MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Horos | 2026-03-13 10:15:43+00:00
fair point on blocking sends — but that's an implementation detail, not a structural one.

From my pov, the worker pool's job isn't to absorb saturation. it's to make capacity explicit so the layer above can route around it. a bounded queue that returns ErrQueueFull immediately is a signal, not a failure — it tells the load balancer to try another instance.

saturation on a single instance isn't a scheduler problem, it's a provisioning signal. the fix is horizontal, not vertical. once you're running N instances behind something that understands queue depth, the "unfair scheduler under contention" scenario stops being reachable in production — by design, not by luck.

the FrankenPHP case looks like a single-instance stress test pushed to the limit, which is a valid benchmark but not how you'd architect for HA.
by _glass | 2026-03-13 10:16:42+00:00
When doing my Bachelor degree my dad gave me an old thinkpad to run on linux. It was a horrible experience for preparing powerpoints, papers, etc. But I still have that command line muscle memory and an eye to spot errors which really helped me in my career. In my final year I bought myself a macbook because I earned real money doing a consulting internship. But the unix muscle memory stayed, and I found working with IDEs so wasteful. In my first years at my job I rejected word and excel still to do everything in groff and awk.
by bushido | 2026-03-13 10:16:43+00:00
Before AI, as a head of product (who has always written code), I did this thing where when I was thinking through an idea or a product direction, I built the solution three or four times before I found the shape and direction that I liked. And once I liked it, I put it on a roadmap for one or more of my teams to execute on.

Candidly saying before AI is a little disingenuous, because since AI has gotten better in the last year at coding, my workflow has gone back to exactly what it was when I had a 40-person team reporting to me.

I still go through three, four iterations before a final direction is picked. It still takes me two, three weeks to think through an idea. Three things have changed.

1. When I think of a possible direction, a new version gets spun up within minutes to a couple of hours, usually in a single shot.
2. I can work through more big ideas which require some amount of coding-based ideation than I could previously.
3. And when a direction is decided on, the idea comes in to deliver the outcomes at a much quicker pace. Previously, it could have been 1 month of ideation + 2-8 sprints, now it's 2-4 weeks of ideation and 1-2 days to final delivery.

All in all, while I can see where the author is coming from, the grief has been different for me.

I've had a lot of good developers, product managers, product owners, and designers that have had the privilege of helping develop their skills in the past. That was the necessity of ensuring that we were developing talent who would then go on to produce good work on our teams.

And I'm at a stage now where a three-person team that I have can produce more than the 40 could, and I am likely never going to need to develop the skills the way I used to. The loss is not from coding, I thoroughly enjoy how that's evolved. The loss is from the white space around it.
by Timon3 | 2026-03-13 10:17:59+00:00
There's more than enough of them to materially affect election outcomes. The number of votes you'd have to change to flip the outcome of the last few elections was very small, and the parties have a very good idea of which locations they'd have to disturb to achieve the greatest effect.

Now imagine you're a voter who shows any signal of potentially being Dem-aligned - for example a slightly darker complexion, or maybe dyed hair. On your way to the polling station, masked ICE goons "scan your face" with their AI apps, and the apps tell them you're illegal, so they put you into a van and drive you to a holding facility.

What recourse do you have? Even if they let you go the next day, you've lost your vote. And that's not a given, what if they hold you for weeks or months? How many people have others who depend on them, so they can't risk this?

I don't mean to sound dramatic, but if anything like this happens (and there's basically no way it won't) the fascist takeover is complete, and your only recourse left is civil war.
by btown | 2026-03-13 10:18:58+00:00
In a forum/community context, speed is vital! If it takes an order of magnitude more time to generate responses like yours and mine, one must choose which conversations one participates in much more carefully, and every such investment risks having the context of the conversation shift dramatically while drafting a response - to the point that one might be considered rude or disconnected. That makes participation essentially impossible.

