MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thangalin | 2026-03-06 16:36:59+00:00
> it is much easier to write a transpiler for Pascal->C than to rewrite TeX. Asking an LLM to rewrite it in the language-du-jour ...

I thought that the combination of the Pascal and Java versions[1] of TeX would be sufficient guidance to produce another language/implementation.

> is a huge cost for very little benefit

A greenfield Java implementation with an MIT license would have been useful[2] for rendering TeX inside of my desktop Markdown editor[3]. Instead, I had to rename all the Java source files to abide by the NTSPL license terms (or GPLv2, which is viral).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Typesetting_System

[2]: https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenType/-/blob/main/LICENSE.t...

[3]: https://keenwrite.com/screenshots.html
by jimnotgym | 2026-03-06 16:37:29+00:00
In a discussion yesterday about a large and complex physical system that is hard to optimise further without more work for it to do (lots of excess capacity), the VP suggested we should 'consider how emergent technologies could be leveraged to decrease overhead'. It is a clever way to say, I have no ideas either, but if a better machine that hasn't been invented yet becomes available we should use that'. I say 'clever', because the other execs nodded in approval, and agreed. From other conversations I have had with him I was just glad he didn't say 'AI' as per usual, although I am in two minds as to whether he did actually mean AI, but thought he had said it too many times in the last week. I'm not popular because I ask difficult things like, what kind of AI?
by niels8472 | 2026-03-06 16:37:30+00:00
You should consider it's much easier rich people to deal with the fallout from climate change (or living in a failed/failing state for that matter) than for poor people. Plus they often have interests in the things that are causing the issue(s) in the first place. Additionally, the children argument is probably the most powerful, but they would probably expect their children to be rich too. All in all I'm doubtful the arguments you are providing have any effect.
by sulam | 2026-03-06 16:37:59+00:00
I’m not a modeler but I have directly asked modelers if clathrates, permafrost melting, wildfire incidence and ocean drawdown responses to warming was incorporated in the major models. 5 years ago the answer was no. Today the answer might be yes, but this is not really the point I’m trying to make. It’s really that we should expect to see acceleration in warming as the natural environment responds to anthropogenic (“forced”) climate change.
by Aunche | 2026-03-06 16:38:05+00:00
> Nothing will change until developed rich countries are starting to hurt.

The EU reduced their emissions by over a third from their peak. Their emissions per capita is less than that of China (not meant to be a dig at China who is the leader the development of renewables). Even Americans reduced their CO2 emissions by 15% in absolute terms and by about 30% per capita as well.

Why is it so hard to understand that individual people, let alone hundreds of millions of people in aggregate, can have multiple priorities? This whole doomerist attitude doesn't help anyone. If anything, it contributes to the erosion of the good things we already have. Nobody gave a damn about USAID saving millions of people until it could be weaponized against Trump/Elon for taking it away.
by jcfrei | 2026-03-06 16:38:09+00:00
Same reply to you as the other commentator: Fully agree that not doing anything will hurt more. The hard part is finding policies that actually work without costing the lower and middle class more right now. The conservatives basically everywhere around the world are against redistribution - so they ideologically oppose anything that looks like it. At the same time if we just enact policies that limit CO2 the rich people won't really care that flying, heating, driving and some foods have gotten a bit more expensive. But the poor people will. And of the ones who would get hurt by the higher prices a lot of them are ideologically opposed to any kind of redistributing policies. So you are kind of stuck in a catch-22 for now.
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-03-06 16:38:11+00:00
But if someone says something like "synergizing paradigms", isn't that essentially a parse error to any normal person?

