MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eklavya | 2026-03-06 13:47:51+00:00
I bought a macbook pro m1 pro. Its value is 25% in 4/5 years. I bought a second hand dell latitude 7/8 years ago, it was 3/4 years old then. Still running as a server today. A cheap acer bought in 2017 runs almalinux and is surprisingly fast and capable today, I had upgraded ram and put in nvme SSD long back.
by khambir | 2026-03-06 13:48:18+00:00
TL;DR
- Hello Developer: March 2026
- What's New in Swift
- Apple's biggest hardware week in years
- SwiftUI Onion Architecture with Swift Effects
- Implementing Passkeys in iOS with AuthenticationServices
- Using an MCP for product optimizations
- New lineHeight(_:) modifier in SwiftUI on iOS 26
- SwiftUI Agent Skill

Bonus: iOS Job Market - 45 new positions this week
by i_think_so | 2026-03-06 13:48:22+00:00
How telling that I get a

> Just a moment...

and

> Enable JavaScript and cookies to continue

just to look at an official blog post. Sigh.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260306133059/https://blog.mozi... for those of us who prefer not having to open our browsers to additional risk just to learn about how our browsers are supposed to be getting less risky.
by sgc | 2026-03-06 13:48:40+00:00
I understand, but the improvement is actually more than that. It is not directly programming, but look at this page [1] for example. I spent years handcrafting parallel texts of English and Greek and had managed to put just under 400 books online. With AI, I managed to translate and put in parallel 1500 more books very quickly. At least 2/3 of those have never been translated into English, ever. That means I have done what the entire history of English-speaking scholars has never managed to do. And the quality is good enough that I have already had publishers contacting me to use the translations. There are a couple other areas where I am getting similar speed ups, but of course this is not the norm.

[1] https://catholiclibrary.org/library/browse/
Ask HN: Modeling executive function as a grey-box system: Valid or delusional?
by chrispbacon | 2026-03-06 13:48:51+00:00
I’ve spent the last year treating executive function attributes (Discipline, Grit, Patience, etc.) as mutable "system variables" instead of fixed traits.

I’m taking a systems-engineering approach to “prescribe” CBT-based psychological interventions when I hit a wall (e.g. procrastination, "redlining"), and also to identify which traits need the most attention to optimize overall “system” (my) output.

*Model Overview*:

I’m using a Grey-Box model, dependent on the following premises:

1. Performance as Function: Performance output is in large part a function of the psychological traits I listed.

2. Mutability: These traits are mutable to the extent that maximizing them results in non-trivially enhanced performance.

3. Control Theory Loop: Defining a self-correcting model for these traits using control theory, benchmarking it vs some ground truth (e.g. features shipped, PnL), & running trial and error on individually-tailored psychological interventions can yield actionable growth insights.

*The Bottlenecks*:

1. It’s vulnerable to heavy GIGO ("Garbage-In-Garbage-Out").

2. Accurate state estimation currently requires high-friction journaling, which is the primary failure point, but not insurmountable w/ the advent of LLM journaling

*Questions for HN*

1. Prior Art: Do any of you take a structured, quantified approach to improving these (or any other) personality traits?

2. The Placebo Check: Please poke holes in the logic. I worry the success I’ve personally found with this approach may just be a placebo.
by joe_mamba | 2026-03-06 13:49:35+00:00
>They absolutely do add value

Not to the non-technical bean counters. When they allocate money they want to see you prove how that extra money translates to an immediate ROI, and it's difficult to prove that in an Excel sheet exactly what the ROI will be without making stuff up on vibes and feels.

Like at one German company i was at ~15 years ago, all the devs wanted a second 19" monitor on our workstations for increased productivity, and the bean counters wouldn't approve that because they wanted proof of how that expense across hundreds of people will increase our productivity and by how much %, to see if that would offset the cost.

This is how these people think. If you don't bring hard numbers on how much their "line will go up", they won't give you money.

