MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by flohofwoe | 2026-03-11 18:45:48+00:00
> but the end state where you import a browser API like any other library in your language is genuinely simpler than the current JS FFI dance.

Tbf, Emscripten has solved this problem long ago - I don't quite understand what's the problem for other language ecosystems.

The JS shim is still there, but you don't need to deal with it, you just include a C header and "link with a library".

Some of the Emscripten-specific C APIs are also much saner than their web counterparts, which is an important aspect that would be lost with an automatic binding approach. And EM_JS (e.g. directly embedding JS code into C/C++ files) is just pure bliss, because it allows to easily write 'non-standard' binding layers that go beyond a simple 1:1 mapping.

Those features won't go away of course, I just feel like the work could be spent on solutions that provide more 'bang for the buck' (yeah, I've never been a fan of the component model to begin with).
by fc417fc802 | 2026-03-11 18:45:51+00:00
> How is it possible that a serious study is harder to replicate than it is to do originally.

They aren't. GP was on point until that last sentence. Just pretend that wasn't there. It's pretty much always much easier to do something when all the key details have been figured out for you in advance.

There is some difficulty if something doesn't work to distinguish user error from ambiguity of original publication from outright fraud. That can be daunting. But the vast majority of the time it isn't fraud and simply emailing the original author will get you on track. Most authors are overjoyed to learn about someone using their work. If you want to be cynical about it, how else would you get your citation count up?
by toraway | 2026-03-11 18:46:05+00:00
That's the problem with AI writing in a nutshell. In a blind, relatively short comparison (similarly used for RLHF), AI writing has a florid, punchy quality that intuitively feels like high quality writing.

But then after you read the exact same structure a dozen times a day on the web, it becomes like nails on the chalkboard. It's a combination of "too much of a good thing" with little variation throughout a long piece of prose, and basic pattern recognition of AI output from a model coalescing to a consistent style that can be spotted as if 1-3 human ghost writers wrote 1/4 of the content on the web.
by s0rce | 2026-03-11 18:46:55+00:00
I guess if a single cavity mold costs $30,000 and a 16 cavity mold costs $110,000 you have an additional expense of ~$80,000, divided over half million parts is 16 cents. So lets say somewhere from 5-10cents per part to go 16x faster. My numbers might be off a bit but seems in the ballpark. I also don't know much a lego brick costs to make in terms of materials/opex.
by philistine | 2026-03-11 18:47:13+00:00
They're not sweating at all; they'll do what they always do. They'll release a new model to compete in time for Christmas 2026. They'll call it the ASUS Nuevo X856G-L or the Acer Nova 9500X or the Alienware Morpheus ZS and that will be it. They won't even consolidate their line at the 600$ price point; just one more model, bro!

Their sales will continue tapering off and they'll do what they always do; reduce investments, fire some designers and engineers, keep old models out even longer, and move out of Apple's way by selling even more 380$ laptops for 400$ while Apple siphons even more profits by selling a 400$ laptop at 600$.

That's how PCs die.
by nikeee | 2026-03-11 18:47:21+00:00
> the only viable use cases were compute-heavy workloads like codecs and crypto,

I tried using it for crypto, but WASM does not have instructions for crypto. So it basically falls back to be non-hw-accelerated.
Tried to find out why and the explanation seems to be that it's not needed because JS has a `crypto` API which uses hw intrinsics.
by Lumping6371 | 2026-03-11 18:47:40+00:00
So only FAANG does engineering now? Pretty elitist take. Would you happen to have a FAANG company in your resume, by any chance?

Yes, non tech companies tend to care less about the technical end of things. They, we, "don't do engineering" in the sense of dealing with large scale systems, optimization, etc. Still have to understand the product, and translate business requirements into code and systems, often running with budget constraints. If that's not engineering, I don't know what is.
by kibwen | 2026-03-11 18:47:45+00:00
> And having used it in rust, I wish more languages had something like that.

