MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TheTaytay | 2026-03-13 15:25:08+00:00
I think this is really neat. You should probably take it as a compliment that the biggest criticisms so far are about the website landing page. ;)

I like canvases in general, and I especially like them for mentally organizing and referring to this sort of broad work. (Honestly, I think zoomable canvases would make a better window manager in general, but I digress)

One small piece of friction: My default mouse-based ways of dragging the canvas around (that work in most canvases like Figma) aren't working. I saw that you had a tutorial, and I have learned to hold space now, but I prefer the "hold middle mouse button to drag my canvas view around".

I've got a couple of research tasks running now, and my current open questions as a very new user are:
1) How easy will it be to store the outputs into a Github repository.
2) How easy will it be to refer back to this later?
3) Can I build upon it manually or automatically?
4) Can I (securely) share it with someone else for them to see and build upon it?
5) Can I do something "locally" with it? Not necessarily the model, but my preferred interface for LLMs at this point is Claude Code. Could I have a Claude Code instance running in one of these boxes somehow?
6) What if I want to do private stuff with it and don't like the traffic going through Spine's servers? Could I pay them for the interface, but bring my own keys? (Related: Can I self host somehow?)
7) When this is done, each artifact it found (screenshot, webpage, etc), is going to be helpful. The data-hoarder in me wants to make sure I can search these later. Heck, if I could do that, this would become my preferred "web browser". (But again, I digress.)
by iamnothere | 2026-03-13 15:25:58+00:00
If you’re an American and you want to change this, feel free to propose and pass an amendment. That’s the allowable process for changing what the government can and can’t do regarding individual rights.

> Two guys built a website to try and help people curb their undesired sexual proclivities and because they were bad at security, their users' personal information (including their own logs of their sexual proclivities) is leaked. They will see no consequences other than "oops, oh well, I guess we're going to shut down our website now and, probably, build another one."

Erm, what? Did you think this was a normal thing to include in your reply? (Just as an aside, no particular reason, to nobody in particular: personal moral failings are not a valid reason to go on a crusade for legal changes that affect everyone. Again, just saying!)
by Cpoll | 2026-03-13 15:26:01+00:00
> When confronted by Goran, Umart went to the trouble of quoting the Australian Consumer Law but made a seemingly byzantine and twisted interpretation of it, reiterating that a refund at the original price was the proper remedy.

Have I been living in a country with weak consumer protection for too long? I can't see refunding the product as byzantine, and I've never heard of anyone getting a refund at the new price.
by primer42 | 2026-03-13 15:26:02+00:00
I get the appeal but I disagree

The strength of open source software is collaboration. That many people have tried it, read it, submitted fixes and had those fixes reviewed and accepted.

We've all seen LLMs spit out garbage bugs on the first few tries. I've written garbage bugs on my first try too. We all benefit from the review process.

I would rather have a battle tested base to start customizing from than having to stumble through the pitfalls of a buggy or insecure AI implementation.
by xorcist | 2026-03-13 15:26:16+00:00
"Identity theft" is newspeak right up there with "intellectual property". It serves the sole purpose of diminishing real theft. If someone says "we gave all your money to this other guy, but it's not our fault because he had stolen your identity" doesn't make it so. There are cases of mistaken identity, and with criminal intentions, but there is also an enormous majority of not checking identity because someone was lazy.
by mhurron | 2026-03-13 15:26:48+00:00
Amazons assistance for account issues to organizations if an employee did anything individually is honestly horrible.

They treat it like the organization is attempting to commandeer someone else's account so all the privacy protections you expect for your own stuff is applied no matter how much you can prove it is not some other individuals account.

