MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: A more usable Docusign
by alex_shi | 2025-08-27 21:50:45+00:00
Let me start off with a disclaimer.

I'm aware that there's like a gazillion e-signing products that exist in this space — including some half decent self-hosted options too. And yes I agree that the success of incumbents such as Docusign come primarily from distribution rather than making a superb product.

But hear me out. Few enterprise tools are as universally disliked as DocuSign: 1,050 Trustpilot reviews, 1.5 stars. To me, that signals two things: (1) a burning problem, and (2) an incumbent that’s barely tolerable.

My "vision" for my current project, Formable, is to eventually create something akin to a Figma/Linear/Canva — late to market, but disruptive through usability and fresh design. One example: our fields aren’t static checkboxes. You can draw any shape/size, then apply logic with natural language (e.g. “must be a valid US state”).

I’m launching the free MVP now, with a waitlist for a much more advanced pro version. I’d love to gather some constructive feedback: what would make you actually love a paperwork tool?
by perching_aix | 2025-08-27 21:51:35+00:00
> nazis held the same believe.

Along with being against any form of animal cruelty.

They were also pretty obsessed with spiritualistic quackery.

Are we giving each other fun facts or what? Surely one does not need to go all the way to the nazis to find a Picasso hater? Or are you just following the footsteps of the blogpost author too?
by jaybrendansmith | 2025-08-27 21:51:41+00:00
Let me guess: The aluminum found in vaccines. Of Course. Why didn't we think of that? It only took an addled, evil, brain-wormed, drug-infested moron to point it out. Never mind there are 1000s of clinical studies showing no impacts. THOUSANDS. We should print out all that evidence, put it in 300 page volumes, enclose them in binders with ribbons, box them up, and drop it from an airplane onto his house!
by unshavedyak | 2025-08-27 21:52:26+00:00
For anyone using Zed, how extensive is its ability to be configured/modded to emulate other editor behaviors, bindings, etc? Eg i want something akin to Helix, but i'm not interested in Zeds Vim mode. Nor am i interested in a straight Helix mode, as my own Helix usage is quite customized.

Can i make my own Modes trees like Helix/etc offers? I'm aware of https://zed.dev/docs/helix, just not sure what the UX is to customize this behavior yourself as a user.
by mikestew | 2025-08-27 21:52:37+00:00
The 35% reduction refers to the number of managers who oversee fewer than three people, according to a person familiar with the matter.

If you oversee 0-2 people, in most cases that’s probably not an efficient ratio. How did Google get so many folks in that position in the first place? And I assume the other 65% take up the slack to fluff their teams? Or what? Leave the other 65% managing 0-2 people?
by kube-system | 2025-08-27 21:53:09+00:00
> So when you go to Delaware that has 0% sales taxes, you make sure to log everything and pay taxes to your home state upon return?

If you don't, you are technically violating the law. All states with sales tax also have a use tax.

For example, if you are a resident of neighboring Maryland, this is the form you'd need to fill out for purchases you make in Delaware.

https://www.marylandcomptroller.gov/content/dam/mdcomp/tax/f...
by ggm | 2025-08-27 21:53:11+00:00
Organised communism is almost completely defunct and afaik the 4th international likewise. At this point accelerationist left views would be as fringe as sovereign citizens and certainly not allied to the coal oil and nuclear industries.

The former RCP members who joined the tory party in the UK, people like Dominic Cummings are interesting of course. And Steve Bannon is fond of posturing as a Maoist in style if not in substance. His oilskin coat is a performance Mao jacket.
by sunshowers | 2025-08-27 21:53:32+00:00
Yes, this is true of any resource. But Tokio mutexes, being shared mutable state, are inherently likely to run into bugs in production.

In the Rust community, cancellation is pretty well-established nomenclature for this.

Hopefully the video of my talk will be up soon after RustConf, and I'll make a text version of it as well for people that prefer reading to watching.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-08-27 21:53:41+00:00
> The harm argument is simple — AI data centers use energy, and nearly all forms of energy generation have negative side effects. Period. Any hand waving about where the energy comes from or how the harms are mitigated is, again, bullshit — energy can come from anywhere, people can mitigate harms however they like, and none of this requires LLM data centers.

