MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by munchbunny | 2026-03-04 16:36:11+00:00
It depends on the situation.

Sometimes you just have a bad interviewer who is looking for something specific from you but isn't telling you. If you're experienced in these interviews, you catch the signs and adapt by asking questions to suss out which direction the interviewer wants to take it.

Sometimes your answer is plausible but the interviewer wants to see you justify it. Sometimes your answer is wrong but the interviewer wants to see if you can reason your way through it, and maybe come up with an alternative.

If you're junior/inexperienced, it's often hard to tell and it'll feel arbitrary/unfair, and unfortunately that's just how it goes. As a more senior/experienced candidate, you can often figure out which situation you're in by asking questions to feel out the interviewer and then try to pivot during the interview, though it still takes valuable minutes out of the interview that you could have otherwise spent showing your competence.
by bubblewand | 2026-03-04 16:36:30+00:00
It’s great if you run max two “web apps” at a time. More, and it’s heading into “may be a problem” territory.

I’ve seen a Gmail tab eat 2.5Gb of memory all on its own… just sitting there. And you need some headroom for content and file caching and such to keep things feeling snappy.
by bravura | 2026-03-04 16:36:30+00:00
For me, trying to fine-tune a model to write "best day" prose I would accept over 80% of the time.

You are correct if we are talking about knowledge.

However it is bad at hyper-idiosyncratic, gritty style transfer.

I first noticed the issue when asking claude code to draft email responses. The choice of register was off. ("Register in writing refers to the level of formality and tone chosen to suit a specific audience, purpose, and context.")

I decided to talk all my HN comments and rewrite them in various bad LLM prose, and see if I could use DSPy to optimize a prompt using in-context-learning (ICL, I give it 10 examples of my HN comments) and the results were abysmal. RHLF fine-tuned frontier LLMs have a deep seated aversion to the target stylistic distribution of my comments.

I tried fine-tuning qwen3, llama, and gemma models. Instruct models are already so tuned that they could not be tuned.
This is using several hunded comments as gold targets and 5 different LLM degradations per gold as the input.
by butILoveLife | 2026-03-04 16:36:32+00:00
>I’m hearing positive noises about the 27B and 35B models for coding tasks that still fit on a 32GB/64GB Mac

Isnt it interesting that you never see someone say "I used this on my Mac and it was useful"

Instead we get "you could put this on your Mac" or "I tried it, and it worked but it was too slow"

I feel like these people are performing an evil when they are making suggestions that cause a waste of money.
by tracker1 | 2026-03-04 16:36:32+00:00
I'd add one point to this, as someone who voraciously fights against complexity t every turn, more and more as I get older. I've experienced times where leadership/management will assume that you're fighting against the complex solution simply because you don't grasp or understand it. It's irritating at best.

The longest lived projects and solutions I've worked on have always been the simplest, easiest to replace solutions. Often derived from simple tests scenarios or solutions that just work and get shifted over without much re-work.

What's somewhat funny, with this is that AI code assistants have actually helped a lot with continuing this approach for me... I can create a stand alone solution to work on a library or component, work through the problems, then copy the component/library into the actual work project it was for. I'm in a really locked down internalized environment, so using AI for component dev is on my own hardware... but the resulting work is a piece that can be brought in as-is. No exposure of internal data/resources.

I don't think I'll have a level of trust to "one-shot" or vibe code solutions from AI, but leveraging the ability to spin up a project as a sample to test a component/library is pretty great to say the least.
by kaylamathisen | 2026-03-04 16:37:02+00:00
Short version:I tried to get my Claude Cowork agents to self-report their status to a dashboard. They wouldn't. The fix was using Cowork's hook system to monitor them at the infrastructure level, bypassing agent judgment entirely.

