MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thrill | 2026-03-01 18:31:33+00:00
“E-bikes with throttles should not be refereed to as e-bikes”

This is simply wrong and does a disservice to the growing eBike interest. The US-federally defined classes are proper and while IMO overly limiting (max speed should be 60kph and still classified as an eBike as it’s simply safer in traffic), they adequately classify what is an eBike and what is not, and having a throttle does not make something not an eBike, but max speed and power.

People have this urge to classify their limited version of what something is by how they use it with some desire to belittle others, and want to limit everyone else who have completely different requirements and capabilities and desires. eBikes in most US states can be ridden on sidewalks, in bike lanes, in traffic, on trails, and across a grassy meadow. There is no justifiable reason to require someone to have different eBikes to be able to do all those things with comfort and safety and capability and utility when a well engineered eBike can do all of them. That they might be safer with circumstantially restricted speeds, such as overtaking pedestrians, etc. again does mean multiple eBikes should be mandated to be able to do each of them.

In the US, hopefully the next administration will buy a vowel and realize they need to set federal standards and eliminate this hodgepodge state and county and city and park and street and neighborhood capricious variety of who can ride what when and where, and with what gear and at what times and for what reasons. If decisions are made that no one under 13 can ride an eBike, and then only to school until you’re 16, and you must wear a helmet until at least 19, then at least there will be consistent rules for people to argue for and against.
by tadfisher | 2026-03-01 18:31:36+00:00
"Anti-user' and "anti-usability" are far too harsh. Outdated, yes. A product of 1990s-era UX design, absolutely. But every changelog has some mention of a UX improvement, and actually using the product at version 3.0 is, dare I say, pretty enjoyable once you unlearn things and pretend it's Photoshop 6.0. Single-window mode by default helps a ton.

I have used far worse software from commercial outfits. You would not believe how much aerospace and specialized CAD stuff still uses Motif and doesn't support scroll wheels or extra mouse buttons.
by nerdsniper | 2026-03-01 18:31:49+00:00
> I'm sure it's of use to many people but it's been no end of pain for me and it has really signaled to me what it's like to grow into an old man unable to use computers when I was once a young man who would find this easy.

My only "good" solution for passkey UX is to make sure all my devices are Apple. Apple's password/keychain integrates reasonably well enough with Chrome, I can share passkeys with my cofounder easily in shared folder (he is also all-in on Apple ecosystem) and I can share passkeys with my work computer (different AppleID) for low-stakes things like news websites or Amazon.com (I work in IT security for the org, so I know exactly how much I can trust my employer)

I do also use Linux and Windows personally, and the passkey story is much worse there, particularly for Linux which doesn't seem to play well with my Yubikeys. Luckily, a lot of websites seem to have a "Scan this QR code with your iPhone" feature to complete the passkey authentication.
by Barbing | 2026-03-01 18:32:11+00:00
Want this w/o killing the free open web.

Maybe I run an old PC adjacent to the scraper to manually visit the scraped pages without an adblocker, & buy something I need from an ad periodically (while a cohesive response is being generated in the meantime)

Ya sounds dumb, wishing for a middle ground that lets us be effective but also good netizens. Maybe that Cloudflare plan to charge the bots…
by goodmythical | 2026-03-01 18:32:53+00:00
I think that the weakness doesn't lie within GIMP itself.

Imagine that you are a car hobbyist. You know your way around a wrench.

But then you step in to an F1 garage or even your local repair shop run by that one guy who inheritted his father's shop in the 50s and has thrown a tool away since the Reagan administration.

It's going to be possible for you to do everything that you know how to do, and even to learn some things along the way, but you're not going to be anywhere near as efficient as you were in your garage where the only tools you have are the ones you regularly use and you know the locations (perhaps roughly) of everything.

The same could be applied across any number of domains. Knowing your way around and ambulance isn't going to go as far as you might think it would in a surgical suite.

Knowing some python isn't going to get your pulls accepted in Canonical, Debian, etc.

