MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ontouchstart | 2026-03-06 12:35:25+00:00
It doesn’t matter, you can replace “Rust” with any trendy language at the moment.

FORTRAN, COBOL, PASCAL, C, Java, C++, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, JS, TS, and now Rust…

The only thing matters is people pay attention to them and then have to use them because their job requires them.

AI would not change it.

We are slaves of the trend.
by jurgenburgen | 2026-03-06 12:35:58+00:00
Of course I don’t, it’s just the likeliest outcome. Betting markets are a terrible way to try to predict anything. People are irrational and sometimes irrational people are in power.

If the US doesn’t literally go and take away that enriched uranium it will be used to build a bomb. Nuclear weapons are the only fool-proof insurance against regime change operations.
by qudat | 2026-03-06 12:36:47+00:00
It’s not that it just makes mistakes but it also implements things in ways I don’t like or are not relevant to the business requirements or scope of the feature / project.

I end up replacing any saved time with QA and code review and I really don’t see how that’s going to change.

In my mind I see Claude as a better search engine that understands code well enough to find answers and gain understanding faster. That’s about it.
by vb7132 | 2026-03-06 12:36:57+00:00
I was at a big tech for last 10 years, quit my job last month - I feel 50x more productive outside than inside.

Here is my take on AI's impact on productivity:

First let's review what are LLMs objectively good at:
1. Writing boiler plate code
2. Translating between two different coding languages (migration)
3. Learning new things: Summarizing knowledge, explaining concepts
4. Documentation, menial tasks

At a big tech product company #1 #2 #3 are not as frequent as one would think - most of the time is spent in meetings and meetings about meetings. Things move slowly - it's designed to be like that. Majority devs are working on integrating systems - whatever their manager sold to their manager and so on. The only time AI really helped me at my job was when I did a one-week hackathon. Outside of that, integrations of AI felt like more work rather than less - without much productivity boost.

Outside, it has proven to be a real productivity boost for me. It checks all the four boxes. Plus, I don't have to worry about legal, integrations, production bugs (eventually those will come).

So, depends who you are asking -- it is a huge game changer (or not).
by kotaKat | 2026-03-06 12:37:26+00:00
I hold both an amateur license and a conventional ‘itinerant’ LMR license good nationwide.

The LMR license is more useful to me than my amateur license - I can just hand my friends my pile of cache radios and get yapping at an event. As a plus, we can run encryption and other fun things on the LMR license (within the bounds of our emissions) like APCO P25 (Project25) data transmissions.
by nevertoolate | 2026-03-06 12:38:15+00:00
So you had generated 2000 lines in 30 minutes and ran out of tokens? What was your prompt?

I’d use a fast model to create a minimal scaffold like gemini fast.

I’d create strict specs using a separate codex or claude subscription to have a generous remaining coding window and would start implementation + some high level tests feature by feature. Running out in 60 minutes is harder if you validate work. Running out in two hours for me is also hard as I keep breaks. With two subs you should be fine for a solid workday of well designed and reviewed system. If you use coderabbit or a separate review tool and feed back the reviews it is again something which doesn’t burn tokens so fast unless fully autonomous.
by hoopyKt | 2026-03-06 12:38:17+00:00
There is a certain irony here as well that this project was considered for actual community ownership by being added to the standard library, but it was decided that it was ineligible due to the LGPL license. Had this been MIT from the start you'd actually be correct about the community having some kind of ownership over how the project is operated, but that isn't the case here, it's not community owned. It's owned by the maintainer, it's their IP broadly and they can do as they wish within that LGPL license, including removing the LGPL licensed code.
by fidotron | 2026-03-06 12:38:45+00:00
Similar.

Experience of Canadian ham scene though is it's almost all just buying/selling equipment, to the point some channels were occupied by automated announcements of what people were buying and selling. APRS is fairly well used though, and by far the best way to find what is in the local area.

