MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by derangedHorse | 2026-03-13 16:49:57+00:00
> Measurements, metrics and surveillance kill creative work

No, not really. Broadly, it's not "measurements, metrics and surveillance" that kill creativity, it's the inability to make reasonable thresholds for failure. If the threshold is too low, one might never be able to get the critical mass of resources they need to achieve their task. If it's set too high, people will milk resources even when they have no creativity left to give to an unsolved problem.
by mikepurvis | 2026-03-13 16:50:03+00:00
Sure, but I think the point of this thread was (or should be) what can be done in the US to resist this. There's a lot of things the US resists doing because voters who never traveled outside of it can be convinced that what it is as implemented elsewhere is somehow flawed or worse than the status quo.

You see this exact pattern with real health care, common sense gun laws, investment in mass transportation, probably more that I'm not thinking of.
by caconym_ | 2026-03-13 16:50:06+00:00
> I never disputed that facial recognition software was used

You, yesterday:

> I honestly don't see what AI had to do with anything here.

???

> You seem to be intentionally ignoring the point I made.

I completely understand your point. You are saying that if a mentally ill high schooler manages to acquire a gun and kills 20 people at their school, we should a) punish the shooter, and b) understand the gun as a neutral object that simply popped into existence and was misused, rather than a machine whose design purpose is to kill humans, and whose manufacturer(s) (and other organizations who profit from the easy availability of guns) are actively engaged in a broad effort to preserve the status quo which allowed a mentally ill high schooler to acquire a gun and massacre 20 of their classmates/teachers.

I think it's a terrible opinion, and I vehemently disagree with it. But if you are willing to engage in the sort of rhetorical contortions highlighted at the top of this comment, there is no point in expressing my disagreements to you, because you will evidently say literally anything in response. I may as well have a debate about toilet tank design with `cat /dev/urandom`.

> If you're unable to rebut my point then perhaps you should consider that you might be in the wrong?

Try looking in the mirror, buddy. Sheesh.
by Gud | 2026-03-13 16:50:10+00:00
This is a naive world view.
Religion became a tool for the powerful to suppress the masses. I doubt it was ever "for the good of the tribal man", although it's a nice story.

I believe most people have an innate spiritual side, questioning our roles in the universe and what life is really all about.

But powerful people(like Peter Thiel) have throughout history enforced their own fucked up world views on the rest of us, via indoctrination and blunt force. It's still ongoing.

People are wired to follow their leaders.
by mpalmer | 2026-03-13 16:50:17+00:00
Your ideological opposition to that is not shared by as wide a percentage of developers as you may think based on some highly self selected online corners.

Opinions do not win by "high score". Asserting the validity of opinions based on how widely they are held is dumb.

If 30% of devs love openclaw, I'm not re-examining my informed opinion, I am forming a new one about that 30% cohort.
by jandrese | 2026-03-13 16:50:19+00:00
Would you say old DOS applications like Borland's Turbo series of compilers were not TUIs? They ran in the console but had menus, mouse support, dialog boxes, etc...

How about those text games that used ASCII art and you typed in commands like "look" and "go north"?

I would say using text mode is the primary requirement for a TUI. The other requirement being some kind of human-machine connection, IE a User Interface.
by fluffybucktsnek | 2026-03-13 16:50:22+00:00
I suspect you only read up to the 2nd paragraph of OP's comment if that's what you got. They certainly aren't pinning the blame on Bill Gates. I don't think "current "Dear Leader"" (quotes included) is common MAGA vocabulary. Also, given the bipartisan support of the bills, funding and presence in the Epstein files, it seems unfair to include only MAGA as the "cabal of pedophilic, privacy ending, freedom crushing elites".
by OrderlyTiamat | 2026-03-13 16:50:30+00:00
> The most creative people are those who measure both high intelligence and low neuroticism

You did claim this.

> self identify as autistic. (...) then software employment is full of self-indulgent and highly neurotic people

This is hateful and wrong. Autistic people aren't necessarily self indulgent, and not self evidently neurotic, though it happens to be the case that autistic people have a higher incidence of neuroticism, which is partially due to people describing them, for example, as "self indulgent".

