MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by poulsbohemian | 2026-03-11 18:54:53+00:00
>If you just need to do your taxes or answer a Zoom call, why would you get a Macbook Neo?

Because it's a Mac. Maybe not to you, but to many people Apple signals luxury. It signals trust. You have an iPhone, an iWatch, and AirPods in your ears, why wouldn't you also buy a Mac? And at that price point, mom and dad don't think twice about buying one for the kids anymore where previously they might have gotten by without.

>macOS itself has been declining in quality since at least Mojave; people don't rave about it anymore.

Maybe because computing devices overall are just so good. The gains are to be had in services that are part of the Apple ecosystem, not the OS alone (for the most part).

>The Macbook Neo will 100% continue the trend of people showing up at Best Buy and comparing the Lenovo machine to the Mac that costs 3x as much. This will not sway the average Joe any more than the Macbook Air did. It's not even seriously competing with the iPad price bracket that might tempt students.

In the 2000s, Apple has not cared about competing at Best Buy. That isn't their customer. If anything though, the Neo is more of a foray into that wider market. Anyone with kids lugging home a crappy school-issued Chromebook though took one look at this device and knew this is a device Apple can position into schools -- a market they once dominated and lost. There are lots of markets where this will be a great device, where the customer wants a Mac and not "just" an iPad. In those cases, it isn't the end consumer buying this device, it's an IT manager - who can likely be tempted by that Mac ecosystem and a better grade of device relative to competition.
by peterw__ | 2026-03-11 18:55:00+00:00
Do you know where one can find those search/alternate-UI tools? I tried to search for them but mostly came back with posts about general web search without AI.

Closest I could find was haxor-news which looks to be a decade old, and would need you to build your own AI filters if the post collection interface still works.

https://github.com/donnemartin/haxor-news
by lich_king | 2026-03-11 18:55:09+00:00
I don't think it's "much smaller" once you aim for feature parity (DOM). It might be more regular than an implementation of a higher-level language, but we're not getting rid of JS.

By the same token, was Java or Flash more dangerous than JS? On paper, no - all the same, just three virtual machines. But having all three in a browser made things fun back in the early 2000s.
by wat10000 | 2026-03-11 18:55:22+00:00
> Parenthood is not special. It’s just another ride in the park. But it is there, and it was built for us, and we were built for it, too.

> So, that is a second reason to become a parent. You’re in this amusement park only once, and I think you might as well ride the rides.

Well, that's not quite true. It's pretty much unique among all the rides in that you can't get off the ride, ever. (Unless you're OK with completely abandoning your children.) So you really want to make sure you're going to like that ride. That's a pretty good reason not to ride it if you think that might not be the case.
by Sesse__ | 2026-03-11 18:55:46+00:00
> And since arithmetic operators are left-to-right associative, the rather ugly code, as written, is fast and not as wasteful as it appears.

This is incorrect, for exactly the reason you are citing: A * x * x * x * x = (((A * x) * x) * x) * x), which means that (x * x) is nowhere to be seen in the expression and cannot be factored out. Now, if you wrote x * x * x * x * A instead, _then_ the compiler could have done partial CSE against the term with B, although still not as much as you'd like.
by superxpro12 | 2026-03-11 18:56:00+00:00
I hate that we get so caught up on applying labels to the disenfranchisement, rather than completely and forcefully rejecting any attempts to disenfranchise any voter.

In a functioning democracy, voting is sacred. It must be treated as THEE core, fundamental right of every person under its care.

To violate this sacred tenet should be immediate grounds for exile. If you can't respect the ONE CORE tenet, or are incapable of, then there is not space for you in this society.
by rfwhyte | 2026-03-11 18:56:03+00:00
This post absolutely reeks with the privilege of wealth. For the vast majority of people on this earth, the "Returns" from their labor matter a lot more to them than some vaunted, abstract ideals, as those ideals won't put food on the table or a roof over their children's heads.

The bottom line is that the majority of people alive today have to take whatever deal they are given in a sense, as they absolutely do not have the "Luxury" of not "Playing zero sum games."

