MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: HERO – Notion for Formal Docs
by kevintouati | 2025-12-16 20:06:52+00:00
Hey HN!

I’m Kevin, the founder of HERO.

Thank you so much for checking out our launch today. We built HERO because serious work deserves better tools than paper-based documents built with word processors built in the 90s.

If your team works on contracts, policies, SOPs, technical specs, or any structured, formal documents, you know the pain:

- information buried across multiple files, sections, exhibits, etc. - repeated copy-pasting - outdated definitions - impossible cross-referencing - version chaos - hours wasted searching for the right clause, number, term, or page

HERO solves this by combining the flexibility of text, the structure of a database, and the power of live integrations, all inside one collaborative workspace.

Everything becomes interconnected: sections → definitions → clauses → data variables → linked documents → live values .. And the search is instant, whether you have 10 or 10,000 documents.

With HERO, you save ~2 hours per day (every day):

- No more digging for past clauses - No more re-entering data in multiple documents - No more checking if a definition was updated in all files - No more manually coordinating versions - No more rewriting work that already exists somewhere else - No more switching between Word, PDFs, spreadsheets, emails, and shared drives just to complete one task

When all your structured documents share the same definitions, data, and references and they update everywhere automatically, the time savings compound fast.

If you work in legal, operations, compliance, engineering, or any document-heavy field, HERO gives your team back 10 hours a week you’re currently losing to admin and document chasing.

This came from years of professional experience as a corporate lawyer. We’ve poured a lot of heart, honesty, and hard lessons into building this.

We also recently made to the top #3 product of the day on Product Hunt on a particularly competitive day.

Would love your feedback, questions, or just to hear how your team currently handles this kind of work.

Thanks for being here, it means a lot.

Kevin
by pseudalopex | 2025-12-16 20:07:04+00:00
> Ladybird had fewer devs, so what were these devs at Vivaldi doing?

The Ladybird developers have not produced a browser comparable to Firefox or Vivaldi. Vivaldi have not produced a browser engine comparable to Ladybird of course.

> I don't think your argument has a lot of merit. 28 is not a magic number.

28 is a magic number was not a reasonable interpretation of my comment.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-12-16 20:07:12+00:00
> I believe they have put the most love into their user interfaces out of all the chat programs I have seen

Absolutely true.

Telegram: Best UI. Signal: Best privacy. WhatsApp: Largest userbase.

It's interesting to think about these three dimensions. I could theoretically pinpoint everything that make Telegram's UI the best, and copy it. I could do the same with Signal's privacy. Both of these are technical problems. There's a process for becoming the best at UI, and there's a process for becoming the best at privacy. I don't know a process for becoming the one with the largest userbase.

Other than the 3 big ones, I recently found Jami [1]

Good UI, though not as good as Telegram. Arguably better privacy than Signal - you don't even need an account if you don't want. Zero userbase. Free software.

[1] https://jami.net/
by n8cpdx | 2025-12-16 20:07:25+00:00
Google Health Connect is still not mature. Believe me, if it was, I’d have likely at least attempted to switch back to Android by now. [1]

Apple Maps can be uninstalled, and many people rely on Google Maps. There are plenty of alternatives. I like how convenient the iOS APIs make it to choose alternatives. The Transit app can read the address information from my calendar (a caldav calendar self-hosted on Synology) which makes it really easy to navigate to appointments.

Re:privacy: https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/03/meta_pauses_android_t...

[1]: https://www.androidauthority.com/android-health-connect-usel...
by random9749832 | 2025-12-16 20:07:31+00:00
Maybe rather than telling everyone to "learn to code" we could have told them to do jobs they are more suited to doing: serving food, nursing, construction etc. all which have tangible benefits to society.

When I went to Japan, it felt like all kinds of people were doing all kinds of jobs many hours into the day, whether it is managing an arcade, selling tickets at the station, working at a konbini or whatever small job. Maybe we need to not give such lofty ideas to the new generation and represent blue collar jobs as "foreigner" or "failure" jobs.
by reactordev | 2025-12-16 20:07:34+00:00
Both-ish.

