MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by autoexec | 2026-03-10 21:39:01+00:00
Prisons and more specifically prisoners are massively profitable to their jailers/owners no matter if they're private, state, or federal. Even private corporations are profiting from the US prison system. The federal government runs a corporation called FPI/UNICOR which sells out prisoners for profit. States also have programs or companies that lease their prisoners out to private companies who pay those prisons (or the government) a lot of money to get an endless supply of workers who can't complain about working conditions or being paid pennies a day (almost all of which goes back to the prison anyway). Some prisoners are forced to work for no pay at all.

Prisons will let people who are supposedly so dangerous that they need to be locked up and denied parole out of jail long enough to work their shifts at fast food restaurants, retail stores, plants (like Tyson Foods) and warehouses and they'll run their own companies inside the prisons themselves like call centers which get contracted out to private corporations or government agencies for a profit.

Some prisons also run farms, modern day plantations, that use slave labor to sell millions of dollars worth of food and crops to corporations whose products show up in our stores. Whole foods, kroger, walmart, and target all sell products made by prison labor. Food and crops raised on prison farms even get exported to other countries.

Inside the prisons everything prisoners get they have to buy from the prison which overcharges them for everything. The workers make pennies but the markups on what they need can be 600%. The commissary vendors are for-profit and the prisons get kickbacks from them to get exclusive access to the captive customer base. Private companies partner with prisons for release cards and make profit from that. Phone calls from prisons can cost over $20 for just 15 minutes (https://brilliantmaps.com/jail-call-cost-usa/). The US prison system is designed to make money. Private prisons tend to make more profit on their prisoners, but so do state and federal prisons, the vendors they employ, and private corporations.
by pants2 | 2026-03-10 21:39:13+00:00
I understand Amazon wants to protect their customer experience / advertising potential and avoid being commoditized, ie. "hey perplexity order me the cheapest option between Amazon and 17 other online retailers."

However I think they're fighting a losing battle here. Atlas browser for instance can shop on Amazon just fine and they'll have a hard time distinguishing between human and LLM without broadly getting restraining orders against every AI company.
by philip1209 | 2026-03-10 21:39:29+00:00
I think the deeper need is a "self-review" flow.

People push AI-reviewed code like they wrote it. In the past, "wrote it" implies "reviewed it." With AI, that's no longer true.

I advocate for GitHub and other code review systems to add a "Require self-review" option, where people must attest that they reviewed and approved their own code. This change might seem symbolic, but it clearly sets workflows and expectations.
by sltkr | 2026-03-10 21:40:03+00:00
Are you sure you are comparing apples with apples here?

The fact that i686 is 14% faster than x86_64 is a little suspicious, because usually the same software runs _faster_ on x86_64 (despite the increased memory use) thanks to a larger register set, an optimized ABI, and more vector instructions.

Of course, if you are compiling an i686 binary on i686, and an x86_64 binary on x86_64, then the compilers aren't really doing the same work, since their output is different. I'm not a compiler expert, but I could imagine that compiling x86_64 binaries is intrinsically slower than for i686 for a variety of reasons. For example, x86_64 is mostly a superset of i686, so a compiler has way more instructions to consider, including potential optimizations using e.g. SIMD instructions that don't exist on i686 at all. Or a compiler might assume a larger instruction cache size, by default, and do more unrolling or inlining when compiling for x86_64. And so on.

