MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hrmtst93837 | 2026-03-11 09:07:14+00:00
If the ssh man page were any lazier it would just be a list of arguments with no context at all, so I get the frustation. The tricky bit is that much of the "secret menu" knowledge about ssh only lives in blog posts and random issue comments, which makes the doc gap feel intentional at times. If you want real examples or usage patterns you pretty much have to scrape Stack Overflow or crawl through dotfiles in public repos hoping someone else already fought the same fight.
by kindkang2024 | 2026-03-11 09:07:41+00:00
> That is simply untrue;

Fair point — updated to "most of the time."

> the opposite is the literal definition of rent-seeking behavior, which produces gobs of money, but provides no (or very little, at best) new value to others.

Rent-seeking is real, and you're right that it can be very profitable — while creating very little value for others. But even so, it remains the best available option when nobody else steps up to offer something better in free markets.

There are always two sides to any deal — the deal maker and the taker. The more competition on the maker side, the more value the taker can get. And the more takers demand real value, the less room rent-seeking behavior has to survive.
by shevy-java | 2026-03-11 09:08:17+00:00
My initial reaction was "because AI is so stupid".

However had, I use the terminal all the time. It is the primary user interface to me to get computers to do what I want; in the most basic sense I simply invoke various commands from the commandline, often delegating onto self-written ruby scripts. For instance "delem" is my commandline alias for delete_empty_files (kept in delete_empty_files.rb). I have tons of similar "actions"; oldschool UNIX people may use some commandline flags for this. I also support commandline flags, of course, but my brain works best when I keep everything super-simple at all times. So I actually do not disagree with AI here; the terminal is efficient. I just don't need AI to tell me that - I knew that before already. So AI may still be stupid. It's like a young over-eager kid, but without a real ability to "learn".
by cpursley | 2026-03-11 09:08:54+00:00
I think there’s a strong bias towards hacking and cool side projects from the hackernews crowd. But I’m not so sure much of the general population would use their free time afforded by UBI for productive and useful endeavors. At least from my observations there’s a significant portion of the population that uses their free time to be idle and veg in front of the TV and/or get wasted. My concern with UBI, even if it was financially tenable as it would underwrite a whole lot of that - including the more criminal, antisocial sub-population.
by KingMob | 2026-03-11 09:09:00+00:00
It's probably because maintaining the immune system at high levels costs more energy.

You probably know that antibiotic use is rampant in industrial livestock. But do you know precisely why?

Antibiotics aren't just given prophylactically to prevent infections; constant low doses actually *increase the animal's size*. The animals can put more energy into growing larger, and spend less on their immune system.
by nkmnz | 2026-03-11 09:09:22+00:00
>Power is essentially free when…

This is not true, since you still need to pay for capex and depreciation. The reason it appears to be free is not because its production doesn’t cost anything, but because at times of a glut there‘s just no one willing to pay much for it. Please make some good will effort to acknowledge the difference between cost and price.

Now, about your question, why people should buy „expensive“ nuclear power: for the same reason that people buy health insurance for: volatility increases risk, and you’re willing to pay an ongoing premium to reduce systemic risks. Over- and undersupply of electricity are risks for a lot of businesses and lots of them spend a lot of money on capex to avoid them, e.g. hospitals that have diesel generators. Generators are for a different failure mode (rare, longer duration outages), but for the high frequency, short time interruptions and/or price spikes caused by unbalanced generation volatility, contracts with a nuclear power company are similar; the capex is just shifted to the power company, and the customer might pay a premium during those times that other sources would deliver energy „for free“.

That said, this is not a black-and-white scenario. Of course we can benefit a lot from solar and wind. I’m not very positive about large scale batteries and lean more towards having flexible consumers, e.g. H2 production for the chemical industry. But right now, we don’t have the choice of nuclear vs. renewables, it’s (renewables + nuclear) vs. (renewables + turbines run with Russian gas or LNG from the US and Qatar). My choice here is clear, and it should not be muddied by the Russian propaganda of nuclear power clogging our electricity grids.
by IronTony | 2026-03-11 09:09:47+00:00
Hi HN,

I built VoltRN CLI, an open source CLI that helps developers scaffold and manage React Native/Expo projects.

