MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by radarsat1 | 2026-03-06 09:26:58+00:00
This is interesting because I've been considering a similar project. I maintain a package for a scientific simulation codebase, it's all in Fortran and C++ with too much template code, which takes ages to build and is very error prone, and frankly a pain to maintain with its monstrous CMake spaghetti build system. Furthermore the whole thing would benefit with a rewrite around GPU-based execution, and generally a better separation between the API for specifying the simulation and the execution engine. So I've been thinking of rewriting it in Jax and did an initial experiment to port a few of the main classes to Python using Gemini. It did a fairly good job. I want to continue with it, but I'm also a bit hesitant because this is software that the upstream developers have been working on for 20+ years. The idea of just saying to them "hey look I rewrote this with AI and it's way better now" is not something I would do without giving myself pause for thought. In this case it's not about the license, they already use a permissive one, but just the general principle of suggesting a "replacement" for their work.. if I was doing it by hand it might be different, I don't know, they might appreciate that more, but I have no interest in spending that much time on it. Probably what I will do is just present the PoC and ask if they think it's worth attempting to auto-convert everything, they might be open to it. But yeah, the possibilities of auto-transpiling huge amounts of software for modernization purposes is a really interesting application of AI, amazing to think of all the possibilities. But I'm happy to have read the article because I certainly didn't think about the copyright implications.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-03-06 09:27:01+00:00
> That makes sense for purely offline media playback, but how could that work for a game or application or website? Ship several versions of the app for the different brackets and let the OS choose which to run?

Suppose you had an ID requirement instead. Are you going to make two different versions of your game or website, one for people who show ID and another for people who don't? If so, do the same thing. If not, then you have one version and it's either for adults only or it isn't.

> You'd also not be reporting your age, you'd be sending a "please treat me like an adult" or "please treat me like a child" flag.

Except that you essentially are reporting your age, because when you turn 18 the flag changes, which is a pretty strong signal that you just turned 18 and once they deduce your age they can calculate it going forward indefinitely.

This is even worse if it's an automated system because then the flag changes exactly when you turn 18, down to the day, which by itself is ~14 bits of entropy towards uniquely identifying you and in a city of a 100,000 people they only need ~17 bits in total.
by evolighting | 2026-03-06 09:27:05+00:00
privacy data it self is merely the case;

The real problem is that tech giants only need to claim that their use of data is appropriate, and they can then feel free to use it to provide "better" services.

After all, they should never have been allowed to do this from the very beginning. Users aren't fools—they can learn too. So what we need isn't automatic push, but easier ways to actively seek things out.
by ezst | 2026-03-06 09:27:44+00:00
JFYI, LLMs still can't solve 7x8, and well possibly never will. A more rudimentary text processor shoves that into a calculator for consumption by the LLM. There's a lot going on behind the scenes to keep the illusion flying, and that lot is a patchwork of conventional CS techniques that has nothing to do with cutting edge research.

To many interested in actual AI research, LLMs are known as the very flawed and limiting technique they are, and the increasing narrative disconnect between this and the table stakes where they are front and center of every AI shop, carrying a big chunk of the global GDP on its back, is annoying and borderline scary.
by eptcyka | 2026-03-06 09:27:57+00:00
> There is nothing weird with that; the origins of that workflows are on-site CI/CD tools

Well, it is pretty weird if you end up using it on a cloud based open platform where anyone can do anything. The history is not an argument for it not being weird, it is an argument against the judgement of whomever at Microsoft thought it'd be a good idea. I'm sure that person is now long gone in early retirement. It'd been great if developers weren't so hypnotized by the early brand of GitHub to see GitHub Actions for what it is, or namely, what it isn't.
by jongjong | 2026-03-06 09:28:04+00:00
But people have data. A lot of empirical data from their own lives. When something resonates with someone, it just means it fits the data they collected in their brains.

Most people aren't stupid. If they sound stupid, it's often because they have not heard a better narrative which fits their data.

