MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by NoSalt | 2026-03-04 15:13:13+00:00
I feel this. I once worked for this manager, and whenever we finished a sprint, the first question he ALWAYS asked was "What tool(s) did you use/implement?" Many times, the answer was "No tools, I just banged out a bit of code to do the job.", only to get looked at for several seconds before he looked disappointed, and moved on. It was infuriating!
by vitlyoshin | 2026-03-04 15:13:16+00:00
An interesting idea came up in my latest podcast conversation about branding:
Many companies believe they have a marketing problem when they actually have a differentiation problem.
If a product doesn’t clearly stand apart from alternatives, the market simplifies the decision to price or features.
That’s why so many companies end up competing in a race to the bottom.
One definition that stuck with me was: branding is the art of differentiation.
Curious how others here think about this, especially in tech, where many products converge quickly.
What companies or products have truly clear differentiation in your opinion?
by youknownothing | 2026-03-04 15:13:29+00:00
This resonates so hard with me. I was self-employed for over eight years, since I was the one who had to deal with all messes I always made sure that things were as simple as sensible (but not simpler). I made a good career out of it. Then I went back to being employed by a company, and I was completely befuddled but the over-complication of designs. Engineers aren't trying to help the business or solve a problem, they're trying to prove how good they are. It's just the completely wrong set of incentives. If you only get promoted by solving complex cases and there are no complex cases to solve, then you'll make them up.
by fartfeatures | 2026-03-04 15:13:56+00:00
It was just an example of a simple app built by Apple themselves being a RAM hog. 375MB just for control centre on fresh open (15.7) but like I said I have seen it higher recently on multiple occasions. That's before we talk about a lot of their seemingly endless and inefficient background tasks. mds_stores anyone?

Hopefully the presence of a laptop like this will be beneficial to software quality. They should make their developers use it one day a week.
by zerkten | 2026-03-04 15:14:01+00:00
There can be different cohorts of students. If a student is at the point where they can start exploring iOS development they can perhaps have a swing at it with this machine. In reality, they'll have been using this machine, know enough about the limitations, and be thinking of upgrading.

Kids already are well aware of iPhone upgrades. Parents will get them this machine. They'll get going and soon enough be badgering their parents for an upgrade to a more competent machine. That is all by design while being an affordance for people who can only get in at the cheap end.
by musesum | 2026-03-04 15:14:04+00:00
I wrote something similar in a Claude Code instructions.md: "minimize cyclomatic complexity" What happened next? It generated an 8 line wrapper function called only once from a different file. So, I told it to inline that logic in the caller. The result? One. Line. Of. Code.

So, I asked it to modify its instructions.md file to not repeat that mistake. The result was the new line "Avoid single-use wrapper functions; inline logic at the call site unless reused"

instructions.md is the new intern.
Show HN: BrowseBrawl – What if browser agents battled to generate training data?
by HrubyOnRails | 2026-03-04 15:14:26+00:00
I remember watching the AlphaGo documentary in 2017. What stood out to me was that the model got drastically better when it started competing against itself. GANs clicked for me similarly: a generator and discriminator competing, and somehow the competition is what produces something remarkable.

I've been curious whether this principle generalizes to today's agents.

So mehulkalia and I built Browser Brawl at the YC / BrowserUse hackathon last weekend and won first place. It is a fun experiment in which an attacker agent tries to complete tasks on live websites while a defender agent injects JavaScript to sabotage it.

The analogy isn't perfect, because browser tasks aren't zero-sum. But our hypothesis is that an agent faced with an adversary should produce more interesting training data than one navigating clean, static environments.

Try it on: http://browser-brawl.com

GitHub: https://github.com/RichardHruby/browser-brawl

Demo Video: https://youtu.be/NIoFXv-JvBY

(Skip to [0:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIoFXv-JvBY&t=55s) to see the agents “brawling” in the arena :), [1:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIoFXv-JvBY&t=1m52s) to see the browser traces generated)

Would love to chat with anyone building or training browser agents. Happy to dive in below!
by amiga386 | 2026-03-04 15:14:29+00:00
turns out... little monkey fella

