MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by GarnetFloride | 2025-08-11 19:21:49+00:00
Not Just Bikes did a YouTube on Seoul South Korea that brought this point up. They’ve got costs down because they’re working on it continuously.

As a tech writer people have a lot of experience but they never turn it into institutional knowledge because it’s never written down. Ay best it’s tribal knowledge passed by word of mouth.

I know some people refuse to document things because they are hoping for job security but that never happens. Or sometimes for revenge for getting rid of them. But many companies survive despite those efforts.
by mring33621 | 2025-08-11 19:22:27+00:00
Lawyers are a protected class in our society and government.

One of the justifications for that is that they must "uphold to the highest standards", whatever that means

The actions of MANY lawyers, who are again, a protected and privileged class, clearly DO NOT UPHOLD any standards that our ancestors would recognize as important, shared American values.

Argue all you want, but we're getting to the point where apologists will no longer be tolerated
by kevintouati | 2025-08-11 19:22:28+00:00
Thanks for checking out HERO 2.0!

I’d love feedback on two areas in particular:

1. Structure vs. Flexibility – One of our core design choices is keeping strict document hierarchies (sections, clauses, schedules) while still allowing flexible, free-form editing. Do you think this helps or hurts for high-complexity docs?

2. AI Workflows – We’re experimenting with AI tools that can draft clauses, check consistency, and update terms across multiple linked docs in real time. If you’ve tried similar tools, what’s worked well and what’s been a miss?

Also curious: if you currently use Notion, Google Docs, or Word for legal/technical/SOP writing, what’s the biggest pain point you’d want solved?

I’ll be answering questions throughout the day — really appreciate any thoughts, ideas, or even brutal critiques.
by dcre | 2025-08-11 19:22:30+00:00
"The bet was that by the following year, the application inference would cost 90% less, creating a $160 gross profit (+80% gross margins). But this didn't happen, instead of declining the application inference costs actually grew!"

This doesn't make any sense to me. Why would Cursor et al expect they could pocket the difference if inference costs went down? There's no stickiness to the product; they would compete down to zero margins regardless. If anything, higher total spend is better for them because it's more to skim off of.
by seansh | 2025-08-11 19:22:39+00:00
I've gone through this too and came to the same conclusion except for phone.

While on laptop/desktop nothing beats txt (or md or org), it's just so uncomfortable using a text file like that on the phone and relying on dropbox or something.

And I get it, all the note taking apps on the phone have issues: not local first, proprietary, subscriptions, or no encryption, or a thousand features before making sure the full text search works even offline.

Last year I finally sat down and wrote my own PWA out of frustration [1]. There was a SHOW HN too [2]. Yes, shameless plug. There are only a handful of other people using it (and probably never more than that) but I really wrote it for myself and it's been such a relief the past year knowing I always have my notes whenever wherever and works exactly the way I want.

I probably spent <5h fixing a few issues in the past year. As far as I'm concerned, my problem is solved once and for all.

[1] https://unforget.computing-den.com/demo

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40645743
by mlsu | 2025-08-11 19:22:42+00:00
As far as book reviews, professional is professional. I have never, ever read anything on Goodreads that compares at all to something in the London Review of Books for example. They just aren't even in the same category. People who read and review books for a living simply are better at it. They have more context than casuals, they are better writers, they have the education to fully understand a work and place it in context etc. Professionals.

As insular and snobbish as publishing may be, publishers developed taste over hundreds of years. Goodreads, by contrast, is is social media.
by hnlmorg | 2025-08-11 19:23:18+00:00
This is what people forget about GitHub. Its popularity isn't because it has the best tools on the market. It is popular because of the network effect. It's the social network of developer tooling.

I don't really want to be using a Microsoft product but I use github for the same reason I use Linkedin: because it benefits my career to be visible on these social networks.
by notahacker | 2025-08-11 19:23:19+00:00
Yeah.

