MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
AI utility is perceived uniquely by programmers, scientists, and writers
by kokhanserhii | 2026-03-01 16:22:03+00:00
Their understanding of the exoskeleton, the exo-wings, and what those can do is entirely different. And it is not just a matter of "their understanding." The actual capabilities are genuinely different, the relevant functionality is genuinely different, and the ways of mining chat pearls are genuinely different too.

Strangely enough, I tend to place the writer in the manager category - he effectively manages the actions of his characters and strives to produce certain impressions on his superiors, meaning his audience and readers.

The programmer ideally wants a precise formal solution that can be quickly and cheaply verified in debugging.

The manager needs to improve something in his system, and life will be the judge of that - slowly, tediously, expensively, and often with ambiguous interpretations.

The student needs to go deep into knowledge, and the scientist needs to go deep into knowledge and also do the manager's job - searching for ways to apply and extend that knowledge.

This is of course a very incomplete list of the meaningful variations. But it will be enough for you to start understanding that there are very different worlds in the use of AI - and this is true even within a single profession, from junior all the way up to investor, senior, architect, and so on. Programmers who build AI or build agents on top of it often have no idea about these other possibilities. They often don't even know the names of the most important fields of knowledge required for that other kind of work with AI.

Here you will find notes on these topics, fragments of various files that were meant to become secret but somehow never did:
https://zenodo.org/records/18824868
"These are notes that are not obliged to be true, let alone universally true."
by cgriswald | 2026-03-01 16:22:06+00:00
I don’t know what you consider to be an advertisement but just off the top of my head:

Many (most?) streaming services advertise their own shows and other content ahead of other content you elect to watch even on ad free subs.

Hulu’s ad free subs have some shows that show unambiguous ads.

Prime and others muddy their interfaces with others’ “channels” and content that you can subscribe to through their service. They also show other content you can purchase or rent through them that aren’t part of your package. These things are included in search, viewing UI lists, and banner ads.
by mikestew | 2026-03-01 16:22:49+00:00
Nobody wants those, and nobody wants this.

Just because you don’t want it doesn’t mean <checks notes…> a billion or so people don’t want an iPhone. Or rather, a phone they don’t have to dick with straight out of the box.

OTOH, I don’t really even know what you’re on about. Android is a nightmare because…it’s like iOS, which is “take phone out of box, restore from backup, sorted”? That doesn’t even make any sense, especially in light of what TFA describes.
by Aurornis | 2026-03-01 16:23:18+00:00
> I've shipped 7 side projects in the past year using AI heavily. But I've noticed something counterintuitive: the total time from idea to shipped product barely decreased.

> Why? Because the bottleneck was never typing code.

Were you also shipping side projects every 2 months before AI?

If not, this comment just reads like cognitive dissonance. Your core claim is that AI has enabled you to ship 7 projects in 12 months, which presumably was not something you did pre-AI, right? So the AI is helping ship projects faster?

I agree that AI is not a panacea and a skilled developer is required. I also agree that it can become a trap to produce a lot of bad code if you’re not paying attention (something a lot of companies are going to discover in 2026 IMO)

But I don’t know how you can claim AI isn’t helping you ship faster right after telling us AI is helping you ship faster.
by alexchaomander | 2026-03-01 16:23:28+00:00
In this episode of Humans of AI, I sit down with my friend Eric Zhu to unpack what are the frameworks and architectures powering modern AI products today.

From our times building Semantic Kernel, Autogen, and GraphRAG at Microsoft, we offer a retrospective on the evolution of this space and where we think it'll go in 2026 and beyond.

We dive into how AI systems are actually being built today, why early agent frameworks were brittle, and what’s changing as models, tooling, and abstractions improve. Eric shares insights from hands-on experience building AI systems, including lessons around memory, orchestration, open source, and why building has become dramatically faster than even a few years ago.

We also talk about the human side of all this—how builders should think about careers in AI, avoiding burnout, and navigating a fast-moving field without getting overwhelmed.

