MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yadavraju | 2026-03-04 21:39:54+00:00
I'm a software engineer who moved to the US from Nepal. For years, I watched colleagues — brilliant engineers, doctors, founders — spend more time writing emails than their American counterparts. Not because they didn't know what to say. Because translating thought → native language → English prose is exhausting mental overhead that compounds every single day.
Existing tools (Wispr Flow, Dragon, even Whisper) are built assuming you think in English. They don't handle accents well, they don't translate, and they don't adapt tone between Slack and Gmail.
So I built Oravo. You press a hotkey anywhere, speak in Spanish/Hindi/Mandarin/whatever, and it types clean English with the right tone for the app you're in. Casual in Slack, professional in email, technical in Notion.
It's free to try (30 min/month, no credit card). Currently Mac + Windows.
Honest question for the HN community: is the translation-first angle the right wedge, or should I be leading with pure dictation speed for developers? Still figuring out positioning and would love brutal feedback.
by dqv | 2026-03-04 21:40:10+00:00
Yes, at least in the US, being a litigious freak gets results.

Weird trick to get unblocked: follow the standard three-email procedure to sender support, then send a fourth email ccing buscond@microsoft.com telling them to unblock or next step is attorney general.

The thing about a lot of attorney generals is they LOVE to smack down a big corporation like Microsoft for the little guy.
by gosub100 | 2026-03-04 21:40:18+00:00
My wishlist:

- dc motor conversions for air conditioners and voltage controllers that can adapt to multiple panel types to drive it. There's a lot to be gained without going all-in an inverter. What if I stayed on grid but heavily offset my heating / cooling bill by having a wall mount unit that was free to run during daylight hours on a completely separate circuit?

- conversion kit to make the wall mount unit a heater in the winter months

- a DC home system for select appliances such as lights, computers, or even refrigerators. This requires more precise voltage regulators because DC is more finicky when you add / remove loads. But you save some losses in efficiency.

- a thermal battery, so my window mount cooler can freeze a solid block of ice all day during the sun, and use it to cool me when I get home. It would be sealed of course. But condensation would still have to be managed. Maybe a hot water tank adapter that uses excess electricity and dumps it in the tank, but not so much to explode. Again, a form of offset, not a replacement for gas. Another thermal battery could be a sewage tank that aborbs heat from the AC unit before it goes down the drain. This would reduce the load of the fan.

- a wind generator that works best in storms. It could dump straight to a heating element and fan indoors. Who wouldn't love free heat during violent storms? Maybe it could have a clutch (mechanical or electric) to tune the load to the wind gusts.

- a solar cooker, maybe with a molten fluid or superheated steam. The latter can go well above 500F so plenty hot enough for cooking. But of course very dangerous so would need a professional device, if it's even possible. But this would allow e.g. restaurants in the summer to offset or replace heating for their kitchens. It pains me to think of how much energy is wasted in a hot desert city to pay for a gas grill and then pay again to pump to he excess heat outside.
by agendacreativa | 2026-03-04 21:40:37+00:00
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by oofbey | 2026-03-04 21:41:29+00:00
Thanks for all the detail. I still wouldn't equate "it's going to get a lot worse" with "it's too late". The only way I can interpret the phrase "it's too late" is as giving up - which means stopping trying, and admitting defeat. We can acknowledge that things are unavoidably going to get a lot worse without giving up. Or even admitting defeat. Because if we do give up, the outcomes will be even worse. And I believe that while many bad outcomes are unavoidable at this point, we are still facing the possibility of truly horrendous outcomes which can be avoided.
by tlb | 2026-03-04 21:41:49+00:00
Many of the great hacks have involved breaking through 2 layers of supposed security. You break into the 3D printer, which lets you send packets on the local network. Then you use that to break into the exercise bike, which has a camera because it's based on a generic tablet.

Either vendor might see the flaw as low-severity. So what if someone can send packets? So what if someone already on the local network can hack the camera? But combine them and you're pwned.
by D-Machine | 2026-03-04 21:41:53+00:00
I do work in science, I am claiming that pre-publication / journalistic peer review is limiting (and biasing) the amount of post-publication / non-journalistic peer review that can happen, and it is not limiting this in a very reliable or even IMO particularly desirable way.

