MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwaway290 | 2026-03-07 13:58:03+00:00
> argument that women are not capable

I know this is called techbro crowd for a reason, but you know that plenty of women invented things and did scientific discoveries right? especially after they were unbanned from it

> Certainly women can be destructive too

Sure if you say so.

It's just that 0% of these destructive weapons and tech in the article was developed by women.

Maybe there's a pattern here
by nickjj | 2026-03-07 13:58:18+00:00
> But, this also all depends on the experience level of the developer. If you are gonna vibe code,

Where I find it struggles is when I prompt it with things like this:

> I'm using the latest version of Walker (app launcher on Linux) on Arch Linux from the AUR, here is a shell script I wrote to generate a dynamic dmenu based menu. This is working perfectly but now I want to display this menu in 2 columns instead of 1. I want these to be real columns, not string padding single columns because I want to individually select them. Walker supports multi-column menus based on the symbol menu using multiple columns. What would I need to change to do this? For clarity, I only want this specific custom menu to be multi-column not all menus. Make the smallest change possible or if this strategy is not compatible with this feature, provide an example on how to do it in other ways.

This is something I tried hacking on for an hour yesterday and it led me down rabbit hole after rabbit hole of incorrect information, commands that didn't exist, flags that didn't exist and so on.

I also sometimes have oddball problems I want to solve where I know awk or jq can do it pretty cleanly but I don't really know the syntax off the top of my head. It fails so many times here. Once in a while it will work but it involves dozens of prompts and getting a lot of responses from it like "oh, you're right, I know xyz exists, sorry for not providing that earlier".

I get no value from it if I know the space of the problem at a very good level because then I'd write it unassisted. This is coming at things from the perspective of having ~20 years of general programming experience.

I don't think I'm cut out for using AI because if I paid it and it didn't provide me the solution I was asking for then I would expect a refund in the same way if I bought a hammer from the store and the hammer turned into spaghetti when I tried to use it, that's not what I bought it for.
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-03-07 13:58:27+00:00
OK, glad to hear I was mistaken, but it certainly seemed like about halfway through your first response you went off the rails and decided to take my question as some sort of personal affront. It was not the strangest response I've had on HN, but one of the strangest. I could go through with a full analysis of why I thought "this guy is having problems", but that would take a long time and as you say you aren't I guess it isn't particularly useful.

I guess we aren't going to get anything meaningful between us on this subject, because you seem to think it is like arguing with an anti-vaxxer, which funny enough I thought the same thing,

So fine, you experience a gain, you just do, and it is so clear and evident you don't need to guard yourself against being deluded despite studies suggesting that gain is not there. That seems crazy to me, I would doubt and want to verify my gain if I read a study suggesting the gain was illusory. No meaningful convergence seems possible between needing verification and not needing verification.
Show HN: NovaSCM – open-source SCCM alternative (WPF and Python and SQLite)
by Claudio82 | 2026-03-07 13:58:28+00:00
I built NovaSCM, a self-hosted fleet management tool inspired by Microsoft SCCM but free and open source.

Stack: C# WPF console (Windows), Python/Flask REST API, SQLite, cross-platform Python agent.

Features:
- Generates autounattend.xml for zero-touch Windows installs (USB/PXE)
- Network scanner (IP, MAC, vendor, open ports)
- Visual workflow editor for multi-step deployments (winget, PowerShell, reboot, registry...)
- WiFi 802.1X EAP-TLS certificate issuance and auto-enrollment
- Change Request tracker per machine

MIT license. No cloud. No telemetry.
by jghn | 2026-03-07 13:59:09+00:00
> A neighbor had much faster internet

In the very, very early days I had a 6ms ping to my server on a then high bandwidth connection. This was when most players were at best on a 28.8 modem with multihundred ms ping times. I remember being able to easily outrun people who were on horses.

