MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
There's Probably a $1M Idea Sitting in This Database
by briebella | 2026-03-04 15:06:33+00:00
Most startup ideas on the internet are scattered across random places, Reddit threads, tweets, comment sections, half-finished blog posts. Individually they’re interesting, but it’s hard to see patterns when everything is fragmented.

While searching on Google recently, I came across something called StartupIdeasDB, which is basically a curated database of a couple thousand startup ideas gathered from around the web. What I found interesting is that when ideas are organized in one place, you start noticing repetition, the same problems showing up across different industries and communities.

That’s usually a good signal that something real is there. A lot of the ideas aren’t flashy or revolutionary, but many feel like the kind of “boring” products that quietly become profitable businesses. It made me wonder if somewhere inside a dataset like that there’s probably a $1M idea just waiting for the right person to execute on it. Not affiliated with it, just thought the concept of treating startup ideas like a searchable dataset was interesting.

Curious how others here go about discovering ideas in the first place.
by NietTim | 2026-03-04 15:06:49+00:00
There it is! Very interesting offering. It's nice that it's running full mac os with "root access" (whatever that means on macs in current year) I was afraid they'd introduce some bastardised version of iPadOS for this device. This seems like the type of device I'd want my kids to use instead of an iPad or other touch & app based device and just let them figure things out like I did.

> Apple also pointed out that the MacBook Neo is Apple's lowest-carbon Mac. It features 60% recycled materials, more than any other Apple product. This includes 90% recycled aluminum and 100% recycled cobalt in the battery.

This is _incredibly_ cool.
by vidarh | 2026-03-04 15:07:13+00:00
> Author states it's a volume problem.

How is that relevant? The entire point of using a bot is to be able to achieve volume while including customisation and the ability to hold a conversation if you reply. There are major providers offering to do this at volume for pennies.

> Examples show no individualisation beyond the book content.

The post has no examples. Where have you found examples? And why do you presume adding hurdles will stop things for more than a day or two before the campaigns are more effective?

EDIT: If the examples you're referring to are on his post from November, consider that he didn't change anything despite those. It is logical to assume things have gotten worse since. And it's not unreasonable to think part of this is related to how at least 3 mass-email providers having launched AI bot-driven campaigns in the last couple of months, including at least one of them integrating OpenClaw - I'm sure there are many more, those are just the ones I've casually spotted.

> My suggestions would be quite effective.

Your suggestions are based on you presuming an outdated spray and pray approach that is increasingly being replaced by far more sophisticated campaigns. I'm not Scalzi, but I regularly get approaches that include far more customization than what you propose, including e.g. full-on web pages customized for my business.

> This isn't a new phenomena in the author world, it's been plagued by 'you have won 1st prize in a poetry competition' for decades.

I know. It's been decades since I got my first one. That is also a good reason to think that something has changed for Scalzi to decide this now after he's for years been above average accessible.
by testfrequency | 2026-03-04 15:07:18+00:00
Chromebooks are much more secure for enterprise and education.

macOS is awful to manage on an enterprise and education level. This will always be Apple’s achilles heel in truly breaking into this market. Admins will push back.

Google has Security down to a science. ChromeOS has little to no malware. Google is constantly reporting malware and exploits to Apple so they can patch active vulns.
by CivBase | 2026-03-04 15:07:26+00:00
> In what ways has the pursuit of perfection harmed the good in their development?

Their lack of device support means I am still running Google's Android and will continue to be until a GraphineOS-supported device that meets my needs becomes available. This means I'm not just lacking in security, but I'm also stuck with Google and all of their anti-consumer practices.

Running GraphineOS without all the security features they want would be better for me than what I currently have.
by skydhash | 2026-03-04 15:07:31+00:00
> Noone is going to develop on this after all.

