MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cyberax | 2026-03-05 05:34:44+00:00
Hard disagree. Co-routines are utter hell. They should have never become popular.

With traditional locking, the locked segment is usually very clear. It's possible to use race detectors to verify that objects are accessed with consistent locking. The yield points are also clear.

With async stuff, ANY await point can change ANY state. And await points are common, even sometimes for things like logging. There are also no tools to verify the consistent "locking".

So I often spend hours staring blankly at logs, trying to reconstruct a possible sequence of callbacks that could have led to a bug. E.g.: https://github.com/expo/expo/issues/39428
by anilgulecha | 2026-03-05 05:35:46+00:00
This is precedent setting. In this case the rewrite was in same language, but if there's a python GPL project, and it's tests (spec) were used to rewrite specs in rust, and then an implementation in rust, can the second project be legally MIT, or any other?

If yes, this in a sense allows a path around GPL requirements. Linux's MIT version would be out in the next 1-2 years.
by deaux | 2026-03-05 05:36:00+00:00
Since you quoted the long-term part:

The policies you're naming are still enacted for their expected long-term consequences. That doesn't mean all of them are successful in achieving their goals, sometimes their expectations turn out to be wrong. This can happen with any policy, regardless of whether the goal was short-term of long-term.

If you're talking about the power shift part: Many if not most (including me) believe that slowing of economic growth was inevitable, it simply wasn't a level that could be sustained in the long run. There are plenty of issues in China and plenty of policies that may turn out to have failed - much of it remains to be seen, as again, the goals are long term and we may consider them successful a decade or two from now. But the scientific gap with the rest of the world is widening every day, China is crushing it in that area and the fruits will be reaped. Robotics, every kind of energy, every kind of engineering.

> Certainly what Xi did with Hong Kong made peaceful re-unification with Taiwan very unlikely.

It didn't have an impact. By 2019 the chance was already zero barring black swan events. The chance is still zero barring black swan events.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-03-05 05:36:09+00:00
The idea isn't that Oppenheimer was a saint, but that the government he served well and faithfully -- at the expense of his soul, some would argue -- turned on him viciously as soon as he dared to question their agenda.

As you suggest, it is easy to imagine Altman in the same hot seat. Never mind his sexual orientation, which the Republican theocrats will eventually use against him as surely as the knives came out for Ernst Röhm.
by francink | 2026-03-05 05:37:12+00:00
I am working on an open-source library for encryption of application data on cloud storage (https://baolib.org/). The idea is a local application where a remote storage is a synchronization media between different peers.
The storage is encrypted and content is accessible only to the granted peers. The library supports file and SQL interface.

I will appreciate any feedback. Thank you!
by mindslight | 2026-03-05 05:37:21+00:00
Just plug several units into a power strip ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Just curious - are you exporting power or zero export with a current monitor upstream of the main panel? Also same question regarding off-grid operation and a transfer switch ahead of the main panel.

I don't know what 3 phase breakers cost in NL but the second panel and feed-in breaker sound like the straightforward solution in the US too. Our wires cost considerably more, and we don't even have RCD in the breakers you'd use for that.
by alwillis | 2026-03-05 05:37:36+00:00
> I've read and heard others say this is the opposite of the truth, that Apple never gives bulk discounts.

When I worked in higher education at an Ivy Plus university for 14 years, we were able to get discounts. We also had a campus store where we sold and repaired Macs.

I understand that higher ed is quite different from K-12. It also seems like sales reps have much less leeway now than they used to. I have no doubt there's been multiple reorganizations, etc. and things could be completely different now.

It's not just discounts; even if you pay the normal education price, Apple could throw in some extras (software licenses, AppleCare, etc.) to sweeten the deal.
by mechramc | 2026-03-05 05:38:04+00:00
Hi HN,
It is hard to communicate how frustratingly opaque Apple's hardware stack can be. Everyone targets the Mac's GPU for local models, but there is a dedicated accelerator—the Apple Neural Engine (ANE)—sitting completely dark for LLM workloads. CoreML treats it as a black-box scheduler, stripping away any direct control or ability to train.

There are a few real caveats here, but imo the fundamental constraint to using the ANE hasn't been compute—it’s been the complete lack of a native orchestration layer.
Building on incredible foundational reverse-engineering by maderix (who mapped the private ANEClient/ANECompiler APIs and discovered the ~19 TFLOPS fp16 ceiling), I wanted to see if we could bridge the gap from a raw hardware exploit to a stable runtime.
I just open-sourced Orion: an end-to-end system that bypasses CoreML entirely to run and train LLMs directly on the ANE.
Just to be concrete about what this took to build: my day-to-day is in enterprise systems orchestration, not writing low-level Objective-C kernels. I approached this entire build as an exercise in architectural delegation—using Claude to rapidly generate the execution syntax while I managed the system state, debugged the hardware limits, and held the structural vision.
What we ran into was a wall of undocumented silicon behavior—what I'll call the hardware impedance mismatch. We cataloged 17 total programming constraints, 11 of which were completely undocumented.