The best part is the billing issues that arise from that. In your example, if the previous engineer logged into that account (because they can) and racked up huge costs, assuming that account is getting billed or can be tied to your client, Amazon will demand your client pay for them, while at the same time refusing to assist in getting access to the account because it's someone else's. They hold you responsible, but unable to act in a responsible manner.
by bee_rider | 2026-03-13 15:27:26+00:00
I often wonder what rights were not written down because the people writing the Constitution in the US just didn’t think of a state with enough capacity to infringe on them. I think a lot of surveillance stuff is like that: they concerned themselves with improper searches because that was how your privacy was violated. They didn’t even consider a system that could just automatically log all public actions and what could easily be inferred from those logs.

That said, I don’t think I would like to live in a region governed by gangs or rebel groups, even if they probably don’t have the capacity to annoy everybody, the low odds of a catastrophic interaction with enforcement seems bad.
by ralferoo | 2026-03-13 15:28:02+00:00
From the follow-up article: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2022/01/27/scale/

"If you are sticking with the 2022 equivalent of MS-DOS and machines that do exactly one thing at a time, then yeah, you are going to have a whole fleet of systems all sitting there busy-waiting on something stupid."

"Don't recreate the basement full of PCs when the problem can actually be solved with a single box sitting in a cabinet somewhere."

If they really were just PCs to act as a modem-to-network bridge, this seems to be remarkably cost-inefficient. I remember around 1997 helping the university chuck out a few serial line concentrators (no idea what they were actually called), each of which had 32x RS-232 ports that worked up to 19200 baud and a 10Mbit coax network connection at the back. The on-board computer (wouldn't be at all surprised if it was much more than a 68000 or two) interfaced with all the serial ports and translated it to telnet on a remote machine. You could also send it an escape code and then via a primitive command line connect to any arbitrary IP address and port over TCP. I remember in my student days (so maybe 1995) using finger and SMTP directly from these text terminals without actually logging on.

No idea when these became available, but we were chucking them out in 1997 or 1998 as we were upgrading the labs of text terminals to PCs, so they probably at least a decade old by then.
by brackishman | 2026-03-13 15:28:05+00:00
Before the Enlightenment, what we now call science was alchemy. Productive, sometimes brilliant, but without a formalized process for distinguishing real understanding from convincing error. The scientific method changed that, and science became possible.

Software engineering today is closer to software alchemy. We build through craft and intuition, and when it works we often can't fully explain why.

AI is making the labor of producing software cheap while leaving the work of understanding it hard, and that combination is new.
We've never had to build a shared mental model of a software solution deliberately. It has always come for free through the raw effort of writing code.
by richardcrosby | 2026-03-13 15:28:08+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been building a small side project called FontCraft over the last month.

The idea started because my girlfriend (a designer) wanted to create a handwriting font for journaling and some client work. The tools she tried mostly relied on downloading templates, filling them in, scanning them, and uploading them again. It worked, but the workflow felt pretty clunky.

So I started building a browser based tool where you can draw the glyphs directly and see the font generate live.

The workflow looks like this:
1. Draw letters directly in the browser
2. Adjust spacing and alignment in a refine mode
3. Preview the font and Export it as TTF, OTF or WOFF2 in build mode

It works particularly well on an iPad with Apple Pencil, though it also supports the classic template upload workflow.

Some technical challenges were around making the drawing feel good. I spent quite a bit of time working on pen smoothing and stroke rendering so letters feel natural to draw rather than jagged or laggy.

The project has only been live about two weeks but around 80 users have created roughly 100 fonts so far.

There’s a free tier where you can create one font with A–Z, a–z and 0–9.

I’m still actively developing it and would love feedback from HN, especially around, the drawing experience, the glyph editing workflow, missing type design features, general UX

Happy to answer questions about the implementation too!
Ask HN: Should HN update this site guideline?
by throwaway23293 | 2026-03-13 15:28:13+00:00
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills

I feel like it's not an illusion anymore, comments are filled with random LLM bots, at this point i wouldn't be surprised to know that they're someone's openclaws
by jayd16 | 2026-03-13 15:28:36+00:00
Graffiti on a bathroom stall is the purest form of art as it is not done for acclaim or monetary reward ... as the joke goes.

