MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lich_king | 2026-03-10 15:22:06+00:00
> My question on AI generated contributions and content in general: on a long enough timeline, with ever improving advancements in AI, how can people reliably tell the difference between human and AI generated efforts?

Can you reliably tell that the contributor is truly the author of the patch and that they aren't working for a company that asserts copyright on that code? No, but it's probably still a good idea to have a policy that says "you can't do that", and you should be on the lookout for obvious violations.

It's the same story here. If you do nothing, you invite problems. If you do something, you won't stop every instance, but you're on stronger footing if it ever blows up.

Of course, the next question is whether AI-generated code that matches or surpasses human quality is even a problem. But right now, it's academic: most of the AI submissions received by open source projects are low quality. And if it improves, some projects might still have issues with it on legal (copyright) or ideological grounds, and that's their prerogative.
by HeinanCA | 2026-03-10 15:22:28+00:00
Hey HN, I'm the sole DevOps Lead for a team of 8. We fell into the classic trap of building Grafana dashboards that just polled AWS APIs until they rate-limited us into oblivion. I wrote this about how we ripped that out and moved to an entirely data-driven OpenTofu architecture where the devs just write JSON to get event-driven alerts. Would love to hear how other solo/small ops teams are handling alert delegation without falling into the concierge trap.
by caconym_ | 2026-03-10 15:22:30+00:00
It's almost as if there's nothing special or unspecial about any of these populations. Just transient cultural factors that (in addition to generally being understood in limited hindsight and through rose-tinted glasses) will inevitably erode and dissolve under sustained attack.

> lay down and crawl along and accept everything without even a whimper.

People just want to live their lives. Maybe you think you would be doing differently in their position, but until you've had a chance to prove it, I don't believe you.
by hellojesus | 2026-03-10 15:22:30+00:00
What happens when they move from default dns to ech with pinned dns servers? I was reading about ech a bit yesterday so I could keep up with apps trying to circumvent dns filtering on my kids' devices.

Usually I require a root cert so devices can have their traffic inspected or be isolated into an unsafe network where most nonessential traffic is blocked by default. I suppose letting an iot device connect will become more risky in the future when I can't control the dns resolver or can't confidently block requests through dns alone.
by efilife | 2026-03-10 15:22:35+00:00
> Who really needs this level of self observation and control

I liked doing similar things in the past. There's no anxiety in the equation, just pure curiosity. How many times have I done a thing a month/year? I was always curious about stuff like this, much like the OP. There's also the hacker spirit in play - designing the apps for tracking stuff.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-03-10 15:22:39+00:00
from TFA:

> That looks complicated, but remember how we built it: we looked at the hints and selected one option at a time. Now, if this is a log type we’ll use often, we are going to start to be able to write out that incantation without even looking at the hints. It’s both discoverable and efficient.
by 8s2ngy | 2026-03-10 15:22:40+00:00
I share your wish. Emacs, as wonderful as it is, has accumulated a lot of cruft over the decades and would benefit immensely from a rewrite. A "Neo-Emacs" could be multithreaded from the ground up and drop support for archaic platforms. The rewrite could even be in Rust to attract younger developers.
by hkonte | 2026-03-10 15:22:47+00:00
flompt (https://github.com/Nyrok/flompt) - a visual prompt builder for Claude/GPT.

The core idea: instead of writing prompts as one blob of text, you decompose them into 12 typed blocks (role, objective, constraints, output format, etc.) on a canvas, then compile to structured XML. The model gets cleaner signal, you get a prompt you can actually iterate on.

Built it because I kept rewriting the same prompts from scratch every time something didn't work. Now I can tweak one block and recompile. Open-source, solo project.

Demo at flompt.dev. A star on github.com/Nyrok/flompt is the best way to support it.
by craigtp | 2026-03-10 15:22:48+00:00
Location: Liverpool, England

Remote: Yes (Remote only)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: C#, .NET Core, ASP.NET, SQL Server/MySQL/PostgreSQL/MongoDB/EventStoreDB/Redis, RabbitMQ/Kafka, CQRS/Event Sourcing, Azure/AWS.

