MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shagie | 2026-03-07 22:13:46+00:00
I know a lot of developers who have learned their skillset by rote from the early 2010s and have not progressed in competency (they still write code with the same issues as they did a decade ago) or technology (haven't been able to pick up technologies that they lacked when they started).

That puts them in a precarious place since the organization that downsizes would be looking at them first ... and that they haven't been able to attain any mastery of the newer technologies that are coming into play in the system.

For many of them, they're finding themselves leaning on AI to make up for the lack of learning new things (and without learning those new things). They're also realizing that any candidate who is more skilled than they are would be a stronger candidate (and that their job is increasingly becoming entering prompts into an LLM that is easily replaced).

Why they got to that spot and stopped? That's an open question. Some might have gotten comfortable at that spot. Others forcefully reject the idea that continuous learning outside of the 9-5 is needed (spend 40 hours a year learning a new technology). Others may lack the problem solving capabilities to go beyond that spot. I know I've seen all three of those. There are probably other reasons too.
by meisnerd | 2026-03-07 22:13:57+00:00
100% agree on making debugging obvious. That's exactly why everything is local JSON files — you can literally cat tasks.json | jq '.tasks[] | select(.kanban=="in-progress")' and see exactly what's happening. No database queries, no admin panels, just files.

The activity log captures every state change with timestamps and actor IDs, so when something breaks you can trace the exact sequence. And since agents communicate through inbox.json, there's a full message trail — who delegated what, what reports came back, what decisions were requested.

Curious about your markdown + git approach — do you get merge conflicts when multiple agents write to the same state files simultaneously? That was the main reason I went with JSON + async-mutex instead. Git history gives you great auditability but concurrent writes to the same file need some kind of coordination layer.
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-03-07 22:13:59+00:00
> For instance, you can learn how much introspection has been trained in during RL,

That's not introspection: that's a simulacrum of it. Introspection allows you to actually learn things about how your mind functions, if you do it right (which I can't do reliably, but I have done on occasion – and occasionally I discover something that's true for humans in general, which I can later find described in the academic literature), and that's something that language models are inherently incapable of. Though you probably could design a neural architecture that is capable of observing its own function, by altering its operation: perhaps a recurrent or spiking neural network might learn such a behaviour, under carefully-engineered circumstances, although all the training processes I know of would have the model ignore whatever signals it was getting from its own architecture.

> all chip analysis, say of an unknown chip, starts with etching away layers

Good luck running any software on that chip afterwards.
by Aurornis | 2026-03-07 22:14:20+00:00
I also went from an Intel MacBook Pro to an M1 and appreciated it, but that leap was exaggerated by how bad the last few generations of Intel MacBook Pros were.

The Apple Silicon chassis was allowed to finally house an appropriate cooling solution, too. They are much quieter than the same Intel laptops when dissipating the same power levels.
by abustamam | 2026-03-07 22:14:22+00:00
In Islam, a Muslim who dies in war is considered a martyr, and it's desirable to die in the month of Ramadan. In other words, it's something that most Muslims want to have happen, but it's not like something we want to make happen. Like I don't want to die right now, but if I were to die, may as well be during Ramadan.
by amaury_bouchard | 2026-03-07 22:14:22+00:00
I haven't tried it personally, but I don't see any reason why they wouldn't work well together. µJS manipulates the DOM via fetch and swapping, while web components live in the DOM like any other element. The only thing to be aware of is that if µJS replaces a fragment containing a web component, connectedCallback will fire again, which is the expected behavior. Would love to hear your feedback if you give it a try!
by meisnerd | 2026-03-07 22:14:23+00:00
You're right that this is fundamentally a signal flow problem. The whole architecture is designed around that — tasks, inbox messages, decisions, and activity log are all just JSON files that any agent can read/write. The daemon polls for new signals and dispatches work automatically.

On email specifically: great callout about structured vs raw MIME. My current thinking is a parsed webhook approach — sender, subject, body, thread ID as structured fields. Raw MIME would be a nightmare for agents to parse and waste tokens on headers nobody cares about. The GitHub Issues integration is closer to shipping (it's one of our open issues now), email is further out but the inbox architecture already supports it — just needs an ingest layer.

