MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rendaw | 2026-03-08 02:57:29+00:00
What was the issue with MPS? MPS also looks like "custom widgets in normal text-based java" i.e. mixed paradigms and not "ground up ast-based editing".

I'm not sure if I can agree with your other points. I can't think of the last time I cat'd or maniuplated rust/java/go outside a heavy and slow editor. Many languages have more or less "one" editor with all the features that most people use, and often use it for change review too. And it seems weird to characterize needing new tools as a "dead end"... all languages need new tools and won't have them at the start.

Plenty of people use go, rust, and java which are not gradually typed.
by pibaker | 2026-03-08 02:58:45+00:00
Let's just focus on CS for a moment because this is HN and I have a CS degree. How do you evaluate a student's ability to implement a piece of non trivial software following a specification that would take, say, over five thousand lines? This is a fairly common type of coursework for CS students. It's not possible to do it in one exam setting. Well, unless you can type continuously without having to stop to think or check your work.

What will likely happen if you have to force all evaluation into one exam is you will get a Leetcode style programming quiz, that tests something, except that something is only barely connected to your daily job after college. Or you end up with something like a multiple choice exam that is again disconnected from your work and can be gamed by studying just for the exam.

Courseworks exist for a purpose. You can't just throw it away and pretend it never did anything useful.
by pembrook | 2026-03-08 02:58:53+00:00
In the culinary arts your greatness as a chef is ultimately measured by the final end product, the full dining hospitality experience, as judged by influential customers (like Michelin).

The food is just one factor of that experience, and the overwhelming majority of that food on any given night is not actually prepared by the chef with their name on the door, but by his/her staff.

So yes, your greatness as a Chef is in fact wholly dependent on being a manager of restaurant kitchens.
by anonnon | 2026-03-08 02:58:56+00:00
> but the recent one about "I love coding at 60 now because of Claude Code!" by a new user with "cc"

I immediately guessed that's what prompted this thread when I saw the title.

> I'm not trying to spark a controversy here, but I'm wondering if others feel the same or if I'm just overreacting.

No, you're not. Besides the OP and its abundance of upvotes and all of the green accounts (and I say this as someone who's long-preferred throwaway posting, so I feel uneasy automatically impugning them) shilling CC and AI, even more disturbing was the older accounts, some created more than a decade ago, posting in a similar bot-like cadence, shilling just as enthusiastically, and in some cases, freely interacting with the obvious bots.

I can only guess there's a black market for HN accounts (as there is for reddit accounts), or perhaps some entities have been seeding bot accounts for years.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-03-08 02:58:59+00:00
I went from a 1Mhz Apple //e in 1986 to a Mac LCII in 1992 with a 68030/16 MHz LCII. That was the last time I felt a step change in day to day work. Of course things like games, video and audio encoding got faster.

The next time I felt a step change was the M series of Macs. P
by qzira | 2026-03-08 02:59:03+00:00
I think a lot of people feel this tension.
Programming used to be mostly about building things directly.
You write code, run it, fix it, repeat.
With agents it starts to shift toward supervision:
define the task, watch the output, correct the drift.
It's a different kind of work.
Sometimes it feels less like programming and more like
managing a very fast team that never gets tired but
also never really understands the goal unless you
spell it out extremely carefully.
I suspect a lot of developers still enjoy the "building"
part more than the "supervising" part.
by glenstein | 2026-03-08 02:59:13+00:00
I also think you can easily get overzealous with it and diagnose increasingly large percentages of ordinary human language as "tropified" due to being part of recognizable cadences. I think most of the things on the list are legit but I think it starts to get to a gray area where it's borrowing ordinary mannerisms of speech that aren't necessarily egregious.
by csomar | 2026-03-08 03:00:16+00:00
This is not limited to Iran. Many Islamic countries have very high female participation in STEM because these degrees grant women greater freedoms. Iran (and most Muslim countries) is not Afghanistan; women do have a certain degree of freedom, and in some countries it's considerable.

