MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Founders: Don't Give Up
by gametorch | 2025-06-09 14:14:11+00:00
When I initially launched my startup on HN, one of my posts made it to the front page at around 1am Mountain Time and stayed there for 1-2 hours before it got flagged because the comment section was a flame war.

The comment section was extremely discouraging to me. My signup conversion rate was abysmal, too --- more than 15,000 views for "free" and only 8 sign ups. My conversion rate from HN today is still 0.2%. Terrible. I almost gave up at this point.

This morning, I ran my simple analytics script against my nginx logs. It shows signup conversions from four sources: 1) HN 2) Reddit 3) Google 4) itch.io.

Reddit is garbage at 2% on a good day. Google is meh, at ~4.5%. These are traditional ad campaigns with hyperspecific subreddit and keyword targeting (I'm trying to avoid drawing users for related topics who won't actually want to pay).

Itch.io, however, is what convinces me I'm on to something. Conversion rate close to 20% with so much positive feedback.

TL;DR: Don't let HN's or Reddit's negativity about everything dissuade you from building something you love. Other people might love it too.
by jeffbee | 2025-06-09 14:14:33+00:00
I think you're misrepresenting the situation and the relationship between the federal and state and local governments. There certainly is not anything in the Constitution that compels a local government to allow a federal agency to house their prisoners in the local jail, or to have offices in the local police station, or to have keys to the coffee room in the local courthouse. For that matter, if the feds happen to have their own offices there's absolutely nothing that dictates that there has to be a local road to that place, that anyone is allowed to drive on.

If a state or local government reckons that their material support for federal activities is limited to a certain extent, that is well within that state's purview.
by sgarland | 2025-06-09 14:14:46+00:00
I get what you’re saying, but I also think the two are strongly correlated.

If you have a website with excellent UX, but it’s massively bloated and has noticeably slow load times on anything less than a 1 Gbps connection, that’s making for a frustrating experience for a large swath of your users (though maybe you also are targeting a niche crowd and know that they all have adequate internet speed).

It’s also possible to have both. McMaster-Carr [0] had its web dev moment last year when tech influencers rediscovered what basic performance optimizations can do, but hype aside, it’s legitimately good design (to me). It’s simple, intuitive, and fast. It’s nothing it doesn’t need to be.

[0]: https://www.mcmaster.com/
by alexpadula | 2025-06-09 14:14:50+00:00
You state open-source, building in the open, then charge 15 dollars for a lot of confusion and sus currently.

On the homepage I see for 15 dollars one time fee.

"Full access to source code"

is it not open source?

"Receive free lifetime updates"

again is it not open source?

"Deploy unlimited projects anywhere"

it cost money to run a database? how does 15 dollars one time payment cover that?

Really confusing.
by incomingpain | 2025-06-09 14:15:01+00:00
>could LLMs actually be a net positive for the environment?

They produce a tremendous amount of heat in usage and at power generation. In most circumstances are powered by fossil fuels. I cant see how this would ever be justified.

>Should it earn all the benefits that come with ESG status?

Not a chance. AI is literally an antithesis to climate folks and ESG.

The ESG/climate folks should be opposing AI as much as possible.
by enaaem | 2025-06-09 14:15:05+00:00
Imo too much of environmental discussions are focused around climate change, which causes an automatic allergic reaction in roughly half the population. Much better is to focus on things everyone already agrees on. More plants is better, cleaner water is better and cleaner air is better. Improving these things automatically helps against climate change. It works well politically because you have immediate tangible results. Who isn’t happier when they see more trees?
by throw0101d | 2025-06-09 14:15:17+00:00
> Military jammers can be much, much bigger. As big as a 5,000,000x Loran transmitter even!

Which can become a target themselves.

> I think in reality, it’s easier to put little star trackers on your boats and planes.

The star tracker in this article is €250K: that may be 'affordable' for a plane manufacturer or a >5000 TEU cargo ship, but perhaps less so for smaller commercial and recreational boats. Meanwhile a survey of Loran-C receivers published in 1984 had some units available down to the USD 2000 range:

* https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/11795/dot_11795_DS1.pdf

I would think that the development of electronics over the intervening decades would allow for units to be much cheaper now. A (touch-screen) chart plotter with built-in GPS is available for as little as USD 800:

* https://www.westmarine.com/multifunction-displays-combos/?sr...

Compare its capabilities to a (LCD screen) Loran-C receiver from 1990:

* https://sarmarine.com/product/raymarine-raynav-780-loran-c-r...

* https://www.manualslib.com/manual/313978/Raymarine-Raynav-78...

At the end of the day, it's probably more about both-and and not either-or. The more you want to reduce risk, the more independent systems you want to use to tie together to create a better model of reality with regards to where your location "is".