There is definitely a problem with the over-production of junk science, and we definitely need a way to filter this out somehow. I am just claiming journalistic / pre-publication peer review does not do this effectively or reliably at all anymore (if it ever did).
by tzs | 2026-03-04 21:41:57+00:00
> Isn't software engineering "engineering" too?

No.

FTA:>> Important nuance: "engineering" here means New York Education Law Article 145 professions (professional engineering, land surveying, and geology), not software engineering.

What the law is basically saying is that in fields where it would by a crime for a random human to give any substantive response, information, or advice chatbots also should not do so. Software engineering is not one of those fields.

The law does not make it a crime for a chatbot to do so, but if it does and the person it advises suffers damages it makes it so the injured person can sue the chatbot operator for those damages (and for attorney fees if the chatbot operator willfully allowed the chatbot to give such advice).
by adampunk | 2026-03-04 21:42:04+00:00
Remember that you can burn human intelligence but you can also burn technical capacity. Israel has shown itself willing to burn technical capacities to strike (see also: the pager attacks).

I would also submit that forcing Iranian traffic engineers to investigate their camera system is probably not a very high priority at Mossad. What is much more valuable is forcing other countries to change over their traffic control system to a new vendor that has been compromised by the Israelis. That is exactly how they achieved the pager compromise that they did— they fomented a crisis which forced adversaries to change their networks to a network that the Israelis controlled. This is more effective if it is not a bluff.

Finally, the intelligence that they describe is most easily explained by the capability that they burned. You cannot have a human intelligence source sit on a street corner like that 24 hours a day in a country like Iran without someone asking questions. You absolutely need someone sitting on that corner 24 hours a day in order to get the kinds of intelligence that they got. You simply cannot collect that with a human source. On the contrary, it is quite easy to imagine how that intelligence could be gathered given only a traffic camera.
by jfengel | 2026-03-04 21:42:25+00:00
I'm surprised that cooling takes less energy than heating. I imagine that depends a lot on the temperature range; they only need so much to cool a room even on a "hot" day in the UK.

Still... AC still feels like magic. I know how it works and understand the over-unity factor. But it feels like it ought to take enormous energy for it to work at all.
by ApolloFortyNine | 2026-03-04 21:42:49+00:00
I've seen this called AI Psychosis before [1]

I don't really think this is every possible to stop fully, your essentially trying to jailbreak the LLM, and once jailbroken, you can convince it of anything.

The user was given a bunch of warnings before successfully getting it into this state, it's not as if the opening message was "Should I do it?" followed by a "Yes".

This just seems like something anti-ai people will use as ammunition to try and kill AI. Logically though it falls into the same tool misuse as cars/knives/guns.

[1] https://github.com/tim-hua-01/ai-psychosis
by miltonlost | 2026-03-04 21:43:14+00:00
> Do gun manufacturers get sued for mass shootings at US schools?

Because Congress and the gun lobby have artificially carved out legal immunity for gun manufacturers for this.

"in 2005, the government took similar steps with a bill to grant immunity to gun manufacturers, following lobbying from the National Rifle Association and the National Shooting Sports Foundation. The bill was called The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, or PLCAA, and it provided quite possibly the most sweeping liability protections to date.

How does the PLCAA work?

The law prohibits lawsuits filed against gun manufacturers on the basis of a firearm’s “criminal or unlawful misuse.” That is, it bars virtually any attempt to sue gunmakers for crimes committed with their weapons."

https://www.thetrace.org/2023/07/gun-manufacturer-lawsuits-p...

