MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alpaca128 | 2026-03-04 14:37:57+00:00
My screen is 4k and it looks as sharp as it gets with the 1080p scaling. As far as I understand it only gets blurry when using the 1440p setting as that changes the render resolution to 5k which doesn't scale cleanly to a 4k screen.

Which means the UI & text is a bit larger than usual but it's the right size for me.
by cestith | 2026-03-04 14:38:26+00:00
It looks like a good value if you can get by with 8 GB of RAM. This is a market niche that will sell, but it doesn’t replace the Air. The Air has 16GB standard and can be ordered with up to 32. I’m also curious about the benchmarks between the A18 Pro and the M5, although for a lot of people that’s going to be less important than the RAM.

Good on them for bringing back bright colors, and for including a 3.55mm audio jack on their new lowest end laptop.
by snowwrestler | 2026-03-04 14:38:30+00:00
The final version of the “wedge” Air case was an amazing piece of physical design. The lid had a large-radius complex curve that perfectly controlled reflections. The bottom case had a curve that made it look like the machine was hovering above the desktop from almost any angle. Calling that a “hack” is sort of like calling it a “hack” that a Ferrari looks fast even when it’s parked.

The new designs are overtly boringly utilitarian. I would say they intentionally look ugly. I guess this must have been intended as a marketing signal.

And it seems like it’s working since you think the new design delivers better battery life. It doesn’t! The 13-inch M1, M2, M3, M4, and M5 MacBook Airs are all specced for 18 hours of battery life.
by echelon | 2026-03-04 14:38:46+00:00
It's not hot air garbage.

Secondly: this is a temporary vacuum state. We're only needed to bridge the gap.

I wouldn't be trying to be a consultant, I would be scurrying to ensure we have access to these tools once they're industrial. A "$5M button" to create any business function won't be within the reach of labor capital, but it will be for financial capital. That's the world we're headed to.
by pwthornton | 2026-03-04 14:38:51+00:00
The ram is the only thing that I think is a little light, but with the ram situation in the world, asking for 12-16 GB have been too much.

This looks like a huge step-up from most Chromebooks, which are frankly junk. Apple, however, will need to build education software and services to really get schools to commit.
by rtkwe | 2026-03-04 14:38:55+00:00
That's only a little more than the EU price of 699 Euro or approx $813. Part of that is VAT which is included the price (right?) instead of being added at checkout like the US. That would bring the USD price up to $713. IDK where the rest of the increase would come from though.

edit: Denmark VAT is actually 25% not 20% so the USD price plus Denmark VAT is ~$750
by leecarraher | 2026-03-04 14:38:56+00:00
probably a lot of economics going on, such as early age vendor lock-in, and new market acquisition loss-leaders, but ultimately it's not cutting edge hardware. So the same reason the laptop you bought 2 years ago is half the cost it is today. Granted, even that is not purely a cost only decision. Stratify any market and see how much you can get each segment to pay, and convince them they are getting the best deal for their money.
by gwbas1c | 2026-03-04 14:39:12+00:00
> If a member of my team actually proposed building a bespoke system for something that can be straightforwardly done in a spreadsheet, we'd be having some conversations about ongoing maintenance costs of software

All interviews are contrived / artificial situations: The point is to understand the candidate's thought processes. Furthermore, we're getting Bilsbie's (op) take on the situation, there may be context that the interviewer forgot to mention or otherwise Bilsbie didn't understand / remember.

Specifically, if (the hypothetical situation) is a critical business process that they need an audit log of; or that they want to scale, this becomes an exercise in demonstrating that the candidate knows how to collect requirements and turn a manual process into a business application.

The interviewer could also be trying to probe knowledge of event processing, ect, ect, and maybe came up with a bad question. We just don't know.

Given that Bilsbie can't read their interviewer's mind, there's no way to know if that's what the interviewer wanted, or if the interviewer themselves was bad at interviewing candidates.
by Nevermark | 2026-03-04 14:39:40+00:00
I think the entirety of the A-series, M-series and even S-series lines are essentially one chip product line, with different balances of chip area, cost, compute and energy use.

