MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hahn-kev | 2026-03-13 18:24:20+00:00
You could argue that we have security licenses (eg SOC 2), however I don't think it actually succeeds in making software safe. I think software is hard because unlike a bridge, which is built with limited scope and the risk is known when it's designed, software grows to become load bearing without us really realizing it. Eg CrowdStrike, I never would have assumed that an outage could affect so much of the world.
by thangalin | 2026-03-13 18:25:11+00:00
> Is this kind of facial reconstruction from a skull legit?

What did you search for when you tried to verify this yourself?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klxUyd3CgrE

Aside, a similar approach was used in a MacGyver episode nearly 40 years ago ("The Secret of Parker House"):

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0638792/mediaviewer/rm119321036...
by random3 | 2026-03-13 18:25:14+00:00
I understand your position and I think it's the norm. Yet I find it difficult to comprehend how it's not self-evidently absurd.

Do you feel like software transcends pyhsics, mathematics and logics? Because that's what the statement translates to.

The only reason it's impossible, is because nobody tries, because trying to do so would interfer with the deliverables of next sprint. The software industry has painted itself into a corner.
by MBCook | 2026-03-13 18:25:50+00:00
I’ve been hoping Apple would allow this for years, although it doesn’t seem like something they would do.

The fact that iPadOS now has windowing seems like it would only make it work better. iPads can already do everything necessary, so why not the iPhone?

Unfortunately I suspect that if this was ever going to happen, which I would’ve bet against, it’s now let’s likely. I suspect current Apple would rather sell me a Neo then let me use my phone. In other words I think the existence of the product might rule it out under current leadership.

Who knows. I could be wrong. Only time will tell.
by simulator5g | 2026-03-13 18:26:11+00:00
No this is not just an enterprise issue. I waited 10 seconds (I counted.) for a Windows Explorer context menu to open the other day. This is on a fully decked out system with an Ultra 9 cpu and a 4090 and 32gb of memory, and basically no apps running. I think I had 2 tabs in Edge? Windows is a shitshow these days.
by zitterbewegung | 2026-03-13 18:26:16+00:00
To be future proof for more administrations you don't want a monopoly at any step. you really want at least three competitors at minimum. Large companies in tech have realized this by now since the 90s. Recently TeraWave was launched by SpaceX due to the inherent risk (and this is a direct competitor to SpaceX. See
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/21/bezos-blue-origin-satellite-...
by puppycodes | 2026-03-13 18:26:24+00:00
None of it is enforcable, its basically meaningless.

Great job politics!

Like lots of laws that are being written nowadays by octogenarians, aimed at strong arming bigger tech companies into designing things differently at the expense of everyone smaller which ironically ends up curtailing our basic freedoms, privacy, etc... even when the intent was otherwise.

Then again I have yet to meet a politician that actually cares as long as: "this looks good for my campaign".

Regulating big platforms that affect billions of people is one thing but I really wish they would write laws actually discriminating between those platforms and everyone else.
by alephnerd | 2026-03-13 18:26:44+00:00
The form factor is a major difference.

HNers are significantly more technical than the median consumer and are used to text and keyboard interfaces - a large portion of humanity isn't. You see this with Foundation Models as well - most have started to shift away from only concentrating on text to TTS and STT usecases.

Also, DeX style monitor screen share with a Bluetooth keyboard has been supported since iOS 15.

Additionally, a major portion of Apple's desktop revenue is coming from poweruser and specialist demand - IT departments bulk purchasing developer laptops, designers having their entire design workflow within the MacOS environment, and video editors heavily dependent on MacOS.

Furthermore, arguments about how Apple has an incentive not to cannibalize revenue are dumb, given how open Apple is to cannibalizing revenue where PMF exists (eg. the iPad Pro versus lower tier MacBooks or the MacBook Neo versus lower tier iPads).
by Analemma_ | 2026-03-13 18:27:08+00:00
This is why I'm never giving a penny to OpenAI again, now matter how much damage control Altman tries to do with "look, we reworded the contract to have redlines too!". Yeah, legal redlines that the administration can bypass with their secret memos and secret rubberstamp courts. This isn't even a Trump thing: the Bush DOJ wrote secret memos making torture legal, the Obama DOJ wrote secret memos making it legal to assassinate American citizens. Non-technical redlines which aren't under the vendor's control aren't worth a piss squirt.
by jerf | 2026-03-13 18:27:14+00:00
Money.

