MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fuoqi | 2026-03-10 03:34:08+00:00
Computer systems (most importantly, UNIX) should've been using TAI [0] from the beginning. Human-readable time in turn should be computed from it using periodically updated time zones database which would include offset between TAI and UTC. By eliminating leap seconds we effectively re-invented TAI with a weird offset. While I am in favor of eliminating leap seconds as a hacky way to fix the current mess, it's sad to see that we added yet another quirk to the already complicated system of datetime keeping.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time
by Muskwalker | 2026-03-10 03:34:12+00:00
The Thaler case here is something different than "AI-generated = uncopyrightable" though. Thaler was not trying to copyright work in the way humans who make work with tools normally copyright their work ("Copyright 2026 by Me"), he was specifically trying to give AI the copyright ("Copyright 2026 by My-AI-Tool"). The court rejected this because only humans can own copyright.

I believe there are other cases where AI-generated works were found uncopyrightable but Thaler is not a good example* of them.
by hug | 2026-03-10 03:35:33+00:00
Not using the combination for one of its ambiguous purposes does not strip it of ambiguity, you've just trained yourself to avoid those circumstances.

That, of course, is one of the pain points that the article addresses: Training yourself to do so is additional cognitive load that never should have been necessary in the first place.

I flip between macOS and Linux and, occasionally, Windows. On one of my laptops, insert is also a Fn switch away, so I have to either remember that this machine needs Ctrl-Fn-F11 specifically when I'm copying from terminal.

On another keyboard I have the same problem, but insert is mapped to a different key entirely, so it is ctrl-fn-equals, and fn is on the opposite side of the keyboard from ctrl.

Contort my fingers in which way on which keyboard? Mental load and annoyance I don't need.
by topspin | 2026-03-10 03:35:42+00:00
Last I looked (about a year ago,) IBM is 3 things: Software licensing, services and Big Iron. The companies' revenue is split roughly equally among these three areas.

An interesting perspective of IBM is its relative position. It's leveled off at about $60b/y, after a lengthy decline. It is far overmatched by many big tech companies today in terms of revenue.

It's a niche business, serving niche demands. I think IBM's moat is that most of its business is highly uninteresting: industrialized box ticking work, deeply entangled by contracts and a strong need for continuity by its customers.

I actually had a recent encounter with one of IBM's products. A commercial B2B REST API I created was analyzed by an IBM vulnerability scanning platform on behalf of a major US municipality. It didn't find anything actually critical, but there were some worthwhile points in the report, and working around a false positive was a frustration. The product, in this case, is diffusion of responsibility.

On the Big Iron end, IBM isn't really selling hardware. They selling an ecosystem: services, software, support, continuity (over decades,) etc. It pleases me that they chose to stick to Power: it's nice to know Itanium didn't kill off every enterprise RISC platform.

Maybe, one day, some major quantum computing breakthrough happens at IBM. As far as I can see, that's the only play they have that could change their trajectory. In the meantime, they have a large software portfolio and plenty of institutions that will keep signing contracts long after I'm gone.
by bitwize | 2026-03-10 03:37:26+00:00
Turns out there are a number of profoundly negative social consequences to giving everyone a general purpose computing device with always-on internet connectivity. Malware, piracy, CSAM, revenge porn, people goaded into self-destruction by social media or AI, etc. Doing nothing is no longer an option, and nobody cares what a handful of nerds think. Those nerds must be held accountable to the greater society of which they are a part. Using a computer will become a much more regulated activity, one way or another, as the pressure has been building for decades. General purpose computing is dead; its time has passed.
by coolcoder9520 | 2026-03-10 03:37:43+00:00
The 'JVG algorithm' is a perfect example of what happens when theory meets the harsh reality of polynomial scaling. It’s a recurring pattern in the field: someone manages to get a toy circuit to factor '15 = 3*5' and the hype machine instantly pivots to 'quantum supremacy.'

