MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shireboy | 2026-03-07 12:18:24+00:00
Similar story. I’m a bit younger, but Amiga BASIC/VB3/VB6/ASP/.NET was my path. There was a joy when “Visual Studio” meant “you can visually drag a component on and that is the app” instead of editing text files. But gradually we learned you need to be in the code. Sure you have figmas and low code tools today. But industry has gravitated back to editing curly brackets and markup in text files. And for good reasons I think.

I landed on GitHub Copilot. I now manage a team, but just last night snuck away to code some features. I find my experience and knowing how to review the output helps me adopt and know how much to prompt the agent for. Is software development changing? Absolutely. But it always has been. These tools help me get back to that first freedom I felt when I dragged a control onto a VB6 designer, but keep the benefits of code in text files. I can focus on feature, pay attention to UX detail, and pivot without taking hours.
by downsplat | 2026-03-07 12:18:43+00:00
The old defense of 16-bit chars, popping up in 2026 still! Utf8 is efficient enough for all general purpose uses.

If you're storing gigabytes of non-latin-alphabet text, and your systems are constrained enough that it makes a difference, 16-bit is always there. But I'd still recommend anyone starting a system today to not worry and use utf8 for everything.j
Show HN: iQWEB – a diagnostic engine for website performance issues
by david_iqlabs | 2026-03-07 12:18:50+00:00
I’m a solo developer from New Zealand and have been building a project called iQWEB over the past few months.

The idea came from a pattern I kept seeing when talking to web designers: tools like Lighthouse and PageSpeed produce a lot of metrics, but turning those signals into something meaningful for client conversations is difficult.

I started experimenting with a deterministic scoring model that analyses performance, structure and security signals and tries to identify the primary constraint affecting a site.

The output is a structured diagnostic report that highlights:

• the primary constraint affecting the site
• the fixes most likely to produce the biggest improvement
• explanations developers can use when discussing issues with clients

The goal isn’t to replace Lighthouse or PSI but to interpret those signals into something closer to a technical diagnosis.

Curious to hear whether developers think this kind of prioritisation model makes sense or if it misses the point.
by c0m4r | 2026-03-07 12:19:00+00:00
A lawyer's opinion will be directly proportional to their fee and will have little to do with reality, because the law hasn't kept up with what's happening right now. If you don't code with AI, you'll be left behind. Everyone is coding with AI, even in places where it's not immediately obvious, there's AI. You open the refrigerator and AI comes out. I don't know how this will be regulated, I'm not an expert in this field, but for now, it is what it is. The most important thing for me is that I don't derive any financial benefit from this and I give attribution where it is due.
by zack-alex | 2026-03-07 12:19:01+00:00
That's a nice article, thanks! I learned something new from it (somehow I didn't know that typical finite difference error plot is linearly V-shaped).

tang library looks cool, and I wonder whether it will become a modern full-fledged math library independent of ancient BLAS and solver libs... I wish it would, but that would require huge effort.

A couple of nitpicks for the article:

> The pathological function barely hits 10⁻⁵.

Huh? The pathological function's error plot goes below 10⁻⁸.

> What does that buy you? Watch two gradient descent particles race down Himmelblau's function

The default value in the visualisation for h is 0.5. Of course it performs poorly! Switch to h=0.1 and the difference is gone. I wonder if there exists a more significant demonstration
by ben_w | 2026-03-07 12:19:45+00:00
> So, increase of 4.7% and then (likely) decrease of 0.3% is progress?

Yes. Obviously.

Because of why it happened, and because of how it didn't come with a recession this time.

Enough progress? I doubt it. But it is progress, and it's China doing it while still growing their economy, so it's time to end this idea that China's emissions are a reason for anyone else to refuse action.
by HendrikHensen | 2026-03-07 12:20:05+00:00
I cannot identify with this at all. We have Python and Go applications in production, and for Go the vibe is mostly "standard library plus a few dependencies" (e.g. SQL driver, opentelemetry) whereas with Python it's mostly "we need a dozen libraries just to get something done".

