MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by joelolawanle | 2026-03-05 23:27:32+00:00
Web scraping, the automated process of extracting data from websites, has evolved from a niche technical skill to a foundational practice across numerous industries.

By systematically collecting information that is often publicly available but siloed, businesses and researchers can unlock significant insights. This data forms the backbone of informed decision-making, fueling everything from market trend analysis to the development of sophisticated artificial intelligence models.

This article explores seven key applications where web scraping proves particularly transformative, offering actionable strategies and demonstrating its broad utility.
by bartread | 2026-03-05 23:27:37+00:00
I dunno: I think SMB 3 gets plenty of plaudits and is widely agreed to be the best SMB on the NES.

Frankly, all three of the NES games hold up well even today, but 3 is for me the pinnacle even though very late in the life of the console, particularly in North America and Europe. This wouldn’t have helped sales with the SNES about to drop but it nevertheless was very successful.

Absolutely one of the greats.
by 4k0hz | 2026-03-05 23:27:57+00:00
> That backlash was short lived. Adobe went from $4.4 billion in revenue in 2021 to $23.7 billion

So? Anecdotally, the vast majority of Adobe product users are still upset about the subscription model (but not upset enough to switch to worse software)

> It used to cost $2500 for the "master collection". Now it's $50 a month.

Illustrator-filmmaker-animator-publisher-photographer-web-designers everywhere rejoice!
by Jtsummers | 2026-03-05 23:28:09+00:00
The last time this was submitted a question was asked and left unanswered: Why this versus Alire? You currently have two packages available, Alire has a lot more. So what distinguishes this from the primary alternative? Do you have a mechanism for easily creating packages from existing Alire crates to kickstart your set of packages and at least bring it to parity?

https://alire.ada.dev/crates.html
by hn_acc1 | 2026-03-05 23:28:17+00:00
As an old-school programmer who thought computers would improve people's lives back in the 80s when I was a wide-eyed teenager.. I am constantly appalled by the current generation of SV people who are very right-leaning and are happy to steal anything and everything they can. It didn't seem like this 20 years ago when I started. I hate the advertising industry with a passion.

Anecdotally, it feels like it fits right in with the "if there's no cop around to give me a ticket, I can drive however I want" attitude I've seen post-Covid. People entering two-way turn lanes or HOV merge lanes to PASS people in the main lane. People going through stop signs without any stopping while I'm waiting for my turn. Using the HOV on-ramp lane with only the driver to merge onto the freeway where it's clearly marked "24 hour HOV lane", etc.

It's as if the entire social compact evaporated during/after Covid, and "everyone only out for themselves" is the norm now.

Or maybe I'm just more aware of it and more cynical.
by teddyh | 2026-03-05 23:28:32+00:00
> Just pull one hdd out,

That only works with RAID 1. If the server uses RAID 5 or RAID 6, this won’t work.

> extract what you need

Well, yes. This is addressed in the FAQ.

> or change the image.

> Then you turn off the server, and just start a vm with the captured init and capture the key.

Well, as explained in the FAQ, an attacker will have to do so quickly, before the Mandos server decides that the Mandos client has been offline for too long, and disables that client. The default value is five minutes, but is configurable per client.
by csb6 | 2026-03-05 23:28:36+00:00
Having a single digital ID that is used for everything makes sense from a technical perspective (less duplication, ambiguity, and need to maintain multiple IDs) but from a privacy perspective it is bad. Effectively everything you do online would be tied to a single comprehensive representation of your identity even if the task that uses the ID doesn't require more than knowing "this is a unique person using this service". If user data is leaked then it is easier to tie every digital service being used by a person together since there is a single ID number used everywhere.

IMO fewer things should require ID (e.g. domestic flights) because it opens up the risk of personal data being leaked or misused for often not much benefit.
by mikehostetler | 2026-03-05 23:28:46+00:00
My strongest opinion with Jido is that agents must be architecturally correct WITHOUT LLM's before they can be correct WITH LLM's

Jido core has zero LLM support for this reason.

