MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
What the 2026 AI price hikes taught me about lean engineering
by davidvartanian | 2026-03-14 14:45:22+00:00
I spent the last two weeks struggling with AI costs going up like crazy. I realized I had been treating AI tokens as if they were free. Like many others, I fell into the trap of using premium, Ferrari-level models to perform supermarket-run tasks. I convinced myself it was necessary because the API costs were negligible.

But the subsidy era is over.

The 2026 price hikes, driven by rising HBM memory costs, new energy taxes, and heavier compliance mandates, are not just inflationary pressures. They are the market correcting years of massive economic malinvestment. For years, VC subsidies allowed us to build systems without genuine demand, treating compute as infinite. From a Misesian perspective, building where there is no market demand for that resource consumption doesn't make us more productive; it makes us poorer by wasting scarce resources.

I started a business with my own savings, not venture capital. I thought this made me immune to "grow at all costs" mentalities using VC money in non-essentials that won't make the product profitable, but I was wrong. I had adopted the habit of using the most powerful, expensive models for every single task because it was easy, convincing myself that was essential to guarantee performance (it was bullshit). It wasn't until the costs started biting into our margins that I realized I wasn't just being wasteful; I was being lazy.

I started experimenting with "Model Tiering". I shifted routine processing to smaller, faster, and cheaper models and reserved flagship models only for complex reasoning where the value-add actually justifies the cost. The result was surprising: the performance difference was negligible for 80% of our tasks, but also the latency dropped and now I get things done even faster.

I’ve come to realize that real wealth is generated when you align resource usage with actual demand. Every time we create demand artificially, fueling growth with VC money, we create malinvestments that the market eventually corrects (and that's never nice).

To stay lean in this environment, I've adopted three constraints:
1. Local Compute Sovereignty: If a task can run on local hardware, it should. Subscribing to an API for something that could be a local asset is now a liability.
2. Prompt Minimalism: I am aggressively stripping filler and redundant context. In an era of high variable COGS and especially with the energy scarcity still not being resolved, every unnecessary token is a direct drain on capital.
3. Prioritize Human Action: AI is a tool, not a strategy. The most valuable builds are those where human insight directs the machine, not where we abdicate strategic judgment to a prompt.

I’m focusing on building a profitable, sustainable business model, not manufacturing fake growth. I’ve learned that the skill of making a product profitable is far more valuable than the skill of raising money to scale a loss-making one. I am finally being forced to account for the actual scarcity of intelligence, and frankly, whether we like it or not, it is making us better humans.
by FabHK | 2026-03-14 14:45:29+00:00
I wondered to which extent Habermas with the Frankfurter Schule and Critical Theory could be held partially responsible for postmodernism's march through the institutions, identity politics, and indirectly for Trump's two election victories. But it looks like he was explicitly critical of postmodernism and other counter-enlightenment movements.

RIP.
by Bender | 2026-03-14 14:45:41+00:00
All interesting ideas but to get traction make it part of a low latency haptic suit that people can use to sex each other up or show off their PVPness, make some prototypes for executives and investors to play with and I could see it getting attention. Maybe get a demo integrated with VRChat. On the more taboo end and to not discriminate make all sizes of suits for all body types and ages. Provide an SDK so that all gaming companies can incorporate your suit. That should give "Collision Detection" a whole new meaning and experience.
by 9rx | 2026-03-14 14:46:22+00:00
I did see the early presentations. And since you did too, you will recall that one of the primary priorities was for it to "feel like a dynamically-typed language". You know, because it was trying to be a faster Python.

What you might be confusing that with is that their assumption was that Google services were written in C++ because those services needed C++ performance, not because the developers wanted to write code in C++. It turns out they were wrong — the developers actually did want to write C++ code — but you can understand the thinking. After all, Guido van Rossum was also working at Google at the time. They were already "all in" on Python where performance didn't matter.

Google later started the Carbon project to bring some of the same qualities Go was aiming for, while being more C++-like instead of Python-like.
by alpaca128 | 2026-03-14 14:46:22+00:00
One day the glove will have some connection problem and you won't be able to troubleshoot it because you can't use the internet.

