MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tveita | 2026-03-12 08:54:25+00:00
Probably more like the long tail of software - software that was created for a particular purpose in a particular domain by a single person in the company who also happened to know programming - maybe just as Excel macros.

I strongly assume the long tail is shifting and expanding now and will eventually mostly be software for one-off purposes authored by people who don't know how to code, and probably have a poor understanding of how it actually works.
by vineyardmike | 2026-03-12 08:56:01+00:00
> You could have said same about Transformers, Google released it, but didn't move forward, turns out it was a great idea

Google released transforms as research because they invented it while improving Google Translate. They had been running it for customers for years.

Beyond that, they had publicly-used transformer based LMs ("mums") integrated into search before GPT-3 (pre-chat mode) was even trained. They were shipping transformer models generating text for years before the ChatGPT moment. Literally available on the Google SERP page is probably the widest deployment technology can have today.

Transformers are also used widely in ASR technologies, like Google Assistant, which of course was available to hundreds of millions of users.

Finally, they had a private-to-employees experimental LLMs available, as well as various research initatives released (meena, LaMDA, PaLM, BERT, etc) and other experiments, they just didn't productize everything (but see earlier points).
by jclulow | 2026-03-12 08:57:22+00:00
I had some serious struggles with the delinquent landlord and property owners, and the dangerously incompetent builders that plagued our building in Alameda for years. While they were not always legally empowered to come and stop the skulduggery, the Alameda city council offices of planning and compliance were the only people who consistently and professionally responded to phone calls and emails and were available if you went to their offices. People complain about public servants, but at least in Alameda they were really good people doing their best.
by metalman | 2026-03-12 08:58:16+00:00
I cant stand trying to use a phone to my ear, never use anything but speaker.
The speaker for the ear piece is just useless, precious junk, I have given up, dont, wont, try to use it.
Guy tried to discpiline me for useing the speaker the other day, and I said no, he got the idea that I would in fact escalate, ha!
Worse it is no longer possible to get a phone with decent volume for taking calls in the truck or on work sites, or just to listen to music,you know at home....so those things dont happen.....

phone speaker rating is gone from
any list of features, and there are no reviews that compare the volume and sound quality, how did that happen with zero discussion or push back?

fuck you all for trying to live in your little pristine taboo bubbles ,eh!

no problem stopping a conversation without preamble or appology 5 times to answer the LOUD notification for a message , critical no doubt, so back to fucking you
give us back decent speakers, and perhaps a real ear piece...? molded into the flip side
??? or something other than AI garbage and mountains of unwanted "features", and adverconsumption oportunities.
by MITSardine | 2026-03-12 08:58:25+00:00
In an organization, the number of sequential steps doesn't really scale with number of participants, does it? Rather with dependent steps of the tackled process; say, devise building permit request, await approval, purchase materials, move materials to site, hire workforce, etc.

Theoretically, each of those steps is parallelizable to some extent. Amdahl's law equivalent here would be that some delays are outside the reach of an organization to improve. For instance, a building permit will take the time it takes to be examined based on an external public administration.
by pegasus | 2026-03-12 08:58:55+00:00
> The rewritten paragraph sounds written in the notorious "LLM voice". It's less direct, more pandering and removes injection points for further discussion.

Does it? I don't see it. If anything, it is more direct and clear, not less, i.e. "to help me find wording that conveys my thoughts the way I want them to be understood by the reader" instead of the more convoluted "to search for a way to formulate my thoughts like I intend them to be received by the reader". How is it pandering? And how exactly does it remove "injection points"?

It basically chose more precise words where that was possible, resulting in a net improvement, AFAICS.
by mark_round | 2026-03-12 09:00:08+00:00
The "one-person framework" thing is a big draw. I'm amazed at how productive I was in it, and it's not just at the code level. Even though I've been doing sysadmin/devops/architect work for over 25 years now, it's just so damn nice now not to have to think about e.g. standing up a HA PostgreSQL cluster or Redis and deployment is largely a solved problem.
by 9rx | 2026-03-12 09:00:31+00:00
> that looks a lot like it has the same implications as affordability.

Exactly. Mr B being able to get an apple by "devine right" and him being able to afford the apple are the exact same thing. And as you can see, Mr B was suddenly able to afford an apple he previously may not have been able to afford just because some people changed what they believed in. So, as you can see, resource allocation is entirely a social construct.

> The social construct you're pointing at is the labelling of the situation rather than the underlying physics of the situation, is where I'm going with this.

