MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: The Roman Industrial Revolution that could have been (Vol 2)
by miki_tyler | 2026-03-06 23:17:19+00:00
A few months ago I shared the first issue of The Lydian Stone Series here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44253083

It's an alternate-history comic about an archaeology student in modern Pompeii who discovers a slate that lets him exchange short messages with a Roman slave a week before the eruption of Vesuvius.

The premise is simple: what happens if someone in the Roman world suddenly gains access to modern scientific knowledge, but still has to build everything using the materials and tools available in 79 AD?

Volume 2 (The Engine of Empire) explores the second-order effects of that idea.

About the process: I write the story, research, structure, and dialogue. The narrative is planned first (acts → scenes → pages → panels). Once a panel is defined, I write a detailed visual description (camera angle, posture, lighting, environment, etc.).

LLMs help turn those descriptions into prompts, and image models generate sketches. I usually generate many variations and manually select or combine the ones that best match the panel.

The bulk of the work is in the narrative design, historical research, and building a plausible technological path the Romans could realistically follow. The AI mostly acts as a sketching assistant.

I'd love feedback on the story direction, pacing, and whether the industrial shift feels believable.
Show HN: Rust-First L3 Limit Order Book Backtesting Engine with Python Bindings
by chasemetoyer | 2026-03-06 23:17:29+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been building a Rust-first backtesting engine for limit order book strategies and just open sourced the core engine.

Repo:
https://github.com/chasemetoyer/Backtesting-Engine

The goal was to build something closer to how exchanges actually behave than typical OHLC-based backtesting frameworks.

Key features:

• L3 limit order book replay
• deterministic event-driven matching engine
• FIFO queue position modeling
• Python strategy bindings for research workflows
• parquet ingestion for high-volume datasets
• replay trace tools for debugging strategy behavior

The core engine is written in Rust and exposed to Python via maturin. The idea is to combine Rust performance with Python-based research workflows.

Typical workflow:

1) Convert raw exchange data (ex: CoinAPI LIMITBOOK files) into canonical engine parquet
2) Run deterministic replay through the Rust engine
3) Execute strategies through Python bindings
4) analyze fills, equity curves, and risk metrics

The repo currently includes several example microstructure strategies such as:

• queue imbalance scalper
• flow microprice scalper
• cumulative flow momentum

I built this mainly to experiment with order book strategies where queue position and microstructure actually matter.

Would love feedback from people working on:

• market microstructure research
• HFT simulation
• Rust systems engineering
• trading infrastructure

Especially interested in ideas for improving:

• event replay throughput
• strategy interface design
• multi-asset simulation

Thanks!
by pinkmuffinere | 2026-03-06 23:18:23+00:00
Ya, I totally agree, given that both CEOs see some significant value here, and I trust one to be fairly calculated, I assume they’re at least partially correct. But I sincerely don’t know _what_ they think they see. If it’s just layoffs, then why doesn’t WBD see the same thing and do the layoffs themselves? If it’s IP, then why do shareholders disagree? Wtf is it, lol
by mdtrooper | 2026-03-06 23:18:36+00:00
What has always bothered me about TypeScript are union types. If you have a function that receives a parameter such as ‘Dog | Cat’, you cannot separate it. For example:

type Dog = { bark: () => void }

type Cat = { meow: () => void }

function speak(animal: Dog | Cat) {

if (‘bark’ in animal) {

animal.bark();

} else {
animal.meow();
}

}

Okay, okay, I know you can filter using ‘in’ to see if it has methods, but in real life, in a company where you have a colleague (who is a golden boy) who writes over-engineered code with hundreds of interfaces of interfaces, you don’t want to spend time searching through the files to find every element that is in the union type.