Presented like this, the argument is complete bullshit. Anything we do consumes energy, therefore requires energy to be supplied, production of which has negative side effects, period.

Let's just call it a day on civilization and all (starve to death so that the few survivors can) go back to living in caves or up the trees.

The real questions are, a) how much more energy use are LLMs causing, and b) what value this provides. Just taking this directly, without going into the weeds of meta-level topics like the benefits of investment in compute and energy infrastructure, and how this is critical to solving climate problems - just taking this directly, already this becomes a nothing-burger, because LLMs are by far some of the least questionable ways to use energy humanity has.
Show HN: Kai – a private, offline AI "second brain" that remembers you(no cloud)
by no_internet | 2025-08-27 21:53:43+00:00
I built Kai because I was tired of assistants that forget and cloud tools that mine my data. Persistent memory: what you teach Kai sticks. Local-first: data never leaves your device; no telemetry. Transparent: memory graph shows what it knows and why. I’m looking for early users who care about local, privacy, and explainability. The landing page has a simple waitlist; I’ll onboard in small waves and share progress.
by qball | 2025-08-27 21:54:13+00:00
They're all in France, whose construction began under a military dictatorship to ensure energy security whenever the US starts a war in a place supplying it with energy.

This strategy was proven decisively correct in 2022, and also applies to solar and wind when the US (and by proxy, the whole West) inevitably gets into it with China and suddenly your degrading solar panels and growing need for energy become major problems (and thus forces you to build out nuclear anyway).

Cost isn't the only factor here, and it would be short-sighted to take the cheaper short-term option by buying Chinese rather than paying our own people to regain and retain that engineering and construction experience we foolishly squandered 30 years ago.
by vlovich123 | 2025-08-27 21:54:55+00:00
I'm not sure this introduces any new failure though:

let data = mutex.lock().take(); let new_data = process_data(data).await; *mutex.lock() = Some(new_data);

Here you are using a traditional lock and a cancellation at process_data results in the lock with the undesired state you're worried about. It's a general footgun of cancellation and asynchronous tasks that at every await boundary your data has to be in some kind of valid internally consistent state because the await may never return. To fix this more robustly you'd need the async drop language feature.
by godelski | 2025-08-27 21:54:58+00:00
> I’m still not even a vim master.

I can do some things that people using vim for decades didn't know was possible. I'm still not a vim master. How does one ascend to the levels of TPope?

Joking aside, I think that's one of the nice things about vim. There's always more to learn. Not in the way that you're missing something but in the same way this is true for any programming language. It's because these tools are so flexible they can do just about anything
by reptilian | 2025-08-27 21:55:15+00:00
The vast majority of "anti Semitic attacks" have been perpetrated by Israelis or Zionists to stoke anti Islamic sentiment or encourage the narrative that "Jews aren't safe". There are tens of thousands of examples spanning the last forty years. Most recently in Australia, a spate of anti Semitic attacks were claimed, but found to be run by criminal gangs with Israeli Mafia ties. This plays directly into Israel's work against Iran, and stinks of a Mossad operation. The latest news is that it was Israel who provided the intelligence to Australian security services. If you aren't aware, mossad's motto is "by deception we do war".
by tehdely | 2025-08-27 21:55:58+00:00
100% correct, and there's no way I could possibly "well ackshyually" you on this, Garth.

I guess the way I look at it is TypePad began with MT's "publish-then-serve" design, but scaled way up. I agree it wasn't actually directly downstream of MT. Regardless, after Seismic and Phenotype/etc. it looked like a three-tier web app, if a bit idiosyncratic.

