MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lelanthran | 2025-09-17 06:32:05+00:00
> In the last two weeks, at least five near-identical apps have appeared on the App Store.

This has always been a problem, TBH. I completely stopped releasing anything on any store after my first experience on Android, where I created an actual novel approach to a personal problem experienced by many, and found clones within the first month of it getting traction.

That was in 2014!

> My app's value is its simplicity. In an environment where simple, successful ideas can be replicated this quickly, what is the moat? Is it brand, speed of innovation, marketing, or something else?

"Something else", but I don't know what that could be other than "marketing dollars".

I'm struggling with this right now, having a (what I think is) a novel approach to using LLMs in a way that improves the practical performance on complex tasks while simultaneously reducing tokens[1], but it's such an obvious approach that it can be replicated by a CC-driven process in (probably) a week or so, for the cost of a $200/m subscription.

So until I have some idea of how to proceed in a manner that lets me retain whatever customers I can get from cold-start, I've put my release on hold and simply use it myself for now.

My best idea thus far (and probably what everyone will be doing soon), is to engage individual businesses and sell only enterprise licenses of this.

This doesn't make the problem go away, but it means that a truly useful product will be under the radar to at least make back some of the development cost before clones appear.

Two other things to keep in mind:

1. Posting on HN used to be a good way to get traction. That is no longer the case - your idea will be shamelessly vibe-coded and marketed to an already collected and curated set of leads before the discussion is even archived!

2. The traditional startup advice about release early+often then iterate on PMF no longer applies: as you asymptotically approach PMF, the clones are going to be only a few hours behind you. Todya, as things stand, I dare not attempt to find PMF in public - it will be done with my carefully curated list of leads, privately.

==========

[1] No, it's not caching!
by ajb | 2025-09-17 06:33:14+00:00
If you are charged with murder, but you killed because someone was attacking you, it is a legal defence that you were defending yourself.

There is no such defence against a charge of genocide.

The lawyers who wrote the international treaty, many of whom themselves survived the Holocaust and lost their relatives in it, carefully considered whether to add such a defence. They did not add it. They considered that genocide is a crime for which there is no excuse. That is should be possible to defend yourself without resorting to it.

In any case, the group at issue is not Hamas. The genocide is being conducted against all Palestinians.

Your argument also conveniently omits the extreme level of military dominance which Israel has over the Palestinians.

The real reason many Israelis cannot conceive of a solution other than killing or expelling them, is: how can we leave them there, after the level of hatred, murder, violence, and abuse we have heaped on them over the last two years? We have taken revenge for our 36 dead children, won't they want revenge for their 20,000?
by xvinci | 2025-09-17 06:33:29+00:00
Do you have a source for that? As to my knowledge advanced systems (such as lights on the twy directing you) are only present at very few airports. Recent incidents even happened due to RWY incursion without a ground controller noticing under bad visibility. So we are at a level where your runway is not even protected accordingly, let alone your 50+ taxiways.
by tlavoie | 2025-09-17 06:34:33+00:00
Some Model Ys have them, under a trim piece, in a door pocket. Others have none, so it's a total gamble to get into one.

Kind of related, Teslas (some?) don't have a manual hood release either, so firefighters' first hope is to find the guy who knows what menu on the fucking touch-screen is going to pop the hood. E.g., when making sure that the high voltage stuff can be disabled, the car won't try to leave with fire crews in the way, and so on. There are more... destructive ways to get in, and it will happen, but they could have just installed a pull cable like everyone else.
by rhubarbtree | 2025-09-17 06:35:03+00:00
It’s a tricky one, but something that I repeatedly come back to is that publishers are regulated, but social media is a free for all. A newspaper can’t just make up something without consequences (in the UK), for example they may be sued for libel.

Social media companies, by contrast, can publish posts from their anonymised users that contain almost anything, and it is permitted. It can be racism. It can state that £300M a week could be spent on the NHS if only the UK would leave the EU. And those posts can be sent to millions of people without regard to truth or the damage they can do.

