MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zer00eyz | 2026-03-07 18:51:05+00:00
> Include the spec for the change in your PR

We would have to get very good at these. It's completely antithetical to the agile idea where we convey tasks via pantomime and post it rather than formal requirements. I wont even get started on the lack of inline documentation and its ongoing disappearance.

> Lean harder on your deterministic verification: unit tests, full stack tests,

Unit tests are so very limited. Effective but not the panacea that the industry thought it was going to be. The conversation about simulation and emulation needs to happen, and it has barely started.

> We'll need to figure out the techniques and strategies that let us merge AI code sight unseen.

Most people who write software are really bad at reading other's code, and doing systems level thinking. This starts at hiring, the leet code interview has stocked our industry with people who have never been vetted, or measured on these skills.

> But anyone who's able to ship AI code without human review

Imagine we made every one go back to the office, and then randomly put LSD in the coffee maker once a week. The hallucination problem is always going to be NON ZERO. If you are bundling the context in, you might not be able to limit it (short of using two models adversarially). That doesn't even deal with the "confidently wrong" issue... what's an LLM going to do with something like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47252971 (random bit flips).

We haven't even talked about the human factors (bad product ideas, poor UI, etc) that engineers push back against and an LLM likely wont.

That doesn't mean you're completely wrong: those who embrace AI as a power tool, and use it to build their app, and tooling that increases velocity (on useful features) are going to be the winners.
by uberman | 2026-03-07 18:51:47+00:00
I'm guilty of upvoting that and in fact I did not even read it. Here is the thing though. I'm older, not 60 but older for a coder and the sentiment in the title alone resonates with me. If I upvoted it then I can see many others doing so. Is it worth 600 points? I dont know but it was worth 1 from me.
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-03-07 18:52:26+00:00
> The doctors were pretty useless and said they couldn't see anything wrong and to just live with it.

Unfortunately that is the truth of it. Sometimes tinnitus can be traced to other parts of the body, but more often it seems to be caused by the brain acting up. And we just don't have enough knowledge about the brain to fix things like that, so all you can do is try to habituate.
Show HN: I made an App for learning Japanese, and it won in Vercel's OSS program
by thebababak | 2026-03-07 18:52:36+00:00
As someone who loves both coding and language learning (I’m learning Japanese right now), I always wished there was a free, open-source tool for learning Japanese, just like Monkeytype in the typing community.

Here’s the best part: I added a gazillion different color themes, fonts and other crazy customization options, inspired directly by Monkeytype. Also, I made the app resemble Duolingo, as that’s what I’m using to learn Japanese at the moment and it’s what a lot of language learners are already familiar with.

Miraculously, people loved the idea, and the project even managed to somehow hit 1k stars on GitHub now. Now, I’m looking to continue working on the project to see where I can take it next.

Back in January, I even applied to Vercel’s open-source software sponsorship program as a joke. I didn’t seriously expect to win, and did it more out of curiosity, fully expecting to lose.

Lo and behold, yesterday I woke up to an email saying the app has been accepted into Vercel’s Winter cohort. Crazy!
GitHub: https://github.com/lingdojo/kana-dojo
Live demo: https://kanadojo.com/

Anyway. Why am I doing all this? Because I’m a filthy weeb.

どうもありがとうございます!
by gowld | 2026-03-07 18:53:32+00:00
Bad code isn't Technical Debt, it's an unhedged Call Option

If you search for that quote, you can find #1 result is an AI slop paraphrase published last week, but the original article was 11 years ago, and republished 3 years ago.

https://higherorderlogic.com/programming/2023/10/06/bad-code...
by accrual | 2026-03-07 18:53:37+00:00
IIRC, part of the GHz problem is that very long pipelines like that of the Pentium 4 tend to show increasing benefits at higher clocks. If you can keep the pipeline full then the system reaps the benefits. Sort of like a drag racer - goes very fast in a straight line but terrible on corners.

