MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simonw | 2026-03-12 23:03:53+00:00
This sounds right to me:

> Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day. Writing code by hand. Using the same editors, the same languages, the same pull request workflows. The craft-lovers and the make-it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable. The motivation behind the work was invisible because the process was identical.

Helps explain why some people are delighted to have AI write code for them while others are unhappy that the part they enjoyed so much has been greatly reduced.

Similar note from Kellan (a clear member of the make-it-go group) in https://laughingmeme.org/2026/02/09/code-has-always-been-the... :

> That feeling of loss though can be hard to understand emotionally for people my age who entered tech because we were addicted to feeling of agency it gave us. The web was objectively awful as a technology, and genuinely amazing, and nobody got into it because programming in Perl was somehow aesthetically delightful.
by awbvious | 2026-03-12 23:04:47+00:00
Blog says: ATM didn't kill jobs. Okay, it did kill some jobs. Proportionally did, but lots of new banks means overall more jobs. (The relationship management stuff is kind of irrelevant, it was simply the banks took the efficiencies to expand, thus still less tellers per branch, but more tellers overall.) /Completely different technology that didn't have the physical space limitations of ATMs/ then caused branches to decline and then the actual teller decline was felt.

Pretty funny how this is being twisted into what feels like AI booster shillery. Smart people are talking about AI as being similar to ATMs (I prefer the analogy of a spelling and grammar checker in a word processor) or other marginal increasers in human productivity/efficiency. They absolutely will increase productivity. They mean less people can do more. But the the roles don't go away completely because they have clear technological limitations. They spout probably likely text, and straight up lie, and you can't trust 'em. That's a limitation in what they are just like an ATM needs to be in a big metal box and they only dispense cash.

AI can't do the automated firm linked to (to be fair, didn't read that linked substack, as it looked as ridiculous as that other sci-fi fanfic by Citroni Research or whatever it was). Not AI as it is now known, namely an LLM chatbot. /A completely different technology/ might. A technology that might be informed by AI. Sure. Just like I'm sure mobile banking was informed by the technology in ATMs. But we're not calling smartphones with mobile banking apps "mobile ATMs". Because if we were, then you could get away with it. And the future technology that could remove "labor shaped holes" (or however the author phrased it) could be twisted into an AI nomenclature. Just like Machine Learning (ML) got twisted into AI nomenclature. But the iPhone probably didn't need the ATM to come first. It needed things the ATM uses. The next thing could very well use ML. But not enough to be called "AI" except to boosters shills.

Overall, this sounds like the usual AI boosterism that Ed Zitron complains about often. And I agree with his critiques. This article says nothing about how a /new/ technology needs to come about from AI. If it did, it would also have to comment on whether we need to spend insane amounts on data centers and circular deals to get to it. Because my guess is the answer is, no, it takes R&D and a truthful "we don't know what it looks like yet and we can't promise you shareholders when it will come" to get to it.

Ironically the author says the ATM story was used to come up with two incorrect interpretations, and then provides what I feel like was another. Still interesting, if possibly irresponsible in how it frames AI as iPhone--and not the ATM it still feels like. [EDIT: a word.]
by conductr | 2026-03-12 23:04:47+00:00
> The ATM precedent is optimistic

Is it? Maybe with survivor bias but what about all the laid off tellers? Did their situation improve? Walmart grew a lot over this time period, maybe most of them had to downgrade and be cashiers for a generally bad employer.

Also, and this might be a different analysis and topic, but tellers in the 80s had a pretty good job. It was often a decent wage with a pension and good benefits. Maybe on par with a teacher or government employee - granted not the highest pay but good, was considered a “profession”. Compare that to how it’s changed, it’s a low hourly rate on par or only slightly above retail and fast food work, heavy part-time status so as to avoid paying benefits.

I wouldn’t say that was a great example and is likely to be what may happen elsewhere once the routine work is sufficiently devalued.
by Schmerika | 2026-03-12 23:05:07+00:00
We've spent more than $20 trillion dollars on 'wars' in that region since 2003.

We've killed millions.

The people responsible have made billions.

These 'numbers' (ie, our future potential, not to mention millions of lives) don't ever seem to have much effect.

