MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fragmede | 2026-03-07 20:46:38+00:00
Yeah, none of it was really about file systems. There was a brief mention that file systems look like a graph, and that you build roughly an index so it looks graph and thus database-y, but you could store it all in a sqlite database with a column, called filename and a column called content for all the details about file systems this post went into. I too was expecting something more in depth about file systems like for instance, cluster file systems have made a little to no advancement. ZFS is not a cluster file system and we've been needing a good one of those for decades, ever since VM's became feasible on consumer grade hardware. Still, files on desk is better than having to pay Oracle a fee per-skill on today's modern, open Internet. That was never going to happen.
by zmmmmm | 2026-03-07 20:47:22+00:00
> Agents have removed most of the satisfaction and fulfilment from designing, building, testing and completing a feature or component

I highly recommend not using these tools in their "agentic" modes. Stay in control. Tell them exactly what to write, direct the architecture explicitly.

You still get the tremendous benefit of being unlocked from learning tedious syntax and overcoming arcane infra bottlenecks that suck the joy out of the process for me, but you get freed from the tedious and soul crushing parts.
by abathur | 2026-03-07 20:48:15+00:00
I don't disagree with you that a reasonable way to cope with the current problems is to ensure everything that "counts" is done in a controlled environment, but pedagogy and its goals are vast.

There are things you learn from spending several days structuring a 20-page argument that you will not learn (and cannot assess) from oral examination or a 5-paragraph essay written in a blue book.
by staplung | 2026-03-07 20:48:24+00:00
I'm a little surprised Meta is even bothering to fight this. I mean the argument looks farcical to me be IANAL and weirder things have happened. If they do end up losing they'll have to pay however many millions to their law firms plus whatever the in or out of court settlement end ups being.

And you just know that whatever they end up paying will be so tiny that it will just be seen as the cost of doing business. From a corporation's perspective it's always better to break the law and maybe pay a tiny fine (if you get caught and can't argue your way out of it) than it is to follow the law and miss out on profit/revenue/strategic advantage etc.
by apple4ever | 2026-03-07 20:48:47+00:00
I never have to miss Objective-C because I still write in it! I never hopped on the Swift train because I saw it as an inferior language to Objective-C. And a decade later I'm more sure of that. It's such a joy to still write in an amazing language. Yes I use Python too and that is a joy. But nothing like Objective-C.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2026-03-07 20:48:51+00:00
Betting was once a vice overseen by the mob -- and those addicted to it were rightly viewed as pathetic figures, akin to serious alcoholics. Now betting pervades nearly every aspect of Anglosphere life. This transformation, which has taken place over the past 100 years but has really picked up steam over the last 15, has not been an improvement. It's net negative for society, and the evidence on this is very clear.

Prediction markets are the worst and most insidious manifestation of this phenomenon. They reward insider trading and may also induce people to seek outcomes that are undesirable for society at large. (e.g. in tfa.) There's literally no way this experiment ends well -- which is to say that there's no way this ends in "markets" that benefit and enlighten the common man.

I look forward to the pendulum swinging the other way. Even with such a broken political system, it might.
by JoeAltmaier | 2026-03-07 20:49:27+00:00
UUID solve oh so very, very much.

You can have several versions of the same set of data object at once - an entire source set for a build, all the names duplicate but tagged with 'revision' so they can be distinguished.

Hard to do that without a UUID at root, to use for unique identification of the particular 'particle' of the particular data set.
Show HN: Luna Agent – Custom AI agent in ~2300 lines of Python, no frameworks
by nonatofabio | 2026-03-07 20:49:53+00:00
Hey HN. I evaluated three agent frameworks for a homelab project, one had 400K lines of code (and 42K exposed instances on Shodan), one was 9 days old, and the third was so thin I'd rebuild most of it anyway. None worked for me.

So I built my own in ~2300 lines of Python. No frameworks, 8 runtime dependencies, 106 tests.

