MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Arainach | 2026-03-14 20:07:41+00:00
If the businesses that want data centers want to pay the full construction costs for the new power plants, great. Otherwise consumers are paying for them in the rates they pay to energy companies.

It should not be considered shocking or controversial that people already hit hard by corporate greed and other effects of late-stage capitalism don't want to pay higher utility rates to subsidize the data centers being built by megacorporations who want to take away even more of their jobs.
by joe_mamba | 2026-03-14 20:08:49+00:00
It takes time to correct 10 years of ZIRP, plus COVID overhiring that doubled the headcount of those 10 years in just 2-3.

The jig was up when social media like Reddit and tiktok during the pandemic was full of posts with big tech workers gloating about getting hired for six figure salaries to sleep in and play video games at home while putting in 2 hours of work a week, obvious to anyone with two neurons to rub together that it was a too-good-to-be-true unsustainable bubble that's gonna pop and trigger a brutal reset on the job market.

Further reinforced with Elon firing 80% of Twitter and the website didn't stop working, reminding big tech CEOs that they can also start looking into trimming the overhiring fat in their back yard, with no operational loss.

Reinforce that with wall street rewarding mass layoff with share price going up, contrary to the pandemic rewards of shares going up with over hiring, and you have the perfect storm.

AI and the idea of it replacing jobs, has nothing to dow with this, it's just 10 years of ZIRP reawarding every unprofitable bullsit SaaS start-up, and 10 years of "just learn to code bro" where every shoeshine boy became a coder so now tech companies hiring are spoiled for choice.

Edit: Oh I forgot, add to that the increased of offshoring to places with cheaper labor thanks to the normalisation of remote work making it an even perfecter(is that a word?) storm on why an average programmer's labor has way less value.
by verdverm | 2026-03-14 20:09:26+00:00
If you can't trace across agents (like services), then you haven't set up OTEL completely

What your hard fail is, that's at a different layer of control, separate from OP questions about just seeing it so you can design those control systems. That's more guards, validators, and the like (more subagents)

I stay more human in the loop because these things are not ready for prime time the way you describe using them. That's burning tokens on average imo.
by enriquto | 2026-03-14 20:09:27+00:00
> It sounds like Onlyfans is exploiting workers and their own customers.

But this is the basic principle of capitalism. The company exploits workers (in order to obtain a net benefit from their work), and exploits customers (by selling the lowest-quality, most expensive product it can manage to). Companies that don't behave like that get out-competed by companies that do. This dynamic is the root of our economic system, as was very clearly explained by Adam Smith and Karl Marx two centuries ago (in slightly different tones of voice).

The particular case you mention is nothing special. The exact same thing happens for all the products that people buy. This is just the stable state of our (some would say "rotten", some would say "healthy") society.
by carlosjobim | 2026-03-14 20:09:38+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.

With AI code we might get software that is an ugly mess underneath, but at least we have it. While human programmers are unwilling to provide this software for even a high price.

I could argue that people are better off having nothing to eat rather than having high quality food. But in reality something is better than nothing.

There is a gigantic market and a gigantic need of software in the field between hobbyist and enterprise. And AI code will serve that field. Software engineers like you are the people who can best exploit this market segment, probably by leveraging these new AI tools.

Otherwise more and more people will do like me and have AI make their own bespoke solutions.
by giorgioz | 2026-03-14 20:09:41+00:00
Yes it's awesome! I'm creating a lot of CLIs with Claude Code to interact with external services. Yesterday made a CLI for the Google Search Console so I can prompt "get all problems from indexing in Google Search Console and fix them".
Same with Sentry bugs. Same with the customer support "Use the the customer support cli skill to get recent conversations from customers and rank bug reporting and features requests and suggest things to work on"
by cyanydeez | 2026-03-14 20:09:47+00:00
what. People absolutely have no idea what's going on without large, organized data.

The point is, the argument isn't "this data is right leaning" vs "this data is left leaning" or whatever your skew-scope is.

The argument at present: "We don't need to know to know X" versus "Of course we need to know X".

And ther'es clearly a fascist convincing people it's all useless while they ply their grift of choice.
by WhyNotHugo | 2026-03-14 20:09:50+00:00
OTOH, with Bluetooth headphones I can stand from my desk and stretch, or rest my eyes focusing on something while standing next to the window — without interrupting whatever I'm listening to.

I can also freely move around the house while listening to music or any podcast. Carrying my laptop around would hardly be convenient.

I do have a pair of wired headphones which I rarely use. My laptop has ended up on the floor twice due to me standing and forgetting about the cable. I almost broke the plug another time when I stood up and they were still plugged to the desktop. As someone who's grown up with the comfort of wireless headphones, using wired headphones is like wearing headphones with an anchor.

