MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by apical_dendrite | 2026-03-07 18:01:43+00:00
My company recently hired a contractor. He submits multi-thousand line PRs every day, far faster than I can review them. This would maybe be OK if I could trust his output, but I can't. When I ask him really basic questions about the system, he either doesn't know or he gets it wrong. This week, I asked for some simple scripts that would let someone load data in a a local or staging environment, so that the system could be tested in various configurations. He submitted a PR with 3800 lines of shell scripts. We do not have any significant shell scripts anywhere else in our codebase. I spent several hours reviewing it with him - maybe more time than he spent writing it. His PR had tons and tons of end-to-end tests of the system that didn't actually test anything - some said they were validating state, but passed if the system returned a 200. There were a few tests that called a create API. The tests would pass if the API returned an ID of the created object. But they would ALSO pass if the test didn't return an ID. I was trying to be a good teacher, so I kept asking questions like "why did you make this decision", etc, to try to have a conversation about the design choices and it was very clear that he was just making up bullshit rationalizations - he hadn't made any decisions at all. There was one particularly nonsensical test suite - it said it was testing X but included API calls that had nothing to do with X. I was trying to figure out how he had come up with that, and then I realized - I had given him a Postman export with some example API requests, and in one of the API requests I had gotten lazy and modified the request to test something but hadn't modified the name in Postman. So the LLM had assumed that the request was related to the old name and used it when generating a test suite, even though these things had nothing to do with each other. He had probably never actually read the output so he had no idea that it made no sense.

When he was first hired, I asked him to refactor a core part of the system to improve code quality (get rid of previous LLM slop). He submitted a 2000+ line PR within a day or so. He's getting frustrated because I haven't reviewed it and he has other 2000+ line PRs waiting on review. I asked him some questions about how this part of the system was invoked and how it returned data to the rest of the system, and he couldn't answer. At that point I tried to explain why I am reluctant to let him commit his refactor of a core part of the system when he can't even explain the basic functionality of that component.
by kristofferR | 2026-03-07 18:02:05+00:00
Yeah, but remember how joyful we'd have been if copyright had been this weak in 2003. As long as this flows down to regular people instead of just corps, then copyright won't halt societal development as much as previously anymore. The weakening of copyright is a great thing.

Just step back into space. Pretend you're so high that you can see your own person from outside yourself, like you are the CCTV camera in the corner. Now look at copyright, the law about the restriction of the right to copy to a select group. It's an absurd sight, like a bad trip.

This might be relief, we might hopefully get past copyright and patents and just have innovation free for all.
by antonvs | 2026-03-07 18:02:27+00:00
Good chunks of the article don't trigger this for me, but I would bet money on the final paragraph involving AI:

> That's not a technical argument. It's a values argument. And it's one that the filesystem, for all its age and simplicity, is uniquely positioned to serve. Not because it's the best technology. But because it's the one technology that already belongs to you.
by salawat | 2026-03-07 18:02:34+00:00
For one thing, people to divest themselves of the notion "leaving money on the table" is a bad thing. It's part of the affordability crisis and why two income households are the default. It's already priced in as they say. Until that Ethic gets revised, and all the ethical arbitagers are found and eliminated with extreme prejudice, that vision cannot come to fruition. Because the price you pay will be adjusted to reflect your maximum actuarial capacity to earn. Fun bit is, you on the bottom don't get to make the decisions that effect that change. The people at the top/in the .001% do, because if everyone else made the change first without dealing with them, they're sitting on enough assets to buyout everyone else adopting the new paradigm. Then again, there's also the question of "just let em do it, then ignore their claim." Long as everyone else is in alignment, and we just ignore those people, a second system ought to be able to stabilize to which the .001% can either sync to, or remain ostracized. It does require full solidarity from the 99.99% though. That means literally treating the horded wealth and businesses of these people as no good. Destabilizing in the short term; probably gonna hurt like a sumabitch. A theoretical offramp to the vision, however, it is.
by Forgeties79 | 2026-03-07 18:02:57+00:00
Microcenter is not available for the vast majority of us - they don’t ship. The nearest one to me is an almost 8hr drive and I live in a major city. I’m not spending 2 days and $200-$300 on gas/food/lodging to get there and back.

