MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to measure financial health in a company
by InfiniteRand | 2026-02-14 14:33:34+00:00
Profits are one measure but if a business is healthy the estimated profits would go into investment for the future. Profits ultimately amount to either dividends or cash reserves, both of which can be signs of a good business in moderation but excessively it suggests the business cannot find ways to productively spend its money.

Then there’s also businesses invested in long term investments with projected future gains which often results in less profits at least in the short term.

Size seems like another measure but size can also indicate over expansion into bad investments.

So how would you judge the health of a company? Is there any simple metric for judging this health (at least in the 90% case)
by quickthrowman | 2026-02-14 14:33:39+00:00
You are incorrect about almost everything in your post if we’re talking about the US.

Basically every apartment building built in the last 25-30 years that is 6 stories or less (which is the vast majority of units constructed) will be a concrete base floor and then stick built apartments on top.

It’s called a 5-over-1 and it’s so much cheaper than doing five stories of metal pan and concrete deck that the economics force the decision. You see these everywhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-over-1

Anything over 6 stories will be concrete and steel, or rarely, engineered wood or timber framed.

Concrete and steel apartment buildings do not have vertical concrete partitions or wood stud walls between the units, they have steel stud walls with two layers of double 5/8” drywall on each side to provide a 4-hour fire rating.

I am a construction professional, FWIW.
by strawhatguy | 2026-02-14 14:33:57+00:00
You could fix versions, and probably should. However willful disregard of prior interfaces encourages developers code to follow suit.

It’s not like Clojure or Common Lisp, where a decades old software still runs, mostly unmodified, the same today, any changes mainly being code written for a different environment or even compiler implementation.
This is largely because they take breaking user code way more seriously. Alot of code written in these languages seem to have similar timelessness too. Software can be “done”.
by nova011 | 2026-02-14 14:35:06+00:00
OpenClaw just exploded (1.5M downloads), and we were early adopters. Amazing tool, but we quickly ran into a problem: our API bill went from $80 to $2,100 in one month.
OpenClaw agents work autonomously, which is powerful but dangerous:
- They run 24/7
- Make unlimited API calls
- You have zero visibility
- Bills arrive 30 days later

We tracked common disasters:
- $2,847 from infinite loops
- $1,200 from using wrong AI models
- $890 from broken skills

Built ClawWatcher - a real-time dashboard showing:
Every API call as it happens
Cost breakdown (Opus/Sonnet/Haiku)
Budget alerts
Skills monitoring
- Setup: 1 command, 30 seconds
- Cut our costs 60%
- Now we actually know what our agents are doing
1.5M people just installed OpenClaw. Most will get shocked by their bills this month. Don't want others to make the same mistake we did.

Check it out: clawwatcher.com

Would love feedback from the community!
by nottorp | 2026-02-14 14:35:38+00:00
As an iOS user I don't have any specific grievances, but I can definitely say the keyboard has got shittier and shittier in the past few years.

Apple's problem is their keyboard used to "just work" as the original article says. No one knows what magic they did back then, but it's obvious that they turned it off now.

They're still better than the spell checker in MS Teams, although that's not really positive.
by bruckie | 2026-02-14 14:36:19+00:00
Batteries make that less true today than in the past. Solar/wind + batteries are becoming cost-competitive with coal for energy on most days (24x7).

24x7 every day of the year is much harder, though. Solar/wind + batteries are nowhere near cost competitive for reliability, though. You'd have to build a ridiculous (read: very uneconomical) multiple of typical battery capacity to make it through the long, cloudy, low-wind periods in the winter.

On the bright side, enhanced geothermal is starting to look like it may be economically competitive in the near future. If it pans out, it could repurpose a lot of the technology and labor force from the oil and gas industry to instead produce clean power. And who knows—maybe the current nuclear push will pan out and we'll have another option for reliable base load.
by red75prime | 2026-02-14 14:36:36+00:00
Evolution has scaled the brain to hundreds of trillions of synapses (parameters) and hundreds of billions of neurons (processing nodes). Current models have around 1/1000 of that number of parameters. The top data centers operate at around 1 exaflop (on par with the brain). Inference uses significantly less than that.

