MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mullingitover | 2026-03-04 19:46:09+00:00
> At present, the bare economics of it, without any subsidies, put solar as the most cost-effective new power capacity to add.

Not just more cost-effective for new power.

The operating expenses for a given coal plant are greater than the buildout cost for the equivalent solar+battery plant.

It no longer makes financial sense for coal plants to continue existing in almost all cases. This isn't some environmentalism thing, it's strictly hard math. Fossil energy is no longer viable without taxpayers keeping it on life support.
by lynndotpy | 2026-03-04 19:46:48+00:00
I am a huge 3.5mm jack defender and I am still upset at how Apple created a post-USB C world. But this is a common misconception.

USB C headphones and 3.5mm headphones (and Bluetooth, USB A, etc) are all equally as "analog" as one another (with the exception of someone with all-analog equipment, of course).

You need a DAC somewhere between the chip you're getting the digital signal from and the speakers that are playing an analog signal. And so the quality of that depends on (among other things) the quality of your DAC.

With USB or Bluetooth headphones, the DAC is somewhere in the headphone. With the 3.5mm jack, the DAC is behind jack. If you have a device with a crummy built-in DAC giving you a noisy signal, you'll be better off using a USB DAC.

I haven't used Apple's USB C earbuds, but Apple does make a $10 USB C to 3.5mm DAC that performs very very well for its price point.
by codethief | 2026-03-04 19:46:52+00:00
Hi William, thank you for the interesting post!

> At a certain point, the verification complexity takes off. You literally run out of time to verify everything.

Could you elaborate on this? Your post makes it sound as if the verification complexity diverged as the number of components n approaches a certain finite value n_0, but that seems unlikely to me. If, in contrast, the verification complexity remains finite at n_0, then verification should still be possible in finite time, shouldn't it? Yes, it might be a considerable amount of time but I assume your theorem doesn't predict lower bounds for the involved constants?

Either way, this entire discussion assumes n will increase as more and more software gets written by AI. Couldn't it also be the opposite, though? AI might also lead us to removing unnecessarily complex dependencies from our software supply chain or stripping them down to the few features we need.
by westurner | 2026-03-04 19:47:12+00:00
> For any developers interested in offering their own app store, Google says it'll launch its Registered App Stores program "with a version of a major Android release" before the end of the year. According to the company, the program will be available in other regions first before it comes to the US.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37843650 :

> What's a ballpark figure for what the monthly cost to Fdroid would be to scan all uploaded APKs for security vulnerabilities?

Will the user need to basically add a pubkey for each 3rd party repo? Could they install an APK from Play Store to add the key, or will there be something like the distribution-gpg-keys package?
by CamperBob2 | 2026-03-04 19:47:26+00:00
The newest Firefox build has a nice feature: you highlight some text on a page, and instead of having to right-click and navigate to the AI submenu to bring up a list of canned prompts, none of which are what you actually want to ask, it just pops up a button next to the highlighted text that you can click to enter a prompt immediately.

So this guy's rant, besides not making a whole lot of sense (first he complains about the length of the right-click menu, then he complains that they moved the AI stuff to a side menu...?) is also obsolete.
by jameshilliard | 2026-03-04 19:47:29+00:00
> The decision to use cheap bombing or an expensive one will go from the top.

I don't see any indications that unguided munitions are being used if that's what you're referring to. The advantages in terms of accuracy from precision guided munitions tends to largely eliminate any cost advantages unguided munitions may theoretically have.

Regardless of the statements being made by some of the leadership the actual targeting appears to be done in a way that tries to avoid civilian casualties.
by parliament32 | 2026-03-04 19:47:32+00:00
> a hypothetical scenario where the watch has a publicly reachable IPv4 address

Or one of your other IoT / smart home devices / malware on your PC is doing local network reconnaissance? Connecting this device to a public wifi? Or just a bad neighbour who hijacks your SSID? This smells of "I'm secure because I'm behind a NAT" which conveniently ignores the couple dozen other paths an adversary could take.
by augusto-moura | 2026-03-04 19:47:52+00:00
The laptop can also supply more power to the chip and might have better integrated data lanes. Throughput to cache might be faster too if the access to disk and RAM are faster, they could try a more aggressive CPU scaling governo, since the hardware can handle it. And the list goes on

Benchmarking is not only about raw processing power, we can easily prove this on chips that are not hardware bound, benchmarks can vary wildly between machines running Intels or AMDs. The hardware between a phone and a laptop are orders of magnitude different, even though the CPU is the same
by mbgerring | 2026-03-04 19:48:58+00:00
Cool, we agree, and if you think the place to cut corners on that is the engineering calcs, you have lost your mind. If you do that, not only will people die, you will drastically increase costs because the infrastructure project you built will collapse.