As an engineer, I care about where the curve bends. If your 'supremacy' algorithm fails the moment you step out of the 'demo sandbox,' it's not a solution—it's a nerd-snipe. I'd much rather see 10 years of incremental work on error correction than 10 minutes of hype over a flawed paper.
by testifye | 2026-03-10 03:38:48+00:00
I've been using the x86_64 Alpine jslinux browser image in Chrome for the last 4 hours - pulling code down via git, building several large packages from source, editing and altering code, and running their test suites. This VM may be 50 times slower than native, but it is rock solid - worked perfectly and is stable. It's simply remarkable.
by spudlyo | 2026-03-10 03:40:12+00:00
It's a product of its time. In the mid 70s when Emacs was originally created, the MIT Lisp Machine Project had already been going for a few years, and Lisp was kind of a big deal at MIT's AI Lab, where it was created. When Stallman started GNU Emacs in '85 or so, he took lots of inspiration from Lisp and those systems.

You can think of Emacs as a kind of software Lisp machine with an emphasis on editing. Although that analogy only works well if you squint or if you don't know a lot about Lisp machines.

As someone who first learned Lisp through Emacs Lisp, I found it fun, well-documented, and powerful. Once you grok the basics of how the system is dynamically glued together, infinitely hackable, and self-documenting it's kind of mind-blowing.
by pron | 2026-03-10 03:41:24+00:00
The ranking compiled on Wikipedia is from a couple months ago. X is now behind Pinterest, Reddit, and LinkedIn (and of course, the major social players). Also, why would it be "wishful thinking"?

BTW, on US iOS App Store, Claude today is way ahead of Chrome, Google Maps, YouTube, Gmail, TikTok, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Surely you don't think it means it's used by more people.
by kittikitti | 2026-03-10 03:41:31+00:00
While I think the idea that claiming one can "precompute the xr mod N’s on a classical computer" sounds impractical there are a subset of problems where this might be valid. According to computational complexity theory, there's a class of algorithms called BQP (bounded-error quantum polynomial time).

Shor's algorithm is part of BQP. Is the JVC algorithm part of BQP, even though it utilizes classical components? I think so.

I believe that the precomputational step is the leading factor in the algorithm's time complexity, so it isn't technically a lower complexity than Shor's. If I had to speculate, there will be another class in quantum computational complexity theory that accommodates precomputation utilizing classical computing.

I welcome the work, and after a quick scroll through the original paper, I think there is a great amount of additional research that could be done in this computational complexity class.
by eviks | 2026-03-10 03:42:33+00:00
Is there any hope for these incompetent design churners to realize that users can do better and give us some power?
Like, why can't I simply tweak a few things in a visual designer and have that as my toolbar design in all toolbars written with the standard Apple GUI framework?
(or find a mod written by someone other better designer?)

Then any OS upgrade would simply be an extra theme suggested by the OS that I can safely ignore and continue to use my own without breaking my workflow?
by phil21 | 2026-03-10 03:43:08+00:00
> I don‘t know where this observation comes from, but here in Austria a majority of people in lower income sectors than IT do all of this?

The observation comes from myself, from a medium to low income background. Think mechanics, janitors, construction laborers, etc. family background. Along with most of my peers and extended family members.

The "old" generation - e.g. my grandparents did all those things. Their kids (for the most parts, exceptions do exist) and my generation (and my kids) do basically none of them. They go to whatever supermarket they go to every week or two, stock up on whatever they usually buy, and that's it. Zero consideration for anything else. It is very surprising to me.
by nakedgremlin | 2026-03-10 03:43:46+00:00
I thought this was a great write up on the current state for artists and AI engines. I'm honestly surprised by this nugget:

> A free Tess subscription to use their own model for brainstorming and scaling repetitive work (roughly 1 in 4 artists took advantage of this)

So based on the math I'm seeing... the 21 artists in the system, only 5 ("1 in 4") optioned to use the tool for their own productivity? That seems really low and makes me wonder what the user experience for creation feels like. I would assume if you decided to commit to this endeavor, you would want to see what derivative results will look like.
by dsf2 | 2026-03-10 03:45:09+00:00
I dont agree with that.

