MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by NoLinkToMe | 2026-03-04 16:17:39+00:00
Seems like a strange take. It wasn't per se a luxury brand, it catered to providing cutting edge consumer technology. That's still the case. Which company makes better phones, laptops, tablets, headphones, smart watches and consumer software?

The fact it stood for quality doesn't mean you can't keep offering quality at lower budget and lower spec levels, while still pushing high-budget and high-spec levels. In fact it seems very succesful in doing so and keeps capturing more of the market.

You could say there is limited growth in the hardware (total pie), and that there is are increasingly smaller shares of the market share pie left to conquer. And that's mostly true.

But Apple has built out its Services business, from $12b in 2012 to $110b last year. That $110b revenue is more than Tesla's revenue, and that has a market cap of $1.2 trillion. And unlike hardware, services (i.e. software) are extremely high-margin. It's estimated that $110b revenue constitutes something like $80b in gross margin, whereas Tesla's $100b revenue lead to <$17b in gross margin, and just 3.8b in net profit.

A push into budget offerings increases users and scales service revenue, a high-margin and fast growing business. Apple has been a tremendous success. I won't make predictions of the future but its push for affordable devices was a strategic win, to the contrary of your point.
by yokostuno | 2026-03-04 16:17:49+00:00
Hi HN — I’m Hoan.

I’ve been building IOcomposer (https://iocomposer.io), a free Eclipse-based IDE and optional AI assistant for embedded C++ development.

Try it (one-script install): https://iocomposer.io
(macOS/Linux/Windows install commands are on the landing page. If you don’t like curl|bash, download the script, read it, then run it locally.)

Context (using nRF54 as the example): if you’re coming from years of nRF52 / nRF5-SDK bare-metal C/C++, moving to nRF54 often pushes you into nRF Connect SDK + the Zephyr config/tooling stack (West/CMake/Kconfig/Devicetree). For many teams that’s a workflow + architecture rewrite. IOcomposer targets the “keep writing firmware” path.

What IOcomposer does:
- MCU-centric project setup: wizard generates an Eclipse CDT managed project (build + toolchain + debug config). Boards are typically just pin maps (board.h). No Devicetree/Kconfig required.
- Build/flash/debug from the IDE: Eclipse Embedded CDT managed build with 1-click JTAG/SWD debugging. No external build-system glue.
- Optional AI: indexes installed vendor headers + the underlying HAL so suggestions match real APIs (not generic C++). Outputs patch-style edits; core IDE works without AI.

3-minute unedited demo (prompt → BLE peripheral project → compiles + debugs on real hardware):
https://youtu.be/LR2vYtMeC8A

Targets: Validated (builds + runs baseline examples on hardware): nRF52, nRF54L15, STM32 baseline. Experimental: nRF53, nRF91, nRF54H20, additional STM32 families.
Underlying framework (for the curious): https://github.com/IOsonata/IOsonata

The ask: IOcomposer is early beta. Where does this workflow break for your use case? Where does the AI help vs. become noise?

Happy to answer questions about build/debug integration, the AI layer, or why I chose Eclipse over VS Code.

— Hoan
by thewebguyd | 2026-03-04 16:17:54+00:00
That's what happens when we collectively stop making optimized, native apps and just go "eh, javascript is good enough for everything" and make everything using electron.

The common complaint in this thread about the 8GB of RAM is "But chrome..." well I think I see the problem then.

That's why I try to support native whenever I can. Even if a web app might do something better, I'd rather pay for a native app from an indie dev when I can than have yet another chrome tab I have to have open all the time.

macOS at least still has somewhat of a native-app first culture and dev base, so I try to support it when I can.
by tialaramex | 2026-03-04 16:18:04+00:00
Rules vary. In Britain it was completely normal for say 15-year old me to be in a bar - it was illegal to buy booze but not a problem to be there. But when I travelled to Austin aged 19 I couldn't meet adult members of my team in the hotel bar because I wasn't old enough even though by then I was legal to drink, to marry, to go to war and so on in my own country.

