MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stavros | 2026-03-08 09:50:36+00:00
Everyone here says "if developers are so much faster, why aren't we seeing more features?!" as if the only thing required to release a feature is developers.

My CEO keeps asking me "how can we go faster with AI", and my answer is "we can't, because even if we had developers that would instantly develop any feature perfectly, we'd still be bottlenecked on how slow we are at deciding what to actually release".
by bartvk | 2026-03-08 09:53:13+00:00
You probably joke but I'm an avid motorcycle rider and when I ride in the 30 km/h (20 mph) zones in my city, these kids race past me. No matter it scares the shit out of me, when an accident occurs then the injuries will be horrific.

I'm not against them, to be sure. I don't know the solution, really. Maybe campaign for helmets, but how effective is that going to be?
by whstl | 2026-03-08 09:55:30+00:00
I'd argue that local effects of productivity were already visible since the start of ChatGPT. I was already using it a lot back then for writing tests and as a "smarter scaffolding", even before Copilot and such. Often cutting the time of doing something from half an hour to a few seconds.

IMO the bottleneck remains the same: doing proper engineering is more than writing code. Even 20 years ago a big corp would spend a few years writing something that a startup would do in weeks (and yes: even 20 years ago) just because of laser-focused requirements, better processes/less bureaucracy, using the right tools for the job and having less friction in tooling. That hasn't changed.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-03-08 09:55:41+00:00
To be clear, the framework I built is independent of the MonoGame framework. As for how it was built, it's relatively straightforward. There are three layers: platform layer, framework layer, and the game layer. On the platform layer, I started by implementing a basic hello world-tier game loop using Win32 window/messaging APIs, OpenGL for graphics rendering, and OpenAL for audio playback. Then I wrote tidy wrapper layer functions for calling into the platform layer, with better ergonomics/readability, which the game layer calls. Then, I began adding WASM APIs at the platform layer, with branching #if statements in the framework layer that control whether src\platform\win32 or src\platform\wasm functions are called based on build target. In this way, the game code remained unchanged but support for web was seamlessly added (with some pain in adjusting the wrapper APIs to work for the large differences in Win32 and web APIs). Then repeated this process for each additional platform. The csproj is set up to branch into different csprojs per build target, with one using the Microsoft.NET.Sdk.Webassembly project SDK, etc. Over time, I expanded features of the platform layer and wrapper layer as they were needed.

For the game I had already made progress on when trying MonoGame, I had already written a wrapper layer over the MonoGame APIs even before I had started on my own framework. My new framework wrapper layer was designed as similarly as possible, so transitioning my game code to the new framework was mostly painless, and only required adjusting the shape of some rendering/audio/input calls here and there.
by Valhizen | 2026-03-08 09:55:43+00:00
I built a 3D solar system simulation in C++ and OpenGL where 1 pixel = the Moon's diameter (3,474.8 km). Everything is to scale planet sizes, orbital distances, and orbital paths.
The video shows light traveling from the Sun to Earth in real time. It takes about 8 minutes and 10 seconds, which gives you a sense of how vast even the inner solar system is.
Features so far: free camera, planet tracking, flight mode, and a light-speed travel mode that lets you fly between planets at c.
Built from scratch no game engine. Happy to answer questions about the math, rendering, or orbital mechanics.
by ay | 2026-03-08 09:56:14+00:00
I tried qwen3.5:4b in ollama on my 4 year old Mac M1 with my own coding harness and it exhibited pretty decent tool calling, but it is a bit slow and seemed a little confused with the more complex tasks (also, I have it code rust, that might add complexity). The task was “find the debug that does X and make it conditional based on the whichever variable is controlled by the CLI ‘/debug foo’” - I didn’t do much with it after that.

It may be interesting to try a 6bit quant of qwen3.5-35b-a3b - I had pretty good results with it running it on a single 4090 - for obvious reasons I didn’t try it on the old mac.

I am using 8bit quant of qwen3.5-27b as more or less the main engine for the past ~week and am quite happy with it - but that requires more memory/gpu power.

