MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Traubenfuchs | 2026-03-09 22:07:01+00:00
To make this easier we could develop some kind of… query or… command language for this.

Take OPs example…

> I am addicted now that I can ask it, “hey in the companies table only show me the ones who have more than 5 employees”

Now how could that command language look like, maybe something like…

PICK * of COMPANIES if EMPLOYEE_COUNT >10;

We could call this DCCL: Dench Claw Command Language!
by ternus | 2026-03-09 22:07:58+00:00
"Wonder" might be the wrong way to describe it, but Blindsight by Peter Watts gave me the same feeling of "this is incredibly alien and I have no idea what will happen next".

Other books with a similar plot structure and deeply alien vibe:

- Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky (recommended elsewhere in this thread)

- Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds

I know there's one I'm forgetting.
by aziaziazi | 2026-03-09 22:08:01+00:00
Is there a non-automatic light enforcement other than placing a policemen at every light - which makes the light useless?

Revenu generation is a bonus point: in my country taxes that incentive smokers to quit are directed to healthcare and most of the speeding tickets revenue goes to road maintenance and safety.

I’d prefer a public handling but the trend is privatization with everything : from health to education to water treatment. Even military assets! IMHO red light tickets enforcement is as much important.
by jmb99 | 2026-03-09 22:08:44+00:00
You can however set the block size to something quite large, which means you write the same random pattern spread out over multiple blocks repeatedly. If you pick an "odd" block size (like say, your native block size multiplied by 47), it's highly unlikely your disk under test will be swapping around "groups of 47 blocks." (I usually just do a nice multiple, like 4K16, but if you're super paranoid a weird multiple should be pretty much good enough). You won't get reporting of which exact* blocks on the drive are failing, but these days, that isn't really useful information - if any blocks are failing, warranty or ditch the drive.
by Grimblewald | 2026-03-09 22:08:49+00:00
I have, hence my perspective. For boiler plate and solved problems, it can do ok. However, anytime it needs to do something novel it will be hit and miss, usually miss. If it needs to do something where best practice has changed but training data overwhelmingly does bad / dated practice, you'll get that if you don't specify. Loads of issues like that. So, without giving small isolated and well framed tasks the output of which is then critically engaged with, you'll get increasingly opaque and unstable code.
by jameshilliard | 2026-03-09 22:09:11+00:00
> YOU are the regime. Only an american can pretend not to understand that the riots were orgsnized by US and Israel precisely to justify war on "regime killing its own people".. fighting agsinst people armed by US and Israel, but this piece is omitted in the free western media.

The US and Israel is no way forced Iran's regime to mass murder their own people. The US/Israel aren't even using the regime mass murdering their own people as the main justification for going to war either way, the nuclear program, ballistic missiles and general security issues are the main justifications they seem to be using. The protests were probably just a trigger event that opened up an opportunity to finally take action against Iran that was likely going to happen in the near future regardless.

> And still, also the people pretending to not understand, do know what is going on.

Most Iranians want the regime gone, not everything is a conspiracy.
by nomel | 2026-03-09 22:09:14+00:00
I think you're conflating "knowledge" with "intelligence". And, "agency" seems to be a missing concept, which is the only way for something intelligent to apply its knowledge to achieve something practical, on its own.

Google search can't achieve anything practical, because it has no agency. It has no agency partly because it doesn't have the required intelligence to do anything on its own, other than display results for something else, that does have agency, to use.

The applicable definitions, from the dictionary:

Knowledge: facts, information, and skills acquired through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject.

Intelligence: the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.

Agency: the ability to make decisions and act independently.
by ternus | 2026-03-09 22:10:02+00:00
DO NOT READ THE SEQUELS

One of the few cases where they actively ruin the first book, to the extent you take them as true sequels. Clarke basically licensed his name and plot to Gentry Lee, who proceeded to ruin the sense of wonder by explaining everything, often in deeply unsatisfactory ways. They would have been reasonable scifi books (for their time) if they hadn't attempted to follow up the classics.

