MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by skydhash | 2026-03-10 14:08:49+00:00
It does generate word salad (and usefulness depends on the person reading it). If both the writer and the reader share a common context, there's a lot that can be left out (the extreme version is military signal). An SOS over the radio says the same thing as "I'm in a dangerous situation, please help me if you can" but the former is way more efficient. LLMs tend to prefer the latter.
by User750 | 2026-03-10 14:08:52+00:00
It’s wild to see how almost every project on Show HN today is AI-centric. While LLMs are great, I wanted to build something "old school" and deterministic that runs entirely locally and focuses on pure performance.
My main goal was to see how much I could squeeze out of pure Python using bitwise operations. Achieving 18µs/char was a personal milestone, but I'm curious – for those of you dealing with high-performance Python, do you see any obvious bottlenecks in my implementation or ways to push it even further without dropping into C/Rust?
by crazygringo | 2026-03-10 14:09:05+00:00
If you want to reduce air travel for environmental reasons, then tax it more.

Shaming individuals doesn't seem to be productive or helpful.

Air travel works for people if the benefits outweigh the costs. The only thing that changes behavior is to change the costs.

And even if costs were 10x there are still plenty of people who will fly tons, because it would still be economically productive. There are always going to be people who fly 10x more than others, because certain jobs and roles simply require it.
by Aurornis | 2026-03-10 14:09:19+00:00
> for literally no gain to you whatsoever?

I literally gain from using their services for communication and voice chat with friends.

“Literally no gain whatsoever” is completely wrong.

I’ve tried Matrix/Element for years. I’m still in some IRC channels. I know what the alternatives are I can confidently say I’m gaining value from the ease in which Discord allows us to voice chat, screen share, and invite less technical people to join.
by sgbeal | 2026-03-10 14:09:47+00:00
> Solar on the balcony railing is very popular right now, mostly amongst apartment renters

i have yet to see a single solar panel on an apartment building in Brandenburg, Germany, whereas a large portion (perhaps even a majority) of single-family and duplex units here have them. Perhaps they're more common in the richer parts of the country where a profit can be more readily turned, but not up here.
Show HN: Volt – Fast, Git-native API client written in Zig (Postman alternative)
by artski | 2026-03-10 14:10:13+00:00
Hey HN,

I wanted to build something real in Zig, and I was annoyed that Postman
needed an account and an internet connection just to send a GET request.
So I figured I'd make something I would actually use.

It kind of snowballed from there. 50,000+ lines later, it does requests,
test assertions, collections, environments, CI/CD reports, import/export,
and has a browser-based Web UI (`volt ui`). All in a single binary with
zero external dependencies.

Some numbers:

- Binary size: ~4 MB (Postman: ~500 MB)
- Startup: 42ms (Postman: 3-8 seconds)
- RAM idle: ~5 MB (Postman: 300-800 MB)
- Dependencies: 0
- Account required: No

It uses plain-text .volt files that live in your git repo. Your API tests
are just files, versioned with your code.

For CI, you copy one binary and run `volt test`. No npm, no Docker, no runtime.

Why Zig? Honestly, I wanted an excuse to write a lot of Zig. But the
explicit allocators, comptime, and cross-compilation from one machine made
it practical to ship Linux/macOS/Windows from a single codebase with no
external packages.

There's a CLI, a TUI with tabs and search, and a Web UI. It's not perfect
but I use it daily and it hasn't crashed on me yet.

Site: https://api-volt.com
Repo: https://github.com/volt-api/volt
Benchmarks: https://github.com/volt-api/volt/blob/main/BENCHMARKS.md

Happy to answer questions about the Zig implementation, that's the part
I'm most excited to talk about honestly.
by albert_e | 2026-03-10 14:10:16+00:00
Cat and mouse.

Then we shall only ever connect to a throwaway wifi ssid created for the sole purpose of setting up that TV and deleted promptly afterwards.

Samsung will then use NFC / QuickShare transient hotspot to helpfully sync all useful info from your Samsung phone nearby.

Then we block that IP address or MAC ID from router side.

Then smart TVs will switch to open mesh networks hosted by unsuspecting ISP customer boxes in neighborhood.