Happy to answer questions about the setup. I'm still unsure about the right task counter threshold for restarting sessions. Also, I'm trying to find a way to get the agents to indicate on my dashboard when they're "stuck" and waiting for something like access approval. The Claude Desktop app clearly knows when this happens (indicates it with a blue circle) but I haven't found a way to get the information into my dashboard.
by bikenaga | 2026-03-04 16:37:02+00:00
"Abstract. The impacts of sea-level rise and other hazards on the coasts of the world are determined by coastal sea-level height and land elevation. Correct integration of both aspects is fundamental for reliable sea-level rise and coastal hazard impact assessments, but is often not carefully considered or properly performed. Here we show that more than 99% of the evaluated impact assessments handled sea-level and land elevation data inadequately, thereby misjudging sea level relative to coastal elevation. Based on our literature evaluation, 90% of the hazard assessments assume coastal sea levels based on geoid models, rather than using actual sea-level measurements. Our meta-analyses on global scale show that measured coastal sea level is higher than assumed in most hazard assessments (mean offsets [standard deviation] of 0.27 m [0.76 m] and 0.24 m [0.52 m] for two commonly-used geoids). Regionally, predominantly in the Global South, measured mean sea level can be more than 1 m above global geoids, with the largest differences in the Indo-Pacific. Compared with geoid-based assumptions of coastal sea level, the measured values suggest that with a hypothetical 1 m of relative sea-level rise, 31–37% more land and 48–68% more people (increasing estimates to 77–132 million) would fall below sea level. Our results highlight the need for re-evaluation of existing coastal impact assessments and improvement of research community standards, with possible implications for policymakers, climate finance and coastal adaptation."

(Wikipedia) The geoid is the shape that the ocean surface would take under the influence of the gravity of Earth, including gravitational attraction and Earth's rotation, if other influences such as winds and tides were absent.
by adrian_b | 2026-03-04 16:37:08+00:00
Soldered RAM is not necessarily bad, because it is usually more reliable than SODIMMs, so it is less likely to require replacements before other parts fail and it is less likely to suffer from transient hardware errors that are not caught due to the lack of ECC memory in most laptops and mini-PCs.

However I consider soldered SSDs and/or soldered batteries as completely unacceptable, as they limit the lifetime of a computer to low values.
by keyringlight | 2026-03-04 16:37:09+00:00
Language is filled with those types of phrases, the one which bugs me once it was pointed out (even though I use it myself) is "to be honest...", which could carry the implication anything said without that qualifier may be dishonest. What including those phrases seem to come down to is an informal style, a bit more acceptable in a spoken conversation but for written it probably depends on the audience.

Something I'd wonder about is if usage of it has changed based on the medium people use over the years, whether that's in-person, telephone, writing letters, or computer/smartphone writing. Has using computers for short form conversations allowed conversational phrases to bleed into formal writing.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-03-04 16:37:16+00:00
I try to avoid calling LLMs intelligent when unnecessary, but it runs into the fundamental problem that they are intelligent by any common-sense definition of the term. The only way to defend the thesis that they aren't is to retreat to esoteric post-2022 definitions of intelligence, which take into account this new phenomenon of a machine that can engage in medium-quality discussions on any topic under the sun but can't count reliably.

I don't have a WSJ subscription, but other coverage of this story (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/04/gemini-ch...) makes it clear that Gemini's intelligence was precisely the problem in this case; a less intelligent chatbot would not have been able to create the detailed, immersive narrative the victim got trapped in.
by bityard | 2026-03-04 16:37:26+00:00
Yes, and?

This project isn't being marketd to people who call up a company to white-glove the whole-home installation end-to-end. This is for DIYers who have enough knowledge to tinker with self-designed solar projects but not the EE degree required to engineer some of the more specialized equipment themselves.

I'll give a good example: I use solar to power a ham radio station for a weekend in the summer. However, nearly ALL of the equipment you can buy for the production and storage of solar power emits some degree of radio-frequency interference, which is bad when your whole goal is to power a very sensitive radio.