Task provenance is an interesting gap you've identified. Right now tasks have createdAt, assignedTo, and the activity log tracks every state change, but there's no explicit "originated from" field linking back to an email or Slack message. That would be a clean addition to the schema — something like source: { type: "email" | "github" | "manual", ref: "..." }. Appreciate the specific feedback.
by 112233 | 2026-03-07 22:14:42+00:00
Uhuh. Let me present you Rudolph. For the next 15 minutes, he will paste pieces of top rated SO answers and top starred GH repos. Then he will suffer complete amnesia.
He might not understand your question or remember what he just did, but the code he pastes is higher quality than any codes you have seen in your 20 years in F500! For 20$ a month, he's all yours, he just needs a 4 hour break every 5 hours. But he runs on money, like gumball machine, so you can wake him with a donation.
Oh, you are responsible for giving him precise instructions, that he often ignores in favour of other instructions from uncle Sam. No, you can't see them.
by idle_zealot | 2026-03-07 22:14:42+00:00
What's the HN policy on LLM-generated comments and linked content? There's so much of it on the front page and in threads that I feel increasingly like I'm in a crowd of machines chasing karma points rather than seeing what people think or care about. Is the engagement also botted? Or can people just not tell? Or do they not care and reply to the obvious robot anyway?
by ufo | 2026-03-07 22:15:09+00:00
Students are very grade-motivated and unfortunately they rarely do the homework assignments if they are not worth points.

At-home coding projects, writing essays, etc also exercise different skiils than you can test for in a 2 hour written exam. It's unfortunate that due to rampant AI cheating, we can no longer reward the students who put in the work and develop these skills.
by pstuart | 2026-03-07 22:15:19+00:00
We live in a post truth age, unfortunately. Many citizens are happy to only hew to the truth that they want, versus the "real" truth. (note the quotes -- truth is tricky).

There's a bitter irony in this issue -- toppling the regime in Iran would be a wonderful thing, but doing so via bombs is not the way. We have Afghanistan and Iraq as very dear lessons in how not to do it.
by wongarsu | 2026-03-07 22:15:25+00:00
You can detect if texts from a year ago used AI based on statistical patterns. Nobody is taking issue with that. But once you tell people "we will run these tests to detect if your future submissions are using AI" you create an adversarial environment and your statistical methods will continuously break. Not because statistics is broken, but because you are trying to hit a moving target that doesn't want to be hit.

That's not like detecting thoughts via fMRI, it's like detecting tomorrows malware with yesterday's malware signatures. Or like researchers making a vaccine against the common cold

And the obvious proposal to fix that has been made multiple times in this thread: don't make take-at-home tasks part of the grade. Instead of trying to punish what you can't reliably detect, take away the incentive to do it in the first place
by BugsJustFindMe | 2026-03-07 22:15:46+00:00
> Those differences are not so complex and confusing

One might ask why Bluesky has more sign-ups and monthly active users acquired in less time even without the facestagram login power funnel that Threads has. And of course Threads has waaaaaayyy more. The evidence of what people want from a social media service is right in front of us and very clear.

This reads to me very much like the timeless words of Seymour Skinner, "Am I so out of touch? No! It's the children who are wrong."
by cade | 2026-03-07 22:16:09+00:00
> It signals either astroturfing or someone who just accepts what they are sold without thinking.

> Nor this level of spam and bad submissions.

Your comments seem pretty aggressive for what you’re replying to. Maybe take a beat to assess your biases? I thought the main comment was pretty fair and sensible, yet somehow you landed on calling them a spammer/bad submitter/astroturfer/non-thinker. Maybe they are? I could be wrong, but that's quite a strong reaction for what they asserted at face value. Not really trying to police anything here, I just thought the initial comment had merit and this devolved quite quickly.
by kencho | 2026-03-07 22:16:13+00:00
Hello, the demo searches 10,000 paintings using semantic search, so you can type things like "dark forest with fog" or "people dancing at a party" and it actually finds relevant results even though none of those words appear in the metadata

