MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jeroenhd | 2026-03-04 14:28:14+00:00
> Pretty sure modern web apps can do all of those

If you're on Chrome and give them permission, or stuff them into Electron and friends, they can. The workflow isn't as smooth as with native applications, though.

On the other hand, the web browser does protect you from some of the risks this essentially "trust me bro" curl2bash-as-a-service product inherently comes with.
by kurthr | 2026-03-04 14:28:28+00:00
Sometimes, as in the bilsbi's top level comment, the solution is to use a free tool/library/product that already exists. The solution is not always to write new code, but the agent will happily do it.

Maybe that's "the manager's job", but that's just passing the buck and getting a worse solution. Every level of management should be looking for the best solution.
by mantas | 2026-03-04 14:28:31+00:00
A used one probably has not-so-healthy battery and a bit worn keyboard. Maybe some scratches on the screen as well.

At this price, a new device seems very tempting over dealing with a used hardware which is always a bit of a lottery.

Performance-wise A18 would be plenty for casual stuff. IIRC it's faster than M1.
Show HN: Zsh plugin to switch macOS Terminal.app profiles
by sfcodes | 2026-03-04 14:29:46+00:00
I wrote a small Zsh plugin that lets you switch macOS Terminal.app profiles directly from the command line.

It's useful if you color-code environments (prod, staging, dev) or when you have a lot of terminals open of the same thing — multiple Claude or Codex sessions, SSH connections, or different projects — and want a quick visual way to tell them apart.

Type `profile` and press Tab to see and autocomplete all available Terminal.app profiles.
Gaia – open-source assistant that does for actions what ChatGPT did for answers
by DhruvMaradiya | 2026-03-04 14:30:21+00:00
Three years ago, finding information meant opening Google, clicking 4 links, reading, and piecing together an answer yourself. ChatGPT collapsed that into one step.

We haven't had that moment for taking action yet.
To set a recurring water reminder today, you still open your todo app, hit New Task, type it out, set a recurrence, and save. To block focus time, you open Calendar, find a slot, create an event, then update your Slack status separately. Every small action is a small tax. They add up to hours of invisible overhead every week.

GAIA is our attempt at that shift. You tell it what you want done — or it acts before you have to ask.

Gmail & Calendar
"Summarise my unread emails and flag anything needing a reply" — runs every morning automatically.
"Block 2 hours Thursday for deep work" → calendar event created, Slack status updated.
"Draft a follow-up to anyone I haven't heard back from in 5 days" → drafted, waiting for your review.

Slack & Notion
"Turn the action items from today's standup into Notion tasks with owners and deadlines".
"Remind the team on Slack every Friday at 4pm to update their Linear tickets".

GitHub
"Every time a PR is opened, post a summary to the #engineering Slack channel".
"Assign new issues labelled bug to me automatically".

Add your own integrations via MCP
GAIA has 20+ integrations out of the box. If yours isn't there, you can build your own using MCP, and publish it to the marketplace for others to use. Any existing MCP server works with GAIA out of the box.

The honest version: it works well for workflows you define explicitly, and it's getting better at the ones you don't.

We're a small student team. We've been using GAIA ourselves for quite some time — it genuinely changed how we work, which is why we're releasing it now instead of waiting for perfect.

The design question we keep coming back to: at what point does an assistant acting autonomously feel like it's no longer under your control? We've defaulted to "always reviewable before it sends" — curious how this community thinks about that line.

heygaia.io (no setup)
Self-host: docs.heygaia.io/self-hosting
GitHub: github.com/theexperiencecompany/gaia
by chrismatic | 2026-03-04 14:30:26+00:00
He makes quite a few quite controversial assertions without evidence or even bothering to explain them. At the top of my head and paraphrasing:

- "The conflict is a game of chicken." Only in the vaguest sense in which any war or confrontation could be called that.

- "The USA is not equipped to handle a war against drones and fanatics". Idk they seem more capable than any other nation save Ukraine given that those two things have been a major feature of their recent wars.

- "Countries that are poor have more energy and are more cohesive". This is just demonstrably false, but he does not bother to explain why he thinks this.

- "The US wants to break Iran into ethno-states that compete for water until they are all dead." He even admits that this is pure conjecture and hand-waves this as the game-theoretic "optimal" strategy which is completely bonkers.

