MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sdrinf | 2026-03-04 04:47:43+00:00
Counterpoint to peeps on this thread:

* This approach is the _most consistent_ with retaining anonymity on the internet, while actually helping parents with their issues. If any age-relevant gatekeeping needs to be made on the internet at all, this is the one I find acceptable.

* this is because the act very specifically does NOT require age _verification_ ie using third-parties to verify whether the claimed age is correct. Rather, it is piggybacking on the baked-in assumption, that parents will set up the device for their kids, indicating on first install what the age/DoB is, then handing over the device -a setting which can, presumably, only be modified with parental consent

* yes, there are edge cases, esp in OSS, and yes, it would be nice to iron those out -but the risk = probability x impact calculus on this is very very low.

* If retaining anonymity on the internet is of value to you, don't let the perfect be the enemy of good enough.
by elminson | 2026-03-04 04:47:45+00:00
Hey HN,
I'm a software engineer who does hiring. Not full-time recruiting — just the kind of technical interviewing that falls on your plate when your team is growing and no one else wants to prep.
The part that always got me was the 30-45 minutes before each interview. You read the resume, cross-reference the job description, mentally map the candidate's background to what you actually need to know about them, then cobble together questions that aren't just "tell me about yourself." Multiply that by 4 interviews a week and it becomes a real time sink — especially when half the questions end up being recycled anyway.
So I built RecruitLens in some weekends: paste a resume (PDF, raw text, or URL), and get 15 tailored interview questions in under 10 seconds. Questions are split into Technical, Behavioral, and Problem-Solving categories, and each one comes with an answer guide so you know what a good answer actually looks like.
A few things that surprised me building this:

Generic prompting is terrible for this. Early versions produced embarrassingly generic questions. The key was making the AI first identify the candidate's actual signal — specific skills, gaps, career transitions — and then generate questions that probe those exact things. The difference in quality was night and day.
Interviewers don't want 50 questions. They want 15 good ones they can actually use in 45 minutes. Restraint in output mattered more than volume.
Answer guides changed the most behavior. I expected the questions to be the main value. Turns out, knowing what "good" looks like for each question is what hiring managers actually cared about — especially for roles outside their core expertise.

What it doesn't do (yet): it won't conduct the interview, score the candidate, or auto-reject anyone. I've been deliberate about keeping it as a prep assistant rather than a decision-making tool. That line feels important.
We have few teams using it now. Free tier gets you 1 analysis/week. Pro is $9/month for 100 analyses.
Would genuinely love feedback from anyone who does a lot of hiring — especially on the question categories. We have Technical / Behavioral / Problem-Solving right now, but I'm debating whether that's the right split or if it's too generic.
A few things I'm curious about from HN:

For those doing regular hiring: what's your actual prep process look like right now?
Is there a category of interview questions (leadership, culture, estimation) you always end up adding manually?
Any concerns about AI-generated questions you've thought through?

https://recruitlens.io (still improving)
by bg24 | 2026-03-04 04:47:47+00:00
I think it depends on the company. In large companies, the role of PM probably won’t change that much. However, PMs who are technical and hands-on can bring significantly more value by leveraging AI tools.

There’s another path for PMs that the article and most of the comments don’t seem to mention.

Technical PMs are now in a great position to start their own companies. In the past, many were blocked or handicapped by the inability to code. With AI-assisted development, that barrier is much lower, which gives them a lot more leverage to build products themselves.
by badc0ffee | 2026-03-04 04:48:30+00:00
I took one of my dual 24" office monitors during Covid WFH and ended up keeping it when I quit that job. I use it as a second display alongside the MacBook which is on a stand.