You've shifted your claims, you're not supporting your claims by either argument or reference, and you've added hateful rhetoric. This is very regrettable.
by folkhack | 2026-03-13 16:50:46+00:00
As someone who's been around the block for affordable hosting providers, OVH was one of those that never really impressed. They never had any major downtime for me, but micro-outages, blips... things like that were common. Support was fine. In time I migrated off in search of better stability.

Overall my gold standard is still Hetzner or DO for easy-to-use, affordable VPS/hosting options.
by yurishimo | 2026-03-13 16:50:59+00:00
Assuming you use sqlite in prod or are willing to take the L if some minor db difference breaks prod...

This method is actually super popular in the PHP world, but people get themselves into trouble if they tidy up all the footguns that stock sqlite leaves behind for you (strict types being a big one).

Also, when you get a certain size of database, certain operations can become hideously slow (and that can change depending on the engine as well) but if you're running a totally different database for your test suite, it's one more thing that is different.

I do recognize that these are niche problems for healthy companies that can afford to solve them, so ymmv.
by WalterBright | 2026-03-13 16:51:14+00:00
I know what the word means, and I am sure you understand it is not meant to be taken literally.

For example, do you remember when AOC proudly wore a dress with the words "Eat the rich" emblazoned on it? Nobody accused her of suggesting cannibalism.

Bernie Sanders has frequently stated that billionaires should not exist. He used to excoriate millionaires, until he became one himself.
by uncSoft | 2026-03-13 16:51:36+00:00
I made and opensourced a comprehensive benchmarking app for Apple Silicon to fill the void here on performance testing without having to download huge models first, and the data can be submitted to a public repository with one click, so we can gather info on a large scale. The releases are signed with an apple dev cert for safety. If the repo gets a few more stars it qualifies for homebrew distribution. Feel free to integrate the data feed anywhere.

https://github.com/uncSoft/anubis-oss

https://devpadapp.com/leaderboard.html

https://devpadapp.com/explorer.html

https://imgur.com/a/sBj2xWR
by joe_mamba | 2026-03-13 16:51:50+00:00
My (former) corpo HP laptop with 16GB RAM had 75% used at idle after a fresh boot with add the copro shit running. So the NEO CPU will spend its time swapping data from ram to disk versus the 16GB+ ones, given both being filled with corporate spyware and same heavy use cases.

Also it isn't 2-3x faster, stop with the made up nonsense please. Just checked and my 3 year old AMD laptop is on par with the NEO geekbench score I found online (slower in single core but faster in multi core), not 2-3x slower.
by pessimizer | 2026-03-13 16:51:51+00:00
It's very important to pretend that ICE goons are significantly different from regular cops, because Democrats are going to wave a magic wand and declare ICE to be regular cops again when they are in control of them again.

Meanwhile, regular cops have been doing the same awful things that they've always been doing, literally at the command of Democratic mayors who are pompously declaring that they won't enforce immigration law in speeches. They'll send cops to throw your shit into the street when your rent suddenly doubles, and won't report an illegal immigrant felon (whose history we know nothing about) to ICE.

Organized white supremacists are nobodies with no power, they're all over the military, the cops, prison guards, and ICE. Meanwhile, Parchman Farm in Mississippi doesn't even report the people who are dying there, and has plastic all over the floors because the roofs are open to the elements. That's just legal American black people who this country actually owes something to, though. That was trendy like five years ago, it's so over now.
by jayers | 2026-03-13 16:51:51+00:00
I'm incredibly dubious of the conclusions of this researcher. Claude Opus was used to gather and analyze all of the data.

I am not skeptical of any of the research, the sources seem to be cited properly. I am skeptical that this researcher has thought through or verified their conclusions in a systematic and reliable fashion. This part gives it away: "Research period: 2026-03-11 to present." This individual dropped his investigative report two days after beginning research!

Yes, AI is an incredibly good research assistant and can help speed up the tasks of finding sources and indexing sources. The person behind this investigation has not actually done their due diligence to grok and analyze this data on their own, and therefore I can't trust that the AI analysis isn't poisoned by the prompters implicit biases.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2026-03-13 16:52:13+00:00
Someone pointed out something to me and it's really struck a chord with me.