But actually I don't think pressure and tracking are inextricably linked. The culture of experimentation is what is important. You can have metrics that can guide you with the understanding that they should not be prescriptive.
by TMWNN | 2026-03-13 15:29:10+00:00
>Apple sold the the base model M1 Macbook Air through Walmart for $600 between when they stopped selling it directly up to early this year.

I took advantage of this after the fact. I bought a pristine open box M1 from VIPoutlet (Walmart's closeout brand, as I understand it) on Walmart last month for ~$350 as a backup computer.[1] The Neo reinforced the wisdom of my purchase, as M1 has slightly better specs for less money.

[1] If the M4 Pro MacBook I am typing this on needs repair, I will use the M1 with a bootable clone of the M4's drive made with SuperDuper!.
by 9rx | 2026-03-13 15:29:19+00:00
Rust is the older project of the two, kicking off in 2006. Go, which set sail in 2007, duplicating the work of Rust would have been pointless. We already had Rust.

Go's objective was to become a faster Python. Which was something we also desperately needed at the time, and it has well succeeded on that front. Go has largely replaced all the non-data science things people were earlier doing with Python.
by panstromek | 2026-03-13 15:30:17+00:00
> Most integration tests are not thread safe and make assumptions about running against an empty database. Which if you think about it, is exactly how no user except your first user will ever use your system.

Yea, cypress has this in their anti-patterns:

https://docs.cypress.io/app/core-concepts/best-practices#Usi...

Dangling state is useful for debugging when the test fails, you don't want to clean that up.

This has been super useful practice in my experience. I really like to be able to run tests regardless of my application state. It's faster and over time it helps you hit and fixup various issues that you only encounter after you fill the database with enough data.
by inglor_cz | 2026-03-13 15:30:20+00:00
I am not sure whether we can call Ancient Athens or Early Modern Italy "high trust". Both were pretty warlike, though - another source of innovations.

The fact that wars tend to result in extremely quick innovation cycles (both out of fear of losing and from usual bureaucracy being shoved away) is quite nasty ethically, but cannot be wished away.

Neither Ukraine nor Russia are high-trust societies, but they have done more drone development in four years than the entire world together in forty.
by tzs | 2026-03-13 15:30:25+00:00
They probably omitted it because it is irrelevant. It says (according to the title of the Reddit post...the body has been removed) Meta is supporting laws to collect more data, which they profit from.

The Register article is about laws that were specifically designed to not give Meta and their ilk anything more than an unverified age bracket. The age reported is whatever the person who set up the account on the computer said to report.
by Khaleel7337 | 2026-03-13 15:30:28+00:00
I’ve been experimenting with a simple idea:

What would AI tools look like if they followed the Unix philosophy?

Most current AI tools are giant monolithic apps or hosted agents. They hide state, permissions, and actions behind a chat interface.

Unix solved a similar problem decades ago with a different model: small tools, clear interfaces, and composability.

Jeriko is an experiment in applying that idea to AI.

Instead of another chat UI, it runs as a local daemon on macOS/Linux and exposes primitives like:

- terminal execution
- file system access
- browser automation
- background jobs
- connectors (GitHub, Gmail, Drive, etc.)

Workflows are composed from small actions rather than one giant agent prompt.

Example idea:

watch ~/Downloads | classify invoices | rename files | summarize to Slack

Everything runs locally on your machine.

Models can be OpenAI, Claude, Ollama, etc.

Install:
curl -fsSL https://jeriko.ai/install.sh | bash

I’m mainly curious about feedback on whether the Unix philosophy actually maps well to AI agents, or if LLMs require a completely different architecture.

Site: https://jeriko.ai
by sarchertech | 2026-03-13 15:30:39+00:00
They said solid middle class not lower.

My family was working class not even lower middle class.

And even we flew a few times in the late 80s early 90s, and we had a (probably used) Tandy computer that hooked up to the living room TV.

