MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sajalnigam | 2026-03-11 05:26:04+00:00
Hi HN,

I wrote this article exploring an architectural question that’s been on my mind recently as AI tools start generating more infrastructure code.

AI systems are probabilistic by nature, but infrastructure governance and compliance systems require deterministic outcomes (same input → same policy decision every time).

In the Kubernetes ecosystem, policy engines like Kyverno and Open Policy Agent have made policy-as-code much more practical. But most policy evaluation still happens relatively late in the workflow (CI or admission controllers).

The article explores whether policy validation should move further left — even into developer workflows — especially as AI tools begin generating more configuration.

Curious how others here think about this tradeoff between:

• AI-assisted configuration
• deterministic governance
• developer-side validation

Would love to hear thoughts from folks running Kubernetes at scale.
by bhawks | 2026-03-11 05:26:39+00:00
Roblox games are all multiplayer - you get a game server running in their POPs and a generous amount of persistent storage and memory. How is that not a developer operational cost?

Creators don't have to pay any hosting - Roblox will serve their content even if a game doesnt monetize their users for free.

The way this economical is thru the redistribution of games that do monetize their users
by gigatexal | 2026-03-11 05:27:16+00:00
Acktually ahem not to be that guy but to be that guy haha (insert me here) …

Apple’s Mac market share of the PC market went from 6.6% to 9% (https://www.cultofmac.com/news/mac-shipments-2025-apple) so that’s nothing to balk at. The MacBook Neo might grow that even more as maybe it converts low end buyers into locked in users in the ecosystem and then they move on to more Mac’s.
by Firehawke | 2026-03-11 05:28:46+00:00
Yep. "Mother of all X" memes weren't even remotely uncommon for a handful of years during and after Operation Desert Storm. The Iraqi Minister of Information, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, also gave rise to "There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!" and the like.

Almost none of those memes are remembered outside of those who were alive and watching the nightly news at the time, but there were some pre-internet memes that were as spread as a modern internet one.
by inkyoto | 2026-03-11 05:28:57+00:00
If I'm not mistaken, microcode is a thing at least on Intel CPU's, and that is how they patched Spectre, Meltdown and other vulnerabilities – Intel released a microcode update that BIOS applies at the cold start and hot patches the CPU.

Maybe other CPU's have it as well, though I do not have enough information on that.
by andrewflnr | 2026-03-11 05:30:08+00:00
I've been using the ~. shortcut for a while, but somehow escaped learning about the help menu.

Another neat thing I noticed while playing with it just now: there's an option to enter ~ twice to send a literal ~, but usually you don't have to do this when typing something like 'ls ~' in a regular session. Not only does the ~ have to be the first character on a line to start an escape sequence, but typing on a line, backspacing all the way to the start and then typing ~ also sends a literal tilde. It only triggers the escape sequence if the ~ is the chronologically first character after a newline (or first in the session), which is an unlikely thing to type into a shell in a normal session. Good choice of UI, both the character and the state machine.
by rurban | 2026-03-11 05:32:10+00:00
I've used an MacAir with 8GB ram starting at 700€ for years, writing and testing compilers. This was until the macOS and butterfly keyboard desasters, which made me go back to 450€ ThinkPad Ryzen laptops with Fedora, upgraded to 64GB RAM.

My wife is using a fancy new air for 2500€, which is way better. But I still think of the good old MacAir times, they'll try to bring up again.
by godelski | 2026-03-11 05:32:11+00:00
> I was talking to a junior developer and they were telling me how Claude is so much smarter than them and they feel inferior.

Every time I talk to a wizard I feel like they're so much smarter than me and it makes me feel inferior.

So I take that feeling and use it to drive me to become a wizard like them. I've generally found that wizards are very happy to take on apprentices.

I'm not trying to call Claude a wizard (I have similar feelings to you), but more that I don't understand that junior's take. We all feel dumb. All but time. Even the wizards! But it's that feeling that drives you to better yourself and it's what turns you into a wizard.

