MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hogwasher | 2026-03-04 22:17:17+00:00
Most people couldn't tell you how their car works, at least not enough to fix it. Is that handholding, too?

People can't be knowledgable about everything. There's just too much information in the world, and too many different skills that could be learned, and not enough time.

A carpenter can rely on power tools without understanding fully how the tools work, and it's fine, as long as the tools are made to safe standards and the user understands basic safety instructions (e.g. wear protective eyewear).

To me, making sure that apps don't screw with people, even if they don't understand how the apps work, is roughly the equivalent of making sure power drills are made safely so they don't explode in peoples' hands.
by lynndotpy | 2026-03-04 22:17:18+00:00
Yes, but that's different than what we're saying. I think many more people want and use 3.5mm jacks than they do SCSI ports. The 3.5mm jack is excellent. We're in a thread about a new device released with this wonderful port.

Also, many people want to run Linux on their phone. About 7 in 10 smart phones run Linux, and smart phones are devices billions of humans use every day.
by wahern | 2026-03-04 22:18:01+00:00
This reads like word games. The article basically argues for optimizing the calling discipline on a per-function basis, using the function body to guide the optimization. That's not a calling convention and definitely not a standard ABI. What they're arguing for is a kind of static optimization mid-way between targeting a calling convention and inlining. That's not a bad idea on its face, but has nothing at all to do with the C ABI. As to whether it would actually improve anything, frankly, I'm half-surprised compilers don't already do this, i.e. for functions where it's deemed too costly to inline, but which aren't externally visible, and the fact that they don't suggests that maybe there's not much to gain here.

I've yet to read an article criticizing the so-called C ABI that doesn't end up effectively changing the problem statement (in this case, into something utterly incomparable), as opposed to providing a better solution to the same problem. Changing the problem statement is often how you arrive at better solutions overall, but don't try to sell it as something it isn't, insinuating that the pre-existing solution is stupid.
by dwoldrich | 2026-03-04 22:18:18+00:00
That's a good point about context sensitivity and the need for process-level controls needing a top level menu. I would say that part of the friction with window-level menus is moving targets. It's less cognitive effort to find and hit menu targets that are always in the same place on the screen.

Part of the discoverability of menus is learning what actions are modal (titles have the ellipsis) and learning what hotkeys and key chords do what in the app. There's nothing faster than hotkeys. Ideally, users train themselves to use hotkeys to get work done and forego the menu except to discover additional features.
by philipkglass | 2026-03-04 22:18:41+00:00
I looked at the electric car example for the United States. It has 3 kilowatt hours priced at $0.51, 17 cents per kilowatt hour, which seems about right. The "petrol car" example at the top of the chart isn't powered by electricity so its cost number is not directly comparable to the things that consume electricity.
by craftkiller | 2026-03-04 22:18:43+00:00
You must not be in the United States. Here, regular home cable/fiber internet ISPs usually assign a (dynamic) public ipv4 address to your router. Your cellular internet connection is usually behind cgnat, both on your phone and the new home wireless internet from the cellular providers, but regular home cable/fiber internet is the most common home internet type.

So I agree that the watch would likely be behind NAT (for IPv4), I just disagree with the statement that ISPs usually put their customers behind cgnat.
by octoberfranklin | 2026-03-04 22:19:37+00:00
It is unlikely that any browser will ever require ECH without a fallback to non-encrypted ClientHello.

If the CDNs come under pressure, they can stop allowing ECH, just like they stopped allowing domain fronting. Unlike fronting, they can do this selectively -- like, only if the client is in $COUNTRY and the hostname is one of XYZ.
by kami23 | 2026-03-04 22:19:38+00:00
You should do your own experiment when you see compaction about to start use the end of your window to have it write one first, and then let the session compact and compare. I was surprised by how small the compact message is.

When I tell it to write a letter to itself I usually phrase it.

'write a letter to yourself Make notes of any gotchas or any quirks that you learned and make sure to note them down.'

