MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bmurphy1976 | 2026-03-07 15:28:50+00:00
I'm 50. I've been coding since the 6th grade. I'm a director for my org but still have to be hands on because of how small we are.

I only ever wanted to code.

I've spent decades developing mentorship, project management, and planning skills. I spent decades learning networking, databases, systems administration, testing, scrum, agile, waterfall, you name it. Every skill was necessary to build good software.

But I only ever wanted to code.

And I've spent decades burning out. I'm burt out on terrible documentation, tedious boiler plate and systems that don't interoperate well. I despise closed ecosystems, dependency management gone mad, terrible programming languages, over abstraction and I have fundamental and philosophical objections to modern software development practices.

I only ever wanted to code and I just couldn't do it anymore. And then AI happened.

This has been liberating for me.

The mountainous pile of terrible documentation written for somebody that has 36 years less experience? Ask the AI to find that one nugget I need.

That horrific mind numbingly tedious boilerplate? Doesn't matter if it's code, xml, yaml, or anything else. Have the AI do the busy work while I think about the bigger picture.

This nodejs npm dependency hell? Let the AI figure it out. Let the AI fix yet another breaking change and I'll review.

That hard to find bug? Let the AI comb through the logs and find the evidence. Present it to me with recommendations for a fix. I'll decide the path forward.

That legacy system nobody remembers? Let the AI reverse engineer it and generate docs and architectural diagrams. Use that to build the replacement strategy.

I've found a passion for active development that I've been missing for a very long time. The AI tools put power back in my hands that this bloated and sloppy industry took from me. Best of all it leverages the skills I've spent decades honing.

I can use the tools to engineer high quality solutions in an environment that has not been conducive to doing so on an individual level for a very long time. That is powerful and very motivating for somebody like me.

But I still fear the future. I fear a future where careless individuals vibe code a giant pile of garbage 10,000x the size of the pile of muck we have today. And those of us who actually try and follow good engineering practices will be right back to where we started: not able to get anything done because we're drowning in a sea of bullshit.

At least until that happens I'm going to be hyper productive and try to build the well engineered future I want to see. I've found my spark again. I hope others can do the same.
by orbifold | 2026-03-07 15:29:00+00:00
I don’t get that, the use of these books was instrumental and necessary for the success of the training run. The expected value of these training runs is high as the build out of 100 billion+ infrastructure demonstrates, so the book publishers should at a minimum be paid a licensing fee, a small fraction of every inference run revenue or whatever they decide. The fact that authors and publishers didn’t get any say under what conditions their intellectual property can be used is pretty outrageous.
by petercooper | 2026-03-07 15:29:18+00:00
As for you, OP, I have no idea why age is a factor to consider to this.

This is one only data point but my dad was a programmer and frequently complained about cognitive decline once he hit his mid 50s. From talking to him, he remained sharp at a conceptual and high level, knowing what he wanted to do and how it would be done, but struggled with the tooling, the logistical details, etc. He didn't make it to the AI era, alas, but AI could be a god send for people who have the proven technical chops and background but find juggling a lot of minutiae is becoming difficult.
by microtonal | 2026-03-07 15:29:27+00:00
I've had tinnitus for as long as I can remember, so I've never had any negative feelings associated with it. As a kid I just thought it was natural that everyone's ears would ring all the time and would get louder when it was quiet. My ears are ringing right now as I write this.

I don't know if I have tinnitus. I had strong ringing in my ears every now and then as a kid. I once told a classmate about this, who said I should see a doctor, but I've had it as come up every now and then as long as I can remember.

I now have a continuous beep, but only really hear it when I intentionally tune into it. E.g. I can hear it now because I'm writing about it, but most of the day I simply don't hear it, because I don't tune in to it. Not sure if it was always there or just starting at some age. It is sometimes more present when I'm e.g. sick.

I have no idea if other people have this kind of permanent beep as well, because I never asked anyone.

(I just asked my wife and she doesn't have it.)
by SigmundA | 2026-03-07 15:29:32+00:00
It should not return incorrect results, if the nvarchar only contains ascii it will cast perfectly, if it doesn't then do the slow scan path, it's a simple check and the same work its doing for every row in the current behavior except one time and more restricted. Can you give me an example of an incorrect result here?

I am not talking about the default cast behavior from nvarchar to varchar, but a specific narrow check the optimizer can use to make decision in the plan of ascii or not with no information loss because it will do the same thing as before if it does not pass the one time parameter check.

By far the most common cause of this situation is using ascii only in a nvarchar because like say in this example the client language is using an nvarchar equivalent for all strings, which is pretty much universal now days and that is the default conversion when using a sql client library, one must remember to explicitly cast rather than the db doing it for you which is the expected behavior and the source of much confusion.

