MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by std_move | 2026-03-03 18:47:12+00:00
This is the best laptop for the general consumer around $1k.

- it has no annoying fans, it is completely silent
- a high res display with no PWM flickering and reasonable response times, no burn-in issues, enough brightness for outdoor use
- best-in-class hardware, very very efficient, amazing single thread performance, good multi thread, very good GPU
- no Microsoft Windows annoyances, ads, bloatware, broken stuff all the time
- much better real world performance on battery than x64 processors (!). you can get reasonable perf by setting Intel/AMD CPUs to high perf, but then goodbye battery life and get ready for very loud fans. this is simply a point not emphasized enough, the real world battery perf of Intel/AMD laptops is very sluggish on default power modes and despite that, they consume more battery than the M5
- amazing battery life
- good workmanship, no creaking, good hardware overall (mics, webcam, keyboard, touchpad!)
- very good speakers

There is simply nothing comparable in the Windows laptop world. You can maybe get a cheaper Windows laptop but it will be terrible in almost everything - the new Apple budget MacBooks will probably be a much better choice. And around $1000, there is no comparison. I wish it was different.
by written-beyond | 2026-03-03 18:47:18+00:00
You've basically described Flutter and Jetpack compose(for desktop). The problem really does turn into effort to pay off, even if we stayed with JS and the rendering engine, figured out a way to compile JS into native code and completely stripping all of the unused functionality and doing the same thing with the rendering engine. All of that would need to be made, it's not like electron apps literally crash you machine. You have metrics, hundreds of millions of devices running electron apps at a daily basis. Unless you make your own company, I don't think anyone can convince their leadership to take such a decision.
by keeda | 2026-03-03 18:47:22+00:00
Unpopular opinion: AI is just a new medium of art.

It's like the advent of photography after painting. It was dismissed as an art form for a long time:

- https://antique-photography.com/when-was-photography-conside...

- https://medium.com/@aaronhertzmann/how-photography-became-an... (from 2018!)

Similarly, right now AI art is widely dismissed as "just prompts." But having tried many times to generate images via prompts, it's very hard to get what's in my head to show up in the result. I ended up spending much more time editing the images than creating them... but, I could do that with much simpler tools, without learning advanced tools like Photoshop.

In a couple of instances though, the AI has blown me away by generating something that better captured what I wanted to convey! I suspect the trick is in beng very detailed in where I was coming from and the emotions I wanted to engender.

I predict appreciation of AI art will shift to overall imagination, taste, and appreciation of technical nuances noticeable only to those "skilled in the art", such as prompting techniques and the quirks of the model used. I even suspect there will be genres of AI art using weaker models (kind of like photographs with Polaroid cameras.)
by kjshsh123 | 2026-03-03 18:47:27+00:00
Wages also changed since then. During COVID food outpaced wages. Since then, wages have outpaced food. Maybe not for you but on average.

Just like food prices didn't just jump one day, they won't just drop one day. We target 2% inflation, so they'll still go up, but slower.

Going up slower than wages means better affordability.
by w_kr | 2026-03-03 18:47:34+00:00
Location: Atlanta, GA, USA (ET)
Remote: Yes (US)
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: Interactive Prototypes, Design Systems, Figma, AI tools, HTML, CSS, Tailwind, JS
Résumé/CV: https://williamkriigel.com
Email: wkriigel@gmail.com
Looking for: Staff / Senior Product Designer roles in Cyber Security, DevSecOps, or related

Product designer with engineering background. Focused complex workflows and system problems in security and tooling. 10+ years experience with small, mid, and enterprise teams.
by southerntofu | 2026-03-03 18:47:57+00:00
There's fallacies with your argument:

- it's technically illegal for me to do that here in France, even if i'm the legal owner of the woods

- it could be a choice to live low-tech alternative lifestyles, if there was not active attacks by the State and corporations to destroy any kind of alternative means of survival, such as the very violent processes over the past few centuries to destroy subsistance farming and non-monetary exchanges (laws & regulations, expropriations, imprisonment and murder of political opposition such as during the Paris Commune)

- it doesn't matter what we personally and individually do: this is a problem at scale that can only be addressed at scale, and pretending otherwise is a bad faith argument on either side ("recycle your plastic bottles to save the planet")

- there's a wide range of possibilities for durable/repairable goods and sustainable lifestyles in between primitivism and our current ecocidal nightmare: to frame political choices as a binary is very limited or dishonest from an intellectual perspective
by Crowberry | 2026-03-03 18:48:14+00:00
I’m going to be giving off: ”Grandpa screams at clouds”-vibe with this comment. But I’m so sick and tired of ads and popups online.