I think the largest I would want at my current desk is 27". 30 is way too big for me. But more importantly I want something that matches the crispness of the MBP display, and 1440p and 1600p are too low res.
by fnordpiglet | 2026-03-04 04:49:04+00:00
I run Qwen 3.5 30B MOE and it’s reasonable at most tasks I would use a local model for - including summarizing things. For instance I auto update all my toolchains automatically in the background when I log in and when finished I use my local model to summarize everything updated and any errors or issues on the next prompt rendering. It’s quite nice b/c everything stay updated, I know whats been updated, and I am immediately aware of issues. I also use it for a variety of “auto correct” tasks, “give me the command for,” summarize the man page and explain X, and a bunch of tasks that I would rather not copy and paste etc.
by yevgenyhong | 2026-03-04 04:49:18+00:00
Recently, I slefhosted "actual budget" in my server.

It is really good software for managing personal finance.

also i built custom wake on lan page for turning on to home PC for remote work

I always worried about security problem, So i tried apply mTLS to Caddy proxy. it works for me.

p12 certificates working greate.

My wife also using this Wake on Lan tool every day. She learned how to use RDP over ssh tunneling from me
by raydev | 2026-03-04 04:49:39+00:00
- at worst you're getting a 7 year old monitor

- the new 5k XDR has 4x as many dimming zones so it would objectively look better than the old XDR

- not sure what the market for used 6k XDRs is like, but there's a good chance you'd be paying new 5k XDR monitor price for an old 6k XDR used monitor
by firecall | 2026-03-04 04:49:40+00:00
Not a recommendation as such, but I recently purchased this for one of kids gaming monitors:

> ASUS XG27UCDMG ROG Strix 27" 4K QD-OLED 240Hz G-SYNC Gaming

> https://rog.asus.com/au/monitors/27-to-31-5-inches/rog-strix...

Doesn’t have built in speakers, and can’t comment on what it’s like for work.

However it does look absolutely amazing!

Jaw dropping gorgeous. The colours are just so rich. I was genuinely not expecting to as impressed by it as I was!
by adrianwaj | 2026-03-04 04:50:07+00:00
This is the most cost-effective mini PC right now, that I've found. Also, one of the smallest.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005010070780662.html

I'm not so fond of it because it has a fan. But if you could use it at home, and then had a "phone conversion housing" you could attach it to a belt and have a smart phone. Run wired earbuds out it. Have a trackpoint nub.

Here is a $15 screen. https://medium.com/@lee.harding/building-a-real-time-hn-disp...

There's something elegant about only requiring 1 computing device for everything.

It's what Steve Jobs would want.
by rvz | 2026-03-04 04:50:25+00:00
Because unfortunately, someone proposing simplicity somehow means that it threatens another person's job security, which is quite frankly pathetic, even though it can lead to saving the business money and time.

The only valid excuse is whether the risk is worth it vs the potential gains. But the solutions that I prefer are the ones that offer minimal changes with massive gains rather than co-ordinating with hundreds of teams for years over an unrelated change.

If you have to do the latter for a tiny code change, then the architecture was most certainly built on a bad foundation, riddled with hundreds of brittle moving part waiting for an incident.
by gnabgib | 2026-03-04 04:50:43+00:00
Couple of small discussion previously:

(20 points, 21 days ago, 5 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46966522

(13 points, 19 days ago, 6 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47004440
by instahotstar | 2026-03-04 04:50:46+00:00
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It’s perfect for students, office professionals, and businesses who regularly handle multiple PDF files and want a fast, secure, and hassle-free solution.
by ChadMoran | 2026-03-04 04:50:55+00:00
I launched a technical feature on Amazon's retail platform that is responsible for 9 figures worth of revenue. When I launched it, it had no infrastructure. It was a collection of small changes across every core platform (Detail Page, Cart, Checkout, etc).

At first people were like "Well, you didn't do much" but when they saw the value things changed drastically. It's a bit of marketing you have to do to help bring people along.

Often perceived impact is correlated with complexity, sadly.
by kerkeslager | 2026-03-04 04:52:36+00:00
And speediots' data free claims don't ever honestly talk about how they're totally okay with letting thousands of people die every year so they can save a few seconds that they're just going to waste posting their self-centered opinions to Hacker News.

