Hacker News

Show HN: Maps Can Lie. Earth Doesn't – See How Flights Travel

Hacker News - Wed, 04/16/2025 - 6:52am

I built a tool showing the dramatic difference between flight paths on traditional flat maps versus their true trajectories on a 3D globe. Maps Can Lie. Earth Doesn't. This visualization reveals how our mental model of air travel routes is often distorted by map projections, and helps users understand the actual paths planes take around our planet.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43703762

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Categories: Hacker News

Ask HN: Should every country have their own national CA certs?

Hacker News - Wed, 04/16/2025 - 6:51am

We have so many regulations that force companies to store their customers’ data within the country, which makes sense from a perspective of privacy and security.

How do you feel about having a national CA certificate in every country?

How would someone feel living in authoritarian governments, knowing that the government can easily intercept and read many things?

How would a country feel that all the data of its people can be decrypted by another company? (most of the CAs are in the USA)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43703758

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Categories: Hacker News

A Postmortem of a Startup

Hacker News - Wed, 04/16/2025 - 6:39am

Article URL: https://buildwithtract.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43703682

Points: 10

# Comments: 0

Categories: Hacker News

Ask HN: How does Cursor make money? Please ELI5

Hacker News - Wed, 04/16/2025 - 6:38am

Cursor's Pro plan offers 500 "fast" GPT-4 level requests + unlimited "slow" requests for $20/month. I'm struggling to see how this is sustainable given LLM API costs.

A rough estimate for just the 500 fast requests:

Assume ~1,200 tokens/request (modest input/output). Total: 500 * 1,200 = 600,000 tokens/month.

Using even cheaper modern models like GPT-4o (~5/15 per M tokens), this is ~5/month. Using older GPT-4 models (30/60 per M) would push costs well over 20.

This basic calculation doesn't include: The cost of unlimited slow requests, Infrastructure, overhead, R&D, Longer context usage typical in coding.

How can Cursor offer this at $20/month? What's the likely strategy here? Seems like the raw API costs alone could easily approach or exceed the subscription fee for many users. What am I missing?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43703681

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

Categories: Hacker News

The Poser Manifesto

Hacker News - Wed, 04/16/2025 - 6:35am
Categories: Hacker News

Show HN: A free tool for generating sprint name ideas

Hacker News - Wed, 04/16/2025 - 6:29am

I just wanted to share this free tool that I've made that will generate you sprint name ideas based off of an input. It's been a fun little ceremony our team enjoys. Generating a name at the start. Worth a couple of laughs

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43703637

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

Categories: Hacker News

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