MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stopbulying | 2026-03-11 07:26:11+00:00
And also back then we had Enron speculating on electricity while there were rolling blackouts even for hospitals in CA.

Tapes reveal Enron's secret role in California's power blackouts https://www.theguardian.com/business/2005/feb/05/enron.usnew...

> the energy corporation Enron shut down at least one power plant on false pretences, deliberately aggravating California's crippling 2001 blackouts with the aim of raising prices.

Rolling blackout : USA : CA 2000-2001
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_blackout

Enron scandal: 2001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal
by tovej | 2026-03-11 07:26:26+00:00
You cannot claim that a formulaic thesaurusing of a text is parody, not unless the process is related to the message of the original text itself. Even then, that's a dubious claim. Especially if it was done automatically.

I can just as well say that a translated work contains "linguistic observations". In fact a translator has to do a lot of transformative work in order to translate a text.

An LLM just takes a set of texts, looks at n-gram distributions, and generates similar text. It is quite literally a fuzzy way of copying. There aren't any mathematical observations in the output. Any math (statistics) is done in the copying process.
by ajuc | 2026-03-11 07:26:28+00:00
Might be as simple as cost/effect in resource-constrained environment.

Inflamation uses up resources. When we were hunter-gatherers and had to survived ice ages - it wasn't a good idea to waste calories and vitamins just in case.

Better for 3 people out of 30 to die of flu than for all 30 to starve.

Nowadays the optimal trade-off might be completely different.
by 4gotunameagain | 2026-03-11 07:26:34+00:00
Have you seen population pyramids for the west ?

There will be too few people.

Additionally I will argue that if you care about the environment and our planet, it is your duty to have children and educate them about all these things.

Regarding the doomerism, I will brush it off as internet caused (too much news/social media)

Nobody knows what is going to happen and where. For all we know things might go amazing. It doesn't look like it, sure.
by risyachka | 2026-03-11 07:26:36+00:00
>> If others with AI will deliver that value cheaper...

That's the most interesting thing - in 99.9% they don't.
All their value is negated by lowering code base quality, pushing slop to prod ("but code reviews..." - don't help sorry, unless you spent a long time getting to understand a problem - simply reading a solution gives only false confidence that you understood it - you didn't, not fully). E.g. see all the outages at amazon, cloudflare, etc.

Quick short term wins lead to big longer term losses - and this is already happening.

The issue is - its basically impossible to make decision makers see this as this requires many years of expertise in tech, and it is very not obvious, and sounds like you just don't want to rely on AI to replace you etc etc.

While selling AI is easy - "look! it did this feature in 5 minutes! so much productivity".
by kindkang2024 | 2026-03-11 07:26:55+00:00
> Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

What counts as a return is quite subjective — it goes beyond money. Respect, happiness, meaning — all of these count.

Given that, if there are no returns at all, I bet that is not a positive-sum game that could last long. Like if you give and create value for others, but the recipient has no respect for you and you receive nothing — it is not meaningful and will not last long. And you'd better walk away and start worrying about the returns.

And to be frank, look at who creates the most value in the world — they also could be the richest. That is no coincidence. Take Elon Musk — tremendous positive-sum deals with people everywhere, and all together, that's what got him to the top.

Kudos to all the entrepreneurs who work hard and create deal opportunities that could make everyone win.
by pnt12 | 2026-03-11 07:27:44+00:00
Just because two things are "annoying", doesn't mean they have the same ethical problems.

The fun single player games only need to convince you they are a fun experience and you should buy them once.

Games with loot boxes are trying to convince you every day to spend money on them. Dunno about roblox, but often the items are visible, and "defaults" are often perceived as poor or noobs.

We can't be naive: It's a whole other level and companies are spending millions on manipulating kids to spending more and more money.
by bonesss | 2026-03-11 07:28:07+00:00
Zuckerberg runs a company beholden to its platform operators: Apple, Google, and Microsoft who dictate online advertising access.