The underlying product is Vecstore, a search api for text and images. the idea is you skip the whole embedding pipeline + vector database setup and just call an api. You send in your data, you search it. that's it

It also does reverse image search, face search, OCR (finding images by text inside them), and nsfw detection. all from the same api

Built with Rust
by stif1337 | 2026-03-07 22:16:35+00:00
Update: Since the initial post, I've shipped several features based on feedback:

- Screenshot capture: GET /windows/{pid}/screenshot → returns PNG

- Batch operations: POST /interact/batch → multiple actions per request

- Wait/poll: GET /windows/{pid}/wait?q=Submit&timeout=5000

- Python & TypeScript SDKs (local install, PyPI/npm coming soon)

- OpenAPI spec, Dockerfile, 7 example scripts

- Demo GIF in README showing Calculator automation via Claude Code

Thanks for the feedback everyone!
by IshKebab | 2026-03-07 22:17:08+00:00
Nah I agree with him. Spinning disks were always a huge bottleneck (remember how long MS Word took to open?) and SSD's basically fixed that overnight. The CPU advancements were big, but software had a chance to "catch up" (i.e. get less efficient) because they it was a gradual change. That didn't really happen with SSDs because the change was so sudden and big.

I'd say software never really "caught up" to the general slowness that we had to endure in the HDD era either. Even my 14 year old desktop starts Word in a few seconds compared to upwards of 60s in the 90s.

The closest I've seen is the shitty low end Samsung Android tablet we got for our kids. It's soooo slow and laggy. I suspect it's the storage. And that was actually and upgrade over the Amazon Fire tablet we used to have which was so slow it was literally unusable. Again I suspect slow storage is the culprit.
by galkk | 2026-03-07 22:17:21+00:00
There is nothing nuanced about that. You look into 2 places and see read it for yourself. Stop spreading lies.

—-

https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=1.90.100

RCWs > Title 1 > Chapter 1.90 > Section 1.90.100

RCW 1.90.100

Personal income tax prohibition.

Neither the state nor any county, city, or other local jurisdiction in the state of Washington may tax any individual person on any form of personal income. For the purposes of this chapter, "income" has the same meaning as "gross income" in 26 U.S.C. Sec. 61.

——

https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim...

Gross income defined
(a) General definition
Except as otherwise provided in this subtitle, gross income means all income from whatever source derived, including (but not limited to) the following items:
(1) Compensation for services, including fees, commissions, fringe benefits, and similar items;
(2) Gross income derived from business;
(3) Gains derived from dealings in property;
(4) Interest;
(5) Rents;
(6) Royalties;
(7) Dividends;
(8) Annuities;
(9) Income from life insurance and endowment contracts;
(10) Pensions;
(11) Income from discharge of indebtedness;
(12) Distributive share of partnership gross income;
(13) Income in respect of a decedent; and
(14) Income from an interest in an estate or trust.
by cm11 | 2026-03-07 22:17:35+00:00
I totally agree with this. I would add that it's well beyond the discussion boards. It's probably most clear there and it's well possible we learned it there and then took it into our social interactions everywhere, but the majority of my irl interactions—except with my closest friends—are sorta like this. Sometimes I think its ADHD, other times I think it could be any number of things, but I think to say anything that isn't dead simple (or in dead agreement with the other person), you need a few sentences. Often, you need to hear the third sentence before the first will make sense. But if you get distracted by the first one or can't suspend your disagreement enough to get to the third you will think the person is mistaken. You'll think that about both their first point and the larger one, which you didn't really hear or even get to but thought you did. So the speaker does the hedging each sentence in hopes of getting to the third (or whatever) sentence.
by soared | 2026-03-07 22:18:09+00:00
You can review that user’s trade history. It’s a bit weird for sure, but they didn’t just stop in to bet on those. They’ve bet huge sums on every prediction relating to Iran, Israel, sp500, recessions, etc.

They’ve been betting for 2 years but only recently starting profiting a lot.

https://polymarket.com/profile/%40Magamyman
by elcritch | 2026-03-07 22:18:23+00:00
> he could probably bag a few trillion if he can trick humanity into kicking off the biggest space boondoggle

That makes no sense. You don't pick colonizing Mars as a get rich quick scheme. Also his seemingly genuine obsession has revolutionized space launch with Falcon 9's and internet connections with Starlink.