But with longer pipelines comes larger penalties when the pipeline needs to be flushed, so the P4 eventually hit a wall and Intel returned to the late Pentium 3 Tualatin core, refining it into the Pentium M which later evolved into the first Core CPUs.
by jmyeet | 2026-03-07 18:54:38+00:00
Therein lies the problem with hyper-individualism. It's not a virtue. It's just selfish. And short-sighted. It's the basis of First They Came [1].

The reaons some of us care so much about how the least of us are affected by these changes is because the fabric of society depends on so many people and it hurts all of us when society falls apart. You don't have to be disabled to care about disabled rights, for example, because everybody is one incident away from being disabled. Just look at long Covid.

This isn't some Darwinian game where the "strong" "win". Or at least it doesn't have to be.

[1]: https://hmd.org.uk/resource/first-they-came-by-pastor-martin...
by malklera | 2026-03-07 18:54:41+00:00
I am new enough to programming that I actually have no concrete idea what a context is; I just use it when a library asks for it.

> lemoncucumber

> it can be tempting to keep adding layer upon layer of wrapping resulting in an unwieldy error string that’s practically a hand-rolled stacktrace

I thought this was the whole reason to wrap errors, to know where they passed up the chain.

Funny how it seems no matter the subject, if Go is involved, errors get discussed.
by jghn | 2026-03-07 18:55:21+00:00
Exactly. I was channeling the stereotypical dev that says they "just want to write code". To your point they're not literally *only* writing code, but this was the sort of person/mentality I was calling out.

What it says to me is they've actively avoided what appears to be becoming the most important skills in the new world. They're likely to find themselves on the short end of the stick.
by FrankWilhoit | 2026-03-07 18:55:35+00:00
A kernel is a hierarchal container of device drivers: processors, busses, memory, above the usually-considered devices. As such, its responsibility is to expose the appropriate subset of the capabilities of those devices to each user-role. The syscall API must be optimized for this. User roles must not be shown operations on APIs to which they do not have rights. Protection rings are not good enough.
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-03-07 18:55:50+00:00
> they're doing as well as professionals do without oversight on production environments.

That's nonsense. First, most people haven't deleted the production environment by accident. They have enough sense to recognize that as a dangerous thing and will pause to think about it. Second, the ones who do make that mistake learn and won't make it again, which is not something the clanker is capable of.
Show HN: Dead Man's Switch – miss a check-in, alert your contacts
by pajones | 2026-03-07 18:55:51+00:00
I built this for myself after realizing that as someone who spends time alone, there was no simple way to ensure someone would be notified if something happened to me.

The idea is straightforward: you check in on a schedule you set (daily, weekly, or a custom interval). If you miss your deadline, the system automatically notifies your emergency contacts via email and SMS. You control the grace period before alerts go out.

It's a Node.js/Express backend with a PostgreSQL database, PWA frontend, and Web Push notifications. No app store required.

It's in early beta — invite only for now while I work out the kinks.

Happy to answer questions about the technical implementation or the product itself.
by sarchertech | 2026-03-07 18:56:12+00:00
Translating from a natural language spec to code involves a truly massive amount of decision making.

For a non trivial program, 2 implementations of the same natural language spec will have thousands of observable differences.

Where we are today, that is agents require guardrails to keep from spinning out, there is no way to let agents work on code autonomously that won’t end up with all of those observable differences constantly shifting, resulting in unusable software.

Tests can’t prevent this because for a test suite to cover all observable behavior, it would need to be more complex than the code. In which case, it wouldn’t be any easier for machine or human to understand.

The only solution to this problem is that LLMs get better. Personally I think at the point they can pull this off, they can do any white collar job, and there’s not point in planning for that future because it results in either Mad Mad or Star Trek.
by gz09 | 2026-03-07 18:56:23+00:00
That would be surprising to me if anyone would think this is novel.