Metas investments into VR make abundant sense as an effort to capitalize on a market where Meta was leading, has mindshare, and owns the platform (Oculus). If the bet paid off, or pays off, it would create a sorely lacking competitive moat and potentially provide Enterprise inroads where Meta is otherwise a non-player.

Apple went down the same road, they see the same potential profits. I don’t think either is guilty of contemporaneous dot-com-boom thinking or investments with regard to VR/AR.

Carmack was on board, he remembers Pets.com too.
by jarjoura | 2026-03-11 07:28:36+00:00
This whole article is nonsense.

Yes, the Trump administration fucked over a decade of university research with his weird DEI campaign. That same fuckery also blew up all kinds of research grants not tied to universities. I'm sure some of us here know someone directly impacted by that decision. It was cruel and ruthless.

Otherwise, everything else that article talks about is a nothing-burger.

I can't tell you my professors' political beliefs, nor did I care. I went to school to learn about the world and topics that interested me. If there was a professor who tried to radicalize me or speak about things I didn't agree with, I would have dropped the class.

Some students are like me, and are there loving the process of learning. Other students couldn't care less, and are happy just to get the grade and get out of there. Either way, if a teacher is going to make a course an extension of their personal beliefs, I highly doubt any student will suddenly assimilate if they didn't already agree. They'll just bitch to their friends that the professor is some wacko, and roll their eyes.

No no, some conservatives are just trying to do what they love doing and that's get academics worked up and divided for empty rhetoric.
by alfiedotwtf | 2026-03-11 07:28:44+00:00
Over 60% are SUSE?! Sorry, but I’m with everyone else…

I remember since the start that SUSE was more popular in Europe, but no way would that be the case in the US. If anything, I’d be willing to put my money on > 60% of Linux installs being RHEL/Centos rather than SUSE
by austin-cheney | 2026-03-11 07:29:35+00:00
Through all of my career there have only been two career routes:

1. Do what others cannot

2. Do what is most trendy

I always followed route 1, which mostly harmed my career as a JavaScript developer. I no longer know what the best answer is, at least for juniors. Now that I am in management in a niche area route 1 is all that matters, but it still bristles at personalities that are higher neurotic.
by IshKebab | 2026-03-11 07:32:04+00:00
I think having separate unaligned load/store instructions would be a much worse design, not least because they use a lot of the opcode space. I don't understand why you don't just have an option to not generate misaligned loads for people that happen to be running on CPUs where it's really slow. You don't need to wait for a profile for that.

As for `seed`, if you're running on a microcontroller you can just look up the data sheet to see if it's seed entropy is sufficient. By the time you get to CPUs where portable code is important a CSPRNG is probably fine.

I agree about page size though. Svnapot seems overly complicated and gives only a fraction of the advantages of actually bigger pages.
by VerifiedReports | 2026-03-11 07:32:39+00:00
Windows is such an offensive, defect-ridden pile of shit now that every PC maker should be blaming Microsoft for their inability to compete with the Neo.

I bought my parents Asus laptops years ago, and can't wait to replace them with a Neo.

Microsoft has spurned and scorned users. Now it's time for computer makers to push back and reject its shit. I'd love to see a consortium of computer makers come together to refine a Linux distro that's consumer-friendly enough to oust Windows and compete with Mac OS.
by iberator | 2026-03-11 07:34:19+00:00
It's nearly impossible to know or to implement all utf-8/16 as beside of UTF support you need also to provide fonts for each. Thousands of scalable fonts - takes a lot of memory. That's why using such characters is risky as somewhere on the path such font will be displayed aa trash. (logs to email to presentation to word to excel to csv to database for example)

For years Ł support on Python on windows for example broke sometimes when imported from poor quality Excel files haha
by sfink | 2026-03-11 07:34:31+00:00
True, creating value isn't sufficient. But if you're creating value, you don't need that community; that community needs you. That doesn't mean it'll be easy to leave nor that you won't lose a lot by doing so, but it's better than being a leech. Leeches can only survive by finding another victim to suck blood from, and at some point that merry-go-round is going to run out of horsies. Pardon the mixed metaphors.
by OKRainbowKid | 2026-03-11 07:34:32+00:00
You are accusing me of belittling "you", after you wrote "gaga show".