Honestly so much of what I hear from the "AI does all my coding" crowd just sounds very junior. It's just the same like how a year or two ago they were saying "it does the repetitive stuff". Isn't that what functions, libraries, functors, templates, and other abstractions are for? It feels like we're back to that laughable productivity metric of lines of code or number of commits. I don't know why we love our cargo cults. It seems people are putting so much effort into their cargo cults that they could have invented a real airplane by now.
Show HN: Self-hosted DCF workspace using Damodaran datasets, LLM narratives
by softcane | 2026-03-11 05:32:24+00:00
I wanted a valuation tool I could actually audit. Every "AI stock
analysis" product I tried either hid the math or hallucinated the
inputs. So I built my own.

You type a ticker. You get:
- Intrinsic value via DCF using Damodaran's industry datasets
(betas, ERP, country risk premiums)
- Every assumption exposed — cost of capital, reinvestment rate,
terminal value, all of it
- LLM-generated bull/bear narratives with cited news sources
- The base case and the override case are shown side by side

The math is deterministic. The LLM handles research and narrative
Only, it cannot silently change the numbers.

Runs fully local, one Docker command:
https://github.com/stockvaluation-io/stockvaluation_io

Rough edges still. Curious what assumptions people would challenge, especially the terminal growth rate, and how to handle high-growth names where DCF tends to break down.
by man8alexd | 2026-03-11 05:34:30+00:00
3. vm.oom_kill_allocating_task is a footgun. It kills the last task that asked for memory and it could be any random task in the system.

4. disabling overcommit is another footgun, it makes malloc fail long before the memory is exhausted. See for a detailed explanation https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/797888/1027
by gorgoiler | 2026-03-11 05:36:46+00:00
Giving children handheld access to global cable TV — every single channel in existence no matter how… niche — must be one of the most reckless things a parent can do. My parents* used to screen my technology magazine subscriptions and cut out the pages on weapons!

In an alternate universe we would be leaning on OS providers to give us child friendly installations that hook into content scanners and white/black lists. Handing the scanning and blocking keys over to the government feels as reckless as letting kids roam free on the net.

*Ahem, when I were a lad, even.
by comgen42 | 2026-03-11 05:37:39+00:00
Author here. I wrote this because "AI agent" has become meaningless vendor-speak — everything from a basic chatbot to a full autonomous system gets the same label now.

The article cuts through that by showing exactly what the loop actually looks like: send messages to an LLM, check if it wants to call a tool, execute the tool, feed results back, repeat until it's done. Both OpenAI and Anthropic SDK versions included.

Then it goes one level up to a ToolRegistry pattern — a decorator-based system that auto-generates JSON schemas from Python type hints and lets you add tools without touching the agent loop.

I also lay out the five things this minimal agent can't handle (memory, multi-step planning, error recovery, multi-agent coordination, large tool libraries) and where those patterns live. The article is the foundation — I cover the rest in the companion book.

Happy to answer questions about the implementation or the design decisions.
by xp84 | 2026-03-11 05:39:14+00:00
To prove or disprove your hypothesis, we can look at historical gas prices.

In today's dollars (adjusted for inflation) the US average gas price stayed below $2.75/gal from roughly 1986-2002. Then they broke through that barrier, only ever going below it again for two brief moments in 2016 and in 2020. Most of the time since, they've been well above $3.50, and above $4 sometimes. [1]

If you're right that demand for gasoline is highly elastic, meaning people adjust their demand in response to price, then since gas prices got much more expensive, we should expect that gas usage decreased. Have we seen this? (No. [2]) Of course we haven't, because somewhere between 63-67% of people in the US and Canada live in car-dependent suburbs.[3] These cities and towns, in addition to most rural areas, are fundamentally car-dependent and cannot function without daily car use by a majority of residents. The only way for our society to consume less gasoline would be mass electrification of private transport.

And notably, even the recent increased popularity of EVs in the post-Model-3 era isn't manifesting in the data [2] in the form of decreased consumption to my eyes. Perhaps for every new BEV out there not using gas, five people traded the cars they used to drive for inefficient, huge SUVs.

1. https://www.inflationtool.com/adjusted-prices/us-gasoline

2. https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=w...

