MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rcbdev | 2026-03-01 15:57:21+00:00
Public procurement tenders in the EU for city, state and federal contracts often stipulate that the bidding company must have something like three years of consecutive p. a. revenues exceeding anything from €300.000 to €1.000.000 - please tell me how even a freelance developer who bills through their LLC can reasonably participate here on EU rates?

I don't see how this is about people finding out how their government's processes work. Most people in the EU are painfully aware of our horribly broken public procurement schemes.
by ben_w | 2026-03-01 15:57:23+00:00
For the swift apps, at least half of the errors are of a type where I wouldn't expect to have needed to tell someone to not do it like that, and only a student could reasonably be expected to not know better.

For the python physics sim, step 1 was to generate the plan, the prompt included "I want actual plasma physics, including high-density, high-field regimes, externally applied fields, etc., so consider which FOSS libraries would suit this.", and then it proceeded itself to choose some existing libraries, and I made sure those specific named FOSS libraries actually ended up in the plan.

My first clue this wasn't going to work was that even from step 1 it was pushing for writing all the simulation code and not actually using e.g. WarpX despite that it itself had suggested WarpX. In fact, even when WarpX was in the plan, it was "integrate" rather than "just use this from the get-go".

I may well throw the whole thing out and try again with Claude when this trial expires. Most of the runs have been comically non-physical, to the extent you don't even need a physics degree to notice.
by karl42 | 2026-03-01 15:57:26+00:00
Fortunately, AI can also be used to reduce complexity. The case I noticed most often is to use the slightly more ugly API, or duplicate some generic code, but avoid pulling in a dependency. Examples are avoiding UI frameworks and directly accessing the DOM in simple web projects, using the CLI arg parser from the stdlib or adding simple helper functions rather than pulling in left-pad like dependencies.

Since managing dependencies is one of the major maintenance burdens in some of my projects (updating them, keeping their APIs in mind, complexity due to overgeneralization), this can help quite a lot.

See also https://www.karl.berlin/simplicity-by-llm.html for some of my thoughts regarding this.
by matt_heimer | 2026-03-01 15:57:29+00:00
The real question will be; Do we need to pay the juniors to write code to become seniors?

If coding is an art then all the juniors will end up in the same places as other struggling artists and only the breakout artists will land paying coding gigs.

I'm sitting here on a weekend coding a passion project for no pay so I have to wonder.
by troad | 2026-03-01 15:57:44+00:00
> LLMs have also given engineers access to clear communication.

A lot of the time, the inability to express an idea clearly hints at some problem with the underlying idea, or in one's conceptualisation of that idea. Writing is a fantastic way to grapple with those issues, and iron out better and clearer iterations of ideas (or one's understanding thereof).

An LLM, on the other hand, will happily spit out a coherent piece of writing defending any nonsense idea you throw at it.
by simonw | 2026-03-01 15:57:52+00:00
My current policy on this is that if text expresses opinions or has "I" pronouns attached to it then it's written by me. I don't let LLMs speak for me in this way.

I'll let an LLM update code documentation or even write a README for my project but I'll edit that to ensure it doesn't express opinions or say things like "This is designed to help make code easier to maintain" - because that's an expression of a rationale that the LLM just made up.

I use LLMs to proofread text I publish on my blog. I just shared my current prompt for that here: https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-pattern...
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-03-01 15:57:57+00:00
What’s the importance of then learning to contribute if they will probably jump ship anyway when they get good enough? Your HR department is not going to give them a market rate raise to keep them - see salary compression and inversion. A junior developer just isn’t worth the investment.

I have never once told my manager “it would be really nice to have a few junior developers. It would really help us get this project done on time”. They do “negative work”.

