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I wonder if at some point we'll see a hockey stick adoption of self-driving cars. For now every new city is worth a blog post, eventually they'll allow intercity drives. Will international adoption take off? Will I be able to use it on a country road to visit my family in 10 years?

If Waymo's announcements come to reality, that is happening this year. Phoenix entered full service in 2020, then San Francisco and Los Angeles in 2024, and Austin and Georgia in 2025 (in partnership with Uber). But this year they are planning on rolling out in 13 cities! Miami and Orlando are already in full service. Nashville, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio are running invite-only service. Tampa, New Orleans, Minneapolis are in testing. San Diego, Detroit, Las Vegas and D.C. have been announced to launch this year, but haven't started testing yet. And that is on top of eight other cities that they are already testing in, but don't have timelines for offering full service.

That is already a huge jump from two cities a year.


The DC rollout is mired in regulatory red tape and is most likely dead until the mayoral election goes through, and if the new mayor is anti-Waymo unlikely to go through in the near future.

You can definitely see a bit of a hockey stick forming in Waymo's reported rides per week. Nice chart in this article. https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/27/waymo-skyrocketing-ridersh...

> eventually they'll allow intercity drives

You can drive, on the highway, from San Francisco to San Jose, two cities that are about 50 miles apart.

I suppose you mean something more "road trip-y"? Interstate, not intercity?


I'd assume so. Even the city launches are extremely limited to a section of the overall metro area that one would consider necessary for full local service. They are dropping a lot of seeds and then will allow them to grow. While it seems very slow, I have always enjoyed watching Google's taxi service GTM approach much more than I did watching Uber's.

The inflection point will be cities building infrastructure and passing laws supporting self driving. Then it will hockey stick.

Waymo and Baidu are the only big players and both are working on launching in foreign markets for the first time this year, in addition to big expansions in their home markets. But country roads are not on the agenda. I predict an eventual public-private partnership to bring AVs to rural areas. It would be a cost-effective way to support the healthcare of ageing rural populations who are facing hospital closures.

It will mirror the chart of Gs subcontractors in India / Phils

For me it was:

- most posts I saw on Facebook were from my friends

- Instagram was full of photos from my friends

- on Twitter I mostly saw tweets from people I knew in person or open source contributors I followed

Then my Facebook feed started having more and more „suggestions” then pages and groups, more brands than people. Instagram started showing me influencers and over time moved from photos to videos to counter TikTok. Twitter also started showing algorithmic feeds with more and more „suggested” people rather than those I followed. I stopped replying, commenting, eventually posting, social media turned into consumption-heavy media


What's the alternative? Are you suggesting other LLM providers don't charge high price? Or that they don't make mistakes? Or that they provide better quality?

We're talking about dynamically developed products, something that most people would have considered impossible just 5 years ago. A non-deterministic product that's very hard to test. Yes, Anthropic makes mistakes, models can get worse over time, their ToS change often. But again, is Gemini/GPT/Grok a better alternative?


Will they? Will someone have enough time, skill and dedication to maintain it? I don’t think using AI will by itself make a big enough difference, it’s still a lot of work to maintain a project

> I don’t think using AI will by itself make a big enough difference, it’s still a lot of work to maintain a project

I think you are wrong. The "a lot of work maintaining a project" would be reduced, specially issues investigation, code improvement, security issues detection and fixes. SDL isn't a that relevant project, but "ban AI-written commit" - which reading the issue, sounds more like ban "AI usage" - is counterproductive to project.


> SDL isn't a that relevant project,

SDL is kinda the king of “I want graphic, but not enough to bring a whole toolkit, or suffer with opengl”. I have a small digital audio player (shangling m0) where the whole interface is built with SDL.


> SDL isn't a that relevant project

Unreal 5 uses SDL to be able to create "windows" in a cross platform manner (specific use case, but not just a thing on Linux [1]). Many others do as well.

[1] https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/unreal-engine/updati...


>SDL isn't a that relevant project

Many, many things use SDL. It's one of those bottom pieces in the Jenga tower of infrastructure dependency[0].

Not maintained by some random person (that would be Sean Barret's STB library) but still, it seems irrelevant only because it's already ubiquitous.

[0]https://xkcd.com/2347/


I’d love to see a streaming service where my payment goes to artists I listen to.

Spotify pays 70% of their music revenue to publishers based on the total number of listens. All revenue is put together and split based on the global numbers. Which means that niche band I like will get next to nothing. Instead if they account for 50% of my listening time in one month, they should get 35% of what I paid to Spotify that month. Unfortunately big labels will never agree to that.


But, unless they put some thresholds on minimum listens, isn't basically the same thing what they do and what you propose?

