MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hiddenlife | 2026-03-14 11:02:35+00:00
The idea of embodied cognition might explain why we struggle to intuitively visualise objects in four-dimensional space. Basically the argument is that our visual imagination is grounded in sensorimotor systems that are optimised for three spatial dimensions. But reasoning is not limited to sensory experience so we can abstractly figure out how spatial systems in higher dimensions would work if they actually existed. Like we do for most mathematical concepts that don't easily map to what our bodies experience.

So by this perspective, it's not arbitrary, but is the result of our physical embodiment and how we interact with the world.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-03-14 11:03:11+00:00
Lightning is not a better connector. It maxed out at USB 2 speeds and I needed separate bespoke adapters and chargers. I can now use standard USB C cords with everything, standard USB C headphones, connect my iPhone to my portable external monitor with the same USB C cable I use for my computer…

https://imgur.com/a/fIwsjIQ

And the iPhone supports all of the USB C standards that computers support - audio, video, mass storage, network, keyboard, mice etc
by dogman1050 | 2026-03-14 11:03:33+00:00
I hear this expression said with the incorrect "could" more often than than with the correct "couldn't." I attribute this to one of the following:

- the speaker is using wry sarcasm, although the inflection is usually wrong.

- the speaker actually does care a bit.

- it's easier to say "could" or it's habit.

I try not to be a pedant about this, but often fall. Yeah, I'm fun at parties.
by nephihaha | 2026-03-14 11:04:05+00:00
I have seen that one. It is very sweet. I'm familiar with the area it's filmed in.

However, I do not think the BBC has provided a decent service to Scotland over the years at all. We tend to be represented in certain clichés, if we are represented at all. Another clip from the same era is basically about a Scottish drunk who cycles over the Lairig Ghru and back, and has a patronising posh voiceover the top.
by visarga | 2026-03-14 11:04:19+00:00
> Though it’ll be interesting to see what happens to ChatGPT and the like once the amount of quality content for them to consume slows to a trickle.

Creative loop moves inside the agentic chat room, where we do learning, work, art, research, leisure, planning, and other activities. Already OpenAI is close to 1B users and puts multiple trillion tokens per day into our heads, while we put our own tokens into their logs. An experience flywheel or extended cognition wheel of planetary size. LLMs can reflect and detect which of their responses compound better in downstream activities and derive RLHF-RLVR signalling from all our interactions. One good thing is that a chat room is less about posing than a forum, but LLMs have taken to sycophancy so they are not immune, just easier to deal with than forums. And you can more easily find another LLM than a replacement speciality forum.
by ifh-hn | 2026-03-14 11:04:56+00:00
I've a bachelors of science (first) in computer science, and currently doing a dissertation for a master's in cyber security, on route for a first but that might change depending on the mark for this dissertation.

My experience with the bachelors was that despite my project being derailed by the bullshit around formatting the document, doing "research" by searching the library for peer reviewed papers that backed up my claims, etc, etc; I got a excellent mark. In short I set out to make something and due to the academic processes failed in making anything, but because I was able to critically reflect on it, I got a good mark. Waste of time, unless you were just are a good mark.

For my masters I know the project doesn't matter, I'm concentrating on the academic nonsense because that's where the marks are.
by hubertdinsk | 2026-03-14 11:05:14+00:00
so not niche at all. You described a bit of everything.

Niche is more like "ISO26262 compliant, response time under 50ms, measured with a oscilloscope with at least 40MHz bandwidth, failure rate less than 10^-7, proven with maths and soak tests". It gets more niche the closer you get to hardware.

Next word prediction will get you laughed out of the room.
by justinclift | 2026-03-14 11:06:02+00:00
Looking at the license file, it has this exception tacked onto the end:

> EXCEPTION: The above license does not apply to files located in the directory
`sp-client/public/assets`. Those files are the property of Siementech Co. Ltd
or whoever has inherited the intellectual property thereof, and are excluded
from the MIT license grant above.

Is the general idea there that people can build the code and use the assets in personal projects, but if they want to distribute a full bundle they'll need to create their own assets?
by burnt-resistor | 2026-03-14 11:07:16+00:00
Not completely correct, nuanced, or comprehensive.

