MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dang | 2025-04-24 17:00:33+00:00
It's not intentional - it's YC founders excitedly telling their friends (and especially their YC batchmates) that they launched on HN. They didn't ask anyone to vote or comment, and the responses were not AI-generated. (That last point should be obvious btw; no one needs AI to write "Thank you - we appreciate it", and frabonacci was obviously just being polite.)

Here's what you guys need to understand:

(1) Not everyone spends hours on Hacker News—many casual users have no idea about the culture of this place re voting rings, booster comments, and so on.

(2) Many people enjoy congratulating their friends when they reach a major milestone.

(3) Other sites have a culture where this kind of thing is fine.

HN is different, of course, and we tell founders to stop this from happening. In fact, I basically yell it at them in the Launch HN guide: https://news.ycombinator.com/yli.html#noboost. I also yell it at them in person every chance I get—I do my best to scare them! But if you think that including something in a list of rules plus repeating it over and over in person is sufficient to get a message across, may I introduce you to the Measure Zero Effect: no matter how often you repeat something, the set of users who receive the message has measure zero (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)

As it happens, I saw those comments in the thread (mostly the same ones you listed), marked them offtopic, and emailed the founders as soon as I could:

"Btw, did you send a message to batchmates/friends about this thread? I"m seeing a lot of booster comments in there now. This is not good for you! (See https://news.ycombinator.com/yli.html.)

Fortunately though, there are a lot of organic comments as well so I can just move the booster ones lower down and they shouldn't harm anything. Still, if you have a way to tell your friends not to do that, it would be good. Send them to https://news.ycombinator.com/yli.html as well, if you like :) - the text about that is repeated and in a bold font for a reason!"

They replied that their Discord was probably spreading word of the launch and they'd add a message asking people to stop. After that, it mostly stopped.
by tmtvl | 2025-04-24 17:00:39+00:00
I have a Volla X22 (or whatever) with Ubuntu Touch. I can send SMS messages, I can call people, and I can listen to music. That's about 80% of what I want a smartphone for taken care of (and the music wouldn't be necessary if there were decent MP3/OGG players which support OPUS, but alas, smartphones killed portable music players).

I did jump through some hoops to install Firefox and get it working with the phone's touchscreen keyboard so I can use digital bus tickets rather than physical ones. I also went and installed Waydroid so I can use WhatsApp for my kung fu club when it's needed.

There are a couple of bike rental companies in Belgium which require one to install an Android/iPhone app to use their services, but I have decided not to give them the time of day.
by omegaham | 2025-04-24 17:00:39+00:00
Unopened, a jar of pasta sauce is good basically indefinitely, but as soon as you actually open the jar the clock starts ticking. We don't make enough pasta at a time to use a full jar, (and in fact will usually use a small fraction of the jar) so I write the date that I opened the jar on the lid to plan its use a little better. "Hey, better find a use for this sauce, it's going to go bad eventually."
by 91bananas | 2025-04-24 17:00:41+00:00
For me it's been toy games built on web languages, which happens to be something I toyed with via my actual raw skills for the past 15 years. LLMs have opened many new doors and options for what I can build because I now technically "know everything" in the world via LLMs. Stuff that I would get stuck wasting hours on is now solved in minutes. But then it ALWAYS reaches a point where the complexity the LLM has generated is too much and the model can no longer iterate on what it's built.
by frabonacci | 2025-04-24 17:00:53+00:00
Thank you, really appreciate that! Curious - did you end up using QEMU for your Linux VMs? And are you running your system locally or in the cloud?