Another point about STEM: families are more likely to accept, and even encourage, their women to go abroad and study. This is strictly STEM-specific: something like music or cinema wouldn't be accepted and would be social suicide. In my opinion, this is the very reason women push so hard in STEM in these countries.

It's still worth noting that the Iranian government isn't against its people or women pursuing higher education. They definitely encourage it (it's free!). They just want their people to align with their ideals and contribute to their goals.
by komali2 | 2026-03-08 03:01:03+00:00
Imo good sci fi was never really meant to be a technical description of cool technology, but more about how humans interact in specific scenarios dictated by the existence of certain technologies. Star Trek was less about the intricacies of the warp drive and more about "what if humans could interact with hundreds of unique cultures," or "what could human society look like without scarcity?"

There are many stories to tell in the age of AI. I've yet to find a good Luddite novel that explores how the technology might be taken by the commons, rather than hoarded and made to serve capital (the way governments have been). There's plenty of stories to tell around exploring university of ethics once we have a truly non human intelligence to reckon with. Accelerando spent just as much time exploring the legal implications of non-human intelligences as it did the underlying technology.
by jasomill | 2026-03-08 03:01:09+00:00
My dad had an address in Morgantown, Indiana, and the fact that he lived several miles south, over the county line and past antother small town, always made it pretty clear to me that he didn't live in Morgantown.

Likewise, if you live in another state, there's little confusion because state lines appear on maps and are well marked on all major roads.

Businesses and individuals are responsible for knowing which state they reside in and paying the appropriate taxes, regardless of where their mail is sorted.

As for elections, electoral districts don't generally align with city limits in the first place, so this has to be sorted out by the election registration system based on the full address in most cases anyway.

As for what city name appears in legal documents, the answer is that "preferred" doesn't mean "mandatory". A warrant to search the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, 4790 W 16th St, Speedway IN, 46222, would be perfectly valid, despite the fact that the USPS prefers mail to be addressed to "Indianapolis" rather than "Speedway". For there to be any possibility of confusion, you'd need to have a scenario with two distinct addresses with identical ZIP codes differing only by city name, which for obvious reasons the postal service will not allow.
by slopinthebag | 2026-03-08 03:02:15+00:00
I can't help but to feel like this is an odd moral position to take. OP is apparently fine with building technology to spy on civilians in other countries, and I don't see a moral relevance to citizenship on this matter. If spying on civilians is fundamentally wrong, it doesn't become OK when the people live in a different region of the world. If spying on civilians is fundamentally OK, then why would there be a moral exception for civilians who live inside the geographical region in which the company is legally registered? Perhaps someone can enlighten me here.

The autonomous killing thing is more reasonable, but still, if you're OK building death technology, I'm not exactly sure what difference having a human in the loop makes. It's still death.
by dokdev | 2026-03-08 03:02:24+00:00
A few hours ago. I am learning a new language (rust) so I disabled auto complete and AI suggestions. Otherwise AI becomes more of a distraction than a booster.

But for languages I am more confident (like JS and dart), I usually don't write code and only review it.

If it is a throw-away project (like I am only experimenting something or just need something for one time), I don't event look at the code and only focus on the outcomes.
by wanderlust123 | 2026-03-08 03:02:58+00:00
Except what you are saying doesn’t really make sense and is implicitly sexist. You are assuming women in those countries don’t enjoy studying these subjects.

Also, to pursue a hard STEM degree or phd would detract from being a housewife, so no “oppressive” husband would allow that in the first place. Ergo the women pursuing these paths are not oppressed in the first place.
by chongli | 2026-03-08 03:03:07+00:00
It's basically fantasy except the magic is, to varying degrees, rooted in real science and physics.

That's a superficial view of both Sci-Fi and Fantasy. Sure, there's a lot of schlock out there which essentially functions as this sort of meaningless escapism for the reader. But proper Sci-Fi and Fantasy is philosophical in a way that makes them radically different, if not diametrically opposed.

