MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stackghost | 2026-03-02 21:45:35+00:00
I've always had a soft spot for Fortran, even though I rarely use it any more.

When I was in undergrad, so sometime around 2006 or so, I read somewhere that Fortran was actually faster than C in some cases, due I believe to the compiler and certain choices it makes regarding aliasing arrays and whatnot.

I am an aerospace engineer and avid flight simmer, mostly WWII combat sims, and a huge part of the hobby involves arguing with other people about WWII piston aircraft and their performance. Pages upon pages of forum threads replete with PDFs of historical documents in German, Russian, etc. In order to win arguments more effectively, I decided to write a parametric "flight sim" that would accept a set of maneuvers as an input (e.g. "start at 10000m, dive until speed reaches X km/h indicated, zoom climb back up" or "turn in a circle at Y km/h indicated") so that I had something to compare the in-game results and historical data with.

I decided to write the whole thing in Fortran 2003 (the 2008 revision was still a draft, as I recall), because fast.

I bought a copy of Stanley Hooker's book "The Performance of a Supercharged Aero Engine" from the Rolls-Royce heritage press, implemented the method therein. Implemented a numerical vortex panel method for the lifting surfaces, the whole shebang. It was actually a really fun project and it worked pretty well. Fortran is a neat, quaint language and I look back on that project fondly but ultimately I don't miss Fortran. The syntax is needlessly verbose. I/O is a chore. String manipulation is a pain. If you ask me, C++ (despite its many flaws) is superior in every way.
by LeoPanthera | 2026-03-02 21:45:52+00:00
I've been running Tahoe since 26.2, after cowardly skipping 0 and 1.

And... it's fine? Am I only using the happy path? Or are people just particularly confident about complaining about Tahoe after seeing everyone else do it.

For sure it has glitches, but as far as I can tell, they're the same glitches that were in Sequoia. (If anyone at Apple is reading this, can you take a glance at your NFS client code? It does like to just hang up occasionally.)

The only major complaint I have is the window resize target, which seems not to line up properly with the actual window corner, since they gave them Very Rounded Corners.

It's also a bit weird that the radius of the VRCs seems to change app to app.

But these are nits. I work on Tahoe every day and it seems fine.
by watwut | 2026-03-02 21:45:55+00:00
My comment was flagged. But, basic assumption should not be that Trump voters and Biden ones are symmetrical.

One group finds candidate who defrauds more then any other politician before appealing and right kind manly. They see him sexually harassing women appealing. Moreover all fascists vote for Trump. Both sides have bad people in ... but Trump side is defined by them.

There is no symetry here. This particular choice is literally showing that yes, you are more likely to be unfair kind of juror.
by ordinaryradical | 2026-03-02 21:45:56+00:00
This is going to be remembered as a comical fumble, in my view.

I was fully locked-in to the ecosystem, the phone, the services, the TV, and I am looking for the exits.

I’m starting to parallelize to software which will play well on Linux, and when I’m feeling ready (or miserable enough) I will not be looking back.

The macOS exodus will be like Hemingway’s line about bankruptcy: very slowly and then all at once.
by BeetleB | 2026-03-02 21:46:07+00:00
> Far simpler

And far less capable. I have a whole system for managing TODOs, notes, etc, and I've not found an app that fits my needs (especially given that the system evolves over time).

But I agree - if you have a flow that works great for you with just a phone, then I wouldn't recommend OpenClaw for that use case.

> You've not yet described anything that literally 99% of the population can not already do with the existing hardware and software in their pocket.

And in the early days, literally everyone I knew who owned an iPhone also owned a digital camera and a laptop. Why pay some crazy amount for a fancy phone?
by littlestymaar | 2026-03-02 21:46:08+00:00
Most LLM sucked at Rust at the beginning because there's much less rust code available on the broad internet.

I suspect the providers started training specifically in it because it appeared proportionally much more in the actual LLM usage (obviously much less than more mainstream languages like Python or JavaScript, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was more LLM queries on Rust than on C, for demographic reasons).

Nowadays even small Qwens are decent at it in one-shot prompts, or at least much better than GPT-4 was.
by lgdimaggio | 2026-03-02 21:46:32+00:00
Hi HN.

The goal is: “ask your machine how it’s feeling” in natural language, backed by tool outputs (not just free-form text). For a lightweight demo I used a hairdryer

The idea is simple. Instead of dashboards, scripts, you “ask the machine how it’s feeling”, and the system produces an operator-style diagnostic report backed by tool outputs (via MCP and Claude Skills).

For a fun demo I used a hairdryer rather than an industrial machine .
If you just want to see the end result, the page includes a downloadable hairdryer diagnostic report.

I’d love feedback.
by gf000 | 2026-03-02 21:47:21+00:00
> Lifetime analysis is a local analysis, same as any other kind of type checking

That's what the compiler is doing.

