MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zmmmmm | 2026-03-06 05:14:42+00:00
the numbers they show are barely distinguishable from noise as far as I can interpret them.

For me, the impact is absolutely in hiring juniors. We basically just stopped considering it. There's almost no work a junior can do that now I would look at and think it isn't easier to hand off in some form (possibly different to what the junior would do) to an AI.

It's a bit illusory though. It was always the case that handing off work to a junior person was often more work than doing it yourself. It's an investment in the future to hire someone and get their productivity up to a point of net gain. As much as anything it's a pause while we reassess what the shape of expertise now looks like. I know what juniors did before is now less valuable than it used to be, but I don't know what the value proposition of the future looks like. So until we know, we pause and hold - and the efficiency gains from using AI currently are mostly being invested in that "hold" - they are keeping us viable from a workload perspective long enough to restructure work around AI. Once we do that, I think there will be a reset and hiring of juniors will kick back in.
by saratogacx | 2026-03-06 05:15:16+00:00
In a world of boring corporate "rounded corners are less aggressive" websites and app designs, I really appreciate something that is more out there. Crush is their "opencode"-ish app and is my go to when not using CC or CopilotCLI directly. Sure, it everyone's cup of (bubble) tea but that is kind of the great part, it doesn't have to nor does try to be.
by bandrami | 2026-03-06 05:15:19+00:00
OK so this comes back to the question I started this subthread with: where is this better software? Why isn't someone selling it to me? I've been told for a year it's coming any day now (though invariably the next month I'm told last month's tools were in fact crap and useless compared to the new generation so I just have to wait for this round to kick in) and at some point I do have to actually see it if you expect me to believe it's real.
by CobrastanJorji | 2026-03-06 05:15:20+00:00
My crackpot theory: USB chargers and cables. Right now, a quality USB charger is cheap, but it's indistinguishable from a shitty USB charger, and there's a practical difference. And it's frequently on your desk. And it's got a lot of space for branding. A luxury USB cable would be identifiable and also (hopefully) also work well for whatever you might plug it into, until they invent the next new USB standard.

Of course, there are downsides. Nobody's gonna just walk away with your watch, but a cable on your desk that also costs $1000? And also, a lot of us would look at your diamond-encrusted USB adapter and think "this man is a moron."
by godelski | 2026-03-06 05:15:22+00:00
> The idea of teaching some sort of “secular” ethics has never made sense to me …

An intro ethics class won't shy away from religion, it comes up a lot. You'll most likely even discuss differences in different sects of Christianity. You should also have the discussion of if morals are universal (and if so, which ones) or are all made up.

Secular just means you discuss more than one viewpoint. The idea of teaching morality from only one perspective never made sense to me. You won't even get that limited viewpoint in Seminary school, even though it'll certainly be far more biased
by alephnerd | 2026-03-06 05:17:02+00:00
> Is expansion all that matters to you

I care about expanding public service delivery capacity. In developing countries, the only cheap and efficient manner to do so is via DPI.

The only countries that escaped the middle income trap have either been subsidized by EU development grants, oil exports, or US largess.

For countries where none of those are the option, you need to make do with what you have.

> The benefits of security and stability do not outweigh the alternative when authoritarian governments decide to curb stomp the natural rights of people that don't want to comply with their agendas

When the decision is between luxury beliefs or survival, and in a country like Ethiopia whose developmental indicators are comparable to Afghanistan, the latter will always win.
by saghm | 2026-03-06 05:17:03+00:00
> One that's most silly to me, the tires have huge branding but the actual useful info, what pressure they need, is nearly impossible to read without perfect lighting and then me taking a photo and zooming in.