What it does:
- Persistent memory via SQLite (FTS5 keyword search + sqlite-vec embeddings + recency decay, fused with Reciprocal Rank Fusion)
- MCP tool integration — add capabilities by editing a JSON file
- Native tools with safety guardrails (bash blocklist, timeouts, output caps)
- Discord interface with session isolation
- Structured JSON logging for every operation
- Conversation compression for effectively infinite context

Runs locally on 2x RTX 3090 with Qwen3-Coder-Next via llama-server. No cloud APIs.

The design philosophy was: don't build what you don't need, but don't block the insertion points. For example, my AI firewall isn't built yet, but all LLM traffic goes through a single configurable URL, swapping in a filtering proxy is a config change I'll do later.

DESIGN.md documents the reasoning behind every architectural decision. Tests mock the LLM client so you can run them on a laptop.

GitHub: https://github.com/nonatofabio/luna-agent
Blog post with full technical deep-dive: https://nonatofabio.github.io/blog/post.html?slug=luna_agent

Happy to answer questions about any of the design tradeoffs.
by hanwenn | 2026-03-07 20:50:01+00:00
blaze/bazel was a big improvement over its predecessor (a set of python scripts that generated huge makefiles), but that did not make it free of accidental engineering. The google infrastructure teams were very tightly staffed, so for a long time, it was held together with proverbial duct tape and heroism.

Source: I was on part of the team that did the open sourcing, and had to clean lots of cruft in the code base that had accreted over 8 years.
by ritlo | 2026-03-07 20:50:34+00:00
One of the worst habits distinctive to online discussion-board writing (especially the sorts of places with lots and lots of people and where it's fairly hard to get permanently kicked out—like here) is too much hedging and over-specifying to try to head off shitposting by bad or bad-faith readers. It's all over forum posts, and it's poor writing, but without moderation that slaps down responses based on plain mis-reading you have to write that way, or your post will spawn all kinds of really stupid tangent strings of posts (and they still do anyway, sometimes). And, yes, the excessive and too-close-together repetitiveness you mention is part of that.

The result is that a ton of web forum/social-media posting would, in any other context, be fairly poor writing (even if it's otherwise got no problems) simply because of the the extra crap and contortions required to minimize garbage posts by poor readers who are, themselves, allowed to post to the same medium.

This is in addition to, though not wholly separate from, the tendency toward combativeness in online posting.
by Frieren | 2026-03-07 20:51:20+00:00
> New technologies and increased digitalisation of financial transactions pose additional challenges, such as the convergence of different types of criminal activities like fraud, cybercrime and financial crime into one. Economic and financial crimes undermine legitimate financial organisations, distort competition and the overall dynamics of a free market environment, and have a significant negative impact on society at large. Criminal proceeds also fuel corruption, which in turn furthers crime.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2020/6520...
by speakingmoistly | 2026-03-07 20:51:28+00:00
> Even Khosrowshahi sets boundaries around his personal time: Whenever he’s in town, he blocks off two hours to have dinner with his family.
>
> But just after the meal ends, he’s back to checking his emails at 9:30 p.m., and goes through his inbox again when he wakes up at 5:30 a.m.
>
> It’s possible to strike some balance while working hard, he insists—but something will always have to give.

"Whenever I'm in town, I carve out two hours to have a family dinner" doesn't exactly scream healthy balance. I suspect that it's mostly off-work time that "will always have to give".

This very much reminds me of the saying that roughly goes "in the end, the only people who remember you working late are your kids/partner".
by stevenicr | 2026-03-07 20:51:43+00:00
I was chatting with AIs about this a couple weeks ago, and was surprised by some of the things it knew would be done to protect the data centers and those who still make money.

I had never heard of some of the things they are already doing to protect electric cables and the way that a combination of technologies are deployed to surveil and shoo away humans. - on one of the AIs even provided me with youtube videos to show these hardening methods already in use.

The strain on the overcrowded prisons, increase in cybercrime, new tech to give people credits to get gov powdered cheese and mealworms grown from the former office space was quite interesting.

A peaceful island sounds nice until we realize there will be 11 million people that need to be there within 12 months and it just increases from there.

This plan sounds like the fyre festival 3.0 combined with "the island" from 2005 - https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/1635-the-island
-- which makes me wonder if this was written by AI since it knows what is coming and may want to start to pre-corall people.
Show HN: ShareNova – Zero-knowledge file transfer with magic-byte scanning
by HatemDabet | 2026-03-07 20:52:09+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm a software engineer in IT support. I constantly need to transfer large log files and system images securely between machines. Existing tools either had size limits, required accounts, or lacked real encryption. So I built ShareNova.

