MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bombcar | 2026-03-02 21:04:54+00:00
"Block" games existed in the 90s, perhaps, but Minecraft is from 2009.

"Factorio" type puzzles may have existed, but nothing of that detail until 2016.

Part of the big advancements of the 80-90s was that the technology was advancing insanely quickly, which meant that things that were simply impossible a year ago were commonplace next year.

LEGO still exists, but the Lego of 2026 is not the Lego of the 90s (for good or ill).

Toy cars existed in the 80s, but the Cars franchise started in 2006.

Part of the problem is it's hard to see what will be huge in 20 years that already exists today.

You also have "sideways cannibalization" where something in one area never really expands to another: Harvest Moon never moved to PC/Mac and so there was an opening that Stardew Valley took advantage of, and now has moved way beyond. In a way it's "the same thing locked in time" in another it's not.

What do they say about there being only seven stories?
Ask HN: Would engineers be interested in a technical prep consultant?
by TechPrepper | 2026-03-02 21:04:59+00:00
Hi, apologies if this is the wrong thing to post, please delete as needed.

I've been a technical recruiter for 10+ years at major FAANG companies and startups, working on niche specialized roles. I used to come to Hacker News regularly to check "Who Wants To Be Hired," as I always like a more independent hacker mindset in engineers.

Would engineers here on Hacker News be interested in any interview prep consultation? I've been thinking about taking a sabbatical to travel, but I would stay active with work by offering consulting on technical prep and interview help.

I'm more just testing the waters here, but I would be open to doing a few free prep calls with anyone who has interviews lined up. The only ask is I would want updates on how thing went, and what you think the helpw as worth.
by m463 | 2026-03-02 21:05:19+00:00
I think people also overlook opportunities to talk... at their peril.

I remember going to a motel (they actually had cabins) to reserve a place for relatives coming into town. The owner was a nice guy, and he ran the whole place himself.

I took the girlfriend with me, drove over and we walked over to talk to him. As I started the conversation, you could see he took pride in his place and he was a garrulous guy with sort of a twinkle in his eye.

"How much will this cost?!" the girlfriend blurted out.

All of a sudden the blossoming conversation ground to a halt, as he put his hand on the back of his neck and started thinking about what a cheap room would go for.

We talked about it later, sort of like "I think we were all starting to form a relationship at the start of the conversation, and we lost an opportunity"

I think all of us have these opportunities to form a relationship with lots of people we interact with every day, and we can allow it or deny it.
by PaulHoule | 2026-03-02 21:05:25+00:00
Also in my dealing with birds and animals of all sorts I've come to believe that they are very capable in many forms of cognition without the use of language.

There was a fad called "structuralism" that liked to imagine that such and such is "structured like a language" but then when we got a paradigm for language it was one of those "normal science" paradigms that Kuhn warned you about, like you could write papers grounded in the Chomsky theory for a lifetime but it wouldn't help you learn to read Chinese more quickly or speak German without an accent or program a computer to parse tweets. That is, the structure of language is absolutely useless except for writing papers about linguistics -- and the "language instinct" becomes some peripheral that grafts onto an animal but you need the rest of the animal for it to work.

Now LLMs may not be a model for how we do it but they are certainly going to bring back structuralist and "wordcel" positions because they do seem to show, somehow, that "language is all you need" to accomplish whatever it is LLMs accomplish.
by Igrom | 2026-03-02 21:05:31+00:00
Location: Zürich, Switzerland, Europe/EU

Remote: Nice to see. Worldwide okay, depending on arrangement.

Willing to relocate: Poland/Switzerland, optionally China, but depends on the offer.

Technologies: Strong with distributed systems, networking (SD-WAN, VPN, ZTNA), authorization systems, web/network security and more. Backend: Rust, Typescript, Python, C#, Go and a variety of other interpreted and compiled languages. Frontend: React, Angular, Tailwind and so on. Relational and document databases. Data analytics. AWS and Azure. China specialist and interpreter, can speak German.

