MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dnielsen1031 | 2026-03-06 22:26:29+00:00
We open-sourced Speclint today. It's a linter for the specs you feed to AI coding agents.

The premise is simple: AI agents build exactly what the spec says, not what you meant. "Make the dashboard faster" produces different code every time. "Dashboard P95 load time under 800ms, measured via Lighthouse, no regressions on existing tests" produces the right code on the first try. The model isn't the bottleneck — the spec is.

Speclint scores specs across 6 dimensions:

Measurable outcome (20 pts) — does the spec define success you can observe?
Testable criteria (25 pts) — are there acceptance criteria with action verbs?
Constraints (20 pts) — scope limits, tech assumptions, tags?
No vague verbs (20 pts) — "improve X" fails; "reduce X from Y to Z" passes
Definition of done (informational) — specific states/thresholds in ACs
Verification steps (15 pts) — how will you prove it works?

Try it now:

npx @speclint/cli lint "Improve dashboard performance"

The whole scoring engine is 94 lines of TypeScript. We're not pretending this is rocket science. The value is making spec quality a measurable, enforceable thing in your CI pipeline.

What's open source vs paid: OSS (MIT) gives you the scoring engine, CLI, all 6 dimensions, run locally, unlimited. Cloud free is 5 lints/day via hosted API. Cloud paid ($29-79/mo) adds unlimited API, batch scoring, codebase-aware scoring, and team dashboard.

We built this because we run Claude Code and Cursor agents on our own projects and kept getting garbage back from vague specs. The scoring rubric is opinionated — looking for feedback on the dimensions and whether you'd add this to your CI.

Cloud: https://speclint.ai/
by to11mtm | 2026-03-06 22:26:32+00:00
Depends on the numbers/specifics. Some homeowners policies may exclude high dollar items or limit the coverage to items in the premises (i.e. if it was stolen off the shelf in the house, that could be covered, but not necessarily other scenarios.)

A specific policy can still be cheap however; mine comes in at about 311$ of replacement value per dollar of premium a month, if you're traveling a lot or shooting at places where stuff can come up missing it's not the worst peace of mind.
by alephnerd | 2026-03-06 22:26:50+00:00
Succession planning.

This appears to be Larry Ellison trying to manage succession for his kids. We'll probably see a second major acquisition like this for Megan (who tends to be more progressive leaning).

Larry would not be able to do something similar at Oracle today (definitely in the 2000s though), as by the 2010s operational control at Oracle increasingly shifted to operators like Catz, Hurd, and Kurian. It also would have led to bad blood à la the Murdochs.

One heir cultivating the right wing (David) and the other heir cultivating the progressive wing (Megan) buys a level of political impunity for the next generation that is hard to come by.
by estimator7292 | 2026-03-06 22:27:02+00:00
Yes. Read up on "gentleman scholars" from before the 20th century. An astonishing amount of all our foundational knowledge about the universe comes from wealthy dudes (or with wealthy patrons) exploring science for the sheer hell of it.

And when I say astonishing, I mean it. Almost all the foundations of every field were built this way.
by popalchemist | 2026-03-06 22:27:05+00:00
It was an elaborate scam between Trump and his billionaire buddy (and contributor) Ellison to make money in various ways (both the acquisition as well as driving down shares in Netflix so Trump could buy the dip - as was reported earlier in the week) as well as to MAGA-ify the entertainment industry further.

It's all a grift.
by conductr | 2026-03-06 22:27:07+00:00
It’s sufficiently foul and is heavy in the air, as in you can smell it for an hour or more after he’s left. The foulness reminds me of the GI wing we had, were the hospital put all these cases in a single cluster so as to try and contain the smell. A “GI bleed” has a uniquely poopy smell, that is what I remember quite specifically. Hard to explain other than it is more than a smell, I have a strong stomach and never got sick myself, but it almost makes even me want to vomit.

