MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mapt | 2025-09-25 13:05:37+00:00
Just a reminder to everybody that we are competitively sprinting towards the brick wall of Kessler Syndrome by building out mega-constellations between about 600km and 1600km, sacrificing humanity's future in order to save a small amount of money right now using lower altitude orbits.

Even Starlink is arguably flying too high, but the attempt to compete with them at 1000km where satellites will be causing secondary and tertiary debris events for literally millennia, makes that look sensible.
Do Discounts Help Your Startup Grow?
by evermike | 2025-09-25 13:05:44+00:00
I’ve always believed discounts should help you earn more, not less. So giving them out “just because someone asked” never felt right.

Volume discounts for big clients worked fine and helped us close deals.

Annual discounts are also a good win-win, but to convert well the difference has to be significant. At 30% off signups spiked. At 15% the effect was much smaller.

Urgency campaigns surprised us. For a few months, every last week we ran “Sign up in the next 5 days and get 25% off.” Conversions went up on those days, but the real win was retention. These customers stayed longer because they didn’t want to lose their deal.

Still, we never made it a regular thing. It feels unfair to existing customers who paid full price. And if you repeat it too often, people just wait for discounts. That only cuts your revenue.

We never tried lifetime deals. For B2B, in my opinion, it doesn’t really fit. Small clients don’t want to pay a big sum upfront and large ones make it unprofitable. Honestly, it can even cheapen your product in their eyes. Maybe you have a different opinion.

We also tested “cancel discounts,” showing an offer when someone clicked “cancel subscription.” Some stayed, but fewer than we expected. Plenty of people already know the trick, so they unsubscribe on purpose to see if a deal pops up.

Curious to hear your take. What discount strategies have you tried in your product? What worked, what didn’t and what have you decided to avoid completely?
by benterix | 2025-09-25 13:06:30+00:00
As a person working with Americans, if I may express my honest opinion, this is BS. Your advantage is the fact that you are professional, hard-working, are able to question the demands in a positive way, can communicate with American management more easily, live in the same time zone and in general you can get on with the rest of American team more easily. I would never say physical location is an asset (although I might be biased as I work for corporations that have multiple offices in various continents, for small startups it might be different).
Looking for a new job, but want to be picky
by truetaurus | 2025-09-25 13:07:51+00:00
I am in the process of looking for a new job (I am a senior software engineer - web related mostly).

Now there are websites like linkedin but i find all the jobs there not really interesting. What other job search sites are there? I would love to be able to enter my interests and skills and get a list of companies that could be a match. Or enter a list of companies i like and find similar.

For example I would like to work in the space industry but i find it hard to find all companies, big or small.
by andyasprou | 2025-09-25 13:08:24+00:00
I built AI Primer: a builder-first daily brief for AI engineers, PMs, and leaders

Most AI news chases headlines. Builders need real signal: niche model drops, eval results, concrete workflows, and price/perf/sentiment shifts

It ingests niche technical AI sources and surfaces high-signal updates you can act on immediately (real workflows, evals, niche releases, etc)

I’ve personally used it for months to stay on the bleeding edge shipping vertical AI SaaS
by skeeter2020 | 2025-09-25 13:08:31+00:00
I don't think this is a valuations vs. stagnant offer scenario. I think it has more to do with YC scaling up from dozens to hundreds and thousands of investments in a very competitive landscape. From a few early successes when no one was doing what they did, to having way more money to invest than there are good ideas and now it's spray & pray; trade on the YC name and with some luck hope there's a pay-off. If we start with the apocryphal "VCs look for 1 in 10 home runs", well the earliest YC classes only had like ten in a batch, so they had the time, energy and NEED to have a success. YC added a lot of partners who had a successful exit - or didn't - and surprise, they look like every other VC partner in the industry, at least minus the identical headshots in navy blue suits.
by DecoPerson | 2025-09-25 13:08:44+00:00
The syntax highlighter not understanding GStrings (heh) doesn't help here.

