> This post is 100% human-written. Claude was used for feedback and to assist with the linker symbol diagram. Cursor was used for feedback and to ensure examples were compilable.
Love this, I hope every blog have the same disclaimer about how AI is used.
I'm pretty much hardline anti-AI and even I would say this is too far. If I read documentation or ask my wife to review something, those people did not write the final product. Perhaps it would be mentioned in a citation, like this person has.
If the feedback or involvement is substantive it used to be common to mention this, even if just in a prologue, epilogue, or footnote. You still see this is some academic writing and some journalism, where authors mention with whom they consulted. Books and other literature have tended to dissociate people from sources of knowledge, and the Internet furthered the dissociation. But honest writing should disclose all the sources of substantive claims, preferably traced back to primary sources. Legal writing and scientific papers are perhaps the last bastions where this is still done, or at least expected to be done, fairly rigorously, but the manner in which AI is used seems qualitatively more problematic for maintaining any kind of rigor in citation.
Yeah! It was typed into a computer and never even put on paper. How can you say it was written at all?
Further, can anything be "100% human writt even if it uses pen and paper? No of course not! Unless it is created by pricking a finger and put on human vellum, it's only partially human written.
Seriously though - if you want to do stupid purity test games, at least be properly pure about it. This half-assed nonsense is just trite.
It will pay for itself if you spend >300$ per month. I personally wish Waymo have a 399$ per month subscription that give 2 free ride per day so I don't need to own a car just for work.
Did you mean no one who does 100% of their driving in urban cities? I could maybe see that happening some day, but 10s of millions of Americans don't fit that description and to one degree or another drive in areas that Waymo has no interest in supporting since the unit economics will never be that good.
Honestly, I think your post is/was unfairly downvoted. Your sarcasm is spot-on, especially for HN which has an ongoing, eternal debate around urbanism.
I will reply in good faith. For the United States, the following places come to mind (central/super-rich areas of these cities): Boston, NYC/Manhattan, Washington D.C., Miami, Chicago, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. (For any Texans here: I am struggling to pick a city in Texas, even though many are very wealthy!)
Depends where you live. In SF, parking alone is more than $300/mo if you have to pay for a spot. Also, many companies subsidize Waymo rides for employees as part of their commuter benefits.
They are often still offered as benefits to the employee.
Offering Waymo and taxis as "commuter" benefits (meaning, to/from the employee's home) to the employee is considered taxable income to the employee unless it's used so rarely that it is considered a nontaxable fringe benefit.
As this creates payroll headaches, most companies outside of perhaps a few in the Bay Area do not offer Waymo or taxis or black car services or Uber/Lyft as "benefits" to the employee.
This is different from the kind of travel costs that can be expensed by employees (i.e., for business trips, client meetings, etc.).
Add tag tax, residential parking, subsidized work parking, maintenance, incurred violations, tolls.
400/mo or 5000/yr for not having to worry about all that plus never playing the "wait let's circle the block, maybe a spot has opened up" game... sounds tempting.
If you live in a city, parking tickets are fairly inevitable. I am sure some folks get away with none but at least in SF I have gotten tickets that were not even for the correct meter and it’s takes more time (at least used to) to fight it than pay the money.
I've never lived in Los Angeles but the one that gets you in San Francisco if you do street parking is the street cleaning, and the random vandalizations.
Great? Too many variables such as not having to park on the street or bad/good luck. If you live somewhere that has street cleaning, street parking and meters there is a good chance of getting a ticket. Not everyone but the likelihood increases and most of LA does not really check most of those boxes at least in the areas I have been.
Street cleaning days/times are posted and if they aren't - you can contest and win the case. Meters? It's easy to NOT park in one hour zone if you need more than an hour. It's easy to avoid parking next to fire hydrant.
I have a friend that often parks in 30 minutes zone, for her hour-long yoga, sometimes she gets a ticket, but that's a gamble she is willing to make. You don't magically get tickets in big city, you get tickets because you ignored the rules willingly. Couldn't find parking because you were in a rush? Who decided to not account for "time to find parking time"?