That's ironic. And no, money is not flowing in one direction only. As I already wrote, Bavarian industry is effectively massively subsidized by the north investing massively in renewable energy production and overpaying for their own energy because demand is driven by the south (who is fighting tooth and nails against building their own wind turbines for ideological reasons).

Greetings from Hessen (another Geberland, just like Bavarian, but without the Bavarian exceptionalism, which most of Germany just sees as arrogance)!
by tovej | 2026-03-11 07:35:10+00:00
Why are you taking the LLM-hallucinated version of the argument as truth? I even clearly stated how the LLM-version of my claim is a misunderstood version of the argument.

Do you remember the point we're arguing? That a human can understand text about a way of writing, and apply that information to the _process_ of writing (not the output).

If you admit the LLM can't do this, then you are conceding the point.

I don't know why you're claiming that humans can't do this when we very clearly can.

An illustrative example: I could describe a new way of rhyming to a human without an example, and they could produce a rhyme without an example. However describing this new rhyming scheme to an LLM without examples would not yield any results. (Rhyming is a bad example to test, however, because the LLM corpi have plenty of examples).
by ashmil | 2026-03-11 07:35:39+00:00
Hi HN,

I was spending over 5 hours manually testing my Agentic AI application before every patch and release. While automating my API and backend tests was straightforward, testing the actual chat UI was a massive bottleneck. I had to sit there, type out prompts, wait for the AI to respond, read the output, and ask follow-up questions. As the app grew, releases started taking longer just because of manual QA.

To solve this, I built Mantis. It’s an automated UI testing tool designed specifically to evaluate LLM and Agentic AI applications right from the browser.

Here is how it works under the hood:

Define Cases: You define the use cases and specific test cases you want to evaluate for your LLM app.

Browser Automation: A Chrome agent takes control of your application's UI in a tab.

Execution: It simulates a real user by typing the test questions into the chat UI and clicking send.

Evaluation: It waits for the response, analyzes the LLM's output, and can even ask context-aware follow-up questions if the test case requires it.

Reporting: Once a sequence is complete, it moves to the next test case. Everything is logged and aggregated into a dashboard report.

The biggest win for me is that I can now just kick off a test run in a background Chrome tab and get back to writing code while Mantis handles the tedious chat testing.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. How are you all handling end-to-end UI testing for your chat apps and AI agents? Any feedback or questions on the approach are welcome!
by remuskaos | 2026-03-11 07:36:05+00:00
I've only recently gotten a MacBook after using Linux Pretty much exclusively for over twenty years. And I have to say I'm really surprised how much I like it. For gaming it's all right, but not great. Factorio works but not much else.

But for that I still have my Bazzite or Steam Deck. I really encourage you to try Linux for gaming. It's incredible what Valve has achieved on that front.
by jspdown | 2026-03-11 07:36:11+00:00
At this stage, AI is no longer a tool that enhances your ability to ship code, it has replaced you entirely in that role. You don't control what is shipped, and you can't verify if it's correct. That's a serious problem! As software engineers, we remain accountable for code we no longer fully understand.

Then, what comes next feels less like a new software practice and more like a new religion, where trust has to replaces understanding, and the code is no longer ours to question.
by PaulmHope | 2026-03-11 07:36:19+00:00
A bit more context on why I built this:

When I use AI for research I often check several models because answers sometimes contradict each other.

MetaLayer sends the query to multiple models and then synthesizes a consensus outcome so you can see where they agree.

Right now it's still early and I'm experimenting with the scoring and how consensus is calculated.

If anyone here regularly compares answers between models I'd be interested to hear how you approach it.
Prisoner's Dilemma in World Baseball Classic for Mexico and Italy Threatens USA
by travisjungroth | 2026-03-11 07:37:44+00:00
With USA losing to Italy 8-6 in the group stage, tie breaking rules are at play.

Only two of these three teams can advance. Italy and Mexico are set to play each other at 7pm ET tomorrow.

Winner advances.

