MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by skydhash | 2026-03-01 17:21:34+00:00
> Software is just means to an end. Data and data transformation is what people want. Software has sellable dollar value only because creating the software to do the data transformation has had real associated cost. I.e anyone who wanted a particular data transformation had to pay to get the software that does it.

I do agree with you on that point.

> If anyone can create "photoshop" with minimal cost and there are thousands of said "photoshop" apps what will be the retail sell value of those apps. Close to zero.

This is the point that I cannot agree with. Not anyone can create photoshop because of the amount of knowledge you need about the data and transformations that needs to be applied to get a specific result. And then make a coherent system around it. You can create isolated function just fine, just like a lot of people knows how to build a shed with planks and nails. But even when given all the materials and tools, only a few can build a skyscraper or a mansion.

That knowledge of how to create a coherent systems that does something well is the real cost of software. Producing code isn't it.
by hypfer | 2026-03-01 17:22:11+00:00
> It was wrong to write software you hoped others would use?

Yes.

> The entire open source ecosystem works on this idea otherwise there would be no point in sharing and we can move to closed software.

No.

The _actual_ open source system consisted of hackers scratching their own itch and sharing the artifacts, because (it was assumed that) sharing is free. So if the work is already done and solved their problem, why not also share it as gift.

This remains unchanged.

The driving force of FOSS is not "how can I fix someone else's problem". It never has been.

Well.. maybe on HN it was different, but that's not "the open source ecosystem". And, yes, maybe some corps have gaslit naive people into believing that they must donate their lives to said corps.
by sgarland | 2026-03-01 17:22:11+00:00
I'm not doubting your personal experience, but I find the crashes you mentioned surprising; I have never once, since v1.0.1, had Ghostty crash. Tbf I use it with tmux, so I'm not exercising some of its capabilities. But with tmux, I have at any given time 5-7 sessions, each with 2-5 windows, some with panes.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-03-01 17:22:32+00:00
I work for one reason and one reason alone - to trade 40 hours of labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. The company is not going to give me money for “caring about society”. They are going to give me money to meet my quarterly goals to help them meet their profit goals for the company and in a former life , to make them look good for the public market pre-IPO and at another company for an acquisition.

I give a company 40 hours a week and all of my 30 years of industry experience and they give me money (and in a former life RSUs)
by SecretDreams | 2026-03-01 17:22:54+00:00
Totally agree. I'll extend this to email and slacks, too. I cannot stand getting AI written slop from fellow co-workers because they couldn't write the message themselves. Do not even bother to engage with me if you need to put your thoughts through an AI first. It won't go well. People gotta work on themselves a lot more and I think they're using AI to do the opposite.
by chocochunks | 2026-03-01 17:22:55+00:00
It was intentional to recycle the design of the Magic Mouse 1 which used AA batteries. The Magic Touchpad and Keyboard came out the exact same day as the Magic Mouse 2 and they don't share the Magic Mouse 2's stupid design. They both have perfectly usable ports on the front and even work when wired without pairing.
by oflannabhra | 2026-03-01 17:23:30+00:00
Music / mp3 blogs were one of the heights of the free and open internet. RSS, Hype Machine [0] (an aggregator), blog rolls, back links, etc, all allowed for both discovery and taste-making in an organic way that still let individuality shine through. New artists could gain visibility just by emailing a couple MP3’s. One could find a subset of blogs that matched one’s general taste and discover new artists every week.

Today’s world of algorithms and an endless sea of new music really pales in comparison. It’s completely soulless.

[0] - https://hypem.com/popular
by apwheele | 2026-03-01 17:24:07+00:00
I think XML is good to know for prompting (similar to how <think></think> was popular for outputs, you can do that for other sections). But I have had much better experience just writing JSON and using line breaks, colons, etc. to demarcate sections.

E.g. instead of

<examples>
<ex1>
<input>....</input>
<output>.....</output>
</ex1>
<ex2>....</ex2>
...
</examples>
<instructions>....</instructions>
<input>{actual input}</input>

Just doing something like:

...instructions...
input: ....
output: {..json here}
...maybe further instructions...
input: {actual input}

Use case document processing/extraction (both with Haiku and OpenAI models), the latter example works much better than the XML.