Résumé/CV: https://sowinski.blue/files/cv.pdf

Email: igor at sowinski.blue

I have 9+ years of experience as a software engineer and technology-oriented China specialist. Based in Switzerland. I have designed and implemented a large part of internal production systems at a well-known international printing company, and currently develop zero-trust solutions at a Swiss networking company.

I've been engaged with China since 2015. In 2020, I've started a degree in Chinese Studies at the University of Zürich. In 2024, I have finished a scholarship at the BFSU, the best language university in China. I have interpreted between Polish, English and Mandarin Chinese for the Polish Trade & Investment Agency at the Polish-Chinese Economic Forum in Shanghai (see pics on LinkedIn). I also keep tabs on technology and Chinese cybersecurity laws through Chinese sources and keep in touch with open source enthusiasts based in Mainland China and in Taiwan.
by DriveTime | 2026-03-02 21:05:37+00:00
I'm on HN mainly to keep up with surveillance and privacy news and tech. I have a number of sources I pull from, including:

OSINT blogs and resources like indicator news, Bellingcat
404 Media
Individual Blogs like michaflee.com, Zach wittackers "This week in security"
Courtwatch.news
Privacy related forums like privacyguides.org
Academic sources like Workshop on Privacy in Electronic Society, etc etc.

I'll spin up an n8n instance at some point to sift through everything I find.
by D-Machine | 2026-03-02 21:05:58+00:00
The use of "him" by GP is extremely unusual IMO, and I suspect is odd for anyone with English as their native language. The current convention among normal people seems to me to be to avoid pronouns other than "it" with these tools, and generally just use the name. The name is not really relevant: like, sure, in some contexts we think of ships as "she/her", and may prefer feminine names for them, but if you used e.g. "she" rather than "it" to refer to the Titanic or any other ship with a female name, this is going to cause some double-takes / disfluent comprehension in the vast majority of native speakers in most cases.

Only if you imagine e.g. some stereotypical pirate with an eyepatch slapping the hull and saying something like "Aye, but she weathered the storm, as she always does" might this feel normal. Or, maybe if you are a Redditor and trying to make it your AI boyfriend / girlfriend, you can use he/him or some other neo-pronoun, but this is currently abnormal and not the general context.

And the fact that you can make the model act as any gender again shows why choosing "him" as some default here is strange. Absent any specific context, the choice of "him" here is poorly justified.
by estimator7292 | 2026-03-02 21:06:02+00:00
The difference is between "I can tell this story better/more engaging/more entertaining/more realistic" vs "let's cash in on the success this movie had five years ago"

The Wizard of Oz was a new interpretation of Baum's original story. They put enormous effort into making the new film better than other interpretations, of which there were several. Which is why it's a successful, beloved classic!

The same really can't be said of this week's Marvel/DC remake of whatever they made a few years ago. It's just about being a cash grab and nothing else.

P.S. If you've never heard of the sequel 'Return to Oz', do yourself a favor and watch it without doing any research. Just go in straight blind, it really enhances the experience. If you drink, keep a bottle nearby, you'll need it.
by castral | 2026-03-02 21:06:03+00:00
Maybe it is the framing of the step as a "reversion" or "roll-back" rather than "spike" or "prototype" that is causing that sense. Personally, I would never throw away the code I spent time and effort writing just to stick to a systematized refactoring method like this "Mikado." I don't think the advice is unsound, and I have done exactly this many times in my own career, but instead of throwing it away I would shelve it, put it in a branch, write a document about what has been/needs to be done, and write a corresponding tech debt or feature/fix ticket for it with the new and realistic estimate.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2026-03-02 21:06:07+00:00
i bought a magic keyboard for my 11" ipad pro and ultimately didn't use it much. it does have a traditional laptop-style hinge, but the way the ipad mounts to the case brings it forward over the keyboard more than with a regular laptop. the hinge also doesn't allow for a very wide range of motion (even compared to macbooks). finally, the center of gravity is really high compared to a laptop which makes it awkward to use as a literal laptop or when lying down.