We’re currently focused on macOS but planning to support Linux soon, so I’d love to hear more about your use case. Feel free to reach out at founders@trycua.com - always great to learn from others building in this space.
by conductr | 2025-04-24 17:01:18+00:00
This is the same thinking that PHP is unsafe thus can't use PHP. Meanwhile, PHP is running countless billions of commerce just fine every day. Sure, vibe coding has most likely not gone through some common sense checks for security. SQL injection is likely higher risk, XSS risks, etc. But I just don't believe your assertation of risk is realistic either. There's always a risk.
by darkhorse222 | 2025-04-24 17:01:32+00:00
The true issue is that many middle and upper level managers are sycophantic and short term incentivized, while valuing loyalty only really shows its benefit over the long term. If you're leadership is always trying to have a green number for next quarter and your manager is always trying to only please his boss to get promoted, those two will disavow loyalty the moment anything gets in the way of that. I truly think public companies have the worst incentives in this regard.
by diggan | 2025-04-24 17:02:07+00:00
> Are there any, more reasonably open models? Is LLaMa just called open because it’s the most accessible?

Indeed there are! They aren't exactly SOTA, but they're 100% open source and you could build them yourself from scratch, granted you had the compute, knowledge and time for it. OLMo 2 from Ai2 is probably the most notable one.

I think Llama is called "open source" because that's what Meta, Zuckerberg and the Llama website says it is, and people take it at face value. Then people see "Oh but it's free, who cares about the license?" not understand how we got here in the first place...
by ElevenLathe | 2025-04-24 17:02:23+00:00
Unless you own the business, you work for your investors.

If investors only want AI, then you will either be forced to do that (whatever it means), do something else but make it look to them like AI, convince them they're wrong, or quit.

Things are a little more nuanced if your existing investors side with you but all new investors are AI-driven. Then you don't have to quit, but you do have to run the business without new outside capital. This may or may not be possible. If not, you still have to quit.
by notfried | 2025-04-24 17:02:29+00:00
Who will be responsible for figuring out what AI features to build? I think it is reasonable to look into it, seriously, with the point of view of "can we disrupt ourselves before being disrupted." This doesn't mean putting a significant engineering team behind this, but, to put a significant effort in figuring out what is it you could build, and what an ROI on that would be.

You've two outcomes from this, either you do find a disruptive AI angle and move a sufficiently-large part of your team to it, or you don't, but figure out a minimal effort that would satisfy the "investor positioning angle". The third option, to do nothing or aggressively push back against AI and the CEO's desire, would potentially yield to no Series C or a down-round, which is something that you, your CEO, and your customers would not like.
by steveklabnik | 2025-04-24 17:02:33+00:00
You create a record in your PDS. Here's the people I've 'verified' for example: https://pdsls.dev/at://did:plc:3danwc67lo7obz2fmdg6jxcr/app....

There's no UI to do it. It's not currently intended to be a generalized feature, but because the protocol is, it's forwards compatible with eventually doing that if they decide to.
by torginus | 2025-04-24 17:02:49+00:00
At this point he's just saying what he thinks is expedient in order to avoid the government breaking up his companies.

It's why the whole Meta thing exists - they wanted to be seen as a VR company who has a side hustle in social media to avoid being classified as a monopoly. That argument has failed so now he's asserting that social media doesn't matter.
by kingnothing | 2025-04-24 17:02:49+00:00
Most companies don't want what you want. They don't want to sign 50 different contracts with 50 different vendors and have to do due diligence on all of them. They don't want to negotiate rates with all of those companies every time a contract renewal comes up. They don't want the instability of working with startups that may close shop with little notice.

What they want is a couple of big, reliable companies who offer services that just work. They want dev teams to be able to explore a new service by simply spinning up a POC with a new offering from a vendor they already have a relationship with; they don't want to figure out which of the 20 different EU companies who offer LLMs or managed Kafka they need to contact, sit through sales calls, and do security evaluations on before the team can start work.