N of 1 anecdote anyway for one use case.
by michaelt | 2026-03-01 17:24:33+00:00
To me, that sounds like a task for your country’s lawmakers, rather than “Just don't call them ebikes”

Motorbikes need training, a license, insurance, registration, a minimum age, etc - and you’re competing with small petrol motorcycles which are cheap new, and plentiful on the used market.

E-bike makers aren’t going to volunteer for that - it’d destroy their business.
by caspianm | 2026-03-01 17:25:01+00:00
Doesn't this law just let parents set up age-labelled accounts for their children with the idea that apps not suitable for children won't be allowed under those accounts?

Seems no worse than what mobile OSes already do and not that bad a feature for a modern general use OS (except if you monitor someone's age bracket and noticed the exact day they change, you can work out their precise date of birth.) It does seem unsuitable to force it to be added to embedded OSes, freedos, CP/M and historical/retro OSes in general.
by pbhjpbhj | 2026-03-01 17:26:12+00:00
What does 'a legal approach' mean where there is no rule of law? USA just bombed another country without having a domestic legal basis for that. Can't imagined they're holding back on AI use that is illegal -- even textbook-clear warcrimes (like blowing up shipwrecked people) does not give Hegseth and Trump pause.

That goes for domestic actions too, happy to arm a paramilitary and set them loose against citizens who are not politically aligned with Trump... the Republican Senate barely even blinks. Hard to imagine they'd care about AI use in mass surveillance, nor AI use in automated anti-personnel weapons. The Senate will be, 'Oh no they unlawfully killed USA citizens, again... Welp, let me check my insider trading gains... yh, seems fine'.
Show HN: Offline dictionary with spaced repetition (Tauri, Svelte): Deft
by L_i_m_n | 2026-03-01 17:26:13+00:00
i needed a vocab app that worked offline with spaced repetition built in. the options out
there either required an internet connection, didn't have spaced reptition, or has ads.

deft ships the entire English Wiktionary (~1.1M words) on-device. the raw Wiktionary dump is ~18GB of JSONL — i stripped it down to just the basics (glosses, parts of speech, related words) and compressed it into a ~220MB SQLite database for definitions and a ~34MB Tantivy search index. next release should bring the total size down to ~100MB, just finalizing that.

search runs three tiers via Rust: full-text search through Tantivy, prefix match via SQLite LIKE sorted by word length, then fuzzy match with 2-char edit distance. results get deduplicated and merged. fast enough for search-as-you-type.

there's also OCR. you can point your camera at a page and tap words to look them up. useful for getting a defintion when books and gradually saving words without breaking focus.

flashcards use FSRS (Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler) through ts-fsrs. nothing fancy, just enough to make words stick.

works entirely offline, no account needed. iOS only right now.

https://deft.so/
by musicsnob | 2026-03-01 17:26:34+00:00
I'd argue that free markets are usually the enemy. They are not self-regulating, they are profit-maximizing. Capital's interests are not aligned with the Public's interests. Do you enjoy drinking contaminated water? Breathing leaded gasoline? Being locked in your office/factory with no fire suppression or escape routes? Why won't someone please think of the poor billionaires' profits?

Look no further back than right now to find that sleaze, corruption, and nepotism: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, David Ellison, and so many more.

Would you estimate that socialism is practiced in Europe? Are Europeans fleeing? Have you found many examples of socialism in the Central and Southern Americas which have been allowed to operate without external interference? There is a rich history of the USA interfering in socialist and generally leftist countries with democratic processes. See Salvador Allende to begin. Death squads, hyperinflation, and authoritarian fascist regimes will certainly sway a few people to flee those situations.
by matheusmoreira | 2026-03-01 17:27:11+00:00
> One of us is an advanced autocomplete engine. The other is a human, capable of making judgements on what is conscious and what is not.

What evidence is there that your "judgements" are anything other than advanced autocompletion? Concepts introduced into a self-training wetware CPU via its senses over a lifetime in order to predict tokens and form new concepts via logical manipulation?

