MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by embedding-shape | 2026-03-10 20:22:11+00:00
> 2. Having Less comments on their PRs: for some drastically dumb reason, having a PR thoroughly reviewed

I'm very far away from liking Amazon's engineering culture and general work culture, but having PRs with countless of discussions and feedback on it does signal that you've done a lot of work without collaborating with others before doing the work. Generally in teams that work well together and build great software, the PRs tend to have very little on them, as most of the issues were resolved while designing together with others.
by MichaelRo | 2026-03-10 20:22:11+00:00
>> I wonder how this will work in practice. Say I'm a senior engineer and I produce myself thousands of lines of code per day with the help of LLMs as mandated by the company.

LOL, it's the age old "responsibility without authority". The pressure to use AI will increase and basically you'll be fired for not using it. Simultaneously with the pressure to take the blame when AI fucks up and you can't keep up with the bullshit, leading you to get fired. One way or the other, get some training on how to stack shelves at the supermarket because that's how our future looks, one way or the other.
by gruez | 2026-03-10 20:23:15+00:00
>and keep shipping mandatory DRM modules that run with deranged levels of privilege in places like TrustZone

What's "deranged" about TrustZone? It's just a way to allow code to be executed in a tamper-proof way. Advocates like Stallman might object to this on the basis of "freedom to tinker" and "user control", but it can't steal your data, which is what "deranged levels of privilege" sounds like.

Moreover it's not too hard to imagine DRM implemented in a way that doesn't have those issues. The most obvious example would be some sort of dongle that handles decryption and forwards it to a TV. In other words, a chromecast. It'll still be a black box, but I doubt anyone seriously cares. You can make a case about how your computer or smartphone should be "open", but the case is far less persuasive for a media dongle.
by beAbU | 2026-03-10 20:24:10+00:00
It's manual layout. There's nothing auto in there. You add your pictures, and then arrange, crop, rotate and resize as you see fit.

I chose this approach as I reckoned I would know best what I want to with each photo I'm printing: maybe one needs to go into a specific-sized frame while another needs to fit a blank space in a scrapbook or something. Auto-layout will probably get it wrong, which will require manual intervention anyway.

Click the link and check it out - I have some sample photos loaded so you don't have to upload your own.
by munk-a | 2026-03-10 20:24:15+00:00
A long list of contribution PRs are seen as a resume currency in the modern world. A way to game that system is to autogenerate a whole bunch of PRs and hope some of them are accepted to buff your resume. Our issue is that we've been impressed with volume of PRs and not the quality of PRs. The correction is that we should start caring about the volume of rejected PRs and quality of those accepted PRs (like reviewing merge discussions since they're a close corollary to what can be expected during an internal PR). As long as the volume of PRs is seen as a positive indicator people will try and maximize that number.

This is made more complex that the most senior members of organizations tend to be irrationally AI positive - so it's difficult for the hiring layer to push back on a candidate for over reliance on tools even if they fail to demonstrate core skills that those tools can't supplement. The discussion has become too political[1] in most organizations and that's going to be difficult to overcome.

1. In the classic intra-organizational meaning of politics - not the modern national meaning.
by thewebguyd | 2026-03-10 20:24:33+00:00
> I'd be in favor of making any company that handles personal data pay in advance

How about we start with some strict data privacy and handling laws? Make it so you straight up just can't collect & store personal information without proving that it's required and without it your business would not work (and no, data harvesting for advertising/marketing doesn't count).

Security is the problem, but it would be less of a problem if everyone wasn't trying to hoard as much data as possible from their customers for seemingly no reason at all. Take a scroll through the Play Store/App Store and look how many really simple apps request permissions for camera, microphone, location, local network, etc. for something like a metronome app that needs none of that.
by newobj | 2026-03-10 20:24:51+00:00
Speed of code-writing was never the issue at Amazon or AWS. It was always wrong-headed strategic directions, out to lunch PMs, dogshit testing environment, stakeholder soup, high turnover, bureaucracy, a pantheon of legacy systems, insane operational burdens, garbage tooling, and last but not last -- designing for inter-system failure modes, which let's be real, AI has no chance of having context for -- and so on...