For better or worse the more dynamic and technically interesting stuff now seems to be with SDR and Meshtastic/Meshcore. Even the people with envy inspiring antenna arrays are mainly on the mesh stuff.
Show HN: Open Wearables – self-hosted wearable data platform with an AI layer
by bartmichalak | 2026-03-06 12:39:17+00:00
Hi, I'm Bart, one of the maintainers of Open Wearables.

For the past few months we've been building an open-source, self-hosted backend that normalises health and fitness data from multiple wearable providers (Garmin, Whoop, Apple Health, Samsung Health and others) into a single AI-ready REST API - and thought it was worth sharing here too :)

We built this out of our own experience doing custom wearable integrations for clients, and from working with paid SaaS solutions that often lack the flexibility to customise data pipelines or debug what's actually happening under the hood. Surprisingly, there weren't any mature open-source projects filling this gap.

What you get:

- A single normalised API covering 60+ health metrics (cardiovascular, sleep, body composition, activity, respiratory) and 80+ workout types across all supported providers

- A dashboard to manage users, API keys, and sync status — with a full view of each user's health data across connected devices

- An AI layer via MCP, letting you plug users' health data into any LLM or build a custom agent around it

- Open-source mobile apps for SDK-based providers (like Apple Health) so you can quickly test how data flows from device to your platform end-to-end

On the roadmap: more providers, deeper AI features, direct wearable connections via BLE/ANT+ and performance and stability improvements to support enterprise deployments.

Happy to answer any questions. If this solves a problem you've been dealing with - give it a try, open an issue or contribute. All feedback welcome!
by stuxf | 2026-03-06 12:39:17+00:00
It's interesting that they counted these as security vulnerabilities (from the linked Anthropic article)

> “Crude” is an important caveat here. The exploits Claude wrote only worked on our testing environment, which intentionally removed some of the security features found in modern browsers. This includes, most importantly, the sandbox, the purpose of which is to reduce the impact of these types of vulnerabilities. Thus, Firefox’s “defense in depth” would have been effective at mitigating these particular exploits.
by repelsteeltje | 2026-03-06 12:39:19+00:00
Thank you for pointing out this mistake. Of course, there also is nothing technically preventing anyone to ignore the GPL; the license itself is "just" some legalese.

I do believe, though, that these kind of references (from paper into the real world) often introduce surprising gotchas. Especially when they are intended to address some future (mostly unknown) issue.

The designated anchor point (person, technological artifact, legal entity) is itself often more likely subject to change than the thing it's trying to govern. Persons may be hit by a car, registries may expire, companies may go bankrupt. Governing laws may change. Countries may cease to exist...
by pigpop | 2026-03-06 12:39:26+00:00
>More multitasking, more overtime, more burnout, more skills you're expected to learn (on your own time if necessary), more interpersonal conflict among colleagues. And this is not being offset by anything tangible like an increase in pay.

Similar things happened with the adoption of computers in the workplace. Perhaps there's a case for banning all digital technology and hiring typists and other assistants to perform the work using typewriters and mechanical calculators? There would certainly be less multitasking when you have 8 hours worth of documents to retype and file/mail. Perhaps there would be less overtime when your boss can see you have a high workload by the state of papers piled upon your desk. Or maybe we can solve these problems in a different way.
by vaylian | 2026-03-06 12:39:48+00:00
It's one thing to build a software just for your own needs. It's a completely different story when your software runs on systems that you can't really control and where you have only very limited visibility/feedback when things don't go according to plan.

If the software is just for yourself: Just add some more code for handling the previously overlooked edge case and rerun the program.
Else: Deal with the communication overhead and all of the misunderstandings and potentially fix the wrong problem. Also: XKCD 1172
by curt15 | 2026-03-06 12:40:13+00:00
>Anyways, it feels like all sides of the political spectrum are trying to strip away any semblance of anonymity or privacy online both in the US and abroad. No one should have to provide any personal details to use any general computing device.

What was the legislative history for the California law? Who sponsored it, and who are their backers? Is there some coordinated effort by surveillance state proponents?
by rich_sasha | 2026-03-06 12:40:45+00:00
I find LLMs are good at essentially boilerplate code. It's clear what to do and it needs to be typed in. Or areas where I really have no idea where to start, because I'm not familiar with the codebase.