HTH.
by amaury_bouchard | 2026-03-08 09:57:38+00:00
Thanks, looking forward to your feedback!

I deliberately chose the phonetic spelling 'mu' of the 'µ' greek letter, rather than the typographic approximation 'u'. The 'u' convention comes from ASCII limitations; when µ wasn't available, 'u' was used as a fallback. Since we're well past those limitations, 'mu' felt more accurate and more original.
by IshKebab | 2026-03-08 09:58:11+00:00
These sort of things are really hard to study. Combine that with the fact that the AI landscape is so varied and fast moving... It's easy to see why there aren't many studies on it.

There are a mountain of things that we reasonably know to be true but haven't done studies on. Is it beneficial for programming languages to support comments? Are regexes error-prone? Does static typing improve productivity on large projects? Is distributed version control better than centralised (lock based)? Etc.

Also you can't just say "AI improves productivity". What kind of AI? What are you using it for? If you're making static landing pages... yeah obviously it's going to help. Writing device drivers in Ada? Not so much.
by pkal | 2026-03-08 09:59:23+00:00
From the historical sources I could find online, it appears that Rust's borrow system was independently invented, or at least they don't mention linear logic or anything substructural. This is kind of interesting to me, especially given the reactions in this thread, and ties into the general difficulty of PL research to find acceptance among practitioners, especially when presented by researchers (which I think is regretful, I like the ideas in the article!). Perhaps we really should stick to terminology like "function colors" to make effect systems more popular (or not, because the color framing makes it sound bad to have different colors in a program, IIRC).
by keiferski | 2026-03-08 10:00:10+00:00
Astroturfing was already a thing 20 years ago with fake comments on blogs. AI is no different, except now it's much easier to both create content and upvote that content.

Not sure if there is a real solution to the Eternal September problem, other than moving to a more niche space that the marketers and bots don't care about.
by DiscourseFan | 2026-03-08 10:00:11+00:00
I've never lived in Japan but I've spent a good deal of time there (probably about 3-4 months total over the course of the last 6-7 years), and I have friends who are Japanese that I have met up with and even traveled with.

I think you'll find that for most of these things, you can get them in New York City. Lots of small local shops, everything is within walking distance or a few stops away on the subway. It is not as safe as most parts of Japan, but its still pretty safe compared to most big cities in the US, and I've seen many people walking around alone at night in Central Park, which is surprisingly quiet and peaceful then.

They'll be a lot of things you'll miss. The Golden Gai is not a tourist hot spot for nothing; that's not to say that New York does not have a million cool local bars you can run into by accident, great food prepared with care by chefs, diverse groups for any interest you could think of, and certainly more than Japan every single possible cuisine from everywhere in the world at high quality.

And while you might miss the Japanese rent, you are not going to miss the Japanese wages. Its true, you have to work in tech or finance to live in Manhattan for the most part, and Brooklyn seems to be filled with trust-fund babies struggling to launch their career in arts (though I've met a few who are doing decently well as video fx artists and UX designers), but if you do manage to secure a decent wage, life will be similar enough, and things will feel affordable, even if they are not by any other standard.
Show HN: J2Download – A simple online downloader supporting 40 platforms
by manhg | 2026-03-08 10:01:23+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a small web tool called J2Download.

It allows users to download videos and media from many social platforms in one place. The goal was to make something simple and fast that works directly in the browser.

Currently it supports platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter/X, Vimeo, Reddit, Bilibili and many others.

It also supports some music platforms like SoundCloud, Mixcloud, Spotify and Tidal.

You just paste the media link and download it.

Website:
https://j2download.com

I'd really appreciate any feedback or suggestions to improve the tool.
Show HN: Conflicts.app, Iran conflict dashboard better then alternatives
by juliusolsson | 2026-03-08 10:02:03+00:00
IMO every conflict dashboard going viral right now has terrible UX. Raw feeds dumped on a page, impossible to actually understand the situation from.

So I built my own.

No ads, no paywall, no signup and will never monetize it. Going open source soon.