Using bitmaps to indicate whether things are in-use or not is very common in systems programming. Like you said PG does it, but most other systems do this too. It's not specific to databases: in an operating system, one of the first thing it needs is an allocator, the allocator most likely will use some bitmap trick somewhere to indicate what's free vs. what's available etc.
by ai-x | 2026-03-07 18:56:34+00:00
put your money where your mouth is. Any idiot can generate hysteria in 2026.
Make your prediction about any HDI metric -- Real GDP, Child Mortality, Life Expectancy, Poverty, Malnutrition (hunger) and give me your prediction for 2030 (or any year < 2035). If your doom prediction doesn't come true, Announce to the world, "I'm pretty much clueless about how the universe works and will stop posting hysteria on Social media"
by salawat | 2026-03-07 18:56:59+00:00
Wait, wait, wait. You were fine with the savory of peanut butter, texture, mouthfeel and crunch of the chunky variety of PB... But the jelly gave you fits for adding a shot of sweet and a slight hint of gelatinousness? You have uh... an interesting and idiosyncratic taste response, to say the least. The bacon would probably help, mind, though it's the culinary equivalent of "no shit, Sherlock". It'd run a spectrum from adding chewyness, to a bit of crunch depending on how it's prepared. It'd increase umami response, and add some protein content, but not really change the overall profile. If by chips you mean potato and not fries, you'll add some salty notes, crunch, and maybe a slight touch of after sweet as your saliva breaks down the complex starches. Still same problem with your jelly response. If you meant fries, salty notes, puffy mouthfeel/texture ranging from soft all the way through to crunchy-soft-crunchy depending on prep. If baked air fried, less oil contribution to umami. If deep fried, you have the frying medium notes added to the overall product. It'd be an experiment. I just think you maybe need to vary your jelly ratio. In proportion to your PB since you seem to have an exaggerated preference for umami.
by lyu07282 | 2026-03-07 18:57:10+00:00
This reminds me of the US soldiers after the Iraq invasion not understanding why the population didn't celebrate them as liberators. Even young Iraqis initially optimistic about the future were quickly disillusioned by the reality.

Two full decades in Afghanistan "liberating" the Afghani people from the Taliban, when you left it took less then a day to undo with zero resistance, that's how much the population appreciated your efforts to "bring them liberal democracy".

I suppose it's because the US public never had to reconcile their fantasies with reality in quite the same way as them.
by hiro1986 | 2026-03-07 18:58:22+00:00
Beyond the facts corrected by other user, graemep, the translator school was in fact established after the christian kingdom of Castile conquer the city of Toledo, and the king Alfonso X [1], actually is what is studied as main promoter of it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toledo_School_of_Translator

Then, first heliocentrism with some approximations of size and distance, as far as I know was Aristarchus of Samos, but there is not much that we know about it.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristarchus_of_Samos
by lwansbrough | 2026-03-07 18:59:13+00:00
I'm not saying MAD is a bad doctrine, I'm saying it breaks down as the complexity of diplomacy increases quadratically with the number of nuclear equipped actors.

I'm Canadian. Things are good here. Obtaining a bomb wouldn't make life materially better for anyone in Canada, nor would it defend us against the US. Not to mention anybody could drive a nuke into the middle of Manhattan and detonate it and you'd maybe never know who was responsible.

The importance of non-proliferation cannot be understated.
by duskwuff | 2026-03-07 18:59:55+00:00
And that was an extremely common repair on the system - possibly the most common one. Early-2000s laptop hard disks were pretty fragile; one bad fall could easily crash the drive.

I think iFixit might also be wrong about the Airport card. IIRC, those were socketed for regulatory reasons, not so that you could install your own.
by hirvi74 | 2026-03-07 19:00:11+00:00
I believe that, on a fundamental level, the principle of 'trust, but verify' can be followed to its logical endpoint, as covered in Ken Thompson's lecture, 'Reflections on Trusting Trust' [1]. At some point, one simply has to trust that something is correct, unless they have the capability to verify every step of a long chain of indirection.

So, in regard to your book: Claude may or may not have hallucinated the information from its cited sources. Gemini, as well. However, say you had access to the cited information behind a paywall. How would you go about verifying the information cited in those sources was correct?

