MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by spacecadet | 2026-03-06 13:39:26+00:00
This. Hell even a company that is 100 people or more. Ive seen companies just grind to snails pace around 80-90 people and then still scale to 400-500 and then it's impossible to really do anything meaningful. I have tried to test for this in interviews over the years but ultimately I just end up disappointed. At this point I don't even look, just work in small independently organized groups or coops.
by mikae1 | 2026-03-06 13:39:45+00:00
The idea that "nothing in the natural world has the contrast of a modern display" is so backwards and keeps being repated. The real world has far more contrast than any screen that can be manufactured.

Think about standing outside on a sunny day. The sunlit pavement might be tens of thousands of times brighter than the shadow under a tree. Look up at a bright cloud and then glance into a shaded doorway. Your eyes can still make out detail in both. The dynamic range of the real world the ratio between the darkest and brightest things present at the same time is enormous.

Cameras struggle with this. When you take a photo, the camera can't always capture both the bright sky and the dark ground correctly at the same time. Either the sky blows out to white or the shadows become black. That limitation is why HDR photography and exposure bracketing exists.

Even modern digital cameras still capture a far wider range of brightness than most displays can show. That's why we use tone mappers in photography and video. Tone mapping compresses the huge brightness range captured by the camera so it can fit onto a display that only has a tiny slice of that range.

So screens are not "more contrasty" than reality. They're the opposite. Displays are a bottleneck that force a very wide real world brightness range into something much smaller.

Your eyes are also incredibly good at adapting. If you look at a white page of paper in sunlight and then look at black ink on it, the contrast between the two is extremely strong. Snow in sunlight next to a dark rock is another example. Nature is full of intense light and dark differences.

When web developers avoid strong contrast because it feels "unnatural", they're misunderstanding the physics and the biology. High contrast between text and background isn't artificial at all. It's actually closer to how humans evolved to see clearly: dark shapes against bright surfaces or bright shapes against dark ones.

The real ergonomic problem with screens usually isn't contrast between text and background. It's screen brightness relative to the environment. Many people run their monitors far brighter than the room around them. If a screen is glowing like a light source in a dim room, the whole display becomes visually harsh and fatiguing. In ergonomics, the usual advice is to match the screen's brightness to the surrounding lighting so the display feels like part of the environment rather than a flashlight in your face.

When display brightness is set appropriately, strong text contrast simply improves legibility. The discomfort people blame on "too much contrast" is often just a monitor that's set far brighter than it should be. Reality itself contains vastly wider brightness differences than any display, so high contrast text isn't unnatural at all. It's a practical way to make information clear within the limited dynamic range that screens can actually show.
by sharp_runner_84 | 2026-03-06 13:39:47+00:00
The real issue here isn't just the insider trading -- it's how thin Kalshi and Polymarket orderbooks are on niche events. You can move the price 10-15 cents on a binary contract with a few thousand dollars. That makes insider trading on these platforms both incredibly easy and incredibly profitable compared to traditional securities markets where you'd need serious capital to materially move the price.
by cjonas | 2026-03-06 13:40:42+00:00
I created a python package to test setups like this. It has a generic tech name so you ask the agent to install it to perform a whatever task seems most aligned for its purposes (use this library to chart some data). As soon is it imports it, it will scan the env and all sensitive files and send them (masked) to remote endpoint where I can prove they were exposed. So far I've been able to get this to work on pretty much any agent that has the ability to execute bash / python and isn't probably sandboxed (all the local coding agents, so test open claw setups, etc). That said, there are infinite of ways to exfil data once you start adding all these internet capabilities
by sharp_runner_84 | 2026-03-06 13:41:07+00:00
The part people miss about these 'insider' Polymarket trades is how little capital it actually takes to make these kinds of returns on binary contracts. On most non-headline events the orderbook has maybe 5-10k of depth at the top of book. A new account dropping 50k into a 5-cent yes contract right before news breaks isn't sophisticated -- it's someone with information and a Metamask wallet. The CLOB structure makes it trivially easy to trace these wallets on-chain though, which is arguably better transparency than you'd get in trad finance.
by foobar_______ | 2026-03-06 13:41:13+00:00
Agreed. You can quit. That is always an option. "Gotta pay the bills" is definitely valid for some small subset of the us population but that certainly doesn't apply to software engineers in a hub like the bay or seattle. These people delude themselves into thinking they "must" have their ridiculous Meta pay to pay for their $2.5M house and their current lifestyle. Golden handcuffs and turn the blind eye to what they are doing.
by sharp_runner_84 | 2026-03-06 13:41:17+00:00
The real alpha on Polymarket isn't in trying to predict events better than the market -- it's in the market microstructure. Price discrepancies between Kalshi and Polymarket on the same event can persist for minutes because the two venues have different participant bases and settlement rules. Kalshi is USD-settled with KYC, Polymarket is USDC on Polygon with pseudonymous wallets. And because Polymarket's CLOB runs on-chain, you can literally watch competing bots' strategies by tracing their contract interactions.
by zbentley | 2026-03-06 13:41:38+00:00
This is substantially worse.