The general public thinks phones and computers are fundamentally different. Heck, I remember arguing this point even on HN back when smart phones were first coming out and being generally on the losing side as people got very excited about "app stores" and such. I see no practical path to getting to the point that enough of us realize that there is simply no reason for our phones to be locked down the way they are that the companies are forced to undo it, especially with our elites pushing with all they are worth to lock things down harder.

The companies take that confusion to the bank.

There have been numerous attempts at making phone/laptop crossovers, where you can plug your phone into a dock and get a computer, or slide your phone into a laptop case, etc. Some of them are even still around, but they're all definitely second-class citizens. There's a variety of problems that I think they've had in the market, not least of which is the fact that the average person still sees "phones" and "computers" as fundamentally different so the product makes no sense to them, but another issue that I think has held them back is that the product inevitably work by porting the limitations of the phone into the computer, rather than porting the freedom of the computer into the phone.

In the USB-C era, there is no excuse for every phone not having a mode where you can plug it into any ol' USB-C hub/dock and be able to get a desktop environment, even down to the "middle-of-the-line" phones. It would require in most cases no extra hardware. They just don't.
by withinboredom | 2026-03-13 18:27:38+00:00
Heh. I've had my fair share of mailing list drama. This is political AND technical. Someone saying "let’s cut throughput" is going to get shot down fast, no matter the technical merit. If someone with the political clout were to be willing to champion the work and guide the discussion appropriately while someone like me does the work, that's different. That's at least how things like this are done in other communities, unless go is different.
by seanhunter | 2026-03-13 18:27:39+00:00
Yes. It’s not legal to coach a witness in that way and in particular in real time. Apparently the dude was Lithuanian but was bringing an action in the UK. This is relevant because he had a Lithuanian lawyer attending via video link who claimed not to be acting for him. The judge thought that was fishy and terminated the video link. The guy started playing for time instead of answering questions and they noticed the smart glasses. When they removed his glasses his mobile phone in his pocket came on speakerphone with the voice of someone reading out the answers he should give.

Bottom line: all his evidence was deemed untrustworthy and thrown out and the judge found for the defendant in the entirety.
by ericwebb | 2026-03-13 18:27:53+00:00
Nice. I've been thinking about something tangential: using the same hook mechanism to guide the agent toward better tools, not just block bad ones.

Claude Code sometimes issues Bash commands for things it could easily do with builtin tools (e.g., shelling out to grep when it has a dedicated Grep tool). A hook that catches those and nudges the agent back — "you already have a tool for this" — could improve session quality without blocking anything.

I suspect there's a lot of overlap with what you've built: parse the command into tokens, run it against rules, decide. The difference is the output is "redirect" instead of "deny." Have you thought about non-blocking rules that warn or suggest rather than reject?
by MBCook | 2026-03-13 18:28:05+00:00
There are other reasons.

A big factor in the success of the iPad and maybe just some degree the iPhone, but especially the iPad, is that it’s “unbreakable”. All out restrictions mean it’s computer people don’t worry will suddenly stop working because they clicked to the wrong link. It won’t get a weird virus from their email.

That is a serious upside for a lot of consumers.
by hrmtst93837 | 2026-03-13 18:28:11+00:00
Helium for party balloons is low grade and not pure enough for chip fab use, so stacking up birthday tanks won't keep TSMC running. Industrial grade helium has a restricted and oddly international supply chain thanks to regulation and a few weirdly-placed depots. The US 'helium stockpile' isn't really a menu you can just order from when a factory across the planet runs dry, especially if offtakes and logistics are tied up by decade-old government contracts. If you want to see supply chain fragility, try pricing MRI-grade helium after a shutdown and watch everyone in medical procurement panic quitely.
by ifh-hn | 2026-03-13 18:28:31+00:00
Oh dear, no need for a hissy fit. My initial comment stands. I've tried to be reasonable but since you insist, let's see... School shootings are a regular pretty much unique American phenomenon, what else oh yeah the 2008 banking crisis, there's also the unique way American healthcare works. Together all of those far outweighs the post office scandal in terms of lives lost and scale. So yeah, only in America.

