MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sneak | 2026-03-14 22:15:32+00:00
“pennies an hour” sidesteps the fact that $2-3/hr is a fairly decent wage in the Philippines.

The average hourly wage is $2.11 and the minimum wage is $1.36 per hour. It is likely easier work and better pay than being a waitress.

Voluntary, harmless sex work such as that described in TFA has no relation whatsoever to slavery. Your crusade is out of place in this thread, I believe. Most working class jobs are unpleasant, and being a sex chat operator is probably one of the safest jobs one could have in the world. You seem to be intentionally conflating the topic at hand with unregulated street prostitution.

> most people would prefer not to role play intimacy with men online if there were another option.

What does that have to do with the people who DO do these jobs? They plainly have other options and they work as sex chat operators by choice.

TFA intentionally frames their wages as exploitative when they are median for the locale and substantially above minimum wage there.
by rubyn00bie | 2026-03-14 22:15:42+00:00
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately… For years this has been said, and for most of us isn’t something we’ve been able to experience until recently. Yet, now we can see how chatbots have made sane folks lose their minds, by simply being too agreeable. I think it’s a grim look at what it’s like to be hyper wealthy. The odds that they’ve completely disassociated from reality, IMHO, have increased exponentially after seeing the effects on “normal” people. The only difference is us plebs, don’t have the resources to then bring our distorted view of reality to life.
Show HN: doXmind – for people who want docs, not all of Notion
by wangzhangwu | 2026-03-14 22:16:39+00:00
Hi HN, I’m Steve, co-founder of doXmind.

We built doXmind for people who want docs and AI, but not all of Notion.

Notion is powerful, but if your main use case is writing, collaboration, and AI help inside documents, it can feel like more than you actually need. You end up inside a much bigger workspace of databases, templates, and project management features, when sometimes all you really want is a clean doc editor with strong AI built in.

So we took a different approach.

In doXmind, AI works directly in the document instead of living in a sidebar chat. It reads the structure of what you’re writing, helps with multi-step workflows like research → draft → revise → format, and applies changes inline. Every AI edit shows up as a diff, so you can review and accept or reject each change instead of getting a black-box rewrite.

You can also upload PDFs, research papers, and style guides into a knowledge base. doXmind searches across those sources, pulls relevant context into the writing flow, and cites what it used.

We’ve also built support for cross-document AI across your files, version history with restore, BYOK, diagram support, presentation mode, and export to Markdown, PDF, and Word.

We’re two co-founders bootstrapping from Toronto. We don’t train on your content.

It’s free to try: https://app.doxmind.com

We’re also running an early-bird Pro plan at $2.99/month.

If you’ve wanted something lighter than Notion for writing-focused work, I’d love to hear what matters most to you in a doc editor.
by ryandrake | 2026-03-14 22:17:35+00:00
I know this is a salty take, but reliance on A/B testing to design products is indicative of product deciders who don't know what they are doing and don't know what their product should be. It's like a chef saying, I want to make a pancake, but trying 50 different combinations of ingredients until one of them ends up being a pancake. If you have to test whether a product works / is good / is profitable, then you didn't know what you were doing in the first place.

Using A/B tests to safely deploy and test bug fixes and change requests? Totally different story.
by dh2022 | 2026-03-14 22:18:06+00:00
Afghanistan - economically not a big impact. The economic pressures in the 80s were low agricultural productivity requiring imports from Western countries, low oil/gas prices and productivity, endemic corruption. And if we really want to be pedantic, nobody forced USSR to invade Afghanistan.

I had to look up Jeffrey Sachs (0). He was an adviser-that is all he did. He did not impose anything on Yeltsin or Russia.

I agree that American decline will not resemble Russian collapse. Their commonality is both declines have internal causes. But other than that there isn’t much in common.

(0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Sachs#Russia
by Newlaptop | 2026-03-14 22:18:11+00:00
> US instantly becomes a pariah state

Aren't we already?

