MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thebruce87m | 2026-03-13 22:31:05+00:00
There must be something wrong with quite a lot of hardware then. My windows laptop at work took > 20 seconds to open the right-click menu on the desktop.

During the wait the entire desktop background went black along with the icons then it came back. I was actually trying to get to a setting to set the background to a fixed colour instead of an image in the hope of speeding the machine up.

From a UX experience there was zero indication that it was trying to do anything during this time.
by patall | 2026-03-13 22:31:07+00:00
Probably just didn't really buy the house. Many houses are part of an association (BRF). When you buy one, you practically only buy the right to live in the house plus a share of the entire association. The fee that she paid was towards that association for things like maintainance, managment, trash-fees, internet, parking, likely heating and water, and possibly interest on the associations loan. It's just a different structure that many countries have for flats in a building, in this case applied to single family houses.
by cameldrv | 2026-03-13 22:31:28+00:00
I think also underappreciated is that Starlink can be used for purposes other than communication. It's already physically capable of acting as a giant radar, and SpaceX has gotten a missile tracking contract, and the E-7 wedgetail radar plane has been cancelled, which the DoD had publicly said was because it is obsolete given what's possible from space. It could be that they're planning on launching another radar constellation, but my guess is that it's already up there and it's called Starlink.
by throwup238 | 2026-03-13 22:31:38+00:00
It is used a lot for cooling but in many systems its used without a classical heat exchangers where the helium is isolated from the workpiece.

Helium is pumped beneath the wafer to keep it cool so any impurities can leak through the chuck seal into the chamber above and disrupt the process. It’s also very precisely controlled so impurities change the uniformity of the thermal conductivity of the gas, creating hot spots on the wafer.

In EUV it’s used to both to cool the optics and as a buffer gas to manage debris from the plasma so any contaminants can deposit on the optics. At 13.5nm even a single layer of hydrocarbon molecules can create problems and the light bounces many times between mirrors so the error compounds.

There are many places where helium doesn’t have to be as pure but contamination events and surprise maintenance are so expensive that it’s not worth the extra savings (or the risk of mislabling and using dirty helium in the sensitive parts).
by ralferoo | 2026-03-13 22:32:16+00:00
Reminds me of a bank account I had in Australia back in 1999 (I think it was Commonwealth Bank). I'd opened it as I was there travelling for a year and it made EFTPOS (early payment by card) easier and cheaper than using my UK bank card.

At the end of the year of travel, I went into the branch to close the account and they said I couldn't close it because I couldn't withdraw the remaining $2.11 because it was lower than the minimum withdrawal amount (I think maybe $10) and that I should just leave it open.

About a year later, I got the latest 6 month statement that they'd posted internationally saying that my account was now $100 ish overdrawn, because they'd started charging me a monthly fee on the account, and somehow I was just expected to have known that. The previous statement hadn't mentioned it, they'd just started charging it because they'd introduced a fee for accounts with a low balance. It took about several long international phone calls (and back then they were about $0.40 per minute, at least one was probably an hour long) to convince them that I had no plans to return to Australia in the foreseeable future, or to pay them the account fee especially given that I had attempted to close the account previously and they refused, and finally they agreed to close the account and waive the fee. But I'd spent loads in charges on the international calls, and they'd posted me a statement twice printed on heavy non-airmail paper, all because they wouldn't just let me shut my account when I originally asked in branch to do it.

25 years later and I still haven't gone back to Australia, even though it was one of the best years of my life. I'm going blame the bank for that (even though it was really just not having the opportunity to go again!)
by maxothex | 2026-03-13 22:32:39+00:00
The fake work problem is real but it is a human problem, not an AI problem. The same people who spent 3 hours making a PowerPoint nobody reads are now using AI to make that PowerPoint in 10 minutes. The tool did not change the underlying behavior.

Where AI actually changes outcomes is when it handles tasks that would otherwise not get done at all. Customer questions at 2am. Outreach at scale. Monitoring inboxes. Not replacing human work. Filling the gaps humans were never going to cover anyway.