Now to you nonsense that I somehow downplayed the post office scandal by pointing out your attempt to compare apples to oranges (aka false equivalence, as in youre engaging in a logical fallacy); utter ridiculous nonsense, not even a good attempt at straw man.

Either way you're no worth engaging with further. You've nothing to add, and engaging further would risk breaking the rules of this site...
by krab | 2026-03-13 18:28:33+00:00
Why would it decimate the Windows market? From my experience, there's a strong correlation between iPhone and Mac usage.

Looking at the stats, the Win:Mac ratio is 4:1 but Android:iPhone only 2:1 so it might hurt Windows. But if iPhone users are more likely to use Mac or don't use computers much already, then expanding iPhone capabilities would cannibalize Apple business.
by contextfree | 2026-03-13 18:28:46+00:00
Reading discussions online and comparing them to my own experience makes me feel crazy, because I've found today's LLMs and agents to be seemingly good at everything except writing code. Including everything else in software engineering around code (debugging, reviewing, reading code, brainstorming architecture, etc.) as well as discussing various questions in the humanities and sciences where I'm a dilettante. But whenever I've asked them to generate any substantial amount of code, beyond a few lines to demonstrate usage of some API I'm unfamiliar with, the results have always been terrible and I end up either throwing it out or rewriting almost all of it myself and spending more time than if I'd just written it myself from the start.

It's occurred to me that maybe this just shows that I'm better at writing code and/or worse at everything else than I'd realized.
by miyoji | 2026-03-13 18:28:52+00:00
> Is "let's abolish phone numbers and addresses on government forms" a good issue to run on? No.

Good thing I'm not running for office, and instead am merely having a conversation on the internet. I would vote for someone running on that issue, though!

> But if you're undocumented, it's already a massive pain to participate in society.

So I should be fine with any changes that embiggens that pain? I am not.
by herf | 2026-03-13 18:28:55+00:00
It's easy to lie to an OS about your age because it's a single-user experience, and if your parents allow you to lie (or don't know), that's all it takes. Social networks are so much better equipped to estimate age because they have a simple double-check, which is that most kids follow other kids in their grade level.

The patches on top of this are really bad. For instance, we are seeing "AI" biometric video detectors with a margin-of-error of 5-7 years (meaning the validation studies say when the AI says you're 23-25 you can be considered 18+), totally inadequate to do the job this new legislation demands.
by nirava | 2026-03-13 18:29:10+00:00
Outside corporate setting, it is also the fact that most windows systems you encounter are installed on cheap machines by people who just care that their word processor works a few times a month. And you were probably forced to fix it.

At the same time, as someone with a well maintained Windows gaming rig, I don't like spending time in the OS these days. Something about transparently doing stuff that puts money in their pocket while inconveniencing me gives me the ick.
by bitwize | 2026-03-13 18:29:21+00:00
It's also because U.S. carriers don't like people hooking up arbitrary devices that can run arbitrary software to their network. In the civilized world, you have a device that talks GSM/LTE, you're golden as long as you don't violate any transmission laws. But in the USA carriers are still doing device allowlisting because I guess they want to bin QoS and don't want pro-grade traffic going over consumer accounts, nor the added expense of support for consumer accounts with exotic hardware that "might" break the network.
by spwa4 | 2026-03-13 18:29:44+00:00
They have suddenly discovered what engineers have been telling them for about 80 years, and theoreticians have known for 100+ years is actually true: directional beams that cannot realistically be distrupted + satellites out of reach + even if you can you can only take ALL satellites out of orbit (ie. including your own, not just the enemy's). So on future battlefields, everyone will have livestreaming.

