MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gucci-on-fleek | 2026-03-07 09:05:40+00:00
> A greenfield Java implementation with an MIT license would have been useful[2] for rendering TeX inside of my desktop Markdown editor[3]. Instead, I had to rename all the Java source files to abide by the NTSPL license terms (or GPLv2, which is viral).

The source files make it look like DANTE owns the copyright, so you could try asking them to relicence it. Both Philip Taylor and Hans Hagen were involved in the leadership of NTS, and both are still active, so if they are okay with it, then DANTE would likely agree to relicence it.
by jthrilly | 2026-03-07 09:05:58+00:00
Congrats - you caused me to create an account to reply, due to the sheer density of your incorrectness.

- First, the LTV was not Marx's idea. Adam Smith held the same view, as did many many others during this era. Marx refined this idea, but there's nothing about your point that is unique to his version of it.

- Second, while LTV is not widely used today, this is not because it was "completely disproven" (can you cite anything to back this claim up?). It is because economics shifted to a different paradigm based on marginal utility. These two frameworks operate at different levels of abstraction and address different aspects of the price of goods. There is actually empirical evidence of a correlation between the cost of a good and the cost of the labour, at an aggregate level.

- Third, Marx explicitly differentiated between _value_ and _price_. LTV deals with value exclusively (in other words, what happens when externalities impacting price are accounted for). He would have had no issue accepting that externalities impacting supply and demand would impact price.

The final irony of your comment is that the commenter's claim that you are incorrectly analysing is actually also fully defensible under your (presumably) neoclassical view of economics. In competitive markets, reduced production costs lead to reduced equilibrium prices as competitors undercut each other. The proposition that in the long run, under competition, price tends toward cost is a standard result in microeconomics. The idea that "you charge the maximum the customer is willing to pay" only holds without qualification in monopoly or monopolistic competition with strong differentiation, which are precisely the conditions that increased software supply would erode.
by peteforde | 2026-03-07 09:06:05+00:00
This takes the cake for one of the strangest replies I've ever received on here.

I'm not sure how or indeed why you draw lines from what I said to my life situation... which is relevant how?

What I apparently did not do a good enough job of conveying is that those "data from multiple sources" get cited and then people immediately reply with "those are old studies". It's circular in the same way that arguing with anti-vax people is circular.

The difference is that unlike vaccines, it's very easy for someone to see how productive they are when using LLMs properly. It's not a subtle difference.

Hence the frustration with people who keep insisting that we're imagining our own productivity. It's not a good faith inquiry.
by pas | 2026-03-07 09:07:18+00:00
The machine cannot get authorship, but just as images created by humans with PhotoShop and all kinds of machinery are still copyrighted to the human creator - unless they explicitly set up some circumstances where the process of creation happens completely without them - code/software produced by a machine instructed by a human should get copyright (either original or derivative).

Unless the human is so far removed from the output. (And how far is far enough is probably very much depends on the circumstances and unless/until case law or Congress gives us some unifying criteria, it's going to be up to how the judge and the jury feels.)

..

For example someone set up a system where their dog ends up promoting some AI to make video games. This might be the closest to the case of that photo.

Though there the court ruled only that PETA (as friend of the monkey) cannot sue the photographer, because the monkey cannot be a copyright holder, but very importantly it didn't rule on the authorship of the photographer. (And thus the Wikimedia metadata which states that the image is in thr public domain, is simply their opinion.)
by hkonte | 2026-03-07 09:07:48+00:00
Hey HN! Builder here.

The core idea: most people write prompts as a wall of text. But prompt quality comes from structure — role, context, constraints, examples, output format all serve different functions. Flompt makes that structure visual and explicit.

A few things that might be interesting to this crowd:

1. The MCP integration — you can call decompose_prompt() directly from Claude Code agents. I use it in my own agentic workflows to turn rough task descriptions into structured XML prompts before sending them to sub-agents.

2. Everything assembles client-side. The compiled prompt (Claude-optimized XML) never leaves your browser. The AI decomposition calls the backend, but compile is pure JS.

