MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hackersk | 2026-03-01 14:22:22+00:00
This resonates. I've shipped 7 side projects in the past year using AI heavily. The code writing part got 10x faster. But I've noticed something counterintuitive: the total time from idea to shipped product barely decreased.

Why? Because the bottleneck was never typing code. It was always understanding the problem, making architectural decisions, debugging edge cases, and most importantly - knowing what NOT to build.

AI made me faster at producing code, but it also made me produce MORE code, which means more surface area for bugs, more maintenance burden, more complexity to reason about. The discipline of "write less code" is harder now because writing code costs almost nothing.

The engineers who thrive will be the ones who can resist the temptation to over-engineer when the marginal cost of adding complexity drops to near zero.
by smokel | 2026-03-01 14:22:22+00:00
The author introduces the term "Supervision Paradox", but IMHO this is simply one instance of the "Automation Paradox" [1], which has been haunting me since I started working in IT.

Interestingly, most jobs don't incentivize working harder or smarter, because it just leads to more work, and then burn-out.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automation#Paradox_of_automati...
by estearum | 2026-03-01 14:22:56+00:00
What? That's your second strawman in two comments.

Nobody said you claimed they were harmless. People are taking issue with your assertion that biological agents can be either contagious or lethal (not both), and therefore you discount its risk. This implied tradeoff between contagiousness and lethality simply is not enforced by anything in nature.

The natural emergence of a pathogen that's both highly contagious and highly lethal would be a much rarer event than the natural emergence of one that's either contagious or lethal, but we're talking about engineered pathogens. There is no reason to think that pathogens cannot be deliberately created that are both of those things.
by jfengel | 2026-03-01 14:23:12+00:00
Before CU, "issue ads" were constrained not to mention a candidate. They could talk about the issues, and strongly hint at which candidate did what they wanted, but it couldn't instruct you on who to vote for.

Now all that's required is a thin fig leaf that you're not actually directly coordinating with the actual campaign. And even that much is never enforced. It almost completely undoes campaign limits.
by er1t0 | 2026-03-01 14:23:25+00:00
I got sick of copypasting between ClaudeCode and Codex and was looking for a tool which parses the local sessions to create a new one. I found a few libraries out there but for some reason they carried over just the last ~10 messages.

handoff reads the full session history, uses tiktoken for token estimation, and gives you 3 tiers to choose from : full (conversation + tool calls + thinking + files modified), focused (no thinking blocks), or minimal (conversation only). It trims oldest messages first if the context is too large for the CLI arg limit.

it also checks if Claude's CLAUDE.md and MEMORY.md exist for that project directory and passes them along, so the receiving tool gets your project conventions.

zero-dependency TUI (just ANSI escape codes), single file, installs with uv tool install.
by knorker | 2026-03-01 14:24:02+00:00
> if we had high confidence we knew where they were

That's a very big gamble. They only need to have hide one on a cargo ship and the attacker is going to have a Very Bad Day.

Nobody's made that gamble yet. Yes, there's been kinetics between India and Pakistan, and Iran sending missiles at Israel, but not a credible threat to the state.

> Pedantically, Ukraine.

Not sure when you mean. Did they get bombed while they had physical control in the early 90s? They never had operational control, but now that they're being bombed they don't have even physical control of nukes.
by daveguy | 2026-03-01 14:24:08+00:00
The collapse happened when we elected a power drunk fool with a Project 2025 playbook to completely strip the separation of powers in favor of the Executive branch.

Now the war fool is trying to start as many conflicts as possible inside and outside the US to distract from his disturbingly heavy Epstein involvement to give him an excuse to take over polling sites in the US. No more wars my rear.

We have a chance to recover in the November elections. The question is whether or not we will take it.
by srean | 2026-03-01 14:24:09+00:00
In general I would agree. I think it holds true at the highest levels.

What worries me is the noticeable uptick of presentations of the sort -- look ma better fit ... deep neural nets. These are mostly by more junior folks, but not necessarily. I have been in the audience in many.

