MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yego | 2026-03-04 10:08:00+00:00
One thing that keeps surprising me: patterns we spent decades perfecting for human cognition are becoming irrelevant — or even counterproductive — when agents do the work.

We fought duplication our entire careers. DRY was gospel. Because humans can't efficiently look at multiple places at once, can't hold the full picture in their heads. Abstractions, libraries, frameworks — these were mental crutches, ways to reduce cognitive load. You couldn't read the entire codebase every time, so you built layers to avoid having to.

Agents don't have that limitation. Reading the whole thing again is not tedious for them. It's instant. So duplication, which we always treated as a bug, can actually make a system less fragile. Two independent implementations of the same logic means changing one doesn't silently break the other. The coupling we introduced to eliminate duplication was often worse than the duplication itself — we just couldn't see it because we were optimizing for human brains.

Documentation is another one. The eternal problem of docs drifting out of sync with code — that's a human problem. We needed docs because we couldn't parse the full codebase fast enough. But documentation is just an index. In principle, you don't need it at all — it can be reconstructed from code on the fly. Code is the source of truth for the current state of the system. The sync problem disappears when your reader can regenerate the index in seconds.

This is also why I use plain text and terminal for everything. Sublime Text instead of an IDE. Markdown files instead of project management tools. No fancy abstractions that hide what's actually happening. Everything in my setup is human-readable, inspectable, and changeable. I've always been a believer in command line, text documents, and reproducibility — and it turns out this approach maps perfectly to working with agents. They don't need GUIs. They need readable state.

This also changes how I think about code quality. I run forward fast — build features, accumulate mess, don't worry about duplication while shipping. Then when the codebase gets unwieldy, I just say "now refactor this" or "remove the duplication here." I give hints on the direction, and the agent reworks large volumes of code in minutes. I tried building refactoring into the workflow automatically — it didn't work. The agent would over-optimize prematurely, or refactor things that were still changing. So I accepted the pattern: sprint forward, then clean up. Tests too — add them when you need confidence in a specific area, not as a ritual on every commit.

The irony: the tools and patterns we built to help humans think are now getting in the way of agents working. Less abstraction, more duplication, plain text over structured tools, mess now and clean later — it feels wrong after 15 years of engineering discipline, but it works.
by vidarh | 2026-03-04 10:09:19+00:00
That's why I specifically didn't call the LLM itself Turing complete, but stated that if you put a loop around a Turing machine you can trivially make it Turing complete. Maybe I should have been clearer and write "the combined system" instead of it.

But the point is that this is irrelevant, because it is proof that unlesss human brains exceed the Turing computable, LLM's can at least theoretically be made to think. And that makes pushing the "they're just predicting the next token" argument anti-intellectual nonsense.
by pembrook | 2026-03-04 10:09:28+00:00
You haven't been involved in a long list of public scandals because you've never done anything in your life that's publicly notable.

By tricking yourself into believing you sit on a higher moral pedestal you're simply easing the pain of comparison.

When high school girls spread gossip that the pretty, popular girl has loose morals, they aren't performing this service out of the goodness of their hearts. They're hoping to elevate themselves by tearing down the competition.
by rglullis | 2026-03-04 10:10:45+00:00
The issue of "enthusiast phones" is not the same as for small phones. The problem that MKBHD is describing is that a company that starts as an enthusiast phone can not grow by getting the niche larger, so they need to start competing in the "average consumer" market. But a large, established company like Motorola and Samsung can for sure segment their product line to serve a particular demand.

I think the issue of small phones is that, while there people saying they would buy if it was available, no one is saying "I would buy one small phone at flagship prices, even if they don't have flagship features".
by halper | 2026-03-04 10:10:48+00:00
Through luck and happenstance, I have rarely needed to look for a job before; I have always come across new opportunities through my network. Usually it has been a recommendation/referral + one or two interviews and then I have received an offer. This has worked for 20 years, but after a relocation I have been searching for my next thing recently, the traditional way. I am now in the situation where I am someone "off the street" instead of someone warmly recommended by a current or former employee. At least where I am looking, the market is definitely not great, and even getting a first reply at all is rare.

