MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vkorost | 2026-03-12 14:22:26+00:00
Matrioshka brains and KGB lobsters. I read Accelerando twenty years ago and forgot about it. Then OpenClaw went viral, lobster references were everywhere, and the memory came back.
I re-read the summary and stopped. Neural interfaces. Autonomous robots. AI outpacing human cognition. Mars colonization. Post-scarcity economics. Planetary-scale computation. That's not vaguely what Musk is building. It's specifically what he's building.
Three AI research systems (Claude Deep Research, Gemini, Perplexity) independently scored twelve concept pairs across five dimensions. Average convergence: 7.2 out of 10. Then there's the divergence: Stross wrote this as a horror story, pivoted hard after 2022, and now calls the singularity framework bankrupt. Musk kept building.
A novelist who wrote what looks like a blueprint, then disowned it. An engineer constructing it brick by brick. I wanted to read that analysis. It didn't exist, so I wrote it. Claude Code did the drafting under my direction. Full transparency on that.
The repo includes the book in four formats, the raw scoring data, and an interactive visualization of all twelve concept pairs. CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0.
by jgbuddy | 2026-03-12 14:22:29+00:00
This is of course true as a blanket "gotcha" headline- although I wouldn't call a failed test the CI itself failing. A real failure would be a false positive, a pass where there wasn't coverage, or a failure when there was no breaking change. Covering all of these edge cases can become as tiresome as maintaining the application in the first place (of course this is a generalization)
by alpaca128 | 2026-03-12 14:23:09+00:00
Imho 8GB RAM for productivity can quickly be restrictive. I used an M1 with 8GB and my current Macbook is M2 with 16GB, and to me the difference feels bigger than 2x. It seems not everyone here feels that way, but I'd say there's a reason Apple bumped the base models to 16 and makes that exclusive to non-Neo models.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-03-12 14:23:29+00:00
> And I have a hard time believing people who tell me stories about low power consumption, because no one had cared about that until Apple pretended people cared about it.

That’s because battery life was pretty mediocre across the board, with Apple occasionally squeaking out a bit of an upper hand on the Air. Most laptops were in the same boat, aside from gaming and workstation laptops but battery life has never been the point of those.

That changed dramatically with the M-series Macs. People didn’t start caring because Apple did, but because it meant no longer being tethered to a wall, being able to do a lot of outings without a brick or charger cable at all, and on extended trips being able to get by with a little phone charger instead of a the usual huge ungainly brick.

One of the primary objectives of a laptop is portability, and long battery life is an objective upgrade in that category. Not everybody needs it but for those who do it’s difficult to give up once you’ve had it.

EDIT: Another advantage of that higher efficiency is that MacBooks can run at full performance without being plugged in without it obliterating battery life. x86 laptops universally throttle when untethered and while this can be disabled, they burn through their batteries much more quickly.
by ot14 | 2026-03-12 14:23:30+00:00
As RAG systems scale, the memory requirements for high-dimensional embeddings often result in a rapidly growing infrastructure bill. I recently conducted an empirical study to compare two primary paths for cost reduction: Quantization and Matryoshka Representation Learning (MRL).
The goal was to identify the "sweet spot" where we can slash the storage footprint while maintaining production-ready retrieval quality.
Key Results (384d Baseline):
* Scalar (int8): 63.7% reduction in storage footprint with 98.1% Recall@10 retention.
* MRL + Scalar: Truncating from 384d to 256d MRL with Scalar Quantization reaches ~71% savings while maintaining 95.4% Recall@10 retention.
* Binary (1-bit): 82.3% storage reduction, but hit a significant performance cliff in ranking quality compared to truncated MRL.
My conclusion was that for most RAG use cases, MRL shortening combined with Scalar Quantization is a more robust optimization path than moving to Binary Quantization.

Full Article: https://towardsdatascience.com/649627-2/
by thiago_fm | 2026-03-12 14:24:21+00:00
Same. Also became a .net developer after almost 20 years of Ruby/Rails.

Nowadays C# is anyways much more expressive than before. Meanwhile Ruby is still very slow.

