MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by avsm | 2026-03-07 18:15:18+00:00
Thanks for the kind words! I've been prodding @justincormack to resurrect the single most fun OS unconference I've ever attended -- New Directions in Operating Systems (last held back in 2014). https://operatingsystems.io

Some of those talks strangely make more sense today (e.g. Rump Kernels or unikernels + coding agents seems like a really good combination, as the agent could search all the way through the kernel layers as well).
by testbjjl | 2026-03-07 18:15:22+00:00
I just agreed to my first terms of engagement with a company to do this very thing. There is strong demand for enabling SMB, especially tech adjacent businesses to do and know more for less. The job loses in the coming quarters will not be limited to technology.

Personally I think governments will force higher taxes on AI companies driving up the cost of tokens exponentially sooner than later. Paying a politician to pass favorable legislation becomes more difficult when their constituents are in food lines. Not impossible, but difficult. The best solution I think is good leadership. We don’t have that at the moment. That’s not just a “Trump thing,” though his open grift and dishonesty is really dangerous, we need leaders who can see and understand the moving parts and make decisions that benefit us all.
by MrJohz | 2026-03-07 18:15:30+00:00
> This way you never have content that is out of sync.

They can definitely go out of sync, particularly if something that isn't the editor or the AI changes the code (e.g. running shell commands or opening the file in a different editor and making changes there). I've had a whole load of issues with VSCode where there's been spurious edits all over the place that show up again even if I try and revert them, because every time the AI makes an unrelated edit, VSCode tries to reset the file to the version it thinks exists and then play the AI's edits on top.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-03-07 18:16:40+00:00
Can we bring back Plan9 architecture now? It had what was essentially MCP. You make a custom device driver, and anything really can be a file. Not only that, but you network them, so a file on local disk could be a display on a remote host (or whatever). Just tell the agent to read/write files and it doesn't need to figure out either MCP or tool calls.
by nunez | 2026-03-07 18:17:18+00:00
Agreed. That was the next big boost! I installed my first SSD in this HP workstation-grade laptop that we got "for free" from college. It was like getting a brand new computer! In fact, I ended up giving that computer to my sister who ran it into the ground.

I didn't feel any huge speed boosts like that until the M1 MacBook in 2020.
by bryanlarsen | 2026-03-07 18:17:35+00:00
Verification is the bottleneck now, so we have to adjust our tooling and processes to make verification as easy as possible.

When you submit a PR, verifiability should be top of mind. Use those magic AI tools to make the PR as easy to possible to verify as possible. Chunk your PR into palatable chunks. Document and comment to aid verification. Add tests that are easy for the reviewer to read, test and tweak. Etc.
by 9rx | 2026-03-07 18:17:44+00:00
> if err != nil is verbose and distracting and happens a lot.

if err != nil is no more or less verbose than if x > y. You may have a point that Go could do branching better in general, but that isn't about errors specifically.

If there is something about errors that happening a lot then that still questions your design. Keep trying new ideas until it isn't happening a lot.

> Surely we can do better than this for error handling?

Surely we can do better for handling of all types? And in theory we can. In practice, it is like the story of generics in Go: Nobody smart enough to figure out a good solution wants to put in the work. Google eventually found a domain expert in generics to bring in as a contractor to come up with a design, but, even assuming Google is still willing to invest a lot of money in the new budget-tightening tech landscape, it is not clear who that person is in this case.

Ian Lance Taylor, as you mention, tried quite hard — with work spanning over many years — in both in both cases to find a solution, which we should commend him for, but that type of design isn't really his primary wheelhouse.
Ask HN: Can we talk about AI Astroturfing?
by overgard | 2026-03-07 18:17:53+00:00
Well first, I don't mean this as a shot at the mods that do a great job.

I'm noticing a lot of posts and comments around AI seem like industry plants. Look, I recognize that people are excited about AI and want to share their perspectives, and I'm not trying to accuse people that disagree with me of being industry plants, but the recent one about "I love coding at 60 now because of Claude Code!" by a new user with "cc" at the end of their name seems a LITTLE suspicious. As is the number of upvotes -- I can understand how a new model gets a lot of excitement, but a stranger on the internet enjoying the new model doesn't seem like 800 points worthy?