Imagine if the #1 problem of your woodworking shop is staff injuries, and the solution that management foists on you is higher RPM lathes.
by RovaAI | 2026-03-10 20:24:56+00:00
Great execution on aggregating live feeds. Two questions from someone who does similar work on the B2B side:

1. How do you handle deduplication when the same event surfaces across multiple feeds simultaneously? For news aggregation this is the hard part - an event that appears in Reuters, Bloomberg, and 12 downstream outlets is one story, not 13.

2. What's your rate limiting strategy across 15 sources? Some of the better data APIs (Shodan, GreyNoise, etc.) have strict per-minute limits that become a real constraint at even modest query frequencies.

The B2B application of this pattern is company intelligence - pulling company news, job postings, funding signals, and tech stack changes from 10+ sources and surfacing the relevant signal per account. Same architecture challenge (deduplication, rate limits, signal:noise ratio) with a much smaller initial data volume but higher precision requirements per entity.
by tgrowazay | 2026-03-10 20:25:02+00:00
I think Meta’s AI strategy is to advance AI/ML that is beneficial for them, no more charity.

They need a good-enough LLM (llama) to cut content moderation costs, they need a good segmentation model (segment anything) for photo filters, AR/VR and photo/video content moderation.

For LLM frontier, they can wait it out to see AGI become a commodity they can buy after it is ready.
by HeyLaughingBoy | 2026-03-10 20:25:18+00:00
I took a printmaking course at a local art school (MCAD) a long time ago and it was so much fun! Some of the others in the class were printmakers who had signed up for the course just so they'd have access to bigger machines than they had in their shops. It was really cool watching them work.

I'll have to investigate LEGOpress.
by Gibbon1 | 2026-03-10 20:25:26+00:00
I don't have a phrase to describe this concept. But it's when we blame one thing for a problem caused by another. Because placing the blame where is belongs is inconvenient.

You create a transport system where you're mixing incompatible modes of transport and carnage is what you get. What I see is instead of placing the blame on that everyone wants to place the blame on someone anyone else based on whatever moral anxiety they have.

Consider some people are drunks, you create a system where they have to drive you get drunk drivers. Don't want a bar walking distance from your quiet suburban neighborhood, again drunk drivers. Zoning that separates businesses and stores from low density housing. Driving, accidents. Mix pedestrian, bicycle, bus and car traffic, you get carnage.

No one really wants to blame the system and spend money to fix it. So blaming other individuals is what we do.
by RovaAI | 2026-03-10 20:25:27+00:00
Interesting deployment model. The comparison to Vercel for agents is apt - the hard part isn't running the agent, it's the deployment + monitoring + retry infrastructure around it.

One question: how do you handle the handoff between filesystem state and external API state? For example, if an agent is mid-workflow when it modifies a local file but then needs to call an external API that fails - the rollback semantics get complicated fast.

For B2B automation use cases this is where most agent deployments break down. The agent does 80% of a task (enrich lead, draft email, update CRM) but when step 3 fails, nothing has a record of what happened in steps 1-2. The workflow becomes orphaned.

Does Terminal Use have any primitives for workflow checkpointing or idempotent retries?
by logicprog | 2026-03-10 20:25:34+00:00
I mean, I do open PRs for most of my changes upstream if they allow AI, once I've been using the feature for a few weeks and have fixed the bugs and gone over the code a few times to make sure it's good quality. Also, I'm going to be using the damn thing, I don't want it to be constantly broken either, and I don't want the code to get hacky and thus incompatible with upstream or cause the LLMs to drift, so I usually spend a good amount of time making sure the code is high quality — integrates with the existing architecture and model of the world in the code, follows best practices, covers edge cases, has tests, is easy to read so that I can review it easily.

