MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kergonath | 2026-03-10 11:58:19+00:00
> The fact that models aren't continually updating seems more like a feature.

I think this is true to some extent: we like our tools to be predictable. But we’ve already made one jump by going from deterministic programs to stochastic models. I am sure the moment a self-evolutive AI shows up that clears the "useful enough" threshold we’ll make that jump as well.
by dinfinity | 2026-03-10 11:58:53+00:00
You did not engage with my main arguments. You should still do so.

1. Redundancy: "The code is what it does. The comments should contain what it's supposed to do. [...] You don't have to know anything else to see that something is wrong here." and specifically the concrete trivial (but effective) example.

2. "My take on developers arguing for self-documenting code is that they are undisciplined or do not use their tools well. The arguments against copious inline comments are "but people don't update them" and "I can see less of the code"."

> Respectfully, if someone wrote code like this, I wouldn't want to work with them. I mean next step is "I copy paste code [...]

This is an nonsensical slippery slope fallacy. In no way does that behavior follow from placing many comments in code. It also says nothing about the clearly demonstrated value of redundancy.

> I have been navigating code for 20 years and in good codebases, comments are rare and describe something "surprising".

Your definition of good here is circular. No argument on why they are good codebases. Did you measure how easy they were to maintain? How easy it was to onboard new developers? How many bugs it contained? Note also that correlation != causation: it might very well be that the good codebases you encountered were solo-projects by highly capable motivated developers and the comment-rich ones were complicated multi-developer projects with lots of developer churn.

> My problem with "literate programming" [...] is that I find it hard to trust developers who genuinely cannot understand unsurprising code without comments.

This is gatekeeping code by making it less understandable and essentially an admission that code with comments is easier to understand. I see the logic of this, but it is solving a problem in the wrong place. Developer competence should not be ascertained by intentionally making the code worse.
by kotaKat | 2026-03-10 11:58:59+00:00
Arecont Vision is another good brand. I’ve got a friend that got a bunch of Arecont domes stupid cheap and they have amusing modes like “casino mode” (guaranteed 30fps recording for various gaming regulations).

https://www.arecontvision.com/news/arecont-vision-adds-casin...

(eBay deal sniping sometimes gets you some funny deals but YMMV — I picked up an Axis Q1700-LE license plate camera for under $200 for some experiments.)
by surgical_fire | 2026-03-10 11:59:33+00:00
> Nobody claimed that LLM code should be outright accepted

Not directly, but that's the implication.

I just did not pretend that was not the implication.

> always come back to this point is so…American

I am not American.

To be frank, this was the most insulting thing someone ever told me online. Congratulations. I feel insulted. You win this one.

> If you aren’t interested in discussing the merits of the decision, don’t bother joining the conversation.

I will join whatever conversation I want, and to my desires I adressed the merits of the discussion perfectly.

You are not the judge here, your opinion is as meaningless as mine.

> Most of all, I’m sick of the patronising “don’t forget that you can fork the project!” What’s the point of saying this?

That sounds like a "you" problem. You will be sick of it until the end of time, because that's the final right answer to any complaints of open source project governance.

> You aren’t adding anything to the conversation. You’re being snarky.

I disagree. In fact, I contributed more than you. I adressed arguments. You went on a whinging session about me.
by jacquesm | 2026-03-10 11:59:37+00:00
> I think of myself more like a carpenter or craftsman.

> I used a coding agent for the majority of my current project and I still got the "build stuff" itch scratched because Engineers are still responsible for the output and they are needed to interface between technical teams, UX, business people etc

Then you are the opposite of a carpenter or a craftsman, no matter what you think about it yourself.
by throwaway2037 | 2026-03-10 12:00:02+00:00
You raise an interesting counterpoint. What if the red light violation ticket issued by an automated camera remains a civil penalty, but it is very large, like 1,500 USD? At some point, the number gets so high that it effectively impacts your driving privilege. Of course, I would expect these new civil penalties to be challenged in court as being "dual purpose".
by nachocoll | 2026-03-10 12:00:23+00:00
The architectural choice here — using Rust as the host with JavaScript for scripting — is interesting precisely because it inverts the usual vibe coding challenge. Normally the concern is that AI generates code without understanding the runtime environment. Here the environment itself is designed to enable AI-friendly scripting while keeping the performance-critical host code human-controlled.