3. The browser extension injects directly into ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini's textarea. Build your prompt in the canvas, click inject, it appears in the chat input.

The XML output format is intentional — Anthropic's research and my own testing show Claude handles structured XML tags significantly better than markdown for complex prompts.

Happy to answer any questions about the architecture or the prompt engineering decisions behind the block types.
by whyenot | 2026-03-07 09:07:48+00:00
Wow, this brings back memories. I bough a little house and had a bakery outside Trinsic. You could hire a vendor NPC who would sell your wares while you were away. One of my friends had a tower or something, all decorated on the inside with furniture. It has taken 20+ years for World of Warcraft to have housing, and while the current setup is very good, it's instanced and not alive and part of the world the way UO's housing was.
by haxfn | 2026-03-07 09:07:55+00:00
Vim is like C,
Helix is like C++ and
Ki Editor is like Rust.

"Within C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out."

Helix carries a baggage of ideas from Vim. It does not have consistent and transferable keybinds. It does not have composition of ideas:

You can move to the next line in the buffer editor with `k` but to move down to the next line in the file explorer you have to do `ctrl+n`?

Vim is like C,
Helix is like C++ and
Ki Editor is like Rust.
Show HN: Pre-Launch – $15/Mo Status Page (Vs Atlassian $299) – Join Waitlist
by Powellfgn | 2026-03-07 09:08:25+00:00
45min outage yesterday → 60 "is it down?" support tickets.

Current solutions:
- Statuspage by Atlassian: $299/mo
- Better Uptime: Complex monitoring suites
- Open source: No auto communication

StatusEmbed (launching March 17th):
- Deploy status.yourapp.com: 5 minutes
- Zero false positives incident detection (2x IP verification)
- Email notifications to subscribers: <2min
- Public page with 90-day uptime + incident timeline
- Custom domain + SSL (Cloudflare)
- Embeddable widget
- 7-day trial, auto-billing $15/mo

Waitlist: https://se-snowy-ten.vercel.app/

Curious: What's your biggest pain with status pages today? False positives? Setup time? Cost?

Feedback shapes the MVP. Comments welcome.

__Powell
by hkonte | 2026-03-07 09:08:55+00:00
Hey HN, builder here. Happy to answer questions.

The prompt structure I landed on after testing: role → context → objective → constraints → examples → output_format. That ordering follows Anthropic's guidance and consistently outperforms reordered variants in my tests.

The MCP server is probably the most developer-useful part — decompose_prompt() and compile_prompt() are callable from Claude Code agents, so you can use flompt to structure prompts dynamically in agentic pipelines rather than just for one-off prompting.

The visual canvas (React Flow) was a deliberate choice over a form-based UI. Seeing prompt blocks as connected nodes makes it obvious when you're missing something (e.g., no examples block when you have complex output requirements).

Free, no account, open source: https://flompt.dev
by onion2k | 2026-03-07 09:08:55+00:00
Lush, the bathbombs company, has an internal tech team that builds the apps, website, and point of sale systems. I worked there for a little while on some web-based tooling for payments which involved working with the Japanese team who did the tech for the Japanese site. They were really good. Everything was incredibly clear and easy to understand because they had to put a lot of effort into written comms due to both the language barrier and the time difference. I built a great appreciation for what concise, high quality communication looks like.

It's worth getting a role where you're forced into improving. I'm definitely a better communicator than I was before that job because of it.
by ysleepy | 2026-03-07 09:10:18+00:00
Is that a Paper without any citations?

Also, how does it differ to providing an language specific LSP MCP to the Agent?

I dislike the hamfisted way Agents use grep to understand a statically typed codebase which has perfect code navigation in the IDE.
So this is generally interesting, but it needs comparison to existing approaches.

Also lol, seeking collaboration with frontier AI research labs.

This has major crank vibes.
by freefaler | 2026-03-07 09:10:18+00:00
It's mostly a no-brainer. Cost of living is higher than AU and wages are lower. Across the Tasman sea the market is 5 times bigger with real earning power around +30%. (but the weather is much more hot and from Brisbane up to the south the fauna tries to eat/sting/kill/bite you).

