MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hdivider | 2026-03-14 13:32:27+00:00
Here's a standard-structure, VC-funded, exit-oriented startup to consider: make video calls reliable. As in, you provide a guarantee and pay the customer if the call didn't work.

Wired headphones could be one part of the solution. They're just far more reliable (if they don't break, which they will). But if the reliability of video calls can be improved so that it's literally as reliable as talking to someone next to you in a quiet room, I bet lots of people would pay for it. There is so much latent frustration about unreliable calls, even with the best setup, even in NASA, in DoD, corporations, zoom and other platforms fail to perform reliably in so many cases.
by jmward01 | 2026-03-14 13:32:48+00:00
The writer asks for it, so I will be blunt. They are demanding people have perfectly formed thoughts crafted in a way to give them just the information they wanted with no consideration for the process of thinking or consideration for the person speaking. It is selfish and impossible. Articles like this, I think, expose how bad we have gotten at both speaking and listening.

"I personally value directness, so when someone communicates with me in that way, it deos influence how I perceive them, even subconsciously."

Communication is mind control. The point isn't the words, it is literally trying to get a person to do something. I often point out to people that if you just couldn't see people's lips move then speech would appear like the sci-fi definition of psychic powers. The better a person is at communication the more they will fit their message to the audience to get the action intended. If 'direct' really works then over time it will be used but the fact that direct isn't used often implies strongly that it doesn't work for most people or it has secondary effects that are too negative. Demanding the exception is a pretty big ask especially if your aren't willing to meet half way.

A second aspect here is that while communicating we are developing our thoughts. We need time to tease out our real intentions and filler conversation helps that. Arguing 'they should have just said x from the start' is 20/20 hindsight a lot of the time. Expecting me to come to you with a terse, perfect information drop tailored to your quirks or else you will get annoyed with me is your problem, not the speaker's.

In the end speakers are practicing a really hard skill and the author ignores how hard it is. Learning to listen when someone has a hard time communicating something is also a really hard skill that this article completely ignores. If I could sum this article up it would be 'I want to give up trying to learn how to listen so now it is your fault I don't understand you'.
by vehemenz | 2026-03-14 13:33:09+00:00
I'm somewhat relieved. I didn't invest much effort into my community, but I had an amazing, top-level name and over 1000 members.

Moderation was really hard. We didn't have AI posters, but there were persistent posters who were extremely annoying (mostly in their post volume and long-windedness) while still following the rules. I was really trying a hands-off approach with moderation, and it seemed to be working for the most part. It's all moot now though.
by mopsi | 2026-03-14 13:33:42+00:00
Sponsorblock offers by far the best experience. It skips over channel intros and outros, engagement prompts, sponsored segments, tangents, etc (configurable per channel) and offers jumping to "highlight" (that is, the most important part of the video).

Highly ironic that the best experience is free, and no paid option gets even close. Tim Cook watching paid Youtube on Apple TV device has far worse experience than some random kid with Firefox and Sponsorblock gets for free.
by abruzzi | 2026-03-14 13:33:56+00:00
I just hate the move to wireless for things that don't need to be wireless and having to constantly keep things charged. I got so frustrated with my $100 magic mouse at work a few weeks ago that its now in a drawer and I'm using a $10 POS Dell mouse. My wireless mac keyboard just has the wire permanantly plugged in. And wireless headphones? I've never gone down that road, and never will. I bought a handfull of the $10 Apple 3.5mm to lightning adapter because I lose them frequently, and when I'm eventually forced to upgrade to a phone with USB-C, I'll buy a handfull of the 3.5mm to USB-C adapters.
by vova_hn2 | 2026-03-14 13:34:25+00:00
Two thoughts:

1. Open source tools solve the problem of "critical functions of the application changing without notice, or being signed up for disruptive testing without opt-in".

