MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Someone | 2026-03-14 13:17:13+00:00
> I can't even see inside my CPU, why would I care if there's an empty slot?

Then, you’re not the target audience.

> Why would I pay for a piece of plastic to fill that slot that doesn't do anything?

It doesn’t do nothing. FTA: “Their sole purpose is cosmetic, though. While they light up and synchronize with your existing RGB ecosystem, they don't contribute to your computer’s memory capacity or performance.”

This is for people with transparent PC cases and memory sticks with RGB LED lighting. For example, see https://v-color.net/collections/prism-pro-rgb-memory-voclor/...:

“RGB SOFTWARE SYNCHRONIZATION SUPPORT

Dynamic RGB lighting control synchronized across main leading M/B such as RGB FUSION, MSI Mystic Light Sync, AURA Sync, POLYCHROME Sync etc. Customize lighting profiles or assign colors to each LEDs to create your own spectacular look.“
by treszkai | 2026-03-14 13:17:54+00:00
Why wouldn't one buy a second-hand refurbished MacBook Air M1 with 8 GB RAM and 256 GB storage for the same price? [1]

I really don't see the advantages of getting a newer computer for the same price with worse specs, unless it's a gift and social customs only allow a new one.

[1]: https://www.rebuy.de/i,11380014/apple/apple-macbook-air-13-3...
by steve-atx-7600 | 2026-03-14 13:17:57+00:00
Long term effectiveness? LLMs are such a fast moving target. Suppose anthropic reached out to you and gave you a model id you could pin down for the next year to freeze any a/b tests. Would you really want that? Next month a new model could be released to everyone else - or by a competitor - that’s a big step difference in performance in tasks you care about. You’d rather be on your own path learning about the state of the world that doesn’t exist anymore? nov-ish 2025 and after, for example, seemed like software engineering changed forever because of improvements in opus.
by Hackbraten | 2026-03-14 13:18:34+00:00
At the cost of a slightly more complex schema, the JSON representation can be made much more readable:

{
"path": "/tentativeTaxNetNonRefundableCredits",
"description": "Total tentative tax after applying non-refundable credits, but before applying refundable credits.",
"maxOf": [
{
"const": {
"value": 0,
"currency": "Dollar"
}
},
{
"subtract": {
"from": "/totalTentativeTax",
"amount": "/totalNonRefundableCredits"
}
}
]
}
by thatwasunusual | 2026-03-14 13:19:23+00:00
It's completely unbelievable that so-called developed countries are struggling with this in 2026.

In Norway, we've had a more or less automated tax system for many years; every year you get a notification that the tax settlement is complete, you log in and check if everything is correct (and edit if desired) and click OK.

It shouldn't be more difficult than this.
Show HN: ctk-applet – run Cut-the-Knot Java applets locally
by joseluis | 2026-03-14 13:19:29+00:00
This is a small helper for running Cut-the-Knot Java applets locally.

It handles the published classes archive and lets you work directly from the original Cut-the-Knot page URLs with appletviewer.

I ended up making it after trying to use the applets myself and realizing the old workflow was still more cumbersome than it needed to be.
by jwrallie | 2026-03-14 13:20:14+00:00
Sorry, my choice of word was not great, I was not targeting you in specific, but the way the education system works prior to a PhD in general.

I’m aware the experience will not be the same everywhere as PhD programs can be quite different, but many students that asked me if they should do a PhD are surprised when I tell them it’s not just up to the university or their advisors that they will get their degree and even more surprised when I tell them how early they have to start submitting their papers.

Even though I was well warned by my seniors, I admit that I also had this misconception to some degree.
by aleph_minus_one | 2026-03-14 13:20:28+00:00
>
It depends on whether the limited call stack capacity will be an issue for the particular problem you’re solving.

First: that common programming languages use the limited call stack for implementing recursion is an artifact of the programming language (implementation). One can, for example, use a stack data structure for implementing DFS instead of using the call stack; it would be no problem for a programming language implementation to use a similar method for implementing recursion.

This said: there actually exist two kinds of recursion (barely every computer science textbooks at most barely mentions this):

1. "normal" recursion (with all its problems such as potential stack overflow etc.)