The classic response to this is “well, you can’t expect us to police such a large amount of content, it’s impractical” - a fair response - but then there’s a bit of sleight of hand from Meta et al: they conclude that they should therefore be allowed to broadcast anything a user shares. But an alternative conclusion is _well, then perhaps you shouldn’t be broadcasting inflammatory nonsense from any person/bot who posts_ and you have to find a new operating model.

It’s tricky because free speech is important, but I think we’ve seen enough times how dangerous, divisive, and destructive social media is. If there’s no way to prevent people and states from abusing it, then it probably shouldn’t exist. When the retrospective is written on the fall of America and the west, social media will be one of the key explanatory factors, along with hypercapitalism.
by rootshelled | 2025-09-17 06:35:14+00:00
Most jobs especially in webdev are like that. Most of it is just reheated slop, if the market was efficient the webdev market would shrink by 75%. I've done novel stuff but most of my jobs end up just pushing a star shape through a square and a triangle whilst making sure the whole legacy spaceship keeps floating.

There are truely novel webdev jobs out there, but they are a needle in a haystack. If you want something that mentally stimulates you as an developer find a job that doesnt involve web for higher chance of finding something that fits the bill.
by jeroenhd | 2025-09-17 06:36:01+00:00
I was pretty disappointed when my work MacBook ran into the same "Bluetooth headset connected, set as audio sink, but the OS refuses to acknowledge its existence further and routes audio through the speakers" but that I've seen on every other desktop OS. I really hoped Apple would be better, considering their hardware costs more than twice as much.

I also ran into weird Wi-Fi issues that required a reboot, and getting that thing to recognize external displays without corrupting video is some kind of dark art while my Lenovo and Steam Deck work just fine with the same USB C plug.

Apple beats some brands for sure (especially the cheap "consumer" lines with a starting price lower than Apple's headphones) but their computers are hardly flawless.

I have yet to run into issues with my Steam Deck, which is very impressive, but I'm sure I'll run into an issue at some point. No computer works flawlessly.
by userbinator | 2025-09-17 06:36:02+00:00
I wonder if the "programmer" (and I use this term very loosely) who wrote that sleep-in-an-interrupt code ever tested the code personally, or if it was some other distant responsibility-diluted department of a hundred other lamers who didn't care "because the automated tests all pass". This is a situation where dogfooding, in the original Microsoft sense, would definitely be beneficial as among the developers experiencing this on their own machines, surely one would be tempted to fix it.
by pflenker | 2025-09-17 06:36:03+00:00
I don’t want to be limited to „meaningful connections!“ I stay in close contact with those who are dear to me outside of social media. I want to stay connected to some random coworker I enjoyed working with in 2011, because I enjoy watching them from a distance, getting married, settling down, that kind of stuff, and occasionally comment on these things. This used to be a strength of social media before algorithms came in and decided that because I am not liking every post of that person it follows that I am not interested.
by weinzierl | 2025-09-17 06:36:41+00:00
The way you can write code of the target DSL without wrapping it in a string both gives me fears and excitement:

solver.assert((&x + 4).eq(7));

My subconsciousness shouts "MISSING QUOTES" while my ratio says "Calm down, that's nice and clean and safe and how it's supposed to be - ever has been".
by throawayonthe | 2025-09-17 06:36:50+00:00
the motherboard does have a 4x pcie slot, but the default case wouldn't fit a second gpu

you can buy it without the case: https://frame.work/marketplace/mainboards?compatibility%5B%5...

P.S. the igpu in this really is comparable to a 'real' gpu in performance, with the bonus of being able to allocate arbitrary amount of vram
Tinder for Startups
by firstusers | 2025-09-17 06:37:16+00:00
Yep Tinder for startups Basically, the matching happens automatically based on the early adopters interests and needs

For example, if you submit a startup for marketing, the early adopters who chose marketing as their interest or need will get notified via email, and your startup will appear on their dashboard.

It’s free submit your startup: http://firstusers.tech/
by lelanthran | 2025-09-17 06:38:13+00:00
> App cloning has existed forever.