These and the uptick in research proposals funded by providers of infra for such DNNs. I have been in the audience of many.

A charitable read could be that they just want the money and would do the principled thing.
by toddmorey | 2026-03-01 14:24:12+00:00
“ For years, you’ve sat in front of a rectangle, moving tinier rectangles, only to learn that AI can now move those rectangles 10x better. As someone outside the equity class, you begin to wonder what your role is in this new paradigm. And whether rectangles were ever your ticket to happiness in the first place.”

Best summation of my current feelings yet.
by pjmlp | 2026-03-01 14:24:20+00:00
Agreed, especially since in Europe there was hardly any Apple presence.

It is no accident that to this day Demoscene is all about Spectrum, C64, CPC, MSX, Atari, Amiga, PC and there is hardly any retrogaming/demoscene focus of Apple hardware.

Regarding Windows, I would place Windows 95, NT 4.0, 2000 and 7 as my favourite UI flavour ones.
by zzzeek | 2026-03-01 14:24:26+00:00
I still feel like I'm writing code. I tell Claude what to write and I am very specific about it. There's still tons of problems for which Claude has no particular solution and it's on me and other humans to figure out what to do. For those cases where I tell it to just go off and write a whole script that I'm not even looking at, those are throwaway / low-value cases I dont care about where previously I'd not have even taken on that particular job.
by lqstuart | 2026-03-01 14:24:39+00:00
This isn’t how deep learning works. You can’t just “adjust weights” for some random user/product.

I feel like even otherwise intelligent people these days think these chatbots are Westworld-like programmable AIs and not pieces of shit that barely run or work. There is no tech monolith that’s getting advanced and gaining new capabilities. There are some very smart people who have switched from building ad recommenders or autonomous vehicles to building KV caches and reinforcement learning systems, and then in a different department there are the same people who built ads systems at whatever big tech company that will build the same shit at OAI etc.
by skeledrew | 2026-03-01 14:24:56+00:00
Yep the experience is quite something. Another thing I've noticed, and you likely soon will also, is that Claude only attempts a follow-up if the one is needed or the prompt is structured for it. Meanwhile ChatGPT always prompts you with a choice of next steps. It can be nice, as sometimes the options contain improvements you never thought of and would like, but in lengthy conversations with a detailed plan it does things really piecemeal, as though trained to maximize engagement instead of getting to a final solution.
by ghm2199 | 2026-03-01 14:25:34+00:00
The "trick(s) here are to limit the scope by always reading the plan very carefully. Here is how I do it to tackle this problem:

1. You should recognize when said holes are not "needed" holes e.g. you could make do with in memory task scheduler without rolling out more complex ones.

2. You can break up the plan— longer plans have more holes and are unwieldy mentally to go 20 rounds with in a chat coding UI.

3. Give it Learning Tests: i.e. code to run against black boxes. It's just like how we write a unit test to understand how a system works
by Spide_r | 2026-03-01 14:25:35+00:00
Its worth mentioning that this essay has some signs of being either partially AI generated or heavily edited through an LLM. Some of the signs are there (It's not X, it's Y), With the blog having gone from nearly zero activity between 2015 and 2025 to have it explode in posts and text output since then also raises an eyebrow.
by danielgafni | 2026-03-01 14:26:05+00:00
Hey, I’m the author.

At the bare minimum tests of unchanged code and dependencies would be skipped (cached) as well in this setup.

More sophisticated rules would have to be set up by hand, but again it’s easy to do with Dagger (as you can expected any kind of logic there).

But the whole point of using Dagger in this setup is to get tests caching out of the box, and for that you need to assemble the container correctly (by only including relevant dependency files).
by DiabloD3 | 2026-03-01 14:26:25+00:00
Zero code is in your head if you can't read it.

The predominant monitor in existence is your average 24" 1080p monitor, sat at, on average, 32" away from the head. The average person has worse than 20/20 vision.