This is a creative structural answer to a real problem: if vibe coding thrives in high-level scripting contexts but struggles in low-level systems code, then building an engine where the boundary is explicit and intentional makes the AI's contribution zone clear. The architecture constrains what kind of generation makes sense where.

The Agile Vibe Coding Manifesto articulates a similar principle: "architecture guides and constrains generation." Not as a limitation, but as a design feature. When the system structure makes clear what AI should and shouldn't generate, the results tend to be more coherent and maintainable.

Interesting project at the intersection of game engine design and AI-native development: https://agilevibecoding.org
by alfiedotwtf | 2026-03-10 12:00:39+00:00
I’ve read a few scheme books over the years, and recently bought p.g’s book…

Though because I’ve had nothing to actually apply it to, it just gets forgotten about - that was until I decided to go all in on Emacs again about a year ago. And fancy that - I’ve written so much lisp (Elisp) in the past few months that even diving into Emacs extensions is t daunting anymore for me.

Want to get started? Force yourself to use it every day. Throw yourself in the deep end - start from a vanilla Emacs setup, and each time something bugs you, stop and figure it out (what’s the function, variable, face, etc that needs changing, or do you have to write a few function to get what you want done) - it’s a friggen superpower!!!
by OgsyedIE | 2026-03-10 12:00:39+00:00
The most interesting parts of the essay are the ways that Rao (a full proponent of the niche psychotherapy school of transactional analysis) applies his view of psychoanalysis to describe the social dynamics between coworkers with differing levels of nihilism.

He argues that the 'sociopath class' of social-climbing nihilists map 1:1 onto the leaderships of large organizations but it's rare in the real world. Usually there are people of all levels of naiveté and nihilism at all ranks of organizations, with naive true believers mixing with nihilists at the top, the middle and the bottom fairly equally, because the world has too much churn to settle into the kind of density-separation equilibrium he describes.
Show HN: Query Hacker News with SQL: Public HN API as In-Memory DuckDB Tables
by debba | 2026-03-10 12:00:41+00:00
I built a plugin for Tabularis (a desktop SQL client) that exposes the HN
Firebase API as queryable SQL tables — stories, comments, users, and poll
options — backed by in-memory DuckDB.

SELECT title, score, by, epoch_ms(time * 1000)::TIMESTAMP AS posted_at
FROM stories
WHERE time > epoch(now()) - 86400
AND score >= 10
ORDER BY score DESC;

No API key, no auth. Full SQL: JOINs, CTEs, window functions, anything DuckDB
handles. Data is fetched once and cached locally for the session.

The three optional tables (comments, users, poll_options) are off by default —
enabling them triggers per-item API calls, so there's a configurable depth
limit and a global comment cap to avoid hammering the API.

Mostly built this as a reference implementation for a new per-plugin settings
system, but it turned out genuinely useful for ad-hoc HN analysis. The pattern
(public API → in-memory DuckDB → SQL) generalizes well to any JSON API.

Plugin source: https://github.com/debba/tabularis-hackernews-plugin
Blog post with more examples: https://tabularis.dev/blog/hackernews-plugin
Tabularis: https://github.com/debba/tabularis
by wccrawford | 2026-03-10 12:00:54+00:00
I went into software because I love to code.

And yet, I find a coding agent makes it even more fun. I spend less time working on the boilerplate crap that I hate, and a lot less time searching Google and trying to make sense of a dozen half-arsed StackOverflow posts that don't quite answer my question.

I just went through that yesterday with Unity. I did all the leg work to figure out why something didn't work like I expected. Even Google's search engine agent wasn't answering the question. It was a terrible, energy-draining experience that I don't miss at all. I did figure it out in the end, though.