Cool story. YMMV but for anyone that has lived in more urban cities it’s pretty normal to get at least a few parking related tickets. Not always but also not rare. In my example I already shared I would get meter tickets especially on my motorcycle where the looked at the wrong meter stall. Too much trouble to bother fighting. Just a cost of living in a city.
Glad it works for you but it’s not unreasonable to consider it a partial cost of living in a city. It’s easy to pick out the folks that have not owned cars in dense cities.
Spread across a city probably more than you think, especially if you include parking tickets. I've never had a driving ticket, and maybe 4 parking ones over decades, but I'm probably on the lower end of the curve. In their first 40 days of operation, Oakland's speed cameras issued 82,000 tickets according to reports. I welcome those as they make streets safer, and I think they should be low cost, but high frequency.
Or lower because the system is under public scrutiny and they don't wanna tune it for revenue just yet. Hard to say because nobody who makes such decisions gets that high in government by writing down their deliberation on such matters.
Yeah, that seems like an odd factor to include. The whole message of fines is supposed to be "don't do these specific anti-social things" not "be sure to factor in the arbitrary charges you'll be hit with".
You'd be surprised at how many people will only see the latter. When they introduced congestion pricing in NYC, there were actually people who were commenting, completely unironically, along the lines of "There's no way I'm going to pay that, I'll just take the train. That'll show em!"
They 100% saw the fee as solely a means to tax residents, and didn't even consider that the primary purpose could be to change behavior.
I saw some wildly ignorant videos on YouTube of objectively wealthy people complaining about needing to driving (a few blocks!) to 59th Street to visit a relative, but needing to pay the congestion fee. I think these people have no idea how insulated there are from the Real World.
Did you know before hand this would be the case ? cause even when choosing a model that was deemed well made and long-lasting, we hit an unfortunate engine belt timing failure (100k cars were concerned, we got one..) and had to replace the whole thing.
Yes, if you get a Toyota and maintain it, it would be expected to make it past 200k miles. They are by far the most reliable cars. Timing belt failures are only catastrophic for interference engines, and most cars use timing chains now, which have a much lower failure rate.
I wonder if you live in a very warm dry part of the world where it doesn't rain and they don't salt the road?
In $job-2 we had a small fleet of Toyota pickups that were leased brand new, returned to the leasing company at three years old just before they were due their first MOT. They were picked up from our workshop, and driven straight to the scrapyard and crushed. There wasn't a hope in hell of them passing even their first MOT.
It was a nissan micra k12, and I used the wrong term, it's not a belt it's a timing chain (metallic) allegedly designed for longer longevity, but there was an industry issue (bad alloy or something) that made them stretch and lose sync with the timing chain counter circuit. The ECU would trip and rapidly the engine would just stop (quite dangerous depending on which road your on). Car mechanics had to swap the whole engine.. we sold it not long after that.
Many years ago (like 30) an old neighbour of mine gave me his Nissan Micra K10 because the timing belt had snapped. It had been his first car that he'd bought, and he couldn't bring himself to scrap it. I bought him a pint, because we were in the local pub, and fair exchange is no robbery.
So, we towed it up to my house with my mate's Suzuki Jeep, and I set about removing the head. Sure enough, belt snapped, wrapped round the cam pulley, all eight valves bent.
It turns out, my mum's neighbour used to use K10s as her driving school cars, and when one had been written off in an accident her husband had pulled the engine. But, now he wanted his shed cleared to get his boat in, and would I mind giving him a hand? Yes of course I'd give him a hand, and he gave me the engine.
So 25 quid or so of my hard-earned dole money and I bought a Haynes manual for the Micra (which I still have, the manual not the car), a head gasket set, a timing belt set, and six tins of beer, and set about reassembling the engine with the good head off the engine from the shed. It took a few hours of a nice Sunday afternoon and by early evening it was back together and would start and run, come up to temperature, no bubbles in the coolant, no funny noises, smooth as silk.
I put another 85,000 miles on that in the next four years before it eventually got to the point where it was just too rotten to consider welding any more.
I kind of wish I'd just chucked it into a nice dry shed and left it until I could properly strip the shell and weld it up. It would be tax and MOT exempt by now, a historic vehicle! Can you imagine, a historic D-reg Micra?