Résumé/CV: https://craigtp.co.uk/cv

Email: craig [at] craigtp.co.uk

Hi. I'm Craig. I'm an experienced Senior Software Engineer, Systems Architect and Microsoft Certified Professional with a passion for software development.

I work primarily, but not exclusively, with Microsoft technologies and the .NET / .NET Core frameworks, leading complex and challenging enterprise software development projects to successfully deliver robust, secure, scalable and efficient software solutions, encompassing over 30 years of experience in the field.

An accomplished team leader, mentor and architect, I'm skilled at taking a leading role in the overall architecture of a project, in driving team developments and employing proven industry disciplines and best-practices to deliver successful software projects that frequently exceed client expectations.

I'm passionate about distributed systems design, CQRS and event sourcing and a proponent of domain-driven design to ensure that solutions are laser-focused on solving real business problems. I'm an open source enthusiast and advocate using the best and most appropriate tools available, providing for an effective and pragmatic solution that delivers genuine and quantifiable business value.

Throughout my career I've helped numerous businesses of varying sizes in varying industries get their technology investment right and I can do the same for you.

Recent projects include:

+ Architected and executed a comprehensive overhaul of a core legacy system, migrating it to a robust microservices architecture. By strategically applying Domain-Driven Design, CQRS, and Event Sourcing, we enabled a prominent African FinTech company to seamlessly scale from 1 million to 10 million active users while achieving a remarkable 30%+ reduction in cloud expenses.

+ Successfully delivered an ambitious project to re-engineer a number of monolithic applications to cloud-native, event-driven distributed services for a leading hospitality software provider as part of a company-wide effort to modernise their entire software estate including training and mentoring staff on event-driven architecture and distributed system design.

+ Designed & delivered a large, global SaaS product to manage and automate music royalty collection and payment for one of the UK's largest and most demanding independent music publishers including full cloud geo-distribution & redundancy to ensure high availability & reliability for the worldwide client base.

+ Spearheaded the creation of a groundbreaking anti-motor fraud solution for a prominent UK law firm. This industry-leading platform combined a user-friendly web application, powerful API, and sophisticated data systems, including Europe's largest anti-fraud database, giving the firm an edge in fraud detection.
by ziyao_w | 2026-03-10 15:23:01+00:00
Random anecdote and Mr. Hoare (yep not a Dr.) has always been one of my computing heroes.

Mr. Hoare did a talk back during my undergrad and for some reason despite totally checked out of school I attended, and it is one of my formative experiences. AFAICR it was about proving program correctness.

After it finished during the Q&A segment, one student asked him about his opinions about the famous Brooks essay No Silver Bullet and Mr. Hoare's answer was... total confusion. Apparently he had not heard of the concept at all! It could be a lost in translation thing but I don't think so since I remember understanding the phrase "silver bullet" which did not make any sense to me. And now Mr. Hoare and Dr. Brooks are two of my all time computing heroes.
by gbourne1 | 2026-03-10 15:23:05+00:00
I’m tired of every AI capability at SaaS companies charging usage fees. I get it: they both have their own token costs and want to make a profit on the feature. But it makes a $50 a month product potentially hundreds if I’m not careful. For example our customer chat tool with AI on is going to be hundreds a month instead of the $39/mo we pay. We turned off the AI capability.
by dietr1ch | 2026-03-10 15:23:35+00:00
> having a globally shared buffer state, etc. is an anti-feature

Yeah, it feels a bit weird to not have some isolation.

Spacemacs offers layouts[^1] that give you some buffer-isolation. Each window has a "layout", and layouts have sets of buffers. It works well, but you can run into extra prompts if you open the same buffer from two layouts and try to kill it from one of them (kill the buffer (for all layouts)? just remove from this layout? In my mind the latter should just be the default).

[^1]: https://www.spacemacs.org/doc/DOCUMENTATION.html#layouts-and...
Ask HN: Are people shipping their AI "vibe-coded" apps to production?
by infiniumtek | 2026-03-10 15:23:35+00:00
I’ve noticed a pattern with a lot of AI-assisted projects lately.

People can build surprisingly capable apps using tools like Cursor, Replit, Loveable, etc... but many of those projects never actually make it to a real production launch.