Bestbuy is selling ram and storage at the same cost as everyone else. I imagine Walmart is not much better. I’m also not sure what you do with all the bundle parts that you don’t need. Do you sell them? Where do you sell them?

What deals did you take advantage of? What did everything cost you in the end/when did you build? If you don’t feel like answering that’s fine but it’s valid to remain skeptical given all the evidence to the contrary. Perhaps you’re just really good at finding deals but you can look around this thread and see that we are all telling the same story. Building a computer has gone up $600+ for common builds over the last 4-5mo on top of the already inflated GPU prices we’ve been experiencing for years. If you put my exact build I did last April into PC part picker it is an additional $500+ to build now, and that’s with an AMD GPU to keep costs down.

It’s strange times when Mac minis are a budget-friendly computer. Building a half decent PC for less than $1500 is a serious challenge now. Things are so volatile valve still hasn’t released or even set a price for the new Steam machine.
by jghn | 2026-03-07 18:03:01+00:00
This is the point I'm raising. I agree with you, but what I'm saying is I think the skillset you describe is the next on the chopping block.

The acquaintances of mine who are absolutely *killing* it with these tools are very experienced, technically minded, product managers. They have an intimate knowledge of how to develop business requirements and how to convert them into high level technical specifications. They have enough technical knowledge to understand when someone is bullshitting them, and what the search space for the problem should be. Historically these people would lead teams of engineers to develop for them, and now they're sitting down and having LLMs crank out what they want in an afternoon. They no longer need engineers at all.

My contention is that people with that sort of skillset will have an advantage due to their experience with skills like finding product fit, identifying user needs, and defining business requirements.

Of course, the people I'm talking about were already killing it in the old paradigm too. I'll admit it's a bit of a unicorn skillset I'm describing.
by umanwizard | 2026-03-07 18:03:56+00:00
> The state doesn't make me pay it because I don't watch live broadcast TV, therefore I don't have to pay it.

There are plenty of taxes that only some people have to pay, for example, the fee to register a car.

> Furthermore the state isn't in charge of administering it anyway, it's a civil matter brought about by the BBC (or rather the company which is subcontracted to enforce licencing). The BBC has the authority to do this based on the Royal Charter that governs it

I'm trouble understanding how this doesn't make it part of the state? It is a 100% state-owned entity to which the state has granted (in a "Royal Charter") the ability to collect taxes... the distinction you're trying to draw seems meaningless to me.

Sure there may be two separate entities, one called "The UK Government" and one called "The BBC" where neither is part of the other, but structurally I don't see how you can claim that they're not both part of "the State" in general.
Show HN: Personal Standup
by baristaGeek | 2026-03-07 18:04:36+00:00
Companies do standups. People say what they did last week, and they’ll do the next one. I thought there should be a personal version of this. Keeping you accountable with other people pushes you to progress. Send your weekly update, vote on other people’s update, and climb up on the leaderboard.
by zbentley | 2026-03-07 18:05:19+00:00
> the Dockerfile has continued because of its flexibility

I wish we had standardized on something other than shell commands, though. Puppet or terraform or something more declarative would have been such a better alternative to “everyone cargo cults ‘RUN apt-get upgrade’ onto the top of their dockerfiles”.

Like, the layer/stage/caching behavior is fine. I just wish the actual execution parts had been standardized using something at a higher level of abstraction than shell.
by rzerowan | 2026-03-07 18:05:37+00:00
Were it more portable BeOS/Haiku's BeFS would have been a perrfect fit in this instance.Seeing that it is a filesystem thah has database properties via extended attributes[1] and indexing.

Were Haiku mor mature/stable would have been a nice fit for the OS for the LLM/Ai personal use cases.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/the-b...
by Bewelge | 2026-03-07 18:05:44+00:00
Thanks!

