MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Porting MIT CADR to RISC-V
by lstevens14 | 2026-03-04 14:55:55+00:00
Hi! I have been reading up on lisp lately and the MIT CADR lisp machine. I have found some projects like Lispers field-programmable gate array implementation of the CADR project. Does anyone know of a port of the MIT CADR system to risc-v? I have have tried researching this to no avail. If there is no such project, then I may start a one to port CADR to a modified risc-v, but if there is a existing project, then I would much rather contribute to that. Thanks!

[1]: https://github.com/lisper/cpus-caddr
by fatnoah | 2026-03-04 14:56:06+00:00
> He got the prompt, asked questions about throughput requirements (etc.), and said, “okay, I’d put it all in Postgres.” He was correct! Postgres could more than handle the load.

I had this happen in a Google interview. I did back of the envelope math on data size and request volume and everything (4 million daily events, spread across a similar number of buckets) and very little was required beyond that to meet performance, reliability, and time/space complexity requirements. Most of the interview was the interviewer asking "what about" questions, me explaining how the simple design handled that, and the interviewer agreeing. I passed, but with "leans" vs. "strong" feedback.
by browningstreet | 2026-03-04 14:56:16+00:00
yesterday I wrote in a group slack that today I would get to decide whether:

* i'm not buying any machine at all, or waiting for omarchy to support the new dell xps

* i'm buying the macbook neo at the top specs

* i'm buying the macbook air at the bottom specs

* i'm buying the macbook air with 32GB RAM and 2TB SSD

as someone who lives in claude code / opencode these days, the 8gb hurts but.. maybe, i dunno. they made this decision very painful. it's basically an opencode terminal that let's me access my apple iphone reminders, notes, etc.

but 8gb?
by ferguess_k | 2026-03-04 14:56:29+00:00
Do you think the RAM is too weak while the CPU is too strong for the use case? Like, with just 8GB RAM it can't do much that needs that kind of CPU. And with the same price point I can easily get a refurbished 16/32GB Dell mobile workstation -- which I admit won't last as long as a Macbook, but 8GB is only enough for light usage, which could just use a much older and maybe cheaper CPU.

*Edit*: just read about education discount, so yeah, $499 or lower is more competitive.
by sokka_h2otribe | 2026-03-04 14:56:32+00:00
I got halfway through. I'm tired of AI writing sometimes here. <<That's what most calculators get wrong>>. Not, that's $11, it's NOT very significant.

AI slop ATM seems to indicate heavy importance on all your sentences, but not all of your sentences are that important. It makes it harder for me to skim personally, and ultimately, it's harder to edit because it "sounds" ok as it is (even when it's not.)

But, in my experience, the AI writing slop [negative experience] is everywhere here.
Google Account "Digital Execution" While Auditing a Chrome Store Vulnerability
by NTT_Prime | 2026-03-04 14:56:33+00:00
A Digital Execution in Real-Time: The Last Seconds of NTT Prime

The Manifesto

“Hello world, I am NTT Prime.

I am writing this as an analyst—one who lives and works with irrefutable evidence, charts, and data. I have prepared screenshots and the most detailed technical analysis to show you how dangerous the ‘Zombie Assets’ vulnerability is.

But, I want to offer my sincere apologies: I failed before the deadline. Imagine you are a researcher pouring your heart and soul into an Audit Report to protect the community. You have absolute faith in the Google ecosystem. You click on a captcha solver downloaded directly from the official Chrome Web Store—a tool approved and endorsed by Google itself.

And then, BAM! No delay. No review. The moment that click echoed, a cold, impersonal message appeared:

‘Your account has been disabled.’

I witnessed my digital identity being executed in an instant. Google had trapped its own users: They approved the tool, they allowed it to exist on their ‘marketplace,’ and then they ‘eliminated’ anyone who trusted and used it. They might let me download some soulless compressed data files, but they imprisoned the true ‘soul’ of NTT Prime:

The Substack playground.

The knowledge network on Drive.

The brand name Gmail that I had painstakingly built.

I was racing against the pulse of Google’s servers to press the ‘Submit’ button before being completely killed off. This was the last effort of a digitally disarmed expert.

