MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-03-07 12:11:03+00:00
>As someone who leads a team of engineers, telling someone their code is slow is not nice, helpful or something a good team member should do

right, I'm sure there are all sorts of scenarios where that is the case and probably the phrasing would be something like that seems slow, or it seems to be taking longer than expected or some other phrasing that is actually synonymous with the code is slow. On the other hand there are also people that you can say the code is slow to, and they won't worry about it.

>So no that’s not the proper way to talk to humans

In my experience there are lots of proper ways to talk to humans, and part of the propriety is involved with what your relationship with them is. so it may be the proper way to talk to a subset of humans, which is generally the only kinds of humans one talks to - a subset. I certainly have friends that I have worked to for a long time who can say "what the fuck were you thinking here" or all sorts of things that would not be nice if it came from other people but is in fact a signifier of our closeness that we can talk in such a way. Evidently you have never led a team with people who enjoyed that relationship between them, which I think is a shame.

Finally, I'll note that when I hear a generalized description of a form of interaction I tend to give what used to be called "the benefit of a doubt" and assume that, because of the vagaries of human language and the necessity of keeping things not a big long harangue as every communication must otherwise become in order to make sure all bases of potential speech are covered, that the generalized description may in fact cover all potential forms of polite interaction in that kind of interaction, otherwise I should have to spend an inordinate amount of my time lecturing people I don't know on what moral probity in communication requires.

But hey, to each their own.

on edit: "the what the fuck were you thinking here" quote is also an example of a generalized form of communication that would be rude coming from other people but was absolutely fine given the source, and not an exact quote despite the use of quotation marks in the example.
by jagged-chisel | 2026-03-07 12:11:08+00:00
I think lots of commenters are being unintentionally pedantic. It’s clear that there are different types of abstractions one is concerned with when programming at the application level. Yes, it’s all abstractions on top of subatomic probability fields, but no one is thinking at even the atomic level when they step through the machine code execution with a debugger.
by ramon156 | 2026-03-07 12:11:40+00:00
I think a lot of people have a biased idea of writing code. When you're a good programmer, you will be able to prompt a pretty good concept and navigate through any missteps.

When you have no fucking idea what you're talking about, you cannot fix those issues. Simply telling opus "its broken, fix it" wont help. Sure, eventually it comes with a solution, but you have no idea if it's good.

Its like renting a bunch of construction tools and building a house. Unless you know what's important, you have no idea if your house will fall down tomorrow. At the end of the day, companies will always need an expert to sit there and confirm the code is good.
by dizzy9 | 2026-03-07 12:11:48+00:00
Some of us are old enough to remember when the RIAA sued children for downloading Metallica albums on filesharing networks. They sued for $100,000 per song, an absurd amount when you consider that even stealing a physical album would amount only to around $1 per song. What was bizarre was that courts took the figure seriously, even if they typically settled cases for around $3,000, still around 30x actual damages. The legal maximum was $150,000 per infringement: when a staffer leaked an early cut of the Wolverine movie, the studio could only sue for that much.
by orbital-decay | 2026-03-07 12:12:11+00:00
That's exactly what you do in case of refusal training, though. Yes, it will affect other "parts", but that's not the point. In this case the model itself doesn't even need a jailbreak.

>Nobody creating jailbreaks “understand what they’re doing”

Unless you mean those "god mode jailbreaker" e-celebrities showing off on Twitter/Reddit, that's simply not true.
by vladdoster | 2026-03-07 12:12:26+00:00
Location: Nashville, TN
Remote: true
Willing to relocate: boston || nashville
Technologies: Python, Django, IaC, Terraform, Golang, CI/CD, Azure/AWS, {ba,z}sh, Lua, Springboot,
Redis, Docker, Open Service Broker, {,non}relational & vector dbs, shared services, SOA
Email: mvdoster@gmail.com

resume: https://linkedin.vdoster.com && http://github.com/vladdoster

sr. cloud software engineer @ Mastercard (5 years)