[fyi, this is one of those misquotes like "play it again sam" or "scotty beam me up": https://scrimpton.com/ep/ep-xfm-S3E07#pos-1138 "turns out it was a little monkey" + https://scrimpton.com/ep/ep-podcast-S1E10#pos-280-280 "little monkey fella"]
by dlisboa | 2026-03-04 15:14:37+00:00
I wish more would be done on weight. The 12 inch Macbook was very lightweight, just 2 pounds. Today there's no Apple product that gets close to that: an iPad with the added accessories weighs more and it's still an iPad. The Macbook "Air" is not airy, this Macbook Neo weighs the same as an Air.
by petercooper | 2026-03-04 15:15:09+00:00
I think 8GB with Tahoe will lead to a lot of griping in a month or two, but I've bought one for family use. We have some old iMacs with various issues issues and this ticks all the boxes for basic family use. Plus, the sickly color will hopefully mean no-one will hog the machine or take it outdoors.
by sodality2 | 2026-03-04 15:15:14+00:00
Crazy good market segmentation by Apple here - it's pretty easy for college students to justify this plus an iPad, and still have to upgrade to a "real" laptop post-grad.

Personally this looks really compelling for students - I did something similar, dinky 4GB ram 2 core laptop with crazy good battery life - because I don't care about specs at all, LMS's and note-taking apps in school are not heavy. I just NEED to be able to work all day long, when lecture halls lack outlets. If I needed development weight I would just use an IDE plugin to remote to a desktop in my dorm.

Are there any similar laptops around this price range with comparable battery life? My impression is the market around ARM laptops is pretty small. If so this is a standout for this use case.
by basch | 2026-03-04 15:15:54+00:00
RAM need shave changed slightly post nvme. Normal people apps can swap just fine with a pretty seamless experience. Average people aren’t opening single files that can’t fit into 5gb of ram.

RAM is also an insanely high percentage of computer price right now. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/hp-says-memory-co...
by compounding_it | 2026-03-04 15:16:09+00:00
Forget people, id like to see Apple themselves optimise the macOS experience for 8gb Ram. The M1 Air base should ideally be useful until the MacBook Neo loses macOS updates. So 6+6 years at least. But we all know M1 Air will lose updates in a couple of years maybe because Apple doesn't want us to keep using old hardware even if it's similar to new hardware.
by strcat | 2026-03-04 15:16:42+00:00
SailfishOS doesn't use the security features which are being worked on and doesn't keep up with kernel, driver and firmware updates. It doesn't use secure elements, verified boot or hardware memory tagging so it doesn't need the work being done on those things. They don't have similar requirements for hardware and have little use for what's being worked on for these devices.

The portions of SailfishOS specific to it are largely closed source including the user interface and application layer. It isn't possible to fork the overall operating system. It has much worse privacy and drastically worse security than the Android Open Source Project even without taking the GrapheneOS improvements into account. It's in an entirely different space and this has no connection to it.
by MickeyShmueli | 2026-03-04 15:16:47+00:00
the test generation loop is brutal. i've been burned by this exact thing, you ask the agent to write code, then ask it to write tests for that code, and surprise, they all pass because the tests are literally just "does the code do what the code does"

honestly think the answer isn't more tests, it's stricter contracts. like if your API has an OpenAPI spec, you can validate requests/responses against it automatically. the spec becomes the source of truth, not the tests, not the implementation

we've been doing this backwards for years. write code, write tests that match the code, realize six months later that both the code and tests were implementing the wrong behavior. but if you have a machine-readable contract (openapi, json schema, whatever), at least you can verify one dimension automatically

ngl this is why i'm skeptical of "AI will write all the code" takes. without formal specs, you're just getting really confident garbage that happens to pass its own tests. which tbh describes a lot of human-written code too lol
by AgentK20 | 2026-03-04 15:16:48+00:00
How does ECH make it impossible for parents to control their children's access to computers? Sure they can't block sites at the router level, just like your ISP won't be able to block things at the ISP level, but you (the parent) have physical access to the devices in question, and can install client-side software to filter access to the internet.

The only thing this makes impossible is the laziest, and easiest to bypass method of filtering the internet.
by jen20 | 2026-03-04 15:16:50+00:00
This largely shows how far standards have fallen - it’s not that long ago that 8 gigabytes of RAM was unthinkable in a desktop class machine - much less one that cost nothing once inflation was taken into account. It required buying an E10K style machine for tens to hundreds of thousands to get 64GB. And all of those hardware gains have been squandered by the electron people.

