MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by loevborg | 2026-03-04 16:12:11+00:00
I'm a big Rich Hickey fan. He's a big user of a (to me) peculiar variant of the phrase, "it ends up": a total of 144 times in https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts

It also struck me as a bit of a sleight of hand - but maybe it's just rhetorical flourish. Or more charitably you could say it's inevitable - in a conference talk of finite length, you can't possibly back up every assertion with detailed evidence. "It turns out" or "it ends up" are then a shorthand way of referring to your own experience.
by egypturnash | 2026-03-04 16:12:13+00:00
If you read the original paper (https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....) then they go into more detail on the piles of pebbles and what got taken; the graphs in figure 4 (https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....) make it very obvious that the chimps loved the crystals.

(an "euhedral" crystal is one with lots of obvious facets, an "anhedral" one is one that's been rounded down into a more pebble shape.)
by mananaysiempre | 2026-03-04 16:12:17+00:00
These claims are compatible. For instance, lex, re2c, ragel, etc. are exponential in the length of the automaton description, but the resulting lexers work in linear time[1] in the length of the string. Here the situation is even better, because the DFA is constructed lazily, at most one state per input character, so to observe its full enormity relative to the size of the needle you need an equally enormous haystack. “One state per input character” somewhat understates things, because producing each state requires a non-constant[2] amount of work, and storing the new derivative’s syntax tree a non-constant amount of space; but with hash-consing and memoization it’s not bad. Either way, derivative-based matching with a lazy DFA takes something like O(needle + f(needle) × haystack) time where I’m guessing f(n) has to be O(n log n) at least (to bring large ORs into normal form by sorting) but in practice is closer to constant. Space consumption is less of an issue because if at any point your cache of derivatives (= DFA) gets too bloated you can flush it and restart from scratch.

[1] Kind of, unless you hit ambiguities that need to be resolved with the maximal munch rule; anyways that’s irrelevant to a single-RE matcher.

[2] In particular, introductions to Brzozowski’s approach usually omit—but his original paper does mention—that you need to do some degree of syntax-tree simplification for the derivatives to stay bounded in size (thus finite in number) and the matcher to stay linear in the haystack.
by harshreality | 2026-03-04 16:12:24+00:00
Journals are not about providing access to science, much less public access.

Journals are an academic-career-advancement service. It therefore makes sense that they do not pay academics. You don't pay your customers.

That means they need to generate a secondary customer base elsewhere, who will pay. Those secondary customers happen to be the employers of the academics who are the primary customers. That socializes the cost of providing the service, since academics individually wouldn't be willing and able to pay.

Once journals have established a reputation, their policies and paywalls and fees are the result of trying to signal exclusivity and set an optimum market price.

Until the supply side of the research market largely agrees on a way to use open-access repositories like arXiv as a primary career-advancement signal, complaining about closed-access journals is tilting at windmills.

Changing the law to prevent journals from being able to copyright anything could potentially force the research industry to rapidly develop a new solution, but at the cost of short-term chaos and career instability for new academics.
by dismalaf | 2026-03-04 16:12:25+00:00
All this is game theory top to bottom. The only way to really quantify productivity is to look at "how much" of a thing has been created. In this case, lines of code, features, files, etc... So of course people who want to maximize their own income through promotions will also be incentivized to maximize the only quantifiable thing that they're judged on.
by lo_zamoyski | 2026-03-04 16:12:31+00:00
On the one hand, interviewers can suck. They can be uninterested in understanding and embrace instead the role of a trigger-happy interrogator looking not for a good response - something that may very well require effort and considering new ideas on the part of the interviewer - but an excuse to cross you off the list. The interview begins to look like a game of "Guess what I'm thinking". Interviews should simulate a colleague asking you for help.

