MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thewebguyd | 2026-03-11 17:49:54+00:00
> "hahaha, wut, with 8 GB of RAM? lmao, lol, you Apple bot?!"

And it would seem they never learn either. I saw the same comments when the M1 Air came out, then they quickly shut up when people were pushing those little base model airs well beyond what anyone thought they were capable of.

The same thing is happening with the Neo now. It feels like an M1 moment all over again for the PC OEM industry.

If you aren't a gamer, there is zero reason at this point to consider any other laptop besides a macbook. Apple now has one for every price point. This neo is going to destroy the consumer PC space. Dell, HP, Acer are probably sweating right now.
by dchftcs | 2026-03-11 17:50:01+00:00
It may be surprising to you, but I don't drive (I don't live in the US, but even when I did I didn't really have to), and there was a period of time I resorted to not even taking taxis because a crash in those times would have been much messier than just myself dying. But my own private life aside, driving, to many people, is a necessity, sometimes even for survival, while lending a hand to a stranger, however nobel that may be, is not.
by ASalazarMX | 2026-03-11 17:50:12+00:00
> _capitalization_ is one of those "arbitrary rules"

If you're going to qualify capitalization as an arbitrary rule, then it wouldn't matter if it's all lowercase or all uppercase. It's not a whim of scholars, it improves readability, it emphasizes, it carries meaning.

All uppercase looks loud today, but early computers were also all uppercase and it was normal. All lowercase looks bland and sloppy, only a few steps removed from "what u doing lol?" texting shorthand.
by adrian_b | 2026-03-11 17:50:44+00:00
Euler had both an address-of operator, which was prefix "@" and an indirect addressing a.k.a. pointer dereferencing operator, which was a postfix middle dot.

So it had everything that C has, except pointer arithmetic.

Only a subset of the programming languages that have pointers also allow pointer arithmetic, because many believe that whenever address arithmetic is needed only indices shall be used, not pointers, because with indices it is much easier for the compiler to determine the range of addresses that may be accessed.
by pc86 | 2026-03-11 17:51:12+00:00
> they aren't contributing via B&O tax like businesses do

Well they're not businesses so that makes sense.

> "just" proportional to how much money they spend (emphasis mine)

Yeah, which for most of them is going to be a lot more than someone earning a fraction of what they earn, so they do actually contribute more in absolute terms, even if for some reason you think that their contributing less on a percentage basis is for some reason bad.

Good luck finding someone making $2M/yr who isn't spending a lot more in the local economy than someone earning $40k/yr.
by ramses0 | 2026-03-11 17:52:10+00:00
I asked this question a while back (the "only train w/ wikipedia LLM") and got pointed to the general-purpose "compression benchmarks" page: `https://www.mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html`

While I understand some of the fundamental thoughts behind that comparison, it's slightly wonky... I'm not asking "compress wikipedia really well", but instead "can a 'model' reason its way through wikipedia" (and what does that reasoning look like?).

Theoretically with wikipedia-multi-lang you should be able to reasonably nail machine-translation, but if everyone is starting with "only wikipedia" then how well can they keep up with the wild-web-trained models on similar bar chart per task performance?

If your particular training technique (using only wikipedia) can go from 60% of SOTA to 80% of SOTA on "Explain why 6-degrees of Kevin Bacon is relevant for tensor operations" (which is interesting to plug into Google's AI => Dive Deeper...), then that's a clue that it's not just throwing piles of data at the problem, but instead getting closer to extracting the deeper meaning (and/or reasoning!) that the data enables.
by mikepurvis | 2026-03-11 17:52:20+00:00
I've been a ROS 1 (and now 2) user since 2010. I think like the game engine analogy given elsewhere in the thread, in that ROS gives you some important things "for free" if you cooperate with its ecosystem conventions. Bagging, visualization, and sim are the three obvious ones that I think a lot of teams don't think about if they're just focused on getting cartographer or whatever going, and not considering the larger development and debugging questions.

