MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by matheusmoreira | 2026-03-12 01:58:51+00:00
> I don't understand why voting machines can't just print your vote on a piece of paper behind a plastic window for you to see while also recoding the vote in a database.

They absolutely can. Brazil uses electronic voting machines and that exact method was proposed to increase the trustworthiness of the system. We'd get the best of both worlds: fast vote counting and an auditable paper trail that serves as the ultimate truth.

Supreme court declared it unconstitutional using total bullshit arguments ranging from "it compromises voting secrecy" to "it's hard to implement", thereby fueling concerns that the voting machines are compromised.
Collecting perceptual data for a possible CSS optical-center property
by gorkemyildiz | 2026-03-12 01:59:03+00:00
Play icons in YouTube, Spotify and Apple Music are not mathematically centered – they are optically centered. Most icon systems adjust this manually.

I'm collecting perceptual data to explore whether a CSS “optical-center” property could be defined, similar to how fonts have baseline metrics.

The experiment takes about 5–7 minutes (40 steps) and works on mobile and desktop. No login required.

Results and the dataset will be shared publicly after collection.
by ordu | 2026-03-12 01:59:59+00:00
I'm not entirely sure, that I totally convinced, but yeah, it is better than me. I mean, I could do the same, but it would take me ages to go through 500 pages and to use them for the actual translation.

I'm not sure, because Gemini knows a lot of languages. The third language is easier to learn than the second one, I suppose 100th language is even easier? But still Gemini do better, than I believed.
by abustamam | 2026-03-12 02:00:03+00:00
Not disagreeing with you, but at least when I hear "lego knockoff" I think of the shitty ones, because I've never seen a Lego knockoff that wasn't shitty.

Lumibricks seems like a promising brand, but I've never heard of them, possibly because they don't spend as much on marketing as lego. And if they did spend more in order to compete with Lego, they might need to increase price!
by ljhsiung | 2026-03-12 02:00:20+00:00
One of many things that bums me out about AI is whether content I create will be truly appreciated by humans, or will just be fed back into the algorithm.

I often wonder how exactly you'd mitigate this. Further, as a user, I wonder what incentive there is for me to write anything at all online, let alone commenting on forums, if it will just be fed back into an LLM.

Is paywalling or forcing user accounts the solution? That feels antithetical to the reason for the internet at all.

Just musings.
by falkensmaize | 2026-03-12 02:00:59+00:00
Absurdly high markups? They just released a very good laptop for $599. The Galaxy S26 Ultra is $1299. The OnePlus 15 is $999. A Dell XPS 16 with 32gb ram is over $2000.

I won’t argue that they charge a premium for memory and nvme, but I have never felt like I overpaid for my MacBooks or iPhones, in part because they last so long.
Scaling the Lexinova Data Pipeline
by LEXINOVAFaqs | 2026-03-12 02:01:02+00:00
We just wrapped up a major infrastructure shift for LEXINOVA. We replaced our legacy stack with a custom API-first architecture, focusing on high-density data visualization and sub-100ms response times.

The goal for LEXINOVA was simple: eliminate UI bloat while maintaining a professional, minimalist aesthetic for complex information.

How do you guys handle high-performance data parsing in your own projects?
by asadotzler | 2026-03-12 02:01:22+00:00
ML based word or phrase editing is hardly a problem any more than pre-AI spellcheckers were. AI sentence and paragraph manufacturing is a problem and everyone knows the difference between that slop and a spellchecker. No one cares if your editor does inline spellchecking or even word autocomplete. What they care about is slop and word at a time spelling or phrase grammar checking are harmless.
by Ferret7446 | 2026-03-12 02:02:15+00:00
I don't think privacy and helicoptering is a dichotomy. Hell, the concept of privacy is actually very recent, and the default state for protohumans is no privacy (can't hide anything when everyone is in the same cave/hut)

I'm not saying kids should have no privacy, but I think privacy is overrated and the real problem is parents being overly controlling
by yellowapple | 2026-03-12 02:02:34+00:00
The flip-side of that is that it's just as easy to say that Tom Zubiri is the worst programmer on Earth and probably multiple other planets and his code was so bad it killed my dog and every other dog within a 5-mile radius, and now that is already implanted in the “next-token prediction rewards” ;)

At least with link-based SEO “optimization” there's the concrete success criterion of driving traffic to a specific place and put eyeballs on ads.
by cbeach | 2026-03-12 02:02:48+00:00
> 16 year olds can leave home, marry, join the army, and so on. Why should they not vote?

