MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Postnix AI – Helps Indie Hackers Get Their Work Seen
by Stevinn | 2025-10-25 06:01:36+00:00
Hi HN ,

Six months ago, I built JustGrind, an AI habit coach. Coding it was fun; shipping it? Nightmare. Marketing it? Even worse.

I realized the hardest part of building a product isn’t the coding—it’s getting people to actually see it. So I built Postnix AI, a tool that helps indie hackers, creators, and solo founders craft posts that get attention:

- Fetches top-performing posts in your target communities

- Analyzes what makes them work

- Helps you write your own posts that feel natural and hit the right vibe

- Suggests flairs, formatting, and style tweaks that increase visibility and engagement

Key lesson: no matter how good your product is, if nobody knows it exists, it doesn’t matter.

It’s still early days, but people are already getting traction with their posts. Would love feedback from the HN community!

Demo: https://www.tiktok.com/@postnixai/video/7563596577915391239
by Retric | 2025-10-25 06:01:47+00:00
> Yes, constitutional amendments are laws (in one sense) that amend a law (in the other sense) and which states need to ratify, and regular Acts of Congress are laws (in the first sense) that may or may not amend one or more pre-existing laws (in the second sense) and which states do not need to ratify.

Yea, obviously we agree with what’s going on this is just a question of arbitrary definitions that don’t impact anything.

> Which is not useful for the discussion of whether an old law has or hasn’t been updated, since by that definition updates to any law are impossible.

It’s definitely easier work with the law based on the provided organizational structures with tax code being separate from family law etc. Yay, congress is doing something reasonably efficiently.

However, timing matters as making something illegal ex post facto is explicitly banned by the constitution etc. Further, in case of conflict newer laws win even without explicitly declaring the old laws invalid. So each bill is a meaningfully different law, and there’s in effect one law at any given moment after resolving those conflicts.

Net result three mutually contradictory but still useful definitions. But IMO organizational structure is by far the least meaningful one from a legal standpoint while being the most useful one from a practical standpoint.
by anonzzzies | 2025-10-25 06:02:20+00:00
More the 70s than 80s; our company wrote software in the mid 80s more or less the same as we (my company) still does; in the 80s-90s we just did ship a v1.0 a lot later than we do now, simply because in those times ages were basically impossible. Especially software on cardridges made it so you had to ship with 'no bugs'. But no blueprints; we just started on an idea we had and worked until it was good enough to ship.
by JimDabell | 2025-10-25 06:03:55+00:00
> there was a type of person in the 2000s era who insisted that APIs were not truly RESTful if they weren't also hypermedia APIs

The creator of REST, Roy Fielding, literally said this loud and clear:

> REST APIs must be hypertext-driven

> What needs to be done to make the REST architectural style clear on the notion that hypertext is a constraint? In other words, if the engine of application state (and hence the API) is not being driven by hypertext, then it cannot be RESTful and cannot be a REST API. Period.

— https://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypert...

I think of all the people in the world, the creator of REST gets to say what is and isn’t REST.
by simianparrot | 2025-10-25 06:05:56+00:00
Having lived through this, observed it first-hand, read the studies, having dozens of anecdotal evidence on top from near friends and family, and still not able to even question the new mRNA platform publicly without knee-jerk backlash and demonisation, has done more damage to my faith in institutions and the medical community than anything else I’ve witnessed in my near forty years on this planet. Covid made crystal clear to me that we still live under tyrannical dogmatic rule devoid of scientific nuance because it’s “for the greater good”.
by ggm-at-algebras | 2025-10-25 06:06:08+00:00
At some point the cost of the meter exceeds the value of the product being metered. This happened very soon after hotels really jacked up telephone bills. Somehow they decided not to stop being silly, simply to bill the ignorant or lazy and airlines look to be cut from the same DNA: we're maybe going to wind up with viable cellular comms inside aircraft that bypasses the airline.

