MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zvadaz | 2025-10-09 09:59:07+00:00
The single biggest challenge when pitching to VCs:

Convincing them that you can return their fund.

VCs never talk about this at the meeting. But, it is THE key factor that drives their decision.

Took me a while to understand this when I was fundraising.

These 6 simple steps helped me address the “fund returner” during the pitch:

1 - Always check the fund size of each VC before the meeting - an easy one today with all the ai search tools out there.

2 - Say it's $100m. This means that you need to show the VC how they will get $100m from your startup at exit (sale or IPO), i.e. that you will “return” their $100m fund.

3 - Assume the VC will own 10% of your startup at exit --> if they need to get $100m back, that means your exit valuation needs to be $1bn.

4 - Next, assume that the revenue multiples in your industry are 5x --> this means that you will have to generate $200m of annual revenues.

5 - Now, divide that by your current Average Revenue per User (ARPU). This will get you to the number of paid customers that you need to have at exit.

6 - Say, your ARPU is $10k. This means that you need to have 20k paying customers at exit with your current business model / pricing.

Now you’re done with your prep.

Your main job is to explain how you will acquire all those customers (or increase the ARPU).

The more concisely this is baked into your story, the easier you make it for the VC to invest.

Good luck!

Zdenko https://www.linkedin.com/in/zzvada/
by michaelsshaw | 2025-10-09 10:00:18+00:00
Not necessarily the best idea. Often they are the only dry bulk(flour, etc.) or paper/plastic distributor that a restaurant can access. See if they also get deliveries from others before jumping to such conclusion.

Restaurants hate Sysco just like you do. They deliver late, get it wrong every time and argue about rejection when half their delivery is destroyed goods.
Ask HN: How do I get invite to Lobste.rs?
by pankajtanwar | 2025-10-09 10:02:27+00:00
I was researching tech communities while learning AI and came across Lobste.rs. Looks like a great place to join! Can anybody be so kind and send me an invite? Thanks! You can reach me at pankajtanwar510 [at] gmail [dot] com
by contrarian1234 | 2025-10-09 10:02:55+00:00
I think the scientific community has done just fine. When these individual substances are tested they're by and large not found to have negative health effects. Then the loonies just refuse to believe it and thing the chemicals are making their kids gay.

The problem isn't the MSG. It's providing a well balanced diet. We have a relatively clear idea of what constitutes "well balanced". You can quibble about the specifics but this bill is fundamentally off on a crazy unscientific tangents.

There are just three lines that actually address nutrition:

(i) The food or beverage contains 10 percent or greater of total energy from saturated fat.

(ii) The food or beverage contains a ratio of milligrams of sodium to calories that is equal to or greater than 1:1.

(iii) The food or beverage contains 10 percent or greater of total energy from added sugars.

Instead of paragraphs of banning the "scary chemicals", why not work on making sure kids get the vitamins, vegetables and fiber they need in each meal. I'm not a nutritionist, but there are some basics that are braindead simple that don't involve banning Sucralose.
by mschuster91 | 2025-10-09 10:03:02+00:00
Yes, because (ultra) processed food tends to be much more cheaper than un- or minimally altered food.

Think of ordinary tomatoes for example. In its raw form a tomato goes bad after a few weeks (depending on how it's stored), as a store you got to discard a bunch of them before that time because the tomato develops blemishes from handling/storage, and the tomatoes have to be handled more sensitively and with more effort.

Now, take that tomato and can it straight after harvest, together with a bunch of preservatives. It now has a far longer expiration time in the order of years, it doesn't need cooling, and tomatoes that come from the field with blemishes can now be used as well, just cut them up, remove the unsightly pieces and sell it as cut-up canned tomatoes.

From here on, the calculation is the same for both kitchens and low income populations... both need tomatoes to cook a meal. So what do they prefer? Fresh tomatoes where one now also needs to take care of leftover tomatoes and do another meal before they expire, or canned tomatoes that are cheaper to source and easier to match with actual demand?
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-09 10:03:29+00:00
> puffed rice absolutely requires an industrial process

“Traditional methods to puff or pop rice include frying in oil or salt. Commercial puffed rice is usually made by heating rice kernels under high pressure in the presence of steam, though the method of manufacture varies widely” [1].

If I had to guess, the commercial stuff is more thoroughly and homogeneously gelatinized. That, in turn, probably raises its glycemic index.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffed_rice
by nicce | 2025-10-09 10:03:32+00:00
> A CEO is a person. He is human. Can't a human be on the wrong side of history on various matters, and what does it matter if he is? Can't he still do a decent job (whatever it is that CEOs do)? Why do we expect random entrepreneurs, celebrities, engineers, and so on to also be moral authorities or role models?