Honestly, I hate dealing with cables, even more having cables wrapped around me. I can't imagine being out on the street and having cables wrapped around me, connected to the phone in my bag or pocket, while trying to move around or use my arms in the usual way.
by hirehalai | 2026-03-14 20:10:03+00:00
The practical impact of 1M context is less about stuffing everything in and more about eliminating the architectural complexity of retrieval pipelines. With 200k you still needed RAG for any serious codebase; at 1M you can fit most monorepos verbatim and let the model do the "retrieval" natively via attention. The interesting question is whether the effective accuracy at position 800k+ is actually usable for tasks like "find the bug in this file" or if it degrades like previous long-context evals suggested.
by hirehalai | 2026-03-14 20:10:23+00:00
The AGENTS.md convention that Claude Code and similar tools use is already a de facto standard for this — drop a markdown file in your repo root describing how the agent should behave, what tools it has, what constraints to follow. The value is that it's zero-infrastructure: no server, no API, just a file that both humans and agents can read. The hard part nobody has solved well is persistent state across sessions — the agent forgets everything between runs unless you explicitly wire up memory files or a database.
by keyringlight | 2026-03-14 20:10:32+00:00
Two things that strike me.

One is the "when everyone is special, no one is special" factor, but I think that's tempered a bit by PCs becoming a status item (alongside the rise of streaming that shows the streamer and their environment) so it's important the PC is conspicuous. Also for those that have invested significant time/money it has become a point of pride for them that they want to display, and get into flamewars on the internet to defend their team. The manufacturers probably don't mind that it lets them display their brand in lights too and not be hidden away as a sticker or PCB marking.

Also that there seems to be space in the market for 'PC as a pretty lightbox', RGB systems are sophisticated now alongside LCD systems getting attached to various components. The PC becomes a decoration as opposed to a tool that fades into the background like a lot of other devices which are pure display or have enthusiasts salivating about thinner bezels. The thing I find curious is that the lightbox is constrained in the form of a PC (even if they sometimes try hard to hide the machinery of it such as wires or putting components on PCBs hidden behind panels), there's not a lot of consumer products where you could assemble elaborate colored lighting displays.
by mc32 | 2026-03-14 20:10:40+00:00
I’m down for that. There are so many “facilitators” in middle management, some really good and quite a few bad ones and many making no difference. I don’t know how people thought they were good positions to hire for.

Remember before Covid many a company deadweight showing us the vast amounts of unwork they did at their companies on their YouTube videos? Proudly showing how idle they were?

Not all the firings are deadweight but a lot are. There is also a general tightening of budgets and people who are part of dead-end programs that are being let go. When the economy was hotter companies would keep these people to add at the margins; I think now that money is still tight they’re not keeping that luxury.
by lb1lf | 2026-03-14 20:10:51+00:00
Anecdotally, I don't think hi-fi's decline has to do with cost - at least not cost alone. You can still get a more than decent system which will fit most living rooms for quite reasonable money - I just had a look at prices at a national retailer's website here in Norway, and you can get a pair of decent bookshelf speakers and a stereo amp delivering 2x60W into 8 ohms, built-in streaming support and a HDMI input to ease connection to the TV, covering the most common use cases nowadays, for less than $1,000.

For comparison, median income after taxes is approx. $50,000 a year, so we're looking at less than a week's net wages.

I think it is more likely that our media consumption habits have changed - when I was a kid in the eighties, a few - like, the bank branch manager, the dentist and a few others - had a VCR at home. The rest of us had TVs, meaning we watched what was on at the time, or (once in a while) rented a VCR and a movie.

That aside, our media choices were radio, going to the cinema (not very often!) or - drumroll - recorded music.

Hence everybody had stereos. I believe my parents were quite typical - when I was a toddler, they bought a number of LPs with radio dramas for kids on them, music for kids &c - the stereo was basically the entertainment hub.

Today my family and I - wife and three kids aged 10, 12 and 16 - have between us, let's see, 2xTVs, a 40" and an 85", the latter with a 5.1 system attached, both with Apple TVs, a stereo (making us an outlier!), three ipads, three smartphones, two dumbphones, a handful of radios, three - oops, four - laptops, a PlayStation, a couple of Nintendo Switches...

There's basically so many more options to spend our media time on, and at the same time there's way more leisure activities aimed at kids now than when I was a kid, so the kids are barely at home during the week (at least it feels that way!), leaving less time (methinks) for media consumption than only a generation ago, while at the same time having many more options.