When it comes to charge controllers in particular, there are exactly two companies that claim to make RFI-quiet MPPT controllers. One has mixed reviews (some people say they work great, some say they are not any better than anything else), and one is very good but also very expensive for what you get. So, more open design and community feedback from people like me might get the cost of a reliable RFI-free charge controller down to where it should be.
by jplusequalt | 2026-03-04 16:38:38+00:00
>And I have the AI deal with "knowing how to do it" as well. Often it's slower to have it do enough research to know how to do it

This is exactly the sort of future I'm afraid of. Where the people who are ostensibly hired to know how stuff works, out source that understanding to their LLMs. If you don't know how the system works while building, what are you going to when it breaks? Continue to throw your LLM at it? At what point do you just outsource your entire brain?
by butILoveLife | 2026-03-04 16:38:41+00:00
>it catered to providing cutting edge consumer technology. That's still the case. Which company makes better phones, laptops, tablets, headphones, smart watches and consumer software?

I think their marketing pretends they are cutting edge, but I always found them behind. iOS was years behind Android in features. Macbooks don't even have Nvidia in them.

Apple is never 1st place in tech quality. At best they are 2nd place.
by SurceBeats | 2026-03-04 16:38:41+00:00
Hey HN! We've been building HomeDock OS, a platform to self-host Docker apps with a full desktop-like UI running entirely in the browser.

Version 2.0 introduced exactly that, Prism, a window manager with real multitasking: drag, resize, minimize, and snap windows. It runs on Raspberry Pi, Linux, Mac, or Windows.

On the Drop Zone, files are encrypted with AES-256 GCM and 1.2M PBKDF2 iterations, even on a Pi Zero. App updates use Docker manifest digest comparison, not just tag checking so you can easily update them from the taskbar with a single click.

Happy to answer questions about architecture or design decisions!!!!
by JDye | 2026-03-04 16:38:48+00:00
We've had an interesting experience on the interviewing side of this. Asking a system design question and getting answers involving multiple layers of caching, pub/sub, event-driven whatever/etc.. when the real answer is to just use postgres. It handles the scale we're asking about. We know it, as that's what we use internally.

I've only worked at my startup so I can't comment on scale elsewhere, but if our simple architecture can handle 30k requests per second, I think it can handle most other companies scale too.
by kittikitti | 2026-03-04 16:38:49+00:00
When I'm on a team and there are multiple engineers and data scientists, many of them come from Big Tech: Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. I don't get any points with them for implementing a one-liner that does whatever Google implemented but they get very excited if I did. I get a "Oh wow, I know someone who worked on that at Google, I am really glad it's useful!"

This extends to suggesting huge licenses like from Salesforce. The Marketing and HR teams are ecstatic that they can purchase another license of their favorite software, they can go shopping! If I had implemented a free and more efficient CRM, there would be no networking effect.

This all builds systems that are vastly more expensive (to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars), slower, and much harder to fix. YCombinator financially benefits from this and it's all very corrupt. Most of the time, I have to really gain the "soft skills" to activate the networking (nepotism) effects.

It's not about what you know, it's about who you know.
by quesera | 2026-03-04 16:39:19+00:00
This is wrong.

My daily-driver M2 16GB has been up for 54 days, running three web browsers simultaneously (all Firefox, which does help, about 30K tabs across them), plus a medium-sized Rails app and postgres, iTerm2 and tmux (about 38 panes), and the Slack app.

Current RAM usage is 6.14GB.

Things change when I run local LLMs or VMs or Xcode, of course.
by runjake | 2026-03-04 16:39:19+00:00
No, we really care about durability. The amount of damage is crazy. So many units are damaged that it would be cost-prohibitive to dispose and replace them.

The screenshot in that Reddit post more or less looks like ours. Schools generally repair these, if they have the technicians. And everyone is cannibalizing parts out of last generation models. It's like a Jawa shop.

> Apple can only compete if they provide bulk deals which bring the overall cost in line with chromebooks.

I've never seen, nor heard of Apple providing competitive prices, even in quantities of ~10,000 units. They haven't even gotten close and they've largely given up on the idea of Macs as a standard K12 school device. ~$250 iPads are still strong in low primary grades and special education, though.
by SpartanJ | 2026-03-04 16:39:21+00:00
Shameless plug: For anyone interested in new code editors, I'm working on a multi-platform one called ecode [1]. It's similar in spirit to Notepad++ and Textadept, and some of the newer ones like Zed. It tries to be a fresh take using modern tools like LSP and DAP. I started it after using Geany for many years but finding it lacking some essential features for my needs. Speed is a big focus and it has very fast startup time.