"Stealing" ip flows over Port 53 isn't the way out, the path out is having RF which doesn't flow through the airline's base station.
by hinkley | 2025-10-25 06:08:04+00:00
Long ago I learned that anesthesiologists make more money than devs when starting out. Not a lot more, but most medical professionals do not.

When I asked why the answer was because it's the most dangerous job there. There's more opportunity to kill a patient with the anesthesia than any other means.

The main reason they don't want you to eat before surgery is that you can regurgitate and damage your lungs. But even if they solved that, the anesthesiologist's job is easier if you're in a fasting state both before and at the end of a surgery.

A quadruple bypass is not dangerous because you're stitching 4 new arteries onto a heart. It's dangerous because it takes so long to stitch 4 new arteries onto the heart that you're running up against the limits of how long you can safely keep someone sedated without causing life threatening complications.

I'm having trouble finding current statistics but at the time I was learning this, a double bypass was many times safer than a quadruple. Articles on bypass surgery understandably focus on the aspects that are within the patient's control.
by yyyk | 2025-10-25 06:10:43+00:00
By that logic, wouldn't the electric kettle heating water for the coffee be intelligent? Had it not measured heat when activated, it wouldn't know how to stop and the man would have thrown it away or at least stopped paying for the kettle's electricity.

I think we need a meta layer - ability to reason over one's own goals (this does not contradict the environment creating hard constraints). The man has it. The machine may have it (notably a paperclip maximizer will not count under this criteria). The crow does not.
by _kidlike | 2025-10-25 06:11:25+00:00
I think you're misunderstanding the purpose of hateoas.

If we jump down to the bolts and nuts, let's say on a json API, it's about including extra attributes/fields in your json response that contain links and information of how to continue. These attributes have to be blended with your other real attributes.

For example if you just created a resource with a POST endpoint, you can include a link to GET the freshly created resource ("_fetch"), a link to delete it ("_delete"), a link to list all resources of the same collection ("_list"), etc...

Then the client application is supposed to automatically discover the API's functionality. In case of a UI, it's supposed to automatically discover the API's functionality and build a presentation layer on the fly, which the user can see and use. From our example above, the UI codebase would never have a "delete" resource button, it would have a generic button which would be created and placed on the UI based on the _delete field coming back from the API
by benzible | 2025-10-25 06:11:30+00:00
If we didn't already know this, Apple's previous positioning as the privacy company was just branding with zero actual conviction behind it. Now, just as ICE contracts with Paragon for zero-click spyware that bypasses encrypted apps, Apple erases the key forensic artifact for detecting state-sponsored mobile surveillance. Along with Cook's cash-and-gold-for-tariff-exemptions scheme, they're racing to the bottom with the rest of big tech.
by hinkley | 2025-10-25 06:12:13+00:00
There's not a lot that Brooks got wrong but the surgical team is it.

There's not a lot of team in a surgical team. Software does not need to be limited to one thing happening at a time the way open heart surgery does. There's room for more hands.

It's more like a sports team. But we don't practice, review, or coach the way they would, and so it takes a lot longer for us to reach excellence.
by rand17 | 2025-10-25 06:15:00+00:00
Yet most computer games employ firearms and the targets are other humans, rarely (but of course not never) you hunt and gather food for survival. Don't get me wrong, I played my fair share of games from the earliest 8bit machines in the eighties to modern day shooters but in my opinion glorification comes unintended and killing is a cheap game mechanic, and has always been: here, in backwater European country, middle of nowhere, we have zero domestic gun violence, maybe even 0.0001% is just too much.
by somat | 2025-10-25 06:15:04+00:00
I would have said the biggest thing hurting plan 9 adoption is that there is no C++ compiler. And this sort of slots into the next biggest thing, it's not posix, Yes posix is several sorts of terrible and a large part of the plan 9 ethos is to break from it's unix past and do things right. But posix keeps everybody on the same page so things tend to be easy to port. It is very hard to port software to plan 9. There is that posix layer APE but it does not appear to help for any moderately complicated program. I think this is because there is no C++ compiler.

