MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SirensOfTitan | 2026-03-13 19:15:36+00:00
In my mind, AI is making a lot of engineers, including Carmack, seem fairly thoughtless. At the other moments in recent history where technology has displaced workers, labor has either had to fight some very bloody battles or had stronger labor organization. Tech workers are highly atomized now, and if you have to work to live, you're negotiating on your own.

It seems like Carmack, like a lot of tech people, have forgotten to ask the question: who stands to benefit if we devalue the US services economy broadly? Who stands to lose? It seems like a lot of these people are assuming AI will be a universal good. It is easy to feel that way when you are independently wealthy and won't feel the fallout.

Even a small % of layoffs of the US white collar work force will crash the economy, as our economy is extremely levered. This is what happened in 2008: like 7% of mortgages failed, and this caused a cascade of failures we are still feeling today.
by bombcar | 2026-03-13 19:15:49+00:00
> I think one of the more prominent issues folks take with mass training on OSS is that the companies doing it are now profiting for having done it.

He says it's a gift, and if people do whatever, he doesn't care; he already gave it away.

I think it's interesting that nobody would cry that Fabien should shovel cash from his book sales towards Carmack, nor should those who learned how to code by reading source owe something to the authors beyond gratitude and maybe a note here and there.

Even things like Apple's new implementation of SMB, which is "code clean" from GPLv3 Samba, but likely still leans on the years and years of experience and documentation about the SMB protocol.
by alwillis | 2026-03-13 19:16:19+00:00
> As long as you're ok with arm64 guests

I've run amd64 guests on M-series CPUs using Quem. Apple's Rosetta 2 is still a thing [1] for now.

[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102527

[2]: https://mac.getutm.app
by medhir | 2026-03-13 19:16:28+00:00
My contention is that the definition of said product and its inherent capabilities is being gatekept by a corporation that would love you to buy both an iPhone and Mac, and treat them as separate. In fact, I do have both already! But I still want rights to modify my iPhone as the computer it is.

The MacBook Neo is a great example of just how fungible these categories are, at least as far as the SoC that runs them is concerned. I paid for my iPhone in full, there is no reasonable justification for why I can’t repurpose it / modify it as I see fit.
by mapontosevenths | 2026-03-13 19:16:50+00:00
When I first considered this in the late 90's I was inspired by Google's Page Rank algorithm, and wanted something akin to that for humans in a social network.

My core idea (back in the early 00's when I cam up with it originally) was to identify a small cadre of trustworthy individuals in various sectors - lets say finance, computing, healthcare, etc (but more granular) and give them high trust (maybe a manual score of 10). Then let who they score, and who those people score "trickle down" as it does in Googles page rank. It was a variation on what Google later called trust rank, I suppose.

It would have either failed to launch completely or turned into a dystopian nightmare akin to China's Social Credit System. It may have even turned out worse than China's system because the goals of finance do not always align with the goals of humanity.

A more modern implementation could be built on the block chain and be made very profitable... while it crushes us all.
by liuliu | 2026-03-13 19:16:51+00:00
GPL is not for you to make money. It is for the end-users to have freedom with their hardware.

If you want to make money, use a proper license.

To expand on this, GPL is not against capitalism neither. Sometimes, end-users' freedom with their hardware is good to make money on (they buy your support, to have confidence they can migrate from one hardware to another, or use their hardware way longer than the original manufacturer can stay in business). But it is also not an automated license to say "give me your money" neither.
by rootusrootus | 2026-03-13 19:17:12+00:00
I will dare to admit aloud that I think maybe the founders were making a rational choice when they decided that only certain citizens would have the right to vote. As awful as that sounds, there are halfway decent arguments in favor. Maybe not just restricting to white wealthy landowners, but sometimes I do wonder if we would benefit from a filter that adequately screens for people 1) with real skin in the game and 2) a plausible claim to being well informed.

That is just a thought experiment, though, I do not believe it would play out beneficially if we tried to implement it in real life.
by bfrog | 2026-03-13 19:17:21+00:00
Oh yeah no... its still terrible even without all the spyware.