Fantasy stories typically depict a society in decay, with evil ascendant, and characters who yearn to return to a time of past innocence. It's ultimately backward looking and conservative. When it functions as social commentary, it's a critique of the alienation and impersonality of modernity.

Science Fiction is forward-looking. It asks "what if" questions about the limitations of our modern society by inviting us to view a society that has been freed from those limitations. It challenges our ideas about human nature. It's ultimately progressive, even when it depicts dystopian governments.
by wildzzz | 2026-03-08 03:04:10+00:00
A tangent, but I've always wondered what is the most efficient way to order the drop-down menus for year, make and model. Assuming your a retailer for hard to find car parts, e.g. rockauto, how do you order those menus such that someone has to do the least amount of scrolling? Year cuts down a number of defunct or newer manufacturers but Make cuts down the number of years for that same group.
by alex_dev42 | 2026-03-08 03:05:08+00:00
The discussion about Dockerfile vs Nix is fascinating. Having dealt with both in production environments, I think Docker's "ugly flexibility" mentioned by bmitch3020 is precisely why it won.

The barrier to entry matters enormously for adoption. A Dockerfile that starts with `FROM ubuntu:22.04` and runs shell commands is immediately understandable to any ops person, even if they've never used Docker before. Meanwhile Nix, despite its superior hermetic builds, requires learning an entirely new paradigm.

That said, the reproducible builds issue __MatrixMan__ raised is becoming critical. I've seen subtle supply chain attacks that exploit the non-deterministic nature of traditional builds. The SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH support in buildkit is a good step, but we need more tooling that makes reproducibility the default, not an afterthought.
by komali2 | 2026-03-08 03:05:25+00:00
Just go read engineering documentation about the Apollo flights then. What you're describing has never been sci-fi - you're falling in that camp of people the article described that are demanding authors not write above a fifth grade level.

Scifi has always been an exploration of the human condition within certain circumstances created by fantastic technologies. The human condition is made of politics, sexuality, philosophy, ethics, identity...
by qzira | 2026-03-08 03:05:35+00:00
That's a really good analogy.
The interesting part is that the "intern" is not only fast,
but also extremely confident.
A human intern usually hesitates, asks questions,
or signals uncertainty when they are unsure.
Agents often produce very clean-looking output
even when the reasoning behind it is shaky.
So part of the supervision isn't just checking the result,
but trying to detect when the confidence is misleading.
by alex_dev42 | 2026-03-08 03:07:16+00:00
Great analysis! The cloud vs colo debate is fascinating but often misses the operational overhead discussion.

While zackify's math on raw compute cost is compelling, there's hidden complexity: How much time does your team spend on hardware failures, network issues, IPMI troubleshooting, firmware updates, etc? For CI/build workloads specifically, colo makes sense because downtime is just inconvenience.

But for production workloads, I've seen too many "we'll just rack a few servers" projects turn into full-time infrastructure jobs. Cloud's value isn't just compute - it's shifting operational burden.

That said, hybrid approaches work well: Use cloud for production and autoscaling, colo for predictable batch workloads like CI. The benchmark shows AMD Turin's strong performance across providers - that consistency is valuable even if you pay a premium.
by timr | 2026-03-08 03:09:29+00:00
> If you were trying to determine if the quantity of daylight increased over a week in spring, would you account for the differences caused by day and night? What about cloud cover? Or is that just massaging the data?

Just to draw a better analogy to the low quality of the current work, let's say you wanted to compare average daylight last week, globally, to all of recorded history. Then you made a model that had terms for (say) astronomical daylight, longitude, latitude and, I dunno...altitude of the measurement. Then you made a regression, subtracted three terms, and claimed that the residual was still "significantly darker". Then you run around waving your arms and shouting that if we only extrapolate forward N weeks from last week, soon we'll be living in a fully dark world!