For example Go has production ready HTTP server and client implementations in the standard library. But with Python, you have to use FastAPI or Flask, and requests or httpx. For SQL there's SQLAlchemy I guess and probably some other alternatives (my Python knowledge is not that great), whereas again with Go the abstraction is just in the standard library and you only include the driver for the specific database.

We use Renovate to manage dependency upgrades. It runs once a week. Every Python project has a handful or more dependency upgrades waiting every week, primarily due to the huge amount of dependencies and transitive dependencies in each project. The Go projects sometimes have one or two, but most of the time they're silent because there is nothing to upgrade (partly due to just having so few dependencies to begin with).
by Noaidi | 2026-03-07 12:20:34+00:00
> I’m chasing the midnight hour and not getting any sleep.

I am saying this in all seriousness, what difference is this to addiction?

This is something already talked about [1]. You are getting the sugar (results) and none of the nutrients (learning).

[1]https://quasa.io/media/the-hidden-dangers-of-ai-coding-agent...

https://hils.substack.com/p/help-my-husband-is-addicted-to-c...
by throwa356262 | 2026-03-07 12:20:40+00:00
'xAI sued the state in December. It argued the law violated its free-speech rights under the U.S. Constitution and would force the company to reveal trade secrets about how its AI models are trained'

The law is not about training but what data is used. When you think about it, every other sector has to do this. E.g. the food industry has to declare exactly what they put in their sussages.

Apples to oranges? I dont know
by msmitha | 2026-03-07 12:20:53+00:00
I did some contract work a few years ago here in the UK for a doctor who wanted to build out a system he had created to manage the subtleties of on-call staff scheduling. He went on to turn it into a very successful business. I think the key for him was knowing the domain and being able to articulate it effectively as well as being very business-minded. Also having excellent contacts within the the business helped.
by tlogan | 2026-03-07 12:22:07+00:00
The stats for 2025 are yet official.

The quote from your link:

> China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions fell by 1% in the final quarter of 2025, likely securing a decline of 0.3% for the full year as a whole

So, increase of 4.7% and then (likely) decrease of 0.3% is a great progress?

I would rather wait for official IEA data before claiming victory:
https://www.iea.org/countries/china/emissions
by elzbardico | 2026-03-07 12:22:38+00:00
> Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software.

No, it can't. I use claude code and AMP a lot, and yet, unless I pay attention, it easily generate bad code, introduces regressions while trying to fix bugs, get stuck in suboptimal ideas. Modularity is usually terrible, 50 year ideas like cohesion and coupling are, by the very nature of it, mostly ignored except in the most formal rigid ways of mimicry introduced by post-training.

Coding agents are wonderful tools, but people who think they can create and mantain complex systems by themselves are not using them in an optmal way. They are being lazy, or they lack software engineering knowledge and can't see the issues, and in that case they should be using the time saved by coding agents to read hard stuff and elevate their technique.
by bigthymer | 2026-03-07 12:23:23+00:00
> Puff piece with 1000+ words that doesn't ever assert anything in particular that the author was wrong about

His article mostly talks about other things but I think his title is sufficient. He says that he never thought that the news would become so unreliable that he would end up getting his news from randos on Bluesky who simply share what they know without an intention to monetize it.
by nickjj | 2026-03-07 12:24:12+00:00
Is it only possible to have success with paid versions of these LLMs?

Google's "Ask AI" and ChatGPT's free models seem to be consistently bad to the point where I've mostly stopped using them.

I've lost track of how many times it was like "yes, you're right, I've looked at the code you've linked and I see it is using a newer version than what I had access to. I've thoroughly scanned it and here's the final solution that works".

And then the solution fails because it references a flag or option that doesn't even exist. Not even in the old or new version, a complete hallucination.

It also seems like the more context it has, the worse it becomes and it starts blending in previous solutions that you explained didn't work already that are organized slightly different in the code but does the wrong thing.

This happens to me almost every time I use it. I couldn't imagine paying for these results, it would be a huge waste of money and time.
by YesThatTom2 | 2026-03-07 12:24:15+00:00
Here we see Go haters in their natural habitat, the HN comment section.

