MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by beagle3 | 2026-03-06 19:21:28+00:00
What they did not win was the popularity contest, mostly thanks to Windows - the Wintel market was just too massive to compete with.

But that’s changed somewhat - Apple has managed a larger mind and market share (while switching into ARM). The vast majority of uses are now available on the web, which is CPU agnostic, and there is a huge amount of open source software available.

The only things for which x86 still shines a little brighter are games, and native office. But office is mostly available on web, on Mac, and on Winarm. So games. Which aren’t big enough market mass to sustain the x86’s popularity — and is a segment (soon) under attack by Valve.
by thinkling | 2026-03-06 19:21:35+00:00
Agreed, would really like to understand what this (setting the LLM up to assume a role to improve performance) is doing under the cover and why it works.

Why aren't the labs training models to pick a mantra appropriate to the task and do this themselves? "Huh, a database question. I am going to pretend I'm a database expert with lots of experience. OK, here we go!"
by tremon | 2026-03-06 19:21:50+00:00
That topic should be a non-starter as long as US government policy is to keep shitting in the food bowl. There's way too many communities living under the toxic spill or waste of some unregulated industrial process -- and the country seems perfectly ok with that kind of "lifestyle". I really don't see why we should villify individual lifestyle choices when the entire country is happy with intentionally harmful policy choices.

So, if health insurers want to start charging premiums I suggest they send their bills to Superfund sites first, then to regular toxic cities like Flint, Camden, Hinkley or Picher, then to producers of known-carcinogenic substances (like Chrome-6 or Roundup), and then to advertisers of known-harmful products like alcohol or tobacco. Only when they run out of those targets can we have a discussion on individual lifestyle choices.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-03-06 19:22:01+00:00
There's a dozen different angles all coming out at once. I'll try to summarize some.

- really wants to hire H1B, but needs to pretend to interview first for compliance. These usually have absurd requirements to make it viable to reject anyone.

- really wants to do an internal or referral hire or promotion, but needs to interview for HR compliance. These usually have such specific requirements that only the person they want qualifies.

- posts jobs because a company wants to look like its growing, even when it's not.

- posts jobs to either signal to an employee that they are replaceable, or to try and relieve a stressed employee that more help is coming. Either way, it's a bluff

- yes, sometimes you want to hold out for the perfect unicorn and are not in any way in a rush to find them. There's no distinction for this, but job posts are cheap so why not?

- outdated posts that still stay up because There's no rush to take it down.

- a technique used to lower compensation. They post a job, see how many applications it gets. If it's more than enough, they take it down (with no interviews) then put it up once more at a lower rate. Repeat until not enough people apply. This may or may not lead to interviews because the actual goal is market probing.

-purely to advertise the company instead of actually hire. Usually done at career fairs where you talk and realize there's no actual open positions.
by beepbooptheory | 2026-03-06 19:22:15+00:00
For all the employment insecurity going around, each day I am more and more confident in myself. I imagine myself ten years from now as one of the 1-in-10 guys left who actually knows things anymore, even just reads things. It will be a formidable superpower!

Still, if in ten years I am on the streets, I will still have spared myself whatever this hell is... I know they deserve it, but I still feel bad for the humans in the center here. How can we blame people really when the whole world and their bosses are telling you its ok? Surely its a lot of young devs too here.. Such a terrible intro to the industry. Not sure I'd ever recover personally.
by moffkalast | 2026-03-06 19:22:28+00:00
The worst thing you can do when you're actively geoengineering is to abruptly stop doing it. So naturally we found a way we were already doing it and cut it immediately to make sure we fuck ourselves as much as possible :)

I'm almost convinced it's intentional at this point, the rich are busy building their offbrand vault tec bunkers and starting random wars for no real reason. Longtermism nonsense over the today.
Show HN: VaultNote – Local-first encrypted note-taking in the browser
by powerwild | 2026-03-06 19:22:45+00:00
Hi HN,

I built VaultNote, a local-first note-taking app that runs entirely in the browser.