The Immortality of an Idea

This may be my first product, and also my last farewell under this name. But remember this: Google can erase an account, they can kill off a ‘digital body,’ but they are utterly powerless against a free spirit.

I hand over this Audit to you not just as a technical document, but as a part of my flesh and blood, a legacy rekindled from the ashes of injustice. As you read these lines, the name NTT Prime may have vanished into nothingness, but my will, the trust you placed in me, and the knowledge I imparted will become eternal.

Even if the digital identity is ‘executed,’ the spirit of NTT Prime has already dissolved into the flow of the internet, existing in every hard drive, in every folder, and deep within your own thoughts.

The digital body may vanish, but the soul of NTT Prime is immutable. I will not fade into nothingness to be forgotten. I will remain here:

In the lines of code you write.

In the vulnerabilities you patch.

In the hearts of those who dare to stand up against tyranny.

NTT Prime will always be with you. I walk alongside you, forever and everywhere.

From this moment on, NTT Prime no longer belongs to Google. NTT Prime belongs to you.

Link to Audit Article: Discovery of ‘Zombie’ Assets

(Case ID: 8-9617000040907)

Farewell, and keep fighting.

NTT Prime - Analyst powerless against time, but immortal in truth.
by DaSHacka | 2026-03-04 14:56:38+00:00
The majority of people have a use case more demanding than having one open Hacker News tab and doing everything in the terminal with vi and minimal shell scripts.

I'm definitely pretty squarely on the other end of the spectrum, but even the 32GB of RAM in my ThinkPad feels insufficient when I properly multitask with modern, bloated electron applications that eat multiple gigabytes each.
by JackFarrell | 2026-03-04 14:56:39+00:00
Hi HackerNews! I thought this community might find this interesting.

I recently built an AI agent for a mid-sized leasing office. It handles inbound tenant requests (maintenance requests, scheduling tours, questions on unit availability, etc.).

Initially I had a difficult time improving the agent. My business partner understands the nuances of the tenants' problems and I just write the code. Every time the agent made a mistake, she’d flag it and then I’d try my best to translate her feedback into prompt changes or backend logic updates. She knew exactly how the agent’s behavior needed to change and I was just the middleman. I wanted to make something where she could make those changes herself.

I decided to separate the system into two types of steps:

Inference (judgement) – any step that requires interpretation. Is this a prospective tenant or a current one? What request are they making? Do they seem upset? These steps are written as plain-English instructions that anyone can read and edit.

Function calls (actions) – any step that actually does something. Check unit availability, submit a maintenance ticket, schedule a tour, etc. These are backend functions. Engineers own these.

Now she owns the agents' reasoning and I own the agents' capabilities.

If something goes wrong:

She opens the log

Sees every decision the agent made in plain language

Finds the step that made a mistake

Updates the instruction herself

If she wants the agent to handle something new (say handle pet policy questions), she adds an inference step.

If she wants the agent to be able to do something new, she asks me for a new function call step.

She is now able to update the system immediately when something goes wrong and I can just focus on the code.

I realized that this pattern is not specific to leasing offices at all. It works for any text-processing agent where an LLM interprets text and triggers actions. I’m now using the exact same structure to build a Slack bot for my team that handles scheduling requests and internal ops workflows.

The separation between reasoning (owned by domain experts) and capabilities (owned by engineers) turns out to be reusable across use cases.

Because I kept reusing this structure, I ended up turning it into a small platform called Chainix. It’s basically a drag-and-drop interface for building agent workflows where each step is either:

An editable inference block (plain English)

A function call (code)

It’s been really useful for me when building agents with non-technical people.

If anyone here is building something similar or has any critiques of this approach, I’d genuinely love some feedback.