2. This makes me afraid that it is absolutely impossible for open source tools to ever reach the level of proprietary tools like Claude Code precisely because they cannot do A/B tests like this which means that their design decisions are usually informed by intuition and personal experience but not by hard data collected at scale.
by dangus | 2026-03-14 13:34:26+00:00
- I don't think you're correct about the gulf in single core performance. On battery, the Cinebench 2024 scores (single core) of the Ryzen 7 AI 350 are 97% of the score you get from an M4 MacBook Air. (Cinebench is a lot better than GeekBench, IMO). In any event, the end user is not going to notice a difference. If Apple is ahead, being ahead by 10-20% is not something an end user is going to notice or care about, especially if that advantage gets eaten up by running out of RAM with a bunch of Chrome tabs open.

(source: https://youtu.be/3ZTe5kUYt9k?t=702)

- Screen real estate does not equal resolution. Nobody is going to scale their MacBook Neo's smaller 13" screen down to take advantage of those pixels. So the real question is whether the $500-800 user is a pixel hunter and loves smoother text at the expense of other purchase factors. IMO, macOS has weird resolutions like this because it sucks at scaling (e.g., 27" 4K monitors look worse in macOS than on Windows, which is why Apple goes with 5K)

- Yoga 7 video playback actually beats the Neo at almost 17 hours. The 70Wh battery is almost twice the size of the Neo's 36.5Wh battery. That means that, even though the Neo has efficiency advantages, it can't get over issues like being less resilient to running higher intensity tasks, a bright screen, or a backlit keyboard (which was removed from the design)

(source: https://youtu.be/3ZTe5kUYt9k?t=726

- Yoga 7 office productivity rundown is very close at 10 hours 54 minutes, I don't think anyone is going to be upset at that:

https://youtu.be/3ZTe5kUYt9k?t=753

- 2.7 vs 3.1 pounds is insignificant, not worth losing half your RAM over
by pas | 2026-03-14 13:35:27+00:00
cost-benefit analysis of things is important, eventually putting a number on things (services, risks, infrastructure, stock and flows, health, life, wellbeing, noise, air quality, aesthetics, user experience, fairness, and so on ...)

of course outright securitization, privatization, and other types of not-quite-unintentional ways of responsibility diffusion also should be put to the aforementioned analysis.

(there's, after all, now a (new) label for economically sound, responsible, sustainable, human-centered stewardship: state capacity libertarianism - https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/01/wh... because neoliberal became a swearword)
by dangus | 2026-03-14 13:35:47+00:00
IMO, macOS' strange scaling exacerbates issues with having PPI at the wrong ratio. macOS looks a lot worse on a 27" 4K monitor versus Windows, and is most ideally displayed at 5K.

I don't think anyone but the pickiest pixel hunters are going to mind the difference, and they'll enjoy the benefits of OLED like vastly improved contrast, HDR capability, and higher peak brightness than the Neo.
by microtonal | 2026-03-14 13:36:48+00:00
The 'much harder for programmers to work with' was that the official way of doing a lot of programming related to XML was to do it in... XML. E.g. transformations were done with XSLT, query processing with XQuery. There were even XML databases that you had to query with XML (typically XQuery).

All these XML DSLs were so dreadful to write and maintain for humans that most people despised them. I worked in a department where semantic web and all this stuff was fairly popular and I still remember remember one colleague, after another annoying XML programming session, saying fuck this, I'll rip out all the XSLT and XQuery and will just write a Python script (without the swearing, but that was certainly his sentiment). First it felt a bit like an offense for ditching the 'correct' way, but in the end everyone sympathized.

As someone who has lived through the whole XML mania: good riddance (mostly).

And don't even get me started on the endless meetings of people trying to design their XML schemas.

I have found that this attracts certain type of people who like to travel to meetings and talk about schemas and ontologies for days. I had to sit through some presentations, and I had no idea what they presented had to do anything, they were so detached from reality that they built a little world on their own. Sui generis.
Show HN: BirdDex – Pokémon Go, but with real life birds
by stellay | 2026-03-14 13:36:53+00:00
Hey HN!

I've always loved games where you collect various creatures and chase 100% completion (ahem, Pokémon)

I made BirdDex to try to bring the fun of those games to real life.

Here’s how it works: you snap a photo of a bird, identify the species with AI, and add it to your personal BirdDex collection.