I’ve barely gotten far enough to be drawn in by the article and then I get a giant popup (on mobile) to subscribe to read more posts like this.

Put it at the very end and I might. I’ve made it a habit to just exit the article whenever this happens. Nobody respects each other’s time in today’s internet, more intrusiveness = numbers go up.

Rant done
LotusQ Cross platform voice dictation with free local Whisper(Mac/Windows/Linux)
by nkodev | 2026-03-03 18:48:16+00:00
I've been building LotusQ for the past several months — a voice dictation app that runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux simultaneously.

How it works technically:

Push-to-talk hotkey (configurable) → audio captured → transcribed → pasted directly into the active text field via OS accessibility APIs
- Local mode: runs faster-whisper (or MLX-Whisper on Apple Silicon) entirely on-device. Audio never leaves the machine.
- Cloud mode (Pro): audio → Cloud → LLM for ASR → Llama 3.1-8B for formatting → back to client via WebSocket
- App-aware formatting: detects the active app (Discord, Outlook, VS Code, Slack) and applies different formatting styles via prompt engineering
- Auto-learn dictionary: reads the text field 7s after injection via UIA/AXUIElement, diffs against injected text, learns corrections

Stack: Tauri (Rust + React), Python FASTAPI, GCP Cloud Run, Supabase auth, Stripe billing.

Why I built it: Wispr Flow is the dominant player, but it's Mac& Windows only and has no free tier. Linux users have been asking for over a year. I wanted something that actually works everywhere, respects privacy in local mode, and gets smarter over time.

Free tier: Unlimited local Whisper, forever. No account required to start.

Download and source available at: https://lotusq.app/download

Happy to answer questions about the architecture — the hybrid local/cloud routing logic and the UIA-based correction detection were the trickiest parts.
by yieldcrv | 2026-03-03 18:48:17+00:00
traders use bloomberg terminals at $30,000/yr

they don't theoretically have to aside from that industry going that direction and the stickiness of communication through it, but it simplifies some of their job

it didn't revolutionize trading or make it more democratized, despite simplifying some aspects of the industry

the technology could have but it remains a specialized tool

thats the way I see agentic coding tools and the trend is following it

once the UX designers, PMs and ideas guys get bored of their newfound SaaS slop capabilities, it will be back to specialists doing this and nobody else
by asah | 2026-03-03 18:48:22+00:00
great post - let me add that native was forced into some of this by the web:

1. locked up files ==> that's for security, which wasn't an issue in the 1990s.

2. inconsistent look ==> people are embedding browsers inside apps for all sorts of reasons, ruining the "native" UI/UX even if the OS "look" were stable.

It took a while, but once again open source and the web kinda won, though if you like consistency, then I agree it's a pyrrhic victory...
by pjmlp | 2026-03-03 18:48:56+00:00
Exactly because Android Java isn't Java proper, it is Google's J++.

Even after they dumped Apache Harmony for OpenJDK, they only cherry pick what they feel like from OpenJDK, relatively easy to check, comparing the AOSP source code with OpenJDK.

Then there is the whole history of what ART can do, versus the native JVM bytecodes, where some features are lost in translation, e.g. lambdas aren't nested classes, they make use of invokedynamic.

Additionally they are in no hurries to update Java baseline version, other than when Kotlin starts losing access to more recent Java libraries at Maven Central.
by cdcox | 2026-03-03 18:49:05+00:00
I think there are few plausible reasons not mentioned.

