MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by starkparker | 2026-03-13 18:15:27+00:00
Yeah, very little of this is still true of the period in which the Neo or modern Chromebooks exist.

If the school is managing these Macs, including laptops sent home with a student, then unless it's for a specific purpose they aren't allowing you modify files, you probably aren't allowed to open a terminal or system settings, and you definitely aren't disabling SIP. You might not even be able to access the open internet if they've hard-configured it into a VPN. No different from a managed Chromebook.

Likewise, even older and lower-end unmanaged Chromebooks can enable a full Linux environment that runs a terminal in a browser tab. Doing so doesn't require root or developer mode, and it doesn't change or sacrifice any of the rest of the ChromeOS environment (for which your core assertion, that an unmanaged Mac is a computer and an unmanaged Chromebook is a thin-client appliance, still fundamentally holds). You can install Blender and have it running in a window by about 1 minute into watching a YouTube video titled "How To Download Or Update ANY VERSION Of Blender On Chromebook".

Gaining root on a Chromebook is mostly just a prerequisite to modifying things specific to ChromeOS, but the easier to access, more featureful, and safer LDE is still an entire operating system that you can tinker with, screw up, overload, blow up, and reset to zero, all without losing the happy path of opening up Canva (or, more likely, CapCut on their phone/iPad) and editing videos or whatever.
by vladdoster | 2026-03-13 18:15:50+00:00
Location: Nashville, TN
Remote: true
Willing to relocate: boston || nashville
Technologies: Python, Django, IaC, Terraform, Golang, CI/CD, Azure/AWS, {ba,z}sh, Lua, Springboot,
Redis, Docker, Open Service Broker, {,non}relational & vector dbs, shared services, SOA
Email: mvdoster@gmail.com

resume: https://linkedin.vdoster.com && http://github.com/vladdoster

sr. cloud software engineer @ Mastercard (5 years)

Designed and built Platform-as-a-Service for microservice workloads running on Azure and AWS
to migrate on-prem workloads to the cloud. The platform operates globally, allowing teams to
deploy to several Azure-backed regions worldwide. Helped plan and create regional landing zones
in Azure for application teams wanting to perform globally. Designed platform components using
Terraform, Go, and Node; developed support tooling using Bash, Python, and Azure CLI. De-risk the
platform by addressing security vulnerabilities and ensuring the platform is PCI compliant.

api/devops software engineer @ Harvard Medical School (2 years)

Worked as part of the DevOps team to manage a 15k core CentOS HPC cluster. Designed and implemented
Python-based security scanning pipeline to securely deploy & run Apptainer images via SLURM.
Coordinated cross-team emergency patching eﬀorts. Collaborated with researchers and engineers across
3-letter institutions to deliver secure research infrastructure. Built CI/CD Pipelines with GitHub, Jenkins,
to automate code builds, testing, and deployments. Wrote Puppet modules to manage configuration of HPC fleet.
Wrote custom Puppet module & Python scripts to automatically remediate Tenable findings.

full-stack software engineer @ Global Prior Art (3 years)

Used Django, Celery, Selenium grid, and AWS API Gateway for IP rotation to scrape USPTO patent PDFs,
apply CV for data extraction, and generate reports with relevant claims, saving employees 4-5 hours daily.
Wrote E2E black-box/fuzzing unit tests. Automated on-premise deployment via Github Actions and Ansible.

maintainer @ Zinit (5 years)

Develop and maintain a zsh plugin manager on Github with 4k stars. Implemented unit tests,
containerization, bug fixes, and new features.
See: https://github.com/zdharma-continuum/zinit

contributor @ Open-source documentation (5 years)

Contributed hundreds of documentation corrections and enhancements to 400+ open source projects.
by brudgers | 2026-03-13 18:15:53+00:00
For wireless headphones I've gone to bone conduction and open-ear. Started with some cheap models from Ali-Express to see how I liked it. I did.