And maybe even starlink.

=====

Maybe wifi standard should stop using static passwords and create a device specific hash to let it connect. Wifi admin should get to approve each device connection request.
by mmooss | 2026-03-10 14:10:22+00:00
One reason might be how off-putting the Neovim community is, hijacking Vim discussions to denigrate an all-time-great, beloved work of technology and its creator (who did decades of work for free, gave it to the world, and gave any money to actual orphans) all for Neovim users'/devs' own egos, promotion, and obsession. Almost all of Neovim was made by Moolenaar, from concept to execution, and I don't know that I've ever seen any gratitude.

I've never seen Vim users do that. If I had to choose, I'd use Vim.
by RahulMJ | 2026-03-10 14:10:29+00:00
Hey celadevra_, author here. Thanks for submitting my post to HN, I really appreciate it.

Seeing it stay at #1 for a few hours while my blog server struggled with the requests was quite a joy :)

PS: Also, thanks to everyone who commented on it. While I can't reply to all of you, I'm doing my best to read everything. I'm glad to hear that the project resonates with so many people, whether philosophically, aesthetically, or as something partially useful.
by spiderfarmer | 2026-03-10 14:10:39+00:00
I'm someone who's always eager to try the next thing. That's why I'm not really good at anything. I always doubt my capabilities because I know enough to know exactly why I suck at doing the thing.

Being a parent is completely different. I can't exactly move on to the next thing even if I ever wanted to. But there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that I'm good at this.

Because at the very least I'm a lot better than my parents ever were. My wife and kids are all happy and I really, really enjoy being a parent. That's something a lot of children never get to experience.
by uyzstvqs | 2026-03-10 14:10:46+00:00
Grok 4.20 is currently in beta and ranking #4 on arena.ai for text generation, only beaten by Claude Opus 4.6 and Gemini 3.1 Pro. Grok 4.1 Thinking is in #9, still a top model. Grok Imagine is consistently in the top 10 for image and video generation, ranking #1 for Image-to-Video.

If you meant code generation, Grok has never really been a top model for that purpose. Claude remains the undefeated king there.

https://arena.ai/leaderboard
by beepbooptheory | 2026-03-10 14:11:02+00:00
Is that conceit somehow intrinsically absurd? Or is everyone just supposed to just know?

Like I wish it was simple as "if it wasn't viable, they wouldn't be in business," but alas that argument is kinda the more naive one in this world. Right?

Or is there some intuition about energy/cost here all the dump posters miss, that you could tell us about?

Please, anything, my company is dying.
by zvqcMMV6Zcr | 2026-03-10 14:11:10+00:00
> Heracles, which sped up FHE computing tasks as much as 5,000-fold compared to a top-of the-line Intel server CPU.

That is nice speed-up compared to generic hardware but everyone probably wants to know how much slower it is than performing same operations on plain text data? I am sure 50% penalty is acceptable, 95% is probably not.
by jollyllama | 2026-03-10 14:11:27+00:00
Except we're not, in this case. Oracle is not hiding the fact that the cuts are due to rising costs and expenses, rather than actualized efficiency gains. This is in contrast to everyone else, ex. Dorsey's block, who are putting a brave face on cuts, saying it's simply due to efficiency gains from AI. The question is: why are their statements being taken at face value?
by lambda | 2026-03-10 14:11:27+00:00
Magit is absolutely the best Git GUI ever.

Unfortunately, for most people the fact that it's part of Emacs is a blocker.

And because most people use worse Git tools, they tend to use workflows that are easier with more cumbersome tools; generally just committing all kinds of junk commits to a branch, and using the "squash and merge" feature of GitHub or GitLab to clean everything in a PR/MR up into a single commit.