I do share his negative sentiment and outlook about the war, but there are way better critics that don't resort to this type of intellectual laziness.
by arowthway | 2026-03-04 14:30:29+00:00
The server can also advertise a public name that doesn't match any domain it has a TLS certificate for, like example.com or nsa.gov.

I'm not 100% sure it's allowed in the specs, but it works in Chrome.

As I understand it, without this feature it would be pretty useless for small website owners, since they would need to register a separate domain for their ECH public name, which censors could just block.
by dTal | 2026-03-04 14:30:32+00:00
This shouldn't be surprising. They are ultimately trained on human generated text! Or on text that was generated by something trained on human-generated text, or some even deeper recursion. In the end, all "intelligence" is an emergent consequence of emulating humans. The less human-like you make them, the further they get from the "source" of their intelligence. It wouldn't be problem if we knew how to teach programs "how to think" - but we don't!! That is why, in 2026, we train language transformers on huge corpuses instead of symbolically programming expert systems in Lisp.

Something I'm kind of surprised by is the lack of interest in bootstrapping language models into something like a "person". Not a butler, assistant, programming tool, doctor, therapist, sycophant, whatever - a convincingly independent person with thoughts and feelings, moods, flaws and all. Maybe there isn't economic demand for it.
by literoldolphin | 2026-03-04 14:30:35+00:00
Wait did I read that correctly? There's no backlit keyboard? I don't recall any Mac laptop not having a backlight keyboard since the 2011. And they're marketing it to students -- they are always going to be working in the dark on their beds during the exams...

Forget memory - this is like the more major loss in terms feature set.
by vessenes | 2026-03-04 14:30:49+00:00
I thought I wanted this. And in fact, I turned on the 'window' option for my iPad Pro when it came out. I did not, in fact, want this. The iPad just has totally different ergonomics, even with keyboard / trackpad / etc. Anyway, for years I've been convinced that would be the perfect combo - but in my own tests, - meh - At the very least, new hardware needs to be built that gives laptop-grade typing and trackpad. With that, then it would be upside - but I'm not sure that it would be that much cheaper than just having two devices.
Show HN: Open-sourced a web client that lets any device use Apple's on-device AI
by tayarndt | 2026-03-04 14:31:04+00:00
I use Claude every day but there are things I will not type into a cloud service. I have a Mac with Apple Silicon running Apple Foundation Models locally and privately. But I was not always at my Mac.
So we built Perspective Intelligence Web. One Mac runs Perspective Server. Any device on your network opens a browser and chats with Apple Intelligence through it. Phone, Windows laptop, Chromebook, Linux machine. Streaming responses, token by token. Nothing leaves your network.
MIT License. Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind. Full writeup: https://taylorarndt.substack.com/p/i-opened-claude-and-then-...
by sidk24 | 2026-03-04 14:31:07+00:00
I spent the last few months writing about the layer underneath individual agent usage: what happens when you go from one developer using a coding agent to a team shipping agents in production. Authorization, context engineering, cost control, observability, incident response, adoption.

The result is a 33-chapter guide, free to read online: https://agents.siddhantkhare.com

Early version — open source, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

There are rough edges and likely mistakes.
Corrections welcome: https://github.com/Siddhant-K-code/agentic-engineering-guide

Individual patterns for using agents well are one piece. The infrastructure, security, and team practices for running them safely at scale are another. This covers the second part.
by zitterbewegung | 2026-03-04 14:31:29+00:00
It's interesting that to get to the price point of $499 (edu) or $599 that what Apple did was

- No touchID on the base model

- 8GB of RAM

- USB 3 and the second port is USB 2

- No MagSafe.

But, you can still get a 512 gb of SSD and it adds the TouchID sensor back. For education the upgrade may actually make sense.
by drob518 | 2026-03-04 14:31:32+00:00
Thanks for the info.

I’d like to do agentic coding first, but then chatbot and classification as lower priorities. I don’t really care about image gen.

Also, if you’re only able to run 35B models in 32GB, seems like I’d definitely want at least 64GB for the newer, larger models (qwen has a 122B model, right). My theory there is that models are only getting larger, though perhaps also more efficient.
Ask HN: Why has ChatGPT disabled links to websites?
by krschacht | 2026-03-04 14:31:33+00:00
I was just using ChatGPT to help me pick an SDK library. It mentions a few options by name (e.g. Baileys, whatsapp-web.js), but when I click those names rather than opening a browser with the source page like it used to, it now opens a modal and uses ChatGPT to basically generate a fake homepage for this tool.