Each photo earns XP based on the species' rarity, and your goal is to try and “catch” all the birds in your region (lists pulled for every country from wikipedia)

Would love any feedback or thoughts!
by softwaredoug | 2026-03-14 13:36:57+00:00
Are we really just seeing the AI market sort itself out? We have leaders [OpenAI, Anthropic, Google]. Secondary players [xAI, Meta] once looked promising, now sort to the back.

We don't need half a dozen frontier labs. They're capital intensive.

And since neither Metas AI / metaverse investments worked out, they're back to the same business they've always had: social media. Which is an OK enough business, but not high growth.
by aleph_minus_one | 2026-03-14 13:37:02+00:00
> Nobody will fall in love and start a relationship/family with you for showing up and fulfilling some list of criteria.

The "date-me doc" community might disagree:

* https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/02/style/date-me-docs.html

* https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-describable-d...

* https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comment...
by Zigurd | 2026-03-14 13:37:26+00:00
Actually, no. Starship has deployed zero satellites to orbit. It pushed some dummy satellite simulator things out of its hilariously small satellite slot, which then fell back into the atmosphere. The starship upper stage has not completed an orbit. Neither have both stages of Starship ever been landed on those chopstick things. Elon is the Deepak Chopra of space enthusiasm. Neither of them are going to get you to Nirvana.
by thunderbong | 2026-03-14 13:38:02+00:00
This is a very interesting take.

From the article:

> Because sites on my.WordPress.net are private by default and not accessible from the public internet, they don’t behave like traditional websites. They aren’t optimized for traffic, discovery, or presentation, and they don’t need to be. Instead, WordPress becomes a personal environment where ideas can exist before they are ready to be shared, or where they may never be shared at all.

One of the main ideas of the internet, and therefore WordPress, is to be able to share stuff on the public internet.

Without that capability, I wonder who would this be targeted towards. For personal note taking there are numerous software already out there.
by devld | 2026-03-14 13:38:27+00:00
But does it still generate slop?

I'm late to the party and I'm just getting started with Antrophic models. I have been finding Sonnet decent enough, but it seems to have trouble naming variables correctly (it's not just that most names are poor and undescriptive, sometimes it names it wrong, confusing) or sometimes unnecessarily declaring, re-declaring variables, encoding, decoding, rather than using the value that's already there etc. Is Opus better at this?
by rglullis | 2026-03-14 13:39:03+00:00
I do believe that charging for it is one way to create some friction, but it's not enough.

Twitter is full of blue checks that are just bots and automated reply guys.

I'm treating now all these bots as a stressor on our defense systems, and we will end up having to learn how to build a real Web of Trust, and really up our game on the PKI side. We also need some good Zero Knowledge proof of humanity that people can tie to their Keyoxide profile, so that we can just filter out any message that is not provably associated with a human.
by computator | 2026-03-14 13:39:43+00:00
This trend story about wired headphones is possibly a "submarine" story as Paul Graham calls it[1], like a headline that "Suits make a corporate comeback":

"The suit is back," it begins. Trend articles like this are almost always the work of PR firms. Once you know how to read them, it's straightforward to figure out who the client is. With trend stories, PR firms usually line up one or more "experts" to talk about the industry generally. In this case we get three: the NPD Group, the creative director of GQ, and a research director at Smith Barney. When you get to the end of the experts, look for the client. And bingo, there it is: The Men's Wearhouse.

[1] https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
by jfengel | 2026-03-14 13:40:29+00:00
It's not a DSL. It's a generic lexer and parser. It takes the text and gives you an abstract syntax tree. The actual DSL is your spec, and the syntax you apply.

It's one of many equivalent such parser tools, a particularly verbose one. As such it's best for stuff not written by hand, but it's ok for generated text.

It has some advantages mostly stemming from its ubiquity, so it has a big tool kit. It has a lot of (somewhat redundant) features, making it complex compared to other options, but sometimes one of those features really fits your use case.
by hnfong | 2026-03-14 13:40:39+00:00
I'm not sure what the author means by "(XML) was abandoned because JavaScript won. The browser won."

