MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dminik | 2026-03-14 00:21:36+00:00
I'm not sure that's true. You may not see it that way, but you're still participating in a capitalist society. Not that there's necessarily something wrong with that, but you have to acknowledge that and act accordingly.

Most people wouldn't work for free. Yet companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google exploit OSS maintainers like that. They're winning and we're losing. And if they have their way, millions of programmers will lose their livelihood.
by kolinko | 2026-03-14 00:21:38+00:00
All the airlines, all the trains, and other government-supported entities may have a strategic interest to use a local version of Starlink. But everyone else? I don't think anyone will buy a service that will be 10x more expensive, 10x slower and 10x more energy hungry than Starlink -- this first mover advantage may be hard to beat.
Show HN: I wrote my first neural network
by allenng | 2026-03-14 00:21:52+00:00
I have been interested in neural nets since the 90's. I've done quite a bit of reading, but never gotten around to writing code. I used Gemini in place of Wikipedia to fill in the gaps of my knowledge. The coolest part of this was learning about dual numbers. You can see in early commits that I did not yet know about auto-diff; I was thinking I'd have to integrate a CAS library or something. Now, I'm off to play with TensorFlow.
Show HN: Pixel Press – Fast Image Converter for Windows (WebP / AVIF)
by ghostlyInc | 2026-03-14 00:22:24+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a small Windows tool called Pixel Press for fast image conversion.

It focuses on modern formats like WebP and AVIF and supports batch conversion with simple drag & drop. The goal was to make image optimization for websites quick and simple.

Main features:
- Batch image conversion
- WebP and AVIF support
- Drag & drop workflow
- Runs locally (no cloud)

Demo videos:
https://www.youtube.com/@Info-GhostlyInc

Download:
https://ghostlyinc.com/en-us/tools/pixel-press/

Happy to hear feedback.
by xnyan | 2026-03-14 00:22:58+00:00
> I doubt they exist.

I think you're misunderstanding, of course they do not exist. People don't get $300 windows laptops for their performance, build quality, or anything similar. Nor do they care about screen brightness, and 256GB is fine for the use case which is running word or some other simple application for as little $$ as possible.
by text0404 | 2026-03-14 00:23:01+00:00
Those numbers still scale whether you're talking about total or discretionary spending, which means science/grants are an even smaller fraction of the 3%.

Why start cutting from the smallest piece of the pie? My point is that defense spending is already outsized and increasing while we cut science spending. Instead of increasing it, why not cut it and provide 100x the savings before cutting science spending? Doesn't seem like such a hard choice.
by calmbonsai | 2026-03-14 00:23:43+00:00
Look, I don't know what else to tell 'ya, but in 2026 if you're getting "mysterious" charges from AWS after "deleting everything", you're simply not competent.

With a plethora of free billing tips from places like Duckbill https://www.duckbillhq.com/, to full-on repos like AWS-Nuke, https://github.com/ekristen/aws-nuke , down to AWS's own account monitoring and management services like Control Tower https://aws.amazon.com/controltower/, and Config https://aws.amazon.com/config/ , and full IAC ecosystems like Terraform https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform or OpenTofu https://opentofu.org/ , you are not leveraging all the cost-management capabilities of the modern cloud.
by altairprime | 2026-03-14 00:24:03+00:00
For example: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/re-enable-rig... is a Firefox extension that 'rewrites' webpages to remove 'disable right click' code, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-autop... 'rewrites' webpages to disable HTML5 video autoplay, etc. So you could, perhaps, rewrite the <source src=""> attribute within <video> elements to, if it doesn't already end with #t=x (x is in seconds), to end with #t=30. (Perhaps only the first one? This isn't something I desire, so my investment is limited.)

See also: https://www.w3.org/TR/media-frags/
by schiffern | 2026-03-14 00:24:23+00:00
In urban areas you probably can just have the whole-house surge protector and skip the rest, since that protects all costly electronics not just a single device. With just a surge strip on the PC I'd say you're a tad under-protected, yeah.