Star Wars prequel/sequel situation.
by poisonarena | 2026-03-09 22:10:15+00:00
back in 1994, when I was 9 years old, one of my favorite albums that got me into electronic music as a young boy was the concept album "Songs of Distant Earth" by Mike Oldfield.. Also the remixes by Jam&Spoon.. I think he released some kind of weird software about it too.. I think its time to finally read the book.

https://youtu.be/gRivMEEZZE8?si=S1ZCDAg9Sl37jwoX full album
by incr_me | 2026-03-09 22:10:21+00:00
I know this sounds sarcastic but I really mean it: For years everyone has been monastically extolling some variation of "the best code is deleted code". Now, we have a machine that spits out infinite code that we can infinitely delete. It's a blessing that we can have shitty code generated that exposes at light speed how shitty our ideas are and have always been.
by analog31 | 2026-03-09 22:10:26+00:00
I did something similar. I’m not a developer, but I use programming as a problem solving tool, and have written little apps for limited uses such as controlling a fixture in the factory — stuff that the devs won’t touch. My first language was BASIC on a mainframe, before I had access to a microcomputer.

I was getting sick of Visual Basic and Excel, and besides, my VB license was more than a decade old. So I went “language shopping” by trying out the same two tasks in a whole bunch of languages. And I also let myself be influenced by online discussions, blogs, etc. Between computers at work and at home, I tried out each language on both Windows and Linux. One of the tasks was computational and graphical, the other was controlling a widget connected to USB.

I ended up with Python, and have been loyal to it for 13+ years. Did I make the best choice? I can drum up a list of pro’s and con’s, but it would be based on hindsight.
by sarchertech | 2026-03-09 22:10:33+00:00
Bit rot is real. The dependencies listed here include calling into AI APIs that will stop working with time. So yes if no one keeps this up to date it will rot into useless likely very quickly.

That’s not even mentioning that this tools doesn’t do much beyond wrap a call to Claude. And it’s using Claude to display blood test data to the end user. This is not something I’d trust an LLM to not mess up. You’d really want to double check every single result.
by dvh | 2026-03-09 22:10:39+00:00
When I need desktop app for my personal needs, I'm still writing them in Lazarus (text editor, git client, music player, spreadsheet, image cropper, various oddball one off desktop apps). It works on Linux and windows. If it really doesn't need to be desktop (typically visual apps that works on different files in different local dirs, or opening it in browser would be awkward) then I make browser app or extension in vanilla js. If it can be both desktop or browser, I chose browser most of the time, Lazarus is not exactly pinnacle of bug free apps.
by paxys | 2026-03-09 22:10:42+00:00
Plenty of enterprise server hardware (racks, servers, RAM, disks) does have an active secondhand market after 3-5 years of use, but I think GPUs are too specialized for it to be viable. I doubt anyone has the setup to run a H200 in their home rig.

I also don't think companies are going to have mandatory replacement cycles for GPU hardware the same way they do for everything else, because:

1. It is an order or magnitude (or more) more expensive.

2. It isn't clear whether Moore's law will apply to the AI GPU space the same way it has for everything else.

Unless Nvidia can launch a new chip every 2-3 years with massively improved performance-per-watt at a lower price no one is going to rush to recycle the old one.
by Maxatar | 2026-03-09 22:10:44+00:00
I wouldn't say strictly speaking that I've written no code, but the amount of code I've written since "committing" to using Claude Code since February is absolutely miniscule.

I prefer having Claude make even small changes at this point since every change it makes ends up tweaking it to better understand something about my coding convention, standard, interpretation etc... It does pick up on these little changes and commits them to memory so that in the long run you end up not having to make any little changes whatsoever.

