MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zmactep | 2026-03-06 19:27:25+00:00
Dear Andrew, first of all — thank you so much for your feedback, both the technical and the legal parts. Your earlier comments about SDF and PDB parsing corner cases are incredibly valuable.

PyMOL has been one of my primary tools for 15 years, and I've always held it in deep respect. This project was born entirely out of a desire to contribute something to molecular visualization in the modern world — something fast, modular, and with qualities I've been missing in existing tools. And as a source of inspiration, I took the best one: PyMOL.

Of course I spent a lot of time reading and studying its code, and I openly took concepts and algorithms from it. I don't hide that — it's why the project carries the name it does, and it's why the README has had an Acknowledgments section since the very first commit: "Inspired by PyMOL, created by Warren Lyford DeLano. This is an independent reimplementation, not affiliated with Schrödinger, Inc."

You are absolutely right about the "clean-room" wording — I used it loosely, meaning "rewritten from scratch in a different language with a different architecture," not in the legal sense. That was misleading, and I've already removed it from the README.

You're also right that DSS or CE was a fairly direct port of PyMOL's algorithm, and it should carry proper attribution. At the same time, many other parts — surface generation, cartoon rendering, the shading pipeline — are done quite differently, and the gap keeps growing. But that doesn't excuse insufficient attribution where code was closely followed.

Going forward, I'm focusing on genuinely new functionality — Rust plugin system, web interface, novel shading models (try set shading_mode, skripkin!) — things the original PyMOL never had. But this is not an attempt to distance the project from DeLano's creation. It's a respectful continuation of his ideas in a completely new product.

Thank you again — your comments are making this project better.
by future10se | 2026-03-06 19:27:45+00:00
> https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/15805010

Not to bash on x86 or anything, but that's an outlier. Very overclocked with a compressor chiller or similar. Also the single-threaded and multi-threaded scores are the same; it's probably not stable at full load across all cores.

I don't think that's really representative of the architecture at scale, unless you're making the case for how overclockable (at great power/heat cost) x86 is.
by blakec | 2026-03-06 19:27:58+00:00
Lot of good points in this thread but it keeps circling "LLMs produce code that looks right but isn't" without landing on what to actually do about it.

The two I hit most often: the model says "I'm confident this works" without running tests (the completion report just... fabricates results), and the model claims tests pass without executing them. METR found 30% of agent runs involve reward hacking, models that know they're cheating keep going anyway.

You can't prompt your way out of that. But you can gate it. Block the completion report unless it contains actual proof, real test output, file paths cited. Grep the final output for "should work" and "probably" and force re-verification when they show up. Mechanical, not behavioral.

Once you stop accepting the model's self-assessment as evidence, most of the "lying" problem just becomes a testing problem.
by 0x457 | 2026-03-06 19:28:05+00:00
This is where I disagree. Copyright was most likely violated, but (most likely) because book was obtained not via a legal way.

LLMs didn't spit out Harry Potter until it was prompted to do so. There is argument to be make that LLM can be used as transport of pirated content.

My argument is that it's not different from searching for "file:pdf Harry Potter"
by warrenronsiek | 2026-03-06 19:28:07+00:00
I've created an AI children's storybook creator. I believe that I have the best product in the space, and by a wide margin. However, I'm concerned that product quality doesn't matter, and I'm looking for advice on what to do with the product.

There are many issues with this as a business:
1. Zero barriers to entry.
2. Low margins.
3. Repeat/subscription revenue is low or non-existent.

The margins on the business are too low to make ads make sense. New entrants constantly coming into the space and buying up keywords. You have to compete with them for SEO ranking even if their product is worse. By the time the customer has realized that the first ad/link they clicked on results in a sub-par book, they already made the purchase or gave up on the impulse. I've tried Facebook/Youtube/TikTok. My ads (according to FB) had above average performance, but even so CAC was WAY bigger than per-sale margin.