If Mexico wins with 4 or less runs, they both advance. (Maybe as many as 5 in an extra innings situation).

Italy advancing by winning would give them a better seed than by losing.

This creates a situation where Mexico winning with a low score lets them both advance. Going for this intentionally would be cooperation. Going straight for the win is defecting.
by gustawdaniel | 2026-03-11 07:38:39+00:00
I’ve been experimenting with hash map designs that prioritize CPU prefetcher efficiency over algorithmic complexity. The result is compact-dict, a Rust implementation that focuses on strict memory contiguity.

While modern standards like hashbrown (SwissTables) are highly optimized with SIMD, I wanted to see if a "brutalist" approach using Linear Probing and a Continuous Memory Layout could outperform them by better utilizing L1/L2 cache lines.

The core thesis: Modern CPUs are so efficient at sequential memory access that the overhead of pointer chasing (separate chaining) or even the complexity of metadata-based probing can become a bottleneck for small to medium-sized datasets. By keeping everything in a single, predictable slab of memory, we maximize cache hits.

Current trade-offs:

Append-only: I’ve intentionally deferred deletion support to avoid the performance penalties of tombstones or backward-shifting, focusing purely on lookup throughput.

Load Factor: Performance is sensitive to clustering, so it’s optimized for a load factor < 0.7.

The benchmarks show it trading blows with hashbrown in specific lookup-heavy workloads. I’m curious if the HN community thinks "hardware-first" simplicity is a viable path forward for specialized collections, or if the safety/generality of SwissTables will always win out.

Repo: https://github.com/gustawdaniel/compact-dict

I'd appreciate a technical roast of my unsafe pointer arithmetic and any thoughts on cache-line utilization.
by gib444 | 2026-03-11 07:39:42+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/mar/11/shabana-mah...

I don't support that organisation, but I support the right not to be banned from walking in protest, in a pre policing move.

You can bet the static protest people will be kettled too as a defensive measure. I don't support frightening makeshift imprisonment in the street.

I don't support the requirement to get permission from the police to walk in protest either

Tell me: how much change you think you can effect with a few people stood static, self policing your words as not to cause offence to anyone, and then likely kettled by the police? Tell me that isn't banning protest

You're basically permitted to stand silent with a totally inoffensive sign (offensive or potentially to absolutely nobody) in a very small group that attracts no attention
by OptionIncome | 2026-03-11 07:39:48+00:00
OptionIncome is an option trade tracker and options analytics platform that helps traders automatically track option trades, analyze performance, and understand their real trading results.

Active option traders often manage many positions across different symbols, strategies, and expiration cycles. OptionIncome acts as an automated option trading journal and options portfolio tracker, organizing your entire trading activity into a single analytics dashboard.

Users can connect brokerage accounts to automatically import option trades, equity positions, and historical transactions. The platform then structures this data into clear analytics that help traders track performance across symbols, strategies, and time periods.

OptionIncome helps traders analyze real trading performance by consolidating trade history, tracking rolling positions, and organizing complex option activity that is difficult to manage with spreadsheets.

Key capabilities include:

1.Automatic option trade tracking across brokerage accounts

2.Option trading journal that records historical trades and performance

3.Options portfolio analytics to evaluate profit and loss over time

4.Symbol-level trade history to analyze performance on specific stocks

5.Strategy insights to understand how different option strategies perform

6.Unified dashboard to monitor positions and portfolio activity in one place

Instead of maintaining spreadsheets or manual journals, OptionIncome provides a dedicated platform to track option trades, analyze trading performance, and gain deeper insights into your options portfolio.
by bdbdbdb | 2026-03-11 07:39:53+00:00
600 is a bargain for a MacBook, but I can't see the public windows users switching en masse. Most people who buy cheap windows laptops do so because
1) they need to replace a broken laptop and want to pay the lowest amount possible
2) they don't want to learn some new thing

600 might seem budget, but it's out of budget for most people. And my guess is PC manufacturers will retaliate against this by cutting prices just a little to drop under that 600 price point for mid range ryzens, with more ram and space.