[1] https://github.com/SpartanJ/ecode/
by thewebguyd | 2026-03-04 16:39:37+00:00
Swapping isn't a big issue on the apple silicon macs, the storage is generally fast enough.

I had an M1 Air w/ 8GB when it first came out, and although I haven't used Tahoe on it, it handled anything I threw at it no problem while swapping. Tons of Chrome tabs, mail, music, terminal, VSCode all open without so much as a hiccup. macOS also has really good memory compression compared to Windows.

Trying to do the same on an 8GB Windows machine would be an effort in frustration.

I do wish it had 12GB, but AFAIK Apple didn't make an A18 Pro with 12GB. I suspect if they refresh it in a couple years with the A19 Pro, it'll have 12GB of RAM.
by subscribed | 2026-03-04 16:39:40+00:00
Ahahah.... This thread doesn't show what you think does.

Unfortunately you come out as whining that the project focused on security doesn't want to support insecure hardware.

Go for it, fork, call it, say, ClayOS and have GOS on whatever you want. Why would someone else have to do something that's contrary to the project just because you want to lower the security?

Bizarre. Just fork it mate.
by beambot | 2026-03-04 16:40:27+00:00
> This is actually what ruined my respect for Academia.

Spoken like someone who never went through grad school at a competitive R1 program

It was already a grueling 60-80 hour grind every week with frequent all nighters, high-pressure deadlines, absolute minimal pay, thankless duties, and plenty of politics. It's about the same for professors too.

We already paid our dues by helping peer review (for free) a half dozen papers for each one we submitted. Why should we be expected to review random papers on arxiv too...?
by undermineduser | 2026-03-04 16:40:28+00:00
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by looperhacks | 2026-03-04 16:40:29+00:00
This is a reference to the weird situation that Schleswig Holstein was really the only state that allowed gambling until 2021 (there were exceptions). Every (legal) online gambling platform officially required you to be from Schleswig Holstein, otherwise, you were not permitted to join.

Of course, this went exactly as you'd think. However, since 2021, you can get a gambling license in all of Germany.

Fun fact: Since it's illegal to gamble with a non-licensed provider, using international platforms like polymarket can get you in trouble.
by btown | 2026-03-04 16:40:35+00:00
> Readers are simply more willing to tolerate a lightspeed jump from belief X to belief Y if the writer himself (a) seems taken aback by it and (b) acts as if they had no say in the matter - as though the situation simply unfolded that way.

This reminds me of p-hacking in academia: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4359000/ is a decent overview.

And, to a certain extent, the manipulation of "league tables" in finance: https://mergersandinquisitions.com/investment-banking-league... / https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB117616199089164489

All these allow a presenter to frame a discovery or result as "surprising" and "novel" - even if, from the very start, the rhetorical goal was to take a pre-ordained desire to publish along certain lines, and tweak things to present it as if it was a happenstance discovery, washing the presenter's hands of that intentionality.

One of the things I worry about, especially as education shifts more and more towards AI, is that we lose the critical thinking skill of: "here are a set of facts that are true, but there can still be bias in the process by which those facts are selected, thus one must look beyond the facts presented."

And in theory, AI could help us to do this with every fact we consume! But it's steered (quite intentionally) towards giving simple answers, even when reality isn't simple, and the underlying goal of those presenting the facts that entered one's corpus is as important as those facts' existence.
by ajross | 2026-03-04 16:40:38+00:00
And I repeat, you're doing a meme like performance art:

Me: The windows junk is three times cheaper and does the same thing.

You: "You should look at the total output of the human / cost + equipment. If the output of the human is 10% higher but the cost is only a fraction of their monthly salary, then it is worth it"

Jedi: The windows junk is three times cheaper and does the same thing.

I mean, I'm not actually as dumb as the chad in the meme. I know how to do division. I'm just unwilling to accept your framing like "10% higher output" without evidence, and am pointing to the bleedingly obvious and extremely large signal (price) that I can measure.

