MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by phs318u | 2026-03-11 20:57:19+00:00
What’s interesting to me is the number of commenters here making a case of the form “use your own words; grammar and spelling are not that important; we’ll know what you mean”, and yet it’s often the case that different discussions will often contain pedants going off-topic correcting someone else’s use of language.

Re-reading the HN guidelines, each seems individually reasonable, yet collectively I’m worried that they create an environment where we can take issue with almost anyone’s comments (as per Cardinal Richelieu’s famous quote: “Give me six lines written by the most honorable person alive, and I shall find enough in them to condemn them to the gallows.”)

Really, all the rules can be compressed into one dictum: don’t be an arsehole. And yet the free speech absolutists will rail against the infringement upon their right to be an arsehole. So where does that leave us? Too many rules leads to suppression of even reasonable speech, while too few leads to a “flight” of reasonable speech. End result: enshitification.
by craftkiller | 2026-03-11 20:57:22+00:00
My rebuilds fail all the time, but that's self-inflicted. I build my whole system from source with the nix binary cache disabled and optimizations for my processor enabled, so it seems like every update I have multiple failures which range from transient issues like GNU's savannah being down to persistent issues like software suddenly not compiling with -march znver4.

Reading the blog, they complain about compile times, which makes me wonder if their issues are similarly self-inflicted. The average user shouldn't need to compile software due to the nix binary cache. So they must have been either modifying packages or enabling optimizations.
by scottlamb | 2026-03-11 20:57:27+00:00
I can relate to setting an arbitrary challenge for myself. fwiw, don't know where you draw the line of an architectural change, but I think that switching AoS -> SoA may actually be an approachably-sized mechanical refactor, and then taking advantage of it to SIMDify object lists can be done incrementally.

The value of course is contingent on there being a decent number of objects of a given type in the list rather than just a huge number of rays being sent to a small number of objects; I didn't evaluate that. If it's the other way around, the structure would be better flipped, and I don't know how reasonable that is with bounces (that maybe then aren't all being evaluated against the same objects?).
by rincebrain | 2026-03-11 20:57:39+00:00
I think the reason for that is less that they didn't want to do it and more that they hadn't polished the mechanisms for it.

I've said before that the analogue for these sorts of games is arcade games - where you had to put in currency per unit time of enjoyment, and they had to try to guesstimate play time versus amount they're willing to pay for it and then would go in person to "test" arcades with early versions of games to see if they were wrong.

The internet reduced that feedback cycle to minutes, so we speedran evolution on it.

TBH, I don't see monthly fee games as even in the same category of concern - at least, not in a vacuum. Games with microtransactions, yes, absolutely, but that's true whether it's nominally a pay-once game or not, I think.

I said in another comment, I don't hate the idea of allowing microtransaction/gambling-style mechanics in games as long as they can't involve real currency on either side, if children are the market - not because I think it's great for kids, but because I think you're not going to manage to ban everything that's the same addictive "shape" as those, and allowing people to be exposed to that in a venue they care about, but with foam sword padding so you can't blow actual money on it, is probably a reasonable risk/reward balance.

(You might reasonably argue that this is just going to lead to kids being primed for addictive behaviors as adults, but the only thing that's going to help that is being mindful about it, e.g. education, and nothing short of people the kids respect reinforcing that is going to change that whether the games allow this sort of soft pain or not...and being exposed to something like Vegas naive or primed is going to, I think, have the same outcomes either way if you're not mindful about it.)
by jsbisviewtiful | 2026-03-11 20:57:54+00:00
My household just bought The Brick to start taking control of our phones and online usage. We've been very online for 15+ years but are hoping to break the addiction cycle by simply blocking our devices from access. The timing feels right, mostly because sites like Instagram and Reddit are too braindead and spam+ad heavy these days. The executives and shareholders' desire for profits have already killed two of my biggest online pastimes.
by jimsrand | 2026-03-11 20:57:58+00:00
Definitely still a need for this product. We built an "audio slack" app with some similarities to this a decade ago and it was too early at that time for various reasons. But there's definitely a need for it and now the AI capabilities are far better than what we were working with back then. Good timing.

At some point I suspect you'll want offline functionality / on-device for some aspects of it. Would be interested to chat if you do. Look us up at switchboard.audio -- we are now building dev tools for applications like yours.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-03-11 20:58:01+00:00
Are you seriously attempting to imply that Nature retractions aren't few and far between?