The demonstrator was to validate some basic concepts they were promoting about being able to achieve supersonic flight without supersonic booms. It achieved that at relatively low cost, and gave them something to brag about, an indication of baseline competence at certifying airframes and possibly ticked off some investor boxes. There wasn't much more to be learned about large passenger jets using their intended custom engines from a small GEJ85 powered platform, so its not surprising they haven't gone to the expense of continuing to fly it. It's not going to be useful for most other stuff they might want to test, apart from perhaps their intended custom engines which are probably years away from being certified for flight tests, never mind hitting performance and reliability targets.
by mikestew | 2025-08-11 19:23:21+00:00
phhhht, Ford’s a lot of talk, and they have been for years. When they actually build something instead of blowing hot air on an earnings call, we can then perhaps close the lid on Slate’s casket. I say this as one who put down the (thankfully refundable) deposit for that $40K electric F-150 that hit dealers at two or more times that price.
by api | 2025-08-11 19:24:15+00:00
I had an evolutionary bio professor in college say this: "you don't understand evolution until you understand how contraception could lead to overpopulation."

Anything placed in the path of reproduction is a barrier to be overcome.

If there is anything in the human genome that correlates with a positive desire to choose to have children, we are selecting hard for that right now. We may see a bottleneck this century and then a gigantic population explosion next century as a result, with a world full of people with very loud "biological clocks" who just adore and crave babies.

That is assuming this is genetically determined enough to be a target for selection. There are probably correlates that are, and I could speculate endlessly about what they are, but I also know that such speculations are likely to be wrong because these systems are complex and often counter-intuitive.

One I've speculated about recently is negativity bias. It seems to me that a lot of people choosing not to have kids right now are doing so because of negativity bias, because they see the world as a terrible place as a result of their consumption of negative media. Historically negativity bias may be something that's been selected for, but this may now have flipped. Optimists may have higher fitness now while pessimists did pre-industrialization and pre-modernity. But again, speculation.
by zzo38computer | 2025-08-11 19:24:23+00:00
It does not affect how I do it. I do not use LLM, but if I publish something, then someone can do what they want with it, including LLM usage. I do not want to allow excessive scraping for that purpose, but once someone has a copy for whatever reason (including being mirrored elsewhere, which I would encourage), it is now available for public use.
by duxup | 2025-08-11 19:24:32+00:00
Neither are most AI related terms. People talk about learning and intelligence and thinking. If it remained a technical term and everyone understood "not really learning..." its fine but it gets out into the wild and man it's not learning it's doing word math and stringing words and bits of words together.

I enjoy using it for programming, I read what it gives me, I test it, but a lot of the AI terms are wonky. AI clearly doesn't "know" what I'm saying or even what it spits back at me.

I suspect like all things marketing and hype, once the hype train leaves the station with a bunch of terms nobody wants to be the guy who says "uh no we're not changing the world, we're doing that we're doing something useful within the limits of the technology".
by pjmlp | 2025-08-11 19:25:04+00:00
Yes, the whole XBox division has been a mess, especially after ABK.

However XBox plus Microsoft Gaming Studios, is still one of the biggest group of AAA publishers, they have a big enough slice of the market.

Hence why now they're dominating PlayStation charts with cross-platform games.

Many Microsoft haters don't have an good enough idea of how big they have become on games industry, regardless of layoffs and such.

SteamOS keeps being around until they feel like doing a netbooks like move, taking all their games out of Steam, or whatever else Microsoft might think of.

Hence why I regularly complain Valve should keep trying to bring developers to target GNU/Linux natively instead of translating Windows games.
by amluto | 2025-08-11 19:25:08+00:00
> ALTER TABLE events ADD COLUMN version INT DEFAULT 1;

I’ve always disliked this approach. It conflates two things: the value to put in preexisting rows and the default going forward. I often want to add a column, backfill it, and not have a default.

Fortunately, the Iceberg spec at least got this right under the hood. There’s “initial-default”, which is the value implicitly inserted in rows that predate the addition of the column, and there’s “write-default”, which is the default for new rows.
by alecco | 2025-08-11 19:25:12+00:00
The best and latest Gemini Pro model is not SOTA. The only good things it has are the huge context and the low API price. But I had to stop using it because it kept contradicting itself in the walls of text it produces. (My paid account was forced to pay for AI with a price hike so I tried for a couple of months to see if I could make it work with prompt engineering, no luck).