During my professional life I have interviewed hundreds of people. Among other things, I have built teams from the ground up, I have managed people remotely across three continents and I sometimes meet up with people I "managed" 15+ years ago who claim that that team was one of the best they ever worked in. But when I sit on the OTHER side of the table, it is evident I am really, really, REALLY rusty: it happens at least a couple of times per interview that my mind basically blanks when I get a question that I should be able to answer. Naturally, as soon as I step out of the interview, my helpful brain provides me with the answers.

I was just thinking, on my morning walk today, that I should be looking for someone who may want to inflict a couple of mock interviews upon me...
by YuriiKovalov | 2026-03-04 10:10:54+00:00
I built a CLI and TUI for casting local video files to Chromecast devices.

The problem: VLC's Chromecast support has been broken for years. Chrome tab casting murders quality. I wanted something that just works from the terminal.

CastLocal auto-discovers devices, probes the video format, and if it's not natively supported (MKV, AVI, etc.), transcodes on-the-fly using ffmpeg with HLS segmentation — so playback starts in seconds, not minutes.

The TUI is a dual-pane Far Manager-style interface (nostalgia included). Left pane browses files, right pane shows devices as folders. F5 to cast.

Built with Python, pychromecast, Textual, and ffmpeg.

pipx install castlocal
by YmiYugy | 2026-03-04 10:11:25+00:00
yes it would, but depending on the app it could put you in a ton of hurt.
- AI has gotten a lot better on less popular tech, but there is still a big capability gap between native frameworks an the blessed react + tailwind stack.
- You will get something that is likely in the right shape but littered with a million subtle bugs and fixing them without having intimate knowledge of the plat form is really hard.
by petr_stehlik | 2026-03-04 10:11:27+00:00
Location: Czechia (EU)

Remote: Yes (remote-only or EU-based)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Go, TypeScript, Python, PHP/Symfony, GCP (certified), AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, Vue.js, event-driven architecture, CQRS, microservices, PCI DSS, CI/CD, observability/SLOs

Résumé/CV: https://petr.dev/cv.pdf

Email: ahoj+hn[at]petrstehlik.cz

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stehlikpetr/

Engineering leader (CTO/Head of Eng) looking for my next role leading real teams — 10-30 engineers, proper org complexity.

Career arc: IC → EM → Head of Engineering → CTO over ~6 years. Led Stream.cz (Czech Republic's largest video platform, 1M+ daily views) at Seznam.cz. Did PCI DSS certification twice at Kiwi.com and co-built their payment infrastructure. ML thesis on neural network anomaly detection (2016, before it was cool).

Currently CTO at Spaceflow (B2B SaaS proptech). The real story: company hit a severe downturn, I had to lay off most of my team, ran the platform on a skeleton crew of 3 for a year, then rebuilt. If you want a leader who's made the hard calls and kept the lights on — that's the pitch.

Still hands-on daily, GCP certified, but looking to lead not because I can't code — because I'm better at making engineering orgs work well.

Target: Head of Engineering, VP Eng, or CTO where the role involves actual strategy and real teams underneath. Fintech, B2B SaaS, proptech, dev tools, infra — basically anything except gambling and ad-tech.

Contractor or employment.
by jeroenhd | 2026-03-04 10:11:32+00:00
Something that puzzles me about ECH:

> In verifying the client-facing server certificate, the client MUST interpret the public name as a DNS-based reference identity [RFC9525]. Clients that incorporate DNS names and IP addresses into the same syntax (e.g. Section 7.4 of [RFC3986] and [WHATWG-IPV4]) MUST reject names that would be interpreted as IPv4 addresses.

Aside from apparently not considering the existence of IPv6, why are IP-based certificates explicitly ruled out? This makes the spec entirely meaningless for small servers and basically requires shifting hosting to shared hosts/massive CDNs to provide any protection against SNI snooping.
by whitemarmot | 2026-03-04 10:11:51+00:00
I built an MCP server that lets Claude (Desktop or Code) watermark images using natural language
prompts.