So yeah, it's sad that people don't use Git to its full potential because almost no other Git interface works as well, and most people aren't going to learn Emacs just for a Git UI.
by tgw43279w | 2026-03-10 14:12:34+00:00
That was a fun read! The base64 decoding and encoding is quite interesting. A parallel: these models are surprisingly robust to heavy word mangling, back in 2023 people used this trick to jailbreak the models very often, but what was more surprising is that they even understand it. I always thought of it this way there must be some circuitry in the model that maps these almost unrecognizable words/sentences into their rectified versions. But what your base64 also shows is the fact thy can also encode them back as well! (However models are known to not be able to produce mangled output that looks convincingly random. I think the base64 transformation is more mechanical in this regard and hence it‘s easier to do the reverse for them.)
So your layer circuit hypothesis aligns pretty well with my mental model of how these models work based on the interpretability work I am familiar with! I really also like the way you used the heatmaps as a tool to derive layer insights, very intuitive! But it’s really surprising that you can simply duplicate layers and achieve better results that generalize!
This is some research grade effort! I’m confident you could publish this in NeurIPS or ICML if you put it into a paper! I‘m quite impressed! Great work!
by pjc50 | 2026-03-10 14:12:47+00:00
https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/electricity-price chart is extremely noisy, and is quoting wholesale rather than retail, but to my eyes that actually looks flat over the period from before the Ukraine war. It seems to have started that spike in late 2021, before the war in February 2022 (which of course shoots it upwards, that's the "doubling in late 2022" you mention).
by aerhardt | 2026-03-10 14:12:54+00:00
I drive a Cupra (a Spanish brand, a spinoff of SEAT, owned by Volkswagen) and when I was driving my car out of the dealership I had to tell the salesman I was not interested in signing up for the free app they were trying to foist me. He was dumbfounded. The model was selling like hotcakes yet I was the first customer that had outright refused to sign up for their shitty app. They pulled off the inevitable switcheroo, it now costs a monthly fee and I don’t want to think about what insidious things they can do with it.
by antonvs | 2026-03-10 14:13:33+00:00
> These are the kind of criminals where the judges will let them stay under home arrest in their twenty-bedroom mansion…

Another egregious example of this sort of thing:

> Robert H. Richards IV was convicted of rape, the wealthy heir to the Du Pont family fortune […] received an eight-year prison sentence in 2009 for raping his toddler daughter, but the sentencing order signed by a Delaware judge said “defendant will not fare well” in prison and the eight years were suspended.

— https://www.cnn.com/2014/04/02/justice/delaware-du-pont-rape...

Talk about a two-tier justice system.
by hunter2_ | 2026-03-10 14:13:54+00:00
Probably because the transfer of accounts (typically for reasons of better spamming, but in this case for adult access) is possible.

However, that makes me wonder what mechanism might "unverify" an account holder's age upon transfer. I suppose it's simply a need to re-verify (take a new photo) upon every login, but then folks could transfer the session cookie to avoid needing the new owner to perform a login (unless a new device ID/fingerprint makes the old cookie useless).
by tinfoilhatter | 2026-03-10 14:14:03+00:00
I agree that the rampant toxicity on X / Twitter is quite extreme, but it's also there on BlueSky, just in a different form. Both platforms have polarized bases but the only difference in my mind is that one platform resorts to banning speech it doesn't like whereas the other does little to curb it. Neither is ideal in my mind.

> Banning hate speech which incites violence against a minority group is a slippery slope, but I think it's for the better. At the same time, of course it can be abused, such as with the IHRA definition of antisemitism used in many jurisdictions, under which many valid criticisms of Israel would be deemed "antisemitic"

Anti-semitism definitely gets weaponized and while I don't agree with people that praise Hitler, I also don't pretend the history I learned about WWII and the persecution of Jewish people was objective truth either. It's important for me to remember who the people defining what is and is not hate speech are as well.
by dgacmu | 2026-03-10 14:14:13+00:00
I don't disagree.

I assume that most of these purely llm generated unwanted contributions will just end up in dead end forks, because my impression is that a lot of them are just being generated as GitHub activity fodder. But the stuff that really solves a problem for a person - eh, good. Problem solved is problem solved. (Unless it creates new problems)
by lpcvoid | 2026-03-10 14:14:17+00:00
German here. I pay around 24c/kWh. It's much cheaper than it was in late 2022 with the energy price shock due to russia attempting to blackout Europe. I cannot imagine how much worse we would be off, would our Power generation stem from fossil or nuclear fuel.

More renewables is the answer. We need to build so much that power becomes almost free (already the case in the summer at high noon, see [1]).