Watch as they stand at the watering hole, bored and listless. A sad look on their faces, knowing that now that Go has generics, all their joy has left their life. Like the dog that caught his tail, they are confused.

One looks at his friends as if to say, "Now what?"

Suddenly there is a noise.

All heads turn as they see the HN post about UUIDs.

One of the members pounces on it. "Why debate this when the entire industry is collapsing?"

No reply. Silence.

His peers give a half-hearted smile, as if to say, "Thanks for trying" but the truth is apparent. The joy of hating on programming languages is nil when AI is the only thing looking at code any more.

The Go hater returns to the waterhole. Defeated.
by kdheiwns | 2026-03-07 12:24:26+00:00
Tech has also changed to become an all encompassing thing. In 2000, loads of people didn't have computers or cell phones. Maybe they owned a CD player and watched TV. Tech was avoidable then. But now everyone has a phone in their pocket, a computer, does all their banking through apps instead of visiting the bank, orders food online, orders taxis through apps, and so on. Everything is lumped under tech now and unavoidably so.
by pimeys | 2026-03-07 12:24:27+00:00
I've been running two distros with Plasma: Bazzite OS and CachyOS. Both very different, and stellar with Plasma.

I use CachyOS in my ThinkPad and in my Framework Desktop, for work. A stellar OS, has great defaults, is very fast and prioritizes KDE although you can do other WMs too if you're adventurous.
by grey-area | 2026-03-07 12:24:34+00:00
If you have both the start of the call chain and the end of the call chain mapped you will get a different error response almost every time and it is usually more than enough, so say your chain is:

Do1:...Do10, which then DoX,DoY,DoZ and one of those last 3 failed.

Do you really need Do1 to Do10 to be annotated to know that DoY failed when called from Do1? I find:

Do1:DoZ failed for reason bar

Just as useful and a lot shorter than:
Do1: failed:Do2:failed:Do10:failed:DoZ failed for reason bar

It is effectively a stack trace stored in strings, why not just embed a proper stack trace to all your errors if that is what you want?

Your concern with having a stack trace of calls seems a hypothetical concern to me but perhaps we just work on different kinds of software. I think though you should allow that for some people annotating each error just isn't that useful, even if it is useful for you.
by juanre | 2026-03-07 12:25:14+00:00
I think that the biggest difference is between people who mostly enjoy the act of programming (carefully craft beautiful code; you read and enjoyed "Programming Pearls" and love SICP), vs the people who enjoy having the code done, well structured and working, and mostly see the act of writing it as an annoying distraction.

I've been programming for 40 years, and I've been on both sides. I love how easy it is to be in the flow when writing something that stretches my abilities in Common Lisp, and I thoroughly enjoy the act of programming then. But coding a frontend in React, or yet another set of Python endpoints, is just necessary toil to a desired endpoint.

I would argue that people like you are now in the perfect position to help drive what software needs writing, because you understand the landscape. You won't be the one typing, but you can still be the one architecting it at a much higher level. I've found enjoyment and solace in this.
Show HN: Zmod codemod toolkit, 8x faster
by oss-luke | 2026-03-07 12:25:27+00:00
I built zmod because running jscodeshift on a large enterprise monorepo was taking 4-5+ minutes.

It's 100% API compatible with jscodeshift — just swap the import — but powered by Rust + oxc under the hood.

Benchmarked at 8x faster on average, up to 11.7x on small files. 21 react-codemod transforms passing.

Still early. Feedback welcome.
by spotijk | 2026-03-07 12:27:00+00:00
I'm 45 and I feel exactly the same way.

Such a big part of coding becomes mundane after a while. Constantly solving variations of the same kinds of problems.

Now Claude does it at my direction and I get so much more done!

But maybe even more important: It gets me to go outside my comfort zone and try things I wouldn't normally try because of the time it would take me to figure it out.

Like: Wat if I used this other audio library? I don't have to figure it out, I just pass in the interface I need to implement and get 90% of a working solution.