THe majority of university courses don't require one to be in the environment - e.g. medicine does in contrast.

Employers frankly don't care about that - what they care about is 'are you going to be productive?'. Therefore what Universities have failed to understand is that students don't even care about the experience anymore - they want confidence that by the time they are 21 they will be employable.

Essentially what I'm pointing at - that you are missing - is that the University system is one-dimensional whilst not addressing the issues re. the bridge to the labour market and what employers demand. Something else, something much better is necessary that re-organises and disrupts the existing university model. I actually have a solution in mind, however, it's going to cause so many prof's who just collect a pay-cheque to lose their job that it'll cause a riot so I don't see people willing to push it through.

FYI I have spoken to many CEO's across a myriad of firms of varying complexities and sizes - they all fall on the same conclusions as I've stated. They simply do not care and want people who will be productive, particularly in-line with specifics of what the job entails, from day one. There is very little patience and resource allocated towards training anymore than years-past.
by bb88 | 2026-03-10 03:48:48+00:00
I'm so fucking tired of trying to do a super spock pinch with my keyboard. I've always thought composition of typing various keys in sequence is better than trying to press 4 keys at once, particularly if your left handed or right handed, say.

There were "compose" keys that let you type characters to combine other characters -- (not ai) but they weren't forcing the person to super spock pinch the keyboard to get the character they wanted. It was "compose" then "c" then "s" to get the "ç" character.

I honestly would like to be able to do the same thing with ctrl-alt-x, eg. where ctrl alt and x are separate key presses.
by ericol | 2026-03-10 03:50:25+00:00
The future is not evenly distributed.

I tried to search for it, but even the 2 documents that superseded the one from around the time my daughter was at school at not available.

I mean, the site doesn't even have a valid secure certificate so...

In the site below (In Spanish) you can search for 10/2019 and a cursory translation of the document title will show that this is the proper document (For 2019 onwards, the replaced doc 04/2014 isn't available either)

https://koha.chubut.edu.ar/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl?idx=k...
by mindslight | 2026-03-10 03:50:40+00:00
Just a friendly reminder that if any of this were about good faith attempting to protect children, the focus would be on end devices having software that would allow parents to directly control what sites their children can see:

The straightforward implementation would be a mandate that every website over a certain size must publish tags about what types of content their site contains, the user-user communication features, the moderation policies, etc. These would be legally-binding assertions on the part of the site operators. Browsers would then allow setting parental controls based on these tags, or other criteria the parents choose (eg no social media, even if social media companies went out of their way to make sites their lawyers deem child-appropriate). And with this setup, the only thing locked down owner-hostile computing devices would be necessary for is for the devices parents would want to give to their kids.

The only way to view an architecture with the information flow being the complete opposite of what makes sense is as a push to start exerting top down control over what can be published on the Internet for viewing by everybody. Basically, a government repudiation of the idea of the Internet as a permissionless communications medium, in favor of decreeing it must be a sanitized kid-friendly space by default.
by alterom | 2026-03-10 03:50:47+00:00
Sorry, but this seems to be so off-base (as well as naively optimistic) that I am having difficulty responding to this.

But I'll try nevertheless.

- >Want to run a program as you wish? Great! It's easier than ever to build a replacement.

Non-sequitur. Building a replacement does nothing for being able to run a program as you wish.

Nobody else is able to run your program as they wish unless you release it with a Copyleft license.

- >Want to study a how a program works and to modify it? This is now much more achievable.

Reverse engineering is more achievable.

Modifying a program, without having its source code, documentation, and a legal right to do so guaranteed by the license is (and always be) easier compared to not having those things.

- >Want the freedom to redistribute copies to help others? Build your own version! It may not even be copyrightable if it's 100% generated (IANAL).

So, that's not about redistributing copies. That's about building an alternative option.

I can download an Ubuntu image and get Libre Office on it with a click.

Go vibe-code me a Microsoft Excel running on Windows 11, please, and tell me it's easier.

- >Want to distribute modified versions? yes! see previous.