It seems funny though: The advantages of GPGPU are so obvious and unambiguous compared to AI. But then again, with every new technology you probably also had management pushing to use technology_a for <enter something inappropriate for technology_a>.

Like in a few decades when the way we work with AI has matured and become completely normal it might be hard to imagine why people nowadays questioned its use. But they won't know about the million stupid uses of AI we're confronted with every day :)
by steve1977 | 2026-03-07 18:06:20+00:00
> That's my point, the software was getting bloated at least as fast as the CPUs were getting faster

I think there's a difference between bloat and actually useful features or performance.

For example, I started making music with computers in the early 90s. They were only powerful enough to control external equipment like synthesizers.

Nowadays, I can do everything I could do with all that equipment on an iPad! I would not call that bloat.

On the other hand, comparing MS Teams to say ICQ, yeah, a lot of that is bloat.
by rwmj | 2026-03-07 18:07:08+00:00
Not really. It elegantly solves the "create a process, letting it inherit these settings and reset these other settings", where "settings" is an ever changing and expanding list of things that you wouldn't want to bake into the API. Thus (omitting error checks and simplifying many details):

pipe (fd[2]); // create a pipe to share with the child
if (fork () == 0) { // child
close (...); // close some stuff
setrlimit (...); // add a ulimit to the child
sigaction (...); // change signal masks
// also: clean the environment, set cgroups
execvp (...); // run the child
}

It's also enormously flexible. I don't know any other API that as well as the above, also lets you change the relationship of parent and child, and create duplicate worker processes.

Comparing it to Windows is hilarious because Linux can create processes vastly more efficiently and quickly than Windows.
by pjmlp | 2026-03-07 18:08:25+00:00
Going over the 50 bump, and I see myself selling toasts, as being an IC/Architect is no longer valued enough, everyone is expected to be a PM for their agents minions.

The teams get reduced, as now one can do effectively more with less, and in South Europe, in IT there is hardly a place to get a job above 50 years old, unless one goes consulting as the company owner, and even then the market cannot hold everyone.

As kid I have seen this happening, as factory automation replaced jobs in complete villages, the jobs that weren't offshored into Asia or Eastern Europe for clothing and shoes, got replaced with robots.

The few lucky ones were the ones pressing the buttons and unloading trucks.

Likewise a few ones will be lucky AI magicians, some will press buttons, and the large majority better get newer skills beyond computing.
by zeagle | 2026-03-07 18:08:30+00:00
I'd take that election atmosphere and then recognize Canadians are living in a charged environment with cost of living/quality of life/economy changing and uncertainty. Many Canadians see Trump & his with the de facto support he has (in that nothing has been done about it despite posturing) as a threat and root cause of much of it. Not all of that's true or due to him or the US. But it means nobody down there will meaningfully protect Canada with his threats/economic war if they can't even block his domestic chaos. Folks are happy to see other folks and appreciate visitors but they also recognize a threat. Just like in America. So agree why publicize foreign political views.

Perhaps in the white vs black experience lens that most of my US friends seem to see every world conflict through to relate to their own history (wild conversations about Middle Eastern politics there being racial), it's like wearing something racially inflammatory to the wrong neighbourhood. If one's blowing $$,$$$ on bespoke fly in tourism you can probably get away with it with a polite topic change as tourism keeps food on the table, but park a Trump sticker on a residential street I'd be surprised if even in the nicest neighbourhood there isn't some damage to it. Likely from a teenager goofing off with friends in the current environment.

To the second individually most Americans are nice in my experience, if you are seen as a person and not anonymous in the crowd. I've had a family member get a rifle leveled at them for stepping over a property line in the US where clearly they weren't seen as a fellow human... what can I say to that or the normalization of it.
by rebolek | 2026-03-07 18:09:05+00:00
Ernst Mach is such an interesting guy! I’ve started working on a synth which is named by him [1] and I believe he needs much more recognition - this self portrait exactly captures his philosophy - there’s no absolute frame of reference, everything is relative, which leads directly to you know what. I wish he would be remembered for more than just Mach number.

