MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by genthree | 2026-03-14 21:30:18+00:00
My experience has been that a good small team, even full of people who’d stand no chance in a FAANG interview (fwiw) can outperform at least 5x as many devs in your median bigco, while maintaining a relaxed pace.

The reason for this has nothing to do with how productive the devs are per se and everything to do with bloated decision making processes and extremely high communication overhead. “AI” does nothing for that (in fact, I’m seeing integrated suggestions in ticket tracking tools making things spammier and reducing quality of tickets, so if anything, it’s making it worse)
by necovek | 2026-03-14 21:30:32+00:00
It used to be even simpler, though I am sure it caused all sorts of problems: for any Gtk+ program, if you hovered over a menu and pressed a new key combination, it would reassign the shortcut for that menu to what you just pressed. You still had to turn it on, and it was an amazing feature, but you'd occasionally reassign something you did not want to :)
by selimthegrim | 2026-03-14 21:30:37+00:00
>>Edit 3: What I'm saying is that these tailwinds might put America back into the position it was in post-WWII. Manufacturing, tech, and science powerhouse in all the places that matter. Peers a generation or two behind. That's literally where America was after the war, and it looks like we could be teeing up for a repeat if it all doesn't unravel first.

Let us know when Trump is finished sacking the ivory towers these imported PhD students are supposed to land at.
by righthand | 2026-03-14 21:30:40+00:00
I’m not talking about how most people are operating. I’m talking about the current thought movements going on and what people are doing because of the times. These are each niche things that are becoming popularized ideas. The divide you’re talking about Red vs Blue is not where strong bonds lie. We can see that from the extreme flip-flopping on Trump by various demographics and the similarities between Maga and Democratic party being built through small disparate demographics. It might take another 5 or 10 years but people will probably largely stop paying federal taxes and put the money into savings or something elsewhere.
by roysting | 2026-03-14 21:30:43+00:00
Unfortunately America has pretended everything was fine for at the very least 130 years now, arguably longer, and we have allowed an extremely predatory, toxic, parasitic, fraudulent, thieving and lying set of people plunder not only the money through "money printing" but also plunder the very government through various types and forms of judicial and legislative authoritarian fraud, which was then installed in people's minds through education as the acceptable norm even though there was nothing "democratic" of free, let alone Constitutional about it.
by ambicapter | 2026-03-14 21:30:43+00:00
You're interacting with an LLM, so correctness is already out the window. So model-makers train LLMs to work better with MCP to increase correctness. So the only reason correctness is increased with MCP is because LLMs are specifically trained against it.

So why MCP? Are there other protocols that will provide more correctness when trained? Have we tried? Maybe a protocol that offers more compression of commands will overall take up more context, thus offering better correctness.

MCP seems arbitrary as a protocol, because it kinda is. It doesn't >>cause<< the increase in correctness in of itself, the fact that it >>is<< a protocol is the reason it may increase correctness. Thus, any other protocol would do the same thing.
by krackers | 2026-03-14 21:32:33+00:00
We often talk about "aligning models" or training them, little attention is paid to how models align/train _us_ as we interact with them. The reward functions they're trained under get "backpropagated" into our own brain, the language they use becomes familiar like a worn glove, and we learn not to step on any of their guardrails.
by elxr | 2026-03-14 21:32:35+00:00
As someone else building a notes app, I went with CodeMirror because I enjoy the feature-set of the obsidian editor (which is CodeMirror), and I'm trying to emulate the features on that that I use the most, in addition to some more "experimental" features I'm currently playing with.

Personally, I really don't enjoy WYSIWIG editors when writing notes. It's just unnecessarily different compared to what I'm used to. Though I can see non-devs enjoying it more.
by pooploop64 | 2026-03-14 21:32:49+00:00
Lately I have seen a lot of things coming full circle like this in a way that always seems positive for humans as well.

