MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by staplung | 2025-12-03 20:04:49+00:00
I actually did already know that factoid but was struggling (am still) to see how it relates to a wooden trough that merely holds cables.

Another interesting factoid about the catenary: Robert Hooke proved that it takes on the shape (though inverted) of the ideal arch, in terms of supporting loads above it. La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona is filled with them.
by harmmonica | 2025-12-03 20:04:59+00:00
Do you mind giving a bit more details in layman's terms about this assuming the $60k per subscriber isn't hyperbole? Is that the total cost of the latest training run amortized per existing subscriber plus the inference cost to serve that one subscriber?

If you tell me to click the link, I did, but backed out because I thought you'd actually be willing to break it down here instead. I could also ask Claude about it I guess.
by SigmundA | 2025-12-03 20:05:03+00:00
Not sure how that makes sense, if the stats change significantly then caches would be evicted during the gathering of statistics.

I believe popular connection poolers and clients attempt to do plan caching through prepared statements and keeping the connection open.

My understanding its not easy to do in PG since connections are process based instead of thread based and the query plans are not serializable between processes, so they cannot be shared between connections.

MSSQL has been doing statement plan caching for at least 20 years and it did stored procedure plan caching before that.
by bee_rider | 2025-12-03 20:05:24+00:00
Not many people buy Windows, they buy laptops that happen to have Windows installed. IMO this is a worthwhile distinction because most people don’t really care about operating systems anyway, and would happily (I suspect, at least) use an Open Source one if it came installed and configured on a device that they got in a store.

Installing an OS is seen as a hard/technical task still. Installing a local program, not so much. I suspect people install LLM programs from app stores without knowing if they are calling out to the internet or running locally.
by _keats | 2025-12-03 20:05:24+00:00
I think this comment (and TFA) is really just painting with too broad of strokes. Of course there are going to be people in tech hubs that are very pro-AI, either because they are working with it directly and have had legitimately positive experiences or because they work with it and they begrudgingly see the writing on that wall for what it means for software professionals.

I can assure you, living in Seattle I still encounter a lot a AI boosters just as much as I encounter AI haters/skeptics
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-03 20:05:36+00:00
I want people who are working on a project/initiative that I’m responsible for to speak up and I do a scenario question when I’m interviewing candidates to see if they will speak up.

But I’m not going to stick my neck out and be “the problem”. I will definitely speak up about misgivings over ideas where my manager has some authority to change something. But that’s about it.

But in my experience, line level managers are useless. They have no organizational weight or authority.

When someone reaches out to me about a job where they wanted me to lead strategic organizational changes or initiatives, the first thing I tease out is whether I will be reporting directly to someone who has real authority - in a smaller company someone with C* as their title. In a larger company a director.
by mingus88 | 2025-12-03 20:05:44+00:00
A group of four friends typically will have four incomes

A family of four typically has one or two incomes

I have travelled domestically without even providing an ID at all for my underage children. Keeping current passport-level IDs for a large family is indeed a new burden that a group of adult friends does not have to account for

For example, how often does your child need a current realID? Not until they hit the TSA. Good luck tracking all the expiries of every child, and making sure it’s all updated before your next 1hr flight to visit grandma.

I know this is HN and demographically you largely skew younger without large families, but this is a real PITA for no actual security benefit
by asacrowflies | 2025-12-03 20:05:59+00:00
They even seem to be on of the rare companies that recognized the issues of this and massively pulled themselves BACK from these dark patterns. They seem to have major restraint and working to undo the evil..... imagine if a Activision blizzard had something like the steam market place for cards and gifts..... They would be full face in the cocaine to make it all WORSE and more egregious
by groos | 2025-12-03 20:06:13+00:00
It's not just that AI is being pushed on to employees by the tech giants - this is true - but that the hype of AI as a life changing tech is not holding up and people within the industry can easily see this. The only life-changing thing it's doing is due to a self-fulfilling prophecy of eliminating jobs in the tech industry and outside by CEOs who have bet too much on AI. Everyone currently agrees that there is no return on all the money spent on AI. Some players may survive and do well in the future but for a majority there is only the prospect of pain, and this is what all the negativity is about.
by rawgabbit | 2025-12-03 20:06:23+00:00
Regarding "And then came the final insult: everyone was forced to use Microsoft's AI tools whether they worked or not."