What's even your point here? Hopefully we are at least in agreement that Nature is seen as prestigious and worth looking through precisely because of the sort of content that they publish. Diluting that would dilute their very nature. (Bad pun very much intended sorry I just couldn't resist.)
by dormento | 2026-03-11 20:58:01+00:00
Kind of a drag isn't it? I want to learn a new language.... but why would I, since we'll have an earpiece or glasses or whathaveyou that translates in realtime. I want to learn to play an instrument, but why would I, since we have sonos? I would like to go back to drawing, but why, when the importance people ascribe to art is at an all time low? Makes me depressed jsut to think about it.
by fidorka | 2026-03-11 20:58:23+00:00
To confess something I built just today a little cron that monitors HN for posts I might find interesting, pulls in some context about me, and proposes a reply. Just to help me find relevant posts and to kick start my thinking if I want to engage.

Today it flagged a post about an AI tool for HN and suggested I reply with:

"honestly, if you need an AI to sift through hn, you might be missing the point—this place is about the human touch. but hey, maybe it'll help some folks who just can't take the noise anymore."

So my AI, which I built specifically to sift through HN for me, is telling me to go flame someone else for doing that.

No deeper point here. I just thought it was really funny.
by mschuster91 | 2026-03-11 20:58:27+00:00
> But...even then, Tim Cook is CEO still, and he is a supply chain guy, so you better believe this is top of his list when it comes to their product lineup. You don't increase operational complexity for no reason, because that is where the cost for every product lies for them, it's not just dealing with silicon binning.

Sure... but when looking at sales numbers, HP and Apple are tied by monthly sales volume on Amazon [1], with everyone else being widely behind them. But HP has almost 300 models, Apple much, much less - and Apple can react much, much faster because they almost directly run the production sites and mostly sell themselves, so they can produce an initial run of products and whenever a store or a region runs out of one specific variant, they just tell Foxconn to, say, instead of making a run with black casings they now make a day worth of gray casings, ship that onto a plane and that's it. HP, Dell et al? Their inventory gets distributed by an intricate web of middlemen who all need buffer.

[1] https://laptopmedia.com/highlights/august-2025-best-selling-...
by Imnimo | 2026-03-11 20:58:34+00:00
>What we’re learning from this episode is that the government actually has way more leverage over private companies than we realized.

Who is learning this for the first time only now? Even just restricting ourselves to the current administration, look at how many times Trump has directed punitive actions against private entities! Look at his actions against law firms like Perkins Coie or Covington & Burling. This is not something that just arose out of nowhere with Anthropic.
by caconym_ | 2026-03-11 20:58:42+00:00
What is the value of this "output"? If I want to know what LLMs think about something, I can go ask an LLM any question I want. For a comment on [a site like] HN, either the substantive content of the comment originated inside a human mind, or there is no substantive content that I couldn't reproduce by feeding the comment's context into an LLM. At the extreme, I don't have any interest in reading or participating in a conversation between a bunch of LLMs.
by djhn | 2026-03-11 20:58:52+00:00
The demand for authorised translators (approved in country X to correctly translate into country X’s native language from a particular language) has been steadily growing with globalisation and international trade. Contracts, court documents, financial records, medical records, birth and death certificates, technical reports: all of these must be translated and stamped by someone with the authority to do so, someone the government has confirmed to be competent.

The professional guilds are sounding the alarms, because there aren’t enough translators qualifying.
by arrsingh | 2026-03-11 20:59:00+00:00
There should be a "flag as AI" link in addition to "flag" and then a setting for people to show flagged as AI. Once the flagged as AI reaches a certain threshold then it disappears unless you enable "Show AI".

Maybe once enough posts have been flagged like that then that corpus could be used to train an AI to automatically detect content generated by AI.

That would be cool.

Maybe the HN site wouldn't add this feature but if someone wrote a client then maybe it could be added there.
by MisterTea | 2026-03-11 20:59:07+00:00
This was the point I made in another comment here. My bet is the US deployed the weapon and accidentally sickened their own people. So of course they play stupid and deny that any such tech could exist.

Though the Russians have been very clever in the past stumping the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
by FarmerPotato | 2026-03-11 20:59:28+00:00
The precision in tolerance over the years is truly breathtaking.

It speaks to Ole Kirk Christiansen's impossible standards: "Even the best is not good enough" (Det Bedste Er Ikke For Godt.) (usually translated "Only the best is good enough.")

Much more strenuous in Danish than the usual quoted translation! but I know some Danish, and most of all that's how Kjeld Kirk Christiansen explained it to an American audience at Brickfest 2003 (IIRC the year).

As I commented elsewhere, it's not 60 years. Sure, the outer dimensions have not changed and are very strict metric Lego Units. [1] But there have been continual improvement that render old and new less than wonderful to use together. You don't really want to mix 70s-early 80s bricks.

Conversely, if you're reselling those old sets, you need to find vintage pieces (though also Lego would use up older pieces and begin to use newer ones in that set)

But bricks from the mature design of the 80s even didn't age so well (clutch too hard, walls can warp), and there have been many improvements to the interior of a brick. All for sound engineering reasons. Thinner walls and internal voids to prevent warp, subtle changes to fine-tune clutch power.

