MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pessimizer | 2026-03-12 14:16:34+00:00
> I've been feeling more and more that generative AI represents the average of all human knowledge.

No, it's far worse. It's the mode of all human knowledge. The amount of effort you have to put into an LLM to get it to choose an option that isn't the most salient example of anything that could fit as a response is monumental. They skip exact matches for most common matches; it's basically a continuity from when search engines stopped listening to your queries and just decided what query they wanted to respond to - and it suddenly became nearly impossible to search for people who had the same first name as anyone who was famous or in the news.

I've tried a dozen times to get LLMs to find authors for me, or papers, where I describe what I remember about them fairly exactly. They deliver me a bunch of bestsellers and popular things, over and over again, who don't even match at all large numbers of the criteria I've laid out.

It's why they're dumb and can't accomplish anything original. It's structural. They're inherently biased to deliver lowest common denominator work. If you're trying to deliver something original or unusual, what bubbles up is samplings of the slop that surrounds us every day. They're fed everything, meaning everything in proportion to its presence in the world. The vast majority of things are shit, or better said, repetitions of the same shit that isn't productive. The things that are most readily available are already tapped out. The things that are productive are obscure.

You can't even get LLMs to say some words by asking them to "say word X." They just will always find a word that will fill that slot "better." As I said, this is just google saying "did you mean Y?" But it's not asking anymore, it's telling.

edit: It's also why asking it to solve obscure math problems is a dumb test. If the math problem is obscure enough, and there's only one way to possibly solve it, and somebody did it once, somewhere, or referred to the possibility of solving it that way, once, somewhere, you're going to have a single salient example. It's not a greenfield, it's not a white sheet of paper: it's a green field with one yellow flower on it, or a piece of white paper with one black sentence on it, and you're asking it to find the flower or explain the sentence.

edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346901 - I'm late and long-winded.
by rcleveng | 2026-03-12 14:16:38+00:00
It's been super amazing to see how much they could continue to support newer hardware and keep it going considering that I don't believe they have the kernel source.

It wasn't too long ago I saw OS/2 on some ATM machine that was crashed.

I used to love OS/2 back when developing DOS applications (since I could crash the app and not the machine). OS/2 got me interested in "real OS's" and then SunOS in college, etc.
by wincy | 2026-03-12 14:16:40+00:00
My m1 air with 1TB ssd and 16GB of ram is a little champion, I use it during travel to play indie games like Hades II or Slay the Spire, and it works really well, better than my Steam Deck which broke. The only issue it really has is when I try to plug it into my docking station it struggles mightily with 2 2K screens and a 4K screen, so I just use my desktop in that case.

I am jealous of my wife’s 13” M5 iPad Pro though, that oled screen is gorgeous, a wonder of modern engineering.
by Praney-Behl | 2026-03-12 14:16:45+00:00
I'm Praney, solo developer. I'm partially dyslexic, so since high school I've been converting articles and papers to audio to actually absorb them. That habit became a personal tool. Over the last year that tool became this.

Vois is a desktop voice AI studio. Everything runs on your machine. No cloud calls, no data uploaded, no per-character billing.

Three voice engines in one app: a fast one (English, 6x real-time on Apple Silicon), an expressive one for character work, and a multilingual one covering 23 languages. 63 voices across 15 character archetypes, voice cloning from a 15-second sample, and voice design where you describe the voice you want in plain text and get something in the right ballpark.

The script editor supports multi-speaker dialogue, so game developers can prototype NPC conversations without burning through credits on lines that'll change in the next revision. The timeline is multi-track for mixing and arranging. Mastering covers loudness normalization, de-esser, EQ, and limiter. Export to WAV, MP3, FLAC, or AAC.

Content creators use it for podcast narration and audiobooks. App developers are building it into accessibility tools and AI companion apps. L&D teams use it to keep e-learning voiceovers updated without paying per character on every edit. For me personally, the Listen mode — converting whatever I'm reading into audio — is still the feature I use most.

The build:

Tauri 2, Rust backend, React/TypeScript frontend. GPU acceleration on Windows landed just today in v1.2.1.

No tokens counting, generate UNLIMITED and local.

