MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vunderba | 2026-03-07 15:57:28+00:00
Nice job~~

As a someone who recently built a chess app with Stockfish (WASM with a fallback to the server, see my profile if interested), just be aware that if your application becomes even moderately successful, a couple dozen users hitting your Stockfish server concurrently is very likely to be slower than running individual Stockfish WASM on the client side unless you significantly beef up your backend.
by rolandog | 2026-03-07 15:58:38+00:00
It feels like "they're" pulling the ladder after building the surveillance state with our free tools.

I wonder if "they're" trying to install a Nomenklatura-style [0] government.

[0]: Alison "alimcforever" McIntyre, The Soviet "communist" elite was already a owning class. <https://youtu.be/QYRMgjKTy1s>
by VLM | 2026-03-07 15:58:39+00:00
400 yen for a ten pack is more like $2.50 than $5

Typical markup in the USA is 100% from wholesaler to retail. Running brick and mortar is very expensive. So if Walgreens were selling this, the wholesale price would be $1.25. I think it reasonable to expect the Yakult Ladies are pulling in the same $1.25 per package that walgreens gets.

The key, I think, is "Most of them are self-employed". Its a gig economy idea. You have to eat. If you're walking home from the store anyway (or kids school or on the way home from work or whatever), you may as well deliver packages for $1.25 each on the way home. You're walking home anyway, you may as well make free money on the walk.
by JKCalhoun | 2026-03-07 15:58:41+00:00
"Spark" might be putting too fine a point on it if I am being honest (and I always am, ha ha).

But I vibe-coded a web site [1] that I would not have otherwise attempted (I just didn't want to have to figure out how to learn a map-type framework in order to put little points-of-interest on a web page.)

I also vote-coded an extremely esoteric app for turning .mpo files into stereograms that you can then print to display in an old-fashioned stereoscope [2].

I have lately been learning (I hope?) to build a hobbyist analog computer. This a deep dive into electronics—something I have no training in.

And I have already queued up a couple of my abandoned projects (also esoteric) that I hope to turn an LLM loose on when I free up some time (from my current analog computing obsession).

It's hard to say if I would not have pursued all the above without an LLM. I am giving examples though of projects that I feel were sort of on the tipping point for me as to whether they were worth the effort to pursue or not—the learning-curve-required vs. useful-end-product balance. I am finding the LLMs are a finger on the scale tipping it more often toward "Go for it." Maybe you would call that a "spark"?

[1] (where I map out the location of a pair of YouTubers that have been road-tripping the U.S. for over three years) https://engineersneedart.com/OneAdvanture/

[2] https://engineersneedart.com/stereographer/stereographer.htm...
by deaux | 2026-03-07 15:58:46+00:00
> This is my experience with how LLMs "draft" legal arguments: at first glance, it's plausible — but may be, and often is, invalid, unsound, and/or ill-advised.

Correct, and this of course extends past just laws, into the whole scope of rules and regulations described in human languages. It will by its nature imply things that aren't explicitly stated nor can be derived with certainty, just because they're very plausible. And those implications can be wrong.

Now I've had decent success with having LLMs then review these LLM-generated texts to flag such occurences where things aren't directly supported by the source material. But human review is still necessary.

The cases I've been dealing with are also based on relatively small sets of regulations compared the scope of the law involved with many legal cases. So I imagine that in the domain you're working on, much more needs flagging.
by tarr11 | 2026-03-07 15:59:59+00:00
52 here, been a full time people manager for about a decade now. Coding manually makes me tired just thinking about it. When I think about embark on a new project my mind goes back to all the times I worked 12 hour days trying to get some basic system to function. I’m too old for that now, my back hurts if I sit too long and occasionally get migraines if I look at a screen too much.

Using AI has been really perfect for me. I can build stuff while I do other things, walk the dog, make lunch, sit on the porch.

Sometimes i realize that my design was flawed and I just delete it all and start again, with no loss aversion.
by ZeroGravitas | 2026-03-07 16:00:02+00:00
Does it work if you get the agent to throw away all of its actual implementation and start again from scratch, keeping all the learning and tests and feedback?