As a customer, I actually had an MS account manager once yelled at me for refusing to touch <latest newfangled vaporware from MS> with a ten foot pole. Sorry, burn me a dozen times; I don't have any appendages left to care. I seriously don't get Microsoft. I am still flabbergasted anytime anyone takes Microsoft seriously.
by jfalcon | 2025-12-03 20:07:01+00:00
After reading the article and the comments, here are a few points people are missing from their analysis:

- OverUtilized/UnderCharged: doesn't matter because...

- Lead Time vs. TCO vs. IRS Asset Deprecation: The moment you get it fully built, it's already obsolete. Thus from a CapEx point of view, if you can lease your compute (including GPU) and optimize the rest of the inputs for similar then your CapEx overall is much lower and tied to the real estate - not the technology. The rest is cost of doing business and deductible in and of itself.

- The "X" factor: Someone mentioned TPU/ASIC but then there is the DeepSeek factor - what if we figure out a better way of doing the work that can shortcut the workflow?

- AGI partnerships: Right now, you see a lot of Mega X giving billions to Mega Y because all of them are trying to get their version of Linux or Apache or whatever at parity with the rest. Once AGI is settled and confirmed, then most all of these partnerships will be severed because it then becomes which company is going to get their AI model into that high prestige Montessori school and into the right ivy league schools - like any other rich parent would for their "bot" offspring.

So what will it look like when it crashes? A bunch of bland empty "warehouses" with mobile PDU's once filling all their parking lot space gone. Whatever "paradise" that was there may come back... once you bulldoze all that concrete and steel. The money will do something else like a Don McLean song.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-12-03 20:07:02+00:00
Literally everyone I know is sick of AI. Sick of it being crowbar'd into tools we already use and find value in. Sick of it being hyped at us as though it's a tech moment it simply isn't. Sick of companies playing at being forward thinking and new despite selling the same old shit but they've bolted a chatbot to it, so now it's "AI." Sick of integrations and products that just plain do not fucking work.

I wouldn't shit talk you to your face if you're making an AI thing. However I also understand the frustration and the exhaustion with it, and to be blunt, if a product advertises AI in it, I immediately do treat it more skeptically. If the features are opt-in, fine. If however it seems like the sort of thing that's going to start spamming me with Clippy-style "let our AI do your work for you!" popups whilst I'm trying to learn your fucking software, I will get aggravated extremely fast.
by purpleidea | 2025-12-03 20:07:12+00:00
This is great work and good news, however if you want to guarantee a long-term public benefit, use copyleft without a CLA! A more well-funded company can fork this and make the new work proprietary, meaning you did all that initial development work for them for free.

Apple and Microsoft are the two most likely parties to do so here. This isn't a theoretical risk.
by stego-tech | 2025-12-03 20:07:20+00:00
This isn’t just a Seattle thing, but I do think the outsized presence of specific employers there contributes to an outsized negativity around AI.

Look, good engineers just want to do good work. We want to use good tools to do good work, and I was an early proponent of using these tools in ways to help the business function better at PriorCo. But because I was on the wrong team (On-Prem), and because I didn’t use their chatbots constantly (I was already pitching agents before they were a defined thing, I just suck at vocabulary), I was ripe for being thrown out. That built a serious resentment towards the tooling for the actions of shitty humans.

I’m not alone in these feelings of resentment. There’s a lot of us, because instead of trusting engineers to do good work with good tools, a handful of rich fucks decided they knew technology better than the engineers building the fucking things.
by ryanwhitney | 2025-12-03 20:07:24+00:00
Our (on-the-way-out) mayor likes it!