And if you don't want to rely on electronics at all, then you can also get a mechanical watch and a sextant, which was done even on aircraft:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xc3rAlCDf54

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7gAiI79nOY
by JimDabell | 2025-06-09 14:15:28+00:00
I just tried that search on Google.

The first thing I saw was the AI summary. Underneath that was a third-party site. Underneath that was “People also ask” with five different questions. And then underneath that was the link to the American Airlines site.

I followed the line to the official site. I was presented with a “We care about your privacy” consent screen, with four categories.

The first category, “Strictly necessary”, told me it was necessary for them to share info with eleven entities, such as Vimeo and LinkedIn, because it was “essential to our site operation”.

The remaining categories added up to 59 different entities that American Airlines would like to share my browsing data with while respecting my privacy.

Once I dismissed the consent screen, I was then able to get the information.

Then I tried the question on ChatGPT. It said “Searching the web”, paused for a second, and then it told me.

Then I tried it on Claude. It paused for a second, said “Searching the web”, and then it told me.

Then I tried it on Qwen. It paused for a second, then told me.

Then I tried it on DeepSeek. It paused for a second, said “Searching the web”, and then it told me.

All of the LLMs gave me the information more quickly, got the answer right, and linked to the official source.

Yes, Google’s AI answer did too… but that’s just Google’s LLM.

Websites have been choosing shitty UX for decades at this point. The web is so polluted with crap and obstacles it’s ridiculous. Nobody seems to care any more. Now LLMs have come along that will just give you the info straight away without any fuss, so of course people are going to prefer them.
by bradlys | 2025-06-09 14:15:54+00:00
If you’re joining after there’s been any money raised, you’re likely triggering some taxes.

How many people are joining startups that haven’t had a 409A yet? I’ve joined seed stage companies and even then - there’s a FMV that would trigger taxes.

My more general point is that you should be a founder (cause it’s what you want to do) or join a pre-ipo (cause you need employment/money).
by kstrauser | 2025-06-09 14:15:58+00:00
The non sequitur was implying that the list was related to why those instances blocked this one, as though everyone blindly followed the fediblock recommendation. I didn’t. I’ve never, not once, taken fediblock’s advice without following up personally to verify their claims.

I blocked this instance when their user called me the n-word and the instance moderators didn’t act on my report. I didn’t block them due to fediblock, but because of negative interactions that I was personally involved with. And yet my server shows up on that list, as though it were related to fediblock.
by isr | 2025-06-09 14:16:57+00:00
I agree with what you're saying, but it strikes me (& this is particularly poignant on THIS site), that this discussion is somewhat equivalent to the "blub" paradox (aka, how do you explain the power of lisp macro's to someone who grew up only with c & Java).

Americans are THAT brainwashed into thinking they really have a real choice at the ballot box, when in reality all choices that matter were weeded out long long before in the backroom selection process...
by xpe | 2025-06-09 14:16:58+00:00
> Data from paid API queries will also typically not be used for training or tuning the models...

Extremely unlikely in my opinion. I would expect some forms of customer data are used for some kind of value or competitive advantage. If not used outright, this might still include transformed, summarized, aggregated, or anonymized data. In my view, various mappings from legal terms of service to the myriad ways data can be massaged leads to massive gray areas. Expecting this to tilt in favor of customer privacy does not match historical practice nor incentives.
by Estuary | 2025-06-09 14:17:38+00:00
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by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-06-09 14:17:39+00:00
Democratic voters want those things. It's not at all obvious the party establishment does.

The tell is that when Republicans push through their policies, Democratic opposition is weak and ineffectual. Instead of ferocious opposition the Dems send one of their famous sternly worded letters.

Since at least 2000 the party establishment has absolutely refused to do any of the things it could do to change this - including packing the Supreme Court, supporting and promoting grass roots activism between elections, using the filibuster, and so on.

Biden couldn't even get any of Trump's prosecutions over the line - including televised evidence of insurrection, and treasonous mishandling of official state secrets (!)

However it's spun, there is a very obvious reluctance to challenge the extremes of Republicanism.

The party is far more likely to censure one of its non-centrists than its centrists, while the opposite is true of the Republicans.
by krisoft | 2025-06-09 14:17:57+00:00
If I were in a situation like that I would reach out for advice to some religious authority the person in question trusts.

There are widely accepted fairly common sense exceptions for saving lives. [1] That could maybe apply to an automatically activating fire sprinkler. Only someone well versed in the scriptures could say for certain. (And only they would be believed anyway.)

Even about the emergency lighting one can probably find a workaround. For example could it be wired so it is always on via a timer during shabbat?