Designed and built Platform-as-a-Service for microservice workloads running on Azure and AWS
to migrate on-prem workloads to the cloud. The platform operates globally, allowing teams to
deploy to several Azure-backed regions worldwide. Helped plan and create regional landing zones
in Azure for application teams wanting to perform globally. Designed platform components using
Terraform, Go, and Node; developed support tooling using Bash, Python, and Azure CLI. De-risk the
platform by addressing security vulnerabilities and ensuring the platform is PCI compliant.

api/devops software engineer @ Harvard Medical School (2 years)

Worked as part of the DevOps team to manage a 15k core CentOS HPC cluster. Designed and implemented
Python-based security scanning pipeline to securely deploy & run Apptainer images via SLURM.
Coordinated cross-team emergency patching eﬀorts. Collaborated with researchers and engineers across
3-letter institutions to deliver secure research infrastructure. Built CI/CD Pipelines with GitHub, Jenkins,
to automate code builds, testing, and deployments. Wrote Puppet modules to manage configuration of HPC fleet.
Wrote custom Puppet module & Python scripts to automatically remediate Tenable findings.

full-stack software engineer @ Global Prior Art (3 years)

Used Django, Celery, Selenium grid, and AWS API Gateway for IP rotation to scrape USPTO patent PDFs,
apply CV for data extraction, and generate reports with relevant claims, saving employees 4-5 hours daily.
Wrote E2E black-box/fuzzing unit tests. Automated on-premise deployment via Github Actions and Ansible.

maintainer @ Zinit (5 years)

Develop and maintain a zsh plugin manager on Github with 4k stars. Implemented unit tests,
containerization, bug fixes, and new features.
See: https://github.com/zdharma-continuum/zinit

contributor @ Open-source documentation (5 years)

Contributed hundreds of documentation corrections and enhancements to 400+ open source projects.
by sethammons | 2026-03-07 12:12:56+00:00
Not in my experience. Usually your call chain has forks. Usually the DoThing function will internally do 3 things and any one of those three things failed and you need a different error message to disambiguate. And four methods call DoThing. The 12 error paths need 12 uniquely rendered error messages. Some people say "that is just stack traces," and they are close. It is a concise stack trace with the exact context that focuses on your code under control.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-03-07 12:13:45+00:00
Damn. I hadn't thought of that, Given Oil prices increasing too. US can profit from Europe from all of this and also pull it into the conflict. So I think that this is gonna be a massive loss for Europe/Sovereignity in general.

That being said, I have also heard the opposite of it that it is not in profit for US either and I'd love a discussion about it too.

So basically, Strait of hormuz being blocked and Iran is gonna most likely strike de-salination plants of middle eastern countries like Saudi Arabia too.

Strait of hormuz is essential for food as 90% of food comes through this chokepoint which is essentially blocked now and with all of this combined. 2 weeks are some estimates that I hear that issues can come within the middle eastern countries.

They got shit ton of oil but they can't feed their population oil. It puts direct pressure on the monarchy and other countries to stop the war as the population might revolt against the govt. to stop the war. Also doesn't help the religious aspects side of things as arabs are likely to step with iran in this war from the sentiment online that I see.

So the pressure on Middle East countries to fight against US could very well mean the end of petro-dollar and the debasement of US dollar as the global currency as well.

If the people in the middle-east can't drink water and can't eat food. Then a lot of factors change quite significantly
by xigoi | 2026-03-07 12:13:55+00:00
> How did you verify that?

The compiler works without an internet connection and requires too little resources to be secretly running a local model. (Also, you can’t inspect the source code.)

> You know humans can hallucinate?

We are talking about compilers…

> We agree then that you can verify, test, and trust the deterministic code an LLM produces without ever looking at it.

Unlike a compiler, an LLM does not produce code in a deterministic way, so it’s not guaranteed to do what the input tells it to.
by scriptsmith | 2026-03-07 12:14:16+00:00
The "First-class syntactic selection" reminds me of my most used shortcut(s) in Jetbrains IDEs: the Expand / Shrink Selection.