There's nearing 40+ years of "Agent" research in CompSci, LLM's came along and we threw out all of it. I didn't like that so I spent time researching this history to do my best at considering it with Jido.

That said, I love LLM's - but they belong in the Jido AI package.
Show HN: Real-time collaborative editing plugin for Blender
by arryleo10 | 2026-03-05 23:28:54+00:00
I’ve been experimenting with a plugin that enables real-time collaboration between multiple Blender sessions.

Currently supports:

Object creation sync

Transform synchronization

Lights and cameras syncing

Still early, but the core networking and state synchronization work.

GitHub: https://github.com/arryllopez/meerkat

Feedback welcome.
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-03-05 23:28:59+00:00
> Heck, one company built a (prototype but functional) web browser

No, they built something which claimed to be a web browser but which didn't even compile. Every time someone says "look an LLM did this impressive sounding thing" it has turned out to be some kind of fraud. So yeah, the idea that these slop machines could build an OS is insane.
by dheera | 2026-03-05 23:29:11+00:00
Auth is a massive pain across almost all Google products.

Just being able to send commands to my Nest thermostat (which I own, and is on the same LAN) involved creating a cloud account, a "project" (wtf is a project, I just want an API key damnit, this isn't JIRA), a billing account, enabling billing, enabling the billing account, creating another account somewhere else on some other Google site, doing through mountains of 2FA issues in the process where I had to tap "Yes" on another device instead of the device I was actually using, enabling the project in the other account, installing it, publishing it, paying $5 somewhere in between and I didn't understand exactly for what, ...

Why the hell can't I set my temperature with a simple "curl" command to the thermostat's LAN IP? At the most with a simple "Authentication: Bearer" header?
by sxates | 2026-03-05 23:29:53+00:00
A real question - who or what are we building software for? If we're using AI to build apps that are just used by other AIs, then yes, why does anything need a UI?

But while AIs are doing all the creating and all the consuming, what exactly are us humans doing all day? Do we really think software for humans will shrink to just an Agent interface?
by elevatortrim | 2026-03-05 23:29:59+00:00
You are pointing to an outlier that is not expensive due to its beauty but historical significance. Typical expensive watches look normal and beautiful:

https://www.iwc.com/gb-en/watches/pilot-watches/iw388106-pil...

https://www.omegawatches.com/en-gb/watch-omega-speedmaster-m...

https://www.rolex.com/watches/submariner/m124060-0001
by coderjames | 2026-03-05 23:30:01+00:00
I haven't tried it myself so you might be right, but I was thinking of the silver conductive pens from Chemtronics with a conductivity of 0.02-0.05 ohms/sq/mil.

For attachment, I'd evaluate their conductive epoxy or maybe glue down the underside of the component and then smother the lead with the silver conductive ink. But again, just hypothetical since I have a quickturn shop make cheap prototype PCBs for me and either hand solder or use a stencil, paste, and a hot air gun for my hobbyist projects.

https://www.chemtronics.com/circuitworks-conductive-pen

https://www.chemtronics.com/circuitworks-conductive-epoxy-2
by Macha | 2026-03-05 23:30:21+00:00
So if:

- you always denied those popups

- .. including any hidden legitimate interest sections that are being treated as a second, opt-out "consent" for things that really don't actually qualify as legitimate interest

- and the companies actually followed it

Then in theory the companies won't have that data. But doing 1 is tedious, companies exercise dark patterns to avoid you doing 2, and it's hard to audit if they've done 3, so most people are probably in those data sets.

Also, a government likely to buy this data for purposes like in the original article, is unlikely to be the type of government that goes around slapping companies for not complying with privacy regulation on that data.
by GenerWork | 2026-03-05 23:30:21+00:00
>Tens of thousands of engineers and designers rebuilding slightly different drop-downs is an inefficient world that is unarguably coming to an end.