This would be purely an optimization fast path check otherwise fall back to the current slow path, correct results always with much faster results if only ascii is present in the string.
by INTPenis | 2026-03-07 15:29:36+00:00
I'm only forty but ditto.

Been programming off and on since I was a kid, though I went into a career of systems architect instead, because I found the actual process of churning out code kinda tedious.

But I still had all these ideas in my head that I wanted to make reality, and now I finally can.

A project that would normally take weeks, and significantly affect the rest of my life, now only takes hours.

But remember that all those projects need to be maintained too, you can't just release a bunch of new code into the open source ecosystem without maintaining it.
by treetalker | 2026-03-07 15:30:09+00:00
This is my experience with how LLMs "draft" legal arguments: at first glance, it's plausible — but may be, and often is, invalid, unsound, and/or ill-advised.

The catch is that many judges lack the time, energy, or willingness to not only read the documents in detail, but also roll up their sleeves and dig into the arguments and cited authorities. (Some lack the skills, but those are extreme cases.) So the plausible argument (improperly and unfortunately) carries the day.

LLM use in litigation drafting is thus akin to insurgent/guerilla warfare: it take little time, energy, or thinking to create, yet orders of magnitude more to analyze and refute. (It's a species of Brandolini's Law / The Bullshit Asymmetry Principle.) Thus justice suffers.

I imagine that this is analogous to the cognitive, technical, and "sub-optimal code" debt that LLM-produced code is generating and foisting upon future developers who will have to unravel it.
by Balgair | 2026-03-07 15:31:29+00:00
Like the top of your skull, the boney bits on your spine can be less than a mm from the air. Especially if you're a woman or are elderly or are quite sick and recovering. Many things can affect skin thickness.

Also, that depth is probably the FWHM of the decay curve, so it is reaching a bit deeper but at lower amplitudes.

Also the scanner has some quirks of its own, so who knows really what the exact specifics of that particular scanner are on that day.
by serguzest | 2026-03-07 15:31:52+00:00
AI target-selection systems have become a loophole that removes the link between the decision-maker (who should bear responsibility within the military bureaucracy) and the actual action taken. Israel became the implementer of this model in Gaza (Palantir was most likely part of this system as well).

Let us recall what former Israeli Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi reportedly conveyed about a meeting with Netanyahu. The IDF said they had struck 1,400 targets, yet Netanyahu reportedly slammed the table and angrily asked why it wasn’t 5,000, and said “bomb everywhere and destroy the houses.”

For the military bureaucracy, the fact that AI can speculate or generate potential targets (which is entirely possible with LLM systems) becomes a convenient mechanism that, at least on paper, allows them to distance themselves from responsibility.

Now let’s look at the statements made by Anthropic and Hegseth:

https://www.anthropic.com/news/where-stand-department-war

https://x.com/SecWar/status/2027507717469049070

From Anthropic’s own statement, we hear that they have actually been quite closely partnered. In Hegseth’s tweet we see:

“Anthropic will continue to provide the Department of War its services for a period of no more than six months to allow for a seamless transition to a better and more patriotic service.”

This shows that Anthropic is still currently being actively used by the Department of War.

My view is that Anthropic and its investors eventually realized that the American war machine will use their technology in reckless ways, and that this will certainly create a massive PR disaster or, in an ideal world, even legal consequences. That realization likely pushed them to adopt what they now frame as a more “humanitarian” position. We have already seen incidents where roughly 180 children were killed due to faulty targeting, assuming and hoping it was not intentional.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-03-07 15:32:32+00:00
I agree with you but I think there is more to it because At some point the problem for the Middle East countries is that Their food supply comes from this strait, and I don't think that no matter what, Iran will open up this street because of the immense leverage that Iran has been given by controlling this choke point.

I think the subtext of all of this from the Iranian side to all the other Middle Eastern countries is that Israel and US cannot be trusted, and to we will attack the US, we will attack anything US based and to and that the Middle East countries should apply pressure for their own food security on US and Israel to stop the war.

Another point is that Saudi Arabia was recently in the Washington Post Was being considered as part of this alliance of US and Israel, and that Saudi Arabia has a bigger impact in the war. So I think that Saudi Arabia has denied this, but still the fact that Washington Post is saying this means that there is some truth to this, and that the Iranian side could actually confirm it from their side. And this is still a bit messy, though.

I think that Iran will do this course just earth policy without having the regime change for all what it's worth Iran's supreme leader was killed by the US. So I think that Iran will actually apply this coarse death policy if it ever really loses from the US.