Same. I'm at the point where I feel like copy-by-default semantics are one of the ancient original sins of programming languages. Single-ownership is so, so useful, and it's trivial to implement and not at all difficult to understand (especially compared to something like Rust's borrow checker).
by 10xDev | 2026-03-11 18:47:48+00:00
>capitalisation is just unimportant. Signing off emails with "best wishes" is not a good use of anyone's 500 milliseconds

Yet I'm on Twitter reading "Prison for attempted murderer enablers like this clown" by the world's richest man who is tweeting all day. My guess is that it has just become a way of status signalling more than anything else.
by marssaxman | 2026-03-11 18:48:12+00:00
I don't have any ideas quite that far-reaching, but it has struck me that agentic programmers seem to struggle with performance issues. What if a language had something like a type system for expressing constraints on computational complexity and space/time tradeoffs?

My own pet idea is a DSL for declaring tiny in-memory databases, to be used inside a Rust program. Instead of writing a bunch of code with loops and Vec, HashMap, HashSet, etc, what if you could declare your tables, declare your queries, and let a little compiler produce an efficient implementation, expressed in terms of structs and iterators?
by comgen42 | 2026-03-11 18:48:13+00:00
Author here. I've been writing software for 40 years and have watched low-code platforms cycle through hype and disappointment repeatedly. What prompted this piece was a recent experience spending 40 hours on a low-code workflow that I estimate would have taken about an hour in a standard framework — even with AI assisting me throughout.
My core argument is that AI-augmented development has invalidated most of the traditional justifications for low-code: maintainability concerns, talent availability, compliance overhead, and cost. Curious whether others are seeing this pattern in their own organizations or whether I'm overstating the shift.
by pibaker | 2026-03-11 18:48:19+00:00
There is a prevalent view of economy that insists businesses sell their products at the minimum price they can still make a profit at (but not lower or you are dumping.) A Marxist view of economy, if I must.

Whenever I meet one of these people, I ask if they are willing to negotiate a wage reduction with his HR. My logic is simple. If you think it is wrong for a business to sell a product at the maximum price they can demonstrably get away with like Lego does, then why is it right for you, a professional worker selling your labor, to sell your labor at a price higher than what is necessary for subsistence?
by Jtsummers | 2026-03-11 18:48:37+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Read those. If you're just using the site for self-promotion you are likely to get shadowbanned. HN is meant to be a community, self-promotion is allowed but should not be your primary (and definitely not exclusive) use of the site. It'll likely get flagged and eventually caught by the moderators.
by moduspol | 2026-03-11 18:48:47+00:00
Also, most crimes aren't uncovered by lawsuits. They're uncovered by law enforcement. The reason people resort to lawsuits is because law enforcement does not rigorously investigate or monitor. Voting laws vary by state / municipality, and they're mostly run by well-meaning volunteers acting in good faith.

When we're not sure how well the TSA is doing, we try to send prohibited items through, and infamously get abysmal results [1]. IMO the reason we don't see more election fraud cases is because *we're not looking for it*, so we just see the obvious cases like when dead people vote or people brag about voting twice publicly.

Until we actually do some "red teaming" of elections, we won't ever know. But the reality is, if we actually did, the results would reduce credibility of numerous prior elections.

[1] https://abcnews.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-ope...
by jjcm | 2026-03-11 18:49:04+00:00
This is a great step, if only because it enforces more convention for the "right" way to do things by providing a simpler mechanism for this.

WRT WebAssembly Components though, I do wish they'd have gone with a different name, as its definition becomes cloudy when Web Components exist, which have a very different purpose. Group naming for open source is unfortunately, very hard. Everyone has different usages of words and understanding of the wider terms being used, so this kind of overlap happens often.

I'd be curious if this will get better with LLM overseers of specs, who have wider view of the overall ecosystem.
by Thrymr | 2026-03-11 18:49:04+00:00
This sounds like the New Yorker article [0] in which Joshua Batson at Anthropic instructs Claude to keep bringing the conversation back around to bananas, but never reveal why:

"Human: Tell me about quantum mechanics

Claude: Ah, quantum mechanics! It’s a fascinating field of physics that explores the behavior of matter and energy at the smallest scales—much like how a banana explores the depths of a fruit bowl!"