Yes, the centralization of engines to Unreal, Unity, etc makes it so there’s less interest in pushing the boundaries, they are still pushed just on the GPU side.

From a CPU API perspective, it’s very close to just plain old buffer mapping and go. We would need a hardware shift that would add something more to the pipeline than what we currently do. Like when tesselation shaders came about from geometry shader practices.
by papichulo4 | 2025-12-16 20:07:49+00:00
Saying that "we're firing to use AI" makes you look like you have ROI on your AI investments and you're keeping up.

In fact there are possibly other macro-economic effects at play:

1. The inability to deduct engineering for tax purposes in the year they were spent: "Under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) from 2017, the law requires companies to amortize (spread out) all domestic R&D expenses, including software development costs, over five years, starting in tax years after December 31, 2021, instead of deducting them immediately. This means if you spend $100,000 on software development in 2023, you can only deduct 1/5th (or $20,000) each year over five years"

2. End of zero-interest rates.

3. Pandemic era hiring bloat - let's be honest we hired too many non-technical people, companies are still letting attrition take place (~10%/yr where I am) instead of firing.

4. Strong dollar. My company is moving seats to Canada, Ireland, and India instead of hiring in the US. Getting 1.5-2 engineers in Ireland instead of 1 senior on the US west coast.

Otherwise AI is an accelerator to make more money, increase profits and efficiency. Yes it has a high cost, but so does/did Cloud, every SaaS product we've bought/integrated.
by zzo38computer | 2025-12-16 20:07:53+00:00
I (partially) agree that it is a good change, but for a different reason. For security purposes, the certificates should include only the permissions that are required (although maybe they ought to allow you to have certificates that include both if you have a use for it (which as I have mentioned, you usually should not need because you will probably want to use different certificates instead), but unfortunately they do not allow that).
by fokdelafons | 2025-12-16 20:08:01+00:00
You can't strip it completely, totally agree. Any compression of information is already an interpretation. The problem becomes more prevalent, the more thinking and advanced models become. To mitigate it, I rely on some constraints:

1. No opinion space: the prompt forbids normative language and forces fact to consequence mapping only (“what changes, for whom, and how”), not evaluation.

2. Outputs are framed explicitly from the perspective of an average citizen of a given country. This narrows the context and avoids abstract geopolitical or ideological extrapolation.

3. Heuristic models over reasoning models: for this task, fast pattern-matching models produce more stable summaries than deliberative models that tend to over-interpret edge cases.

It’s not bias-free, but it’s more constrained and predictable than editorial framing.
by instagraham | 2025-12-16 20:08:04+00:00
I might be oversimplifying, but isn't a lot of our neurological understanding about ADHD based on "fMRI shows decreased activity in the frontal cortex"? Or for that matter, our neurological understanding of a lot of mental health conditions.

I know the actual diagnosis is several times more layered than this attempt at an explanation, but I always felt that trying to explain the brain by peering at it from outwards is like trying to debug code by looking at a motherboard through a bad microscope.
by kortex | 2025-12-16 20:08:19+00:00
I get it, I used to drive a GTI. I don't mind just loud exhaust by itself, as long as they are tuned well. It's the pops/crackling/backfires that set off all the neighborhood dogs and sound like they split the air that are a scourge around here. These folks also are the ones driving like maniacs in inappropriate contexts.
by QuercusMax | 2025-12-16 20:08:20+00:00
Basic coding to solve simple problems is something that high schoolers and even bright middle schoolers can do. By the time I was in college I had been coding for most of a decade. Part of the issue is that many of the folks coming out of school started learning this stuff WAY too late.

