Posts

New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: How do word docs, slides, excel, and PDFs generate value?

Ask HN: How do word docs, slides, excel, and PDFs generate value? 3 by FailMore | 3 comments on Hacker News. This is a bit vague, but as an engineer, it’s possible to walk past the other functions in an office and see people creating word docs, presentations, etc. and be a bit shocked that creating static artifacts is valuable enough to drive employment. I’m wondering if anyone has any ideas on where the value lies in this work. I know this is all very industry specific, so if you want to share you can talk from your own perspective. Vague and wild answers accepted too. I’m looking to have a wide ranging discussion about this.

New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Is grpcurl home page compromised?

Ask HN: Is grpcurl home page compromised? 3 by jicea | 0 comments on Hacker News. Clicking on some FAQs (like "Does grpcurl Does grpcurl require a .proto file?a .proto file?") redirects me to https://ift.tt/HFztoOZ a really suspicious web site). Am I crazy or over-paranoid? Update: nevermind that's been discussed here https://ift.tt/6puZkSV Sad to see an Open source project targeted like that

New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: How to enforce engineers to understand the code they are shipping

Ask HN: How to enforce engineers to understand the code they are shipping 3 by hchua | 2 comments on Hacker News. Everyone is using AI for everything now. Company is pushing for AI-first and encourages the adoption of AI in every part of our work. AI for planning, AI for RFC, AI for writing code, AI for creating PRs. Sure we can have harnesses and tests to ensure nothing breaks. But how do we enforce engineers to have a deep understanding of the code that they are shipping? Our team has the usual suggestions: write a plan first, write test cases first, etc. But in this age, how do you verify that the engineer did not simply delegate these tasks to an LLM first? Also genuinely worried about junior engineers' growth if this is the future.

New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Company is rapidly cutting AI tool spend how to prep team?

Ask HN: Company is rapidly cutting AI tool spend how to prep team? 5 by Snakes3727 | 8 comments on Hacker News. Company I work for is now rapidly planning to scale down its AI tooling spend. Claude code access is basically getting removed and people are forbidden from using personal plans. Reasoning is cost apparently our monthly Claude bill has become astronomical for the org. Nearly 3x our saas's cloud spend. Apparently we are going to get limited access to codex at severely reduced plans. I have tried some local models such as Kimi, however most are barely functional. I am very concerned as the expectation of amount of work done is to remain consistent. Ignoring the fact teams have made entire workflows around Claude I am very worried and frustrated. How can I help my team ease this transition? Are their local models that run well on local machines that only have 16gb ram?

New ask Hacker News story: Booking.com and Weaviate

Booking.com and Weaviate 2 by CShorten | 0 comments on Hacker News. Vector search looks easy, until you hit production scale. I'm super excited to share a new episode of the Weaviate Podcast with Başak from @bookingcom on production-scale vector search, RAG, and agentic AI with @weaviate_io! The podcast begins by discussing Booking's tipping point into adopting vector search and emerging use cases. The scale of Partner-to-Guest messaging alone is insane! There are nearly 250,000 such exchanges daily , and Booking's Agent is already helping with 10s of thousands of these! Başak describes how the team navigated increasing scale and workload complexity. They ran an exhaustive evaluation of Weaviate with 100M embeddings and tests often left out of common ANN benchmarks. This includes Filtered Vector Search, Multi-Threaded Concurrency, and testing with simultaneous Reads and Writes. The podcast concludes with Başak's career journey to Booking and her thoughts on Travel A...

New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Could free/low cost LLMs be a momentary thing?

Ask HN: Could free/low cost LLMs be a momentary thing? 4 by senda | 8 comments on Hacker News. Say they(OpenAi Etc)don’t find a way to reduce the cost of running these LLMs. Will we shift towards slower/worse LLMs running locally? Or maybe enterprise ones only used by large corporations for specific tasks? Will the era of using these to generate code end? Is the assume that the inference problem will be solved?

New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Do you know what data your AI coding agent sends to the cloud?

Ask HN: Do you know what data your AI coding agent sends to the cloud? 2 by lbrauer | 0 comments on Hacker News. Every session my AI coding agent reads files, runs commands, makes API calls. I have no idea exactly what ends up in the cloud. Is anyone actually tracking this at a granular level, or do we just trust the tool?