MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hackyhacky | 2026-03-07 03:12:20+00:00
tldr: many great scientific advancement were created by well-intentioned researchers who were subsequently shocked to find their work applied to military, often to the great detriment of mankind.

The unwritten implication is that this applies to AI, as well. I find it hard to disagree. I don't know what to do about it.

The HN crowd is elated that we can finally finish our side projects, while the ruling class is already using AI to subvert democracy, spread misinformation, and develop weapons. "If we don't build these weapons, someone else will." If we can learn nothing else from history, we should learn that you can't turn back the clock.
by lll-o-lll | 2026-03-07 03:14:01+00:00
> I think these developers should face the fact that those skills and those ways they are reticent to give up are more or less obviated at this point.

Yes. We are this generations highly skilled artisans, facing our own industrial revolution.

Just as the skilled textile workers and weavers of early 19’th century Britain were correct when they argued this new automated product was vastly inferior, it matters not at all. And just as they were also correct, that the government of the day was doing nothing to protect the lives and livelihoods of those who had spent decades mastering a difficult set of professional skills (the middle class of the day), the government of this day will also do nothing.

And it doesn’t end with “IT”; anything that can be turned into a factory process with our new “thinking engines” will be. Perhaps we can do better in society this time around. I am not hopeful.
by zozbot234 | 2026-03-07 03:14:47+00:00
Could this same kind of interface have potential for use in the handheld console form factor? The gamepad-like buttons on a handheld are often reminiscent of those on a TV remote control. The handheld generally adds touchscreen control, but this feels like it might be comparatively easy to account for. Of course, ultimately we'd probably want to see something that's sort of halfway between this Bigscreen and Plasma Mobile. Perhaps a new project altogether?
by like_any_other | 2026-03-07 03:14:55+00:00
> Implication that there is bias, and the degree to which is left up to the reader's imagination.

I would be shocked if there was zero bias - the field is staffed by humans, and has political implications. And no, I did not leave the degree of bias up to interpretation - I set an upper bound to it, that precludes global warming skepticism.

> What about the specifics of the conclusion

To date no field has been 100% correct in everything. I already told you I'm not a global warming skeptic - what do you want, for me to pretend climate science is infallible for the benefit of morons that want to twist my words?

> And then, the coup de grace, attempting to substitute the reputation of the famously soft and hard to replicate social sciences for climate science, in an attempt to equate the two and thus further degrade the perception of climate science.

On two separate occasions I explicitly wrote I believe climate science. Obviously my attempt at imparting a nuanced understanding of scientific fallibility is wasted on someone that doesn't even bother to read my posts. You want a PR statement aimed at reassuring the lowest common denominator that the scientists know what they're doing, not a discussion.

If this is how much you argue with someone who agrees with you, then, I don't know what to say. Good luck in life, man.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-03-07 03:15:01+00:00
The difference for me recently

Write a lambda that takes an S3 PUT event and inserts the rows of a comma separated file into a Postgres database.

Naive implementation: download the file from s3 and do a bulk insert - it would have taken 20 minutes and what Claude did at first.

I had to tell it to use the AWS sql extension to Postgres that will load a file directly from S3 into a table. It took 20 seconds.

I treat coding agents like junior developers.
by risingsubmarine | 2026-03-07 03:17:07+00:00
On the slim chance that anyone at Apple reads this... I can't justify buying one of these as I already own multiple more powerful macbooks in similar sizes.

...but if you made a smaller one, the same physical size as an 11inch ipad, then yeh I would instantly buy one as my sling-book for light coding work in cafes!

It would also quiet down many of those calling for macOS on the iPad.
by rellfy | 2026-03-07 03:17:14+00:00
I don't think AI coding means you stop being a craftsman. It is just a different tool. Manual coding is a hand tool, AI coding is a power tool. You still retain all of the knowledge and as much control over the codebase as you want, same with any tool.