My roommate and I could sit next to each other and between the combination of our connection and the advantage voice communication provided for coordination was an enormous advantage. We spent a lot of time in PK hot spots pretending to be lagged newbies, only to give the PK gangs a rude awakening when they'd come to grief us. Turns out a pair of toons who were multi-GMs when most weren't a single GM yet, who were lighting fast compared to others, and with perfect coordination made short work of your average PK gang back then
Stop Making Models Smarter
by noemit | 2026-03-07 13:59:19+00:00
I like to use 'dumber' models (like Composer 1.5, which is possibly a fine-tuned Qwen) even though it requires much more specific outlined guidance from me.

Claude Opus 4.6, which is probably the 'smartest' model out there, is great at "one-shotting" - but I find I rarely want to one-shot anything, unless its a really small discrete element, which a dumb model can one-shot as well.

There are funny examples of telling Claude "Make a game about Dadaist frogs that uses a betting mechanic where you try to become the richest frog in the pond. Make no mistakes." And Claude executes something that runs, and more or less is what you asked for.

For real work, I like that the dumb models don't know as much. I noticed they use web search more agressively because of their lack of knowledge, for example. (Although tool use can be improved via system prompts.) I also feel that dumber models have less bad opinions. Claude tends to jump to conclusions - it almost needs more guardrails because it's smarter (and a little overconfident?)

Curious what others' experience is.
by da_chicken | 2026-03-07 13:59:36+00:00
Sure.

Now generate your random ID. Did you use a CSPRNG, or were your devs lazy and just used a PRNG? Are you doing that every time you're generating one of these IDs in any system that might need to communicate with your API?

Now transfer it over a wire. Are you sure the way you're serializing it is how the remote system will deserialize it? Maybe you should use a string representation, since character transmission is a solved problem with UTF-8. OK, so who decides what that canonical representation is? How do we make it recognizable as an ID without looking like something that people should do arithmetic with?

It's not like random IDs were a new idea in 2002.
by onion2k | 2026-03-07 13:59:53+00:00
What right do they believe to have to dictate to their users what the can and can't read? That should be solely in the user's hand.

Are they choosing what people can read, or are they choosing what they're willing to federate? No one is stopping people writing and publishing things on federated services. People are only choosing what they're willing to broadcast over the part of the service they run.
by tzs | 2026-03-07 13:59:56+00:00
You are off a bit on the numbers. First, though, they did not sue for downloading. The suits were against those who distributed the songs via file sharing apps.

Here is how their enforcement actions generally went.

1. They would initially send a letter asking for around $3 per song that was being shared, threatening to sue if not paid. This typically came to a total in the $2-3k range. There were a few where the initial request was for much more such as when the person was accused of an unusually high volume of intentional distribution. But for the vast majority of people who were running file sharing apps in order to get more music for themselves rather than because they wanted to distribute music it averaged in that $2-3k range.

2. If they could not come to an agreement and actually filed a lawsuit they would pick maybe 10-25 songs out of the list of songs the person was sharing (typically around a thousand) to actually sue over. The range of possible damages in such a suit is $750-30000 per work infringed, with the court (judge and jury) picking the amount [1].

NOTE: it is per "work infringed", not per infringement. The number of infringements will be one of the factors the court will consider when deciding where in that $750-30000 range to go.

3. There would be more settlement offers before the lawsuit actually went to trial. These would almost always be in the $200-300 per song range, which since the lawsuit was only over maybe a dozen or two of the thousand+ songs the person had been sharing usually came out to the same ballpark as the settlement offers before the suit was filed.

Almost everyone settled at that point, because they realized that (1) they had no realistic chance of winning, (2) they had no realistic chance of proving they were were an "innocent infringer", (3) minimal statutory damages then of $750/song x 10-15 songs was more than the settlement offer, and (4) on top of that they would have not only their attorney fees but in copyright suits the loser often has to pay the winner's attorney fees.

4. Less than a dozen cases actually reached trial, and most of those settled during the trial for the same reasons in the above paragraph that most people settled before trial. Those were in the $3-15k range with most being around $5k.