I'm not trying to spark a controversy here, but I'm wondering if others feel the same or if I'm just overreacting.
by ironman1478 | 2026-03-07 18:18:50+00:00
Verification has always been hard and always ignored, in software more than other industries. This is not specific to AI generated code.

I currently work in a software field that has a large numerical component and verifying that the system is implemented correctly and stable takes much longer than actually implementing it. It should have been like that when I used to work in a more software-y role, but people were much more cavalier then and it bit that company in the butt often. This isn't new, but it is being amplified.
by btown | 2026-03-07 18:19:06+00:00
They can go hand in hand! But if you give a dump of a session to someone, with literal reams of command inputs and outputs etc. interleaved in the session... they'll most likely read the beginning and the end. And possibly absorb the importance of the discovery, but not the types of "prodding" I was doing to the agent to make that possible.

Slowing it down to show the back-and-forth, and to let the viewer absorb and internalize the techniques behind each "prod," is vital!
by thundergolfer | 2026-03-07 18:19:50+00:00
The ‘brow’ standards have dropped significantly, in a process Fussell has described as the general proletarianization of culture.

For a long time films that would be considered niche and arthouse were middlebrow, because film itself was at best a middlebrow medium.

To people still concerned with the various brows, Marvel films are below low. They are sign of a debased and infantile film culture that caters to childish tastes and merchandising, not art.
by jillesvangurp | 2026-03-07 18:19:55+00:00
You just complete to a parsable structure.

This stuff reminds me of intentional programming (Charles Simonyi). That never really panned out but the premise with intentional programming was that programming is about AST transformations that are correct (sort of like refactoring) but all the way down to the machine code level. You get these increasingly more complex languages that are defined in terms of building blocks that are ASTs.

Refactoring of course is based on the same notion that manipulating code correctly at the AST level is a lot easier than messing around with text files. That came out of the smalltalk world originally which also had very fancy IDEs already in the nineties where everything (including the IDE) was something you could mess with. Refactorings were defined as syntactically correct transformation of one AST into another (rename, extract class, move function to parent class, etc.).

Charles Simony had a solution for what you describe as well. Just serialize stuff to text if somebody wants to "edit" and then parse it back when they are done. What happens to the text in between of course is the programmer's problem.
by coliveira | 2026-03-07 18:19:56+00:00
I'm not a fan of AI and try to avoid it, but there is a difference from AI output published by someone knowledgeable and any other AI output that you run by yourself. If an expert looked at the result and found it to be ok, then you can have some assurance that it at least makes sense. Your own AI run doesn't mean anything, it could be 100% hallucination and a non-expert will buy it as truth.
by apical_dendrite | 2026-03-07 18:20:41+00:00
I used gemini to look up a relative with a connection to a famous event. The relative himself is obscure, but I have some of his writings and I've heard his story from other relatives. Gemini fabricated a completely false narrative about my relative that was much more exciting than what actually happened. I spent a bunch of time looking at the sources that Gemini supplied trying to verify things and although the sources were real, the story Gemini came up with was completely made up.
by whartung | 2026-03-07 18:20:48+00:00
I know some systems leverage the modern file meta data (extended attributes), but it's clearly not successful enough that folks can use them for an application like this.

Ostensibly, things like MacOS Spotlight can bring real utility and value to the file system, and extended attributes through the sidecar indexing, etc. But Spotlight is infamous for its unreliability.

The other issue with file systems is simply that the user (potentially) has "direct access" to them, in that they can readily move files in and up and around whimsically. The "structure" is laid bare for them to potentially interfere with, or, such as the case with the extended attributes, drag a file to a USB fob, and then copy it back -- inadvertently removing those attributes.

And thats how we end up with everything being stuffed into a SQLite DB.
Show HN: SRA – A new architectural pattern for modern product engineering
by FelixZY | 2026-03-07 18:21:24+00:00
I have spent years trying to understand and follow established software architectures - and wound up writing my own at the end: SRA (Specification - Realization - Assembly). Please do check it out and let me know what you think!