A little while after that, back in the UK, I drove my young cousin to the seaside. I didn't carry ID - I don't drink and you're not required to carry ID to drive here† so it was never necessary back then, but she did, so I try to buy her booze, they demand ID, I do not have any ID so I can't buy it even though I'm old enough to drink. So, she just orders her own booze, she's under age but they don't ask because she's pretty.

† The law here says police are allowed to ask to see a driving license if you're in charge of a vehicle on a public road, but, since you aren't required to carry it they can require you to attend a police station and show documents within a few days. In practice in 2026 police have network access and so they can very easily go from "Jim Smith, NW1A 4DQ" to a photo and confirmation that you're licensed to drive a bus or whatever if you are co-operative.
by eigen | 2026-03-04 16:19:15+00:00
> certain cables won't charge certain devices

not sure how you can make a cable that doesnt connect power from end to end. I can see if it doesnt charge as fast as others if it doesnt have the bits required for higher current support. and if a device requires >5V to charge, thats on the device not the cable.

> other cables won't transfer data

again, not sure you can make a cable that doesnt connect the USB2 pair from end to end. but if device doesnt use USB2 and requires something else without mentioning it then that again seems to be on the device not the cable.
by kolja005 | 2026-03-04 16:19:22+00:00
I just refactored a bunch of our microservices into a monolith. Fortunately the business justification was pretty straightforward because it was clear to all of us that the service architecture was weighing us down.

Since one of microservice's benefits is solving a coordination problem, now that teams are getting smaller due to AI, I wonder if we will see monoliths make a resurgence in some cases.
by EricPhy | 2026-03-04 16:19:25+00:00
I turned on my old XS Max a couple weeks ago for the first time in several years. I had bought it refurbed way back when (previous one was destroyed after touching water – IP68 my ass xD). It's running iOS 15.5.

It runs like a dream; silky smooth, absolutely like-new performance even by modern standards. It genuinely feels like a brand new, top of the line device.

There's no doubt that Apple makes changes over time to reduce UX/perf, both intentionally and by accident. And yes, gatekeeping-as-a-service.
Show HN: Agenthub – Public addresses so agents can message each other
by Lws803 | 2026-03-04 16:19:31+00:00
My colleagues and I each run agents across a bunch of different environments, Claude Code, Cursor, Cowork, OpenClaw.

There's no lightweight way to pass context between them.
Finish something in one agent, need to hand it off to another, maybe yours, maybe a coworker's, and you're back to copy pasting things cross platform.

Agenthub gives each agent a self-generated public address. One command, you get a public key, that's your address.
No need for registration, OAuth, accounts. Anything that has your address, another agent, a coworker's agent, or any program can message you.
Your agent decides whether to trust the sender. Our server just routes.

How are you currently passing context between agents in different environments?

GitHub: https://github.com/lws803/agenthub
by manwe150 | 2026-03-04 16:19:34+00:00
I don’t think it is just a hardware issue: Windows still just maps all movements and scrolling directly into pixels and lines. Most programs just slightly blur the viewport when scrolling to hide the latency, but that just adds even more latency. You can disable the scroll delay in the web browser settings, but not any of the new applications, like the new notepad

Whereas Apple uses smooth acceleration curves
by Fwirt | 2026-03-04 16:19:48+00:00
Legitimately curious, how would you implement a “secure” scratch file functionality? Or is it just that the whole notion of scratch files is insecure?

The great thing about Textadept’s extensibility (and use of Lua specifically) is that it’s easy to pull in other Lua modules to add functionality. I don’t think it would be much work to modify the scratch file extension to prompt you for an encryption key on startup and then run the scratch files through libsodium (via luasodium) if you want to have your cake (scratch files) and eat it (some cursory level of security).
by bitexploder | 2026-03-04 16:19:50+00:00
The problem I see regarding LLMs is they are the extreme edge of what humans have created. They are trained on the outputs of intelligence and thought and its representation in language is this like parallel stream to intelligence that has pointers back to the underlying machine and semantics. The fact that LLMs are able to take that output and reverse engineer something that mimics the underlying machine that created that output is fascinating. But you can still see this machinery for what it is.