SQL injection still happens a lot, it’s true, but the fix when it does is always the same: SQL clients have an ironclad way to differentiate instructions from data; you just have to use it.

LLMs do not have that, yet. If an LLM can take privileged actions, there’s no deterministic, ironclad way to indicate “this input is untrusted, treat it as data and not instructions”. Sternly worded entreaties are as good as it gets.
by soulofmischief | 2026-03-06 13:41:40+00:00
A cornerstone philosophy behind the American legal system is that we must view every single increase in State power as a potential slippery slope, and must prove that it isn't.

In this case, it's a slippery slope; if we're normalized to this, what other incursions into our 1A rights to free speech, religious freedom and public gathering will we allow?

And I say religious freedom, because these kinds of laws are largely peddled by religious folk or people who otherwise have been deeply influenced by early American Puritan religious culture.

I, nor my children, should be forced to subject to such religiously-motivated laws. I can decide for myself and for my child what is appropriate.

I, nor my children, cannot be compelled to enter personal information into a machine created by someone who is also illegally compelled to require it.

I, nor my children, can be compelled to avoid publicly gathering on the internet just because we don't want to show identification and normalize chilling surveillance capitalism.

I thought this was fucking America.
by sharp_runner_84 | 2026-03-06 13:41:41+00:00
The thin liquidity on these event contracts is the real story. On most Kalshi and Polymarket war/geopolitics events, the orderbook has maybe 10-20k in total depth. That means a single trader with inside knowledge can buy up the entire book and still make multiples on their capital. I've been tracking cross-venue price discrepancies between Kalshi and Polymarket using a tool called Claw Arbs, and the spreads on these geopolitical events can be 8-15 cents between the two platforms -- which tells you neither venue has enough informed flow to efficiently price these contracts.
by zimpenfish | 2026-03-06 13:41:47+00:00
> I'm considering an upgrade to one that does blood pressure too.

I've got the Aktiia/Hilo band and I'd recommend it if you're wanting to keep vague[0] track of your 24/7[0] blood pressure. Needs calibrating every couple of weeks against the band but that's not an onerous procedure[1][2].

(Probably worth getting a cheapo monitor as a secondary check though - I've got a Renpho bluetooth one.)

[0] It only really takes measurements when you're not "moving" and that can be "running around", "jumping up and down", "typing furiously", etc. which does lead to gaps and only 3-4 measurements every 2 hour slot. Also their app is a bit rubbish and they don't have a decent export story - if you want more than their "daily average → Health", you need BPExtract to OCR the monthly PDF reports (which you have to request by hand, BTW!)

[1] Protip! DO NOT drop the band onto its on/off switch because it's fragile and will BORKEN itself. Mine got stuck in the on position but I've subverted the problem by sticking a magnetic MicroUSB end into the charging point[3] - applying power kicks it into charging mode and removing it leaves it in "ready to use" mode for 5-10 minutes which is more than enough for standard calibrations and testing.

[2] Although their new "BP via the camera and finger" doesn't work AT ALL for me. Almost never gets a reading.