Yes not having juniors become seniors is an industry problem. But my goal is to reach my company’s quarterly and anual goals - not what’s going to happen 10 years from now.
by mctt | 2026-03-01 15:58:06+00:00
The article does not say anything about F-droid. However, there was discussion about this a few months ago;
F-Droid and Google's developer registration decree
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45409794

F-Droid warns that Google's new "Developer Verification System" will require all Android app developers, even those outside the Play Store, to register personal data and pay a fee to Google to remain installable. The project argues this mandate threatens the existence of free and open-source ecosystems like F-Droid by ending anonymous development and stripping users of the right to choose their own software.

So that is one threat to what we have now. Right now you can install an APK that you trust and have been using for years.

What the article does say is that Samsung is removing several core options from the Android recovery menu, including the ability to sideload updates via ADB or SD cards and the "wipe cache partition" tool. While the reason for this change remains unconfirmed, it appears to be a permanent security policy shift tied to the One UI 8.5 update and the February 2026 security patch.

So why does this matter? Well some users like nocturn9x [0] have been able to take back control of their devices by installing:
1. An Unlocked Boot Loader.
2. An Unlocked OneUI/ROM
3. And then F-droid style installs are not problem.

Specifically, you can still install your trusted APK if you perform these steps, own a device where the hardware eFuses have not been blown and decline "Play Protect" nag screens and OneUI updates.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47205434
by EchoReflection | 2026-03-01 15:58:20+00:00
I used multiple sync "solutions" (terrible idea, in retrospect); Dropsync, Syncthing, Drivesync, in addition to paying for Obsidian Sync, because I was delusional about "backing up my data". Huge mistake on my part, I've spent many, many, many hours deduplicating worthless "backups". Agree with "just pay for Obsidian Sync".
by pluc | 2026-03-01 15:58:55+00:00
If AI could innovate it wouldn't be a public product. It would be a cash cow. Why give your customers the ability to come up with new and amazing ideas when you can just keep it for yourself and launch a thousand products? USA is a capitalist society. It doesn't share profitable ideas.

And if AI was really about productivity they'd be talking about doing more faster with the same workforce, not reducing the workforce.
by whstl | 2026-03-01 15:59:08+00:00
For me, one thing that completely changed was dealing with junior developers.

In the past, I would give them an assignment and they would take a few days to return with the implementation. I was able to see them struggling.

Today, there are two kinds: 1) the ones who take a marginally smaller amount of time because they’re busy learning, testing and self reviewing, and 2) the ones who watch Twitch or Youtube videos while Claude does the job and come to me after two hours with “done, what’s next” while someone has to comb through the mess.

Leadership might see #2 and think they’re better, faster. But they are just a fucking boat anchor that drags down the whole team while providing nothing more than a shitty interface to an LLM in return.
by lokar | 2026-03-01 15:59:09+00:00
Yep. This is why many companies have a terminal level with “up or out “ rules. Before that level you are not fully independent and require too much supervision. No one wants a Jr engineer with 10 years of experience.

I see a lot of Sr engineers get very frustrated by how much time they have to spend helping Jr engineers. But, that’s the job, or at least a big part of it.

Or at least it was.
by lelanthran | 2026-03-01 15:59:34+00:00
> Weird that you're so delighted to shift the blame for the tragedy of children being blown up in school, even more so that you're relying on unsubstantiated claims to do it.

Where in my message does it seem that I am delighted?

No doubt the truth will eventually come out, what I have seen is that the school was sited unusually close to an Iran launch site.

You can judge me all you want for "being delighted", whatever the hell that means, but I'm not advocating that schools be used as shields for rocket launchers, am I?

I'm advocating the exact opposite.
by skydhash | 2026-03-01 15:59:55+00:00
Software is not becoming worthless.

The value of computers since its inception was that it's capable of transforming data very, very fast and autonomously. But someone has to input that data from the real world or capture it using some device, and someone has to write the rules.

What happened is that we created a whole world of information and the rules has become very complex. Now we have multiple layers stacked vertically and multiple domains spread horizontally. At one time, ASCII was enough, now we have to deal with Unicode.