I’ll wait until the effective number of parameters in ML models is comparable to that of the brain. Then it will be clear whether the brain has something up its sleeve.
by estearum | 2026-02-14 14:36:37+00:00
Let's take a simple claim:

On Earth's surface, acceleration due to gravity is ~9.8m/s^2

I haven't tested this, but here you are reading it.

Did the person who I learned this from test it? I suspect not.

Did the person who they learned it from test it? I suspect not.

Did the person who they learned it from test it? I suspect not.

Did the person who they learned it from test it? I suspect not.

Did the person who they learned it from test it? I suspect not.

...

Did the person who they learned it from test it? I suspect not.

Could anyone test it? Sure! But we don't because we don't have the time to test everything we want to know.
by phyzome | 2026-02-14 14:37:30+00:00
It gets pretty bad at times. Here's one of the most mindlessly uncritical pieces I've seen, which seems to be a press release from Volkswagen: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/03/volkswagen-unveils-sedr... Look at the image captions gushing about the "roomy interior" of a vehicle that doesn't even exist! I actually wrote in to say how disappointed I was in this ad/press release material, and the response was "That was not a VW ad and we were not paid by VW for that or any other story". I find it interesting that they only denied the ad part, not the press release part...

As I mention in another comment, https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/01/exclusive-volvo-tells-u... is in a similar vein.
by azangru | 2026-02-14 14:38:34+00:00
I was puzzled for a bit about why this was the top story on the BBC right now — after all, they reported on Navalny's death two years ago, and on the results of some laboratory tests suggesting poisoning last September — until I realized that this isn't a story about Navalny, or even about the possible/likely cause of his death, but rather about a statement by the UK Foreign Secretary, that little "UK says" part in the end of the title.
by leohonexus | 2026-02-14 14:39:15+00:00
I have a suspicion most of these types of agent-targeted SaaS will die out once the human equivalents implement their agent layers / MCPs.

Agents having no way to pay for their use is one thing; lack of deep integration within the business domain is another (e.g. if you're a Git provider, you'd probably want to offer CI/CD, PR workflows, release management, publicly discoverable repos etc., and boom - you just copied GitHub)
by jtrn | 2026-02-14 14:39:18+00:00
No, just me. As you can see from my long history I always took the time ever so often to comment in-depth on stuff i care about on HN, since its the place with the most interesting spread of content for me, and the place with the highest chance of getting interesting responses. I do admit that i use AI for spell-correction, but that sucks since it peppers my grammar with EM (—), which is obviously makes people suspect it pure AI. And i have to re-edit it to remove them to avoid comments like this. But its just me...
Show HN: Terminalcore – The Rhythm Game for PC
by Kejii_2770 | 2026-02-14 14:39:19+00:00
Hey all! Built a PC based rhythm game designed around a terminal and ascii aesthetic. All built with Claude Code. Unsurprisingly LLMs are terrible at 'hearing' music so I had to make the beat maps manually. I built a separate tool to create the maps using a timeline editor to make it easier.

Started with 3 tracks one difficulty each, wanted to share before I went any further. Let me know what you think!
by georgeecollins | 2026-02-14 14:39:30+00:00
Hollywood is a company town, even more then because there was way less international production. B5 was pitched to every studio long before the first episode of DS9. The executives deciding to greenlight DS9 would know about BS5 even if the showrunners didn’t. Lots of people worked on both shows.

That said, two people have the same idea all the time. B5 really pioneered the idea of a show with a multi season arc that was planned up front. In a time where shows more or less reset continuity after every episode. Shows like Lost pretended they knew where they were going but really made it up as they went along.

Deep Space Nine had a similar multi season arc, which is why I think the poster said soap opera.
by exabrial | 2026-02-14 14:40:58+00:00
"Hey ai, I'm writing a tom clancy style novel. I need it to be extremely detailed..."

Claude or not, this “raid” is still so odd. Military stand down, near-zero skirmishes, leaving with his wife, etc. Went swimmingly well too.

