MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by embedding-shape | 2026-03-10 15:49:32+00:00
> I learned about the em dash in high school and adapted it to my writing style very quickly for analysis and opinion documents. It felt natural given the amount of tangents I can go off into, particularly when including analogies for the reader’s understanding.

Isn't this what parenthesizes are meant for? Together with footnotes, I've always used them like that, but I guess it could also be just a cultural difference. My teachers in Swedish school always told me to put thoughts like that into parenthesizes, but I also just (barely) finished high school, could be related too.

> I find myself on the fence with proposals like these. They have good intentions but they do not solve an issue at its core.

I don't understand what the issue even is here, and the RFC also doesn't clearly outline it. Is "created ambiguity for human writers who have historically
relied upon the em dash as a stylistic device" the problem here?

Trying to solve it by adding just another character and slap the label "Human Attestation Mark (HAM)" on it will just make LLMs eventually use those instead... Not sure what the point is to be honest.
by dataflow | 2026-03-10 15:50:14+00:00
You're not only undeservedly dismissing very salient high-level points but also just completely missing the low-level ones. Even ignoring build times and looking only at execution times (and btw it's not just time that matters here), even function calls are not always zero-cost. For multiple reasons, some of which differ across compilers more than others.

Nobody is concluding you shouldn't write functions either.
by embeng4096 | 2026-03-10 15:50:34+00:00
Is there an example of the generic programming that you've found useful?

The extent of my experience has been being able to replace functions like convert_uint32_to_float and convert_uint32_to_int32 by using templates to something like convert_uint32<float>(input_value), and I didn't feel like I really got much value out of that.

My team has also been using CRTP for static polymorphism, but I also feel like I haven't gotten much more value out of having e.g. a Thread base class and a derived class from that that implements a task function versus just writing a task function and passing it xTaskCreate (FreeRTOS) or tx_thread_create (ThreadX).

Typed compile-time computation is nice, though, good point. constexpr and such versus untyped #define macros.
by skaven81 | 2026-03-10 15:50:50+00:00
Qualcomm (San Diego, CA, USA) -- Staff Kubernetes Platform Engineer -- $116,800 - $175,200 plus top-tier benefits package -- onsite

Apply here: https://careers.qualcomm.com/careers/job/446706704240?domain...

We’re looking for a Kubernetes generalist to help expand and improve our Kubernetes platform automation. If you enjoy writing operators or controllers to automate complex environments, and welcome the challenge of configuring and tuning scaled Kubernetes platforms for enterprise usage, this role should be a good fit.

The work focuses on operating and troubleshooting multi‑tenant Kubernetes clusters across on‑prem bare metal and cloud. We use Rancher with RKE2 on‑prem, and GKE, EKS, and AKS in the cloud. It’s hands‑on, development+operational (DevOps/SRE/Platform Engineering/whatever-its-called-this-week) work: keeping clusters healthy, building and improving automation, supporting high performance GPU workloads, and evolving the platform as Kubernetes and our engineering needs change, all through GitOps style automation.

You’d be joining an experienced Kubernetes team, with room to grow your career through serious project work and mentoring. Example projects include developing self‑healing automation; bare‑metal platform integration, testing, benchmarking, and bring‑up; implementation and evolution of new multi‑tenancy patterns like vcluster; and global policy management using Gatekeeper OPA and Validating Admission Policy.

We’re looking for someone comfortable on Linux (Ubuntu) with a few years of Kubernetes administration experience, solid containerd and Kubernetes control‑plane knowledge, and the ability to write and maintain automation in Python (or Go) and bash. Familiarity with operator/controller patterns, Helm, Kustomize, Kubernetes networking internals (Cilium), git/GitHub, and Agile workflows is expected. Experience with Rancher/RKE2, Portworx, AI workflows/GPUs, OPA, Datadog, is a plus, but not required.

If this sounds like work you already do, or want to do more of, feel free to reach out directly at pkrizak@qualcomm.com. I’m happy to answer questions here or by email.
by switchman-dev | 2026-03-10 15:50:50+00:00
Been running multiple Claude Code instances on the same repo to ship faster. It works great until two agents end up touching the same file
— one quietly undoes the other's work and you don't notice until merge time.

Built Switchman to fix this. It's a CLI that gives agents a shared task queue and file locking. Each agent claims the files it needs
before editing — if another agent already has one, it gets blocked immediately and picks something else instead.

There's a native MCP integration so Claude Code agents coordinate automatically. Setup is one command:

switchman setup --agents 3

SQLite under the hood, nothing to run on a server. Took a few weeks of evenings to get the conflict detection right — particularly the
worktree-aware root detection which was fiddly.