It's a story of continual improvement, but it makes the old bricks seem less wonderful.

Weird thing Lego started to advertise in the 2000s: Lego bricks reach the proper clutch power after 7 insertions! I guess you have to stress-work the new plastic...

[1] I've used a micrometer on pieces of various age and can't get a difference from the outside. Doesn't help that they compress under measuring.
by gabriel666smith | 2026-03-11 20:59:30+00:00
Quite! It's very easy to send a HN link to one of our new artificial friends to see what they have to say about it. Subsequently publicly posting the inference variation you receive strikes me as very self-centered. Passing it off as your own words - which the majority seem to - is doubly bizarre.

It's very funny to imagine people prompting: "Write a compelling comment, for me, to pass off as my thoughts, for this HN news thread, which will attract both upvotes and engagement.".

In good faith, per the guidelines: What losers!
by bonoboTP | 2026-03-11 20:59:33+00:00
There is a sliding scale from that, to it being the LLM that communicates, not the person. LLMs can really reshuffle and change priorities and modify emphasis in a text. All the missing pieces will be filled in and rounded out and sandpapered off by the inner-average-corporate-HR-Redditor of the LLM.
by lowsong | 2026-03-11 20:59:57+00:00
It's not even as simple as "views as replaceable". It's pure economics. It's someone looking at a spreadsheet going "We spent a lot of money on SWE salaries, our financial results look better if we fire some of them. Is there a cheaper option?"

From that perspective, yes some management view SWE as replaceable. My argument is that all attempts to actually implement that have failed to date, and the most successful financial companies are staffed by upper management who know that to remove much of the SWE staff would doom the company in the medium term.

It's a move of either desperation ("we'll go bankrupt if we don't do this"), or short-sightedness ("if I cut 40% of headcount, our P&L will be better, which will result in better quarterly results, which is likely to increase share price, which gives me a bigger performance bonus. Who cares what happens after that."), or a lack of experience in managing software companies and watching this play out before.

AI, even if it lives up the hype, is no different.
by cjcjameson | 2026-03-11 21:00:04+00:00
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by nbf_1995 | 2026-03-11 21:00:21+00:00
I think this is a mostly fair criticism of nixos. Nixos has a lot of powerful tools, but if you don't need them, they can get in the way. Some assorted notes:

> unless you run nix-collect-garbage periodically

nix.gc.automatic = true;
nix.gc.options = "--delete-older-than 10d";

> the constant cycle of rebuild → fix → rebuild → fix → rebuild

I've found this useful to eliminate the rebuild loop:
https://kokada.dev/blog/quick-bits-realise-nix-symlinks/
It lets you make the config of the program you choose a regular mutable file instead of a symlink so you can quickly iterate and test changes.

> In contrast, Arch Linux simply downloads prebuilt binaries via pacman or an AUR helper

If a binary exists. A lot of AUR packages I used to rely on didn't have a binary package (or the binary package was out of date) and would have to build from source. On nixos my machines are set up to use distributed builds (https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/Distributed_build). Packages that do need built from source get built on my server downstairs. The server also runs a reverse proxy cache so I only need to download packages once per version.

Distributed AUR builds are possible on arch, but they require a lot of setup and are still fragile like regular AUR builds, your only choice of dependencies are what's currently available in the repos.

> On my machine, regular maintenance updates without proper caching easily take 4–5+ hours

It sounds like the author may be running the unstable release channel and/or using some heavy unstable packages. Which might explain a lot of other problems the author is having too.

Back when I used arch, I found that as time went on, my system would sort of accumulate packages. I would install $package, then in the next version of $package a dependency would be added on $dep. When I updated, $dep would be installed, then eventually $package would drop the dependency on $dep, but $dep would remain installed. I would periodically have to run pacman -R $(pacman -Qtqd | tr '\n' ' ') to clear out packages that were no longer required.
by bakugo | 2026-03-11 21:00:27+00:00
Odds are it would harm real discussions more than it would harm bot spam.

The bots exist for a reason, usually to covertly advertise a product, and by themselves already cost money to run. Someone looking to astroturf their AI B2B SaaS would probably be more willing to pay $10 to post than a random user from a less wealthy country who just wants to leave a comment on an interesting discussion.
by delichon | 2026-03-11 21:00:33+00:00
I don't think I'll get agreement on this one, but I'd like for HN to use AI to add tags to comments as a reflection of the guidelines, e.g.

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

Then a comment that includes

Those lowbrow assholes deserve their fate.

would get the tags

#sneer #fulminate
by dutchCourage | 2026-03-11 21:00:33+00:00
This depends heavily on your use case. I'd get rid of Windows entirely if I could. For most people I'd say MacOS is the most sane and plug and play experience. The email/browser/note taking experience is better than on Windows, and easier than on Linux.

