MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by embedding-shape | 2026-03-07 15:47:29+00:00
> Nothing since has packed nearly the impact with the exception of going from spinning disks to SSDs.

"Bananas" core-counts gave me the same experience. Some year ago I moved to Ryzen Threadripper and experienced similar "Wow, compiling this project is now 4x faster" or "processing this TBs of data is now 8x faster", but of course it's very specific to specific workloads where concurrency and parallism is thought of from the ground up, not a general 2x speed up in everything.
by hypeatei | 2026-03-07 15:47:33+00:00
The graph ("vs. Headline Rate")[0] follows the same trend lines as the BLS numbers just with a higher percentage. I don't see how the "poverty wage" methodology (which is arbitrary) is helpful here, it doesn't take into account caregivers or disabled people who may be keeping their wage low on purpose due to benefits cliffs.

Effectively they just take the official numbers and add a constant.

0: https://www.lisep.org/tru
by twistedpair | 2026-03-07 15:47:54+00:00
I don't think everyone will easily make the jump to coding at warp speed. Pushing 6 agentic sessions at once, while seeing a half dozen new features/fixes out to prod is more mental gymnastics. If you're the "add a button to a form" enterprise developer, this is going to feel like a dramatic shift in how you're used to working.
by rmunn | 2026-03-07 15:48:10+00:00
Best thing, if you accepted the book but realize within a few steps (maybe immediately) that you didn't actually want it, would be to walk back to the person handing it out and say "Changed my mind, don't actually want it, why don't you give it to someone else?" I know some people who hand out religious tracts or other such materials, and every one of them that I know personally would accept the item back with good grace. They'd rather give it to someone who will actually read it.

And if they're the kind of person who won't take it back with good grace? Place it on the ground right next to them, and walk away. Make it their responsibility to deal with it. (If you don't want to go out of your way to find a trash can: some public spaces make them easy to find, but others not so much).
by rpdillon | 2026-03-07 15:48:50+00:00
You're overthinking it.

Programming is a tricky skill and takes a long time to get good at. Lots of people aren't good at it. AI helps them program anyway, and allows them to sometimes produce useful programs. That's it.

It's not a talking point. It's just the reality of what the technology enables, and it's a simple enough observation that millions of people can independently arrive at that conclusion, and some of them might even refer to it as "democratization".
by ygjb | 2026-03-07 15:49:07+00:00
You have conflated the joy of learning with the joy of building. I have been writing code since I was 6 years old and was left to my own devices with the vic-20, the manual, and BASIC instructions.

I have worked as a developer, security engineer, program manager and engineering manager through my career. Writing stuff to understand algorithms or hardware requires engaging with the math, science, and engineering of the software and hardware. Optimizing it or developing a novel algorithm requires deep comprehension.

Writing a service that shuffles a few things around between stuff on my home network so that I can build an automation to turn down the lights when I start playing a movie? Yeah, I could spend a day or two writing and testing it. Having done it a few times, the work of it is a bit of a chore, I'm not learning, just doing something. Using an Claude or some other agent to do that makes it go from 'do I want to spend my time off doing a chore?' to 'I can design this and have it built in an hour'.

Making the jump to using the tools in my day job has been a bitore challenging because as a security engineer I have seen some hairy stuff over the last two years as AI generated stuff wends it's way into production, but the tools and capabilities have expanded massively, and heck, my peers from Mozilla just published some awesome successes working with Anthropic to find new vulns :)

Don't let using tools take away the love of learning, use them to solve a problem and take care of the drudgery of building stuff.
by g947o | 2026-03-07 15:49:11+00:00
GitHub Copilot, Claude Code and Codex provide fairly good IDE integrations. They don't just edit files behind your back. They actually edit the files you have in the IDEs using editor APIs and even show you a nice diff view. This way you never have content that is out of sync. I find this approach very usable and appealing.

On the other hand, many of the AI tools and their companies think that you should completely ditch IDEs for CLIs only, because "nobody needs to write code anymore". Some of them even stopped maintaining IDE extensions and go all-in in CLIs.

