MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by timschumi | 2026-03-12 04:26:00+00:00
Every system and package manager will be affected if it cannot download source code to build a package.

NixOS less so, because pretty much all source downloads that are not restricted by license are a separate output that will therefore be stored on (and downloadable from) NixOS cache servers.

I'm not sure what your expectation for this is in general, nobody can just wish into existence data that is just gone.
by jltsiren | 2026-03-12 04:27:11+00:00
As a gross simplification, there are two kinds of fields. Some are defined by the methods they use, and some by the topics they study.

The latter will use any methods that may yield results. That creates a problem. The people who are in the target audience for a paper and may try to replicate the results often fail to do so, because they lack the expertise. Because their background is too different.
by deathanatos | 2026-03-12 04:27:27+00:00
We are using very different versions of JIRA.

The cloud version I used was slow and riddled with bugs. Entire views sometimes just refused to load or render, or something.

Did it "get the job done?" Yes, in a literal reading of those words, I suppose it did, but anyone who understands the amount of work that a modern 2.4 GHz CPU should be able to do per unit time would not think highly of it.

Nowadays … my company uses Linear … which, while it does have a sleeker, more modern looking UI … is nobody able to make a good bug tracker?
by _heimdall | 2026-03-12 04:27:31+00:00
The stat has been raised frequently of late that 20% of the world's oil floes through the Straight.

My understanding is that its 20% of total oil, but that around half of all oil production is used domestically where it is produced and never enters global markets.

Unless I missed something when fact checking that, Iran is capable cutting off 40% of all purchasable oil.
by jjmarr | 2026-03-12 04:27:48+00:00
Yes, it's sarcasm. I'm contrasting how Britain made their legal process gradual enough to match reality with the USA's demand that legal processes create reality.

For reference, fully elective abortion legally doesn't exist in most of the UK. It's just that a fetus being dangerous to the mental health of the mother has progressively been interpreted more and more broadly...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_the_United_Kingdom
by Aerroon | 2026-03-12 04:28:06+00:00
We have faster memory, it's just all used in data center cards you can't buy (and can't afford to buy).

AMD actually used HBM2 memory in their Radeon VII card back in 2019 (!!) for $700. It had 16 GB of HBM2 memory with 1 TB/s throughput.

The RTX 5080 in conversion l comparison also has 16 GB of VRAM, but was released in 2025 and has 960 GB/s throughput. The RTX 5090 does have an edge at 1.8 TB/s bandwidth and 32 GB of VRAM but it also costs several times more. Imagine if GPUs had gone down the path of the Radeon VII.

That being said, the data center cards from both are monstrous.

The Nvidia B200 has 180 GB of VRAM (2x90GB) offering 8.2 TB/s bandwidth (4.1 TB/s x2) released in 2024. It just costs as much as a car, but that doesn't matter, because afaik you can't even buy them individually. I think you need to buy a server system from Nvidia or Dell that will come with like 8 of these and cost you like $600k.

AMD has the Mi series. Eg AMD MI325x. 288 GB of VRAM doing 10 TB/s bandwidth and released in 2024. Same story as Nvidia: buy from an OEM that will sell you a full system with 8x of these (and if you do get your hands on one of these you need a special motherboard for them since they don't do PCIe). Supposedly a lot cheaper than Nvidia, but still probably $250k.

These are not even the latest and greatest for either company. The B300 and Mi355x are even better.

It's a shame about the socket for the Mi series GPUs (and the Nvidia ones too). The Mi200 and Mi250x would be pretty cool to get second-hand. They are 64 GB and 128GB VRAM GPUs, but since they use OAP socket you need the special motherboard to run them. They're from 2021, so in a few years time they will likely be replaced, but as a regular joe you likely can't use them.

The systems exist, you just can't have them, but you can rent them in the cloud at about $2-4 per hour per GPU.
by Waterluvian | 2026-03-12 04:28:16+00:00
I think it’s wild to me just how much my mainstream news doesn’t feel like it’s covering some of what’s really going on. I have to go to YouTube to see that Iran is successfully fighting back in many ways including hitting oil tankers and depots.