For some, packaging/deployment would also fall under the umbrella of a solved-by-ROS problem, however I don't think the Open Robotics supplied debs are suitable for most product deployments, for a variety of reasons that I've talked about in two separate ROSCon talks.
by sixo | 2026-03-11 17:52:24+00:00
Prices are constrained by demand moreso than by cost of production. Lego pieces are expensive because they can be, they still sell, and this is largely due to the quality. As long as the quality moat persists, they can charge as much as people will pay, and--good for them!

That you personally would prefer lower prices does not mean they "should" be lower. Those lower costs of production, to Lego company, "should" mean higher profits, not lower prices, and again--good for them!
by pizlonator | 2026-03-11 17:52:25+00:00
WebAssembly has had extraordinary levels of investment from browser devs and the broader community.

> terrible no-good DevEx for basically the whole time

I'm telling you why.

> still steadily making it's way into more and more of the web.

It is, but you can still browser the web without it just fine, despite so much investment and (judging by how HN reacts to it) overwhelming enthusiasm from devs
by juliet_apps | 2026-03-11 17:52:43+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a small app called Vacation Maximizer to solve a recurring problem: manually cross-referencing my calendar with public holidays to figure out how to get the longest breaks using the least amount of annual leave.

It’s a simple tool that maps out your PTO for you. It currently supports holiday calendars for over 100 countries.

Key features:

Privacy-first: No account required, no tracking, and it works entirely offline.

Global support: 100+ country calendars included.

Free: I built this as a side project and wanted to keep it accessible for everyone.

Tech/Links:

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/ie/app/vacation-maximizer/id675843810

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.julietdupr...

More info: https://www.julietdupreez.com/home/vacation-maximizer/

I’d love to hear your feedback on the UI or any additional features (like specific regional holidays) you’d find useful!
by WorldMaker | 2026-03-11 17:52:46+00:00
> What I don't understand is why they had to make string formatting so rigid. Maybe it has to do with internationalization? I'd have liked if it included a sort of templating system to make the construction of rendered date-time strings much easier.

I think Temporal takes the right approach: toString() is the (mostly) round-trippable ISO format (or close to it) and every other format is accessible by toLocaleString(). In Python terms, it is a bit like formally separating __repl__ and __str__ implementations, respectively. Date's toString() being locale-dependent made it a lot harder to round-trip Date in places like JSON documents if you forgot or missed toISOString().

Temporal's various toLocaleString() functions all take the same Intl.DateTimeFormat constructor parameters, especially its powerful options [1] argument, as Date's own toLocaleString() has had for a long while and has been the preferred approach to locale-aware string formatting.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
by alexbuiko | 2026-03-11 17:52:56+00:00
Those sigma numbers are incredible—dropping variance by 24x practically confirms that you’ve managed to 'trap' the model in a low-entropy state. In production, predictability (the 'anti-tangent' factor) is often worth more than the raw discount.

SDAG (Systematic Defect Awareness & Guidance) is a protocol we’re developing for auditing AI infrastructure at the hardware-inference interface.

Most observability tools look at the 'what' (tokens, logs), but we look at the 'how' (routing entropy and hardware stress). We use it to detect when a model's routing logic starts 'redlining' the hardware—essentially catching those exploration tangents you mentioned by monitoring physical signals like memory controller stress and cache thrashing before they even manifest as high latency or cost spikes.

We're currently open-sourcing the core SDK [https://github.com/alexbuiko-sketch/SDAG-Standard]. Given your results, I’d be very curious to see if your 'pre-indexed context' approach shows a direct drop in hardware-level jitter. It sounds like you've found a software-level 'clamp' for what we’ve been measuring as physical entropy.
by pc86 | 2026-03-11 17:53:57+00:00
> Alternatively, they may try to define high income as a new class of property. Property taxes only have to be uniform within a specific class of property, so if they create a new class, then it would be uniform for that class.

If nothing else, from a rhetorical/argumentative perspective I am actually really interested in hearing a coherent argument that your 1,000,001st dollar is a difference class of property than your 999,999th.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-03-11 17:54:15+00:00
When it lasts 5 to 10 years. I’m still using my 2020 MacBook Pro, and figure I’ll get another half decade out of it. That’s <$200/year. The Neo could be a <$100/year laptop, which puts it in the same class as $200 shitbooks that crap out after two or three years.
by Ygg2 | 2026-03-11 17:54:50+00:00
I think the issue is OOP patterns are one part missing features, one part trying to find common ground for Java, Modula, C++, SmallTalk, that it ends up too broad.