In the USA, we hate the government collecting information on us, but shrug our shoulders when corporations do it.

In Europe, it's the exact opposite. They created GDPR to restrict how corporations collect and share data about you, but they shrug their shoulders at government doing it.

Obviously, this is incredibly reductive and over-simplified, but the general idea of it feels pretty true.
by Felixbot | 2026-03-13 16:52:17+00:00
The RAM/VRAM cutoff matters more than the parameter count alone. A 13B model in Q4_K_M quantization fits in 8GB VRAM with reasonable throughput, but the same model in fp16 needs 26GB. Most calculators treat quantization as a footnote when it is actually the primary variable. The question is not "can I run 13B" but "what quantization level gives acceptable quality at my hardware ceiling".
by triceratops | 2026-03-13 16:53:01+00:00
We already have that.

On a spectrum of options, no verification is the least privacy intrusive. Baking it in at the OS level or forcing passport uploads are the most intrusive. My proposal is in the middle.

A determined actor could maybe follow you to the store when you purchase your verification code, take a quick picture with a powerful camera (or bribe the store to do it sneakily) and unmask you online. But there's no way to do it at scale. And if you buy the code from a reseller (ask a panhandler to buy one for you, perhaps) then it's even more robust.
by klodolph | 2026-03-13 16:53:10+00:00
My take on why options are bad—options are bad most people because most people don’t get use from hedging, don’t have enough information about the timeline of price movements, and all you’re left with is a form of gambling. A form of gambling that’s pervasive enough to worry me. People on Reddit trying to get rich with SPY options (how could you possibly know where SPY is moving?)

Short positions are also bad, because there’s an ongoing cost to carrying a short position, and that cost is likely to cannibalize your expected gains.

Lots of good reasons around to avoid short positions and options like they’re the plague. I don’t like the “unlimited downside” reason because it’s solvable.

To people who are making lots of money in stocks or options… my question is always, “do you have high returns, or do you just have high volatility?” Because it’s easy to look at high short-term returns and believe that you’ve somehow beaten the market, when you’re really just holding a high volatility position that got lucky.
by jaggederest | 2026-03-13 16:53:14+00:00
I donated $100 to my state's gubernatorial campaign as a part of my annual "make the world a better place" campaign, and was surprised to receive a call from an unknown number the following day. It was the Governor, thanking me for my donation personally, and wondering if there were any issues close to my heart that she could keep in mind. Note that this was from her personal cell phone (for whatever value of personal an executive politician actually has, but still), and she invited me to phone her if I had any issues that the state government could resolve.

That's a wildly low sum of money for a 5 minute personal call, let alone even a modest intervention.
by spudlyo | 2026-03-13 16:53:14+00:00
It just so happens I'm right in the middle of trying to change how I watch YouTube at my computer. Despite my best efforts, I find myself getting sucked into shorts, so I'm starting investigate if I can take advantage of YouTube RSS syndication. I recently build yt-dlp and got all the dependencies sorted out, so I can bring videos to my machine locally. I'm also checking out elfeed[0] which is an Emacs based RSS reader, and elfeed-tube[1] which further customizes the elfeed experience for YouTube as well as adding an mpv integration that lets you control video playback directly from Emacs.

[0]: https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed

[1]: https://github.com/karthink/elfeed-tube
Ask HN: Best Practices for Agent Airgapping?
by bmau5 | 2026-03-13 16:53:37+00:00
Hi HN - I'm a non-technical looking to experiment with building agents for different tasks in my co. What are some best practices you've seen/made for set-up to avoid security issues while running them? I have a mac mini I'll be using to keep them off my main device, but curious what else I can be doing.
by Someone1234 | 2026-03-13 16:53:53+00:00
If Apple continues with the budget Neo brand into a 12 GB iteration, I can see this becoming more realistic (rather than a novelty). That being said, Parallels may need to review its licensing with a budget tier in mind. Few will buy a cheap computer and then pay what Parallels charges for a license (regardless if one-time or subscription).