There's no ethical justification for speeding--you're just okay with being unethical if it allows you to not have to learn patience.
by tw04 | 2026-03-04 04:53:19+00:00
Reminder, Larry “citizens shouldn’t get any privacy” Ellison now owns tik tok. If you’re still using it or have friends and family using it you should stop immediately. It WILL eventually be used against you if this regime gets its way.

https://digitaldemocracynow.org/2025/03/22/the-troubling-imp...
by akssassin907 | 2026-03-04 04:55:00+00:00
The frozen-in-time thing is real but I've been running agents with persistent memory files that get written back between sessions and it genuinely changes behavior in ways that feel less "snapshot" and more continuous. It's a hack — you're manually approximating what the hippocampus does — but it works better than I expected.

The actual hard problem isn't the static weights, it's recall. Even with huge context windows the model starts "forgetting" things buried deep. If GPT-5.4's 2M window actually has solid recall that's the more interesting story than the size.
by ux266478 | 2026-03-04 04:55:01+00:00
I'm almost certain we will live to see "they can't fine all of us" get torn to shreds in real time as government language models patrol the 'net for software projects that lack an age verification call.

Why, we could even see a legal requirement for code repositories to run one themselves, constantly scanning for compliance. That way the compute cost is offloaded properly on the citizenry :)
by pinkmuffinere | 2026-03-04 04:58:11+00:00
Coincidentally similar story, but with a different end -- I eliminated a test station from the final assembly line for Astro (Amazon's home robot), because there were no unique failure modes that the test station could catch (we collected ideas, and then went through and analyzed every failure mode suggested). I think we estimated that was ~$1 million savings, in addition to simplifying the workflow and reducing time spent to do final testing. I brought this up with my manager when pushing for a promo, but he told me "somebody else made that value, you just stopped it from being thrown away", lol. Maybe I should have pushed harder, but I definitely felt underappreciated, and am still not sure if I could have gotten better recognition for it.

Don't feel sorry for me though, they still paid me well enough, and I'm happily doing my own stuff now :)
by zozbot234 | 2026-03-04 04:59:43+00:00
This is correct, with the proviso that the meaning of the claim/statement depends on the definitions and checking these can be a bit tedious. But still feasible, and better by orders of magnitude than "checking" the proofs. Abuses of notation and just plain sloppiness are a big issue though if you wish to auto-translate an informal development into correct definitions and statements for formalization.
by anrikus | 2026-03-04 05:01:14+00:00
My team at Microsoft AI Security is looking for a Principal AI Safety and Security Engineer to secure systems from XPIA, distillation attacks, agentic exploit chains, psychological, societal, and systemic harms, basically the entire shebang.

We’re building detection, threat intelligence, and incident response systems that protect users through the full spectrum. This is a hands-on technical leadership role for an engineer who loves to dig into existential problems and build solutions at the edge. You'll develop infrastructure that uses metacognition and mechanistic interpretability to catch attacks and emergent harmful behavior at scale; mature company-wide AI observability; shape the systems our threat hunters and forensic analysts use to trace sophisticated adversaries in massive, noisy datasets; partner closely with applied scientists to enable state-of-the-art ML techniques; ship robust mitigations to indirect prompt injection attacks; and more.

Looking for someone obsessed with how AI systems work, can reason about them with statistically sound evidence, systematically break them at scale and then fix them, lead through ideas and code, and take the lead in preventing harm at the scale for Microsoft and the open source community.

Linkedin Post from the hiring manager: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mdressman_principal-software-...
by rdiddly | 2026-03-04 05:01:45+00:00
"The situation is made more complex because TikTok has long faced accusations that ties to the Chinese state may put users' data at risk."

And yet, it's even more complex than that, since it's now owned by cronies of the current US President. I've never had a TikTok account, but conceptually I was mostly pretty okay with being spied-upon by China. I'm never going to China.
by themafia | 2026-03-04 05:01:50+00:00
> while actually helping parents with their issues.

> that parents will set up the device for their kids

Are the devices parents are currently setting up lacking these controls? Is there no third party software which can achieve this?

