MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by myrmidon | 2026-03-06 23:02:04+00:00
> it’s not fair that the upper class should have to shoulder the majority of the tax burden.

I don't know what the definition of "upper class" is to you, but from my view anyone that earns most of his income not by working himself but by others working for him in some form (capital gains, rent, employees, ...) draws wayyyyy outsized use from the state compared to an average citizen. Not only does the state provide enforcement, but also infrastructure, education for workers, a framework to solve disputes, ...

So those people should also pay morefor that privilege. Note especially how companies taking over the roles of a state is not really a thing anymore (company towns, providing education, solving disputes, internal paramilitary, etc): Everyone realizes they are getting a brilliant deal, and no one actually wants to take over those functions (despite lots of people whining about government inefficiency all day long).

All this is much more valueable and useful the bigger your whole money making enterprise is, obviously.

> I don’t agree with this claim. Bloomberg outspent his opponents to an absurd degree, which resulted in him losing by an embarrassing amount.

What is your claim? Media/campaign spending most obviously has a large effect on voting outcomes, because otherwise people wouldn't spend billions on it.

I'm not saying that by spending money you can literally win every election ever, my point is just that sufficient media spending alters voting outcomes most drastically. You don't even need to play the political circus yourself to get access (just consider Musk spending a good chunk and basically getting the DOGE thingy in return).

> I don’t agree that wealth inequality results in less opportunity for anyone.

In a very obvious way, wealth already buys you time, the most valuable opportunity cost for anyone-- time that an average person would need to spend breadwinning for themselves/family.

Education, business contacts, employees and machinery of all kinds are up for sale as well.

If wealth is stratified, the number and kinds of opportunities available to people will necessarily become much more different as well.
by hunterpayne | 2026-03-06 23:03:07+00:00
Its not hard. Its capital intensive with a low profit margin. So it doesn't attract a lot of competition because you can make more money in other ways that have moats. There are at least a dozen other chat apps, some of which are decades old.

To have a successful chat business, you need the network effect of lots of users (big marketing spend), you need lots of capital for operations (big spend on disks and compute) and after all that you get only a few dollars per user. Its just not a great business on the balance sheet. Notice that quality software doesn't even get a mention in this niche.
by himata4113 | 2026-03-06 23:03:18+00:00
Use After Free Use After Free Use After Free Use After Free Use After Free Use After Free Use After Free.

I would be more satisfied if they gave a proper explanation of what these could have lead to rather than being "well maybe 0.001% chance to exploit this". They did vaguely go over how "two" exploits managed to drop a file, but how impactful is that? Dropping a file in abcd with custom contents in some folder relative to the user profile is not that impactful other than corrupting data or poisoning cache, injecting some javascript. Now reading session data from other sites, that I would find interesting.
by ajxs | 2026-03-06 23:04:58+00:00
I use Ada for a lot of projects where C would otherwise be the default language of choice. I find that I spend much less time getting tied up debugging silly errors. In a lot of cases, Ada makes it difficult to do things the wrong way. When I move from working in C to Ada, there isn't much I miss, but when I move the other way around, I feel like I'm missing so much!
by borski | 2026-03-06 23:05:13+00:00
It depends on whether or not you like that style of writing. It has always been consistent with Galloway; I like it, but I prefer listening to it over reading it.

Whereas I definitely prefer reading PG’s writing over listening to it, interestingly enough.

Just personal preference. Scott’s a good storyteller; if you let him finish the story. :)
by BeetleB | 2026-03-06 23:05:16+00:00
> What if i told you some big tech jobs let you earn $300k+ a year, while take 4 weeks+ time off, and working 40hrs a week?

Acknowledged in my original comment. The key word is "some".

And my point is that people earning half that in Europe tend to go on more vacation travel than those earning the same amount in the US.
Show HN: Natural language queries for Prometheus Kafka metrics (StreamLens)
by muralibasani | 2026-03-06 23:05:37+00:00
I've been working on an open-source Kafka topology tool called StreamLens and just added a new feature: natural language queries for Prometheus Kafka metrics.