I find anything else, I spend more time coaxing them into doing 85% of what I need that I'm better off doing it myself.

So they're not useless but there's only so many times in a week that I need a function to pretty-print a table in some fashion. And the code they write on anything more complex than a snippet is usually written poorly enough that it's a write-once-never-touch-again situation. If the code needs to be solid, maintainable, testable, correct (and these are kind of minimal requirements in my book) then LLMs make little impact on my productivity.

They're still an improvement on Google and Stack exchange, but again - only gets you so far.

YMMV
by Madmallard | 2026-03-06 12:41:39+00:00
2. Translating between two different coding languages (migration)

I have a game written in XNA

100% of the code is there, including all the physics that I hand-wrote.

All the assets are there.

I tried to get Gemini and Claude to do it numerous times, always with utter failure of epic proportions with anything that's actually detailed.
1 - my transition from the lobby screen into gameplay? 0% replicated on all attempts
2 - the actual physics in gameplay? 0% replicated none of it works
3 - the lobby screen itself? non-functional

Okay so what did it even do? Well it put together sort of a boilerplate main menu and barebones options with weird looking text that isn't what I provided (given that I provided a font file), a lobby that I had to manually adjust numerous times before it could get into gameplay, and then nonfunctional gameplay that only handles directional movement and nothing else with sort of half-working fish traveling behavior.

I've tried this a dozen times since 2023 with AI and as late as late last year.

ALL of the source code is there every single thing that could be translated to be a functional game in another language is there. It NEVER once works or even comes remotely close.

The entire codebase is about 20,000 lines, with maybe 3,000 of it being really important stuff.

So yeah I don't really think AI is "really good" at anything complex. I haven't really been proven wrong in my 4 years of using it now.
by emporas | 2026-03-06 12:41:39+00:00
Porting code from one programming language to another will be one of the most important tasks of code gen A.I.

Imagine doing the same with vehicle engines. Less fuel consumption, less pollution, less weight and who knows how many more benefits.

Just letting the A.I. do it by itself is sloppy though. The real benefit is derived only when the resulting port is of equal or better quality than the original. It needs a more systematic approach, with a human in the loop and good tools to index and select data from both codebases, the original and the ported one. The tools are not invented yet but we will get there.
by mikehostetler | 2026-03-06 12:41:47+00:00
Not sure if this will surprise you - but I 100% agree with this. I went through the journey that many others did - implementing the loop, then trying to make it useful, realizing the limitations, etc.

I came to similar conclusions - what does valuable agentic software look like? It's not OpenClaw (yet)

The game theory then, in my opinion, is to focus on the knowable frontier - implement tools we can trust - and continue working and sharing that work.

I am holding onto the optimistic case - valuable use cases beyond coding agents will emerge.
by chickenimprint | 2026-03-06 12:41:54+00:00
> What I think is much more likely to happen is the number of software engineers greatly reduces, but the remaining ones actually get paid more.

You realize that this is contradictory, right? If the number of competitors remains the same, yet there are far fewer jobs, it's a buyer's market: companies have to offer very little to find someone desperate enough.

> It will allow for more cohesive higher-level design, and less focus on local artesenal code quality.

I don't buy this, LLM code is extremely bloated. It never reuses abstractions or comes up with novel designs to simplify systems. It can't say no, it just keeps bolting on code. In a very very abstract sense you might be right, but that's outside the realm of engineering, that's product design.
by athrowaway3z | 2026-03-06 12:44:38+00:00
I made this comment half a year ago as well, but i believe AI is going to bring down the profitability of the big tech companies by a lot.

Instead of massive scaling advantages which has given software its extreme valuation, it now hit on something that is almost a perfect commodity. Energy and depreciation are easy to calculate and its subject to global competition.

Great for consumers, less so for people looking for a ROI.
by jagged-chisel | 2026-03-06 12:45:12+00:00
I found this interesting:

“… the two decades after World War II in the United States, a time of economic redistribution and reversal of upward social mobility.”