Pricing: $29/month or $14/month billed annually ($168/year). Free tier: all voices and all engines, 10 generations a day, no card required.

Happy to go deeper on any of the engineering decisions.
Show HN: Oncourse AI – Personal AI Study Mate for Med Students
by monkeypilot | 2026-03-12 14:16:48+00:00
Hi HN! We're Oncourse AI — an AI-powered medical exam prep platform. We built this because watching friends waste 6-12 months on ineffective prep was painful.

The problem: Medical students use static question banks (UWorld, Amboss) + generic study plans. They burn out, waste 10+ hours/week, and have no data on what's actually working. Average pass rate has stagnated for years.

In my college, I got an average 3/4GPA. Then I came across neuroscience principles of learning which made me get a perfect 4/4 GPA with lower effort. But there was no good product which let me apply these principles, and none of them were fun. This is why we built Oncourse.

Our solution: An AI study mate that:
- Lets med students practice clinical scenarios with AI patients that you can chat with and diagnose (Clinical Rounds)
- Gives high-yield questions and adapts the difficulty based on performance
- Give flashcards & interactive lessons - all personalised
- Gives clear explanations with visuals like flowcharts
- Uses spaced repetition for optimal retention

Tech: Uses LLMs for the content and has been reviewed by doctors. And spaced repetition algorithms, with real-time analytics and memory to personalise to students. Available across all platforms.

More than 30,00+ medical students across 30+ countries are using Oncourse AI already to help with their prep and their medical studies.

We're a 6-person team in Bangalore. Open to feedback. Especially if you're prepping for USMLE, NEET-PG, or INI-CET, try it free.
by OJFord | 2026-03-12 14:16:57+00:00
> Laptops also now fall into the trope of good/better/best with Neo/Air/Pro.

...until the bestest Ultra launches, as GP pointed out?

(Also Air used to be 'the light one', not the standard/middling one on same spectrum.)

We could say a similar thing with the Dell names above, the point is that it's confusing to work out which you need/want when there's so many, not that they don't fall in some sort of order across a line from mediocre to best.
by ifwinterco | 2026-03-12 14:17:17+00:00
A better measure is what % of the total money supply you have.

I.e. you started out with 2e-20 % of the total money, and after 5 years you now have 1e-20 % of the total money, then whatever happened to CPI, you've been diluted and you would probably have been better off investing in something else other than cash.

That makes sense in theory, but in reality what "total money supply" is is a complete can of worms and basically impossible to measure
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-03-12 14:17:24+00:00
A lot of $350-ish Windows machines also don’t have SSDs but instead eMMC storage, which is dog slow and will make modern SSD-mandatory Windows feel even more awful to use.

If Windows/Linux/x86 is non-negotiable and that’s your budget, I would never in a million years recommend anything brand new. This is when you go pick up a $350 used midrange ThinkPad on eBay. It won’t outperform a Neo in terms of CPU and battery life but I guarantee it’ll be a better experience than the garbage routinely sold at this price point.
by gizmondo | 2026-03-12 14:17:26+00:00
There is no connection between profits and dividends, some monstrously profitable companies pay little to no dividends and return money to shareholders via buybacks. The act of doing an acquisition by itself also does not affect profits.

The reason Atlassian doesn't "declare a profit" is that they are not profitable - they pay a lot with SBC, thus diluting shareholders year after year and not returning anything.
by hansvm | 2026-03-12 14:17:28+00:00
Cheating is possible in the abstract, but I found a tight correlation between interview and take-home performance. For whatever reason, candidates didn't seem to cheat much.

The AI point is worth diving into a little. This was a year ago, so SOTA was worse, but I didn't find it terribly hard to write questions AI couldn't solve, whose answers you couldn't search for, and which good candidates could solve. The test was a few of those questions and a few which were easier to cheat, and almost nobody had good scores on just the cheatable section.

I don't think that moat will exist indefinitely, but today's AI just isn't very good at a lot of incredibly basic tasks unless the operator has enough outside knowledge to guide it in the right direction (and if a candidate did that I mostly wouldn't care because, by definition, they had the knowledge I was looking for). I use AI a lot, it's great at a lot of things, some even quite complicated, but it was weaknesses, and those are pretty easy to exploit.
by someperson | 2026-03-12 14:17:55+00:00
I think the lede is somewhat being buried here.

