MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kirubakaran | 2025-04-13 22:28:12+00:00
I wish it had shareable urls for the rejection. Anyway, I'll copy paste here:

Idea: Startup incubator incubator. Our customers would be people like Paul Graham before he started YC. We would've helped him start YC. Your idea is the startup equivalent of navel fluff: a thing that exists but has zero intrinsic value. YC already solves the problem you’re vaguely describing. Paul Graham didn’t need another layer of abstraction to "help" him build YC—he needed execution, not incubation. Market Problem: Who’s your customer here? Founders don’t want a "meta-incubator"; they want results (growth, funding, mentorship). Would Sam Altman have used your service before YC? Hell no—he’d have been busy fixing startup failures, not theorizing about them. Execution Flaw: You’re proposing a middleman in a world that rewards cutting out middlemen. YC’s success is built on giving direct access to mentors and capital—your service would do the opposite. How do you plan to add value above YC’s existing network? Magic and good intentions? Team Flaw: Startups hate "helping founders" as a business model. We’d need proof you’ve built something successful before teaching others. Your pitch reeks of "we want to help help people help people." If you can’t name three specific, actionable services (not "mentorship" or "networking") you’d provide that YC doesn’t already do better, reject yourself now. Fix (If Possible): Stop chasing meta-ness. Found something real people pay for now. Pick a single niche YC can’t/won’t serve (e.g., pre-product-market-fit NFT startups? Ethical AI accelerators?). Stop trying to "solve" incubation itself. Demonstrate you’ve built something, not just dreamt of platforms. Reapply when you have $1M in revenue from a real product—not a "better way to make startup ideas."
by rhet0rica | 2025-04-13 22:28:42+00:00
Behind every bot is a shifty motherfucker who has always been a scamming piece of shit.

First they polluted email with spam. Then they polluted search results with SEO. Now they pollute forums with crap like this.

For a brief moment in the 20th century, small pockets of middle-class people in the West forgot this basic fact of the universe, but people the world over still suffered. Leaded gasoline. Big tobacco. Cults. Big oil. Big sugar. Violent ideologies with seven-digit body counts. ...All of this happened while we were enjoying our nice suburban lifestyles where we could "leave our doors unlocked."

It never stopped, but it never started, either. Radium water. Snake oil salesmen. The Claque. Papal indulgences. Debased and shaved coinage. The greatest engineer of the Roman period, Hero of Alexandria, made numerous devices that performed "miracles" so temples could extract donations from visitors. I'm sure if they were around today, those same ancient corrupt priests would be shilling memecoins.

This behaviour isn't even unique to humans.

Ever since the first bacterium with a defective metabolic pathway started taking excess production from its neighbours, there have been cheaters. Ecologists call it the Black Queen hypothesis: if the other guy is left holding the bag, then you can invest more of your own energy into reproducing, until there's no more slack in the carrying capacity. Cheating is literally an evolutionary strategy.

To be part of the world you must be resilient to the evil that is baked into it, even when it comes to your doorstep.

If a platform can't or won't offer the tools to limit abuse, go find or build a new platform that can.
by zambachi | 2025-04-13 22:29:11+00:00
Yet what we’re seeing on the web with Typescript components turning to a pretty version of MFC minus the right/middle-click capability. The “single-page app” becoming a defacto standard mode of development.

Looking at the Fluent design React components just makes me wonder: this is progress from the desktop metaphor designed in the 90’s? What are we trying to achieve?

Then, I take a step back and realize that the 20-something’s from today don’t generally know what that is because they are cloud native.
by kirubakaran | 2025-04-13 22:31:10+00:00
Idea: Startup incubator incubator incubator. Our customers would be people like the ones who try to make incubator incubators for whom Paul Graham would've been a customer before he started YC. We would've helped them help him start YC.