You should really think about changing out the engine and cabin air filters. And spark plugs. And unless you are driving 50,000 miles per year, I can't imagine the battery is going to last too much longer.
This stuff varies a lot by location. Sure in San Francisco and a handful of other cities parking and tolls cost a great deal, but that's not the case in most locations and presumably Waymo's goal is to expand far beyond a few locations. People in, say, Phoenix aren't paying for parking. If you don't have a car payment your monthly transport costs are going to be much lower than that.
You're correct. I was trying to build on the parent comment about convenience.
Worst case this is an option I don't take, best case is that this would give me more time (shorter commute) with the benefits of being able to read or create.
If you're tying to budgetmaxx, why are we having a car payment on our total?
Gone are the days of $500 dollar drivable shitboxes, although you can easily get cars in the US for under a few grand. Why you'd be penny pinching and taking a loan out is beyond me. You ideally don't want a loan for anything, but some may excuse a home loan...
Both of my Range Rovers cost under a grand, combined, although that's in the UK.
They cost pennies to tax and insure. They're a bit expensive to run, but they do stuff I can't easily do with something cheap to run like pull 3500kg trailers up mountains.
If two Waymo rides per day is covering your driving needs, there's no way you're spending $120/month on gas. Also, car insurance in CA is a huge ripoff, but I still don't pay anywhere near $180/month for very thorough coverage on my ~$40k car. Believable enough otherwise though.
Comprehensive, collision and 500k liability through USAA, $120/month. Deductibles are as high as they will allow, which is $1k IIRC. I was recently forced to consider a move to Utah. Thankfully I didn't end up moving, but a quote for the exact same coverage in SLC was just $40/month.
I shop around regularly. USAA isn't even remotely the cheapest option, and the handful of experiences I and family members have had suggest that they are just as shitty as any other insurance company when it comes to handling claims. I only stick with them because they are consistently within 20% of the cheapest option and I value having all of my banking and insurance handled in one place.
I think they are just saying something like 400 * 72 gives you an absolute hard ceiling of 28k and change. Once you add in interests, sales tax, and other fees, you end up with something like the numbers you're saying. 72 months sounds stupid, because it is, but extremely long car loans are becoming increasingly common these days https://www.marketscreener.com/news/new-experian-automotive-... and you can even sometimes go to 84 if you really want that 28k number at $400/m.
well, you voluntarily purchased a condo without deeded parking. if you want private storage for your private vehicle, pay for it.
i have a sports car and two motorcycles, and consequently, i did not buy a condo in the mission. instead, i bought a house by 19th street bart and my commute to the city is shorter than some of my coworkers who live half as far as me (by distance).
"the total average annual cost of ownership—which includes your car payment, depreciation, fuel, insurance, maintenance, and taxes—is approximately $12,297 per year (or $1,025 monthly) over a 15-year lifetime"
that's crazy. my 2005 volvo, 1991 nissan, and 1986 toyota altogether cost me a little over $1k per year (mostly insurance) and it was less than $10k total to buy them all. goes to show average financial literacy in the US. people won't save a few grand for a used car (or take out a small loan even!) and then pay 10x the cost for new
I think you and I may be a rarity. Most people seem to value having new vehicles, and I don't say that dismissively- there's definitely something to be said for modern safety features as vehicles continue to grow bigger and heavier.
true, not all of these are created equal. that old volvo has side curtain airbags and other safety features that were ahead of its time. but it takes experience to know what you're shopping for. I turned down a corolla that was 10 years newer for the same price because the older volvo was actually the better vehicle inside and out
Oil changes cost like $35/year if you do it yourself. Decent tires last 4-5 years, so that's like $100/year (to be generous). Air filters are so cheap and need replacement so infrequently as to not even be worth counting.
I can only get 1-2 years out of tires, but I also drive 25K+ miles a year. (And its a heavy EV Van) Tires are $800ish a set for the affordable ones (also due to heavy van)
Cabin air filter is twice a year at $18 a filter (I replace them as soon as it smells weird)
The increased frequency of tire changes for EVs is not something I realized when I bought an EV. Those batteries are heavy, and put a lot of extra wear on the tires.