And to drive this point further, even prior to using LLMs, if I review someone's work and see even a single typo or something minor that I could probably just fix in a second, I still insist that the author is the one to fix it. It's something my mentor at Google did with me which at the time I kind of felt was a bit annoying, but I've come to understand their reason for it and appreciate it.
by conductr | 2026-03-09 22:11:25+00:00
Have considered that as well but shared time with that person would have been more and I would be none the wiser to the actual timeline, so I feel it’s appropriate to treat them as the same “child” instead of theoretical kid vs actual kid and how I’m happy I waited because this kid is so cool, pretty sure I would have felt the same towards the other kid (who knows maybe not but even if he was a jerk of a kid I’d assume a delayed child would have also been a jerk too)
by vcf | 2026-03-09 22:11:28+00:00
I wanted exactly that for my Mac and ended up with a working version with the help of Claude in about one day (my first swift app!) It took a couple more days of working with it and asking claude to add any feature I felt I was missing and now i’m pretty happy with it. I still use my airpods or the laptop mic as primary audio input, but I have one button mapped to super whisper for speech to text input (first button I mapped). I can control the mouse and scroll with the joysticks, but my primary use case is to navigate tmux/claude sessions in the terminal. It works great with workmux. For the rest, I mostly map buttons to my existing raycast shortcuts.

It will sure beat the old laser pointer the next time I have to present or teach.

I could make the repo public if anyone is interested.
by palata | 2026-03-09 22:11:40+00:00
> an argument for protecting that test suite and API specification under copyleft terms.

If we protect API under copyright, it makes it easier to prevent interoperability. We obviously do NOT want that. It would give big companies even more power.

Now in the US, the Supreme Court that the output of an LLM is not copyrightable. So even a permissive licence doesn't work for that reimplementation: it should be public domain.

Disclaimer: I am all for copyleft for the code I write, but already without LLMs, one could rewrite a similar project and use the licence they please. LLMs make them faster at that, it's just a fact.

Now I wonder: say I vibe-code a library (so it's public domain in the US), I don't publish that code but I sell it to a customer. Can I prevent them from reselling it? I guess not, since it's public domain?

And as an employee writing code for a company. If I produce public domain code because it is written by an LLM, can I publish it, or can the company prevent me from doing it?
by dmix | 2026-03-09 22:11:54+00:00
I'm in the former group where I personally support Meta taking risks on big ideas while still being profitable. Just like SpaceX and others. I don't blame Mark for getting excited about AR which is very likely a big market in the future, the gamble on the tech being affordable enough was just far too early for the scale of investment. Their investments there might still pay off as it gets cheaper.
Show HN: Dark Hacker News
by alexandermorgan | 2026-03-09 22:12:07+00:00
Dark-mode version of Hacker News. This is mostly to be able to read Hacker News at night without hurting my eyes. Hackers have to sleep too!

For all the features that you have to be signed-in for work, those links take you to the real HN site. Similarly, the pages not supported by the api (past, comments, submit, and from) take you to the real pages as well. Also, the "Light Hacker News" link in the top right corner takes you to whichever page you're currently on in the real website.

The routes mirror those of the real website, so if you're ever on Hacker News and want to switch to this dark mode, you can replace "news.ycombinator" with "darkhn" and it will take you to the same page as long as it's not the one of the ones mentioned above. The simple html-only setup is inspired by Simon Willison's html-tools initiative.

If for some reason ycombinator doesn't want this page up, they can let me know and I'll take it down.

Enjoy.
by Grimblewald | 2026-03-09 22:12:08+00:00
Useful is relative. Silly little toy aps? Sure go full auto, heck, i personally do. However, these will fail catastrophically or have failures that should never even have happened.

So, in professional environments, full auto is negligent to a point i hope it becomes a fireable offense. Like trusting lane-assist and adaptive-cruise in a car to handle full auto driving. It might even seem like it can, until the leading car disappears, until it hits a t intersection. You get me? Modern llms are lane assist and adaptive cruise, not full self driving. It frees up some of your headspace and attention but not all, in fact not even most of it.
by emerkel | 2026-03-09 22:12:55+00:00
I’m 66 and retired in 2023, and I agree.

In most respects I consider myself a Luddite, or maybe a neo-Luddite. I think a lot of that comes from the constant business push for “new” and “faster” for no reason other than that they’re new and faster.