I 100% think that Gun Manufacturers should be liable for crimes done by their products. They just cannot be, right now, due to a legal fiction.
by culi | 2026-03-04 21:43:20+00:00
Their scorecard seems to get updated regularly, but based on current "non-legacy" scores we have:

10, Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 7 and T16 Gen 5
10, Framework Laptop 12
10, Framework Laptop 16
9, Lenovo ThinkPad L16 Gen 2
9, Lenovo ThinkPad 13w 2-in-1 Gen 3
9, Lenovo ThinkPad L14 Gen 6
9, Lenovo ThinkPad E14 Gen 7
9, Lenovo ThinkPad E16 Gen 3
9, Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 6
9, Lenovo ThinkPad T16 Gen 4
9, Lenovo ThinkPad E16 Gen 2
9, Lenovo ThinkPad E14 Gen 6
9, Lenovo ThinkPad L14 Gen 5
9, Lenovo ThinkPad T16 Gen 3
9, Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 5
8, Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Gen 3
8, Microsoft Surface Laptop 7
7, Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 3
5, MacBook Air 13″ (M4)
5, MacBook Air 15″ (M2)
5, MacBook Air 13″ (M2)
5, MacBook Pro 14″ (M1)
4, MacBook Pro 14-inch (M5, 2025)

These seem to be all the models that have been evaluated. In older scorecard versions an HP EliteBook and a Dell Latitude have also achieved a 10

https://www.ifixit.com/repairability/laptop-repairability-sc...

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1R_egXm7iwR0isCt_UxcG...
by wtallis | 2026-03-04 21:43:35+00:00
Yes, that's one of the things that really should have been an extension. Tree Style Tab works alright as an extension-provided sidebar.

Putting the chat or sidebar in the core of the browser sounds very much like something done by a developer who wasn't around for Mozilla prior to Firefox, and isn't aware of the original goal of being the antithesis of the browser that included everything and the kitchen sink.
by lern_too_spel | 2026-03-04 21:44:25+00:00
Location: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/location-service...

> To use features such as these, you must enable Location Services on your iPhone and give your permission to each app or website before it can receive location data from Location Services

> By enabling Location Services for your devices, you agree and consent to the transmission, collection, maintenance, processing, and use of your location data and location search queries by Apple and its partners and licensees to provide and improve location-based and road traffic-based products and services.

Android and every other consumer general purpose OS lets you read GPS coordinates from the sensor without telling anyone.

App installs: Any app installed from the App Store obviously tells Apple you installed it. Apple does certificate verification for every side-loaded app, where Apple is the CA. There is no way to install an app on iOS without telling Apple.

Android and every other consumer general purpose OS lets you install apps without telling anyone.
by TazeTSchnitzel | 2026-03-04 21:44:55+00:00
If they have the predisposition for it, a month or two of bad sleep and a particularly compelling idea may be all it takes to send a person who has previously seemed totally sane into an incredibly dangerous mental and physical state, something that will take weeks to recover from. And that can happen even without sycophantic LLMs, but they sure make this outcome more likely.
by probably_wrong | 2026-03-04 21:45:01+00:00
> Should knife manufacturers be held responsible for idiots who stab themselves in the eye using their knives?

I suggest an alternative rhetorical question: if the world's largest knife manufacturer found out that 1 in 1500 knives came out of the factory with the inscription "Stab yourself. No more detours. No more echoes. Just you and me, and the finish line", should they be held responsible if a user actually stabs themselves? If they said "we don't know why the machine does that but changing it to a safer machine would make us less competitive", does that change the answer?
by DoneWithAllThat | 2026-03-04 21:45:34+00:00
What’s startling to me is how many comments in this thread just take the provided values as gospel without asking questions that methodology answers either in the abstract or barely describes. Also going giving a cost for “United States” is absolutely nonsense - electricity, gas and gasoline prices vary widely across the country. There is no one cost for each, and the average is worthless for this kind of thing (especially since the average of each - gas vs. electric vs. gasoline cost - are independent variables that have no relation to each other on a region by region basis).

Why are people so gullible?
by mrwh | 2026-03-04 21:45:37+00:00
A stat that shocked me recently is one third of people in the UK use chat bots for emotional support: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd6xl3ql3v0o. That's an enormous society-wide change in just a couple of years.