Every couple of years I resolve to try plan9 again, because I love the idea of it. and every time I sort of lose interest, I am mot a good enough programmer to make the pieces I want from scratch, it is too hard to port existing software, every thing is too different from any unix system. So I struggle for a day or two then go back to my obsd. As shallow as it is I think having a good web browser would solve 90% of my issues. and we loop back to the no C++ compiler again.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-10-25 06:16:13+00:00
> giving your body to a master tradesman to get a piece of paper over many years and be allowed to practice installing said systems results in a huge shortage of qualified people.

The job is physically difficult and does not provide steady hours. It involves driving long distances each day and working in hot and cold and rainy conditions, in cramped corners, in houses with varying levels of cleanliness.

People with options tend towards other careers, resulting in lower supply of qualified people, and hence higher prices to compensate for the drastically lower quality of life at work.
Can someone explain why Bitcoin isn't crashing due to quantum?
by XiphiasX | 2025-10-25 06:17:14+00:00
Institutions hold Bitcoin. Institutions are smart. Smart entities are able to extrapolate and understand that quantum computers will be able to crack encryption before 2030 due to accelerating advancements both in intelligence and quantum computers. Accelerating advancements, not linear. So smart money knows that there is not an unreasonable chance Bitcoin gets cracked at around 2027-2028. That’s about 2 years left. Yet one Bitcoin costs a two bedroom apartment in St. Petersburg. Something does not compute for me here.

Am I the only one who’s delusional or the world has gone mad?
by pclmulqdq | 2025-10-25 06:17:22+00:00
I think it's a bit naive to believe that the original coreutils developers only used what is now in the public test suite. Over that length of development, a lot of people probably tested a lot of things even if those tests didn't make it into the official CI suite. If you're doing a rewrite, just writing to the existing tests is really not enough.
by amritananda | 2025-10-25 06:18:53+00:00
This is basically what Xray [1] does. For any connection request matching a particular SNI and not presenting a secret key, it proxies the entire SSL handshake and data to a camouflage website. Otherwise it can be used as a regular proxy disguised as SSL traffic to that website (with the camouflage website being set as the SNI host, so for all purposes legit traffic to that host for an external observer).

It's meant to get around the great firewall in China, so it has to avoid the GFW's active probers that check to make sure the external website is a (legit) host. However a friend was able to get it to work American's in-flight firewall if the proxy SNI is set to Google Analytics.

[1] https://github.com/XTLS/Xray-core
by taneq | 2025-10-25 06:19:15+00:00
Trying to translate this terminology into normal Aussie speak here. :P So a “heat pump” is reverse cycle aircon, I’m guessing it’s usually a central unit ducted to each room? Am I right in thinking that “mini split” is what we’d call a “split system” (ie. wall unit inside, heat exchanger outside, refrigerant pipes running between)? Is there a power cutoff above which it’s no longer mini, or is anything non-ducted a mini split?
by spoon404 | 2025-10-25 06:21:02+00:00
I went to a Montessori school in the Netherlands and feel like it failed me. Just one data point and maybe it was just a bad school.

I have autism and nobody noticed or did anything about it until it was time to start preparing for high school in seventh grade. I had read all the books in the school library but was not able to spell and write. It was just way to easy for me to escape work I did not want to do.

We moved after I started high school and my sisters had to change school because of it. One of the first things they noticed at their new school is how incredibly lazy they where.

I am very happy working as a mailman but I do wonder what I would be doing now if I had learned how to study and learn at a younger age.
by Agingcoder | 2025-10-25 06:21:08+00:00
The way you express it is different from most other languages I’ve come across. It doesn’t make it bad in any way ( I’ve written Ada professionally), just unusual. Basically Ada already provides natively substantial capabilities relative to encapsulation, modularities, generics etc but in a procedural context. The designers bolted on OO facilities on top of said existing mechanisms.

While it may look reasonably clean in the link below, I’ve always found it integrates badly with an existing codebase, the primary problem being that the ‘boundaries’ of the objects are not clearly visible.

https://learn.adacore.com/courses/Ada_For_The_CPP_Java_Devel...