[1] https://energy-charts.info/charts/price_spot_market/chart.ht...
by lelanthran | 2026-03-10 14:14:23+00:00
> That was a fun read, and it might even explain why a lot of Gen-z is opting out of any sort of career building, wanting values instead (or next to) a paycheck.

Wouldn't that make them even bigger ~losers~ Clueless?

The ~losers~ Clueless are strictly those who put in more effort than they get in return but who cannot see it!

Putting in +25% extra into their job for a 5% promotion, for example.

Putting in effort for anything other than money is in the companies interest - they want people to be happy with vibes-as-compensation instead of money-as-compensation!

---------------

EDIT: I meant to say Clueless, not "losers".
by Divisibly3 | 2026-03-10 14:14:29+00:00
The Wii U is from 2012 but the homebrew scene is surprisingly active and the toolchain (devkitPro) is well-maintained nowadays. At least that is my impression after developing some homebrew myself.

The interesting parts: cross-compiling C++ with devkitPro, using SDL2 on a console target with basically no documentation and debugging on real hardware without a proper debugger. Most of the resources you'd normally reach for just don't exist for this platform, so a lot of it was reading source code and trial and error.
by thepasch | 2026-03-10 14:14:34+00:00
> while taking the joyful bits of software development away from you

Quick question: by "joyful bits of software development," do you mean the bit where you design robust architectures, services, and their communication/data concepts to solve specific problems, or the part where you have to assault a keyboard for extended periods of time _after_ all that interesting work so that it all actually does anything?

Because I sure know which of these has been "taken from me," and it's certainly not the joyful one.
by oren1531 | 2026-03-10 14:14:37+00:00
Grok's value was never really about model quality - it was the only model with real-time access to what's actually being said on X. And it's less filtered than the others, which matters for certain topics where ChatGPT/Claude will just refuse or hedge. Those are two genuinely unique things. But they're sitting on both advantages without shipping anything meaningful, and competitors will find workarounds eventually. The SpaceX merger adding organizational noise right now seems like the worst possible timing.
by mdocc | 2026-03-10 14:14:55+00:00
>StaticQueue: LinearisedIterator

Using C++ iterator interface to fix the main problem of a standard ring buffer of non-contiguous regions is a cute idea, but I like to use a "bip buffer"[1] instead which actually always gives you real contiguous regions so you can pass the pointers to things like a dma engine.

[1] https://ferrous-systems.com/blog/lock-free-ring-buffer/

The tradeoff is that you have in the worse case only half the buffer available - the ring buffer essentially becomes a kind of double buffer where you periodically switch between writing/reading at the end or the beginning of the storage.
by benban | 2026-03-10 14:15:16+00:00
This makes sense for OpenAI, my experience with Promptfoo is great at testing model outputs. But I keep wondering who's looking at the other side: the actual agent code, and what happens now for other models such as Gemini/Claude etc that are using Promptfoo being locked-in with OpenAI and OS.

Like, an eval will tell you the model gave a bad answer. It won't tell you that your agent passes that answer straight into a shell command, or that a loop has no exit condition and burns through your API budget overnight.

We've been working on this, static analysis that reads agent code and maps out what can go wrong before you deploy. Found issues in ~80% of the repos we scanned.

would be great to get your feedback: https://github.com/inkog-io/inkog
by foresterre | 2026-03-10 14:15:29+00:00
That's a rather unkind comment.

For the parent there's immaterial value knowing that is written by a human. From what I read in your comment, you see code more as a means to an end. I think I understand where the parent is coming from. Writing code myself, and accomplishing what I set out to build sometimes feels like a form of art, and knowing that I build it, gives me a sense of accomplishment. And gives me energy. Writing code solely as a means to an end, or letting it be generated by some model, doesn't give that same energy.