Not sure how either of those are space boondoggles. Even Starship is making huge progress towards something which could help make a moonbase a reality in the next few years.
by Aurornis | 2026-03-07 22:18:38+00:00
> The magic was that Apple brought the uncompromised experience to a laptop.

Apple’s power efficiency was a great bump forward, but the performance claims were a little exaggerated. I love my Apple Silicon devices but I still switch over to a desktop for GPU work because it’s so much faster, for example.

Apple had that famously misleading chart where they showed their M1 GPU keeping pace with a flagship nVidia card that misled everyone at launch. In practice they’re not even close to flagship desktop accelerators, unfortunately.

They have excellent idle power consumption though. Great for a laptop.
by hamburglar | 2026-03-07 22:19:36+00:00
It’s really not that complicated a problem. Don’t worry, you’ll certainly be able to solve all the problems yourself as you encounter them. What you end up with will be functionally equivalent to a proper UUID and will only have cost you man-months of pain, but then you will be able to truly understand the benefit of not spending your effort on easy problems that someone solved before you.
by sjmcmahon | 2026-03-07 22:19:38+00:00
That phrasing isn't perfectly clear, as there's two things at play.

If you're delivering a large dose D all at once, FLASH spares normal tissue compared to conventional rate irradiations, with maintained anti-tumour effect.

But, you can instead deliver your treatment in a number of smaller doses, say n "fractions" of dose d. This also spares normal tissue (1). This latter approach - fractionation - is the way radiotherapy was delivered for most of its history. But at these low doses, FLASH sparing is small to negligible.

So, we have two demands in tension - and its unclear which is actually optimal. Some of the early results in FLASH showed huge sparing, but lots of more recent studies have shown more modest effects which may not be worth giving up benefits of fractionation for(2). And to date I think we have basically no meaningful in-human data to guide this, so there's still a lot of uncertainty.

1 - Fractionation also spares tumours, a bit, but you can offset this by increasing the total dose a bit and still see benefit.

2 - There is a general move to somewhat larger, fewer fractions even in normal radiotherapy, although almost all of these are still below the threshold where FLASH sparing is seen.
by leptons | 2026-03-07 22:19:48+00:00
No, assembly doesn't always inherently deal with abstractions. It depends on the system involved. I don't really count "microcode" as an abstraction, it's essentially part of the hardware and doesn't even exist on many embedded CPUs. The assembly instructions for all intents and purposes operate directly on the hardware. If you wanted to get really absurd with it, you could say that all of it is an abstraction of electrons.

Embedded CPU assembly is what I do most often, for the last 40 years, and there aren't really any abstractions at all - not even microcode. You have a few KB or ROM and maybe a few KB of RAM, ALU, registers, peripherals, and that's it - no APIs, no kernel, no system calls, no stdlib. Just the instructions you burn into the ROM.
by drnick1 | 2026-03-07 22:19:50+00:00
> We're talking about paying to get IPs delisted from spam blacklists, choosing arbitrary geolocations with no validation, buying "unattributable" white-labeled address space, and renting residential IPs that make traffic look like it's coming from someone's house.

Sounds pretty good from a privacy point of view, and a natural response to big tech and governments trying to fingerprint and track everyone.
by gwbas1c | 2026-03-07 22:19:52+00:00
Anyone else having trouble getting this to work?

I tried building myself, and the build ended with a certificate error. (I get it, distributing software always hits unexpected snags.)

Then I installed from zip and when I use preview (in the screen saver options,) I just get a blank screen. There's a message at the top of the screen, but most of it is truncated from the notch from the camera.

---

Edit: I tried adding sources, but they don't seem to download. Not sure why. Sigh.
by stevesunderland | 2026-03-07 22:20:12+00:00
SEEKING WORK | USA | Remote

Developer + Designer

I'm a graphic designer and web developer who creates websites, applications, brand identities and marketing material for a variety of companies including startups, agencies and non-profit organizations. In addition to my design skills, I am also a full-stack web developer.