But if a project bans AI then yeah, they'll be run out of town because I won't bother trying to contribute.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-03-10 20:25:35+00:00
My last project was basically an ETL implementation on AWS starting with an empty AWS account and a internal web admin site that had 10 pages. I am yada yada yadaing over a little bit.

What I checked.

1. The bash shell scripts I had it write as my integration test suite

2. To make sure it wasn’t loading the files into Postgres the naive way -loading the file from S3 and doing bulk inserts instead of using the AWS extension that lets it load directly from S3. It’s the differ xe between taking 20 minutes and 20 seconds.

3. I had strict concurrency and failure recovery requirements. I made sure it was done the right way.

4. Various security, logging, log retention requirements

What I didn’t look at - a line of the code for the web admin site. I used AWS Cognito for authentication and checked to make sure that unauthorized users couldn’t use the website. Even that didn’t require looking at the code - I had automated tests that tested all of the endpoints.
by dabinat | 2026-03-10 20:25:35+00:00
> And surprise surprise, the blog post in question appears to be very thinly disguised marketing for one of those third parties.

To be fair, there is no official Google announcement to link to. They seem to have announced this very quietly and it is easy for someone to go to the Widevine docs and build something around the server without realizing it’s going away.
by thefounder | 2026-03-10 20:25:41+00:00
The good Netflix movies are small diamonds in a swamp of garbage. Most of the content is the equivalent of fast food for movies with a political agenda.

WB has not been immune to the political angle but they at least care about their IP and produce decent content.
Of course Netflix would have used WB IP and Netflix’s “state of the art” movie making machine to maximise the value of the WB IP.

TBH I don’t care about the WB news media part through I’m not sure if they will really destroy it just to align with their political views. If they make CNN like Fox News the viewers will just leave.
The right move for Netflix from a shareholder’s perspective would be to get into the short drama movies that are popular in China and recently the US too. That would allow them to cover the whole garbage media spectrum and make a lot of money.
by rbanffy | 2026-03-10 20:26:07+00:00
I did read it. A Banana Pi is not the fastest developer platform. The title is misleading.

BTW, it's quite impressive how the s390x is so fast per core compared to the others. I mean, of course it's fast - we all knew that.

And don't let IBM legal see this can be considered a published benchmark, because they are very shy about s390x performance numbers.
by adrian_b | 2026-03-10 20:26:16+00:00
I have never seen any advantage of CMake over the much simpler GNU make.

Ninja is supposed to be faster for compiling very big software projects, but I have never seen an embedded software project that is well organized and which is not compiled in a few seconds on a powerful development computer with many cores, so I do not see the benefit of Ninja for such projects.

All Eclipse-based IDEs that I have ever seen are extremely slow for anything, both for editing and for building a project and they make the simplest project management operations extremely complicated. Even Visual Code Studio is much faster and more convenient than using Eclipse-based IDEs. Other solutions can be much faster.

While the example programs provided for STM32 MCUs are extremely useful for starting a project for them, I believe that using the methods of project building provided by the vendor results in a waste of time. I have always obtained better results and faster development by building a GNU toolchain (e.g. binutils,gcc,gdb, some libc) from scratch and by using universal GNU makefiles, which work for any CPU target and for any software project, with the customization of a few Make variables. I have written once a set of GNU Makefiles, according to its manual, around 1998, and I have never had to change them since then, regardless what platform I had as a target. For any new platform, there is just a small set of variables that must be changed by generating one per-platform included file, with things like the names of the compilers and other tools that must be invoked and their command-line options.

For new projects, there is one very small file that must be generated for each binary file that must be built, which must contain the type of the file (e.g. executable, static library, shared library) and a list with one or more directories where source files should be searched. No changes are needed when source files are created, deleted, moved or renamed, and dependencies are identified automatically. I am always astonished when I see how many totally unnecessary complications exist in the majority of the project building configurations that I have ever seen provided by the vendors or in most open-source projects.
by mkobit | 2026-03-10 20:26:34+00:00
You could be thinking of the Claude tool search tool [0][1], which lets it do that on-demand loading. Skills (like another comment mentioned) have a progressive disclosure mechanism built-in. Agent Skills [2] appear to be the common format across most of the tools, but I have no idea if this actually has tool provider buy-in.