Here I am, running OpenBSD on a 2019 Dell with 8th gen CPU. I'm currently using a bit less than 4GB of with 6GB as caches (for IO?). It's fine for a lot of progamming work (I have built kernel on this). 8GB is a good amount of RAM if you're not using bloated software.
by snowwrestler | 2026-03-04 15:07:32+00:00
People habitually misunderstand this moment in Apple’s history. Jobs took a shredder to a complex product line of poorly selling products, produced by a company that was nearly bankrupt. That was the right thing to do at that time.

Later when Apple was on sound financial footing, Jobs expanded the product line. That was the right thing to do at that time.

With the Neo, Apple now offers 3 lines of laptops: Pro, Air, Neo. This is not substantially different from 2010 when Apple under Jobs offered 3 lines of laptops: MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air.
by II2II | 2026-03-04 15:07:42+00:00
> That was never a strength of Linux, which most Linux fans would probably acknowledge.

If you are comparing apples-to-apples (e.g. setting up pre-installed Linux verses pre-installed Windows, or installing Linux to installing Windows), I would argue that Linux has been in the lead for many years. Setting up a reasonable desktop distribution (Fedora, Ubuntu, etc.) is no more and no less technical. Linux distributions won't encourage you to create online accounts, try to upsell you online services, or bombard you with questions about privacy settings.

From my last experience with macOS: on a technical front, macOS is simpler to reinstall. The online account setup and upselling is far less intrusive (perhaps to the point where you can legitimately consider it as a beneficial setup step for the end user). Perhaps macOS has the lead, but it is a marginal one.
by Bridged7756 | 2026-03-04 15:08:10+00:00
I agree, it just sucks at understanding style and simplicity.

It's good at code generation, feature wise, it can scaffold and cobble together shit, but when it comes down to code structure, architecture, you essentially have to argue with it over what is better, and it just doesn't seem to get it, at which point it's better to just take the reins and do it yourself. If there's any code smells in your code already, it will just repeat them. Sometimes it will just output shit that's overtly confusing for no reason.
by slaye | 2026-03-04 15:08:14+00:00
Simon, if you're reading this, I'd be really curious to hear your thoughts on how to effectively conduct code reviews in a world where "code is cheap".

One of the biggest struggles I have on my team is coworkers straight up vibing parts of the code and not understanding or guiding the architecture of subsystems. Or at least, not writing code in a way that is meant to be understood by others.

Then when I go through the code and provide extensive feedback (mostly architectural and highlighting odd inconsistencies with the code additions) I'm met with much pushback because "it works, why change it"? Not to mention the sheer size of prs ballooning in recent months.

The end result is me being the bottleneck because I can't keep up with the "pace" of code being generated, and feeling a lot of discomfort and pressure to lower my standards.

I've thought about using a code review agent to review and act as me in proxy, but not being able to control the exact output worries me. And I don't like the lack of human touch it provides. Maybe someone has advice on a humane way to handle this problem.
by lbreakjai | 2026-03-04 15:08:17+00:00
But it is related, isn't it? I wrote "...each swearing they have the secret sauce and the right incantations...". Now compare it to ""Use red/green TDD" is a pleasingly succinct way to get better results out of a coding agent."

Doesn't it sound like the "right incantation"? That's the point of LLMs, they can understand (*) intent. You'd get the same result saying "do tdd" or "do the stuff everyone says they do but they don't, with the failing test first, don't remember the name, but you know what I'm saying innit?"

I'm perhaps uncharitable, and this article just happens to take the collateral damage, but I'm starting to see the same corruption that turned "At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective" into "Mandatory retro exactly once every fortnight, on a board with precisely three columns".
by lich_king | 2026-03-04 15:08:31+00:00
As someone coming from a family of editors and plugged into the publishing world, I think it would be really weird if that was your job. It's not an adversarial relationship. Your job is to pressure-test the arguments and the language, not to ask every time if maybe the person submitting the article didn't really write it, or didn't really interview the person they're claiming to have interviewed.

> A lapse in that non-hypothetically left me responsible, and legally liable, in situations like this.

