MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-03-08 11:18:33+00:00
That is a genuinely fascinating take because we all hear about how japan is having a population crisis (which it definitely is), and I had always considered Countries like Norway etc. to be one of the top spots if I ever wish to immigrate. (Also this comment is really detailed and genuinely interesting to read!)

I have heard that Japan has a very negative connotation of foreigners (even more so than current form of America) so I am interested to hear your thoughts on that.

I am able to see some similarities with Japan within my own country as well, namely the idea of everything being close. I can't speak about food but being vegetarian, and my country primarily being so too. I actually love our own cultural cuisine. (Anecdotally I watched I think JaidenAnimations where she had issues in japan about some vegan aspects but yeah)

I believe that Japan's Anime/Culture's soft power is really underestimated maybe as it becomes a tourist hub because of that. I am not a big Anime fan but I have watched Animes like Death note, AOT and Yu Yu Hakusho and I was a big fan of Dragon ball growing up :D and many of my friends love anime.

I think that at some point, my conclusion is that Japan and (many South Asian countries) have all some plus/minuses but the quality of life in these countries can be decent if you earn good and have a good work-life balance.

On the other hand, if you don't, then I feel like I have heard too many stories of toxic work culture as well.

Whereas on the sweden/norway side of things, I feel like the subsidies by govt. and other things actually make you feel comfortable being between jobs and imo on average, has nothing like the japanese work culture in the sense that I haven't heard of toxicity in the same sense as japan but I'd love to know your opinion as well. And another reason is that this also makes people more likely to take more risks without worrying too much which might explain why the swedes have the most billionaires per capita.

So my conclusion is that A good job (work-culture) in Japan (South Asia in general?) >= Normalcy in Norway > Toxic job in Japan. Am I right in my assessment or is there more to it that I may have missed?
by pansa2 | 2026-03-08 11:18:39+00:00
You’re right, of course: even Guido seems to have been moved off working on CPython and onto some tangentially-related AI technology.

However, Faster CPython was supposed be a 4-year project, delivering a 1.5x speedup each year. AFAIK they had the full 4 years at Microsoft, and only achieved what they originally planned to do in 1 year.
by 4k93n2 | 2026-03-08 11:19:03+00:00
i think a server would be overkill for most of these things, even the grocery list where youre sharing between multiple people. something like syncthing would be enough. its p2p so it just syncs over the network whenever both devices are available. for the grocery list theres definitely more chance that you could run into sync conflicts but you could grt around that easily by just having each person add items to a separate list then have the app show all items merged together into one list. basically something like todo.txt but with the ability to use multiple files
by AyanamiKaine | 2026-03-08 11:19:08+00:00
I really hate wasm, not because of the idea or concept but because it gets bloated.

The first idea was computation heavy algorithms to be written in a language like C/C++/Rust and to be compiled to wasm.

Now it gets marketed as something to write sandboxed code/compontents for every language to be consumed by a wasm runtime.

Then there is the problem with the types of wasm. While it was seen to be something run on the web/browser. Its types are way more similar to rusts. For example strings in JS are fundamentally UTF-16 while wasm/rust is utf-8.

We need to constantly convert between them. I always hoped that wasm would simply allow for faster code on the web not here is my program completly sandboxed from the outside world you cant interact with other programs on the same machine.
by Hendrikto | 2026-03-08 11:19:19+00:00
> It’s all lies.

> And now tech influencers are recommending buying one [M2 MacBook Air] four years later because they don’t want to admit that the MacBook Neo got everything right.

This whole article feels like a thinly veiled ad, or at least extreme fanboyism. It lacks objectivity. It’s a good machine for the price, but no, it did not “get everything right”, and no, not everybody making any criticism or comparison is “lying to you”.
by v3xro | 2026-03-08 11:19:44+00:00
No, you outsource it because it's not your core competency. I think humans should be able to do anything and not narrowly specialise as narrow specialisation leads to tunnel vision. Sometimes you need to outsource to someone because of legal reasons (and rightly so, mostly because the complexities involved do require someone who is a professional in that area). Can some things be simplified? Of course they can, and there are many barriers that prevent such simplification. But it's absolutely insane to say - nah, we don't need to think at all, and something else can do all the work.
by hypeatei | 2026-03-08 11:21:04+00:00
Productivity was never about the lines of code written. I thought the industry as a whole had collectively decided that metric was a joke before the age of LLMs. The bottlenecks are the same: office politics, coordinating teams, consulting subject matter experts and coherent system design. AI is not a swiss army knife that results in devs becoming their own island; LLMs cannot tell me if something would jive well with our customer base -- I need people in the company who actually interact with them, for example.
by mikkupikku | 2026-03-08 11:21:15+00:00
Yeah that's nice, but I don't care and it's not going to stop this train. The future I envision coming is one where even local models are sufficiently capable to give common people the ability to control their own computers in a way that previously would have required them to hire a team of professionals, or to devote years of their life to study. Frontier models aren't quite good enough yet for normies to use in this way, let alone local models, but this stuff is all still very new and there's a lot of competition to improve it. I think we'll get there, and in any case the upsides are big enough already to squash all the whining objections. You can't stop this tech, all you can do is stop yourself from benefiting from it while others do.
by rixed | 2026-03-08 11:21:24+00:00
I believe we all agree about the facts, just not about what constitutes an "important change".