Ctrl + W
Ctrl + Shift + W

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/working-with-source-code...

It really changed my perspective on interacting with the 'text' of a file.

VS Code, Zed, etc. have similar operations, but in my experience they expand and shrink too coarsely.
by atoav | 2026-03-07 12:14:35+00:00
This is The Lingo. It is something people use when they try to say bland obvious stuff while sounding like they are tech wizards that deserve a high wage. I know the pattern, I studied philosophy, where you also have some writers that express simple ideas with complex lingo, while you have others where the lingo is complex, but it is needed, because the thought is also complex. For the uninitiated telling the two apart can be hard.

In this case that just means: our landing page needs to convince more people to sign up without getting too bloated.

This means it implies a linear correlation between amount of content on the page and sign ups. More content, more signups. But not too much, otherwise it is bad again.

In essence it is a bad take on a probably real problem, expressed by a person that needs to hide behind the lingo.
Ask HN: Which third-party Mac apps feel indistinguishable from Apple apps?
by fahadbuilds | 2026-03-07 12:14:43+00:00
I'm a developer looking for well-designed native Mac apps for inspiration.

One example is Pixelmator. It feels so Apple-like that Apple's acquisition of it almost felt inevitable.

I'm curious what other third-party Mac apps people think look and feel like they could have been made by Apple.
by GrimLabs | 2026-03-07 12:14:45+00:00
Built this because I was paying $45/user/month for DocSend to share pitch decks. That's it. Serve pages as images, count the views, charge a fortune.
Papermark is the obvious open-source answer but it's AGPL -- if you want to embed a secure doc viewer in a commercial product, that's a dealbreaker. And there's no npm package for this anywhere. If you want secure document viewing in your app today, you're writing it from scratch.
CloakShare is MIT, API-first, and ships an embeddable Web Component. Upload a file, get a tracked link. Recipients hit an email gate, view pages rendered on canvas with per-session watermarks (email + session ID baked in), you get webhooks for every page turn and time spent. Revoke anytime.
Also handles video -- HLS streaming with adaptive quality tiers and watermark overlays. DocSend doesn't do this at all.
A few choices worth mentioning if you want to dig in:
Hono over Express -- runs on Node, Bun, Deno, and edge runtimes. SQLite/Turso over Postgres -- zero config for self-hosting, Turso when you need distributed. Poppler over MuPDF because MuPDF is AGPL and would poison the license. Canvas rendering over PDF.js because PDF.js hands the raw file to the browser -- no watermarks, no analytics, no access control.
On the watermark question: yes, you can screenshot. Canvas watermarks make leaks traceable and casual sharing inconvenient -- they're not DRM. Same as DocSend. I'd rather say that upfront than have someone find out and call it snake oil.
Self-hosted version is MIT, no feature gates. Cloud version (coming) handles the ops. That's the business model. https://www.cloakshare.dev/
by Philip-J-Fry | 2026-03-07 12:14:50+00:00
The work involved in maintaining a standard library is things like bug fixes. A larger standard library (or multi versions) means there's more likely to be bugs. You also have performance improvements, and when new versions of the language come out which has features to improve performance, you will most likely want to go back through and refactor some code to take advantage of it. You will also want to go through and refactor to make code easier to maintain. All of this just gets harder with a larger surface.

And the more stuff you pack into the standard library the more expertise you need on the maintenance team for all these new libraries. And you don't want a standard library that is bad, because then people won't use it. And then you're stuck with the maintenance burden of code that no one uses. It's a big commitment to add something to a standard library.

So it's not that things just suddenly break.
by SigmundA | 2026-03-07 12:15:02+00:00
Separate tables can have multiple attributes besides a text description and can be exposed for modification to the application easily so users or administrators can add and modify codes.

