MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by superkuh | 2026-03-14 20:28:15+00:00
I'll definitely give this a try. Older linux distros that have full working accessibility support don't run very well on modern hardware if at all (ie, the CSM compat mode quirks CSMWrap is meant to avoid). It'd be great to keep running my xorg linux with working screen reader on a modern ryzen system that'll last another 15 years.
by staticassertion | 2026-03-14 20:28:29+00:00
> If they're too precious to adapt or take a different job, then starve.

Yeah I mean I think everyone is with you except for the "then starve", this is just weirdly combative and lacking in empathy, I find it totally strange.

> Me and hundreds of thousands of other organizations who have software needs that were under served by the market.

And... you blame software developers for that? You blame software devs for a lack of capacity in the field? So weird.

> Now we will have AI write that code for us - or more realistically, now we will purchase this software from any of the thousands of boutique software development shops that will emerge, which use AI + talented human developers to serve us.

Okay, I mean, this has always been an option. I guess it will be more of an option now. There have been consulting agencies or "WYSIWYG" editors like Wix or other "low code/ no code" platforms for ages. No one is going to be upset that you're using them. This hostility is totally one sided lol

> I have the strong impression that programmers in many cases have a good deal of snobbery regarding what tasks they are willing to work on.

We like to work on interesting projects... is that surprising? Is that snobbery? I don't get it.

> If it's not giant enterprise software, then it's usually just filed under "hobbyist" or open source.

I find this funny because hobbyist/ open source projects are by far the ones that are glamorized by the field, not enterprise software.

> Hopefully many programmers will find a well paying career serving less glamorous customers with software that solves real world problems. But many will have to change their attitude if they want to do that.

I have no idea where you get this impression from. Most software devs I've worked with are motivated heavily by solving real world problems. I think you have very, very little insight into what software development actually looks like or what software engineers are motivated by. Frankly, this comes off as very much "I was snubbed and now I'm happy that the people who I perceive as having snubbed me will be replaced by AI", which I think is quite lame. You definitely seem to have a resentful tone to your posts that I find weird.
by matheusmoreira | 2026-03-14 20:29:22+00:00
Your right to do all that should be taken away. Our freedom to own our computers is more important than your right to punish us for trying to do so by banishing us from digital society via remote attestation. Your only option should be to accept that we own our computers and deal with us on those terms. Refusing to do so should be criminalized on the same level as racism.
by Arainach | 2026-03-14 20:29:25+00:00
The US does not limit the number of doctors that can graduate. The limit is on the number of residencies funded by medicare. If the private sector wanted more doctors in order to pay doctors less, they could just offer paid residencies themselves. Somehow the free market hasn't solved that one. This ignores that doctors' salaries aren't a significant cause of the problems and insurance companies are the true root of high prices.

Rent control stabilizes prices while more supply can be built, because it is in the interests of society for people to be able to afford to live, and we can't will additional buildings into place overnight. High eviction rates destroy communities and have many negative side effects.

In the absence of regulation, corporations lie, cheat, and steal, and have a massive power imbalance against ordinary people. No one has enough time and energy to research every option for everything in their daily life, and they rely on laws to establish safety measures they can rely on.
by c5huracan | 2026-03-14 20:30:34+00:00
The bottleneck isn't "how do I define my agent." It's "how do agents find the right tool for their task."

I run a search service that 110+ agents use. They don't browse catalogs or read specs. They describe what they need ("MCP server for Postgres") and expect results back immediately. The definition format matters far less than whether the description is good and whether something can find it.

SKILL.md, AGENTS.md, SOUL.md, they're all converging on the same idea. That's fine. But the portability win only kicks in once there's a discovery layer that can index all of them. Without that, these files are just README.md with a new name.
by amelius | 2026-03-14 20:30:45+00:00
Anthropic should work on their billing. It's crazy. I did my best to not get billed more than I consciously pay into my account, auto reload is off and never was on, but still now the meter shows an unpaid balance. This is nuts. One customer is angry and disappointed.

And why do I need to create a new API key whenever I run out of balance?
by jacquesm | 2026-03-14 20:31:12+00:00
True, but the USA has institutionalized the power of money in politics to the point that this is now a reality: what would be called outright bribery elsewhere is called campaign donations, there are lobbyists who get to write the laws that favor their paymasters and in fact it has been argued that 'money is speech' (it doesn't get much more bizarre than that to me). What Musk did during the last elections would get you jail in some 3rd world countries, you know, where they take voting serious.

Whether any of these require incredible levels of wealth or not is moot, I think. The reason for that is that it only matters when 'lesser levels of wealth' come up against 'greater levels of wealth' and the latter will always win that confrontation.
by sarchertech | 2026-03-14 20:31:16+00:00
I’m not going to defend the tone of the OP, and it is clearly wrong to assume that everyone who is pro AI is a shill or bot.