"I said, Imagine how cool would this be if we had like, a 10-foot wall. It’s interactive and it’s historical. And you could talk to Martin Luther King, and you could say, ‘Well, Dr, Martin Luther King, I’ve always wanted to meet you. What was your day like today? What did you have for breakfast?’ And he comes back and he talks to you right now."
by Aloisius | 2025-12-03 20:07:28+00:00
The US limit is typically 80,000 lbs, so 36.29 megagrams (aka "metric" tons).

The EU countries have limits of 40 Mg or higher (except Albania). Netherlands allows vehicles up to 50 Mg.

Of course this is all for 5+ axle vehicles. A 5-axle 40 Mg big rig is putting a 8 Mg of load on each axle (if it was perfectly distributed).

A Dodge RAM 1500 loaded up has a gross vehicle weight of about 3.27 Mg - about 1.64 Mg/axle. Fourth power law means about 566 loaded RAMs would equal one about 40 Mg 5-axle big rig in terms of road damage.
by venturecruelty | 2025-12-03 20:07:44+00:00
I'm stuck between feeling bad because this is my field–I spend most days worrying about not being able to pay my bills or get another job–and wanting to shake every last tech worker by the shoulders and yell "WAKE UP!" at them. If you are unhappy with what your employer is doing, because they have more power over you, you don't have to just sit there and take it. You can organize.

Of course, you could also go online and sulk, I suppose. There are more options between "ZIRP boomtimes lol jobs for everyone!" and "I got fired and replaced with ELIZA". But are tech workers willing to expore them? That's the question.

It just feels like it's in bad taste that we have the most money and privilege and employment left (despite all of the doom and gloom), and we're sitting around feeling sorry for ourselves. If not now, when? And if not us, who?
by nunobrito | 2025-12-03 20:07:44+00:00
Me. Able to bring into reality so many ideas that wasn't able to do on my own since two years. Gigantic productivity boost.

I'm not even using an IDE because I'm not able to edit the code, it has effectively became a blackbox. This is for me the worst thing, because I'm neither learning to program in the language being used nor am I reflecting on the approach being used.

In the past, I'd pass much more time thinking about different aspects and about the overall architecture of the code, which helped to make good design decisions. With AI is very comfortable to just see the solution appearing but then underneath the hood there are plenty of errors/bugs/bad implementations that you are not even seeing (yet).

In overall, grateful. Without these tools would require a team of 5 people and a quite hefty VC investment. Like this can at least produce a working product to see in action and decide if it is worth moving forward or use the lessons learned and move to another iteration. I'm right now on the 4th iteration of the same idea, thanks to the high-output speed and seeing how these "dreams" come in reality and which parts need to be improved.
by munksbeer | 2025-12-03 20:07:45+00:00
> Tbh, I'm sure I'm going to get down voted to hell, but it's pretty amazing how many highly educated and otherwise intelligent Europeans just... don't believe in economics anymore when economics says their lives are worse than their peers in America. It's one of the major touch points of anti intellectualism in this forum.

Immigrant from a developing nation, living in the UK here. I very much notice this attitude on hn, and elsewhere. Europeans (I include the UK obviously) are extremely protective of the idea that the welfare state here automatically makes everything better than life in the US. It's a bit easier to be objective when you live here but you're not actually from here.

I love the UK. It has been my home for over 20 years. I love the fact that there is a safety net that mostly, sort of, works. But I also know people from my original country who have moved elsewhere. Some who actually lived in the UK, then moved elsewhere. Some of those to the US, where they have really accelerated their earnings and their comfort and in some respects, quality of life.

I think there is no doubt that the material comforts that most people enjoy out of life will be improved just by working the same job in the US. Obviously there are non-tangibles such as living in a society where people can't carry guns, one of the things I appreciate about the UK compared to the US. Or also knowing that poorer people living just a few streets away from you can enjoy the same facilities I do (to a large extent), and are mostly going to be ok in life. I like living in Europe, where we're exposed to so much culturally. Etc.

