MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by scannyai | 2026-02-10 22:38:50+00:00
Most AP clerks spend 80% of their time on repetitive manual tasks—downloading invoices, renaming files, typing line items, chasing approvals, and reconciling mismatches. A typical day involves:

Morning: drowning in emails, PDFs, and paper invoices.

Midday: hours of manual data entry and three-way matching (invoice ↔ PO ↔ receiving report).

Afternoon: exception handling, chasing signatures, resolving duplicates, and finally batching payments.

Hidden overhead adds another 16–26 hours per week (vendor inquiries, lost invoices, audit prep). The result: slow cycles, high error rates, missed discounts, and wasted human potential.

Automation flips the script:

Cost per invoice drops from $12–15 to $2–4.

Cycle times shrink from 8–10 days to 1–2.

Error rates fall below 1%.

Discount capture jumps to 80–90%.

Instead of being data-entry specialists, AP clerks become financial operations analysts—optimizing cash flow, managing vendor relationships, and spotting savings. The role evolves from tactical to strategic.

Takeaway: Companies that automate AP see 80% lower costs, 90% faster cycles, and 95% fewer errors. The question isn’t whether to automate—it’s how quickly you can make the transition
Ask HN: Is there real demand for a open source Railway-style PaaS that deploys?
by theonlyvasudev | 2026-02-10 22:38:56+00:00
Hey all, I am building an open-source platform with railway-grade UX.

Nothing to show yet, but just validating the pain before I spend more weeks on it.

So some quick questions (especially if you’re in the SF Bay, Seattle, DC, London/Berlin/Amsterdam scene):

Have you ever seriously considered leaving

1.Railway/Render/Vercel/Heroku because of cost, lockin, or compliance?

2. What’s the single biggest reason you wouldn’t try a BYOC option tomorrow?

3. Rough pricing you’d tolerate for the control plane (e.g. $29–99/mo flat for unlimited apps + your own infra bill)?

4. Any feature that would make you go “okay I’m in” on day one?

I’d love blunt answers - even “this is pointless because X” is extremely useful right now.
If you’re interested (drop a comment) + quick demo video when the first prototype is up. Happy to jump on a 15-min call too and offer the first month of free usage on the product(when mvp is ready).

Thanks for reading - really appreciate the time.
by h4kunamata | 2026-02-10 22:39:13+00:00
Late 30s here, I have seen:

* dial-up being replaced by DSL

* CAT being replaced with fiber for companies

* VOIP replacing bulk BPX

* Cloud replacing on-prem to an extent

* Cloud services plague now called SaaS

* License for life being replaced by subscription

* AI driving everything to shit literally

The technology is no longer helping anything, it is actually tearing our society apart.
Up to 2000s, things were indeed evolution, improvements, better life style be it personal or professional.
Since 2000s, Enshitification started, everything gets worse, from services, to workflows, to processes, to products, to laws.

Gen-Z does not realize how bad things are, and how we are no longer becoming smarter but dumber, kids cannot even read but have every single social media account.

If they could spend one day back in early 2000s, the current generation would start a civil war in every single city across the globe.
by bigbadfeline | 2026-02-10 22:39:21+00:00
> Total disregard for common good, maximal selfishness.

Or lacking better alternatives for a decent life aggravated by having zero positive role models and a media/political culture whose only positive value is mo' money.

> I would say about 20% of people are like that.

That depends on region, language and the conditions described above. Placing a numeric value collectively on all of humanity conveys zero useful information.
by dekhn | 2026-02-10 22:39:35+00:00
From what I understand, Waymo has never hidden the fact that they have remote operators, and also they have clarified that the remote operators are not actually "driving" the car (in the sense that they are not using a remote steering wheel and pedals).

I find this fact to be an interesting litmus test- for example, jwz (who hates self-driving cars, AI, and bigtech) interprets the news to mean the opposite of what I said (it's a bunch of remote workers individually turning steering wheels, etc). While folks who are happier with the product or with tech and latency know that remote driving from 5000+ miles away is not technically feasible.
by mindslight | 2026-02-10 22:40:05+00:00
What exactly are you saying "full stop" to?

You have said very little that addresses anything I said, except to appeal to some vague sense of "both sidesism" which is so far away from our current predicament that the only applications I see are (1) to say "I told you so", which isn't productive and widely misses the mark with me (2) normalize the current situation and/or absolve blame by shifting it onto the other side.

Investigative agencies are going to be able to investigate people. So supposing that the "US government can ... investigate Richard Spencer ... based on a web post" isn't a compelling argument unless your goal is to completely reject the concept of government. This can certainly be a consistent position (I've held it in the past), but it's not a common one.