3. https://lcau.mit.edu/research/american-suburbs-project
by hg07 | 2026-03-11 05:40:11+00:00
Hey Husain here, co founder of Modulus
Can talk about this for hours but heres a summary
Every repo added by the user is analyzed for technical specifications which are stored without the code itself.
Updated every time a significant change is made to the codebase.
These are used at the time of retrieval by checking for relevance of the connected repos and extracting them as relevant context to the ongoing task.
Hope that answers your question!
by hkonte | 2026-03-11 05:41:16+00:00
The "spec quality is the bottleneck" problem is really a prompt structure problem. Most specs are freeform paragraphs, so role, constraints, acceptance criteria, and context are entangled. The LLM evaluator can't score them independently, and when a phase fails you can't localize which part caused it.

Typed semantic blocks fix this. If you decompose the spec into discrete named fields (objective, constraints, examples, acceptance criteria), the evaluator can score each block independently and failures point to a specific input component. Swapping one block and re-running becomes a controlled experiment.

I built flompt (github.com/Nyrok/flompt) around this principle for prompt construction: 12 typed blocks that compile to Claude-optimized XML. The structural logic applies to spec pipelines too. Named blocks produce testable, diffable specs instead of freeform text blobs that resist automated scoring.
by Arcanum-XIII | 2026-03-11 05:43:24+00:00
Blue Robotics (bluerobotics.com) is also using Pi, for their BlueRov and survey boat (BlueBoat) - they’re quite nice to use (and not toys… you can add sonar, dvl, usbl locator to go at depth - max 600m with the kit)

I’m also starting to build other water/ground vehicles for underground exploration - communication and localisation are challenging, without speaking about navigation on uncertain terrain. Pi are accessible and cheap, and the Pico’s are also very useful to interface with the motors, sensor and so on.
by HarshitKhemani | 2026-03-11 05:43:37+00:00
make any repo vibe-codeable, agent-ready, and cursor-compatible in minutes!

$ npx skills add HKTITAN/cursor-best-practices

built a skill that helps you set up Cursor, write good rules, use commands and subagents, and follow recommended workflows, with docs and ready-to-use templates.
by bhawks | 2026-03-11 05:43:56+00:00
You're missing the parts where:

1: Roblox hosts your multiplayer gameservers in its pops for free, with a generous amount of free persistent storage and memory

1.a: Roblox handles scaling and SRE work for you for free - you're not going to be able to support millions of concurrent users yourself at that price point

2: when people buy robux on their phone the app store takes 20-30% of the dollar - but the player still gets 1 robux for each penny.

2.a: your game immediately is playable on iOS, android, PC, Mac, Xbox, PlayStation, questvr, etc etc - no fees for you to get this distribution.

3: Roblox pays out creator rewards - a redistribution of revenue - to experiences that reengage dormant users or are played by paying users even if your game itself has no purchasable items.

Roblox's economic model has a redistributive nature that isn't common in other economies. If you're just looking at the devex rate and not building on the platform you wouldn't immediately appreciate it.
by scuff3d | 2026-03-11 05:44:15+00:00
Mitchell Hashimoto (developer of Ghostty) talks about Zig a lot. Ghostty is written in it, and he seems to love it. The churn doesn't seem to bother him at all.

I asked him about in a thread a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47206009#47209313

The makers of TigerBeatle also rave about how good Zig is.
by StableAlkyne | 2026-03-11 05:44:31+00:00
> a metaverse that no one wanted

That's the thing though, there is interest in "metaverse" style programs. VRChat, the biggest one, got 80k concurrent users last month (all time peak) according to SteamDB. Seems low, but hardware is a limiting factor for them.

What happened is Facebook's version of this was a corporatized, simplified, G-rated fraction of what its competition is. Despite being in a medium where the defining factor is the ability to look out the eyes of anything vaguely humanoid, you could only be a generic human who only exists from the waist up, devoid of almost any self expression beyond maybe accessories or retexturing.