If you’re curious what I built, it’s at https://chainix.ai.
by TheRealDunkirk | 2026-03-04 14:56:39+00:00
I'm sorry, but what!? Right back atcha. If you'd have bothered to have looked at the chart in link I posted, you'd have seen that market share of "consumer compute" for Windows was 26% as of 10 years ago. You're going to have to do a lot better anecdata to find a 44% resurgence over the last 10 years, especially given the dismal things that have happened to it as a platform over that time.
by sethuu | 2026-03-04 14:56:42+00:00
Hello All, jumping in to add: my main goal with Rushiram Finance is to keep expanding this as a safe, client-side utility belt for personal finance. I'm looking to add more day-to-day calculators next. If you have any specific formulas or tools you find yourself needing often (but hate giving your data to random sites to use), I'd love to hear your ideas!!
by Ajedi32 | 2026-03-04 14:56:42+00:00
Good to see this called out. The HN echo chamber has this really terrible habit of attributing any disagreement with the prevailing opinion here to big, shadowy forces with evil motives (billionaires, corporations, three letter agencies, politicians, etc) instead of facing the reality that sometimes people just have different values and priorities than us. Very rarely does that narrative get challenged directly.
by ddingus | 2026-03-04 14:56:45+00:00
Have you consulted any professionals?

There are grave and disturbing outcomes ahead for anyone implementing these ideas.

We can only control our own speech. Repeat that to your self in the mirror each morning until it sinks in.

We can empower others too.

Focus on that. Help make people better able to employ the many options they have when faced with speech they don't like.

The world will thank you. That cause is noble.

What you are attempting is dystopia in a can, just add people and mix.

Seriously. Think it all the way through. Imagine you, yourself hobbled and muzzled behind these ideas.

Good luck. And let us both hope you do not find yourself bound by your own ideas.
by john-tells-all | 2026-03-04 14:56:51+00:00
Yes. And, a bad test -- that passes because it's defined to pass -- is _much worse_ than no test at all. It makes you think an edge case is "covered" with a meaningful check.

Worse: once you have one "bad apple" in your pile of tests, it decreases trust in the _whole batch of tests_. Each time a test passes, you have to think if it's a bad test...
by janitor77swe | 2026-03-04 14:56:59+00:00
I have an M4 Air and I just pre-ordered 3 Neos. One for myself, one for my niece as a present and one for my parents to replace their Windows laptop.

I honestly don't understand people who complain about the lack of M5 Pro specs and features on a £599 Macbook. "Oh no, it's 1/3rd of the price of a Pro but I want the Pro specs on it." People seriously need to do think twice before pressing the submit button. And nobody in the right mind would buy a used Macbook for the same price, just because it's more powerful.

I have an 8G M2 at work and it's more than enough and I have two browsers running with 20+ tabs, Teams, Outlook, Figma, VScode... If you are a power user buy a Macbook Pro, you can't reasonable expect Pro performance out of a device that costs a third.

This Neo is going to sell like crazy because it's an amazing product for the price. That's how much Chromebooks cost but you actually get a full desktop OS rather than a web browser. And for students to buy a new Macbook for £499 come on, some of these comments are just ridiculous.
by throw899832 | 2026-03-04 14:57:05+00:00
> A nice thing about the Deutsche Bahn is that they exist. It's not the case in every country in the world.

EU does not have a train monopoly.
There are other train companies in Germany (FlixTrain, OBB, BRB...). And operators from other countries can also operate there, even French SNCF!

DB is blocking slots on rail, that could be used by other operators. And they are not going to change because it is Germany.
by LandR | 2026-03-04 14:57:10+00:00
The point isnt to give a simple answer, even if it's a correct answer. The point is show how much you know and how smart you are.

The question is framed to you as a way for you to show you know x, y and z and talk about x, y and z.