Shokz had a black friday deal on Open-Run Pros and those are my goto. Admittedly, they are not as convenient as my Airpods were, but my ears appreciate not being bombarded with noise canceling.
by PaulHoule | 2026-03-13 18:16:07+00:00
Personally I've lived in the world of "small entrants" and can see that but I think the average voter doesn't really understand that "just anybody" could have created an online service. That is, they think you have to have VC money, be based in Silicon Valley, have to have connections at tha pp store, that it's a right for "them" and not for "us".
by pwg | 2026-03-13 18:16:11+00:00
> I'm not sure I fully grok the hypothesis that Meta is materially advantaged by pushing for OS-level age verification.

These laws, that attempt to move "age verification" into the OS, 100% absolve Meta (and all the Meta owned "properties") from any legal liability so long as all of Meta's app's follow the law's required "ask the OS for the age signal of the user".

Any "bad stuff" which then gets shown to "underage users" then becomes "not Meta's fault, they followed the legally proscribed way to check the age of the user, and the OS said this user was 'old enough'" and Apple/Google then get to shoulder the liability (and pay out for the class action lawsuits) for failing to provide a proper age signal.

That's the "material advantage" gained by Meta by pushing these laws.
by meatmanek | 2026-03-13 18:16:15+00:00
Yeah, I use Kinto (which seems to be what Toshy is originally based on). A recent Ubuntu update broke it though, and I accidentally deleted my config file while trying to fix it, so maybe now's a good time to try out Toshy. Looks like Toshy creates a python virtualenv instead of relying on system packages, which should make it a little more resilient to system package changes.
by everdrive | 2026-03-13 18:17:17+00:00
There's an unspoken rule in corporate America, colleges, etc. Laptops MUST be loaded down with terrible software, no exceptions. My last corporate laptop actually had the paid version of winzip in 2025, and it ran with a little tray icon that I couldn't disable or remove. That was in addition to all the other corporate crap I couldn't remove.

Some of this is not _just_ a corporate problem. Why would Winzip have an auto run application and tray application in the first place? Every single app seems to think they need one, and it's a classical tragedy of the commons. Perhaps on a virgin Windows install, your app with autorun and a tray icon will be more responsive. But when 20 other apps pull that same trick, no one wins.

This is actually one of the reasons I'm not excited at the idea of Linux defeating Windows. If it did, corporations would just start crapping up Linux the way they've crapped up Windows.
by Blackstrat | 2026-03-13 18:18:15+00:00
I went through 11 takeovers in my career. I survived them all, some with promotions, until the very last one. It was within a couple of weeks of my severance that I was diagnosed with the Big C. That puts everything in perspective. Nothing really matters then except treating and beating the cancer. Focus on that. If in the process, this job doesn't work out, find a new one when you are in remission or cured. And decide what you want to do after that. I was nearing retirement anyway and decided I didn't need anymore of the corporate life. Not knowing your age, that may not be an option for you. What is an option for you is keep a positive attitude, eat right, exercise, and get treated. Yes, cancer is a serious kick in the pants, but you can't let it beat you down. If you do, it's far, far worse than it has to be. Yes, it's depressing. But, don't give into it. And remember that you aren't really alone. You'll likely sit in the waiting room before treatment with people that have a far worse prognosis. Certainly, I did. Which made me all the more determined to not give in to my darker thoughts. I'm five years cured, though life is irrevocably change. It happens. Strive to be one of us.
by bottlepalm | 2026-03-13 18:18:33+00:00
Anyone have a theory why Apple hasn't done this yet? They release an 'iBook' which is basically a wired or even wireless lapdock for your iPhone running OSX in a partition. Seems like that would decimate the entire Windows, laptop, even desktop market in short order.

Everyone with an iPhone, no longer needs their laptop/desktop. Just buy a cheap iBook and there's a good chance it'll already be better than most consumer PCs.
by hedora | 2026-03-13 18:18:35+00:00
Short of a general strike, this sort of thing is going to move forward.

They don’t need you to purchase hardware or software any more. We’re moving to centralized economic planning, where resources for datacenter buildouts are reserved for people with sufficient political loyalty (and come from tax dollars), and the only products are surveillance and collective punishment.