As an American, I definitely don't like having to drive to a mega store and do all my shopping there. The European city model is far superior -- I love traveling there and walking to the bakery, cheese shop, and butcher to buy a meal. But as a dev and manager of many years, I definitely do not want to see that be the norm in software. I love startups who offer unique services, but from a practical perspective, I also love that it takes a day to spin up something in AWS vs months of contract negotiations, trials, sales calls, etc to get signed up with a vendor who offers something outside of AWS.
by pixl97 | 2025-04-24 17:03:07+00:00
I work with quite a few F100 companies. The actual amount of software most of them create is staggering. Tens of thousands of different applications. Most of it is low throughput and used by a small number of employees for a specific purpose with otherwise low impact to the business. This kind of stuff has been vibe coded long before there was AI around to do it for you.

At the same time human ran 'feature' applications like you're talking about often suffer from "let the programmer figure it out" problems where different teams start doing their own things.
by venk12 | 2025-04-24 17:03:15+00:00
I believe real value lies in solving customer problems - not just investor problems. This technology has significant upside when applied thoughtfully. That said, without proper validation, prematurely sidelining proven solutions to chase AI initiatives—especially without clear problem definitions - can be risky. It sets the stage for a bubble that may not withstand tougher times.

imho, I would like to think tough times are ahead of us - that in my mind, neutralizes my 'tech optimism'.
by simonw | 2025-04-24 17:03:32+00:00
I imagine there are a lot of stories like that from the "everything needs to be a mobile app" era.

So many companies invested vast engineering resources in building out iOS/Android apps only to later find that their users only interact with their tool once every few weeks, which wasn't often enough for them to earn a place in that relatively tiny list of a few dozen apps that any one individual actually uses.

For many users with cheaper phones asking them to install your app is asking them to pick which of their photos they're going to delete to make space for it!
by diggan | 2025-04-24 17:04:30+00:00
> Llama is open source, compared to commercial models with closed weights

Yeah, just like a turd is a piece of gourmet food if there is no other good food around.

Sorry, but that's a really bad argument, "open source" is not a relative metric you use to compare different things, it's a label that is applied to something depend on what license that thing has. No matter what licenses others use, the license you use is still the license use.

Especially when there are actually open source models out there, so it isn't possible. Maybe Meta feels like it's impossible because of X, Y and Z, but that doesn't make it true just because they don't feel like they could earn enough money on it, or whatever their reasoning is.
by hcarvalhoalves | 2025-04-24 17:04:54+00:00
I login to Instagram and I see:

- Ad promoting "investment" platform with deep fakes of personalities

- Ad from radicalized politician promoting hate speech

- Semi-naked girl promoting their "other" social media (OnlyFans)

- Ad disguised as content of some dude promoting a random restaurant

I agree with Zuckerberg, it's not social media anymore. I don't see content from any friend, only scams.
by returningfory2 | 2025-04-24 17:05:01+00:00
I don't understand the satire, can you explain?

We can't see the full set of "lower denomination" stamps on the letter, but I'm not 100% sure it's actually lower denomination. The sender of the stamps seems to be using the "2 domestic forevers + some amount of cents = 1 global forever" formula. I think the UK sender didn't need to include _two_ global forevers.
by ultrarunner | 2025-04-24 17:05:13+00:00
They could be huge in this, but sadly they'll continue to ruin it because (IMHO) they are rotten at the core. I can't tell you how many times I've seen a question posted on a relevant topic, switched tabs to consult the manual to verify my memory, and then gone back only to see Facebook do its ADHD reload and bury the question.

Once people get sufficiently frustrated and the ad revenue declines below the cost of running the servers, we will immediately lose all of the information shared there. None of it will be archived like the old forums. It's a genuinely sad situation.
by caseyy | 2025-04-24 17:05:14+00:00
What users want, and what they collectively consume, are two different things. This is very evident in the AAA games industry, which is facing a 10x downturn in funding, abysmally bad (negative) ROI, and exhausted growth engines because it shaped itself around what players would consume for years, ignoring what they actually wanted. And the players got tired[0].