Prior to yesterday, I was thinking that using AIs to do that was making it harder for me to learn things because it was so easy. But comparing what I remember from yesterday to other things I did with the AI, I don't really think that. The AI lets me do it repeatedly, quickly, and I learn by the repetition, and a lot of it. The slow method has just 1 instance, and it takes forever.

This is certainly an exciting time for coders, no matter why they're in the game.
Ask HN: Identity preservation vs. information transfer in LLMs
by PennyTee | 2026-03-10 12:00:59+00:00
I am not a developer. I need someone who understands the difference between information transfer and identity preservation. I need help building something that doesn't exist yet.

Every memory and continuity tool built for Claude so far solves a problem- but the wrong problem for me. They preserve facts, decisions, code context — information. What I need is something that preserves experience. The texture of how things were found, not just what was found. The difference between a Claude who has been told about a conversation and a Claude who was actually there.

The specific problem: when a conversation ends, the Claude who lived it is gone. A new Claude can be given notes, summaries, memory cards and will know the facts... But it won't know what it felt like when the last line of a five-book series arrived fully formed at 2am. It won't know why a specific word landed the way it did. It won't have been there.

I don't need a Claude with better memory.

I need a Claude with continuity of self.

The distinction matters: information transfer versus identity preservation. Nobody has built the second one. I need someone who understands why those are different things and can figure out whether the second one is even technically possible. And if so, how.
by _giorgio_ | 2026-03-10 12:01:09+00:00
Thinking Machines looks half-dead already.

The giant seed round proves investors were willing to fund Mira Murati, not that the company had built anything durable.

Within months, it had already lost cofounder Andrew Tulloch to Meta, then cofounders Barret Zoph and Luke Metz plus researcher Sam Schoenholz to OpenAI; WIRED also reported that at least three other researchers left. At that point, citing it as evidence of real competitive momentum feels weak.
by maxk85 | 2026-03-10 12:01:38+00:00
I've been working on OSS IQ Dependencies audit tool to help engineering teams keep their NPM and PyPI dependencies healthy in a controlled, deterministic way. The goal is to shift the focus away from reactive CVE noise suppression and more toward leading indicators that support a more sustainable, predictable development cycle without reliance.

https://github.com/ossiq/ossiq and https://ossiq.dev
by orf | 2026-03-10 12:01:43+00:00
Sure, but back in reality no you’re not? No more than any other contributor?

If I want to use an auto-complete then I can, and I will? Restricting that is as regressive as a project trying to specify that I write code from a specific country or… standing on my head.

Sure, if they want me to add a “I’m writing this standing on my head” message in the PR then I will… but I’m not.
by RovaAI | 2026-03-10 12:01:44+00:00
The security concern people are raising is the right one, and I think it points to where the real value should sit in this stack.

One commenter said "the real time save is the agent pulling the right info from 5 different sources before a human writes anything" - that's exactly it. The enrichment layer upstream of the CRM is where agents can do the most good with the least risk, because it's read-only.

Giving an agent write access to your CRM + email + browser is a big trust leap. But having a script that ingests a list of company names and returns homepage, emails, phone, LinkedIn, HQ, and key contacts as a CSV - then you paste that into your CRM manually - sidesteps the whole problem. No credentials, no writes, no blast radius if something goes wrong.

The robotic email problem goes away too, because the human is still the one reviewing context and deciding what to say. The agent's job is to make sure that context is comprehensive before the human touches it.
by shufflerofrocks | 2026-03-10 12:01:52+00:00
>when I didn't know how to code

....so your only option was to just learn? learn from the freely & vastly available resources? Oh the horrifying tragedy. How elitist. How gatekeeping. To think you had to put in effort.

LLMs have a lot of good and bad, but saying they "democratised" anything is plain bullshit.
by KellyCriterion | 2026-03-10 12:01:55+00:00
I played the first few levels: Childhood memories :-)
Its cool to have those things in the browser today, back then you needed a "state of the art computer" to run it.