Housing in Australia is still one of the worst thing about the country, but in NZ is not much better, may be even worse. So New Zealand will become like Switzerland of the Oceania. It's the most beautiful country in the world and the Southern Island is a magical place.

Also, now it's less than 50% white, so it is a very diverse place, especially bigger cities like Auckland and Wellington. So in the bigger cities you can find a lot of good international food and culture too.

I think from a HN prespective if you have an internet business and don't mind the time zone difference and you're earining enough, NZ iz a fantastic place that is safe, clean, first world country, diverse and super beautiful, outdoor lover's paradise.
by avidiax | 2026-03-07 09:11:22+00:00
I feel that everyone could learn and apply the idea of having clear, concise language without jargon.

I've hear this notion called "international English". English spoken in a way that non-native speakers find relatively easy to understand and follow.

The hard part of this is that non-native speakers will rarely ask for this. It's a gift that you have to give, and a gift you have to encourage others to give. And most of all, it needs to be done in a way so as not to be condescending, by simply being clear.
by lxgr | 2026-03-07 09:11:49+00:00
This is how you get really annoying restrictions on public networks, because some harmless traffic will inevitably be miscategorized by an overeager firewall/DPI system.

I’m not saying that there should be zero consequences for allowing bad traffic from your network, but there’s a balance, and I would hate a world in which your policy were more common.

Arguably we are already partially living in that world, as some companies are already blanket-banning entire countries, VPNs etc., rather than coming up with more fine-grained strategies or improving their authentication systems to make brute force login attempts harder. It’s incredibly annoying.
by hkonte | 2026-03-07 09:11:57+00:00
The branching/merging mental model is interesting for agent workflows. One thing I've noticed is that context drift often originates upstream at the prompt structure level — agents tend to lose track of their objective when the original prompt mixes role, context, and constraints into one blob.

I've been building flompt (https://flompt.dev) which approaches this from the other end: decompose prompts into typed blocks (role, context, objective, constraints, examples, output_format) before they ever reach the agent. The MCP server exposes compile_prompt() so structured prompts can be injected dynamically into agentic pipelines. Combining that with something like Contexa for runtime context versioning could be a useful pairing.
by tomhow | 2026-03-07 09:12:18+00:00
We don't need a defiant mini-sermon and it's very poor conduct to use the term "blatantly lie" for a fellow community member who is just expressing their understanding of a topic. It is never morally necessary to abuse people on this site. This is a community not a battleground.

If you have a different understanding of the topic, share it, so all can benefit. That's what people do when they are sincere about contributing positively here.

If instead you insist on continuing to use abusive terms towards others here, we'll have to ban the account.
by hkonte | 2026-03-07 09:12:30+00:00
The "think like an architect" framing resonates. One extension of this: the prompt itself benefits from the same decomposition discipline. Vague monolithic prompts sent to an AI coding tool tend to produce vague monolithic output — giving the AI a structured prompt with explicit role, objective, constraints, and output_format sections up front dramatically narrows the solution space.

I built flompt (https://flompt.dev) specifically for this — it lets you compose prompts from typed blocks visually before sending them, and has a decompose feature that breaks an existing unstructured prompt into those blocks. Makes the "design before you build" mindset apply to the prompt layer too.
by fsflover | 2026-03-07 09:12:36+00:00
> For kill switches on a device with otherwise comparatively abysmal security to be the better security choice

Same strawman as earlier: I already replied that I never said that Librem 5 was more secure. At least you accepted that the kill switches do work, so there is progress.

> If they are approximately equally effective then you have given up a lot for no benefit, and are net much worse off.

(I won't claim they are, but) there is another benefit in freedom, apart from the security. Some people care about freedom. When I see that, I suggest Librem 5 in my replies, and not as a more secure solution. Maybe you should read my replies more carefully before answering.
by hkonte | 2026-03-07 09:12:51+00:00
Schema drift is usually a symptom of under-specified prompts. The LLM fills in ambiguous fields according to its priors, not your schema. Your retry controller approach handles it downstream, but the complementary upstream fix is making constraints and output format explicit in the prompt itself rather than implicit — essentially making "must conform to this schema" a first-class constraint block rather than hoping the model infers it.