A common extra attribute for a coded value is something for deprecation / soft delete, so that it can be marked as no longer valid for future data but existing data can remain with that code, also date ranges its valid for etc, also parent child code relationships.

Enums would be a good feature but they have a much more limited use case for static values you know ahead of time that will have no other attributes and values cannot be removed even if never used or old data migrated to new values.
by PetriCasserole | 2026-03-07 12:15:06+00:00
Bwahaha! I'm 55 and just started grad school at an R1 because I can't compete. Fucking scary as hell! My lab partner is 23, I get up as my peers are going to bed, and I work hard to not say, "In my day..." BUT, I love being enrolled. The resources are incredible and networking is in high gear again.
by villgax | 2026-03-07 12:15:30+00:00
Bigger issue here is why the government is involved with select companies for subsidizing compute. There’s no pre or post criterion to assess success, it should have just been an open market for people with money to purchase compute instead of 10 companies with no prior experience in making models of any kind.

Public funds should beget public datasets and training scripts to see how it is being aligned as well and not just pandering to a particular govt.
Show HN: I couldn't scale my YouTube channels, so I built Shortgram
by mister_tars | 2026-03-07 12:15:40+00:00
Hey HN,
I'm a solopreneur, and I've been banging my head against my keyboard for weeks trying to solve a problem that was driving me crazy: I couldn't scale my YouTube channels.

I have multiple channels, and the workflow was a nightmare:
- Recording videos took 20% of my time
- Editing, optimizing, scheduling... the other 80%
- And still, growth was painfully slow

So I did what any obsessed developer would do: I built something to fix it.

Shortgram takes your long-form content and turns it into optimized short-form clips automatically. Think of it as your video editing co-pilot that actually understands what makes content go viral.

The stack:
- Supabase (postgresql + edge functions + jobs)
- Using Gemini and Claude
- Google Cloud Run to compose the videos

This is the tool I wish I had when I started. I've been using it for my own channels and finally decided to ship it publicly.

Would love your feedback. What features would make this a no-brainer for you?
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-03-07 12:16:06+00:00
right, it would have to a specialized tool that you used to do analysis of codebase every now and then, or parts that you thought should be cleaned up.

Obviously there is a just keep generating more tokens bias in software management, since so many developer metrics over the years do various lines of code style analysis on things.

But just as experience and managerial programs have over time developed to say this is a bad bias for ranking devs, it should be clear it is a bad bias for LLMs to have.
by DeepSeaTortoise | 2026-03-07 12:16:25+00:00
$5 is probably too much, tho. I'd be looking more at the $.2 to $1 range.

Maybe a 3 to 4 tier inbox. Known and trusted user being able to contact you without paying, a high value inbox for the $1+ range, a low value inbox for the $.2 range emails wont be auto-deleted in and a very low value inbox emails will be deleted in depending on the amount paid, with free mails being gone within e.g. an hour, all the way up to e.g. a month for $.19 mails.

Then unify those inboxes and set up notifications to the users' likings.

Also, I'd normalize e.g. 10% going to the e-mail service providers and enshrine that amount into the protocol right away. Otherwise the protocol wont get a lot of attention from the major providers and if it does, the provider taking his share is going to become normalized anyway. But then the split isn't going to be in favor for the users. Which isn't negative per-se, but it'd be nice to have at least one type of service where this is split is reversed. And it is fair to assume whoever takes the larger split has more influence on the prices, potentially either making this feature useless or pricing very casual users out of the service.
by xrd | 2026-03-07 12:16:44+00:00
I'm not being lazy here but I have reviewed this site and outbound links. And, I have reviewed the threads there.

I can't for the life of me figure out if this is a way to put KDE on my TV by overwriting the existing OS, or if this is something to install on a computer which I then plug my TV into via HDMI.

I'm very interested in repurposing my LG Smart TV and have been hesitant about installing a software package on it.

If I brick the TV I'm fearful my kids will burn me at the stake.