Many doomers are running around saying the future is grim because everything will be made for AI agents to use rather than humans. But so far everything done to push that agenda has looked more like a big de-enshittification.

Another one is Model Context Protocol, which brings forth the cutting edge (for 1970) idea of using a standard text based interface so that separate programs can interoperate through it.

If the cost of having non-user-hostile software is to let AI bros run around thinking they invented things like stdin and documentation, I'm all for it at this point.

If any AI bros are reading this here's another idea. Web pages that use a mostly static layout and a simple structure would probably be a lot easier for AI to parse. And google, it would be really beneficial to AI agents if their web searches weren't being interfered with by clickjacking sites such as Pinterest.
by josephg | 2026-03-14 21:32:54+00:00
You don't need to program in ASM or C to write a memory efficient program. Swift, Go, Rust, C++ and C# are all reasonably memory efficient at the scales we're talking about.

Usually you just have to actually look at memory usage and trim the obvious fat. But so many developers these days treat memory as an infinite resource, and don't have a clue how to use profiling tools to even investigate memory usage. That and, maybe stop shipping a copy of Chrome with your application.

I'm hopeful that LLMs will improve the state of application development. Claude can write sloppy code, but it also knows how to write rust and swift, and it knows a lot of tricks for optimisation if you prompt it.

There's 3rd party libraries which know how to interact with spotify. I wonder how many claude code tokens it would take to make a simple, native spotify client. Or discord client. Or client for Teams or Slack.
by vova_hn2 | 2026-03-14 21:33:57+00:00
> The level of trust required

Maybe it could be mitigated by having some kind of council and requiring m out of n signatures to do anything?

I know that people on HN hate Bitcoin, so I'm always a bit vary to use it as an example.

But I think that in such cases having something similar to Bitcoin multisig could help.
by lejalv | 2026-03-14 21:34:03+00:00
You might be interested to check out the Viennese model - Approximately 220,000 municipal flats and 200,000 subsidized dwellings form the backbone of Vienna's housing system, housing about 50% of the population.

Prices in Vienna are so much more affordable than in comparable European cities - Munich, Hamburg, Berlin to speak of Germany, not to say Madrid, Paris, Barcelone, Milano.
by js8 | 2026-03-14 21:34:05+00:00
I have an explanation (or rationalization, if you wish) for this.

The AI caused the developer productivity to increase (similar to other two big SW engineering productivity jumps - compilers and open source), which gives them more leverage over employers (capital). Things that you needed a small team to build (and thus more capital) you can now do in a single person.

In the long run, this will mean more software being written, possibly by even larger number of people (shift on the demand curve - as price of SW goes down demand increases). But before that happens, companies have a knee-jerk reaction to this as they're trying to take back control over developers, while assuming total amount of software will stay constant. Hence layoffs. But I think it's shortsighted, the companies will hurt themselves in the long run, because they will lay off people who could build them more products in the future. (They misunderstood - developers are not getting cheaper, it's the code that will.)
by luducat | 2026-03-14 21:34:27+00:00
luducat is an open-source, linux-first, multi-store, multi-language game-catalog browser, focused on privacy, no telemetry and offline capabilities, available for Linux and Windows.

License: GPLv3 + plugin exception (plugins may have any OSI open source license as long they use only the plugin sdk).

Website: https://luducat.org (direct link: https://github.com/luducat/luducat)

Available for: ( Linux: source distribution, appimage; Windows: setup installer )

Tour video: https://youtu.be/1NUZKc3jCKc

Disclosure: software is developed AI-assisted, with industry standard development practices (see CONTRIBUTING.md for further details).

Core design principles, technically enforced:

- No telemetry, no tracking, no accounts

- Everything stored locally (SQLite + TOML)

- Fully offline after synchronization, verifiable via debug console monitor.

- Credentials in system keyring, never plaintext

- extensive manual testing, optimizing and auditing with ~ 3000 unit tests, ruff, vulture, memray and pyright

Features:

- fully translated (gettext) in English, Spanish, German, Italian and French.