Europe and Asia both have reliable, modern infrastructure that’s decades ahead of the United States and they did not need the million-monkeys-on-typewriters machine to accomplish that.
by tedmiston | 2026-03-04 19:49:14+00:00
> A18 Pro chip (2 performance cores + 4 efficiency cores) whereas the macbook air has the M5 chip

i don't see the m5 air on geekbench yet, but here are some related numbers for context (sorted by multi ascending):

| device | cpu | single core score | multi core score |
|:----------------------------|:------------------------------------------------|------------------:|-----------------:|
| iPhone 16 Pro Max | Apple A18 Pro | 3428 | 8531 |
| iPhone 16 Pro | Apple A18 Pro | 3445 | 8624 |
| MacBook Air (15-inch, 2025) | Apple M4 @ 4.4 GHz (10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores) | 3708 | 14698 |
| MacBook Air (13-inch, 2025) | Apple M4 @ 4.4 GHz (10 CPU cores, 8 GPU cores) | 3696 | 14729 |
| MacBook Air (13-inch, 2025) | Apple M4 @ 4.4 GHz (10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores) | 3696 | 14729 |
| MacBook Pro (14-inch, 2025) | Apple M5 @ 4.6 GHz (10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores) | 4228 | 17464 |

https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarks

https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks
by crystal_revenge | 2026-03-04 19:49:32+00:00
And the Obama administration really just talked about it. It was under his administration that the US shale oil extraction really started heating up.

The problem is the only solution to climate change is keeping oil in the ground. There are other things that can be done to make a zero emissions transition less painful, but oil (and all other fossil fuels) need to start staying in the ground.

During the Obama administration is when we started to see a dramatic increase in US oil production [0]. The US hegemony is oil powered and founded on the petro-dollar. There's no way US policy can be aligned with anything remotely resembling a path towards a sustainable energy environment.

0. https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/leafhandler.ashx?n=pet&s=m...
by w10-1 | 2026-03-04 19:49:44+00:00
Maybe not promoted, but certainly hired, as a consultant.

Most of my engagements consisted of replacing politics-driven complications with simple solutions.

The bigger problem was first quietly showing all the affected people other interesting things that needed doing so they would let go.

And TBH, the simple stuff lasted the longest because it harder to misunderstand or misrepresent.
by sva_ | 2026-03-04 19:49:46+00:00
I actually used a netbook when I was in school, it wasn't all that bad.

People thinking I mentioned my (somewhat) disappointment about the CPU because it is also used in Phones, but actually what I meant is that I would be interested in doing some reverse engineering work to contribute to the Asahi Linux project for the M-chips if this was a cheap option to attain one.

But I don't really see doing that for the A18, personally; even though I don't doubt its a good chip!
by hightrix | 2026-03-04 19:49:51+00:00
Taking the laptop to the office and back home again daily. The hinge has gotten weak over time. The connection to take off the screen is very fragile, tapping the button to enable removal only works about half the time. Then, when re-attaching the screen sometimes it doesn't catch, or the keyboard connects but doesn't realize it is connected so the machine stays in tablet mode. The trackpad has gotten spongey and harder to click.

It didn't happen to me, but of the 4 people in direct team that had them, 2 had battery issues where the battery expanded making the laptop unusable.

This is from approximately 2 years of daily use for work. I no longer use my surface.

I typically care for my laptops very diligently. I still use my MBP from 2012 and it works like a champ. I don't have a windows laptop anymore, but my main desktop is windows. I'm not a Mac fanboy.
by einpoklum | 2026-03-04 19:49:59+00:00
Article seems to suggest that simplicity vs complexity is a sort of a binary, or at least a spectrum. In fact, it's very often the case that:

* You can have a bunch of simple code for a latent or implicit concept that is complex; and that making the code more complex might make the reflect principle simpler.