This would always need some backup solution and now you're back on square one.

Edit: also you'd need accessibility, so a glove is out. And how do you handle game consoles? Voice assistants like Siri or Alexa?
by jmclnx | 2026-03-14 14:47:08+00:00
Needs to be here, from fortune(6):

> THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #18a: FIFTH

> ....

> The many versions of the FIFTH language reflect the sophistication and financial status of its users. Commands in the ELITE dialect include VSOP and LAFITE, while commands in the GUTTER dialect include HOOTCH and RIPPLE. The latter is a favorite of frustrated FORTH programmers who end up using this language.
by Saline9515 | 2026-03-14 14:47:15+00:00
Richer people have many ways to protect themselves from society, unlike poorer people who have to bear the envy of others and can't escape it. Just ask any homeless person.

A rich man can just (and likely should, given the comments here) leave the Swedish crab basket.

Having society obsessed with watching how their neighbor is doing is a very good way to get everyone to look away, while, in the case of Sweden, a single family owns a large part of the stock exchange.
by nephihaha | 2026-03-14 14:47:28+00:00
In the 1980s, the USSR made one of the best onscreen adaptations of Sherlock Holmes, starring Vasily Livanov as Sherlock Holmes and Vitaly Solomin as Dr. Watson. The filming locations were all Soviet, with the old town of Riga doubling up as London.

Despite its issues, it is remarkably faithful to the source material. The Reichenbach Falls scenes are remarkable. I would put it as my second or third favourite adaptation, behind the British one with Jeremy Brett.
by xivzgrev | 2026-03-14 14:47:30+00:00
Author has a point that some people take it too far but he's losing forest for trees.

People are responsible for their emotional responses. But you also will be impacted by their reaction. It's unrealistic to assume that people will always act unemotional - they are not Spocks. It makes sense to do some padding / emotional prework. If you don't you will end up actually spending MORE time getting what you want.

Example: you are giving feedback to a peer

Direct: this is a poor user experience. Our customers tell us they want xyz, but this experience is doing the opposite. Can you change it?

Padded: hey can I share some feedback on this experience? (Yes) ok our customers tell us they want xyz, but the experience seems to be doing the opposite. Can you help me understand?

Most people would feel more defensive and closed with the first approach than the second, which will make it less likely they will want to help, listen to you, or take you seriously. They'll just be focused on defending themselves. Whereas with the second, you can start to have an actual discussion.

And it's not just the opener, it's throughout.

Words have power. Two sentences can mean the same thing but can lead to different reactions from people.

Or you might not mention something that significantly influences how something is interpreted.

I just gave this feedback yesterday to a team member. The problem was in a presentation she presented a strong conclusion based on a shaky methodology and people tore into it. She basically was attributing an effect to a change pre/post, not with a holdout.

Her underlying data was sound, she had diligently collected the timing of events and such, but she didn't realize how pre/post methodology could be perceived as shaky.

The whole thing could have been avoided had she said something like "we didn't have a hold out, and all of this effect likely isn't from the cause, but directionally there's smoke - our campaigns performed x before, and y after. So this is worth testing to help validate this hypothesis"

Now their message goes from
"This big bad thing happened so I'm going to fix it" to "I don't know exactly what happened, but there's one factor that directionally had an impact so I'm going to test it to validate and can scale from there".

Both essentially say the same thing: there's an opportunity for upside and that's why this is worth testing. But the reaction will be different, so it behooves all of us to be mindful of that.
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-03-14 14:47:30+00:00
If you compose a text of enough references and (well-known) in-jokes, and get the perplexity/burstiness stats right, you too can reliably produce text that the AI-detectors think is inhuman. I suspect that doesn't work so well for the latest-generation AI-detection systems (e.g. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inffus.2025.103465), but there's definitely a way to fool those, too.
by NBJack | 2026-03-14 14:48:00+00:00
You need the right ones.