I do often wish we were living in 6a's (in retrospect) polly-anna view of a future where everyone self-published and built community, instead of whatever... this world is.
by craftkiller | 2025-08-27 21:56:33+00:00
Ah! Thank you. I was wondering why mjg59 needed to geo-block people on his blog. I had no idea dreamwidth was a platform and he was only a user of that platform. I don't think I've ever seen anyone else's content on that site. Now I feel dumb because I've been calling him "dreamwidth" in my head for years.
Ask HN: What are the best Google alternatives in 2025?
by eel | 2025-08-27 21:56:34+00:00
I am currently in the worst customer support situation I have ever been in with the Google Store. I ordered a gift for a friend, but Google sent me the wrong item. Google Support has acknowledged the wrong item was sent but in 3 days of back-and-forth communication, they have refused to refund me or ship a replacement. Both items are under $200.

If it were any other company, I would feel justified going to my credit card company and disputing the charge. However, I understand that if I initiate a chargeback, Google could terminate my account, so they have all the leverage in this interaction. I fully rely on my Google account for phone service (Pixel phone with Fi), email service (Gmail), documents/spreadsheets, photos, maps, and likely other items that are not coming to mind.

This event has made me realize that I've put too much of my life in one provider, and I need to switch. What alternatives does HN use for various Google services?
Ask HN: How to Learn to Build Agentic AI Systems (Like Claude Code)
by hhimanshu | 2025-08-27 21:57:03+00:00
Hello folks,

I’m trying to learn how one can build agentic AI systems similar to Claude Code, and eventually adapt that knowledge toward domain-specific use cases (e.g., “Claude Code for healthcare, finance, education, etc.”).

For those of you who’ve studied or built these kinds of systems, I’d love to hear your recommendations on:

• Foundational learning: What books, courses, or papers provide the best grounding for understanding LLM-based systems and their decision-making?

• Architectural patterns: What design patterns are worth studying for things like context management, memory, reasoning, and orchestration?

• Build vs. deploy: How do you think about building internal systems vs. packaging/distributing them as APIs, SDKs, or products?

• Open source projects: Which ones are most valuable to study for internals (decision making, evals, context engineering, tool use, etc.)?

• Evals and observability: What tools or products help evaluate quality, measure system behavior, and observe performance in real-world use?

• Models: Which models are best suited for “thinking” (reasoning, planning, decomposing problems) vs. “doing” (execution, coding, retrieval)?

• Learning path: How would you approach going from theory → prototype → production-quality system?

My goal is to discover high-quality resources that one can truly spend time learning from and building with—through iteration and practice—while also sharing what I learn so others on the same path can benefit.

Thanks in advance for sharing your experiences and guidance!
by abdusco | 2025-08-27 21:57:12+00:00
I think the only thing Hamas succeeded in doing is to expose Israel's evil acts to the world for a little while, until the west says "..., anyway" and goes back to being best buddies with Israel, singing and chanting how righteous they are.

So far the only thing that's close to a sanction from the EU is Norway divesting from some Israeli companies[0] and the EU _proposing_ (!) to suspend Israel from a research program[1].

That will show 'em!

[0]: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/norway... [1]: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...
by petralithic | 2025-08-27 21:57:42+00:00
I still don't get why you don't see it as a tool and not the creator itself. The human sitting behind the desk is the one attaching their emotions to what they send, because they control what image they want to send, otherwise they reroll or redo their work flow. These days they can even edit the image with natural language so they can build it up just as one does in Photoshop, only using words instead of a mouse.
by teo_zero | 2025-08-27 21:58:13+00:00
> Object oriented programming implies certain contracts that the compiler enforces

Sorry, but where did you got this definition from? I've always thought OOP as a way of organizing your data and your code, sometimes supported by language-specific constructs, but not necessarily.

Can you organize your data into lists, trees, and hashmaps even if your language does not have those as native types? So you can think in a OO way even if the language has no notion of objects, methods, etc.
by ActorNightly | 2025-08-27 21:58:16+00:00
Look bro, we can spend arguing about details, but in reality, its pretty easy to put a nail in this: Trump tried to coup the government in 2020. And Elon supported this. This is not arguable. There is no fake media around this, you can read the lawsuit that resulted in the Supreme Court immunity ruling yourself.

You would have to prove with exceptional evidence that whatever Biden did or Kamala would have done would have been much worse.