* You have trade-offs: If one aspect is simple, other aspects must become more complex to accommodate.

* There is no consensus over what constitutes complex vs simple code.
by iamnothere | 2026-03-04 19:50:17+00:00
Yeah, sounds like something from an authoritarian police state.

> Essentially, this is a cross-platform, cross-device, government-led parental control system that has been painstakingly planned out by Beijing.

> The rules are incredibly specific: kids under eight, for instance, can only use smart devices for 40 minutes every day and only consume content about “elementary education, hobbies and interests, and liberal arts education”; when they turn eight, they graduate to 60 minutes of screen time and “entertainment content with positive guidance.” Honestly, this newsletter would have to go on forever to explain all the specifics.

We don’t do this in free societies. Let the parents decide.
by nandomrumber | 2026-03-04 19:50:33+00:00
Sure, but that’s increasingly likely to be a private IPv4 address as a result of:

Carrier-grade NAT (CGN or CGNAT), also known as large-scale NAT (LSN), is a type of network address translation (NAT) used by Internet service providers (ISPs) in IPv4 network design. With CGNAT, end sites, in particular residential networks, are configured with private network addresses that are translated to public IPv4 addresses by middlebox network address translator devices embedded in the network operator's network, permitting the sharing of small pools of public addresses among many end users. This essentially repeats the traditional customer-premises NAT function at the ISP level.

Having said that, NAT isn’t a firewall.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-03-04 19:50:46+00:00
> Except that computers did, in fact, learn to speak.

But prior to it happening it was just a long term prediction that had kept not happening for the longest time.

> Has the climate collapsed?

There's an awful lot of room between "business as usual" and "total collapse".

Must we wait until after bad things have happened to only then discuss what we might have done about them in hindsight? Surely proactively avoiding problems is better?
Show HN: I built a language app that generates songs from your vocab list
by gursu8 | 2026-03-04 19:51:24+00:00
I built Lingotify to solve a problem I kept running into while learning German: I could remember words from songs I heard once, but flashcard vocab disappeared overnight.

There's research backing this up (Ludke et al. 2013 — singing foreign vocabulary improves short-term recall vs speaking it). The mechanism seems to be melody acting as a retrieval cue. I wanted to see if that could work as an intentional learning strategy, not just a happy accident.

How it works: you select vocabulary words you're learning, pick a music genre, and the app generates a song with those words in the lyrics. Then you practice with SRS flashcards and take quizzes on the lyrics (karaoke-style song pauses, you fill in the missing word).

Tech stack:
React Native + Expo (development build, not Expo Go — needed for react-native-track-player)
Supabase (auth, postgres, edge functions, realtime)
OpenAI gpt-4o-mini / Gemini for lyrics generation (2-stage: lyrics first, then line-by-line translations)
Suno V4.5 for music generation via a proxy edge function (API key stays server-side)
SM-2 spaced repetition algorithm with modifications (speed bonuses, combo tracking, leech detection at 8+ lapses)
-
Some interesting technical challenges:
Lyric validation: AI generates lyrics but must include ALL selected vocabulary words. Retry mechanism if words are missing (up to 2 retries)
SRS concurrency: optimistic locking on practice_count to prevent race conditions when multiple sessions update the same word
Music generation is 2-stage with webhook callback (no polling)

Solo dev, been building this for about 6 months.
6 languages supported (EN, DE, ES, FR, TR, IT). Free tier available, no account needed to browse.

Curious what HN thinks about the approach. Also happy to answer questions about the tech or the learning methodology.
by pocksuppet | 2026-03-04 19:51:30+00:00
> How do you determine to whom an IP is even registered to?

You check the RIR's records.

> They get sub-leased all the time.

With records updated. If not, any consequences from wrong information fall on the lessor and lessee.

> There's also no way to actually know _where_ an IP actually originates from. Only its AS path.

Ping time from different locations on their upstream AS gives a good guess.
by crystal_revenge | 2026-03-04 19:51:36+00:00
> wrong side of history on this one.

