MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mothballed | 2026-01-23 22:33:36+00:00
If you aren't vertically integrate with repair, personal screening of renters, transport, education you are basically fucked in the heavy equipment rental business. The IT end of it is by far the easiest part.

Heavy equipment isn't anything like renting cars.

A difficult part of heavy equipment is that it relies heavily on personal contacts, operator skill, and having market advantage on repairs (in-house skillset) in order to operate it profitably.

Your typical equipment renter beats the everliving fuck out of the machine, operating it improperly, not letting hydraulics warm up, not taking care of the engine, doesn't lubricate the machine in the field, puts large force on the equipment with cylinders extended etc etc. It's not a model that can work anywhere close to something like car rentals where the renter can expect the police to pull them over if they really thrash the equipment that at least the median renter will only push the car so hard.

I live in a DIY heavy rural area and I have seen these guys go bankrupt while every other rental business in the area succeeded. It's a brutal business. The guy I have seen locally succeed the most basically works on the anti-model of EquipmentShare -- he gets renters largely via word of mouth and has people size you up when you enter his facility and if they think you are a tool they will only rent you something of small value to see if you beat the shit out of it.
by vegabook | 2026-01-23 22:33:38+00:00
cool, but doesn't sound that great when you close your eyes and just listen. Other synths beat this hands down especially at > $1000, and can easily bring in the physical world already, including live workflows. The thing to remember is that when we get into the physical analogue world, craftsmanship, materials, shape, often age, and of course the varied kinetic interactions with the sound solicitor, bring depth and richness which no little electrically-excited xylophone will ever get anywhere close to.
by dontdoxxme | 2026-01-23 22:33:56+00:00
The code is mostly vibe coded and under the BSL. I think the interesting bit here is a single developer can write something like this with an agent. Does it make sense to open source such a thing or just each ISP write their own to their requirements?

I also don’t get the focus on handling DHCP renewals in the kernel fast path. With 2000 subscribers per OLT and say a 5 minute lease time that’s only a few renewals a second.
by felarof | 2026-01-23 22:34:29+00:00
> “Every month, alert me to any fluctuations in product cost and which items in my Square catalog are affected. Highlight any items where my COGS exceeds 35%. All the invoices are available in my email.” That would be incredibly powerful.

You could try this use case on on agent builder even today. We also have a scheduled tasks for you to schedule it to run monthly

> Have you ever thought about a marketplace for premade workflows?

We want to do this and are moving towards that! But we first need to make the premade (or user published) workflows very reliable.
by 1718627440 | 2026-01-23 22:34:58+00:00
> Yeah but how legitimate is the Constitution really? Nobody alive has given their consent to it!

You do by being a citizen. You can renounce your citizenship, if you don't want a constitution to bind you. You can always ask another country whether they want you as a citizen, if you prefer their constitution.

> emotionally satisfying

Democracy is not supposed to be "emotionally satisfying", Democracy is boring. That's what makes it great. If you want "emotionally satisfying", than you have better lack with a monarchy, dictatorship or civil war.
by philwelch | 2026-01-23 22:35:10+00:00
Tesla isn't speeding either (probably; if FSD is speeding that's another issue), they're just manufacturing cars and leasing them to people in the UK.

In most US states, auto registration and auto titles are two separate things, which means our automated traffic camera systems can mail the tickets to the people who are probably actually driving the car. But I guess it's easy for a country like Britain to lay that kind of burden on auto manufacturers when they don't have any of them anymore.
by eieio | 2026-01-23 22:35:13+00:00
Eh, I was a little annoyed at the comment last night but read through the thread again today and you were clearly engaging in good faith.

I totally get being exhausted at LLMs. And I don't mind the nudge to be a little less lazy and install wireshark for next time.

hope I get you to play the game when it's out!
by jandrewrogers | 2026-01-23 22:35:26+00:00
In low-level systems software, which is a primary use case for C++, exceptions can introduce nasty edge cases that are difficult to detect and reason about. The benefits are too small to justify the costs to reliability, robustness, and maintainability.