Incidentally whole-house surge protection is now required by code in new houses. Existing buildings aren't required to upgrade, but by my reasoning what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
by janalsncm | 2026-03-14 00:24:36+00:00
The problem with this argument is you can’t know or control what will happen in the future with something you built. This is the same moral dilemma the scientists faced after developing nuclear bombs.

And the future is not deterministic (or if it is, it is highly chaotic) so the existence of a thing does not have a simple relationship with what will happen in the future. Scientists who developed convolutional neural nets could not know how much good or evil was caused by image recognition technologies. The same technologies that are used to detect tumors in images can be used to target people for assassination.

There are exceptions, but my opinion is the supply chain of evil is paved with mundane inventions.
by TurdF3rguson | 2026-03-14 00:24:37+00:00
I'm not following this at all. It seems like OP is saying if you share a secret in your (private?) gist and give Algolia permission to read the gist, they will invalidate it. But why would the secret be in a gist and not a repo? Also if you're aware enough to add that partner it seems you're aware to not do dumb things like that in the first place.
by system7rocks | 2026-03-14 00:24:46+00:00
My comment may not have been posted.

If you work for an AI firm or drone outfit even loosely related to a security defense firm, here are your three options:

1 - Quit, salvage what remains of your dignity.
2 - Share all information you can as a whistleblower to media, the world, etc.
3 - Prepare to go to jail. This is profoundly evil.

Period.
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-03-14 00:25:27+00:00
Not everybody means the same thing by open source, it's always been a rather bad umbrella phrase for a lot of different things (and I'm old enough to remember when it first became current).

Whether you agree with them or not the free software / copyleft advocates mean something very different from what Carmack is getting at and always have before or after AI. It has always been an anti-corporate position and it's not difficult to reconcile in my mind at all?

That said, I'm personally a free software advocate, and in favour of the GPL as a license but I use "AI" (LLMs) (critically). To help make [A]GPL software. I kinda feel by copylefting the output, in some sense I'm helping to right the wrong.
by AngryData | 2026-03-14 00:25:39+00:00
I would think because the original founders spent a lot of time planning, researching, and designing combined with decent timing of Musk jumping in with money. Why else would Musk have bought them in the first place if they didn't have incredibly impressive ideas and engineering to sell? When the roadster originally came out, it was expensive, but also had a near 300 mile range which nobody else even came close to offering and boasted very impressive engineering and crash safety. And im sure a lot of that work was put into atleast the next 2 models released.

Of course the quality has fallen faster than the price over time, but initial impressions still hold on for a long time in general.

I think SpaceX's success is mostly down to throwing money at the problem. The US had tons of graduated aerospace engineers with limited places to go, and places they could go directly in aerospace fields were already committing their funding to established programs. SpaceX startup would of been a dream job for the top aerospace engineers because it was all fresh ground but with a far larger budget than 99.9% of startup aerospace companies. They weren't offered to build one piece of a rocket that may or may not get sold to NASA or someone 15 years down the line, they were offered to work on and put their mark on a completely new rocket design that was going to at the least be test launched. And im sure their early successes helped boost recruitment even further, combined with government contract to keep the money flowing.

We probably don't see many rising EV companies in the US because you need an ass-ton of capital to start an automotive company, and most people holding enough capital to do so know that try to sell cheap consumer cars that most people want is not really the highest margin business. Selling a few hundred or even a few thousand cars still leaves you with a mountain of capital requirements in front of you that your margins are going to have a really hard time climbing. And if you don't climb fast enough, good luck fighting established auto makers and their lawyers with every cent tied up into trying to scale and engineer.
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-03-14 00:27:58+00:00
And as a writer: I find that my instinct to write caveats like "I know you're the expert on the codebase" corresponds to a process I need to follow to verify the information. Emails like this can take me hours to write, as I scour the codebase, logs, etc for the missing pieces of information demanded by "mere politeness". Here's an example of a reply I got:

> Thank you for your careful report, I will attend to it asap.

The response was short and to the point, because no other information was relevant. And, indeed, I have written emails like that in the past. But, from the article:

> The fact that you were stressed, or that you had inherited the config from someone else, or that the documentation was unclear3, or that you asked your lead and they said it was probably fine, none of that is relevant to the incident report.