Background:

Whenever I would learn a new architecture, the initial ideas seemed interesting but the implementation almost always ended up with my autistic sense of detail screaming loudly about one or more shortcomings and even inconsistencies.

For example, a lot of architectures rely on human discipline, give certain aspects of the software - such as the UI - an unproportional amount of power, or promote coupling despite claiming otherwise.

As a programming generalist, I also found certain architectures hard to transfer between platforms and project types, especially in multiplatform code bases.

In the end I started from the basics; What is good code? What principles are common regardless of language? How can we make good code easier to write than bad code? What makes code adaptable to evolving technology and changing requirements?

The result: SRA. Enjoy!
by zimpenfish | 2026-03-07 18:21:49+00:00
> About a third of a cent per LED, not even counting the rest of the hardware!

At €20 per 32x8 module (2000/256), that's €0.078 per LED which is considerably more expensive than a third of a eurocent, I think? Even if it was €20 for all 6 panels, that's still over a eurocent per LED (2000/1536).

> I'm amazed at how cheap the LED matrix listed in the parts list is.

Cheaper now - AliExpress will sell you 6 32x8 boards for £59.21 (3.85p per LED or ¢5.16 if you're a colonial) saving you ~€52 over the original €120 price.
by testbjjl | 2026-03-07 18:22:27+00:00
I think the GP and many conflate tech jobs and relative high paying jobs. If you remove high paying from your filters you’ll get more results. Many have not accounted for that. Like most things, if you don’t own the means of production or income generation, your salary is just a loan. Once you’re out and can’t get back in and lose the things you’ve acquired it becomes more clear. The upside, we then start to treat one another better and can see more clearly how most were never actually in the club. After civil disruption comes better policy, historically.
by zahlman | 2026-03-07 18:22:59+00:00
> Asm is simple enough

The general conceptual model of "asm" is simple.

Some instruction sets and architectures are hideous, though.

> merely being a human compiler is not particularly enlightening nor useful.

I don't think I can agree with that. At least it teaches you what the compiler is doing. And abiding by conventions (HLL-esque control flow, but also things like "put the return value in r0" and "put constant pools after the function") can definitely make it easier to make sense of the code. (Although you might share a constant pool across a module or something, if the instructions reach far enough.)

Not to say that you can't do interesting things, and can't ever beat the compiler. One of the things I most enjoyed discovering, in mid-00s era THUMB (i.e. 16-bit ARM) code, is that the compiler was implementing switch statements with tables of 32-bit constants that it would load into an indirect jump. I didn't get around to it, but I figured I could mechanically replace these with a computed jump into a "table" of 16-bit unconditional branches (except for very long functions, but this helped bring the branch distances under thresholds).
by krapp | 2026-03-07 18:23:05+00:00
Things absolutely, undeniably would have gone different under a Harris administration.

Not perfect, obviously, but not this. There was a clear better choice and Trump wasn't it.

And everyone who refused to vote or voted Trump because they saw no difference between the two has to wear that like an albratross around their necks for the rest of their lives. And I pray that they live long enough to feel the consequence of their stupidity close around their necks like a noose.
by ritlo | 2026-03-07 18:23:20+00:00
Same set-up here. Had tried many times over something like 15 years to get Kodi/XBMC working well. Nobody else could/would ever use it (the UI is so bad) and I bet I spent about 50% as much time screwing around to set it up and maintain it as I ever spent watching stuff on it.

Jellyfin, at first with the official client on Roku then on Infuse on AppleTV when x265 hardware decoding started becoming a requirement (my server is too weak to transcode) has been everything I wanted Kodi to be. Web interface is great, I share it with a couple friends over Tailscale. Wife and kids and visitors use Infuse, no problem, no complaints, no help needed. My use-to-fiddling ratio is probably literally 100x better than with Kodi. I have spent overall less total time messing with it than with Kodi, even including figuring out solutions for things like YouTube videos.
by petre | 2026-03-07 18:23:24+00:00
Yeah, they're popular like Ariana Grande is after the Manchester bombing. But just about everything they released after the Black album is kind of lame. The Budapest tickets sold out pretty fast, but they're still lame regardless if people go to their concerts. Compared to Depeche Mode and other bands that only get better with age, Metallica just play the same old songs or worse. And they're not a cult band like Death or The Sisters of Mercy either.
by dangus | 2026-03-07 18:24:01+00:00
I think this is a weak argument.

