MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bizzyskillet | 2026-03-12 20:36:38+00:00
Anyone read Gödel, Escher, Bach (GEB)? I gave up halfway through, and shamefully admitted it to a really smart guy named Chris I met at a conference.

He said "duh, you aren't supposed to finish it - you should only get to the parable about book length, a couple chapters in!"

The parable explores the idea that a reader always has a piece of information you don't want them to have: the amount of remaining pages! If the bad guy dies and you still have 3/4 of the book in your right hand you can be sure it's not over... So as an author what do you do? Add a bunch of Lorem Ipsum? The reader will flip through and figure out where that starts. Splice in an unrelated story? The reader can still find the boundary. So you have to continue the story, but have nothing important happen (e.g., 'the next day Harry Potter ate some toast and watched Friends'). Chris was arguing that GEB talked about doing this, and then actually did it.

The author was clear that he makes his point early on and then just explains it many different ways, so maybe I believe Chris... Or maybe Chris and I are just happy to rationalize our laziness however we can :P
by nine_k | 2026-03-12 20:36:38+00:00
> fetch items in a store. Why?

Because the presence of a human likely prevents shoplifting and / or vandalism. It must make economic sense for the gas station owner to employ a human, and I suppose this is the sense.

What actual useful skill do you think the gas station keeper could learn? Is their employment the thing that prevents them from learning these skills?
by krapp | 2026-03-12 20:37:19+00:00
You don't hold a "proper primary" when you have the advantage of incumbency. You run the incumbent (especially against a candidate they've already beaten) or the VP - the two most famous people in the party. All Harris had to do was read the room and she would have won.

Literally every other possible option would have been a nobody with none of the advantages Biden or Harris had and would have only risked splitting the ticket, whereas every Republican was already going vote for Trump. I can't think of a worse way for the Democrats to fail than that... except for the way they actually failed.

And I mean Trump's physical and mental decline is far worse than Biden's ever was and no one seems to care.
by WorkerBee28474 | 2026-03-12 20:37:27+00:00
> So all of a sudden the nice town clinic has $2,500,000 in debt, raise prices accordingly...

From a financial engineering perspective this is wrong.

Both equity and debt have costs of capital. Debtholders expect interest, capital holders expect RoE. The money going to debt interest is money that would previously have gone to equity, but now does not because the equity is replaced with debt.

Crucially, the costs of debt is lower than the cost of equity because of the interest tax shield. Therefore, the vet clinic now requires less revenue to maintain or even increase its return to equity.
by wehadit | 2026-03-12 20:37:28+00:00
If you use the models like we execute coding tasks, older models outperform latest models.
There's this prep tax that happens even before we start coding, i.e., extract requirements from tools, context from code, comments and decisions from conversations, ACs from Jira/Notion, stitch them together, design tailored coding standards and then code.
If you automate the prep tax, the generated code is close to production ready code and may require 1-2 iterations max.
I gave it a try and compared the results and found the output to be 92% accurate while same done on Claude Code gave 68% accuracy. Prep tax is the cue here
by pinusc | 2026-03-12 20:38:13+00:00
(To two-boxers) it's not half an analysis because once you walk into the room your choice is causally independent of the demon/AI/alien prediction.

There's something vaguely similar to the fallacy of proposed (Cooperate,Cooperate) solutions to the Prisoner's Dilemma. The arguments go as follows: (1) if we're both rational agents and we have the same information and same payoffs, we will make the same choice; (2) therefore, (Cooperate,Defect) and (Defect,Cooperate) are out of the question; (3) therefore, the only options are (Defect,Defect) and (Cooperate,Cooperate); (4) so I should Cooperate since it gives the better payoff. It seems to follow logically but (1) and (2) are problematic because you can't assume symmetrical solutions and thus eliminate asymmetrical outcomes, because that is essentially the same as saying "what I choose causally affects what my opponent chooses".

