MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by truelinux1 | 2026-03-07 20:26:07+00:00
Most of us test our networked code on a fast, reliable local connection — which means we're testing a fantasy. The real world has packet loss, jitter, reordering, and latency that will quietly destroy assumptions you didn't know you'd made.
The fix has been in the Linux kernel since the early 2000s. No extra tools, no containers — just tc and netem, sitting there unused on basically every Linux machine. This post is about how to use them, and why you probably should have been using them all along.
by Frost1x | 2026-03-07 20:26:10+00:00
Not nearly your age but I agree with your sentiments entirely. I mainly focused on using computing not for business purposes but scientific purposes and how we can forward science using compute and technology and I’ve felt much the same way for some time. The new layers and layers of abstraction added little in the way of productivity to getting to the root problems I wanted to and there have always only been so many hours in the day and dollars in the sponsoring agency’s purse to pursue new innovative work.

Now a lot can be cast off to LLMs to focus on the problem space and the innovative computing use around them. It’s been exciting to not worry about arbitrary idiosyncrasies and machete through jungles of technical minutia to get to the clearing. I still have to deal with them but less of them. And I don’t have to commit nearly as much in the technical space to memory to address problems, I can often focus on higher level architectural decisions or new approaches to problems. It’s been quite enjoyable as well.
by NewsaHackO | 2026-03-07 20:26:34+00:00
> If you can't detect the whiff of LLM with your own senses, then it has been used properly and shouldn't be faulted.

But wouldn't this apply to any cheating method? I don't think educators would be able to tell the difference between using a calculator, getting answers from previous tests, resubmitting assignments, etc.
by jmyeet | 2026-03-07 20:26:55+00:00
The profit motive is corrupting and polluting every level of the education space.

Teachers are being hamstrung on curriculum. The districts enter into contracts that require the use of certain programs for certain amounts of time. We've known for decades (if not a century) that direct instruction works [1] but you can't sell devices, platforms and consulting services that way.

We're literally at the point in education we were in the 1950s when the health benefits of nicotine in your Q zone were lighting up the airwaves.

And generative AI means it's all but impossible to have take home writing assignments. But hey this is another opportunity to sell AI or cheating detection software, that's often just an em-dash detection [2].

We have a generation that gets to college quite possibly having never written a book. social promotion through grades and the constant distraction of electronic devices in classroom settings. I don't even necessarily blame the parents entirely either because we've constructed a society where 2 people need 5 jobs to make ends meet.

And while all this is going on we have a coordinated and well-funded effort to defund public education and move government funds to private schools based on the failing public education that's failing because we defunded it. This is usually backed up by some baloney study that shows charter shcool produce better results that really comes down to charter schools being able to be selective with enrolments while public schools cannot be. Plus we mingle in special education kids into public education because those programs got defunded too.

And really that's just a bunch of already affluent people who want a tax break for doing somethign they were going to do anyway: send their kids to private schools so they don't have to mingle with the poors and aren't taught inconvenient things like human reproduction, critical thinking and self-determination.

And after all of that we just end up teaching kids how to pass standardized tests.

[1]: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/02/di...

[2]: https://medium.com/@brentcsutoras/the-em-dash-dilemma-how-a-...
by 999900000999 | 2026-03-07 20:27:28+00:00
Billy downloading a copy of Game of Thrones because he's too poor to afford one, is radically different than super billionaires who just don't want to pay for a license.

Meta, Open AI and everyone else playing this game has enough money to pay the best lawyers on earth. They can act with impunity.

I could even imagine them getting a law passed, a license to ignore copywrite law. Of course Billy don't qualify. It'll only be for the billionaires and maybe a handful of millionaires.
by muyuu | 2026-03-07 20:27:45+00:00
they'd most certainly go for very large curated collections like those of Anna's Archives, we're talking about 10s or 100s of TBs per archive

going 1 by 1 would be quite the exercise in itself considering just how much variety of formats, styles, crap added in the files, random password crapware, etc etc you find for anything other than the most trendy stuff
by knorker | 2026-03-07 20:27:58+00:00
Well, for C++ the backwards compatability is even better. Unless you're using `gets()` or `auto_ptr`, old C++ code either just continue to compile perfectly, or was always broken.

Sure, the Go standard library is in some sense bigger, so it's nice of them to not break that. But short of a Python2->3 or Perl5->6 migration, isn't that just table stakes for a language?

The only good thing about Go is that its standard library has enough coverage to do a reasonable number of things. The only good thing. But any time you need to step outside of that, it starts a bit-rotting timer that ticks very quickly.

> though [protobuf] has gone through some major revisions so perhaps that's what you mean?