Trump talks about military action in Iran - and both sides of the aisle stand up and clap like crazed seals. Harris talks about 'the most lethal military' and the DNC roar with approval.

But hey, the DOW was over 50,000 or whatever.

... It's almost like there's a big club that we're not in.
by CraigJPerry | 2026-03-12 23:05:29+00:00
I've had good success with something along these lines but perhaps a bit more raw:

- claude takes a -p option
- i have a bunch of tiny scripts, each script is an agent but it only does one tiny task
- scripts can be composed in a unix pipeline

For example:

$ git diff --staged | ai-commit-msg | git commit -F -

Where ai-commit-msg is a tiny agent:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# ai-commit-msg: stdin=git diff, stdout=conventional commit message
# Usage: git diff --staged | ai-commit-msg
set -euo pipefail
source "${AGENTS_DIR:-$HOME/.agents}/lib/agent-lib.sh"

SYSTEM=$(load_skills \
core/unix-output.md \
core/be-concise.md \
domain/git.md \
output/plain-text.md)

SYSTEM+=$'\n\nTask: Given a git diff on stdin, output a single conventional commit message. One line only.'

run_agent "$SYSTEM"

And you can see to keep the agents themselves tiny, they rely on a little lib to load the various skills and optionally apply some guard / post-exec validator. Those validators are usually simple grep or whatever to make sure there were no writes outside a given dir but sometimes they can be to enforce output correctness (always jq in my examples so far...). In theory the guard could be another claude -p call if i needed a semantic instruction.
by transpute | 2026-03-12 23:05:33+00:00
Google will launch Chrome for ARM64 Linux devices in Q2 2026, following the successful expansion of Chrome to Arm-powered macOS devices in 2020 and Arm-powered Windows devices in 2024.. Google is partnering with NVIDIA to make it easier for DGX Spark users to install Chrome.

Will be useful in isolated Debian Linux pKVM Arm VM with accelerated vGPU, in Android-ChromeOS converged desktop on Qualcomm Arm laptops. Possibly Nvidia-Mediatek Arm laptops, if they support h/w nested virt for pKVM/AVF.

Android desktop mode: https://x.com/sahajsarup/status/2031963143082295610
by fc417fc802 | 2026-03-12 23:05:42+00:00
Certainly it's possible that could happen to us. If it does I fully expect to have elections throughout the process.

We have the highest concentration of weapons per capita in the world and a deeply ingrained expectation of voting. In a very dark humor sort of way it would be absolutely hilarious if someone was stupid enough to attempt to intervene in the process.

We might go down in flames but you can be absolutely certain we'll have collectively agreed to light them ourselves.
by kelnos | 2026-03-12 23:05:58+00:00
> Many support its repeal.

There's nothing to repeal. Qualified immunity is a doctrine that the judicial branch made up out of thin air, with no legislative backing.

But agreed, we need legislatures to write laws that expressly hold police accountable, and declare that they are not shielded from liability when things go wrong due to their own failures and negligence.
by joozio | 2026-03-12 23:06:24+00:00
Anthropic formalized their enterprise partnership program today. Key partners include Accenture (30k professionals trained on Claude), Cognizant (350k associates with Claude access), Deloitte, and Infosys.

What makes this interesting: Claude is the only frontier model available across all three major cloud platforms simultaneously (AWS Bedrock, Azure, Google Cloud). The Partner Network is how they convert that platform coverage into an actual distribution advantage.

The $100M goes toward: certification programs (Claude Certified Architect launched today), dedicated Applied AI engineers for customer engagements, sales playbooks, and co-marketing.

This signals a shift from "try our model" to "we'll help you deploy org-wide." Curious if others are seeing this pattern play out in their enterprise conversations -- is this differentiated from what OpenAI/Google are doing, or is the whole industry moving this direction?
by Pet_Ant | 2026-03-12 23:07:18+00:00
That's because everyone else has access to the same tools. If you don't become more productive then you will be replace with someone who will.

They only way it'd help you is if you controlled access to AI and it was a competitive advantage of you over a fellow developer. A rising tide lifts all boats... but you are only paid for how much taller you are than the other boats.

It's important to understand that AI is capital, and it's to the owner of the capital go the spoils. Your capital is in your skills, but they are a commodity and thus you have limited leverage.

