MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrajatnath | 2026-03-04 17:49:18+00:00
Rajat here.

A few technical details about how this works.

Stack:
- Next.js
- Tailwind
- KaTeX for rendering
- Supabase storage
- deployed on Vercel

The pipeline is roughly:

image → vision model → Markdown + LaTeX → custom renderer

The tricky part isn’t OCR itself — it's preserving structure.

Examples:

• consecutive equations with aligned `=` signs need to become a single `align` block
• handwritten tables must be reconstructed from vertical alignment patterns
• numbered problems must stay separate instead of merging

The system prompt ended up being ~300 lines mostly consisting of *negative constraints* like:

- don't simplify math
- don't merge derivation steps
- don't reorder columns

Without those rules the model constantly tries to "improve" the notes.

One surprising lesson: prompt engineering for OCR is very different from chat prompts — you want the model to be extremely literal.

Still working on better handling for diagrams and messy annotations.

Curious if anyone here has worked on *math layout detection or document AI*.
Stop Rebuilding Front End Apps for Environment Variables (REP RFC)
by olamide226 | 2026-03-04 17:49:25+00:00
Every environment requires rebuilding the same application just to change configuration like API URLs, feature flags, or auth endpoints.

Backend systems solved this problem long ago with runtime configuration. You build once and configure the application when it starts.

Static webapps never got a clean equivalent.

Most solutions today are ad-hoc:
- env.sh scripts that rewrite bundles
- CI pipelines rebuilding per environment
- templating HTML files
- framework-specific hacks

These approaches are fragile and tied to specific build tools.

I’ve been working on a small protocol called REP (Runtime Environment Protocol) that tries to solve this in a portable way.

The idea is simple:
1. Infrastructure provides configuration as environment variables.
2. A gateway injects them into the HTML response as a JSON payload.
3. The frontend reads them at runtime through a small SDK.
4. The payload is integrity-verified to prevent tampering.

example injected payload:
<script id="__rep__" type="application/json">
{
"public": {
"API_URL": "https://api.example.com"
},
"_meta": {
"integrity": "sha256-..."
}
}
</script>

The frontend can then read configuration at runtime instead of at build time.

This enables:
• build once, deploy anywhere
• environment configuration via infrastructure
• compatibility with static hosting and CDNs
• no rebuilds when configuration changes

The spec focuses on three things:
• a standard payload format
• secure integrity verification
• predictable injection semantics

I’m sharing it mostly to get feedback from people who deal with deploying frontend apps at scale.

Spec:
https://github.com/RuachTech/rep/blob/main/spec/REP-RFC-0001.md

URL: https://rep-protocol.dev

Curious if others have run into the same pain or solved this differently.
by xpe | 2026-03-04 17:49:33+00:00
What you've described seems like a better process than most, by far.

> This is exactly why every AI citation we publish goes through a blocker.

Who is "we"? Kudos!

> What guard rails have other people put in front of AI-written judgements?

A great question. Some 'classic' responses here relate to (a) inter-notator agreement [1]; (b) debate [2]; (c) decomposition / deconstruction [3]; and lots more... computer science is all well and good, but philosophy has studied these topics for thousands of years! Epistemology, in particular, totally slays.

I would also generalize the question: what guard-rails do we need in front of any and all writing? Presumably there is some generative process behind it, but I assume very little now-a-days. Even before the last several years of transformer-fueled mayhem, my confidence even in "highly intelligent" and college-educated people dropped considerably. Talk is cheap, and some people like to talk more than others -- often the kinds of people that I don't find value in listening to.

[1]: Inter-annotator agreement : http://ron.artstein.org/publications/inter-annotator-preprin...

[2]: AI Safety via Debate : https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.00899

[3]: Fact in fragments: Deconstructing complex claims via LLM-based atomic fact extraction and verification : https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09574...
by drdec | 2026-03-04 17:50:11+00:00
This is the discussion I was responding to:

>> Cards don't make money from their fees. They make money from people who fail to pay and then pay the ridiculous interest.