Not to mention how poorly maintained are most Rails projects. People have been "vibe coding" forever.

A well-organized and maintained Rails app is great though. I'd definitely consider working with it again, but it really depends on what company it is.
by butlike | 2026-03-12 14:24:34+00:00
Do I want an iPad Air or Pro? Both seem pretty thin. Why is it called 'Air'. What am I not getting with the Air? When was the last time each product was updated, since I remember a time when different models were updated at different times (and I never updated my internal barometer if this changed)?

Further, I see older versions of the iPhone on display at the apple store. Does this mean I'm potentially browsing an older version of the iPad?

To be fair, there was some overlap in the Jobs apple store days (when the Santa Rosa processor dropped on the MBP and you didn't know if you were getting the older model unless you asked), but it was never this bad. You had the iPad, then the iPad 2. iPhone 4->4S->5. I don't know how the 'Air' slots in between the regular and the Pro, and I don't know if I'm seeing an older model on display. The whole thing is very confusing.
by mcphage | 2026-03-12 14:24:54+00:00
> Why would you ever take both boxes?

As near as I can tell, it boils down to this: no matter what the predictor has chosen, one you walk into that room, there's more money in both boxes, then there is in one box.

But it feels like half an analysis—focusing solely on what you decide, while ignoring the fact that the other side is deciding based on what you think they'll decide.

Maybe that's me being unfair, because I'm a solid one boxer.

I also disagree with the linked article—I don't think it matters at all how the predictor makes their decision, because the outcome really doesn't matter if it's 100% accurate or 99% accurate. Or even like, 80% accurate. There's no magic required for the experiment to work.
by patall | 2026-03-12 14:24:56+00:00
Would be cool if it could also de-knit to modify clothing or reuse later. I.e if there is a hole: automatically deknit, splice in a replacement and fix it. Or if your belly growth: deknit and make that section slightly wider.

And can you use finer yarn as well, like lace? The reason a sweater is knit like it is, is because of the tradeoff between knitting time and material needed. But if labor becomes free, you should be able to knit much bigger yet more delicate stuff.

Edit: ah, deknitting is called frogging
by marklar423 | 2026-03-12 14:25:06+00:00
In the discussion of the Triforce arcade compatibility, there's some discussion of "IC Card" support needing to be implemented, and doing so unlocking a lot of missing functionality.

I think this is referring to the Japanese rail payment cards? I know you can use them on things like vending machines, but from the article it seems like the Triforce cabinets let you save game progress on them too, which would be a great feature I've never seen in US arcades.
by ashleynader | 2026-03-12 14:25:19+00:00
I'm a PM at Arthur. Every release I'd spend hours combing through commit logs and PRs trying to write something coherent for our users. Repetitive, time consuming, painful.

This week, I used Claude to build my very first agent, Louisa — a single Vercel serverless function that listens for git tags, fetches commits and PRs, generates polished release notes, and publishes them straight to GitHub/GitLab Releases. Louisa also posts a summary to Slack to notify my team!

Zero npm dependencies. Works with GitHub, GitLab, or both. The whole thing is about 500 lines of code.

Happy to answer questions about building dev tools as a non-engineer.
by jmyeet | 2026-03-12 14:26:00+00:00
Isn't it a weird coincidence that soon after the US and Israel started an unprovoked and unnecessary war (that billionaires will profit handsomely from, as an aside) that we get stories like this to manufacture consent?

I belive that US tech firms have increasingly become valid military targets. There was a post about this yesterday [1]. BUT I don't think that extends to hospitals and medical supplies, regardless of who owns them or if they treat soldiers or not.

But, as best as I can tell, the company has been inconvenienced, possibly massively. Let's put this in context. The US launched a Tomahawk missile at a school and killed 160 school girls.

And I bet that if you look into pretty much any company hit by a hack, you'll find cost-cutting on IT to increase executive pay and bonuses.

Between the Iran-Iraq war, which the US was responsible for, and decades of sanctions, the US has by this point killed millions of Iranians. The real problem here is the general ignorance of the average American of America's 70+ years of war crimes against Iran [2].