2. tail recursion with guaranteed tail-call elimination (TCE) in the programming language semantics; then recursion basically behaves "like loops".

I want to clarify that it is a common exercise to convert a program that uses "normal" recursion to one that uses tail-recursion, just like it is a common exercise to convert such a program to one that uses imperative style.
by NikolaNovak | 2026-03-14 13:20:49+00:00
- they last forever. I still have sennheiser hd380 pro cans from 25 years ago that sound great.

- cannot overstate lack of lag and simplicity. You plug in and it works, perfectly, every time, forever.

- easily switch devices. I use my headphone on my phone, tablet, laptop, Synthesizer, Groovebox etc without a blink. And my phone never stops playing music and connects to our car my wife just started the way bluetooth ones do :-)

- to me, it's like email. Icq, aim, msn messenger come and go, yet email is old and boring but survives.

There's absolutely a time and place for wireless headphones and I probably use them more at this point. But killing 3.5mm from phones has been a Massive annoyance.
by sgarland | 2026-03-14 13:21:03+00:00
Since you explicitly mentioned fashion, I assume you read this:

> There is a distinction that the industry refuses to acknowledge: developer convenience and correctness are different concerns. They are not opposed, necessarily, but they are not the same thing.
…
The rationalization is remarkable. "JSON is simpler", they say, while maintaining thousands of lines of validation code. "JSON is more readable", they claim, while debugging subtle bugs caused by typos in key names that a schema would have caught immediately. "JSON is lightweight", they insist, while transmitting megabytes of redundant field names that binary XML would have compressed away. This is not engineering. This is fashion masquerading as technical judgment.

I feel the same way about RDBMS. Every single time I have found a data integrity issue - which is nearly daily - the fix that is chosen is yet another validation check. When I propose actually creating a proper relational schema, or leaning on guarantees an RDBMS can provide (such as making columns that shouldn’t be NULL non-NULLable, or using foreign key constraints), I’m told that it would “break the developer mental model.”

Apparently, the desired mental model is “make it as simple as possible, but then slowly add layer upon layer of complex logic to handle all of the bugs.”
by bleudeballe | 2026-03-14 13:21:19+00:00
I don't know if I just don't get it, but this feels like it's describing... an API?

"Identify standard operations

Section titled “Identify standard operations”
Once the resources are defined, identify one or more standard methods for each of those resources. Standard methods operate on the lifecycle of a resource lifecycle: namely, they create, read, update, delete, and list resources."

I mean... yes?
by DennisP | 2026-03-14 13:22:06+00:00
That actually sounds like something Claude could do pretty easily.

Yegge's book describes his coauthor's first vibe coding project. It went through screenshots he'd saved of youtube videos, read the time with OCR, looked up transcripts, and generated video snippets with subtitles added. (I think this was before youtube added subtitles itself.) He had it done in 45 minutes.

And using agents to control other applications is pretty common.
Show HN: QKD eavesdropper detector using Krylov complexity-open source Python
by QuantumSpirit | 2026-03-14 13:22:28+00:00
I built a framework that detects eavesdroppers on quantum key distribution channels by reading the scrambling "fingerprint" embedded in the QBER error timeline, no new hardware required.
The core idea: every QKD channel has a unique Lanczos coefficient sequence derived from its Hamiltonian. An eavesdropper perturbs the Hamiltonian, which shifts the coefficients in a detectable and unforgeable way (Krylov distortion ΔK). Validated on 181,606 experimental QBER measurements from a deployed fiber-optic system, AUC = 0.981.
Based on a 12-paper Zenodo preprint series covering the full theoretical stack: Physical Bridge proof, one-way function property, universality across 8 Hamiltonian families, open-system extension via Lindblad, and Loschmidt echo validation.
Paper series: https://zenodo.org/records/18940281`
by librasteve | 2026-03-14 13:22:40+00:00
I have been playing with DSLs a little, here is the kind of syntax that I would choose:

invoice "INV-001" for "ACME Corp"
item "Hosting" 100 x 3
item "Support" 50 x 2
tax 20%
invoice "INV-002" for "Globex"
item "Consulting" 200 x 5
discount 10%
tax 21%

In contrast to XML (even with authoring tools), my feeling is that XML (or any angle-bracket language tbh) is just too hard to write correctly (ie XML syntax and XMl schema parsing is very unforgiving) and has a lot of noise when you read it that obscures the main intent of the DSL code.
by llm_nerd | 2026-03-14 13:23:30+00:00
XML is fantastic. XML with XSD and XSL(T) was godly for data flow systems. I mean, just having a well defined, verifiable date type was magical and something seemingly unfathomable for so many other formats.

