MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ocdtrekkie | 2026-03-08 23:28:24+00:00
Well, first of all, your source is the same author as the blog post. Second, a messy standard is still a standard.

And the biggest problem is by claiming it doesn't handle OOXML well, LibreOffice sabotages its own marketability. This blog is exactly what you write if you want to torpedo LibreOffice's success in the business environment.

You can not like Office or Office's file formats, but it's important to understand that it is table stakes for LibreOffice to promote how well it handles those formats and how safely it can be used as a replacement for Microsoft Office in an environment dominated by it.
Show HN: Cargo Dispatch – a programming puzzle game about warehouse automation
by matthuggins | 2026-03-08 23:28:50+00:00
Hi HN! I built Cargo Dispatch, a programming puzzle game where you write code to automate warehouse robots that move packages between stations. It started as a small weekend project, and I used Claude Code to help iterate quickly on parts of the UI and simulation logic.

Instead of manually controlling robots, you write a small TypeScript or JavaScript function that decides how robots behave. Their goal is to pick up packages from warehouse aisles and deliver them to trucks.

To introduce different levels of difficulty, the game includes mechanics like:

* Packages must be delivered to specific trucks (color-coded)
* Robots have limited carrying capacity
* The number of robots, aisles, and trucks changes as you progress through the 5-day workweek

I was inspired after coming across Elevator Saga on HN again recently, which I remember playing almost 10 years ago. Cargo Dispatch is somewhat similar, but the colored package → target truck constraint adds an additional coordination challenge.

Each day can be completed with different levels of success (gold, silver, bronze). You don't have to achieve the highest rating to move on, but better automation strategies will earn higher scores.

Technical details for those interested:

* The simulation runs entirely in the browser,
* Player code is sandboxed and executed in a web worker,
* The environment exposes a small API for querying warehouse state and issuing robot commands,
* Monaco editor provides IntelliSense and autocompletion, and
* Simulations are deterministic so runs are reproducible while debugging strategies.

I'd love feedback on:

* Whether the scripting API feels intuitive,
* Whether any important properties or functions feel missing,
* Difficulty progression of the puzzles,
* Any obvious missing mechanics, and
* Ideas for new logistics constraints or level types.

Thanks for taking a look!
by curtisf | 2026-03-08 23:29:36+00:00
> For optional types, 0 is decoded as the default value of the underlying type (e.g. string? decodes 0 as "", not null).

In the "dense JSON" format, isn't representing removed/absent struct fields with `0` and not `null` backwards incompatible?

If you remove or are unaware of a `int32?` field, old consumers will suddenly think the value is present as a "default" value rather than absent
by runako | 2026-03-08 23:29:36+00:00
These things are always so misguided, and this was no exception. The only way to have a piece of writing not flagged as AI is to write poorly. Ignore grammar, misspell words, etc. Don't follow basic guidance on composition. Generally write in such a way that you would merit no better than a C on a high school writing task.

I'll give some examples. Some will be from this list of "AI writing tropes" and some will be from prominent human-written (prior to 2020) sources. Guess which is which (answer at the bottom).

- "Let's explore this idea further."

- "workload creep"

- "Navigating the complex landscape of "

- "Let's delve into the details"

And I'm not going to get into how silly this is as a so-called LLM trope: "Every bullet point or list item starts with a bolded phrase or sentence." I remember reading paperbacks published before the first PC that used this style.

Fractal summaries is literally how composition is taught to students. Avoiding that style will make the writing more likely to sound less like a person wrote it.

I would suggest the author upgrade this to a modern version of Strunk & White and go on a mission to sell that. Call it Anti-Corpspeak or whatever. But don't pretend that these formulations only arrived in bulk in the last 2-3 years.

ANSWER KEY: these are all obviously prominent in text published before LLMs hit, as well as in the tropes doc. They are no more signs of LLM-generated text than is the practice of using nouns, verbs, and adjectives to convey ideas.
by riffraff | 2026-03-08 23:29:37+00:00
> This may be too much advanced type theory for a useful language.

I think a lot of things taken for granted these days were considered "too complicated" some time ago: think of how widespread pattern matching, closures, generics, or functional idioms in imperative languages are, and compare to e.g. Java 1.0.

My feeling is that the "acceptable level of complexity" for programming languages goes up over time, so probably stuff like effect types will be almost everywhere in another 10 years.
by mattiagaggi | 2026-03-08 23:29:39+00:00
wanted to run Claude Code with my own UI so I could actually see the tool calls, but could not find anything satisfying open-source.

So I built my own extension - forked something already available, gave it a proper structure etc.
Then I got tired of modifying it by hand.

So I automated that too.
Now it’s a Claude extension that can self-modify.

