MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alwillis | 2026-03-10 15:41:37+00:00
> and approaches Linux performance in some areas (e.g. Networking)

FreeBSD has been the gold standard for networking features and performance for decades; not sure I'd agree.

> FreeBSD tends to have fewer features in almost all areas compared to Linux

I'm not sure FreeBSD has fewer features in total but on a new install, many of them are turned off; it doesn’t mandate what should be running. There's a lot beneath the surface to get into.

> FreeBSD Kernel and Userland developed together -- it has got that undefined "cohesive" feel

Definitely! It feels like a single entity rather than a collection of components.

> Has less layers of abstraction than Linux, gets the job done. Because there are fewer layers it's easier to understand what is going on and potentially easier to fix.

Agreed. You can tell the FreeBSD developers attitude is to compose features using what the operating system already offers instead of creating new things from scratch.

> Very simple daemon configuration via /etc/rc.conf

I'd say in a good way; quoting from "Service Management: init vs systemd" [1]:

The comparison is best understood structurally. [FreeBSD](https://vivianvoss.net/dictionary#freebsd)'s init system is composed of precisely five elements: shell scripts, one library, one configuration file, one ordering utility, and the shell itself. Each is inspectable, replaceable, and debuggable with tools that predate the engineer using them.

[systemd](https://vivianvoss.net/dictionary#systemd) is composed of, well, rather more. The binary count stood at 69 in 2013, which prompted some concern. By 2024, it had doubled. The project absorbed fifteen distinct tools that previously existed as independent, single-purpose programs, each maintained by specialists who understood them intimately.

[1]: https://vivianvoss.net/blog/init-vs-systemd
by _heimdall | 2026-03-10 15:42:21+00:00
Its usually much harder to decide what's good for society than its made out to be. Externalities matter, something can seem good for society today and turn out to have serious downsides that either weren't known upfront or didn't show up until later.

With regards to authority here, this absolutely is a case of granting more power and authority to the state, or more specifically the state claiming it.

The judge here said its illegal to use redlight cameras in certain situations. Based on the prior comment, if California found a loophole so they can get to the same end by labeling it something different that is them functionally claiming new authority. The judge says its illegal, the state says no its not we can do this anyway.
by short_sells_poo | 2026-03-10 15:42:31+00:00
For a human to be able to do any customization, they have to dive into the code and work with it, understand it, gain intuition for it. Engage with the maintainers and community. In the process, there's a good chance that they'll be encouraged to contribute improvements upstream even if they have their own fork.

Vibe coders don't have to do any of this. They don't have to understand anything, they can just have their LLMs do some modifications that are completely opaque to the vibe coder.

Perhaps the long term steady state will be a goldilocks renaissance of open source where lots of new ideas and contributors spring up, made capable with AI assistance. But so far what I've seen is the opposite. These people just feed existing work into their LLMs, produce derivative works and never bother to engage with the original authors or community.
by wastemaster | 2026-03-10 15:42:35+00:00
Spot on. We often joke that a raw LLM acts exactly like an over-eager junior sales rep—it desperately wants to say "yes" to please the customer. Because they learned from us, they inherit the bad human habit of equating "helpfulness" with agreement. The difference is an AI will scale those broken promises instantly, which is why the constraints have to be architectural.
by _giorgio_ | 2026-03-10 15:42:51+00:00
If his ideas had real substance, we would have seen substantial results by now.
He introduced I-JEPA in 2023, so almost three years ago at this point.

If he still hasn’t produced anything truly meaningful after all these years at Meta, when is that supposed to happen? Yann LeCun has been at Facebook/Meta since December 2013.

Your chronological sequence is interesting, but it refers to a time when the number of researchers and the amount of compute available were a tiny fraction of what they are today.
by subpixel | 2026-03-10 15:43:14+00:00
As the essay points out, we losers have only two paths out of loserdom. The first is to leverage sociopathic tendencies, to scheme and maneuver and accrue power (probably as a minion to an actual sociopath, I don’t think transformation happens except at the early stage of a career). The second is to check out and coast, tacitly improving our position without actually striking a new bargain or finding any safety.