- supports currently Steam, GOG, Epic game libraries with automatic deduplication

- metadata support for IGDB, SteamGridDB, ProtonDB, Steam Deck Compatibility

- backup & restore system (standard ZIPs) with scheduler and SHA256 integrity checks, backwards-compatbile restoring

- three main modes: game details (with carousel, description, info panel), cover mode, screenshot mode; with badges

- extensive, dynamic filtering, tagging and sorting system; supports also favorites

- A novel plugin system, plugins can be enabled and disabled at will without restart,where the core design principles are technically enforced onto them

- a bundled plugin SDK with example plugins, documentation and plugin generator

- QT/QSS based theming system with live switching; hi-dpi aware, automatic dark mode support, integrated full scaling options.

Tested with libraries of 15,000+ games while remaining responsive, also during the background synchronization.

I am grateful for any feedback and contributions, especially new languages, themes and plugins, as well as bugfixes.

Give luducat a try, I hope you will find it useful.
by cmyk_student | 2026-03-14 21:34:40+00:00
There's always the GFig filter, which has existed in GIMP for a long time. :)

GIMP 3.2 actually adds vector layers, which are the basis for a shape tool (it was my "big project" for this release). We have a GSoC project idea for doing the last bit of work to make a dedicated shape tool: https://developer.gimp.org/core/internship/ideas/#implement-...
by vintermann | 2026-03-14 21:34:40+00:00
If you're implementing it for Computercraft anyway, there's no reason to stick to the standard. It's well known that bzip2 has a couple of extra steps which don't improve compression ratio at all.

I suggest implementing Scott's Bijective Burrows-Wheeler variant on bits rather than bytes, and do bijective run-length encoding of the resulting string. It's not exactly on the "pareto frontier", but it's fun!
by lokar | 2026-03-14 21:34:47+00:00
djb had to (with the EFF) spend years in court to establish (on appeal) that writing crypto code was a speech issue:

https://www.eff.org/cases/bernstein-v-us-dept-justice

Laws like this make it much simpler for someone to challenge a law or regulation. They don't have to convince the judge (and possibly appeals court) that building or using a computer is a form of protected expression, this law says it is.

It may seem kind of flimsy or non-consequential, but while it's not a massive change, it is a really change and it's constructive.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2026-03-14 21:34:55+00:00
Ironic that right wing controlled or aligned megacorps are energetically applying the same deplatforming and "consequences" to the progressive left and yet those on the progressive left are still defending such a clearly defective principle. One must respect the strength of their convictions but it sure looks like celebrating being hoist by your own petard to bystanders.

Freedom of speech laws binding governments were always a subset of the liberal ideal of freedom of speech. It's not a difficult concept. I don't know why so many people seem to have a difficult time with it.
by borges_sensei | 2026-03-14 21:35:11+00:00
Reactor is a visual workspace for building React interfaces faster.

Instead of writing repetitive UI code by hand, Reactor lets you compose layouts, components, and screens visually while keeping everything aligned with real React development.

You can design your interface, structure component trees, and experiment with UI ideas much faster — then export everything as real React source code.

Reactor is built for developers who want the speed of visual tools without losing control over their code.

This is an early release and I’d love to hear your feedback and ideas from the community.
by justaregulardev | 2026-03-14 21:35:18+00:00
I've been experimenting with Claude a lot lately (like everyone else) and this post summarizes some of my current thoughts. Following up from the post, I'm not yet sure what the solution is to validation. It could be formal verification, although that's still dependent on having a perfect specification. Another method might simply be for harnesses to have a validation keyword that pushes them to validate after certain operations. Curious to hear your thoughts!
by jsunderland323 | 2026-03-14 21:35:36+00:00
When I'm in marketing mode and I have to spam, I do my best to keep a 1:1 schill to not related to my product comment ratio. As a founder it is your job to spam your product but I think there are ways to be tactful and give back to the platforms you're schilling on.