I understand that, and said literally that in the first section of my extensive response, but, like I also pointed out in my previous response, things are different now.

Traditional advice about fast PMF via fast public release no longer applies, and not just for phone apps; for all applications, whether SaaS, local, etc.

The only solution one can do is first build a set of leads, and then approach each one individually and privately to find PMF.

> You can build a brand by actively participating with your users such that they prefer your app over the clones.

For B2C, this is a losing proposition unless you are fueled with VC money.
by bdamm | 2025-09-17 06:38:49+00:00
Honestly, good riddance.

And let's chuck into the dustbin of history fiddling with IRQ dipswitches to disambiguate your mouse, video, disk, and audio controllers; the "turbo" button; "It is now safe to turn off your computer"; CGA/EGA/VGA/HGA/MCGA/SVGA/XGA, RLL/MFM/SCSI/IDE, and while we're at it, TSR programs like sound drivers, mouse drivers, etc. Let's not even discuss OS/2.

You know what sucked? Booting up into CGA and not being able to figure out how to escape that abomination. Why not pine for that?

All of this trash is behind us and frankly I think we're better off for it. If you want to go play with obsolete computers, then finding some old computers and some old computer junkies who still enjoy that junk is the right way to go. Personally, I had my fun, but I like our modern machines so much more than those old smokey capacitor poppers. But I have to admit, I almost miss compiling my own kernel. Almost.
by sedatk | 2025-09-17 06:38:57+00:00
`mc` was a gateway drug for me to switch from DOS to Linux in 1995. Because I hadn't been gotten comfortable with other text editors and file management commands yet, mc and its own text editor (mc -e) had felt very intuitive at the time. I felt at home. I was also amazed by stuff like FTP VFS support. It was so complete and done right.
by idle_zealot | 2025-09-17 06:40:32+00:00
The theory I've been operating under is that Israel was created as a pretty bad solution to displaced Jews post-WWII, and operates essentially as a vassal state of the US's commercial military interests as a totally intractable perma-war in the region to ensure that even in lieu of other conflict taxpayer money can continuously be laundered to them in the form of expended munitions.

There's obviously a lot more going on from a social/religious perspective, but I'm prone to thinking of large-scale shifts and trends in terms of economic incentives.
by hypercube33 | 2025-09-17 06:40:34+00:00
Intel laptops with igpu and Nvidia chips and thunderbolt docks are absolutely a nightmare between the 3 trips video has to go to even leave the laptop and the drivers and firmware mismatches.

I've had weird issues with this setup since the core2duo days upgrading once a year.

when it works it's amazing, however.

AMD igpu and dgpu work super well together but I feel like over time, since I use this configuration the most things either improve or go to hell with driver updates. depends on the laptop OEM really.

This all said, where the hell are the strix points igpus where they rival desktop cards (yes the lower mid end) at laptops where stuff just works without compromise ...if there is power and cooling.

Side note - I have a rog g14 that until I loaded a beta bios for thunderbolt over usb4 would reboot when shut down and shut down randomly. (amd CPU and GPU)
by energy123 | 2025-09-17 06:40:44+00:00
That's true, but that 60k number isn't just civilians, and even if the total civilian count is higher than 60k, it's still likely lower than the civilians killed in Hiroshima, which is an inconvenient fact best left unmentioned by those who say that Israel has unleashed six Hiroshimas onto a location that's over 10x higher density than 1945 Hiroshima. How do you resolve this discrepancy?
by k310 | 2025-09-17 06:40:45+00:00
Real short. I started out in optical and electronic engineering, with some data crunching and rapid prototyping. (Aerospace) Major sysadmin (University) and the next was hacking sendmail code for email auditing, and some SNMP (banking), Sales engineering with Sun, a one-person IT department at a startup, and then some consulting at another startup.