> Interchange fees seem to be a sizable portion of revenue. Discover has listed them as 29% of revenue, BoA at ~$10B annually…

My complaint is that pointing at revenue alone does not rebut the initial statement. That's all. The argument was insufficient, not your side of the argument is wrong.
by giraffe_lady | 2026-03-04 17:50:38+00:00
I don't think climate change is being ignored: AI, war profiteering, ICE, detention centers, destruction of the international system, global fascism are their answer to climate change.

It's not to prevent it, or to mitigate its damages, it's for the people who disproportionately caused it, and have already benefitted from it, to finalize their control over the resources they want. Some of those resources are some of us.
by game_the0ry | 2026-03-04 17:50:38+00:00
> This is a major challenge to Microsoft.

> Other than Microsoft nobody even makes decent laptops in the Windows world.

I get the impression that microsoft and the pc world have given up on consumer hardware and instead are completely focused on enterprise and ai. That's why windows 11 is saturated with bugs and is basically unusable, but enterprise is forced to buy it.
by bitwize | 2026-03-04 17:51:10+00:00
This is the first use people cooked up for the MITS Altair computer, which at the time could only output to its blinkenlights without expansion. Before a tiny company called Micro-Soft released BASIC for the thing, some madlad at the Homebrew Computer Club found a way to spin the CPU in loops tight enough that the interference could be picked up as tones on an AM radio, allowing for music to be created. Good to see the old traditions are still alive.
by vikramkr | 2026-03-04 17:51:12+00:00
I'm seeing a ton of comments like that one about how apple is holding ipados back but am I going crazy or wasn't the big story of iPad is last year how many updates it got to make it more of a desktop replacement? Like half the features you mentioned were added last year plus a calculator app right? There was specifically a whole iPad os refresh that was well received as finally massively boosting iPad pro capabilities? Like, very recently?
by euanai | 2026-03-04 17:51:21+00:00
Great questions!

Phase gates are hard — it's a PreToolUse hook (phase-gate-guard.js) that checks prerequisites before allowing state.json updates. If something's missing, the write gets denied. Like Phase 1→2 won't pass without literature-review.md (>2000 words), ≥10 papers in metadata, and a references.bib. Phase 6→7 needs a completed tournament with a champion. No exceptions — the agent just can't advance. There are some softer warnings too, but the main gates are hard blocks.

For champion selection — it's Successive Halving. All hypotheses compete in Round 1 (15% of GPU budget), top half survive to Round 2 (30%), champion gets Round 3 (55%). Each round eliminates the bottom half by score. The score is a weighted mix of metric improvement, mechanism signal quality, compute efficiency, and novelty — weights shift depending on venue target (oral cares more about novelty, poster cares more about raw metric gains).
by gus_massa | 2026-03-04 17:51:31+00:00
It would be nice if the 10 example test fits in one page.

I selected "First Grader>Subtraction>Within 10" and I got 10-6 as an exercise. I'm not sure if it's the usual slot. I expect "no carry" subtraction at the first step, but it may vary between schools/country/decade/whatever.
by pembrook | 2026-03-04 17:51:41+00:00
I think this also looks super compelling for people who want to ditch the Macbook Pro.

I'm mostly at a desk so I'd love to be able to switch to Mac Mini only when M5-M6 drops on the mini. The problem is I need a laptop for travel, weekend trips, events, etc.

The Neo is so cheap that I can buy a new Mac Mini AND the Neo for roughly the price of the macbook pro and get the best of both worlds.
by observationist | 2026-03-04 17:52:20+00:00
So by offshoring things like this, Facebook is explicitly making it legal for the NSA et al to engage in what amounts to mass surveillance and do all the things to that data over in Nairobi that are explicitly illegal here in the states.

Maybe we should be banning the offshoring of tech jobs that could and should be done by Americans, not for any reasons of nationalism or isolationism, but for the simple reasons that our laws are not caught up to the fact that these companies are sending sensitive data all over the world. And if Facebook can't afford to pay US wages to sufficiently support their product, then maybe that product deserves to fail in the market.