Does anyone have a summary about the “reversal of upward mobility” bit? I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard that anywhere else and I don’t think I have the mental model to understand it intuitively without an explanation.
by kingkilr | 2026-03-06 12:45:15+00:00
[Work at Anthropic, used to work at Mozilla.]

Firefox has never required a full chain exploit in order to consider something a vulnerability. A large proportion of disclosed Firefox vulnerabilities are vulnerabilities in the sandboxed process.

If you look at Firefox's Security Severity Rating doc: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security_Severity_Ratings/Client what you'll see is that vulnerabilities within the sandbox, and sandbox escapes, are both independently considered vulnerabilities. Chrome considers vulnerabilities in a similar manner.
Ask HN: How AI teams source and license training data?
by ibnzUK | 2026-03-06 12:45:47+00:00
I'm deep in research on how AI teams actually source and license training data (text, audio, video, synthetic). Not the theory, but real, messy, day-to-day process.
I'm NOT pitching or selling anything. I'm having short 15-minute conversations with people who work on this daily, and the insights have been genuinely eye-opening. Happy to share what I'm learning in return.

If you know someone who fits any of these, I'd massively appreciate an intro or a tag in the comments.

Possible targets:
ML engineers or data leads at companies training or fine-tuning LLMs.
Anyone responsible for sourcing or procuring training data.
Teams building domain-specific AI models (healthcare, legal, finance, speech) People working on multilingual model training
by alessandroetc | 2026-03-06 12:46:34+00:00
Hey HN! here's something I couldn't stop thinking about:

your coworkers probably think good things about you that they'll never say. Not because they don't mean it, but because there's no moment in the workday where it's natural to say "you're really good at keeping things calm when everything's on fire."

Most recognition tools try to solve this by asking people to write compliments. That doesn't work. It's awkward, it's performative, and it ends up in a public channel where "Great job Sarah! " means nothing. The insight I kept coming back to is: what if you reframe the compliment as a poll answer? You're not choosing to compliment someone. You're just answering a question. That removes the awkwardness entirely.

So I built KudoSnap. It's a Slack bot. Here's how it works:

1. One person installs it — no admin approval needed. The Slack scopes are intentionally minimal (channels:read, users:read, chat:write). No message access.
2. It builds a social graph from channel co-membership to figure out who actually works together.
3. A couple times a week it sends you a 3-second anonymous poll: "Who explains complex things the clearest?" with 4 names from your actual coworkers.
4. Your vote becomes a private DM to that person: "A coworker said you explain complex things clearly." They answer a poll to see who said it — and now they've also voted for someone. The loop spreads itself.

The whole thing runs on Vercel + Supabase ($0/month at beta scale). pg_cron triggers poll delivery via HTTP calls to serverless endpoints.

It's Employee Appreciation Day, which felt like the right moment to share, but the reason I built this is that appreciation shouldn't need a holiday.

Free beta, open to any Slack workspace. I'd love feedback, especially: what would make you skeptical about installing this?
by salawat | 2026-03-06 12:46:39+00:00
You think you know what taste is. Have you been cranking on real systems all these years, or have you been on the sidelines armchairing the theoretics? I'm not trying to come across as rude, but it may be unavoidable to some degree when indirect criticism becomes involved. A laboring engineer has precious little choice in the type of systems available on which to work on. Fundamentally, it's all going to be some variant of system to make money for someone else somehow, or system that burns money, but ensures necessary work gets done somehow. That's it. That's the extent of the optimization function as defined by capitalism. Taste, falls by the wayside, compared to whether or not you are in the context of the optimizers who matter, because they're at the center of the capital centralization machine making the primary decisions as to where it gets allocated, is all that matters these days. So you make what they want or you don't get paid. As an Arts person, you should understand that no matter how sublime the piece to the artist, a rumbling belly is all that currently awaits you if your taste does not align with the holders of the fattest purses to lighten. I'm not speaking from a place of contempt here; I have a Philosophy background, and reaching out as one individual of the Humanities to another. We've lost sight of the "why we do things" and let ourselves become enslaved by the balance sheets. The economy was supposed to serve the people, it's now the other way around. All we do is feed more bodies to the wood chipper. Until we wake up from that, not even the desperate hope in the matter of taste will save us. We'll just keep following the capital gradient until we end up selling the world from under ourselves because it's the only thing we have left, and there is only the usual suspects as buyers.
by KronisLV | 2026-03-06 12:46:59+00:00
I crave to see people saying "Here's the repo btw: ..." and others trying out porting it over, just so we see all of the ways how AI fails (and how each model does) and maybe in the middle there a few ways to improve its odds. Until it eventually gets included in training data, a bit like how LLMs are oddly good at making SVGs of pelicans on bicycles nowadays.