Who benefits from AI is smaller businesses who could not afford custom application development at previous development costs.
by bushido | 2026-03-12 23:08:31+00:00
Cursor implemented something a while back where it started acting like how ChatGPT does when it's in its auto mode.

Essentially, choosing when it was going to use what model/reasoning effort on its own regardless of my preferences. Basically moved to dumber models while writing code in between things, producing some really bad results for me.

Anecdotal, but the reason I will never talk about Cursor is because I will never use it again. I have barred the use of Cursor at my company, It just does some random stuff at times, which is more egregious than I see from Codex or Claude.

ps. I know many other people who feel the same way about Cursor and other who love it. I'm just speaking for myself, though.

ps2. I hope they've fixed this behavior, but they lost my trust. And they're likely never winning it back.
by bluefirebrand | 2026-03-12 23:08:45+00:00
I suspect your family was not as middle class as you think it was. You're describing a very similar childhood to what I had in the late 80s, but we were lower class for sure

I'm not saying that middle class families flew all the time in the 80s, but they absolutely could afford to if they wanted to make it a priority

A cursory google search seems to bear this out. Cheap flights in north america started in 1978 with some air travel deregulation.
by tzs | 2026-03-12 23:09:40+00:00
In that Padé approximant I think you can save a couple multiplications.

As written it does this:

n = 1 - 367/714 * x**2
d = 1 - 81/119 * x**2 + 183/4760 * x**4
return x * (n/d)

That's got 7 multiplies (I'm counting divide as a multiply) and 3 additions. (I'm assuming the optimizer only computes x^2 once and computes x^2 by squaring x^2, and that all the constants are calculated at compile time).

Replace n/d with 1/(d/n) and then replace d/n with q + r/n where q is the quotient of polynomial d divided by polynomial n and r is the remainder.

This is the result:

n = 1 - 367/714 * x**2
q = 1587627/1346890 - 549/7340 * x**2
r = -240737/1346890
return x / (q + r/n)

That's got 5 multiplies and 3 additions.
by yoyohello13 | 2026-03-12 23:09:41+00:00
This completely discounts the work involved to find service providers you trust. I spent a long time finding a Doctor I trust, finding a Vet I trust, etc. I don't want a "free market" solution where I need to switch providers every 6 months because some rich dude is being a dick.

This is the problem with so many market focused solutions. They discount the burden put on the consumer.
by saafree | 2026-03-12 23:09:41+00:00
Actually, that’s very close to what we’ve been seeing too.

Most agent systems behave like runtimes. They execute tasks, juggle tools, and try to recover state when something breaks.

But the real bottleneck in enterprises usually isn’t just execution. It’s governance, decision flow, and long-lived organizational state.

That’s why we started thinking about it more like an OS for the enterprise, not just an agent runtime.

Execution (state, handlers, orchestration) is only one layer. The harder part is coordinating decisions and policies across the whole system.

We started noticing this once agent systems move beyond small internal tooling and into real organizational workflows.
by acutesoftware | 2026-03-12 23:09:43+00:00
This highlights that all RAG systems should be using metadata embedded into each of the vectorstores. Any result from the LLM needs to have a link to a document / chunk - which is turn links to a 'source file' which (should) have the file system owners id or another method of linking to a person.

If the 'source information' cannot be linked to a person in the organisation, then it doesnt really belong in the RAG document store as authorative information.
by pixl97 | 2026-03-12 23:10:02+00:00
What's worse about all of this is dang is going to be in the middle of a religious war between the AI accusers and defenders on who is using AI to post. People that speak well because they sound like AI will be pissed. AI will just keep sounding more human. And the self-righteous that feel good when they call out a comment are going to be annoying as hell.
by kelnos | 2026-03-12 23:10:10+00:00
The GP seems to be suggesting that there's no recourse at all, usually. You might bring suit against a police department or LE agency, but you'll fail to find any relief there. True that qualified immunity only protects individuals, but there's a raft of other things that makes it hard to get a judgement against a police department, too.

I think there's probably one major exception: civil rights violation investigations. But even then, the people doing the investigating seem to be biased toward the LEOs.