The current administration has torched relationships with essentially every allied country except Israel. From Toronto to Taipei, and across NATO and BRICS, people see the US as a chaotic bully to be dealt with, not a friend or role model.

I don't think that "other countries won't like it" carries any significance at all to the people in power.
by throwup238 | 2026-03-14 22:19:48+00:00
Anything made of steel or aluminum is recyclable because they can just melt it down and easily separate the metals, but the carbon lining and anything nonmetal is basically slag afterwards. Aluminum, electrolyte, and random atoms seep in everywhere and destroy it.

The smelting process I described above is actually the more expensive process to used to produce aluminum from raw bauxite. Recycling aluminum is cheaper and a significant fraction of the world’s aluminum produced every year is from recycled feedstock (over two thirds in the US, last I checked). Same goes for steel and most other metals.
by abeppu | 2026-03-14 22:19:59+00:00
> Moreover is the fact that they're 100% automated a material fact to the consumer?

I do think that for a meaningful fraction of first time customers, the choice to try it is about the novelty of it being automated.
In SF I do often see people explaining waymo to out of town visitors, and the uniqueness of "driverless" vs "remote controlled" is part of the appeal.
by RSimmons2021 | 2026-03-14 22:20:14+00:00
Location: Columbus, OH
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Yes
Technologies: TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, React, React Native, Next.js, PostgreSQL, AWS, Three.js, Flask, Docker, Redis, GraphQL
Résumé/CV: https://richard-simmons-portfolio.vercel.app
Email: richard.simmons.dev@gmail.com
Full-stack engineer with 4 years experience. Shipped 2 mobile apps (FocusFi, Lucid) to iOS/Android with 500+ downloads. Built real-time manufacturing dashboards at Toyota serving 10,000+ users, cut load times from 8s to 400ms. Contributed to ai-hedge-fund open source project (45k+ stars) on frontend visualization.
I care deeply about design and draw inspiration from architects like Luigi Colani and Kengo Kuma. Built my portfolio as an interactive 3D PSP-style game using React and Three.js. Product-minded engineer who ships fast and owns problems end-to-end.
by seanwilson | 2026-03-14 22:20:23+00:00
> It is a bit weird to see LLMs suddenly being presented as the reason to follow what are basically long standing best practices.

Maybe it's the speed of LLM iteration that makes the benefit more immediately obvious, vs seeing it unfold with a team of people over a longer time? It's almost like running a study?

I have a similar reaction to strong static types being advocated to help LLMs understanding/debugging code, catching bugs, refactoring... when it's obvious to me this helps humans as well.

Curious how "this practice helps LLMs be more productive" relates to studies that try to show this with human programmers, where running convincing human studies is really difficult. Besides problems with context sizes, are there best practices that help LLMs a lot but not humans?
by ndiddy | 2026-03-14 22:21:34+00:00
Obviously having OpenTTD available for free on Steam would jeopardize Atari's paid rerelease of Transport Tycoon Deluxe, so I think this is a good compromise. Hopefully they rigged it up so the assets from Transport Tycoon Deluxe get picked up automatically by OpenTTD when you install the bundle. I also hope that Atari will be sharing some of the revenue from the bundle with the OpenTTD team as part of this arrangement. They've spent the last 20+ years adding nice quality of life features and keeping the game playable, and I think they deserve to be rewarded for that effort. Going back to stock TTD after playing OpenTTD feels like a massive downgrade, like going from vim to BSD vi.
by jacquesm | 2026-03-14 22:21:52+00:00
You are off-topic.

Besides that, if there is one constant about Raspberry Pi related articles then it is that there is always someone criticizing them no matter how hard they work and no matter how much they've tried to do within the rules as set by their corporate overlords.

Note that the Raspberry Pi is a lucky break and that every time you piss on the project, the founders, the contributors and the people who hold the purse strings you're doing us all no favors because there are some of us that use these things and that are praying that the peanut gallery (usually purists who would rather have nothing at all than something slightly flawed) doesn't one day cause the big boss to say it's all over.