Those things are often all relevant. I beg the author to read a book about system-theoretic process analysis (STPA). Some are freely-available from the MIT PSASS website: https://psas.scripts.mit.edu/home/books-and-handbooks/. Nancy G. Leveson's CAST Handbook is perhaps most directly applicable.
by alwillis | 2026-03-14 00:28:53+00:00
> This is Apple's "Nintendo moment" when they realize they can package old hardware and win on polish and ecosystem.

The A18 Pro isn't even two years old yet; it debuted in iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max September 2024. What's funny is none of the PC laptops manufactures can match the speed and quality of the Neo.

The benchmarks for the A18 Pro are impressive; its Single Thread Performance beats all mobile processors [1]; remember this processor was created for a phone:

Apple A18 Pro 4,091

Apple M1 8 Core 3200 MHz. 3,675

Apple A15 Bionic 3,579

AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme 3,546

AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 230 3,538

Apple A14 Bionic 3,382

Intel Core i5-1235U 3,090

Apple A13 Bionic 2,354

Intel N150 1,902

Intel N100 1,893

AMD Ryzen Embedded R1505G 1,820

[1]: "A18 Pro Benchmark" - https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+A18+Pro&id=62...
by rootusrootus | 2026-03-14 00:29:44+00:00
> What's the best way to have a sane system?

A start that would not require big changes to our existing system would be open primaries. That would incentivize moderate candidates. Or perhaps eliminate primaries altogether and go with a two-stage general election like some places have for their local elections. Everybody runs, then the top two run against each other (unless one got an outright majority in the first run). Skip the more elaborate instant-runoff styles of voting because that is too advanced for average people.
by mannyv | 2026-03-14 00:30:21+00:00
Oh, never mind - yeah, by using the access logs of segments you can effectively anticipate and pre-encode when you need to. And once the hls or cmaf stabilizes you can just encode one resolution. And the player will tell you it wants to move up or down, so you can trigger the encode it wants.

It's interesting your customers want the video immediately; ours don't care about that. But you guys can really build your manifest files and encode immediately, since you're making those mezzanine files.

Then the encoded files are basically a cache that you can evict whenever.

How long did it take you guys to prove that design out?
by barry-cotter | 2026-03-14 00:30:31+00:00
> When my son was in first grade, he came home from school in tears saying that he hated math. My wife and I are both engineers, so this was the sort of all-hands-on-deck shock that demanded our immediate attention. Before this my son had loved math. He would demand that we challenge him with math problems to do in his head in the car and over dinner. He loved doing flashcards. He played math games on his tablet unsupervised for hours. Even now, years later in 4th grade, he has decided he wants to learn calculus, so he insisted I start explaining it to him as best I could in the car, and started working through pre-algebra in Khan Academy on his own. How is it possible that a kid like this had decided he hated math?

> His misery was all due to i-Ready, the software product our district had purchased for math work and testing. During that period my kids’ happiness at the end of the school day was entirely determined by how much time their school had made them spend on i-Ready. If they hadn’t touched i-Ready, they were happy. If they were forced to do it, they were sad. If they had to spend an unusual amount of time on it, they were in tears. I started asking around to the other kids’ parents, and I heard similar stories from all of them. Their kids described it as torture. Some of them would hide in the bathroom to avoid it. None of the parents felt that their kids were learning anything at all from it.
by cxr | 2026-03-14 00:30:54+00:00
They're scoped to whichever "Account" (collection) you tell it to search under. If you just want to show unread feed items, then right click "News & Blogs" (or whatever yours is called), select "Search Messages…", make sure "Search subfolders" is checked, configure it to "Match on all of the following": "Status" "isn't" "Read", and then "Save as Search Folder".
by overfeed | 2026-03-14 00:30:59+00:00
> That's a hell of a lot more than a Chromebook.