People have different priorities. We certainly couldn’t have afforded a current generation top of the line computer, and we couldn’t have flown every year. But an older computer and the occasional flight were firmly attainable to anyone with stable job if they really wanted them.
by jerf | 2026-03-13 15:31:02+00:00
"There are several writeups of large backends ported from node/python/ruby to Go which resulted in dramatic speedups, including drop in P99 and P99.9 latencies by 10x"

But that's not comparing apples to apples. When you get a dramatic speedup, you will also see big drops in the P99 and P99.9 latencies because what stressed out the scripting language is a yawn to a compiled language. Just going from stressed->yawning will do wonders for all your latencies, tail latencies included.

That doesn't say anything about what will happen when the load increases enough to start stressing the compiled language.
by D-Machine | 2026-03-13 15:31:29+00:00
The post is the perfect example of the kind of writing about AI that dupes people that don't really understand how things like LLMs actually work and are actually trained. Anyone who properly understands these things finds the complete and total lack of detail about training and the loss function (and of course real metrics / benchmarks) to be a monstrous red flag here.

Especially egregious to me is the claim "Because the execution trace is part of the forward pass, the whole process remains differentiable: we can even propagate gradients through the computation itself". This is total weasel-language: e.g. we can propagate any weights through any transformer architecture and all sorts of other much more insane architectural designs, but that is irrelevant if you don't have a continuous and differentiable loss function that can properly weight partially-correct solutions or the likelihood / plausibility of arbitrary model outputs. You also need a clearer source of training data (or way to generate synthetic data).

So for e.g. AlphaFold, we needed to figure out a loss function that continuously approximated the energy configuration of various molecular configurations, and this is what really allowed it to actually do something. Otherwise, you are stuck with slow and expensive reinforcement-based systems.

The other tells are garbage analogies ("Humans cannot fly. Building airplanes does not change that; it only means we built a machine that flies for us"). Such analogies add nothing to understanding, and indeed distract from serious/real understanding. Only dupes and fools think you can gain any meaningful understanding of mathematics and computer science through simplistic linguistic analogies and metaphors without learning the proper actual (visuspatial, logical, etc) models and understanding. Thus, people with real and serious mathematical understanding despise such trite metaphors.

But then, since understanding something like this properly requires serious mathematical understanding, copy like that is a huge tell that the authors / company / platform puts bullshitting and sales above truth and correctness. I.e., yes, a huge yellow flag.
by moregrist | 2026-03-13 15:31:50+00:00
> But once you start adding mouse clickable tabs, buttons, checkboxes etc. you left the UX for TUIs behind and applied the UX expected for GUIs, it has become a GUI larping as a TUI.

Hard disagree. Borland TurboVision [0] was one of the greatest TUI toolkits of the DOS era, had all of these:

> Turbo Vision applications replicate the look and feel of these IDEs, including edit controls, list boxes, check boxes, radio buttons and menus, all of which have built-in mouse support.

Well, I can’t remember if it had tabs.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision
by cbarrick | 2026-03-13 15:31:52+00:00
There are definitely some warning signs that OP could be a bot:

- They "no longer use Github" but their Github account was only created on March 1st.

- Their blog domain was registered on March 1st according to whois.

- They have sixteen (!!) blog posts dated March 10th.

- This is the kind of project you could vibe code: "read the ffmpeg manual and convert all of its flags into a TUI." No shade on the value of the project, just that it's a good one for LLMs.
by mothballed | 2026-03-13 15:31:58+00:00
I reject your premise that the outcome of voting is less dangerous than dropping FOID requirements in places with no ID required to vote, and reject that it is actually reversible (can't undo all the dead school girls in Iran).

But lets accept your premise as true.

You're proposing something like rank-stacking the risk of various rights of citizens and people and if they're high enough on the stack it's OK to to ID and if they're lower maybe it's not OK. That seems to move the goalpost quite a bit from your prior argument.
by butlike | 2026-03-13 15:32:05+00:00
It's not anything though. It's a website and electron app that promises functionality that completely isn't there. It's useless, but instead of being art, it promises functionality, so it's functionally trash.