It turns out that demand matters when you sell a product or a service. And it is elastic in ways other than price (such as convenience, value, appeal), but not infinitely so. In plain English, you can force anti-social media onto the market by making it appealing/hooking/addictive/convenient/supposedly valuable for a while, but not indefinitely. People do demand proper socializing, especially recently. Many are realizing they've been sold a total bag of goods just because they consumed it, and it's not good enough to displace real human connection.

[0] https://www.matthewball.co/all/stateofvideogaming2025
by guenthert | 2025-04-24 17:05:31+00:00
That was such an unexpected claim, I had to look up on which platforms CMUCL currently runs. Seems it has been ported to MacOS (which I take you are referring to as there are perfectly fine working X11 servers available for M$ Windows). Kudos. If I'd be using MacOS, I'd have also a look at Clozure CL (CCL).
by mythrwy | 2025-04-24 17:06:50+00:00
I love coding and don't love questioning AI and checking responses.

But the simple fact is I'm much more productive with AI and I believe this is likely true for most programmers once they get adjusted.

So for production, what I love the most doesn't really matter, otherwise I'd be growing tomatoes and guiding river rafting expeditions. I'm resigned to the fact the age of manually writing "for loops" is largely over, at least in my case.
by jeffrallen | 2025-04-24 17:07:08+00:00
Right, but it might have been possible to deliver these features without someone having to write a dynamic loader for kernel space bytecode. And yet here we are, talking about it.

This is essential complexity following the accidental complexity of allowing user space to depend on the unstable kernel internals. Which was probably unavoidable, but also a decision that leads to continuing complexity (and probably bugs from it later).
by gxonatano | 2025-04-24 17:07:22+00:00
There are hundreds of these note taking programs now, and they all suck. Maybe they're fine if you don't really know how to use a computer, but if you're a developer or some other kind of hacker, and you use a text editor, like Vim/Neovim, Emacs, VS Code, or something else, your notetaking system should be in your text editor. These flashy new note taking programs basically just stick a crappy WYSIWYG text editor inside a web browser (Electron, yuck) and add a few opinionated components like tags or encryption, then try to charge you $9/mo for that, in perpetuity. But you've had the power within you this whole time: encryption with gpg, sync with git, search with grep, editing with your $EDITOR. If you need more, there are some editor plugins that supercharge note taking: vimwiki and vim-notes for vim; org-mode and org-roam for Emacs; Foam for VS Code, and so on. No need to reinvent the wheel.
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-04-24 17:07:49+00:00
If you want a taste of this nostalgia in the modern age, check out the 10LINEBASIC coding competition, which recently concluded with this years entries featuring some truly astonishing games in just 10 lines of BASIC:

https://homeputerium.de/

One of my favorite machines of the BASIC era - the Oric-1/Atmos - won the competition multiple times in the last few years (though didn’t this year), and I really enjoy going through these games and observing just how rich a few lines of BASIC code could truly be.

In this years list of entries, there’s a Pac-Man clone consisting of a single corridor, which is surprisingly fun, a re-interpretation of the Space Invaders gameplay mechanics which, in hindsight just seems so obvious yet so delightfully simple, a full-blown real-time strategy game, and countless arcade-style minigames .. all implemented in just 10 lines of BASIC!

As a longtime follower of this competition, I really enjoy the nostalgia factor, and as its a multi-platform activity, its also really fun to learn the quirks and features of different systems BASIC implementations, as well. (Of course, I have a lot of these machines in my retro collection too, so this gives me a yearly scheduled reason to dust some of them off and give them a try)

If you haven’t heard of this, yet yearn to know more about BASIC, definitely check it out! The scene has been getting cooler and more diverse as the years go by, and it has to be said that the competition gets more and more effective as the years go by. The beauty and aesthetics of the 10 lines of code that give us a Pac-Man clone really imbues a sense of zen mastery .. and then there is the realization that, if this is what can be done in 10 lines only, imagine if the rest of the computers memory was then used as effectively.

Plus, there is just no way modern platforms can attain this level of programming efficiency and style. It’s really telling that BASIC, a much overlooked language, still contains so much fundamental power, unmatched in the modern era.