Sadly, the writing isn't there for (only) you. Anywhere you go and park your car now has a billboard for the tire company. Far more eyeballs that interest the ones putting the writing on it will be looking at it for reasons other than looking for the pressure than ones who are actually trying to get anything done with them.
by throwaw12 | 2026-03-06 05:17:14+00:00
> how good search engines were 10+ years ago

For me this is a huge boost in productivity. If I remember how I was working in the past (example of Google integration):

Before:

* go through docs to understand how to start (quick start) and things to know
* start boilerplate (e.g. install the scripts/libs)
* figure out configs to enable in GCP console
* integrate basic API and test
* of course it fails, because its Google API, so difficult to work with
* along the way figure out why Python lib is failing to install, oh version mismatch, ohh gcc not installed, ohh libffmpeg is required,...
* somehow copy paste and integrate first basic API
* prepare for production, ohhh production requires different type of Auth flow
* deploy, redeploy, fix, deploy, redeploy
* 3 days later -> finally hello world is working

Now:

* Hey my LLM buddy, I want to integrate Google API, where do I start, come up with a plan
* Enable things which requires manual intervention
* In the meantime LLM integrates the code, install lib, asks me to approve installation of libpg, libffmpeg,....
* test, if fails, feed the error back to LLM + prompt to fix it
* deploy
by qsera | 2026-03-06 05:18:10+00:00
Sure, any one can say anything. But I am not referring to that. I am talking about a case where it is objectively true.

But I think that is a question that anyone would rather not consider.

The issue is that if you don't consider that question, and jump into discussion or actions, in general just have an "outrage", then it would be very hard to take you seriously.
by applfanboysbgon | 2026-03-06 05:18:40+00:00
> they are typically dismissed because they look so weird to us.

I dismiss them because Yegge's work (if it can even be called his work, given that he doesn't look at the code) is steaming garbage with zero real-world utility, not "because they look weird". You suggest the apparent utility is undeniable, while saying "based purely on popularity" -- but popularity is in no way a measure of utility. Yegge is a conman who profited hundreds of thousands of dollars shilling a memecoin rugpull tied to these projects. The actual thousands of users are people joining the hypetrain, looking to get in on the promised pyramid scheme of free money where AI will build the next million dollar software for you, if only you have the right combination of .md files to make it work. None of these software are actually materialising, so all the people in this bubble can do is make more AI wrappers that promise to make other AI wrappers that will totally make them money.

I am completely open to being proven wrong by a vibe-coded open source application that is actually useful, but I haven't seen a single one. Literally not even one. I would count literally anything where the end-product is not an AI wrapper itself, which has tens to hundreds of thousands of users, and which was written entirely by agents. One example of that would be great. Just one. There have been a couple of attempts at a web browser, and Claude's C compiler, but neither are actually useful or have any real users; they are just proofs of concept and I have seen nothing that convinces me they are a solid foundation from which you could actually build useful software from, or that models will ever be on a trajectory to make them actually useful.
by atoav | 2026-03-06 05:18:56+00:00
Well. Unsurprisingly fascists will do a fascism – an ideology somewhat defined by merging state and industrial powers. Many economically minded people, many technologists, including in this space, have afforded themselves the luxury of not talking about politics too deeply. As I said some years ago: Ignoring politics has its way of coming back to haunt you. Back then this was an unpopular take.
by colechristensen | 2026-03-06 05:18:59+00:00
Bit flips do not only happen inside RAM

Also, in a game, there is a tremendously large chance that any particular bit flip will have exactly 0 effect on anything. Sure you can detect them, but one pixel being wrong for 1/60th of a second isn't exactly ... concerning.

The chance for a bit flip to affect a critical path that is noticeable by the player is very low, and quite a bit lower if you design your game to react gracefully. There's a whole practice of writing code for radiation hardened environments that largely consists of strategies for recovering from an impossible to reach state.
by YZF | 2026-03-06 05:19:07+00:00
That was an Argentinian court so I'm not sure the government matters. Also there is other evidence of Iran's involvement. Not to mention countless other attacks on Israel proper and Israelis.

I don't think it's clear from an international law perspective. I remember reading the Vienna Convention and not really finding anything specific and my attempts to read it now and use AI to figure it out aren't yielding anything.

The status of the embassy or consulate is generally considered to be an agreement between the host and guest countries. It is not considered territory of the sending country at all.