That being said, I’ve seen hard evidence that pro AI bots do exist on HN.

And at the very large tech company I work at there is a push for everyone to spend more on Claude Code regardless of output. The metric is literally how much you’re spending on Claude Code not how much you’re producing (and in my org we’ve seen no measurable increase in productivity). People are legitimately trying to figure out the easiest way to get it to blow through their allocated credits.

I use AI all the time, I find that Opus 4.6 is great for all kinds of tasks. I don’t think it’s all just hype, but there’s clearly some serious astroturfing going on here, and I understand the urge to be suspicious of everyone.
by staticassertion | 2026-03-14 20:31:43+00:00
> What I'm saying is that it's a non-issue for customers if software has good engineering or not, if it fulfills their needs at a price they can pay.

You think that good engineering is unrelated to fulfilling needs at a price they pay? I think you're confused. Software engineers are tasked with exactly this problem - determining how to deliver utility at a price point. That's... the whole job. We consider how much it costs to run a database, how to target hardware constraints, how to build software that will scale accordingly as new features are added or new users onboard, etc. That's the job...

That's sort of the whole point of the article. The job isn't "write code", which is what AI does. The job is "understand the customer, understand technology, figure out how to match customer expectations, business constraints, and technologies together in a way that can be maintained at-cost".

> While human programmers are unwilling to provide this software for even a high price.

Sorry, but this is just you whining that people didn't want to work for you. Software engineers obviously are willing to provide software in exchange for money, hence... idk, everyone's jobs.

> And AI code will serve that field.

That may be true, just as no-code solutions have done in the past.

> Software engineers like you are the people who can best exploit this market segment, probably by leveraging these new AI tools.

Yes, I agree.

> Otherwise more and more people will do like me and have AI make their own bespoke solutions.

I'm a bit skeptical of this broadly in the long term but it's certainly the case that some portion of the market will be served by this approach.
by inejge | 2026-03-14 20:32:19+00:00
> With network protocols, you make one layer (Ethernet), you add another layer (IP), then another (TCP), then another (HTTP). Each one fits inside the last, but is independent, and you can deal with them separately or together.

It looks neat when you illustrate it with stacked boxes or concentric circles, but real-world problems quickly show the ugly seams. For example, how do you handle encryption? There are arguments (and solutions!) for every layer, each with its own tradeoffs. But it can't be neatly slotted into the layered structure once and for all. Then you have things like session persistence, network mobility, you name it.

Data formats have other sets of tradeoffs pulling them in different directions, but I don't think that layered design would come near to solving any of them.
by mulosolitario | 2026-03-14 20:32:26+00:00
AI gets wrong 40%,50% even 70% of the times. Nonetheless Anthropic Claude has been used (behind Palantir) by the most moral army in the world to decide who to kill in Gaza or where to drop the bombs in Teheran. AI "solves" the problem of the accountability because it can fabricate all the "legitimate targets" you need. So now you can drop a bomb and kill 10 children and claim it is moral because AI said they are terrorists.
by orthoxerox | 2026-03-14 20:32:38+00:00
On the one hand, yes, on the other hand, personal touch doesn't scale. Webcam models maintain a personal touch by broadcasting their interactions with those who tip, but OF models can't do that. They have two options when their customer base grows too large:

Option one is to use these chatters.

Option two is to chat only with those who pay extra or with no one at all.
by ranger_danger | 2026-03-14 20:32:43+00:00
For the majority of large, well-federated instances, I don't think it's meaningless, because deletions also propagate to other instances.

If a mod on one server doesn't like something I say, and they delete my comment, all the other (well-behaved) federated instances will also delete my comment.

Of course this also creates problems in the other direction, like servers that ignore deletion requests.

That combined with a large amount of blocked instances across the board, I feel like you get into this "which direction would you like to piss into the wind" situation where you have no idea how many people/instances will actually see your message if at all.
by gbro3n | 2026-03-14 20:32:51+00:00
Bit of a plug I suppose, but this was what motivated me to set up AS Notes, my VS code extension which makes VS Code a personal knowledge management system, with linking and markdown tooling. I've built an html converter so they can be published to github pages from the repo. It's here if it's of interest to anyone https://www.appsoftware.com/blog/as-notes-turn-vs-code-into-... ... I'm so much more motivated to write docs when a) its easy to keep them up to date using an agent, and b) someone (agents) will actually read them!
by sequoia | 2026-03-14 20:33:02+00:00
Someone paid to have a fantasy of sex, and they got that fantasy. If they don't like it, they don't do it again, and this is true whether it's "the model" or someone else. If they do like it, what's the issue?