The browser supported XML as much as Javascript. Remember that the "X" in "AJAX" acronym stands for XML, as well as "XMLHttpRequest" which was originally intended to be used for fetching data on the fly in XML. It was later repurposed to grab JSON data.

Javascript was not a reason XML was abandoned. It was just that the developer community did not like XML at all (after trying to use it for a while).

As for whether the dev community was "right", it's hard to comment because the article you linked is heavy on the ranting but light on the contextual details. For example it admits that simpler formats like JSON might be appropriate where "small data transfers between cooperating services and scenarios where schema validation would be overkill". So are they talking about people storing "documents" and "files" in JSON form? I guess it happens, but is it really as common to use JSON as opposed to other formats like YAML (which is definitely not caused by Javascript in the browser winning)?

Personally I think XML was abandoned because inherent bad design (and maybe over-engineering). A simpler format with schema checking is probably more ideal IMHO.
by dale_glass | 2026-03-14 13:40:57+00:00
It kinda blows my mind that after XML we've managed to make a whole bunch of stuff that's significantly worse for any serious usage.

JSON: No comments, no datatypes, no good system for validation.

YAML: Arcane nonsense like sexagesimal number literals, footguns with anchors, Norway problem, non-string keys, accidental conversion to a number, CODE INJECTION!

I don't know why, but XML's verbosity seems to cause such a visceral aversion in a lot of people that they'd rather write a bunch of boring code to make sure a JSON parses to something sensible, or spend a day scratching their head about why a minor change in YAML caused everything to explode.

Actually my own problem with XML was annoyance that back when I had the thought of doing a complex config format in XML, the idea of modifying it programmatically while retaining comments turned out to be absolutely non-trivial. In comparison with the mess one can make with YAML that's just a trivial thing.
Show HN: GitAgent – An open standard that turns any Git repo into an AI agent
by sivasurend | 2026-03-14 13:41:25+00:00
We built GitAgent because we kept seeing the same problem: every agent framework defines agents differently, and switching frameworks means rewriting everything.

GitAgent is a spec that defines an AI agent as files in a git repo.

Three core files — agent.yaml (config), SOUL.md (personality/instructions), and SKILL.md (capabilities) — and you get a portable agent definition that exports to Claude Code, OpenAI Agents SDK, CrewAI, Google ADK, LangChain, and others.

What you get for free by being git-native:

1. Version control for agent behavior (roll back a bad prompt like you'd revert a bad commit)
2. Branching for environment promotion (dev → staging → main)
3. Human-in-the-loop via PRs (agent learns a skill → opens a branch → human reviews before merge)
4. Audit trail via git blame and git diff
5. Agent forking and remixing (fork a public agent, customize it, PR improvements back)
6. CI/CD with GitAgent validate in GitHub Actions

The CLI lets you run any agent repo directly:

npx @open-gitagent/gitagent run -r https://github.com/user/agent -a claude

The compliance layer is optional, but there if you need it — risk tiers, regulatory mappings (FINRA, SEC, SR 11-7), and audit reports via GitAgent audit.

Spec is at https://gitagent.sh, code is on GitHub.

Would love feedback on the schema design and what adapters people would want next.
by bartread | 2026-03-14 13:41:53+00:00
There’s more than a bit of irony in the author complaining about A/B testing and then, because they’re getting a lot of traffic and attention on HN, removing key content that was originally in their piece so some of us have seen it but many of us won’t.

Whilst I broadly agree with their point, colour me unimpressed by this behaviour.

EDIT: God bless archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20260314105751/https://backnotpr.... This provides a lot more useful insight that, to me, significantly strengthens the point the article is making. Doesn’t mean I’m going to start picking apart binaries (though it wouldn’t be the first time), but how else are you supposed to really understand - and prove - what’s going on unless you do what the author did? Point is, it’s a much better, more useful, and more interesting article in its uncensored form.