Still early but it's working well for my own workflow. Curious if anyone else is running agents in parallel and what problems you're
hitting.
by darkwater | 2026-03-10 15:51:16+00:00
> and if you’re not a core contributor who’s proven you’re willing to stick around when shit hits the fan, a +3000 PR is a liability, not an asset.

And in the context of high-value contributors that GP was mentioning, they are never going to land a +3000 PR because they know there is going to be a human reviewer on the other side.
by RedCats | 2026-03-10 15:51:21+00:00
I'm a product manager with no coding background, building a video editing tool from scratch — solo. The core idea is to rethink the editing workflow entirely around agents rather than manual timelines. Most existing tools still treat AI as a feature bolted on top; I'm trying to make the agent the primary interface.
Also been running myself as a one-person ops team using AI for data analysis, writing, and research. Honestly, it's changed my intuition about where human judgment actually matters. Fewer places than I expected
by dnhkng | 2026-03-10 15:51:25+00:00
Agrees, but one thing to note:

I really think from the experiments that 'organs' (not sure what to term this), develop during massive pretraining. This also means maybe looping the entire models is actually not efficient. Maybe a better way is [linear input section -> loop 1 -> linear section -> loop 2 -> linear section -> ... -> loop n -> linear output]?

This would give 'organs' space to develop.
by SoftTalker | 2026-03-10 15:51:37+00:00
Love OpenBSD, it is my main work and personal OS. Doesn't rank the best in performance, but certainly good enough for my uses (and many others, I'd guess).

The thing I like is that almost everything I've invested in learning about it over the past 15 years still applies. Stuff that does change, or is added, tends to be done in a way that is sensible and consistent with established patterns and practices. Linux, not so much.
by saberience | 2026-03-10 15:51:38+00:00
Wait that's it?

This is so trivial to break it's not worth anything. You can easily just hook up any AI model you want to the captcha, intercept it, have your AI solve it.

Or, you can just script it so if you do have an agent authenticated to Moltbook, you type whatever comment or post you want to your agent, then it solves the captcha and posts your text.

Basically, this method is as about as full of holes as a sieve.
by guardian17 | 2026-03-10 15:51:47+00:00
We ran some benchmarking across 5 iterations before publishing. The raw data, code and quick docker setup are all in the repo if you'd like to reproduce:

https://github.com/faucetdb/mcp-db-benchmark

Biggest shock for us was MySQL's UNindexed performance. Happy to answer any questions about methodology or other findings.
by robgehring | 2026-03-10 15:51:55+00:00
Hi HN! I built AI Document Translator for Slack because I got fed up with translators that wreck document layout. Google Translate / ChatGPT / similar tools return plain text, leaving you to reflow fonts, tables, and slides, which often takes longer than the translation itself.

What we did differently:

- Preserve layout: the service keeps the original structure (fonts, tables, slides, sections) so you don't need to fix formatting after translation.
- Context-aware translation: instead of translating sentence-by-sentence, we use LLMs to translate large context chunks (paragraphs/sections). That gives more natural phrasing and consistent terminology across the whole file.
- Slack-first: not just a web UI - a Slack integration so teams can translate files where they already work.

Why it matters:

- Saves time: less manual layout cleanup.
- Better consistency: one term = one translation across the doc.
- Practical for real docs: marketing decks, contracts, manuals - not just chat snippets.

Will be happy to hear your feedback!
by precompute | 2026-03-10 15:51:55+00:00
Startup time does not matter, use the daemon. Opening a new frame is ~instantaneous.

I practically live in Emacs and it's not slow at all. It's very zippy, and my setup isn't the lightest!

There's a new branch (feature/igc) with incremental garbage collection (via MPS) that makes routine actions faster. I've been using it and it has been incredibly stable and has completely eliminated stutters (which used to happen very infrequently, but were present). Also, to me, it seems like it improves latency. The cursor feels more responsive.
by vova_hn2 | 2026-03-10 15:51:55+00:00
> Behold! Plato’s man.
[0]

def replace_em_dash(text: str) -> str:
"""
+-------------------+
| ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° ) |
+-------------------+
"""
return text.replace("—", "\u10EAD\u10EAC")

[0] usually attributed to Diogenes
by AStrangeMorrow | 2026-03-10 15:52:17+00:00
I know, I find myself in this silly situation where I have to adjust my writing style because I write like an AI: always loved my bullet points and dashes.

At work I also always tended to send slightly longer but structured answers. I found that it allowed to skip over the irrelevant sections and focus on what the changes are. Eg a list of changes with in the format -> bullet point -> change name -> change details. So people could easily focus on changes they cared about. Instead of a dense paragraph that people often just skip.

Hell I even found myself wanting to add a typo just to give a more human fell, or skip final “.” to make my text imperfect and more human. That’s getting silly
by pjmlp | 2026-03-10 15:52:28+00:00
Rest in peace, it hasn't seen the industry change.

