MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hinkley | 2026-03-12 02:12:26+00:00
Africa is experimenting with something fairly reminiscent to this.

Not sure about the content, but this one has the best pictures:

https://www.upworthy.com/forgotten-half-moon-water-harvestin...

I'm just not sure if the relationship between the holes, the ridgeline, and prevailing winds (rain) line up for this being a water harvesting solution. But it's clear that in several sections they've done this on all of the terrain that's walkable on some of those hills, and I know walking ridgetops is often a solution to get through rocky or desert areas.
by CqtGLRGcukpy | 2026-03-12 02:13:43+00:00
“But to have that reviewed by the arbitrator cost $24,000. Essentially, we must pay to show we cannot afford the costs. We had no choice but to withdraw. So even though we wanted to continue pursuing our last remaining claim, we couldn’t move forward because we could not afford the cost — this was economic exclusion from the legal process.”

"Adobe allegedly made it clear that if the judge were to make the company pay for Carter’s legal fees, it would pay them at the end of the process — meaning Carter would have to pay the costs upfront. "
by davorak | 2026-03-12 02:13:49+00:00
> HN has always been a spirit-of-the-law place, and—contrary to the "technically correct is the best correct" mentality that many of us share—we consciously resist the temptation to make them too precise.

That is from dang's post in:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342616

That whole post is clarifying for the intent of the new rule(s).
by matheusmoreira | 2026-03-12 02:14:04+00:00
> How do you "hack from the other side of the world" a computer that isn't even online?

Supply chain attacks. You just need to get in there before everything is cryptographically signed and sealed.

The best part is even if they published the source code for everything it would prove nothing. I seriously doubt the builds are reproducible. Lack of source-to-binary correspondence means source code would serve only to embarrass anyone protesting the electronic voting system.

As it stands, nothing short of a full audit of the complete signed software image that the machine booted and executed on election day would suffice. The judge-kings are on the record saying this system is UNQUESTIONABLE so they should publish the image on the internet and let the whole world take a look. I'm sure no faults will be found.
by runako | 2026-03-12 02:14:11+00:00
> fixed 8GB of RAM. I think that’s too little for a modern Mac operating on the modern web.

The best comparator here is likely the iPhone 16 Pros, released in late 2024. These were the flagship iPhones until late 2025. They are only one generation old. They have the same CPU and the same 8GB of RAM. I have never heard anyone complain that they suffer performance-wise from having too little RAM.

Many of the apps non-devs use will likely be universal binaries, or adapted from iOS versions. Chrome, Safari, Slack, Calendar, Gmail, Zoom, Claude, Contacts, Notes, Maps, Music, Pages, Numbers, etc. These are apps that run concurrently with no issues on the iPhone Pro 16. I'm not sure why people expect those same apps would cause issues on materially the same hardware because its package includes a hardware keyboard.

(The most RAM you could purchase in an iPhone until late 2024 was 6GB. iPhone 11 had 4 GB of RAM. I have not at any point since approximately iPhone 6 heard anyone complain about the speed of an iPhone Pro for "normal" consumer/not professional media stuff. iPhone 6s was released in late 2015 and had 2GB of RAM.)

Yes, MacOS is a different OS than iOS. But the very same company who built the Neo also make MacOS. They are known to adapt the OS to the hardware they are shipping. I'm willing to bet the experience for the non-dev is similar to the experience of using an iPhone 16 Pro in 2026.
by _pdp_ | 2026-03-12 02:16:39+00:00
There is no doubt there is a lot of AI generated content. We do it too - code, tutorials, etc. It is just too convenient and useful to ignore.

The question that I have is this.

Is it possible the language will converge towards AI mannerism when writing - i.e. most people will naturally write like AI because they will pick up on the subtleties of language from ChatGPT, Claude, etc? In other words there is an exposure effect at play.

I just found out about Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) which makes me think that the answer is probably "yes".
by ddoottddoott | 2026-03-12 02:16:42+00:00
I mean probably not. It's not 1,400 hardcore engineers and 200 Jony Ives being let go, it's a mix of everyone including randoms like HR and the person who orders the office coffee. Business is not good.