FWIW, other smells that I recall quite well - child birth, or, more specifically the odor of women in labor (there’s a specific smell some women in labor produce, not all maybe half, that found it quite gross), gangrene and necrotic/rotting flesh, formalin, the morgue (it’s a weird mix of chemicals and rot), all come to mind.
by kristianp | 2026-03-06 22:27:18+00:00
> A new use case processed about the same amount of data as their existing pipelines, but it ran much slower.

Did I miss something? They didn't mention why the new use case was slower. I was expecting some callback to that new usecase in the article somewhere.

Always enjoy reading about performance debugging, thanks for writing this.

Edit: they didn't talk about profiling either. It was an enjoyable read of rust serialisation for non rusty people though.
by reactordev | 2026-03-06 22:28:17+00:00
Which ones? The wyrms or the big baddies? Dragons one-shot. I remember you needed protection, resistance to fire, and a healer/mage who could heal you consistently between volleys to stand a chance at taming, let alone killing one.

I think this changed during the Mondrian era but in my favorite era, SA/Renaissance, those were the baddies that made you run.

Lich King as well.
by globular-toast | 2026-03-06 22:28:56+00:00
This is exactly my experience. Because the barrier to doing things is lower, you just do more things. But it doesn't actually expand one's capabilities or make learning happen any faster. That needs time (mostly sleep).

Compare playing Counter Strike with having a game of cricket.

Cricket takes a while to organise and set up. You have to contact your pals, physically travel to the field and set up the wickets. Then expect to commit several hours to the game.

Meanwhile, Counter Strike takes no effort. You move your arm to the mouse and click. A game is like 5 minutes of commitment.

The trouble is, before you know it you've spent 5 hours on Counter Strike. You could have easily played cricket in that time, caught up with your pals and exercised your body to boot.
by casey2 | 2026-03-06 22:29:15+00:00
You miss the fact that China's GDP per capita is 1/6th the US. So to produce 1/6th per person they emits 2/3rds the CO2. Which means in total, the thing that matters, is that china produces 4 times the CO2 with no end in sight. They are 99% to blame for the current situation.
by scottlamb | 2026-03-06 22:29:28+00:00
Agreed. The best is going to be to use steering [1] and one pinned thread per core to keep each connection handled on one core as completely as possible.

...with the caveat that it makes the load-balancing much harder when each core is essentially an independent server. If you overload some cores, even briefly, your tail latency will really suffer. And if you decrease utilization to compensate for it, you've lost the efficiency advantage you were going for too. Such that the more conventional approach of a single multi-core reactor can be much better if you don't have a very good load-balancing story.

...another caveat: if you have some massive shared dataset (think search), the cache-efficient approach goes the total other way: each core should own some shard, and a single request should be fanned out across all of them.

...so the best model may vary, but it's not the one in this article.

[1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.1/networking/scaling.html
by distrill | 2026-03-06 22:29:36+00:00
this isn't really my opinion, but i think it's a perceived matter of _some_ principle vs just none, a lesser of 2 evils framing. if anthropic is on board with 99% of a government that i oppose, that could be seen as marginally better than openai being on board with 100% of a government that i oppose.

it does get a little weird thinking too hard about how the deal openai accepted was basically the same as the one anthropic was proposing. but this is my read of most of the sentiment in this direction.
by silverstream | 2026-03-06 22:30:02+00:00
Same experience here with a pnpm workspace monorepo. The baseUrl removal was the only real friction — we were using it as a path alias root, had to move
everything to subpath imports.

The moduleResolution: node deprecation is the one I'd flag for anyone not paying attention yet. Switching to nodenext forced us to add .js extensions to all
relative imports, which was a bigger migration than expected.

Compilation speed improvement is real though. Noticeably faster on incremental builds.
by bibimsz | 2026-03-06 22:30:06+00:00
I assume 5.4 is just the latest version. So if I'm on 5.1, I need to plan to upgrade to the latest version. I may assume the pricing is roughly the same, as well as the speed, and the purpose.