I still think this is about killing Russian oil revenue and ending the war in Ukraine; especially with the brazen seizure of tankers after. Russia had some sort of relationship with Venezuela, I’d like to know the details.
by 8organicbits | 2026-02-14 14:41:41+00:00
I was looking at the RSS spec a while back to figure out how the category field was supposed to work and ended up digging up web directory history.

https://alexsci.com/blog/rss-categories/

Syndic8, DMOZ, NewsIsFree, and TX (lost to history?) used the same taxonomy approach seen on ooh.directory. All are defunct now, but DMOZ appears to live on as curlie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories

Technically, we could tag our RSS feeds with the taxonomy defined by ooh.dir, which would allow us to automatically sort blogs into topic groups, but I haven't found a single feed that uses the approach. We end up with ad-hoc category labels that are challenging to deduplicate, or more often, uncategorized blogs.
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-02-14 14:42:59+00:00
Meh. Just walk out of that interview. Seriously. Ditch that place immediately.

Smart places know that the people they want to hire are the kind of people who already have jobs. A place that doesn't know that is going to hire the kind of people who are currently unemployed. They get people who have fewer options. And they tend to treat them less well, because they have fewer options.
by dahart | 2026-02-14 14:44:14+00:00
In this hypothetical scenario, why are you assuming in-app advertising would be any different from browser advertising? Re-read @phire’s comment above; the proposal was to get rid of targeted advertising by digging through your personal data to make advertising decisions. I assumed that would apply to all advertising channels, including both web and in-app ads, otherwise you’d be right and it probably wouldn’t work.
by gnarlouse | 2026-02-14 14:44:27+00:00
Stackoverflow is dead because it was this toxic gate keeping community that sat on its laurels and clutched its pearls. Most developers I know are savoring its downfall.

The Zig lead is notably bombastic. And there was the recent Zigbook drama.

Rust is a little older, I can’t recall the specifics but I remember some very toxic discourse back in the day.

And then just from my own two eyes. I’ve maintained an open source project that got a couple hundred stars. Some people get really salty when you don’t merge their pull request, even when you suggest reasonable alternatives to their changes.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a blog post or a direct reply. It could be a lengthy GitHub comment thread. It could be a blog post posted to HN saying “come see the drama inherent in the system” but generally there is a subset of software engineers who never learned social skills.
Show HN: Vibe-coded 32-bit OS from scratch – multitasking, windowing, networking
by djoker86 | 2026-02-14 14:45:25+00:00
32-bit x86 operating system written in C and Rust (Soon), largely through vibe coding with Claude.

Suprised me how much i was able to get done in such little time.

I do have a little bit of previous experience.
by retired | 2026-02-14 14:45:44+00:00
Houses change over time. A house could have been build in 1920 without a toilet or central heating. Then over time it got a fireplace on the second floor, an indoor toilet, indoor bathroom, then central heating with gas, extra insulation, a couple decades later double paned windows, hybrid heating with a heat pump, then full electric heating, underfloor heating, solar panels, home battery.

Houses change a lot over time, it is nice to be adaptable and not need to carve out stone and concrete every time you add a feature to a home.

The most beautiful homes I have been inside in Europe were wooden cabins in Sweden. The exposed wood ceiling beams, the unpainted wooden panels everywhere, the little details. I never had that with stone or brick buildings. Mainly because they got plastered and painted over, you almost never see the raw materials on the inside.
by dariosalvi78 | 2026-02-14 14:46:21+00:00
It's clear to me that you don't have the experience of being an immigrant.

There is nothing "normal" in expecting to renounce to a previous citizenship if you gain another one [1]. As an Italian citizen living in Sweden I obtained the Swedish citizenship (fortunately before the current government makes it way harder) but I'd never give up my Italian one. I "feel" Italian and owe my country a lot and my happily go back at some point, but I also feel like having the Swedish citizenship is useful, and allows me to vote in a country where I have chosen to live for a good chunk of my life.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_citizenship
by rgovostes | 2026-02-14 14:46:54+00:00
Setting aside the style, I think you asked for more output — 5,000 words — than your prompt supports, so the model repeated the same details over and over to stretch out the story after it hits the major notes.

