot series (won the Hugo most recently in 2021) are both being adapted. Andy Weir's post-Martian works continue to be hyped, if not quite adapted yet. The fanbase for Tamsyn Muir's Ninth series is rabid in the best possible way - and while ostensibly centered on necromancy, it's remarkably high in sci-fi hardness.

And outside of traditional publishing - democratized writing challenges like https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/, genre-crossing serial sci-fi like the works of Wildbow, and fanfiction in general (I continue to follow and adore the To The Stars, a Madoka fanfic which juxtaposes magic with a spacefaring future humanity, with masterful worldbuilding) continue to thrive.

Traditional publishing houses may indeed be in crisis, but contrary to the original article's assertion, there is no shortage of ideas.