MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Franklin Prompt Studio – desktop tool for decision-ready AI answers
by dfstudioz | 2026-03-03 19:04:17+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m sharing something I’ve been building because one thing kept bothering me about AI answers: most of the time they sound confident, but when the underlying question is vague or underspecified the outputs don’t help you make a real decision.

So I built Franklin Prompt Studio — a lightweight desktop prompt builder and answer checker that helps you:

Turn messy, ambiguous questions into structured prompts

Choose the right mode (Decision, Plan, Diagnose, Risk)

Pressure-test outputs for missing assumptions, hidden risks, and weak next steps

Get answer sections you can actually act on rather than generic prose

It works with your existing AI (you can paste into whatever you already use) and adds reliability checks so you don’t miss critical gaps in reasoning. The core idea is: better prompts → clearer, more reliable AI answers.

Prompt Studio is a one-time purchase ($29 USD) and runs as a Windows portable tool today, with v1 features like structured modes, reliability flags, and a fast 2-pane workflow.

Here’s the site if you want to check it out: https://www.dfrankstudioz.com/

I’d love feedback from people who use AI for real decisions or technical work — especially if you’ve struggled with AI answers that seem helpful but weren’t. Thoughts, critiques, or suggestions welcome.

— Brent
by dragonwriter | 2026-03-03 19:04:18+00:00
> Trying to run open weight modesl to do inference is something 99% of people around the world can't do because it's expensive and technically challenging and the results are poor compared to the main companies.

Just because a model is open doesn't mean that there aren't services that will run it for you (and which won't share any limits that the commercial model vendors impose to fight distillation because neither the host not the model creator cares if you are using the service to distill the model.)

Many users of, particularly the larger, open models now are using such services, not running them using their own local or cloud compute.
by saghm | 2026-03-03 19:04:19+00:00
> The pace of change in the last year has been completely crazy, and it’s not stopping.

> But even if you don’t give in to the constant FOMO - it’s impossible to argue that the way we worked hasn’t changed. Almost every part of our work looks different, and will continue to evolve.

My experience is anecdotal, but this seems to be overblown. I'd say that almost every part of my work looks pretty identical to how it did a few years ago, and that the changes are relatively small in scope so far. Most of the arguments I've heard from those who advocate adopting AI tools are that the rate at which the tools are improving is exponential (or super-exponential, or whatever), which is a prediction about how it will change rather a claim that it has already reached a point that it's necessary. I don't pretend to have any expertise that lets me evaluate those predictions better than anyone else, but unless I happen to be a severe outlier, it seems like gross hyperbole to claim that every part of our work has already changed.
by trueismywork | 2026-03-03 19:04:24+00:00
The author of the blog post has missed the point that Robbie Williams is trying to make in the movie. Its not about math. Math part of the movie is irrelevant. Also its not about someone hiding a talent and getting found, that's a prop too.

Its actually about a person who has been abused all his life finally allowing himself to love himself and allowing others to love him.
by lkey | 2026-03-03 19:04:37+00:00
You're right, it's probably just that. My mistake to read too deeply into someone like this.

I was using Marx's definition, and I am a member of that class, so defined.

My existing wealth and ongoing income of seven figures is derived almost entirely from capital accumulation.

I am knowingly and actively betraying my immediate class interest, here and elsewhere, because I'd rather my wealth increase more modestly to ensure we all live in vibrant society.

I do think it is foolish for salaried white collar workers not to see what is coming and begin unionization efforts; Their interests are ever more misaligned with capital with every year that passes.
by jen20 | 2026-03-03 19:04:43+00:00
While there are missing features (e.g. ability to merge records), I have to say that Passwords.app is worlds ahead of 1Password since their electron rewrite. System Settings is not the best (mostly because the search is broken), but Passwords is sufficiently good that I haven't bothered looking what it's written using, whereas I can immediately tell with Electron.
by input_sh | 2026-03-03 19:04:51+00:00
I never said Google isn't the problem, what I said is that going to an agency isn't gonna fix that problem any more than running a SaaS tool yourself will, because they're not Google and they have no insight into what Google made one website prioritised over the other. Because, as you've pointed out, Google is the problem.

