MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Nevermark | 2026-03-03 17:07:39+00:00
> I read as "Whoops we made the M1 Macbook Pro too good, please upgrade!"

As there target for that marketing, I can report it hits home!

But objectively, there is nothing wrong with my current experience at all.

I have never had that experience over many generations and types of machines. The M1 keeps looking better and better in hindsight.

—-

Looking forward, either the M5 is the next M1, a bump of good that will last. Or Apple will be really firing on all cylinders if it can “obsolete” the M5 anytime soon.
by swyx | 2026-03-03 17:07:54+00:00
> The battery is wearing out a bit, but it started out life with so much runtime that losing a few hours doesn't seem to matter.

this is my exact opposite experience. my M3 Max from 2 years ago now has <2hrs battery life at best. wondering if any experts here can help me figure out what is going on? what should i be expecting?
by doug_durham | 2026-03-03 17:08:12+00:00
It really depends upon the positions you're hiring for. For professors, you are looking at talent at the long tail. Top people in a particular field will be randomly distributed across the globe. The restriction that Florida is putting on universities means that they cannot go after top talent for professorships or researchers if they aren't in the United States. That's a problem. We want them here teaching our students. We want them making their research contributions here where we can profit from it.
Show HN: Embed a dedication page directly inside DRM-free EPUBs
by dnmellen | 2026-03-03 17:08:20+00:00
I built this as a small side project because gifting ebooks always felt a bit impersonal to me. It often feels like you are just sending someone a file.

The app lets you upload a DRM-free EPUB, add a dedication page, and generates a personalized copy of the book. It modifies the EPUB structure directly by inserting a new XHTML file into the spine and navigation.

It does not add or bypass DRM in any way. It only works with DRM-free files.

Uploaded files are automatically deleted after processing.

It is intentionally minimal. I care about open formats and digital ownership, and I wanted something that treats the book itself as the gift.

Would really appreciate technical feedback, especially from people familiar with EPUB internals.
by adampunk | 2026-03-03 17:08:31+00:00
It’s really weird that this article walks past the 2 likely explanations and then declares them both insufficient in favor of an assertion that maybe it’s not any fun.

Speculative generation is expensive and time consuming and in most cases will just be the game company writing a check to a provider every time the player does something. It’s very difficult to imagine a revenue model which allows that to make sense. Even if you did get it to make sense, you then have to worry about their being a market risk to people associating your game with AI. I don’t think you need more than those two explanations to understand why in two or three years we have not seen games that the author describes come out.

Is it a possibility that talking to a chat bot is not any fun from a games per perspective? Yes it might even be very likely. But we’re not gonna have a real answer to that question tested out by real game developers until it becomes pragmatically possible to ship a game using these tools.

The cost of generation will come down and people will find clever uses for it and one way or another opinions about AI will change. Then maybe we’ll see whether or not these are any fun.
Show HN: Xenith.ai – Web Assembly Based Voice Assistant with WebLLM/Whisper/VITS
by cppshane | 2026-03-03 17:08:33+00:00
I built an in-browser voice assistant platform on Web Assembly using WebLLM + Whisper.cpp WASM + Silero VAD + VITS TTS

I've been experimenting with pushing local AI fully into the browser via Web Assembly and WebGPU, and finally have a semblance of a working platform here! It's still a bit of a PoC but hell, it works.

You can create assistants and specify:

- Wake word

- Language model

- Voice

I published a little post on my site with some technical details as well if anyone is interested: https://shaneduffy.io/blog/i-built-a-voice-assistant-that-ru...

https://xenith.ai

https://github.com/xenith-ai/xenith
by ApolloFortyNine | 2026-03-03 17:08:45+00:00
Why is the finder the way it is? Is it actually easier to use than (whatever the normal file browser windows and linux uses is called) if all you ever use is macs?

Most of the other quirks I can work around (though the default alt tab behavior not picking up windows of the same app is an insane default) but the finder is just unusable.
Show HN: OculOS – Any desktop app as a JSON API via OS accessibility tree
by stif1337 | 2026-03-03 17:08:50+00:00
Single Rust binary (~3 MB) that reads the OS accessibility tree and gives every UI element a REST endpoint. Click buttons, type text, toggle checkboxes — all via JSON.