From what I can tell, there is no longer any way to easily get to the underlying web page that was referenced in generating its answer to my question.

This feels like a pretty meaningful step backwards. Am I missing something?
by skyberrys | 2026-03-04 14:31:49+00:00
I found my research field in undergrad ( that lead to grad research ) from going to university talks. To apply it to this situation, once you are in an EE program get the events list for multiple departments and try going to every talk scheduled. Talk to your teaching assistants ask them what they are doing and to tell you about events.

I did wander somewhat but every major to topic I started on I finished. I see another comment recommending a physics program and that is true. I did my undergrad in this, went to talks for physics, CE, CS and EE. The topic I choose was the one I found myself staying up to 3am for just one more experiment run. Once that kept happening it's a good signal you can keep after something and contribute to advancing research.
by spockz | 2026-03-04 14:31:56+00:00
So the biggest difference I see with the new Air is that you get sRGB only in the display, with less brightness. Also it is has 8GiB of RAM, which shouldn’t be an issue for the intended use.

Same weight. You lose a bit on the speakers, microphone, and webcam. Not sure how noticeable this will be.
by vrosas | 2026-03-04 14:32:05+00:00
I agree with you that Afghanistan is a much different country. My fear is that once the entire centralized theocracy is bombed out of existence it will open the door for localize warlords to begin carving up territory. The alternative is a Khamenei 2.0 character stepping in. But then the question is, will Israel/the US not just assassinate them too? I don't know but there's no way this ends well.
by mikkupikku | 2026-03-04 14:32:06+00:00
I disagree with you, deal with it. Specifying a junior developer to make the point of blaming systems instead of individuals, to absolve a journalist of individual blame for fabricating quotes, is flat out bullshit and you're wrong to try weaselling it.

Inb4 Omg I still can't believe you're disagreeing with me, like yikes dude go outside.

Auroiris is right, it's a Motte and Bailey routine. And it's insulting that you're pretending otherwise.
by bagacrap | 2026-03-04 14:32:40+00:00
I am the type of engineer who prefers simplicity and I have not found a way to make AI increase the simplicity of code I'm working on. If left to its own devices, Claude absolutely loves adding more member variables, wrapper functions, type conversions, rather than, say, analyzing and eliminating redundancies. So my experience is that AI is more closely aligned with the engineer type for whom the solution is always "add more code", rather than whatever its human manager would do.
by sidk24 | 2026-03-04 14:33:05+00:00
Spent the last few months writing about the layer underneath individual agent usage: what happens when you go from one developer using a coding agent to a team shipping agents in production.
Authorization, context engineering, cost control, observability, incident response, adoption.

The result is a 33-chapter guide, free to read online: https://agents.siddhantkhare.com

Individual patterns for using agents well are one piece. The infrastructure, security, and team practices for running them safely at scale are another. This covers the second part.
by avarun | 2026-03-04 14:33:11+00:00
No idea why anybody still thinks of this company as making premium devices or catering to the premium market. Tim Cook's Apple makes cheap shit for the mass market, and has for years. It's not surprising when something like this comes out for cheap, because in general Apple has been price competitive for the past decade.

And in that vein of making cheap shit for the mass market, their software quality has suffered incredibly. They no longer serve the consumer tier they used to, but their branding halo from those days is so effective that it helps them sell to this new, lower tier consumer.
by epolanski | 2026-03-04 14:33:12+00:00
> Noone is going to develop on this after all.

Because it doesn't have twice the ram. Otherwise it was a no brainer complementary machine, especially for users like me that work primarily on desktop and don't want to bring the much heavier macbook pro around. I've got both the m1 max and m3 max (16") and I absolutely hate carrying them around yet I have to, because even on vacations I may have to log and fix a bug in prod blocking the company so to me, weight is absolutely a primary factor for a notebook, and this would've been perfect at just twice the ram.
by ventoux-ai | 2026-03-04 14:34:21+00:00
Ventoux AI (YC-style early stage) | Senior Full-Stack Engineer | Remote (LATAM / Eastern Europe preferred) | Contract (6 months) | $5k–$8k/mo | Starts July 2026

Ventoux AI builds AI-powered decision intelligence for healthcare supply chains. We turn fragmented procurement + demand signals + supplier performance into actionable insight to help teams prevent stockouts across Sub-Saharan Africa.