Key ideas:

- 100% local-first: no backend or server
- No login, accounts, or tracking
- Notes stored locally in IndexedDB / LocalStorage
- AES encryption with a single master password
- Tree-structured notes for organizing knowledge

The goal was to create a simple note app where your data never leaves your device. You can open the site, enter a master password, and start writing immediately.

Since everything is stored locally, VaultNote also supports import/export so you can back up your data.

Curious to hear feedback from the HN community, especially on:

- the security approach (local AES encryption)
- IndexedDB storage design
- local-first UX tradeoffs

Demo: https://vaultnote.saposs.com

Thanks!
by ares623 | 2026-03-06 19:22:54+00:00
I've been feeling it too.

Up until a few weeks ago, I've been able to successfully avoid using AI at work. But then mandates happened and now I'm being forced to use them. Absolutely no guidance from leadership though. "Just figure it out amongst yourselves". Other folks in the company have similar reservations but I feel I'm the only one who has very strong feelings about it in the "morality" and ethical sense. I just can't ignore what the tech is built upon and is doing to other people. All so people like us can open 20 PRs in a day. PRs that don't even get merged because no one can keep up with reviews. For tickets that before would've been labeled as "not worth it". For a job that wasn't even that hard to begin with.

Funny thing is that 1-2 years ago when it was all still new I was more open minded. It was a shiny new tool and naturally I would like to try it out. I was one of the first finding potential use-cases for the team. But the more I looked and learned about it the more I hated it.

And I am not a Luddite. Before all of this, I would personally spend my _free_ time using and reading about random and often obscure tools and languages like Lisp, Clojure, Slackware. I'd spend hours curating my Emacs config. I was learning "k8s the hard way" back when it was the hottest tech thing. Does that sound like a Luddite?

I don't have the privilege to just pivot to another career so I have no choice but to stick it out. My only consolation is that when my kids are working age in a couple of years, when they ask me what the fuck happened, I can look them in the eye and honestly say that I did what I can and I did not cheer it on.
by ssl-3 | 2026-03-06 19:22:54+00:00
Huh? I'm trying to learn here. I don't have a dog in this race. :)

Suppose a buyer and myself agree on a contract for the production and purchase of 60,000 widgets of design C. Sometime later, they decide that they don't want design C widgets and insist upon design G instead. The buyer is in breach of contract -- not me.

Now, changes do happen. Buyers (people, businesses, and governments alike) can and often do decide to go in a different direction. It's the kind of thing that happens every day.

A new contract (or quite often, an amendment such as a change order) can be drawn up and -- if we can agree on the terms -- maybe I'll be producing design G widgets and everyone is happy. That also happens every day.

But one party (even the military) can't just unilaterally alter the terms of the deal, and I'm not obligated to agree to the new change at all.

At any given time, I can't be compelled to produce design G widgets unless I've previously agreed to produce design G widgets. That's illegal.

(Unless it has been made legal. We've definitely legislated that before, such as with the Defense Production Act in WWII that forced manufacturers to produce things like military trucks instead of other things like civilian cars.

But that definitely doesn't happen every day, and we aren't operating under those kinds of laws today as I write this in 2026. It can change -- and it can indeed change very rapidly -- but it has not yet changed.)
by vladvasiliu | 2026-03-06 19:23:07+00:00
Here in France, where you need a bureaucrat to sign off some paper for another bureaucrat, and where we levy taxes on taxes, I'm not aware of any restriction on AC from the state. Sure, the politicians say we should put up with sweltering heat, unlike them who have reasons to run their cars' engines for hours while they sit around in useless committees inside air-conditioned historical buildings. But there's no law against AC yet.

What usually happens, is that most people live in cities. And in cities, they have to get a permit from the HOA and from the city, lest the outside unit deface some historically significant square concrete building (yeah, I know there are actually historically significant buildings, ugly concrete ones built after 1950 aren't among them, though they're where the majority of the people live).
by Animats | 2026-03-06 19:23:22+00:00
Corporate jargon is a relatively recent development in business history.[1] It wasn't seen much until the 1950s and 1960s, when "organization development" and management consulting became an industry.
Peter Drucker seems to have popularized it in the 1980s.