As a result, there was no audience: the people who already use VR aren't going to go to an inferior product. And the people who would buy a VR headset aren't going to waste their time on a ghost town.
by debug-0101 | 2026-03-11 05:46:05+00:00
Absolutely agreed! The end-to-end governance across different layers is what we offer to enterprises as a part of the enterprise-first Guard0 Platform. And as you rightly pointed out, access is one of the loose ends in many of the places because it always has been a loosely defined thing at the loss of places. Our thesis is to control and govern access, behavior, and actions. Would you mind opening an issue with specific details or the problem? I believe the g0 scan and g0 test should capture the credential issue, but if not, we can add the desired functionality.
by joshvm | 2026-03-11 05:46:08+00:00
This is true, and even with black tea where you'd normally want hotter, I don't think anyone really pays attention

Thinking about it, we also had some "fancy" packet ramen from Momofuku. Good example there - those noodles take forever to cook compared to the deep fried ones. You'd have to soak, nuke in the microwave and still wait ages.

Most of the coffee we took down were light roast and how well the beans survived shipping/storage, how well they were roasted mattered much more.

There are a bunch of cafetieres as well, but I don't like the silt even with some of the techniques designed to minimize it.
by lazypl82 | 2026-03-11 05:47:24+00:00
The artifact review approach makes sense to me. How the code was produced doesn't change what the reviewer needs to answer: does this do what it's supposed to, and does it do it cleanly? If anything, I'd rather have a short design note in the PR – intent, constraints, alternatives considered – than a full prompt history. The prompt history is noise; the intent is signal.

That said, one thing review can't fully cover is runtime behavior under real traffic. Not saying that's a review problem – it's just a separate layer that still needs attention after the merge.
by frankacter | 2026-03-11 05:47:30+00:00
I’m a bit confused about who this article is really for. The MacBook Neo starts at $600 so when I read:

“MacBook Neo is built on an iPhone chip—the A18 Pro. It’s far less capable of running intensive tasks than any of Apple’s M‑series chips or any moderately powered Intel or AMD processor.”

and that:

“It’s merely the right kind of performance for anybody who wants to browse the internet or stream video.”

...at this price point there are plenty of alternatives for laptops with better performance and specs.

For example, you can get a 15.6" Ryzen 7 5700U laptop with 32GB RAM and a 1TB SSD for less than the “unbeatable” price of the Neo:

https://www.amazon.com/NIAKUN-Computer-Processor-Graphics-Ke...

Or a 15.6" Intel Core i7‑1255U/12650H laptop with 16GB RAM and a 1TB SSD in a similar price range:

https://www.amazon.com/HP-Laptop-High-Performance-i7-1255U-4...

Both of these offer:

* A more traditional laptop CPU

* 2–4× the memory

* 2-4× the storage (1TB vs 256GB base on the Neo)

Standard HDMI/USB‑C video out for external displays

So I can definitely see the appeal of the Neo for people who just want an inexpensive way into macOS, but the claim that “no other budget laptop can compete.” doesn't track.

Maybe it should have been "The least expensive Macbook yet, but that comes with significant downsides."
by throwaway27448 | 2026-03-11 05:47:59+00:00
It's slow and buggy and difficult to wrangle to the needs of modern text editing yea?

Look I live in emacs. I cannot explain to you why this is such a shitty experience. I assume there are random assholes around the world who are holding emacs back so they can view their email from a repl or some bullshit.
by sebmellen | 2026-03-11 05:48:23+00:00
I'm not affiliated with Didit, I run a separate company (https://cerebrum.com). We offer an IDV product and we work with a network of ~40 background screening companies in the US and are integrated to basically every ATS/HRIS system as a result.

If you are in the US, be extremely careful when implementing KYE/HR workflows due to FCRA risk. Glad to speak on this if you're interested or have a need! My email is sebastian @ <ourcompanyname>.com
by fc417fc802 | 2026-03-11 05:48:26+00:00
Right. To play legally purchased blu-rays. Who pirates movies and then burns them on a disk? And if someone did do that why would they be using a gimped blu-ray player instead of a media PC?

The only thing this scheme was ever going to catch was full blown counterfeit disks sold on a street corner to your average joe. I think that was only ever much of a thing in the developing world. Or was it just before my time?
by Incipient | 2026-03-11 05:49:13+00:00
Python is doomed? That's new.

You use python docker images pinned to a stable version (3.11 etc), and between bigger versions, you test and handle any breaking changes.

I feel like this approach applies to pretty much every language?

Who on earth raw dogs on "language:latest" and just hopes for the best?