In other words you're just trying to randomly change the subject, presumably to avoid answering how you think humans won't continue to make problems for themselves even if a magical perfect unicorn took over the role of resource allocation? Scarcity is a thing. That much is true. But it is not what we are talking about.
by larodi | 2026-03-12 09:00:42+00:00
in reality, it is perhaps indistinguishable. like - if I take this whole page of comments, feed it into... say Opus latest 1M, and tell it "have my text tweaked in a way to please these guys' apparent aesthetically preferences", or even "make my writing sound human in the sense all these guys do", then I cannot see how anyone would recognize it.

unless tis signed before uploading, like this is even enforceable?
by DeusExMachina | 2026-03-12 09:00:50+00:00
One thing you learn from game theory is that you need to understand the rules of the game everyone is playing. You cannot change them, you can only play by them.

"Making a cultural change" is not something you or any group of people can do. The superstructure of the game decides those, not the players. You can try, but nobody will play your new game.
by Stevencoles89 | 2026-03-12 09:01:35+00:00
Furnished rental properties go through cycles of tenants with varying levels of care, and bed frames in particular are subjected to repeated assembly and disassembly between tenancies. Particle board frames lose fixing integrity quickly through this cycle — the screw holes enlarge and the joints loosen after two or three reassemblies. Solid pine holds its fixings more securely through repeated assembly, making it a more commercially practical choice for a furnished rental single room. The DHS solid pine single bed frame at 198×98×82cm with a 150kg load rating suits adult occupancy and is available in neutral white+pine, grey, and white finishes that remain compatible with standard rental room aesthetics across multiple tenancies.
by Btmviolet123 | 2026-03-12 09:02:59+00:00
Interesting perspective. The IPv4 leasing ecosystem does have areas that lack transparency, especially in multi-layer subleasing models. Some newer platforms, like LARUS (larus.net), are trying to address this by offering direct first-party IPv4 leasing and verified resource ownership, which could bring more structure and trust to the market.
by mark_round | 2026-03-12 09:03:04+00:00
You're about the 5th person now in as many days who has recommended Elixir when I mentioned I was building a project in Ruby. I'll definitely have to check it out for my next project (whatever that may be!)

Can you expand on why you found it so appealing or "holy crap, this is awesome" things I should look at first ?
by flohofwoe | 2026-03-12 09:03:18+00:00
Yeah, the web API layer stack is essentially inverted, and important parts are missing entirely. Ideally there would be a 3D API at the bottom, on top of that a text-and-font API (e.g. allow to render high quality text into a 3D-API surface without bringing your own text renderer), to the side a vector/shape rendering API as the base for SVG, and a layouting/compositing API, the DOM should only be implemented on top that.

The chance for that ever materializing is most like zero though.
by prox | 2026-03-12 09:03:38+00:00
I really love your post, but I do think (and I come from an artistic background) that some skills have their own beauty, like work of art. Some love for creativity and what we create has a meaning of its own. Certainly worthy of an epitaph.

It’s why overuse of AI is a bad call imo. You skip a part of the journey. Like Guy Kawasaki says “make something meaningful”. If we are all AIs talking to eachother, everything becomes meaningless, we will become a simulation of surrogates.

That said, human compassion, relating to others and everything you mentioned trumps everything else.
by wolvoleo | 2026-03-12 09:03:39+00:00
Personally I think we do need nuclear weapons but not nuclear power. We can't rely on the US anymore for a nuclear umbrella so Europe needs to have its own (and just the UK/French ones is not enough).

It's the only real deterrent against Russia. But nuclear power I'm not in favour of due to the long-term waste and potential safety impact.
by shwetanshu21 | 2026-03-12 09:04:05+00:00
Unfortunately this is becoming common in countries like India since there is no other option. We are looking for a mid level DevOps and get like 1000s of application. The requirements were clear we need k8s and IaC exp. But when we went to interview, none of them had production level exp. They told the recruiter that they had who didnt have a way to verify it. After 2-3 interviews like that, I had so start giving them Coderbyte assesments like write a k8s manifests, a Dockerfile and logs parsing. Otherwise, you won't be able to hire.
by internet_points | 2026-03-12 09:04:24+00:00
I love Emacs, and while that tour doesn't quite look 1978, it sure doesn't look 2026 either. Maybe somewhere in the middle.. yup, 2002 seems about right.

And for some reason, most of the screenshots on that page are in super low res, e.g. I see https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/images/gnus-small.pn... instead of https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/images/gnus.png , I really don't see why they'd want to make it look even worse.

And then on the other hand you have people like Nicolas Rougier https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fp... or Álvaro Ramírez https://xenodium.com/awesome-emacs-on-macos who show how great it can really look.
by fatihmgenc | 2026-03-12 09:04:24+00:00
While building a UI-first application, I kept running into the same problem: my AI agent was generating mock data with static strings and weak examples that did not feel realistic enough for real product work. That frustration led me to build JsonPlace.

JsonPlace MCP is an tool that combines Faker-style field generation with real remote mock endpoints so agents can generate better payloads and actually serve them during development. Another big advantage is that creation is not LLM-based, which saves context, reduces token usage, and makes mock data generation more deterministic.