Xreal One glasses anchor the screen (i.e. it stays in place as you look around), have specific (and adjustable) tech for text clarity, have low chromatic distortion, and do things entirely onboard in the hardware. I've been able to use them for hours comfortably, and have gotten corrective lens inserts to avoid having to use my glasses with them.

They now have a 32:9 mode for ultra wide resolution, which is a real boost to using my work laptop. My aging phone doesn't play as nice as it used to with this mode, but it's a real win having 3 windows arrayed comfortably.

I code and read documents for a living, and I love these things.
by dangus | 2026-03-14 14:48:12+00:00
I would say that HN has a lot of features that would be seen as draconian in how much they limit your interaction by other platforms.

You can barely comment before you are rate limited.

You can’t upvote until you’ve been around a pretty long time.

New accounts are given a green badge of dishonor that makes users scrutinize their comments more.

I’m not saying these are bad things but they’re probably too restrictive for a social media network that’s just meant to be a good fun time.
by probably_wrong | 2026-03-14 14:48:21+00:00
I've been sharing this HN comment with anyone who mentions how good the articles in digg V2 was:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39046023

Apparently the reason why their articles were interesting was because... they copied all of their content from DamnInteresting. Once they were called out they stopped, and the quality went downhill.
by tim-tday | 2026-03-14 14:48:32+00:00
There should be a social theory study of jerks and people who continue to work for them. I’d imagine there’s a sort of logarithmic drop off. It takes time for the knowledge of terrible bosses to work through the labor force, but tech is a small community (of hopefully smart people) and people start to catch on.

A story I heard from a Tesla employee was that it’s impossible to hire because musk is mercurial and every time a hire makes it through the pipeline a hiring freeze cancels all offers. Another story that employees were told to avoid his desk because he randomly fires people. Another that he regularly cancels bonuses because he’s feeling petulant.
I heard another story that he threw up Nazi salutes on an internationally televised event. No wait, that one I watched happen.

After a while smart people will simply decline to work for him no matter the compensation. Not everyone, but enough to start to matter.
by badlucklottery | 2026-03-14 14:49:05+00:00
I've been a watercooling "enthusiast" for about 20 years now and, while the DIY-ness of the old school builds was a lot of fun for young me, I'm also glad I can just buy some off-the-shelf (or at worst "small batch") components that let me get really effective and near silent performance by just slamming some stuff together.

No more scouring junk yards for a particular heater core from wrecked cars or modding aquarium pumps.

That being said, I also never really understood the "add colorful lights to your PC" aspect of some builds.
by bob1029 | 2026-03-14 14:49:29+00:00
E.g.:

> All consumers are required to meet schema validation. Schema validation is the verification that the operations inside the SOAP Body match the contract created by Jack Henry in the XSD documents. It should be noted, that the VER_x tags are required in the requests to meet schema.

https://jackhenry.dev/jxchange-soap/getting-started/developm...
by chris_money202 | 2026-03-14 14:50:02+00:00
Trust is a huge issue and something that is going to be incredibly hard to build. OEMS and AI robotics companies are going to try extremly hard to protect their data and not let it be analyzed by independent sources and will claim IP leakage as a major reason. But without that data, it will be hard to prove that physical AI is operating safely at scale and can be trusted.
by youknownothing | 2026-03-14 14:50:28+00:00
I once suggested a drinking game: shot every time someone says "X is dead". I was told to f** off because I'd kill half of humanity.

COBOL is dead.
Java is dead.
Programming is dead.
AI is dead (yes, some people are already claiming this: https://hexa.club/@phooky/116087924952627103)

I must be the kid from The Sixth Sense because I keep seeing all these allegedly dead guys around me.
by supriyo-biswas | 2026-03-14 14:50:37+00:00
I wish people would move on from this mindset. "Agentic" workflows such as those implemented by Claude Code or Cursor can definitely reason about code, and I've used them to successfully debug small issues occurring in my codebase.