If you don’t want that to happen, then you’ll need to help build an alternative.
by dylan604 | 2026-03-13 18:18:50+00:00
Depending on who you go to, some places will not sell you tanks of Helium. We did a balloon launch expecting to use Hydrogen because Helium was going to be problematic. The sales rep at the supply place took a look at the group of us knuckleheads with absolutely no Hydrogen experience and ended up selling us the Helium while also exchanging all of our connectors. Hydrogen tanks use specific connectors different from all other tanks to make using a hydrogen take by mistake very difficult. I was nervous about using hydrogen and had no issue with the higher price for the helium knowing I wasn't going to catch on fire.
by siliconunit | 2026-03-13 18:19:04+00:00
How is this preventing anyone booting up an old pc and sharing a usb key data. This is utter nonsense made to control people and instigate fear and self censorship... this is 'the system' discovering the internet in slow motion and immediately pushing its boot over it. We live in an artificial moral panic that should have no place in the minds of smart people.
by D-Machine | 2026-03-13 18:19:58+00:00
This is my interpretation as well.

EDIT: Actually, they do make this clear(ish) at the very end of the article, technically. But there is a huge amount of vagueness and IMO outright misleading / deliberately deceptive stuff early on (e.g. about potential differentiability of their approach, even though they admit later they aren't sure if the differentiable approach can actually work for what they are doing). It is hard to tell what they are actually claiming unless you read this autistically / like a lawyer, but that's likely due to a lack of human editing and too much AI assistance.
by johnisgood | 2026-03-13 18:20:03+00:00
Why were you surprised?

You can check out here how it does that: https://github.com/AlexsJones/llmfit/blob/main/llmfit-core/s...

To detect NVIDIA GPUs, for example: https://github.com/AlexsJones/llmfit/blob/main/llmfit-core/s...

In this case it just runs the command "nvidia-smi".

Note: llmfit is not web-based.
by garblegarble | 2026-03-13 18:20:06+00:00
Would you elaborate what you mean by saying Linux on an M-series chip isn't straightforward? That's not been my experience, I (and lots of other devs) use it every day, Apple supports Linux via [0], and provides the ability to use Rosetta 2 within VMs to run legacy x86 binaries?

0: https://github.com/apple/container
by mark_l_watson | 2026-03-13 18:20:23+00:00
I have spent a HUGE amount of time the last two years experimenting with local models.

A few lessons learned:

1. small models like the new qwen3.5:9b can be fantastic for local tool use, information extraction, and many other embedded applications.

2. For coding tools, just use Google Antigravity and gemini-cli, or, Anthropic Claude, or...

Now to be clear, I have spent perhaps 100 hours in the last year configuring local models for coding using Emacs, Claude Code (configured for local), etc. However, I am retired and this time was a lot of fun for me: lot's of efforts trying to maximize local only results. I don't recommend it for others.

I do recommend getting very good at using embedded local models in small practical applications. Sweet spot.
by andy_ppp | 2026-03-13 18:20:26+00:00
Is it correct that there's zero improvement in performance between M4 (+Pro/Max) and M5 (+Pro/Max) the data looks identical. Also the memory does not seem to improve performance on larger models when I thought it would have?

Love the idea though!

EDIT: Okay the whole thing is nonsense and just some rough guesswork or asking an LLM to estimate the values. You should have real data (I'm sure people here can help) and put ESTIMATE next to any of the combinations you are guessing.
by khazhoux | 2026-03-13 18:20:49+00:00
You’re obviously right about SCOTUS. I guess there I was more thinking about the even-longer conservative lock-in with his next appointee.

But I really do disagree on the physical decline though. Put simply, the things people see are: weight, posture, quickness and stability of movement, strength of voice, hair, face (and a few others).

If you compare T16 vs T24, and B16 vs B24, the B delta is much bigger on any of those factors.

Everyone(ish) hits a cliff where they start quickly getting weaker, gaunt, frail, shorter, slower. Where you look at a picture from the year before and think “wow they looked young by comparison just a year ago.” Biden hit that cliff, Trump somehow hasn’t
by PaulHoule | 2026-03-13 18:21:05+00:00
It's one of those glib statements that I never really believed.

If you got at something with the wrong mental model you are always going to be pushing a bubble around under the rug and you're going to feel tied up by constraints, find "correct" always elusive not matter how much time you take.

If you go at something with the right mental modal it often falls into place.

