MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by menaerus | 2026-03-07 07:28:36+00:00
Why not? Even without LLMs it is technically feasible to build custom database engine that performs much better than general database kernels. And we see this happening all the time, with timeseries, BLOBs, documents, OLTP, OLAP, logging etc.

The catch is obviously that the development is way too expensive and that it takes a lot of technical capability which isn't really all that common. The novelty which this paper presents is that these two barriers might have come to an end - we can use LLMs and agents to build custom database engines for ourselves™ and our™ specific workloads, very quickly and for a tiny fraction of development price.
by slopinthebag | 2026-03-07 07:29:08+00:00
In my experience, I have "vibe coded" various tools and stuff that, while nice to have, isn't really something I need or brings a ton of value to me. Just nice-to-haves.

I think people enjoy writing code for various reasons. Some people really enjoy the craft of programming and thus dislike AI-centric coding. Some people don't really enjoy programming but enjoy making money or affecting some change on the world with it, and they use them as a tool. And then some people just like tinkering and building things for the sake of making stuff, and they get a kick out of vibe coding because it lets them add more things to their things-i-built collection.
by lemoncucumber | 2026-03-07 07:30:28+00:00
It was a great piece and I learned a lot, thanks for writing it. I hope you didn’t think that it was you I was disappointed with rather than the language designers :)

It’s ironic how context cancellation has the opposite problem as error handling.

With errors they force you to handle every error explicitly which results in people adding unnecessary contextual information: it can be tempting to keep adding layer upon layer of wrapping resulting in an unwieldy error string that’s practically a hand-rolled stacktrace.

With context cancellation OTOH you have to go out of your way to add contextual info at all, and even then it’s not as simple as just using the new machinery because as your piece demonstrates it doesn’t all work well together so you have to go even further out of your way and roll your own timeout-based cancellation. Absurd.
by slopinthebag | 2026-03-07 07:31:20+00:00
Yeah, even just now I had to go and correct some issues with LLM output that I only knew were an issue because I have extensive experience with that domain. If I didn't have that I would not have caught it and it would have been a major issue down the line.

LLM's remove much of the drudgery of programming that we unfortunately sort of did to ourselves collectively.
by Implicated | 2026-03-07 07:32:20+00:00
If I was on the "replace all the meatsacks AGI ftw" team then I would have referred to it as an oracle, by your own logic, wouldn't I have?

It's a tool. It's good for some things, not for others. Use the right tool for the job and know the job well enough to know which tools apply to which tasks.

More than anything it's a learning tool. It's also wildly effective at writing code, too. But, man... the things that it makes available to the curious mind are rather unreal.

I used it to help me turn a cat exercise wheel (think huge hamster wheel) into a generator that produces enough power to charge a battery that powers an ESP32 powered "CYD" touchscreen LCD that also utilizes a hall effect sensor to monitor, log and display the RPMs and "speed" (given we know the wheel circumference) in real time as well as historically.

I didn't know anything about all this stuff before I started. I didn't AGI myself here. I used a learning tool.

But keep up with your schtick if that's what you want to do.
by sharp_runner_84 | 2026-03-07 07:33:27+00:00
This is why prediction markets have a fundamental trust problem. You can't market yourself as 'the wisdom of crowds' and then unilaterally void contracts when the outcome gets politically uncomfortable. The whole value proposition is that the market prices in messy real-world uncertainty -- if the platform steps in to override that, it's just a bookie with extra steps.
by socks | 2026-03-07 07:33:54+00:00
The non-LLM version of this happened to me in a high school English class, back in the 2010's. I was accused of turning in a downloaded story from the internet, but in reality, I had pushed past the incredible barrier I usually felt at the start of a task, got into the flow, and started enjoying it.