Must be nice to be rich enough to get to spout philosophical BS and not worry how you're going to pay for groceries, but most people alive these days are a lot closer to being homeless than they are to being millionaires, and quitting a job that pays their bills so they can "Provide value to a community" and not worry about how they are going to get paid just isn't even a remotely viable option.
by cannolicannon | 2026-03-11 18:56:10+00:00
The big players are just awful at marketing; too many SKUs and models - it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ.

Just hired a new colleague who prefers Windows. Dell seemed like a reasonable option for a good laptop. Here is Dell's current lineup:

- Dell Laptop (with 14, 15, 16 inch variants)

- Dell Plus (with 14, 15, and 16 inch variants)

- Dell XPS (with 13, 14, and 16 inch variants)

- Dell Premium (with 14 and 16 inch variants)

- Dell Pro Essential (with 14 and 15 inch variants)

- Dell Pro (with 14 and 16 inch variants)

- Dell Pro Plus (with 14 and 16 inch variants)

- Dell Pro Premium (with 14 and 16 inch variants)

- Dell Pro Max (with 14 and 16 inch variants)

- Dell Pro Max Plus (with 14, 16, and 18 inch variants)

- Dell Pro Max Premium (with 14 and 16 inch variants)

It's maddening trying to sift through the differences at this level. Then when you select a model, there can upwards of 8 different pre-built options to review.
by hombre_fatal | 2026-03-11 18:56:13+00:00
Well, mutability is the default, and React tries to address some of the problems with mutability. So React being popular as a subecosystem inside a mutable environment isn't really evidence that people are missing out on the benefits of mutability.

Though React is less about immutability and more about uni-directional flow + the idiosyncrasy where you need values that are 'stable' across renders.
by dangus | 2026-03-11 18:56:14+00:00
That is not what I'm arguing.

I am arguing that the base M5 chip-equipped MacBook Pros are heavy and thick laptops and have a lot of thermal headroom, while the M5 Pro and Max chips are being used in the same chassis.

I think the MacBook Pro lineup should essentially be split so that the M5 model is in a thinner chassis while the M5 Pro and Max can continue to make those weight and thickness sacrifices.

The M5 MacBook Pro is basically the same as a MacBook Air but with a fan to get that extra 10% performance boost, and better screen and I/O. It should essentially turn into a MacBook Air Plus or something like that.

I think that the M5 base chip could easily operate in a much thinner/lighter chassis without the throttling of the fanless Air design while maintaining quiet performance.

Also, the edge of the MacBook Pro is sharp and uncomfortable compared to other laptops when you are resting palms/arms on the laptop directly.
by bigyabai | 2026-03-11 18:56:40+00:00
The same way I reconcile the fact that the 11" Macbook sold millions of devices; consumers don't care. They don't buy Macs as a conscious evaluation of what the device is capable of or how well it was made. Even the 2019 16" Macbook Pro, arguably the worst Mac ever sold, has millions of units floating around in Obsoleteland.

Personally I agree with the parent's comment. I used to buy Macs, but nowadays Apple alienates me. I'm one of the millions that don't buy a Mac because the software enforces arbitrary limitations. Unless Apple changes that stance, I'm one of those millions. Cupertino has the market share statistics, they know where to find me.
by baileywickham | 2026-03-11 18:56:44+00:00
I think I agree here but for us it's more of a defense in depth thing. If you want to give it access to your email you are opening yourself up to attacks, but it doesn't have that access by default. We have an integration to give the agent it's own inbox instead of requiring access to your gmail for this reason. Similarly, if you want to only use Klaus for coding there is no risk to your personal data, even if your Klaus instance is hacked.
by antistructured | 2026-03-11 18:56:46+00:00
JavaScript has great compile-time types (TypeScript), but at runtime, those types disappear.

SigilJS is a tiny library that lets you describe
data using type sigils and validate it at runtime.

Example:

const User = Sigil`
{
name: string
age?: number
}
`

User.check(data)

Zero dependencies.
Bun-first.