It's a different conversation when we talk about people learning to code now though. I'd probably not recommend going for the power tool until you have a solid understanding of the manual tools.
by lunar-whitey | 2026-03-07 03:17:23+00:00
What’s especially frightening about this comparison is that post-Glasnost figures clearly show the U.S. was never even close to being surpassed by the U.S.S.R. economically or militarily. We don’t need to speculate about production gaps between the U.S. and China today - they have been out in the open for years, and all the political class here does about it is counter, “But the stock market is up!”
by gzread | 2026-03-07 03:17:43+00:00
That's the definition of a Loser in the Gervais model - someone who realises the system is BS, does the bare minimum to survive in it to save energy for other things outside the system.

The part that confuses me though ia the Clueless being the ones who do good jobs. If you're paid to be there 8 hours anyway you might as well sharpen your skills by working as well as you can. There is no speed limit. Unless your job is developing algorithms for aircraft with incapaxitated pilots to safely landed at airports with total power failures.
by dbdoug | 2026-03-07 03:18:05+00:00
Hey, I'm nearly 80 years old. I haven't written a line of code in over 10 years. But I'm coding now, with the help of Claude & Gemini, and having a great time. Each block of Python or Applescript that they generate for me is a much better learning tool than a book - I'm going through the code line by line and researching everything. And I'm also learning how to deal with LLMs and their strengths & weaknesses. Correcting them from time to time when they screw up. Lots of fun.
by stein1946 | 2026-03-07 03:18:14+00:00
I am 37;

Claude Code and it's parallels have extinguished multiple ones.

I was able to steer clear of the Bitcoin/NFT/Passport bros but it turns out they infiltrated the profession and their starry puppy delusional eyes are trying to tell me that iteration X of product Y released yesterday evening is "going to change everything".

They have started redefining what "I have build this" actually means, and they have outjerked the executives by slinging outrageous value creation narratives.

> I’m chasing the midnight hour and not getting any sleep.

You are 60; go spend some time with your grand-kids, smell a flower, touch grass forget chasing anything at this age cause a Tuesday like the others things are gonna wrap up.

Absolutely sincerely.
by johnfn | 2026-03-07 03:19:12+00:00
Your response is definitely on the top 5% of reasonableness from AI skeptics, so I appreciate that :-)

But, if you don't mind me going on a rant: the hallucinations thing. It kind of drives me nuts, because every day someone trots out hallucinations as some epic dunk that proves that AI will never be used in the real world or whatever. I totally hear you and think you are being a lot more reasonable than most (and thank you for that) -- you are saying that AI can get detail-oriented and fiddly math stuff wrong. But as I, my co-workers, and anyone who seriously uses AI in the industry all know, hallucinations are utterly irrelevant to our day-to-day.

My point is that hallucinations are irrelevant because if you use AI seriously for a while you quickly learn what it hallucinates on and what it does not, you build your mental model, and then you spend all your time on the stuff it doesn't hallucinate on, and it adds a fantastic amount of value there, and you are happy, and you ignore the things it is bad at, because why would you use a tool on things it is bad at? Hearing people talk about hallucinations in 2026 sounds to me like someone saying "a hammer will never succeed - I used it to smack a few screws and it NEVER worked!" And then someone added Hammer-doesnt-work-itis to Wikipedia and it got a few citations in Arxiv now it's all people can say when they talk about hammers online, omfg.

So when you say that I should spend more time asking "what do they see that I don't" - I feel quite confident I already know exactly what you see? You see that AI doesn't work in some domains. I quite agree with you that AI doesn't work in some domains. Why is this a surprise? Until 2023 it worked in no domains at all! There is no tool out there that works in every single domain.