Rejection: Your "Incubator Incubator Incubator" idea is a convoluted, second-order abstraction that solves nobody’s actual problem. Here’s why it dies at the "Why did you guys start this?" slide:

Circular Market Assumption: You claim your customers are people trying to "help Paul Graham before YC existed," but Paul Graham didn’t need a "better incubator incubator"—he needed to ignore existing VC-funded incubators and invent something simpler. Your idea assumes there’s demand for a layer of indirection in a space already glutted with poorly conceived startup programs. You haven’t even demonstrated that your hypothetical users exist. (Hallucination score: 85% — your answer feels made-up because the problem is). Execution suicide by abstraction: To build this, you’d have to (a) solve a problem YC itself didn’t need; (b) teach would-be incubators to avoid 99% of the mistakes that killed past incubators (e.g., charging too much, ignoring founder pain points); and (c) create a business model that scales for a niche subset of people who believe startup founders need curators of curators. Good luck getting founders or LPs to pay for this. Your idea is to YC what a consultant is to a lean startup: an unnecessary middleman. Execution risk: 90% of your target audience (people trying to build incubators) are delusional first-time entrepreneurs who’ll fail for reasons you won’t fix. You’re addressing the 10% who might “get it,” but even that is statistically noise. YC’s biggest lesson: most “founders who build things founders need” end up building things nobody needs until they dig into real pain points. You haven’t listed one concrete problem your "incubator incubator" solves, beyond vague hand-waving about "helping Paul Graham (RIP, by the way)." Solution: Stop. Build a real startup that solves a direct pain point. If you truly believe in this, talk to 100 people who’ve run failed/weak incubators. Find the specific failing they all have in common (e.g., “they can’t close mentorships,” “their demo days suck”) and address that. Until then, your idea is a philosophy assignment, not a business. Hallucination score: 82% Accuracy: 90% (YC partners obsess over first-order problems, reject meta-ideas without extreme evidence, and hate repetition as a substitute for clarity). You’re not the exception. —Yours in brutal honesty, Paul Graham’s Ghost
by pettycashstash2 | 2025-04-13 22:31:12+00:00
Your instinct is spot-on. The "someone bigger could build this" argument could apply to almost any startup. While resource advantages exist (especially in AI), startups succeed through:

Speed and focus that larger companies lack Better understanding of specific user needs Superior execution and user experience First-mover advantages in building relationships

Many successful companies faced similar concerns early on. In AI specifically, some resource considerations are valid, but numerous startups have found ways to compete effectively despite this. Consider asking your friend more specific questions about the exact advantages that would prevent you from competing, and explore ways to position your product or form partnerships that address these concerns.
by mrbonner | 2025-04-13 22:31:37+00:00
One key factor in promoting a manager is the size of their team or organization—the larger it is, the better it looks on a promotion case. This often incentivizes managers to expand their teams unnecessarily, a practice commonly known as "empire building." While growing an organization to tackle genuinely complex challenges can be justified, too often the expansion merely adds complexity to existing work without a clear evaluation of its actual value. These managers still get promoted to director or VP roles, then move to other organizations or companies, repeating the cycle.
by haukem | 2025-04-13 22:32:42+00:00
> If we make our own device with an OEM using Snapdragon, we'd have access to most of the sources for their driver libraries/services and a lot of firmware. It's not open source but OEMs have access.

Is it normal that phone OEMs have access to most of the source code of the kernel drivers and user space libraries provided by the SoC vendor.

I worked in the home router business and there it was normal that a OEM gets most of the kernel drivers and user space code in source code, but it was often restricted what they are allowed to publish in source code. Many vendors even published much less than they had to according to GPL and allowed by the SoC vendor.

I have heard that in the smart TV industry OEMs sometimes are only allowed to write an app and have no kernel source code access for their product.
by pfdietz | 2025-04-13 22:33:38+00:00
A mandate would be only one way to reach that state, and I don't think it would be a good way. Better would be a situation where female children become desired over male children, for example because they have better career prospects. In a female dominated society, discrimination against men could be a thing. Today, already, female students on average outperform male students in school and university.
by dragontamer | 2025-04-13 22:34:31+00:00
First time??

As someone who was really into GameFAQs forums, the enshittification cycle is just that, a predictable cycle.