The "fast vs cheap" dilemma in a well-run operation is that once you have got efficient development under control (cheap for real) you can spend money to accelerate the schedule. "Efficient" and "under control" pretty much require correct. On the other hand I'd expect the average person using this slogan glibly is working on a project that will be late, expensive, and terribly incorrect.
by anyfoo | 2026-03-13 18:21:12+00:00
The virtualization itself is not the bizarre part. The bizarre part is where the actual OS is 16 bit and runs as the singular "task" of a thin 32 bit layer that merely calls itself a "memory manager". The details of that machinery (segmentation, DPMI, ...) are quite a sight to behold. And it's all because of how PCs evolved at that time, and because we needed to keep running DOS and still wanted to make use of all the extra memory that wouldn't fit into its address space.
by Joel_Mckay | 2026-03-13 18:21:22+00:00
Starlink direct-connect LTE support is simply going to bury any telecom that ignores the technology.

Essentially, anyone with a smart-phone will now be able to text home from anywhere without specialized equipment. Elon can take a victory lap on that product.

Competitors naive enough to underestimate what it took to build Starlink are going to find spectrum auctions already well out of their league. =3
by notepad0x90 | 2026-03-13 18:21:55+00:00
that's great, but when you have a networking issue, you have to deal with two stacks for troubleshooting. it would be much less effort to use just ipv4.

You're not paying for IPv4 addresses I'm sure, so did ipv6 solve anything for you? This is why i meant by zealots keeping it alive. you use ipv6 for the principle of it, but tech is suppose to solve problems, not facilitate ideologies.
by yieldcrv | 2026-03-13 18:22:02+00:00
I haven't read the rest of the thread, I respond from my comment history, so if people are writing the same thing, maybe there's some truth to it, are you familiar with the user experience on Roblox?

where many people can't chat with each other at all, but they can click to an external link or view instructions in an experience to join discord?

in this case, how would you modify the user experience?
Show HN: Execute local LLM prompts in remote SSH shell sessions
by smudgy3746 | 2026-03-13 18:22:08+00:00
Hi HN,

This is a tool I've worked on the past few months.

Instead of giving LLM tools SSH access or installing them on a server, the following command:

$ promptctl ssh user@server

makes a set of locally defined prompts "magically" appear within the remote shell as executable command line programs.

For example, I have locally defined prompts for `llm-analyze-config` and `askai`. Then on (any) remote host I can:

$ promptctl ssh user@host
# Now on remote host
$ llm-analyze-config /etc/nginx.conf
$ cat docker-compose.yml | askai "add a load balancer"

the prompts behind `llm-analyze-config` and `askai` execute on my local computer (even though they're invoked remotely) via the llm of my choosing.

This way LLM tools are never granted SSH access to the server, and nothing needs to be installed to the server. In fact, the server does not even need outbound internet connections to be enabled.

Eager to get feedback!

Github: https://github.com/tgalal/promptcmd/
by leptons | 2026-03-13 18:22:10+00:00
That's nonsense. There's plenty of people that want those APIs that don't work at Google. And it does not give Google "unmediated access" - you have to explicitly opt-in to allow the browser to use them when a website requests access to these APIs. But of course, don't let the facts get in the way of your fanboyism for Apple.
by capitainenemo | 2026-03-13 18:22:26+00:00
Our corporate linux machines have exactly the same monitoring software as Windows - even the servers.
The performance is still not even remotely comparable. Could be the hooks are more performant on linux, could be the filesystem, maybe the tools are written more sanely... But loading apps, filesystem operations... Everything is still far faster on the linux dev instance. And I have half the ram allocated to that one.
by mystraline | 2026-03-13 18:22:33+00:00
Indeed.

The Democrats and Republicans both are different approaches for the same billionaire class.

They're not "opposite sides of the same coin". Instead, they're more akin to 2 sock puppets. One wears red, and the other blue.

Like the Trump tariffs? They were initially Biden's tariffs that Trump increased and extended. Different clothes, same game.

