MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by perfmode | 2026-03-11 17:41:31+00:00
I think what you're describing is vertical integration rather than the walled garden specifically. The walled garden is the App Store restrictions, iMessage lock-in, that kind of thing. What made the Neo possible is that Apple controls the silicon, the OS, the firmware, and the industrial design as a single unit. They could put a phone chip in a laptop form factor and have it feel coherent because there's no seam between the hardware and software teams.

The distinction matters because it changes what the lesson is for the rest of the industry. You don't need a walled garden to compete here. You need to own enough of the stack that you can make aggressive tradeoffs (like shipping 8GB and an A18 Pro) without everything falling apart at the integration boundaries. Microsoft can't do that because they don't make the hardware. Dell and Lenovo can't do that because they don't make the OS. Qualcomm can't do that because they don't control the software ecosystem.

The one company that could theoretically pull this off is Google with ChromeOS on their own Tensor chips, and the fact that they haven't is probably the more interesting question than why Asus is shocked.
by andrewl-hn | 2026-03-11 17:41:49+00:00
The only time you need local dates is for scheduling. Stuff like “Report KPIs for each shift. Shifts start at 8:00 local time.”, or “send this report every day at 10:00 local time”, or “this recurring meeting was created by user X while they were in TimeZone Z, make sure meetings follow DST”.

Outside of scheduling UTC is the way.
by WorldMaker | 2026-03-11 17:42:00+00:00
If your friend lives in London it may be useful to have that associated timezone so that you can be sure to message them that day in their timezone. They might better appreciate a message from SF sent on March 10th at 9PM "early that morning in London" than March 11th at 9PM "a day late".

A lot of that gets back to why Temporal adds so many different types, because there are different uses for time zone information and being clear how you shift that information can make a big difference. (A birthday is a PlainDate at rest, but when it is time to send them an ecard you want the ZonedDateTime of the recipient's time zone to find the best time to send it.)
by everdrive | 2026-03-11 17:42:24+00:00
This is my advice anyone asks me about a laptop. The specs don't matter (at least if you're asking me, it means you don't know computers and will mostly just use a web browser, and therefore nearly any specs on the market will be fine) and the things that do matter are just never on a spec sheet -- keyboard, trackpad, speaker, screen quality. Some stuff won't be discovered until years later: for instance I had an Acer laptop in 2007 which was designed with insufficient cooling, and cooked its thermal paste in about a year or two. Once it was cooked, you couldn't play games or do anything intensive without rebooting the machine. I hadn't thought to research that issue since I figured cooling was a solved problem. But, I'm sure Acer saved a few dollars per unit. (and of course, the screen, trackpad, speaker (yes, singular!) and keyboard were all awful as well.)
by computerdork | 2026-03-11 17:42:34+00:00
... hmm, just looked it up. According to some sites on the web, TDD was created by Kent Beck as apart of Extreme Programming in the 90's and automated testing is a big part of TDD. Having lived through that era, thinking back, would say that TDD did help to popularize automated testing. It made us realize that focusing a ton on writing tests had a lot of benefits (and yeah, most of us didn't do the test first development part).

But this is kind of splitting hairs on what TDD is, not too important.
by mhendric | 2026-03-11 17:42:36+00:00
Author here. There's real overlap with that comparison, and I wouldn't dismiss it entirely. The receding horizon and community dynamics around belief reinforcement do look similar. Where I'd draw the line is the specific organizational failure mode: a product team whose feedback loops get hijacked by token economics. Bitcoin doesn't have a product team in the same sense. But the broader point (that a financial instrument can make belief liquid and self-reinforcing) applies more broadly than just token-funded ventures. I'm less certain where Bitcoin falls on that spectrum than I am about chains driven by ecosystems funded primarily by their tokens.
by SV_BubbleTime | 2026-03-11 17:42:58+00:00
> If you enable reckless behavior, you are even hyping it I believe you are responsible for this behavior too.