> I have to make a full blown website just to ensure I don't get SEO-spammed into oblivion?

No, I said a crappy one on purpose. How good is it doesn't matter, the sooner the Google knows about the domain, the better. Might as well be a copy of your README file using one of the million SSGs GitHub supports that will turn that README file into a website. The only thing that matters is that the website exists and that Google knows about it before the other one.

That's why many people purchase the domain on day 1 before they even start building the thing and also why many have like a dozen domains in their account that is like a boulevard of broken dreams there to remind them once a year they haven't done anything with them.

Still cheaper than a SEO agency or in most cases even one month of ahrefs access.
Ask HN: How are you estimating API costs before committing to an architecture?
by sarthakaggarwal | 2026-03-03 19:04:56+00:00
I've been building agent workflows on top of Claude's API and keep running into the same problem: I can't predict what a feature will cost until I've already built it and run it at some scale.

The input side is manageable — you can count tokens before sending. But output tokens are essentially unknowable upfront, and with agents that chain multiple calls (tool use, multi-turn reasoning, retries on failure), a single user action might be 3 API calls or 40. Multiply that by prompt caching behavior (which is great when it hits, but you can't always guarantee it), and the cost variance per task can easily be 10-20x.

This makes it really hard to do basic things like: set pricing for an AI-powered feature, decide whether an approach is even economically viable before building it, or give finance any kind of credible forecast.

What I've tried/looked at so far:

- Anthropic's token counting endpoint gives you exact input token counts pre-flight, which helps, but doesn't solve the output/chaining problem

- Logging everything post-hoc and building up averages per workflow — works but you're already committed by that point

- Setting hard spend caps at the API level — blunt instrument, doesn't help with per-feature attribution

- Looked at various OSS tools (ccusage, Langfuse, Helicone) — mostly retrospective dashboards, good for what did I already spend but not what will I spend

How are you handling this, especially if you're running agent-heavy workloads or building products where AI cost is a meaningful part of COGS. Are you doing any kind of pre-flight estimation? Cost-aware routing between models? Or just building first and optimizing later?
by gus_massa | 2026-03-03 19:04:57+00:00
I agree. I read the 5000 years time a few times and I don't like it.

When you have a transparent medium like water or glass, the photon that enters and the photon that exit share a lot of properties, in particular energy/color/frequency. Perhaps they have a shift in the phase or a different polarization (like in water with sugar or if you want to be fancy a quarter wave plate). You can still split a beam before in enter and make interference experiments after half of it passed though water or glass, and other weird experiments, so I think it's fair to call them "the same photon".

But in the Sun, the original photons in the center of the Sun have a few very specific values of energy/color/frequency, that are totally lost. (But the neutrinos have so few interactions that they don't lose this information, and it's possible to do neutrino spectroscopy!)

Also, the photons emitted by the "surface" of the Sun have a wide spectrum of energy/color/frequency that is very close to black body radiation at something like 5000K-6000K.

So in my opinion it's better to think that the original photon in the center is absorbed shortly after it's emitted, and transformed into heat. The heat takes 5000 years to get to the surface. And then the hot surface emits a few new photons unrelated to the original one.

I'm not sure what is the main transmission method inside the Sun: conduction, convection or radiation.
by dijit | 2026-03-03 19:04:58+00:00
oh no, absolutely- apologies for the confusion.

Time "Machine" on MacOS continues to work (though it's clearly not as important to Apple as it once was).

The issue is: if you want to back up a phone: it will take space from your laptop and it must be tethered to do the backup. This means that if you have a 1TiB phone, like I do, you need at least 1TiB of local disk on your laptop to be able to do a single backup if the phone is anywhere near full.

This is in contrast to how Time Capsule works right now for MacOS, whereby you have an SMB share (like, a 100+TiB NAS) and your laptop will just back itself up when it can.