EDIT 2: For me it’s not the fact that Anthropic are doing these tests that’s the problem: it’s that they’re not telling us, and they’re not giving us a way to select a different behaviour (which, if they did, would also give them useful insights into users needs).
by devld | 2026-03-14 13:42:00+00:00
A non-technical client of mine has built an entire app with a very large feature set with Opus. I declined to work on it to clean it up, I was afraid it would have been impossible and too much risk. I think we are at a level where it can build and auto-correct its mistakes, but the code is still slop and kind of dangerous to put in production. If you care about the most basic security.
by toast0 | 2026-03-14 13:42:48+00:00
If process A is waiting for a reply from process B and process B is waiting for a reply from process A; that is deadlock. There is no way those processes can continue (unless there's a timeout or one process gets killed). Other processes may progress as long as they don't need a reply from process A or B ... which sometimes is fine. (Edit: nevermind, I forgot the 5 second timeout if you use gen_server:call/2)

Livelock is something like you've got 1000 nodes that all want to do X, which requires an exclusive lock and the method to get an exclusive lock is:

Broadcast request to cluster

If you got the lock on all nodes, proceed

If you get the lock on all nodes, release and try again after a timeout

This procedure works in practice, when there is low contention. If the cluster is large and many processes contend for the lock, progress is rare. It's not impossible to progress, so the system is not deadlocked; but it takes an inordinate amount of time, mostly waiting for locks: the system is livelocked. In this case, whenever progress happens, future progress is easier.

This is a rough description of an actual incident with nodes joining pg2, I think around 2018... the new pg module avoids that lock (and IMHO, the lock was not needed anyway; it was there to provide consistent order in member lists across nodes, but member lists would no longer be consistent when dist distonects happened and resolved, so why add locks to be consistent sometimes). As an Erlang user with I think the largest clusters anywhere, we ran into a good number of these kinds of things in OTP. Ericsson built dist for telecom switches with two nodes in a single enclosure in a rack. It works over tcp and they didn't put explicit limits, so you can run a dist cluster with thousands of nodes in locations across the globe and it mostly works, but there will be some things to debug from time to time. Erlang is fairly easy to debug... All the new nodes have a process waiting to join pg2, what's the pg2 process doing, why does that lock not have the consensus building algorithm, can we add it? In the meantime, let's kill some nodes so others can progreas and then we'll run a sequenced start of the rest.
by znnajdla | 2026-03-14 13:42:53+00:00
> This is equivalent to investing capital at a negative interest rate, so it’s not done anymore.

Stupidity of financializing everything. There’s no amount of money in the world that can quantify the safety of having critical items like food in supply. You can’t eat money. If everyone builds “just in time” supply chains the world collapses after a single shock.
by lexicality | 2026-03-14 13:43:03+00:00
> Let’s revisit the doomsday scenario. Say programming is fully automated and nobody writes code anymore. Does Emacs die?

Commercial programming will be fully automated. That will not stop people doing it by hand. For all intents and purposes clothing manufacturing is fully automated but some people still do it themselves.

One example near to my heart is my mother. She collects her dog's shed winter coat in the spring, cards it, spins it and ultimately knits it into a coat she puts back on the dog the next autumn - all by hand. She could just buy a cheap dog coat from Amazon, but she thinks it's funny to see the dog wearing a coat made of its own fur so she bought the equipment and learned the functionally useless skills required to do it.

No matter what level of automation is available, a small number of people will still do things the hard way as a hobby or out of perverseness. We might be living in the matrix in 100 years but I'm certain someone will still be trying to work out how to exit vim in their holopod
by brokencode | 2026-03-14 13:44:45+00:00
No, when did I say that? That’s impossible for anything of the size of Wikipedia.

I was suggesting that Elon Musk, a man who has donated hundreds of millions to Trump and other Republican causes, who has numerous financial conflicts of interest, and who has publicly lied numerous times, is never going to produce a more unbiased and factual encyclopedia than Wikipedia.

Especially when his effort to do so is essentially AI slop from a third rate LLM on top of his own biases.
by kyle_t | 2026-03-14 13:45:11+00:00
Google Fiber has been aggressively upselling us to a higher plan the last 6-12 months, prior to that in my 6 years with them I don't remember a single upsell. Guess I know why now, trying to grease the numbers for the highest possible sale price.

I'll be sure to take this as a warning sign in the future with other services if aggressive upselling starts happening unexpectedly.