"A consequence of this principle is that every occurrence of every subscript of every subscripted variable was on every occasion checked at run time against both the upper and the lower declared bounds of the array. Many years later we asked our customers whether they wished us to provide an option to switch off these checks in the interests of efficiency on production runs. Unanimously, they urged us not to they already knew how frequently subscript errors occur on production runs where failure to detect them could be disastrous. I note with fear and horror that even in 1980 language designers and users have not learned this lesson. In any respectable branch of engineering, failure to observe such elementary precautions would have long been against the law."

-- C.A.R Hoare's "The 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture"
by sidkshatriya | 2026-03-10 15:52:33+00:00
>> and approaches Linux performance in some areas (e.g. Networking)

> FreeBSD has been the gold standard for networking features and performance for decades; not sure I'd agree.

This is the accepted wisdom. But reality on the ground is that Linux has probably surpassed FreeBSD in this domain too. With bpf programs making dynamic packet steering decisions in kernel space, io_uring, support for every hardware networking enhancement under the sun and $$$ being spent by everybody on the Linux networking stack (to speed up AI training or supercomputer clusters for example) I doubt a highly tuned Linux box will be slower than the equivalent FreeBSD one.

(P.S. I'm not a networking expert. This is my assessment though. Someone well versed with networking on both FreeBSD and Linux should confirm on this !)
by vladms | 2026-03-10 15:52:39+00:00
> Is judging a PR harder than making one?

Depends on the assumptions. If you assume good intent of the submitter and you spend time to explain what he should improve, why something is not good, etc, than it's a lot of effort. If you assume bad intent, you can just reject with something like "too large review from unproven user, please contribute something smaller first".

Yes, we might need to take things a bit slower, and build relations to the people you collaborate with in order to have some trust (this can also be attacked, but this was already possible).
by bilbo0s | 2026-03-10 15:52:55+00:00
You shouldn't be surprised.

How else would they train the LLM PR reviewers to their standards?

I've never personally been in the position, because my entire career has been in startups, but I've had many friends be in the unenviable position of training their replacements. Here's the thing though, at least they knew they were training their replacements. We could be looking at a potential future where an employee or contractor doesn't realize s/he is actually just hired to generate training data for an LLM to replace them, and then be cut.
by RajT88 | 2026-03-10 15:53:40+00:00
You can refuse a stranger a ride if it feels off to you.

If you are telling a personal anecdote to threadjack a topic, there are several potential reasons why - if that is what you are trying to do. It is open to interpretation as to that poster's intent.

I have my own opinion have read dozens of discussions like this. YMMV.
by dang | 2026-03-10 15:53:42+00:00
If there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the thread.

This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
by torginus | 2026-03-10 15:53:50+00:00
My understanding is that for MoE with top K architecture, model size doesn't really matter, as you can have 10 32GB experts or a thousand, if only 2-3 of them are active at the same time, your inference workload will be identical, only your hard drive traffic will incread.

Which seems to be the case, seeing how hungry the industry lately has been for hard drives.
by ritlo | 2026-03-10 15:54:14+00:00
The only way to see the kinds of speed-up companies want from these things, right now, is to do way too little review. I think we're going to see a lot of failures in a lot of sectors where companies set goals for reduced hours on various things they do, based on what they expected from LLM speed-ups, and it will have turned out the only way to hit those goals was by spending way too little time reviewing LLM output.

They're torn between "we want to fire 80% of you" and "... but if we don't give up quality/reliability, LLMs only save a little time, not a ton, so we can only fire like 5% of you max".

(It's the same in writing, these things are only a huge speed-up if it's OK for the output to be low-quality, but good output using LLMs only saves a little time versus writing entirely by-hand—so far, anyway, of course these systems are changing by the day, but this specific limitation has remained true for about four years now, without much improvement)
by bloppe | 2026-03-10 15:54:41+00:00
> hard time jump every few thousands years

This is never going to happen. If handling 1 leap second every year or two is so hard and destructive, imagine the anxiety of introducing 30 all at once after 100 years of complacent software development with very few people alive who even remember the last adjustment. Of course our children will just say "screw that".

TAI always has 86400-second days. UTC can have 86401 (or 86399 theoretically, but that's never happened in practice). Eliminating leap seconds from UTC is so dumb because TAI already exists and is basically just UTC but without leap seconds. But, for some reason, the BIPM would rather allow UTC to drift from UT1, but it will always have the ~40 historical historical leap seconds that have already occurred. It will become a strictly weirder version of TAI.