Such a feature would be pretty killer on iPhones/iPads, or having a "photo server" to offload your photos... idk, but Apple won't do it.
by firefoxd | 2026-03-03 19:05:08+00:00
I used to take Uber to work daily in 2016. It cost around 3 - 4 dollars per 5 miles ride. Now the same ride cost $24 [0]. There's no indication that AI coding tools won't follow the same path given they are funded by VC.

But I think what matters is that the new generation of coders will adopt it as the norm. Gone are the days where you download a free text editor and just trial and error with the documentation one tab away. Every bootcamp is teaching react with clause and cursor. You have to pay to for a subscription to build your BMI calculator.

[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/paying-for-my-8-years-old-ride
by bsimpson | 2026-03-03 19:05:20+00:00
You're using the pixels for something different than the target audience.

People who want a Studio Display want retina crispness. If you enjoy a 42" 4k, you're more concerned with real estate than image fidelity.

I'm happy with a 65" 4K TV in my living room, but a 4K 27" monitor is borderline too low-res for computer work. Same pixel count, but different use cases.
by shevy-java | 2026-03-03 19:05:33+00:00
They hate us for our freedom.

I don't buy for a second that any of this has to do with "age verification".

This is 100% an attempt to increase surveillance of the population. It is not
an isolated step but part of a cohesive unit - YOU are the data. And private
entities want the data. That includes the state; many states are de-facto led
like a corporation (not all states, by the way, but many - most definitely the
USA right now).
by bccdee | 2026-03-03 19:05:44+00:00
I'm reminded of a talk I enjoyed about "extreme rewriting" [1] — how rewriting the same code many times (in certain contexts) can help uncover powerful underlying abstractions.

It makes intuitive sense to me that this would be true in complex domains (e.g. legacy code) where you really need to find the right solution, even if it takes a bit longer. Our first ideas are rarely our best ideas, and it's easy to get too attached to your first solution and try to tweak it into shape when it would be better just to start fresh.

[1]: https://www.hytradboi.com/2025/03580e19-4646-4fba-91c3-17eab...
by Joel_Mckay | 2026-03-03 19:05:50+00:00
These are the times, even renewing a nmfta scac code in the US may require government ID, social security number, and biometric profile check. Save yourself $5 and use a smart-phone, as a webcam will not work... There are no refunds after 3 failures to scan ID.

In general, a social security number is extremely sensitive, and should never be shared outside your home country tax system.

Verification is indeed a perverse invasion of privacy, and a liability to those with financial holdings. I guess the credit-lock service is now a must to deal with the circus that is modern logistics. =3
by criemen | 2026-03-03 19:06:06+00:00
> Out of curiosity, what are some good use cases for a MBP now with the MBAs being so powerful?

Local software development (node/TS). When opus-4.6-fast launched, it felt like some of the limiting factor in turnaround time moved from inference to the validation steps, i.e. execute tests, run linter, etc. Granted, that's with endpoint management slowing down I/O, and hopefully tsgo and some eslint replacement will speed things up significantly over there.
by dotancohen | 2026-03-03 19:06:12+00:00
Instead of claiming "whatever bullshit you come up with" at me, go search for Qatari influence in English too. I prefer Qatari sources in Arabic because then one cannot claim a biased source, but for those who can not read Arabic there is ample English language discussion.

Here's just the first two Google results, enjoy, there's quite a few more from both sides of the US political divide if you would like to start nitpicking sources.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/3334519/elite-us-uni...

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/5334791-qatars-us-...
by stego-tech | 2026-03-03 19:06:19+00:00
This is why I align on comp ranges rather than title. I've been a "Lead" where all I contributed was a new imaging pipeline and introducing NAT to the product line, a "Manager" of a failing company where I had no managerial authority or direct reports, and a "Senior" at a SV firm where I actually behaved a level above a Senior Engineer - owning outcomes, doing research, mentoring juniors, building relationships across silos, governance councils, etc.