On the other hand, interviewees can give poor answers with no explanation. The interviewer should press for an explanation in those cases, of course, but perhaps some are trying to see if the interviewee instinctively provides at least some basic rationale behind the answer without having to be prodded each time, in which case it is a matter of communication habits and skills. Communication is essential, and it is under-emphasized and under-taught in so-called 'STEM' curricula.
by jlarocco | 2026-03-04 16:12:58+00:00
Not to detract from the Show HN entry, but I made this back in 2012 to play with 3Delight's API and implicit surfaces: https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/56307994

The one posted to HN is better in several ways, but I was mainly interested in learning about 3Delight.

I'm really curious what bigger hashlife patterns would look like (metacell, etc.) but the visualization gets tricky with that many objects.
by sloth77 | 2026-03-04 16:13:01+00:00
"There’s no technical reason why Slack needs to load 80 MiB just to show 10 channel names and 3 messages on a screen. The web is not the problem here! It’s a choice to be bad. What makes you think it’ll be different once the company decides to move to native?"

Are you having a laugh? Every electron app I have ever used uses at least half a dozen heavy weight processes, each using 100MB+, typically totalling multi-GB for a single app - regardless of complexity.

Native apps are more work and I agree that OS vendors can't seem to decide on visuals these days, but they are still are far superior option for performance and efficiency.

And with RAM prices through the roof, the last thing I want is another bloated Electron app....
by SirMaster | 2026-03-04 16:13:06+00:00
Depends what you consider luxury feeling. It's so stripped down.

Aside from the slower CPU, half the ram, and half the SSD as the Air this is also what it's all missing compared to the Air:

TouchID, MagSafe, slightly bigger wider color (P3) screen, better 12MP CenterStage camera, 2 more speakers, 1 more mic, backlit keyboard, ambient light sensor, force-touch trackpad, WiFi 7, 2 Thunderbolt 4 ports, larger battery with longer runtime and faster charging.

Yes you can get TouchID with the 512GB upgrade for more money on the Neo.
by tveita | 2026-03-04 16:13:13+00:00
> Elijah Newren, who wrote git's merge-ort (the default merge strategy), reviewed weave and said language-aware content merging is the right approach, that he's been asked about it enough times to be certain there's demand, and that our fallback-to-line-level strategy for unsupported languages is "a very reasonable way to tackle the problem." Taylor Blau from the Git team said he's "really impressed" and connected us with Elijah. The creator of libgit2 starred the repo. Martin von Zweigbergk (creator of jj) has also been excited about the direction.

Are any of these statements public, or is this all private communication?

> We are also working with GitButler team to integrate it as a research feature.

Referring to this discussion, I assume: https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/gitbutler/discussions/12274
by SoftTalker | 2026-03-04 16:13:13+00:00
The example in the story seems, if I may, "too simple."

Rarely have I seen an actually straightforward, simple feature that can be done in a day used as the basis to spin up a 3-week mini-project with a complicated new architecure.

What happens is a complicated-sounding feature is requested, and some devs will just take it literally and implement it, maybe along with some amount of "future-proofing" that logically follows because the spec is poorly scoped.

Other devs will spend some time thinking about it, realize that there is a really a simple requirement at the core of the request, and it only sounds complex because it was vaguely specified (or maybe these days an LLM was used to write the spec, and its vomit was copy-pasted verbatim). They just implement the simple thing that is the actual need.

This is one place where the agile/scrum practice of planning poker can help. You get a few smart people in a room, and discuss the story and its requirements. Hopefully someone will throw out a low number of points and say "isn't this simply asking for..."

Over my career, most of the complicated code I have written is no longer running. What is still running after 10 years? Postgres (or more broadly, a relational database). Fad frameworks or architectures come and go pretty quickly, they don't end up working as advertised, and it's on to the next thing. I no longer want to spend time in this hamster wheel churning out complicated code that will only end up as next year's tech debt.
by alexwebb2 | 2026-03-04 16:14:03+00:00
> Robert Maxwell, one of the architects of the for-profit scientific publishing scheme. When he later went into debt, he plundered hundreds of millions of pounds from his employees’ pension funds. You may be familiar with his daughter and lieutenant Ghislaine Maxwell, who went on to have a successful career in child trafficking.