But when you see something new, the much more natural question than "what doesn't this work on" is "what does this work on". Because it does work in a lot of domains, and fabulously well at that. Continuously bringing up how it doesn't work in some domain, when everyone is talking about the domains it does work, is just a non-sequitur, like if someone were to hop into a conversation about Rust and talk about how it can't solve your taxes, or a conversation about CSS to say that it isn't turing complete.
by incr_me | 2026-03-07 03:19:15+00:00
In the past month, in my spare time, I've built:

- A "semantically enhanced" epub-to-markdown converter

- A web-based Markdown reader with integrated LLM reading guide generation (https://i.imgur.com/ledMTXw.png)

- A Zotero plugin for defining/clarifying selected words/sentences in context

- An epub-to-audiobook generator using Pocket TTS

- A Diddy Kong Racing model/texture extractor/viewer (https://i.imgur.com/jiTK8kI.png)

- A slimmed-down phpBB 2 "remake" in Bun.js/TypeScript

- An experimental SQLite extension for defining incremental materialized views

...And many more that are either too tiny, too idiosyncratic, or too day-job to name here. Some of these are one-off utilities, some are toys I'll never touch again, some are part of much bigger projects that I've been struggling to get any work done on, and so on.

I don't blame you for your cynicism, and I'm not blind to all of the criticism of LLMs and LLM code. I've had many times where I feel upset, skeptical, discouraged, and alienated because of these new developments. But also... it's a lot of fun and I can't stop coming up with ideas.
by HackerNewt-doms | 2026-03-07 03:19:27+00:00
> kebabs and barber shops

Living in Germany, I can confirm that it’s part of the everyday scenery here (Stadtbild).

> and a rave

I can confirm that techno culture is a deeply rooted part of the urban landscape. However, the era of massive, free street parades effectively ended with the 2010 Love Parade tragedy in Duisburg, where a crowd crush claimed many lives. For years, such large-scale public raves vanished due to strict safety regulations. It’s only recently that we’ve seen a revival with 'Rave The Planet' in Berlin—an event led by the original Love Parade founders that attempts to bring techno back to the streets, though under much tighter organizational control.
by atonse | 2026-03-07 03:20:01+00:00
> My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a LLM.

I've been a tech lead for years and have written business critical code many times. I don't ever want to go back to writing code. I am feeling supremely empowered to go 100x faster. My contribution is still judgement, taste, architecture, etc. And the models will keep getting better. And as a result, I'll want to (and be able to) do even more.

I also absolutely LOVE that non-programmers have access to this stuff now too. I am always in favor of tools that democratize abilities.

Any "idiot" can build their own software tailored to how their brains think, without having to assemble gobs of money to hire expensive software people. Most of them were never going to hire a programmer anyway. Those ideas would've died in their heads.
Show HN: DiggaByte Labs – pick your stack, download production-ready SaaS code
by GraysoftDev | 2026-03-07 03:20:07+00:00
I'm a college student and indie dev. I kept spending the first week of every new project wiring the same auth, database schema, and payments setup from scratch. So I built DiggaByte.

You pick your exact stack — database (PostgreSQL+Prisma, MySQL, MongoDB, etc.), auth provider, payment integration, UI library, and deploy target — and download a ZIP with everything actually wired together and ready to run. Not a tutorial. Not a starter template with stub functions. Real deployable code that would have taken me days to set up manually.

Free tier: up to 3 modules, no credit card. Pro is $19 one-time per project for unlimited modules + Stripe webhooks wired.

I'm building this solo. Would love honest feedback — what modules are missing, where the configurator is confusing, what would make you actually use it.
by flare_12 | 2026-03-07 03:20:09+00:00
Hi

Three months ago I got laid off.

I work in marketing, not engineering, and losing my job left me with a strange feeling: most of my work had always been about explaining or growing products other people built. Without that environment, I started wondering what I could actually create on my own.

One night I ran into a small but annoying problem. I wanted to estimate taxes on some investments. I opened several tax calculator websites and most of them felt frustrating: lots of ads, popups asking for email, or calculators that reload the whole page just to show a number.

It made me think: why isn't there a simple calculator where you just type numbers and immediately see the result?

So I tried something slightly ridiculous.