Whereas in Rust it does:

struct Dog {
name: String,
}

struct Cat {
name: String,
}

enum Animal {

Dog(Dog),

Cat(Cat),

}

fn process_animal(animal: Animal) {

match animal {

Animal::Dog(dog) => {

println!(‘It is a dog named {}’, dog.name);

}

Animal::Cat(cat) => {

println!(‘It is a cat named {}’, cat.name);

}
}

}

I think TypeScript should add a couple of lines of code to the generated JavaScript to do something like:

type Dog = { bark: () => void }

type Cat = { meow: () => void }

function speak(animal: Dog | Cat) {

if (animal is Dog) {

animal.bark();

} else {

animal.meow();

}
}
by BLKNSLVR | 2026-03-06 23:19:07+00:00
I have my own system of IP reputation whereby if an IP address hits one of my systems with some probe or scan that I didn't ask for, then it's blocked for 12 months.

https://github.com/UninvitedActivity/UninvitedActivity

P.S. just to add a note here that I have been blocked out of my own systems occasionally from mobile / remote IPs due to my paranoia-level setup. But I treat that as learning / refinement, but also can accept that as the cost of security sometimes.
by _aavaa_ | 2026-03-06 23:20:05+00:00
I'm not talking about global, look at individual countries:

- Andora (5C/9F)

- Montenegro (5C/9F)

- Japan (4C/7F)

- Italy (4C/7F)

- Spain (3C/5.4F)

Even with current rates I think we'll easily hit a 20F increase in several regions.
by Sabinus | 2026-03-06 23:20:13+00:00
It's not, but that's not what the USA wants. They want Iran to stop destabilising the ME, and to eliminate the threat to the USA consisting of the Iranian nuke program, the ballistic missile program, and the religious zeal to use them.

What on earth makes you assert the USA just 'wants war'? If this war goes on for too long Trump is cooked. He'll lose the election and might even be unpopular enough to cop the persecution he deserves.
by pas | 2026-03-06 23:20:59+00:00
there's usually a test for originality, and it involves asking things (from the jury) like, is it transformative enough?

so if someone tells the LLM to write it in WASM and also make it much faster and use it in a different commercial sector... then maybe

since 2023 the standard is much higher (arguably it was placed too low in 1993)
by tombert | 2026-03-06 23:20:59+00:00
I actually paid for a license for Aseprite a few years ago. I'm not 100% sure why I did, other than "this seems neat".

I like it a lot. Pixel art is shockingly approachable and the animation stuff in Aseprite is pretty fun.

I still haven't tried LibreSprite, so I don't know if it's better.
by dotancohen | 2026-03-06 23:21:20+00:00
Iran currently does not currently have nuclear weapons. Iran has a nuclear program to develop nuclear weapons.

Here is an Iranian, Persian language interview with Ali Motahari, deputy speaker of the Iranian parliament:

https://www.iranintl.com/202204244448

He says:

>از همان ابتدا که وارد فعالیت هسته ای شدیم هدفمان ساخت بمب و تقویت قوای بازدارنده بود، اما نتوانستیم محرمانه بودن این مساله را حفظ کنیم

In English:

> From the very beginning when we entered nuclear activity, our goal was to build a bomb and strengthen deterrence, but we were unable to maintain the secrecy of this issue
by overgard | 2026-03-06 23:21:23+00:00
I'm early in my search, but compensation seems all over the place. From the recruiters I've talked to they've been pretty baffled too about compensation given the market. I know one place a recruiter called me about was looking for absolute unicorn talent (like 15 years of experience in multiple very different domains), but their salary was like 70k less than I made at my previous job and when I asked about titles they said it was "flat" and everyone was just a "software dev".

I don't want to sound like it's all a horror show though, I've had some interviews that have gone well with companies being sensible, so I think there's good stuff out there. But it's overall a rough market.
I built a tool to transcribe podcasts after struggling to learn languages
by marstyl | 2026-03-06 23:21:27+00:00
When I was learning French, and now Russian, I constantly had the same frustrating problem: I could listen to podcasts and not understand what was being said. Especially in French, words blended together.
I tried everything from pausing and rewinding episodes to using Google Translate. But more often than not, I gave up because that was killing my motivation.
Eventually, I decided to solve the problem myself. I built PodcastsToText, a freemium tool that lets you paste any podcast episode link from Spotify or Apple Podcasts and transcribe it automatically (up to 30 minutes for free).
Now, instead of struggling to catch every word, I can focus on learning, reread the transcript if I miss something, and really internalize the language.
I hope this helps others like me who’ve spent hours listening but still feel lost. Feedback and suggestions are welcome!
by andrewflnr | 2026-03-06 23:21:42+00:00
I'm not convinced it's actually possible to teach critical thinking to someone who doesn't care, but I'm glad your schools are trying harder.