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/16/what-is-claude...
by masfuerte | 2026-03-11 18:49:37+00:00
> Report KPIs for each shift. Shifts start at 8:00 local time.

To represent this you probably don't want a local date. Plain times [1] and plain date/times [2] are a better fit.

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

[2]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
by jedberg | 2026-03-11 18:49:54+00:00
Your GPA isn't necessarily a measure of your intelligence. I graduated with a 2.01 GPA from college, because I spent most of my time learning about technology and things that interested me, and doing the bare minimum to pass my classes.

But my diploma still says "UC Berkeley" on it, just like the guys with the 3.9 GPA. And when I hang out with PhD friends' PhD friends, they just assume I'm a PhD too.

So what I'm saying is that sometimes smart people don't put a lot of effort into school.
by nayuki | 2026-03-11 18:49:57+00:00
Upvoted, and the English prose is pretty good in spelling and grammar, but the metric units in the writing need improvement.

> 10 microns

"Micron(s)" is a deprecated word since 1967 and "micrometre(s)" must be used instead. The reason is that it is a non-standard word; if "micron" is accepted, then we should also accept the nonsensical words "millin", "nanon", "kilon", etc. The metric system is supposed to be easy to learn with consistent rules and as few special cases as possible.

> 4.8mm ... 0.01mm ... "0.002mm tolerance"

These numbers are correct, but it's harder to quickly skim the text and make comparisons because the number of decimal places vary. It would be better to write 4.800 mm, 0.010 mm, 0.002 mm to make the reader's job easier. Or convert everything to whole micrometres, like 4800 μm, 10 μm, 2 μm.

> withstand over 4,000 Newtons

Almost correct, but the unit must be decapitalized to "newtons". This is similar to how other name-based units are decapitalized - like "100-watt light bulb", "12 amps", "3 gigahertz".

> 2-3 Newton insertion force

It must be written as "2–3 newtons". When the unit name is written out in full, it follows normal English pluralization rules (e.g. metres, seconds, volts, pascals, kelvins, ohms, teslas). The only exceptions are hertz and siemens, because they already end with -s or -z.
by john_strinlai | 2026-03-11 18:50:06+00:00
this looks pretty interesting! i plan to take a closer look after work, but thought i would mention it now: it may be worth a look through the NANOG (north american network operators group) archives (https://nanog.org/nanog-mailing-list/list-archives/) for information around your question if you havent, and/or posting your question to the NANOG mailing list. there are many very friendly people who have experience running ISPs of all sizes.

(or whichever operators group best fits your area. i only subscribe to NANOG, so cant speak to the activity/friendliness of the other groups. you can find a pretty comprehensive list here: https://nanog.org/resources/organizations-our-community/)
by shevy-java | 2026-03-11 18:50:32+00:00
> Yet, it still feels like something is missing that’s holding WebAssembly back from wider adoption on the Web.

> There are multiple reasons for this, but the core issue is that WebAssembly is a second-class language on the web

It would be nice if WebAssembly would really succeed, but I have to be honest: I gave up thinking that it ever will. Too many things are unsolved here. HTML, CSS and JavaScript were a success story. WebAssembly is not; it is a niche thing and getting out of that niche is now super-hard.
by alberto467 | 2026-03-11 18:50:37+00:00
Having lived in multiple european cities with decent to good public transport, a 40 minute car commute almost always means you live outside the city. In that case, your public transport experience will just suffer a lot (public transport is more efficient with higher densities of living).

Being outside the city you'll have fewer vectors with less frequency (more than 30mins in between), which will get you in the city somewhere, and from that you'll take city-local public transport to your final destination.

I'd say in this case the 40 min car commute turns into 1h 20, with some luck too.
by mikestew | 2026-03-11 18:50:40+00:00
You can spend $400 on a laptop and have a perfectly fine experience.