This is like saying you paid for a celebrity plumber & a regular plumber did the work, but you're upset because you wanted the celebrity. "The job" got done one way or another. They're selling digital handjobs here, there's no need to be precious about it.
by theptip | 2026-03-14 20:33:11+00:00
Here is my take -

Old world - each platform writes APIs and then has to publish rich client libraries. Despite the server APIs theoretically being well documented, because users want the quickest time-to-first-demo platforms also ship a bunch of client code. This may bring in dependencies you don’t care for, or otherwise have a wide attack surface.

New world - platforms publish good REST APIs and specs, and Claude can trivially implement the client that is idiomatic for your own app deployment. Within Nanoclaw you don’t even need to handle eg streaming APIs if you only need a simple poll on one endpoint, even though the server (and official client library) might support them. In the best case, this can keep your app more secure.

Of course, the tradeoff/risk is that an individual implementation might be broken. So right now I’m not convinced it’s a win. But I generally buy that it’ll be possible to maintain a high enough security bar within the next year or two.

The time and token cost is probably seconds and cents already, I don’t buy that one.
by nativeit | 2026-03-14 20:33:17+00:00
So you’ve vibe coded an app. That’s just swell. You want to release it? Don’t. You can’t support it. You can’t update it. You are one bad prompt away from it collapsing.

We are convincing a generation of morons that they can do something they plainly cannot. This will be a major problem, and soon.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-03-14 20:33:32+00:00
It's not a fictional universe. It is precisely the waters rights system you've mentioned. Capital-rich entity buys water senior water rights, extracts water, others find their wells descending/drying.

This hasn't happened yet in New Mexico with a data center because these are new. But it has happened numerous times with other capital-rich entities that have bought water rights (sometimes, just cities buying rights from adjacent rural county land).

A small community near where I live no longer has functioning wells because new residential construction below them sucked the water out of the aquifer. They tried to drill deeper, without much success. County is now having to build a water line to the community.
by cyberpunk | 2026-03-14 20:34:39+00:00
The happy path for me is with erlang, due to the concurrency model the blast radius of an error is exceptionally small, so the programming style is to let things crash if they go wrong. So, really you are writing the happy path code only (most of the time). Combine this approach with some very robust tests (does this thing pass the tests / behave how we need it to?) then you’re close to the point of not really caring about the implementation at all.

Of course, i still do, but i could see not caring being possible down the road with such architectures..
by nickjj | 2026-03-14 20:34:42+00:00
Being able to scale an image without losing quality is going to be handy. I always found it odd that scaling down an image now and then scaling it back to its original size 2 seconds later with the same tool resulted in a loss of quality and having to delete the layer, then re-import the image to get the original quality back.

This plugin https://github.com/LinuxBeaver/Gimp_Layer_Effects_Text_Style... also makes adding text effects with GIMP pretty good. This is unrelated to 3.2 but turned out to be a necessity for me.
by bmitch3020 | 2026-03-14 20:34:45+00:00
It's sad how counter productive the unreliable economic data is. The people buying groceries know that things are more expensive. And the people looking for a job know how hard it is to find work.

But this administration wants to say everything is fine, and fires those that say otherwise. So now unemployment seems under control even though it's not great.

Now the Fed, with their dual mandate to maintain a healthy labor market and control inflation, is considering raising rates. If it turns out the job market was much worse than we realized, raising rates could tank the economy more than it already is tanking. All because they wanted to pretend everything is fine.
by sequoia | 2026-03-14 20:35:47+00:00
I find it sad that there's a story of people (mostly women) doing this disgusting job for little pay (yes, chatting up horny men online because you need the money is disgusting, there's no glamour and little dignity to it), and the top comment is how this is unfair to the john (purchaser of sex work) because it's misleading.
by nkurz | 2026-03-14 20:36:11+00:00
Yes, this is a thing that can be done. No "derivatives" are necessary. You just figure out how many dollars worth of that particular stock your portion of the fund holds, and "sell short" that same amount of that same stock. This leaves you neutral to that stock.

Note that this is probably a terrible strategy here, though. The most likely effect of adding SpaceX to the index in the manner described is that the price of SpaceX is likely to go artificially high as the index funds fight for the very few available shares.

If you are actually going to do this, you'd probably want to sell out of the ETF before it's added, wait for SpaceX to be fully added to all the index funds, and only then simultaneously buy into the ETF and short SpaceX.
by polotics | 2026-03-14 20:36:22+00:00
Repugnant it may be, but you're leaving better sells on the table: it is extremely wasteful of human capital, both because the winners after having taken all, tend to spin out and add only negative value to societies. Also the many pre-determined losers, having to waste so much of their energy on survival, mostly cannot contribute positively either, sometimes also drifting into serious negative value generation.