Wow! Surprised that hasn't been mentioned here already. Jumped out to me immediately as a morbidly curious bit of trivia.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-03-04 16:14:12+00:00
One of my niches is Amazon Connect - the AWS version of Amazon’s internal call center. It uses Amazon Lex for voice to text. Amazon Lex is still the same old intent based system I mentioned. If it doesn’t find an intent, it goes to the “FallbackIntent” and you can get the text transcription from there and feed it into a Lambda and from the Lambda call a Bedrock hosted LLM. I have found that Nova Lite is the fastest LLM. It’s much faster than Anthropic or any of the other hosted ones.
by handedness | 2026-03-04 16:14:22+00:00
Adding: Qubes is really no better, and maybe worse in some ways, than having a discrete banking VM in your bare metal Xen hypervisor. Sure, there are some improvements such as handing input devices over to an appVM, those sorts of things one could do in Xen manually, but broadly speaking the value Qubes bring is it does an amazing job of making living out of a Type-1 hypervisor barely doable for some small subset of people. And the "barely" and "small" is increasingly shrinking with each major release.

The magic of Qubes isn't its isolation, it doesn't even provide its own isolation. Qubes is an integration layer added on top of an isolation foundation. So you have a clipboard, file transfers, window dressing, easy configuration of device pass-through rules, all that. It's great.

It's phenomenal at that. But you have to understand what it is. You have to layer on a whole bunch of additional cruft to the Type-1 hypervisor, potentially all of which introduces potential vulnerabilities to dom0 and/or relevant appVMs. (Fortunately the project moves very slowly even for its size, which gives me some reasonable degree of confidence in its third-party code contributions, if less than I have in GrapheneOS's team's contributions.)

GrapheneOS solves a lot of these practical issues in very real and excellent ways, and it does it in large part via its tight integration with the excellent hardware it runs on, "Google" notwithstanding. (Now, "Motorola." "Lenovo." "China." A poor architecture even when made in America is not a practical improvement.)

Qubes-by-way-of-Xen does it despite running on pretty horrendous architecture. Even with your labor-intensive and super geeky improvements you've made to your setup, an evil maid attack, a theft, coercion, legal and political forces, all of these factors hit a harder target in GrapheneOS than they do in any QubesOS configuration currently achievable. But, as stated, trying to contain the most dangerous software most people ever run, a web browser, from leaking into your password manager? It's great. If that's your primary threat model, it's difficult to beat. Profiles on GrapheneOS are also excellent for that, if less well-integrated and therefore usable as Qubes.

Qubes still wins in terms of virtualization, of course, and you're comparing the benefits of virtualization to all of the many other benefits GrapheneOS brings (and in many instances iOS too), but you're not comparing them meaningfully.

Type-1 style virtualization is on the GrapheneOS roadmap, and once they achieve that it will be vastly more secure than QubesOS running on any x86 concoction you can devise. Give me a ThinkPad that meets GrapheneOS's hardware requirements running a virtualization-based GrapheneOS implementation and I would have little reason to ever run Qubes OS again. That would be some kind of peak practical end-user security solution, and I'd imagine enterprise and state customers would flock to that, if the broader enterprise requirements of it all were met, too.
by bee_rider | 2026-03-04 16:14:47+00:00
> Because LLMs don't understand things to begin with.

Ok, that’s fair. But I think the comment was making a distinction between the big picture and other types of “understanding.” I agree that it is incorrect to say LLMs understand anything, but I think that was just an informal turn of phrase. I’m saying I don’t think there’s something special about “big picture” information processing tasks, compared to in-detail information processing tasks, that makes them uniquely impossible for LLM.

The other objections seem mostly to be issues with current tooling, or the sort of capacity problems that the LLM developers are constantly overcoming.
by cplatz | 2026-03-04 16:15:01+00:00
We have a solution for this, launching at NVIDIA GTC this month (March 16 in San Jose, Calif.) If you will be there, stop by the Scaleflux booth to see it demo'd.
There's more we just posted on this here: https://www.lightbitslabs.com/blog/why-we-need-to-rethink-st...
Built a small Postgres tool. Would love some honest feedback
by hari_prasadd | 2026-03-04 16:15:13+00:00
I’ve been working on a small open-source project called Poge: https://github.com/dev-hari-prasad/poge

It’s a lightweight tool for quickly interacting with PostgreSQL — mainly inspecting tables and running queries without opening heavier tools like pgAdmin.