Our society completely disregards the wisdom of old age. We probably meet hundreds of thousands of people in our lives. We collect both quantitative and qualitative data. That's statistically significant.
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-03-06 09:28:05+00:00
That is news to the millions of linux users who upgrade their kernels regularly, and suffer zero consequences.

It's cowardice and FUD, in my view, to clutch to such old versions. It's just bad practice and bad engineering, and a crock of scary tales to make other people (& the people doing this) think their bad engineering & absurd self-injuring time-wasting practices are good, actually.

A lot of devices need to change their expectations around what qualification means, for a lot of systems & devices where requalification is such a pain that a kernel upgrade is a daunting task.
by Frieren | 2026-03-06 09:28:20+00:00
> It turns out changing the answers AI tools give other people can be as easy as writing a single, well-crafted blog post almost anywhere online.

LLMs are a security nightmare at all levels. And I doubt to be something fixable and it is an inherent property of these systems. Integrating LLMs in all products is a very dumb expensive idea that only monopolistic powers can bring to market, any other company would have folded just by the weight of cost, risk and lack of customer demand.
by joe_mamba | 2026-03-06 09:29:57+00:00
>Just year ago, client told me to delete integration tests, because "they ran too long"!

Why are you surprised customers don't like spending money on the items that don't add business value. Add to that QA, documentation, security audits, etc.

They want to ship stuff that brings in customers and revenue day one, everything else is a cost.
Ask HN: Are subagents making flagship AI models feel like managers?
by vgoncharenko | 2026-03-06 09:30:12+00:00
Subagents are one of the newest power features in AI coding assistants, and I have mixed feelings about them.

The basic idea is good. If a task is messy, you can split it into smaller threads, run them in parallel, and merge the results. For large refactors, multi-file debugging, or research implementation work, this can save a lot of time.

But I am starting to notice a strange manager effect.

I ask for a top-tier model because I want the best reasoning and engineering judgment. Instead, the main agent often seems to switch into "manager" mode and delegate most of the actual work to smaller models. The smaller model produces an okay solution, and then the expensive model turns it into a polished final answer.

So the smart model becomes a manager, the cheaper model does the heavy lifting, and the whole chain burns tokens. Ironically, the manager is often the most expensive part and the least useful part.

What I want from these tools is mostly transparency and control. I want to see which model handled which step. I want the option to disable delegation, or restrict it to certain subtasks. And if the tool is making a speed-versus-quality tradeoff, I want that tradeoff to be explicit.

Subagents are genuinely useful. But if I pay for a flagship model, I want flagship-level work, not a summary of a weaker model’s draft.

Curious whether others are seeing the same thing.
by yvdriess | 2026-03-06 09:31:04+00:00
I would be fine with a chaotic bubbly mess of an outside presentation, if the libraries were more robust and foundational. At the moment the underlying code, when you scratch the surface, have the feel of things thrown together to be replaced at later date.

I bounced off of bubble tea not because of the aesthetics and the unhelpful naming, but because of the programming model: a MVC-architecture cribbed from the Elm language. Why? It completely takes over and rips apart my CLI structure. A CLI is not a DOM or System.Windows.Forms, MVC is scattering around logic and adding indirection layers needlessly.

I am still using huh? and vhs, but their libraries have the feel of looking really good in demo and in the provided examples, but break down quickly when coloring just outside those intended lines.
by jjav | 2026-03-06 09:31:52+00:00
> I have an old 2013 laptop that is the "couch machine". It still works adequately.

Sure, because it is from when Apple still was good.

I am writing this right now on a 2014 Mac Mini (running 10.13). Works perfect! Great machine.

The newer stuff, not so much.

I have a 2021 15"? MacBook Pro, highest end very expensive, where the battery randomly goes into rundown and drains in no time, some days it is fine. This one also can't sleep, so must do a full shutdown if I need to close the lid for more than ~10 minutes. If I close it and put it on my backpack for longer, it heats up like an oven and drains the battery. The USBC ports only work half the time at best. It's been like this since 2023, so it really only lasted two years.