The developer (or LLM) is supposed to do the global reasoning so that what they end up writing down makes semantic sense.

Sure, throwing a bunch of variants at it and see what sticks is certainly an approach, but "lifetimes check out" only proves that the resulting code will be memory safe, not that it actually makes sense.
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-03-02 21:47:33+00:00
No, the characterization is very important. You've shown no connection to what's actually at stake, to the engagement patterns here, to the need for people to actually use agents in a way they understand, to the needs to work through & arrive together with your agent at an answer. We cant have a technical discussion until you actually show some engagement in the core topics, but you have been too busy raising frivolous objections to derail anyone thinking about the actual topic and technology.

Your proposal to use APIs is a grossly inefficient waste of LLM's time and energy, and far worse, a misuse of human attention that could be much better directed with the multiplayer/coop/peership of webmcp. You propose inventing brand new communication systems for every interaction, and haven't once considered the merits of leveraging the existing communication medium that users know. Rather than engage in WebMCP & what it brings, trying to hide and confuse the matter & bury any discussion under a sea of objections, objections that don't even carry technical merit. You haven't engaged with the actual topic even once, and have smokescreened the discussion. If you want to actually reply to any of the interesting things rather than blocking and obstructing discussion, I'll happily re-engage.

I've found everything you have said to be radically damaging to understanding the problems that be, by vastly limiting consideration away from all interesting topics and raising only naysaying quibbles that don't address how users and agents would actually do work. Users and agents need to work together. That's simple, and your posts actively distract from what's unique and different here. I'm not going to accept another null response and then waste my time again, and it's sad that people have been steered away from thoughtful consideration like this.
by slibhb | 2026-03-02 21:47:52+00:00
Does that really happen "any time you go to a doctor's office"?

That aside, what if novel therapies like this are linked to the fact that US healthcare is expensive? If you make it cheap -- as in other countries -- there's less incentive for companies to invest and you get less research and fewer breakthroughs. Also fewer doctors, hospital beds, and more rationing.

In an ideal world, everyone would have exactly the right amount of healthcare. But our world isn't ideal, it runs on incentives, and it's not clear to me that all the hand-wringing over US healthcare will lead to positive changes.
Show HN: Vanilla JavaScript refinery simulator built to explain job to my kids
by fuelingcurious | 2026-03-02 21:48:35+00:00
Hi HN,
I’m a chemical engineer and I manage logistics at a refinery down in Texas. Whenever I try to explain downstream operations to people outside the industry (including my kids), I usually get blank stares. I wanted to build something that visualizes the concepts and chemistry of a plant without completely dumbing down the science, so I put together this 5-minute browser game.

I am not a software developer by trade, so I relied heavily on LLMs (Claude, Copilot, Gemini) to help write the code. What started as a simple concept turned into a 9,000-line single-page app built with vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I used Matter.js for the 2D physics minigames.

A few technical takeaways from building this as a non-dev:
* Managing the LLM workflow: Once the script.js file got large, letting the models output full file rewrites was a disaster (truncations, hallucinations, invisible curly-quote replacements that broke the JS). I started forcing them to act like patch files, strictly outputting "Find this exact block" and "Replace with this exact block." This was the only way to maintain improvements without breaking existing logic.

* Mapping physics to CSS: I wanted the minigames to visually sit inside circular CSS containers (border-radius: 50%). Matter.js doesn't natively care about your CSS. Getting the rigid body physics to respect a dynamic, responsive DOM boundary across different screen sizes required running an elliptical boundary equation (dx * dx) / (rx * rx) + (dy * dy) / (ry * ry) > 1 on every single frame. Maybe this was overkill to try to handle the resizing between phones and PCs.

* Mobile browser events: Forcing iOS Safari to ignore its default behaviors (double-tap zoom, swipe-to-scroll) while still allowing the user to tap and drag Matter.js objects required a ridiculous amount of custom event listener management and CSS (touch-action: manipulation; user-select: none;). I also learned that these actions very easily kill the mouse scroll making it very frustrating for PC users. I am hoping I hit a good middle ground.

* State management: Since I didn't use React or any frameworks, I had to rely on a global state object. Because the game jumps between different phases/minigames, I ran into massive memory leaks from old setInterval loops and Matter.js bodies stacking up. I had to build strict teardown functions to wipe the slate clean on every map transition.

The game walks through electrostatic desalting, fractional distillation, hydrotreating, catalytic cracking, and gasoline blending (hitting specific Octane and RVP specs).

It’s completely free, runs client-side, and has zero ads or sign-ups. I'd appreciate any feedback on the mechanics, or let me know if you manage to break the physics engine. Happy to answer any questions about the chemical engineering side of things as well.