But I'd be willing to try a good run with democratic socialism, or hell, communism. What we have is the cushy gold-parachute socialism for the elite, and unabashed hardcore capitalism for the poorest. And that fucking sucks. Burn it down.
Ask HN: Is there prior art for this rich text data model?
by chrisecker | 2026-03-13 18:22:53+00:00
I've built a rich text data model for a desktop word processor in Python, based on a persistent balanced n-ary tree with cached weights for O(log n) index translation. The document model uses only four element types: Text, Container, Single, and Group — where Group is purely structural (for balancing) and has no semantic meaning in the document.
Individual elements are immutable; insert and takeout return new trees rather than mutating the old one. This guarantees that old indices remain valid as long as the old tree exists.
I'm aware of Ropes, Finger Trees, and ProseMirror's flat index model. Is there prior art I should know about — specifically for rich text document models with these properties?
by ineedasername | 2026-03-13 18:22:56+00:00
>That seems worth testing

I have-- I see your info via your HN profile. If I have a spare moment this weekend I'll reach out there, I'll dig up a few examples and take screenshots. I built an exploration tool for investigating a few things I was interested in, and surfacing potential reasoning paths exhibited in the tokens not chosen was one of them.

Part of my background is in Linguistics-- classical not just NLP/comp-- so the pragmatics involved with disfluencies made that "wait..." pattern stand out during just normal interactions with LLM's that showed thought traces. I'd see it not too infrequently eg by expanding the "thinking..." in various LLM chat interfaces.

In humans it's not a disfluency in the typical sense of difficulty with speech production, it's a pragmatic marker, let's the listener know a person is reevaluating something they were about to say. It of course carries over into writing, either in written dialog or less formal self-editing contexts, so it's well represented in any training corpora. As such, being a marker of "rethinking", it stood to reason models' "thinking" modes displayed it-- not unlikely it's specifically trained for.

So it's one of the things I went token-diving to see "close up", so to speak, in non-thinking models too. It's not hard to induce a reversal or at least diversion off whatever it would have said-- if close to a correct answer there's a reasonable chance it will get the correct one instead of pursuing a more likely of the top k. This wasn't with Qwen, it was gemma 3 1b where I did that particular exploration. It wasn't a systematic process I was doing for a study, but I found it pretty much any time I went looking-- I'd spot a decision point and perform the token injection.

If I have the time I'll mockup a simple RAG scenario, just inject the documents that would be retrieved from RAG result similar to your article, and screenshot that in particular. A bit of a toy setup but close enough to "live" that it could point the direction towards more refined testing, however the model responds, and putting aside the publishing side of these sorts of explorations there's a lot of practical value in assisting with debugging the error rates.
by randallsquared | 2026-03-13 18:23:58+00:00
You can't even see this whole comment on an iPhone, let alone the immediate contextual thread that is necessary for framing it.

That sounds flippant, but it's the visceral reaction I have to trying to do everything on iOS (iPads are a little better than iPhone in this regard, but still have the "everything through a keyhole" feeling).

That said, tiny viewports are not really the main problem, since obviously a modern iPhone has far more resolution than almost any monitor available in 1990, or even 2000. It's more that most exploration and creation is not doable on an iPhone, by design.

My original point, though, was that seeing new grad software developers who have never had any non-externally-directed interaction with a computer made me realize why we have to show them how to use the shell in a terminal, and why they seemed to have no particular curiosity about any software thing not directly related to the task that they're doing. For new grads who aren't curious, finding that something they're doing doesn't work due to architectural issues or some nonobvious combination of bugs prompts neither asking for help nor a deep dive into what the problem could be. Asking for help is basically cheating, to them, and they've never before encountered real problems that weren't explained in the text, handled by their group partner, or trivially stack-exchangable (remember, this realization was 2019, and therefore before common LLM usage). At standup after standup, they report making progress on working through the moderately complex ticket they picked up, but in fact, nothing useful is happening. Sometimes people like this can be shown the way, and then become functioning and capable developers and troubleshooters. Sometimes not.

Anyway, /old-man-rant.
by MrWiffles | 2026-03-13 18:24:11+00:00
This. The more locked down, the less in control we are, the higher margins they command. This is why app stores exist - it has nothing to do with safety or security, and everything to do with monopolizing the distribution supply chain from soup to nuts. Don’t like it? Too bad, it’s fully locked down and cracking it is a (potentially) criminal offense, so whaddayagonnadoaboutit?!