Okay I just wrote an "it's not, it's..." organically, is this the zeitgeist or what.
by alwillis | 2026-03-12 02:16:45+00:00
> macOS itself has been declining in quality since at least Mojave; people don't rave about it anymore.

There are levels to this. Sure, recent versions of macOS have some issues, no doubt. Part of the reason Mac users complain about relatively minor issues is because Apple has set the UI/UX bar so high.

But even in its current state, macOS is still leaps and bounds better than Windows. When I worked with customers using Windows and dealing the usual Windows issues, I realized most of them had no idea that computing didn’t have to be so bad, due to the Stockholm Syndrome that Windows users experience--they think all computers are the same.
by firecall | 2026-03-12 02:17:50+00:00
... all of them at this point? ;-)

Be interesting to see the numbers graphed over time.

Funny thing about AI layoffs is the cloud cover it provides to do it. Which I know is not a fresh insight. :-)

In HR speak, if you 'reduce headcount' because you over hired or needed to cut costs, then that's a bad signal to the markets.

If you do it because of AI efficiencies, you are an innovative industry leader and your stock goes up.

Atlassian stock up 2% on the news :-/
by sifar | 2026-03-12 02:18:24+00:00
The point is worrying about results creates anxiety that takes away your focus from doing the job which results is lower performance -> subpar results - it is a recursive spiral. Also results are not "wholly" under our control. Hence avoid worrying about the results "while" doing it.

The final result of any action depends on a lot of external factors for e.g. one might develop a product, but whether it succeeds or not depends on other players, economy, luck and host of other factors that one does not control or know. This feeds into the first point about not worrying about the results.
by 9wzYQbTYsAIc | 2026-03-12 02:19:34+00:00
For me, personally, I'm building things that would have been impractical for me to do as cleanly within the same amount of time - prototypes in languages that I don't have the muscle memory for, using algorithms i have a surface level understanding of but would need time to deeply understand and implement by hand, and, at my pace, as a retired dev, is probably quantified in terms of years worth of time and effort saved.

edit: also, would I take the time to implement LCARS by hand? No. But with an LLM, sure, took it about 3 minutes or less to implement a pretty decent LCARS interface for me.
by deepsquirrelnet | 2026-03-12 02:19:38+00:00
> I tapped into Pangram. Pangram is a remarkably good, conservative model for detecting LLM-generated text. These detectors have a bad rep among techies, but the objections are often based on outdated assumptions

Turing test is really in the rearview, huh?

Humans need machines to detect if a machine wrote the text, because humans aren’t sure.
by jjmarr | 2026-03-12 02:20:02+00:00
Because that requires compromise and Americans are raging absolutists that need immediate results.

In 1791, abolitionists tried to end slavery in the British Empire but couldn't get it passed by the House of Commons. Henry Dundas changed the bill so it would be phased-in. Existing slaves wouldn't be emancipated but their children would be. That bill did pass. Slavery naturally ended over the following decades until the much smaller slave population was bought by the government and freed in 1833.

In the USA, nobody budged until a Civil War happened and then the slaves were freed by force in the 1850s without monetary compensation. But that time, emancipation happened immediately after they got full power, there was no need to give money to racists, and no moral compromises were required.
by jll29 | 2026-03-12 02:20:33+00:00
The original article doesn't dwell too much on the RAM limitation, but I agee with you that 8 GB is too little
for the near future or even today.

I agree with most of the post's arguments, and most of the specs and limitations of the Neo would be okay with me, except there should be 16 GB RAM in 2026.

Apple could perhaps mitigate this somewhat by releasing a "slim" MacOS Neo version that is less bloated by pruning some features. Currently, the OS uses much of the available RAM for caching (I've seen "40%" of total OS RAM usage) to make the system faster, whereas 8 GB RAM permits only essential caching.

(Surely, the tough 8 GB RAM decision was influenced by the three factors 1. current DRAM cost and 2. limited DRAM availability considerations as of 2026, and 3. the massive Neo market size resulting from its attractive price tag, and this may get reconsidered in future editions.)
by yellowapple | 2026-03-12 02:21:10+00:00
> The argument I'm making is that if you care so much about standards you can always hone them yourself instead of taking the lazy way out of having an AI write for you.