Google researchers are great, but Engineering is dropping like a stone, and management is a complete disaster. Starting with their Indian McKinsey CEO moving core engineering teams to India.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/01/google-cuts-hundreds-of-core...
by aidenn0 | 2025-08-11 19:25:30+00:00
IANAL, but my understanding of CA law is that it's more complicated than that:

1. Just like the police, they can only go in without a warrant if they have a reasonable belief that there is imminent danger to a child. They must have a specific thing in mind, not just "vibes." Bringing your child to the door to show them they are fine would often be sufficient to quash that (but you can't do that if your child isn't home).

2. Refusing to be interviewed by CPS and/or denying them access to your children can be used against you in family court (unlike when you are being interrogated by the police).

3. From the ACLU of SoCal(https://www.aclusocal.org/en/know-your-rights/california-chi...):

> If there is no warrant and no emergency and you do not want to allow the investigator in your home, you can say something like, “Sorry, this isn’t a good time for me, but I’d be happy to schedule a visit on a later date.” By offering an alternative date like the next day or later in the week, you can plan to be more prepared for a visit, but also show cooperation. If you refuse any visit, that can be used as evidence against you later in the investigation. Depending on the situation, follow-up visits can take place either at home or the CPS office.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-11 19:26:14+00:00
This is a discussion forum for intellectual curiosity operated from the investment exhaust of a capital market participant. A recent, adjacent analogy is Jeff Lawson taking his Twilio winnings to buy and operate The Onion. The economic mechanizations are usually underpinnings to something more valuable. HN would still be valuable if YC closed up shop tomorrow (and I personally argue, of greater value than the accelerator; value is subjective of course, so opinions will differ on this). Stay curious.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
by jajuuka | 2025-08-11 19:26:52+00:00
It's not entirely self enriching. AI crawlers hit servers hard and everyone has their own crawler. So it's partially covering a business expense. Especially with Reddit being a goldmine of content for training data.

Internet Archive has been terrible as capturing full pages on Reddit for a while. So it's not a real loss. Unfortunately right now these AI companies have full freedom to do whatever they want. Taking paid content, artistic works, and your own posts on social media. So Reddit trying to charge them is a good idea as it's some form of quid pro quo put on AI scraping companies.
by bell-cot | 2025-08-11 19:26:58+00:00
Yes - but it's basically the same as the total mass of the universe.

EDIT: I believe the above could be incorrect - if the universe has too much electrical charge or angular momentum. (And some other cosmological properties, so you couldn't get around the charge & spin issues.)

Might there be a black hole astrophysicist in the house, to comment on this?
by zahlman | 2025-08-11 19:28:30+00:00
> A 'safety' bicycle is what you and I think of as a bicycle with two wheels that are the same size and a chain drive. Bicycles before that would refer to penny-farthings and chainless devices too - that's how ubiquitous the 'safety' bicycle became, we don't even know of the other versions as bicycles today.

What I don't understand about this history is why anyone ever thought the penny-farthing design was a good idea.
by mccoyb | 2025-08-11 19:28:50+00:00
Just from personal experience, visual design is the task with the worst outcomes for Claude Code (w/ latest Opus 4.1, etc).

It truly cannot reason well yet about geometry, visual aesthetics, placement, etc. The performance varies: it's quite good at matplotlib but terrible at any non-trivial LaTeX / TikZ layout or graphic. Why? Not a clear idea yet -- would love to think more about it.

I've tried many things now to try and give it eyes (via text), and this is unavoidably a place where things are ... rough ... right now.

I've had bad results with image screenshotting. More often than not, it has no idea what it is looking at -- won't even summarize the image correctly -- or will give me an incorrect take "Yes indeed we fixed the problem as you can tell by <this part of the UI> and <that part of the UI>" which is wrong.