We are still early in the tech. 2021 LLMs were not fit for any real purpose outside zany Madlibs. The tech has only really gotten fit for purpose since GPT4 and coherent models only got cheap and fast enough since llama 2 (July 2023). Even then smart models only got affordable around Deepseek v2 (May 2024) which was the first gpt4 level model to consistently serve subdollar per million tokens. You need at least a GPT4 level model to make a really interesting game. That's like a blink of time in game making time, indie games have 2-3 year cycles at best and AAA are like 5+. Even now fast, tool native interaction is only just coming online and there are no cheap models for that. Really fun game playing AI needs something like that to be magical.

There are AI games they just don't look like AI games neal.fun's Infinite Craft made a boat load of money and was very popular and it was powered by a Llama backend. Character ai and it's dozen copycats are like online storytelling/roleplay things. Medium popularity in America and massive overseas. That could be a game or like a game platform or maybe it's more like FanFic, it has no fail state but people have made cards with fairly complex rules and states. Skryim and a few other games have pretty popular AI mods that let you add in NPC interactions that can talk, see, and even change their interactions with AI. The Skryim one Mantella has more than ~100k downloads.

We don't really have a northstar yet. Making a good game is really hard and usually takes someone doing something weird and clever. Minecraft is obvious in hindsight but many games on the way failed to make 'legos on the computer' fun. Incorporating AI breaks all the 'rules' of gaming. It operates slowly, it has high potential to break the rules and it has nearly unrecoverable failure states. Indie devs haven't figured out the best way to handle this and I suspect most big companies have just washed their hands of the whole thing until the AI gets faster, cheaper, and more stable.
by mindslight | 2026-03-03 18:49:32+00:00
> They didn't care about ideals any more than modern administrations

They obviously did, just like recent presidential administrations both D and R did - by at the very least paying lip service to them. There was real value in that, and we took it for granted. The current regime is just as (if not more) performative, but they're signalling vices rather than virtues. Following that example makes for a worse society, regardless of how much we actually live up to the virtues in practice.
by eatsyourtacos | 2026-03-03 18:49:46+00:00
Very true.. also I would say even what I get out of claude code is absolutely phenomenal right now.. but sometimes it does take minutes. I just had it take 15 minutes to do something. But what if you had access to the hardware to run it basically instantly?

Just think how these big companies will use that kind of power for themselves to get even more extreme uses out of it.
by viblo | 2026-03-03 18:49:52+00:00
Regardless if the exponential trend the author writes about is correct or not, I do think the cost of AI is reversing the trend for coding. For quite some time the tools we used have become cheaper and cheaper and more avaliable than before. Nowadays compilers, IDEs and other tools are increasingly open source or at least free or very cheap. But with AI its no longer the case.

I wrote more about this in a blog, at https://www.viblo.se/posts/ai-hobbycoding/
by timschumi | 2026-03-03 18:49:56+00:00
> LineageOS was one of the OG de-googled Android ROMs, renamed a few years after Android Jellybean IIRC.

Existing since 2009 as CyanogenMod and since 2016 as LineageOS, that would have been around the time where Android 7 (Nougat) was current.

PS: Not that we are in any way degoogled, other than what we are forced to by the license.
by overgard | 2026-03-03 18:50:11+00:00
I saw a quote today that resonated with me:

"The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth. --@jeffowski"

While I don't think that's the only purpose, I can't help but think that people that become dependent on these tools will have neither wealth nor skill. Keep your skills sharp!
by ToucanLoucan | 2026-03-03 18:50:51+00:00
Respectfully: skill issue. My employer ships software native for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android. Different codebases for all (though they share a lot of common stuff), all maintained by a shockingly small team.

It’s absolutely achievable if you give a shit about your products and I’m long over hearing the bevy of usual fucking excuses from software houses often magnitudes larger than us who struggle to even keep their electron shit working correctly.
by sleepyguy | 2026-03-03 18:50:57+00:00
I wonder if people started to lose their jobs, would that bother them?

I suppose there are also security concerns. Could he put a lot of pressure on NATO and Spain's membership which would certainly cause a lot of pain. I know Spain is far from Russia and all but he could refuse to sell them any parts and weapon systems.