Anyways, as we said this is mostly splitting hairs. Israel had really no grievance with Iran and no reason to act or attack it before Iran decided that destroying Israel is one of its goals. In the kindergarten game of "who started" it was clearly Iran, no doubt about that.
by jmward01 | 2026-03-06 05:19:11+00:00
What needs to be an option is to allow complete and then compact and if needed go into the 1m version. That way you can get the most out of the shorter window but in the case where it just couldn't finish and compact in time it will (at cost) go over. I wonder how many tokens are actually left at the end of compaction on average. I know there have been many times where I likely needed just another 10-20k and a better stopping point would have been there.
by shreyaspn | 2026-03-06 05:19:12+00:00
Location: Boston, MA
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Yes (Anywhere US)
Technologies: C#/.NET Core, React, TypeScript, Python, PostgreSQL, Azure, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD, Prometheus/Grafana, GitHub Copilot, Cursor
Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shreyas-pn/ | https://github.com/Shreyas-PN
Email: pogalnaveen.s@northeastern.edu

I wear two hats: full-stack engineer and cloud/reliability engineer, 4+ years across both. At Accenture I built .NET microservices and React dashboards serving 50,000+ users. At a Boston startup I shipped a greenfield platform from zero to production, then kept it running with Prometheus/Grafana observability, Terraform IaC, and Kubernetes tuning across GKE clusters.

MS in Information Systems from Northeastern, Dec 2025. US work authorized, no sponsorship needed. Looking for roles where I can build things that matter and own them end to end.
by foobiekr | 2026-03-06 05:19:21+00:00
In 2000 I worked for a company that was building a mobile telephony and data product. The partner company asked us to help them implement the lawful intercept function, as is required by law, which we did, however they were asking for 5+% LI traffic when the common practice was 2-ish%. Our hardware was exceptional, we could trivially have done 100% at line rate with zero impact. The engineers all stepped aside, and finally: "Fuck those guys. They get their 2%."

It's one of the better ethical moments I've had in my career of working for _mostly_ very ethical companies (so obviously not any social media or crypto).
by chii | 2026-03-06 05:19:55+00:00
Doesn't make sense to stop hiring juniors.

If AI increases productivity, and juniors are cheaper to hire, but is just as able to hand off tasks to ai as a senior, then it makes more sense to hire more juniors to get them working with an AI as soon as possible. This produces output faster, for which more revenue could be derived.

So the only limiting factor is the possibility of not deriving more revenue - which is not related to the AI issue, but broader, macroeconomic issue(s).
by fiddlerwoaroof | 2026-03-06 05:21:20+00:00
Normalization is possible but not practical in a lot of cases: nearly every “legacy” database I’ve seen has at least one table that just accumulates columns because that was the quickest way to ship something.

Also, normalization solves a problem that’s present in OLTP applications: OLAP/Big Data applications generally have problems that are solved by denormalization.
by aprilthird2021 | 2026-03-06 05:22:15+00:00
> why should a government supplier and private company (Anthropic) and 1 man there - get to decide what an organization with elected officials can and can’t do?

Misunderstanding of what is happening. They have terms and conditions with their private property that anyone can choose to accept or decline. The DoD wants to them turn around and say these terms for a private company's contract around licensing of their private property are so egregious that the government and all government contract holders should be forced out of using any products by that company
by Reloading_Safin | 2026-03-06 05:23:00+00:00
Location:Dhaka,Bangladesh
Remote:Yes
Willing to relocate:Yes
Technologies: Node.js, TypeScript, Python, PostgreSQL , Cursosr, Claude code
Résumé/CV:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uv1Rofo3vhCsvSXz2eZ9NYPZ5QW...
Email:tanzim.safin.dev@gmail.com
by thoughtfulchris | 2026-03-06 05:24:11+00:00
I agree, agents struggle with TUIs. I do think this is easy to fix though (here's an interesting approach: https://github.com/remorses/ghostty-opentui). I think agents will have much better luck with TUIs than browsers.

The more interesting scenario IMO is having apps that are both TUIs AND CLIs where the agent uses the CLI but can pause and show the user a TUI for complex tasks where the user needs to input something.
by godelski | 2026-03-06 05:25:49+00:00
So much so that it's actually the expectation!