In that case, compiling on x86_64 is slower not because the hardware is bad but because the compiler does more work. Perhaps something similar is happening on RISC-V.
by jseabra | 2026-03-10 21:40:51+00:00
The abstraction-over-CLI framing is mostly right, but it undersells what's actually new. APIs required you to know the API existed, read documentation, write integration code. Agent-native discovery, if it matures into something like MCP or structured capability registries, removes all three of those steps. That's not nothing.
The trust question is the interesting one nobody has solved. Right now agents trust whatever the model provider trusts, which is basically whoever got into the training data or the plugin store first. That's not a ranking system, it's incumbency dressed up as curation. An open protocol layer sounds good in theory but you'd need some coordination mechanism that isn't controlled by OpenAI or Google, and I'm not holding my breath.
On the discovery question specifically, I think the answer is already partially visible. If you're building something agents will call, your actual surface area is your schema, your error messages, your response latency, and whether your outputs are deterministic enough to be reliable in a chain. That's a completely different product discipline than conversion rate optimization and landing page copy. Some teams will find that freeing. Most will find it disorienting because they've spent years optimizing for the wrong thing.
The human-as-supervisor model also has a quiet assumption baked in: that humans will know when to intervene. That's probably the hardest part.
by mysteria | 2026-03-10 21:41:04+00:00
Piezo mics are pretty cheap, and if wired up to the microphone input of a computer or phone you could probably get better accuracy as well if you used the same signal processing techniques.

Seems some people have done this anyways with a PC app: https://timeandtidewatches.com/how-to-make-your-own-timegrap...
by antoniokokoshka | 2026-03-10 21:42:09+00:00
you are right. If you don't understand subject you will fail

Giving someone AI and convincing them that they are now an engineer is just asking for a huge disaster.

As an experienced engineer and architect, I know that achieving something that works is not just about writing code, but about understanding the issue and understanding which decisions will cause damage in the long term and what will be appropriate for the solution to be flexible, not prone to errors, and capable of development.

I tell AI what to do, because otherwise it does something else, not what it should be doing, and it will never do what I want. Ask someone to paint something for you, and they will paint it, but it will not be what you wanted or imagined.
by mrpmohibur | 2026-03-10 21:42:34+00:00
Location: Bangladesh

Remote: Yes

Willing to Relocate: Yes

Technologies: React Native, TypeScript, iOS, Android, Redux, Redux Toolkit, Jest, Chrome Extension, VS Code Extension

Resume: https://resume.rnui.dev/

Email: mrpmohiburrahman+hn[at]gmail.com

Summary:
Software Engineer with 5 years of professional experience. My background includes 3 years working remotely for an Estonian company, alongside extensive contract-based experience collaborating with teams in the US, Malaysia, and Dubai.

Heavy Open-Source Contributor [check resume for PR links]:

- Google Gemini CLI (96k+ stars on GitHub, ~3M npm downloads/month): Implemented interactive shell autocompletion. This stands as my most significant and complex open-source engineering achievement to date.

- Zed Editor: Code contributor to the high-performance editor.

- react-native-testing-library (Callstack, 3.3k stars on Github, 896k+ weekly npm downloads).

- react-native-contacts (1.7k stars on Github, solved an issue using Objective-C++).

- react-native-device-info (6.6k stars, solved an Android build issue using native Gradle configuration).

- react-native-bottom-tabs (1.3k stars on Github).

Innovative Project Development:

- Real-Time Chat Application: Built a custom WebSocket server from scratch.

- Awesome UI: Curated a collection of stunning community-created animations.

- NotionKeys for Markdown: A VS Code extension that brings Notion-style '/' commands for Markdown editing.

Community Engagement:
Passionate about knowledge sharing and actively publishing technical YouTube tutorials (https://www.youtube.com/@md.mohiburrahman2877).
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-03-10 21:43:12+00:00
> Everyone's threshold is different and personal. But I think it can reflect a level of anxiety about the cost of living. You aren't OK having $1M or even $10M - you need something far beyond before you feel OK to quit. It's not his fault, more of something the young generations are facing as their parents struggle with the relentless cost of living vs stagnated wages for most except the "laptop class".

I am teen and I think that FIRE has many terms but This still is like a really really FAT fire.

At some point though, I think that what my generation might forget is that even with Fire, you still live a normal life or you would need tremendously more money if your lifestyle is lavish, something which we see in social media (sometimes even on paid money)

If you want to buy 100k$ watches and 1 Million dollar or more lamborghinis, probably even this money would not be enough for you.

