MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nostrademons | 2025-11-14 17:59:02+00:00
So this article is conflating the 3 different types of margins [1], and that's at least partially responsible for the results it gets. It talks about operating margins, but the definition that it gives is actually the definition for net margins, net income / revenue. Operating margins uses operating income, which excludes interest, taxes, and capital expenses. There's also gross margins, which are basically the value you add over cost of inputs divided by your revenue, not counting salaries, marketing, customer acquisition, or any of the other stuff you have to do to get from raw materials to products in customers' hands.

The article found that the highest margins are in ports, financial services, toll roads, etc. with certain key (but not all) software, AI, and semiconductors having good margins. But this is a logical consequence of the definition of margin they chose. These are all very capital-intensive businesses: it takes a huge amount of money to build a port, or a fab, or a search engine, or a road, or to start up a bank or insurance company. The financing cost of building these capital improvements, as well as the depreciation on them, is explicitly excluded from the definition of "margin" that the article chose.

Note also that this explains why certain semiconductor and tech companies have high margins but many are very low-margin. If you are TSMC or Intel, you own your own fabs. You spend tens of billions of dollars to construct them, and the financing cost of those investments is explicitly excluded from the definition of "margin" chosen by the article. But if you are a random ASIC manufacturer, you pay TSMC to fabricate your chips, and those payments are included in Cost of Goods Sold and excluded from your gross margin, let alone your operating margin. Likewise, if you are Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, you're making huge capital investments in datacenters. But if you're a random SaaS, your cloud computing costs are included in COGS, they become revenue for the cloud provider, and so your operating margins look much worse.

I'd be much more interested in seeing the analysis re-run with net margins.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/102714/whats-differ...
by burnte | 2025-11-14 17:59:19+00:00
The absolute last thing I need in my browser is AI. What's it going to do, read the page then rewrite it for me to read? Why would I not just read the page? Is it going to generate images of the webpage for me?

AI is a great tool, but it's not useful in every circumstance. Right now product managers are trying to think of any place to shoehorn AI into regardless of it being a good idea or useful just to be able to push out "AI powered!" features. Putting ChatGPT and Claude in a sidebar is absolutely not an innovation. 25 years ago I made a sidebar extension that let you add webcam feeds to a sidebar so you could keep an eye on multiple internet cams easily. It was literally a webpage in a sidebar that you just added the cam URLs to. This is the exact same thing, except an LLM.

I do not need an AI browser, an AI calculator, an AI hammer (it tells you about the nail you're about to hit!), or an AI lamp (it detects when it's dark and asks if you want to turn on a light!).
by mjamesaustin | 2025-11-14 17:59:29+00:00
Fascinating point, and one I think can definitely apply here.

Though there is a key difference – Galileo could see through his telescope the same way, every time. He also understood what the telescope did to deliver his increased knowledge.

Compare this with LLMs, which provide different answers every time, and whose internal mechanisms are poorly understood. It presents another level of uncertainty which further reduces our agency.
by Philpax | 2025-11-14 18:00:00+00:00
I'm still a Niri newbie, but I'm enjoying the scrolling as a ways to have "subworkspaces": when I'm working on a full-stack project, for example, I can scroll between the backend and the frontend, while arranging my windows in such a way that anything useful (e.g. the browser) remains resident on screen.

You can get similar functionality with tabbed windows, but I'm still trying to decide which workflow I prefer; scrolling feels a bit more "organic", while tabs are superior for density.
by tavavex | 2025-11-14 18:00:11+00:00
It's probably based on most of the content about Game of Thrones that was within the dataset. Regardless, this isn't what the case is about. The authors argue that the summary text itself is infringing, regardless of all other circumstances. Where ChatGPT got the info or how exactly the text was generated is unimportant, this is solely about the summary.
by crazygringo | 2025-11-14 18:00:28+00:00
> You do not need an ID ti fly within the USA

Unless you're trying to be unnecessarily pedantic, yes you do.

