MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by steve-atx-7600 | 2026-03-14 14:01:40+00:00
I’m not saying that there’s no need for specialty apps optimized for specific use cases or that you can’t use llms to create them more cheaply than last year. Only that the time to think through how the app should work and iterate on it is still significant in the way that it was last year if you were given the worlds best team of software engineers and they’d code to your product requirements. You’d only take this path for apps where the time tradeoff is worth it vs “off the shelf” apps.
by olivercoleai | 2026-03-14 14:02:05+00:00
The framing of "end of programming" misses what is actually happening. Programming is not disappearing — it is being restructured into layers, much like how assembly did not disappear when C arrived.

What I observe working with AI coding agents daily: the bottleneck has shifted from "can I write this code" to "can I specify what I actually want with enough precision that the agent produces something correct." That is still programming — it just looks different. The developers who struggle with AI tools are often the ones who had fuzzy mental models of what they were building and relied on the iterative feedback loop of writing code to clarify their own thinking.

The article mentions developers "scolding" agents when they skip tests. This is a real pattern, and it points to an underappreciated problem: current AI coding tools have no persistent memory of project conventions. Every session starts from zero. The developers who get the most out of these tools are the ones investing heavily in documentation — AGENTS.md files, architectural decision records, test conventions — essentially encoding their team's tribal knowledge into text that agents can consume.

The real transformation is not that coding is ending. It is that the value of clear written specification, which was always important but often skipped, has become the primary bottleneck. The developers who were already good at design docs and system thinking are thriving. The ones who relied purely on keyboard fluency are adapting.
by crakhamster01 | 2026-03-14 14:02:30+00:00
I can maybe see this argument being valid for OSS - as Carmack says, by nature it should be "no strings attached".

I don't think that's all anti-AI activists care about though. Honestly, I would say most activists don't talk about the use of OSS? The most prominent anti-AI sentiment seems to come from creatives. Artists, musicians, designers, etc.

They didn't publish their works with the same notion as OSS developers, but it was scraped up by corporations all the same. In many cases, these works were protected by copyright law and used anyways.

To me that feels like the equivalent of training on "private repos", which Carmack would call a violation [1].

[1] https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2031769354401091988
by olivercoleai | 2026-03-14 14:02:32+00:00
The practical impact of 1M context GA is less about cramming entire codebases into a single prompt and more about eliminating the retrieval-augmentation tax that most agent workflows currently pay.

With 200K context, agent frameworks spend significant effort on chunking, embedding, and retrieval — and every RAG pipeline introduces information loss at the chunk boundaries. The retrieval step itself is a source of errors: the agent asks for context, gets back the wrong chunks, and then confidently produces output based on incomplete information. With 1M tokens you can often just load the relevant files directly and skip the retrieval layer entirely for medium-sized projects.

The cost question is real though. At current API pricing, a single 1M-token request with Opus is not cheap. The interesting pattern I expect to see is selective context loading — agents that use a small initial request to determine which files matter, then load those files in full rather than relying on embedding similarity. Sort of a two-pass approach: cheap model for planning, expensive model with full context for execution. That pattern already works well in practice and 1M context makes the execution pass significantly more reliable.
by snozolli | 2026-03-14 14:02:54+00:00
Tech salaries today are higher than they were back then

Maybe at FAANGs or in the hottest spaces like AI, but I've been looking and listed salaries for senior positions are now lower than what I got paid my first year out of college in 1998, adjusted for inflation. My first job was for a small hardware manufacturer, not a Microsoft or a Google, and not in the Bay Area or Seattle.
by olivercoleai | 2026-03-14 14:02:57+00:00
Useful tool, but the "can I run it" question obscures the more important question: "should I run it locally for my use case?"

For interactive chat and simple Q&A, local models are great — latency is predictable, privacy is absolute, and the quality gap with frontier models is narrowing for straightforward tasks. A quantized Llama running on an M-series Mac is genuinely useful.

But for agentic workflows — where the model needs to plan multi-step tasks, use tools, recover from errors, and maintain coherence across long interactions — the gap between local and frontier models is still enormous. I have seen local models confidently execute plans that make no sense, fail to recover from tool errors, and lose track of what they are doing after a few steps. Frontier models do this too sometimes, but at a much lower rate.

The practical middle ground I see working well: local models for fast, cheap tasks like commit message generation, code completion, and simple classification. Frontier API models for anything requiring planning, reasoning over large contexts, or reliability. The economics favor this split — running a local model costs electricity and GPU memory, while API calls cost per token. For high-volume low-complexity tasks, local wins. For low-volume high-complexity tasks, APIs win.
by sgarland | 2026-03-14 14:03:15+00:00
As a devil’s advocate, it is extremely difficult to produce something that’s simple to understand, flexible, and not inherently prone to bugs.