Exactly, it is a human behind the company that does every decision. Company is just legal shield. Every decision is affected by what they really are or think.
by throwaway77385 | 2025-10-09 10:03:33+00:00
If there is only one thing you take from my post, then look up "NextJS middleware auth bypass" or something along those lines. Have fun reading about that and then never touch NextJS or anything Vercel ever again.

I won't repeat what the sibling poster said, but I can tell you, I've been using NextJS from v12-v15 and in that time we've had:

- The catastrophic (and, at the time, UNDOCUMENTED) "aggressive, opt-out caching of all fetch calls", which confused the living daylights out of everyone who suddenly couldn't retrieve updated data from their servers. Like, don't override a native JS function that's supposed to work in an expected way, with black-box magic that adds caching behaviour that then needs to be overriden _per route_ with directives on each route. Cache headers can be added to fetch calls and are easy to configure globally via axios if needed. If you're going to do black magic, call it "nextfetch" or something

- The app router / page router transition was shockingly badly handled, with so much missing documentation around dynamic routes

- I don't know how many different ways of fetching / setting metadata / <head>-related techniques I've had to learn by now. It seems to change all the time. BUT, that isn't the worst part....the worst part was / is:

- You couldn't, for the longest time, fetch metadata for a page without duplicating fetch requests. I think this is where their fetch-deduping thing came from. But again, black-box magic on a native JS function with very inconsistent behaviour, so for a while, all pages in our app just had to make two fetch calls per page that needed specific metadata added to the <head>

- Vercel as a platform not allowing to set billing limits (have fun with your DDoS that they don't recognise as such)

- Middleware is one file. That's what you get. No chaining, nothing. One god-function for everything. Just think about the anti-pattern that is

- I don't know whether it's clever or terrible, but if you want to add a sitemap, you do so by defining a route by creating a folder called sitemap.xml (yes, a directory), where you then put your route.ts which is in keeping with the way the new router should work. But somehow it just doesn't sit right with me. Folders with file extensions. But it also adds a lot of ability to make the sitemap highly customisable and dynamic, so maybe it's ok

- You suddenly needed to start awaiting url params, cookies, etc. which is sort of fine, but was a huge change causing warnings all over the compiler for months and months

Anyway, those are just a few things off the top off my head. I already find React to be quite counter-intuitive and non-deterministic, but NextJS just adds a layer of pain on top with very, very few advantages.

I am dying to get my hands on an alternative, but also don't want to rebuild all of the apps I built when I was still optimistic about NextJS.
by adornKey | 2025-10-09 10:04:16+00:00
Nice line, but it isn't fully complete. After the Mathematicians there's Logic - and Philosophy - And in the end you complete the circle and go all back to Sociology again.

One issue I sometimes witnessed myself was that Mathematicians sometimes form Groups that behave like pathological examples from Sociology. E.g. there was the Monty-Hall problem, where societies of mathematicians had a meltdown. Sadly I've seen this a few times when Sociology/Mass psychology simply trumped Math in Power.
by gugagore | 2025-10-09 10:07:51+00:00
We're not using "type theory" the same way, I think. I'm thinking in terms of

- simply typed lambda calculus - System F - dependent type theory (MLTT) - linear types - row types - and so on

But it's subtle to talk about. It's not like there is a single type theory that underlies Typescript or Rust, either. These practical languages have partial, (and somewhat post-hoc) formalizations of their systems.
by vintermann | 2025-10-09 10:08:49+00:00
No, I think you misread the post. The story about backstabbing Zuckerberg in a Risk game and boasting about it in his blog, I believe the author included especially to show that it's not just about the profit motive. It's far more about rivalry and crushing your opponents, he's basically saying. Clearly, spending so much time in a forum trash talking a rival (without disclosure) isn't a good investment of time, if profit is the sole motive.

Certainly, such people exist though. The picture he's painting of Novati is not something I'd find terribly surprising from an ex-Facebook code boot camp entrepreneur.
by cr3ative | 2025-10-09 10:09:36+00:00
You're right, and thanks for the note - gave me a chance to reflect. I think what I mean is more along the lines that while a right to reply would have been polite, it isn't required of a blogger, and wouldn't change the substance of the post much, which is largely about a pattern of behaviour rather than specifics. Michael's attempts to dismiss/discredit the post based on a process which generally only applies to the press is what sits badly with me.
by jwr | 2025-10-09 10:09:40+00:00
Happy to see a clear path for React going forward. React is under-appreciated in some circles of the fast-moving JavaScript world, where people are somehow expected to rewrite all their code from scratch every couple of years or so, after somebody starts shouting "framework X is dead", and everybody starts focusing on the new hotness. I'm not sure how that is economically viable, I know I couldn't afford that kind of approach.