Another factor is that brake-regen is putting additional stress on two tires if it is a single motor car. So they get a lot of workout accel/regen if you aren't using your brakes as often and driving economically to regen as much power back as possible.
Plus how fun it is to get going in an EV leads to a lot of extra tire wear.
I've found that rotating my tires more often helps spread the wear out from having a single motor EV.
Ah yeah, I avoid cars/vans I can't use in normal economic ways. I need them damn tires to last as long as possible. And base model trims for less shit to fail.
Even with "expensive" electricity, and using your worst case scenario, it's still usually cheaper to charge 400 mile EV from 0-100% (another worst case scenario), than it is to fill up an equivalent gas vehicle. Even before the current gas prices spike.
But let's use your "worst case" scenario.
Worst case 300 mile EV charge (100%, during peak hours): about $50
Filling up a highly fuel efficient ICE vehicle: about $40
Of course, if you only charge the EV to 80% (as is recommended, and more efficient), and only set it to charge it off-peak (as is normal), then the numbers are much better. There are, of course, worst case scenarios, but it's actually hard to make an EV more expensive than an ICE vehicle.
I would say that to charge an EV with a 350 mile range to 300 miles would be about $25 here in California. Right now, a 300 mile range tank of gas is easily $60 or $70.
You have to lose the old mindset of a gas vehicle, ie, you "fill it up" once. EVs are much more convenient: it takes 10 seconds to plug it in when you get home and then the next day it's fully charged - and they're almost all grid pricing aware.
Like, on my BMW PHEV, if I try to fast charge during peak times, the charger actually makes me confirm i want to spend more, instead of trickle charging until 8PM.
An oil change is quick, like 30 minutes. If I grab a granola bar instead of sitting down for breakfast and then instead use that time to do the oil change, the time expenditure is basically a wash.
yep, it's dirt cheap to maintain yourself. and only a few hours per vehicle per year tbh. lots of people on hn don't know basic real life skills so this all seems insurmountable to them, and there's the ev cope that somehow your 60+ grand car is going to save you money in gas and maintenance in the long run. I have 8 cars and motorcyles for less than the cost of that one car lmao
Oil changes are cheap. A lot of places will put your tires on for free or cheaply if you buy tires from them. Assuming the car is free, the cost of car ownership is dominated by gas, insurance, and the raw cost of materials needed to maintain it. Whether you do it yourself or have someone else do it isn't going to move the needle much.
How much liability coverage are you getting for ~ $100/month? In other words if you injure or kill someone with your vehicle how much of that cost will be covered by your insurance company? With Waymo the answer is "not my problem".
I pay ~100/month per car for full coverage on two fairly new cars and $500k in liability from the auto policy plus a $1m umbrella policy. And that's in CA which is comically expensive. I find it very believable that you can get excellent liability only coverage on 3 cars for $100/month depending on the state and drivers.
For comparison, I live in SF and am low-risk on all the dimensions you'd expect on HN, and I pay $100/month for non-owner coverage with similar limits - i.e., I don't own a car and my coverage only applies when I rent one. When I owned a car it was much higher, of course.
Hmm, for my €209/year (~$20/mo) liability insurance I get unlimited coverage for personal injuries and €5M coverage for property damage (both mandated by Finnish law).
One major reason is probably that most of the liability portion is going to be covering medical bills in the US. I only did a quick skim of the Wikipedia summary but it looks like Finland, like (almost?) all of Europe wouldn't have that particular liability?
Another reason might be that insurance costs vary widely in the US. I recently had a reason to get an insurance quote in Utah, and it was literally one third the price that I currently pay in California.
All that said, you do seem to enjoy remarkably cheap insurance over there from my perspective. I hardly think those two factors are enough to cover such a large difference.
Medical bills are covered (the Wikipedia summary seems accurate to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_insurance#Finland). But I'm going to guess that those medical bills, and related damages, are much lower than in the U.S.
Maybe also lower average value of cars and less accidents here plays some part. But not sure how large that difference actually is.