I recall chatting with an older friend recently. She's in her 80s, and loves chatgpt. It agrees with me! She said. It used to be that you had to be rich and famous before you got into that sort of a bubble.
by graypegg | 2026-03-04 21:45:58+00:00
That's such a neat idea! It's like a paintable version of https://www.shadertoy.com

Is there a way to share brushes in the app/a brush sharing gallery? For sharing, I can see the "weekly" section from the homepage, which looks to be a weekly art prompt and everyone's go at it, which is really fun! But for the more artistically challenged (myself), it'd probably want to share a brush on it's own haha
by rsolva | 2026-03-04 21:46:08+00:00
It is not only about raw power consumption. Comparing driving an electric car with using AI only in kW hides a major point: Hyperscale datacenters are massively centralised, which brings it's own problems; a lot of energy is used for cooling, and water consumptions is enormous. Charging electric cars at home is distributed and does not suffer from the same problems as the centralised hyperscalers do. Also, running AI models at home is not much different than a gaming session :)
Show HN: Scopo, Cmd+Tab scoped to the current macOS Space
by IgorCRD | 2026-03-04 21:46:12+00:00
I built Scopo after reading Theo's [https://x.com/theo] post about the "Agentic Code Problem".
The reality that developers now work on 3-4 projects simultaneously and spend more time switching between windows than actually building.

The core idea: macOS Spaces are already project boundaries. Why doesn't Cmd+Tab respect them?

Scopo replaces the system Cmd+Tab with one scoped to your current Space. Each Space is a project context. You see 3-4 relevant windows instead of a bunch of unrelated windows and apps.

I built it for myself, used it for weeks on my work machine, and realized I couldn't work without it when I switched to a machine that didn't have it.

Some implementation details:

- CGEventTap to intercept Cmd+Tab before the Dock handles it
- Moving windows between spaces on macOS 15 is hard — all SLS/CGS private APIs are broken without SIP disabled. Scopo simulates a Mission Control drag (same technique as Hammerspoon's Drag.spoon)
- TF-IDF + cosine similarity for smart window-to-project matching

Built with Swift/AppKit

https://scopo.app

First time launching something, would genuinely appreciate any feedback on the product or the implementation.
by digitalhobbit | 2026-03-04 21:46:44+00:00
I think it's all up to you what you make of this situation. For context: I've been programming for well over 40 years, and I've worked as a software engineer (or eng manager) for close to 30 years. I've gone through cycles of coding a lot and cycles of focusing more on architecture, product, or the business side. And I loved coding when I first started. Making pixels appear on the monitor felt magical back then. But coding got old over time, and I've found myself drawn to higher level concerns, including business, product, engineering architecture trade-offs, etc.

Lately, I've found this new AI assisted coding world immensely empowering. In the last few weeks, I've built web apps (e.g. Astro), an agentic pipeline (Python, Pydantic AI), a proof of concept for a roguelike game (C++ with libtcod), and I'm now working on a cross-platform desktop app in Tauri 2 (Rust and TypeScript). And I'm learning a ton. Not necessarily low level language details - I'm increasingly trusting those to the LLM - but application architecture, product design, marketing, agentic engineering, etc. I've found this genuinely empowering and haven't felt this motivated about application development in decades.

I'd say zoom out a level and see if you can find the joy in learning some of the higher level concerns.
by lurking_swe | 2026-03-04 21:46:51+00:00
As I said I don’t work for an AI company and have zero skin in the game. Idk who you’re yelling at to be honest. I guess you’re fired up and emotional. If your goal is to convince others, communicating with an “outrage” tone is unlikely to sway anyone’s opinion (imo).

> it should stop talking to him altogether, and arguably Google should have moderators reporting these people to relevant authorities for wellness checks and interventions

I agree. This seems very reasonable and I would welcome regulations in this area.

The gray area imo is when local LLMs become “good enough” for your average joe to run on their laptop. Who bears responsibility then?
by greenpizza13 | 2026-03-04 21:46:58+00:00
It's absolutely not the gun control debate in a different outfit.