Other than that, perhaps some small form factor related device support differences.

Never been an OS (iOS, iPad, watchOS vs. Mac) distinction from the hardware standpoint.

The only thing I read from M-series in iPads and A-series in the Neo, is the A chip is better balanced in price and power draw for a low cost laptop with a smaller battery.

The M-chip with that balance is the A-chip.
by jp_nc | 2026-03-04 14:40:08+00:00
If they would offer a reasonable replacement program, I bet they could make a strong case to EDU. The nice thing about Chromebooks is when a kid spills something on it, it's cheap to replace and to get back up and running. A tight EDU iCloud restore and reasonable replacement cost could definitely make this an attractive option for some school districts as this will last for a kid's entire school career.
by phito | 2026-03-04 14:40:17+00:00
I keep reading this online but never encounter it in real life. People I work with and for like simple solutions that don't add complexity. It saves them time and money. I really wonder how is it that some people seem to encounter this toxic mentality so much that they assume it is universal. Is it a FAANG/US culture thing where everyone acts based on corrupted incentives?
by boondongle | 2026-03-04 14:40:29+00:00
In a real, large company, no. Interns generally still get the work that is prioritized but often too simplistic to spend Senior Dev time on to simplify Dev's job. For better or worse, Development represents what the executive level prioritizes often defined by Product Management/Program Management.

There's a whole other level of requests which for political or cultural reasons don't get touched even if there's a great internal rate of return to them or they reflect real bottlenecks elsewhere in the company.

Ideally any/every company would prioritize by actual internal rate of return but that's just not what most of us observe.
by jim180 | 2026-03-04 14:40:32+00:00
there is another differences between Apple monitors vs the rest. - standard and peak brightness[1]. All of them are less bright, than Apple's monitors. I'd really wanna know why.

MSI - 1400 nits, LG - 1250 nits, Apple - 2000 nits. That's peak brightness, standard brightness isn't even mentioned, except for Apple one. Is it just cooling or something more?

[1] https://www.ipsmonitor.com/news/msis-mpg-271kraw16-is-a-firs...
by cml123 | 2026-03-04 14:40:39+00:00
this is interesting because of how much it differs from my own hopes. I don't really have any personal need or want for the Linux desktop marketshare to increase. I like computers because I can program them to do something and it will do it. Ideally you have complete control over it. I've customized my desktop here and there in order to get some result, but while you care most about the _result_, for me the act of _making_ that result happen is as important if not more. I'm not looking to offload it to something else.

I don't really see the troubleshooting/customization as annoying. It's not much different than learning to program. At first you don't have any intuition for patterns or ways to solve problems, but given time, you start to identify them and know how to work on it unaided. For many distros or operating systems more broadly, it's the same thing. When in doubt, I head to the Arch wiki or more rarely the forums, then I'm good to go.

I'm not really after some integrated LLM or Copilot 365 for Linux experience when it comes to using my computer.
by wreath | 2026-03-04 14:41:22+00:00
I dont even think you need to be neurodivergent or anything to answer this question like the parent’s cofounder did.

From one side, we call ourselves problem solvers, on the other hand we are not satisfied with simple solutions to these problems.
If im interviewing for a job, i should be expected to behave and solve hypothetical problems the way id do it on the job. If that screws up your script, you probably suck at hiring and communicating your expectations.
by jihadjihad | 2026-03-04 14:41:27+00:00
I wish there was a little more color in the Testing and QA section. While I agree with this:

> A comprehensive test suite is by far the most effective way to keep those features working.

there is no mention at all about LLMs' tendency to write tautological tests--tests that pass because they are defined to pass. Or, tests that are not at all relevant or useful, and are ultimately noise in the codebase wasting cycles on every CI run. Sometimes to pass the tests the model might even hardcode a value in a unit test itself!

IMO this section is a great place to show how we as humans can guide the LLM toward a rigorous test suite, rather than one that has a lot of "coverage" but doesn't actually provide sound guarantees about behavior.
by Kuyawa | 2026-03-04 14:41:33+00:00
I love it for the things that I do. It's not comparable to Claude which is the top coding experience right now but for typing chunks of code, refactoring, etc is more than enough.