Knowing your professors preffered citation methodology isn't going to gaurantee academically succesful searching of The Library of Congress or even the New York Public Library.

etc etc etc

GIMP represents nearly the totality of knowledge relating to image manipulation, and you can lay it out to perfectly match your personal knowledge and workflow, but it simply is not possible to have it automatically laid out to perfectly match everyone's workflow.

Could it be more intuitive? Perhaps, but moving things around now is liable to break the workflows of tens of thousands who have learned to use and love GIMP the way that it currently is.

For instance, having only ever used GIMP as my primary image manipulation tool, I can and do have some of the same complaints against [insert other software] that people routinely level against GIMP. The last time I tried to use Photoshop I spent more time in tutorials and help pages than doing actual image editting because Photoshop is as unfamiliar to me as GIMP is to a Photoshop user.
Show HN: MCP file tools silently eat your context window.I built one that doesnt
by ckanthony | 2026-03-01 18:33:16+00:00
Hi, I am Anthony.

Every token your filesystem tools consume is context the model cannot use for reasoning. Most MCP file servers are O(file size) on every operation: reads return the whole file, edits rewrite the whole file. The context window fills up before the agent gets anything meaningful done, and the problem compounds silently as your files grow.

Chisel makes edits O(diff) and reads O(match). The agent sends a unified diff instead of a full rewrite, and queries with grep or sed instead of reading entire files. On a 500-line file this is nearly two orders of magnitude less context per operation. The savings scale linearly with file size, so the larger your codebase, the more it matters.

The other thing I cared about was security. Path confinement is enforced at the kernel level via cap-std and openat with O_NOFOLLOW, not a userspace prefix check. Shell commands run via direct execve against a fixed compile-time whitelist — no sh -c wrapper, no arbitrary execution. Atomic writes use a tmp-and-rename so a failed patch never corrupts the target file.

It ships as a standalone MCP server, as chisel-core, a plain sync Rust library you can embed in your own MCP server, and as a WASM build for Node.js and Python runtimes, you can bring your own MCP and build on top of it.

Would love feedback, especially from anyone building agents that do heavy file manipulation.

GitHub: https://github.com/ckanthony/Chisel
by skeledrew | 2026-03-01 18:33:17+00:00
> It is a far more concise and precise way of communicating than using natural languages.

No. We have programming languages because reading and writing binary/hexadecimal is extremely painful to nigh on impossible for humans. And over the years we got better and better languages, from Assembly to C to Python, etc. Natural language was always the implicit ultimate goal of creating programming languages, and each step toward it was primarily hindered by the need to ensure correctness. We still aren't quite there yet, but this is pretty close.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2026-03-01 18:33:42+00:00
> Do you value separation of state and religious authority? Women's rights? Minority rights? Human dignity? Equality before the law? Sanctity of life? Individual moral responsibility? Monogamous marriage? The objective study of history? Fair trial? Witnesses at trial? Tolerance of alternative viewpoints?

Sorry, I thought you were pointing out the many issues with the current US administration and you were showing the difference between Christo-fascists and Christians who value the teachings of Jesus.
by allthetime | 2026-03-01 18:33:42+00:00
I’ve been using iTerm2 for years. I’ve tried ghostty a few times and quickly went back to iterm each time for various reasons I can’t immediately recall. There is nothing I can think of lacking from iterm.

That said; if I was working more on Linux or Windows where iterm doesn’t exist it looks like ghostty would be a good option.
by rdiddly | 2026-03-01 18:33:47+00:00
"You pay and it's yours." Which is exactly why, having paid for an ad-free service, people are miffed when ads appear anyway. I'm not going to take on the responsibility of educating you as to the examples that exist, because that's your own responsibility. Not only because we have to educate ourselves, but because you made the unsupported claim in the first place that the phenomenon doesn't exist. Proving a negative is very difficult, as we with all this glorious mental firepower know. In a world this large, it's a poor bet on a statistical basis alone.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-03-01 18:34:00+00:00
And that junior dev will probably leave in 2 years because HR won’t allow you to give them a raise to match their market comp.