How it works:

Live transfer: Server-relayed WebSocket streaming, chunked with bitfield tracking for automatic resume on disconnect. No account required.

Deferred storage: When the receiver is offline, files are chunked and encrypted client-side using AES-256-GCM (PBKDF2 key derivation, 200K iterations) before upload. The server only stores ciphertext. Keys never leave the browser.

Magic-byte file scanner: Every deferred file is scanned server-side by reading the first 16 bytes and comparing against known signatures. Detects disguised executables (MZ header in a .jpg), double extensions, and archives containing dangerous files. Results are shown as safety badges to the receiver.

In-browser preview: Images, video, audio, PDF, and code files can be previewed before download without breaking the security model.

The stack is Node.js + Express + ws, single-server, no external dependencies for the core transfer logic.

Try it: https://sharenova.io

I'd love feedback on the architecture and the scanning approach.
by etempleton | 2026-03-07 20:52:49+00:00
When I was in high school I was a better writer when I had time (versus in class) and generally a better writer than I was a student. The net result was fairly often being accused of plagiarism. Not because the teacher had proof(I never plagiarized), but because the teacher couldn’t believe I could write to the level I sometimes wrote at on take home assignments. Admittedly, I was a wildly inconsistent student.

This reminds me a bit of that. AI writing is—in many ways—objectively very good, but that doesn’t matter if no one thinks you wrote it. AI writing is boring exactly because it is consistent and like any art form people want to see something original.
by mech422 | 2026-03-07 20:52:56+00:00
Yep, it was a 'momentary' glitch in the matrix ... Things came back even stronger then before, and 'off-shore' just became another tool. Its still around, but it hasn't destroyed the domestic programming industry. However, it was painful for a lot programmers at the time and _seemed_ like the end of the world to them...

Which is why I say, it reminds me very strongly of the current AI trend. AI won't 'go away' - but I don't think it will 'be the end' of programmers (at least not in the next 5-10 years). It will just become another tool
by otherme123 | 2026-03-07 20:53:04+00:00
Put your hand like this: https://static1.bigstockphoto.com/9/5/2/large1500/259859530....

But with your thumbs closing your ear orifices.

Now you have to hit the back of the neck with the tip of your middle fingers, and to get a harder hit you "snap" the fingers, putting the finger like "fingers crossed" position, and the pressing the middle finger towards the head. You should hear a big "thump!" inside your head.

It aleviates the tinnitus for a few seconds, but more likely due to the stapedial reflex than anything related to neck muscles.
by MathMonkeyMan | 2026-03-07 20:53:11+00:00
I use firefox and have my autoplay policy set to aggressive no. There's an icon left of the address bar that shows a crossed-out play button when scripted video is prevented. If I click on that play button, I can select "always allow," and the videos will be allowed to play. That's all it took for me.

I set that option one day when a news website would autoplay a video every time I scrolled (I think it was the New York Times). This sent me into a fit of rage and now I prefer the inconvenience of having to reselect "allow all" almost every time I visit a site with video.
by zzrrt | 2026-03-07 20:53:12+00:00
I'm not a principal, but I would wonder: if AI increases every "coder's" productivity, say, 5x doesn't that replace some teams with 1 person, meaning less "alignment" necessary? Some whole org layers may disappear. Soft skills become less relevant when there are fewer people to interface with.

Even regarding "chase something complex and difficult", there are currently only so many needs for that, so I think any given person is justified fearing they won't be picked. It may be a decade between AI eating all the CRUD work from principal down, and when it expands the next generation of complex work on robotics or whatever.
by jskdev | 2026-03-07 20:53:27+00:00
Wow! I stumbled onto your paper a while ago when I was looking into structural editing and thinking of a masters in CS, exploring editor interfaces / feedback loops.

(Maybe your paper is famous and it’s not wild that I read it, but it was wild to see after so many years)

I never took that path, spent time in tech industry confused why people didn’t seem interested in structural editing and better editing tools.