I don't have a full CLI agent, I just installed deepseek as a plugin in my Sublime Editor, some python code that takes the selected text or file and can do things to it on command, sometimes I just enter a prompt without selection so it can create code for me.

All in all, enough for me as a lone coder, it doesn't have continuous integration or team edition which I don't care for, and for the price (cents per month) I couldn't ask for more.

Let me know if I can be of any help
by NoLinkToMe | 2026-03-04 14:41:56+00:00
Interesting that it's the same weight, less wide and less tall than the Air model, though it is a bit thicker.

Seems like an amazing entry-level offer for kids and students. But to be honest for myself I also don't really much added value of an Air or Pro anymore.

I think the memory of 8gb is the biggest limit for a device you want to use another 6-8 years, except for the most casual of users. Those who have multiple apps and tens of tabs open will enjoy an experience difference with 16gb Air/Pro. And the battery life is significantly (but not radically) better on the Air/Pro.

Really great to see.
by tw04 | 2026-03-04 14:42:04+00:00
> The nice thing about Chromebooks is when a kid spills something on it, it's cheap to replace and to get back up and running.

Is this actually a problem though? For my kids you either pay for the insurance plan at the start of the year, or you're responsible for the full cost of replacement.

There are obviously exceptions made for qualified low-income households but otherwise I don't know why they school would particularly care what replacement cost is if it's passed onto the family.
by alcazar | 2026-03-04 14:42:16+00:00
Thanks! I didn't know about TypeID (and I thought I'd searched thoroughly).

The formalization interests me. Shame they shifted the UUID 2 bits right. Otherwise our implementations would be almost compatible (only the last 2 bits of the 26th character + the last 3 characters would differ). In my next clean codebase, I may use TypeID and append a 15-bit checksum.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-03-04 14:42:31+00:00
Unfortunately, I don’t know of any.

Using LLMs for voice assistants is relatively new at scale that’s the difference between Alexa and Alexa+ and Gemini powered Google Assistant and what Apple has been trying to do with Siri for two years.

It’s really just using LLMs for tool calling. It is just call centers were mostly built before the age of LLMs and companies are slow to update
by est | 2026-03-04 14:42:35+00:00
big corp politics.

qwen started as the NLP team of Tongyi dept, which was part of the algorithm & model offerings from Alibaba-Cloud (aliyun)

Tongyi offerings https://tongyi.aliyun.com/

- qwen series for nlp

- wan series for cv/video

- fun series for ASR and TTS

- icss for AI customer service

- lingma for coding

- xingchen for metaverse hype

- tingwu for podcast/notebooklm

Now that's the awkward part: qwen was too successful, as a small team had more influence than Tongyi and even Aliyun, obviously they started to develop multi-modal capabilities even with their own app, very vertical integrated.

And GPUs were scarce, Alibaba had to balance free open source models and customer use.

In a better world, alibaba might just as well split qwen into an independent entity and IPO it.
by randusername | 2026-03-04 14:42:37+00:00
> Most people think of verification as a cost, a tax on development, justified only for safety-critical systems. That framing is outdated.

> The value is not in the verification workforce. It is in what verified delivery enables

These takes misrepresent safety-critical software verification. The verification workforce is indispensable. Whereas the software engineers are usually highly specialized, the verification team owns the domain and project knowledge to make sure the whole thing integrates. They consult on requirements, anticipate oversights, build infrastructure and validate it, and execute the verification.

So when the business needs a go / no-go call, they ask the verification lead.

Automation and proofs have their place, but I don't see how verification without human accountability is workable.
by accrual | 2026-03-04 14:43:12+00:00
Looks pretty cool. I feel they got some features right for their target demographics:

- 2 fun colors + 2 regular

- The Magic Keyboard looks like it has a decent amount of travel and should hold up well

- Headphone port, recognizing that wired headphones are way more durable in a classroom setting

- Decent price and display, though I wonder about performance w/ Tahoe

I don't currently have a modern macOS machine, so a basic machine like this could be useful to have around even though I daily drive Linux now. Maybe it'll get Asahi support!
by areoform | 2026-03-04 14:43:18+00:00
One of the first things Steve Jobs did when he came back to Apple in 1996/97 is that he took a shredder and a flamethrower to Apple's product lines. He'd ask managers, "which one should I tell my friends to buy?" And if they couldn't give an answer, he'd kill the line. Or so the story goes, https://www.entrepreneur.com/growing-a-business/how-steve-jo...