As long as branding is important, you're going to keep getting slightly different dropdowns. In fact, you could argue that in a front end world that's dominated by AI written code that pulls from standard libraries, branding and all its different dropdowns become more important than ever.
by jason_oster | 2026-03-05 23:31:20+00:00
You're putting a lot of responsibility on a license that has several permissive contemporaries. The original BSD license "Net/1" and GPL 1.0 were both published in 1989, while the MIT license has its roots set in "probably 1987" [1] with the release of X11.

No doubt, GPL had some influence. But I would hardly single it out as the force that ensured software stayed open. Software stayed open because "information wants to be free" [2], not because some authors wield copyright law like a weapon to be used against corporations.

[1]: https://opensource.com/article/19/4/history-mit-license

[2]: A popular phase based on a fundamental idea that predates software.
by bsder | 2026-03-05 23:31:34+00:00
> Bold claim. From my gut feeling this must be incorrect

RAM flips are common. This kind of thing is old and has likely gotten worse.

IBM had data on this. DEC had data on this. Amazon/Google/Microsoft almost certainly had data on this. Anybody who runs a fleet of computers gets data on this, and it is always eye opening how common it is.

ZFS is really good at spotting RAM flips.
by hu3 | 2026-03-05 23:33:33+00:00
To me it's just a Sublime with AI. Except Sublime doesn't eat my RAM.

Very fast but not enough features to use on a daily basis.

And they lack some extensions I love in VSCode such as Markdown All In One and GitLens. They have a big battle against the large ecosystem of VSCode extensions.

And then there's JetBrains which is on another level of refactoring/features.
by LordDragonfang | 2026-03-05 23:33:37+00:00
I mean, to be fair, both things can be technically true. There can be lots of interesting things being done, even while most can be low-effort garbage.

But this is just Sturgeon's Law (ninety percent of everything is crap), not an actually insightful addition to the discussion, and I very much agree it's a stale take.
by sjmaplesec | 2026-03-05 23:34:24+00:00
There's so much more we can do around activation and skills creation. Looking at the eval results, there are even cases where the context makes the agent worse.

Scenario 5, test 1 72% -> 22%

https://tessl.io/eval-runs/019cc02f-bb26-76e0-a7c9-598a7337e...
by cardanome | 2026-03-05 23:34:29+00:00
I don't have a habit of sitting in the dark.

Also I don't understand what would be hard about your challenge. My hands automatically move to the home row, feel the key bumps and I instantly know where every key is. I never need to look at my keyboard. Not to mention having to move my eyes down from the displays would be annoying.

I mean people like backlight keyboards. So if it fits your use case great. Still makes sense to not include in a base model. I actually actively avoid keyboards with any lightning.
by kccqzy | 2026-03-05 23:34:42+00:00
That’s I believe woefully inadequate. There are some levels of code similarity:

Level 0: the code is just copied

Level 1: the code only has white space altered so the AST is the same

Level 2: the code has minor refactoring such as changing variables names and function names (in a compiled language the object code would be highly similar; and this can easily be detected by tools like https://github.com/jplag/JPlag)

Level 3: the code has had significant refactoring such as moving functionality around, manually extracting code to new functions and manually inlining functions

Level 4: the code does the same conceptual steps as the old code but with different internal architecture

At least in the United States you have to reach Level 4 because only concepts are not copyrightable. And I believe chardet has indeed reached level 4 in this rewrite.
by behnamoh | 2026-03-05 23:35:01+00:00
I don't think there's been much of an impact, really. Those who know how to use AI just got tangentially more productive (because why would you reveal your fake 10x productivity boost so your boss hands you 10x more tasks to finish?), and those w/o AI knowledge stayed the way they were.

The real impact is for indie-devs or freelancers but that usually doesn't account for much of the GDP.
by jasomill | 2026-03-05 23:35:19+00:00
IBM never open sourced their BIOS, but they did publish complete source code listings:

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/pc/pc/6025008_PC_Technical_Ref...