For example:
• The concat operation causes an immediate, silent compiler failure.

• BLOBFILE weights require a bizarre 64-byte offset from the chunk header, or you get silent numerical corruption.

• The ANE maintains internal state that hard-caps you at ~119 compilations per process.

Previous attempts at ANE training (like ANEgpt) hit a wall of NaN divergence after a single step. We solved this by wiring up a deferred compilation pipeline and implementing strict activation clamping to stop the fp16 overflow cascade (clamping activations to [-65504, 65504]). To bypass the 119-compilation limit, I used an exec() process restart loop after every training step.

The leverage here is real. Orion currently hits 170+ tokens/s for GPT-2 124M decode, and more importantly, achieves mechanically stable multi-step training on a 110M parameter transformer (loss dropping 12.3 to 6.2 over 1,000 steps with zero NaNs).

It’s not entirely clean yet. The ANE bakes weights at compile time, meaning every training update requires a ~4.2s recompilation penalty. But imo, extracting raw, zero-idle-power throughput directly from Apple's silicon isn't just a benchmark iteration—this is a layer change for local, always-on AI.
The repo (Objective-C runtime, 5-pass graph compiler, no Python orchestration) is up. I’d love to know what the systems engineers here think about the constraint catalog or potential weight-patching workarounds.
by eitally | 2026-03-05 05:39:07+00:00
Why would they do that? They launched the DGX Spark last year with multiple hardware OEMs selling flavors of the reference device (Dell, Lenovo, Asus). That contains a desktop-sized Grace Blackwell architecture GPU (GB10), and word on the street is that they're moving into laptops this year. Their market is the same market Apple is pitching the MacBook 5 Pro/Max, too: devs wanting local models. It's not currently a large market, but it's growing quickly. It makes far more sense for Nvidia to build hardware to service this market than to overly focus on their gaming lines. RTX GPUs are sell once. GB-containing consumer devices are "sell once, but then collect recurring revenue when the workloads those developers build hit production on a cloud somewhere."
by throw5t432 | 2026-03-05 05:41:27+00:00
> People in Hong Kong died

Do you have a legit source for this? When I search for information, I only found this case, “Luo Changqing, a 70-year-old Hong Kong cleaner, died from head injuries sustained after he was hit by a brick thrown by a Hong Kong protester during a violent confrontation between two groups in Sheung Shui, Hong Kong on 13 November 2019.”

None of the other legit sources claim the police killed any of the rioters.
by jgtrosh | 2026-03-05 05:42:05+00:00
Your instinctive reaction matches with scientific consensus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing

> Each historical invention of writing emerged from systems of proto-writing that used ideographic and mnemonic symbols but were not capable of fully recording spoken language. True writing, where the content of linguistic utterances can be accurately reconstructed by later readers, is a later development. As proto-writing is not capable of fully reflecting the grammar and lexicon used in languages, it is often only capable of encoding broad or imprecise information.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_speech

> vocal languages must have begun diversifying at least 100,000 years ago
Show HN: Stop wasting time managing your hardware projects and focus on building [video]
by oleksg | 2026-03-05 05:42:35+00:00
Hey guys! While working on my hardware start-up in the past, I got tired of using spreadsheets and scouring random Google sites for part search.
To help manage all this, I vibe-coded a tool over the weekend.

To try the demo website (with the demo/mock data), checkout

https://odem-git-main-skymark.vercel.app/
Email: demo@gmail.com
Pass: test123

It's super early stage, and mostly mock data, but it's been pretty useful so far. It's got
- Historical price data for parts (predictions?)
- Supply chain risk calculation (for those hoping to get past the prototype stage)
- Alternative part finder (mock on demo)
- LLM-based part search (mock on demo)
- GIT-ish BOM management
- CSV Import/Export
- And more :)

To any hardware founders out there, are there any features you'd kill to have while working on your products?

Also, if anyone wants to try it out properly for their projects, let me know. Will not only let you use it for free, but also build out whatever you want.
by LarsDu88 | 2026-03-05 05:44:13+00:00
These humanoid robots making cars is always a bit disappointing. If you look at videos of an assembly line the humans do manually dexterous complex tasks like bolting in car seats which are move in by hand, or helping place windshields into position.