Exceptions in high-level languages avoid many of these issues by virtue of being much further away from the metal. It is a mis-feature for a systems language. C++ was originally used for a lot of high-level application code where exceptions might make sense that you would never use C++ for today.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-01-23 22:36:33+00:00
> - Operating systems, for various kinds of workloads

I agree that OS is missing but OS for any workload that is not "desktop computer" or "laptop computer" in the EU, and anywhere in the world, is already dominated by Linux. Phones, routers, Internet of Things, servers, supercomputers, smartwatches, satelittes,... Whatever really. It's all Linux.
by pyrolistical | 2026-01-23 22:36:45+00:00
Ah yes. The c abi, the thing that glues all cross lang function calls.

The human race will go extinct with the c abi still as the defacto standard at this point.

IMO any new system programming lang needs to compete over the quality of their c abi integration.

I still haven’t found a better c abi integration than zig. It can describe c funcs with higher precision than c itself.
by thot_experiment | 2026-01-23 22:36:51+00:00
Yeah wild, I don't really know how to bridge the gap here because I've recently been continuously disappointed by AI. Gemni Pro wasn't even able to solve a compiler error the other day, and the solutions it was suggesting were insane (manually migrating the entire codebase) when the solution was like a 0.0.xx compiler version bump. I still like AI a lot for function-scale autocomplete, but I've almost stopped using agents entirely because they're almost universally producing more work for me and making the job less fun, I have to do so much handholding for them to make good architectural decisions and I still feel like I end up on shaky foundations most of the time. I'm mostly working on physics simulation and image processing right now. My suspicion is that there's just so many orders of magnitude more cloud app plumbing code out there that the capability is really unevenly distributed, similarly with my image processing stuff my suspicion is that almost all the code it is trained on works in 8bit and it's just not able to get past it's biases and stop itself from randomly dividing things that are already floats by 255.
by scannyai | 2026-01-23 22:37:03+00:00
Most teams still process resumes, purchase orders, receipts, contracts, and even ID cards manually—costing hours and introducing errors. This guide shows how AI-powered OCR can automate 10 critical document types, cut processing time from minutes to seconds, and slash costs by up to 90%.

Would you like me to also craft a shorter, punchier version optimized for Hacker News’ style (more curiosity-driven, less “marketing”)?
by zahirbmirza | 2026-01-23 22:37:34+00:00
I find this discussion interesting. I have been thinking about the declining appeal of a device that does everything, but on which you can only really do one thing at a time well. Ie, you put the iPhone in a cage and add a tripod and you could make a high quality video. But, then you can't use the phone like a phone...

Solution, a DJI osmo pocket 3, which is something that does video brilliantly. And you can set it up while doing the things you need to do on your phone when you need to.

I recently serendipitously found my sansa clip+ which to my delight has a battery that has somehow and miraculously not failed. It is fantastic for listening to a select few things at night; when I don't want to be starting at my phone screen hunting for playlists and albums. I checked the price on eBay for these things. They are going for 10x what I paid, I won't be selling.
by rlpb | 2026-01-23 22:37:40+00:00
> I genuinely cannot understand why anyone would buy a car or a bed or a fridge that requires a subscription.

There's a huge car finance market where people do exactly that. How much they pay a finance company monthly vs. how much they pay the manufacturer monthly makes little difference to them. It's all about the monthly fee and what they get in return for it.
by thesz | 2026-01-23 22:37:45+00:00
> But I'm unsure if there's a strong argument that resonates with me yet that the language shouldn't have exceptions at all.

Result <E, T> is the type Either e t in Haskell. And Either is a Monad: https://hackage-content.haskell.org/package/base-4.22.0.0/do...

This means you can have a computation inside Either e monad (notice missing result type) which can occasionally produce an exception, and these exceptions are checked (Either String cannot produce SNAFU-type exceptions, only textual descriptions of what was wrong).