It didn't. At worst, it exposed the publisher. And the publisher would have the defense that they had the right policies in place and that the misconduct lies with the journalist. Unless it could be shown that you knew about potential issues and still went through with it for political or financial gain, it's a nothingburger.
by Joel_Mckay | 2026-03-04 15:08:53+00:00
In general, almost all insurance companies will demand UL stamped hardware, and most mortgage/lease/commercial property requires insurance.

A hobby BMS is usually a bad idea, as most kits from unknown origins prioritized cost over safety. Depending where you live, prior to roof installation there may be additional zoning and signed engineering drawing requirements.

It is not hard to find UL equipment, but expect to pay about another $600 for the BMS. Yet, it is better than a house burning down, and the insurance provider denying coverage.

Have a look at local certified installer companies, and make sure to get some real references in your town. Just like most HVAC companies... some installers are just over priced scams. Some folks claim https://www.pegasussolar.com/ was inexpensive, and might be worth a call. Best regards =3
by 999900000999 | 2026-03-04 15:09:03+00:00
Keep in mind this is the same website where someone casually mentioned buying a $5,000 Lecia for their kid.

Would you rather junior drop a $500 laptop while they're not paying attention, which is what kids do, or drop a $2,000 laptop?

The second hand market on this is also going to be great. Maybe Junior upgrades to an M5 air when he starts college, he's going to sell his Neo for 300$ which is very accessible for most.

My first laptop was 350$, brought after working for 6.75$ an hour. It was objectively a piece of junk, but hey I got to do computer and it lasted about 3 years before randomly failing for one reason or another.
by AdamN | 2026-03-04 15:09:52+00:00
Generally the MacBook Air is incredible and what I generally recommend. If somebody is doing 'more' then it's the MBP. Now with the Neo I even have a recommendation for price sensitive people who may have otherwise gotten a cheap Windows device filled with crapware.

I think these are all different markets - $1k seems like a small amount for the MBA but it's too much for quite a few people.
by Bender | 2026-03-04 15:10:17+00:00
Email encryption for most people is sufficient even if the metadata is exposed. One can simply state in their email encryption "Bing Bing Bong" or "Why did you not put the trash out?" which might mean to the recipient :: "check the second SFTP server" or "let the cat outside" or "Jump on my private Mumble chat server" or "Get on my private self hosted IRC server". The email message need not be encrypted for that matter.

The intended payload can be in an header-less encrypted file on a throw-away SFTP server in the tmpfs ram disk.
by podperson | 2026-03-04 15:10:18+00:00
OP here.

I wrote this because I was frustrated by the recent "16 AI Agents build a C compiler" narrative. Building a C compiler is an exercise in implementation; I wanted to see if one dev could use AI for invention.

The result is TJS. It's my attempt to fix what I dislike about TypeScript (erased types) and solve the eval() problem for AI agents. It treats JS like the Lisp it was meant to be: types are real values, autocomplete works by introspection, and execution is strictly gas-metered.

The playground is live here if you want to test the sandbox or the types: https://platform.tosijs.net

Happy to answer technical questions about the compiler architecture, the AJS sandbox, or how the gas metering works.

I am in Finland so apologies in advance if I am slow to reply.
by elxr | 2026-03-04 15:10:51+00:00
Very tempting, but considering a macbook air m4 is often just $300-350 more, the 8GB or RAM feels like it's just enough of an asterisk to make this less of the value champion.

I still really like it, but I'll probably wait for a discount.

12 GB would've been amazing to have though, oh well.
by mexicocitinluez | 2026-03-04 15:11:07+00:00
> The problem is that the average person doesn't know how what their actual problems are in sufficient detail to get a working solution. When you get down to breaking down that problem... you become a programmer.

Agreed. I've spent the last few years building an EMR at an actual agency and the idea that users know what they want and can articulate it to a degree that won't require ANY technical decisions is pure fantasy in my experience.
by musesum | 2026-03-04 15:11:15+00:00
I wrote something similar in a Claude Code instructions.md: "minimize cyclomatic complexity" What happened next? It generated an 8 line wrapper function called only once from a different file. So, I told it to inline that logic in the caller. The result? One. Line. Of. Code.