If the Pi doesn't suit you, then don't use it. If you want something else vote with your dollars of show how it is done and if you manage to put something out with the same power, form factor, price point and not have it be controlled 100% by China I will probably become a regular buyer.
by brynnbee | 2026-03-14 22:21:56+00:00
My biggest issue with "the" unemployment rate is that the one everyone hears all the time is around 4-5%. I think this is massively misleading because it lends itself to people thinking if you picked 100 random men from ages 25 to 54, you'd expect about 5 of them to be unemployed. The real number is actually around 20% are unemployed:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060

If you can dismiss 15% of them because they're not actively looking, or being a full-time parent, or disabled, I think it's missing the bigger picture that I would guess almost all of them want to work and have income, but can't due to things that we can fix as a society. Instead we divert to a 5% number that feels like "don't look over here" strategy. It's also entirely not capturing underemployment, which I imagine is a huge issue too.
Show HN: Musicli – A simple lofi music player in the terminal
by bilater | 2026-03-14 22:22:13+00:00
CLIs are all the rage these days so I built one for myself

This was really fun though. This is a 2 part release.

I wanted a no frills music player inside my terminal. Presenting Musicli (yes I'm proud of the name).

You can install it via npm by running
npm install -g @bilalpm/musicli@latest

Once installed you can just run musicli from your terminal and play your music.

It's focused on lofi music but you can play anything. It has 2 modes: Local or Stream.

You can play music from a local folder or add your favorite YouTube channel and listen. You can layer in effects like rain, cafe or fire etc to personalize the vibe you're going for.

And speaking of local music...

The second part of this project is a release of an open-lofi dataset of over 150 lofi songs. These songs were all generated by me using Suno v5 and are owned by myself as a premium member. I'm now donating them to the public domain.

Go download them and enjoy on Musicli!
by morpheuskafka | 2026-03-14 22:22:25+00:00
> custom ways of doing things, instead of furthering efforts like UEFI on ARM.

I thought uBoot was more or less the standard way of booting embedded Linux? Is it really worth bringing the entire UEFI environment, which is basically a mini OS, to such devices? Embedded devices are often designed to handle power loss or even be unplugged by users, so the boot up process is generally as lean as possible.
by sublinear | 2026-03-14 22:22:40+00:00
The longevity of code depends at least on whether it's a product or a service.

Services are what the majority of devs already work on and maintain. There's almost no incentive for anyone to use LLMs for that outside of startups. They do indeed last a long time because the code is as fundamental to the recurring revenue of the business as their legal or accounting or marketing. Devs make changes according to the evolving needs of the business, and "productivity" isn't as much of a priority as accuracy and reliability. The implementation details are very relevant to the business, especially for B2B services that need to meet compliance requirements.

Products, however, have always been disposable code written by people being thrown into a meat grinder. I don't think LLM-generated code is better, but it's probably not that much worse either.
by pmarreck | 2026-03-14 22:23:19+00:00
Who prompted the LLM?

Who vetted the output?

Who ensured there was adequate test coverage?

Who insisted on a certain design?

Who is to blame if it's bad code? That is the same entity that is responsible, and the same entity that "did it"

tl;dr your stance is full of poop, my dude
by agentultra | 2026-03-14 22:23:22+00:00
The end user of a bridge doesn’t care about most things the engineer who designed it does. They care that the bridge spans the gap and is safe to use. The company building the bridge and the group financing its construction care about a few more things like how much it will cost to provide those things to the end user, how long it will last. The engineer cares about a few more things: will the tolerances in the materials used in the struts account for the shearing forces of the most extreme weather in the region?

So it is with software.

You might not need a blueprint if you’re building a shed in your back yard. This is the kind of software that and user might write or script themselves. If it’s kind of off nobody is going to get hurt.

In many cities in North America you can’t construct a dwelling with plumbing connections to a sewer and a permanent foundation without an engineer. And you need an engineer and a blueprint to get the license to go ahead with your construction.