My own losing trap, which I think is common, is to try to periodically make sense of the organization and map a logical path forward for myself. This never works. My career progress in the organization has actually come about through sheer accident and/or lucky association.
by epolanski | 2026-03-10 15:43:40+00:00
Not really to be honest because the framework under which Venkatesh Rao talks about power talk is a bit different than how most sociologists see power talk.

Sociologists focus on tone, Rao focuses on the content.

In The Gervais Principle information is a currency and treated as negotiation leverage. You never give it for free, unless strictly in the boundaries of your job. Thus, under this lens, you collect as much information and never give it away for free.

Suppose you're a software engineer and a service you work on is slow.

There's two ways you can go about it:

"Our API has a 300ms+ latency, I have some ideas on how to fix it" -> giving information, and work for free. You're in the loser/clueless category.

Which of those depends on your awareness: are you aware of the political game and ignore it and focus on the craft? Loser. Are you not aware of the political game and try to do "what's best for the team/company"? You're clueless.

Then there's the sociopath's version:

"We may have a performance issues affecting reliability. Before we go deeper, we should decide who owns performance optimization."

This is power talk. Even if you don't own the performance optimization you still:

- communicated that you hold information others don't

- you're setting the tone and direction of the meeting

At this point somebody may raise the point of "which performance issues?" and here the hard part begins, how do you navigate and play the game? Are you prepared to motivate why ownership comes before information?

In the end, probably the best way to learn power talk in the context of the Gervais principle is to experiment, observe and study. Because no other sociologists has focused on it with Rao's angle.
by hombre_fatal | 2026-03-10 15:43:51+00:00
Well, the problem you just outlined is a reputation (+ UI) problem: why are contributions from unknown contributors shown at the same level as PRs from known quality contributors, for example?

We need to rethink some UX design and processes here, not pretend low quality people are going to follow your "no low quality pls i'm serious >:(" rules. Rather, design the processes against low quality.

Also, we're in a new world where code-change PRs are trivial, and the hard part isn't writing code anymore but generating the spec. Maybe we don't even allow PRs anymore except for trusted contributors, everyone else can only create an issue and help refine a plan there which the code impl is derived?

You know, even before LLMs, it would have been pretty cool if we had a better process around deliberating and collaborating around a plan before the implementation step of any non-trivial code change. Changing code in a PR with no link to discussion around what the impl should actually look like always did feel like the cart before the horse.
by dnhkng | 2026-03-10 15:43:51+00:00
Thanks for the link!

I think that these models have to learn to efficiently use their parameters, and the best way to do that is 'evolve' (yes, a bad word for it), structures over pretraining time. Unfortunately, they don't have a way to access these structures 'from the inside'. I hope this new approach lets up boost performance in s more experimentally rigorous way
by vladms | 2026-03-10 15:43:55+00:00
> It's negatively impacting people and servers that have no interest in having anything adult on them.

So who should police that? I am in certain communities that try to be stricter on moderation (which I love!) but it's hard work, lots of people trying to be at the edge of rules (with normal things like swearing, insults, etc.).

Whoever labels adult only and does not care is not wishing to put the effort to police that it actually is not.

Personally I do generally mind much more annoying, aggressive, stupid posters (in various channels), than the fact that I am not allowed to post some stupid adult-looking meme.
by orthogonal_cube | 2026-03-10 15:43:57+00:00
> Historically, the em dash (—) has served as a flexible punctuation mark
used by human authors to indicate interruption, emphasis, or sudden
changes in thought.

I learned about the em dash in high school and adapted it to my writing style very quickly for analysis and opinion documents. It felt natural given the amount of tangents I can go off into, particularly when including analogies for the reader’s understanding.

I was surprised to find out in my career that it was rarely used by others. Subconsciously I pulled back on how often I used it — especially when it was once suggested that frequent use could imply neurodivergence. Important and lengthy documents which I’d written and published (internally) at work still display them. On occasion there have been comments asking if I’d somehow accessed early AI models to assist in writing these works because of their presence. I think I averaged two em dashes per letter page.