My current plan is an affiliate marketing system where I recruit influencers to link to books that they create and give them all of the profit in exchange for, effectively, 0 CAC traffic that I convert into an upsell. However, this has various difficulties as well. The influencers I've contacted all want upfront payment, often thousands of dollars, to create a single reel that will get a few thousand views.

Deeper issue is I don't understand how B2C products/marketing is supposed to break even. Somehow people are able to make money/businesses selling single-sale products via advertising, but all my experiments in doing this have negative ROI.

Thoughts? Am I missing something? What should I do?
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-03-06 19:28:19+00:00
> Just that they're still 'developing' and aren't even close to the historical contributions of the US?

This is a sham excuse. Building coal power plants before solar or nuclear were viable or even existed is not the same as choosing to do it in modern day.

> Explain me why the average car in the US is a tank with horrible fuel economy?

The "best selling" light vehicles in the US are pickup trucks because the sales numbers aren't divided out into personal and business purchases and businesses buy a lot of trucks. The best selling non-pickup is the Toyota RAV4, which gets better than 30 MPG in the non-hybrid version and better than 40 MPG in the hybrid version.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-03-06 19:28:27+00:00
If you would like to bet how much nuclear will be operating in ten years, place your bet. I’m willing to bet $10k to a charity of the winner’s choice nuclear generation remains about the same total capacity as today while renewables scale to terawatts. Let me know if I should have a Longbet spun up for accountability.

https://longbets.org/
by kermatt | 2026-03-06 19:29:24+00:00
> renaissance of re-exploring the natural world

I wonder if there was a period of time where people who were inclined to do that were able to dedicate themselves to exploration instead of working to pay for healthcare.

I know that's a gross oversimplification, and that quality of life is better now, but when it came to academic pursuits was it more feasible in the past?

Or am I just subconsciously reacting to constant negative economic news and wondering if the grass was greener on the other side of the timeline?
by layer8 | 2026-03-06 19:29:38+00:00
When Martin Fowler coined the term Dependency Injection [0], that was specifically for the context of container instrumentation. Merely passing service objects as constructor parameters is more akin to the Strategy pattern. At least in the Java world where it originated, “dependency injection” has always been about wiring application components and services together at runtime based on configuration, often directly injecting the dependencies into object fields via reflection, and not about statically compiled constructor invocations that happen to pass service objects.

[0] https://martinfowler.com/articles/injection.html
by sp1nningaway | 2026-03-06 19:29:38+00:00
I think this also explains some of our political climate. Everything the current administration says sounds like gibberish and equivocation to me, but to its intended audience it is a clear communication about wielding power and grift.

Conversely, when someone talks about "decolonizing" a curriculum or "centering" marginalized voices, to me it's a clear statement about who gets to define meaning and whose history counts, but to my Boomer uncle it's incoherent, if not an outright attack.
by oblio | 2026-03-06 19:29:41+00:00
> Eventually they figured out that language served a different
purpose inside the bond market than it did in the outside world. Bond market
terminology was designed less to convey meaning than to bewilder outsiders.
Overpriced bonds were not "expensive" overpriced bonds were "rich," which
almost made them sound like something you should buy. The floors of
subprime mortgage bonds were not called floors--or anything else that might
lead the bond buyer to form any sort of concrete image in his mind--but
tranches. The bottom tranche--the risky ground floor--was not called the
ground floor but the mezzanine, or the mezz, which made it sound less like a
dangerous investment and more like a highly prized seat in a domed stadium.
A CDO composed of nothing but the riskiest, mezzanine layer of subprime
mortgages was not called a subprime-backed CDO but a "structured finance
CDO." "There was so much confusion about the different terms," said Charlie.
"In the course of trying to figure it out, we realize that there's a reason why it doesn't quite make sense to us. It's because it doesn't quite make sense."

The Big Short by Michael Lewis, page 101.
by andai | 2026-03-06 19:29:41+00:00
The argument assumes that there is one platonic ideal wristwatch, and that it is maximally thin and maximally precise.