But with a team of 7, I can’t believe that giving them all a Claude Code subscription wouldn’t be much cheaper and much more productive than hiring a junior. A junior though with AI is more dangerous than a junior without.
by nerdsniper | 2026-03-01 18:35:00+00:00
They are easily exportable from Apple and 1Password AFAIK. Bitwarden seems to be doing some interesting lock-in, and while I have loved them, I no longer have a commercial password manager that I trust (leaving me with only Apple's as a high-functioning, high-trust option). I'm worried about effects of private equity pressure on groups like 1Password, Bitwarden, and LastPass (I strongly recommend against LastPass these days).
by SegfaultSeagull | 2026-03-01 18:35:07+00:00
Calling Israel a “European colony” requires erasing a substantial amount of documented history.

The Jewish people originated in the Levant more than 3,000 years ago. The kingdoms of Israel and Judah existed in that geography in the first millennium BCE. Jerusalem was the political and religious center of Jewish civilization long before Rome, Byzantium, or Islam existed. Even after Roman expulsions in the first and second centuries CE, Jewish communities remained continuously present in cities such as Jerusalem, Tiberias, Safed, and Hebron.

In the 7th century, Arab-Muslim armies conquered the Levant from the Byzantine Empire. The region was incorporated into the Rashidun, Umayyad, and Abbasid Caliphates and later ruled by successive Islamic empires, culminating in Ottoman control. That expansion was part of a broader pattern: within a century of Muhammad’s death, Arab-Muslim forces had taken control of Persia, Syria, Egypt, North Africa, and parts of Europe. These were military conquests that reshaped the demographic, linguistic, and religious character of large indigenous populations.

That is not polemic — it is mainstream historical scholarship.

So if the term “colonial” is being used to describe political control established through conquest and settlement, then the 7th-century Arab-Muslim conquest of the Levant fits that definition far more cleanly than the 20th-century reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty in their ancestral homeland.

Modern Israel did not emerge out of nowhere. It emerged after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate, in the same geopolitical moment that created Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. If Israel is “artificial,” then so are most modern states formed from former imperial provinces.

It’s also inaccurate to frame Israel as purely “European.” Roughly half of Israel’s Jewish population descends from Middle Eastern and North African communities — Jews who lived for centuries under Islamic rule in Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Syria, Iran, and elsewhere before being expelled or pressured to leave in the mid-20th century. Their return was not European colonialism; it was part of a broader regional upheaval.

Reducing Israel to a European colonial implant while ignoring both Jewish indigeneity and the long history of Islamic imperial rule in the region is historically selective.

If the standard is historical continuity, Jews are indigenous to that land. Their sovereignty was interrupted by conquest. It was not invented in the 20th century.
by nunez | 2026-03-01 18:35:12+00:00
It's not about "best" or "traditional," though your bias is clearly set.

"Write me a feature that does _x_" isn't satisfying for me, and, like the author said in the post, it sucks that people that think otherwise are telling me that my way is the "old way", as you put it.

(It's doubly-ironic for me, as I actually like writing documentation!)
by latexr | 2026-03-01 18:35:18+00:00
> Hell, I'll double-down if you really disagree with me.

No wonder the world is in its current state, if when faced with disagreement the reaction is “I’ll plug my ears and dig my heels in deeper” instead of “I wonder if I’m missing something”.

> ChromeOS (…) has a more serious OS than iOS. It is (…) the better professional OS.

For starters, there are professionals (as in, people who get paid to do a job) who do their work on iOS. Not programmers, but writers, illustrators, animators, video editors, photographers, film makers… Maybe you can’t (or refuse to even try?) doing your work on an iOS device—I certainly choose not to—but that in no way means no one does.