Stack is super basic Next.js, TS, DeckGL, Vercel and Supabase for hosting. The agents system is very interesting but will do another post about that.
by RandomGerm4n | 2026-03-08 10:02:12+00:00
9b with 4bits runs with around 60 tok/s on my RTX 4070 with 12GB VRAM and 35b-A3B runs with around 14 tok/s and partial offloading. For roleplaying I prefer the faster 9b Version but for coding tasks both aren't really usable and Claude is still way better especially if you manage to persuade your employer to give you unlimited access.
by cyberpunk | 2026-03-08 10:02:40+00:00
It’s even dumber than that.

Let’s not forget that if even three engineers are working on this migration for only a week your cost is now 10’s of thousands for this couple hundred euros cost saving.

(assuming avg all-in engineer costs in europe)

It makes no sense to optimise cost for infrastructure mostly, it does make sense to make it faster, since almost all your spend is on engineers.

Spending thousands to save hundreds is not a healthy business.
by AugustoCAS | 2026-03-08 10:02:52+00:00
Dora released a report last year: https://dora.dev/research/2025/dora-report/

The gains are ~17% increase in individual effectiveness, but a ~9% of extra instability.

In my experience using AI assisted coding for a bit longer than 2 years, the benefit is close to what Dora reported (maybe a bit higher around 25%). Nothing close to an average of 2x, 5x, 10x. There's a 10x in some very specific tasks, but also a negative factor in others as seemingly trivial, but high impact bugs get to production that would have normally be caught very early in development on in code reviews.

Obviously depends what one does. Using AI to build a UI to share cat pictures has a different risk appetite than building a payments backend.
by wiseowise | 2026-03-08 10:02:52+00:00
> and there's a reason nobody writes books the way he wrote his

And there's a reason nobody came even close to his grandiose.

> Being condescending or dismissive of tools that do everything your tools you're going out of your way to construct will have to do is... weird logic.

They've merely pointed out that there's nothing wrong with reinventing tools, you're the one attacking them.
by graeber_28927 | 2026-03-08 10:03:26+00:00
Electricity analogy is fairplay, but ChatGPT had something like 110% global adoption 5 minutes after its release. The infrastructure and the electrical appliances had to catch up, but the Internet is all built out already.

So I think it's fair to be looking at results a few years in.

Andrey Karpathy famously mentioned in an interview with Dwarkesh Patel [0], that the computer doesn't show up on GDP numbers, there's no noticeable jump or change in slope. Even if Excel is so damn fast, people are likely not drawing its full potential, and institutions are likely actively resisting change anyway.

My take is that the general population hasn't found the productive levers yet, they're at the stage where they're happy to drag down and auto generate the date list in Excel, but don't know to adjust diagrams or read function docs, not to even mention VBS scripting. And the enthusiast (dev) community I'd say is starting adoption with internal tools, and shot-in-the-dark apps, but big successes need time to mature in all the other ways (design, reliability, user feedback, marketing...), which comes back to what you said also, that needs time. Product Market Fit isn't happening automatically by chance or good prompting, I would like to think.

[0] https://youtu.be/lXUZvyajciY?is=CBJI4hIr6w_UHVs9
by boje | 2026-03-08 10:03:39+00:00
>Godot locks you into the Godot way of doing things. MonoGame is a thin cross-platform abstraction over platform APIs for sprite rendering, audio playback, input, and font, leaving you to build your game engine yourself however you like.

That might be changing: https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/110863

Besides, there's a lot of value Unity, Unreal and Godot provide besides just the GUI in ways similar to and different from MonoGame.
Show HN: Proxly – Self-hosted tunneling on your own domain in 60 second
by a1tem | 2026-03-08 10:04:13+00:00
Proxly is a self-hosted tunneling tool that exposes local services through subdomains on your own VPS. npm install -g @a1tem/proxly, run proxly, and the interactive wizard sets up your first tunnel. No bandwidth caps, no session limits. Built it because frp's config is painful and ngrok's free tier is too limited. Open source, MIT licensed.
GitHub: https://github.com/a1tem/proxly
by moffkalast | 2026-03-08 10:04:14+00:00
Obviously it's not going to be of a paid tier 2T sized SOTA model quality, but it can probably roughly match Haiku at the very least. And for tasks that aren't super complex that's already enough.