What hurt XML was the ecosystem of overly complex shit that just sullied the whole space. Namespaces were a disaster, and when firms would layer many namespaces into one use it just turned it into a magnificent mess that became impossible to manually generate or verify. And then poorly thought out garbage specs like SOAP just made everyone want to toss all of it into the garbage bin, and XML became collateral damage of kickback against terrible standards.
by librasteve | 2026-03-14 13:23:56+00:00
Here's how the built-in Raku Grammar can be used to parse this. I can see Raku generating the XML as the Actions from this Grammar so allow ease of DSL authoring with XML as a interchange and strict scheme validation format.

grammar InvoiceDSL {

token TOP {
^ <invoice>+ % \n* $
}

token invoice {
<header>
\n
<line>+
}

token header {
'invoice' \h+ <id=string> \h+ 'for' \h+ <client=string>
}

token line {
\h**4 <entry> \n?
}

token entry {
| <item>
| <tax>
| <discount>
}

token item {
'item' \h+ <desc=string> \h+ <price=num> \h+ 'x' \h+ <qty=int>
}

token tax {
'tax' \h+ <percent=num> '%'
}

token discount {
'discount' \h+ <percent=num> '%'
}

token string { \" <( <-["]>* )> \" }
token num { \d+ [ '.' \d+ ]? }
token int { \d+ }
}
Ask HN: How do you use Coding Agents/CLIs out of coding?
by arbayi | 2026-03-14 13:24:19+00:00
Everyone is shipping. Open any feed, Twitter, LinkedIn, HN, and it's new projects every single day. AI made it so easy to go from an idea to a working product.

If you're not a developer, or you're just starting out, or you only knew one area of software, AI is amazing for you. You can build things you could never build before. If you're experienced, you're just way faster now. Both are great.

I think we can use that same energy on learning new things too. Not just using AI to write code, but using it to understand things we never had time to understand before. Reading more. Going deep on new domains. Building actual knowledge.

For example, if you're a software person who always wanted to learn hardware, this is the best time to do that. AI can walk you through
circuits, explain datasheets, help you debug firmware. Stuff that used to take years of context to even get started with.

LLMs might be the best learning tool ever created, but we're mostly using it to skip the learning. I do believe coding agents are perfect for this job!

I started doing this lately. I use Claude Code less for "build this for me" (I still do build a lot) and more for "help me understand this." It's been really satisfying.

Curious how others here use agents outside of coding. Are you using them to learn? To read? To explore new fields? What's working for you?
by throw0101c | 2026-03-14 13:24:40+00:00
> This isn't a Vinyl vs CD thing where a clearly inferior technology lives on due mainly to sentimental reasons.

"Half of Vinyl Buyers in the US Don’t Have a Record Player, New Study Shows":

* https://consequence.net/2023/04/half-vinyl-buyers-record-pla...

Seems that people are buying records not to listen to, but to use an 'art object', or other type of artefact to publicly show their like and support of the artist(s) in question.
by steve-atx-7600 | 2026-03-14 13:25:29+00:00
If you really want to keep non-determinism down, you could try (1) see if you can fix the installed version of the clause code client app (I haven’t looked into the details to prevent auto-updating..because bleeding edge person) and (2) you can pin to a specific model version which you think would have to reduce a/b test exposure to some extent https://support.claude.com/en/articles/11940350-claude-code-...

Edit: how to disable auto updates of the client app https://code.claude.com/docs/en/setup#disable-auto-updates
by alex43578 | 2026-03-14 13:25:43+00:00
People do plenty of illegal things, but we still outlaw them to reduce the rate of people doing those things.