In the same way, one-boxing is irrational (for this argument, anyway; I'm undecided myself) because the prediction has already been made, and so your choice to one-box or two-box cannot have any causal relevance to the contents of the boxes. Even a perfect predictor cannot invert the flow of causality.
by tsunamifury | 2026-03-12 20:38:15+00:00
And in reality shifted labor markets and supply chain was the issue and the FED in 22 raised interest rates to 'regress labor back to their natural position'.

Never forget: the FED did this more than any republican or democrat and their new stated position is to ensure not the enablement of the population but keeping the labor pool 'in their place.'

This, beyond everything else, changed america the most in recent history.
by szarnyasg | 2026-03-12 20:38:24+00:00
Indeed, it would have been interesting but I really wanted to get the blog post out on the launch day of the MacBook Neo and did not have the bandwidth to run additional cloud experiments.

I ran TPC-DS SF300 now on the c6a.4xlarge. It turns out that it's still quite limited by the EBS disk's IO: while 32 GB memory is much more than 8 GB, DuckDB needs to spill to disk a lot and this shows on the runtimes. Running all 99 queries took 37 minutes, so about half of the MacBook's 79 minutes.

> Command being timed: "duckdb tpcds-sf300.db -f bench.sql"

> Percent of CPU this job got: 250%

> Elapsed (wall clock) time (h:mm:ss or m:ss): 37:00.96
Maximum resident set size (kbytes): 25559652
by jedreckoning | 2026-03-12 20:38:32+00:00
Hi HN — I built fin123 after repeatedly seeing trading desks rewrite spreadsheet logic inside application code.

Typical workflow today:

Analyst
↓
Excel model
↓
Developer rewrites formulas in Python / JS
↓
Application table

That rewrite step is painful and error-prone.

fin123 takes a different approach: the worksheet itself becomes the artifact.

Worksheet spec
↓
Compiled worksheet (deterministic artifact)
↓
Application embeds the viewer

Design goals:

• deterministic builds
• offline computation
• finance-safe joins and lookups
• Polars-backed table evaluation
• explicit lifecycle: commit → build → verify → release

The core engine is open source (Apache-2.0) and runs fully locally.

Happy to answer questions.
by diacritical | 2026-03-12 20:39:18+00:00
The majority of users are not complete morons. If they understand the need to backup their private key (or wallet password, or whatever), they can do it. If they still don't do it, maybe they don't value their data. In 2026 even the proverbial grandma should know what a backup is, even if they don't understand exactly how a given private key or protocol works.

We shouldn't cater to such users and make our communication less secure because people put off making backups.
by greiskul | 2026-03-12 20:39:34+00:00
Absolutely. For more progressive democrat voters already been harbouring bad feelings around the legitimacy of the establishment candidate from previous elections. The two party system already loses a ton of the feeling of choice and participation in Americans. The primary is the escape valve. It is supposed to be when people that care about politics get to argue about policy, direction, etc. Even if you don't agree with the final candidate, you feel like you helped shape the direction of the process. By skipping this, even if there were other circumstances, it feels like a huge turn off for that base of the party.

And then for other democrats, the feeling when you have an unpopular president like Biden was seen at the time is to go anti estabilishment. But Kamala was Bidens VP. She couldnt run an anti estabilishment campaign when she was part of the estabilishment.

If there had been a primary, whoever was the candidate, even if it was Kamala herself, would have been much better positioned for the General Election.
by pauljonas | 2026-03-12 20:39:37+00:00
Still using that 2019 MBP (16 inch, 16G memory) as a daily work machine.

Is still handling the load well, though at times, fans get quite loud, especially with all the background processes and VM setups.

Hope to get a new MBP this year, as being on Intel means lots of software that won't run on it (ie, Codex app for example, won't run on Intel Macs)
by vunderba | 2026-03-12 20:39:39+00:00
It’s interesting you mentioned that. One of the things I’ve started doing recently is throwing a large LLM such as codex-5.3 (highest level of reasoning) at some of the more complex systems we have to produce nicely formatted ASCII diagrams.