Big companies drift away from the ground truth of their employees and customers over time. Without someone highly focused coordinating things, it's easier to create a "new" product and call it a day than it is to innovate.

And when you're big it takes years, decades even, for the cracks to eventually show, but show they will.

Because ask yourself, if you were telling your friend to buy a Macbook, which one would you tell them to buy?
by dgxyz | 2026-03-04 14:43:24+00:00
Well ChromeOS is basically a monolithic browser based OS. These will likely have apps deployed which contain one copy of Chrome each. By the time you get three vendors' worth of stuff on it then you're running three isolated browser stacks and eating up RAM. I'm sitting here on a Mac with Teams, Outlook and Slack open and there's 18 gig of RAM gone for example.

As for Chromebooks, they are fucking awful for education. The abject disaster that is Google Classroom needs to just go away. NOTHING works properly, has any inkling of any reasonable design or engineering or is intuitive. I've seen so many students struggling with them.
by handedness | 2026-03-04 14:43:26+00:00
Qubes hasn't always shipped Xen patches nearly as quickly as I would like. It's the unfortunate reality of the situation they're in, simultaneously trying to catch up with broad-spectrum device support, with a miles-long HCL with many entries having sub-threads attempting to resolve significant compatibility issues. Don't buy hardware that's too new, don't buy hardware that's too old, certified hardware doesn't necessarily stay certified, and so on. It's a mess.

I love what they're doing and it's my preferred daily driver, but from a security standpoint they're still pushing molasses up a sandy hill.
Show HN: CodeYam Memory – comprehensive memory management for Claude Code
by nadis | 2026-03-04 14:43:42+00:00
We built CodeYam Memory because Claude Code kept making the same mistakes on our codebase. Our claude.md files quickly got stale and maintaining by hand or with Claude wasn’t sufficient.

While digging into this we found that Claude has a native rules system that allowed us to target specific parts of our repo with path matching. This was ideal for our use case but trying to manage these rules by hand was already not working and would be even harder with more granular, targeted rules.

CodeYam Memory uses a background agent to review your coding session transcripts, identifies confusion patterns, and generates targeted rules with proper scoping. You review and approve everything. Dashboard for auditing, a background-agent review process so nothing goes stale as code changes, tracking of everything lives in a simple file in git.

How to Get Started:

Install:
npm install -g @codeyam/codeyam-cli@latest

Then from your project root run:
codeyam

This will launch a dashboard with further instructions for initializing CodeYam Memory.

Free, runs locally, no login required, and language agnostic. Would love feedback.

More context:

Background blog post:
https://open.substack.com/pub/codeyam/p/introducing-the-code...

90 sec demo on our own repo:
https://youtu.be/oJ2gTb-lxbE

Demo teaching Claude a real OSS repo (Plane):
https://youtu.be/CjOKBwBCcOs

Website:
https://codeyam.com/
by strcat | 2026-03-04 14:43:51+00:00
Motorola Signature and Motorola Razr Fold are ranked above the Pixel 10 Pro on https://www.dxomark.com/smartphones/. Pixels have fantastic camera hardware and software which is fully functional on GrapheneOS which isn't something we need to lose on a Motorola flagship. There will be much better CPU and GPU performance via Snapdragon too. The compromises are mostly in terms of getting some security improvements while losing others but we'll still be able to meet all of our official security requirements.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-03-04 14:44:11+00:00
Let's hope that in the future, When ram prices come down (if that's a concern to apple right now) then we can have 16 gb ram as well.