(I call that complete BS)
by apical_dendrite | 2026-03-07 15:49:54+00:00
The volume is different. Someone submitted a PR this week that was 3800 lines of shell script. Most of it was crap and none of it should have been in shell script. He's submitting PRs with thousands of lines of code every day. He has no idea how any of it actually works, and it completely overwhelms my ability to review.

Sure, he could have submitted a ill-considered 3800 line PR five years ago, but it would have taken him at least a week and there probably would have been opportunities to submit smaller chunks along the way or discuss the approach.
by adrian_b | 2026-03-07 15:50:18+00:00
In terms of marketing, the "GHz" barrier was special, because surpassing it has indeed created a lot of recognition in the general public for the fact that the AMD Athlon CPUs were better than the Intel Pentium III CPUs.

In reality, of course what you say is true and the fact that Athlon could previde a few extra hundreds of MHz in the clock frequency was not decisive.

Athlon had many improvements in microarchitecture in comparison with Pentium III, which ensured a much better performance even at equal clock frequency. For instance, Athlon was the first x86 CPU that was able to do both a floating-point multiplication and a floating-point addition in a single clock cycle. Pentium III, like all previous Intel Pentium CPUs required 2 clock cycles for this pair of operations.

This much better floating-point performance of Athlon vs. Intel contrasted with the previous generation, where AMD K6 had competitive integer performance with Intel, but its floating-point performance was well below that of the various Intel Pentium models (which had hurt its performance in some games).
Show HN: Outside In – Stream live night sounds from outside to bedside. iOS/free
by telecuda | 2026-03-07 15:50:48+00:00
Hey HN. I built a small iOS app called Outside In (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/outside-in/id6759529344).

The idea is simple: you put a spare/old iPhone outside (porch, windowsill, backyard) and keep the other one by your bed. The outside phone captures whatever's happening out there — crickets, rain, wind, the occasional owl — and streams it to the inside phone over your local Wi-Fi. You flip the inside phone face-down and fall asleep to it.

I built this because my partner and I used to leave a window cracked at night to hear the outside, but the outside temperature isn't always compatible with that. I wanted the sounds sleeping with the window open without the weather.

Some technical details:

The phones find each other via Bonjour (NWListener/NWBrowser), then stream PCM audio over a plain TCP connection with length-prefixed framing. 48kHz mono Float32. No server, no internet. Everything stays on the local network.

There's a speech suppression feature that uses Apple's SoundAnalysis framework to detect human voices on-device and gate them out. It runs a hysteresis gate with ~55% confidence threshold to close and ~30% to reopen, with a 3-second hold time so it doesn't flutter. The gain ramping is exponential per-buffer to avoid clicks. It works surprisingly well. Conversations on the sidewalk get suppressed but you still hear the crickets behind them.

The inside phone uses the accelerometer to detect when it's face-down and still (gravity.z > 0.85 + a 1.75s stillness buffer), then fades audio in. Pick it up and it fades out. The whole interaction model is basically "put it down and forget about it."

No accounts, no cloud, no analytics, no recording. Zero external dependencies. All Apple frameworks. Free, no ads, no IAP etc. I built it for myself and figured others might want it too.

Happy to answer questions (inevitably some folks who would say "why would I want to listen to outside in X city?" :)
by satvikpendem | 2026-03-07 15:51:27+00:00
You know what they mean by that term, it's about building things without needing to put in the learning effort. I have bosses building small POCs via vibe coding, something they would not have done via learning to code and typing it manually.

It's the same sort of argument artists use when it comes to AI generated media, there obviously is a qualitative difference in the people now able to generate whatever they want versus needing to draw something by hand, so saying "they could've just learned to draw themselves" is not very convincing. People don't want to do that yet still get an output, and I see nothing wrong with that, and if you do, it's just another sort of gatekeeping, that the "proper" way is to learn it by hand.

