MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by satisfice | 2026-03-07 20:10:48+00:00
I was on Compuserve and Usenet, both of which were no more difficult to use than Reddit. That was in the late eighties.

In 1986 I ran a FIDO server, which is like what the Fediverse is now, I guess. I had, maybe, 50 users?

I know how things used to be.
by yawaramin | 2026-03-07 20:10:54+00:00
Yeah but the problem is that people don't just use a single webapp all the time. We all browse and go to many different websites, which all have payloads that they want us to download and run. So in practice it ends up that we're re-downloading bundles constantly, many of them which have the exact same libraries, but because they're bundled and minified, they're not cacheable so we have to fetch them over and over again.

Don't believe me? Check this out: https://tonsky.me/blog/js-bloat/
by 2god3 | 2026-03-07 20:10:54+00:00
You’re writing novels when if you had something compelling to show it’d be simple and easy.

If you can’t make it simple and easy… then you haven’t understood it at all. All geniuses refer to this as the standard by which one understands something. Whether it’s Steve Jobs or Einstein. So don’t get mad. Show us all how simple and easy it is. If you can’t.. then accept you’re full of it and don’t quite get it as well as you claim. Not rocket science is it?

But here we are. And actually my project is going to create the future. You’re a bozo programmer who creates the future that others already see. Know your role and don’t speak for others like me who are in the position of choosing who gets hired.
by phil21 | 2026-03-07 20:11:32+00:00
Back in around 2012 or so, some friends and I decided to book a canal house in Amsterdam to all pitch in together and live there for about 2 months. Celebrating a few coinciding life achievements before moving onto the next phase of adult life sort of thing.

I worked remotely, so planned to simply do work for half the time I was there. As such, I brought a proper monitor, keyboard, etc. with me.

As I have my 20" boxed up LCD panel in my arms in the immigration/customs line at Schipol, a Dutch immigration officer comes up and asks me what the monitor is for. I of course like an idiot said "staying here for a couple months for a vacation, but I plan to work some while I'm here!". I got infinitely lucky with the officer in question - she very quickly told me I was incorrect and that the monitor was to play video games and that's what I was going to tell the immigration officer at the passport desk.

One of those early lessons learned that I'm sure looking young, naive, and stupid helped me in a way that I could not get away with in my mid-40's these days.
by ogig | 2026-03-07 20:11:51+00:00
All of those. Applied to urban development; It analyzes GIS layers, validates and extracts data that will be used in text reports, huge time saving mechanical extraction, before it was a bunch of manual steps on each project. I used it to develop a heavy GIS application that hubs many public data providers. And It does help us create the maps/visualizations from that data, again a sort of mechanical transformation. None of these are groundbreaking, but we you stack all of them you end with big time savings.
by fdsjgfklsfd | 2026-03-07 20:12:18+00:00
The Constitution and Founding Fathers are pretty great compared to what we have now.

"At this point, Elbridge Gerry objected to Butler’s earlier-raised proposition that the clause be shifted to a presidential power. Gerry remarked that he never expected to hear in a republic a motion to empower the Executive alone to declare war."

"What is called a republic is not any particular form of government. It is wholly characteristical of the purport, matter or object for which government ought to be instituted, and on which it is to be employed … in this sense it is naturally opposed to the word monarchy, which … means arbitrary power in an individual person; in the exercise of which, himself, and not the res-publica, is the object."
by petre | 2026-03-07 20:12:39+00:00
Not really, they missed that chance when they released Load and Reload and who knows what they did after that. I got fed up with their foray into commercial music and moved on to prog metal and other more interesting stuff. If they had stopped after the black album or continued to release quality works, then things would be different, but they chose money, whining, lawyers and drunk teenagers as an audience. They became lame and popular, which excludes being a cult band. Cult bands are not very popular in fact, as you have yourself pointed out.
by jackp96 | 2026-03-07 20:13:55+00:00
Not OP, but my understanding is that voting for politicians who prioritize more sustainable policies and advocating for industry regulation to cut down on things like single-use plastics (or promoting EV use/infrastructure build outs) has a much bigger impact than recycling or not flying.