I have a 2022 13" MacBook Pro where the screen is completely dead and the trackpad no longer clicks. Using it as a desktop with an external monitor and mouse, but what a disappointment. Made the mistake of buying it without Apple Care shakedown money, so can't be fixed. (Apple wanted ~$1500 to fix it, obviously not worth it).

I have a 2023 MacBook Air which is my current portable. Works ok for now, but the USBC ports are super flaky. External monitors work on a whim, sometimes, or not, which is massively annoying.

Apple quality is just pretty terrible in the 2020s. When this MacMini dies, I'm going back to a Linux desktop.
by Terr_ | 2026-03-06 09:32:21+00:00
> you can buy a SIM anonymously, and make the cell location data essentially useless

Even ignoring the first part, which will vary by country, I think that represents a failure of imagination.

For example, how many other people-with-phones have a pattern of spending 5+ nighttime hours within 100m of your home, and spending 5+ workday hours within 100m of your office?
by idle_zealot | 2026-03-06 09:34:38+00:00
> Applications is a wide field, but I'd be interested in specific examples where you think it wouldn't work.

Sure. Take a game with voice chat. Child mode disables voice chat. How does the game, which presumably uses a load of telemetry, avoid incidentally leaking which users are children via the lack of voice telemetry data coming from the client? It's probably possible, but the fact is we're talking about third party code running on a computer, and the computer running different code paths based on some value. The third party code knows that value, and if it has internet access can exfiltrate it. In that sense, if there's an internet connection, there's not a meaningful difference between "the OS tells the service/app your age rating preference" and "the OS changes what it displays based on your age rating preference."

Though while I'm throwing out fantasy policies we could solve this by banning pervasive surveillance outright.
Show HN: Procedural Music Workstation in the Browser
by timo_h | 2026-03-06 09:34:47+00:00
As a side project for a hockey manager game, I created a small audio tracker, "HM Tracker," which was used to make the game's music.

It is a browser-based tracker-style music workstation. All sound is procedurally generated from oscillators - no samples, no plugins.

The UI lets you edit patterns on a step grid, pick instruments and chords, then export as a standalone JS music engine or WAV file. Built with vanilla JS and the Web Audio API (best experienced on a desktop browser).

Made in the '90s demoscene spirit (at least the looks, anyway).

Would love any feedback!
by zelphirkalt | 2026-03-06 09:34:51+00:00
It would not have hurt to make a version of wikipedia, that will work without JS for the most part, including all that is important. However, that requires a mindset for supporting static pages, which is mostly what W should consist of, and would require a skill set, that is not so common among web developers these days. Such a static version would be much easier to test as well, since all the testing framework would need to do is simple requests, instead of awaiting client-side JS execution resulting in mutation of content on the page.
by diarrhea | 2026-03-06 09:35:14+00:00
Feldera speak from lived experience when they say 100+ column tables are common in their customer base. They speak from lived experience when they say there's no correlation in their customer base.

Feldera provides a service. They did not design these schemas. Their customers did, and probably over such long time periods that those schemas cannot be referred to as designed anymore -- they just happened.

IIUC Feldera works in OLAP primarily, where I have no trouble believing these schemas are common. At my $JOB they are, because it works well for the type of data we process. Some OLAP DBs might not even support JOINs.

Feldera folks are simply reporting on their experience, and people are saying they're... wrong?
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-03-06 09:35:43+00:00
It was ZZT for me, no idea how old I was, probably 8-10 or so.

But when you take a bird's eye view, it's interesting and great to see how over the years, games where you can build your own games remain popular and a common entryway into software development.

But also how Epic went from ZZT via Unreal to Fortnite, with the latter now being another platform (or what Zucc wanted to call a metaverse) for creativity.

Other notable mentions off the top of my head where people can build or invent their own games (in-game, via an external editor or through community support) or go crazy in besides Roblox are Second Life (...I think), LittleBigPlanet, Warcraft/Starcraft (which led to the genre of MOBAs), Geometry Dash, Mario Maker, TES, Source engine games, Minecraft, etc etc.
by latentsea | 2026-03-06 09:36:25+00:00
Your last point is the only one I partially agree with. The rest... will make no practical difference to what is going on in the world today.