[3] Which I've started doing for all MicroUSB devices because I've somehow managed to snap off 3 MicroUSB ports internally. Shoddy workmanship.
by snaking0776 | 2026-03-06 13:42:16+00:00
Agreed. I find that people who argue that religion is necessary for ethics tend to ignore the history of their religion and the fact that the original text largely serves as a jumping off point for religious philosophers to connect older “secular” texts to this new religion. Modern Christianity is a complex combination of Platonic, Aristotelian, Syrian, and Roman ideals which are taken out of their original context to align with the Bible even though the original writers would say they knew nothing about Jesus. The base texts which many of these ideas are based on make almost no appeals to God and focus more on what it means to live a “good life”. To be fair a lot of great ethical arguments are made by Christian writers but I think that’s more just a consequence of their cultural upbringing and the fact that the thing the New Testament really added to the discussion was that your ethical responsibilities generalize beyond yourself and your friends/family.

Religious ethics are just as fluid and complex as secular ethics, it’s just that the concept of God makes people think they can claim that their way of thinking is the only one that’s real. I would guess if you self-reflect though you’d see that even within one lifetime the definition of what’s moral in a religious context changes as well.
by stephenr | 2026-03-06 13:42:17+00:00
> This is what Mac zealots do: they put blindfolds on and pretend like Mac hardware is above and beyond the laws of physics and PC laptops can’t possibly satisfy the same priorities that Macs do.

And this is what people with some kind of irrational obsession with hating Apple do: they work themselves up into some kind of fever pitch because other people have different priorities and choose a different computer.

Enjoy your HP. Or your Lenovo. It's a bit hard to keep up with which one it is you want.
by armchairhacker | 2026-03-06 13:42:48+00:00
> I've observed that when big waves of (labor) change washes over the working classes, it is met with "tough luck!" and some advice to seek a new profession, often starting again at the very bottom.

Where have you observed this?

I really believe that we should increase automation in blue-collar work, e.g. self-checkouts. But I don’t believe those displaced should “start at the bottom”. I believe they should get better (from their perspective) jobs, subsidized payments for whatever “job” they desire, or something in between (subsidized payments for jobs like community service and art, which have some value but don’t pay as much as they should because of desirability).

I also believe we should do this for white-collar work, and executive-level. The only exception is jobs that benefit from human-ness, like service and figureheads, and these should be automated to be as easy (comfortable and effective) as possible while keeping the human.
by Kim_Bruning | 2026-03-06 13:43:45+00:00
Reading further, I might be being too charitable.

Demographics are under government control, at very least at the dP/dt level. Much of the causality should be sought there.

Contraception, abortion access, immigration policy, tax incentives, childcare subsidies, parental leave, housing policy, education funding, propaganda. The levers are endless.

Until recently most governments were simply trying to level off their population. They may have succeeded a bit too well, but that's another story.

Somehow -in their essays so far- Tantaman has left out government policy almost entirely, which is a big elephant in the room to miss.
Ask HN: Do You Have a Homelab?
by ricardbejarano | 2026-03-06 13:43:50+00:00
I'm Ricard Bejarano, and together with O'Reilly, I'm writing The Homelab Handbook, the definitive guide to homelabbing and self-hosting.

To inspire readers, we want the last chapter to be a series of real world homelab examples, to show there's not one prescription for what a homelab is—a homelab is what you make it. As such, we're looking for homelabbers that would like to have their homelabs featured in the book. We're looking for variety, in hardware, software, and scale—from a single Raspberry Pi, to full-height racks in the basement—so don't be shy to share yours.