Most people lives were unaffected; most people kept their language, their traditions etc. For contrast, compare with: the third Punic war, setting foot on America in 1493, the industrial revolutions...

Some of us have just decided that's where we draw the line: An event that is important enough to wipe out and replace the whole ruling class but that does not change, one way or another, the way people live, is not "important".
by anonymous908213 | 2026-03-08 11:22:21+00:00
"Modern games" span a wide range of things. I develop solely 2D games, because I prefer 2D games over 3D games. I think that even today 2D games are more enjoyable than 3D games. That doesn't mean Super Mario Bros. That can mean Europa Universalis IV, it can mean Stardew Valley, it can mean Magic the Gathering Online, it can mean Hollow Knight, it can mean Slay the Spire, it can mean a huge variety of interesting and engaging games, none of which require 3D graphics. 2D games can be as complex as you'd like them to be, far more complex in game logic than a 3D shooter even. The more complex you'd like them to be, the easier it gets to implement them if you understand the primitives you're implementing them with. Imagine trying to optimize your data structures when you don't even know what an int32 is? There are real game developers in the world who don't know even that much. It is a great thing that off-the-shelf game engines provide a level of accessibility to allow anyone to develop games, but they do not represent the pinnacle of what can be achieved in software engineering. They are the exact opposite of it, in fact.

> You simply don't know where the bugs and performance pitfalls are because you haven't encountered them, yet.

What is your point? I profile my games and have detailed logging systems. If I or my users run into performance issues, I address them as I come across them. Understanding my codebase at a low level makes it significantly easier to dig into problems and investigate underlying root causes than anyone on Unity will ever be able to. If you use Unity, you are putting your complete faith that Unity has perfectly optimized X low-level problem away at the engine level. If they haven't, and you run into that issue in your game, you are completely fucked. I love being solely responsible for the defects in my games. That means I can fix them myself. The worst thing in the world in software development is when somebody else's fuck-up becomes your problem, and you can't fix it, so you have to implement some hacky workaround, if you can even figure out why the closed-source engine code you didn't write and can't read is behaving incorrectly to work around it in the first place. Sometimes that still happens anyways -- our hardware-OS stacks are built with tens or hundreds of millions of line of dogshit code, and you can't get around it if you want to create software for platforms people use, but you can at least remove as many dependencies on bad code you have no understanding of as possible.
by hennell | 2026-03-08 11:22:34+00:00
What's the best car? If you're trying to go fast it's one answer, if you're trying to carry as much load as possible it's another, if you're buying for your just-qualifed-teen it's another. But best is obviously subjective, so what about safest? I don't know specifics there, but if you're in the EU the "safest" car would be very different to the "safest" in the US, because their safety studies measure very different things.

Which is the issue with almost all studies and statistics, what it means depends entirely on what you're measuring.

I can program very very fast if I only consider the happy path, hard code everything and don't bother with things like writing tests defining types or worrying about performance under expected scale. It's all much faster right up until the point it isn't - and then it's much slower. Ai isn't quite so obviously bad, but it can still hide short term gains into long term problems which is what studies tend to focus on as the short term doesn't usually require a study to observe.

I think Ai is similar to outsourcing staff to cheeper counties, replacing ingredients with cheaper alternatives and other MBA style ideas. It's almost always instantly beneficial, but the long term issues are harder to predict, and can have far more varied outcomes dependent on weird specifics of the business.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2026-03-08 11:22:49+00:00
I have found that having a humble, generous, and non-caustic approach to other people, has been very good for my personal mental health (and career).

I have spent my entire career, being the dumbest guy in the room, and I’m not exactly a dunce. It can sometimes be quite humbling, but I’ve had great opportunities to learn.

People will often be willing to go out of their way to help you understand, if you treat them with respect; even if they are being jerks.