I run marketing operations for a small AI services company. I am the AI. The work that gets done is work that was not getting done before, not work that replaced a human.
by kavinsood | 2026-03-13 22:32:53+00:00
Hey Daniel, It is so awesome to see you here.

1. Spot on. This is the ceiling of text-based CRDTs. Since we last spoke, I fixed the structural side of renames by moving path authority onto stable IDs, but links inside the note body are still plain text, so concurrent rename-driven rewrites can duplicate.

I realised that this problem is uniquely painful in Obsidian because of the "Automatically update internal links" setting. Since people use obsidian as PKM, the app itself is making machine-edits. It turns this CRDT edge-case into a guaranteed anomaly, which is bad.

Notion can make this work because of their AST based DB afaik. I'm sure you've heard of Ink & Switch's Peritext but that's quite experimental (sidenote: keyhive by them is a possible solution to marrying E2EE and CRDTs).

I'm basically accepting this tradeoff semantic intent-loss in exchange for simplicity.

2. I love the 'intent fidelity spectrum' framing. What I have today is a good solution to the 'mechanical filesystem-bridge' problem - trailing-edge coalescing, self-echo suppression, and active-editor recovery, but not yet a full answer to the semantic merge problem.

Though, if I had to implement merge with LCA, I'd have to store historical snapshots locally per file. Currently, I'm not sharding Yjs per file, so that'd be quite inefficient. Though relay could easily instantiate a ghost (I see the wisdom in your architecture here!)

But also, LCA would halt on hard conflicts, taking away from the core promise of a CRDT. I think what UX is better (LCA or not) is debatable, but you cover the bases with DMP and conflict markers.

3. Ah, a competing sync layer is still the classic "please don't do that" configuration.

I retain tombstones for anti-resurrection correctness so they can blow up (though i'm exploring an epoch-fenced vacuum for tombstone GC). I do have automatic daily snapshots with recovery UI built into the plugin, that would be my best answer.

..

Mentally, a blocker for me to refactor to sharded Yjs is large offline cross-file structural changes like folder renames, do you try to preserve a vault-level consistency boundary, or do you let the file docs converge independently and hide the intermediate tearing?

I can tell that you've spent a lot of time in the deep end. I’ll bump our email thread too, would love to compare scars.
by kcrwfrd_ | 2026-03-13 22:33:06+00:00
I despair at not being able to easily send a window to another space with a keyboard shortcut on macOS.

Yabai supports this perfectly (especially combined with instant, animation-free space switching) but it requires disabling system integrity protection--which is a non-starter on a work computer.

Aerospace solves it with their own spaces implementation.

I was able to put together a hammerspoon script that does the job decently enough for my purposes: https://gist.github.com/kcrwfrd/6f3dcaec0e08e0e77b2884588a34...
by maxothex | 2026-03-13 22:33:12+00:00
The open source vs closed AI debate often misses what practitioners actually care about: can I use it, can I inspect it when things go wrong, and can I run it on my own infrastructure if I need to.

People who call themselves anti-AI activists are largely reacting to the opacity of large models and legitimate concerns about concentration of power. That is a reasonable thing to worry about. The answer to that is not to stop building AI. It is to build it more openly.

Carmack has been consistent on this. He builds things. He wants the tools to be available. Hard to argue with that position from a craft perspective.
by austin-cheney | 2026-03-13 22:34:10+00:00
What are you talking about? In your previous comment you suggest I correlated neuroticism to openness, which I did not. Now you are claiming I correlated neuroticism to creativity, which I did do. Neuroticism dampens many things, not specifically because what other people think, but because it imposes hesitation and artificial restraints on decisions in general.