AI augmented programming couldn't have come at a better time and I'm really happy with it!
by refurb | 2026-03-07 12:29:05+00:00
It’s a ton of work to put together a case and bring it to court - we’re talking months of research and writing for complex cases.

It’s not realistic to assume the courts can strike down something days after it happens if it takes months to put an argument together.

But I’ve been rather impressed by how fast the Supreme Court makes decisions when cases are brought quickly (likely much less complex).
by dccoolgai | 2026-03-07 12:29:56+00:00
Why would I need this tool if I can just say "Claude, make me a CAD drawing of XYZ"?

Not trying to be rude, just generating some empathy for the OP's situation, which I think was missed: Like them, there is something you are passionate about that there is no longer really a point to. You could argue "but people will need to use my tool to generate really _good_ CAD drawings" but how much marginal value does that create over getting a "good enough" one in 2 minutes from Claude?

I feel sorry for bringing this up, but I think you might have missed how the thing that makes this possible makes it unnecessary.
by worksonmine | 2026-03-07 12:30:54+00:00
That comparison table is strange and sometimes wrong. Neovim for example detects and updates external file changes by default. And the coherence of the keybindings in Ki is "Great" bit vim/helix:

> As you can see, there's no single logical categorization for these keymaps, they are either lowercase-uppercase, normal-alt, left-right bracket, or outright unexplainable.

Word, End, Back, Change Word and even Change Inner (, etc are very logical to me and I feel like I'm talking to the editor when editing. I get that it doesn't make sense when one has learned another way to do it, but it does make total sense you just have to make an effort to try and understand it.

It's like learning and always driving automatic then calling manual "outright unexplainable". You simply learned another way and are conditioned into believing that's the one true way. It shows the creator comes from VSCode (multi-cursor is a useless feature, just use s/search/replace and get used to macros and a whole new world will open).
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-03-07 12:30:58+00:00
> cause I follow cool people, and so I just see what they like too

Maybe offtopic but I was reading something on hackernews and thought about something like this yesterday as the world starts getting more brand-ed and corporate-y that perhaps its up to the average person to share the list of cool people/things they know.

But I don't think that a follow itself might be the largest indicator of showing others what cool people are.

Yesterday, I tried linkhut (https://ln.ht) and added it to my profile. It just has cool things that I found online and I have written minor notes below it on why I think the things are cool or not.

I am curious to know but can some idea like this take off within the fediverse community/ say personally for you?

Can you have a linkhut profile that I can just see which can have cool people that you found and why you think that they are cool? And if I think that you are cool, then I can have some of that coolness be transferred to people you think cool too?

I used to be on fediverse and I think that there are some very cool people on fediverse, its just very hard to find them sometimes.
by d4rkp4ttern | 2026-03-07 12:31:04+00:00
I had exactly this problem and didn’t see anything good out there (Claude —resume
only searches session names and auto-created titles) so I got a tool built that uses a Rust/Tantivy full text search index. It’s part of the aichat command suite, called “aichat search”:

https://pchalasani.github.io/claude-code-tools/tools/aichat/...

It brings up a nice TUI for filtering and further actions. There’s also a —json flag so agents can use it as a CLI search tool to find context about any past work. There’s a plugin that provides a corresponding session-searcher agent that knows to use this tool to search sessions.

I have hundreds/thousands of past sessions and this has been a life saver; I can just ask the main agent, “use the session searcher agent to get the details of how we built the tmux-cli tool so we can add some features”.
by Panzerschrek | 2026-03-07 12:31:15+00:00
For real parsing a proper compiler codebase (via a language server implementation) should be used. Writing something manually can't work properly, especially with languages like C++ and Rust with complex includes/imports and macros. Newer LSP editions support syntax-based highlighting/colorizing, but if some LSP implementation doesn't support it, using regexp-based fallback is mostly fine.
by mactavish88 | 2026-03-07 12:31:38+00:00
> Their whole skill set

This is the fundamental problem with how so many people think about LLMs. By the time you get to Principal, you've usually developed a range of skills where actual coding represents like 10% of what you need to do to get your job done.