At which point it comes down to accountability for how delegated powers are used - both in individual cases, and to stop patterns of abuse. For example I've long argued we need to neuter the concept of sovereign immunity, and start routinely compensating people who are harmed by the government but never convicted of breaking the law - one should indeed be able to "beat the ride". So I'm not waking up to this in 2025 clutching my pearls gasping "I can't believe the government can just do this". I've been following how the government operates unaccountably for quite some time, and I'm pointing out that the current regime is still a marked escalation.

This isn't to say I am pushing lame answers like "just vote Democrat" (I don't consider myself a Democrat). And I do agree that meaningful reform needs to be in general terms (eg aforementioned sovereign immunity example). But I also think that dismissing our current situation as some mere extension of what has been happening for a while is a terrible way of framing things.
by K0balt | 2026-02-10 22:41:04+00:00
I’d love to hear an actual counterpoint, perhaps there is an alternative set of semantics that closely maps to LLMs, because “text prediction” paradigms fail to adequately intuit the behavior of these devices, while anthropomorphic language is a blunt crudgle but gets in the ballpark, at least.

If you stop comparing LLMs to the professional class and start comparing them to marginalized or low performing humans, it hits different. It’s an interesting thought experiment. I’ve met a lot of people that are less interesting to talk to than a solid 12b finetune, and would have a lot less utility for most kinds of white collar work than any recent SOTA model.
by FillMaths | 2026-02-10 22:41:06+00:00
The real field is categorically characterized (in second-order logic) as the unique complete ordered field, proved by Huntington in 1903. The complex field is categorically characterized as the unique algebraic closure of the real field, and also as the unique algebraically closed field of characteristic 0 and size continuum. I believe that you are speaking of the model-theoretic first-order notion of categoricity-in-a-cardinal, which is different than the categoricity remarks made in the essay.
by SchemaLoad | 2026-02-10 22:41:11+00:00
For me I've decided to just have everything behind a VPN. Tailscale and Cloudflare tunnels make this quite easy to set up, dealing with ddns and CGNAT for you.

The upside is the security risk is massively reduced, an attacker would have to exploit both the VPN and the service behind it, both of these in theory being secure anyway. The downside is obviously that you require installing a VPN client to access services, but if it's only you using the server this isn't a huge deal.
by JCattheATM | 2026-02-10 22:41:22+00:00
> Apple spent money on this and they really, really wanted to force feed it to every Apple user (not unlike their F1 movie venture). It was incredibly obnoxious.

Apple is an incredibly obnoxious company, obnoxious behavior should be expected.

Also, 'llm_nerd' for a username, really?
by protocolture | 2026-02-10 22:41:42+00:00
>Why write code or prose when the machine can write it for you?

I like to do it.

>You won't think or analyze or understand. The LLM will do that.

The clear lack of analysis seems to be your issue.

>This is the end of your humanity. Ultimately, the end of our species.

Doubtful.
by tasuki | 2026-02-10 22:42:03+00:00
> when I have multiple days of time away (e.g. some trip or something) its refreshing momentarily, but then I remember how lonely and empty things felt much of the time

Same. Despite the daily struggle, I start missing the kid after a single day. Three days of separation is torture - fortunately that doesn't happen often at all :)

Interestingly, I never felt lonely when I was single. It feels like a new addiction :)
by chrisjj | 2026-02-10 22:42:23+00:00
I've read the article and found nothing to substantiate "without reading the code".

But then, I suspect the article is AI slop. Take this:

> Christopher Ehrlich just did something that would have taken a team of engineers months. He pointed OpenAI’s 5.3-codex at the entire SimCity (1989) C codebase and let it run.

No, that wouldn't have taken engineers months.
by cmdtab | 2026-02-10 22:42:28+00:00
I would stay away from any startup for production workload.

Made the mistake. Never again.

Fly, railway, render. Avoid. All have weird show stopper bugs for any reasonable scale and you will fight against the platform compared to using big cloud.

And big cloud works better even in cases where PAAS is advertised as simpler (google cloud run and build is as easy to setup as railway but you have much more knobs to control traffic, routing, roll out etc)
by maxbond | 2026-02-10 22:42:47+00:00
> The process of chlorinating water was first done illegally.

I tried to find a source on this but it doesn't seem to be true? The first chapter of this book describes the history of chlorination: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fd/Chlorina... (which is a source Wikipedia cites) and it doesn't appear to mention anything about illegally chlorinating water. After looking in that book I asked ChatGPT to find a source for the claim, and it reported the claim was false. Chlorination was initially controversial but I can't find anything claiming it was illegal?
by amlib | 2026-02-10 22:42:58+00:00
> In GoldSrc lightmaps cannot get more intricate though, they're tied to the texture scale so you cannot get a finer lightmap unless you also make larger textures and scale them down, and these two combined will wreck your "AllocBlock" budget in which all your textures and lightmaps must fit.