You don't need formal language (though formal languages can serve that purpose). You just need to listen like a normal human being rather than like a corporate suit, and that kind of language is just incomprehensible - a parse error. You have to work at it to make sense of that kind of language. And why I took from your first paragraph is permission to treat it as a parse error instead of as some valid message that I needed to decode.
by order-matters | 2026-03-06 16:38:13+00:00
I do not trust any LLM. But I am with the other person, the intention is not to discredit you or make you convince us - you are doing exactly what a comment section is designed for. Your comment is so good, in fact, that we want to trust it more than a comment in general deserves to be trusted.

while i agree its better to go off and prove it to ourselves, there is merit in having a conversation here
by nebezb | 2026-03-06 16:38:16+00:00
> I've long been irritated by the use of the term "server emulator" in gaming contexts. Technically these projects are just reimplementations of a proprietary networking protocol. Nobody calls Samba a "server emulator" because it reimplements the Windows file sharing protocol, because Samba isn't "emulating" anything from the perspective of the traditional definition of "emulator" in computer science.

I think the distinction is a lot greyer than the black/white you propose.

The very first popular online games used servers mostly to redistribute (and maybe time sync) packets from clients. There is no standard way to to do that. Player-created servers did their best to emulate the official servers logic but it was indeed impossible to replicate it perfectly.

e.g. when breaking up large maps into sectors, the official server might broadcast your location and projectiles X units away and emulators would broadcast it X + 500 units away, which could have an impact on gameplay.

Emulator feels fitting when there is no official server spec to reimplement.

edit: emulator also feels appropriate where servers are responsible for NPC activity or quest-like mechanics. This goes beyond implementing a network protocol. The gameplay is massively impacted.
by jfalcon | 2026-03-06 16:38:41+00:00
Alvin Toffler's book "Future Shock" describes what's going on within this thread.

Toffler predicted that as change accelerated, we'd face the paradox of too many options (like a Cheesecake Factory menu) or, conversely, feeling like we have no options due to the framerate of change. He argued that we would enter a state of transience where our relationships, jobs and values would become "temporary". And thus when the rate of change turns everything "temporary", all the old institutions - religion, family, nation, profession - can no longer provide a frame of reference.

In short, the "simulation" of our existence may be starting to drop keyframes - causing pixelization in our society which we obviously see as glitches.

The machine is just going to do whatever we tell it - it is a horse with blinders on or a steam engine going round and round. It doesn't know it needs to work within the human framework. Physics and society only intersect where it's needed for safety - this seems like one of those cases where we need to make sure we define the conditions how both the dog and tail can wag each other.

There was a court ruling earlier that I think starts to set this up: "AI generated images cannot be copyrighted". The same could be said about the rest of the 3 M's. Then expand upon that. AI generated content not being eligible for copyright would go a long way to put value back into people's work efforts.

Let machines deal with improving the framerate of life. Let humans decide what life should be. Hopefully it will finally have more than 50% humanity in it instead of amoral capitalism.
by vixen99 | 2026-03-06 16:38:43+00:00
Would someone like to explain why the Chinese (if as you say produce 30-35% of global emissions) don't appear to see a problem or at least if alluding to it as they do, fail to do much about it as major contributors of emissions? And then of course there are the countries proud of a relative lack of emissions who are merely exporting the problem to somewhere else, often enough, China.
by i_think_so | 2026-03-06 16:39:08+00:00
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! As recently as yesterday I was forced to abandon a conversation with a normie because I couldn't convince her of this fundamental limitation. ChatGPT was "damn near magical" in her opinion. Sigh.

Is it time to update the laws? [1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws
by neuchatel1968 | 2026-03-06 16:39:08+00:00
I too felt like the omission of GS was a miss.

While the Swiss are competing for exclusivity, GS's UFA is clearly generations ahead of anything else in the market.