There are exceptions like if you're a minor, if you're a passenger on a general aviation flight instead of a commercial one, etc.

But if you're an adult and you want to hop on a commercial flight from JFK to LAX, you need government-issued photo ID, period. You're not getting through security otherwise.
by abbablack | 2025-11-14 18:00:47+00:00
Your argument holds even less ground. Yeah let's not save ~$12,000 a year since it'll never help. Instead say woe and stay in the same bucket and beg for handouts since there's no 12k in safeguards. If you're living from paycheck to paycheck due to your own spending habits it's a personal issue as well. As someone previously commented, it's about reducing expenses while making money. It isn't going to immediately lift you out. But it will eventually.
Show HN: My workout app earns –$1000/month. I decided to build a new one
by strongpigeon | 2025-11-14 18:00:56+00:00
Hey HN

A little over four years ago, I built a weightlifting app for 5/3/1 with the goal of making $1000 total. Five months later I had reached that goal and made it to the top of HN [0]. It’s been earning between $1000 - $1300 every months since.

After that a lot happened. I got a job, then had kids, so I put the project on ice. When I grew too disappointed with my job, I decided to try to raise some money and build on the success of my 5/3/1 app by addressing the main feedback I kept getting: the ability to create your own programs.

Thus, Vis was born.

The initial idea was to create a platform where gyms and trainers could build programs and define them using formulas so they could be derived from parameters like 1RM. I built what I think is the best workout editor out there, but I quickly found out that B2B sales is hard (or maybe I just suck at it). It also just didn’t feel like a big enough sell for gyms.

So I pivoted and decided to focus on the iOS app for now. You can check it out at https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vis-next-generation-workouts/i...

It builds on the strengths of my previous app with a workout experience that focuses on what you are doing right now instead of a spreadsheet-like UI. Rescheduling workouts is now a breeze with a Jiggle Mode style interface. And it is now a fully native SwiftUI app (as opposed to Flutter), which made it easier to use stuff like Live Activities so you can work out from your lock screen.

Right now it comes with well known programs like 5/3/1 and more, and it will soon have the ability to create your own, powered by the same engine.

It has been quite a journey and I wouldn’t recommend doing this with two young kids, but I am really proud of what I built.

Please check it out and let me know what you think!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31508009
by roryirvine | 2025-11-14 18:01:05+00:00
You're not expecting them to set k8s up from scratch, just as you'd not expect the dev team to set up the datacentre power or networking from scratch for the server in your "scp and sysctl restart" scenario.

Typically, a k8s installation is looked after by a cross-functional Platform team, who look after not just the k8s cluster but also the gateways, service mesh, secrets management, observability and other common services, shared container images, CI/CD tooling, as well as platform security and governance.

These platform services then get consumed by the feature dev teams (of which there could be anywhere between half a dozen and multiple thousands). To deploy a new app, those dev teams need only create a repo and a helm chart, and the platform's self-service tooling will do the rest automatically. It really shouldn't take more than a few minutes for a team with some experience.

Yes, it's optimised for a very different scale of operation than a single server at a managed hosting provider. But there are plenty of situations in which that scale is required, and it's there that k8s shines.
by abustamam | 2025-11-14 18:02:01+00:00
I think it's a fair comment though. Porn isn't really useful to society (one could argue that it's actually detrimental to society but that's a separate topic).

But what I understood from parent comment is that they just do it for fun, not necessarily to be a boon to society. And then if it comes with new skills that actually can benefit society, then that's a win.

Granted, the commenter COULD play around with SFW stuff but if they're just doing it for fun then that's still not benefiting society either, so either way it's a wash. We all have fun in our own ways.
by jiehong | 2025-11-14 18:02:29+00:00
Which company will design and make 6G telco hardware in Germany?

I guess it will be 3/4/5G for a while, until they can someday cover the country just barely, and then 6G a decade and half later than everyone else (or is it by giving up sovereignty by buying US stuff instead?)