Would love feedback.
by throaskjdsakn | 2026-03-11 18:56:56+00:00
ChromeXX January 1, 2026 10:38 AM

It's safe to say, since it's been proven these holes exist all over the Amazon, that they were created to catch or divert animals, to keep them from reaching their village. After finding the normal route of the animals and their crossings, the holes were possibly dug to confuse the animals and funnel them into the small foot traffic areas to be caught and killed - whether for food or to control their travel. If it would stop humans from wanting to traverse the land, animals wouldn't want to either. Also, I see "scientists" make this mistake over and over; the lay of the land now is not what it was back then, and large ravines that are there now may have been lush with greenery and completely flat. Earthquakes and landslides could have completely changed the overall landscape by now too.
by skon1212 | 2026-03-11 18:57:05+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a small tool that turns Excel sales data into a visual dashboard.

Many small businesses track sales in spreadsheets, but analyzing the data takes time and requires manual work (pivot tables, charts, etc.).

So I built a simple tool where you can:

• Upload an Excel sales file
• Automatically generate dashboards and charts
• See product performance and revenue trends

The goal is to make basic sales analytics accessible without setting up complex BI tools.

It's still early and I'm improving it based on feedback.

I’d really appreciate any thoughts from the community.

Thanks!
by hmokiguess | 2026-03-11 18:57:24+00:00
To me this reads like trying to fit a solution we know to a problem we haven't yet defined.

The problem is more around ops / visibility / delegation / orchestration of agents, but the solution is being misslabelled as "IDE" which I feel like is the wrong analogy although the right "in-between" step towards what the next thing will be.
by janalsncm | 2026-03-11 18:57:30+00:00
> But in another instance, Epstein was critical of misspelling. A contact forwarded the sex offender his daughter’s college application in 2013. “I wish you had let me review before sending…the grammatical errors and spelling mistakes will make it at least harder for early admission,” Epstein wrote.

It is funny that spelling and grammar matter more when writing to an admissions officer than to a potential business partner. But it’s also funny to imagine a world where you could send in an essay with a bunch of typos and grammar mistakes and expect it not to influence your application.

Spelling and grammar matter in the sense that they are a signal that you know a complicated and somewhat arbitrary set of rules and have agreed to follow them.
by verdverm | 2026-03-11 18:57:30+00:00
I also don't expect those with poor MCPs to have any better CLIs or APIs, most of the big companies we want them for are not investing in DX/AX. I suspect i.e. that Intuit, if they had great APIs et al, would see it as a threat to their business.

Boy would I love to give my agent access to my Quickbooks. They pushed out an incomplete MCP and haven't touched it since.

https://github.com/intuit/quickbooks-online-mcp-server
by Rashka7 | 2026-03-11 18:58:27+00:00
Hi HN,

I built TweetStyler to solve a simple problem on X: limited font styles.

Most posts on X look the same because the platform doesn't support many text styles.
TweetStyler converts normal text into 130+ Unicode font styles that work directly in X posts, bios, and replies.

Features:
- 130+ font styles
- Instant copy to clipboard
- Text decorations and emojis
- Post templates
- Conversion history
- Favorite fonts
- Works on all devices

Try it here:
https://tweetstyler.com/

This is my first project building in public.
I'd really appreciate feedback or suggestions.
by jfengel | 2026-03-11 18:58:37+00:00
And in Russia, it is. That's why they call it "карусель".

In the United States, it hasn't been. The article you link to doesn't even mention the United States. To do it on a large scale requires cooperation from the people running the election, and the US isn't (yet) that corrupt.

The US system isn't completely robust against it, and perhaps some day it will be a problem. But right now there is no evidence that it is a problem, and all of the attempts to "fix" it are clearly aimed at preventing some people from voting.
by tracker1 | 2026-03-11 18:58:41+00:00
I don't necessarily think it's that... it's just a matter of a rush to respond/send quickly and not take a lot of time. It's pretty easy to either fat-finger when typing on a keyboard, or gesture input on a phone to get the wrong word and you hit send before realizing.

Sometimes I'll notice right after, delete and re-reply (social media) other times I'll just let it be... It's pedantic busy bodies that will single you out for a typo as opposed to discussing the idea at hand.
by xp84 | 2026-03-11 18:58:57+00:00
> You cannot buy an x86 PC laptop in the $600–700 price range that competes with the MacBook Neo on any metric — performance, display quality, audio quality, or build quality.