Any family members I've helped shop for computers only care about how much space it has, how cheap it is, and will it struggle to run things like the last one. As it sits the MacBook is more money for less gigabytes
by PunchyHamster | 2026-03-11 07:40:16+00:00
> I'd MUCH rather see a holistic embrace and integration of these tools into our ecosystems. Telling people "no AI!" (even if very well defined on what that means) is toothless against people with little regard for making the world (or just one specific repo) a better place.

If it makes them go thru AI contributions to make sure there is no AI nonsense in them, that's already massive win.

The AI on itself is not a problem

> But, on the flip side, I personally advocate hard for AI from the point-of-view on accessibility. I know (more-or-less) exactly what output I'm aiming for and control that obsessively, but it's AI and my voice at the helm instead of my fingertips.

and you are the 1% (assuming your claims are true and not hallucinated gains, which are common in AI world too), vast majority of AI contributions are peak lazy, or at best goal-seeking with no regard of the target, consequences or quality

THAT is what people complain about. If AI was just used to shortcut the boring, augument the knowledge and produce better quality code, there would be very little arugments against AI-driven contributions. But that is not the case, the AI pundits will purposefully not check the AI output just because that would require time and knowledge and that looks bad on "how faster AI makes you" KPI
by latenightcoding | 2026-03-11 07:40:16+00:00
>> Go create value for others and don’t worry about the returns.

This is just so disconnected with reality. Any new worthwhile project will take few months of full-time work minimum, how many people can invest few months of unpaid full-time work with no guarantees of success. and that's not even considering the amount of time it takes to acquire the necessary skills.
by jarjoura | 2026-03-11 07:40:26+00:00
VR was never the endgame though. It was always AR, except, the "metaverse" bet assumed people were going to adopt AR in the same abundance that they adopted phones.

It was a cool concept, when you were dreaming it up while taking a shower in the morning getting ready for work thinking about the next big idea.

However, it's like those weird Uber/Lyft scooters that popped up in the 2010s. Those things were a cool concept too. However, we got to see right away that it was a terrible business idea for all kinds of reasons.

It took Meta several years (decade +) and 10s of billions of dollars and layoffs to realize, AR was a terrible business idea.

VR is a fun hobby though, and Oculus definitely owns that space.
by kprotty | 2026-03-11 07:40:38+00:00
I've worked on two "production" zig codebases: tigerbeetle [0] and sig [1].

These larger zig projects will stick to a tagged release (which doesn't change), and upgrade to newly tagged releases, usually a few days or months after they come out. The upgrade itself takes like a week, depending on the amount of changes to be done. These projects also tend to not use other zig dependencies.

[0]: https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/pulls?q=is%3Apr+a...

[1]: https://github.com/Syndica/sig/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Akpro...
by vdelitz | 2026-03-11 07:41:39+00:00
Have to disagree with the author's opinion. I think he compares passkeys only to passwords (single factor) and assume people always use autofill.

But you should compare the passkey UX to conventional MFA UX. I think there it's obvious that passkeys are superior (+ the phishing resistance on top. Even if non-tech-savvy users would like to disclose their credentials on a fraud website, they couldn't).

What do you think?
by orbital-decay | 2026-03-11 07:42:50+00:00
It's more complicated than that, the entire former soviet union area was (and is) a huge cybercrime outsourcing market. There are tons of little groups specializing on certain things and selling their services to others. Most notorious "Russian" or "Ukrainian" groups are just visible parts of transnational networks, and depend on the services of others in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Baltics etc. In 2022 the supply chain got partially severed for ransomware and CC fraud in particular, however the black market still functions despite the war.
by flowerthoughts | 2026-03-11 07:48:39+00:00
Old compilers tended to make it a compile-time switch which backends were included, probably because backends were "huge", so they were left out. (The insn lookup table in GCC took ages to generate and compile.) And of course all development environments running on Windows assumed x86 was the only architecture.

With LLVM existing, cross-compiling is not a problem anymore, but it means you can't run tests without an emulator. So it might just be easier to do it all on the target machine.