For some reason the URL box is not getting recognized, maybe someone can help me feel less dumb there too. www.fuelingcuriosity.com/game
by ecshafer | 2026-03-02 21:48:37+00:00
This affect is because of the doctor shortage though.

I am in the process of trying to find a primary care provider, and I cant find anyone accepting new patients.

Bigger places you basically see the doctor for 2 minutes when you actually need one. I went to a ortho surgeon and they had a dozen patients “seeing them” at the same time. As he just went between rooms and nurses prepped everything.
by wincy | 2026-03-02 21:48:47+00:00
This is amazing to see. Spina Bifida is tough as it can range anywhere from “wheelchair bound and substantial intellectual disability” to “has a hard time with potty training”, and you won’t really know until your child has been born.

My daughter is seven now and was born with spina bifida and it’s been a long journey full of pain, but also joy. The first nine months she had breath holding any time she’d get upset (which for a baby is all the time) so she was simultaneously the healthiest and least healthy baby in the NICU.

She’s wheelchair bound, but intellectually very sharp. Getting her a spinal shunt a few weeks after birth helped alleviate spinal fluid pressure in her brain, although it elevates scenarios of “kid has an headache” to “maybe we need to go to the ER at 3am in the worst snowstorm of the season”, but she’s extremely sociable and a light to everyone that meets her.

I’m glad work is being done that can mitigate this and improve quality of life for these children. She keeps asking me when she’ll get her robot legs and we tell her they have to test it out on adults first to make sure it’s safe! Exciting times for people with physical disabilities.
by wat10000 | 2026-03-02 21:49:24+00:00
Not that long ago, and we keep fiddling with them. The US time zones were adopted just over a century ago. The dates for daylight saving time were changed less than 20 years ago. Much of Western Europe changed time zones (much of it rather violently) in the 1940s, as did China. The tz database often requires updates for changes.

If you want to go with what was settled long ago, that would probably be a return to each town observing its own time based on local solar noon, which would be pretty annoying.
Ask HN: How do you get better at coding agents?
by twitchard | 2026-03-02 21:49:30+00:00
For me recent level ups were:
- Going all in on skills with slash commands.
- Learning the phrase "launch an adverserial sub-agent".
- Trying out the Codex desktop app.

Curious what you all have learned recently that felt like a "paradigm shift" in the way you are using your coding agents?
by egwor | 2026-03-02 21:49:34+00:00
I did it today. It took me thirty minutes to fix the networking because I couldn't get Little Snitch to uninstall since it didn't seem to be compatible. Basically I had to reboot in recovery mode to disable security features (csr) to uninstall Little Snitch (via systemextensionsctl). This is the worst update I've ever gone through on Mac, and I started using a Macintosh SE.
by chadlad101 | 2026-03-02 21:49:40+00:00
AIrankings ranks the top AI websites by real-world usage.

It's based on the top 1 million websites list published by Cisco Umbrella, which has 100 billion daily requests and 65 million active users.

Surprisingly, of all the AI websites mapped, only 526 rank in the top 1,000,000 global websites.
So there's a long way to go before AI is saturated :)

Note: this does not include websites where the main function is not AI.
by vimota | 2026-03-02 21:49:44+00:00
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by dewey | 2026-03-02 21:49:49+00:00
It's really sad. When this was introduced (With Lion I believe?) it was such a cool feature to demo to people that didn't have much exposure to Macs yet at that time. Just deleting and restoring a file on the Desktop with the "Space UI" and backups just being there and working without buying complicated backup software was a genuine peak macOS moment.

Now I'm barely using it as every few months I'm prompted to just delete the backup and start fresh because something corrupted.
by theLiminator | 2026-03-02 21:50:20+00:00
I'm not arguing against that, I'm just saying that open source labelling isn't a feature to users.

The downstream effects of something being open source might acquire users, but being open source in of itself doesn't do anything except for a very tiny slice of the population. I'd say (in the US) more than half of the software developers I know use an Apple phone despite Android being much more open.

Whenever I'm on HN I feel like most of the posters here live in a bubble where they think most people are anywhere near as tech literate as they are. (You can really feel how this forum is SF-coded).
by jim33442 | 2026-03-02 21:50:30+00:00
I mean in your C code that's using mmap, I know you can do this with a custom malloc impl, but idk if there's a built-in way:

int len = 1000;
int file = open("numbers.void", O_RDWR | O_CREAT, 0600);
ftruncate(file, len);
void\* buf = mmap(NULL, len,
PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE, MAP_SHARED,
file, 0);

// Treat mmapped buffer as a heap
initialize_heap(buf);
// Manage dynamically-sized array on disk
int* my_array = malloc(sizeof(int) * 8, buf);
my_array = realloc(my_array, sizeof(int) * 16, buf);
free(my_array, buf);

Protobuf, Python pickle, etc can all handle dynamic memory that gets flattened when you want to serialize.
by stackghost | 2026-03-02 21:50:52+00:00
>Fortran (really HPC) people call programs and libraries "codes".

