MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by toast0 | 2026-03-07 17:39:31+00:00
For some items fit and finish can be better if things are assembled with glue/etc rather than screws. Great as long as it doesn't need to be opened.

Keyboard, Trackpad, Screen are a mix of cost and taste. Apple has streamlined product offerings and each model has significant volume. Other vendors either don't have much volume (Framework) or get their volume through a multitude of models and options (Lenovo, HP, Dell), they can't justify engineering costs to get a touchpad made for them, and the Apple one isn't available. Thinkpads models have a spectrum of repairability, so Lenovo probably has some market insights there... they do tend to offer things in less and more servicable generation after generation.

Apple can do well on battery life because they own the hardware design, the cpu design, the firmware, the OS, and at least some of the userland and they have only a handful of models to work with. And they have a roughly incomparable product; it's always Apples vs Oranges, so they can decide to take a 1% perf hit for a 2% battery life gain... whereas if the Lenovo Ryzen Max 390 HyperFighting laptop is 1% slower than the Dell laptop with the same chip, that's bad PR, even if there's 2% battery savings.

Microsoft's own brand laptops could maybe drive better integration of OS and system, but really haven't. Microsoft is busy selling their Cloud, and stuffing Clippy into Notepad. I suspect they don't really want to compete too hard against OEMs anyway.
by kettlecorn | 2026-03-07 17:39:33+00:00
I developed tinnitus a year ago (I'm in my early 30s). I was living in an environment where it was noisy in the morning so I took to wearing sound cancelling headphones and earplugs to sleep.

A few weeks into it I noticed a persistent ringing and I thought it was some sort of electrical wine in an old house. A week later I realized it was permanent so I cut out my sound cancelling sleep routine, but the tinnitus has stayed.
by simonw | 2026-03-07 17:39:54+00:00
I know dozens of people who are in a similar state right now, following the November 2025 moment when Claude Code (and Codex) got really good.

I wouldn't worry about it just yet - this is all very novel, and there's a lot of excitement involved in figuring out what it can do and trying different things.

If you're still addicted to it in three months time I'd start to be concerned.

For the moment though you're building a valuable mental model of how to use it and what it can do. That's not wasted time.
by rramadass | 2026-03-07 17:40:15+00:00
You are making no sense.

Anthropic is selling a model and not applications using that model. The latter is not in their hands but they have drawn two specific red lines over which they are willing to go against the mighty DoW.

If you think that no AI model should be allowed to be used by the Military, then you are living in a clueless la-la land. There are perfectly justified Military/Law-Enforcement uses of AI. What we can demand are controls/oversight by a Human over its usage in a lawful manner. Anthropic has done its part by drawing two red lines and cannot be expected to do more.

It is companies like Palantir who build applications for warfare using Anthropic's (and others) models, enabling features like "shortening the kill chain", "enabling decision compression" etc. who need major oversight.
by lelandbatey | 2026-03-07 17:40:49+00:00
I think the timelines are too short for trends to be completely apparent yet. You can typically hire people faster than you can scale your income sources, even in the face of tremendous demand. Right this moment there's factors pushing folks to fire, but I also do see some companies delivering more (not a lot, but noticably more) and seeing increasing sales as a result. Those are in conflict, and we'll see which way the trends push through time.
by rexpop | 2026-03-07 17:40:58+00:00
The framing of human sociality as a flaw to be eliminated invites the dangerous notion that we can—or should—simply re-engineer ourselves. However, the ambitious project of "rewiring" human nature to eliminate our spontaneous connections and dependencies is not a path to liberation, but the ultimate goal of totalitarianism and oppressive social engineering.

Hannah Arendt explicitly notes that the true aim of totalitarian ideologies is not merely to change political structures, but to achieve "the transformation of human nature itself". When regimes seek total domination over a population, human spontaneity and the unpredictable nature of our social relationships become the greatest obstacles.