The focus is on developer productivity and reducing setup friction.

Features include

• Fast React Native scaffolding
• Screen and component generators
• Feature adders for common libraries
• A project doctor that checks the development environment
• Opinionated templates for common stacks

Repository
https://github.com/IronTony/voltrn-cli

Feedback is very welcome.
by kkfx | 2026-03-11 09:10:09+00:00
Being a full mesh means an immense overhead, so well... You can't get much performances it you can't give immense bandwidth under the mesh. Though being able to exchange textual messages at a sufficient speed without any centralized infra is VERY important. In case of a real disaster we will been able to communicate at distance anyway and that's extremely valuable. The real point today is how to spread such paradigm to give enough people the ability to emergency comms.

The other critical battle is on another field: makes most people understand the opportunity and necessity of transforming the ISP's little router-server into one's own FLOSS home server with a set of services to reduce dependence on the giants, collecting one's own emails there, personal online backups of one's data/systems, to be paired with an offline one manually connected to the "central point" homeserver every evening or week, having one's own photos, contacts, ... on one's own hardware without needing GAFAM and so on.

We have for example, Umbrel, Start9, Univention, ... which more or less offer an "easy" solution; we have a certain popularity of commercial NAS units, unfortunately not exactly FLOSS and often in violation of the GPL, but we still don't have a general understanding of what can be done and how important it is to do it, starting from one's own domain name, to be citizens of the web just as one is with a postal address in the physical world.
by m132 | 2026-03-11 09:10:09+00:00
You can get a lot more out of ProxyCommand. For example, you can run SSH over non-IP protocols, such as serial, Bluetooth RFCOMM for embedded boards, or vsock for virtual machines without networking set up at all. The latter is built into and setup up automatically by systemd:

https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/257/systemd...
by properbrew | 2026-03-11 09:10:14+00:00
This is something that interests me a lot. In my own personal experience, ChatGPT is awesome at troubleshooting, it's given me terminal commands that are perfect and use the exact flags needed to identify and then fix the problem.

Why is there this massive disparity in experience? Is it the automatic routing that ChatGPT auto is doing? Does it just so happen that I've hit all the "common" issues (one was flashing an ESP32 to play around with WiFi motion detection - https://github.com/francescopace/espectre) but even then, I just don't get this "ChatGPT is shit" output that even the author is seeing.
by myrmidon | 2026-03-11 09:11:16+00:00
You might have just had a bad makefile.

The "canonical" way to just build what was changed with make is to let the compiler generate header dependencies during the build and to include those (=> if you change only 1 header, just the affected translation units get rebuilt). Works like a charm (and never messes up incremental builds by not rebuilding on a header-only change).

If you did not have proper incremental builds before, I would blame the makefile specifically and not make itself.

Another way to mess up with make is to not allow anything in parallel, either by missing flags (-j) or by having a rule that does everything sequentially.

Ninja does have less overhead than make, but your build time should be dominated by how long compiler and linker take; such a big difference between the two indicates to me that your old make setup was broken in some way.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-03-11 09:12:48+00:00
I go into the shop, I walk up to the counter, and I say "Can I have a 1/2" drive T50 Torx bit please", and the person behind the counter says "Yes of course" and we go over to the small expensive tools cabinet and get one out.

I don't go into the shop and wander about until I find something that looks like it, then stand there pointing things going "THAT!" until someone figures out what I mean.

And now I have a T50 Torx bit that I can stick on a ratchet with a long extension and get the passenger seat out of the Range Rover so I can retrieve my daughter's favourite necklace from where it's gotten entangled with the wiring to the gearbox and suspension ECUs in a place where I can see it with a dentist's mirror but can't actually get a grabber onto to fish it out, worse luck.