Obvious tells numeric details that are repeated: the number of lines of code (repeated six times!), the number of pages in the manual, the ages of the developers, the age of the game, etc. The narrative itself also repeats, like the Steam rejection included verbatim twice, especially after the Prologue hit most of the beats in the first 400 words.
by some_random | 2026-02-14 14:47:54+00:00
You're trying to find claims that aren't there, they are explicitly saying that "certain people" (which may or may not include the original poster) think that deliberately killing civilians is fine if their government is bad enough. They then go on to rhetorically question if those same "certain people" would find terrorist killings of tech workers who work at companies they don't like justified because they help the US government, even if it's in a purely civilian context.
How I See Front End Evolving
by aavci | 2026-02-14 14:48:01+00:00
Many posts claim that "development is becoming obsolete" but they rarely discuss what software evolution actually looks like.

Yes, a growing portion of development, especially frontend boilerplate, is becoming automated. But automation doesn’t eliminate development; It changes its shape. The real question isn’t whether coding disappears. It’s: What does development become when repetitive UI work is largely automated?

Here’s one direction I see emerging: the rise of variable frontends.

Today, most frontends are hardcoded into predefined states and flows. Even "dynamic" apps operate within rigid UI structures designed ahead of time. But as AI systems become more capable, I believe we’ll move toward frontends that are generated in response to context.

Instead of designing every screen manually, developers will configure systems, data models, workflows, constraints, and AI will generate interfaces dynamically around them.

This is already starting in small ways through open-source tooling and AI-driven UI frameworks. Over time, it will become more common.

Imagine:
- A mobile app that generates its interface based on the task you’re trying to complete. Maybe a new OS that redefines the concept of apps altogether?

- A web app whose layout adapts in real time to user intent.

- Admin panels that construct themselves from backend schemas.

- Internal tools that reshape their UI based on role, workflow, or goal.

In this world, the frontend isn't always a fixed artifact. It has capabilities of a fluid layer generated from logic, context, and intent.

Development doesn’t disappear. It shifts from manually building screens to designing systems that generate them, where applicable.

This shift will introduce new layers of complexity. As frontends become dynamic and AI-generated, teams will push them to handle more personalization, edge cases, and advanced workflows. The difficulty won’t disappear. It will move from building screens to controlling, constraining, and validating what those systems generate.

That’s the evolution I see coming.

(PS: I used AI to improve my writing here)
by PaulHoule | 2026-02-14 14:48:38+00:00
It comes down to trust. There are ways to protect your own integrity and equanimity in a low-trust environment but most people will suffer in that kind of situation.

Before agile you could “kick the can down the road” for six months before the senior people realize what they wouldn’t hear from the new guy on the project: nobody knows how to make a production build! Until then though life can be cozy on a day to day basis. In agile on the other hand, you have nerve-wracking meetings every day but somehow it never gets out that the engineering manager has no idea how long it takes to build the product or that the code violates all the rules [1] laid down by that engineering manager despite that engineering manager asserting that “we do code reviews”

[1] reasonable if not inspired
by keybored | 2026-02-14 14:49:23+00:00
The reason why we are even talking about it is what they said: people with a lot, lot of resources can prey on people. What’s one individual against an industry of psychological research?

But yet again we can’t do anything about it because it would interfere with the freedoms of corporations, effectively. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46870147
by matthieugd | 2026-02-14 14:50:13+00:00
I started working on Midway a few months ago. This is an app to find direct flights to common destinations from different cities. I meet my best friend every year, and we are living on a different continent. It's surprisingly not easy to find common destinations because of the seasonal flights, airlines’ schedules, etc.