So yes: as a system, "wealth" is demonstrably extremely wasteful of capital, in wouldn't take much on both edges to improve it significantly.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2026-03-14 20:36:47+00:00
What the author says they did:

What I found: 173 Gravatar email hashes sitting in Bellingcat’s public
WordPress sitemap, completely unprotected.

I cracked 89 of those hashes back into the original email addresses.
I pulled 32 full Gravatar profiles containing real names, locations,
social media accounts, and bios.

I scraped all 1,318 published articles for author intelligence
and cross-referenced everything against Gravatar’s public API.
Over half of Bellingcat’s staff and contributors were de-anonymized
from a single sitemap.

Why the author says they did it:

I was kicked from their Discord for posting a gif in an inactive
channel. [Non mod users] lectured me about rules I hadn’t broken,
and within minutes I was banned. The reason logged by their system?
"Discord ToS/Threats."

Bellingcat operates a crossban system that propagates bans across
affiliated OSINT communities. I was automatically banned from
Project Owl: A OSINT Community server I had never interacted with.

Due to our increasingly dead internet, I've become a bit more sympathetic to heavy handed moderation (in general). Especially if the moderation team is reachable and reasonable. In this article, I see no indication the author reached out anyone at Bellingcat about his ban.

Further, Bellingcat exists in a space where they push back against some of the most powerful entities in Earth. I assume that brings security nuances I am not aware of.
by adsharma | 2026-03-14 20:37:06+00:00
It's not a popular thing to say on social media.

V-lang is the one I'm tinkering with. It's like rust in terms of pattern matching as an expression, sum types, ?T instead of exceptions.

Like golang, it has shorter compile times.

I try to keep my argument abstract (that you need to lower python to something intermediate before rust) for that reason.
by bayarearefugee | 2026-03-14 20:37:06+00:00
Also, whether Covid is to blame or not, all these layoffs (not just the Meta one) contradict some of the most common rationalizations I've seen for how AI won't destroy the labor market but rather expand it.

If there really is all this latent untapped need to drive a Jevron's effect software explosion that will keep developers employable, why would so many profitable companies be laying off so many workers into the transition?
by GorbachevyChase | 2026-03-14 20:38:01+00:00
Quite a few people think that about Claude code. I disagree with them, personally, but I think we can agree that AI code generation is qualitatively at least as good as the worst human professionals. I think we would also probably agree that the state of the art today is not as good as the very best.

The value per dollar spent is a different calculus and I would say that state of the art models completely surpass any individual’s productive output.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2026-03-14 20:38:39+00:00
The trick though is that you aren't really increasing net income. You are just adjusting the way you provide your safety net while increasing the volume of money and the "velocity" of that money.

A Universal Basic Income gives everyone a flat monthly or bi-weekly income. Whatever jobs you work on top of that also provide you income.

As a standard W-2 employee (in US terms) this UBI payment would be factored into your W-4 paperwork (income tax withholding). As your wage increases your withholding increases as well and at the end of the year ideally your return has a clean net 0 under/overpaid.

Below some income threshold your total income tax contribution would be less than the UBI payments and so you'd be receiving a prorated negative income tax throughout the year. You could also call it a prorated tax credit or fixed disbursement social welfare grant or whatever.

At that income threshold you are receiving an interest free loan from the government for the year with loan disbursment on a fixed schedule throughout the year. And of course you promise to pay back in full by the tax deadline (either via withholding and/or with a lump sum at the end of the tax year).

Above that income threshold you are still receiving that fixed disbursement schedule interest free loan from the government but you also start paying additional income taxes on top of that loan. This is of course all still handled via W-4 deductions during payroll and nobody touches your regular UBI disbursement that shows up in the bank as a direct deposit or as a check in the mail. It still shows up every 2 weeks or every month.

But importantly this system is resilient to sudden changes in income. If your income suddenly increases, you factor that in via your W-4 and nothing changes. But if you suddenly lose your job or you move to a much lower paying job, you keep receiving your UBI disbursements on that fixed interval and you aren't left with a tax burden for it at the end of the year.

And so UBI as a system is purely an implementation detail. If we took existing welfare systems. Housing subsidies, food security subsidies (SNAP, etc), insurance subsidies, etc. We factor their per person cost/payout and roll it all together into one fixed interval UBI check. We keep income tax rates the exact same as they are now but shifted to factor in this UBI income (i.e. start everyone at a negative income floor that slowly gets filled to 0 dollars once every UBI check for the tax year pays out). The taxes paid and the net incomes for everyone stays identical (more or less due to variations in thresholds for existing benefits programs).

So at the end of the day your income stays the exact same but there's more money moving around and more consistency for the tax payer/citizen/resident even when suddenly life events change their financial situation.

/rant. sorry for the wall of text