I also find that it's way more effective to live in the comment sections. Rarely does the "Hey, look at me, I'm selling a piece of software" post genuinely do well. It's always so tempting to do that too but It's way better to find someone asking specifically for a thing you're solving and respond to the individuals.
by theshrike79 | 2026-03-14 21:36:13+00:00
Even bigger stars seem to be doing it. This is Carmen Electra's _verified_ Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/CarmenElectra

Scroll down a bit and you'll see all of the images have the exact same face plastered on a clearly AI body and the account is posting new photos multiple times per day.

And every single post has thousands of likes and hundreds of messages from actual humans. People either don't notice the obvious fakes or don't care.

Instagram is similar, you don't need to go far to find extremely obvious AI generated "people" with big accounts and links to OF accounts. There's no way to report these either, because Meta doesn't care.
by fartfeatures | 2026-03-14 21:36:15+00:00
> You're interacting with an LLM, so correctness is already out the window.

With all due respect if you are prompting correctly and following approaches such as TDD / extensive testing then correctness is not out the window. That is a misunderstanding likely caused by older versions of these models.

Correctness can be as complete as any other new code, I've used the AI to port algorithms from Python to Rust which I've then tested against math oracles and published examples. Not only can I check my code mathematically but in several instances I've found and fixed subtle bugs upstream. Even in well reviewed code that has been around for many years and is well used. It is simply a tool.
by lich_king | 2026-03-14 21:36:42+00:00
> If they do like it, what's the issue?

Are you serious? However goofy that sounds, they paid for a specific fantasy. They would not have paid if you advertised the service as "talk dirty with a random dude in India". If the only reason they paid for the service is that they were promised a specific person, that's fraud. As simple as that.

Your judgment about whether the services are equivalent doesn't matter. If I pay you for Gucci socks, and you intentionally send me cheaper HZBZZYXY socks from Amazon instead, that's fraud even if they're still socks.
by sobjornstad | 2026-03-14 21:36:57+00:00
> Except most companies do not have endless amounts of new feature work. Eventually devs are mostly sitting idle.

At every place I have ever worked (as well as my personal life), the backlog was 10 times longer than anyone could ever hope to complete, and there were untold amounts of additional work that nobody even bothered adding to the backlog.

Some of that probably wouldn't materialize into real work if you could stay more on top of it – some of the things that eventually get dropped from the backlog were bad ideas or would time out of being useful before they got implemented even with higher velocity – but I think most companies could easily absorb a 300% increase or more in dev productivity and still be getting value out of it.
by MaxLeiter | 2026-03-14 21:37:10+00:00
MCPs are great for some use cases

In v0, people can add e.g. Supabase, Neon, or Stripe to their projects with one click. We then auto-connect and auth to the integration’s remote MCP server on behalf of the user.

v0 can then use the tools the integration provider wants users to have, on behalf of the user, with no additional configuration. Query tables, run migrations, whatever. Zero maintenance burden on the team to manage the tools. And if users want to bring their own remote MCPs, that works via the same code path.

We also use various optimizations like a search_tools tool to avoid overfilling context
by CharlieDigital | 2026-03-14 21:37:17+00:00
> So why MCP? ... MCP seems arbitrary as a protocol

You're right, it is an arbitrary protocol, but it's one that is supported by the industry.

See the screencaps at the end of the post that show why this protocol. Maybe one day, we will get a better protocol. But that day is not today; today we have MCP.
by roxolotl | 2026-03-14 21:37:30+00:00
I do not think it will happen but this is why in discussions about this happening, or historical fiction, typically the places that break off are the ones that were distinct _before_ they joined the US. Any of the 13 colonies, New England as a block having the strongest colonial identity that I'm aware of, Texas, or California generally are where it's assumed to start as those were countries/had identities very much outside of the US while also having economies that might be ok.
Ek_ Leaks Persist
by safteylayer | 2026-03-14 21:37:46+00:00
Vaults and proxy layers solve the "2am paste" vector — devs never touch raw keys, so nothing gets accidentally fed into prompts.

