MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by _dwt | 2026-03-07 02:57:14+00:00
I'm sorry you've had that experience, and I agree there are a good share of "skeptics" who have latched on to anecdata or outdated experience or theorycrafting. I know it must feel like the goalposts are moving, too, when someone who was against AI on technical grounds last year has now discovered ethical qualms previously unevidenced. I spend a lot of time wondering if I've driven myself to my particular views exclusively out of motivated reasoning. (For what it's worth, I also think "motivated reasoning" is underrated - I am not obligated to kick my own ass out of obligation to "The Truth"!)

That said, I _did_ read your comments history (only because you asked!) and - well, I don't know, you seem very reasonable, but I notice you're upset with people talking about "hallucinations" in code generation from Opus 4.6. Now, I have actually spent some time trying to understand these models (as tool or threat) and that means using them in realistic circumstances. I don't like the "H word" very much, because I am an orthodox Dijkstraist and I hold that anthropomorphizing computers and algorithms is always a mistake. But I will say that like you, I have found that in appropriate context (types, tests) I don't get calls to non-existent functions, etc. However, I have seen: incorrect descriptions of numerical algorithms or their parameters, gaslighting and "failed fix loops" due to missing a "copy the compiled artifact to the testing directory" step, and other things which I consider at least "hallucination-adjacent". I am personally much more concerned about "hallucinations" and bad assumptions smuggled in the explanations provided, choice of algorithms and modeling strategies, etc. because I deal with some fairly subtle domain-specific calculations and (mathematical) models. The should-be domain experts a) aren't always and b) tend to be "enthusiasts" who will implicitly trust the talking genius computer.

For what it's worth, my personal concerns don't entirely overlap the questions I raised way above. I think there are a whole host of reasons people might be reluctant or skeptical, especially given the level of vitriol and FUD being thrown around and the fairly explicit push to automate jobs away. I have a lot of aesthetic objections to the entire LLM-generated corpus, but de gustibus...
by ilc | 2026-03-07 02:57:23+00:00
As a Principal SWE, who has done his fair share of big stuff.

I'm excited to work with AI. Why? Because it magnifies the thing I do well: Make technical decisions. Coding is ONE place I do that, but architecture, debugging etc. All use that same skill. Making good technical decisions.

And if you can make good choices, AI is a MEGA force multiplier. You just have to be willing to let go of the reins a hair.
by rps93 | 2026-03-07 02:57:33+00:00
I sold my house after being laid off in mid-January from a government IT contractor where I had worked for eight years. The sale and move took about five weeks.

Before that role, I spent two years at another government contractor working on various govt. applications doing UX research, design, and front-end UI development. Overall, I’ve had a 17-year career in UX Research, Design and Development, starting at an ad agency in 2009.

From 2016 to 2022 I worked extremely hard in government and loved working hard with great family like coworkers, as well the positive feedback always received for our work from clients. But from 2022 to 2026 things changed. The company grew, my role narrowed to UX research and design, and the UI development work was handled by newer hires. I often felt underutilized and mentioned it, but management always told me I was doing a good job and not to worry. My last manager is a lazy ass and never told me to do anything, so I focused on staying visible to the client—helping in chat channels where users would note issues to identify UX issues to propose/create design solutions that were appreciated by the client & development developed.

Looking at where the tech industry is now—with constant pressure to work harder, increasing competition, layoffs flooding the market, and AI rapidly changing creative and development work—I’m not too interested in jumping into that kind of stress. I worked hard for many years and enjoyed it, but I value my life and health more than participating in the current “battle royale” environment in tech.

Overall, now with AI I feel graphic & web design, as well as front design web development is a stupid career! It was a nice run, bought two houses from it, worked remotely, when things were slow worked from wherever in the lower 48 and now .... in April Im starting nursing school at Im not young (20 years left of work in me). Roll with the punches here yet the punches are gonna punch millions in the face ... not sure how this any good for an economy and society but here we are! If you are like me sell your house and stash the money away to buy houses when the crash from AI happens!
by gzread | 2026-03-07 02:57:48+00:00
A pattern is exactly what the word "pattern" implies; something that lots of people seem to have found useful, so you might find it useful too.