First experience of Windows 11, trying to download a file through firefox caused my 18 core 10980xe to have the entire UI freeze for the full time the download was going.

Reverted back to windows 10 immediately and the problem went away.

Windows 11 is full of spyware from the Mothership
by kylehotchkiss | 2026-03-13 19:17:21+00:00
I'm worried about South Asia - between this and the immediate impact of LPG availability, the coming months and years seem scary - I don't see the strait returning to "risk-free" transit for years (not months) after this war. lettsss goooo $8/gallon gas for the rest of admin.

On another hand, everybody (or at least I want to believe) in the region knew in the back of their mind that the whole situation was a powder keg with a short fuse, and should have done more to diversify energy sources beforehand.
Ask HN: What's your biggest pain point when joining a new developer team?
by KevStatic | 2026-03-13 19:17:28+00:00
I'm planning to make an AI tool which allows an organisations' developer to access all the files or detect references/calls for any doubts. Usually I feel like new coders in an org, have plenty of questions about the org's framework or operations in general. This makes them ask their seniors which they might not really like due to the wastage of time it would take. Hence, this entire workflow would be eliminated by having a custom AI-based platform for the same to ask all your queries on.
by LoganDark | 2026-03-13 19:17:42+00:00
There's a difference between bloated and batteries included. From a development point of view, macOS has native system libraries for things no other platform seems to include native system libraries for. And by "native system libraries" I do not mean downloadable content, dynamic support or anything similar, even if they're first-party. Though having unremovable system apps for every one of Apple's services MAY count as bloated if you don't use them.
by palmotea | 2026-03-13 19:17:53+00:00
> Because some people committed treason and gave the technology to the Soviets.

American big business is pretty much doing that every day, handing over technology to increase China's manufacturing tech level.

Pretty soon China won't need it anymore. If the massive incompetence of the US government and business establishment is defeated, the the industrial espionage will start to go in the other direction. More likely is the US just declines, becoming little more than a source of raw materials and agricultural products to fuel advanced Chinese industry.
by xp84 | 2026-03-13 19:18:24+00:00
Samsung DEX isn't far off from this, it's just that you're limited to Android instead of Linux, MacOS etc.

But Apple will surely never allow such a thing since their main interest is in selling as many pieces of hardware to each of the Apple Faithful as possible. So they with a straight face suggest that a single human needs an iPad Pro (which easily tops $1500 with the eye-wateringly-expensive keyboard and a storage upgrade) and a laptop. Nevermind that they may have the same chip inside.
by john_strinlai | 2026-03-13 19:19:21+00:00
it has never been my explicit goal. but i have certainly enjoyed the rewards of recognition (e.g. i was able to lean on a successful project of mine to help land a nice consulting gig) and it would be silly to ignore that.

(edit: the comment i replied to was edited to be more a statement about themselves rather than a question about other developers, so my comment probably makes less sense now)
by gravisultra | 2026-03-13 19:19:46+00:00
A first party source, means directly from the originating party. In this case, there is no statement from Iranian officials that exists. Just 2nd hand quotes. Other first party sources would be photographic evidence, videos... like what we have of Zionist crimes in Gaza, the West Bank, Iran, Lebanon...

Iran is inhabited by indigenous people. Israel is ruled by colonizers. That is the difference. Another huge difference that impacts me as a US citizen is that Iran has zero influence on my government and there are zero laws removing my rights in favor of Iran, which is the exact opposite of Israel.
by alwillis | 2026-03-13 19:19:56+00:00
> Last I checked VirtualBox on Apple Silicon only permits the running of ARM64 guests.

I used to use VirtualBox a lot back in the day. I tried it recently on my Mac; it's become pretty bloated over the years.

On the other hand, this GUI for Quem is pretty nice [1].

[1]: https://mac.getutm.app
by aanet | 2026-03-13 19:19:58+00:00
This is utterly fascinating.