No, it seems it's broken way more often than that, requiring manual changes.
by forrestthewoods | 2026-03-07 20:28:49+00:00
I am so thoroughly convinced that Docker is a hacky-but-functional solution to an utterly failed userspace design.

Linux user space decided to try and share dependencies. Docker obliterates this design goal by shipping dependencies, but stuffing them into the filesystem as-if they were shared.

If you’re going to do this then a far far far simpler solution is to just link statically or ship dependencies adjacent to the binary. (Aka what windows does). Replicating a faux “shared” filesystem is a gross hack.

This is a distinctly Linux problem. Windows software doesn’t typically have this issue. Because programs ship their dependencies and then work.

Docker is one way to ship dependencies. So it’s not the worst solution in the world. But I swear it’s a bad solution. My blood boils with righteous fury anytime anyone on my team mentions they have a 15 minute docker build step. And don’t you damn dare say the fix to Docker being slow is to add more layers of complexity with hierarchical Docker images ohmygodiswear. Running a computer program does not have to be hard I promise!!
by twistedpair | 2026-03-07 20:28:51+00:00
I got a new boiler installed recently. $20K. I looked up the _retail_ price for the components/fittings/consumables, ~$6K. Even with overhead, that plumber made a good take for 2 days work. I'm only half kidding when I suggest the kids of today should be destined for the trades.
by staticassertion | 2026-03-07 20:29:04+00:00
I don't really respond to email. I prefer to keep things scoped to single discussions on forums. Beyond that, I'm simply not an expert on these topics so I suspect we'll hit limits almost immediately to what I can meaningfully engage in before I either lead you entirely astray or simply have nothing to provide.

There are numerous academics in this area though who I suspect would be quite interested in discussion, and I'd point you towards the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as the defacto resource for these topics.

I'm actually quite sick with a fever currently so you'll have to excuse me for such a brief response, I'm barely awake as it is.
by throw73838 | 2026-03-07 20:29:41+00:00
> The assignment had been to write an essay about Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron—a story about a dystopian society that enforces “equality” by handicapping anyone who excel

Did not this self censorship process started decades ago? There are certain answers expected in academia, arguing for anything else would get you in troubles. Not using “devoid” seems pretty minor inconvenience.

For me biggest wtf is why students are still expected to write graded essays, and to keep this make believe it is somehow useful and applicable skill.
by teo_zero | 2026-03-07 20:29:49+00:00
> now I write less good on purpose, so whatever I commented doesn't get drawn into a sidetrack off-topic witch-hunt.

I've begun downvoting each and every entry that questions the authenticity of a comment or article.

I don't even bother if the claim is true or not. A text can be AI-generated and interesting, or human-written and dumb.
by carcabob | 2026-03-07 20:29:59+00:00
A few times in some Discord communities, I've been accused of being A.I. because of how I write. Kind of sad and a bit annoying. I also quite like em dashes, but have felt the need to reduce how much I use them.

Glad to see some schools and teachers teach how to use them well, rather than ban them outright.
by prymitive | 2026-03-07 20:30:02+00:00
> they're doing as well as professionals do without oversight on production environments

The difference is that if a human does it there usually is done accountability, you’ll be asked how it happened and expected to learn from it. And if you do it again your social score goes down, nobody will trust you and you’ll be consider a liability.
If a cli tool does it the outcome is different, you might stop saying the tool or you might blame yourself for not giving the tool enough context. And if it does it again you might just shrug it off with “well of course, it’s just a tool”.
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-03-07 20:31:54+00:00
I appreciate the coordination problem here, but I do think that states are making it harder than it needs to be. The federal government doesn't need to be involved. Each state can decide on their own how to coordinate this, it does not need to be the entire nation (and indeed it already isn't, as the examples of AZ and HI show).

Considering that one of the biggest problems in our country today is trying to run more and more at the federal level instead of at the state level, it's really silly to add to that pile.
Tell HN: Bugbrain.app is spamming HN profile email addresses
by jacquesm | 2026-03-07 20:32:17+00:00
Warning, there is a character that calls themselves 'Dave' from 'Bugbrain.app' that is spamming addresses and names harvested from HN profiles on the flimsiest of pretexts. Suggest adding them to the spamfilters and to blacklist them from posting or other participation on HN.

"""Hey Jacques,

Saw your comments on HN about bug tracking—you clearly care about catching issues before they hit users. bugbrain does the heavy lifting by analyzing your codebase and test runs to surface bugs your tests miss. It's like having a second set of eyes that actually knows what it's looking for.

Worth a look if you're tired of firefighting in production.

https://bugbrain.app

Dave"""
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-03-07 20:32:55+00:00
> NOTE: it is per "work infringed", not per infringement. The number of infringements will be one of the factors the court will consider when deciding where in that $750-30000 range to go.

