News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

sahila

Re:Gemini 4 Carbon on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @02:51PM (#50278995)
> local coding agents

what does "local" coding agents mean? Surely you're not hosting it..

Re:Astra for Law on Thursday September 17, 2026 @09:39PM (#49749234)
There's a middle area too between your options - a law firm that utilizes AI offers cheaper pricing than the current firms for the same work. Ideally competition will drive prices down but of course law doesn't have the benefit of do-overs on cases, so reputation still plays a big factor.
This is already a feature in instagram. Then it's also a feature built in the OS in phones.

What more are you looking for?

> The billed items also have to cover everything. It’s not directly $37 for the aspirin, or the $5 or whatever allowed coverage it ultimately gets billed it. That had to cover the facilities, the salaries of the pharmacy staff who reviewed the request and dispensed it, the staff who inventory and order the medications, and the cost of billing insurance.

That's the same as any? CVS charging $5 for aspirin has to cover their staff who stocked and checked out the item, the shelf space, the marketing, and the looting.

The comparison you make between a bottle of wine vs a glass is not the right one. It's two different stores selling the same product. What's different about hospitals?

Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon have all tried to create their own smartphone since Android has been around. Why do you think OpenAI would succeed?

Even if they did make the new physical device, are you suggesting they create a new OS and ask developers to port their apps? It seems like a non-starter.

Re:Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics on Friday June 19, 2026 @01:34PM (#48600952)
Per this sale, BD is worth $3.25B. Just recently, Google paid $2.7B for two years of Noam Shazeer through the Character.ai deal.

This seems like a small correction if they wanted to reacquire and clearly the market isn't valuing BD all that high.

Why do you think it's one of Sundar's biggest mistake?

> So I assume Waymo will be immediately banned from any residential areas until they can demonstrate the ability to follow the laws of the road?

Why do you apply a different standard to waymos than to humans?

Re:What Happened to Fry's Electronics on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @12:47AM (#47147793)
Sure but I don't mind the current outcome. I want my laptop to be small and light and if the tradeoff is the ram and battery have to be glued, I'd take it.
Re:Pebble Round 2 – The Most Stylish Pebble Ever on Monday January 05, 2026 @05:16PM (#46505820)
> Pebble proves that a simple, shallow, and linear menu system works great!

Hard to say this is true when Garmin watches are far more successful than Pebble. That aside, the forerunner is a sports watch first where you want lots of physical buttons that don't get bothered by sweat. The better Garmin comparison is the Venu series which only have two buttons https://www.garmin.com/en-US/c/wearables-smartwatches/?serie....

Re:Crypto got everything it wanted. Now it's sinking on Wednesday November 19, 2025 @10:03PM (#45988404)
How does your chart show it increasing with crypto? Bitcoin came out in 2009 and ethereum in 2015, and adoption was far before 2020.
Re:Apple Mini Apps Partner Program on Thursday November 13, 2025 @08:45PM (#45922921)
This seems like a leap that consumers buy them

>"because they want a walled garden"

I doubt most consumers would care if you could sideload apps on their iOS device or play PlayStation and Nintendo games on their Xbox. In fact most consumers would be all for it!

They buy these things because they find there's already enough value there.

You're just arguing against delivery food generally, not against Uber.

Of course delivery has a cost, was even typical for pizza delivery before the apps. If you're that price conscience, takeout always exists.

Re:The (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh on Sunday September 28, 2025 @01:19AM (#45401958)
> they only collapse when nearly everyone is finally convinced they never will

I get that rationale in some bubbles as that means people are not parking their money as cash where they can buy the dip and support the market (tell me if I'm widely off). But I think this case is different because there's actually VAST sums of money being spent in AI by some very big players who will need an return.

Re:The (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh on Sunday September 28, 2025 @12:57AM (#45401886)
This is fair but it's also assuming that today's AI has reached its potential which frankly I don't think any of us know. There's a lot of investment being spent in compute and research from a lot of different players and we could definitely make some breakthroughs. I doubt many of us would've predicted even the progress we've had in the last few years before chatGPT came out.