But if you want to live a normal life like you do. even 2-3 years of sustained could be MORE than enough even for some slightly expensive side hobbies say horse riding or minor watch collecting even. But if you are online and you see people flexing their 1 million dollar watch, you are gonna add 12 more years of life on a project to get to that level

I'd say its more of an expectation/comparison issue and I am not even sure if 10 years can satisfy that

My personal Fat Fire number is more like ~2 million and I don't even want Fat Fire particularly because I would be happy doing a job that I might like so more of a lean FAT which can be around 300-500k even.

maybe this changes into what is affordable or not within the more western hemisphere though as things feel even more (unaffordable?) but even that doesn't really explain why he might need 40M from my perspective.

To be honest, it can very well be ambition. Might as well make 10 years of money if possible because then the number feels so absurdly large that I can do anything that I want and then I will make my own game. Not realizing that you would only need a fraction of 40M to realisticly achieve that same goal and we are discounting the fact that 400k is even sustainable in a such long period of time.
by bstsb | 2026-03-10 21:44:29+00:00
enough money to cash out via DevEx, Roblox's developer program, every month or so ($110). it's absolutely not a salary - there are barely five people playing at any given time - but given i've done nothing in a year, it's appreciated.

edit: looked at the old stats online. a few years back that game was pulling $1,500+ with no effort each month
by Aperocky | 2026-03-10 21:44:30+00:00
The steps are small at the front and huge on the bottom, and carries a lot of opinions on the last 2 steps (but specifically on step 7)

That's a smell for where the author and maybe even the industry is.

Agents don't have any purpose or drive like human do, they are probabilistic machines, so eventually they are limited by the amount of finite information they carry. Maybe that's what's blocking level 8, or blocking it from working like a large human organization.
by softcane | 2026-03-10 21:45:00+00:00
For years, I've wanted to automate Damodaran's valuation methodology industry betas, ERP, country risk premiums, the whole thing.

His data is free on the NYU page, but turning it into an actual valuation takes hours per stock.

StockValuation.io does it in minutes:
- Pulls live financials via yFinance
- Uses Damodaran's published datasets for cost of capital inputs
- Runs deterministic DCF math (every assumption is visible)
- Layers an LLM on top for bull/bear narratives and assumption overrides

The math never changes based on AI mood. The LLM only touches research and storytelling.

Self-host: https://github.com/stockvaluation-io/stockvaluation_io (one Docker command, MIT license)

Happy to discuss the methodology, assumption choices, or why I think Deterministic math + probabilistic narratives is the right architecture for this.
by rwmj | 2026-03-10 21:45:03+00:00
The 2 designs I'm thinking of are (tiresomely) under NDA, although I'm sure others will be able to say what they are. Last November I had a sample of one of them in my hand and played with the silicon at their labs, running a bunch of AI workloads. They didn't let me take notes or photographs.

> There's no one that expects it'll be hard to optimize for

No one who is an expert in the field, and we (at Red Hat) talk to them routinely.
Apologies for earlier submissions, still learning the rules
by robertsshaun | 2026-03-10 21:45:03+00:00
Hi everyone. I wanted to apologize for a couple of submissions I made earlier today.

I'm new here and didn't realize that posting multiple links to my own projects would be considered promotional. After reading the guidelines and some discussions, I understand why those posts were flagged.

That wasn't my intention. I’m genuinely interested in the discussions here and the community around building things and sharing ideas.

I'll spend more time reading and participating before posting anything else. Thanks for the patience with a newcomer.
Codeown – A platform for developers to document their building journey
by amin2011 | 2026-03-10 21:45:08+00:00
I'm 15 and built this solo. Codeown lets developers showcase projects, write dev logs, and track their building journey.
Tech stack: React, Supabase, Clerk
Would love technical feedback from the HN community.

https://codeown.space
by bawolff | 2026-03-10 21:45:11+00:00
> homomorphic encryption chip speeds operations 5,000-fold

5000 * 0 is still 0.

I joke, but i think relative numbers like this are very misleading as FHE is starting from such an absurdly slow place.