But that's the whole problem, isn't it? Consider how a P2P network operates. There are N users with a copy of the song. From this we know that there have been N uploads, for N users, so the average user has uploaded 1 copy. Really slightly less than 1, since one of them had the original so there are N-1 uploads and N users and the average is (N-1)/N.

There could be some users who upload more copies than others, but that only makes it worse. If one user in three uploads three copies and the others upload none, the average is still one but now the median is zero -- pick a user at random and they more likely than not haven't actually distributed it at all.

Meanwhile the low end of the statutory damages amount is 750X the average, which is why the outcome feels absurd -- because it is.

Consider what happens if 750 users each upload one copy of a $1 song. The total actual damages are then $750, but the law would allow them to recover a minimum of $750 from each of them, i.e. the total actual damages across all users from each user. The law sometimes does things like that where you can go after any of the parties who participated in something and try to extract the entire amount, but it's not that common for obvious reasons and the way that usually works is that you can only do it once -- if you got the $750 from one user you can't then go to the next user and get another $750, all you should be able to do is make them split the bill. But copyright law is crazy.
by twistedpair | 2026-03-07 20:32:57+00:00
The last several years have been monotonically busier for me, year over year, and I've been a principal contributor in this game for many years. Sure, I can push out 1000 PRs a year by riding 4 concurrent agent hoards, but at some point our heads will simply explode. There's a human limit here, at some point.
by pugio | 2026-03-07 20:33:15+00:00
I've been thinking about sovereign AI a lot lately. About a year ago I was wondering what each country would be doing, and looking at places like e.g. Australia (which has pretty strict data residency laws for certain industries) - at that point I thought about advocating for why such countries should train their own models, but now I'm having a harder time justifying that point.

I can't see how any of these other countries could even approach the level of capability of the big three providers. I can imagine only a handful of countries who could even theoretically put enough resources towards reaching the SOTA frontier. Sure, even a model of capability level ~2024 has plenty of valid use cases today, but I'm concerned that people will just go with the big three because what they offer is still so so much better.

Not trying to discourage efforts like these, but is there really a good case for working on them? Or perhaps there's a state/national case, but it's harder for me to see a real business case.
by bryanlarsen | 2026-03-07 20:33:15+00:00
I don't understand what you're trying to say.

The northernmost tip of the continental US gets about 8 hours of daylight during winter solstice. School is normally about 6.5 hours, so it's possible to give kids at least 45 minutes of daylight on either end of school any day of the year. Obviously not possible in Alaska, but possible in the other 49.

If you insist on your time zones being an hour wide, that makes it 15/75 and 75/15 on the edges. 15 minutes isn't a lot of time to walk to/from school, but that's only the week of winter solstice which is often during Christmas break anyways. Every week away from solstice adds about 15 minutes.
by ninalanyon | 2026-03-07 20:34:00+00:00
I think that in some senses it was easier in most of the previous century simply because there were fewer distractions. A young person (or indeed any person) interested in science, engineering, literature could spend hours at the local public library digging into whatever subject interested them without that nagging feeling that they were missing out on something all the time. We didn't have that firehose of interesting stuff just a click away from us all the time.
Show HN: ExoArmur – Deterministic governance runtime for autonomous systems
by slucerodev | 2026-03-07 20:34:11+00:00
I built ExoArmur because autonomous systems are becoming capable of taking real actions (deployments, infra changes, trading, etc.), but most systems still lack deterministic governance boundaries.

The core idea is that every action must pass through a verifiable execution boundary that produces a replayable evidence bundle.

Pipeline:

Gateway → ActionIntent → PolicyDecisionPoint → SafetyGate → Approval Workflow → ExecutorPlugin → ExecutionTrace → ExecutionProofBundle

This allows you to deterministically replay a decision and verify exactly why an action was allowed or denied.

The repo includes a restrained-autonomy demo where an operator vetoes an action and the system produces a deterministic audit stream.

I'm particularly interested in feedback from people working on agent infrastructure, security, and safety systems.
by globnomulous | 2026-03-07 20:34:12+00:00
Thanks, I needed this.

There doesn't seem to be a place for me in the future of software/tech: I like sitting quietly, alone, solving problems, writing code, and reading it. I like in code much of what I like in art: the fruits of human labor and the results of human ingenuity. Being excited about AI/LLMs makes no sense to people like me. If you're excited because LLMs let you make something, great, good for you. Have fun.

If the tools become a mandatory part of the job, I'll change careers. Spending my days talking to chipper robots and describing what I want rather than making it myself sounds unbearable to me.
by allajfjwbwkwja | 2026-03-07 20:34:51+00:00
> I review AI code in literally seconds

You've just settled for hackathon standards and told yourself it's okay because you're using AI.