Granted I wouldn't be running Facebook's backend on something like this. But i feel that isn't a problem 95% of people need to deal with.
by dimaggiosghost | 2026-03-11 05:49:33+00:00
One thing I'm finding early success with is to define how the system can know if this statement is being met. Frequently I will include in the prompt e.g. "research what makes good high quality engineering practices and derive how to tell if those practices are being followed".

Directly telling it my team's values would be better, if we have it developed (like the style guide you mentioned) ... but that's a lot of work, the reasons that hasn't happened before are just as true now, and honestly - there's a lot of overlap with the generic research result.

> Are these changes good, high quality, good engineering practices, in line with known best practices and the style guide
by fouronnes3 | 2026-03-11 05:52:07+00:00
Mindshare death is a very large overstatement given the massive amount of legacy C++ out there that will be maintained by poor souls for year to come. But you are right, there used to be a great language hiding within C++ if the committee ever dared to break backwards compat. But even if they did it now it would be too late and they'd just end up with a worse Rust or Zig.
by anon373839 | 2026-03-11 05:54:39+00:00
> "Open weights" borrows the legitimacy of open source

I don't really see how open-weights models need to borrow any legitimacy. They are valuable artifacts being given away that can be used, tested and repurposed forever. Fully open models like the OLMo series and Nvidia's Nemotron are much more valuable in some contexts, but they haven't quite cracked the level of performance that the best open-weights models are hitting. And I think that's why most startups are reaching for Chinese base LLMs when they want to tune custom models: the performance is better and they were never going to bother with pretraining anyway.
by 405nm | 2026-03-11 05:54:43+00:00
i like it a lot, being agnostic to communication channel sets it apart from the lora only meshes. it’s cool to be able to use a mesh device to communicate with people who are both on and off the mainline internet seamlessly.

and there’s some cool stuff happening on nomadnet as well l

oh yeah and there’s a voice chat protocol that works over lora, too
by sockaddr | 2026-03-11 05:54:52+00:00
Your amazon links are broken. But I think you're missing the point of this thing. This isn't for people that really even care about performance. It's for people that want a laptop that works with their iPhone, does all the things their school needs them to do in a browser, and doesn't come with a complete dogsh*t OS, and isn't of dubious quality like an HP or a "NIAKUN", whatever that is.

Now the color options, that's a tragedy.
by xp84 | 2026-03-11 05:55:57+00:00
Sure, but if you define the code as the only spec, then it is usually a terrible spec, since the code itself specifies bugs too. And one of the benefits of having a spec (or tests) is that you have something against which to evaluate the program in order to decide if its behavior is correct or not.

Incidentally, I think in many scenarios, LLMs are pretty great at converting code to a spec and indeed spec to code (of equal quality to that of the input spec).
by rurban | 2026-03-11 05:57:58+00:00
Doing tickets and commenting cost and quality in the PR.

Still, the best are outstanding, and the medium ones bare usable. I rank it by IQ. From 140 to utterly stupid. opencode/gpt-oss-120b local got a 90. opencode/opus-4.6 gets 140. codex/gpt-5.4 gets 115. All for C/C++ tasks.

There was one expensive Chinese SWE benchmark posted recently to arxiv. It did confirm my evaluation.
by frankacter | 2026-03-11 05:59:06+00:00
>Your amazon links are broken.

Thanks. Fixed.

>This isn't for people that really even care about performance. It's for people that want a laptop that works with their iPhone

That was my conclusion to my comment in my original. The title of "no other budget laptop can compete" is not just sensationalized, it is factually wrong. It should have been "the least expensive macbook yet comes with a catch"
by rendaw | 2026-03-11 06:00:40+00:00
I had signed up for an Apple Developer account for "sign in with apple". I had auto-renew on. For the last month or so I was getting increasingly urgent emails about "Your Apple Developer Program membership expires in X days.". I logged into the website and there was a text block talking about a "renew" button that didn't exist on the page. According to reddit this is because mine is set to auto-renew so it's fine (why the text though, then?). A few days ago the subscription expired without auto-renewing. And I realized, maybe I don't need "sign in with apple".

They couldn't be trying harder to sink this ship.