It does get those into the letter but if you check compaction a lot of it is gone.
by STARGA | 2026-03-04 22:20:02+00:00
The "compilers are hard" myth holds back a lot of people who would benefit from writing one. A basic compiler for a subset of a language is a well-defined pipeline: parse to AST, lower to IR, emit target code. Each stage is independently testable. The hard parts — register allocation, optimization passes, ABI compliance — only matter once you're past the prototype.

PHP is an unconventional choice for the host language but it actually demonstrates the point well. The compiler's correctness depends on the semantic rules you implement, not on what language you implement them in. If your AST-to-x86 lowering is correct, it does not matter whether the lowering logic is written in PHP, Python, or Rust.

That said, for production compilers the host language starts to matter when you need to do graph transformations on the IR at scale. SSA construction, dominator trees, and liveness analysis benefit from data structures with predictable memory layout.
by AndreiDia | 2026-03-04 22:20:08+00:00
Hi everyone, I'm the creator of LearnCodeGuide.

I started building this tool because when writing or learning code it's often hard to know if the code is actually good or just "working".

LearnCodeGuide analyzes code and returns a health score with detailed findings and suggested fixes.

You can run different analysis modes like:
• debug
• security
• refactor
• tests
• explain
• all-in-one

The goal is to help developers quickly identify logic issues, performance problems, security risks and maintainability issues.

This is still the early version and I'm actively improving it based on feedback.

Happy to answer any questions.
by 0x3f | 2026-03-04 22:20:17+00:00
I assume this is probably a function of our respective locations, because the most popular stories I see as an 'outsider' are those that would discourage tourism or immigration, not those that would worry already-citizens.

To address your stories specifically, my point would be that I'm still not sure whether this shows the US is notably worse on this than any other place.

E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal
by STARGA | 2026-03-04 22:20:30+00:00
The 336x speedup claim makes sense if the baseline is scikit-learn with Python overhead on every prediction call. Python's interpreter loop is the bottleneck for inference on small models — the actual linear algebra is already in C/Fortran via BLAS, but the per-call overhead dominates when your model is a 50-feature random forest doing sub-millisecond predictions.

The Ollama analogy is good framing. The pain point with deploying classical ML has never been the model itself — it is the serving infrastructure. You either vendor-lock into a cloud ML platform or write a custom Flask wrapper around pickle files. A single binary that loads ONNX and serves predictions over a local API removes most of that friction.

Curious about the model format support. ONNX covers the common cases but some production systems still have legacy PMML or proprietary formats. Is there a plugin system for custom model loaders?
by jurakovic | 2026-03-04 22:20:30+00:00
I love RSS but I didn't find good enough online reader that can be customized to my liking, so I built my own: https://jurakovic.github.io/dev-links/news/

I have many more ideas, but I don't have that much free time to implement all of it (even with Claude Code). But it serves me very well for now
by erelong | 2026-03-04 22:20:39+00:00
a bit disturbed to see this upvoted as much on HN as I thought techy people shunned Apple products (like Stallman calling their ecosystem a "jail") but...

I can see there are a lot of Apple users here apparently. I have some old hardware I still make use of but couldn't see a case for anyone buying new stuff (overpriced, locked down, etc.)
by kelseyfrog | 2026-03-04 22:20:49+00:00
Everything is a slippery slope. That undermines the argument rather than strengthening it.

The reality is that people aren't doing this. Saying "parents should X" feels good, but changes nothing.

Please think like an epidemiologist rather than an engineer. This isn't an engineering problem. It's a public health problem. We're asking for the pump handle to be taken away and folks are saying we should keep the pump and that parents should simply walk farther for clean water for their kids. It's an absurd response that misses the point.
by STARGA | 2026-03-04 22:20:55+00:00
Building on Postgres with pgvector instead of a dedicated vector DB is the right call for this scale. The operational complexity of running Elasticsearch or a separate vector store alongside Postgres rarely justifies itself for teams under a few million documents.

pgvector's HNSW indexes handle the approximate nearest neighbor search well enough for workplace search, and you get transactional consistency with the rest of your data for free. The real win is that your document metadata, access control, and vector embeddings all live in the same database — no sync layer to maintain.