You're not even trying here.

One can't legally modify and redistribute copyrighted works without explicit permission to do so.

You keep saying "...but vibe coding allows anyone to create something else entirely instead and do whatever with it!" as if that is a substitute for checking out a repo, or simply downloading FOSS software to use as you wish.

- >I dunno; seems like generative coding can be as much a liberator as any kind of problem.

Now, that statement I fully agree with.

Generative coding is a liberator as much as any kind of problem is.

Headache, for example, is generally a problem. It's not a great liberator.

Neither is generative coding.

Now, you probably didn't intend to say what you wrote. And that's exactly why generative coding is not a panacea: the only way to say things that you mean to say is to write precisely what you mean to say.

Vibe-coding (like any vibe-writing) simply can't accomplish that, by design.
by Marsymars | 2026-03-10 03:51:48+00:00
Well the general guideline is that copyright covers the *expression of an idea*, not the idea itself.

Translations are pretty much the textbook example of a derivative work in copyright.

Your jurisdiction may vary, of course, but it's pretty well established in mine (Canada) that "plot" is an idea, and can't be copyrighted, only the expression of the idea (e.g. the written novel) falls under copyright.
by efitz | 2026-03-10 03:52:35+00:00
The government operating automatic camera citation systems, almost never is interested in improving safety or even minimizing undesirable behavior- often the placement of such cameras is done to maximize revenue (as when red light cameras are placed at long-cycle-time intersections vs intersections with a history of accidents). And it’s been documented that some cities have reduced yellow light times (which almost always leads to more citations) rather than increasing yellow light times (which usually leads to fewer people running the yellow, because people are less likely to take a chance after the light has been yellow a long time).

There’s a lot of compelling evidence that these systems are just revenue machines.
Collecting AI Prompting Files in One Place
by shashahchk | 2026-03-10 03:53:26+00:00
Been seeing loads of people talk about their workflow and AI configs, but with github only showing stars, it's hard to know which ones actually work.

So we made a registry of .md files, a place to collect, share, and discuss real setups.
https://dotprompt-seven.vercel.app/

Feel free to contribute.
by skydhash | 2026-03-10 03:53:51+00:00
Unless your idea of software is reduced to the set of todo app, I don’t see how your points hold. AI won’t give you Blender, Inkscape, Kicad, Emacs,… And the algorithms behind those are not secrets, it’s the cohesive vision behind the whole system that is hard.

People will still pay for Matlab, SolidWorks, and Maya because no one who need those will vibe-code a solution. And there’s plenty of good OSS versions for the others.
by jimbokun | 2026-03-10 03:54:04+00:00
This article shows how Emacs remains a beautiful, relevant project several decades after it was first created. The core design and implementation’s ability to evolve into something still useful today and competitive with modern tools is an amazing achievement.

Also, with LLMs driving so much of current development it potentially makes Emacs even more competitive relative to modern IDEs. Development can be driven primarily by an agent like Claude Code from the command line, then navigating and tweaking the code, handling Git commits, etc with Emacs.

I imagine an LLM would be very good at writing Elisp to leverage EMacs’ strong core functionality to make Emacs work exactly how you want. This author managed to do it by hand, but I imagine someone starting now with an LLM could get there much faster.
by username223 | 2026-03-10 03:55:09+00:00
> Just an anecdote - I never used Twitter/X, and never used BlueSky. Recently (about a year ago), joined Mastodon. I enjoy it, find a lot of value there, and have interesting conversations

Same, more or less. Twitter started as a place to be interrupted by attention-seekers, and Bluesky was just "that but with less Elon Musk and more implementation throat-clearing." I never saw the point. Mastodon feels more like old-school Usenet, where you could find communities with shared interests, block the attention-seekers, and shrug at the usual human drama.
by kmoser | 2026-03-10 03:55:15+00:00
And yet, jaywalking pedestrians get killed daily, despite their best attempts at determining whether it's safe to cross. The problem with allowing drivers to use their best judgment as to whether it's safe to continue through a red light (after stopping) is that a non-zero percent of those drivers will fail to judge the situation correctly, especially during an edge case they rarely encounter.
by em-bee | 2026-03-10 03:55:16+00:00
Twenty-seven years since Microsoft did so, Apple too wanted a Windows-style key that only they could control.