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/pc/xt/1502237_PC_XT_Technical_...

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/pc/at/1502494_PC_AT_Technical_...

Between this and the fact that their PC-DOS (née MS-DOS) license was nonexclusive, I'm honestly not sure what they expected to happen.

The nature of early IBM PC advertising suggests to me that they expected the IBM name and established business relationships to carry as much weight as the specifications itself, and that "IBM PC compatible" systems would be no more attractive than existing personal computers running similar if not identical third-party software (PC-DOS wasn't the only example of IBM reselling third-party software under nonexclusive license), and would perhaps even lead to increased sales of first-party IBM PCs.

Which, in fact, they did, leading me to believe the actual result may have been not too far from their original intent, only with IBM capturing and holding a larger share of the pie.
by elevatortrim | 2026-03-05 23:35:23+00:00
Actually most watch collectors do not wear their most expensive watches, they have daily or travel watches to wear that carry less risk.

Also, watches are status symbols to a really narrow niche. Vast majority of people cannot name a non-Rolex expensive watch and would assume Seiko (and maybe Tissot) are the best watches after Rolex, followed by Swatch (and maybe Timex).
Show HN: NavAgent – CDP-free, token-efficient web automation for AI
by DimitriBouriez | 2026-03-05 23:36:46+00:00
Hi HN, I built NavAgent, a small MCP server + Chrome extension that lets AI clients drive your real browser session without CDP.

I use Claude Code daily, and I kept wanting it to interact with pages in my own browser, with my existing tabs, cookies, and logins.

Most browser automation approaches I tried for MCP were based on CDP / Playwright. I wanted something lighter and closer to normal browser behavior, so I tried a different design: the extension scans the DOM and sends the model a compact numbered list of actionable elements over a local WebSocket.

So the model sees something like:
Search [input]
Books [link]
... and can reply with browse_click(2) or browse_type(...)

That keeps scans very small (usually much smaller than screenshots or ARIA-tree dumps) and avoids screenshots, vision models, and huge accessibility payloads.

It currently handles SPAs, shadow DOM, same-origin iframes, and contenteditable editors. Everything runs locally. Setup is just the npm package plus the extension, and you can already try it by sideloading the extension from the repo and running npx navagent-mcp.

It's intentionally narrow: this is not a replacement for Playwright, CI automation or heavy scraping. It's a passive bridge for everyday browser tasks like opening pages, clicking around, and filling forms from an AI assistant.

It's still early, but it's already useful for my daily workflow. Feedback very welcome, especially on edge cases, security concerns and sites where it breaks.
by wat10000 | 2026-03-05 23:37:05+00:00
You can increase your chances by crafting the laws differently, at least.

A law that says the government can't ask for this stuff doesn't help very much. They'll ignore it when it suits them.

A law that says it's illegal for private companies to hand it over would be better. When caught between a request from the government and a law that says they're not allowed to honor that request, there's a good chance they'll obey the law rather than the rogue agency.

A law that says it's illegal for private companies to collect this data in the first place would be even better. It could still be worked around, but it's more likely to be uncovered, and they'd only get data after the point where they convinced a company to start collecting it.
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-03-05 23:37:06+00:00
> I'm kinda leaning towards the analogy that LLMs are to programming as textile machines were to the loom.

The difference is that textile machines reliably produce working cloth. LLMs do not, and indeed probably cannot, reliably produce working software. Instead they generate something which randomly has bugs sprinkled throughout such that a human needs to review the whole thing (which negates the gains). This would be like if a textile machine produced cloth that randomly would rip if you tried to use it for anything. Nobody would have accepted such a textile machine, just like nobody should accept LLMs.
by michaelt | 2026-03-05 23:37:21+00:00
The hope with the TPM is that the system boots to a standard login screen, and the thief doesn't know any user's password. Much like someone snatching a laptop that's in 'suspend' mode.