I originally built it for my own workflow when I just wanted something quick to check data or run a query while developing.

If anyone here works with Postgres regularly, I’d really appreciate:

- Honest feedback
- Feature ideas
- Things that feel missing or unnecessary

Even quick impressions would help a lot while I’m figuring out where to take the project.
by ndriscoll | 2026-03-04 16:15:54+00:00
Network segmentation does nothing for the types of attacks these devices perform (e.g. content recognition for upload to their tracking servers, tracking how you navigate their UI, ad delivery). I'm not worried about them spreading worms on my network. The problem is their propensity to exfiltrate data or relay propaganda. The solution to that is a legal one, or barring that, traffic filtering.
by shreddd24 | 2026-03-04 16:15:57+00:00
Absolutely great work. I have been mostly just thinking about what you are already practicing. I think your site will become an invaluable source for software engineers who want to responsibly apply AI in their development flow.

For a high level description of what this new way of engineering is about:
https://substack.com/@shreddd/p-189554031
by snowwrestler | 2026-03-04 16:16:01+00:00
I don’t understand why people care so much about the cost of journal subscriptions. If we add up all the revenue from all major scientific journal publishers, is that a big number in the context of the national economy? Or even compared to one major tech company?

I feel like this is one of those classic local minima where a community starving for resources fights vociferously amongst itself because they have internalized that they can’t win externally. From where I sit outside academia the problem with science seems obvious: there is not nearly enough money going into it.

I doubt bringing the heads of for-profit journals would change that under current national conditions in the U.S.
by Sir_Twist | 2026-03-04 16:16:11+00:00
It wouldn’t surprise me if this ends up being really popular with families. Parents with iPhones are (I’d imagine) far more likely to get their kids iPhones, and with Messages and FindMy I bet it’ll be the same here. Apple also has screen time and parental controls, so for parents wanting to get their kid a computer but worried about unrestricted Internet access, the MacBook Neo may be the most seamless option.
by jsiepkes | 2026-03-04 16:16:17+00:00
I have a story about this; People had an HSM (in USB key form) which needed to be shared. The question came to create some elaborate piece of software for lending to prevent people from accidentally leaving it in their pockets and accidentally going home with it (which had happened a couple of times).

Instead I went to the hardware store across the street and bought the biggest (and cheapest) screwdriver I could find and attached it with some cord to the HSM. They never lost it afterwards.
Show HN: Gold In Egypt – Arabic-first gold price tracker, shabka calculator
by eibrahim | 2026-03-04 16:16:18+00:00
Gold In Egypt (https://www.goldinegypt.com) is a gold price tracker for the Egyptian market.

Shows real-time gold prices in EGP for 24k, 21k, 18k, and 14k per gram. Includes historical price charts, price alerts, and a dealer directory.

The main differentiator is the shabka calculator. In Egyptian weddings, the groom's family gives gold (shabka) to the bride, and it's one of the biggest financial decisions a couple makes. The calculator lets you input a budget and see how many grams you can get at current prices across different karats.

Arabic-first interface with RTL layout. Responsive web app, price data aggregated from multiple Egyptian market sources.

Feedback welcome, especially from anyone familiar with the Egyptian gold market.
by munchbunny | 2026-03-04 16:16:36+00:00
Having been both the interviewer and the candidate in this kind of situation, this is really a big interviewer training failure.

The general way to handle this as an interviewer is really simple: acknowledge that the interviewee gave a good answer, but ask that for the purposes of evaluating their technical design skills that you'd like for them to design a new system/code a new implementation to solve this problem.

If the candidate isn't willing to suspend disbelief for the exercise, then you can consider that alongside all of the other signals your interviewer team gets about the candidate. I generally take it as a negative signal, not because I need conformance, but because I need someone who can work through honest technical disagreements.