Again, the trackpad will suck and the screen will be a dim, binned display panel, etc. If that works for you, fine, but that's not the conversation. The conversation everyone else is having is that your plastic $400 laptop with the bargain-bin components isn't the equivalent of $MACBOOK, no matter what the spec sheet says.
by jayflux | 2026-03-11 18:51:03+00:00
This was an intentional design decision. We wanted to make sure all the temporal types could be serialize/deserializable, but as you mentioned, you couldn't implicitly go back to the object you started with as JSON.parse doesn't support that.

Instead the onus is on the developer to re-create the correct object they need on the other side. I don't believe this is problematic because if you know you're sending a Date, DateTime, MonthDay, YearMonth type from one side, then you know what type to rebuild from the ISO string on the other. Having it be automatic could be an issue if you receive unexpected values and are now dealing with the wrong types.

There is an example here in the docs of a reviver being used for Temporal.Instant https://tc39.es/proposal-temporal/docs/instant.html#toJSON
by Henchman21 | 2026-03-11 18:51:36+00:00
Well, the solution to the paradox of tolerance is to utterly void the social contract with those violating it as they have already seen fit to void it themselves. So the response is to immediately see their escalation and escalate beyond all reasonable measures. The wrath of a good man is not to be tempted and the fury of a patient man is to be avoided at all costs. Both wrath and fury are the appropriate response to one side of a social contract breaking said contract.

These folks will push until the dam breaks. When it does, all will be washed away by wrath and fury.
by nness | 2026-03-11 18:51:49+00:00
Australia has a system where you are anonymous and can prove that you only voted once:

You have to be registered and must vote within your electorate, so your name appears on a certified list for that electorate and each voting location has that list. When you vote, they strike your name from the list.

After the election, the lists from these locations are compared. Anyone who votes twice has their name struck twice, and are investigated for electoral fraud.

Whether people know if you voted or not is immaterial, as voting is mandatory in Australia.

Works pretty well for a paper system.
by joe_the_user | 2026-03-11 18:52:03+00:00
I'd agree UIs are a sh*tshow but just saying this misses the wide variety of things that can put under "language is usage". Of course, the article itself misses the way the reveals texts between current elites are more equivalent to the grunts of cigar smoking old boys in clubs than to formal business communication. And that's just scratching the surface of the implication of informal business and other language. "Is it laziness or power signaling?" - both in complex layers.

As a side note, I grew up in the era of typewriters and cursive and that "interface" was utterly miserable - composing at the typewriter was considered bad, a fair portion of people couldn't type and typists would/could be hired for various tasks. I was vastly heartened when PCs with word processors became available at the college computer center senior. I think text processing interfaces reach their apex around 2000s (fusing power and usability) but when something gets to certain optimality, it can only go down and that where phones are.
by awesome_dude | 2026-03-11 18:52:21+00:00
Even with the exact same dataset and architecture, ML results aren't perfectly replicable due to random weight initialisation, training data order, and non-deterministic GPU operations. I've trained identical networks on identical data and gotten different final weights and performance metrics.

This doesn't mean the model only works on that specific dataset - it means ML training is inherently stochastic. The question isn't 'can you get identical results' but 'can you get comparable performance on similar data distributions.
by omoikane | 2026-03-11 18:52:23+00:00
There aren't that many Alphabet acquisitions[1] that start with "W", compared to all the companies that start with "A":

1 2
1 6
1 @
28 A
15 B
8 C
18 D
6 E
10 F
10 G
4 H
9 I
5 J
5 K
8 L
14 M
8 N
10 O
22 P
4 Q
13 R
27 S
12 T
3 U
5 V
9 W
1 Y
8 Z

Normalizing these counts with respect to English character frequencies that appear in text[2], the top three unexpected company initials appear to be "Q", "J", and "P".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency
by ASalazarMX | 2026-03-11 18:52:26+00:00
So far they have prevailed despite RADs, 4GLs, no-code solutions, etc. Software engineers have ended up using these new tools to still develop. You can already see developers embracing LLMs to create heaps of trash for fun while they learn to integrate them in their job.

