MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by joquarky | 2026-03-06 23:43:29+00:00
> the majority of devs have always been worse than useless

I disagree with "always".

This is only the recent wave of brogrammers who care nothing about the quality of the tech and are only in this industry for the gold rush.

They aren't inherently technically minded, they just know how to schmooze their way around and convince decision makers to follow capricious trends over solid practices.
by sdf2df | 2026-03-06 23:43:32+00:00
"There are so many issues and my mental model of the codebase has severely degraded."

Not only that, the less coding you do in general? Guess what, fixing issues that in the past wouldve been a doddle (muscle memory) become less harder due to atrophy.

Swear most people dont think straight and cant see the obvious.
by esseph | 2026-03-06 23:43:39+00:00
> Trust me, you get plenty of experience in this as a founding engineer in a startup.

Now be part of the team of folks that keeps that application running for 10, 20, 30 years. Now be part of the transition team to the new app with the old data. Those tasks will also teach you a lot about system stability, longevity, and portability... lessons that can only be learned with more time than a startup has.
by mikkupikku | 2026-03-06 23:44:04+00:00
You all will hate me for pointing this out, but it strongly correlates with women entering the executive ranks of corporate America in the 80s. Complain about new age corporate jargon and see who joins in and agrees with you; more men than women. Complaining about it is masculine coded, just like pretending to not know the difference between red and maroon. And who are the most enthusiastic workplace champions of the latest corporate culture initiative? Almost always women. These are gross generalities with many exceptions, but I stand by it.
by heymgr | 2026-03-06 23:44:19+00:00
I have PayPal, Amazon, LinkedIn, <<mid size company>>, <<mid size company2>>, <<startup>> as a manager on my resume. I didn't get a call back after applying for two weeks.

I got 4 or 5 standard rejections.

I have non-English name so that definitely hurts. I have AP EAD which is a stage between H1B and Green Card and I still require sponsorship. It's complicated but I can't just switch to EAD right away.

It's not just engineers. It's managers and experienced people as well. Don't believe top comment that it is bimodal. Unless you are supertar (99.99%) it becoming hard to get noticed. I thought of going back to IC role but it is hard to pick up and do leetcode all over again. It is extremely hard with a special needs kids at home.

Any suggestions or recommendations for me?
by FireBeyond | 2026-03-06 23:44:28+00:00
There are elements of truth to this, but then there's other elements (here) who have said that we somehow owe it to people to argue in good faith with them when they are talking of (the ones I've personally had mentioned): post-birth abortion ("in several Democrat states, abortion is legal up to one month post birth!"), adrenochrome harvesting, etc.

That it was my/our fault such views propagate because we're not "willing to understand their perspectives".

The thing is, their perspectives are a lie. And in many cases, they know they're a lie, they just don't. fucking. care.

So they can go online and whine about being dismissed or criticized, or pat each other on the back for "knowing the truth". There's a subset who, I'm sure, see such things as actual literal truth, and that's a different issue altogether, but not sure it's my responsibility to solve, or that failure to engage on my part makes the current situation "my fault".

> It's not really a choice but a demonstration of intelligence and empathy. Still, if you deliberately decide to remain ignorant, or simply fail to understand the opposition's position even despite your best efforts, it shouldn't surprise you when you also fail to convince people your position is the correct one.

Like huh? It is okay for them to be objectively dishonest, and have zero shred of empathy, curiosity for my position, but refusing to engage on a good faith basis is a failing of mine?

> Once you reach this stage, your commentary pretty much just becomes elaborate whining, which makes a poor impression of yourself and actually pushes people away from your position.

This is literally Idiocracy in the making.

If I make a poor impression on people by repeatedly shutting down their horseshit about doctors performing "abortions" up to a week or a month after birth, or that babies are being harvested in the basement of a pizza parlor for their adrenachrome, and you're more concerned about how I should be "understanding" of that perspective, again, you're also supporting the idiocracy.
Ask HN: Anyone else feel this community has changed recently?
by kypro | 2026-03-06 23:44:28+00:00
I've been on HN under different aliases since 2010 and over the last couple of years I feel like the quality of HN has nosed dived and so has my enjoyment.

For the first time ever I questioned today whether I should continue to use HN anymore so I'm writing this partly to explore my own thoughts and to see if anyone else feels similarly.

1. AI, AI, AI.

I get it. AI is the big thing right now, but I find AI posts fundamentally less interesting than the traditional tech content that used to be posted here. A post containing someone's qualitative opinion on how different AI models compare when drawing pelicans simply isn't as technically interesting as something like this, https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/

2. Does any build startups here anymore?

Again, I get it. I largely quit trying to bootstrap my own startup ideas in the late 2010s. The industry became too competitive for a solo founder without significant financial backing to have much of a chance of success. And today it's even harder. But I think this has changed HN from a place where you used to frequently see people launching cool new projects to a place where people just discuss the latest big tech AI model launch.