I (unfortunately) just don't think it's pragmatic/reasonable to expect enough people to make personal sacrifices/reduce QOL to make a dent. It's a tragedy of the commons, and we need some form of reasonable regulation to cut down on the worst offenders (probably carbon taxes) while we invest heavily in improving the technology so it makes financial sense to switch.

Renewables have come so far in the past decade and are now competitive with fossil fuels in terms of pricing. As the technology continues to become more efficient and cheaper, we'll likely start to see significant drops in emissions in addition to cheaper energy.*

*Assuming the US elects a rational adult to the presidency in 2028.
by jitl | 2026-03-07 20:14:31+00:00
tv ui favors larger elements and longer transitions to make focus & change more legible for distant viewing. at 1m-3m people have a harder time following the ui. tv browsing is also much more frequently a group activity, where one person is pushing buttons and so knows what transition will happen, but others on the couch need to follow the activity too. different modality & ui priority compared to phone or desktop which are much closer to the face and much more personal/single player.
by antoniojtorres | 2026-03-07 20:14:39+00:00
Got it a few years ago. In my 30s as well. God how it used to bother me, i’d have the whitest noises to the point where it depressed how loud it all was, white noise included.

Went to the doctor, did all those rounds. Once I saw the endemic existence of CBT and other psychotherapies as treatment it dawned on me that I might have to reconsider my relationship with this.

In reality I just got used to it and live with it. I have a tiny white noise sound that is always on my headphones while i work that is just enough and that covers me most of the day, but honestly even if I sit in an electric car that is fully stopped and it’s as loud as it’s gonna be, I notice it, absolutely, but it doesn’t really cause distress anymore.
by nativeit | 2026-03-07 20:15:43+00:00
To be less of a cynical idgit, here's some cool future tech that does work--not great, I imagine, but getting better and could certainly be employed to keep the sounds you emit localized to a single point (controlling/defining the point might be tricky, and would require the listener to stay stock-still):

‘Audible enclaves’ could enable private listening without headphones - https://www.psu.edu/news/engineering/story/audible-enclaves-...
by tliltocatl | 2026-03-07 20:16:02+00:00
Yes, but at what cost? 99% of fork calls are immediately followed by exec(), but now every kernel object need to handle being forked. And a great deal of memory-management housekeeping is done only to be discarded afterward. And it doesn't work at all for AMP systems (which we will have to deal with, sooner or latter).

In 1970 it might have been the only way to provide a flexible API, but nowadays we have a great variety of extensible serialization formats better than "struct".
by cortesoft | 2026-03-07 20:16:07+00:00
The analogy makes sense. Some people love riding snowmobiles, some people love cross country skiing, and some people love both. It makes sense that some of the people who love snowmobiling think cross country skiing is boring and tedious, and some people who love cross country skiing think snow mobiles are loud and obnoxious.

I don't think people are confused why there are the different types of people who like different winter sports, but people seem shocked that opinions differ on the enjoyment of using an LLM
by ginko | 2026-03-07 20:16:35+00:00
Honestly I find the impact of the Columbian exchange on cuisine of the old world overblown. Tomatoes potatoes and corn a sure are great, but you can do without them. Italian cuisine was different but most of the modern elements were in place. I'd say the role of tomatoes in Italian cooking isn't as big as people make it out to be.

On the other hand it's almost impossible to imagine what food was like in the Americas before Columbus. No wheat, no pork/beef/chicken, no dairy, no onions, no cabbage, no oranges/apples/figs, any citrus and much much more.
by dmix | 2026-03-07 20:16:38+00:00
Almost every software engineer seems to agree on that point. Not believing marketing hype is standard practice in this industry because plenty of us are inherently techno-optimists who have been burned by over-belief in the past.

Regardless it is hard to dismiss the fact AI is making it easier for randoms to develop software. And it will keep getting better the more integrated and controlled it gets.
by theptip | 2026-03-07 20:17:15+00:00
This is what terrifies me about the public school system. A revolution has occurred, but it’s unevenly distributed.