We should also ban any transport of sensitive data beyond the border - our laws are built for services in America, and three letter agencies love to play the technical gotcha games with precise wording of the laws. Keep US data in the US, because our government is not to be trusted, and our corporations are not to be trusted, unless or until explicit and well designed laws and regulations rein in any potential abuses.
by misnome | 2026-03-04 17:52:26+00:00
I've been playing with 3.5:122b on a GH200 the past few days for rust/react/ts, and while it's clearly sub-Sonnet, with tight descriptions it can get small-medium tasks done OK - as well as Sonnet if the scope is small.

The main quirk I've found is that it has a tendency to decide halfway through following my detailed instructions that it would be "simpler" to just... not do what I asked, and I find it has stripped all the preliminary support infrastructure for the new feature out of the code.
by m_ke | 2026-03-04 17:52:27+00:00
Future is looking really bleak, I can't imagine what will happen when it's time for OpenAI to pay back the 100s of billions that they burned for a me too model that's no better than the rest of the field.

Will all their ex-meta execs use that personal info that people fed into these chatbots to milk the whales or will it be more profitable to sell to a. company like Palantir for mass surveillance.
by D-Machine | 2026-03-04 17:52:38+00:00
This is IMO just bad faith sealioning, you can look at the whole replication crisis in psychology and social science (esp. the work of people like Nick Brown and the GRIM test, or Uri Simonsohn), or sites like Retraction Watch, and see clear evidence of everything I am saying. There are endless papers in ML research going into issues with test datasets and data duplication, etc. In plenty of cases all data and code is made open, so it is trivial to check data issues and methods.

Also, review is back and forth, and has rounds: you almost always interrogate the scientists of the paper you are reviewing. I don't think you have any idea of what you are talking about at all.
by Itoldmyselfso | 2026-03-04 17:52:40+00:00
Pixel camera app is fully supported by GOS, you just install it from Play store (or from other sources). If you don't have Google Photos installed the last photo preview won't work, but you can install a 'shim' app that fixes it without need for Photos app: https://github.com/lukaspieper/Gcam-Services-Provider

https://grapheneos.org/usage#pixel-camera
by armoredkitten | 2026-03-04 17:52:46+00:00
I've long wished that "journals" and academic societies would transition from a publishing model to a cultivation model. If everything is available on arXiv, that's great, but it also means the best of the best is mixed in with all the rest.

Journals (in the sense of whoever is on the editorial board) don't need to cease to exist; they just need to transition to "here's our list this month of what the best new articles are on X topic". The paper's already there on arXiv, you could already read it before. But having a group of editors that cultivate a list of good articles (as well as the peer review process that can, in an ideal world, serve to improve a paper) can serve to make sifting through arXiv less overwhelming, and draw attention to papers in particular subfields, subject matter, or whatever other criteria might be relevant.
by samcheng | 2026-03-04 17:53:20+00:00
Just yesterday, we were discussing starting to retire our fleet of 8GB Macbook Airs, because 8GB just isn't enough to run Tahoe and a few apps. Luckily, most of our Macbook Airs are 16GB to avoid this kind of obsolescence.

It looks like this MacBook Neo doesn't even have an option for 16GB, unfortunately.
by craftkiller | 2026-03-04 17:53:21+00:00
FWIW the PS5 controller is super particular about what charger you use due to Sony being dumb, but the deciding factor there is the charger, not the cable.

Source is the eternal benevolent champion of usbc compliance testing, Benson Leung: https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/tdduha/commen...

(and also my personal experience, but Benson explains why)
by lentil_soup | 2026-03-04 17:53:27+00:00
chill, I'm not offended, just thought it was worth mentioning it sounds bad to native speakers. Wouldn't you mention it if someone was misusing a Dutch word?

Also, it comes from French and Spanish [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html], it's the same word and same grammar, subject before adjective.
Show HN: ChessWoodie – structured chess tactics training
by ghmaster | 2026-03-04 17:53:30+00:00
I built ChessWoodie as a platform for structured chess tactics training.

Most puzzle trainers give you random puzzles. That can help calculation, but it also means you rarely see the same pattern twice, which makes it harder to build fast pattern recognition.

ChessWoodie organizes puzzles into courses where the same positions repeat across training cycles. The approach is inspired by the Woodpecker Method: solving the same puzzles repeatedly until the patterns become automatic.

