MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Should product/engineering teams reorg as prototypers/scalers?
by raknahs1991biz | 2025-10-13 15:29:50+00:00
Feel like product-engineering-design orgs need to reorganize around:

prototypers vs. scalers

Prototypers:

- Prototypers are responsible for quickly validating ideas. Prototyping squads have a product thinker (more of a tinkerer - can be a PM or designer).

- After validation, prototypers build a basic architecture of the AI system that delivers a particular outcome to users. They're doing the scaffolding for problems or solutions with large surface area.

Scalers:

- Scalers are responsible for taking validated ideas and optimizing and proofing them to work for thousands of users and customers.

When building becomes faster and cheaper, the premium seems to be on productizing solutions to problems competition hasn’t discovered yet?
by tovej | 2025-10-13 15:30:01+00:00
It's a school of economics that became dominant in the 60s, it emphasises free market dynamics, much like the classical school, and especially focuses on consumption and optimizing economic actors, these actors are a very simple (and unrealistic) model of consumers. They also neglect production as an aspect of the economy.

Fun fact: The neoclassical economic school managed to remove the word "political" from "political economy" at the turn of the 20th century.
by otter-in-a-suit | 2025-10-13 15:30:12+00:00
Run whatever you like!

I personally enjoy the big machines (I've also always enjoyed meaninglessly large benchmark numbers on gaming hardware) and enterprise features, redundancy etc. (in other words, over-engineering).

I know others really enjoy playing with K8s, which is its own rabbit hole.

My main goal - apart from the truly useful core services - is to learn something new. Sometimes it's applicable to work (I am indeed an SWE larping as a sysadmin, as another commenter called out :-) ), sometimes it's not.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-13 15:30:18+00:00
Coal generators are reaching the end of their life, and to be frank, the US doesn't have the ability to build more if they tried (labor and skill shortages, primarily, but capital is also going to be hard to come by considering stranded asset risk). There is a 5-10 year backlog of gas turbines by the three companies in the world that build them. Coal retirements will continue, and hopefully, low carbon energy sources (being the least expensive option) will backfill them. Could the US face power shortages due to refusing to build new power generation out of ideology? Certainly. But are 50-60 year old coal plants going to run forever? Unlikely, based on mechanical limitations, supply chain constraints, etc.

Solar, wind, and batteries will continue to decline in cost; whether the US chooses to adopt them is a choice. Make good choices, as I tell my children.

Trump’s major coal sales flop in Wyoming and Montana - https://wyofile.com/trumps-major-coal-sales-flop-in-wyoming-... - October 8th, 2025

Gas-Turbine Crunch Threatens Demand Bonanza in Asia - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-10-07/gas-tu... | https://archive.today/z4Ixw - October 7th, 2025

AI-Driven Demand for Gas Turbines Risks a New Energy Crunch - https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-bottlenecks-gas-turb... | https://archive.today/b8bhn - October 1st, 2025

Most of the planned coal capacity retirements are in the Midwest or Mid-Atlantic regions - https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65744 - July 14th, 2025

Nowhere to go but down for U.S. coal capacity, generation - https://ieefa.org/resources/nowhere-go-down-us-coal-capacity... - October 24th, 2024 ("More than 8,100 MW of currently operating coal capacity will be at least 60 years old by 2030, but plant owners have not yet announced retirement dates. It is highly unlikely any of those units will still be operational by 2040, given the increase in maintenance costs and the decline in performance that go hand in hand with aging coal plants. Another 20,000MW of coal-fired capacity will be at least 50 years old by 2030, putting them at or near their expected operational lifespans.")

US Coal Plant Map Retirement Tracker - https://www.sierraclub.org/coal/coal-plant-map

(think in systems)
by pizlonator | 2025-10-13 15:30:32+00:00
Fil-C running on any x86 box is faster than any CHERI implementation that has ever existed.

That's likely to be true in embedded also, just because of the relationship between volume and performance in silicon. Fil-C runs on the high volume stuff, so it'll get better perf.