So, if you are developing your language, please consider embedding it in Haskell first. That would allow you to experiment with different type representations, at the very least: Result <e, t> of yours is a Result (e, t) in Haskell, which is very distinct from Result e t (Either e t).
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2026-01-23 22:38:11+00:00
Eh, as an American I have to pay Visa/Mastercard fees too.

Why do European drug firms charge so much more for their drugs in the US than in Europe? That is an actual difference between what it is like to be in a consumer in US vs Europe. Even Bernie Sanders thinks it is a problem: https://www.npr.org/2024/09/24/nx-s1-5123689/novo-nordisk-ce...
by pianoben | 2026-01-23 22:38:24+00:00
Maybe I'm wrong about the state of Java in Android today - it's been a few years since I did that work full-time. But I do remember when Kotlin broke on to the scene in 2015, and most of us were thrilled to finally move beyond Java 7! The embrace of a non-Java language was grassroots and genuine; Google's adoption came several years later.

J++ though, now that is a blast from the past! I think I still have a J# book from my student days, somewhere :)
by mamcx | 2026-01-23 22:38:45+00:00
Alternatively look at https://dlang.org/articles/exception-safe.html.

The problem of mixing paradigms is that get confusing. Ideally all is represented equally (ie: All errors are `Result`) but is the handling that get confusing. Each option is a totally different control flow.

And it not compose (even if you use effects ) (and I mean ergonomically*) so you need to pick wich one to make first class

P.D: I'm pretty certain about the "not compose, in practice", I have seen lots of options and none looks nice, but open to corrections!

P.D.2: It should also consider the things on the dlang handling, and the midori article...
by at1as | 2026-01-23 22:38:59+00:00
> Till it has practical everyday uses and is at least semi affordable, I would categorize it as experimental still

I have a Meta Quest 2 from half a decade ago. It's old, but still feels like a mature gaming device (though relegated to more of an occasional fitness device for me).

Sure, it's failed to be anything more (commercial, education, media), but perhaps it's not fated to be for simple entertainment, in which case it's still an interesting new category. And I think the entry price point is like half that of a PS5?

> I don't know a single person who actually owns a Meta wearable device or a 3D printer. Isn't Meta actually shifting their focus away from metaverse?

I think the Ray Ban partnership is consistent with their shift away from the metaverse. The grandiose visions are put on ice, while they shift towards a fashion-accessory with a camera and audio.

Young people seem to be very into 3D printing. My father runs a photography store and a steady portion of the customer base is high schoolers requesting 3D printed models of things they've found online. I presume they'll own their own 3D printers in the future.

> Operating systems that are actively hostile to their users (Windows and OSX).

Never been a better time to give Linux a try. The days of fighting with audio drivers for 3 days after the install are largely in the past

> Everyone trying to shove AI down your throat

There is some backlash against this. SaaS used it to justify price increases, but ironically AI may make it more difficult for them to sustain their very high per seat pricing model

> * No real disruption or competition in the browser space. It will be a long time before Ladybird will be usable.

I still use Firefox for now. But they, unfortunately, have to own their bad decisions.

> You don't own anything anymore. Even building your own PC seems like it will become a thing of the past given how price are rising.

I do worry about this, though less from a cost standpoint, which tend to be cyclical. Deeply embedding and integrating everything does come with some advantages that make DIY builds more difficult to justify outside of seeking peak performance. Though computers like the Framework are actively trying to push against that for some segment of the market.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-23 22:40:17+00:00
I ended up trying to look it up and found this:

> Available options: [...] mark_watched: Mark videos watched (even with --simulate). Only for YouTube

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/c8680b65f79cfeb23b342b...

So I'm guessing without that, it doesn't, so would have to add the flag for it to try to count it as a view.
by kaydub | 2026-01-23 22:40:31+00:00
I usually have multiple agents up working on a codebase. But it's typically 1 agent building out features and 1 or 2 agents code reviewing, finding code smells, bad architecture, duplicated code, stale/dead code, etc.