Interesting metrics, though I'd add that if you count storage and memory as metrics, it'd be hard to find a worse PC laptop. And I don't see why we should artificially exclude ARM PC laptops from the comparison.

https://www.bestbuy.com/product/asus-vivobook-14-wuxga-lapto...

2x the RAM and 2x the storage isn't meaningless to a lot of people.

The PC has a single-core geekbench around 2100 single / 10,000 multicore.
The Neo is apparently in the range of 3600 / 9,000 multicore.

No arguments on the Mac's screen being way nicer though. However, the low-end computer market - unlike most of us on HN - has never cared about pixel density, color accuracy, or really any screen specs other than size (Looks like the Asus has the Mac by an inch on that spec).

Bottom line, for a high-end Chromebook replacement (literally everything is done in the cloud, so storage doesn't matter, and only running a browser, so RAM isn't a big deal), as long as it's for someone who will take care of such a delicate device, the Neo is pretty great. For everyone else, it's debatable.

> And certainly not software quality.

This is most definitely only a little true in that Windows has jumped the shark lately with ads and various enshittification, and thus ties with Mac OS. Tahoe is without a doubt the worst Mac OS ever released. It's both poor quality and poorly designed.
by kennywinker | 2026-03-11 18:59:17+00:00
Yes, but that comes at the cost of using a dumber llm. The state of the art ones are only available via commercial api, and the best self-hostable models require $10,000+ gpus.

This is a problem for coding as smarter really has an impact there, but there are so so so many tasks that an 8b model that runs on a $200 gpu can handle nicely. Scrape this page and dump json? Yeah that’s gonna be fine.

This is my conclusion based on a week or so of using ollama + qwen3.5:3b self hosted on a ~10 year old dell optiplex with only the built-in gpu. You don’t need state of the art to do simple tasks.
by vkuprin | 2026-03-11 19:00:01+00:00
Yep, Site Spy already has push notifications, plus email and Telegram alerts. I see RSS as the open interface for people who want to plug updates into their own reader or workflow. For urgent things like visa slots or stock availability, direct alerts are definitely the main path.

And yeah, element-level tracking isn't a brand new idea by itself. The thing I wanted to improve was making it easy to pick the exact part of a page you care about and then inspect the change via diffs, history, or RSS instead of just getting a generic "page changed" notification
by mempko | 2026-03-11 19:00:04+00:00
Literally everyone working for a wage is creating more value for others than they consume. The problem is the rent seekers are capturing that value. This is a crucial part geohot is missing. What people often don't think about and they should is that when you are employed for a wage by someone, you are the creditor and the employer is the debtor. Why? Because you work for say 2 weeks, and THEN they pay you. That whole time working you are crediting the employer and they are in debt to YOU. Think about how crazy this is. You the creditor must do what your debtor tells you. Maybe we don't think about it because it's too painful.
by jruohonen | 2026-03-11 19:00:40+00:00
> If you fail to prove them wrong and can produce the same results as them, they have done Good Science.

Not really in my humble opinion. Sure, the Popperian vibe is kind of fundamental, but the whole truncation into binary-valued true/false categories seldom makes sense with many (or even most?) problems for which probabilities, effect sizes, and related things matter more.

And if you fail to replicate a study, they may have still done Good Science. With replications, it should not be about Bad Science and Good Science but about the cumulation of evidence (or a lack thereof). That's what meta-analyses are about.

When we talk about Bad Science, it is about the industrial-scale fraud the article is talking about. No one should waste time replicating, citing, or reading that.
by theodorewiles | 2026-03-11 19:01:03+00:00
Yeah I vibe coded a simple app that takes an org-mode file, renders it as a kanban board, and lets me spin up agents for each task with the prompt in the body in a named tmux session. The frontend gets updated via Claude code hooks when an agent is idle.