I have a Clojure/ClojureScript app using React that I've been maintaining for the last 10 years. I don't use all the features of React, in fact I could probably use a much smaller library — the biggest advantage is that it provides a "re-render the UI based on app state change" model that fits Clojure very well. But I'm very happy that React is there and that it's been maintained with relatively little code rewriting necessary over the years.
by Nursie | 2025-10-09 10:10:06+00:00
The demand comes from people who value their children’s perceived safety over the ability of some internet perv to get at porn or for terrorists to plan atrocities.

And no, they don’t want to hear about the importance of freedom to communicate being more important boy. I’m just gonna move this road we go do you wanna go out that way okay, because they believe that their communication will never cross these lines, so it’s irrelevant.

“But what if the government turns bad and uses this against you” carries far less weight, in a large part due to its theoretical nature, than “we need to stop this bad thing now”.

Heck, a lot of the governments likely aren’t thinking beyond “we need to stop this bad thing now so people vote for us” either. The immediate leap from governments wanting any form of oversight to “this is all part of the wider plan to subjugate humanity” that often comes up on this site is amusing but ultimately unhelpful and comes across as conspiratorial. Not because it’s wrong exactly, but because it posits a plan where it’s not very clear there is one. It’s just well intentioned people making well intentioned but poor choices as we stumble our way into mediocrity.
by pimterry | 2025-10-09 10:10:08+00:00
It feels like React generally has an ongoing trajectory towards increasing complexity and features. For something that's effectively become the standard for frontend that's unfortunate. It would be great to have a simple reliable base, with extensions & addition complexity layered on top or included optionally. This announcement doesn't fill me with hope for that direction unfortunately, it mostly seems like Vercel getting more control, and they're driving a lot of that movement.

Being able to ignore parallel rendering, RSC, hooks, etc, and just write simple code for simple sites again would be fantastic.

Unfortunately all the major competition I've seen seems so significantly different that migrating any kind of non-trivial application would basically be a full rewrite. Is Preact or similar offering much promise here?
by truetraveller | 2025-10-09 10:10:29+00:00
Oh, one more thing. All of these "bootcamp" companies are known to be bad, and HN knows this. Perhaps "Codesmith" is better, I can believe that. I did a quick search, and it does seem like it's above the pack. I'm not trying to knock down Codesmith, the founder Will seems genuine. but it's still very plausible it has some of the same "badness" of bootcamps, at least according to Michael. And one might ask, why did Michael focus on Codesmith? The answer is two-fold. 1) he targeted other bootcamps as well 2) and Codesmith claimed explicitly they were unlike other bootcamps, and Michael was on a personal "jihad" to make sure they were called out.
by doikor | 2025-10-09 10:10:57+00:00
Government does issue passports for identiftying their citizens when traveling. It is the one who made/enforces the law that requires that so it is the one who has to provide the means to do that.

Or are you suggesting that anyone should be able to make their own passport?

Or a bit closer example. If there was no official id cards/passports/etc (there currently is no official way of proving your age online) and the government made a law that mandates that one has to be over X to buy alcohol. Who’s job is it to provide the means to prove that you are over X?

For the car a proper analogy would be the goverment requiring drivers license. Who provides the drivers license? Should every manufacturer provide its own?
by kakacik | 2025-10-09 10:11:09+00:00
Merkel was the worst european politician by a lightyear (or two). Maybe growing up in East Germany affected her negatively, don't know but these days she is a huge (and publicly outspoken) putin and russia apologist. Looking at history of her political moves, she was actually the same before, there just wasn't such an obvious war against whole Europe so it all could be labeled as 'low cost gas and oil is good', probably mixed with typical german 'we must atone for the sins of our grandparents' backwhipping.

Current russian war in Ukraine is also her doing. Making german military a joke, sending tens if not hundreds of billions euros to russia. She still admits no mistakes at all, despite being very actively hated across whole eastern part of EU. When asked directly about any of this she just goes into her fairy tale mental space not anchored in reality.

Overall she did a lot of long term harm. I don't believe she is evil at the core, just severely delusional, easy to manipulate and overall a bad, very bad leader. Wake me up when regular germans realize what rest of EU grokked a decade ago.
by ljm | 2025-10-09 10:11:19+00:00
As soon as a hangover shifted from an acute headache to a day or more of drowsiness I started to substantially limit the amount I drink. You can't tackle that with paracetamol or caffeine and it's not worth it any more, and that's just from what would consider casual drinking (a few pints at the pub) in the UK.