Then why is it a crime with an associated fine for me to provide an OS which does not have one? How have I failed to "help parents with their issues?"
by bombela | 2026-03-04 05:02:38+00:00
To everybody trying to justify apple not offering a wwan option.

On Thinkpad you can add the module later. It's a simple upgrade, open up the laptop and plug in the wwan module. The Thinkpad already comes with a sim tray. Though today presumably you would use an esim.

But hey you can pick a color for your macbook, so that's something.

Extra rant: the hardware quality of modern MacBook is fantastic. The keyboard sucks. The reflective screen sucks. The number of ports is ridiculously small. Soldered ssd and ram etc etc. Fantastic battery life. My thinkpad is a turd in comparison. But at least it doesn't bend when dropped. MacOS is horrible, Linux is the only thing I want. Sleep on modern PC is broken by design. A MacBook sleeping loses 1% of battery per day. A thinkpad loses 100%. Why can't we have nice things god dammit.
by pothamk | 2026-03-04 05:02:58+00:00
The core tension here isn’t really about encryption itself, it’s about moderation models.

Most large platforms rely heavily on server-side visibility for abuse detection, spam filtering, recommendation systems, and safety tooling. End-to-end encryption removes that visibility by design. Once a platform is built around centralized analysis of user content, adding strong E2EE later isn’t just a feature toggle — it conflicts with large parts of the existing architecture.
by tamimio | 2026-03-04 05:03:09+00:00
The only speculation part is the timing, the rest are facts, only a naive will think a smart phone is ever private or anonymous. Your phone has a unique ID tied to the hardware that can ID you, your cell modem isn’t open source and is equipped with builtin high accuracy GNSS, plus other hardware and its non open drivers that can be exploited, among many attack vectors that are easily exploited on modern smartphones. This issue isn’t unique to phones too, many modern laptops are also part of it, TPM and plenty of hardware that aren’t really open, the only exception is a laptop can be used in an air gapped environment, not really the case with a smartphone, because assuming you managed to do so, it defeated its purpose to start with.

The conclusion here is if you are after anonymity then you should ditch your phone entirely, having a “secure OS” won’t provide such goal but it might bring more attention to you than using of-the-shelf average phone.
by RulerOf | 2026-03-04 05:03:32+00:00
> I'm personally on the old 30" 16:10 2560x1600 form factor

I sorta wish that form factor had taken off instead of 27" 1440p. The extra vertical space is really nice, and that seems to be the ideal PPI for 100% scaling IMHO.

I keep telling myself I'd like to get a 4K OLED display at the same PPI, but 40" seems to be conspicuously missing in every monitor lineup... at least at a price that will convince me to buy three of them, anyway.
by Duanemclemore | 2026-03-04 05:04:25+00:00
Great article. Where my mind goes as a counterpoint that proves the point is the famous Bill Atkinson lore about -2000 lines of code[0].

As a practicing architect (of buildings) I had a special fondness of working on minimalist projects. Buildings are a complex problem space. You typically can't design out unnecessary complexity entirely. So you have to work backward from goals (the finished condition) to infrastructure (the building structure) to figure out how to make the end product look like almost nothing (Mies's "beinahe nichts").

That's all to say that "complexity impresses" as the article says, but the discerning understand that simplicity can be even more impressive.

It also puts me in the frame of mind of another famous one - Fred Brooks's "No Silver Bullet" [1] and the idea of essential vs. accidental complexity. Or as I like to think of it in a slightly more nuanced way - not necessarily "accidental" but at least "incidental."

[0] https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

[1] https://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks_1986_-_No_Silver_Bullet.p...
by bruce511 | 2026-03-04 05:04:49+00:00
While the post seems simple, it's arguably complex, as the comments here point out.

Simple solutions are good enough some of the time, perhaps even most of the time, but often fall down with edge cases. But edge cases add up, and dealing with them is complicated.

For example, calculating pay for hourly paid workers is a "simple" problem. Deduct start time from end time and multiply by rate. Covers 90% of the workforce.