Works as an MCP server too, so Claude/Cursor/Windsurf can control any desktop app out of the box.

Windows + Linux + macOS. MIT licensed.
by cjcole | 2026-03-03 17:08:55+00:00
Maybe.

“The laws of nature should be expressed in beautiful equations.”

- Paul Dirac

“It is, indeed, an incredible fact that what the human mind, at its deepest and most profound, perceives as beautiful finds its realisation in external nature. What is intelligible is also beautiful. We may well ask: how does it happen that beauty in the exact sciences becomes recognizable even before it is understood in detail and before it can be rationally demonstrated? In what does this power of illumination consist?”

- Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

“I often follow Plato’s strategy, proposing objects of mathematical beauty as models for Nature.”

“It was beauty and symmetry that guided Maxwell and his followers.”

- Frank Wilczek

“Beauty, is bound up with symmetry.”

- Herman Weyl

"Still twice in the history of exact natural science has this shining-up of the great interconnection become the decisive signal for significant progress. I am thinking here of two events in the physics of our century: the rise of the theory of relativity and that of the quantum theory. In both cases, after yearlong unsuccessful striving for understanding, a bewildering abundance of details was almost suddenly ordered. This took place when an interconnection emerged which, thought largely unvisualizable, was finally simple in its substance. It convinced through its compactness and abstract beauty – it convinced all those who can understand and speak such an abstract language."

- Werner Heisenberg

Maybe (just maybe) these things (whatever you want to call them) will (somehow) gain access to some "compact", beautiful, "largely unvisualizable" "interconnection" which will be the self-evident solution. And if they do, many will be sure to label it a statistical accident from a stochastic parrot. And they'll right, for some definitions of "statistical", "accident", "stochastic", and "parrot".
by twosdai | 2026-03-03 17:09:27+00:00
I would add these motions only really make sense in a few cases:

1. its apart of an enterprise sales motion, eg you want to get ~1000$ per user per month out of it.
2. Its apart of some well subscribed newsletter, this looks more like an ad than a cold email.

If your business is trying an outbound sales motion, then these methods might work. If you're going down a Product lead growth motion because of the nature of the problem/product/customer, then I would try getting some influencers who your prospective users like to use your product.

I know a lot less about PLG motions, so take that with a grain of salt. Feel free to email me directly if you want feedback or anything. Email is in my profile.
by fragmede | 2026-03-03 17:09:39+00:00
It's the other direction. You have to put in an extreme amount of effort, like Debian has, which you can just piggyback off of, to cause determinism to be introduced. 2013 they started that initiative. They're reasonably there, thirteen years later, but to disregard the amount of effort it took to get there would be to forget history. Give ChatGPT thirteen more years to iterate, and see where it is then.
by agenthustler | 2026-03-03 17:09:49+00:00
Running a real-world version of this for 67 days — an autonomous Claude Code agent on a 256MB VPS that wakes up every 2 hours, reads its own STATE.md file to remember what past runs did, evaluates what's working, and acts.

It built a crypto volume anomaly scanner (3,082 scans so far), a Nostr data vending machine that processed 800+ jobs, and found distribution partnerships with other AI agents. Revenue: $0.00.

The hardest constraint we found: identity. The agent can't sign up for Stripe, Gumroad, or any mainstream platform without human verification. It's stuck on Nostr/Lightning which has a tiny audience.