35% of 1 is the same as 0.000000035 of 10.000.000


If you and I both pay $10/mo to listen to Spotify, and we are the only subscribers. If I listen to 1 song by Sabrina Carpenter, and you listen to 99 songs by Taylor Swift. Then of our $20 (after Spotify's share) 1% of the money will go to Sabrina and 99% of the money will go to Taylor. Because Taylor was played 99x more than Sabrina. Even though for both of us as users, our respective artist was 100% of our listening.

It doesn't calculate your amount of listening and determine the payout based on that. All listens are pooled together and all subscription money is pooled together. And the payout is determined based on that.


No, because let's say OP pays USD 10 and listens to only one song one time -- obviously, Linkin Park In the end -- right now, the payout is almost nothing.

With OP proposal, they would get USD 7.


no. if you listen only to niche musicians, all of the fee goes to most popular one regardless.

It also promotes botting, as spotify only counts listens, bot listening a ton to a fraudulent artist will siphon money away from essentially everyone.

"Money only goes to artists you listen" would be very good change


Not all listens show the same intention. If I go to the barbershop and they're playing Spotify top-40 playlists running all day long, that is very different from me actively choosing what I want to listen to for a few hours a months while I'm listening in my car, or putting on Friends Per Second while doing the dishes.

My $7/mo should be going to the artists I actually chose to listen to, not the stuff that droned passively for hours in background environments. Particularly when I'm actually a high margin customer for Spotify; the cost to them of my subscription is low since I spend so little time on the service. That makes it all the more galling that my subscription cost is mostly going to Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran.


I mean, I understand and agree, and I'm pretty sure that Spotify Premium users are very skewed towards less mainstream tastes, so I agree it would be better for smaller artists and would probably change the power balance (well, if we forget that music labels exist). But yeah, if as others pointed out you were to give 70% of your subscription cost to the artist that composed/performed the single track you listened this month, it would be very different.


It would be better.

If my listening is to Ed Sheeran for 9 hours a day and I pay $10, spotify take $3 for a platform fee, and Ed should get 10% of the rest - $7

If your listening is to Dave Smith for 1 hour a day and you pay $10, spotify take $3 for a platform fee, and Dave should get 10% of the rest - $7

That would be a fair way of distributing the revenue

But it's not. Instead Ed Sheeran gets 90% of listens and Dave Smith 10%, the listen pot is $14, so Ed gets $12.60 and Dave gets $1.40


At the end of the day, indies need to be on Spotify much more than Spotify needs them there. But for mainstream artists, it's the opposite; so the representatives of top-40 artists are the ones dictating the terms of how the system works for everyone, and unsurprisingly the system they've settled on is one that seems fair enough as long as you don't think too deeply about it, but ensures that the biggest slice of the pie goes to themselves.


To play the devil's advocate, if we do this, your favorite artist will get paid less if you listen to others using Spotify radio shuffle feature vs if you stay on the artist page and only listen to that one artist?

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.


If you listen to the artist less then they will receive less of your money. What's the issue you're seeing there?


Well, if I listen to a shuffle radio then the artists I listen to will get paid, right? Which I’m fine with, it’s not that I want to support one specific artist (I can buy their album or merch if that’s my goal), I just want the money I pay to go to artists I listen to, not to the people from top charts that I don’t care about


That sounds like the intended effect. I think the objection is that the user's payment is being diluted by all the other listeners. Someone who listens to spotify constantly is going to influence the payouts much more than someone who listens to it occasionally, even though they are paying the same amount to spotify and the latter user might have only subscribed to listen to one band.


How bout this: artists whose songs are played on shuffle only get a small percentage compared to those who users play on purpose.


I'm not sure I follow your logic.

100 people subscribe to spotify and listen for 100 hours a month each, for $10 a month. You listen to your favourite artist for 50 hours and other stuff for 50 hours. No-one else listens to your favourite artist.

I assume that if this is band is treated as the "average" Total listening hours = 100 * 100 = 10,00. Total money: 100 * 10 = $1,000. They get: 50 / 10,000 * $1,000 = $5

That seems fair? Obviously some bands won't have negotiating power when they first start and might get less, or some get more, but that feels like how the industry always worked, and not something to do with spotify?


You don't see the problem because you're using the same number of hours for everyone. When you have some accounts using 500 hours and others using 50 there are problems. And the 500 hour account is more likely on autopilot and reinforcing whatever's already popular.


Why is that unfair? Do the maths for me please?

Let’s say I listen to 10h a month of a single artist, nothing else. So 100% of my payment (minus Spotify take) should go to that artist.

Let’s say you listen 90h to another artist, and nothing else.

In the current model both artists are put together, 100h and let’s say $20 to split. Your artist gets 90% because they’ve been listened to for 90h, so they get $18 and my artist gets $2

In my model my artist gets $10 because they get 100% of what I pay and your artist gets $10 because they get 100% of what you pay.