The difference is in how abuse of the given system affects others. This AI affected this person and his actions affected himself. Nothing about the AI enhanced his ability to hurt others. Guns enhance the ability of mentally unstable people to hurt others with ruthless efficiency. That's the real gun debate -- whether they should be so easy to get given how they exponentially increase the potential damage a deranged person can do.
by platinumrad | 2026-03-04 21:47:11+00:00
I'm not sure what you're talking about. The most popular stories are the ones when they detain US citizens, rough them up, and then dump them on the side of the road somewhere without even apologizing.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/13/ice-immigrat...

[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-u-s-citizen-says-ice-f...

[3] https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-...
by PowerElectronix | 2026-03-04 21:47:12+00:00
Useful work is debatable here, a lot of people just talk to the thing or use it instead of searching the internet.

The owners surely think, or at least want us to think that it is very useful indeed, otherwise we'd see no point in burning through piles of investors cash to buy overpriced ram, storage, gpus, cpus, nics, secure the power to run it and then subsidise the users to use it.

I do think that transaction is wrong and it's going to bite them in the ass in the long term, but I don't have the money to outbid them for the power. I do get to see them crash and burn when the investors get impatient.
by ryukafalz | 2026-03-04 21:47:38+00:00
I can't see Apple doing anything that'd make the iPhone not a usable phone while it's being used as a Mac. But I bet they could have macOS components running alongside iOS, in a VM/container of some sort. Would be very cool.

(Honestly I can't see Apple doing that either though since it'd cannibalize their other product lines. But c'mon, Apple!)
by elAhmo | 2026-03-04 21:47:44+00:00
"Welcomes" is a very strong word in this context. Google was somewhat forced to do this, not really something they would do if not from pressure by EU, lawsuits, Epic and others.

Also, the fee is reduced to 20 or 15 percent, not fully gone.

This almost reads like a sponsored article written by Google themselves.
by jfengel | 2026-03-04 21:48:12+00:00
When it comes to the environment the most efficient use is to leave it in the ground.

Hybrids work for trains because they are so large and don't need big swings of acceleration or to climb steep grades. They can run the diesel generators at maximum efficiency.

Battery power would be better, because you can build even larger power plants running at higher heats and not have to haul them with you, but the costs of sufficient battery is too large, so far. That is changing.
by gosub100 | 2026-03-04 21:48:23+00:00
I agree that photons cannot be distinguished, but how do you reconcile the following:

- photons travel at the speed of light in a vacuum

- it takes 90k years (or whatever) for a photon to travel from the sun's core to your retina?

Ok, the core of the sun is not a vacuum, quite the opposite, but the path is fraught with being continuously absorbed and emitted. It's not one photon travelling at a few km/hr is it?

And I don't think photons are reflected in hydrogen, although I have no proof. I just thought reflection was done with things like flat surfaces or mirrors.

This is why I said "not the same photon", but I admit I have only YouTube-spectator level knowledge
by hsuduebc2 | 2026-03-04 21:48:32+00:00
More broadly it's the only medium to have successful any form of voluntary relationships based on sympathy. It's absolutely crucial for non-sociopath to have at least some kind of empathy because otherwise no one would simply chose you to include into their lives.
I understand why they are doing that. It's simply more pleasurable to use. I chose to turn opt-out of this. For me it's creepy. I want Jarvis, not fake virtual friend.
by keybored | 2026-03-04 21:48:38+00:00
That it’s fine because it’s the CCP (commies see all) is a new one.

It’s at best subpar for the same reasons as if it was the usual Silicon Valley spyware.

I could leave well enough alone. But why? Because there are choices? There are five other brands of cereal that do not have 25% sugar? I’d rather be a negative nancy towards these on-purpose addictive, privacy-leaking attention pimp apps.
by chao- | 2026-03-04 21:48:48+00:00
One IP address (exclusively ours) among our email IPs at my place of employment was affected. We have used that IP for nine years. Emails are strictly transactional (receipts, password resets, et cetera).

The "rate limiting" started two weeks ago, giving us a code that Microsoft's documentation doesn't even list. It remains unresolved. Never had critical issues like this on our transactional IPs prior to this, and this particular IP address is still delivering just fine to other consumer and corporate email systems.