Gemini seems to try to get a lot of information upfront with questions and plans but people are famously bad at knowing what they want.

Maybe it should build a series of prototypes and spikes to check? If making code is cheap then why not?
by SloopJon | 2026-03-07 16:00:18+00:00
An editor that tries to be layout agnostic is almost certainly going to be a nightmare for people like me who set the layout in the keyboard itself. I downloaded the editor (I'm on Windows at the moment), and tried it with my keyboard set to Dvorak, which was plainly broken. I'm sure there's a way to fix the mapping, but when software thinks it's smarter than you, you end up feeling pretty dumb.
by accrual | 2026-03-07 16:00:29+00:00
> Is it highly available like more regular DIMM or SODIMM ram?

I imagine it will be kind of like USB-C. It's new and uncommon for a few years until suddenly everywhere you look has piles of it.

Edge connector RAM may one day be looked back on as "old style memory" like SIPP and DIPP is now.
by enraged_camel | 2026-03-07 16:00:38+00:00
I have no idea what I'm doing differently because I haven't experienced this since Opus 4.5. Even with Sonnet 4.5, providing explicit instructions along the lines of "reuse code where sensible, then run static analysis tools at the end and delete unused code it flags" worked really well.

I always watch Opus work, and it is pretty good with "add code, re-read the module, realize some pre-existing code (either it wrote, or was already there) is no longer needed and delete it", even without my explicit prompts.
by jrm4 | 2026-03-07 16:00:46+00:00
So important across the board.

Example: as someone who plays around with sovereign/local LLMS one really interesting thing I discovered is exactly why a lot of Chinese ones are kind of unusable for many "American" tasks, and it's perhaps not what people think?

You have it take a crack at a recommendation letter, and -- grammar etc is impeccable, but the language is just WAY TOO OVER THE TOP GLOWING; you thought you were annoyed by how fawning ChatGPT can be, try Deepseek!

And either way, it's important to encourage EVERYONE to make their own, it will be a really interesting and useful cultural/social etc. window.
by thenamo | 2026-03-07 16:01:22+00:00
So, guys/gals here is my story, I was losing my best ideas. Notes scattered across Notion, Google Docs, Apple Notes, Discord messages, random text files and customization loopholes. By the time I needed them, they were gone—buried in forgotten folders or replaced by newer notes.

So I built KnowDust—a markdown-first note app with Git-like version history, I am the app's first user It solved my own problem couldn't be any happier, and app is getting users.

No overwrites, no lost context, just focused writing with snapshot backups.

Shipped the demo previous month. Already getting traction.

Share your thoughts guys give me feedback what to add next.
by conductr | 2026-03-07 16:01:28+00:00
May be normal but also no reason to not get it checked out. Or at least mention at your next regular doctor appointment. Kidney disease is not binary and has phases, you might be getting an early warning sign with your sweat. You might just need to hydrate more as you sweat more.

I worked in the kidney industry for a bit after the hospital thing and it’s something you don’t want to mess with. You can significantly delay the need for transplant if you catch it early.
by matt_heimer | 2026-03-07 16:01:36+00:00
I still host one of those 20+ year old forums. The Fediverse is different. With forums (and HN/Reddit) you immediately had good sense of them being for you or not. With the Fediverse to have to commit to servers and even then you don't know if they are right for you unless you try and speed time customizing your feeds/follows. It's a lot of work and you don't know if it will pay off. I tried again today and so much of it has no focus at all. It reminds me of this exchange from the Good Place TV show:

Chidi Anagonye: So, making decisions isn't necessarily my strong suit.

Michael: I know that, buddy. You-you once had a panic attack at a make-your-own sundae bar.

Chidi Anagonye: There were too many toppings, and very early in the process, you had to commit to a chocolate palette or a fruit palette. And if you couldn't decide, you wound up with kiwi-Junior Mint-raisin, and it just ruins everyone's night.
by ksherlock | 2026-03-07 16:01:42+00:00
I had the same question about dropping HN earlier this week, and it's entirely from the the AI overflow (most of it low quality, IMO). For now, I've decided to be the change so instead I flag and hide.

