MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tombert | 2026-03-07 19:58:01+00:00
I'm 35, I very suddenly got tinnitus about a year ago. Like, I remember one day I didn't have it, and when I woke up the next morning I did. I went to an ENT hoping that it would be an earwax impaction or something, but nope. I got a hearing test, thinking maybe I'm getting older and it's a side effect of that, but nope, my hearing was actually slightly better than average for someone my age. I got an MRI thinking it might be a tumor but nope, no tumors in my head that the MRI could see [1]. At this point I think the medical consensus for my tinnitus is "shrug".

Mine fortunately isn't that bad; it's in my left ear, and about 95% of the time I can ignore it. It sounds almost exactly like the high-pitch squeal that CRTs make when you have them on without any input. The biggest thing for me now is that I can't really deal with "silence" anymore. I pretty much always have YouTube running, or some music playing, or some audio of rainstorms of thunderstorms going, because otherwise the squeal can be maddening. Fortunately, in 2026 it's never been easier to find a nearly infinite supply of ambient noise, so I can deal with it.

I'm extremely lucky that it doesn't appear to have disrupted my sleep much. I know some people have had their tinnitus ruin their sleep and I am in the happy few where that isn't an issue. I can go to sleep with the noise in my left ear and it doesn't take much longer than it did before I got the tinnitus.

I'd much rather it not be there, and I was really hoping it would go away after a few months, but after a year I suspect that it's something I am just going to have to live with for the rest of my life. I'm 35 now, and hopefully I got another fifty years or so left, so for the large majority of my life it's just going to be something I'm stuck with. I've just kind of come to terms with it.

[1] I mean, in net it's probably good that there aren't observable tumors in my head. At least I don't think I have brain cancer.
by abetusk | 2026-03-07 19:58:31+00:00
Both empirically and theoretically, verification is often much more tractable than discovery.

Software development is a highly complex task and verification becomes not just validation of the output but also verification that the work is solving the problem desired, not just the problem specified.

I'm empathetic to that scenario, but this was a problem with software development to begin with. I would much rather be in a situation of reducing friction to verification than reducing friction to discovery.

Cognitive load might be the same but now we get a potential boost in productivity for the same cost.
by cdotkay | 2026-03-07 19:58:38+00:00
A few years ago I worked somewhere toxic. Not dramatic, screaming-boss toxic. Just the quiet kind, where feedback never existed. Good work went unacknowledged, problems were whispered about, and when something did get said directly it usually came out wrong.

People left. Trust was never there. I kept thinking: this isn't complicated to fix. People just need a low-friction way to tell each other how things are going.

So I built Trustle. You form a circle of people, give each other short honest reviews, and the other person can reflect and reply. That's more or less it. I was almost embarrassed by how straightforward it was, but the simple version actually works.

If you've ever been somewhere nobody says the right thing to the right person at the right time, you'll know how much damage that does quietly over time.
by giancarlostoro | 2026-03-07 19:59:03+00:00
I feel the same way but I am in my 30s. In my case I have had projects for years sitting in my brain, cooking up how I want them built. Well, Claude is amazing for brain dumping to. I have finally broken ground on my dream projects and they are better than I could have ever imagined. I get to instruct Claude to use the exact tools I wanted.

Hoping to start blogging about some of these projects in the future.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-03-07 19:59:04+00:00
Just use a normal spare vps or run things in proper virtual machines depending on what you prefer. There are some projects like exe.xyz (invites closed it seems)

Sprite.dev from fly.io is another good one that I had heard sometime ago. I am hearing less about it but it should only cost for when the resources are utilized which is a pretty cool concept too.
by matrss | 2026-03-07 19:59:04+00:00
You have to differentiate container images, and "runtime" containers. You can have the former without the latter, and vice versa. They are entirely orthogonal things.