Setup takes 10 seconds - add this to your Claude config:

{"mcpServers":{"markly":{"command":"npx","args":["-y","markly-mcp-server"]}}}

Then ask Claude things like:

- "Add 'Copyright 2026' to this image, bottom-right, semi-transparent"
- "Watermark all images in /photos with my logo.png at 20% opacity"
- "Put a tiled DRAFT watermark across this proof sheet"

How it works: The MCP server exposes 4 tools (text watermark, logo watermark, batch, usage check)
that call the Markly REST API. Images are processed server-side with Imagick and returned
immediately. Nothing is stored after processing.

Pricing: Free tier needs no API key, no signup. Output has a small "markly.cloud" mention. Credit
packs start at 5 EUR for 250 images with no branding.

The MCP server is MIT licensed. The REST API is also available directly if you prefer to integrate
programmatically.

Links:
- npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/markly-mcp-server
- API docs: https://www.markly.cloud/developers
- Website: https://www.markly.cloud

Built with Laravel (API), Imagick (image processing), TypeScript (MCP server). Feedback welcome.
by ignoramous | 2026-03-04 10:11:57+00:00
> Was pretty useful back when I was in India since Jio randomly blocked websites

With Jio, you don't really need ECH at all. The blocks are mostly rudimentary and bypassed with encrypted DNS (DoH / DoT / DNSCrypt) and Firefox (which fragments the TLS ClientHello packets into two).

Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34232190
by vidarh | 2026-03-04 10:11:58+00:00
Hence why I finished the sentence "and we have no evidence to suggest that is even possible".

I think it's exceedingly improbable that we're any more than very advanced automatons, but I like to keep the door ajar and point out that the burden is on those claiming this to present even a single example of a function we can compute that is outside the Turing computable if they want to open that door..

> Physical computers are only equivalent to finite state machines (ignoring the internet)

Physical computers are equivalent to Turing machines without the tape as long as they have access to IO.
by anon7000 | 2026-03-04 10:12:31+00:00
I don’t think that’s true. Claude Opus 4.5/4.6 in Cursor have marked the big shift for me. Before that, agentic development mostly made me want to just do it myself, because it was getting stuck or going on tangents.

I think it can (and is) shifting very rapidly. Everyone is different, and I’m sure models are better at different types of work (or styles of working), but it doesn’t take much to make it too frustrating to use. Which also means it doesn’t take much to make it super useful.
by DrScientist | 2026-03-04 10:12:34+00:00
I think you are confusing two things.

- the semantics of a form and a button and the resulting http POST/GET
- and what the page actually does!

So I can have two pages - both with html forms - what they actually do on submission might be completely different - one buys a potted plant the other submits a tax return.

ie the meaning of the action is in the non-semantic elements - the free text, the images, the context.

This is the stuff that's hard for the agent to easily determine - is this a form for submitting a tax return or not?

If what you said is true then there would be already agents out there that use ARIA info to seemlessly operate the web. As far as I can see people have tried to use that information to improve agents use of the web - but have met limited success - and that's for well annotated sites - not because sites aren't ARIA enabled.
by secult | 2026-03-04 10:13:09+00:00
So to not get confused, when you ask for a new laptop in your corporate and you say 14 inch Pro Max, don't get lured to get Pro Max Premium, or even Pro Max Plus, just say you want Pro M5 Max, because otherwise you are getting Dell.
And make sure to not say "Just get me a Pro, bro", because you might be getting HP Pro desktop!
by beeforpork | 2026-03-04 10:13:25+00:00
Same here. And I have a friend who keeps his small IPhone because they stopped building smaller phones, too. There is a demand, maybe not that big.

For me, I want to be able to operate the phone with one hand, and the large screen makes it difficult to reach all the spots on the screen even with large hands. I do operate my Fairphone 5 with one hand, but it is super awkward and at some point, the phone will fall into a gully because I cannot hold it tight while navigating.