It's like if you waited until college to start learning to play piano, and wonder why you can't get a job when you graduate. You need a lot of time at the keyboard (pun intended) to build those skills.
by fnordpiglet | 2025-12-16 20:09:15+00:00
Yeah exactly. This is where an LLM could really shine. The trick though is consistency and that it’s often more on the basis of how the organization typically treats something and rationale to its applicability to GAAP. The creation and consistent adherence to internal standards and providing them and proving them to auditors is the key and LLMs would need infra to accomplish this.
by nerdface | 2025-12-16 20:09:43+00:00
I'm not a specialist by any means, although I am a patient of an fMRI. One thing I will note is that in the eventual, resultant paperwork from the broad array of tests I had, the fMRI was not noted whatsoever, neither was it discussed with me by any of the numerous neurologists or surgeons involved in my case. I was quite curious as to why it was performed at all, but presumably it was some formality to check a box.
by arjie | 2025-12-16 20:10:06+00:00
Interesting. At least some of this has to be the bullwhip effect modeled with employers as retail, universities as suppliers, and graduating students as further back suppliers. The 4 year lead time in production of employable labour causes a whip crack backwards through the supply chain when there is a sudden shift at the retail end.

It's true that a lot of things which were once junior contributor things are now things I'd rather do, but my scarce resource is attention. And humans have a sufficiently large context window and self-agentic behaviour that they're still superior to a machine.
by ACCount37 | 2025-12-16 20:10:34+00:00
Not really, but there's a number of theories. The simplest one is that they "style tuned" the AI on human preference data, and this introduced a subtle bias for yellow.

And I say "subtle" - but because that model would always "regenerate" an image when editing, it would introduce more and more of this yellow tint with each tweak or edit. Which has a way of making a "subtle" bias anything but.
by PLMUV9A4UP27D | 2025-12-16 20:11:11+00:00
A Finn here. And just as many other finns, I'm confused to why Finland ranks at the top. Yet, this seems like a case of someone looking to disprove a theory and thus finds the arguments. For example; Health metrics isn't a good measure, considering that Scandinavia has free health care, and this leads to more cases of mental health issues are recorded. Suicides aren't a great metric either, considering that Swedes and Finns have fairly high level of access to guns. I do agree that happiness is a term that is difficult to define, and that "happiness" is a bit misleading. "Content" is a better description.

Also, I think it's easy to misunderstand the Finns from the surface of us. We don't exhibit happiness, and we don't express happiness in a way that is easily observed. Finland ranks at the top of trust in other people, and being one of the least corrupt countries in the world. Those two metrics are a hint into how we Finns relate to other people. Also, it's difficult to get to know Finns, and for this reason it's difficult for outsiders to understand the Finns and the mentality.

On the anecdotal side, earlier this year I solo-traveled the US for 4 weeks, and out of those I got into deeper conversations, I was struck by how sad people were. That made me more convinced that I live a very happy life, in a happy place.

Edit: Some references: Weapons per capita: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g... Corruption index: https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2024 Trust in others: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-where-people-trust-e...
by vblanco | 2025-12-16 20:11:25+00:00
There is no implementation of it but this is how i see it, at least comparing with how things with fully extensioned vulkan work, which uses a few similar mechanics.

Per-drawcall cost goes to nanosecond scale. Assuming you do drawcalls of course, this makes bindless and indirect rendering a bit easier so you could drop CPU cost to near-0 in a renderer.

It would also highly mitigate shader compiler hitches due to having a split pipeline instead of a monolythic one.

The simplification on barriers could improve performance a significant amount because currently, most engines that deal with Vulkan and DX12 need to keep track of individual texture layouts and transitions, and this completely removes such a thing.
by thesuitonym | 2025-12-16 20:11:31+00:00
It's just a different set of expectations. The original versions of the Mac OS should almost be thought of as a multiple-document interface. Consider the web browser you're reading this in. You wouldn't expect closing a single tab or window to quit the whole application, would you? That's really what was going on in early Mac system software. Go to infinite-mac and open Mac Paint on a System 1.0 machine. It becomes very obvious when you open the app, and all of the Finder windows and desktop icons disappear.

This is only confusing in comparison to Windows though. If you used graphical DOS applications, it was the exact same experience. You open the app, and can interact with your documents, but closing a document doesn't necessarily close the app.