So, I asked it to modify its instructions.md file to not repeat that mistake. The result was the new line "Avoid single-use wrapper functions; inline logic at the call site unless reused"

instruction.md is the new intern.
by wink | 2026-03-04 15:11:17+00:00
I don't remember ever having external accessory issues, I don't use a track pad, battery life is fine (although I will admit macs seem to do better) and the ZFS one is just odd. Literally first time I hear this because while it sure would be nice... everyone uses btrfs or xfs or even ext4 with FDE without any problems for the last.. 15 years? Just one FS apparently has some issues?

Maybe your definition of broken is just as subjective as mine (aka I don't remember ever seeing window management so bad as OSX since fvwm)
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-03-04 15:11:43+00:00
I don't think they would; I'm sure they share a lot of the low level code already, the main difference now is in the user interface and software.

Some time ago (...over ten years ago) they made some movements towards unifying the desktop and tablet interfaces with LaunchPad, which looked like it was designed for a touch screen, but they never followed through. Not even touch screens on their laptops, which honestly still surprises me.
Show HN: Kodama – A self-hosted autonomous daemon for Claude Code and Codex
by flofra | 2026-03-04 15:11:44+00:00
I’ve been using the new Claude Code CLI and Codex extensively, but I found myself constantly babysitting the terminal or waiting for rate limits to expire. I wanted a way to queue up complex coding tasks, walk away, and get a notification on my phone if the agent actually needs my input.

So I built Kodama. It’s a self-hosted daemon written in Go that wraps these CLIs as subprocesses.

Key Features:

Asynchronous Execution: Queue tasks for multiple projects; Kodama runs them sequentially in the background.

Human-in-the-loop (Telegram): When the agent hits a KODAMA_QUESTION or gets stuck, it pings you via Telegram. You can reply directly to the bot to provide the answer.

Rate Limit Management: If the agent signals a rate limit, Kodama saves a checkpoint and automatically retries after a cooldown (default 5h).

Execution Runtimes: You can run project commands (build/test/lint) directly on your host or in an auto-scaffolded Docker environment.

Web UI: A simple dashboard to manage your backlog and watch the live output via WebSockets.

A note on Security:
Kodama is designed as a local-first, trusted-network tool. There is no built-in authentication by design. Please run it on localhost, via a VPN (Tailscale/Wireguard), or behind a secure tunnel like Cloudflare Access.

The project is still a WIP, but it has already changed how I handle larger refactors or boilerplate-heavy features.

I’d love to get your feedback
Show HN: We built a News Synthesis Engine to fight media bias
by charlie_ehlen | 2026-03-04 15:11:57+00:00
Hi HN — we’re Charlie and Sam (two brothers), and we built The Bias, an iOS news app (Android coming soon).

We started The Bias because we found traditional news feeds frustrating: one outlet gives you one framing; opening ten tabs gives you breadth but no synthesis. We wanted a way to understand major events quickly, without spending hours reading or defaulting to a single outlet’s perspective.

For each real-world event we publish a single write-up that makes it clear:

• What coverage converges on (core facts)

• Where perspectives or framing differ

• What’s disputed or still uncertain

• Where specific claims came from (full source list + claim-level traceability for key statements)

• How media around the world reported on the event — which can look very different from domestic coverage. This is especially interesting right now with the situation in Iran, where coverage diverges significantly across regional and international outlets.

How it works (high level):

• Ingest ~5,000–15,000 articles/day from 600+ sources

• Cluster articles by semantic similarity to group reports about the same underlying event

• Extract structured elements (facts, opinions, consequences, speculation, prior context)

• Group and annotate that information

• Generate a first draft with LLMs

• Run the draft through a multi-stage pipeline (coverage completeness checks, contradiction handling, perspective balancing, source traceability, uncertainty labeling, etc.)

• Human review of the final article focused on misrepresentation, hallucination, and missing major viewpoints

We also publish a weekly “rundown” (~25 min read) that summarizes the week, personalized to a user’s interests, using roughly the same process.