So - basically, for many, only a generation ago, the stereo was the entertainment hub and you were kind of expected to have one. Nowadays the entertainment hub is some kind of internet-connected device, and a stereo is a niche product.
by digdugdirk | 2026-03-14 20:12:05+00:00
Hmm... Definitely seeing my weekly usage tick up during the off peak timeslot, so like most things relating to our current AI ecosystem... be careful, your experience may be different than what is claimed.

"Does bonus usage count against my weekly usage limit?

No. The additional usage you get during off-peak hours doesn’t count toward any weekly usage limits on your plan."
by search_facility | 2026-03-14 20:12:14+00:00
biology plays the role, certainly, but nature was trying to capture a model for 3D physical interactions first of all, physics first. And final choice of two 2D sensors is explicitly optimal and minimally effective for 3D - so it can not be similarly descriptive for 4D, just not fair to expect results on same level imho.

For meaningful 4D perception on similar level our body need three volumetric sensors, separated, to define volume with 4D direction
by polishdude20 | 2026-03-14 20:12:18+00:00
Yeah and especially the satisfaction that you were able to make a user delighted to use your thing. Fixing bugs, making things faster, adding new features, for me personally I do it because I feels really good when a customer loves to use the thing I've built.

Weather I've done the manual coding work myself or have prompted an LLM to cause these things to happen, I still chose what to work on and if it was worthy of the users' time.
by ekrisza | 2026-03-14 20:12:27+00:00
> However, LLMs might reduce that effort to zero — we just don't know how developers will look after ten years of using LLMs now.

LLMs might help the new joiner produce code on the level of an average developer faster. But, at the same time, if LLMs are really trained on all open source repositories without any selection, that level might be limited.

I have recently published a potentially related article: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s44427-025-00019-y

It looks like the overwhelming majority of projects on Github, does not really follow stable growth tendencies. In all fairness, as these were the smaller projects, their developers might have never intended to demonstrate best practices, or make the project sustainable on the long-term.

This is all fine, experimentation and learning are very welcome in open source. But, with 83,9% of the projects (in my study) falling into this category, LLM might pick them up as demonstrating overwhelmingly popular best practices.
In the worst case, this might even lead to actual best practices being drowned out, over time.
by bitwize | 2026-03-14 20:13:00+00:00
1) Right now, as things stand, the Democrats are our only alternative to something far more evil. Until we ratify a new constitution which implements a proportional, parliamentary government, the two-party system means you have to pick the lesser of two evils. In the interim maybe we can banish the Republican party to a niche constituency of openly reprehensible racists and bigots, and set up the Democrats as the new right wing and the Greens as the new left wing, but right now it is morally incumbent upon every American to vote Democrat.

2) Read your Marx. Liberty doesn't arrive from toxic individualism, it arrives from the fulfillment of man's nature as a social-creative animal. AI is a tool used by the bourgeoisie to further alienate us from each other; as is right-libertarian individualism.
by akadeb | 2026-03-14 20:13:01+00:00
Many parents are concerned about sending their children's chat transcripts to the cloud and privacy is often the first thing that comes up when we talk about AI toys.

So I built OpenToys so anyone with an ESP32 can create their own AI Toys that run inference locally, starting with Apple Silicon chips and keep their data from leaving their home network.

The repo currently supports voice cloning and multilingual conversations in 10 languages locally. The app is a Rust Tauri app with a Python sidecar with the voice pipeline. The stack uses Whisper for STT, any MLX LLMs, Qwen3-TTS and Chatterbox-Turbo for TTS.
by dudeinhawaii | 2026-03-14 20:13:36+00:00
It's not, hence the "don't post AI slop as your comment" posting a few days back that had 1000+ comments.

Currently an unsolved problem - just stealthier on some platforms than others. Trigger the right topic on HN and the bots come out in-force together with humans sloppily copy/pasting LLM content.
by comet_browser | 2026-03-14 20:13:39+00:00
The interesting structural tension here is that "Right to Compute" framing appeals to individualist/property-rights instincts, but the actual beneficiaries are hyperscalers and large data center operators. Individual compute rights already exist — nobody is stopping you from running a server.

What the bill actually does (based on typical legislation of this type) is preempt local zoning and environmental review for large compute facilities. That's a legitimate policy choice, but calling it a "right" is doing a lot of rhetorical work.

For comparison: Wyoming and Texas have done similar things for data centers via tax incentives rather than regulatory preemption. Both approaches get data centers built; they just differ in who captures the value.
by tombert | 2026-03-14 20:13:41+00:00
Fucking Christ.

I still don’t understand how anyone heard Trump bragging about how he’s going to “open up those libel laws”, in addition to all the other idiotic shit that he said, and still decided to vote for him.

