MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Share files and folders on your own domain or subdomain
by api008 | 2026-03-07 17:45:54+00:00
Hi HN,

I built BulkShare (https://www.bulkshare.cloud/) because I was tired of sending clients generic links from services like Dropbox or WeTransfer. It always felt a bit unprofessional and disconnected from my brand. I wanted a way to share files that looked like they were part of my own site, hosted on my own domain, without having to set up a complex server or manage cloud storage buckets myself.

The idea is pretty simple: you connect your own domain or a subdomain (like files.yourdomain.com), and you can immediately start uploading files or entire folders. You can keep things public if you want them easily accessible, or you can password-protect them for more privacy. It preserves your folder structures perfectly, which makes sharing large sets of organized data much easier.

I think the main benefit here is ownership and branding. You own the URL, so you’re not locked into a specific platform's link format, and it just looks a lot cleaner to your clients or users. I’m really looking for some honest feedback on the workflow—is it easy to set up? Are there features like expiring links that you feel are missing?

I'll be around all day to answer any questions or hear your thoughts!
by k310 | 2026-03-07 17:46:28+00:00
Online "catalogs" are awful.

"Real" catalogs are art. "Art?" you say?

My Dad was a commercial artist. He made electrical products look as cool as book covers for pirate novels. "Real" catalogs spark the imagination. I can't say that for the lifeless still photos of online galleries all built to the same formula.

Step back and look at what much of "modern progress" looks like. Cars still don't drive themselves like the chauffeur did. I still spend lots of time loading and unloading the dishwasher (a mechanical device, not a person) and of course, scraping dried-up bits that survive the machine. And an AI that orders me clothes replaces Mommy or your butler ... I just shop at the thrift store. Mainly for the "surprise" factor.

And, I REALLY don't want the store, online or otherwise, to know too much about me, even if that means a plethora of unsuitable choices presented.

My current peeve is DuckDuckGo, which, not knowing anything about me, interprets my search terms for technical and historical information as "The most popular movie in recent times that appropriated an extremely common noun or verb" or of course, the nearest brew-pub to my geolocation.

I just plug in search terms and qualifiers (and disqualifiers) by the boatload, until the fluff lessens.

Admittedly, my favorites are catalogs from seed and plant companies, which spark dreams of a giant garden, such as my grandfather had.

So here's a proposition and a question. In the past, when jobs were incerdibly scarce, and were lost to the first wave of outsourcing (which caused a ton of xenophobia among the masses and helped elect a "very isolationist" president [0]), I wondered if FAB on a local level might give people jobs creating localized and bespoke products.

Will AI front-end bespoke FAB fabs?

[0] https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/385521-trump-we-...

> Trump: We don’t want to be the policemen of the world BY BRETT SAMUELS - 04/30/18

> “We more and more are not wanting to be the policemen of the world,” Trump said during a joint press conference with Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari.

> “We’re spending tremendous amounts of money for decades policing the world, and that shouldn’t be the priority,” he said.

> Trump ran on the promise that he would extricate the U.S. from foreign wars.
by jdelsman | 2026-03-07 17:46:39+00:00
I have about six or seven backlogs full of tech debt, bugs, and other various enhancements that every team _wants_ to do, but we either don’t have the bandwidth or know-how to do right now.

I spend a lot of time at my org doing one of the following things:

1. figuring out how to onboard engineers and bootstrap them to do their own work to draw down their backlogs

2. show the team cool ideas to spark their interest or bring them from “I’m never using this useless crap AI” to “oh, wow, I never thought of that… fires up a terminal and creates own cool thing”

3. creating a backlog of other things people want to automate but never wrote down/thought through that Claude can do in short order for immediate value
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-03-07 17:46:43+00:00
> Saying "China is >50% coal while the US is only 15%" misses half the picture, because the combined gas + coal percentage is actually almost the same,

Except that coal emits almost twice as much CO2 as natural gas per unit of heat generated, and on top of that the majority of US natural gas plants are combined cycle (which converts more of the heat into electricity), because combined cycle is easy for gaseous fuels, whereas neither China nor anyone else is doing combined cycle for coal at scale because it requires turning the solid coal into a gas first.

