MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-03-07 19:22:31+00:00
Mastodon is extremely technologically stagnant, with one and only one player controlling the entire technical ecosystem.

There is a huge lack of interesting apps or innovation. The protocol is very narrowly defined, and does not have any Postel's Law characteristics. You have to use the limited API offered in the Mastodon form.

There is starting to be some interest from ActivityPub in defining their own client APIs. But this gathering together of people is only just starting, and it's unknown where that effort will go or when it will see traction in adoption.

It also sucks being moderated by whatever Fedi you are on. And the very poor state of account portability sucks.

There's also internally a very aggressive culture, against devs doing fun and interesting things with the social media data. The social rules of engagement seem to be that you can only enjoy Mastodon as a feed that goes by, and you cannot download or analyze deeply. You can't index or search, except with strong carved out cases. People building search or indexing tools are harassed and abused.

I strong recommend this excellent write up, which does a far better treatment than I could offer, on Mastodon: https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fr156-share-where/

Atproto has none of these issues, and has a rich ecosystem of devs building neat tools like RSS readers (skyboard), writing (greengale), book reading (bookhive), trail making (side trail), annotations (margin.at), events (smoke signal), chat (roomy), social/research bookmarking (semble), video streaming (Streamplace), media watching (pop feed), key attestation (keytrace), git (tangled), and yes, devs: containers (atcr).

I'm sorry but Mastodon is a dead end, a bad design, going no where, bereft of interesting dev engagement, with data that is hard to share & make interesting use of, data that is extremely narrowly constrained in shape/form.

I am envious of the dev-centric culture there. But it astounds me that devs would choose to exist on a place that is so technologically unalive & so low potential.
by toast0 | 2026-03-07 19:23:31+00:00
I don't think SLIRP was originally for palm pilots, given it was released two years before.

SLIRP was useful when you had a dial up shell, and they wouldn't give you slip or ppp; or it would cost extra. SLIRP is just a userspace program that uses the socket apis, so as long as you could run your own programs and make connections to arbitrary destinations, you could make a dial script to connect your computer up like you had a real ppp account. No incomming connections though (afaik), so you weren't really a peer on the internet, a foreshadowing of ubiquitous NAT/CGNAT perhaps.
by avsm | 2026-03-07 19:25:08+00:00
Those are global to the machine; generally not an issue and seccomp rules can filter out undesirable syscalls to other containers. But GPU kernel/userspace driver matching has been a huge headache; see https://cacm.acm.org/research/a-decade-of-docker-containers/... in the article for how the CDI is (sort of) helping standardise this.
by croes | 2026-03-07 19:25:15+00:00
If you actually do something that is considered building.

Same with vibe coding, if you don’t write code you just ordered and didn’t code, otherwise all my customers and bosses where coders long before AI because there orders don’t reach much different from today’s prompts. The recipient changed but that doesn’t change the sender.

It’s some kind of Chinese Room but this time for those outside the room.
by wolvoleo | 2026-03-07 19:26:02+00:00
I totally agree it's not for the average user but I'm not an average user. That's why I like it so much. I love the way I can make my computer work the way I want it, rather than being stuck with someone else's design decisions and having to adapt to them (I really hate opinionated design). My KDE is customized heavily though I never needed to use addons because it's so configurable.

I really like this about KDE. And the number of options isn't in the way. When I'm thinking of something new to do there's usually an option for just that that I'd never seen before. I love software like that that feels way ahead of me, almost anticipating my wishes.

Gnome on the other hand, their developers have this attitude of "you shouldn't want to do this". I don't like software or other people telling me what to do. I'm sure their stuff is based on UI principles but those are made for the masses too. I only care about what works for me.

But yeah I'm a power user, that's not for everyone. I love that KDE exists though. And it's great that you like gnome, that's the power of Linux/FOSS.

The only thing I object to is when people claim Linux should get one standard UI (and then they usually want that to be gnome). That's not ok for me. But it's also impossible to enforce anyway.
by sam_palus | 2026-03-07 19:26:08+00:00
We totally agree! And that's why we specifically designed Palus to be as easy to use as possible. It's a one-time setup that takes five minutes. We optimized our UX for founders to spend as little time using it as possible, so they can focus on finding PMF instead.