I will add that the existing non oo features are excellent and I would even argue that in many cases you don’t need OO.
by caminante | 2025-10-25 06:21:15+00:00
> Your overall NPV calculation seems a bit off.

Correct. It's 21y. I missed $500 from a reading error and was assuming $7.5k/y (not $8k/y).

edit: I see your mention of the grant, too. Combined, that's cutting the NPV=0 point in half from 21y to ~12y. Good job.
by light_hue_1 | 2025-10-25 06:22:09+00:00
> From what little I have seen, this kind of role is tightly coupled and dependent on the their Manager.

As you go up the chart you have more independence and are less tightly coupled to your manager. By the time you get to principal you should be largely independent. At the same time, you have much more responsibility.

That's just a practical problem. As your manager becomes more senior (director/VP) their scope also increases. They just cannot "manage" you the way someone would manage a more junior IC. Also at the principal level you aren't just bringing value to your manager, but to other parts of the org as well.

In other words, I can't ask my manager "what should I do today?". I cannot even imagine what his reaction would be if I asked that question.

> The manager has to you like as a person and some how believe that all these activities are adding value.

For what it's worth my manager is a great person. But he wouldn't for a moment believe anyone when they say they add value.

It's up to me to find ways to document and express my value. Figuring out how to do this is part of becoming a principal. So I keep notes, I record wins, I make sure that I do things that bring me visibility, that I present new ideas, I contribute to larger roadmaps at the org level, I make sure that other scientists can say good things about me, I help fix problems that other orgs have so that they report I was useful, etc.
by ggm | 2025-10-25 06:22:30+00:00
I might agree to the premise but I'd rather take the lesson from another source.

Nolan is like Ridley Scott and is tired of being told he doesn't understand history. Duh! "It's historically accurate" is marketing bullshit, just like "Marc Andreessen adds value" is.

Marc isn't a historian, or a biographer, or a researcher into the Manhattan project and postwar red scares. He's just a rich man with an opinion, and questionable morals.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-10-25 06:23:03+00:00
it's possible,but iphones are apple's flagship product. it would be disastrous for them. i don't think any government contract is worth the cost. They're not google or Microsoft, they're not that big in the enterprise side of things.

I'm sure if such a relationship became public,most Americans will forget about it in few weeks time and half will be surprised what the big deal is. But apple will lose out on Asia and Europe where it has solid competition. Their hardware is their bread-and-butter.

It is more plausible for the US government to have planted or extorted an asset working as a developer at apple than apple itself making such a monumentally foolish decision.

Google and Microsoft on the other hand, that I am fairly certain of.

But... i digress a bit, only because Tim Cook was kissing the proverbial king's ring a lot lately. donations are one thing, giving gold gifts in person and on national tv is another.
by gspr | 2025-10-25 06:23:09+00:00
I thoroughly disagree. On the surface, his behavior may seem very similar to the behavior exhibited by toxic people, but once you understand his reasoning, I find it makea perfect sense.

To summarize and paraphrase: the project is his personal garden. It's by him, for him. But he has also decided to open that garden to any random stranger on the internet, free of charge. In a lot of similar projects, that means an invitation is extended to plant stuff in the garden or to suggest that certain plants are moved. He wants to make it clear that that's not the case in his garden. If you wanna plant, you're free to freely and instantly duplicate his garden and get cracking. But he will not be planting your plants in his.

Since people struggle to accept this, he's taken on a harsher-than-normal tone. That's understandable to me.
by mlsu | 2025-10-25 06:26:26+00:00
You can think of the hypergolic fuel as a type of spring. The chemical energy stored in the bonds of the fuel is what pushes the fuel products apart when it reacts. This is what pressure is, it's nothing more than KE of molecules.