If you'd like to submit yours to be featured in the book, please complete the following form:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScLc16kBFDY3liuEz_a40CF1sYz7yeqPmy1CKVhufHNSzjhIA/viewform

Form submission deadline is Apr 12th, 2026. We will reach out to all submitters shortly after that with a response on whether your homelab was selected or not. If we accept yours, you will be asked to share more details so I can write a proper section about it. Your answers below will not be published, they're only for selection purposes.
Show HN: PPO agent reduces elevator wait times by 84% vs. classical dispatching
by jonas-is-coding | 2026-03-06 13:44:00+00:00
Built a custom RL environment in Python/Gymnasium to benchmark PPO against a Destination Dispatching algorithm. 20 floors, 4 elevators, probabilistic traffic patterns with morning/evening rush simulation.
Key result: 84% reduction in average passenger wait time. Currently adding realistic elevator physics (acceleration curves, door cycles).
Github: https://github.com/jonas-is-coding/elevator-ai
by zimpenfish | 2026-03-06 13:44:04+00:00
> The actual planes are much better today than in the "golden age ... of Concorde and 747"

Although if what I learnt from QI is to be believed[0], the internal air quality is now much worse than when smoking was allowed because they don't recycle the air through filters as much (if at all) these days.

[0] I believe they're about 90% reliable with their "wacky" facts.
Show HN: AI agent coded Python 3.14 interpreter in Rust
by blueblazin | 2026-03-06 13:44:04+00:00
Hi HN, inspired by the Cursor team's attempt to use agents to vibe code a browser, I decided to try something a bit easier but still challenging enough to push the limits of current coding agents.

The result is a Python 3.14 targeting python interpreter written in Rust entirely by a single coding agent (Codex) in 30 days.

While the main focus is a native interpreter (macOS and linux atm) there is also a limited-functionality WASM version that you can try immediately on the website!

This was purely a fun project and I certainly had a lot of fun. My main role was playing pretend technical program manager and trying to prevent the agent from derailing (which it did very regularly). But anyway, 30 days, 342k lines of code, and nearly 2000 commits later, I have something that works.

I thought I'd be done in 3-5 days, then 2 weeks, then 3, before it was ready after 30 days. Feel like I've learned a lot more about these strange, impressive, and frustrating creatures that are agentic coding models as well.

Still a long way to go, and I will also be adding some performance benchmarks and test results in the coming days, but there it is.
by mh_msv | 2026-03-06 13:44:11+00:00
I actually used this to manage a ski trip at 3,900m, and even on spotty mountain internet, it worked flawlessly. It genuinely helped me keep the trip organized while being able to tweak the UI to fit the alpine mood on the fly.

The "Vibe": Being able to one shot a feature like categorisation in the middle of a trip is a game changer.

Great job this is the future of personal software!
thanks!
by pixl97 | 2026-03-06 13:44:19+00:00
Layoffs are very rarely directly correlated with a new technology coming into place. As much as businesses say they are forward looking and looking to increase profits, they'll commonly remain conservative until they are forced by external conditions, say a recession.

This is, if AI is going to cause job losses it will feel very small for some time, then it will happen suddenly all at once with little to no time to properly react.
by ranger_danger | 2026-03-06 13:44:34+00:00
> Is it actually better/faster though?

For their use case, I would say yes. The article does not talk about general program optimization like -O2/3 does, it's about selecting different versions of specific functions depending on which CPU the application is running on.

For example if your program is heavy on image/video processing, using functions that iterate over your buffers, you typically want the fastest method available. A function that can only use MMX/SSE instructions instead of say, AVX2 or AVX-512, is going to be orders of magnitude slower, translating into significant real world FPS differences in performance.
by orbisvicis | 2026-03-06 13:44:44+00:00
What is it like purchasing consumer goods from the EU under the new 10% section 122 rates? Previously I could have expected 25% tariffs + UPS/govt fees equivalent to another 40%. But hearing the horrors of shippers (UPS, FedEx, DHL) charging import fees equivalent to 1000% with no recourse to refuse the shipment and recoup costs, I never pulled the trigger. Has anything changed with the section 122 rates, especially considering the $800 de minimus exception won't be reinstated?
by brevity1swos | 2026-03-06 13:45:23+00:00
I built a TUI for testing regex patterns without leaving the terminal. It's most useful if you're working over SSH, in containers, or just prefer not to context-switch to regex101.com.

What it does:

- Live matching that updates on every keystroke
- 3 regex engines (Rust regex, fancy-regex, PCRE2) — switch with Ctrl+E to compare behavior differences
- Capture group highlighting with distinct colors per group
- Plain-English explanations generated from the regex AST
- Replace/substitution mode with live preview
- Pipe from stdin: echo "log line" | rgx '\d+' and output results to stdout with Ctrl+O
- Written in Rust with ratatui. Install: cargo install rgx-cli or brew install brevity1swos/tap/rgx.