Since the release of LLMs over the past four years or so, I have noticed a trend where people are (rightfully) hesitant to trust the output of LLMs. But if the knowledge is in a book or comes from another other man-made source, it's some how infallible? Such thinking reminds me of my primary schooling days. Teachers would not let us use Wikipedia as a source because, "Anyone can edit anything." Though, it's as one cannot write anything they want in a book -- be it true or false?

How many scientific researchers have p-hacked their research, falsified data, or used other methods of deceit? I do not believe it's a truly an issue on a grand scale nor does it make vast amounts of science illegitimate. When caught, the punishments are usually handled in a serious manner, but no telling how much falsified research was never caught.

I do believe any and all information provided by LLMs should be verified and not blindly trusted, however, I extend that same policy to works from my fellow humans. Of course, no one has the time to verify every single detail of every bit of information one comes across. Hence, at some point, we all must settle on trusting in trust. Knowledge that we cannot verify is not knowledge. It is faith.

[1] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
by zabzonk | 2026-03-07 19:01:06+00:00
Well, I'd go for a sharply dressed lady too, but ... what I get is very cheerful Tesco drivers in hiviz, who unpack my groceries and stash the chilled stuff in my fridge. It's a great (UK) service, and they quite often ask if they can do anything else for me (I'm bed-bound) like make a cup of tea. Cannot recommend them highly enough.
by plandis | 2026-03-07 19:01:08+00:00
I’ve found this to be critical for having any chance of getting agents to generate code that is actually usable.

The more frequently you can verify correctness in some automated way the more likely the overall solution will be correct.

I’ve found that with good enough acceptance criteria (both positive and negative) it’s usually sufficient for agents to complete one off tasks without a human making a lot of changes. Essentially, if you’re willing to give up maintainability and other related properties, this works fairly well.

I’ve yet to find agents good enough to generate code that needs to be maintained long term without a ton of human feedback or manual code changes.
by throwyawayyyy | 2026-03-07 19:01:43+00:00
I learned about Terac at college in the 90s.

Some years later, I interviewed at Knight Capital, just a couple of weeks before their blowup. (Dreadful interview at which I did dreadfully, being asked to write C _over the phone_ by a supremely uninterested engineer. Quite a red flag in retrospect.)
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-03-07 19:01:43+00:00
The article says that Claude did recognize the danger, and advised the developer to run a safer setup with no risk of the two websites stomping on each other's resources, but he overrode it. I've definitely seen situations in my career where a junior developer does something dangerous and destructive after a senior dev overrode guardrails meant to prevent it. (None quite this bad, but then again I've never worked on small sites.)
by Dormeno | 2026-03-07 19:02:41+00:00
> Switch to an electric vehicle

I can't afford it. For context, I paid £500 for my current vehicle back in 2020. My bills have only gone up since, but my salary has not.

> Migrate from gas appliances (range, furnace, water heater) to electric (induction, heat pumps)

I can't afford that either. When I got my home assessed, switching to heat pumps requires replacing all the radiators in my house and extra insulation, etc. My gas boiler does have a built-in electric induction system, but it's only used when the tank is cold.

> If your power grid isn’t clean, add rooftop or balcony solar

I can afford the solar panels, but I can't afford the battery storage, nor the installation, and my area does not allow for an inverter connected to the main grid.
by netsharc | 2026-03-07 19:02:44+00:00
The Honda collaboration "wrecked" McLaren too for several years last decade (incidentally it also featured Alonso, who complained about "GP2 engines!"). Damn, they were unbeatable for a few years with Red Bull, but it seems those engineers moved to RBPT, and they now have a typical Japanese/Asian "non-communicative" engineering team...
by wvenable | 2026-03-07 19:02:49+00:00
Microsoft did the hard work of supporting Unicode when UTF-8 didn't exist (and mostly when UTF-16 didn't exist).

Any system that continued with only ASCII well into the 2000s could mostly just jump into UTF-8 without issue. Doing nothing for non-English users for almost two decades turned out to be a solid plan long term. Microsoft certainly didn't have that option.
by puzzly | 2026-03-07 19:03:20+00:00
Literally as my title sugests, in my free-time I wanted to try something new (I'm a web developer and I got bored of my creating web apps and landing pages job).