I mean this as analysis, not justification. But at some point the incredulity at blowback rings hollow.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47341007

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342791
by LollipopYakuza | 2026-03-12 14:26:05+00:00
Yes, this is a very poor way of handling the issue.
It's not like those 1 year vouchers have been stollen from them, they have been handing those out like candies and now they realized it wasn't profitable, they back off without any consideration for their customers.

It's been pointed out on Reddit that this move was not even legal in most EU because they have not been able to point out which of their ToC has been infringed (their official motive for cancellation).
I am tired of companies behaving like cowboys...
by b112 | 2026-03-12 14:26:29+00:00
What a ridiculous comparison. This Iranian regime is responsible for the direct deaths of civilians, on purpose, due to both funding and direct acts of violence around the world. And yes, that includes countless children.

Not to mention its own citizens, Iranian death squads, killing of women, there is literally no comparison between the purposeful, lack of any care or concern for life exhibited by Iran, and a literal accident with a missile.

To highlight that point, the US cares enough to investigate and discover just how such an unfortunate act happened.
by hermanzegerman | 2026-03-12 14:26:34+00:00
To be honest I never had Issues with Battery Life on my ThinkPad.
I've gotten out 10-12 hours with the 96Wh Battery and never felt the need for much more.

I think most people who are so wowed by Macs bought just a garbage Windows Machine (e.g. almost everything from Asus and Acer) before and then splurged the money for a nice one, so obviously it's so much better in comparison.
by tonipotato | 2026-03-12 14:26:42+00:00
Crypto receipts for agent state is cool, especially for compliance stuff where you need to prove what an agent knew at some point. But the thing I keep running into，most agent memory is just append-only. Store everything forever. And in practice long-running agents just drown in thier own noise. The harder problem imo isn't reliable storage, it's deciding what to keep active vs what to let fade.
by SlinkyOnStairs | 2026-03-12 14:26:57+00:00
> So if these companies go under does anyone care?

This is nowhere near as bad as the 2008 crisis, no. The banks don't really use the checking/savings account money for this. If you've invested in something that either invests in Private Credit or is reliant on Private Credit, then it'll suck for you personally.

...

One teeny tiny extremely important detail: Private Credit is bankrolling the AI industry's datacenter construction. If anything happens to significantly increase interest rates, several datacenter companies and Oracle go bankrupt. The other big tech firms have taken on lots of debt as well so expect spending cuts there too, even if they survive.

The systemic risk isn't in "bankers fucked it up again", it's in the AI bubble.
by submerge | 2026-03-12 14:27:13+00:00
I bet their data is included too, for two reasons:

First, identity verification data for KYC is a little bit different from fast food or social media in that it's very difficult to live a normal life without being subject to any KYC checks. (I'm sure someone will chime in that they get paid in bitcoin and buy their groceries with cash.) If you are applying for some financial product or service that requires KYC, and they can't find any information about you, you will often either be denied that product or have to jump through a bunch of additional hoops to prove who you are. So it benefits CXOs to have their data included in these datasets, in fact if they are well paid they may well have more activity requiring KYC checks than the average person.

Second, and much more simply, one's own data often makes for a good test case since you know its accuracy.
by matheus-rr | 2026-03-12 14:27:19+00:00
The Java parallel is apt. Joda-Time dominated the ecosystem for about 8 years before JSR 310 landed in Java 8 (2014). One thing that helped there was a clear, single release target.

What I keep thinking about with Temporal is the adoption timeline question isn't really 'is it specced?' anymore, it's 'what minimum runtime version do I need?' Node.js, Deno, Bun all need to ship it stably, and then the practical floor for usage is wherever most prod environments are. The polyfill situation (@js-temporal/polyfill and others) doesn't really collapse until that happens.

So the speccing is done but I think we're still a couple of LTS cycles away from it being genuinely boring to reach for Temporal.
by UqWBcuFx6NV4r | 2026-03-12 14:27:38+00:00
I’m sick to death of this. It’s so devoid from reality in 2026 that I see it as a lowest common denominator populist political catchphrase more than any legitimate contributor to any conversation. My min spec MacBook Pro from 6 years ago doesn’t flinch at this, and it barely flinches at a whole lot more.