Just saying, why poke a pile of shit and then get it all over you. Trump is temporary and best to just quietly wait it out, unless you want to smell like shit.
by headcanon | 2026-03-03 18:51:00+00:00
+1 for Tauri, I've been using it for my recent vibe-coded experimental apps. Making rust the "center of gravity" for the app lets me use the best of all worlds:

- declarative-ish UI in typescript with react

- rust backend for performance-sensitive operations

- I can run a python sidecar, bundled with the app, that lets me use python libraries if I need it

If I can and it makes sense to, I'll pull functionality into rust progressively, but this give me a ton of flexibility and lets me use the best parts of each language/platform.

Its fast too and doesn't use a ton of memory like electron apps do.
by reenorap | 2026-03-03 18:51:38+00:00
I predicted months ago that $20/month isn't going to fly anymore. I think if it produces code, it will jump to $1000/month at least. The value of the LLM nowadays is much higher than $1000/month and I think we will see that happen in 2026, because these companies need to make money ASAP in order to get more funding for the next round of training.
by jerf | 2026-03-03 18:51:48+00:00
From my post at https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/what_value_code_in_ai_era/ , in a footnote:

"It has been lost in AI money-grabbing frenzy but a few years ago we were talking a lot about AIs being “legible”, that they could explain their actions in human-comprehensible terms. “Running code we can examine” is the highest grade of legibility any AI system has produced to date. We should not give that away.

"We will, of course. The Number Must Go Up. We aren’t very good at this sort of thinking."

"But we shouldn’t."
by libertine | 2026-03-03 18:52:29+00:00
I think the case he's making is that it should not be viewed as victims because it's "normal" in underdeveloped third world countries.

It's of course one of the most messed up things to read, but it's a common thought process of people influenced by propaganda from those countries regines, or are actively spreading propaganda: the framing of "so called western countries/first world countries/etc" is the first red flag.

And then of course the angle is that western countries are decadent and are denying traditional values. This is a common thread of the Russian regime propaganda... Because when the regine destroyed everything else, with no prospects of a good future, it's traditional misery that has to make up for the rest.

Somehow this propaganda works with some people in the west lol
by llm_nerd | 2026-03-03 18:52:32+00:00
I agree with the core assumption (to a point -- there is a point of diminishing return where pretty excellent tools are cheap), but this line is ridiculous-

"the cheapest usable tier of Claude Code is $100/mo"

Bullshit. I have the $20 plan and seldom hit the quota. I used to hit the distinct Opus quota, but now that isn't separate I just don't anymore. Even enabled the extra quota charging and have never paid a penny more.

And to be clear, to most people I'm a pretty heavy user. Like, practically it has a heavy influence on my day to day work, and is an amazing contributor to my functions.

The people who think only the $100+ tier is "usable" are often (albeit not always) usually the people doing the worthless, but "forward-thinking" nonsense, throwing millions of tokens aspirational. Like the OpenClaw nonsense is 99.99% worthless filler where people chased a productivity hack that in reality is just hobbyist silliness.

It's token shredding for almost no value as people show that they're with it. People gloating about their swarms of agents doing effectively nothing are another "I need to max out everything" people. These are the ones who yield the result that AI has no benefit to productivity, as they overdo something to such ridiculous extremes.

The same for the laughably poorly thought out MCP servers that flood a service with a quarter million tokens for negligible value. So much insanely poorly considered nonsense is in use, to the great glee of the AI companies. And, I mean, I guess I should thank these people for basically subsidizing it for the rest of us.

The rest of us are surgically applying AI precisely, to incredible effect. The cheap plans are ridiculously valuable.
by defrex | 2026-03-03 18:53:02+00:00
That compound command issue is infuriating, and really what drove me to make this.

FWIW, the prompt is easily adjustable in a `.claude/PERMISSION_POLICY.md` file in the project.