Do governments and militaries even believe in the laws of physics? I mean that exactly this was going to happen (undisruptable radio comms + robots, on the battlefield) was perfectly predictable near ~about 1960, and it's an absolute miracle that it took so long to come to pass.

And even that is assuming you're only willing to believe in demonstrations. For physicists it must have been a theoretical certainty that this was coming before WW1 was done.
Show HN: Disposable inbox API with OTP extraction and WebSocket push
by dishantsinghdev | 2026-03-13 18:29:48+00:00
I built a REST + WebSocket API for programmatic disposable email inboxes.

The main use case I kept running into while building: automated testing of
sign-up/verification flows. You need a real inbox, a real OTP, and you need
it fast. Existing options were either not API-first, had terrible docs, or
charged $50/mo before you could even try them.

What it does:
- POST /v1/inboxes to register an inbox
- GET /v1/inboxes/:inbox/otp to pull the latest OTP (parsed automatically)
- WebSocket connection for real-time push instead of polling
- Attachments, custom domains on higher tiers

Auth is SHA-256 hashed API keys, usage tracked per-user (not per-key, so
rotating keys doesn't reset your quota). Rate limit headers on every response.

Free tier: 5k req/mo, no credit card.

Interactive playground: https://www.freecustom.email/api/playground
Docs: https://freecustom.email/api/docs

Happy to answer questions about the architecture — running on Node/Express,
Redis for rate limiting and pub/sub, MongoDB for storage.
by wds | 2026-03-13 18:30:08+00:00
A few days ago I cracked the edge of my smartphone's screen at just the right spot to shut its display off entirely, though it still works. Using the USB-C dongle meant for my laptop, the phone pops into a desktop view which basically is the same experience as a Chromebook (for better or worse).

In the meantime before its repair, I shoved my SIM card into an old flipphone I had in the tech graveyard drawer. I've actually really liked the limited flipphone experience. It's a mental breath of fresh air to not have a time/focus black hole in my pocket at all times. It made me realize that I've had a pretty bad relationship with my smartphone in terms of how much time I wasted on it. I'm considering keeping the flipphone as my primary phone. Maybe smartphones do too much.
by gerjomarty | 2026-03-13 18:30:35+00:00
This reminded me of Ersatz TV [1], which on checking appears to have gone into maintenance mode a few weeks ago.

I had wanted to use something that lets me set up an EPG with all of the YouTube channels I watch, to see their live streams in a TV guide and see their upcoming streams in a nice grid format. It's probably harder to do this with live stuff than it is to have a set of videos like this site uses.

[1]: https://github.com/ErsatzTV/ErsatzTV
Wan 2.7 planned for March release with big upgrades
by Alisaqqt | 2026-03-13 18:30:41+00:00
Wan 2.7 is planned for release in March and appears to be a broad upgrade over Wan 2.6.

According to the current roadmap, improvements are expected in:

visual quality
audio
motion dynamics
stylization
consistency
Planned new capabilities include:

first-frame / last-frame guided video generation
9-grid image-to-video
subject and voice reference
instruction-based video editing
video recreation / replication
The overall direction seems to be a more complete video generation and editing workflow rather than a single-feature update.

Atlascloud.ai has been in contact with the Wan team and plans to support Wan 2.7 on launch day.

Would be interesting to see benchmark examples and workflow demos once it ships.
by crooked-v | 2026-03-13 18:30:47+00:00
Just wanting to be a gatekeeper doesn't cover measures like SIP that don't make them anything and presumably took immense man-hours to implement.

I think the more accurate view would be an intersection of some of the company wanting to make money off gatekeeping and some of the company wanting to make quality devices that stay functional and malware-free even after you give to a deeply gullible grandparent for a while, and the former using the latter as a transparent excuse much of the time.
by GeekyBear | 2026-03-13 18:31:39+00:00
> Is it correct that there's zero improvement in performance between M4 (+Pro/Max) and M5 (+Pro/Max)

Preliminary testing did not come to that conclusion.