I'm definitely faster, but there's a lot of LLM overhead to get things done right. I think if you're just using a single agent/session you're missing out on some of the speed gains.

I think a lot of the gains I get using an LLM is because I can have the multiple different agent sessions work on different projects at the same time.
by Marsymars | 2026-01-23 22:41:12+00:00
> You mean consumer? I genuinely cannot understand why anyone would buy a car or a bed or a fridge that requires a subscription. That's beyond me.

If I'm buying something that has recurring costs to deliver services, I feel better if I'm covering those costs, so I'm buying something with a sustainable business model.

Subscription service for heated seats - outrageous.

Subscription service for premium, ad-free mapping - reasonable.
by estimator7292 | 2026-01-23 22:42:15+00:00
It's pretty good, yeah. I get coherent results >95% of the time (on well-known problems).

However, it seems to really only be good at coding tasks. Anything even slightly out of the ordinary, like planning dialogue and plot lines it almost immediately starts producing garbage.

I did get it stuck in a loop the other day. I half-assed a git rebase and asked codex to fix it. It did eventually resolve all debased commits, but it just kept going. I don't really know what it was doing, I think it made up some directive after the rebase completed and it just kept chugging until I pulled the plug.

The only other tool I've tried is Aider, which I have found to be nearly worthless garbage
by nine_k | 2026-01-23 22:42:18+00:00
Android makes it really easy to disable notifications from any app. Pull down the notifications list, long press, select "Turn off" (or "Settings" if you want more details).

It's also possible to make an Android device ask for every permission, including notifications, when a new app is installed. So it's also easy to deny most apps access to notifications, address book, camera, etc. I think it's the default on current Samsung phones, for instance.
by ljm | 2026-01-23 22:42:25+00:00
I’ve been using agent-shell in emacs a lot and it stores transcripts of the entire interaction. It’s helped me out lot of times because I can say ‘look at the last transcript here’.

It’s not the responsibility of the agent to write this transcript, it’s emacs, so I don’t have to worry about the agent forgetting to log something. It’s just writing the buffer to disk.
by 1718627440 | 2026-01-23 22:43:31+00:00
Sorry, did you wanted to point out a contradiction or just add to the point?

What I mainly disagree with is:

> ie: themselves.

Those were completely different incompatible cultures. "middle eastern" simply isn't a term, that makes sense for that time as a cultural distinction.

> Islam today is a huge differentiator.

On yet another note, some claim Islam to be somewhat of a Christian sect.
by defrost | 2026-01-23 22:43:33+00:00
Hmm, there's a throwback.

I first encountered space tethers in 1980 reading an Introduction to Engineering text where the example was given of unrolling a flat spool of thin metal through shaping rollers to extrude a very long boom with a spring on the end to stabilise the orientation of a satellite.

That was one of the first times I noodled about with the dynamics of a pendulum in a potential field.

These days, of course, there's a few more tricks that can be done with a dangling lasso, including interacting with the magnetic field via a looped current.

That aside, I was curious about traditional magnetorquers and their variations actively providing force in the magnetosphere.

The Earths magnetic field has a lot of diurnal pulsing .. the gravitational field is lumpy but stable.

There's a control challenge in getting a smooth desired response from a choppy field.

Cheer's for the lookout though, it hadn't occurred to me that some would be talking about magnetic force against the field using "space tether" as the base description - my background was more about the field equations than the physical implementation.

( Magnetorquers are also used in the US Navy for twisting controls inside a fully sealed container. )
by skybrian | 2026-01-23 22:43:43+00:00
That was very weird. In the post where he was arguably "shilling," he seems to have signposted pretty well that it was dumb, but he will take the money they offered:

> $GAS is not equity and does not give you any ownership interest in Gas Town or my work. This post is for informational purposes only and is not a solicitation or recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any token. Crypto markets are volatile and speculative — do not risk money you can’t afford to lose.

...