Can we please just move on? Maybe get your hardware checked if you’re legitimately still having these issues.
by yorwba | 2026-03-12 14:27:39+00:00
I recommend asking a friend who's a better writer and mathematician than Claude Code to help you reorganize the paper so that there are no gaps in the argumentation and incorrect statements like "For a purely causal transformer
without residuals, the gradient routed from the final token L to an earlier token j after H layers
is given by the bottom row of the exponential Cesàro Matrix M^H" are replaced with mathematically correct descriptions.

Also have them check your experiments, because the description doesn't inspire confidence your (Claude's) implementation isn't flawed in ways that invalidate your results. In particular, "our experimental code utilizes a highly efficient one-pass scalar-probe surrogate" sounds fishy.
by amonith | 2026-03-12 14:27:45+00:00
Sort of, they have no "hands", LLMs can only respond that they want to execute a tool/command. So they do that a lot to: read files, search for things, compile projects, run tests, run other arbitrary commands, fetch stuff from the internet etc.

Obviously the LLM inference is super heavy, but the actual work / task at hand is being executed on the device.
by bpmarkowitz | 2026-03-12 14:28:52+00:00
What started as a "how many tabs do you actually have open" joke and then thinking about how you'd count them turned into this tiny macOS menu bar app that simply counts your tabs for you.

Works across Safari, Chrome, and most chromium browsers.

Uses simple AppleScript to get tab counts and does not read or store any personal data, URLs, page contents, etc.

It's free! Hope you check it out.
by b112 | 2026-03-12 14:28:53+00:00
Iranian hackers have been at place for quite some time beforehand.

And it's not a war started, its a "war" responding to decades of heinous, vicious, deadly funding of terrorist organizations, and bombing of innocent civilians.

Defending Iran is akin to defending a serial murderer. Or complaining that the serial murdered got shot while resisting arrest. Ridiculous.

I sincerely hope the decent people of Iran do get rid of this ridiculous, religiously ran and controlled state.
by graemep | 2026-03-12 14:28:57+00:00
It is easy, and people tend to do what is easy. It takes more effort to minimise dependencies. Your boss or your client will not even notice.

Obviously there are some dependencies that you cannot easily avoid (like the things you mention). On the other hand there is a lot off stuff used that is not that hard to avoid - things like wrappers for REST APIs are often not really necessary.
by multidude | 2026-03-12 14:29:32+00:00
The "deny list is a fool's errand" framing is exactly right. I've been running an AI agent with broad filesystem and SSH access and the failure mode (so far) isn't the agent doing something explicitly forbidden — it's the agent doing something technically allowed but contextually wrong. git checkout on a file you meant to keep is the classic example.

The action taxonomy approach is interesting. Curious whether context policies work well in practice — what does "depends on the target" look like when the target is ambiguous? E.g. a temp file in /opt/myapp/ that happens to be load-bearing.
Show HN: Developer Experience Newsletter
by danesto | 2026-03-12 14:29:40+00:00
I just started a blog and newsletter in the developer experience niche. I plan on writing about my experience of various tools and tech I try out to help developers build faster. Also I will be documenting my whole journey about starting this newsletter there, so it might be a fun serios to follow!

https://danilostojanovic.stoicdev.tech/the-patch
by pella | 2026-03-12 14:29:42+00:00
other test:

2025-09-08 : "Big Data on the Move: DuckDB on the Framework Laptop 13"

"TL;DR: We put DuckDB through its paces on a 12-core ultrabook with 128 GB RAM, running TPC-H queries up to SF10,000."

https://duckdb.org/2025/09/08/duckdb-on-the-framework-laptop...
Ask HN: What's your experience working on software for science?
by temporalparts | 2026-03-12 14:29:49+00:00
Hi HN!

I'm giving an invited talk at APS March Meeting next week about the importance of software for progressing science. I have deep personal experiences, but I'd love to hear from this community!