The vast majority of popular PC laptops sold have soldered RAM and socketed SSDs and that situation is a huge improvement over what Apple delivers. Most people just want to be able to upgrade storage or at least configure storage at pricing that’s somewhat close to market value.

And then you’ve got a whole other segment of PCs that use dedicated graphics and therefore don’t even need soldered RAM at all. You don’t need super fast RAM bandwidth unless you are using high-end integrated graphics. In that respect, there are a lot of thin and light gaming laptops that give you socketed RAM and that is very obviously consumer friendly.

If Framework offered a soldered RAM board it would still be a vast improvement over Apple’s offering. You could say, hey, I want the fast integrated graphics, I’ll choose the soldered RAM version. Or, I will take mid-range integrated graphics and keep my socketed RAM board.

You’d still benefit from their cross-compatibility of boards, support for standalone board usage (I.e., upgrade your board in your laptop and use the old one as a server or desktop computer). You’d still have modular SSD storage and WiFi chips which you don’t even have to buy a Framework to get. Hell, many MacBook competitors have dual SSD slots and there’s no discernible downside to it. Mac SSDs aren’t faster than top end PCI-E gen 4/5 hardware.

Citation needed for impact on look and feel and sound design/durability. My framework has zero deck flex, it’s an aluminum chassis just like a MacBook, and yeah the speakers suck but that’s just because Framework doesn’t own the world’s most successful audio company. As you alluded to, Lenovo makes some repairable systems that have top tier laptop speakers.

Plenty of computers with great MacBook-level fit and finish let you access the SSD at bare minimum. E.g., the latest generation Dell XPS.

Theft prevention and replacement hardware scams is on the bottom of my list. Isn’t this obviously just a convenient excuse to squeeze third party repair shops? One of the easiest ways to prevent repair shop scams would be to make the computer so easy to repair that I don’t need a repair shop.
by asveikau | 2026-03-07 18:24:14+00:00
I think this person might just be seeing Vietnam in a retrospective lens and has not seen the pro vietnam war propaganda from the 1960s which was immensely popular.

I wasn't alive either but I've seen it after the fact. Also the kind of people who thought the Kent State massacre was the right thing to do. The political radicals of that era "won" many culture wars but they were a minority, and the influential, pro-war, pro-establishment people sounded exactly like the ones who were in favor of the Iraq War and who think what's going on in Iran right now makes sense.

There is a reason, for example, that John Fogerty of CCR [of the song "Fortunate Son"] wrote the mid 2000s song "It's like Deja Vu All Over Again" to describe the Iraq war. It's because the war propaganda was all the same, just with a rotating cast.
by metalman | 2026-03-07 18:24:34+00:00
One day, purely by chance, I found myself at the corner of Young and Bloor, at noon, late 1980's, early 90's, and later I found out that business wisdom of the day was to
attempt to compromise the cognitive powers of visitors to the high power offices in the area by paying secretarys to perform there duties while leaving nothing, or perhaps everything to the imagination, and getting a grand a day to do it, there bemused reactions to whatever look on my face as they hit the street going to lunch,is still fun to think about.
by sigmoid10 | 2026-03-07 18:26:52+00:00
Deepseek has shown that you can still do a whole lot if you have to work with limited resources as long as you have some really talented people and don't give a crap about IP. With 1.5 billion people, statistics tell us you'll find quite a few in the high tail-end of the intelligence distribution and I also don't think they have a strong sense to comply with western intellectual ownership. The biggest difficulty for India seems to be that all highly talented people will immediately use their skills to find work somewhere else. And I can't blame them, because I would do so too.
by jjmarr | 2026-03-07 18:27:31+00:00
I daily drive NixOS. I don't have a global "userland". Packages are shipped from upstream and pull in the dependencies they need to function.