99.999% of the time, the obvious hypothesis is the right one. And the obvious hypothesis is that macs are outrageously overpriced and you should just by an Asus Whatnot instead.
by seomarlboro | 2026-03-04 16:40:39+00:00
Hi HN,

I built DEXorado to address a specific blind spot in crypto security: phishing via front-end replicas. While tools like Token Sniffer focus on smart contract analysis, there wasn't a systematic way to verify the DEX URL itself before connecting a wallet.

Attackers clone sites like Uniswap perfectly. The only difference is the domain and the contract behind the "Swap" button. To catch this, I built a weighted scoring system (0–100) that runs a URL through 6 independent checks:

Whitelist Cross-Reference (20%): Matches against a curated list of 200+ legit domains. Uses Levenshtein distance to flag typosquatting (e.g., uniswap-pro).
Threat Intelligence (20%): Aggregates VirusTotal and URLhaus data, with logic to suppress false positives for whitelisted domains.
Smart Contract Router (20%): Verifies the router contract via Etherscan against known deployments (Uniswap/PancakeSwap).
Domain Analysis (15%): Penalizes domains < 30 days old and high-risk hosting providers.
TX Simulation (15%): Analyzes 24h transaction patterns to distinguish legitimate routers from wallet drainers.
SSL Inspection (10%): Checks TLS validity and issuer reputation.
The output is a verdict: SAFE, CAUTION, SUSPICIOUS, or DANGER. I also built a Token Scanner that aggregates GoPlus and DEXScreener data into a unified risk score.

I’m currently iterating on the weighting logic—specifically, whether Domain Age (15%) should weigh more than TX Simulation (15%) given the speed of new scams.

Would love technical feedback from the HN community.
by sodality2 | 2026-03-04 16:40:47+00:00
Yeah, the optimization is going to make or break it. I've heard people say that 8GB on their Air's with M chips are sufficient, but I do wonder if it will still be true now with MacOS - maybe we'll get a cleanup/performance release cycle?... With regards to AI I hope it's not a Gemini/Pixel situation where there's a lot of ram but 3.5GB are permanently reserved for the on-device model to be always-available.
by billyhoffman | 2026-03-04 16:41:00+00:00
There's a nice graph in this Six Colors article:

https://sixcolors.com/post/2026/03/apple-introduces-colorful...

Single Core performance: the A18 Pro is faster than an M3!

Multi Core performance: The A18 Pro is essentially the same as an M1.

This balance seems right for the target market of a $599 laptop.
Show HN: Beacon – Slack app for structured team announcements with subscriptions
by knowshan | 2026-03-04 16:41:19+00:00
The core idea: teams create "broadcast stations" and post structured updates (breaking changes, maintenance windows, feature releases) to them. Other team members subscribe to the stations they care about and get a clean DM when something relevant goes out. No need to join another channel or configure notification settings per-channel.

External feeds feature: Beyond internal team broadcasts, there's also a pull-based external feeds tab in the app home — for following public sources like status pages or release notes from tools your team uses. Right now it supported only few external feeds and I may add support for more feeds later. Same place, different kind of signal.

What would make you actually use something like this at your company? Happy to answer questions and genuinely would love feedback on it.

Hosted on Railway (hobby plan for now — curious how far it holds).

Thanks!
by munchbunny | 2026-03-04 16:41:23+00:00
> While I agree, how much training does anyone get as an interviewer?

TL;DR: not enough training.

As a hiring manager, whenever we start a hiring period I have a conversation with my interviewer team about what qualities we're looking for and review the questions they plan to ask in order to normalize the process. Stuff like "what does a good answer look like, and why? what does a bad answer look like? is this something easy for a candidate to engage with or will you spend half the interview just explaining the background? is this coding question unreasonably hard?" and so on.

I also look at the evaluations that interviewers give relative to other interviewers. Almost every hiring cycle I've done I've had to deal with some interviewer (all over the seniority spectrum) asking unreasonably hard questions.