The problem humanoid robots solve would be addressed better by simply altering the design of the car to not require humans to do that stuff.

What we actually see is humanoid robots deployed to do tasks that can already be done with simpler robot arms...
Spektr – Ask plain English questions about any CSV, get charts
by thepocketledger | 2026-03-05 05:44:43+00:00
I built Spektr because I needed analytics across different datasets (finance, Jira exports, project tracking) without sending data to the cloud.
It's a Go-based analytics engine with a CLI. Point it at any CSV, ask questions in English, get charts and tables back. The AI (Gemini) only sees your column names and schema — never your actual data.
Try it:
spektr --file your-data.csv --query "show totals by category"
What it does under the hood: auto-detects your schema (dimensions vs measures), translates your question to a structured query via Gemini, runs all computation locally, returns charts/tables/text summaries.
Zero-copy RecordView interface means it works with any data shape without materializing intermediate objects. Works as a Go library, CLI binary, or WASM/npm module.

Built in Go. MIT licensed. Happy to answer questions about the architecture.
by kulahan | 2026-03-05 05:46:28+00:00
Thank goodness they removed this fantastic thing everyone wants to give you an extra fourteen seconds of use time per battery charge. Come on man.

As for the importance of it, if you want to give these to kids, you should have something more rugged, more replaceable, and more built for all kinds of environments (including kids who don’t have a conveniently well-lit place to focus on schoolwork at home).

A large school could have thousands upon thousands of broken Chromebooks waiting to be shipped off - literally multiple pallets. I’ve seen it more than once. Absolutely nobody is begging for an unrepairable, unexpandable, more-expensive version of what they all already have. It’s garbage for school, dead out of the gate.
by ori_b | 2026-03-05 05:46:55+00:00
Async and await is manually scheduling threads. So, if you're quite careful about what functions you call, you can arrange things so that you don't get concurrency when you don't want it.

Being careful about what functions you call is quite fragile and tedious, and doesn't compose well: what if a library changes when it adds a yield point?

Overall, async/await is a result of people programming like it's 2003, when threads were still very expensive.
by ynac | 2026-03-05 05:47:09+00:00
I've messed around with remote viewing and GC data for stock trading systems. Less for the profit than just to have a separate system for balance. It's fascinating stuff. It's not nothing, and yet it's just so weird. And, it divides / scares people instantly. If this isn't on your list of resources or area of interest, give it a look!
by stackghost | 2026-03-05 05:48:39+00:00
Wow, I found the writing style to be extremely grating, but here's my attempt at correcting some faulty premises that lead the author astray:

>narrator: he’s assuming that the water at different vertical positions, at a given horizontal position, is moving with the same vector

This assumption is physically impossible, given the first diagram in part #2. Obviously in real life the thing would drain out the side, so obviously there isn't a uniform flow gradient. This sometimes happens where students get so wrapped up in the math that they lose common sense and "prove" reality wrong, creating a paradox.

The author does it again with the "top half of an hour glass" shape:

>Well, we know that the velocities are always strictly vertical (and downward).

No, we actually don't know this. This is again physically impossible, given the shape of the container. If there was no horizontal component you'd get a tube-shaped void extending up from the spout, and water would magically fail to drain from the sides as if you'd drilled out a core sample from solid ice. Obviously, this is not what happens in reality, so obviously the assumption that all the velocity is purely vertical is incorrect.

>The water at the bottom of the spout cannot be going faster than at the top! [...] In other words, the water does indeed accelerate, and it also gets narrower; the pipe is partly filled with air.

The author appears to have forgotten that friction and gravity exist. Generally if the flow is steady (which it will be unless the volume of water in the tank is small compared to the volume of water in the outlet pipe), then the pipe will run full of water at all times. Water does not accelerate in the pipe. If you add length to the pipe then the added height is counteracted by added friction and by the weight of the moving fluid.

Grab an undergraduate fluids textbook and do an energy balance.
by scuff3d | 2026-03-05 05:49:04+00:00
As of 3.14 running without the GIL is optional, but the default still has the GIL in place. 3.13 had it as experimental, but not officially supported. 3.12 and back are all GIL all day.

Python's asyncio library is single threaded, so I'm not sure why you are talking about threads and asyncio like they have anything to do with each other.

Python has been able to do more then one thing at a time for a long time. That's what the multiprocess library is for. It's not an ideal solution, but it does exist.
by hvb2 | 2026-03-05 05:49:26+00:00
It's not monopoly rates, it's actual utility rates. The only problem here is if the utility is allowed to make a profit. Gas pipes, electric lines and internet connections are like roads in today's society. Can't really live without them.