I think it's a European engineering thing that just sort of caught on, actually. For example when I was in undergrad, my 4th-year computational fluids prof made us use "Code Aster"[0] and "Code Saturne"[1] which are both made by a French lab, I believe. Most of the usage of "code as a countable noun" that I've encountered has origins in English-as-a-second-language projects.

[0] https://code-aster.org/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Saturne
by breppp | 2026-03-02 21:50:53+00:00
I don't see the large difference between a civilian port, a civilian oil facility or a civilian aluminum factory vs a hotel on the topic of whether the Iranians are capable of targeting a civilian data center, however, I'll try to help us all with the sources

Finding these take time so I am sorry if this is going to be the last of these sources I'll paste, for example Bahrain:

https://edition.cnn.com/world/video/bahrain-iran-drone-strik...

https://x.com/TravelGov/status/2027843430987010446
by turf_penguin | 2026-03-02 21:51:03+00:00
Market share declining albeit slowly, customer opinions of each device release declining over time as well & they are generally on the more expensive end of the phone market.

Most of the tech enthusiasts who helped them kick off by buying for modding like cyanogen don't go near them now.

They used to be my recommendation to non technical friends and I doubt that I am the only one who long ago changed to other recommendations.

The company needs to revisit their roots in my opinion.
by ebbi | 2026-03-02 21:51:27+00:00
I'm hyped for a iPhone Fold as a concept.

But the leaks I've seen of the size, makes me less excited about it. The phone when folded looks a bit wider and squatter than my Pro Max. And when open, it's smaller than my 11" iPad.

I see the promise of this concept with the tri-fold phones, where when expanded is closer in size to an 11" tablet.
by triceratops | 2026-03-02 21:51:32+00:00
Your post boils down to "funding commitments are worthless and unenforceable", which if true is

1. surprising to me, a layman. and

2. means it's just as well J&J's ploy didn't work.

All the rest about J&J using the same law firm etc. doesn't make for much of a smoking gun for me.

You're also right about the perverse incentives. But it would be equally unfair if the last 37k of those 38k plaintiffs didn't get any money because the first 1000 to win were awarded all of it.

Tl;dr J&J may or may not be playing fair. Is there another orderly process to ensure all plaintiffs are treated fairly?
by _pdp_ | 2026-03-02 21:51:37+00:00
Is Go the best programming language for AI agents? I don't think so.

But what makes Go useful is the fact that it compiles to an actual executable you can easily ship anywhere - and that is actually really good considering that the language itself is super easy to learn.

I've recently started building some A agent tools with it and so far the experience has been great:

https://github.com/pantalk/pantalk
https://github.com/mcpshim/mcpshim
by michaelbuckbee | 2026-03-02 21:51:49+00:00
Tahoe introduced some changes to the windowing code that badly disrupted my DisplayPort device that was rock solid on Sequoia. I ended up switching to a new device as a workaround. Window memory use (I have a lot of virtual desktops and extra screens) is much higher and there's a peristent bug where taking a screenshot with CleanShot somehow resets the DisplayPort driver and everything flips out for a minute and it has to rediscover the external monitors. Infuriating.
by j_kauf | 2026-03-02 21:52:09+00:00
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by fcatalan | 2026-03-02 21:52:11+00:00
There's a lot of language for such a little time, but if you have programmed any Forth it should be easy to pick up, have a look at some of the top level examples.

I have programmed about 3 Forth implementations by hand throughout the years for fun, but I have never been able to really program in it, because the stack wrangling confuses me enormously.

So for me anything vaguely complex is unreadable , but apparently not for the LLMs, which I find surprising. When I have interrogated them they say they like the lack of syntax more than the stack ops hamper them, but it might be just an hallucinated impression.

When they write Cairn I sometimes see stack related error messages scroll by, but they always correct them quickly before they stop.
by gck1 | 2026-03-02 21:52:12+00:00
Yes on both counts. Implementation plan is a second layer after the spec is written, at which point, spec can't be changed by agents. I then launch a planner agent that writes a phased plan file and each builder can only work on a single phase from that file.

So it's spec (human in the loop) > plan > build. Then it cycles autonomously in plan > build until spec goals are achieved. This orchestration is all managed by a simple shell script.

But even with the implementation plan file, a new agent has to orient itself, load files it may later decide were irrelevant, the plan may have not been completely correct, there could have been gaps, initial assumptions may not hold, etc. It then starts eating tokens.

And it feels like this can be optimized further.

And yes on deterministic tooling as well.