Everyone with experience should know that even thorough code reviews only catch stylistic issues, glaring errors, and the most obvious design deficiencies. The only time new code is truly thought about is as it's being written.
by zahlman | 2026-03-07 20:35:11+00:00
Every kind of examination should be proctored.

> using a calculator

Students who are at a level where they'd be learning to do the computations a calculator does, shouldn't have graded homework. And even at that level, real mathematics is more than just computation.

> getting answers from previous tests

Decades ago, my teachers and professors knew advanced tricks for this, like "not just reusing the test questions from last year". Sometimes they even changed the constants in math questions between sections of the class.

Reading previous tests (including correct answers) was never considered cheating, or even slightly unethical, in my education. In fact, one of our professors had this party trick of working through all the answers for a past-year exam (perhaps multiple of them; I can't recall the details, but certainly much faster than students were expected to work things out under exam conditions) in the space of a single lecture, near the end of the course. Students were meant to see this and learn from it (as well as be impressed).

> resubmitting assignments

Why would you ever not notice this?
by Hackbraten | 2026-03-07 20:35:44+00:00
I was referring to the userspace runtime stack, not the kernel. What I criticize is that multiple containers that share a single host usually overdo it with filesystem isolation. Hundreds of MBs of libraries and tools needlessly duplicated, even though they could just as well have used distro packages and deployed their apps as system-level packages and systemd unit files with `DynamicUser=`.

You can hardly call this efficient hardware utilization.
by Karrot_Kream | 2026-03-07 20:35:59+00:00
FWIW I don't think these are techbro responses. They're from people who are scared because the industry is changing. I think software folks were quite lucky that the job didn't change much from 2016-2022, due to the SaaS-ification of the old economy, so the skillset and working practices the industry sought was mostly standardized, and candidates mostly competed on salary. This is why there was so much job hopping both by companies offering high packages to new hires and employees who hopped every 1-2 years.

From 2022 this all changed as markets became more FCF sensitive, ZIRP went away, and AI started automating a lot of the dev practice. I know a sadly high amount of people (though in my circles not too many) who built up lifestyles predicated on high software salaries and a static set of requirements. A lot of these folks are angry and scared and desperately trying to navigate this changing world.
by coldtea | 2026-03-07 20:36:16+00:00
>Employees who are impressed by vague corporate-speak like “synergistic leadership,” or “growth-hacking paradigms” may struggle with practical decision-making, a new Cornell study reveals.

Wasn't it common knowledge that only cynics and idiots like those things?

That's basically 99% of what Dilbert and The Office are about.
by josephg | 2026-03-07 20:36:47+00:00
> If you're going to do that at least mention it's LLM output

Yes, this! Please label AI generated content. Pull request written by an AI? Label it as ai generated. Blog post? Article generated with AI? Say so! It’s ok to use AI models. Especially if English is your second language. But put a disclaimer in. Don’t make the reader guess.

Eg:

> This content was partially generated by chatgpt

Or

> Blog post text written entirely by human hand, code examples by Claude code
by marginalia_nu | 2026-03-07 20:36:57+00:00
Yeah. Due diligence is exponentially more important with something like Claude because it is so fast. Get lazy for a few hours and you've easily added 20K LOC worth of technical debt to your code base, and short of reverting the commits and starting over, it'll not be easy to get it to fix the problems after the fact.

It's still pretty fast even considering all the coaxing needed, but holy crap will it rapidly deteriorate the quality of a code base if you just let it make changes as it pleases.

It very much feels like how the most vexing enemy of The Flash is like just some random ass banana peel on the road. Raw speed isn't always an asset.
by kayo_20211030 | 2026-03-07 20:38:28+00:00
Perhaps we should not grade students on weekly, or other occasional, writing during the term or semester.

How about going back to the old system where, apart from experimental lab work, nothing is graded until the end of the term?

All weekly assignments should just be considered prep for one exam at the end of the term where the student has an opportunity to demonstrate mastery of the course's subject matter. They can prepare as they wish, use AI, and even cheat on the homework, but there will be a revelation at the end of the term.

That final test can be proctored, monitored, audited to ensure that whatever words are used are indeed the student's own words. The resulting grade depends on that, and that alone.

The approach of continuous assessment, which to me always seemed suspect and ripe for abuse, was completely broken by the AI tools that are now available.
by crims0n | 2026-03-07 20:38:48+00:00
You reminded me that building use to be considerably cheaper than buying.

I remember my teen years, doing odd jobs to get some cash, buying a part at a time until the build was complete. Worrying that if you didn't scrap together enough parts soon there may be an architecture change. Finally getting it all together and the feeling of pure bliss installing the OS, troubleshooting drivers, installing this or that. Good times.