But all of that is irrelevant when you consider the very true fact of life that not everything is about work. Many people want something else, and not making all one’s computing decisions around work is healthy.
by greygoo222 | 2026-03-01 18:35:59+00:00
They're not pointing out something the researchers missed, they're pointing out something the people in this thread confidently hyping the results are missing. I'm certain the researchers are familiar with the limitations of the models they used (is it bad that the incentives of science and science journalism leads to overoptimistic coverage that hint at groundbreaking implications without explaining to lay readers what the unknowns are? Probably, but that's not these researchers' faults).

The average person in this thread, however, would probably be better informed by asking an LLM for context. They'd be even better informed by taking a few weeks to work through a textbook on cancer biology, but realistically they won't.

My horse in the race is that I'm annoyed by overenthusiastic comments that display a lack of understanding of the history of cancer treatment, and I'm going to be even more annoyed in a few months when the rounds of "haven't we had 1000 cures to cancer posted to HN??? why aren't we using any of them???" start showing up again. I'd rather encourage informed, skeptical optimism.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-03-01 18:37:10+00:00
I love this basically pointing out that racists call it "Hasbara" and regular people call it "lying".

Don't agree it applies in this situation, but it's nice to see someone break down regular people don't give a special jewish name to something that already has a common name/definition, and that the common name better communicates the intended concept so the purpose of using the word is to convey something different than basic understanding.
by tombert | 2026-03-01 18:37:21+00:00
This is cool, I got Codex to vibe code a Forth compiler for the NES and it worked fine, but I have to say that it is decidedly not fun.

Instead of figuring out how to solve every bug and becoming intimately familiar with with the code, I just delegate all the work to virtual interns and I sit and wait.

I decided to write my own Forth compiler without AI assistance as a result. Side projects should be fun and for learning.

Not judging people who use these tools, I use them too, but i just have been using them less for anything I am doing for fun.
by sosomoxie | 2026-03-01 18:38:21+00:00
I would encourage everyone to read about The Balfour Declaration and Nakba. Like I said, we're tired of being gaslit.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_declaration

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba

I would also encourage everyone to find all of the TikTok videos posted by the IDF themselves, detailing, in depth, the war crimes they committed.
by doctorpangloss | 2026-03-01 18:38:48+00:00
His post, code and all the replies here are LLM authored and don't make any sense. He has no idea why his Claude Code instance wrote Feb 2025 instead of Feb 2026. I mean all his results are placebos or nonsense. I can also start new conversations with only 2% of the context in it, or you can call compact, it will all work better. The post has to be flagged.
by AlecSchueler | 2026-03-01 18:40:05+00:00
> So tired of the idea that HN trying to stay relatively clear of politics is some great loss when every Israel Palestine submission that makes it through is just...

Honestly I don't mind not talking about those things here but it gets ridiculous when there's directly tech related stuff being flagged because it touches on politics, like the whole DOGE saga for example.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-03-01 18:40:06+00:00
Presumably not, but the better approach is anyways to first plan using a powerful/expensive model like Opus, then you can use something less capable and cheaper for the coding part. This would be true even if you just want to use Anthropic models, but makes even more sense if you want to use something cheaper like Qwen3.5 or Kimi K2.5 for the coding part.
by austin-cheney | 2026-03-01 18:40:45+00:00
They are sometimes offering to buy my house at market value in cash without looking at the property. Other times they want to know the condition of the property and send an appraiser out to evaluate for repairs and updates. If they were to offer anything below market rate its because they are accounting for costs of maintenance and repairs that I don't bother with since I have no plans to put the property on the market.

I suspect this is geographically bound. I bet in some areas corporations assess some properties are not worth the effort, no matter their condition, unless they can get the property at a severely depreciated price well below market value. In my area it appears I could make some money without any effort if I were willing to move.
by xandrius | 2026-03-01 18:41:07+00:00
There is fun in what you use something for and doing the something.

I think there is a big divide between people who just love making different tools from scratch by hand and the rest who love being able to instantly whip up a new tool in minutes AND THEN use it to create something fun.