Even though I'm not a developer, I started experimenting with AI tools and slowly built a small site with some tax calculators. It took about a week of late nights and a lot of confusion.

The result is a small project called TaxFreely:

https://www.taxfreely.org

It currently has a few calculators for things like:

- income tax estimates
- capital gains tax
- crypto tax estimates
- after-tax income
- investment growth

The idea is simple: no accounts, no paywalls, no ads everywhere — just quick estimates.

Since sharing it with a few people, I've started receiving feedback and suggestions. Some people pointed out edge cases or calculation improvements, which I've been slowly fixing.

I'm still learning a lot while building this and the calculators are definitely not perfect yet.

If anyone here works with tax software, finance tools, or similar calculators, I'd really appreciate feedback on:

- accuracy
- UX improvements
- missing features
- obvious mistakes I might not notice

Also curious if others here have built something using AI even though it wasn't their main background.

Thanks for taking a look.
by RavSS | 2026-03-07 03:21:20+00:00
I've used it in my personal hobby projects for several years now, Ada/SPARK is a favourite language of mine. It's not a legacy language and it has features which I wish mainstream languages would have, particularly regarding the formal verification utilities of SPARK. It's also great for bare metal development.

I've not managed to convince anyone else to use it, as most are discouraged by either its Pascal-style "verbose" syntax on first glance or its general lack of third-party libraries (relative to something like Rust's ecosystem). Anyone who can get past those aspects should really give it a try.
by atonse | 2026-03-07 03:22:01+00:00
Today every single software engineer has an extremely smart and experienced mentor available to them 24/7. They don't have to meet them for coffee once a month to ask basic questions.

That said, I still feel strongly about mentorship though. It's just that you can spend your quality time with the busy person on higher-level things, like relationship building, rather than more basic questions.
by refurb | 2026-03-07 03:23:12+00:00
> Someone can understand morality inherently without ever thinking about it;

How so? This would infer some universal set of morality, which doesn't exist.

> Anyway, this is tiring. Philosophical discussions are not something to do with strangers.

I think it's tiring because you view ethics and morality as a box that thinking has to happen in. But it's not. Ethics and morality can be anything (as we've seen through human history).
by firecall | 2026-03-07 03:23:23+00:00
As a solo dev, using LLMs for coding has made me a better programmer for sure!

I can ask an LLM for specific help with my codebase and it can explain things in context and provide actual concrete relevant examples that make sense to me.

Then I can ask again for explanations about idiomatic code patterns that aren't familiar for me.

Working on my own, I don't get that feedback and code review loop.

Working with new languages and techniques, or diving into someone else's legacy code base is no longer as daunting with an LLM to ask for help!
by zekiunal | 2026-03-07 03:23:39+00:00
Hey HN,
I've been building FounderScope (https://workspace.founderscope.app/) — a strategic planning platform for early-stage founders that integrates Business Model Canvas, hypothesis management, and financial modeling into a single connected workspace.
The problem I kept seeing: Founders spread their thinking across sticky notes, Notion docs, and spreadsheets that don't talk to each other. A hypothesis lives in one place, the experiment tracking in another, and the financials somewhere else entirely. The result is that critical assumptions never get systematically tested before significant time and money are spent.

What FounderScope does:
Everything is connected. When you add an assumption to your BMC, it automatically appears in the Assumption Matrix ranked by criticality × uncertainty. When you run an experiment and mark it validated, the linked BMC item updates its status. When a revenue stream is defined in the canvas, it flows into the P&L model.
Specifically, the platform includes:

Business Model Canvas with per-item validation status (assumption → testing → validated/invalidated)
Assumption Matrix – auto-plots all assumptions on a criticality × uncertainty grid so you know what to test first
Experiment Lab – Kanban-style experiment tracking linked to specific hypotheses
Value Proposition Canvas with automatic fit scoring per customer segment
Financial modeling – 12-month P&L, J-curve, Unit Economics (CAC, LTV, runway, burn multiple)
Strategy Canvas + ERRC (Blue Ocean framework)
Stage-Gate Roadmap with auto-validation against financial/experiment data
Pivot Log with full version history