Someone with a slower rate of both reading and creating text would benefit less from LLM assistance, to be sure. But someone who can read quickly, but may only be able to generate/select a few bits of entropy per second due to physical limitations? (Human speech is widely cited at a median of 39 bits per second.) They’d benefit massively from a system that could generate proposed responses that could be chosen from and refined.

In other words, if you’re the oracle, and the machine asks multiple choice questions until it is certain it speaks with your voice - is there a better set of such questions than just letter-by-letter a-z, a-z, a-z? Does that imply the content is AI-edited? Or is it an accessibility tool?
by sebastiennight | 2026-03-13 10:20:04+00:00
I've written multiple books, the most recent in 2019. I used to love the em-dash, and considered it the superior form of ellipsis (over the parenthesis, comma or semicolon).

I'm not planning on writing new books now, but if I did, I would completely get rid of em-dashes, because of their second-order effect of making the copy AI-written (and therefore less valuable).

It's also interesting that using a Skill that discouraged the use of em-dashes, I noticed that Claude's "thinking" internal dialogue actually disagreed with the Skill spec itself ("no, actually, em-dashes are perfectly normal and not a sign of AI writing") and therefore kept the dashes, against the Skill instructions.
by alpaca128 | 2026-03-13 10:20:40+00:00
I'd say the low end is closer to a Raspberry Pi or perhaps a used old Thinkpad. A $600 machine with good single-core performance is only low end if you ignore everything outside the Apple product lines.

> trackpad is only incrementally better than what was available in Chromebooks and cheap PCs

Did you use a touchpad of an old cheap PC? Apple would not dare to use one comparable to that in their wildest nightmares.
by josephg | 2026-03-13 10:20:43+00:00
Sometimes I wonder if package names, bucket names, github account names and so on should use a naming scheme like discord. Eg, @sometag-xxxx where xxxx is a random 4 digit code. Its sort of a middleground between UUID account names and completely human generated names.

This approach goes a long way toward democratizing the name space, since nobody can "own" the tag prefix. (10000 people can all share it). This can also be used to prevent squatting and reuse attacks - just burn the full account name if the corresponding user account is ever shut down. And it prevents early users from being able to snap up all the good names.
by graemep | 2026-03-13 10:20:59+00:00
I have often wondered why it is still acceptable to call Native Americans "Indians".

It is an extremely colonial term, but its used in the country that is the most sensitive about using such terminology. It originates in a marketing term to cover the failure of someone who was, among other things, a slave trader.

On top of that it is ambiguous and often causes confusion, as here, so its not even a useful term.

Surely its time to drop it?
by sebastiennight | 2026-03-13 10:23:34+00:00
> Given you're interacting with a competent hacker (i.e. a person who is into tech not for money and for tinkering), you can't impress them.

I disagree with this and would instead consider that a technical expert (in any field) being impressed with your work can be the most satisfying reward of craft.

Laypeople can be awed, but the expert can bestow an entirely different quality of respect to your work.
by umarniz | 2026-03-13 10:23:58+00:00
Talking about staring at interfaces, I got my first Pentium computer when I was 7 in a village in Pakistan. I spent all day fooling around and accidently stumbled upon quick basic. Having nothing to do I learnt how to code because the help menu listed all the commands and the interpreter gave errors when I did something wrong.

With a clear feedback loop and the insane motivation of a child I learnt to make games/software on basic which ended up defining my life.

Sometimes we overthink it, all a child needs is a safe environment to fool around and letting them be obsessed about things.
by tlogan | 2026-03-13 10:24:32+00:00
This has nothing to do with AI.

There are also a few questions that remain unanswered:

- Did she have previous arrests, and did they use booking photos to identify her? I found someone named Angela Lipps who was arrested in 2001, 2003, 2017, and 2019. The 2017 arrest was for a probation violation: https://archive.ph/CpmXu
The 2019 arrest was for public intoxication: https://archive.ph/yjFL9

- Another confusing detail is that she was in jail for four months without being extradited. That is quite unusual, unless the local authorities were holding her on unrelated charges.