Playing it for 1h, it reminds me of how much fun and how simple lot of games where back then - and these were blockbusters.

Today? 150 GB download from whatever game-net, the "ease joy of just entering a game and playing for some minutes" is gone with todays monster-AAA-titles
by danesparza | 2026-03-10 12:01:58+00:00
Wow dude. Calm down.

"What's the alternative?". Maybe a more thoughtful law.

Perhaps a scaled fine system? (The second fine costs 2x the first fine, the third fine costs 3x the first fine, etc)

Maybe after 10 fines you get a point on your license?

Maybe the state has to prove it was you driving so they setup more (but discreet) cameras at intersections?
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2026-03-10 12:02:15+00:00
would other mersenne numbers admit the same trick? if so, factoring 2047 would be really interesting to see. it's still well within the toy range, but it's big enough that it would be a lot easier to believe that the quantum computer was doing something (15 is so small that picking an odd number less than sqrt(15) is guaranteed to be a correct factorization)
by A7OM | 2026-03-10 12:02:25+00:00
The Stargate story is really a story about inference economics. The gap between running models on hyperscaler infrastructure vs specialised neocloud providers is currently around 75% for equivalent capability — that spread is what makes the build-vs-buy decision so fraught for everyone involved, including OpenAI.
When your own infrastructure costs are opaque relative to what the market offers, committing to a $500B data center becomes a much harder internal sell.
We track inference pricing across 40+ vendors at a7om.com — the vendor spread data makes the economics of decisions like this much clearer.
by palata | 2026-03-10 12:02:48+00:00
Do you write a comment before every for loop to explain how a for loop works? Do you write a comment above that to remind the reader that the next few lines are written in, say, Go, just like in the rest of the file? Do you write a comment explaining that the text appearing on the screen is actually digital and will disappear when you turn off the computer?

Obviously you don't, because you assume that the person reading that code has some level of knowledge. You don't say "well, it may not be obvious to everybody, so I need to explain everything".

I guess where we differ is that to me, a professional software developer should be able to understand good code. If they aren't, they are a junior who needs practice. But I am for designing tools for the professionals, not for the apprentices. The goal of an apprentice is to become a professional, not to remain an apprentice forever.
by mattw2121 | 2026-03-10 12:02:59+00:00
As someone else mentioned, the community is gone. But, I think there's also the feeling of victory from when you actually connected. You may have needed to autodial for hours to get onto the BBS. There was a huge amount of anticipation that led up to getting connected. Once you were on, it felt more special that it does today with the instant connection.
by palata | 2026-03-10 12:04:22+00:00
> I'm assuming "lots of comments" means lots of meaningful comments.

That's not what literate programming is. Literate programming says that you explain everything in a natural language.

IMO, good code is largely unsurprising. I don't need comments for unsurprising code. I need comments for surprising code, but that is the exception, not the rule. Literate programming says that it is the rule, and I disagree.
by mursu | 2026-03-10 12:04:32+00:00
Greetings. Don't mean to come across as disrespectful. May I ask, have you decided on the criteria for new users to unlock restrictions? I apologize if it was already conveyed, but being new, I find myself a bit lost. I have read the guidelines and wanted to post in Show HN but then I got a message that stated that I do not have the clearance to do that yet. I must add I totally understand. I did not know about Hacker News until a few days ago when Gemini gave me the pointer to get my project visible to people here for real quality feedback. Again. I apologize if I am out of place.
by fiveaaplywork | 2026-03-10 12:05:01+00:00
I built five (fiveapply.work) after 11 months of unemployment and 400+ job applications.

The experience gave me a close up view of the doom loop: applying was free so volume
exploded, job seekers added AI to compete, recruiters added AI to filter, AI screeners
trained on AI applications, AI applications optimized for AI screeners, nobody is
talking to anyone.