Not that I’m claiming the CBC and such are doing something sinister here. Just that I no-longer get the full story vibe I recall getting back in previous U.S. wars.
by divbzero | 2026-03-12 04:29:31+00:00
> A decade ago, Apple began switching from trackpads with mechanical clicking mechanisms to Magic Trackpads, where clicks are simulated via haptic feedback (in Apple’s parlance, the Taptic Engine).... The Neo’s trackpad is mechanical. It actually clicks, even when the machine is powered off.

I wonder if the real clicks on mechanical trackpad will actually feel better than the simulated clicks on the Magic Trackpad.
by duskdozer | 2026-03-12 04:30:10+00:00
>For preposition, I roll a D20 and hope the best.

This makes me think of something: are nonnative English speakers tempted to use LLMs to correct grammar because mistakes like this actually make the writing unintelligible in their native language? For example, if I swap out the "For" in this sentence for any (?) other preposition, it's still comprehensible. (At|Of|In|By|To|On|With) example, ...
by theamk | 2026-03-12 04:30:32+00:00
"Root cause analysis" is pretty complex, and DNS + TCP + TLS are just a tiny bits of it (and they are one of the most reliable ones too, as those components are written once and then typically never touched).

When I do root analysis, I look into internal logs, server metrics, recent source code changes, and related systems. I am sure this can be partially automated, but this is a lot of work.

An API monitor that can only tell me "You have elevated first-byte latency and increased 5xx rate" is pretty useless, and I certainly don't think it can offer me any "plain-english suggestion" for this problem. What is it going to tell me, "git gud and fix your servers"?
by brailsafe | 2026-03-12 04:30:52+00:00
I disagree with the notion that that's what their word choice implies. Also, there doesn't need be magical solution that's not being implemented for there to clearly be a severely heightened level of precarity in the economy that has a hugely negative impact on people who haven't had time to build a financial safety net, build their careers, or buy a house when it was feasible, in large part due specifically to aggressive, malicious, sometimes coordinated extractions of rent and land value
by mekael | 2026-03-12 04:31:03+00:00
Most people I know don't write any code with agents, 90ish percent is still written by hand. I'm personally still trying to figure out where to fit them into my workflow: there's not much boilerplate to write as well known frameworks and libraries had already taken care of the heavy lifting, templates for major project types cut down on the initial startup overhead, and all of the project planning is done upfront with business partners.

Despite my ethical issues with AI, I am using it for a handful of personal projects so I am at least keeping up with what the frontier models are doing and I'm quite impressed with them for doing reverse engineering (they need a lot of hand holding, but I've been able to knock out months of trial and error pretty quickly).

That being said, I'm still perplexed when people state they're getting huge gains from them in terms of knocking out boilerplate, or helping them plan out the project. I was under the impression that the former was a solved problem, and the latter was a requirement of being a decent engineer.
by autoexec | 2026-03-12 04:31:24+00:00
> I am here to express my ideas and opinions

If that is true you shouldn't have any objection to a rule against letting a chatbot express your ideas and options for you. Express yourself, because asking a chatbot to do your thinking and writing for you is not a superficial thing.

> But if we start ignoring ideas and opinions and instead focus on superficial things like how they are written or communicated, then the whole point of HN is lost.

How a message is communicated matters and always has. Even before this rule, I could express opinions here in ways that would get me banned from this website, and I could express those exact same opinions in ways that would not. Ideas and opinions still matter, but so does how we communicate them. It's a very small ask that you express your own thoughts in your own words while participating here.
by tom_ | 2026-03-12 04:31:27+00:00
The local account tip is a good one. I used it when setting up Windows 11 Pro on my desktop PC.

Regarding updates: you might not even need to think about registry keys! I found these Windows 10 group policy settings to work well for many years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18157968 - and I'm still using them with Windows 11, near enough, though it seems you now need to go to "Windows Update\Manage end user experience" to find the Configure Automatic Updates setting I mention.