I'm not sure if it had any lasting effects. Maybe a burning hatred of Grammarly ads.
by sph | 2026-03-07 07:34:36+00:00
Just n=1, but I’ve been here a lot, wrote a lot about everything, but the recent double whammy of becoming jaded at software (20 years of professional experience means that I am starting to see the cycles and old ideas being packaged as new) and caring more about the artistic and craftsmanship side of life during the AI boom means that, sadly, all I have to contribute is more doomer snark. To save everyone and myself, these days I block Hacker News the same way I block other “brain rot” sites like Reddit or X. When I cave or come back, the place feels ever more alien.

I guess I grew out of Hacker News and software development just like I grew out of most of social media, and let me tell you, for a person that used to participate a lot in either, it is very hard to adjust.

People change while Hacker News is the voice of mainstream/big Tech, the kind most early adults mould themselves to, to become hireable commodities, until the inevitable middle age crisis and reevaluation of priorities in life. In extreme cases like mine, during large cultural changes like today, you just grow apart from places like these, and need to find a new home.

I do agree with you on one thing: the AI boom is unlike anything else we’ve gone through, and the effect it has on such an heterogeneous meeting point is just the canary in the mines, and a teaser of what will happen to the field. We will settle to a new normal eventually, but these are just the first few warning quakes before a massive reassessment of our entire digital society and what it means to be a computer programmer.
by al_borland | 2026-03-07 07:35:22+00:00
The site would then be providing information to the AI, without and means of generating revenue to keep going. Where is the incentive for commercial sites to play this game?

This came up years ago with the Google Answer Box. People were pretty upset that Google wasn’t sending people to the actual websites anymore and just scraping the relevant content. It was seen stealing potential ad revenue from the author who did the work to put the information out on the internet.

I haven’t heard a lot of talk about out about this with LLM, even though they are like the Google Answer Box on steroids. What I’ve heard more is the general talk of IP theft during training.
by mksglu | 2026-03-07 07:35:44+00:00
OpenAI published "Harness Engineering" in February 2026. The thesis: engineers don't write code anymore. They design environments, specify intent, and build feedback loops. Agents do the rest.

Codex proved the concept. Symphony showed the architecture in Elixir/OTP. I wanted the same thing with Claude Code.

So I built Hatice.
by OneMorePerson | 2026-03-07 07:35:48+00:00
I appreciate that rationale, I also see the importance of those two principles and I think there's a lot of value there.

I suppose I see "any idiot" as a more general phrase, like "idiot proof", not directly meaning that anyone who uses a LLM is an idiot. However I can also see how it would be seen as disparaging.

Also, while there's a lot of examples of people entrenching into a certain behavior or status and causing problems, I also think society is a bit harsh on people who struggle with change. For people who are less predisposed to be ok with change feels like a lot of the time the response is "just deal with it and don't be selfish, this new XYZ is better for society overall".

Society is pretty much made up of personal emotions on some level. I don't think we should go around attacking people, but very few things can be considered truly objective in the world of societal analysis.
by jaredklewis | 2026-03-07 07:36:30+00:00
Very hard for me to believe Musk didn’t overpay for Twitter. So whatever he saw, I don’t think was there. Hard to know completely for sure given it is private. But I strongly suspect that money definitely would be making him more in passive investments.

If the argument is that it was a stupid business decision, but he had other motives (clout, etc…), sure whatever.
by globular-toast | 2026-03-07 07:36:35+00:00
What does that mean? You think someone is physically wheelbarrowing something around between banks when you make a transfer? The banks settle up at the end of day and the net amount moved between banks is far smaller than the total transferred. What do they settle up in? Another layer of electronic funds you don't have access to.

If even the smart people on HN can't understand this it's little wonder the finance industry has such a stranglehold on society. The banks just run a ledger. That's all they are doing. But it's a ledger they control and they are allowed to create new money in it. In fact 97% of money is created by the banks when they issue loans.