And then, maybe someone slightly crazy comes along and tries seeing how much they can do with regular codegen approaches, without any LLMs in the mix, but also not manual porting.
by the_af | 2026-03-06 12:48:14+00:00
I do believe there are major technical impediments; other than a modern attack sub reaching that far undetected I can't think of how they would do it. The US is the only nation that can effectively project power so far away from its borders, almost anywhere in the world.

Furthermore, you mentioned this in response to "helping Venezuela", but even damaging a carrier (something technically very, very difficult for Russia or China) would not help Venezuela one bit.

It'd be more technically feasible for them to help Iran than Venezuela, and even that is not particularly feasible now, other than very indirectly.
by tasuki | 2026-03-06 12:48:29+00:00
> It's like someone claiming that automobiles don't improve personal mobility.

I prefer walking or cycling and often walk about 8km a day around town, for both mobility and exercise. (Other people's) automobiles make my experience worse, not better.

I'm sure there's an analogy somewhere.

(Sure, automobiles improve the speed of mobility, if that's the only thing you care about...)
by staticassertion | 2026-03-06 12:48:35+00:00
Maybe, but I'm not really convinced. LLMs make some aspects of the job faster, mainly I don't have to type anymore. But... that was always a relatively small portion of the job. Design, understanding constraints, maintaining and operating code, deciding what to do, what not to do, when to do it, gaining consensus across product, eng, support, and customers, etc. I do all of those things as an engineer. Coding faster is really awesome, it's so nice, and I can whip up POCs for the frontend etc now, and that's accelerating development... but that's it.

The reality is that a huge portion of my time is spent doing similar work and what LLMs largely do is pick up the smaller tasks or features that I may not have prioritized otherwise. Revolutionary in one sense, completely banal and a really minor part of my job in many others.
by sukruh | 2026-03-06 12:48:45+00:00
Good points, but implicitly equating good design with functional design irks me. You can define your terms as you wish, but at least be upfront about it.

> Branding is centrifugal; design is centripetal.

Functional design is centripetal. "Good" design is one which achieves the designer's goals, which are often much more complicated than that.
by FrankWilhoit | 2026-03-06 12:49:02+00:00
My city is third on the list of most downtown land taken up by freeways. Its downtown is also a desert, never willingly visited by anyone if they can help it, due to decades of fearmongering. If you rebuilt it, they wouldn't come -- even if they were physically able to, which, if you tore the roads out, they wouldn't be.
by ghywertelling | 2026-03-06 12:49:25+00:00
This question has been boiling in my brain for quite a long time.

Consider a hypothetical scenario where one spy chinese or russian programmer working in Google or Meta might have siphoned off (copied and uploaded) all the important code (Monorepo) to the Mothership and all of us are now sitting ducks.

I am sure, this question might have crossed your minds. I have no idea. if blueprints for the TPU chip design could get leaked, imagine what might have already happened?
by gzread | 2026-03-06 12:50:01+00:00
The problem is that putting restrictions on adults comes with a thousand times more outrage than putting restrictions on kids, and look how much outrage there already is about putting restrictions on kids at the discretion of their parents. If we can't even give parents the option to keep kids away from bad stuff, then mandatorily keeping adults away from bad stuff is a complete non-starter. They'd probably burn down Parliament.