You can try it directly in the browser. There’s a guest login if you want to jump straight into solving puzzles.

Curious to hear feedback from people who train tactics regularly.
by hintymad | 2026-03-04 17:54:37+00:00
There has been tension between Qwen's research team and Alibaba's product team, say the Qwen App. And recently, Alibaba tried to impose DAU as a KPI. It's understandable that a company like Alibaba would force a change of product strategy for any number of reasons. What puzzled me is why they would push out the key members of their research team. Didn't the industry have a shortage of model researchers and builders?
by malloci | 2026-03-04 17:54:44+00:00
Actually metal's pretty bendy when compared to plastic (most anyway...mmv based upon formula).

The metal construction is what prompted me to switch over to macbook pro's back in the day. The plastic dell laptops i used to use couldn't handle the abuse that it took during all of the travel i was doing at the time (cases kept cracking). I switched to a pro and was rewarded later with it surviving a 5 foot fall from a car rental counter. It bent part of the corner, but the screen was still in tact and it continued to work well enough to get me through the trip. I suspect the plastic alternative would have been toast.

Having kids today and seeing how rough they are with their toys, I'm not confident that a plastic laptop would survive them long.
by NoboruWataya | 2026-03-04 17:55:01+00:00
> On that topic, an honest question: what is the killer feature of banking apps that everyone is so hot on? Are we talking like retail banking or money transmitters? I am not using any bespoke banking apps, and I don't feel like I'm missing out, but maybe I just don't know what I'm missing.

For me, the killer "feature" is that I need to generate an auth code on my bank's app to be able to log in to my account and make transfers via my browser (or I can use the app directly). In other words, it's considerably more difficult to actually do (retail) banking without my bank's app.
by ieviev | 2026-03-04 17:55:15+00:00
Yes, most (i think all) lazy DFA engines have a mutable DFA behind a lock internally that grows during matching.

Multithreading is generally a non-issue, you just wrap the function that creates the state behind a lock/mutex, this is usually the default.

The subtle denial of service part is interesting, i haven't thought of it before. Yes this is possible. For security-critical uses i would compile the full DFA ahead of time - the memory cost may be painful but this completely removes the chance of anything going wrong.

There are valid arguments to switch from DFA to NFA with large state spaces, but RE# intentionally does not switch to a NFA and capitalizes on reducing the DFA memory costs instead (eg. minterm compression in the post, algebraic simplifications in the paper).

The problem with going from DFA to NFA for large state spaces is that this makes the match time performance fall off a cliff - something like going from 1GB/s to 1KB/s as we also show in the benchmarks in the paper.

As for eviction techniques i have not researched this, the simplest thing to do is just completely reset the instance and rebuild past a certain size, but likely there is a better way.
by swat535 | 2026-03-04 17:55:43+00:00
As an Iranian in the West who has a family of Shia mulsims, what Westerners don't understand is that the sectarians _pray_ for death..

It's difficult for someone on this forum to fathom how anyone would _want to die_, but that's how these guys operate. Killing Khamenei did nothing but to grant him exactly what he wanted. He was martyred at the hands of the enemy during the holy month of Ramadan. He had already delegated all his operations and stayed home, waiting for bombs to drop.

Assassinating him simply poured more gasoline to the fire. Decapitating extremist leadership doesn't achieve much (as we just witnessed), you can't kill an ideology like this with guns.

The other thing that I'll mention is about 30% of the population in Iran supports IRGC and within those 30%, at least _half_ of them are willing to die for the cause. in a country of 90M, that's millions of people..

So unless you're going to conduct a genocide, you're not killing all of them, and even if you do, the few that remain will grow again.

United States did a great job exporting liberalism to Iran over the past 40 years and some of those ideas were starting to take shape. However I feel like now they undid all that work and united all IRGC supporters because of the war.