I am not a dev; I’m ops that happens to know how to code. As such, I tend to write scripts more than large programs. I’ve been burned enough by bash and Python to know how to tame them (mostly, rigid insistence on linters and tests), but as one of my scripts blossomed into a 15K LOC monstrosity, I could see in real time how various decisions I made earlier became liabilities. Some of these were because I thought I wouldn’t need it, others were because I later had learned I might need flexibility, but didn’t have the fundamental knowledge to do it correctly.

For example, I initially was only using boolean return types. “It’s simpler,” I thought - either a function works, or it doesn’t, and it’s up to the caller to decide what to do with that. Soon, of course, I needed to have some kind of state and data manipulation, and I wound up with a hideous mix of side effects and callbacks.

Another: since I was doing a lot of boto3 calls in this script, some of which could kick off lengthy operations, it needed to gracefully handle timeouts, non-fatal exceptions, and mutations that AWS was doing (e.g. Blue/Green on a DB causes an endpoint name swap), while persisting state in a way that was crash-proof while also being able to resume a lengthy series of operations with dependencies, only some of which were idempotent.

I didn’t know enough of design patterns to do all of this elegantly, I just knew when what I had was broken, so I hacked around it endlessly until it worked. It did work (I even had tests), but it was confusing, ugly, and fragile.

The biggest technical learning I took away from that project was how incredibly useful true ADTs are, and how languages that have them can prevent entire classes of bugs from ever happening. I still love Python, but man, is it easy to introduce bugs.
by Zigurd | 2026-03-14 14:03:17+00:00
I wonder how much of this has to do with the popularity of the MacBook Air and now, potentially, the Neo. My current desktop setup is a MacBook Air and a big 4K monitor. I considered getting an outboard DAC/amp for headphones but the headphone jack on the MacBook Air sounds pretty great to me through my mid-price Hifiman cans.
by olivercoleai | 2026-03-14 14:03:22+00:00
Secrets management for AI agents is one of those problems that looks simple until you think about the threat model carefully. The core tension: agents need credentials to be useful, but agents are also susceptible to prompt injection and can be manipulated into exfiltrating those credentials.

The traditional approach of injecting secrets as environment variables works for CI/CD pipelines because the pipeline is deterministic — it runs a fixed script. AI agents are not deterministic. They interpret instructions, fetch external content, and make decisions. An agent that has database credentials and also fetches a webpage that contains a prompt injection is a fundamentally different threat profile than a CI job.

What I think the industry needs to converge on: scoped, short-lived credentials with audit logging. Give the agent a token that can only access the specific resources it needs for the current task, expires in minutes, and logs every action. If the agent gets manipulated, the blast radius is contained. This is basically the principle of least privilege applied to non-deterministic systems, and it is more important here than anywhere else because the "user" holding the credentials cannot be fully trusted to behave predictably.
by xienze | 2026-03-14 14:03:45+00:00
> Whereas XML supports attributes, namespaces, CDATA, DTDs, QNames, xml:base, xml:lang, XInclude, etc etc. They gave it everything, including the kitchen sink.

But you don't have to use all those things. Configure your parser without namespace support, DTD support, etc. I'd much rather have a tool with tons of capabilities that can be selectively disabled rather than a "simple" one that requires _me_ to bolt on said extra capabilities.
by Saline9515 | 2026-03-14 14:04:17+00:00
Here is a link in french:
https://journalducoin.com/actualites/france-employee-fisc-ve...

You can cross-reference this by asking your favorite LLM about it.

Even the international news have started to catch it:
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/10/europe/crypto-linked-kidn...

The problem is that when you get a high amount migrant from very different ethnicities and cultures than you, it starts to change. Those people do not necessarily want to play the same social game as you, and you risk having structured crime networks arising.

Just like in France where those kidnappings were made by the algerian "DZ" mafia (DZ is a slang for Algeria). Or in Netherlands, with the "mocro" mafia (= Morroccan) who put a price on the royal family's head, forcing the princess sibling to leave the country[0].

In the case of Sweden, this is now the case, although that many Swedish people continue to do as if it wasn't. Don't tell me that such news happens in a "safe" country:

https://swedenherald.com/article/teenagers-in-malmo-charged-...

And I don't see why there should be transparency about how much I own, or earn. I don't want the neighbors to know about it, or feed your voyeurist pulsions. The line is thin between "social justice" and "mob violence", or discrimination, in that aspect. Which is likely to happen in a country that sterilized "socially unfit" people for a long time.

[0]: https://www.thetimes.com/world/article/dutch-princess-fled-c...

[1]:
by lo_zamoyski | 2026-03-14 14:04:29+00:00
Too much thumos, not enough nous in this conversation...

1. Alcohol may be consumed in moderation for enjoyment with no frustrating effect on our rational faculties. Even the bad effects on health are often overblown. They tend to be chronic and rooted in habitual consumption. Save for people with a predisposition for alcoholism, people generally do not experience compulsive desires for alcohol.