Of course, a thief could try to bypass the login screen by e.g. booting with a different kernel command line, or a different initramfs. If you want to avoid this vulnerability, TPM unlock can be configured as a very fragile house of cards - the tiniest change and it falls down. The jargon for this is "binding to PCRs"
by kolektiv | 2026-03-05 23:38:10+00:00
Very clearly put, and I'd only emphasise that without the final "enforcement" point of that, the other points become entirely irrelevant. While European regulators have imposed some significant sounding fines on prominent entities, they generally work out to be "less than the value gained by doing the thing in the first place" - or at least close enough to that for the entity to not consider it too negative/a future deterrent.

Unless you have some body which is a) serious about enforcement, b) sufficiently toothful to make a dent and c) not undermined by wider geopolitical posturing or economic neutering, you can have all of the regulation you might want and still end up in the same place. I'm not arguing that we shouldn't try and control this, but that we have some extremely large genies to stuff back into bottles along the way.
by eek2121 | 2026-03-05 23:38:45+00:00
Definitely going to hard disagree with Gabriele Svelto's take. I could point to the comments, however, let me bring up my own experiences across personal devices and organizational devices. In particular, note where he says this:

"I can't answer that question directly because crash reports have been designed so that they can't be tracked down to a single user. I could crunch the data to find the ones that are likely coming from the same machine, but it would require a bit of effort and it would still only be a rough estimate."

You can't claim any percentage if you don't know what you are measuring. Based on his hot take, I can run an overclocked machine have firefox crash a few hundred thousand times a day and he'll use my data to support his position. Further, see below:

First: A pre-text: I use Firefox, even now, despite what I post below. I use it because it is generally reliable, outside of specific pain points I mention, free, open source, compatible with most sites, and for now, is more privacy oriented than chrome.

Second: On both corporate and home devices, Firefox has shown to crash more often than Chrome/Chromium/Electron powered stuff. Only Safari on Windows beats it out in terms of crashes, and Safari on Windows is hot garbage. If bit flips were causing issues, why are chromium based browsers such as edge and Chrome so much more reliable?

Third: Admittedly, I do not pay close enough attention to know when Firefox sends crash reports, however, what I do know is that it thinks it crashes far more often than it does. A `sudo reboot` on linux, for example, will often make firefox think it crashed on my machine. (it didn't, Linux just kills everything quickly, flushes IO buffers, and reboots...and Firefox often can't even recover the session after...)

Fourth: some crashes ARE repeatable (see above), which means bit flips aren't the issue.

Just my thoughts.
by hanishabsigh | 2026-03-05 23:38:56+00:00
One direction I'm considering is exposing these resume agents via MCP so recruiters (or sourcing tools) could query across candidates programmatically.

Instead of keyword searching resumes, an agent could ask things like:
"Find product managers who shipped payments or marketplace products."

Curious if recruiters would actually use something like that or if it's overkill.
Is anyone else drowning in terminal tabs running AI coding agents?
by parsak | 2026-03-05 23:39:17+00:00
I work on a 300k line monorepo, just me and my co-founder. At any given moment I have 3-6 CLI agents (Claude Code, Codex, Aider) running simultaneously across git worktrees. The throughput is great. Managing it is not.

Every tool I found was either another agent, an IDE plugin, an abstraction over my CLIs, or doesn't understand worktrees. Conductor is Mac-only and getting buggier. Warp and Ghostty were interesting but not opinionated enough for my worktree-to-PR workflow.

So I built Pane (https://runpane.com). Keyboard-driven desktop app that gives you one interface to monitor and control CLI agents across worktrees. Ships with a command palette, simple shortcuts (ctrl + up or down arrow to switch between each worktree, VS code shortcuts for other basic things). Each worktree gets a run button that auto-generates a script (via Claude Code on first run) to spin up on isolated ports, so I can have every branch hot reloading in its own tab.

Been using it daily since last week. Hard to go back. I fully open sourced it here, so you can ship your own features to Pane, using Pane: https://github.com/Dcouple-Inc/Pane

How are others handling multi-agent workflows?