Have you worked on scientific software? What was your experience? What went well? What went sideways? What advice do you have for others trying to make an impact?
by matheus-rr | 2026-03-12 14:29:51+00:00
This is the thing people who haven't run a Rails app for years don't appreciate. I went through the Next.js pages router to app router migration on a production app. That wasn't a version bump, it was a rewrite across a different mental model.

Rails upgrades are painful but the path is documented, the deprecation cycle gives you a full minor version to fix warnings before they become errors, and the team usually knows where the sharp edges are.

The Ruby version management story is actually solid too. rbenv/asdf pin files make it hard to accidentally run the wrong Ruby version, which removes a whole class of environment drift issues you don't even realize you have until you've fixed them.
by kingnothing | 2026-03-12 14:29:59+00:00
Maybe it's an excellent experience these days, but every time I've tried Linux on desktop over the past 25 years I get burned. Maybe it works for a while, then your NIC driver gets borked and you spend 2 days trying to get it working again. Or some update goes sideways and you lose the GUI, launching only into a terminal. It's always something. And laptops have even less common hardware than desktops.

On the other hand, every Mac I've used over the past 15 years has been bulletproof. It turns on, it works, it runs *nix. It's an invisible interface to getting work done.
by lokimedes | 2026-03-12 14:30:10+00:00
All I want is an API for my AI, you can ask me for my public key, if you want my human identity verified. The collateral damage of this bot hunting is the emergence of personal AIs. Do we really want that? It feels regressive.
(I see the hypocrisy here, we are fighting the scrapers that feed the LLMs that runs our personal agents)
by azath92 | 2026-03-12 14:30:19+00:00
I find the money stuff newsletter by Matt Levine (bloomberg) great for this, the link is behind a paywal, but the newsletter is free. strong rec. todays newseltter https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-03-11/pri...

From that newseltter:

> At the Financial Times, Jill Shah and Eric Platt report:

>JPMorgan Chase ... informed private credit lenders that it had marked down the value of certain loans in their portfolios, which serve as the collateral the funds use to borrow from the bank, according to people familiar with the matter. >...

>The loans that have been devalued are to software companies, which are seen as particularly vulnerable to the onset of AI. ...

From what i can tell the problem isn't that an individual who had cash to invest in a private (tech in this case) company goes down

the problem is that a company "private credit firms run retail-focused funds (“business development companies” or BDCs)" which took out a bunch of loans to invest in private tech companies is now having the underlying assets that they got those loans against (long term investments in private tech companies) valued lower.

the link im missing is what happens when people who also invested in BDCs want their money back, where their actual money is locked up in long term investments made to private tech companies, and their ability to get loans is now valued lower. I think this is called a "run" where if someone starts pulling money out, and ultimately you cant, then its a race to get your money out before others do, which applies to both the individuals and the institutional loans.

Note: my quotes are from the bloomberg newsletter i mention, which helped me, not the OP article. And i am writing as much to clarify my own thinking as from a place of understanding. I welcome clarification.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-03-12 14:30:22+00:00
Is that under Windows or Linux? It’s not awful, but depending on usage a MacBook can do 16h+ with the same size battery, especially if put into low power mode, which is substantially better.

The smaller 13” Air also gets similar numbers despite its smaller battery, which is a big deal for people who don’t want to lug around a 15/16” laptop.
by cogman10 | 2026-03-12 14:30:37+00:00
> Object references are pointers

I know this is pedantic, but they aren't. At least not in the sense of what it means for something to be a pointer.

Object references are an identifier of an object and not a memory pointer. The runtime takes those object references and converts them into actual memory addresses. It has to do that because the position of the object in memory (potentially) changes every time a GC runs.

This does present it's own problems. Different runtimes make different choices around this. Go and python do not move objects in memory. As a result, it's a lot easier for them to support interior and regular pointers being actual pointers. But that also means they are slower to allocate, free, and they have memory fragmentation issues.

I'm not sure about C# (the only other language I saw with interior pointers). I think C# semi-recently switched over to a moving collector. In which case, I'm curious to know how they solved the interior pointer problem.