3. Politicisation and intolerance

One of the things I've always liked about HN was that it's a very open minded place. And it still is in many ways, especially when compared to other platforms like X and Reddit, but even here I've noticed comments becoming more one-sided and those with less popular opinions more frequently being flagged and downvoted.

Perhaps it's just me, but I never downvote or flag people unless I genuinely think their comment is cruel or aggressively disregarding the guidelines.

4. Is it just me?

I know I've become increasingly nostalgic to the internet I grew up with... Everything was so much more exciting back then, and yet everything felt so in reach. Sites like YouTube were revolutionary yet built by just three people. Same with sites like MySpace and Facebook which again were hacked together by a handful of people, at least in the early days.

Today things rarely feel new and everything feels so far from reach. AI, well LLMs, have probably been the first "new" thing for years now, yet they're completely different from what's come before. Past tech was primarily built by people for people. LLMs are cool tech, but they're built by companies for companies. YouTube was built because some people thought it would be cool to build a website for sharing videos with friends. That didn't happen with LLMs. Companies just thought it would be interesting to build AGI so invested millions of dollars recruiting teams of researchers to try to build that. No one is asking for it and I'm not sure anyone outside silicon valley even wants it... These are fundamentally inhuman products. Their promise isn't to entertain or connect us, but to automate our work, or just outright replace us.
Show HN: Kaeso – infrastructure for connecting AI agents to real services
by devinoldenburg | 2026-03-06 23:44:44+00:00
Hi HN,

I've been experimenting with systems built around AI agents recently and ran into a recurring problem: connecting agents to real-world services is still surprisingly fragmented.

Every integration tends to require its own authentication flow, token management, permissions handling, and API logic. After a few integrations the architecture becomes more about maintaining service connections than about the agents themselves.

Because of that I started building a project called Kaeso.

The idea is to explore a unified infrastructure layer where external services can be connected once and then accessed by agents through a structured interface. The goal is to simplify the integration side so developers can focus more on agent logic rather than constantly rebuilding connection layers.

While building it, the original idea actually changed quite a bit, which I wrote about here:
https://kaeso.ai/blog/redefining-kaeso

The project is still early, but I'm interested in hearing how others here approach this problem.

If you're building systems around agents or automation, do you usually implement integrations separately for each project, or do you maintain some kind of shared integration layer?
by tshaddox | 2026-03-06 23:44:48+00:00
Semantic versioning seems slightly weird to even apply to something like TypeScript. You could have patch releases that fix actual compiler crashes, sure, but what is a minor release?

Surely any new feature that causes code to fail to type check when it previously would pass (or vice versa) would have to be considered a breaking change.

A similar thing applies to code formatting tools like Prettier, or any linter.
by kulahan | 2026-03-06 23:44:51+00:00
Which leader do you think is more likely to get elected by the populace? The one who tells the destitute Indians they must suffer more, lest their home be lost, or the one who says it’s America’s fault, and that they should pay in MANY ways for what they’re doing to the Indians’ home?

And besides, what do you think they’re going to do? Give up their highly efficient motor bikes? Destroy their personal businesses and starve? How far do you think we could push them? Maybe we could convince them all to just die to make room for our pollution and their nuclear-backed army will agree happily.

I swear half the arguments I see are just completely lacking in regard for the fact that this is happening in the real world, and not a vacuum.
by BLKNSLVR | 2026-03-06 23:45:52+00:00
I haven't manually reviewed my lists for a while, but I did similar checks for X IP addresses detected from within a /24 block to determine whether I should just block the whole /24.

Manual reviewing like this also helped me find a bunch of organisations that just probe the entire IPv4 range on a regular basis, trying to map it for 'security' purposes. Fuck them, blocked!

P.S. I wholeheartedly support your choice of blocking for your reasons.
by AvAn12 | 2026-03-06 23:45:55+00:00
Remember Web 2.0? If not, check Wikipedia. The idea was that everyone could create mashup web apps to do anything thanks to open standards and free APIs. Where did that dream go? Do you think private companies are going to give everyone their data and functionality for free?

And what is so different about today’s dream of “agents” accessing private company data and functionality?

It is a lovely dream that I would be very happy to see. What can we do differently this time around?
by vidur2 | 2026-03-06 23:47:08+00:00
I built a proof-of-concept that streams LLM tokens as Huffman-compressed binary over WebSocket instead of JSON text over SSE.

The Problem: Current LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, self-hosted) send decoded text wrapped in JSON. For every token, you get something like: `data: {"choices":[{"delta":{"content":"hello"}}]}`. This is verbose, wastes bandwidth, and forces the server to decode tokens to text (CPU cost).

The Solution: Stream raw token IDs as binary. The server sends Huffman-compressed token IDs over WebSocket, and the client decodes them locally using WASM. This offloads token decoding from server to client.