I typically have to come in and make a bunch of fine-grained changes to get something visually appealing. I'm sure at some point we'll have a system which can go all the way, and I'd be excited to find approaches to this problem.

Note -- tasks which involve visual design which I've run into diminishing returns: * proper academic figures (had a good laugh at the GPT 5 announcement issues) * video game UI / assets * UI design for IDEs * Responsive web design for chat-based interfaces

All of these feel like "pelican" tasks -- they enter into a valley which can't be effectively communicated via textual feedback yet ...
by ElCapitanMarkla | 2025-08-11 19:28:58+00:00
I use Joplin. I made a little extension which generates a file with Monday's date and then the days + dates as headers.

On Monday I copy anything I still want from the previous week and then just jot down notes as I go.

---

# Monday - 11

# Tuesday - 12

# Wednesday - 13

# Thursday - 14

# Friday - 15
by aruggirello | 2025-08-11 19:29:00+00:00
Who knows? Deprecate manual code writing someday? 'You're trying to commit some code, sir, but Microsoft Defender©, Git Edition™ has determined it wasn't generated by any of our tools, as reported by telemetry, so changes have been blocked for your own convenience, safety and ultimately, wellbeing. Starting september, 2029 we're only accepting commands from Microsoft products such as Visual Studio Autocode©, Cortana AGI Edition™ and Microsoft Office 2028 Clippy©. Please ask Microsoft James Bond® to take action and he'll solve the issue for you [Charges may apply]. We're also deprecating git push, pull, etc. since Microsoft Tools are so much more secure, optimized and convenient that nobody wants to use those ancient commands anymore.'
by steveklabnik | 2025-08-11 19:29:00+00:00
Sure, we're talking about how there's no skill use with Google. But there is. That doesn't mean that every tool is good for every purpose. I agree that not every tool is good for every purpose. That also doesn't mean that every time a tool isn't useful, it's because it's not fit for purpose. Sometimes, it's because the wielder doesn't have the appropriate skills.
by jjk166 | 2025-08-11 19:29:01+00:00
For anyone who disobeys the order, it's the end of their career; and every person with a conscience who leaves now will be replaced by someone who will gleefully follow much worse orders in due time. Everyone at the top levels whose job is to actually take a stand against these acts, to serve as a rallying point for others to know when the time to resist has come, have abdicated their duty. If the authoritarians are smart, they will never create a situation where we are backed into a corner, where the time to fight is obvious; we will be convinced that our best course of action is to continue in lockstep with the system in the hopes of fixing it, right up until the slaughter.
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-08-11 19:29:16+00:00
At what point is is time to put this very real island on a virtual island and just block all traffic that seems to be coming from there? Maybe they're right and all their meddling will really make the internet better, in which case I hope they enjoy their own private improved internet very much while I enjoy my inferior one in which I am not forced to aid materially in the government's surveillance of me.
by lordnacho | 2025-08-11 19:29:32+00:00
Too much emphasis on documentation. It's people that matter.

If you build the sort of culture where people hang around, they will occasionally have time to tell each other the internal folklore. "When I started, an old guy told me about the plug under the canal".

People who work with software know this. Yeah, there are documents describing the system. No, reading them does not mean you understand the system.

Alas, it's an intangible, and doesn't get counted with the rest of the beans.
by projectazorian | 2025-08-11 19:29:33+00:00
> Society only really works if we know we have each other's backs when the chips are down

I'd disagree with this - capitalism tends to reward defection from this norm, and it's been a stable equilibrium for centuries at this point. You have more of a point when it comes to community, but even many intentional communities are massively hypocritical when it comes to this, with higher-status people having the ability to deviate from norms at will.

helpful reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemeinschaft_and_Gesellschaft
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-08-11 19:29:34+00:00
Is this Fords first multi-chassis skateboard design? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skateboard_(automotive_platfor...