That said, as a GS owner, I still think their marketing sucks, the watch photos on their website are garbage, and no one except us watch nerds are going to remember SBGA211.
by conductr | 2026-03-06 16:39:26+00:00
I think they were controlling the perception that third party apps could change your entire device settings. That was/still is something that iPhone users expect to be “safe”. As in, if I carelessly install an unknown app, it at least can’t do much harm and I can just delete it without having any real consequences. The existence of “hack apps” undermines that layman understanding of their device security
by neojakey | 2026-03-06 16:39:47+00:00
Since posting this morning, I've set up a Dev.to article going deeper into the architecture (Repository Pattern, the agentic engineering approach vs vibe coding, and how the categorisation engine works). Also pushed PulseTech.news to LinkedIn and Twitter/X — early feedback has been positive on the speed and dark mode. Happy to answer any technical questions about the PHP/MySQL stack or the scraper design.
by tlogan | 2026-03-06 16:39:59+00:00
Using the IEA’s 2024 energy-related CO₂ data, advanced economies emitted 10.9 billion tonnes out of a global 37.8 billion tonnes in 2024, which is about 28.8% of the world total.

So if developed countries completely eliminate all pollution we will reduce it by 30%. Good. Then what is the next step? War with China? Attack India?

[1]
https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2025/co2-em...
by bargainbin | 2026-03-06 16:40:27+00:00
Much like LLM output, this seems convincing at first glance but it’s stating assumption as fact; That assumption being “when LLMs get better”. They don’t say what that ceiling is, but then go on to say “it can’t represent someone in court”. Why not? It can reason about more law and precedent than any human can right? As a society surely we want a fair and by the book justice system?

Look at GPT 5.4 and Opus, we’re clearly hitting diminishing returns already and these guys are pumping unsustainable amounts of money into them.

I’m bullish on AI, it’s been a net positive for me and my team. All I see here though is propaganda disguised as science to convince businesses to shrink their engineering budgets and redirect it to AI companies.

TL;DR: AI company says AI is amazing, more at 10.
by anthonypasq | 2026-03-06 16:40:48+00:00
most businesses dont actually have an infinite amount of work that has extremely high ROI. every new project at google for example has to justify the engineering spend of developing a product that has comparable margin to the ad business. Why spend 10 million a year of engineering resources on a new product that might 1. completely fail or 2. be a decent product with 20% margins when they could do nothing and keep raking in 90% margins from the ads business.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-03-06 16:41:24+00:00
As someone who grew up in the US, we went through the same cycles in the 1970s and 1980s and it's about that time period where it comes through again. I remember the fear that we were losing and the Soviet Union was outcompeting us. Reagan (the President that just shutdown mental institutions and put the people in them to live on the streets) told us constantly in much scarier words than we talk about China we were losing to the Soviets. My parents were in constant fear for their jobs. Interest rates made home buying unaffordable. Everything was rundown because there was a boom in the 50/60s and that stuff was getting tired and run down. There were huge crack epidemics and city downtowns looked bombed out.

China will start going through it as all that new infrastructure starts needing to be replaced and/or maintenance costs go up, 'new' cool cities just become regular old cities, peoples bodies break down and populace gets tired.

I am so glad that China is doing good though. I'm excited for more people's lives to improve!
by Oleksa_dr | 2026-03-06 16:41:29+00:00
I believe it is necessary to implement this at the OS level. This has been needed for a long time, because the “goodwill” approach never works.

The introduction of age verification is something that was to be expected with the growth in the use of the web, rather than individual programs.
But there are a bunch of ways to get around it, which you do, but no one will punish you.
This way, you will have parental control and transfer it to the website, while facilitating control over minors' access to unwanted content. And this way, websites do not need to implement their own terrible age verification methods.
And when people complain that this is a problem for parents, this is exactly what will help parents: once they set the age in parental controls, programs and websites will have to monitor access (following the law, not goodwill).

This way, access can be controlled at the first level, i.e., at the OS level. There is a law, and there will be others to help improve it.
In the same way, you can avoid the use of identifiers and, in general, face verification and a bunch of nonsense.

Ultimately, the responsibility lies with parents who did not specify the user's age on the device. But there may be “products” that ignore information from the OS.

Current parental controls do not solve the problem well, because you have to pay for a bunch of questionable products, sacrificing privacy.
And it still does not protect against outdated black/white lists.
Therefore, the requirement at the OS level to have such control and place responsibility on “products” is an excellent solution in my opinion.