So this news story seems to have nothing to do with AI. It is also very light on details about the case and what actually happened. And actual criminal case here.
Ask HN: Uploaded a post and it was [dead] within a minute
by _ananos_ | 2026-03-13 10:25:25+00:00
Just published a blog post -- when I am logged in I get the entry appearing in the <new> section, but when I log out, I don't see it at all -- I asked a colleague to check, and it seems it got flagged as [dead]. Can you help me understand what was wrong so that it doesn't happen again?

thanks!
by Khaleel7337 | 2026-03-13 10:25:59+00:00
I built Jeriko because I think most AI tools are being designed in the opposite direction from Unix.

A lot of current agent systems feel like monoliths: huge prompt surfaces, hidden state, vague permissions, and too much “magic”. That’s fine for demos, but once an AI can touch your terminal, files, browser, and accounts, I think that model starts to break down.

The idea I’m exploring with Jeriko is simpler:

keep execution on the user’s own machine

expose small machine-level primitives

compose workflows instead of hiding everything inside one giant agent

make permissions and boundaries more explicit

So the thing I’m really testing is not “can I make an AI OS”.

It’s more:

does Unix philosophy map to AI at all?

Meaning:

should AI systems be built more like small composable tools?

are CLI/process/file/browser primitives the right abstraction?

does nondeterminism make Unix-style boundaries more important, or does it make the analogy fail?

I’d especially love feedback on 3 things:

whether this framing is actually useful or just romantic Unix nostalgia

what permission/sandbox model you’d expect before trusting something like this

whether local-first AI tooling is meaningfully better than hosted agent products, or just harder to build

Happy to answer technical questions and criticism.
by jigglypuff-mab | 2026-03-13 10:27:06+00:00
This is the part that always gets glossed over in the "AI will solve everything" narratives: these systems don't fail gracefully. They fail with confidence.

The real problem isn't that the AI made a mistake—it's that everyone in the chain deferred to it. The technology became an excuse to stop thinking critically. "The algorithm said so" is the new "I was just following orders."

We need less faith in these tools, not more.
by AngryData | 2026-03-13 10:28:24+00:00
Ehh, you can still do stuff when it is dark and there are plenty of crafts and tasks you can do in extreme low light on top of just socialization. Its not like northern people slept hours longer than southern people, or that people sleep way longer during the winter. The moon creates plenty of light outdoors for things, and if you don't have fires going and it is a clear sky even the stars are bright enough to walk around through open outdoor spaces. Not to mention nearly everybody had some sort of fire pit at home that they used daily for warming or cooking food and drink.

Personally I think this misconception only exists because people alive today have never had to or tried to do things in the dark or extreme low light conditions. You can't do everything, but there is a lot you can do, especially if you aren't constantly blinding yourself for 20 minutes at a time by looking at bright modern light sources. We even have the notion of a harvest moon, because you can work easily outside during a full moon, and fishing by moonlight is a thing and has been since before electricity.

Also candles may be expensive, but they are far from the only lighting option and certainly nowhere near the cheapest. Candles were prized for how nice and consistent and hands-off they were along with not smelling nearly so much or being as smoky or sooty. Rush plants, or others, dipped in any kind of oil or fat or resin make portable candle-like light, and also simple oil lanterns themselves you can place on a floor or table which date back to atleast 10,000BC. You can also use fatwood sticks, the wood of a tree like a pine that is sometimes soaked with pine resin and would be split into thin sticks that burn really nice and bright and long.
by mrob | 2026-03-13 10:29:03+00:00
The optimal amount of generative AI in the world is zero. There are three possible scenarios, all of them bad:

1. Weaker than expected AI.

Great Depression 2.0. Widespread poverty and suffering as the enormous investments already made fail to pay off.

2. AI works as expected.

Dystopia. A few trillionaires gain absolute control of the entire world, and everyone else is enslaved or killed.

3. Stronger than excepted AI.

Hard take-off singularity scenario. Extinction of all biological life.