Then came PowerPoint.

Before that it was more of a political and religious style of communication. In those areas, speeches and texts designed to be popular but not commit to much dominate.
Religious texts are notorious for their ambiguity.

The point seems to be to express authority without taking responsibility.

[1] https://www.rivier.edu/academics/blog-posts/circling-back-on...
by hungryhobbit | 2026-03-06 19:23:36+00:00
>You're better off with white skin and a US passport than with white skin and a British passport, but you're also better off with brown skin and a US passport than brown skin and a British passport and that's still better than brown skin and a third-world passport.

Tell me you're not an American without telling me you're not an American.

I hate to say it, but to many (racist) Americans, brown skin < anything else ... and ICE has a disproportionate number of those people, because they deliberately hire them.
by no_wizard | 2026-03-06 19:23:46+00:00
High performer is so subjective too.

You can be a great unblocker, team lead, and work well within cross cutting areas and with interdepartmental stake holders, have a history of strong technical performance.

and yet its nebulous if that means you're a high performer or not to those hiring. It seems I'm seeing 'culture fit' as a common reason people aren't getting hired again. That was out of vogue for a good while.
by SenHeng | 2026-03-06 19:23:50+00:00
Was it actually that hard?

I played on the JP/KR asian servers in a PK/APK/PVP guild so maybe it was just my bubble but it was pretty common to see players with 7 skills maxed out. If I remember correctly

- sparring

- swordsman or fencing

- magic

- magic resistance

I don't remember the rest. It's not quick or easy like modern games, but we would regularly power level each other's alts and it took maybe 2 weeks to max out all 7 skills? We had a bear trapped in the guild house so we could power level wrestling and other combat skills.
by tehjoker | 2026-03-06 19:24:00+00:00
I don't really know how to respond politely to downplaying genocide. What I can say is that it is becoming accepted that Kamala Harris lost in part because she refused to change genocide policy. If you want to win, you should start taking it seriously.

My swing-state vote was stupendously easy to get. (a) don't commit a genocide (b) give voters something big and material like free healthcare (c) don't cover up COVID and Long COVID

They didn't even try.

https://www.axios.com/2026/02/22/dnc-2024-autopsy-harris-gaz...
by tliltocatl | 2026-03-06 19:24:17+00:00
..which is a huge thing because AFAIK most Cortex-A SoCs on the market are full of undocumented peripherals. Cortex-Ms are usually sufficiently documented that you can bring them up from scratch. Once you want a MMU it's either "use our mainlined Linux drivers full of dark magic" (if you are very lucky - perfect if you want Linux, less so if you are developing your own OS), "use our Linux kernel full of binary blobs" (if you are less lucky) or, as a rule, "sign a NDA and don't even bother us if you aren't a billion-dollar corporation".

(Started it as a minor edit, then decided to elaborate so moved it to a new comment).
by dirkc | 2026-03-06 19:24:20+00:00
Maybe the multiplier is 4x and by the time you have a team of ten you're back down to 2x? My theory is a bit of a hyperbole and I don't know what the multipliers would be? But I know that many times you can move quick when you're small.

And to your point, a single person can easily get stuck, I know that applies to me many times.
by rnunery13 | 2026-03-06 19:24:25+00:00
I agree with Elevaes, this was absolutely fascinating and I love the use of books to help understand the concepts. I could relate right away. The token usage reduction potential is massive especially when it comes to enterprise usage and costs - many companies are experiencing sticker shock because they weren't prepared / didn't anticipate the usage. The potential for better costing and estimation with the process could have widespread impacts to financials (in a good way) and allow for more accurate pricing estimates and models.
by nostrademons | 2026-03-06 19:24:26+00:00
The "Our World in Data" citation cuts off right as China's emissions started to decline. More recent data [1] indicates that China's emissions have been flat or falling since the beginning of 2024, and falling fast in the last quarter of 2025 (1%, which is huge on a quarterly basis).

China's decarbonization & renewable efforts have been paying off in a big way. EVs now have a 51% market share among new vehicles [2], exceeding every single major city in the U.S [3] (though the SF Bay Area comes close). Likewise, renewables are 84.4% of its new power plants in 2025 [4].