Software becoming worthless will mean that everyone has learned the rules of the systems we created and capable of creating systems with good enough quality. I'm not seeing that happens anytime soon.
by sega_sai | 2026-03-01 16:00:35+00:00
I recently read a similar discussion in the context of AI in science and PhD students. And the point the author was making that the goal of having PhD students is NOT to produce academic research, but to train people. I think the same idea applies here.
Somebody still needs to train people, and the companies will probably need to ensure that they have resources for that, as there will not be enough senior people for all the tasks.
Show HN: Nano Banana 2 Playground – text-to-image and image-to-image demo
by iamouyang | 2026-03-01 16:00:52+00:00
Hi HN — I’m an indie developer. I built Nano Banana 2 Playground, a simple web demo for generating images from text and transforming existing images (image-to-image).

My goal was a fast, minimal UI that lets you iterate on prompts quickly and compare results without extra friction.

I’d love feedback on:

Prompt UX (what feels missing/confusing)

Which controls/presets are actually useful

How to communicate limitations and expected results clearly

Thanks for taking a look — happy to answer questions and improve it based on your suggestions.
by xelah | 2026-03-01 16:02:06+00:00
I don't want to argue if this is good/OK/useful, etc. I'm just wondering where this will go? Assuming it becomes so easy to copycat everything you found online, what would be the motive for anyone to do OSS? If it's trivial to copy, no one will ever care about maintaining any of that. They will just keep it private to themselves or the company they work for.

And the long-term consequence: we will all have to learn to build all of that ourselves. Yes, with the help of AI, but now the entire idea and architecture must be internal because there is nothing you can copy from.

I agree this might be helpful to an extent. We don't need another leftpad or isodd library. There are lots of things we should keep internal and do ourselves. And with AI, it becomes trivial. But if people try to play the whole OSS to their advantage, I think this can end up badly for everyone.

This boils down to one thing: If this is the future of OSS, give me one good reason for anyone to do anything open-source (or even source-open). And then show me from what those models will learn... The old stuff plus what you have internally? Have fun with that.
by hluska | 2026-03-01 16:02:09+00:00
> If I’m reviewing your code and I ask you why you went with a certain approach, and you tell me “the AI suggested it”, I’ve immediately lost confidence in you.

I’ve experienced similar things and so understand the feeling, but this is poor leadership. If someone on your team makes it all the way to a code review and still thinks ‘the AI suggested it’, you failed to train them, failed to set expectations and they have justifiably lost more confidence in you than vice versa.

If we analyze the rest of the article through the lens of weak leadership, it sounds less like an AI problem and more like a corporate leadership problem.
by dwedge | 2026-03-01 16:02:26+00:00
It might be a bug in remote handling and I might have unfairly called out GhostTTY for this, but "forgetting to update terminfo on my remote system" just doesn't hold with the way I work.

I work managing different systems for different clients and often login to systems for the first time. The servers aren't mine, and configuring something like Ansible to configure my home just seems like a waste of time for little benefit. It means that generally I end up using systems that are likely to be already instead - Bash not zsh, Perl, basic vim without any bindings. It might sound special but I'm sure I'm far from the only person working this way.

So given this, I'd always prefer a terminal that doesn't require me to change remote servers. In this particular case I can modify $TERM in my local .zshrc and it works fine so it's a moot point, but if I had to modify the remote system it would be a no go.
by FinnLobsien | 2026-03-01 16:02:27+00:00
Oh, I totally agree with this, and it's awesome to see you interact here. iA Writer is one of the favorite apps I have and I think your approach to building software is incredibly beautiful and more companies should do it this way.

I was responding specifically to a commenter who pretended as though the article was super promotional, which it isn't. I agree your proposition is the right way to transitioning away from MS Office.

Was just saying you're actually NOT proposing to get administrations on iA Writer as their default writing tool, as a prev. commenter was insinuating.
by DiabloD3 | 2026-03-01 16:02:29+00:00
Yes, its a nightmare because Android is becoming more and more like iOS: anything that the user used to be able to do... they can no longer do.

Android phone manufacturers want $1200 for something that is a toy, just like the Apple iToys.