Titles are fungible, but your comp isn't. Don't let a company sell you on a better title for less comp, especially when the JD or role doesn't align with the title; the next place won't give a shit what your title was if all you did was Junior-level work because you bought into someone else's narrative rather than control your own.
by sehugg | 2026-03-03 19:06:21+00:00
Realize, though, that just grabbing a frame buffer is not a thing anymore. To render graphics you need GLES support through something like ANGLE, vectors and fonts via Skia, Unicode, etc. A web browser has those things. Any static binary bundling those things is also gonna be pretty large.

And JavaScript is very good at backwards compatibility when you remove the churn of frameworks (unfortunately Electron doesn't guarantee compatibility quite as far back)
by etothet | 2026-03-03 19:06:23+00:00
"The real reason is: native has nothing to offer."

I get it, but this is a bit dramatic.

One of the biggest challenges I've found with using non-native tools (and specifically the various frameworks that let you write JavaScript that compile to Native code) is that there is much less of a guarantee that the 3rd party solution will continue support for new OS versions. There's much less of a risk with that with 1st party solutions.

Additionally, those 3rd parties are always chasing the 1st part vendor for features. Being far behind the regular cadence of releases can be quite inconvenient, despite any advantages initially gained.
by sammy0910 | 2026-03-03 19:06:52+00:00
there are some

I built a little mafia game a few years ago, but it was never very popular. http://gptmafia.io/

and someone i know made one too:
https://talktomehuman.com

maybe the games market is just hard in general, but i dont know that ai games are super popoular even though people are building them. playing mafia against the ai feels somehow tiring, even if it is also occasionally fun
by bilbo0s | 2026-03-03 19:06:55+00:00
It is.

That's how they make loot on their 128GB MacBook Pros. By kneecapping the cheap stuff. Don't think for a second that the specs weren't chosen so that professional developers would have to shell out the 8 grand for the legit machine. They're only gonna let us do the bare minimum on a MacBook Air.
by sophacles | 2026-03-03 19:07:01+00:00
What utility does a box of cookies have? A bar of chocolate? A can of soda? Those things are about pleasure and have serious harmful consequences if overused - just like tobacco, alcohol and drugs.

What about video games? They only have utility in pleasure and the sedentary lifestyle associated with over-playing them is extremely harmful.

Sounds to me like you have some random things you decided you don't like and want to ban ads for them, not that you've done any thinking about utility (other than as a bad attempt at rationalizing your anti-some things campaign).
by dragonwriter | 2026-03-03 19:08:13+00:00
US states cannot, under current federal law, go permanent daylight time (they can go permanent standard time, though), and they can't unilaterally make the latter have the same effect as the former by simultaneously switching time zones because they can't switch timezones without approval of the federal Department of Transportation. I don't see the current federal government making special accommodation for California, Oregon, or Washington on, well, anything in the next eight months, so...
by Y-bar | 2026-03-03 19:08:14+00:00
Yes, if you are able and willing to follow those sources you can end up on for example this United Nations page https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/unifil-statement-14-november-...

> In October, UNIFIL peacekeepers conducted a geospatial survey of a concrete T-wall erected by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) southwest of Yaroun. The survey confirmed that the wall crossed the Blue Line, rendering more than 4,000 square metres of Lebanese territory inaccessible to the Lebanese people.
by shevy-java | 2026-03-03 19:08:18+00:00
> I do use an ad blocker, and never click on ads. I feel like that action has a bigger return on investment than no clicking the cookie banner.

Right, but this is not solely about cookies or blocking ads. You also leave behind data which helps create a profile. AI is mass-creating profiles of everyone. Not everyone will have the same pattern, but information space is finite and they get more and more data about you over time. You may think this is not relevant for your use cases, but can you make this as prediction in the future?
by williamsss | 2026-03-03 19:08:31+00:00
The weight is an issue for me at 189g. I've been looking for something compact, light weight, secure with a decent OS for 2 years without luck.