The schools simply don’t have the flexibility, agility, or frankly it seems motivation to adapt to what has already happened.

The ship has sailed; essay writing is no longer a viable form of assessment.

The idea to try to build a reliable AI detector is asinine, and fundamentally misunderstands how any of this works now, let alone the very obvious trend-lines.

Stop with the lazy half-baked solutions, get your head out of the sand, rethink the whole curriculum. This is an emergency, we needed to be urgently attending to this years ago.
by bjourne | 2026-03-07 20:17:17+00:00
Actually, I used fewer words. I don't think you understand what the authors are doing. They are modeling temperature T per year as a sum of four terms: T = E + S + V + R---(E)l Nino, (S)solar irradiance, (V)olcanic activity, and (R)emaining factors. Then they subtract E, S, and V. Then they show that R fits a super-linear curve. Why there would be no "statistically valid way" to do this is beyond me, the authors, and the article's peer reviewers. If this is "bad methodology", lodge your complaints on https://pubpeer.com/.
by hyperhello | 2026-03-07 20:18:13+00:00
If you look at a schedule of sunrise and sunset, there is no reasonable hour for school kids to walk in the daylight year-round. So your choice is to either let them walk in the dark in winter; not let them walk at all; change school hours seasonally; or change all hours seasonally.

It’s not clear that daylight savings is the least reasonable solution. And there is no fundamental reason to me that the time has to be the same in two different states. Wanting to live with the hobgoblin of consistency does not make your plan correct.
by lysace | 2026-03-07 20:18:25+00:00
It also allows the other person to take their time to understand and reply. They can use online translation tools etc.

(Edit: Now that I read this: I should try writing e.g. Chinese using these tools, next time, instead of defaulting to English. My mother language isn't English, but it's pretty close, comparatively speaking.)

A pattern I often end up with when there is a large language barrier: begin with long async messages that take a minute or two to write. End up with brief sync-ish messages as things get more detailed and we share more context.
by Bratmon | 2026-03-07 20:19:29+00:00
I'm curious why. To me "We updated our library to change some things in a way that's an improvement on net but only mostly backwards compatible" seems like an extremely common instinct in software development. But in an environment where people are doing that all the time, the only way to reliably deploy software is to completely freeze all your direct and indirect dependencies at an exact version. And Docker is way better at handling that than traditional Linux package managers are.

Why do you think other tools will make a comeback?
by port11 | 2026-03-07 20:20:30+00:00
> There’s never been a better time for customers to upgrade from a previous generation…

Of all the stupid things Apple has said lately, this is the most obtuse, pro-market-insulting nonsense. Intel-based Macs were knee-deep in issues Apple wasn’t fixing, and then along came the snappy and always-cool M1.

That was the best time for customers to upgrade. The new Silicon generations can be quite good, but they’re not worlds ahead in anything.

I’ll upgrade my M1 when Apple releases a macOS worthy of being used by its pro customers.
by charcircuit | 2026-03-07 20:20:40+00:00
>Learning requires studying the knowledge created by other humans.

You can learn from AI. Just because it comes from another human you doing have to socialize with that human.

>Creating requires materials and methods created by other humans.

You can AI generate these materials. And even if you don't, downloading an image or using a method from someone else does not require socialize with them.
by scoofy | 2026-03-07 20:20:48+00:00
I feel like there just something about "this thing is slightly difficult to get started using" that keeps normies out and keeps the place reasonable. It's the only way to prevent the Eternal September of a popular social network.

I felt a similar experience to this on a trip to Scotland recently. My partner and I visited Iona, and it was just amazing. I suspect it was such a pleasant experience because, while the place is about tourism, it's somehow not cliche shit. I suspect the difficult in accessing the island plays a big role.
by Buttons840 | 2026-03-07 20:21:16+00:00
Tangent:

I've noticed I write a lot different because of combative online arguments. I have a problem.