(I've also switched to using option 2 (Notify for download and auto install) rather than 3 (Auto download and notify for install), on the basis that it sounds safer, and I've had no problems from doing that. Not to say that I actually remember having any problems from letting Windows download the updates ahead of time! - but I'm comfortable living dangerously.)
by yellowapple | 2026-03-12 04:31:30+00:00
Is that an actual drop-off in commenters, or in comments? The latter is readily explainable by “commenters who would previously call out the errors now choose to not engage with those comments/posts at all”.

In any case, I don't think it's a bad thing to want to communicate as clearly as possible, and if an LLM helps you do that, I ain't one to judge. Sure, ideally I'd want to read folks' thoughts without the LLM-induced layer of vaseline smoothing them over, but even that's better than not reading them at all :)
by lazystar | 2026-03-12 04:32:00+00:00
> Or, do you tell it the basic functionality you want, test it out, then add feature after feature that you want, sometimes dropping them and sometimes adding new ones that you thought of as your worked

the problem with this is long term maintainability. it works - and the engineer understands how it works - but a) the AI does not prioritize cleanup/organization/naming, and b) there's a blind spot/boiling frog type of phenomenon that can prevent the engineer from spotting the growing problem. the codebase becomes recognizable only to them. the engineer sees all features working, all bugs fixed, 90% test coverage, and submits it for a PR.

the engineer tasked with reviewing the PR will treat it as slop.
by dang | 2026-03-12 04:32:20+00:00
Thought and creativity won't be averaged away because human beings have a drive for these things. This just raises the bar for it. And why not? We get complacent when not pushed.

Dostoevsky said that if all human knowledge could ever be reduced to 2 + 2 = 4, man would stick out his tongue and insist that 2 + 2 = 5. That was a 19th century formulation—he was a contemporary of Boole. I wonder what the equivalent would be for the LLM era.
by peesem | 2026-03-12 04:32:22+00:00
it seems to me like the acceptance of breaking changes by the Zig community is more coming from "it's worth it to get a nice, polished language" than some "source of pride" which i personally have not seen in my time in a/the Zig discord server.

what is the problem with zig being developed for 10+ years? if people want stable languages there are stable languages to be used. if a language like zig is not achievable in less than 10 years, should it just not be developed from the start?

i think your problems with build.zig are overstated. where do you see someone saying "to build your first Hello World, first understand this build script in non-trivial Zig"? you can literally just do `zig run file.zig`, so if someone is advocating for that then i think many would agree they are teaching the wrong way. i wonder if you saw an example project with a build script that was intended to show the power and possibilities of Zig rather than to be a starter guide.
by nchcss76 | 2026-03-12 04:33:59+00:00
I feel this is good. It will push economies towards more alternatives(nuclear/solar/wind etc), increase electrification of transport/cooking. Amazon saw India induction stove sales jump 30x after LPG supply hit issues. There is no real reason to be importing expensive gas for cooking, when the induction stove are just much more efficient and cheaper. This is one way to change existing habits that people find uncomfortable letting go off.
by itake | 2026-03-12 04:34:19+00:00
1/ When authors use AI for editing, it reduces their credibility.

2/ As much as I don't like the current administration (and Israel leadership), there is absolutely no way the assumptions this article makes about them are false.

There is no way the US/Israel didn't calculate that:

- the straight would be closed

- a new leader may represent similar idiologies of the past leader.

Everything that has happened so far (in regards to Iran attacking neighbors) has been extremely predictable. There is just no way these weren't calculated in.
by JoshTriplett | 2026-03-12 04:34:51+00:00
> An LLM doesnt compete with Art the same way that Photoshop doesnt compete with Art.

Yes, it does. Many people are using AI-generated works in places where they originally would have either paid an artist, programmer, or other creative professional, or done without. Many companies are claiming to reduce staff because of AI (whether that's true or an excuse). There is plenty of evidence that AI is directly competing with various individuals, businesses, and industries.