There's not much history left. What we're seeing right now is people getting ready to win the end game of civilization. The oligarchs are well aware of the myriad existential threats to our civilization (and species) and are playing the game to make sure they're the last person alive living in comfort.

History will increasingly be told by powerful, oligarchical, modern warlords.
by baby_souffle | 2026-03-04 19:51:37+00:00
I can't speak to flock but I know that other vendors in the space have software designed to calculate optimal locations to maximize probability at least one license plate scan for every trip taken.

Presumably that software can then be used to upsell additional cameras because with an increased density your capabilities start to approximate real-time live position tracking instead of just getting approximate locations of hot plates.
by ramkarthikk | 2026-03-04 19:51:43+00:00
Thank you for submitting this. I built this over the weekend. I have been blogging since the mid-2000's when blogging was at it's peak. There was a whole community around it - familiar faces commenting, friends promoting each other's post - sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and Technorati where you could find interesting new blogs.

And then it slowly faded away as social media platforms rose in popularity. There are still many people who blog but not enough places to find them since the social platforms pretty much deprioritize external links.

I built Blogosphere to aggregate posts from over 1,000 blogs (adding more every hour and you can add them via the "Submit Blog") along with categories to help people find new and interesting blogs.
by smokel | 2026-03-04 19:51:47+00:00
For the uninitiated: Interestingly, it is not advisable to take this to the extreme and set temperature to 0.

That would seem logical, as the results are then completely deterministic, but it turns out that a suboptimal token may result in a better answer in the long run. Also, allowing for a little bit of noise gives the model room to talk itself out of a suboptimal path.
by sobiajulu | 2026-03-04 19:52:02+00:00
Coding agents have made development dramatically faster, but paperwork is still manual. Every time I need to update a dollar amount in a SAFE, fill in company details on a cloud services agreement, or negotiate an NDA, I'm back in Word doing it by hand. For anyone at a startup, more of your time is now spent on .docx tasks precisely because the coding got faster.

I built safe-docx at a legal AI startup where we use it in production for contract editing. One of our law firm customers asked for more transparency into how the tools works, so we open-sourced it. We ported it from Python to TypeScript so it runs anywhere JS runs with no native dependencies. It lets coding agents make format-preserving edits to existing Word documents — read and search without blowing up your context window, apply edits that preserve formatting, and export a clean copy or tracked-changes version.

Why not just have the agent unzip the .docx and edit the raw XML? I tried that. Across 25 Common Paper and Bonterms templates, the XML is a median of 12x the size of the actual text. An agent could write regex or DOM parsing to extract the text, but that's code it generates each session — and sometimes there's a bug it has to debug. safe-docx gives the agent a compact view that only shows formatting where it's changing, stable paragraph IDs that don't drift, and a JSON edit format you can tweak and reapply. MIT licensed — fork it and customize as you like.

I use it for: NDAs, order forms, equity docs, SOC 2 policy templates auditors hand you in .docx. One-off documents you just need to fill out once and move on.

Install:

gemini extensions install https://github.com/UseJunior/safe-docx
claude mcp add safe-docx -- npx -y @usejunior/safe-docx
npm install @usejunior/safe-docx

No .NET / Python / LibreOffice dependencies.

What .docx edge cases should I prioritize next?
by lamontcg | 2026-03-04 19:52:13+00:00
Yeah, if you turn it all into buttons and settings in the actual settings menus, someone else is going to post a long rant about how the settings menus have a million confusing options that nobody uses...

Mine also isn't anywhere nearly as confusing as his by default, so this smells like a power-user-has-power-user-problems-and-solutions rant...
by StayHuman | 2026-03-04 19:52:42+00:00
On the "coordinated efforts" front, some anecdata:

Three separate posts on Craigslist in the Community section about Flock Cameras, trying to increase local awareness. Posted to two different cities, various posting iterations (e.g. with links / without, pics / no pics, etc.). All appeared to post fine when entered, but never saw the light of day and were marked as removed within a few minutes.

Any other subject: posts fine.

Try it yourself and see what you get.
by 999900000999 | 2026-03-04 19:52:46+00:00
It was definitely the Fuji X Half review.

https://arslan.io/2025/06/14/fujifilm-x-half-is-it-the-perfe...