We could argue about how they only "predict the next word", but there's also other stuff going on in the other layers of their NNs which do facilitate some sort of reasoning in the latent space.
by throwaway5752 | 2026-03-14 14:51:07+00:00
I agree. For whatever reason, whether it is a change in community sentiment or something else, I get downvotes talking about this. I can't think of a more useless thing to care about. Even if I cared, I couldn't think of a better way to spend accrued social capital.

The hold that scumbags - influencers, political operatives, narcissists with Messiah complexes - have taken over young men, particularly those inclined to go into the software field, is alarming.

Various former founding members of PayPal, leaders of the companies they've founded subsequently, member of A16Z and some opportunists and hangers on to these wealthier individuals who are beneath the dignity of mentioning separately - they have lost their moral and ethical moorings in the course of accumulating massive wealth and they are corrupting others in doing it.

Even modest startup incubators are be obsequious to the wealth and power of these people in the field and decided that money is more important than morality. Or at the very least there is no pretense of it now.
by mapontosevenths | 2026-03-14 14:51:39+00:00
Out of curiosity, are you a reader? When was the last time you read a full length chapter book for fun? Does it feel like work to you? Is it a slow process?

I ask not to insult, but to understand. I can't help but wonder if a lot of this demand for terse language comes from a simple inability to read well? Reading is really not supposed to feel like work to the educated, and it does not to me. For me its just a state of consciousness, and doesnt require any more effort than being awake does.

I am genuinely surprised to hear otherwise educated people imply that simply reading something a coworker wrote significantly slows down their work.
by naasking | 2026-03-14 14:52:08+00:00
Redundancy is not "hate", it's robustness against failure. Complex, interconnected supply chains are fragile. If you're building an online storage API, you would (I hope) consider it deeply irresponsible not to setup plenty of followers of the main system for redundancy and automatic fail over. The idea that supply chains should not do this, or that any such suggestions are emotionally driven decisions is extremely bizarre.

Yes, this may increase costs slightly because robustness necessarily has a cost associated with it.
by Lliora | 2026-03-14 14:52:17+00:00
Had the same updater burn 30% CPU on a Ryzen desktop last month. Traced it to the options+ auto-update service polling a dead CDN endpoint every 5s. Wrote a 20-line autohotkey script to remap the side buttons and uninstalled the whole suite. CPU went flat and the mouse still remembers DPI onboard.
by fellowniusmonk | 2026-03-14 14:52:19+00:00
I do like to see the historic use of non-conformist.

Non-conformists and free thinkers/ non-theists teaming up has produced some great outcomes. Think of the popular non-conformist support for Jefferson & Madison in VA in 1786.

The idea of baptists handing out copies of common sense has always had a certain beauty to it.
by Brajeshwar | 2026-03-14 14:52:50+00:00
Trying this one. It worked with a simple script mapping CAPSLOCK to the default Push-to-talk (OPTION + Space);

```
{
"description": "Caps Lock to Option+Space (Handy push-to-talk)",
"manipulators": [
{
"from": { "key_code": "caps_lock" },
"to": [
{
"key_code": "spacebar",
"modifiers": ["left_option"]
}
],
"type": "basic"
}
]
}
```
by orbit7 | 2026-03-14 14:52:56+00:00
I explore a lot of new music to listen to, probably in the region of 5000 new tracks a year. I find exploring labels helps with this as often I find music in the same label I also alike. Music app recommendations and also manually reviewing music festival line ups round the world where artists you like are playing, inventory who else is playing at those event and sample listen to some of there music.
by troosevelt | 2026-03-14 14:53:59+00:00
I've nver seen discussion of politics on forums do anything but turn into hate-filled, dogmatic posts which aren't productive at all. Every political thread here turns into the same takes and HN imagines itself as intellectually better than others. It's not interesting or productive. If talking about politics fixed things, why are politics worse today than they've ever been? There's no costs and no solutions to ranting about politics online.

The vast majority of people do not want to get on a forum to escape their life to see every more or worse content about their daily lives.