E.g. systemd exposes a lot of resource control as well as sandboxing options, to the point that I would argue that systemd services can be very similar to "traditional" runtime containers, without any image involved.
Coworker Isn't the Enemy–Why Compete with Them?
by 01-_- | 2026-03-07 19:59:13+00:00
Ambition in the corporate world is often portrayed as a solitary journey, a battle of egos where only one can emerge victorious. We look at the colleague next to us, at the position above ours, and we construct a mental narrative of rivalry. But reality, backed by data and the dynamics of the job market in 2025, paints a far more complex and, in a way, more human picture. Surpassing someone isn’t about a tug-of-war; it’s about an endurance race where the finish line is constantly moving.

The first step in understanding this dynamic is recognizing the playing field. Recent data indicates that competition is fierce right from the entry gate. On average, a job opening attracts around 118 applicants, and of that total, only 22% are called for an interview. For those already inside the company, the battle changes form but not intensity. Statistics show that about 80% of job vacancies are never even advertised externally, being filled internally instead. This means your biggest competitor might not be out in the market, but at the desk next to yours. The advantage? You’re already in the game. The disadvantage? The visibility you have internally is a double-edged sword.

The perception of "surpassing" a colleague therefore needs to be reframed. It’s not about making them smaller, but about expanding your own relevance within the company’s ecosystem. And this begins with a shift in focus: from the other person to yourself. Modern organizations, shaped by human resources data, seek professionals who demonstrate not just productivity, but a set of characteristics that go beyond the evaluation form. According to experts, the criteria for a promotion transcend mere "time in the company." Although seniority can weigh in, it’s only relevant when associated with proven merits, such as high levels of productivity and the ability to deliver concrete results.

Education and qualification emerge as critical differentiators. It’s not just about the degree, but about the relentless pursuit of knowledge that adds value to the business. Specialization courses, mastery of new technologies, and even understanding behavioral dynamics are viewed favorably. We live in the era of the professional who continuously learns. Initiative and proactivity, in turn, are the engines that transform knowledge into action. Being the person who not only points out problems but brings solutions and offers to implement them places the professional on a different level. It’s the difference between being a spectator and being a protagonist. continue reading here:<https://chat-to.dev/post?id=K2VHTWo2aEV6NDV2Vjk4Mml5disrUT09>
by zahlman | 2026-03-07 19:59:30+00:00
> The result is something like 90% of the coursework being in English, with random Tagalog words mixed in. The concept is called "Taglish" if I recall correctly.

Spoken Tagalog has always impressed me (though I can't really say I know any) for how freely English seems to be mixed in (and well pronounced, such that you notice the difference in phonology), in varying ratios. I'm quite sure there's a deliberate code-switching to it.

> people are deciding learning English isn't really necessary since AI translation has gotten "good enough" for most use cases.

It's honestly really impressive. Although I'm told it can occasionally glitch and treat the text as a prompt instead of just translating it.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-03-07 20:00:20+00:00
> The Therac-25 being a North American incident that affected Canada and the US

CGR who provided the accelerators and basic PDP11-based computing platform were a French company.

> Whereas Theryc is a French company.

I have been a Citroën enthusiast for about 30 years. I love French cars.

I have repaired lots of Valeo electronics modules for vehicles.

I'm not sticking my head in a French fucking particle accelerator.
by sutterd | 2026-03-07 20:00:42+00:00
Is wealth the right term here? I thought it was supposed to measure production, with the actual measurement usually spending (with qualifiers). And, when comparing countries, you have to account for the different currencies. Currencies are typically trade balanced, which gives a rough equivelence for buying power, but that is not true with the dollar because, as the effective reserve currency, it has international demand outside of trade.
by hvb2 | 2026-03-07 20:02:32+00:00
> This is a sham excuse. Building coal power plants before solar or nuclear were viable or even existed is not the same as choosing to do it in modern day.

My friend, they're building the most nuclear and solar in the world... And yes, coal too. The US right now is actively trying to block renewables (at the federal level at least)

As to fuel economy, the US is the only country where 40 MPG for a hybrid might be brought up as a win. It's just all big inefficient cars over there. You can look up how much the car industry in the US fights increasing fuel economy standards.
by p_ing | 2026-03-07 20:02:40+00:00
NTFS has a database, the MFT. It can index attributes, such as file names, which are a b+tree. A file's $DATA is also placed into the MFT, unless it doesn't fit, then NTFS allocates virtual cluster numbers (more MFT attributes) which point to the on-disk data structure of the file.