But I’ve used both Claude and Codex for more than a year now, and while they can still be amazingly frustrating, they also keep getting better. Since the projects I work on now are my own, I like being able to work with these tools almost the way I’d work with a smart but inexperienced junior programmer—useful, capable, sometimes surprising, and still needing guidance.

To me, it still takes skill, domain knowledge, and programming knowledge to get meaningful results. What it can remove is not the need to think, but a lot of the hours spent pounding out code.

I understand the sense of loss some people feel when they talk about the art of programming. But no one is stopping them from opening their IDE and doing it the old way. For my part, I enjoy seeing my ideas come to life with less sweat. I’ve done plenty of sweating alrea
by batterylake | 2026-03-09 22:13:00+00:00
Very insightful! I found the section on killing papers to be a helpful reminder. As a Ph.D. student, this can be particularly challenging as your environment expects somewhat steady progress (annual reviews, advisor meetings, etc.), and you're encouraged to finish papers rather than starting over.

This might also be of interest: https://karpathy.github.io/2016/09/07/phd/
by rbanffy | 2026-03-09 22:13:10+00:00
I feel the stories got successively smaller from 2010 and on. 2010's epilogue hints at the developments after 20,000 years, and 2061 and 3001 feel small in comparison.

2010 is a good follow on to the 2001 book, and answers some of the questions the first book left while expanding the mysteries and the sense of wonder.

My wife and I still quote it when answering questions such as what's for dinner.

"Something wonderful".
by crazygringo | 2026-03-09 22:13:29+00:00
Sorry, I misspoke. Transformation is what makes the LLM itself legal -- its training data is sufficiently transformed into weights.

And so, a work being sufficiently transformative is one way in which copyright no longer applies, but that's not the case here specifically. The specific case here is essentially just a clean-room reimplementation (though technically less "clean", but still presumably the same legally). But the end result is still a completely different expression of underlying non-copyrightable ideas.

And in both cases, it doesn't matter what the original license was. If a resulting work is sufficiently transformative or a reimplementation, copyright no longer applies, so the license no longer applies.
by shirro | 2026-03-09 22:13:34+00:00
We are a playful species. People enjoy play. If we didn't have to work for a living but still enjoyed food security that is all most of us would do. But we are also a very exploitative species, some more than others. Companies have made billions of dollars on top of Fabrice Bellard's works, qemu, ffmpeg etc.

These companies don't have any imagination. Their management has no vision. They could not create anything new and wonderful if they tried. People like Fabrice do and we are all richer for it. If your asking about the practical use you are likely in the exploitative mindset which is understandable on HN. The hacker/geek mindset enjoys this for what it is.
by harry8 | 2026-03-09 22:13:43+00:00
> "Or projects that make it easier to use AI"

This is exactly the same reason why the appropriate question to ask about Haskell is "where are the open source projects that are useful for something that is not programming?"

The answer for Haskell after 3 decades is very, very little. Pandoc, Git Annexe, Xmonad. Might be something else since I last did the exercise but for Haskell the answer is not much. Then we examine why the kids (us kids of all ages) can't or don't write Haskell programs.

The answer for LLM coding may be very different. But the question "where is the software that does something that solves a problem outside its own orbit" is crucial. (You have a problem. You want to use foo to solve it, now you have two problems but you can use foo to solve a part of the second one!!)

The price of getting code written just went down. Where are the site/business launches? Apps? New ideas being built? Specifically. With links. Not general, hand-wavy "these are the sorts of things that ..." because even if it's superb analysis, without some data that can be checked it's indistinguishable from hype.

Whatever data we get will be very informative.
by rozab | 2026-03-09 22:13:45+00:00
I've read reports about Havana Syndrome before and remain thoroughly unconvinced. The locations vary wildly, the symptoms vary wildly and can be explained by normal medical phenomena in a way Occam would find more agreeable.

Look at their 'smoking gun' evidence here:

>He tracked down an email, what he considers a receipt, for services provided to the Russian government by a member of Unit 29155 for "potential capabilities of non-lethal acoustic weapons."