To achieve total control, these systems attempt to fabricate a new kind of human species. Arendt observes that concentration camps functioned literally as "laboratories" to test these changes in human nature. The objective was to eliminate human spontaneity and transform the human personality into a mere "thing," reducing individuals to a predictable "bundle of reactions". Arendt compares the success of this psychological rewiring to Pavlov’s dog, noting that conditioning a creature to abandon its natural, spontaneous instincts creates a "perverted animal".

James C. Scott traces a similar impulse in "high-modernist" ideology, which champions the "mastery of nature (including human nature)" through the rational, scientific design of social order. This kind of extreme social engineering requires stripping people of their distinctive personalities, histories, and organic community ties, treating them instead as abstract, interchangeable "generic subjects".

When human beings are placed in environments designed to severely restrict their organic social interactions and enforce rigid functional control, they suffer. Such environments foster a kind of "institutional neurosis" characterized by apathy, withdrawal, and a loss of initiative.

Paulo Freire similarly observes that the drive to completely control people—to "in-animate" them and transform them from living beings into inanimate "things"—is the essence of oppression. He argues that attempting to turn men and women into "automatons" directly negates our fundamental "ontological vocation to be more fully human".

If we were to successfully "rewire" ourselves to no longer need others, we would be executing the very project that authoritarian regimes have historically attempted through terror and indoctrination.

Our "flawed" social dependency and spontaneous need for one another are exactly what guarantee our freedom. To engineer that vulnerability out of the human psyche would not solve the problem of loneliness; it would simply reduce us to isolated, predictable mechanisms, destroying our humanity in the process.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-03-07 17:41:10+00:00
It's insane that all the answers to your comments are disagreeing that those want to do things well and keep learning aren't entering very exciting times.

The negative comments are all agreeing, between themselves (but not with me), that people shouldn't learn anything anymore and shouldn't be inclined to do things well.

It's really just sad to read such negative comments.

As for TFA: TFA is very right in one thing... Secretary jobs didn't entirely disappear. People overreact (which is obvious in all the negative comments anytime AI is the topic) and believe "this time it's the end". It was the same with outsourcing to India/China: people overreacted and were convinced there'd be no more developers.

I do think there are still going to be devs: and it's going to be, precisely, jobs for those who want to keep learning and do things well. And it's not the vast majority: the majority were perfectly happy knowing just the bare minimum to write the equivalent of "punch the monkey" abusive JavaScript ads and picked computing because the pay was good.

I'm very happy to see those replaced by AI.
by ufmace | 2026-03-07 17:41:31+00:00
That seems a bit contrived to me. Okay, that particular place is pretty deeply nested, but it's clearly a regular menu tucked away in there, with a option to show the menu bar. If you turn that on, then those options are half as deep. Or if you don't need to adjust those options, you don't go that deep.

The sibling comment, meanwhile, is complaining about extra space devoted to explicit controls for all of the extra options. Well, you can't have it both ways. If you want to have a lot of features and options, you have to either devote some space in the main UI to them, or have a lot of deeply nested menus like that.

Or I guess you could do a config file somewhere, but IMO that's even worse. If we're going to complain about bad UIs, isn't it even worse than some deeply nested menus to need to open a separate file somewhere else with a separate program and learn whatever config file syntax they happen to use.
by jmyeet | 2026-03-07 17:41:51+00:00
It has been the dream of the wealthy to eliminate labor since at least the Industrial Revolution (and probably much longer). Workers are annoying. You have to pay them. They demand things like time off and safe working conditions. They hurt profits.

Through the 20th century we saw increased automation that displaced so-caleld blue collar workers who were repeatedly told "get better skills" like this was somehow their fault.

In 2000 we had the dot-com crash that saw massive unemployment in the tech sector. A lot of these people left the industry and never came back. The software engineer to plumber pipeline was a real thing.