Are the people mad at ICE complaining that immigration was perhaps a little too lax under Biden’s admin, and possibly creating a situation where so many people felt inclined to vote for the Mass Deporations Guy?

Is there retroactive anger for Biden Admin? Note that I’m talking about a conservative voter’s right or wrong stance on the popular-at-the-time migrant caravans and not the actions of a specific person in a mid level position.

Not that I’ve seen, ymmv.
Show HN: Making Debates Great Again
by TheAntiEgo | 2026-03-11 17:43:20+00:00
Hey HN. I'm building SuperDebate. The basic idea is that millions of adults did competitive debate in school and there's nothing for them now. No leagues, no local clubs, no way to compete. We're trying to fix that.

We built a platform where you can run structured debates with assigned sides. That's the key piece. You don't argue your opinion. You get assigned a position and have to make the best case for it. It changes the whole dynamic.
I coached in the Chicago Urban Debate League years ago. My students were the first national champions from an urban debate league. I've been thinking about how to bring that format to adults for a long time. We've been running events in Chicago and just ran our first international tournament in Honduras. Now we're expanding to other cities.

The way it works: a local host picks a topic, we provide the format and platform, people show up and debate. We're looking for people who want to run one in their city. If you've ever wanted to do something more structured than arguing on the internet but didn't know where to start, that's what we're building for.

Would love feedback on the product. And if you're interested in hosting a debate locally, reach out. superdebate.org
by perfmode | 2026-03-11 17:43:24+00:00
The bird analogy is actually a really good one, but I think it supports a narrower claim than you're making. You're right that the capacity to symbolize and formalize intuitions is a distinct and important thing, separate from just having the intuitions. No argument there. But my point wasn't that symbolization doesn't matter. It was about how often humans actually exercise that capacity in a strong sense versus doing something more like recombination within familiar frameworks. The bird can't theorize flight, agreed. But most humans who can in principle theorize about their intuitions also don't, most of the time. The capacity exists. The base rate of its deployment is the question.

On Bessis, I actually think his argument is more compatible with what I was saying than it might seem. If the cognitive process underlying mathematical reasoning is the same one operating on a Tuesday afternoon, that's an argument against treating Euclid-level formalization as categorically different from everyday cognition. It suggests a continuum rather than a bright line between "pattern matching" and "genuine reasoning." Which is interesting and probably right. But it also means you can't point to Euclid as evidence that humans routinely do something qualitatively beyond what LLMs do. If Bessis is right, then the extraordinary cases and the mundane cases share the same underlying machinery, and the question becomes quantitative (how far along the continuum, how often, under what conditions) rather than categorical.

I'll check out the book though, it sounds like it's making a more careful version of the point than usually gets made in these threads.
by moregrist | 2026-03-11 17:43:45+00:00
> In most cases an IPO isn't worth it for founders because an IPO means you lose operational control.

This is counterintuitive to me.

If you’re acquired, you’re giving up ownership and you tend to lose operational control unless you have agreements in place that say otherwise.

With an IPO it seems like you have a better chance to retain control: you can control the share allocations going into an IPO to give you solid voting power. While you’re accountable to a board of directors and theoretically accountable to stockholders, in reality management often runs the show, at least until the board runs out of patience with bad earnings.
by observationist | 2026-03-11 17:44:30+00:00
Feature size prevents computation from being fast, even if you could tweak it to create "organs" that did distributed processing. Basic limits of what cells can do would constrain the clock speed of any particular compute component to ~6khz or less, or about 100x what they can do naturally.

A mycelial mat, coupled to a PCB, with a few genetic tweaks, though, could allow traditional computers to make use of incredible networks that have trillions of intersections; if you could somehow elicit the algorithm underlying human cortical networks, edit fungi to mirror that, you could get a potent AI hybrid device, about the size of a doormat, as thick as a paperback book, but it's not something where a little chip sized chunk of fungi is going to be useful for a wearable. You might do interesting things with robot sensors, if the electrical signaling translates to touch, maybe a thin network of mycelium over a robot could act as robot skin/touch/pressure sensors?

