MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nateb2022 | 2026-03-04 18:07:36+00:00
> I've seen the stocks app take up 2GB of RAM before. Even Control Centre can be a RAM hog. If Apple were still slinging efficient software 8GB is one thing but their catalyst based crapware is far from efficient.

Guessing based on your comments about 8GB of RAM that you have a lot more RAM than that. You should be aware that when you have a lot of unused RAM, many programs will cache data in RAM, and the OS won't really "clean up" paged memory, since there's very little memory pressure. In modern OS architecture, "free RAM is wasted RAM."

If you have 32GB of RAM for example, macOS will allow processes to keep decorative assets, pre-fetched data, and UI buffers in memory indefinitely because there’s no reason to flush them. This makes the system feel snappier. The metric that actually matters isn't "Used RAM," but Memory Pressure. A system can have 0GB of "Free" memory but still be performing perfectly because the OS is ready to reallocate that cached data the millisecond another app needs it.

Judging efficiency based on usage in a low-pressure environment is like complaining that a gas tank is "inefficient" just because it’s full.
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-03-04 18:07:45+00:00
> Iran is going to end up looking like Afghanistan (a broken country of small feudal states) at the end of this.

Soooo, lateral move from 1999 with the benefit of the theocratic regime that rules over those states having a bit of hindsight this time and being keenly aware that they ought not to let themselves be exploited puppet or proxy for larger international conflict? I'm not saying Afghanistan on track to be a shining beacon of modernity in an otherwise backwards region but things are looking pretty up for them and I wish them the best.

An equivalent for Iran would be what? Next guy shows up in charge, promises a few token reforms. Bombs stop falling, protestors go home, business as usual resumes but with a little more normalcy toward the rest of the world.
by andrewcastmate | 2026-03-04 18:07:49+00:00
I'm a bit too lazy to look it up, but this is surprising to me. I still have an 11-inch, and it has a huge bezel around it, but it still feels way, way smaller than a 13-inch MacBook Air.

If the Neo has the same size screen as the MacBook Air, it's just a little confusing to me where it could be smaller.
by happyopossum | 2026-03-04 18:08:26+00:00
Yes to all of the above. Macs swap incredibly well, and an M1/*gb mac is more than capable of having hundreds of chrome tabs open while running excel with giant spreadsheets.

As for "running multiple programs at the same time" - I assume you're leaning pretty far into hyperbole here given that machines with 1% of the resources of this one can do so...
by Terr_ | 2026-03-04 18:08:36+00:00
> Under international law, the desalination plants are protected. But I have seen enough Middle Eastern wars to know the weight of the Geneva Conventions when missiles and bombs start flying.

Not just the Middle East either. The author does note this later in piece ("Zaporizhzhia") where Russia has been bombing Ukrainian power-plants, in a war-crime way which is much more about freezing civilians to death in the winter than measured military goals.

> “Riyadh would have to evacuate within a week if the plant, its pipelines, or associated power infrastructure were seriously damaged or destroyed,” according to a 2008 memo from the US embassy in the kingdom released by Wikileaks.

To make another, odder connection: Hong Kong. Once or twice back during the PRC crackdown on free speech, I've seen people wonder about local independence, but the region is entirely dependent on fresh water piped in from across the border, so all an enraged PRC would need to do is start closing some valves. The large flow needed would be difficult to ship by tanker (and easy to blockade) and any desalinization system (bringing us back to this topic) would be somewhere the top-5 largest in the world... and probably require a nuclear-reactor to power it locally too.
by AlotOfReading | 2026-03-04 18:08:57+00:00
Add much as I'd like to be more efficient, modern toolchains absolutely need these kinds of numbers for big projects. My 48GB system will OOM trying to link clang unless I'm extremely careful. The 64GB system is a bit more forgiving, but I still have to go for lunch while it's working.

Sure, might be ambitious to do that sort of workload on a budget conscious laptop, but it'd be nice y'know?
by bumby | 2026-03-04 18:08:59+00:00
I understand that, and I was trying to be helpful and foster an discussion instead of snarky. I clearly pointed to costs as well, but it didn’t seem to sink in.