Dolphin is bringing back support for the Triforce arcade cabinet that was jointly developed by Nintendo, Sega and Namco that was dropped by Dolphin in 2016.

Notably games includes F-Zero AX (not to be confused with F-Zero GX on Gamecube) and Mario Kart Arcade GP 1 and 2.

This is pretty big!

https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2026/02/16/rise-of-the-triforce...
by the_af | 2026-03-12 14:17:56+00:00
(According to the theory) it is a terrible way to live, because everything the Clueless believes is false.

The Clueless believe their work makes a difference, but it doesn't. They believe it matters they do a good job, but it doesn't truly matter except for the advancement and power plays of the Sociopaths. They believe themselves "company men", and are loyal to a company that despises them and sees them as completely expendable.

The Losers understand this, and therefore devote their energy to other things outside work, where they find meaning in life.

(Again, I understand this is what the theory states and doesn't necessarily reflect reality. But I do think there's a kernel of truth to it.)
by DrScientist | 2026-03-12 14:18:26+00:00
That works better but is expensive - quite often you have to show the public route has failed before you can justify active recruitment.

Also large companies intrinsically know that in the end active recruitment is a bit of a zero sum game - you poach your competitors staff they poach yours - so there is a hesitancy in getting involved in that game.

I have seen people who are actively recruited ( hey we think your great please apply ), who are then forced to do these kind of HR screenings ( because that's the process ). This clearly doesn't make any sense and sends entirely the wrong signal.
by saafree | 2026-03-12 14:18:29+00:00
You're not entirely wrong — English isn’t my first language (I'm based in Vietnam), so I did use an LLM to help polish the wording.

The underlying idea, though, is something we’ve been exploring for a while: if AI agents become part of the operational workforce of an enterprise, what system layer coordinates governance, decision, and execution across the organization?

Most current tools (agent frameworks, automation platforms, copilots) solve local problems, but they don't really function as a system layer for the enterprise itself.

Curious where you think that coordination should live instead.
by mrothroc | 2026-03-12 14:18:43+00:00
Nice, I've been working on the same problem from a different direction. Instead of analyzing sessions after the fact, I built a pipeline that structures them. Stages (plan, design, code, review, same as you'd have with humans) with gates in between.

The gates categorize issues into auto-fix or human-review. Auto-fix gets sent back to the coding agent, it re-reviews, and only the hard stuff makes it to me. That structure took me from about 73% first-pass acceptance to over 90%.

What I've been focused on lately is figuring out which gates actually earn their keep and which ones overlap with each other. The session-level analytics you're building would be useful on top of this, I don't have great visibility into token usage or timing per stage right now.

I wrote up the analysis:
https://michael.roth.rocks/research/543-hours/

I also open sourced my log analysis tools:
https://github.com/mrothroc/claude-code-log-analyzer
by rendleflag | 2026-03-12 14:18:50+00:00
Again, the question is who blesses the expert? There’s a difference in having a voice and your voice being taken seriously.

If someone posts a link on a a new laptop, who should respond? I am not an expert on the current laptop market, but I have options about it. Maybe my English is not the best so I run through an AI to clean it up of ambiguities or wrong wording. Maybe I say “I like to take my laptop from behind” when I meant “I lift my laptop from the back”. An AI could point out this type of error.
Monitoring the APIs and tools our AI agents depend on
by thaoulani | 2026-03-12 14:18:50+00:00
Hi HN,

One thing we've been noticing while building systems recently is how much modern applications depend on external APIs.

Stripe / OpenAI / Anthropic / Twilio / Supabase / Resend / various 3P APIs

Most teams have very good observability for infrastructure:

servers / containers / databases / queues

But much less visibility into the external systems their software depends on.

The issue becomes even more visible with AI agents.

Agents often rely on multiple APIs and tools to complete tasks. If one dependency slows down or starts failing, the agent behavior changes in ways that can be surprisingly hard to diagnose.

We ran into this repeatedly while building production systems, so we started working on something to make that layer visible.

DependWatch focuses specifically on monitoring external dependencies.