AFAIK some of the improvements include much better light bouncing techniques, transmission of surface colors like source does, more accurate lights, spotlights that emulate what source spotlights does and faster compilation (computers also got faster and MT support helps a lot). That alone allows level designers to be more ambitious by taking advantage of faster iteration and place even more lights.

I do agree that there are likely dozens if not hundreds of reasons why maps can and usually do look way better today than what could be done in the past. Hell, even level designer proficiency with the tools as time goes is also surely a reason.
by Forgeties79 | 2026-02-10 22:42:59+00:00
> Why would I leave when I can just block you if you are harassing me?

If you were involved with bazzite that was not an option. He was too high level, your path crossed with his no matter what. Hence why some people just elected to leave the project entirely, which is unfortunate to see because I’m sure some talented, contributing people are no longer making the project better.

Honestly I’m surprised that I need to explain the need for people to treat each other with basic decency and respect. Have you really never faced harassment that you couldn’t get away from without either leaving, their leaving, or external intervention?

Would you have the same laissez-faire attitude if I was harassing your partner or children? Would you simply tell them to not care about “mean words”? Should a coworker just be allowed to endlessly call you slurs at work?

What hypothetical did I make up? Confused by that question and your first one. Those weren’t my examples (I gave none).

It’s one thing to deal with rude people online. It’s another when it’s when you’re at work, doing a hobby, or contributing your time and energy to an open source project. People shouldn’t be abused in general, however. Yes it is good to have thick skin but it doesn’t change the fact that if somebody behaves like that, they are ultimately in the wrong.
by gleipnircode | 2026-02-10 22:43:02+00:00
As a solo developer working in enterprise systems (ABAP — yes, that's still a thing and yes, it looks the same as 20 years ago), AI tools didn't intensify my work — they unlocked work I couldn't do before.

Even within ABAP, Claude handles the stuff nobody wants to touch. Recursive methods that cost me sleepless nights, test drivers that everyone agrees are important but nobody actually wants to write. That alone is huge.

But the real game changer? It gave me the possibility to build things outside my usual stack that I never would have attempted alone. The limit used to be time and team size. Now it feels like the only limit is imagination.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-02-10 22:43:47+00:00
Why do you allow a mobile handheld computing and communication device to define "computing" ? I understand that they are important devices and lots of people with a hacker mentality would like to be able to hack them the way old folks once hacked DOS. But the current computing environment is much, much wider than iOS/Android, and if you're going to complain about just one aspect of it, I think it would be better to acknowledge that.

In many ways, things like RPi and Arduino have actually massively expanded the realm of totally hackable computing beyond what was even possible for early personal computer users.
by dakolli | 2026-02-10 22:43:59+00:00
I think there's a distribution of agency in humans, hence why we have insults like "npcs". Its probably not fair to use that word to describe people, but the cliche has some truth in it and I think a lot of tech exploits this.

I personally rarely need to use google maps, and if I do its a glance at it on the beginning of a trip, and I can find my way there through normal navigation. I might look again if I get lost, whereas, I have friends that use it to give directions to go five blocks. I don't think sense of direction is innate either, but its a muscle you build and some people choose to not work on that muscle and they suffer the consequences, albeit minor consequences.

I think we are seeing something similar with LLMs with the development and maintenance of reading, planning, creative and critical thinking skills. While some people might have a higher baseline, I think everyone has the ability to strengthen those muscles and the world implores that us to in many situations, however, now we can pay Altman $0.0010 cents to offload that workout onto a GPU much like people do with navigation and maps. Tech companies love to exploit the dopamine driven response from taking shortcuts, getting somewhere quickly, its no different here.

I think (/know) the implications of this are much more hazardous than consequences of not exercising your navigational abilities, and at least with navigation there are fallback to assist people (signs, landmarks ect). There are no societal fallbacks for llm assisted thinking once someone becomes dependent on it for all aspects of analysis, planning and creativity. Once it is taken away (or they can't afford a quality of output the previously did), where do those natural abilities stand? The implications are very terrifying in my opinion.

I'm personally trying to stay as far away as possible from these things, I see where this is heading and its not as inconsequential as needing Maps to navigate 5 blocks. I do not want my critical thinking skills correlated 1:1 to the quality and quantity of tokens I can afford or have access too anymore than I do not want my navigational abilities correlated 1:1 to the quality of Maps service available to me.

People will say that this is cope, its the new calculator, whatever.. Have fun, I promise you that not knowing trigonometry but having access to an LLM does not give you the ability to write CAD software. I actually think not using these will give you a huge competitive advantage in the future. Someone who has great navigation skills will likely win a navigational competition in the mountains, or survive longer in certain situations.
While the scope of those skills is narrow, it still proves a point[0]. The scope of your reading, critical thinking, creativity and planning skills is not limited.