Saying “revenue doesn’t equal profits” is superficially true but lacking any real substantive claim. It’s like saying “to lose weight you just need to burn more calories than you consume.” True, but a lazy attempt at a retort.

I tried to foster discussion. If profits = revenue - costs, I asked where those costs are coming from that would erode those profits. Yet again, you replied in a manner that limits discussion. Many of us come to HN because we expect higher levels of discussion than the typical Internet forum cesspool, like the guidelines lay out.
by Arainach | 2026-03-04 18:09:17+00:00
Agreed. I was an early outlook.com user (was working at MS when it launched, I think internal users got slightly early access allowing me to claim a nicer name than my Gmail) but despite having well over a decade of accounts tied to it got so angry at certain messages never appearing that a couple of years ago I reversed the flow of forwarding and swapped to another account as my primary.

Sounds like it's gotten even worse.
by upboundspiral | 2026-03-04 18:09:27+00:00
Heads + TPM is solid but I suspect it is not at the level of Google/Apple secure enclave. And a strong secure enclave provides benefits outside of first boot to secure certain processor state and continuosly ensure integrity.

For desktop TPM at least to me they seem a bit of a black box with many past vulnerabilities https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Trusted_Platform_....

I think at cold boot as long as one doesn't store the encryption key in the TPM (external hardware key?) then one should be secure. I am not so sure about post boot however, once the system is already running.

This actually prompted me to research a bit on the scale of the security impact of SMM

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

https://doc.coreboot.org/security/smm.html

It seems that coreboot is aware and supposedly for some computers can be implemented to catch calls to SMM (ideally this would prevent the attacker from triggering SMM - if they do it's game over).

I do suspect though that if the system bus is not protected from malicious calls then someone can trigger SMM and have carte blanche to one's computer.

https://www.infoworld.com/article/2167684/hackers-find-a-new...

https://hothardware.com/news/researchers-discover-rootkit-ex...

I don't know what processes Apple / Android use but I suspect ARM chips don't have SMM and that they tie certain functions to their secure enclave. In X86 its backwards, with SMM having control over the TPM (at least in some implementations).

Though some SMM vulnerabilities are patched by now given its history I take X86 security with a grain of salt. I think the potential for a secure platform is there, but I suspect one would want to make their own boards engineered with security in mind to be certain (I hope this happens in the future - it seems to be happening in the server space already).
by maccard | 2026-03-04 18:09:31+00:00
I’ve interviewed a few hundred people. Probably approaching a thousand, if not already. An interview is a scenario, and if you aren’t willing to engage in the scenario that we all agreed to partake in, that’s a huge warning sign that you’re going to be difficult later down the line. The point of the question is to have something remotely understandable for both sides to talk about, that’s it.
by convolvatron | 2026-03-04 18:09:37+00:00
I don't see any reason why we shouldn't make this transitive. working professionals track the literature. if there were a standard way to publish a "I think this paper is interesting" signal, then we could roll that all up. there are certainly practitioners that I really do trust to be in the game for the right reasons, if they think a paper represents a contribution, then that's a strong signal for me.
by watzon | 2026-03-04 18:09:53+00:00
Hi, I'm watzon. I have been working on this for a while and just realized that I hadn't posted about it on Hacker News yet.

Pindrop is a fully free and open source alternative to paid software like SuperWhisper. Unlike the alternatives like Handy and OpenWhisper, Pindrop is written using SwiftUI which gives native performance on macOS. It's also feature packed and in active development.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to afford an Apple Developer account yet, so the installation story isn't the best, but I'm working on that.
by hereme888 | 2026-03-04 18:10:13+00:00
Again, you are misinformed. The nuclear capabilities were real. They had secretly moved facilities and those struck by the US were a detriment but didn't hinder development. The attacks were unsuccessful at their primary objective, per all official information.