Banning new/green account from submitting would probably help. /ask is full of green How do I AI? posts.
by zora_goron | 2026-03-07 16:01:55+00:00
I'm currently an Internal Medicine resident physician; I studied computer science before medicine and worked in Natural Language Processing, and currently working on clinical LLM research, deployment, and evals alongside my clinical training.

Many of the academic medical institutions (at least here in the US) have very interesting roles that balance both clinical practice and software engineering/research. If that sounds interesting, I would definitely recommend reaching out to clinicians running those labs!

Happy to chat more if I can be of help - my contacts (twitter/email) are on my website in my HN profile!
by coffeebeqn | 2026-03-07 16:02:19+00:00
There were quite a few mind blowing upgrades back in the day. The first sound card instead of PC beeper was one of my most memorable moments.

I remember loading up Doom, plugging my shitty earplugs that had a barely long enough cable and hearing the “real” shotgun sound for the first time. Oo-wee
by andai | 2026-03-07 16:02:21+00:00
> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

-Michael Crichton
by garyfirestorm | 2026-03-07 16:02:24+00:00
The ideology has an inherent toxicity to it, along with a self own, doubling down on mistakes that would harm you and the others in longer run, embracing silly ideas and a general disregard for niceties.
Would have been nice if they didn’t hurt their own fans like that could be simply phrased as ‘being MAGA’
by ses1984 | 2026-03-07 16:02:29+00:00
Free speech does exist in the law, not just as an ethical ideal. The law states that the government can’t infringe on your speech.

Anyone who is not the government is free to block your ass if they don’t like you or what you’re saying.

Not all speech is worth defending. The only people who benefit from free speech absolutism are the ones with only horrible things to say.
by ericpp | 2026-03-07 16:02:35+00:00
I first got it in 2015 after playing Fallout 4 almost nonstop for the entire weekend. The game ran poorly and the low stuttery fps caused a massive migraine in my head. I took Tylenol and went to sleep and woke up with it ringing in one of my ears which eventually moved to both. The doctors were pretty useless and said they couldn't see anything wrong and to just live with it.

My brain eventually figured out how to tune it out and now it associates the sound with silence.

Now I've developed it again after feeling depressed and blasting music in my car. The new version crackles and alternates tones in my left ear. I have a doctors appointment coming up to hopefully figure it out.

There is a new expensive treatment for it called Lenore which works by playing sounds and stimulating your tongue at the same time. Those pathways are located close together in the brain and by stimulating both at the same time, it's supposed to train it to filter out the noise.
by signatoremo | 2026-03-07 16:02:36+00:00
> here’s no democracy in being mostly beholden to a few companies which own the largest and most powerful models, who can cut you off at any time, jack up the prices to inaccessibility, or unilaterally change the terms of the deal.

That would not happen, simply because those companies' interest will never be aligned entirely. There are at least three SOA models at the moment plus many open weight models. Anthropic vs. Pentagon is exactly what would play out.

And what is a precedence? Don't say Google, because search is well and alive.

> You know what’s truly “democratic” and without “gatekeeping”? Exactly what we had before, an internet run by collaboration filled with free resources for anyone keen enough to learn.

We have way more free resources at the moment. Name anything you'd like to learn, someone will be able to point you to a relevant resource. There are also better ways of surfacing that resource.

> This parroted argument

Most of arguments here on HN have been discussed ad nauseam, for or against AI. It's only parroted (or biased) if it's against your own beliefs.
by HoldOnAMinute | 2026-03-07 16:03:26+00:00
The primary reason I do programming is for me. I'm 51. It's always been that way for me.

First with LOGO on the Apple ][, making the turtle move around the screen and follow your commands. It was magic.

Then discovering BASIC, and the ability to turn the pixels on and off and make them any color you like.

Making my Amiga talk with the "SAY" command.