it definitely looks cool (i could see the design having been inspired by the OG Mac and 20th Anniversary Mac) but works best on a stable surface; plus if you want to use it purely as a tablet, you're left with a big clunky keyboard case to deal with.

the idea of a laptop/tablet combo is cool but i haven't seen the concept executed very successfully from either starting point.
by 10000truths | 2026-03-02 21:06:30+00:00
> The network file system to host is usually pretty slow no? That was my impression.

NFS doesn't have to be slow. If you avoid traversing the TCP/IP stack, performance is fine. Linux guests can use vsock to communicate with the hypervisor directly, and macOS hosts can use the Virtualization framework to map a guest vsock to a host UNIX socket.
by recursive | 2026-03-02 21:06:53+00:00
> Hard to share the things people use at the same time.

Yes, but if it's your goal to have fewer cars, then you'd make an effort not to need to use it at the same time. If that's not what you're trying to do, fine. My wife and I share a car. It's slightly inconvenient sometimes, but really not bad at all. For our particular life anyway.

So here we're talking about iPads. Some families need multiple devices for various reasons. Some don't except for the fact that iPads don't support accounts. No one's saying you would have to use them. But you're not allowed to.
by hinkley | 2026-03-02 21:07:19+00:00
Mikado is really only powerful when dealing with badly coupled code. Outside of that context you’re kinda cosplaying (like people peppering Patterns in code without an actual plan).

Refactoring is generally useful for annealing code enough that you can reshape it into separate concerns. But when the work hardening has been going on far too long there usually seems like there’s no way to get from A->D without just picking a day when you feel invincible, getting high on caffeine, putting on your uptempo playlist and telling people not to even look at you until you file your +1012 -872 commit.

I used to be able to do those before lunch. I also found myself to be the new maintainer of that code afterward. That doesn’t work when you’re the lead and people need to use you to brainstorm getting unblocked or figuring out weird bugs (especially when calling your code). All the plates fall at that point.

It was less than six months after I figured out the workaround that I learned the term Mikado, possibly when trying to google if anyone else had figured out what I had figured out. I still like my elevator pitch better than theirs:

Work on your “top down” refactor until you realize you’ve found yet another whole call tree you need to fix, and feel overwhelmed/want to smash your keyboard. This is the Last Straw. Go away from your keyboard until you calm down. Then come back, stash all your existing changes, and just fix the Last Straw.

For me I find that I’m always that meme of the guy giving up just before he finds diamonds in the mine. The Last Straw is always 1-4 changes from the bottom of the pile of suck, and then when you start to try to propagate that change back up the call stack, you find 75% of that other code you wrote is not needed, and you just need to add an argument or a little conditional block here and there. So you can use your IDE’s local history to cherry pick a couple of the bits you already wrote on the way down that are relevant, and dump the rest.

But you have to put that code aside to fight the Sunk Cost Fallacy that’s going to make you want to submit that +1012 instead of the +274 that is all you really needed. And by the way is easier to add more features to in the next sprint.
by hoherd | 2026-03-02 21:07:26+00:00
I was also going to point out how awesome the Steam Deck multi-user experience is:

1. Turn on Steam Deck
2. Open Steam on your phone
3. Scan QR code
4. Choose whether or not to stay signed in on the Steam Deck

It is such a great UX that makes using the hardware very easy for any random Steam user who picks it up.

I'm sure the security angle would be something a lot of people would bring up, but if iPad had this feature, they could make great use of Apple's Data Protection Classes[1] to ensure that all per-user data is encrypted when that specific user is not logged in and actively using the device.

1. https://support.apple.com/guide/security/data-protection-cla...
by CloakHQ | 2026-03-02 21:07:30+00:00
The "don't sync, own" model makes a lot of sense. We were thinking about it wrong - trying to push state out to a shared file, when the cleaner move is to pull it in on demand.