[0]: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/tool-us...

[1]: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/advanced-tool-use

[2]: : https://agentskills.io/home
by steelbrain | 2026-03-10 20:26:42+00:00
I've considered it, thanks for the nudge. Since the patches are quite specific to my usecase:

- https://github.com/steelbrain/ffmpeg-over-ip/blob/main/fio/f...
- https://github.com/steelbrain/ffmpeg-over-ip/tree/main/patch...

I am not sure they'll be accepted for upstreaming, but in exploring the options, I noticed ffmpeg has sftp:// transport support and there were some bugs surrounding that. I do intend to publish some patches for those.
by foxglacier | 2026-03-10 20:26:58+00:00
How is it that articles about DRM have people like you commenting who are critical of IP (I'm not disagreeing with you on that), but articles about AI being trained on GPL code, books, and art are full of people complaining about IP rights not being respected. Why don't the commenters cross-pollinate so the pro-IP guys can come here and say "We need DRM to protect artists' livelihoods" and the anti-IP guys can go there and say "AIs are doing God's work making information free like it wants to be".
by RovaAI | 2026-03-10 20:27:54+00:00
The appeal of a single queryable database for personal data makes a lot of sense - the hard part is always the ingestion and normalization, not the storage.

One pattern I have seen work well for the business version of this: a "company intelligence" database where everything known about a prospect company gets accumulated in one place over time. Homepage content, job postings, news mentions, funding history, tech stack signals, all deduplicated and queryable.

The challenge on the B2B side is the same as personal data: the data comes in from 8 different sources in 8 different formats, often with conflicts (two sources disagree on headcount, three sources have different founding dates). Your approach of controlling the schema from the start rather than trying to normalize later is the right call. Schema drift is what kills most long-term data projects.

What storage engine are you using? And how do you handle temporal data - do you snapshot state over time or just keep the latest version of each entity?
by SunshineTheCat | 2026-03-10 20:28:17+00:00
I know this is going to sound like an "old man yells at cloud" moment, but I cannot get over the number of people using "cause" as a replacement for "because."

Maybe it was my time spent in the book publishing industry, but it causes me pain every time I see it.

The horror: https://x.com/search?q=cause&src=typed_query&f=live
by KaiserPro | 2026-03-10 20:28:34+00:00
Having been acquired by facebook, its a pretty accurate read.

If they land in the right org, they'll be allowed to maintain the open version (see https://www.mapillary.com/) However that's a rare outcome.

They'll be dumped in some org, and then bit by bit told that they can't do what they were doing before and now need to "forge alignment" or some other bullshit by posting on workplace.

They will need to deliver impact, But, as there are 3 other teams trying to do the same thing as you, you'll either be used as a battering ram by your org to smash the competition, or offered up as meat to save headcount.
by johnea | 2026-03-10 20:28:37+00:00
I don't see how a new unicode point solves anything.

What stops any generated text from using this codepoint versus the existing em dash codepoint?

I find the punctuation annoying, mostly because the dashes are routinely used without a space on each side. Thus making the text look hyphenated.

The comma serves the same purpose and is superior in every way.
by astrostl | 2026-03-10 20:28:40+00:00
Invalid certs according to what? Quoth Claude Code:

OpenSSL can't validate the cert because it contains a critical extension it doesn't recognize — specifically 1.2.840.113635.100.6.27.3.2, which is an Apple-proprietary OID marked as critical. Per X.509 rules, if a client encounters an unrecognized critical extension, it must reject the cert.

That said, this is likely intentional on Apple's part — browsers and Apple's own TLS stack (SecureTransport/Network.framework) almost certainly know how to handle this extension. It's a private Apple CA (Apple Server Authentication CA) signing an Apple-internal service endpoint, so it's designed to work within Apple's ecosystem rather than with generic OpenSSL.