Nobody wants those, and nobody wants this. Google needs to get out of the business and let the FOSS community handle it.
by lapcat | 2026-03-01 16:02:30+00:00
> cross-reference all of Apple's CVE notes

I never suggested that. But Apple itself prioritizes patches by severity when deciding what to backport.

Some issues are so severe that Apple occasionally releases a new security update for previous OS versions that no longer receive security updates otherwise.

A lot of issues are merely privilege escalation, which is not necessarily a big problem on a personal computer.
by alephnerd | 2026-03-01 16:02:32+00:00
> Leaders thinking they will basically prompt out new revenue generating features with no human engineers to "figure it out"

Yeah and I'm telling you as one of those leaders that most of the leaders I am meeting with know this is unrealistic and non-tech enterprises.

I think the issue is, a lot of SWEs think their work actually matters to the bottom line (and PMs and execs will massage their ego - I'm guilty of doing this as well) but in reality they don't matter because they are working in a cost-center product or feature.

Every SWE on HN should sit down and ask themselves whether or not

1. The feature they are working on directly generates revenue for their employer.

2. If it does, does it generate revenue equivalent to at least 1% of overall revenue per year.

3. Whether the cost of your team of SWEs+PMs are putting the feature/product in the red (ie. If you are 3 Eng and 1 PM working on a product who's revenue is only $500K/yr).

If all of those questions are negative, your product/feature is at risk from LLMs but was already at risk of being offshored.
by karmakaze | 2026-03-01 16:02:33+00:00
Very glad for that--it's what made me stop my evaluation the first time around. I looked for the feature in issues and just saw #9821 about memory use of the buffer which could be an issue if configuring very large scrollback as I do.

BTW is there feature parity between macOS and Linux, e.g. scrollback buffer searching on Linux?
by adrian_b | 2026-03-01 16:02:35+00:00
This particular silicon compound is unlikely to help much in that direction.

On the other hand, silicone resins and elastomers are already in widespread use in applications where resistance to high temperatures or burning is required (silicone =/= silicon, the former coming from silic-on + ket-one, a name based on a wrong hypothesis).

However, their mechanical resistance is usually modest, so if that is important they must be used either in combinations with other materials or reinforced, e.g. with glass fiber.

They are also more expensive than hydrocarbon-based plastics, so they are typically used only where strictly necessary.
by zimpenfish | 2026-03-01 16:02:36+00:00
Going off some Photoshop dimensionating with the scale bar, that Benchy is about w 6mm x h 5mm[0] which, if I'm reading [1] correctly, is just about 100x smaller than the canonical Benchy. Impressive that you can recognise it at all, I'd say.

[0] Strictly more like 5.5mm x 4.5mm but you get the idea.

[1] https://www.3dbenchy.com/dimensions/
by dahart | 2026-03-01 16:02:43+00:00
It’s not an estimate, the point was that AI produced code multiples faster than the prompter, and the prompter is in a pretty good position to make that claim. I can confirm and make the same claim, so I believe that it’s true that for some tasks, Claude makes me 10x faster than on my own without AI, where 10x absolutely is a completely made up number that’s still true in spirit.
by somenameforme | 2026-03-01 16:02:52+00:00
I think this can be falsified by just considering the history of humanity. It wasn't that long ago that human language literally did not even exist. And our collective knowledge wasn't all that much more than 'poke him with the pointy end'. Somehow we went from that to putting a man on the Moon, unlocking the secrets of the atom, and more. And if you consider how awful we are at retaining/sharing information and just general inefficiencies due to the fact that we're humans and not just logical information processing machines, we did all of this in little more than the blink of an eye. This is something that seems to certainly be rather special.
by gruez | 2026-03-01 16:02:55+00:00
>I wonder if the "no new wars" voters will condemn him?

They'll retcon it and fall in line behind Trump, just like with Venezuela. This is from both opinion polls and also interactions with actual MAGA people.

https://files.catbox.moe/h2wqwz.png

https://files.catbox.moe/64uhqw.png
Show HN: Lensboy – Lightweight camera calibration with spline distortion models
by robertleoj | 2026-03-01 16:02:58+00:00
I do a lot camera calibration.