Even for a Series A company, putting $5M into Palus should yield an extra $50k-75k per year, just for having your money sit in a smarter place. Put another way, it should cover six months of a junior engineer's salary for free.

For five minutes of setup, we think most founders will find it worthwhile.
by suzzer99 | 2026-03-07 19:26:09+00:00
One trick for avoiding this is to use artifacts in the PoC that no self-respecting developer would ever allow in production. I use html tables in PoCs because front-end devs hate them - with old-school properties like cellpadding that I know will get replaced.

I also name everything DEMO__ so at least they'll have to go through the exercise or renaming it. Although I've had cases where they don't even do that lol. But at least then you know who's totally worthless.
by hombre_fatal | 2026-03-07 19:26:22+00:00
If your problem is with your code appearing in training data, then you cannot release your code anywhere.

That link you provided only points out GitHub has integrated "create pull request with Copilot" that you can't opt out of. Since anyone can create a pull request with any agent, and probably is, that's a pretty dated complaint.

Frankly not very compelling reasons to ditch the most popular forge if you value other people using/contributing to your project at all.
by frank_be | 2026-03-07 19:26:35+00:00
The trust argument for self-hosting is real: I wouldn't hand my master seed phrase to a random SaaS either.

But there's a deep irony in self-hosted dead man's switches: they need to work when you can no longer maintain them. Docker images rot. SSL certs expire. The VPS stops getting paid. Your DNS registrar reclaims the domain. In the 15-year scenario (which is the actual scenario this thing is built for) self-hosted infrastructure has a shelf life that works against its own purpose.

Who watches the watchman? You need infrastructure that outlives you, which almost by definition means trusting something external. The question isn't whether to trust. More how to structure that trust so you're not just handing a third party your keys.
by its-kostya | 2026-03-07 19:27:06+00:00
> ... but is not like the companies asked for it.

This doesn't justify them double dipping. Raising prices on consumers to cover tarrif costs and then getting refunded for tarrif costs isn't ethical no matter who caused the tariffs.

Consumers didn't ask for this either, so are we going to see year-long sales from companies?
by adrian_b | 2026-03-07 19:27:11+00:00
What can be done by raising the power consumption per core to hundreds of watt, while cooling the package with liquid nitrogen, is completely irrelevant for what can be done with a CPU that must operate reliably for years and at an acceptable cost for the energy consumption.

For the latter case, 6 GHz has been barely reached, in CPUs that cannot be produced in large quantities and whose reliability is dubious.
by card_zero | 2026-03-07 19:27:16+00:00
Onions, carrots, and celery, there you have it. I was trying to find out what renaissance celebrity chef Bartolomeo Scappi typically did for sauce, but I'm not sure. I think mostly meat broth. This tortellini here has a sort of Christmas spices stuffing with nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, and raisins ... and marjoram and mint and rosewater and saffron ... and sugar and parmesan on top. In meat broth.

https://www.theeternaltable.com/historical-recipes/tortellin...
by socalgal2 | 2026-03-07 19:27:44+00:00
I agree with you. The person in the article worked at Mercari which I used to go their tech meetups. The moment you entered it was as though you teleported into an SF/SV meetup. Mostly English speaking people with English presentations in a room with an SV like microkitchen, free SV snacks, etc... That's not the norm at all.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2026-03-07 19:28:00+00:00
There are some hurdles preventing that flow from achieving reproducible builds. As the bad guys get more sophisticated, it's going to become more and more important that one party can say "we trust this image hash" and a separate party to say "us too".

That's not going to work if both parties get different hashes when they build the image, which won't happen as long as file modification timestamps (and other such hazards) are part of what gets hashed.
by frank_be | 2026-03-07 19:28:19+00:00
That $120B number is real, but the problem is more subtle than most people think. A USB drive solves "where are my keys", and then creates three new problems: physical destruction (fire, flood, theft), the assumption that your beneficiary knows what to do with it, and the maintenance overhead of keeping it current as you rotate accounts and add wallets.

