MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Retric | 2026-03-13 05:06:47+00:00
History shows the timeline of dependence here. Before the introduction of cars, “poor road engineering practices” wouldn’t result in those deaths. So clearly it’s cars that are necessitating sidewalks, etc.

Same deal here, if something “becomes a problem” because of the introduction of AI, it’s AI that is the root case of the resulting issues. Many people are tempted to argue that flawed humans can’t implement the perfect system that is Anarchy, Communism, Recycling programs, or whatever but treating systems as needing to operate on the real world is productive where complaining about humans isn’t.
by Leftium | 2026-03-13 05:06:55+00:00
I think it's better to have the AI write scripts that extract the data required from logs vs directly shoving the entire log content into the AI.

An example of this is: I had Claude analyze the hourly precipitation forecasts for an entire year across various cities. Claude saved the API results to .csv files, then wrote a (Python?) script to analyze the data and only output the 60-80% expected values. So this avoided putting every hourly data point (8700+ hours in a year) into the context.

Another example: At first, Claude struggled to extract a very long AI chat session to MD. So Claude only returned summaries of the chats. Later, after I installed the context mode MCP[1], Claude was able to extract the entire AI chat session verbatim, including all tool calls.

1. Sometimes?

2. Described above. I also built a tool that lets the dev/AI filter (browser dev console)logs to only the loggs of interest: https://github.com/Leftium/gg?tab=readme-ov-file#coding-agen...

3. It would be interesting to combine your log compression with the scripting approach I described.

[1]: https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/47193064
by wafflemaker | 2026-03-13 05:07:03+00:00
The really crazy thing that happened to me when I changed diet to a more gut-biome friendly* is that (like I craved sweets before) I started craving vegetables and oatmeal. Like there was a regime change in my gut and the new guys pushed the buttons to get more of their food.

(less/no simple sugars, much more vegetables and starches/fibers, regularly eating 4 corn/20 plant oatmeal few times a week)
by donavanm | 2026-03-13 05:08:14+00:00
For the gp: the other side of the risk/reward coin is that private credit has limited upside. They're going to get the margin between the private 6/7/8/9/10% loan and their funding source + admin. Whereas PE can go “to the moon” if things work out.

morningstar had a nice writeup of the changing winds https://dbrs.morningstar.com/research/469893/2026-private-cr...
by dang | 2026-03-13 05:08:18+00:00
Could you please not create an account for every few comments you post? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
by gopalv | 2026-03-13 05:08:39+00:00
> The writing isn’t the problem. The problem is that when I’m done, I look at what I just wrote and think this is definitely not good enough to publish.

Ira Glass has a nice quote which is worth printing out and hanging on your wall

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work.

Or if you're into design thinking, the Cult-of-Done[1] was a decade ago.

[1] - https://medium.com/@bre/the-cult-of-done-manifesto-724ca1c2f...
by tombert | 2026-03-13 05:09:19+00:00
Oh no argument on that.

I have a typical yuppie software job with decent pay, so generally I will buy the right tools for a job now instead of trying to make due with whatever I can scrap together. I'm not that busy of a person, but I certainly have more obligations than I did when I was sixteen, and now sometimes it really is worth it to spend an extra grand on something than it is to spend a week hacking together something from my existing stuff.

Still, I look back at the hours I spent making terrible YouTube videos with my terrible computer really fondly. I was proud of myself for making things work, I was proud of the little workarounds I found.

I think it's the same reason I love reading about classic computing (80's-90's era). Computers in the 80's were objectively terrible compared to anything we have now, and people still figured out how to squeeze every little bit of juice possible to make really awesome games and programs. The Commodore 64 and Amiga demos are fun to play around with because people will figure out the coolest tricks to make these computers do things that they have no business doing. I mean, the fact that Bad Apple has been "ported" to pretty much everything is something I cannot stop being fascinated by. [1] [2] [3] [4]

[1] https://youtu.be/2vPe452cegU

[2] https://youtu.be/qRdGhHEoj3o

[3] https://youtu.be/OsDy-4L6-tQ

[4] https://youtu.be/Ko9ZA50X71s
by jason_s | 2026-03-13 05:09:25+00:00
> How awesome that you were able to find this! I’m only missing a couple!