If you are a language designer and you see lots of people writing the same boilerplate, it behooves you to put it into the language. A pattern is a desire path - pave it. In that sense, they are missing language features.
by kccqzy | 2026-03-07 02:58:55+00:00
Yeah right. A LLM in the hands of a junior engineer produces a lot of code that looks like they are written by juniors. A LLM in the hands of a senior engineer produces code that looks like they are written by seniors. The difference is the quality of the prompt, as well as the human judgement to reject the LLM code and follow-up prompts to tell the LLM what to write instead.
by virgildotcodes | 2026-03-07 02:59:27+00:00
Tax plundering, really dude?

Quick guess, do you think more tax dollars have gone to the fossil fuel industry, or climate scientists?

Political power, just again, amazing.

Who do you think wields more political power in the world? The fossil fuel industry and petro states, or climate scientists?

It's such a blatant, weird attempt to invert reality. It's the whole "accuse your enemy of that which you are guilty" approach.

I don't understand how this propaganda talking point sticks in anyone's head and doesn't fall apart with two seconds of critical thought.
by fxde | 2026-03-07 02:59:28+00:00
I don't get how this can lead to confusion. You can hit PrintScr, draw a rectangle and hit save, or enter "screenshot" into the bottom left menu, rectangle, save.
There you can also see the common options with shortcuts for "Full Screen" etc, at least on openSUSE Tumbleweed. I would assume that is the default behaviour.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2026-03-07 03:01:46+00:00
Good luck!

I suspect that nursing is an excellent choice.

I got pushed out, and slapped with the Dead Fish of SV Ageism. It was brutal, and I got pissed off.

But in the long run, it's been the best thing that ever happened to me. I would have liked the extra ten years of salary and saving, but I'm not entirely sure that I would have survived it.
by c0m4r | 2026-03-07 03:03:25+00:00
I got your point. The project structure remains from the initial phase of building the tool. I think I'll eventually remove it or put it on the wiki or somewhere else. My excessive attachment to copyright probably stems from the fact that years ago, when I wrote my own websites and articles, people often simply copied them and signed them as their own. The Linux Foundation website has attribution instructions that ask for the use of the ® symbol; I simply followed this instruction, but I agree that it's probably an exaggeration on my part. Considering what this tool does, I personally think it's lightweight in terms of both binary size, execution times, and dashboard performance. But I agree that's debatable.
by mmaunder | 2026-03-07 03:03:27+00:00
I kind of agree. But I'd adjust that to say that in both cases you get good looking code. In the hands of a junior you get crappy architecture decisions and complete failure to manage complexity which results in the inevitable reddit "they degraded the model" post. In the hands of seniors you get well managed complexity, targeted features, scalable high performance architecture, and good base technology choices.
by vishnugupta | 2026-03-07 03:04:07+00:00
> late 40s

This describes me nearly perfectly. Though I didn’t exactly burn out of coding, I accidentally stumbled upon being an EM while I was coding well and enjoying. But being EM stuck so I got into managing team(s) at biggish companies which means doing everything except one that I enjoy the most which is coding.

However now that I run my own startup I’m back to enjoying coding immensely because Claude takes care of grunt work of writing code while allowing me to focus on architecture, orchestration etc. Immense fun.
by notAnAIBot768 | 2026-03-07 03:04:51+00:00
> None of that is generated by an LLM

How did you verify that?

> prone to hallucination

You know humans can hallucinate?

> is perfectly deterministic

We agree then that you can verify, test, and trust the deterministic code an LLM produces without ever looking at it.

> That's one reason we test

That's one way we can trust and verify code produced by an LLM. You can't stop doing all the other things that aren't coding.

I get there's a difference. Shitty code can be produced by LLMs or humans. LLMs really can pump out the shitty code. I just think the argument that you cant trust code you haven't viewed is not a good argument. I very much trust a lot of code I've never seen, and yes I've been bitten by it too.