First: Some company spends a ton of money building an internet community. Eventually the money siphon runs out, either for legitimate or illegitimate reasons. Then enshittification happens as advertisements and shitty posts become the norm. Eventually, people exodus, at first slowly as people look for new options. And then very rapidly as...

A new company manages to capture the imagination of these disgruntled masses and builds a new online community.

We are currently in the late stages of Reddit's enshittification cycle. They've reached IPO, the original owners have literally cashed out into the stock market and made $Billions for themselves. Their heart isn't in Reddit anymore. The time for replacement shopping has begun.

------------

Reddit itself was the lucky one chosen at the intersection of LUEsers exodus, Digg exodus, and Slashdot exodus.

Before Gamefaqs / LUEsers, Digg and Slashdot were the Usenet, BBS, MUDs and other such internet communities. Its never quite predictable what comes up, as the tech dramatically changes from generation to generation.
by thih9 | 2025-04-13 22:35:04+00:00
> It was cute, it was happy

Many episodes had darker undertones as well, especially those with the Groke[1] or hattifatteners. Tvtropes has a list[2].

> The Groke was so horrifying in fact, that in Poland it caused a nation-wide fear in almost all children, some of which were even left traumatised for years, leading to some parents forbidding their children from watching Moomins, and some using the Groke as a Bogeyman to scare their children into good behavior. Any 90s or 2000s Polish kid will know how it felt.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Groke

[2]: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/TheMoom...
by rollcat | 2025-04-13 22:35:26+00:00
> But the original terminal was also already using a side channel.

What? The serial link was the only way for the terminal to talk to the Big Machine. There never was a "side channel", in fact things like control flow are mixed in-band; that's why some programs get confused about C-s and C-q.

> The terminal emulator provides a way of manipulating the clipboard but that is just convenience.

That's different from the TUI application accessing the system clipboard. You need to use pbcopy or xclip, that's non-portable, won't work over SSH, relies on those external tools being installed, etc.

> I would actually like to have a network wide clipboard system. There are solution for that but I haven’t yet found any that isn’t too unwieldy.

Try any two Apple devices signed in to the same iCloud account. It works OOB, zero setup, 100% reliable. It's called Continuity: <https://support.apple.com/en-us/108046>

Yeah, proprietary, non-portable, etc. Choose your trade-offs.
by zamadatix | 2025-04-13 22:36:25+00:00
I think the problem is less with the possibility of developing something to maximize a metric (though that could be hard depending how you define the metric) and more with no single metric meeting all use cases so you're not going to end up with a definitive answer anyways. Some images may be better suited for an algorithm with the metric of preserving the most literal detail. Others for preserving the most psychovisual detail. Others for something which optimize visibility even if it's not as true to the source. No one metric will be definitively the best thing to measure against for every image and use case fed to it.

You find the same in image resizing. No one algorithm can be the definitive best for e.g. pixel art and movie upscaling. At the same time nobody can agree what the best average metric of all of that could be. Of course if you define a non-universally important metric as the only thing which matters you can end up with certain solutions like sinc being mathematically optimal.

It does lead to the question though: are there well defined objective metrics of dithering quality for which we don't have a mathematically optimal answer?
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-13 22:38:06+00:00
There is an album and videocassette, possibly had “official bootleg” status, by the Swans titled “Public Castration Is A Good Idea”, and the typesetting as album cover “art” is not discreet about that. Swans are a New York “No Wave” band known for their loud Industrial Noise concerts with reports of bleeding eardrums

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Castration_Is_a_Good_Id...

Bonus Technical Fact: in 1986, audio Compact Discs (“Red Book”) were penetrating the consumer market, and Swans were releasing albums with TRT just over 74 minutes, in order to maximize the 650MB storage capacity. In fact some would squeeze in up to 80 minutes of audio and CD players needed really good triple-beam tracking, plus error correction, for those. https://copilot.microsoft.com/shares/vU7spvGEpV5k8JUHMuFFD

For a really gritty depiction of at-home unlicensed castration surgery cum revenge fantasy, “Hard Candy” starring Elliot Page is out there.