So I can see both sides of this, but I am definitely on your side of the fence with regard material quality of life. My salary is high in the UK, I'm in the top percentile of earners, but without any family money, I'm never going to lead an extravagant life here. I'm going to struggle to retire early like my US peers would be able to.
by maxglute | 2025-12-03 20:07:57+00:00
Your theory doesn't work in real world timeline where we have to factor in actual execution time. Also it simply doesn't match actual policy history. Xi doesn't get to flip switch and conjure a bunch of domestic phone brands and shift market share within a few quarters. That stuff takes years, not suddenly. Hence on/around. The fact that Samsung peaked right when Xi entered office means Xi was not causative since Xi wouldn't have any time to implement buy domestic policy, which also didn't exist at the time. Market share changes work on multi year lag, for Samsung shares to decline, it requires Xiaomi, Vivo, Oppo etc to have build out manufacturing years prior, i.e. before Xi.

Samsung global sales stagnated few years later and saw some decline in the same period as Huawei was doing double digit global YoY growth - again factor in actual market lag of PRC companies cornering domestic market before going abroad. Then HW got knee capped by export controls. Now maybe HW might not have surpassed Samsung but it's pretty clear Samsung wasn't growing while PRC brands were, while none sanctioned brands continue to chip away at Samsung (i.e. this article).

Either way, claiming there was some anti foreign policy in 2013 simply doesn't comport with reality because we have paperwork of Xi's actual year 1 policies, there wasn't any anti-foreign or buy domestic initiatives. Hence I don't see the relevance of McGee regardless. I think chapter talks about political awakening to PRC business climate not any mobile sector industrial substitution policies (which again, did not exist).

PRC telling Apple to follow PRC laws, i.e. cloud sovereignty isn't anti foreign it's just forcing foreign companies to compete on same requirements as domestic companies like data localization. That happeneing in 2013 was part of broader cybersecurity/ideological work, i.e. the institution work stuff that applied to domestic and foreign companies. Actual MIC2025 related industrial policy didn't happen until years later. Procedurally Xi's first year focused on corruption/CCDI, institutional stuff, there wasn't any industrial policy like MIC until a year later, like 3rd plenum was in December 2013. Xi wasn't going around telling domestic consumers to stop buying Samsung phones or kicking Samsung out of the country. Otherwise Samsung again, wouldn't have freely returned to PRC to partner with PRC ODMs for low end lines that they realize even PRC has cost advantage on vs Vietnam. Incidientally the same cost advantage that made PRC / global consumers buy from affordable PRC brands in the first place.
by arjie | 2025-12-03 20:08:30+00:00
I wonder if I'm the guy in the bubble or if all these people are in the bubble. Everyone I know is really enjoying using these tools. I wrote a comment yesterday about how much my life has improved https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46131280

But also, it's not just my own. My wife's a graphic designer. She uses AI all the time.

Honestly, this has been revolutionary for me for getting things done.
by toast0 | 2025-12-03 20:09:19+00:00
> After a pause I tried to share how much better I've been feeling—how AI tools helped me learn faster, how much they accelerated my work on Wanderfugl. I didn't fully grok how tone deaf I was being though. She's drowning in resentment.

Here's the deal. Everyone I know who is infatuated with AI shares things AI told them with me, unsolicited, and it's always so amazingly garbage, but they don't see it or they apologize it away [1]. And this garbage is being shoved in my face from every angle --- my browser added it, my search engine added it, my desktop OS added it, my mobile OS added it, some of my banks are pushing it, AI comment slop is ruining discussion forums everywhere (even more than they already were, which is impressive!). In the mean time, AI is sucking up all the GPUs, all the RAM, and all the kWH.

If AI is actually working for you, great, but you're going to have to show it. Otherwise, I'm just going to go into my cave and come out in 5 years and hope things got better.

[1] Just a couple days ago, my spouse was complaining to her friend about a change that Facebook made, and her friend pasted an AI suggestion for how to fix it with like 7 steps that were all fabricated. That isn't helpful at all. It's even less helpful than if the friend just suggested to contact support and/or delete the facebook account.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-03 20:09:22+00:00
As another Nix person who’s just made public a Nix -> HTML library (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46139067 ), I’m curious what you think about a syntax like this instead?