That's a separate argument.

My point is Labour's change to the rules is very politically convenient for themselves. In the most recent polling, 32% of 16-17-year-olds would vote Labour, while only 17% of the overall electorate would vote Labour.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_U...

> They didn't run pointless elections by request of the very councils that were due for them, because those areas are being redrawn and would have to have fresh elections almost immediately, making the results meaningless.

They allowed individual incumbent councillors to choose whether elections were cancelled. This was politically convenient for the Labour and Tory parties because the Reform Party is new, and while it's polling well ahead of Labour, it doesn't have many incumbent council seats.

When a court challenge loomed, Labour quickly u-turned on the latest round of cancellations. Funny how something can seem sensible one day, and can then be u-turned at the slightest whiff of legal scrutiny.

> They also gave all the conservative hereditary peers lifetime peerages so they will keep their seats.

Can you name a single Conservative hereditary peer that will be given a lifetime peerage in Starmer's reform plan?
by abustamam | 2026-03-12 02:03:27+00:00
I'd be curious to know if in '76, most households were dual income or single. My intuition is that many families could afford to have a parent stay at home with the kids back then.

Additionally, let's not ignore the fact that housing appears to have gotten more expensive disproportionately to income rising. And if two parents are working they often have to pay $1000+ for daycare
by tpmoney | 2026-03-12 02:04:32+00:00
I think you are completely misremembering what the Apple product lineup looked like even with the Steve Jobs cleanup. At its absolute simplest, it contained the iMac, iBook, PowerMac and PowerBook lines. Within each line was a "Good", "Better" and "Best" pre-configured model each being a few hundred different from the other and each of those models was further configurable to add additional storage / memory etc.

That level of simplicity lasted from approximately 1999 to 2002 when the 14 inch iBooks, the 17 inch iMacs and the eMacs were introduced, followed by the 12 and 17 inch powerbooks in 2003. By 2005 they had also introduced the Mac Mini. And again most of these had a "good", "better", "best" variant, though in some cases (like the first 17 inch iMacs, the "best" tier was also the next model variant).

Apple's lineup is undeniably more complicated now than it has been in the past, but the simplification was never really about cutting model types down, so much as it was about making distinct model categories that people could easily understand why they would pick one or the other.

I think they still do a relatively good job at retaining that distinction, and I agree that the iPad lineup is probably the most muddled. Though special mention goes to the "Macbook Pro with M4 Pro" branding, which anyone should have caught and thought that maybe they needed a better moniker than "Pro" for the processor variant (and of course also, is the "Pro", the "Max" or the "Ultra" the best?)
by altairprime | 2026-03-12 02:04:53+00:00
Simply putting up a basic auth wall that says “Enter any password to proceed” would stop all modern crawlers dead in their tracks, afaik. You could make it more defensible to the trivial overcome by putting a rotating / per-source password in the basicauth message, but honestly, I think they’re all coded not to invite a CFAA hacking lawsuit by trying random passwords on password-protected sites :)
by hinkley | 2026-03-12 02:04:58+00:00
Apple has a different relationship with the Paradox of Choice than most companies. The price stability makes it a bad idea generally to buy the old model right when the new one comes out. And not chasing inflation numbers I think is also part of that.

They also have some of the highest margins on consumer electronics in the business. Higher IIRC than Nokia had, before smartphones killed them. So absorbing a 3% bump in the dollar isn't that big a deal for them.
by superbowl | 2026-03-12 02:05:02+00:00
> At the biggest tech companies, new graduates went from roughly a third of all hires in 2019 to somewhere around 7% today. In the US, entry-level hiring at the top 15 tech firms fell 25% from 2023 to 2024 alone.