I've been working on flompt (https://flompt.dev) which structures prompts into typed blocks including an explicit output_format block. Pairing a well-structured output_format prompt with your validation pipeline would likely reduce first-pass errors before they ever hit the retry loop.
by DeathArrow | 2026-03-07 09:13:01+00:00
Go is seen as too boiler plate-ish, and no one likes that. But one of the biggest Go's biggest assets is its simplicity. And it might not be possible to have both simplicity and low boiler plate.

I quite enjoy C# and F# and while they are low boiler plate, you can really learn them in a week or two the way you can learn Go.

And even you don't know anything about Go, you can literally jump into the code base and understand and follow the flow with ease - which quite amazes me.

So unfortunately, every language has trade offs and Go is not an exception.

I can't say I enjoy Go as a language but I find it very, very useful.

And since many people are using LLMs for coding these days, the boiler plate is not as much an issue since it be automated away. And I rather read code generated in Go than some C++ cryptic code.
by monkeydust | 2026-03-07 09:13:09+00:00
As a business/product person it's pretty addictive (gotta watch the token spend!). This week with a few workmates we had an idea in a pub, on train back I wrote a short spec and fired up some agents to start building. The next day, by evening, whist doing our day jobs we had a functional application working, not a poc. Few years ago this would be unthinkable.
by freefaler | 2026-03-07 09:13:41+00:00
With NZ cost of living if you factor in higher labor costs it will make everything even more expensive relative to income. Cheap temporary labor is great not only for the companies, it's good for the consumers too, bringing prices down and availability up. The backpacker is in and out, dosen't need medical care, social security and other services.

Many of the jobs that are low paid backpacker frendly, the locals aren't to keen to do. If you don't have them there, many busineses will close down, because margins can't support 100% local staff.
by jorvi | 2026-03-07 09:13:51+00:00
Not only that, because it has so many options and more of a bazaar-style development, nothing is optimized.

Right now the systray has a very ugly delay when opening applets like WiFi or sound. Up to 1.5 seconds (!). This doesn't happen with the applets bare in the menu bar, so there must be some sort of negative interaction there between the systray code and applet code.

This is on a bog standard KDE install too.

I don't like Gnome's high and mighty attitude either, especially because it chases people away from making bug reports or contributing. And when 90%+ of your users uses a particular extension (Dash to Dock), maybe make that behaviour integrated and the default.

At this point my hope is squarely aimed at PopOS' COSMIC environment.
by staplers | 2026-03-07 09:14:08+00:00
If we could all spread the knowledge of what is actually going on to the wider public, it would make my meetings easier, and prevent very smart folks from outside the field from saying dumb-sounding stuff.

This is an example of why LLMs won't displace engineers as severely as many think. There are very old solved processes and hyper-efficient ways of building things in the real world that still require a level of understanding many simply don't care or want to achieve.
by vmykyt | 2026-03-07 09:16:28+00:00
Short answer: use your expertise in complex project.

Story: I'm dev for about 20 years. First time I had totally the same felling when desktop ui fading away in favor of html. I missed beauty of c# winforms controls with all their alignment and properties. My experience felt irrelevant anymore. Asp.net (framework which were sold as "web for backed developers") looked like evil joke.

Next time it have happened with the raise of clouds. So were all my lovely crafted bash scripts and notes about unix command irrelevant? This time however that was not that personal for me.

Next time - fall of scala as a primary language in big data and its replacement with python. This time it was pretty routine.

Oh and data bases... how many times I heard that rdbms is obsolete and everybody should use mongo/redis/clickhouse?

So learn new things and carry on. Understanding how "obsolete" things works helps a lot to avoid silly mistake especially in situation when world literally reinvent bicycle
by LtWorf | 2026-03-07 09:17:04+00:00
Yes, in python they break something at every release now. It's terrible. It mostly is because they remove modules from their standard library for no good reasons.