Personally though, I find Qwen useless for anything but coding tasks because if its insufferable sycophancy. It's like 4o dialed up to 20, every reply starts with "You are absolutely right" with zero self awareness. And for coding, only the best model available is usually sensible to use otherwise it's just wasted time.
by Zardoz84 | 2026-03-08 10:05:08+00:00
I need to build a Dobson mount for my old homemade 8" F 5.5 Newton ... Why doesnt have a mount ? Well, it had 2 mounts in the past. It was built by my father, and we moved to another house, we need to ditch the mount. I managed to save the tube and the parts, and lately built an adapter to be attached to an EQ6 mount that I was allowed to use with a university astronomical association.
by defrost | 2026-03-08 10:05:11+00:00
The damage risked by Keto diets includes nutrient deficiency, liver and kidney problems, constipation, fuzzy thinking and mood swings.

Of these risks it's the potential veering into liver and kidney problems that deserves the closest monitoring.

See: https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/should-you-tr...

~ Howard E. LeWine, MD, Chief Medical Editor, Harvard Health Publishing
by ansgri | 2026-03-08 10:05:42+00:00
Polypropylene is great: it revolutionized residential plumbing, at least in countries that adopted it (apparently not the US). With PP tubes you can weld any complex plumbing with like $50 worth of tools and minimum skills. The only drawback is significant thermal expansion, but they’re flexible enough that they won’t break even if you forget to design around that.
by Nevermark | 2026-03-08 10:05:43+00:00
I think most major efficiency improvements involve more adaptation costs than expected.

Those that can “see” the potential clearly push through the adaptation period over time, but it can be much longer than anyone expects.

Depending on how forward looking a group is, that is a problem, or pure win.

But external measurements won’t be able to distinguish between what may be very fast accumulating forward looking returns/value vs. little or negative benefit, for some time.

I also wonder what the demise of non-adaptive firms does to these numbers. When underlying value lags, despite top line returns, and then disappears due to failure, is that serious previously masked lack of “efficiency” ever accounted for?

—-

This is the dual of measuring running productivity/effort without taking into account long term accumulation of tech debt.

If/when technical debt becomes an obvious drag in performance, it suddenly goes from invisible to overriding significance.
by magicalhippo | 2026-03-08 10:05:52+00:00
There's a dearth of organ donors, so one could say let them have their fun.

Problem I have is that they often collide into others or cause others to have severe accidents, not unlike drunk drivers. And that's not cool at all.

We don't have a fat bike plague here, but we do have similar issues with E-scooters. Too many drive them with no regards for other peoples safety.
by brainless | 2026-03-08 10:06:08+00:00
Local models, particularly the new ones would be really useful in many situations. They are not for general chat but if tools use them in specific agents, the results are awesome.

I built https://github.com/brainless/dwata to submit for Google Gemini Hackathon, and focused on an agent that would replace email content with regex to extract financial data. I used Gemini 3 Flash.

After submitting to the contest, I kept working on branch: reverse-template-based-financial-data-extraction to use Ministral 3:3b. I moved away from regex detection to a reverse template generation. Like Jinja2 syntax but in reverse, from the source email.

Financial data extraction now works OK ish and I am constantly improving this to aim for a launch soon. I will try with Qwen 3.5 Small, maybe 4b model. Both Ministral 3:3b and Qwen 3.5 Small:4b will fit on the smallest Mac Mini M4 or a RTX 3060 6GB (I have these devices). dwata should be able to process all sorts of financial data, transaction and meta-data (vendor, reference #), at a pretty nice speed. Keep it running a couple hours and you can go through 20K or 30K emails. All local!
by tripledry | 2026-03-08 10:06:27+00:00
What's a good alternative if I want to self host and convenience?