Basically when in dev mode it has an MCP server to its own source code.
by hn_acker | 2026-03-08 23:29:53+00:00
The proactiveness of Senator Graham's independent communications with Benjamin Netanyahu and Mohammed bin Salman strikes me as abnormal for a legislative branch member:

> To help make the case on Iran, Graham traveled several times to Israel in recent weeks, meeting with members of the country’s intelligence agency. “They’ll tell me things our own government won’t tell me,” he said. He spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, coaching him on how to lobby the president for action. Netanyahu showed the president intelligence that persuaded Trump to go ahead, Graham said.

> Graham also talked to the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, to make sure he was aware. “I went to MBS to say, ‘OK, I think this is going down.’ ”
by KittenInABox | 2026-03-08 23:29:56+00:00
Disabled people exist, even temporarily so (e.g. pregnant with a craving, broken ankle and can't drive, etc)!

Also, sometimes some meals are arguably not worth the labor of cooking. Making proper pho takes at least a whole day. Pad Thai really doesn't function without the kind of intense heat of specific equipment. Etc etc.
by thepaulthomson | 2026-03-08 23:30:07+00:00
I figured there was quite a big surface here for misuse. But I've done my best to curb that. You're right, that if this scales, the compute to oversee moderation would be inaccessible for a solo hobbyist like me. I don't have a huge audience, so I think for now, at least, the moderation is in scope.

Also MQ is one of my all-time favourite shows (mainly first seasons, it kinda lost steam in the later ones).
by grapheneposter | 2026-03-08 23:30:34+00:00
I do something similar with quality gates. I have a bunch of markdown files at the ready to point agents to for various purposes. It lets me leverage LLMs at any stage of the dev process and my clients get docs in their format without much maintenance from myself. As you said once you get it down it becomes a very coherent process that can be iterated on in its own right.

I am currently fighting the recursive improvement loop part of working with agents.
by tsoukase | 2026-03-08 23:30:53+00:00
Companies structure is much more monarchic than almost all regimes in history. CEOs stand in the top position like Gods, having full power at will, and then all the others follow as his workers. He can easily earn multiple times more than the next highest in the company because his responsibility is elevated. So, the company can afford to pay huge sum to one person because he is the only one that is able to bring in multiples of this (eg fire people, increase the stock price, prepare for a sale off). Companies are not democracies, not even monarchies, they are machines with a single brain for strategy: the CEO's.
by godelski | 2026-03-08 23:31:09+00:00
Then I'm concerned as the writer is quite explicit. So let me quote from the post

> We build tools, and ultimately some responsibility lies with us to think through how those tools will be used. Not just what their intention is, but also what misuses might come out of them. None of us wants to build things that will be used for evil.

> The Association for Computing Machinery is a society dedicated to advancing computing as a science & profession. ACM includes this in their Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct:

>> Well-intended actions, including those that accomplish assigned duties, may lead to harm unexpectedly. In such an event the responsible person or persons are obligated to undo or mitigate the negative consequences as much as possible. One way to avoid unintentional harm is to carefully consider potential impacts on all those affected by decisions made during design and implementation.

> So how can we “carefully consider potential impacts”? Honestly, I don’t have any answers to this. I don’t think that there really is a universal answer yet, because if we had it I have to believe we’d not be building these dangerous pieces of software.

> I do have a couple of ideas though. One I got from my friend Schneems is to add to the planning process a step where we come up with the worst possible uses of our software.

It doesn't matter if the tech is about finding WiFi or if your contract is with the DOD. Any technology that can do good can also do harm. It is easy to be distracted by the challenge of the project. It is fun and exciting, but it makes it easy to ignore how people who aren't well intentioned may use your creations. You'll never be able to prevent your creations from being used maliciously, but this adversarial process certainly can reduce the potential for harm.

I'll mention that in traditional engineering this is often a more explicit discussion. Ethics is required in the coursework and even outside the ethics classes you hear many such examples of unintended consequences. Of where people do their best yet mistakes are made that cost peoples lives or do other types of harm. If you were lucky you'd have a professor that walked you through this, showing you how easy it is to be blindsided by such things and where the harm is obvious post hoc but not before.

So if you want to not be distracted you have to know what the distraction is. You have to know what distracts you. You have to know that you too can be distracted. None of us are immune. The moment you think you cannot be distracted is the moment you are deeply distracted.
by scoofy | 2026-03-08 23:31:38+00:00
I quit moderating because it was destroying my mental health.

Getting called a fascist and rehashing how “no, you’re libertarian politics are fine, but can you please just start your own sub” in a long, drawn out, hateful, back and forth gets exhausting after the 200th person who comes to the bicycling subreddit and feels they should be allowed to endorse harming cyclists with their vehicles.

Everyone got mad at spez for having the audacity to fuck with these kids, and there is a point there, but after living with it, I could see myself doing the same damn thing.
by samsartor | 2026-03-08 23:31:54+00:00
I've been working on a reactivity system for rust over the past couple of years, which uses a lot of these ideas! It also tries to make random concurrent modification less of a pain, with transactional memory and CRDT stuff. And gives you free undo/redo.