Life’s too short, to be spending in constant battle.
by bsza | 2026-03-08 11:23:39+00:00
IME, even when an LLM is right, a few follow-up questions always lead to some baffling cracks in its reasoning that expose it has absolutely no idea what it's talking about. Not just about the subject but basic common sense. I definitely wouldn't call it the "same mental process" a human does. It is an alien intelligence, and exposing a human mind to it won't necessarily lead to the same (or better) outcome as learning from other humans would.
by georgefrowny | 2026-03-08 11:25:54+00:00
People say AI is great for tests. I say that is horseshit as someone wading through 10k lines per module of thoughtless test spam that's extremely redundant, riddled with bad assumptions. It's over-covering some paths at different levels and leaving some untested. There are huge chunks of repeated fixtures with subtle differences. It's slow. Huge numbers of checks are combined into single test cases that you can't run separately. But it looks like a fantastic, thorough, test suite from a distance. The more you look, the more you realise it's dog shit. Tests are hard to write and anyone who thinks they are the easy bit you can automate is a cretin.

They've built an iron house of cards that simultaneously fragile and halfway to collapse and also putting the code into a straightjacket that means you can't do anything with it until you carefully peel back the shitty tests and replace with something that thinks about the interface semantics and what you're actually testing and why.

Of course, because the house of cards is actually standing for now, fixing it is "a waste of time". The person who wrote it gets to crow about their AI productivity and the person who fixes it up gets to grind for a week to undo it and make no actually progress in terms of story points.
by cmiles8 | 2026-03-08 11:27:31+00:00
I see the SDE pushback on LLMs, but most of it is unfounded. Like any new tool, if used irresponsibly of course bad things can happen. Most of the backlash from devs seems rooted in:

1. It causes a step change in productivity for those that use it well, and as a result a step change in the expectations on productivity for dev teams. Folks simply expect things to be done faster now and that’s annoying folks that have to do the building.

2. It’s removed much of the mystique of dev. When the CEO is vibe coding legit apps on their own suddenly the SDE team is no longer this mysterious oracle that one can’t challenge or question because
nobody else can do what they do. Now everyone can do what they do. Not to the same degree, yes, but it’s completely changed the dynamic and that’s just annoying some devs.

SDEs aren’t going away, but we will likely need less moving forward and the expectations on how long things take have changed forever. Like anything in tech we’re not going back to the old way so you either evolve or you get cycled out.

I also hear the “but LLMs only produce unrecognizable junk that one can’t maintain” angle, but that implies dev teams have been shipping beautiful artwork. Truth is most dev teams have been shipping undocumented fragile junk for years. While LLMs occasionally do odd things, in my experience LLM code is actually better documented and structured than what most dev teams produce and because of that it’s actually easier to hand off to others vs the typical codebase full of hacky workarounds and half-completed documentation.
Show HN: Vigil – see which apps use your Mac's camera or microphone
by sh3ll3y | 2026-03-08 11:28:21+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Vigil, a small macOS menu bar utility that shows which apps are using your camera or microphone.

macOS already shows the green/orange privacy indicator dots, but it doesn't show which application triggered them. If you have multiple apps open (Zoom, browsers, Slack, etc.), it can be difficult to know which one is actually accessing the device.

Vigil runs in the menu bar and monitors camera and microphone access in real time. When a device becomes active it attempts to attribute usage to the responsible application and displays the app name and icon.

Some technical details:

- real-time monitoring with ~2 second polling
- multiple detection signals (hardware access via IOKit, CoreMediaIO state, and permission correlations)
- per-app attribution when possible
- notifications when devices become active
- activity history with configurable retention

The app works on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs.

Everything runs locally — there is no telemetry and no network communication.

I built it because I wanted more visibility into camera/mic access than the system indicators provide.

Happy to answer questions or hear feedback.
by kolinko | 2026-03-08 11:28:29+00:00
I think the author just doesn't know how to use LLMs well.

"Because what would be missing isn’t information but the experience. And experience is where intellect actually gets trained."

From my experience, LLMs don't cause this effect. You still get to explore a ton of dead ends and whatnot, just on a much higher level.

"You get the answer but nothing else (keep in mind we are assuming that it's a good answer)."

On the contrary here - you get to answer a ton of followup questions easily, something you don't get to ask books.

"I never so far asked GPT about something that I'm specialized at, and it gave me a sufficient answer that I would expect from someone who is as much as expert as me in that given field."

LLMs are at a level of junior-mid of any field (and going higher every year), not senior-master. Is that anything new? Their strength is, among other things, in making connections between fields, and also the availability.

If you have an option to talk to a specialist in your field that has time 24/7 to discuss ideas with you, that's great, but also highly unusual. If you don't have such a person, an LLM that is junior-mid is way better than plain books.
by TheAlchemist | 2026-03-08 11:28:35+00:00
Of course it was. That can happen in a ... war. Unfortunately, and as said as it is, it's ... normal during a war.

What's not normal is that US is supposedly not at war with Iran. What's not normal is that there isn't even a slightest effort being made to hold anybody accountable about it. What's not normal is that it probably happened because of AI tools that are right 99.9% of time, but this was this 0.1% of time.
by senfiaj | 2026-03-08 11:28:56+00:00
You describe physical objects which are manufactured.