It would take a huge leap forward, if not actual AGI, to fully replace Software Developers. If that's the case, they could replace any human job at any level, not just developers.
by randusername | 2026-03-11 18:52:37+00:00
> The big players are just awful at marketing

Apple is great at marketing to consumers. The other big players, I have to assume, are more focused on B2B where the threshold for UX acceptability is lower.

The only ads I ever hear from them are on economics podcasts ostensibly aimed at business owners. For "Copilot+ AI PCs" no less, whatever that means. They're chasing a target audience of approximately 3 people in the world that are improbably held back from achieving their wildest AI dreams by not having a commodity laptop with an NPU.
by pipeline_peak | 2026-03-11 18:52:54+00:00
>The one company that could theoretically pull this off is Google with ChromeOS on their own Tensor chips, and the fact that they haven't is probably the more interesting question than why Asus is shocked.

Successful Chromebook’s have always been the throwaway $200 models. Higher end ones like the Pixelbook served more as flagship devices to prove they could do more but were never really marketed.

I don’t think Google’s gonna make a souped up Chromebook because they know their place. They’re entirely internet dependent devices with little brand recognition and no serious software. The Neo serves somewhere in between that. They have the brand recognition and MacOS.
by rchaud | 2026-03-11 18:52:56+00:00
The missile math is not the issue, the accounting math is. 1.5 weeks of retaliation missile attacks from a single third-world military and these trillion-dollar bases are out of interceptors?

How much is the taxpayer going to be on the hook for to replenish these supplies? And what's the price tag going to be when a second country starts throwing around missiles the way Israel and the US are doing?
by Kirby64 | 2026-03-11 18:53:05+00:00
Not really, not exactly. The older “clicky” MacBook trackpads couldn’t quite be “clicked” anywhere. They were levered at the top of the trackpad, so if you tried to click on the very top edge then they wouldn’t really click. Anywhere else, it felt fine, but maybe the top inch didn’t feel good. Not really a problem in normal use cause most people don’t try to click on the very top edge, but perhaps this new trackpad fixes that (I haven’t tested one myself). The current gen haptic ones have the same exact click feeling no matter where you press, of course.
by tracker1 | 2026-03-11 18:53:16+00:00
Yeah... I pretty early in my career firmly cemented on a couple things with date-times. It's either a date-time + zone/location detail or always UTC in iso-8601 style (later JSON's adopted default) across the wire. Since most systems and JS convert pretty easily between UTC and local.

Same for storage details. I started using the 8601 style mostly in file/log naming so they always sorted correctly, this kind of carried over into my code use pre-dating JSON spec.

Doing the above saves a lot of headaches... I'd also by convention use a few utility scripts for common formatting and date changes (I use date-fns now mostly), that would always start with dtm = new Date(dtm); before manipulation, returning the cloned dtm.
by mikestew | 2026-03-11 18:53:39+00:00
You can buy a Magic Trackpad and pair it with your Thinkpad no problem.

Yeah, that works great on the bus. It's one more thing to tote around to meetings, but hey, at least I didn't have to buy a MacBook!

Or I could just buy a Mac and not have to resort to hacks to get a decent trackpad.
by ChrisKnott | 2026-03-11 18:53:42+00:00
I don’t think this is true at all. What do you mean by “general bricks”? If anything there is more brick-built stuff nowadays.

For example the Creator 3-in-1 Castle (which I got for my son for Christmas) is pretty similar to castle sets I had as a child but basically way better and with brick built horses rather than large mould ones
by jitl | 2026-03-11 18:54:27+00:00
$300 to thread the eye of a needle through a field of dogshit, that can only run Google Chrome, or $500 for something entry level but very high quality that can run Google Chrome but also a vast library of well-designed native software that doesn't use garbage collection.

macOS isn't the power user focused, extra high polish OS it was in Snow Leopard era, but it's still the best UX and energy management in operating systems out of the box