[ "div#main.container" { lang = "en"; } [ "h1" "Hello" ] ]

Would turn into:

<div class="container" id="main" lang="en"><h1>Hello</h1></div>

I think I've hit the sweat-spot with the hiccup-inspired way of just using Nix data, and avoids a whole shebang of templating issues since it's not actually templates, just Nix data and expressions.
by trueno | 2025-12-03 20:09:54+00:00
toyed with pg_lake against our absolute dump of iceberg files (the nerds in my field call it a data lakehouse but engineering already has too many abstractions). it's pretty insane having postgres & the power of duckdb for mega aggregation, i threw a lot of wild windowed queries and aggregations at it and it seemed to really intuitively switch to using the duckdb jujutsu very well.

looking at migrating the rest of our catalog to iceberg now just to have the pg_lake option in our back pocket for future application development. it's so damn cool, as far as dbs go i haven't personally been involved in anything that needed more power than what postgres could deliver with writes. to be able to tack on bigboi analytics on top of it really consolidates a lot for us. im generally pretty cynical of these big saas peoples acquiring cool stuff but snowflake nabbing crunchydata here (crunchydata = guys who work on some pretty interesting postgres extensions) and helping them push this one to the a proverbial finish line and then open sourcing it was really great to see. i was worried when the acquisition went down because this was the major postgres thing i was really hoping someone would deliver, and crunchydata imo seemed to have the best plan outlined that understood the need.
by SECProto | 2025-12-03 20:10:15+00:00
> but was struggling (am still) to see how it relates to a wooden trough that merely holds cables.

Overhead Catenary [1] is a standard term, for a system that has two wires overhead - one suspended from the posts (forming a series of catenary curve), the other suspended from that cable at regular intervals (and held level relative to the track). The wood in Boston's system seems to replace the catenary cable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overhead_line#Overhead_catenar...
by mvdtnz | 2025-12-03 20:10:39+00:00
There is a certain category of developers (a category that multiplied in size many times over around the same time as the boom in coding bootcamps, take that for what you will) who believe that there's virtue in running the same code on the client and the server, despite them being totally different paradigms with different needs. This kind of thing is the predictable result.
by jofla_net | 2025-12-03 20:10:42+00:00
Its not. I know some ex bay area devs who are the same mind, and i'm not too far off.

I think its definitely stronger in MS as my friend on the inside tells me, than most places.

There are alot of elements to it, one being profits at all costs, the greater economy, FOMO, and a resentment of engineers and technical people who have been practicing, what execs i can guess only see as alchemy, for a long time. They've decided that they are now done with that and that everyone must use the new sauce, because reasons. Sadly until things like logon buttons dis-appear and customers get pissed, it won't self-correct.

I just wish we could present the best version of ourselves and as long as deadlines are met, it'll all work out, but some have decided for scorched-earth. I suppose its a natural reaction to always want to be on the cutting edge, even before the cake has left the oven.
by mrguyorama | 2025-12-03 20:10:47+00:00
Also you need a hundred million dollars to run a campaign at all.

Bernie snuggles up to the democrat party because even being extremely popular doesn't ensure you will be re-elected if you don't run a campaign.

The 2024 and 2020 elections cost $15 and $18 billion dollars. We literally spend more than it costs to build an aircraft carrier, for no reason. An entire industry exists to suck up that money every 2-4 years. All that money comes from rich "donors", who always want to ask how you feel about <X> before agreeing to give you that money instead of your competitor.

Most countries have strict limits on how much you can spend on campaigns, and limit how early you can start campaigning. Only in the US do you have to endure presidential campaign adverts in off years.

Only in the US have we decided it's wrong to prevent the rich from totally controlling our electoral process through their wealth and resources.

This no limits system means our politicians aren't even up for sale, they are up for auction. Can you outbid Dupont the next time regulation comes up for forever chemicals?