The core paper is here [1], but the SciAm article says:

"...around the 14th century, Indian mathematician Madhava of Sangamagrama provided the first exact formula, expressed as an infinite series—a sum of endlessly many terms that, if you could somehow add them all up, would yield pi exactly. The catch: his series converged agonizingly slowly, requiring hundreds of terms just to nail down a few decimal places. More than three hundred years later Leonhard Euler discovered another series that converged faster. And in the early 1900s, the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan produced formulas that are still revered for their efficiency today.
...
Each equation seemed unrelated to the others. But in late 2025, a team of seven AI researchers at the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology found a previously unknown mathematical structure underlying hundreds of pi formulas, including those of Archimedes, Euler and Ramanujan. “It’s not every day that you get to cite Archimedes,” says Ph.D. student Michael Shalyt, part of the team. The structure, called a conservative matrix field, or CMF, acts as a kind of mathematical common ancestor, showing how formulas that look nothing alike turn out to be different expressions of the same underlying object."

From the abstract:

"Our system combines large language models (LLMs) for systematic formula harvesting, an LLM-code feedback loop for validation, and a novel symbolic algorithm for clustering andeventual unification. We demonstrate this methodology on the hallmark case of π, an ideal testing ground for symbolic unification. Applying this approach to 455,050 arXiv papers, we validate 385 distinct formulas for π and prove relations between 360 (94%) of them, of which 166 (43%) can be derived from a single mathematical object—linking canonical formulas by Euler, Gauss, Brouncker, and newer ones from algorithmic discoveries by the Ramanujan Machine.
Our method generalizes to other constants, including e, ζ(3), and Catalan’s constant, demonstrating the potential of AI-assisted mathematics to uncover hidden structures and unify knowledge across domains"

The whole paper is waay over my head, but I find it elegant that there is a simpler underlying structure.

---
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.17533
by layer8 | 2026-03-13 19:20:05+00:00
When the code is low-quality, you can’t reason well about it, can’t reason well about what changes to apply and what their effects will be, can’t reason about what the outcome will be when making changes to the context (inputs, environment) the code is run it. Instead everything becomes an experiment on a black box or gray box, whose behavior you can’t well predict in advance.

Engineering is the task of making things behave predictably and reliably. Because software is malleable and rarely “finished”, this applies to changing software as well.

I’m pretty sure that there is more than one divide regarding AI among developers, but one of the dividing lines concerns the predictability and reason-ability of the tools and the code. AI fundamentally lacks these qualities.
by sobiolite | 2026-03-13 19:20:11+00:00
Are you suggesting that authors didn't know or understand that commercial exploitation of their OSS contributions was possible? If so, that is a complete misrepresentation of history. There has always been open-source licenses that disallowed commercial use. Authors have chosen not to use them, and instead chose licenses, such as MIT/GPL, that allowed commercial use. And there has always been commercial use of OSS. Big companies, small companies, tech companies, oil and gas companies, weapons manufacturers, banks, hardware companies, etc. They all use OSS and they all make a profit from it, without giving anything back to the people who originally wrote it. That's not an edge case or an unexpected consequence, it a fundamental tenet of free (as in freedom) software: You do not get to choose who uses it, or how they use it.
by 9rx | 2026-03-13 19:20:27+00:00
> If a voter stops voting for one party, or the other, the "leadership" of a state fails.

Political parties in democracy are quite literally labor unions. The people in them do not independently lead the state, they are merely employees, hired by the leadership. You know, that's what you host elections for — to choose which employee you want to hire from the set of candidates who want the job. They may act as sub-leaders within the capacity of their job, but they are not the top leaders we are talking about. "Leadership" here was never intended to be about "middle managers".

That seems pretty obvious, but perhaps this confusion is the source of your misunderstandings?

> and as such we are done here.

Done with what? Thinking other threads are related this one? That is a good idea.
by johnmaguire | 2026-03-13 19:20:32+00:00
> people who open source their code do not care about profit

Not only are there businesses built around open-source work, but it used to be widely-accepted that publishing open-source software was a good way to land a paying gig as a junior.