This gets less and less true when you start pluging peripherals and wanting to change the default behavior or use certain apps. But then they're not the target of the Neo.
by filoleg | 2026-03-11 21:00:34+00:00
To answer your question: LLMs don't have free speech, because they aren't companies/businesses, they are a tool (that is used by companies/businesses).

Whether a company/business uses an LLM or a real human to write a particular piece of text, it is entitled to free speech on the basis of the company signing off on it. Not on the basis of how that piece of writing was produced.
by gr8tyeah | 2026-03-11 21:00:38+00:00
I pay for my ISP and the financial institution the money comes from has age verification

Social media, HN and the rest of internet first business can go broke

I don't see anyone out there propping me up directly. Why would I give crap if some open source hacker or etsy dealer doesn't have a home next month? Yeah I don't because they're not caring in the same way

Thoughts and prayers everyone else but your effort is clear, not going to be 1984'd into caring for people who clearly don't care back.
by zer00eyz | 2026-03-11 21:00:47+00:00
> But within 20 years, 99% of the workforce in the military, the government, and the private sector will be AIs.

I haven't seen this much hype and hopium since the dot com boom. The whole open AI -> Anthropic saga just reeks of the same evolution of Viant/Scient.

Look we have an amazing tool, but it has some fundamental shortcomings that the industry seems to want to burry its head in the sand about. The moment the hype dies and we get to engineering and practical implementations a lot is going to change. Does it have the potential to displace a lot of our current industry: why yes it does. Agents can force the web open (have you ever tried to get all your amazon purchase history?) can kill dark patterns (go cancel this service for me), and crush wedge services (how many things are shimmed into sales force that should really be stand alone apps). And the valuable engagement is going to be by PEOPLE, good UI, good user experiences are gonna be what sells (this will hit internet advertising hard for the middle men like google and Facebook).
by Teever | 2026-03-11 21:01:00+00:00
Maybe you have it backwards?

Why do you need to communicate in English with us native English speakers? Why don't we need to learn your language to communicate with you?

The way I'm looking at it is that you're putting all this e ffort forward in learning how to communicate with people who would never without an outside pressure do the same for you.

If language learning is intrinsically a positive thing what can we do to encourage it in native speakers of English, specifically Americans who are monolingual (as they dominate this website)?
by ticulatedspline | 2026-03-11 21:01:08+00:00
Dunnow, everyone is in a bubble of some sorts. I'm online a good bit but rarely on my phone, If I'm away from my desk I'm offline. My social circle is similar so I would naturally have bias for what I experience.

Year or so ago I took an Uber and was mesmerized by the driver. He had his phone up mounted on the left and was pretty constantly interacting with it. Checking for new rides, watching a video, checking facebook. It was quite impressive how much content he consumed while at a red light and how dexterously he navigated to and through like 10 different apps.

I very much got the feeling that this was a person that was terminally online and suspected that he's not alone. A bit alienating really, living in the same country speaking the same language but realizing there's this huge cultural/behavior divide between us.
by fluffybucktsnek | 2026-03-11 21:01:42+00:00
Dare I say, it is mostly your bias. I get not wanting to read raw or poorly reviewed LLM slop, but AI-edited comments? I thought the point was about having interesting discussions about unique ideas we come up with, not the surpeficial wording around it. If someone manages to keep the core of their idea mostly intact while making the presentation more readable, does it really matter that it was post-processed by an AI?
by crooked-v | 2026-03-11 21:02:11+00:00
The Creator 3-in-1 sets are basically what you're looking for, they just don't get advertised much. A lot of them are more generified and rebuildable, sometimes even more refined versions of more expensive sets or parts of more expensive sets. Maybe the most obvious are the 3-in-1 dragon and dinosaur sets, which to me feel obviously like more generic reworks of D&D and Jurassic Park builds.
by halyconWays | 2026-03-11 21:02:29+00:00
That should disqualify them from ever being taken seriously on anything. Would you trust water from a well that was once poisoned? Even if you scrubbed every inch with soap and water, wouldn't there still be some residue that you'd rather not ingest? And I don't think people's inner selves can actually be cleaned, nor do they even want to, usually.
by Karrot_Kream | 2026-03-11 21:02:30+00:00
In my experience every English-language online forum not rooted in some project or community external to the forum (e.g. an open source project's forum or a local club's forum) devolves into anger, cynicism, and American political partisanship. I suspect that the people who like discussing these feelings are more numerous than the spaces that want to discuss them and so any open forum fills up with their posts. Lobste.rs's unique rules and moderation culture results in a particular manifestation of symptoms but the disease is the same.