> the US only really gets to enjoy that cleaner gas in its energy mix because it has so much of it (while China has none).

Oil and gas are an international commodity. It's not even like anyone has a monopoly on it -- if you don't like the US, buy it from Russia. If you don't like Russia, buy it from countries in the middle east.

On top of that, it's assuming that a modern grid even needs to be 60% fossil fuels. Meanwhile several other countries are demonstrating that it isn't at all necessary.

> Blaming China for using coal instead of gas just feels like blaming non-Norway countries for not using enough hydro power to me.

It's not physically possible to build large-scale hydro power in a place like Iraq or Singapore. China can't import a river from Norway. They could very easily import natural gas from any number of countries -- and many countries do.

> What makes gas power acceptable and coal not? And the obvious answer is just that fossil fuels are a really attractive as dispatchable power.

Except that isn't the real answer. The real answer is that the US has a major oil industry lobbying to sustain its existence. Which is a bad reason, but nobody has figured out a great way to overcome it yet. However, that doesn't apply when you're only first building the infrastructure in the first place, because then you don't have incumbents trying to sustain a status quo that isn't yet established -- and then why would you pick the most terrible one to entrench?
by zof3 | 2026-03-07 17:46:50+00:00
Your mental model point is very true. We all had to learn how to google at some point — explaining how to use these tools to someone outside the bubble feels like explaining how googling works to someone. Much of it is intuitive understanding from experience.

My question would be how much we think the processes will change as the models do. Much advice from two years ago is no longer relevant or realistic. Where do we think it will go next?

Does anyone have a really good way to explain to their relatives and friends how using an agent is different from simply using Google?
Just saying ‘fundamentally different’ doesn’t go very far; the best I’ve found is sitting down and giving a demonstration.

It’s also difficult to explain the enormous gap between frontier models and the free ones many people are accustomed to using. Is there a tangible comparison to a normie real-life ‘thing’ that anyone has used successfully?
by avsm | 2026-03-07 17:47:24+00:00
(coauthor of the article here)

Well, before Docker I used to work on Xen and that possible future of massive block devices assembled using Vagrant and Packer has thankfully been avoided...

One thing that's hard to capture in the article -- but that permeated the early Dockercons -- is the (positive) disruption Docker had in how IT shops were run. Before that going to production was a giant effort, and 'shipping your filesystem' quickly was such a change in jobs. We had so many people come up to us grateful that they could suddenly build services more quickly and get them into the hands of users without having to seek permission slips signed in triplicate.

We're seeing the another seismic cultural shift now with coding agents, but I think Docker had a similar impact back then, and it was a really fun community spirit. Less so today with the giant hyperscalars all dominating, sadly, but I'll keep my fond memories :-)
by evilhackerdude | 2026-03-07 17:47:28+00:00
great question. data source: https://aella.substack.com/p/my-birthday-gangbang

the diagram is calculated with d3-sankey & rendered with imgui. you can stretch that window however you want—ok, enough.

edit: the original steam-engine sankey diagram created a far stronger emotional reaction in me. the aella chart is just more modern, i guess?
by FKJ | 2026-03-07 17:47:41+00:00
Hi HN!

I built YearToBeat, a lightweight daily browser game to test chronological memory.
You watch 5 short music video clips and guess the exact release year.

I expected people to be fairly accurate, but after collecting ~18,600 data points from players, I found a bizarre statistical anomaly that completely breaks our assumptions about memory.

The Data:
People’s chronological memory of the 1980s is razor-sharp (guesses form a tight bell curve with a standard deviation of ~1.5 years). But the moment we cross into the late 90s and 2000s, our collective memory collapses.
The standard deviation doubles to 3.5+ years. I graphed the anomaly this morning, and Reddit is currently having a massive debate about why "The 2000s Blur" exists.

The Theories:
The death of the TV/Radio monoculture (Napster and the iPod destroyed our shared chronological anchors).
The "HD Plateau" (Video and audio production homogenized around 2005, removing visual cues).
We use the 80s as a rigid cultural reference point, but treat the 2000s as "just a few years ago."