CHERI doubles the size of pointers, so it's not like it has a decisive advantage over Fil-C.
by bluecalm | 2025-10-13 15:31:04+00:00
Buying back stock is just as a way to distribute money to shareholders. It's neutral when it comes to "shareholder value". It's the same as paying dividends and having some shareholders reinvest it.

It just saves an extra step and doesn't trigger tax event. It also makes more sense. If you prefer cash you sell it on the market to the company. If you prefer holding shares you don't do anything. You get a choice when it cash out instead of being forced to on regular basis.
by leetrout | 2025-10-13 15:31:33+00:00
Sure Figjam is great but my anecdata is that a majority of the value of the whiteboard is the discussion as it happens not the resulting artifact. Lucid works better for that because it let's you easily frame things into slides (yes, a section in figjam is usable for this but it's not the same).

The concept being that you break things down and layer in details so the evolution is explained similar to the train of thought from live sessions.

I've been remote almost exclusively since 2012 and have used everything out there... the biggest thing that makes an improvement with remote comms? A very high quality microphone with a high quality compressor / gate (hardware, even) and using Mumble / Teamspeak / etc with a good codec where everyone can hear everyone speaking at the same time with low latency. That's what we lost from copper phones and it's exponentially worse in Zoom where you can't tell when someone is trying to interrupt you with the auditory cues. It really makes a big difference.

I'm an extrovert so I love video / cams on but really audio is all that is needed when paired with a tool like Figjam and getting high quality audio makes a remarkable difference.
by aardvarkr | 2025-10-13 15:31:41+00:00
Any update can brick your device if done poorly. This device just happens to be a car.

You misunderstood what OP was saying. They claimed that an update to the infotainment system shouldn’t be able to brick the other systems in the car. The response points out the car’s OTA update subroutine has access to update every critical system in the car by design. It’s flawed logic to assume that OTA updates only affect the infotainment system.
by abustamam | 2025-10-13 15:32:00+00:00
Can't speak for the medical school but my guess is familiarity. Can't remember what the Mac landscape was like at that point but it probably wasn't vetted enough for HIPAA. And windows 7 wasn't that shitty at the time.

And even so, let's say they didn't use Windows — I'd still expect the same rigor for any operating system update.
by PaulHoule | 2025-10-13 15:32:07+00:00
When I got my first Unix account [1] I was in a Gnu emacs culture and used emacs from 1989 to 2005 or so. I made the decision to switch to vi for three reasons: (1) less clash with a culture where I mostly use GUI editors that use ^S for something very different than what emacs does, (2) vim doesn't put in continuation characters that break cut-and-paste, (3) often I would help somebody out with a busted machine where emacs wasn't installed, the package database was corrupted, etc and being able to count on an editor that is already installed to resolve any emergency is helpful.

[1] Not like the time one of my friends "wardialed" every number in my local calling area and posted the list to a BBS and I found that some of them could be logged into with "uucp/uucp" and the like. I think Bell security knew he rang everybody's phone in the area but decided to let billing handle the problem because his parents had measured service.
by kmm | 2025-10-13 15:33:06+00:00
In Newtonian gravity, the relation between the orbital period T and the semimajor axis a of the orbital ellipse is a^3 / T^2 = GM / 4π^2, where M is the reduced mass of the system (in this case, with 99% of the mass being in one of the two black holes, it's simply the mass of the heavier one).

Plugging 12 years and 18e9 solar masses gives about 2e12 kilometers, or roughly a fifth of a lightyear. This also means the smaller black hole is zipping around the bigger one at around 6% of the speed of light, which is low enough that the Newtonian approximation is probably reasonable accurate (at least to give a rough idea of how large the distances must be).
by beaugunderson | 2025-10-13 15:33:20+00:00
the new windows 11 setup experience is so abysmal, I just went through it yesterday... so many upsells and opt-outs. OneDrive is especially annoying. to save someone else the trouble:

1. in OneDrive settings under Account, click "unlink this computer"

2. in "add or remove programs", you can uninstall OneDrive completely (listed as "Microsoft OneDrive")
by san4d | 2025-10-13 15:33:59+00:00
"it would be easier to change the single client versus multiple servers" + "trivially implemented on the client" It would be! That said, adding a new feature requires implementing that feature on the server, so requiring an additional change on the client is actually more work.