On the contrary, if we accept that people are mature enough to choose to drink, they certainly should be mature enough to spend $20 opening loot boxes. Fewer cases of cirrhosis, drunk driving accidents, and bar fights from loot boxes.
by JSR_FDED | 2026-03-14 13:25:54+00:00
Some good advice in the comments. Perhaps you could take some important open source systems in the data science space, and then use AI to help you deeply understand how they’re built and why they were built that way.

That will give you hands-on with the new AI tools, and deepen your understanding of key open source systems - far more than going through online tutorials. That might even lead you to making some contributions to the projects, which in turn will help you answer the interview question “so what have you been up to?”
by gzread | 2026-03-14 13:26:11+00:00
I used to think that, and indeed a computer can run any equations you want. However with analogue you're getting a bunch of interesting-sounding equations without having to think of them and write them down, and that's the "analogue sound." Analogue circuitry isn't a perfect math processor the way digital is, only an approximation, and the deviations from perfection are useful.

Especially if you get into synths. A digital sine wave oscillator is doing sin(time*frequency)*gain. An analogue one is designed to produce a close to perfect sine wave at a certain set point, but you make it able to be varied around that set point by replacing some of the components with adjustable ones in somewhat ad-hoc ways, and see what it sounds like. The frequency may be set by a 3-stage RC circuit, you replace all the Rs with vactrols and see what happens, now the impedance changes as well as the frequency and it might affect other parts of the circuit. You may one-point calibrate it to 1 volt per octave but it won't be linear.
by ramesh31 | 2026-03-14 13:26:40+00:00
>"This fresh context thing is a big reason subagents might work where a single agent fails. It’s not just about parallelism: each subagent starts with a fresh context, and the parent agent only sees the result of whatever the subagent does — its own context also remains clean."

This is the true power of agent teams: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-teams

You maintain very low context usage in the main thread; just orchestration and planning details, while each individual team member remains responsible for their own. Allows you to churn through millions of output tokens in a fraction of the time.
by philistine | 2026-03-14 13:26:44+00:00
Why are the Thinkpads getting 10/10 when the math coprocessor can’t be replaced and the N2 cache is inside the CPU as well?

We culturally decide what parts can or cannot be replaced. Apple solders their RAM on the CPU for performance reasons. It’s coming to PCs at some point, if they ever decide to compete on performance ever again.
by sevenzero | 2026-03-14 13:26:50+00:00
Yea, by my less is more logic its sometimes also difficult to do. With that approach people try to become clever and write shorter code thats unmaintainable due to mental gymnastics other people have to go through when reading it. What LLMs are doing is probably going for some kind of overengineered "best practice" solution.
I personally only use them for simple Laravel CRUD apps and they are admittedly pretty good at that.
by jrmg | 2026-03-14 13:27:37+00:00
It’s been my experience that those that most loudly say they value extreme directness like this are also those with the most fragile egos. If you directly tell them something they did is wrong or non-optimal, they conclude that you’re an idiot, don’t change anything (or, worse, double-down), and will sometimes even berate you (directness!). You need to couch your discussions with them more than is usual with others.
by mrcwinn | 2026-03-14 13:28:05+00:00
Everyone here seems focused on bots, as does the author of the post. The bigger problem (as also stated in the latter half of the post) is straight-forward: there product wasn't very good. Who is asking for digg to return, save for a very (very) tiny community of nostalgic diehards? Digg is irrelevant. That doesn't mean the internet is dead. It just means digg is.
by librasteve | 2026-03-14 13:29:04+00:00
Suggest to Raku to that list. All the early Raku devs were Haskell coders (the first Raku parser (PUGS) was written in Haskell).

Since Raku suports both OO and Functional coding styles, and has built in Grammars, it is very nice for DSLs.
by moregrist | 2026-03-14 13:29:14+00:00
> And what's up with L.L.M, A.I., C.L.I. :)

It’s probably N.Y.T. style requirements; a lot of style guides (eg: Chicago Manual of Style, Strunk & White, etc) have a standard form for abbreviations and acronyms. A paper like N.Y.T. does too and probably still employs copy editors who ensure that every article conforms to it.
by NikolaNovak | 2026-03-14 13:29:56+00:00
Not the op but for me - Different headphones for different purposes.

For convenience and casual on the go listening, or to not annoy anybody, I'll use earbuds or light headphones.