But there's no argument against someone who thinks everything is a conspiracy. You will always come up with a creative argument, however false it may be.
by thewebguyd | 2026-03-04 18:10:17+00:00
It definitely feels that way. Microsoft has made it clear they don't care about the consumer market anymore. Xbox is dying or already dead, they've done nothing with the game studios they acquired, Windows laptop OEMs still ship plastic 1080p crap targeted at general office workers.

They'll continue to sell it, because it's effectively free surveillance for them, but they certainly aren't focusing on the consumer market as a target demographic.

And with less and less windows-specific apps now a days, there's very little reason for the average user to buy a Windows laptop, especially over this new macbook.
by palata | 2026-03-04 18:10:31+00:00
When the complaint people have about a product is "I can't use it and I really wish I could", I feel like it's a good problem :-).

> Running GraphineOS without all the security features they want would be better for me than what I currently have.

But then it would be like running LineageOS, which is a great (but different) project. Why not using LineageOS?
by Shalomboy | 2026-03-04 18:10:47+00:00
> K-to-12 edu customers don’t care for that and just want a keyboard with a screen with dead-simple admin options.

Which is why I highly doubt this is a play for the K-12 education space. Lots of school-owned chromebook repairs get done at the district level before making their way to the OEM for RMA/replacement. There's no way Apple is supporting that system, they'll want all repairs done under their roof. Not to mention MacOS adminware options lag behind what's built-into ChromeOS. Are you really gonna tell your severely-underpaid sysadmin to put 10,000 devices on Kandji? They'll walk into traffic before you finish speaking.
by eitau_1 | 2026-03-04 18:11:21+00:00
> And whenever Congress delegates authority to the executive branch, it faces a basic principal-agent problem: how do you ensure that the authority will be used by the executive branch in ways that conform to congressional intent? […]

> Beginning in the 1930s, Congress increasingly dealt with the delegation problem via another strategy: the legislative veto. Congress would provide authority to the president or other executive-branch officials, but reserve the right to overturn any individual use of the authority, via passage of a concurrent resolution in the House and Senate. […]

> This essentially retained majoritarian congressional control over presidential uses of IEEPA. If Congress didn’t like an action the president took using his IEEPA authority — be it a sanction, asset freeze, or (gasp!) tariff — they would have the authority to overturn it, by majority vote, without the cooperation of the president.

> But wait, you say, didn’t the House and Senate already both vote to overturn some of the the IEEPA tariffs put in place by Trump by declaring an end to the NEA emergency that triggered the authority? Yes, they did. […] But those were largely symbolic political votes, because the Supreme Court destroyed the legislative veto 40 years ago. […]

> But even worse than that, the Court chose to sever the legislative vetoes from the laws in which they were placed. That is, the Court removed the legislative vetoes but left in place the delegations of authority! […]

> Of course, Congress could just rewrite the laws with tighter restrictions on the delegated authority, or withdraw it all together. […] If Congress wants to change that […] they would need either the consent of the president (good luck), or a supermajority vote in Congress to override his veto.
by altairprime | 2026-03-04 18:11:30+00:00
If its sole contribution is to help 20 million people find an outlet for boundary play that is not the more common ‘nonconsensual abuse of other human beings’, then that sounds like a win. Of course I’d prefer those people invest in human kink communities, but I can certainly respect their choices not to. Tech has always in part been about meeting needs that some parts of society find awkward (photocopiers enabled Spirkfic, CU-SeeMe reflectors were designed specifically to support exhib-cruising years before the web got webcam support, etc.) While there’s a slim chance that some might normalize it back into real life, they’re much more likely to be raised with boundary abuse as an everyday-normal by their parents (especially here in the U.S.!) than they are likely to be converted to being an abuser unknowingly by a chatbot.
by pojzon | 2026-03-04 18:11:39+00:00
What in case engineer picks a simple solution that is hard to understand, cant be tested and next person that comes looks at it and says “wth is that?”

In case you ask “how can simple solutions be hard to understand and test?”