> Note: The next few sections are about online gambling in all its forms, where “investing” is the buy-and-hold long-form “acceptable” form of gambling because it’s tied to world GDP growth. Cryptocurrencies are subject to wild swings and spikes, and the currency tied to Gas Town is on a wild swing up. But it’s still gambling, and this stuff is only for people who are into that… which is not me, and should probably not be you either.

In the next post he said he wasn't going to shill it any more, and then the price collapsed and people sent him death threats on Twitter. It probably would have collapsed anyway. Perhaps there was supposedly some implicit bargain that he shouldn't take the money if he wasn't going to shill? Well, there's certainly no rule saying you have to do that.

I think he's not very much to blame for taking the money from degenerate gamblers, and the cryptocurrency idiots are mostly to blame for their own mistakes.
by PunchyHamster | 2026-01-23 22:43:54+00:00
> Is there any way to test these changes against a simulation of real world routes? Including to ensure that traffic that shouldn’t hit Cloudflare servers, continues to resolve routes that don’t hit Cloudflare?

You can get access to view of routes from different parts of networks but you do not have access to those routers policies, so no

> I have to imagine there’s academic research on how to simulate a fork of global BGP state, no? Surely there’s a tensor representation of the BGP graph that can be simulated on GPU clusters?

Just simulating your peers and maybe layer after is most likely good enough. And you can probably do it with a bunch of cgroups and some actual routing software. There are also network sims like GNS3 that can even just run router images
by dang | 2026-01-23 22:44:01+00:00
By that argument, it's we who are doing all the upvotes, downvotes, and flags on the site. I don't think most HN readers would look at it that way.

The distinction between moderation done by users (votes, flags, etc.) and moderation done by admins (killing posts, banning accounts, etc.) is long established and well understood by the community. It's not about blaming.
by jadbox | 2026-01-23 22:44:12+00:00
Meditations:

- If a drop separated from the ocean and returns to the ocean, is it not still existing in the ocean?

- Are you fully identified with memories? What if you had a head wound and forget your past- are you still yourself?

- After the drop is given back the ocean, is it possible that a new drop will become separated and hold all the same properties as the first droplet (minus its specific history/memory)?
by ottah | 2026-01-23 22:44:47+00:00
Everything except the first provision is reasonable. IMO it's none of your damn business how I wrote the code, only that I understand it, and am responsible for it.

It's one of those provisions that seem reasonable, but really have no justification. It's an attempt to allow something, while extracting a cost. If I am responsible for my code, and am considered the author in the PR, than you as the recipient don't have a greater interest to know than my own personal preference not to disclose. There's never been any other requirement to disclose anything of this nature before. We don't require engineers to attest to the operating system or the licensing of the tools they use, so materially outside your own purant interests, how does it matter?
by bflesch | 2026-01-23 22:44:53+00:00
> YC also needs to pivot it's marketing

Depends who you're marketing to. Do they need to follow what others did or should they stay in their own niche? Because I'm not hanging out on a16z forum because they make fancy marketing materials, I'm one of the thousands of people who bought into the YC brand which was build over decades. Would be stupid to become one with the crowd of sleeky VCs.

As European I'm quite happy I didn't see YC involvement with the current administration, and if they stay a bit clear of the AI supergau I'm sure they'll be fine.
by kaydub | 2026-01-23 22:44:54+00:00
Not just tests.

I run multiple agents in separate sessions. It starts with one agent, building out features or working on a task/bug fix. Once it gets some progress, I spin up another session and have it just review the code. I explicitly tell it things to look out for. I tell it to let me know about things I'm not thinking of and to make me aware of any blind spots. Whatever it reviews I send back to the agent building out features (I used to also review what the review agent told me about, but now I probably only review it like 20% of the time). I'll also have an agent session started just for writing tests, I tell it to look at the code and see if it's testable, find duplicate code, stale/dead code. And so on and so forth.

Between all of that + deterministic testing it's hard for shit to end up in the code base.