I can't imagine how badly drunk you have to get to swallow something like a toothpick without knowing.
by csmantle | 2025-10-09 10:12:15+00:00
I don't know, but the "Read Online" button leads me to "https[://]talkpython.fm/books/python-in-production/#read-online", and that URL then tries to redirect to "https[://]talkpython.fm/books/python-in-production#read-online". (Notice how the last slash of the path is missing).

This forced my browser to reload the page, and it beats the entire purpose of anchoring and fragment-based navs.
by azangru | 2025-10-09 10:13:32+00:00
> Every decision is affected by what they really are or think.

This is called micromanagement :-)

I am sure there are organizations where the actual work that people do day to day is unaffected by who the people at the top are or what they think on matters other than the business (people at the top are often rather unpleasant anyway). I can't say whether such organizations are common or whether Vercel is one; but I believe I worked at such.
by submeta | 2025-10-09 10:13:41+00:00
I can imagine that some „food“ corps going berserk now. And setting up campaigns worth millions against these moves.

I have drastically reduced the amount of ultra processed food in my diet, now eating clean food only, and I cannot describe in words how my energy level climbed to levels I have never seen in the past years. My blood glucose is stable, my mood as well, and I have no cravings. Also my body weight dropped significantly. Although I eat full plates with vegetables, fish, poultry.
by gusgus01 | 2025-10-09 10:16:55+00:00
Man, you're missing a bunch of ingredients to actually make tasty cookies. Definitely need some salt. She's probably also using vanilla extract or purchased chocolate chips (or chunks) or cinnamon. Plus the leavening agent, so baking powder (or baking soda and another acid). That's all just for the basic cookies, there's so many options out there using stuff like malted chocolate powder, and that's ignoring making palatable gluten-free cookies.
by tanya-donska | 2025-10-09 10:17:32+00:00
Four years ago, I would’ve said yes before they finished the brief. Marketing websites were my bread and butter. I had a process. I had case studies. I had that dangerous confidence that comes from not knowing how broken the industry actually is.

Now I know better. And knowing better means turning down work that makes everyone miserable — clients, users, and especially me.
by tboy1337 | 2025-10-09 10:17:49+00:00
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by jongjong | 2025-10-09 10:18:44+00:00
But you can't fake profits that way (without cooking the books); you can only fake revenue. That's why profits matter.

Though I guess with high velocity of money circulating in tight loops, everyone involved can feel rich. 1 million dollars changing hands once per day can potentially mint 365 'millionaires' during the course of a year. If they just pass it back and forth among themselves to buy each other's stocks and products and don't let that money escape their network to actually pay for something useful, they can all be millionaires... On paper.

Not to mention how relatively small amounts of money, moving at high velocity, can inflate asset prices... On Alice's birthday, Bob can buy 100 shares of Alice's shell company at a price of $10 per share. If Alice owns 1 million shares of the company (which she founded), it means that Alice's net worth is at least $10 million... It cost Bob only $1000 to give Alice a net worth of $10 million. Now imagine that same $1000 moving in and out of that company's stock, traded 1000 times per day between various people. With just $1000 circulating back-and-forth at high frequency (A.K.A. high-frequency trading), you can generate a trade volume of $1 million per day... So it all seems reasonable; a company with a $10 million valuation with $1 million daily trade volume... Nothing suspicious. So you can basically start a shell company and fake everything; from the market cap, to the trade volume; using only a relatively small amount of money. This is what they were doing in the early days of crypto.

The same money can hop around in circles between an insane number of people when it's just 'revenue' because revenue is not taxed (after expenses). Only profits are taxed... But the same money, as profit, can barely hop between 6 people before it's taxed down to just 10% of its original number. High-velocity revenue can severely distort people's perceptions of the market, especially in the era of media filter bubbles.
by drob518 | 2025-10-09 10:18:56+00:00
Do you only want us to get our news once daily via a physically printed and distributed newspaper? That’s the timeframe that we used to use for news updates. If not (I.e., you’re in favor of keeping the Internet), how would you reconcile the asymmetry between trading and news updates? If there is a disparity between these timescales, you end up with markets gapping hugely every time they open. This just increases risk and volatility. Yes, markets do this overnight today, but 24-hour markets don’t do this as much and they allow a trader to set stop orders that are active overnight to protect positions. So, for instance, futures markets will gap over a weekend break, but because they trade 23 hours per day during the week, they are much more smooth than they would otherwise be. Compare gaps in ES SPX futures contracts vs. gaps in the SPX itself, for instance. In general, smoother is better for everyone.
by b00ty4breakfast | 2025-10-09 10:19:19+00:00
I understand I grew up in a different era but it is beyond absurd to me that a chat application requires government ID from it's users. I understand the rationale but I do not find it convincing in the least, especially with the way that security is treated at basically any entity that has this kind of info on file.

I do not like this world that we have created and I would like to apply for a full refund