This thinking has nothing to do with not caring about being a good teammate or the business. I've no idea why you put that on the same pile.
by sgbeal | 2026-03-10 14:15:41+00:00
> (which of course shoots it upwards, that's the "doubling in late 2022" you mention).

i guaranty you that my electricity costs were 22c in mid-2022, jumped to 47c in either late 2022 or January 2023, and just went up from 47c to i don't know what in February (i got the notification of an increase but didn't bother logging in to see the new prices).
by mmooss | 2026-03-10 14:15:54+00:00
The GGP comment talks about how all these non-hetero people are somehow more dangerous. It's hard to escape the implications or the responsbility for implying what is a long-time trope of hate - constructing a reality where non-hetero people are somehow actually dangerous despite doing nothing that affects anyone else or is anyone else's business, realizing and rationalizing fears. Fear and hate are two sides of the same emotion.

The unknown is scary to people, to everyone. Get to know some non-hetero people and you'll find they are just like everyone else - and you are just like them.
by the_af | 2026-03-10 14:15:58+00:00
> Brent (Gervais) is neither a sociopath nor the top dog he thinks he is, he's a middle manager who it's implied was legitimately good at sales, but is not at all good at the role he's been promoted into because it's a completely different one.

I think in this hierarchy Brent is supposed to be Clueless rather than Sociopath.

I agree it doesn't 100% match the characters.

By the way, I like Steve Carell but the British show was much better than the US one.
by riskable | 2026-03-10 14:16:27+00:00
The right time to speak up about something that's wrong is always NOW. Why? Because if you knew and didn't say something at the earliest possible moment you will get blamed for inaction later.

If you don't say something when you see something is wrong, never say anything about it (at all). Otherwise you're asking for trouble later when the shit eventually hits the fan. "You knew and didn't say anything‽"

Even if someone gets upset at you for speaking up, that's still a better situation than being blamed later when the real finger pointing occurs.

"Don't look at me! I warned about this!" is a very real get-out-of-jail-free card in medium to large organizations. Especially if you have your objections in writing (save all emails!).

As a great example: At my work, the company made a piss poor decision to buy an (expensive) enterprise product that I warned would not work to solve the problem it was being purchased to solve. I warned them ahead of time that it wouldn't work. Then I warned them in the middle of the project and again, at implementation time.

When it didn't work, management came down HARD on everyone. In the middle of the finger pointing meeting I pulled up my emails which were sent to the people trying to point the proverbial finger and the meeting was over. Just like that! I saved the whole team with the simple act of voicing my objections in writing at every stage of the project.

If I didn't do that I have no doubt that some scapegoat would've been fired. Instead, no one got fired (sadly, because the normal rules of incompetence don't apply to the clueless/management layer, haha).

Unfortunately, to this day management never takes my offers of, "instead of purchasing this terrible 'enterprise' solution for millions of dollars, give ME that money and I'll produce a solution that's better in every way. I'll even have it up and running faster than we could requisition and install the product!"
by jonpalmisc | 2026-03-10 14:16:40+00:00
Tangential, but I really wish there would be a performance renaissance with Emacs.

Native-comp was a good step forward, but Emacs is still so much slower than Neovim, even in the case of launching and immediately quitting, with no config:

$ time emacs -Q -e kill-emacs
/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs -nw -Q -e kill-emacs 0.18s user 0.03s system 98% cpu 0.213 total

$ time nvim -es --cmd 'vim.cmd("q")'
nvim -es --cmd 'vim.cmd("q")' 0.02s user 0.01s system 82% cpu 0.034 total

Even with a very minimal set of packages, text insertion, etc. is slower, and opening Magit (when it hasn't been loaded yet) takes about a second due to slow package loading.

Emacs is my favorite editor, full stop.

But every time I open Neovim or Sublime for quick tasks, it's always painfully apparent how much faster they are when I CMD+Tab back to Emacs.
by throw0101d | 2026-03-10 14:16:44+00:00
> Or just run -current in production, like we do.[0]

If you develop, it's probably best to do that against current [1], but if I'm running a web, mail, file, database, etc, server there is IMHO very little advantage to doing so. Most folks aren't trying to push >400Gbps.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4TZxj-Dq7s

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ0mvmZtbaY
by orf | 2026-03-10 14:16:54+00:00
What a reductive argument. Is this your first day on planet earth? If so, here’s what you need to know:

- people can just say things

- when people say things, you don’t have to listen to them

- not listening to them doesn’t make you superior or more powerful than them

We can practice: I’d like you to always comment in uppercase letters from now on please. It’s my policy.