For example, one of the rooms in the house just installed house lighting to help with resetting rooms between guest groups. One one of the controllers has this.

Once I implemented the hardware logic, I updated the server's state response to include a new button that pointed to a new house lights endpoint. That button immediately showed up in the admin app. Super fun DevEx, and this is what I meant by minimize future work - minimal work to expose new room functionality.

"My assumption rests on the idea that changing the client is easier though" Think about the number of changes required to implement the feature end-to-end. You're right that updating N controller C++ templates for a button is wild, but that's not the entirety of the work. Those controllers already needed to be updated to handle what that button does. Adding the button itself is minimal work (copy-paste, really) in comparison to the feature work.
by _aavaa_ | 2025-10-13 15:34:01+00:00
That isn’t what they’re textbooks examples of.

GE (under Jack Welch specifically) is a textbook example of how financialization and focusing on numbers at the expense of products destroys companies.

Kodak is a textbook example of disruption. Yes they failed to capitalize on digital cameras specifically, but their research in all other areas was very much acted upon.
by nabla9 | 2025-10-13 15:34:09+00:00
"I am convinced that the next step in escalation will be a small-scale provocation against a Baltic country before the end of the year. He will do it. He just needs to show that Article 5 does not work. His goal is to prove that NATO is dead, and the best way is to display its impotence. He will try it with a limited incursion. I'm not talking about a massive invasion or attacking Poland. He knows that would end very badly for him. But a limited incursion in Estonia or Latvia is another matter."
by dec0dedab0de | 2025-10-13 15:34:17+00:00
I've had a Jeep for a few months, and it bothers me so much that the entire community is about modifying the vehicle as much as possible, but they still come with this locked down OS.

If any car could be the champion of OpenSource, it is a Jeep Wrangler, but they're using an OS made by SiriusXM for some reason.
by Citizen_Lame | 2025-10-13 15:34:27+00:00
This has nothing to do with GDPR, but nice try. By default you need to provide your details for domain registration, to hide these details is optional.

Nothing wrong with that, but coupled with hiding yourself on open source project as well and coupled with host which proudly advertises:

Dedicated Servers & VPS with DMCA Ignored Hosting

No, thanks. Probably Russkis but still.
by leakycap | 2025-10-13 15:34:31+00:00
My feedback is: I don't deal with companies that don't have pricing models on the homepage, and it honestly seems gross to me when anything related to accessibility is behind a high cost barrier.

When I see "Get a free audit" and "Request pricing", the tab is usually closed and I go to the next link.

I've learned companies without public pricing often have egregiously high costs.

I think you're losing many potential leads -permanently- because of the early 2000s customer acquisition model currently being used.

> Making accessibility more accessible.

Then start by making your product/service accessible by offering up-front, no-B.S. information. It feels like the kind of service I often "rescue" clients from when I find out a non-profit is being gouged for something like this.
by pegasus | 2025-10-13 15:34:38+00:00
I think the claim would be that an LLM would only ever pass a strict subset of the questions testing a particular understanding. As we gather more and more text to feed these models, finding those questions will necessarily require more and more out-of-the-box thinking... or a (un)lucky draw. Giveaways will always be lurking just beyond the inference horizon, ready to yet again deflate our high hopes of having finally created a machine which actually understands our everyday world.

I find this thesis very plausible. LLMs inhabit the world of language, not our human everyday world, so their understanding of it will always be second-hand. An approximation of our own understanding of that world, itself imperfect, but at least aiming for the real thing.

The part about overcoming this limitation by instantiating the system in hardware I find less convincing, but I think I know where he comes from with that as well: by giving it hardware sensors, the machine would not have to simulate the world outside as well - on top of the inner one.

The inner world can more easily be imagined as finite, at least. Many people seem to take this as a given, actually, but there's no good reason to expect that it is. Plank limits from QM are often brought up as an argument for digital physics, but in fact they are only a limit on our knowledge of the world, not on the physical systems themselves.
Show HN: Page Gym - page speed analysis and optimization tool for advanced users
by razcoj | 2025-10-13 15:35:14+00:00
Hi everyone,

Like the title says, it lets you test your page and then try different optimizations (preloading stuff, inserting HTML, executing arbitrary JS, etc) on the page without making any changes to your code.