You must test your website in such conditions and make sure it is readable, and also make sure it meets at minimum WCAG A, but preferably the whole way to AAA if possible.
by jfengel | 2026-03-01 14:27:44+00:00
I agree, but coding that up in law turns out to be tricky. Americans are reluctant to pass laws about how you can spend your money, especially if that money is being spent to express your opinion.

We used to have some limits on it, but now it's trivial to bypass those limits because the Supreme Court decided that the First Amendment isn't limited (except for all of those other limits.)
by Archer6621 | 2026-03-01 14:27:48+00:00
I agree with your overall perspective here. You need the human in the loop to ground the request/direction in a reality with human needs, but that's about it.

What I was getting at is that nothing stops you from asking AI what would be the next best smartwatch app to build, and based on all its aggregated knowledge and other inputs (e.g. search) it has, it can potentially make a better estimation than you or any human of a product that would sell.

Of course whether that is actually true depends on how well its training data is able to model/mimic reality, and how grounded its inputs (e.g. internet) are. You can always help it a bit by steering it into the right direction, providing additional grounding. Was mainly wondering for how long this "additional" guidance would be a necessity, fearing that it won't be for as long as we think.
by agentic_lawyer | 2026-03-01 14:28:05+00:00
The thing is that there already is a very good self-hosted option for sync - Livesync. I won't say it's not eccentric and confusing (it is!) but once you get it to work, it actually works extremely well and is lightning fast too. I use syncthing as well for backups but livesync has the obvious advantage of working natively inside Obsidian.

I'm so done with subscriptions for cloud based solutions and between livesync and syncthing, you've got a very robust set of options to use.

iCloud sync actually messed up every file I opened due to the lag between remote copy and local edits. iCloud would delete the last few edits whether I was in the file or after closing the file. Sometimes I would be typing something and I'd watch it delete what I just typed. It was a complete disaster.
by edgyquant | 2026-03-01 14:28:08+00:00
Voter suppression is not a large scale problem in American (neither is voter fraud.) I would be curious why you mentioned that?

America is an indirect democracy, which isn’t a flaw it’s a design choice. Things like the electoral college still follow a process where the people choose (same with the Supreme Court) it’s just staggered as a system that prioritizes stability over big swings/rapid change.
by thinkingemote | 2026-03-01 14:28:27+00:00
It's now almost certain that every submission about LLMs will be written (or assisted) by LLMs.

That this kind of writing puts a great number of us off is not important to many who seek their fortune in this industry.

I hear the cry: "it's my own words the LLM just assisted me". Yes we have to write prompts.
by randomtoast | 2026-03-01 14:28:43+00:00
> This is not a contradiction. It is the reality ...

> That is not an upgrade. That is a career identity crisis.

This is not X. It is Y.

> The trap is ...

> This gap matters ...

> This is not empowerment ...

> This is not a minor adjustment...

Your typical AI slop rhetorical phrasing.

Phrases like: "identity crisis", "burnout machine", "supervision paradox", "acceleration trap", "workload creep"

These sound analytical but are lightly defined. They function as named concepts without rigorous definition or empirical grounding.

There might be some good arguments in the article, but AI slop remains AI slop.
by onion2k | 2026-03-01 14:28:48+00:00
If this is what AI ends up as it'll be fine. Those ads are easy to detect and block. The danger is if the ads are far less intrusive, so an advertiser bidding on which hosting company to use would be the only result mentioned in the text, or the examples are all pointing to one player, or worst of all, examples for more than one but only the bidder's examples actually work properly. An ad-nerfed AI could be made to hallucinate non-working example code for anyone that isn't paying. Done subtly that could shift marketshare from an incumbent to a new service very quickly.