Bravo, science, fun stuff. We're going to get autonomous cyber hybrid mushroom robots, like a "Last of Us" and "Terminator" hybrid.
by idle_zealot | 2026-03-11 17:44:35+00:00
I don't think they're saying it shouldn't be possible to mutate arguments, just that the ! convention should be enforced. The Ruby runtime could, for instance, automatically freeze all arguments to a function that doesn't end with a !. That way all code that correctly follows the mutation naming convention will continue to work, and any development who doesn't know about it will quickly learn when they try to mutate an argument and get an error. Ideally a helpful error telling them to add the !.
by cmovq | 2026-03-11 17:44:39+00:00
> After all of the above work and that talk in mind, I decided to ask an LLM.

Impressive that an LLM managed to produce the answer from a 7 year old stack overflow answer all on its own! [1] This would have been the first search result for “fast asin” before this article was published.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/26030435
by Someone | 2026-03-11 17:44:41+00:00
> IMO the consumer PC industry is near an existential crisis. The big players are just awful at marketing; too many SKUs and models -

I see your point, but as a counterexample, look at the TV industry, at PC monitors, at washing machines, etc. There manufacturers have, for decades, created SKUs left and right, sometimes only so that a large dealer can offer to match lowest prices because no other dealer has access to the same SKU.

> it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ. The exact same specs will be in two different chassis designs.

I don’t know how they do things nowadays, but it used to be the case that the same SKU didn’t even guarantee you the same hardware. Two machines of the same order could even be slightly different, requiring different drivers.
by IshKebab | 2026-03-11 17:44:44+00:00
Yes... though I think Chesterton's fence definitely belongs in the "technically correct advice that actually does more harm than good" bucket, like "premature optimisation", "if it works don't fix it", the Unix philosophy and so on.

This doesn't apply to capitalisation, but generally especially in computing if there's something that looks useless you should remove it. If it breaks the fault lies with whomever left something useless there without a note to explain it.

The current project I'm working on has about 3 copies of every component because nobody bothers to clear up after themselves - dead code isn't doing any harm and it's better to leave it in case it's needed right?

Well sure, if you want me to work about 3x slower than I otherwise could. Not an exaggeration.
by MengerSponge | 2026-03-11 17:45:21+00:00
> Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future!

> Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-03-11 17:45:32+00:00
> I am of the opinion that imagination and creativity comes from emotion

How do you see emotion as being necessary for creativity?

It sure seems that things like surprise (prediction failure) driven "curiosity" and exploration (I can't predict what will happen if I do X, so let me try) are behind creativity, pushing the boundaries of knowledge and discovering something new.

Perhaps you mean artistic creativity rather than scientific, in which case we're talking about different things, but I'd agree with you since the goal of much art is to elicit an emotional response in those engaging with it.

I don't think there is anything stopping us from implementing emotions, every bit as real as our own, in some form of artificial life if we want to though. At the end of the day emotion comes down to our primitive brain releasing chemicals like adrenaline, dopamine, etc as a result of certain stimuli, the functioning of our brain/body being affected by those chemicals, and the feedback loop of us then recognizing how our brain/body is operating differently ("I feel sad/exited/afraid" etc). It's all very mechanical.

FWIW I think consciousness is also very mechanical, but it seems somewhat irrelevant to the discussion of intelligence/AGI.
by saphalpdyl | 2026-03-11 17:45:55+00:00
I recently found out about Apache Netbox that would act as the authoritative source of truth for the network topology and replace majority of aether.config.yaml. In Splynx, I did not see any mention of an external solution. It seems they have their own stack for that.