And quite an elegant one at that. Without involving any government identifiers or anything else.

Combined with the widespread implementation of TPM, this will become even more feasible.
by tmuhlestein | 2026-03-06 16:41:40+00:00
One challenge many teams are hitting right now is the gap between AI demos and production AI systems.

This AWS case study covers some of the work GoDaddy has been doing to operationalize AI workflows using AWS infrastructure.

One example highlighted is Lighthouse, a system built using Amazon Bedrock to analyze large volumes of customer support interactions and extract patterns that can improve customer experience and operational efficiency.

What’s interesting from a systems perspective isn’t just the model usage, but the broader shift toward treating AI as part of production infrastructure:

data pipelines that continuously feed models

orchestration layers around LLM workflows

recursive learning platforms that allow real-world signals to continuously improve systems

integration into existing operational systems

The biggest challenge for many organizations right now isn’t building models — it’s building reliable systems around them.

Curious how others here are approaching AI infrastructure vs experimentation.
by jandrewrogers | 2026-03-06 16:41:48+00:00
You can add in the increasing B&O (revenue) taxes, payroll taxes, data center taxes, and the expansion of the extremely high sales taxes to things that effectively make Washington uncompetitive. The cost of doing business has become unreasonably high and is so badly structured that it creates perverse incentives for how you organize business.

And then you have a litany of new business regulation across every sector of the local economy. My recent favorite, which fortunately did not make it out of this session due to heavy lobbying by tech, was requiring data centers to turn-off power during periods of high electricity demand. It's insane that this is even being seriously considered.

Oregon is also a mess but it has always been a mess.

Texas isn't the only alternative. Turning Washington into California with worse weather even makes California relatively attractive.
by dragonwriter | 2026-03-06 16:41:55+00:00
> Problem #3: He approved "terraform destroy" which obviously nukes the DB! It's clear he didn't understand

The biggest danger of agents its that the agent is just as willing to take action in areas where the human supervisor is unqualified to supervise it as in those where it isn't, which is exacerbated by the fact that relying on agents to do work [0] reduces learning of new skills.

[0] "to do work" here is in large part to distinguish use that focuses on the careful, disciplined use of agents as a tool to aid learning which involves a different pattern of use. I am not sure how well anyone actually sticks to it, but at least in principal it could have the opposite effect on learning of trust-the-agent-and-go vibe engineering.
by mafia15 | 2026-03-06 16:41:57+00:00
A few months ago I was drowning in emails. Nothing catastrophic, just the slow accumulation of newsletters, receipts, university notices, work threads, and random things I'd signed up for at some point. My inbox had become a place I avoided.

I tried the obvious solutions. There are some genuinely good email productivity tools out there. But they all had the same two problems that I couldn't get past.

First, the price. $25-30 a month for the good ones. That's not objectively expensive but it's the kind of subscription that sits in your bank statement making you feel vaguely guilty every month, especially when you're not sure it's actually working.

Second they all wanted me to leave Gmail/Outlook. Use their inbox instead. Learn their interface. Trust them with my email data. I tried a few. I never stuck with any of them. There's something deeply uncomfortable about not knowing what a third party is doing with the contents of your email.
So one evening instead of subscribing to another tool I just started building.

I want to be honest — I assumed it would take me a weekend. It took four weeks of evenings and weekends. There were three separate moments where I nearly gave up and just paid for the subscription.

But somewhere in week three something clicked and it started working. My inbox started sorting itself. Labels appeared automatically. Emails that needed replies had drafts waiting.

The thing that surprised me most wasn't the technical part. It was realising how much I'd been avoiding building things because I assumed the existing solution was good enough, or that building it myself would be too hard, or that my time was better spent elsewhere.