Direct lighting strikes cannot be defended against without extreme costs. This type of risk is generally extremely unlikely except for certain niche use-cases like equipment or facilities on tall peaks.

Transients from lightning (E2) nearby and distant nuclear detonations can be defended against, and often require additional protection of telco and internet entry points. Whole house type 1 SPD devices exist for residential applications. This is much more likely than direct lightning strikes, especially in certain areas and can be defended against for reasonable cost. The main issue of lacking it is the unseen, cumulative degradation of semiconductor components that lead to instantaneous or eventual failure, especially in high value devices like electrically-communicated motors in HVAC systems. There is no reasonable expectation of defense against a direct lightning strike even with type 1 SPD, and there are different types of lightning with vastly different amounts of energy. A positive strike direct hit will totally fry anything and everything.

What generally isn't defended against at all in any infrastructure or system except some military equipment is H/NEMP E1 (short duration impulses) or E3 (E3a or E3b; long duration surges larger than lightning) such as from unusual space weather events or nuclear blasts.
by estearum | 2026-03-14 11:07:47+00:00
Not my ChatGPT (didn't include because I deleted my subscription there a few weeks ago).

1. Mao Zedong (China)
Estimated deaths: 40–70+ million
Mostly from the Great Leap Forward famine (1958–1962) and later political campaigns like the Cultural Revolution.

2. Joseph Stalin (Soviet Union)
Estimated deaths: 15–20+ million
Includes purges, the Holodomor famine, Gulag deaths, and forced collectivization.

3. Adolf Hitler (Nazi Germany)
Estimated deaths: 17–20+ million
Directly tied to the World War II in Europe and the Holocaust.

+ a footnote about Ghengis Khan is probably ~40MM but lack of records.

Every current LLM gives virtually the same exact answer as Grok.
by anonimousdev_ | 2026-03-14 11:08:47+00:00
After burning through $200K+ across 47 different startup attempts, I analyzed the patterns that led to consistent failure. This checklist documents the most common anti-patterns: premature scaling, building without customer validation, ignoring unit economics, and legal/technical debt accumulation. Available at cost ($5) as many of these mistakes are systematically avoidable with the right framework.
by iamjankoch | 2026-03-14 11:09:12+00:00
Built this over a weekend to experiment with AI-assisted coding.

Data comes directly from Germany's official energy registry (Marktstammdatenregister / MaStR) — 40,500 wind turbines with real GPS coordinates, capacity, manufacturer, hub height, and commissioning date.

Technical details:
- The bulk export is a 2.8GB ZIP. Instead of downloading it all, I used HTTP range requests to read the ZIP central directory (42KB), locate EinheitenWind.xml, and download only that file (7.5MB compressed → 184MB XML)

- Rendered with deck.gl + MapLibre (CartoDB dark tiles, no API key needed)

The EEG layer is what surprised me most: 9,247 turbines have already lost Germany's 20-year wind energy subsidy. Another 3,094 expire by 2028 — those are the repowering candidates.

Happy to answer questions about the data pipeline or rendering approach.
by nephihaha | 2026-03-14 11:09:26+00:00
Suchet's Poirot is definitely good, but I should point out that it is produced by ITV not BBC (their long term rival). My mother used to watch it, so I'm very familiar with it thanks to her.

However, I've never been much enamoured with the Miss Marple adaptations. Joan Hickson's is maybe the best (even though I prefer Geraldine McEwan as an actress) but I never took to it like Poirot.

You might like the nineties Jeeves and Wooster which stars Stephen Fry as Jeeves and Hugh Laurie (of House fame) as Bertie Wooster. It is formulaic but fun. I think it's the best thing Stephen Fry ever did.
by spacedcowboy | 2026-03-14 11:10:04+00:00
Reasons for the MacBook:

- It has ~1.5x the screen real-estate (2408x1506 vs 1920x1200)

- The CPU is (3566,8646) compared to the AMD (2366,9243) on geek bench. Single core (the most important) is ~1.5x faster

- PC's battery life is 8-10 hours real-world (rather than quoted "up to 13"), Toms Hardware benchmarked the Neo at 13.5

- Neo is slightly lighter at 2.7 vs ~3.1 lbs.