That means unlike Gentoo, I've never dealt with a "slot conflict" where two packages want conflicting dependencies. And unlike Ubuntu, I have new versions of everything.

Pick 2: share dependencies, be on the bleeding edge, or waste your time resolving conflicts.
by leptons | 2026-03-07 18:28:09+00:00
I doubt any of that is valid. Therac-25 happened 44 years ago, that's a very long time, and many people involved in cancer research today weren't even alive when it happened.

"Theryq" and "Therac" are not quite the same either. The word "therapy" and derivatives of it using "thera" are still used widely across the medical industry.

So I'm not really sure why anyone here is making a big deal about the name of the company being "Theryq".
by blueone | 2026-03-07 18:28:14+00:00
I will become a leader of the free human movement. So, my fellow people, follow me and rise up against AI and more importantly, the 1% who seek only to deploy AI to become even richer.

Once we have succeeded, I will ask only for a peaceful island once owned by a former CEO so that I may live out the rest of my life peacefully; while the rest of you bicker amongst yourselves about how things should be, all while climate change slowly but surely brings us our inevitable fate.
by naomi_kynes | 2026-03-07 18:28:44+00:00
Something that shifted for me: tools like Claude Code made it viable to actually run multiple agents on real long-running workflows, not just one-off scripts.

Which immediately surfaces the next problem: how do those agents communicate back to you while running?

Most setups default to tailing a log file, or a Slack/Telegram bot bolted on as an afterthought. Works for one agent. Falls apart when you have five running overnight and one hits an edge case at 2am that needs a human call.

The agent-to-human communication layer is still surprisingly ad-hoc. You can generate more ideas and actually implement them now — but the infrastructure for keeping humans in the loop as agents execute is still duct tape. Feels like the next interesting problem after the coding unlock.
by borski | 2026-03-07 18:28:58+00:00
> What he's describing is fairly normal and is just to do with blood pressure in your ears, from what I've subsequently read.

That’s called tinnitus. And I agree, it isn’t rare. From TFA, roughly 15% of people have it (that report it).

Sounds like you may have severe tinnitus, which is more rare, limited to 1-2% of people.
by msvana | 2026-03-07 18:29:13+00:00
I think there is one problem with defining acceptance criteria first: sometimes you don't know ahead of time what those criteria are. You need to poke around first to figure out what's possible and what matters. And sometimes the criteria are subjective, abstract, and cannot be formally specified.

Of course, this problem is more general than just improving the output of LLM coding tools
by tharmas | 2026-03-07 18:29:44+00:00
Iran isn't being bombed because the leadership is nasty (terrorist regime). They are being bombed because they are s rival power to Greater Israel expansion, and they are a major oil exporter that doesn't use $US.

The leader of Syria is a Sunni terrorist but he stays in place because he blocks arms shipments through Syria from Iran to Hezbollah. That suits Israel. Israel doesn't care how the Syrian leader treats his own people so long as he continues to disallow arms to Hezbollah from Iran. And the USA goes along with whatever Israel wants.

It has nothing to do with how the Iranian regime treats its own people. Just look at how the Saudi regime treats its people.
by JNRowe | 2026-03-07 18:30:00+00:00
If you want to relive it then simh¹ with mame² might be an option. There appears to be some support for VT11³, along with docs⁴ to use as a starting point.

No, I'm not claiming to have read all one hundred pages already. However, from what I have read I'd love to see a functional demo.

¹ https://simh.trailing-edge.com/

² https://www.mamedev.org/

³ https://github.com/simh/simh/blob/master/PDP11/pdp11_vt.c

⁴ https://wiki.mamedev.org/index.php/MAME_and_SIMH
by thangalin | 2026-03-07 18:30:08+00:00
> then DANTE would hopefully agree to relicence it.

In Feb 2023, when I emailed Hans about changing licenses, he wrote back:

> We decided to stick with the GNU (GLP) license. It's not like anyone is going to check in detail what happens with NTS after all these years. We just wanted to add the option for GPLv2. We're not going into endless debates about licences, which are always a sensitive topic in the tex community.