The point with discussing these with a religious authority is manifold. They might better know how to mediate. In both directions! They might explain to the engineers what is and isn't a sticking point. Similarly they could explain if a given technique is permissible to the person who worries about them. Or alternatively they might have heard solutions others have employed in the past previously.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pikuach_nefesh
by hackinthebochs | 2025-06-09 14:19:05+00:00
>But LLMs are fundamentally, completely, incapable of X. It is not something that can be a result of their processes.

This is the very point of contention. You don't get to just assume it.

> it is because it is, at its root, a statistical engine generating plausible next tokens, with no semantic understanding of the underlying data.

Another highly contentious point you are just outright assuming. LLMs are modelling the world, not just "predicting the next token". Some examples here[1][2][3]. Anyone claiming otherwise at this point is not arguing in good faith. It's interesting how the people with the strongest opinions about LLMs don't seem to understand them.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.15943

[2] https://x.com/OwainEvans_UK/status/1894436637054214509

[3] https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language...
by mock-possum | 2025-06-09 14:19:27+00:00
Agreed, chess is for all intents and purposes a ‘solved’ game, it’s merely a matter of processing power, and even then we have shortcuts that are easily ‘good enough’ to play perfectly against human opponents.

But how do you reduce the requirements for software to something so simple and elegant as chess rules? Is it foolish to assume that if we could have, we already would have? Even for humans, the process of writing software includes a lot of guess-and-check most of the time - the idea that you could sit down and think through every aspect of software, then describe it immaculately, then translate that description to a working solution with no bugs or review or need for course correction is just… it’s a pipe dream.
by vlovich123 | 2025-06-09 14:19:38+00:00
I didn’t say everyone. I said do it as a pilot for 2-5 more patients so that you don’t write it off as a fluke, then give a talk at a conference. If you’re having good results then you can talk with the administrators how to make this a more serious program if there’s actually good results and desire to scale this up.

Nowhere do you start from 0 and go to 100. You take baby steps scaling up to see if the results hold.
by audunw | 2025-06-09 14:20:41+00:00
Its the feature I’m waiting for before I start a project I’ve wanted to do for a while in Zig.

I’d say it’s really important to get async nailed before 1.0, because it’s potentially one of the biggest killer features for many projects.

Zigs async isn’t just about I/O, I’ve found the feature useful in hardware simulation code as well.
by Y_Y | 2025-06-09 14:21:47+00:00
> guidelines with respect to preparing and eating food in an unelectrified fridgeless warm to hot climate are emergent from the nature of the physical universe.

That sounds reasonable, but consider that the original texts give instructions that are quite specific, and leave the door open to all sorts of poor food habits.

Exodus 23:19 (and 34:26) -

"Bring the best of the firstfruits of your soil to the house of the Lord your God.

Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk."

---

Deuteronomy 14:21 -

"Do not eat anything you find already dead. You may give it to the foreigner residing in any of your towns, and they may eat it, or you may sell it to any other foreigner. But you are a people holy to the Lord your God.

Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk."
by qualeed | 2025-06-09 14:22:00+00:00
>The notion of FSE whining about being blocked by some cabal is hilarious to me.

Are they whining about being blocked? I didn't catch it in the article, but maybe I missed it?

The only thing I saw was kind of the opposite of whining: "FSE being fedi's equivalent of a dive bar, I understand people on "gated community" instances not wanting to deal with it"

They seem totally fine & understanding if people want to block them. They just don't want the block reason to be a lie (e.g. saying they allow loli stuff when they don't). Presumably, you saying they are a bunch of assholes as your reason for blocking them would be completely accepted by them.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-06-09 14:22:24+00:00
> > With LLMs, suddenly we have a tool that can generate misinformation on a scale like never before.

> And code, personalised lessons, essays, gardening advice, recipes, meme pictures, clip art, degree-level STEM, …

> Even legal advice...

You don't think that lessons can be misinformation? Legal advice? Meme pictures?

Even degree-level STEM, code, and gardening advice can be "misinformation" within their own fields.
by smartaz42 | 2025-06-09 14:22:36+00:00
I've found Jason Ricci to be a most useful source as well. Adam Gussow, Tom Leckie, Will Wilde, and Howard Levy all have recommended YouTube content.

I haven't checked out the app, but certainly plan to in order to fine tune my scales (major/minor penatonic, blues, and a few more).

By the way, once you get 2nd position major pentatonic those same notes are 5th position minor penatonic (albeit with a different starting notes). Same for 1st major and 4th minor, and 12 major and 3rd minor.
by jsnell | 2025-06-09 14:23:03+00:00
OpenAI: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/your-data

> As of March 1, 2023, data sent to the OpenAI API is not used to train or improve OpenAI models (unless you explicitly opt in to share data with us).