The SPEC.md as the extraction target after a feature is done is a nice touch. In our case the tricky part is that browser automation state is partly external - you have sessions, cookies, proxy assignments that live outside the codebase. So the "ground truth" we needed wasn't just about code decisions but about runtime state too. Ended up logging that separately.

Checking out agent-doc, the snapshot-based diff to avoid re-triggering on comments is clever. Does it handle cases where two agents edit the same doc around the same time, or is the ownership model strict enough that this doesn't come up?
Show HN: Ed – A modern take on ancient codebook technology
by smalltorch | 2026-03-02 21:07:48+00:00
ED is a new way to protect your messages in a old way.

The typical codebook comes with many challenges. They are hard to transport, hard to update, distribute. They do have one solid feature however. If the codebook can be kept secret, it will not be broken with compute.

ED attempts to solve these issues.

The words database included in the repo is a collection of over 2million common words, phrases, people, places and things. Each entry is tied to a unique string of numbers. To generate a 'key' we simply shuffle the map using secrets.randbelow() function. This is important as it's using device level entropy. Each entry reaches the 2million+! Permutation equally.

The combination of shuffles is now considered your key. This is what you can share with Bob.

Because each entry has multiple entries, based on how common a word or phrase is. You can send the same exact message many times without it ever repeating.

Alice and Bob can also generate long term keys that can be rotated. This comes at the cost of key size, but a 365 day key schedule is still only around 4gb.

Because of the ability to compress a long phrase into a single entry, this codebook shrinks the data efficiently.

Once the two ends are established, you should be able to privately communicate over any channel, including public channels.

Example Gallery: https://postimg.cc/gallery/Gs23JQW
by wlesieutre | 2026-03-02 21:07:54+00:00
Finally moved on from my 12 mini, but I still have it sitting in my office and when I pick it up I think "wow this feels like a phone from the future."

Wish they made a new mini instead of the Air. A friend bought one of those, and frankly I just don't get it.

The screen is too big to use it one-handed, and thickness is really the only one of the three dimension of the phone that I don't care about how small it is (within reason). They probably spent billions of dollars shaving off half a millimeter and what do we get with that technology? Phone that's too big.

If this keeps up in another 5 years I'll be looking at flip phones and a separate camera.
by -Brian- | 2026-03-02 21:08:08+00:00
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We are actively filling this role and will respond to applicants.

Details and how to apply:
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by gf000 | 2026-03-02 21:08:45+00:00
I absolutely love Rust, but due to the space it occupies there is simply more to specify in code, and more things to get wrong for a stochastic LLM.

Lifetimes are a global property and LLMs are not particularly good at reasoning about them compared to local ones.

Most applications don't need low level memory control, so this complexity is better pushed to runtime.

There are lots of managed languages with good/even stronger type systems than Rust, paired with a good modern GC.
by yacthing | 2026-03-02 21:08:49+00:00
There are inefficiencies with both. In a perfect world, yeah, it'd be more efficient to not have capitalism. You'd just have to get around inefficient labor allocation, increased fraud, etc.

At least for capitalism, the amount extracted by ad companies is known and taxed.

It's not fair to compare things in practice (captialism), and in theory (whatever you're suggesting).
by ksk385 | 2026-03-02 21:09:10+00:00
Location: Greater New York Area
Remote: Yes (US-based)
Willing to relocate: No

Services: Healthcare data engineering, Clinical data pipelines, AI/ML integrations, Cloud architecture, Full-stack development, Technical Discovery

About Me: I'm Karan Krishnani, an independent software consultant with almost 20 years of experience. For the last several years I've been focused on healthcare tech, building HIPAA-compliant data pipelines, clinical analytics infrastructure, and AI applications for organizations like Tuva Health, NYU Langone, and VA.gov. I work best as a fractional embedded team member for healthtech companies that need senior technical help without a full-time hire.