The apps work locally or in a demo environment, but the “last mile” tends to be where things stall:

• infrastructure and hosting
• SSL and domain setup
• environment variables and secrets
• CI/CD pipelines
• scaling and monitoring
• security concerns

I’ve spent most of my career working in software engineering and DevOps, and recently started helping indie builders and small startups solve this exact problem, getting their AI-generated apps shipped to production.

I put together a page describing the typical deployment path and the kind of help I’ve been providing:
https://infiniumtek.com/vibes/

I’m curious what others here are seeing.

For those building AI tools or AI-assisted products:

Where does the launch process usually break down for you?

Is it infrastructure, deployment complexity, security concerns, or something else?

- Thomas
by chriswarbo | 2026-03-10 15:24:37+00:00
Emacs can certainly be sluggish, but I'm not sure how much that's e.g. inherent to ELisp, or due to synchronous/single-threaded code, or choosing slow algorithms for certain tasks, etc.

For me, the best performance improvement has been handling long lines; e.g. Emacs used to become unusable if it was given a line of around 1MB. Since I run lots of shell-mode buffers, that would happen frustratingly-often. My workaround was to make my default shell a script that pipes `bash` through a pared-down, zero-allocation copy of GNU `fold`, to force a newline after hitting a certain length (crossing a lower threshold would break at the next whitespace; hitting an upper threshold would force a break immediately). That piping caused Bash to think it wasn't interactive, which required another work-around using Expect.

Thankfully the last few versions of Emacs have fixed long-line handling enough for me to get rid of my awful Rube-Goldberg shell!
by jruohonen | 2026-03-10 15:24:42+00:00
Debian has always been Debian and thus there are these purist opinions, but perhaps my take too would be something along the "one-strike-and-you-are-out" kind of a policy (i.e., you submit slop without being able to explain your submission in any way) already followed in some projects:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47109952
by theragra | 2026-03-10 15:24:48+00:00
Lem is underappreciated. I've recently reread a book with his interviews Tako rzecze... Lem (in Russian, English version does not exist). This caused me to remember some of his works.

While he is a bit snobby and complaints too much, you can't deny he really envisioned huge amount of things to come. His imagination is next to none, and probably some things he described we will see only in the distant future, or maybe during the singularity, if it happens.
by kritibehl | 2026-03-10 15:24:59+00:00
Most distributed job queue implementations rely on lease timeouts to prevent duplicate execution. The assumption is: if a worker hasn't checked in by the deadline, it's safe to reassign the job.

The assumption is wrong. A slow worker can finish the job, commit the result, and fail before acknowledging the expiry — while another worker has already picked up the "abandoned" job. Two workers, one job, undefined behavior.

Faultline uses two layers to prevent this:

Fencing tokens — every lease acquisition increments a monotonic counter. A worker holding generation 6 cannot commit using generation 7's slot. The application layer rejects the stale write before it reaches the database.

UNIQUE(job_id, fencing_token) — a database constraint that makes duplicate commits physically impossible regardless of application logic. Even if there's a bug in the token check, the DB rejects the second insert.

I wanted to actually validate these guarantees rather than just reason about them, so I built a 29-assertion drill suite covering 16 failure scenarios (mid-execution crashes, stale worker commit attempts, concurrent reclaim races, retry exhaustion, network interruptions during commit).

Then I added FaultProxy — a configurable psycopg2 wrapper that injects latency, connection drops and query timeouts independently. I ran the full 500-reproduction suite at 0%, 5% and 10% fault injection rates.
Results across 1,500 total race reproductions: 0 duplicate commits, 1,500 stale-write rejections confirmed.

The repo has the full drill suite, FaultProxy implementation and instructions for running against a real PostgreSQL instance.

GitHub: https://github.com/kritibehl/faultline

Curious what failure modes others have hit in distributed job processing that aren't covered by the fencing token + DB constraint approach.
by ldenoue | 2026-03-10 15:25:49+00:00
I grew tired of endless YouTube videos, X articles or web articles.
So this app lets you open any link and you instantly get an AI summary + brief about the content.