The 'spring action' of fuel is very good because there's a lot more energy (per unit mass) stored in the bonds. Orders of magnitude more than a mechanical spring.
by edg5000 | 2025-10-25 06:27:40+00:00
They are efficient but do not have as high of an energy output as a smaller and cheaper gas furnaice. Apart from that, the water temperature is lower, so you need much larger radiators. Due to the lower energy output, you also need better insulation or a relatively massive heat pump. And the tech was not around 20 years ago (for reasons unknown to me).
by lenkite | 2025-10-25 06:27:45+00:00
> Please kill RN and Flutter already.

Just No. Nobody will kill >30% of apps on the iOS store. Flutter is simply a massively superior development experience overall compared to the horrifying disaster that is SwiftUI. SwiftUI is so utterly pathetic that more than a third of all apps are now being written in Flutter.

"The compiler is unable to type-check this expression in reasonable time" -> one of the most atrocious and common errors that increases cortisol levels and reduces life expectancy amongst mobile developers.

Please kill SwiftUI already. For the sake of Humanity.
by zkmon | 2025-10-25 06:28:13+00:00
There are two kinds of computing - precision computing and probabilistic computing. For example, cryptography falls into precision computing. There is no room for being incorrect even by a single bit. Where as machine learning is about getting a range of answers, with tolerance for error.

I like to visualize them as cuts and spans in a continuum, such as a number line. They make up the full picture. One exists only because of the other. One can't do the job of the other and one is defined only in terms of the other.

Banks wouldn't use AI to compute the account balance after a transaction or for authenticating a customer. Network software wouldn't use AI for encryption and decryption of the TLS traffic. Also, banks wouldn't mind a x% error in computation of a credit rating, fraud detection or industry trends analysis.

Writing code is a probabilistic task with many variations possible, while the work done by the code during runtime, is a precision task, in most of the cases.
by Cuttly | 2025-10-25 06:30:16+00:00
Thanks, that’s a great question. You’re right - most shorteners are still seen as utilities, but we’ve been building Cuttly as more of a link management platform that connects analytics, branding, and engagement tools.

Bitly focuses on enterprise scale and Linktree on social bios. Cuttly sits somewhere in between - combining branded links, dynamic QR codes, link-in-bio pages, short surveys, and aggregated campaign analytics under one roof.

The goal is to make it a flexible hub for teams and creators who want to measure and manage, not just shorten.
by NL807 | 2025-10-25 06:30:57+00:00
Ok, so by that definition a geodesic sphere has the Rupert property, as the sphere is an approximation made up of equilateral triangles. What if we perform isotropic subdivision on the equilateral triangles, such that each inserted point lies on the sphere, centred on each base triangle. We then subdivide each base triangle by constructing 3 new triangles around the inserted point. Thus at each iteration, geodesic sphere of N triangles is subdivided into 3*N triangles. If we continue with the subdivision, each iteration is a refinement of the geodesic sphere, and the geometric approximation gets closer to the shape of a true sphere. As N approaches infinity, the Rupert property holds true (according to the definition). What happens at infinity?
by geocar | 2025-10-25 06:32:30+00:00
Right, so how did the "highest hacker to user ratio" diminish then? You or I are probably misunderstanding something.

If they just meant "the hacker to user ratio" diminished, they should've said that, but it seems like a weird way/phrasing to acknowledge that linux-using-hackers sell to non-hackers (and is a no duh).

Carmack's point was that linux was a good place to get hackers, so it's good for him to target as a business, but maybe it's better to get them on mac now (in 2025). I don't know: I use a mac laptop outside of my office, but I mostly just use it to browse the web and remote to my linux desktop inside my office. I wonder sometimes if it is important to target mac to get smarter users, and so I might believe mac has the "highest hacker to user ratio" now when in 1997 Linux definitely did. Depending on what I'm doing the bsds might be a better focus.

That is, I suspect that Linux might not actually have the "highest hacker to user ratio" anymore, which is what I think the person I am replying to meant as well. I don't know; and I don't have good reasons for believing such a thing that beyond my own experiences, but I'm curious and willing to be convinced, and so I ask questions.