A much saner definition is looking at how languages evolved and how term is used. The way it's used is to describe an inheritance based language. Basically C++ and the descendants.
by atmavatar | 2026-03-11 17:55:12+00:00
Please enlighten us: which former presidents have been similar strong man caricatures engaging in anywhere near the level of cronyism and systemic corruption as the current administration? What precisely did they do which demonstrates such behavior?

We've certainly had some colorful presidents in the past, but the current president is engaged in a lot of blatantly impeachable behavior, and as far as I know, we've never had such a passive and complicit Congress before.
by cush | 2026-03-11 17:55:13+00:00
Imagine for a second if supply and demand were actually the only forces at play for these businesses run by billionaires… - forgetting oligopolies, blatant antitrust, lobbying, the revolving door between government and the c-suites, legal tax evasion, etc.

We don’t live in a fantasy world simulation on a frictionless plane where anyone can be a billionaire if they just pull up their bootstraps.
by M4R5H4LL | 2026-03-11 17:55:40+00:00
per ChatGPT, it becomes cost effective (against the $200/mo usage tier) to acquire an RTX 6000 Pro if heavily (+8 hrs/day) after around 2 years (at $0.20/kwh which is lower than cal residential rates). I am interested in alternatives too but I haven't found anything close to Claude Code.
by DangitBobby | 2026-03-11 17:56:26+00:00
I have a Real ID, and I supplied a proof of citizenship to get it. However, in my state, it's possible to obtain a Real ID without providing proof of citizenship, so my Real ID does not qualify as proof of citizenship. My passport is the only document I have that could function as both photo ID and proof of citizenship. Passports are not the easiest things to obtain and they are not free.
by brodouevencode | 2026-03-11 17:56:26+00:00
You're right.

But society where the basis has a liberal perspective, individual sovereignty is held in the highest regard, private property is protected, and the nuclear family is the underpinning of it, I'm okay with. Judeo-Christian societies have this, and maybe aside from Sikhs and some Buddhist sects I don't know of any other religion that does this.
by drnick1 | 2026-03-11 17:56:33+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. And certainly not software quality.

I would argue the opposite: while Apple hardware is generally excellent, it is the software that leaves to be desired. Apple has also been consistently pushing the industry in a dangerous direction (walled gardens with app stores, excessive power over developers and users). MacOS is also very behind Linux these days in terms of app compatibility (especially games).

I won't be buying a Neo before a compatible Linux distro is confirmed. If the stock OS can't be replaced for one reason or another, it's dead on arrival as far as I am concerned.
by pxeboot | 2026-03-11 17:56:52+00:00
> I don’t know how they do things nowadays, but it used to be the case that the same SKU didn’t even guarantee you the same hardware. Two machines of the same order could even be slightly different, requiring different drivers.

Apple is guilty of this too. For example, two iPhone's purchased at the same time can have displays from different manufactures, with noticeable quality differences between them.
by nyrikki | 2026-03-11 17:57:07+00:00
> Can't they run an example prompt and verify they get the exact same output token probabilities for all prompts?

You don’t even get that with GPUs in general, or really floating point in general.

The Art of Computer Programming. Volume 2: Seminumerical Algorithms section 4.2.2 with explain where it loses floating addition associativity property.

Apartness relations are another possible lens.
by irishcoffee | 2026-03-11 17:57:24+00:00
TL;DR: scientists are still pursuing science.

> Eichhorn and her colleagues are pursuing a different possibility. In 1976, Steven Weinberg, a theorist who would eventually earn a Nobel Prize, pointed out that if you zoomed in far enough, you might reach a place where the rules of physics would stop changing. New realms would stop appearing; the intensities of the forces would stabilize; and gravity would turn out to make perfect sense after all.
by SilverElfin | 2026-03-11 17:57:25+00:00
The lack of competition is at this point choice American politicians and the voters. They should be breaking up mega corporations or at least taxing them at really high rates.