I find myself on the fence with proposals like these. They have good intentions but they do not solve an issue at its core. An LLM is going to reflect one of many writing styles. If today it’s frequent em dash usage, tomorrow it could be frequent parentheses. Swapping Unicode characters becomes a cat-and-mouse game with the cat always two steps behind. The real issue is that the social contract is broken because LLM output is attempted to be passed off as human work. Review and revise that social contract instead to adapt to the existence of the new tools.
by infiniumtek | 2026-03-10 15:44:01+00:00
Happy to take a look.

If you’re comfortable sharing, feel free to post the repo or describe the stack you’re using (framework, hosting, databases, etc.). Sometimes a quick architecture review can reveal the easiest path to production.

If you’d rather chat privately, you can DM me or reach out through the contact form here:
https://infiniumtek.com/vibes/

Either way I’m happy to help point you in the right direction.
by PTOB | 2026-03-10 15:44:05+00:00
Two of the things I love intersect here: good punctuation and engineering documents.

AI stole the em-dash from my toolkit.

I have memorized a group of useful Alt-codes for engineering documents. They include symbols for diameter, delta, degrees, dot product, and trademark among others. If you're of a certain age, you will remember how useful Alt+255 was for folder naming.

At the cusp of the 21st centuries, I added the Windows Alt-code for the em-dash. Compared to parentheses it is less jarring. Commas are dainty things. I use the em-dash, and I am human.*

* I confess that I also use semicolons; I still claim to be human.
Show HN: Worktale, a local-first CLI to turn your Git history into a dev journal
by plsft | 2026-03-10 15:44:45+00:00
Hey HN,

I built Worktale because I couldn't remember what to say at my last performance review: "What did you ship this quarter?"

I'd spent months debugging race conditions, redesigning a reporting pipelines, shipping a major migration — all behind a corporate firewall in private repos. None of it was visible. Not on GitHub. Not on my resume. Not even to me.

So I built a CLI that reads your local git history and turns it into a personal record of what you actually built. No account, no cloud, no code leaves your machine.

How it works:

npm i -g worktale
cd my-project
worktale init # scans full git history, installs a silent post-commit hook
worktale # opens a TUI dashboard — overview, daily log, heatmap
worktale digest # generates a daily summary (template or local Ollama AI)

After 'init', every git commit silently captures metadata (message, lines changed, timestamps) into a local SQLite database. That's it. No network requests, no telemetry.

If you don't want hooks in your repos--fair point, for those with a fear of commitment:

cd ~/projects
worktale batch --since 3m # scans all repos recursively, imports history, installs nothing
worktale hook install # opt-in to live tracking per repo later

Technical details for the curious:

- TypeScript, compiled to ESM with tsup
- TUI built with Ink 5 (React 18 for terminals)
- SQLite via better-sqlite3 in WAL mode
- Historical analysis runs in worker threads (batches of 500 commits)
- Bash + PowerShell git hooks for cross-platform support
- 385 tests across 28 test files
- MIT licensed

What it is not:

- Not a time tracker (it estimates from commit timestamps, but that's a side effect)
- Not a replacement for GitHub contributions (this is your private journal)
- Not a team tool (yet — cloud with shareable profiles is on the roadmap)

The whole thing runs locally. The only optional network call is if you use Ollama for AI-generated digests, and that's localhost.

Source: https://github.com/worktale/worktale-cli
Site: https://worktale.org

npm: npm i -g worktale

Happy to answer questions about the architecture, the SQLite schema, or why I parse git log --format instead of using a library.
by jrm4 | 2026-03-10 15:45:08+00:00
Unfair characterization. You can make informed prediction about these 2nd order effects without thinking they are dumb. I don't think people who send nudes with Snapchat behaving as if they will be definitely deleted are dumb either because, you know, the heart wants what it wants.