The hardest design question in this space isn't encryption. It's the human handoff. How do you build something secure enough that a stranger can't crack it, but simple enough that a grieving spouse who's never touched a terminal can actually use it? Most solutions I've seen either punt on that question or assume the recipient is technical. "I secured my keys" vs "my family can actually recover them" is where the real product problem lives imho.
by mindslight | 2026-03-07 19:28:21+00:00
You can't extrapolate from Trump supporters having nothing in their life besides Trump, to thinking that people who don't support Trump have lives that are completely barren. It's all the things I have in my life that keep me from embracing destructionism - Trumpism appeals to the hopeless, and sooner or later you will realize he was merely a conman promising false hope in order to steal even more from you.
by like_any_other | 2026-03-07 19:28:33+00:00
So you think, but you're wrong. What really drives distrust in science is claims of infallibility and demands for total trust, so the only ones that remain expressing doubts are oil lobbyists and those whom they've convinced, hence your misidentification of me as one of them.

Let's take a small detour. In the show Downton Abbey, there's an episode where a character may be sick. Two doctors give their diagnoses. One says she's not sick, and that he's 100% certain. The other says he thinks he knows what illness she has, but he's not totally sure - despite knowing the patient better. Still he recommends treating her for that illness. They go with the first doctor, he turns out to have been wrong, and the patient dies.

Even the humanities and English literature graduates that wrote that show understood what you do not, that the person open about their uncertainties and faults is more trustworthy than the one claiming to be perfect. Not only is more trustworthy, but is the one that people will trust, that is why they gave that characteristic to the doctor they wanted the audience to side with - the likable permanent character, not the antagonizing guest character.
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-03-07 19:29:09+00:00
Edit: I'm a silly-billy who doesn't know what words mean. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threaded_code is not a bad description of a large WAM program, although =/2-inlining and peephole optimisation will turn some procedure clauses into quite sophisticated collections of pattern-matching and unification instructions, which represent a non-trivial computation. Does a tight loop operating over linked lists still count as threaded, if it used to be a tail-recursive procedure call? Or does the term refer instead to the program as a whole? (Probably the second one.)

---

I thought WAM was single-threaded? It does a lot of trickery to simulate "fork, wait, and either kill parent or child" with no copying and minimal rollback, but most of that trickery relies on the absence of threading, and will explode in the presence of such hubristic assumptions as "once we've returned from a procedure, the old stack frame is freed and its memory can be re-used", "a clean-up procedure will be run when we drop objects", and "clean-up procedures do not need to be run when we drop objects".

I would be interested to see approaches that make it work in parallel. Even cheating with Unix and COW would be interesting: since Prolog predicates can have side-effects, a cut in an earlier branch would retroactively cancel the later branches you've eagerly executed in parallel. You'd either have to deal with that somehow (maybe with IO monads?), or invent some notion of (dependent?) purity and then ensure procedures in the dynamic procedure database remain correctly tagged with their purity, transitively (i.e., including all possible callees, unto the deepest generation). I'm not confident the speed-up would be worth the overhead, for most programs.
by frank_be | 2026-03-07 19:29:28+00:00
Anonymous signup is a smart move, no PII means no breach surface. But for a dead man's switch specifically, anonymity creates an interesting tension.

You want the service to be able to verify you're actually gone (not just on vacation, not just changing phones, not incapacitated temporarily). But you don't want it to know what it's guarding or who you are. Those two goals pull in opposite directions. The more the service knows about you, the better it can distinguish "dead" from "busy." The less it knows, the safer your secrets are.

That's a genuinely hard protocol problem. Multi-party verification, tiered escalation, trusted contacts as oracles, ... there are approaches, but nobody's cracked it cleanly yet. The 12-word anonymous account is a solid starting primitive, though.
by sheepscreek | 2026-03-07 19:29:29+00:00
I’ve used Navage and it honestly helps whenever I have a horrible sinus infection and the constant post-nasal drip wrecks havoc, affecting my quality of sleep the most (also recommend salt water gargles for sore throat).