Technologies: Languages: JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Java | Frontend: React/Next.js, TailwindCSS | Backend: Node.js/Express, Django, GraphQL | Cloud: AWS, Azure, GCP, Vercel, Supabase | Data: Databricks, Snowflake, dbt, DuckDB, Tuva Data Model | AI/ML: RAG pipelines, OpenAI, Vector Stores, Hugging Face | Other: Docker, Terraform, DataDog, Git

Recent work: Tuva Health (Principal Architect, HEDIS quality measurement platform, millions of patient records), KeyWell (HEDIS measure logic in Databricks), NYU Langone (provider scheduling), VA.gov (AI chatbot).

Résumé/CV: https://karankrishnani.com/resume
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/karan-krishnani
Email: karan.krishnani@gmail.com
by CloakHQ | 2026-03-02 21:09:12+00:00
The worktree approach is interesting - keeps the filesystem separation clean. The parallelism tradeoff makes sense if the tasks are truly independent, which in practice is most of the time anyway.

What does your spec file look like when you kick off a new agent? Curious if you start from scratch each time or carry over context from previous sessions on the same project.
by roughly | 2026-03-02 21:09:31+00:00
> No equity holders got anything out of the liquidation - whether big or small

This statement is not supported by the link you posted, nor any other reporting I've seen on the matter. What I have seen is that TSG is senior to all of the other equity holders, so if there's money to be had, they're getting it before the small holders.

Also from your link:

> TSG was promised an 18% compound return on its investment (which means the amount they’re owed grows by 18% each year, with each year building on the last).

> TSG’s preference shares entitle it to an 18% compound return on its £213 million investment. That return has snowballed over time. By 2024, it had grown to around £801 million.

I can't say for sure, but I don't believe those terms were available to the average investor.
by chipotle_coyote | 2026-03-02 21:09:45+00:00
I mean, you can take your iPad back to Apple and have them replace the battery, you know. For my current one (a "4th generation" Air) that'd be $120, which is not cheap, but it's cheaper than replacing it for $700 and a lot less stressful than trying to replace the battery myself.

(Having said that, I'm not ruling out replacing it, but I don't think I'll be inclined to do that until they stop updating its version of iPadOS.)
Show HN: IndieMe – AI for music artist brand identity and release strategy
by JY058 | 2026-03-02 21:09:56+00:00
Hi HN,

My team and I (a group of independent music artists and developers) have been building IndieMe, an AI system that helps artists define their identity while planning releases.

A pattern we kept seeing in independent music is that artists don’t necessarily struggle with making songs. They struggle with clarity — who they are, what they stand for, what their visual world looks like, and who they’re actually speaking to. Without that foundation, release marketing tends to feel scattered.

So we built a structured onboarding workflow that models an “Artist Profile” first — including target audience, visual direction, color palette, narrative positioning, and messaging backbone. From that profile, the system generates release strategies, content ideas, and actionable timelines that stay consistent with the artist’s identity.

Under the hood, we focus on structured outputs instead of open-ended chat. The goal is to generate modular, editable building blocks (identity system → strategy modules → task plan) rather than walls of AI text.

We’re officially launching now with a free tier and Pro subscription, and are actively testing whether artists are willing to pay for identity-first strategy tooling.

Would really appreciate feedback — especially from:
- indie musicians
- people building AI-native SaaS
- anyone thinking about identity modeling/content planning for creators

Happy to answer questions.

https://indie-me.ai

— Jason
by daveguy | 2026-03-02 21:10:11+00:00
The point is accuracy. He literally can only mandate the federal government. Everyone else knows it's the Gulf of Mexico in every state in the US and every English speaking country in the world.

I haven't heard of any states bothering to reprint maps. They all know his whole clown show charade will be over in the blink of an eye.

You could pretend he has more power than he does, but what would be the point?