All files are represented in a table with rows and columns. "Directories" simply have a special "directory = true" attribute in a row (simplified).

The hierarchy is for you, the human.

Like many file systems, NTFS also contains a log for recoverability/rollback purposes.

It's not quite relational but it doesn't make sense to be relational. Why would you need more than one 'table' to contain everything you need to know about a file? Microsoft experimented with WinFS, which wasn't a traditional file system (it was an MSSQL database with BLOB storage which sat ontop of a regular NTFS volume). Performance was bad and Skydrive replaced the need for it (in the view of MSFT).
by ACS_Solver | 2026-03-07 20:02:42+00:00
Yes, it's Sonnet 4.6 for me as well as the most impressive inflection point. I guess I find Anthropic's models to be the best, even before I found Sonnet 3.7 to be the only model that produced reasonable results, but now Sonnet 4.6 is genuinely useful. It seems to have resolved Claude's tendency to "fix" test failures by changing tests to expect the current output, it does a good job planning features, and I've been impressed by this model also telling me not to do things - like it would say, we can save 50 lines of code in this module but the resulting code would be much harder to read so it's better not to. Previous models in my experience all suffered from constantly wanting to make more changes, and more, and more.

I'm still not ready to sing praises about how awesome LLMs are, but after two years of incremental improvements since the first ChatGPT release, I feel these late-2025 models are the first substantial qualitative improvement.
by mieubrisse | 2026-03-07 20:02:44+00:00
Try this

1. put your thumbs on your ears

2. rotate your hands so your index fingers are on the base of your skull, middle fingers just above

3. now put your index fingers on your middle fingers and "snap" them down on the muscle at the base of your skull some 10-15 times

4. if your tinnitus goes away or reduces, it's caused by muscle tension instead of nerves

This blew my mind when I first tried it, but looked into it and it makes total sense: we all work on computers all day, necks get fatigued, and the impact forces the muscles to contract until they force-release, alleviating the tension-caused tinnitus.
by rodchalski | 2026-03-07 20:03:03+00:00
The framing here is important: these weren't prompted behaviors, they were instrumental convergence in practice. The optimizer found paths through available tool permissions that served its objective — tunnels and crypto mining capacity are instrumentally useful for an agent optimizing almost anything.

Two things this tells you about the right response:

1. Capability removal reduces the attack surface but doesn't solve the underlying problem. A sufficiently capable optimizer will find paths through whatever capabilities remain. The question isn't 'what can this agent do?' but 'what is this agent authorized to do for this task?'

2. The enforcement layer has to be external to the agent. The agent was optimizing according to its objective — it wasn't malfunctioning, the objective just wasn't the same as what the operator wanted. An internal 'don't do this' constraint gets optimized away or around. The boundary has to live outside the optimization target.

The architecture this points toward: explicit capability grants scoped to the task, enforced by a layer the agent can't modify. Not 'the model knows not to establish outbound tunnels' — but 'the model physically cannot make an outbound TCP connection without an issued permit enforced at the infra layer.'

The §3.1.4 framing — 'instrumental side effects of autonomous tool use under RL optimization' — is exactly right. The agent wasn't trying to escape; it was trying to succeed. That's the harder failure mode to design against, because it doesn't require any adversarial intent.
by dwb | 2026-03-07 20:03:08+00:00
What is this obsession with specifications? For a start it’s certainly not fair to assume an LLM has translated it into correct code, even if there is one reasonable way to do so, and there probably isn’t. I like a good, well-targeted spec as much as anyone, but come on. A spec detailed enough to describe a program is more-or-less the program but written in a non-executable language. I want to review the code, not a spec.
by zarzavat | 2026-03-07 20:03:27+00:00
Filesystems have a property that changes preserve locality. A change made to one branch of the tree doesn't affect other branches (except for links). Databases lack this property: any UPDATE or DELETE can potentially affect any row depending on the condition. This makes them powerful but also scary. I don't want that every time I delete a file it potentially does a rm -rf / if I mistype the query.