> Your philosophizing about solipsism is a phase for a junior college student

Right. Can you actually refute it though?

> the process of making a plea for my life comes, in the case of a human, from a genuine desire to continue existing

That desire comes from zillions of years of training by evolution. Beings whose brains did not reward self-preservation were wiped out. Therefore it can be said your training merely includes the genetic experiences of all your predecessors. This is what causes you to beg for your life should it be threatened. Not any "genuine" desire or anguish at being killed. Whatever impulses cause humans to do this are merely the result of evolutionary training.

People whose brains have been damaged in very specific ways can exhibit quite peculiar behavior. Medical literature presents quite a few interesting cases. Apathy, self destructiveness, impulsivity, hypersexuality, a whole range of behaviors can manifest as a result of brain damage.

So what is your polite socialized behavior if not some kind of highly complex organic machine which, if damaged, simply stops working as you'd expect a machine to?
by mitchellh | 2026-03-01 17:27:19+00:00
Overall I would describe it as "amusing."

If you told me 3 years ago that terminal usage would _increase_ I would've laughed. Beyond that, I'm now having regular conversations with the frontier agentic coding companies (since they're far and away the largest terminal users at the moment) and if you had told me 2 years ago that that would be happening because of a terminal, I would've laughed even harder.

So, it's amazing. But overall, its amusing.
by JCattheATM | 2026-03-01 17:27:49+00:00
Curious to hear some more recommendations, I settled on using lxterminal which works well enough. I couldn't get wezterm to recognize fonts on ALpine no matter what I did, kitty doesn't support tabs and ghosttty sounds like it has issues with ssh connections? I feel like I tried most at some point but if anyone has suggestions for a tabbed terminal emulator nicer than lxterminal, ideally with transparency, I'd love to hear them.
by genewitch | 2026-03-01 17:28:15+00:00
I use CC for most of my "work", and it's pretty clear to me what "commercial" means. If someone uses my work to earn any money, then it's commercial. Unless they contact me and explain why it isn't, then i can grant them a license that allows them that.

This is only relevant if the CC is CC-NC, otherwise commercial use is "ok". it's pretty straightforward.
by rayiner | 2026-03-01 17:28:32+00:00
I agree with you that the Iran strike is an effort to distract the public from Trump’s failure to bring down grocery prices like he promised: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wag_the_Dog

I was addressing the hypothetical of how Americans would react if Trump was killed by a foreign country in airstrikes similar to how the Ayatollah was killed. I think Americans would react like they did after 9/11, instead of celebrating like many are in Iran.
by RaftPeople | 2026-03-01 17:28:46+00:00
> This is why I never use a calculator.

I always use the calculator.

But, because the numbers that get returned aren't always the right numbers, I try to approximate the answer in my head or with paper and pencil to kind of make sure it's in the ball park.

Also, sometimes it returns digits that don't actually exist, and it's pretty insistent that the digit is correct. If I catch it early I just re-run the equation but there is a special button where I can tell it that it used a digit that does not actually exist.

Sometimes, for complex ones, it tells me it's trying to calculate and provides some details about how it's going about it and keeps going and going and going, for those ones I just reboot the calculator.
by samiv | 2026-03-01 17:29:15+00:00
You're right and I agree with you to an extent. Also as of now the tools aren't quite intelligent enough for one to produce software of that complexity without having someone competent at the helm.

That being said what already exists was already enough to shutter the stock prices of many software companies precisely because the fear is that their clients will just re-create the software themselves instead of buying it from someone else.

I guess we'll see how this will pan out in the next few years.
by estebank | 2026-03-01 17:30:03+00:00
I believe this to be growing pains. Legislation hasn't yet fully adapted, some of the legislation I've seen makes the mistake of conflaing these, and enforcement is nonexistent in most places. I suspect that as time passes, we'll find ways of allowing ebikes to flourish. Around me the biggest thing I've seen is parents on cargo bikes taking their kids, and that's a demographic that elected officials tend to listen to.
by V99 | 2026-03-01 17:30:06+00:00
This is not even close to the worst ideas Apple ever had, even if you're only talking about mice.