Still, this is pretty cool and there are probably niche applications that become possible with this, but i think this is a small enough speed up that it is still very niche.
by bigfishrunning | 2026-03-10 21:45:46+00:00
Whether the quality of the code is the responsibility of the submitter or not is kind of irrelevant though, because the cost of verifying that quality still falls on the maintainer. If every submitter could be trusted to do their due diligence then this cost would be less, but unfortunately they can't; it's human nature to take every possible shortcut.
by danjl | 2026-03-10 21:45:51+00:00
Yes, more time on up front spec and plan building. Bite sized specifically to fit within the context window of a single implementation session. Each step should have a verification process that includes new tests.

Prior to each step, I prompt the AI to review the step and ask clarifying questions to fill any missing details. Then implement. Then prompt the AI after to review the changes for any fixes before moving on to the next step. Rinse, repeat.

The specs and plans are actually better for sharing context with the rest of the team than a traditional review process.

I find the code generated by this process to be better in general than the code I've generated over my previous 35+ years of coding. More robust, more complete, better tested. I used to "rush" through this process before, with less upfront planning, and more of a focus on getting a working scaffold up and running as fast as possible, with each step along the way implemented a bit quicker and less robustly, with the assumption I'd return to fix up the corner cases later.
by shubham2802 | 2026-03-10 21:46:17+00:00
RunAnywhere builds software that makes AI models run fast locally on devices instead of sending requests to the cloud.

Right now, our focus is Apple Silicon.

Today there are two parts:

MetalRT - our proprietary inference engine for Apple Silicon. It speeds up local LLM, speech-to-text, and text-to-speech workloads. We’re expanding model coverage over time, with more modalities and broader support coming next.

RCLI - our open-source CLI that shows this in practice. You can talk to your Mac, query local docs, and trigger actions, all fully on-device.

So the simplest way to think about us is:
we’re building the runtime / infrastructure layer for on-device AI, and RCLI is one example of what that enables.

Longer term, we want to bring the same approach to more chips and device types, not just Apple Silicon.

For people asking whether the speedups are real, we’ve published our benchmark methodology and results here:
LLM: https://www.runanywhere.ai/blog/metalrt-fastest-llm-decode-e...
Speech: https://www.runanywhere.ai/blog/metalrt-speech-fastest-stt-t...
by kittikitti | 2026-03-10 21:46:27+00:00
I am greatly saddened by the passing of Tony Hoare. His work has affected me deeply; in personal, academic, and professional life. Without visionaries like him, I would not find the love in computer science as I do now. It would be a great honor to have accomplished a fraction of what he did. My condolences to his close friends and family.
by Arainach | 2026-03-10 21:46:34+00:00
> If your repo requires a colleague's approval before merge, and that colleague is on level 2, still manually reviewing PRs, that stifles your throughput. So it is in your best interest to pull your team up.

Until you build an AI oncaller to handle customer issues in the middle of the night (and depending on your product an AI who can be fired if customer data is corrupted/lost), no team should be willing to remove the "human reviews code step.

For a real product with real users, stability is vastly more important than individual IC velocity. Stability is what enables TEAM velocity and user trust.
by magneticmonkey | 2026-03-10 21:46:38+00:00
It was posted about here several months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44613438

Shaper Tools builds an overpriced handheld CNC. It is super cool. Compass CNC was an open source alternative. They were getting ready to sell and ship kits and they were recently taken down.

Looks like they probably had legal issues with Shaper Tools :/ It's too bad the official repo couldn't have stayed up. Stuff like this makes me super angry especially when companies flex on the little guy. I am sure it was some kind of patent issue. Still sad.

https://www.reddit.com/r/diycnc/comments/1qwnuwl/what_happen...
by bluefirebrand | 2026-03-10 21:46:57+00:00
> we’re doing the industrial equivalent of eating our seed corn and there is seemingly no will to slow that trend down, much less reverse it.