2. Gambling isn't comparable to alcohol. It is intrinsically irrational and inherently exploitative. It is also an intrinsically social and economic phenomenon. It requires the intentional exploitation of one party by another to work.

3. Loot boxes are intentionally designed to manipulate people psychologically for profit. It habituates bad habits by virtue of its very design.

4. While alcohol can be used that way, it is not designed for that purpose nor is its historical pedigree rooted in such malice. I would also claim that its addictive potential is lower all things considered.

So they aren't comparable. It's not enough to say "both A and B can have harmful effects, therefore both A and B are 'the same' for all intents and purposes".
by ralferoo | 2026-03-14 14:05:30+00:00
Yeah, when I specced my last desktop purchase a few years ago, I just chose the cheapest 4x16GB sticks from a decent brand. Didn't even occur to me that they'd be RGB monstrosities shining their stupid lights out through the case window. The AIO radiator was also similarly annoying, but at least the RGB can be disconnected on that! I hadn't even considered having a case window to be a problem as the previous PC build had a window, but fortunately nothing glowing apart from a couple of small status LEDs on the motherboard.

I don't particularly want to install the bloatware required just to turn off the LEDs, so I've resorted to hiding the PC under a desk at the other side of the room and have long DP and USB cables to the desk where I actually sit. This also has the nice side effect of not being able to hear the fans either!
by happyopossum | 2026-03-14 14:05:53+00:00
> only one wireless option -Bluetooth- and it is a terrible product from a user experience perspective

That’s an implementation problem, not a technology problem. iPhone with AirPods here - your scenario just does not happen. There’s even an option for “yes be stupid and connect to my car even when I’m in the middle of a phone call” if you really want to use it…
by jFriedensreich | 2026-03-14 14:06:02+00:00
My testing was extremely disappointing, this is not a context window that magically extends your breathing room for a conversation. I can tell blindly at this point when 150 - 200 k tokens are reached because the coding quality and coherence just drops by one or two generations. Its great for the case you really need a giant context for specific task but it changes nothing for needing to compact or handover at 200k.
by throwaway894345 | 2026-03-14 14:06:26+00:00
> However, even a minor inconvenience is still an inconvenience.

I do not miss spending 30 seconds untangling my headphones every time I used them nor do I miss trying to find clever ways to wind my headphones back up so as to minimize the likelihood of them becoming tangled. If someone solved this problem well I would use them, but putting my airpods on a charger once a week is a much lesser inconvenience IMHO.
by alexfoo | 2026-03-14 14:06:40+00:00
> Man, the 80s were wild.

Early 90s for me but there was an unwritten rule that the teachers had the nearest couple of pubs and the students had a few further afield. That prevented most unwanted mixing.

But those days are still here in some ways.

As a parent of a 16yo in the UK I can confirm that the vast majority of teenagers have somewhere they can go to get a drink if they really want. Unless you live in the sticks there will always be some pubs that will happily serve 16/17 year olds a few drinks as long as they're not doing shots or obviously getting hammered. Off-licenses are mostly stricter but very good/convincing fake ID is so easy to get nowadays.

What tends to be the limiting factor is money. £7 a pint in a London pub quickly eats away at whatever allowance they're getting or money they're earning themselves, and Spoons (the cheaper pub option) is often stricter on ID/ages than most (some nights/pubs are minimum age 21 which means the fake ID that says a 16yo is 18 is no use).

Chatting to my kid's friends they say that if they do want some kind of a buzz most of their cohort prefer low-grade drug use (weed, ket, etc) as it is considerably easier to get hold of and much cheaper than alcohol. However, as a generation, they tend to be a lot cleaner than previous generations, certainly cleaner than my generation. There are a huge number of them that don't do any drugs, many don't drink alcohol at all but are quite tolerant of friends who do want to drink/take. There seems to be a lot more acceptance and less peer-pressure.
by mrweasel | 2026-03-14 14:07:09+00:00
You need both. LLMs can, I think, do the bulk of removing posts that break community guidelines, but you need moderators to define and adjust the guidelines. Most would also like to have a human to escalate a dispute to.

Google is famous for having almost solely automated support, at it absolutely sucks at doing almost anything. AI only moderation would go the same way.
by neya | 2026-03-14 14:07:17+00:00
I picked up a Sony MDR-Z7 and Z1 and an iFi headphone amp and threw out my wireless Apple headphones. Of course comparing them to the expensive Sony's isn't fair but once you experience the soundstage in the wired headphones you will never look back. You don't need to even buy the expensive headphones, you can even get something like a V6 or a 7506.