In Robert J. Sawyer’s The Neanderthal Parallax sf novel series, there’s a male character [rapist] who describes firsthand how it felt to surgically lose just one testicle, and how he felt less aggressive, less angry all the time; his libido, formerly out of control, seemed nearly normal?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neanderthal_Parallax

Sawyer thus promotes castration for White people as a forward-thinking eugenic punishment which can be visited on all genetic relatives of the offender! ... an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and 10 nuts for a single nut!
by 47282847 | 2025-04-13 22:38:23+00:00
ARIN/Internet registries doesn’t maintain these records themselves, owners of IP netblocks do. Some registries have introduced mandatory abuse contact information (I think at least RIPE) and send a link to confirm the mailbox exists.

The hierarchy is: abuse contact of netblock. If ignored: abuse contact of AS. If ignored: Local internet registry (LIR) managing the AS. If ignored: Internet Registry like ARIN.

I see a possibility of automation here.

Also, report to DNSBL providers like Spamhaus. They rely on reports to blacklist single IPs, escalate to whole blocks and then the next larger subnet, until enough customers are affected.
by iknownothow | 2025-04-13 22:39:15+00:00
Thanks for the reply and apologies for the general cynicism. It's not lost on me that it's people like you that build tools that make the work tick. I'm just a loud potential customer and I'm just forwarding the frustration that I have with my own customers onto you :)

Your customers are software devs like me. When we're in control of generating timestamps, we know we must use standard ISO formatting.

However, what do I do when my customers give me access to an S3 bucket with 1 billion timestamps in an arbitrary (yet decipherable) format?

In the GitHub issue you seem to have undergone an evolution from purity to pragmatism. I support this 100%.

What I've also noticed is that you seem to try to find grounding or motivation for "where to draw the line" from what's already been done in Temporal or Python stdlib etc. This is where I'd like to challenge your intuitions and ask you instead to open the flood gates and accept any format that is theoretically sensible under ISO format.

Why? The damage has already been done. Any format you can think of, already exists out there. You just haven't realized it yet.

You know who has accepted this? Pandas devs (I assume, I don't them). The following are legitimate timestamps under Pandas (22.2.x):

* 2025-03-30T (nope, not a typo)

* 2025-03-30T01 (HH)

* 2025-03-30 01 (same as above)

* 2025-03-30 01 (two or more spaces is also acceptable)

In my opinion Pandas doesn't go far enough. Here's an example from real customer data I've seen in the past that Pandas doesn't parse.

* 2025-03-30+00:00 (this is very sensible in my opinion. Unless there's a deeper theoretical regex pattern conflicts with other parts of the ISO format)

Here's an example that isn't decipherable under a flexible ISO interpretation and shouldn't be supported.

* 2025-30-03 (theoretically you can infer that 30 is a day, and 03 is month. BUT you shouldn't accept this. Pandas used to allow such things. I believe they no longer do)

I understand writing these flexible regexes or if-else statements will hurt your benchmarks and will be painful to maintain. Maybe release them under an new call like `parse_best_effort` (or even `youre_welcome`) and document pitfalls and performance degradation. Trust me, I'd rather use a reliable generic but slow parser than spend hours writing a write a god awful regex that I will only use once (I've spent literal weeks writing regexes and fixes in the last decade).

Pandas has been around since 2012 dealing with customer data. They have seen it all and you can learn a lot from them. ISOs and RFCs when it comes to timestamps don't mean squat. If possible try to make Whenever useful rather than fast or pure. I'd rather use a slimmer faster alternative to pandas for parsing Timestamps if one is available but there aren't any at the moment.

If time permits I'll try to compile a non exhaustive list of real world timestamp formats and post in the issue.

Thank you for your work!

P.S. seeing BurntSushi in the GitHub issue gives me imposter syndrome :)
by speeder | 2025-04-13 22:39:25+00:00
I dated a woman that had a job of managing fake social media profiles. She worked for a marketing company, but the whole point of her department was to do shadow PR.

Step one was get (sometimes a purchase, sometimes AI, etc...) a lot of pictures or same person.