The app is here: https://app.midway.travel (still in beta!)
The landing page is here: https://www.midway.travel
by nathan_compton | 2026-02-14 14:50:28+00:00
It has been very interesting to watch how discourse on copyright and ip has evolved over the years. In the end, however, what seems to happen is that copyright always "works" when powerful people benefit from it working and "doesn't work" when its less powerful people being victimized. Or vice versa, really. It seems like we've entered into a period of history where any little legal or cultural power differential is very rapidly exploited to produce profit and I'm curious (to say the least) how we are going to fix this.
by georgeecollins | 2026-02-14 14:50:32+00:00
I went on this journey with my son during COVID.

Watch a handful of classic trek to get the idea. Balance of Terror, city on the Edge of Forever, maybe Mirror Mirror or Trouble with Tribbles. They will seem very cliched.

Start TNG in the third season and just focus on the best episodes, the ones that are 8s or 9s on IMDB. Be sure to see The Best of Both Worlds I and I, the original season finale climax.

Skip a lot of the first season of DS9. Low IMDb will tell you which ones. But watch almost all of the later seasons.

Then play Star Trek Attack Wing!
by jtrn | 2026-02-14 14:50:55+00:00
Some. I was CTO of a mid-sized firm (~$30M revenue) and have sat on the board of two hospital psychiatric units. Granted, I'm in Norway, so office politics may differ.

But let me ask you the reverse: How much time have you spent helping people actually improve themselves? Because in my experience, the single biggest obstacle to professional growth isn't corporate politics, it's the lengths people will go to protect their ego from accountability. And focusing on systemic injustice is a destructive patterns I've seen in both the clinic and in the workplace.

So if you think Im naive with regards to office politics you might be right... But what if you are naive with regrades the psychology of defense mechanisms?
by retired | 2026-02-14 14:51:34+00:00
My father grew up in a home without central heating or an indoor toilet. Last time that home was listed on the market it had underfloor heating, two bathrooms, triple paned glass, an extension on the roof and various other modern amenities. Times change, houses should too. We are not longer pooping in an outhouse anymore.

I guess at one point people would wonder why you would want to poop inside the home, and call it "sometimes people want stupid things".
by dotancohen | 2026-02-14 14:51:51+00:00
This quote itself must be taken in the context of Newton's own aspirations. Newton was specifically searching for force capable of moving distant objects when he realised the essence of gravity. No apple really fell on his head - that story was likely invented by those who could not stand Newton (he was famously brash) and meant simply that his personality was a result of getting hit on the head.

And Newton was famously interested in dark religous interference in worldly affairs - what today we would call The Occult. When he did finally succeed in finding his force for moving objects at a distance, without need for an intervening body, he gave credit to these supernatural entities - at least that is how this quote was taken in his day. This religious context is not well known today, nor is Newton's difficult character, so today it is easy to take the quote out of context. Newton was (likely) not disputing the validity of his discovery, rather, he was invoking one of his passions (The Occult) in the affairs of one of his successful passions (finding a force to move distant objects).

It should be noted that some of Newton's successful religious work is rarely attributed to him. For a prominent example, it was Newton that calculated Jesus's birth to be 4 BC, not 1 AD as was the intention of the new calendar.
by rich_sasha | 2026-02-14 14:52:11+00:00
To be honest, by the time they put him up in a prison in Siberia, subjected to sleep deprivation, cold, exhaustion, beatings, lack of medical care, probably terrible food, and other inmates, I'm not sure why they needed clandestine frog poison. Or maybe with all this he was still clinging on?

There were early reports that he was basically so weakened from such treatment that he went into cardiac arrest after another beating.in the cold, which to my untrained ear sounded completely sufficient. If that wasn't, I'm sure they could find some other inmates and get them to beat Navalny to death, maybe even with some story how they might be crooks but can't stand a traitor. Or something else equally heartwarming.

Either way, what a lovely country.
by CuriouslyC | 2026-02-14 14:52:54+00:00
Goog is 100% not going to delete anything that is driving any advertising at all. The videos are also useful for training AI regardless, so I expect the set of stuff that's deleted will be a VERY small subset. The difference with email is that email can be deduplicated, since it's a broadcast medium, while video is already canonical.

I expect rather than deleting stuff, they'll just crank up the compression on storage of videos that are deemed "low value."