Instead, it looks like all the existing incumbents will just continue to rule over society. They have capital, monopolies, and the moats of distribution channels and contracts with their current customers. There is no fair competition - they’ll just replicate your clever product easily.
by happyPersonR | 2026-03-11 17:57:42+00:00
Tbh ipv4 and cgnat im hoping at this point will go the way of POTS and be something we force turn off. There are differences between how ipv6 works and v4 ….

But I’m not sure the cost of running these shims for forever is worth what they’re holding back.

The only question remaining in my mind is if the world is ready for ipv6 … but maybe it’s better if we at least set a date.
by boothby | 2026-03-11 17:57:43+00:00
Thinking about speed like this used to be necessary in C and C++ but these days you should feel free to write the most legible thing (Horner's form) and let the compiler find the optimal code for it (probably similar to Horner's form but broken up to have a shallower dependency chain).

But if you're writing in an interpreted language that doesn't have a good JIT, or for a platform with a custom compiler, it might be worth hand-tweaking expressions with an eye towards performance and precision.
by maxglute | 2026-03-11 17:57:53+00:00
Lazy LLM acronym dump:

1IC / 2IC: First Island Chain / Second Island Chain.

ABM: Anti-Ballistic Missile.

CENTCOM: United States Central Command, combatant command for Middle East

MENA: Middle East and North Africa, in this case oil that comes from gulf to asia.

IR: Iran

MIC: Military-Industrial Complex.

PRC: People's Republic of China.

SKR: South Korea (Republic of Korea).

PH: Philippines.

The broad analogy is imagine a boxing match. US is aging heavy weight with finesse, Iran is a teen whose been training for a few years. The super weight's day job is protecting other teens from Iran.

On paper one would expect US to absolutely brain Iran in first round. Before fight, heavy weight had to spend months training / prepping. Which is strange vs fight against teenager, but we can charitably interpret that as diligence. Fight starts, teenage Iran somehow lands a few blows. Which is concerning. Maybe got lucky, a little embarrassing but as long as US heavy weight knocks out teen emphatically in first round. Then teenager survived first round, spent rest period between rounds to punch the other teens US was obligated to protect in the face. Fight continues, what if that knockout doesn't happen until round2... 3... 4... etc. What if heavy weight drags out and wins by TKO in 10th round, what if heavy weight gets tired and forfeits by 5th round. Other teens in protection racket gets nervous, because PRC is not Iran, PRC is like 10 super heavy weights with homefield advantage watching US heavyweight borrow equipment to finish a minor fight with Iran. Some will fixate on the fact that yes, in deed the super weight can probably murder that teen eventually, but the amount of effort required feels insane.

Maybe the strategically dignified / smart thing was for US not to accept (pick) that fight in the first place.
by voidmain0001 | 2026-03-11 17:57:55+00:00
From work, I have a Thinkpad X1 gen 13 and it's awesome. Super lightweight, and great power. But, when I tried Linux a few months ago its hardware was still too bleeding edge. Things may be better with kernel v7 on the way. I like the Gram as a personal device so may I know what model Gram you have?
by scosman | 2026-03-11 17:58:01+00:00
What's the best "docker with openclaw" currently available? I have my own computers to run it on (I don't need a server). I want to play around, but containerized to avoid the security risk of MacOS app.

There seem to be about 20 options, and new ones every day. Any consensus on the best few are, and their tradeoffs?
by frankfrank13 | 2026-03-11 17:58:22+00:00
Analysis:

1. How do I build a datacenter

2. How is the industrial ceramic market structured, how do they perform

3. How does a changing environment impact life insurance

Strategy:

1. Should I build a datacenter

2. Should I invest in an industrial ceramics company

3. Should I divest my life insurance subsidiary

Specifically in the software world this would be "automate some esoteric ERP migration" or "build this data pipeline" vs. "how can we be more digital native" or "how do we integrate more AI into our company"
by rhcom2 | 2026-03-11 17:58:37+00:00
> voting requiring proof of citizenship

Isn't this just a solution in search of a problem though? Multiple investigations have discovered absolutely minuscule amount of non-citizen voting in US elections. It's something that seems reasonable on its face but lacks any purpose and comes with an ulterior motive that it is part of the made up GOP talking points of a "stolen election" and "illegals voting".
by rvz | 2026-03-11 17:58:49+00:00
It's quite amusing to see so-called "developers" waiting for their 10x engineer called "Claude" to hand hold them like interns who can't read or write any code when it goes and takes a break for 2 hours.