The GP's linked article doesn't seem to even talk about this, so not sure why that's there.
by mmooss | 2026-03-12 23:10:17+00:00
You're missing out on an infinity of great food - great for anyone, vegan or not. Just think of all the Chinese, Latin American, Indian, etc. food that is vegan. Think of many appetizers even in mostly-meat restaurants. And there are world-class restaurants that serve vegan dishes

Eliminating beef, fowl, and fish leaves a universe of foods including all fungi, fruits and vegetables, grains, nuts, and legumes. It also includes all spices and herbs.
by gdiamos | 2026-03-12 23:11:09+00:00
I personally don't mind letting Claude write about work.

You could spend 80% doing the work and 20% writing about it, or 99% doing the work and 1% copy-pasting Claude's writeup about it into a blog.

There is nothing wrong with writing if you are into it, and yes you can probably do better than Claude, but I can related to engineers who just want to build.
by CharlieDigital | 2026-03-12 23:11:10+00:00
The divide is a matter of perspective.

I'm a 23+ year dev; among the highest level ICs in my org.

It's still craft, its just that the craft is different. I don't write *.ts, *.cs files anymore; I write *.md files that other devs are using, that we're using as guardrails, that ensures that we minimize the slop while increasing speed and basically lift every developers level up by several notches.

I went from building one kind of framework/platform level artifact to another type of framework/platform level artifact.

If one's perspective is that it's just a shift in what "craft" means, then it's still craft. I'm still building systems; just a different kind of system.
by lurking_swe | 2026-03-12 23:11:21+00:00
understood. my point is it’s still pretty good by international standards, and if it’s 3x the salary, it’s not a “no brainer” like you claim. It depends on what your goals are.

That’s all i’m pointing out. I agree that the U.S. really lags in terms of taking care of its people. I am NOT recommending the U.S. as a great place to work for most people.
by simoncion | 2026-03-12 23:12:13+00:00
> The central idea is that a IPv4x packet is still a globally routable IPv4 packet.

That's cool and all, but end-user edge routers are absolutely going to have to be updated to handle "IPv4x". Why? Because the entire point of IPvNext is to address address space exhaustion, their ISP will stop giving them IPv4 addresses.

This means that the ISP is also going to have to update significant parts of their systems to handle "IPv4x" packets, because they're going to have to handle customer site address management. The only thing that doesn't have to change is the easiest part of the system to get changed... the core routers and associated infrastructure.
by simonask | 2026-03-12 23:12:18+00:00
Why do you mention lifetimes here? They are exclusively a compile-time pointer annotation, they have no runtime behavior, thus no overhead.

Dynamic dispatch in general is much, much faster than many people’s intuition seems to indicate. Your function doesn’t have to be going much at all for the difference to become irrelevant. Where it matters is for inlining.

Dynamic dispatch in Rust is expected to be very slightly faster than in C++ (due to one fewer indirections, because Rust uses fat pointers instead of an object prefix).
by kelnos | 2026-03-12 23:12:29+00:00
I'm usually a big supporter of labor unions, but police unions in the US generally have an outsized amount of power, and even when mayors etc. want to hold police accountable, the union ends up bending the mayor over a barrel.

I'm not sure what the solution is here. Forbid police from unionizing? That would probably have some bad consequences too.
by kalalakaka | 2026-03-12 23:12:47+00:00
After years of working at startups I’ve long since abandoned any notion of craft at work. I have developed a very keen sense for harmfully cutting corners though, and unreviewed AI code (or unreasonably large PRs - defined by a size you can’t comfortably review) is absolutely cutting corners. It’s nothing to do with craft and everything to do with both correctness and incurring massive amounts of future debt.
by pseudosavant | 2026-03-12 23:13:26+00:00
This is exactly what happened at a SaaS company I previously worked at. It was an awesome company with ~1500 employees, turning a small profit. Private Equity comes along, buys it with ~$2B in debt. Sticks the SaaS company with a $100M+ annual interest payment. Round after round after round of layoffs ensued. Then interest rates went up... and it got even worse.

I think they are under 500 employees now. They basically laid off almost all of engineering and hired 100 new contractors in India to completely rebuild the entire platform in Node.js, as if the language it was written in was the problem. So glad to be far from that dumpster fire.