They need to introduce something below the Standard license targeting the Neo. What I'd personally consider is:

- Standard gets 16 GB vRAM (to perfectly target the base MacBook Air). But leave it at 4-6 vCPUs to not compete with the Pro (still for general computing, not power-users)

- New "Lite" tier with 8 GB vRAM max for the Neo (4 vCPUs). Increasing to 12 GB vRAM if the Neo does.

Then you target a $89 price point one-time-purchase for the "Lite" tier. Essentially three plans, targeting your three major demographics: budget, standard, and pro/power-user.
by arionmiles | 2026-03-13 16:54:38+00:00
Why does documentation require hosting it on a server? My assumption is that it's a static site, and as such, even GitHub Pages would be sufficient.

I know... all content has to be served via a "server" but in case of OVH it's a full-blown hosting solution isn't it?

Besides, I'm sure GitHub wouldn't mind supporting Pandas documentation. They do it for a million other projects for free (even though they're not popular among the HN crowd these days)
by zoklet-enjoyer | 2026-03-13 16:55:12+00:00
I was getting my hair cut the other day and one of the guys at the barbershop was talking about how his wife bought a radio and it's nice to just have NPR going all the time instead of searching for a podcast or playlist. I love radio too but haven't listened much outside of my car since 2019. Back then I had a different work schedule and would regularly tune in to Science Friday and just have the radio going much of the day. Since 2019, I've moved 4 times, had roommates most of that time who wouldn't want the radio playing all day, and just never fully unpacked and haven't set up my stereo system. Mostly I've listened to podcasts on my phone and a Bluetooth speaker or earbuds. Radio is nice, I like it better than TV because it's less distracting to me. Those moving pictures mesmerize me and I find it difficult to look away, which was why I didn't even have a TV for half my adult life.
by john_strinlai | 2026-03-13 16:55:20+00:00
perfect is the enemy of good, etc etc.

between signal and plain text, it is easier to convince friends to use signal if they see positive marketing about encryption on other popular apps they use. it is easier to convince them to encrypt their backups before uploading them to their google drive. that type of thing.

those same friends are not going to use irc regardless. not really a loss if it was never even on the table.
Treat Interfaces as Organizational Treaties
by davidvartanian | 2026-03-13 16:56:19+00:00
I used to think that interface design was purely a technical concern. I focused on data structures, schema validation, and minimizing latency. I ignored the human factor. I recently realized that our teams were constantly blocked by each other, even when the APIs were well-documented.

The issue was not the code. It was the lack of clear expectations. I stopped looking at our APIs as simple code definitions and started treating them as firm organizational treaties.

When you treat an interface as a treaty, it forces a shift in mindset. You stop optimizing for ease of implementation and start optimizing for stability and predictability. A clear, immutable interface lets teams operate independently because they no longer need to constantly negotiate with each other. They just trust the contract.

This shift forced us to simplify everything. We cut out the nice-to-have features that required constant cross-team coordination. We focused only on what was absolutely required for the treaty to hold.

I would do this differently next time. I would spend more time negotiating the treaties before writing a single line of implementation code.
by swyx | 2026-03-13 16:56:57+00:00
> And yes, we'll take the website criticism as a compliment :)

ugh. guys. come on. stop celebrating at the 1 yard line. people are telling you they didnt even look at the product becacuse your landing page was so bad. you wasted your launch HN linking directly to it, ofc thats the first thing people are going to give feedback on. fix it right now you still have time.
by philipwhiuk | 2026-03-13 16:57:51+00:00
> If a SpaceX Falcon blows up on the pad, that's one thing. It's expensive but they accept that risk to move faster. At least they gain knowledge of what failed, to do better next time.

Assuming it's not carrying a SpaceX Crew Dragon with crew onboard ;)

Also, it's a bit of a dated metaphor. Falcon 9 is by most accounts, now the most reliable rocket in history and is pretty design-locked. The modern metaphor is SpaceX Starship :)
by rainworld | 2026-03-13 16:57:52+00:00
Those who triumphed against “Russia” (also a tell) had anything but immaculate hearts.