It's pretty clear that in this case the use of AI is not a matter of laziness, but rather quality/consistency assurance. I use code formatters not because I'm too lazy to indent code myself, but because it helps guarantee that it's formatted consistently. I use a stud finder when mounting things to walls not because I'm too lazy to do the “knock on the wall” trick, but because the stud finder is more precise and reliable at it.

I don't use AI to edit my comments, but if I did, it would be not because I'm too lazy to check for all the things I want to avoid putting in my comments, but as an extra layer of assurance on top of what I've already trained myself to do.
by NiloCK | 2026-03-12 02:21:27+00:00
I know the thing you are describing, but the real bitch is that you're actually just describing the lowest effort default outputs. The help-desk assistant persona.

Sometimes speedbumps that deter the lowest effort infractions are sufficient but I don't think this is that time.

On a per-prompt basis, or via a persistent system prompt or SKILL, or - god help us - via community-specific fine tuning, LLMs can convincingly affect insane variations in prose styling.
by pear01 | 2026-03-12 02:21:31+00:00
With what? And the damage caused was what?

The answer: A drone. The damage, little to none.

What a powerful response to an outright attack on their country. This is the capability we are supposed to start a war over?

Sorry it does not follow that politicians in Greece and beyond in Europe were gambling with their citizens lives by entertaining the possibility Iran might launch a drone to crash unceremoniously off-target in Cyprus if their regime was attacked. I don't think anyone in Cyprus cares, actually the only thing this really seems to have kicked off in Cyprus is a protest movement against the American military presence there.
by Kim_Bruning | 2026-03-12 02:21:40+00:00
Probably not. A typical S/N ratio (rule of thumb) is about 1:10. Sturgeons law (a useful rule of thumb) says "ninety percent of everything is crap."

You shouldn't just dump a big pile of slop on someone's plate: the actual trick is to filter it down to the bit that counts. Usually when posting, you should do that for the reader. It's only polite.

So, if we filter out the noise, that leaves you with 100 words and 1 link to a reference. Which is actually about right for a typical HN reply. (run this through wc ;-))

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law
by SapporoChris | 2026-03-12 02:22:09+00:00
>As an example, I never see Japanese people on their speakerphones in public.

It does happen. I do not see it frequently, but I do see it. I've seen/heard bicyclists on their phones. I've seen walkers video chatting.

They tend to be less aware of their surroundings and are a nuisance by moving slower than normal and erratically.
by marcus_holmes | 2026-03-12 02:22:33+00:00
> What happens then?

The part that the human created, the prompt, can be copyrighted.

The part that the LLM created, cannot be.

Copyright in code works exactly the same way: the source code is copyrighted. The binary code is only copyrighted to the extent that it is derived from the source code. This is well-established.
Proposal: Global Solar-Offset Fractional Time (G-Soft) Model
by 4TimeSake | 2026-03-12 02:22:51+00:00
OBJECTIVE: To replace the disruptive biannual one-hour clock shifts with a system of four scheduled 15-minute fractional adjustments. The proposed G-SOFT protocol aligns human activity with the natural seasonal drift of the sun in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres while maintaining global synchronization and returning to whole-hour UTC offsets for the majority of the year.

RATIONALE:
- Biological Integrity: A single 60-minute jump causes significant circadian disruption. G-SOFT’s 15-minute increments are virtually imperceptible to human biology, mimicking the body's natural ability to adapt to minor daily light changes.
- Operational Stability: Gradual changes eliminate the "Monday after" productivity slump and the documented spike in heart attacks and workplace accidents associated with traditional one-hour DST transitions.
- Hemispheric Optimization: G-SOFT allows the Northern and Southern Hemispheres to move in opposite directions simultaneously. This ensures both regions follow the sun—gaining evening light in summer and morning light in winter—without breaking international coordination.
- Global Standardization: By performing these shifts over four designated weekends, the system ensures that for ten months of the year, all nations maintain clean, whole-hour offsets from UTC. Nations near the equator may choose to remain on a Static UTC Offset, as their daylight variation is minimal.

IMPLEMENTATION: Transitions occur over the four Sundays of March and September at 2:00 AM local time.