Missing a couple of features you want to add?

The "able to find this" (the 1981 Exxon magazine) needs context to appreciate re: the dispersion of certain personal belongings over time. I would have picked the magazine up in 1981 or 1982 (possibly 1983) at the school energy fair, and it remained in my physical possession for the next 40-something years.

In elementary school I did not have a significant amount of possessions outside of toys. Then in middle school I got a small desk, and in high school I got a larger desk, and it ended up in a folder of "neat stuff" that I saved.

Then after college my stuff from the desk ended up in a banker's box, which I still have, along with a couple of other boxes of stuff from that era. This year I looked for maybe 20-30 minutes and found it.

I still have all of my copies of Compute's Gazette from the mid-late 1980s.

I will say that it is amazing to be able to go online and find all sorts of old computer/electronics/whatever magazines from the 1950s-1980s on archive.org or bitsavers or worldradiohistory.org and there they are... unless they're not.
by zzzgydi | 2026-03-13 05:09:51+00:00
I built this after deploying OpenClaw on an Ubuntu server.

When the agent needed web search / browsing / scraping, the usual options were either headless browser automation or calling APIs directly. My first instinct was that there should be another path: use a real headed browser in an isolated sandbox, and let a human step in through VNC/Xpra for login or other sensitive steps.
I do the first step when needed, and the agent does the remaining 99+ steps.
And if I don’t fully trust an action, I can still watch or take over.

So I made a self-hosted browser sandbox with:

- remote GUI access via VNC/Xpra
- CDP for Playwright / agent-browser tools
- multiple isolated browser sandboxes for different accounts/login states
- basic file handling for downloads
- simple single-user auth

The main use case is personal/self-hosted agent workflows, not multi-tenant SaaS.

Also if you run agents on your own Mac Mini, maybe you can use this to change another Chrome profile and keep your auth info separate from the agent's.
by maguay | 2026-03-13 05:10:13+00:00
My first computer was a hand-me-down Compaq LTE laptop, several times removed from the original owner, with a 700MB hard drive and Windows 95 a decade after those were leading-edge specs. It had only Word and Access, of all things, and little room for more.

But it was mine, I tinkered with it forever, learned databases enough to turn Access into a basic quasi-Excel for my needs, cataloged things that really didn't need to be tabulated, and generally learned as much as that little machine would let me.

That was a limited computer, one that couldn't possibly have let me do what I needed to do when I hit university. But it got me started, taught me to tinker, and I'm prety sure pushed me to learn more than a state-of-the-art for the time computer would have.

And so I do wonder, at times, if it's the nostalgic look back at early computing that makes people inclined to say "my god that would have been an amazing computer to start out with" when you look at an entry-level computer. I'm inclined, even, to say man that's going to be an epic $100 computer on the second-hand market in a half decade or less.

When at the same time, it's actually a solid machine for more of us than us geeks with our inflated expectations of computers have than we'd like to accept. That, too, is pretty cool.
by dang | 2026-03-13 05:10:14+00:00
Submitted title was "The AI coding divide: craft lovers vs. result chasers" - which does seem to be a fair statement of what the article is about, and in that sense not so biased.

We've reverted the title to be that of the article now, though, in keeping with the site guidelines, since it was neither misleading nor linkbaity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by danpalmer | 2026-03-13 05:10:42+00:00
> Some of the best research ... has come from surprisingly young people. ... They're not afraid of looking stupid.

Young people aren't doing things without worrying about looking stupid, they just don't know that they look stupid. I say that as a former young person who was way more naive than I thought I was at the time. This is good and bad.