We’re a small, technical team. The product is working today. This role is to harden and extend it for a major UN agency + foundation-backed engagement across 100+ countries.

What you’ll do
• Production-hardening for client deployment: reliability, performance, security, error handling
• Build/adapt integrations + MCP tools for procurement/supplier/demand workflows
• Extend DuckDB analytics pipeline for multi-country ingestion + harmonization
• Ship UX in React/Tauri that makes complex analytics usable for non-technical procurement staff
• Join sprint demos + user feedback sessions; write maintainable handoff-quality code

Stack

Python, FastAPI, DuckDB; React, TypeScript, Tauri, Tailwind; SQLAlchemy/Alembic/Pydantic; pytest (680+ tests). LLM orchestration across Claude/OpenAI/Gemini via Model Context Protocol (MCP).

What we’re looking for
• 5+ years production software (Python + web frameworks)
• 3+ years React + TypeScript (own features end-to-end)
• Strong SQL/data instincts (analytical DBs, pipelines)
• Comfortable with ambiguity + ownership; async communication; professional English

Nice to have: LLM/agent tooling, DuckDB/Tauri/MCP familiarity, global health/supply chain exposure.

Details
• Contract: July–Dec 2026 (6 months)
• Remote; LATAM/Eastern Europe preferred for timezone overlap
• Comp: $5,000–$8,000/month depending on experience/location
• Team: founder + you + data engineer + PM

If you want work where “production” means procurement officers making better decisions about essential medicines for millions of people, we’d love to talk.

Apply: https://www.ventoux.ai
(Include GitHub/portfolio + 2–3 examples of production systems you shipped.)
by mschuster91 | 2026-03-04 14:34:28+00:00
> 8GB is STILL perfectly fine for a starter notebook, casual browsing and light work. Noone is going to develop on this after all.

Given the ridiculous speed of Apple's almost-on-the-SoC flash storage, 8GB is fine for basic development workloads.

That's the tradeoff you get with soldered RAM and storage... you can't expand it, but the lack of sockets and shorter PCB trace paths gives a lot of headroom on what is essentially high-frequency analog signalling. The longer the traces the more latency, and the more sockets and vias, the more potential for interference.
by digikazi | 2026-03-04 14:35:09+00:00
I wonder if Apple is positioning these to counter Google's Chromebooks? The pricing makes sense, especially as lately I've seen some pretty expensive Chrome devices: £500 - £700... which is not that far off from base Macbook Air, but without the quirky limitations.

As an aside, I have been a firm ChromeOS user since 2013; since my computing life at work is pretty complicated, so I wanted to keep it really simple at home. For the most part, this setup worked just fine.

However, lately... I've found the Pixel line to be very underwhelming and expensive - add to that the ever increasing cost of Chromebooks... What can I say? Moving over to the Great Walled Garden of Apple makes sense. I'll probably buy one of these.
by bagacrap | 2026-03-04 14:35:13+00:00
I think this is often true and it's the limiting factor that prevents complexity from spiraling out of control. But there's also a certain type of engineer who generates Rube Goldberg code that actually works, not robustly, but well enough. A mad genius high on intelligence and low on wisdom, let's say. This is who can spin complexity into self reward.
by Tadpole9181 | 2026-03-04 14:35:24+00:00
And fix: a functioning government would make a law that outlaws such flagrant abuse of a media company.

What, if making murder illegal was hard would you just throw your hands and give up and make murder legal? Why is it that suddenly, when it's about corporations to do whatever they want - including destroy democracy itself - we're little babies who can't possibly lift a single finger to stop it?

But that guy who sold an eighth? Implement the full extent of mass surveillance and send a tactical SWAT team to the wrong house to arrest him for 40 years!
by sigwinch | 2026-03-04 14:35:26+00:00
Really sounds like Article 4 instead. If the characteristics last September didn’t reach Article 5 then this would need a different formula…

Back in September, the incursion was a Russian probe for an attack in Eastern Europe. It was to Trump’s advantage to downplay it. But this missile is a pretext for responding to Iranian aggression. He’s thirsty for some useful pretext right now, and at the very least would like to send the bill for military action to Europe.
by rayiner | 2026-03-04 14:35:54+00:00
He didn’t suppress it hard enough. You gotta choke it out. Sisi in Egypt has the right idea.

