MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by daemonk | 2026-03-01 16:17:01+00:00
It's a different skillset and way of thinking. Engineers tend to think vertically deep on technical problems. With AI, you have to think horizontally broad and vertically up on the architectural problem. The trick is to be comfortable relegating the details to AI.

One concrete example of this realization was when I was researching how to optimize my claude code environment with agents, skills, etc. I read a lot of technical documents on how these supplemental plugins work and how to create them. After an hour of reading through all this, I realized I could just ask Claude to optimize the environment for me given the project context. So I did, and it was able to point out plugins, skills, agents that I can install or create. I gave it permission to create them and it all worked out.

This was a case of where I should not think more technically deeper, but at a more "meta" level to define the project enough for Claude to figure out how to optimize the environment. Whether that gave real gains is another question of course. But I have anecdotally observed faster results and less token usage due context caching and slightly more tools-directed prompts.
by vunderba | 2026-03-01 16:17:21+00:00
Great article!

It’s been a while (obviously), but I always used to compile the QB-related runtime modules (QB 4.5) directly into the EXE itself, and the size of most of final binaries fit comfortably on a 1.44 MB floppy.

We later had a copy of Microsoft BASIC PDS 7.1, which I believe was the last version of QuickBASIC before they moved to VB for DOS. I do remember the final file sizes being smaller so it's possible that it was more intelligent about pruning the library by only bundling the relevant calls pertinent to the source file.

> I would claim age is a factor, but my former boss, who started university before I was born, is now giving seminars on how to build a project from scratch using Claude Code.

I hate to be cynical (who am I kidding, no I don't) - but I'd wager everyone is playing this game. It's not because they're necessarily super passionate about AI - it's because giving the corporate equivalent of a TED talk is one of the low-hanging fruit to increase your visibility across the org.
by northfield27 | 2026-03-01 16:17:46+00:00
I have also felt something similar.

A few days back, I tried to implement a PDF reader by pure vibe coding. I used all my free Antigravity, Cursor, and Co-pilot tokens to create a half-baked, but working Next.js PDF-reader that (to be honest) I wouldn't have glued together without 2 weeks of work. As an MLE, I have done negligible web development using JavaScript and have mostly worked with Python and C.

But the struggle actually started after the free tokens were exhausted. I was feeling anxious to even look into those Next.js files. I am not able to describe, but it was probably some kind of fear - fear of either not being able to debug/implement a new feature, or not willing to put in precious hours (precious because of FOMO that I could do something cool with AI-paired vibe coding) to understand and build the feature myself.

I abandoned that project since that day. Haven't opened it yet - partly because I am waiting for the renewal of free tokens.
by MattyRad | 2026-03-01 16:18:01+00:00
> One engineer captured this shift perfectly in a widely shared essay, describing how AI transformed the engineering role from builder to reviewer.

I stopped here. Was this written by an an LLM? This sentence in particular reads exactly like the author supplied said essay as context and this sentence is the LLM's summarization of it. Nowhere is the original article linked, either, further decreasing trust. Moreover, there's an ad at the bottom for some BS "talent" platform to hire the author. This article is probably an LLM generated ad.

My trust is vacated.

This makes me feel that the SWE work/identity crisis is less important than the digital trust crisis.
Show HN: I stopped wireframing pages – I design SaaS products as visual sitemaps
by epic_ai | 2026-03-01 16:18:02+00:00
When building small SaaS tools, I kept running into the same problem:
I’d design beautiful pages…
Then completely rethink navigation later.
So I flipped the workflow.
Now I design the entire product structure first as a visual sitemap.
Not a text list.
Not a static diagram.
A drag-and-drop map of every page and connection.
What changed:
I cut unnecessary pages before writing code
Navigation debates disappeared
Feature creep became obvious
User flows felt cleaner
It felt less like “designing pages” and more like designing a system.
Because I couldn’t find a lightweight tool that felt simple enough, I built this workflow into my own product —

EPIC ( https://no-edit.lovable.app )

It includes a visual sitemap builder designed specifically for small SaaS founders who want to think in structure before UI.
I’m not sure why more design tools don’t prioritize structure thinking upfront.
Curious —
Do you plan product structure visually first, or jump straight into UI?
by svilen_dobrev | 2026-03-01 16:18:08+00:00
> the real danger from AI (ads) is the AI slowly convincing you to ${GOAL:-buy stuff} over time.

(man bash: ${X:-abcde} means use value of X else abcde by default )

where GOAL can be anything one may be persuaded into. Choosing $15 burger over $7, brand X over brand Y, notion of X wholesale (to EV or not to EV), Elections, climate-this-or-that, ...