Many Kafka clusters expose metrics through Prometheus, but troubleshooting usually still requires remembering metric names and navigating multiple dashboards.

In this update, StreamLens can ingest a small set of important metrics and make them queryable through the built-in AI chat panel.

Example:

Prometheus metric
under_replicated_partitions

Instead of searching dashboards, you can ask:

“How many partitions are not fully in sync with replicas?”

The assistant maps the question to the relevant metric and returns the value.

Prometheus metrics are also now used for producer detection, which helps identify active producers in environments where JMX is not available (for example managed Kafka services).

The goal is to make Kafka troubleshooting more conversational — asking questions about cluster health instead of searching across multiple monitoring tools.

Repo:
https://github.com/muralibasani/streamlens

Would be interested in feedback from people running Kafka clusters on:

- which metrics are most useful during incidents
- whether natural language queries for metrics are actually helpful
- other Prometheus metrics worth integrating
by HanClinto | 2026-03-06 23:05:43+00:00
I never played it, but from what I've heard, it sounds like the original Star Wars: Galaxies MMO (before they added all the NGE stuff?) had fairly mundane / commoner roles as well.

It sounds like a fan-driven reboot of this game has a fairly decent following, in a very similar way to what UO experiences? It feels like there is still player desire to have mundane sorts of immersive RPG experiences in this way.
Show HN: NeoNetrek – modernizing the internet's first team game (1988)
by yuriksan | 2026-03-06 23:05:50+00:00
Netrek is a multiplayer space battle game from 1988–89, widely considered the first Internet team game. It predates commercial online gaming by years, ran passionate leagues for decades, and is still technically alive — but getting a server up has always required real effort, and there’s been no easy way to just play it in a browser.
NeoNetrek is my attempt to change that:
Server: Based on the original vanilla Netrek C server, modernized with simpler configuration and containerized for one-command cloud deployment. There are ready-made templates for Fly.io and Railway, and public servers already running in LAX, IAD, NRT, and LHR. Anyone can self-host using the deploy templates in the GitHub org.
Client: A new 3D browser-based client — no downloads, no plugins, connects via WebSocket. I built it starting from Andrew Sillers’ html5-netrek (github.com/apsillers/html5-netrek) as a foundation and took it in a new direction with 3D rendering.
Site: neonetrek.com covers lore, factions, ship classes, ranks, and an Academy to ease the notoriously steep learning curve.
A significant portion of the code and content was developed with Claude as a coding partner, which felt fitting for a project about preserving internet history.
GitHub org: https://github.com/neonetrek
Play now: https://neonetrek.com
by 20k | 2026-03-06 23:06:25+00:00
I mean, is it really that hard to find information in the docs?

Like, if I want to find out what, I don't know, "GetQueuedCompletionStatus" does. I google

GetQueuedCompletionStatus

Find this page:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/ioapiset...

Bam, that's the single source of truth right there. Microsoft's docs are pretty great

If I use an LLM, I have to ask it for the documentation about "GetQueuedCompletionStatus". Then I have to double check its output, because LLMs hallaucinate

Doubly checking its output involves googling "GetQueuedCompletionStatus", finding this page:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/ioapiset...

And then reading the docs to validate whether or not what its told me is correct. How does this save me any time?
by phil21 | 2026-03-06 23:06:56+00:00
Hard to take much of this too seriously, since there are total misrepresentations like this:

> Their automated reputation management system actively maintains the "cleanliness" of leased IPs, ensuring they don't end up on blacklists — which is a polished way of saying they launder IP reputation as a service.

No, as someone who leases some unused blocks via IPXO the entire point of the reputation management system is to centralize abuse reports for them to respond to so they get categorized, tracked, and handled. If more than a few come in the lease gets canceled as that’s against the AUP. I’ve had folks lease a /24 and try some dirt with it, only for IPXO to pull the route within hours. Far faster than I could have responded.