It tracks things like:

• latency across API providers
• failure rates per endpoint
• cost signals across APIs
• alerts when dependencies degrade

The goal is simple: one place to see whether the APIs and tools your system relies on are healthy.

We've been building it quietly for a while and are starting to open early access.

Would love feedback from people running systems with lots of API dependencies or AI agent workflows.

https://www.dependwatch.app/

Curious how others here monitor external dependencies in their systems.
by TremendousJudge | 2026-03-12 14:18:55+00:00
It's also amazing that, if the rich, non-oil producing countries of the world actually went and transitioned away from oil, these ""problematic"" countries would lose all their power. All the middle eastern militaries are founded by oil an gas exports, the autocratic regimes are kept in power via military might, and the only reason why they matter in the international stage is that they export oil and gas.
Show HN: Libre Closet – self-hosted wardrobe organizer (single Docker run)
by gian-lazzarini | 2026-03-12 14:19:10+00:00
I built a self-hosted wardrobe organizer that runs as a single Docker container.
You photograph your clothes, categorize them, and build saved outfits. It's a
PWA so it installs to your phone's home screen and works offline.

docker run -d -p 3000:3000 -v librecloset_data:/app/data ghcr.io/lazztech/libre-closet

No external services required. SQLite by default, optional PostgreSQL. Local disk
storage by default, optional S3-compatible provider. Optional JWT auth for
multi-user households, or run completely open for personal use.

There are a handful of wardrobe apps in the wild, but they're either unmaintained,
cloud-only, or require a stack of services to stand up. This one is a single
image. I wanted something I'd actually use.

Source: https://github.com/lazztech/libre-closet
Live demo: https://librecloset.lazz.tech (register free, no email verification)
by abruzzi | 2026-03-12 14:19:15+00:00
I think the real point is a) change is difficult, and b) we all have different needs.

If you asked me to use a Windows machine I would be frustrated from day one and would want my Mac back, but everyone else where I work (except one) uses Windoes every day, and I don't know how they do it.

As far as needs, I haven't been a serious dev for a long time (ask my employees who won't let me near any code), so containerization is a non issue I could care less about for myself, but (for personal use) there are apps on Mac that work for me that don't run on Windows, and definitely don't run on Linux.

There are probably reasonably "objective" measures that can be used to rank OS's agains each other, like security or bugs, but even some measures that sound objective may be based on data but their value is subjective. The OS wars are old, and maybe I'm old too, but they're getting tired (unless we want to discuss how the AmigaOS was better than any other OS at the time but with one fatal flaw.)
by sriramgonella | 2026-03-12 14:19:20+00:00
Rails feels like one of those frameworks that quietly keeps winning because of developer productivity rather than hype cycles.In a lot of startups I’ve seen, teams spend enormous time assembling stacks (React and multiple backend services + infra glue) when Rails would have shipped the same product months earlier.
Curious if the newer generation of developers is rediscovering the value of opinionated frameworks.?
by dogtimeimmortal | 2026-03-12 14:19:20+00:00
These are not cheap machines! Looking around online, i found a lot of 4 Shima Seiki machines listed for $40k! If someone is interested getting into knitting, I would recommend starting with some cheap hand-crank machines from a brand like Sentro. You will learn a lot more, and there is a lot you can do with knit tubes. If absolutely don't want a tube, you can get a so-called panel machine. I think you can find one on Amazon or Etsy - i forget the listing i saw, but it was like $500(much less than a Shima Seiki).

Here are a couple useful sites to get started:

https://machineknitting.fandom.com/wiki/Machine_Knitting_Wik...

https://www.knittingparadise.com/forums/machine-knitting.20/
by canuckintime | 2026-03-12 14:19:37+00:00
I had a Surface Book 2 WITHOUT the base i.e. just the screen. Best tablet I've ever had. 15" and yet thinner (then) and lighter than an iPad Pro which still doesn't come bigger than 13".

Two useful accessories I had were 'surface connector to USBC' adapter (to mitigat the small battery) and a ring mouse. Scrolling on touchscreen for Windows has been as good as MacBook haptic trackpads, certainly better than most Windows oem trackpads.