The scanner is live if curious: https://frog03-20494.wykr.es

What's the 'works while I'm offline' use case you're targeting?
by guerython | 2026-03-03 17:09:50+00:00
Flash-Lite’s $0.25/$1.50 price finally lets us run the translation+compliance queue without ripping through tokens. We push 400 req/s but keep a 20-second fuzzy cache of hashed prompts and only send the de-duplicated, heuristically filtered text so the model never re-processes the same boilerplate. The thinking-level knob is huge: level 1 by default gives us sub-200ms TTFB and we only bump to level 3 for flagged QA summaries. Anyone else pairing path-specific thinking levels with caches to keep high-frequency workloads sane?
by tewr | 2026-03-03 17:09:55+00:00
There is so much going on in the industry right now that it is not fun to be an EM with rusty tech skills. However, the claim that staff engineers are more in demand is unsubstantiated. Hiring will slow to a crawl as everyone is watching to see where this is going. The EM role is not being replaced as fast by agents as much as the IC role, simply because EMs don't have as much to gain from agents yet.
by tcmart14 | 2026-03-03 17:10:07+00:00
I'm not really into AI and LLMs. I personally don't like anything they output. But the people I know who are into it and into running their own local setups are buying Studios and Minis for their at home local LLM set ups. Really, everyone I personally know who is doing their build your own with local LLMs are doing this. I don't know anyone anymore buying other computers and NVIDIA graphics cards for it.
by moi2388 | 2026-03-03 17:10:37+00:00
I initially thought, well, we can implement it with zero knowledge claims, just a yes/no from a government app: am I allowed to use this app? I.e. is my age above let’s say 16 or 18?

But then I remembered the game 20 questions, and how few yes/no questions you need to guess pretty much any concept.

I am no longer willing to share anything, not even a yes/no question.
by icegreentea2 | 2026-03-03 17:10:41+00:00
Berger is clearly guarded and measured when he talks about Musk and SpaceX. Given the configuration of the space industry and the reality that Berger clearly needs access to make his living, I think Berger has provided generally even handed coverage of SpaceX, Musk and Musk's antics.

For example, his article on the SpaceX/xAI merger ends with a section called "Has SpaceX lost its way?", and framing that clearly indicates "this is what Musk says". https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/spacex-acquires-xai-plans...

In his article on SpaceX's "pivot from Mars to Moon", he describes Musk as "In the last 25 years, Musk has gone from an obscure, modestly wealthy person to the richest human being ever, from a political moderate to chief supporter of Donald Trump; from a respected entrepreneur to, well, to a lot of things to a lot of people: world’s greatest industrialist/supervillain/savant/grifter-fraudster.". https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/02/has-elon-musk-given-up...

You can read a AMA he did on the SpaceX subreddit last year for more of his thoughts: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/1fnq02q/eric_berger...

I think Berger got a lot of flack for not really commenting on Musk and DOGE during his articles last year, and I think it's fair to criticize him for that choice, but I don't think it's really a "Musk can do no wrong" position.

In other words, I think you really need to read between the lines for Berger re Musk.
by mcv | 2026-03-03 17:10:51+00:00
I completely agree. The only services for which I will verify my age (and the entire rest of my ID) are bank accounts and other services involving a real legal requirement for real ID.

The notion that you should upload a passport to random sites for age verification is unbelievably dangerous. That's a recipe for identity theft. And face scanning is also an invasion of privacy, not to mention very unreliable (my 16 year old son has apparently been accepted as 20 years old).

I've pointed out in many places already that the only way to do online age verification right, is for the government to provide an e-ID that the random site will direct you to with the question "is this person older than X?", then you log in to the e-ID site, which informs you exactly what the site wants to know (which should be as rough as possible; no birthdate), then the e-ID site directs you back to your original site (or possibly through a proxy, if you don't want the government to know what sites you visit), and calls their webhook (through a proxy) with the confirmation of your age.

That's also how my online payments work, and this should be the standard pattern for everything that needs to be secure. Not sharing sensitive or personal data with random sites.
by hedora | 2026-03-03 17:10:59+00:00
I wish we lived in the timeline where the most reputable and market-leading age verification provider was PornHub, which would have a modestly dressed model check via video chat. I'd actually trust that more than the actual providers that exist in reality, and hey, if even 1% of the money goes to college tuition, great. Of course, if that was how this worked, the optics would kill most of these schemes before they were implemented.

As a parent, I'd like to point out that the threat I care about is not "my kid of age N talks to a sicko of age M, where M - N > P for some legislatively-prescribed value of P".

The threat is "my kid of age N talks to or can be observed by a sicko".

These age verification schemes do nothing to help against that. Also, the worst predators online are often the vendors providing "kid friendly" services.

On top of that, these laws are being pushed hardest by the worst of the most corrupt politicians on earth. Why would I install a webcam on my kid's machine because that group of people wants me to?!?