Not trying to be an ass, more trying to figure out how im going to deal for the next decade before retirement age. Uts going to be a lot of testing and verification I guess
by linkjuice4all | 2026-03-07 03:05:20+00:00
GE and others also had marketing campaigns that pushed electric appliances [0]. Yes, GE did make consumer appliances but they also made many production and supply components so it was clearly in their interest to promote this new wonder to build demand and a customer base.

It's almost shocking that these AI companies aren't "magicking" up open source replacements for things like Slack, even as just a proof-of-concept. And if not the providers directly, this seems like an easy win for agencies/organizations that build crap to show off "how good they are at AI".

Lastly, where's the one-person start up that's putting Slack, JIRA, and Photoshop out of business? I believe in the value of these tools but there's clearly more progress required before we can type in "replace slack and generate me a million dollars, make no mistakes".

[0] https://dahp.wa.gov/live-better-electrically-the-gold-medall...
by sathish316 | 2026-03-07 03:05:45+00:00
It might be extremely expensive to build Claude into every group chat.

A better option is to have Claude as an assistant or bot in every group chat and triggered when needed. That is just a different interface for Claude or Cowork chat with the group chat context.

Leaving aside the implementation details, the call for action here is valid since Slack is a black hole of your enterprise data and tribal knowledge and Slack is extremely restrictive. Try using Slack MCP in Claude Chat or any AI product
by rodchalski | 2026-03-07 03:06:04+00:00
Good framing of the identity layer. The credential management problem is real — long-lived secrets, rotation, scoping. Solving it is necessary.

The gap worth thinking through: strong identity for an agent tells you who it is and whether it's allowed to start. That doesn't tell you what it's allowed to do at runtime.

Traditional IAM is session-level: authenticate once, then you have access to what you're allowed to access. For agents, the problem is different. An agent is granted permission to "schedule a meeting" at step 1 and is still executing at step 23, having made tool calls that collectively touched the calendar, external contacts, and Slack — each individually within nominal scope, but the chain as a whole wasn't what was authorized.

Two separate problems:
1. Who is this agent, and is it allowed to run at all? (identity, credential management — well covered here)
2. At this step, for this task, is this specific action permitted? (runtime authorization — not addressed by identity alone)

The second problem requires enforcement at the tool boundary, independent of the agent's own reasoning. The agent can't self-authorize; it can only request. The enforcement layer decides.

Most orgs solve #1 and assume it covers #2. It doesn't.
by rodchalski | 2026-03-07 03:06:37+00:00
The capability-declaration problem is real and underserved. Most tools are designed for human cognition, not machine consumption.

Worth separating two distinct contract questions though:

1. Capability contract: what can this tool do? (what Sonde addresses — commands, inputs, outputs, discovery)
2. Authorization contract: what is this agent allowed to do with this tool, in this context?

The first contract lives in the tool. The second can't. Even with a perfect manifest, an agent that reads it learns what's possible — not what's permitted for this specific task.

The manifest helps the agent construct a valid request. The enforcement layer decides whether to grant it. Those are separate surfaces, and conflating them is where a lot of agent security debt accumulates.

Concrete example: an agent reads the manifest for a filesystem tool, discovers `delete_file`, constructs a valid call with correct parameters. The manifest says it's a valid call. What stops the agent from running it on a file outside its working scope? That can't be encoded in the manifest — it requires external enforcement that knows the task context, not just the tool schema.

Sonde looks like a clean foundation for the capability side. Curious if you're thinking about the authorization layer as a next step.
by nadeem1 | 2026-03-07 03:06:43+00:00
I'm a developer at a consultancy where I've been building Athenaflow as an internal
product. The E2E testing problem came from firsthand pain — we were spending more time
fixing broken selectors than writing new tests across client projects.

Happy to answer questions on the architecture, particularly the Claude Code hook system
and the semantic snapshot approach in agent-web-interface.
Show HN: Contd makes interactive CLIs usable for agents in an async way
by wefchen | 2026-03-07 03:06:48+00:00
I built contd, a small CLI wrapper that helps agents run interactive CLI/TUI programs without getting stuck in a blocking loop.