We've seen this happen on Google's results pages. Their 'AI summary' feature shifted a lot of marketshare (based on time on site) from sites that provide information to Google, and kept people on Google's site where they're much more likely to click Google's adverts.
by lioeters | 2026-03-01 14:29:03+00:00
Closest thing I found was:

Single Bit Neural Nets Did Not Work - https://fpga.mit.edu/videos/2023/team04/report.pdf

> We originally planned to make and train a neural network with single bit activations, weights, and gradients, but unfortunately the neural network did not train very well. We were left with a peculiar looking CPU that we tried adapting to mine bitcoin and run Brainfuck.
by jonhohle | 2026-03-01 14:29:21+00:00
That was the point of Tog's conclusion: edges of the screen have infinite target size in one cardinal direction, corners have infinite target size in two cardinal directions. Any click target that's not infinite in comparison, has infinitely smaller area, which I suppose you could conclude is infinitely worse if clickable area is your primary metric.

This wasn't just the menu bar either. The first Windows 95-style interfaces didn't extend the start menu click box to the lower left corner of the screen. Not only did you have to get the mouse down there, you had to back off a few pixels in either direction to open the menu. Same with the applications in the task bar.

The concept was similar to NEXTSTEP's dock (that was even licensed by Microsoft for Windows 95), but missed the infinite area aspect that putting it on the screen edge allowed.
by lotsofpulp | 2026-03-01 14:29:40+00:00
Would you want to be born a girl in the 1940s? How about as a non white person? And that is assuming you were even born in the US.

Before women had the ability to be professionals earning real money, or access to birth control and many, many other types of healthcare specific to women. Before no fault divorce and before rape within marriage was outlawed?

Decades before the Civil Rights Act and Jim Crow laws still existed?

> better access to doctors

I would take a nurse today over a doctor from the 1940s. The amount of advancement in healthcare between 1940 to today, even just over the counter stuff or information wise from online searches is tremendous.
by altmanaltman | 2026-03-01 14:29:58+00:00
It is almost 90% generated using AI text. So many paragraphs to say basically nothing at all.

Like look at this paragraph:

> Junior engineers have traditionally learned by doing the simpler, more task-oriented work. Fixing small bugs. Writing straightforward features. Implementing well-defined tickets. This hands-on work built the foundational understanding that eventually allowed them to take on more complex challenges.

The first sentence was enough to convey everything you needed to know, but it kept on adding words in that AI cadence. The entire post is filled with this style of writing, which, even if it is not AI, is extremely annoying to read.
by SecretDreams | 2026-03-01 14:30:17+00:00
I feel like it's such a lack of self respect and respect for others when people write using AI on personal blogs.

Reading AI code is very pleasant. It's well annotated and consistent - how I like to read code (although not how I write code LOL). Reading language/opinions is not meant to be this way. It becomes repetitive, boring, and feels super derivative. Why would you turn the main way we communicate with each other into a soulless, tedious, chore?

I think with coding it's because I care* about what the robot is doing. But, with communication, I care about what the person is thinking in their mind, not through the interpretation of the robot. Even if the person's mind isn't as strong. At least then I can size the person up - which is the other reason understanding each other is important and ruined when you put a robot in between.
by pjmlp | 2026-03-01 14:30:42+00:00
In theory, that will be taken care of with contracts and further revisions.

In practice, it depends on how the contracts drama folds out.

However I do agree it is still not quite there.

Still, C++ isn't going anywhere anytime soon, so any improvement is welcomed, even rustc has to gain from it.