People very often underestimate the sheer amount of "soft" skills required to perform well at Staff+ levels that would require true AGI to automate.
by Philip-J-Fry | 2026-03-07 12:31:44+00:00
>Some new value will be discovered in the code itself - maybe conceptual clarity, algorithmic novelty, structural cleanliness, readability, succinctness, etc. Those values will become the new foundations for future gatekeeping.

It's a nice idea, but I feel like that's only going to be the case for very small companies or open source projects. Or places that pride themselves on not using AI. Artisan code I call it.

At my company the prevailing thought is that code will only be written by AI in the future. Even if today that's not the case, they feel it's inevitable. I'm skeptical of this given the performance of AI currently. But their main point is, if the code solves the business requirements, passes tests and performs at an adequate level, it's as good as any hand written code. So the value of readable, succinct, novel code is completely lost on them. And I fear this will be the case all over the tech sector.

I'm hopeful for a bit of an anti-AI movement where people do value human created things more than AI created things. I'll never buy AI art, music, TV or film.
by ben_w | 2026-03-07 12:32:22+00:00
> Musk saw genuine bloat at Twitter.

I'm reminded of a saying: "Just because they are out to get you, doesn't mean you're not paranoid."

That he was able to cut a lot from Twitter, doesn't mean he cut wisely, for reasons connected with reality. It survived the loss of teams dedicated to ongoing feature development, but the loss of teams dedicated to community management appears (from the outside) to have been the proximal cause of the loss of trust that many advertisers, users, and governments have had with the company. Cutting both at the same time suggests the action was not done from a place of wisdom, but rather that it was luck one of the cuts wasn't critical.

(This is what I expect given a Muntzing strategy: discover which components are load-baring by seeing what happens when they are removed. But when did I learn about Muntzing, and was it after Musk did his thing with Twitter?)
by lolzenom | 2026-03-07 12:32:27+00:00
I built a tool that takes your product URL, analyzes what you sell, then scans Reddit for conversations where people are actively looking for a solution like yours.

The pipeline: URL -> AI product analysis -> buyer-intent keyword mapping -> Reddit scanning (RSS + Brave search + PullPush) -> multi-stage AI scoring -> ranked lead feed.

Each conversation gets scored by purchase intent, not just keyword relevance. "I need help with X" scores higher than "I hate X" which scores higher than "X is interesting."

Built with Next.js, Supabase, and Google Gemini. The AI assessment uses a mechanism-first matching approach - it rejects posts that are in the same industry but need a different solution than what you offer.

https://leadsfromurl.com
by sethammons | 2026-03-07 12:33:11+00:00
Use a dependency. It was a wild pattern that still confuses me years later.

Literal interview: concurrently hit these endpoints that returns json and sum the total of values returned. Handle any 400 or 500 level http errors.

Literal former Googlers and flubbing the interview. They would spend too much time setting up an IDE and project, not be sure how to handle errors, and unable to parse the json. We eventually added a skeleton java project and removed json from the api, allowing text only responses. I learned java people don't set up projects or deal with json. It is the only explanation
by eej71 | 2026-03-07 12:34:15+00:00
I think you've got this backwards!

I've been working with computers since an Apple ][+ landed in our living room in the early 80s.

My perspective on what AI can do for me and for everyone has shifted dramatically in the last few weeks. The most recent models are amazing and are equipping me to take on tasks that I just didn't have the time or energy for. But I have the knowledge and experience to direct them.

I haven't been this enthused about the possibilities in a long time.

This is a huge adjustment, no doubt. But I think if I can learn to direct these tools better, I am going to get a lot done. Way more than I ever thought possible. And this is still early days!

Just incredible stuff.
by nenepbl | 2026-03-07 12:34:21+00:00
Yes, you're right.

Unfortunately, running Java code in a browser requires emulating a Java virtual machine using JavaScript/WebAssembly (in this case, I used cheerpJ), which will run Mars4_5.jar. There are several layers that limit the performance of MARS MIPS in the browser.

Even so, it's possible to test ALL the functionalities of MARS in small projects.

NFILES