I know this is difficult to understand from the PoV of SV Americans where gazillions of dollars just fall from the sky at their workplaces.
by g947o | 2026-03-06 13:49:37+00:00
> Firefox was not selected at random. It was chosen because it is a widely deployed and deeply scrutinized open source project — an ideal proving ground for a new class of defensive tools.

What I was thinking was, "Chromium team is definitely not going to collaborate with us because they have Gemini, while Safari belongs to a company that operates in a notoriously secretive way when it comes to product development."
by dotancohen | 2026-03-06 13:49:40+00:00
The 2016 treaty that Trump ripped up allowed for Iran to become nuclear capable in "10 to 15 years". Do you know when then means Iran can have a nuclear weapon?

The only people who could claim that Obama's treaty had a positive effect were those who either see 10 years as an extraordinary long time and no longer their worry, or those who wish to see a serious threat to the American way of life.
by zbentley | 2026-03-06 13:51:04+00:00
Sanitization isn’t enough. We need a way to separate code and data (not just to sanitize out instructions from data) that is deterministic. If there’s a “decide whether this input is code or data” model in the mix, you’ve already lost: that model can make a bad call, be influenced or tricked, and then you’re hosed.

At a fundamental level, having two contexts as suggested by some of the research in this area isn’t enough; errors or bad LLM judgement can still leak things back and forth between them. We need something like an SQL driver’s injection prevention: when you use it correctly, code/data confusion cannot occur since the two types of information are processed separately at the protocol level.
by PaulHoule | 2026-03-06 13:51:39+00:00
Back in the 90's I had an overclocked AMD486 machine which seemed OK most of the time but had segfaults compiling the Linux kernel. I sent in a bug report and Alan Cox closed it saying it was the fault of my machine being overclocked.

I dialed the machine back to the rated speed but it failed completely within 6 months.
by GJim | 2026-03-06 13:51:44+00:00
> Gen-X was making the popular new art at the time. It was a strong reflection of the feelings of our generation.

I posted this in a thread about the 90's film 'Hackers'.....

In the 1990's and for us Gen-X'ers, the worst thing you could do was to sell out; to take the mans money instead of keeping your integrity. Calling people and bands 'sell outs' (sometimes without justification!) was to insult them.

With the rise of 'influencers' the opposite appears to be the case; people go out of their way to sell out and are praised for doing so. This is a massive change in the cultural landscape which perhaps many born in the 2000's aren't aware of. (Being aware of this helps give some perspective to Gen-X media and films like Hackers).

BTW: Remember the 'product scene' in the film Waynes World?
by mitchell_h | 2026-03-06 13:51:54+00:00
I'm sold. My wife is a teacher(refuses to use a chromebook because they suck, or an Ipad because data input sucks). She'll be getting one of these. Kids probably will too. I'm having a really hard time finding another laptop on the market the hits the "i use gmail, and gdocs, and some other webapps all day" demographic so well.
by 542354234235 | 2026-03-06 13:52:02+00:00
Building a new factory would cost $20 billion and take 3 to 4 years [0,1]. With chip output capacity and AI boom profit margins, it would take just under a decade to break even. If the bubble bursts and chips return to pre-boom levels, then it would take over 30 years to break even.

Ford had almost $20 billion in EV car manufacturing investments planned for the mid-late 2020s and the abrupt end of the EV subsidies cost Ford billions of dollars and they have abandoned multiple investments.

If you do nothing, you still are rewarded because you are making pure profit in either scenario. If you invest billions then you are digging out of that for years regardless, and could be in the whole for decades if you bet wrong.

[0] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-to-build-a-20-bil...

[1] https://techovedas.com/what-does-it-take-to-build-a-semicond...
by tinfoilhatter | 2026-03-06 13:52:11+00:00
Or it could be because of... https://www.jstor.org/stable/26363914

Which is the situation that led to the conflict in Ukraine in 2013/14 - an IMF loan that was up for renewal with harsh structural adjustments.

The IMF / WB consistently consult with NGOs and allow them to heavily influence their policies. You can point to four success stories of countries accepting IMF loans and recovering. There are 86 to 91 developing countries as of late 2025 that are still indebted to the IMF, especially in Africa.