I think that whether you need to continue working to afford to live is very relevant to discussions about AI.

Profits don't need to be direct - and licenses are chosen based on a user's particular open-source goals. AI does not respect code's original licensing.
by j-bos | 2026-03-13 19:20:50+00:00
Yeah, it's rhymes with people getting mad about pharmacos charging outrageous prices for life saving drugs they developed in order to charge outrageous prices. In both cases (drugs and OSS) it's an ugly process that produces great and greatly uneven value to humanity, but the alternatives are less value overall, even to those on the losing side of the uneven value.
by SlinkyOnStairs | 2026-03-13 19:20:54+00:00
> Whether he is set for life or not has nothing to do _in this context_, since, presumably, people who open source their code do not care about profit.

What's your point here? Because whether or not someone needs income to pay their bills is MASSIVELY relevant to whether or not they have to care about the profit on their work.

The bulk of Open Source maintainers aren't "set for life", and need to get a real job in order to not be homeless.
by azmenak | 2026-03-13 19:21:39+00:00
From my personal testing, running various agentic tasks with a bunch of tool calls on an M4 Max 128GB, I've found that running quantized versions of larger models to produce the best results which this site completely ignores.

Currently, Nemotron 3 Super using Unsloth's UD Q4_K_XL quant is running nearly everything I do locally (replacing Qwen3.5 122b)
by sixo | 2026-03-13 19:21:40+00:00
HN people always try to do this cute rhetorical gesture where you take a thing and say "hmm nice idea what if we called it <thing that already exists>", but they like this joke so much they get baited into doing it in dumb ways like this one.

A coworking space in every building != a WeWork. There's a big difference between these! You could implement the former by opening a million WeWorks but that doesn't sound good at all; residential apartment buildings already have common areas, free to residents, they would simply have to be reimagined slightly.
by StackArchitect | 2026-03-13 19:21:43+00:00
I decided to build StackArchitect to help Shopify store owners identify wasted spend on automation and tracking apps.

The $0 Automation Stack replaces multiple paid apps with one workflow, saving users around 500+/month on average.

The site walks you through a quick diagnostic to estimate your store’s potential savings. No code or extra apps required.

Curious to hear feedback from HN on the workflow, UX, and value.
by casey2 | 2026-03-13 19:22:09+00:00
YAY! this is exactly what I wanted as the final step of some agent batching prompts to sub agents, but seeing it in action made me realize: Wow being able to talk to any program during runtime, including the OS, because an LLM is your CPU! What a concept!

Computing is going to be so weird in a few decades, writing programs faster than I can speak with full semantic introspection into every byte of code.
by themafia | 2026-03-13 19:22:29+00:00
I create "job function" DLs. "Company-Region-IT Manager". Then give that DL it's own SMTP address. Then use that.

It's really nice when you have to hire someone new for the position. You add them to the DL and they're automatically in control of all those accounts.

I have no idea why more companies don't do this.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-03-13 19:22:35+00:00
I’m not even afraid of being persecuted by the current administration, it’s the possibility of a much worse administration in the future that gave me pause.

Unfortunately, your (entirely understandable) position is exactly what will enable such an administration to come to power.

What you are doing in 2026 is what you would have done in 1936.
by jltsiren | 2026-03-13 19:22:40+00:00
It's more that most European countries had little reason to spend money on defense. Until recently, Finland and Sweden were small countries close to Russia but outside NATO, and their defense spending was similar to West European NATO members. In other words, nobody saw any real military threats to Western / Northern Europe, and the NATO security guarantees had more political than military value. Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and the threat environment changed.

I'm less familiar with the situation in Eastern Europe. Many countries joined NATO as quickly as possible, because they understood the Russian doctrine and saw a real threat there. Russia tries to surround itself with puppets / friends / allies, by force if necessary, to avoid having to fight in its own territory. Many East European countries didn't want to be part of that so soon after the fall of communism. But it looks like the idea of being in friendly terms with Russia instead of fully committing to the West never went away.
by Animats | 2026-03-13 19:22:58+00:00
I've wanted something like this for level of detail processing.