It's a fundamentally different model to the antiquated "banks lend out your deposits" one.
by pulketo | 2026-03-07 07:39:52+00:00
It doesn’t matter where you get that passion for getting back into the swing of programming, I’m not far from your age, and truly everything becomes more monotonous over time in this life, and what was once a passion becomes something hard to achieve. In my case, AI helped me handle the tedious part of things and just kept the fun stuff of finding the solution and just tell it how to solve it, and it helps me achieve it much faster than ever before. Keep going and going! Who knows what you’ll achieve tomorrow. Keep the channel open with updates.
by Atheros | 2026-03-07 07:39:53+00:00
Your math teacher was wrong when he said, "You won't have a calculator" but he wasn't wrong when he implied "You need to learn this."

If children are allowed to use AI as an omnipresent tool, what do you believe students should learn? Lots and LOTS of people would be perfectly happy to outsource all of their thinking to AI as soon as it's possible to do so.
by i_think_so | 2026-03-07 07:42:22+00:00
We definitely need more information. 9 or 10 years ago, under Solaris/Sparc with 1000BaseT connections, things were quite different than even the most boring and average Linux environment today.

This discussion should drive home the importance of not listening to conventional wisdom and presuming optimal performance without actually testing your options. And particularly, don't presume that a blog post (or an LLM that scraped it) knows what's right for your particular use case.
by roenxi | 2026-03-07 07:42:27+00:00
Bit of a tease, they don't explain why New Zealand are seeing an exodus in over-30s. I suspect there is an elephant in the room here that isn't being discussed. Particularly in that age range I doubt people are getting a sudden urge to adventure and excitement that they didn't feel in their 20s.

These articles like to throw out random economic statistics as though they have explanatory power, but they really don't. What exactly are the policies at play here?

> “Our wages are similar in Australia and employment law means longer probation periods, but the pros definitely outweigh the cons”

It is just a minor point, but really. If a country has an employment problem, short probation periods are a terrible idea. To get employers to employ people the easiest strategy is to make it easy and safe for them to employ people. Let them hire and fire at will. What is it with people and this instinct to immediately make life harder for the only person willing to offer someone a job. If people are leaving the island and a contributing factor is they don't have jobs, make it easy to give them a job. Don't make it harder then do this mild surprise routine when they move somewhere where people can actually employ them.
by gucci-on-fleek | 2026-03-07 07:42:39+00:00
Ah sorry, my bad. I thought that "mtxrunjit" was removed longer ago, but I only removed it from TeX Live in June 2025. Regardless, you should use the "context" command to compile files with ConTeXt. Example:

$ cat <<EOF > hello-world.tex
\starttext
Hello, world!
\stoptext
EOF

$ context hello-world.tex
[...]
system > ConTeXt ver: 2026.02.19 11:49 LMTX fmt: 2026.3.7 int: english/english
[...]
system | total runtime: 0.632 seconds of 0.768 seconds

$ pdftotext hello-world.pdf - | tail -1
Hello, world!
by tstrimple | 2026-03-07 07:43:29+00:00
This answer probably feels unsatisfying and I agree. But some things actually need repetition and ongoing effort. One of my favorite quotes is from Ira Glass about this very topic.

> Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me.

> All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it's like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you're making stuff, what you're making isn't so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good.

> But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you're making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.

> Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn't as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that.

> And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you're going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you're going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you're making will be as good as your ambitions.

> I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It takes awhile. It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.

> —Ira Glass
by b00ty4breakfast | 2026-03-07 07:45:33+00:00
the US military has never had any real qualms about murdering innocent civilians; they've just had a problem admitting it out loud to the public.

You'll recall the multiple wedding parties that were massacred by drones during the Obama administration, or the Winter Soldier testimonies from Iraq and Afghanistan ca 2008 or the original Winter Soldier investigation in 1971 or the infamous My Lai massacre ca 1968.

Hegseth is skipping the normal ritual of denial and fake regret but this event is firmly within a well-documented lineage going back decades.
by KronisLV | 2026-03-07 07:45:37+00:00
> It's incredibly frustrating arguing these same points, over and over, every time that this comes up. You're asking people who are experienced developers absolutely chewing through checklists and peeking at HN while compiling/procrastinating/eating a sandwich/waiting for a prompt to finish to not just explain but quantify what is plainly obvious to those people, every day. You want us to bring paper receipts, like we have some incentive to lie to you.