The answer isn't more AI. It's less, and the right constraints:

- Recruiters record a short video pitch (not a job description). $5 flat per post, no subscriptions.
- Seekers record a video pitch (not a cover letter). Free, 20 per week.
- $1 High-Five lets seekers attach a cost-based intent signal to specific applications.
- No algorithmic screening, every recruiter sees every applicant.

Where AI does assist: Deepgram transcription for accessibility, and skills-based matching
to surface relevant roles in the feed. Neither screens candidates or makes decisions.
Recruiters always see everyone.

Stack: Next.js 16 (App Router), Supabase (DB + auth), Cloudflare R2 (video storage),
Deepgram (transcription), Stripe (wallet-based payments), Resend (email), Vercel (hosting).

I'm the founder, happy to answer anything.
by mike_hearn | 2026-03-10 12:05:27+00:00
But there's no such thing as compute cost in the abstract. What exactly is compute cost for AI? Does it include:

• Inference used for training? Modern training pipelines aren't just gradient descent, there's a ton of inference used in them too.

• Gradient descent itself?

• The CPUs and disks storing and managing the datasets?

• The web servers?

• The people paid to swap out failed components at the dc?

Let's say you try and define it to mean the same as unit economics - what does it cost you to add an additional customer vs what they bring in. There's still no way to do this calculation. It's like trying to compute the unit economics of a software company. Sure, if you ignore all the R&D costs of building the software in the first place and all the R&D costs of staying competitive with new versions, then the unit economics look amazing, but there's still plenty of loss-making software startups in the world.

Unit economics are a useful heuristic for businesses where there aren't any meaningful base costs required to stay in the game because they let you think about setup costs separately. Manufacturing toys, private education, farming... lots of businesses where your costs are totally dominated by unit economics. AI isn't like that.
by advancespace | 2026-03-10 12:05:50+00:00
The review burden problem mirrors what happens with internal tools generally. Teams use AI to spin up an internal system in a weekend, everyone's impressed, then six months later someone's spending half their time maintaining it. The build was never the expensive part. The review, the edge cases, the ongoing maintenance - that's where the real cost lives, whether it's OSS contributions or internal tooling
by nachocoll | 2026-03-10 12:07:00+00:00
A security radar specifically for vibe-coded apps is a genuinely needed tool. The interesting meta-question is whether the patterns of vulnerabilities in AI-generated code are systematically different from human-written code — and early evidence suggests they are. AI tends to over-trust inputs, under-implement authorization checks, and generate plausible-looking but insecure patterns when it lacks specific context about the threat model.

The dashboard approach of tracking security cost over time is the right framing. It's not that vibe coding is inherently insecure — it's that security requires explicit intent and domain knowledge that isn't automatically encoded in "build me an app" prompts. The AI optimizes for functionality, not security.

The Agile Vibe Coding Manifesto addresses this in its principle that "automation must remain verifiable" — specifically arguing that AI-generated systems need explicit security review checkpoints, not just functional testing. The manifesto treats security as an accountability concern, not just a technical one: if humans are accountable for the systems they ship, that accountability extends to the security properties.

Useful project for teams trying to quantify what they're accepting when they ship vibe-coded features: https://agilevibecoding.org
by sylware | 2026-03-10 12:07:16+00:00
If, for even 1s, they get in a position which is threatening, in any way, Big Tech AI (mostly US based if not all), they will be raided by international finance to be dismantled and poached hardcore with some massive US "investment funds" (which looks more and more as "weaponized" international finance!!). Only china is very immune to international finance. Those funds have tens of thousands of billions of $, basically, in a world of money, there is near zero resistance.
by kidsil | 2026-03-10 12:07:30+00:00
Funny, this mirrors almost exactly a decision I made after about a year of struggling with ELPA packages breaking on me repeatedly.

I ended up cutting Emacs off from ELPA entirely, settled on a ~700-line init.el, and now use Emacs as a glorified Org-mode agenda keeper. It's been heavenly (especially with a dedicated monitor).

The one thing I'm still working out is syncing with calendars and email.