Short demo: https://youtu.be/IKSu-rv78wI

It's something I've been developing over several years, and to which I've dedicated my full time over the past 7 months or so. Let me know what you think.
by holden_nelson | 2025-10-13 15:35:15+00:00
if scientists are so curious, why do they have to eat??? checkmate atheists

Less snarky: getting funding and making a living in academia, which is the most accessible way to be a scientist, has been cutthroat since long before this administration. If it were more accessible, or if staying alive weren't so damn expensive, I think we'd see more curiosity-driven science being performed.

Also, I don't believe one negates the other. As an engineer, my work satisfies my curiosity / desire to build, and I would do it for $50k, but I'm not gonna take a pay cut to prove how curious I am.
by candiddevmike | 2025-10-13 15:35:22+00:00
IMO, the backdrop to all of this is global warming. We're seeing so many warning signs and growth stagnating that governments need something, ANYTHING, to prop up their debt fueled economies and keep the music playing. In the face of impending GDP/population contraction due to global warming and the upcoming breadbasket collapses, GenAI isn't going to do shit for us. All of the money and effort being spent on it is money that could be spent on figuring out how to give our kids a glimmer of hope.
by rglover | 2025-10-13 15:35:25+00:00
I can't for the life of me understand why infotainment systems knock so many engineers for a loop. Is there a particular reason (industry/domain-specific) beyond just low-quality software development?

My Mazda 3 (2018) just had a class action lawsuit for its infotainment system which, completely at random after years of normal operation, starts clicking on menu items and scrolling about the settings (only to stop and not do it again for a couple of months). It can get so bad you just have to disconnect any devices and drive in silence/with the AM/FM radio.
by MobiusHorizons | 2025-10-13 15:36:12+00:00
My knowledge is a few years out of date, but at the time china’s power generation was mostly coal, despite the heavy investment in solar. New power generation at the time was not replacing old but just keeping up with rising demand, so china was building new coal plants as well. I don’t think most _new_ generation was coal even 5 years ago, but most existing _generation_ was coal , and I expect that is still true
by mindslight | 2025-10-13 15:37:02+00:00
Something we can easily infer is that the counterparty must be a connected Trump donor.

I have to wonder if there is some deeper connection whereby the introduction of this large not-yet-regulated economic sector actually creates pressure to move our whole society towards an oligarchic mobster/patronage style government. In a steady state where laws are widely known, it's harder to eek out an edge by breaking laws and then buying your way out of trouble - with the law being clear, the Schelling point is to be opposed to you. And an aggrieved counterparty can spend some resources to make sure it stays that way, even if they're not necessarily in favor with the ruling party.

Whereas with this case, nobody actually knows what the law "is" or really even what it "should be". Cryptocurrency was designed on a strong assertion of "code is law". But this doesn't keep governments from inserting their own semantics after the fact. Since there is no clear diving line, most people are not predisposed to thinking it should go one way or the other. This makes having a connection to the big boss man who can put his finger on the scale become much more relevant, and therefore much more valuable.
by catigula | 2025-10-13 15:37:05+00:00
This talk of arms race with China is very, very dangerous. We need to start having a more important conversation if people really believe this because, otherwise, why shouldn't China just kinetically strike US infrastructure and vice versa?

If AI is an executioner's blow to your opponent by enabling you to dominate them in terms of hacking, economy, government, politics, etc. kinetic strikes are more than justified. You could destroy most of the US's ability to create AI for decades with Pearl Harbor-esque first strikes.

Do people think countries are just going to roll over and die?
by simpaticoder | 2025-10-13 15:37:06+00:00
>[Matrices] seem to represent a more fundamental primordial truth.