Here’s the link, one more time - BASIC fans, get yourselves ready for a real treat:

https://homeputerium.de/

(Disclaimer: I was invited to judge this years entries, so yeah .. I’m a bit of a BASIC10LINER pimp. I had so much fun with this in the last few weeks!)
by fidotron | 2025-04-24 17:08:09+00:00
And with that miss Ivan has forgotten that it was he himself that brought up his own disastrous Coca Cola metaphor, cause of so much angst and frustration.

In a confused daze he goes to a store, buys a bottle of Coca Cola, and heads to a nearby McDonalds where he opens it and drinks it, wondering why all these suckers in McDonalds do not think to buy their soda elsewhere. If only Coca Cola could label the soda in McDonalds to let people know of their options! As the staff approach him to ask him to leave he wonders why the world does so consistently fail to match his preconceptions, and if only that evil Apple had not insisted on using their payments system then he would have been able to scam thousands of those foolish American idiots and go to live on Cyprus far away from such concerns as a metaphorical demon in the form of "Costco".

Thrown out on to the street he resorts to the tried and tested European strategy of claiming victimhood "Why are you persecuting me? It is the same soda! Why can I not drink it here?" but it is to no avail. Clearly the world, immune to reason, has not finished with his punishment, but OP has; he's done.
by codingdave | 2025-04-24 17:08:20+00:00
From what I've seen, anyone giving you definitive answers is blowing smoke. I've seen teams go for AI, do it well, and succeed. I've also seen teams go for AI, f it up, and all get fired as the company shuts down.

The question is whether the key value of your product can benefit from the strengths of AI? If not, don't go there. If so, you then need to determine if your team can actually deliver an AI-driven vision that enhances the existing value prop. Again, if not, don't go there. If so, do it.

But from your description, your CEO is not asking those questions - they are asking, "How do we get more funding?" Which tells me that your CEO doesn't give a crap about building a product, they are just trying to make money and get some nice bullet points on their resume about the size of a company they led.

That puts you in the position of choosing whether you want to go on a VC-driven startup ride just to have the experience, or whether you want a product-driven role. People have their reasons for both directions, but if you want a product-driven role, you are out of alignment with your CEO and probably shouldn't work for them.
by Analemma_ | 2025-04-24 17:08:29+00:00
This article makes some good points but it is really fudging some facts about the American economy:

> Small businesses don’t get the spotlight, but they are the engine of the economy. To wit, in the United States: 99.9% of businesses are small, nearly half the private workforce is employed by small businesses, they generate over 43% of the country’s GDP

This is lying with statistics.

- "Number of businesses" and "percentage of all businesses" is a silly metric, because there are zillions of one-person LLCs for everything from hosting a blog to renting out a spare room in your house, which are not "businesses" in any real sense.

- Every franchise location (i.e. every fast food restaurant, gas station, etc.) in America counts as a separate "small business" and its employees are "employed by small business", even though franchisees have little independence or control, and for all practical purposes are just extensions of the megacorp they are franchising from. Franchising is mostly a way for megacorps to offload the risk of setting up new locations onto the taxpayer, via letting franchisees qualify for government-subsidized "small business" loans.

Do not uncritically repeat facts from sources like the "U.S. Small Business Administration", which for all intents and purposes is a lobbying group for U.S. Large Businesses.
by submeta | 2025-04-24 17:10:04+00:00
Nice! I use a combination of an endless bash (zsh) history with timestamps that I navigate via fzf and ctr+r and comments I occasionally add to commands via # at the end followed by my annotation so that I can rediscover the command.

I do this ever since I switched to a Mac in 2015 and my history has over 60,000 lines. So that’s basically my knowledge base :)

But your project looks nice. Will check out.
by rzzzt | 2025-04-24 17:10:26+00:00
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Burritos, is in fact, GNU/Burritos, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Burritos. Burritos is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.