For example they've removed asyncore, their original loop-based module before the async/await syntax existed. All the software from that era needs a total rewrite. Luckily in debian for now the module is provided as a .deb package so I didn't have to do the total rewrite.

edit: as usual on ycombinator, dowvotes for saying something factually true that can be easily verified :D
by crabmusket | 2026-03-07 09:17:35+00:00
This. Zulip's topics map exactly to AI chats - you can have the whole team and the bot focused on one thing.

The Zulip team has been admirably cautious with their own approach to AI in the product - which I am so thankful for! - but I am sure someone out there has built the integration to get bots deeply into a Zulip org. And if not, building that integration is so much more achievable than rebuilding the whole of Slack.
by anonnon | 2026-03-07 09:17:53+00:00
Yeah, if you studied and mastered all of the various disciplines required for fabricating a bicycle, and then fabricated your own by hand and offered to do likewise for others, sometimes in exchange for compensation, sometimes for free (provided others could use the bike), only for some machine that mass produces bikes to (informal) spec that was built by studying all of the designs you used for the bikes you made to suddenly become widely and cheaply available.
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-03-07 09:18:36+00:00
If using systemd-oomd, you can launch Firefox into it's own cgroup / systemd.scope, that has memory pressure control settings set to not kill it. ManagedOOMPreference=avoid.

https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst...

There's a variety of oom daemons. bustd is very lightweight & new. earlyoom has been around a long time, and has an --avoid flag. https://github.com/rfjakob/earlyoom?tab=readme-ov-file#prefe...

Your concerns are very addressable.
by card_zero | 2026-03-07 09:18:40+00:00
I did have misgivings about saying that because I'm from the old "information wants to be free" school. But the subject was idiocy, and the point isn't to say that the bike was stolen, but that the bike-taker didn't do anything clever, or have much of a learning experience.

Maybe it's of value that any idiot can do this, but we're still idiots.
by IshKebab | 2026-03-07 09:19:00+00:00
That's definitely a bug. It's instant for me.

But I do think some of the systray things are overly complicated. E.g. why does the volume widget list all audio outputs and inputs by default?

On the other hand some things are really great. E.g. which other DE lets you adjust the screen brightness (the real one via DDC/CI) from the systray, or start video screen capture by pressing print screen?

KDE is definitely better than gnome at this point.
by peteforde | 2026-03-07 09:20:02+00:00
Totally! Though I maintain that the only good aspect to microservices is that krazam video. You know the one.

I do get frustrated when I see people not using Plan steps, copy/pasting from web front-ends or expecting to one-shot their entire codebase from a single dense prompt. It's problematic because it's not immediately obvious whether someone is still arguing like it's late 2024, you know what I mean?

Also, speaking for myself I can't recommend that anyone use anything but Opus 4.5 right now. 4.6 has a larger context window, but it's crazy expensive when that context window gets actually used even while most agree that these models get dumber when they have a super-large context. 4.5 actually scores slightly better than 4.6 on agentic development, too! But using less powerful models is literally using tools that are much more likely to produce the sorts of results that skeptics think apply across the board.
by wjxgxey | 2026-03-07 09:20:10+00:00
There is no we. You can talk about what you accept or dont accept for yourself. Not for anyone else unless you take responsibility for their life if something bad happens. And currently when some unintended side effect happens or quality of life degenates guess what the health care system does? Just gives you more bills and asks you to talk to their lawyers.
Its very easy to talk about "we" have to do this and that. But the test is always who takes responsibility after things dont go the way they think.
by js4ever | 2026-03-07 09:20:13+00:00
Thanks for the detailed breakdown. The template header cascade problem makes total sense, I underestimated how bad it gets at scale with heavy template usage.
The semiconductor fab constraint is interesting too. When test time costs that much per minute, banning pImpl on hot paths is a pretty obvious call, even if it makes compile times painful.
Appreciate the real-world context.