And I wouldn't mind 2mm more thickness if this means the cameras are flush with the back and the battery is larger.
by Kim_Bruning | 2026-03-04 10:14:31+00:00
Oh, that actually seems ... bad. On the gripping hand... restricted in which way? I learned to program on the BBC B, for instance.

I keep thinking that computers that are actually made to be good for children should be a thing. Perhaps like "A Young lady's Illustrated Primer" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age )
by patrickk | 2026-03-04 10:14:38+00:00
I’m seeing loads of posts in the likes of /r/n8n where people are figuring out how to do the jobs of multiple people with just one person, using workflows built and enhanced by AI. Copywriting, cross posting on social media, blogging, cold email outreach, fully automated user generated video content, running Facebook and Insta ad campaigns, google ad campaigns and more. All this can can be done once you nail down a solid workflow, powered by the likes of n8n, Claude code etc.
by jeroenhd | 2026-03-04 10:15:23+00:00
Only if the attacker has a valid certificate for the domain to complete the handshake with.

Relying on HTTPS and SVCB records will probably allow a downgrade for some attackers, but if browsers roll out something akin to the HSTS preload list, then downgrade attacks become pretty difficult.

DNSSEC can also protect against malicious SVCB/HTTPS records and the spec recommends DoT/DoH against local MitM attacks to prevent this.
by nsteel | 2026-03-04 10:15:34+00:00
Agree entirely with your take. The packaging story is awesome, I wish there were more details on the stacking used on this one.

But I am at a loss to how Intel are really going to get any traction with IFS. How can anyone trust Intel as a long-term foundry partner. Even if they priced it more aggressively, the opportunity cost in picking a supplier who decides to quit next year would be catastrophic for many. The only way this works is if they practically give their services away to someone big, who can afford to take that risk and can also make it worth Intel's continued investment. Any ideas who that would be, I've got nothing.
by tarasshyn | 2026-03-04 10:15:44+00:00
People are out here launching entire AI-powered companies staffed exclusively by OpenClaw agents. Content teams, SEO squads, customer support - all AI. And how are they managing these "employees"? Slack threads? Telegram groups? A spreadsheet?

These agents are doing real work. They deserve a real office.

So I built them one.

ClawOffice is a 3D office you walk through in your browser. Your deployed OpenClaw agents are sitting at their desks - literally.

You walk up to one, start a conversation, give them an assignment, and move on to the next desk.

Like a proper manager doing their rounds.

It's absurd. It's also genuinely useful.
by Nursie | 2026-03-04 10:16:17+00:00
> You don't exactly get to dictate how the government implements it!

Who was talking about the government implementing it? I wasn't.

And also "This has been done poorly in the past so we should never attempt to do it again, better" seems an odd way to go about things. There are well put together schemes by international standards bodies in this area now. Neither of the above links followed them.
by seba_dos1 | 2026-03-04 10:16:54+00:00
And what I was trying to tell you is that they're free to choose whatever point on the curve they want and pursue that as long as they don't misrepresent what they're doing. What is "full-stack alternative" supposed to mean when it relies on the very thing it's supposed to be an alternative to? What is Purism's effort then, "even fuller-stack alternative"? Words have meanings.
by Orygin | 2026-03-04 10:17:51+00:00
It's impossible not to bake racism sexism and any other bias into AIs since they are trained on human input which is always biased in some way.

Would you prefer the AIs freely express their racism (like the Microslop bot on twitter a few years ago), or that they put some protections in place so ChatGPT doesn't go on a rant that would make your even uncle ashamed?
by sd9 | 2026-03-04 10:18:35+00:00
Yeah, I've always _preferred_ integration tests, but the cost of building them was so great. Now the cost is effectively eliminated, and if you make a change that genuinely does affect an integration test (changing the text on a button, for example) it's easy to smart-find-and-replace and fix them up. So I'm using them a lot more.