Hardly any programming. Scripting as needed.
by SarthakGaud | 2025-09-17 06:40:54+00:00
Thanks @Disposal8433 Yeah, agreed on the JS limitation — right now it only works where the little decryption script can run in the browser, so it’s not truely universal. On the crypto side though, this isn’t meant to be deep security — just casual privacy. The point was the pattern (encrypt locally, store publicly, key in your head), not using AES-level algorithms.
by catlifeonmars | 2025-09-17 06:41:11+00:00
I think it definitely couldn’t hurt. You’re right it doesn’t eliminate the threat of supply chain attacks, but it would certainly reduce them and wouldn’t require much effort to implement (either manually or via script). You’re basically giving maintainers and researchers time to identify new malware and patch or unrelease them before you’re exposed. Just make sure you still take security patches.
by leakycap | 2025-09-17 06:41:25+00:00
I'm the solo user of my device & have rarely if ever launched Photos or Photo Booth, but I launch Photoshop a handful of times everytime I work.

For the last few years, it is a total gamble of what Spotlight's first suggestion will be when I trigger it and type "Pho"

Often, Photos.app Weirdly, about once a week, Photo Booth.app 80% of the time, it correctly guesses Photoshop.app

So I can't just trigger spotlight, type "pho", and hit return. I have to wait for Spotlight's guess, sometimes arrow to Photoshop, or sometimes just hit enter when it guesses correctly.

So many macOS microFrustrations like this, and now Tahoe looks like it does.
by cluckindan | 2025-09-17 06:41:27+00:00
You’re seriously considering that inhaling vapor of nicotinized smoke machine liquid is equally bad as inhaling 700-1200 Celsius combustion products containing microparticles and radioactive isotopes?

I get that people want to scare kids, but that level of hyperbole is way overkill and has the opposite psychological effect on those who can think for themselves.
by dahrkael | 2025-09-17 06:41:47+00:00
back in 2009 in Spain we had what the author describes in Tuenti (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuenti). at first it was invite only and by default people's profiles were private, you'd need to be friends to see their activity and pictures. your feed was just your friends statuses and new pictures in chronological order.

later on it got some games and a realtime chat but it ended up dying because of newer social networks. it was great to keep your actual friends and family connected.
by blindseer | 2025-09-17 06:42:50+00:00
I would really like to see more people who have never written C++ before port a Rust program to C++. In my opinion, one can argue it may be easy to port initially but it is an order of magnitude more complex to maintain.

Whereas the other around, porting a C++ program to Rust without knowing Rust is challenging initially (to understand the borrow checker) but orders of magnitude easier to maintain.

Couple that with easily being about to `cargo add` dependencies and good language server features, and the developer experience in Rust blows C++ out of the water.

I will grant that change is hard for people. But when working on a team, Rust is such a productivity enhancer that should be a no-brainer for anyone considering this decision.
by phil21 | 2025-09-17 06:43:56+00:00
I always wished for AR glasses. I described it like playing a MMO with player names overlaid above their heads.

I have an incredibly hard time remembering faces and names. Close to disability level. People I have known for 20 years and interact with monthly can take a bit for me to recall their names and it requires a ton of mental tricks to do so.

I used to go to a decent number of trade shows, and the number of folks who casually knew me and my name but I couldn’t place was embarrassing. And crippling for business purposes.

I always thought if I had someway to overlay a persons name over their head it would level the playing field and allow be to avoid a lot of personal embarrassment.

Now that the future is here I’m not so sure. One of those things I want for me but not for thee.
by Eisenstein | 2025-09-17 06:44:24+00:00
Reductio ad Absurdum is not a fallacy but a legitimate rhetorical technique where you can point out obvious flaws in logic by taking that logic and applying it to something that people would find ridiculous. Note that this is not the most 'extreme' version, it is the same version, using the same logic.

Example:

Argument: People should be able to build whatever they want on their own property.

Reductio ad Absurdum position: I propose to build the world's largest Jenga tower next to your house.