MARCH TRANSITION (Sample 2026)
Date | G-SOFT Phase | NY (UTC-5) | Sydney (UTC+11) | Diff
------- | ------------ | ---------- | --------------- | ----
Feb 22 | Base State | UTC-5:00 | UTC+11:00 | 16h
Mar 1 | Step 1 | UTC-4:45 | UTC+10:45 | 15.5h
Mar 8 | Step 2 | UTC-4:30 | UTC+10:30 | 15h
Mar 15 | Step 3 | UTC-4:15 | UTC+10:15 | 14.5h
Mar 22 | Peak State | UTC-4:00 | UTC+10:00 | 14h

SEPTEMBER TRANSITION (Sample 2026)
Date | G-SOFT Phase | NY (UTC-4) | Sydney (Peak UTC+10) | Diff
------- | ------------ | ---------- | -------------------- | ----
Aug 30 | Peak State | UTC-4:00 | UTC+10:00 | 14h
Sep 6 | Step 1 | UTC-4:15 | UTC+10:15 | 14.5h
Sep 13 | Step 2 | UTC-4:30 | UTC+10:30 | 15h
Sep 20 | Step 3 | UTC-4:45 | UTC+10:45 | 15.5h
Sep 27 | Base State | UTC-5:00 | UTC+11:00 | 16h

TECHNICAL FEASIBILITY: Modern Network Time Protocol (NTP) and operating systems already support fractional offsets (e.g., India at UTC+5:30). G-SOFT leverages this infrastructure to automate transitions, making the change invisible to the end-user while providing a "soft landing" for aviation, logistics, and high-precision digital systems.

CONCLUSION: The G-SOFT Protocol resolves a century-old logistical problem with a health-conscious, technically precise solution. By "gliding" the clock instead of "snapping" it, we achieve better solar alignment and a safer global environment.
by garciasn | 2026-03-12 02:23:27+00:00
I do Rover for extra fun money and I get to watch other peoples dogs when I don’t have one myself right now.

Several folks have noted that my immediate reply threw them for loops. One told me she thought it was spam that I responded so quickly.

Rover has a “Star Sitter” designation and response time is one of the metrics. Star Sitters show up at the top of the algorithm’s results so I’m incentivized to keep it up. Plus; I absolutely despise waiting forever for others to reply and I want to make sure I get bookings, knowing there are MANY available sitters in my area.

I never would have thought it was spammy or suspicious AI behavior. Thank you for cementing it in my mind that maybe I’m a little too eager. Considering I’m entirely booked out until mid-October, I’m either doing something right or people are that desperate for a good human to watch their pup for them.
by salawat | 2026-03-12 02:24:12+00:00
>Show me the incentive and I'll show you the result

Ah, you're one of those.

See, this clever little aphorism of yours is the constantly reached for salve of the "wiseguy". "Everyone would do it if they were in my position; so I'm not going to bother myself about it. Let's work around it."

Problem is, in reality, that isn't the case. Most people will sit there, look at the regulation, realize the development is likely going to attract families or soon-to-be-families, and would realize, yeah. Okay. Need to accommodate that. They approach it in good faith. Then you come along and start acting in bad faith. Your bad faith implementation for maximized extraction creates knock on problems, that create knock on problems, that now are everyone else's problem to solve. Eventually, with a high enough concentration or frequency of such agents, we enter game theory territory, and escalation tends to happen quickly from there.

Historically, this comes with a brand of solutions for people like that. It'd stew to a point, then generally involved an entire community not seeing a damn thing while someone came to physical harm in a tragic accident. Or just straight up Wildcat demonstrations.

Communities/ planners don't want that. So they make regulations that are a good faith attempt at curtailing spirals of reasonably foreseeable problems. A wiseguy comes along and creates reasonably forseen problems through non-compliance.

Are you noticing a pattern yet? You being a bad faith asshat isn't the policy's fault.

That's your fault for being a garbage human being, and maybe just a bit our collective fault for making the world such a comfortable and safe place for humans with garbage mindsets drawn to bad faith in all things business. Nevertheless, the gradient is clear. Do good faith business. Everyone wins. Do bad faith, and you win til it's worth someone's time to ensure you lose.