I genuinely think the only two solutions to this problem that are workable are "zero privacy, zero freedom" or "fuck the children, we don't care".

Now, to be fair... there is a middle-ground that is neither of those options that I believe would be much more effective and allow us to retain our freedom and privacy and keep kids a lot safer. It's called education. But... no one will go for it, because I think for it to truly be effective you'd have to go as far as showing very young kids all the darkness that's out there and lay it out in paintstaking detail exactly how it works and deeply drill it into them. Ain't a snowballs chance in hell anyone would go for that, BUT... would it work? I'd bet you bottom dollar it would. The current extent of this education in public schools is a half hour visit from a police offer to the classroom and handing out a sheet to the kids and giving a 'good touch' / 'bad touch' talk. What's needed is a full length university level course on the whole topic from end to end.

If you're in an adversarial relationship and need to defend yourself the best thing you can do is "know your enemy". But no... "they're too young to learn about that stuff, we need to shield them from it - think of the children!" is the reasoning people throw back at you when you suggest it. It hands down has to be the number one thing that could actually move the dial significantly, and it's just completely unpalatable to the majority of the populace.
by gucci-on-fleek | 2026-03-06 09:37:15+00:00
> I wonder what's the status of LaTeX 3

It's either already here or never happening, depending on your perspective [0] [1].

> it would be nice to have an automation in the style of Tectonic

What do you mean by "automation"?

[0]: https://www.texdev.net/2024/11/11/the-mythical-latex3

[1]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb44-1/tb136mitt-history.pdf#page=5
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-03-06 09:38:35+00:00
> Funnily enough, marking content that's harmless as only for adults was also punishable, though that might have been in context of a different law. That would be censorship, blocking people under 18 from accessing legal content, was the reasoning. Welcome to German bureaucracy.

That's how you get the thing where instead of using different equipment to process the food with and without sesame seeds, they just put sesame seeds in everything on purpose so they can accurately label them as containing sesame seeds.
by abhisek | 2026-03-06 09:38:44+00:00
We found a malicious npm package pino-sdk-v2 impersonating pino, one of the most widely used Node.js loggers with nearly 20 million weekly downloads. The package is a near copy of pino’s source, docs, and README with one addition: an obfuscated payload in lib/tools.js that scans .env files for secrets and exfiltrates them to a Discord webhook on require().

pino-sdk-v2@9.9.0 copies pino’s entire source tree with a single modification: obfuscated credential stealing code injected into lib/tools.js

The payload scans .env, .env.local, .env.production, .env.development, and .env.example for secret keys

Extracted credentials are sent to a hardcoded Discord webhook

No install hooks. The code executes on require(), bypassing scanners that only flag install scripts
by ruszki | 2026-03-06 09:39:37+00:00
I hit limit of Pro in about 30 minutes, 1 hour max. And only when I use a single session, and when I don't use it extensively, ie waits for my responses, and I read and really understand what it wants, what it does. That's still just 1-2 hours/5 hours.

What do you do to avoid that?
by halapro | 2026-03-06 09:39:38+00:00
I think there's a huge "it depends" caveat. In the JS world I remember browserify, it did what it was meant to do and it was extendable. A really nice Unix-like minimal software.

The reality is that it was just a small piece in a larger ideal build chain. So for the past 10+ years, we've seen an explosion of more complete build tools that do everything.

Browserify now sits there "finished" and receiving bugfixes. Nobody uses it anymore, even if it popularized npm for the frontend.
by ncruces | 2026-03-06 09:40:01+00:00
I guess someone read the “announcement” that I'm now confident enough this will work that I'll be switching my mildly popular SQLite bindings to use it: https://github.com/ncruces/go-sqlite3/discussions/361