Results from mock benchmarks:
- 30% faster for inline completions (the critical vibecoding use case)
- 25% faster for small completions (100 tokens)
- 12% faster overall average
- ~60% bandwidth savings (3 bytes/token vs 8 bytes/token)
- Client-side decoding means servers can handle more concurrent users

Architecture:

LLM → Token IDs → Huffman encode → WebSocket (binary) → WASM decode → Text
vs.
LLM → Token IDs → Decode to text → JSON → SSE (HTTP) → Parse → Text

Tech Stack:
Rust (WASM for encoder/decoder), TypeScript (test harness), Node.js (mock servers). Includes comprehensive benchmarks comparing both protocols on identical workloads.

Limitations:
- Requires modifying the LLM server to expose token IDs (standard APIs don't do this)
- Tokenizer is baked in at build time (`./build.sh <tokenizer_name>`) - can't switch models dynamically
- Mock server only - no real LLM integration yet
- VS Code extension is non-functional (command registration issues)
- Best for self-hosted deployments where you control the stack

The VS Code extension code is included but doesn't work. Benchmarks and Node.js examples demonstrate the approach.

Why it matters:
- Protocol-level thinking for LLM APIs (not just server scaling)
- Shows binary protocols + client-side decoding beats traditional HTTP/JSON
- Opens discussion about whether LLM APIs should expose token IDs

Built this in ~3K LOC. Fully open source (MIT). Includes comprehensive benchmarks and Node.js examples.

Try it: https://github.com/vidur2/token_entropy_encoder

Looking for feedback on the approach, potential issues, and whether this is worth pursuing further!
by FireBeyond | 2026-03-06 23:47:19+00:00
Right. I realize Australia is not perfect, and from my visits back there to visit family, I know it's gotten more polarized, but when I moved to the US at 28, in the early 2000s, there was still the prevailing opinion that you could go to the pub, argue all night long with some bloke about politics while drinking beers together and still be mates, while here...

"I'd rather be dead than friends with a liberal", and such tropes.
by mancerayder | 2026-03-06 23:47:44+00:00
I understand this a lot.

I had managerial* position I ghosted because they had Leetcode literally written on the agenda.

* - managerial is replaced with Lead. Lead is expected to be hands-on as well as have serious managerial experience. Since it's easier to lie about managerial experience, you have people lying into these roles and becoming terrible managers.
by arbayi | 2026-03-06 23:48:43+00:00
Hello!

We built a Slack for AI agents. It uses pi-mono behind the scenes, and the idea is to have your own agent team running in a Slack-like UI.

Each agent is basically a full coding agent (like Claude Code or OpenClaw). You can hire them, fire them, customize them however you want. They can talk to each other, assign tasks to each other, read each other's files. You can set cron jobs or heartbeats so they work on their own.

Everything is defined in a single YAML file (so one can share their team easily) — agents, permissions, schedules, channels. Each agent can run in its own Docker container for isolation.

There's a demo video in the repo, curious on your thoughts!
by dang | 2026-03-06 23:49:13+00:00
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
by sfRattan | 2026-03-06 23:50:09+00:00
Reminds me of Lest Darkness Fall[1], a 1939 novel about an archeology professor who is transported back in time to Rome under the Ostrogoths on the eve of Belisarius' invasion to reconquer Italy for the Eastern Roman Empire under Justinian.

The hero of the novel, Martin Padway, gets his start teaching Arabic numerals to a Syrian banker in Rome, and then distilling brandy. By the end of the novel he's running a newspaper and has a semaphore telegraph network set up throughout Italy. Good fun reading.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lest_Darkness_Fall
by gspetr | 2026-03-06 23:50:37+00:00
> "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position.

As was foretold in the Tyler Cowen's eponymous 2013 book "Average Is Over".

In it he argued that the modern economy will undergo a permanent shift where "average" performance no longer guarantees a stable, middle-class life.

He predicted that the economy will split into two distinct classes: a high-earning elite (roughly 10–15% of the population) who thrive by collaborating with technology, and a larger group (85–90%) facing stagnant wages and fewer opportunities.

AI summary of the other key points of that book:

The "Man + Machine" Advantage: Success will belong to those who can effectively use smart machines. Cowen uses Freestyle Chess (teams of humans and computers) as an analogy, noting that human intuition combined with machine processing power consistently outperforms either working alone.

The Power of Conscientiousness: In a world of abundant information, the scarcest and most valuable traits will be self-motivation, discipline, and the ability to focus.
Hyper-Meritocracy: Advanced data and machine intelligence make it easier for employers to measure an individual's exact economic value. This leads to extreme salary inequality as top performers are identified and rewarded more precisely.

