HN user
Father, husband, Googler, Eph. Mostly.
Nobody really knows or cares about Mr Jumper
There's no place in polite company for comments like this, and you could be trolling. But since you also simply might not know:
John Jumper won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024 for his contributions to AlphaFold and is a Fellow of the Royal Society. Among the more influential scientists of our time.
The art style under "A Sillier Solution" [1] reminds me very much of the cover of Dragon Magazine #100, August 1985 [2].
[1] https://lisyarus.github.io/blog/media/a-silly-diffuse-shadin...
[2] https://archive.org/details/DragonMagazine260_201801/DragonM...
This means OAI won't need ads. Just rev share
If OpenAI thinks there’s sweet, sweet revenue in email and calendar apps, just waiting to be shared, their investors are in for a big surprise.
robotaxis are just electric bikes and scooters of 2025
Ubiquitous, and life changing for the millions of people who use them daily?
The microwave oven is a strange choice of metaphor here, considering that even now microwaves sell 100's of millions of units every year, are nearly ubiquitous in households in the western world, are present in nearly every commercial restaurant and kitchen outside fine dining, and reached $5m/year in sales in their first decade, $30m/yr in their second, and doubling basically every decade since, before finally reaching near 100% market penetration and plateauing around $15b year ever since.
I mean, I get the author's point not to over-hype AI, but the microwave oven is one of the most successful inventions in the past 100 years.
How about ... the Segway? I hear whole cities will be designed around them.
Can use rust, go, or whatever compiled language you want and it'll probably be much more performant starting up than any interpreted language.
One additional bit of context is the person you’re replying to, simonw, is also the creator of Django, which at the time was the world’s defacto standard Python web framework, and was created at a time (2005) that long predates either Go (2009) or Rust (2012).
"There's no reason for this to be a NYT link."
I respectfully disagree. The NYT paid the author, Gina Kolata, to research and write the story, which contains more details than just the press release alone, then used their platform to made the news widely available and thus helped people like me discover it.
As cynical as one may be about the state of contemporary journalism, I'd say that short articles like this are still something good that comes out of newspapers in 2025, and I hope it doesn't go away just yet.
One interesting bit of context is that the author of this post is a legit world-class software engineer already (though probably too modest to admit it). Former staff engineer at Google and co-founder / CTO of Tailscale. He doesn't need LLMs. That he says LLMs make him more productive at all as a hands-on developer, especially around first drafts on a new idea, means a lot to me personally.
His post reminds me of an old idea I had of a language where all you wrote was function signatures and high-level control flow, and maybe some conformance tests around them. The language was designed around filling in the implementations for you. 20 years ago that would have been from a live online database, with implementations vying for popularity on the basis of speed or correctness. Nowadays LLMs would generate most of it on the fly, presumably.
Most ideas are unoriginal, so I wouldn't be surprised if this has been tried already.
“Amazon might be a good analogy here. I'm old enough to remember when Amazon absorbed billions of VC money, making losses year over year. Every day there was some new article about how insane it was.”
Not to take away from the rest of your points, but I thought Amazon only raised $8m in 1995 before their IPO in 1997. Very little venture capital by today’s standard.
It may please and amuse you that this fellow child of the 70's, growing up across the pond in Boston, could have written that exact same comment, nearly word for word. The impact of Doctor Who was truly global, and for many of us Americans, our first introduction to the BBC (as rebroadcast via PBS affiliates in the States) and to British culture in general.
From the announcement:
"We're excited to share with you a new library called Keras Core, a preview version of the future of Keras. In Fall 2023, this library will become Keras 3.0. Keras Core is a full rewrite of the Keras codebase that rebases it on top of a modular backend architecture. It makes it possible to run Keras workflows on top of arbitrary frameworks — starting with TensorFlow, JAX, and PyTorch."
Excited about this one. Please let us know if you have any questions.
"$25,000 was not enough money to retire on for sure, even in 1996."
$25,000 in 1996 is $42,000 in 2021.
Seems like a modest incentive for top tech talent, even back then.