Whether you’re an AI engineer, founder, researcher, or just curious about where things are headed, this conversation goes deep into the why behind modern AI systems.

Find the podcast on:

YouTube: https://youtu.be/9FqByZJrTN8

Spotify: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/alex-chao/episodes/...

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-hard-truth-about-a...

How are you building AI agents in 2026? Are you still using a framework?
by kccqzy | 2026-03-01 16:24:07+00:00
Since people are mentioning latency I’ll mention throughput. Basically the idea is that you accidentally cat a large file to your terminal and we are measuring how much time it takes for the terminal to finish displaying it. This test generally favors GPU-accelerated terminals.

Ghostty performs very well on this regard, among the same league as Alacritty and Ptyxis.
by msteffen | 2026-03-01 16:24:24+00:00
I liked this a lot in retrospect.

I really like to understand the practice of software engineering by analogy to research mathematics (like, no one ever asks mathematicians to estimate how long it will take to prove something…).

Something I think software engineers can take from math right now: years of everyone’s math education is spent doing things that computers have always been able to do trivially—arithmetic, solving simple equations, writing proofs that would just be `simp` in Lean—and no one wrings their hands over it. It’s an accepted part of the learning process.
by hollow-moe | 2026-03-01 16:24:33+00:00
I fear every single time I have to switch phones. Being degoogled means I first have to choose hardware based on custom ROMs compatibility, and fight the thing to just install the ROM. Then the fun begins, for every single stupid feature I have to install and setup a solution (app) optionally restoring a backup individually. Contacts, calendar, files, maps, passwords, airtag protection, email, IM, keyboard, weather, notes, smart garbage:tm:, alternative YouTube client...The state of current tech is pityful, if it wasn't what I was doing to put food on the table I wouldn't want any of this garbage 10 meters near me.
Edit: Before any of the geniuses here says "at least you can use alternatives" I don't want to hear your copium, it's obvious this won't last.
by volemo | 2026-03-01 16:24:49+00:00
I really tried to understand: I’ve read the entire two articles you have on your site, looked at all zero posts on both social accounts you’ve linked there. The names are highly generic, so googling is futile.

Is it that hard to clearly explain what it is that you’ve built and are now showing us? To give an interested reader some prose to start from and not just walls of outlines and nested lists?

Ok, it’s a game. How is it played? What’s the goal? What are the rules? Is it a board game, or word game, or something else? You describe it using a language you’ve designed yourself — could you link to a specification or an explanation of it? STL is impossible to search for, given that a widely used format with that name already existed long before you coined yours.

Or am I being dense and this here is just a shitpost?
by bcooke | 2026-03-01 16:24:53+00:00
I originally thought AI-assisted writing would help synthesize what felt like original ideas I had, that I just wanted to get out there without the laborious task of editing. I didn't expect the writing to end up feeling so incredibly tired and watered-down, but upon more reflection on how the models actually work, it's not all that surprising. Uniqueness in writing is both in the style/structure and the message, and all AI seems to do is find the local maximum of both. Lately I've found myself going back to writing things myself (not all the time, depends on the task), and wishing there was a way I could just completely eliminate the slop from certain things I look at. I worry about all our minds, and the garbage-in, garbage-out net effect of this.
by bgentry | 2026-03-01 16:25:21+00:00
Here is something that gets lost in all the excitement about AI productivity: most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code.

I think there's a big split between those who derive meaning and enjoyment from the act of writing code or the code itself vs. those who derive it from solving problems (for which the code is often a necessary byproduct). I've worked with many across both of these groups throughout my career.

I am much more in the latter group, and the past 12mo are the most fun I've had writing software in over a decade. For those in the first group, it's easy to see how this can be an existential crisis.
by WarmWash | 2026-03-01 16:25:37+00:00
First off the content creators don't mark up where sponsored segments are, the algo builds on statistics of where people skip. So if a video is fresh, it might not work.

Second, you are capable of building a coherent argument, but left out that almost half of viewers don't pay. When you are a child, paying for things is frustrating and annoying, so the ones taking the money are bad. When you grow up, you realize that everything costs money to everyone, and taking money isn't really nefarious, and paying for what you consume is just honest. If you don't like the cost of something, you don't buy it. If you like the cost, you pay and it's yours.