If I really want to enjoy music I'll take the big ol' cans (circimaural open-back), lie back, and enjoy the music fully. Etc.

(And I'm extremely not an audiophile! But big roomy headphones are super comfy and sound super nice to me :).

If I'm on zoom calls all day I want something lightweight but with a boom microphone (massive Grrrr! To everybody joining meetings with airpods).

etc. I'm an extreme example but I have a few different boom-mic headsets in my home office for work, gaming headphones, running around headphones, and listening to music headphones. All of that at a teeny fraction of price people used to spend on basic entry level home hifi setup.
by seniortaco | 2026-03-14 13:29:56+00:00
I think a big part of the reason is that there is only one wireless option -Bluetooth- and it is a terrible product from a user experience perspective. It's 2026 and I still can't move through my world with earbuds in without my audio randomly switching to my wife's car in the driveway or our Bluetooth speaker that is on upstairs.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2026-03-14 13:30:00+00:00
The "scientific consensus" the parent comment mentioned is referring to published studies, with data to back up their conclusions. The numbers you are citing seem to be from an opinion poll. Where did any of the 49% surveyed get the idea that "50% or more of the Black-White gap" can be "attributed" to genetics? What is their methodology for the attribution?

Bringing up an opinion poll as a counterpoint makes it read like you're arguing that Wikipedia should focus less on fact and more on opinion. Of course, you're free to think what you wish, but I suspect that's where most disagree.
by pinum | 2026-03-14 13:30:43+00:00
Here’s the original article which was much more informative and interesting:

https://web.archive.org/web/20260314105751/https://backnotpr...

Can’t believe HN has become so afraid of generic probably-unenforceable “plz don’t reverse engineer” EULAs. We deserve to know what these tools are doing.

I’ve seen poor results from plan mode recently too and this explains a lot.
by figassis | 2026-03-14 13:30:53+00:00
The problem seems to be identify, a real problem, and looks like it will only get worse. Would creating a zero knowledge digital identity service (maybe centralized, maybe decentralized idk), where you prove you're human via your government id, passport, driver license, whatever, and the service can then attest you're a real person? So if I'm Digg, I would ask for some form of OAuth, the system would simply verify that you are in fact a human, and you would go on to create your account, forever verified. This way the identity service only does identity, it does not keep a record of where you are attesting, no logs, nothing, just your identity and basically saying yes/no, no sharing of ids or any other data.

So people would go through one hurdle in life, to get this id, and reuse it for every service.

Is this a worthwhile idea? I know many have tried, so help me poke holes in it.
by seanwilson | 2026-03-14 13:31:22+00:00
> The real story is that Python is designed to be maximally dynamic -- you can monkey-patch methods at runtime, replace builtins, change a class's inheritance chain while instances exist -- and that design makes it fundamentally hard to optimize. ...

> 4 bytes of number, 24 bytes of machinery to support dynamism. a + b means: dereference two heap pointers, look up type slots, dispatch to int.__add__, allocate a new PyObject for the result (unless it hits the small-integer cache), update reference counts.

Would Python be a lot less useful without being maximally dynamic everywhere? Are there domains/frameworks/packages that benefit from this where this is a good trade-off?

I can't think of cases in strong statically typed languages where I've wanted something like monkey patching, and when I see monkey patching elsewhere there's often some reasonable alternative or it only needs to be used very rarely.
by gruez | 2026-03-14 13:31:32+00:00
>There’s a lot of articles about it. ....

>https://ezzekielnjuguna.medium.com/why-anthropic-is-practica...

You chose a bad one. It just asserts the 95% figure without evidence and then uses it as the premise for the rest of the article. That just confirms what I said earlier about how "Every time I see claims on profitability it's always hand wavy justifications.". Moreover the article reeks of LLM-isms.
by hypercube33 | 2026-03-14 13:32:14+00:00
Feels like every mouse, keyboard, webcam whatever needs a separate different bloated app to configure and they even then don't have all of the settings. Hopefully I'm crazy but it also feels like they are even getting worse over time.

It's not just Logitech I have seen other vendors with app sprawl. Lenovo has duplicate or triplicate apps that do the same things or are wired into drivers and some are just a front end for tools they claim the new are replacements for. Wild stuff