I think the key is to combine human and agent task tracking in one pane of glass.
by syntheticnature | 2026-03-11 19:01:22+00:00
The Macbook Neo is $599. Looking at my local Best Buy and dividing by 3, the laptops below $200 are all HP Chromebooks:

Chromebook/N4500 (2021!)/4GB RAM/64GB eMMC, $149 white $179 in grey
Windows/N150/4GB RAM/128GB, $219 (first Windows machine)

The first Lenovo is a Chromebook that's $299, and it's got a MediaTek processor from 2022 and is supposedly on a $100 sale.
by gitgud | 2026-03-11 19:01:34+00:00
Well yeah, business has literally always extracted value from open source software, that’s one of the main benefits of it… (although license violations have been unprecedented with AI)

“Creating value” in open source has never been about capturing value at all, it’s always been about volunteering and giving back, and recognising the unfathomable amount of open-source software that runs the modern world we live in

“Capturing value” is the opposite of this, wall-gardens, proprietary API’s, vendor lock-in, closed-source code… it’s almost antithetical to the idea of open source
by Ardon | 2026-03-11 19:01:35+00:00
I agree with your point that attempts at cheating are inevitable, the rest is confusing though:

We have a long and storied history of coming up with extremely disturbing capitol punishments performed in public, and yet those punishments coexisted with much higher rates of criminality then now.

Stealing from the church in history carried some pretty gruesome deaths, and yet plenty of people still stole from the church, etc.

People are chronically bad at transferring future risk to their current decision making. Any consequence that relies on people being able to model a future problem against their current desires/needs is always going to have a lot of transmission losses. You end up trying to make ever more horrible punishments to overcome the losses in transmission.

I think the goal should be the smallest possible functioning consequence, which is possible by being close to the 'crime'. The very best way is when community can do it immediately. Like if someone does something fucked up, but then their buddies go 'that was fucked up dude', I am very confident this will prevent then from doing it again much more efficiently then a distant jail sentence. (among all the other ways too, there's never one clean action to take to solve problems on a societal level)
by jfengel | 2026-03-11 19:01:42+00:00
Same in the US.

You can try voting again at other stations, especially since they don't require ID. You just need the name of somebody assigned to that station, who hasn't already voted. There is a signature check if there is a suspicion, but that's rarely done.

But that's practically never done. The risks are too high, and to have a significant impact would require enough votes to make it certain you'd get caught.
by stackghost | 2026-03-11 19:01:58+00:00
>Trump himself truly believes he is the smartest person in the room, regardless of who else is in it; and he will not suffer anyone who dares to contradict him.

I actually believe he has a crippling inferiority complex, which is why he leans so hard into bluster and bravado, why he surrounds himself with incompetent sycophants, and also why he's so vicious at even a hint of being slighted.

I think he probably knows, deep down, that he's mid at best and his most deep-seated fear is being perceived as insufficiently masculine, intelligent, powerful, wealthy, etc.
by oxag3n | 2026-03-11 19:02:03+00:00
This is Java EE all over again.

When I graduated in 2012 it was pushed everywhere, including my uni so my undergrad thesis was done in Java.

Everyone was learning it, certifying, building things on top of other things.

EJB, JPA, JTA, JNDI, JMS and JCA.

And them more things to make it even more powerful with Servlets, JSP, JSTL, JSF.

Many companies invested and built various application servers, used by enterprises by this day.

Every engineer I've met said Java is server side future, don't bother with other tech. You'll just draw data schema, persistence mapping, business logic and ship it.

I switched to C++ after Bjarne's talk I attended in 2013. I'm glad I did although I never worked as a software engineer. Following passion and going deep into technology was a bliss for me, the difference between my undergrad Java, Master C++ and Rust PhD is like a kids toy and a real turboprop engine.

Don't follow the hype - it will go away and you'll be left with what you've invested into.
by vkuprin | 2026-03-11 19:02:28+00:00
Yep, changedetection.io is a good project. With Site Spy, I wanted to make the browser-first workflow much easier: install the extension, connect it to the dashboard, click the exact part of the page you care about, and then follow changes as diffs, history, or RSS with very little setup. I can definitely see why the open-source / self-hosted route is appealing too.
by hitekker | 2026-03-11 19:02:58+00:00
I beg to differ on "damn good chromebooks for the $200-$300 territory."

I had a phase 2 years ago where I tried many cheap Chromebooks. I initially liked the stripped down experience and "value for dollar" hardware.

But ChromeOS UX gaps, bad keyboards, and a litany of other issues wore me down and I gave up on the "second computer" quest.

I look back now and see many of those Chromebooks don't even exist anymore.