Obviously you have passed that threshold of reasoning, so it might be worthwhile to rebalance your argument around the fact that almost half (30-50%) of viewers still feel entitled to free viewing of content. They don't boycott it, they still consume it, but they don't compensate. That leaves the honest ones to bear the cost of their consumption.
by Myzel394 | 2026-03-01 16:26:20+00:00
I love Ghostty, especially the UI is so much nicer than Kitty. However, for some reason ghostty sometimes has severe issues with dealing with SSH connections. The terminal is like broken and wrongly displayed and you can't properly type something. Therefore, I still use Kitty, especially for SSH connections. I don't know what `kitten ssh` does, but it makes my terminal work with SSH.
by iFreilicht | 2026-03-01 16:26:23+00:00
This is fascinating. I scrolled through that page and immediately felt like something was marketed to me. I actively hated reading this because it felt so much like the tech company's buzzword-filled landing pages that I have come to despise over the course of my career.

But giving the paper to Claude and having a dialogue about it was a very pleasant experience because I could ask questions to focus on the parts that seemed most interesting to me.
by wolttam | 2026-03-01 16:27:00+00:00
Maybe there aren’t that many new/necessary ideas that can be mined from the fundamental building blocks of software development (languages, syntax, runtimes, static analyses, type checking, etc). Maybe people will continue to innovate by instructing models to build novel things out of those building blocks? Perhaps things we would not have thought of building before due to the effort required without LLM assistance.
by Aurornis | 2026-03-01 16:27:40+00:00
> some opensource models really are strong and useful

To be clear I never said they weren’t strong or useful. I use them for some small tasks too.

I said they’re not equivalent to SOTA models from 6 months ago, which is what is always claimed.

Then it turns into a Motte and Bailey game where that argument is replaced with the simpler argument that they’re useful for open weights models. I’m not disagreeing with that part. I’m disagree with the first assertion that they’re equivalent to Sonnet 4.5
by II2II | 2026-03-01 16:28:18+00:00
I grew up as a native English speaker in an English country, and had to look up what gimp means. Should the name be changed? Yes. On the other hand, I have never encountered the word outside of the context of the image editing program. That is unusual, even for an offensive term. It leaves me with the feeling that someone dug up an obscure piece of slang in order to paint the project in a negative light. (I've been using open source for long enough to know that painting open source in a negative light was a thing. For example: it used to be common to paint supporters of open source as Communist, which is treasonous in some circles.)
by HDThoreaun | 2026-03-01 16:28:42+00:00
Moral relativism can be real and I can be against another cultures moral ideology. They’re allowed to have their beliefs and I’m allowed to think they are wrong and they deserve to be killed for having them. Protestors do not deserve to be killed for protesting. People who kill protestors for protesting do deserve to be killed. Is that all personal opinion? Yes of course, so what?
by Aurornis | 2026-03-01 16:29:37+00:00
> Yes and no. "Last-gen" (like, from 6 months ago) frontier models do still tend to outperform the best open source models

That’s exactly what I said, though. The headline we’re commenting under claims they’re Sonnet 4.5 level but they’re not.

I don’t disagree that they’re powerful for open models. I’m pointing out that anyone reading these headlines who expects a cheap or local Sonnet 4.5 is going to discover that it’s not true.
by jonasdegendt | 2026-03-01 16:29:49+00:00
I worked at a bring your own distro place before, ISO certified. I don’t exactly recall what we had to install for compliance but one of them was Clam AV. So it’s possible.

I recall Arch, Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora being used. Relatively small shop though, like 40 devs.

Ironically we were contracting with ASML at the time and ended up having to work on Windows machines using Remote Desktop 99% of the time.
by tkel | 2026-03-01 16:30:31+00:00
If software development were democratized, then decisions that software developers make would be made democratically. On or off the job. On the job, the workplace would be run democratically, instead of as it is now, dictatorially. Or off the job, groups of engineers would be coming together to create governance and make collective decisions about the software they use, like the Debian project or the recent Nix governance. Neither is the case.