Lastly, many, many open weight models exist.
by Bombthecat | 2026-03-07 15:51:46+00:00
Absolutely agree, when we got our last junior one and a half year ago. He started with using AI for... Everything. If you told him research this and that topic and ways to do X and y and if it's possible. He just used AI which missed half the steps and information.

I'm not against research with AI. But using a search engine helps you go through a railway basically and helps you gather information step by step and you have time to notice it something is missing.

With AI you don't have the mental pause to process the information.
by ergonaught | 2026-03-07 15:52:31+00:00
A few years younger than OP, and started programming somewhere around 1982. The technology is obviously interesting, the capabilities are fascinating. I use LLMs a very large portion of every day.

The problems, as ever, are 1) what negative things are enabled by the technology, 2) do the positive things that are enabled by the technology outweigh those ("is the price worth paying?"), and 3) how much harm will "stupid" and/or "evil" cause as a result of the technology?

And so on.

The fact that a thing is exciting or interesting or stimulating is neat, for sure, but as always there is no relevant thought given to ramifications.

Humans lag well behind technological advancement, and this particular wave is moving faster than perhaps anything else (because prior technological advances enable it, etc).

It's cool that you enjoy it. Me, too. I might enjoy shooting heroin into my eyeballs, too, right up until I don't.
by JKCalhoun | 2026-03-07 15:52:35+00:00
I remember arriving at Apple Park to meet a friend/coworker a few years before I retired. Sitting there enjoying the food by one of the huge, curved glass walls, he was distractedly focused on one of the gardeners that Apple employs. This man was out in the center part of Apple Park trimming a plant or something similar.

It was clear that my friend was looking on somewhat enviously and when I asked, he admitted as much.

And I knew too immediately the draw. Before I was old enough for "gainful employment" there was a neighbor who hired my sister and I (I think I was 11, my sister 10) to ride along with him and his kids (our neighborhood friends) and help with his lawn services business.

I know. But this was the 1970's, a small working-class neighborhood in a Kansas suburb… And he paid us by the hour, helped load/unload the lawn mowers. We'd get a free lunch at a "Wiley's" fast-food hamburger joint.

But despite the physical labor of pushing a lawn mower all over someone's yard, there was a curious sense of satisfaction that came from having arrived at a tatty, overgrown lawn but then leaving it looking neat, tidy. It is the usual "sense of accomplishment" that physical labor often metes out that is often more elusive in the white-collar world.

To be sure there's no arguing about the differences in pay—I'm talking strictly about a sense of job satisfaction. (And, over the course of my three decade career as a programmer, the closest to that had been early on when I had full ownership of the code.)
by messh | 2026-03-07 15:53:01+00:00
I don't like the positional keybindings. There is no real difference from regular keybindings configured with profiles for Qwerty, Dvorak, etc. In practice, it just means presenting them drawn into keyboards in a way that is hard to quickly search or use in the terminal and anywhere really. Where's the "line" key? Search the drawing! (Oh... it is there in th top left corner, but which exact key?) I prefer a list. So, really, it is not even that big of a "special thing" except the presentation.
by adampunk | 2026-03-07 15:53:11+00:00
I have owned four Apple laptops since 2005. The first one I got was the first Intel MacBook Pro. The last one I have is an M1 MacBook Air. The repairability score of these laptops has dropped linearly; I could with a guide and some dedicated tools, completely disassemble and reassemble the 2005 laptop. I would be a fool to try that with the MacBook Air.

That’s in line with what this article is saying, but I would be remiss if I did not say that the durability of those laptops has gone up inverse to the repairability. The 2020 M1 MacBook Air is one of the most durable machines I’ve ever bought from Apple. I strongly suspect that this trade-off of durability and repairability is real.

I should also point out that I needed to disassemble and reassemble the 2005 MacBook Air because Apple screwed up the manufacturing. I had to take the whole computer apart and replace the thermal paste because they had put on too much. A later machine I had to replace the battery. I have not had to open up the last two that I bought.

It was cool and fun and scary to open that machine up and have to reassemble it and hope that it would work again, but I don’t really want to do that with a machine that I depend on. I would much rather never have to do that.