I have some hobby sites I host on a VM and currently I use docker-compose mainly because it's so "easy" to just ssh into the machine and run something like "git pull && docker-compose up" and I can have whatever services + reverse proxy running.

If I were to sum up the requirements it would be to run one command, either it succeeds or fails in it's entirety, minimal to no risk of messing up the env during deployment.

Nix seems interesting but I don't know how it compares (yet to take a good look at it).
by lxgr | 2026-03-08 10:06:47+00:00
How about we don't? We really don't need to tie even more things to SIM cards and phone numbers.

Criminals have more than enough ways to still get anonymous SIM cards (at least until every country on the planet makes KYC mandatory for prepaid SIMs), and legitimate users are greatly inconvenienced by this.

> Pay part of that revenue to hotspot-owning businesses.

To subsidize a network connection they probably already need for their business operations, e.g. their payment terminal or POS? Why should I? The marginal cost of an incremental byte on wired Internet connections is basically zero, these days. It's literally too cheap to meter, so why bother?

Besides the centralization and tracking concerns, not nearly every device has a SIM card. Why does my Laptop not deserve to access a coffee shop Wi-Fi, my Kindle to use an in-flight conenction, or my smartwatch to use the gym's network for podcasts?

It's very strange to me that people keep trying to willingly ruin the open Internet.
by viruswami5511 | 2026-03-08 10:07:30+00:00
One interesting takeaway here is that the cryptography itself wasn’t broken — the failures came from how the Fiat–Shamir transcript was constructed.

The pattern seems to be:

commit data → derive challenge → verify equations

If any prover-controlled value is added after the challenge is derived, the prover can bias the verification equation and make an invalid statement pass.

What’s striking is that several independent zkVM systems hit similar issues. That suggests the fragile part isn’t the primitives (pairings, hash functions, etc.), but the transcript discipline across multiple layers of the system.

Once you have modular components (execution traces, lookup arguments, polynomial commitments), each layer can implicitly assume that another layer bound something into the transcript. If no one actually does, the security guarantee disappears.
by wanderlust123 | 2026-03-08 10:07:43+00:00
It absolutely does assume that. There is an implicit assumption in their argument that women are doing something they don’t want to due to “oppression”.

The percent of women being married is irrelevant. Women can be oppressed even if they are not married due to societal expectations. If a single woman is expected not to pursue education and simply become a housewife, then it’s irrelevant whether she is married or not. She is oppressed. However, that is literally a contradiction because STEM education shows high representation of women in Iran.

Honestly there are a lot of people here asserting what they think are facts who don’t have the slightest idea how the world works outside their own city, let alone country. I would encourage some critical thinking when it comes to stuff like this.
by srean | 2026-03-08 10:08:40+00:00
I right away admit that I am an absolute novice in this space, but I have a few questions. The question I always had is why do we not model it closer to the actual tangible Physics and Biology going on ?

For example, the Physical reality is the different frequencies (equivalently wavelengths) of light. The Biological reality is that different types of cells on our retina respond with differing intensity to each of those frequencies.

So to my naive mind, a way of modeling color is to have (i) a forward model that map light frequencies to response intensities of the different types of cellular light receptors and (ii) an inverse model that estimates the frequency mix of light from the cellular responses.

That is, have two spaces (i) the light frequencity space (a list of tuple of frequency and intensity/power at that frequency) and the (ii) cellular response space.

Once we have these, we can go from a pigment or excited phosphor to a biological response in a two step process.

From (a) pigment/phosphor (+ frequency mix of illuminating light) to output light frequencities (b) from those frequencities to cellular response.

For all processing make frequencities the base space to work in (allowing us to change/personalize the forward model).

Yes, the inverse model leads to an ill posed inverse problem, but we are now very knowledgeable about how to solve these.

The frequencies may need to discretized for convenience.

I am obviously a novice and don't know much about modeling color, but this way of modeling seems more grounded in the tangibles. This also gives a way to model how a color-blind person might perceive a picture.

Is the reason that we do not do it this way it's complexity ?

Eager to be illuminated (pun intended).