I know I'm probably coming across as a lunatic lately on HN but I really do think we're on the path towards violence thanks to AI

You just cannot destroy this many people's livelihoods without backlash. It's leading nowhere good

But a handful of people are getting stupidly rich/richer so they'll never stop
by gnabgib | 2026-03-10 21:47:08+00:00
Title: Too Much Color

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47321206

Related from Keith: What's my JND? (this blog post is linked from there) (9 points 5 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47321188

(10 points, 6 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47321188
by znpy | 2026-03-10 21:47:36+00:00
"Make senior engineer sign off ai-assisted changes" sounds incredibly weird.

First thing that comes to mind is: reminds me of those movie where some dictatorship starts to crumble and the dictator start being tougher and tougher on generals, not realizing the whole endeavor is doomed, not just the current implementation.

Then again, as a former amazon (aws) engineer: this is just not going to work. Depending how you define "senior engineer" (L5? L6? L7?) this is less and less feasible.

L5 engineers are already supposed to work pretty much autonomously, maybe with L6 sign-off when changes are a bit large in scope.

L6 engineers already have their own load of work, and a fairly large amount of engineers "under" them (anywhere from 5 to 8). Properly reviewing changes from all them, and taking responsibility for that, is going to be very taxing on such people.

L7 engineers work across teams and they might have anywhere from 12 to 30 engineers (L4/5/6) "under" them (or more). They are already scarce in number and they already pretty much mostly do reviews (which is proving not sufficient, it seems). Mandating sign-off and mandating assumption of responsibility for breaking changes means these people basically only do reviews and will be stricter and stricter[1] with engineers under them.

L8 engineers, they barely do any engineering at all, from what I remember. They mostly review design documents, in my experience not always expressing sound opinions or having proper understanding of the issues being handled.

In all this, considering the low morale (layoffs), the reduced headcount (layoffs) and the rise in expectations (engineers trying harder to stay afloat[2] due to... layoffs)... It's a dire situation.

I'm going to tell you, this stinks A LOT like rotting day 2 mindset.

----

1. keep in mind you can't, in general, determine the absence of bugs

2. Also cranking out WAY MUCH MORE code due to having gen-ai tools at their fingertips...
by basket_horse | 2026-03-10 21:47:39+00:00
This is missing the point. If you’re a 2 man team it’s much more important to have code that has a couple bugs in it but allows you to quickly find your product market fit. As opposed to perfect code with no bugs that is useless.

No one is disagreeing that tests are good in a vacuum / mature product. But if your focus is building a mvp, and you’re trading off the test time with other things, it’s not always worth it.

Screw “leadership” but consider for a second that you’re the leadership.
by Swizec | 2026-03-10 21:47:41+00:00
> Apparently his FIRE number is $40M

> it can reflect a level of anxiety about the cost of living

I think a lot of people (especially young) just haven't done the actual math. Or have lifestyle desires beyond basic not-working.

You can FIRE living in SF for $4M. This gives you $160,000/year basically in perpetuity. If you do it right, there's little to no income tax on that money so 160k should be plenty enough for a 1-person income. 4-person families survive (in SF) on less household income than that.

But yeah a 4M exit is definitely not classic ferrari or even flashy lambo levels of wealth.
by ivan_gammel | 2026-03-10 21:47:43+00:00
> No, it's not that simple. AI generated code isn't owned by anyone, it can't be copyrighted, so it cannot be licensed.

There is no way to reliably identify code as AI-generated, unless it is explicitly labelled so. Good code produced by AI is not different from the good code produced by software engineer, so copyright is the last thing I would be worried about. Especially given the fact that reviewing all pull requests is substantial curation work on the side of maintainers: even if submitted code is not copyrightable, the final product is.
by twunde | 2026-03-10 21:48:53+00:00
For people to care of would have to be like healthcare. The Change Healthcare breach cost 2B+ and led to a huge loss in market share. Or like AMCA, which went bankrupt after the breach (Labcorp's billing company). If you're a health tech company you can no longer insure your way out of the problem over you reach a certain size.

The reality is that we need data breaches to be painful but maybe not company ending events unless it really is sensitive data. As patio11 likes to say the right level of fraud is not zero. There's a middle ground where we can increase company liability or reduce the damage caused by a beach.