It’s possible that this, and not planned obsolescence, is what is driving things. If it is planned obsolescence, they’re doing a really bad job of obsoleting my six-year-old computer.
by stephbook | 2026-03-07 15:53:11+00:00
God how i hate these unresponsive TV interfaces. Even the apple TV feels slow and like it renders at half a frame per second.

Instead of selecting something you already see, it feels like you're discovering something that's slow to render.

Imagine your PCs desktop was like this, or your phone's app list. Click once per "next selection." It would drive me mad.
by matsemann | 2026-03-07 15:53:28+00:00
You know you could just choose a framework and stick with it? The way you look down on "the whole profession" for what's basically a straw man and your own decision is a bit bizarre. Especially coupled with the fact that tech has never moved so fast as right now, being on top of the AI-game is a target changing a hundred times faster than frontend frameworks back in the days.
by icedchai | 2026-03-07 15:54:29+00:00
There is a fine line between "not proofreading" and "not paying attention at all to the output." There are many things that look like they work, but won't pass a sniff test, especially when it comes to security or performance. I witnessed agents create "private" endpoints that had no authentication, but sent user IDs as part of the payload and trusted them.
by hedora | 2026-03-07 15:54:45+00:00
The Athlon XP was the bigger milestone, as I remember it.

They were both "seventh generation" according to their marketing, but you could get an entire GHz+ Athlon XP machine for much less than half the $990 tray price from the article.

I distinctly remember the day work bought a 5 or 6 node cluster for $2000. (A local computer shop gave us a bulk discount and assembled it for them, so sadly, I didn't poke around inside the boxes much.)

We had a Solaris workstation that retailed for $10K in the same office. Its per-core speed was comparable to one Athlon machine, so the cluster ran circles around it for our workload.

Intel was completely missing in action at that point, despite being the market leader. They were about to release the Pentium 4, and didn't put anything decent out from then to the Core 2 Duo. (The Pentium 4 had high clock rates, but low instructions per cycle, so it didn't really matter. Then AMD beat Intel to market with 64 bit support.)

I suspect history is in the process of repeating itself. My $550 AMD box happily runs Qwen 3.5 (32B parameters). An nvidia board that can run that costs > 4x as much.
by NotPractical | 2026-03-07 15:54:49+00:00
By "fundamental individual right", I believe they're referring to the first amendment. How we should interpret the first amendment is not something we can put up to a vote. Only the judicial branch holds the power to interpret the law. As the root commenter noted, the Supreme Court has already decided that sexual speech is not necessarily protected by the first amendment.

At the same time, you're allowed to disagree with their decision. The Supreme Court tries its best, but there is no "100% correct" interpretation and individual justices often disagree (as they did on Miller v. California).
by HoldOnAMinute | 2026-03-07 15:55:36+00:00
Do you remember the part where they built a machine in the Transcend that had to work at the Bottom of the Beyond?

The other day I was using Claude for a task, but it occurred to me, what if Claude is unreachable.

So, I told it to "encode your wisdom into this script in case you are not available"

That was my own version of that
by sbuttgereit | 2026-03-07 15:55:46+00:00
As someone that constantly reached for some sort of GUI/TUI tool to work with git repos, I can understand the hesitation. The normal git CLI is sufficiently opaque and my interest in it is sufficiently low that those tools were really the only way I could work done efficiently since they made the arcane ways of git a bit more evident.

The curious thing for me is that with jj I find that I don't ever really reach for a GUI/TUI anymore. At first I did try a GUI, but then I realized that the vast majority of what I want to get done conceptually didn't require it. So most of what I do now is just using the jj command line and very rarely do I reach for any sort of other tool.