Country wants to expand its territory? Most likely place to extend to is those in its borders. It's literally the lowest hanging fruit.

Small country being invaded by large country? Who are they most likely to turn to? Does it seem that unlikely that they'd go to the biggest actor who doesn't like that country? The enemy of my enemy?

Coincidence? I think not! It's literally the most logical thing
by dotancohen | 2026-03-06 05:26:27+00:00
Yes, it is prudent to destroy the nuclear capability of a country that chants "Death to America" before they become an imminent threat.

Had the US waited until Iran were an eminent threat and then suffered a nuclear blast in one of her harbours, they would have nothing but "I told you so" to comfort them. Don't let your repulsion of war blind you to the fact that other cultures with different values don't have the same repulsion as you.
by bluegatty | 2026-03-06 05:26:55+00:00
He's easily gulled but he's also still very much in charge.

There is no script. They get him to believe and think certain things, also, looking for money on the backside. Deals, freebies.

I see Trump Plazas all over the Gulf after this is over if he does not have a hard landing, which is also very possible.
by TZubiri | 2026-03-06 05:27:29+00:00
the issue with this Stallmanian view on IP is that IP predates software and solves an actual issue.

I don't think Stallman has a real proposal to how innovation can be incentivized and compensated.

Take the example of medical innovations, sure big pharma is bad, but if they don't get to monetize their inventions, how will R&D get funded?

If you destroy IP and allow everyone to clone whatever, you will have a great result in the short term, then no one will continue R&D
by nomas_research | 2026-03-06 05:28:47+00:00
Hi guys, if you need sanitized&real-time SEC Form 3,4,5 13F, company_facts, Failure-To-Deliver data
for training your Model or simple data fetching. I have implemented a cheap/free solution. I host everything on AWS: EC2, RDS(All sanitized SEC public data), SES. So I am open to buy-out offer as well.
by kstenerud | 2026-03-06 05:28:51+00:00
Always sandbox your agent.

- It prevents your agent from doing too much damage should an exploit exist.

- The agent's built-in "sandboxing" causes agents to keep asking permission for every damn thing, to the point where you just automatically answer "yes" to everything, and thus lose whatever benefits its sandbox had.

It's why I wrote yoloAI: https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai
by nikkwong | 2026-03-06 05:29:00+00:00
I feel like I do a lot of see-sawing on this issue; deciding it will displace a lot of coding jobs, then thinking it won’t, and here and to.

Today I was debugging a specific part of code where we were applying a map to some api response incorrectly. I asked AI to help me with it, and it kept insisting that the payload, which is polymorphic, may be of a specific type, which is why we were seeing the bug (this is a simplification of course). After going back and forth, i wasn’t getting anywhere and started debugging myself more deeply. I realized something about the state of our system, which is a result of something way upstream, was causing the issue. Without this insight, the bug wouldnt be fixable. In retrospect, I don’t know if this is a problem that AI could reasonably be able to solve, even if it were far more capable. It requires knowledge about the entire state of the system across multiple code bases and relies on some sorta not well documented hand-wavy agreements across code bases.

Maybe AI can do these soon, but it can’t do them now, and I think that’s why a lot of developers still have jobs. I’d admit that many people work on CRUD apps that aren’t very sophisticated and those jobs may be ripe pickings for LLMs. And even getting rid of just those jobs could cause massive displacement in the market. But I would guess that a lot of FAANG level work with sophisticated codebases will be here for a few more years just based on some sorts of complexities that i have trouble understanding how LLMs would be able to grasp based on the way they reason.
by hellojesus | 2026-03-06 05:30:03+00:00
HN was one of the best places for finding cited research regarding covid and the mrna tech at the time.

With all the other conflicting information floating around online, it was a breath of fresh air to come to HN and see articles describing exactly how mrna works and why it was likely not a health risk, complete with thoughtful discussion. I'm too lazy to go look up citations and reference those old posts, so you can take this as anecdotal.
by godelski | 2026-03-06 05:31:08+00:00
I think the funniest part is the fact that all the western countries are even afraid to recognize Taiwan's independence. It's a much better argument to say Korea or Japan are ruled by the US (and Korea and Japan absolutely hate one another!).

