MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-03-07 19:47:46+00:00
Minor point related to Theo (Creator of this tool) but I actually used to watch theo and that's why I had joined hackernews because so many of the articles he talked about came from here, might as well read here and Oh boy did I discover something amazing.

I went from Fireship -> Primagen -> Theo t3 -> hackernews (currently here) -> (??)

That being said, the reason why I stopped watching theo was his arrogance. I saw one of the video[0] of his where he felt so arrogant about the fact that dev relations person from MongoDB couldn't recognize him...

and that was essentially one of the larger reasons why he didn't like mongodb and wanted the product to die. There are many reasons to hate Mongodb but he made the most arrogant one possible.

Later on, I also feel like the whole reaction genre that he is part of has faults as well because he could rake in hundreds of thousands of views essentially reading an article and there were sometimes not even ways to support the person who actually wrote the interesting piece themselves.

And Theo had also reacted to an hour long Genuine documentary from one of the best youtube channels in tech scene (Cult repo) which made (IIRC) a video about "story of react" which was an hour long and theo added 10-15 minutes of content and there was a whole controversy about it but to me, it felt like it impacted the genuine hard work of the people of CultRepo.

I don't know, I always liked primeagen about this stuff. Primagen/Fireship have made much of my opinions in regards to golang and svelte and it was really sweet watching these people because it always felt like learning something new especially from primagen as Fireship sold out.

Primagen might truly be the reason why I wanted to code, because I wanted to go into finance and then was using Linux previously. I knew how to code previously, quite a decent bit but it was that I liked finance and seeing people like Primagen who were authentic. I do believe that the decision at the end of the day was in which of the jobs do I feel more valuable and how much impact I might truly make in the world and Software felt really liberating in that regards even with the prospects of AI looming over. it just felt so exciting watching his videos for hours.

He's just a really nice guy overall who is honestly humble :D

At some point, the influencer ego really is something as parasocial relationships are infinitely easier to develop, so there are only a few who still remain humble.

[0]: Mongo can’t stop winning (I hate it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEJQUwr9d_s / (Preserved version for archive): https://preservetube.com/watch?v=MEJQUwr9d_s
by sofixa | 2026-03-07 19:47:53+00:00
It operates sort of like a guild. For music, there's the SACEM, where songwriters, musicians, etc. register themselves (hey I have this thing), and get help (e.g. SACEM invests in young aspiring music professionals) and royalties based on how their music was used and by whom. All music users pay SACEM for the use, and SACEM distributes the proceeds to the copyright holders.
by wahern | 2026-03-07 19:48:15+00:00
> To people still concerned with the various brows, Marvel films are below low. They are sign of a debased and infantile film culture that caters to childish tastes and merchandising, not art.

Marvel films just seem like PC versions of Westerns of yore. All the moral dilemmas are there, just abstracted to avoid overt alienation of various groups. In the coming decades the better written Marvel films will likely be elevated just like some Westerns, and the superhero trope will become fodder for highbrow concepts (more so than already occurs). The bulk of the superhero films will fade into oblivion, just like most Westerns.
by porridgeraisin | 2026-03-07 19:48:17+00:00
Tracks, I guess. MSDS@UCSD, MSA@GT, MSCS@CMU all got jobs at meta, IBM, amazon. First two in the bay, third one as well I think. MSCS@NCSU got an internship at amazon but did not get full time yet. MSCS@NEU also did not get anything yet. CS@Columbia did not get anything, but EE@Columbia (semicon stuff) got one in bell labs NJ.
by Timon3 | 2026-03-07 19:48:20+00:00
> Sounds borderline implausible.

Okay? Weird comment.

> If anything, that's not a typical user user case by far.

The scale may not be typical, but the pattern (many more screenshots copied to clipboard than saved as a file) is something I see across all kinds of users around me, be they technical or even very much non-technical.

Let's not turn the defaults into "The Homer", okay? Allowing the user to choose their preferred action in the same step as allowing them to change the outline doesn't make things unnecessarily confusing, doesn't add unnecessary clicks, or anything else.
by furyofantares | 2026-03-07 19:48:30+00:00
I've been pointing out LLM written stuff for months now, and often people ask how I determined it. When they do, I mention all the aesthetic things, and then I usually engage with the content and why the content is bad. In every case the content has been garbage. Usually it's a really bad infodump, in a singular tone, usually oversold, and you can't tell what was important to the original author and what's not. Often the some of the info isn't right. So it's like, infodump with extra labor to read that includes mistakes and masks what the author cared about.

It's just too easy to make garbage content that gets upvoted because it looks good if you skim it and serves as a good jumping-off ground for discussion. Engaging with the content of all the LLM-written garbage is a major waste of time and would make the site not worth it anymore to me.