If I'm on Haiku, I don't assume I need to upgrade to Opus soon. I use Haiku for fast low reasoning, and Opus for slower more thoughtful answers.

And if I'm on Sonnet 4.5 and I see Sonnet 4.6 is coming out, I can reasonably assume it's more of a drop in upgrade, rather than a different beast.
by sovietswag | 2026-03-06 22:30:32+00:00
Part of my training for doing "engine room checks" on a boat involved checking for any unusual smells, e.g. fuel leak, burning oil (from generator/engine), burning coolant (from generator/engine), or burning rubber (from sea chest raw water impeller). All of the components in there are equipped with sensors[1] that measure levels, temperature, etc. Perhaps there is room for a new olfactory sensor there? Aside from avoiding catostrophic issues like fire and engine or generator failure, it's also important to not pump out[2] any water from the compartment into the ocean if it's contaminated with oil, fuel, or coolant (the laws about this are super strict).

[1] There are digital sensors that are readable directly from the pilothouse by the captain which are rigged to automated alarms, as well as manual sensors (e.g. a pressure dial) that are readable from the engine room itself, for redundancy. So I don't think an olfactory sensor would replace the unusual smell check, but it could maybe augment it.

[2] The "bilge pump" is used to pump out water from the bilge (bottom floor cavity of engine room). To be honest on my vessel the policy is to never turn on the bilge pumps in the engine room at all because the risk of dumping contaminants is too high. But I still thought to mention this just in case there's an idea there.
by giarc | 2026-03-06 22:30:53+00:00
>people won't see it.

You are correct because it's happening already (massive wildfires burning down cities, 100 year floods every year, mass migration out of hot, dry climates) and the news will state something like "scientists are 85% certain this fire was accelerated by climate change" and then will move onto the next story. Climate change is all around us, but we refuse to see it.
by agentultra | 2026-03-06 22:31:23+00:00
What is a high performer?

Someone who jumps higher than expected when the boss demands it?

Someone who works 996 in the office?

Or someone who knows what they’re doing?

I think this is bigger than any individual. It’s just a matter of time before you’re let go. There’s no loyalty from companies at all. Not when they’re seeing higher than expected profits and are still cutting huge percentages of staff every year. There’s no strategy or preference to it. I don’t think this has to do with how you or I perform on the job.

Most people I’ve talked to lately who are still employed are watching out for their job to get cut.
by nostrademons | 2026-03-06 22:31:35+00:00
> A senior manager on reviewing a proposal asks them to synergize with existing efforts: Your work is redundant you're wasting your time.

> A senior director talks about better alignment of their various depts: We need to cut fat and merge, start identifying your bad players

In my experience neither one of those are automatically a sign of impending layoffs. Rather, it's an executive doing their job (getting the organization moving in one direction) in the laziest way possible: by telling their directs to work out what that direction is amongst themselves and come back with a concrete proposal for review that they all agree on. The exec can then rubber-stamp it without seriously diving into the details, knowing that everyone relevant has had a hand in crafting the plan. And if it turns out those details are wrong, there's a ready fall guy to take the blame and save the exec's job, because they weren't the one who came up with it.

Interestingly, this is also the most efficient way for the organization to work. The executive is usually the least informed person in the organization; you most definitely do not want them coming up with a plan. Instead, you want the plan to come from the people who will be most affected, and who actually do know the details.

If the managers in question cannot agree or come up with a bad plan, then it's usually time for layoffs. A lot of this comes down to the manager having an intuitive sense of what the exec really wants, though, as well as good relationships and trust with their peers to align on a plan. The managers who usually navigate this most poorly (and get their whole team laid off in the process) are those who came from being a stellar IC and are still too thick in the details to compromise, the Clueless on the Gervais hierarchy.
by robwwilliams | 2026-03-06 22:31:52+00:00
Well worth reading from Pam Vagata. Some important insights and predictions.

Her vision of autonomy is not true autonomy, but a vision of AI servants on slightly longer chains.