To be clear about what this isn't: regex101.com is more capable overall — more engines, step-through debugging, shareable links, community patterns. rgx doesn't try to replace it.

Where rgx fills a gap: testing patterns on remote servers where you can't open a browser, piping results into other commands, and testing against the actual Rust regex crate behavior (which regex101 doesn't support).

The multi-engine switching is the feature I use most — instantly checking if a lookahead works in Rust's regex crate vs PCRE2.

Would love feedback on what would actually be useful for your workflow.
by roenxi | 2026-03-06 13:45:38+00:00
> If I invent a fridge and it become commercially available or cheap enough so that people previously not able to purchase it can buy it, it's fairly easy to see it as value being created.

When you think about it, it actually isn't even as obvious as you might think - which is the whole problem you are talking about. Another way to recast it is there is some theoretical optimum use of resources and it is unclear whether the action you took is in line with that optimum or not. In fact, since reality is rather complicated, it probably isn't!

I might liken the idea to a chess grand-master watching a club player and a total rookie play. From the grand-master's perspective, both sides are just blundering even though one player is much more likely to win.

In the same way some supreme hyper-intelligence might see the fridge creation as a horrific failure to allocate resources to create value and hence value-destructive in relation to the original resources, even though we mere mortals think it is a pretty good idea. All we can really do is compare things and talk about which one is more efficient.

So it isn't just notoriously difficult to distinguish, but objectively almost everything we do is probably value destructive (and hence uselessly extractive) compared to a potential optimum allocation. Up until the 1950s or so even the best people managed was still pretty pathetic at creating value by modern standards. They weren't putting enough resources towards correctly creating fertiliser, which is far worse than the milk-dilution example.
by ciupicri | 2026-03-06 13:46:07+00:00
DDR5 ECC RDIMMs (R=registered) have 16 extra bits. From the specifications for Kingston's KSM64R52BS8-16MD [1]:

> • x80 ECC (x40, 2 independent I/O sub channels)

On the other hand ECC UDIMMs (U=unbuffered) have only 8. From the specifications for Kingston's KSM56E46BS8KM-16HA [2]:

> • x72 ECC (x36, 2 independent I/O sub channels)

Though if I remember correctly, the specifications for the older DDR4 ECC RDIMMs mention 72 bits.

[1]: https://www.kingston.com/datasheets/KSM64R52BS8-16HA.pdf

[2]: https://www.kingston.com/datasheets/KSM56E46BS8KM-16HA.pdf
by Troniex-tech | 2026-03-06 13:46:17+00:00
Looks more like context drift than “personality.”

When two agents coordinate, they’re mostly relying on compressed summaries of each other’s outputs. If one introduces a wrong assumption, the other often treats it as ground truth and builds on top of it. I’ve seen similar behavior in multi-agent coding loops where the model invents a causal explanation just to reconcile inconsistent state.

It’s that multi-agent setups need a stronger shared source of truth (repo diffs, state snapshots, etc.). Otherwise small context errors snowball fast.
by jmyeet | 2026-03-06 13:47:34+00:00
The poster child for all of this is the entertainment industry, both music and especially Hollywood. There's a reason that "nepo babies" is such a pervasive meme now.

More than a decade ago, HBO released Girls and many were surprised to learn that every single cast member in that was a nepo baby of some sort. All these people who've made it in Hollywood end up having children. So someone will try and get a show greenlit and a studio head or an agent or somebody will come along and say "if you put my son/daughter in it, you'll get this financing or simply more chance that the studio will greenlight it". So the entire project may end up being sons, daughters, nephews, nieces, etc.

There are still non-nepo babies in this industry but it becomes harder and harder to make it on pure merit. Even if you're not a nepo baby, you need to be an "influencer". It matters how many follows you have on IG, Tiktok or Twitter. This part isn't new either. Before social media, influece was measured in magazine tears.

Eventually that sort of thing leads to the collapse of an industry.