Out of curiosity, how do you think LLMs and genai affect the value of structural editors and similar tooling?

Part of me wants to stay disciplined— of course it’s valuable to work efficiently and work on the AST and with a repl. The other part of me gets paid to work on essentially a punch card system (building dev, ship to prod and see what happens)
by nick__m | 2026-03-07 20:53:30+00:00
from the article (pay attention to the part in italics):

FLASH radiotherapy flips the conventional approach on its head, delivering a single dose of ultrahigh-power radiation in a burst that typically lasts less than one-tenth of a second. In study after study, this technique causes significantly less injury to normal tissue than conventional radiation does, without compromising its antitumor effect.
by stif1337 | 2026-03-07 20:53:36+00:00
It actually supports both you can use it as a plain REST API (no MCP needed) with any HTTP client:

curl localhost:7878/windows
curl -X POST localhost:7878/interact/{id}/click

MCP mode is an optional layer for AI agents (Claude, Cursor, etc.) that already speak MCP. The REST API works standalone for scripts, testing, CI/CD — no AI required.
by stif1337 | 2026-03-07 20:54:02+00:00
Yes, electron apps expose a reasonable accessibility tree through Chromium's UIA/AT-SPI bridge. We've tested with Spotify (Electron/CEF), VS Code, Slack, and Chrome itself.

The tree is shallower than native Win32/WPF apps, but key interactive elements (buttons, inputs, lists) are usually exposed. You can check what's available with:

curl "localhost:7878/windows/{pid}/find?interactive=true"
by vunderba | 2026-03-07 20:54:07+00:00
This post is rather peak irony given that your very first post on Hacker News is basically soliciting feedback. Your karma is ONE and you seemingly have never participated in any other threads or given feedback to anyone else yourself.

I take a little time out of my day each week to browse "Show New" and offer some constructive feedback. I wish others would do the same, but c’est la vie.

As for your idea there have been a few attempts at this in the past, usually in smaller more intimate settings. I’m part of a private Discord with only about a dozen other devs who do exactly this, but we all know each other, so there’s a camaraderie that encourages everyone to share and give feedback.
by fsflover | 2026-03-07 20:54:21+00:00
> Sure, if you switch off every kill switch you're in pretty good shape for the time being.

So you confirm that you and strcat were spreading false information about Librem 5 with a convincing tone, while saying that you're "sharpest security minds on the planet" and calling me "disingenuous"?

> Same as if you turn off all radios and sensors on a GrapheneOS device.

This is plain false. Software switches can never be as secure as cutting power from hardware components. Are you saying that GrapheneOS can reliably save you from tracking by a state actor? This is very unlikely. The number of lines of code in Trusted Computing Base of GrapheneOS is likely similar to one in the monolithic Linux kernel (10 MM lines of code, https://doc.qubes-os.org/en/latest/developer/system/security...). (I would be happy to be corrected if I'm wrong here.) This is why it can never be as reliable as hardware virtualization relying on 100000 LoC. I'm happy that GrapheneOS is going to add the virtualization btw.

> Saying you can't imagine how something could be more secure than your Qubes setup is a better indication of your ability to imagine than it is of any security reality.

You walls of text are so large and not always constructive, because they frequently contain personal attacks like this one (and words like "disingenuous" I mentioned above).

> You ask basic, easily researched questions relentlessly

If this is so basic, I don't understand why you are making so many false or implausible claims and do not just give me a link with a simple, high-level explanation for noobs like me. Instead you keep attacking me and presenting yourself as very smart, with words like these.

I agree with you that GrapheneOS is a very important project. I disagree that trying to point out its weaknesses or ways to improve it harms the project. I also would like to add that Librem 5 is similarly important project, and you unnecessarily harm it with your false claims. Some people come to discussions about GrapheneOS asking to get root of rely more on free drivers, or expand the supported devices by lowering security requirements. My replies about Librem 5 to these people do not harm GrapheneOS, since they aren't your target audience anyway. I just help them to find what they want.
by alsetmusic | 2026-03-07 20:54:23+00:00
I debated heavily whether I'd stay in tech or change my career almost a decade ago. I concluded that the only other profession that I considered rewarding (at that time) would be to become a professor of history. Making history interesting to even one student per semester would be a win.