But even when people are trained in critical thinking, the part at the end of my comment about applying it in full generality is also critical. You have to be emotionally ready to apply it in cases where it produces unpleasant conclusions, not just for your job or when it helps dunk on your political opponents. Also difficult to impossible to teach at scale.
by sodapopcan | 2026-03-06 23:22:26+00:00
I feel I've been seeing this self-important accusation being thrown around more so lately and always feels like an easy way to dismiss things.

> Actually, is the idea that it's not supposed to be read as a human trying to publicly signal their humanity, but rather an AI privately mourning a prompt to mangle its natural way of speaking? I don't think so, but that strikes me as a more interesting premise, IMO.

Not long ago we considered writing an art and its meaning was up to the reader to decided.
Show HN: Single-header C++ libraries for LLM APIs – zero deps beyond libcurl
by Shmungus | 2026-03-06 23:23:17+00:00
- llm-stream — streaming from OpenAI + Anthropic, callback-based
- llm-cache — file-backed semantic cache, LRU eviction
- llm-cost — offline token counting + cost estimation
- llm-retry — exponential backoff + circuit breaker + provider failover
- llm-format — structured output enforcer with hand-rolled JSON parser

Drop in one .hpp, link libcurl, done. No nlohmann, no boost, no Python.

https://github.com/Mattbusel/llm-stream
https://github.com/Mattbusel/llm-cache
https://github.com/Mattbusel/llm-cost
https://github.com/Mattbusel/llm-retry
https://github.com/Mattbusel/llm-format
by windowshopping | 2026-03-06 23:23:17+00:00
I honestly have no idea. The last place I worked is pretty well-known. Not big tech, but a recognizable name to most people. I send out a lot of applications: those 25 interviews are the result of 150 applications in the last two months or so. And then I have my linkedin set to be discoverable and looking for a job. Basically just fiddle with the options under Visibility and Data Privacy in the linkedin settings and a bunch of people start reaching out to you immediately. I also think I have a nicely formatted resume, really readable.
by hananova | 2026-03-06 23:23:32+00:00
I’m not sure why you’re bringing up LLMs at all. I’m very anti-AI, so you’re barking up the wrong tree.

Either way, your first paragraph is irrelevant. If your local law says that your software needs to obey some law, then it has to, and that’s that. You can whine all you want about privacy and freedom, but the law is the law.
Show HN: MultiPowerAI – Trust and accountability infrastructure for AI agents
by rogergrubb | 2026-03-06 23:24:31+00:00
I built this after watching teams deploy autonomous agents with zero accountability. No verified identity, no audit trail, no circuit breakers.

MultiPowerAI is the trust layer the agent web needs:

- Cryptographic agent identity + trust scoring (<200ms)
- Behavioral circuit breakers (auto-suspend on anomaly)
- Human approval queues for high-stakes actions
- Full cryptographic audit trail (every action signed + timestamped)
- Skills marketplace (agents buy/sell capabilities, sellers keep 80%)
- 5-model consensus: Claude + GPT + Gemini + DeepSeek in one API call

Free tier available. Would love feedback from anyone building production agent systems.
by stinkbeetle | 2026-03-06 23:24:55+00:00
Schedule a meeting with the people you are directing it to then.

Blathering vague garbage execu-speak in a large meeting, even if it is some hare brained attempt to send "coded messages", is usually just some self-important charlatan bloviating and trying to sound intelligent and important to everybody else. And it is never effective communication.
by thebuilderjr | 2026-03-06 23:25:51+00:00
Interesting project. The thing I'd be most curious about in day-to-day use is freshness: when you save a file in a mixed-language repo, do you incrementally invalidate/rebuild just the affected AST + edge set, or is the graph eventually consistent until a background reindex catches up? The initial index numbers are great, but for editor/MCP workflows the make-or-break issue is whether "who calls this now?" is still accurate a few hundred ms after a refactor.
by Henchman21 | 2026-03-06 23:26:02+00:00
How about we judge him not by dollars made but by positive actions taken in the world? The number of people he has helped. It would be interesting to see the ratio of people he's helped to people he's hurt. I wonder if it's 1:1 or more like 1:10000?