That doesn't mean that there is no danger of people having "buyer's" regret later, or more importantly that there are issues beyond the individuals.
by ShawnC21 | 2026-03-10 15:45:27+00:00
I'm Building MVAR: It's a deterministic execution firewall for LLM agents. The core idea: prompt injection becomes dangerous only when model output can trigger privileged execution.. Instead of detecting malicious prompts, MVAR enforces policy at the sink level.

Invariant: UNTRUSTED input + CRITICAL sink → BLOCK

Just hit PyPI this week. https://github.com/mvar-security/mvar
by alecco | 2026-03-10 15:45:31+00:00
What I've seen many, many times.

1. business people sold themselves as the best to manage companies and took over companies (just like lawyers do in governments), changing the norm from decades ago when it was more likely for engineers to run companies than some kind of McKinsey guy

2. but they have no idea besides business/money metrics so they quickly become overwhelmed and decide based on who makes the most compelling argument ("don't bring me more problems, give me solutions")

3. sociopaths exploit this by telling the execs what they want to hear

4. only after a while, after significant investment of resources in the decisions/projects proposed by the sociopaths it comes up to light it's complete nonsense

5. the sociopaths are aware of this, so they usually pivot before SHTF or they even exploit the situation to ask for more to "fix" the problems

6. the execs who backed the sociopaths want to cover their own asses so they hide the problems from higher ups for as long as possible (CEO, board, investors, shareholders, clients, authorities, public)

7. competent people are pulled out of productive work and thrown to solve impossible or even contradicting situations; some burn out, some leave, and the ones who stay are often stained forever like they were the cause of the problem

Sometimes the sociopaths are external consulting companies or companies offering some magic huge system that they promise will solve all the problems.

Sociopaths exploit information asymmetry.

Classic: https://web.archive.org/web/20051013062258/http://www.kuro5h...
by davidjade | 2026-03-10 15:45:52+00:00
I wrote software for a company that did legal forms on a PC - used by those same users that mastered WordPerfect for DOS. Those users typically had lower powered PCs even as Windows was slowly gaining traction in the market. Lawyers were slow to upgrade to more powerful PCs when WordPerfect for DOS was their main use. I pitched that Windows was the future but my boss at the time, rightly so, argued that those users could not adopt it on the hardware they typically used.

The compromise was I developed the new software as Windows 3.0 apps and used a text-based rendering compatibility layer called Mewel that implemented the Windows API in text mode for single DOS applications. A few #ifdefs and I could compile for both Win16 and DOS Text mode. This not only allowed me to develop under Windows using the superior at the time Borland compilers, it gave the company a solid footing when the legal world finally came around and wanted Windows software - we had it finished already. Sales slowly transitioned to the Windows version and then it really took off around Windows 3.11 (Windows for Workgroups).

That company was later bought by Pitney Bowes because they were the only company with Windows compatible legal forms software for Windows. Performa (or was it Proforma - I can't remember) was the name of the software.
by nickspicer1993 | 2026-03-10 15:46:06+00:00
Spruce (London/Bristol, UK) — Lead Full Stack Engineer — £85–120k + equity — Hybrid

Spruce builds the operating system for heat pump installation businesses across the UK. The UK needs to install 600,000 heat pumps a year to hit net zero by 2050 — right now we're at ~100,000. We're building the software to close that gap, supporting 500+ installers and growing fast. Founded early 2024, VC-backed.

The problems are genuinely interesting: 2D floor-plan geometry and drawing tools, offline-first PWAs with sync conflict resolution, cross-company job sharing with RBAC permissions, underfloor heating physics and hydronics calculations, LiDAR integration, and solar and battery systems.

Stack: TypeScript, React, Node.js, PostgreSQL/PostGIS, Prisma, Docker, Konva, Tailwind.

You'd own slices of architecture and technical strategy, write high-leverage code on critical paths, and mentor a growing engineering team — while still spending most of your time hands-on.

Looking for someone strong in TypeScript across the full stack, who's product-minded and wants real ownership over what they build.

33 days holiday + 30 days/year working abroad. Hybrid (2 days/week in office). Nursery benefits.