> Apple’s New M5 Max Changes the Local AI Story

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGe7ldwFLSE
by roughly | 2026-03-13 18:32:32+00:00
EU had a reliable military and technological partner in the US until circa 2016, and maintaining that belief became untenable in 2024. The reason EU countries are all of the sudden investing in onshoring critical military capabilities is that until Trump it’s been the policy position of the US to prevent them from doing so by doing it for them, a policy we inaugurated after WW2 and expanded during the Cold War for various reasons that we seem very sure don’t apply anymore.
by api | 2026-03-13 18:33:07+00:00
Other than UI and other surface differences, the fundamental distinction between a Mac and an iDevice is... what it is.

A Mac is a real computer. I can run any code I want on it. I have root.

An iDevice is like a game console. I can only run App Store apps (without jumping through a lot of hoops). I do not have root (without again jumping through many hoops or ugly hacks).

If Apple wanted to unify the platform they have two choices. The first is to abandon the "real computer" market entirely. The second is to make iDevices real computers by unlocking them.

I suspect they'd rather keep two platforms.

Under the hood they both share a lot of code, so it's not two totally distinct platforms. It's more like two sets of defaults and two "skins."
by zitterbewegung | 2026-03-13 18:33:14+00:00
This isn't a novelty it will crush the low end of the PC market. No one cares if the next iteration will be better with 12GB of ram. The workloads that people say that 8GB can't handle will be ones that the actual users will either wait or tolerate. I've been noticing that people who review the Macbook Neo basically don't get the point [1] and just the headline of this article matters that VMs work and thats a big win. The most ridicuous thing about the laptop is that it appears to be reparable which sort of tells me this is a template similar to the M1 Air of the future laptop designs that Apple will come out with. [2]

[1] https://samhenri.gold/blog/20260312-this-is-not-the-computer...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbPCGqoBB4Y
by jameschaearley | 2026-03-13 18:33:19+00:00
The intent-conditioned compression is the interesting part here. Most context management I've seen is either naive truncation or generic summarization that doesn't account for why the tool was called. Training classifiers on model internals to
figure out which tokens carry signal for a given task -- that's doing something different from what frameworks offer out of the box.

I poked around the repo and didn't see any evals measuring compression quality. You cite the GPT-5.4 long-context accuracy drop as motivation, which makes sense -- but the natural follow-up is: does your compression actually recover that accuracy?
Something like SWE-bench pass rates with and without the gateway at various context lengths would go a long way. Without that, it's hard to tell if the SLM is making good decisions or just making the context shorter.

A few other things I'm curious about:

• How does the SLM handle ambiguous tool calls? E.g., a broad grep where the agent isn't sure what it's looking for yet -- does the compressor tend to be too aggressive in those cases?
• What's the latency overhead per tool call? If the SLM inference adds even 200-300ms per compression step, that compounds fast in agentic loops with dozens of tool calls.
• How often does expand() get triggered in practice? If the agent frequently needs to recover stripped content, that's a signal the compression is too lossy.
by xxwink | 2026-03-13 18:33:29+00:00
Your aerospace analogy is fair, and I'd push back on one thing: the problem isn't that developers don't plan — it's that most planning tools for software are too lightweight to actually constrain AI output. "Plan mode" is indeed vibe-coding with extra steps if your plan is a bullet list.
I've been building a Go web framework using AI as the primary code writer. What made it work wasn't a task list — it was locking architectural decisions upfront in a document the AI reads before touching any file. Not guidelines. Decisions. Closed. With rationale, rejected alternatives, and consequences documented.
Any change that crosses a decision boundary gets stopped. Any change touching more than one file requires an explicit Amendment — numbered, approved, then implemented. If you've worked with formal change control in project management, it's exactly that mental model applied to AI-assisted development.
The AI writes code. It does not decide what gets built or how the pieces fit together.
That's closer to your requirements derivation + down-select model than to anything most software teams do. The difference is the tooling forces it — the AI won't proceed without the context, and the context is the spec.