[1] https://pokuston.com/mach-i.html
by avsm | 2026-03-07 18:09:27+00:00
Docker broke out the build layer into a separate component called BuildKit (see HN discussion recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47166264).

However, Dockerfiles are so popular because they run shell commands and permit 'socially' extending someone else shell commands; tacking commands onto the end of someone else's shell script is a natural process. /bin/sh is unreasonably effective at doing anything you need to a filesystem, and if the shell exposes a feature, it has probably been used in a Dockerfile somewhere.

Every other solution, especially declarative ones, tend to come up short when _layering_ images quickly and easily. However, I agree they're good if you control the entire declarative spec.
by vladdoster | 2026-03-07 18:10:20+00:00
Location: Nashville, TN
Remote: true
Willing to relocate: boston || nashville
Technologies: Python, Django, IaC, Terraform, Golang, CI/CD, Azure/AWS, {ba,z}sh, Lua, Springboot,
Redis, Docker, Open Service Broker, {,non}relational & vector dbs, shared services, SOA
Email: mvdoster@gmail.com

resume: https://linkedin.vdoster.com && http://github.com/vladdoster

sr. cloud software engineer @ Mastercard (5 years)

Designed and built Platform-as-a-Service for microservice workloads running on Azure and AWS
to migrate on-prem workloads to the cloud. The platform operates globally, allowing teams to
deploy to several Azure-backed regions worldwide. Helped plan and create regional landing zones
in Azure for application teams wanting to perform globally. Designed platform components using
Terraform, Go, and Node; developed support tooling using Bash, Python, and Azure CLI. De-risk the
platform by addressing security vulnerabilities and ensuring the platform is PCI compliant.

api/devops software engineer @ Harvard Medical School (2 years)

Worked as part of the DevOps team to manage a 15k core CentOS HPC cluster. Designed and implemented
Python-based security scanning pipeline to securely deploy & run Apptainer images via SLURM.
Coordinated cross-team emergency patching eﬀorts. Collaborated with researchers and engineers across
3-letter institutions to deliver secure research infrastructure. Built CI/CD Pipelines with GitHub, Jenkins,
to automate code builds, testing, and deployments. Wrote Puppet modules to manage configuration of HPC fleet.
Wrote custom Puppet module & Python scripts to automatically remediate Tenable findings.

full-stack software engineer @ Global Prior Art (3 years)

Used Django, Celery, Selenium grid, and AWS API Gateway for IP rotation to scrape USPTO patent PDFs,
apply CV for data extraction, and generate reports with relevant claims, saving employees 4-5 hours daily.
Wrote E2E black-box/fuzzing unit tests. Automated on-premise deployment via Github Actions and Ansible.

maintainer @ Zinit (5 years)

Develop and maintain a zsh plugin manager on Github with 4k stars. Implemented unit tests,
containerization, bug fixes, and new features.
See: https://github.com/zdharma-continuum/zinit

contributor @ Open-source documentation (5 years)

Contributed hundreds of documentation corrections and enhancements to 400+ open source projects.
by krapp | 2026-03-07 18:10:34+00:00
They're arguing in favor of MAD, which kept the US and Soviets from bathing the entire world in radioactive fire for approximately 45 years, and is the only thing keeping American and Chinese imperialism even slightly constrained.

If you have a better idea, we're all ears. Disarmament isn't an option, the destroyer is here so choose its form.
by avsm | 2026-03-07 18:11:26+00:00
We've given up on native Windows containers in OCaml after trying to use them for our CI builds for many years. See https://www.tunbury.org/2026/02/19/obuilder-hcs/ for our recent switch to HCS instead. Compared to Linux containers, they're very much a second-class citizen in the Microsoft worldview of Docker.
by ritlo | 2026-03-07 18:11:37+00:00
Build it on Retroarch and you don’t even need X/Wayland. And the menu/launching functionality is done, you’d just be making a theme for it.

Really if someone made a WebKit “core” and a Jellyfin client “core” (which, actually, you might get “for free” with the browser if you can tolerate web bloat on your platform) under libretro it’d be a pretty damn capable set-top-box UI. All the “cores” right now are games/emulators, but they don’t have to be.
by lofatdairy | 2026-03-07 18:12:03+00:00
This is only tangentially related, but regarding:

>>Post-modern?!