Building yourself a table using some new carbon fiber hammer isn't democracy. That's just consumerism.
by WD-42 | 2026-03-01 16:30:51+00:00
Mitchell,

What has it been like witnessing terminal emulators make such a huge comeback with the advent of Claude Code et. all? I remember comments here in the early days of Ghostty along the lines of "Why is he working on a terminal emulator? We need people working on future problems, not the past!" Pretty funny considering I regularly hear people say they are in the terminal more than the browser now. Crazy times!
by yearolinuxdsktp | 2026-03-01 16:32:33+00:00
Your passive-aggressive comment doesn’t deserve a response, but I’ll bite.

You see the desktop picture when you walk up to the Mac to unlock it, or immediately after you lock it before walking away. Or momentarily when you use Exposé or move windows out of the way to access files on the desktop.

Or if you are running multiple monitors, it’s common to clear out a side monitor or half of one for a new window/different app.

And I have more windows open than a Microsoft test lab.
by RevEng | 2026-03-01 16:32:41+00:00
I disagree on making it easier. I'm very capable of writing code in multiple languages but it's boring and monotonous. It's getting in the way of me building the system I have in mind. I prefer the engineering (design) to writing. If I can describe my system design to something (a junior developer or an AI) and see it come to life quickly, that's great; it lets me spend more time on designing the system, or perhaps designing more systems.

That said, there are plenty of amateurs who find coding to be approachable and system design to me daunting. For them, eliminating coding and moving the focus to system design would be a nightmare.
by addaon | 2026-03-01 16:33:03+00:00
> I have never once told my manager “it would be really nice to have a few junior developers. It would really help us get this project done on time”. They do “negative work”.

I have. A good junior can do in a week what a senior with domain knowledge can do in a half day, with only an hour of mentoring along the way. This isn’t a great exchange rate per dollar (juniors are cheaper than seniors, but not that much cheaper) — but seniors with domain knowledge are a finite resource, you can’t get more of them for love or money, while juniors are fresh-minted every semester. The cheapest way to shipping may not go through juniors, but the fastest way usually does; and that’s completely ignoring the HUGE side benefit of building seniors “the hard way,” which is still easier than hiring.
by tux1968 | 2026-03-01 16:33:09+00:00
Ghostty's terminfo entry doesn't enable 24-bit color*, and as far as I can tell they don't provide a "ghostty-direct" entry that does. It just seemed odd that it's completely supported and working, yet not easily enabled. Maybe I just missed a trick, and didn't need to make a custom terminfo entry myself?

* "msgcat --color=test" is an easy test that shows the blending of 24-bit color, or blocky gradients otherwise.
by nvartolomei | 2026-03-01 16:33:20+00:00
Upgraded to one of the latest iPhone recently. First time I clicked on “transfer data from old phone”. I’m used to reinstalling the operating system every couple of months from when I used Windows. It took maybe 15 minutes with close to 0 interactions. Everything was transferred. I was already authenticated in apps. What took manual steps was eSIM transfers.

I don’t remember exact steps so there could have been a bit more. But it was an impressive experience and I told my geek friends about it. They were surprised this is the first time I used this feature.
by markus_zhang | 2026-03-01 16:33:37+00:00
Te be frank, a lot of companies don't need engineers. They need someone to do the jobs "quickly", "ASAP" and that's it. They are hiring coders masqueraded as programmers who masqueraded as engineers.

I'd say this -- if you really want to be a real engineer, you should avoid many career paths out there. Potentially ANY positions DIRECTLY facing business stakeholders is at best not a good choice, and at worst deprive your already remote chance to be a good engineer. The lower level you move into, the better, because the environment FORCES you to be a true engineer -- either you don't and fail, or you do and keep the job.
by viditjn02 | 2026-03-01 16:34:49+00:00
We just released BossBot, the latest Swarm System of Agents that act faster than most agentic systems today. Our agents communicate with each other to run tasks in parallel and at much lower limits reducing expenses and getting rid of the setup costs of ClawdBot. Visit our X.com post to learn more: https://x.com/FounderUnder20/status/2028137958361227602
by colechristensen | 2026-03-01 16:34:54+00:00
After a surge in popularity sales have declined steeply based on consumer demand.