The first time I dialed a BBS in the dead of night with my Commodore 64 and my 300 baud modem, watching those colorful letters sloowly make their way across the TV screen...

Running my own BBS software and dialing in from my cousin's house at Thanksgiving...

Putting up my own web page and cgi-bin scripts....

It's all been magic, and it's all been just for me.

So when you remove everything else, all the cruft and crap,

I will still be programming just for me.
by righthand | 2026-03-07 16:04:03+00:00
Arguably never has their been a Potus willing to destroy the economy. Potus can pull levers to try and boost the economy which is more or less at the whim of everyone else participating. That is the truth that was being referred to before. Now we have a Potus bent on destroying it so the levers he pulls are actually effecting the economy in ways. But he still doesn’t control it.
by switchbak | 2026-03-07 16:04:27+00:00
“yet I don't have to know or care about implementation details”

Implementation details can very much matter though. I see this attitude from my managers that now submit huge PRs, and it is becoming a big problem.

I definitely agree that these tools allow one with an in-depth developer background to cover territory that was too much work previously. But plop me into a Haskell codebase, and I guarantee I’d cause all kinds of problems even with the best intentions and newest models. But the ramp up for learning these things has collapsed dramatically, and that’s very cool.

I still don’t want to have to learn all the pitfalls of those frameworks though. Hopefully we will converge on a smaller number, even if it’s on tooling that isn’t my favourite.
by ay | 2026-03-07 16:04:31+00:00
I am 50, coding since ~12. Started with Apple II, during the uni times wrote my own editor in assembly for BK-0010 (a soviet computer), then 30 years in computer networking with some high performance dataplane stuff more recently;

The last years somehow it felt like there’s nothing new anymore, the same 10 ideas being regurgitated with slight modifications. I tinkered with AI for the past 2 years but it was mostly a “tool for writing boilerplate”. I have tried a few ideas for agents but didn’t see how it could work.

That changed with Opus 4.6 and the subsequent wave of local models - now I try 10 ideas a day and it’s like magic! And if something doesn’t work - jumping into the code and debugging it is huge fun!

Understanding that the era of the almost-free cloud tokens might come to an end, I run my own harness pointing to my own GPUs running Qwen3.5-27B, and the last few days it has been very busy! :)

My harness doesn’t “pressure cook” since it doesn’t make sense to do that with only one GPU (besides many other reasons), it runs everything in a linear fashion, including subagents, and logs everything - reading the logs as they go by is another cool thing - sometimes I pick up interesting things from it !

The distribution of people’s moods related to AI seems indeed bimodal. And I feel lucky somehow ending up in the “enthusiastic” rather than “depressed” part of it. To the folks in the other one: I am sorry. I don’t know why it is this way. If I knew I might have given unsolicited advice.
by bee_rider | 2026-03-07 16:04:45+00:00
It is true that we haven’t seen single core clock speeds increasing as fast, for a long while now. And I think everyone agrees that some nebulously defined “rate of computing progress” has slowed down.

But, we can be slightly less pessimistic if we’re more specific. Already by the early 90’s, a lot of the clock speed increase came from strategies like pipelines, superscalar instructions, branch prediction. Instruction level parallelism. Then in 200X we started using additional parallelism strategies like multicore and SMT.

It isn’t a meaningless distinction. There’s a read difference between parallelism that the compiler and hardware can usually figure out, and parallelism that the programmer usually has to expose.

But there’s some artificiality to it. We’re talking about the ability of parallel hardware to provide the illusion of sequential execution. And we know that if we want full “single threaded” performance, we have to think about the instruction level parallelism. It’s just implicit rather than explicit like thread-level parallelism.

If the syntax of C was slightly different, to the point where it could automatically add OpenMP pragmas to all it’s for loops, we’d have 30GHz processors by now, haha.
by lapcat | 2026-03-07 16:04:47+00:00
For me, a replaceable battery is the most important factor. With my level of usage, it's not a question of if but rather when I'll need to replace my MacBook Pro battery.