Is that fair?
Yes, I think so.

The key questions are not being asked: What drives autonomy? Who or what selects the motivation and defines the scope of action in a real stateful world?

I set my thermostat and it acts “autonomously” over the range I set. But that is not the autonomy she implies.

Give me CS types and founders like Hassabis, Sutton, Kanerva, Amodei, Bach, Levin, LeCun, Brooks, Hawkins, Sejnowski, and Friston (and about ten other scientists) who understand some of the core requirements of autonomy (but not all).

One hard but invaluable book to read before contending with the word autonomy: Maturana HC, Varela F (1980) Autopoiesis and Cognition. Finally reissued as a paperback.
by robinsonb5 | 2026-03-06 22:32:29+00:00
I still have a dusty old XP box here with PageMaker 7 on it.

As long as you don't need transparency effects it's still plenty capable.

I used to use it with an Agfa Accuset imagesetter - and in that role it was more capable than InDesign, since it exposed all the options in the PPD, whereas InDesign would expose only a subset.
Show HN: OculOS – Give AI agents control of your desktop via MCP
by stif1337 | 2026-03-06 22:33:04+00:00
Hi HN,

I built OculOS because giving AI agents (like Claude Code or Cursor) control over desktop apps is still surprisingly difficult. Most current solutions rely on slow OCR/Vision or fragile pixel coordinates.

OculOS is a lightweight daemon written in Rust that reads the OS accessibility tree and exposes every button, text field, and menu item as a structured JSON API and MCP server.

Why this is different:

Semantic Control: No screenshots or coordinates. The agent interacts with actual UI elements (e.g., "Click the 'Play' button").

Rust-powered: Single binary, zero dependencies, and extremely low latency.

Universal: Supports Windows (UIA), macOS (AXUIElement), and Linux (AT-SPI2).

Local & Private: Everything runs on your machine; no UI data is sent to the cloud.

It also includes a built-in dashboard for element inspection and an automation recorder. I’m looking forward to your feedback and technical questions!
by tzs | 2026-03-06 22:33:16+00:00
They are building coal for things that cannot yet be handled by renewables because coal is the fossil fuel natural resource they have the most of.

It's the same reason it was the dominant fossil fuel for electricity in the US until the shale revolution made natural gas cheap and abundant.

The reasons Trump is a schmuck for pushing coal are (1) he wants it instead of renewals rather than as a way to help fill the gap between renewables and what we need until we can build enough renewables and storage, and (2) in the US that makes no sense because because natural gas can fulfill that role and is better in pretty much every way that coal.

Compare to China which is putting vast amounts of resources into building renewables, storage, and also a nationwide UHV distribution network (currently 40-50000 km compared to ~0 in the US) which means local variations in solar/wind can increasingly be covered by non-local renewables, which should reduce the need to fire up those new local coal plants.
by nomel | 2026-03-06 22:33:20+00:00
> Thus, the ingrained short-term thinking of the markets and politicians

I don't think they're the only ones to blame. People want what's cheaper/keeps their standard of living the same. Any of these changes temporality upset and outright destroy large portions of the economy. You would be kicking the silent majority right in the wallet, who doesn't care all that much about any of this.
by es617 | 2026-03-06 22:33:26+00:00
Ha, good question. Short answer: I often let Claude Code find it.

Sessions are grouped by the folder where you ran Claude Code (e.g. ~/.claude/projects/Users-<user>-<path>), so if you don’t run everything from the same directory, it’s usually easy to narrow down.

They’re also plain JSONL files, so grep works well if you remember part of a prompt.