People are massively using it as search engine. So it does not need to lie, just can "spare"/not-show some results that do not match the GOAL..

extra: like 25th frame in 24frame video.. like, last word at each sentence is part of another 5-word goal-sentence.. repeated across 20 sentences..

IMO the "text exegesis" (i.e. what particular text actually means) may need resurrecting as discipline, and not only in higher-education / academia but down into school.

scraping all history every time may or may not be possible..

should one have like 5 accounts and share them with 10 people? across the globe?

mmh. interesting times ahead
by matheusmoreira | 2026-03-01 16:18:12+00:00
Paying to get rid of ads is paying for the privilege of doing their market segmentation for them. It's paying to segment oneself into the upper echelons of the market. People who pay to avoid ads have a lot of disposable income, the value of their attention increases.

I wish uBlock Origin would incorporate AI features too. It could automatically detect brand names and product placement and blank it all out. Works on images and video. Augmented reality glasses with uBlock Origin would be life changing.
by manofmanysmiles | 2026-03-01 16:18:22+00:00
> Here is something that gets lost in all the excitement about AI productivity: most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code.

1) I guess I am not included in the set named "most software engineers."
2) If the title is "Software Engineer," I think I should be engineering, not coding.

This has probably been beaten to death, but I think this is the biggest disciminating question between "pro ai" and "against ai" in the software world is: "Dp you do (this) becuase you like writing code, or because you like building things for the world?"

Of course I don't think it's a binary decision.

Although I more more motivated by building things, I do somewhat miss the programmer flow state I used to get more often.
by beej71 | 2026-03-01 16:18:25+00:00
It's also because we (generally) consider a blog to be human communication and we consider math and programs to be something else.

If you're talking to someone on the phone and halfway through they identify themselves as a bot, surprising you, there's a profound sense of something like betrayal. A moment ago you were having a human connection, and suddenly that vaporized. You were misled and were just talking to an unfeeling robot.

And heartfelt writing is similar. We imagine the human at the other side of the screen and we relate. And when we discover it was a bot, no matter how accurate the sentiment, that relationship vanishes.

But with math and software, it's already sterile from a human connection perspective. It's there for a different purpose. Yes, it can be beautiful, but when we read it we don't tend to build a human connection with the coder.

An interesting exception is comments. When we read the fast inverse square root code and see the "what the fuck..." comment, we instantly relate to the person writing the software. If we later learned that comment was generated by an LLM, we'd lose that connection, again.

IMHO. :)
by zozbot234 | 2026-03-01 16:18:30+00:00
> My nightmare scenario (which might start to materilize) is that our last years in the industry will be becoming prompt monkies / agent "managers" working on codebases we barely understand in such velocity there's no way we can gain real understanding.

It will always be preferable to work on an understandable codebase, because that maximizes the AI's affordances too. And then the AI can explain things to you. A skilled human will always have a lot of solid knowledge relating to their hyper-specific niche that isn't part of your average general purpose AI, so humans will obviously have a key role to play still.
by bnsn | 2026-03-01 16:19:01+00:00
Tall exchange Tot allowing une data collectors tree access to tne country's most valuable resource. If data is a resource, then perhaps we need a sovereign wealth fund for it.
Taxing data extractors cannot, however, be a get-out-of-jail-free card that allows them to run roughshod over individual privacy or civil liberty. For users of platform technology, transparency could be increased with "opt-in" provisions that allow them more control over how their data is used (as is the case with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, and the even tougher proposals in California). The "opt-in" language should be clear and simple, with the burden of proof for violations on companies rather than individuals. Big Tech companies should also be required to keep audit logs of the data they feed into their algorithms, and be prepared to explain their algorithms to the public.
"A recurring pattern has developed," says Frank Pasquale at the University of Maryland, "in which some entity complains about a major Internet company's practices, the company claims that its critics don't understand how its algorithms sort and rank content, and befuddled onlookers are left to sift through rival stories in the press." Companies should be prepared to make themselves open to algorithmic audits, as suggested by mathematician and Big Tech critic Cathy O'Neil, in case of complaints or concerns about algorithmic bias that could allow for discrimination in the workplace, healthcare, education, and so on.
7
Individuals should also have their digital rights legalized.
Former Wired editor John Battelle has proposed a digital bill of rights that would assign possession of data to its true owner, which is, of course, the user and generator of that data, not the company that made off with it. He believes this notion should be so central that it should be enshrined as an amendment to the Constitution. As the Europeans have put it, people should also have a "right to be forgotten," in which companies must delete any data held on individuals should they wish it Two million Europeans have already made the choice to opt out. Finally, I would like to see a digital consumer protection bureau, with tough rules around discrimination by algorithms, and a system for ensuring that individuals can access and understand how their personal data is being used, as we can with credit scores today.
All of this relates to the need for more transparency and simplicity in the discussion about Big Tech. Complexity (or the illusion of it) is too often used to avoid legitimate public interest questions, such as how propagandists get their messages across, or how users are tracked and valued. Companies should help us understand by opening the black box of their algorithms. This needn't be a competitive disadvantage; research has shown that it is the amount of data plugged into an algorithm, rather than the cleverness of the algorithm
by skyberrys | 2026-03-01 16:19:04+00:00
I usually use it for sub $10 things (mostly groceries) and I'm actively grocery shopping when I do it. So say I'm standing in the store trying to decide between 8 different yogurts all of which have different sales going on and different servings sizes, so instead of having to flip over and read all the 8 brands and do math to equalize everything myself I take a photo of the shelf and ask Gemini which one has the most protein per dollar. It usually gets it pretty accurate, I'm doing the math to check in my head but it's just a time saver to not have to fuss every single time there's a sale. But it's not just yogurt it's lots of things, like debating chicken vs beef meatballs or which of the breakfast cereal is closest to the current favorite because I don't want to have to go to an extra store because this one doesn't have it. When I first got Claude I was determined to save $200 having spent the $200 on Claude and I would say it did manage to assist in grocery shopping sufficiently to make it worthwhile. It also helps keep a running memory for me about prices of certain things, did you know the prices for Bonne Maman chocolate hazelnut spread have been fluctuating by $4 it goes from $4.50 to $8.50. I take photos of the eggs section and ask what's the best hen care to price this week. Probably the biggest oops I've had doing this was asking it how to replace my bicycle freewheel, and it told me to watch a video, order the part, only to discover I'm not strong enough by far and the real solution was to pay the guy at the bike shop 10 dollars to do it with his giant vise grip + special freewheel tool. I did have to pay bike shop guy an extra 10 dollars too for him to fix my own attempt that almost ruined the whole wheel.
by loeg | 2026-03-01 16:19:33+00:00
I haven't seen anyone else mention Terminology yet. It uses an unconventional GUI framework (Enlightenment / EFL), but that aside, it's fast and has more or less all of the features you'd expect of a terminal:

https://github.com/borisfaure/terminology

Its "moment" as a new novel terminal was over a decade ago, but it still chugs on working just fine. Notably(?), gregkh uses it (or used to use it):

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/blog/greg-kroah-hartman...
by jeroenhd | 2026-03-01 16:19:56+00:00
Samsung's UI and software behaviour may be shitty in general, but they're one of the few manufacturers reliably offering timely long-term security updates. When you go beyond Samsung, you quickly end up with brands promising "quarterly updates" or having months-long delays fixing CVEs.

Plus, when they do something novel, they do it quite well. Their flagship phones have great price/performance if you buy them a month or two after launch (often for three quarters of the launch price + free earbuds/smartwatch + cashback), their software suite is quite complete and generally well-localised, and they have support channels non-English support channels available.

I do wish they'd fix some of their terrible software design crimes and stop the endless race to the bottom shoving product placement into their apps, but it's hardly a no-buy to me.
by tim333 | 2026-03-01 16:20:03+00:00
The models we have now don't do it because they are chatbots and have been told to be nice but really autonomous killing machines go back to landmines and just become more sophisticated at the killing as you improve the tech with things like guided missiles and AI guided drones in Ukraine.

The actors in war generally kill what they are told to whether they are machines or human soldiers, without much pondering sentience.
by oddsockmachine | 2026-03-01 16:20:06+00:00
I'm already seeing this in the company I recently joined: 80-90% of code is generated/prompted. Big PRs, very little review or oversight. Absolutely nobody considering long-term architecture (and IMO nobody capable of such). In general, there's very little critical thinking involved at any stage, just throw error messages back into the LLM, rinse and repeat.
I'm hoping there's a world where people with skills are useful in getting these projects back on track, but perhaps as a society we're learning to accept this reduction in quality.
by bnsn | 2026-03-01 16:20:07+00:00
fter my brief flirtation with the idea of working at A Groe nearly a decale azo, the mex lime lid vinit the company's New York office was in 2017, shortly after taking up my position as the Financial Times' global business colum-© 201 ood was just as good, but the cognitive dissonance brew how the Googlers viewed the company and how many others viewed it had grown more extreme. When I brought up the issue of monopoly power with the public policy staffer I was meeting with, she seemed genuinely surprised.
"We feel like we are under threat all the time, from other big technology companies," she told me. "We just don't understand the argument that there's not enough competition in the marketplace."
I could see it from her perspective-as we've already learned, Amazon has become a major competitor for Google.
The problem is that two or three behemoths competing against each other doesn't really count as a competitive economic landscape. For that, you need a wide variety of firms of all sizes able to enter and thrive in a marketplace. But increasing-ly, that's not happening. That's because Big Tech enjoys several natural advantages that breed monopoly power: information asymmetries,
the network effect, the ability to
easily copy the ideas of smaller competitors in an open-source environment, gatekeeper rents (even if they are in the form of data, not dollars), the advantages of both owning a platform that others must use as well as being able to conduct commerce on that platform, and the legal and political muscle the largest players can exert at will in Washington. I would witness that political power firsthand later that year, as I watched Eric Schmidt, one of the largest funders of the New America Foundation, an influential Washington think tank, squash a policy wonk whose ideas he found threatening.
I had known of the scholar Barry Lynn because of his prescient work on supply chain economics, in which he'd examined how the United
States had lost manufacturing
competitiveness to China.' Lynn, who like me was an advocate for localism and small business, had recently begun looking at the way in which Big Tech firms were dominating the economy, and hindering entrepreneurial vibrancy and growth as a result. When Lynn's research group, the Open Markets division, posted an article on the think tank's website in praise of the EU antitrust ruling against Google, Schmidt (who was at the time still executive chairman of Alphabet, Google's parent company) called up the head of New America, Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former director of policy at the State Department under Hillary Clinton, and voiced his disapproval.