2008 saw a crash that eliminated entry-level jobs in many white-collar fields that never came back. This decimated the millenials who did the right thing, went to college and accurred massive debt and then found there were no jobs for them so ended up as baristas, working at Walmart or, ultimately, doing gig work.

And now in the mid-2020s, the tech people who told people to do computer science in college are now seeing automation come for their jobs. And now it's somehow an emergency worth addressing. Weird.

The core problem is that if the wealthy succeed and replace all the workers, who will buy their products? How will society survive if people don't have jobs? The only growth area is healthcare because you need everyone from orderlies to surgeons, at least until automation comes for those jobs too.

This is why I think we're headed for systemic collapse. The flood waters keep rising and we're running out of high ground to retreat to.
by kakacik | 2026-03-07 17:42:03+00:00
You live for others? As in remove those others and you lose whole purpose of life? I am not trying to be rude, seems like retirement homes house plenty of such people but it doesn't make sense for younger folks... although this is hardly a choice, is it. But - I believe one can work on this and move themselves quite a bit if wanted.

My 2 cents - mountains and nature and activities in them are always beautiful, as in it doesn't get boring or mundane, not for anybody I know. Working out on oneself, experiencing various adventures, backpacking around the world, sports, adrenaline/risky activities that make you feel alive, seeing cultures and history and food... those are done for oneself and they are absolutely 100% fulfilling that no career could ever deliver.

Saying above as one such person, and also father of 2 amazing kids (and a pretty decent wife to complement) whom I love more than anything. But I don't live for them despite doing various hard sacrifices for them, I live for me and do those things for me, to be happy, content, recharged, better father and husband and when looking back at my life being fine with various choices made.
by ossa-ma | 2026-03-07 17:42:22+00:00
This is a propaganda/marketing post.

1) What 60 year old in tech his entire life only makes a HN account in the last 17 hours?

2) Assuming he wasn't aware of it. What brought the site to his attention and why now?

3) Did not engage with the thread at all after his initial post. Has not engaged with anything else since. You'd think someone introduced to a tech community would be eager to look around and contribute??

I completely understand your sentiment though and it's exactly what makes the OG post so tone deaf.
by jcims | 2026-03-07 17:42:30+00:00
My daughter is T1 as well. This bothers me every time I think about it. You are probably already aware but if your wife is using the dexcom there’s an app called follow that she can add you to to get alerts if things go awry (highs or lows).

She probably won’t want to use it but if she worries about that at all it might provide some peace of mind.
by dlcarrier | 2026-03-07 17:42:51+00:00
Linux's ePBF has its issues, too.

I once was trying to set up a VPN that needed to adjust the TTL to keep its presence transparent, only to discover that I'd have to recompile the kernel to do so. How did packet filtering end up privileged, let alone running inside the kernel?

I recently started using SSHFS, which I can run as an unprivileged user, and suspending with a drive mounted reliably crashes the entire system. Back on the topic of swap space, any user that's in a cgroup, which is rarely the case, can also crash the system by allocating a bunch of RAM.

Linux is one of the most advanced operating systems in existence, with new capabilities regularly being added in, but it feels like it's skipped over several basics.
by kinow | 2026-03-07 17:42:59+00:00
I had fun working with QGIS some years ago, connecting it to GeoServer, mapserver, importing shapefiles, and customizing a few maps. I didn't use as much as the GIS engineers I worked with, but it was definitely a great open source tool.

I had to use ArcGIS too, and while sometimes it performed well, when it didn't it was quite painful to have to deal with the local vendor to implement our features, and troubleshoot bugs in their software.
by numpad0 | 2026-03-07 17:43:34+00:00
Standard Japanese public education through to college/university include ~1k hours total of English classes, changing but still focused on word-for-word translations.

The goal and aim of those classes (I think) is so that 21st century Japanese engineers can decode foreign scientific papers and encode export user manuals on their own.