> With the result that anything produced by the LLM does not reproduce any single source in its entirety

You do not have to reproduce sources in their entirety to produce derivative works.
by yellowapple | 2026-03-12 04:35:10+00:00
The problem with “spirit-of-the-law” is that having rules be subject to discretion is a pretty clear avenue for discrimination and abuse. Not as big of a deal for an Internet forum as it would be for, say, a country's legal code and the enforcement thereof, but the lack of a clear standard for a rule makes that rule hard to follow and harder to enforce impartially.
by jitl | 2026-03-12 04:35:18+00:00
there are a zillion of these "json pro" kind of things: superjson, devalue, capnweb, all with slightly different ideas about how to lower high-level semantics to json's available types. it's so easy to do this kind of thing, its a real https://xkcd.com/927/ situation.

CBOR (Concise Binary Object Representation) has JSON-like semantics with type extension support; with built in type extensions its much easier to get some agreement about registering certain magic type IDs to mean certain things. for example from a random google search for "cbor datetime" https://j-richter.github.io/CBOR/date.html; there's an IANA registry of type IDs: https://www.iana.org/assignments/cbor-tags/cbor-tags.xhtml

however, it is binary.
by _heimdall | 2026-03-12 04:35:29+00:00
Trump, the neo-cons, and much of the Republican party might as well hang up their hats if they put boots on the ground (beyond special forces which is often ignored for some reason).

The US will be bogged down for years at a minimum if we entered Iran on the ground, or we would lose quickly and tuck tail.

This isn't a fight to be won in a conventional war, the administration put every chip they had on a gamble that regime change was possible with air superiority alone. I don't know of any historical example of that working, but I guess we'll see what happens.
by jiggawatts | 2026-03-12 04:35:32+00:00
Normally what happens in these scenarios is that both sides declare victory and go home to lick their wounds.

The US and Israel can claim that they've caused the IRGC sufficient damage to set them back a decade or more.

Iran will declare that they've fought off a superpower with minimal real losses, and they can say that despite the best efforts at interference, they chose and kept their preferred leader alive.
by slopinthebag | 2026-03-12 04:35:42+00:00
I think it's possible we could get to something like %30. I imagine that AI is being overused by a lot of devs in places where it has a marginal or even negative impact of productivity. It's easy to remember your "WOW!" moments when it does something quickly and flawlessly, but I think we tend to forget the times when it struggles or when you outright have to throw it away and start over.

So even just learning how to use it better (or less side-eying the AI boosters) will lead to improvements. I'm not sure how much of a difference incremental improvements on the models or harnesses will make.

Of course this is also skewed by what type of work you do - textbook stuff that's well inside the distribution will have more tasks that can be accomplished with AI tools than stuff that is less well represented in the training data. It's not a mystery why the majority of my AI usage is with HTML and CSS.
by foxglacier | 2026-03-12 04:36:50+00:00
> Your GPL licensed library? Yeah, we used claude to rewrite it and released it under MIT.

Good. "You" made the world a better place at the expense of "me", the rent-seeking GPL author. I can go suck it if nobody wants my equivalent product with a worse license anymore. How do people not get this? If AI enables somebody to reproduce somebody else's hard labor much more cheaply, then it should do so instead of holding everyone else to ransom just because some self-entitled programmer wants to prevent competition when he's falling behind the market.

If you're a programmer, you have no moral right to complain about that because it's also the whole point of computer software. To do things more cheaply - ie to make somebody else's work worthless.
by Uptrenda | 2026-03-12 04:36:56+00:00
The client fetches the pub key off the server which is decentralized? There's no part in the protocol that authenticates whether or not a pub key is legit. If its replaced by an attacker and someone subsequently goes to fetch a key they can read those messages. I mean, pub key infrastructure is meant to solve that. With SSL and such... that's why you its a federated chain of certificates with providers vouching that names = pub keys.

This is a very common problem. There is potential to possibly make this more decentralized with smart card technology. Like imagine a smart phone with access to pub keys in the hardware tied to an account cryptographically. Then you can say something like phone number = subscriber = pub key. Encrypted messaging apps seem to bootstrap off of ownership for numbers in the mobile system (mobile system security is very bad so there are dragons here.) The other apps like pidgin with OTR plugins they have unique phrases that help with the issue.