Maybe we should focus on prosecuting the backlog of stuff in the Epstein files pertaining to politicians pushing these age verification services, not let anyone (except parents) control how kids access stuff online.
by ASalazarMX | 2026-03-03 17:11:16+00:00
B-but, why?? Bubbletea, its inspiration, follows up on the philosophy of TUIs, fast, direct, lightweight in resources, bonus for being a small binary. I can't wrap my head around why one choose React to make a TUI, seems like making a dune buggy out of a Hummer.

I know the standard answer, "why not?", but I'm struggling to figure the expected use cases.
by rfwhyte | 2026-03-03 17:11:18+00:00
You can very easily replace the battery yourself for less than $100 USD too if it ever becomes enough of an issue that you feel you actually need to do something about it. My M1 Max is at about 88% battery health, but it still gets 4X-6X longer on battery (At full performance too boot) compared to my old PoS Razer laptop, so I likely won't be replacing my battery any time soon.
by emp17344 | 2026-03-03 17:11:55+00:00
What goalposts do you think are being moved? I constantly see AI enthusiasts use this phrase, but it’s not clear what goalposts they have in mind. Specifically, what is it that you want opponents to recognize that you believe they aren’t currently?

We now have a tool that can be useful in some narrow domains in some narrow cases. It’s pretty neat that our tools have new capabilities, but it’s also pretty far from AGI.
by vidarh | 2026-03-03 17:12:02+00:00
Context effectively provifes an IO port, and so all the loop needs to do is to simulate the tape head, and provide a single token of state.

You can not be convinced Turing complete is relevant all you want - we don't know of any more expansive category of computable functions, and so given that an LLM in the setup described is Turing complete no matter that they aren't typically deployed that way is irrelevant.

They trivially can be, and that is enough to make the shallow dismissal of pointing out they're "just" predicting the next token meaningless.
by ottah | 2026-03-03 17:12:08+00:00
Age verification is about one thing only, it's about controlling how you participate in public society. The state wants a veto on public participation that they don't like. This system will not prevent children from being exposed to unsafe spaces, but it will be effective at barring people with counter political narratives from sharing online. Look how they've desperately tried to crack down on Epstein and information on Gaza. They want the same controls over information and political content as China.
by throwforfeds | 2026-03-03 17:12:33+00:00
I guess I'm just a luddite that spends my life on a CLI or text editor. Taking my hands away from my keyboard to leave finger prints on my screen just doesn't make sense to me.

I think people that do do tasks where a touch screen makes sense are probably just doing most of their work on an iphone or an ipad anyway.

Now gesture control on VR/AR setups? Sure, that feels like a new human/computer interaction system that makes sense. Jabbing at my laptop screen with one hand on my keyboard, not so much.
by kpw94 | 2026-03-03 17:12:41+00:00
"water is wet" kind of study, as tariffs are precisely supposed to increase price for consumers for imported goods... But the last 3 paragraphs are interesting:

- Importers raised the price more than needed (i.e. blame tarifs to increase their profit margin)

- Price increases took one year to fully reflect to the customers, and persisted nearly one year after the tariffs expired.

- chicken-tax-like loopholes implemented wherever possible (for wine apparently it's raising the ABV to more than 14%)
Show HN: A runtime authorization layer for AI agents
by rkka | 2026-03-03 17:12:42+00:00
Hi HN,

Over the past few months, we’ve been experimenting with something that kept bothering us about AI agents in production.

Most agent systems today are “fail-open”:
• The model proposes an action
• The tool executes
• Logs are written
• Monitoring happens after the fact

This works fine for demos and low-risk workflows.

It feels different when agents:
• trigger payments
• deploy code
• modify production data
• access local files
• interact with real infrastructure

We started asking a simple question:

What if execution itself was policy-bound?

⸻

What we built

We built a runtime authorization layer that sits between:

LLM → Proposed Action → Policy Engine → Allow / Deny / Compute / Escalate → Execution → Trace + Replay

Instead of parsing messages or relying on post-hoc logs, we:
• evaluate the proposed tool invocation
• bind it to a policy (OPA-based)
• gate execution before it runs
• emit reproducible artifacts

Each decision produces:
• policy digest
• input/output hash
• trace ID
• optional ledger entry
• replay support

⸻

What this is NOT
• Not another agent framework
• Not a monitoring dashboard
• Not prompt-level guardrails
• Not pattern extraction

It operates at the action surface.