One thing worth watching: hybrid search (combining BM25 keyword matching with vector similarity) tends to outperform pure vector search for workplace content. ParadeDB's full-text search combined with pgvector gives you both primitives. Reciprocal rank fusion to merge the two result sets is straightforward and usually lifts relevance by 10-15% over vector-only retrieval.
by Marazan | 2026-03-04 22:21:12+00:00
Flash was not particularly battery hungry (My go to example when HTML 5 demos started coming out was rebuilding a HTML 5 demo that was using 100% of 1 core into a flash app that used 5%).

The reason it burned CPU cycles is that non-coders could make programs with it and they would produce the world's worst code doing so that "worked". The runtime itself was fine (efficiency wise, not all the other things).
by csours | 2026-03-04 22:21:27+00:00
> Would this be less efficient than battery powered EVs?

Measured in terms of mass * distance, trains with steel wheels will beat anything with rubber pneumatic tires.

Part of the magic of hybrid trains is that you can have multiple generation units that can be turned on or off as needed.

---

Efficiency is just one consideration for a power plant.

Historically, reliability has been more important than efficiency, especially for industrial applications like locomotives. In other words, locomotives are probably not as efficient as they could be. For instance, you could use a lower viscosity engine oil for lubrication, but that would reduce reliability as engines fail due to friction.
by STARGA | 2026-03-04 22:21:31+00:00
The premise has a subtle error. NAND flash stores data by trapping electrons on floating gates, but those electrons come from the substrate — they are not created. The total electron count in the chip stays constant. What changes is the charge distribution across gates.

If anything, the energy stored in the electric fields of charged floating gates contributes a tiny amount of mass via E=mc², but this is orders of magnitude below the article's estimate and would apply to any capacitor, not just SSDs.

The more interesting physical question is whether the information itself has a thermodynamic weight. Landauer's principle says erasing one bit dissipates at least kT ln(2) of energy. By mass-energy equivalence, storing N bits in a maximally efficient reversible memory would have a mass contribution proportional to the information entropy. But this is around 10^-38 kg per bit — unmeasurable with any current technology.
by ieviev | 2026-03-04 22:21:38+00:00
There is plenty still to do.

One part of this is SIMD algorithms to better compete with Hyperscan/Rust, another is the decades of optimizations that backtracking engines have for short anchored matches for validation.

There's analysis to do for specific patterns so we can opt for specialized algorithms, eg. for fixed length patterns we skip the left-to-right pass entirely since we already know the match start + match length.

Lots of opportunistic things like this which we haven't done. Also there are no statistical optimizations in the engine right now. Most engines will immediately start looking for a 'z' if there is one in the pattern since it is rare.
by natebc | 2026-03-04 22:22:16+00:00
https://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/article29105...

A Sedgwick, Kansas, police chief used Flock Safety license plate readers to track his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend’s vehicles 228 times over four-plus months and used his police vehicle to follow them out of town, according to a city official and a report released this week by the agency that oversees police certifications.
by dangus | 2026-03-04 22:23:22+00:00
It's hilarious to me that you are acting like these features you are bringing up are exclusive to Mac!

SSD larger than 2GB? That's not a differentiating feature of a Mac. As a completely random example, an HP Omen Transcend 14 has DUAL M.2 SSD slots and that's not even a high end PC laptop. Macs are the only systems on the market where you can't upgrade the storage after purchase and you're doing so at insane markups.

More than 64GB of memory, yeah, that's also available on other PCs. Numerous PCs. I found multiple models from multiple manufacturers that support the same 128GB maximum. My Framework 13 supports 96GB and it's socketed DDR5 so I can just buy it at a store after purchase, or you can look at the new Lenovo T series Gen 7 (10/10 iFixit Repair Score) which has LPCAMM2 memory, allowing for BOTH repairability/upgradability AND high memory speed.

External IO, again, Apple isn't the gatekeeper of Thunderbolt 5. Where is the MacBook Pro with Oculink for the best external GPU performance? My Framework 13 has four fully customizable ports, I can literally put whatever ports I want on the machine and switch them out. Apple can't be bothered to put a USB-A port on a device despite the fact that it's still widely used and it would be convenient to just have one on there.