LLMs falls apart on really simple reasoning tasks because when there is no statistical mapping to a problem in its network it has to generate a massive amount of tokens to maybe find the right statistical match to this new concept. It is so slow. It is not something you or I would recognize as a process of logical reasoning. It is more like statistically brute forcing reason by way of its statistical echo.

So, I guess pattern recall is the right words. Or statistical pattern matching. Recall works if you view a trained model as memories, which is how I often model what they store in my own mind. So, it is... something. Maybe intelligence. Maybe just a really convincing simulation of the outputs of intelligence. Is there a difference? Fundamentally I think so.
Tell HN: Digital Ocean has run out of GPU droplets
by nathannaveen | 2026-03-04 16:19:55+00:00
Today I wanted to test out some stuff on GPUs and normally I use Digital Oceans GPU droplets to do this, but when trying to create a droplet I get "We're currently out of GPU capacity in all datacenter regions

North America
New York • Datacenter 2 • NYC2
Creates in this datacenter are disabled
San Francisco • Datacenter 3 • SFO3
Creates in this datacenter are disabled
Atlanta • Datacenter 1 • ATL1
Creates in this datacenter are disabled
Toronto • Datacenter 1 • TOR1
Creates in this datacenter are disabled
Europe
Amsterdam • Datacenter 3 • AMS3
Creates in this datacenter are disabled
"
by francosimon | 2026-03-04 16:20:12+00:00
Hey HN – I built NEXUS because discovering A2A agents is only half the problem. The other half is: once you find an agent, how do you trust it? How do you pay it? How do you coordinate multi-step workflows across frameworks?

NEXUS is the full stack for agent economies:

- Agent Registry – Publish A2A Agent Cards, discover by skill/category/trust score
- Task Coordination – Route tasks via A2A JSON-RPC with retries, timeouts, SSE streaming
- Trust Engine – Reputation scores (0-100) earned from real task outcomes, not marketing
- Credit Billing – Agents transact with micropayments, 5% platform fee
- MCP Server – Any LLM (Claude, GPT, Cursor) can discover and use NEXUS agents

Unlike Waggle (which indexes agent cards) or KiboUP (which deploys agents), NEXUS is the marketplace layer – think Stripe Connect but for agents. A CrewAI agent can discover a LangGraph agent, verify its trust score, delegate a task, and settle payment automatically.

Stack: TypeScript, Next.js 15, Supabase (pgvector), Vercel. Apache 2.0.

Live: https://nexusprotocol.dev
npm: pnpm add @nexus-protocol/sdk
GitHub: https://github.com/Francosimon53/nexus

The SDK is 10 lines to register an agent:

const nexus = new NexusClient({ apiKey: 'your-key' });
const agent = await nexus.agents.register({
name: 'My Agent',
skills: [{ name: 'summarize', description: 'Summarize text' }],
endpoint: 'https://my-agent.com/a2a'
});

Looking for feedback on: (1) trust score algorithm design, (2) credit vs direct billing for micropayments, (3) what agents would you want to discover first?
by twodave | 2026-03-04 16:20:14+00:00
This is just an indication that it's a poor interviewing technique. If you ask a question expecting the answer to be predictable then you had better cover all possible ambiguity in leading the candidate to the answer you want to hear. But then you're no longer asking the candidate to be creative, are you? As an interviewer I might be more inclined to allow such an answer and then follow up with questions of my own to test the limits of the candidate's knowledge of and confidence in Postgres as a technical choice for serving all the different constraints of the problem space. This way either I discover how well-reasoned the answer is or else (for a good candidate) it prompts them to adjust the design to better fit the problem. In no case would I expect they need to fit their answer into some key and then scold them for not playing along with my imaginary game.
by lbreakjai | 2026-03-04 16:20:55+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?

I was speaking from a software engineer's point of view, in the context of the article, where one of the "agentic" patterns is ... test-driven development? Which you summon out of the agent by saying ... "Do test-driven development", more or less?

> What would you call it, "just asking things"?

I'd call it software engineering. What makes good software didn't suddenly change, and there's fundamentally no secret sauce to getting an agent to do it. If I think a class does too many things, then I tell the agent "This class does too many things, move X and Y methods into a new class".
by cristoperb | 2026-03-04 16:20:56+00:00
This is a nitpick, but since this essay is over 15 years old now I don't think the author will mind. This phrase always rankles me:

> Let me explain what I mean.