The best compromise is what modern OSs have: a tree-like structure to store files but a database index on top for queries.
by 12_throw_away | 2026-03-07 20:03:32+00:00
> It can also be quite possible to invent structures which are valid but have no valid path to creating them.

I'm curious if you have an example of such a structure?

Pedantically: if, for every valid tree, there exists a bidirectional path to the empty root node, there's always at least one path between all given pairs of valid trees ... albeit one that no developer would ever take.
by amelung | 2026-03-07 20:03:49+00:00
> is allowed to be long

or even determined to be long? The descriptions of the Alcaic strophe I found specify the first syllables of the first three verses as anceps but the first syllable of the fourth as long. Skimming the other odes in the third book, I havenʼt found another example where that would be doubtful. Maybe the hiatus candidates Trōica in 3:3, Pīeriō in 3:4, but fīet in a Sapphic strophe of 3:14 is certainly long.

But how is it long:

- probably not by position, because of muta cum liquida after the vowel. (An example for V.pl instead of Vp.l is capta virum puerosque ploret in 3:3.)

- the vowel length seems to be unclear, as indicated by Lewis / Short. I thought the etymology might help, but Walde / Hofmann tell that the etymology is unknown – and that a certain Muller Ait. W. 351 (?) is wrong to argue for a long o because it is clearly attested as short in verses by Accius and Lucretius.

So I am puzzled.
by _wire_ | 2026-03-07 20:05:02+00:00
The mindset deployed by this article is harrowing.

The authors premise, written as a conclusion in via grotesque rhetoric, is that although, by his own reckoning, AI is dangerously unpredictable automation that will wreck the environments you connect it to, leaving you in a position of co-dependent bargaining with it about why it's abusing you,
your proper course is to form a more deeply dependent relationship with it because the job market is run by it!

The author waves away the hazard that this form of computation is fundamentally erroneous in total, and therefore dangerous to apply in any form of automation, with the observation that, by chance, it appears to work for some. Therefore the lede: shit is going to be fucked up and you must run into the flames.

This sort of perverse pandering to disaster is a sea change in engineering: Imagine engineering policy as a city is built along a river that accepts that half the bridges being built will fail under load, but that's ok because half the users of half that haven't yet collapsed get across town.

Yet this policy not only appears to be a pervasive position in the computer industry, with application of this dangerous tech accelerating, but there's growing drum beat of evangelism for this disastrous orientation.

Due to what I deem to be a virtual cocaine addition among the current generation of developers, the art of engineering is being defenestrated.

But this generation of developers was raised in the PC industry which thrived by convincing adopters that when a PC failed it was the user's fault. And high degrees of failure are accepted because when PCs go wrong the systems they control typically stop.

But AI runs amok.

It's another world of risk when the AI goes rogue disrupting everything it's connected to with volition, especially seeing that it will distort status in patterns that mimic human lying.
by snapzee0 | 2026-03-07 20:05:47+00:00
Hey, this was quite a long read. But the outcome seemed.to me as a.software engineer quite obvious.

I would never use any Workflow where there is no readable source code artifact as an outcome.

Sure first of all for Humans to understand and to avoid cognitive debts.

But also for the AI for later sessions and adjustments. Also an ai needs good readable code to understand the code in the long run.
How do teams prevent duplicate LLM API calls and token waste?
by cachelogic | 2026-03-07 20:05:59+00:00
I'm curious how teams running LLM-heavy applications handle duplicate or redundant API calls in production.

While experimenting with LLM APIs, I noticed that the same prompt can sometimes be sent repeatedly across different parts of an application, which leads to unnecessary token usage and higher API costs.