Also I think this point ignores that as people grow in their careers they often become more highly leveraged. I've moved from writing code to coaching others who write code. It is very normal for much of the "important" stuff to be done by relatively young people, but this understates the influence from more experienced people.
by gnabgib | 2026-03-13 05:10:49+00:00
PB&J AI (3 points, 1 year ago, 2 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42222009

Dad Annoys the Heck Out of His Kids by Making PB&Js Based on Their Instructions (2017) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13688715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41599917

& infamous: sudo make me a sandwich (2009) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=530000
by alwa | 2026-03-13 05:11:04+00:00
If you haven’t had the pleasure of Los Angeles public-access television’s Let’s Paint TV…

https://www.letspainttv.com/

Or, to save your eyes, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let's_Paint_TV

For more than 20 years, Mr. Let’s Paint TV (artist John Kilduff) has encouraged viewers to “EMBRACE FAILARE”—charitably put, to pass through the valley of incompetence as it’s the only path to the slopes of mastery. Just do the thing.

I couldn’t agree more with that impulse and TFA’s: the common trait that cuts across all the most impressive people I know—from artists to businesspeople to scientists to engineers to even leaders-of-organizations—is a cheerful unselfconsciousness, a humility, a willful simplicity—a willingness to put it out there while it’s raw and stupid and unformed, and hone it through practice with the people around them.

A taste:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PvbL_5rH1QQ
by radar1310 | 2026-03-13 05:11:36+00:00
I think the standard BBS modem for most BBS’s was the US Robotics brand if I’m not mistaken.

My first modem was a Supra 2400 baud, then thinking about all the speed I would have with my new 56.6. My first hard drive was a 20 meg, new it was $320. 20 megs $320 kids, imagine that.

That was for my wonderful brand new Amiga 500. Those were the days.
by jandrewrogers | 2026-03-13 05:12:02+00:00
> There aren't many datasets exceeding that outside fundamental physics.

Just about every physical world telemetry or sensing data source of any note will generate petabytes of analytical data model in hours to days. On the high end, there are single categories of data source that aggregate to more like an exabyte per day of high-value data.

It is a completely different standard of scale than web data. In many industrial domains the average small-to-medium sized company I come across retains tens of petabytes of data and it has been this way for many years. The prohibitive cost is the only thing keeping them for scaling even more.

The major issue is that the large-scale analytics infrastructure developed for web data are hopelessly inadequate.
by throwawaysleep | 2026-03-13 05:13:28+00:00
Efficiency, metrics, and willingness to look stupid works when nobody has much future power over you. If you can just refresh to a new pool, that is fine but if it is the same pool, it has consequences.

I was on an interview panel for a role and a guy lost out on the role because about 18 months prior, he had asked too many questions one time and because of that the PM thought he struggled to grasp concepts.

One meeting did in his promo.
by wafflemaker | 2026-03-13 05:14:05+00:00
Yup. Discovered me and my dad have ADHD at pretty much the same time. In our case (very stimulant sensitive) we had to quit coffee to use ADHD meds. While I eventually switched to Inka (a roasted grain coffee substitute) when I saw how my heart results get better without coffee, he still struggles.
He recently quit meds for some time due to unwanted symptoms and told me how he was away with some friends and deeply relished being able to normally drink coffee again.
by dang | 2026-03-13 05:14:42+00:00
It's increasingly clear that the LLMs leave more of a mark than authors realize when they run their writing through for a touching-up. This has been coming up a lot lately: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346449.

That's why readers end up reacting to the LLM imprints rather than the content.

I don't mean to be critical because it's a good article! But I bet if you shared the version before it was "tightened up", most of us would prefer it.