[0]: It should be noted that some of the worlds most high agency and successful people actually participate in navigation as sport called Orienteering, and spend boatloads of money in it.. I wonder why that is?
by SchemaLoad | 2026-02-10 22:44:01+00:00
I don't think many advice non tech people to get in to self hosting, but there are a lot of people who do enjoy messing with computers who these articles are marketing to.

The average user will only self host when it's a managed box they plug in and it just works. Like how Apple/Google home automation works. Maybe we will see managed products for photo / file syncing pop up.
by reify | 2026-02-10 22:44:02+00:00
from a psychological stand point it is to do with Introjection.

Introjection occurs when a person unconsciously adopts the ideas, attitudes, or behaviors of another person or group, often an authority figure.

like someone with high status in the world of Big Tech. The CEO's we see selling their bullshit every day

The influencers, boosters and shills are perfectly places to create this type of environment.

The more you promote a product, the more likely people will introject that product even if it does not work work.

Imagine how a child learns the rules of life from parents.

These are introjected by the child without question or any consideration whether the rules are right or wrong, the child just takes it all in to become part of them
by digiown | 2026-02-10 22:44:20+00:00
Imagine that's the worst that happens to "your" library. Good times. We really need to bring the idea of ownership back.

https://www.howtogeek.com/playstation-is-deleting-tv-shows-f...

https://www.npr.org/2009/07/24/106989048/amazons-1984-deleti...
by jiggawatts | 2026-02-10 22:44:45+00:00
One perspective of the complex numbers is that they are the even subalgebra of the 2D geometric algebra. The "i" is the pseudoscalar of that 2D GA, which is an oriented area.

If you flip the plane and look at it from the bottom, then any formula written using GA operations is identical, but because you're seeing the oriented area of the pseudoscalar from behind, its as if it gains a minus sign in front.

This is equivalent to using a right-handed versus left-handed coordinate systems in 3D. The "rules of physics" remain the same either way, the labels we assign to the coordinate systems are just a convention.
by demiourgos | 2026-02-10 22:45:27+00:00
"When Western sanctions cut Russia off from Visa and Mastercard in 2022, the country’s domestic payments were immediately disrupted." Lol. In reality this had 0(zero) effect on domestic payments. All Visa/Mastercard cards issued by Russian banks worked absolutely fine. Russia had built it's own payment system before war and just switched seemlessly.
by palmotea | 2026-02-10 22:46:00+00:00
> We really need a rule in politics which bans you (if you're an elected representative) from stating anything about the beliefs of the electorate without reference to a poll of the population of adequate size and quality.

Except that assumes polls are a good and accurate way to learn the "beliefs of the electorate," which is not true. Not everyone takes polls, not every belief can be expressed in a multiple-choice form, little subtleties in phrasing and order can greatly bias the outcome of a poll, etc.

I don't think it's a good idea to require speech be filtered through such an expensive and imperfect technology.
by RegW | 2026-02-10 22:46:13+00:00
> Follow the law. As a guest in a country, treat your host with respect. Do not support terrorist groups.

The article describes Thomas-Johnson as a "student activist and journalist" and "whose work has appeared in outlets including Al Jazeera and The Guardian".

Are you saying that there is evidence elsewhere that he is part of some terrorist organisation? Hey wait a sec, perhaps you are confusing "Al Jazeera" with "Al Qaeda". You know Google is your friend - oh wait...
by kube-system | 2026-02-10 22:47:02+00:00
Americans' appetite for small cars seems to be linked pretty closely to the inflation-adjusted price of gasoline. Automakers always want to push more premium vehicles, because they make their margins selling to people with more money to buy more features, more space, more performance. The low end of the market is lower margin and you have to make up for it with volume.

When we hit another recession, we'll see smaller cars appear again.
by prmoustache | 2026-02-10 22:47:02+00:00
The fact you have the visa or mastercard logo doesn't mean you can't avoit to use their tech for your daily payments.

Example, in France most debit and credit cards are called "carte bleue" (literally blue card) but all of them either have a visa/mastercard logo. However when you pay with them you can decide with the merchant to use the CB system or the visa/mastercard. Sadly very few people know that and do the selection.
Dear OpenAI and Anthropic Sales Leaders
by kevinprince | 2026-02-10 22:47:15+00:00
We've been going through enterprise sales processes with both of you, and I've encountered some practices I haven't seen before with other B2B vendors:

Usage data availability:

We're being told we can't access usage data for our existing accounts unless we sign a 12-month commitment. We need this data to make an informed purchasing decision.

Pricing validity:

Received a pricing link with 14-day validity. On day 13, we were told pricing had doubled and the original quote wouldn't be honored.

I understand AI is a fast-moving market and everyone's scaling rapidly. But these create real trust issues for procurement teams trying to make informed decisions.

Has anyone else experienced similar challenges with AI vendor negotiations? I'm hoping these are isolated issues rather than emerging patterns.