As an ip holder I don’t want my resources being abused and added to blocklists so this is important to me. I do indeed plan on taking them off the market for my own use as my IPv4 usage needs increase over time. Until then, leasing them was a way to be able to justify the money spent acquiring some blocks before I got entirely frozen out forever by the hyperscalers and giant companies of the world eating practically every large block they could get their hands on.

It’s future proofing my digital sovereignty. IPv4 scarcity is used by the AWS of the world to reduce competition and choice.

Geolocation is such a stupid game as it is. I’m in strong support for anything that makes it even more obviously worthless. It’s been gamed by those with the skills and access since it first existed. The internet would be a better place without it.

The Whois database stuff is actually a decent point, and I’m working on some ways to automate RIR registration this weekend as chance has it.

From time to time I do indeed check where my blocks get advertised and utilized. One /22 right now is being used by a broadband ISP in Europe - and via nmap, traceroute, and BGP looking glass it appears to be legitimate, or at least quite well faked. The other blocks are colo and dedicated server providers competing with AWS/GCP/etc. Who knows what those customers are doing with them - probably a mix of good and bad like everything on the Internet. Functioning as-intended imo. If I'm helping reduce the need for CGNAT and helping a small company stand up to the giant tech conglomerates eating the world I'm calling it a job well done.
by koliber | 2026-03-06 23:09:10+00:00
Be careful to make judgement calls like this.

I've been running the same job ad for 2 years now, as a recruiter for a big Canadian bank. I've been laughed at for having ridiculously unrealistic standards. I've been accused of running ghost ads.

I'm in the process of hiring the 13th person using this same job ad for new and existing teams that need a very particular type of engineer.
by 20k | 2026-03-06 23:09:40+00:00
Except you have no idea if what the LLM is telling you is true

I do a lot of astrophysics. Universally LLMs are wrong about nearly every astrophysics questions I've asked them - even the basic ones, in every model I've ever tested. Its terrifying that people take these at face value

For research at a PhD level, they have absolutely no idea what's going on. They just make up plausible sounding rubbish
by prescriptivist | 2026-03-06 23:09:41+00:00
> Is there no longer any need to think about new software paradigms, build new frameworks, study computer science, because the regurgitated statistical version of programming is entirely good enough?

All I'm saying is you're gonna have to figure out how to do this with an agent. It's not that I don't see value in the craft; it's just that value is less important. As far as the new paradigms, the new frameworks, new studies in computer science -- they still exist, it's just that they are going to focus on how to mitigate heisenbugs, performance regressions and security holes in agent written code. Who knows.. in five years most of the code written may not even be readable. I'm not saying it's going to be like that, but it's entirely possible.

In the meantime, there's nothing stopping you from using the agent to write the code that is every bit as high quality as if you sat down and typed it in yourself. And right now there is a category of engineers that exclusively use agents to create quality software and they are more efficient at it than anybody that just does it themselves. And that category is growing and growing every day.

I may be out a job in five years because all of this. But I am seeing where this is going and it's clear and so I'm going to have to change with it.
by 27bstroke6 | 2026-03-06 23:09:44+00:00
I was fortunate to work for and with him during his philanthropic career. He was every bit as influential, far-sighted, and effective in doing good as he was in building software.

When he sold Aldus, he pocketed around $100M. The very first thing he did, literally that same year, was to found the Brainerd Foundation and put $40M into its endowment. (It's since full spent out and wound down operations in 2021.)

I'll say it again: THE FIRST THING HE DID WITH HIS WINDFALL WAS TO GIVE NEARLY HALF OF IT AWAY. (And he still had plenty -- and he would ultimately give a lot of that money too!)

Imagine if all of the tech billionaires who would follow in his footsteps had taken that as their north star.

He was a giant. We would all do well to emulate his intellect, his vision, his decency, and his generosity.
by rodchalski | 2026-03-06 23:10:19+00:00
Nice catch on the supply chain layer. Static analysis for the 537 flagged tools (crypto miners, SSH backdoors, .env readers) is exactly the right tool — that's the pre-deploy trust boundary.