When you start looking at decentralized pub key infrastructure tied to human-meaningful names you start to run into zookos triangle:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko%27s_triangle

human-meaningful, decentralized, secure -- pick two
by cassonmars | 2026-03-12 04:37:50+00:00
PFS is valuable largely in stable, small groups that rarely change shape or association.

PFS in an open, freely-associable environment is far more complicated when you move beyond even the smallest of group sizes. Realistically, once the group size is beyond Dunbar's number you can reasonably assume that PFS is moot, because you no longer can depend on maybe four or five people's personal security, but 150+. Statistically, someone's opsec failure will be guaranteed.
by olalonde | 2026-03-12 04:39:04+00:00
> my personal workstation remains a 2021 M1 Max MacBook Pro

I was surprised that a guy who shills Apple for a living still uses a 5 year old MacBook. It goes to show how the longevity of laptops has increased over time. I'm also on a M1 Macbook and find it hard to justify an upgrade.
by steve_adams_86 | 2026-03-12 04:39:18+00:00
This is written a bit like the US dollar depends solely on the price of oil, which isn't true.

It also seems like if we're to game theory this, we'd need to plot out the full escalation capacity of the USA, which the author is failing to do here. I don't like the idea of doing that because the thought is sickening, but it's necessary to consider the entire decision tree to make a remotely rational model.

In retrospect I guess game theory is used kind of rhetorically here. If you consider what's written through that lens, it's very poorly developed and doesn't make sense. Maybe this is a thing, though? Am I misunderstanding what the author means by game theory here?

I do think the asymmetry of war costs are a serious problem for the USA, and the less they're willing to escalate or otherwise mitigate this, the more serious that problem becomes. If I were to make a statement like the author did about the war, I'd frame it more like "this is going to be insanely fucking risky and expensive for the USA", but certainly not that they'll lose.

edit: Listening to the Professor Jiang analysis and I understand why game theory was referenced now. He seems much more thorough and analytical so far.

edit again: he claims Dubai will probably go bankrupt in one scenario. This seems exceedingly unlikely, but he doesn't explain why it could be true
by dang | 2026-03-12 04:39:26+00:00
The dynamics of content production are shifting hard right now. Things that used to signal something interesting are being generated in minutes with little thought. It's getting democratized, but also commoditized.

It's too soon to know how this is going to shake out, so we should resist the temptation to impose rules prematurely. And we should especially not do so out of resistance to change (when has that ever worked out?)

But we'll do what we need to do to keep our heads above water. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/showlim. I figure pragmatics are fine as long one keeps adjusting.
by fulafel | 2026-03-12 04:39:33+00:00
This is worrying about trivialities. We need to be rapidly phasing out fossils usage to mitigate the climate catastrophe. Which of course requires a much much smaller supply of oil.

There should be ~ $250/barrel cost added to the market price to account for externalities (barrel of oil releases 0.43 tons of co2 and avg social cost of carbon from https://arxiv.org/html/2402.09125v3 is $500+/ton)
by silisili | 2026-03-12 04:40:10+00:00
Whatever points this author was trying to make were completely obliterated by the LLM it was run through or used to generate it.

A shame because it seems to have interesting points, but was too wordy and LLMified to keep attention. Stop telling me what it's not every other sentence, and just say what you mean. I wish folks would just use their own words.
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-03-12 04:40:39+00:00
> Since 2022 we do. But it’s through the political process of the States.

Which is exactly as it should be. There's nothing in the Constitution which gives the federal government power to act on this issue, therefore it should be decided on a state by state basis. Government works best when it is done based on the values and needs of the local population, not one solution for an entire heterogeneous nation.
by tcskeptic | 2026-03-12 04:40:43+00:00
The idea that any results of AI productivity enhancements that include data from 2024 are valid is bananas.

I’m not even a programmer — but the step change since late fall 2025 is incredible.

I have a young relative that manages in house product for a financial services company. Programming team of 150 ish. That will be 15 ish by June and they are iterating much more quickly now.

So much cope in this thread. AI is in fact the grim reaper for the median coder. The emerging middle class in India tech hubs is about to get vaporized