Iphone air is tempting at 165g if the screen was smaller.
Unihertz Titan 2 Elite may hit the sweet spot if the weight is kept low.
Show HN: Agent from Scratch – Bootstrap an agent from a copy-paste, no framework
by brotchie | 2026-03-03 19:08:34+00:00
I wanted to see if I could self-build a working OpenClaw-like agent starting with nothing but a fresh Linux VM.

The result is a model-specific REPL "genesis snippet." It's a short bash script that prompts for your API key, asks the model to generate a REPL with an agentic tool-use loop, and then drops you straight into that running REPL.

The self-imposed rules:

1. No copy-pasting code after the initial snippet.
2. No manual editing—the agent has to write and fix everything for you.
3. Zero agent frameworks or libraries.

From there, the goal is to ask the agent to rewrite its own REPL, add quality-of-life improvements, and eventually figure out how to connect itself to Telegram.

I put the snippets up on a site along with some open challenges like code golf and speed runs:

https://agentfromscratch.com

To try it, you just need your own API key and a Linux VM or Docker container. If you want to see how it actually behaves before running it, here is the raw terminal output of my first successful run:

https://agentfromscratch.com/polis/afs-genesis/
by PaulHoule | 2026-03-03 19:08:46+00:00
Try to browse the web. Try to listen to music with Plexamp. Ordinary boring stuff but I think it is looking all over Slovakia for my AirPods or something so it can take them away from whatever machine I really want to use them on.

The feeling is exactly like the way it was with Windows circa 2005 when you expected your machine to go bad like cheese in a few months.
by ysnp | 2026-03-03 19:09:10+00:00
>are by incompetent/lazy/pressured devs who just throw in some library and don't even care that it leaks data to Google

Even if I agreed with this statement, I don't understand why it is better to put limited/precious resources something the app developers can easily circumvent, praying they never stop being incompetent/lazy/pressured and tell device owners it is an important privacy feature? Instead of waiting for the apps to become actively hostile why not just feed them fake data in the first place? Like the scoped access permissions do?

If you really want to do this, you (and any GrapheneOS user) can do it today with mitmproxy and RethinkDNS but I think it is perfectly OK users choose their (privacy-invasive) apps and choose how to mitigate annoyances like that themselves. Otherwise they need to complain to the app developers and app stores.

>That's why I said that the main focus of GOS is security, not privacy. If they cared about privacy primarily, they would actively support microG and NetGuard, or at least similar solutions.

That feels more like you are framing your opinion as a fact. To me it is not so obvious.

When I think of privacy, I think of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (https://petsymposium.org/). I also think of things like:

* separate network namespaces for profiles (https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/5225#i...) and/or a GrapheneOS-Gateway equivalent to https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Whonix-Gateway,
* built-in OS support for chaining VPNs together or splitting different traffic over different privacy-enhanced networks like in RethinkDNS,
* adversarial pressure wave + ultrasonic noise to thwart smart listening devices https://youtu.be/xMYm2d9bmEA?t=1305,
* virtualisation as a sandboxing and anti-fingerprinting primitive (https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/5775-device-fingerprinting-...),
* control over what apps can communicate with each other https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/2197
* location scopes/phone state scopes etc that are already planned.

etc.
by tegling | 2026-03-03 19:09:23+00:00
Isn't the eIDAS2 regulation addressing this issue? It applies to EU/EES and from my understanding would help enforcing the data minimization principle related to user identity. I.e. a service (like a social media platform) wouldn't be allowed to force you to show your identity unless they are required by law to know your identity. Instead, the EUDI wallet provides functionality related to identification through (user-managed) pseudonyms. For services that are required by law to verify user age, the wallet provide means to make verifiable claims like "over 18". Am I missing something?
by florentmsl | 2026-03-03 19:09:39+00:00
To be honest, in retrospect I should have released the first version. But as an engineer, I got stuck fixing things and adding features because I thought, “otherwise no one will use it.” While adding features, I realized I needed to change the tech stack in order to move faster and add more functionality more efficiently. In the end, I’m happy with Rails, but I should have released years ago.