I literally would never ever in my existence be interested in making a compiler if I had nothing to use it for. If I ever wanted to make a cool program which uses that compiler then whether the compiler came into being thanks to a wizard, my enjoyment wouldn't change a single bit.
by wolttam | 2026-03-01 18:43:37+00:00
The GP isn't suggesting to literally use quotes as the delimiter when prompting LLMs. They're pointing out that we humans already use delimiters in our natural language (quotation marks to delimit quotes). They're suggesting that delimiters of any kind may be helpful in the context of LLM prompting, which to me makes intuitive sense. That Claude is using XML is merely a convention.
by jlongo78 | 2026-03-01 18:44:11+00:00
One pattern I've seen work well with multi-agent setups: treat each agent session as a named, persistent unit rather than a throwaway process. When sessions are addressable and resumable, debugging becomes dramatically easier because you can replay exactly what the agent saw. Task management layers on top of this are useful, but the foundation is durable session state. Without that, you're just orchestrating amnesiacs.
by jlongo78 | 2026-03-01 18:44:16+00:00
Git worktrees are underrated for parallel agents. One pattern worth adding: give each worktree its own named terminal session with the agent command and working directory baked into the session config. That way you can switch context instantly without hunting for which terminal is running which branch. Also helps post-mortem -- you can scroll back through exactly what the agent did in that worktree without output getting mixed together.
by eoskx | 2026-03-01 18:44:25+00:00
"Anthropic’s team was relieved to hear that the government would be willing to remove those words, but one big problem remained: On Friday afternoon, Anthropic learned that the Pentagon still wanted to use the company’s AI to analyze bulk data collected from Americans. That could include information such as the questions you ask your favorite chatbot, your Google search history, your GPS-tracked movements, and your credit-card transactions, all of which could be cross-referenced with other details about your life. Anthropic’s leadership told Hegseth’s team that was a bridge too far, and the deal fell apart. Soon after, Hegseth directed the U.S. military’s contractors, suppliers, and partners to stop doing business with Anthropic. The list of companies that contract with the military is extensive, and includes Amazon, the company that supplies much of Anthropic’s computing infrastructure. The Department of Defense did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Anthropic referred me to the company’s statement addressing Hegseth’s remarks.
by boomskats | 2026-03-01 18:44:37+00:00
It's funny that you mention music and notation: sheet music is very compact for musical absolutes like pitch/rhythm/harmony, but a huge part of what we care about with music is nuance, which doesn't reduce cleanly to symbols. Hence there are plenty of words in musical notation that try to describe the desired characteristics of performance, that can't be otherwise encoded into that notation. For example, "with feeling".

That reminds me of an argument on here a while back: where I said I wished Spotify let you filter tracks by presence of pitch-correction or autotune. This wasn't because I thought autotune was 'bad' or modern artists were 'fake', but because sometimes I wanted to listen to vocals as a raw performance - intonation, stability, phrasing - I wanted the option of listening to recordings that let me appreciate the _skill_ possessed by the artists that recorded them.

I got _absolutely destroyed_ in that comments section, with people insisting i'm a snob, that I'm disrespectful, bigoted towards modern artists, there's no way i can actually hear the difference, and if i cant why does it even matter, and anyway everyone uses it now because studio time is expensive and it's so much cheaper than trying to get that perfect take. People got so angry, I got a couple of DMs on Twitter even. All the while I struggled to articulate or justify why I personally value the _skill_ of exceptional raw vocal performance - what I considered to be performance "with feeling".

But, I had to come to terms with the fact that anyone can sing now - no-one can tell the difference, so the skill generally isn't valued any more. Oh, you spent your entire life learning to sing? You studied it? Because you loved music? Sorry dude, I dunno what to say. I guess you'll have to find another way to stand out. You could try losing some weight. Maybe show some skin.
by bumahkib7 | 2026-03-01 18:44:51+00:00
Update since posting: zero-config env var analysis is now live. Connect a repo, Runix scans your code, auto-detects every env var your app needs, provisions Postgres/Redis automatically, generates the secrets, and only asks you for the keys it can't know like STRIPE_SECRET_KEY. Most apps deploy with 2-3 fields to fill instead of starting from scratch.