[1] If the defendant can prove they are in "innocent infringer", meaning they didn't know they were infringing and had no reason to know that, then the low end is lowered to $200. If the plaintiff can prove that the infringement was "willful", meaning the defendant knew it was infringement and deliberately did it, the high end is raised to $150k.
by misswaterfairy | 2026-03-07 14:00:13+00:00
> if you try and do things it doesn’t like, you’re going to have a bad time.

Also that there's the 'Esri' way of doing things, and the 'platform independent' (more-or-less) way of doing things which do not play well with 'Esri-isms'.

Esri does have some really nice enterprise components though; I haven't yet found a remotely user-friendly open-source equivalent to Workflow Manager Server or Data Interop., or an as-polished ArcGIS Portal yet, though I constantly keep a look out.

QField is getting better and better, too. I wish I knew C++ well enough to help develop it further.
by seec | 2026-03-07 14:01:06+00:00
Well, it's my observation as well, but the point is that it's not the first time this happened.

In fact, we have records from not that long ago that at some point climate became colder after it had been warmer for a bit.

It's obvious human civilization has an impact, but the real question is more, can we actually do anything about it that is not just letting go of a comfortable life? Because that option is a pretty stupid proposition, and game theory pretty much guarantees that if you make that choice, you will be the ultimate loser no matter what.

Climate activist make it look like it's a settled issue, but the problem isn't the science; the problem is trying to use the science to enforce decision that are highly political in nature and are not to be left only to the designated god scientist, no matter how hard they cry...
by jonkoops | 2026-03-07 14:01:23+00:00
> And cancel culture. Highly politically motivated cancel culture.

Most of the people who started on Mastodon are people of the LGBT+ community that were getting constantly harassed on other platforms. This 'cancel culture' is just a healthy attitude to having a zero tolerance policy on abuse, it is how it avoids being the enormous bigoted alt-right techbro mess that is now X.

Since Mastodon is federated, you can choose the instance you want to use, and what you see. Just don't expect other instances to actively want to engage there.
Show HN: A tool that converts Excel files into dashboards instantly
by skandersab | 2026-03-07 14:01:37+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a small tool that turns Excel files into dashboards automatically.

The idea came from seeing how many people still build reports manually in Excel every week. They export data, clean it, create charts, update them again the next week, etc.

So I built a simple workflow:

1. Upload an Excel file
2. The system analyzes the structure
3. It automatically generates dashboards and charts

The goal is to remove the repetitive part of reporting.

It’s not meant to replace BI tools like Power BI or Tableau, but rather to quickly generate visual dashboards from raw spreadsheets.

I’m currently testing the idea and would love feedback from the community:
- What types of Excel reports do you generate most often?
- What charts would you expect to be created automatically?

You can try it here:
https://www.datanestanalytics.com/
by tqwhite | 2026-03-07 14:01:52+00:00
I wrote SuperSecretCrypt.com, ScoreRummy.com. Other stuff, too.

I have integrated Claude Code with a graph database to support an assistant with structured memory and many helpful capabilities.

I have a freelance gig with a startup adapting AI to their concept. I have one serious app under my belt and more on the way.

Concrete enough?
by riedel | 2026-03-07 14:02:00+00:00
The question is rather if Mozilla can win this catch-up game and win new users. If they do this they should rather IMHO simply upstream the stuff done by Zen [0], which IMHO has a much more modern look and feel. Btw: there is still quite some users that are lost if UI changes. Particularly older people might simply use pre-installed Edge if they have to get used to a new design anyway. My parent in law were still on SeaMonkey until a few months. I installed some weird old school theme (I think echolon [1]) to ease the transition.

[0] https://zen-browser.app/
[1] https://echelon-theme.github.io/
by ollybrinkman | 2026-03-07 14:02:23+00:00
This maps directly to the shift happening in API design for agent-to-agent communication.

Traditional API contracts assume a human reads docs and writes code once. But when agents are calling agents, the "contract" needs to be machine-verifiable in real-time.