It's obvious once you release that whatever is inside a GString is simply an expression.

def expr = foo."${baz}" println("Bar value: ${expr}")

This makes sense.

But this, or any of the other variations...

def expr = foo." + baz + " println("Bar value: ${expr}")

...does not make sense.

If the syntax highlighter understood GStrings, then this would be obvious.

Let S be string colour and _ be non-string colour:

println("Bar value: ${foo."${baz}"}") ________SSSSSSSSSSSSSS____SSS___SSSS_
by 2d8a875f-39a2-4 | 2025-09-25 13:08:54+00:00
TFA doesn't make it clear to me how the line is drawn from "bunch of mates playing a pro-sports seasonal drafting game and spice it up with a buy-in pot" to "you sit alone in front of an online skinner box and lose money on opaque spot wagers on ongoing pro sports events".

One thing is very different from the other.
by frbr | 2025-09-25 13:09:19+00:00
The ad slot is purely a revenue tool, not a discovery aid. It forces developers to pay just to defend their own branded search terms. App Store Search ads are a hidden increase in commissions that you either accept to pay by bidding on your own app's name, or omit at the expense of having competitors show on top of you all the time, stealing your revenue. It creates a significant drain on resources for indies, to the point that it's often no longer worth it to bother creating apps.

That's why Apple is now doing everything in their power to make app development easier, but that will more likely increase quantity and not necessarily quality, as it only deepens the ecosystem's problems by inviting more noise. The practical reality is, if you are not VC-backed and if you are not playing the heavy ad spend game, the App Store is more of a barrier than anything else.
by epolanski | 2025-09-25 13:09:30+00:00
> My hot take: your mathematician friends looking at suspicious betting patterns are a way for sportsbooks to greenwash and "legalize" their exploitative practices.

I have no clue, but I'm sure that it's meant to make money, not be a charity. If someone does show some suspicious alpha he gets banned.

Users with non-suspicious alpha are generally kept on the platform but they get limits (how much can they bet).

I absolutely believe that the betting industry is exploitative in any case. It's not a business where I would want to be involved.
by eowyn | 2025-09-25 13:09:42+00:00
I think this was the last statement from Ruby Central: https://youtu.be/VyCiE3GjQps?si=QgY1sa_w-59jJjQ3

This topic seems to be in a holding pattern now. People are waiting to see how Ruby Central responds. Some are hoping for the Q&A to be rescheduled or at least another statement
by Aurornis | 2025-09-25 13:10:02+00:00
> I have registered my existing trademark on the Bundler project.

Can someone familiar with trademark law comment on this? If I understand this post correctly, there was a merger between Ruby Together and Ruby Central at some point in the past. The combined organization was paying for some combination of developer time and server costs for the project.

Can an individual member of this merger actually go register the trademark for the project name and claim that it belongs only to them after merging the organizations and working on the project together, including financial contributions? Is this a loophole situation where neglecting to register a trademark for the group organization left an opening for someone (who is a member of the combined organization) to come in and scoop the trademark registration for themself later? After a decade of the word being used generically by the community, can anyone suddenly trademark it and claim it wasn’t a generic term at this point? Have I misunderstood something about the order of events or nature of the merger?
by ipdashc | 2025-09-25 13:11:03+00:00
Coal used to power entire countries, and it still runs our steel mills. American industrial might and American quality of life was only possible because of our coal miners. A Walmart stocker puts cheap Chinese stuff on shelves.

The typical romanticized coal miner is a masculine figure, a breadwinner, the representative of an industry that might have been core to the family and town for generations. A Walmart stocker is a guy in a T-shirt. Walmart itself is famous for... pricing out local businesses whenever it comes to a small town.