This puts what I have been feeling in the recent months into words pretty concisely!

To me, it really is a force multiplier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47271883

Of course, I still have to pay attention to what AI is doing, and figure out ways how to automate more code checks, but the gradual trend in my own life is more AI, not less: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/i-blew-through-24-million-token... (though letting it run unconstrained/unsupervised is a mess, I generally like to make Claude Code create a plan and iterate on it with Opus 4.6, then fire off a review, since getting the Max subscription I don't really need Cerebras or other providers, though I still appreciate them)

At the same time I've seen people get really bad results with AI, often on smaller models, or just expecting to give it vague instructions and get good results, with no automated linters or prebuild checks in place, or just copying snippets with no further context in some random chat session.

Who knows, maybe there's a learning curve and a certain mindset that you need to have to get a benefit from the technology, to where like 80% of developers will see marginal gains or even detriment, which will show up in most of the current studies. A bit like how for a while architecturally microservices and serverless were all the rage and most people did an absolutely shit job at implementing them, before (hopefully) enough collective wisdom was gained of HOW to use the technology and when.
by f311a | 2026-03-07 07:46:19+00:00
Language grammars are ~200-250MB though.
They are in a separate folder, and often they are all bundled to support all the languages.
Some of them are HUGE.

.rwxr-xr-x 4.6M aa 6 Mar 21:52 ocaml-interface.so
.rwxr-xr-x 4.6M aa 6 Mar 21:52 rpmspec.so
.rwxr-xr-x 4.9M aa 6 Mar 21:52 tlaplus.so
.rwxr-xr-x 5.1M aa 6 Mar 21:52 ocaml.so
.rwxr-xr-x 5.1M aa 6 Mar 21:52 c-sharp.so
.rwxr-xr-x 5.3M aa 6 Mar 21:52 kotlin.so
.rwxr-xr-x 5.4M aa 6 Mar 21:52 ponylang.so
.rwxr-xr-x 5.5M aa 6 Mar 21:52 slang.so
.rwxr-xr-x 6.1M aa 6 Mar 21:52 crystal.so
.rwxr-xr-x 6.8M aa 6 Mar 21:52 fortran.so
.rwxr-xr-x 9.2M aa 6 Mar 21:52 nim.so
.rwxr-xr-x 9.5M aa 6 Mar 21:52 julia.so
.rwxr-xr-x 9.9M aa 6 Mar 21:52 sql.so
.rwxr-xr-x 16M aa 6 Mar 21:52 lean.so
.rwxr-xr-x 18M aa 6 Mar 21:52 verilog.so
.rwxr-xr-x 22M aa 6 Mar 21:52 systemverilog.so
Show HN: Pouch – a session-first GNU Screen manager with a focused terminal UI
by zpdldhkdl | 2026-03-07 07:47:08+00:00
I made Pouch because I still use GNU Screen, but managing sessions gets awkward fast.
The main pain point was that Screen works, but the workflow is too manual. You end up remembering session names, checking what is running,
and handling attach/restart/stop flows with more friction than necessary.
Pouch is a small session-first UI on top of Screen. It shows sessions immediately, lets you create and attach quickly, keeps external
Screen sessions visible, and adds safer restart/stop flows plus a doctor command for environment issues.
I built it because I wanted Screen to feel easier to operate without replacing it.
by burnt-resistor | 2026-03-07 07:48:04+00:00
Medicare rolled out prior authorization gatekeeping to kill more patients in 6 states: Arizona, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, and Washington to use the Orwellian-sounding "Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction" (WISeR) that is administered by unaccountable private corporations using AI to deny and delay care. Medicare is a corporate joke that people confuse for single-payer healthcare which it ain't, and so Medicare for all (M4A) would be awful. (Medicare "Advantage" is even worse.)
by phanisaimuni116 | 2026-03-07 07:48:05+00:00
Hey HN , I built glide after getting tired of Claude Opus stalling mid-task under peak load.