It appears most people - even on Hacker News(!) - are unaware that Chromebooks have a one-click Linux VM (currently Debian Trixie is the default). It is well-integrated into the Chrome desktop/launcher, and any Linux app can even be pinned onto the taskbar, next to your browser. Any Limux package you can `apt get` or `curl | sh` can run on Chromebooks made in the last 5ish years.
by rootusrootus | 2026-03-14 00:31:30+00:00
> Trump is an absolute imbecile

And thank god for that, at least. He is too stupid to make his petty policies more durable, instead relying on methods that are just as trivial to undo as they were to implement in the first place. We would be in a much worse place if he had the cunning of Kissinger.
by tyleo | 2026-03-14 00:31:45+00:00
I mentioned this at work but context still rots at the same rate. 90k tokens consumed has just as bad results in 100k context window or 1M.

Personally, I’m on a 6M+ line codebase and had no problems with the old window. I’m not sending it blindly into the codebase though like I do for small projects. Good prompts are necessary at scale.
by beloch | 2026-03-14 00:31:49+00:00
It adds a layer of obscurity, but not real security. If somebody is looking, neither sender or receiver can detect it or know if their ciphertext was intercepted. Depending on the methods used, the cipertext might not be immediately crackable with currently known algorithms and resources. However, it can be archived and broken at a later date, or by an actor who has access to algorithms/resources that aren't currently public.
by xuki | 2026-03-14 00:32:05+00:00
I'm not sure in this instance, but for industrial plants, the expectation is for them to run 24/7/365 without disruption. They're not designed to be turned off and then on again. When you shut something down, how do you "reset" it to a clean state so production can start again? Think about all the existing stuff still in the pipes, residual, etc.
by zamalek | 2026-03-14 00:32:14+00:00
I have OTEL + Rust in production, alongside some other languages (+ OTEL), and it is by far more useful and predictable than the others. I often find myself monkey-patching in logging for other language libraries, where with Rust it just works.

(Except for this, that is: https://github.com/tokio-rs/tracing/issues/2519)
by vjvjvjvjghv | 2026-03-14 00:32:31+00:00
I think you are simplifying a little. Musk had the courage to go against the big manufacturers and build the charger network which at the same a lot of smart people would never work. Same with SpaceX. They did something most people thought could never work.

I don't like Musk politically but that doesn't mean we can't acknowledge that he transformed 2 industries by sheer willpower and stubbornness.
by nephihaha | 2026-03-14 00:32:50+00:00
The BBC can be very pigheaded, i.e. offering no incentives for people coming forward.

Even without losses, they have a trackrecord of stockpiling a lot of old content but not making it available to the public. I doubt this would happen to Doctor Who but it would elsewhere. You would think with streaming that the BBC could make a lot of obscure old content available, but they don't.
by w0m | 2026-03-14 00:32:52+00:00
> Why did Tesla work initially?

Becaues they were ~first to market - and honestly, as a tesla driver for the last 6 years - It's the best car I ever owned (including Toyota, Mazda, and domestics).

6 years ago, for the effective price of a Honda Accord, I was able to get a car with excellent AWD for NorEast winters, perfect weight distribution (previously drove a Miata for comparison), could beat ~95% 'super cars' in a straight line, and it got 140MPG.

6 years ago. And I've had 0 maintenance outside of tire / air filter changes since. There was nothing anything remotely like it on the market, and it still holds up today. That's incredibly compelling.

Then PedoDiver, and it's been downhill from there... I'll likely get an R3X when it comes out.
by vladdoster | 2026-03-14 00:33:07+00:00
Location: Nashville, TN
Remote: true
Willing to relocate: boston || nashville
Technologies: Python, Django, IaC, Terraform, Golang, CI/CD, Azure/AWS, {ba,z}sh, Lua, Springboot,
Redis, Docker, Open Service Broker, {,non}relational & vector dbs, shared services, SOA
Email: mvdoster@gmail.com

resume: https://linkedin.vdoster.com && http://github.com/vladdoster

sr. cloud software engineer @ Mastercard (5 years)

Designed and built Platform-as-a-Service for microservice workloads running on Azure and AWS
to migrate on-prem workloads to the cloud. The platform operates globally, allowing teams to
deploy to several Azure-backed regions worldwide. Helped plan and create regional landing zones
in Azure for application teams wanting to perform globally. Designed platform components using
Terraform, Go, and Node; developed support tooling using Bash, Python, and Azure CLI. De-risk the
platform by addressing security vulnerabilities and ensuring the platform is PCI compliant.