The title says the pipeline is collapsing, but the article describes a reduction. In my workplace, hiring stopped for teams working on non-AI products because all the money went to the teams building AI products. I would guess the AI teams wouldn't describe their pipeline as collapsing. It seems companies are going all in on AI and laying off or ignoring everything else.
by happyopossum | 2026-03-12 02:05:28+00:00
I ah e not seen this play out in practice at all. In 25 years I’ve been at 8 tech companies, all of which came through connections.

None of those have had an insular bubble - typically you know a few people, and they each have worked with a few others, but unless you go all “6 degrees of Kevin Bacon” on it, none of these jobs look like what you’re describing.
by Nevermark | 2026-03-12 02:05:50+00:00
Note that Amdahl's rule doesn't capture the practical situation.

1) The purpose of algorithms is ultimately to create value, not compute some fixed value X. This is important as it gives flexibility to choose different value producing tasks where parallelism dominates over serial tasks, whenever the the latter becomes a bottleneck.

2) In terms of producing value, perfect accuracy or the best possible solutions are not always necessary. Many serial tasks can become very parallel tasks when accuracy or certainty do not have to be complete.

3) Solutions that are reusable changes the math further. No matter how serial a calculation is, if something is calculated that can be reused, that serial part becomes effectively order O(1), after calculation if reused exactly, but as neural network demonstrate, many serial tasks become very parallelized after training a model that can be reused for now a wide class of specific problems. Resulting in very amortized serial computing costs.

It doesn't matter how many steps something takes, if those steps are now in the past and the value is "forever" reusable.

4) The economics of serial and parallel computation are not static, but improve relative to economic value achieved. Meaning that demand for cheaper serial time and currency costs result in improved scaled up hardware that delivers cheaper serial costs. This may have less impact than the previous points, but over years makes a tremendous difference on top of all those points.

This can go on.

The point being Amdahl's law certainly applies to specific algorithms, but is not the dominant determinant of computing in general, and not useful application of computing to a significant degree, where problems can be strategically chosen, strategically weakened or altered, and can be strategically fashioned to create O(V) of value - to balance any O(S) cost of serial computing, via direct reuse and generalization.
by esperent | 2026-03-12 02:06:07+00:00
Happy for your girlfriend, and anyone else who escapes because of this.

But it's not about the current generation of addicts. It's a play to capture the next generation.

It remains to be seen whether they'll get caught or not but it's important to remember that even if all of us mature humans find this new AI social media weird and gross, children don't have our preconceptions.

Meta is going to do everything in their power to train the next generation of young, immature brains into finding AI social media normal and addictive.

They (along with TikTok) already managed to do that to the last two generations so they have a scary track record here.
by schipperai | 2026-03-12 02:06:18+00:00
good challenges! xargs falls to unknown -> ask, and find -exec goes thru a flag classifier that detects the inner command like: find / -exec rm -rf {} + is caught as filesystem_delete outside the project.

The npm test is a good one - content inspection catches rm -rf or other sketch stuff at write time, but something more innocent could slip through.

That said, a realistic threat model here is accidental damage or prompt injection, not Claude deliberately poisoning its own package.json.

But I hear you.. two improvements are coming to address this class of attack:

- Script execution inspection: when nah sees python script.py, read the file and run content inspection + LLM analysis before execution

- LLM inspection for Write and Edit: for content that's suspicious but doesn't match any deterministic pattern, route it to the LLM for a second opinion

Won't close it 100% (a sandbox is the answer to that) but gets a lot better.
by lovich | 2026-03-12 02:07:24+00:00
The Use tax is levied when you bring items from State 1 into State 2 and use it within State 2's jurisdiction.

Not State 2 taxing you for using items within State 1's jurisdiction.

As far as I remember from my tax days they are also limited to the difference between the tax you paid for in the originating state and the state you use the item in, much like US federal taxes for citizens abroad.