There are other reasons to go with the AMD version, larger storage, touchscreen if that's your thing, some people might even like Windows 11.

But the Neo is still going to be a runaway hit.
by jefffoster | 2026-03-14 11:10:18+00:00
I did a PhD in the late 90s.

What was the motivation? Honestly, I was too lazy to get a job and staying in academia for another 3+ years seemed amazing (probably not recommended, but it worked out OK for me).

What helped get me through it:

1) Doing something I genuinely enjoyed - I approached the Computer Vision professor who gave me some ideas. I super enjoy writing code, and the idea of processing gigabytes of video to produce answers seemed cool. I treated it as a super difficult programming project.

2) Breaking my leg - Just before starting, I broke my leg badly. And that meant working from home with a weekly visit from the professor with a stack of reading papers. That time spent understanding state of the art was super useful.

3) Funding - At some point, DARPA gave enough money for me not to worry about funding, so I never had to work a job or get distracted.

4) Marriage - The final straight of writing a thesis was tough and I was super lucky to have a supportive wife who pushed me to get-shit-done.
by maccard | 2026-03-14 11:10:24+00:00
Oh absolutely. The wireless for gaming headsets isn’t Bluetooth either. If your argument is Bluetooth isn’t suitable for real time, I’m on board - I’d even go further and say Bluetooth isn’t suitable for anything other than fire and forget.

Gaming headsets are usually 2.4GHz wireless, and pro audio stuff is ~500-800MHz and the proper stuff requires a wireless license to use.
by Razengan | 2026-03-14 11:10:59+00:00
> Not sure how you'd enshrine price limits into law, though; that seems impractical.

Thinking in childrens' terms:

• Any microtransaction <$1 is fine, up to 10 per week or 20 per month or whatever

• Anything between $1-$10 should be more limited

• Anything $10 or above should be limited to 1 per week

• No microtransaction should cost more than 50% of the game's own full price, if the game isn't free
by anonimousdev_ | 2026-03-14 11:11:17+00:00
Thanks for the interest! A few quick notes for anyone considering this:

• The $200K+ loss is real - I actually tracked every failed attempt in detail
• Most expensive mistake: Building a food delivery app for 8 months without talking to restaurants first. $47K down the drain.
• The checklist format works because you can literally go through it before making any major decision
• At $5, it's intentionally priced at coffee-level to remove friction (I learned the hard way that perfectionist founders will spend $50K on the wrong features but hesitate over a $5 guide)

Currently 47 items covering everything from "Did you validate this with 10+ potential customers?" to "Do you have a realistic customer acquisition cost model?"

Happy to answer specific questions about any of the failure patterns if helpful.
Show HN: Intake API – An inbox for AI coding agents
by mjsweet | 2026-03-14 11:12:11+00:00
I built this (vibe coded) to solve a problem I kept hitting with AI coding agents: when they need input from someone outside the terminal — a client, a stakeholder, a subject matter expert — the human operator becomes a manual relay, copy-pasting between email and the agent session.

Intake API is a single Cloudflare Worker that lets an agent create a structured form, pre-fill it with data it already knows, and send a token URL to the right person. That person opens the link, verifies the pre-filled info, fills in the gaps, and submits. The agent retrieves the structured response via API and keeps working. No accounts, no apps.

The key idea is pre-filling. The agent does its research first (scraping websites, checking business registries, gathering public data) and populates the form before sending it. The person verifies instead of typing from scratch.

I built it for client discovery in website migration projects, but the pattern generalises to code review requests, approval workflows, lead qualification — anywhere an agent needs structured input from someone who isn't in the loop. It even supports file uploads to R2.

Stack: Hono, NEON Postgres (Drizzle ORM), Cloudflare R2. The whole thing is two API calls — POST to create a form, GET to retrieve the response.