I made puzzly, it's a website that has 8 simple games, they can either be played daily (like WORDLE or infinitely, but that requires an account, which is free).

I will never run ads on it, not intending to make money, just want to know if people enjoy this idea, some games I tried being creative with, others are just reimagined existing games and so on.

If possible, please share your feedback on it! I'll gladly accept any type of feedback whatsoever.
by gosub100 | 2026-03-07 19:04:18+00:00
The far left is all in on climate change so they suppress anything that contradicts the narrative. You think Nature is going to publish "oops we were wrong about" stories wrt climate change? Each side has dug their heels in.

I believe people have influenced the climate, but the far left is using it as a political football to get Their Guy elected, not to actually stop it. The idea of a rising sea is a perfect disaster they can sell you the solution for. If they actually cared, 1) the Democrats would be fighting AI tooth and nail, unless it was 100% powered by renewables (not nuclear, remember their version of science denialism is no nukes.). 2) they would be worshipping Elon for bringing us EVs. Instead they take all that silicon valley AI money and tell us to save the ocean. No way San Jose!
by BurningFrog | 2026-03-07 19:04:58+00:00
GDP just measures the average wealth of a society, on the assumption that production equals consumption. Wealth is unambiguously good, but of course it fails at measuring the full extent of human flourishing.

My take on Economists is that they keep desperately trying to make people understand that prices are set by supply vs demand dynamics, while society keeps refusing to understand it.
Show HN: PriceMon – get alerted when a competitor changes their pricing
by scrygl | 2026-03-07 19:05:17+00:00
I kept finding out about competitor price changes weeks late —
from customers or in sales calls. Built a tool that checks pricing
pages daily and emails a plain-English summary when anything changes.

Free for 1 competitor, no card required

Happy to answer questions about how the detection pipeline works.
by DiskoHexyl | 2026-03-07 19:05:35+00:00
But they kind of are (a cult band). Most people in the world know Metalica while hardly anyone ever heard any of the Sisters Of Mercy's tracks.

Normal people don't care- they just enjoy a ballad or two.

I've long since learnt to separate an artist from their art- a fair share of the musicians, actors, directors etc aren't really a decent bunch
by NetMageSCW | 2026-03-07 19:06:10+00:00
A link to the original article seems like it would have been more appropriate:
https://www.geekwire.com/2026/pagemaker-pioneer-paul-brainer...

I used the original Windows version of PageMaker for a long time, and also Ventura Publisher. It was more programmable and I ended up using it with a Paradox database to create a publishing system that created catalogs for dog shows for a local person who put them on. It create a couple hundred page book that would be professionally published for a weekend show. It had to be done every few months or so.

I used PageMaker to create a newsletter for the local Star Trek club which is how I met my wife.
by ai-x | 2026-03-07 19:06:22+00:00
At the end of the day, we are talking about humanity/civilization and not planet earth itself.

We have easy measures of that

- Real GDP.

- Global Life Expectancy

- Global Child Mortality

- Global Poverty

- Global Food Production

If you are really into science and evidence, you should be tracking that for humanity extinction/survival trends (and the effect technology is having in tackling climate change), which is what my position is
by ahsisjb | 2026-03-07 19:07:18+00:00
> Figuring out how to trust AI-written code faster is the project of software engineering for the next few years, IMO

Replace AI written with “cheap dev written” and think about why that isn’t already true.

The bottleneck is a competent dev understanding a project. Always has been.

Another fundamental flaw is you can’t trust LLMs. It’s fundamentally impossible compared to the way you trust a human. Humans make mistakes. LLMs do not. Anything “wrong” they do is them working exactly as designed.
by guerython | 2026-03-07 19:08:55+00:00
Nice to see a CLI turning a design system into a skill.md so the agent + UI share the same token set. We throw tree-sitter dumps plus a dependency graph at Claude and tag the package with a matching token manifest so the chat widgets, docs, and dashboards all pull the same palette.
Would it make sense to add an export command that emits JSON/CSS variable files so the dashboards and telemetry tooling can consume those specs without any copy/paste?