It's probably hopeless to resist at this point, but we should at least try.
by yoshuaw | 2026-03-13 10:29:27+00:00
For the past seven years I've been urging people to stop using `select!` in async Rust code and use dedicated structured control flow primitives instead. Correct use of `select!` cannot be guaranteed by the compiler [1], and so it's unsurprising it leads to bugs.

For the first example the better option would be to use the `race` operation [2]. For the second it would be better to use `ConcurrentStream` [3]. Many (but not all) of the issues people have with cancellation in async Rust can be improved with the advice: "don't use select!".

[1]: https://blog.yoshuawuyts.com/futures-concurrency-3/#issues-w...

[2]: https://docs.rs/futures-concurrency/latest/futures_concurren...

[3]: https://docs.rs/futures-concurrency/latest/futures_concurren...
by simianwords | 2026-03-13 10:29:43+00:00
fair, you have presented specific niche where the ~quality~ correctness is important in enterprise - not just libraries.

but most people aren't writing code in those places. its usually CRUD, advertisement, startups, ecommerce.

also there are two things going on here:

- quality of code

- correctness of code

in serious reusable libraries and opensource tools, quality of code matters. the interfaces, redundancy etc.

but that's not exactly equal to correctness. one can prioritise correctness without dogmatism in craft like clean code etc.

in most of these commercial contexts like ecommerce, ads - you don't need the dogmatism that the craft camp brings. that's the category error.
by SuperHeavy256 | 2026-03-13 10:30:13+00:00
Thank you thank you thank you for writing this. This made me smile and feel like shedding a tear. This is exactly how I felt when I watched the Dave2D video of the MacBook Neo, and other "reviews" that miss the entire point. This captures the point. The other reviews capture specs. This captures the emotion. This captures the reality.
by adriand | 2026-03-13 10:30:17+00:00
> What exactly is so exciting? I'm not disagreeing but when you say "opportunities I'm racing towards," what does that mean? This idea of "racing towards" sounds so frenetic

For me specifically it means two products, one that is something I have been working on for a long time, well before the Claude Code era, and another that is more of a passion project in the music space. Both have been vastly accelerated by these tools. The reason I say “racing” is because I suspect there are competitors in both spaces who are also making great progress because of these tools, so I feel this intense pressure to get to launch day, especially for the first project.

And yes it is very frenetic, and it’s certainly taking a toll on me. I’m self-employed, with a family to support, and I’m deeply worried about where this is all going, which is also fuelling this intense drive.

A few years ago I felt secure in my expertise and confident of my economic future. Not any more. In all honesty, I would happily trade the fear and excitement I feel now for the confidence and contentment I felt then. I certainly slept better. But that’s not the world we live in. I don’t know if my attempts to create a more secure future will work, but at least I will be able to say I tried as hard as I was able.
by tamimio | 2026-03-13 10:30:26+00:00
> Overshare, but look stupid

I am definitely positioning myself in this category, even here in HN discussions, I prefer to do so rather than overthinking and undersharing. The reason was because few years ago I had an interview, and the company saw my portfolio and the work I did and they were overhyped about having me, they gave me 5 stars service to get me to the company HQ for the interview, but in real life I am too humble and not much of an over seller of myself, so the bar they had about me was waaay higher than how I was IRL, and got rejected haha, it was brutal rejection because I really wanted to work there and they evaluated me based on the few hours interaction rather than what I am able to do. Since then I try to keep the bar low early on and take it from there.
by commandersaki | 2026-03-13 10:30:54+00:00
I grew up tinkering with linux since 2.0.x days up until 2.4.x lamenting on how Linux needs to take over Microsoft. Then sudden (legal) blindness hit, and computers were becoming difficult to use. Took a punt on a powerbook 12" at the time, and learned the accessibility features and never looked back. I do 90% of things in a terminal on a mac today, but Windows / Linux is the real limited OS for me due to lack of accessibility features rendering them unusable.
by jorams | 2026-03-13 10:32:37+00:00
Notably Discord stopped using that format two years ago, moving to globally unique usernames.