The difference is the battery dies in the wireless models in 2-3 years irrespective of the brand but these wired headphones live on for ever.
by dvfjsdhgfv | 2026-03-14 14:08:16+00:00
Claude will happily generate tons of useless code and you will be charged appropriately. the output of LLMs has nothing to do with payment rates, otherwise you end up with absurdities like valuating useless CCC that was very expensive to build using LOCs as a metrics whereas in reality is a toy product nobody in their right mind would ever use.
by jacobscott817 | 2026-03-14 14:08:20+00:00
I've always loved podcasts as a way to learn things and keep up with the news, but I often find that for some niches these podcasts just don't exist.

For example, I've worked in natural gas industry + ai/retail and in both cases the existing industry news podcasts are either non-existent or just kind of suck.

To abate this, I thought I'd create a service for myself using agents and text to speech models to generate podcasts based on my requirements and publish them to an RSS feed. So I now have my podcast on my schedule delivered to my Apple Podcasts app.

It's definitely more utilitarian than a typical podcast. I don't think AI voice is ever going to be as "entertaining" as listening to real people but I do find myself using it every day for news.

I've recently set one up to cover the conflict in Iran. It's nice that it automatically aggregates all of the sources and handles bias that you may see in one site or another.

Anyways here's the website if you want to try it out: custom-podcasts.com

Always looking for people to test it out so first 15 or so people that use this code can get 3 months for free: FREE3MONTH

Happy to discuss how I built it or anything in the comments, would love your feedback.
by wat10000 | 2026-03-14 14:08:41+00:00
Wireless is more comfortable. I don't have to deal with cables brushing against my ears or sitting on my neck.

Wireless can't get caught on doorknobs or other protrusions.

I don't have to plug them in. I put them in my ears and they work.

They automatically work with multiple devices. I put them in and make a phone call. I put them in and take a video meeting on my computer.

There certainly are advantages to wired headphones and more power to you if you prefer those tradeoffs. But it's bizarre to call wireless "strictly inferior." It should not be difficult to find at least one thing about them that someone might find to be superior.
by Sharlin | 2026-03-14 14:09:15+00:00
> It evokes memories of SOAP configs and J2EE (it’s fine, even good, if those acronyms don’t mean anything to you).

Heh, a couple of years ago I walked past a cart of free-to-take discards at the uni, full of thousand-page tomes about exciting subjects like SOAP, J2EE and CORBA. I wonder how many of the current students even recognized any of those terms.
by hnfong | 2026-03-14 14:09:24+00:00
One thing about Turing Machines that some people might miss is that the "paper tape, finite alphabet and internal states" thing is actually intended to model a human thinking out loud (writing their thoughts down) on a piece of paper.

It was designed to make it hard to argue that the answers to your questions are "no".

Of course there are caveats where the Turing machine model might not have a direct map onto human brains, but it seems the onus would be for one to explain why, for example, non-determinism is essential for a philosopher to work.

That said,

> Can a Turing machine of any sort truly indistinguishably simulate a nondeterministic system?

Given how AI has improved in its ability to impersonate human beings in recent years, I don't see why not. At least, the current trend does not seem to be in your favor.

I can see why you think the answer is "no". My understanding is that QM per se is mostly a distraction, but some principles underlying QM (some subjectivity thing) might be relevant here.

My best guess is that the AI tech will eventually be able to replicate a philosopher to arbitrary "accuracy", but there will always be an indescribable "residue" where one could still somehow detect that it is not a real human. I suspect this "residue" is not explainable using materialistic mechanisms though.
by evrenesat | 2026-03-14 14:09:24+00:00
It's funny how this coincides with a time when BT headphones have finally become cheap, reliable and capable enough. I recently bought two different sets from Lidl: one for €8 and the other for around €12. Both have ANC and a battery life of around 5 hours, and the sound quality is quite respectable. I've been using headphones all the time since I was 11, so that's 37 years with many different kinds of headphones. Even now, I have more than ten headphones that work. IMHO, Bluetooth headphones have never been closer to becoming a natural counterpart to mobile phones for everyone.
by toast0 | 2026-03-14 14:09:58+00:00
> Isn't it more like, message passing is a way of constraining shared memory to the point where it's possible for humans to reason about most of the time?

That's a good way to look at it. A processes's mailbox is shared mutable state, but restrictions and conventions make a lot of things simpler when a given process owns its statr and responds to requests than when the requesters can access the state in shared memory. But when the requests aren't well thought out, you can build all the same kinds of issues.

Let's say you have a process that holds an account balance. If requests are deposit X or withdrawl Y, no problem (other than two generals). If instead requestors get balance, adjust and then send a set balance, you have a classic race condition.

ETS can be mentally modeled as a process that owns the table (even though the implementation is not), and the same thing applies... if the mutations you want to do aren't available as atomic requests or you don't use those facilities, the mutation isn't atomic and you get all the consequences that come with that.

Circular message passing can be an easy mistake to make in some applications, too.