[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...

[2] https://electrek.co/2025/08/29/electric-vehicles-reach-tippi...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/06/climate/hybri...

[4] https://en.cnesa.org/latest-news/2025/11/4/chinas-newly-inst...
by mifydev | 2026-03-06 19:24:45+00:00
I'm quite concerned about x86 future, but the article has a point if you read it past the title.

It says that x86 is highly standardised - even with different combinations of chips, peripherals and motherboards you know it will work just fine. It's not the case for ARM systems - can you even have something similar to IBM PC with ARM?

I personally know that adding support for ARM devices on Linux is a huge and manual task - e.g. look at devicetree, it's a mess. There is no standard like ACPI for ARM devices, so even powering off the computer is a problem, everything is proprietary and custom.

I don't agree with the article though, x86 is dying and my worry is that ARM devices will bring an end to such an open platform like modern PCs are.
by zie | 2026-03-06 19:24:50+00:00
At .49% expense ratio, plus whatever your cut is, it won't be a very cheap product. Even SPAXX, the default holding of cash at Fidelity is cheaper at .42% ER.

There is no free lunch in investing, so that extra yield comes with extra risk. Be that duration, credit, etc. That's not to say MBS's don't have their place, but I would never claim people's mortgages as equivalent to cash in any shape or form. Your website claims MBSF is safe for 3+ month durations, but that is not the avg duration of MBSF held securities, so you are encouraging duration risk.

I haven't read the full prospectus on MBSF, so I'm not an expert on that product, but it seems expensive and complicated, which is not what you want for cash and cash-like things. This should be a hard pass for literally everyone.

Meanwhile you can hold something like ICSH[0] or SGOV[1] with expense in the .09% or lower range(i.e. for every $10k we are talking $9/yr or less in fees). SGOV is 0-3 month max duration, so it's perfect for holdings in the 3 month time-frame. If you need longer time frames you can buy govt bond ladders in whatever time frame you want.

What your product should have been: You specify duration for each of your buckets, and then you pick appropriate, cheap index-based investments that are cheap and easy to reason about for each of the buckets.

0: https://www.ishares.com/us/products/258806/ishares-liquidity...
1: https://www.ishares.com/us/products/314116/ishares-0-3-month...
by bell-cot | 2026-03-06 19:24:52+00:00
Reminds me of stories about Germany's State Justice Office for Nazi War Criminals recently starting going after 100-year-old, bottom-tier "criminals". Who the Justice Office has known everything about for 6+ decades. But never believed to be worth bothering. Until now - when their choices are "prosecute some junior assistant file clerk who was a teenager at the time" and "finally close down your Justice Office and lose your jobs". Naturally, they pick the former.
by joshuamanton | 2026-03-06 19:25:14+00:00
All pointer reads/writes are sandboxed. The game state is a power of two number of bytes (64MB right now, might have to bump this up as people make more complex games), so we can use masking to quickly clamp any pointer to the sandbox by computing `game_state_base + (<pointer> & (game_state_size-1))` before doing the access. That masking makes sure you can't access anything outside the game state, but you can corrupt your own game state if you'd like!
by pppone | 2026-03-06 19:25:31+00:00
It's been great. We've been operating with it at our observatories (SPECULOOS, ESO Paranal, Chile) for the past 2 years without issues that can be attributed to Alpaca. We had to modify the Alpyca library timeout from 5 to 60s (which Astra uses) given our legacy ASCOM drivers not being as compliant as they should be, but other than that it has worked well.
by hn_acker | 2026-03-06 19:25:50+00:00
Mike Masnick's commentary at [1]. (Yes, I'm aware that he used "hostage note" to refer to a note written by a hostage rather than a note written by a hostage-taker.) Key excerpt:

> Under any previous administration—Democrat or Republican—a company telling the Defense Department “we’d prefer our AI not make autonomous kill decisions without human oversight” would have been a mostly unremarkable negotiating position. It might have been a deal breaker for that particular contract. The two sides might have parted ways. What would not have happened is the Secretary of Defense going on social media to accuse the company of “betrayal” and “duplicity,” the President directing all federal agencies to stop using the company’s products, and the company’s CEO subsequently having to write a public groveling statement apologizing for having accurately described the situation while pledging free labor to the government that attacked him.