The product exists today on iOS and can be used immediately:

• Methodology: https://thebias.co.uk/policies/what-we-do

• About: https://thebias.co.uk/policies/about-the-bias

Free download; limited reading without a subscription.
Subscription removes limits and unlocks features like claim traceability and international outlook.

We’re especially interested in feedback on:

• Does this feel faster than reading multiple outlets, or just different?

• What would make you trust (or distrust) a synthesis like this?

• Is claim-level traceability enough, or would you want stronger signals?

• Is this meaningfully different from using Ground News?

• If you think this is a bad idea, we’d genuinely like to know why.

Happy to answer questions about the pipeline, trade-offs, or mistakes we’ve made so far.

— Charlie and Sam
by Aurornis | 2026-03-04 15:12:01+00:00
Postgres might have been a perfect answer, but the candidate needs to explain why and how.

The purpose of the interview is for the candidate to demonstrate their thought process and ability to communicate it. “Just use Postgres” doesn’t do that.

This would be more obvious if it was a LeetCode problem and the candidate just regurgitated an algorithm from memory without explaining anything about it. Yeah it’s technically the right answer but the interviewer can’t tell if you actually understand what you’re talking about or if you just happened to memorize and answer that works.

Interviews are about communication and demonstrating thought process.
by jihadjihad | 2026-03-04 15:12:09+00:00
Agreed, and that's why I think adding some example prompts and ideas to the Testing section would be helpful. A vanilla-prompted LLM, in my experience, is very unreliable at adding tests that fail when the changes are reverted.

Many times I've observed that the tests added by the model simply pass as part of the changes, but still pass even when those changes are no longer applied.
by MrBuddyCasino | 2026-03-04 15:12:42+00:00
If the numbers can be satisfied by a Postgres then thats the correct answer. The interviewers fucked up, because they sized the problem wrongly.

This is the same issue that was prevalent when the industry switched from HDD to SSD: some system design questions suddenly became trivial, because the IOPS went up by magnitudes. This is not a failure of the interviewees, who correctly went with the times, but a failure of the interviewers.
by gtowey | 2026-03-04 15:12:50+00:00
LLMs can't be strategic because they do not understand the big picture -- that the real work of good software is balancing a hundred different constraints in a way that produces the optimal result for the humans who use it.

It's not all that different from the state of big corp software today! Large organizations with layers of management tend to lose all abiliy to keep a consistent strategy. They tend to go all in on a single dimension such as ROI for the next quarter, but it misses the bigger picture. Good software is about creating longer term value and takes consistent skill & vision to execute.

Those software engineers who focus on this big picture thinking are going to be more valuable than ever.
by Okawari | 2026-03-04 15:13:04+00:00
> No. You're still not quite internalizing that the California regulation does not mandate any verification or enforcement or protection of the accuracy of the age bracket data. It mandates that the question be asked, and the answer taken as-is.

That was my read of this as well. OS developers seems not not necessarilly need to make any effort here. Ask for an age as a number at account creation and let the user change it as they please at any given time.

This might be a dumb question, but what actually constitutes an "affected child for each intentional violation"? Violation of what? The text specifies that "A developer shall request a signal with respect to a particular user from an operating system provider or a covered application store when the application is downloaded and launched."
Am I being negligent just for not checking the age, even if the application is unequivocally ok for all ages? And are children affected by my negligence in any way even though no one was hurt?
by matthewkayin | 2026-03-04 15:13:09+00:00
They are just gotos, but does that mean that they are bad (along with their friend try/catch, who is also a goto?), or does that mean that gotos can be useful when used with restraint?

Gotos get a bad rep because they become spaghetti when misused. But there are lots of cases where using gotos (or break/continue/early return/catch) makes your code cleaner and simpler.

Part of a programmer's job is to reason about code. By creating black and white rules like "avoid gotos", we attempt to outsource the thinking required of us out to some religious statement. We shouldn't do that.

Gotos can be useful and can lead to good code. They can also be dangerous and lead to bad code. But no "rule of thumb" or "programming principle" will save you from bad code.