You'd be rightfully laughed out of any room you were in.
by alex_dev42 | 2026-03-08 03:10:17+00:00
This is fascinating! AST-based editing addresses one of my biggest frustrations with traditional text editors - the disconnect between semantic understanding and text manipulation.

I've spent countless hours debugging issues that could have been avoided with proper structural editing. The number of times I've accidentally broken code by deleting the wrong parenthesis or brace... Ki's approach of making the AST a first-class citizen is brilliant.

The multiple cursors + syntax node selection is particularly compelling. Most multi-cursor implementations are just "select similar text" which often breaks on edge cases. Having it understand the actual structure should be much more reliable.

I'm curious about language support - does it use tree-sitter, or does it have its own parsing infrastructure? And how does it handle incomplete/malformed code during editing?

The modal editing redefinition also sounds intriguing. vim's modal editing is powerful but the movements are text-based. Having consistent selection modes across different semantic units could be a game-changer.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-03-08 03:11:36+00:00
> meant the fraction

Decent hypothesis, but not substantiated.

In 2020 the fraction of graduates who were STEM in China was 41%, Russia 37%, Germany 36%, Iran 33%, India 30%, and France 26% [1]. If we take the eleven countries in that article's GDP per capita, we find no statistically-significant relationship.

[1] https://cset.georgetown.edu/article/the-global-distribution-...
by smackeyacky | 2026-03-08 03:13:07+00:00
I think the poster was partly being facetious about being corrected on the internet.

Agile has turned out to be terrible in most organisations I’ve worked at. From officious PMs demanding stupidly mismatched sprints vs the deliverables, to the use of story points as a baseball bat of invented malarkey instead of proper estimation. The useless ceremonies that aren’t tuned to the state of the project. The fantasy land of ill specified tickets and terrible business analysis landing on developers.

Not all of that is purely due to agile but the ephemeral nature of sprints seem to encourage terrible behaviour from the non technical parts of the project management cycle.

I hate it.
by BelVisgarra | 2026-03-08 03:14:17+00:00
There’s definitely some truth to that. Many of the best opportunities do move through relationships.
At the same time, job boards still handle a huge portion of the market — especially for people outside strong networks, early-career candidates, or remote roles.
I’m curious whether better verification or signal on the job side could at least reduce the “lemons” effect a bit, even if it can’t replace relationships.
by alwillis | 2026-03-08 03:14:23+00:00
> This looks really nice, but I suppose I might ask the hard questions - how does this compare to Obsidian,

To be honest, other than both of them allowing you to write markdown, they're not comparable.

Obsidian is the current favorite of the "make a second brain" crowd which is based the concept of a Zettelkasten [1]. There are thousands of plugins to customize Obsidian to turn it into whatever you want. It just so happens to use Markdown files to store your notes. It's a very powerful tool, but it's overkill for most people who want to write a few notes in Markdown.

Ghost isn't about wiki links, plugins, hypertext, Zettelkasten stuff.

It's just for writing, which I think is fine. Not everyone wants or needs all of whiz bang features of Obsidian or Notion or Microsoft Word.

Regarding that previewing isn't included; it's not a big deal in reality.

The Notes app that comes with macOS can import markdown files and render them. There a hundreds of apps, utilities, plugins, websites that enable a user to render a markdown file. For most people, that wouldn't be ideal; I get it.

(Aside: at a user group meeting, I saw a developer coding something in Vim with no syntax highlighting. I had never seen that before. He said he liked it better that way. Not everyone likes the same things.)

There's a great app from indie developer Brett Terpstra called Marked [1] that was created to preview markdown files. It has tons of features, all centered around previewing markdown files. I've been a satisfied customer of Marked for years.

We all use certain apps for certain things even if we have other options; sometimes it's for aesthetic reasons or we just like how a particular app "feels" when we use it.

If people enjoy using Ghostmd, that's great.