It's a monetary tool for Western hegemony. Pretending it's anything else is disingenuous.
by PaulHoule | 2026-03-06 13:52:35+00:00
"All I needed was patience but I didn't have time"

In the great fight between Covey (7 Habits) and Collins (Good to Great) I tend to agree with Collins that realized purpose is more important than structure, habits or technique. There are few ways I could serve you worse than to increase your patience or grit applied to the wrong task.
by tosh | 2026-03-06 13:52:37+00:00
Incredible when you consider that the next one or two generations of the macbook neo will probably come w/ 16gb+ ram and support 5k displays.

A few more generations and we might see < 1kg, 120hz oled and multi day battery life.

But I'm most excited about the near future because if the macbook neo becomes a huge success it will hopefully encourage app devs to waste less ram.
by 3A2D50 | 2026-03-06 13:53:21+00:00
I think there is an unspoken concern among policy makers about how sophisticated AI is becoming. I think they envision a scenario of swarms persuasive AI bots controlled by an adversary, pushing people to elect bad actors with bad policies. So the main objective isn't to protect the children it is to eliminate anonymity! At some point these age verification requirements will go from answering a simple question to providing your ID. I'll add that there is also an aligned interest with companies that rely on ad revenue as they don't want to serve ads to bots!
by adamnew123456 | 2026-03-06 13:53:36+00:00
> Well, most architectures do not use plain jumps with implicit arguments for function calls, but have explicit call/ret or branch-with-link instructions.

Anyone who wants to go deeper on this would be well served doing some reading on "return oriented programming" and shadow stacks / control flow integrity. I got turned onto this by a few LWN articles that talk about the subject (https://lwn.net/Articles/940403/ among others).

It turns out that "jump to this pointer" is actually a dangerous construct, and it's not something you get much high-level exposure to since functions as an abstraction are so unleaky.
by rishikeshs | 2026-03-06 13:53:42+00:00
This is not only openai, but other models as well. Last week I added a summarise with AI block on a product blog page. I had seen it somewhere and felt like it’s a cool feature to have. Wrote a small shortcode in hugo for the block and added it with various models.

It’s like a hit and miss, sometimes claude says i cannot access your site which is not true.

Ref: https://formbeep.com/blog/building-formbeep-weekend/
Show HN: Crow's Nest – a weekly planner and budget tracker for Harvest users
by julianrubisch | 2026-03-06 13:53:49+00:00
I've been a freelance developer for years and always struggled with planning my weeks and tracking project budgets. I use Harvest for time tracking, but it doesn't give me a weekly view or budget visibility until it's too late.

So I built Crow's Nest – a work week planner and budget visibility layer that sits on top of Harvest. It pulls your time entries and shows you:

- Your week laid out by project and capacity (before Monday hits)
- Real-time budget progress for each project
- The gap between what you planned and what actually happened

It's not a Harvest replacement – just the planning layer that's missing. You need an active Harvest account to use it.

Why I'm sharing it on HN: I'd love technical feedback from fellow freelancers and builders. The product is early (two alpha users), and HN's constructive criticism has always been invaluable for my projects.

Technical details: Ruby on Rails with heavy usage of Web Awesome and Phlex

Biggest challenges:

1. Mapping Harvest's time entry data to a weekly planning model
2. Creating a simple UI that doesn't add cognitive load
3. Handling timezone differences for freelancers working with global clients

Try it: https://mycrowsnest.app

Would appreciate feedback on:

- Does this solve a real problem for freelancers who use Harvest?
- What features would make it indispensable?
- UX/UI improvements

I'm the developer, building this in the open. All feedback welcome.
by soerxpso | 2026-03-06 13:54:21+00:00
No it's not. It's based on how much he "made" in the first half of 2020, mostly originating from gains in Amazon's stock, in a period specifically selected to inflate the number. If you actually want to display how much Bezos made since the user opened the page, there are many public APIs to get live stock data and you could show the actual live gain/loss. But that wouldn't really support the point you're trying to make, since there would be days where he actually loses more money than most people ever see.
by everdrive | 2026-03-06 13:54:27+00:00
In addition to System76's thoughtful response here, does anyone have a good _personal_ plan for what to do? Possibilities I'm thinking about include:

- Switch to a non-compliant distro. (could put me in a dead end down the line depending on what happens)

- Find a browser that can block the API access and just use two browsers.