Because if you get it wrong you can make people in the dwelling sick and damage the surrounding environment and infrastructure.

Software-wise this is where you’re handling other people’s sensitive data. You probably have more than one component that needs to interact with others. If you get it wrong people could lose money, assets could get damaged, etc.

This is where I think the software industry needs to figure out liability and maybe professionalize a bit. Right now the liability is with the company and the deterrents are basically no worse than a speeding ticket in most cases. It’s more profitable to keep speeding and pay off the ticket than to prevent harm from throwing out sloppy code and seeing what sticks.

Then if you are building a sky scraper… well yeah, that’s the large scale stuff you build at big tech.

There are different degrees of software with different requirements. While not engineers by professional accreditation, in practice I would say most software developers are doing engineering… or trying.

What I agree with in the article is that AI tools make bad engineering easier. That is for people building houses and skyscrapers who should be thinking about blueprints: they are working under assumptions that the AI is “smart” and will build sky-scrapers for them. They’re not thinking about the things they ought to be and less about things that will pass on to the customers: cost and a product that isn’t fit for use.

A bridge that falls down if you drive too fast over it isn’t a useful bridge even though it looks like a bridge.
by abadmos | 2026-03-14 22:23:39+00:00
People who tailor their CV to each role are 3x more likely to hear back. Most people know this but don't do it because it takes forever, or they paste it into ChatGPT and spend ten minutes writing instructions and fixing the output.

Reframed does one thing. Upload your .docx, paste the job description, get it back rewritten for that role in fifteen seconds. Layout intact, nothing made up.

Free to try: reframed.cc
by dr_kiszonka | 2026-03-14 22:23:55+00:00
That divider with a time stamp on the right is very cute!

I am looking for, in a sense, the opposite of this app. I need an AI-powered IDE-like editor for markdown files. I keep a ton of research notes in markdown and when it comes to writing reports for admins and such, I need something to help me make sense of them, integrate them, reformat, do a "semantic refactoring" across files, diffs. etc. I saw people use Obsidian with some plugins, but I think I need Cursor for markdown. Any suggestions?
by aucisson_masque | 2026-03-14 22:24:02+00:00
Just put an ai behind it already. People will get bored of it and onlyfans will die by itself.

If OF managements can't see what's coming, I think it's well deserved.

Hell, there are even cases of only fans models being entirely AI. photo, video and chat entirely made by ai.

I mean at this point you're better getting a chatgpt subscription, right ?
by enriquto | 2026-03-14 22:24:22+00:00
> I always found it odd that scaling down an image now and then scaling it back to its original size 2 seconds later with the same tool resulted in a loss of quality

I'm honestly baffled at your surprise... say, if you crop an image, and 2 seconds later you enlarge it to its original size; do you expect to get the inital image back? Or a uniform color padding around your crop?

Scaling is just cropping in the frequency domain. Behaviour should be the same.
by realityking | 2026-03-14 22:24:25+00:00
Most European countries (except France and the UK) are not interested in projecting power outside of a fairly narrow geographic area (mostly the European continent and adjacent seas).

These “military starlinks” will be much smaller systems than actual Starlink. The German one plans for 100 satellites.

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-07/airbus-te...
by motoxpro | 2026-03-14 22:24:59+00:00
Programming is one of those things where everyone thinks they are above average, like driving.

If most people are average, then just use the bot to spit out average code. Or better yet, if you are above average, use it to spit out average code and then you need above average code, then write it.

Most programming is boilerplate. Its not faster to type boilerplate than t is to have the robot do it. I promise.

Programming is hard. If it wasn't you wouldn't be getting paid what you do.
by redgridtactical | 2026-03-14 22:25:14+00:00
You're right that the launch cost gap is the real barrier. Europe's been talking about sovereign launch capability for years but Ariane 6 still can't compete on cost with SpaceX. I think the more likely path is that smaller nations lease capacity on someone else's constellation rather than building their own. The question is whether that actually solves the dependency problem or just moves it from one provider to another.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-03-14 22:25:15+00:00
It's actually possible to turn a linear pot into an approximation of a log pot by wiring a resistor in parallel with the wiper and one end. The volume pot is a voltage divider so the amount it "scales" by is given by Scale = Rbottom / (Rtop + Rbottom).