[1]: https://marked2app.com
by O1111OOO | 2026-03-08 03:14:44+00:00
I am not that person. I use an FF extension that let's me know if a story has been posted on HN. This one was not submitted according to the extension.

Thank you so much for letting me know that israel, working with the FBI to manipulate a sitting president into war was something that is not a viable submission.

You do the entire community proud...
by xerrs | 2026-03-08 03:15:41+00:00
True, responses are rarely seen, and when they are seen they are bland "Looks good" type of feedback. Difficult to encourage feedback, and even more difficult to encourage good feedback.

Experimenting displayed improved feedback when given a proper structure. I guess it is rewarding to people when they see feedback they hope for get implemented. Though the feedback-loop is something that rarely occurs.

EDIT: Grammar fixes
by SigmundA | 2026-03-08 03:15:42+00:00
>Sure they do, because now your row / index is variable length rather than fixed length. Way more complicated.

Come on its literally a 2 byte per column header in the row so it just sums the column lengths to get the offset, it does the same thing for fixed length except it gets the col length from the schema.

It's not much more complicated than a fixed length column only the column length is stored in row vs schema. I am not sure where you are getting this idea it way more complicated, nor the 3 vs 4 byte thing, the whole row is a variable length structure and designed as such, null values change the row length fixed or variable data type and have to be accounted for since a null takes up no space in the column data its only in the null bitmap.

> what's the point of user-configuration of someone hard-codes 'NY' in a query or in the code

Because it doesn't matter, 'NY' isn't changing just like 11 the int wouldn't change, but 'NY' is way easier to understand and catch mistakes with and search for code without hitting a bunch of nonsense and distinguish when 10 columns are all coded next to each other in a result set.

I prefer my rows to be a little more readable than 1234, 1, 11, 2, 15, 1 ,3 and the users do too.

I have had my fill of transposition bugs where someone accidentally uses the wrong int on a pk id from a different table and still gets a valid result that passes a foreign key check almost enough for me to want to use guid's for pk's almost. At least with the coded values it is easier to spot because even with single character code people tend to pick things that make sense for the column values you know 'P' for pending, 'C' for complete etc, vs 1 2 3 4 used over and over across every different column with an auto increment.
by wolrah | 2026-03-08 03:16:12+00:00
It absolutely has not. I absolutely agree most of those kinds of apps could, and those that can probably should, but more than enough have not.

I support a lot of dental practices using Patterson Eaglesoft and they still don't officially support VMs in any form, even for the server (despite it working fine) while they have removed all support for using terminal services. Obviously the basic application works fine, but a dental practice needs to be able to take digital x-rays. Shock the sensor drivers only exist for Windows and back when RDP and Citrix were supported it required a special bridge running on both the client (which of course still had to be Windows) and the server.

We used some thin clients back in the day for front desk stations and hygiene rooms that didn't need any special hardware, but the main practice rooms and the pano stations always needed full Windows PCs.

The client app is built with PowerBuilder so it'd require a deep rewrite to support any other platforms.

The server side is a Sybase SQL Anywhere database and a SMB file share so it could easily be run natively on Linux but the vendor can't be bothered.

This is a company that still insists that every user needs local admin privileges, despite literally nothing going wrong when they don't have it, and who usually doesn't support new Windows releases until a few months after it becomes the default for new PCs.

---

There are other dental platforms that do have web interfaces intended mostly to enable the use of iPads and other tablets but switching platforms is far from straightforward for practices with years of data, custom integrations, etc. Even if you are willing to go through the trouble (or starting fresh) those platforms, to my knowledge, still require Windows PCs for digital x-ray support.
by Twirrim | 2026-03-08 03:17:08+00:00
I've been finding it very practical to run the 35B-A3B model on an 8GB RTX 3050, it's pretty responsive and doing a good job of the coding tasks I've thrown at it. I need to grab the freshly updated models, the older one seems to occasionally get stuck in a loop with tool use, which they suggest they've fixed.