Sorry for being hopeless, but Germany has been very good at proving its inability to fix telco issues (or its train issues…).
by kstrauser | 2025-11-14 18:02:39+00:00
That hasn’t been my experience. It’s a lot more friction to pull out a phone than to not tap a single control center button.

It’s why I take a notepad to meetings now. I’ve tried taking notes on a laptop, and simply can’t. I can either fight to make something work even though it’s failed for me for decades, or give in and adopt another strategy.
by nerdponx | 2025-11-14 18:02:50+00:00
If you have genuinely interesting and valuable results to report, but you ask AI to do the final writeup for you and it comes across in that generic AI slop style, is it slop? Kind of a gray area for me. It certainly feels lazy and disrespectful to me as a reader, but on the other hand if they don't spend an afternoon proofreading and revising, maybe they can spend that afternoon instead building stuff. I don't know, our whole concept of the purpose of the written word is falling apart.
by murphyslab | 2025-11-14 18:03:00+00:00
Not to cast shade, but it looks like you've essentially built a front-end for Desmos. It definitely makes things faster than trying to do it directly in Desmos.

Suggestion: Most of the fits that you've done assume that the errors are normally distributed. It would be worthwhile adding some graphical or numerical checks on that, rather than having goodness of fit or visual inspection be the only indication if this is a faulty assumption.

It gave made for a good quick check testing some data I had.
by ModernMech | 2025-11-14 18:03:03+00:00
If anyone is wondering why solving homelessness and poverty is so hard, this sibling reply is dead but I think people need to see that this opinion exists, and we need to contemplate the richest and most powerful people in this country share this sentiment:

"we're not blind to it, half of us are sick of paying for it for multiple generations, accruing interest. we're paying for poor people from 20 years ago still. let them sink, let them go away. its a test, they failed it."

Here, "go away" is a euphemism for "die from exposure".

20 years ago we had a worldwide financial crises caused by the capricious whims of the richest people in this country, they caused massive amounts of damage, destroyed people's lives and livelihoods, kicked them out on the street, and it's framed as "paying for poor people".
by bwhiting2356 | 2025-11-14 18:03:10+00:00
> But, I absolutely hated working in an office. I also hated what digital marketing has done to people’s privacy. I had to get out. So, after 10 years I left and went back to my roots. I founded a sprinkler contracting business with my brother and work outside all day, every day. And I love it.

I don't think this person should be putting themselves in the same category as people who are stuck in poverty with no options.
by shalmanese | 2025-11-14 18:03:23+00:00
Why would you set the probability at 1/3rd? It feels closer to 1/100 at most.

They've admitted the documents, if they're anywhere, are buried in a file cabinet at Iron Mountain. You can set a lower limit on the amount of labor required to produce the document. Activision is not going to go on this quest if the labor required * chance of the document existing exceeds the amount they can win in a lawsuit.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-14 18:03:30+00:00
Customers are increasingly wary of building their business on someone else's land because they've seen it happen too many times that once you're locked in the price goes up, or the company who is now your only viable supplier decides to enter your own market.

And at least if anyone can buy the hardware you'll have your own or have multiple competing providers you can lease it from. If you can only lease it and only from one company, who would want to touch that? It's like purposely walking into a trap.
by WD-42 | 2025-11-14 18:04:31+00:00
It's the same thing as a tiling WM, with all the benefits. You can still tile windows vertically or horizontally. The big improvement is that if I have a view with my browser, editor, a terminal or two all tiled nicely but then all of a sudden I need to open the Gimp or a PDF for some one-off work related to what I'm working on, it just opens to the right. I can move over to it and do what I need to do without messing up the current layout and then close it when I'm done.

This is opposed to a traditional tiling WM where you'd either need to open the app in another workspace, use some stacking feature or worst of all shove the new window into the current view by resizing some other window(s) which is often not ideal.
by tim333 | 2025-11-14 18:05:13+00:00
>It is ultimately a hardware problem.