Some agent runtimes are still optimized for: run command -> wait -> parse output -> continue.
That works for non-interactive tools, but breaks when a command needs stdin interaction (debuggers, installers, prompts, etc.).

contd starts the command in a managed background session and returns control when:
- a timeout is reached, or
- the process is waiting for stdin

I think it's useful for interactive TUIs or interactive install prompts.

In my repo, a demo video shows how an agent in Cursor which would get stuck when running interactive CLI can run gdb dynamically with the help of contd. (I know gdb can be executed in a non-interactive way by -q, but that's just showing the capability.)
by gzread | 2026-03-07 03:08:27+00:00
kerygma is not a management bullshit word. I have never heard a manager say kerygma. Or anyone, for that matter. I've heard a non-manager say gestalt at least once... And the last time I heard "ontological" was someone trying to explain "lowkirkentologicalockedinlowstate" which is not manager BS but merely tiktoker BS.
by mmaunder | 2026-03-07 03:08:41+00:00
Ah - I know! Seriously I know. There's such a bad need for this right now. The problem is that the folks who are great at agentic coding are coding their asses off 16 to 20 hours a day and don't have a minute they want to spend on writing guides because of the opportunity cost.

One of the rare resources I found recently was the OpenClaw guys interview on Lex. He drops a few bangers that are really valuable and will save you having to spend a long time figuring it out.

Also there's a very strong disincentive for anyone to write right now because we're competing against the noise and the slop in the space. So best to just shut the fuck up and create as fast as we can, and let the outcome speak for itself. You're going to see a lot more products like OpenClaw where the pace of innovation is rapid, and the author freely admits that they're coding agentically and not writing a single line.

I think the advantage that Peter has (openclaw author) is that he has enough money and success to not give a fuck about what people say re him writing purely agentically, so he's been very open about it which has been great for others who are considering doing the same.

But if you have a software engineering career or are a public figure with something to lose, you tend to STFU if you're doing pure agentic coding on a project.

But that'll change. Probably over the next few months. OpenClaw broke the ice.
by eli | 2026-03-07 03:09:00+00:00
It depends whether anyone was ever actually going to spend that week doing it the "hard" way. Having Claude do it in a few minutes beats doing nothing.

Put another way: I absolutely would have an intern work on a security audit. I would not have an intern replace a professional audit though.

It's otherwise a pretty low stakes use. I'd expect false positives to be pretty obvious to someone maintaining the code.
by SigmundA | 2026-03-07 03:09:06+00:00
Can you give an example whats dangerous about converting a nvarchar with only ascii (0-127) then using the index otherwise fallback to a scan?

If we simply went to UTF-8 collation using varchar then this wouldn't be an issue either, which is why you would use varchar in 2026, best of both worlds so to speak.
by SigmundA | 2026-03-07 03:09:12+00:00
I am talking about coded values, like Status = 'A', 'B' or 'C'

Taking double the space for this stuff is a waste of resources and nobody usually cares about extended characters here in English language systems at least they just want something more readable than integers when querying and debugging the data. End users will see longer descriptions joined from code tables or from app caches which can have unicode.
by keithluu | 2026-03-07 03:10:04+00:00
I understand your concern. The copycat problem is real.

But if you come from a technical background and this is your first time building a product, you'll soon learn that it is so damn hard to get users, especially *paying* ones.

I was there. I built something, shared it, prayed people would notice. The truth is most of the time your product fails. Better explore the problem you are trying to solve first, share your idea if necessary, and collect feedback. You'll have a much clearer picture of what you need to do from there.
by sam_palus | 2026-03-07 03:10:26+00:00
Agreed, QSBS is too valuable to be cavalier about.

The active business asset test is about "intent and substance" and not balance sheet line items. I think it's very clear in this case that you'd be using it as a cash equivalent, since floating-rate agency MBS have a comparable risk profile to money market holdings (short duration, government-backed, highly liquid). And economically they're serving the same function: parking working capital safely until your business needs it. And frankly, I think accessing those assets through a treasury management platform, rather than a brokerage account, helps establish intent and substance.