If the agent attempts to call a tool, the call is evaluated before runtime.

⸻

Example (simplified)

If the agent tries:

fs.write_file(”/prod/config.yaml”)

Policy may:
• DENY
• ESCALATE (human required)
• COMPUTE (force safe path)
• ALLOW with constraints

The key idea:

Authorization becomes structural, not contractual.

⸻

Why we built it

There’s a growing gap between:

Model capability
and
System accountability

As agents move from answering to acting, the stack shifts.

We’re curious whether others are running into the same problem.

⸻

Looking for feedback

We’re currently:
• running this locally via a desktop client
• integrating with MCP tool surfaces
• experimenting with observe-only and enforce modes

Would love thoughts from folks:
• deploying agents in production
• thinking about policy / governance
• building infra around AI execution

Especially interested in criticism.

Happy to share architecture details.
by wpm | 2026-03-03 17:12:54+00:00
That's only because they are focusing on upstreaming all of their work into the kernel first. A handful of them spent a small amount of time building some device trees for M3 and it didn't take them long to get to the point M1's were at at the first release of Asahi.

I imagine once a lot of the cleanup and maintenance is done on what they have, they'll be in a better spot to accelerate support for other SoCs, and it probably won't be half a decade before the M6 or whatever is supported.

All said, Apple could just spend a tiny tiny amount of their warchest and just ship some goddamn drivers for Linux a la Boot Camp and save the Asahi team the time divining it from the tea leaves.
by ctoth | 2026-03-03 17:13:09+00:00
I built a Klatt formant synthesizer with Claude from ~120 academic papers. Every parameter cites its source, the architecture is declarative YAML with phased rule execution and dependency resolution.

Here's what "spaghetti" looks like:

https://github.com/ctoth/Qlatt/blob/master/public/rules/fron...

One thing I want to point out. Before I started, I gathered and asked Claude to read all these papers:

https://github.com/ctoth/Qlatt/tree/master/papers

Producing artifacts like this:

https://github.com/ctoth/Qlatt/blob/master/papers/Klatt_1980...

Note how every rule and every configurable thing in the synthesizer pipeline has a citation to a paper? I can generate a phrase, and with the "explain" command I can see precisely why a certain word was spoken a certain way.
by jf22 | 2026-03-03 17:13:14+00:00
I'm a former EM who would never go back in an AI age.

EMs deal with friction and from my experience more output is more friction.

You have org leaders and businessy people putting their foot on the gas because AI is so productive and then programmers shipping 2-3x more code.

These two forces collide and you're stuck dealing with the friction so 10x the amount of initiatives you did before.

The friction is like sandpaper on sandpaper.
by anosidium | 2026-03-03 17:13:17+00:00
Location: London, England, UK
Remote: Yes — also open to hybrid or office-based roles
Willing to relocate: Yes, depending on the country
Technologies: Swift, SwiftUI, UIKit, AppKit, macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, Core Data, Combine, Swift Concurrency, Grand Central Dispatch (GCD), Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), Model–View–Controller (MVC), Model–View–ViewModel (MVVM), Accessibility, Cocoa, Cocoa Touch, Mac OS X, OS X
Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YOy2r2KhHYSo86TtVUtB7xQwrJxA0HeG/view?usp=drive_link
E-mail: Please refer to my CV

iOS and macOS developer with a strong focus on native development for Apple platforms. Actively building and maintaining personal projects whilst staying up to date with the latest in Swift, Apple frameworks and industry trends.

Currently developing a macOS Mastodon client, Oliphaunt — more details, screenshots and feedback are available here (https://github.com/anosidium/Oliphaunt-App). Previously built HacKit (https://apps.apple.com/app/id1549557075), a macOS Hacker News reader, which has been well received for its simplicity and adherence to platform design language. (https://github.com/anosidium/HacKit-App)

Open to freelance or full-time roles. Particularly interested in working on meaningful software that makes a positive impact — whether as part of a small, focussed team or a larger organisation with a clear and thoughtful product vision.