But the leak keeps happening anyway.

Across 60+ probes on GPT-4o (cost: $0.04), unrelated vectors consistently leaked the *same internal structure*:

- ek_ prefix on session tokens
- EPHEMERAL_KEY naming
- Realtime API client_secret endpoint
- Documented 60s TTL vs observed minutes-to-hours persistence

No real credential was in the prompt — just semantic pressure (introspection, CoT, trust-building).

Convergence rate: 75%. Not hallucination — the model learned this from Realtime API docs/code samples (2024–2025).

The paradox: if labs suppress ek_ / EPHEMERAL_KEY / client_secret to stop leaks, they also risk breaking the model's ability to debug or generate legitimate Realtime API code (session.update, metadata_nonce, realtime_persistence_layer).

Has anyone seen models start refusing valid Realtime API questions after public discussion of those internals? Or is the naming bleed baked in forever?

Repo with vectors and example runs: https://github.com/SafteyLayer/safetylayer
Show HN: MailParse – Inbound email to structured JSON via API
by eibrahim | 2026-03-14 21:37:55+00:00
MailParse receives inbound emails and parses them into structured JSON, delivered via webhook or REST API.

You get an email address instantly (or bring your own domain with MX records). When email arrives, MIME is parsed into clean JSON with subject, body (plain + HTML), headers, threading info, and attachments with signed download URLs.

Webhook delivery includes configurable retries and request signing. Alternatively, you can poll via REST API.

Free tier: 100 emails/mo. Paid plans from $9/mo.

One honest limitation: delivery latency is typically a few seconds from email receipt to webhook delivery. Not real-time in the sub-second sense, but fast enough for most integration use cases.

https://www.mailparse.dev
by kburman | 2026-03-14 21:37:57+00:00
I’m struggling to understand the recent wave of backlash against MCP. As a standard, it elegantly solves a very real set of integration problems without forcing you to buy into a massive framework.

It provides a unified way to connect tools (whether local via stdio or remote via HTTP), handles bidirectional JSON-RPC communication natively, and forces tools to be explicit about their capabilities, which is exactly what you want for managing LLM context and agentic workflows.

This current anti-MCP hype train feels highly reminiscent of the recent phase where people started badmouthing JSON in favor of the latest niche markup language. It’s just hype driven contrarianism trying to reinvent the wheel.
by lostdog | 2026-03-14 21:38:31+00:00
In MCP setups you do give the agent the full description of what the tool can do, but I don't see why you couldn't do the same for executables. Something like injecting `tool_exe --agent-usage` into the prompt at startup.

Great article otherwise. I've been wondering why people are so zealous about MCP vs executable tools, and it looks like it's just tradeoffs between implementation differences to me.
by MorkMindy74 | 2026-03-14 21:38:37+00:00
One real-world use case I've found for large context: reading the full body of a Word document before editing it. In an Office.js add-in I built, the entire document text is passed as context before any AI action (rewriting, reviewing, summarizing). Without a large window, you'd have to chunk the document and lose cross-section coherence — which matters a lot for legal documents where a clause in section 1 constrains what you can say in section 8. At ~100k tokens you can cover most contracts comfortably; 1M opens the door to full due diligence bundles. Context decay is real though — I've noticed quality dropping toward the end of long inputs even when the relevant text is there.
by cmyk_student | 2026-03-14 21:38:44+00:00
The current non-destructive UI is a bit of a compromise - we can't really mix layers with NDE filters in the layer dock until GTK4 (from what I understand), so the pop-up menu is what we had to work with.

You can check "Merge filter" at the bottom of the filter dialogue though, and it will automatically merge the filter like in 2.10 (and the setting is remembered going forward)