Literally no other issue matters until you get over this bridge. Unless of course you are in support of a dictator and think his attempt to throw any legal process and the constitution out was justified, but at that point just say that instead of dancing around the issue.

>It's the nature of politics

No, at this point its solely in the moral/fabric of society territory.
by sunshowers | 2025-08-27 21:58:28+00:00
True! This is the case with std mutexes as well. But holding a std MutexGuard across an await point makes the future not Send, and therefore not typically spawnable on a Tokio runtime [1]. This isn't really an intended design decision, though, as far as I can tell -- just one that worked out to avoid this footgun.

Tokio MutexGuards are Send, unfortunately, so they are really prone to cancellation bugs.

(There's a related discussion about panic-based cancellations and mutex poisoning, which std's mutex has but Tokio's doesn't either.)

[1] spawn_local does exist, though I guess most people don't use it.
by imiric | 2025-08-27 21:58:32+00:00
"Just a font" is an ignorant statement, and misses the point.

Behind every (well-designed) font is a world of typography. That's an entire industry at the intersection of science and art. Type designers take great pride in their work, and well-designed typefaces are practically timeless. Like good art, they transmit emotion. As a commercial product, they represent brands. A lot hinges on choosing the right type for a specific purpose, even if most of the general public is not consciously aware of it. So these announcements can indeed be deep and meaningful.

That said, the changes in this case seem very minor to me, as a casual type aficionado. I could barely tell the difference from Arial with both side by side, but I'm sure a lot of thought and effort went into this. Maybe it was worth avoiding the licensing costs? I wasn't aware Arial required licensing, though.

Another good reason to do this is to have a baseline font from which they can create different variants, or add new characters. This is probably why they were able to make so many proportions, weights, and slants. I don't remember Arial having a monospace variant, for example.
by dmeijboom | 2025-08-27 21:58:36+00:00
We built Steiger after getting frustrated with Skaffold's performance in our Bazel-heavy polyglot monorepo. The main pain points were:

The TAR bottleneck: Skaffold forces Bazel to export OCI images as TAR files, then imports them back into Docker. This is slow and wasteful

Cache invalidation: Skaffold's custom caching layer often conflicts with the sophisticated caching that build systems like Bazel and Nix already provide.

Currently supports:

Docker BuildKit: Uses docker-container driver, manages builder instances

Bazel: Direct OCI layout consumption, skips TAR export entirely

Nix: Works with flake outputs that produce OCI images

Ko: Native Go container builds

Still early days - we're planning file watching for dev mode and (basic) Helm deployment just landed!
by ceejayoz | 2025-08-27 21:58:40+00:00
> Germany would need the equivalent of 20-30y of global bess deployments to ditch fossils

“In 2019, California had 770 megawatts of battery storage. Now, it's 14 times higher, at 10,383 megawatts, and by the end of this year, it expects to add another 3,800.”

We saw the same curve with solar and wind. 20-30 years worth today will be peanuts in the near future. You’ve outlined a very achievable goal.
by nradov | 2025-08-27 21:58:50+00:00
Nah. Parts of the F-35 program were terribly managed (procurement malpractice) but the final product largely works as promised. The whole reason it was developed starting in about 1994 was that exercises and simulations had shown that legacy strike aircraft weren't survivable against modern air defenses: that part hasn't changed, in fact the situation has gotten worse. It doesn't matter how cheap an aircraft is if it can't accomplish the mission.

Perhaps someday cheap, expendable drones will be and to take over the entire mission set. But for now that concept is still science fiction.
by charlie-83 | 2025-08-27 21:59:06+00:00
Do you have a source for x86 taking x10 the energy? I generally hear that Arm is something like 30-40% more power efficent which lines up with my experience that Arm laptops don't have 10x more battery life than x86 ones.

In any case, my point in the last sentence is not that we shouldn't encourage people to use more power efficent devices. My point is that encouraging people to use open software and encouraging people to use power efficent devices are, to me, two seperate and unrelated goals. It seems that, by not offering x86 Linux you sacrifice one goal over the other which doesnt seem needed.