Like it's already a major drain just to notice the aesthetic tells and then disengage. It's significantly more work to engage, and, AFAICT, around a 0% conversion rate to "oh shit I'm actually glad I read that."
by landr0id | 2026-03-07 19:48:40+00:00
I've always used GUIs and had to basically break my brain to learn vim keybindings (in Sublime Text) some time ago and the helix bindings are just different enough to throw me off. Sucks because I would prefer an out-of-box solution that "just works" and I'm comfortable in across all my machines for terminal text editing.
by Noaidi | 2026-03-07 19:48:50+00:00
Because of this I am finding the internet more and more useless. I cannot tell you how much reading this freaks me out. I mean, is anyone else here as freaked out as I am?

The only way out is to unplug. Something I am realizing is very hard to do mainly because of my conditioning. My goal it to become the next Jesus (in the human sense), or the next St. Francis.

Just like my compulsive intent to keep coming back here to make these useless comments. What does it really do for me?

The capitalists (and you cannot tel me this is not because of capitalism) have ruined everything about the internet.

My goal: A flip phone (with a faraday bag) and a laptop with no connection to me at all, just to use to look up things, like a library.
by greggoB | 2026-03-07 19:49:35+00:00
I appreciate that you can so readily admit that - definitely not something commonly seen.

Could you say a bit more about what's behind your dislike of Bluesky? I'm curious as I don't know much about it, other than it's possibly become a home of the more liberal/left-leaning base that found themselves disguested by Twitter/X once Musk took over (fairly so IMO, given how that's led to things like Grok AI's sexualized photo).
by Havoc | 2026-03-07 19:50:49+00:00
>I am not sure the average budget constrained developer is the right audience for this product.

Actually think that's their #1 audience.

They absolute take an L on raw pricing, but their "don't send me surprise 100k bills" story is very strong. Their billing is prepay and when I was looking at their WAF even the free tier thing it looked solid on rate limit features

> intense tasks at the edge for just $600-700 bucks.

I'd venture that it would be the wrong tool for that anyway. I'd probably do something like static page on their CDN, dynamic requests to a magic container/function and that passes it on to something VM-ish that isn't publicly exposed. To me 100s of dollar spend in exposed edge compute just doesn't make sense
by bastawhiz | 2026-03-07 19:51:47+00:00
> serialize to a string and store in a db

Ah, here we are. If it's just bytes, why store it as a string? Sixteen bytes is just a 128-bit integer, don't waste the space. So now the DB needs to know how to convert your string back to an integer. And back to a string when you ask for it.

"Well why not just keep it as an integer?"

Sure, in which base? With leading zeroes as padding?

But now you also need to handle this in JavaScript, where you have to know to deserialize it to a Bigint or Buffer (or Uint8Array).

UUIDs just mean you don't need to do any of this crap yourself. It's already there and it already works. Everything everywhere speaks the same UUIDs.
by noemit | 2026-03-07 19:52:13+00:00
This is the Cobra Effect in action - the "solution" creates the very problem it claims to solve.

What's fascinating here is how AI detection tools assume there's a static "human" writing style. But writing has always been iterative and collaborative. Students use spell check, grammar tools, style guides, peer review. The line between "assisted" and "generated" was blurry long before LLMs.

The deeper issue: we're optimizing for detectability rather than quality. Students learn to game the detector instead of developing their voice. It's a classic metrics problem - when you measure the wrong thing, you get the wrong behavior.

I've been thinking about this in product contexts too. When we build AI features, are we solving real user problems or just creating new adversarial dynamics? The students who "fail" AI detection aren't cheating - they're caught in a system that prizes surveillance over learning.

The real question: what would assessment look like if we started from "how do humans actually learn and communicate" rather than "how do we catch cheaters"?
by nowittyusername | 2026-03-07 19:52:18+00:00
Got mine after my first Acid trip (still don't know if it was real acid). Its not debilitating for me, just annoying. So yeah, be careful out there folks. The Acid trip was very cerebral though and I consider it to be an important experience in my life so I am kind of on the fence that it might have been worth the trade off....
by mieubrisse | 2026-03-07 19:52:33+00:00
I've been wondering this too: for us, UUIDs are super opaque. But for an agent, two UUIDs are distinct as day and night. Is the best filesystem just blob storage S3 style with good indexes, and a bit of context on where everything lives?

One thing directories solve: they're great grouping mechanisms. "All the Q3 stuff lives in this directory"

I bet we move towards a world where files are just UUIDs, then directory structures get created on demand, like tags.
by Implicated | 2026-03-07 19:52:39+00:00
Right - it's not a big deal and it LITERALLY is amateur hour. But I did it. I wouldn't have done it prior, sure I could have done a bunch of google searches but the time investment it would have taken to sift through all that information and distill it into actionable chunks would have far exceeded the benefit of doing so, in this case.

The whole point is that it is amateur hour and it's wildly effective as a learning tool.