>It's a joke. If Neovim is the modern Vim, then Helix is post-modern.

It's interesting that postmodern is so often used by people, perhaps less familiar with the arts and the humanities, to mean "an update to modern" or a progression thereof. They use it in a strictly literal sense, eschewing the precise meaning of the term they're referencing by mere addition of discontinuity as incremental difference.

Obviously, there's little impact to this. The term is hardly degraded by engineers advertising to other engineers. It looks a touch unread, but then again we have people like Thiel and Luckey misinterpreting Tolkien, so again it's hardly the most egregious example. I guess it just jumped out to me because I was hoping to see something creative truly postmodern.
by mattmanser | 2026-03-07 18:12:56+00:00
That's not really tinnitus, I used to have that before I got tinnitus.

Tinnitus is like 30-50 times the volume of that, depending on how rundown I am or whether I have a cold. For me it's predominantly in one ear, though does sometimes change.

What he's describing is fairly normal and is just to do with blood pressure in your ears, from what I've subsequently read.
by nunez | 2026-03-07 18:13:00+00:00
What a time to be a kid then.

We had a hand-me-down DEC x86 desktop at home with a Pentium II running at 233 MHz until I want to say 2002? This was around the time I learned how to build a PC since doing that was cheaper than buying one and no-one in my family had the money for that!

I saved whatever money I could to buy a 128MB stick of RAM from Staples (maybe it was 256MB?), a few other things from TigerDirect/Newegg and _this processor_. With some help from my uncle and a guide I printed from somewhere whose website started with '3D' (it was quite popular back then; I don't think it exists anymore), I got it done.

Going from 233 MHz to this was like going from walking to flying in a jet! Everything was SO MUCH F**ING FASTER. Windows XP _flew_. (The DEC barely made the minimum requirements for it, and boy did I feel it.) Trying to install Longhorn on it a year or two later brought me back into walking again, though. :D
Show HN: AI video generator for small businesses without video production budget
by frankylarry | 2026-03-07 18:13:21+00:00
I built ReelsLab after realizing small businesses need video content but can't afford production teams or spend hours editing.
You type a prompt, it generates a video using Seedance 2.0. No editing required.
You can watch a demo without signing up. Would love feedback on the output quality and use cases you think it fits.
by analog31 | 2026-03-07 18:13:28+00:00
This could be an age thing. I’m 62. I didn’t know there was such a thing as an em dash until I was nearly finishing grad school. My buddy had an Apple Mac and was up to date on typography, and told me about em dashes. I ignored him and have continued to use double hyphens — all the way up to this point where my iPad seems to convert them into em dashes.
by lowsong | 2026-03-07 18:13:35+00:00
> AI is actually better getting those built as long as you clean it up afterwards

I've never seen a quick PoC get cleaned up. Not once.

I'm sure it happens sometimes, but it's very rare in the industry. The reality is that a PoC usually becomes "good enough" and gets moved into production with only the most perfunctory of cleanup.
by dangus | 2026-03-07 18:15:09+00:00
Yeah, shows you how bad the present situation is.

I would say that Apple never specifically built computers with repairability in mind save for your occasional Power Mac G3 type of model that was specifically meant for professional users installing specialized third party hardware.

No, it was more like, that’s just how computers used to be built. The only way to build a computer was to get a hard drive from Toshiba and screw it in.

Sure, occasionally you had a standout like the polycarbonate MacBook with removable battery and drive/RAM right behind an easily accessible panel. I’m sure at some point an engineer thought about upgrades and repairs and corporate management didn’t mind.

I think Lenovo even talked about their iFixit partnership in a similar way where they discussed how you’re under pressures that are really more important: you’re trying to design something and get it out the door in the right form factor and you are thinking about how you’re putting it together. Even if you want the computer to be repairable it’s always down below #1 on your list on priorities even if you don’t mean to specifically prevent people from repairing and upgrading the system.