Note that this does not take into account any counter arguments such as 'if it falls on me you will still be liable for negligence', but it makes a point without violating the logic of the original argument. To violate that logic would indeed be a straw man.
by jagrsw | 2025-09-17 06:44:31+00:00
I don't think it's being paranoid. It's a remotely controlled parser. Fuzzing has turned up some of bugs in irssi and weechat over the years. Things like malformed color codes, DCC filenames, or even basic protocol messages led to crashes.

I personally use weechat inside nsjail on a raspberry pi (isolated rpi is enough here, but just for fun): https://github.com/google/nsjail/tree/master/configs
by spapas82 | 2025-09-17 06:44:38+00:00
In a restricted environment like a console only system these two pane file managers are very useful. I was a heavy user of norton commander (nc) back in my DOS days. Also these are useful on mobile.

However I rarely use them on a graphical environment like windows where I can open arbitrary explorer windows and arrange them as I see like. I guess it depends on what people have experience on...
by lolive | 2025-09-17 06:44:39+00:00
Making it big used to be a mix of luck, hard work, insane talent and tons of marketing. The marketing stratégies are, from my perspective, what makes things different nowadays.

[but when you simply ignore the marketing , and are a bit picky in your choices, the current offer is 10000% more qualitative than it has ever been. And BIG THINGS happen behind the curtain of mass marketing]
by jeroenhd | 2025-09-17 06:45:16+00:00
Microsoft documents replacing the ACPI table with their API: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/b... (bottom of the page)

Unfortunately you need to disable signing for that, which will trigger anticheat in online games and makes Windows nag you about it.

Someone wrote a bootloader specifically to patch ACPI on boot in CSM mode if you're okay with reinstalling Windows on an older system that can't play certain games: https://github.com/MovAX0xDEAD/ACPI-Patcher
by jbm | 2025-09-17 06:45:27+00:00
Thank you, 100 times this. There was literally nothing fun about it.

I remember desperately trying to put drivers in high memory, because Wing Commander 2 needed more memory if I was to get the precious images of the joystick moving. Slowly removing items, one by one from my autoexec.bat file, desperately hoping it was going to work, but then the creeping realisation that I would have to unload my soundcard drivers if I wanted a chance.

Or the time our bios randomly wiped its memory and my dad was convinced I had destroyed the harddrive. Thankfully I was told by a family friend that I would only have to turn on the BIOS and set it to # 31 (because somehow hard disk sizes, sectors, et cetra were all standardized) in order to access our precious 95 megabyte hard disk.
by hypercube33 | 2025-09-17 06:45:45+00:00
Surface Pro 8s have a bug where the battery just gives up randomly and won't ever charge again. 2, 3,4 and 7 do not have this - one sitting on my shelf two years charged right up from 10%.

Replacing the battery costs like $200-500 because the screen likes to explode when removing it.

Lenovo docks of a specific gen will have the USB hub/billboard just crash and stop doing display port.

older Dell docks would pollute arp tables and crash switches.

Computers have always had some wild flaws, some worse than others. They are built to a price point typically and by humans under politics so the best design or parts usually don't make it -- cost and profit.
by xkbarkar | 2025-09-17 06:47:12+00:00
In Denmark its not recommended for women over a certain age.

So please don’t get it regardless of age. Its not really considered effective for women who have been sexually active for some time.

Which is why its only recommended for girls, not women.

https://www.ssi.dk/vaccinationer/boernevaccination/vaccinati....

Tldr; Dont rush to get a vaccine that is probably not effective for you. Make an appointment with your doctor and discuss it with her first.
by lucas_membrane | 2025-09-17 06:47:27+00:00
Fun fact (???) wayback about 40 years ago Central Point Software was humiliating Microsoft with its suites of utilities for Microsoft's OS's, which included file managers for Windows (and MS-DOS IIRC), and was a top rated #1 best seller. Microsoft graciously offered to buy a license for said software from Central Point, which they would make a standard part of windows. This was the kind of deal that practical realists tend to accept, even though it spells DOOM with a capital 3-finger salute. 'Tis great to see something as versatile as the wheel and axle or the Oklahoma speed wrench still rolling along.