I too remember running `rails new MyGreatApp` and having hoop dreams of being the next billionaire entrepreneur, but a boilerplate app is a boilerplate app.
by mindcrime | 2026-03-13 15:32:06+00:00
> comments are filled with random LLM bots

Let's say you're right. What good is going to come from posting a comment calling attention to that? As far as I can tell, that's just more noise masking whatever signal is present in the conversation.

The guidelines also say:

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

I would think "accusations of comments being authored by an LLM" would fall into this regime. Probably better to just email the mods, than posting a comment that nobody wants to read, and which is not guaranteed to be seen or acted on by the mods.
by 7777777phil | 2026-03-13 15:32:31+00:00
Last year I dug into Pozsar's Bretton Woods III stuff and wrote two posts on it (0), and this is exactly what he was getting at. Pozsar's whole thesis is that after the West froze Russian reserves in 2022, the global monetary system started shifting from inside money (Treasuries, dollar reserves) to outside money (commodities, gold). Gold going from $1,900 to $5,000+ since then kind of makes his point.

A waiver for oil already floating at sea is the regime admitting you can sanction the financial system but you can't sanction the tanker. physical commodity doesn't care about the nominal layer's rules. Every carve-out like this reinforces it imo..

(0) https://philippdubach.com/posts/pozsars-bretton-woods-iii-th...
by miki_ships | 2026-03-13 15:32:58+00:00
The TUI-vs-GUI debate in the comments is probably not the most useful frame. The practical question for something like this is whether the exported code models terminal layout constraints correctly. Textual and Ratatui both use constraint-based layout, not absolute positioning, and a designer that works in pixel coordinates will produce UIs that look right at one terminal size and fall apart at others. Has anyone tested an export against real usage?
by deaux | 2026-03-13 15:33:10+00:00
> Just another reminder of how we need to protect what we have in the EU (not a guarantee, but at least a chance of fair dealing and a sustained commitment to civic values).

What you have in the EU is this: https://noyb.eu/en/project/dpa/dpc-ireland

> Now that the mask has fully fallen, we have to take every step possible to root out American influence.

You have literal rogue states in your union that neutralize the entirety of it, as the above shows. It's a joke. The EU is a joke. A single country is enough to mean US tech can do whatever it wants, similarly a single other country is enough to mean Russia can largely do what it wants.

The others are of course in on it too. Which is why for all the empty EU talk on US big tech you've never heard them talk about the Irish DPA and what they all enable. Strange right? Would think that this would be a priority. But it shows that even if the rest weren't in on it, just one country would be enough. And it could even be a tiny place like Luxembourg.

Laws and regulations aren't worth the paper they're written on if they're not enforced. The current ones aren't enforced at all, why would any new ones be? Did you know that there was a long period where hosting European citizens' PII on US-controlled servers (like Amazon instances in Europe) was illegal, after the "Privacy Shield" was deemed unlawful? No one cared. Did you know that this is currently the case again, because the thing that replaced it has once again had its basis ripped out from under it by Trump? Once again, no one cares, and indeed EU governments and corporations are _still_ making migrations _to_ US clouds.

Not that it matters, within a few years RN will be running France and AfD will be running Germany and you don't have to pretend any more as the "mask will have fallen" just as much.
Show HN: Apple Ads Toolkit – Run Your Apple Ads as GitOps Terraform
by ndxone | 2026-03-13 15:34:00+00:00
https://github.com/ndx-technologies/go-apple-ads

this is super helpful to us, I think more people should be aware of this approach

combine this with your: AI agent, cronjob, and git repo of your configs — and you get automated highly efficient, fully traceable, decision log, with ability to roll-back, understand every decision, and get learning loop of AI to optimize your campaigns.

this tools work well with humans in the loop too (color formatting), and built with AI agents running in CLI in mind (no-color, filters, help pages and self-discovery). inspired by Go linters (analysers) there are common linters to detect mistakes in configuration as well.

enjoy!