A better and UX-friendly implementation would have been Netbox + aether.config.yaml -> configuration pipeline -> topology.yaml + <other generated files>.
by vikingerik | 2026-03-11 17:47:07+00:00
If you're complaining about the prices, remember how capitalism works. The price is set by buyers, not sellers. That's the invisible hand, the seller will set the price to what buyers show they will pay. If you're unhappy about $500 for a Millennium Falcon or whatever, your beef is not with the company for accepting that when people choose to pay it, it's with those other buyers for paying that much.

As the other replies are saying, it's mostly brand power. If your complaint is that $500 for a Falcon is monopolistic because there's no competition because nobody else can legally sell Falcons, the monopoly is really with Star Wars not Lego, they're just delegating it to Lego. You're always free to find your cheapest source of bricks perhaps from other manufacturers and build your own equivalent.

As for stickers and apps and the other stuff... yeah that's the enshittification that also always accompanies capitalism. It's lamentable but it only changes if enough customers vote no with their wallets.
by butILoveLife | 2026-03-11 17:47:08+00:00
>scientists focused on quality not quantity.

I know a PhD professor doing post doc or something, and he accepted a scientific study just because it was published in Nature.

He didn't look at methodology or data.

From that point forward, I have never really respected Academia. They seem like bottom floor scientists who never truly understood the scientific method.

It helped that a year later Ivys had their cheating scandals, fake data, and academia wide replication crisis.
by starkparker | 2026-03-11 17:47:22+00:00
> The A18 Pro has much better single core performance than the M1 and slightly better multi core performance.

For the first few minutes of sustained use. Then it drops like a rock: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/apple-macbook-neo-re...

> In extended single-core benchmarks, performance drops to the 3.7-to-3.5 GHz range within a minute or so, and they drop to the 2.9-to-3.2 GHz range after about five minutes. Both the M1 Air and the new M5 Air (4.46 GHz) are able to sustain their peak clock speeds indefinitely in single-core mode.
by thiagoharry | 2026-03-11 17:47:24+00:00
No, the private ownership of the means of production needs to be created and maintained by a state. There is nothing natural about it; if you see it as natural, it is because you naturalize the society you live in. First of all, like any type of property, it is a social construct that must be upheld by laws and instruments of coercion. And speaking of the means of production, to ensure wage labor, a process or arrangement is needed that guarantees one group of people holds ownership while others do not. In the case of land, for example, this requires enclosure, the destruction of the concept of land as something communal.
by pizlonator | 2026-03-11 17:47:31+00:00
> Language portability is a big feature.

It's a big feature of JS. JS's dynamism makes it super easy to target for basically any language.

> Google switched to compiling Java to Wasm-GC instead of JS and got a lot of memory/speed improvements.

That's cool. But that's one giant player getting success out of a project that likely required massive investment and codesign with their browser team.

Think about how sad it is that these are the kinds of successes you have to cite for a technology that has had as much investment as wasm!

> Almost 6% of page loads use wasm

You can disable wasm and successfully load more than 94% of websites.

A lot of that 6% is malicious ads running bitcoin mining.

> Wasm is way too complicated to use today.

I'm articulating why it's complicated. I think that for those same reasons, it will continue to be complicated
by ricree | 2026-03-11 17:47:31+00:00
>but most states do not have a per se ID

Out of curiosity, do you have a source or list for this? My own home state and those around me that I've spot checked all have a state ID available as an alternative to a driver's license. My understanding was that this is the case for most states.

Unless I've misunderstood you and you meant a state ID that is completely separate from a driver's license to the point that people with a DL would have one?
by cyberax | 2026-03-11 17:47:48+00:00
NSS/PAM modules have to work inside arbitrary environments. And vice versa, environments have to be ready for arbitrary NSS modules.

For example, you technically can't sandbox any app with NSS/PAM modules, because a module might want to send an email (yes, I saw that in real life) or use a USB device.

NSS/PAM need to be replaced with IPC-based solutions. systemd is evolving a replacement for PAM.