But the other 10% take much more work. That team that rotates an on-call worker (which earms an allowance), who gets a call (first hour is free, next is double time etc.)

So it is with software. Adding 2 numbers is trivial. But what about overflows? What about underflows? What if one number is infinity? What if it's i?

The simple solution is "just add, ignore edge cases". The complex solution handles the edge cases. Which is better in the long run?
by rixed | 2026-03-04 05:05:03+00:00
Let's pretend for a moment that age verification has anything to do with protecting kids.

If we agree that nobody should be viewing porn because it makes us worse human beings, then maybe we should be wondering why producing it is permitted in the first place?

I have no definitive opinion on the topic, like everyone I am torn between desire for individual freedom and desire for effective collective measures. I wish I lived in a world in which we could regularly and scientifically assess the costs and benefits and just enact policies accordingly.
by danpalmer | 2026-03-04 05:05:35+00:00
This is true, I think there's also quite a lot of folks sticking their head in the sand about complexity. Software should be as simple as possible _but no simpler_, yet I see a lot of people floating "simple" solutions that don't actually meet the requirements. By all means be skeptical of requirements, but disregarding them without any work to remove them, is just bad engineering.
by Ostrogoth | 2026-03-04 05:05:50+00:00
Having grown up in churches that began to embrace NAR tenets in the 90s-00s, this particular eschatology gained a foothold across a wide swath of denominations from non-denom/charismatic/baptist all the way to methodist/CoC. In my experience it’s less a retreat from society, and more of a particular strain of religious fundamentalism that seeks to draw a line in the sand against “secular” culture. Most NAR organizations are lead by a “prophet” or leader who followers believe directly hears from God (aka a new apostle). A predominant theme among NAR churches is increasing christian influence in government (i.e. “7 Mountain Mandate” for example). I also recently learned about catholic integralism, which shares similar dominionist goals with NAR, and has gained momentum in the US.
Ask HN: Who's hiring but companies that don't have AI mandates?
by ares623 | 2026-03-04 05:07:33+00:00
I'm looking for companies that don't have AI mandates.

I suppose this can be interpreted in two ways:

- no mandate that forces the use of AI (employees are free to use them or not at their discretion and team dynamics)

- or the opposite, a mandate to enforce that AI should not be used (I suspect this will be even rarer?)
by neya | 2026-03-04 05:07:47+00:00
Ok, some of the stuff - like calling out the community for NPC behaviour (aggressively), I wasn't aware was in the guidelines, but it totally makes sense. Won't happen again. The Ars Technica one? Screw them. That's on me. But, like you said, I do owe it to the community to not turn it into a reddit thread, so, I will be mindful next time. Thanks, dang.
by ethbr1 | 2026-03-04 05:08:01+00:00
It basically boils down to: (a) 90s web developers tended not to have computer science backgrounds and weren't aware of fundamentals -> (b) when js frameworks exploded in popularity and diversity in the 00s, there was much wheel reinventing, because those developers (and to a lesser degree framework inventors) were often ignorant of wheels -> (c) there are persistent, fundamental mistakes* in the web ecosystem that could have been fixed at the start if anyone with experience had been asked.

All of those people are now the vibe coders of the 20s, and it's going to end up in the same dumpster fire of 'Who knew it might be a good idea to cryptographically sign and control library packages in a public repository?'

* Note: I'm distinguishing things going sideways despite best intentions and careful planning from YOLO + 'Oops, how could that possibly have happened?' shit
by debazel | 2026-03-04 05:08:31+00:00
Children are just too effect of a tool when building a surveillance state. We should have banned children from owning open computers a long time ago just like we do with Alcohol, Driving licenses, etc.

Instead children would own special devices that are locked down and tagged with a "underage" flag when interacting with online services, while adults could continue as normal. We already heavily restrict the freedom of children so there is plenty of precedent for this. Optionally we could provide service points to unlock devices when they turn 18 to avoid E-waste as well.

This way it's the point of sale where you provide your ID, instead of attaching it to the hardware itself and sending it out to every single SaaS on the planet to do what they wish.