I think TRUMP miscalculated Iranian's abilities to take over the regime. The diaspora celebrating Iran getting bombed are out of touch with the reality of the country.
by tdaltonc | 2026-03-04 17:55:49+00:00
We talk a little bit about this in the paper, but just a bit. And it is an important question. Real entities change! We’re not just trying to create a representation of now, but a historical record of how we got here. The two ideas we played with that didn’t make it in the paper were
1) explicitly tell the NERD system to keep a timeline for each entity that tracks “core state” changes.
2) Let the NERD-agents also access the full change log of the NERD documents, so that they could see the history of the document. Possibly like a git history. For the paper we left these out because they were both too complicating.
by a456463 | 2026-03-04 17:55:49+00:00
lmao the koolaid in this thread is mind boggling. most of the development on mac unless everybody is doing iOS and Swift development with 3rd party web services / APIs, is going to involve brew/virtualization. currently running 29GB out of 32GB on M4 for work. This is just absolute unrealistic claim.

I also survey and manage development env for a 250 engineer tech org. 8GB is not going to fly
Show HN: FileShot – zero-knowledge file sharing, 50GB/file free, no paywalls
by GraysoftDev | 2026-03-04 17:56:12+00:00
I'm a college student developer who built FileShot because I was tired of "privacy-first" file sharing being marketing copy rather than an architectural commitment.

The thing that bothers me most about the current landscape: services claim zero-knowledge encryption, then require you to hand over your full name and email address just to password-protect a link. If the server genuinely never sees the key — why does it need to know who you are before you can use a basic feature? It doesn't. That's a conversion funnel, not a privacy decision.

How FileShot actually works:
- AES-256-GCM runs entirely in the browser before any bytes leave your machine
- Keys are generated client-side and exist only in the URL fragment (#key=...)
- URL fragments are never sent in HTTP requests — the server is architecturally incapable of seeing your key
- Password protection, expiry dates, download limits: all free, no account required
- Accounts exist only for things that genuinely need server-side state: File Manager, history, persistent settings

What I've shipped as one person:
- Web app (pure static HTML — no build pipeline, no framework bloat)
- Native desktop app (Windows + Mac)
- Chrome extension (screenshot capture, clipboard upload, page selection capture)
- Android app

Free tier: 50GB per file. I have the infrastructure to support it, so I do. No file count limits, no bandwidth throttle, no artificial feature gates.

I built this because I genuinely believe a single developer with the right infrastructure can build something that competes with well-funded startups on the actual merits. Not to harvest data. Not to build funnels. Because doing it right felt more satisfying than doing it profitably.

Would love honest feedback — especially: what would it take for you to actually trust a service like this with sensitive files? What trust signals matter most to you?
by brendoelfrendo | 2026-03-04 17:56:20+00:00
I think this is part of the point, perhaps? I get strong Urbit vibes from the Gastown fanfic. Take a relatively simple concept, but invent an entirely new vocabulary to describe it. It satisfies the creator's ego, and acts as a filter for non-believers. People need to buy in to the creator's vision and commit to learning the lingo in order to engage. People who don't get dismissed as lacking the capacity to understand. In other words, cult behavior.
by daneel_w | 2026-03-04 17:56:24+00:00
> Pinephones have entirely closed source baseband firmware.

> The baseband firmware itself doesn't have any replacement available.

Same with the Google Pixels and their Samsung Exynos modem. Neither you nor GrapheneOS users have any idea at all what's going on in their cellular transceivers. What will it be for the upcoming Motorola phone?
by philistine | 2026-03-04 17:56:45+00:00
Well the battery is usually glued, but Apple has started using this weird glue that releases if you give it a specific electric charge. It's replaceable but it's a complicated affair. I expect the Neo's battery to be glued on the chassis.

The SSD is difficult to replace because Apple uses storage chips with no controller; the SSD controller is in their CPU. So you can't put in any M.2 in there even if you wanted. Some small companies have managed to offer upgrade parts for the Mac Mini, which has socketed storage chips.

As time marches on and PC manufacturers stay still, Apple manages to simplify its logic boards by reducing the number of connectors and parts, lowering the price to make a computer. Apple, which has never really offered anything below 1000$, has entered a new market with a bang.

I expect a computer in 20 years to look like the system-on-a-chip that Apple makes for its watches. I don't know why people are adamant that we need more controllers and chips on our machines, not less.