You're right, there needs to be some outlet but when people propose this it's because they are sick and tired of politics and the injection of them into everthing is not helping those politics, it just makes it worse.

Tons of people aren't political creatures and want nothing to do with politicians. This notion that more politics will fix thing isn't born out by Reddit, X, the US Congress, Brexit, etc. It's too easy to divide and manipulate people.
by twoodfin | 2026-03-14 14:54:09+00:00
Indeed, I was agreeing that the XML ecosystem as currently constituted has all the problems necovek pointed out.

But the W3C might have made some different choices in what to prioritize—notably, identifying a common “XML: The Good Parts” profile and providing the standards infrastructure for tools to support such a thing independent of more esoteric alternatives for more specialized use cases like round-tripping data from French mainframes.

Instead they chased a variety of coherent but insufficiently practical ideas (the Semantic Web), alongside design-by-committee monsters like XHTML, XSLT (I love this one, but it’s true), and beyond.
by raffraffraff | 2026-03-14 14:54:24+00:00
A friend worked at sennheiser about 15 years ago and I took advantage of his cost-price deal on a pair of HD700. They are, without a doubt, the best sounding and most comforted cans I've ever used. Now, I treated them badly, throwing them into ruck sacks etc, and eventually one of the transducers failed. I contacted Sennheiser who charged me €140 to "repair" them... They sent me a brand new set with the thick silver core cable (I never sent mine back so now I have two, and those cost over 100 bucks by themselves)
by jleyank | 2026-03-14 14:54:24+00:00
While there's coast near Bandar Abbas (sez Google), there's a whole lot of mountains inland of that. Not sure what the range of Iranian weaponry is, but digging troops out of mountains is something that tends to be avoided. There is a mountain division in the US inventory as I recall, but (a) no clue what its strength is and (b) also no clue when it last played in the hills post-WW II.

If the Marines actually face well-armed zealots, it's going to look far too much like WW II in the Pacific. Are the US-ians ready to re-experience such casualties? Cuz I expect the zealots would be willing to do so. And Ukraine has shown the power of man-portable weaponry against the traditional tools of 20th century military operations.
by mvkel | 2026-03-14 14:55:18+00:00
The patterns were there if you knew to look for them.

The original Digg excepted, Kevin Rose's attention span is extremely limited. He will give something ~3-4 months of attention before (apparently) getting bored and wanting to move on to something else.

Up until that point will be an unrelenting hype man of whatever is being built.

Then the hype posts start to drift. They show up once every few days, then once a week, then stop entirely.

A few months later, a dramatic explainer post arrives, outlining why the idea didn't work and why the next one will be better, for sure, for real.
by CyberDildonics | 2026-03-14 14:55:29+00:00
Well, allocating and freeing according to need is reusing

That's a twisted definition. It seems like you're playing around with terms, but allocating memory from a heap allocator is obviously what people are talking about with "dynamic memory allocation". Reusing memory that has already been grabbed from an allocator is not reallocating memory. If you have a buffer and it works you don't need to do anything to reuse it.

Modern TCP perf is not bottlenecked by that. There's pools of recycled buffers that grow and shrink according to load etc.

If anything is allocating memory from the heap in a hot loop it will be a bottleneck.

Reusing buffers is not allocating memory dynamically.
by mapontosevenths | 2026-03-14 14:55:41+00:00
"Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untravelled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as "empty," "meaningless," or "dishonest," and scorn to use them. No matter how "pure" their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best." - Robert Heinlein
by raffraffraff | 2026-03-14 14:55:50+00:00
I bought a tiny lapel clip Bluetooth receiver that has buttons and a headphone socket. Charge over USB, pair with phone, turn any headphones into Bluetooth. If the battery runs out, plug the headphones straight into the phone.

However, the noise cancelling gap is real. I'd kill for wired IEMs with an inline battery + buttons, and noise cancelling mic & circuit in the earpieces.

Closest is the Sony cans, which have wired mode (ie: they have a tiny jack, so you can use them passively) but I don't think they cancel noise when using them that way