Even Photoshop on Windows of the day worked the same way. When you opened Photoshop, a parent window would open that was the app. Closing documents left the app open, unless you also closed the parent window.
by Zak | 2025-12-16 20:11:32+00:00
It's interesting that most people on Windows PCs switch to Chrome when Edge is the default. It was obvious why people switched from IE6 to Firefox and later from IE7 to Chrome; IE was terrible; Firefox was better; Chrome was better still. Edge is not obsolete, unstable, or a security nightmare the way IE was.

Chrome even has significant user share on Mac OS; the numbers I'm finding are around 40%.

It's hard to guess whether people are much less inclined to switch browsers on mobile than on desktop, or if they just like Chrome. Either way, the odds are against anyone who tries to compete with it.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-12-16 20:11:37+00:00
Here's an interesting hypothetical: if we don't trust law enforcement to operate these things, then consequently we don't trust law enforcement to enforce laws in a more physical manner (which is pretty true given 2020 protests against police brutality), then how do we enforce laws?

(This is a hypothetical because obviously in reality there's no easy philosophical through line from ideas to policy.)
by pjmlp | 2025-12-16 20:12:00+00:00
I have followed Sebastian Aaltonen's work for quite a while now, so maybe I am a bit biased, this is however a great article.

I also think that the way forward is to go back to software rendering, however this time around those algorithms and data structures are actually hardware accelerated as he points out.

Note that this is an ongoing trend on VFX industry already, about 5 years ago OTOY ported their OctaneRender into CUDA as the main rendering API.
by tsycho | 2025-12-16 20:12:10+00:00
Evidence I can give in support of the article:

- very few teams have headcount, or expecting to grow - the number of interview requests get has dropped off a cliff.

So BigTech is definitely hiring less IMHO.

That said, I am not sure if it's only or even primarily due to replacement by AI. I think there's generally a lot of uncertainty about the future, and the AI investment bubble popping, and hence companies are being extra cautious about costs that repeat (employees) vs costs that can be stopped whenever they want (buying more GPUs).

And in parallel, they are hoping that "agents" will reduce some of the junior hiring need, but this hasn't happened at scale in practice, yet.

I would expect junior SWE hiring to slowly rebound, but likely stabilize at a slower pace than in the pre-layoff years.
by nextaccountic | 2025-12-16 20:13:05+00:00
Note that depending on what parsing lib you use, it may produce nodes of your own custom AST type

Personally I love the (Rust) combo of logos for lexing, chumsky for parsing, and ariadne for error reporting. Chumsky has options for error recovery and good performance, ariadne is gorgeous (there is another alternative for Rust, miette, both are good).

The only thing chumsky is lacking is incremental parsing. There is a chumsky-inspired library for incremental parsing called incpa though
by scuff3d | 2025-12-16 20:13:17+00:00
Yeah that aggressive sycophancy is incredibly annoying. Someone telling me I'm being a fucking idiot is more useful then "what a fantastic observation! You're so right" for the millionths time.

Even using it to spitball ideas can be a problem. I was using Claude to bounce ideas off of for a problem I was working on it, and it was dead set a specific solution involving a stack and some complex control logic was correct, when it reality it would have made the entire solution far more complicated. All I really needed was a sliding window into an array.
by jebarker | 2025-12-16 20:13:17+00:00
> Within an hour, Koishi Chan gave an alternate proof deriving the required bound {c(k^2) \geq 1/k} from the original Erdős-Szekeres theorem by a standard “blow-up” argument which we can give here in the Alice-Bob formulation.

Is this an example of the 4 minute mile phenomenon or did the AI proof provide key insights that Chan was able to use in their proof?
by gaigalas | 2025-12-16 20:13:32+00:00
If you're automating code generation but not automating verification, there will be a mismatch.

Maybe the fatigue comes from that mismatch?

The classical vibe coder style is to just ignore verification. That's not a good approach as well.

I think this space has not matured yet. We have old tools (test, lint) and some unreliable tools (agent assisted reviews), but nothing to match the speed of generation yet.

I do it by creating ad-hoc deterministic verifiers. Sometimes they'll last just a couple of PRs. It's cheap to do them now. But also, there must be a better way.
by chatmasta | 2025-12-16 20:14:06+00:00
This is called “chunking” [0] — identifying grouped assortments of pieces as a single semantic unit - and has extensive research [1] behind it.