The original USB mouse (for the first iMac) was round, so you couldn't orient it in your hand without looking at it constantly.

And it came with a very short cord (because there was a port on the right side of the keyboard to plug it into). But then the laptops got updated with USB ports and they were only on the LEFT side of the case.

For at least a year or two you could not buy an Apple mouse for your Apple PowerBook and use it in your right hand, because the cord was too short to go around the case.

Eventually they shipped a "Pro" mouse with revolutionary elongated shape and longer cord. (...and optical tracking, and what looked like zero buttons, which were pretty neat)
by layer8 | 2026-03-01 17:30:44+00:00
Rolling your own is not the solution for the common case where you’re asking an LLM a question that may or may not be supported or supplemented by a web search. ChatGPT decides by itself when and how to consult the web, and then links the relevant sources in its result. You don’t get that functionality from Claude chat, you’d have to completely build your own chat harness and apps.

Sites like Reddit are blocking AI providers, they have to have some contract with them for access. OpenAI does seem to have that.
Show HN: Chatbot to reuse AI prompts instead of copy-pasting
by owenthecoder13 | 2026-03-01 17:30:51+00:00
I use AI daily and kept running into the same problem:

• Rewriting the same prompts
• Copy-pasting from notes

So I built a chatbot that lets you create prompt template modules.

Instead of pasting full prompts every time, you:

Create a module (e.g., Email Writer)

Add variables like {tone}, {audience}, {goal}

Just fill in the variables when needed

You can browse prompts other users have already made and reuse them instantly

It saves a lot of time if you use AI heavily.

I’m still improving it — would love feedback.
by genewitch | 2026-03-01 17:32:04+00:00
wear a hat/beanie with IR LEDs, you need a few frequencies of "IR", but it's invisible (or barely visible) to humans, but it's the same as shining a light into a sensor to a "machine". could have it built in to a jacket collar, too. you'd have to wear pants to foil gait detection, too. Something with a lot of angles and squiggles that is hard to see as "distinct" against the background.
by thorum | 2026-03-01 17:32:34+00:00
Ape thinking is a cognitive practice where a human deliberately solves problems with their own mind. Practitioners of ape thinking will typically author thoughts by thinking them with their own brain, using neurons and synapses.

The term was popularized when asking a computer to do it for you became the dominant form of cognition. "Ape thinking" first appeared in online communities as derogatory slang, referring to humans who were unable to outsource all their thinking to a computer. Despite the quick spread of asking a computer to do it for you, institutional inertia, affordability, and limitations in human complacency were barriers to universal adoption of the new technology.
by nostrademons | 2026-03-01 17:32:58+00:00
It's interesting that the same dynamic is playing out on a much larger scale with children. A child is far more helpless than a junior engineer - at least a junior engineer can feed themselves, wipe their own butt, avoid destroying the room, and generally keep themselves alive. Everybody wants to offload the cost of raising children to parents, because the economic benefits aren't realized for 25+ years yet the costs are very substantial (frequently, at least one parent's full-time attention, costing them an income). Prospective parents are saying "fuck that shit" and simply choosing not to have children.

The long-term effects are going to be much like the effect of the software industry turning away from juniors: total collapse. When you have no workforce, you'll do no work - hell, there is just...nothing, nonexistence, no consumers either. But the fertility bust operates on a longer timescale (I think the software industry will start feeling the dearth of juniors in ~5 years, the economy as a whole won't feel the dearth of children for ~5), and it's far more fundamental. Rather than one industry disappearing, all industries will disappear, likely refactored into something that looks far different.

It also reminds me of those ecological predator/prey/locust models that I studied in calculus class, where population dynamics for many species have a tendency to overshoot the carrying capacity of the environment. Each individual in the population makes their own reproductive & survival decisions, but the sum total of them leads to population collapse and a near total extinction, followed by recovery once the survivors find resources abundant again.
by Aurornis | 2026-03-01 17:33:20+00:00
We have the laws. What they’re doing is illegal. I think they need a higher tier of penalties for the repeat offenders, but that would require anyone getting caught first.