Could also be some difference in the insurance premium systems: The amount of accidents changes one's cost for next year based on fixed rules - the ~$20/mo is with the highest discount (no liability insurance covered accidents in many years). The maximum it can grow to (for me, with my modern car) is ~US$100/mo, by having 4 consecutive covered accidents without accident-free years. Not really sure how wildly this varies in other countries or if the systems are similar...
The optional car insurance is more expensive, my full coverage (including damage, theft, parking, glass, fire, towing, substitute car etc.) is in the ~US$100/mo range, with ~$230 deductible on most coverage, and towing, substitute, glass repair at $0.
Who cares? Liability coverage is only there to satisfy the state and little more IMO. If you do need it the counterparty will exhaust the limits of your liability coverage and call it quits. It is not worth it for the other guy's insurance to sue you unless you're a million bucks in the red.
sure, but also that would drive new car prices down and put pressure on dealerships to stop adding ridiculous fees on top of the MSRP. and more used cars on the road means more independent mechanics means cheaper service. Japan is a great example. in addition to their strong domestic market, the driving culture there is a decent size tourist industry unto itself. there are more tracks per capita in Japan than any other country
do you buy things just to look at them? my vehicles (all 8) are for driving. fuel costs vary, and as another commenter in this thread said they were comparing $50 (max) to recharge an EV vs $40 (min) for gas. so depending on where you live, what you drive, and how you drive it you'll get wildly different ideas about fuel costs. fueling up is not maintenance either. even in the best case the difference in fuel cost is a drop in the bucket vs the difference in vehicle price
Ok, I think the situation is different when you have 8 cars which are for driving. It's not really fair to compare per vehicle costs when you're dividing your usage up among 8 vehicles whereas most people are dividing it among 1 or maybe 2
Can you explain where this comes from? I mean, that's not even close to what the norm is in Europe. Though, to be fair, we don't normally count fuel into TCO and the reasoning is: if you want to go distances then you are always paying for them. Whether it's public transport or taxis or whatever. Is fuel the major contributor in the number?
If you want to go some distance you're always paying something to do it - you can't therefore assume all means of going a distance cost the same and that factor can be ignored, though. A plane, train, bus, car, and taxi are all going to have different cost efficiencies (some more different than others) of going on a given type of trip. From a different perspective, they all require purchase, maintenance, licensing, and registration as well - but those are still part of TCO because it's part of the total cost. If you remove them for being the same type of cost rather than the same actual cost then you wouldn't really end up with much going into TCO even though the total cost of each is wildly different.
In general, you're almost certainly no longer on the path to calculating anything that should be called TCO once you've started removing costs associated with using the item. Apart from that, you're probably not on your way to a very meaningful cost comparison either.
As an American I would also like to know... My actual expenses for my low end luxury car are nowhere near that high, and I live in CA which has massively inflated car expenses in practically all fronts.
Registration: $600/year
Insurance: $1,500/year
Gas: ~$2,700/year (15,000 miles @ 30mpg @ $5.50/gal)
Loan: ~$3,500/year if I had borrowed the entire price of the car on a 60 month loan and then kept the car for 15 years as the GP stated
Maintenance: Certainly less than $1,000/year, much less in most years.
And in some states registration and insurance could literally be a third of what I pay. Gas could easily be half. I can't imagine anyone is paying $12,000/year for any non-luxury vehicle.
I only disagree a little. It's that sometimes there is a discussion about AI itself where "I prompted X with Y and it output Z" can add to the convo.
But those are pretty specific cases (For example, discussing AI in healthcare). That's about the only time where I think it's reasonable to post the AI output so it can be analyzed/criticized.
What's not helpful is I've been hit by users who haven't disclosed that they are just using AI. It takes a few back and forths before I realize that they are just a bot which is annoying.
Here is where I'd like to push back just a little.
Not all AI prompting is expanding the prompt.
What if the original prompt is 1000 words, includes 10 scientific articles by reference (boosting it up to 10000) , and the AI helps to boil it down to 100 words instead?
I'd argue that this is probably a rather more responsible usage of the tools. And rather more pleasant to read besides.
Whether it meets the criterion is another thing. But at least don't assume that the original prompt is always better or shorter!
Use your brain and summarize the article yourself if it's of such great importance. Why should I care to read it if you can't be bothered to actually write it?