Some people want hyper-realistic fake ground beef, etc. but not everyone, not all that many it turns out.

People who want to be vegetarian are also people who don't want to eat ultraprocessed food.

Authenticity is big with people. If I were to go vegetarian I'd want to eat... vegetables.
by braebo | 2026-03-01 16:36:08+00:00
At work we build enterprise software with stuff like Kotlin+Spring + multiple NextJS apps + Microservices + Rust CAD engine.

I haven’t have written code aside from tweaking stuff here and there in probably 3 or 4 months. Before that I wrote code by hand every day for many years.

I’ve found a lot of fun parts of my new workflow that I enjoy. I still miss being fully immersed in a problem deep in the files… and sometimes it feels like homework reading so many implementation summaries from Claude because the feature spans 4 repos and is too much code to read. But I do love shaping the code into different solutions exploring in a way that is unique to ai native workflows. And I love building agent skills and frameworks with/around them and expanding it out to more aspects of the company or life — there’s deep work to be had that still feels like hacking in the trenches. I get a lot of the same satisfaction in different ways, and there’s a lot of exciting novelty to explore that was previously out of reach due to time and energy constraints.

Also I don’t like our backend stack and I hate React / NextJS to the degree of derangement syndrome — I am so happy that I don’t have to write it and I can just focus on UX, making customers happy / lives easier / shaping the software into better and better versions of itself at such a faster pace.

People who learned good software engineering intimately before the inflection point are extremely lucky right now. Existential dread and the stages of grief have been a part of the journey for me too sadly, but there’s a lot to celebrate and explore with the right attitude.
by RevEng | 2026-03-01 16:36:18+00:00
And yet there isn't widespread unemployment. Fewer farmers were needed so fewer people became farmers. Food became cheap and plentiful. Everyone else went on to do other things that they couldn't afford to do before. Software will do the same; we will make more software with fewer people and it will become ubiquitous to the point that people will just quickly generate whatever software they need rather than do many monotonous tasks manually.
by rudedogg | 2026-03-01 16:36:34+00:00
I've been thinking this too. I frequently do deep research on some systems programming technique, ask it to generate a .md for it, and then I use that in later sessions with Claude Code "look at the research I collected in {*-research}.md and help me explore ways to apply it to {thing}".

At the research step it frequently (always?) uses memory to direct/scope the research to what I typically work on, but I think that kind of pigeon holes the model and what it explores. And the memory doesn't quite capture all the areas I'm interested in, or want to directly apply the research to.

And regarding the crap in memories, I found the same. Mine at work mentioned I'm an expert at a business domain I have almost zero experience with.

I feel like the companies building this stuff accept a lot of "slop" in their approach, and just can't see past building things by slopping stuff into prompts. I wish they'd explore more rigid approaches. Yes, I understand "the bitter lesson" but it seems obvious to me some traditional approaches would yield better results for the foreseeable future. Less magic (which is just running things through the cheapest model they have and dumping it in every chat). It seems like poison.

Related: https://vercel.com/blog/agents-md-outperforms-skills-in-our-...

Also, agent skills are usually pure slop. If you look through https://skills.sh on a framework/topic you're knowledgeable in you'll be a bit disheartened. This stuff was pioneered by people who move fast, but I think it's now time to try and push for quality and care in the approach since these have gotten good enough to contribute to more than prototype work.
by srean | 2026-03-01 16:36:39+00:00
Yes you can certainly do that.

What I had not articulated well is that linear classifiers have the opportunity to use matvecs that have a different level of L1 L2 cacheable goodness and non-branchy code. There using proper memory layout gives an outstanding win. The win for decision trees are less impressive in comparison, so you needn't be feeling bad for your code.