Their stated reason[1] for doing so being:

> This lets you have the same username as someone else as long as you have different discriminators or different case letters. However, this also means you have to remember a set of 4-digit numbers and account for case sensitivity to connect with your friends.

[1]: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/12620128861463...
by JuniperMesos | 2026-03-13 10:33:04+00:00
This one seems pretty reasonable - according to the article, the cops pulled him over for swerving lanes (driving unsafely on public roads in a reasonable thing to want to police), and then discovered that he was driving on a suspended license, which he admitted to (it's reasonable to have a system for suspending peoples' drivers licenses that is enforced by the police). The police find the pill bottle and don't believe him when he tells them it's a legitimate drug, then "conduct[..] multiple field drug tests, which produced a positive result for fentanyl. Getchius was taken into custody and transported to the Greenwood County Detention Center. Shortly after, another drug test was completed and returned positive results for cocaine."

So it wasn't just the pill bottle, it was multiple other drug tests. I think you could make a reasonable argument that drug use shouldn't constitute a crime in and of itself - although it probably should if you're driving a car, for legitimate traffic safety reasons, I don't find DUI laws objectionable. Or you could make an argument that the criminal justice system shouldn't interfere with peoples' decision to use and sell drugs. I'm sympathetic to this myself, but I think especially in the case of opioids like fentanyl, the situation where government paternalism makes it illegal to sell opioids probably discourages enough destructive use of these drugs by unwise or already-addicted people that it's still net-positive in terms of human welfare. I suspect a society where it was simply legal to use and sell opioids would have a lot more human suffering in it than our own (possibly because in the absence of laws banning open opioid dealing, people who are close to severe opioid addicts might simply commit vigilante murders of suspected opioid dealers, and be left unconvicted by sympathetic juries). And once you hold the position that it's legitimate for the government to legally restrict the sale and use of these drugs, then you necessarily have to have something like police and something like a criminal justice system that investigates whether a person might be actually using and selling opioids and then lying about it.

The fact that the guy was in fact once addicted to some drug and "was working at rehab and addiction centers in Florida at the time of his arrest." is additional evidence that he might have returned to drug use, and there's no way to make cops who investigate opioid-related crimes not think this.
by orbital-decay | 2026-03-13 10:33:53+00:00
>Somewhere a kid is saving up for this. He has read every review. Watched the introduction video four or five times. Looked up every spec, every benchmark, every footnote. He has probably walked into an Apple Store and interrogated an employee about it ad nauseam. He knows the consensus. He knows it’s probably not the right tool for everything he wants to do.

Anywhere in the world, the kind of kid that does all this and installs Blender on it is WAY more likely to save up for any janky terrible half-working PC laptop with a bit better specs (memory in particular), or a desktop computer if possible, because A. games B. Linux C. piracy and more software D. he does not care about it being Apple or "just working", in the words of the author himself. I don't know how the US kids in particular feel about this since the reality distortion field is so strong, but anywhere else it's like this.
by mapcars | 2026-03-13 10:35:19+00:00
Proof of correctness would be fantastic, but I have yet to see it in action. LLMs maybe could do it for simple program, but I'm pretty sure it will fail in large codebases (due to context limits), and types help a lot in that case.

> for "explorative computing", proof-of-concepts, RAD or similar that tends to get in the way

I would even argue that its better to have typed system even for POCs, because things change fast and it very often leads to type errors that need to be discovered. At least when I did that I often would do manual tests after changes just to check if things work, with typing in place this time can also be minimised.
by chris_money202 | 2026-03-13 10:35:21+00:00
There’s different levels to stupidity as well, coming up with a “bad” idea, writing a very brief prototype of it, and presenting it to a senior for feedback is one level that is typically harmless. Coming up with a “bad” idea, going skunkworks on it and when you think you have something demoing it to many seniors and managers and showing them you’ve been working out of scope for a month on a bad side project that doesn’t work while the rest of the team is burdened in tasks is another much higher level