As a candidate, what's worked for me before was to ask the interviewer if they'd prefer that I pretend ____ doesn't exist and come up with a new design, but it makes me question whether I want to join that team. IMO it's the systems design equivalent of the interviewer arguing with you about your valid algorithm because it's not the one the interviewer expects.
Show HN: I put HN discussions next to the article where it belongs
by krenerd | 2026-03-04 16:16:37+00:00
It it always bugged me when I read or share an article, the discussion lives separately from the article. I imagined being able to add Google-Docs or Notion style comments on any website. We save a snapshot of the website and allow adding discussions that live side-by-side and directly reference parts of the article.

HN articles are automatically indexed in https://cooo.link/hackernews

and you can add any website, PDFs on https://cooo.link/

Built with SvelteKit, SingleFile(for archiving page), Railway. Solo dev. Would love feedback if you found it interesting! Thanks
by D-Machine | 2026-03-04 16:16:38+00:00
> Your argument depends on worse peer review at top journals - but fundamentally, you fail to show how doing any peer review is strictly worse than doing no peer review.

No, it doesn't. The argument is that peer review is incompetent gatekeeping in general, and so slows things down and makes thing expensive. Also, I am countering the argument "we need journals because journals do peer review" by arguing "peer review by journals isn't clearly actually good", I am not saying "peer review in general is unneeded", as I support review by the entire scientific community, rather than journal gatekeepers.

> you fail to show how doing any peer review is strictly worse than doing no peer review

I wasn't trying to show that. I have provided plenty of arguments to show why killing journal-based peer review could definitely speed things up and so potentially make things better. I want actual organic review by the community, not by tiny groups of gatekeepers.
by zoba | 2026-03-04 16:16:39+00:00
I tried the new qwen model in Codex CLI and in Roo Code and I found it to be pretty bad. For instance I told it I wanted a new vite app and it just started writing all the files from scratch (which didn’t work) rather than using the vite CLI tool.

Is there a better agentic coding harness people are using for these models? Based on my experience I can definitely believe the claims that these models are overfit to Evals and not broadly capable.
by sovietswag | 2026-03-04 16:17:20+00:00
Ha! I just had a debate about this with my friend. A certain ferry company uses a big Google Sheet to track where all of its vessels are currently docked in their home port, as well as which employee is assigned to which vessel for the day, etc (it's very information dense with color coding, and employees check it daily to get their vessel assignment). My friend thought this was completely unacceptable for a big company, and that they should build a bespoke software for this purpose. I think that it was a brilliant idea to use Google Sheets, it already solves all of the difficult problems and obviates the need to have an inhouse software development team or an expensive contract. I buried my hubris deep underground
by vladms | 2026-03-04 16:17:33+00:00
> higher-profile journals in general have more retractions and research misconduct [1-2]

Given that reviews are not a mechanism to check for truth but soundness, the higher profile the thing I would imagine there would be more misconduct. I mean would one risk prison to steal 10$ or to steal 1 million $?

> lower research quality [3]

To cite exactly from your link "the evidence is mixed about whether they are strongly correlated with indicators of research quality.". I find saying "lower" a bit too strong given the original quote.

> in fact weaker statistical power and reliability [4]

For a specific field "cognitive neuroscience and psychology papers published recently"!

> statistical reliability even in high prestige journals is still extremely poor overall [5]

According to https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/arti... they kind of targeted bio/medical/psychology field for the analysis. Which seems to me very focused to be able to draw general conclusions.

> Also, making it through peer review is highly random and dependent on who you get as a reviewer [6], or is just basically a coin toss even when looking at reviewer groups:

It's a coin toss if paper could get accepted at all, and that's less than ideal but what the system should do (at least) is reject obvious crap, not ensure that something gets clearly accepted. The danger is False Positive (accepted even if it's crap) rather than False Negative (rejected even if it might be something useful).

Overall note: the review system is not ideal and should be improved. But it's a hard, complex and delicate problem.