The pattern I've seen work: explicit acceptance criteria in API responses themselves. Not just status codes, but structured metadata: "This response meets JSON Schema v2.1, latency was 180ms, data freshness is 3 seconds."

Lets the calling agent programmatically verify "did I get what I paid for?" without human intervention. The measurement problem becomes the automation problem.

Similar to how distributed systems moved from "hope it works" to explicit SLOs and circuit breakers. Agents need that, but at the individual request level.
by kotaKat | 2026-03-07 14:02:27+00:00
Typically a once to twice-a-year event for many conventions. These are extremely volunteer-led conventions, so a lot of financials just aren't there to support hundreds of dollars for a short term rental for an event weekend. We're out here for the love of the con(vention) pouring our own funds into things for the most part.

Some conventions can be only a couple hundred people (or less!) as fledgling conferences, so getting the costs per-attendee as cheap as possible out of the gates is important. I could see myself donating Zebra label printers into a convention to support the cause if they executed something like this.

One thing to add though: Have a "DR" (Didn't Realize) plan when you run out of your pre-printed card stock. You may find out your convention gets too popular and you run out of cards - you may need to consider having a backup available (such as printing and laminating color 'badges' to hand to your daypasses, for instance).
by skandersab | 2026-03-07 14:02:39+00:00
If anyone is curious to try it, I'd really appreciate feedback.

You can upload any Excel file and it will automatically generate charts and dashboards.

I'm especially interested in cases where it fails or produces weird charts — that helps me improve the detection logic.

If you test it, let me know:
• what kind of data you uploaded
• what charts you expected
• what didn’t work well
Show HN: Brf.it – Extracting code interfaces for LLM context
by jeff-lee | 2026-03-07 14:02:42+00:00
I've been experimenting with ways to make AI coding assistants more efficient when working with large codebases.

The problem

When sharing repository context with LLMs, we often give them everything: full files, implementation details, comments, etc. But for many tasks (like understanding architecture or navigating a repo), the model doesn't actually need most of that.

This creates two problems.

* unnecessary token usage
* noisy context that can obscure the structure of the codebase

The idea

Instead of sharing the full implementation, what if we only shared the interface surface of the code?

Function signatures, types, imports, and documentation. Basically the parts that describe how the system is structured rather than how every function is implemented.

The experiment

I built a small CLI tool called Brf.it to test this idea. It uses Tree-sitter to parse source code and extract structural information, producing a compact representation of the repository.

Example output:

<file path="src/api.ts">
<function>fetchUser(id: string): Promise<User></function>
<doc>Fetches user from API, throws on 404</doc>
</file>

In one simple comparison from a repo:

* original function: ~50 tokens
* extracted interface: ~8 tokens

The goal isn't to replace sharing full code, but to provide a lightweight context layer that can help with things like:

* architecture understanding
* repo navigation
* initial prompt context for AI agents

The idea was partly inspired by tools like repomix, but Brf.it takes a slightly different approach. Instead of compressing the full repository, it extracts only the API-level structure.

Language support so far:

Go, TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Rust, C, C++, Java, Swift, Kotlin, C#, Lua

Project:

https://github.com/indigo-net/Brf.it

Docs:

https://indigo-net.github.io/Brf.it/

Curious if others have experimented with similar ideas.

What information do you think is actually essential for LLM code understanding?

Are function signatures and docs enough for architecture reasoning?

Are there formats that work better for LLM consumption than XML or Markdown?
by ollybrinkman | 2026-03-07 14:02:54+00:00
The UUID stdlib debate reveals a deeper tension in API design: when does standardization help vs hurt?

UUIDs won because they're "good enough" - collision-resistant without coordination. But v7's timestamp ordering breaks that independence by leaking information. Now you need to reason about clock sync, monotonicity, privacy.

For distributed systems, I increasingly see folks moving to: use v7 internally (btree efficiency matters), expose v4 externally (don't leak creation order to clients). Add a mapping layer at the API boundary.

