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Why do Macs ask you to press random keys when connecting a new keyboard?

2026-04-06 @ 16:40:46Points: 16Comments: 21

Show HN: I Built Paul Graham's Intellectual Captcha Idea

2026-04-06 @ 16:36:00Points: 27Comments: 28

I felt the same way. So I built one using a mix of simple math, logic, and Twitter/X Community Noted posts. Try sample questions here - https://mentwire.com/sample - without signing up.

- Invites are temporarily open to HN users.

- Onboarding test + one daily question before accessing feed, post or reply.

- Posts authors are anonymous until upvoted or downvoted, forcing evaluation of content on merit.

- Face ID (on-device only) to post/reply, pangram checks for AI text.

Sourcing good questions turned out to be much harder than I thought. If you have suggestions to scale this, I would love to hear. Eventually, could be gated across disciplines/topics to get a competence × interest graph instead of the pure interest graph of today's social networks.

[1] https://x.com/paulg/status/1235949761359904768 [2] https://x.com/paulg/status/1576517990182359040 [3] https://x.com/paulg/status/1514979883948126209 [4] https://x.com/paulg/status/1505842647319126016

Repost from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47577829. This link contains a full quiz and linked directly to sample to try without signing up.

Launch HN: Freestyle: Sandboxes for AI Coding Agents

2026-04-06 @ 16:32:11Points: 55Comments: 22

https://freestyle.sh). We’re building a cloud for Coding Agents.

For the first generation of agents it looked like workflows with minimal tools. 2 years ago we published a package to let AI work in SQL, at that time GPT-4 could write simple scripts. Soon after the first AI App Builders started using AI to make whole websites; we supported that with a serverless deploy system.

But the current generation is going much further, instead of minimal tools and basic serverless apps AI can utilize the full power of a computer (“sandbox”). We’re building sandboxes that are interchangeable with EC2s from your agents perspective, with bonus features:

1. We’ve figured out how to fork a sandbox horizontally without more than a 400ms pause in it. That's not forking the filesystem, we mean forking the whole memory of it. If you’re half way down a browser page with animations running, they’ll be in the same place in all the forks. If you’re running a minecraft server every block and player will be in the same place on the forks. If you’re running a local environment and an error comes up in process that error will be there in all the forks. This works for snapshotting as well, you can save your place and come back weeks later.

2. Our sandboxes start in ~500ms.

Demo: https://www.loom.com/share/8b3d294d515442f296aecde1f42f5524

Compared with other sandboxes, our goal is to be the most powerful. We support full Linux + hardware-virtualization, eBPF, Fuse, etc. We run full Debian with multiple users and we use a systemd init instead of runc. Whatever your AI expects to work on debian should work on these vms, and if it doesn’t send a bug report.

In order to make this possible, we’ve moved to our own bare metal racks. Early in our testing we realized that moving VMs across cloud nodes would not have acceptable performance properties. We asked Google Cloud and AWS for a quote on their bare metal nodes and found that the monthly cost was equivalent to the total cost of the hardware so we did that.

Our goal is to build the necessary infrastructure to replicate the human devloop on the massively multi-tenant scale of AI, so these VMs should be as powerful as the ones you’re used to, while also being available to provision in seconds.

81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone

2026-04-06 @ 16:15:41Points: 193Comments: 159

Reducto releases Deep Extract

2026-04-06 @ 16:13:47Points: 20Comments: 2

sc-im Spreadsheets in Your Terminal

2026-04-06 @ 16:00:29Points: 58Comments: 13

AI Singer Now Occupies Eleven Spots on iTunes Singles Chart

2026-04-06 @ 15:57:07Points: 42Comments: 54

A Cryptography Engineer's Perspective on Quantum Computing Timelines

2026-04-06 @ 15:31:20Points: 80Comments: 20

Sky – an Elm-inspired language that compiles to Go

2026-04-06 @ 15:22:53Points: 29Comments: 3

I Won't Download Your App. The Web Version Is A-OK

2026-04-06 @ 14:31:29Points: 621Comments: 337

When Virality Is the Message: The New Age of AI Propaganda

2026-04-06 @ 14:16:35Points: 54Comments: 49

Germany Doxes "UNKN," Head of RU Ransomware Gangs REvil, GandCrab

2026-04-06 @ 13:52:37Points: 172Comments: 70

Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with the Feb updates

2026-04-06 @ 13:50:35Points: 318Comments: 207

Book Review: There Is No Antimemetics Division

2026-04-06 @ 13:44:01Points: 108Comments: 73

PostHog (YC W20) Is Hiring

2026-04-06 @ 12:59:33Points: 1

What Being Ripped Off Taught Me

2026-04-06 @ 12:53:41Points: 214Comments: 129

France pulls last gold held in US for $15B gain

2026-04-06 @ 08:03:43Points: 486Comments: 264

Drop, formerly Massdrop, ends most collaborations and rebrands under Corsair

2026-04-06 @ 04:24:49Points: 110Comments: 54

An open-source 240-antenna array to bounce signals off the Moon

2026-04-06 @ 03:22:42Points: 224Comments: 45

The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes

2026-04-06 @ 03:03:22Points: 242Comments: 157

Show HN: I built a tiny LLM to demystify how language models work

2026-04-06 @ 00:20:12Points: 776Comments: 119

Fork it and swap the personality for your own character.

Gemma 4 on iPhone

2026-04-05 @ 18:45:53Points: 796Comments: 222

Music for Programming

2026-04-05 @ 18:23:08Points: 306Comments: 156

Show HN: Real-time AI (audio/video in, voice out) on an M3 Pro with Gemma E2B

2026-04-05 @ 17:53:19Points: 224Comments: 26

Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

2026-04-05 @ 17:27:41Points: 717Comments: 498

Running Gemma 4 locally with LM Studio's new headless CLI and Claude Code

2026-04-05 @ 17:13:51Points: 371Comments: 92

LÖVE: 2D Game Framework for Lua

2026-04-04 @ 09:20:34Points: 383Comments: 199

Signals, the push-pull based algorithm

2026-04-04 @ 08:31:20Points: 131Comments: 34

Sheets Spreadsheets in Your Terminal

2026-04-04 @ 06:34:12Points: 166Comments: 45

One ant for $220: The new frontier of wildlife trafficking

2026-04-02 @ 12:55:56Points: 94Comments: 26

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