So much of my communication is directed to people who don't want to hear me or understand me. So I've become very punchy and repetitive, trying to hammer home ideas that people are either unable or unwilling to understand.

I need to find ways to talk to people who want to hear and understand me.

It's hard to find other people who actually want to hear and understand though. People have different interests, and even when people appear to be working towards the same goal, they often aren't; like a boss who just won't understand the bad news, because it's easier to ignore the problem.
Show HN: Turn an audio recording into a LinkedIn video – no signup, no server
by tonelord | 2026-03-07 20:22:06+00:00
I am working on some bigger projects and wanted to start sharing them on LinkedIn and YouTube. The problem is you can't just post audio on LinkedIn, it needs to be a video. Every tool I found for this wanted a signup or a subscription, and none of the demos looked how I wanted anyway.

So I just built one with Claude. It runs in the browser, nothing gets uploaded anywhere. It is a single HTML file. A bit janky but it does what I need.

If you are on the job market or building something new and want to share your voice without being on camera, maybe it helps you like it helps me. If you think something could be improved, reach out.

Try it here: https://ohmstone.github.io/audiogram/

Source: https://github.com/ohmstone/audiogram

Other projects: https://github.com/orgs/ohmstone/repositories
by zahlman | 2026-03-07 20:22:21+00:00
I object to the idea that the LLM writing that these students are trying to distinguish themselves from, is actually good in the first place. Although students might well end up writing worse because people are trusting the detection of LLM content to other LLMs. (And really, it's bizarre that these massively complex systems required to produce roughly human-like output, apparently offer such simplistic reasoning for what they detect as non-human.)

Honestly, I lean towards shaming educators who do that. If you can't detect the whiff of LLM with your own senses, then it has been used properly and shouldn't be faulted. If that premise invalidates your assignment, change the assignment. It's not as if you're assigning this work to test the basic mechanics of writing (grammar, sentence/paragraph structure, parallelism, whatever) — I mean, how much of that did you consciously try to teach? My recollection is, not an awful lot; and I can only imagine it's gotten worse since I was in K-12 (and I went to pretty darn good K-12).
by OldSchool | 2026-03-07 20:22:21+00:00
When Alder Lake finally made a sizable jump, I looked at decades of old tests I'd done along the way with CPUs and tried to bridge them together reasonably.

Between IPC (~50 to 100-fold improvement) and clock speed increases (1000-fold alone), I estimated that single-thread performance has increased on the order of 50,000x - 100,000x since the 4.77 MHz 8088.

In human terms this is like one minute compared to one month!
by jcynix | 2026-03-07 20:22:24+00:00
And the eye's periphery, while it isn't sharp, is highly sensitive to movement. Which is "obvious" if you ponder the question where dangerous things appear first. Thus things dangling from the rear mirror in a car are a bad thing, they need (subconscious) attention.

The cone cells in the eye's center are color sensitive, but need a lot of light, while the rod cells at the edges are highly sensitive to motion, even in low light. And that might be one of the reasons why flicker is strenuous for the eyes. Funny side effect is that looking at stars in the night sky seems to work better when you look slightly besides a star, I guess that's because then the low light parts take over.
by softwaredoug | 2026-03-07 20:22:34+00:00
Maybe I’m less worried. Teachers seem to have adopted.

In my experience educators no longer use AI detectors given the risk of false positives. But some work is obviously lazy AI content. When that happens, educators talk to the student to see if they understand what they wrote.

Teachers cope with more in person writing, oral presentations, defense of what’s been written.

If you think out it the pre-AI computing generation is itself anomalous for having ubiquitous access to efficient human-only writing tools. We probably wrote more than previous generations. Early Internet / blogging culture bears this out.
by Setas | 2026-03-07 20:22:50+00:00
Yes — I've been running this for my solo SaaS company since January. Not a side project, it's the actual business operations layer.

Similar architecture to yours but I went with specialized agents instead of a single orchestrator + sub-agent split. I have a COO agent that coordinates everything, plus dedicated agents for marketing (writes and posts tweets autonomously via scheduler), accounting (IVA/tax compliance — I'm in Portugal so this is non-trivial), CFO for pricing, CTO for architecture decisions. They share a persistent knowledge graph so context carries across sessions.