I am sure people had their reasons, and maybe some of them even weren’t racist, but I am still having trouble comprehending how anyone didn’t see all this shit coming.

https://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/02/donald-trump...
by lucb1e | 2026-03-14 20:14:09+00:00
Why? If the voltage spikes on the grid (that's what I understand a power surge to mean), wouldn't even more of it end up in your house (that is: the grid voltage spike even higher) if the neighbors have equipment that doesn't let their devices consume some of that energy?

Edit: wait, maybe I figured it out: those devices must be consuming the excess rather than blocking it. Is that it?
by skybrian | 2026-03-14 20:14:11+00:00
UBI is not luxury communism, or at least not any of the proposals I've seen. A guaranteed $1000 a month would help a lot of people, but $12000 a year is not a high income and many people will want to keep working to earn more money than that. Maybe they'd be able to retire sooner, though?

As for inflation, a lot depends on how gradually it's adopted. As we saw in the pandemic, supply chains need time to adjust and bad things happen after sudden changes.
by hparadiz | 2026-03-14 20:14:14+00:00
America was largely a free market until the 1920s. Since then more regulations have actually increased the cost of living. The healthcare problem in America has a lot to do with increased regulations. For one we have a fixed limit on how many doctors can graduate every year. That was put in place by the medical lobby in the US. Ever since then healthcare costs have increased exponentially. Tale as old as time. This happens with every single new rule put in place. Rent control does the same thing. Prices just go up. This includes NIMBY laws.
by eddythompson80 | 2026-03-14 20:14:21+00:00
> explaining that the entire region knows this dialect because Egypt is the TV and movie hub of the Arabic world.

I suspect this is actively changing and in another generation or so won’t be true. All major TV, movies and music production has migrated to the Arab oil states since the late 2000s and accelerated in the 2010s. Today all major media production companies are based in the Gulf states.
by mattlondon | 2026-03-14 20:14:33+00:00
A think a more workable and politically palatable version of UBI would be some form of universal utility allowance.

E.g. the first x kWh electric you use, or the first X litres of water, or the first x GB of data you use is entirely free, for everyone (where X is some reasonable number that someone could just conceivably survive on). Then as you use more and more the prices start to gradually increase across a series of bands so that the heaviest users are subsidising those using the least.

It would promote efficiency, would be progressive, and would allow people to live without quite so much "bill fear" for essential utilities.

Plus it is not literally putting money in people's hands which is often unpopular with some demographic groups. People would still need to work but there would be some element of safety net.
by redgridtactical | 2026-03-14 20:14:41+00:00
The dual-use problem with Starlink is really just the most visible version of something happening across the military. Phones with civilian GPS chips are increasingly used alongside dedicated mil-spec hardware, simply because the commercial stuff is more usable and gets updated faster.

The real strategic question isn't whether Starlink can be weaponized - of course it can - it's what happens when military operations become dependent on commercial infrastructure that a single company controls. The vendor becomes a strategic chokepoint, and there's no precedent for how that plays out in a peer conflict.
by tptacek | 2026-03-14 20:15:37+00:00
It's OK if our premises are too far apart to hash this out. No, I don't think shredding T&S is one of the principal components of the giant Twitter RIF. Yes, T&S got killed; yes, that's bad. No, you can't explain how Musk manages to keep Twitter technically functioning as well as it does by pointing to T&S.
by randerson | 2026-03-14 20:16:20+00:00
> You're failing to explain what dictates the price the market will bear.

Most people like to live in the nicest place they can afford. This is a force pulling prices upward when many people with excess cash are competing for a limited supply of homes. Its why you'll pay more for the same size property in a wealthy neighborhood.

> Why are prices for an apartment in SF only 3k/mo instead of 30k?

Because some people in SF can only afford 3K/month. But if you added 3k/month to literally everyone's income, that number would increase.

(In case you're wondering why the many people with more than 3k/month don't crowd those people out: the wealthy depend on those 3k/month people for labor. At least for now.)
by comet_browser | 2026-03-14 20:16:48+00:00
Jazzband's model was interesting precisely because it tried to solve the bus factor problem by distributing maintainership across a community. The fact that it's sunsetting suggests the problem runs deeper than just individual maintainer burnout.

The real gap is that there's no natural mechanism for projects that are critical infrastructure for many companies to capture even a tiny fraction of the value they create. pip, Django, and the whole ecosystem that Jazzband helped steward are worth billions in aggregate business value. Their maintenance costs a few thousand dollars a year in volunteer time.

I don't think licensing changes alone fix this. Companies have legal teams that can route around them. What might actually work: large package registries (PyPI, npm) implementing a voluntary but strongly encouraged funding mechanism where companies self-report their usage and contribute to a foundation pool. It would need to be opt-in and friction-free, but even 10% adoption from mid-sized companies would transform the economics.