Design rationale: https://www.userhat.com/giving-ai-coding-agents-an-inbox/
Github Repository: https://github.com/mjsweet/intake-api
by shalmanese | 2026-03-14 11:12:35+00:00
What's interesting is that Apple was the one responsible for removing the jack from their phones but they've stubbornly kept them on all their computers.

The only port in common between a 2015 Intel Macbook Pro and a 2026 Macbook Neo is the 3.5mm headphone jack. But also, the only port in common between a 2015 Intel Macbook Pro and a 1991 Powerbook 100 is the 3.5mm headphone jack.
by nephihaha | 2026-03-14 11:12:52+00:00
I think one has to cut old series some slack. I tend to find they come with slower pacing and can be very set-bound in some cases. That is partly because the old cameras used to be much bulkier. However, I think the acting is often better than today so there is some trade off.

The Baader-Meinhof series is good. I enjoyed the film they made about them some years ago. I was impressed by how nuanced it was, i.e. showing all the various angles.
by homebrewer | 2026-03-14 11:13:35+00:00
Anything from Etymotic never failed me. The current ER3 SE has been going for 7 years, and the cable is replaceable (when/if it fails — they're still on the original cable).

All Etys have a peculiar love/hate neutral sound profile, so you should try them before committing to them. I exclusively listen to podcasts, so they're a perfect match.
by alpaca128 | 2026-03-14 11:13:39+00:00
> Macs overall are only 10% of Apple’s revenue

"Only" $43 billion in revenue is more than 95% of corporations achieved.

Apple is pretending to be eco-friendly and using that as excuse to ship fewer chargers, for example. If they can optimize the same Mac's packaging to use paper that's folded in all kinds of fancy ways, they can add a tiny bit of functionality to an existing port. You can't tell me Apple isn't able to care about small details, because they absolutely do when they want and not only when it's about revenue.
by phrotoma | 2026-03-14 11:14:40+00:00
On the landing page one can find:

- a list of AEPs (explore the AEPs)

- a link to the AEP ecosystem

- a description of how AEPs are built

- a list of AEP clients

- something to do with open standards and versioning

- a blog

and

- a single sentence suggesting the project has something to do with APIs

If any maintainers stop by this comment section, I suggest offering some explanation about what this project _does_.
Show HN: Privacy Shield an extension that hides your tabs during screen sharing
by yusufA207 | 2026-03-14 11:15:07+00:00
I built this after accidentally exposing my ChatGPT history during a team presentation. That moment of panic when you realize everyone can see your open tabs and all of those mentally unstable chat namings really stuck with me XD

How it works:
Meeting Mode auto-detects when youre sharing your screen or in a meeting and instantly hides all tab names and favicons
Alt+Click any element on any page to blur it blurs persist after refresh
When the meeting ends, everything restores automatically
Options page lets you set per-site rules, adjust blur intensity, and whitelist sites

It's free, no signup required, installs directly from the Chrome Web Store.

Would Love any kind of feedback it would surely make my day thanks hackers!
by dbacar | 2026-03-14 11:15:16+00:00
I dont know what the deal is with these editors that makes them on HN front page so frequently. In my opinion they are good text editors (used emacs for 4 years, and switched to vim nearly 10 years ago) but for coding I see them as a joke apart from some edge cases(clojure, lisp...). They are hard to setup as code editors, lots of customizations are needed and in my opinion it does not pay off.
by danielfetz | 2026-03-14 11:15:53+00:00
"There are two well-known attempts to build miniature cities for children: Mini-Munich and KidZania.

Both have streets, storefronts, jobs, and a local currency. But they are built on opposing assumptions about what children are capable of. One treats children as consumers of scripted activities; the other lets them participate in a city whose parts depend on one another and is malleable to their actions."
by agentstead | 2026-03-14 11:15:57+00:00
Hi HN — I launched agentstead.dev, a platform for running AI agents on dedicated hardware with full Linux desktops.

The core idea is simple: a lot of current “agent” tooling seems optimized for narrower automation tasks, but in practice many useful agent workflows need something closer to an actual computer — persistent storage, terminal access, browsers, installed tools, desktop apps, and an environment that survives restarts.

So instead of building around the idea that agents should live inside a thin abstraction layer, I built agentstead.dev around giving them a proper working environment.