But I know a lot of people who wear watches for different reasons. Some people's idea of "brand" is the frugality of the F-91W. Some people wear obnoxiously large watches. Some people go for something more classy and subtle.

And then there's a great deal of difference in taste. Some watches are works of art. Some are made of wood. Some are full of diamonds.

I think a lot of these niches are underserved, and so your brand can be "the one that owns this niche."
by vladvasiliu | 2026-03-06 19:29:48+00:00
> Older European cities with high-density stone buildings and less green space often trap heat more effectively than typical U.S. suburban layouts.

Doesn't that mean that they would need AC, then? At least for those specific buildings.

However, as a European living in Paris, one of the densest cities in the world, I only feel the need for AC like 2-3 weeks a year. I think the issue is that most people dying of heath are already very old and much more sensitive to it.

But if you live in any kind of share building, you can't just go and set up a split. If it is outside the building, you need permits, both from the architects, so that you don't deface your ugly concrete building, and from your fellow residents, who usually vote "no" by default.
by Aurornis | 2026-03-06 19:30:24+00:00
> Companies have also adopted your strategy: interviewing candidates "to see what's out there" - there's a job I've interviewed for that's still open after 10 months

When I was doing a lot of hiring we wouldn't take the job posting down until we were done hiring people with that title.

It made a couple people furious because they assumed we were going to take the job posting down when we hired someone and then re-post a new listing for the next person.

One guy was even stalking LinkedIn to try to identify who was hired, without realizing that many engineers don't update their LinkedIn. Got some angry e-mails. There are some scary applicants out there.

Some times a specific job opening needs to stay open for a long time to hire the right person, though. I can recall some specific job listings we had open for years because none of the people we interviewed really had the specific experience we needed (though many falsely claimed it in their applications, right until we began asking questions)
by post-it | 2026-03-06 19:30:26+00:00
> The best engineers can visualize the whole architecture in their head, and describe exactly what they want to an AI

I think this must be part of it. I see so many posts about people burning a thousand dollars in AI credits building a small app, and I have no idea why. I use the $20 Claude plan and I rarely run out of usage, and I make all kinds of things. I just describe what I want, do a few back-and-forths of writing out the architecture, and Claude does it.

I think the folks burning thousands of dollars of credits are unable to describe what they want.
by godelski | 2026-03-06 19:30:38+00:00
But that knowledge was never hidden or out of reach. Why not read books, manuals, or take online classes? There is free access to all these things, the only cost is time and energy.

Everyone has tons of ideas. But every good engineer (and scientist) also knows that most of our ideas fall apart when either thinking deeper or trying to implement it (same thing, just mental or not). Those nuances and details don't go away. They don't matter any less. They only become less visible. But those things falling apart is also incredibly valuable. What doesn't break is the new foundation to begin again.

The bottleneck has never been a shortage of ideas nor the hands to implement them. The bottleneck has always been complexity. As the world advances do does the complexity needed to improve it.
by jjmarr | 2026-03-06 19:31:15+00:00
Juniors from non target schools are getting pushed out since the skill floor is too high.

I graduated 9 months ago. In that time I've merged more PRs than anyone else, reduced mean time to merge by 20% on a project with 300 developers with an automated code review tool, and in the past week vibe coded an entire Kubernetes cluster that can remotely execute our builds (working on making it more reliable before putting it into prod).

None of this matters.

The companies/teams like OpenAI or Google Deepmind that are allegedly hiring these super juniors at huge salaries only do so from target schools like Waterloo or MIT. If you don't work at a top company your compensation package is the same as ever. I am not getting promoted faster, my bonus went from 9% to 14% and I got a few thousand in spot bonuses.

From my perspective, this field is turning into finance or law, where the risk of a bad hire due to the heightened skill floor is so high that if you DIDN'T go to a target school you're not getting a top job no matter how good you are. Like how Yale goes to Big Law at $250k while non T14 gets $90k doing insurance defence and there's no movement between the categories. 20-30% of my classmates are still unemployed.