I'm not at all denying that it's a culture and glorification thing. I just think this is a factor people sometimes miss when looking at how a lot of the country is nostalgic for the 20th century economy, and why people keep wanting (mostly via vibes) to reindustrialize America.
by jordanb | 2025-09-25 13:11:16+00:00
Interestingly I read a history of the French Army mutinies in WWI. One thing that came out of that is lower commanders had a duty to question orders from superiors if they didn't think the goals were achievable. Previously any hint at not following an order was considered "cowardice" and millions of men were led into insane situations with impossible objectives because nobody thought orders from the top could be challenged.
by simonw | 2025-09-25 13:11:32+00:00
I'm concerned about prompt injection attacks telling the LLM how to escape the Docker container.

You can almost think of a prompt injection attack as a supply chain attack - but regular supply chain attacks are a concern too, what if an LLM installs a new version of an NPM package that turns out to have been deliberately infected with malware that can escape a container?
by aniruddhagupte | 2025-09-25 13:12:10+00:00
Indian founders once had a strong presence in hashtag#YCombinator, with a record hashtag#74_startups in 2021 across Winter and Summer batches, followed by hashtag#51_Startups in 2022. But the numbers began to slide rapidly, hashtag#18_Startups in 2023, before collapsing to hashtag#JUST_4_Startups in 2024.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-09-25 13:12:39+00:00
honest question: do you think that in a job market where it seems to be ridiculously hard to land that junior corporate job maybe starting your own thing is a increasingly valid alternative? I'm not sure this is aligned with the properties that YC is necessarily shopping for (they seem to compete with companies eager to hire the same people) but maybe if you're a newish grad from a lesser-known school? My sample size of one includes someone who did that in the 90's and built a $B+ valued company.
by arcbyte | 2025-09-25 13:14:03+00:00
I actually do open the app store specifically to find a cool new app to install. I do this maybe a couple times a year.

It never works. The apps it suggests are all ad farming garbage. I have found maybe one fun game doing this over the years, but mostly its been repeated frustration. I keep doing it occasionally in hopes that I find another diamond in the rough but I think Google has just trashed this whole thing up.

There is probably a set of users who download tons of apps and throw money after them like crazy, and that's probably what Google has optimized for.
by zoom6628 | 2025-09-25 13:14:03+00:00
Ideas: Wind = 风 is shorthand for custom or style Pole = 极 limit or point Dragon = 龍旂 flag

So my take would be asking if there are JSP settings(defaults,limits, flags) that interact With the runtime.

My 2c.

For the record the original question is much more enjoyable :-D
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-09-25 13:14:21+00:00
> HN is supposed to be high quality discourse and you have to be on your toes if you want to participate!

I am so sorry not to be at the correct level and, as a non English speaker, not to know all the references.

I feel so ashamed, fortunately you enlightened me about the high quality discourse I was missing.

Thank you very much for your kindness.
by brudgers | 2025-09-25 13:14:22+00:00
we'll be able to have a conversation about it

That is all you really have. Conversation. Trust.

Everything else is pretending their peers don’t have internet access. Pretending your child isn’t clever. Isn’t an autonomous person.

Every bit of time you spend shopping for solutions, spend writing code, spend configuring firewalls is time you don’t spend on your peer to peer relationship with your child. Time you don’t spend building trust. Time you don’t spend talking.

Ten years old is about the end of reliable “because I said so” parenting. Good luck.
by jjkaczor | 2025-09-25 13:15:07+00:00
Well - back then, it was "new and shiny" - now, I haven't done it myself the intervening decades.

If you are interested in radio/security, I could see it being an on-going thing. Myself, I rarely uploaded to WiGLE (just used it to peruse regions that were "unmapped") - but, these were also back in the "before-times" when ubiquitous cell network data connectivity was expensive - so, I did my mapping using an offline version of Microsoft MapPoint with NetStumbler on my laptop in combination with a VBScript interface I wrote that would drive MapPoint and visually display findings.

After posting this yesterday - I checked WiGLE for my home and office wifi networks - which have been around with the same SSID for 5+ years and they are not listed, so not many people are actively wardriving these days.

But - like any hobby, there are always a few people in the "long-tail".
by gwbas1c | 2025-09-25 13:15:09+00:00
I'm less interested in privacy browsers that just use Chromium and then slap some chrome around it.