- Have an "online accounts" computer and an "old fashioned" computer?

- Switch to books and DVDs?
Show HN: Followers are a bad primitive – I built a group-first social app
by dagobert1 | 2026-03-06 13:55:22+00:00
Most social apps are built around follower graphs and broadcast reach. I’ve been experimenting with what happens if groups are the core structure instead.

I built Aligno around that idea: chat, posts, events, and shared boards designed for shared momentum, alongside personal goal tracking.

I’m sure variations of group-based social apps have existed before, but this is my take. The idea came from noticing how hard it can be to find intentional communities of people working toward the same goals — and how motivation and momentum tend to fade as life gets busier.

Currently it’s iOS only. If the idea resonates and feedback is strong, I’ll likely bring it to Android as well.

Curious what builders here think. Looking for honest product critique and edge-case feedback.
by terminalshort | 2026-03-06 13:55:23+00:00
Universities were just elite finishing schools. It's a status signal to be able to afford to spend 4 years of your youth not working, partying, and paying tuition to "study" subjects that have no economic value (studying practical things like medicine and law was not elite because it shows that you need to work for a living). This stopped being a status signal with the advent student loans because it removed the exclusivity, but it takes generations for the non elite to figure that out.
by chownie | 2026-03-06 13:55:24+00:00
Selimenes1 is an 11 day old account which sat silent for 10 days and then all of a sudden starts posting from today, and it's all multiple paragraph responses to threads about AI.

I would like to state for the record that the strategy to swap em-dashes into double-hyphens between the generation and posting step is probably not enough transformation to disguise this behaviour. Whoever is running this clawdbot or whatever it is should really be putting that information on the account page.
by signaturefish | 2026-03-06 13:55:28+00:00
Foundation licensee here in the UK, working on my Intermediate (and hoping to pass that exam this year). I manage the radio system for the UK Discworld Convention (every other year, next instance August 2026), and I spend a chunk of time on the VHF repeater near me, in the Cambridge area (mostly listening).

5 and 5, 73.
by notfried | 2026-03-06 13:55:43+00:00
The Neo is incredibly executed by Apple, and one they must have been planning for for years: to be able to create a machine this good at this price. I wouldn't be surprised if it dramatically reshapes the laptop industry.

Spec-wise, this is as good as an M1-M2 Air, which is already an over-powered device for most non-professionals. All the "compromises" they made, like no center stage in the camera, less ports, only one monitor support, "just WiFi 6E", and others, are all non-issues for a typical average consumers.

And the price is the best it could be. At $499 for students, in a year's time when Gen2 is released, you will find a new Gen1 at possibly $399, and a refurbished Gen1 at even less. I don't see why anyone who wants an "entry-level/starter laptop" would buy anything but a Neo. We already are in a world in which average people don't need specific Windows-only apps. Most common apps are either cross-platform or web-based.

Dell, HP and alike are lucky that they're being enamored with datacenter server demand. I expect them to shift-away from the consumer laptop market and focus more on the enterprise in the coming years, which could have negative consequences for their pro-lineups.
by alexpotato | 2026-03-06 13:55:49+00:00
> I think, for better and worse, brands are a lot more than that.

There is a great quote about this:

"For things that are visible to other people when you use them, there are many brands. e.g clothes, cars, watches, skis, furniture etc

For things that are not visible, there are much fewer brands e.g. underwear.
by lproven | 2026-03-06 13:56:06+00:00
Well, it was a breath of fresh air after even 3.0 let alone Windows 2.

But personally, I enjoyed NT 3.1 more. Built-in PPP so I could dial up to CompuServe and get on the Net. Not the web, which barely existed yet, but the Internet. Grab my email at the same time as I downloaded some files over FTP and grabbed the latest from my newsgroups.