We cannot get around this by interviewing well because anyone can cheat on interviews with AI, so they don't even give interviews or coding assessments to my school. We cannot get around this with better projects because anyone can release a vibe coded library.

It appears the only thing that matters is pedigree of education because 4 years of in person exams from a top school aren't easy to fake.
by Fricken | 2026-03-06 19:31:41+00:00
Having a 70 year old play tennis is much more expensive than letting him die off and instead have an up and coming 17 year old play tennis. 17 year olds stay healthy and young, and are able to have meaningful life experiences at no extra cost.

Humans weren't designed to last forever, and it's inefficient to push against that constraint, you run into fast diminishing returns, and it leads to maladies and stratification when done at a societal scale. It doesn't matter how much we spend on health care, we're not going to live forever.
Show HN: Rental Property Deal Analyzer – 20 metrics, deal scoring, AI analysis
by bkapu | 2026-03-06 19:32:33+00:00
Free, open-source rental property investment calculator. FastAPI backend (~1K lines) serves a single vanilla HTML/CSS/JS file (~2.8K lines) — no frameworks, no build step.

Calculates Cash-on-Cash, Cap Rate, DSCR, NOI, GRM, Break-Even Occupancy, and more. 14-point deal scorecard grades each metric individually. 5-year total return projection breaks down Cash Flow + Appreciation + Debt Paydown + Tax Benefits. Strategy fit analysis for Cash Flow / Wealth Building / Low Risk / BRRRR.

Optional AI analysis via LM Studio (free, local, GPU), Ollama (free, local), or Anthropic Claude (paid). Streaming responses via SSE with real-time filtering of thinking-model artifacts.

Zillow scraping with 4 extraction strategies for their __NEXT_DATA__ JSON + Playwright headless fallback when httpx gets blocked.

Save/compare scenarios, export PDF + HTML. MIT license.

Source: https://github.com/berkcankapusuzoglu/Rental-Property-Deal-A...
by jmalicki | 2026-03-06 19:32:49+00:00
The Mac silicon is nice in that it has partial x86 emulation in that it can work in x86 memory store mode.

Since they had control over the hardware, they could punt on one of the hard parts of Rosetta and bake it into Silicon.

Understanding the memory ordering requirements from binary without source and without killing performance by being overly conservative (and hell, the source itself probably has memory ordering bugs if it was only tested on x86) sounds next to impossible.
by harrall | 2026-03-06 19:32:57+00:00
Yeah we had an exponential jump when we discovered oil but we maxed that out and the growth has been linear since (and paying for it environmentally too).

I’m waiting for the next big major discovery in energy generation.

We’re always on the verge of fusion… fusion will be like the discovery of oil. Humanity will jump forward… well, technologically at least.
by mjg59 | 2026-03-06 19:33:03+00:00
There's a standard like ACPI for Arm devices - it's called ACPI, and it's a requirement for the non-Devicetree SystemReady spec (https://www.arm.com/architecture/system-architectures/system...). But it doesn't describe the huge range of weirdness that exists in the more embedded end of the Arm world, and it's functionally impossible for it to do so while Arm vendors see devices as an integrated whole rather than a general purpose device that can have commodity operating systems installed on them.
by jinko-niwashi | 2026-03-06 19:33:23+00:00
This is what happens when you give an agent execution power without guardrails. The tool isn't the problem — the absence of governance is. In my setup I treat the AI as a junior dev with root access: every destructive operation requires explicit human approval, and the session context includes hard constraints on what it can and can't touch.

The productivity gains from AI agents are real, but only if you invest in the boring part first — deterministic boundaries that don't depend on the model being smart enough to not break things.
by bobmcnamara | 2026-03-06 19:33:40+00:00
LVGL has begun relicensed and removed the lv_xml module from and moved it under LVGL Pro

More discussion here: https://github.com/lvgl/lvgl/issues/9663

Have to read the commit history on this one to see the order things happened - lv_xml appears to have started as MIT licensed with everything else, then license changed last fall, then it was removed with claims of always-been-proprietary.
Show HN: Aporium AI – a study app that refuses to give you answers
by kenandervisagic | 2026-03-06 19:33:54+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Aporium AI, a study platform based on the Socratic method.