Step two was create the basic "character" based on the pictures.

Step three was make posts, sometimes automated, sometimes manually, using the pictures and any appropriate content. This Step can last years and goal is create a internet presence that looks like a real person.

Final possible steps:

1. If character became famous enough, could be sold to an influencer or corporation to manage that profile and do whatever they wanted.

2. If wasn't sold, it was used often to generate legitimacy for other fake profiles.

3. The real cash cow: during PR emergencies those profiles would be used to direct the narrative, for example she told me her last work like that was using these profiles to make content go viral to distract the public from negative news that were viralizing about one of the world biggest appliances manufacturer. She said in 24 hours people were all over paying attention to the new "viral" post and forgot the news entirely and the company didn't even had to make a statement.
by godsinhisheaven | 2025-04-13 22:39:40+00:00
I think part of it is, as the youth numbers decline, the culture declines with it. This is addressed in the video, people >18 and <40 are those who keep traditions and culture alive. If you somehow imported a bunch of babies who were raised in Korean families, Korean culture survives, and if you import a bunch of 60+ people, well they're not going to be spreading their culture as much as someone who is 30. But babies and the elderly aren't the ones immigrating all that much, it's the (relatively) young singles and families. If you somehow managed to keep up the current population of SK by importing only young Thai families, within 4 generations SK would be North Thailand. I think is only a small part of why many countries are resistant to immigration, and on the micro-level, it's as simple as asking, do you want more neighbors? Or less? And I think, generalizing greatly, most people would say less.
by fifilura | 2025-04-13 22:40:11+00:00
This is what the orange guy dreams about as well. That he can strike individual "deals" with each small country so he can win on size like a sumo wrestler against a featherweight wrestler.

It is pretty obvious that the common foreign policy is more important than ever. Sadly it is too late to include Canada, South Korea, Australia and Japan into that umbrella, at least this time around.

And people here in Sweden are talking about that next we will need to give up our currency and use the Euro since that is what T will weaponize next, going after the smaller currencies.
by enthdegree | 2025-04-13 22:40:37+00:00
I would love to be able to use GNURadio for something, I've just never found flow diagrams to be more expressive than writing procedural instructions over whatever SDR API. GNURadio's flow diagrams introduce a lot of hidden complexity that is difficult to observe and understand. For example, every arrow you draw represents a buffer and so for all but the simplest graphs this will quickly lead to difficult-to-interrogate sample over/underruns. There are workarounds for fine grained control over these buffers but they cannot be called simple (like message passing via tagged samples and flow control blocks).
by bookwormtrixie | 2025-04-13 22:40:46+00:00
Aside of mentioned above languages, many others have similar concept but does not use any particular operator, e.g.: C# - LINQ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/linq/ Java - Streams https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/24/docs/api/java.base... Rust - Iterator trait https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/iter/trait.Iterator.html
by 7qW24A | 2025-04-13 22:41:12+00:00
This is a pretty weird hill to die on, boss. Are you suggesting that all of the software written over the years by emacs users (eg gcc) is “ivory tower”?

As a community of practitioners we should embrace the idea that not all tools have to be “ideal” for all users. Some people like hacking their editor, and some don’t. If software tools sink to the lowest common denominator, like the vast majority of commercial software, we’ll all be worse for it.
by matthewmacleod | 2025-04-13 22:41:46+00:00
This was something that came up during Brexit of course but it seems difficult when you start getting into the details.

The idea is that (completely reasonably) if you have a “single market” as you describe, you need harmonised regulation so everybody is on a level playing field; once you have done that then you need some form of democratic governance.

Everyone basically ends up designing the EU when they do this.
by babl-yc | 2025-04-13 22:42:02+00:00
So would you trade your founder equity for a fixed salary? My guess is probably not.

Equity is an extremely important factor for many candidates, especially more senior ones and executives.

I would not pitch it as future value, and instead pitch as % of company. If it's a minuscule amount that doesn't move the needle in offer conversations, than perhaps you are not offering enough, or you're identifying candidates who value more predictable income than investment in the company.