Acoustic crowd control weapons are not mysterious, there are people on YouTube building and testing them! American companies will sell them to any oppressive government around the world (I believe the ones used against Serbian protestors were American). Yet this description contradicts speculation about microwaves just a bit further down in the article.
by conductr | 2026-03-09 22:13:45+00:00
Yeah I give same advice, if you know you want kids and found your partner just start soon. We didn’t have many fertility issues just weeding out some unfortunate genetics, but I’ve seen people try for years and it’s really taxing on both the individual and relationship.

The stuff we weeded out was on my wife’s side and the boy ended up being my clone. We joke about it as if we weeded out all of her genes. Even small things like his cowlicks and how his teeth are coming it are exactly like mine which I never would have expected to even be possible (I never gave it much thought tbh)
by martin-t | 2026-03-09 22:13:46+00:00
I've been thinking this for over two years, that's why I stopped contributing to open source at that time - my work was only gonna be exploited to make rich people richer regardless of the license.

Crazy that only now we're seeing a bunch of articles coming to the same conclusion now.

I think copyright should still apply, but if it doesn't, we need new laws - ones which protect all human work, creative or not. Laws should serve and protect people, not algorithms and not corporations "owning" those algorithms.

I put owning in quotes because ownership should go to the people who did the work.

Buying/selling ownership of both companies and people's work should be illegal just like buying/selling whole humans is. Even if it took thousands of years to get here.

Money should not buy certain things because this is the root cause of inequality. Rich people are not getting richer at a faster rate by being more productive than everyone else but by "owning" other people's work and using it as leverage to extract even more from others.

Maybe LLM and mass unemployment of white collar workers will be the wakeup call needed for a reform. Or revolution.

Last time this happened was during the second industrial revolution and that's how communism got popular. We should do better this time because this is the last revolution which might be possible.
by BoppreH | 2026-03-09 22:13:48+00:00
> Without explaining that, the rest of this blog post is just rambling notes about developer ergonomics.

That's how I took it, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. If you're making a small app by yourself, sufficiently bad developer ergonomics can be the reason that the app doesn't get made at all, or the frustration makes me regret it. That's important for me.

> Maybe I'm just too young to have ever experienced the kind of stability expected here.

This could be it. I've been around many cycles of technology, and it always feels like a great waste when you have to abandon your tools and experience for something that's buggy and better in only a few small ways. I'm willing to tolerate a lot more bullshit for something that I know will be long-lived, like QT or a static website, than Microsoft's UI-framework-of-the-month.
by Findecanor | 2026-03-09 22:13:54+00:00
I've been wanting to get one for a PC mITX case mod. I love Sun's design language and the IPX cases are cute.

I have got a Sun Type 5 keyboard though. I brought it to a mechanical keyboard meetup once, only to show it off because it is so pretty. Not the best key feel though, but I've got nothing to use it with.
by xlii | 2026-03-09 22:14:02+00:00
> We've been running Code Review internally for months: on large PRs (over 1,000 lines changed), 84% get findings, averaging 7.5 issues. On small PRs under 50 lines, that drops to 31%, averaging 0.5 issues. Engineers largely agree with what it surfaces: less than 1% of findings are marked incorrect.

So the take would be that 84% heavily Claude driven PRs are riddled with ~7.5 issues worthy bugs.

Not a great ad of agent based development quality.
by amiga-workbench | 2026-03-09 22:14:04+00:00
I'm glad someone else said this because I was right about to.
One of the things I love about Rama 1 is how it squashes the idea of a human centric universe where everything has to occur for reasons knowable by us. Rama is truly alien, inscrutable and fulfilling a purpose we don't get to understand. As soon as it enters our solar system, its gone for good, leaving a lot unanswered.
by triceratops | 2026-03-09 22:14:12+00:00
It isn't literally "answer 1 email on a Saturday occasionally" though. I've done that for a lot less. The expectation is to work 7 days/week and/or be available to work anytime.

I appreciate that this is the reality for many jobs with lower pay - especially retail and fast food. Software and software-adjacent jobs are not like that though. Professionals in this field have, for the past quarter century, had better opportunities. I understand it's a unique job market right now and people do what they must.