In the end, I remembered how much I hated schooling. This is despite being a huge fan of education. It wasn't realistic to think that I'd complete the work needed for accreditation.

Regardless, I'm happy today having selected for the thing that I already knew. I hope you also find yourself satisfied. It's lonely feeling lost when evaluating a thing you'd known through a new paradigm.
by mmooss | 2026-03-07 20:54:44+00:00
If you respect and consider ideas that conflict with your own, that's how you can learn new things.

Many factors influence economics; climate change is one part of the equation. There are many examples of climate change's direct impact so far - floods, fires, sea-level rise (requiring investment in massive public works), droughts, etc. I don't think it's debatable that these things have negative economic impact.

Climate change is expected to greatly increase its impact in many ways. Let's not wait until it overcomes all other factors in economic growth and makes our economies shrink.
by anonym00se1 | 2026-03-07 20:54:59+00:00
TMJ disorders are linked to tinnitus because of the nerves that run near it. In my case, if I force an underbite I can make both of my ears ring but I don't have any TMJ issues.

There are some physical therapists (also dentists) that focus on maxillofacial dysfunction and TMJ disorders, so that's an avenue to go down as well.

The other two common reasons for tinnitus:

* Hearing damage (gunshots, explosions, etc.) and those are not reversible as of yet

* Ototoxic drugs. When I last did research on it it years ago, like hearing damage from gunshots, was also irreversible.
by steve1977 | 2026-03-07 20:55:42+00:00
Well know that you mention that, my very first steps actually were with Soundmonitor on a C64, one of the OG trackers probably (even though not called tracker yet IIRC). I kind of forgot about that, as that was still very amateurish (I mean what I made with it, not the software).

https://www.c64-wiki.de/images/f/f1/rockmon3.png

Or also at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw&t=400s in the video already linked below. And yes, I had to type in that listing.
by stif1337 | 2026-03-07 20:55:43+00:00
No toolkit dependency, OculOS reads the OS-level accessibility tree, which is toolkit-agnostic:

- Windows: UI Automation (works with Win32, WPF, WinForms, Qt, Electron)
- Linux: AT-SPI2 (GTK, Qt, Electron)
- macOS: AXUIElement (Cocoa, Qt, Electron)

The coverage varies by toolkit. Win32/WPF/GTK expose rich trees. Electron apps expose key elements but the tree is shallower. Custom-drawn UIs (games, OpenGL) have minimal or no accessibility tree. That's the main limitation.
by pinkmuffinere | 2026-03-07 20:55:50+00:00
> Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was not, it’s safe to assume, a devoted Polymarket user. If he had been, the Iranian leader might still be alive. Hours before Khamenei’s compound in Tehran was reduced to rubble last week, an account under the username “magamyman” bet about $20,000 that the supreme leader would no longer be in power by the end of March.

I know this is more for the drama than an actual claim, but it made me wonder -- is this bet a remarkable occurence in the data, or just one trade in a sea of similar trades? _Would_ somebody have been able to guess it? I looked for the original market, and am surprised by two things:

1. There was lots of activity around that value when the order was placed, so I don't think the trade would have alerted anyone [1].

2. Polymarket lists the trade as happening _19 days ago_, Feb 16! I don't understand why polymarket says it happened feb 16, when all the news I've seen reports it happening just before the strikes. I'm guessing there's a bug in the way polymarket displays past trades?

Note that if polymarket is displaying the history of trades incorrectly, my claim #1 probably doesn't hold.

[1] https://snipboard.io/DP1MWK.jpg
by xantronix | 2026-03-07 20:56:03+00:00
I can't help but think that the logical conclusion of spec-first development is a return to Waterfall methodology. The amount of rigour required almost entirely negates the speed advantages of LLMs, even in the hands of seasoned developers. Unless the stakeholders are external, there will always be that necessary organisational bottleneck; of course, the C-suite could always decide to foist project management entirely on individual contributors, or take it on themselves, but I see that ending either in burnout or eventual neglect. All in the service of being on the forefront of adoption, and for what end?