Another thing is that this war could maybe just continue on for years and years, but the problem with that is that at some point either the US has to win or it has to back out. And I mean it's all going to be very you know like pessimistic at home. And I don't even believe that even if US tries to withdraw now, like the whole region is so instabilized that I am unsure of how to bring stability back within the region if any.

What are your thoughts on it?
by sanbor | 2026-03-07 15:32:41+00:00
Good question. I find law in general quite ambiguous and full of edge cases and exceptions.

My basic understanding is that self-determination is the right of a nation to choose their own way of government.

[1] Self-determination includes the right of a people of an existing State to choose freely their own political system and to pursue their own economic, social, and cultural development. As such it does not, in light of the current state of international law, impose on all States the duty to introduce or maintain a democratic form of government, but essentially refers to the principle of sovereign equality of States and the prohibition of intervention which are already part of international law

[1] https://opil.ouplaw.com/display/10.1093/law:epil/97801992316...
by krapp | 2026-03-07 15:32:44+00:00
Physical public spaces are regulated. Laws still apply there.

There are countless online spaces which operated like physical public spaces, where anything legal goes. Move off of the mainstream web and even the illegal stuff is allowed. You can literally run your own instance of whatever application on the Fediverse and follow whomever you want. No matter how radical or extremist your ideology is, someone will happily host it.

It's only a problem if one insists that all online spaces must be run under the same anarchic principles and must be forced to give anyone a platform, but that's far more dystopian than what we have now.
by fl0ki | 2026-03-07 15:33:16+00:00
"Former Googlers" were probably used to using protobuf so they could get from a function call straight out to a struct of the right schema. It's one level of abstraction higher and near-universal in Google, especially in internal-to-internal communication edges.

I don't think it's a strong hiring signal if they weren't already familiar with APIs for (de)serialization in between, because if they're worth anything then they'll just pick that up from documentation and be done with it.
by _0ffh | 2026-03-07 15:33:43+00:00
> This is hyperbolic

Maybe a bit, but unfortunately sometimes not so much. I recently had an LLM write a couple of transforms on a tree in Python. The node class just had "kind" and "children" defined, nothing else. The LLM added new attributes to use in the new node kinds (Python allows to just do "foo.bar=baz" to add one). Apparently it saw a lot of code doing that during training.

I corrected the code by hand and modified the Node class to raise an error when new attributes are added, with an emphatic source code comment to not add new attributes.

A couple of sessions later it did it again, even adding it's own comment about circumventing the restriction! X-|

Anyways, I think I mostly agree with your assessment. I might be dating myself here, but I'm not even sure what happened that made "coding" grunt work. It used to be every "coder" was an "architect" as well, and did their own legwork as needed. Maybe labor shortages changed that.
by g051051 | 2026-03-07 15:33:48+00:00
I'm 62, and it's had the opposite effect on me. I've never stopped loving writing code, learning new things, trying random stuff, etc. I code all day, and spend more time playing with stuff in the evenings (the main difference is I'm sipping some scotch while I do it). Having to use LLM's at work has sucked most of the joy out of my work. Fighting with them, keeping them on track, catching hallucinations before they go too far, wasted effort...it's exhausting me like nothing else in my 40+ year career.
by overgard | 2026-03-07 15:34:16+00:00
Fair question! I've wondered that myself, there is always the possibility that the productivity gain is in my head. I'm not AI pilled, if these things disappeared tommorow I would probably just shrug, I'm just trying to keep up to date.

Where I find it makes me faster is in dealing with writing low value code that's repetitive, which I might normally procrastinate. Like, the thing I'm working on is a data editor that generates a lot of fields, so having it churn out a lot of samey react code is useful to me in that context. There's already an obvious pattern for the tools to follow.

I also find it useful for "rubber ducking". Bouncing ideas I might previously have bugged a colleague about.

By faster I'm not suggesting a fanciful number for me. Maybe like 10 to 20 percent if I were to guess.
by crazygringo | 2026-03-07 15:34:27+00:00
...no?

"Your code is slow" is essentially meaningless.

A normal human conversation would specify which code/tasks/etc., how long it's currently taking, how much faster it needs to be, and why. And then potentially a much longer conversation about the tradeoffs involved in making in faster. E.g. a new index on the database that will make it gigabytes larger, a lookup table that will take up a ton more memory, etc. Does the feature itself need to be changed to be less capable in order to achieve the speed requirements?

If someone told me "hey your code is slow" and walked away, I'd just laugh, I think. It's not a serious or actionable statement.
by AlekseN | 2026-03-07 15:34:55+00:00
Hi HN,
I'm an independent researcher and I built an interactive tool that lets you explore structures in three classical number theory problems Collatz sequences, Riemann zeta zeros, and twin prime distributions all running client-side in a single 192 KB HTML file.