api/devops software engineer @ Harvard Medical School (2 years)

Worked as part of the DevOps team to manage a 15k core CentOS HPC cluster. Designed and implemented
Python-based security scanning pipeline to securely deploy & run Apptainer images via SLURM.
Coordinated cross-team emergency patching eﬀorts. Collaborated with researchers and engineers across
3-letter institutions to deliver secure research infrastructure. Built CI/CD Pipelines with GitHub, Jenkins,
to automate code builds, testing, and deployments. Wrote Puppet modules to manage configuration of HPC fleet.
Wrote custom Puppet module & Python scripts to automatically remediate Tenable findings.

full-stack software engineer @ Global Prior Art (3 years)

Used Django, Celery, Selenium grid, and AWS API Gateway for IP rotation to scrape USPTO patent PDFs,
apply CV for data extraction, and generate reports with relevant claims, saving employees 4-5 hours daily.
Wrote E2E black-box/fuzzing unit tests. Automated on-premise deployment via Github Actions and Ansible.

maintainer @ Zinit (5 years)

Develop and maintain a zsh plugin manager on Github with 4k stars. Implemented unit tests,
containerization, bug fixes, and new features.
See: https://github.com/zdharma-continuum/zinit

contributor @ Open-source documentation (5 years)

Contributed hundreds of documentation corrections and enhancements to 400+ open source projects.
by rootusrootus | 2026-03-14 00:33:20+00:00
> Do you think Australia won't lurch to the anti-liberal and anti-democratic side as soon as someone with the right combo of charisma and psychopathy arises?

Indeed, all of our friendly western liberal democracies should not get too comfortable thinking this insanity won't come to them. Some of them already experience increasing amounts of it, and the rest could easily be in that position.
by slopinthebag | 2026-03-14 00:33:54+00:00
It's not, you need actual parental controls. Furthermore if this was just for the children it would be a setting you opt into, fully optional and unregulated, like parental controls are now.

And no, there is absolutely no argument for a slippery slope here. Especially considering we've had OSS for what, 50 years now? And corporations are doing just fine. Unlike the vast history of authoritarianism and government oppression and violence that occurs exactly through this mechanism of giving an inch over and over again until they have taken miles.

Don't be an idiot.
by jordand | 2026-03-14 00:34:25+00:00
A full FOSS replacement is absolutely necessary now. Options+ gets noticably worse every 6 months. The latest thing now is that every time you open it, a pop-up 'View available offers' Ad shows which (of course) you can't disable. The bloat is ridiculous given they embedded a whole additional GUI framework (Flutter) just for that AI Prompt builder many people don't want.
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2026-03-14 00:35:23+00:00
Kind of. I mean that they have gotten way better at taking some braindead sentence like “trace the performance of this app” and deriving what you actually mean which involves looking at your codebase, identifying your deployment scenario, identifying the steps required to pull the traces, writing the query to sample the traces, then correlating it all together. Just an example, you say 5 words and it’s able to figure out exactly what you want it to do and it might ask questions to clarify but otherwise it’s really good at figuring out what you actually need.

In the dark before times of 6 months ago, the thing would go completely off the rails and fuck it all up. In today’s world, 80% of the time it’s gonna get you pretty close to what you actually want with literally 5 words for simple tasks.

Complex tasks require more upfront work but my anecdata has demonstrated for me that complex tasks are showing similar relative reductions in upfront planning and effort to succeed
by pm90 | 2026-03-14 00:35:41+00:00
Out of curiosity, it sounds like you're the kind of person that could easily find another job. Why slog it out until the end rather than quit/find a better gig? Genuinely interested because every time I've ended up with a manager like that my mental health has suffered so now I generally start planning my exit as soon as I'm stuck with a bad manager.
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-03-14 00:35:43+00:00
NTFS supports case-sensitivity, but if you have case-sensitive distinctions in a directory that's marked case-insensitive, bad things happen. (Those bad things are probably entirely deterministic, theoretically-predictable, and documented in one of Raymond Chen's big books of Windows sadness, but that doesn't mean I want to deal with them as a mere mortal.)