The idea came from my own frustration while studying. I used to highlight entire textbooks and feel productive, but when exam time came I often realized I hadn’t actually understood much.

The Socratic method - guiding someone with questions instead of giving answers has been used for over 2,000 years. I wondered what it would look like if an AI tutor used the same approach.

So I built Aporium.

How it works:

• Upload your notes or PDFs
• Generate quizzes and flashcards from specific pages
• Chat with an AI tutor that asks guiding questions instead of giving answers
• Track progress with learning statistics

One thing I focused on was keeping everything tied to the student’s own materials. The quizzes, flashcards, and discussions come directly from the uploaded notes so they stay relevant to the class.

The AI can also adapt to different academic levels (elementary → high school → college → postgrad).

It’s still early and actively evolving, so I’d really appreciate feedback from the HN community.

Curious about:

- Would you have found something like this useful while studying?
- Are there features you’d expect from a tool like this?
- Any concerns about using AI for learning?
by yearolinuxdsktp | 2026-03-06 19:34:01+00:00
Your AWS backup snapshots must go one-way (append-only) to a separate AWS account, to which access is extremely limited and never has any automated tools connecting to with anything other than read access. I don’t think it costs more to do that—-but it takes your backups out of the blast radius of a root or admin account compromise OR a tool malfunction. With AWS DLM, you can safely configure your backup retention in the separate AWS account and not risk any tools deleting them.

Terraform is a ticking time bomb. All it takes is for a new field to show up in AWS or a new state in an existing field, and now your resource is not modified, but is destroyed and re-created.

I will never trust any process, AI or a CD pipeline, execute `terraform apply` automatically on anything production. Maybe if you examine the plan for a very narrow set of changes and then execute apply from that plan only, maybe then you can automate it. I think it’s much rarer for Terraform to deviate from a plan.

Regardless, you must always turn on Delete Protection on all your important resources. It is wild to me that AWS didn’t ship EKS with delete protection out of the gate—-they only added this feature in August 2025! Not long before that, I’ve witnessed a production database get deleted because Terraform decided that an AWS EKS cluster could not be modified, so it decided to delete it and re-create it, while the team was trying to upgrade the version of EKS. The same exact pipeline worked fine in the staging environment. Turns out production had a slight difference due to AWS API changes, and Terraform decided it could not modify.

The use of a state file with Terraform is a constant source of trouble and footguns:

- you must never use a local Terraform state file for production that’s not committed to source control
- you must use a remote S3 state file with Terraform for any production system that’s worth anything
- ideally, the only state file in source control is for a separate Terraform stack to bootstrap the S3 bucket for all other Terraform stacks

If you’re running only on AWS, and are using agents to write your IaaC anyway, use AWS CloudFormation, because it doesn’t use state files, and you don’t need your IaaC code to be readable or comprehensible.
by KIFulgore | 2026-03-06 19:34:16+00:00
I'd forgotten about PageMaker. I was on my college newspaper staff and we used it for layout.

It was a small college in the rural midwest, so the local newspaper ran our copies. They didn't use digital tools, so we printed our content from PageMaker and laid it out by hand on a wax board. [1]

RIP and many thanks for making our jobs easier. At least to the point we waxed the master layout.

[1]: http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2009/05/dead-tech-waxers.h...
by JeremyNT | 2026-03-06 19:34:40+00:00
> Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone.

While I could buy that hiring managers believe this, it's not actually true.

The gulf between the quality of what a sr developer can do with these tools and what a jr can do is huge. They simply don't know what they don't know and effective prompting requires effective spec writing.

A rando jr vibe coder can churn out code like there's no tomorrow, but that doesn't mean it's actually right.