As my need for accuracy increased, I started using mrcal, a great camera calibration tool. But I found it didn't fit my workflow well in terms of workflow and as a software dependency.

What I wanted from a calibration library was:

Accuracy (obviously)

Trivial dependency, both calibration time and runtime

Simple and notebook-friendly python API

Support for both OpenCV and spline distortion models

Great built-in analysis tools

Board warp estimation

Outlier filtering

So that's what I built!

Would love feedback from other robotics / computer vision folks.
by IshKebab | 2026-03-01 16:03:13+00:00
> Them claiming to have hand-written the code isn’t any better than them claiming to have thoroughly reviewed the code. We can’t know in either case.

It is better, because most people aren't out-right liars. If he said "I hand-wrote the code", sure it doesn't prove it, but I would believe him. When he says "I thoroughly reviewed the code"... yeah maybe. That's the sort of thing people do lie about (even to themselves).
by butILoveLife | 2026-03-01 16:03:40+00:00
To be fair, they are doing with a Samsung phone, and Samsung is the Apple of Android (Big marketing budget, mid quality if we are being generous).

Samsung as a company is a universal No Buy. The fact OP bought Samsung makes me raise an eyebrow.

Credit to Apple where credit is due. When I unboxed my first iphone, I was happy to give Apple all my personal information, birthday, emails, ssn.... It was bizarre, I'm usually apprehensive to give this stuff away, but Apple made it fun. Within a few days, I was disappointed by a lack of widgets, slow transitions between screens, and a buggy podcast app. But the damage was done, my company was out $600 and Apple had my contact info.
by weatherlite | 2026-03-01 16:04:05+00:00
Not only that, I have a feeling a lot of people are gonna be disappointed now they can implement their side projects in a week instead of 6 months. Finally - the thing is there, ready. And the likely outcome is

a) Almost no one but you cares and

b) Now that this has become trivial, there's no much joy in it. The struggle we had before A.I was the real joy; prompting agents for a few days and getting what you want isn't that joyful.
by gilbetron | 2026-03-01 16:05:00+00:00
But the total market size (in number of products) also multiplied. For instance, as a relatively tiny example, I create a nutrition tracker. There's hundreds already out there, but they never met my specific desire for one. So I created one with Claude (took maybe 2 hours total over a few days) that completely matches my desire, plus I can tweak it as want for my needs.

No one else will want this specific piece of software. But I love it.

Sure, there will be 100x the competition, but there will be also 100x the software needs. Now, if you want to get crazy rich building software, that does get tougher, but that's a good thing, I think.
by znnajdla | 2026-03-01 16:05:09+00:00
One massive risk that I don’t hear anyone in the West talking about is the risk of giving Sunni populist rage over Gaza the spark it needs to overthrow US-aligned partners all over the Middle East. This could backfire really badly for Israel and the US if they suddenly lose all of their friends in high places in these countries. 98% of the non-elite Sunnis all over the world are enraged at Israel over Gaza. All of the surrounding countries (Egypt, Jordan, or Saudi Arabia) currently employ brutal authoritarian methods to suppress any pro-Palestinian sentiment beyond thoughts and prayers. If the regimes fall, all hell will break loose, and all of the hate will be directed towards Israel.
by yetihehe | 2026-03-01 16:05:57+00:00
Quoting last paragraph of article:

> It works every time.

> I find this simultaneously the most useful and the most disturbing thing I’ve ever learned about human beings. Useful because - if you can see the playbook - you can choose not to be played. Disturbing because the playbook has been visible for a century, and we keep falling for it anyway.

If you can see the playbook, you can choose not to be played. But you will then see billions of people being played anyway. And then, you will be played again because someone will improve on that playbook so you won't see it in time to do anything.

Obvious solution: make children learn about countering techniques of manipulation at school. Result: a nation of anarchists?