Even if a valid solution is just do a, that's great. But the interviewer has no idea if you actually know about x ,y and z do they ?
by mananaysiempre | 2026-03-04 14:57:10+00:00
As a potential user (not the author), what jumps out at me about the two is:

OMRN: No lookaround, eager compilation

RE#: No submatches, lazy compilation

Both lookaround and submatch extraction are hard problems, but for practical purposes the lack of lazy compilation feels like it would be the most consequential, as it essentially disqualifies the engine from potentially adversarial REs (or I guess not with the state limit, but then it’s questionable if it actually counts as a full RE engine in such an application).
by umvi | 2026-03-04 14:57:16+00:00
As a complete layman, quantum computing seems like it could be like AI. AI for the longest time was a scam. Like, it was clearly improving, but only in marginal increments. The bar was so low though... even the state of the art was garbage - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot), for example. Eventually it was starting to seem like narrow applications of CNNs/machine learning would be the future of AI, but that general purpose AI would be garbage forever. It took the attention/transformer breakthrough (and someone to realize how to use it) before we hit the explosive improvement in general purpose AI that we see today. Quantum computing could still be in the "Tay" phase right now.
by dannythecount | 2026-03-04 14:57:17+00:00
I built O4DB (Only For Determined Buyers) to invert the standard commerce hierarchy. Instead of supply-side browsing or scraping, it uses direct demand-side injection. It’s a decentralized M2M protocol for cases where the buyer has a specific identifier (EAN, OEM_PN) and needs strict anonymity.

Key Specs:

Decentralized: Runs on local hardware; interoperable with legacy ERPs.

Anonymity: Identity and UODI logistics data are only disclosed upon bilateral confirmation.

Security: Zero-Trust architecture using AES-256-GCM + ECDH.

Lot of work. This is the first version. Throw the repo into your favorite AI and tear it apart. I want to know if I should expand this or bury it in a drawer. Thanks.

USPTO Patent Pending: 63/993,355
Academic DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.5151528
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-03-04 14:58:05+00:00
Atleast on Linux, I have been able to do almost everything in 8gb without any concern but I have the macbook air which has 16 gb and this can also do everything pretty much.

So IMO in 8GB most types of coding is possible actually.

But regarding Xcode+Iphone simulator, I am not sure if that's possible tho. It's possible to run android simulator on Linux 8 GB with waydroid while being pretty smooth. So theoretically could be possible but I am not familiar with building with Xcode/Iphone simulator.
by nobleach | 2026-03-04 14:58:41+00:00
Way back when I was in IT Admin, I used to have this problem all the time. Some non-tech person emails a spreadsheet, another non-tech person edits it, and saves it. The original person complains that they can't see the changes. Yeah, because it's saved in some MS Windows Profile location that no sane human would ever visit. My solution was to ONLY email links to shared files on a shared resource. The LAST thing I'd ever think of is writing software to solve this problem!

These days if I were interviewing someone and they said, "I'd use the simple solution that is fairly ubiquitous", I'd say, "yes! you've now saved yourself tons of engineering hours - and you've saved the company eng money".
by gracelynewhouse | 2026-03-04 14:58:56+00:00
That feedback loop architecture sounds right — the homogenous dataset trap is one of the most common failure modes in production CV and it's good you caught it early. The welfare data angle is particularly interesting. The distinction between "the tool is neutral but the selection criteria are up to the breeder" makes sense bc it avoids the poultry industry's mistake of optimizing the selector itself. Have you published anything on the calibration pipeline? Would love to see the methodology.
by egorfine | 2026-03-04 14:59:09+00:00
> Anybody can become an Ubuntu developer

Oh yeah, by the way! How much time left until people are allowed to develop software without KYC? Before you laugh off, this was unimaginable just a year ago and here we are: Google won't bend anymore. ID yourself or never develop for Android.

> have fallen for Lunduke's clickbait in their ignorance.

This is indeed clickbait, but surely you realize that the merit is here.
by lhl | 2026-03-04 14:59:20+00:00
I was a bit interested to do a replication and see if better harness could avoid some of the problems they ran w/ context management, poor instruction following, etc and it looks like yes, it's definitely possible.