In practice as well, no government gives a fuck about regular consumer abuse at that level. You get hit for violating the taxes when you either were A: committing other crimes and this was more of them throwing the book at you, or B: are a company or organization abusing the tax difference at large, such as a laundromat in Massachusetts buying 500k of machines in New Hampshire and thinking your'e so clever for tricking the tax man.
by kQq9oHeAz6wLLS | 2026-03-12 02:07:43+00:00
It's not really "much of the left" that is against it, just the loudest voices. Pew research says [1 sorry for the ugly URL]

Support for photo ID requirements also remains widespread in both parties. More than nine-in-ten Republicans (95%) and about seven-in-ten Democrats (71%) favor requiring all voters to show government-issued photo identification to vote.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/08/22/majority-of-...
by marcus_holmes | 2026-03-12 02:07:55+00:00
But almost all the remainder are political appointees.

It's disappointing that they didn't replace the hereditary peers with some other non-politically-appointed folks. There is a very great need to have people in the House of Lords who are not beholden to any of the political parties.

I personally favour a lottery system where random people get given the opportunity to join the House of Lords for the rest of their working lives.
by marcellus23 | 2026-03-12 02:08:01+00:00
I use Windows and macOS both daily and it's truly baffling to me that anyway could consider Windows software quality to crush the Mac -- either first party or third party. macOS has no shortage of bugs but compared to Windows it works like a dream.

As one example of many, Night Light (Windows' version of adjusting your screen to be warmer at night) has been broken for me, for 5+ years. I mean literally it just never works on its own. The only way to kick it into working is toggling HDR on and then off, every single time I wake it up.

I would guess it's just my configuration but I built a second PC from totally new parts, and got a different monitor, and installed Windows 11 instead of 10, and it's still broken.
by yellowapple | 2026-03-12 02:08:32+00:00
> Broken and true is more authentic than polished and approximately so.

From the perspective of someone reading the comment, I'll take “inauthentic” but actually comprehensible over “authentic” but incomprehensible any day.

Also, using bad grammar as a heuristic for humanity will just end with LLMs being prompted to deliberately mess up their grammar, and now we're back to square one, with the state of the written word even worse off than it was before.
by notatoad | 2026-03-12 02:08:40+00:00
Before chatbots, people used to link to Google search result pages as a passive-agressive way to say “the information is out there, go find it, I don’t care about you enough to explain it to you”

Pasting a chatGPT response into a comment, and labeling it as such, feels the same to me.

It is more, not less, insulting than trying to pass an AI response off as your own.
by higheun | 2026-03-12 02:09:07+00:00
Interesting to see this formalized. I've been running controlled experiments on why context separation improves LLM review quality — something I'm calling Cross-Context Review (CCR).

Setup: 30 artifacts (code, docs, scripts), 150 injected errors, 4 review conditions, 360 total reviews using Claude Opus 4.6.

Results:

- Cross-Context Review (artifact only, no production history): F1 28.6%

- Same-session self-review: F1 24.6% (p=0.008 vs CCR)

- Same-session repeated review (SR2): F1 21.7%

The SR2 result is the key finding — reviewing twice in the same session doesn't help (p=0.11 vs single review). The model generates more noise, not more signal. This rules out "two looks are better than one" as an explanation. It's the context separation itself that matters.

The gap is widest on critical errors: 40% detection for CCR vs 29% for same-session review.

Mechanism: production context introduces anchoring bias + sycophancy + context rot. A fresh session eliminates all three simultaneously by removing the conditioning tokens.

What Anthropic is doing here — dispatching independent agents that never saw the production context — is essentially this principle at industrial scale. Working on a paper but not published yet.
by burnt-resistor | 2026-03-12 02:09:49+00:00
Still waiting for iOS and iPadOS security updates to 18 as per the tradition of supporting the past 2 generations of OSes rather than this sneaky rug-pull of trying to foist fugly 26 on users who don't want an unusable device.

This sort of spurious patching and releasing token cheap devices is a form of gaslighting.
by st3fan | 2026-03-12 02:10:07+00:00
Weird .. I easily run 40 docker containers on an 8GB MacBook just fine!