[1] Anthropic's Statement To The 'Department Of War' Reads Like A Hostage Note Written In Business Casual - https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/06/anthropics-statement-to-...
by w10-1 | 2026-03-06 19:26:15+00:00
Respectfully disagree - using PG's own wisdom.

1. You don't find a golden age by looking for interesting problems. You find it by solving customer problems, even if they're boring.

2. Luxury watches, or anything luxury or fashion, are almost by definition using brand for status signaling. That's a business where you don't control your destiny but jump in front of the crowd.

The most important thing about brand is that it reduces the information costs of reliance, which only gets more important as customer reliance is deeper and more complicated. Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Netflix, McDonalds, Halliburton, even Berkshire: they're somewhat distinguished by quality, but mainly get their premiums by their reliability at serving complicated needs.

(Indeed, the problem with the beautiful luxury mechanical watches is that they require good care and maintenance - high cost of reliability. Quartz watches just work, reducing the market for mechanicals to status symbols.)

This is (yCombinator's) golden age because software/ai and devices/(mainly Arm, somewhat robots) now can reach many more customer needs. But being reliable means marriage: lifelong devotion to this one problem. Already taken: the transferable-skill opportunities of general-purpose computers, frameworks and infrastructure, consumer internet and cloud compute. Now available: small and complex niches.
by danlivingston | 2026-03-06 19:26:21+00:00
https://proton.me/support/payment-options

Quote:

You can pay for any Proton subscription with Bitcoin — but it won’t appear as a payment option when you first create your account.

To use Bitcoin, create a free Proton Account, then upgrade to a paid subscription in your account settings.

Quote:

We accept cash payments in US dollars (USD), euros (EUR), or Swiss francs (CHF).
by dmoy | 2026-03-06 19:26:24+00:00
I don't think trump has gun rights as a big part of his platform. I guess they got rid of tax stamp fees but that doesn't really mean anything.

But again, that doesn't really have much to do with what I said?

However minimal Republican support of gun rights may be, they don't have increasing gun control as a major part of their platform like the Democrats do.
by znpy | 2026-03-06 19:26:41+00:00
I first had the touchscreen on my current x13 gen1 amd, which is overall a shitty laptop with crappy linux support.

It’s… okay-ish. I occasionally use it as it’s comfortable to scroll with my finger when I’m using my laptop on the couch.

HOWEVER: i rarely do that but the touchscreen is drawing power all the time.

I’d have preferred a non-touch display…
by WalterBright | 2026-03-06 19:26:44+00:00
> There is no such thing a truly free market.

Nothing human is perfect. However, history shows us that the more free market an economy is, the more prosperous it is. It doesn't have to be "truly free" to be effective.

In contrast, whenever socialism is tried and it fails, socialists describe it as "not true socialism". Since there is also no such thing as true socialism, the more "true" a socialism is, the more it fails.
by Aurornis | 2026-03-06 19:27:12+00:00
> Honestly, a lot of senior devs lose this ability over time. They get comfortable with the idea that as a very senior hire you don't have to do all that annoying stuff anymore.

A few years ago, when interest rates were 0% and companies were hiring at an unsustainable rate, I got a lot of criticism for cautioning engineers against non-coding roles. I talked to a lot of people who dreamed of moving into pure architect roles where they advised teams of more junior engineers about what to build, but didn't get involved with building or operating anything.

I haven't kept up with everyone but a lot of the people I know who went that route are struggling now. The work is good until a company decides to operate with leaner teams and keeps the people committing code. The real difficulties start when they have to interview at other companies after not writing much code for 3 years. I'm in a big Slack for career development where it's common for "Architect" and "Principal Engineer" titled people to be venting about how they can't get past the first round of interviews (before coding challenges!) because they're trying to sell themselves as architects without realizing that companies want hands-on builders now.