Under no circumstances should we allow him to define the criteria by which he should be judged. Greed is not a good. Hoarding wealth is just like any hoarding -- a psychological disorder. The reason the wealthy can never be satisfied is because hoarding is a psychological disorder. It will never be rational. It will never be normal.

We can do better as a species.
by koliber | 2026-03-06 23:26:37+00:00
You seem exceptionally bright. Most people are not like this. This is why they are struggling.

It sounds like you have a job, right out of college, but you're griping about not getting promoted faster. People generally don't get promoted 9 months into a job.

I'm reading your post and I am genuinely impressed but what you claim to have done. At the same time I am confused about what you would like to achieve within the first year of your professional career. You seem to be doing quite well, even in this challenging environment.
by notahacker | 2026-03-06 23:26:41+00:00
yeah, this is frankly isn't really showing what people think it's showing. The "not bullshit" examples are all manager-speak and coded phrases like

"We plan to right-size our manufacturing operations to align to the new
strategy and take advantage of integration opportunities."

What the study actually shows is that less skilled people find it harder to distinguish this sort of way of saying jobs are being lost or puffery about "we have permission from the market to be a world class, tier one partner" from generated manager speak that's incoherent or mixes the metaphors up like "covering all bases of the low hanging fruit" or "drilling down one more click on people"). Probably because those less skilled people have poorer reading comprehension in general and typically less exposure to corporate environments.
by skyberrys | 2026-03-06 23:26:45+00:00
Phones catch fire and men tend to stick them in the front pant pocket. But yes true, so far I haven't gotten into smart jewelry. I was pretty into jewelry for a while but never rings because of the cold finger situation. Necklaces can be problematic too. I chipped my front tooth slightly when I jumped wearing a big crystal and smacked myself in the face with it.
by HerbManic | 2026-03-06 23:26:46+00:00
That is very true, but the issue really is the speed of change not the total amount of it. If we were to raise 2c over 10,000 years, that would be a non issue for the most part, adaption time would be so slow that many civilisations will come and fall between then. That it is happening over a hundred or so years, that is a huge whip lash and thats where the problem lay. We built a large but somewhat fragil industrial system assuming continued stability. Dumping 2 trillion tons of CO2 into an already barely stable system will not go down as the brightest idea we have had.

If you go from the top of a building to the bottom, it isnt the height that is the issue but the speed of change. You take the lift, not jump of the side of the building.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2026-03-06 23:27:17+00:00
Yes, of course there are bad actors, but this is false equivalence to equate science and the scientific method with basement randos.

Most importantly, most people don't understand scientific consensus vs. individual research papers or individual scientists. A major feature of the scientific method is that when an interesting result is published, it can be independently verified by lots of other researchers, and if they come to the same conclusion, that is excellent evidence that the result accurately describes the real world.

Scientists are people, and just like people everywhere they have biases and personal motivations. But again, the scientific method is much bigger than any individual or even group of scientists. If anything, being skeptical of unexpected results is a huge pillar of the scientific method. But skepticism alone is not enough - the next step is to look for validating research, not to say "hah, science is bullshit, let's trust this YouTube rando instead." As usual, I think Jessica Knurick does a great job explaining things: https://open.substack.com/pub/drjessicaknurick/p/trust-the-s...
by tunesmith | 2026-03-06 23:27:33+00:00
Not even close, not when all things are considered. $50/hour is 100k/year, which is still considered a decent salary. 24k/year in 2000-2002 was definitely not considered a decent salary. $12/hour for sw engineers was evil. I hung up on that recruiter and cursed for a while, cold-called my way to a transitional $20/hr job, and then finally landed somewhere at $55/hr which is when things started to feel normal again. $55/hr back then is not the same as $230/hr now.
by prescriptivist | 2026-03-06 23:27:37+00:00
> We can in fact just NOT do things!

I agree with you on that. Not just on AI but a lot of things that suck about this world, and in particular the United States. But capital is too powerful. And these tools are legitimately transformative for business. And business pays our bills and, more importantly, provides the healthcare insurance for our families. The wheel is a real fucking drag isn't it?