DESIGN: websites, apps, UI/UX, mobile, logos, marketing material, trade show displays, packaging, photo retouching, book covers, etc.

DEVELOPMENT: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Vue, Angular, Python, Django, SQL, PHP, Bootstrap, Foundation, REST APIs, Wordpress, Webpack, Jekyll, Hugo, etc.

PORTFOLIO: https://sunderland.studio

LINKEDIN: http://linkedin.com/in/stevesunderland

CONTACT: stevesunderland@gmail.com
by rglover | 2026-03-07 22:20:22+00:00
> Programming is a tricky skill and takes a long time to get good at. Lots of people aren't good at it.

This is a good thing. It's a filter for the careless, lazy, and incompetent. LLMs are to programming what a microwave is to food. I'm not a chef because I can nuke a hot pocket. "Vibe coders" (not AI-assisted coding) are the programming equivalent of the people on Kitchen Nightmares. Go figure, it's a community rife with narcissism, too.
by JKCalhoun | 2026-03-07 22:20:34+00:00
I have to call you out a bit on the: "I don't have nearly the chops or talent you and your peers have".

Trust me, when I started at Apple in 1995 I was way in over my head. Or so I thought.

After a couple months on the job I asked a coworker down the hall (who seemed particularly chill—Hi, Brian!), "How long until I feel like I know what I'm doing?"

"6 months."

I liked the unambiguity of his answer even if it seemed kind of off the cuff.

He was more or less right. It was somewhere about 6 months that I more or less knew what I was headed in each morning to work to accomplish. And I felt like I, with a little help perhaps, could even contribute in a small way.

Still, I was always surrounded by some of the most amazing programmers I had ever met. One guy (hi, Cam!) could walk through a "backtrace" in machine code, look at the registers, addresses and data on the stack, and then declare, "You're accessing memory after you've already released it. Do you know what could be 24 bytes in size?"

And who was I? Some kid from Kansas with no degree in software engineering.

It may have in fact taken closer to two decades before I was able to shake off the imposter syndrome. At some point I had to admit that I wasn't so dense to have not learned anything in my 20+ years of coding. I was still not on Cameron's level, never will be, but I might have made up for that shortcoming by leaning into being prolific, coding two or three prototypes quickly in order to finally determine The Best Path.

Just from your comment I would be willing to bet your enthusiasm alone would make you a valuable asset.

That is kind of how it worked: there were some people that could hold multiple threads in their head and rattle off a semaphore strategy that was performant, skirt a deadlock.

There was the "math guy". We all knew who they were and would cycle by their office when we were wrestling with matrix inversions and the order of transforms.

And there were people that you could rely upon to take perhaps the most dreaded task of a project and work diligently at it. Trust me, no one split hairs over whether that individual could disassemble PPC code just by looking at it. The team appreciated the "tanks" that could do some of the drudge-work. (I was from time to time that person.)

I don't need to belabor a point, you get it, it took all types. It took me some time to see that though, and longer still to see where I fit in as well.
by upboundspiral | 2026-03-07 22:20:34+00:00
The purpose of grades is to punish students, something which they are keenly aware of. Remove grades from the equation and hold students back until they have mastered the material and they will cease cheating.

If someone knows 80% of the topics on an exam like the back of their hand and doesn't know the other 20% they shouldn't get a B, they should pass the subjects they know and be asked to retake and relearn the subjects they don't know.

When people know they can make mistakes and the result is not a perpetual black mark on their record (any grade not an A) but they are given the chance to improve and demonstrate this improvement then perhaps they might be more willing to admit and understand mistakes instead of cheating.
by adonovan | 2026-03-07 22:21:04+00:00
Likewise! I often marvel at the patience of readers of earlier times. Of course, they had more time and fewer distractions, and I suspect that there was a dynamic at work in which both the writer and reader derived a certain satisfaction from long meandering sentences, the writer proving their skill, and the reader proving (to themselves) their stamina.

Nowadays we tend to write in a plainer style demanding a smaller “parser stack”. Some style manuals have excellent examples of sentences of equal length but very different “stack depth” and thus ease of comprehension.