So that's my afternoon sorted then. Because we're not just hacking on computers round here.
by squibonpig | 2026-03-11 09:13:52+00:00
If you've ever flown in an airplane and looked down at a town, it's outskirts and interface with nature, and the natural environment that surrounds it, you'll probably know the feeling. Our species, if it's even right to lay some kind of claim to the species or to the amalgam of biological, social, technical processes that we lump under that label, is a great colonial organism pervading a larger body. But like the bacteria that inhabit our bodies, even in the cases of bacterial infestations that are unhealthy for us, there's no ontological distinction between the bacteria and the body. The body is eating itself or burning itself up always like the body of a starving person; in doing so it produces beautiful and complex arrangements and unknowable futures, it produces itself anew and becomes somebody else. When we take moral judgements, which are no more than functional elements at work within the body, and attempt to apply them to the body at large, or to our representational, projected image of it, all we're doing is helping along the same process of self consumption (or immolation) that the body is already undertaking. Whether you press the button or don't press the button, the process, its beauty and its horror, continues along uninterrupted.
by ivell | 2026-03-11 09:14:00+00:00
I don't think we actually know who conceptualized the caste system. Even Manusmriti seems to be not as old as we thought before.

However, even in Mahabharatha there are examples of Karna and Ekalavya who despite having qualities (as Yudhishtira claims) of Kshathriya, they were rejected by the society as being lesser.

It is possible that caste system is an extension and crystallization of nepotism. Typically professions and trade secrets are handed down the families and it is conceivable this was codified at some point far in the past.

To claim that caste system has a more philosophical foundation would be a bit of a stretch in my point of view, especially when it has been throughout the history being used suppress.
by borski | 2026-03-11 09:14:01+00:00
Agreed on all points; and I think that's precisely what this post argues people should do.

> The days of rent seekers are coming to an end. But not because there will be no more rent seeking, it’s because rent seeking is a 0 sum game and you will lose at it to bigger players. If you have a job like that, or work at a company like that, the sooner you quit the better your outcome will be. This is the real driver of the layoffs, the big players consolidating the rent seeking to them.
by pjc50 | 2026-03-11 09:14:39+00:00
> The opposition needs to "live" somewhere!

Not if they're systematically wrong about everything. There's no need to keep an intellectual disease vector in the academy any more than there would be a moral obligation to open your windows to the malaria mosquitos.

Climate change and medicine are the largest, most visible aspects of this, but it's intellectual dishonesty all the way down.

Note that this has got much worse since about the Obama era. There are no true small-c conservative intellectuals any more.
by IshKebab | 2026-03-11 09:14:46+00:00
> RVA23 doesn't guatantee them not being unreasonably-slow

Right but it doesn't guarantee that anything is unreasonably slow does it? I am free to make an RVA23 compliant CPU with a div instruction that takes 10k cycles. Does that mean LLVM won't output div? At some point you're left with either -mcpu=<specific cpu> and falling back to reasonable assumptions about the actual hardware landscape.

Do ARM or x86 make any guarantees about the performance of misaligned loads/stores? I couldn't find anything.
by DaedalusII | 2026-03-11 09:15:30+00:00
bad grid, bad fibre, #146 in the world in electricity production per capita. less power output than many US states, rule of law risk, civil unrest risk, and data sovereignty (gdpr), must get expat engineers (and get them visas)

large scale offshore wind in norway could generate 50-75% of the entire US production with 80% uptime and then DCs built in norway or EU area
by yorwba | 2026-03-11 09:16:37+00:00
Every company is subject to constraints. A bigger budget is not an infinite budget. And there is no tradeoff between efficiency and raw power. An optimization that lets you build a similarly powerful model for less money also lets you build a more powerful model for the same amount of money.

Honestly, I wonder what you think closed LLM companies do R&D on if not optimizations. And the nature of research is that most ideas that sound good turn out duds, so they already need to have an established process for testing many ideas quickly. Now if somebody publishes a new idea they haven't tried yet, setting up an experiment to try it out is just a routine task... But they aren't going to tell anybody the results, just quietly integrate it if it works.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2026-03-11 09:16:58+00:00
His guess is as good as mine, as to “why,” but the results can be terrible.