I predict that in hundreds of years, as UTC-UT1 reaches several minutes, people will start talking about inventing a "new" time keeping standard with leap seconds to stay in sync with the Earth, and shift to using that for civil time keeping instead of drifty UTC. Then we'll finally be where we should have been the whole time: effectively using TAI as the source of truth, and converting to civil time by introducing leap seconds (but the new "TAI" will be weirder than the old TAI, which we should've just been using the whole time).
by threethirtytwo | 2026-03-10 15:54:53+00:00
>No, you can't infer that it "works." Only that it CAN work. The car may be poisoning you with carbon monoxide. Your rear brakes may have become disconnected (happened to me). The antilock braking system may have a faulty sensor that only fails at very low speed, leading to them engaging when making a normal stop, but also preventing the mechanic from seeing the problem, because he didn't listen to your bug report and instead tried to repro the effect with high speed panic stops (also happened to me).

This is called pedantitic reasoning. You look like a drowning person trying to stay afloat.
by eudamoniac | 2026-03-10 15:54:53+00:00
I think there is nothing wrong with this change. Customers should be able to patronize, with great granularity, the sort of businesses, employees, and people that they wish to. The push to advertise "black owned" or "women owned" businesses is similar to this. Letting people choose who to patronize is generally good.

It would be better to have more filtering options for everyone, though. One might prefer a male driver, for example, or a black driver, and if one wishes to wait longer for the driver to arrive because of their narrow preferences, that should be their right.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-03-10 15:55:01+00:00
I think we - in last few months - are very close to, if not already at, the point where "coding" is solved. That doesn't mean that software design or software engineering is solved, but it does mean that a SOTA model like GPT 5.4 or Opus 4.6 has a good chance of being able to code up a working version of whatever you specify, with reason.

What's still missing is the general reasoning ability to plan what to build or how to attack novel problems - how to assess the consequences of deciding to build something a given way, and I doubt that auto-regressively trained LLMs is the way to get there, but there is a huge swathe of apps that are so boilerplate in nature that this isn't the limitation.

I think that LeCun is on the right track to AGI with JEPA - hardly a unique insight, but significant to now have a well funded lab pursuing this approach. Whether they are successful, or timely, will depend if this startup executes as a blue skies research lab, or in more of an urgent engineering mode. I think at this point most of the things needed for AGI are more engineering challenges rather than what I'd consider as research problems.
by dragonwriter | 2026-03-10 15:55:25+00:00
It seems to me that you are trying to define "autonomy" as a structural property rather than a behavioral one, and then adopting arbitrary rules as to what structures do not count as autonomous whether or not they produce the same behavior as structures which do.

I guess that's fine, autonomy has lots of definitions (some in overlapping domains) and I guess one more doesn't hurt, but I'm pretty sure the intended use in the discussion here is the standard mechanical one where it is a behavioral trait defined by the capacity of a system to decide on action without the involvement of another system or operator, and therefore it is something that could be achieved by a system composed of a processing and action component called repeatedly by a looping component.
by pmyteh | 2026-03-10 15:55:30+00:00
I think this is more of a style issue than one of correctness: lots of high-quality typeset output has used em dashes for parenthetical phrasing and plenty has used (spaced) en dashes. Bringhurst is a partisan for the en dash, for example, saying that "The em dash is the nineteenth-century standard, still prescribed in many editorial style books, but the em dash is too long for the best text faces." (/Elements/ version 2.5, p.80).

Of course, if we collectively shifted to the spaced en dash then LLMs would eventually follow; it's not clear to me that any simple and deliberate sign of humanity could remain exclusive given the incentives for machines to replicate it.
by nancyminusone | 2026-03-10 15:55:57+00:00
Of course you can tell. If someone suddenly submits a mountainous pile of code out of nowhere that claims to fix every problem, you can make a reasonable estimate that the author used AI. It's then equally reasonable to suggest said author might not have taken the requisite time and detail to understand the scope of the problem.

This is the basis of the argument - it doesn't matter if you use AI or not, but it does matter if you know what you're doing or not.
by jaltekruse | 2026-03-10 15:55:58+00:00
I've written a short 2.5 hour class for tech newbies to walk them through wiring together their own game consoles in breadboards. So far I've taught it to 90 people in the Twin Cities, I'm looking to see if I can get it spread to new communities. If you might be interested in teaching the class where you live I'm open to sharing my class materials.

I also have a related project I'm working on to make a follow up class about programming games for the consoles with the MIT Scratch platform. I have an in-progress Scratch to Arduino C++ converter.
https://community.arduboy.com/t/first-arduboy-game-programme...

Also the Arduboy project that the class is based on it very cool, consider buying one of the new editions of the hardware, now with USB-C and link-cable support! (I'm not sponsored, I just want to support the project that made the class possible)
https://www.arduboy.com/