The point of my story isn’t “I’m from a Muslim country, so I can say there’s no Islamophobia.” My point is that “I’m from a Muslim country, so I know what moderate Muslims have done to deal with political Islam, which is a real threat.”
by tome | 2026-03-04 14:35:57+00:00
Right, OK, I guess if you're complaining about some land about the area of an athletics running track then you are technically correct. I'm not sure that's what people would have understood by tsimonescu's original claim that Israel is occupying parts of Lebanon.

And what exactly is Israel doing there, on that land the size of an athletics track? Something very nefarious?
by PkLavc | 2026-03-04 14:36:09+00:00
Hi HN, I built CodePulse to explore how far a "no-framework" approach could go for a functional online IDE. It’s a monorepo with a Vanilla JS frontend and a Fastify backend on Render. It supports 8+ languages via Glot.io. While it obviously can't beat local latency, the goal was a zero-setup, high-performance web interface for quick prototyping and testing. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the architecture!
by klibertp | 2026-03-04 14:36:12+00:00
If you claim it's the fastest, how does it compare to one-more-re-nightmare?

- https://github.com/telekons/one-more-re-nightmare

- https://applied-langua.ge/posts/omrn-compiler.html

OMRN is a regex compiler that leverages Common Lisp's compiler to produce optimized assembly to match the given regex. It's incredibly fast. It does omit some features to achieve that, though.
by jpsdtj | 2026-03-04 14:36:12+00:00
Tax deadline is 6 weeks away and I got tired of paying $150/year to services that want my xpub. So I built Opacore.

Import your xpub, descriptor, or wallet file (Sparrow, Unchained, Coldcard). It syncs your transaction history, calculates your gains (FIFO, LIFO, or HIFO), and spits out a Form 8949-ready CSV. Watch-only — no private keys ever touch the server.

It's also a full portfolio platform if you want it to be — dashboard, DCA tracker, invoice/payment links, fee estimator, price alerts.

Two ways to use it:

opacore.com — hosted, free, just sign up
Self-host — Docker Compose, one command, your data stays on your server
MIT licensed. No node required. No altcoins.

GitHub: github.com/opacore/opacore
Stack: Rust + BDK, Next.js, SQLite
by jp_nc | 2026-03-04 14:36:26+00:00
FWIW, my son has a 2020 M1 Air with 8gb and it runs just fine still. 8gb in the Mac world is much different than 8gb in the Windows world. Also, I am guessing most of the Chromebooks currently used in schools are running 4gb. If you need more ram, go up to an Air... reality is this will work fine for most kids and casual browsing scenarios.
by eastbound | 2026-03-04 14:37:03+00:00
> MacBook Neo features two USB-C ports for connecting accessories or an external display[5]. Both ports can be used for charging. MacBook Neo also includes a headphone jack for wired audio.

> [5] MacBook Neo features two USB-C ports — USB 3 (left) and USB 2 (right). External display connectivity supported on left USB 3 port only.

So, 1 display. Note that there’s probably already $100 of dongles on top of a Mac price, but at least this one would be an excellent fit for my father.
by mananaysiempre | 2026-03-04 14:37:15+00:00
Right, the explanation seems to be a bit oversimplified, but I don’t think it’s difficult to fix it up: you need to collect non-overlapping starts (with an RTL scan) and ends (with an LTR scan) and zip them together. The non-overlapping matches are the last ones you see before you need to reset the matcher (traverse a failing edge). This feels like it should work.

(I tried to write some pseudocode here but got annoyed dealing with edge cases like zero-length matches at EOF, sorry.)
by mrtksn | 2026-03-04 14:37:34+00:00
I'm not convinced at the insane price at all, you can buy an older model macbook Air and get the full experience at similar prices.

Edit: TBH I'm disappointed, I was hoping for an ultra portable macbook that is less than a kg and extra thin. This is just for the edu market. I'm sure it will do well, financially.
by robinhood | 2026-03-04 14:37:42+00:00
I can totally see many, many students and parents use that machine for daily tasks. Yes, base specs are pretty low: 8Gb RAM, 256 Gb drive - but the price tag is also low in the Apple world. I assume the trackpad will be excellent and the promise that the battery lasts all day is probably true (all day = 6-7h max). Good move from Apple, for once.