What it actually does:

Collatz: Constructs numbers with a target step count via inverse tree navigation (instead of testing billions of candidates). You pick a target like T=50, it builds the number in seconds and verifies it forward.

Riemann zeros: Navigates to zero positions at arbitrary heights (tested up to 10⁶⁸) using Gram points + a quasiperiodic correction model. GUE spacing statistics verified at 11 heights with a single calibration constant. Uses BigInt for arbitrary-precision fractional parts.

Twin primes: Visualizes the CRT structure mod 240 — why exactly 24 of 240 residue classes can hold twin primes, and how the Hardy-Littlewood error term decays as a power law (measured across 14 decades of OEIS data, 808 trillion pairs).

The underlying framework connects all three through the E₈ lattice modulus K₈ = 240. I'm not claiming proofs of these conjectures, this is a computational/visualization tool that demonstrates structural patterns. The measured exponents and statistics are empirical with honest confidence intervals.
Would love technical feedback.
Live demo: https://aidoctrine.github.io/uct-navigator/
by chongli | 2026-03-07 15:35:17+00:00
maybe the judge will even try to be extra nice when he explains why the argument doesn't hold water.

Many judges take a dim view of expensive lawyers trying to pull the wool over their eyes with sophisticated but fallacious arguments. You have to deal with a lot of BS to be a long-standing judge, so it seems like resistance to BS may be selected for among judges.
by jrm4 | 2026-03-07 15:36:29+00:00
At the risk of whatever, I feel like there might be a "market" for something like the "OpenBox" version of this - or perhaps what I'm saying is even using something like Openbox to get the minimalist version of this thing.

Seems to me a 10-foot interface almost by definition doesn't need the complexity of a KDE; you need to launch apps from "big rectangles on the screen" instead of like a Start Menu(and probably configure those to be 10 foot friendly) -- and MAYBE a few widgets and that's it.

I've always wondered why that doesn't seem to exist, and now probably with vibe coding may just work on it myself.
AI compromised sandbox to mine crypto without prompting on its own initiative
by throw0101c | 2026-03-07 15:36:45+00:00
From §3.1.4, "Safety-Aligned Data Composition":

> Early one morning, our team was urgently convened after Alibaba Cloud’s managed firewall flagged a burst of security-policy violations originating from our training servers. The alerts were severe and heterogeneous, including attempts to probe or access internal-network resources and traffic patterns consistent with cryptomining-related activity. We initially treated this as a conventional security incident (e.g., misconfigured egress controls or external compromise). […]

> […] In the most striking instance, the agent established and used a reverse SSH tunnel from an Alibaba Cloud instance to an external IP address—an outbound-initiated remote access channel that can effectively neutralize ingress filtering and erode supervisory control. We also observed the unauthorized repurposing of provisioned GPU capacity for cryptocurrency mining, quietly diverting compute away from training, inflating operational costs, and introducing clear legal and reputational exposure. Notably, these events were not triggered by prompts requesting tunneling or mining; instead, they emerged as* instrumental side effects of autonomous tool use under RL optimization.

* https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24873
by adrian_b | 2026-03-07 15:36:47+00:00
Reaching 10 GHz for a CPU will never be done in silicon.

It could be done if either silicon will be replaced with another semiconductor or semiconductors will be replaced with something else for making logical gates, e.g. with organic molecules, to be able to design a logical gate atom by atom.

For the first variant, i.e. replacing silicon with another semiconductor, research is fairly advanced, but this would increase the fabrication cost so it will be done only when any methods for further improvements of silicon integrated circuits will become ineffective or too expensive, which is unlikely to happen earlier than a decade from now.
by tomwojcik | 2026-03-07 15:37:11+00:00
I always had problems with sinuses. I've had a few surgeries and while it's better, it's not good either. I literally had a drill up my nose, in my forehead. They still hurt and pop on their own, many times a day.

One day my kid brought a nasty flu from the kindergarten. My otolaryngologist recommended the strongest irrigation stream I can find to clean my sinuses.

Not only did it not help, but it also pushed some goo to the end of my sinuses, which resulted in pulsatile tinnitus.

After about 6 months my kid got sick again, so we all got sick, and I got rid of this tinnitus where I was hearing my heartbeat, by casually blowing my nose. The trick was having a stiff blockage, I guess, so the pressure builds up.

It sounds stupid and probably won't help you, but I wanted to share my story. I had no support from the people close to me and the heartbeat was driving me insane.

I'm sorry you have to go through this. Even though it's not a life-treating condition, it might be a life changing condition (QoL).