And for NSS modules in particular, we even have a standard solution: NSCD. It's even supported by musl libc, but for some reason nobody even _knows_ that it exists. Porting the NSCD protocol to Go is like 20 minutes of work. I looked at doing that more than once, but got discouraged by the other 99% of complexity in getting something like this into the core Go code.
by rexpop | 2026-03-11 17:48:01+00:00
Their schedules are full of leisure, and they can't be arsed to extend even the oz of courteous effort that proper punctuation and grammar require.

And their class all recognize it. Possibly it's a class marker.

Here, I have to carefully articulate my point because I am desperately trying to convince you not to carry water for the Epstein a class.
by radpanda | 2026-03-11 17:48:03+00:00
I don't really see that as the same thing as what the article was pointing out. Those are shibboleths that only an insider would know. You have to get the pronunciation of Cholmondeley or Couch "right" to pass for an insider.

The random misspellings, missing spaces, sloppy grammar, etc in the examples in the article seem different to me. Misspelling "en route" as "enriewu" doesn't show, "look, I know the secret country club spelling for en route". It simply shows that you don't have to care about your mistakes. You write something that approximates what you mean, and you're too important to spend time revising. The mistake could be "enrout" or "n route" or on any other word. But you're not going to be a try-hard who edits and frets over their messages, you're blessing someone with 10 seconds of your attention and they're lucky to receive your correspondence, typos and all.
by eszed | 2026-03-11 17:48:12+00:00
> Of each of these special pieces

I didn't see him making any generalized claim. I recall the things I'm really into better than I do things I'm not, which is all I think he was saying about his kids. (My four year old remembers facts about volcanos - including the name of the scientist who made the claim - waaay better than he does where he left his shoes, so it tracks for me!)
by colesantiago | 2026-03-11 17:48:23+00:00
> Part of this is jealousy (yes, I said it)

This feels like cope here.

They want to get rid of SWE because they are highly paid (in the US especially) and they want them for cheap (e.g. Bangalore, London)

AI just makes it a no brainer.

Also I don't think there is anything wrong with everyone being a software engineer, more accessibility to the SWE field for all is great.

Current SWE's will just need to now adapt quicker to remain relevant, and those that can't will just then leave the field.

Perhaps those that don't adapt were probably not good engineers anyway.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2026-03-11 17:48:25+00:00
The flip side is that my exclusion of others is often other's exclusion of me.

When someone says "aks" instead of "ask", they know what they're doing. They look around and think "I am like those who say aks, so I will say aks too. Those who say ask are outsiders". So I response: Ok, you're an outside to me then.

Approaching like "they can't speak properly and we're evil for excluding them" is patronising and racist.
by efficax | 2026-03-11 17:48:45+00:00
Calling this a "content consumption" device seems wrong to me. Sure, it's not a professional laptop. You're going to have a bad time trying to run more than one Adobe creative suite app at once, or running the iOS emulator, but the chip in it is very powerful, and you can do real work on this laptop. I was even thinking of snagging one to use as a kind of thin client for dev accessing my big linux box via tailscale. It might be worthwhile to ensure that a web app you're developing will work on a less powerful machine without killing the browser, for example.
by bottlepalm | 2026-03-11 17:49:13+00:00
It's scary, without the em dashes, and the rapid fire commenting of the account - who would ever realize this is a bot? Two easy to fix things, and after that it'd be very difficult to tell that this is a bot.

It's not a question of if there are other bots out there, but only what % of comments on HN right now and elsewhere are bot generated. That number is only going to increase if nothing is done.
by tavavex | 2026-03-11 17:49:32+00:00
I didn't say I thought it was popular because of AI. I clarified whether this mental link could be faulty because a lot of new projects are AI-related in general.

I might give it a shot soon. Would you recommend it for simpler all-in-one web projects that don't utilize most of the vast array of tools it includes? Or is it more suited to the heavy-weights?