I think it's more an algorithm problem. I've been reading how LLMs work and the brain does nothing like matrix multiplication over billions of entities. It seems a very inefficient way to do it in terms of compute use, although efficient in terms of not many lines of code. I think the example of the brain shows one could do far better.
by smallerfish | 2025-11-14 18:05:47+00:00
I think Claude Code makes TilingWMs doable. I've always given up in the past because there have been reams of configs necessary to get to a fairly usable state, and I don't love reading manuals for desktop environments - but now it's all pretty easy to crank out.

I've been on HyprLand for a week now and haven't hit any blockers yet that'd force me to go back to KDE.
by hbn | 2025-11-14 18:05:48+00:00
I'm happy we stumbled into in a state where you can buy a controller and plug it into your computer and it'll likely work hassle-free with basically all of your games. And I think that's what most people care about, more than being able to use wacky controllers with extra buttons.

Hell, configuring my own controls for a game is one of my least favorite things to do. I haven't even played the game yet, I don't know what button should do what!

The way it is, the devs know what kind of controller everyone will likely be using, they can figure out their ideal mapping for how the buttons should be used, and we all have an easy time using our controllers.
by sleepybrett | 2025-11-14 18:05:49+00:00
My writer friend also loved the alphasmart stuff until his last one died and he was looking for something with a bigger screen. I gave him my old remarkable and he got himself a little fullsized bluetooth keyboard and he's as happy as a clam now. Every time we see each other he thanks me. Loves the epaper and extra screen real estate and claims it's easier to pack around than the alphasmart. (flatter, boxier, etc)
by jerf | 2025-11-14 18:06:07+00:00
The Microsoft Agent, available through ActiveX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Agent

Which meant you could use it in Internet Explorer but not anywhere else. But it did make for some interesting web pages. I built a custom one with the mascot of the university I was attending at the time. It was, let's say, some peak 1990s internet. (Never shipped it to anyone, just had it internally.)

That took some non-trivial web searching. "Microsoft" "Agent" and most of the other keywords are pretty well covered by a few million other web pages by now.
by rckt | 2025-11-14 18:06:07+00:00
This is kind of a good way to understand that people who never really struggled in life aren't able to understand, step into struggling's person's shoes. It's simply an unknown concept for them. Everyone's values, perspective, actions are dictated by the past experience. I made my way from a poor country to a western-European wealthy one. And the question that amuses me is "So, how do you like here?". I fucking LOVE it here. People don't even understand that I can compare these nice streets to an absolute shithole. And they either have never lived abroad or just been to some neighboring countries. And they talk about food, views, sea, whatever. Oh man, they don't understand that just going outside is already a nice experience for me. Going to a doctor, using public transport, taking my kid to a nice school. Ha! I just tell them that yeah, it's nice, I like it. But there's a huge gap between our concepts of nice places.
by sgarland | 2025-11-14 18:06:25+00:00
As a child, I went from firmly middle-class (dad was a firefighter in San Diego, CA) to pretty damn poor (we moved to the middle of nowhere in Nebraska). I joined the U.S. Navy, and got a B.S. while I was in, then an M.S. in SWE afterwards on the government’s dime thanks to the GI Bill. I did the latter while working nights. I now make more money than I ever thought would be possible.

I said all of that to say, I am a poster child for “I crawled my way out of poverty, so you can too,” and I hate that sentiment. Even though I know that I did in fact work hard to get to where I am, I know plenty of people who work way harder than I ever have, and who have very little. It’s not that they’re blowing their money, it’s that their skill sets don’t pay nearly as lucratively as tech. Very little comes close.

If you have never been poor (or at least were raised poor) yourself, you cannot possibly understand what it’s like, and you should probably not be giving advice to those who are.
by bwblabs | 2025-11-14 18:06:33+00:00
Very positive to have a governmental hosted git/code platform, although I would still advise Gitea (it's not documented that pick is explored).