That's my view on it at least, and I know many companies use these assets for long-term cash without issue. But I'm not a tax expert.

I do really appreciate you bringing this up though, and I'll reach out to our tax lawyer to get a proper written opinion we can share with our customers. Of course it's not a replacement for getting your own tax advice, but I think it'll be helpful regardless.
by elief22 | 2026-03-07 03:10:32+00:00
I started using it for interview prep, its clean and it really works well w how i interact w LLMs some things I noticed

the canvas scroll doesnt work well especially when contents is near the edge of page (ive returned to previous page a few times)

i would love if BYOK was available

exporting chat would be nice (though w the branching it would need some thought behind it like exporting a certain branch flows vs entire chat)

hyperlinks in sticky notes would be cool

due to right click being in app options i cant auto correct works when misspelled

overall very impressed w this and can see it entering my daily workflow outside of interviews but for doc analysis/research/meeting prep

please let me know if ther is any way i can be helpful!
Show HN: Career AutoPilot – AI guidance for navigating your career
by bvikasgupta | 2026-03-07 03:10:52+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve noticed a common problem: even highly skilled professionals spend years working hard but often guess their way through career decisions — what skills to learn, when to switch jobs, how to prepare for interviews, or whether their resume even tells the right story.

I’ve seen this firsthand through my work leading engineering teams at Apple and DocuSign, conducting hundreds of interviews, and mentoring professionals. The problem isn’t talent — it’s lack of guidance.

So I built Career AutoPilot, an AI-powered platform designed to help anyone take control of their career. It helps with:

AI-powered career guidance

Resume and professional story improvement

Interview preparation

Planning long-term career growth

I’m sharing here because I’d love feedback from the HN community — especially from engineers, PMs, and professionals who have navigated multiple career changes:

Would this actually help you in your career?

What are the hardest career decisions you’ve faced?

You can check it out here: https://www.careerautopilot.ai/

Any thoughts, critiques, or suggestions would be incredibly valuable as I iterate on this. Thanks!
by sebgr | 2026-03-07 03:11:37+00:00
this makes sense, in 2018-2022, I would get tons of emails from recruiters at meta, doordash, snap, stripe etc now I barely see any (maybe they've given up )

My friends who are still at Google also say that most job postings will end up going to someone internally - in fact people say they don't do that many external interviews anymore.

Finally the interview cycle seems to take a lot longer than I remember with quite a few added rounds.
by Alex3917 | 2026-03-07 03:11:47+00:00
Having worked at both greenfield startups and unicorns, I've found that virtually every problem I've encountered at the unicorn startups was caused by folks being incompetent at the greenfield level. Maybe when you get to the scale of Google things are different, but it's certainly possible to build a business big enough to retire off that doesn't require any more technical knowledge than what you'd learn at a two-person pre-PMF startup.
by Rohunyyy | 2026-03-07 03:11:49+00:00
Referrals are also getting games. If your company has a referral bonus, then I promise you pretty much every single referral you have looked at, is from a guy who DIDNT know the guy. I applied to 20 Big Tech companies last month. All from "referrals". Check out teamblind.com if you don't know (Be careful. The site is like a tech version of 4 chan. Well maybe not THAT bad.) The whole game is messed up.
by codethief | 2026-03-07 03:11:51+00:00
> Your LLM Doesn't Write Correct Code. It Writes Plausible Code.

I don't always write correct code, either. My code sure as hell is plausible but it might still contain subtle bugs every now and then.

In other words: 100% correctness was never the bar LLMs need to pass. They just need to come close enough.
by AnonHP | 2026-03-07 03:12:10+00:00
How is it on older or budget hardware though? It’s been a long time since I tried KDE, and in between even worked with Xfce because Gnome was a bit more resource intensive. Is it still the case that in terms of hardware specs and demand of the hardware, KDE needs/uses more than Gnome? I guess Xfce will be in a different league capability wise and resource requirement wise.