Too damn smart to learn the virtue of self-restraint, too damn stupid to recognize the threat too many of you pose to everyone else. Or how quickly things go bad once people start catching onto the games you seem to delight in playing.
by alephnerd | 2026-03-12 02:24:34+00:00
American Urea production is orthogonal to LNG production in the Gulf - most American NatGas is sourced domestically, from Canada, or the Carribean [0].

This will be a shock, but mostly in Asia where LNG is dependent on Gulf sourcing, but most of the larger Asian countries began investing in building alternative supply chains and the financial buffer to ride out these kinds of shocks.

This isn't the first system shock to have happened in the past 5 years - the Russian Invasion of Ukraine in 2022 led to a similar shock, and larger countries began building redundancies as a result.

You will see this in the graph linked above as well - urea prices are well below their 2022-23 peaks.

Additionally, the North American farming uses significantly less urea than other countries [1]

[0] - https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/ng_move_impc_s1_a.htm

[1] - https://ammoniaenergy.org/articles/decarbonizing-urea-produc...
by Octoth0rpe | 2026-03-12 02:24:38+00:00
> They haven’t been able to fix it with many multiples of that.

which may actually be the problem. I suspect that there is actually some ideal ratio that could be calculated of Input Fields / Dev, LoC / Devs, or maybe Unique Pages / Dev, or some mix of all of the above. Some of the metrics I hear out of places like airbnb absolutely blow my mind (>5000 engineers! wtaf are they all doing?!?). I can sort of see the #s at google, MS making sense given the breadth of the problems they are solving, but other places, not so much.
by parsimo2010 | 2026-03-12 02:24:54+00:00
I love this and I love seeing that it's from 2026 and someone still took the time to do all this testing- it must have been seriously involved because even at 6x it takes a while to fill up a DVD, and then to repeat that hundreds of times on several discs would be an eternity.

I haven't used a DVD+-RW in several years, as wireless file transfer over networks and flash drives handle pretty much all of my needs now, but I sure used the heck out of my DVD writer when I had it. I had no idea these discs could go hundreds of writes before failure, I always got paranoid about reliability and probably never went above 20 writes on a disc.

Edit: at the end of the post the author says, "that’s about 4020 hours across two drives, 5248 burns and both drives are still seemingly operating just fine." What a colossal amount of time.
by js8 | 2026-03-12 02:28:12+00:00
There's a way to measure "entropy" of a codebase. Take something like the binary lambda calculus or the triage calculus, convert your program (including libraries, programming language constructs, operating system) into it, and measure the size of the program in it in bits.

You can also measure the crossentropy, which is essentially the whole program entropy above minus entropy of the programming language and functions from standard libraries (i.e. abstractions that you assume are generally known). This is useful to evaluate the conformance to "standard" abstractions.

There is also a way to measure a "maximum entropy" using types, by counting number of states a data type can represent. The maximum entropy of a function is a crossentropy between inputs and outputs (treating the function like a communication channel).

The "difference" (I am not sure how to make them convertible) between "maximum entropy" and "function entropy" (size in bits) then shows how good your understanding (compared to specification expressed in type signature) of the function is.

I have been advocating for some time that we use entropy measures (and information theory) in SW engineering to do estimation of complexity (and thus time required for a change).
by atmavatar | 2026-03-12 02:28:39+00:00
Over and above the fact that everyone should already know that the SSN database is extremely sensitive, DOGE had to strong-arm people out of the way to gain access to it in the first place. Even a fresh twenty-something should have known better than to download the entire thing onto a flash drive and carry it around, let alone take it home with them, and especially not to share with a future employer.

The idea that could be done accidentally and innocently lacks any sort of credulity. It's so far out of the ordinary that I don't think applying Hanlon's Razor can be done in good faith.
by dataflow | 2026-03-12 02:29:30+00:00
> there's no scientific link between race and the ability to go to a DMV once every 10 years

That form of ID is neither accepted per the proposed legislation [1] nor does it last 10 years (more like 4-5 years from what I've seen). Please go look at what's actually required per the SAVE Act.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safeguard_American_Voter_Eligi...