Codex was taking a nap for 8 hours [0] recently with many of the interns here complaining that it is "down".

[0] https://status.openai.com/incidents/01KK9JA8JKQKDW1W24T09NHB...
by SoftTalker | 2026-03-11 17:58:51+00:00
Epoch (a/k/a "unix timestamps") are OK when you just need an incrementing relative time. When you start converting them back and forth to real calendar dates, times, with time zones, DST, leap seconds, etc. the dragons start to emerge.

A lesson I learned pretty early on is always use the date-time datatypes and libraries your language or platform gives you. Think very carefully before you roll your own with integer timestamps.
by Ocerge | 2026-03-11 17:59:15+00:00
You will run into thundering herd/hotspotting/pre-warmed caching issues when you have to restart. There's generally not an easy to way to switch these sorts of systems on and off, especially a relatively new system that isn't battle-hardened.

I got nothing for the github outages this year though, that seems like incompetence.
by SilverElfin | 2026-03-11 17:59:30+00:00
The problem is if you go public as a small company, it can be hard to survive. You need to meet expectations every time you do an earnings call or watch your stock get crushed, and it’ll never be given another chance. The burdens are also a lot higher in terms of the cost.

You don’t really see companies under $10 billion going public anymore. That may continue to be the case, but it’s terrible for entrepreneurs.
by dheera | 2026-03-11 17:59:42+00:00
ROS is, in my opinion, dying on the industry front.

* It is a dependency hell

* It is resource-heavy on embedded systems

* Huge chunks of it are maintained by hobbyists and far behind the state of the art (e.g. the entire navigation stack)

* As robotics moves toward end-to-end systems, stuff needs to stay on GPU memory, not shuttled back and forth across processes through a networking stack.

* Decentralized messaging was the wrong call. A bunch of nodes running on a robot doesn't need a decentralized infrastructure. This isn't Bitcoin. Robots talking to each other, maybe, but not pieces of code on the same robot.
by Mooshux | 2026-03-11 18:00:02+00:00
The secrets question that keeps coming up here is worth unpacking. When your agent runs in the cloud, the question isn't just "did the VM get compromised." It's what keys the agent had in the first place. Most setups dump long-lived API keys into environment variables and call it a day. That works until it doesn't.

We built API Stronghold specifically for this: instead of baking keys into the agent's environment, you issue scoped, short-lived credentials at runtime. The agent gets exactly what it needs for that task, nothing more. If the agent misbehaves or gets hijacked, the blast radius is the credential TTL, not your entire API account.

Worth thinking about regardless of which agent runtime you use: https://apistronghold.com
by pc86 | 2026-03-11 18:00:22+00:00
Going from a high tax state to a low tax state to purchase goods is not substantially different than going from a state with strict anti-abortion laws to a state with lax anti-abortion laws to get an abortion. At best it is intellectually inconsistent to think one is good and the other is bad. I'd rather people have the freedom to vote with their wallets and feet.

Even taking states out of the equation, if I live in a city with a city-specific sales tax, that city doesn't suddenly get the right to lay claim to all my economic activity whether in that city or elsewhere.
by kccqzy | 2026-03-11 18:00:28+00:00
> It might be worthwhile to ensure that a web app you're developing will work on a less powerful machine

If that’s your goal this machine is still too powerful. Web apps generally care about single thread performance. The machine has a single thread performance that exceeds any and all Intel/AMD processors, according to Geekbench (A18 Pro: 3445; Ryzen 9 9950X: 3385). My own test for ensuring my web app performs well involves a machine less than half as fast and my web app runs with all assertions turned on.
by whycome | 2026-03-11 18:00:35+00:00
I had a Microsoft surface book 2. The provided charger could not provide enough power to the device when it was under heavy load and there was no higher charger option either. That shit should be illegal. And if the battery for the base/GPU died? You can't use the computer w the gpu even with a charger attached. The device itself could have been a dream and something i could have seen Apple doing : a touchscreen monitor that was also a computer and could be detached from the keyboard/gpu.