That said, we are where we are - I wouldn’t buy a machine with only 8GB for any purpose at this point.
by mauvehaus | 2026-03-04 15:16:52+00:00
Your plumber is probably making a good choice. Valves that don’t get exercised regularly can be all but guaranteed to be a pain in the ass when you need them to work.

We have a calendar reminder to exercise the valves in our house yearly, and the fact that they’re easy to get at helps make sure it’s a quick job, not a tedious one.

Not a plumber, but have lived in enough old houses with iffy valves to have been bitten a few times.
by JHer | 2026-03-04 15:17:01+00:00
If all I have todo is ask the thing what I want, where is all the great new software? Why isn't everyone running fully bespoke operating systems by now?

While I agree with the sentiment that we shouldn't make things more complicated by inventing fancy names, we also shouldn't pretend that software engineering has become super simple now. Building a great piece of software remains super hard to do and finding better techniques for it affords real study.

Your post is annoying me quite a bit because it's super unfair to the linked post. Simon Willison isn't trying to coin a new term, he's just trying to start a collection of useful patterns. "Agentic engineering" is just the obvious term for software engineering using agents. What would you call it, "just asking things"?
by prepend | 2026-03-04 15:17:31+00:00
I’m not sure about that. Physical build quality on chromebooks is poor. My kids school switched off because the kids were always breaking them.

iPads a Macs stand up to much more abuse by students.

MacOS has very little malware even though users have more access to do things.

All google data is used to train AI and advertise. I’d like to not have that near my kids. Would rather have Apple’s “make money off hardware” from a data privacy standpoint.
by lofaszvanitt | 2026-03-04 15:17:40+00:00
Oh, the guy who is still mentally on the level when he started his channel. And these shenanigans.... putting a phone in a mini coffin. sigh

Why it has to be a flagship? Sell them cheap. It's like AAA game makers cry about ballooning costs, and they make 60 hour games that literally nobody plays through....
by vanderZwan | 2026-03-04 15:17:47+00:00
Very nice visualization!

I thought this was going to be like a Game of Life variation I came up with about 15 years ago where you stack multiple layers of 2D Cellular Automata, allow each layer to have their own rule set, do single steps of each and then define the interactions between the layer as applying Boolean operations before doing the next step (e.g. set layer 1 = 1 xor 2, layer 2 = 1 xnor 2).

I'm pretty sure that's effectively a subset of what you can encode with a multi-state CA (you can after all interpret each layer as a "bit", so e.g. with two layers each point can be in "four states", meaning any give combination of rulesets ber layer + masking operation should have an equivalent four-state CA, but I never bothered to figure out how one would map from one to the other, and then the hard drive where the code was stored crashed so I forgot about it.
by WarmWash | 2026-03-04 15:17:58+00:00
The problem that software suffers from is that every app/program tries to cover as many bases and use cases as possible in a single package. Obviously it's what you want to do if you want to maximize reach/customers.

Vibe apps are different. They do exactly what you want, exactly the way you want it done. No more downloading an app that is mysteriously 180MB and requires watching a youtube video to learn how to make it change your background every 5 minutes to different dog pictures.
by elxr | 2026-03-04 15:18:16+00:00
It's perfectly capable for doing simple backend or webdev work too. Especially with a TUI editor, sqlite as a DB, and being disciplined enough to bookmark/close your browser tabs instead of leaving 150+ tabs open.

I really wish they let you pay for RAM upgrades though. I like the colors way more than the macbook air, even though I know the air (or non-apple laptop) is what I should really be looking at.e
by jpfr | 2026-03-04 15:18:22+00:00
The "byte-code" coming from the query planner typically only has a handful of steps in a linear sequence. Joins, filters, and such. But the individual steps can be very costly.

So there is not much to gain from JITing the query plan execution only.