This is the first public version of the idea. It is completely free and open source, and I would genuinely love to hear feedback, ideas, and real use cases from other developers.
by bob1029 | 2026-03-12 09:04:34+00:00
The short lived certificates started making a lot more sense to me when I discovered I could get Let's Encrypt to issue IP address certs. Clearly, in this context of use we need our certificates to die quickly.

You can now make any web server operate with a publicly valid TLS certificate without paying any money, registering a domain, configuring DNS or disclosing any personally identifiable information. It can be entirely automatic and zero configuration. The only additional service required is something like a STUN server so the public IP can be discovered and updated over time.
by h45x1 | 2026-03-12 09:05:01+00:00
Starting with the CTAP 2.1 standard, there is a largeBlob extension in the standard that allows for storage of a small amount of arbitrary user data. The current libfido2 library implementation uses a largeBlobKey provided by the authenticator to encrypt the data in userspace before storage. However, at least on a Yubikey, obtaining the largeBlobKey does not require User Presence, which IMHO lowers the essential security guarantees that a hardware authenticator normally provides. Recently got myself a set of Yubikeys and tinkered with them for a while. It seems it is also perfectly possible to use the hmac-secret provided by a Yubikey to encrypt one's data in user space and then store it in the largeBlob array on a Yubikey. Importantly, requesting the hmac-secret does require User Presence.

That combination is hardly documented anywhere. And so I somewhat skeptical about my unorthodox security solution. Sharing on the off-chance a security expert would comment.
by bartmichalak | 2026-03-12 09:05:40+00:00
Hey! Your ring looks very promising, especially the subscription-free model and the focus on raw sensor access.
Curious about the data access side on your end - are you planning to expose the PPG/sensor data via an SDK, a REST API, or both? I'd want to understand the data flow to figure out the best integration path (e.g. whether we'd pull from a local SDK on-device or sync from a cloud endpoint) with Open Wearables.
by new_user55 | 2026-03-12 09:05:53+00:00
Its really cool! If you don't mind me asking, does it support variable size inputs? I am bit confused about JAX in that regards. I am trying for long to run JAX stablehlo models in C++ for inference. However dynamic shapes were still an issue. If I understand correctly, it recompiles the kernels for all different shapes at runtime, so if inputs vary too much in shape, it will spend considerable time recompiling kerenels. In C++ inference it becomes impossible .However I could be wrong (I did not fully understand the issue, the developer of gopjrt tried to explain it to me!). Do you have any thoughts on this?

e.g.:

https://github.com/openxla/xla/issues/33092
https://github.com/openxla/xla/issues/35556

Explanation from the gopjrt dev:

https://github.com/gomlx/gopjrt/issues/59
by atoav | 2026-03-12 09:05:54+00:00
This is the point. The way you carry out elections need to optimize for not having the loser riot on the streets, nearly all other considerations are secondary: speed, efficiency, etc.

It is also interesting which role human psychology plays in this. Trump for example used the late trickeling in of the mail vote to incite the January 6th riots. His followers found it shady that the gote changed in the end.
by teiferer | 2026-03-12 09:06:32+00:00
I understand the appeal of this tech to techies. It's so cool to automate knitting!

Though it totally misses the point of actually knitting something, with your own hands. The time it takes, the details you need to think about, the skills you work on perfecting, the quiet evening on the sofa or in a cafe with friends, chatting and knitting away, all that goes into a piece of clothing that you've knitted. Letting a machine do that is completely missing out.

I feel similarly about AI generated music. Taking the musician out of the loop misses the point of the whole thing.
by talkingtab | 2026-03-12 09:06:47+00:00
The concept is good. It is in the right direction.

I think it needs to not have a dependence on github. This is a microsoft thing, and at best it means this will become another way for a corporation to make money from people.

Speaking of money, it needs to be paid for. (The github part is free from Microsloth and so is NOT free). So how do you pay for this? Micropayments.

So we need a system of micropayments. Then we need it to provide a way to help people economically. These are not barriers, because this is hacker news, instead this is an accurate understanding of more of the problem.

People keep talking about a collaborative internet without using the term. But to be clear we are talking about a fundamentally different kind of internet. That we can build.
by micheles | 2026-03-12 09:07:13+00:00
The article is badly written. This has nothing to do with fractals, they are talking about the assumption that there is an UV fixed point for all physical laws, which can even be true and personally like. It means there are no ultraviolet divergences and that at some point quantum field theory becomes finite. Over a certain large mass scale (which still can be much smaller than the Plank scale) all the coupling constants freeze, there are no radiative corrections and all is simple and well behaved. The problem is, you need some extra fields to do that, with some symmetry cancelling the divergences over the mass scale (it does not have to be supersymmetry) and we lack a theory for that. Moreover, the low energy physics will be nearly independent from the high energy modifications, so the predictive power is low. Yes, they predicted the Higgs mass, but it could very well be a coincidence. If they could predict something really new, though, then it would become quite interesting.
by aspenmayer | 2026-03-12 09:07:15+00:00
> I’ll start working on an HN comment in a few weeks and try to remember to post it back to this thread

iirc HN threads automatically close, due to inactivity and (/or?) based on time since the original post. I wasn’t able to find a thread with the comments still open from 16 days ago, let alone a “few weeks”, but in good faith I’m assuming that you already know that, and aren’t using that as an out to avoid replying, not that anyone is “owed” a reply by you, or by anyone.