Really disappointing to see a great company gutted by some private equity people who almost certainly got their bonuses before the shit hit the fan.
by drivingmenuts | 2026-03-12 23:13:41+00:00
This bill isn't about actually solving a problem - it a feel-good measure aimed to make it appear that the legislator is actually doing something, in the same way that every other "it's for the children" law has been created.

Which is not to say it shouldn't be wholeheartedly opposed, but there's going to be pushback on that and it's going to be difficult to overcome.
Show HN: Sergamon – I defined 3,700 font glyphs as plain-text pixel grids
by sgmonda | 2026-03-12 23:13:49+00:00
Every glyph is defined as an 8×16 pixel grid in a plain-text .glyph file, compiled to TTF/WOFF2 via TypeScript + opentype.js. The design philosophy: what you type is what you see. No ligatures, no weight variants, no anti-aliasing intended. 3,700+ glyphs. Open source (OFL).
by tialaramex | 2026-03-12 23:14:33+00:00
This particular defect is a Quality of Implementation problem that's cheerfully allowed by the standard.

Rust's standard sorts not only lack the API footgun which causes so many C++ programmers to blow their feet off this way, but even if you go out of your way to provide a nonsensical comparison both sorts are safe anyway because it's a safe language and yet they're also faster than any popular implementation of std::sort

It's kinda silly, as late as the Biden administration one of the popular C++ stdlib implementations wasn't even O(n log n) because apparently twenty years was not enough for them to have introduced an introsort yet... That one isn't the standard's fault, the C++ 11 standard does say you should provide an O(n log n) sort at least.
by ifh-hn | 2026-03-12 23:14:44+00:00
Just reading the headline I said to myself: bet this is in America.

Every time I see something like this I can never quite believe this sort of stuff happens. Complete, life ruining incompetence, with no consequences for the idiots that caused this to happen. Ignoring the AI input, which to me has nothing to do with this (it was used as a tool to identify a potential suspect), this woman went to jail for 5 months on the opinion of someone with no other evidence. Only in America.
by sgmonda | 2026-03-12 23:14:45+00:00
Hi HN! I built Sergamon because I love classic pixel-art fonts and was mass-frustrated with many missing characters and symbols in existing fonts.
I wanted a font that treats source code as sacred text, without ligatures, without many weights — what you type is what you see, always.

I want to share the result, but also the funny build pipeline I've designed. How it works: Every glyph is a plain-text file with an 8×16 grid of dots and X's — basically ASCII art that compiles into a real font. Example:

# A (U+0041)

..XXXX..
.XX..XX.
XX....XX
XX....XX
XXXXXXXX
XX....XX
XX....XX
........

A TypeScript pipeline parses these files, runs a greedy rectangle-merging optimizer (to keep vector paths compact), and outputs TTF/WOFF2 via opentype.js.

Design decisions that might be controversial:

- No ligatures, period. This is a philosophical choice. Your code should render exactly as typed. If you want → , type →.
- Single weight. No bold, no light. Like a VT220 terminal — every pixel has the same stroke.
- No anti-aliasing intended. The font is designed for integer scaling with no smoothing. It looks best at 16px multiples.

Some fun challenges along the way:

- Designing confusable pairs (0/O/o, 1/l/I, backtick/quote) to be instantly distinguishable at small sizes within just 8×16 pixels is a surprisingly hard constraint-satisfaction problem.
- Drawing Arabic (254 glyphs with contextual forms) and Devanagari (119 glyphs with combining marks) on a pixel grid meant for Latin was humbling. I have new respect for Unicode.

3,700+ glyphs so far, covering Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Thai, Devanagari, Georgian, Armenian, braille, box-drawing, math, and more. OFL-licensed.

Would love feedback and contributions, especially on glyph readability and any scripts/characters I should prioritize next.
by vkou | 2026-03-12 23:15:12+00:00
Sure. But when you ask "Do you want the police to be unable to do their job and live in a lawless hellscape ran by gangbangers and ISIS cartels?, the answer is also 'No.'

The problem is that the mass media sets the framing of acceptable discourse, and that mass media is in large part an ideological monoculture. And even when it's not, it is happy to present absolutely insane batshit lunacy as 'one of the two sides' of an issue.