JITing begins to make more sense, when the individual query plan steps (join, filter, ...) themselves be specialized/recompiled/improved/merged by knowing the context of the query plan.
by zigak | 2026-03-04 15:18:36+00:00
Location: Ljubljana (Slovenia - EU)

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Go, Python, Solidity, C++, LLM fine tuning, cloud architecture

Résumé/CV: https://zigakokelj.com/Ziga_Kokelj_Resume.pdf

Email: info@zigakokelj.com

Backend-focused engineer working with Go and Python, building AI and blockchain systems. Experience with Solidity, LLM fine-tuning, and cloud architecture (Azure). Interested in blockchain, backend, infrastructure, or applied AI roles.
by kacper-vstorm | 2026-03-04 15:18:37+00:00
I'm Kacper from Vstorm. We build AI agents for production and open-source our tooling as Pydantic AI libraries.

pydantic-ai-backend (github.com/vstorm-co/pydantic-ai-backend) provides file storage and code execution backends for Pydantic AI agents. We've supported Docker sandboxes since day one. In v0.1.12, we added Daytona as an alternative.

A few technical points:

1. *The sub-90ms number.* Daytona pre-provisions VMs and keeps them warm. "Create sandbox" is essentially "assign a pre-warmed VM" — no image pulls, no container creation, no daemon startup. The bottleneck is network latency to their API, not infrastructure setup.

2. *BaseSandbox abstraction.* We extracted an abstract base class that both Docker and Daytona implement: `execute()`, `_read_bytes()`, `write()`, `edit()`, `is_alive()`, `stop()`. Adding Daytona meant implementing 4 methods. Zero changes to agent code or toolsets.

3. *Native file APIs.* Docker pipes file I/O through shell commands (`docker exec cat ...`). Daytona has direct upload/download APIs via their SDK. Measurably faster for binary files.

4. *CompositeBackend.* You can route by path prefix — read source files from local filesystem (fast, no overhead), execute untrusted code in Daytona (isolated). The agent doesn't know — it calls `read_file()` and `execute()`, and the composite routes each call to the right backend.

5. *Docker isn't going away.* For local development and self-hosted setups, Docker is still the right choice (free, custom runtimes, no external dependency). Daytona is for cloud-native deployments where Docker daemon access is impractical — CI/CD, serverless, Kubernetes without privileged containers.

Install: `pip install pydantic-ai-backend[daytona]`

Happy to discuss the architecture or the backend abstraction design.
Open Memory Initiative (OMI) - an open DDR4 UDIMM reference design
by mertefesensoy | 2026-03-04 15:18:51+00:00
Hi HN! I’m building the Open Memory Initiative (OMI): a community-driven engineering project to make system memory understandable, reproducible, and independently verifiable (not performance-leading, not commercial, not “competing with vendors”).

A quick clarification upfront (based on earlier feedback): yes, JEDEC DDR/DIMM standards exist, and you can build/use memory controllers. My claim isn’t that DDR is unknowable. The gap I’m trying to close is that a complete, end-to-end, publicly reproducible DIMM module implementation (with explicit constraints, bring-up steps, and publishable validation evidence including failures) is still hard to find in one place, in a form others can rebuild without NDA/proprietary dependencies.

OMI v1 target (intentionally narrow):

DDR4 UDIMM reference design

8 GB, single rank (1R)

x8 DRAM devices, non-ECC (64-bit bus)

Status:

Stages 5–7 are complete/frozen (architecture decisions → block decomposition → full schematic + edge pin map integrity).

We’re now in Stage 8: Validation & Bring-Up Strategy — defining platform selection, procedures, success criteria, failure-mode documentation, and review checklists/templates.

Stage 8 is explicitly correctness, not performance.

I’m also realistic about the SI/PI side: serious DDR work often involves experienced teams + tools (and IBIS models are vendor-provided I/O models used by simulators). I don’t have “corporate lab” resources, so the approach is to be conservative, document assumptions, and collect evidence in a structured validation ladder:

L0 artifact integrity → L1 bench electrical → L2 host enumeration → L3 training/boot → L4 stress/soak (repeatable, with failure logs)

What I’m asking for (high-signal feedback):

Review: “rookie-killer” module pitfalls (PDN/decoupling, topology/routing constraints, SPD/config gotchas)

Validation: what minimum evidence you’d consider credible at each ladder level (and what claims should be off-limits without expensive gear)

Testing: volunteers with commodity platforms willing to run a documented bring-up/stress procedure and report results (including failures)

Repo: https://github.com/The-Open-Memory-Initiative-OMI/omi

Stage 8: https://github.com/The-Open-Memory-Initiative-OMI/omi/tree/m...