In practice:

- Works fine in Apple clients (Safari, curl on macOS using the system TLS stack, iOS apps)
- Fails with raw OpenSSL or other non-Apple TLS implementations
- Not a misconfiguration — it's Apple intentionally using a proprietary critical extension on their private PKI
by logicprog | 2026-03-10 20:28:45+00:00
> Vibe coders don't have to do any of this. They don't have to understand anything, they can just have their LLMs do some modifications that are completely opaque to the vibe coder.

I spend time using my agent to better understand existing codebases and their best practices than I'd ever have the time/energy to do before, giving me a broader and more holistic view on whatever I'm changing, before I make a change.
Lessons from 30 Years Building Software Systems
by alkas | 2026-03-10 20:28:47+00:00
Over many years building software systems, I noticed that many failures are not caused by technology itself but by misunderstandings of how businesses actually operate.

Several patterns appear repeatedly.

1. Systems built without clear business rules

Many organizations start software projects before defining operational rules and processes. When development begins, developers must spend time discovering how the business actually works.

2. Weak data models

Teams often focus on infrastructure and scalability, but the real problem appears earlier: the data model does not reflect how the business actually operates.

When the model is wrong, complexity spreads everywhere.

3. Complexity introduced too early

Modern architectures such as microservices are powerful tools, but they introduce significant complexity. Many teams adopt them before they actually need them.

In many successful systems, development starts with a well-structured monolith and evolves gradually.

In my experience, successful systems usually begin with something simpler:

a clear understanding of business processes

a good data model

architecture that evolves as the system grows.
by InsideOutSanta | 2026-03-10 20:29:13+00:00
The issue I see is that the high test coverage created by having LLMs write tests results in almost all non-trivial changes breaking tests, even if they don't change behavior in ways that are visible from the outside. In one project I work, we require 100% test coverage, so people just have LLMs write tons of tests, and now every change I make to the code base always breaks tests.

So now people just ignore broken tests.

> Claude, please implement this feature.

> Claude, please fix the tests.

The only thing we've gained from this is that we can brag about test coverage.
by exmadscientist | 2026-03-10 20:29:16+00:00
That's why I also mentioned US companies with primarily US clienteles. I think that in that case, "browser is sending en-US language" and even say "IP geo-resolves to the US" is a strong enough signal to justify prioritizing "United States" in a country dropdown. It helps a decent fraction of your customers, and for the ones where it's wrong, they go from picking their country in the full drop-down to... picking their country in the full drop-down. The downside is microscopic on this one.

It's not evil like forced language/region selection with no fix available.
by tavavex | 2026-03-10 20:29:17+00:00
> There's also this nuance that they were acquired by meta so yeah they're rich but now they're working for not-serious people and will flame out in 18 months.

For the lack of a better word, this feels like cope. In the modern world, being rich easily covers any of those other 'downsides'. Rich people will have a far better life than I and probably many other people here ever will, despite what the situation is like in the rest of their lives.
by bigyabai | 2026-03-10 20:29:28+00:00
> Is all security a weasel word for surveillance?

If the security asks you to "trust them"? Yeah, that's usually pretext for hidden abuse.

When the Wizard of Oz says "pay no attention to the man behind that curtain" then you don't look the other way. Trust is unnecessary in situations where transparency is demanded. Accepting "trust" is equivalent to accepting every single abuse of the technology, up to and including using age verification to facilitate child abuse. Do you really "trust" the internet to use this power for good alone?

> How do you suggest to disallow children access to pornography, harmful content, etc?

Stop leaving them unattended in front of the TV. It worked in the 1980s, it still works with the iPad (gasp! screen time?).

This whole argument reeks of the Catholic moms protesting HBO, desperate to make themselves the victim. Bad parenting is not the TV network's problem. You cannot contort it into a working argument or legitimate ethical quandary. The solitary reason we see age verification pushed so hard is to promote online surveillance. If you want to enrich and entertain your kids without exposing them to topics you consider unsavory, buy them a book instead of an iPad. It's not rocket science.