And I must make a correction, he doesn't explicitly mention trusting his kids with a 5k Leica. He's using a 10k M11 as a family camera and he lets his wife use it.

Still, I'd imagine a family with this type of money would have no issue giving the kids 500$ MacBook.

I should of brought up the thread where someone felt they needed to buy each daughters a Tesla...
by lreeves | 2026-03-04 19:54:29+00:00
In my experience Qwen3.5/Qwen3-Coder-Next perform best in their own harness, Qwen-Code. You can also crib the system prompt and tool definitions from there though. Though caveat, despite the Qwen models being the state of the art for local models they are like a year behind anything you can pay for commercially so asking for it to build a new app from scratch might be a bit much.
by mmsc | 2026-03-04 19:54:40+00:00
> Mine also isn't anywhere nearly as confusing as his by default

You can run the following and try it for yourself. Don't forget to highlight some text before right-clicking an image (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Factbook)

TMPPROF="$(mktemp -d /tmp/ff-tmp.XXXXXX)"
/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -no-remote -profile "$TMPPROF"
by sobiajulu | 2026-03-04 19:54:51+00:00
Size ratio methodology: I measured 25 .docx templates from Common Paper (https://commonpaper.com) and Bonterms (https://bonterms.com) — open-source standard agreement templates anyone can download. I excluded our own templates to avoid cherry-picking. Short-form templates (amendments, term sheets) skew the high end because they're mostly formatting with little text; the median is representative of typical multi-page agreements.

Results (template: doc.xml bytes / text bytes = ratio):

bonterms-mutual-nda: 50,759 / 1,077 = 47.1x
bonterms-professional-services-agreement: 60,276 / 1,627 = 37.0x
common-paper-ai-addendum-in-app: 91,790 / 9,000 = 10.2x
common-paper-ai-addendum: 114,349 / 9,478 = 12.1x
common-paper-amendment: 35,389 / 537 = 65.9x
common-paper-business-associate-agreement:197,553 / 12,716 = 15.5x
common-paper-cloud-service-agreement: 417,787 / 37,112 = 11.3x
common-paper-csa-click-through: 128,682 / 13,580 = 9.5x
common-paper-csa-with-ai: 690,102 / 54,237 = 12.7x
common-paper-csa-with-sla: 643,237 / 53,086 = 12.1x
common-paper-csa-without-sla: 529,720 / 46,116 = 11.5x
common-paper-data-processing-agreement: 350,375 / 30,530 = 11.5x
common-paper-design-partner-agreement: 160,847 / 14,585 = 11.0x
common-paper-independent-contractor: 161,157 / 19,519 = 8.3x
common-paper-letter-of-intent: 59,796 / 4,176 = 14.3x
common-paper-mutual-nda: 47,828 / 1,426 = 33.5x
common-paper-one-way-nda: 86,211 / 7,710 = 11.2x
common-paper-order-form-with-sla: 164,494 / 7,524 = 21.9x
common-paper-order-form: 122,607 / 5,751 = 21.3x
common-paper-partnership-agreement: 255,661 / 27,562 = 9.3x
common-paper-pilot-agreement: 220,683 / 20,371 = 10.8x
common-paper-professional-services: 472,579 / 39,360 = 12.0x
common-paper-software-license: 300,638 / 33,659 = 8.9x
common-paper-statement-of-work: 99,102 / 3,582 = 27.7x
common-paper-term-sheet: 36,410 / 1,627 = 22.4x
MEDIAN: 12.1x

Reproduction script and templates are in the open-agreements repo: https://github.com/open-agreements/open-agreements/blob/main...
by zahlman | 2026-03-04 19:54:52+00:00
> The LLM also can’t really learn. An intuitive response to this problem is to simply continue adding more and more instructions to its pre-prompt, treating that text file as its “memory”, but that just doesn’t work, and probably never will.

The link goes to a "bug report" (really a support request) noting that Claude Code gives a length warning for CLAUDE.md, and asking whether it makes sense to factor out separate files. The first response (several weeks later) is blatantly LLM-generated text running with the idea. It even features:

> Are you sure this works?

> You've asked a fantastic and very insightful question. It gets to the very heart of how CLAUDE.md works, and I apologize if my previous answer was ambiguous.

Painful. Why do people think they are providing a service by doing things like this?