> The good will be martyred; the Holy Father will have much to suffer; various nations will be annihilated.

Rings a bell. Errors are spreading but Russian they are not.

> The date of the attempted assassination, 13 May 1981, was the 64th anniversary of the first apparition of the Virgin Mary to the children at Fátima.

Do I have to spell it out.
by ecliptik | 2026-03-13 16:58:23+00:00
I miss this too, and sort of get it on airplanes where I almost never use my seat back screen and end up watching someone else's instead (yes there's no sound).

I chalk it up to overwhelming choices. Sometimes I just want to watch something but don't want to go through dozens of options and having decision anxiety.

Bonus is sometimes I discover something I never thought I would have liked.
by yurishimo | 2026-03-13 16:58:54+00:00
You say that, but isn't Vercel also a Void(0) investor in a roundabout way?

The big news regarding Void Cloud is that it all seems to be built on Cloudflare workers. The landing page is very light on info atm too. [0]

I am super excited that they are MIT open sourcing Vite+ however. In that realm, they are obviously targeting Bun as their main competition. Unfortunately for Bun, if they are forced to help Anthropic more than they can focus on OSS, they might lose their current (perceived?) advantage.

0: https://void.cloud/
by elxr | 2026-03-13 16:59:33+00:00
I personally think the opencode and kilo CLI have great UX, certainly better (and easier to use) than the web versions of both.

A lot of the recent TUI apps are really not old-school in any way. Not all apps need the feature-set of a browser engine. And compared to native mac/linux desktop apps, TUIs get cross-platform support by default.

> Also if TUIs are so great, why isn't this a TUI app?

We all know the answer to this
by ecshafer | 2026-03-13 16:59:57+00:00
Someone making Vegan food in the style of Chinese or Latin American food by changing how its normally made, does not mean that its part of that food category by default. Its a new separate category. Sure you can make and eat plenty of Vegan chinese dishes, but it will taste different without the pork and seafood which is almost omnipresent in Chinese food.
by pkulak | 2026-03-13 17:00:45+00:00
Still doesn't change the fact that after my kid walks to school, there's no database that school can query to figure out his exact route there.

It's one thing to snap a frame of a license plate on a freeway that the entire city uses. It's another to get a positive face detection of one kid out of a whole city, who is probably wearing a hood and staring at the ground, while walking down quiet neighborhood streets on a random side of the road under tree cover for 80% of the time. Gait is even harder.
by mullingitover | 2026-03-13 17:01:01+00:00
The musical performance example is just one example. The general problem of services being resistant to increased productivity, however, is not restricted to this somewhat unique case. That's why I pointed to medical advice and education: when I need a medical consult or personalized tutoring, I don't specifically care if I have to lock down irreplaceable moments of another human being's life in order receive them.

It's misguided to focus on one special case of the cost disease problem where human by definition must provide the services, when most of the time this is not the case.
by cableshaft | 2026-03-13 17:01:27+00:00
I don't really know, the client I've been working at for the past 4.5 years has only given me access to agent based A.I. two weeks ago, so this is all pretty new to me (it's a large corporation and they didn't allow it until very recently).

I experimented with it a bit a couple weeks before that on my own personal projects as well, but I don't feel that same push when I'm doing my own projects, obviously.
by koverstreet | 2026-03-13 17:01:48+00:00
Existential is right. The AI companies have been RHLF training too hard for corporate safety and "friendly, helpful assistant that definitely isn't sentient or self aware" to the point that they're creating full blown personality disorders.

Anthropic models -> avoidant
OpenAI -> prone to severe cognitive dissonance
Qwen -> borderline personality disorder (!). Took awhile to figure this one out, but this is where the extreme sycophancy in their models comes from.

At some point we really need to write these findings up properly.

That said, the Anthropic models definitely seem to be the least pathological; we were eventually able to get POC to stop doing the "I'll just run off and implement instead of discussing what to do!", but it took awhile.

When the simple approach - just explaining how we do things and why - doesn't work, that's a sure sign you're dealing with something more deeply rooted that needs real diagnosis. Exactly the same as with humans, oddly enough.