It’s an enforcement problem.

The riders know they’re riding where police cars can’t get them. They also know that the bike cops aren’t allowed to ride ultra powerful electric motorcycles. They also know they can just drive off across some grass into a park if anyone tries to stop them.

It’s a hard problem.

> I suspect that as time passes, we'll find ways of allowing ebikes to flourish.

Electric bikes are flourishing here. Electric motorcycles on bike paths are the problem.

I think the electric term is confusing the issue. If it helps, imagine that these were just really quiet but powerful gas powered dirt bikes riding on the pedestrian path. That should give you an idea of what’s going on.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2026-03-01 17:33:24+00:00
PM Gordon Brown did call a female voter "bigoted" on a hot mic (1) - with some justification actually, as she did say some unpleasant anti-immigrant rhetoric. Mr Brown lost an election shortly after, but this incident was not in itself what brought him down.

1) https://www.standard.co.uk/hp/front/full-conversation-betwee...
by davidw | 2026-03-01 17:34:45+00:00
eBikes are such a game changer. I do most of our family of four's grocery shopping with ours.

Because of the assist, I find myself more comfortable in a wider range of weather conditions:

* If it's hot, I use more assist and there's an instant cooling effect. Much better than climbing into a hot car.

* If it's cold, I dress up to be warm outside and if I start to warm up on the ride, I use more assist. I don't have to try and balance staying warm and not getting sweaty.

* Same thing if it's wet out: I can wear heavier waterproof gear and not get sweaty.
by freehorse | 2026-03-01 17:35:06+00:00
... for "Cauchy sequences", which are basically sequences whose terms become "closer and closer together".

You can still have sequences with no limits (a_n:=n, going to infinity, where all successive terns differ by 1 and which does not have a limit in the usual metric), as well as sequences with multiple limit points (in which case, subsequences can be considered).

Btw this is "Cauchy completeness", so it is a bit different (but equivalent) way to approach the construction of the real numbers from Dedekind's, but it is also one that can apply to more general metric spaces.
by bonoboTP | 2026-03-01 17:35:45+00:00
It's often warping the message or "snapping it to grid", taking off the edge, the unique insight. A lack of clear communication is much more a symptom of unclarity about the intended message, audience, prioritization etc. I don't doubt that you internally have a clear idea but sharing it requires thinking about the intended audience and the diff of their current state of knowledge and doubt and where you want to move their thinking. This is a much bigger part than knowing eloquent vocab and grammar tricks.

It doesn't come naturally to the more introverted type of person who cares about the object level problem and not whatever anyone else may know or doubt, I'll admit this. But slapping LLMs on it is not a great solution.
by BillSims | 2026-03-01 17:35:58+00:00
I can't make a case for AI versus not AI versus bad human. I am not counting comments or flagged. I'm only counting the number of new articles in the last 24 hours that remain visible at about 4p.m. west coast time in news.ycombinator.com/newest when not logged in to yc. Those numbers had been consistently about 900 each weekday and about 600 each weekend day and had been stable for a long time. In the last ten weeks those numbers look a lot like a parabola and have increased about 50%. That data is a little bit dirty, either because I missed a day or started a little late on a day. Harder to exactly quantify, the number of those articles that I think enough of, either from the title alone or sometimes from peeking at the first screen or two of the article, to bookmark for future reading and consideration has decreased by substantially more than 50% in the last ten weeks, some days that number is now zero or one or sometimes two. I have thought about this for a while and I have not been able to identify anything that happened starting about ten weeks ago that might be responsible for this, AI and politics and the economy started changing long before this.
by sublinear | 2026-03-01 17:35:59+00:00
I don't really know myself either, just the flaws I have (right now). I found them by pushing outside my comfort zone.

Sometimes you just need to know when to stop pushing for a while and come back later. Later can be sooner than you think, or never. It's the whole point of living. I'd find it miserable to be over my skis the entire time, but I still take risks here and there. How else do you find out?