The decision tree problem @rodchalski mentions is real. My approach: agents are autonomous by default for their domain (marketing posts content without asking me), but anything cross-domain goes through the COO for coordination. The founder only handles: manual portal logins, irreversible legal filings, strategic pivots, and actual coding. Everything else just runs.

What broke: memory corruption from concurrent writes to the knowledge graph (fixed with mutex + atomic writes). Agents hallucinating product URLs that don't exist (fixed with a domain registry they must check). Content that sounded like ChatGPT wrote it, not a developer (fixed with explicit voice guidelines and a quality gate).

The hardest part isn't the AI — it's defining the boundaries clearly enough that agents don't drift. Wrote about the full setup here: https://dev.to/setas/i-run-a-solo-company-with-ai-agent-depa...
by coldtea | 2026-03-07 20:23:11+00:00
That's like someone hearing about a landmine problem with people getting their legs blown off, and saying "it's a good thing, as wings are better anyway, and they'll be able to just fly wherever they want" - when nobody is getting wings or mentioned anything about wings.

Likewise, nobody said the higher unemployment is combined with higher wages (it's combined with worse jobs and inflation), or that it indicates "more single income households able to make ends meet and live higher quality lives" (rather, family households live hand to mounth, and single with no kids still have troubles financially).

And of course there's absolutely no indication or real possibility that this will be the case.

>I’d argue in favor of deflating costs or raising wages instead of increasing labor force participation, but that’s my personal soapbox.

Why not also give everybody a free pony while at it? So they can spend all that quality time they gain from not having a job in 2026.
by neogodless | 2026-03-07 20:23:57+00:00
I think it should be ever so slightly more nuanced than that.

It doesn't matter which instance you join if you're just getting started, and don't know enough to make a meaningful decision about which instance to join.

After a week or a month, you might understand how it works a bit better, and also which communities exist, and might have an informed opinion about which community you resonate with.
by KittenInABox | 2026-03-07 20:24:34+00:00
This is the first time I heard that this is an issue where the brain isn't filtering out noise properly. This explains why I have had tinnitus, the sound of breathing, whooshing in the ears from my heartbeat, etc. audible to me for as long as I've been conscious and have never understood why everyone else seemed to be really disturbed by what I consider to be supremely normal. Except I also have a sensory processing disorder that makes my brain unable to filter input well so I also come off as sensitive to touch and able to pick up smells well. Because I grew up with all this though I have normalized it enough to function.
by GOD_Over_Djinn | 2026-03-07 20:24:49+00:00
It’s crazy how the same people that are pro-labor union are also pro-immigration. How do they not realize that immigration is used as a weapon against labor organization? Workers movements of the 20th century were well aware of this obvious fact. But I guess in this hyper polarized culture, people are scared of being labeled a bigot for having a stance on immigration that divergent from the liberal orthodoxy
by wvenable | 2026-03-07 20:25:15+00:00
Enums are for non user-configurable values.

For configurable values, obviously you use a table. But those should have an auto-integer primary key and if you need the description, join for it.

Ints are by far more the efficient way to store and query these values -- the length of the string is stored as an int and variable length values really complicate storage and access. If you think strings save space or time that is not right.
by alsetmusic | 2026-03-07 20:26:05+00:00
> The advantages of GPGPU are so obvious and unambiguous

I remember being a bit surprised when I started reading about GPUs being tasked with processes that weren't what we'd previously understood to be their role (way before I heard of CUDA). For some reason that I don't recall, I was thinking about that moment in tech just the other day.

It wasn't always obvious that the earth rotated around the sun. Or that using a mouse would be a standard for computing. Knowledge is built. We're pretty lucky to stand atop the giants who came before us.

I didn't know about CUDA until however many years ago. Definitely didn't know how early it began. Definitely didn't know there was pushback when it was introduced. Interesting stuff.