Apple doesn't make their own display panels. You can get a PC laptop with a wide variety of panels including the same mini-LED technology. Where is the MacBook Pro with a tandem OLED panel? You don't really get a choice with a Mac, you are stuck with the two different panels that they sell.

On Mac you're stuck with macOS. On a PC laptop you have more choices, Windows or a wide variety of Linux and BSD derivatives. Linux on Mac hardware is not fully functional and compatible with the hardware. Being stuck with Mac means you are unable to run a far wider array of software than being stuck with Windows or Linux. Imagine it this way: you just bought a top of the line MacBook Pro with the M5 Max chip, you've got a beast of a machine! You just spent your day crushing high intensity productivity tasks. Now you'd like to leverage the insane speed of your MacBook Pro playing some AAA video games. Oops! The macoS game library is miniscule, and CrossOver ($ annual license fee) is not ideal compared to Steam on Windows or Steam/Proton on Linux. I guess I can just play Cyberpunk 2077 or Rise of the Tomb Raider for the 10th time on my Mac!

Nobody mentions a removable WiFi card until their WiFi/Bluetooth stops working and they're stuck with an astronomical repair bill and now because they're Apple customers they are buying an entirely new system and "recycling" their old laptop. On a system like a Framework or a Lenovo T series 7th gen, components like USB-C ports are removable in case they are physically damaged, and you can buy parts directly from the manufacturer. Apple's strategy is to upsell you on an extended warranty/insurance plan to try and avoid astronomical repair bills.
by u1hcw9nx | 2026-03-04 22:23:39+00:00
Yes. It's the Apple's product first philosophy that Steve Jobs repeated again and again:

"A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."

"Some people say, 'Give the customers what they want.' But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do."

"You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new."

"If I had asked customers what they wanted, they would have said 'a faster horse."
by nomel | 2026-03-04 22:25:15+00:00
Where I am at least, people using less power because power because power need to profit more, is wild.

They literally had record profits the last few years, rather than being forced to lay down solar. I think power should be a global endeavor, not some local for profit business with complete regulatory capture that makes competition illegal.

Yes I'm angry, because I pay more in electric than most anywhere in the world. If I charge my care with LEVEL 2 using city provided charges, during the day, it's more expensive than gas.
by ssl-3 | 2026-03-04 22:25:26+00:00
On the energy tab: It says that driving a petrol car 10 miles uses 10,000 Watt-hours, eg 10 kWh.

On the costs tab, for the United States: It says that this has a cost of $0.97.

97 cents ÷ 10kWh = 9.7 cents per kWh

(I didn't look further than that. Perhaps I should have.)

---

edit: I now see a note at the very bottom stating that it is using an assumed "$0.17 for electricity".

$0.17 per kWh is plenty close enough for rough figurin', so I'd like to take this opportunity to retract my previous complaint.
by ggm | 2026-03-04 22:25:27+00:00
Aside from economists directly employed by the WH and adjacent agencies, are there any, let alone many economists who think these tariffs work? I try to read widely but in economics, I struggle to find people I can stand reading who seem informed to the realities of the modern world and so mostly I'm reading a strongly anti tariff biassed view e.g. Paul Krugman (who btw, strong bias here aside, writes beautifully)

I'm getting a very strong impression from overseas inputs that nobody thinks "sender pays" and nobody much thinks this benefits americans working, trading, or the economy overall. It seems entirely counter-productive. I am not reading of a massive return to factory manufacturing in the US, the chip and IT sector moves are not high employment, and are mostly done under force, or as local assembly to get round the law.

It is possible there is a strong deflationary element, supression of spend by price pressure, something in the price elasticity/inelasticity space. And it is possible that has other benefits, but I don't see them.

What I do see outside of the US (I live outside of the US) is a lot of discussion of market diversification, and agreeing that avoiding the pain of trade with the US is probably in everyones interests in the short/medium term, given it comes with price/tax certainties. My economy sends things to the US market which the US market wants badly enough, many of them do not get a tariff.