I still review each diagram afterward, but the great thing is that, unlike image-based diagrams, they remain fully text-readable and searchable. And you can even expose them as part of the knowledge base for the LLM to reference when needed going forward.
by footy | 2026-03-12 20:39:52+00:00
What a bizarre comment. I'm Canadian, and during my misspent youth I spent time in Wisconsin and in Boston. I didn't drive in those places and I don't drive here.

I did finally cave recently and bought a cargo bike (not electric). I've used it during snowfalls. It's fine, just like walking in snow and/or in negative 30 degree weather is fine.
by user____name | 2026-03-12 20:39:58+00:00
The best politicians understand the value of being perceived as authentic. Pushing the VP at the last minute and pretending nothing was wrong just felt incredibly stilted and insincere. Politicians like Trump are popular because they "tell it like it is" and not the media trained evasive responses you typically get from politicians.

I would have voted for a partially sentient dung heap over Trump, which at the current rate is probably in the cards as a next GOP candidate.
by linkjuice4all | 2026-03-12 20:40:33+00:00
They already did that - the Democrats are/were clearly not the same as the Republicans and that should have been enough (especially after we already got a preview of Trump's Republican party the first time around). They already ran strong enough campaigns and their candidates were already good enough. Most of them actually wanted the job because they believed in the mission of government, not because they personally benefited from ruining whatever office or authority they might be given.

The only thing the non-Republican voters had to do was show up, hold their nose over whatever bullshit short-coming their rep had (in comparison to "perfect" and whatever it is the Republicans offer to voters), and vote for whichever jerk had a D next to their name. There were only ever two options and U.S. citizens fucked up - through either silence (mostly) or blind support of whatever it is that's happening now.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-03-12 20:40:45+00:00
The oldest NVMe SSD I have at home is a Samsung 950 Pro (the 256 GB version!) which I bought in late 2015 IIRC (and put on a ASUS Z170-A mobo, that already had a NVMe slot) and which has been in use that whole time (but mostly light desktop use):

Percentage Used: 27%
Data Units Read: 48,801,760 [24.9 TB]
Data Units Written: 84,590,914 [43.3 TB]
Power Cycles: 228 <-- only 228 power cycles in 11 years, that's about 17 days uptime every time I think
Power On Hours: 37,153 <-- not sure about this one, this comes out at about 9 hours / day of uptime

And after 11 years it's still going strong!

Now it's not on my main computer anymore: I'm rocking a WD-SN850X (recommended here on HN when it came out) but the old Samsung 950 Pro is on the desktop computer my wife uses daily (and she WFH).

> I think SSDs can take quite the beating nowadays

For regular use definitely. In my servers I've got ZFS in mirroring though: you never really know when a drive is going to RIP.
by jajuuka | 2026-03-12 20:40:57+00:00
As a more general point, 2024 saw many establishment governments switch across the world. My hypothesis is that many people around the world were still craving a pre pandemic lifestyle and world. And that was expressed as anger at the current government regardless of how they handled covid and the aftermath. Others have brought up specific issues but I think there is some connective tissue for people across the world because amount of similar sentiment from different cultures. There is no silver bullet though. Multiple events, policies, and statements factor into a major election win or loss.
by mahendra0203 | 2026-03-12 20:41:12+00:00
Honestly? Don't think you don't need to rewrite your CLI.

The whole "raw JSON > flags" argument sounds clean in a blog but falls apart in practice. Agents are actually good at parsing messy human output. stderr, exit codes, even tables.

I run AI agents against CLIs every day. The failures are almost never, "the outpt wasn't structured enough." They're context window overflows, permission issues, and the agent confidently running the wrong command over and o ver.

The real insight here shouldn't be "rewrite for agents" — it's "make your CLI not actively hostile." --output json and non-zero exit codes on failure. That's should be it.

Maybe we are optimising the wrong layer..
Show HN: Every Developer in the World, Ranked
by ejc | 2026-03-12 20:42:00+00:00
We've indexed 5M+ GitHub users and built a ranking system that goes beyond follower counts.
The idea started from frustration: GitHub is terrible for discovery. You can't answer "who are the best Python developers in Berlin?" or "who identified transformer-based models before they blew up?" without scraping everything yourself. So we did.