Apply: nick@spruce.eco
by pixl97 | 2026-03-10 15:46:26+00:00
Russia has very effective media in using the firehose of falsehood (Trump and his media groups follow the same pattern). You fill the field with so many lies that Bullshit Asymmetry makes it near impossible to figure out the truth.

The entire point is making everyone so tired all the time and feel like they can't make any progress. Then the government as less work of finding the few places where people congregate and stop them from meeting there.
by dnhkng | 2026-03-10 15:47:36+00:00
I build my own analysis tools. I'm just finishing up running the current generation of LLMs (MiniMax M2.5 and the Qwen3.5 family), and then I will put it all on Github.

It less 'tool', than an assorted set of scripts, tailored to my unusual hardware setup. But it should be easy to extend; I would have released this earlier but I had the (stupid) idea to 'write a paper' on this. Aiming for that delayed this a year. Blogs are the way to go (for me).
by netfortius | 2026-03-10 15:47:37+00:00
The "organization evolution" diagram is missing a crucial step, usually happening just before "death": some Sociopaths start trading intelligence (required, to a certain level, if to sustain crucial efforts in producing positive results) for mediocrity, in order to gain full obedience (the Clueless being hired are no longer A+ or A, but rather D, E, etc. level players, fully & blindly dedicated to the "leader"). This step is to be observed today in some governments.
by sigbottle | 2026-03-10 15:48:19+00:00
I don't know why this got downvoted. I've already been so frustrated by HN LIDAR mindsets but holy shit.

Human society exists because we value humans, full stop. The easiest way to "solve" all of humanity's problems is to simply say that humans aren't valuable. Sometimes it feels like we're conceding a ridiculous amount of ground on that basic principle every year - one more human value gone because it "doesn't matter", so hey, we've obviously made progress!
by markh1967 | 2026-03-10 15:48:47+00:00
About 9 years ago I had a run-in with stomach cancer. After a few months of chemo and a 7 hour operation I was eventually declared cancer free and have been ever since, but still have to live with the consequences of the treatment and be vigilant for any signs of it returning.

I still suffer intermittent stomach aches, especially in the early hours of the morning, and had a terrible time trying to decide if they were getting better or worse over time.

Our narrative voice is awful at detecting long term trends and tends to overcompensate for particularly good or bad patches so it was impossible for me to judge and I started keeping records of how bad the aches were each day.

Long story short, the average severity was mostly decreasing over time and the average time between bad aches was slowly increasing but it would have been impossible to tell if this was happening without keeping detailed records because it wasn't consistent - some months were much worse than others and completely skewed my perception of long term trends.

While most people hopefully won't ever need to do something like this, it did make me realise just how bad we are at picking up on long term trends so I can definitely see keeping daily records of, for instance, average daily happiness being eye-opening.
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-03-10 15:49:02+00:00
> It seems that gun control—though imperfect—in regions that have implemented it has had a good bit of success and the legitimate/non-harmful capabilities lost seem worth it to me in trade for the gains.

This is even true despite the fact that there are bad actors only a few minutes drive away in many cases (Chicago->Indiana border, for example).
by bhouston | 2026-03-10 15:49:09+00:00
Trump does seem to resent the UN in part because of both the influence of Israel/AIPAC in the human rights realm, Russia in the war of aggression realm, COVID reactionaries/MAHA in the health realm and Elon Musk/Christian White superiority interests in the humanitarian realm - no more aid to non white Christians in developing world. It is the perfect storm for the UN.

US is done with the UN under Trump. Will we see a rethink if/when Democrats come back and then whipsaw back when Republicans gain power again?
by petcat | 2026-03-10 15:49:13+00:00
> Now your countries are little different from Russia or China or Dubai

The fact that many independent national newspapers (including this article from CNBC) are openly calling-out the surveillance state and entering the debate into the public conscience should tell everyone that USA (and the West) is very different from Russia or China or Dubai.

USA is not perfect, but at least is has active public discourse. We can openly (and legally) debate these things, and if we convince enough people, then we can change them.