I have Tinnitus, which I first noticed when I was sick one time as a kid - probably 5-8 yrs old. Thankfully I have no other adverse experiences to report (related to this).
by k310 | 2026-03-07 19:30:15+00:00
I hereby propose, in addition, banning toxic social media for over-16's, the people who can do the most damage to themselves, society and their under-16 kids.

How do we define toxicity? There are studies that can be made into algorithms. Only non-toxic sites like Hacker News will be available to those either over 16 or under 16, inclusively.

Defining and detecting toxicity on social media: context and knowledge are key [0]

> Abstract
Online platforms have become an increasingly prominent means of communication. Despite the obvious benefits to the expanded distribution of content, the last decade has resulted in disturbing toxic communication, such as cyberbullying and harassment. Nevertheless, detecting online toxicity is challenging due to its multi-dimensional, context sensitive nature. As exposure to online toxicity can have serious social consequences, reliable models and algorithms are required for detecting and analyzing such communication across the vast and growing space of social media. In this paper, we draw on psychological and social theory to define toxicity. Then, we provide an approach that identifies multiple dimensions of toxicity and incorporates explicit knowledge in a statistical learning algorithm to resolve ambiguity across such dimensions.

Paper: [1]

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09252...

Also: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/aii_fac_pub/511/

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.10788
by socalgal2 | 2026-03-07 19:30:18+00:00
No, in general they don't. Anyone telling you differently was in a bubble of English speaking Japanese. That's not the norm, not even in Tokyo.

Engineers can probably read because the majority of tech, computer languages, libraries, their docs are in English. Though that might change now that LLMs can make all the docs in Japanese removing the need for English skills.

Speaking ability is rare.
by port11 | 2026-03-07 19:31:03+00:00
Isn’t the iPad already competing in these segments? Because unless reality has changed dramatically, this is still fairly pricey and a full-fledged laptop that doesn’t make for direct competition with Chromebooks.

Even in my home country of Portugal 700€ is a lot to throw at a ‘laptop’ that will be somewhat obsolete in 3–4 years, assuming Apple continues the trend of graphics-intense, memory hungry OS releases. An iPad seems like a better candidate for students or those on a budget.

I’m actually not sure who the Neo is for. Unless it’s a 3-model trick to price the Air upwards.
by antonymoose | 2026-03-07 19:31:08+00:00
This seems closest to my experience. There is work out there but it’s of lower quality.

I turn on LinkedIn “Looking for Work” a few times a year. The only recruiters I get now are those trying to run an agency, farm you out to their Blue Chip clients like BOA or Duke Energy for a low-ball salary on a 12 month contract while they dangle the hope of future hiring as a carrot.

I live close enough to a small/mid city that I could get a proper job quickly enough… except I would be taking a 30-40k pay cut and transition from remote to having an 80-mile / 3-hour commute daily.

Meanwhile at my day job we’re trying to hire a Senior Data Engineer to manage our data pipelines in AWS. Nothing too crazy, it’s remote, it’s advertised on LinkedIn, but we cannot find qualified candidates to save our life. All the while I open HN daily and see the complaints about job hunting and layoffs all over. Where are all the laid off applicants?
by nothrabannosir | 2026-03-07 19:31:24+00:00
Yes just to be clear I edited that original commnt from “there’s no law he’s breaking” to “for every such law, there’s another one which exonerates him/them”, so technically speaking I think we agree: he is breaking laws.

my impression from more closely following the actual Supreme Court (and federal) cases and reading the opinions as a total layman is that the laws and cases are rarely clear cut, nor isolated. They constantly pull in context and other laws and try and guess what congress meant. And many times the judges make very fair points. Things I thought were clear , actually aren’t. And I’m happy that they’re erring on the side of reticence when it comes to punishing the executive because that is a power that can (and will!) be used against the other side, in a constant escalation of partisanship. That was my original point.