Does the US have influence in Taiwan? Certainly! But if that meant Taiwan was the US's puppet then Taiwan would simultaneously be China's puppet. Schrödinger's Vassal
by hombre_fatal | 2026-03-06 05:31:24+00:00
How would you know if all software written in the last six months shipped X% faster and was Y% better?

Why would you think you have your finger on the pulse of general software trends like that when you use the same, what, dozen apps every week?

Just looking at my own productivity, as mere sideprojects this month, I've shipped my own terminal app (replaced iTerm2), btrfs+luks NAS system manager, overhauled my macOS gamepad mapper for the app store, and more. All fully tested and really polished, yet I didn't write any code by hand. I would have done none of that this month without AI.

You'd need some real empirics to pick up productivity stories like mine across the software world, not vibes.
by throwaw12 | 2026-03-06 05:31:28+00:00
People who are saying they're not seeing productivity boost, can you please share where is it failing?

Because, I am terrified by the output I am getting while working on huge legacy codebases, it works. I described one of my workflow changes here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47271168 but in general compared to old way of working I am saving half of the steps consistently, whether its researching the codebase, or integrating new things, or even making fixes. I have stopped writing code, occasionally I jump into the changes proposed by LLM and make manual edits if it is feasible, otherwise I revert changes and ask it to generate again but based on my learnings from the past rejected output

I am terrified about what's coming
by linsomniac | 2026-03-06 05:32:07+00:00
>still only marginally faster.

Is it? A couple days ago I had it build tooling for a one-off task I need to run, it wrote ~800 lines of Python to accomplish this, in <30m. I found it was too slow, so I got it to convert it to run multiple tasks in parallel in another prompt. Would have taken a couple days for me to build from hand, given the number of interruptions I have in the average day. This isn't a one-off, it's happening all the time.
Ask HN: Do you have a good solution for isolated workspaces per project?
by straydusk | 2026-03-06 05:33:13+00:00
I often work on 2-3 projects at once. They each have some combination of:
- terminal windows
- browser for testing
- browser for research, brainstorming, etc
- documents & finder windows
- various tools (expo, etc)

I have a lot of trouble keeping these separate. I use MacOS - you can have many desktops, but they're all in the same workspace. I think what I was is something like tmux for my whole computer, where I can switch away from a project and come back and be where I left off, with only the content from that project.

I actually tried to build this myself as the OS level, but Mac seems to lock everything down pretty hard.

Anybody have a good solution?
by cpt1138 | 2026-03-06 05:33:16+00:00
I ordered something from a Chinese company and they quoted me 5USD per unit and 35USD shipping. I accepted and the units were shipped and delivered and of excellent quality.

Sometime later FedEx sends me a weird bill for some random seeming amount of money I owed. They had a link or email or something to basically refuse to pay. I did refuse to pay. The shipper ended up communicating with me to determine I was going to refuse to pay and I found where Fedex had on the website that indicated the shipper was responsible for all fees. I assume the randomness of it was related to tariffs but I wasn't going to pay anything like what they sent me.

I do hope that some repercussions come of these terrible economic policies and the shipper gets their money back from Fedex, but as a company or as an individual I don't think a company's policy to send random bills after delivery is valid either.
by CamelCaseCondo | 2026-03-06 05:33:42+00:00
During lockdown I started growing clementine from seed. One of the interesting details of this genus is polyembryonism: multiple seedlings emerging from one seed. Apparently, one of the seedlings will be a clone of the motherplant and the rest will be the product of pollination/genetic reshuffling. My clementine seeds all had 2 seedlings per seed but other attempts (with lemon I think) yielded 3 or more).

During my reading I came across a lot of contradictory info about the origin of the clementine: some papers say it’s an unknown hybrid, other clearly state it’s a mutation instead of a hybrid. So it’s interesting to read the hybrid parentage in this triangle, stated with confidence.