(It's free up to 20 articles because there are real costs: I use Gemini to summarize the pages you open)

AI voices run locally on your iPhone/iPad (web extension version coming soon).

When you find something useful, you can share the overviews online (free hosting), e.g. https://voiceview.app/a/2J49UnwK

Hope this helps cut the noise and help folks save time.

Laurent
by iSnow | 2026-03-10 15:26:02+00:00
>I want my brain to be strong in old age, and I actually love to write code unlike 99% in software apparently (like why did you people even start doing this career.. makes no sense to me).

I am old now, and the unfortunate truth is that my brain isn't working as fast or as precise as when I was young. LLMs help me maintain some of my coding abilities.

It's like having a non-judgemental co-coder sitting at your side, you can discuss about the code you wrote and it will point out things you didn't think of.

Or I can tap into the immense knowledge about APIs LLMs have to keep up with change. I wouldn't be able to still read that much documentation and keep all of this.
by coldpie | 2026-03-10 15:26:07+00:00
> In that case a lot of proprietary software is in breach of copyleft licences. Its probably by far the commonest breach.

Sure, but this doesn't really seem relevant to the conversation. Someone else violating software license terms doesn't justify me (or Debian, in the case of TFA) doing so.

> Is it always ethically dubious to breach a law?

I'm not really concerned with the law, here. I think it is ethically dubious to use someone else's work without compensating them in the manner they declared. Copyright law happens to be the method we've used for a couple hundred years to standardize the discussion about that compensation, and sometimes enforce it. Breaching the law doesn't really enter into the conversation, except as a way our society agrees to hold everyone to a minimum ethical standard.
by smitty1e | 2026-03-10 15:26:13+00:00
> I think having a globally shared buffer state, etc. is an antifeature.

Maybe, but I'd like to hear why you think this is such an antifeature for a single-threaded application.

Given the extra resources available these days, for example, why not just bring up a stand-alone ERC instance for chatting, if shared state is a concern?
by jgrahamc | 2026-03-10 15:26:15+00:00
He was the professor in the Programming Research Group (known universally as the PRG) at Oxford when I was doing my DPhil and interviewed me for the DPhil. I spent quite a bit of time with him and, of course, spent a lot of time doing stuff with CSP including my entire DPhil.

Sad to think that the TonyHoare process has reached STOP.

RIP.
by tom_m | 2026-03-10 15:26:21+00:00
I wouldn't be so sure about the courts overturning it. This is yet another opportunity for this administration to test its power. Even if the courts do, it'll be very time consuming and expensive.

Unfortunately this is really bad for Anthropic. Given how quickly the other providers jumped on the opportunity, you can tell how fast things move here and ultimately that could mean the difference between survival in this industry.

I hope something changes, but it can get a lot worse. Individual developers signing up won't help Anthropic. If things get worse, you can rule out Anthropic in most enterprise situations. Supply chain risk means you can't even build software with the thing. Forget about using AI as part of the product, as a user facing feature - people won't be able to build with it as it's part of the supply chain.
by Sean-Der | 2026-03-10 15:26:26+00:00
https://github.com/sean-der/stream-sniff is the code.

I wanted to help people debug/understand their live stream quality better. I would really appreciate people's feedback!

I see a constant stream of people saying 'my video is blurry' or 'why do I have so much latency' and I wanted to build something that helped people understand/diagnose. Also wanted to make something that runs in the browser so you can share/send a link to a friend (or on discord) to make debugging easier.

I am hoping to move it to https://github.com/glimesh org soon so it can sit next to broadcast-box.
by _aavaa_ | 2026-03-10 15:26:34+00:00
Germany uses less coal and gas today then it the past and has been a straight decline broth before and after the nuclear phase out [0]. They are currently committed to phasing it out by 2038. We can argue that it may have gotten rid of coal and gas faster, but that’s a counter factual that would have to be proved.

[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...
by bob1029 | 2026-03-10 15:27:15+00:00
I feel like there is an unofficial version of AGTI already in place for certain AI providers.

Whenever I generate a large amount of code, there is a ~20% chance that my editor will pop a warning "Some unicode characters in this file could not be saved in the current codepage".