What we built:
CodeRank score - a composite reputation signal across contributions, repository impact, and community influence
Tastemaker score - did you star repos at 50 stars that now have 50,000? We track that
Comparison Builder - allows users to build comparison graphics to compare devs, repos, orgs, etc.
Sharable Profile Graphics - share your scores and flex on your coworkers or the community at large

Some things we found interesting:
Most-followed ≠ most influential. The correlation between follower count and tastemaker score is surprisingly weak. There's a whole tier of developers who consistently find projects weeks and months before they trend, with almost no public following.

Location data on GitHub is a disaster. We spent an embarrassing amount of time on normalization and it's still not anywhere near perfect.

Try it: https://coderank.me/

If your profile doesn't have a score, signing in will trigger scoring for your account.

Curious what the HN crowd thinks about the ranking methodology, happy to get into the weeds on any of it.
by rossdavidh | 2026-03-12 20:42:15+00:00
Agreed, but I think the mechanism relates to different microbes. If there are two microbes in your gut, and type A requires a dose of high-calorie, low-fiber food coming down the pipe every day, and type B is not able to reproduce as fast as type A but is able to live on high-fiber food, this tells you two things:

type A cannot have been living in humans thousands of years ago, but type B might have

type A benefits from making your brain worse at choosing healthy foods, and type B does not

Which kind would you rather have in your gut?
by sean2 | 2026-03-12 20:42:46+00:00
I skim 100 comments here everyday. Good comments/bad comments, overly long comments, whatever, time to read is low. I assume all those authors have a strong opinion / expertise on the subject that urged them to take the time to write that comment, which makes skimming hacker news to keep a pulse on the world (imho) a valuable task. If, instead, most of those comments are composed by molt-bots, then I'm not getting a "real" view of the world, I don't care how good and concise the comments are, I'd be wasting my time reading about news that may not matter to anyone and opinions that may not exist.
by anon7000 | 2026-03-12 20:43:05+00:00
If people payed attention, Kamala’s policies were decently well thought out and not the exact same as Biden.

It’s more about how demonized the libs have been, dissatisfaction with “woke culture,” certain groups of conservatives who will never vote pro-choice, and certain populations not feeling like they have a spot in liberal dialogue. (Young men.) and partly because she’s a black woman.

I would argue the election had almost NOTHING to do with actual policy or cabinet choices, because Trump should have easily lost if it was. His previous cabinet was a disaster and he can no longer attract the best and brightest due to his controversy. So, exactly as expected, his cabinet is a fucking disaster. People are attracted to the guy who will go apeshit on a system that doesn’t seem to work for them, even when stability & slow progress is actually better. (Fast progress is even better, but that’s not what Trump provides)
by reaperducer | 2026-03-12 20:43:19+00:00
Apple care has always seemed like an extortion scheme to me yet Apple owners seemed to feel it was a good deal, not realizing that you shouldn't even have to replace stuff before the 7 to 10 years mark appart maybe for the battery.

It's not about "having to" replace parts. It's for just-in-case. It's essentially insurance.

The battery in my M1 MacBook Pro went bad recently. But I have AppleCare, so I was able to walk into an Apple Store and hand it to someone, and the next day I picked it up all repaired. (New keyboard, too, since the keyboard and battery are considered one part.)

Total cost without AppleCare: $250 + tax.
Total cost with AppleCare: $0.
Total I've spent on AppleCare: $150.

If I had some machine from Dell or Acer or even Microsoft, what would I do? Ship it back to China for six months? There's no store I can walk into to get it fixed the next day.

The value in AppleCare is the same value you have in fire insurance. Maybe you want to save a few bucks and take your chances that everything you own won't burn to ashes and you have to start over with nothing. I'm not in college anymore.
by dec0dedab0de | 2026-03-12 20:43:26+00:00
I think Kamala should have flipped on the second amendment then gone on all the podcasts and called trump a nerd for being sober and not liking guns.