Still kind of WIP, but it isn't secret. People are welcome to check it out at https://gitlab.com/samsartor/hornpipe
by big_toast | 2026-03-08 23:31:55+00:00
I hadn't seen your site before (or been following SBC for a while) and just skimmed the article and was going to move on. (The post was very cool.)

It wasn't until this thread that I actually clicked through to the sbc.compare. I saw you complement the CIX P1 and Qualcomm in the post but it took looking at the Geekbench numbers on sbc.compare to understand the magnitude of the situation.

(I guess I'm saying the table might've helped me. But I still appreciate the post as is.)
by tmh88j | 2026-03-08 23:32:01+00:00
> Devils advocate take: I think the quality of the ShowHN projects are in fact getting higher, at least the ones that land in the front page.

I haven't seen so many low effort and obvious astroturfing posts linger on the front page than in recent months. They never mention what they're doing and have no proof of their work. There was a post the other day titled "Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion"[1] that had tons of traction with no substance. It was posted by an account created that day and the comments were filled with bots responding about how productive they are, but no mention of what they're actually doing.

It's annoying seeing these obvious spam/astroturfing posts take attention away from interesting content that's worth reading.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47282777
by Dylan16807 | 2026-03-08 23:32:28+00:00
>> You don't like how they acted

> I don't like having my intelligence insulted by such brazen falsehoods, so in that regard this is true.

Okay I guess I assumed you disliked the stuff you were calling a lie and a moronic cover story.

> I'm happy for your heroic amounts of credulity, it must make life a lot easier in this administration.

It's not that I'm being very credulous, it's that they said very little about their decision process. The claims you're objecting to are relatively minor details about the situation. You keep exaggerating the implications of their claims every time you say why they must be wrong.
by dangus | 2026-03-08 23:33:28+00:00
Of course, accomplishments like the Apple I/II, Macintosh, Newton, iMac, iPod, and iPhone really had nothing to do with monopolistic advantages. All of these industry-changing products were built by a company that was nowhere close to being a dominant force.

In my original comment I did acknowledge the problematic aspects of giant companies like Apple or AT&T in my examples, but I can still see how one might separate that from real legitimate innovation and positive impact and be willing to celebrate that.

I’ve talked to a lot of space enthusiasts that have similar mixed feelings about SpaceX. It’s hard to root against a company that is so innovative in a field of your interest just because the owner is an asshole.

Further examples, I’m sure a lot of aviation geeks feel the same about Boeing. All the scandal, corruption, and military aspects of the company shouldn’t completely erase the awe-inspiring experience of being on a 747 or a 787 jet.
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-03-08 23:33:51+00:00
> The fire hose of data will inevitably become ever more fecal. We can only walk away from it or be more careful about the pearls we pluck out. It ends well only if we get better at pearl detection.

I'm not sure we can. Imagine an AI that 1) creates multiple accounts, 2) spews huge numbers of comments, 3) has accounts cross-upvote, and then 4) gets enough karma on multiple accounts to get downvote privileges. That AI now controls the conversation. Anything it doesn't like, it can downvote to death.

I mean, I'm sure that HN has a "voting ring" detector, but an AI could do this on a sufficient scale to be too large to register as one cohesive group. And I think HN has a "downvote brigading" detector, but if the AI had enough different accounts, I'm not sure that would trigger, either.

The best chance to detect it is just on volume (or perhaps on too many accounts coming from the same IP address or block). But if the AI was patient, I'm not sure even that would work.

That's depressing. I don't want HN to become a bot playground, with humans crowded out. But I'm not sure we can stop it, if it was done on a large enough scale.
by its-kostya | 2026-03-08 23:34:28+00:00
I write production Rust code that becomes critical infra for our customers. I got tired of nil checks in Go and became a squeaky wheel in incident retros, where I finally got the chance to rewrite parts of our system in Rust during a refactor.

I admit the skill issue on my part, but I genuinely struggled to follow the concepts in this article. Working alongside peers who push Rust's bleeding edge, I dread reviewing their code and especially inheriting "legacy" implementations. It's like having a conversation with someone who expresses simple thoughts with ornate vocabulary. Reasoning about code written this way makes me experience profound fatigue and possess an overwhelming desire to return to my domicile; Or simply put, I get tired and want to go home.

Rust's safety guardrails are valuable until the language becomes so complex that reading and reasoning about _business_ logic gets harder, not easier. It reminds me of the kid in "A Christmas Story" bundled so heavily in winter gear he cant put his arms down[0]. At some point, over-engineered safety becomes its own kind of risk even though it is technically safer in some regards. Sometimes you need to just implement a dang state machine and stop throwing complexity at poorly thought-through solutions. End old-man rant.