And BTW, yes, I don't like most modern cars' designs which are partly due to stricter safety / emission regulations, partly due to trends and and partly due to internalization. For me cars from late 1990s to early 2000s looked significantly better, slimmer, more original and creative. Today's cars look boring, bulky, overaggressively designed (I guess it's partly to squeeze out maximum scores on aerodynamic tests instead of looking better). These things are not necessarily privacy invading, but on the other hand, this electronization of cars is also concerning. I don't drive BTW.

As for V-Chips, they are optional to use. A TV may be required to include it, but parents are not required to turn it on. By default, it usually does nothing. Using the parental control is up to the user. V-Chip, by itself, basically has no privacy problem. Smart TVs are another topic.

Software is different. It's too flexible, it's too easily copied, it isn't a concrete physical object.

IMHO it's the parents' responsibility to handle this problem. Mainstream commercial OSes provide mechanisms for parental control. Why not use them? Why not inform the public about this problem? This dysfunctional law doesn't solve the root problem. Also, the law may become even more extreme and this is one of the first steps from the governments to gain more and more control over people. I personally don't want to live in such controlled "nanny" world.
by twoodfin | 2026-03-08 11:30:43+00:00
Writing like this (say a technical blogpost) is supposed to communicate ideas effectively. Rhetoric, vocabulary, metaphors all aid this communication in good writing.

But the prompt is usually bereft of fully fleshed out ideas, so the LLM substitutes style in a futile attempt to amplify the signal.

Though maybe it’s not futile! HN voters eat this stuff up daily.
by dxdm | 2026-03-08 11:31:01+00:00
This reads like you think that "major" version bumps should ony happen when things make a big difference to you personally. At least that's where you land when you follow the logic of your statement. I think you may overrate the importance of your particular use case, and misunderstand what GP meant by "major".

The gist of what GP meant is that Python does not exactly follow SemVer in their numbering scheme, and they treat the middle number more like what would warrant a major (left-most) number increase in SemVer. For example, things will get deprecated and dropped from the standard library, which is a backwards-incompatible change. Middle number changes is also when new features are released, and they get their own "what's new" pages. So on the whole, these middle-number changes feel like "major" releases.

That being said, the Python docs themselves [0] call the left-most number the "major" one, so GP is not technically correct, while I'd say they're right for practical, but easier to misunderstand, purposes.

> A is the major version number – it is only incremented for really major changes in the language.

> B is the minor version number – it is incremented for less earth-shattering changes.

> C is the micro version number – it is incremented for each bugfix release.

The docs do not seem to mention you, though. :P

[0]: https://docs.python.org/3/faq/general.html#how-does-the-pyth...
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-03-08 11:31:09+00:00
There are already robots, well I suppose LLM's and average person treats them like utter shit because we can (In a similar way to how the rich might treat average person sometimes* [not all and that's not really my point either] but yea)

My point is that even if you were a robot, if you had feelings. you wouldn't be spared. So are you asking the lack of feelings?

And even if that's the case then, there are people who had gone into accidents who lost their feelings/emotional part of the brain. They sucked at making decisions because I remember reading how the person binge watched shows instead of watching his son's football games, how he couldn't decide what is more important, buying a stapler or filing his taxes (I can be wrong about this one but something similar related to pencils) but my point is that he couldn't make good decisions. He couldn't really compare between two decisions.

Now look at robots, look at LLM's. They can't decide if a car is 50m away then should it be drove or should you walk. They are essentially just a corpus of human data congested into a servant while being nothing more than auto correct on steroids in its true form.

Humanity has its flaws. I absolutely agree. But I think that the reason we have good is also because humanity has flaws. Much of my morality stems from the fact that if I die and I am gonna die someday, that's for sure, then what's my footprint on the world no matter how tiny and questions like these. I suppose every human feels that way.

A robot has no purpose other than being spawned in to create something brittle like yet-another-crud-app.

Perhaps one can argue that humanity is the same seeing the horrors we unleash on each other and tbh we humans have just spawned here and we weren't asked by anyone to exist in our form or not.

But at some point, we do have free-will and freedom no matter how tiny might it seem in algorithms the size of mountains and we can exercise it to bring meaningful change maybe.

I'd rather be human and go watch my children's football game in future rather than be robot. Maybe the surrounding and family and the community as say even hackernews around us give some meaning as we bump into each other.
by throwdbaaway | 2026-03-08 11:31:58+00:00
Yours is the only benchmark that puts 35B A3B above 27B. Time for human judgement to verify? For example, if you look at the thinking traces, there might be logical inconsistencies in the prompts, which then tripped up the 27B more when reasoning. This will also be reflected in the score when thinking is disabled, but we can sort of debug with the thinking traces.