Here's my repo: https://github.com/lhl/claudecycles-revisited

I used Codex w/ 5.2 xhigh and a relatively simple AGENTS.md - I have some session-analysis as well. The original replication was 47 minutes, then another 30 minutes of gap filling, and finally about 30 minutes of writing an extension to take the work a bit further, with Claude Code Opus 4.6 doing some documentation cleanup and verification.
by CloakHQ | 2026-03-04 14:59:48+00:00
the risk-bucket framing is a useful upgrade from binary pass/fail. we've run into something similar where the failure category changes what you actually do about it - a compliance drift is a rollback, a business logic drift might just need a prompt tweak, a UX drift you might ship anyway and monitor. collapsing those into one score loses the signal that matters for the decision.

the 6-12 turn state drift pattern is real. in browser sessions the equivalent is the fingerprint signal accumulating - each action is fine, but by turn 8 you've built a behavioral profile that reads as bot. same compounding problem, different domain. makes me think the right eval unit for agents in general isn't the turn or even the session, it might be the trajectory shape.
by ElectricalUnion | 2026-03-04 14:59:58+00:00
Common business-oriented language (COBOL) is a high-level, English-like, compiled programming language.

COBOL's promise was that it was human-like text, so we wouldn't need programmers anymore.

The problem is that the average person doesn't know how what their actual problems are in sufficient detail to get a working solution. When you get down to breaking down that problem... you become a programmer.

The main lesson of COBOL is that it isn't the computer interface/language that necessitates a programmer.
by sthlm | 2026-03-04 15:00:01+00:00
Europeans (I'm German) often sigh at the price differences, but a big part of it is just that US prices are listed without VAT, while European prices are, and VAT differs across EU member countries.

Denmark has a VAT of 25%, so the DKK 5499 price without VAT is DKK 4399, which amounts to ~$684. Still more but not substantially.
by GuB-42 | 2026-03-04 15:00:04+00:00
Tests are not any more or any less of a spec than the code. If you are implementing a HTTP server for instance, RFC 7231 are your specs, not your tests, not your code.

I would say that which come first between specs and code depend on the context. If you are implementing a standard, the specs of the standard obviously come first, but if you are iterating, maybe for a user interface, it can make sense to start with the code so that you can have working prototypes. You can then write formal documents and tests later, when you are done prototyping, for regression control.

But I think that leaning on tests is not always a good idea. For example, let's continue with the HTTP server. You write a test suite, but there is a bug in your tests, I don't know, you confuse error 404 and 403. The you write your code, correctly, run the tests, see that one of your tests fail and tell you have returned 404 and not 403. You don't think much, after all "the tests are the specs", and change the code. Congratulations, you are now making sure your code is wrong.

Of course, the opposite can and do happen, writing the code wrong and making passing test without thinking about what you actually testing, and I believe that's why people came up with the idea of TDD, but for me, test-first flip the problem but doesn't solve it. I'd say the only advantage, if it is one, is that it prevents taking a shortcut and releasing untested code by moving tests out of the critical path.

But outside of that, I'd rather focus on the code, so if something are to be "the spec", that's it. It is the most important, because it is the actual product, everything else is secondary. I don't mean unimportant, I mean that from the point of view of users, it is better for the test suite to be broken than for the code to be broken.
by pradn | 2026-03-04 15:00:15+00:00
The problem can be complex, which sometimes means the solution needs to be complex. Often, you can solve a complex problem in simple ways. There’s many ways to do that:

a) finding a new theoretical frame that simplifies the space or solutions, helps people think through it in a principled way

b) finding ways to use existing abstractions, that others may not have been able to find

c) using non-technical levers, like working at the org/business/UX level to cut scope, simplify requirements,

The way you can make complexity work for your career, is to make it clear why the problem is complex, and then what you did to simplify the problem. If you just present a simple solution, no one will get it. It’s like “showing your work”.

In some orgs, this is hopeless, as they really do reward complexity of implementation.
by aurareturn | 2026-03-04 15:00:19+00:00
- "The US wants to break Iran into ethno-states that compete for water until they are all dead." He even admits that this is pure conjecture and hand-waves this as the game-theoretic "optimal" strategy which is completely bonkers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47245067

What do you think of this?
by opan | 2026-03-04 15:00:26+00:00
Sadly the T440p (my main machine for several years) and T420 run insanely hot even with fresh paste and a cleaned fan, at least while docked and in continuous use. Could not for the life of me overcome it. Got a T14 Gen 5 and it's a solid 40 degrees cooler now on average. Big relief. I'm guessing T480 is decently cool but haven't daily driven one to be sure.