This is all to say, I appreciate the thread as a bystander, and would thus naturally eagerly await your reply if and when it arrives before the closure of individual this post’s comment section.
by pegasus | 2026-03-12 09:07:39+00:00
I disagree. To my ears, "to help me find wording that conveys my thoughts the way I want them to be understood by the reader" conveys the same meaning as "to search for a way to formulate my thoughts like I intend them to be received by the reader", only less convoluted and more precise: for example "understood" vs "received" - the former is more specific, the latter more general and fuzzy. The effect is to make the phrasing easier to read and understand.

Introducing "because" also adds to the clarity without weighing down things or changing the meaning. "Improved" instead of the bland "better" again is an... improvement.

I imagine GP didn't sneak in the tendentious "to fit with and be well received in the hacker news community" in his instructions.

Overall this was a worthwhile assist. I believe (totally understandable) anti-AI animus is coloring a lot of these replies. These tools can be useful when applied sparingly and targeted la GP did. It's true and very unfortunate that often they are used as the proverbial hammer in search of a nail, flattening everything in the process.
by schipperai | 2026-03-12 09:08:48+00:00
good points.

nah does inspect Write and Edit content before it hits disk - regex patterns catch base64-to-exec chains, embedded secrets, exfiltration patterns, destructive payloads. And base64 -d | bash in a shell command is classified as obfuscated and blocked outright, no override possible.

but creative obfuscation in generated code is not easy to catch with heuristics. Based on some feedback from HN, I'm starting work to extend nah so that when it sees 'python script.py' it reads the file and runs content inspection + LLM with "should this execute?".

full AV-style is a different layer though - nah currently is a checkpoint, not a background process
by LeonM | 2026-03-12 09:09:06+00:00
Similar story, I had a customer who wanted me to change the entire UI of a legacy application, because some information would not fit on the ancient 1024*786 15" desktop monitor of one employee, meaning he would have to use horizontal scroll constantly.

I recommended them giving this employee a larger monitor, not only would that be much cheaper than having me rebuild the entire UI, it would also boost this employee's productivity. Not to mention that swapping a monitor takes 10 minutes, changing a UI probably weeks.

Customer insisted to change the UI, because "if we give him a new monitor, everyone in the office will want one". I nearly got fired for responding with "Great! Then everyone can benefit from more productivity!".

In the end we did change the UI, I believe the total cost was something like 30k. The customer had maybe 15 employees, so new monitors would still have been much cheaper.

A few months later their offices were remodelled with expensive designer furniture, wooden floors and custom artwork on the walls. Must have cost a fortune. In the end, the employees still worked on ancient computers with 15" monitors, because new computers didn't fit the budget.
by prox | 2026-03-12 09:09:17+00:00
My mention of Gen-Z wanting values is exactly them seeing the bullshit of the sociopaths at the top (and the crap like “we are a family”. Gen-Z sees through that fluff.

The values I mentioned in the top comment are exactly about having people at the top who actually give a damn, that guide or lead with empathy. That doesn’t mean they don’t have to make shitty decisions, it just means they give a damn.
by js8 | 2026-03-12 09:10:00+00:00
I think what would be nice (but won't happen until cost of AI somewhat decreases):

1. Pre-moderation - AI looks at your comment before you submit it, and suggests changes for clarity, factuality and argumentative strength. You can decide whether to accept these (individual) changes or not. It will also automatically flag if it breaks moderation guidelines too much.

2. Discussion summary - AI will periodically edit main debate points and supporting sources into a comprehensive document, which you can further add to with your comment. This will help to steer the discussion and make it easier to consume in the future. It can also make discussions less ephemeral, which is a huge problem.
by lelanthran | 2026-03-12 09:11:18+00:00
> This probably only works properly in the developed countries. In developing countries like India we suffered through decades of "booth captures" [1] where armed gangs would take over a polling booth and cast votes for their political candidate at gun point. Villagers would be disallowed from casting their votes. In many instances, the polling booth itself would be set on fire, ensuring that those votes are never counted.

Yeah, but these are visible! They provide evidence that the voting was not fair.

Compare to electronic voting, where a capture might be done and no one ever finds out.

We want rigging of elections to be visible. That's the whole point.