If you're interested in generated sample code, see: https://github.com/ncruces/wasm2go/tree/main/testdata
by tikotus | 2026-03-06 09:40:25+00:00
Much of that is at least for my company handled by our accounting company. We just print the correct VAT on the invoice, and report the same VAT to the accountant and they take care of the rest. The shop/payment processor etc doesn't need to be integrated to any of it. Though I have to post-process Stripe's reports, as they refuse to include the used VAT rate in there, despite them knowing it. Stripe does try to sell the tax service to us, but I refuse.
by gucci-on-fleek | 2026-03-06 09:40:34+00:00
I work on the packaging in TeX Live, and I'll freely admit that it's arcane and convoluted (from a packager's perspective), but it's super reliable, and the end-users are mostly insulated from all the inner workings. It can indeed be tricky to debug if something breaks, but this is thankfully quite rare.
by nephihaha | 2026-03-06 09:41:03+00:00
Quite easily. I haven't had a licence for over twenty years.

TV Licensing has no right of access to your home, so if they turn up, you can turn them away. You also ignore their letters. TV licensing is actually a private company separate from the BBC and the government.

In order to get access, they have to apply for a warrant to get into your home. To do that they have to fill out a lot of paperwork. If you have a TV (and I don't), it should not be visible or audible from anywhere outside these little toerags can hear/see it.
by pawkaman84 | 2026-03-06 09:41:49+00:00
He was trying to say that "making money in a free-market" is fundamentally linked to creating value for someone. It wasn't the 'money' word that you should have focused on, but the 'value'.

On average this way of creating value bottoms-up has undoubtedly produced the largest human flourishing in the history of our species. It has unlocked human creativity and has lifted millions of people from poverty. It is the best system we have been yet able to create. If you disagree - point me to an alternative (even if theoretical).

Of course, as in the case of averages, there is variance. Sure, greed, illegal money making is bad, but the total net benefit is overwhelmingly positive.

I think your blind spot is that you implicitly attribute no ethical value to 'money making'. For you they're disconnected. In fact, it's the oppositve - there is a lot of ethics in money making.
by laserlight | 2026-03-06 09:42:43+00:00
I did my own experiment with Claude Code vs Cursor tab completion. The task was to convert an Excel file to a structured format. Nothing fancy at all.

Claude Code took 4 hours, with multiple prompts. At the end, it started to break the previous fixes in favor of new features. The code was spaghetti. There was no way I could fix it myself or steer Claude Code into fixing it the right way. Either it was a dead-end or a dice roll with every prompt.

Then I implemented my own version with Cursor tab completion. It took the same amount of time, 4 hours. The code had a clear object-oriented architecture, with a structure for evolution. Adding a new feature didn't require any prompts at all.

As a result, Claude Code was worse in terms of productivity: the same amount of time, worse quality output, no possibility of (or at best very high cost of) code evolution.
by vladms | 2026-03-06 09:42:54+00:00
> ... will be required to squash free speech as soon as possible.

Maybe pointing the obvious but things happen if enough people care about them or do not care to oppose them.

From my perspective speech became "more free" lately - meaning everybody says all kind of incorrect, wrong things without fear of retribution even if there are laws against some of those, because people just don't care.

So maybe we should also focus on teaching people what is free speech, why is it good for them, why they needed, rather than worry about some hypothetical mechanism that someone will prevent it.

Of course both can be done, but I find it a bit funny that if the focus in mostly on not having mechanisms to prevent free speech, we might still end up in a situation that there are no such mechanisms but on the other hand nobody speaks freely because they don't care or only stare at their tiktok.
by PennRobotics | 2026-03-06 09:43:42+00:00
I keep purchasing ThinkPads (Z13, X1 Gen 11, X1 Gen 12, T16) where the USB-C port breaks within a year (respectively: "no dock or external monitor", "no charge and only non-Thunderbolt enumeration" on a single port, "charge only, no USB enumeration at all" on both ports, "fries other devices during reverse PD"), and I'd love to be able to swap out a broken port rather than ship the entire machine to Poland for two weeks and get lectured by the support contact that, "maybe ports only stop working under Linux but we'll still repair the mainboard this time."

I am waiting to jump ship to a different manufacturer, but nobody is challenging ThinkPad on keyboard quality/layout and Linux support, the two factors where I'm totally unwilling to compromise. (Tuxedo is close but still not the better alternative.)