As noted, terminal commands can be ridiculously powerful, and can result in messy states.

The last time I asked an LLM for help, was when I wanted to move an automounted disk image from the internal disk to an external one. If you do that, when the mount occurs, is important.

It gave me a bunch of really crazy (and ineffective) instructions, to create login items with timed bash commands, etc. To be fair, I did try to give it the benefit of the doubt, but each time its advice pooched, it would give even worse workarounds.

One of the insidious things, was that it never instructed to revert the previous attempt, like most online instruction posts. This resulted in one attempt colliding with the previous ineffective one.

Eventually, I decided the fox wasn’t worth the chase, and just left the image on the startup disk. It wasn’t that big, anyway. I made sure to remove all the litter from the LLM debacle.

Taught me a lesson.

> “A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.“

-Mark Twain
by kergonath | 2026-03-11 09:17:34+00:00
No, but my point is that to some extent we value determinism. By making the jump to stochastic models we already move away from the status quo; further jumps are entirely possible. Depending on use case we can accept more uncertainty if it comes with benefits.

I also don’t think there is a reason to believe that self-learning models must be unpredictable.
by IshKebab | 2026-03-11 09:17:49+00:00
I don't think it's too bad. The compressed extension was arguably a mistake (and shouldn't be in RVA23 IMO), but apart from that there aren't any major blunders. You're probably thinking about how JAL(R) basically always uses x1/x5 (or whatever it is), but I don't think that's a huge deal.

About 1/3 of the opcode space is used currently so there's a decent amount of space left.
by tinco | 2026-03-11 09:17:50+00:00
Why couldn't a machine that identifies relations between tokens be AGI? You're imposing an arbitrary constraint. It is either generally intelligent or its not, whether it uses tokens or whatever else is irrelevant.

Also, languages made up of tokens are still languages, in fact most academics would argue all languages are made up of tokens.

Anyway, it's not LLM's that achieve AGI, it's systems built around LLM's that achieved AGI quite some time ago.
by greatgib | 2026-03-11 09:18:13+00:00
One of the best kept secret and one that he should have tried is "Kate".

Good old style editor that is a native app, not an electron app. All the features that you might want and more, but simple and efficient.

And the most important for me, super snappy. I can't bear the latency that you get for typing code when using things like vscode. I don't know how people can appreciate that.
by techtalksweekly | 2026-03-11 09:18:22+00:00
https://techtalksweekly.io/

I'm working on Tech Talks Weekly which is a free weekly email with all the recently published Software Engineering conference talks in the past 7 days.

Every week I pull all the new talk recordings from hundreds of conferences (Devoxx, KubeCon, PyCon, QCon, LeadDev, JSNation, and many more). I feature the ones I think are must-watch with short summaries written by me, then include a list of everything else uploaded that week.

It started as a personal project to fix my own messy YT subscriptions and RSS feeds and now 8,700+ people read it.

I also publish extra editions from time to time like “The Most Watched Talks of 2024” which made it to the HN front page. Currently, I'm working on 2025 edition that will be published very soon.

If you watch software engineering conference talks, you might find it useful.

I’d love to know what you think!
by geob01 | 2026-03-11 09:20:48+00:00
Location: EU, EEST Bucharest time zone

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Possibly

Technologies:

Python 3.13, C++ 17, Linux, REST APIs, Git, Protocols, FastAPI, Flask, VS Code, Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins, SOLID, TDD
AI: Agents, RAG, Prompt Engineering

Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pnVituSV1qz0hFUMajTj38bi...

Email: (Check Résumé/CV)

About: Software engineer with expertise in C++, Python, and web technologies (14+ years of full time software development experience). Proven track record in designing, developing, and deploying scalable backend systems and embedded applications. Passionate about writing clean, efficient code. Language agnostic, open to multiple tech stacks.
by solstice | 2026-03-11 09:21:26+00:00
> The trick is not to play zero sum games. This is what I have been saying the whole time. Go create value for others and don’t worry about the returns. If you create more value than you consume, you are welcome in any well operating community.