Lets just say you use single line bash scripts with multiple pipes, loops and very niche cmds.

It will work, it will look like nightmare, it will be simple -> one line.
by boricj | 2026-03-04 18:11:49+00:00
That article made me chuckle.

I'm currently building a full-blown OpenAPI toolchain at work, where the OpenAPI document itself is the AST. It contains passes for reference inlining, document merging, JSON Schema validation, C++ code generation and has further plans for data model bindings, HTML5 UI...

Why? Because I'm working on a new embedded system which has a data model so complex, it blew past 10k lines of OpenAPI specifications with no end in sight. I said "ain't no way we're implementing this by hand" and embarked on the mother of all yak shavings.

I want all of the boilerplate/glue code derived from a single source of truth: base C++ data classes, data model bindings, configuration management, change notifications, REST API, state replication for device twins and more. That way we can focus on the domain logic instead, which is already plenty complex on its own.

I'm not designing all of this to be simple to develop. I'm designing it so that it's simple for the developers. Even with the incomplete prototype I have currently, the team is already sold ("you mean I just write the REST API specification and it generates all of the C++ classes for me to inherit?"). The roadmap of features for that toolchain is defined, clear and purposeful: to delete mountains of menial, bug-prone source code before it is ever written by hand.

Sometimes, it takes complexity to deliver simplicity. The trick is to nail the abstractions in-between.
by everforward | 2026-03-04 18:12:24+00:00
I would call what you’re describing Datacenter Operations, with the exception of PXE boot.

You could have SRE do it, but most places don’t because you can get someone to swap a dead drive for way cheaper (it’s not really a complicated operation).

That growth of SRE teams comes from wanting reliability further up the stack. If you’re not on AWS, there’s no Aurora so someone has to be DBA to do backups, performance monitoring, configuring failovers for when a disk dies and RAID needs to rebuild, etc. Same for network, networked storage, yada yada
by giveaccountpls | 2026-03-04 18:12:48+00:00
> neurodivergent people in our ecosystem who would trip up on that question just because of how it's framed

If anything, it's neurodivergent interviewers. If I insisted on a different design I'd either ask a question that's not solved by "just use postgres" or follow up with "ok, that would work, but what if <something that would prevent postgres from working>". Just failing a candidate for a correct answer is a prime example of why interviewing is so bad.
by nateb2022 | 2026-03-04 18:12:51+00:00
> It chugs if I launch a node server yes but that's an outlying use case for an 8gb air.

May I ask if you have many 3rd party apps installed? What apps do you usually keep open at a time? Because 8GB should be more than fine for a node server.

Is it an Apple Silicon Air, or an older Intel model?
by Terr_ | 2026-03-04 18:13:05+00:00
Hence the "not obviously require" bit: For another portion of cases, the "simple glue" will work for a time until errors come to a head, then suddenly they'll need a professional to rip out the LLM asbestos and rework it properly.

That said, we should not underestimate the ability of companies to limp along with something broken and buggy, especially when they're being told there's no budget to fix it. Even without LLMs.
by prmph | 2026-03-04 18:13:05+00:00
> 'Managing' the software to 'use the machine well' to get serious work done is unacceptable in 2026

I agree, I just don't think the rush to get more and more RAM and storage is the root of the problem.

Why on earth does a browser need more than 10 GB to display web pages?? Why does macOS keep piling/hiding trash that should be deleted in "System Data"?

And, if you need to keep device backups, put them on an external drive; that's what those things are for.
by bloggie | 2026-03-04 18:13:09+00:00
Yesterday I wanted to change a white background to transparent on some clip art. I’m still learning Affinity so asked Google Gemini Nano Banana PRO 2. The output looked ok at first but the grey squares were a little off. They didn’t make a perfect grid. I opened it in mspaint and was able to erase the grey squares. It didn’t change the white background to transparent, it just drew an array of grey squares, but only good enough for a first glance. I have no idea how these AI tools can make anything of use if left to their own devices.
Show HN: Chrome extension to export ChatGPT chats, project folders to MD ZIP
by vincze-tamas | 2026-03-04 18:13:14+00:00
ChatGPT's official export produces a single JSON blob with no folder structure. This extension reconstructs the project hierarchy and converts everything to readable Markdown files in a ZIP archive.