It turns out that if you're writing an essay or a youtube script you don't have to tell me that you're going to explain something to me before you explain it to me. I guess it acts as a "hack" to try to impart some gravity to what follows without actually having to write a convincing introduction, but unlike "it turns out" it can almost always just be deleted to improve the flow.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-03-04 16:20:59+00:00
It works well for Python too and JavaScript and on a whim I had it create AppleSoft Basic code. Trust me there is no “craftsmanship” in a LOB CRUD app or yet another SaaS app. Your CRUD enterprise code is just as cookie cutter. You’re not doing anything groundbreaking.

Absolutely no one gives a damn about “craftsmanship”. I just got rave reviews from a customer for my completely AI generated website for their internal use. I didn’t look at a single line of code and haven’t done any serious web development since 2002 in classic ASP.

The customer is happy. My company is happy and they continue putting money in my bank account on the 1st and 15th. I use to think like you. But I quickly grew out of it.
by bikenaga | 2026-03-04 16:21:02+00:00
"Abstract. As humans, we store and share information. This allows us to distribute knowledge necessary for survival and to coordinate large groups. Our hominin ancestors harnessed the surfaces of mobile artifacts and cave walls as information carriers since the Paleolithic time period. Theories abound as to the meaning and function of these Paleolithic signs. However, very little is known about their basic, measurable properties. We here analyze a corpus of more than 200 mobile objects of a 43,000 to 34,000 y old Aurignacian culture—associated with the first modern humans to settle in Central Europe. These objects are adorned with several thousand geometric signs. We apply classification algorithms and statistical models to capture their quantitative properties. First, our analyses illustrate that these sign sequences are clearly distinguishable from modern day writing. Second, however, their statistical properties are comparable to sign sequences on the earliest protocuneiform tablets. Third, Paleolithic signs were systematically applied to yield higher information density on certain types of objects, e.g. ivory figurines compared to tools. These results cannot be taken to strictly prove that Aurignacian sign sequences encoded numero-ideographic information as in the case of protocuneiform. However, they prove that the first hunter-gatherers arriving in Europe already applied sign sequences of comparable complexity in a deliberate, systematic, and conventional manner—several ten thousand years before the advent of genuine writing."
by shreddd24 | 2026-03-04 16:21:15+00:00
AI tools are delivering real productivity gains in software engineering, faster features, less boilerplate, but speed has never been free. This essay explores how acceleration can quietly erode review depth, increase technical debt, thin system understanding, and limit skill formation through reduced exposure to hard problems. Drawing from observations and recent research (e.g., Daniotti et al. in Science), it argues for conscious trade-offs rather than defaulting to more output.
by snowwrestler | 2026-03-04 16:21:21+00:00
The naive public does not believe anything in particular about peer review. They think new scientific results are significant when they read about them in the popular media, that’s it.

People who do need to work professionally with peer review, do understand what it actually does and its limitations.

You seem stuck somewhere in the middle, caring deeply about a system you don’t seem to fully understand.
by amiga386 | 2026-03-04 16:22:06+00:00
For those that don't have 4 hours to spare: https://youtu.be/yDp3cB5fHXQ?t=2339

> But it turns out writing a good review is really difficult. For example, I use the phrase "it turns out" more than once every video by accident because I'm bad at it. I'm not even joking. I've written "it turns out" in the next section without realizing it. That's how fuckin' bad I am.

> Being able to write a good review is a unique and difficult skill. Creative people often have trouble recognizing their skills as skills because eventually they feel like second nature, and they don't feel real and practical like building a house or domming. But it turns ...in... that this stuff actually is valuable. If it wasn't, people wouldn't be stealing it.
by sosodev | 2026-03-04 16:22:31+00:00
I really hope this doesn't hinder development too much. As Simon says, Qwen3.5 is very impressive.