Anthropic: https://privacy.anthropic.com/en/articles/7996868-is-my-data...

> By default, we will not use your inputs or outputs from our commercial products to train our models.

> If you explicitly report feedback or bugs to us (for example via our feedback mechanisms as noted below), or otherwise explicitly opt in to our model training, then we may use the materials provided to train our models.

Google: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/terms#paid-services

> When you use Paid Services, including, for example, the paid quota of the Gemini API, Google doesn't use your prompts (including associated system instructions, cached content, and files such as images, videos, or documents) or responses to improve our products
by xpe | 2025-06-09 14:23:30+00:00
> The entire comparison hinges on people only making simple factual searches ... on both search engines and LLMs.

I disagree, but I can see why someone might say this, because the article's author writes:

> So let's compare LLMs to web search. I'm choosing search as the comparison since it's in the same vicinity and since it's something everyone uses and nobody pays for, not because I'm suggesting that ungrounded generative AI is a good substitute for search.

Still, the article's analysis of "is an LLM API subsidized or not?" does not _rely_ on a comparison with search engines. The fundamental analysis is straightforward: comparing {price versus cost} per unit (of something). The goal is figure out the marginal gain/loss per unit. For an LLM, the unit is often a token or an API call.

Summary: the comparison against search engine costs is not required to assess if an LLM APIs is subsidized or not.
by bee_rider | 2025-06-09 14:24:13+00:00
> Yes, capex not opex. The cost of running inference is opex.

This seems sort of interesting, maybe (I don’t know business, though). I agree that the cost of running inference is part of the opex, but saying that doesn’t rule out putting other stuff in the opex bucket.

Currently these LLM companies train and models on rented Azure nodes in an attempt to stay at the head of the pack, to be well positioned for when LLMs become really useful in a “take many white collar jobs” sense, right?

So, is it really obvious what’s capex and what’s opex? In particular:

* The nodes used for training are rented, so that’s opex, right?

* The models are in some sense consumable? Or at least temporary. I mean, they aren’t cutting edge anymore after a year or so, and the open weights models are always sneaking up on them, so at least they aren’t a durable investment.
by cwillu | 2025-06-09 14:24:23+00:00
I'm sympathetic to this line of reasoning, but “LLM can play chess” is overstating things, and “despite not being trained for it” is understating how many chess games and books would be in the training set of any LLM.

While it's been a few months since I've tested, the last time I tested the reasoning on a game for which very little data is available in book or online text, I was rather underwhelmed with openai's performance.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-06-09 14:24:30+00:00
> It’s not really questionable that science and math are the only things to come out of philosophy or any other academic pursuit that have actually shown us how to objectively understand reality.

Excuse me? According to whom? This is preposterously false. The claim you are making is a philosophical one, and an extremely naive one, and I invite you to study the philosophical analysis of that claim. A good, lucid, and synthetic introduction to the philosophy of science might be this book [0], but there are many others, and many less modest in scope. Thomas Nagel, for example, is known for his criticisms of physicalism. Bertrand Russell also had some things to say about the nature of physics that you might find interesting.

> It is generally true however that physics = math + reality

What does that mean? And how can math be so useful in physics if it has nothing to do with reality? [1]

[0] https://a.co/d/3WlTqfZ

[1] https://firstthings.com/keep-it-simple/
by Jackpillar | 2025-06-09 14:24:48+00:00
What? AI is horrific for the environment from the embedded energy from the production necessary for the hardware and the energy required to train & run the LLMs. They use an insane amount of water and the resulting emissions are that of small countries.

Not only that, your argument depends on the saved emissions/energy consumption from laying off someone. Which is first and foremost just dark - but also how do you know that the laid off SWE isn't 10x more energy intensive when they're at home? Driving a lot, flying a lot, has a Ford F350, 5 kids and now runs AC all day while they're home?
by Palmik | 2025-06-09 14:24:52+00:00
> API that is likely a loss-leader to grab market share (hosted LLM cloud models).

I don't think so, not anymore.

If you look at API providers that host open-source models, you will see that they have very healthy margin between their API cost and inference hardware cost (this is, of course, not the only cost) [1]. And that does not take into account any proprietary inference optimizations they have.

As for closed-model API providers like OpenAI and Anthropic, you can make an educated guess based on the not-so-secret information about their model sizes. As far as I know, Anthropic has extremely good margins between API cost and inference hardware cost.

[1]: This is something you can verify yourself if you know what it costs to run those models in production at scale, hardware wise. Even assuming use of off-the-shelf software, they are doing well.