That was when Slaughter told Lynn that "the time has come for Open Markets and New America" to part ways. Not because of his work, she stressed in an email that was reviewed by The New York Times, but because his "lack of collegiality" was imperiling the organization as a whole. The episode called to mind an email that Slaughter had sent him a year earlier, in 2016, in the run-up to a well-received conference on the market dominance of Google, Amazon, and Face-book, which Lynn had
by azernik | 2026-03-01 16:20:41+00:00
The Paris Agreement included an explicit clause allowing parties to exit it after giving notice of withdrawal. It did not go out of effect immediately on Trump's election, but the administration went through the legal procedure.

The NPT has much stricter terms for withdrawal, which in any case Iran has not followed.

(The better and much more relevant analogy would be the JCPOA. That's what happens when the US does foreign policy by "executive agreement" instead of treaty. Foreign countries should not value them more than the paper they're written on.)
by null_deref | 2026-03-01 16:20:54+00:00
That’s not because French society is different than Israeli society, it’s because French society cards are much better. It has far more stable economy and political system because of hundreds of years of colonialism and wars in Europe which render France the Resourceful state which it is today, if Marine La Pen could rise to almost win the election because of migration imagine what could happen if France was surrounded with states that host militants that want to anhilate it and stand attacks like the 7th of October (1,200 killed and raped in one day + parts of the country occupied for couple of days).
Instead you chose to sit in your high horse attributed to you by previous generations that looted and killed anything in sight and after that somehow built a liberal society you have contributed nothing to, and you then ask me to leave my country instead of recognizing liberal people exist in both sides of the Israeli Palestinian conflict and they’re your allies
by hearsathought | 2026-03-01 16:20:57+00:00
> America and Israel are lawless countries.

America is as much a victim of israel as iran is. You act like we have a choice in this matter. We are forced to cut funding for food programs, education, healthcare, etc because of soaring debt. Yet, we'll take on any amount of debt for israel's wars. It's amazing how we've become a slave of such a small nation.

> Can you imagine other countries assassinating a foreign head of state and not getting immediate blowback?

It's simply a matter of power. Who is powerful enough to do the enforcing of laws or punishing of bad actors? Might makes right.
by nickjj | 2026-03-01 16:21:04+00:00
Yep, I've been using tmux for almost 10 years. Its config has followed me across every terminal I've used in Windows with WSL 2, macOS (work laptop) and native Linux. It's a nice abstraction over getting split panes, windows (tabs), sessions, search, scroll back, consistent key binds and the overall theme to work the same across environments.
by latexr | 2026-03-01 16:21:06+00:00
> It’s not an estimate

Yes, it is. “It would take a team 6 months” is an estimate, and I don’t see how you can argue it’s not. Even if it just said it would take them longer, that would still be an estimate.

> Claude makes me 10x faster than on my own without AI

Also an estimate.

> where 10x absolutely is a completely made up number

And by your own admission, an estimate taken from the ass that you thus cannot be certain is true. Made up perception does not equal reality.

https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
by chrismorgan | 2026-03-01 16:21:56+00:00
Courier New is a bad font that no one should choose to use. In typical font-weight terms, where Regular should be 400, it’s 200–250, because it was improperly digitised, not taking ink bleed into account. Windows put some hacks into ClearType to make it render a little less badly, but they’re not dependable these days.

(“Courier”, as provided by macOS, is fine. But Courier New is irredeemably bad.)

Concerning font-family declarations, if you’re doing something like `"Courier New", Courier, monospace`—please just write `monospace`.

(I’m not going to address the font size.)