It used to be so damn easy with my 2006 MBP. Pop the old one out, pop a new one in, literally seconds to replace. You could even carry an extra battery with you when traveling.

Now battery replacement is a giant PITA. And Apple wants you to mail the machine to them and be without it for days instead of getting onsite same-day replacement. I hate this.
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2026-03-07 16:05:28+00:00
At a prior job, there was an internal project code system for tracking billable hours or people assignment kind of thing. Everyone knew the codes of their projects. It was a six digit code, two letters and then four numbers: giving you some ~7 million point space. Company was ~100 years old and only had some 15k codes recorded in all history. The list of codes was manually updated once a quarter by an admin who might add another ten at a time.

Some chuckle head decided to replace the system with UUIDs. Now, they are no longer human memorable/readable/writable on paper/anything useful. Even better, they must have used some home grown implementation, because the codes were weirdly sequential. If you ever had to look at a dump of codes, the ids are almost identical minus a digit somewhere in the middle.

Destructive change that ruined a perfectly functional system.
by bluetomcat | 2026-03-07 16:06:16+00:00
No. Plausible code is syntactically-correct BS disguised as a solution, hiding a countless amount of weird semantic behaviours, invariants and edge cases. It doesn't reflect a natural and common-sense thought process that a human may follow. It's a jumble of badly-joined patterns with no integral sense of how they fit together in the larger conceptual picture.
by mrwh | 2026-03-07 16:06:24+00:00
The etiquette, even at the bigtech place I work, has changed so quickly. The idea that it would be _embarrassing_ to send a code review with obvious or even subtle errors is disappearing. More work is being put on the reviewer. Which might even be fine if we made the further change that _credit goes to the reviewer_. But if anything we're heading in the opposite direction, lines of code pumped out as the criterion of success. It's like a car company that touts how _much_ gas its cars use, not how little.
by dasil003 | 2026-03-07 16:06:55+00:00
I think the analogy is directionally good, but it short changes the abstract and recursive nature of software.

We were already writing code that was automating not only manual work but also simpler programs. LLMs essentially just move us one more (large) hop up the abstraction ladder. And yes I get that it’s a different type of hop (non-deterministic, extremely leaky, etc), but it’s still a hop.

So if the only thing you want to do is manually write code in the traditional way (perhaps with vim instead of IntelliJ) then yeah I think you’re cooked. On the other hand, if you are willing to work with LLM-assisted tooling and learn how to compensate for its shortcomings then I think you’ll have a bright future.
by freedomben | 2026-03-07 16:07:08+00:00
This does work but it requires prompts to instruct on it. It's also not perfect, though it is pretty good.

What I've found when doing exactly this, is that the cost of the initial code makes me hesitant to throw it away. A better workflow I've been using is instead to iterate on very detailed planning documents written in markdown and repeatedly iterating on that instead (like, sometimes 50+ times for a complex app). It's really quite amazing how much that helps. It can lead to a design doc that is good enough that I can turn the agent loose on implementation and get decent results. Best results are still with guidance throughout, but I have never once regretted hammering out a very detailed planning document. I have many times regretted keeping code (or throwing code away).
by Pxtl | 2026-03-07 16:08:05+00:00
You can't be serious. Did you miss all that talk of 51st state and "governor Trudeau" or "governor Gretzky?"

> A reporter asked if he was "considering military force to annex and acquire Canada."

> "No," replied Trump. "Economic force."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/donald-trump-canada-51st-st...

"The only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State. This would make all Tariffs, and everything else, totally disappear. Canadians’ taxes will be very substantially reduced, they will be more secure, militarily and otherwise, than ever before, there would no longer be a Northern Border problem, and the greatest and most powerful nation in the world will be bigger, better and stronger than ever."

"If Canada merged with the U.S., there would be no Tariffs, taxes would go way down, and they would be TOTALLY SECURE from the threat of the Russian and Chinese Ships that are constantly surrounding them."

https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/03/19/trump-canada-annex/

We're into "reject the evidence of your eyes and ears" territory here.