It's a transparent proxy that tracks rolling p95 TTFT per model and cascades to a faster model before you ever hit a timeout. Three routing strategies: solo (primary healthy), hedge (race two models, stream the winner), skip (both slow → sequential cascade).

Stack: Python, FastAPI, asyncio streaming, SQLite for persistence, Prometheus metrics endpoint. Provider-agnostic — mix Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Ollama in one cascade.

Happy to answer questions on the implementation, especially the mid-stream SSE abort for TTT (time-to-think) enforcement.
by Garlef | 2026-03-07 07:48:11+00:00
A good rule of thumb:

- Don't even let dev machines access the infra directly (unless you're super early in a greenfield project): No local deploys, no SSH. Everything should go through either the pipeline or tools.

Why?

- The moment you "need" to do some of these, you've discovered a udecase that will most likely repeat.
by 1659447091 | 2026-03-07 07:48:27+00:00
> Can objects like expensive precision optics be insured against damage from the TSA?

"You may file a claim if you are injured or your property is lost or damaged during the screening process."

It takes ~6 months or so, and you need to be very thorough and provide as much info as you can (like receipts to prove the cost). And they do actually investigate, even for minor claims and will send a check if they were at fault (ie, not the airline losing your stuff).

https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/claims
by sebastiennight | 2026-03-07 07:48:37+00:00
The way I was taught this in French school is that the diaeresis causes the letter to be pronounced separately, so in maïs the "¨" forces you to say "a" and "i" separately (ah- ee) instead of together ("eh" as in "mais" which is an existing French word).

It only affects the diphthong AFAIK, so I agree with you that it's not the reason for why the "s" is pronounced out loud.

The final "s" is usually silent in French and I'm not aware of any rule for what defines the exceptions.

The outcome for the final "-s" is somewhat influenced by the origin of the word, as you would pronounce "bis" differently depending on whether you mean "beige" or half-whole-wheat bread, vs. if you mean "repeated" (from latin).

There are a bunch of such weird exceptions, like "vis" (screw, or past tense of "to see") or "bus" (bus, or drank) which both can be pronounced either depending on their meaning, or "os" which is different depending on plural vs. singular.

For the ending "-s" there is also some regional variation. Where I was born, you would normally pronounce the final "s" in words like "plus" or "moins", and I was very surprised as a teenager to meet people from other French regions who made fun of it.
by stevenhuang | 2026-03-07 07:49:28+00:00
At least it's an easy way for those who don't know that they're talking about to out themselves.

If they'd bother to see how modern neuroscience tries to explain human cognition they'd see it explained in terms that parallel modern ML. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding

We only have theories for what intelligence even means, I wouldn't be surprised there are more similarities than differences between human minds and LLMs, fundamentally (prediction and error minimization)
by anonnon | 2026-03-07 07:49:52+00:00
> elitist in a negative way.

It's funny you say that, because I've seen plenty of the reverse elitism from "AI bros" on HN, saying things like:

> Now that I no longer write code, I can focus on the engineering

or

> In my experience, it's the mediocre developers that are more attached to the physical act of writing code, instead of focusing on the engineering

As if getting further and further away from the instructions that the CPU or GPU actually execute is more, not less, a form of engineering, instead of something else, maybe respectable in its own way, but still different, like architecture.

It's akin to someone claiming that they're not only still a legitimate novelist for using ChatGPT or a legitimate illustrator for using stable diffusion, but that delegating the actual details of the arrangement of words into sentences or layers and shapes of pigment in an image, actually makes them more of a novelist or artist, than those who don't.
by dragonwriter | 2026-03-07 07:50:54+00:00
> I don't know what's wrong with you, honestly, that you would so vivaciously defend this impractical, immoral and completely nonsensical law so vivaciously.

I don’t know what’s wrong with you that you are reacting to arguments that exist only in your own mind. I'm not defending the law. (Nor—while I am very much opposed to the law—have I been opposing it here. I haven’t made a normative argument in either direction.)

Also, I don't think “vivaciously” means what you think it means.