But, if you put a resistor in parallel, you need to work out that:

R = 1 / ((1 / R1) + (1 / R2)) or Rbottom = 1 / ((1 / Rbottom) + (1 / Rfixed)) where Rfixed is the amount you're "bending" it by.

So you could make the amount of "logness" be adjustable by having another (linear) control to vary Rfixed.

You'd work out, for a pot rotation Vol from 0 to 1:

Rbottom = 1 / ((1 / Vol) + (1 / Rfixed))
Rtop = 1 - Vol
Scale = Rbottom / (Rbottom + Rtop)

Now for those better at arithmetic than me, how can you reverse this? Imagine you've got a pot in a piece of equipment with a resistor between the wiper and ground giving a log curve, and you've got to read that with an ADC and turn it back into the linear position of the wiper.

It ought to be possible but I've always sucked at arithmetic.
by tptacek | 2026-03-14 22:25:45+00:00
Why is this the right way to go? It's not solving the problem it looks like it's solving. If your challenge is that you need to communicate with a foreign API, the obvious solution to that is a progressively discoverable CLI or API specification --- the normal tool developers use.

The reason we have MCP is because early agent designs couldn't run arbitrary CLIs. Once you can run commands, MCP becomes silly.

There is a clear problem that you'd like an "automatic" solution for, but it's not "we don't have a standard protocol that captures every possible API shape", it's "we need a good way to simulate what a CLI does for agents that can't run bash".
by everydaynews | 2026-03-14 22:25:55+00:00
Interesting approach — treating agent definitions the way Kubernetes treats infrastructure. The core idea is that your agent's identity, tools, constraints, and execution strategy all live in a single .agf.yaml file, and any runtime (LangChain, ADK, whatever) can execute it via adapters.

The engineering blog goes deeper into the motivation: https://eng.snap.com/agent-format

A few things that stood out to me:

The schema is grounded in POMDP formalism, which gives it a principled foundation rather than being yet another config format

There's a "tighten-only invariant" for multi-agent systems — child agents can never exceed their parent's constraints. Governance gets stricter as you go deeper, never looser

It explicitly separates agent-level constraints from org-level policies. The runtime composes both at execution time

They position it alongside MCP (tools) and A2A (agent communication) — three complementary layers rather than competing standards

The JSON Schema is published, there's an interactive playground on the site, and the spec itself is vendor-neutral. Curious if anyone has tried plugging this into their own stack.
by throwworhtthrow | 2026-03-14 22:26:16+00:00
Another situation where bad actors benefit. From the article:

> What really interests Cian, who has published research[1] exploring how audiences tend to have less trust in media outlets that are transparent about their AI use, is the fact that the Post disclosed its use of algorithmic pricing at all. “If you ask people [whether they] want transparency on what’s behind your pricing strategy, people say ‘yes,'” he says. “But what we found in my research is a paradox, in the sense that people think that they want to know, but once they know, the reaction is worse than not knowing.”

> [1] https://ideas.darden.virginia.edu/AI-disclosure-dilemma
by intoXbox | 2026-03-14 22:26:33+00:00
Great write up and recognisable performance. For a pipeline with many (~50) build dependencies unfortunately switching interpreter or experimenting with free threading is not an easy route as long as packages are not available (which is completely understandable).

I’m not one of these rewrite in Rust types, but some isolated jobs are just so well sorted for full control system programming that the rust delegation is worth the investment imo.

Another part worth investigating for IO bound pipelines is different multiprocessing techniques. We recently got a boost from using ThreadPoolExecutor over standard multiprocessing, and careful profiling to identify which tasks are left hanging and best allocated its own worker. The price you pay though is shared memory, so no thread safety, which only works if your pipeline can be staggered