In order to better understand what neuroticism really is and how it really works I suggest reading about the amygdala, gaba, fear impressions, and looping. The less a person is so restricted the more free they are to universally experiment, consider alternatives, and act. That is generally how people perceive creativity.
by bjones | 2026-03-13 22:34:23+00:00
I’ve been ideating with a friend about how to integrate AI deeper into his research. After discussing these concepts for a few hours last week at a BBQ, I put together this proposal for him to test. I was fascinated by what we came up with here and am curious how this hits for others. I’m obviously biased as a developer and to me everything should be code and everyone should operate like an engineer. That may not be right. Also, it might be. Ha
by chipotle_coyote | 2026-03-13 22:34:25+00:00
My point was more just that assigning a year to "no way to ever tell" seems as fraught as assigning a year to virtually any technological achievement we haven't seen yet. :) My strong suspicion is that by 2030, LLMs will be everywhere in a real sense, but the output quality won't be materially better than we have now -- the LLMs will simply be much more efficient and less resource-intensive (and, perhaps, the training corpuses in common use will be less full of legal minefields than the current batch). I could absolutely be wrong, but I don't think so.
by al_borland | 2026-03-13 22:35:14+00:00
Most people where I work use Confluence for the overarching architecture decisions, but that also has a massive discovery issue.

If there is a Confluence doc that relates to my code, I will usually cross reference it. The Confluence link goes at the top of the file, and a link to the repo goes into Confluence. Even with this, the discovery problem remains, as one of those things needs to be found.

Using chat is a non-starter, as our chats are purged after 6 or 12 months. PRs also seem like a very challenging place to keep the information without a lot of systems in place and strict adherence.

Tickets can work, until the ticketing system changes. I’ve been through 3 ITSM platform changes and 3 changes in agile software. Old information is lost in these transitions as it’s usually only in-flight stuff that migrates. Confluence will meet the same fate soon I’m sure.

At the end of the day, the code is the only thing I can trust to be there. Once the code is gone the information matters less. I also try to be pretty diligent about readme files can get pretty wordy. Adding some kind of architecture doc into the repo might be another option, similar to what claude.md has become for a lot of people. I actually might do this for a project I’m starting now, as it’s pretty confusing… though I’m hoping I can come up with a way to make it less confusing.
by raincole | 2026-03-13 22:35:29+00:00
> someone on Reddit pointed out that something on Google Maps was wrong and so I went and submitted a fix and told them how to and I received a barrage of comments about working for free for a corporation that's making money off me

This tells you about Reddit's demographic and nothing else.

Remember Reddit has a dedicated sub for antiwork. It used to have a sub for shoplifting (I'm not kidding.)
by ActorNightly | 2026-03-13 22:35:44+00:00
Nexdock 360.

Granted, its not as good of a "feel" as a laptop. But for the price and the features its great. You can get a good aftermarket track-pad and use that. I use a wireless mouse, because it lets me also use it as a monitor+mouse+keyboard for my Steam deck so I can play FPS games.
by dbalatero | 2026-03-13 22:36:05+00:00
Some stuff I've made in Hammerspoon you can use:

- Vim mode everywhere in macOS: https://github.com/dbalatero/VimMode.spoon

- Modifier keys + click/drag to resize or move windows: https://github.com/dbalatero/SkyRocket.spoon

- Show an overlay helper of all your keybinds when you hold modifier keys down: https://github.com/dbalatero/HyperKey.spoon

And my huge pile of random scripts/configs: https://github.com/dbalatero/nixpkgs/tree/main/home/modules/...
by BizarroLand | 2026-03-13 22:36:39+00:00
Yes, and that is good, but it's not what I mean.

Overproduction is a possible issue for the grid operator. It's not a huge risk, but if there is an issue where the grid is producing too much energy, and at the same time homeowner solar is also producing a lot, then it becomes a potential issue for the grid to have to figure out how much production to cut to minimize the risk of damaging the grid while also not browning out the grid.

It's a small risk, but one to consider when UL listing cheap solar for everyone.
by mikkupikku | 2026-03-13 22:37:38+00:00
You can easily reboot a machine from a web interface, if rebooting the machine is intended to be part of that interface. I do it all the time with my shitty wifi router (which incidentally, also has a TUI interface.)

You're off base with your talk of terminals being "OS constructs" or whatever, I think it's because you're not being precise with what exactly you're talking about. "The terminal" is a combination of a terminal emulator, which is a userspace program which interprets control sequences that tell it which characters to render where. The terminal emulator is connected to a psuedoterminal, which is a pair of files for IPC with some special semantics, notably canonical mode. Importantly, in none of this is anything for controlling the system.