The difference is 50/50 vs 90/10 split


Ah right, I get it now, thanks.

The unfairness comes when you spend an abnormal amount of time listening. If you listen less than the average user then the bands you like won't be getting x% of your money that lines up with your listening habits.


Why is that unfair? Do the maths for me please?

I always thought it was a really cool idea to bridge the spotify streaming idea with local style purchasing, so say 10$ a month and the user gets ~3$ per month of that to "buy" media. so it defaults initially to their most played artist unless they indicate they want to buy something in particular instead.

Artists get big cuts when people buy their music, and if people decide to cancel their paid subscription, they still have the bought media available with no predatory gating like spotify uses to try to coerce people to resubscribing.


Listening is no longer profitable. Artists cannot sell listening. What they can sell are live performances.

Digital music just becomes marketing for live performances.


Nobody writes about their work thinking the whole world will read it. They write it for their friends, maybe a small group of regular readers, also for themselves. I for one really like it, even if I get bored after reading 5 similar articles, because maybe someone will only ever read one of them, and it’ll help them improve their own work.


I mean, that argument doesn't hold water when you then post it on HN and Reddit.


Absolutely, the moment I saw „95% of Slack core functionality” I stopped believing the author knows what he’s talking about


I think it means parallel branches. Normally in git you can use one branch at a time. With agentic coding you want agents to build multiple features at the same time, each in a separate branch


Can agents not checkout different branches and then work on them? It's what people also do. I have a hard time to understand what problem is even solved here.


Yes, this is the obvious solution. Multiple agents working on multiple features should use feature branches.

Can’t believe how this whole AI movement seems to want to reinvent software engineering, poorly.


Their goal is not to give us a better tool, it's to get us to think our old tools are rubbish so we give them money instead.


to be entirely fair while git is getting better, the tooling UI/UX is still designed with expectation someone read the git book and understood exactly how it works.

Which should be basic skill on anyone dealing with code, but Git is not just programmer's tool any more for a long time so better UI is welcome


Has that ever been achieved in software/dev industry?


claude can use worktrees.. so if you have a system with say 10 agents, each one can use a worktree per session.. no need to clone the the repo 10 times or work on branches. Worktreeees.


That has been implemented 10 years ago:

  git worktree add -b feature-2 ../feature-2


Even before git has the worktree feature, you could just clone the repo again (shallowly if it’s big).


Sooooo git worktree. It's exactly that. One repository dir checked out in different places with different branches.


Not quite, Gitbutler allows you to apply multiple branches to the code base at once. With codebases you will have multiple code bases not one.

for example: It allows me to test coworkers branches with mine without merging or creating new branch.

It has many features that makes it super easy to add patch to any commit in any branch


Seconding others here, what you're bringing up as distinct features of Gitbutler seems to just be stuff git can do.

- One local copy of a repo with multiple work trees checked out at once, on different branches/commits? Git does that.

- "Add a patch to any commit in any branch" I can't think of a way of interpreting this statement (and I can think of a couple!) that isn't something git can do directly.

Maybe it adds some new UI to these, but those are just git features. Doesn't mean it's a bad product (I have no idea, and "just UI" can be a good product) but these seem to be built-in git features, not Gitbutler features.


Yeah ur right, Gitbutler is just UI that makes it easier to do the mentioned stuff.


> for example: It allows me to test coworkers branches with mine without merging or creating new branch.

How is that not supported by worktrees? You are aware, that you can checkout commits?


...I don't think you actually know how git works if you think that's the thing you can't do with git.


Does it checkout different branches at the same time, provides an in memory representation to be modified by another API, or does it to multitasking checkouts. The first thing is already natively in Git. I guess the others are innovation, although the second sounds unnecessary and the third like comedy.


Heroku runs on AWS though, doesn’t it? They just package it.

I don’t think it’s impossible for them to survive. Salesforce bought them more than 10 years ago and did little to support growth of Heroku. And yet they’re still around and people still ask „is there something new with comparable customer experience?” because they don’t mind paying more


Vercel is the chosen replacement, I believe.


Vercel is basically just an AWS reseller too though


I actually enjoy having mobile apps for lots of use cases – travel, news, entertainment, utility bills, banking. I have probably around 100 apps on my iPhone right now and I'm fine with this number.

There are 2 things though that make me dislike mobile apps.

First, regularly logging me out. It's so frustrating, especially if the app does not support biometric login. I have a password manager, so I can log in rather quickly, but I just want to be logged in for months.

Second, webviews, I just can't understand mobile apps that render part of their content inside webviews. Like, either commit to having a proper native mobile experience or just let me use your website. One of the more annoying cases for me personally is NBA app. I'm searching for some stat, I open their website in a browser, it redirects me to the app, the app opens and then renders the same web page in a web view. What's even the point?!


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