The Gauntlet:
The Reddit crowd is currently getting destroyed by this temporal blindspot. I’m curious if the HN analytical brain is actually any better at pattern-matching recent history. I bet most of you will confidently nail the older tracks in today's puzzle, but miss the post-1999 tracks by at least 3 years.

Tech stack: Go backend with a "old school approach" index.html with CSS and JS.
No ads, no logins.

Would love your technical feedback on the UI, or your sociological theories on why our memory broke after the year 2000.
by kakacik | 2026-03-07 17:47:41+00:00
> the tech people who told people to do computer science in college are now seeing automation come for their jobs. And now it's somehow an emergency worth addressing.

You are in tech mostly forum, is it really that hard to grok why we discuss this more than other professions? Most folks out there are just happy with llms that they do a better search or help them do bureaucracy more efficiently and don't bother with it further.
by sqrtminusone | 2026-03-07 17:47:41+00:00
Yeah, no, getting out of the Fediverse was my best decision, or perhaps second only to getting out of Twitter.

I think the model itself of following people (instead of, e.g. following topics) is basically irredeemable, you either:

a) follow only people with whom you 100% agree, which is very dangerous;

b) follow only people who post cat pictures or anything else as unobjectionable;

c) get a lot of negative emotions from all the nonsense in the feed.

It was the latter for me, I still have nightmares from having to ban the #NixOS tag from my feed, from my entire feed approving of the murder of some random insurance CEO, from the endless "AI is scam" takes, etc., etc...

And I can't really unfollow someone who posts 75% of nonsense if they post 25% of interesting technical stuff. Because then my entire feed is gone. You can /technically/ follow topics on Mastodon, but that doesn't really work as it should.

Besides:

> So in this complete breakdown of the press came in the Fediverse. It became the only reliable source of information I had.

Like, no. Getting news from social media is a dead end, is this not obvious just from looking at people who get their news from Twitter? In the very best case one might follow reliable journalists, but then one should follow the places they work. What's more likely is that the author has found a very comfortable bubble.

I have hope that there can be some actual truth-seeking information aggregation algorithm that can finally replace the very imperfect media system, but so far it's not even close. It's very ironic that "a fascist high on ketamine" has, against all odds, managed to produce Community Notes, which is the best attempt so far, but it's like, a few orders of magnitude off being capable of replacing the so-called "legacy media".
Show HN: Excalidraw Architect MCP for AI Based IDEs
by Venky1729 | 2026-03-07 17:47:49+00:00
Hey Folks, I've been building an MCP server that generates beautiful Excalidraw architecture diagrams fully auto-laid-out, no manual positioning. It's open source, works with any AI IDE (Cursor, Windsurf, etc.).I wanted to share it early because the core layout engine is solid and already producing clean diagrams.

What Problem Am I Solving?
AI IDEs generate architecture diagrams as Mermaid or ASCII art. When they attempt Excalidraw, they hallucinate coordinates and boxes overlap, arrows cross through nodes, and you spend more time fixing the diagram than drawing it yourself. LLMs understand what a system looks like, but they have zero intuition for where things go on a 2D canvas.

How Does This MCP Solve It?
You describe the components and connections. The MCP runs a Sugiyama hierarchical layout algorithm to compute positions deterministically -- the AI never touches coordinates. It auto-styles 50+ technologies (say "Kafka" and get a stream-styled node), stretches hub nodes like API Gateways to span their services, and routes arrows around obstacles. The result is a clean .excalidraw file in seconds, with stateful editing so you can say "add a Redis cache" without starting over.

Why Not the Official excalidraw-mcp?
The official MCP gives the AI a raw canvas and lets it place elements freely -- great for general sketching, but architecture diagrams still end up with overlapping boxes. excalidraw-architect-mcp takes a structured graph as input and runs a proper layout algorithm, so every diagram is overlap-free by design. It also runs fully offline in your IDE with no API keys, outputs version-controllable .excalidraw files, and includes architecture-aware styling that the general-purpose tool doesn't have.