This is a render from Second Life, in which all the texture images were shrunk down to one pixel, the lowest possible level of detail, producing a monocolor image.
For distant objects, or for objects where the texture is still coming in from the net, there needs to be some default color. The existing system used grey for everything. I tried using an average of all the pixels, and, as the original poster points out, the result looks murky.[1] This new approach has real promise for big-world rendering.

[1] https://media.invisioncic.com/Mseclife/monthly_2023_05/monoc...
by paxys | 2026-03-13 19:22:59+00:00
Everyone is hypothesizing government backdoors and whatever else but to me there's a simpler and more obvious reason - AI.

Companies started pushing E2EE a few years ago because users' private messaging data used to be a liability. Now that the data can be fed into LLMs for training and inference its value has gone up significantly, and the privacy and security tradeoffs are suddenly worthwhile.

PMs across the industry are pushing product decks with "conversational AI assistants" to get their next promotion. I've been in more than one of these meetings myself. If the data is encrypted then there's no way to build this kind of stuff.
by bentt | 2026-03-13 19:23:16+00:00
I love this. At a glance, here are some dynamics this reveals:

1. You can share a channel with a friend and know that they see the same thing as you. What's on at 5:03pm on channel 4 is the same for everyone.

2. The decision of what to watch is topical and greatly simplified. It extracts the decisions from "the algorithm" and gives you agency again.

3. There's a lot of stuff you never see on Youtube's recommendations because the algorithm doesn't show you those videos. Ever.
by ryandvm | 2026-03-13 19:23:18+00:00
If folks don't want LLMs scanning their codebases we should just make some new OSS licenses. Basically, "GPL/BSD/MIT + You pinky promise not to scan this for machine learning".

Either it works and the AI makers stop stop slurping up OSS or it doesn't hold up in court and shrinkwrap licenses are deemed bullshit. A win/win scenario if you ask me.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-03-13 19:24:16+00:00
> Those are revenue figures

And also net income.

> just makes the problem worse

Did you skip the part where it’s not a serious cost issue? None of these birds are even close to being propellant restricted.

> These things are not staying up long, and they're staying up shorter and shorter

Because they’re being intentionally deorbited to make room for better birds. They don’t have to be deorbited as quickly as they are. But overwhelming demand makes it a profitable bet.

> it remains to be seen how much money they're willing to put up for it

$70mm per year for 22 birds [1].

[1] https://www.space.com/spacex-starshield-space-force-contract
Show HN: Monet – Claude Code Multisession Management
by jeffrwells | 2026-03-13 19:24:48+00:00
https://monetworkspace.com
Youtube Demo: https://lnkd.in/dTY7CxDn

Organize and manage dozens of claude code agents for you in a grid.
Alerts when the agents need help. Keyboard driven. Dictation native.
On Mac at your desktop or iPad/iPhone on the go.

--

This started as a nagging side project — I wanted to spend less time at my desk, improve my own posture and lifestyle and spend less time sitting at my desk and more time standing and dictating, sitting outside, or just making use of downtime.

As Claude Code and other agentic engineering tools have gotten good enough, I spend more time in system architect and product mindset and less time actually writing code..

But as they can run autonomously for longer and longer, I get incredibly bored and open a new tab and start on another feature...multiple sessions got increasingly overwhelming and unorganized. So I built Monet.

Releasing as an alpha at a discount. It's not a subscription. I'm bootstrapped and intend to stay that way. Just a one-year license, hopefully low enough price engineers can expense it.

On that note, it's all SQLlite running on your computer. If you want to use it on your phone you need to use a Tailscale VPN to access it directly. Nothing leaves the machine except to check for updates and validate the license key.

Even with some bugs, I can attest as the number one power user...it's a game changer. I encourage you to try it if you use Claude Code a lot.