* To respond to the comment below, the author had been working as a hardware systems engineer at headquarters for 10 years by 1996.
I’m the co-author and maintainer of the OpenSearch syndication protocol and I posted in support of reusing the name here: https://groups.google.com/g/opensearch/c/gi-iVJZgfdA
"Road directionality" being only 98.9% accurate seems to be a huge problem for a navigation app!
Not Vonnegut to my knowledge, but Pynchon in _V_.
Yay! Welcome back!
Public libraries have been a thing since the 1800's, which are equally amazing in terms of bringing tremendous impact to millions of people who wouldn't have otherwise had that benefit.
The key different of course is that mid-80's DOS software is more-or-less obsolete and abandoned for a reason (the computer history community notwithstanding, of which I'm a part), whereas public libraries are filled with books that still retain almost as much value as they day they were written.
14-bedroom, 11,000 sq. ft castle on 94 acres. Not too bad.
By way of comparison, this is what $3.3M buys you in SF: https://www.redfin.com/CA/San-Francisco/2070-Beach-St-94123/...
Neat project, unexpected title. I thought the PDP-11 (and the PDP line in general) was designed as an explicit alternative to "Big Iron", i.e. a minicomputer.
For those that find this interesting, I highly recommend Tailscale (https://tailscale.com).
Thanks! Mostly I just hated to think that a developer might fall into protracted customer support discussion asking for their account to be refunded, if the $25 turns out to be a hardship. I wouldn't expect this to impact many people, but you never know.
I'd also be curious what happens if people ask the normal channels for the refund, of course.
Sure thing. Same address.
And if it turns out that there's a pattern of a _lot_ of developers who all recently signed up for first-time Google Play Developer accounts just to monetize Chrome apps, I'd be maybe a little surprised, but more than happy to have helped identify an unexpected trend.
I have no connection to any of the teams involved, but if you have problems getting this resolved, please send me a mail (my HN name @google.com) and I'll make it right.
If there were intelligent like out there advertising it's presence, are we likely to detect it given the sheer quantity of sources?
Humans are pretty intelligent. Intelligent enough to ask that question, anyway.
So flip it around. If humans were to advertise our own presence to possible species living tens of billions of light years away, how would we go about doing it?
Sadly, even if they noticed and wrote back, our sun will have since burned out, our time in this universe long past.
This is problematic even for people who don't mind linking to an online Microsoft account (I'm one of them). There is a long-standing Windows bug where local user directory names are created using a truncated version of the online account's name. This is rarely what you want. The work-around has long been to create an offline account first to name your own local directory, then convert it to an online account.
This will break that work-around, and this is universally bad.
The price seems high for something Square presumably needed to unload. Who else would have been bidding it up? And why are food delivery businesses still in a bubble?
That's not a slam on businesses in a bubble phase, either. Many industries go through one before settling into a steady, sustainable state. Just surprised that delivery is still in one, while related industries, like ride-share are cooling off.
"What I Learned Co-Founding Dribble"
As a benefit to readers who aren't already familiar with Dribble, or with the author, perhaps he could add a quick introductory sentence to the article saying both who "I" refers to, and also what Dribble is.
Interestingly, neither anywhere appears on the page anywhere, nor above the fold on the "About" page.
PS: Seems like a good article and a very interesting author.
I'm not surprised. Amazon's entire MO is a relentless focus on the customer. They do that by methodically optimizing and controlling every aspect of the supply chain right up to the moment the product is handed off to the customer. And they get better at it every day.
Restaurant delivery breaks that model. There is too much variability. Too much can go wrong outside their control, and they don't have enough leverage to change it.
If they can't win (even at zero margin) and can't make customers consistently happy, why be in it at all?
Right. But the question the person above asked was "or do away with the warehouse altogether and have products ship directly from manufacturers."
Isn't that drop shipping?
I'm not an expert, but regarding your last question, I believe it's an industry-standard practice:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drop_shipping
And something that Amazon does as well. If you're a third-party seller:
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/201808410
But this more-or-less hidden from the customer if Amazon is the seller.