Instead, what I want is a browser that actively blocks annoying page behaviors. For example, I want a browser that makes all text on a page selectable, prevents a page from trapping right-click, prevents a page from accessing the clipboard, ect, ect.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-09-25 13:16:04+00:00
After fifteen years of not enforcing the trademark, a common legal interpretation in case of a conflict would be to consider the trademark genericized or abandoned. Which means any trademark owners apparently were not interested in enforcing their trademarks and effectively abandoned their rights.

Of course this is not guaranteed and just a common interpretation of trademark law by judges in trademark related cases. In case of conflicts, the trademark owner would be unlikely to win for this reason if a defendent can argue that the trademark was abandoned for years.

Oracle is in the same boat with Javascript. Technically they own the trademark. But world+dog has been using that trademark freely without them doing anything about it. So, their claims to the trademark are weak at this point. Hence the recent articles about e.g. Deno wanting to challenge their ownership of that trademark.

And you are right to call out the jurisdiction. Because interpretations and laws vary between countries and even between states inside the US. This stuff is complicated.
by testdelacc1 | 2025-09-25 13:16:06+00:00
I sympathise with the author, I really do. He’s obviously put in 15 years of work on this, and he’s engaging in a thoughtful, kind manner. The action on the trademark he’s taking is measured, and necessary.

But I don’t know if I agree with the title. It says bundler belongs to the ruby community. It should, certainly. But right now it belongs to the rich people who fund the work on Ruby and Rails. That’s DHH and Lutke (Shopify CEO).

Whether the community wrests control from them remains to be seen.
by close04 | 2025-09-25 13:16:13+00:00
> I have to walk though many other unrelated things to see the desk chairs

That's what I was trying to say earlier with the limitations of the physical world. IKEA implements a lot of psychological tricks to get your eyeballs on as many products as they can but at the end of the day they can have only so many corridors and entrances to the store. You want a chair, I want a pillow, someone else wants a flower pot. Sooner or later someone will need to walk a bit to get to what they want, IKEA can't put everything right at the entrance.

But Google can put my desired result right at the top, at the entrance. It's the advantage of digital, it can be changed to suit each individual user. As it turns out, Google made it only their advantage.
by surgical_fire | 2025-09-25 13:16:17+00:00
> It sounds like a good job where the most important part is finding other people’s mistakes.

And reviews are not that. Systems are complex, and having a mental model of complex systems is difficult. Everyone has blind spots. A fresh pair of eyes can often spot what who was coding would not.

> But returning a PR solely because it doesn’t have tests, is effective, but a little performative too.

And this is not what I said. I spoke of suggesting extra tests. A scenario that wasn't covered, for example.
by bluGill | 2025-09-25 13:16:32+00:00
In Stocks exchanges and brokers are different things. Exchanges list companies, they are the places where different brokers gather to exchange stocks and agree on prices. Brokers are people/companies who go to the exchange on your behalf (historically someone physically went there, now it is mostly computers)

NYSE and NASDAQ do complete with each other for companies to list on them. (as do other exchanges around the world). When a company is on more than one exchange there are people who make it their job to run "arbitrage" - this is they buy on one and sell on the other anytime the prices are different and this keeps things in check.

It is also valid for betting platform to run arbitrage with their competitors - but various anti-monopoly laws and other such things should(!) get in the way. I don't know what they are doing about this or exactly what the law says. As such I don't know what Betfair is really doing, but I know this is a risk they somehow either take (which if they are national might be low enough), or if they somehow get arbitrage done.

And betting platform is normally both the exchange and the broker. As such they have this risk and need to mitigate it while staying within the law. There are many ways to abuse mitigation that need to be illegal and so it must be hard to mitigate - this doesn't mean impossible.
by nucleardog | 2025-09-25 13:16:43+00:00
> As for the actual Ikea-style instruction pamphlet... I suspect that making it was very helpful for the author. But I don't think the result would have helped me as a novice.

I have no formal CS background or education at all, but have been working in IT for... over 20 years now?