i always thought that was the command key, it even used to have an apple logo on it. and i thought it was microsoft that created the windows key because it wanted its own key like apple had.

wouldn't you also map the windows key to command when you used such a keyboard on a mac?
by spudlyo | 2026-03-10 03:56:51+00:00
> Surveys consistently showed that consumers believed artists deserved payment when AI generated content in their style.

It's interesting that "consumers" are generally for the expansion of IP laws. At at the moment, I'm fairly certain that "style" is not something protected by Copyright. I personally do not want this, and I'm sure there are likely many like me.

> What 325 Cold Emails to Artists Taught Us

I'm surprised 1% didn't respond with "EAT HOT FLAMING DEATH SPAMMER" for sending them unsolicited commercial email. ;)
by nsm | 2026-03-10 03:58:41+00:00
https://without.boats/blog/revisiting-a-smaller-rust/

I think there is a programming language hole for a Rust-like language, but with GC and green threads. One that dispenses with single-ownership, and async/await footguns.

Something like F#/Kotlin is closest in terms of developer experience.

Unfortunately, we are really lacking a language that skews badly on some other axis

- F# - tainted by being Windows only for really long and being Microsoft.
- Kotlin - tainted by the JVM
- Java 24+ - has virtual threads, sum types, match expressions and other niceties, but tainted by the JVM again (Verbosity included, but this is not really a factor with IDEs and LLMs.)

Note that the opinions above are not mine, but "consensus". I'd say they are all unfair opinions.

I feel like people end up favoring new languages, simply because of novelty. Like, inevitably, somebody is gonna say Gleam. I'm all for having existing BEAM users getting access to new languages, but I'm not sure why one would pick a BEAM language for non-server applications when the developer tooling story for CLI apps, line-of-business apps and so on is so much stronger for the .NET and JVM ecosystems. No offense to the Gleam folks intended.
by dalyons | 2026-03-10 03:59:05+00:00
That’s not the way the energy market works though. The cheapest sources (like daytime solar) will knock your expensive nuclear off the grid. Or force it to sell at significantly below operating cost, which is suicidal in the long term, since nukes need a guaranteed high price nearly 100% of the time to pencil out (pay back the capex).

Your argument only works in state controlled grids, not in free energy markets of independent suppliers.
by amluto | 2026-03-10 04:00:10+00:00
There is a genuinely interesting complexity class called BQP/poly, which is pronounced something like “bounded-error quantum polynomial time with classical advice” (add some more syllables for a complete pronunciation).

The JVG algorithm is not a high quality example of this or really anything else. If you think of it as “classical advice”, then it fails, because the advice depends on the input and not just the size of the input. If you think of it as precomputation, it’s useless, because the precomputation involved already fully solves the discrete log problem. And the JVG paper doesn’t even explain how to run their circuit at respectable sizes without the sheer size of the circuit making the algorithm fail.

It’s a bit like saying that one could optimize Stockfish to run 1000x faster by giving it an endgame table covering all 16-or-fewer-piece-positions. Sure, maybe you could, but you also already solved chess by the time you finish making that table.
by kristianp | 2026-03-10 04:00:45+00:00
https://infinitemac.org/ is an example of a good use: users can try out old versions of Mac OS, to see what's changed and what software used to be available for old versions. It doesn't use JSLinux, but other emulators [1]

[1] https://blog.persistent.info/2025/03/infinite-mac-os-x.html
by brucehoult | 2026-03-10 04:03:09+00:00
The RISC-V one has just never been touched since it was created in 2018.

> newer gcc versions have significantly better optimization passes

So what you're saying is that with a modern compiler RISC-V would win by even more?

TBH I doubt much has changed with register allocation on register-rich RISC ISAs since 2018. On i386, yeah, quite possible.