(I suppose I'd better add that this isn't a criticism of LLMs either - it's about figuring out how to use them well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342045)
by zoklet-enjoyer | 2026-03-13 05:14:51+00:00
I'm a nearly 40 year old man and I skip through the halls at work most days. It's something I've been doing for a long time because it's fun, it's faster than walking, and it looks silly. It seems to help some people loosen up when they see their colleague skipping down the hall and I think that helps team morale.
Show HN: Adversarial Code Review paired agents, zero noise,validated findings
by rainmod | 2026-03-13 05:15:47+00:00
Author here. We built this because one AI reviewing code and checking its own work just agrees with itself — the research confirms LLMs can't reliably self-correct on hard reasoning.
The fix: split it into two agents with opposed goals. A reviewer agent finds problems.
A dev agent tries to disprove each finding with specific counter-evidence from the codebase.

Three verdicts: VALID, INVALID, AMBIGUOUS. Only what survives reaches your team.

Agents are auto-generated per service — point the skill at your repo, it scans your stack and produces the full set. ~30 min of human tuning per service to add tribal knowledge.
Repo includes the shared preamble (quality constitution), reviewer/dev templates, and the auto-generation skill. Happy to answer questions.
by ipaddr | 2026-03-13 05:15:52+00:00
Measured. If what you are saying is being downvoted this group might not be ready for it.

Saying something like Claude is over rated as a general llm because of loftly guardrails will get downvotes today but seen as insightful down the road. You can be too early or late.

Take Tailwinds. Is it loved or hated now? We went through different phases.
by zephen | 2026-03-13 05:16:05+00:00
I think the phrasing is fine. It's self-aware. It acknowledges that stupidity, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

"Looking stupid" is not the same as "being stupid." It could be very smart indeed, depending on your circumstances, to learn an additional language, and the point being made is that when going out in public and speaking it in front of native speakers, ridicule is not unexpected, and should be embraced.
by jezzamon | 2026-03-13 05:17:32+00:00
Plenty of great tools for kids to start making games with if they're interested in it! Personally, I think running something on a Raspberry Pi isn't very interesting or inviting as a first thing to play with. Creating a game in Roblox, designing an outfit in Roblox, or building a game within Minecraft is more interesting. And people build crazy stuff in Scratch.

But also, not every kid is interested in that anyway.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-03-13 05:18:53+00:00
I was that kid, and can confirm.

My curiosity for all things computer related was boundless, but I eventually tinkered with Linux but only because I’d had been exposed to a *nix style command line from the comfort of an OS X desktop first.

By then I had started messing around with code but had only built toys and extremely basic tools and would’ve been lucky to write a moderately functional desktop program using high level libraries (which didn’t happen for several more years).

Writing drivers or poking around in kernel code was so far beyond the scope of capabilities at that point that you would’ve had better luck teaching your dog how to knit. I don’t think I could’ve had any chance at doing these things until at least my mid 20s.
by creato | 2026-03-13 05:19:17+00:00
Using this example: a computer was an unlikely purchase for a lower-middle class person in the US, but it wasn't totally unattainable. Many people in the US probably did it, and some of them probably found some positive return on that investment.

That's not true of many "objectively" poor people in the world, who even if they could buy the computer, they might not have had access to electricity to run it.
by tombert | 2026-03-13 05:20:00+00:00
On my second day when I worked at Reddit, I learned by accident that I do not want my terminal to have clickable links.

I was working on image compression, and we had a script where we would render a column with the original image link, and a column with the new compressed image, and a column with the relative percentage of size to PNG, and there would be like 200 rows at a time.

I managed to somehow accidentally click on a link in iTerm, my browser opened, and I discovered what "sounding" [1] is, on a company computer, in the company office.

I saw it, whispered "oh fuck!", and quickly killed my browser. I don't think anyone saw me but I was extremely worried that I was going to get fired on my second day of work for viewing porn on a company computer in front of everyone, even though it was a legitimate accident.

So now I don't want my links to be clickable. If there's a link I'll highlight it and paste it into Firefox manually.