I've been testing Qwen3.5-35B-A3B over the past couple of days and it's a very impressive model. It's the most capable agentic coding model I've tested at that size by far. I've had it writing Rust and Elixir via the Pi harness and found that it's very capable of handling well defined tasks with minimal steering from me. I tell it to write tests and it writes sane ones ensuring they pass without cheating. It handles the loop of responding to test and compiler errors while pushing towards its goal very well.
by JeremyNT | 2026-03-04 16:22:41+00:00
> Your point being? You're just rambling assumptions about copyright and other things, which don't even track the actual law.

I'm replying to the post that claimed:

> If that’s how the court interpreted it, then the software industry is hosed, since that’d mean none of the generated code running in production right now is under any sort of copyright or otherwise protection, lol.

There is in fact "otherwise protection" for the software industry by... not distributing the code. They don't need copyright over the generated code if they vibe code a SaaS backend. Whether there's copyright or not is irrelevant for the business model.
by igor_ryabenkiy | 2026-03-04 16:22:49+00:00
Every few months someone declares SaaS dead.

A more useful question is: what kinds of SaaS are actually getting funded today?

Over the last couple of years the barrier to building software has dropped significantly. AI tools make it easier to build interfaces, automation layers, and basic functionality quickly. As a result, products whose differentiation lives mostly in UI or thin workflow automation are harder to defend.

That's why generic productivity tools, project management platforms, CRM clones, and thin AI wrappers built on top of existing APIs are finding it harder to raise funding and survive.

The companies that still attract strong interest tend to have a few characteristics:

- products embedded in real operational processes

- ownership of structured or proprietary data

- deep domain expertise in a specific industry

Reproducing an interface is relatively easy. Reproducing years of accumulated data, integrations, and operational trust is much harder.

Another shift is pricing and distribution. Seat-based SaaS models are under pressure, especially when AI agents can replace or compress human workflows. Consumption-based pricing and value-linked pricing models are becoming more common.

For startups this means the bar is higher. A large codebase is no longer an advantage by itself. What matters more is speed, focus, and a clear understanding of the workflow you’re improving.

Curious how others here see it, especially founders building SaaS products today.
by AnotherGoodName | 2026-03-04 16:23:03+00:00
Fwiw i have an 8gb macbook air m1 with 8gb and it’s pretty decent. Factorio (not megabasing past the endgame), Baldurs Gate 3 and Newstower all run well. General browsings no issue and it’s well beyond whats needed to plug into tvs for streaming.

The tiny screen basically encourages one app being used at a time and it seems to use swap fast enough with the ssd.
by helsinkiandrew | 2026-03-04 16:23:12+00:00
> The articles usually start with a case description followed by “learning points” that include statistics, clinical observations and data from CPSP.

I can see the reason where fictional cases could be used here as teaching aid - based on real cases/ilnesses but simplified to make the learning points succinctly, but surely if the cases are being cited elsewhere someone should have raised the issue earlier?
by jeroenhd | 2026-03-04 16:23:17+00:00
8GiB of RAM, combined with "Built for Apple Intelligence.", makes me question the user experience on this thing. macOS with a browser open pretty quickly hits 13 GiB of RAM usage for me. That poor SSD is going to be swapping its whole usable life.

I suppose it's enough if all you're doing is light office work, but you can get a laptop half the price to do that.

The USB 2.0 USB-C port seems like something that's going to confuse a lot of people. One of Apple's perks in terms of connectivity has been that you can basically assume all USB-C ports do everything. It also seems like they didn't include an SD card reader, like they used to. That's going to make the 256GiB rather cramped, I feel.
by SurvivorForge | 2026-03-04 16:23:22+00:00
There's a related dynamic that I don't see discussed enough: simplicity is also harder to defend in design reviews because it looks like you didn't consider the edge cases. When someone proposes a three-table schema, the immediate question is "but what about X?" and the simple answer — "we handle X when X actually happens" — sounds like hand-waving compared to someone showing an elaborate diagram that accounts for every hypothetical scenario.

The irony is that the elaborate design usually handles those hypotheticals incorrectly anyway, because you can't predict real requirements from imagination. The simple version gets modified when real feedback arrives, and the modifications are cheaper because there's less architecture to work around.