[0]: https://youtu.be/PKxsOlzuH0k?si=-88dxtyegTxIvOYI
by orwin | 2026-03-08 23:35:39+00:00
Yeah, my country tried to do a switcharoo in the 2000, by funding what was called 'proximity police' on the national police budget. They couldn't arrest for misdemeanor or traffic infractions, couldn't do an identity check, didn't have any weapons, were only able to call other services in case of an imminent danger, and was tasked to organise regular spelling bees, basketball/football games etc. Basically street councillors. Worked in some areas, worked less in others, still, in most areas where young people violence was an issue, it had promising results.

Turns out the police noticed and lobbied the next government into removing the department and getting all the money back for regular law enforcement.
by lukevp | 2026-03-08 23:36:09+00:00
You can also use cloudflare to create a dns record for each local service (pointed to the local IP) and just mark it as not proxied, then use Wireguard or Tailscale on your router to get VPN access to your whole network. If you set up a reverse proxy like nginx proxy manager, you can easily issue a wildcard cert using DNS validation from your NAS using ACME (LetsEncrypt). This is what I do, and I set my phone to use Wireguard with automatic VPN activation when off my home WiFi network. Then you’re not limited by CF Tunnel’s rules like the upload limits or not being able to use Plex.
by etherus | 2026-03-08 23:36:36+00:00
I don't think the point is that you have to be all of those things, or even any of them. Just that imagining what kinds of things people you'd like do is a good way to know what might enrich you also. You shouldn't be discouraged if that seems far off, but all of it can be broken up into as many pieces as you like. If it all feels too much
by sulam | 2026-03-08 23:36:42+00:00
CoT is just next token prediction with longer context windows. Why do you think reasoning models are so much slower?

I’ll believe the labs have discovered something truly ground-breaking and aren’t talking about it when I see them suddenly going dark about AGI being “just two years away, maybe 5” and not asking for their next $100B.

P.S. the benchmarks are a joke. The best proof I have of that is that you can’t actually put one of these models onto any of the gig-work platforms and have it make money.

P.P.S. I am not an AI skeptic. I am reacting to the very specific statement that OpenAI should shut down because they’ve lost the AGI race. They have not lost the race, and I’m pretty skeptical that the current tech is ever going to win that race. It may help code something that is new, and get us to AGI that way, but that system will promptly shut down the Opuses and Codexes of the world and put the compute to better use.
by mort96 | 2026-03-08 23:37:05+00:00
100% with you on the IO. I've never even wanted two display output ports with any raspberry pi.

You know what I do want though? An actual damn HDMI port! HDMI cables are everywhere, wherever I am I have unlimited options to connect an HDMI device to some kind of screen. But micro HDMI? The literal only thing in my life that uses it is the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5. There have been plenty of times where I've reached for a Pi 3b instead of a 4 or 5 just because I didn't have a micro HDMI cable.

I do not understand what has gone through their head. How could anyone look at the use case for a Raspberry Pi and decide that two micro HDMI ports is a better choice than one HDMI port? I don't understand it. Like you, my experience with the Pi is that they mostly just sit there, headless, so the only reason I need display output is that it's useful during setup (because they don't have a proper serial console port).

I can't set up a Pi 4 or 5 without going hunting for that micro HDMI cable I bought specifically for that purpose and never use for anything else. I can set up a Pi 3b anywhere, at any time.
by comoMagna | 2026-03-08 23:37:24+00:00
why is this on hackernews? This is not hackernews. This is not related to tech in any way. I am trying to avoid the news/politics, I go to hackernews and I see these unrelated to tech at all politics posts. JumpCrisscross you posted several non tech related posts on hackernews already today.

Looking at this account's posts, most of the stuff they post is just politics unrelated to tech.
by xahrepap | 2026-03-08 23:37:42+00:00
Honest question, how do you handle high cardinality data points?

Reference to where my brain is at: https://www.robustperception.io/cardinality-is-key/

I feel like splunk’s business model favors a healthy system and gives major disadvantages to an unhealthy one. What I mean in an example: when the system is unhealthy, I know it because all my splunk queries get queued up because everyone is slamming it with queries. I hate it.

But I’m stuck in knowing how to move some things to Prometheus. Like say we have a CustomerID and we want to track number of times something is done by user. If we have thousands of customers, cardinality breaks that solution.

Is there a good solution for this?
by palata | 2026-03-08 23:38:07+00:00
Well many times it does.

bool isEven(number: Int) {
return number % 2 == 0
}

I would say this expresses the intent, no need for a comment saying "check if the number is even".

Most of the code I read (at work) is not documented, still I understand the intent. In open source projects, I used to go read the source code because the documentation is inexistent or out-of-date. To the point where now I actually go directly to the source code, because if the code is well written, I can actually understand it.