Actually, I'd like to expand a wee bit. Don't know if you've ever done a scientific library usage course or so. It's one of those things you tend to forget are important.
One of the most important lessons is not to read as many papers as possible. It's weeding out as many as possible so you can spend your limited grey matter reading the ones that actually matter.
And that's where the LLM comes in handy, especially if it's of decent quality. It's a Large Language Model. Chewing through language and finding issues and discrepancies, or simply whether a paper matches your ultimate query is trivial for them .
You know, I probably have standing to argue that people who use the web are just as lazy ;-)
I'm just old enough that I was in the middle of the transition from paper (in primary school in the 80s) to online (starting late 90s)
I say this somewhat tongue in cheek, but obviously people should drive to 3 different libraries across 3 countries and read the journals in their own binders (in at least 3 different languages)
In reality: full-text online is convenient. Having an LLM assist with search and filtering is convenient.
I could go back to the old ways. Would you like me to reply in pen? My handwriting is atrocious.
I really prefer modern tools, though. Not everything older is better. Whether you want to read what I write is up to you.
(edit: Not hyperbole. I live in a small country, and am old enough to still remember the 80's as a kid.)
Push the idea past a single comment. Someone decides they have a great method for getting summaries, and adds it as a comment to every post they look at. Other people have similar ideas. Is that fine? It doesn't take a lot for the whole site to feel like useless spam.
It'd be far better to just have a thread about the best way to get good summaries.
Probably not. A typical S/N ratio (rule of thumb) is about 1:10. Sturgeons law (a useful rule of thumb) says "ninety percent of everything is crap."
You shouldn't just dump a big pile of slop on someone's plate: the actual trick is to filter it down to the bit that counts. Usually when posting, you should do that for the reader. It's only polite.
So, if we filter out the noise, that leaves you with 100 words and 1 link to a reference. Which is actually about right for a typical HN reply. (run this through wc ;-))
Would prompts really be interesting or thought-provoking, though?
I don't expect AI HN responders to out themselves by sharing, but I would be curious to learn if people are prompting anything more involved than just "respond to this on HN: <link>", or running agents that do the same.
I often edit my comments rather manically; get into discussions, and sometimes email exchanges with other HNers. I also often use claude, kimi, gemini to check my comments for tone, adherence to HN rules etc. I probably spend way too much time.
So technically the prompts involved might expand into megabytes all told. And in the end I formulate a post by myself (to adhere to HN rules), but the prompting can be many many many megabytes and include PDFs, images, blocks of text from multiple sources, and ... you know. Just Doing The Work.
I think this is valid. Previously I would have (and have) (and still do) search google, wikipedia, pubmed, scientific literature, etc. Not for everything. But often. And AI tooling just allows me to do that faster, and keep all my notes in one place besides.
Again, the final edit is typically 90-100% me. (The 10% is if the AI comes with a really good suggestion) . But my homework? Yes. AI is involved these days.
This should be ok. I'm adhering to the letter and the spirit. My post is me.
"Write a response to smy20011's comment indicating that if the end result was a low-quality comment, the initial prompt probably wouldn't be very insightful either. Make it snarky."
Disagree. The prompt holds no information at all. The answer actually discovers information, organizes it, presents it in a way that's easy to read.
Example: "write me an article about hidden settings in SSH". You get back more information than most of HN's previous posts about SSH, in a fraction of the text, and more readable.
Actually, screw it, we should just make a new version of HN that has useful articles written by AI. The human written articles are terrible.
It's not just AI-generated articles -- it's the other things that we delve into as a result. Listicles. Comments. Posts. It's what it means to be human, and honestly? That's rare.
An outage could cost Amazon ~millions to tens of millions. Most of the time, we want the junior to learn from the outage and fix the process. With AI agent, we can only update the agent.md and hope it will never happen again.
It interesting to see that the eval set becoming more and more expensive. Previously we just need to evaluate one test set, right now we need to create a lot of diffs and run a lot of tests.
I think the good thing about it is that if you are given good specification, you are likely to get good result. Writing a C compiler is not something new, but it will be great for all the porting projects.
Love this, I hope every blog have the same disclaimer about how AI is used.
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