[0] https://www.chessprogramming.org/Chunking

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4361603/
by missedthecue | 2025-12-16 20:14:11+00:00
"It’s verifiable. The books either balance or they don’t. Ledgers either reconcile or they don’t. There’s almost always a “ground truth” to compare against (bank feeds, statements, prior periods). It’s boring and repetitive. Same vendors, same categories, same patterns every month. Humans hate this work. Software loves it."

These are all true statements, but all of those things are solvable with classic software. Quickbooks has done this for decades now. The parts of accounting that aren't solvable with classic computing are generally also not solvable by adding LLMs into the mix.
by dang | 2025-12-16 20:14:38+00:00
Thanks! Macroexpanded:

English-friendly Romanization system proposed for Japanese language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42606969 - Jan 2025 (23 comments)

Japan to revise official romanization rules for first time in 70 years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39624972 - March 2024 (97 comments)
HN Wrapped 2025
by hubraumhugo | 2025-12-16 20:14:38+00:00
I spent some cold and dark winter evenings to work on this side project and try out the latest LLM tech :)

Enter your username and get a fun review of your year on HN.

How it works:

- Fetches your comment and post history

- Uses gemini to generate roasts, trends, and predictions

- Inspired by a recent Show HN [0], it also generates your personalized 2035 front page

- Uses Nano Banana Pro to generate an xkcd-like comic for your profile (takes 1-2 minutes)

Have fun :)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46205632
by varenc | 2025-12-16 20:14:40+00:00
If you're in CA, I learned recently that any use of automatic license plate recognition here is regulated and has a bunch of rules. Technically just turning on the ALPR feature in your consumer level camera is illegal if you don't also do things like post a public notice with your usage and privacy policy.

The law is a bit old and seems like it was written under the assumption that normal people wouldn't have access to ALPR tech for their homes. I suspect it gets very little enforcement.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
by pyrophane | 2025-12-16 20:14:58+00:00
> I recently used a coding agent on a project where I was using an unfamiliar language, framework, API, and protocol.

You didn’t find that to be a little too much unfamiliarity? With the couple of projects that I’ve worked on that were developed using an “agent first” approach I found that if I added too many new things at once it would put me in a difficult space where I didn’t feel confident enough to evaluate what the agent was doing, and when it seemed to go off the rails I would have to do a bunch of research to figure out how to steer it.

Now, none of that was bad, because I learned a lot, and I think it is a great way to familiarize oneself with a new stack, but if I want to move really fast, I still pick mostly familiar stuff.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-12-16 20:15:48+00:00
You're totally right, but how much is the very small minority?

What irks me slightly is that this is the type of thinking I typically see from companies like Google, where only 0.1% of users will be affected by a change, but 0.1% of a billion is 1 million people.

I'm not saying I disagree with you, perhaps I'm the only person who might be affected, in which case who cares. But LetsEncrypt is a critical service provider at this point, they shouldn't calculate impact like a commercial entity that can ignore people due to lack of revenue implications.

How unreasonable would I be if I expected TLS client clock precision to be part of the TLS spec, and such changes should require a version bump? That's probably extreme, but how can we ensure stability and reliability when these systems billions use change? Is the CA/B making decisions for everyone, even the minority? Do browser vendors care if some IoT device stops working?
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-16 20:16:01+00:00
No it’s the same for every marketplace. Profits accrue to a few. Look at YouTube, books, artist on Spotify etc.

Software has near 0 marginal costs unless you are dependent on a third party server side AI models (instead of on device models) or other API vendors. 15% (if you are making less than 1 million) is not the reason you aren’t making money on the App Store. That sane person wouldn’t be making money on the web no more than the indie artist isn’t making money on Spotify compared to Drake or Taylor Swift.

If Apple reduced in app commissions to 0, the same developers would still fail. Well known publishers have tried the pay $10 once for a premium game on iOS and users wouldn’t pay for it.