Sometimes the existing solution isn't good enough. Sometimes building it yourself is the only way to get exactly what you want. And sometimes the four weeks you spend building it teaches you more than the thing itself.
I don't know if this applies to everyone. But I suspect there are a lot of people paying monthly for tools that almost do what they need, and not building the thing that would actually do it.
Has anyone else gone down this rabbit hole? Built something just because the existing options didn't sit right with you?"
by fortedoesnthack | 2026-03-06 16:42:26+00:00
it depends where you live... I live in Japan now. One comment I hear often and see reflected in old TV shows is how different summers are already. 20-25 years ago it would have been considered a hot summer day around 30c.

Now every summer day is 30c+.

Also, a comment I hear often is that people didn't really need air conditioners back then. You definitely cannot get away with living in Tokyo without an air conditioners these days!
by bloody-crow | 2026-03-06 16:42:33+00:00
Those numbers make no sense.

According to this website:

$116k — Senior software developer yearly salary. Interns makes more than that in US. Not that anybody's hiring interns anymore, but that's not the point.

$142k — "basic" Aston Martin Vantage. The base model starts at $192k currently. I don't remember times where new AM was anywhere near 140k no matter how "basic".

$182k — Fully loaded Tesla Model S. This one is the most egregious. More expensive than Aston Martin? Come on, a fully loaded Plaid is $115k with delivery right now.

Haven't watched further since I was already too flabbergasted by how much those numbers didn't match my expectations.
by sfink | 2026-03-06 16:42:42+00:00
If you want to dig into it, you can post a bunch of that computer's crash reports (navigate to about:crashes) on bugzilla: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Firefox&c...

Or you can view several of them and see if there's a common pattern in the "Signature" field. Firefox really should only be regularly crashing if: (1) there's a real bug and the thing that triggers it, (2) you're running out of memory, or (3) you have hardware.

I don't know what the odds of faulty hardware are for a randomly chosen user, but they're much higher for a randomly chosen user who is seeing regular crashes.
by thewebguyd | 2026-03-06 16:42:43+00:00
Just because it's not novel, doesn't mean it's right. I also don't agree with, for example, many mechanics being forced to buy their own tools (especially what little they get paid).

I don't do tech outside of 9-5, so either my employer pays for it all, or I don't use it. Simple as that. Thankfully, they do pay for it, but I couldn't imagine working somewhere that says "You need to use AI" and then not providing it on their dime.

Quite frankly it should be regulation that if a W2 employee needs something to perform their job duties, the employer must provide it.
by 01100011 | 2026-03-06 16:42:51+00:00
I initially supported this comment but no, I think it's worse than this. As rich countries cut back, dirty energy becomes cheaper and developing nations just use more. They'll need to use more just to fight the climate. India, for instance, is going to need a whole lot of air conditioning just to survive.

Sure, blame developed nations for getting us here, but the path forward isn't solely in the hands of those developed nations.
by sn0wflak3s | 2026-03-06 16:42:56+00:00
The line is scope.

I'm not asking an agent to build me a full-stack app. That's where you end up babysitting it like a kindergartener and honestly you'd be faster doing it yourself. The way I use agents is focused, context-driven, one small task at a time.

For example: i need a function that takes a dependency graph, topologically sorts it, and returns the affected nodes when a given node changes. That's well-scoped. The agent writes it, I review it, done.

But say I'm debugging a connection pool leak in Postgres where connections aren't being released back under load because a transaction is left open inside a retry loop. I'm not handing that to an agent. I already know our system. I know which service is misbehaving, I know the ORM layer, I know where the connection lifecycle is managed. The context needed to guide the agent properly would take longer to write than just opening the code and tracing it myself.

That's the line. If the context you'd need to provide is larger than the task itself, just do it. If the task is well-defined and the output is easy to verify, let the agent rip.

The muscle memory point is real though. i still hand-write code when I'm learning something new or exploring a space I don't understand yet. AI is terrible for building intuition in unfamiliar territory because you can't evaluate output you don't understand. But for mundane scaffolding, boilerplate, things that repeat? I don't. llife's too short to hand-write your 50th REST handler.