Or at the very least, try to target anyone that didn't already support her. This last election was the first time I didn't get targeted by the democratic presidential nominee at all. I did not see one positive ad for Kamala the entire election, I still don't really know anything about her. Normally I'm sick of them a month into the campaign. It kind of felt like a snub, as if they were telling me they didn't want my vote. I could imagine someone else using that as the reason to vote for Trump.

That said, I only ever vote 3rd party because I believe they work together to keep each other in power, and that a vote for either is a vote for both.
by fanf2 | 2026-03-12 20:43:26+00:00
There are several ways to map the IPv4 address space into the IPv6 address space, going right back to the first IPv6 addressing architecture RFC. Every compatibility protocol added a new one.

IPv6 added IPSEC which was backported to IPv4.

IPv6 tried to add easy renumbering, which did’t work and had to be discarded.

IPv6 added scoped addresses which are halfbaked and limited. Site-scoped addresses never worked and were discarded; link-scoped addresses are mostly used for autoconfiguration.

IPv6 added new autoconfiguration protocols instead of reusing bootp/DHCP.
by hrmtst93837 | 2026-03-12 20:43:58+00:00
Putting heavy AI workloads in a 12MB binary means you either make savage cuts on model support or you lock users to strange minimal formats. If you care about ops, eventually you hit edge cases where the "just works" story collapses and you end up debugging missing layers or janky hardware support. If the goal is to experiment locally or run demos, 12MB is fine but pretending it fits broader deployment is a stretch unless they're pulling some wild tricks under the hood.
by nlawalker | 2026-03-12 20:44:03+00:00
>I’m not really looking for something to read. I just want to skim an overview of the main theories. I’ve experimented with asking AIs to give the same information in various styles, and I reluctantly concede that the formatting helps. But that’s not reading.

[...]

>Namely, why do so many people today seem to write more like Exhibit A than Exhibit B?

Because they're writing for an audience that's not really looking for something to read. See Axios and Smart Brevity:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axios_(website)#Content

https://www.axios.com/smart-brevity
by stephbook | 2026-03-12 20:44:09+00:00
> It’s one of those things that crackpots keep trying to do, no matter how much you tell them it could never work. If the spec defines precisely what a program will do, with enough detail that it can be used to generate the program itself, this just begs the question: how do you write the spec? Such a complete spec is just as hard to write as the underlying computer program, because just as many details have to be answered by spec writer as the programmer.

Joel Spolsky, stackoverflow.com founder, Talk at Yale: Part 1 of 3
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/12/03/talk-at-yale-part-...
by jmuguy | 2026-03-12 20:44:15+00:00
Yeah really the take away apparently is that Democrats should just lie, brazenly, about everything. I mean that's what Trump and JD Vance did and continue to do. When you can just invent your own world to live in, how are rational people supposed to deal with that? Would people have reacted different if Biden and Harris had truthfully said "oh and the world is still fucked up because of COVID, electing Donald Trump won't change that"
by arjie | 2026-03-12 20:44:23+00:00
tl;dr A US political party is more like a European coalition government than a European political party.

US political parties try to form tents that various subgroups can join under. Usually, some sort of compromise is formed among the various participants. One break down in the Democratic Party tent was over Israel/Gaza, another was over pro-tech/anti-tech. Simultaneously, there were factional wars over redistribution and immigration in both parties. These are two such but perhaps not even the biggest two such things. Inflation and government spending were another. And Biden's competence was also in question.

Every faction is likely convinced their own support is what would have turned the tide because it is somewhat true, except for the property that they're linked. e.g. pro-Gaza positions are also usually anti-tech so depending on how much you aim to get more Gaza supporters you also lose pro-industry people. There are many things like that.

A US politician will therefore try to walk the line of support to get elected. For example, you'll see a substantial change in Sen. Elizabeth Warren's positioning over time. Notably, she is currently actively attempting to reduce housing construction by corporations - a position she has not been historically associated with - because this polls very well among Americans (who, for the most part, believe that building new expensive housing makes all housing cost more).