That said, it might be nice for claude-replay to add a helper command to list or search recent sessions.
by arjie | 2026-03-06 22:33:49+00:00
My wife and I use a shared Telegram chat to talk to our claw and it seems pretty fine to be honest. It's useful to just see what the other is getting done but it can be pretty noisy. Usually I'm not that interested in the details of it. Telegram doesn't have a threading notion, but Slack does, so it's particularly well-suited to it. Integrating with Slack is much higher friction, but now that I've thought about it, it's a pretty good idea. I guess I went with Telegram because it's free but we already use Slack.
by connorb-coder | 2026-03-06 22:34:12+00:00
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by johnnyanmac | 2026-03-06 22:34:36+00:00
1. Of course. I'm not saying a basic filter isn't needed. But if you don't trust your basic filter, how is that going to go when you need to actually invest time interviewing the candidates? You're already off on the wrong foot because your looking for falsehoods instead of qualities.

2. It varies, but I don't think it's a lack of ability so much as liability. My industry is full of NDAs. I can't exactly give precise dates and timelines even for released products. So it's a weird dance of how much I can disclose and how much is a red flag to talk about (since inevitably, this place also probably had me sign an NDA as well).

I'm fine with generic role questions. It usually falls back to leetcode stuff, though.
by conductr | 2026-03-06 22:34:44+00:00
I handled a lot of biopsy tissue back then, and oddly enough had a sexual encounter several years later where I implored her to go get a mammogram afterwards due to something I felt. She didn’t take it seriously and I hounded her about it. She finally went in and within a month had a double mastectomy and started chemo.

Somehow a random person’s poop feels more awkward to discuss.
by jmyeet | 2026-03-06 22:34:51+00:00
Control of the media has become more important than the direct financial results of that acquisition. We are at a precarious point in history and it's becoming increasingly necessary to manufacture consent to maintain the American imperial project.

Don't think of this in terms on a financial return on investment. A half dozen people control almost all American media because the fear is that without the manufactured consent, the entire system is going to collapse. Historically, that's tended to result in heads on spikes or being hunt from the city walls.

Perhaps it's nihilistic of me but I thought that after the 2024 election, we're now beyond the point where any of this is going to get better through electoral politics. Any democracy now is performative. Both sides are bought and paid for. There is no significant, organized resistance to any of this. Material conditions will continue to get worse.

Think about it: it doesn't matter if you, as Larry Ellison or Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, have $200 billion or $300 billion or $400 billion. Like that has no impact on your life. There is nothing you can possibly buy that requires more wealth. The goal now is to preserve the system at any cost.
by arcivanov | 2026-03-06 22:35:48+00:00
For the past 20+ years, MariaDB/MySQL's MEMORY (HEAP) engine has refused to store BLOB and TEXT columns entirely. This meant the optimizer was forced to spill temporary tables to disk (Aria/MyISAM) whenever a query involved JSON, TEXT, GEOMETRY, or Dynamic Columns, even when the actual data was small enough to fit in memory.

I wrote a patch for MariaDB 10.11 that removes this limitation. The MEMORY engine can now store BLOBs natively using continuation record chains, with a zero-copy fast path for the common case of small blobs that fit in a single continuation record. Non-blob tables have zero overhead since all blob-specific code is branch-guarded.

The practical impact: queries that use GROUP BY, DISTINCT, UNION, subquery materialization over tables with TEXT/JSON/GEOMETRY columns can now stay entirely in memory instead of hitting disk. This matters most for workloads with lots of small-to-medium temporary tables.

Some highlights:

- Zero-copy reads for single-run blobs (the common case in temp tables)
- GEOMETRY column support (HA_CAN_GEOMETRY)
- Free-list reuse with contiguous run detection to reduce fragmentation
- Comprehensive test suite covering CRUD, deduplication, subquery materialization, and multi-run edge cases
- No overhead for existing non-blob MEMORY tables

Limitations: no BTREE indexes on blob columns (HASH only), no FULLTEXT (triggers conversion to Aria as before), and multi-run blobs need a temporary reassembly buffer.

The patch is currently in review. If you run MariaDB from source or are comfortable with preview builds, I'd love for people to try it out and report any issues back on the JIRA ticket.

Feedback, benchmarks, and bug reports all welcome.