The exceptions to the GUI/TUI use are resolving conflicts. For me being able to see the conflicts side by side and much more interactively choosing which I want is still more comfortable than simply hand-editing the file. And I also find I'm searching or chatting with an LLM anything I want to do something a little more advanced and less common, like rebasing all my feature branches on the most current mainline branch in one command... jj has a rich set of functions and pattern matching which I haven't (and may never) take the time to learn. But the majority of day to day interactions... just me and the command line. I would never say such a think using git by itself.
by cweld510 | 2026-03-07 15:55:52+00:00
I agree with this — there is at least some bifurcation by skillset and capabilities. Lots of engineers are overfitted to working on consumer web apps or SaaS products, but those are no longer an area of focus. You need to be adaptable enough to work on other kinds of systems too. Doing so either requires that you’re really good commercially (can lead development of a product over time, drive revenue, etc) or very good technically at a wide breadth of technologies and problems.

What makes this more extreme is that we’re in a paradigm shift, technically. Systems of the future look different than what’s been built before. Building agentic stuff is very different than web apps. The infrastructure side is also different. Moreover, both are uncertain so there’s no plug-and-play set of skills that would fit into any company in the way you could probably get hired reliably in the 2010s if you can operate Kubernetes, design a database schema, write Node.js APIs, etc.
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-03-07 15:56:08+00:00
thanks, this seems pretty useful information.

Assuming inbound volume clearly increased is something like we've been handling more tickets than ever before over the last few quarters or something like that.

I've read this code review thing before, and this tends to go into these studies suggesting that the whole process is taking the same amount of time, but for that to be the case the code reviews would have to take longer on the individual code review level and for you it is just volume increase because of increased tickets being pushed through.

Is there anything about your ticketing strategy? For example do you make your tickets much more atomic than lots of teams who say they do but then end up with things that could be split up into two or three tickets? How much time do spend on preparing tickets for ready for development / ready for AI?

Just trying to identify behavioral patterns in your successful usage that would explain the success. Given the example of throughput of tickets over long time I suppose we can assume that the gain is not illusory.
by queenkjuul | 2026-03-07 15:57:08+00:00
Not only have i never had a coworker as bad as these people describe, the point is as you say: why would I want an LLM that works like these people's shitty coworkers?

My worst coworkers right now are the ones using Claude to write every word of code and don't test it. These are people who never produced such bad code on their own.

So the LLMs aren't just as bad as the bad coworkers, they're turning good coworkers into bad ones!
by kannanvijayan | 2026-03-07 15:57:10+00:00
I'm sure there are cognitive declines as you age, but even discounting those there's some fundamental change happening to the opportunity space.

I'm in my mid 40s, I've had a really fulfilling career working on interesting things and making decent money, and over that time have accumulated a few passion projects that I knew were always out of my reach.

Well, technically within my reach but I'd need to somehow find someone to pay for me and a team for some period of time to work on stuff.

When I started playing around with these tools, it started feeling like maybe some of my ideas were within reach. Some time after, it felt plausible enough that I've decided to go for it. I'm actively in the middle of some deep performance research that I simply would not have the bandwidth or capacity for without these tools.

I've also managed to acquire enough confidence in the likelyhood of some degree of success that I'm investing in starting a company (self-funded) to develop and release and license the stuff i'm building.

I don't know exactly how my ideas will turn out, but that's part of the excitement and anticipation. Point is I never felt I had enough breathing room to really go for it (between normal life obligations like mortgage, feeding kids, etc.)

These tools have changed the equation enough that it's made it more feasible for me to pursue some of these ideas on my own. Things I would have shelved for the rest of my life, probably.. or maybe tried to encourage and interest others into doing.
by dennis_jeeves2 | 2026-03-07 15:57:14+00:00
>You are reading HN, the survivorship bias and groupthink is just as high as any other self-calibrating online community

Agreed. To expand IMHO and somewhat tangentially: recognizing the importance of software/technology and using it as tool is the hallmark of a person with balanced mental makeup. Someone who has ever had 'passion' for software (or in general technology) extended beyond a few weeks can be considered to have something abnormal going on - for example autism. This is like a carpenter becoming obsessed with his chisel and deriving his entire sense of purpose and happiness from delving into the minutiae of chisels.