I do think that 8 gb is fine for most cases, even development. I used to use a PC with 8 GB ram and it worked perfectly fine and honestly depending on the workflow if you need more, a VPS can always be your good friend (I really love using zed on a VPS with cloudflare tunnels or perhaps tailscale)

Looks pretty good to me. There have been two wins in just these couple of days. This Macbook Neo and The grapheneos+Motorola phone both seem to make decent options available for the market.

I might have to go recommend this to a friend of mine who had once asked me what laptop they should pick when they get into college.
by nadis | 2026-03-04 14:44:22+00:00
Hey HN! I’m Nadia, one of the builders. Happy to answer anything.

Some context on what “rules” are for people who haven’t seen them: Claude Code has a built-in system for structured context beyond claude.md files. Rules support path matching (apply context only to specific files/directories), scoped organization, and structured formatting.

We have been running CodeYam Memory on our own repo for the past few weeks. The main difference we see is fewer repeated mistakes and less manual context maintenance. It’s still early, but it has meaningfully improved how we work with Claude Code.

If discussion gets too long for HN threads, we also have a Discord for questions and feedback: https://discord.gg/eFPUs7CeFw
by the_tli | 2026-03-04 14:44:26+00:00
We've started to be an early user in December and have since adopted it in a brown field codebase. I'd describe this as Lovable 2.0 or vibe coding 2.0.
The p0 workflow allowed us to delegate medium to complex full features to Claude Code while staying in lane with our standards. It allows us to go from idea to fully working prototype and PR within half and hour to hour, most of the time fully hands off.
PRs still need to be reviewed for production. However p0 allowed to drastically improve per engineer velocity, AI code quality and iterate faster with working prototypes and refinements.

Compared to Claude Code directly, which we also use heavily, p0 keeps very strong coherence from user story, spec planning, architecting, engineering and QA - across many several agents and subagents. Breaking down the work into sequential and parallel task. With Claude Code alone this would be usually requiring lots of hand holding, or be be only partially focussed, rest lost in the woods.
Also, we attempted to replicate some of p0 ideas with home grown software dev personas and workflows which fell apart. I think the strong point of p0 is that they really nailed the decomposition and software dev cycle with agents.

Really recommend to try, and at the very minimum you get to make your codebase agent ready if you haven't already.
by busterarm | 2026-03-04 14:44:31+00:00
Honestly I think that the real result of this is developers that don't really understand the underlying tooling and invent all sorts of bad architectures.

One common example I cite is at one job I owned Kafka and RabbitMQ clusters. Zero consideration was given to message size recommendations and we had incidents on the regular because some application was shoving multi-hundred megabyte messages into RMQ. They'd do other stupid shit like not ack their messages which would cause them to never be removed from local disk. This was a huge org, public company, hiring "only the best and brightest".

Management endlessly just threw more hardware at it rather than make the engineers fix their obviously bad architecture. What a headache. Some companies take the "prioritize engineer happiness" thing right off a cliff.
by augusto-moura | 2026-03-04 14:44:33+00:00
Hard to know relative performance before we get benchmarks. Aside from that anything that runs on M1 should run on this in the same way. In fact, the processor on Neo should support slightly more modern software since it implements ARMv9 [1] agains M1 ARMv8 [2]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A18

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M1
by cc-d | 2026-03-04 14:44:36+00:00
I like the art in this article.

Boss says, back to home softies, did you guys really think all you had to do was show up, play on the computer, eat yum yums, and suddenly you have all the money and women?

Software hard mob.

Edit mob: most of you guys paired up with our partners. Pre-martial sex might not have been such a great idea ! (mob loves you all dearly)

Especially with more than one partner! In dad's time when everybody from same village, maybe okay, now, maybe not great idea. Not a great idea to let our MOBinamls into your homes either.

We did dog. Dog is a domestic military black op. Mob says this is very untrue, WE did not do dog, but we are very suspicious as to why dog is in home as well :thonk:
by ArcHound | 2026-03-04 14:45:05+00:00
Oh snap. Say I'd like to compute some JA4 hashes on my server. I know this can be done as the server has the keys required. But is there a ready made solution that can account for ECH and compute JA4 as a proxy? Please? I saw HAProxy should work and I know that nginx module for JA4 is incomplete, are you please aware of other solutions for self-hosting?