At the same time, I had all of MS Office open, and a few command prompts, and a connection to the big office VAX watching that it was happy...

I enjoyed taunting Amiga owners about Real Multitasking on Windows. :-D I was about 25 at the time, in my defence.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-03-06 13:56:15+00:00
Oops. I may have written too long trying to respond to it that it got too long for hackernews haha.

I have written that comment on here now[0]

The TLDR tho of my post/comment is that Brand age that PG mentions is essentially something so linked to marketing and advertising and spending money/injecting money and becoming the differentiating factor. This can be a big thing for pure capitalists but the current forms of advertising rely on black boxes attention centralized which you have to go to ads for and this whole system feels rent seeking for the existence of livelihood/businesses extracting money from them small or large and very famously, Adam smith was against forms of rent-seeking.

Marketing to me seems like converting everything to a statistic and everything related to marketing subsequently starts having infinitely looser morals which I don't think I need to be telling everybody of. It feels like trying to capitalize on top of anything or everything without any regards to anything.

I do think that we do have some say in it. The nature of AI is that its out and there is no way of putting it back in the box especially with OSS models reaching parity and no company is putting their frontier models back and this means that AI slop is something that we just have to deal with. But instead of dealing it with brands which can inject money because they got money. It's better if we try to filter things on top of authenticity and I do feel like we have a say in this.

have a nice day.

[0]:https://smileplease.mataroa.blog/blog/i-dont-want-brand-age-...
by rich_sasha | 2026-03-06 13:56:37+00:00
I often wonder what I am missing. Recently I wanted to wrap a low level vendor API with a callback API (make a request struct and request id, submit, provide a callback fn, which gets called with request IDs and messages received from vendor) to async Python (await make_request(...)). Kinda straightforward - lots of careful code of registering and unregistering callbacks, some careful thread synchronisation (callbacks get called in another thread), thinking about sane exception handling in async code. Fiddly but not rocket science.

What I got sort of works, as in tests pass - this with Opus 4.5. It is usable, though it doesn't exist cleanly on errors despite working to death with Claude about this. On exception it exits dirtily and crashes, which is good enough for now. I had some fancy ideas about logging messages from the vendor to be able to replay them, to be able to then reproduce errors. Opus made a real hash of it, lots of "fuck it comment out the assert so the test passes". This part is unusable and worse, pollutes the working part of the project. It made a valiant effort at mocking the vendor API for testing but really badly, instead of writing 30 lines of general code, it wrote 200 lines of inconsistent special cases that don't even work altogether. Asked to fix it it just shuffles around the special cases and gets stuck.

It's written messily enough that I wouldn't touch this even to remove the dead code paths. I could block a few days for it to fix but frankly in that time I can redo it all and better. So while it works I'm not gonna touch it.

I did everything LLM proponents say. I discussed requirements. Agent had access to the API docs and vendor samples. I said think hard many times. Based on this we wrote a detailed spec, then detailed inplementation plan. I hand checked a lot of the high level definitions. And yet here I am. By the time Opus went away and started coding, we had the user facing API hammered out, key implementation details (callback -> queue -> async task in source thread routing messages etc), constraints (clean handling of exceptions, threadsafe etc). Tests it has to write. Any minor detail we didn't discuss to death was coded up like a bored junior.

And this also wasn't my first attempt, this was attempt #3. First attempt was like, here's the docs and samples, make me a Python async API. That was a disaster. Second was more like, let's discuss, make a spec, then off you go. No good. Even just taking the last attempt time, I would have spent less time doing this by hand myself from scratch.
by lapcat | 2026-03-06 13:56:41+00:00
> What if you're wrong? What if one day you wake up and the world (as we know it) hasn't ended?

It appears that you misunderstood. I said, "This is not [emphasis added] like nuclear war" and "We're cursing our descendants with a world much more hostile than the one we were born into". Much more hostile does not imply the end of the world, and indeed the existence of our descendants implies that everyone is not dead.

> I think I understand where you're at.

I don't think you do, and I wasn't in need of therapy.