The core design principle: methodology-first. Every module maps to an established framework (Osterwalder's BMC, Lean Startup's Build-Measure-Learn loop, McKinsey Horizons, Stage-Gate). The goal isn't to reinvent strategic planning — it's to make these frameworks actually usable in one place without losing the connections between them.
This started as a tool I wanted for myself. Curious to hear from anyone who's tried to run a structured validation process — what broke down for you? What did you resort to?
by nonstopnonsense | 2026-03-07 03:24:17+00:00
So ... There are two options while recording. By default, only the absolute necessary traffic is captured for effective playback by any LLM. The other option is to capture all - that would be for sleuth - privacy and security abusive investigation.

The API drift is something I need to think about. They are bound to change over time - webbridge_update was made for that for now.

I am not entirely understanding "over fitting", can you please explain more?
Show HN: SurvivalIndex – which developer tools do AI agents choose?
by scalefirst | 2026-03-07 03:24:41+00:00
We've been running coding agents against standardized repos
with natural-language prompts — no tool names, no hints —
and measuring what they actually choose.

Early finding: Claude Code picks Custom/DIY in 12 of 20
categories. Not because it can't use the tools (BFCL scores
suggest it can) but because it doesn't reach for them.
That's a different failure mode than capability benchmarks
measure.

We score each tool on: agent visibility, pick rate vs
Custom/DIY, cross-context breadth, expert human ratings,
and implementation success rate. Tools above survival=1
persist. Below it, agents synthesize around them.

Methodology is at survivalindex.org/methodology. Very
curious what people think of the measurement approach,
especially the human coefficient variable.
by Akash907873 | 2026-03-07 03:24:44+00:00
I built a tool on Apify called YouTube Transcript Extractor that pulls transcripts directly from YouTube videos and returns them as structured JSON.

It’s designed for developers building AI tools, RAG pipelines, or content analysis systems.

What it does:

Extract transcripts from any YouTube video with captions

Return clean structured data

Language selection support

Easy API integration

Example uses

AI summarization tools

LLM training datasets

Video content analysis

Converting videos into blog posts or datasets

If anyone is building automation or AI tools around YouTube content, I’d love feedback.
by orbital-decay | 2026-03-07 03:24:48+00:00
Looking at his attempts at jailbreaking some models, I'm not sure he even remotely understands what he's doing, e.g. he tries to counter non-existent refusal training in Gemini [0] while doing nothing against the external guardrails which actually protect the model. Looks like a pompous e-celeb, all performance with no substance.

https://github.com/elder-plinius/L1B3RT4S/blob/main/GOOGLE.m...
by cherrycherry98 | 2026-03-07 03:24:54+00:00
Anecdotally, the person on my team who is producing the most output and the highest quality happens to explicitly shun LLMs and is also relatively young. Other team members embracing AI spend their day being misled by chat bots, trying to get their agents to work properly by toying with contexts (just needs a little more knowledge!), and producing verbose code that's hard to review and with obvious bugs when you actually think about what it's doing. My favorite is how everything is excessively commented but more than once I've caught the code not matching what the comment said it would do!

FWIW I find it useful if I know exactly what I want and it's quicker to prompt it than type it myself. Also for research and building understanding it's generally good. I still catch it being wrong on details of you're really paying attention or literally contradicting itself between prompts. That gives me a lot of pause about trusting things it told me that I just accepted as fact without having enough knowledge myself to question it.
by tptacek | 2026-03-07 03:25:04+00:00
You say this, about AWS using IPv4 scarcity for lock-in, but IPv4 prices have been falling for years.

If you want to buy space and auction it off to lessors, more power to you. I don't think there needs to be a moral dimension to it one way or the other. The RIR system was also not good.