Each agent currently gets:

• 2 vCPU
• 4 GB RAM
• a persistent workspace
• a full remote Linux desktop
• preinstalled tools/apps (Codex, Claude Code, etc full terminal apps and terminal tools)
• backups, secrets, schedules, and API access
• Tailscale networking for agent-to-agent communication
• secure Tailscale access into your own tailnet for SSH/private access

A few implementation details that may be relevant here:

• this is not a VPS resale layer
• we run our own bare metal dedicated servers
• agents are partitioned directly using raw Docker container installs, so overhead stays low
• secrets are not stored inside the container; they’re handled through a secrets proxy
• configs and workspaces are backed up with redundant off-node storage
• deleting an agent removes the agent, its workspace, and its backups
• we also accept direct crypto payments

The platform is live now. There are still bugs and rough edges, but it’s usable, and I’d genuinely like criticism from HN on both the product and the premise.

In particular, I’d love feedback on:

• Is this something you would consider for a remote agent setup?
• Does the pricing seem fair?
• What price would you happily pay for an agent desktop service like this?
• what feels missing or poorly thought through?

Happy to answer technical questions, infra questions, pricing questions, or hear why you think this is the wrong approach.

All comments welcome!
by throwthrowuknow | 2026-03-14 11:16:15+00:00
I agree even though I used to be a die hard Claude fan I recently switched back to ChatGPT and codex to try it out again and they’ve clearly pulled into the lead for consistency, context length and management as well as speed. Claude Code instilled a dread in me about keeping an eye on context but I’m slowly learning to let that go with codex.
by hparadiz | 2026-03-14 11:16:34+00:00
I don't really agree.

People should still understand the code because sometimes the AI solution really is wrong and I have to shove my hand in it's guts and force it to use my solution or even explain the reasoning.

People should be studying architecture. Cause now I can orchestrate stuff that used to take teams and I would throwaway as a non-viable idea. Now I can just do it. But no you will still be reviewing code.
by Panoramix | 2026-03-14 11:16:36+00:00
It's about the thermal conductivity.

Helium has 150mW/mK vs Argon ~18mW/mK so you can't replace it.

The only alternatives to Helium are Neon, which is 3x worse and much more expensive, and hydrogen. However, hydrogen is flammable so it's a very bad idea to use it in a fab which has extremely poisonous gases and needs a cleanroom environment. A fire would ruin your whole factory and kill your engineers.
by butILoveLife | 2026-03-14 11:17:10+00:00
>What was the motivation? Honestly, I was too lazy to get a job and staying in academia for another 3+ years seemed amazing

This is actually how I view academia. "Couldn't get a job"

It really lowered the prestige of a PhD for me. Heck, if I think through my PhD friends... none of them were A students. They were all C-tier.
by ryeguy_24 | 2026-03-14 11:18:52+00:00
I still use AirPods for listening but if I’m ever taking a call, I always use EarPods (USB-C). The microphone quality is multiple times better and that’s important to me. Especially for work. It only took me a few times to hear other people will AirPods to be tainted. It just seems unprofessional now because of how bad it sounds.
by burnt-resistor | 2026-03-14 11:19:01+00:00
Definitely use quality surge protectors on expensive equipment connected to generators.

PSA: UPSes and GFCI/GFI extension cords won't work properly when connected to a stand-alone generator with a bonded neutral. I've tried using enterprise UPSes on such generators, but they absolutely won't work. In such scenarios, debond the generator's ground from neutral, apply a very large warning label to it being debonded, and drive a massive ground rod electrode into the ground as close to the generator as possible and ground the neutral there. This does work and is much safer because there's a stable voltage reference source. It's more of a hassle but can be necessary for some off grid and temporary scenarios.
by g947o | 2026-03-14 11:19:16+00:00
Actually, no.

We know as a matter of fact that Android does NOT handle your audio properly when you transmit audio over USB-C then converter. It used to work fine with 3.5mm.

https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/250602/how-to-di...

And you could run into weird issues like this

https://support.google.com/pixelphone/thread/238773737/assis...

Which nobody needed to worry about.