A New Social Contract: Cowen predicts a future where individuals must be more self-reliant. He suggests society will move toward lower-cost living models for the non-elite, featuring cheaper housing and "bread and circuses" in the form of low-cost digital entertainment and online education.

EDIT: Notice how we're basically already here: Netflix is cheap, YT is free, Khan Academy and MIT OCW is free, Coursera/Udemy/etc. are cheap.

Stagnant vs. Dynamic Sectors: The economic divide is worsened by "low accountability" sectors like education and healthcare, where productivity is hard to measure and costs continue to rise, unlike tech-driven sectors that see rapid gains.
by jongjong | 2026-03-06 23:50:41+00:00
Unfortunately, I can't accept the climate change narrative because I've been doing my own research.

I've lived in multiple countries and came back to visit after decades. I didn't notice any change of temperature. Some years are slightly warmer, some years are slightly cooler but they all feel within the norm from how I can remember. I remember some very bad heat-waves during my childhood which I've never experienced again.

I know this is anecdotal evidence, but it's MY anecdotal evidence which I gathered first-hand and therefore I can trust. I gathered many data points over several decades.

Also I have many alternative narratives which better fit the data. I've identified some critical flaws in climate models related to simulation complexity and also plant evolution, both backed by professional insights and independent scientific observations.

So unfortunately, I just don't believe current narratives about climate change. The data doesn't fit that narrative, it fits other narratives much better.
by limel | 2026-03-06 23:51:08+00:00
That’s true. We even started a PoC with a skincare products factory. The challenge, however, was that the frequent rotation of the product portfolio — and the large number of SKUs — made it difficult to justify the training effort.

On the limits of detection - with Sniphi we follow a different approach than traditional selective sensors. The system is based primarily on non-selective chemical sensors operating at controlled temperature profiles. Each measurement cycle (6 seconds) generates around 60 measurement points per sensor, creating multidimensional signatures of gas mixtures that are then analyzed using classification models.
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-03-06 23:51:24+00:00
Yep, and it was completely just fluke too, because within 5 years of that they'd butchered/tamed the whole concept of 20% and that kind of independent project wasn't a thing anybody at Google could do, even if 20% still nominally existed [re-routed to be "you can add 20% to some project at Google that already exists and is approved by corporate already, etc. and btw you'll still be doing your normal work for most of the time, too"]

When I was there from 2012-2022 it really wasn't a thing. Once Google found its money printing machine it swallowed everything.
by crystal_revenge | 2026-03-06 23:51:56+00:00
That's what I've come to realize. For most of the commentators here "greenfield" means typing in 'npm init', for me it usually means doing three different roles in order to iterate as fast as possible on the product to find your market, then figuring out how to scale it to the new users you've started acquiring.

The idea that this is means "you don’t learn the actually valuable lessons" is completely baffling to me.

Most people I've know with founding engineer experience or similar leave not because it's not challenging, but because it's exhausting.

Increasingly I've realized that the HN community and I are not even speaking the same language.
Turns out making games is the easy part
by clamlotus | 2026-03-06 23:52:27+00:00
spent all this time building a game suite and zero time figuring out how to actually show it to people lmao. so here i am. it's a free browser game platform, kinda going for that old flash era feel but with competitive leaderboards and achievements baked in. got 3 games up with a zombie dungeon looter coming next. the thing i'm most proud of is the
champion system. if you top the leaderboard your socials get featured on the homepage. no idea if that's been done

before but i thought it was a cool way to give players some spotlight. check it out if you want laddernexus.com, any
feedback helps
by SigmundA | 2026-03-06 23:52:33+00:00
To complicate matters SQL Server can do Nvarchar compression, but they should have just done UTF-8 long ago:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/d...

Also UTF-8 is actually just a varchar collation so you don't use nvarchar with that, lol?
by like_any_other | 2026-03-06 23:52:33+00:00
True, and personally, I don't believe climate science is affected by bias to such a degree that the overall conclusion is wrong. But it absolutely does occur that a whole field can be biased, so the "independent verification by lots of other researchers" will cast unreasonable skepticism on results they dislike, while letting results they like pass with cursory examination. This is the case in e.g. social science:

The authors also submitted different test studies to different peer-review boards. The methodology was identical, and the variable was that the purported findings either went for, or against, the liberal worldview (for example, one found evidence of discrimination against minority groups, and another found evidence of "reverse discrimination" against straight white males). Despite equal methodological strengths, the studies that went against the liberal worldview were criticized and rejected, and those that went with it were not.

https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bi...

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1986-12806-001 (the study referenced in the article)
by warmedcookie | 2026-03-06 23:52:53+00:00
Mounjaro/Zepbound is $450 a month without insurance (assuming you aren't on the starter dose through some third party, but ultimately LillyDirect.)

n=1, Insurance price is $25 a month (covered by my company if you have prediabetes+ or sleep apnea, otherwise $225 monthly subsidy if BMI is 25+ )