What's the Future?
Diagram-from-code (point at a codebase, get an architecture diagram automatically), live sync so diagrams update as code evolves, richer layouts (radial, swimlane, grid), and an expanded component library covering cloud-provider icons and CI/CD tools. The goal: architecture diagrams as a byproduct of building software, not a separate task.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-03-07 17:47:55+00:00
> Windows remains mostly fully responsive even when memory is being pushed to the limits and swapping gigabytes per second ...

The problem problem though is all the times when Windows is totally unusable even though it's doing exactly jack shit. An example would be when it's doing all its pointless updates/upgrades.

I don't know what people are smoking in this world when they somehow believe that Windows 11 is an acceptable user experience and a better OS than Linux.

Somehow though it's Linux that's powering billions if not tens of billions of devices worldwide and only about 12% of all new devices sold worldwide are running that piece of turd that Windows is.
by warty | 2026-03-07 17:48:21+00:00
There's a chance this comment is what the user would have described as an incoherent but outright attack.

The user was claiming they didn't really understand the terminology but seemed to be trying their best when asked of another user to elucidate. You led with calling them dishonest.

You then said they were functionally MAGA and brought up some presumably racist German dude that I suspect few of us know about. You then had a diatribe on some view that had never been brought up in this thread and are now somehow discussing local governmental policies and propaganda.

I have no clue what I just read or how it connects to the post they made. I've tried to read in best effort but as best I can tell you maybe responded to the wrong person.
by leonflexo | 2026-03-07 17:49:15+00:00
I wonder how much of a lost in the middle effect there is and if there could be or are tools that specifically differentiate optimizing post compaction "seeding". One problem I've run into with open spec is after a compaction, or kicking off a new session, it is easy to start out already ~50k tokens in and I assume somewhat more vulnerable to lost in the middle type effects before any actual coding may have taken place.
by majormajor | 2026-03-07 17:49:31+00:00
Sure, but what about once Photoshop was open? Aka where you spend most of your day after you start up your stuff?

Would you take the SSD and a 500Mhz processor or a 2Ghz dual-core with a 7200k or 10000k HD? "Some operations are faster" vs "every single thing is wildly faster" of the every-few-years quadrupling+ of CPU perf, memory amounts, disk space, etc.

(45sec to load Photoshop also isn't tracking with my memory, though 30s-1min boot certainly is, but I'm not invested enough to go try to dig up my G4 PowerBook and test it out... :) )
by FireBeyond | 2026-03-07 17:49:44+00:00
As someone who immigrated here, legally, from a low-risk country, I can tell you it cost the best part of $35,000 going through the process, and byzantine weirdnesses and requirements that included things like my mother-in-law signing surety on my usage of Social Security and Medicare and other financial commitments because US immigration is in some ways so broken that it cannot at all comprehend a world where the immigrant might be the breadwinner, and not the USC (I was working as an experienced senior IT person while my US partner was back in college).

Ultimately, it would have been quicker, easier, and cheaper (and in the end, just as legal as my immigration) to come here on a tourist visa or the VWP, marry her in spite of the prohibition thereon, and ask for forgiveness and apply to be able to stay anyway.

When it's those three things versus "legal immigration", and other factors, I rather empathize with many of those people.

And as for your comment, it's more and more apparent that Trump intends for ICE to be his cudgel for all manner of opposition, not just immigration issues (witness the attempts to extort Minnesota into handing over state voter rolls, "We will move ICE enforcement out of the state if you do") so no, we'd still be having it.
by dangus | 2026-03-07 17:49:57+00:00
I think a more common claim is that the current downturn is way more obviously explained by Covid-era overhiring.

Basically all the charts on that subject are incredibly eye-opening.

To me it shows that the tech industry has actually been extremely resilient. Despite clearly going on an insane hiring spree that was not justifiable in the end, there hasn’t really been the kind of collapse we should expect. Tech companies have still maintained revenues and we haven’t seen any real sign of collapse. Companies that have gone trough major layoffs generally still have more employees than they did before 2020.