It's also quite easy to remix the script with claude to meet your needs. Right now it prompts the user and runs the script, so it's a race. If you added a delay in the script and increased the hook timeout in `.claude/settings.json` you should be able to accomplish what you're looking for pretty easily.
by S_Bear | 2026-03-03 18:53:10+00:00
I work as a librarian (and have been one for 25+ years), but I kind of hate the things that librarians should care about. I got into this business because I like helping elderly people in my community with their smartphones and tablets, and getting children to read. I don't care about cosplaying as a social worker or lawyer, fighting injustice and challenging assumptions; I just want to help Mildred w her iPad so she can zoom with her grandkids.
by cortesoft | 2026-03-03 18:53:25+00:00
Yes, the Paradox of Voting is the exact same situation [1]. My decision to vote is not rational, but I know if all the rational people don't vote that is bad, and so I focus on the other parts of voting, like civic pride and the little sticker that says "I voted"

> It may be you don't believe in democracy at all, and that's fair, but consumer action is the only way you can affect business decisions, by joining the decision-cohort you agree with more. Joining the opposite cohort because it's less work represents that you're okay with things continuing in that direction.

I actually believe even less in 'voting with your wallet' than in actual voting, for all the same reasons except the cost of 'voting' in this case is even higher (choosing an individually suboptimal option with my wallet hurts me directly even more than the cost of voting in an election does... e.g. choosing to pay more to avoid major corporations costs me every time I shop) I personally think the only way to avoid companies destroying the common good for profit is to price in the destruction to make it explicit (e.g. carbon taxes, pollution taxes, etc).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_voting
by alpaca128 | 2026-03-03 18:54:12+00:00
The Files app cannot access images in the Photos app or music in the Music app. The only way to add music to the Music app is to copy the files onto the iPhone from a computer. You can however install VLC player and copy the files into the VLC folder. I guess VLC player is more trustworthy than Apple Music considering it's less isolated. Or Apple really wants you to pay the Music subscription, who knows. Want to give another app access to these files? You'll have to duplicate them, using up more storage space.

I get that it's supposedly about security, but this is not the only secure way. It is however the most convenient secure way for Apple, as now the only simple method of backing up and syncing files through all those isolated containers is iCloud.
by giancarlostoro | 2026-03-03 18:54:40+00:00
On my 24GB RAM M4 Pro MBP some models run very quickly through LM Studio to Zed, I was able to ask it to write some code. Course my fan starts spinning off like the worlds ending, but its still impressive what I can do 100% locally. I can't imagine on a more serious setup like the Mac Studio.
by EduardoBautista | 2026-03-03 18:55:04+00:00
Also, Rust's strong and strict type system keeps Claude honest. It seems as if the big LLM models have trained on a lot of poorly written TypeScript because they tend to use type assertions such as `as any` and eslint disable comments.

I had to add strict ESLint and TypeScript rules to keep guardrails on the coding agents.
by cortesoft | 2026-03-03 18:55:05+00:00
> My own personal bend is that I do not want to be sold anything

You can always choose this no matter what ads they show you. In some ways, choosing to not be sold AFTER being shown ads might be more effective at shutting down that behavior than simply avoiding the ads entirely; forcing the company to pay to show you the ad that you ignore is costlier to them than simply not being able to show you the ad at all.
by igravious | 2026-03-03 18:55:15+00:00
I think I'm going to have to stop reading HackerNews

> I guess it's exactly the opposite for me ... I always hated using "normal" language with the computer.

it's called natural language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language

> I often quip that I became a programmer specifically to avoid having to use spoken language. I always twitch at the thought of using any voice-based assistant.

You're one of these people who think that programming languages are structured and formal whereas in contrast natural language must be unstructured and lacking form? Going by the Chomsky hierarchy of formalisms natural language sits somewhere between context-free and context-sensistive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mildly_context-sensitive_gramm...

> Thinking in systems and algorithms is more enjoyable than using human language when it comes to computers IMHO ...

You don't think in "systems and algorithms" -- those are the outputs of your thinking.
by bigyabai | 2026-03-03 18:55:19+00:00
I say this as a former First Class scout, the entire thing is a racket. The "point" of Boy Scouts is to make you associate pointless meritocratic flair with actual accomplishment. It is a conditioning and propaganda pipeline with the purpose of stimulating enlistment.

The Boy Scouts were not an apolitical fun-fair, which became pretty glaringly obvious when the Army recruiters came by to meet with middle-schoolers. If you didn't enlist, you probably didn't stick around to earn your Eagle scout.