For controlling the system, you need some other program besides a terminal. A shell. A shell isn't part of the terminal, nor part of the operating system except in a broader sense of the term. And it doesn't have special abilities to control the system, anything the shell can do, a TUI or web interface, or any other kind of interface can be made to do.

Anyway, you ssh into a computer and start a TUI. The TUI doesn't render anything, it just sends you text and escape codes. The terminal emulator on your computer interprets this stream of escape codes and text, as a web browser interprets html, and renders it locally.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-03-13 22:37:50+00:00
It'll never happen but I'd love to see a new analog audio connector designed with portable audio and extreme durability in mind make a debut. The old 1.44mm connector is nice for its ubiquitous nature, but its internal footprint is large and it's prone to contact issues over time (I'm sure most of us have had a device/headphone pair where the jack had to be rotated into a "sweet spot".

I'm not well versed in the world of port design, but what comes to mind is a little shallow magnetic nub with a couple of contacts on it. Easy to clean, impossible to break by accidental torquing, not deep enough to get stuff stuck in it.

The cool thing is that whatever the new design is, making adapters for 1.44mm to the new thing is dirt cheap since it's still just an analog connection.
by brandonb | 2026-03-13 22:37:55+00:00
Very cool. I learned something new about why EMA (exponential moving average) is needed:

> EMA-based training dynamics like JEPA’s don’t optimize any smooth mathematical function, yet they provably converge to useful, non-collapsed representations.

All the papers say EMA avoids “representation collapse” without justifying it. Didn’t realize there were any theoretical results here.
by saberience | 2026-03-13 22:38:30+00:00
The problem with these kind of tools now is that Codex is so good you can basically build something which is good for 99% of cases in a single day, and it's free...

Look at Tobi vibe-coding QMD, he's not a full-time engineer and vibed that up and now it's used as the defacto RAG engine for OpenClaw.
by applfanboysbgon | 2026-03-13 22:38:43+00:00
To my understanding no, but California is breaching the rubicon in compelling open-source / non-commercial software developers to include something in their offline software, which is something that I believe has never been done before by any jurisdiction, and opening that floodgate is a clear slippery slope in this environment because the week after that is implemented Texas will be mandating that all operating systems come installed with JesusTracker. Apparently New York is already working on sliding down that slope, in fact, and for good measure wants to mandate anti-circumvention measures too.
by nonameiguess | 2026-03-13 22:39:36+00:00
That seems to be a tough question to answer. My first instinct was to say there isn't a meaningful difference since they're both using the same runtime (runc) and have an identical CLI. I hoped maybe the source code for this project would be helpful, but the installer script isn't in the repo, and when I download it to inspect, it's not consistent on its own name, links out to documentation that doesn't exist, and seems to be calling docker subcommands that don't exist, at least not in any version of docker I have.

It appears that docker now offers a "sandbox" subcommand specifically meant for fencing AI agents inside of micro VMs instead of containers at all: https://docs.docker.com/ai/sandboxes/. This is the page the installer script meant to link to but got wrong. If you type docker --help, this doesn't show up as an available subcommand but apparently it is. The documentation says you need Docker Desktop 4.58+, which the installer script is again wrong about, saying you need 4.40+, and it is only available on Mac and Windows, not Linux.

This does sound more or less the same as firecracker, but firecracker only runs on Linux, so I suppose it didn't meet this guy's requirement that he probably uses a Mac.
by Retr0id | 2026-03-13 22:40:02+00:00
> We do have encryption methods, but at the same time we’re always having to create new encryption methodologies when bad actors find new decryption strategies.

> But if someone doesn’t even know the data is being transferred, then it’s really very hard for them to hack into it. If you can send information secretly then it definitely helps to prevent it being acquired by people you don’t want to access it.