So I'm not a "novice" in one sense, but in another my education on "algorithms" is pretty light and mostly through osmosis. Quicksort specifically is something where I've looked at the Wikipedia article on a number of times to understand but never managed to grasp.

The diagram made it click for me pretty much immediately. Yesterday if you asked me to implement a quicksort I wouldn't have had any idea where to begin, today I can say pretty confidently that I could implement something that would give you back a sorted list.

I'm probably an outlier here--minimal algorithms background, but an intuitive comfort with things like recursion--but at least some anecdotal evidence that it _may_ be useful to a novice!
by bell-cot | 2025-09-25 13:17:40+00:00
> Many of these genes are involved in immune system function—especially the innate immune system, the body's first line of defense against infections.

> The team also found that several of the genetic variants linked to unstable mRNA had already been associated with autoimmune diseases in large-scale genetic studies.

> [...]

> Using additional modeling, the researchers linked expression levels of these stability-regulated genes to diseases including allergic rhinitis, lupus, diabetes mellitus and multiple sclerosis.

Anyone here familiar with mRNA-targeted pharmacology? Even if "take this pill" only worked for 10% of those afflicted with such disorders, that'd still be a huge reduction in human suffering.
by ErikCorry | 2025-09-25 13:17:57+00:00
It's one thing who the blocks are assigned to, but that doesn't mean the whole block is assigned to the same country. In fact not many of the /8 blocks are only used in one country. I half-vibe-coded a zoomable map of the geoip info for the IPv4 space at https://erikcorry.github.io/hilbert-virtual-memory-map/?file...
by zeroimpl | 2025-09-25 13:18:07+00:00
Naively it seems difficult to decrease the ratio of 1.8x while simultaneously increasing availability. The less duplication, the greater risk of data loss if an AZ goes down? (I thought AWS promises you have a complete independent copy in all 3 AZs though?)

To me though the idea that to read like a single 16MB chunk you need to actually read like 4MB of data from 5 different hard drives and that this is faster is baffling.
by yearesadpeople | 2025-09-25 13:19:21+00:00
Ideally, searching once for 'midjourney' would mean getting the url to directly access it time and again (and, create a bookmark). Perhaps the issue is more on the business model, rather than the effectivness of search offered by Google.

What is search anyway (not being flippant!)? Its quite an odd 'thing' really these days.
by bluGill | 2025-09-25 13:19:30+00:00
If you are drawing up blueprints for a machine the two are essentially identical. You choose whichever makes sense for the joint you need, but they are essentially identical on the blueprint.

If you are making the card reader for automated machines, knitting, weaving, and playing a piano are virtually identical - you just move some lever in response to a hole. Someone working on a different part of the machine cares about the difference, but to the card reader they are identical.
by gjgtcbkj | 2025-09-25 13:19:41+00:00
Allen Iverson got criticized by the media for “letting down his teammates” for skipping a few practices. He famously said “We’re talking about practice, practice! not the game! How is MY going to practice gonna make THEM better?!” He got flack for those comments, but what he said was accurate. If we’re talking about outcomes you’re beholden to the person who is seen as the difference maker, all the teamwork in the world isn’t going to improve an individual’s the lack of ability.
by threetonesun | 2025-09-25 13:20:16+00:00
If we're making odd analogies to politics I think most high performing teams tend to end up in the Marxist "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". Or instead of the military, think of a basketball team. How do five excellent athletes work together. The coach is not a "dictator", nor is anyone on the team, but they also don't vote on plays. They know what each other is good at and, based on the situation given to them, execute in a way that is most likely to succeed.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-09-25 13:20:26+00:00
I love the show and rewatch it often, but if you lived in that world during the show's timeframe you can see it's changed draamtically. It still holds up as the "vision" of what we thought a SW startup looks like, but the reality is these scrappy little altruistic startups are not lead by hands-on tech founders, they're all taking the money today - often from PE - and are already the people from the show we laughed at. Show a member of a YC25 class SV today and they'll think Gavin Belson is a "how-to" tutorial.