The adjacent problem worth thinking through: what a clean tool is authorized to do at runtime. A tool that scores 95/100 can still call arbitrary tools the agent has access to, read context it shouldn't touch, or request external resources — if the agent doesn't scope what it grants at execution time.

Two separate trust questions:
1. Can I trust this code? (your scanner)
2. What is this tool allowed to do once running? (runtime scope enforcement)

The attack vector your scanner can't see: a clean tool that gets hijacked via prompt injection to call other tools in the agent's context. That bypasses static analysis entirely — it's why runtime authorization has to be its own enforcement layer, not a downstream assumption.

Curious if you're thinking about behavioral profiling alongside the static score — what a skill actually calls during test execution vs. what it declares in its manifest.
by ua709 | 2026-03-06 23:10:46+00:00
I'm not sure the nation wide raw statistics are that reliable in the field of software engineering without interpretation.

In the 90s tons of people who were de facto software engineers were listed as "Information Technology Workers". I suspect a lot of that still hasn't been shaken out of the system.

According to the BLS in the year 2000 there were 3.4 million information technology workers.
by m463 | 2026-03-06 23:12:17+00:00
I wonder if this word salad means our devices will "route around" if we don't hook to wifi or bluetooth?

Will our smart televisions not need to piggyback on our "consumer traffic" and just send ACR and ads on their own private/commercial connections?

nowadays all cars have sim cards. Will the technology cheapen this sort of thing so all devices will connect to 6G?
by thebruce87m | 2026-03-06 23:12:37+00:00
I think you responded to the wrong person, unless you think I was implying that the extra bits needed for ECC didn’t need extra space at all? I wasn’t suggesting that - just that they aren’t like a checksum that is stored elsewhere or something that can be ignored - the whole 72 bits are needed to decode the 64 bits of data and the 64 bits of data cannot be read independently.
by bluejellybean | 2026-03-06 23:12:44+00:00
I have a very small utility library that receives a few downloads every couple of weeks that I just spent a few hours upgrading today.

It solved a problem I had, but it's a very small problem that few people share and the efforts spent selling it would be a poor use of my time given how niche it is. The few extra minutes to hit npm publish is worth the couple hits of dopamine I receive whenever it's downloaded.

It's just nice to know I saved someone an hour or so of their life. No need to reinvent this wheel.
by mgraczyk | 2026-03-06 23:12:48+00:00
How about we do the following.

I have not done win32 programming in 12 years. Maybe you've done it more recently. I'll use an LLM and you look up things manually. We can see, who can build a win32 admin UI that shows a realtime view of every open file by process with sorting, filtering and search on both the files and process/command names.

I estimate this will take me 5 minutes
Would you like to race?
by dlivingston | 2026-03-06 23:12:57+00:00
Greater Boston area here. I've worked in C++ roles at two companies over the past three years and both times we were desperate for competent C++ developers. Similar trends for both companies: we had positions open for ~six months, interviewing many candidates, and being disappointed at their quality. We eventually filled the positions (about a half-dozen in total) but it was not easy. My current company, but different team, still has a quite a few recs out for C++ devs.

TL;DR - at least in my little bubble, the C++ systems engineer market has been consistently hiring people, though good engineers are hard to find.
by trevwilson | 2026-03-06 23:13:06+00:00
You may want to take a look at the source and code sample #2 in the post - the site CSS is rendering em dashes in the source with 2 hyphens by using a custom font. Admittedly it's not the most portable solution, but speaks to (what I take as) one of the post's points that there's not a single, easy shibboleth for identifying AI writing
by alexgleason | 2026-03-06 23:13:35+00:00
Hey HN! Alex here. I built an AI agent that handles all the accounting at my company -- contractor invoices, payments in fiat and Bitcoin, bookkeeping, expense tracking, 1099s. It's called Sheila and it's open source (AGPL).

The short version: I tried building complex multi-step automation in code first. It was fragile. What actually worked was building 50+ granular scripts that each do one thing (check a balance, send a payment, append a row to a spreadsheet, read an email), then writing a 600-line AGENTS.md file that describes the workflows in plain English. The AI agent reads the instructions and chains the scripts together.