Reminds me of Manfred Macx' attitude in the novel Accelerando by Charlie Stross
by tda | 2026-03-11 09:21:46+00:00
Some operations (downsizing already heavily compressed video with the latest and greatest compression techniques) are CPU or GPU bound, but others, like bunching thousands of high res jopg into a lightly compressed timelapse are more likely to be IO bound. So how does this tool make the trade-off? I imagine some things can best be dealt with locally, whilest for ither operations offloading to a external GPU will be beneficial. Also makes a lot of difference if your bandwidth is megabits or gigabits.
by DimKat | 2026-03-11 09:22:19+00:00
A few weeks ago I launched a small iPhone app I built that puts your calendar directly on the lock screen.

Right after release I shared it on Reddit and the response was surprisingly strong. Around 3,000 people installed it in the first 48 hours. The app was completely free at that point and a lot of the comments were along the lines of “I’d actually pay for this”.

So I decided to try monetizing it.

In the next update I added a subscription with a free trial. Importantly, I didn’t lock any features that early users already had — everything they were using stayed free. The paywall only applied to new features and customization options.

But the moment the subscription appeared, the tone of the feedback changed quite a bit. Ratings dropped quickly in some regions and reviews started focusing mostly on the fact that the app now had a subscription at all.

One thing I realized is that I originally positioned the app more as something aesthetic (nice lock screen layouts, wallpapers, etc.). After the update I shifted the onboarding toward the productivity angle — seeing your schedule instantly without opening the calendar app. That actually improved install-to-trial conversion for new users quite a bit.

Still, the initial free launch seems to have set expectations that were hard to change later.

Curious how other indie developers here handle this transition from completely free to paid. Is it better to start with monetization from day one, even if the product is still early?
by torginus | 2026-03-11 09:22:44+00:00
Yes, unaligned loads/stores are a niche feature that has huge implications in processor design - loads across cache-lines with different residency, pages that fault etc.

This is the classic conundrum of legacy system redesign - if customers keep demanding every feature of the old system be present, and work the exact same then the new system will take on the baggage it was designed to get rid of.

The new implementation will be slow and buggy by this standard and nobody will use it.
by marioskales | 2026-03-11 09:23:26+00:00
Thank you - the BSL-1.1 decision was exactly about sustainability. I want Skales to stay free for personal use forever, but I also don't want a big company to fork and rebrand it overnight.
v5.5 just shipped today with an approval system (AI asks before sending emails, deleting files, changing calendar), full screen reader accessibility, and security fixes - all based on community feedback.
Also launched on Product Hunt today: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/skales
Appreciate the thoughtful comment.
by casey2 | 2026-03-11 09:23:40+00:00
Protecting children means protecting them from people who wish to harm them, that includes the government and platform owners, since these laws don't provide any actual protections to children from those two entities it's reasonable to assume that the law is trying to facilitate child exploitation rather than prevent it.

You have to keep in mind your idea of child protection is likely different from most of Americas'. The law makers' idea is to maximally enable them to perform (largely) uncompensated white collar work. Protected means that by the time they are 22 they have maximally warped their brain into an economically viable specialty and are in massive personal debt. If they make Roblox a $1M in the meantime of course that money won't go to their brainwashing, that would make them lazy.
by Thlom | 2026-03-11 09:24:02+00:00
Sure, but I still need a Microsoft account of some sort to play Minecraft? And parental controls still exists inside Microsoft or Xbox (is that the same account??). I spent a couple days just trying to make it possible for my daughter and her friends to be connected on Minecraft. And then you need to figure out what a launcher is, that Prism even exists. And you get a completely different experience on iPad where Prism doesn't exist. It's stil a hassle compared to Downloading free Roblox and start playing and having the same experience across devices.