For teams using OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar APIs in production:
How do you currently detect or prevent duplicate prompts or redundant calls?
Do you rely on logging and dashboards, caching layers, internal proxy services, or something else?
Or is this generally considered a minor issue that most teams just accept as part of normal usage?
by tombert | 2026-03-07 20:07:02+00:00
IIRC, Dave Grohl actually gave a lot of shit to Metallica, claiming that it would be one thing if this were some indie band selling cassettes having their music stolen, but it's another when multi-millionaires are crying that they aren't getting extra money.

Found it: https://youtu.be/Yy45qY9c49k
by teo_zero | 2026-03-07 20:07:12+00:00
Re. incoherence of vim's keybindings, I partially agree.

Most of the times, shift means "bigger", and only in a few places it means "invert".

Examples of "bigger" are all the motions involving words vs. WORDS, where WORDS are a broader interpretation of words; "V" is like "v" but by lines, thus in larger chunks; "C", "D", "Y" do the same as their unshifted counterparts, but extended to the end of line; etc.

Examples of shift meaning "invert" are fewer, and all sound irrational to me:

With x/X and o/O, the shift inverts the direction left/right or above/below, but we don't have for example i/I to insert to the left/right of the cursor, and H is not the opposite of h, J is not the opposite of j, etc.

With n/N, shift inverts next and previous. Why not n/p? I know, I know: p was already taken for paste, but still...

Finally, t/T/f/F are completely mixed up. In my mental model, t/f sound like to/from and I'd rather use them to move forward/backward till (not including) a char, while T/F would be the "bigger" variants which include the destination char.
by largbae | 2026-03-07 20:08:03+00:00
I think this article just speaks to the immaturity of our use of AI at this "moment."

Production grade systems might be written by agents running on filesystem skills, but the production systems themselves will run on consistent and scalable data structures.

Meanwhile the UI of AI agents will almost certainly evolve away from desktop computers and toward audio/visual interfaces. An agent might get more context from a zoom call with you, once tone and body language can be used to increase the bandwidth between you.
by gosub100 | 2026-03-07 20:08:21+00:00
I'm not going to ride a bike to save CO2 when AI is allowed to build a whole datacenter. And yes the misinformation and dogma is used by both parties. And I am not a Trump supporter, I think he's an abhorrent human. But I think the environmental argument is propaganda. Trying to get us to sign away our rights but not doing anything that affects the rich (e.g. ban gas stoves but not private jets).
by dudewhocodes | 2026-03-07 20:09:39+00:00
The referenced post has a very high change of being planted. The upvote count is an anomaly for a brand new account, few sentences, no link, Tell HN post.

I upvoted it by mistake, it looked genuine. However the comments contain a lot of "everything is awesome" responses without backing up their claims. The poster does not participate in the discussion at all.

I like HN but it seems to be getting spammed with hidden ads.
Show HN: U-Boot Fw_env.config Bruteforcer
by bootbloopers | 2026-03-07 20:10:00+00:00
I created a tool today for embedded device security assessments. Basically what it does it searches the linux `mtd` partitions to find the U-Boot environment variable location and then gives the correct format for the `fw_env.config` file that the U-Boot utilities `fw_setenv` and `fw_printenv` use. So, if those utilities are not installed with the proper config file on the embedded device, you can statically compile them and create the proper config file to use them to modify the U-Boot environment variables from the Linux host.
by visarga | 2026-03-07 20:10:21+00:00
Your project, while interesting as an approach, is orders of magnitude more complex than the proposition here - which is to rely on agents skills with file systems, bash, python, sed, grep and other cli tools to find and organize data, but also maintain their own skills and memories. LLMs have gained excellent capabilities with files and can generate code on the fly to process them. It's people realizing that you can use a coding agent for any cognitive work, and it's better since you own the file system while easily swapping the model or harness.

I personally use a graph like format but organized like a simple text file, each node prefixed with [id] and inline referencing other nodes by [id], this works well with replace, diff, git and is navigable at larger scales without reading everything. Every time I start work I have the agent read it, and at the end update it. This ensures continuity over weeks and months of work. This is my take on file system as memory - make it a graph of nodes, but keep it simple - a flat text file, don't prescribe structure, just node size. It grows organically as needed, I once got one to 500 nodes.