I'm a self hosting GoGogs / Gitea user for almost 10 years, I did follow the Gitea fork. However regarding the Forgejo fork: the main contributors stayed with Gitea. The ideologically forked Forgejo made some license changes and hard fork decisions that increased the maintenance burden even more, resulting in missing upstream features and decreased security. Forgejo is more busy managing ideals, than creating software.
by dijit | 2025-11-14 18:06:41+00:00
Even this does a poor job of explaining being poor.

The constant open loop on everything you own, terrified to discard anything even if its broken because there are components that might be useful to fix something else; the constant churn of second-hand (and cheap/disposable) things that are already close to death before they come into your possession and- crucially: the crushing weight of knowing that any financial roadbump is existential.

As the author mentions, a £50 fine might as well be £50,000- its unpayable, and leads to a sort of doom-spiral of lending to avoid worse consequences. Easily you can end up in unmanageable debt, in rare cases prison, its not uncommon to have the few worthwhile items you own being seized by bailifs to recoup debts, treasured heirlooms that cannot be replaced and have little monetary value so they do no impact to your debt. The hoarding of canned goods to avoid being unable to eat.

It’s hard to convey this, and what it does to your mentality- I am now built mentally to think quite fiscally conservative and do not take debts or put savings into investments like my peers. I am well off but a fraction of what I could have been had I not has this mentality.

You have to live it to understand it, but I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, its a tarpit and getting out of it without someone handing you a branch (and if you no longer have the strength to pull yourself out) then you’ll be stuck in it forever.
by turnsout | 2025-11-14 18:06:47+00:00
Uber and Lyft basically destroyed the taxi industry by subsidizing incredibly cheap rides until they had wiped out independent drivers, then gradually raised their prices much higher than taxis ever were.

If there was an Uber for plumbing/HVAC, you would get ONE quote, and it would be higher than any of the ones you got.

So I'm not sure that's the future we should be racing toward.
by _jab | 2025-11-14 18:07:00+00:00
One symptom of AGI fantasy that I particularly hate is the dismissal of applied AI companies as "wrappers" - as if they're not offering any real technical add on top of the models themselves.

This seems to be a problem specific to AI. No one casts startups that build off of blockchains as thin, nor the many companies that were enabled by cloud computing and mobile computing as recklessly endangered by competition from the maintainers of those platforms.

The reality is that applying AI to real challenges is an important and distinct problem space from just building AI models in the first place. And in my view, AI is in dire need of more investment in this space - a recent MIT study found that 95% of AI pilots at major organizations are ending in failure.
by sidcool | 2025-11-14 18:07:02+00:00
Reading a ton of docs and interpreting them is a tedious activity. If you can get deducible or inferable answers with AI, that's a huge win. I have faced issues with kubernetes that needed me to wade through the code for days to find it was a missed case or unsupported. AI would help me in minutes. That's the claim here, if it works that way.
by pixl97 | 2025-11-14 18:07:10+00:00
>That sort of community existed and probably still exits the most in places where the population is the least dense.

I think you misunderstand suburbanism... In those places where the population is not dense the number of people that move commonly is not that high. Again, neighborhoods tend to have longer and deeper roots.

Suburbia has little to no community these days.
by fullStackOasis | 2025-11-14 18:07:26+00:00
I have had the same problem. I studied some leetcode, but didn't feel motivated and never got very good at. Good enough to get an okay job, but nothing at a top-paying company. So you might want to take the approach that you don't need to get a job that requires a huge amount of of leetcode study; focus on networking or whatever.

If you feel you have no choice, though, I wonder if you could try to gather together a group of people who are in a similar situation, in order to do practice sessions. Each person could take turns explaining a leetcode problem on a whiteboard. It would give you interview practice, help you make networking connections, and hopefully make the task less boring and introduce an aspect of accountability. I think you'd have to be careful to make sure that the people involved were friendly and helpful, not make it about one-upmanship. Anyway, that is what I'd do today, if I had the problem that I needed to pass leetcode tests.