Technical notes:

ChatGPT projects are internally "gizmos" — the correct API is /backend-api/gizmos/{g-p-hex32}/conversations?cursor=0, not the undocumented /projects endpoint (which 404s)
Cursor-based pagination throughout (offset-based parameters are silently ignored by the API)
MutationObserver captures project links from the sidebar DOM, including the hover-only "More" popup
Pure JS ZIP builder: CRC32 + local headers + central directory + EOCD, no libraries
Chrome MV3, long-lived port for popup ↔ content script communication; export survives popup close
Markdown content is pre-encoded to Uint8Array before ZIP assembly to halve peak memory usage
Show HN: Go-duckfs – making DuckDB quack like a Gopher
by achille-roussel | 2026-03-04 18:13:31+00:00
I made this because I kept running into issues and limitations when trying to embed DuckDB in Go applications: because DuckDB and its extensions do their own I/O in C++ land, integrating with the rest of my applications to get authentication or instrumentation working was really challenging. With go-duckfs, all this happens on the Go side, it's like a sandbox for all I/O that happen during queries.

It's kind of like https://duckdb.org/docs/stable/guides/python/filesystems but for Go. I think it'll be useful to anyone who is using DuckDB in a Go application, let me know!
by vunderba | 2026-03-04 18:13:46+00:00
It kind of depends on what you build.

Shah Kur is a chess trainer that lets you set novel types of invisibility to help teach you to learn to play blindfold chess (without a board). It's got VAD + voice recognition (can use on your phone hands-free) alongside a WASM implementation of the chess engine, etc.

Lend Me Your Ears is a free piano game in the style of the old "Simon" toy which presents players with a sequence of musical notes and challenges them to reproduce the sequence using either an on-screen piano or a connected MIDI keyboard. It uses the Web MIDI API and YIN for realtime accurate detection of notes (so you can use a guitar for example).

That's just a few examples, but you'd be surprised how far you can get with nothing more than a client-side application.
by srbhr | 2026-03-04 18:13:57+00:00
Hey HN Folks,
Back to the drawing board, and earlier this year I've updated Resume Matcher.

This time focusing on:
- PDF's text optimisation.
- Ensure that extracted text follows a pattern similar to markdown.
- And above all, a simple and faster way to optimize your existing resume to a job description, that light nudge with the keywords that makes it fit.

It's not perfect yet, but I'm working towards it more and more. Grateful to have community support so far.

Also, a new website: https://resumematcher.fyi/
Show HN: LinkedRecords – a graph-based Firebase replacement
by WolfOliver | 2026-03-04 18:14:01+00:00
Hi HN

I’m building LinkedRecords, an open-source backend-as-a-service designed for collaborative SaaS apps.

The core idea is simple:

Instead of collections and documents, LinkedRecords uses a graph-based triple store (facts: subject–predicate–object).
Authorization is part of the data model itself — not a separate rules file.
And real-time sync is built in from the start.

Why I built this

Most BaaS tools (Firebase, Supabase, Convex, etc.) are great — but they usually:

lock you into a hosted backend

separate auth rules from your actual data logic

use last-write-wins conflict resolution

make multi-tenant / server-sovereign setups hard

LinkedRecords takes a different approach:

Graph-native data model — flexible relationships without migrations

Authorization baked into queries — access control is enforced at the data layer

Real-time collaboration — conflict-aware merging instead of blind overwrites

Server-sovereign architecture — SaaS customers can choose where their data lives

Frontend-first usage — call the backend directly from your SPA

The goal is to make it easy to build collaborative tools (think Notion/Figma-style sync) while keeping control over hosting and data ownership.

It’s fully open source, and I’d love feedback.

Happy to answer any technical questions.