I think the bubble will be defined on whether these investments pan out in the next two years or if we just have small incremental progress like gpt4 to gpt5, not what products are made with today's llm. It remains to be seen.

Re:$100K fee added to H1B applications on Friday September 19, 2025 @07:52PM (#45308219)
> It's always baffled me how the same candidates that claim to be pro labor and pro environment are also pro globalization. The way it plays out is that the jobs are just offshore to jurisdictions that lack the same labor and environmental protections.

Why's that? The jobs and lives of individuals in those countries are better than the alternatives present otherwise to them. Globalization may hurt certain America jobs but certainly countries like India is grateful for all of the engineering roles.

High consumerism is harmful to the environment but I don't think the link between offshoring jobs is direct to environmental harms and certainly it's helpful to giving more job opportunites.

That's a little reductive. I grew up in San Diego and went to school in LA and had the same experience with taxis - never took them. But now I use ubers in those cities whenever I'm there.

The US has tons of cities like this that I imagine would have issues with taxis - all parts of the bay area peninsula / east bay, cities in Texas, Denver, etc. Most cities are not like the NYC/Boston and even in places in Chicago, unless you lived downtown likely didn't see taxis driving around.

It's not the only example, Chegg's another one.
Re:Giving people money helped less than I thought it would on Tuesday August 19, 2025 @03:16PM (#44955196)
Well I can disagree with you and can tell you that more money would solve my money problems, particularly with my housing and being able to buy / rent a bigger place.
You're making big assumptions here regarding students desires to attend stanford. Ignoring everything else though, having two elite universities that cater to merit is better than one just for the sake of doubling the number of students.
> But social mobility for serious kids is much easier in the United States than elsewhere.

This is an unrelated point, is your contention that the US is better off with unserious students? Social mobility / wealth accumulation for the masses does suck in other countries but it's great that people are still seriously motivated by schools. It's a big reason those students immigrant to the US and companies here hire those people in masses.

Can't wait for Advanced Gemini Advance.
It's not a big deal but the cars allowed on Uber has worsened. I remember trying to sign up as a driver a few years ago with a 2009 Corolla and being denied because the car was too old and now see cars from then allowed today. Maybe that's the cost of scaling but I find it worse. Also no more Uber pool.
Not wise in what way? You say that likely as an American without caring at all about the people in Iran. The US is the only nation is have used a nuclear weapon and frankly is far more capable of destruction than Iran is even with nukes.
What about an internal tool that helps improves processes but doesn't ever sell or google.com and gmail which are free to users?
> This is unlike how capital assets are valued for any other industry!

Is your dismay that it's unfair compared to other industries or that the policy doesn't reflect reality that software is a capital asset that has a lifetime longer than 6 years for many companies?

Sure, but now when the backup is restored two weeks later, is the user redeleted or just forgotten about?
How do you manage deleting data from backups? Do you know not take backups?
Re:Google blocked Motorola use of Perplexity AI, witness says on Wednesday April 23, 2025 @07:03PM (#43777611)
So are you proposing that Google shouldn't allow other companies to install Android? What would Samsung, Motorola switch to and do app developers have to create apps targeting all of the different mobile OSes?

This seems like a far worst path than today, and to OP's point, though Google isn't perfect, they're doing better than their competitor in providing options. Pushing Google to only offer Android on their own phones is not a win for consumers.

Didn't google just buy deepmind and rebrand it too?
Re:The average college student today on Monday March 31, 2025 @04:47AM (#43532692)
That's not entirely true at Amazon. It's expected for many of the more involved people in the meeting to read ahead of time, and at least be familiar with the subject.

At the same time, the time is given because not everyone will have time to read ahead of time. That 15 minutes at the start is their calendar block; think of managers who have back to back meetings all day.

It's not some referendum on people being careless.

Older »