So assuming the pipe maintenance is done at cost, with no money not being spent on the network. What would your better net positive solution even look like?
by jillesvangurp | 2026-03-05 05:49:43+00:00
In the US the cost of the red tape / bureaucracy is about 3-4x the cost of the total installation in places like Australia on a per kw basis. Including the Ozzy red tape. The US just has very inefficient bureaucracy.

In Australia you can go from the notion of "hmm I might want to put some solar on my roof" to having it, approved, installed and running in a couple of weeks. Safely and legally. In the US you lose months at best. Half a year is nothing. And everybody involved wants to make a profit so that's where all the cost goes. The crazy thing is that even with all that cost and bloat it's still worth doing. Imagine how good it would be if the US could figure out how to do stuff efficiently.

Both cost and complexity have to come down there. A lot of the friction in the system is a combination of the fossil fuel industry lobbying very successfully against anything to do with renewables, local energy monopolists resisting change and the notion of competition from their own customers (or any form of competition), and inept politicians coming up with ways to keep those happy.

And as an EU person, it's not that much better here. Better than the US. But we can do better.
by compounding_it | 2026-03-05 05:50:03+00:00
I recently erased my M1 Air 8gb Mac on Tahoe and use it for basic stuff like browsing music podcasts video conferencing etc. while I moved work development to linux. Runs really great for it. Now add things like Xcode/Vscodium, iTerm, preview, slack and you are going to see it become hot and in general slow down. CPU usage easily goes beyond 50% now.

When I got the Mac a few weeks after launch, I was doing these exact same things daily. In fact I used Xcode and Emulator back in 2021 frequently along with many apps. It had no slowdowns. Maybe things would occasionally stutter if swap/cache was used and I did too many things. I also relied on rosetta 2 apps at times so things were not exactly optimised either. The overall experience was 'Apple Silicon is FAST'

If anyone with Monterey can test their M1 Air 8gb with Tahoe they will definitely notice a difference in doing the same tasks.

I am not arguing the M1 Air is slow. I am arguing that the Macs now run slower for the same things than they used to with the prominent change being macOS. The headroom for apple silicon was really high. How apple managed to use it up is something that feels very shady given that macOS doesn't do much more than it did 5 years ago that would warrants the usage.

note: disabling Apple Intelligence doesn't make much of a difference.
by retsibsi | 2026-03-05 05:50:03+00:00
It's very easy to adopt a posture of above-it-all cynicism, and to think that anyone who sees an important distinction between two flawed powerful people is a sucker. But it's not particularly smart or sophisticated, and it's not helpful. In politics, the assumption that they're all equally corrupt and sociopathic is exactly what the worst of them want us to default to. In rich-guy PR wars, too, it's only going to work to the benefit of the ones with 0 principles, at the expense of the ones with some principles.
by Zanfa | 2026-03-05 05:50:31+00:00
I went with the T18 board since it’s passively cooled. IIRC it could also do PD through USB-c, but that would require additional cooling and I just don’t trust noname Chinese manufacturers to do that correctly anyway, so I typically have it hooked up via HDMI. So far it’s been perfectly stable, without any issues. I think there might have been a small addon board to be able to use full brightness as well. There’s a built-in retro display monitoring menu, but I haven’t had a need to use it really, most configurations work from Mac OS, including color profiles and brightness control.

For cables, my iMac had an opening in the back for RAM sticks, which I popped out and wired all cables through. I mounted the driver board on a piece of plexiglass so that most of the ports are accessible directly to the RAM opening. For power, I use a regular third party power brick I had laying around, though some people have reused the iMac’s original power cable with an internal power supply.

Honestly, the hardest parts were identifying the correct driver board and gluing the front glass back on after assembly.
by c0balt | 2026-03-05 05:50:44+00:00
Vodafone is quite a pest in terms of spam, leaving them led to two dozen emails, a bunch of SMS and five phone calls. It is not surprising they don't bother to check spelling on their spam anymore.

Especially the emails, resending me literally the same offer of a 5€ rebate per month five times is just offensive spam. The other ones were just variations of the same offer with different styling.
by stinkbeetle | 2026-03-05 05:51:42+00:00
> The world is a graveyard littered with startups that thought this way. One of the consequences of wealth concentration and monopolies is that it is insufficient to be better than your competitors because your customers are also incompetent.

It's less that and more that governments and bureaucrats are corrupted to create barriers tot the market and to turn a blind eye to anti competitive behavior and outright illegal practices. For example huge banking corporations have been caught laundering money for drug cartels and got away with fines -- if your fintech startup tried that on, you would never see the outside of a prison cell.