I don't expect any RIR for GCC and LLVM happening any time soon, not only due to existing code, also due to all universities, and companies that contribute to upstream and aren't racing to adopt Rust.
by bigpod | 2026-03-01 14:30:46+00:00
system extensions are just as usable on bootc based systems but bootc based systems allow for much simpler composition, you dont have to know about all the intricacies of linux filesystem tree to install a set of packges for your own image as you can base uppon what someone else did easily using industry standard semantics and use actual package managers. And on top of all that it uses a far better distribution system, the oci's distribution spec
by spwa4 | 2026-03-01 14:31:33+00:00
History isn't quite so simple. Half the academic establishment, especially the human sciences, chose to side with the Nazis before they actually came to power. A lot of institutions in Europe, inside and outside of Germany, removed Jewish scientists before anyone asked them to. Ironically that mostly turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to both the Jewish scientists themselves and a number of people that chose to leave with them (there are entire cities in Europe that were founded by Jewish scientists forced to leave and the people who left with them). For example, after the UN (technically then "League of nations") fired Einstein for not being sufficiently Swiss (it's more complicated than just racism though) in 1932, he was shown why not to return to Germany and was offered a job in the US, at Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. He returned to Germany anyway and was shown why accepting the Princeton offer was a good idea, after experiencing "the degree of their brutality and cowardice". Note: he was talking about German academics and institutions, not the Nazis directly. This was before the first time the Nazis forbade Jews from teaching, which was in April 1933.

Of course, the Nazis turned out to be anti-intellectuals to an extreme degree too and whether it was by concentration camp mistreatment or using them as cannon fodder (or just sending them to the Russian front and leaving them to freeze to death), the Nazis eventually killed most of those scientists, including outside of Germany, who chose to remove Jewish scientists before being asked.
by ms9598 | 2026-03-01 14:31:52+00:00
I was recently analyzing a TypeScript module in our new project to learn how it works, and was thinking, "I wouldn't have done it like this” and “the styling is not for me". Then the realization slapped me in my face: this code came from me!

This article also slapped me, and has crystallized my jumbled thoughts on the topic. I'm deep into my career as a productive software engineer, yet I'm concerned there is a visible vanishing point of my value. My retirement is also visible, but I'm more concerned about our trade and those of you who have many years ahead.

While adaptation is hard when moving a lightspeed, workflows must adapt, more time on imprinting the generated code into our heads with iterating on trialing, testing, editing, before PRs is prudent.

A larger problem is architectural drift and leak. Those feel like they could become extremely problematic. We’ll need to put more effort into steering agents so their output aligns with architectural goals. The steering will also need to be iteratively refined.

Great article! I’m concerned, but also rallying for us.
by mads_quist | 2026-03-01 14:32:04+00:00
AI made programming A LOT MORE FUN for me.

What I never enjoyed was looking up the cumbersome details of a framework, a programming language or an API. It's really BORING to figure out that tool X calls paging params page and pageSize while Y offset and limit. Many other examples can be added.
For me, I feel at home in so many new programming languages and frameworks that I can really ship ideas. AI really helps with all the boring stuff.
by bombcar | 2026-03-01 14:32:12+00:00
I was surprised when I actually dabbled in x86 ASM (in the guise of MASM which arguably is a higher-level language than direct ASM) with BIOS and DOS interrupts as functions - it's quite close to C and not at all difficult - just tedious.

A powerful editor/IDE makes it ... not the worst programming experience in the world.

And since it's "so detailed" it's pretty easy to understand and explain, unlike higher-level languages that "do everything for you".
Show HN: A calculator for your 10,000th day on Earth and other milestones
by eirabben | 2026-03-01 14:32:16+00:00
A few weeks ago I realized I was turning 33.33 years old sometime this year — exactly a third of a century. It got me thinking about what other mathematical or interesting milestones we pass without realizing.

So, I built a small tool to calculate them. You input your birth date, and it generates a timeline of your past and future milestones (like 1 billion seconds, 400 months, or 10,000 days) that you can easily sync to your calendar. I also added a satirical “dark mode” that swaps out the fun milestones for existential dread.

I originally built it as a simple Vite/React app, but I had some issues with getting custom share links with generated Open Graph images to work when you send them to a friend. So, I ended up rewriting the base of the app in Next.js just to get SSR and dynamic Open Graph tags working for the custom share cards.

All the actual date math runs client-side for privacy, and I’m self-hosting it on a VPS using Dokploy. I also added some privacy respecting analytics with Umami to monitor traffic.

I had a lot of fun building this project, especially brainstorming ideas for milestones with my friends (and AI). I would love to get some more ideas for more milestones or new “modes” I can add.