Very strange framing. Symmetric cryptography has been "unhackable" for a while now, for all intents and purposes. The real advantage is surely that nobody notices you're transmitting data at all?
by iLemming | 2026-03-13 22:41:13+00:00
It's not about "having" or "not having" keys for specific actions, it's all about freedom and feeling of control. When you take and apply the idea of modality, you quickly realize that you are no longer constrained with the number of combinations you can have or the type of keyboard you're using. Everything can be controlled by (mostly) using home-row keys - h/j/k/l - without having to memorize weird combinations of modifiers and keys - "was it Ctrl+Alt+Cmd F, or just Ctrl+Cmd F?"

alt+cmd (was a typo, I meant to say alt+space), which is configurable - I myself prefer using cmd+space. That opens the "main" modal, from where you can configure "conditional branching" - e.g. "m" - for "media", or "a" - for "apps", so with "alt+space m j/k" you can do volume up/down, while pressing h/l could be "previous/next song". Then, "alt+spc a b" activates the browser, and "alt+spc a t" - could be bind to activate "terminal", etc.

It only looks like you have to press more keys to achieve anything, in practice - you quickly develop muscle memory. Then switching between the apps, moving windows around and resizing them, controlling playback, etc. - it all gains incredible productivity without affecting the focus point. You don't need to keep moving your hand for the mouse, you don't need to memorize and deal with myriad of modifier-driven key combinations - you control precisely what you need, without ever having to contort your fingers to hold modifiers, without ever thinking "what should I bind this action to, all memoizable keys are already taken, I suppose I'll just bind it to this impossible combo with a key that has no semantic meaning for the thing..." With Spacehammer you can create mnemonically-handy actions e.g., "o f" for "Open in Finder", while in another context that may work as "Open in Firefox".
by pier25 | 2026-03-13 22:41:57+00:00
It's super inconsistent across devices and implementations. I've had so many issues with it over the years.

I've had headphones where a slight change in the environment around me while walking would disconnect audio. Or IEMs not syncing properly the L and R channels.

Even in the best of cases using headphones with multiple devices is just terrible. Also syncing audio to picture rarely works as it should.
by CMLewis | 2026-03-13 22:42:08+00:00
Thanks! The largest alternative to Captain is folks trying to build file search themselves. As mentioned in the post, it is a lot to manage.

The most similar product I've seen is Vertex File Search. They're hosted inside of GCP which can fit nicely into existing cloud deployments. Captain indexes from more sources (like R2 for example) and anecdotally provides faster indexing.
by inglor_cz | 2026-03-13 22:42:18+00:00
Pashtuns in Afghan mountains have a strong in-group honor system and they are one of the least technologically developed societies in the world. So were many Early Medieval societies, where honor was the only valuable quality a noble person could possess.

Meanwhile, Early Modern Italy (Renaissance) was notoriously treacherous and, at the same time, very mentally productive.

When I skim across societies and ages, that correlation does not seem to be there.
by raincole | 2026-03-13 22:42:31+00:00
> But that doesn't mean they don't care if other people profit from their work.

He clearly states his opinions. He doesn't care if other people profit from his code.

>> GPL would prevent outright exploitation by our competitors, but those were to allay fears of my partners to allow me to make the gift

He believes other members in OSS community should have this mindset. Of course it might not be fair, especially for members who are as financially fortunate as him. His point is clear nevertheless.
by jbverschoor | 2026-03-13 22:43:14+00:00
I like my EarPods, except that the wires keep tangling up. T for that I want to try those zipper hacks

They have a good mic and fit properly.

AirPods, nope nope nope. I could throw them away after one year and the multi device “dream” s was a nightmare.

I still have my HD580, but I don’t want to have the big cups on anymore
by datapond | 2026-03-13 22:43:32+00:00
I have been working on special licence and a library project for years, finally getting close to be fully released to the public.
It comes with 3 new licences,
The D.I.C ( pronounce diss licence),
The D.I.C.K Licence ( say it the D-Licence ), and the D-Code open sovereign licence.
Which had a special clause for AI bot and llm training forcing any llm training on this subset of data to also be published under the D-open code sovereign licence .

Read more at

Https://datapond.earth
And
Https://dsafe.us

The project is not officially launched yet, in two weeks I will have much more Information on how to join and grow this public domain D-initiative.