Start here: https://github.com/The-Open-Memory-Initiative-OMI/omi/blob/m...

Scope: https://github.com/The-Open-Memory-Initiative-OMI/omi/blob/m...

If you think the framing is wrong, I’d appreciate concrete critique: what assumption breaks, how it shows up during bring-up, and what evidence would settle it.
by strcat | 2026-03-04 15:19:06+00:00
It has always been a hardware requirement to be able to unlock the device, install GrapheneOS and lock the device again. Verified boot has been a requirement since it was introduced for Pixels and the is main benefit of locking the device. There are additional security features enabled by verified boot. The overall hardware requirements are listed at https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices.
by SirMaster | 2026-03-04 15:19:21+00:00
VIPOUTLET which is Walmart liquidation, they have been going here solid for months, price went up slightly but its 340-350 for reburb or open box with coupon code.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/136699644252

https://www.ebay.com/itm/136452780686

The refurb M4 Air are on Apple website.
by ndiddy | 2026-03-04 15:19:33+00:00
> Browsers, very light photo editing, and email/school/office work is general use and this will do that for the next 10 years.

I'm currently running pretty much that exact use case on my M1 MBA (Firefox with 10 tabs open, Pixelmator Pro, Apple Mail, Apple Music playing a local playlist) and I'm at 12.5 GB of RAM used. This is also on Sequoia, from what I hear Tahoe uses more resources. I'm sure that Mac OS can do fancy things with memory compression, swapping, etc when memory pressure is higher, but if you're an individual you might as well buy a refurb M2 or M3 MBA with 16 GB of RAM for the same price as this and not have to worry about it.

That's why I said this seems more targeted towards schools. They want a fleet of brand new cheap laptops with a support contract, they don't want to bother with buying individual used laptops off of ebay.
by pavlov | 2026-03-04 15:19:45+00:00
All I want is a MacBook Pro with a funky color like citrus.

I always buy the new color option from Apple when getting a phone, it helps me keep my device generations apart. But Macs have been sadly boring in recent years. "Starlight" is barely different from silver... I loved the rose gold they had for the M1 Air, that was a great computer.
Show HN: Teaching Tokens: Implementing Private, Lightweight AI in the Classroom
by Beckmeister | 2026-03-04 15:19:47+00:00
Introducing students to the fundamentals!
This app does the following:
-./setup.sh
-Installs Ollama Docker Container
-Pulls in first LLM (1B Parameter model)
-Starts WebUI chat interface
-Use can one-click deploy other models easily

Lesson plan included on the GitHub page. Put students in front of Kali and have them follow the directions!

Thanks for looking.
by MickeyShmueli | 2026-03-04 15:19:55+00:00
the mock tool platform thing is smart. testing agents against real APIs is a nightmare, you get flakiness, you burn through rate limits, and you can't reproduce failures

one thing i'm curious about: how do you handle testing the tool selection logic itself? like the agent choosing WHICH tool to call is often where things break, not the tool execution

we had a support agent that would sometimes call the "refund order" tool when the user just wanted to check order status. the tool worked perfectly, the LLM just kept picking the wrong one. your mock platform lets you verify the tool returns the right data, but does it catch when the agent calls the wrong tool entirely?

also the full-session evaluation vs turn-by-turn is spot on. had a similar issue with a verification flow where each individual turn looked fine in langsmith but the overall flow was completely broken. you'd see "assistant asked for name" (good), "assistant asked for phone" (good), "assistant processed request" (good), but it never actually verified the phone number matched the account

tbh this feels like one of those problems that's obvious in hindsight but nobody builds the tooling for until they get burned in production
by geerlingguy | 2026-03-04 15:19:57+00:00
Apparently the two USB-C ports are different specs [1]

- USB 3.0 10 Gbps with DisplayPort support
- USB 2.0 480 Mbps

Both support charging but only one supports higher speeds and DisplayPort (A18 Pro limitation, as Apple probably doesn't dedicate much silicon to USB I/O).

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/04/macbook-neo-features-tw...