No, matrices (or more specifically matrix multiplication) are a useful result picked out of a huge search space defined as "all the ways to combine piles of numbers with arithmetic operators". The utility of the discovery is determined by humans looking for compact ways to represent ideas (abstraction). One of the most interesting anecdotes in the history of linear algebra was how Hamilton finally "discovered" a way to multiply them. "...he was out walking along the Royal Canal in Dublin with his wife when the solution in the form of the equation i2 = j2 = k2 = ijk = −1 occurred to him; Hamilton then carved this equation using his penknife into the side of the nearby Broom Bridge" [0]

The "primordial truth" is found in the selection criteria of the human minds performing the search.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Rowan_Hamilton
by Leif24 | 2025-10-13 15:37:14+00:00
> If someone is interested in draw over a period, e.g. over one hour, you'd say it used 5Wh in that period.

Wh per hr? Let's just cut through the confusion and say it draws (J/s)Hr / Hr. :P

More seriously, if you are interested in energy the "correct" SI unit is J although in electrical applications [k/Mega/Giga]Whr is common. If you are interested in energy draw over a period, aka power, the "correct" and common unit is W. While 5 Wh per hour might seem simpler, it is equivalent to say this thing draws as much energy per hour as a device that that draws 5W would draw over one hour - needlessly redundant.
by kijin | 2025-10-13 15:37:21+00:00
Not the parent, but I see that several messages related to buying a subscription are translated into the locale of my browser. In my language, it just feels a little amateurish. In other languages, perhaps it might contain something totally wrong.

So it will be safer to just use languages you are comfortable with, like English and Russian. Especially on pages that concern money. :)
by wmeredith | 2025-10-13 15:37:48+00:00
My high schooler is in theatre and they post critical updates via Instagram. It drives me crazy.

And don't get me started on all the custom apps cluttering my phone that these schools and sports leagues get sold on for sharing flyers and other info (Parent Square, Peach Jar, Playmetrics, Mojo, etc.) I guess it's a feature that most of those apps are not well designed and they don't suck you into addictive engagement loops like the big social media platforms.
by maleldil | 2025-10-13 15:38:20+00:00
The very first paragraph in ripgrep's README makes that behaviour very clear:

> ripgrep is a line-oriented search tool that recursively searches the current directory for a regex pattern. By default, ripgrep will respect gitignore rules and automatically skip hidden files/directories and binary files. (To disable all automatic filtering by default, use rg -uuu.)

https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep
by elzbardico | 2025-10-13 15:38:28+00:00
I still have the hope that the AI bubble will leave as a side effect a massive build-out of energy infrastructure: Nuclear, Solar and Natural Gas.

In my book, prosperity and progress is measured in Terajoules. If you have free, clean and abundant energy, you have industry, jobs, every fucking thing a healthy economy should want or need to have.

And on the other side, I think the Chinese are deluding themselves on robotics.
by Eridrus | 2025-10-13 15:38:31+00:00
Yeah, it's nonsense.

I think the core problem is that innovators typically only capture low single digit percent of the value they generate for society.

Bell Labs existed in an anomalous environment where their monopoly allowed them to capture more of the value of R&D, so they invested more into it.

This is the typical argument for public subsidy of R&D across both public and private settings because this low capture rate means that it is underprovisioned for society's benefit.
by twobitshifter | 2025-10-13 15:38:44+00:00
Not why it can’t be done so much as why it isn’t done. Share buybacks allow companies to reward executives directly as their compensation is tied to stock price. If we started not doing that, the priorities might shift, but those executives like things the way they are.

Before Tim Cook Apple had never done a buyback - Jobs was always thinking Apple could do better with the money in R&D than paying off shareholders. Wall Street did not approve of this position, but Jobs wasn’t one to listen to anybody, so it did not matter. Most CEOs are not going to take such a strong position when they, the stockholders, and every other executive can be guaranteed a financial reward through a buyback.
by OG_BME | 2025-10-13 15:38:44+00:00
The writing style of this article is interested, on one hand, it's packed full of details and information like a well-researched, human-written article.

On the other, there are many ChatGPTisms, it's not this, it's that, groups of 3 terms, em-dashes, etc.

My thinking is that there was a thorough draft written by a human that then was passed through an LLM and heavily modified. Not that there's a problem with that.