[1] If you do not know what sounding is, I do not recommend you look it up, just know that it's a weird sex thing that I wish I didn't know about and cannot unsee.
by ofrzeta | 2026-03-13 05:20:01+00:00
"Kubernetes backed by S3-compatible object storage for WAL archiving — giving you 11 nines of durability on your backups .. " - that might be the case with AWS S3 but maybe not with Minio or even Ceph when you need to operate it yourself.

Anyway that interview question is so stupid it hurts. I would never expect just a simple answer to an interview question and mark it off as "done". It's much more valuable to get into a dialogue and see how the candidate is approaching things.
by ekropotin | 2026-03-13 05:20:34+00:00
I’m actually start seeking at work how people are writing skills in a very procedural manner. Something like:

First, collect the following information from user: ….
Second, send http request to the following endpoint with the certain payload….
If server returned error - report back to user.

It makes me crack every time I see that kind of stuff. Why on Earth you won’t just write a script for that purpose? 10x faster, zero tokens burned, 100% deterministic.
by abahgat | 2026-03-13 05:21:06+00:00
Author here. It’s a very hopeful time for interactive learning. Coincidentally, it is inspiring that both OpenAI and Anthropic released these improved visualization capabilities just this week.

Using Gemini's canvas for chord progressions is a great example of this. When I was building this suffix tree visualizer, I kept thinking about how much "spatial" intuition is required to understand the algorithm; having these live, interactive environments available to students is a massive step forward.

https://openai.com/index/new-ways-to-learn-math-and-science-...
https://claude.com/blog/claude-builds-visuals
by fc417fc802 | 2026-03-13 05:21:58+00:00
Well I (thought it was obvious that) I was referring to roads constructed relatively recently. If cars necessitate sidewalks and the city chooses to cut costs by not putting those in that isn't the fault of automobile designers or manufacturers or dealers or private owners or whoever.

To your example, technology changes and that necessitates infrastructure changing. That doesn't mean that fault for mishaps in the meantime can be attributed to the new technology. A user operating the new technology in an obviously unsafe manner is solely at fault for his own negligence.
by nomel | 2026-03-13 05:22:09+00:00
When I was younger, I was so embarrassed to ask a question that I thought everyone else in the room obviously knew, since they weren't asking about it.

Now I realize there's a near certain chance that I'm not the only one.

And, being much more on the presenting side now, there's NOTHING more disheartening that going through some presentation or explanation without any questions, because you know you've failed to communicate anything, at that point.
by andai | 2026-03-13 05:23:23+00:00
Main machine is a $50 Thinkpad.

I haven't used a computer more recent than 2016. As far as I can tell, the only thing I'm missing is AAA gaming (RTX looks cool), and local LLMs.

I did a bunch of game jams on it. Even won one! (Of course, even 2010s hardware is overkill for 2d games :)

I also did some basic video editing on it but it was a bit slow to render.

I won't say I'm not missing out — I'm certainly looking forward to an upgrade! — but that you can get surprisingly far with surprisingly little.
by ares623 | 2026-03-13 05:23:25+00:00
> I like woodworking because I like building something that never existed before. I don’t mind using a CNC router or a 3 printer to help me out. I don’t care about the process, I care about the result. But I care deeply about the quality of the result.

Why not outsource it to someone else? That way you do none of the work.
by solatic | 2026-03-13 05:23:48+00:00
To add some context -

> Imperfect enforcement is too easy for law enforcement officers to turn into selective enforcement. By choosing who to go after, law enforcement gets the unearned power

This is by design, in an American context of building a free society. By default, you are allowed to do whatever you like to do in a free society. To constrain behavior through law, first a legislator must decide that it should be constrained, then they must convince their legislator peers that it should be constrained, then law enforcement must be convinced to attempt to constrain it de-facto, then a judge must be convinced that you in particular should have a court case proceed against you; a grand jury must be convinced to bring an indictment, a jury of 12 peers must be convinced to reach a verdict, and even afterwards there are courts of appeal.

The bar to constrain someone's freedom is quite high. By design and by wider culture.