I don't see a listed hardware matrix, but do see a link to enter into the matrix server and ask questions. I don't see packages or a repository to add.

I think llms generally produce quite a bit of slop content but I think they could be used to explain open source projects a bit better. This seems like an opportunity.
by throwaway894345 | 2026-03-07 12:16:51+00:00
That makes sense. I guess I usually think of developing policies for this kind of thing to be pretty much what staff would do. I don’t usually expect the CTO to make decisions about how to do testing. To the extent the engineering leadership are to blame, it’s that they were the ones who hired/retained this guy. The buck ultimately stops with them to be sure, but making these kinds of policies seems within the remit of a staff eng.
by dkrich | 2026-03-07 12:17:00+00:00
> My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a LLM.

My greatest frustration with AI tools is along a similar line. I’ve found that people I work with who are mediocre use it constantly to sub in for real work. A new project comes in? Great, let me feed it to Copilot and send the output to the team to review. Look, I contributed!

When it comes time to meet with customers let’s show them an AI generated application rather than take the time to understand what their existing processes are.

There’s a person on my team who is more senior than I am and should be able to operate at a higher level than I can who routinely starts things in an AI tool but then asks me to take over when things get too technical.

In general I feel it’s all allowed organizations to promote mediocrity. Just so many distortions right now but I do think those days are numbered and there will be a reversion to the mean and teams will require technical excellence again.
by dtech | 2026-03-07 12:17:51+00:00
I'm significantly younger but also programmer for two decades since my early teens and am experiencing something similar. CC is so freeing in that it makes those "nice but no time" ideas into reality by doing it next to your main project, almost feels like a drug.

It suddenly turns that dead time while you're waiting for CI, review or response into time where you can work on the fun or satisfying side projects by firing up a few prompts, check an iteration or 2, and then pause again until the next time or while the agent is doing its thing
by password54321 | 2026-03-07 12:17:54+00:00
The field more than likely has peaked out for software developers. Jevons paradox means there probably will not be enough agents anytime soon as ambition grows but that doesn't mean the number of developers will grow with it. You will probably need less "real" pilots behind these agents as tools improve around them and so do the agents themselves before they can essentially fully pilot themselves and work in parallel. Work may even increase for the developers that remain where they are expected to do the work of >10 developers as a single dev but to expect the number of developers to increase with the number of agents seems unlikely as having more people will actually end up being a bottleneck then a lean team that can orchestrate a growing force of agents.

AI companies have set themselves up for this scenario. They won't solve themselves out of the equation, they will only solve you.
by Arnjen | 2026-03-07 12:18:11+00:00
Author here. I've been running programmatic SEO experiments on my own domain
with almost zero backlinks. The setup: 225 pages crossing 15 business models × 15
niches, all targeting "how much do [X] make" queries.

Key findings after 4 weeks of GSC data:

- Hub/category pages indexed at 87%, leaf pages at 18%
- YouTube + Gaming was the top performer (1,309 impressions)
- 6,220 total impressions but only 7 clicks (0.11% CTR)
- Google appears to detect repeated template structure across pages
- Zero backlinks = zero authority = selective indexation

The biggest lesson: Google doesn't mind programmatic content if it doesn't
look programmatic. The pages that got indexed were the ones where the content
happened to diverge most from the template pattern.

I'm now differentiating templates by business model type (5 variations instead
of 1) and enriching hub pages. Will post a follow-up when there's enough data
to compare.

Happy to answer questions about the setup, the data, or pSEO in general.
by emerongi | 2026-03-07 12:18:17+00:00
I review PRs daily and people are pushing changes that have basic problems, not to talk about more serious flaws. The amount of code an engineer can produce is higher, but it's also less thought through.

There will be more code with lower quality. If you want to be valued for your expertise, you need to find niches where quality has to stay high. In a lot of the SaaS-world, most products do not require perfection, so more slop is acceptable.

Or you can accept the slop, grind out however more years you need to retire, and in the meanwhile find some new passion.