It is difficult to take the economists directly involved with the WH seriously. They seem to lack credibility to everyone else, or have serious issues around their projection of belief into the world. The drive to fuck around with the federal bank, and to override treaty bound agreements on trade does them no credit. Why would any nation invest at such risk, to supply a US market, if there are sustainable reliable trade partners elsewhere?

When China disrupted trade with my home economy, we diverted business and decided the risk of 50%+ dependency on Chinese markets was stupid. The chinese trade has come back but we're pretty happy to be selling to a more diversified pool of places now. US trade is less than 10% of our overall trade, the impact on us of a 10 or 20 percent tariff is not great but it hardly destroys our economy. I think its much the same for Europe now the mental shockwave has moved through.
by manarth | 2026-03-04 22:25:39+00:00
"If one or both was under 18 when they first met"

The age of 18 relates to the age of consent for step- relationships.

The age of consent in the UK for most relationships is 16. It's raised to 18 in the case of many step- relationships.

The age at which they met is irrelevant; the age at the moment of the activity – marriage/sexual congress – is the relevant matter in law. Once both parties are older than 18 there is no legal impediment.
Show HN: SellifyMate – Automate daily Etsy sale campaigns with countdown timers
by simonij | 2026-03-04 22:25:59+00:00
I built SellifyMate to solve a tedious daily task I kept seeing Etsy sellers complain about: manually restarting sale campaigns every day just to keep the green "Sale ends in X hours" countdown visible on listings.

Etsy's algorithm rewards active sales, and the countdown timer creates real urgency for buyers. But resetting campaigns manually every single day is annoying busywork. SellifyMate automates it with a Chrome extension that connects to your shop and runs fresh daily campaigns on a schedule.

Tech stack: Chrome extension + Laravel backend. Currently used by 4,600+ sellers.

Curious if anyone here has experience with Etsy's API limitations around sale automation — we've had to work around a few quirks.
by hobofan | 2026-03-04 22:26:14+00:00
You can nowadays do fine with macOS or Linux in most college degrees I've seen, since nowadays there are decent open source alternatives for the most prolific software that's on the level of popularity that it will be used in teaching.

However by default almost every college curriculum I've seen (unless it's in CS or IT combined field like bioinformatics) is still taught Windows-first, be it sociology, biochemistry or economics. In many you also have strong presence of MS Office suite, which is probably the first software that any university will buy license packs for for their students.
Ask HN: The new wave of AI agent sandboxes?
by ATechGuy | 2026-03-04 22:26:27+00:00
In the last couple of months, several new solutions for sandboxing AI agents have launched (microVMs, WASM runtimes, browser isolation, hardened tool containers, etc.). Curious to hear from people using them in production. Are they working as advertised, or are there still major tradeoffs around security, cost, and performance?

Here's my list of sandboxing solutions launched in the last year alone: E2B, AIO Sandbox, Sandboxer, AgentSphere, Yolobox, Exe.dev, yolo-cage, SkillFS, ERA Jazzberry Computer, Vibekit, Daytona, Modal, Cognitora, YepCode, Run Compute, CLI Fence, Landrun, Sprites, pctx-sandbox, pctx Sandbox, Agent SDK, Lima-devbox, OpenServ, Browser Agent Playground, Flintlock Agent, Quickstart, Bouvet Sandbox, Arrakis, Cellmate (ceLLMate), AgentFence, Tasker, DenoSandbox, Capsule (WASM-based), Volant, Nono, NetFence
by onion2k | 2026-03-04 22:26:49+00:00
Is that different to the number of people who have that going on in their life even without AI though? If it's 0.01% outside of AI, and 0.07% of AI users, then either AI attracts people with those conditions or AI increases the likelihood of having them. That's worth studying.

It's also possible that 0.1% of people have them and AI is actually reducing the number of cases...
by limagnolia | 2026-03-04 22:27:07+00:00
F-Droid build APKs themselves from source, so presumably 0, as they don't allow APKs to be uploaded.

F-Droid does do some safety checks themselves already too, I don't know exactly what.

Edit: Perhaps I am mistaken... but I think the linked post was referring to users adding additional repos to the F-Droid store, not the default F-Droid repo??