This all is why I’ve come to the impression that a congress with a strong point of view is the most robust way out. If congress passes clear laws with unequivocal language about what should and shouldn’t happen in which specific transgressions of power, the judiciary will uphold it. They may be partisan in the details if that’s how you want to see it, but they will absolutely not ignore clear language from congress. These are still real judges.
by lovehashbrowns | 2026-03-07 19:31:33+00:00
My first pc I built was with an AMD athlon 64 4000+ and a GeForce 6600GT. Going to that from an e-machines piece of junk was INSANE. It’s so hard to come up with a similar experience shift nowadays. Even websites seemed to load instantly with the same DSL connection. Everything felt soooooo good.
by M95D | 2026-03-07 19:31:44+00:00
> there are so many phones with devicetree... and proprietary blobs controlling boot and running beneath ring 0

It's not the same!

A bootloader, once it loads the kernel and executes it, is overwritten in memory. No trace of it remains while the sistem is running - until the next boot. UEFI / ACPI / SMM continue to execute on the CPU after it finished booting, "under" the kernel, preempting it as they please.
by k310 | 2026-03-07 19:32:13+00:00
Meanwhile, back in the U.S.[0]

> President Donald Trump said he's not considering declaring a national emergency around the midterm elections, as a draft executive order circulating among his allies suggests.

> The 17-page proposal, a working document reviewed in full by PBS News, would give him extraordinary power over the 2026 midterm elections. It claims to address election integrity issues caused by foreign interference. By declaring a national emergency, the document hypothesizes, the president could take control over some voting mechanisms in the country, including requiring hand-counting of ballots and voter identification at the polls.

> "Who told you that?" the president said in response to a question from PBS News about the proposal.

Countdown to emergency 5, 4, 3, 2 ...

[0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-says-hes-not-mul...
by jfjasdfuw | 2026-03-07 19:32:56+00:00
CGO_ENABLED=0 is sigma tier.

I don't care about glibc or compatibility with /etc/nsswitch.conf.

look at the hack rust does because it uses libc:

> pub unsafe fn set_var<K: AsRef<OsStr>, V: AsRef<OsStr>>(key: K, value: V)
by suzzer99 | 2026-03-07 19:33:12+00:00
I'm 56 and still coding full-time. My least favorite part of the job has always been trying to learn some brand new tech, googling with 47 tabs open, and you don't even know enough to ask the right questions yet. Turns out you were stuck on something so beginner that Stack Overflow didn't even have a post on it. ChatGPT has made that part of the job soooooo much less painful. But I'm not ready to let Claude run wild yet. I still want to understand everything I'm pasting.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-03-07 19:33:50+00:00
I agree - I took "plausible" here to mean plausible-looking, no different than similar-looking.

The trouble of course is that similar/plausible isn't good enough unless the LLM has seen enough similar-but-different training samples to refine it's notion of similarity to the point where it captures the differences that are critical in a given case.

I'd rather just characterize if as a lack of reasoning, since "add more data" can't be the solution to a world full of infinite variety. You can keep playing whack a mole to add more data to fix each failure, and I suppose it's an interesting experiment to see how far that will get you, but in the end the LLM is always going to be brittle and susceptible to stupid failure cases if it doesn't have the reasoning capability to fully analyze problems it was not trained on.
by port11 | 2026-03-07 19:33:52+00:00
I keep being told that a proper harness makes agents better, but no one has shown me exactly what is it that gives them such amazing results.

Yesterday Gemini burned 40 minutes trying to diagnose a failed Expo build and going into loops of changing the Podfile and re-running the build, when the issue was that Xcode needed updating (quick Google search for it).

But my comment on burnout stands. The lack of downtime and dynamic thinking modes (admin, planning, review, actual coding) seems like it would conspire to make you either cram out more work or disconnect from it. Both of these become dangerous, after a while.

(Information workers were productive 4–6 hours a day, and the economy did just fine.)
by avsm | 2026-03-07 19:34:35+00:00
> I don't think SLIRP was originally for palm pilots, given it was released two years before.

That's a mistake indeed; "popularised by" might have been better. Before my beloved Palmpilot arrived one Christmas, I was only using SLIRP to ninja in Netscape and MUD sessions onto a dialup connection which wasn't a very mainstream use.