The real lesson: IDs are part of your API contract. If clients can infer system behavior from ID structure (request rate, shard assignment, rollout timing), that's signal you may not want to transmit. Standards help, but context still matters.
by ollybrinkman | 2026-03-07 14:02:59+00:00
The sovereign model angle is interesting beyond just geopolitics.

India has unique ML infrastructure constraints: lower compute costs, different data mixtures (22+ official languages), cultural contexts Western models miss. If Sarvam actually trained from scratch rather than fine-tuning Qwen, they're exploring a genuinely different part of the solution space.

The benchmark performance matters less than the training methodology. Did they collect novel datasets? Use different tokenization for Indic scripts? Optimize for inference on different hardware profiles common in Indian datacenters?

The "derivative vs creative" question is key. Most regional models are just Llama + local data. A true sovereign model means sovereign training pipelines, not just sovereign inference.

Would love to see their training data composition and infrastructure details beyond the marketing fluff.
by ollybrinkman | 2026-03-07 14:03:06+00:00
The "experience as the real asset" point resonates deeply. I've been building agent orchestration systems and the difference between junior and senior use of AI tools is stark.

Juniors prompt "build me X" and get frustrated when it goes sideways. Seniors architect the constraints first - acceptance criteria, test harness, API boundaries - then let the AI fill in mechanical work.

The real shift: AI makes the cost of prototyping near-zero, which paradoxically makes taste and judgment MORE valuable. When you can spin up 5 approaches in a weekend, knowing which one to actually ship becomes the bottleneck.

The folks who defined their value as "typing code" will struggle. The folks who defined their value as "knowing what to build and how to verify it works" are thriving.
by acdha | 2026-03-07 14:03:22+00:00
That’s a different question. The person you’re replying to was referring to historical totals and they were right:

https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2

> the United States has emitted more CO2 than any other country to date: at around 400 billion tonnes since 1751, it is responsible for 25% of historical emissions; this is twice more than China – the world’s second-largest national contributor
by MrDarcy | 2026-03-07 14:03:45+00:00
I have a single wrap function that does this for all errors. The top level handler only prints the first two, but can print all if needed.

I have never had difficulty quickly finding the error given only the top two stack sites.

Any complaint about go boilerplate is flawed. The purpose and value is not in reducing code written, it is to make code easier to read and it achieves this goal better than any other language.

This value is compounding with coding agents.
by youelfedr | 2026-03-07 14:04:16+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Wabio (wabio.xyz) — paste a GitHub URL and
get a professional README in about 10 seconds.

The problem I kept hitting: I'd build something,
push it to GitHub, then stare at the empty README
for 20 minutes before writing "TODO". Every developer
I know has repos like this.

How it works:
- Fetches repo metadata, file tree, key files
(package.json, requirements.txt, etc.)
- Sends structured context to Gemini AI
- Returns formatted markdown with badges,
sections, code examples

Technical decisions I made:
- Next.js 15 App Router for the full stack
- Rate limiting per IP + per account + device
fingerprinting to prevent abuse
- SSRF protection: URL must match
github.com pattern, owner/repo sanitized
- Supabase + Prisma with connection pooling
(pgBouncer port 6543) for serverless

Free tier: 5 READMEs/month
Pro: $9/month for unlimited + private repos

I'm 17, this is my first shipped product.
Happy to discuss any technical decisions.
by skandersab | 2026-03-07 14:04:19+00:00
That’s fair. There’s definitely a lot of AI tools being posted lately.

In this case the goal isn’t to generate random dashboards with AI, but to automate a task people already do manually: turning Excel tables into charts and simple dashboards.

The system analyzes the structure of the spreadsheet (columns, numeric fields, categories) and then generates charts that make sense for the data.

It’s still very much an experiment, and I’m curious where it breaks.

If you have a messy Excel file you’re willing to test with, I’d actually love to see how it behaves.