There was brief moment in time where Panay was poised with the Surface Book and Surface Studio (just wish they made a monitor version of the studio) to give Apple a run for their money. But they replaced the Surface Book with Surface Laptop studio, devolved the OS with ads and AI and now I'm mainly only on the Mac...
by hermanzegerman | 2026-03-12 14:19:52+00:00
Where do I get a Laptop with a Nvidia GPU for 600$ ?

I'm right now in the Market for a new Laptop, because I need way more GPU Power than my T470 provides, and to be honest the MacBookPros are quite competitively priced compared to the P-ThinkPads with Nvidia Cards. (Both around 3000€)
They also finally offer a matte screen option

The only thing holding me back right now is the soldered SSD, RAM (and shitty Linux support).

It was quite nice being able to upgrade RAM, SSD and replace the Battery on it. Otherwise it wouldn't have lasted for 9 years
by specialist | 2026-03-12 14:20:19+00:00
Agree with all. Especially about nationalization.

The origins of each colony (a la Albion's Seed) continue to shape our politics. Spoiler: The Virginians won.

> it took a "white knight"

Yes and: each progressive reform, however modest, barely squeaked thru, overcoming huge opposition. The Farmstead Act (et al), New Deal, Great Society, ACA, IRA, etc.

Followed by an outsized reactionary backlash. Every single time. Just like the current cycle of revanchism.

--

Albion's Seed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed
by lich_king | 2026-03-12 14:21:38+00:00
You break highlighting and copy-and-paste. If I want to share or comment on a piece of your website... I can't. I guess this can be a "feature" in some rare cases, but a major usability pain otherwise.

I'm not a fan of all the documentation and marketing content for this project evidently being AI-generated because I don't know which parts of it are the things you believe and designed for, and which are just LLM verbal diarrhea. For example, your GitHub threat model says this stops "AI training crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot, etc.)" - is this something you've actually confirmed, or just something that AI thinks is true? I don't know how their scrapers work; I'd assume they use headless browsers.
by dwa3592 | 2026-03-12 14:21:40+00:00
Nice. I have been working on something which utilizes obfuscation, honeypots etc and I have come to a few realizations-

- today you don't have to be a dedicated/motivated reverse engineer- you just need Sonnet 4.6 and let it do the work.

- you need to throw constant/new gotchas to LLMs to keep them on their tows while they try to reverse engineer your website.
by ifwinterco | 2026-03-12 14:22:05+00:00
There's actually (at least) three things going against you going short:

- position has significant negative carry (what you're talking about there)

- stock/bond prices are nominal and the government constantly prints the denominator so prices tend to go up even if there's no actual growth

- for equities there is a genuine long term positive drift over time even if the denominator doesn't change

So yes, it's hard to make money going short and timing is everything
by throwpoaster | 2026-03-12 14:22:11+00:00
The MacBook Neo is, to my mind, almost certainly a sink for rejected mobile chips. My understanding is that they run a nominally six-core chip in five-core mode.

This is fine, and actually a brilliant business move to monetize inventory investment that is otherwise sunk while releasing a new product that doesn't require them to fight for fab capacity.

It's just not something I'm seeing in the consumer discourse that, perhaps, people might like to understand.
by teiferer | 2026-03-12 14:22:13+00:00
Sure.

The original post is a blog post that somebody put into their blog. Its purpose isn't (necesaarily) to engage into a discussion or even interact with anybody. It's the root of a discussion tree, if you will, a place to make a bold statement or just express a random thought.

In contrast, the post I replied to is a response, which by definition (and purpose of this forum) is meant to contribute to a discussion. It's an inner node of a discussion tree and thereby needs to engage with the presented argument.

So, this is an apples-vs-oranges situation, not a double-standards situation.
by nananana9 | 2026-03-12 14:22:15+00:00
I'd pretty much always store pitch/yaw for a first/third person controller. This makes it trivial to modify the values in response to input - `pitch += mouse_delta.y` and to clamp the pitch to a sane range (-90 to 90 deg) afterwards.

You can then calculate a quaternion from the pitch/yaw and do whatever additional transforms you wish (e.g. temporary rotation for recoil, or roll when peeking around a corner).