That article could definitely use some history and or dates. GM AUTOnomy (2002) for example feels like the first time I really recall seeing this design suggested. https://www.adrianchernoff.com/project/autonomy/
by IshKebab | 2025-08-11 19:31:06+00:00
I don't think so. The company I worked for until recently had around 200 licenses for our main simulator - at that rate it would cost $50m/year, but our total run rate (including all salaries and EDA licenses) was only about $15m/year.

They're super opaque about pricing but I don't think it's that expensive. Apparently formal tools are way more expensive than simulation though (which makes sense), so we only had a handful of those licenses.

I managed to find a real price that someone posted:

https://www.reddit.com/r/FPGA/comments/c8z1x9/modelsim_and_q...

> Questa Prime licenses for ~$30000 USD.

That sounds way more realistic, and I guess you get decent volume discounts if you want 200 licenses.
by crinkly | 2025-08-11 19:31:32+00:00
Agreed.

The trick I've always used in these circumstances is the cynical approach. That is assume nothing changes. If it does change, adopt late, rather than burn all your time, money and energy on churn and experimentation.

In the last 35 years of doing this, I've seen perhaps 10% of technology actually stick around for more than a few years. I'll adopt at maturity and discard when it's thoroughly obsolete.

Being fintech, no technology so far has fundamentally changed what business we do or even how it's done for a long time even if we pretend it does. A lot of the changes have just been a cost naively written off through arbitrary justification or keeping up with trends. 99% of what we do is CRUD, shit reports and batch processing, just like it was when it was S/390.

Even fewer things have had an ROI or a real customer benefit. Then again we have actual customers not investors.
by anigbrowl | 2025-08-11 19:31:33+00:00
I don't know if it was staged, but i am skeptical. The reason why is the photograph of the guy covered in blood. It's obvious that he has suffered a bloody nose and maybe been punched in the mouth, but that all the blood on his body is smeared over him rather than being from multiple injuries. I have been in a lot of fist fights in my life, including groups rather than 1 on 1, and had a good few bloody noses. Such an injury doesn't leave you covered in blood like that. All the blood on his body is smeared, and so is all the blood on his pants - note there aren't any tears in the fabric. A bloody nose bleeds a lot but it doesn't spray all over the place.

It's conceivable this his shirt got pulled off during the fight, but equally conceivable that he took it off and wiped blood on himself. I've seen people fake injuries at political demonstrations, using the old pro wrestling trick of making a small cut in the hairline with a sharp blade (scalp wounds bleed a lot because there are so many capillaries on the head). I can't say this is what's happened here, but it just doesn't look consistent with real violence.

Another reason I'm skeptical of the reported account is that there's no mention of injuries to his female companion. If it were a regular mugging or carjacking, you'd expect to read the woman was pushed to the ground and her bag taken. This could be poor quality reporting, but stories like this generally include a catalogue of all victims' injuries.

Article including the photo I'm describing: https://abcnews.go.com/US/19-year-former-doge-worker-assault...
by sshine | 2025-08-11 19:31:40+00:00
I’ve selected for interesting work primarily by working for R&D departments, for sketchy startups, and in niche domains.

The cost has been that I don’t have deep domain knowledge that could lead to making a startup myself.

And it’s the kind of stuff with few or no examples of anywhere, so no LLM help. For example, building cryptographic primitives for a custom zero-knowledge VM in the VM’s own esoteric assembler language. Nothing closely resembles it.
by shmoogy | 2025-08-11 19:32:12+00:00
I feel the pain of this, I use obsidian for my day to day note taking and tasks to do as a general plan, I push tasks from Slack into Trello inbox as people chat me things that I need to look into, I make reminders for myself while away from a computer on my iPhone via Siri.

Apple reminders has a kanban now that is actually pretty okay, but I dont have a great way to get things from slack into it - manually copying all the text/attachments/url is super annoying.

There is an app that syncs your reminders with an obsidian task list, but I ran into too many bugs with it resetting and taking too long to clean all the old shit up that just got archived due to not being required.

I could probably get away with a bunch of MCP servers that query my local reminders, trello, and obsidian daily notes, outlook calendar, gmail calendar.... but it feels like such a bad way of going about aggregating everything.