The fact it derived everything from things that have been done... yea, that's also the point? What point are you trying to make here? I'm well aware it's not a great tool if you're trying to use it to create novel things... but I'm not a nuclear physicist. I'm a builder, fixer, tinkerer who happens to make a living writing code. I use it to teach me how to do things, I use it to analyze problems and recommend approaches that I can then delve into myself.

I'm not asking it to fold proteins. (I guess that's been done quite a bit too, so would be amateur as well)
by phil21 | 2026-03-07 19:52:46+00:00
Spatial audio is pretty good these days on some titles. It's just most folks don't have a sound system that can really do much with it. Headphones can only do so much in this arena.

Couple a modern AAA title (like Battlefield 6, etc.) with a proper Atmos sound system and you will likely be pretty amazed. Even a simple 5.1 setup is pretty decent for hearing footsteps behind you/etc. which actually does help with gameplay.

I haven't kept up on it as my computer gaming area doesn't lend itself towards a proper speaker setup these days, but playing with headphones on lately has made me start to look into this again. I need to find some high quality tiny cube speakers or something to be able to put in weird spots on the ceilings/walls.
by plagiat0r | 2026-03-07 19:53:26+00:00
Back in the 90/2000 the was a very popular tool named rrdtool to store metrics in a round robin structure on disk, especially suited for network metrics. The goal of the storage was to have a fixed size and cover only last NNN days, circularly.

I use rrdtool to this day, as a building block, but this project looks much better.
by Capricorn2481 | 2026-03-07 19:53:27+00:00
So people don't look at the code, or the tests.

So they don't know if it has the right behavior to begin with, or even if the tests are testing the right behavior.

This is what people are talking about. This is why nobody responsible wants to uberscale a serious app this way. It's ridiculous to see so much hype in this thread, people claiming they've built entire businesses without looking at any code. Keep your business away from me, then.
by lich_king | 2026-03-07 19:53:46+00:00
Eh. In the 1980s and 1990s, the capabilities of the software you could run on your new computer were changing dramatically every two years or so. Completely new types of computer games and productivity software, vastly improved audio and video, more and more real-time functionality.

Nowadays, you really don't get these magical moments when you upgrade, not on the device itself. The upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11 was basically just more ads. Games released today look about as good as games released 5-10 years ago. The music-making or photo-editing program you installed back then is still good. Your email works the same as before. In fact, I'm not sure I have a single program on my desktop that feels more capable or more responsive than it did in 2016.

There's some magic with AI, but that's all in the cloud.
by mieubrisse | 2026-03-07 19:54:18+00:00
I'm building an agent orchestrator (plug: https://github.com/mieubrisse/agenc) and asked Claude what prior art exists.

It pulled back Plan 9, and I was shocked: this is exactly what we need today, as I'm convinced we need to think about minimizing agent permissions the exact same way companies do. Plan 9 was just too early.
by 0x20cowboy | 2026-03-07 19:54:20+00:00
Maybe have a play with them a bit more. LLMs are quite good at coding, but terrible at software engineering. You hear people talk about “guiding them” which is what I think they are getting at. You still need to know what you are doing or you’ll just drive off a cliff eventually.

At the moment I am trying to fix a vibe coded application and while each individual function is ok, the overall application is a dog’s breakfast of spaghetti which is causing many problems.

If you derive all your pleasure from actually typing the code then you’re probably toast, but if you like building whole systems (that run on production infrastructure) there is still heaps of work to do.
by tylerjaywood | 2026-03-07 19:54:26+00:00
I built an audio timegrapher feature for my watch accuracy app, ChronoLog. Professional timegraphers use a piezo contact sensor and can cost upwards of $1,000. I wanted to do it with a phone mic.

The problem: an iPhone's built-in microphone picks up a mechanical watch's tick at about 1.5 dB SNR. The solution turned out to be epoch folding — the same technique radio astronomers use to find pulsars. Stack 100+ tick periods together and you get +20 dB of effective gain, enough to reliably measure rate and beat error.

The post covers the full DSP pipeline — bandpass filtering, epoch folding, autocorrelation (and why it finds harmonics before fundamentals at low SNR), Kalman filtering for convergence — and what I learned from five rounds of device testing.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-03-07 19:54:37+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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...

The US grid is 18% nuclear, 10% wind and 6% solar. China is 5% nuclear, 9% wind and 6% solar.

The UK is 34% wind+solar. Uruguay Greece, Spain and Germany are all >=40% wind+solar. Lithuania and Denmark are >50% wind+solar.

How is it that nuclear, wind and solar can handle a higher percentage of the grid in all of these other countries?

> 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

The only thing Trump wants is to shore up votes in coal-producing swing states for the midterms. He's going to slightly delay the shuttering of some coal fired power plants that are just going to close anyway for a ridiculous and purely political reason and the real-world consequences of it are going to be negligible, because this:

> 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.