And so Japanese engineers can interpret and compose English text files as, one would handle C-like code. Consequently read/write data rates as well as emotional grasp are closer to that for code than speech, and the ability also gets dubious quick for anything "platform" specific and not literal. Like, even "to pull off" will cause an exception and quick jump/return with "achieve". It would be fair to say that calling it English literacy is a bit of a stretch.

It will do for many purposes, so in that sense, yes, Japanese people do know English.

There are people(not me) from rich or otherwise unique backgrounds or educated before WWII who use actual English and not that embedded English Lite, they're rare.
by hiremelocally | 2026-03-07 17:44:10+00:00
New roles at my FAANG company are mostly outside HCOL areas, and often outside the US. It's not just outsourcing. These roles have real hiring standards, are getting real work for real teams, and they're remote. Outsourcing feels different this time because it's not some offshore contract team; it's full-time company stuff. Makes me wonder if it's just because WFH proved it works, so why not hire from Krakow?
by accrual | 2026-03-07 17:44:10+00:00
Therac-25 is a great case study for software engineers too, recommend reading the Wikipedia article for anyone who hasn't, it's not too long.

> Previous models had hardware interlocks to prevent such faults, but the Therac-25 had removed them, depending instead on software checks for safety.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

Another interesting part of the story is the user element. The issue was most often triggered by fast, experienced technicians who were able to key commands more quickly than Therac engineers anticipated:

> After strenuous work, the physicist and operator were able to reproduce the error 54 message. They determined that speed in editing the data entry was a key factor in producing error 54.
by cheema33 | 2026-03-07 17:44:26+00:00
I am in my 50s. I agree with what others have said about your happy place. For me, it is not APIs and fine details of operator overloading. I love solving problems. So much so that I hope I never retire. Tools like Claude Code give me wings.

The need for assembly programmers diminished over the decades. A similar thing will happen here.
Show HN: Paster – A keyboard-first clipboard manager for Vim users
by luanderock | 2026-03-07 17:44:29+00:00
Hi HN,
I’ve tried just about every clipboard manager for macOS, but I've always ran into the same two issues: either they were heavy Electron apps that felt sluggish, or they required me to take my hands off the keyboard to find what I needed. Raycast is what I used most of the time, but it's slow in loading screenshots and is search first, meaning I needed to leave the loved home row to scroll down through items.

I built Paster because I wanted something that felt like an extension of my terminal and had instant load of the content being copied. It's written in Rust to keep the latency as low as possible and uses a local SQLite database for history. It's completely private and does not have any telemetry, your data is your own. It does reach to it's domain to validate the license.

Some specific choices I made: - Navigation: I mapped it to j/k and / for search. If you use Vim or a terminal, it should feel like second nature. - Privacy: I’m not a fan of cloud-syncing my clipboard. Everything stays local on your machine. - Quick look: I've added a nice little bonus feature to view each clipboard item in a larger quick look window. Pretty handy for screenshots and offers syntax highlighting for text.

It’s currently a paid app with a 7-day trial. I’m really curious what the community thinks about the "Vim-for-everything" approach. For transparency sake, it's built with help from AI (Gemini) mostly for UI stuff which requires lots of boiler plate.

It's Macos only for now, I do intend to work on a Linux version but no promises.
by grey-area | 2026-03-07 17:44:33+00:00
The stdlib has been very very stable since the first release - I still use some code from Go 1.0 days which has not evolved much.

The x/ packages are more unstable yes, that's why they're outside stdlib, though I haven't personally noticed any breakage and have never been bitten by this. What breakage did you see?

I think protobuf is notorious for breaking (but more from user changes). I don't use it I'm afraid so have no opinion on that, though it has gone through some major revisions so perhaps that's what you mean?

I don't tend to use much third party code apart from the standard library and some x libraries (most libraries are internal to the org), I'm sure if you do have a lot of external dependencies you might have a different experience.
by jitbit | 2026-03-07 17:44:35+00:00
Turning 50 this year.