What we are seeing are some tech employees who were used to nearly a decade of easy work act like spending 3-6 months looking for a job is industry apocalypse.

I think you actually need to support the idea that there isn’t a nearly endless demand for software to be written.

Software is just business logic.

What businesses don’t involve software?

What businesses are you seeing that are saying “our software is done, there are no more ways to optimize our business, and there’s no need to evolve business processes to compete, we don’t need to update it anymore!”?

I can’t think of any business vertical that isn’t expecting constant improvement with their software.
by 8organicbits | 2026-03-07 17:51:19+00:00
It can be, but you should prefer UUIDv4 if you do that. One problem is that UUIDv8 does not promise uniqueness.

> UUIDv8's uniqueness will be implementation specific and MUST NOT be assumed.

Here's a spec compliant UUIDv8 implementation I made that doesn't produce unique IDs: https://github.com/robalexdev/uuidv8-xkcd-221

So, given a spec-compliant UUIDv4 you can assume it is unique, but you'd need out-of-band information to make the same assumption about a UUIDv8.

I wrote much more in a blog post: https://alexsci.com/blog/uuid-oops/
by talkvoix | 2026-03-07 17:51:44+00:00
Great point about coding agents! Back then, Docker gave us 'it works on my machine, let's ship the machine'. Now, AI agents are giving us 'I have no idea how this works, let's ship the prompt'. The early Docker community spirit really was legendary though—before every hyperscaler wrapped it in 7 layers of proprietary managed services. Thanks for the memories and the write-up!
by Arainach | 2026-03-07 17:51:44+00:00
> what's there to win? there is nothing to win for anybody.

There are ideological battles to be fought by all sorts of parties - convincing groups to hate each other, to support or oppose the governments in power, to spread division and destroy societies.

There are trolls who consider it a battle to be won, and the more they succeed the more everyone else leaves the platform.

The party currently in control of the United States is there largely due to people who were fed divisive narratives (often in online channels) to make them hate other groups and a significant number of them consider it more important to "own the libs" and "hurt the right people" than to have the government actually improve their own circumstances. So yes, there's absolutely things to be won.
by doobeeus | 2026-03-07 17:51:58+00:00
Shuffling through my 70's here. It's still mind blowing to be able to build stuff that would take orders of magnitude more time and effort otherwise but today's AI is still an idiot savant though the ratio of savant to idiot continues to improve. Since good prompting/specing is the key to success, the most disappointing aspect of today's AI is its inability to be a better brainstorming design partner where the limitation is how utterly pedestrian the AI's contributions typically are.
by braincat31415 | 2026-03-07 17:52:15+00:00
Yeah, right.
Both involve us in wars that have nothing to do with us, both are sucking away the money that could be spent on improving things domestically instead of spending it on MIC. Both use lame excuses for justification (WMD vs "fighting for democracy".) One is about protecting private equity access to Ukrainian agriculture, the other one is about denying China access to heavy crude. Both are likely to be losers.
I am sick of both.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-03-07 17:52:31+00:00
> Assembly still runs on abstractions: You're ignoring the CPU microcode ...

Yes and no. There's no way to "get" to these. Arguably assembly is an abstraction on top of codes (hexcodes or binary if you want to see it that way), but the assembly instructions are the lowest level we get to access. For as a programmer you don't get to access the microcodes emulating an amd64 architecture and you cannot decide to use these microcodes directly.

Otherwise it's just electricity. Then it's just electrons.

So it's not false that it's all abstractions but it doesn't help much to view it that way.
by jdenning | 2026-03-07 17:53:22+00:00
For people suffering from tinnitus, here is a technique that greatly helped me:

1. Place your hands over your ears such that your fingers are on the back of your skull - thumbs should be on your neck and middle fingers at the base of your skull.

2. Tap your middle fingers on the base of your skull repeatedly for ~30 seconds

It apparently doesn’t work for everyone, and it’s not permanent, but for me it greatly reduces the “volume” or stops it entirely.

I have no idea what the explanation is, but it’s free, safe, and you can try it right now.

Hope that helps! Tinnitus sucks.