And not only that, renewables are now the cheapest form of new generation until the grid gets above something like 40% renewables and you have to start actually doing something about the intermittency. Neither the US nor China have that much yet and in neither case do they need the percentage of fossil fuels that they currently have.

But the argument for continuing to operate existing plants is that you still need electricity while building new renewables. The argument for replacing coal plants with natural gas is that conversions are cheaper than new plants and natural gas is better than coal. There is no argument for building new coal when your grid is <40% renewables -- just build new renewables.

> Compare to China which is putting vast amounts of resources into building renewables, storage

Then why is their number lower than the US one, never mind countries in Europe?

> 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.

The US is covered in 100+kV transmission lines. Even higher voltage transmission lines have lower losses, but you're talking about going from a single digit percentage to a lower single digit percentage. It's basically a cost trade off between building all new transmission towers or using the same money to build slightly more renewable generation capacity -- and the latter benefits you more on the normal days when you're not trying to supply power to someone hundreds of miles away and can just use the extra power locally.
by iwontberude | 2026-03-07 19:55:07+00:00
I remember our school getting new computers to replace the 233Mhz G3 iMac computer lab during the Megahertz Wars and the vice principal announcing the purchase of new "screaming fast" 600 Mhz Dell Optiplex GX100. The nice thing is that the G3 iMacs then got pushed out to the classrooms, but it was sad to see Apple lose the spot in the lab. I miss the wonder of playing Pangea Software games for the first time like Bugdom and Nanosaur.
by Someone1234 | 2026-03-07 19:55:43+00:00
I've started do this on social media. I got "called out" after using big words or using a - in a sentence. So now I write less good on purpose, so whatever I commented doesn't get drawn into a sidetrack off-topic witch-hunt.

As soon as someone yells "witch" you cannot disprove you're not one, and I've even had people put my handwritten comments through "AI detector" websites that "proved" they were AI (they weren't). It literally just highlighted two popular English phases.

LLMs were trained on sites like HN and Reddit, so now if you write like a HN or Reddit commentator, you sound like AI...
by Implicated | 2026-03-07 19:56:41+00:00
I've had very consistent success with plan mode, but when I haven't I've noticed many times it's been working with code/features/things that aren't well defined. ie: not using a well defined design pattern, maybe some variability in the application on how something could be done - these are the things I notice it really trips up on. Well defined interfaces, or even specifically telling it to identify and apply design principles where it seems logical.

When I've had repeated issues with a feature/task on existing code often times it really helps to first have the model analyze the code and recommend 'optimizations' - whether or not you agree/accept, it'll give you some insight on the approach it _wants_ to take. Adjust from there.
by luckylion | 2026-03-07 19:57:00+00:00
That absolutely makes sense, but I'm not sure it is the reason. I mentioned we're remote first: we hire _everywhere_. I've been with this company for 7 years, and haven't traveled to HQ even once, and have worked from home or a spot of my choosing (but honestly, that spot is almost always home!) every day, that's how remote first we are - nobody has to uproot their life to work with us.

But it's still extremely hard to find senior+. I'm sure our tech stack plays a role, and naturally senior developers are much less common than juniors. But whenever I hear about the job market being super hard, I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe.

AI is not replacing anyone from my perspective, but AI might become our only hope at some point, because we're growing aggressively. I have to keep mediocre people because I can't even replace at that level easily - the only ones I'm pruning are the ones that are net-negative contributors.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-03-07 19:57:24+00:00
> Therac-25 is a great case study for software engineers too, recommend reading the Wikipedia article for anyone who hasn't, it's not too long.

I re-read the original paper every few months, more frequently if I'm working on Safety-of-Life-Critical equipment. Which, given my day job, means I'm re-reading it every couple of weeks at most.

Keeps you sharp, doesn't it?
by to11mtm | 2026-03-07 19:57:37+00:00
I think they've got some ineffable qualities, and frankly there's lots of other genres where people might decide to give them a listen...

Which is really just a roundabout way of saying I think Apocalyptica did a lot to help refresh them in the modern zeitgeist (Yes I know it was older, but I remember youtube videos causing it to enter at least my and other's conscious space...)
by gbraad | 2026-03-07 19:57:59+00:00
I thought it was raining on our trip to venice: "you hear that dear, quite nasty rain". She looked at me puzzled, but hadn't noticed what I really heard. The next day was obvious... This now 15+ years ago. Some days it is bad, some days I hardly notice. It does not affect me that much: still hear near pitch perfect (work on music stuff as hobby), mostly a consistent hiss which can get annoying sometimes as it can distracts, mostly can ignore it. Some people can't, maybe lucky?
Edit: Local doctor just once told me:just listen to music to drown it out, don't over do.... Keep enjoying it. never seeked further help.