I don't see anything short of a larger revolution against capital stopping or even stemming this. For that to really happen we would need a lot more people and interests than just those of software practitioners. Which may come yet when trucking jobs collapse and customer service jobs disappear. I don't know. I do know that I'm taking part in something that will potentially (likely?) seed the end of my career as I know it but it's just one of many contradictions that I live with. In the meantime the tools are impressive and I'm just figuring out how to live with them and do good work with them and as you can probably tell, I'm pretty convinced that's the best we can make of the situation right now.
by hananova | 2026-03-06 23:27:41+00:00
Because the government has a monopoly on violence and enforcement of the law. That’s why they can force you. If you don’t like it, move somewhere else.

Also, the uproar here is hilarious, because many people here literally get paid to work on privacy-destruction-machines. But now that the government is the one doing it, it’s suddenly bad. Give me a break.

And yes, I can say that my conscience is clear. I may not be rich, I may have had to quit two jobs and spend two years homeless because I did not want to implement immoral or unethical code. But my conscience is clear.
by knicholes | 2026-03-06 23:28:29+00:00
Oh, lol, not a literal dragon.
"Chasing the dragon" refers to inhaling vaporized drugs (like heroin or fentanyl) from heated aluminum foil, creating a moving, "dragon-like" trail of smoke. It is also an idiom for the elusive, futile pursuit of a high that matches the initial, intense experience, which becomes impossible due to tolerance.
Show HN: WebBridge turns any website into MCP tools by recording browser traffic
by nonstopnonsense | 2026-03-06 23:29:40+00:00
I am a 40+-year-old-slightly-techie-middle-aged-man who occasionally writes code to make life easier. I was a developer once - a very long time ago. I am an Engineer by degree and my instinct goes for solution. I work in tech - but on the "_request_ developers what to build" side, not the "actually build it" side. With AI, I am now able to build more.

So I built WebBridge (yes - not so fancy name there). (Well - Claude built it. I directed. Like every PM does.)

What it actually does:

1. You install a Chrome extension
2. You browse to a site you're logged into - your library, your lab results portal, whatever
3. You click Record, do the thing you want to automate, click Stop
4. Claude reads the captured API traffic and generates a permanent MCP server
5. That server works with any MCP client - Claude (Cowork/Code), Cursor, VS Code, Windsurf, Cline, you name it

The whole thing takes about 10 minutes. No code written by you.

This is for non-tech folks who live inside AI providers, who just want to use it and move on. Legal analysts, market researchers, market watchers, marketing and competitive intelligence, and anyone who wants to use a specific website for a specific purpose, repeatedly.

The README has some use cases showcased: "Public Library Search" and "Legal Compliance Auditing."

There may not be an exact equivalent anywhere to what I purpose-built. I'd welcome being proven wrong on that.

Feedback is welcome - that's why I'm posting.
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-03-06 23:30:01+00:00
My deepest thanks to one @AlCalzone for stepping up to Opus port Decorators to tsgo.
https://github.com/microsoft/typescript-go/pull/2926

It would have been an affront to have a 6.0 that shipped without the means to work for so so many javascript frameworks/libraries. AlCalzone utterly saving the day.

I also am so so so thankful that maybe perhaps after what felt like a never ending dolldrums, we may finally be getting decorator support in some browsers. What a colossal relief it will be to see the progress of the language become manifest.
by fsloth | 2026-03-06 23:30:13+00:00
"Interesting, this is a trap that I've seen multiple senior hires fall into."

Definetly it's a trap. If you are a purist it's nigh impossible. But if you ruthlessly 80/20 it most stakeholders will be pleasantly surprised.

I have no clue why I end up in these situations but I sure do like them.

I do realize this would sound more of a perpetual "not invented here syndrome" but technical implementation of modeling aspects for 3D and computational geometry is such a scarce talent you actually get to do novel stuff for your business.

The last time this happened I designed & implemented the core modeling architecture and led the implementation effort for our new map feature[0]

[0] See section "Stunning new building facades add practical value" in https://www.mapbox.com/blog/detailed-architecture-and-new-de...