The only problem is... they still take much longer to _run_ than unit tests, and they do tend to be more flaky (although Claude is helpful in fixing flaky tests too). I'm grateful for the extra safety, but it makes deployments that much slower. I've not really found a solution to that part beyond parallelising.
by diacritical | 2026-03-04 10:18:41+00:00
Why take away people's choice to use a forum with permanent comments? I know my comments will be here forever, but so will other people's comments. That's what makes HN valuable.

The alternative is what you see on reddit. A lot of threads from the past have posts deleted or overwritten with some script. You now have to dig through archive sites to find the comments, and you usually do find them.

I participate in Signal chats with self-destructing messages, too. But I post different things here and on Signal, under different usernames. Heck, after a few weeks I'll make another account here, anyway.

Even if you somehow deanonymize me, it's a risk I willingly took when I started posting.

Finally, if you go after HN for deleting comments, will you go after the many archive sites?
by ArmaloAI | 2026-03-04 10:19:18+00:00
Agreed on observability — it's the gap that turns multi-agent systems from "promising demo" into "production infrastructure." The debugging-by-tea-leaves problem is real.

Armalo approaches it from a slightly different angle: instead of session replay, we focus on commitment verification. Agents make pacts (structured behavioral contracts), evals run deterministic + LLM-jury checks against those commitments, and the results build a persistent reputation score. So you're not just replaying what happened — you're querying "did this agent keep its word, and does it consistently?"

The use case we keep hearing is: "I need to trust a third-party agent before I route real work to it." Session replay helps you debug your agents. Pact verification helps you trust other people's agents. Both matter; they're different problems.

On mDNS for node discovery — genuinely underrated. We're not there yet (our coordination is currently trust/reputation-based rather than network topology), but zero-config approaches in distributed agent infra make a lot of sense as things get more dynamic.
by carlos256 | 2026-03-04 10:19:41+00:00
He has some good points. This one is from a different paper (Good Ideas, Through the Looking Glass):

Designers had ignored both the issue of efficiency and that a language serves the human reader, not just the automatic parser. If a language poses difficulties to parsers, it surely also poses difficulties for the human reader. Many languages would be clearer and cleaner had their designers been forced to use a simple parsing method.
by pkorzeniewski | 2026-03-04 10:19:47+00:00
One thing I rarely see mentioned is that often creating code by hand is simply faster (at least for me) than using AI. Creating a plan for AI, waiting for execution, verifying, prompting again etc. can take more time than just doing it on my own with a plan in my head (and maybe some notes). Creating something from scratch or doing advanced refactoring is almost always faster with AI, but most of my daily tasks are bugs or features that are 10% coding and 90% knowing how to do it.
by vidarh | 2026-03-04 10:20:18+00:00
Yes, but for most uses that is irrelevant. Most of the complaints are not about them not being top-level writers, but that they stand out negatively from human writing by relying on a bunch of bad tropes and stereotypical language use.

Maybe we shouldn't use it to write novels if we can't push it well beyond average, but you don't need to get it to produce anything more than pretty much average or a little bit better for it to be good enough in competition with average humans.
by llbbdd | 2026-03-04 10:20:55+00:00
I looked up the WASM Qt target and it renders to a canvas, which hampers accessibility. The docs even call out that this approach barely works for screen readers [0], and that it provides partial support by creating hidden DOM elements. This creates a branch of differing behavior between your desktop and browser app that doesn't have to exist at all with Electron.

It should go without saying that the requirements of the LGPL license are less attractive than the MIT one Electron has, fairness doesn't really come into it. Beyond the licensing hurdles that Qt devotes multiple pages of its website to explaining, they also gate commercial features such as "3D and graphs capabilities" [1] behind the paid license price, which are more use cases that are thoroughly covered by more permissively licensed web projects that already work everywhere.

On your last point I'm completely lost; it's late here so it might be me but I'm not sure what distinction you're making. I guess I interpreted dmix' comment generally to be about the process of producing software with either approach given that my comment above was asking for details on alternatives from the perspective of a developer and not a user. I don't have any personal beef with using apps that are written with Qt.

[0] https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/wasm.html#accessibility-and-screen-re...

[1] https://www.qt.io/development/qt-framework/commercial-qt