I suppose that the part of your position which I don't understand, and I am still interested to hear more about, is: if you are this concerned about openness and power efficiency, why even offer x86 Windows which is objectively worse by your metrics than x86 Linux.
by heyyaah | 2025-08-27 21:59:29+00:00
I've been examining the extent to which a company's market capitalisation is dependent on its founder remaining in leadership.

An intriguing perspective is provided by prediction markets, which enable direct comparisons of outcomes such as Tesla with Musk as CEO versus Tesla without Musk as CEO.

This can be measured thanks to conditional markets, which indicate that Musk's presence itself owns between 9 and 10% of Tesla's value, albeit with a very small sample.

Can these markets accurately reflect value of founder dependency or are they just pure speculations?
by blueflow | 2025-08-27 21:59:33+00:00
Edit 2: I accidentally minimized Steam to tray, but Gnome has no tray. Steam continues running invisible without being represented somewhere in the UI. One of the developers of Gnome (the only DE where this happens) said this is an application bug[1]. And then continues to complain that devs only test against "stock" environments.... but Gnome is the stock environment. What an ass.

I do understand why people bash Gnome and their developers. The hate is deserved.

[1] https://discourse.gnome.org/t/feature-request-show-when-apps...
by fencepost | 2025-08-27 21:59:43+00:00
Even if there aren't (there are cases where individuals fight extradition to other states though I have no idea if that's ever effective, and questions of conflict between states has come up recently regarding interstate prescribing of abortion medications, etc. with some states explicitly stating that they will not cooperate with Texasistan), a civil judgement against an entity operating in one state could likely be enforced without even interacting with the state where that entity exists - e.g. if they're using a bank with a presence in MS, the state might be able to simply go after their accounts held with the national-scale bank.
by thelastgallon | 2025-08-27 21:59:54+00:00
>Unfortunately, the penalties for failing to comply with the Mississippi law are incredibly steep: fines of $10,000 per user from Mississippi who we don't have identity documents verifying age for, per incident -- which means every time someone from Mississippi loaded Dreamwidth, we'd potentially owe Mississippi $10,000. Even a single $10,000 fine would be rough for us, but the per-user, per-incident nature of the actual fine structure is an existential threat.

Reminds me of Silicon Valley. PiperChat has grossly violated COPPA as there was no parental consent form on the app leading to a 21 billion dollar fine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3zU7sV4bJE
by superfrank | 2025-08-27 22:00:18+00:00
For the same reason a bars don't just ask people to sign a document saying they're 21 in lieu of an ID.

The laws are written in a way where the responsibility for enforcement falls on the operator of the business. In both cases, the business doesn't actually have to verify anything if they don't want to, but if it's found that they're allowing violations to happen, they will be held legally responsible.
by tibbar | 2025-08-27 22:00:20+00:00
For a team that size, you would assume the manager is only spending around half of their time on people management and probably around half their time working directly on whatever the team does. It can be a good arrangement if the goal is just to give a little more leverage to the manager, but it's also equally possible that the manager doesn't have time to do anything particularly well. Also, a lot of time a part-time line manager like that won't have enough organizational clout to look out properly for the team.

Having tried that arrangement a few times, I think it's better to have small pods where everyone is an engineer and then all the pods report up to a dedicated people manager.
by arn3n | 2025-08-27 22:00:25+00:00
I believe you’re referencing Patrick McKenzie’s takes on fraud, which I agree with — but when he (and others) talk about the optimal amount of fraud they’re usually referring to fraud from “losing money from the company to customers”. This is not PayPal’s case; because PayPal isn’t the victim of fraud on its platform but makes money off its use, their optimal amount of fraud is “as much as they can permit without losing customers or regulators getting up their ass”.
by butlike | 2025-08-27 22:00:26+00:00
Game theory would say that if you're looking to move the overton window, anything less than max would be a missplay. That is to say, anything except total polarization would fail to move the overton window the max amount in any given direction, since with max polarization, the possibility exists to move it the full amount, whereas a more nuanced claim that moved it only a little bit would only ever move it 'that little bit.'