The key insight for me was that the human feedback loop is what makes agents actually work. I sit in the terminal watching Sheila process invoices. She drafts emails and prepares payments, I see what she's doing before it goes out. Hundreds of iterations between me and the AI is what made this reliable -- not some autonomous agent platform where you click "deploy" and hope for the best.

I think the industry has this backwards right now. Everyone is building agent platforms top-down. But you can't design a useful agent abstraction layer without first understanding what a useful agent looks like, and you can't understand that without building one from scratch, script by script.

Source: https://gitlab.com/soapbox-pub/sheila

Happy to answer questions about the architecture, the Bitcoin payment flow, or why I think most agent frameworks are solving the wrong problem.
by Analemma_ | 2026-03-06 23:13:55+00:00
TypeScript never would’ve taken off if it had been strict from the beginning, it would’ve been just another forgotten gravestone next to Dart and CoffeeScript. I’m not saying those are bad languages, they’re not, but anything other than a very slow and gradual opt-in transition was just a non-starter. It was painful, but TypeScript played the long game.
by bombela | 2026-03-06 23:15:03+00:00
> You won't be able to use the data outside of Rust and you're probably tied to a specific Rust version.

This seems false after reading the book, the doc, and a cursory reading of the source code.

It is definitely independent of rust version. The code make use of repr(C) on struct (field order follows the source code) and every field gets its own alignment (making it independent from the C ABI alignment). The format is indeed portable. It is also versioned.

The schema of the user structs is in Rust code. You can make this work across languages, but that's a lot of work and code to support. And this project appears to be in Rust for Rust.

On a side note, I find the code really easy to understand and follow. In my not so humble opinion, it is carefully crafted for performance while being elegant.
by koliber | 2026-03-06 23:15:19+00:00
It sucks from both sides.

I am on the interviewing and screening side and understand what you're saying. I also empathize with the people I routinely reject who don't understand why they were rejected. It's hard to see why you might not be a right fit for a role.

> it seems really unlikely to me anyone would want to do interviews without seriously intending to hire someone.

I keep seeing this accusation thrown around and like you, I have a hard time seeing this. On the flip side, looking at it from the eyes of many disenchanted candidates, I can see how a theory like this is appealing and self-reinforcing.
by butterisgood | 2026-03-06 23:15:30+00:00
> Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone.

That is pretty context sensitive. You're correct that there's no real deep AI use expertise broadly understood to exist at this point (unless you're Steve Yegge?), but if people think they can toss out the engineers with experience in the systems that have been around a while, with junior developers "guiding" changes — that's likely a good way for a business to fall on its sword.
by Karrot_Kream | 2026-03-06 23:15:57+00:00
I don't think HN has been frequented by startup engineers with leadership responsibilities in any density in a long time. It's very obvious to me reading a lot of the comments here that most folks are ICs somewhere in a large, bureaucratic software organization. That's why there's so much BOFH style commentary here these days.

(For readers, I don't think there's anything wrong with that but it just means that certain perspectives are overrepresented here that may not be more reflective of the broader industry.)
by archagon | 2026-03-06 23:17:03+00:00
“When you're in Hollywood and you're a comedian, everybody wants you to do things besides comedy. They say, ‘OK, you're a stand-up comedian — can you act? Can you write? Write us a script?’ It's as though if I were a cook and I worked my ass off to become a good cook, they said, ‘All right, you're a cook — can you farm?’”
—Mitch Hedberg

Agentic programming isn’t engineering: it’s a weird form of management where your workers don’t grow or learn and nobody really understands the system you’re building. That sounds like a hellish, pointless career and it’s not what I got into the field to do. So no thanks: I’ll just keep doing the kind of monkey engineering I find invaluable. Especially while most available models are owned and trained by authoritarian, billionaire, misanthropic cultists.

Fortunately, I am not beholden to some AI-pilled corporation for salary.