(Just posting this to show that you have to be very specific when talking about these kind of things. Yeah maybe you need 32GB because you run some large deployment 3 times. Others mayb be totally fine with less if they just develop a basic Python web app. Who knows. The devil is in the details. Omitting them makes the discussion ambiguous and just difficult.)
by Supermancho | 2026-03-12 02:10:40+00:00
I use AI for the elements I feel are weak or unclear in the transcription. Sometimes I copy-paste a paragraph into ChatGPT or whatever, to ensure my (aging) thoughts are being communicated in a crystal clear manner. I cannot always point out why I think they are unclear or jumbled.

I don't feel this is an imposition on others. I think it's the opposite. It enhances signal by reducing nitpicking, spelling/grammar errors that might muddle intent, and reminds me of proper sentence structure.

Many of us are guilty of run-ons, fragments, overly large blocks of text[1] because it's closer to how people often converse, verbally. Posts on the internet are not casual conversation between humans. They are exchanges of ideas.

[1] This is a classic example where I had to go back and edit it to ensure it was readable. As you do self-review with any commit ^^
by nemo44x | 2026-03-12 02:11:16+00:00
At the very least teams will communicate with each other much better. So much of the tedium of office work is able to be automated so people can spend more time solving problems instead.

But the communication will massively improve. More artifacts being generated of progress and needs and AI can link related things around an organization rapidly and accurately. Workflows will massively improve. A living graph of an entire organization will come to life.

I think more productivity gains will come from this automation than anything. People will look back at all the drudgery workers did.
We built a lean, high-perf dashboard for Yeahchain
by YeahchainTECH | 2026-03-12 02:11:59+00:00
Just wanted to share a quick project we wrapped up at Yeahchain. We were tired of the usual bloated admin dashboards, so we rebuilt the whole internal engine for Yeahchain from scratch.

We focused on two things: keeping the UI super minimal (Neo-Brutalist style) and hitting sub-100ms load times. It’s essentially just a lean pipeline that turns messy data into clean, readable tables, but it feels infinitely faster now.

Curious to know how you guys keep your dashboards fast without sacrificing utility?
by catlifeonmars | 2026-03-12 02:12:15+00:00
> I would call this one of the biggest dick move

I don’t think that’s a fair characterization. You don’t know if the maintainer/reviewer is overloaded. No one is obligated to accept/review PRs and there is no question that the amount of noise has gone up. You are not the main character in that story, so to speak.
by komali2 | 2026-03-12 02:12:24+00:00
> but part of the point was to allow candidates to gauge their own abilities and not waste their time interviewing without a chance of being hired.

In my experience this is the wrong game theory. Unemployed people can make job hunting their full time job, so a 20 minute take home doesn't select for "who delivers the highest quality solution in the least amount of time," it selects for "who is the richest applicant who can burn hours on a take home to deliver a higher quality result than people with less time they can afford to spend?"

Also, nobody should ever self-select themselves out of an interview process. Passing a resume review and getting a callback is about 10% likely: for every job hunt, in my experience , candidates get about 10 callbacks for every 100 resume sends. From there, it's about 20% chance to get to final stage, and from there, maybe 50% to get an offer (you're either their first choice or second; if second, your hiring hinges on whether the first choice accepts). Math is right there: once you pass a resume check, in terms of the volume of applications you've sent, it's optimal to spend far more effort into this gig than into firing off ten or twenty more resumes.

Therefore, even if the candidate doesn't think they're a good fit, they should do everything they can to stay in the game, including lying by omission.

After all they might be engaging in imposter syndrome, right? Why assume for the interviewer that your python skills aren't good enough - maybe the interviewer understands perfectly well that you've only used it for scripts and one off tools, but doesn't care because they personally believe your startup experience is more valuable to them and they believe you can up skill! Maybe the take home was designed poorly by someone who was tasked randomly by a lead to shit out a take home, and it's not an accurate indication of what the job would be like. Maybe they sent you the wrong take home? Maybe it's a good take home but you need money so fuck it, if you manage to sneak in despite not being a good fit, you can just bust ass to upskill and make up the difference before anyone notices. Or fuck it twice, it's a shit market and who knows how much longer you'll be able to sell your labor as an engineer, even if you can only fool them for two weeks, that's two weeks of income while you still keep up your job hunt.