Launch HN: Promptless (YC W25) – Automatic updates for customer-facing docs
Hi HN! I’m Prithvi, and my co-founder Frances and I built Promptless (https://gopromptless.ai), an AI teammate that proactively updates docs while you ship software. There’s a demo video at https://youtu.be/pmslSl8dOgE, and also a “Live Demo on Your Own Docs” at https://gopromptless.ai/demo where you can plug in the URL to any existing docs site and simulate […]
Money lessons without money: The financial literacy fallacy
Try Thinking and Learning Without Working Memory (2008)
Imagine dialing a phone number by having to look up each digit one at a time in the phone book. Normally, you look up the number and remember all seven digits long enough to get it dialed. Even with one digit at a time, you would have to remember each digit long enough to get […]
One year after switching from Java to Go
I always told people memory is cheap, black magic is OK and efficiency doesn’t matter in most cases, but boy, how wrong was I… My Java journey started back in 2011 (14 years ago – wow) when I started studying computer science at the Vienna University of Technology. Using editors like jEdit and compiling my […]
Svelte 5 is not JavaScript
For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been dealing with the fallout of upgrading a web application to Svelte 5. Complaints about framework churn and migration annoyances aside, I’ve run into some interesting issues with the migration. So far, I haven’t seen many other people register the same issues, so I thought it might be […]
Are Electric Cars That Much Cheaper to Operate Than ICE?
Recently, I engaged in a conversation about the cost-effectiveness of electric vehicles (EVs) compared to internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles with a friend. This discussion prompted me to conduct a detailed analysis of the potential cost savings associated with owning an EV, particularly focusing on fuel savings and overall cost return. In this article, I […]
Catalytic Computing Taps the Full Power of a Full Hard Drive
“Obviously” is a dangerous word, even in scenarios that seem simple. Suppose, for instance, you need to do an important computation. You get to choose between two computers that are almost identical, except that one has an extra hard drive full of precious family photos. It’s natural to assume that the two options are equally […]
Tristan Davey’s Punch Card Archive
Punched cards were once a ubiquitous part of accounting, data collection and early computing. At their peak of use, in the 1950s and 60s, hundreds of companies around the world printed millions of punch cards every month. Yet within a few years of their obsolescence they all but disappeared from the public consciousness. This archive […]
Migraine is more than a headache – a rethink offers hope
Andrea West remembers the first time she heard about a new class of migraine medication that could end her decades of pain. It was 2021 and she heard a scientist on the radio discussing the promise of gepants, a class of drug that for the first time seemed to prevent migraine attacks. West followed news […]
By the end of today, NASA’s workforce will be about 10 percent smaller
Spread across NASA’s headquarters and 10 field centers, which dot the United States from sea to sea, the space agency has had a workforce of nearly 18,000 civil servants. However, by the end of today, that number will have shrunk by about 10 percent since the beginning of the second Trump administration four weeks ago. […]