Coding has never _stopped_ being a passion for me, but my increasingly limited time becomes an issue.

And Claude code (and cursor) saves me So. Much. Time.

I only have 10-20 active years ahead of me, so this is really, really important. Young ppl don’t get it.
by Normal_gaussian | 2026-03-07 17:44:36+00:00
> The challenge is getting this to be a useable way of entering programs.

Well exactly.

When the path between Program A and Program B can only be valid programs, you are going to end up with either a much longer, less intuitive path, or deleting everything and starting again. It can also be quite possible to invent structures which are valid but have no valid path to creating them.
by hnthrow0287345 | 2026-03-07 17:44:54+00:00
This still seems like technical debt to me. It's just debt with a much higher compounding interest rate and/or shorter due date. Credit cards vs. traditional loans or mortgages.

>And six months later you discover you’ve built exactly what the spec said — and nothing the customer actually wanted.

That's not a developer problem, it's a PM/business problem. Your PM or equivalent should be neck deep in finding out what to build. Some developers like doing that (likely for free) but they can't spend as much time on it as a PM because they have other responsibilities, so they are not as likely not as good at it.

If you are building POCs (and everyone understands it's a POC), then AI is actually better getting those built as long as you clean it up afterwards. Having something to interact with is still way better than passively staring at designs or mockup slides.

Developers being able to spend less time on code that is helpful but likely to be thrown away is a good thing IMO.
by handoflixue | 2026-03-07 17:45:02+00:00
> if you restrict moderation to stuff like gore and porn, then you don't need that many moderators.

Have you ever been involved with moderating even a small subreddit or Discord server? I'm on a server with one moderator and it routinely gets spammed while the guy is asleep.

> can't people just unfollow or block others whose opinions they don't want to see?

How do I block people BEFORE seeing the opinions I don't want to see? Trolls can roll up a new account for every single post they make, if they want to.

> there is no obligation to refute bullshit to begin with.

No, but if you're neither blocking nor refuting it, then your community is going to quickly become majority bullshit.
by skygazer | 2026-03-07 17:45:27+00:00
I’ve had tinnitus since I was maybe 5 years old, maybe from my frequent ear infections at the time? I remember discovering it during nap time and noting that silence had a high-pitched, discordant set of tones to it. But I thought it receded when normal sounds, like people talking, tv or music, or wind occurred. It was just the sound of silence.

I still have it, and now I know what it is. I think it’s worse now, but I can still unconsciously ignore it most of the time, although knowing what it is and that it’s aberrant and not something everyone hears has made it psychologically more irritating than when I was young.
by alephnerd | 2026-03-07 17:45:29+00:00
> Makes me wonder if it's just because WFH proved it works, so why not hire from Krakow?

As someone in the room when those decisions were/are made, pretty much.

Additionally, when the COVID recession began (before the stimulus package) most employers were laying off employees on work visas or giving them the option to open and expand offices in their home country.

A lot of senior Indian and Polish Googlers took the offer, and that's how you saw the massive Google expansion in India and Poland over the past few years.

Additionally, the Indian, Polish, Israeli, Romanian, and other governments are giving massive subsidizes to attract GCCs, while states like NC and GA which used to offer subsidizes to open offices in RTP became much less responsive and inefficient due to domestic politics (turns out it's easier for local politicans to be elected on culture war topics instead of tech hub expansion).

I can pick up a phone right now and get connected with senior bureaucrats in Czechia, Poland, and even the UK and India in a day if I offer to open a $20M R&D hub - most US states don't do that anymore.

Edit: can't reply

> For better or for worse, the most desirable places in the US not only refuse to participate in the race to the bottom anymore

Tbf, you don't really need subsidizes to attract business in an already established hub becuase the ecosystem already exists.

A subsidy helps when I am entering a new or unknown ecosystem to mitigate risk.

Additionally, local governments in the major hubs like NYC (even under Mamdani) and SF are fairly responsive to business needs and requests.