I suggest taking a look at the raw outputs of a major AI provider in a hex editor. That (zero-width) whitespace could be hiding a lot of information.
by lkjdsklf | 2026-03-10 15:27:21+00:00
Templates don’t have to be complicated.

Just very basic type substitution is one of the most useful uses of templates and is useful in pretty much all software

They’re also useful when you can’t use virtual dispatch. Concepts help a lot in making that tolerable.

Sure they can get stupid complicated and ugly as hell, but you don’t have to do that. Even their basic form is very useful

That said, RAII is probably the must useful thing
by ogurechny | 2026-03-10 15:27:41+00:00
Here's another take: The idea that you can only choose between one set of desperate spying and killing fools trying to create a world where they could be totally invincible (with a swarm of lesser demons trying to make a fortune serving them) and another set of desperate spying and killing fools trying to create a world where they could be totally invincible (with a swarm of lesser demons trying to make a fortune serving them) is stupid.
by dragonwriter | 2026-03-10 15:27:54+00:00
> I’m tired of every AI capability at SaaS companies charging usage fees. I get it: they both have their own token costs and want to make a profit on the feature. But it makes a $50 a month product potentially hundreds if I’m not careful.

Well, I understand how, as a user, yoou’d prefer your $50 subscription to include hundreds of dollars of subsidies for the costs of consuming third-party AI resources, but other than a startup spending VC to buy a userbase and force the traditional unsubsidized competition out of business before milking their new monopoly hard to payback investors, how do you expect a firm to justify that?
by eaglelamp | 2026-03-10 15:28:02+00:00
If they have spare capacity then there is no opportunity cost to selling $100 subscriptions for exactly that reason. If they don’t have spare capacity then, at the margin, they could replace a subscription user with API calls that make them $5000: that’s opportunity cost.

If you own equity in Anthropic you should care about that cost. Maybe you are willing to tolerate it to win market share, but for you to make the most profit you need that cost to shrink.
Show HN: Point it at your local dev server, get a demo video with AI voiceover
by mhamann | 2026-03-10 15:28:07+00:00
Hi HN, I'm Matt, one of the engineers behind DemoFly!

We built DemoFly because we got tired of the gap between building features and showing them to people. Our team has been doing full-stack engineering for over a decade (most recently building Rownd, an authentication platform) and the one thing that never got easier was making demo videos. You finish a feature, you know it works, but showing it to someone means opening a screen recorder, figuring out what to say, re-recording when you stumble. So the demo just...doesn't happen.

DemoFly is a CLI tool. You point it at whatever you're building and it autonomously navigates your app using Playwright + image recognition, then produces a polished video with AI-generated voiceover. No screen recording, no scripting on your part.

How it works technically:
- Node-based CLI. You run demofly against localhost or any browser-accessible target.
- Playwright drives a headless browser. Image processing observes the rendered UI and decides what to interact with next.
- As it navigates, it builds a narrative of what it's seeing and doing.
- That narrative becomes a voiceover script, synthesized locally with AI TTS (kokoro).
- Video is composited from the browser session frames + voiceover audio.
- Output uploads to a dashboard where you can review, edit, and share.

What it's good at: Standard CRUD apps, multi-page flows, dashboards. Works well for "hey, check out what I built on this branch" type demos. Fits into CI if you want auto-generated changelogs or PR previews.

What's not perfect yet: Auth flows can trip it up (ironic, given our background in auth). Highly dynamic SPAs with lots of client-side state might confuse the navigation model. Canvas/WebGL/Video elements are mostly opaque to it. Voiceover occasionally describes something slightly wrong.

Pricing: Free tier has every feature, so no credit card is needed and there are no feature gates. Paid tiers just give you more credits for higher quality voices and output.

Grab the CLI, run your first demo, and roast our AI's narration! We’re ready for the feedback. I think...
by vladms | 2026-03-10 15:28:09+00:00
Very reasonable stance. I see reviewing and accepting a PR is a question of trust - you trust the submitter to have done the most he can for the PR to be correct and useful.

Something might be required now as some people might think that just asking an LLM is "the most he can done", but it's not about using AI it's about being aware and responsible about using it.